:;____A Penciled Reality__

Sunday, November 27, 2005

I WON!! I REACHED (and passed) 50 K! My novel's far from complete, but I REACHED 50K!! (throws a party)

There. My life is complete. Ish. Snrk. But, hey, I did it. I'm at 50 700 words and feel... complete. Ish. Of course, there's still a lot more plot to go, but I'm going to write it anyway... (sigh) But later. I must recover and sleep a lot. Sleep is good. I haven't gotten enough of it. I don't do well on 6 hours of sleep. I need 8 to be awake. Not that I don't work well asleep, at least on writing... heh...

I ♥ Jether. Snrk. (rolls eyes) I'm dead tired, really, that's all, and finally was informed on how to do the heart!!

i hit the post button at 11:32:00 PM

6 comments
Friday, November 25, 2005

This is really chapter five, but I jumped the chapters up so it's now chapter six, or something like that... meh. I just edited some junk, is all. So don't worry about the seeming gap, this should be next in order, cryonologically.

Notice the sort of pit-like enviorment? It was COMPLETELY unintentional, the reminicence. Which becomes more obvious as time carries on. But I'm amazed it's not completely parodied of TDE yet... heh... and yes, Wyn must be related to Danian. But Laytha won't notice that when she pops in later on.

For some weird reason, I find this chapter bitterly hilarious.

Oh, and I drew Amber. Once I color and finish inking her, I'll post her. I know she looks like Ariane in the picture. I WAS originally drawing Ariane and NOT Amber. Which is why it's fire-themy. It could easily pass as Ariane younger AND Amber. (shrugs)

***

Chapter Six: In Which The Narrator Couldn’t Think of an Appropriate Chapter Title

**

The East Farthings

**

By the time a day had passed, Essar was bored silly. Not that he had any great desire to go on some incredible quest to save Amber from the evil spell, or whatever it was, but he had still thought that perhaps it would’ve been more amusing than this. This was just purely boring. It was the empty trudge of footsteps pattering through an empty land. It was fighting to open a cookie jar and discovering that it was empty of everything but crumbs.

Sometimes there would be couple of chocolate chips left, but it was mostly just crumbs that held absolutely no purpose beyond cluttering up a potentially nice jar.

The rain had continually poured down on them, drenching them in a downpour of frustrating liquid that hindered them from reaching their goal. This was the first moment in Essar’s life that he regretted having long hair. Soaked, it dangled into his eyes and completely hindered his sight while at the same time making him appear like a drowned cat. To make things worse, Amber insisted on walking backwards the entire time.

No lifeforms had appeared beyond circling birds overhead in the pouring rain and several pestering insects which had left Amber wailing to high heaven about the evil menaces from the depths of the storm. Although the threatening growls and creaks in the distance of the pattering rush of a downpour had left them both on edge.

And the scenery had remained untouched, a continual rocky slumber. Every once in a while Essar had noticed a slightly crooked tree alongside a deep black rock with a red heart. It had seemed slightly suspicious, as they clearly were not going in circles. The land itself seemed nearly menacing, a deep world of whispering fear from the shadows.

They had stopped for the night by now, refuge taken underneath an overhanging cleft of gray rock, Essar’s attempt to light a fire ultimately failing in a puff of slightly damp smelling smoke. He tossed away the damp brush in disgust.

Amber had made her haven in the furthest and deepest corner of the crevice. It was certainly no cave that the two huddled in, wrapped up in their damp cloaks and slightly damp blankets from their packs. The worst thing it held was a few bugs, but Amber had murdered them with a glance. Well, perhaps more literally it had been with a large stick and a rock that the legions of dry bugs had met their deaths. Terrified of them clearly, it seemed that she had taken great joy in murdering the little things.

Essar, on the other hand, had the elusive feeling that there was something phantasmal about, the eerie whisper of a crawling sensation down his spine that none of this was what it seemed. It had started out peaceful, but now everything had this eldritch feel of magicality, of an invisible nature to what was occuring.

He didn’t believe in fate. He didn’t intend on starting now.

“I’m cold,” Amber whispered after killing the last of the bugs. The human girl had pulled herself into a huddle, arms wrapped around her knees. “I miss my mother.”

Essar glanced over at her briefly, wondering if she was trying for a pity case. “What about your father?” he asked, figuring the slightly sarcastic shot back was safe enough ground.

Amber closed her eyes. “I never really knew him.”

“He’s dead?”

“Oh, no. I just don't know him.”

Essar found this a rather strange statement that made very little sense to the way his mind worked. “Your parents are separated?”

Amber shook her head, and he merely grew all the further confused. “We’ll be there by tommorow,” he offered to change the topic when she refused to speak, and the silence had grown awkward enough to be spread upon a cake and eaten for tea.

“I know.” She closed her eyes, and leaned back against the cliff wall, a smattering of the rainy mist having touched her face with a light misty gleam. The situation was far beyond either of their comprehension, as little as they knew of it now. Essar couldn't bring himself to sleep, his feet crossed in tired slumber. However, as tired as his feet were, his mind refused to come to rest.

He wanted to know what eluded him. He wanted to know why there was a tingling feeling in the air whenever he reached out to Amber. He wanted to know what had happened to her when she had fallen into that so-called magical fountain.

It had done something to her, but she refused to speak upon it.

He closed his eyes, and tried to fall into uneasy dreams, and into a dull demeanor that could drop him into a dreamy reverie of sleep and things beyond comprehension.

Essar wasn’t allowed very long to sleep. He was awaken to a pair of amber eyes staring at him with a brilliant and insane gleam. Underneath the eyes was a nose, a face, a slight beard, a mouth, and a face. Not to mention the remainder of the person with the eyes, of course. “Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-d morning!”

“It’s not morning. Go away,” Essar grumbled, grabbing for his pillow (which wasn’t there), and pulling it over his head. He realized a second later that his pillow was not that, and that there was something over his head that was not a pillow. He felt it tentatively, went immediately red, and moved Amber back to where she had been sleeping like a limp rag.

She collapsed in a heap, not even a slight twitch from being dragged over to use as a pillow.

“You have to get up!” the cheerful amber eyed character chirped, waving a... a... Essar narrowed his eyes. He didn’t know what it was, but it looked dangerous. “It be breakfast time, yes!”

The halfling discovered a pizza box shoved under his nose.

“Pizza’s not breakfast!”

“It’s breakfast no-o-o-o-o-o-w!” the amber eyed character crowed, suddenly vanishing in a puff of purple and orange smoke that smelt suspiciously like powdered grape juice.

Amber sat up. “Why do I smell pizza?” she asked narrowly, glancing over at Essar, holding a pizza box with the lable Runeite Pizza Parlor in swirling letters. He made an attempt to hide it behind his back, which was rather purposeless, being as the box was wider than he was. “You ordered pizza?!”

“No!” he protested. “The guy just showed up. I think... er... that bird up there did. Yeah.”

She moved over to glance at it. “Sans-Serif- Font- Size- 60- Runite- Pizza- Parlor®- Subscript- CNI®- Font- Size- 20- Delivery- in- thirty- minutes- guaranteed- or- may- all- the- birds- of- the- foulest- nations- take- my- liver- and- feed- it- to- the- sharks- of- the- furthest- oceans- of- the- Inner- Realms- and- your- money- back- as- an- added- bonus- fries- not- included- toys- each- sold- separately.” Her expression could only have been described as a lower case o, an underscore, and an uppercase O. “Sounds vicious. Do we want to eat it?”

“Where’s the toy?” Essar muttered, looking about for the baggie with the toy, and wondering how she possibly pronounced the ®.

“It might have brains on it,” Amber mused.

Essar turned his head upside down in order to look underneath the box without possibly hurting the pizza.

Amber tilted her head, pursing her lips in a contemplative expression. “But then, it could also have spider guts, orange bellied lizards, the deadly poisonous blowfish of the western seas, and improper grammar on it.”

“He stole the toy!” Essar exclaimed in horror, his eyes widening. “How could he!?”

“But then,” Amber mused, “deadly poisonous fish might not taste half bad. No one really knows, because no one’s ever wasted their dying breath to expand upon the idea of what the deadly poisonous fish tasted like. It could also taste rather horrible...”

Essar opened the pizza box. His widened eyes paused, confused for a moment before one of them twitched slightly, lowering. The other one took a bit longer to catch up before it lowered likewise, giving him a narrowed expression. He handed the box over to her wordlessly.

In the little pink circles of various who-knows-what meat, filled with unknown parts of pigs, cows, and possibly poisonous fish from the western seas that no one knew what flavor they were was spelt out a symbol. It looked remarkably like a semicolon with a capital P beside it.

“I was right!” Amber exclaimed. “It does have improper grammar on it! Hah!”

“Er...”

“Well, that certainly doesn’t look proper to me.” She took a slice, removing the dot from the semicolon, and began munching on it. The pizza was warm and perfectly flavored.

