Vilageidiotx

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Generally, this is the way I do things:

I have several ideas about what I might do with every character. I have ideas about what I want to do with all of my stuff as a whole. These are vague ideas and they change when I come up with better ideas, or when somebody suggests something that I think might work better.

Then I have more specific ideas about what I want to do. Could just be a line, or it could be an event. Could be how I want a character to die. I remember some of these and play with them in my head, and some I write down.

So you take something like the Rouge General. I had a plan about how he was going to die, and I knew the general rhythm of the war (when he was going to win and when he was going to lose). But the rest of it I just sort of made up as I went. I had his death scene planned something like a year in real time before I actually wrote it, but most of the other details like where exactly the battles were fought or how they would be won or lost were not really planned at all.

Similarly, I have a general idea on how I want Sahle's arc to end, but i'm not completely sure on how i'm going to get there. And I know how I want several characters to die, I just don't know when yet.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Shit post because I kind of ran out of time.

But shitpost is better than no post.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Addis Ababa

Even in the pale morning sun, Queen Azima's skin felt cold. Numb. The air was cool and wet from the mist running off the marble fountain in the center of the garden, and the green grass was weighed down by dew protected from the sun by the shade of the palace itself. The building was smooth brownstone, with pearly white arches protecting the collonade. Birds sung peacefully in the trees, and the calm babble of the fountain should have made her feel comfortable, if not happy.

But it didn't.

Her mother-in-law - the Queen Dowager Elani - was one of the kindest women she had met. She had become her mother, in a way, in law and in her mind. My real mother was taken away. Now i'm losing another...

She had be raised with the royal children, spending her childhood playing in the gardens with Yaqob and pining over his older brother while her father, Ras Hassan, discussed politics. Hassan was a cold man, and fatherhood had not warmed him. She had learned later that he had not wanted to take her from her mother at all - the decision had been made by Yohannes. 'My fathers men don't want a Somali upstart to come before them' Yohannes had argued. He had not been the Emperor yet - just the governor of Wollo, with grand plans for the future that would follow his ailing father's passing. Hassan had risen fast, and his popularity with the Prince annoyed those who he threatened to replace. Old names, those that had followed Iyasu when his reign was still uncertain. They argued that Hassan was a thug, and the allegation that he had raped a woman in his home country of Somalia only fueled their campaign against him. Yohannes told him to marry the woman and adopt the child she claimed was his, but he proved to stubborn too marry. He took Azima and left her mother behind.

But Elani had filled that gap. She had always been a sweet woman, willing to treat the lost little girl from the shanties of Mogadishu with the same care she gave her own children. She had heard the homesick little girl when she was frightened and helped in any way she could as that same little girl grew into a headstrong, but lost, adult. Sadly, the world did not repay her kindness. A bullet ended her marriage, and the threat of war caused her oldest son to disappear - a disappearance that only Azima understood, but even to her seemed to have ended in death. A second bullet had nearly taken her second son from her, and even though he lived it had left him scarred and surly. She had lost so much, but now she was losing her self.

The doctor was young - hardly twenty five if he was that old at all. His skin was the color of coffee and his eyes brown pearls behind a pair of glasses with circular frames. Too young. What could he possibly know? He had came recommended by Dr. Sisi himself - the wealthy psychiatrist who had surprised the medical establishment across the world when he presented them with advances Azima didn't quite understand. He had spent the better part of a week interviewing Elani privately, and his diagnosis came as no surprise. Early onset Dementia. Her brain was dying and she was fading away.

"We can make her comfortable, of course." the doctor explained. "She will be aware of it at times, and it will distress her. But I can prepare a small team to help her cope."

"Will she need to be moved." Yaqob asked. He held Tewodros in his arms as the child slept. To Azima, it looked like he was holding him close to himself for comfort. This bothers him more than it bothers me. This is his mother, and the last of his family besides Taytu. Taytu had meant to be there for the diagnosis, but work had taken her. There were reports of suspicious action being taken by the Spanish forces in the Mediterranean. An informant had sold information to several agencies that a Spanish commander had made his troops aware that they were planning to invade Africa.

