[OOC] Sleepless Nights\\ Iron Cages

[OwO]

@PerfectThought Cleaners need a blessed weapon, magic, or a relic so make mention of one of those.

[Theyra]

So after thinking about it, I am withdrawing from this. I just can not think of a char. So bye, and good luck with the rp.

[PerfectThought]

@PerfectThought Cleaners need a blessed weapon, magic, or a relic so make mention of one of those.

@OwO

Oh, my bad! I'll get that fixed up when I can and I'll resubmit it. Thanks B)

[Vertigo]

Hmm, would it be okay to have a character who's originally born in one of the inner districts, but ended up working in the 10th later on? Death of wealthy parents and the loss of her own wealth, a rank that allows her to travel or some other reason? If not, I can definitely have her be born in the 10th as well.

[OwO]

Hmm, would it be okay to have a character who's originally born in one of the inner districts, but ended up working in the 10th later on? Death of wealthy parents and the loss of her own wealth, a rank that allows her to travel or some other reason? If not, I can definitely have her be born in the 10th as well.

@Vertigo

Rank II cleaners and above can travel between districts (at least temporarily), so that's fine. Primarily, it's civilians that can't go between.

Generally, each district requires you to buy a citizenship unless you're born there, cleaner exemption withstanding. Most people won't be able to afford it.

You can go either way. Buying a 10th district citizenship (not worth much), being connected in politics, cleaner rank travel, etc.

[PerfectThought]

Tomtabeg Niid

Tomtabeg Cornwotsall Niid III

Identity: Tomtabeg is one of the many children of a fairly wealthy merchant and trader. And as the 6th in line to inherit the family business he was always put on the back burner. He began life being trained into the role of a doctor-surgeon, a profession of enough class to suit his family's status but nothing that might threaten his sibling's firm positions as business mogul heirs and heiresses. However, he paid no mind to this, as he was perfectly happy flying under the family radar and spending his time getting into minor trouble and being an overall daredevil and speed freak. He found himself in the business of Cleaning more as a hobby than as a means to sustain his life. Given he has access to pretty major funds anyway. However, apart from an extensive suite of cybernetics and enhancements, he lives a seedy life. Preferring instead to live the life of a minor criminal than the boring luxury of a merchant's son. By his teen years, he was already extensively modified, both cosmetically and functionally. He naturally picked up the habit of the usage of many different 'mind-altering substances' and a fair few body-altering substances as well. He lives a hedonistic life of savage violence, white-knuckle action, and drug-fueled partying. One might find him somewhat entitled, given he was gifted with so many advantages in life and chose to blow them all on drugs, crime, and action; but he considers it to be a simple matter of rebellion and rejection from the lifestyle the was pre-determined he was meant to live.

Armaments: In a scrap Niid tends to go back to the basics, favoring a blessed heavy machine pistol and a large blessed machete. He wields them with superhuman speed and strength given his augmented body, which allows him to easily wield a rather monstrous E9-EWV, a .41 Magnum-firing machine pistol. Stuff that'll easily tear up unarmed civilians sure, but against the supernatural? It's hard to tell how effective his non-magic weapons and body will suffice. He supplements his basic weapons with a generous assortment of chemicals, including a wide range of combat stimulants, painkillers, psychedelics, and genuine medicinal concoctions. Finally, Niid carries a well-hidden relic in a small case affixed to his left breast with a rod of Asclepius symbol adorning it. Inside it is a CAT in the form of an ampoule. Niid theorizes that the liquid is some kind of form of liquid Vita. It's clear in colour and contains a full 5 doses of the substance. As well as the ampoule he keeps a handy auto-injector for the emergency administering of the substance. When injected into a patient's bloodstream the highly concentrated Vita is added to their Vita source, if ingested orally the results are unpredictable and likely hazardous. Niid has yet to use it on anything orally.

Abilities: Niid is an ex-street brawler and knows his way around a fight. As well as the typical advantages of augments (i.e. superhuman strength and reaction speed) Niid is capable of self-administering large doses or a wide variety of chemical substances he carries on his person. He can almost dose other people, and provide various first-aid as well as being reasonably skilled at Ghetto surgery. He also has access to an apartment and a slightly more-than-necessary amount of funding.

