Avatar of Naril

Status

Recent Statuses

6 yrs ago
To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the Devil his due.
6 yrs ago
And when you said hi, I forgot my dang name.
3 likes
8 yrs ago
Everything beautiful is math! Everything beautiful is a problem.
8 yrs ago
But whatever they offer you, don't feed the plants!
1 like
8 yrs ago
Do you like cyberpunk? Do you like stories? Do you like complicated characters, and conspiracies? Take a look! roleplayerguild.com/topics/1..

Bio

Hi! I'm Naril. I write, build things, and I'm incredibly busy, all the time. I'm probably older than you. I'm not interested in isekai, school settings, sandboxes, excessively grimdark settings, or invitation-only threads; I'm very picky about militaria, I don't care for A Song of Ice and Fire, Nation roleplay bores me to tears, most fandom doesn't really catch my attention, and though I prefer Advanced-level writing, I'm not going to help you write your book (Unless you feel like paying my day rate) - which almost certainly means I'm not here. Some day, maybe. Probably not, though!

I am interested in science fiction, cyberpunk, space operas, and stories of working together, uplift, and progress. You'll catch my attention with fantasy adventures in an interesting world, or with almost any modern fantasy. I have a soft spot for superhero stories, and you might find me in the occasional Star Wars or Star Trek fandom.

My standards are high for myself and mild for everyone else; I love writing dialogue and making you feel like you can taste the place I'm creating. I write in the style I like to read, which is the part I find fun. If you want an example of the authors I enjoy, look at Ann Leckie, Tamsyn Muir, N.K. Jemisin, Martha Wells, Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman.

Most Recent Posts

These posts are so much fun. <3

I'm writing a Next Post in between unexpectedly doing night work all weekend, but I'm typing away regardless. Hooray!

All right, everyone! The IC is up.

For the purposes of this scene, I'm trusting everyone to basically do what they like, and collaboratively tell a good story. Treat this like a long-form improvisation exercise where you're handing narrative hooks to the next person in line, whoever that may be.

That means, for example, please don't just kill the spider in one post, that's no fun. Please do yell at the other characters, that's very fun. If you do something and want the GM's Word as to what that action actually did, let me know and I'll either write a GM interstitial post or just PM you whatever it is you'd like to know.

My posts will include information that is generally plot-relevant especially in scene-setting and NPC dialogue, otherwise I'm doing my best to treat Morgan as any other player-character. I encourage collaborative posts, especially when dialogue or conversations are involved.

Think of this initial scene like the tutorial level. You can't really do the 'wrong' thing in terms of the plot, and there will be more information peppered though as we go along.

<3

------------

And, I apologise @Dead Cruiser, but for the moment the cast is full and locked down. This may change in the future though!
Priest & Hawthorne Investigations

A Modern Fantasy Adventure


An introduction


The moon was a crescent of hard silver light the night Cameron walked into the aging room of his distillery and found a spider the size of a Volkswagen. There were other shapes nearby - cocoons, smaller than a person but not by so much that he thought he'd stick around and take a closer look. Cameron swallowed hard and backed out of the room, afraid that if he rolled the door shut he might wake the thing up. At the same time, though, if he left the door open, the spider might have an easier time getting out. Deciding that discretion really was the better part of valor, or at least of not being eaten at exactly this second, he walked backwards with slow steps past the threshold, back out into the night. Overhead, a sodium lamp cast harsh orange shadows over the rust-streaked exterior of the huge warehouse, lent only a little extra color by the watery headlights of Cameron's truck, which had been new sometime before the first time humans set foot on the Moon.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen, then back up at the door to the aging room. He called up a dial pad, but...who was he supposed to call? The police? Animal control? An exterminator? He imagined the last conversation and let out the first bite of a barking, hysterical laugh, something that yipped out of his mouth and bounced off the corrugated metal wall in a sharp spray of discordant echoes. In front of him, the huge spider shifted, one giant leg coming uncurled from the apparently-sleeping mass with an almost delicate motion. Cameron took a step back, the phone slipping out of his hand, panic welling up behind his eyes while he watched another leg unfold, opposite the first. No longer caring how much noise he made, Cameron scrambled toward his truck, out of view of the door, and started digging in his jacket for his keys.

He was well into dropping them for the third time when he heard another sound coming up the driveway, this time something more familiar. Tires crunched on the gravel road, along with...something else. Cameron turned away from the slowly-unfurling spider, raising one hand against the glare of another pair of headlights, the sound of John Denver's Country Roads wafting into the night. The lights resolved into an old and slab-sided van with large, knobbled tires. It came to a sliding, skidding halt a couple of meters from the door, rocking on its suspension and spraying gravel all the way to Cameron's boots.

