Reflected Tarnished Silver

Rhiannon Held wrote this book, actually she wrote more than one book, three that I know of.  So, I have not read Twilight, nor will I read twilight, because Vampires do not 'Glisten' in sunlight in my world.  Ever since twilight came out, there has been a Twilight-Affect on all supernatural creature books  that have come out.  They can't be all like Twilight, but enough are.  So I have been staying away from those type of books lately.  Really, I think if Twilight came out before Anne Rice, I would not have read her, and that might have been a good thing.

Rhiannon Held wrote a book called Silver.  Guess what it is about?  It is not bad though, it is actually pretty good.  It is set in this world at this time and there is no apology and certainly no explaining what these people are.  Everyone in the book is one of these creatures and to them they are normal, so why would they need to explain themselves? 

In the Second book, called Tarnished, there is a normal human as a character, so now there needs to be some explanation.  Because a normal human can only pick so much up from a group of these people and might actually need someone to tell them something.  This is fine, because the first book treats the audience as a member of this group of people, so we have been able to pick up what these people are, but now we can learn things about them that are not evident by what they do and say to each other.

In the first book we learn about their culture and their mythology, or is it a mythology at all or is it truth?  

Andrew Dare is the enforcer for his Alpha.  And his job as enforcer is to track down and confront individuals who stray into their territory uninvited.  He also has to deal with any threats first hand.  As the enforcer for the Roanoke territory he is a very feared individual, more so because of his past.  Ten years ago when he lived in Europe his wife was murdered and he hunted down her murderers and wiped them out, all seven of them.  That was not the worst of it though. 

A strange woman is being hunted by something far worse than Dare.  It is so bad that it has driven her insane and she has forgotten her name.  Dare finds her and resolves that as part of his job he needs to find out who she is, where she is from and who is hunting her.

Did you guess that hey are Werewolves?  The third book, Reflected, comes out sometime this year.

Generally who's who in Exalted

Normally I would start again with the story of the Nameless, but perhaps you have been following the story and you don't know the game.  I have been sort of explaining it as I go along, but there is a lot so I thought I would take some time to explain a few little things. Okay big things.

1. Fair Folk

These are the First.  When the Primordials suddenly appeared out of the random possibility of the Wyld and created Creation there were intelligences outside of this static creation that were against it because it never changed and creatures of the Wyld are about change.  There are two sets of creatures, the true Wyld which have no form and want to destroy all static forms.  The second kind are the first kind that invaded Creation and the very act of invading it were given form and they liked it.  The first type hated the second type because it has form.  The second kind lives on the shores of creation, in the shallows, because the edge of creation in the First Age was a sharp line, but in the eroded Second Age, it is a gradation.  The Fair Folk are all very good looking, or perfectly horribly looking.  They are completely alien and live on plot, that is the plot of a story of their own creation.  Outside of Creation they need imagination to survive and they will strip it from Humans.  Because Creation has been weakened in the Second Age, it requires belief to continue to exist and so the depopulated regions are rife with Fair Folk.

2. Death Lords and the Underworld

Before the First Age, when primitive people died, their souls were reborn into new bodies or were kept in storage until they could be used.  When the Gods Rebelled against the Primordials the fight was bad, some of the Primordials died.  When the first Primordial died, there was no place for them to go, but viola, their soul went somewhere, where the other souls went, but the container was too little for their soul so the underworld was created.  The Underworld is a mirror of Creation, each mountain and each island was mirrored there.  Important towns were mirrored there but it was empty of everything living and all the souls as well.  After the that great war, occasionally people died with unresolved issues and their souls lingered in this new underworld.  The great disasters that occurred when the First Age Solar Exalted were murdered and the subsequent failure of creation caused hundreds of millions of souls to linger in the underworld.  When some of the First Age Solar Exalted died some of them were angry that they were murdered and the dead Primordials contacted them, because their existence was torture and they could not cease to exist until Creation ceased to exist, so they contacted these powerful ghosts and a few accepted greater power in exchange for a promise to destroy Creation.  

A few places in the world are severely damaged, too much death and not enough life happened in certain areas, cities with millions of people died, or millions of people were butchered and the edge of creation began to blend with the Underworld.  Ghosts and other things could enter creation through these weak points.  Walking through these Shadowlands is very dangerous, but exiting them can be even worse.  Exiting a shadowlands at night will leave you in the Underworld and in creation in the day.  A Shadowlands can be walled off with a line of salt or a line of germinating grain and they can be shrunk by doing life affirming things and grown by killing and murdering in or near them.

When the Solar Souls were released, the Death Lords got one third of them and converted them into Death Knights which are the mirror of Solar Exalted.

3. Dragon Blooded

When the Gods Decided to revolt against the Primordials, they created generals and great warriors, the Solar Exalted, and battle lords for the Generals, the Lunar Exalted, they created overseers that could look over creation and guide the battles and spy on the enemy from affair, the Sidereal Exalted and the soldiers, the footmen, the vast number of all the Exalted, millions in number more sturdy than regular Humans but much weaker than the others.  Their exaltation is the only one that is hereditary, so there is a genetic component, but mystically the more diffuse the stock the lower quality of the exalt.  They are called Dragon Blooded in the Second Age, in the First, they were called Terrestrial Exalted.  They are split into the five elements, Fire, Water, Earth, Air and Wood.  Their natures are similar to their elements.  Dragon Blooded live longer than humans, about 300-400 years but potentially 50% more than this.  They can use Jade as a magical material to make awesome artifacts that they can use, each element has a specific colour of jade they can use. 

4. Lunar Exalted

When the Solar Exalted were created, Luna was worried that they were too powerful and would overwhelm everything and every one.  Since She was the second most powerful God, she created the Lunar Exalted to be their mates and their counterpart.  They balanced the Solars.  They could change their shapes and assume other forms, they were bodyguards, advisors and lovers of the Solars.  They were battlers.  There were only three hundred in number in all of Creation but their impact was great.  When the Dragon blooded overthrew the Solars, the Lunars fled Creation to the Wyld, where they changed to survive.  Originally there were five castes, to match the Five Castes of the Solars, but the Wyld changed them and they became three castes, Full Moon, Changing Moon and No Moon.  They also received tattoos made of the magical Moonsilver that fixed their forms in the Wyld.   They are hunted by the Dragon Blooded when they can be found, but they are truly a force of nature when they are possessed, they have a war form that is not human and not animal but somewhere in between and quite a bit more powerful than either.   they can live for about five thousand years.

