Tortoise

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

<Snipped quote by Tortoise>

I appreciate that and I might be a little delayed in joining the discord at first but I'll get around to all of it when I post my characters to the character tab and get myself situated (up-to-date with reading all the IC posts).

@OddnessApproved

That's understandable, no rush.

We're almost done in our current, first Destination. Depending on how you feel after catching up to the IC, you might decide to wait until we advance to the next Destination to join-in. But that'll be your choice :)

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

@Tortoise I suppose that I will throw myself into this if you are still accepting that is, are you?

Edit: I'll place these here.

Birch "Cricket" Oakenstorm

Birch Bayberry “Cricket” Pluma Oakenstorm

Race, Age, Time in the Caravan:
_{The clan of the fungi! — Yes, I am a part of the mushroom clan… — Cricket, as she introduces herself, comes from a clan of fairies that dedicate their lives to healing the ecosystems of the earth. She is roughly 120, meaning she is practically a young adult in fairy terms. How long has she been a part of the caravan? Roughly 11,250 years — or — one human year.}

Appearance:
_{Pictures do not do everything! Cricket is roughly 5 and a half inches tall and weighs slightly over a half pound. You will never see her without her staff that has oyster mushrooms on it (non-toxic), and her outfit usually matches that type of mushroom.}

History:
_{Cricket grew up in a specific fairy clan that dealt with fungi and other vegetation of the woodlands. (More may be added in the future?)}

Personality:
_{Cricket could be considered “one of a kind” when it comes to her personality. Most think of fairies to be proper things, maybe? She is not proper… Somewhat loud when it comes to it. She is spunky, quick-witted, and constantly going off a whim. She tends to follow her heart, but she is always arguing with it, because of her brain. Some might consider her weird to a point. You can catch the tiny humanoid talking to herself upon decision-making and sometimes just for fun. A little strange – wouldn’t you say?
All in all, she is considered a tomboy.}

Motivation:
_{Cricket never felt like she completely fit into her clan, back home, so she decided to leave on a whim one day. She was looking for somewhere to fit in, at least a little better, so you could say that she allows her heart to pull her along with the wind. A reason she joined the caravan was out of being a misfit but desiring adventure, something new, and an experience.}

Skills, Strengths and Weaknesses, and Tools:
Cricket grew up in the forests and wildlife, so she tends to have a lot of use – ful or less — knowledge when it comes to flora, fauna, and specifically fungi.
Fairy Ring Creation
Healing — Would fall under the advanced level or beginner levels.

Aromatherapy: To heal using scents, fragrances, or perfumes.

Herbalism: To heal using medicinal plants, fungi, minerals, animal parts, etc., often through magic.

Nature Empowerment
Clairsentience: can sense the energy that radiates from the soul of a creature or living thing.
Transmorph: Can only turn into different types of fungi to hide.
Fairy Dust Manipulation
Nature Manipulation

Specifically, Fungus Manipulation

Vulnerabilities/weaknesses/etc…:
— Iron: harmful, being pierced with iron can be fatal. Iron clashing together, no matter if it is swords or bells, can cause this little fairy to become dizzy or nauseous.
— Silver (can burn her)
— If someone pours sugar or salt (or sometimes sand) in front of Cricket, she impulsively has to count each grain till she is done counting.
— Cream (aka fairy alcohol)
— Poppy seed extract: causes Cricket to faint or be very drowsy.

Optional: Extra Details

What They Most Want: Pretty rocks.

If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be: Chaotic good

Three Likes:
— Rocks and fungi
— Buttons
— Sugar
Three Dislikes:
— Iron: smells like rotten eggs
— Rue, St. John's wort, and yarrow (anti-fairy herbs)
— Lies
Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?: Heart 110%

Worst Fear: Iron

Favorite Color: Carrot

Most Like The Animal:
_{A dog, specifically a golden retriever}

Favorite Time of Day: Dawn and Dusk

How They Dress: Like a homeless person or hermit — give or take.

Favorite Season: Spring and Fall

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):
_{Gods? Deities? Spirits!! Pffttt! — who needs those? Those are real? I mean... they are kind of cool, I guess. Please don't smite me. I was just joking when I said you aren't needed.}

Virro

Virro

Race, Age, Time in the Caravan:
_{Virro’s homeland is known to be the Feywild, with extremely remote origins. He’s roughly 225 in age and has been with the caravan for about five decades.}

Appearance:
_{Virro stands an inch or two over seven feet and weighs somewhere around 270 pounds. He is a slender and lengthy individual with lean muscles. Even though he is tall and weighs a decent amount, he would be considered to have a petite skeletal frame for his species.}

History:
_{Like most of his species, he grew up in a democratic tribe. Their ways can be considered bizarre to others — humans — as common practice in his tribe was to exile ones who caused forest fires (even accidentally) or brought harm to any animals, especially of rarity. When Virro was a youngling, he experienced the wrath of forest fires from an uncareful member of the tribe — learning how to distance himself from other individuals at a young age.
Virro stayed in his community for roughly forty-five years before going off on his own. Deciding to take the path of a hermit and learn the ways of the druid. He went out into the forest to find his way and learn from the natural world. Loneliness became addicting and Virro lived this singular lifestyle for around one-hundred years before departing from the Feywilds. He made his way into the outer world, traveling the vast world around him and experiencing the outside world for thirty years before meeting the caravan. He has been traveling with the caravan since.}

Personality:
<sub>More often than not, Virro keeps himself in a middle-latitude zone. Constantly being indifferent but rational and reasonable about the decisions and responses he gives others or himself — these are the foundation for his personality.
Sometimes it is difficult for even the most strong-minded individual to keep a reasonable mindset and Virro is not an exception. He can be extremely passionate. Showing what he truly cares about. This can lead to him even becoming emotional and showing how sensitive he can be about certain topics.

Other than his indifferent ways and his sometimes passionate explosions, Virro tends to be a friendly individual. Trying his best to respect everyone, he has a harder time with humans. He sees them as destructive, ignorant, and arrogant. Even with humans, he tries to be polite — his common tongue seems to always stay in a polite and blunt sphere.</sub>

Motivation:


Skills, Strengths and Weaknesses, and Tools:
<sub>Virro knows the common language along with giant and elvish — knowing giant better than any language that he can speak. This might be because his tribe follows the multiple deities that created the species of giants and such.

Strengths:
— Powerful build: Virro might have a lean build, but he can carry, push, drag, and move a lot more than what he weighs.
— Transparency: Virro can make himself transparent. This helps him to be unseen in the forest and in times of having to be sneaky.
— Access to Nature Magic (Energy based):
→ Nature Manipulation
→ Nature Channeling
— Fauna and Flora handling, communication, and friendship: He can speak to the flora and fauna along with having a balanced relationship with most creatures in the forest. He has no language to understand his leafy or furry friends, but he is patient enough to listen to their body language and behavior to know what they need or want.
— Advanced and diverse knowledge of the natural world
— Proficiencies with a bow and arrow, knives, and daggers.
— Wild-based cooking (venison, wild root vegetables, etc…)
— Medical knowledge of wrapping, bandaging, splinting, stitches, and invasive-based procedures. All based on experiences from what he had to do on himself (no formal experience).

Vulnerabilities/weaknesses/etc…:
— Consumption: This could be considered a weakness when food is scarce. It takes at least twice as much food a day to keep Virro functioning. A common thing with his kind or species his size.
— Extremely honest to a fault. Anyone — even someone that has the smarts of a box of rocks — could catch Virro lying. For some reason, his kind becomes physically uncomfortable upon lying even by omission. A few tell-tales of him lying are fidgeting, pacing, no eye contact, and massaging his torso, arm, or where it hurts the most from lying.
— Decision-making when it comes to the forest (animals or plants especially of rarity) and anything else. He might choose a kelpie over you.
— The ashes of Ashwood can be used in many ways to default Virro into a bad situation (and others of his species). It can be used as a poison in food or drink, becoming fatal if consumed. If the ashes are poured in a thick line, Virro cannot cross it. Meaning one could trap themselves into a circle that Virro cannot break or cross to get to the other.
— Like much different fey, iron is known to be a weakness for certain species. Natural healing appears to not be suitable when recovering from the cut or pierced flesh by iron. This can become fatal and magical healing is recommended, infection has a higher chance of spreading and killing him without unnatural ways of recovery.

Tools and inventory:
— Two twin daggers
— A book mixed of experience: herbology, fauna, flora, recipes, songs, certain spells, and more
— Pan flute (knows how to play, has been playing since he was a kid)
— Bow and a handful of arrows</sub>

Optional: Extra Details

What They Most Want: Protection and safety for the fauna, flora, and all of the wild.

If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be: Neutral Good

Three Likes:
— Tea
— Soup
— Meditation. Alone time. Peacefulness. Quietness.
Three Dislikes:
— Individuals who lack empathy for the fauna, flora, or ones who need it.
— Negative energy
Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?: He is always debating with the two, but he tries to stay reasonable.

