HereComesTheSnow

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP Interest Check

Bringing back Renar “the Toboggan” del Hagen?

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP Interest Check

While I would definitely miss writing Gerard, and have gotten very attached to that angry little bastard over the past three years, i have to admit that a weekly posting schedule might be tough to keep up with where i’m at now. I’ll be taking some time to think things over, if it’s all good with you

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

It’s been real

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

Gerard Segremors

@VitaVitaAR

Pulled away from the search of everything with potential to be anything useful, Gerard swiftly about-faced on his heel, marching over to his leader's side and gazing at the words over her shoulder, reading them in time with her finger as it traced a line through the text. He was lucky he'd made a habit of harassing the merchants passing through his town in youth— literacy was a rare skill among most of his possible paths of education back home.

"Damn," The erstwhile mercenary grunted, left with no recourse but a curse beneath the breath. After a revelation like that... the mind couldn't tear itself away from a single track of thought, even if it may have tried to first mind the broader scope of things. "Right under our noses the whole time."

His free arm felt the urge to fold across his chest— impossible with its partner in a sling. Instead, it floated up and behind, scratching an itch around the back of his head. An absentminded gesture. His eyes continued to pin the text to the page, a tight, sharp glare that received neither word nor gaze in reply. Thinking back to that night, he remembered truly needing to war with his own impulses— that thirst for battle that was so ingrained it began to swell at the slightest tension. Despite the Silver Stone being a place of order, protection, symbolic of Mayon's gentle light and care for peace... was it possible that having a shard in the proximity had exacerbated things?

Maybe. Maybe his concerns that night had been on the money in grander scale. He didn't know enough to say. More importantly...

"I suppose that explains what the Boars were doing there," he ventured, reaching down and tapping the words 'Brennan Forest' twice. "First the fort where we know one was stored, then the forest the Stone's within, rather than the Stone itself. No idea who left that note, nor whom it was a hint for, but..."

He took a breath, trying to pull the tension growing in his shoulders out. No luck. Not with that conclusion staring them both in the face, plain as day. He couldn't imagine what else the answer was, not remotely.

"They came from the forest, too— Not the Shrine. They had to be hunting that temple, right?"

And they'd been hunting the shards as a collective, not just one.

Reforging the blade? Unthinkable. Surely anyone that ambitious would have made themselves known by now.

... Then again, they had made sure to obfuscate the search by hiring mercenaries instead of using personal forces or adventurers from the guilds to do dirty work like attacking a garrison. in dealing with a threat like this, one that jeopardized the very nation if it got as bad as it potentially could... Best not to assume all parties listened to their first thoughts quite so much.

...They needed that prisoner to rat his employer out, more than ever.

Clad in Iron, War of the Worlds and Mecha

Yes.

Clad in Iron, War of the Worlds and Mecha

Name: Liam Haggerty

Age: 20

Gender: Male

Job: Chief Gunnery Operator

Country of Origin: England

Appearance: Wiry, brisk, and brimming with furious purpose. Liam is a young and frankly small man, standing only 170 cm or so even in ramrod naval posture, and he carries little in the way of extraneous bulk on his person, having neither need nor wish of living lavishly at altitude. Whatever blubber a fuller diet might have given him to insulate his frame from the outside world is burned away by the heat of constant motion on the gun decks of the mighty airship, as he loads, aims, and fires heavy comets of lead unto his hated foe a man possessed. In so doing, he often looks more the part of a engine worker than a uniformed soldier, topcoat stripped to hang around the waist as both his pale skin and white undershirts are constantly stained black by gunpowder. It too carries in the short head of mahogany hair he's topped with, never quite getting the odor out free from his follicles or pores. His eyes are a dark, stormy gray, as though cast from the same iron as his holy airship's namesake— and the vessel that saved his life, five years ago.

Personality: A stern, focused gunner, Operator Haggerty is a brash, outspoken individual on the floors of the cannonade decks, a man singularly focused: If there are Martians to rain down God's Judgement upon, he will see to it that they are tried. He is fiery in his passion for the craft of artillery, stating simply that "It's no coincidence that the Thunderchild—the First One— was the best weapon we had against those damned squids! The shells put them down! I was there!" when questioned. His anger at the demons from Mars, as a young man who survived the initial invasion of the British Isles, runs deep enough to touch his core. He was a boy who lost family, lost friends, lost his home, lost his nation— and watched many of them burn, screaming, beneath the devilish rays of heat. He hates none of his fellow men and women, and would call himself a friend to all mankind, regardless of their heritage— and on the other side of that coin, would gladly do whatever necessary to wipe the Martians that took his world away off the face of the planet— and theirs, too.