5. Sidereal Exalted

These are the Exalts of the Maidens, the wandering stars on the constellations.  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Five maidens and five castes.  There are only one hundred of these exalts and they are weaker than in many ways than either the Solars or the Lunars.  But they are the planners and the observers of Creation and the Loom of Fate.  It is because of their role, that they foresaw a great cataclysm in the future a time when Creation would end maybe.  This was just before the end of the First Age and indeed it ended because of them.  Three groups formed and argued about the best way to prevent the end of everything.  The Gold Faction sought to contact the Solars and hope that they could reform their destructive ways and creation would continue at the same great way.  The smallest Faction belied that the Lunars could save creation, the Silver Faction.  The largest Faction was the Bronze Faction who advocated killing the Solars and imprisoning their souls to prevent reincarnation and letting the great world fall into a lesser age, but one that would weather the destruction.  This Faction won out and they organized the murder of the Solar Exalted, some of the Gold Faction was murdered too.  The Usurpation was a very bloody affair, 90% of the Solars were wiped out in the first five days, but the cost was very high.  In the battle, over a million Dragon Blooded perished and hundreds of millions of mortals.  Entire nations died when the seas crashed over them and drowned them, the battle ruined the capital city, a city of wonder that had a hundred million inhabitants.  It took the infrastructure of the First Age hundreds of years to completely collapse, but by the end life was brutish and shortened for all.

6. Demons and Malfeus

These are the people that created it all.  The Primordials are more different than anything that you can imagine, but they were the first rulers and the first creators of Creation.  Gaia was one of them, the Oceans were another, Autochan was the crater of man, who prayed to the Primordials and made creation work.  There were more than a few of these Primordials.  And they reigned Creation for an uncounted length of time.  They created the Gods to run it and they played in creation.  When they created the Gods, they made sure that they could never act against them, but they did not put any such fail safe into the creatures that lived there, because they were so puny.  The Gods were jealous of their power and they conspired to rebel, but we're prevented in taking any action directly.  Two of the Primordials were upset by the behavior of the rest.  Gaia was the world and Autochan created the animals and the humans, but the others would do things to both like change the water to acid just to see the people run around.  So Autocan created the Exalts to work for the Gods to over throw the Primordials.  Each Primordial had a hundred souls or more, and they had many forms that ran around creation.  They were called Demons and had different levels of consciousness.  The First circle Demons had only one soul and were thus mortal.  The Second Circle Demons had three to five souls and were immortal, but could die by violence.  The Third Circle Demons had as many as twenty souls were immortal but could die by violence, but were so powerful that they do not even related to anything mortal in perspective.  If they died then something else would be created in their place and the Primordial would change to reflect its new self.  And because of this the Primordials were completely immortal, unless the demon of the Third Circle that contained the Primordial's Fetch soul was killed, then the primordial would be dead, or at least wish he was dead.  After a long hard fraught battle, the remaining Primordials surrendered to the Solar Exalted and the Gods and were imprisoned within their leader, Malfeous and he was exiled to Elsewhere.  The Primordials as a parting shot cursed the Exalted who defeated them.  They received a sixth of all the Solar's souls when the Death Lords broke the prison and are going to try to use them to break out of their prison one day. 

7. Solar Exalted and the First Age.

300 individuals, from five Castes, Dawn the warriors, Zenith the priests, Twilight the artificers, Night the assassins and Eclipse the diplomats.  Three hundred created for the Perfect Sun God, three hundred Exalts that had no limit except they were mortal, the lived only 3000-5000 years before dying, except they were crafty and figured out how to live longer, as much as fifty thousand years, except none go to live beyond the five thousand years because they were murdered.  In that few thousand years they brought humanity up from a primitive nomadic culture to a vast magically technological society that raised the standard of living to great heights and extended Creation further than thought possible.

But they were cursed, all exalts were, but the Solars, the most powerful, were cursed the most.  The more powerful they got the more destructive they became, but know one knew, they only saw the devastation that they caused.  The Lunars were cursed to be more Wyld and needed to be alone, the Sidereals were cursed to be blind to everything outside their sight Terrestrials, the least powerful became most like their elements temperament.  No one knew, not even the gods.  

When the Usurpation occurred only few of their souls escaped imprisonment and when the prison was broken by the Death Lords, only half of their souls won free.  Their potential is limitless, they could even exceed the power of the Gods.  The World they made could not be sustained without them, creation shrunk and the richest person in the Second Age was only as wealthy as the poorest from the First Age.  Such was the fall to the Bronze Age.

8. The Gods and the Elementals

Gods are different here.  Every thing has a god, every tool has a small god that maintains it.  Every concept has a god, every idea.  If it has a name or has been named it has a god, every mountain every tree that dwindles in a mind anything that was made.  Things that were not made have Elementals.  Each tree has a dryad, and possibly a god.  Every branch has a smaller elemental.  Every stand of trees has a greater elemental, but if it is a grove there is a god.  A forest has both, but there is a god of falling branches.  Elementals occur in the five elements, fire, water, earth, air and wood, but gods are different.  Seasons have gods, a storm has an elemental, but there is a god of storms.  A crop has a god, like the corn goddess, but each plant has an elemental, each field has a god, but the ground has an elemental, and abandoned field has a god too.  The more important a god the more power it wields, same for Elementals.  Power can be gained or lost the god of flying machines in the First age was strong and not today, the god of slavery was week in the First Age and strong now.  The Sun God is the most important and the most important, the elemental in a tiny dandelion fluff is not.  They all do work to make creation work, but in the Bronze Age, even the gods are neglecting their duties. 

Some Gods participated in the usurpation, some did not.  Some like the God of war, thrived, some were tied up until after it was over.  In the Bronze age some gods are neglecting their duties.

9. Mortals

It sucks to be a mortal.  If you are really good at what you do, you could exalt if there is a soul for you available.  Prayers of mortals run Creation. Their prayers are like money to gods and are the only thing they eat.

Podcasts

I have been in to podcasts for a while now. It started right after I got my first iPod about seven years ago to combat workplace boredom. It was not one of those old iPods but one that could store about eight gigabytes of data, so I could listen to all my music, which admittedly is not that much, but also my radio station's content, which was available in podcast format. I listened to The Current, Ideas, Quirks and Quarks and a few other shows that were available. The problem eventually became that I would finish listening to all the content. 

 My first non-CBC podcast was AstronomyCast, I started listening to them, and then I went back and listened to all of their previous shows. And I learned a lot about astronomy. Fraser Cain a Canadian (important for me just a smidgen) and Dr. Pamela Gay host an informal question and answer style show. They try to touch on every topic in astronomy from the history to the most cutting edge of theoretical astrophysics. After I drained them of all their content I had to then wait for them to add more episodes, which they do on a more or less regular period.

The next podcast that I got into was The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe which is a popular skeptic podcast, arguably the most popular. Each episode runs about seventy-five minutes and they release one episode a week. They talk about science news in the week and the newest and most egregious examples of pseudoscience that has hit the media recently. They have a number of regular segments including interviews, sound identification contests, science truth or fiction contest where the lead Dr.Steven Novella presents three or four scientific paper's headlines one of which is fake and the gets his co-hosts to try to guess which one is fake. Very fun and educational podcast. 

 That lead me to look for that kind of podcast and there are a few. I listen to a few of those, like The Reality Check and Science for the People (which used to be called Skeptically Speaking). What is nice about those two podcasts is that they are Canadian, but that was really incidental. The Reality Check hooked me with their theme, they don't have one, but they do parody songs with a skeptic words most recently they did a parody of Wrecking Ball, but they have done Sailor Moon and nearly one hundred others. They will do requests, especially if you start them off with some words. They are really not much more than a few guys who are part of Ottawa Skeptics and they started a podcast. They touch on topics, about three every week, but mostly they are just fun.

