VoliminalVerse wrote:
Novellaro wrote:
Andrew Rhodes wrote:
"Yo Theo, why does she talk like that Thanos guy?" He pointed at Ixqueya
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
He looked at Watari and he laid across the couch after stepping back into his Mark II armor "paint me like one of your French girls, Jack"
Watari won't respond as he doesn't know earth lore. And his name isn't jack. And Thanos wishes he could talk like her. Lol
Andrew is just wild. He's basically what happens if War Machine acted like Deadpool with memes.
I figured that hence the Lol fam.
I was just informing you why Watari wouldn't acknowledge so you didnt think I was ignoring you ooc. He doesn't know what French is, Titanic, and he isn't painting women so to him you would be speaking to another.
Aleksandr Von Drakenfell wrote:
The subtle spice of a mentholatum smoke filled the air as the cacophony of varied strategems and the work of war cast a resonant symphony of its own, the beating heart of war as it were, a scene played out in myriad forms across the annals of history for so long as there had been life there had been conflict. It was a fact the Lord General was well accustomed to, each must earn its keep upon the realm and the universe yielded naught to one who hadn't the audacity to stake the claim.... and keep it. Only one thing was acceptable to the Imperium, a persistent forward push and in their diction, the term retreat was all but taboo, a strategic necessity, a happenstance oft not repeated more than once. The doctrines of commanders had varied such and such though Aleksandr, characteristic of his Mordian heritage, sought clockwork efficiencies in his warmachine which stood in stark contrast of the traditional doctrines of the massed assault, he garnered where a bludeon took many hits to maim, a warhammer, a truly honed weapon, intended to get the job done precisely and in as few hits as possible.
They were the Astra Militarum, excellence was not the expectation it was the standard, on the other side of which lay only two fates, death or summary execution nevertheless, advances in a new sector were customarily challenging, unexpected lapses in progress spurning strategic contingencies, myriad acts of heroism spurned upon vox-casters to hold the morale not that Aleksandr was particularly concerned about that of hsi own. To the Lord General's eye, war had been tediously gamified and it was a matter of wit and resolve, the ever-precarious gambit unto which territories and lives were laid on the line but then, excellence was the standard, withdrawal and advance, assault and defense, interception and interdiction, terminologies were better described then when they saw action. The schola progenium had played one part in orienting him to the realities of war, but the greatest tutor had been experience and his time in the trenches as Commissar was not forgotten. But the great game was played with far higher stakes at this table, necessitating what was an axiom what described the Lord General; Tactical Discretion.
In the Grim Darkness of this millenium, each foe presented itself anew, countless strata of varying edicts and battle formations each unpredictable and menacingly effective in its own right, every foe bringing the devastations of their own arsenal to the front leaving humans to do what they did best; improvise, adapt, overcome . Ofcourse, not all was left to chance, the Lord General laid upon each battlefield a meticulously master-crafted magnum opus that in some ways did not vary in their degree of detail from the work of that eccentric tailor that had just been lingering around, but ofcourse, War was a far more endearing and passionate endeavor than cloth craft and such and such. Nothing brought the General as much satisfaction as a well planned surgical strike excising away the buboe which was the ambition of the foe, with fire, plasma, las and more, a palette that he exercised with fervid and furious intent upon that eternal canvas, the auspicious arena, the field of honor. What a privilege and an honor it was to serve the Emperor so, he loved his job.
The only shame was he could not frequent that place as much as he would have liked, for the duties of the office now beckoned to him like wanton wench having acquiesced a new suitor.
✠✠✠
" What news from the front, was that Tau expedition in the southern zone dealt with? "
He inquired taking momentary pause from the smoking pipe as he reclined upon the auscpicious pulpit what which bore the imperial seal, that surely hung above them all, symbolically if not in forme.
" No, your grace. No engagement was recorded by the perimeter patrol, they departed soon after, we speculate it was an impromptu scouting party with some other motive. They did not intend on being discovered, directed by intel our augur arrays were directed to the area with the machine spirits running a more scrutinizing protocol that was able to diffuse the scrying noise put in place by the xenos, we were able to get a lock and I presume they were well aware, this likely prevented an exchange since the perimeter patrol was not appropriately equipped ... er... supposedly. "
Aleksandr pondered for a moment, his semblance conveying neither displeasure nor approval
" Hmn... very well... see to it that I am not mocked... caution is to be exercised for the principle strategy of that particular breed of xenos is to strike from out of sight, we should anticipate that we are being watched, stagger the patrols, change the routines, Commodore, you have my approval to start conducting regular sorties in that zone utilizing our augur-craft. And... have a basilisk division deployed at the second line, so we have the capacity to strike back if caught unawares... "
The officers receiving command nodded dilligently
" In the meanwhile make our claim against the manufactora in Noumensyd for the debt the locals owe us "
Aleksandr added, taking a slow drag off his smoking pipe
At once, your lordship
Aleksandr, issued a slow exhale of the smoke, before returning to thought
" Still no word of that man of Regac's ? He who took the Thrones ? "
Inquired the Lord General
" No, your lordship "
Was the precarious and somewhat hushed response of a subordinate
" Nor will there be... "
Was the sly response issued from a Colonel Martellan, brooding in the corner amidst other officers
" This was a ploy of Regac's to take the thrones and blame another, this man is well hid and your Lordship's money well spent... I wager it.
