Shienvien

The Prophecy

Domhnall McRaith

The young lad appeared to have no more words to spare him, and the white-haired and white-eyed woman just offered him a curt nod before quietly inquiring something of the older black-eyes next to her. Olan, was it? He had never been too good with foreign names...
The old guy himself was looking around with an almost childlike wonder, from him to Iridiel to their new slumbering friend, and, perhaps more notably, showing signs of positive recognition when Iridiel's goddess was mentioned. Unusual. From what he had seen and heard, the people of this land did not appear to recognize neither her nor the nine other Éireannach deities - Epona of hunting, Sulis of healing and nature, Aedh of honorable warfare, Lugus of learning and knowledge, Rosmerta of fertility and agriculture, Belisama of rivers, lakes, seas, and storms (or perhaps water in general), Belenus, the secondary god of healing, Andraste of victory, Belatucardos of bloodthirstiness and anger, and Arvernus of government and society.
Instead of them, the people of those lands appeared to worship a plethora of entities foreign to the Éireannach, who generally had little contact with the outside world and its various religions. The most they were generally aware of was the monotheistic religion of Thessaleia - their old rival and arch-nemesis. From what Domhnall understood, the "eastern" deities often stood for the same aspects Éireannach deities did ... which was probably also why in each respective region, only one or the other was recognized. Water alone had something like at least two ... maybe three or four or more "eastern" deities assigned to it; who knew how they all managed it without constantly squabbling amongst themselves. (Or perhaps they did bicker all the time, unable to agree on where a river or another was supposed to go or what place to flood or which area to subject to drought?)
He would probably never learn all the names of those "eastern" deities. There were far too many, these were not their deities, and he was not a particularly religious man. There was an obvious benefit to traveling with someone capable of healing or dealing massive damage at the mere utterance of a deity's name (not that it was the main, or even a particularly prevalent reason why he had stuck with Iridiel for those last years of his life; thankfully, those services of hers had not turned out to be necessary all that often thus far), but other than that ... he simply did not think he would have had the faith or devotion to become favored himself. More often than not, his relation with deities could be summed up with "try not to piss them off too badly, and you will most likely do just fine".

The older black-eyes replied something to the white-eyed woman, and they both carefully made their way over to where the little group's leader lay, seemingly still asleep. The male forestfolk lingered for a bit, uncertain on whether he was still needed there or he could go and check up on his companion.
Aemoten was normally a very light sleeper, and generally tended to regain full alertness within moments of waking (though in instances where his sleep had been cut particularly short, he also tended to be significantly more irritable than otherwise), but not there and then. The events that had transpired since he woke this early morning had taken a too heavy toll on his soul, and in an effort to replenish itself, it now clung to the Spirit Realm with all ten nails, figuratively speaking. While it remained at least possible to wake the foreign warrior, it would have taken considerable effort to do so.
The blind woman's fingers tentatively running across his face as she brushed aside errant strands of hair did not suffice to stir him, and as such he remained in his slumber, head tilted to the side, breathing evenly, though still shallowly.

The older black-eyes did not seem to wait long before his attention was back on him, "Okay, okay, I'm dying to know - what two éireannach and a del-korm are doing here? And together, too. That's probably about the most unusual thing I remember seeing, you know!" His exclamation even diverted the white-eyes' attention to him, for a bit.
"Myself and Iridiel - we were hunting, caught a deer before setting up a camp nearby" he began after a moment's pause. "Now we're headed for Zerul City ... large place, should be good fer trading."
He heavily suspected this was not what the old man had meant, but it gave him a bit of time to think over what he could actually say of his and Iridiel's shared past. Or the pasts of them individually. He did not think it was his right to share why Iridiel had originally been forced to leave his home, and he was not entirely certain these newcomers would look at him the same way if he shared the less fortunate bits of his past right away. All in all, he found himself in a bit of a predicament.
It was strange, though ... the man actually knowing what he and Iridiel (who was much more humanlike than he!) were, and furthermore also knowing what manner of creature Claw was. From what the wolf-man had told, he was from some isolated island up north, and probably even father west than the Éireannach lands.
Absentmindedly, he scratched his bearded cheek as he pondered, then clasped his hands together in front of himself.
"Been traveling' with Iridiel fer a few years now... Met her not far from my old home; never been to her lands meself. She's a hunter like me back home, aside of a Favored one of Sulis, from a small place called Loch Garman, I believe. She's sent out to learn and improve herfelf by her people." Which was technically a correct statement, and probably a much nicer way to put it than "exiled"... He himself had not been made to leave as much as he thought it might be for the better himself.
"Traveled east for a good while... Heard there's not much but ashen rocks and some sandy desert further east from here, so decided to take a bit of a break. Leas' gave me some time to learn some of the language. Claw we met not long before you lot. Seems like the honorable sort."
Odd, to think of it for a bit - aside of their profession, he and Iridiel were practically opposites in many things, and not only because he was a man and a forestfolk, and she a woman and a highlander, but she was also a devout woman while he was practically irreligious, she was a fairly reserved individual and did not do well with people whereas he was always the one to do most of the talking stuff... As they somehow had ended up staying together until this day rather than splitting ways, he supposed that they complemented one another well enough in the end. That, and there simply were no other Éireannach around.

