Spoopy Scary

Mass Effect: Caelestis

<Snipped quote by Spoopy Scary>

This is going to be a lot more intense than the TES roleplays.

If you want to apply, make sure you can make that commitment, and understand that there will be no waiting around for you to catch up if you’re behind. If you’re behind, you’re out.

@Stormflyx

I’ll definitely keep you up to date on what’s going on, especially after the next couple days. The issue with the TES I think is that I was putting energy into something that wasn’t moving. After this string of essays I’ll let you know what my schedule looks like.

Mass Effect: Caelestis

We're hiding from me? Sounds just like grade school.

Mass Effect: Caelestis

As you know I am very busy, but given the character I have in mind -- and I suspect you know who it is -- it should be relatively easy for me to keep up with this one. Would love the opportunity to write with you again.

And I guess you too @The Ghost Note, :vomit_emoji:

The Elder Scrolls: Eye of the Hurricane

<Snipped quote by Hank>

Whatever I don’t remember a lot about that character

Also if you guys keep bullying me I WILL defend myself by any means necessary

@Leidenschaft

ok boner boy

The Elder Scrolls: Eye of the Hurricane

<Snipped quote by PapaOso>

I’m almost insulted you’d liken any of my work to that bastard Spoops.

@Leidenschaft

They're referring to your face-claim being the fan art of a D&D character from Critical Role, whose name is Caleb Widogast. Cheq urself

The Elder Scrolls: Eye of the Hurricane

Venwen

V E N W E N

---

_{"Like how neither men nor mer can seem to stomach the Old Ways, I can't seem to stomach the sight of them clutching their pearls."}

══════ C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T ══════ _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ ═══════ C H A R A C T E R S U M M A R Y ══════ Venwen _______________________________________________ 68 | ♀️ | Bosmer | Playlist _______________________________________________ Jaqspur, Green Pact Fanatic, Adventurer ▼ P H Y S I C A L T R A I T S ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ► Build - Lithe and lean. ► Skin Color - Pale bronze and freckled. ► Hair Color - A muddy red, like auburn. ► Eye Color - Green. ► Other - Small horn nubs are protruding from the top of her forehead, muddy warpaint swirling around her arms. ▼ D O S S I E R ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ► Birthplace - Malabal Tor ► Birthsign - The Steed ► Biggest Regret - Being forced to destroy her own tribe. Perhaps if she had seen the signs beforehand, she could've prevented her tribe's betrayal. ► Venwen's Goal - Venwen is still relatively young for a Bosmer and still has a life that she wants to live. That said, she greatly admires the Green Lady and Wilderqueen, and would perhaps like to be a personal bodyguard for either one of them. She's also collecting trophies from her kills to create a set of bone scale armor that she could either use for herself or give as a gift to the Green Lady. ▼ F A V O R E D A T T R I B U T E S ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ► Agility ► Speed ▼ S K I L L S ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ► Archery - Expert ► Acrobatics - Expert ► Athletics - Adept ► Stealth - Adept ► Light Armor - Adept ► Pickpocket - Apprentice ► One-Handed - Novice ▼ S P E L L S ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ► Racial: Forest Coupling ▼ E Q U I P M E N T ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ► Weapons - A highly decorated Bosmeri bow made of bone and horn, and the bowstring is sinew made of Khajiiti gut. Also a bone-carved shortsword. ► Armor - Stiffened leather strips pleated over one another and stitched over soft hide provides comfortable and lightweight protection for her torso. ► Containers - A quiver made from leather and carapace that carries a variety of arrows, and two small pouches made from hoarvor sacks. ► Food, Drink, Potions - A pouch of jerky and insects. ► Miscellaneous - Another pouch filled with knuckle bones and leaf-shaped bone shards cut from skulls.