Worst Fear: Forest fires (PTSD from childhood trauma with a forest fire)

Favorite Color: Forest greens, browns, tans, and natural colors

Most Like The Animal:
_unknown

Favorite Time of Day: undecided

How They Dress: A traveler of the forest

Favorite Season: Any

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):
_{Virro follows under the goddess Iallanis, the goddess of peace and mercy. He knows his people’s origins to be derived from the goddess Othea having an affair with the god Ulutiu.}

Theme song
Battle theme music

@OddnessApproved

Wonderful, we're always accepting! And, as per my promise in the OP, any sheets that were greenlit in the original version are automatically accepted here as well. So your Oddness is Approved. You can drop them in the CHAR tab and start posting whenevers.

I also strongly recommend joining the Discord. All the others are on there, which means that 99% of the planning and discussion about the RP happens exclusively on the Discord Server. You're likely to be a little bit lost without it. discord.gg/5y9EkWyFCW

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Athulwin

Addressing: @Enigmatik and @Antediluvixen

Athulwin emerges out of his caravan, stepping out firmly into the outside world by his own will for the first time today, with his face set like fire. The Beyonder, he thinks, back straightening. I cannot let it harm the Caravan. He does not know exactly what form the thing that fell from the sky will take, but he knows that Gadri and Morvanne should not be facing it alone. Some creature has come from the void, for all he knows, some unknowable monstrosity, and the skills of a smith and an occultist are not enough. All the others are out fighting undead- Athulwin knows what duty must call him to do next. He has sent the message ahead of himself, the warning to stay away.

But now he will follow with it. And they will all face this thing together. He used to have to steel himself like this, before a hard Trial at Queensrock. The monastery he once belonged to was the strictest of monastic orders, more than either of the other sects of Frowen-worshippers who call the Old Marshes their home. In that entire land, they were the only religious body that regularly made the faithful go through "Trials." Tests of pain and bravery, is all they really were.

The worst one was when Athulwin was maybe ten winters of age, and a much older monk, some graybearded sage, jostled him awake in the middle of the night. He was holding a nasty whip in his hands. He said to the boy, who was already quivering in his bed, "Don't fall back asleep. I am going to whip you with this. I am not going to do it yet, but I'm going to eventually. You must not cry out when you see the whip coming. You must not fall back asleep waiting for it to come. If you do either of these things, you will stand naked in the winter air tomorrow morning where everyone will see you." And then the old graybeard stood over Athulwin for hours. Every now and then, to tease him, he would lift the whip up as if he were about to bring it down, and then would seem to change his mind. Then he'd do it again. Athulwin, holding his blankets in white-knuckle hands, never cried out even when he was most sure he was about to be struck. At last, without a word, the old monk turned and walked out of the room. Young Athulwin was left in peace the rest of that night. That was the Trial of Anticipation.

There were other Trials, that had other names, but they were all of the same kind of thing. Sometimes you had to walk over hot coals. Sometimes you had to wrap your arms around a pillar behind you, and let the other kids hit you in the stomach. The Uttering Monks, the younger Athulwin daily thought, confuse masochism for piety.

The older Athulwin understands better. There are two kinds of trials in life, he believes. There are the ones that come on like storms, strike you as hard as lightning, and in turn harden you. Those are the trials that, properly endured, make a man stronger. One day you will be able to walk into that storm and you will not flinch at all its flashing and rolling thunder. To use a common kind of phrase, you can learn to take a punch.

But then there's the other sort of trials, and it's the second kind that are the truly poisonous ones: those tests that do not happen all at once, but come in the form of a steady drip of pain that has the capacity to go on for months, or years, or for a lifetime. A recurring illness. The inescapable feeling of poverty. Long years of bodily abuse. It is those trials that soften you, drip by drip, until you are too worn down to fight any longer. They are the hell that buries you.

All of the trials of the Uttering Monks were of the first kind. They could conceive of nothing else. It was the second that Athulwin found on the road, and from the mouth of Alder.

Like a boy preparing to meet the whip, Athulwin readies his soul to encounter the Beyonder.

Malleck had asked earlier "Come on then Mr Athulwin, let’s go meet this God, hmm? He said it without the ending quotation marks, just like that. At the time Athulwin had politely pushed the suggestion away, citing the excuse that he'd be better use inside his Caravan, thinking on things and directing others via the Wind. That proved to be true only up until the moment that he realized what this thing that fell from the sky may actually be. A 'God' indeed. Now he goes to get Malleck, and off they rush together to the site of the Fallen Star.

--- ~--( )--~ ---

Some Time Later

The smoking crater is an easy mark to follow. The black tail trailing up into the sky is a sign that will probably be seen miles around. But Athulwin has to hold in a pained gasp once he finally gets close to it. The forest around where the star fell has been demolished. The trees around the crater have fallen down in a circle -Athulwin thinks they look like supplicants bowing down to the ground- and the earth itself is churned up like butter. There in the middle of it all, something shining and twisted that his eyes struggle to comprehend. This thing is an assault from the Void and a raping of nature. It's the fallen star.

And then he sees Gadri and Morvanne, standing in front of it stunned. Athulwin feels stunned too, at the site of this huge chunk of metal and abomination sticking out of Alwyne's side like a tic that's latched itself to a man's thigh. But that's not what they're looking at.

The angle is wrong. Whatever they're seeing, Athulwin's view of it is blocked by the star. As Athulwin creeps closer, as stealthy as he can manage to be while wearing his pair of walking boots, he sees that Morvanne has a look of horror marring her face. That makes him worry. Athulwin always thought she's the kind of woman he would find beautiful, but that stare has taken beauty right off the page. What is it that she's seeing? "Go, Malleck," he whispers behind him, "go around the other way. I'll make the confrontation. I have the elements with me."

He has brought his Moiling Chain along, too. It's a thick, iron chain, five feet long, heavy and enchanted. Like many of the tools of the Uttering Monks, it's attuned to the practice of Utterance. He speaks a few of the guttural barks that make up the language of Fire, and at their command the chain grows hot in his hand. Not good enough. He speaks more Fire. The chain gets redder, then redder, and finally magical flames begin to dance along it. He holds the flaming chain in his hands like a whip.

He emerges from behind the Fallen Star. Now he understands what has twisted up Morvanne's face so hideously. The thing is a cross between a fox and a woman, but not like the beastraces of Alwyne. It's features are incongruent: a pretty girl's face, a fox's ears, a girl's body, a fox's tails. And there's too many of them. The tails are too many.

Athulwin speaks.

"Get back," he says to the Morvanne and Gadri. In the direction of the Beyonder, he swings his flaming chain slowly in his hand, ignoring the memories it brings him of his own Trial of Anticipation. He's not trying to fight it, not yet. Just scare it away from the others. "You-" he says to it- "why are you here? For what purpose have you assaulted the world of Eld Frowen?" His every word brings Fire out from his mouth.

Tort Dumping Story Fragments

The Old Taker

First Funeral

The worst funerals are the ones where the casket is small. The mourners file in to a tiny, slightly poor brand of funeral home with that weight on their back: the knowledge that this funeral's happening far too soon, and most of them should never have lived to see it. It's a burial that should be occurring five or six or eight decades into the future. Whatever one believes, by all the laws of nature or of God, one thing that all people know is that you are meant to have a life before you die. This girl never got hers. She skipped straight to the end- and now a room full of people dressed in black are here to commemorate that. It almost feels wrong. Here we are, a bunch of men and women who lived our childhoods a long time ago and had the chance to grow up. Sorry that you won't get to.

The dearly beloved who are gathered here today might be sensing that irony, the way they sort of float around the room tragically and have short, painful conversations with one another that lead to nowhere. Nobody knows how to act. There's a couple of teenage relatives of the deceased who, not genuinely meaning any disrespect, are leaned against the lacquered wood of the walls. Maybe twenty feet of space from one wall to another in here. The air. It's thick. And there's something that none of the mourners have yet seen, standing behind the casket.

The one person who's seen the Thing behind the casket is her brother, who is terrified and trying desperately hard not to look at it again. He's only eight years old. That is, in fact, exactly how his mother is answering the question that all the relatives are asking: “Oh, how old has your Jamie gotten to be now?” They ask it because it's easier and more comfortable than talking about the girl in the box. Any other day, if they were in any building except for this building, and if they were doing anything other than what they're here doing, Jamie would've corrected his mother. “I'm not eight, I'm eight and a half!” He’d feel righteously indignant about it, too. That's vitally important to him. Those six months since he turned seven are nothing to the grown-ups, barely a blink of an eye, but they’re an eternity to him. For a child, lifetimes pass between birthdays.