A subtle grin appeared over Aleksandr's features.
" You have a rare grasp of the conspirator's mind, Martellan... and are to be commended on it. Better us than the Tau, doubtless sowing discord by virtue of bolstering notions of resistance. "
✠✠✠
" Some speak of certainties and others seek to defy them, for better or for worse, there are those who inspire poetic allegory and those who write and sing of it and better to be in the former camp, excess consideration of intricacies whittles the mind, what matters truthfully is absolution in the present. The Emperor beckons us to live while we live, oblivion is a certainty but it is also the end and better therein to invest in the journey than to dream about ends... on my part, I do not wish to keep company with the dead, so long as the heart beats and there is vivacity, Emperor willing we shall go on with vigor. And nothing quite inspires vigor as.... Amasec "
Ruby waves cascaded into crystalline chalice, sweeping unto themselves as rich crimson settled, an exquisite vintage nonetheless, the grape that had given its life for such delectable ends was not without its meaning and the bottle itself paid homage to the vine, to some meaningless theatrical eulogy, to others an epitaph, an edifice of celebration, perspective is what differed, the only flaw was to be so grounded in one or the other, to live excessively or to give in to lamentations and obsess over death. Aleksandr had no sympathies for heartless neuters, a contradiction into themselves, a cry for grandeur ill-earned, a beckoning for adorations unmerited, the expectation of reverence by virtue of ill-fulfilled privilege, misconstrued and ill-afforded by parasites with ulterior motives what would easily be confused for true respect and then in subtle jest to make challenges upon it, but a cliff was neither daunted by the roar of the wave nor did it afford its audience.
In truth, a profound sense of self-respect could be easily mistaken for pride, but the former needn't supplication, it was equally at home upon the throne or within the trench, for its virtue was act, not record. These things became increasingly incomprehensible, hubris was easily afforded to those who narrowed the confines of their horizons to absolute truths, in one forme or the other. And why should one not aspire to some measure of greatness, posterity would not afford recognition to those not emboldened to seek some measure of glory or to defy the mundane simplitude, the principle greatness therein was that a portion of the quill that writ fates was present in the hands of even the unlikeliest of souls. There were those to call Alexander proud whom had not marched the deserts at Opis, there were those to call Caesar proud whom had not baptised themselves in the frigid Rubicon, but were they proud to aspire to something more than themselves and to not be contented with anything less than the world and if kings and conquerors were truly forgotten then they would have no place in the histories of civilizations and peoples far removed from them by centuries.
Carpe Diem... Carpe... Diem.
Or forever be unto those whom should say, it was luck, it was fortune, it was favor, it was far too difficult, it was not known... and so forth. But to be granted a day and not invest it in some measure of achieving greatness was in and of itself not necessarily virtue. The theatrics were well-merited, the bravado festive and unperturbed, the passion unabashed and the will indomitable. The Emperor had not left in his stead those whom should see the galaxy surrendered to others, his gilded visage beckoned conquest and battle to every soul in the Imperium, for therein was progress, the endless, unforgiving, glorious march. And in the end, to possess dignity was to have something to be dignified about, it phased not the wise and self-assured but infuriated those whom had something to envy.
✠✠✠
The lord general issued a slow swirl to the sanguine concoction, a fresh measure of Lho-substrate added to the smoking pipe, easing himself for a moment. The wall decorated with the skulls of various xeno and heretic, trophies taken from past foes and great battles, they were game unto him. Frigid eyes scowered the horizon beyond the window.
" Arpat will be ours "
He muttered, before eyes shifted to the great library beside him, the deeds of the imperiums great heroes, treatises on strategies and great battles and anecdotal volumes on varied disciplines of science, technology and medicine.
" Your Lordship "
Stated one of Aleksandr's subordinates coming forth with a large case, undoing the clips before bowing down on one knee presenting the contents to the Lord General. A gilded galvanic rifle, a true masterpiece of mechanicus ingenuity.
" Ah, Archibald, you've been missed old friend... "
The Lord General added, addressing the rifle.
" The magnificent trait of the galvanic rifle is that it kills yet leaves the corpse intact, well-suited for the mechanicus to conduct their experiments or... for a trophy hunter to process their quarry. Tell them to ready the lander and we'll see if those feral orks continue to be a problem "
✠✠✠
Good post fam.