══════ A P P E A R A N C E ══════ A delightful savagery envelops the bosmer that is obvious at first glance, reeking of danger (among other things) from the intense focus of her predatory eyes to the wild tousling of her muddy red hair. From point A to point B, her gaze follows you with a familiar smile as if you were prey. While most people have had the pleasure of knowing at least one bosmer, it becomes clear upon meeting Venwen that, from her disposition and striking features to the paler and subdued bronze of her speckled and dirty skin, she's from the deeper and darker thickets of Valenwood's heart and is one of wild elves you might've read about in books. Those who've read of the cheerful ferocity of the Green Pact bosmer can pick out those traits rather quickly in Venwen, who carries herself proudly and casually, while simultaneously stalking -- not walking -- in a perpetual fox-trot and reminding you with her smile that she is religiously carnivorous, as indicated by a showing of half of her teeth that have been filed down to points as sharp as her ears. However, it can be easy to underestimate Venwen due to her comparatively diminutive stature to other Bosmer when you're standing on the ground next to her. She stands at a meager 5'2" and weighs as little as eight stones. Her level of fitness is as to be expected of one who lives and dies by their ability to hunt and escape from being hunted. She is tough and sinewy, capable of bounding through the boughs with grace and athleticism with almost unnatural ease for her size, and doing so for days on end with tireless stamina. Even with a lack of toning, watch as she climbs a tree or draws her bowstring to witness the wiry muscles flexing beneath the skin of her arms and back, or as she maneuvers and tumbles through the air with her acrobatics. Short horn nubs have grown out the sides of her forehead, not like a whole rack of antlers as some bosmer are known to possess, but regardless does little to comfort strangers to the Bosmeri and their culture. Even her nails seem to grow with a black keratin. Her big elven eyes are as green as the Green she resided in. Her attire is notably comprised solely of animal-based material, from leather to bone and fur and wool. Stiffened leather is pleated over soft hide as armor, strictly over her forearms as bracer and on her torso (which goes over her normal wraparound top), leaving her arms bare for freedom of movement and comfort. She is far more comfortable this way, worrying only about protecting vital spots when she worries at all as her first line of defense is the distance she puts between herself and her enemies and her second being her acrobatic ability to deftly dodge and weave. Wearing only else but simple pants and leathers boots to protect her shins and knees, she owns too few possessions to properly accessorize beyond the green shawl gifted to her by family, lovingly stitched with the complex embroidery of floral iconography, which she wears wrapped around her neck like a scarf. The most she'll wear in addition to this could be one of countless patterns of war-paint she'll apply, though whether it is made of mud, blood, or some kind of insect's innards might vary. ═══════ P E R S O N A L I T Y ══════ An Imperial scholar by the name of Flaccus Terentius once described the Bosmer with "cheerful ferocity," and there is perhaps no more appropriate description of Venwen's carpe diem attitude. Ask our favorite bosmer what her greatest strengths are and she'd reply not with any of her skills, but her self-proclaimed optimism and confidence. Her personality bleeds into her appearance quite a bit considering how she carries herself, so her complex dichotomy of intensity and chipper can-do spirit can catch most people unfamiliar with her off guard. She asserts herself as a hunter and a predator with a huge grin on her face and relishes in the possibility of conflict like any good adrenaline junkie would, and witnessing such an event has been compared to a manic dancing amidst chaos. If you can't help but wonder if the madness of Sheogorath has taken hold, either rest assured or with great anxiety (according to your preference) that Venwen is entirely lucid in these cases. The differences in culture has resulted in many misunderstandings and miscommunications between Venwen and others. Most certainly Venwen, in fact almost specifically Venwen, for the culture inherited from her tribe differs even from greater Valenwood. She is a Green Pact hardliner who holds fast to antiquated traditions that go as far back as the Second Era, such as the consumption of fallen enemies and family members, Mourning Wars, and taking it upon herself the burden of punishing apostates. So while she was raised to live in harmony with nature, violence is as much a part of the natural order as harmony if not more. Naturally, the young tribal bosmer would be raised to become accustomed to violence and death, and suddenly what came across as sociopathic before begins to look more like a survival instinct. The belief of being returned to the Green to join their kin closes the distance in Venwen's relationship with death, which plays as much a part in nature as life. This cycle, as she sees it, brings her comfort and has made her close friends with death. Naturally, her lifestyle hasn't exactly left her as an educated individual. Though she's sharp witted and a fast learner, most of her knowledge comprises of most natural forces within the Valenwood. She knows how to survive, hunt, track, she knows every branch and rock and blade of grass in her home forest -- but as far as the sciences go, she's rather hopeless. Her understanding of the world hinges almost entirely around superstition and her religion, convinced of the animus in all things, and she's mostly ignorant of many complex advances outside of her home province. She isn't particularly worldly as she's only stepped foot outside a couple years ago and hasn't exactly made any extensive efforts to appreciate foreign cultures and tends to just compare them to her own. Her skills of critical analysis are lacking as she'd rather just go with flow of whatever she feels like doing at the time, as that is far simpler.

