Tikua Sidodu The Boar of Justice

Thorns, one of the great cities of the Threshold and a strong independant ally of the Realm.  You knew in your heart that you and your fellow citizens were that way and that is what you grew up believing.  The culture and the architecture was peerless and its military might was close to par with the Realm and Lookshy, if not in numbers, than in training.  Son of a nobleman you were given the best schooling and there was great hopes that you would exalt like many of your other kin, including three of your six siblings; you didn’t, but that was not a reflection on yourself only an accident of luck, so you told yourself.  You trained hard to prove to the Dragons that they were wrong.  Family connections got you into the House of Swords, the best school out side of the Realm, but it was your determinism and gal that got you top honours among the unexalted and even honours above some of the Dragon Blooded too, including your brother.

When the call went out that Thorns was seeking to expand its territory to match its strength and glory, you were the first to sign up, and you were given a commission immediately.  You were hoping for a Scale Lord commission, highest that a mortal was allowed, but you were instead passed up for this and given a commission as an adjunct to a Winglord.  You were disappointed and you angrily questioned your parents if they had pulled strings to keep you out of the fight, but soon it became clear that it was your old Headmaster that had made the arrangement.  He told you that he had a sixth sense about these things and he told you the field was not where you were meant to die.  What ever his intentions were, you saw a lot of combat.  Your wing was in the thick of battle for most of the war.  

The towns of the Marukan fell before you.  Your wing sacked and destroyed the walled town of Mardur and its slaughter.  You were in the first ranks when you marched into Celeren unopposed.  And you fought in the battle outside Deren’s Ford and claimed booty for your household.  It was not all glory though, you also learned the truth of this war, that the Realm was using Thorns as a proxy to fight against the might of the River Provinces and Lookshy.  The supplies were from the Realm and the planning sessions were run by old Dragon Blooded who cared nothing for the City-State of Thorns.  It was them that pressed the whole forces into battle the combined forces of the Confederacy of the River Provinces.  You were outnumbered two to one, but the Realm was supplying Essence Cannons and an Auxiliary unit of Warstriders.

You lost.

You were severely wounded and taken captive.  The Warstriders, abandoned your forces and the Realm Soldiers were elsewhere.  The defeat of THorns was complete.  Less than one in ten of its soldiers survived the war.  The Libraries, Academies and Royal houses were looted and burned.  The great doors of Thorns were torn asunder and as part of the treaty they were not allowed to rehang them for five years.  Thorns was not allowed to raise any army for that time and its fleets were torched, the harbour destroyed.  The Realm was safely away and unhurt.  True, they did flood the city with humanitarian aid, but nothing else.  You returned to your city, a shell of your former self and scarred horribly, just like your city.  

Your recovery was slow, just like the city’s.  You are the only surviving child of your father’s household, but you did not take your place there, in the place that was offered.  You took your place in the Immaculate Order as an itinerant monk and you prayed for atonement for yourself and for your city.  As you devoted yourself to the to the betterment of your soul the city regained its feet.  Late last year, your years of prayer and contemplation were rewarded by a voice, but not from the Immaculate Dragons, but from the God above even them, The Unconquered Sun.  “Son of Thorns”, the voice spoke, “Son of Creation, look around you and open your eyes.  The failure of Thorns is a reflection of Creation.  Rise up, my Son, and act.  See the suffering around you and end it.  Fight for Creation against my enemies and those that would see it end.  Act!”  Your quiet solitude and prayer in the darkness was broken by a light so pure that you could see for the first time how the Realm had broken Thorns and how it had caused a crack to form in Creation.  You saw that good men and women sat by and let it happen for fear, but mostly for their own profit.  You saw the injuries of the world and felt them.  You saw how it had been in the First Age, when even the poorest beggar had a life style better than most nobles.

You acted.

When you acted, they attacked you.  When you acted they called you Anathema.  When they attacked you you killed them, you cleansed the rotting meat from the wound of Thorns and Creation, and you felt better.  Then you ran, not out of fear, but out of duty, dying in Thorns at the hands of the Immaculate Order would not help the World at large and it would not help the people in the long term.  The Nameless Wolf picked you up and brought you to Nowhere, and the Cult of the Illuminated, the upstart reflection of the Immaculate Order.  You saw this as what it was, a place to grow strong and learn to fight the problems that plague Creation.

And it is a place to start and to act.