Science for the People is different. It is a podcast that is made for a radio broadcast. It is professionally done and they have an interview format. Quality guests every week, returning guests and really thoughtful conversations. Minute for minute it is the best quality podcast that I listen to. To be clear, they have had a change in e past year, they were known as Skeptically Speaking and they had a a really cool theme song with cleaver words set up like a rap and I was disappointed that they changed all that, but their reason was sound; they were no longer a skeptical podcast but a science show. They are based at the University of Edmonton. There are a few themes that are reacquiring, bugs, sex and science. Sex? Really it is the science of sex, sexual attraction and about the parts and I bet even the sex squamish people I know would be interested in that stuff, eh WaifGirl? Notable episodes recently have been the science of food, the history and science of beer. So far they are about 250 podcasts, so there is a lot of choice. One other note is that it is one of the few podcasts whose host is female, two women who interchange regularly, which is double rare, for science and podcasting. I think they did that on purpose. A lot of their guests are also women, proving science is a field for women. 

 Actually before those two I started listening to Skepticality: the Official Podcast of Skeptic Magazine. Which is not as good sat it sounds, it is actually the weakest skeptic podcast, in my opinion, that I listen to regularity, but it is very informative. They do have more segments in it with other contributors. What I do like about this podcast was what it did for me, it empowered me. One of the contributors last year took time off last year due to exhaustion, he was exhausted from constantly being on the go with his various pursuits. His little five minute segment was the tip of what he did, but I found it very informative: This Day in Skeptic History. Along with that segment, is the Wikipedia Project, a talk about taking the fight to the pseudo science on Wikipedia. It is not about trashing pseudo science, but filling in the other side and posting scientific findings. How Likely Is It?, is a segment where people post odd coincidences that have happened in their life and they break them down into their actual probability. The thing is that most one in a million things that happen in your life are not that uncommon once you look closely at them. There is a segment that talks about language too. The rest of the podcast is taken up with interviews. This podcast comes from Atlanta Georgia, so really it is like it is from a completely different country. I live closer to them than I do Edmonton, but they have a Deep Southern accent and it is more difficult to process parts of it. The entire feel of this podcast is that of a magazine, which might be their point. 

StarTalk Radio, is Neil deGrasse Tyson's radio show. He is an astronomer and is e new face of Cosmos, the relaunched science television show. If you listen to him, it is because of the laughs and the interviews. This is a radio show, it plays all over e United States in syndication. The interviews are usually with himself his guest and one or two guest hosts, one or more is a comedian. Some of the interviews are taped but some are with the gang style. I did not at first realize that most of the hosts were Black, but they are. This is not a problem for me, but it is a message to everyone else, science is for everyone and it touches everyone's lives. There are quite a few people who would answer the phone for an interview on a radio show with banality, but for Neil, there are some quite famous people jumping at the bit to join him on his show, or at least get interviewed by him. The other thing is that we, people tend to forget that the Civil Rights Movement was really quite recent. Not while I was alive, but just before I was born. I grew up in a world where the colour of your skin does not matter, who you screwed at night did not matter, thanks Mom and Dad and I hope that universal equality will reign supreme in the near future, but a lot of people were there for that fight and Neil interviews some of them, but also he brings science to the people, all people. 

I listen to the Sandra The SexNerd, because I want to know more about sex. This is about sex, it is also about feminism and sexual deviation or kink; it is about learning what is kink and understanding it, because understanding it is the opposite of hate and there is too much hate in this world. What is age play, what is consent? What is the difference between gay sex and straight sex. What turns people on and what turns them off. The simple answer is everything and everything. What is a fetish? What are you. 

 I listen to a few atheist podcasts because I am an atheist, a proud atheist and a skeptic. Actually, I am a militant Atheist, practiced skeptic and more of a feminist than most women. I don't listen to feminist podcasts, maybe I should. I listen to atheist podcasts because I am skeptical, and in this world there is one fight that most skeptics focus on, that of religion. I have started listening to a few of these. Ask an Atheist is a radio show in the Tacoma Washington area. It is an information broadcast and an interview platform, but they also talk about the things that they have been doing in their real world life. Recently they have been talking about a fight in a local town council where one councilor was trying push his religious views on town council, by falsely quoting the founding principals were Christian based. The podcast is actually more about Humanism than Atheism, Humanism is the belief in humans can solve their own problems.

Another podcast is The Atheist Experience. That is the audio format of their long successful television show. They have a YouTube channel and they have nearly seven hundred shows under their belt. This is a very interesting podcast because it is a call-in show. Lots of theists call in to it the show and try to argue the existence of God. The hosts are varied but all intelligent and have a number of disciplines in their background. A few of them have been religious leaders before they saw the light.

Some more Canadian content, I just started listening to a podcast called the Bible Skeptics, based in Ottawa. This is a reading of the bible, cover to cover by an Atheist and a Christian, both of whom have never read the bible. This is an interesting podcast because no one has really read the Bible and tried to understand it; these two people are. I don't think they are reading a King James version but one different versions, because there were things that they read that we're not in my Bible. I know, you are thinking why does an Atheist have a Bible? Because theist refer to it so often it is good to be able to look up the context of the quote that they are not talking about. What I mean is Theist are the world's first and best quote miners. Anyways I have read the bible once or twice before, but I found it to be very boring each time. Don't believe me, try Deuteronomy and Numbers. So far the Christian is becoming an Atheist, just by reading the bible. 

 Last podcast, The Tolkien Professor. Thank you WaifGirl. This is a university like seminar based podcast. I consider myself a self taught Middle Earth expert. Well I am better than most people, but I have not torn up the books looking for every nuisance of the books and analyzed the crap out of them. I really can't wait until and if he gets to the aspects of JRR Tolkien that I am a little shady on the Unfinished Tales and the great poem of Tolkien. But also the tales that are well known like Turin and Hurin, the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Right now I am at the beginning of this podcast and I have so many weekly updates, and depending on where I am, I can't listen to them all every week. As such there are a few that I listen to first, the Reality Check because it is fun, Science for the people because the quality of the information, the Skeptics Guide, because of the mix of both, Astronomy Cast because it is astronomy. I am behind in Quirks and Quarks and Skepticality, the Sex Nerd, Bible Skeptic and Ask an Atheist, the Tolkien Professor of course. 

Leviathan Wakes

I read a really good book last autumn, it was called Leviathan Wakes.  Space opera at its best.  Science fiction has gone through the same revolution that Fantasy has gone through.  That revolution was made up of really imaginative people writing books that very few people initially read, but eventually was read be millions of people.  Most of the writers were not bad, some of them were bad, but their stories were good, the ideas.  But let me be clear, very few of them were great writers.  Even the best writers, were not as good as the best writers of the standard works.  On the other hand in the present, the writers still follow the standard deviation of good and bad writers, but there are a lot more of them.  And the bad ones are reading better fiction and so they are not as bad as what they could have been, so the bad writers are not that bad.  James SA Corey, is not a good writer, mostly because he does not exist, he is two people and together, they are excellent.