“You know, that looked remarkably like a little person sticking out their tongue tilted on its side,” Essar remarked, taking another slice of the pizza before she could consider eating it all. He didn’t know how or why it had gotten there, but he didn’t care. It was nice warm pizza, and he hadn’t had to pay for it. He was going to eat it.

Amber swallowed her mouthful. “Right.” She gave him an odd look before taking another bite. Essar sighed. He didn’t expect her to see the logic of the little face sticking its tongue out in the midst of cheese and mushroom coating the pizza in pure stretchy bliss. He thought to himself that he was greatly indebited to the person who had thought to introduce the idea of circles of some sort of dough with tomato sauce, various meat chunks, cheese, and various vegetables to Endyr. As well as the person who had introduced Hawkey. It was a great game when it wasn’t raining. Running around batting a little black circle around on ice or slippery ground with a slightly bent stick into a net. So many girls thought it was pointless, but he thought it was great fun.

Both of the inventors, he remembered, had hailed from some place called Cahnadah. On Terra, they had said.

He reached for another piece of pizza at the exact same moment as Amber, and their hands connected. She froze. It was like an electric shock passed between the two of them. Their eyes connected, time seemed to freeze...

He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

Then Essar realized an electric shock had really passed between them. He picked the toy out of the warm and gooey cheese. “I guess they didn’t steal it,” he mused, picking up the little electronic toy guilty of the static shock. Amber took the moment to grab the slice of pizza and munch thoughtfully on it.

Essar took the moment to sulk. That piece had possessed the most pepperoni pieces, and he had liked pepperoni pieces. However, he had no great desire for ABC unknown random meat, and instead tinkered with the unknown toy, until he got shocked again. This led to the decision that eating seemed like a better idea, and the ultimate consumption of an unfortunate slice of pizza, leading to digestion and further processes which will not be described here in text, as you may be considering eating sooner or later.

Yes, Endyr had electricity of a sort. Get over it.

***

Wyn wandered off, snickering slightly to himself. He had just known that it would work to get them pizza without having to waste a single step, though he was walking at the moment, and therefore wasting single steps. More than that, actually, considering that he was taking about three to fifteen steps for every sentence spoken herein...

Oh, never mind.

He had just known his scroll of delivery would work once he had worked out the glitches in making it pass through reality and the dreamscape. Well, that, and the little incident with it arriving before the person had ordered i...

He paused, and for a moment considered that it certainly hadn’t seemed as if Essar had wanted the pizza...

Now, wasn't that interesting, he thought upon observing a rather purple looking flower with an orange butterfly perched on top of it. It looked remarkably shiny as well. Quite shiny. He liked it. It was pretty...

Lost to a tangent, he decided to pick flowers for his mother.

i hit the post button at 1:50:00 AM

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Wednesday, November 23, 2005

The Rest of Chapter Five

**

Naraqe had nearly reached the house numbered 1138 Westmark Avenue when a particularly cute looking kitten with orange and black markings bounced past her, a gray ball of wool in its teeth. Aw. How adorable, she thought, watching as the innocent kitten bounded past her.

Five and three seventeenths of a second later a short woman dressed in pink with bunny slippers and wearing oven mitts crashed into her. The two went sprawling into the dust, a cloud of gray and brown swirling up into the air as they both flew backwards in a flurry of speedlines. Naraqe jumped to her feet, and offered the spawled short woman a hand.

“That cat...” The shorter woman coughed, and pulled herself upright. “Has my Wool of Doom!”

“Your what?”

“Wool of Doom!” the woman exclaimed, pointing wildly in the direction of the kitten.

Some part of Naraqe’s mind decided that she thought she liked this woman. “Oh. Well, in that case...” The elf queen grabbed the woman’s arm, and dragged her off in the direction of the thieving cat. Togther they chased after it through the streets of Serenor, attempting to recover the Ultimate Superweapon.

Chickens went flying, merchants found themselves pushed aside, and dust went clouding up into the air in large murky quantities as they dashed after the adorable kitten in possession of the Wool of Doom. For some odd reason the fact that the ball of wool had been dubbed the Wool of Doom didn’t really sink into Naraqe’s mind. The fact that the woman had smelt like chocolate chip cookies had, however, and she hoped that if they made it to the cat, she would be able to apprehend a few of the cookies in reward.

No matter that she had just eaten a chocolate tea cake. The elf wanted cookies. She liked cookies every bit as much as she liked pickles, cake, and apples (though not all mixed together).

The other woman, on the other hand, seemed very set on catching the cat. But Naraqe thought she seemed nice.

They barreled through a stall full of various rugs and unbreakable ornaments in attempt to locate the cat, sending pet rocks flying into the street. One of them went flying and hit a garden gnome in the forehead, who carried on to start a protest on the mistreatment of smaller races, leading on a campaign to stop the racism directed towards species under four feet tall. This led several human childern to join in, declaring that they were protected by the new demands as long as they remained under four feet tall, and this in turn lead to tortured teenagers cutting their legs off in order to attempt to join in the new society for the Vertically Challenged. Greatly inspired by the testimonies of various short people, a bard wrote a deeply moving poem in favor of love for all races, and a listener found himself throwing his arms out dramatically. A vase was knocked from a window when he did this, and accidently hit an elf on the head. This elf was the leader of a crime ring, and when the vase knocked him out, the ring was ended.

None of which had any relevance to the present plot, of course.

Finally running into a blank wall, the two looked around wildly for the cat.

Naraqe blinked. The cat had vanished.

The other woman blinked as well. It wasn’t as if blinking was an abnormal thing to do. It removed dust particles from ones eye that could otherwise bring blindness to their remarkably useful retinal tools. Or at least cause ones eyes to grow strained and liquid to pool up in their corners causing one to look as if they are remarkably distressed. Of course, by this time, one is quite likely to be very distressed from not blinking, because all sorts of atoms would be brushing against the surface of your sclera and oculus, and who knows what could be in those. This does cause remarkable distress after about twenty seconds or more, unless of course you are fond of the feeling of your eyes drying up and shriveling into useless circular shapes of muscle.

So, in that context, it was not an abnormal thing for either of them to blink at that time.

The shorter woman threw her hands out dramatically, bringing about the ultimate demise of several unfortunate atoms. “Why, oh why does fate hate me?” she declared.

“Perhaps we could lure the cat with some of those cookies you obviously baked?” Naraqe asked hopefully.

“Perhaps that would work...” The shorter woman considered it with a contemplative expression. “How did you know I made cookies?”

“You smell like them, and you’re wearing oven mitts.” And pink bunny slippers, Naraqe noted with an amused expression.

“You could smell that I made cookies in Serenor?”

“Yes...”

The other woman looked rather impressed. Considering that most of the city smelt like a brilliant mass of various scents from horse droppings to chocolate cake to the mixture of a million various being’s sweat mingled into the air, it was an impressive feat. To think about all the millions of things you were breathing into your nasal passages by the mere act of breathing in Serenor, and several cities like it made one think twice about breathing, in truth. Because anyone who had studied anything about the human body (and most other races) knew that smelling involved several particles of the unpleasant smell working their way up your nose and lodging themselves in your head.

Although this did explain why a lot of people acted like butt-heads, and as if they continually had their heads stuck in an outhouse, it still wasn’t a pleasant thought to think that there were tiny particles of horse droppings in your nose mingling with the scent of chocolate and roses.

Naraqe took a final look around for the cat, which had vanished. “Who did you say you were again?”

“Didn’t say,” she replied.

“I thought you did.”

“I didn’t. The author isn’t calling me by my proper name.”

Naraqe blinked. “You can hear narrators too?”

“No, but it’s a logical deduction.” She shrugged. “I’m Lyrane.”

Naraqe nodded, and offered her left hand to Lyrane’s great confusion. To offer your left hand in a friendly handshake generally confuses the person who has to accept the hand proffered unless they’re a lefty by heart. Naraqe knew this. She just enjoyed irritating people greatly. “I’m Naraqe.”

“Hi.” Lyrane finally sorted out her hands and took the offered left hand, shaking it firmly.

“About those cookies?” Naraqe asked pointedly.

“Sure thing.” Lyrane took the lead and led her back towards 1138 Westmark Avenue again, all the while wondering whether luring the cat with cookies would work, or if her Wool of Doom was lost forever. She wouldn’t have doubted the latter. Every time someone she had known had made an all powerful artifact of great magical use, it had either been stolen, vanished mysteriously, been borrowed by a powerful wizard, or backfired at the last possible moment.

She doubted the elf would sympathize with her case, however. The elf seemed far more interested in the idea of eating cookies than taking over the world. But then, Lyrane reasoned, cookies seemed a lovely idea in themself.