In the rare moments that he allows himself to be away from the mighty guns (and the thankfully less rare moments where he's forced away by outranking officers), he retreats into a quiet shell, keeping his words tight and controlled and close to his chest. At times, one wonders if part of him might realize that he was twisted irreparably from the joyous young man that lived in Hull up to the Summer of 1897, and that he needs to keep himself tightly wound and locked in place when he has no demons there to Hate so fervently. In these cases, socialization seems almost an unfamiliar chore, if not necessarily unwelcome. A few beers (or if you manage to steer a conversation somewhere he knows how to get going within) can sometimes change this— bringing out a ghost of the boy who died on the steamer's deck, in time with the valiant heart of the Ironclad.

History: A coastal lad hailing from the port town of Hull, Liam's origins are by necessity humble, the Haggerty family settling on the lower end of the newly birthed middle class post-Industrialization. His father was a hardy steel mill worker who moonlit as a fisherman and enjoyed jellied eels and meat pies with his daily pint at the local pub. His mother kept the house and routinely enlisted her boys— Liam and his older brother James— with the more labor-intensive work in the years of his adolescence, slotting cleaning and repair between their studies and ventures into the forests a few miles north. It was by all accounts a simple life— one that the Martians dispassionately tore from him at the age of 15, mere months after his brother had enlisted in the Army. The demons, in their impossible and deadly engines of destruction, cut a swath through the Isles mercilessly, with no warning to speak of. It was all he could do to take his ailing mother, feverish at the time, and hurry her through the streets of Hull onto the nearest ship they could— a small steamer, filled to the brim with similar refugees, that barely puffed out of port as the three-legged monsters loomed high above what was once his home. His father is to this day unaccounted for, and he presumes him dead, likely within the steel mill he was employed by.

The steamer limped southward, only making one daring stop— skirting along the Essex coast for supplies and fuel, its load unfortunately lighter. Those injured in the attacks could often not be adequately treated, and were grimly tossed overboard after they passed by the crew and whatever family could muster the courage. It was on this fateful stop that young Liam saw the shadows of those demons again. This time, his boat wasn't so lucky— small, slow, and surrounded by a trio of the striders, they were to be easy pickings.

And then, one of them fell to a crack of thunder, as a furious horn sounded from an ironclad bravely surging into the fray. He watched, awestruck, captivated, as the roaring ship bore down at full steam, heedless of the heat rays or warbling cries of the war machines. Their only answer came in the form of her mighty guns, her bellowing engine, the scream of metal tearing into metal, and the warrior calls of the men aboard as she rammed the second, defiant to the last as the final walker's heat ray melted her valiant heart. It was here that the shellshocked boy's soul changed forever, casting all his hope, all his hate, and all his sorrow into the single chant the refugees aboard the little steamer repeated, slinking away as the voice of legion.

"Come on, Thunder Child!"

As the ship made port in France, the boy's heart was set upon the one thing he saw that had made those demons bleed.

Five years later, his naval career has lead him aboard a new child of the storm, one that sits in the same leaden skies its sacred namesake fought beneath, each an indomitable testament to human will, in the face of a truly existential threat.

Equipment: A Webley Model 1887 revolver sidearm, opposed by a long, front-curved knife that hangs from his opposite hip to round out his personal protection should things ever become that disastrous— a kukri obtained from a Gurkha, reportedly as some form of trade bargained at some point prior to his stationing aboard the airship. That this is nonstandard seems to be overlooked, given his proficiency with the mapbook, wind charts, protractor, rangefinder, and texts on various artillerist's concerns such as the Coriolis effect, geometry, and gun maintenance. Always seems to have a stout on hand, especially when working.

Fighting Machine: HMS Thunderchild. Knows her inside and out, knows the Gun Decks every which way one can short of "biblically".