Leviathan Wakes takes place in the not so distant future, how far, certainly centuries.  The population of the Earth is over thirty billion, Mars is at four billion and they are terraforming that planet.  The outer planets have millions, but only millions.  There are ships moving from planets in the outer solar system to mars and the outer planets with water in the form of ice.  Mars and Earth are presently in a stand off, Earth has a much larger fleet but Mars has a much more advanced fleet and relationships are strained.  Artificial Gravity exists, it is created with spinning hunks of rock and by accelerating ships at the level of gravity that they want to experience.  Think about it, if a ship is accelerating at 10m/s or about one Earth Gravity, the people in the ship feel as heavy as they would on Earth and they would be constantly speeding up.  After an hour they would be cruising at 36 kilometers a second after a day, they would be going as fast as 1008 km/s then the ship reverses its direction and slows down at the same rate creating artificial gravity for another day as it slows down.  Trips between the planets would still take days, and the more outer ones would take months.  In the book the most comfortable gravity is 1/3 Earth gravity.  But faster accelleration is possible, if you can protect the human inside the ship, too fast and the human dies.

In this book the bad guy is human.  The evil cooperation.  Actually the pursuit of the mighty dollar causes a horrible disease to infect one of the outer colonies.  The story starts off with a prologue that is truely horrifying.  The plot of the SciFi book is a mystery, crime fiction, an unlikely Cop on the distant Dwarf Planet Ceres starts looking for a girl, the daughter of a wealthy conglomerate owner, based on the moon.  Millions of people live on the interior of Ceres, and the entire planet was spun up to create a higher artificial gravity.  At the same time, a pseudo terrorist trade union, the OPA, outer planetary alliance, declares independence from Mars and Earth.  Part of the OPA is a company that is building ships for people with a lot of money.  In this case, the Mormons, who are commissioning a generation ship that will take them to Tao Ceti at a fraction of the speed of light.  Into this mix, a group of space faring crew is thrown into the mix when their scout ship investigates a abandoned ship and a stealthed military ship nukes their water hauler and they are forced to make their way to the nearest port of call and their desperate search for the truth.  The truth combines everything so far mentioned and it becomes a shooting war, or not war exactly.  The not war ends when the infection is determined to have an extra terrestrial origin….

There is a second book, which I read last week, and there is a third book which I read yesterday.  There is a fourth book that is to come out later this year.  Overall I would have to say this series rocks.  Read it.  If you like crime fiction but hate SciFi, you can read this too.  But overall it is a five star read.

Big Smoke and my adoption.

I just spent ten days with my friends from Big Smoke.  I really enjoyed their company but it was bitter sweet.  I love my friend's family.  The little Girl is cute and cuddly, the little boy is cute and cuddly but also fun to be around, well they are all fun to be around.  My friend and his wife are strongly in love with each other and it shows.  They have a rule, bad feelings end after a sleep.  A one day rule, the kids have a variation on that too, the six year old has an half day rule, bad things are not held against him after a few hours.  The three year old has a half hour rule.  

They watch a lot of Phineas and Ferb, which is a great Disney cartoon that has science at its core and is fun for adults to watch too.  But they also play computer games with their mother.  The only thing that She lacks is Role Playing.  To be honest, she is not a ten out of ten on the beauty scale, but as an overall person she is a dead match for my friend, socially, intellectually, and personality wise.  The relationship between those two and me has deepened over the few years that I have known them as a couple, almost to the point that we sleep together, except that will never happen because they never would.  

My friend cooks every meal for the family, and that means me when I am there, and he makes allowances for my vegetarianism.  He and his wife say that while I am there I am their guest and don't have to pay for anything when they are out as a family.  I pay for stuff that I want for myself, and for stuff out on my own but not when I am there or with them.  I tried to break this rule and they explained to me that they considered it rude of me.  So, I don't.  

They are not married yet, they point that out when ever I refer to them as married.  Then they tell me that their six year old gets made at my friend because he has not married his mother.  They tell me that they will get married when the children are old enough to understand the significance.  

The children love me.  They kept on asking them if I was still there when they picked them up from school and daycare.  I was down stairs the day I left before any of the children.  I caught them talking to each other saying that they would be sad when I left.  When I think about them I want to cry too, because I was told that after I leave, they cry because I am gone.  My world is so empty with out them.  Both the children and the adults.  I told the boy, who is unfortunately not as terribly cute as his sister and thus is everyone's favourite when they first see them, that he is my favourite boy child, and then I told him that I have two nephews too.  He is little but he insists he is big.  Little adjectives make him mad.  I think I do love him more than my sister's children.  I love his sister a lot too.  I even love them when they try to hurt me.  The boy smiles a wicked grin right before he bags me, so I know what he is thinking before he actually tries anything.  His sister also beats me up too, more successfully though, because I am not expecting it, eye gouges and head buts resulting in fat lips and pain.

My friend makes up songs when songs come on the radio about his children.  Most of the songs are about his smelly son, who gets angry, but then when he is confronted with the truth, that he smells, he surrenders.  My friend makes up songs about the theme songs for the television programs that they watch, always dirty and usually insightful: Ruby and Max, Max and Ruby, she's a teen age mom on Crack …. In the show they have parents but they are never there, Ruby is the older sister of Max, but how much older is Ruby, could she be Max's mom?  Yes she could.

When I come there I here the stories.  To the daughter, she sleeps in my room, when I am not there, not the reality that she gives up her bed when I am there.  My friend and his wife tell me that I am apart of their family, that it was the kids that told them so.  They have told me that I can move in any time, that I am a part of their family.  I really love them all so very much.  

On other fronts:

I was hoping to meet with a couple of other friends while I was there.  One is currently suffering of a disease called new boyfriend.  The other made arrangements to meet me and then got sick and cancelled, and then told me that she would tell me what happened later, only she never did.  And never rescheduled.  So when I look at Big Smoke I get the positive feelings of the love I feel from one friend and the loss of the others.  I spent half my life in that city and have so little friends from there.  I grieve.

I played a little exalted with my friend, the Nameless had a few stories added to his history, I have to take the time to write them down and put them here.  He also started a story for me, of a character in the series that I played with him and two others a while ago.  I don't like his storytelling style.  He tells stories like a book, it is a really good story, but there is a lot of control on to where the character can go and do and the character advancement must fit his ideas, so usually he does not award experience as much as tells you how the character has changed.  My friend is a control freak.

Anyways sometimes when I am down I think of them, and I don't want to die as much.  Sometimes I think about them and it makes me want to die more, because I am sharing their happiness and it will never be mine.

Stuff in Big Smoke

Sometimes the problem with going away and hanging out with my friends in the Big Smoke is that I get exposed to them and the happiness that I see around them and their children.  And I get melancholy.  Sometimes it is that sometimes it is other things.  There was a bit of activity on one of the dating sites, someone looked at my profile.  Mostly I know that just because someone looks at a profile does not mean that they are interested just that they looked.  In my area that also means that they were looking, rather than not looking which is most of the profiles.  

I don't mean to get my hopes up unnecessarily, but surrounded by so much love, I just hope for something.  

