A quick question before I post - what kind of tone did the lieutenant use when he asked is question in the end?
(Hmm... And by my understanding only the three guards attacked by the yth were severely injured - of whom two are dead, I presume from the comment about the blankets?)

Mercinus3 said
Hey guys,I do apologize if I haven't been on in a while. Things reared its ugly head at university (possibly one of the worst things that could happen during university, a death of a flatmate, occurred over the Easter holidays), so my mind has been occupied with other things. I'll try and get a post up here as soon as possible, but just so you guys know of the circumstances.M3

Sorry to hear that Merc. :/ Feel free to take your time - I'm in no rush!

The lieutenant spoke in a slightly frantic, but very demanding manner when he asked the question, and yes, by my count only the three guards were attacked and the two of them are dead (writing "blankets or sheets" was really more of a reference to Jaelnec not being immediately able to tell which it was than there being variation in what was used).

What exactly, in this world, is life? ...Generally it is a somewhat poorly defined artificial set of characteristics, and not at all a separate thing in itself - and by that definition it can be a bit hard to speak of "making life possible". The exact same things and processes which take place in and make up living beings can be observed in a vast number of other places, and on the other hand, there is no discernible line between "living" and "not living" to begin with. (When does a chemical process start being alive?)
- It doesn't help that the more advanced organisms still function mostly like colonies of much smaller beings rather than singular entities. White blood cells especially are essentially tiny amoeba ... a type of which actually physically goes and crawls up to nerve endings to ask the brain what it is supposed to do every now and then. And generally, the rest of the cells (except the ones dedicated to deal with this kind of thing) could not care less whether or not something or other somewhere else in the body is dead ... as far as they are concerned, they'd gladly continue living on, except at some point either the environment gets too toxic or - as generally happens first - they simply cannot find anything to sustain themselves on in the vicinity (since the heart has stopped and nutrients are no longer carried around - basically, when the heart stops, the other cells die simply because they "starve to death", and for no other reason whatsoever). If you take a set of cells out and put them in a nutrient solution instead, they will keep living on like nothing happened, aside of receiving very significantly decreased amount of external orders. If by any chance those cells have telomerasis activated, for whatever reason (many types of cancer cells, for example), then those are practically immortal on top of it. (And not only hypothetically so - there is a strain still in laboratories from a woman who herself died several decades ago, at the ripe age of 86...)
"Severe organ failure" is furthermore a rater questionable thing, since the body in entirety can circumvent plenty of things quite decently - happens often enough that people suffer no serious discomfort from it. It would actually feel more natural in those terms if mages often felt no immediate effects (unless very severe - more than quarter of all blood in body - blood loss occurs or something like that ... people often enough do not notice if they have heart attacks were a third of their heart dies, even) and randomly died a few days later. If it is the brain that gets damaged, though, then the change often is immediate and can be very drastic.
...I am not entirely sure where am I going with this anymore, so I leave it at that until I figure out what I actually wanted to say.

In any case, the statement of making life possible has never really made sense to me - these things always automatically work otherwise since that is a part of their chemical/physical nature, but now that the components are within a body physics suddenly no longer apply to them and suddenly they have to be "activated"?
- Souls being mandatory for life (rather than just magic/afterlife), a common fantasy trope as it is, tends to be one of those things that I inevitably end up placing in the box of things I actively avoid thinking of (I probably have to find a bigger box for those things ... soon), since I cannot create anything even remotely reminiscent of a working system with them. My own fantasy settings actually have it established that souls do not exist at all as far as "mortals" are concerned (and mages are more weird compound beings rather than just ordinary mortals ... I guess I *could* have made everyone like that, though)...
- - Uh, and if I am by any case bothering you with my incessant picking apart of things, then honestly, just let me know. It's just you've been nice enough to at least try to explain how everything might fit together, so I've dared to bother you more than I otherwise do...

(Does magical exhaustion never damage the brain? I'd assume thinking / controlling body / memories are at least tightly bound to it in Reniam cases, too... Uh, and mind exists separately from body in other than the figurative sense?)

- Why would the body alter itself after the soul? The soul has been described to "cling" to the body - things sort of get "pulled into place"?

On a random thought - do you (as someone as a person who uses character with a long-sword) know what half-swording is (since I haven't seen you describing anything like it IC, and it seems to be a bit little known that such thing exists, even if it is very useful technique utilized by both modern and old practitioners of sword art)?

(By the way, I did post in the collab some time yesterday ... with nothing but the number to go by it can be hard to tell.)

...I go back to coding and trying to figure out what I wanted to say with most of it. My thoughts are a bit of a mess at the time being.

Ugh, we're on some pretty philosophical things now, and technically the various cultures and beliefs of the Planes have different definitions of what is alive and what is not, and there are certain things that are frequently argued over by Reniam philosophers, like whether undead are alive, or whether dead spirits in the afterlives can still be considered as in possession of something that can qualify as "life", whether immortals are alive, whether plants are alive... heck, some of the most extreme views even questions whether animals and monsters are alive. Some might claim that the presence of magical energy is the trait that defines life, which creates doubt about the nature of such as Minions and reanimated corpses, others that it is the possession of a unique soul, which in many cases except plants (since these often share a soul with their surrounding plants) and would leave out things such as Harvesters, which have a different kind of lifeforce compared to most other beings.
If I, as the creator and demiurge of the universe, were to define what life in the Planes is... it would be that which is capable of affecting the course of fate. To someone who can see possible futures it will be evident that things that happen by chance are predetermined and will happen regardless of how many possible futures one takes into consideration, barring of course those that remove chance from the equation, whereas things that happen because someone decided something will be different every time. The web of fate is made up by a multitude of futures formed by countless decisions, and that is what life in the Planes is; the ability to make decisions.