Other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRHCP-Czj0Y

Made his weaponry blessed and gave him a little relic. If you can't tell, he's intended to somewhat play the role of a combat medic, also I think the variety of a tech-based character compared to the other magic user characters might be interesting. B)

[OwO]

@PerfectThought He's fine to put in the CS tab. Just be mindful of your writing since there's fragments and such that actually make it a bit difficult for me to parse things out.

[ERode]

So when IC?

[OwO]

So when IC?

@ERode

Probably Sunday since I have courses to finish this week.

[PerfectThought]

@PerfectThought He's fine to put in the CS tab. Just be mindful of your writing since there's fragments and such that actually make it a bit difficult for me to parse things out.

@OwO

I'm sorry. Could you possibly provide an example so I can sort the issue out? Rereading my text I'm not really sure what you're referring to, but that might just be because I understand what I'm on about haha.

[OwO]

<Snipped quote by OwO>

I'm sorry. Could you possibly provide an example so I can sort the issue out? Rereading my text I'm not really sure what you're referring to, but that might just be because I understand what I'm on about haha.

@PerfectThought

I don't really police writing (god knows how much schlock I've sent erode over the years), but here's my honest thoughts. A lot of it is subjective and whatever since my personal take is readability first (I'm not going to submit collaborative writing to my spirit of James Joyce antics).

RPG doesn't let me annotate things, so you'll have to deal with me speaking in generalities and highlighting specific things deep at 4AM.

Paragraph length is pretty huge. One of the things to keep in mind is that line length is about 1.5x the length of a book. Because of the length, it's even easier to lose one's place in vertically dense paragraphs. I'm not really one for being a stickler for convention. I'm a firm believer of putting prescriptivists in their place. However, when they say that paragraphs should be ~150 words max, this is for readability reasons.

For a quick primer, compare these two for their readability:

Example 1

Identity: Tomtabeg is one of the many children of a fairly wealthy merchant and trader. And as the 6th in line to inherit the family business he was always put on the back burner. He began life being trained into the role of a doctor-surgeon, a profession of enough class to suit his family's status but nothing that might threaten his sibling's firm positions as business mogul heirs and heiresses. However, he paid no mind to this, as he was perfectly happy flying under the family radar and spending his time getting into minor trouble and being an overall daredevil and speed freak. He found himself in the business of Cleaning more as a hobby than as a means to sustain his life. Given he has access to pretty major funds anyway. However, apart from an extensive suite of cybernetics and enhancements, he lives a seedy life. Preferring instead to live the life of a minor criminal than the boring luxury of a merchant's son. By his teen years, he was already extensively modified, both cosmetically and functionally. He naturally picked up the habit of the usage of many different 'mind-altering substances' and a fair few body-altering substances as well. He lives a hedonistic life of savage violence, white-knuckle action, and drug-fueled partying. One might find him somewhat entitled, given he was gifted with so many advantages in life and chose to blow them all on drugs, crime, and action; but he considers it to be a simple matter of rebellion and rejection from the lifestyle the was pre-determined he was meant to live.

Example 2

Identity: Tomtabeg is one of the many children of a fairly wealthy merchant and trader. And as the 6th in line to inherit the family business he was always put on the back burner. He began life being trained into the role of a doctor-surgeon, a profession of enough class to suit his family's status but nothing that might threaten his sibling's firm positions as business mogul heirs and heiresses. However, he paid no mind to this, as he was perfectly happy flying under the family radar and spending his time getting into minor trouble and being an overall daredevil and speed freak.

He found himself in the business of Cleaning more as a hobby than as a means to sustain his life. Given he has access to pretty major funds anyway. However, apart from an extensive suite of cybernetics and enhancements, he lives a seedy life. Preferring instead to live the life of a minor criminal than the boring luxury of a merchant's son.