Despite the threatening state of her disposition, she is very much capable of love and friendship, and her blase' expectation of danger and death around every corner does little to discourage her from engaging with others and looking for companionship. She's already familiar with death and understands that it to be unavoidable, so it would do her little good as a romantic to fear death or allow it to impede her desire to live life. She'd rather seize the day, which likely has a negative impact on her impulse control as far as her sexuality or penchant for partying goes and has seen her accused of wanton promiscuity and hedonism by the mild-mannered people of the world. This is all to say that she'd rather make a new friend than a new enemy, even if her abrasive approach to interacting with other people tends to make enemies all the same. As far as she's concerned, it's not her fault if some people don't have a sense of humor and humor is an important part of her interactions with others. However, her interactions with other also tends to indicate a certain level of disrespect for their boundaries with the unfair expectation of respect for her own. One prime example of this could be her fondness for a Bosmeri tradition known as the Rite of Theft, which claims that anything she can steal from others and get away with rightfully belongs to her and that she can demand something of equal value in return. This usually doesn't work very well outside of her home province however.

A surefire way to get her fuse running, however, would be to call into question her loyalty to the Green, her integrity as a bosmer, and her devotion to her religion. Pride is certainly her greatest vice and would be the most likely culprit of her undoing. As far as she's concerned, she has bled and given up as much as anybody else for the Green Pact to which she's devoted, and she's faithfully adhered to every one of its tenets and mandates. She has come to know and love every inch of the Green as far as she's concerned, and would probably rather die than to live as anything other than a sap-blooded bosmer. She wouldn't go so far as to be violent in the face of insult or disagreement, but it should be known that she is fiercely protective of her homeland and any transgression against it ought to be responded to in kind. There's only been one philosophy that's never failed her in dissuading those who would bring harm to her territory: a bone broken for each twig snapped underfoot.

_{═══════ B A C K G R O U N D ══════}

Y'ffre, the Storyteller, is the Spirit of the Now, and from his Earth Bones came the bosmer. It was his sacrifice that brought order to the ever-changing Ooze, and in exchange for giving the bosmer stable forms, they were to protect the Green. This is the Treaty of Frond and Leaf, and to know the origin of this Green Pact is to know the tragedy of the Houndsmen.

Y'ffre, Z'en, and Baan Dar were the three of the Bosmeri pantheon the tribe worshiped most. Y'ffre was their patron deity, Z'en was the God of Toil, and Baan Dar was the trickster spirit of thieves, and as one of the remote tribes of Valenwood, their traditions remained insulated from the influences of the outside world and every bloody facet of the Green Pact was upheld. What made the Houndsmen unique among the tribes however was the addition of their worship of Hircine, Daedric Prince of the Hunt -- and Venwen was one of these wild elves. Their worship of Hircine went as far back as the Second Era, and even through the ups and downs of their tribe with their precarious involvement with Daedra worship, they managed to survive. Most other bosmer acknowledge Hircine if nothing else, for his spirit and influence could be felt in every hunt. While many do not actively seek out his favor, they seek not to upset him lest he decide to starve the bosmer. The Houndsmen Tribe were one of the exceptions who, before each hunt, sung the Invocation of Hircine to guide their arrows into the hearts of their quarries. Venwen was, and still remains, no exception.

