windlion

Guardian snippet from a longer fic I am not sure if I will get around to writing-- this is mostly because I was complaining to Flidget, "WHY HAS NO ONE GIVEN ME SHEN WEI DOING FORMS?!" I guess I'll have to do it myself! :D

As a professor, even as a scientist, it was reasonable that Shen Wei would take care of his health. Stepping away to the gym for an hour or two was not to be unexpected, and would likely even be encouraged. So it would not be out of character if he left the lab with that explanation.

He repeated this to himself as he walked across the campus, even as he hoped that no one had the chance to see the note he’d left at the door, conscientiously turning the lights off in his wake. There was little risk of the grad students coming back; he’d turned them out to sleep with firm orders not to return before eight a.m. at the earliest. However, he knew there were more eyes on him and the university than he’d like.

And some of those may report back to the SID.
( Read more... )

The whole set up reminded him of a horror movie. Or a myth about dark gods imprisoned below the earth. Maybe if he could just zoom out far enough he'd see the binding sigils and talismans. The "Danger! Do not touch! Unspeakable evil!" warning labels. Because he couldn't leave well enough alone, he stopped back (roughly) in front of the guy and gamely asked, "So what did you do?"

"Do?"

"To deserve this." Zhao Yunlan threw his hands wide to encompass what sure as hell looked like eternal solitary isolation.

"It's what I would have done."

The cop in Yunlan came to a screeching halt. "All right, you're going to have to walk me through that one. Done what, to who?"

"This." The prisoner's head thumped back audibly against the pillar, and Zhao Yunlan thought he might be looking at him through that curtain of hair. The words that followed were faint and heavy with shame, "To my didi."

Anyone who had that much remorse either had a good long damned time to think about what they did . . . or they would never have done it by choice in the first place. Zhao Yunlan firmly told his suspicions to shut the hell up and not interfere with ongoing investigations. "That sounds like some serious sibling rivalry. What did he do?"

"Nothing that mattered."

Zhao Yunlan just stood, both eyebrows hiked skywards, waiting for the other man to elaborate on that blatant lie.

"I failed him."

Da Qing drummed his fingers restlessly on the table, rings flashing in the light, "What if Kunlun didn't die?"

Zhu Hong scowled at him, "That's a corpse--he's not getting any livelier."

Da Qing could feel the wheels turning into place. "We're the only ones who know."

Gelan, who found him, Sang Zan, who she called, then Zhu Hong and Da Qing. Da Qing let a speculative look cross his face as he considered Zhu Hong first: she was a predator, efficient, ruthless in her own way. "Unless you want to step up and take over?"

The way she balked for a split second, eyes going wide before narrowing into an implacable, scornful expression, he knew she didn't want it. Not yet. "I could. Why not you?"

Da Qing drawled, "I'm a lieutenant, I'm not a leader. Too much work."

"Lazy."

"Smart." Da Qing stretched, from toes to fingers reaching for the skylight. "This crew is too rowdy for the likes of me."

Zhu Hong snorted, but it wasn't in disagreement. She looked directly at the other two in the room. "What about you?"

Gelan looked pale, more fragile than usual in the protective arms of her boyfriend. Sang Zan frowned at them, hesitating. He didn't want to let go of her to sign, so he scowled and stammered, "Not me. Too much fighting."

Gelan raised her hand to rest it on his, turning her head up so that he could follow her lips as she spoke, "Ah Zan's right. Kunlun was the only one who could hold the factions together."

Da Qing smirked at the room, "So, we're in agreement that it's best if Kunlun didn't die."

Zhu Hong leaned forward over the table, sharp fingernails threatening to scratch the lacquer wood. "Except he did. How do you plan to fix that?"

Da Qing didn't let himself retreat from the attention, thought of every single time he'd caught Kunlun out of the corner of his eye or heard his voice and nearly said another name instead. Training had saved him from tripping over his tongue, and luckily Kunlun had allowed the familiar nicknames without protest as Da Qing wormed his way into the triad.

"I know someone who can be Kunlun."