**

****

Woo! Now our lovely two female heroines have met. Well. Two of them. Amber still hasn't, and I'm at 44 230 words. *falls over* Next update will include the entirety of Chapter Six I think.

i hit the post button at 4:17:00 PM

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Saturday, November 19, 2005

The rest of chapter four, and most of chapter five. (grins) Meet Lyrane, humans.

WOO!

**

Trailing through the dusty streets of Serenor, the elf queen sought a merchant selling chocolate cake. Cake felt as if it would be a good idea. At least her stomach agreed avidly that it felt like a good idea to balance off the apple, which had been the last thing she had ate. And that had been at least an hour ago now.

And perhaps some tea to go with it, she thought. Some nice herbal tea.

Naraqe was a bit satisfied that Leron had agreed to come with her. At least, that was the impression she had gotten from the dialogue with him. And she doubted that he would insist on trying to deny his agreement to go along with her into the Inner Realm Archives if she gave him a nasty enough look.

Leron and Naraqe were not related, married, or otherwise very close significant others to each other. He was not her mentor, nor was she his servant. Their relationship had been merely a business relationship between two royals at one time. And then it had expanded into a slight friendship between the emotionless Leron and the hopeless romantic Naraqe. They didn’t like each other much, but they did both trust each other.

And it wasn’t as if either of them had never saved the other’s life. She owed him her life ten times over, and he nearly as likewise to her.

The elf nearly crashed into a rather tall metal pole with several dints in it, one of which looked remarkably like a little ‘; P’. She found that almost weirdly amusing. But pausing from the near collision with the strange pole she glanced over and observed with great joy a merchant selling various tea cakes of interesting colors and flavors. A strong feeling of elation settled over her heart, and she grasped her purse as she walked over to him.

Her purse was magically protected by a series of fire runes, threatening the hands of anyone who would’ve tried to pickpocket her. This was affirmed by the smoking fingers of a nearby human boy, shrieking about his fingers being eaten alive by a rogue leather handbag.

Naraqe nodded once, and turned to the merchant to buy a chocolate cake. Five minutes later, after an interesting dialogue concerning why the merchent’s fingers were slightly shorter than normal, and clearly burnt, she found herself walking away cheerfully with a chocolate cake. I will have your cake, humans...

“Wait!” She turned at the frantic cry of the merchant behind her, having just glanced down at the markings of the packages of the cakes, and noticing one certain pattern missing in his sudden nonplused reaction to her interrogation about his smoking fingers and her purse.

“Ye-e-e-e-e-s?”

“That cake... it’s... it’s...”

“It’s?” she inquired, taking on a fragement of Leron’s tone for a bare moment of her inflection. She glanced down at the cake, having already licked off some of the icing.

“It’s... er... never mind,” he muttered.

Naraqe nodded and turned to carry on walking. About twenty seconds later she found herself nearly choking on a very non cake flavored object as it connected with her teeth and refused to crush. The elf narrowed her eyes, and carefully fished a little box out of her mouth from the back of her molars.

That’s not cake.

Or incredibly edible cheese either, she thought wryly. Glancing around to make certain no one was attempting to shadow her at the moment, she pried it open and revealed a message scribbled in very tiny runes.

Very likely a horse rental contract paper writer wrote this, Naraqe reasoned, squinting at it. The elf didn’t have any dramatic and incredible vision advantages just from her race. In fact, she was slightly nearsighted. The page was just as hard to read as it would’ve been for everyone else. But after a little bit of deciphering around the places where saliva had worked its way in around her tooth shaped indents, she managed to make out the following message.

1138 Westmark Avenue
1400 hours
Secret Password

She considered this, and decided to guess that it was a location, a time, and a secret password. Swordfish was the most often used secret password when someone wanted no one to guess, it seemed, so clearly someone had decided to be smart for once. As everyone would clearly decide to guess the obviously unobvious password first, why not go with the totally obvious password that no one would ever guess. I like whoever wrote that, she decided.

Contemplating it for a moment longer, she decided that it was obviously meant for someone involved in the heart of a top secret conspiracy in an attempt to overthrow the present government and set a cruel Overlord in command with all his Legions of Terror to control the population. Obviously meaning that everyone would suffer. And I’ll probably be killed, since I’m part of the present government, even if the king’s far more important...

Naraqe considered this.

She didn’t think it would be particularly fun to be killed off just because of an evil and top secret conspiracy to set the Overlord of All Evil Power on the throne. For that matter, it didn’t feel like it would be fun to be killed for any purpose, malicious or otherwise. Considering that the clue had just fallen into her hands, she decided it would be a good idea to go to 1138 Westmark Ave. and see what was going on.

But after she ate her cake.

She considered the rest of the chocolate cake, and sat down to finish eating it. Chocolate cakes were good. Far better than ridiculously named chapters about cheese which had absolutely nothing to do with cheese!

**

Chapter Five: The Overlor...er?

**

1138 Westmark Avenue, Serenor

**

An annoyed Lyrane stared at the object in her hand. “A ball of wool?”

“Why yes, Overlor...er...” Her companion hesitated. “M’lady.”

She sighed aloud, and handed it back to him. “A ball of wool? Why?”

“Well, you wanted your weapon to look inconspicuous, did you not, m’lady?” he asked hesitantly.

Lyrane stared at the ball of gray wool. She wore light pink robes, a tunic and pants of a similar shade. Her hair was loose, and looked as if it could’ve used a bit of hair gel to keep it from falling apart. Her eyes were a deep brown, and she wore fluffy bunny slippers on her feet. “Well, of course I did,” she growled.

“So thus I have created the Wool of Doom!” her companion exclaimed, waving one hand melodramatically into the air and humming a few bars of melodramatic theme music.

“That’s just wrong, you know,” she noted dryly.

“Why, yes,” he said agreeably, backing towards the door. “Now if you’ll excuse me, m’lady, I have to get back to my pizza business...”

“Pizza business,” she muttered, and held her hand out for the Wool of Doom. He handed it over to her quickly, and whirled for the door. As ultimately evil as she was, Lyrane just let him go, to a very relieved expression from the wizard, turning the Wool of Doom over in her hands.

About five seconds later, there was a loud clonk, and the wizard fell backwards, half of his body in the room, and the other half on the other side of the door. A rather large lump throbbed on top of his head, and he moaned before twitching a couple times and lying still.

“And that is my Medal Pole of Terror,” Lyrane said cheerfully. “The rather large metal object that just met up with your head.”

The wizard stirred, and groaned. “Metal.”

“What?” She placed the ball of wool down and stood up to a full and dramatic height of five feet, one inch.

“It’s metal,” he muttered.

“What?!”

“Medal is one of those things you hang around your neck...”

“Maybe that’s just what I want you to think,” she said flatly, and grabbed his arm. No one knows what would’ve happened after this point had not a shrill buzz carved its way through the tensely thick air. Lyrane immediately reacted, pulling herself upright and whirling towards a partly open door. “Blast!”

The wizard sat up, rubbing his head. “Blast what?”

“My cookies are done! Stay right there!”

He didn’t, of course, immediately dashing for the door. Another five seconds later he connected to the Medal Pole of Terror again, and fell over, completely unconscious this time. One of Lyrane’s Legions of Terror dashed in and dragged the wizard off. As he was the founder of the Runeite Pizza Parlor (delivery in thirty minute guaranteed, or your money back), and one of the most powerful wizards in the entirety of Endyr, she was rather torn on whether it would be better to kill him.

Considering that magical artifacts had this tendency to backfire as soon as their creator was destroyed, she reasoned that it would be safer to leave him among the living until she figured out how to create zombie anything’s beyond kittens, gerbils, small mice, and parrots. And she didn’t have that many incredible magic users working under her. Magic users tended to immediately rebel and attempt to overthrow you as soon as you had done all the dirty work.

No, mercenaries could just be paid off, and they sometimes had a few decent magic users. And peasants would often work for decent living quarters, fresh food, and no evil slave masters over them to keep them “in line”.

Removing the cookies from the oven, she left them to cool down as she contemplated world domination. At least, she would have, had not a cute little kitten appeared in the corner of the room, and latched onto her ball of wool. Or, more rightly, the Wool of Doom.

Within 2.333333... seconds, the world had reached an instable point due to an impossible repeating number bringing about an infinite number of repeating paradoxes, and reality grew blurry. Reality exploded, bringing about the end of everything sentient kind had ever known.

THE END

What? Why are you all looking at me like that?

You didn’t want it to end without knowing why they were after the sleeping princess?

You wanted to know if Essar and Amber fell in love in the end?

But why?

Oh, sheesh! Stop waving that sword around so threateningly.

**

However, as it wasn’t the story’s time to die out, time winged backwards about 2.333333... seconds, and the kitten vanished with the Wool of Doom, leaving a horrified looking Lyrane to stare at the space where the kitten had once stood.

She let a moment stand for the occurrence to sink in. Then she whirled towards the door and dashed after the kitten with a small dagger in hand.