Zenith Caste

If Great Forks could be considered to have mean streets, it was these that you were born on.  It was in the North Quarter, and you were the seventh son of a street sweeper and a fruit vendor.  Your home was pressed between two wealthy merchant’s slave pens; technically each of the slaves had more room than the people in your family did, but you were free and they were not, so you always could hold your head high.  You could read too, but then so could they.  There were people less worse off than you, but not too many.  Seven was a lucky number and you were born on the 400th year since the founding of the city, but you were also the thirteenth child too; three times lucky, but not all of it good.

Lucky Leaf you were known for the first part of your life, going where the winds blew you and trusting to your luck.  Sometimes the winds blew you into a dark alley or into a tavern brawl you could not win, but mostly it blew you into good fortune.  You studied in school and you learned what you could and when the winds stopped you found yourself on the doorstep of the great temple to Spinner of Glorious Tales or Talespinner.  For a half dozen years the wind blew you nowhere and you studied and prayed.  You met your wife and married her and over the course of time she bore you three fine children and three also being a lucky number, you stopped there.  The wind picked you up then and moved you and your family to a different place.  The vocation of telling stories became your bread and butter and you grew wealthy from it.  You children were born in the opulence of the Temple District, but they were raised in the shadows of one of the great playhouses, yours.  

As lucky as a Leaf became a turn of phrase for awhile and you slowly grew old.  You remained the picture of health, money can't buy happiness, but it can afford you the very best of drugs for staving off the effects of aging.  You forgot that luck can go both ways and in your 53rd year you were reminded of this fact quite harshly.  FIrst, your wife sickened and died of an illness suddenly.  Second, all of your children, with promising careers in the military, died in the Battle of Mishaka against Thorns.  Lastly, a freak gust of wind overturned a lamp in your playhouse and the building was consumed in flames.  It was all just bad luck, the illness was sudden and unexpected, the battle losses were felt across the city, 100 returned from a force of 3000, and the fire.  Your fortune was lost paying fines and families for people and property lost in the fire.

That was nine years ago.  Since then you have taken up your old vocation as a thespian, but this time travelling Creation attached to Guild Caravans.  It has been a hard end to your long life, but it has brought a measure of happiness back to your life, but the days are getting harder for you: the heat of Summer makes breathing difficult, but the cold of Winter cuts through to the bone and when it rains your joints hurt something fierce.  It is at night that you feel most alive, a new village and a new crowd where you can once again take the stage and tell great tales about King Justier with Three Fingers, The Prince and the Piper, or Three Gods in a Fountain.  Nine years after the tragic year you were happy again.

The day you realised that you made your own luck, started out as any other day.  The caravan was just outside a small village north of Cho-Huloth and the caravan was going to spend the night there.  Trading in the village was not especially good but the caravan master wanted to be well rested for the next leg of the journey to Chaya, so we were going to stay the night and there was an opportunity to practise a play before a new audience.  The first act went well and the second was well underway when the disturbance blew into town on a foul wind.  They were marauding Rakasha or Fair Folk in the common vernacular and they had come to feast on the villagers.

The guards were mismatched, the villagers more so and we the players had only prop swords, so it was clear that if we fought we would die or wish that we had.  I noticed then a small glimmer of a chance, the body language of the beasts was that of curiosity.  

Damn them!  Let the Play go on!  

Whether by inexperience or because the lanterns lighting the stage, my fellows did not notice a thing.  The play was coming to a conclusion and one of the Fair Folk joined you on the stage.  He was tall and regal looking; he was close to seven feet tall, dressed in fine silk robes with a light suit of white armour with a sword made of the same white metal, upon his head was a thin circlet of silver, but it was the way he held himself that struck you most as regal.  He appeared not to like the way the play was ending.  The younger players stumbled with the break in the lines of the play and they faltered as the Fae delivered a line that was not in the play.  The illusion that the play had created was about to fail and then the Fair Folk would slaughter everyone.  Taking the initiative you moved on to the stage and began to deliver an improvisational soliloquy to counter the move of the Rakasha Lord.

The battle of words was one sided from the beginning, but still you fought on using the words of your craft to create a contrasting picture to the idea that the Fae Lord created, but your words were like paper against steel.  As you faltered from his onslaught, your mind cleared, like a ray of sunshine breaking through a cloudy day.  “Leaf, I, The Unconquered Sun, Exalt you.  Oppose the enemies of Creation and subdue them.”  You stood tall then, the infirmities of age left you, and strength returned to your voice.  

Inhaling deeply, your mind cleared of the cobweb of words and the speech you uttered staggered your foe.  Your quick series of words lashed him and brought him low.  When he realised his failure, he gripped his blade and drew it forth.  Your anger grew at his insolence, your new caste mark glowed and light blasted him as you parried his blow with your sword of wood.  A few blasts into the crowd dispersed the rest and the spell lifted from the crowd.  