(For the . . . spirit of Six Sentence Sunday, if not the proper count.)

“Chief Zhao.” Professor Shen’s voice was sharp, strident, his hand catching Yunlan’s wrist, and Yunlan froze under his cold touch, eyebrows raised. That was a lot more Hei Pao Ge than the good professor usually let show. “I wouldn’t. Do you know what was studied here?”

Yunlan sighed and tucked the lollipop back into his pocket. There were times he regretted not smoking any more. “No, but I’m guessing you do.”

“Not specifically, but we are in the same field. Take care with what you touch, and do not eat until you have washed and changed. There will be biohazards here. And,” Shen Wei deliberately turned his gaze to Guo and Chu on the other side of the room, “this scene is . . . particularly distasteful. I would not show it to those who are unprepared.”

(Cheating because I did not write this today but it's kicking around in the back of my brain for a bit. Also, don't even try to count. >_>)

“Why didn’t you say that you have the skill to transform earlier?”

“It’s …” Shen Wei’s hand twitched, and he forcibly stilled himself, breathing carefully. "It’s not my skill; it’s a gift.“ He paused, long enough that (Kunlun) wondered if that was all he had to say on the subject, until he finished quietly, "I would not use it selfishly.”

(Kunlun) arched his brows, but Shen Wei held his lips firmly pressed together. "If it’s a gift, then isn’t a shame not to use it?“

(Auuuuuuuugh I need a name for this incarnation of Kunlun. Possibly something referencing foothills. A second river. An unexpected spring. Anything.)

This is your obligatory "Hello, I am still alive" post, made in precisely the same reluctant tone as a bear grudgingly rolling out of hibernation.

I am Windlion on . . . AO3, FFnet, deviantart, tumblr, dreamwidth, and pillowfort. Also livejournal but we don't go there any more. I did not catch Twitter in time, and I have not yet taken to it. Where we goin' next, folks?

2016 Year In Review, because I should attempt to keep that going!

( Struggling to remember how to do this! )

All right, let's see if I can keep the trend rolling . . . 2015 in review!

( Read more... )

Current Mood: exanimate

All right, because it is a meme and it is potentially informative thing to look back on~ I shall follow the example set before me and have a go at the year in review.

( Read more... )

Current Music: One Republic "Love Runs Out"

This was rattling around in my brain, so I wrote it. Reblogging from tumblr, as this is a far more permanent locale. I'm not actually feeling that melodramatic today, I just needed the peptalk.

I think a lot of people with some form of depression or anxiety do this thing where we borrow happiness. We give ourselves conditional happiness, or at least, we tell ourselves that x + y = happy. We find things, be it a favored food or song or media or item, and we tell ourselves, if I’ve done x, if I’ve endured through some goal, I can have y. That will be our reward. It might not be the same thing as being actually happy but we’ve won our treat, and that should make us happy, right?

And sometimes, it works. It might not be something that anyone else would recognize as a reward, or value, or even see the point of. But you’ve earned it, however you had to in your brain, so you get Your One Thing. Your tiny bit of happiness.

And that is good. As good as you get.

So this is my reminder to myself, to everyone else who knows how this goes, that it is okay to beg, borrow, and (hopefully not but who am I to judge) steal, to do what you have to in order to have Your One Thing that will help keep the demons at bay just that little bit longer. Your tiny bit of happy is for you, no one else, and no one else should judge what it is that you need to do to keep going. Don’t let them take it away from you.

Keep your happy. You’ve earned it.

