@princess Sure. Ignoring the strait for convenience's sake, how long would it take to walk, say, from Kolonivka to Montauppe? What kind of a land scale are we looking at here? I was thinking of placing the prison where it would be cold, alienated, and inaccessible (ie. near Kolonivka); but not if it'll take me three months IC to hit the scene lol

Is there an established, canonical lore I should be reading up on and strictly adhering to on when I'm invited to the Discord, or are we free to worldbuild?

In the same vein as the previous question, when was the last time this setting was embroiled in total war, or any conflict large enough to upheave power structures, borders, etc.? Anything you can tell me about that conflict, such as numbers, factions, results, famous battles, etc.?

Here in the OOC tab, one GM post says this is a pre-industrial society, while another GM post declares this universe has developed steam ships, dirigibles, trains, etc. Which of these is accurate? If we were to look at firearms as a microcosm of the technological epoch, are people using flintlocks? Percussion caps? Matchlocks? Earlier, or even no firearms at all?

That's what I've got for now.

@princess Sure. Ignoring the strait for convenience's sake, how long would it take to walk, say, from Kolonivka to Montauppe? What kind of a land scale are we looking at here? I was thinking of placing the prison where it would be cold, alienated, and inaccessible (ie. near Kolonivka); but not if it'll take me three months IC to hit the scene lol

Is there an established, canonical lore I should be reading up on and strictly adhering to on when I'm invited to the Discord, or are we free to worldbuild?

In the same vein as the previous question, when was the last time this setting was embroiled in total war, or any conflict large enough to upheave power structures, borders, etc.? Anything you can tell me about that conflict, such as numbers, factions, results, famous battles, etc.?

Here in the OOC tab, one GM post says this is a pre-industrial society, while another GM post declares this universe has developed steam ships, dirigibles, trains, etc. Which of these is accurate? If we were to look at firearms as a microcosm of the technological epoch, are people using flintlocks? Percussion caps? Matchlocks? Earlier, or even no firearms at all?

That's what I've got for now.

I'm okay spending a few posts alone to do some character writing, but yes, thank God for the railroad. I can 100% work with the logistics of what I wanted to do in the north.

Might have the application ready as soon as this evening.

At your service, mademoiselle. [+]

^{(click image for theme song)}

^{Guillains de Pontviliard
(gī-YĒYN' də pо̄n-VÎL'-ī-ār)}

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Age 38 Height 5'9" Weight 12 Stone Eye Color Br Hair Color Br Hair Length/Texture Medium-Long, Fine, Full, Straight Skin Color Pale Facial Details ♠ Several prominent moles ♠ ♠ Waxed moustache ♠ ♠ Sunken, forlorn eyes ♠ Distinguishing Features ♠ Strange, flamboyantly side-braided hairstyle, indicative of his time in the 2nd Hussars ♠ ♠ His distinctive sword—a spadroon, both stouter and heavier than the smallsword of the modern style—also eschews in its handguards the usual brass or pinchbeck in favor of sterling silver ♠ Clothing Preferences Dark, Stiff, & Durable ______________________________________________________

Likes ♠ Single Combat—participating or spectating ♠ ♠ Billiards, chess, piquet, & misc. games of skill ♠ ♠ Schnapps ♠ ♠ Solitude ♠ Dislikes ♠ Sycophants ♠ ♠ Bragging, and other worthless noise ♠ ♠ Apathy, lethargy, listlessness—call it what you will but a better man lives by a code, relentlessly and sincerely ♠ ♠ Most people in general, truth be told ♠ ♠ Opium—the one vice he fears and forgoes ♠ Sexuality Heterosexual Hobbies ♠ Provoking better men into fighting him ♠ ♠ Killing those men ♠ ♠ Gambling ♠ ♠ Drinking ♠ ♠ Brooding ♠ Life Goals, Dreams He hasn't been free long enough to have yet decided. His elderly mother succumbed to tuberculosis while he was "away," so he hasn't anyone left to protect; the authorities would have confiscated his modest fortune long ago and yet it particularly interested him to begin with. He has no need for power. He supposes vengeance sounds nice, but hardly even knows what he might avenge at all: his wounded pride? His disgraced name? The freedom of which he was very deservedly robbed, because of the crime he most assuredly committed? Bah. Personality To describe de Pontviliard, first describe a creature whose hand is spurned to its hilt at even the slightest insult (imagined or otherwise); a creature engorged with hot, musky, vinegary pride behind the promontory of its breastbone. Describe the fervent, almost religious slaking of thirsts and lusts, as it stands to reason that no worthy God, or "gods," or fate, or constellation, or any other idol would festoon the earth with such sweet sacks and honeys and breastmilks and mean for man, in his finite and flimsy resolve, to abstain from them. The creature loves much, and it loves unabashedly, and it loves equally, and so describe a tongue which worships at all of its altars with the very same undying veneration: the altars of grape and grain and quim and deadly, caustic jape. Describe—ergo—a creature who refuses, altogether and regardless of the cost, to regulate his passions—for even death itself is preferable to boredom.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Prior Occupations