What mages feel when they are subjected to magical exhaustion is rarely actually organ failure, though this is indeed one of the reasons that severe magical exhaustion can at times take a very long time to recover fully from; rather what one feels is the little things, things that are unlikely to be lethal but are immediately painful and/or crippling. Any experienced mages draining themselves a lot but not feeling a lot of the usual effects of exhaustion would actually be a lot more concerned than if they had been in searing pain, since the lack of pain meant that the damage inflicted by magical exhaustion was targeting something not immediately felt... which among other things could mean that they were suffering consequences that could kill them over time. What does kill them quickly is mainly when an organ responsible for short-term survival stops functioning altogether (the heart is the most common and quickest cause, although the lungs are also an ordinary cause, while somewhat slower), which the exhaustion can cause directly or indirectly (such as with a blood clot or internal bleeding). The brain is actually extremely rarely affected by magical exhaustion (directly, at least... indirectly still suffers frequently, which is another cause of immediate death) to a lethal degree, and even more rarely in a non-lethal manner. I could explain why, but then I'd start moving onto information that will actually play a major role in extremely late IC story, so I'll leave it at that.
I think I touched the subject of the relationship between soul and brain in Reniam once before... they cooperate, each storing information on its own in itself but mostly they will work in complete accordance with one another, although the most notable difference would be that the soul solely deals with thinking and feeling on both a conscious and subconscious level (which the brain also does), and whereas the brain is the only of the two responsible for "automatic" functions of the body. Memories are stored in both soul and brain, although the memory of a soul is more fickle than that of a brain, and tends to hinge even more on emotions. As for the mind existing separate from the body, what exactly do you mean by that?
The last bit, about why the body is altered to fit the soul, I will also have to abstain from explaining. There is a reason, but it is plot-relevant, so one day it will become evident. For now, though, let's just say that this is how it is, and leave it at that.

I do know about the technique of half-swording, yes (I was unfamiliar with the term itself, admittedly, although I did guess correctly as to what it referred to, as I confirmed by googling it), and I do have that up my sleeve to use when it seems appropriate, but somehow that hasn't seemed like it has been the case thus far... The people I have described fighting with swords have either been relatively inexperienced (various crusader grunts), had their blades wrapped in fire (rune mages and Goldheart Templars) or been Jaelnec, who uses Roct, which is perpetually significantly sharper than regular bladed weapons can reliably be due to its higher durability and thus not entirely safe to handle by holding the blade. The only sword-user I've written as for whom it would actually have been appropriate to half-sword was the vampire follower of Rilon at the Schaxathris church, and she was highly aggressive in her fighting and relied a lot on speed and reach. There may have been others, but frankly there just hasn't been a situation in which someone would actually have half-sworded yet.

EDIT: What do you guys think of the new Prophecy-banner?

@Dj I like it and I may get a post up after lunch :)

And again I am asking questions which shouldn't be asked... Why *are* there questions which shouldn't be asked? We live in a free land!
...Well, each of us does live in a free land, even if it isn't necessarily the exact same free land.
(More things to look forward to as we progress further into the story, I guess...)

Yeah... Philosophical matters indeed (though I *did* warn I might end up in some such place). Then again, arguably from the moment onward "living" or "not living" starts to have a part in the mechanics of the world, it would stop being a philosophical matter and start being a, well, physical fact (or something of the kind).
(...If possession of unique soul would except some plants due to sharing one according to one branch, wouldn't it simply mean the said colony of plants in entirety is alive? Animals are colonies of cells, too...) If I wanted to go even more philosophical, I could start wondering over how free a being's will is, since usually someone will act or decide in a certain way because they are that kind of a person sum with past experiences and the information available for them at the time of deciding.

The relation of soul and brain was touched, somewhat, mostly in relation to how things such as brain damage, multiple personality disorder, sociopathy and other various deviations work out in regards to it. (And some types of damage - those which permanently alter thinking - apparently work out differently in there, causing soul-splitting and other interesting stuff...) Still haven't gotten any closer to why a body couldn't technically function - though magic-, and afterlifelessly (not sure how the "normal" way dreams are produced fits in Reniam) - without a soul (having never had one), as all of its processes are either purely automatic (as in, don't even require a brain to oversee) or brain-controlled (with soul doubling some of those).

As for the mind existing separately from the body... Well... Mind not being the pretty much physical result of something that brain does?

You can half-sword a rather sharp sword without any fear - I have seen it bare-handed demonstrated live with a sword that was indeed at least borderline razor-sharp (likewise demonstrated to be a fact) ... and then it was not simply in the way of grabbing hold of the blade to guide it, but properly held in reverse and taken a full-strength swing with - with which, if the sword's hilt had actually hit a head, would most likely have killed regardless of any potential helmets.
(How sharp is Roct, exactly? Jaelnec's furthermore wearing gauntlets, after all... Admittedly I have mostly imagined it more being indeed perpetually sharp - not needing to be sharpened, not notching, not ... doing any of the things blades generally do as a result of cutting and being bashed against other hard objects - than being significantly sharper than, say, razor blades... It may be a bit hard to characterize cutting capabilities past that by example. And Roct (with your usual longsword being somewhere between 1.2-1.6kg) would furthermore weigh some 200-300 grams only...)
- I can get a scythe sharp enough to reliably cut through both grass and finger-thickness saplings (and grass especially tends to just flatten out rather than being cut through if the blade that is swung at it is not being sharp enough) using the traditional sharpening method easily enough, and I am not even good at it. ...As for why I would use and own a scythe in the first place, then it has actually proven the most reliable method for keeping the edges of my pond in check... Lawnmower would either drown or constantly get stuck and the electric trimmer would require me to circle around the entire house with the wires (or throw the extension cord out of a second floor window on the back of my house, I guess?) and then diagonally across half of the lot, and then there are some things which don't want to run over wires, and the matter of getting to the rear end of the pond and onto the semi-peninsula section of it ... and all waterproof extension-cords maybe shouldn't be submerged, at least not the linking sections? Yeah, not worth it. Scythe is easier.
...I can don my long black coat, too, and then I can play lady Grim Reaper, if I want, though he fact that my scythe has a metal shaft isn't probably appropriate.
- As for why I asked the question in the first place, then it was due to a side-discussion about some general cluelessness in regards to how swords work, in movies and fiction especially. "You hold it by the sharp end, right?" ...Why, yes, you sometimes *do* want to do it. Figured I'd inquire since I couldn't really recall you writing it (in the RP, novel, or other RPs).