Watari watched her relocate with the focus he once gave to predators that did not need to rush. Ixqueya did not retreat. She simply changed her angle. A judge shifting from dais to gallery. The boards beneath her answered with the tired complaint of old wood. The room adjusted around her without daring to admit it had adjusted at all. His eyes followed the motion. They caught, for the briefest instant, the line at her lower back where alien addition suggested itself. The wasp-stinger shape. Barbed implication more than decoration
A faint distaste tightened his mouth. Watari had never trusted such insects. Not for fear of pain alone. For the way they arrived without warning. For the way they punished without reason. In the grasslands of his youth, where the sky lay wide and merciless, he had seen a whole camp thrown into agitation by a thing no larger than a fingernail. Horses stamping. Children woken from sleep with a cry. Men swearing at darkness that would not answer. The steppe taught him early that small cruelties were often the most faithful. They did not tire. They did not negotiate.
It figures, he thought, that one of her line would find such a shape appealing. Giants did not borrow from what was pretty. They borrowed from what was effective. Still, the question pricked at him in spite of himself. How had flesh been persuaded into that amalgam. What vow. What pact. What slow series of choices until the body itself learned new borders and called them natural.
He set the thought aside. His attention returned to his board, as if to an old map that still required one last correction before it could be trusted. The tavern’s bones were there in pigment. The curve of a beam where the grain twisted like a stream around stone. The warped plank at the threshold where years had swollen the wood and made it stubborn. The bar counter itself rendered with a craftsman’s respect for honest wear.
He worked in silence. The motion of his hand was steady. Bristles moved like a leaf’s edge dragged across wet clay. Small strokes. Patient pressure. He set down a final line where light died against the underside of a shelf. He softened the hard edge of a shadow where boots had scuffed the floor into a pale track, the kind of track that a hundred strangers unknowingly share until it becomes a path.
He paused over one last detail. A smear of spilled drink that had dried into a dark crescent on the counter. A flaw that spoke more truth than any heroic embellishment. He let it remain. When the work felt complete, he sat back. A slow breath left him. Not relief alone. Something cleaner. The quiet satisfaction of finishing a task that asked for attention rather than violence. The feeling of setting a small stone on a grave that no one else would mark.
He rose. His fox tail followed with a natural sway, unforced, as if it belonged to the same wind that moved grasses far away from any roof. His ears twitched at a shift in the room’s murmur. Sound traveled differently here than on open ground. It did not run. It pooled. It hid behind furniture. It crept along the walls. Watari crossed toward the bar with the unhurried gait of a traveler who knows that haste is a kind of announcement. The fire light caught the edges of his armor and slipped away again, glancing from bronze as it glances from river stones. His shadow went with him along the planks, stretched and wavering, a dark companion that asked no questions.
At the counter he made his request without flourish. Simple words. A simple drink. The barkeep’s hands moved with practiced efficiency, thick-knuckled and quick, like roots that have learned to work in soil full of stones. A cup was set down. The liquid within held the light at its rim and swallowed it at its center. Watari accepted it with both hands for a moment, letting the warmth of the vessel sink into his palms. His ears flicked once more. Habit. Vigilance reduced to something gentler.
He offered a friendly nod to those gathered nearby. Men and women loitering in the loose gravity of drink. Their faces shone with the damp sheen of heat and exertion. Their laughter rose and fell in uneven bursts, like birds startled from hedges and settling again. One leaned too heavily on the counter as if the wood were the only steadfast thing left in his life. Another spoke with wide gestures that belonged in a field, not a room, as though his story needed space to breathe.
Watari did not judge them. He had seen men break under grand causes. He had seen men survive by clinging to small comforts. He understood the difference. Only once did his gaze drift, brief as a fox’s glance toward the treeline, to Ixqueya’s corner. She remained where she had chosen to be. Ledger close. Posture composed. Watching the room as if it were a landscape that would eventually reveal its hidden trails to anyone patient enough to wait.
Watari returned his attention to the cup. He took a measured sip. He let the taste ground him in the present. Then he stood quietly at the bar, tail swaying with slow ease, ears alive to the room. A man who had once served banners and campaigns. A man who now served quieter vows. A witness. A maker. Still watchful. Still moving forward, even if some pretended the world did not deserve to be remembered.
(I am open to any RP if anyone's interested.)
A faint distaste tightened his mouth. Watari had never trusted such insects. Not for fear of pain alone. For the way they arrived without warning. For the way they punished without reason. In the grasslands of his youth, where the sky lay wide and merciless, he had seen a whole camp thrown into agitation by a thing no larger than a fingernail. Horses stamping. Children woken from sleep with a cry. Men swearing at darkness that would not answer. The steppe taught him early that small cruelties were often the most faithful. They did not tire. They did not negotiate.