She became proficient enough with the use of a bow as a young teen to join her tribe's hunting parties, and it was from this age that she not only tracked down and killed large game, but defended the forest edge from would-be invaders. It is said that to be acknowledged as an adequate ranger, wood elven children are allegedly expected to be able to travel through Valenwood while blindfolded. Venwen claims this to be true, even if for no other person than herself. She'll tell you many tall tales about Valenwood myths and folklore and oftentimes the stories keep on changing, but one she'll always swear by and keep consistent is her claim of practicing for many years to always know her way through Valenwood with her eyes closed. True or not, it is hard to deny her familiarity with the Green and her aptitude for traversing it. It is a little wonder why then she was acknowledged by her tribe as a jaqspur many years younger than the average archer. She learned to shoot like a jaqspur, firing from far distances with a single flowing motion from her quiver to releasing the bowstring. Eventually the need for a quiver became optional, as any good archer may only need to carry what they can hold in their hand.

Venwen's view on Hircine was like that of the Houndsmen Tribe of days old, many generations prior. It was that the Huntsman ought to be treated like any beast: respected from a distance. But over the many years of bounding through the grahtwood boughs, she didn't notice the gradual change in her tribe's culture on the ground, where they were slowly offering themselves into the beast's maw. Harmony with nature was no longer at the forefront of their minds, and all else including the Green Pact was becoming secondary to the hunt. History was repeating itself, and the Houndsmen Tribe were reaching another low point as they re-embraced their origins from the Second Era. It might've been spurred on by the development of the Aldmeri Dominion and the Valenwood purges throughout the Green, some of which Venwen had fought against, always ready and able to protect her culture. Thinking back on it now, she might not be able to bring herself to blame them, but they crossed the line when they threw themselves wholly and willingly to the Huntsman's hunger.

When they uttered their words of sacrilege, spoke of their sacred and God-given forms as the shackles of Y'ffre and compared themselves to caged beasts, their final and most blasphemous act of defiance was to desecrate their own bodies with foul and accursed were-touched transformations. Venwen was the sole member of the tribe insulated from the Daedra's influence by the distance she put between herself and home. One could say it was because she was so free-spirited that the trappings of a tribe could never tie her down long enough for their influences to take hold, but now she was presented with an ugly reality and an impossible decision: everyone she's ever been close to had broken the Green Pact, their most sacred oath, and were now apostates. She could turn her back on them and allow them to run rampant and unchecked through Valenwood, or deliver this news to Silvenar and put an end to this madness once and for all.

As Venwen now says, mostly as a deflection, that it wouldn't have made for nearly as exciting a story if she had chosen the former. She returned to Malabal Tor backed by a squad of Vinedusks to hunt down and kill the rest of her tribe. That she is still standing today speaks of her success, but it is not a story that she tells fondly or often. It was her first experience with death that had actually shaken her, and it was because with every werewolf that she dropped, she'd see them returning to normal -- a face that she recognized with a name that she knew, and she could watch the light leave their eyes. It was a pain made even worse with the knowledge that they were going in death where she could not and would not follow. As with any bosmer who broke the pact, they would return to the Ouze, separated from the Earth Bones and the rest of the bosmer for eternity. That was the price they chose to pay in exchange for power.