The more I stay here the more I get to know my friend's wife.  She wants to be friends with me and she is fun, but the more I get to know here the more jealous I get, envious of their relationship.  She has my friend's sense of humour.  When I came there this time they both sat me down for a 'talk'.  They told me that their daughter's bed, the guest bed, no longer had the plastic sheet on it and so I was not allowed to wet the bed anymore, nor masturbate.  As if I would wet the bed.  As if I could masturbate in a three year old's bed.  As I said twisted sense of humour.

I have been tired of being single for so very long, so long that I jumped out of a good situation a few years ago in to this bad situation, just for the chance at something, anything, relationshipwise.  I am very likely to leap at the next opportunity for the same reason.  This depresses me.  Of course the situation I am in now is also horrible it was better far away from this happiness I feel around them.  

I was just talking to the Wife, she was trying to convince me to move closer to them so that I would have better dating opportunities and be closer to them.  

Tough choices

Next Exalted story plan

Exalted plot line re: Ragara Dinyacout and the Fair Folk

Gossamer items are traded for the lives of slaves which are drained and given back.  Occasionally guards as well.  The tricky part of this encounter is that it will involve combat with characters that are superior to the player character.  The guards are mere mortals, but they could be elite and so the regular dramatic rules about combat with mortals fails.  Regular dramatic combat rules are when combat occurs against weaker non magical foes, the game master treats them as such, every three successes when hitting the foe counts as a level of damage, it need not be rolled and each foe has only three levels of health instead of seven.  This dramatically increases the speed of combat for lesser foes.  The guards in this case will be slave guards for the most part, the dragon blooded character will not be a real combatant but a bureaucrat, to make him an easier fight.  But the Fair Folk will be very deadly, even if they are Worker Caste and poor in combat, they will still be deadly and able to warp people with their thoughts.  

Fair Folk are intelligences of the pure chaos that dwell beyond the edges of creation when in Creation, they are affected by the stability of Creation and are forced into a fixed shape, but it would be wrong to assume that they just how they appear.  It would be more reasonable to think that they are malleable by nature and can change things to fit their nature.  More specifically they change things to fit the story of the way things should be, to them.  In this case Worker Caste Rakasha (the name they call themselves) have raised themselves to Nobility and have overthrown their cruel master, the Noble Caste Rakasha.  However, this is extremely unlikely as Noble Rakasha are superior to workers in every way.  The Noble Rakasha wanted a dramatic story arch that would be worthy of a tale to his caste deeper in the Wyld, so manipulated hi own story, he shaped the his story and those around him to suit his needs and he was captured by his underlings.  

On a tour in the south of the Wyld, Stanza like a Summer Breeze that Harkens to the Winter to Come, was waylaid by a local nature spirit,  his retainers, Words of Chill and  Urgent Chill took him at unawares and bound him in Gossamer. Summer Breeze means to spend a century or so under the power of his lessors so that he might gain a fury that drives him forth so that he may never be subjugated again and thus rise to prominence within the Jet Court of his peers.  He has spent the better of a century already in this bondage, but has not worked out a way to escape and subjugate is imprisonors, that should happen in a decade or so and defeat his foes in a great struggle.

Alas, Summer Breezes story arch has encountered a unforeseen plot twist, the Nameless coming to investigate and stop the Dragon Blooded from selling slaves to his oppressors in exchange for gossamer items of little worth.  Seizing upon the plot twist as an means of early escape, he sends the Solar Exalted to extinguish the Bonefire at the center of the Freehold to free herself and bring the freehold down.  Once the Freehold is compromised Summer Breeze will stand with her new Ally to fight her oppressors and their ally the Dragon Blooded Ragara Dinyacout and fight them in a great Battle.

If the Nameless acquits himself well in the battle, Stanza like a Summer Breeze that Hakens to the Winter to Come will grant him a limited boon in addition to the unravaged slaves, to be named later, when they meet again.  If, however, the Nameless does not do so well in the combat with the superior Dragon Blooded, Summer Breeze will block the killing blow and defeat Ragara Dinyacout, if only he would grant her a boon at a later time.  If the boon is granted, The Nameless will be miraculously healed and will be given the unravaged slaves.  The Boon is important as it will tie a future story to Summer Breeze and the Nameless and that will increase the power of the story that he will tell in the Jet Court.

It should be noted that the motivations of the Fair Folk cannot be understood by mortals; the Rakasha are alien in every sense of the word to Creation.

The Freehold will have the appearance of an Ice Palace, hidden in the depths of a lingering snowdrift.  The ice crystals that form the Palace shift and move at odd whims.  If the Nameless tries to ambush someone prematurely to Summer Breeze's wishes, they may form a mirror that reflects the impending attack.  The Freehold is large, larger than the Nameless will get to see.  Summer Breeze has split it in two, the first part where the two Worker Caste live and hold Summer Breeze prisoner complete with fake Bonefire and font of Liquid Ice to put out the fake Bonefire.  If the Bone fire is put out, the bonds that hold Summer Breeze will break, freeing her and putting her with the Nameless against their combined foes.  The second part of the Freehold is the greater part, where Summer Breeze might normally live when not at court, it contains the real Bonefire, which can't normally be simply put out, but must be willed out by an act of shaping the Bonefire with their mind.

Ragara Dinyacout, was a bureaucrat with a problem many years ago.  He had a slave discipline problem, many more escapes than the other administrators and his overseers had noticed and he was told that he had to deal with the problem or he would be replaced.   

Of course it could all go into the garbage when we start playing,

Recent

What am I doing these days would be something that people who I know might ask.  I don't typically post what I am doing anywhere, not on Facebook.  Typically if you want to know you have to ask.  This blog is typically where my thoughts and conclusions go, but not what I am doing. Who knows maybe you want to know what I am doing.

No car.  I no longer have one, my father was concerned, but I am not.  In the summer I rode my bike everywhere and I did not need a car.  I carried less groceries and had to go more often, which is a good thing because it limited what I would buy to what I could carry, however you can pack a lot of horrible food in a backpack.  I had to do my laundry more often and that was also a good thing, because sometimes I did not have a full load and in order to make one I was washing some things I would not have washed as often, more often, like my bed sheets.  When I had a car, my parents always asked me to come out to their house just because, now they never ask me out.  Which is a mixed blessing.  I like my parents, but they use guilt as well as any other parent (typically parents use guilt without knowing that they are, it must be a sapient feature of parenthood).  They have not been asking me so I have been seeing them less often.  

It has been snowing a lot more than a typical Winter in Boonieland.  Actually 2013 has been a wet year; it rained and snowed 25% more rain than the typical average year, recently our weather has been on the dry side, so it seems like more.  So the down side is that we have a lot more snow than recent years.  It snows almost every day and there is a large snow pack everywhere.  Right now we have two feet of snow on the ground, 60cm, and that is a reduction after the melt we had for about a week, including rain.  Lots of rain.  What does this mean for me with no car?  Nothing: I bought a winter bike.  Truthfully it cost me $2000, but that roughly equalled the savings that I got from not having a car, not gas because I rarely went anywhere, but insurance and unexpected repair bills which usually resulted in a bill for $1000 each event.  Brakes, muffler, some little part that no-one but a mechanic knows about, are all expensive things.  