That thought suddenly seems to matter a lot to him- birthdays. There's something about birthdays. He can’t quite figure it out. His mom pulls him by the shirt-sleeve when it’s time to sit down and- not wanting to be yelled at in front of all these people, because he knows his mother will absolutely do that- he does squeeze down into the little funeral house pew. There’s an ancient man in a suit standing in front of the sister’s body who looks ready to start talking. He was introduced, Jamie thinks, as Pastor Redmond. This is the first funeral that Jamie has ever attended, but he already instinctively has the feeling that the Pastor is "just doing his job," the way adults like to say it. He has never seen this man before in his sister's life.

Makes it seem weird that he'd be the one doing the speaking, doesn't it? But the boy is able to look up at him talking without having to focus too much on the thing that's behind him, the huge thing that's behind the casket. And that's a small mercy. Pastor Redmond has that caved-in look, the sunken-in kind of cheeks and eyes that you'll only see on the fantastically old or the incredibly ill. Mr. Redmond may just be both. He has to stand with the help of his podium- Jamie imagines him falling down and crumbling to dust on the floor without it. Arms and legs are just bones with a lifetime of skin sloughing off of them. The same as his face. When he speaks, it is watching a corpse speak. His casual scan over the audience passes over Jamie and their eyes lock, and when that happens this kid not even ten years old yet suddenly feels sick and pale and so, so old, too. And dead. Really, that's the main thing. The old man's eyes make him feel dead. As old as Redmond and as dead as his sister.

Jamie squirms uncomfortably, he looks away.

He thinks that might just be the oldest man that he's ever seen. Jamie didn't know it was even possible to be that old and still taking in breath. He decides that, actually, he doesn't wanna look at the pastor, either. He wastes away the rest of the eulogy focusing instead on the eldritch patterns to be found in the soft fabric seat of his pew. And occasionally- just so long as it doesn't mean lifting his head and having to look up at those two monsters again- he listens in.

Jamie feels like he'd do the eulogy pretty differently, if he could. The old Pastor talks about "this time of grief," the way in which many can feel shaken by events like this, the counseling services offered, but they all sounds like nothing-words. What should the eulogy have been about? Bugs, he thinks. Olivia, for some stupid reason, liked bugs. She liked them in the way that normal kids are supposed to like video games or ponies. This eulogy, Jamie thinks, should be about bugs- it's what his sister would want. Like the time that she dragged Jamie out by the arm (he was always too small to resist his sister, the poor boy) to look at a Lady Bug she'd caught roosing up in the lowest-hanging of the backyard leaves. "Girls shouldn't like bugs," Jamie informed his older sister, while she was prodding away at it with a twig 'cause she wanted to see what it looked like flying. "Bugs are a boy thing." He knew that he was right, "just like he knows the sky is blue and rain is wet," as his dad would say, but she didn't listen to him. Not then, not the other times.

He remembers another day. A Friday, it was Family Movie Night, as every Friday is in the esteemed Fitzgerald household. They all voted democratically on what to watch. Mom voted for Bridge to Terabithia. Jamie voted Monster House. Olivia voted to watch a documentary about bugs instead of what Jamie would've called a "real movie." Jamie remembers, he was really protesting that one. He thought this was ridiculous- he was loud about it. But Olivia was always their father's favorite, and in the end, he voted with her. They watched the science documentary. It felt unfair. He hated it then and he hates it now. But that's what Jamie would tell the eulogy about.

He catches the fat, plump tears running away down his cheeks before anyone else has the chance to see them. Pulling up a handful of his mom's nice expensive dress, he wipes it right across his face. At first his mother looks down with an expression of horror- but then she figures out why he's doing it. She looks back up to Pastor Redmond's preaching and says not a word.

Now he realizes why the thought of birthdays was important. It's because Olivia is having no more.

A couple of months away from her eleventh birthday. Olivia's out playing in the summer freedom, she sees something on the other side of the road. (Maybe it was a bug, maybe a school friend- nobody knows.) She goes to cross the street, and at the same time there's an alcoholic behind a steering wheel driving on it. It was so random. It'd be one thing if it was evil, if there was some cruel killer that had meant to take her life. But the killer here was just a stupid, stupid drunk, and Jamie saw the body before it was all cleaned up. He doesn't think he'll ever forget. No, that's not true. He knows he will never forget.

He's interrupted. Mom is tugging at his sleeve, again, always her preferred way of telling him to start moving. The sound of everyone getting up out of their pews at once makes Jamie get up, too, not even thinking about it really. He's not thinking much about what's going on at all anymore, all lost in those deep memories of Olivia and her killer, and that's how it gets him. As everyone stands for the end of Pastor Redmond's sermon, nearly time to start the sad manual labor of bearing out her body, Jamie's eyes drift up to where the casket is. His eyes drift up to the casket, and this time he's forgotten to avoid looking at what is behind it.

What does an eight year old call something that he knows nobody else can see, and that, to him, is the Worst Thing in the World? He calls it a monster. That's what the thing is to Jamie. He can't figure out what it looks like. Not from when he was only seeing it from the corners of his eye, and not now that he's staring it right down from the pew. It has arms, like a human, but human arms don't stretch from one wall to the other. It has a white and frog-like hand stretched all the way to the upper left corner of the funeral parlor, and the other stretched all the way up to the right corner. It's body isn't any bigger than a man's, it might even be smaller, but the mouth is huge. It's standing there as motionless as a paused video, with a wide, cartoonishly stretched-out open mouth that Jamie is terrified could fit his entire body inside. Its big enough that it seems like it could dive down and swallow up Olivia's casket in one gulp. Like the snake swallows the egg. It's naked.

None of the other mourners reacted to it when they came in. None of them ever will. And it doesn't even move. But Jamie knows- he knows- that it's there.

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Terilu

Oh, yes, yes, this is perfect. The others have taken that undead messenger's bait- Galaxor, then Ivraan, then that lass Ilyana, all charging away into the tomb. Now the Ascendent of the Third Caste will have his chance to show them all what he's worth. Reaching out, he snatches his friend Knossos by the arm, and from there he pulls him. "Come on, Illa Diul Qa*!" he shouts. "You know that these fools will surely need our magic." And, Eratie tugging the old human by the elbow, in they go both together.

The moment he steps into the cool darkness of the barrow, Terilu finds himself strangely anxious to show the rest of them the kind of contribution that he can make. The way he has this secret power, this high and esoteric skill that none of these people have ever mastered because they were not born in the right country for mastering it. He wants them to realize that- the great value Terilu is bringing the Wingless in using necromancy on their behalf. Here he walks amidst giants. All these brutish skinned races, they are terrifying huge in size and their swords are like claymores to him, and watching them fight is like watching mountains go to war. Especially this one called Galaxor. That thing is a force of nature in a fight.

There's a part of Terilu's mind, a little voice of anxiety deep in the back of his head, that keeps screaming "Run out of there, you'll get crushed, you'll get crushed!" Terilu's anxiety, as always, speaks in the voice of his Mother Haula, that most fearful of all old women. She was one of his family members who told him he'd be dead the moment he left Tureiamú. He tells her voice to shut up, and then releasing Knossos, he takes flight.

There'd be too little space to move around in a tomb, one would think. No trees to roost up in; no clouds for poor Terilu to soar up into and rest in their wet embrace. He'd guess there's ten or so feet until he'd just hit cold, stone roof. But for one as small as him, that's still blessed plenty of space to maneuver around in. He beats his wings with all his might three, four, five times and he has lifted himself off the ground, hovering in the form that the Eratie call Ara Eltie ul'Turra**, meaning "Imp-style flying." In the forest, he had soared as a bird does on the wind, his head and feet level with one another. If anyone had looked up, they'd have seen him moving as quick and straight and stiff as the hunter's arrow. Now he does the natural opposite. He hovers slowly with his feet dangling down below him, just the way a human being stands were it not for the fact that he is five feet up into the air. One of the skeletons, he fears, might still grab him by the ankle and yank him down ('Beat you to death!' cries the voice of Mother Haula in his mind,) but still he feels a thousand times safer up here.

This is how he follows behind the more adventurous adventurers. Galaxor heading up the front and the two maybe-elves charging in with bravery, Terilu floats behind. They may not even know that he's helping them, he realizes with a pinch of shame, though most certainly he is. Whenever one of them is about to approach to fight an undead, Terilu reaches out towards it with his necromantic powers and does all he can to fuddle it. He saps its dark strength. He pulls the Narcae that is within it into himself, making him strong and making the skeleton stumble around weakly. The party is slaying them with ease. He feels like crying out "You're welcome, everybody!" but resists that urge. They are, nonetheless, real fighters with or without him.

Ilyana is the first one to come to the passage leading down.

"Wait!" He calls out to her. "Don't descend alone, let me catch up!" Just for a moment he flies at true speeds to hurry up to her, and there at the mouth of the ramp leading down, he stops himself floating. He holds out a hand for the others to stop, too. Galaxor, Knossos, Ivraan. These skeleton-killing warriors. He doesn't know how they'll react, but it's come to be that time.