She had since received an invitation to join the Vinedusk Rangers for her skill, service, and sacrifice for Valenwood and the Green Pact, but after such a painful ordeal, she decided it might've been better for her to leave for a while and explore Tamriel outside of Valenwood. She did intend to return at some point, but only after her heart had healed from what her hands had committed. As hurt as she was, she also felt intense anger and rage, as well as betrayal. To think that her own tribe would go and do something so ridiculous and so stupid that would force her to take the blood-stained burden of responsibility for them was worse than anything she could think of. The thought that she could've been one of them, a traitor to the Green Pact, was beyond her imagination. When she left Valenwood through the northern treeline and took her first steps into Cyrodiil, they were her first steps into a brand new world. A world that'd send her to High Rock, through Skyrim, into Morrowind, and cutting back through Cyrodiil to reach Elsweyr, and along the way, in Cheydinhal, found a friend in a dark elf alchemist named Inanna. Only now after many years of travel, exploration, adventuring, and a recent prodding by her new friend has Venwen decided that she was ready to return home and show Inanna the beauty of Valenwood.

---

_{"The Green gives us life, and the Hunt takes it away."}

---

Previous user, back in town!

I've been meaning to branch out from the genre I've typecast myself into. Hope to see you in a future post-apoc roleplay!

Microfiction&Poetry Contest #1 - Voting and Feedback

I will abstain from voting, but I can definitely provide some feedback. I've taken classes in literary theory, creative writing, and had some training in different schools of criticism, so I hope the contestants find it useful.

Metamorphosis: My favorite wordplay is likening the dead mother's wings as colorful robes, which gives a humanizing aspect to nature. In a prompt that inherently invites ecocriticism, this does well to make us care about the subjects in the work, but it also brings humanity to the forefront of our minds which is in constant conflict with nature. That's a good dichotomy I think. The formatting of the poem adds a cute little visual to the work that, I think, would be most effective if the piece does not explicitly state that it was about a butterfly. Perhaps continue likening it to humanity as a parallel to nature, and the formatting clues you in to the actual nature of the work. That it starts with conception, followed by death, then birth, metamorphosis, and actualization makes it feel like a fully realized cycle of life. Where it falls flat, I think, might be in the final two stanzas. Perhaps it was to keep to the formatting, but keep in mind that structure and rhyme exists to serve the poem, not the poem existing to serve the structure or rhyme. The penultimate stanza is conceptually sound, but it doesn't have the same transitions as the preceding stanza and therefore comes across as abrupt. The final line of the last stanza possibly could've used better word choice as, reciting it aloud, sounds similarly abrupt. This is not to say that abruptness does not have its place in poetry, but having uniform throughout a poem is important to flow. Experiment with more metaphors, symbolism, and "a single unitary effect," which is when an entire poem serves to culminate in one particular feeling or emotion.

The Lepidopterist: There is a lot to love about what was done here, and I personally have a strange sort of fetish for surrealist art and literature and yours definitely begins venturing into that territory by the very end. There isn't a whole lot to decipher until the very end, and even then, it's little so it's difficult to do so -- but even so, sometimes art doesn't require a lot of unpacking, and many pieces of modernist art exist solely to make fun of "high culture." The microfiction feels more like an exercise in description, as the setting and character were beautifully landscaped, only for my expectation of it to be nothing more than that to be suddenly subverted. I can see my old classmates spend a few minutes of pondering what the significance of eating the butterfly is. Does he intend to be like them? Is he just weird? If he smiled at the end, that'd be an interesting parallel to the genus name being "difficult to swallow without smiling" - and speaking of, there's an interesting trend of butterflies being consumed. Between removing the predators of coyotes, birds, creatures biting their bitter wings, swallowing the name, and the character swallowing the butterfly by the very end. Does the character see itself as sparing the butterfly from a harsh fate, and as a kindred spirit, would he too rather be swallowed than live in nasty, brutish freedom? The story gives no answers, but that its able to raise so many questions is a good sign. My personal preference would ask for more weirdness like that sprinkled intermittently throughout, but this does provide a nice and unexpected punch at the end that makes it fine as it is. As much as I'd also like more as another person said, having endings like these allows the story to stick with the reader.