It figures, he thought, that one of her line would find such a shape appealing. Giants did not borrow from what was pretty. They borrowed from what was effective. Still, the question pricked at him in spite of himself. How had flesh been persuaded into that amalgam. What vow. What pact. What slow series of choices until the body itself learned new borders and called them natural.
He set the thought aside. His attention returned to his board, as if to an old map that still required one last correction before it could be trusted. The tavern’s bones were there in pigment. The curve of a beam where the grain twisted like a stream around stone. The warped plank at the threshold where years had swollen the wood and made it stubborn. The bar counter itself rendered with a craftsman’s respect for honest wear.
He worked in silence. The motion of his hand was steady. Bristles moved like a leaf’s edge dragged across wet clay. Small strokes. Patient pressure. He set down a final line where light died against the underside of a shelf. He softened the hard edge of a shadow where boots had scuffed the floor into a pale track, the kind of track that a hundred strangers unknowingly share until it becomes a path.
He paused over one last detail. A smear of spilled drink that had dried into a dark crescent on the counter. A flaw that spoke more truth than any heroic embellishment. He let it remain. When the work felt complete, he sat back. A slow breath left him. Not relief alone. Something cleaner. The quiet satisfaction of finishing a task that asked for attention rather than violence. The feeling of setting a small stone on a grave that no one else would mark.
He rose. His fox tail followed with a natural sway, unforced, as if it belonged to the same wind that moved grasses far away from any roof. His ears twitched at a shift in the room’s murmur. Sound traveled differently here than on open ground. It did not run. It pooled. It hid behind furniture. It crept along the walls. Watari crossed toward the bar with the unhurried gait of a traveler who knows that haste is a kind of announcement. The fire light caught the edges of his armor and slipped away again, glancing from bronze as it glances from river stones. His shadow went with him along the planks, stretched and wavering, a dark companion that asked no questions.
At the counter he made his request without flourish. Simple words. A simple drink. The barkeep’s hands moved with practiced efficiency, thick-knuckled and quick, like roots that have learned to work in soil full of stones. A cup was set down. The liquid within held the light at its rim and swallowed it at its center. Watari accepted it with both hands for a moment, letting the warmth of the vessel sink into his palms. His ears flicked once more. Habit. Vigilance reduced to something gentler.
He offered a friendly nod to those gathered nearby. Men and women loitering in the loose gravity of drink. Their faces shone with the damp sheen of heat and exertion. Their laughter rose and fell in uneven bursts, like birds startled from hedges and settling again. One leaned too heavily on the counter as if the wood were the only steadfast thing left in his life. Another spoke with wide gestures that belonged in a field, not a room, as though his story needed space to breathe.
Watari did not judge them. He had seen men break under grand causes. He had seen men survive by clinging to small comforts. He understood the difference. Only once did his gaze drift, brief as a fox’s glance toward the treeline, to Ixqueya’s corner. She remained where she had chosen to be. Ledger close. Posture composed. Watching the room as if it were a landscape that would eventually reveal its hidden trails to anyone patient enough to wait.
Watari returned his attention to the cup. He took a measured sip. He let the taste ground him in the present. Then he stood quietly at the bar, tail swaying with slow ease, ears alive to the room. A man who had once served banners and campaigns. A man who now served quieter vows. A witness. A maker. Still watchful. Still moving forward, even if some pretended the world did not deserve to be remembered.
(I am open to any RP if anyone's interested.)
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Ami Arpatia wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Very much the lvl 1 Guardswoman to lvl 100 Canoness arc, a lineup for a fantastic story and iterative character development no less.
Tyranoth wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Very much the lvl 1 Guardswoman to lvl 100 Canoness arc, a lineup for a fantastic story and iterative character development no less.
I don't know much about warhammer. I only know what I have dealt with IC. Had an invasion once from that fandom into winterwake. Was fun, they died. But I purposefully classified it as noncanon fun. We all enjoyed it, which is what matters.
Now, don't be chopping the heads off too many host. or Ixqueya might start to think the general has a particular fetish Lol))
Ami Arpatia wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Girl power.))
The_Diva wrote:
Tyranoth wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Very much the lvl 1 Guardswoman to lvl 100 Canoness arc, a lineup for a fantastic story and iterative character development no less.
I don't know much about warhammer. I only know what I have dealt with IC. Had an invasion once from that fandom into winterwake. Was fun, they died. But I purposefully classified it as noncanon fun. We all enjoyed it, which is what matters.
Now, don't be chopping the heads off too many host. or Ixqueya might start to think the general has a particular fetish Lol))
Lmao well I certainly appreciate the fleeting inquiry into the general's fetishes, but I concede that was a bit of ill-construed mischief... there shall be no taking of heads...