Clad in Iron, War of the Worlds and Mecha

Stormbringer

Name: Liam Haggerty

Age: 20

Gender: Male

Job: Chief Gunnery Operator

Country of Origin: England

Appearance: Wiry, brisk, and brimming with furious purpose. Liam is a young and frankly small man, standing only 170 cm or so even in ramrod naval posture, and he carries little in the way of extraneous bulk on his person, having neither need nor wish of living lavishly at altitude. Whatever blubber a fuller diet might have given him to insulate his frame from the outside world is burned away by the heat of constant motion on the gun decks of the mighty airship, as he loads, aims, and fires heavy comets of lead unto his hated foe a man possessed. In so doing, he often looks more the part of a engine worker than a uniformed soldier, topcoat stripped to hang around the waist as both his pale skin and white undershirts are constantly stained black by gunpowder. It too carries in the short head of mahogany hair he's topped with, never quite getting the odor out free from his follicles or pores. His eyes are a dark, stormy gray, as though cast from the same iron as his holy airship's namesake— and the vessel that saved his life, five years ago.

Personality: A stern, focused gunner, Operator Haggerty is a brash, outspoken individual on the floors of the cannonade decks, a man singularly focused: If there are Martians to rain down God's Judgement upon, he will see to it that they are tried. He is fiery in his passion for the craft of artillery, stating simply that "It's no coincidence that the Thunderchild—the First One— was the best weapon we had against those damned squids! The shells put them down! I was there!" when questioned. His anger at the demons from Mars, as a young man who survived the initial invasion of the British Isles, runs deep enough to touch his core. He was a boy who lost family, lost friends, lost his home, lost his nation— and watched many of them burn, screaming, beneath the devilish rays of heat. He hates none of his fellow men and women, and would call himself a friend to all mankind, regardless of their heritage— and on the other side of that coin, would gladly do whatever necessary to wipe the Martians that took his world away off the face of the planet— and theirs, too.

In the rare moments that he allows himself to be away from the mighty guns (and the thankfully less rare moments where he's forced away by outranking officers), he retreats into a quiet shell, keeping his words tight and controlled and close to his chest. At times, one wonders if part of him might realize that he was twisted irreparably from the joyous young man that lived in Hull up to the Summer of 1897, and that he needs to keep himself tightly wound and locked in place when he has no demons there to Hate so fervently. In these cases, socialization seems almost an unfamiliar chore, if not necessarily unwelcome. A few beers (or if you manage to steer a conversation somewhere he knows how to get going within) can sometimes change this— bringing out a ghost of the boy who died on the steamer's deck, in time with the valiant heart of the Ironclad.

History: A coastal lad hailing from the port town of Hull, Liam's origins are by necessity humble, the Haggerty family settling on the lower end of the newly birthed middle class post-Industrialization. His father was a hardy steel mill worker who moonlit as a fisherman and enjoyed jellied eels and meat pies with his daily pint at the local pub. His mother kept the house and routinely enlisted her boys— Liam and his older brother James— with the more labor-intensive work in the years of his adolescence, slotting cleaning and repair between their studies and ventures into the forests a few miles north. It was by all accounts a simple life— one that the Martians dispassionately tore from him at the age of 15, mere months after his brother had enlisted in the Army. The demons, in their impossible and deadly engines of destruction, cut a swath through the Isles mercilessly, with no warning to speak of. It was all he could do to take his ailing mother, feverish at the time, and hurry her through the streets of Hull onto the nearest ship they could— a small steamer, filled to the brim with similar refugees, that barely puffed out of port as the three-legged monsters loomed high above what was once his home. His father is to this day unaccounted for, and he presumes him dead, likely within the steel mill he was employed by.

The steamer limped southward, only making one daring stop— skirting along the Essex coast for supplies and fuel, its load unfortunately lighter. Those injured in the attacks could often not be adequately treated, and were grimly tossed overboard after they passed by the crew and whatever family could muster the courage. It was on this fateful stop that young Liam saw the shadows of those demons again. This time, his boat wasn't so lucky— small, slow, and surrounded by a trio of the striders, they were to be easy pickings.