By his teen years, he was already extensively modified, both cosmetically and functionally. He naturally picked up the habit of the usage of many different 'mind-altering substances' and a fair few body-altering substances as well. He lives a hedonistic life of savage violence, white-knuckle action, and drug-fueled partying. One might find him somewhat entitled, given he was gifted with so many advantages in life and chose to blow them all on drugs, crime, and action; but he considers it to be a simple matter of rebellion and rejection from the lifestyle the was pre-determined he was meant to live.

It's not perfect since I'm pretty much just adding in line breaks to something I didn't write, but using bold and adding linebreaks makes things much easier to read. I didn't really bring this up initially because it comes up less often in posts.

When I say fragments and the like, I mean in a way that the sentence construction makes things difficult to read. Some sentences feel like incomplete thoughts, some are written in a way that make them feel bloated. I'm just going to go down sentences line by line.

Example 3

Tomtabeg is one of the many children of a fairly wealthy merchant and trader.
This is fine; calling him a merchant and trader is a bit strange. Generally, if there's something to inherit, you'd phrase it in a way to denote it. Something like head of a company/corporation/conglomerate/chaebol. But it is also a weird anachronistic world where crown-magistrate is a position.

And as the 6th in line to inherit the family business he was always put on the back burner.
A weird way to phrase it. Probably remove the preposition (And) and add a comma to denote the dependent clause.

He began life being trained into the role of a doctor-surgeon, a profession of enough class to suit his family's status but nothing that might threaten his sibling's firm positions as business mogul heirs and heiresses.
This is an pretty long sentence that is meant to convey information, but gets pretty lost.

However, he paid no mind to this, as he was perfectly happy flying under the family radar and spending his time getting into minor trouble and being an overall daredevil and speed freak.
Another long sentence. When you compound long sentences after each other, they kind of get difficult to track as there's so much going on. Splitting it into two would make it a bit more readable.

He found himself in the business of Cleaning more as a hobby than as a means to sustain his life.
This one's fine. I don't like capitalizing cleaning because it just looks wrong to me, but it's whatever in the scheme of things.

Given he has access to pretty major funds anyway.
I'm pretty sure this is a fragment (I think it's a dependent clause; I'm not the most accurate at identifying them)

However, apart from an extensive suite of cybernetics and enhancements, he lives a seedy life.
This is probably fine. I preposition > dependent clause > independent clause sometimes and I've never actually checked if it's correct to do that.

Preferring instead to live the life of a minor criminal than the boring luxury of a merchant's son.
I think this is pretty weird construction. I think it's a dependent clause.

By his teen years, he was already extensively modified, both cosmetically and functionally.
This one's a comma splice, pretty sure.

He naturally picked up the habit of the usage of many different 'mind-altering substances' and a fair few body-altering substances as well.
You can shorten this a lot (see below). Also, it's pretty weird to scare quote mind-altering substances. It signifies that they weren't actually mind-altering substances.

He naturally picked up the habit of taking as many different mind-altering and body-altering substances as he could stomach.

He lives a hedonistic life of savage violence, white-knuckle action, and drug-fueled partying.
This one's really good. I like this line. It's like it punches me in the face with exactly what he is as a man (which is a very good thing).

One might find him somewhat entitled, given he was gifted with so many advantages in life and chose to blow them all on drugs, crime, and action; but he considers it to be a simple matter of rebellion and rejection from the lifestyle the was pre-determined he was meant to live.
This one is also kind of weird. It has a comma splice and restates some stuff. Making some changes smooths it out. Compare it to:

One might find him entitled given that he was gifted with so many advantages and still blew it all on drugs, crime, and action. Nid, however, considers his lifestyle to be a simple matter of rebellion from his predetermined upbringing.

Also this came up when I was doing a post audit: "its" is the possessive, "it's" is a contraction for it is. It's a curse when you learn this because you start reading stuff as "the earth and it is people" and the like.

---

This post got out of hand pretty quick. I'm not the best at identifying and rationalizing things beyond "it looks strange to me" so it probably has a few mistakes in my critique (plus I wrote it deep in the AM while watching my friends play Dork and Dorker).

[Vertigo]

Hope this works!

emma

Emma Badeaux

——————————————————————————————————————

"ℙ𝕖𝕠𝕡𝕝𝕖 𝕕𝕠𝕟'𝕥 𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕣 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕕𝕒𝕣𝕜; 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕪 𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕣 𝕨𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕝𝕦𝕣𝕜𝕤 𝕨𝕚𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟.