The van’s doors opened and a handful of people piled out, stepping over one another in no particularly good order. In the headlights' glare, Cameron couldn't quite see who these people were - save for the driver, who stepped out and closed the distance to the man with long, quick strides. He could just make out her blue-green eyes, the curve of a cheekbone, the cut of her tailored suit. She looked at him, then at the warehouse, then back, and she shoved a hand through sweat-dampened hair.

"Hey, so," she said, sounding almost a little sheepish, "I've got a weird question for you."

Cameron looked at the woman, at the shapes of people behind her, back at his warehouse. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a kind of squeak.

"Right," the woman said, "Look - this probably sounds ridiculous, but..." She took a deep breath and pointed at the building, "Is there a huge spider in there?"

Cameron gawped, a proper gawp, the kind that left his jaw hanging loose for a moment. It took him a long, long moment to get enough of his muscles under control to nod and point.

"Okay, thanks." The woman turned and gave a thumbs-up to the people behind her, and they came forward.

Cameron saw the group now, in the hard shadows of two sets of headlights. They didn't look 'official' - no matching suits, no coordinated gait, not even the same kinds of haircuts. They were rumpled, disheveled, exasperation written plainly across their faces. A man held a shotgun with a practiced casualness that Cameron found alarming, and he would have sworn he saw embers and motes of light dancing around another woman’s hands and arms. The driver, though, his attention kept coming back to her. He couldn't help it, something he could no more resist than the pull of gravity.

"Who...who are you?" Cameron managed, after what felt like an eternity.

"Ah," the woman said, "...I'm Morgan. We're from Priest and Hawthorne Investigations."

Inside the warehouse, the spider had finished unfolding. It turned in place, its legs making the kind of thumping sounds on the ground Cameron usually associated with forklifts. One of the newcomers shouted, and the shotgun boomed. Cameron winced and fell against his truck, hands covering his ears. Morgan, for her part, stood unruffled, the ghost of a grin tugging at one side of her mouth. The spider shrieked, the sound almost louder than the shotgun, loud enough to make the sheet-metal walls vibrate in sympathy. Morgan turned toward the warehouse, then looked back at Cameron. To her left, the metal wall buckled and half a meter of monstrous spider-leg punched through. With a wail of tortured metal, the leg started tearing toward the ground through the sheet metal, a couple of rivets zinging out into the night.

"I wouldn't worry," Morgan said, reaching into her jacket, "We have this perfectly under control."
Are our characters meant to be operating together for an external reason related to an overarching plot, or is this an every-person-for-themselves sandbox?
Oh, god, everyone. Hi!

I am much, much sicker than I had anticipated being! This is awful.

However, the IC will be up tomorrow evening.

Thank you all for your patience. <3
Mmn. It's certainly been a day, but!

Here's our cast:

@Penny - I can't ever say no to your writing. I cannot wait to see what Sophia has in store for us.

@vietmyke - You had me at 'Auntie Morgan.' I promise that'll be adorable.

@HeySeuss - Treehugging war-veteran Druid, that's something I haven't seen before. I'm very intrigued.

@Hour Error - Toma and Sophia can compare scars and prison ink. I'm looking forward to the two of you bouncing off one another. <3

So, there we have it - lots of magic, lots of mischief, lots of damage and scars. I think it's kind of hilarious that all three female-identifying characters have backstories involving handcuffs and hostility, too.

This was an agonizing decision process, y'all. I can't wait to write with all of you when our paths cross in the future. <3

I still have a cold, and will be going home to sleep it off shortly. I would expect an IC post sometime late Saturday or maybe Sunday morning, which will be a slightly bulked-out version of the introduction on the first page of the OOC. Your characters will be the figures getting out of the truck (or maybe a van, five is a tight squeeze in a truck), and you're facing down a giant spider. This is an in medias res kind of thing, to try and avoid starting with the prosaic and quotidian. :3

Love you all already. Let's make some magic.

I am fighting off a cold and turning in early for this evening - which means there's one more day (or, at least, till tomorrow morning) of suspense!

There are a lot of characters I really like, but I'm pretty committed to keeping the cast list fairly small. We'll see what happens! <3
I'm always happy to read character sheets. :3

I'm going to start making some preliminary decisions starting tomorrow! I've got a new laptop, and I can't let it go too much longer without writing a whole pile of words on it. <3
Nobody's been accepted yet, because this isn't first-come, first-served. :3 I'll happily read sheets until I make my final decisions, but right now the only 'accepted' character is Morgan, and that's because she's my character. And, if she doesn't make sense to have with the cast I pick out, I'm comfortable with taking her out of play, too.
If this story winds up as PHI: Wizard Squad, I am so here for this.
© 2007-2024
BBCode Cheatsheet