“Not just a stoneworker—I’m a force mage, my lord, and I also am learned in the practice of surveying.”
Damn, she thought, ever so slightly biting her lip, maybe a bit curt. Oh well. Reflecting on the previous days’ events, she considered Silbermine’s verbiage.
“Is it really a temple? What would a deity be like to invoke such a temple…”
She briefly lost herself in thought. There were, no doubt, grand religious edifices across Kanth-Aramek; working in construction, she was familiar with a few of them, particularly those in Mythadia’s capital whose intricate stonework never failed to grab Subira’s attention. Great ogival arches, daunting ceiling heights, and immaculate jointing were near universal in these especially public places.
“My lord, if there’s one thing that I’m certain of, it’s that their… temple is not of a structure that exists anywhere on the continent, as far as I know. What is falling apart about it? I made a couple rounds, admittedly at a distance, and it is simply like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
She paused.
“It would seem that these humans have devised a way to build with metal,” she announced wearily, scrunching her eyes up, “and that just… eludes me. I could probably begin to get an understanding of what’s going on in there if I had, uh, access or, could talk to them or…”
Her eyes flicked upwards as she scratched her temples.
“In any case, my lord, buttresses are doable, without a doubt. How far beyond bare necessity do you want that project to go? Is there an urgent deadline?”
Subira suppressed the urge to either roll her eyes or grimace at the way she was talking. At least I’m not dealing with those Ascendancy dolts… although at this rate it looks like my hand will be forced. All the same, she was far below Silbermine, and was a total stranger in Mythadia. However silly she found it, she knew her place.
“Again, I can also offer my services as a surveyor and a force mage.”
As usual, somewhere between belonging and… its opposite.
Not especially kempt following her long walk to the crash site, Subira wore simple leather travel gear; a wandering mind permitted a distracted hand to fiddle with a frayed edge, blindly reading it back and forth. Faded and grey, featuring little in the way of intricacies besides some haphazard modifications (if one were to look closely: faint, nesting geometries, punched in with a reappropriated stone engraving tool), the basic getup left her feeling underdressed, underprepared?
She could sense the mounting tensions in the negotiations unfolding before—suddenly, an impossible voice barked at her in the lingua franca that she was only begrudgingly accepting as the vehicle of her everyday communication. While she didn’t miss much from the Ascendancy, occasionally, she detected the absence of the comfort afforded by conversing in her mother tongue.
What an accent! Where in the world…
Whirling around, ashy feathers rustled, her eyes widened as she took in the contraption that had addressed her.
“This is a restricted area. Please identify yourself,” it requested once more, its intonation not detectibly aggravated from having to repeat itself. Subira’s beak twitched; she stammered, desperate for answers.
“I… what are you? I’m supposed to be here. I mean—”
She blinked.
“I’m Subira, I’m a force mage, I work with Mythadia…”
She closed her eyes tightly, briefly, shaking her head as though to rattle it straight.
The unliving pieces remained coldly before her, calculating.
“I’m looking for Silbermine! I have been informed of very little. Do you understand me?”
Her life had suddenly become very complicated. Having raised her voice somewhat and slowly assuming a defensive position given the otherworldliness of the talking assembly, Subira was beginning to cause a commotion that could not be completely ignored, as much as she oh-so wished to stay out of the way.
Normally, Subira would have jumped at one of these “change of scenery” sort of orders. Well-to-do strangers had, somewhere between the Jotunheim’s resting site and modest Keraknúr, confirmed her bearings to her, and her steps were quick, firm. This all seems a bit… political, she languished to herself. It was supposed to be a big deal, or so she had heard, to be called out to Undisclosed Location for this urgent construction project, at the request of some “Silbermine.”
Urgent. What’s urgent about construction? At least, she always told herself, her interest (and therefore involvement) ended as soon as the cornerstone was posed. Urgent construction project on the Ascendancy’s border? In a way it was like going backwards. All that work to put the Ascendancy behind her… And here I am trudging right back. Basically. It was, however, new callings to which she responded those days. A reminder inside a reminder.