This time, Foxfire goes under the microscope. I threw in a few questions of my own at the end because this quiz feels a bit repetitive in some respects. I think they're planning more on readers prompting rather than some idiot plowing through the whole list. XD;;

Foxfire Five-Steps-From-the-Sun

( Take two! )

So I found the Excessively Detailed Headcanon Meme and set it aside as something I wanted to do eventually, and today, I tackled it for Rafe~ And suddenly I discovered, how many ways can I say "Prim, proper, somewhat anal retentive, with little to no life?" I'm going to have to do Foxfire next just so that the comparison is blindingly obvious. I feel like they repeat a lot more here than they could have; maybe I'll switch out some of the questions for things that are more exciting or cover fresh ground. XD

Rafael DeCrescenza:

( In excruciating detail! )

I posted this on tumblr awhile back and forgot about putting it here~ I haven't been working on writing at all lately, but I really should. -_-; On the upside, I made a Rafe as my starter character for FF14, and there's hope that a Foxfire may follow sometime. At the very least I'm having fun RPing Rafe, to the extent that FF14 is able. (Rafe's a Wild Wood Elezen (read: elf), stupid tall, widows peak and all, resident of stiff-necked and divided Gridania. He starts out wishing to be a Wood Wailer as an archer, but finds he does have a regrettable affinity for setting things on fire, so he seeks training as a mage in Ul'Dah, even though the corruption in that city makes his skin crawl. Foxfire, when he joins the scene, is going to be an arcanist/summoner coming out of the cheerfully piratical and loose-moraled Limsa Lominsa. Look, these things happen.) And it does keep the characters fresh in my mind, even if I have to keep canon and RPG separate. . .

This is a wee chunk of canon backstory for Rafael from before the story begins, and is noteworthy for having been written on Twig and Lunar's couch when I visited Boston. :D Old cities are good for writing old cities.

( The Garrett )

(I love how I find errors whenever I reread things. Augh. Suffice to say I will deal with the wonky numbers at another time. Names are, as always, bullshitted on the spot. The fun thing is that Sarvan did not really exist before I started this, beyond the thought that Rafe's brother's in-laws are factors/distributors in the city, and that they're all pretty fiery lively people. :D)

I keep attempting to poke at this thing for my "I can't believe it's not Nano" - wherein the Nano is implied because any time I attempt to commit to something, that does horrible terrible no good things to my inspiration/ability to function. I don't think I've fooled my brain, though, because this has been a stone-cold son of a bitch to actually get anything down for. Instead I keep getting heaps and heaps of back story and details.

So this is the kind of detail I keep getting. *makes faces* Elements are kind of a big thing here; not so much Avatar-ish, but it has a lot to do with how their magic works. A person might be anywhere on a spectrum between the four traditional points, with metal being the midpoint between earth and fire, lightning (energy) between fire and air, storm (weather) between air and water, and wood between water and earth. Someone could reasonably expect to be the same alignment as the rest of their family. Sarassa, while not being a magic-using country, still considers alignments the same way you’d think of a personality test or zodiac sign.

( Rafael vs The Sea )

( Foxfire vs Alignment )

Foxfire basically showed up and went " I named myself after swamp gas! This is how I roll." So yes, word of warning that all the names are so bullshitted. Especially the locations. (It goes country - Sarassa, state/region - Ciant, city - Paracen.) And even then I catch myself spelling them wrong so AHAHAHA internal consistency what internal consistency? Sarassa is basically my fantasy Italy/Greece Mediterranean equivalent. You want the history of Sarassa, I can give you that! I can tell you what the city is like, how the three Watches of the Guard generally operate, how this poor bastard Rafe has generally spent any given year of his life. . . ALL OF THAT. Write you a coherent story involving the aftermath of foreign interests and prejudice intersecting with magic and mayhem, well, I'm afraid I'm fresh out. Augh.

The story is supposed to be: Rafael's a stubborn, stiff-necked, ill-favored Lieutenant of the Night Watch! Foxfire is a wastrel dilettante being pressed into service as an envoy from the magic-using country everyone hates and fears! THEY FIGHT CRIME! (And stop wars.)

Current Mood: frustrated

Guess what I did this evening! :D I wrote out the premise and breakdown of Odin's Children~ I am so ashamed that ALMOST NONE OF THIS made it through in the webcomic before it shut down. So much world-building. So much.

None of this is discussing what happens directly in the story, but it does bring us up to speed with where the story starts from. The backstory would obviously be released much more slowly in story, rather than info-dumping like this. In the same vein, I also did a run-through of stats and bios for a bunch of the mains who came to mind, but I'm debating posting that as backstory and in-depth personality breakdowns are somewhat spoilery by nature.

