Post by Deleted on Aug 29, 2014 15:17:51 GMT -8
*Saachi is my alt character. I play her just as much as Xifang though (and depending on what I'm leveling, sometimes more). While she's not in Arcanum, I'd like her to interact with many of the company's members... So I'm sticking this here until I get yelled at. ^_^; -Xi
“There are monsters”, he said, his voice as even, gentle and warm as ever, the slightest shadow of a sympathetic, loving smile flickering across his lips as hard to discern as the shapes of shadows that the flickering candles threw against the walls. “Some you can see from a distance and others not until it’s too late. There are monsters that will walk beside you, that seem harmless, and then”, he reached for his young daughter, tickling her under the arms and kissing her rapidly on her plump cheeks while she squirmed and gigged, “gobble you up!”
He was dressed immaculately; he always was, and he smelled of some sort of combination of spice and galago mint. His daughter’s straight-laced, strict, and often rather morose, nursemaid never cooked anything that had those spices or that mint and the house never smelled that way save for when the girl’s father visited. Sometimes he’d lie down in her bed when he’d read her to sleep and then her pillows and blankets and would smell like him for days. She liked that. The comforting smell of her father wasn’t her preference, but in the absence of his physical presence, it sufficed well enough.
His black hair had begun to gray at the temples and when she was young she imagined that he had wanted it to be that way- like his tailored suits and that mysterious cologne, perhaps her father had carefully picked the shade of gray and black that his hair had become. As she grew older and watched his hair gray further and his annoyance at her pointing it out, she learned that this wasn’t true, but still fancied that it was just how fathers looked. Hair graying on the temples, the knitted brow, the lines on his face, these all gave him access and membership to the elite Club of Fathers, of which she amused herself by pretending he must have been the leader. Of course he headed the Club of Fathers, he seemed to be in charge of everything else.
How could he NOT lead ? Her father, Aban Medyed, knew, after all, all things that there was to know (he assured her of this often). Mathematics, science, history, religion, warfare, magic, business... on and on, of course he knew these things. She’d never seen him balance his finances, pour one chemical from one mysterious, official vial to another, pray to any god, bring a man to his knees with martial prowess or cast a spell of any sort, but there was no reason not to believe him. His eyes sparkled when he spoke and he’d pat her hair when she got scared or cried. He was never there when she was sick, but he’d bring her a toy or a pretty bracelet and a new book and tell her how proud he was that she had defeated another illness. So he was trustworthy. He knew all things. Of course, being a hero, he knew about monsters too.
…
“So what a disappointment”, Saachi, 13 years older than that memory (a ripe, old 19 now), thought to herself somewhat detached from her emotions,” to discover that he knew so much of them because he was one.”
“There are monsters that will walk beside you”, he had said.
She looked out the window of the small inn she was visiting for the night, an old, familiar book (one that he had, of course, read to her) resting open on her lap, its cover a little damaged, but still stubbornly hanging in there… a suitable analogy for how she sometimes felt these days.
She urged herself to think of something else, anything else, and it worked for a period of time. The elezen’s mind was frequently restless, darting from one idea to another, like an indecisive patron at a restaurant jumping from one menu item to the next then back again, or a bee from flower to flower. She thought about one of her favorite stories, the tale of a gladiator who, tired of wrestling beasts and men, came to wrestle, conquer and ultimately marry a fire spirit. With a wry smile she found herself chuckling at the thought and talking to herself, “It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for romance. He could have started with flowers…”
From there she tried to imagine what sort of music might accompany such a scene if his tale were to be performed by an acting troupe. She only knew how to play harp, and a little bit of the violin, and neither quite as well as she’d have liked, and she thought maybe his song would require more intense drumming and swelling brass than strings anyway. Could she write the song? Probably not. She’d started taking up song writing, here and there, but it was still extremely amateurish and one of her favorite tales deserved more than the simplicity of her music theory. She thought on the color and shape of the flowers in the vase beside her bed, on the fabric of the curtains on the windows, of how the inn blanket felt like it was made out of clouds, what it might be like if SHE were made of clouds, on and on… but then, like a fly that refuses to vacate the room, thoughts of the life she left behind landed upon her again.
“There are monsters that will walk beside you” he had said.
He had said these things often, any time she wanted to run outside and play in the autumn leaves or follow him into the city.
