TheMaster99

The School in the Woods - Mystery/Fantasy Roleplay

Regular Appearance

This, with dark grey eyes.

Reaper Appearance

Note: Immediately before, and for a while after being in reaper form, his face appears pale – even translucent, depending on the lighting. Name: Kyle Messor Age: 16 Year: 3rd Year Normal or Supernatural: Goalkeeper by day, Grim Reaper by night. Personality: Quiet, and withdrawn. Kyle isn’t much for talking, although he does plenty of it at soccer practice, and during games. Many have grown to describe Kyle as weird, and creepy. Both of these adjectives are pretty accurate. Kyle, if he’s honest, is afraid that he’ll do something – what, he isn’t sure – wrong and reveal himself for who he really is… the Grim Reaper. Thus, he does his best to keep himself away from humanity, lest he messes up, which he considers to be inevitable. He’ll contribute to conversation when required, but has a tendency to do so to a minimal extent. Furthermore, he shows little compassion, excepting those who are unlucky enough (in his eyes) to form a bond with him. Given his line of work, this attribute is something of a necessity – one could drive themselves insane while collecting souls, if they were to view them as anything more than souls. Bio: Many cultures have portrayed Death as a sentient being. Typically, Death is an immortal, skeletal figure wearing a cloak and wielding a scythe, going around the world and collecting souls all day, every day, for eternity. But logistically, this is simply impossible, even for a supernatural being. Instead, every region on Earth has it’s own Reaper – and they aren’t skeletons, thank you very much. Reapers are chosen at random from the human populace, as needed. Although technically immortal (they age physically, to a point), curiously they never last. It is thought that they eventually go insane, and the Gift of the Reaper – although usually thought of as a curse, by those who wield it – withdraws itself from their body, moving on to the next and leaving it’s previous host in a state of total disaster. Of course, what is more important is the Reaper himself, not the ideology behind him. Kyle was born, like all other humans, exceedingly normal. Other than being from a wealthy family, there was absolutely nothing to discern him from any other young man in New England. He worked hard in school and got good grades, and joined the school soccer team, becoming their goalkeeper. Then one day, over the summer in middle school, something changed. His parents had no idea what had happened to their boy, but the young, social active extrovert they once knew became shy, withdrawn, mysterious. No matter how much they pleaded him to just tell them why he was acting so peculiarly, he refused to explain it. If anything, he went deeper and deeper into his shell with every “Are you okay?” and “Honey, what’s wrong?” eventually becoming the person that the student body of Northwood know today. The only exception to Kyle’s social collapse was soccer, which he still played wholeheartedly, and in fact found that he had become much better over that summer. By the end of the year, his parents had no other options. They sent him away to Northwood Academy, hoping that a change of scenery might just be what it takes to restore their beloved son. Three years later, although doing as well as ever academically and excelling in soccer, his condition has only worsened. Over the last summer vacation, the only thing his family was able to get out of his mouth was the same thing, over and over again: “that girl’s soul, it was quite… peculiar.” How you came to the school: Paid for by his wealthy family Preferred Dorm: Wells Hall

The Triwizard Champions

As the last of the Gryffindor students disembarked, the crowd of Beauxbatons girls gave one giant, unified curtsey. Beauxbatons students were, of course, well-known for their respect, politeness, and most importantly of all, their prolific curtseying. As Alice stood back up, she couldn’t help but wonder about that contraption the guests had arrived in. She had heard of automobiles, of course – Muggle ingenuity amazed her sometimes – but this thing was the size of several automobiles combined. What did they call it? A bus? Something like that. At that moment, the crowd started giggling. The bus had spit out all of their luggage, and started to sputter away. The Hogwarts headmaster began to chase it, although the aging man was no contest. “Ah, les etudiants magnificents du Hogwarts, toujours avec une grande entrée!¹” Alice laughed, earning her another roar of giggling from the crowd. If the bus’ actions were a sign of what was to come, then clearly this was going to be an entertaining year at Beauxbatons. Alice looked up, realizing then that the Durmstrang ship was docked, and its passengers beginning to disembark. “Mesdames!” she spoke sharply, immediately bringing the giggling crowd to attention. “Nous avons plus les invités.²” The group turned to the disembarking Durmstrang students, and gave another curtsey when they bowed. Durmstrang students were much more, well, respectful than their Hogwarts counterparts, which any good Beauxbatons lady could appreciate. “Très bon, plus respectueux que les etudiants d'Hogwarts.³” The Beauxbatons students nodded to each other, breaking into small conversations, before being silenced again by Alice. She was quickly showing that her classmates respected her. Or perhaps they were just drawn in by her Veela charm? Regardless, she stepped forward, addressing the foreigners. “Welcome to zee Beauxbâtons Academy uv Majic,” she greeted, with broken English and a heavy French accent. “Make yourzelvez at home.” She turned to the Hogwarts party. “Az for yew, perhahps yew could take zee Durmstrang ztudentz az an exhample uv proper behavior?” This remark earned her a smack from the Headmistress. “Desolé, Madame Belgard,⁴” she quickly apologized, before leading the girls in another curtsey. They turned, and walked back through the front entrance, leading their guests in.