( Infodump ahoy! )

There's a questions for writers meme floating around on tumblr, especially regarding what got you started and what your first story really was. This got me thinking, and another writer posted that she thought what got her started writing was really what she was reading, and that the two go hand in hand. I concur! So I then set forth to chronicle how I became addicted to the written word.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: nostalgic

So sometimes I feel in the mood to poke my original characters. This is for an unspecified urban fantasy world of mine, where I basically have a ton of different characters and their own stories whom I can pretend are all co-existing in the same world. A fairly alarming number of them come from dreams. I think the progenitor story is well over a decade old by now. Apparently I had this idea almost exactly three years ago! And it decided it wanted to be poked at today. It's more character building than anything else, a little slow exploration.

And what might be a recruitment.

I kind of love that while I had the character concept in mind before, she wasn't actually a person with any sort of details until I started putting words together. Then it comes out that she's named Rhea, is a plump twenty-something mixed race woman of indeterminate queerness, rooming with a cheerful morning person Asian girl she met in college. These things happen.

Also in this universe are, notably, the blind arbiter, the okashira maitre'd and the restaurant ninjas, the journeyman sorcerer and the unicorn, the reality-challenged Seer, the changeling child and his foster-fae counterpart, and even possibly a very disgruntled accountant. (The sorcerer waits tables at the ninja restaurant for cash, the arbiter judges cases from the police detectives who may or may not be a Pixie and Minotaur, no one wants to admit to being even distantly related to the accountant but possibly the organization he encounters has tendrils that reach into all of the above. Certainly they'd be happy to employ one misplaced unicorn from Summer. *jazzhands* It's all connected!)

( The Blind Arbiter )

Sah, I have an Otakon recap that has sat for over a week in-progress; not sure I need to write it up properly now given so much time has passed. Suffice to say, it was good! Hotel was surprisingly swank! Food was delicious! The Mews were awesome! Amusing to note, I found myself using nonsense filler words for effect and emoting . . . the way I tend to around long-time friends. So either they automatically slotted into that "I should have known you forever" space in my head or I was just that sleep-deprived. XD They definitely got me unfiltered; it was like a four-day-long sleep over.

The other thing to shake out of Otakon is my inspiration. I'd initially gone hoping to connect with the RotG fandom; I knew two other RotG authors at least were going, amongst other fans and cosplayers. What actually happened is that . . . I used up my bravery just introducing myself to the authors, and didn't have anything left over to manage an actual conversation with. It was extremely awkward. And I basically retreated immediately in both cases. *sigh* The more time goes by, the more I feel like I don't belong in the fandom any more, and it's not resonating with me as much. There's still an active fandom, but I'm not on the right wavelength with them. And that's okay. They're not wrong. But it's not what I'm interested in, it's not what I was writing. I don't think anyone will care that much either way whether I write more for RotG or not. I don't like to abandon things and I'll never say never, but right now, it's not happening.

What I did get a kick in the pants for is Odin's Children, as the Mews actually remembered and recognized it. XD That just . . . I floundered for awhile, because - MY OCS. THE TERRIBLE OLD ART WORK. THEY REMEMBERED IT FONDLY. They probably heard more than they wanted to about it for the rest of the con because that stirred up the old characters. While I had Mr. Feather Mullet Schlagger on my brain the most at the con, Sabre has been the most talkative for me this week.

So without further ado-

( some writing~ )

I know this is a long shot, but is anyone headed to Otakon with potential floor-crashing space? I am totally willing to pay my way, but dropping $400 on a room for just me for the weekend is downright stupid and not happening.

I have to figure out in the next few days if I should definitely put in for vacation time or just let it go. . . I know I'll save a lot of money if I don't go. And awkward interactions with strangers, not really good incentive.

Current Music: crickets

Beware, pontificating below. I should probably not be allowed to blog after sane people go to bed.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: drained

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windlion

July 2019

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