Her blasé attitude evaporated as she was finally able to make out what the Jotunheim was. Or, rather, was unable to make out what it was. From afar, the glistening, smooth fortress perplexed her as much as it ignited her curiosity, giving her interest in the project she had been called away from her post as a force mage in the capital’s construction sites for a new lease on life.
Crackling through foothill undergrowth at an unimpressive pace, Subira remained at a healthy distance from the goings-on in the clearing upon reaching it, taken aback by the multiple, clearly aggravated opposing factions occupying it and getting in spats and tense discussions—she read this in their uneasy stances and awkward groupings, rigid body language. Yet, she could not make out their words.
Her eyes drifted about the clearing from where she was concealed. They widened. What are those? Or… who? Or what? The smooth skin, peculiar faces, and enchanting getups of the unfamiliar beings buzzing around the metal edifice gripped her. These are completely new. I have never seen whatever that is. Her mind raced, the scale and gravity of what she was suddenly mixed up in only just beginning to dawn on her. I have to find Silbermine… why am I even here?
Carefully, she descended into the clearing, the inevitable collision of her Tekeri body with what everybody would soon know to be her Mythadian allegiance nagging somewhere in the back of her mind. The one who best matched the description of Silbermine was… Oh perfect, he is the center of attention. I can’t think of a better way to make an entry than by immediately becoming associated with him.
She waited impatiently as the frigid discussion unfolded to report to him; meanwhile, both sets of eyes danced across the incredible beings and objects scattered around her, trying to make connections where there were simply none to be made, no, everything was just so out of place… What is any of this? She dared not speak, having been violently ripped far outside her comfort zone.
Appearance Subira’s plumage is a paler black than many Tekeri, approaching an almost chestnut complexion all over in bright light. She is of average build and height, somewhat toned from her history of dancing and extensive martial arts practice. Jet black pupils disappear into the darker feathers on her face, which comes to a point in her typical yet short beak. Amongst Tekeri, she would be perceived as plain if not a bit stern of countenance. Capriciously dressed, her wardrobe and manner of accessorizing ranges from the unnoticeable to the perplexing. The details are always tended to, in one way or another.
Magical affiliation Force Domain
Occupation Stoneworker and Surveyor
Key skills -Unarmed combat: a desire for greater autonomy and security navigating the new and bustling lands of Mythadia’s capital region combined with a history of dancing, led her to train extensively in martial arts -Construction surveying: a surprise obsession with cartography in general narrowed down over time to the art of land and construction surveying -Masonry (engraving): an eye for detail and a pre-existing interest in construction brought her, at length, to the quarries supplying Mythadia’s grand construction projects as an engraver and tailor of construction stone
Personality Subira is eager and transitory. She develops fascinations on a whim but lives them with deep seriousness. She is ludic, finding the game in everything, yet reserved. She is generous and flowing but maintains picky, hard-headed tendencies, especially with others. Towards herself, she can be unforgiving—only her forgetfulness and detached demeanor soften this. She is overly compassionate (at least in her head) and can get lost in daydreams. She gets lost quickly and easily in her work, at times neglecting other aspects of her life. She doesn’t hesitate to ask things of others but fears others’ dependence on herself. If pressed, she would reveal that she is dismissive of grand narratives and has trouble believing in much of anything.
Backstory Tending towards elsewhere, Subira never saw herself in what others related to her as “homesickness.” How could she, when her upbringing left her no real home to be sick for, anyway? Long, quiet days, mulling over the aimless complexities of all the plants that, despite the changing scenery, remained a reassuring consistency in her many homes. Tracing the veins kept her company.
Her parents had always wholly subscribed to Ascendancy ideology, caught up in all sorts of complexes about endlessly getting ahead, proving and reproving themselves, climbing ladders and so on. A branch of the contemporary experience whose significance escaped Subira entirely. Perhaps well-learned, at least on paper, the vapidity of her various trainings as a petty gentry child did little to quench her erratic nature, little to box up her fluidity and ludic aspect.