"Listen, Wingless," he says to them. "I am going to tell you the truth. I'm a necromancer. Yes, yes- a necromancer. I am a student of the dead. Have some of the undead we've faced today seemed slower than they should be to you? Weaker, easier prey? Of course they have. I'm sapping whatever strength I can from them, but..." He looked down the passageway. There was Something down there.

"I believe things will be harder down lower in this tomb. The people who buried their forsaken here put the grander corpses in the lower halls, not in the higher. Those below us will be better armed and more forceful. I do not know if we will survive if I cannot use my power openly. If you do not call me a devil for what magic I study, stand behind me, and I will raise up for us what help I can..."

His hands reach out towards the skeletons already slain. The ones that Ilyana and Ivraan took down especially- they're still in decent condition, unlike all the dead that Galaxor has turned into smashed porcelain pottery on the floor. All the Narcae, the necrotic energy, that he sapped from them while they were still his foes, now he pours back in. Raising an undead who's never been an undead before is always a complicated, longwinded ritual, involving lots of eldritch circles and darkly strange incantations. It's easier when they were walking about as skeletons just fifteen seconds ago. A long moment passes, a hollow and white wind seems to come to life and blow itself through the hall- and some of the undead that the party has already put down begin to twitch and stir. The first skeleton rises back up and takes his rusted sword back in hand. The second, then the third soon after- but these are not enemies any longer. They bow to Terilu with a little head tilt that is something of a nod, something of a salute; it was probably how their people showed allegiance in life.

Three skeletal warriors stand risen a second time from the grave.

"Do not harm them," Terilu tells the party. "These are on our side. These are mine." He relishes the word. "Let them be our honor guard down this hall. If something must die in this fight- it shall be the already dead rather than the living!"

And with that, he turns, and hovers away down the black hall, trying to look as if he doesn't really care if the others are coming. The skeletons hurry to the side of their winged master.

*"Old wiseman"

**Literally "As floats the devil"

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Athulwin

Addressing: @Enigmatik@Antediluvixen

At the place where Fumiko's spaceship assaulted the world of Alwyne, the world reacted. Just like a hurt, living thing that has found an arrow lodged in it's side. The earth shakes and caves in where her ship plummets into it from the sky. The sound of its landing is like an explosion, and ushering out from that spot there is a ferocious wind that rustles through all the trees of the Emerald Forest and brings havoc to the wood.

The rush of wind tears through thick underbrush that the Caravan could never have crossed. It creates its own path through the forest, as it rips apart the green. The trees themselves stand strong. They can not be felled by a gust of wind, not unless they take a strike from a tornado. But their little and dead branches spin off, and their leaves become kites. From the ground on up grass comes kicking and thrashing out into the air.

The wind runs on through the Emerald Green howling like a woman in childbirth. For most, this is just a sound: the rush of air hitting plants and making animals scream in confusion. There is a proud buck who struggles against it, believing (in its own, animal way) that it can beat back the air with its ten-point antlers, the way it beats away rival males. It comes the closest, of all the living creatures of the Emerald Forest, to hearing what the wind is trying to say. It spins around him for a second, but it is fruitless. It passes him by too, and comes to someone else.

Athulwin, Sayer of the Uttering Monks, was just inviting Malleck into his Caravan. This is an invitation made with just the smallest fleck of reluctance: Athulwin is not certain how he feels about Malleck. The dogman is an aggravating personality, in the precise way that actual dogs are aggravating. Which is to say, he's the kind of person who shows up unannounced and calls out your name from the door. He is that breed. A talker, an extrovert, a ray of bright light shining in your eye. But it does help that Athulwin is an admirer of hard-learned skills, things that someone can do that they've worked hard at mastering until it has become nearly a part of them, just as he finds it in his heart to appreciate Gru's cheesemaking even while he knows Gru to be repulsive.

He feels the same tug of admiration when he looks into Malleck's eyes. The Ainok surely will never know it, but Athulwin has often listened to his music when he plays for a crowd. The sweet notes of his voice or whatever instrument he was able to get ahold of float up into the air and are borne by the insane flourishes of Wind to Athulwin, who listens wrapped up in his Caravan. He knows music to be not just a pleasure, but a focuser for the mind. He'll let it play on while he chants the Breviary. The good Sayer does this as he does all things. Quietly, and without admitting it.

But no sooner have the words "Would you like to come in?" left his mouth do they become irrelevant. They become irrelevant because Athulwin is no longer standing in the door of his Caravan. He is kneeling on the ground, his knees in the dirt of the earth. The Wind has found him. It has grabbed him like a great hand and thrown him forward out of his home, down to the ground, where it can begin to scream at him.

The Wind pours out all that it has witnessed into his unwilling ears. That Something has fallen out of the sky, it says. It says that there's Something foreign burying itself into the soil. There is Something that has fallen from the sky and it is of shining and smooth and strong and large, and it is of burning with heat, the Wind says. And it brings with it the sound of an explosion, a great BOOM! that follows just behind itself. Athulwin clutches at his ears. For anyone else in the world, nearly, this commotion of air coming forth through the forest would have just been a sudden burst. It might have blown their hair and ruffled their clothes, but quickly moved on past them, as a rushing wind is meant to, and that is surely what it did for every other soul in the Caravan. This is the natural way. Not for Athulwin; he is attuned to Wind; it chooses to stay swirling about him in a circle and keeps on doubling-back to blow by his caravan again, in its own incomprehensible language saying more things to him every time.

A windstorm of maybe ten feet across, the world's tiniest natural disaster, is forming. With all of the air spirit's frantic energy and excitement- it's childlike excitement- flowing into him, Athulwin feels his heart rising up in panic. Wind talks at sixty-five miles an hour. But he is able, taking the deepest breaths he can and focusing his mind as much as he is able to focus his mind while he's being shouted at, to Utter something in the language of the Wind. He gets out just one word: Stop. This is the most dangerous and the most rarely used word in the language of Winds, because it is a synonym for death. As it leaves his lips, it is obeyed, and he has killed the Wind that was assaulting him. It stops blowing. Suddenly, very suddenly, there is a calm.

The Sayer has to spend a few moments with his hands in the soil to right himself. He stays motionless while letting in loud, deep breaths of the stilled air. Curse this Curse, he thinks. It has him so weak... he should not have been brought down like that. Wind is notoriously mercurial. Whatever it is that fell from the sky startled the nearby air enough to send it sprinting like that, and it wouldn't mind trampling Athulwin to the ground to tell its share of the story. The Sayer who dabbles in this tongue must be one who is always ready for unexpected happenings, important moments that come and then go without any warning at all. His monastery teachers would have reminded him. Athulwin swears at himself.

He explains what he can to Malleck. Tells him that the air which was going through the forest spoke to him. ("You know that it does that, of course, Master Freepaw. It was rather energetic this time. I am sorry if it frightened you.") Here is where he makes the mistake of trying, like a fool, to stand up. He is able to get his leg halfway up before he stumbles back down onto the ground again. That's not the Wind this time. It's not an excited spirit with the personality of a toddler who hasn't learned not to push yet; it is Athulwin's own body stopping him from standing himself up, being too weak and far too old for someone with only 37 winters on the clock. The damned Curse. The sinking, shameful feeling in his gut as he realizes that he's not going to be able to stand up by himself. It's not the first time. Every time it feels like a little death.

"Master Freepa- Malleck," he says, a flicker of flame forming in his throat at having to ask. "Could you help me up? I, well, that is- I need someone to prop up on, I think."

--- ~--( )--~ ---

Some Time Later

Although nobody knows it, at the very same moments that Gadri is sawing Fumiko free far away deeper in the forest, it comes to pass that Athulwin realizes what has happened. All the pieces come together in his mind at once, just like a puzzle. He nearly wishes it hadn't.

He was sitting with his hands folded over his thick and leatherbound copy of the Eld Breviary. He was in his favorite (and only) sitting spot in the caravan, a little bench-like table that strikes out from one wall opposite the door. He's covered the seats of it with blankets and pillows, but the top of it tends to stay strangely empty. There is a nearly finished cup of tea, and the Breviary, and that is all. Athulwin finds a little bit of empty space absolutely necessary for being able to think clearly. Clutter in your environment amounts to clutter in your thoughts. A million little objects screaming "I'm right over here! I'm taking up space right here!" It's an itching distraction that often makes his soul long for the austere, mostly-empty, half-abandoned halls of the Monastery (which was a structure meant to house twice as many monks as it did.)