(I intended to comment on the new banner before it was asked about - I noticed it about as soon as it was put up, I think -, but it seems I was a bit late with that. It is nice. I like the change.)

***

@cthulu: A post? Thaler's waking up? Aemoten's going to be immensely relieved, though he probably wouldn't know what to pay the most attention to again.
- Should I refrain from posting until then? I wouldn't mind either way, since I have some stuff to do today. Aemoten - as it currently is - wouldn't be doing that much besides some thinking and speaking about two lines, so it probably wouldn't make a significant change in what you'd post.
To recap, he is currently sitting on the bed right next to Thaler's upper body (and has probably instinctively tried to shift himself to be more in between Thaler and the lieutenant), though his head is turned halfway away at the moment so he can better watch the head of the guards' actions. He already managed to heal her hand and shoulder, but there might still be some minor bruises/scratches left elsewhere.

Its a sleepy post but i may have her wake up. I didnt finish it before i had to leave to sign on. So whoever manages to post first can? It doesnt matter when she wakes on my side of things.

And posted. sadly couldn't get as much detail as I could into her nightmare but lets say it was pretty real to her. I know there's a lot of 'but dreams aren't that real' stuff and I don't know your view points on them but....

I have been murdered in over 75% of the dreams I've remembered. I've never woken up while being in pain, or even while I'm dying or in fact after I've died immediately. Each of these dreams is so real that I've got an 'inception' like totem under my pillow to make sure that I'm awake and in the real world and I have to change it regularly or it is copied in my dreams. I had one recently involving a dying newborn baby because the mum abandoned it. We kept it alive, just, but it was SO realistic I can't so much as look at a newborn baby photo right now without feeling a tug on my heart and I can't hear a newborn cry without welling up with tears. In these nightmares I can see, hear, taste, touch and smell as I can when I'm awake and 99% of the time I don't know its a dream until I wake up.

My personal dreams have always felt "real". Not all my dreams have some kind of I to begin with, though (I occasionally have the dreams when there is no "myself" or "I" - not even in the form of bodiless thoughts on what is going on - there is only the following of events, kind of from a camera point of view). And then I have had some fairly odd ones where there is presumably at least two selves simultaneously, and such things. Not always do I have human form, sometimes shapeshifting and other oddities are present, and physical laws and biological functions may differ. (Got a finger cut off? No worries, it will grow back in a month or so - I have never witnessed it actually happening after an dreamworld injury, I just know it eventually would happen ... almost exactly how you *know* fingernails and hair grow back if cut, but never really *see* it aside of noticing tat things have changed compared to some date in the past.) I will mention, though, that the laws always tend to stay perfectly consistent for the duration of the dream, though they may vary dream-from-dream.
There are dreams which are essentially derivates from real-life events (have visited the forums; was halfway through reading a book by [Jack] in one dream during the time I was proofreading the novel for the first time - not a book of The Prophecy series, interestingly enough) and movies/computer games (only with the added immersion of running around in the world as the character, aware that I am just playing the game), and then are more or less purely alternate worlds (rarely they might feature people or limited locations I actually know)... And these are indeed complete worlds. In the dreams, I know what happened ten, twenty years ago, I have an entire life's worth of made-up memories, locations and places (though I cannot obviously tell whether these are formed from the beginning or only as my dream-self happens to think back... There is usually a very clear succession of events, I feel physical pain, the lurch of falling, the motion and position of my body, pressure, water and wind, temperature, I feel hungry and taste the food I eat, get physically exhausted (and occasionally fall asleep in the dream when I do ... talk about Inception)... Well, everything. The dream-worlds feel as real as the usual life, while my brain is keeping them up. (Never understood the Inception totem - your brain can easily recreate a version of it that behaves as it should. There is no way to ensure it won't, and recentness might not even decrease the likeliness. I personally have dreamed things I had never laid eyes until not long before I went to sleep aplenty...)
I have never actually been killed in my dreams (aside those which are computer-game immersions, and then it is very concretely perceived as the character dieing, not me), but getting an arm torn off, stabbed, impaled, rent with claws, even cutting my own utterly mangled hand off with a knife (since damage of this kind will never heal) ... those things are fairly common in those of the alternate-world scenarios which are of apocalyptic, warlike or chase nature. When I was very young other people my dream-self was allied to tended to be cut down like nothing in those dreams (and I find this kind of helplessness infinitely nastier than any physical pain - which I endure extremely well anyway and am fairly apathetic about - or threat to my own person ... not that I'd have working self-preservation instincts to speak of, or be able to feel fear in the typical sense), but in later life the dream-self has learned to fight and typically takes up the role of a defender. And being a defender is in any case better than having to watch people you(r dream self) care(s) about fall.
- If I pause to think over the dream I had and run it briefly through my mind right after waking up, I will remember it. If I don't, I'll forget it. (Which is pretty common - there is more or less a mechanism for garbage collecting dreams in place ... sometimes it takes brief wakings between periods of sleep with it. Don't wake people up to inform of them something, only to let them fall back asleep, since there is a significant possibility they would either not remember any of it or only be able to vaguely recall that there was something they should have remembered.)