A warm gust caught the doctors coat, sending its open sides flaring like two white flags hanging from his shoulders. Underneath, he wore an orange sweater with a student's identification tag pinned to the chest Dr. Malcolm Orji. He was charismatic in a soothing kind of way, but there was a subtle hint of distance in his eyes. Was she just thinking of Sisi? The Good Doctor - or so his students seemed to call him - was ice hidden a smile. He spoke like a thesaurus who's understanding of the world had came from reading a dictionary, but that wasn't what his ice was. It was hidden in his face. His smile was always the same, more condescending than warm, as if everything around him was a joke. And his eyes... he looked at people with the same focus he used to stare at a piece of art or a plate of food. He had done a lot for them, but what he truly felt was... Azima didn't like to think of it.

"Your home is large enough for us to take care of her here." the young doctor assured. There was a tenderness in his voice that made her comparisons to Sisi fade away. "And it will be better for her"

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Dinh AaronMk said
What does oZode even smell like? Space operas?

If his smell fills a bus, it's either heavy cologne or heavy BO. Considering the context, I'm assuming the later.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Looks more like a Mexican grandfather.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Chapatrap said
But is it canon? We should make it canon.

That is how POW ends.

Hou teaches Sotelo how to love. And then they spend the last chapter just... lovin'

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Chapatrap said
They were probably patching this Heartbleed thing.

"Oh shit, guys, we gotta make sure those hackers can't take our RP accounts! They might post non-cannon material!"

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Chapatrap said
We could make a thread in the Character Sheet section. Seeing as not everyone got a chance to post on the first page.

That is not a bad idea. If people actually do it, it would make their information easier to access so that the rest of us can drop mentions of shit elsewhere without having to search for example posts.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Addis Ababa, Capital of the Seven Kingdoms African Empire

Malta.

There had been something in the air when Dr. Sisi left the Hassan's offices in the government's Imperial Palace. Walinzi agents were there, dressed in black knee-length greatcoats and sunglasses. They looked like reapers, skulking in the corner and talking in hushed voices about something Sisi could not understand. Malta. I am absolute on this matter. One of the phantomed operatives made mention of that knighted isle.

He sat in the back of an air-conditioned limousine, the noontime Addis Ababa sun darkened by the tint of his windows so much that it looked like dawn. The seats were slick black leather, and the plush lining of the frame was an eggshell white. Sisi rested royally with his leg on one cheek, his body turned so that one pressed firmly ahead of the other. A gold tipped cane rested next to him, holding down a perfectly folded oil-black coat.

From the outside, his ride looked out of place among the weighed down sedans and ill-repaired trucks with their chipping paint and make-shift parts. His was a Maybach - an old symbol of German luxury from a generation ago when the last of the true European aristocrats began to fade away . White-wall tires, washed tirelessly by those in his service and protected by polished black fenders. The nose of the car was long and thing, ending in a silver grill and impeccable raised round headlights. The cab was more than any simple four-door sedan - it was smooth and rounded, like something designed by artisans rather than engineers. It was what any gentleman such as Sisi would prefer. Sisi had traveled Europe in his youth, and he had fell in love with the ruins that existed behind the modern reconstructions. Old castles hugging hilltops, velvet carpets and silk sleepwear. He discovered western learning and western speech. He loved it all, and it defined him.

But he had never been to Malta. He knew little about the island, save for its Christian past. The Knights of St. John - crusader knights that had harried the Holy Land as the Knights Hospitaller - held the island against Turks and ruled it as their sovereign land through the European golden age, until Napoleon took it. And then it was British. And then it was Spanish.

Hispania. There is that heinous name label again. How they vex my employers. The image of Sotelo made newspapers and television broadcasts more often than any other world leader. He was a well dressed man, with slicked back hair and pointed features. There was a charisma too him that was difficult to nail - different from Yaqob's young warmth. It was stone, solid and certain. But there was also something else. I am scholar of the mind and an abiding student of the brain. Sotelo is concealing a truth with... those eyes.