Indeed, death is a bit of a staple in the universe, I don't imagine they fared well in an unfamiliar domain, I find it hard to fault their loss, If I may interject, I hypothesize that when your grace had come to meet the host in combat, your movement naturally resulted in the optimal jiggle frequency which cast some sort of discordant psychic influence that likely nullified the intent of the foes to do any harm. Lamentable, but nothing in our universe could have foreseen such a profound magnitude of wobble.
Tyranoth wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Tyranoth wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Very much the lvl 1 Guardswoman to lvl 100 Canoness arc, a lineup for a fantastic story and iterative character development no less.
I don't know much about warhammer. I only know what I have dealt with IC. Had an invasion once from that fandom into winterwake. Was fun, they died. But I purposefully classified it as noncanon fun. We all enjoyed it, which is what matters.
Now, don't be chopping the heads off too many host. or Ixqueya might start to think the general has a particular fetish Lol))
Lmao well I certainly appreciate the fleeting inquiry into the general's fetishes, but I concede that was a bit of ill-construed mischief... there shall be no taking of heads...
Indeed, death is a bit of a staple in the universe, I don't imagine they fared well in an unfamiliar domain, I find it hard to fault their loss, If I may interject, I hypothesize that when your grace had come to meet the host in combat, your movement naturally resulted in the optimal jiggle frequency which cast some sort of discordant psychic influence that likely nullified the intent of the foes to do any harm. Lamentable, but nothing in our universe could have foreseen such a profound magnitude of wobble.
I am going to bring my nerdy demure character,. Ixqueya is sitting alone; she might be a bit too...cold (pun intended) for most. Nothing wrong with that, she is an acquired taste by design. owo))
The_Diva wrote:
Tyranoth wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Tyranoth wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Very much the lvl 1 Guardswoman to lvl 100 Canoness arc, a lineup for a fantastic story and iterative character development no less.
I don't know much about warhammer. I only know what I have dealt with IC. Had an invasion once from that fandom into winterwake. Was fun, they died. But I purposefully classified it as noncanon fun. We all enjoyed it, which is what matters.
Now, don't be chopping the heads off too many host. or Ixqueya might start to think the general has a particular fetish Lol))
Lmao well I certainly appreciate the fleeting inquiry into the general's fetishes, but I concede that was a bit of ill-construed mischief... there shall be no taking of heads...
Indeed, death is a bit of a staple in the universe, I don't imagine they fared well in an unfamiliar domain, I find it hard to fault their loss, If I may interject, I hypothesize that when your grace had come to meet the host in combat, your movement naturally resulted in the optimal jiggle frequency which cast some sort of discordant psychic influence that likely nullified the intent of the foes to do any harm. Lamentable, but nothing in our universe could have foreseen such a profound magnitude of wobble.
I am going to bring my nerdy demure character,. Ixqueya is sitting alone; she might be a bit too...cold (pun intended) for most. Nothing wrong with that, she is an acquired taste by design. owo))
Certainly, nothing wrong with demanding effort for reward, a gelid exterior hardly discourages genuine admiration. I look forward to writing with you and learning about your realms should I be granted the honor. ))
"Have I come in at a bad time?"
Her theme. I am the female singer/song writer Novellaro played the instruments and composed it.
She halted at the lintel with the rigid stillness of an instrument encountering an unexpected boundary condition.
Beyond the doorway, the tavern did not manifest as “a room full of people.” It resolved as a bounded system with competing fields. A thermodynamic basin centered on the hearth. A laminar-to-turbulent transition where patrons crossed one another’s wake. A stratified canopy of smoke adhering to the rafters like a stubborn aerosol layer whose settling velocity had been vetoed by heat. Sound behaved as stochastic impulse. Bursts of laughter. Cutlery clicks. A chair-leg scrape. Each event arrived as a spike, then decayed into a low, persistent noise floor.
Her mind tried to model it. Her body tried to flee it.
Inside her skull, cognition accelerated until it felt superluminal. A thousand miles an hour, and still climbing. Hypotheses spawned faster than she could falsify them. A runaway iterative solver. Diverging. Recalculating with poisoned priors. Every glance she *might* have caught became data. Every absence of attention became camouflage. She was sure she was being stared at, judged, measured for weakness, though the distribution of gazes in the room did not support the conclusion. The crowd was mostly occupied with its own microeconomies of ale and appetite.
She could not convince her limbic system of the math.
She stepped in, small movements, constrained amplitude, as if she could discretize her presence into tolerable increments. The white-and-blue outfit made the attempt absurd. It fit her like a manufactured certainty. High-gloss, immaculate, tight through the waist and hips, with blue paneling and harness seams that made her torso look diagrammed. The fabric returned firelight in hard specular fragments. Reflection was an announcement. She wanted to be a rounding error.