♠ Career Soldier—a Chef de bataillon in the Varian Grand Royal Army ♠

Current Occupation

♠ Vagabond ♠
♠ Grifter ♠
♠ Sponge ♠

Relatives

♠ Valabrandt—Father, for which Guillains has not forgiven him ♠
♠ Alesna—Sister ♠
♠ A web of insignificant cousins, nephews, uncles, et al.—he doesn't know them and nor does he care to ♠

Skills

♠ Fencing—his first and finest love ♠
♠ Shooting ♠
♠ Horseback Riding ♠
♠ Oration ♠
♠ Wargaming ♠
♠ Bluffing ♠
♠ Wine Tasting—for such a shameless lush he's surprisingly knowledgeable about fine liquors ♠

History Summary

Very few can attest—at least, not with any credibility or candor—that they'd have been better off born amongst Varian's commons than her landed gentrymen; that they yearn, truly, for the grueling hours and the squalid conditions of a textile factory, or a slaughterhouse, or even the decks of a whaler over the pampered, powdered lap of idle luxury—that they envy the farmhand's sunburnt nose and the boatswain's blisters. After sixteen hours in a sweatshop, with all the body's reserves of vigor thusly sapped, the intellect, itself depleted by tedium and rote, longs for nothing more than the sedation of a hot meal (though lukewarm will do), cold gin, and straw-stuffed burlap's blithe oblivion. (One will find this principle, on the whole, divulges why the intellectuals of the time, and every time, are always bred in the taverns: where blends that heady admixture of late hours, plentiful beer, and melancholic humors which in one or another ratio has produced all human philosophie.) But Guillains de Pontviliard, soldier and gentleman (if only in the past tense), might indeed be counted among that rare breed: a being haunted by his own cynicism, hollowed by grief, and perpetually doomed to either destroy or despoil whatever he touches.

There comes that event horizon in every boy's maturation—his fermentation, as Guillains puts it—where he has just had his very first thought which he can truly consider his own; a thought not bored into him by the intentions and expectations of others but which materialized from his own matter, like the bubbles at the bottom of a soup cauldron; when he first realizes his father is a dullard, for instance, or he has for the first time violated the household's curfews and received no punishment, or formed his first conjectures, volatile and indignant, on god or king or family or some other pillar infallibly sacred and yet evidently powerless to strike him down for his apostasy. It's been since that vague day, Guillains supposes, that he has abhorred life: its futility, its tyranny, and its futile, tyrannical dullness.

But even in his tenderest boyhood he hated when he wanted a cup of watered wine, for there was ever and always a servant there to fetch it for him. (Soon he'd learned not to seem thirsty whatever, absconding instead to the wells and streams to reel up the farmhands' jugs and sneak sips from their switchel.) He hated that he would grouse and fuss when he was made to sit down for horn lessons, and rather than whack him upside the head and guard the door until he'd recited his major scales, and the minor as well for the inconvenience, his father would acquiesce, and grovel, and after the boy had pecked at his supper that night would allow him the same heaping dessert as every other. And more than anything else, the young Guillains hated Midwinter—when both his parents and all his grandparents and godfathers, his uncles, even some of the more doting servants would muster, to spend an entire week lavishing him with undeserved gifts, gorging him on feasts of chocolate; plucking, honeying, and roasting whole flocks of pheasants in his honor; celebrating deeds he hadn't performed and virtues he didn't possess. A bizarre child, he; these appeasements would have rotted any other boy through with vulgar haughtiness, while Guillains bittered instead with a precocious disdain for all such pomp and ceremony, and the likes of people who profit thereon.

Never did he feel more pathetic, however, than a mild day early in the autumnal harvest of his eleventh year. Tucked his breeches into sagging stovepipe boots did he, and went forth into the fields in a slouch hat hoping to assist the sharecroppers, and share in their ways, but each of them at best ignored him, or likelier rejected him outright; for wheresoever went the little lord went also the men tasked with his utmost safety, wearing carbines slung over their backs and sabers at their hips. They would not be responsible for the snapping of an ankle in a gopher hole, or the trampling under a draft animal's metal shoes, or the opening of his hand on one of their deathly-keen sickles, and so they sent him away to eat the breakfast they'd reared and slaughtered that morn, and bathe in the waters they'd arduously lugged up all those stairs for him, and dress into the fineries they'd years ago embroidered from their finest wools and cottons.

Not even the boy's personal physician could fully rationalize why Guillains's humors tinged so strongly melancholic at what should be such a carefree and choleric age; nor why before his twelfth birthday he was already a socialist. But in that unripe shade of life, owing at least partly to his rigid countenance and his seething disposition, he already passed for a man of sixteen, and therefore in that year successfully lied to a recruiter and enrolled himself in the military academy in Stravy. The choice surprised and appalled many among the manor, father most of all, though perhaps it shouldn't have; if Guillains wanted to feel like he had earned his place at the family table, and in the world itself, what sacrifice among young men would be more readily lauded than to offer up body and limb and spirit to be crushed under the iron spokes of war? But on the whole they had taken him at his appearance—that of an undisciplined, sulking, disaffected little wretch—and so as he packed his paltry belongings and departed, they suckled on the comfort of knowing he'd drag himself not two months through a military career before he'd struck a commanding officer, or ignored a direct order, or in some other way effected his own discharge.