It wasn’t exactly something easy to do, to run in bunny slippers. But somehow Lyrane managed to pull it off.

***

i hit the post button at 3:20:00 PM

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005

My sister read my entire novel last night. All 73 pages that I had then. (I have 77 now, and 32 000 + words) She loved it. This is suppose to be a crappy novel, but my sister loved it. Let me tell you, that does a LOT for my ego... she loved it, loves the characters (most particularly Amber and Essar, then also Lyrane... Varok's been dubbed creepy but pitiable, Iren's interesting, the princess had acne *she liked that a lot*, and what is Laytha in there for?!.)... so... yeah. At least I know I'm not a hopeless failure. Even if she reads and enjoys MK and A books, it still means there's going to be other people who'll be able to read this book and enjoy it.

Here's half of chapter four. I'll get the rest up later. This was mostly word filler, even if it did have purpose... snrk... and yes, if it seems vaguely like a parody of a few familiar character's dialogue/common lines have been stolen, they have. (snickers) It should be fairly obvious what/who this is borrowed from anyway, TDE-wise.

***

Chapter Four: The Incredible Edible Cheese

**

A tall and dark haired woman knelt and picked up a shattered rose from her floor. The frozen icy pieces had shattered into a million tiny puzzle pieces of frost when it had hit the white floor. Naraqe narrowed her eyes, brushing them into her hand and depositing them on a nearby table.

She brushed her hand off on her robe. The rose had been in her collection of various pointless objects for ages. It seemed almost strange that it should break then and there, falling into millions of unmendable pieces. It had to be metaphorical, some melodramtic warning from powers beyond her sight that something was going to happen. Something that could possibly spell the end of all sentient kind on the planet, or at least all random frost-worked roses. Something that could very well spell the offset of everything possibly normal in the entire universe!

Clearly, she decided, it was time to eat.

She picked up an apple from a basket on the cupboard and chewed thoughtfully on it. Eating was always an answer to the problem. It was a perfectly logical solution. Put something in your stomach, and then you didn’t have to worry about it anymore, because you were busy worrying about chewing. And it also tended to bother people anyway. They never expected you to just randomly eat. They expected you to do something about it.

It didn’t mean she didn’t intend on doing anything about whatever it was, whether it was the end of all reality or not. It just meant that she was hungry.

But then, Naraqe was always hungry. It wasn’t as if it were an abnormal thing for her to decide to randomly eat, because it was a perfectly normal thing for her to want something to eat. Considering that somehow she had managed to retain a slender shape, it didn’t really hurt for her to do anyway, and apples weren't ever very fattening unless eaten in an excessively fanatical amount.

Finishing the apple, she disposed of the core in a nearby wastebasket. Her rose had shattered. She wasn’t normally clumsy, so for the woman to have accidentally broken it was a very serious matter.

She contemplated the idea. Could it be possible that she had accidentally broken it? Or was it really a dastardly and melodramatic foreshadowing incident caused by a sadistic narrator meaning to cause a quest that would lead to death, doom, destruction, the possible idea of a tear in the fabric of reality, and quite likely true love between at least one pair of characters?

Most likely the latter, she decided. True love was always interesting in the midst of all reality falling into pieces.

Naraqe stood up from her chair, nearly pushing it over, but catching it a moment before it could reach the point of no return and crash to the ground. The elf quickly grabbed her cloak from a nearby rack and threw it on over her clothing, and turned to dash out the door.

If we’ve got a plot going on, that can only mean one thing...

**

Serenor Locale, inner city

**

“A quest!” Naraqe explained with a brilliant expression touching her face for a moment as she threw her hands up dramatically. “Something weird is going on. We have to find out what it is!”

“Are you being a hopeless romantic again?” the person she was talking to asked flatly, giving her an odd look. He was tall and dark haired, as was she, but a lot less elf in appearance, being clearly of human, though quite possibly royal, birth. His hair was neat, as was most of his appearance, clothing tailored to his exact fit. And the blade he wore at his side was anything but a cheap blacksmith’s job.

“Well...”

He raised one eyebrow. “I thought so.”

“But there’s narrators!” she insisted. “And I broke my glass rose.”

He nodded once, and gave her an odd look again. “Nara...”

She folded her arms. “Are you going to come with me or not?”

“Come with you where?”

“What do you mean? Obviously, uh... well...”

He interlaced his fingers underneath his chin, waiting for an answer. He needed a slight shave by this point, a slight smattering of facial hair tinting his chin a shade of gray to match a couple of streaks through his mostly black hair.

The elf queen looked a tad bit nonplused. “I’m not sur... hey!”

“Hey what?” He turned a gray gaze on her fair face.

She folded her arms with a very ticked off expression, and he blinked, glancing around for a possible source of her sudden change in eager mood. There was nothing beyond the simple wooden cantina walls around them and the slightly distant hum of people working, drinking, and talking about topics from everything to pizza deliveries, marriages, problems with their employers, and chickens.

“Well?” he pressed. Outside a bird went haywire and crashed into the window, causing little or no effect to the present occurences beyond to cause the elf to glance over her shoulder for a second and wonder if they were under attack by enemy spies just waiting to throw off the balance of reality.

“The chapter title!” Naraqe exclaimed, ignoring the bird, and hoping it wasn’t an evil enemy spy about to report their entire conversation to the antagonist’s Minions of Great Doom.

He blinked, and gave her a peculiar expression somewhere along the lines of Okay, I always knew you were going crazy... just stay here while I call the men in white coats... However, cell phones hadn’t been invented by that point.

“The narrator called it The Incredible Edible Cheese,” she complained. “I didn’t even get any cheese. I just got an apple.”

“So...?”

“I demand that it be changed!” she yelled at the roof. “This is stupid. No chapter should be named cheese. It’s not even a cheesy chapter. No one kissed, no one spouted purposeless drivel, and no one ate any cheese! At all! Period! Exclamation point! Several exclamation points!”

He sighed.

She reached out and picked a piece of orange cat hair off of his rich crimson toned tunic and flicked it off towards the floor. It stuck to her finger. “You need to shave.” The elf queen attempted to blow it off. Being of an exceedingly stubborn nature, the hair decided to stay put on her finger.

He blinked once at her motion, and then blinked again when she reached out and brushed it off of her finger on his cloak.

“Really,” Naraqe reasoned. “Your chin is going to start matching your hair fairly soon, Leron.”

The now named Leron gave her an odd look, and wondered if there was a nearby loony-bin for insane elf queens. “Black with a few streaks of gray?”

“Stupid chapter title,” she muttered, glaring at the wall. He unconsciously moved out of the way of her gaze as she continued glaring at the wall furiously. About five minutes later a small trickle of smoke began to rise from the wooden wall, and a charred and red circle fell from the wall and onto the ground, breaking into charcoal. He heard the distant whine of a smoke alarm set off by the sudden smoke, but she had lessened the intensity of her stare.

Leron didn’t think it would be a wise idea to get her mad. He gave her a typically blank look, which was all he was best at doing. “Perhaps if you had an idea of where you were headed, I would join you,” he stated, “but I have no purpose to randomly wandering about in circles to find a potentially nonexistent... quest.”

“Who names their chapter Incredible Edible Cheese anyway?” Naraqe growled at no one in particular.

Leron didn’t find he had an answer to this question. It wasn’t a logical question. Trees, it wasn’t even an illogical question, which he could field effectively if the need was ever there.

“I mean, seriously...”

“Nara, did you have a destination in mind?” he asked dryly, deciding that falling back on a logical topic might have been the only way to keep his brain cells from suffering unfortunate painful deaths from her illogically off topic remarks on cheese.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. The Inner Realm.”

“The what?”

“You don’t just name a chapter cheese for no reason!” she wailed.

Leron delaced his fingers and rubbed his eyes. He wondered just how hard it would be to get a decent drink in this place, or whether it was completely full of tacky beverages. “You don’t just go into the Inner Realm for no reason, Nara...”

“But, seriously. CHEESE?!”

“Why would you need to go into the Inner Realm?” he continued on in his questioning, though he had gotten very little response to his last remark.

“Because.”

“Hmm.” He considered the logics of the theories based around reality being pinned to surreality by what most people simply called magic and possibly math playing a factor in this. A moment later he decided she had killed a few of his brain cells and that this was playing haywire with his ability to focus on logic.

“But why cheese?!”

“Nara...”

She picked a piece of her hair from her eyes, pushing the dark brown strand back behind her pointed ears. It didn’t want to stay without a pin and within seconds had slipped back into her eyes, dangling tauntingly in her face. “I’m not going to go very far into the Inner Realm, Leron,” she reasoned. “Or I shouldn’t have to. I just need to get in far enough to access the Archives, and I can’t do that without the level of magic the Inner Realm offers.”

“The Archives?” That seemed fairly tame for the generally dramatic elf queen of the North.