Her body would not permit it. She moved with dense, unmistakable curvature and a tall, full-limned silhouette that made stealth an insult to geometry. Green skin, not cartoon-bright but vivid in a way lamplight could not ignore. Its surface caught warm photons and cooled them as it returned them, leaving her looking alternately verdant and mineral, as if she were a living sample prepared for examination.
Her horns rose in paired crescents, keratinous and leaf-veined, their ridges catching highlights like fine striations on cut stone. Green hair spilled beneath them in thick waves. Her mouth remained slightly parted, as though she were perpetually about to speak and perpetually deciding it was unsafe.
Her eyes were worse. Better. Both.
Green and topaz, luminous in the shadow as if they stored charge. The pupils diverged into two apertures like an octopoid slit. Then they fused again, seamlessly, as if ink had been poured into a single, obedient pool. The cycle repeated with metronomic insistence. Split. Fuse. Split. Fuse. It was not performance. It was physiology. It made her gaze look briefly nonhuman in its optics, then falsely ordinary again.
And perched on her shoulder, Slouth.
A conch-creature, spiral-shelled and alive, its single ember eye recessed deep in the shell’s throat. The iris glowed with a steady orange intensity that did not flicker with the fire. It was constant. A reference point. A baseline measurement in a world that felt like noise.
She tried to speak to no one in particular, because silence felt like surrender and sound felt like bait. The words came fast, clipped, protocol-driven, stitched together with an anxious efficiency. Every syllable sounded like it had been optimized for bandwidth.
“Evenin’, nuh. Mi sorry. Mi jus’ comin’ inside. Mi nah lookin’ fuh no trouble, yuh hear.” Her throat tightened. She swallowed and forced the next phrase out as if it were a theorem she could hide behind. “Probability o’ confrontation… supposed to be low, if mi assumptions ain’ corrupt.”
No one answered. No one challenged. No one surged toward her with a sneer or a fist. The neutrality should have lowered her pulse.
Instead, her pulse treated neutrality as a feint.
She half expected an attack, verbal or physical. Some insult that would latch to her skin and not wash off. Some shove. Some laugh. The anticipation coiled tighter because it had no release. Her mind kept running permutations, inventing outcomes and then bracing for them.
To keep from drowning in prediction, she began to sing.
Not loudly. Not for attention. For containment. A mnemonic chant of magical theorems and properties arranged with the ruthless sing-song logic of a recitation. It was a periodic table’s cousin. Not elements, but axioms. Not valence, but binding. Each line snapped into the next like a proof forced into rhyme.
“Aether constant. Resonance quotient.
Leyline gradient. Phase-point ratio.
Entropy climb. Containment lock.
Name di law, an’ yuh tame di shock.”
She winced mid-chant, irritated by her own imprecision.
“Dat line sloppy, nuh.” She corrected herself under her breath, still in that clipped cadence, still in that warm, heavy accent. “Mi mean. Avoid metaphor. Keep it formal.”
She moved deeper into the tavern like a particle seeking a minimum energy state. She did not weave with casual grace. She navigated as if the air were full of invisible vectors. Chair legs became collision hazards. Table corners became acute angles of potential pain. Each patron was an unknown variable with an untrusted distribution.
She wanted a corner. Not for melodrama. For geometry.
She found it in the dimmest quadrant where the hearth’s radiance attenuated into soft murk and faces lost their crispness. She slid into the seat with abrupt relief. Back to the wall. One dominant approach vector. A constrained domain where surprises had fewer degrees of freedom.
In that pocket of shadow, her eyes continued their oscillation. Split. Fuse. Split again. The topaz ring around green irises pulsed faintly as it intercepted stray light. Slouth’s ember-eye remained steady on her shoulder, a quiet constant beside her frantic oscillations.
Her mind did not slow. It only changed shape. Instead of imagining knives and jeers, it imagined equations. It tried to turn panic into a solvable model. She kept singing, quieter now, as if the chant were a set of rails her thoughts could cling to while they raced.
“Aether constant. Leyline load.
Eigenmode match. Channel code.
Vector bind. Sigil align.
Keep yuh mind from fractal-spin.”
She gripped the table edge, fingers splayed, needing tactile confirmation that the world was still solid. She listened for laughter aimed at her and heard only laughter that belonged elsewhere. She watched for hostility and found only ordinary motion.
The data suggested safety.
Her body refused to accept the dataset.
So she stayed in her corner, humming proofs to herself in a trembling cadence, eyes splitting and fusing in the dark like a living uncertainty, while Slouth sat on her shoulder and held the line of constancy against a mind moving a thousand miles an hour.
She halted at the lintel with the rigid stillness of an instrument encountering an unexpected boundary condition.