And then, one of them fell to a crack of thunder, as a furious horn sounded from an ironclad bravely surging into the fray. He watched, awestruck, captivated, as the roaring ship bore down at full steam, heedless of the heat rays or warbling cries of the war machines. Their only answer came in the form of her mighty guns, her bellowing engine, the scream of metal tearing into metal, and the warrior calls of the men aboard as she rammed the second, defiant to the last as the final walker's heat ray melted her valiant heart. It was here that the shellshocked boy's soul changed forever, casting all his hope, all his hate, and all his sorrow into the single chant the refugees aboard the little steamer repeated, slinking away as the voice of legion.

"Come on, Thunder Child!"

As the ship made port in France, the boy's heart was set upon the one thing he saw that had made those demons bleed.

Five years later, his naval career has lead him aboard a new child of the storm, one that sits in the same leaden skies its sacred namesake fought beneath, each an indomitable testament to human will, in the face of a truly existential threat.

Equipment: A Webley Model 1887 revolver sidearm, opposed by a long, front-curved knife that hangs from his opposite hip to round out his personal protection should things ever become that disastrous— a kukri obtained from a Gurkha, reportedly as some form of trade bargained at some point prior to his stationing aboard the airship. That this is nonstandard seems to be overlooked, given his proficiency with the mapbook, wind charts, protractor, rangefinder, and texts on various artillerist's concerns such as the Coriolis effect, geometry, and gun maintenance. Always seems to have a stout on hand, especially when working.

Fighting Machine: HMS Thunderchild. Knows her inside and out, knows the Gun Decks every which way one can short of "biblically".

Clad in Iron, War of the Worlds and Mecha

COME ON THUNDERCHILD

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

Gerard Segremors

@VitaVitaAR

"Right," He nodded simply, breathing out through his nose as it seemed any potential offense was avoided. It was good to know she'd not begrudged the idea at all— last thing a man needed was to get under the skin of his commander. Regarding his condition... "I ought to be back up to speed in a few days."

With that established, he returned to folding the concept over in his head, eyes scanning the shelves. If his Captain hadn't considered the sides that lied outside raw legends and academia, that wasn't unforgivable—his own notions of knighthood and chivalry stemmed from the same sources through the majority of his military career, after all. It was a reminder, if anything. Just as he was new to this station... she'd barely had any more tenure under hers.

Two of a suit, if not a kind.

His eyes narrowed as he glanced back to her, shaking off a little color from her cheeks. Probably kicking herself for missing the thread his experiences had naturally drawn him to, if he had to guess— he couldn't count the number of occasions he himself had fumed similarly. But more to the point, that meant his perspective and hers sat in contrast— his way of approaching the issue differed.

Best to share that, too. It might not have helped with her immediate shame, but if fighting alongside men like Fleuri and Nicomede had taught him anything, it was that the tools would give her the means to not blank on that again.

As he ambled between the shelves, ever searching, he spoke.

"One of the things I learned was the landscape's role on the field," he spoke with a tone more of recollection than declaration or teaching. He didn't have that much presumption in him, even after the reassurance that his help was favorable. "How a battle can be shaped by it, how it directs troop flow, how you can use it to narrow your expectations ahead of time. All stuff I'm sure you know as well, but... from the perspective of a single soldier, I guess. Knowing where not to step, where our unit might get bogged down, how to read for signs of ambush. If you know a field's full of sinkholes, you skirt the edges unless you know the path."

Here, he found a potential candidate: Thaln's Locales— The Many Faces of the Homeland. A little general, and not necessarily exactly what they were going to find their information in, but he had to imagine even an overview would mention areas of hostile terrain. Places hard to reach that a shard might be hidden, or perhaps...

"My thinking's along similar lines here, I mean— That the land itself could end up being a clue. We know exposure to the shard can drive men crazy enough to kill one another from Fort Daelantine, right?" He slipped the book into the crook of his arm within the sling, wincing minutely but soldiering on. "So I'd imagine one sitting in one place for a long time... might have that curse similarly desecrate the area around it, be it a temple or a valley or whatever you like. Such places that inspire madness ought to be warned away from, even if the rest has nothing to do with the shards."

Humble origins only mattered if they turned out to lack effect. Even a stick's a weapon, if you can beat a man over the head with it.

"Anything you've come up with so far, ma'am?" he asked idly, pausing to peruse the tomes above head height behind his squint.

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

gerard soon, just tidying up other commitments