Renting a car to go to Big Smoke for the weekend in the summer cost a bit, about $150 or so, and getting a bus ticket and other transit costs can add up to $130 per round trip, but are less versatile, however I have time to spend this time of year.  I am off this time of year for about three months, which is not very fun and I am not sure that it balances out the rush of activity in the spring.  This last year I work just under 1900 hours in 40 weeks, which is about what your typical wage slave works in a whole year.  My boss gave me a bonus this year.  Typically if you make it to the Christmas break he gives you a bonus, however this year he changed the policy.  This year if you had testicles you got a bonus.  He called in someone who had been laid off for a month and gave them a bonus too.  Testicular challenged employees were not called in and given a bonus too.  

I have been laid off now for a few weeks and I have not been bored yet.  Why?  I have been going to Big Smoke a bit.  My Friend in Big Smoke has been laid off for a few months now and he wants me down there, for a number of reasons.  One because he needs distraction, because being out of work is difficult.  His wife is not the sole wage earner and there is some conflict there and me being there will defuse it a little bit.  Secondly, but not in importance, their eldest is having some difficulties in Math in school.  He is only in grade 1, but he has already been identified.  I pointed out what they already knew, that their son was a boy and boys tend to work differently than girls.  ADD/HD should not be jumped to immediately.  They are working with him after school which is something that I know will pay off later on no matter what, but still the pressure is on.  I said that before anything like diagnosis occurs time should be spent letting him be a boy.  Teachers are trained in the discipline of metacognition, that is thinking how to think, but teachers these days are almost always women and women do not know how boys think because it is alien to them; school is built for girls, sit down, don't move, soak up what I say.  Boys are doers and need to do the thing that they are learning, so school is difficult.

The third reason is they like me, for some unknown reason.  All of them like me. Their children love me.  If my friend suggest a threesome, I will have to say no, but it is almost like that.  

I have been playing Star Wars the Old Republic, an online role playing game MMORPG to be exact.  And I have been reading, not just books.  I have been reading and watching YouTube videos by Creationist who are calling Atheists immoral and stupid, meanwhile claiming that the world is 6000 years old and denying Evolution.  I am going to get blocked soon, but that is what these people do to people who can form a thought that counters what they are saying.  I need to do this because I am not going to allow such thinking a pass anymore.  To many people I know and love have been sucked into this horrible way of thinking and it needs to stop.  I will lose friends, but either way I will not accept people spreading ignorance.

I am listening to podcasts.  Lots of podcasts.  I am having some difficulty on this front because I like to do something at the same time.  I can't just listen to stuff.  If I just listen, will drift off.  I need to be doing something else, but a lot of the things I can do mean I won't be listening to the podcast.  I can't read and listen, I can't play Star Wars, I can't sleep, I can't do nothing.  I can play Civilization though.  But I have been bored with that game recently.  Still I find that I can eat up about ten hours of podcasts a week.  I also listen to the Radio, CBC online app, let's me hear the news and current events and lets me listen to the Current, which is a great current events documentary that lasts for 90 minutes each day.  I find that it is thought provoking and I want to write about everything that they say; my own two cents.

There may be a booty call in the future.  I don't think it will come into fruition.  For the second time the conversation has stopped.  I think it is her, she needs to meet and then we will go from there, provided that we actually meet.  Conversation is necessary to keep me in her mind to think of me when she is available.  That is the problem.  The is a lack of dating opportunities in this town.  There are a number of dating profiles, but I have been discovering their short falls.  PoF is one, it is free so good if you are on a budget, but bad because there is no trick to it.  Also I have detected its lie.  When you search last joined sorting you get an accurate listing, but you can't tell when they joined.  When you select last online, to get a listing of active profiles you get a different list every time, which if you just then select the first one, you think good, but if you log on at 3am and do ten consecutive searches you should expect similar results, but instead you get ten random listings.  That means many of the profiles could have been created and abandoned five years ago and might show up in the most recently on list.  Which means I could write a long detailed message touching on points from their profile and they may never read it, because they had gotten married in the meantime.  OkCupid is far superior in this respect, but disheartening because selection is so poor.  I think in my area there are two people and they are looking for younger people, a lot younger.  So I have to just not look and accept dying alone. 

Exalted story continued

It has taken me a while to get this written down.  I have been distracted and have had to travel to coffeeshops to concentrate enough to write

Exalted story continued

The Nameless continued on his journey of discovery.  Having the goal of looking in on a report of a disturbance in the northern latifundia  he headed to investigate.  Upon reaching the distant settlement he discovered that it was the very same location that he was tortured at and exalted in. He, having made it this far, only to discover that he knew the particulars of the situation decided that he should investigate anyways to determine what if anyone knows who he was and if they are looking for him.  

Thus he begins.  The head administrator, his assistant, the head guard  and his assistant were all in the room taking part in the interrogation.  Out side on lookout were two additional guards.  All of these were killed before they could raise an alarm and thus the rest of the latifundia were able to sleep the entire night before they found the grisly scene.  On his way out of the mining camp, the slave, Nameless, encountered a guard dog and dispatched it quietly.  All this he knew except for the part about who cleaned up his mess and that the victims in their dying struggle had painted the walls with a number of bloody hand prints. 

What he did not know was that there was an Immaculate Monk, who was Dragon Blooded, investigating the scene.  There was also a slave hunter investigating the escape.  Both concluded that a slave not prepared for the full winter of the north did not survive the winter, let alone cross the mountains that his tracks suggested.  The mountains in question, whose foothills were like the Rockies, were like the tallest mountains on Earth.  

Satisfied he headed back to the Capitol of the province, Dehenna.  He found his new employers and then meticulously began to lay out his plans and the other men began to lay out their own objectives.  The two objectives were at odds.  

Aside: often a storyteller tries to figure out what his or her players will do and lays down plans accordingly, but at the same time the players are thinking in a different line or perhaps on the same line they take an unanticipated tangent.  When this occurs the storyteller has two options, one pull out their hair and say they need to rethink the story, which is bad, or they can go with the flow and modify their plan on the fly.  It helps to have several plans in your head so that you can modify one that matches their direction and to have a firm grasp of what the major players are willing to do in that region.  I had both, plus a little something extra called patience and sidestepping.  

The leader of the organization in Dehenna Yemudral, said the he needed to consult his own boss, the wealthy and conscientious Guild Factor who was funding this thrust of slave freedom in the North, Yanobu Chogee.  The original plan called for the guild to finance the purchase of disruptive slaves from the Realm, and get them to a safe island where they could work off their debt as indentured servants, providing valuable resources for their owner.  But The Nameless was more interested in freeing slaves and training them to raid and free more slaves from the Realm.  (In Role-Playing games it is important to realize who is the most important role in the game, which is the player, so when there is story conflict of the greatest degree, the player wins; happy players continue to play, unhappy players walk, always).

So, The Nameless contrived to show the Dehenna branch of this private factor of the Guild exactly what he had in mind and how he would accomplish it.  The leader hereabouts, had stated that he would have to okay any change of the short or longterm goals of the plan with the Factor himself.  As such, the Nameless, proposed to give him a personal introduction to the lands which he was to operate, but had yet to see.  The security in the Slave States was such that foreigners were permitted only as far as the first city.  