“You are very weak”, he would say patiently, “and you get ill very easily. If you go out there it will be too much for your heart. The things out there”, he said, that familiar, gentle, hint of a smile on those lips, that she realized only now did not always match the expression in his eyes, “that will come after you and will hurt that weak heart of yours. It is safer to stay here. I will see you again before you know it”
And as regular as day turns to night, he’d disappear from the tiny house that had become her prison, only to re-emerge a day or two after she’d begin to think she’d never see him again. Her life had become an endless cycle of thinking she’d never see her father again, him reappearing much to her heart’s delight, her asking to please go with him somewhere, anywhere!, outside of the house, his making an excuse and then vanishing again. As she grew older she grew more difficult to control. She’d test the waters by saying a mean thing, here and there, to her father and he’d guilt her about what an ungrateful daughter she was and how if it was to be that way, he’d just leave and not return.
He was always threatening, after she talked back, that his job might take him further away from her and he might be able to visit less often. And since, after all, he was an actual hero, out there fighting monsters, beasts and criminals, any day could possibly be the last day for him. It’d be terrible for him to leave after she said those awful things to him and not be able to come back, “but”, he’d say, looking hurt, his voice shaking a little, “I can’t control time and the time has come for me to go…”
Of course she’d apologize! She loved him and wanted to see him! She didn’t want him to die. She learned that if she didn’t bring up wanting to leave the house, he stayed longer and they had a nicer time together.
But the people in the stories he read to her were always leaving to go places. She supposed they didn’t have weak hearts like she did. But, as she’d put a hand on her heart and feel the rhythmic Ba-Dump, Ba-Dump, Ba-Dump of it against her palm and in her ears, she’d wonder “How is it weak?” And, besides, she got sick sometimes, but did she really get sicker more often than other people? She didn’t know; she didn’t SEE other people… except a number of silent maids and an increasingly more depressed nursemaid.
“HA”, the 19 year old declared to the nothing that kept her company in the inn room. She dropped the book to the ground just so she could hear the sound of its thud echo against the wall. “My heart will be hurt? Really?”
Well. Yeah. She supposed that was true. Since breaking free of that prison, a lot of things had managed to hurt her heart. But they were frequently the things that healed it as well. Every encounter that upset her since being free probably hurt her twice as hard as it should have, but often just thinking about how she had been able to experience that kind of pain at all was enough to make her feel momentarily elated again.
Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t feel as afraid as others in the world were constantly telling her that she should. She took up the sword and shield, she took up fighting with an axe, she learned various forms of magic and, yes, she had fought a wiiiide variety of monsters, beasts and criminals. And, yeah, it was scary. She wasn’t so foolish as to suggest that she never felt fear, just that that fear had never been enough to dissuade her from the fight. In fact, she found that she reveled in the fight! She looked forward to it! She felt alive. She felt like she was DOING something, taking control of something… and she hadn’t felt like that for many, many years.
So that was it then. Life was about DOING. Life was about freedom and choice and experience. About compassion and respect for others. From here on out, she would manage to find pride in herself anytime she realized she was making a decision of her own and living life as she thought she should. The enemies she encountered, should they be people, she’d try to give opportunities for choice to as well. Because, she thought, we all have a past that we are coming from and we all have the right to walk into a better future.
It felt like the dark, oppressive room of candles, shadows and soft-spoken manipulation was always clawing its way back into her brain, or riding on her back with her gear, but what mattered to her was that when it was all said and done she wouldn’t fall helpless before it. Her future was starting now and she’d fill it with dancing, singing, battling, drawing, arguing, running, leaping and crying all that she wanted to… and it’d be on her terms. She’d wrestle a fire spirit (and subsequently marry it) if she wanted to. People mocked her for being too whimsical, or berated her for being too extreme, or clucked their tongues at her for hanging on to what was publicly considered “childish delusions of heroism and grandeur”, but it didn’t at all dissuade her from continuing to behave exactly as she wanted to: full of whimsy, adrenaline chasing, heroic grandeur!
“Because”, she said to herself, lying down on her inn room bed, “sure, this world is full of monsters, even ones that sometimes walk beside us and hurt our hearts, but”, she rolled onto her side and stared at the vase on the table,“it’s also full of good people, flowers with faces like the sun and inn room blankets that smell like different cities and feel like the clouds... So the good pretty much outweighs the bad”
She yawned sleepily and imagined what music wandering performers might play for her story. She hoped it’d feature at least a little bit of harp or violin.