“Couldn’t they possibly came up with something far better than cheese?! We all know cheese is edible! Why did they have to use a chapter title of random purpose rather than one which could’ve explained the purpose of this chapter?! Why incredibly edible cheese?! Why?!”

Leron groaned. “Couldn’t you just find a slice of cheddar, dub it incredible, and eat it to fulfill the purpose of the chapter title?”

Narque gave him a horrified look. “Of course not! That would completely destroy their purpose of having a purposeless chapter title!”

He blinked.

“I want cake,” she decided, and stood up, picking her skirt up just enough to keep it from trailing into the dust covering the floor. Though the rest of the room was completely clean, possibly due to the neat-freak at present inhabiting it, dust seemed to grow from the floor in most places. It just naturally needed to be there.

He blinked again. “Yes, well, I’m certain you can find cake somewhere.”

“Mmm, cake...”

Leron took a moment to consider the elven queen and her natural tendencies for strange reactions to various situations, and decided it would be safer for his brain to avoid trying to understand why she acted the way she did. Elegant in appearance, and clearly beautiful, but she had no sense of reality at times.

Cake, after all? That was as strange as randomly appearing chickens. All of which had tendencies to appear if she was around.

Of course, he had no time to consider why things continually reacted strangely about her, as she vanished past the oaken door and down the stairs to seek chocolate cake. At least one thing was good about that, he reasoned. He didn’t have to listen to her horrified rant on cheese and allow any more of his unfortunate brain cells to suffer slow and torturous deaths at the hands of random remarks.

He didn’t understand why cheese mattered anyway. If the world was going to end, or reality implode, or whatever she had been rambling about was going to occur, why did edible cheese matter. Why did it matter if it had been used completely randomly?

i hit the post button at 12:29:00 AM

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Saturday, November 12, 2005

I redid some of the prologue... yes, horribly cliché, but better than the original... which was painful... this ties into my first posted scene with Essar.

**

Prologue:
Two people were alone in the shadows. One was tall, the other notably short, but they both shared one thing in common. They both had blood on their hands, torn clothing, the exhausted looks of battle touching their eyes. The shorter, the female, had the expression of one lost, of one who no longer had any remaining hope.

He might have looked royal once, but his garb, though rich, was stained with time and dirt, of blood and battle. Now he just looked as if attempting to change his expression from the hardened stare would shatter his face. Now he just looked as if death was the only goal therein.

She had switched her blade to her left hand in the lull of the battle, rubbing her right against her tunic in an attempt to wipe some of the sweat from her palms. But it was in her dark eyes; she knew she was losing.

“Couldn’t this have stayed with our childhood?” she whispered, voice nearly given out. “We didn’t need to carry this foolish battle out beyond stolen teddy bears. You of all people, surely, should understand purpose...”

The lull had finished. He swung his weapon hard into hers, smashing it against the nearest wall to lock the woman into position. “I seen no position in carrying it on, but you seemed to insist.” He watched as she strained against his lock, fought to keep a grip against one far stronger than she could ever be. Slight of build, her advantage had been in speed, in stealth rather than a direct battle. When it had come to this, a dart whipping through her hair when he had noticed her near silent decent into the shadows...

She knew she was losing. The woman released her hold on her blade a moment before he would’ve shoved it from her sweaty grip, stumbling away from him as her balance suddenly changed. Wielding a heavy weapon limited ones movements, and made her balance altered from a typical stance.

But there wasn’t anything she could have done to prevent the obvious face of death staring at her. He spun, blade underneath her chin as she backed away into the cliff face. They were in the bottom of the canyon, away from all other sentient contact. Death wouldn’t do anything but kill her; screaming would only make it worse. She fell silent, hands raised in an unconscious attempt to defend herself, to offer anything that could prevent him from striking her down where she stood.

Within the Inner Realm, killing her would only send her back to where she had come from, leaving her death empty, and fated to be repeated again and again. It wouldn’t destroy her, only force her to remain.

Back hitting the cliff face, there was nowhere left to turn, to run. She raised her chin in slight defiance to stare the far taller being in the eyes. “So kill me.”

“After all you’ve done, I should merely kill you?” His face didn’t change upon saying this, a dull stoic expression remaining, keeping him from looking angered, cheered, pleased, or revealing any other emotion. He had the feel of one who thought that showing any emotion would possibly sent him falling to his death from a cliff.

She had the frozen appearance of one who was going to fall into tears, to weep and plead for mercy, but couldn’t bring herself to lower her dignity that far. She had some level of forced beliefs in dignity, in honor. “You don’t strike me as the type to take advantage of a female prisoner...”

“You’re certainly correct there.” For a moment he did reveal something, a contempt for those who lacked respect for other races, for other genders. Even though his garb was stained red with blood, her blood and his own, he still carried some honor. For that, she was relieved. Death was far easier to tolerate at the hands of someone who still respected you for who and what you were, rather than merely seeing you as chance.

It still wasn’t on her to do list. But the fact that his blade rested uncomfortably sharply against her throat spoke otherwise. It spoke of her death, of pain. “Please... for some respect for who I am, kill me quickly.” The words were forced from a throat nearly constricted in fear, and he had to salute her inwardly for not revealing it on her face- she was terrified.

The man narrowed his eyes nevertheless, expression flickering just slightly. “No.” He drew his blade back, and hit her over the side of the head with the flat side. For a mere second, her eyes widened, then rolled back in her head. She slumped forwards, collapsing in an unconscious slumber. He cast her a slightly disdainful glance, cleaning the blood off of his sword on the edge of his tunic. It was destroyed as it was from the battle.

He doubted she would die from her wounds. He hadn’t hit her that badly, most of the blood being merely surface wounds carefully cutting her arms in an attempt to disable her. He knew he was mildly wounded likewise, light cuts that crossed his features where her blade had found slight holes in his defenses. No, unless something came across her unconscious body, she would live, if not a bit uncomfortably.

The man sighed innerly. All this over a childhood incident concerning a teddy bear... it was so foolish. For a long moment he was tempted to take his blade, and run her through, just to end any further clamor over this issue. But this was quickly pushed aside. If she died, it would be from the elements, and not his weapon. Enough blood had been shed over a childish vendetta as it was.

Finishing his job on his sword, he sheathed it again, and turned to leave the Lesser Cliffsettings.

It was several hours before the woman at last stirred, fighting with her waning strength to force a teleportation back to the Middle Realm... back to Endyr. She would be safe there, she hoped.

***

But that’s how stories always work. One seemingly unessential event can change a lifetime. When he had stolen her teddy bear as a child, he had not thought ahead and thought that perhaps it would cause him a lifetime of agony. And it is strange, how little events can slowly tie together.

Which is why, in a completely different part of Endyr, a child had a birthday party. A few years later, he had another one, and another one. By the time he was twelve, all the local girls had decided that he was hot, plus a few others beside. As he was a halfling, complete with the adorable features of one, and conveniently a few too many inches tall, he was immediately dubbed unique, and an obvious target of all girls. Halflings do tend to be under at least four foot seven inches, just because they’re suppose to be near half sized.

This one was five foot two inches. In the West Farthings, this meant that all the halfling girls thought he was cute because he was so tall, and all the human girls liked him because he was short enough to look down on, but tall enough to comfortably kiss, being as they were about five foot seven.

He was completely unaware of any vendettas from years past that had been going on the year he had been born. To be truthful, he probably wouldn’t have cared either. Neither would the girls who continually followed him around cared, as they were too facinated by his gorgeous blue eyes. Though admitably, he might have at least pretended to care, had it gotten him out of the events preceeding his seventeenth birthday.

It all started when his mother forced him to invite those nice girls that just happened to be his friends. Because for one of them, it wasn’t an ordinary event. This made it rather unordinary for him, and thus led forward in a chain of events that would gradually explain how and why teddy bear vendettas made sense.

But enough talk. Welcome to confusion, human...

i hit the post button at 3:44:00 PM

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Friday, November 11, 2005

Meet the Evils, and the Sleeping Princess...

Oh, just shut up about clichés. I KNOW it's horrid. It's not going to be as bad as you think... and this is the entirity of chapter 3. I've finally started focusing my chapters. Heh. And I may consider posting it all, now that my prologue makes less sense and is more palitable... I couldn't live without rewriting it... diary babble about hot guys... yeesh. Now it's a confusing vendetta... ><

If the princess seems familiar, it is because, yes, she has a bit of Tiana influenence. She is not Tiana, however.

This chapter is the painful proof that my evils hate cooperation with being evil. t least, my intended main evil is anyway... >< Not anymore... meh.

**

Chapter Three: A Sleeping Princess

**

The Frost Passage

**

In what seemed a hollowed out stone tomb, a young woman slept. Her features were fair enough to dub her pretty, though she wasn’t a beautiful young knockout—she had a slight case of acne, and she certainly wasn’t flawless. There was an empty innocence about her, leaving her to seem as if an untouched being amidst sin tainting a once beautiful world within ancient times.