Since then things have been better, you know now that luck does not happen, it is made.  As such you have to be careful or you will attract bad luck.  Making sure the lamps are all out before closing down; things like that.  Making sure the Dragon Blooded don't hear about your exploits and send a Wyld Hunt to check you out . . .

Teach me?

The side benefit of a really early layoff is that it gives me a chance to throw myself back into Education.  While I write resumes and cover letters for jobs there are other jobs and cover letters I could be writing, the ones that give me a more permanent job an teaching job.  Permanent, what a laugh!  There is not permanent job these days, even in teaching.  

but my girlfriend has confidence in my abilities.  I do not, except I do; it is my confidence in expressing my abilities and pushing myself.  I have experience landscaping, but not in leading a team.  I have knowledge of teaching but little experience infront of a class.  I do have some though in both cases.  I learned to excel in both, but in my own way.  My classes tend to be noisier than the others, but that is because I encourage class discussion and less individual work.  In landscaping I am most comfortable in planting than anything else and in both cases in one on one instruction, but I can do small groups too.

Last year I had a boss that said to me, okay you are in charge while I get more plants.  And her was gone for five hours.  I had to tell the workers how to plant things, yes roots down green up, but it is more than that.  There was a plan and I was uncomfortable with that plan as everything had to be in lines and everything was pressed too close together, but I managed.  I taught them to use sight lines to make everything straight and I showed them how to place things and to check their work.  I corrected their work, but more I participated beside them and I gave them the impression that I thought they were competent to leave without supervision.  I showed taught them about the face of a plant how most perrenials and shrubs had a back side or many backsides and they had to be turned so that they faced the correct way.  And I taught them that you could plant something too deep or not deep enough and that some plants go in rows and other do not.  When I taught them how to plant something and how to check, how to make sure the plant was facing the correct way, they developed pride in their work.  I asked them their opinion as to how a plant should go, making them think.  I did not tell them the answer, but let them tell me.  

Most of those people I never worked with before that day and some of the others took the lessons I taught them to other job sites.  

I want to be a paid teacher, but I am already a teacher already.  I want to teach in a formal setting and wear a tie with a dress shirt.  I want to teach science and words and math, but I don't want to teach music and gym class but I will, I will do a lot of it in math class, language class and math class, science too—just to avoid the gymnasium and the music room.  

The confidence that my girlfriend sees is there, it is hidden by experience and doubt, but it is there aching to explode out.

The hungry and the starving companies

I have learned the lesson of working for a Twilight Landscape company.  Well I have been taught the lesson, if I learned it we shall see.  Then again when you go out and get a job how can you tell if one is a Twilight company or not until you work there.  

What is a twilight company?  Well it is a company that has all it needs and is not looking to expand.  It generally believes that it is the best out there and will continue to believe that.  It does not go out looking for work but sits back waiting for it to land in its lap.  This strategy works in most markets for a while, but it fails eventually depending on the market.  In BigSmoke it fails because the market is saturated and there is little room for expansion; every client that is lured away by a less expensive newer company is a lost opportunity that may never come back.  In Smallville, where the market is growing faster than the existing companies can fill e orders they survive, but they will lose out eventually.

Of course there are dangers in Hungry Companies too.  Some are new and expanding.  These companies may not survive the season or even the next five years.  They may not have continuos work and they may die.  Some hungry companies are businesses that have been around for a while and are established.  They push and have work from past people and word of mouth, every job they do they are using it to expand.  They are not quite the largest people on the block but they are growing and want to be that big fish one day.

It is not fun to work for a twilight company because they can shed you as I was shed when things are tough.  The company was not looking for work, so when work was thin there was no need of the new employees.  The last company I worked for was shrinking, lost twenty percent of their clients in the last year, that meant that they lost twenty percent of their steady work.  I knew, I felt it was coming because we were going to work sites and I was wondering why there was four workers for a three man job.  Well now I know.

Willfully Asexual?

I was trying to figure it out yesterday.  I was walking in the city heat looking around there were a lot of people milling around and most of them were young people.  More than half of them were women or girls, but being make I may have only noticed the girls and not the men.  This, I am told, is perfectly natural for men.  There were women with large busts and tight clothing, women with plunging necklines, women wearing tank tops, women wearing just bras and there were women in short shorts or mini mini skirts.  

I was looking at all these girls, mostly in their twenties but some clearly younger.  I was looking at them and seeing their beauty and not feeling anything at all.  They were attractive, they were comely, and I was not interested.  