- I still can't entirely comprehend where Thaler is taking her interpretation of what Aemoten said, though. He in reality never belittled her, even less told her she was evil, and would never do something of the kind. ...And before after they had already went back into the borderhouse she was mostly just confused and frustrated and didn't want to deal with this whole mess. What exactly happened in her mind after they went back in?
(Guess it shows how subjective thing mind can be ... something that can be witnessed in actuality all the time.)

I very rarely remember my dreams when I wake up, and when I do I usually forget them in a matter of minutes after. Most of the time I am simply aware that I have dreamed, and often I will even know what the dream was about, but the dream itself will elude me completely. With what I do remember from dreaming, and from what I researched on the subject once, dreams are indeed capable of convincingly fabricating impressions through all of one's senses. Whenever I sit down and really focus on a game (which I tend to do whenever I start an intended complete playthrough) for longer periods of time I, too, often dream about them... in fact I have occasionally gone to bed annoyed at a game because I reach an impasse of one kind of another, only to find an answer to the problem in my dreams (whether that answer actually works in the game has varied, though; the rules in the game and the rules in the dream tend to differ). I also frequently view the game-character as myself in dreams, even if I am aware that it is a game...
There is admittedly a lot about my dreams that I just don't know about because I forget them so easily, but I do know that I view myself in third-person sometimes, or that I dream as someone else than myself... and that I will switch from being one person to another in mid-dream, not as though I transform but more as though the viewpoint just changes. Similarly it's not unusual for me to dream that I am several people at the same time, and that I am equally convinced that I am every actor in the dream (one dream that for some reason stuck with me was one in which I was running from a monster (it was only ever implied that it was a monster... I never actually saw it) which was also me (as in I controlled/viewed the dream from the monster's viewpoint as well as my own)).
I find dreaming highly fascinating... especially the concept of lucid dreaming. To be aware of the fact that you're dreaming and able to control everything, create anything, do anything... I would really like to try that, but the times that I've actually managed to become lucid while dreaming it has always caused me to abruptly feel extremely conscious about the fact that my eyes were closed, and I felt an irresistible urge to open them, thus waking me up and ending the dream. Quite annoying, really. According to what I've read there are a number of ways to somewhat reliably check whether you are awake or dreaming, the simplest one that I prefer being to just pinch your nose closed and try to breathe through it; if you can't you're awake, and if you can you're dreaming. They also say that if you lean against something in a dream you'll fall through it, and that if you jump straight up you won't fall back down... and that if you look at a piece of text, look away and then look at it again, the text will be different from when you read it the first time (this is all second-hand information, though; I've never been aware enough of my dreams to notice stuff like that).
One thing about dreams that I have read and somewhat personally confirmed is that your mirror-image is different. People say that if you look at yourself in a mirror in a dream you won't see yourself as you actually look, but the way you subconsciously view yourself. This particular detail has stuck with me, because a year or so ago I had a dream in which I briefly glanced at a mirror, which was at an angle so that I could only see my right hand in it, and immediately woke, sat up, gasped, whined and cried - which I've never done before. I wanted to scream, but luckily I was borderline hyperventilating and couldn't. The sight of that hand has been burned into my mind since that day... looking as though it'd been fed through some kind of machinery, the skin ripped and lacerated, covered in blood, flesh torn so bad that the bone showed many places. I've gutted fish and seen gross movies and such and haven't been particularly bothered by it, but somehow this was infinitely worse because I for some reason was absolutely convinced that it was my hand. It does make an eerie kind of sense for me to view my hand like that, given its condition and the fact that my hands are in near-constant pain, but regardless that single event made me resolve never to look at a mirror in a dream again.

Returning to the questions from before, the mind is a result of what the brain does, but it is also a result of what the soul does. Most of the time these two will be in accordance with each other, and causing one to work differently somehow (such as through illusions) will also affect the other. If the two come to be desynchronized somehow it can be really bad for the person; one could develop all kinds of mental disorders from brain and soul being in disagreement.
As to the matter of half-swording, I read up on the subject some more and while it does seem like it could be done with just about any regular sword (since apparently a blade won't cut if you just hold on to it tightly, but only slice if you move along it) I still don't see it as being safe to do with Roct. Not only is Roct razor-sharp (which is unusual for medieval swords; it is generally agreed upon that the average sword had a sharpness that was about the same or slightly lower than that of an average modern kitchen knife, since if it was any sharper it would chip too easily) but it is also extremely smooth and relatively frictionless... Even if it was possible to hold it by the blade without cutting oneself, it seems likely that it would slip and slice one as one used it like that. The gauntlets would help, but meh... it still seems like Jaelnec wouldn't be comfortable with running that risk.

The simplest one that I prefer being to just pinch your nose closed and try to breathe through it; if you can't you're awake, and if you can you're dreaming. They also say that if you lean against something in a dream you'll fall through it, and that if you jump straight up you won't fall back down... and that if you look at a piece of text, look away and then look at it again, the text will be different from when you read it the first time (this is all second-hand information, though; I've never been aware enough of my dreams to notice stuff like that).
One thing about dreams that I have read and somewhat personally confirmed is that your mirror-image is different. People say that if you look at yourself in a mirror in a dream you won't see yourself as you actually look, but the way you subconsciously view yourself.