Mahz's Dev Journal

It wouldn't be too bad if they actually put spaces after the commas... Right now the overflowing part is all one "word".

Mahz's Dev Journal

It might be not so much an error as much as it's simply a mismatch. I could probably give a more specific conclusion if I was pointed out a few specific instances of it happening in posts, and not just what markings seem to be mismatched and/or undefined. (I know one person who occasionally has markings in his posts that do not confuse my computers or browsers, but *do* have codes that end up being unmapped on the server I use to backing up posts in case of a disaster, for instance ... something which I can't really do much about, as it is not my server to tamper with.) As well as their system's/browsers' encoding settings (for instance, my default is UTF-8 pretty much everywhere).

Mahz's Dev Journal

Sounds like rather clear-cut encoding issue to me. I've encountered similar before in other environments. Mind that markings looking identical doesn't mean they're mapped the same.

Also, the logout issue is back. Sorry, Mahz...

The Prophecy

I assume it's either you or Mercinus first, and then Yoshua (since it was mostly Morgan being addressed and these two are the ones wearing masks).

The Prophecy

...I was just about to poke you and see whether you were still responsive, as it's been far too quiet here lately. I'll see whether I can post a reply a bit later in the evening (edit: if Nessa feels like posting before that, she can feel free to, as I don't think there'd be any interference from my side). And is there still a PM I said I'll send you, isn't there? *thinks* There is a PM I said I'll send... Oeh.
(Are you certain Olan was supposed to be bemused in the first sentence? As in the negative feeling of being confused and slightly taken aback?)

The Prophecy

*Looks at Jack, Legion and cthulu*
I no can do. I posted last, and my other character is a bit indisposed. You and Jack can feel free to post; Domhnall likely won't be moving to Iridiel until he considers himself done with the newcomers (yell "Skip!" if you think Thaler isn't going to do anything, I suppose), and Legion is basically just going to post when he is actually able to.

The Prophecy

Ugh, and don't even get me started on trying to translate names... They did it with LoTR and Harry Potter, and it was equally horrendous to see some of the names that resulted from the attempt. I've personally been very annoyed with LoTR sword, Sting, in that respect, because some translator decided that its name in Danish should be "Stik" (which is the imperative form of the verb "sting", or the word used to describe the area that has been stung (a mosquito bite is, while we're at it, a "myggestik" - a "mosquito sting" (despite the fact that mosquitoes are not even in possession of a sting in the first place))) instead of what I thought was a much more logical name, "Brod" (the anatomical feature called sting, used to perform the aforementioned action). Doesn't make sense. Eh...