The Nameless and his two charges headed inland after a day's journey Woodward (East) by a small galley.  Upon landing the galley was beached and the mast removed to the underbrush not far away.  If the Realm should discover the galley, it's crew would plead they lost their mast in a storm and were seeking repairs, if after a week, the party was not back they would leave and head back to Dehenna.  Once on the ground the Nameless set up a fast pace through the wilderness, passing through the brush and forests slightly slower than if the way was paved with cut fieldstone blocks; slow for him, but he was leading to unExalted fellows.  

The wilderness was a second home to him and he pushed them deep and fast giving them time to rest every hour for a tenth part of that hour.  In that time he would quickly find refreshment close at hand weather it was potable water, spring leaks, over wintered wild vegetables or a fine brace of rabbits for a meal later on; the wild areas were a home and a larder both.  After the first day, he reckoned that to make the largest impact on his fellows about his competency and skill, he would make for the furthest latifundia he knew of, the one that he had escaped from and the one he had just visited, a full and difficult weeks journey.

True to his plan he decided to match his plan with to additional hinderances, by ignoring the easier paths, the ready made roads and byways made by the Realm except when crossing them and by making for the settlement by the straightest possible route, ignoring streams and rivers, hill and fen, up and down foothills that exceeded four thousand meters in height.  The first spur was meek compared to the last, covered in forests to its summit.  The second's top was bare of trees and e third would have been a true mountain range if it were alone and not attached to glacier topped giants.

After a week, they reached tundra capped submits that rested above the last latifundia, a kilometer below.  There he told them what they looked upon and that the easy of traveling here was an example of his skills.  He told them that the mountains behind them to the untrained appeared unpenetratable, but to him he could cross them as easily as he journeyed to this place with them.  He proposed that freed slaves could be taken to sanctuaries in verdant valleys on the other side that he had already scouted out.  Any supplies that they could not make for themselves or steal from the Realm, could be brought in with little difficulty and little expense as he brought them here.  Raiders could move between the various latifundia with ease, that their scattered nature while providing few options for escaped slaves also provided great opportunity for insurgent forces.

On the way back he skirted the edges of many settlements to prove his point.  The province was set up with clusters of latifundia within difficult terrain far apart from others and the open space empty of any civilization.  Following the Realm built roadways he showed them that traffic within the roads was minimal, that on average travel between the clusters was limited to no more than one or two messenger per day.

They arrived back in the city and The Nameless decided that he wanted to rescue slaves while the Yemudral went to discuss the possibility of his boss working with him and merging their interests to reach their goals.  Nameless had three goals that he wished to attain while Yemudral was out of town.  He wanted get an accurate map of the area, he wanted get an idea of how many languages were being used to segregate the slaves and he wanted to free slaves, but without letting the establishment know that he was doing so.  He pondered this conundrum for a few minutes before moving into action.  

None of the people in the foreign district had any information on the countryside as none of them were permitted beyond the walls into the rest of the city and beyond.  The Nameless had only a few ideas where he might find a map, in the palace, but where, within the bureaucracy of the work areas in the rest of the city, but where were those places exactly and maybe the Jackal head quarters, reasoning that the jackals would have to know where to start looking for escaped slaves, and the Jackal HQ was a place he knew.

In the slave hunting center along with informal barracks for the Jackals there was a large map hanging on the wall.  He could steal it he reasoned, but it was very large and would likely be conspicuous if it were to vanish as it was as large as a floor rug.  He asked the bureaucrat present if there were smaller maps available, whichever there was not, so he asked for a copy to be made that he could use for himself.  The next day he came back and tipped him a hit of mildly expensive drugs that he thought would be a good tip.  

What the Nameless did not know was that the drug he tipped in was a low value drug for slave in that station, further the bureaucrat was not actually a slave, but a low level functionary of the Realm.  Jackals are the slaves who hunt other slaves and the only slaves that can buy their freedom.  They are illiterate other than the code that was created for them to understand the description of the slave they are hunting, which does not need to be very accurate as anyone they find in the wilderness is most likely an escaped slave.  The writing beside the marks is in Low Realm, for the bureaucrats.  The bureaucrats speak multiple languages so they are able to deal with the jackals who only understand their one language.  The map was to help with new bureaucrats and new Jackals, each of the settlements has an address that is simple enough to be easily memorized by region, branch, cluster and settlement.  All these things marked the Nameless as a person of interest to be looked into.  But the most damning information was that the bureaucrat knew the jackal who The Nameless was impersonating.

Next The Nameless scouted out each of the local latifundia and searched through waste bins for a repot from each office in the settlements.  After acquiring one report from each latifundia, he sought out the clerk who helped him learn to read.  He dropped the small copy of the map of Dehenna Province down before him and asked him if he could enlarge it so that it might be more useful and added the stack of documents to the table.  Each of the documents he had copied the address that was carved into each gate, on to the back of the document and he asked the Clerk, if he could identify the languages on each  report.  Using these reports he was able to assign languages to each latifundia on the map and he was able to determine which languages he would need to learn to make his operation work.  The languages that he now knew in the Slave States were Realm Common, Waterspeak, Firespeak, Riverspeak and Woodspeak.  Airspeak was the language of the regions around the States and thrust thought to be the language that an escaped slave was most likely to encounter, so it was not used and High Realm was the Language of the Dynasts.  He and the Clerk also discovered scrawling in the margins of the reports of all the communications.  In the ones written in Realm Common, the words seemed to be communication of news between origin of te report and the latifundia.

He then went back to the Jackal's HQ to find a list of recent escapees and selected one that had escaped from a latifundia that used Realm Common, the only one he could speak.  In short order he was on the trail of the escaped slave and the Jackal that had got on his trail first.  He caught up with the slave just as the Jackal was about to recapture him.  The Nameless slew the Jackal expediently and began the process of weening him off his drug addiction and bringing him to a safe location.  When he was finished and set the escaped slave up in a more secure location, he journeyed into the city again to see if any word had been received on the Guild Factor.  There had been news and a proposed mission. 

Yemudral greeted The Nameless with good news.  Guild Factor Yanobu Chogee wished very much to work with him, but had a few concerns, mostly about his reputed skills.  He thought that it was a good plan to have bases to launch sorties into the provinces to liberate slaves and to set up slave towns to support the liberators, but he still wanted to salvage a part of his old plan, getting some of the slaves out of the province permanently.  The Nameless agreed that some could find succor outside of the region entirely.  

Yemudral then let The Nameless in on the current operations in the entire region.  The Factor had set up posts in two of the remaining provinces, but no in the Province of Serrat, because initial forays were brutally rebuffed by Ragara Dinyacout a Dragon Blooded Dynast.  Dinyacout had not only Sussed out the the nature of the Factor Chogee, but had implemented a brutal campaign of subjugating rebellious slaves within Serrat.  He was so successful that the jackals were mostly without work in that province.  Dinyacout was becoming known for this program and also for his archeological expeditions that he took into the wilds north of Serrat.  It was said in certain circles that Dinyacout would take the most rebellious slaves of the past seasons on his diggs and when he returned with the fruits of his labour, the rebelliousness had been removed from the slaves; they came back changed.  Any one that went with Dinyacout to find out where he was going or what he was doing disappeared.  