None of this works for me... My dream-self (given I have a self in this dream) very much will feel like they are suffocating if I/she logically should, I have done my fair share of leaning against things, and jumping up in dreams wherein I cannot fly will result in me falling back down... Well, and if the laws of the world are different, my mind will compare them to the dreamworld usual, not the reality's usual. For while I am dreaming, reality does usually not exist (and as such, it doesn't even occur to me I might be dreaming). And as I said before, things in my dreams tend to be not always in accordance to the reality, but they are at least consistent, chronologically and otherwise.
The only (and very far-between) occasions I have caught up on that I am dreaming and have been able to lucid dream at all are those which are indeed very close derivates or real life - somehow it seems that in those specific occasions, unlike at all other times, my mind may try to access my real memories for their similarity instead of the dream-generated ones, and that generates enough disparity for me to catch up on the fact that I am dreaming. - Yeah, two replicas of the same memory for the same body without any memories of dual existence simply don't work for my mind. (Though I was once able to simply wake up from a specific kind of unpleasant dreams, as the occasional tilting (in the way of gravity going haywire? the building I was in itself becoming tilted?) was distinctive enough ... I haven't had anything like that for at least a decade and half, though.)
- From what I know - have experienced, read and heard -, the methods for checking whether you are dreaming tend to very rarely work, and those that do (or occasionally do) work vary wildly person by person. For the blind guy I know it is the absence of temperature. For myself it is apparently memories being double without there being also a memory of two selves existing...

The opinions on lucid dreaming tend to vary - from my impression, those who only occasionally do it tend to generally enjoy it, but those who always do it (and in fact naturally dream like that) tend to not like it... They say they can never really immerse themselves anymore, or that it becomes somehow boring (including those of them who can alter things at will, but will still have random things occur)...
- Jack, your coming close to lucid dreamings might actually you having partially woken up, or caused yourself to partially wake up (and then, feeling your body, waking completely up)? At least it sounds more like the times I have been half-asleep (the whole feeling your body and knowing you're dreaming, but also seeing the dream). It actually occurs to me fairly often ... almost always, actually ... when I am falling asleep, at least as often when I am in no particular hurry with waking up , when something disturbs me while I sleep ... sometimes I likewise get too conscious of my body or alternatively just recall something I would have or like to do in reality, sometimes I just drift back to full sleep without the dream that I know is a dream never breaking. I don't even relate these times to the few occasions I've actually lucid dreamed (the awareness of your physical body stays off). But... yeah. I very frequently, if not almost always, start dreaming before I fall fully asleep (and on those occasions, if I don't like where the dream is going, I can just focus on my physical body, open my eyes, and wake back up).

...I also have the tendency of thinking of whatever I was dealing with before deciding I am too tired and opting to go asleep, analyzing it, trying to find solutions, and it frequently enough happens I end up getting up and continuing working on the thing in the subsequent dream, and making great progress, only to wake up again and realize all my dream-work has had no impact whatsoever on the reality.

My mirror image tends to be simply me in the dreams I look anything like my real self (to think of, I have seen reflections of myself often enough in my dreams...). If the dream-I looks different, then the mirror image will be different, and so forth. It isn't actually what my subconsciousness sees myself as for my - it is, rather, very distinctly what my current dream-self expects there to be, or alternatively just random. (May be a bit confusing explanation. Also, I doubt my subconsciousness sees me as all the things I've been in dreams...)
- Actually the most common occurrence I intentionally look in mirrors while dreaming is when something has happened to my face right before it (the second-common is while I am apparently a not-too-confident shapeshifter and want to monitor the change I self-induce more closely - I wanted yellow eyes, are my eyes yellow? -, and I have happened upon completely random mirrors fairly often enough - nothing remarkable there). Seems logical enough - get hit in the face with something, go find a mirror and look what happened to it... The last time I remember doing so for this purpose I had actually been partially caught in an explosion-blast, and in addition to being in pain all over, my dream-self's sight in one eye was completely gone as a result, and that of the other, left eye was somewhat blurring. The image that looked back at me? Missing the right eye, with the entire right side heavily damaged, and the left eye largely filled with blood, too... My dream-self was almost completely unfazed, if mildly bothered by the fact that it felt possible that I might lose sight in the left eye, too. Being or looking mutilated has seemingly never particularly bothered my dream-self much, perhaps due to how often it seems to happen. (I know I said I am fairly apathetic towards pain and such anyway, but some of those things? Seriously, having all kinds of mutilations occur to oneself in dreams seems to be one of the most common kinds of nightmare out there, but out of all cases I've been told of, my own dream-self seems to be the only one who barely if at all cares if something like that happens...)

Dreams can indeed be disturbing stuff... And I've more or less concluded that at least in my case they are usually completely pointlessly and without any sense so.

It seems real pain or real injuries never really translate over to dreams or dream-pain to reality in my case... I don't recall my right hand taking any more damage than usually when it has been damaged, or be more susceptible to damage compared to my left, for instance, and my right hand is probably the part of me that has suffered the most over time (bitten by my mother's parents' dog, my little brother hitting scissors halfway through it ... somewhere between those two I also burned it against a pan at my father's parents' home quite badly ... then I managed to get an actual knife right through it because my reflexes do not work properly and if a thing isn't particularly large compared to me, the automatic reaction is to block, rather than dodge)... Yeah. The scars are absent or present depending on dream, though. (Which would be weird, if my dream-self was my own mental image of myself, since I practically do consider those scars part of me ... the earlier two injuries happened early enough in my life for the marks to have been there almost my entire life. It was by those scars that I learned to tell right and left hand apart - I am ambidextrous, so I don't really have a "better" hand.)
Edit: There was something about looking at your hands in general that was also somehow supposed to prove that you're dreaming, but the cousin of mine who brought it up did not remember what it was supposed to be. In any case, it had apparently not been something that was true for her, and the general consensus amongst the people there at that time was that they did not remember anything particularly odd about hands in dreams in general ... no odder than anything else in dreams, anyway.
(I wonder, though, whether a part of your reaction to seeing your hand in the mirror in the dream might have been due to the shock of discovering that your hand is in that condition? Analogously to how my father's father told me of one time he fell of a bike, did not feel anything significant, got up, then actually looked down at his hands and - ohshit ... I was reminded of it when I read your description. It was bad enough for his knuckle-bones to have been scraped bare - a fact which was especially visible since his hands did not start bleeding until much later.)