This, I realized, is demiromantic for you; seeing the beauty around you and not being interested in at all.  I was interested in that they were pretty women.  But not interested in sleeping with them.  It is true, I have a girlfriend, but it has always been that way, or has it?

Did I realize years ago that girls might not want strangers leering at them and pawing at them with their eyes and decide that I was not going to do that and because of e nature that is me, that desired behaviour became locked and part of me.  Could that be it?  Could I be on the Asexual Spectrum because of an act of will?  

Dangers of love

I had a difficult twenty-four hours this week, really difficult.  It started out with my girlfriend telling me that she was in-love with me and did not just love me.  The active form of love.  I have been actively struggling against falling in-love with her, as had she, but had succumbed.  Not that the state is a horrible state, it IS the most wonderful of states, but it is irrational at times and can be dangerous.  I really want to be in-love with her too, but I want to be level headed with her and everything because of her situation, married with children.  

She asked me for more involvement in my life and I consented.  There are things in my life that I find difficulty doing and her help would be appreciated.  But I could not ask her, because I am fiercely independent, but I was torn between that and my real love for her, deep genuine love and a desire to see her happy.  So I asked her to help me find a place to live and a better job.  She has a stake in where I live now, she travels to where I live to be with me.  I don't want to be inaccessible to her so it is important that my new place be close to work and easy for her to travel too.  And work, landscaping is fun and hard work and the hard work part damages the body.  I am big and strong, but I have tendinitis in my shoulder and both arms.  Rest is the only cure and that means no landscaping, which means that my arms won't get better while I work.  

I love some aspects of landscaping more than others and I love helping people with problems.  I get into conversations with regular people about plants and I realize how little they know and how much I can help them.  I get into conversations with landscapers who have more experience than me and I realize how little they know too.   I find that last part so strange!

So she did both.  She asked me if I would consider being a mail carrier, a Mailman and I said I would, but I thought they were hard jobs to get, but she told me that the turnover rate was very high.  Most people don't last a week.  And she came over and helped me look for a place to live, and to soften the blow.

Soften the blow.  You see my land lady called me distressed a few weeks ago and told me this sad story that she had family coming to immigrate and the place she was renovating was very behind schedule and she had to evict all the tenants of the house I was living in to provide space for them.  It is the only way that a landlord is allowed to evict people quickly no questions asked in Ontario.  So I had to look for a new place to live.  My girlfriend and I went through the list of places to rent in the area and one of them was my room and the room was available as soon as I vacated it for her family members.  It felt like a stab in my gut.  She had lied to me and tried to make me sorry for her predicament to get me out quietly, but then unabashedly posted the room up for rent again where I could see it.  

The next day I was fired from work.  Laid off is the correct term, due to lack of work.  I made it very easy on them because I had seen the signs already and my mind is very pessimistic and I feel like every day I am on trial at work.  There has been a drought this spring and summer and things have not been growing.  They have been dying actually.  And people don't want to start new projects when things are dying.  Grass does not need to be cut if it does not grow, but it still hurt.  I was very light and happy for the next twelve hours.  I thought of painting words for the next tenant on the ceiling of my room with glow in the dark paint, "The Landlord enters this room when you are not here." and "the Landlord paws through your stuff when you are not here." and "This room does not meet the Fire Code, it is an illegal rooming house." and "If you stay here too long the Landlord will tell you that she needs the room for family and you have to leave. She is a liar." all of it true.  

Then on Saturday, around 2am my lack of depression broke a part.  My girlfriend was beside me, her admission of being in love with me and not her husband broke her restlessness and she slept beside me for the first time.  Slept.  But my happiness that had arrived in the Winter and which had been sustained by She-Who-Lay-Beside-Me, had broken and I don't know when the happiness will return.

But she is doing a great job.  She arranged with her husband that I could stay with her, in their house, with their children.  And she got past my trepidation.  They way she tells it, she had a harder time convincing me to do it, than her husband and her kids.  I am not convinced, yet.  I think it is the worst idea in the entire world.  She came up with a list of rules that I would have to follow that were more severe than her husband would have imposed, like no sex when ever there is anyone else in the house.  No public intimacy at all.  And the scariest one, I had to participate in eating dinner with the family!  I warned her that I would disappear.  But I also thought that the threat of living with her and her family would push me harder to get a job and find a new place to live.

I told her that this could be the end of our relationship.  Not because she would stop loving me or I her, but because in the rules of their open marriage, their hearts would remain true to each other and hers has not.  People think that they can hide stuff like that from people, but they can't.  They can hide it from their love, but not from others.  It is like looking at a tornado; if the tornado is heading straight at you you can't see it move (away from you too), but if you are looking at it from the side, you can't help but see it.  When I have been in-love, everyone sees it except the person who I love, unless they know.  The attention I throw at them is visible to others and I think I have been good at hiding it; I am not and I have had a lot of experience being in-love.  