And while he was at that table, thinking, he couldn't get one particular idea out of his head. It kept buzzing back around into his thoughts whenever he tried to dismiss it. Somehow, he just couldn't explain it, he felt that he should have seen this coming. Whatever that newborn Wind had been trying to tell him: that Something has come to the world which doesn't belong here, and that it fell from the sky. Those words were oddly familiar, but in the way that a bad dream is familiar. You don't really want to remember. You want to forget it. Still, there it is, tickling the back of your brain. It finally came to him as he drained the last swallow out of the tea.

The Stars, just before the Caravan came into the Emerald Forest, had given him one of their most Odd warnings. All of the Stars messages and warnings are cryptic by nature- but this one was its own unique genre of cryptic, a kind of strange that Athulwin hadn't heard before. It was under a clear dark sky that he had been speaking to them when these words came uninvited into his mind:

"Cursed One, Traveller:
Something falls from us. It is not of us.
A Note from Another Song. Alwyne does not know it.
How can a story be told with Foreign Words?
It will cut the sky's face."

It made no sense to him then. Now it does. Add it to what the wind said. Consider the orange bolt that everyone saw flying across the blue sky today, like a cut across a face. Remember the way Gadri and Morvanne ran off to find what they thought would be starmetal, that mysterious resource that can only come down from above. All the clues fit together with an almost audible click.

Something has landed on Alwyne. It comes from someplace else, far away above the sky. It isn't part of our little world at all.

Some of the Uttering Monks believed in such things. A younger Athulwin, a boy in the Monastery, thought they were insane. But there are poems in the oldest of the oldest of their scriptures that imply certain things live beyond the world of Alwyne, either far above it or far below it, where no man's eyes could catch them. The Beyonders. They existed outside of Eld Frowen's Great Story, and had no natural part in it. This is why they are dangerous. All the world of Alwyne, as the Uttering Monks describe it, is like a story being told by their god Eld Frowen. Everything that is, is something Eld Frowen once said.

Athulwin remembers some of the most sensitive monks prefering to comparing it to a song instead- but that doesn't change the meaning much. Then you would simply say that all things are notes in Frowen's song, working together to create a melody only He can hear. The birds, the sunrise, goblins, the dwarves, thieves, and everyone they take from, preachers and every soul they convert- all are simply a part of the Song of Frowen. His Great Story.

But Athulwin also recalls one night, him and a group of young faithful were going over those stranger scriptures that speak of things above the stars. One of them was a freckly, lanky lad with eyes that were uncomfortably glassy and fish-like- his name was Beornheard, and he was drunk. Slurring his words together, he still managed to swear up and down that he heard from an uncle in Yellmarsh, who heard from a friend, who knew a scholar, who said that the Beyonders were real. Everyone nodded politely at this and tried to move on. But the drunkard seemed to like the subject of Beyonders and wouldn't be taken off of it. He said that the scriptures really did imply ("Whether you believe me or not, Athulwin, this is what they say") that the Beyonders were natural anathema to Eld Frowen and everything else in the world of Alwyne. The scriptures called them Foreign Words. Things that shouldn't exist in the spoken Story of Frowen, and disrupted it even by being there. And they only ever come from the stars.

Athulwin suppresses a shutter. Something foreign, a thing not of the Great Story, has come to Alwyne today. A Foreign Word. A Beyonder. The stupid drunk was right.

He sends a message, carried by the wind, to Gadri and Morvanne. He prays it isn't too late. The words of the message are simple:

"Stay away from that thing."

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

Terilu

Terilu- Ascendent of the Third Caste and Called by the Reaching Hand, in Form of Baítudatu-Thumilie, of New Dawnlit- is really bothered right now. He's soaring up high in the sky, which usually lifts his spirits as much as it does his body, but the sun keeps getting in his eyes. He's nocturnal, as any rational being should be; he hates taking off during the day.

Especially this day, this summer day. The sun burns so brightly that Terilu is finding his way over the Emerald Forest half-blind. There's this vile human expression- "blind as a bat-" that is, like most human sayings, completely inaccurate. They should know better. Terilu's eyes are as sharp as theirs. All bat eyes are. Most of the time. When they are not being forced to climb up close to the sun at midday. Now.... well, right now, he really is as "blind as a bat," and blinder. The stupid expression has become true. Under the shadow of his wingspan, it makes him grin a little.

The light is so distracting. Too much for wide, black eyes. His breed is meant to glide gently under moonlight and cloud-cover, letting those special breezes that seem to exist only at night carry him up aloft over the world. Travel during daytime- it is barbaric. It's running a marathon blindfolded, barefoot, and with hot fires burning all around you. How do the savage races do it? Viewed from up and over the treetops, up here in the wilding air with the birds, shimmering light looks to be bouncing off of every blade of grass and every leaf. It has made the atmosphere green. (A very unnatural color, in Terilu's mind. The grass in his part of the world is gray.) Batting his wings three times more, they lift him up further over the world and they ache from the heat and stress. He imagines them to be melting like wax. But there, look- he can see his targets.

Even through the daylight blur, there's no mistaking the form of a Stoneclaw giant. Humans and elves already are giants, obviously, even the creatures they funnily call "dwarves" are giants in Terilu's mind, but then there's this one. The one that even the others know to be a lumbering behemoth. That's an easy target to spot. And, as if to wrap it all up in a little bow, the giant is even singing a song. Ha! Literally announcing his name and quest for every ear in the forest to hear, in musical form. You really could not miss him, or the sound of him rising up over the leaves. Terilu hears...

"With Galaxor's might, Nemeia's divine grace, and Ivraan's arcane wit,
To the tomb of undead, where they all just sit.
In the shadows, we'll bicker, and in chaos, we'll slay,
Galaxor, Nemeia, and Ivraan, are on their way.”

Wow, what a voice! Like a mountain took shape and learned language. Enjoyable. Skeletons would like this song, he thinks, it vibrates the bones pleasantly. So there is no pretense of difficulty as Terilu stalks the giant and his companions. They are slower by foot than he is by wing; no roots to trip you up or tree-trunks to stand in your way up in the sky, and that makes it a child's game to stay close to the wandering trio. The only worry: that they hear him rustling through the treetops when he lands behind them to rest in the branches, or when he leaps off again. Do they notice that pair of black eyes starring out from the green? Does a chill go down your spines, travelers?

It is not the first time Terilu has felt like a bird of prey. He has wanted to earn his keep in the Caravan, but those big, unreasonable human guards wouldn't allow him to raise up even so much as a skeleton to assist in the cooking of meals. What, he asked them, would it hurt us to have an extra set of hands at the galley? But most of the Wingless are like that. Close-minded. So he had to find a necromancy-free way to assist his new nest, and he found that in hunting. It's an Eratie tradition. Every night for a week, since they entered this strange wood, the lone bat has gone out soaring to capture fishes and little mammals he can bring back to the Caravan, for the others to eat. The poor animals can hardly see him coming from above the trees, and they cannot escape from the powerful flight of an Eratie in Form of Baítudatu-Thumilie. It is only with a strange sense of worry that, the last few nights, he has realized he truly enjoys the sensation of a squirrel finding itself trapped in his claws. It's intoxicating. Having that power over something's life. So similar to necromancy.

He's left these "donations" anonymously. Hunting's a very low-caste job, sadly- he'd be embarrassed for anyone to suspect that he was doing it. Only the head cooks of the Caravan know where the new supply of food is coming from. And Knossos.

Regardless. He is moving like a hunter now.

Following the group, he lands high in a bizarrely tall, gnarled-looking grandfather of a tree. It stands, he can see peering downwards from the branches, right at the yawning mouth of a tomb. He had heard of the barrows in this wood, but didn't believe he'd be lucky enough to come across one. The trio he's been following have slowed now. They approach the tomb, and even from here Terilu can feel the energy coming off of it. It radiates. To him, it is an inviting sensation, the promise of great gain. Every stone in that construct is soaked in the powers of undeath, and it blows outwards into the blighted land around itself, killing the grass and turning the trees to deadwood. Sights like that are a good sign to him, it means a place is rich for the kind of magic he practices- this tomb is a feast to Terilu. The others came here to destroy the undead, but he came to feed on it.

He scutters out to the furthest-reaching branch of the grandfather tree, keeping a tab on the the others from above. They're watching the entrance, not quite entering yet. Ilyana, some sea-traveler who might be a human or might be an elf- Terilu has trouble telling the difference, and she looks a little like both, just like that boy she's always looking out of the corner of her eyes- has joined them. Oh, he wants to join them too. His claws already loosen up out of the grooves they were digging into the bark, eager to release, jump down and announce his presence to this adventuring throng, as a nest-mate and an ally. But it's hard. He is hesitating, because they aren't Eratie. Necromancy isn't normal and natural to them. What'll they say when they see him trying to-

Another new voice interrupts his anxiety, saying "There's no telling what kind of undead lurk here, but the information Athulwin got noted that something talked to the other people who came by here. If there's any chance the same thing approached us, we could at least try to see if-"

Knossos! The cold, smart voice of Knossos! Good. Good. That's a blessing from Ad'itie herself, his appearing at this hour. This man is the one Wingless who would understand what necromancy is all about. The beauty of it, the artistry. A friend. He glows with dark magics himself, not unlike the stones and air of this wonderful place in front of the tomb.