- And yeah, sharp swords are typically sharp enough to cut through paper suspended in air without tearing it - my "sharp" kitchen knives can do it easily enough, I just tried, and my "sharp" kitchen knives are a whole lot duller than my tool-knives -, but not quite razor-sharp (minus the variants were renown for their sharpness) ... that which was shown to me was more demonstration stuff more so than added practicality there.
Notching should more relate to the material, though... The actual sharpened edge itself is rather insignificant under normal circumstances and shouldn't have that much of an effect. (Nor have I noticed it having ... not on my tool-knives, at least, and those tend to take quite a lot of abuse. I turned a high carbon steel knife into shrapnel, once - that was long ago, though. I've since learned that if I feel a thing will break if I exert it any further, it will. It is always good idea to trust in what your senses tell you, at least in my case...)

Ill let Dj post before me. :)

And I have posted once more (well, did so ten or so hours ago).

Huh, and I sure can type a lot without really noticing it, looking at my last ooc-post. On another random note on the last topic, I am somewhat inclined to relate dreams to our ability to imagine, or more specifically visualize things and recall what something tasted, smelled or felt like - which could give some explanation to why dreams came to exist in the first place. (I tend to maintain that while there is always a complete and logical explanation to how everything works - furthermore an explanation which does not require weird exceptions to the laws that govern everything else -, there might not always be a reason why something came to exist besides a long row of coincidences.)
As I noted earlier, I usually kind of start dreaming before I fall completely asleep, and on those occasions, I both see and feel the dream and can also still feel my body until at some point I fall completely asleep and the sensory input can no longer be consciously detected and the knowledge of being about to fall asleep fades off. Now, when I think of it, then the most vivid visualizations and "conjured" sensations have felt somewhat (remind you, I am both naturally good with visualization, and have been actively practicing sensory- and body-control for a rather long time) ... similar, minus the obvious difference of in one case the experience being formed by the subconsciousness with the conscious part being just an observer, whereas in the second case the conscious mind is both the creator and the observer. And in lucid dreaming, the distracting sensory input is still off as it usually is while dreaming, you are aware of the experience being a dream and (in many, but not all cases - some apparently just know they are dreaming and wander about with that in mind, but cannot really alter the surroundings and happenings at will?) the conscious mind can override whatever the subconsciousness has given form to.
- I could give a fairly good explanation to how dreams are produced on the biochemical level (as well as some related phenomena being explained as an extension of it), and I have seen elaborate works on how dreams, visualizations and sensory input can be observed as brain activity and vice versa (to the point that brain activity has actually been translated back to a blurry version of the image the person was trying to visualize) - and from there I would say that these things very greatly do overlap - but I haven't really seen anyone reliably try to analyze the overlappings more specifically.

- The rune mage has the runesword on his back, right, or am I just making an assumption here based on another rune mage? And momentum is still a problem for the wielders of such, even if the weight isn't? (Although arguably, the weight of your own body still tires you to hold up - just try holding your arm horizontally to the side for five minutes or so) ...How can they get the runeswords off their backs at any reasonable speed, or attach those on there? Or how do they sit or run with those there, for example? Historically swords weren't really kept on the back for a significant number of reasons...

Actually I don't think he ever got around to actually returning the sword to his back, no... he brandished it when he went outside during the attack of the crows and has been in danger constantly since then, so I think he's still got it in hand. Oh, but the standard cleaver-type runeswords are indeed generally kept on the back (and would have been by this rune mage as well) due to them being simply too large to keep anywhere else.
Momentum is indeed still an issue when using the massive runed cleavers, and it does tire a rune mage to carry around their sword; especially trying to hold it like Thomas did when he was threatening Ixion, or alternatively how he held it in the novel when he released the lightning-rune (which is why they usually support their wielding arm with the other one in these cases), and generally when being held in a somewhat horizontal manner without resting on something else. Holding a runesword passively one would usually either rest the blade against the ground or one's shoulder, since keeping it raised for any extended duration is quite strenuous. Additionally I should point out (although you probably already know this) that rune mages do feel the weight of their runeswords as long as they keep them on their back due to the Unity-rune not being activated during this time, since they aren't touching the energy-conveying crystal handle.
As to the exact device serving to hold the swords in place on the rune mages' backs, it is a contraption of several reinforced leather straps that ties around the mage's shoulders and chest on one side and locks with the spike-like crystal extremities of the runesword hilt on the other; normally one would have to undo the straps to actually draw the runesword (which can be done by releasing a clasp, which can be reached while grasping the actual handle), though in urgent cases it is possible (but not guaranteed to succeed) to get the sword loose with some violent pulling and wriggling due to the shape of the sword-hilt... though this method does run a risk of damaging the harness and the sword-hilt. Sitting with a runesword is uncomfortable but possible, since it is only anchored to one point between the rune mage's shoulderblades and can be shifted around to various angles as this necessitates, whereas running with it can be difficult and even dangerous, so one usually doesn't do that without at the very least reaching up and grabbing the hilt before running, to have some control over where the blade is actually pointing.