Spain was a unique customer from the perspective of Sisi's... other ventures. The Spanish had money - more money than there was in Africa, there was no doubt - but there was some obstacle in the way of Sisi's custom. It was not simply borders - smugglers always found a way, even into the supposedly impregnable China. Spain had simply not warmed up in the way he would have liked.

Psychedelics were a unique sort of drug. Uppers and downers had ruled the market for ages, with the more hallucinogenic narcotics hiding in monasteries and sweat lodges. Someone had once told him that psychedelic mushrooms had been found to be relatively abundant on Sinai, where God was said to have given Moses the laws of the land. It was blasphemous, surely, but it was hard for Sisi to pretend that it wasn't an amusing fact at least. When he had heard it, he had smirked and done the sign of the cross lazily - but sincerely - over his chest.

Malta

Sisi thought of knights again, and he thought of Sotelo. It brought an image of the later to mind, dressed in silvery steel with a surcoat displaying the Spanish flag. I imagine that is how he sees himself.

They reached one of the centers of the city, where three of the capitol's main arteries met in a single turnabout. In the center was the statue of a lion carved in stained dark granite - some of the stains coming from the rock, while others were simply the white smear of bird droppings. It was a true enough depiction of a lions form, but there was something square about the design. The folds of its mane, the shape of its paws against the flat top of its base, and it's sturdy jaw... it was all square in some vague way. In it's left paw, it held a long sceptre and on it's head it wore a crown topped by the Ethiopian cross - a cross whom's branches flared out into three ornately designed diamond shapes.

And behind him, a panorama of the city spun around.

Addis Ababa was small. White-wash buildings stood next to egg-shell blue and pale pink, each one heavily plastered. There were a few buildings that could truly be called skyscrapers. Few of them reached even twenty floors, and even fewer - a small handful of towers built from dull concrete and glass - reached thirty or forty.

Sisi reached for a small manila folder sitting neatly next to his coat. The label on top of it read "Project Think." What a ghastly title. He opened it and flipped several pages in.

It was all updates on the discoveries of his laboratory in the depths of the Congo. The subjects there had been acquired from the Germans during their invasion six years prior, and they had mostly been used up. The few remaining - a few hundred at best - had been moved to a new facility in the jungle interior. If Sisi had been given a choice, he would have managed them completely alone - a subsidiary of the school he operated in Kinshasa. Those students who rose to the very top of his classes were given the privilege of working on his prized subjects. With exception of the one who protested so indignantly. That was ugly business.

But the rest of his manpower came from the Walinzi, and Sisi's friendship with Ras Hassan. They had met during that war, when Sisi fed Hassan the basic materials he needed to win. Food, clothing, ammo... Hassan had found himself trapped in the African interior, and Sisi's supplies were the lifeblood of his war effort.

Sisi flipped a few more pages.

Slow substitution of CSF with Lysergide produced limited results. Early experiences suggested a reaction similar to typical inter-venous usage, but this was soon followed by a catatonic state. Death followed. The statistical outflows...

A peculier choice for experimentation. Sisi wondered. He had preferred surgical matters to these more chemical ones, but he was proud to admit that his students had discovered interesting bits of information as well. Still, the Congo lab was no longer interesting. Too much had been done there already, and even their remaining subjects had nearly reached the point of being so often used that there were too many confounding factors working against their experiments.

"Doctor." the driver called back. Sisi looked up and recognized where they were immediately. "We have arrived. Your plane is ready on the tarmac."

"Pleasant. Marvelous." Sisi answered. He scooped up his cane and folded his jacket under his arm.

Enough of Africa. I have a better laboratory to revel in.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

I did another infosheet.
Link

For everybody, new to the RP or not, keeping a character and post sheet like this is insanely useful and I recommend that everybody at least try. For those who want to refer to mine, it is the fourth of fifth post on the first page of the OOC and is easy as shit to access.