A bit sappy: There's a nice little bittersweetness to the poem that I'm sure many of us are all too familiar with, and I'm sure we've all wondered at some point in our lives what it would've been like to be an animal or part of nature as some kind of reprieve from the burden of sentience. As a disclaimer: I personally don't like monorhyme poems. If you ever played the same key on a piano or the same cord on a guitar repeatedly, it wouldn't sound like music. A rhyme is a tool to denote parallel within a work, and if every line ends with the same rhyme, each line better be tightly bound to one another. As soon as you begin to struggle, and the poem becomes a slave or tool for rhyme, it doesn't work. My recommendation, in order to make the best use of monorhyme, is to experiment with punctuation and enjambment. Enjambment is one of my favorite poetic tools, and in my opinion, poets never use it often enough. It allows you to change the flow of your poetry and still maintain the rhyme. If you have hard stops at the end of each line in a monorhyme, it can sound flat. Instances of enjambment in monorhyme can be found in "Monorhyme in the Shower" by Dick Davis, or the famous song Willy Wonka sings while their boat flies through the tunnel.

The Butterfly: Making an anagram with your poem is cute and clever, and like "A bit sappy," I'm sensing a little bit of envy toward the butterfly. I have a feeling that before the end of the day, I'm gonna pick up a connotation between butterflies and freedom. However, an anagram cannot be the only thing a poem has going for it. You don't necessarily need a rhyming scheme, but try experimenting with metaphors and specificity. Poems are usually short, right? Shorter than stories, at least. In order to make up for that, poems use metaphors to pack even more meaning into their size. Specificity and word choice is important because it can help you paint a more vivid picture. Instead of calling things "colorful" you can use certain colors, or highly specific colors or metaphors with a warm and pleasant connotation, like cherry wine, dry honey, or churning ocean foam. Using multiple colors in your poem implicitly describes the setting as colorful without telling us explicitly -- showing instead of telling.

Butterfly: It's a haiku and it is short, so too will have to be my feedback. Haikus suffer more than any other kind of poetry of being small and, for that reason, need to make every word count. Metaphor is essential to packing as much meaning as possible into 17 combined syllables and having it really punch the reader. Nice job in fitting calignious into a haiku, first of all, and I can see the contrast between the calignious sky and a colorful butterfly -- experiment with words other than colorful, as it lacks in specificity -- and how that might denote hope. A nearly endless, gloomy void? The butterfly is a splash of color I'd love to see in watercolor on a canvas. A good, solid metaphor can really bring this haiku home. "See!" might be a wasted syllable, not that its devoid of meaning, but it doesn't contribute to impact. I already spoke of "colorful." How does "a speck of hope dawns" sound?

полуденное солнце: I don't know any Russian, so I can only appreciate what you have half as well as it deserves, but I wanna start by saying I'm impressed that you managing to keep the syllable count the same in both Russian and English. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme scheme in English, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it does in Russian. I fear that there might be a lack of vocabulary equivalence, as the English translation doesn't seem very cohesive and I have trouble pinning down the relationship between lines. Midnight sun. Gold, glowing gentle blossom. A sleep fantasy. Are they dreaming? Does a sun in the night sky look like a glowing flower? Or is it talking about a sunflower under the night sky? Regardless, I'm not sure how the poem relates to the prompt unless one of the Russian words means butterfly.

I gave feedback to half of the works here, I'm stopping for now, and I'll come back later to give my feedback to the rest of the entries sans myself. Good work so far everyone! Also don't take anything said too personally, because I actually liked reading all of them. I just hope to help everyone how I can along the way. :insert your favorite emoji here:

The Elder Scrolls: Eye of the Hurricane

<Snipped quote by PapaOso>

Of course!

If you have a character idea, feel free to send me a message or we can chat here :) Would be happy to have you!

You just have to kill Spoopy for your place.

@Stormflyx

That's a funny way of spelling sweet release.

The Elder Scrolls: Eye of the Hurricane

She is lovely, @Lemons!