Hmm... My post doesn't actually state that the rune mage has the sword on his back, just mentions it as unreasonable, so I guess I'll just leave it as is and consider it a random thought.

- As for most runeswords being too large to be kept anywhere else than on the back, then, well, I'd personally not attach those to people at all and just have wielders carry them around pretty much in hand if they have to walk somewhere with them. Just rest them on your shoulder when you are walking, and perhaps lean the flat tip to ground when standing still for a longer time. Sure, you have somewhat less use of one hand, but then again you can keep the unity-rune activated at all times if you wish, you do not have to release the thing from anywhere when you suddenly need to use it, and nothing would be hitting against your calves every time you as much as dare think of taking another step. ...The more I think of it, the more it starts to feel that keeping runeswords on one's back would be very obtrusive to simply walking indeed - not only is there something heavy, hard and somewhat sharp where your legs will be with every step (or the trailing leg will be with each step, anyway), but being essentially connected by single point effectively turns the runesword into quite hazardous pendulum even at less than running-speeds.

Another slightly questionable thing would be the spikes on the hilt, which at least in some cases are pointed towards the holding hand? How is it ensured that those would not cut into the wielder's hand?

(I may have listened NG rant over these kinds of things one time too many ... although all people I know who actually practice sword-arts seem to do it. Hobby-induced peeves, I guess. I more relate to doing it with live-action stuff (the number of instanced where actors get severely injured by their own props is quite intimidating ... especially common seems to be for women to suffer from their own costumes trying to routinely murder them in all manners possible), the more flashier fantasy stuff generally not so much. I personally do not think I could make myself take Final Fantasy-style combat seriously enough to ever start criticizing it. Yeah, sure, it is utterly over the top ridiculous by all standards, but it's not like they're even trying to pretend to have the slightest semblance to anything remotely realistic. Soo much shiny...
- Armor should preferably still look like armor, though, not something that is going to either fall off or stab the person in the breast as soon as they move.)

Many rune mages actually do carry their runeswords in hand at all times, usually only even wearing the harness to attach it to their backs when they have to make some kind of official appearance (assuming that they are in a position that requires official appearances to be made; most Rodorian rune mages serve the duchy of Zerul, after all, and as such have duties to uphold) since it is part of the Zerulic rune mage "image", and most others come into the habit of reaching a hand behind themselves to keep the sword steady whenever they're moving around, particularly if they need to run. The only ones that voluntarily keep their runesword on their back are the ones that are either unwilling to question their instructions upon receiving it and the ones who lack the power to keep the Unity-rune perpetually active... or the ones that just want to preserve their magical energy in anticipation of needing all of it imminently.
The spikes are (under normal circumstances) almost always pointed towards the holding hand, yes, though it should be noted that this particular detail is far from an intentional part of the design of the swords; the crystal hilts "grow" like this on their own when they are created by feeding magical energy into the initial crystal, and just as the handle rarely grows longer than to fit the grip of one hand (one could just keep growing the crystal to produce a longer handle, of course, but this would also cause the spikes to grow even longer, making them more dangerous (the instances where the handle does manage to grow longer without the spikes becoming a significant hazard are usually reserved for special weapons for special people)), it rarely occurs that it grows very small spikes, and even more rarely that it grows none at all. Crystal hilts where the spikes are deemed too dangerous are actually discarded, broken and recycled rather than attempted used, and even the ones that are acceptable - albeit initially still dangerous - have their tips dulled so that they aren't actually sharp, but at most just in the way. The spikes can't be safely severed, either, or the crystal would lose its proficiency at channelling magical energy.

And yeah, heh, some things are just not meant to be taken seriously; I often find myself facepalming in early stages of games or movies where the actors do things that are clearly in no way actually possible (magic excluded, obviously, since that always follow different rules than the ones we know; things that would have seriously injured or killed a person should still severely injure or kill them, though... or at least that's what I think) until I decide that such is the norm in that particular instance and just stop applying the laws of our world to it altogether. That said, unrealistic as though it may be, I find myself thoroughly enjoying at least several of the Final Fantasy games... Ironically FF7 is by far my favorite, featuring its main protagonist with the infamously huge Buster Sword and its main antagonist (possibly my favorite antagonist of all time, maybe tied with GLaDOS from Portal) with the equally infamously impossibly long Masamune. But yeah, there is a time for realism and a time for craziness, and I think either can be enjoyable.

While I'm writing: Ashgan, are you there? It's been a while since we heard from you, and I'm starting to get worried...

Don't worry, I am there. I kind of want to post, and may get to it too, but it could easily take another week. I kinda dug my own grave and have more shit on my plate than I ought to be able to handle, but we'll see about that; either way, a Prophecy post is, unfortunately, not my highest priority at the time, but I haven't forgotten about you guys, obviously. I will get to it within this month, but it's unlikely this week, and if it's next week then it will happen towards the latter half. I guess it depends on how well I can manage my stuff.

@Cthulu: Would you like to post first?

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You would not have to keep the Unity-rune active, though, even if you're keeping the runesword in hand, so tying it on your back to preserve magical energy doesn't make too much sense (I mentioned just as an option for people who might want to do so)? - As long as you are leaning it on the ground, especially if you keep it mostly vertical, the weight matters marginally, and if you are resting it on your shoulder, the weight should have somewhat lesser impact than while having it on your back (since the body is a straight pillar supporting the weight instead of the weight being off-balance and tilting it backwards). The only extra exertion would come from the (likewise optional) shifting between the two positions.

- Hmm... I've mentioned it before, but dekkuns don't really roar, at least not in the traditional sense. They produce various snorts and low, deep growls, and aside of that they produce a wide array of vocalizations that probably more resemble something that could be produced by drawing two (straight-edged) blades against one another than anything else. The louder calls are very clear and metallic, and actually fairly high in tone (probably a bit closer to the typical "eagle-call" than, say, a lion's roar? I can't really bring a good example here).