“There are monsters”, he said, his voice as even, gentle and warm as ever, the slightest shadow of a sympathetic, loving smile flickering across his lips as hard to discern as the shapes of shadows that the flickering candles threw against the walls. “Some you can see from a distance and others not until it’s too late. There are monsters that will walk beside you, that seem harmless, and then”, he reached for his young daughter, tickling her under the arms and kissing her rapidly on her plump cheeks while she squirmed and gigged, “gobble you up!”
He was dressed immaculately; he always was, and he smelled of some sort of combination of spice and galago mint. His daughter’s straight-laced, strict, and often rather morose, nursemaid never cooked anything that had those spices or that mint and the house never smelled that way save for when the girl’s father visited. Sometimes he’d lie down in her bed when he’d read her to sleep and then her pillows and blankets and would smell like him for days. She liked that. The comforting smell of her father wasn’t her preference, but in the absence of his physical presence, it sufficed well enough.
His black hair had begun to gray at the temples and when she was young she imagined that he had wanted it to be that way- like his tailored suits and that mysterious cologne, perhaps her father had carefully picked the shade of gray and black that his hair had become. As she grew older and watched his hair gray further and his annoyance at her pointing it out, she learned that this wasn’t true, but still fancied that it was just how fathers looked. Hair graying on the temples, the knitted brow, the lines on his face, these all gave him access and membership to the elite Club of Fathers, of which she amused herself by pretending he must have been the leader. Of course he headed the Club of Fathers, he seemed to be in charge of everything else.
How could he NOT lead ? Her father, Aban Medyed, knew, after all, all things that there was to know (he assured her of this often). Mathematics, science, history, religion, warfare, magic, business... on and on, of course he knew these things. She’d never seen him balance his finances, pour one chemical from one mysterious, official vial to another, pray to any god, bring a man to his knees with martial prowess or cast a spell of any sort, but there was no reason not to believe him. His eyes sparkled when he spoke and he’d pat her hair when she got scared or cried. He was never there when she was sick, but he’d bring her a toy or a pretty bracelet and a new book and tell her how proud he was that she had defeated another illness. So he was trustworthy. He knew all things. Of course, being a hero, he knew about monsters too.
…
“So what a disappointment”, Saachi, 13 years older than that memory (a ripe, old 19 now), thought to herself somewhat detached from her emotions,” to discover that he knew so much of them because he was one.”
“There are monsters that will walk beside you”, he had said.
She looked out the window of the small inn she was visiting for the night, an old, familiar book (one that he had, of course, read to her) resting open on her lap, its cover a little damaged, but still stubbornly hanging in there… a suitable analogy for how she sometimes felt these days.
She urged herself to think of something else, anything else, and it worked for a period of time. The elezen’s mind was frequently restless, darting from one idea to another, like an indecisive patron at a restaurant jumping from one menu item to the next then back again, or a bee from flower to flower. She thought about one of her favorite stories, the tale of a gladiator who, tired of wrestling beasts and men, came to wrestle, conquer and ultimately marry a fire spirit. With a wry smile she found herself chuckling at the thought and talking to herself, “It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for romance. He could have started with flowers…”
From there she tried to imagine what sort of music might accompany such a scene if his tale were to be performed by an acting troupe. She only knew how to play harp, and a little bit of the violin, and neither quite as well as she’d have liked, and she thought maybe his song would require more intense drumming and swelling brass than strings anyway. Could she write the song? Probably not. She’d started taking up song writing, here and there, but it was still extremely amateurish and one of her favorite tales deserved more than the simplicity of her music theory. She thought on the color and shape of the flowers in the vase beside her bed, on the fabric of the curtains on the windows, of how the inn blanket felt like it was made out of clouds, what it might be like if SHE were made of clouds, on and on… but then, like a fly that refuses to vacate the room, thoughts of the life she left behind landed upon her again.
“There are monsters that will walk beside you” he had said.
He had said these things often, any time she wanted to run outside and play in the autumn leaves or follow him into the city.