1.“Oh, the magnificent students of Hogwarts, always with a grand entrance!” 2. “Ladies! We have more guests.” 3. "Very good, more respectful than the students of Hogwarts." 4. “Sorry, Madam Belgard.”

Mahz's Dev Journal

I have background in web development. My biggest problem is jumping into an already-huge project and my newness at Github and pull requests... I don't even know where to start or how to really help effectively. Plus, I don't really have a way to test the database stuff myself, so that makes it harder, too... But I'll probably dip my toe into the code and maybe eventually I'll feel comfortable enough to help with some of the bugs/features.

Alamantus

You'll have to install PostgreSQL during the setup for a local dev environment, and it has a gui tool that can be used to test queries/etc. During the setup of the site on your computer, a sample db is written, with some posts, users, etc.

Do we even have code-savvy community members who can help Mahz in this regard?

Hank

I'm not familiar with JavaScript specifically, but I'm capable of learning code quickly. If I could make time, I'd be willing to assist Mahz with the GuildCode if it would be of help. I'm more of a programmer than a web developer (which is why JS has escaped my view thus far), but I'd be more than willing to pick it up if it means an improvement, and a lighter load on Mahz.

LegendBegins

Yeah, I'm not a web developer either, but it really isn't bad. Other than the lack of helpful error messages/stack traces (at least from what I've seen), the current setup seems easy to work on.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Do we even have code-savvy community members who can help Mahz in this regard?

Hank

We do, Hank. We're not sure on names though. (we're hopeless with names)

Ellri

I would be one of them, although I have been wrestling with the code a lot so far and getting more bugs than anything, but I guess it is to be expected when a game dev suddenly starts doing web as well (not to mention that the guild is a fairly large site to serve as my first real web experience lol). Currently working on a user search page, I just need to track down one pesky bug first that is preventing the page from loading. EDIT: Also, multiple people have submitted bug fixes, but unfortunately they have done so anonymously so Mahz can't really credit them.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I was using Chrome on Windows 7 when I saw this error. When I switched to Firefox, this error was not there.

Dedonus

That explains why I can't see it, as I use Firefox.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Placing two spaces between sentences that run over into a second line causes the to sentences to overlap. Here is an example that shows this happening. "Mythology" and "The" are overlapping. I know that this was more of a "if Ares dies", but I don't think the potential of the Greek gods dying meshes well with Greek Mythology. The Greek gods are called the athanatoi (ἀθάνατοι, 'immortal, deathless') for a reason.

Dedonus

They don't overlap for me.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Latest Firefox on win 8.1, for me. It isn't really important, was just pointing it out.

Mahz's Dev Journal

- Can't reproduce the Preview mode messing with native undo. The BBCode editor buttons themselves mess with undo because they don't trigger "InsertText" events. So interleaving manual writing with BBCode buttons will hose the undo system.

Mahz

Just tried without any BBCode, still can't undo. (also, .gif is supported. Nice)

Mahz's Dev Journal

Mahz, may I ask why you decided to remove BBCode tabs? Was there some pesky bug that you didn't want to make the entire BBCode system wait for, or something? I was looking forward to using them, but if they were causing a problem somehow then that's fine. Good work, I'll try to track down my error (again) later today, once I have some spare time. EDIT: Also, when you highlight text, add a BBCode tag to it (was pleasantly surprised that it automatically wrapped the tags around the selection) and then Ctrl+Z, it highlights the entire post. Completely random and not really worth worrying about, but thought I might as well note it. EDIT 2: When you preview your post, you lose the ability to undo/redo - the editor seems to forget all previous actions. Again, not very important, but noteworthy.