Four years later, then a man of "twenty," Guillains graduated from the academy and entered the Grande Armée Royale as a sub-lieutenant. By unsubmitted technicality, he was the youngest commissioned officer in the army.

Of course, no small degree of mischief happened along the way. It is there at the academy, for instance, via the centuries-old tradition of Mesure, that our fiery Guillains discovered both his penchant for dueling and his talent for it. Every cadet wore a sword by compulsion, and having joined a fraternity, as was the fashion, his tendency—indeed, his duty—was to defend his fraternity's honor and his own whensoever arose even the faintest opportunity to do so. That meant both accepting every challenge issued out to him, and, as he soon learned, challenging others as well over any slights he could perceive no matter how subtle. Daily for all those four years these flashes of violence erupted in the squares and forums of the school, and even in the city beyond, with a dozen or more bystanders always gathering round to bear witness for the contestants. And although no one "lost" these duels—the "loser" displaying just as much bravery by taking a scar, as the victor did skill by inflicting one—Guillains made it his purpose to develop and nurture his deadliness as far as it could naturally strive. Thankfully as the son of a landed man he'd already had some training, but what truly set him above his peers in this period was his utter disregard for the value of his own life; thus, his fearless abandon in the face of his enemies, even when their intent was terrifying, and vicious, and dangerously real—aimed at organs and arteries in lieu of the cheek.

Those scars from his academic days have long since faded (those few opponents who marked him having been very deft indeed, their cuts clean), though for as long as they lasted Guillains wore them proudly, as does any Varian man of any worth.

And it was there, standing at the precipice of greatness, that Guillains de Pontviliard, then a young man filled with strength and cunning and courage, met again his lifelong mortal foe: he could never have realized military life would be so frightfully dull until he'd already signed on, but there he was, ordering his troop (and later on an entire battalion, as he climbed to the rank of major) to dig defensive trenches against an enemy which would never come; to march themselves up and down unneeded communications lines; to polish their boots and scrub the cannons and cut the frays from their tassels. Fourteen years and five ranks and outside of drills and training, Guillains could recall precisely one time a gun was fired amongst his unit: a negligent discharge during a routine patrol across from the Caesonian coast, for which the guilty corporal received a terrible rebuking. Yes, as it happens the world has no need of career soldiers during over a century of industry, trade, and the kingly cowardice called "peace"; and though the Chef de bataillon de Pontviliard could think of many ways in which to incite a conflict, he would instead go on to scapegoat several others for his pent-up bloodlust. The Grande Armée Royale strictly forbade dueling between men of different ranks, so Guillains could only challenge other sub-lieutenants, then lieutenants, and so forth as he climbed the ranks himself. And challenge them he did: at least eight of them, in fact, over the course of a year, though likelier ten. And though normally the Varian military courts did not sufficiently care to enforce this rule, instead allowing dozens of officers to die each year to their own comrades' indignantly drawn blades, this year there was supposedly a cold war with Caesonia—supposedly, on one side of the river a landed family had stubbornly refused to relocate and make way for the construction of a new railroad route through their property. And with one kingdom defending the family's right to homestead where they had been settled for over a hundred years, and the other kingdom grousing that they alone should not renegotiate a new route and shoulder the additional construction costs (several hundred thousand pounds of silver by the sound of it), each side watched the other warily from across the choppy waters, leering for any sign of instigation—escalation. And while the war slowly, tediously amounted to nothing, there was Battalion Chief de Pontviliard, taking out his aggression and his meanness on his fellow officers for injuries and insults nigh-imperceptible to everyone but himself. And with the whole world holding its breath, watching for any escalation, any dropping of a hat, someone high up in the Varian military tribunal must have decided they should not overlook the law this time—not with such great bloodshed and national embarrassment at stake. So they court-martialed de Pontviliard, and dragged him before the tribunal, and because he is not ashamed or a liar he confessed to all ten duels, although only six of them stuck (on the basis of their having resulted in "grievous bodily injury which has rendered the victim, whether by death, dismemberment, or other affliction, unwillfully derelict in his duties to God, queen, and country"). The court contemplated the heedless waste of life at de Pontviliard's hands; but to his surprise, so too did they consider that the deaths had occurred under the code of honorable combat, with each of the slain consenting to the fight beforehand, and even this only after allegedly besmirching the plaintiff's personal reputation in the first place. In the end he would serve six years in a military prison near Kolonivka: one for each of the captains he maimed, with two of them laying figuratively dead at his feet, their literal bodies delivered to their homes for burial.

That was six years ago to the date. They release him today, and learn whether his time in a dank, cold cell has changed the man for the better, or driven him ever deeper into the throes of his angst and his wrath.

let me know if it sucks ass lmao @princess@Tae

Man, I dunno whether to be flattered or sad. 😭

I hope you'll reconsider, but all the best to you regardless.