“You are very weak”, he would say patiently, “and you get ill very easily. If you go out there it will be too much for your heart. The things out there”, he said, that familiar, gentle, hint of a smile on those lips, that she realized only now did not always match the expression in his eyes, “that will come after you and will hurt that weak heart of yours. It is safer to stay here. I will see you again before you know it”
And as regular as day turns to night, he’d disappear from the tiny house that had become her prison, only to re-emerge a day or two after she’d begin to think she’d never see him again. Her life had become an endless cycle of thinking she’d never see her father again, him reappearing much to her heart’s delight, her asking to please go with him somewhere, anywhere!, outside of the house, his making an excuse and then vanishing again. As she grew older she grew more difficult to control. She’d test the waters by saying a mean thing, here and there, to her father and he’d guilt her about what an ungrateful daughter she was and how if it was to be that way, he’d just leave and not return.
He was always threatening, after she talked back, that his job might take him further away from her and he might be able to visit less often. And since, after all, he was an actual hero, out there fighting monsters, beasts and criminals, any day could possibly be the last day for him. It’d be terrible for him to leave after she said those awful things to him and not be able to come back, “but”, he’d say, looking hurt, his voice shaking a little, “I can’t control time and the time has come for me to go…”
Of course she’d apologize! She loved him and wanted to see him! She didn’t want him to die. She learned that if she didn’t bring up wanting to leave the house, he stayed longer and they had a nicer time together.
But the people in the stories he read to her were always leaving to go places. She supposed they didn’t have weak hearts like she did. But, as she’d put a hand on her heart and feel the rhythmic Ba-Dump, Ba-Dump, Ba-Dump of it against her palm and in her ears, she’d wonder “How is it weak?” And, besides, she got sick sometimes, but did she really get sicker more often than other people? She didn’t know; she didn’t SEE other people… except a number of silent maids and an increasingly more depressed nursemaid.
“HA”, the 19 year old declared to the nothing that kept her company in the inn room. She dropped the book to the ground just so she could hear the sound of its thud echo against the wall. “My heart will be hurt? Really?”
Well. Yeah. She supposed that was true. Since breaking free of that prison, a lot of things had managed to hurt her heart. But they were frequently the things that healed it as well. Every encounter that upset her since being free probably hurt her twice as hard as it should have, but often just thinking about how she had been able to experience that kind of pain at all was enough to make her feel momentarily elated again.
Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t feel as afraid as others in the world were constantly telling her that she should. She took up the sword and shield, she took up fighting with an axe, she learned various forms of magic and, yes, she had fought a wiiiide variety of monsters, beasts and criminals. And, yeah, it was scary. She wasn’t so foolish as to suggest that she never felt fear, just that that fear had never been enough to dissuade her from the fight. In fact, she found that she reveled in the fight! She looked forward to it! She felt alive. She felt like she was DOING something, taking control of something… and she hadn’t felt like that for many, many years.
So that was it then. Life was about DOING. Life was about freedom and choice and experience. About compassion and respect for others. From here on out, she would manage to find pride in herself anytime she realized she was making a decision of her own and living life as she thought she should. The enemies she encountered, should they be people, she’d try to give opportunities for choice to as well. Because, she thought, we all have a past that we are coming from and we all have the right to walk into a better future.
It felt like the dark, oppressive room of candles, shadows and soft-spoken manipulation was always clawing its way back into her brain, or riding on her back with her gear, but what mattered to her was that when it was all said and done she wouldn’t fall helpless before it. Her future was starting now and she’d fill it with dancing, singing, battling, drawing, arguing, running, leaping and crying all that she wanted to… and it’d be on her terms. She’d wrestle a fire spirit (and subsequently marry it) if she wanted to. People mocked her for being too whimsical, or berated her for being too extreme, or clucked their tongues at her for hanging on to what was publicly considered “childish delusions of heroism and grandeur”, but it didn’t at all dissuade her from continuing to behave exactly as she wanted to: full of whimsy, adrenaline chasing, heroic grandeur!
“Because”, she said to herself, lying down on her inn room bed, “sure, this world is full of monsters, even ones that sometimes walk beside us and hurt our hearts, but”, she rolled onto her side and stared at the vase on the table,“it’s also full of good people, flowers with faces like the sun and inn room blankets that smell like different cities and feel like the clouds... So the good pretty much outweighs the bad”
She yawned sleepily and imagined what music wandering performers might play for her story. She hoped it’d feature at least a little bit of harp or violin.