Is the devil in the details, or is it in our relationship with those details? Subira was constantly browsing through textures, floating in and out as the moment took her. It wasn’t for her precision that her day-to-day life materialized as anything resembling order, at least not in the sense of properness. As many objects pleased her for many reasons, she often found herself at the center of immediately illegible object-galaxies of her own making.
Frantic, flirty obsessions with newcomers in her life played off of her reserved tendencies to construct someone bubbly yet inconsistent, unreliable. Having had little lifelong friendship, she bloomed in anonymity.
Barely fulfilling the Ascendancy’s secondary training requirements, her general disillusionment coupled with a desire for that elsewhere fueled Subira’s flee towards anything but that which she already knew. She was able to pick up odd jobs for a few years, relishing in the bits that nourished her picky interests and merely bearing the (far more frequent) onerous periods.
In a few of these time-killers she took especial pleasure. A tavern off a busy trade route near the village of Pescit in Mythadia found her and a group of traveling traditional dancers crossing paths by chance one cold autumn night. Subira’s parents, demanding as they were, hadn’t forgotten to have her train in certain traditional arts, and although it had been many years since she had danced with any sort of regularity (and under an entirely different tradition), she caught herself mesmerized by the flowing motions, rhythmic skin. Discovering they were looking for new dancers only pleased her more, and she traveled with them for some time, never tiring of the careful balance between order and chaos in the dancing body.
Subira etched a slow, meandering path through Mythadia towards its illustrious capital, encountering more varied and seedier milieux the closer she got. The kaleidoscope markets of the larger cities got the better of her, mysterious and exciting wares presenting themselves to her as though in a gallery. In these bustling spaces, an inevitable mugging and other close encounters pushed her towards a martial artist recommended by a fellow dancer. Simultaneously, a particular obsession was overtaking her in the form of old cartography, in no small part sustained by a vendor she encountered often in the markets. This Glen vendor traded in these antiquities while primarily an active researcher in the history of cartography; Subira’s overt fascination for the matter brought him to introduce her to his work, and she offered her time and energy without hesitation.
It was in this way that detail-oriented yet marginal Subira found a first material craft that checked a lot of boxes for her. Having left the dancers, she focused for a while on martial arts and cartography, specifically the history of surveying. Deep in her work in the cozy basements of the vintage cartographers’ guild of Evenis, a busy town outside the capital, she encountered a nearly incomprehensible map, the likes of which she had never seen. Disturbingly well-preserved, the document mixed pictorial and geometric descriptions of a site that, through much study, Subira was able to determine must be outside the city in a meadow. Her curiosity piqued by the specificity and apparent banality of such a map, she took it upon herself to venture out to the spot, naïvely unequipped. Cloudless dawn illuminated a snowy clearing; Subira, frigid and sharp, noticed the dark, floating cloak and the twin dripping blades orbiting it too late.
Shot with terror, she stood frozen to the spot, eyes wide as the desolate apparition floated breathlessly. She understood quickly that if she moved backwards, it moved twice as close. Choosing the freedom of the clearing over the mess of the woods for once, she stepped into the being’s arena, nerves fraught. Limbless and empty, the cloak and blades suddenly moved on her, stimulating Subira’s self-defense combat reflexes, the inherent deep control. Too many close calls. The otherworldly blades, even just grazing her nimble body, nipping at her dancing feathers, sent obliterating pain coursing through her every vein.
Subira was bloody and near defeat when the merciless enemy became locked in place; the ripples on the cloak died out and the fabric hung lifeless. Fighting just to stay conscious, she remarked through the haze of pain that the blades, too, floated in the air mere inches from her chest, unmoving. Deep within her, an essential reorganization and series of reconnections was taking place as she discovered an ability to, with great concentration, remove the blades even further, to maintain an even greater lock on the silent cloak. At once, the pitch fabric crumpled lamely upon the soft snow below, and the sleek blades exploded outward like overturning click beetles, landing dozens of feet away at the foot of the trees. Sleep claimed Subira.
She awoke in a glacial state hours later; collecting the perplexing cloak and blades, rejoined the warmth of the city. She knew not how to recount any of what had happened at the clearing to anyone she knew, choosing to keep the battle a secret, but was ecstatic to announce her sudden revelation that she had stepped into magehood to those around her.