𝕀 𝕓𝕖𝕗𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕕 𝕚𝕥."

—————————

There was once a young girl that feared the dark. Born among the neon signs of the wealthy inner districts, she was luckier than most. Her life was not spent entirely in darkness, Outis' eternal night lit up by a sea of artificial light that surrounded her housing district. Most of the time, the darkness only lurked at the edges of her vision, patient, waiting, a threat only if she looked, and she'd learnt not to. It was only come time to sleep, when the servants pulled the blinds and turned off the lights, wishing her goodnight in lieu of her parents, that the darkness swallowed everything. And there, in the absence of light, lurked the monsters. In her closet, under her bed, watching her, nibbling at her hands and feet if she dared dangle them outside the safety of her blanket. She wanted to scream, but knew she shouldn't. The supernatural could not hurt her. Her parents had said so the few times she'd seen them; had hired cleaners to that end, and they'd never found anything in her room. Only she did. It was all in her head. She was a good girl, and good girls did not wake people up because of things in their heads. Then, one day, a stranger found his way into her room. A monster, though she didn't know it at the time, for he was not made of darkness and fear - but of flesh and blood. She didn't know what the stranger had already done, not about the state of her parents, not about this man's grudge for the wealthy. Not about the gun behind his back. She tried to warn the man of her monsters. She knew they'd attack him. So certain was she, that the world bent to her will, and creatures that defied all logic poured out from the shadows to assail the man the second his foot crossed the threshold. His gun was of no help, for what sort of a bullet could pierce darkness? There were shouts, and then there was silence. Everyone else in the house was dead. The girl was alone. Except she wasn't. She never had been, and she never would be. But she had made a mess, and her parents always told her to clean up after herself. Years later, it turned out she was petty good at cleaning. The girl's name was Emma. Is Emma, because her story isn't over yet. She turns 18 this year, and no longer fears the dark. She's looked into its depths, seen all its horrors, and given them names. To this day, they come when she calls.

Armaments:

None; petite and untrained in the art of combat on her own, Emma has no skill in wielding any weapon, traditional or otherwise.

Abilities:

Emma is able to manifest the creatures she believes live in the shadows to sunder and devour whatever may stand in their way. Their forms are fluid, always shifting with the whims of her imagination and fears, but they resemble animals more often than not. They did originally spawn from a child's mind, after all, back when beasts were scarier than man. Though of late, some have taken a more humanoid shape, and can even outwardly resemble the types of immortals she's fought recently.

The strength of the creatures varies; in pitch black darkness they can be everywhere all at once, their number limited only by Emma's capability to output vitas. Under the blare of intense neon lights, she struggles to bring them forth anywhere except the darkest of corners.

Other:

- Emma has trouble befriending real life animals, as they tend to shy away from her upon approach.
- She is left handed.
- Always carries around a parasol, which many assume to be a blessed weapon. It's not; it's simply a way to "protect" her from unwanted light.

[OwO]

@Vertigo I love Emma. You can put her and her friend(s?) in the character tab.

Also yea, IC probably some time Sunday (within 28 or so hours) since I need to finish some last coursework.

[ERode]

Heh.

Yasu and Emma, never alone because of their magic, but also in entirely different trajectories.

[Vertigo]

Heh.

Yasu and Emma, never alone because of their magic, but also in entirely different trajectories.

@ERode

Ha, true, didn't even realize! Love it.

[OwO]

@ERode@Abstract Proxy@PerfectThought@Vertigo

IC is up. Main goal is to introduce your characters, establish anything beforehand, and ask questions about the job you're about to perform.

[ERode]

Just a quick post n all. Keeping the tempo up.

[Abstract Proxy]

Yay!

I'll try to toss up a post later this evening.

[PerfectThought]

@OwOHope that post fixed some other the issues you raised the other day. Thanks for the advice :)

[Expendable]

Despite all those questions I asked in the interest thread to get this to connect for me, I haven't been able to come up with a character, so I'm afraid I'll have to pass.