There was almost no dim light to cast a shadow over her features, instead leaving the room bland and gray. It was colorless, and to some, nameless. There was nothing tangible about it but the woman cast within it, lying in a preserved slumber.

She did not stir.

The room she was in appeared to be made of some volcanic stone, built up by time rather than human hands. It was easily dubbed a chasm, a hollow maw meant to swallow the sentient being whole and leave them to suffer a painful death within an eternal chill within rather than without. It was a mouth, a cavern, a prison of words rather than iron bars. It was death from within one’s mind rather than a physical pain sending them reeling into an agony that would crush the heart and mind.

In that room, the young woman slept peacefully, the only sign that she was not dead the slightest rise and fall of her chest. Her hands were clasped beside her face, unreceptive eyes drawn closed against grasping ice in an eternal sleep.

She was the sleeper, the one sentenced to sleep under stone and under trees, fingers icily cold and chilled with the bite of death until the end. No one knew what her end would be. For one thing, there wasn’t anyone around to really wonder about what her fate was, and for another, there were no known crazy prophecies centered around her. She was merely the sleeper, a young woman with a slightly pretty face, slightly chewed up fingernails, and braided light brown hair.

Her white fingers were clasped tightly around a single longer lock of her hair that had escaped the binding braids, though there were naturally staticy pieces flickering around her features.

A voice suddenly cut through the air, the acoustics of the chamber sending his voice ringing through the hollows and echoing back to him in a dramatic and unintended effect. “The sleeping princess. Not quite what I expected.”

Beside the original speaker, a mid-height ranged being stood. He shook his head. “Not beautiful enough.”

“Maybe it was all the stock they had in princesses at that time,” the original speaker murmured thoughtfully, reaching out to brush a piece of her brown hair from her face. Over time, wind currents had tossed her hair, making it messily strangled in tiny bangs over her face in some places. He brushed these tenderly back from her forehead and gazed down at her thoughtfully, almost jerking his hand back. The princess’s face was as cold as ice in the depths of winter in some country in the north of Endyr where everyone said ‘eh’ all the time and watched people hit black disks into nets with bent sticks. The taller man’s name was Iren, and his companion was simply Bob.

Iren wore loose gray clothing, nondescript and revealing no affiliation with any side or country. His face was as plain as the sleeping princess’s, no dramatic scars creasing it in checkerboards of scar tissue, no hooked or hawk like nose, and no stringy goatee brushing his chin. He looked simply human, an ordinary peasant type of being, beyond the cruel looking blade sheathed at his waist. And he wore no dramatic magical jewelry, the only glimmering piece gracing his presence being a gold ring on one hand.

Bob, on the other hand, looked as if he were trying to be intensively cliché and noticeable. Owing to his name, perhaps it was to make up for the lack of fear inspired by his pseudonym. He wore deep black robes, belted with a thick buckle, and dramatic boots. His hair was short and black, carefully combed over his eyes, and nearly black eyes stared out from underneath his hair to pierce the nearby wall. Had he been magically equipped with flame, his gaze could’ve literally burnt through the wall or anything else he had decided to stare at.

The shorter Bob, clearly elf-born by his pointed ears, drew a dagger and approached the sleeping girl. She stirred briefly, looked as if she might cry aloud in her sleep.

“Wait!” Iren put a hand over Bob’s arm. “We’re not going to kill her, ninny.”

“Ninny?”

“The important part of that statement was that we weren’t going to kill her,” Iren explained.

Bob nodded once, and sheathed his dagger. The elf hadn’t appreciated being insulted with a derogatory term when he was as skilled as his taller human companion, but he was also smart enough to not stab Iren randomly. “Why not?”

Iren raised his eyebrows, and gave his companion an odd look. “Because we don’t know what will happen if we kill her. She might spell the end of the world as we know it.”

“I thought that was what we wanted.”

Iren sighed aloud, an annoyed look brushing across his eyes. “We don’t want to see the end of the world, Bob. We just want to prevent anyone from waking her up.”

“So, why can’t we kill her, then?”

The taller human chewed on the inside of his lip, attempting to avoid falling into what would ultimately cause him to get annoyed, shriek a bit, and possibly hurt something. “Because that’s not the point,” he finally decided. “And we don’t want reality to implode due to a lack of congruity with a notable lack of dramatic prophecies either declaring the end of the world or at least all things good and shiny in the universe. Considering the mathematical reasoning behind our princess’s placing, it is very likely that if we were to disturb her slumber, all things we know as reality would be shunted aside and cause a large paradox in the tapestry of all things remotely pertaining to logic in the universe.” He drew in a breath, and nodded once at the princess.

“We’re going to hold her hostage?” Bob asked hopefully, deciding that reality imploding due to something about the thing in the whatever was too much to think about.

“Perhaps.”

“Well, then, what do we want with the stupid sleeping princess if we aren’t gonna do anything with her?” Bob asked, slightly annoyed as he fingered the hilt of his jeweled, rune carved, magically, and remarkable shiny dagger.

Iren merely smiled dryly. “We just wanted to know where she was so that we’d have access to the interwinding passages between reality and imagination. That’s all.” He gestured to one end of the stone tomb. “Take the other end, please. And don’t be looking up her skirt,” he added as Bob waltzed over to the other end of the coffin-like bed and grabbed the handles.

Bob sighed, muttering a bit under his breath about no one ever understanding him. Iren rolled his eyes, and braced himself at the other end. Counting to three aloud, they heaved the tomb up, and began a slow and steady trek out of the cavern. The girl herself wasn’t notably heavy, but the tomb-like bed was solid, and weighed enough to be incredibly awkward to move had the elf not been fairly strong for his size.

“We’re stealin’ the princess?” Bob asked incredulously.

Iren smiled. “We’re stealing the princess.”

“And not to hold her hostage?”

“Not to hold her hostage. Yet.” Iren sighed.

As the princess was shifted around, her hands fell unclasped, and a small rose fell from her right hand, landing on the stone carved ground. A petal slipped from its flower and was crushed under the weight of Bob’s leather boots, but the rest of the flower remained in tact.

A faint glimmer happened around it, and it turned into an frost-coated flower as it completed a circle in its fall, turning as pale as snow. But none noticed, not even Iren, that the flower had fallen and been preserved in winter’s bitter chill of ice.

**

The Lesser Shadowcoves

**

For Iren, sitting silently was something almost easy to do. In the gloom of the Shadowcoves, he held the sleeping princess at what was in a way his own beck and call. He held the power over her, and could’ve ordered her destroyed on a whim.

He had no purpose to.

He sat silently on a carefully carved wooden chair, watching the sleeping woman. In what had seemed a moment of panic she had clasped her hands over her chest, but had still not awaken from her everlasting slumber. Bob had tried yelling in her ears, and still she had not stirred whatsoever. She remained frozen in a single moment of cold, lingering between reality and dreamscapes.

For a moment Iren brushed his fingers over her icy face again, feeling the biting chill teasing the warmth of his own flesh. It had been a long time since he had tried to touch a woman from affection, and he didn’t plan on starting with the sleeping princess. He was married.

A thin smile touched his face.

Married, but certainly not in love. Not any more.

The princess’s face had changed over the time it had taken to move her from her dark cavern to the Shadowcoves and the dull gray theme of the entire room. Somewhere there was an electric blue gleam sending brilliance shot through the misty tones, but it wasn’t in that room where a quiet Iren sat, thoughtfully watching the princess. He watched for any possibility of change, of any hint of a shift in her patterns from the movement from ice to shadow.

She now looked worried, as if something had been taken from her. She looked as if she was longing for something to be there for her in this strange place. Though her eyes hadn’t opened or even slightly flickered, still something managed to show on her face without the hint of a movement.

Iren was certain that the princess he now held in his captivity was afraid. Unable to see, unable to hold even an awareness over his touch, but still afraid.

Afraid for what?

He wasn’t certain. But he knew she was. And he knew that it wouldn’t be long before someone came after him for taking the princess from her resting place. It never was long that someone came after him, he knew. Always someone jumping on him, demanding that he as the antagonist surrendered the magical whatever, gave in to the demands of a foolish hero who always won...

Well, not this time. This time he had the princess.

That didn’t mean no one was going to stop him. He wasn’t even trying to take over the universe. But it did mean, to him, that he had something more than the heroes did. But Iren didn’t even know if there were going to be any convenient heroes after him.

Heroes. He grimaced. They were always so foolish, yet always managed to win. Bob had taken ages regaling him with tales about how the heroes had done this and that and this and this and then, while they were at it, had the nerve to do this! The nerve of them!

He touched her hair lightly, and pushed it back out of her face. The sleeping princess. Walking the doorway between monsters screaming, purple skies... between a fourth dimention and reality.