Her work studying surveying and attention to detail led, at length, to an interest in the finer arts of construction. With some scattered references and recommendations, in her 27th year, she found herself tailoring stone in quarry ateliers on the outskirts of the capital. Detailing and engraving the local limestone, often with the help of the force magic she was slowly learning to handle, she maintained a curious position in the quarry’s hierarchy, being trained and traveled but with little to show for it, an immigrant in a strange land but still better off than the quarriers below.
Appearance Subira’s plumage is a paler black than many Tekeri, approaching an almost chestnut complexion all over in bright light. She is of average build and height, somewhat toned from her history of dancing and extensive martial arts practice. Jet black pupils disappear into the darker feathers on her face, which comes to a point in her typical yet short beak. Amongst Tekeri, she would be perceived as plain if not a bit stern of countenance. Capriciously dressed, her wardrobe and manner of accessorizing ranges from the unnoticeable to the perplexing. The details are always tended to, in one way or another.
Magical affiliation Force Domain
Occupation Stoneworker and Surveyor
Key skills -Unarmed combat: a desire for greater autonomy and security navigating the new and bustling lands of Mythadia’s capital region combined with a history of dancing, led her to train extensively in martial arts -Construction surveying: a surprise obsession with cartography in general narrowed down over time to the art of land and construction surveying -Masonry (engraving): an eye for detail and a pre-existing interest in construction brought her, at length, to the quarries supplying Mythadia’s grand construction projects as an engraver and tailor of construction stone
Personality Subira is eager and transitory. She develops fascinations on a whim but lives them with deep seriousness. She is ludic, finding the game in everything, yet reserved. She is generous and flowing but maintains picky, hard-headed tendencies, especially with others. Towards herself, she can be unforgiving—only her forgetfulness and detached demeanor soften this. She is overly compassionate (at least in her head) and can get lost in daydreams. She gets lost quickly and easily in her work, at times neglecting other aspects of her life. She doesn’t hesitate to ask things of others but fears others’ dependence on herself. If pressed, she would reveal that she is dismissive of grand narratives and has trouble believing in much of anything.
Backstory Tending towards elsewhere, Subira never saw herself in what others related to her as “homesickness.” How could she, when her upbringing left her no real home to be sick for, anyway? Long, quiet days, mulling over the aimless complexities of all the plants that, despite the changing scenery, remained a reassuring consistency in her many homes. Tracing the veins kept her company.
Her parents had always wholly subscribed to Ascendancy ideology, caught up in all sorts of complexes about endlessly getting ahead, proving and reproving themselves, climbing ladders and so on. A branch of the contemporary experience whose significance escaped Subira entirely. Perhaps well-learned, at least on paper, the vapidity of her various trainings as a petty gentry child did little to quench her erratic nature, little to box up her fluidity and ludic aspect.
Is the devil in the details, or is it in our relationship with those details? Subira was constantly browsing through textures, floating in and out as the moment took her. It wasn’t for her precision that her day-to-day life materialized as anything resembling order, at least not in the sense of properness. As many objects pleased her for many reasons, she often found herself at the center of immediately illegible object-galaxies of her own making.
Frantic, flirty obsessions with newcomers in her life played off of her reserved tendencies to construct someone bubbly yet inconsistent, unreliable. Having had little lifelong friendship, she bloomed in anonymity.
Barely fulfilling the Ascendancy’s secondary training requirements, her general disillusionment coupled with a desire for that elsewhere fueled Subira’s flee towards anything but that which she already knew. She was able to pick up odd jobs for a few years, relishing in the bits that nourished her picky interests and merely bearing the (far more frequent) onerous periods.
In a few of these time-killers she took especial pleasure. A tavern off a busy trade route near the village of Pescit in Mythadia found her and a group of traveling traditional dancers crossing paths by chance one cold autumn night. Subira’s parents, demanding as they were, hadn’t forgotten to have her train in certain traditional arts, and although it had been many years since she had danced with any sort of regularity (and under an entirely different tradition), she caught herself mesmerized by the flowing motions, rhythmic skin. Discovering they were looking for new dancers only pleased her more, and she traveled with them for some time, never tiring of the careful balance between order and chaos in the dancing body.