Chogee desired that the Nameless track him to the location of the dig site to find out what he was doing and to report on him.  Dinyacout was supposed to be leaving in just a fortnight, which did not leave much time for the Nameless to get to Serrat, to find him.  Additionally, the transport he was taking encountered strong head winds making the trip slower than expected.  The transport had to stop at the Town of Wallport and was not able to go further because of the weather, which meant that he was stymied, as he would have to travel by foot and get to Serrat in two days, the city was close to 200 kilometers away.  Running through the woods, he made it to the city of Serrat.

At this point, The Nameless, has visited three of the capitols of the Slave States, Dehenna the smallest, Inhajal it's neighbour and Serrat.  He has yet to see Amber Creek.  He has also seen the Town of Wallport as well, which is the port town connected to the Great Northern City of Whitewall hundreds of kilometers north.  He has already noticed a few differences.  Wallport is much busier and much more open.  Although it is called a town it is larger than Dehenna.  The town sits upon a cliff and there are many large well constructed cranes that take goods from the quays and docks into the town the Harbour walls are massive and made of white marble and seem to be thousands of years old, but still imperishable.  The walls protect the Harbour from wind and weather while the water they are built in is deep, deep beyond sight.  On top of the cliff many of the buildings appear to be newer construction and yet thus appear to be run down when compared to the older construction.  The wonder of the town though is the road that leads due north as straight as an arrow for nearly a thousand kilometers to the city of Whitewall.  The road is paved with white marble and is warm to the touch, at night the lamp posts illuminate the way for its entire distance.  The road is thousands of years old, but never needs maintenance, such we're the builders of the First Age; most of the town itself is part of that great wonder.  From beneath the road, a giant illuvial pipe spews a gout of sewage from the very distant city all year long.

Foreign district is populated with foreigners and Realm citizens not from here exclusively.  Most of them are traders from the Guild, the Realm and the rest are sailors from the Blue Fleet of the Realm, indeed most of them are from the Blue Fleet.  Since no one is allowed in the country proper, all of the facilities that these people need are in this portion of e city.  There are taverns and brothels.  There are supply warehouses and there are ship repair facilities.  There are individual residence compounds for the major players and there is a Realm Bureaucratic building, where any interactions with the province and the outside world occur.  At no time are any foreigners allowed beyond the walls that surround this district.

Bus ride home

There is a startlingly pretty woman next to me on the bus.  She is short compared to me, seemingly of Indian extraction dressed in a royal purple sweater with a multicoloured dark hued wool scarf.  She is wearing black leggings with black boots that reach up to her knees. She has a good watch on her right arm with a silver bracelet as well. Her other wrist has a black leather cord.  I can't quite see her face as it is rude to stare, but she has startling blue eyes, given her seemingly south Asian or strong native like complexion makes me think that she is wearing coloured contacts.  She is really quite pretty, I have said that before but it bears repeating.  If I were more gregarious I might have tried to talk to her, but that would not likely have gone over well since she has not tried to talk to me and is intent on listening to her iPhone and texting away.  She also has a laptop on her lap and she appears to be running her phone off its battery.

I wonder what her life is like.  I wonder where she is going.  The bus is crowded and I am lucky enough to have this pretty woman beside me, but I am afraid to move and my butt is quite asleep.

Tally of meaning of what was not

Thinking on what I have written in the las little while, my experimenting, my fetish and a few other things, I look shallow.  I do look shallow if you forget that I am obsessed with sex.  Sex being in my mind as what happens when you are in a mutual loving relationship.  Thinking back though, I realize that my obsession is more of the actual relationship itself.  I did not cut my ties to my new and better life for good sex, but rather a mutual loving relationship that includes sex and all the intimacies that such a relationship offers.  

I see this as the pinnacle of what I want.  Which is the mirror of my personal deficit.  The thought that I went to sleep here with on my mind was that this was never going to happen to me.  I am staying with friends in Big Smoke and I see their interactions and secretly wishing that they were mine.  Even horrible dramas of other people are preferable to the long string of one sided relationships that I have had in my life, one sided because the other person did not even know that I was interested.  I was afraid to ask not because I feared rejection, but because I knew there would be rejection that would end that fantasy life.  

I look at those people from those "relationships" and I still love thing at a deep level.  I wonder what this means, that perhaps to me it was real?  I just looked back at the objects of my affection and a few of them stand out after twenty years, others fade to shadows.  Sarah, I did never really talk to you, you were never my friend: you are gone.  Sheryl, I was your best friend when you were not single, I am sorry that I fell in love with you when you were single, but you were a very shallow person in reality: you are a shade in my history of life.  MagicEyes, I could have loved you forever, if you wanted to be in my life, I would not be carless now, but you do not desire me in your life either as a friend or more: you are becoming a shade, but one that is entirely my fault, but thank you — if we had just been friends, a lie in my heart, I would have accepted it when you got into a relationship with someone else, history has told me so, however it might destroy me, so thanks.  MPTR, I don't hate you, I don't trust you, therefore you are a shade.  Linda, if we had only just been friends.

There are a few others though I look on with a different feeling, a feeling something other than indifference, perhaps there was something in the way that the friendship ended that I feel that the relationship did not end truly or perhaps that I actually still love in some lesser or greater way.  People if they called me out of the blue might make me cry or make me very happy even if I was feeling despair, maybe not all because I love them as more than friends, but people who I still love in my heart.  Benita, a name that I cherish, a face that still haunts, perhaps the entire reason why I fin ALL Indian women attractive: sometimes I try to figure out where you live, but I stop.  I look for you on Facebook, I wonder why you use your maiden name for you teaching career, but out of the deepest respect for you I will never actually try to find you in person, but if you were in trouble I would try to rush to your aid if you called.  Sandy, Sandra, you were my bestest of best friends, it is you who I wanted to call every week, but could never figure out when would be the least disruptive time to call and never did, you were on my calling plan even though I had stopped calling on your birthday because you were never home even though you were right there I think.  Because you rebuffed two of three Facebook friend attempts, I got the message, but I ignored you because I love you so much as a friend that when it occurred to me that you might be more, I bagged those feelings pummeled them and filled the bag with bricks and tossed them into the lake, because I did not want anything to change.  If you started to talk to me on Facebook I would be happy.  If you mentioned that you cottaged an hour from where I live I would be ecstatic and I would go and see you.  I know we could pick things up from where they were last dropped.  MagicEyes, I still love you, even though I should not.  Seven, you have made your choices.  When I look at your Facebook pictures I feel love and caring for you, maybe in a decade they will go away.

I look to my friends in Big Smoke and I realize that missing out on what they have, death is preferable.  There are fights, I see only the good sides, they say, but I see the everyday sides and that is so telling.  I know that love could be around the corner for me, so I will stick it out, but deep down I want to die.  I want to die, but I can't bring sadness to my new best friend and my old friends and their children whom I love.  Perhaps later, if I am still alone, I will let myself die.

The Experiment.

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