The anatomical feature is called "a stinger" (though this can rarely also be used for the entire being who committed the act). Hornets, wasps and bees have stingers, for instance... Simply "sting" is a verb - the act of stinging -, and "a sting" as a noun ... would be either be the sensation of a certain kind of sharp pain (akin to that) experienced when stung or, indeed, the place which was stung, which makes the Danish translation under question a linguistically correct one, though most likely not one which carries the intended meaning, whereas translating it as "the Stinger" is a bit of a creative freedom... I personally have always interpreted the English variant as being the verb "sting" for some reason (as this is arguably at least somewhat illogical way of interpreting a name); naming a sword after a feeling of pain (as most people who call themselves "Sting" mean it) definitely makes more sense than naming it after a sting as in the spot which was stung, though, so now when I actually think on it, it seems most reasonable to assume the sword is pretty much named a variant of "Pain". (That said, they actually translated the sword Sting into "Stinger" [as in the functional body part, not the culprit] in Estonian ... in I think all of the variants. Those that I've seen, anyway. Then again, the verb or sensation-noun might feel be a bit odd, or I'm just used to it being "[the] Stinger" in Estonian - as I read/was read the Hobbit long before I saw the English version anywhere, when I was perhaps four, which also might or might not have contributed to my mental image of orcs as toothpicks, as that was the most common kind of "ork" I knew.) But yeah... "A stinger" is what one stings with (or a specific medical condition, or - rarely - someone who stings), "a sting" is either the pain or the site of it...
I should perhaps also correct myself: I prefer the fully Estonian translations, but only if the Estonian translations are actually any good. Granted, the fully Estonian translations definitely also have the general tendency to be better - I think because it forces the translator to actually think on what makes sense and/or sounds good, as opposed to just putting down whatever word comes to mind first or just kind of "approximating," which can be either amusing or painful, but usually painful, especially combined with the cumbersome sentence structure that tends to result for not putting words in the order they are supposed to be in in the end-product language. Occasionally, bad translations are painful enough for me to just give up from the the constant desire to cringe and either find an English/Finnish version or abandon trying to read the thing altogether. As for more entertaining mistranslations go, I recall a rather curious article about the production of processors, with insisted that the deposits of a rare substance, called "siliitsium" are about to run out, and processors will thus raise in price, and we'd have to invent new alternatives to substitute for the rare "siliitsium"... (The Estonian word for silica is "räni". And no, it wasn't April fools.)
- The "carnivorous squirrel" being an important thing was actually a reference in one of our private messages, in relation to me learning words of foreign languages which are of dubious worth in real scenarios that don't involve teaching your friends and acquaintances silly things. - The squirrel that started the conversation was one of the usual red omnivorous ones found in most of Europe, seen while we were wandering around in Vienna with a couple of locals (if you haven't seen one there, you've not been there). One of the other Estonian people with us asked what squirrel is in German, and then commented that "squirrel" might be the weirdest-sounding German word they've heard yet. We also saw a lot of crows, in one park in particular, sitting a dozen to two on each tree (the trees were maybe five meters tall at most, so quite small), and occasionally dropping down to investigate when someone dropped something, only to return to position right after. I think I only heard cawing maybe twice while I was there? The rest of it was in full silence despite of there being literally hundreds of the birds there. Reminded of the Rilon-scene, somehow, and those were mostly the black "carrion" variety of crow, too. A few were saddlebacks, and a bit more than the latter were hybrids. Tried to take a picture, but my cell-phone camera isn't always reliable.
And we pretty much call chipmunks "striped squirrels" ... more specifically, the kind of stripe that goes the along the length of something, rather than transverse stripes. "Earth/ground squirrel" is a different creature, the same as in English. Ehh... They all are the same taxonomic family, though so are marmots and prairie dogs, which we do not call "squirrels".

Any comments about my thoughts on mind-affecting spells and self-knowledge and awareness? Since, yeah, as long as it's not specifically thought-control or the spell isn't sophisticated enough to separately null your knowledge of self ... I'd say any kind of generic-effect spell or abrupt illusion would actually be consciously rather jarring and immediately identifiable, especially when you're aware that someone was casting a mind-affecting spell.
Alright, and I'll write up something about the Illusionist (and a few other older things), then. There are a few things I said I would like to offer additional information in, actually, and at least one other thing that was left on OldGuild.

The Prophecy

@yoshua171: Sure, feel free to consult me when you're not certain whether something or another would work, be it magic or something else - I suppose I'm perhaps around a bit more consistently*, and also during your daytime. My word obviously doesn't have the same weight as Jack's when it comes to the specifics or the world of the Prophecy more narrowly, but I've been around for a long time and if he's ever actually written the information down where I could see it, I can most probably recall it. If it was literally over five years ago, it may be a bit outdated, and if I don't know enough to as much as infer anything, we'd be waiting for him anyway, but that's that... In a sense, I'm pretty much like a sapient browser cache.