Terilu sees no need to hide anymore. He can sense an undead approaching, and he knows the others must hear it. He leaps down from the tree, letting his wings catch air and glide him gently down to the dead grass. The soft 'thump' as he touches earth is an announcement of his arrival. He strides up to the group. Dreamwalker will understand why he wants to join them. Maybe he'll be an advocate, as he was when Terilu "accidently" bestowed the powers of undeath on that one wagon. Not everyone has forgotten about the Undead Wagon Incident. It still lurks in the bushes behind the Caravan sometimes, when it thinks nobody is watching. It's got wooden legs now. Who gave it wooden legs? What gave it legs? Doesn't matter. Terilu approaches the group, just as Nemeia the self-proclaimed cleric finishes giving some motivational speech he's sure isn't important and that Ilyana girl is asking some questions he doesn't care about.

"Hi," he says, interrupting them all. "Hope you don't mind another companion. I am Terilu, Ascendent of the Third Caste and Called by Reaching Hand, in Form of... you know what, it's not important. My full name is longer than the time you've all spent standing here. And that is, if you'll here me say it, way too long- look, don't you hear it?" He paused, and just on time, the creaking and cracking sound of the walking dead starts up again. "An undead approaches. I am going to help you. Don't argue, there's no more time for the rigors of debate. Only rigor mortis! Ha-ha."

He turns to the tomb, where something is slowly coming out of the arched entrance way. It's hard to see- but it looks skeletal to Terilu, something made up all of bones and wrapped in winding sheets. The sheets it was buried in, he's sure. It has at it's bony hip a scabbard, and from the scabbard it has drawn a sword that looks as ancient and menacing as it does. In its eye sockets, instead of eyes, two pale blue lights glow. It is dead, and yet alive. A thrill goes down Terilu's spine. What a wonderful thing.

It has stopped just at the mouth of its home, right under the shade of the stone archway. It does not dare to step out into the sunlight. And Terilu feels that with one long, bone hand, it is gesturing to them. Come closer, it seems to be saying in his mind. Let us parlay. He doesn't know if the others can hear it or not, but Terilu takes the liberty to answer. "Greetings!," he calls out to the skeleton. He speaks in the common tongue so that the others can hear what he's saying, but it is purely his magic that communicates his intent to the skeleton. "I am Terilu, Ascendent of... doesn't matter. We have come here to your home because-"

The skeleton speaks over him. It's voice is the rasping of bones on a gravestone, the dryness of the desert, and the coldness of a long-abandoned body. It is something felt more than heard. "Kú nwa pinychi psú kúúm ghu kú psú j’iiw," it rasps, "nyip kwii suptuuskuny snú!" Terilu blinks. It's not a language he knows, but somehow, perhaps through his necromantic connections, the meaning is instinctively obvious to him. He translates for the others:

"He says that we must leave the Forest. He says that it belongs to him and the other undead, and that- that they will keep bringing plague on us and our camp until we have left." The sickness. Is that what it is?

"I don't get the feeling he actually wants to fight us, but he really does think this forest is his." He expects the Forest does not agree, as willful as it's shown itself to be. Dipping a little into his memories of necromantic theory, he adds, "Some undead are like this. They don't altogether realize they're dead, or they don't care. They think they can keep ownership over the things they had when they were alive. Him and the others probably used to rule this forest ages ago. We're like invaders to them." He pauses, takes a breath, stretches out his wings.

"I vote we rush in and unmake them. If they think we're invaders, let us be invaders."

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

<Snipped quote by Tortoise>

SPEAKING OF THAT HERE SHE IS WOOOOOOOOOOOO SPACE. History and some other stuff is pretty truncated but like, I mean. I'll fill in more details on her tools, too, if Tort in his magnanimous beneficence lets me.

Still has no art so I'm gonna work on that NEXT and update the stupid picture thingy i made too. All that redacted text in there, y'all? It'll get uncensored as you get to know her and find out more about her and her history IC. Because reasons.

Anyway uhhhhh yea space fomsk

Hoshitsune Fumiko

Commander Hoshitsune Fumiko

Image Coming Eventually™

Race, Age, Time in the Caravan:
Kitsutamin, 194, <1 day

Kitsutamin:

A race of humanoid, and indeed human-derived, people from a planet far, far away. Best described as animistic spirits, or ‘Kaisa’ in their own language, controlling empty human bodies that shift and alter their physical makeup to match the spirit controlling them. Visually, they look almost like humans - but sport unnatural eye colors, foxlike feet, long claws, large canine teeth, large fox-like ears, and large fox tails. They reproduce normally, and reproduction with humans will produce a Kitsutamin offspring. There are two notable attributes of the people that set them apart from the norm. First is their ability to adapt to new environments over a period of some years, adapting resistance or immunity to any injurious traits of the environment. Second is their lifespans - utterly random, utterly unpredictable. Go to sleep every night, not knowing if this will be the last one. The connection of spirit and host body is a tenuous one that can break easily. Some among them have nine tails, a part of a long and arduous process towards some sort of immortality and gaining immense power along the way. Others, like Fumiko, born to these individuals, do not possess any remarkable powers - but are notably more stable in their spiritual connection to the body, granting them the opportunity to some day gain power like their parents. How humans evolved on another planet, however, is another matter entirely…

Appearance:
Fumiko has snowy white hair that reaches well past normal military regulation length down to her waist, with large fox ears and nine fluffy tails of an identical shade. She has two amber eyes - one framed by a thin amount of peculiar black material and a long broad scar that runs across it. How the eye appears to still be fully intact from such an injury is anyone’s guess. She stands at approximately a 171cm and sports a well-muscled physique born of intense physical training and the rigors of combat. She wears her pilot’s suit, and carries her weapons strapped to it, though will rapidly seek a cloak or some other means of obscuring its nature to onlookers.

History

History:

Part 1: Peace

Commander Hoshitsune Fumiko was born on 12/14/4032, in the city of Akharata, Koshin Prefecture, in the South Kamita Federal District of the Republic of Yatovina. The daughter of an experienced Kyukitsutamin mage who had devoted her life to the practice of art - specifically poetry, she was displayed a marked interest in the subject herself from a young age. Though raised communally, as is custom among the kitsutamin of Yatovina, her fascination with her mother’s work went well beyond what was normal. Many joked that she would follow in her footsteps, another poet bearing the family name on for the next thousand years, perhaps even more.

As she began her secondary education, however, she found an additional love, one that came to surpass that earlier childhood love. Science. She loved science in all its forms, seeing the ways the world around her fit together, learning the mechanisms and laws that governed the world around her. Her mother would take her to the cosmodrome for launches, and she would scream in excitement as she watched the rockets lift into space, silhouetted against the frozen sea beyond. This love never faded away, and in fact only grew stronger.

A change began as the child grew older, however. Her temperament soured. She could be found getting into brawls and arguments. The authorities became involved - the heavy hand of the law of the old Yatovinan regime not as brutish or as strict back in those days. But even so, she fell out of education, much to the dismay of her mother. The child grew more violent, more outspoken - until finally she took it too far. The world of organized crime had never been particularly huge in the republic. Even without the sun’s nurturing warmth, they had found a way to stay alive, supporting themselves in their cities through subterranean hydroponics systems and other, less pleasant sources of food and energy. But as the decades and then the centuries had worn on, this slowly began to fray. The increasing deprivation and hardship felt by some in the nation as others took more than their share wore on them, and the Yatovinan criminal underworld surged back to life, and Fumiko had gotten caught up with them.

When she was released from the penal system, she emerged a changed woman. She was fortunate, so many years ago. The rot had not seeped in where she lived yet, the system still worked as intended. And it was that working as intended that saved her. She had begun a correspondence with a researcher working at a nearby university who re-enkindled in her a love of learning and seeing the function of the world around her. Fumiko emerged determined, disciplined, and with a fresh start on life.

She had rediscovered her love of science, and enrolled in the university with the researcher with whom she had spoken. Certainly, the extra tails had probably helped - having a kyukitsutamin, even if just a born one, attending was always prestigious. But so too did the endorsement of the researcher. Magic was all well and good. But magic could not be understood in the way science could. When a dragon flew - in the unfrozen southern lands, of course, what gave it that ability despite the sheer impossibility of it from a physical perspective? Many had tried to determine what, or how, enabled this process - and all had come up empty. There was a reason research into physics and chemistry was still needed. A mage could, with decades of practice, certainly produce formidable results. Certainly her own mother, a kyukitsutamin of formidable power who had gone through the process of transformation, rather than being born into it, could produce magical effects the likes of which few could dream. But a mage couldn’t be mass produced, and not everyone could train to be a mage.