And yeah, I certainly agree that there is place for realism and place for absurdity, and depending on what you currently feel like, both can be equally entertaining.
- I guess I myself kind of prefer to things be clearly identifiable as one or another, though? In any case it seems that suspension of disbelief works better if I take one long look at the thing and can decide from the beginning that the world follows different laws from ours and the part of me that usually analyzes the plausibility of things can go and take a coffee break in the meantime so it wouldn't bother itself too much. As opposed to me getting halfway through something before - wait a moment, what [/b]exactly[/b] happened now? That isn't possible...
Ironically enough, I find that people die in action movies for little actual reason as often as they survive things which simply aren't survivable, and poisons apparently work in altogether mysterious ways. But yeah, the hero gets an explosion going off right behind his back and just gets back up and continues walking (total body disruption, anyone?) while the nameless goons instantly drop dead from literally any bullet that touches them, no matter where it hit (the death rate for random gunshot-wound is roughly five percent nowadays, excluding headshots usually due to bleeding out or infection - and the latter two tend to take some time; often the victims don't even pass out at any point (both personal accounts and reports)). Never mind the hitting person over the head to knock them out for several hours ... that simply doesn't work like that, and even if the person survived, they'd most likely not be able to stand up and walk across a room for quite some time. Making a person fall fully unconscious with some chemical without killing them is typically nigh-impossible, too.

...I admittedly haven't played much of the Final Fantasy series myself - I own none of the games, so it's just when I have taken a look at them at someone else's place (but still... so much shiny). I am a PC gamer, it falls slightly out of my usual field (and I tend to have slight disagreements with the third person view, camera shenanigans and perception-skewups mostly - I'd rather have first person or the typical real-time strategy overview), and it seems I only have enough time to spare to take up a single new game every once in a while to begin with... Sephiroth is actually one of the very few characters from the series I could both name and recognize from image - probably the only one I relatively certainly wouldn't mix up with anyone else. (The protagonist of FF7? Erm, a guy with fluffy hair? Wouldn't be able to identify, not without the sword at least. Might be called Cloud or something else weather-related... I think Final Fantasy has had several protagonists with weather-related names.)
I can certainly agree you on GLaDOS, though. Portal (though engaging for the concept's simplicity the game is) wouldn't quite be the same without her, and I'd say she is certainly one of those antagonists you actually do not want to see destroyed (as long as they stay on the other side of the screen, anyway). - I could probably partially blame you for taking the game up, since you were one of the very first people back in the day to advise me to play it (along with Half-Life; I now know why people draw orange lambdas everywhere!). That was on MG, so a long time ago...
The other sort-of well-known and sometimes pointed out as remarkable female AI antagonist (SHODAN from System Shock - I think the evil AI base concept is quite common?) did not leave that much of an impression. Didn't really seem to get much more intellectual than a lot of hastily cobbled together plans and "You inferior insect. I magnificent." - I think the logs lying about everywhere gave more to the game (I also got the impression the second game wasn't taking itself too seriously anymore, as opposed to the first one).

To think of it, I haven't alway only stuck with entirely serious roleplays, either... (So! A six-winged angel, dwarf, a humanoid stingray, a dark elf, an elf, an Englishman, a feathered wyvern and a dark-worshiping desert-man walk into bar one day. Literally. Well... I can't really imagine playing the character I had there in more "realistic" fantasy RP, if for the reason that the canonical reaction of humans - aside of those inhabiting their native lands - to members of her species was to either flee, hide, flee and hide, or arrange a destined-to-fail attack.)
At some point I considered making an otherwise realistic character to be played in a somewhat absurd manner just to balance off Aemoten, who has been ... quite a bit more depressing recently than I'd like (and spent quite some time being either completely useless or lamenting at the fact that he is being completely useless in between). Didn't find a roleplay to put him in, though ... luckily, I had Etakar and the god to play for at least some of the time meanwhile.

Hmm... The average lifespan of RPG roleplays has never been to great, either - it seems that most of the time I make something only three or four IC posts ever get made. I sometimes have thought of trying to start a RP of my own - especially since good low scifi seems nonexistent -, but I don't think I'd stably have the time to pour into solo-GMing a RP (...I apologize if I port a bit too many of my things over here instead?). Maybe in the way of 1x1 roleplays... (Jack shouldn't be so intimidated by me - you have never even been a RP GMed by me, even less in a 1x1 with me. - Since you mentioned running it with just me once, Makers of Fortune *had* a third player till the end, whom we waited to post for sometimes several weeks in a row, and who somehow never got to posting during the last turn... Also, it was long ago. At least I have done quite a bit of collaborative writing with just a single other person at a time since, and that's pretty much what you've been doing with Ashgan ever since Jillian parted ways from the group. :-P)

(I can confirm that all people of The Prophecy are still here for what it's worth, though, aside of sartorous/Ink Blood, who has vanished off the planet again and whose contacts I never had in the first place.)

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@Ashgan: University stuff, mostly? It seems that most people have the end of the year arriving somewhere between less than two weeks and two months... (The northern hemisphere, anyway.)

That's correct, Shien, uni stuff. Not just mostly, but exclusively. It's the final stretch, my last projects all bundled up with the last couple tests, so that I can take my time over the next four months to write my bachelor thesis. It's all pretty stressful right now, but hopefully things will smooth out in June/July when I only have to worry about writing said thesis, which won't tax me nearly as much as all this shit combined. Honestly can't wait until Fall when I (at least, plan-wise) get my degree and finish with this crap.