*Somewhat ironically, I am even more omnipresent when I'm working, as this effectively prevents me from leaving all computers alone for extended periods of time or immersing myself in something enough to neglect to patrol the places I frequent as I otherwise am wont to do. Granted, I tend to at least check up on most places on my cellphone when I am away from laptop-friendly places, but unless it's something that requires my immediate attention or can be answered in a sentence or two (which, knowing my general verbosity in text, isn't all that common occurrence), I am not too likely to respond in text from a touch-input device. Pocket-screens are good for reading things without getting out of bed and quickly checking something on the go, but not literary works.
Speaking of which, I'll probably never fully understand the phenomenon that is the popularity of tablet computers (their general cheapness left aside). Can't fit one in your pocket, which negates half the portability of cellphones, and they're still touch-input devices with all the flaws that has. (As a sidenote, I kind of wish they hadn't gone from pressure-sensitive screens to touch-sensitive screens ... especially in cold weather, where you might want to wear gloves, or in cases when you hands aren't all that conductive in general.) Could attach a more reasonable input device peripherally, but then you're left with a screen without a stand and/or not enough hands to hold everything and control things at the same time (whereas I'm reasonally capable of holding a laptop on my right arm and typing with my left while standing, never mind using a laptop as the name designates).
On a more random note, I don't think we're going to have thought to text any time soon. And *not* because the technology won't be here (hey, we kind of can get vague images out of people who envision things hard enough already). More simply because human brains don't tend to work as such technology requires - conscious thoughts very rarely are one continuous, coherent stream of words. Brains get distracted, context-switch, get even more distracted, context-switch again, backtrack, think better of something that was already put down, context switch again... We'd probably have to raise a generation of people who exist in constant state of deep meditation while also handling all daily tasks of life before thought-to-text will be easier to the average person than just typing. That, or we'd minimally need a competent enough AI for it to be capable of figuring out what would or wouldn't make sense ... and one or the other of previous conditions filled, there is still the issue of literally reading minds being now possible. Just imagine the possible social ramifications of that...

Hmm... Reading through the OoC posts, it seems rather strange that the effect of such kind of mind-control spell would be hard to determine on oneself. If you already know there has been *some* kind of mind-affecting magic at play, then it should, conversely, be exceedingly easy as long - or about as easy as answering questions like "How do I feel/what do I perceive?" and "Do those things make sense?" I'd say the spell would minimally either have to be sophisticated enough to also cancel out the person's awareness and knowledge of self or, alternatively, it would have to be not a generic mind-affecting effect, but more specifically thought-control.
Speaking of mind-control effects in general, I perhaps should send a PM later to discuss why the ailment/blessing from the Illusionist-confrontation occasion...

Re: Words and folklore things
Yeah... Danish and English are probably much more similar than Estonian and English - immediate self-correction: there is nothing "probably" about it, as English and Danish are factually far more closely related than Estonian is to either, my own observations left aside -, and as such it may be a bit harder to tell what has been recently "borrowed" and what has been there for a long time (as I noted being rather obvious with "devil" having a proper Estonian word for it and "demon" being a very glaringly un-Estonian borrowed word). - I personally do not like lending words into Estonain from English in general, and actively avoid lendwords whenever possible... The words simply do not fit, and more often than not are fairly unpleasant to listen to ... kind of as if the person is actually using random English words in their speech, and doing so with an absolutely atrocious accent. It .. just doesn't sound good. At all.
I also assume at least part of why there aren't proper words for creatures like leprechauns is them not being an inherent part of the your culture, some variations on what a creature or another is was originally up to regional differences (also why I occasionally distinguish between Middle-, Southern-, Northern- et cetera Estonian folklore), or - perhaps as a derivative of the latter - the Danish "troll" was not so much English "troll" as it was more simply some variation of - or at least closer in meaning to - "monster". If you try to assign the English word monster to any specific kind of being then you run into approximately the same "issue". (For some reason, I tend to associate "trolls" with Norway first and foremost, though as far as I'm aware they're prevalent throughout Scandinavian folklore - minus Finnish, but they're not really Scandinavian in other ways but by placement ... they do have evil witches, though, much more so than Estonians did, and northern Finland is more the Samic culture.)
"Little devil" sounds almost adorable, somehow ... also somehow feels like you have the definitions of "devil" and "demon" in reverse, as much as I've always seen imps defined as "minor demonic creatures" or just "minor demons" and often used interchangeably in stories. It's also interesting that you'd mention the LoTR series, as some creature labels and even people's names (such as Bilbo being "Baggins" in one book and "Paunaste" in another) have gone back and forth quite a bit. I personally prefer the "properly" Estonian variant ... mostly because otherwise either the words look weird and randomly untranslated or worse, they just happen to be Estonian words, but not those Estonian words. Nothing detracts from the epicness of a tale like the main bad guys being a particularly angry set of toothpicks**...

**"Ork" is pretty much a sharpened stick. "Hambaork" is a toothpick. And "carnivorous squirrel" is "lihasööja orav". I knew there was something important I was forgetting...

Starless

@yoshua171: *waves back* I'm the omnipresence. Got to hold up my reputation.