And so that was how young Hoshitsune Fumiko’s life progressed. She was a natural genius at the sciences, double-majoring in biology and in chemistry, voraciously devouring any information she could get her hands on. With those degrees under her belt, she moved further, into advanced studies, receiving a masters and then a PhD from a new university, and threw herself into the research with gusto. The decades passed in a blur as she devoted herself to her passion. Her old loves manifested, too. She wrote poetry of the wonder of the natural world that learning about the sciences had instilled in her. She fell in love, numerous times in fact, bringing four children into the world who she raised together with the rest of the community, as was custom. She and their fathers always moved on, eventually, but they remained a part of her. Her life was a happy one, working under researchers centuries her senior and learning everything she possibly could from them, and eventually becoming a minor figure in her own right. In her spare time she pursued the study of the magic of the world, too. Though she had devoted her life to science, she could not simply ignore the other side of the world, inscrutable as it was. She never became a true mage, but she did gain a good appreciation of the body of knowledge surrounding the phenomena regardless.

Despite this, the world around her was not so blissful.

Part 2: War

The Republic was in crisis. The earned authority it had been built on had been concentrated, abused, used to extort and squeeze the people of the republic dry when they already made do with so little in the ice and snow. The leaders spoke of how under their guidance they would find a way past the heliopause once more and reignite the artificial sun that had once burned bright in their sky. But in truth there was only hardship. Empty bellies. Tightening belts. And eventually it became too much, and the people of Yatovina rose in revolt. The revolt began in the east, in Kamita where she lived, and from its inception it had Fumiko’s unreserved support. She was a believer in tradition, in authority, in the functioning of systems and their mechanisms - for the good of the people. A fervent believer in the rhetoric of the revolution, or returning to the system laid out long ago. She would support the revolution from the backlines, pledging her knowledge of science to the cause.

And then her mother died. Fumiko had not even known she was in the army, let alone fighting. Volunteered to serve a noble cause and an ideal of a nation she remembered from long ago. Using her formidable mages’ skills as a self-created kyukitsutamin.

And she was dead. All those years. Fifteen hundred and thirty six years gone. Gone in an instant. It hadn’t been easy, she’d heard. Her mother had died a hero, her sacrifice saving an entire city. She wasn’t even her only child, far from it. Over fifty living children, many of them centuries older than Fumiko herself. Others dead even before that from the random nature of their lives, born before she had completed the process. All of those years on this world, pushing for its improvement, writing and singing of its beauty gone. Gone in a single act of heroism.

The next week, Fumiko had volunteered for the army. She couldn’t wait behind the lines, now, not anymore. Perhaps it wasn’t what her mother would have wanted - but she didn’t care. She was no formidable mage or experienced soldier, but she didn’t care. Even if simply an armed grunt, one of millions, she would fight, spirits as her witness.

However, she would not be just another footslogger. She was instead funneled into the armored forces, where her educational and professional background initially indicated she serve a backline support role. But that wouldn’t satisfy her - she would fight, one way or another, their arguments against it be damned. Eventually, she won out, and began training as a pilot for the MV-9 assault vehicle.

It all passed in a blur, for her, but what she knew now was that she was a pilot, trained and certified both to pilot the machines and to fight as elite augmented infantry should the situation call for it. And as she entered the war, she found she was an excellent pilot. The war came naturally to her. The fighting, the killing. It came disturbingly naturally. She had never thought herself a truly violent person - her youthful insubordinations had never truly harmed anyone. But now? Now she was violent. Now she had killed many people. Too many people. And yet she pressed on, determined to fight to the bitter end no matter the devastation to her mind, to bring about victory. Slowly the revolution linked up and pushed their way through the snow and ice, with the aid of an unlikely party of intrepid heroes.

But despite her fearsome skills, Fumiko’s time as a pilot with the ground forces was coming to a close. A new generation of brain-computer interfaces was being rolled out, and for whatever reason, they didn’t work with her. Why, how, they didn’t know. A buildup of glial tissue. The words were a blur to her. She had been unable to receive the full suite of augmented infantry implants, but had been given supplementary implants to make up some of the difference. Certainly, they were far less overt than others. But it was not enough, now. To her dismay, she was phased out of the ground forcesr ranks.

Part 3: and Peace…?

Transferred to space and got assigned to captain solo patrol missions in deep space, big downgrade in terms of prestige even if it was way safer and paid better
Transferred to the Aerospace Forces, Fumiko reluctantly began this new phase of her career. Flying two-person crew scouting corvettes around the system on routine, uneventful patrol. Three person, if one counted the ship’s spirit. Older vessels, still in service due to the demands of the war on the surface, and perfectly suited to a skilled BCI pilot with an ID-13 interface.

She adjusted to this as well, over time, as her people had done so since they had existed. The cramped walls of the corvette eventually came to feel like a second home. The ship’s spirit helped. A young one, relative to the venerable spirits they had aboard the real warships. She even found an experimental treatment that promised to aid her, perhaps let her rejoin the fight. A part of her jumped at the chance - she wanted to fight, to be a part of the victorious army that would bring about a better tomorrow. But another part of her balked at it, traumatic memories of war flashing across her mind. But still, she accepted it. The treatment showed promise, and she was due to be re-evaluated for compatibility with the new interface.

And then the world came apart around her.

Personality:
Fumiko’s personality is in many ways the direct product of her upbringing. She carries herself in a strict, disciplined manner, and seems always to be on the alert for some unseen threat that might be lurking just out of earshot, or just beyond her view. She is a harsh, severe, uncompromising individual who adheres rigidly to an internal code of law and morals that she views as representative of the nation to whom she owes allegiance. And yet she can also be mischievous, teasing, nurturing, and more. She is not an automaton of the state, but rather someone who believes wholeheartedly in the righteousness of the cause for which she fought and the laws and values of her nation. When not in conflict with that, or with her duty, she is as pleasant company as ever one might wish to find. Keen to crack a dirty joke or lend a shoulder to cry on, and just as keen to pass on what knowledge she herself has to others. She is inquisitive, thoughtful, obstinate, righteous, mischievous, indulgent, and many other words besides. _{(That is to say, I prefer to explore the character’s personality IC).}

Motivation:
Before she came to this world, Fumiko’s motivation was simple. Victory. Victory over the forces that threatened what she believed in with destruction. Victory in a brutal war that had raged on and off for over four decades. Victory, so that she could find peace, and return to doing what she loved. Now? She does not know, now. It could be said that her motivation is to find out what happened to her - and that is certainly true. Understanding the nature of… whatever strange occurrence it was that brought her to this place does motivate her. But is it the motivation that drives her? What would she do if she found out? There is no returning whence she came - perhaps in someone’s fantastical dreams or stories a ship might be able to simply lift itself off from the planet. But not here, not in this cold, hard reality.

Perhaps it is to find a way to live in this strange new land. To understand its laws and its people and find a place for herself in it. Or to understand other, far more baffling things - how are humans present on this world as on her own? Perhaps she will finally learn magic and try to adapt herself to it. Find a little corner somewhere and settle down. Build a tower and become an eccentric local. Would she start another family here? Certainly, she is liable to long outlive most anyone she would know. Would she want her children here to outlive everyone around them? Without the communal society of home, how would she raise them? Who would they become here?

Perhaps, then, Fumiko’s goal is yet to be decided. Perhaps her motivation is to find a motivation.

Skills, Strengths and Weaknesses, and Tools:
Skills:
Combat Training: Trained for a period of some years as both a pilot for the MV-9 AMAV and as an augmented infantry soldier, Fumiko is both highly proficient and highly experienced with all manner of weaponry and in both ranged and hand to hand combat.
Scientific Knowledge: Fumiko is no ordinary dabbler in science, she holds a PhD in organic chemistry and has over a century of experience working in the field - though almost all of it with reagents and materials far more advanced than would be found easily in her new environ. Nevertheless, her understanding of scientific principles, mathematics, and more is immensely formidable and will prove useful even in this new world.
Mechanical Knowledge: Not a particularly strong asset, but an asset nevertheless. Fumiko is, by virtue of her origin and training, a decent hand at understanding and repairing complex mechanical systems. Certainly above the average for this new world.
Basic medical training: As a soldier, Fumiko received basic training in medicine and field triage. She is no learned doctor back home - but she knows the aorta from the spleen and knows techniques that, absent some other means of healing, can prove life saving in an emergency.
Magical Learning: Though she possesses minimal actual skill in the use of magic, Fumiko herself does hail from a world where it is a commonplace phenomenon - her own people inherently magical. She understands the phenomena to some extent, and this is perhaps her greatest avenue of integrating herself into this new world. She can, if nothing else, always talk at length about the nature of undeath or of pyromancy with the avid practitioner, even if lacking deeper knowledge.