Subira etched a slow, meandering path through Mythadia towards its illustrious capital, encountering more varied and seedier milieux the closer she got. The kaleidoscope markets of the larger cities got the better of her, mysterious and exciting wares presenting themselves to her as though in a gallery. In these bustling spaces, an inevitable mugging and other close encounters pushed her towards a martial artist recommended by a fellow dancer. Simultaneously, a particular obsession was overtaking her in the form of old cartography, in no small part sustained by a vendor she encountered often in the markets. This Glen vendor traded in these antiquities while primarily an active researcher in the history of cartography; Subira’s overt fascination for the matter brought him to introduce her to his work, and she offered her time and energy without hesitation.
It was in this way that detail-oriented yet marginal Subira found a first material craft that checked a lot of boxes for her. Having left the dancers, she focused for a while on martial arts and cartography, specifically the history of surveying. Deep in her work in the cozy basements of the vintage cartographers’ guild of Evenis, a busy town outside the capital, she encountered a nearly incomprehensible map, the likes of which she had never seen. Disturbingly well-preserved, the document mixed pictorial and geometric descriptions of a site that, through much study, Subira was able to determine must be outside the city in a meadow. Her curiosity piqued by the specificity and apparent banality of such a map, she took it upon herself to venture out to the spot, naïvely unequipped. Cloudless dawn illuminated a snowy clearing; Subira, frigid and sharp, noticed the dark, floating cloak and the twin dripping blades orbiting it too late.
Shot with terror, she stood frozen to the spot, eyes wide as the desolate apparition floated breathlessly. She understood quickly that if she moved backwards, it moved twice as close. Choosing the freedom of the clearing over the mess of the woods for once, she stepped into the being’s arena, nerves fraught. Limbless and empty, the cloak and blades suddenly moved on her, stimulating Subira’s self-defense combat reflexes, the inherent deep control. Too many close calls. The otherworldly blades, even just grazing her nimble body, nipping at her dancing feathers, sent obliterating pain coursing through her every vein.
Subira was bloody and near defeat when the merciless enemy became locked in place; the ripples on the cloak died out and the fabric hung lifeless. Fighting just to stay conscious, she remarked through the haze of pain that the blades, too, floated in the air mere inches from her chest, unmoving. Deep within her, an essential reorganization and series of reconnections was taking place as she discovered an ability to, with great concentration, remove the blades even further, to maintain an even greater lock on the silent cloak. At once, the pitch fabric crumpled lamely upon the soft snow below, and the sleek blades exploded outward like overturning click beetles, landing dozens of feet away at the foot of the trees. Sleep claimed Subira.
She awoke in a glacial state hours later; collecting the perplexing cloak and blades, rejoined the warmth of the city. She knew not how to recount any of what had happened at the clearing to anyone she knew, choosing to keep the battle a secret, but was ecstatic to announce her sudden revelation that she had stepped into magehood to those around her.
Her work studying surveying and attention to detail led, at length, to an interest in the finer arts of construction. With some scattered references and recommendations, in her 27th year, she found herself tailoring stone in quarry ateliers on the outskirts of the capital. Detailing and engraving the local limestone, often with the help of the force magic she was slowly learning to handle, she maintained a curious position in the quarry’s hierarchy, being trained and traveled but with little to show for it, an immigrant in a strange land but still better off than the quarriers below.
Hello everyone! For some background, I used to roleplay a lot on different forums in the early 2010s, around my middle school period. I stopped in high school and never was on any dedicated roleplaying sites (nor have I tried any systems...) and am now looking to rekindle what I feel like was a fruitful creative outlet and plane of interaction in my life. I did a lot of scifi roleplaying back then, but I'm also interested in fantasy and other interesting or original scenarios.
Anybody else have a similar background, or has anyone else rediscovered something a part of their life they had lost touch with here?
Lemons