Beyond the doorway, the tavern did not manifest as “a room full of people.” It resolved as a bounded system with competing fields. A thermodynamic basin centered on the hearth. A laminar-to-turbulent transition where patrons crossed one another’s wake. A stratified canopy of smoke adhering to the rafters like a stubborn aerosol layer whose settling velocity had been vetoed by heat. Sound behaved as stochastic impulse. Bursts of laughter. Cutlery clicks. A chair-leg scrape. Each event arrived as a spike, then decayed into a low, persistent noise floor.
Her mind tried to model it. Her body tried to flee it.
Inside her skull, cognition accelerated until it felt superluminal. A thousand miles an hour, and still climbing. Hypotheses spawned faster than she could falsify them. A runaway iterative solver. Diverging. Recalculating with poisoned priors. Every glance she *might* have caught became data. Every absence of attention became camouflage. She was sure she was being stared at, judged, measured for weakness, though the distribution of gazes in the room did not support the conclusion. The crowd was mostly occupied with its own microeconomies of ale and appetite.
She could not convince her limbic system of the math.
She stepped in, small movements, constrained amplitude, as if she could discretize her presence into tolerable increments. The white-and-blue outfit made the attempt absurd. It fit her like a manufactured certainty. High-gloss, immaculate, tight through the waist and hips, with blue paneling and harness seams that made her torso look diagrammed. The fabric returned firelight in hard specular fragments. Reflection was an announcement. She wanted to be a rounding error.
Her body would not permit it. She moved with dense, unmistakable curvature and a tall, full-limned silhouette that made stealth an insult to geometry. Green skin, not cartoon-bright but vivid in a way lamplight could not ignore. Its surface caught warm photons and cooled them as it returned them, leaving her looking alternately verdant and mineral, as if she were a living sample prepared for examination.
Her horns rose in paired crescents, keratinous and leaf-veined, their ridges catching highlights like fine striations on cut stone. Green hair spilled beneath them in thick waves. Her mouth remained slightly parted, as though she were perpetually about to speak and perpetually deciding it was unsafe.
Her eyes were worse. Better. Both.
Green and topaz, luminous in the shadow as if they stored charge. The pupils diverged into two apertures like an octopoid slit. Then they fused again, seamlessly, as if ink had been poured into a single, obedient pool. The cycle repeated with metronomic insistence. Split. Fuse. Split. Fuse. It was not performance. It was physiology. It made her gaze look briefly nonhuman in its optics, then falsely ordinary again.
And perched on her shoulder, Slouth.
A conch-creature, spiral-shelled and alive, its single ember eye recessed deep in the shell’s throat. The iris glowed with a steady orange intensity that did not flicker with the fire. It was constant. A reference point. A baseline measurement in a world that felt like noise.
She tried to speak to no one in particular, because silence felt like surrender and sound felt like bait. The words came fast, clipped, protocol-driven, stitched together with an anxious efficiency. Every syllable sounded like it had been optimized for bandwidth.
“Evenin’, nuh. Mi sorry. Mi jus’ comin’ inside. Mi nah lookin’ fuh no trouble, yuh hear.” Her throat tightened. She swallowed and forced the next phrase out as if it were a theorem she could hide behind. “Probability o’ confrontation… supposed to be low, if mi assumptions ain’ corrupt.”
No one answered. No one challenged. No one surged toward her with a sneer or a fist. The neutrality should have lowered her pulse.
Instead, her pulse treated neutrality as a feint.
She half expected an attack, verbal or physical. Some insult that would latch to her skin and not wash off. Some shove. Some laugh. The anticipation coiled tighter because it had no release. Her mind kept running permutations, inventing outcomes and then bracing for them.
To keep from drowning in prediction, she began to sing.
Not loudly. Not for attention. For containment. A mnemonic chant of magical theorems and properties arranged with the ruthless sing-song logic of a recitation. It was a periodic table’s cousin. Not elements, but axioms. Not valence, but binding. Each line snapped into the next like a proof forced into rhyme.
“Aether constant. Resonance quotient.
Leyline gradient. Phase-point ratio.
Entropy climb. Containment lock.
Name di law, an’ yuh tame di shock.”
She winced mid-chant, irritated by her own imprecision.
“Dat line sloppy, nuh.” She corrected herself under her breath, still in that clipped cadence, still in that warm, heavy accent. “Mi mean. Avoid metaphor. Keep it formal.”
She moved deeper into the tavern like a particle seeking a minimum energy state. She did not weave with casual grace. She navigated as if the air were full of invisible vectors. Chair legs became collision hazards. Table corners became acute angles of potential pain. Each patron was an unknown variable with an untrusted distribution.
She wanted a corner. Not for melodrama. For geometry.
She found it in the dimmest quadrant where the hearth’s radiance attenuated into soft murk and faces lost their crispness. She slid into the seat with abrupt relief. Back to the wall. One dominant approach vector. A constrained domain where surprises had fewer degrees of freedom.