“The sleeping princess will not be awaken by love’s true kiss or any of that foolish blather,” he remembered somehow, distantly. “Just don’t touch her, and nothing weird will happen. Don't move her, and don’t kill her. And don’t try getting anyone to kiss her either...”

“Why, what would happen?”

“Well, nothing, really. Just she’s got horribly bad breath. She hasn’t brushed in a few weeks, you know, being asleep and all.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So the world’s not going to explode or anything if we try to wake her up?”

“Well, no one knows. We’ve never done this before. But likely as not you’ll just end up with a sore throat or something. From screaming too much. Or a flu. There’s a lot of them going around.”

“Ah.”

“She’s just a sleeping princess. Why worry about it anyway?”

“Because she’s not suppose to be eternally sleeping? Because she’s lingering on the threshold between reality and dreams? Because if someone who didn't hear you tell me not to kiss her might kiss her and end up with a bad virus from her horrible breath?”

“That’s just what they want you to think.”

Iren couldn’t recall exactly where the conversation had come from, or why. But then, he was old enough to have enough interesting memories, even if he wasn’t really that old at all. It wasn’t as if he never got out, unlike some villain-types. He did, after all, have a wife to worry about. Even if she didn’t love him much, she still insisted on being taken out to see a drama every now and again, and a nice dinner once in a while too.

He wondered why exactly he had bothered getting married. Beyond the fact, of course, that his wife was an assassin, vicious, and very useful to the young human attempting to learn how to rule the universe.

Iren inwardly sighed. He didn’t even want the universe anymore. Too much of a bother, trying to keep everything from blowing up. Politics weren’t as fun as everyone seemed to think, and even if you were the Overlord of Terror with Minions of Great Ph34r through the land, you still would need people helping you out, or a really good stress relief class. It was hard enough keeping a city running straight, politically-wise.

Oh, well, such is life, he decided, and removed his hand from the princess’s hair. He found her somewhat pretty, in a plain sort of way. Not the sort of literal knockout that his wife was, and not outstandingly beautiful either. Just pretty.

He let a slight smile touch his face. Of course she was. A sleeping princess under a dramatic spell couldn’t be just plain ugly, could she?

Of course not.

It had still come as a slight shock to realize that the girl wasn’t a knockout and stunningly beautiful. It always seemed to work that way. The girl under the spell was stunning, managed to make the villains go starry eyed and act like dimwits, and fell in love with the hero at the end. They always had long silky hair, glimmering eyes, and flawless skin.

This one didn’t. She didn’t even have shiny hair. It was a bit tangled. But Iren didn’t particularly mind. After all, she was the sleeping princess, and he needed her, if only for the simple sake of distracting the heroes. Though, he noted silently, that she was indescribably and surprisingly simple was doing a fair job of throwing him off already.

Stage one complete... we have the sleeping princess, he thought. And wondered just how long it would take before there was a reaction from someone, or anyone about to enter into the dreadful fate of the quest.

Not long, of course...

i hit the post button at 1:02:00 AM

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Thursday, November 03, 2005

Introduction for Varok

An introductionary piece for one of my Nano characters... I know, it seems very estranged from Amber and Essar's pieces... it'll seem very estranged from Iren's piece too, once I post that, and Naraqe's... well... hers might actually make a bit of sense when it comes to tying it all together in the end... Wyn's piece should be just as confusing... but we'll see, eh?

This is from Chapter Two: A Rainy Walk. (yeah, I'm naming my chapters)

**
Serenor Locale, Outskirts

***
"YAAGH!" There was suddenly a thud, the sound of a cat yelping in pain, and the sound of several large objects crashing to the ground.

About five seconds later, there was an explosion.

A tall and pale humanoid picked himself up from the ground with a rueful expression, and brushed his clothing off. A chicken feather took residence behind his left ear, and he picked that off too, flicking it into the dusty air.

Wearing black clothing is never a wise idea when one is about to get thrown into a dusty street, as his robes were now a peculiar shade of gray and brown in amidst the odd black streaks. Before he had hit the ground, he might’ve been dubbed a stylish dresser, clothing neatly pressed, and very stylized in a fashion slightly before its time.

However, as it was now rather gray toned, and wrinkled, he looked like any ordinary person who had just been tossed out into the street. He sighed, and brushed his hair out of his eyes with pale fingers. I merely wished for some tea, he thought ruefully, finally giving up on picking feathers and dirt from his cloak. It would need to be washed before he could ever appear semi-stylish again.

But, no, people these days. Certainly, he had fangs. And certainly, his eyes were slightly redder than normal. And yes, indeed, he was a vampire. That didn’t have to mean anything, did it? After all, he was a nice vampire. He hadn’t intended on biting anyone in the general store, and he would’ve paid for his tea too.

Clonk.

A box of tea rebounded from his black hair, and crashed down to the cobblestoned road.

"And stay out!" a hysterical female wailed from within the store before a door slammed shut, and he faintly heard the noise of a lock clicking shut against a bar. Then the sound of furniture being dragged over to block the door. Then the smell of garlic as a clove was tossed at him from a nearby window.

A cross rebounded off of his hair too, and he made a face. So much for nice hair. The vampire carefully picked his hair back into place, leaned over and took the garlic and mint tea, and raised a hand cheerfully towards the window.
"Cheerio, and thanks for the tea, chaps."

A steak rebounded off of his hand, leaving a bloody splat. He grimaced.

"That’s stake, you idiot!" he heard someone yell from within the house.

"Oh."

Varok raised his eyebrows for a moment, and picked the steak up, donating it to a nearby and drooling mutt. It was covered in dust and chicken feathers as it was. The dog grabbed it cheerfully, and dragged it off into the dusky murk of near-twilight in Serenor. He cast a rueful glance at his clothing before trudging off down the street with the dinted box of mint tea and the garlic clove.

I wasn’t going to hurt them.

He sighed aloud, and sat down on an abandoned bench to contemplate a tea bag. Varok had no idea where he was going to come up with boiling water without getting it thrown over his head, and he had no desire for any further pain. Being shoved down a set of stairs into a crate of chickens, a vicious cat, and a pile of dust isn’t particularly fun. And to make matters worse, they had had the nerve to throw garlic and religious symbols at him. He hated that.

It wasn’t as if all vampires were cruel bloodsucking monsters.

In honesty, Varok Beloth was a vegetarian anyway. The idea of eating something that had been (he shuddered to think) alive at one time repulsed him. It was as disgusting as the idea of biting a human just to drink their blood. It wasn’t the blood that bothered him, it was the fact that a great deal of human beings had this fascination with either not bathing at all, or wearing dramatic perfumes. Both of which tasted rather disgusting if you were planning on sucking through it.

He preferred tea anyway. His parents had raised him on teas. But no, all other beings had the positive sense that he was going to be a cruel, bloodsucking monster. They ran, threw things at him, and wouldn’t even sell him tea!

Varok sighed, nearly brought to tears. He wished someone would consider just trying to talk to him for once, rather than trying to drown him in holy water. Just because he had rather large fangs, and looked as pale as dawn...
He chewed on the tea bag thoughtfully. Not even a dentist will listen to me. I bet not even a shrink would. Or an insurance salesman.

i hit the post button at 3:52:00 PM

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Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Snrk!

snrk (sn • ER • kuh) v. snrk, snrking, snrked, snrketh;— 1. Indicate wry or twisted amusement to a statement 2. Smirk or snicker in response to an amusing or sarcastic statement. 3. Laugh, but not as intensively as lol would indicate.

Derived from snicker, smirk, and snort, this word is a crossbreed meaning to indicate slight wry or sarcastic amusement at someone's remark. Is used in situations where lol doesn't quite suffice to indicate twisted amusement.

See also snerk, meaning to smirk.

(grins) I was bored. That's all there is to say in explanation to why I wrote that piece. Hopefully it helps Anya rather than gets her on my case... ;)

i hit the post button at 8:59:00 PM

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I updated the icon cut in the corner there. Not nearly as many as I would've preferred, but it's still some icons. 13 TDE based ones.

Have a couple of random ones.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

i hit the post button at 5:36:00 PM

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PART of my nanowrimo novel's prologue... part of chapter one's in my nano profile. (shrugs) No, you don't get it all. You won't until it's finished...

Introducing the two MCs from the piece in my Nano profile, Essar and Amber... (grins) Yes, I was in an odd mood over writing this.

***

A brilliant cheer lit the gold and green pathways of the West Farthings. Sunlight danced in the flowers as birds made their ways between trees to trees, and filled the air with what could've been called music, of a sort. The gold bathed the deep green trees in light, leaving their leaves to drip a metallic gleam onto the ground, and the rusty ground to puddle up with light.

The air smelt of good fortune amidst the salty scent of ocean water and the distant calls of seagulls across the teal waters. It saturated the very air with well-being, and made one wonder why such a simple world merited such beauty at moments.