Strengths:
Combat Veteran: Fumiko is a combat veteran through and through. She has seen horrors the likes of which few can scarce image. She has killed more people than most will ever encounter in their lifetimes. Almost nothing scares or startles her, and she can be relied upon to stay cool and collected no matter the situation.
Disciplined: A product of the many trials her life has put her through, Fumiko is an immensely disciplined individual. If given an order for a plan or scheme to come to fruition she will follow it to the letter. She will not stray from it, will not allow personal whimsy to distract her from it, and will carry it out to the best of her ability.
Extremely Knowledgeable: Fumiko’s knowledge, scientific, medical, military, or otherwise, is without a doubt exceptional. While significantly less applicable here than back home, her expertise is undeniably a major asset.
Heightened Hearing and Smell: As a product of her nature as a Kitsutamin and in addition to all the other differences it conveys to her, Fumiko has excellent senses of smell and hearing, like that of a fox.

Weaknesses:
Stranger in a Strange Land: Fumiko is not from here. Fumiko is not from anywhere NEAR here. And it shows. She is completely out of her element, out of her depth, and out of her mind. Terrified at the alien world she has arrived at, and at what circumstances might have brought her here, she is adrift. She does not understand the native languages or customs, she cannot meaningfully interact, she is without the home and people she has known all her life, and she cannot begin to reason a way out of it. Whatever her formidable strengths and skills, they are fatally undercut by her being cast adrift from everything she ever knew.
Overconfident: As an extension of the former, Fumiko is accustomed to being an expert, a skilled professional, confident in her knowledge and grounding in her world. Here? She is nobody. She knows nothing. And she forgets this fact all too easily, speaking down where she ought not, acting as an authority in that which she is not anymore, and so on.
Alien: In her own life, her own world, Fumiko is one among millions. Unremarkable except for her extraordinary skills. Here? There are no others like her. She is unique, a literal alien. She will stick out in any crowd and cannot go unnoticed or unremarked. The strange additions to her body - black, reflective surfaces, an eye that glimmers too much to be wholly natural, and more - these only add to her alien nature.
Haunted: Not by ghosts - except perhaps figurative. Fumiko has seen and done horrible, terrible things. She sleeps poorly at night, kept awake by memories of war and suffering, of things she did. Illusions dance in the corner of her vision, pulling at her spirit and threatening to drown her in a yawning abyss. She can still see it. Still hear it. Still smell it.

Both:
Hardened: Fumiko is hardened by war. She is callous in the face of death and violence, desensitized and dulled to death’s crimson harvest. This can be both an asset and a liability. Where one might see a resolute defender, another sees a sociopathic monster that has no place in society.
Visibly Scarred: Similarly, Fumiko is marked by war in a physical, distinct way. The scar that runs across her eye is not her only scar, and her otherwise beautiful foxlike features are marred by the damage and marks of war. Some might be impressed by these, others intimidated, and others might shun her. Whatever this strange creature did to get scars like that can’t have been good, after all.
Cybernetic: Fumiko is not wholly organic. Though her body has not been replaced to the extent of the other pilots, her muscles have still been augmented, the eye she lost was replaced, her mind stores vast sums of scientific data - the bulk of which is now useless. Her heart, too, is synthetic, and she has no pulse, no beating of that life sustaining organ. This gives her many advantages, of course, but also disadvantages. She must eat. She must eat a lot, far more than one might ordinarily expect. Electric currents can prove incredibly disruptive to her, far moreso than normal, and can incapacitate her longer than a normal individual. Should something go wrong, she is the only person who can fix it.

Tools:
Revolver: An eight shot high powered 7mm revolver she carried as a personal sidearm. Will fill in more details on this later, reptilian overlord permitting.
Sword: A sword from her home country in the characteristic slightly curved, two handed pattern and partially made from advanced materials, but also bearing enchantments enhancing its hardness and toughness. Will fill in more details on this later, reptilian overlord permitting.
Flight suit: An advanced ground forces pilot’s suit filling numerous different functions and serving as light armor, and it also has a lot of pockets. Will fill in more details on this later, reptilian overlord permitting.
Cybernetics: Fumiko’s body has been enhanced with subtle cybernetic enhancements. Will fill in more details on this later, reptilian overlord permitting.

Tort plz lemme do some nerd shit here I’ll help u conlang an alphabet!

Non-Optional: Extra Details

The ruffling of a sheet of paper fills the air as the strangely clad woman sets herself down with a slight grunt, followed by the dim sound of a sword scabbard thumping against the floor. The cracking of someone’s mouth opening, then closing, then opening again. “And you are wanting to ask me questions why, again?”

Her words come slowly, and are stilted, thickly accented, as though only just recently learned and poorly practiced. Certainly, she is not from here. Not from *anywhere* near here. The strange black material in her face and adorning small parts of her body, the contraption strapped securely to a strange pouch on her thigh, the sword and scabbard made of materials wholly unrecognizeable. That enough was sufficient to mark her as an anomaly - but the two large, white, foxlike ears that protruded from the top of her head, and the nine large white fox tails that trailed behind her, unlike anything else seen before, only added further mystery to her origins. She looked almost human, were it not for those ears, those tails, the odd color of her eyes…

“I had questions for you, newcomer.” Comes another voice, and the sound of shuffling paper fills the room again. “You’re clearly not from here. If what I’ve heard is to be believed, not from this world. So what are you? Where are you from? Why are you here?”

The woman sighs, “Hoshitsune Fumiko, Commander, Yatovinan Aerospace Forces, serial number 5-81- [UNTRANSLATEABLE]. Look, I do not know, yes? I am just as confused as you. Can I go?”

“What do you most want, then?”

“To find out what [UNTRANSLATEABLE] happened to me. Failing that? I just want to find place here, getting home is not option.”

“Would you consider yourself more lawful or chaotic, and would you consider yourself more good or evil?”

The woman laughs, “What? [UNTRANSLATEABLE] is this question? I- fine. Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil? We need structure. We need order. I fight- fought, for order and peace. I have done bad things. Things I think at time were good? I still think are good? But I do not sleep well. Is it evil to kill a hundred innocent people to end a war sooner? If it saves a thousand, or ten thousand others, is it okay? You can decide.”

“Three likes?”
“I- okay. Learning new things, fresh baked bread, naps.”

“Three dislikes?”
“Stupid questions, quantitative analysis, selfish people, overcooked vege- that is four, my apologies.”

“Do you follow your heart or your mind?”
“My mind. Hundreds are dead because I follow my mind. Thousands w- this language is hard. Thousands are alive because I did not follow my heart. I follow my mind to understand universe, understand cause and effect, I let my heart decide less important things.”

“Worst fear?”
“Forgetting my children’s voices, forgetting sight of snow covered mountains in Kamita, forgetting smell of seared tonbama. Never seeing home again. Losing who I am. Forgetting.”

“Favorite color?”
“Emerald. Or red.”

“What animal are you most like?”
Fumiko simply grins, large shiny white canine teeth glinting in the light as her eyes glimmer with foxlike mischief. “Is it not obvious?” After a moment, she adds, “A raven.”

“Favorite time of day?”
“Midnight. Before I joined military, I liked to go to roof and look at stars and listen to sound of generator humming in bac- nevermind. Or afternoon. Is an excellent time for naps.”

“How do you dress?”
“You mean, when I am not in pilot suit? What I will wear here as time goes on? Probably something soft, with many pockets. Something soft and fluffy to go around my neck.” She rubs the lining of her suit, visibly made of an incredibly soft and comfortable material. “I will be sad when this is wo- you have mending magics yes? Perhaps I will not need to!”

“Favorite season?”
“Oh yes, seasons! We did not have these in my part of world back home. Just eternal nuclear winter. Sun is dead you see an- nevermind. Winter.”

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):
“That is question with very long, very complicated answer. Technically, I am spirit myself, yes? Possessing empty human body, altered,” she gestures to her ears, and to her tails, “by my presence in it. But I will save long answer for later. I do not worship any gods, here or back home. But I miss spirits of home, and spirit of my ship. He was kind.”

@Lady Lascivious

The reptilian overlord will permit it.

Approved. Drop in the char tab, whatevers.

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

@Enigmatik Your writing is fantastic. That pantheon is one of the best I've ever read; I'm jealous that you could create it.

Anyway, you're obviously approved, but I would check over the Oblitarchy hider again if I were you. Your diagram of the ten gods is a broken image.

Caravan: An Episodic Fantasy with Worldbuilding! [Always Accepting]

It also helps to remind others like myself when my character is interacting with that character so their details and perhaps their history helps me craft a better scene.

@Expendable

You are always free to take notes for your own use, of course.

<Snipped quote>

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

uwu

@Lady Lascivious

>Lady proceeds to put a space soldier with a PhD in chemistry into a fantasy RP