In that pocket of shadow, her eyes continued their oscillation. Split. Fuse. Split again. The topaz ring around green irises pulsed faintly as it intercepted stray light. Slouth’s ember-eye remained steady on her shoulder, a quiet constant beside her frantic oscillations.
Her mind did not slow. It only changed shape. Instead of imagining knives and jeers, it imagined equations. It tried to turn panic into a solvable model. She kept singing, quieter now, as if the chant were a set of rails her thoughts could cling to while they raced.
“Aether constant. Leyline load.
Eigenmode match. Channel code.
Vector bind. Sigil align.
Keep yuh mind from fractal-spin.”
She gripped the table edge, fingers splayed, needing tactile confirmation that the world was still solid. She listened for laughter aimed at her and heard only laughter that belonged elsewhere. She watched for hostility and found only ordinary motion.
The data suggested safety.
Her body refused to accept the dataset.
So she stayed in her corner, humming proofs to herself in a trembling cadence, eyes splitting and fusing in the dark like a living uncertainty, while Slouth sat on her shoulder and held the line of constancy against a mind moving a thousand miles an hour.
"What?"
"No idea what happened. But nice to see you again, Miss doctor lady."
Tyranoth wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Tyranoth wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Tyranoth wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Very much the lvl 1 Guardswoman to lvl 100 Canoness arc, a lineup for a fantastic story and iterative character development no less.
I don't know much about warhammer. I only know what I have dealt with IC. Had an invasion once from that fandom into winterwake. Was fun, they died. But I purposefully classified it as noncanon fun. We all enjoyed it, which is what matters.
Now, don't be chopping the heads off too many host. or Ixqueya might start to think the general has a particular fetish Lol))
Lmao well I certainly appreciate the fleeting inquiry into the general's fetishes, but I concede that was a bit of ill-construed mischief... there shall be no taking of heads...
Indeed, death is a bit of a staple in the universe, I don't imagine they fared well in an unfamiliar domain, I find it hard to fault their loss, If I may interject, I hypothesize that when your grace had come to meet the host in combat, your movement naturally resulted in the optimal jiggle frequency which cast some sort of discordant psychic influence that likely nullified the intent of the foes to do any harm. Lamentable, but nothing in our universe could have foreseen such a profound magnitude of wobble.
I am going to bring my nerdy demure character,. Ixqueya is sitting alone; she might be a bit too...cold (pun intended) for most. Nothing wrong with that, she is an acquired taste by design. owo))
Certainly, nothing wrong with demanding effort for reward, a gelid exterior hardly discourages genuine admiration. I look forward to writing with you and learning about your realms should I be granted the honor. ))
No better time than the present. Naturally, if its a fandom it wont be Canon. But that doesnt mena it cant be fun or fulfilling. The world has a few nation states.
White sand empire, Mongolian and middle eastern
Verdant dynasty, mesoamerican
Farhomless expanse, Caribbean
Winterwake/hextor, native american.
Tyranoth wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Tyranoth wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Tyranoth wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
The_Diva wrote:
Ami Arpatia wrote:
((Ami is currently elsewhere. Once she is allowed rest and relaxation, she will be back here...))
Look forward to reading more of her.
Very much the lvl 1 Guardswoman to lvl 100 Canoness arc, a lineup for a fantastic story and iterative character development no less.
I don't know much about warhammer. I only know what I have dealt with IC. Had an invasion once from that fandom into winterwake. Was fun, they died. But I purposefully classified it as noncanon fun. We all enjoyed it, which is what matters.
Now, don't be chopping the heads off too many host. or Ixqueya might start to think the general has a particular fetish Lol))
Lmao well I certainly appreciate the fleeting inquiry into the general's fetishes, but I concede that was a bit of ill-construed mischief... there shall be no taking of heads...
Indeed, death is a bit of a staple in the universe, I don't imagine they fared well in an unfamiliar domain, I find it hard to fault their loss, If I may interject, I hypothesize that when your grace had come to meet the host in combat, your movement naturally resulted in the optimal jiggle frequency which cast some sort of discordant psychic influence that likely nullified the intent of the foes to do any harm. Lamentable, but nothing in our universe could have foreseen such a profound magnitude of wobble.
I am going to bring my nerdy demure character,. Ixqueya is sitting alone; she might be a bit too...cold (pun intended) for most. Nothing wrong with that, she is an acquired taste by design. owo))
Certainly, nothing wrong with demanding effort for reward, a gelid exterior hardly discourages genuine admiration. I look forward to writing with you and learning about your realms should I be granted the honor. ))
She is part wasp. Wasps are evil.
Dr Natalie Manning wrote:
"Have I come in at a bad time?"
"Probabilmente. Non lo so più nemmeno io. I doubt anyone does."
"I appreciate that."
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