I worry.  I love her and I don't want it to end.  I love her and I know what it is like to be in-love and to lose it—I don't want her to be hurt that way, but I am doing it anyway.

Organic growth: tale of a road

The character of a city can be changed with one or two elements.  Sidewalks and fences.  Commercial and Residential integration.  

Yesterday I traveled a considerable length of a road that resides in a few cities  in Southern Ontario.  I rode my bike in two cities and I was able to see how the road looked in both cities and how the neighbourhood felt.  The road in question was Burnanthrope.  Like many roads and streets that travel east to west, west to east, Burnantrope originates in BigSmoke.  I have seen how this road dies, it letters out fifty kilometers away or more north of LittleSmoke, but I would not be too surprised if it still existed in some form a hundred kilometers to the west.  People add to roads forever.  In LittleSmoke it is fenced in farm fields intersecting with other country roads, it is a little better than a dirt track.  I imagine that it was like that in MiserySaga a hundred years ago and like that in BigSmoke too.  Now, though, it is different.  In MiserySaga it is a four to six lane thoroughfare through the city.  

MiserySaga, it is a Sad Story, like most Suburbs it was planned and it is lifeless.  The neighbourhoods are planned: this square has people's houses, this square has commercial shopping options, this square is where people work.  It does not work.  The squares are separated by layers of defence against integration.  There is the center of wide roadway.  Beside the road on both sides is a two meter strip of grass, sometimes it widens to five or ten meters of grass.  Beside that is a strip of concrete sidewalk, sometimes there is an asphalt bicycle trail, that the locals know about but it is not regular and it appears and disappears without warning—I suspect it abuts residential blocks and disappears with them.  On the other side of the pedestrian corridor is another two meter stretch of grass and then a fence.  The fence depends on the block, wood fencing denotes a residential block, brick and iron announces a commercial or industrial zone.  The Residential block faces away from the roadway, the residential zone is accessed by a road that loops through it with a few crescents and courts off of it to fill in the gaps.  The houses face these roads but they are closed off too; they are miniature fortresses that stand alone and apart.  The people are either away at one of the other zones of commercial enterprise or hold up inside living in fear that some stranger will try to talk with them.

There are lots of parking in the commercial zones as everyone must drive, because the walls and the regulated entrances into the blocks and the distance from the commercial zones and let's face it, not every store is located as close as others.  So the stores are all surrounded by two levels of parking spots, a fence, two layers of lawn strips a sidewalk and the road.  There is also a sidewalk on the outside of the stores.

Occasionally there is a block for nature.  It might be a park that is designed for the people, who hide in their homes or it is a too small wild area with paths to comfort the people hiding in their houses.  These spaces are places to go if you want to be alone, because you will be.  Unless you have dog or want to see a dog, then you will see people walking there dogs here.  

This is the nature of Burnanthrope in MiserySaga.

I crossed a bridge into BigSmoke and suddenly everything was different: everything was pressed closer.  The road was still two lanes in both direction but the strips of lawn had disappeared, the sidewalk was pressed against the roadway and the otherside were houses and commercial spaces with no fences.  The mono devoted spaces were gone.  The houses faced the world not turned into their communities.  There were people walking the sidewalks.  Not a lot, because I was travelling at the dinner hour, but I saw more people on the sidewalks that the entire trip through MiserySaga, less cars on the road too. 

The feel was different.  The air was different about the community, it felt like a community.  People moving freely about it.  But I will not lie about it either.  Off the street onto the ancillary streets they were house filled too and I did not travel down them.  When I had to leave Burnanthrope, it was on to a residential thoroughfare that felt more like MiserySaga, sans the fences and the controlled accesses.  Public transit was more present too.  

What I said about Burnanthrope, Should not be applied to all of MiserySaga.  I told you it was a Sad Story.  Misery Saga is a tale of integration and amalgamation.  It is the story of halfa dozen to a dozen smaller communities becoming one city and the spaces inbetween being filled with planned spaces while the organic towns began to lose identity.  The organic towns are still there, with their main streets and their open residential areas with integrated commercial stores, with parks that people travel in and play in without having to walk a dog.  Spaces that are just as old as the many small communities in BigSmoke, all unplanned.  There are planned spaces in BigSmoke too, they are as lifeless as the planned spaces anywhere else, but they are smaller.  That is the way of the bigger central city, more organic growth for longer.