For it was beautiful in innocence. Though not untouched by darkness, as was clearly stated in the eyes of girls pushed down by the influential powers of their clique leaders, as was stated by the tear colored eyes of a child as he fell and scraped his knee against a sharp stone, it was still innocent. The ground seemed untouched by bloodshed, the air seemed to reek of flowers and trees rather than flames burning straw houses to the ground.

There was no frantic whinnying of horses pressing against the air as they fought to flee a war ground heavily pressed with smog and the smell of death. There was no high pitched screams of women as their husband was cut down beside them by a merciless bandit. There was no traces of footsteps tinged with blood covering the ground as a child fled a wolf intent on seeing its dinner.

There was no smell of fearful adrenaline in the air as beings fled for their life. There was no pressing horror in the eyes of the women and children as they stumbled off to work under the whips of a slave master cruel and thoughtless. The men didn't struggle under heavy loads as slavery set in.

And no one was out to kill each other just for the sake of two silver pennies.

It was innocent, even if touched by shadows.

And it was in this innocence that Essar Longbarrel was having his seventeenth birthday. At the urging of his mother, he had invited several of the girls from his classes at the local schoolhouse, albeit reluctantly. They all had crushes on him, he reluctantly noted. Every single one of them, a passion for his eyes, his hair... and some of them far worse, he thought with a shudder.

So I have nice eyes, the boy thought helplessly. What's that to them?

Obviously a lot more to them than it was to himself, he noticed dryly as he got another couple of stares from a pair of halfling girls. They were quickly diverted by their boyfriends, however, to the beautiful sight of a tree.

He wondered about this, a lot.

But no, his mother insisted. Such lovely girls! You should be proud to call them your friends, Essar!

Proud? he thought. That one tried to touch me... on... on... a place that should not be touched! And all the squeeing. It's enough to make a well-bred halfling flee for dear life. Flame it, I've tried. They just keep following me!

Why can't they like... that guy!

His mind's eye wandered off towards a guy with a tall expression, dark blond hair, and muscles. Surely he was good looking. Why didn't the girls tackle him, and try to kiss him for ridiculously long periods of time, and try to stick their tongues down his throat?

It wasn't like Essar needed a tonsillectomy. He had gotten one a couple years ago from an elven physician when they had gotten enflamed enough to need removal. So why did those girls keep on trying, and squealing like piglets when they tried?

He tried to tell them...

He had tried to tell his mother, who had said that's nice, and went back to cooking supper. He had tried to tell his father, but unfortunately, as his father was nothing more than a tombstone making an attempt to push up daisies, he had gotten no reply. The girls had tried to exploit this too, catching him talking aloud to a grave with a pencil and paper in case he got any replies. They had said he was going mentally insane and needed tender loving care to recover.

Then tried to kiss him again.

Essar had ran and locked himself in his room for seven days after that.

But no. He still had to invite them to his party because they were such looooooooovely people.

I want to marry a twig, he decided, and sat down beside a tree to try and talk to rocks. Perhaps if the girls decided that he was insane, and couldn't be saved by being glomped to death, they would leave him alone to become a monk, or a priest, or a writer...

"Hi!"

Flame it, he thought. "Hullo, Amber," he muttered reluctantly to the rock, refusing to look up at the girl's face he knew would be there. He just knew it. He knew her voice, even from the shrieking hi she always gave...

She sat down beside him, and he allowed a worse mental curse.

"What'd'ya want?" he mumbled, still examining the rock. It was a pretty rock. It had sparkly spots in it, and he liked shiny objects, and it was a nice smooth black too. It might've made a decent skipping stone, he reasoned, but it wasn't skinny enough to get anywhere. It would just sink in a couple of splats.

But it was pretty, with rainbow like colors deep inset into the shades of silver in the speckles of shimmery rock.

"I'm talking to ferns," she said cheerfully, taking a fern out of her pocket. "This is my fern. It's name is Dragoon."

Essar nodded. "Can't you go talk to your fern somewhere else?"

"Why?"

"...Because I asked you to?"

"No, you just asked me whether I could go and talk to it somewhere else."

"Well, can you?" Essar looked up from the shiny rock and gave the girl a pointed look. She had auburn hair that was closer to red than auburn, and light brown eyes. For a human, she wasn't that bad looking, just a bit big and overwhelming to talk to when he was standing, even if he was tall for a halfling.

He didn't like girls that could look down on him.

For that matter, he reasoned, he didn't like girls at all. They were just too shrieky about bugs and spiders and lizards. And spiders were cute, he thought in that shrieky tone that the girls always took on when they seen his eyes. They were so cute!! And he just knew they were adding two exclamation points and breaking all logical grammatical rules to shriek at him.

"Yes, I can."

Essar waited about five seconds before looking back up at her again from his rock.

"Well...?"

"You just asked me whether I could. I'm quite able to."

"Well, can you, then?"

"I told you I could."

"..." Essar exhaled in frustration, an ellipses hanging in his voice as he stared at the girl. Of course, the beautiful blue eyes he wore didn't look too menacing, merely proving to make him look totally adorably hot, at least, according to Amber. "I invited you to my birthday party. Isn't that enough?"

She frowned. "Of course that's great."

"Then why won't you go away?"

"Oh!" A light suddenly lit up behind her eyes, and he wondered why she wasn't blond. It would've made her look that much more bleached in her personality. "Why didn't you say so?"

"I did!"

"No-o-o-o..."

"I did too." He folded his arms, dropping the shiny rock in the process. As gravity took effect, it smashed into his toe, and he stifled an outcry as it crushed his toenail. She didn't appear to notice the expression that suddenly appeared on his carefully tanned face (though he hadn't tried to get it this shade, and try as he might, he wouldn't burn). For about five seconds he looked as if he were constipated.

He wondered if she thought this was cute too, if she even noticed outside of his beautiful blue eyes.

"No, you didn't."

"I did too."

"No, you didn't. You asked me whether I could go away."

"And you didn't," he stated with gritted teeth.

Amber tilted her head, and gave him a confused look. "You didn't say you wanted me too, you just asked me if I could. Of course I can. But you didn't ask if I would."

Essar blinked. He went through this a few times in his mind, and couldn't get it. Didn't couldn't and wouldn't mean the same thing? What about could and would. Of course they were the same. If she could go away, she would go away. Right?

"Could means I can. Can means I am able to," Amber patiently explained, as if talking to a two year old. "Will means that I will. Would you go away is different than could you go away, because would is indicating that you want me to rather than asking if I am able to go away."

He blinked again for good measure. It made absolutely no sense.

It never got to making sense either as the girl suddenly shrieked, and started batting wildly at her hair. "A bug! There's a bug in my hair! Get it out! Get it out!! GET IT OUUUUUUUUUUUT!!" She leapt to her feet, her fern falling to the ground, now forgotten in light of the rather large looking beetle that had taken refuge in her red hair.

He raised his eyebrows, and flicked the beetle out of her hair, feeling very sorry for the poor bug that it would have to suffer her dreadfully high pitched wailing of distress. It didn't seem right for nature to have to suffer the arts of a terrified girl, even though she had no real reason to fear the harmless bug.

"You saved my life!" she shrieked, throwing her arms around the halfling, and kissing him on the cheek. He shoved her away.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," he muttered, and sat back down to stare at his rock. "Now go away and grammarize some other guy. Like perhaps Jaythan Lars?"

She wrinkled her nose. "But you're cute."

"Whatever." He stared ruefully at a blade of grass, and wished it could make him not cute.

"You're hot," she decided cheerfully, and patted him on the top of the head. He wanted to bite her, but felt that it might not be particularly civilized to attempt to take a bite out of one of his fellow teenagers, even if it seemed a particularly satisfying idea. Though he had tried biting someone else before, and they hadn't tasted very good.

Maybe some salt...

The idea seemed almost reasonable. They were out to bite out his tongue, he might as well bite their fingers off... it couldn't be that bad of a trade.

Then he decided that their parents wouldn't be that happy, and might try to marry him off to one of them, and that idea wasn't particularly pleasant feeling at all. But by this point, Amber had vanished, leaving him alone to contemplate blades of grass and various twigs.

He examined the various twigs, and found a cute looking one.

Why couldn't I just be able to marry a twig?

i hit the post button at 1:50:00 AM

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Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Ahh... Nanowrimo's started... (scared) I've changed my novel from the Nameless on a whim, and it's now tentatively Through Silver Glass, or perhaps just Silver Glass, or something of the like...

Unlike the Nameless's plot, this one's a fantasy parody concerning a girl and an ocean and a bunch of elemental theory crap regarding magnets, a vampire, and elf queen, a crazy old wizard, a birthday party, and a sleeping princess. (rolls eyes) Or something like that.

I'm tossing and turning between that one and The Nameless... ergh. Both good plots. But I think I'll be more able to write crap with a parody-like plot. I just need a good villian...

i hit the post button at 11:22:00 AM

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