The Ramble

Posted on

Musings on NaNoWriMo

So I’ve kept saying over and over again since last year (actually, since before last year) that I wasn’t going to try to do NaNoWriMo again since graduate school inevitably prevents me from actually getting it done.  The ideas tend not to be my strongest or my best (When All’s Said and Done, my first NaNo, is a huge exception to that; I really need to go back and do a second draft on it to add in some more stuff regarding miss Allyson and suchnot) or my longest stewed over, which hurts whatever I write to begin with.

Of course, I keep saying that I’m not going to put myself through the stress of it again, especially with so many half-started (half-finished, mostly finished) writing projects already, plus my thesis, plus two classes, plus everything else.  Shiawase, among others, talked me into doing it last year.  I got about 26,000 words in and had to call it there.  I’ve kept the project, still untitled, and poke it every so often (it’s a prequel to a post-apocalyptic Arthurian reimagining that I want to write someday–another one of those half-started projects–that’s based in part on a short story I wrote in college), though not often at all.  Epsilon more often captures me (that’s trying to become three books from two, with one focusing on the resistance movement in the Borderworlds.  We’ll see what happens).  But I digress, as I often do.

An idea has been tugging in the back of my brain for the past several days, a confluence of some things that happened at work and some random musings.  I work in retail clothing sales, so I meet all kinds of people and help people find clothes for all kinds of occassions.  An incident this past weekend got me to thinking about one of the strangest customers I’ve had in the thirty-some odd months I’ve worked there, and that in part triggered the idea for what may or may not end up being my NaNoWriMo project for this year.  The other part that’s inspired me was thinking philosophically about World of Warcraft, the internet, and how we meet and come to know people through cyberspace without actually knowing much about their “real lives,” their “real” circumstances.  These things coming together have given me a starting point for a potential NaNoWriMo project for this year.  I’ll probably do some scribblings about it today before work, maybe, while I’m grabbing my dinner (otherwise, I’ll be reading in the cafe at Macy’s like I usually end up doing–one or the other).  I suppose in part the idea is also inspired by .hack//sign though only in a vague sense–some of the elements of my idea are similar, but only on the surface.

“Byron” is a very sick young man, probably in his early twenties or so, with little hope of survival.  He retreats into “Universe,” a VR-equipped (though not required) MMORPG that’s become popular in the past several years.  He’s played since launch and is somewhat popular and powerful as a result.  “Iryn” or “Ryn” is a more recent comer to the game and isn’t a big fan of Byron’s at first, until she gets to know him thanks to a mutual friend (maybe the mutual friend gave her the account?  I have to brainstorm more).  Byron and Ryn form a tight bond and after a while, Byron opens up to Ryn, telling her about his out-of-game circumstances.  Out of the blue, after this, she receives a VR rig for the game.  Not too long after this, she realizes that he’s stopped logging out of the game and starts to worry.  She ends up tracking him down thanks to some other friends and meets his terrified parents.  Byron, having suffered some painful, difficult setbacks, has completely retreated into the game through virtual reality and cannot be pulled out–he has to make the choice to log out, which he will not do.  Ryn convinces him to log out for the sake of his parents, at least for a little while.  I don’t have much more than this figured out (it’s a very new idea, after all), but it’s a start, at least.  Maybe I’ll be attempting NaNoWriMo this year after all.

Posted on

Torg update – session of 6 August 2009

So…a plan come up with shortly before leaving for session kind of sort of worked (yes, Vee, you’re right and we’re crazy, but maybe what we ended up doing might work out for us).  No evacuation plan for the Inquisition prison we were going to break into…but misdirection seemed to work in our favor, at least for a while.

While on our way to the site of the Inquisition prison where Frederico DeSoto’s being held, Ren suggests that maybe we should let Mable set off some explosive distractions–the sort of things that will let some of us sneak inside hopefully unnoticed.  She intended it to be a lot more hands-off than it ended up being, but in the end I’m generally more flexible than most.  The plan, of course, gets changed even before we start setting it up and the group splits between an infiltration team (Ren, Grant, Grace, and Ano) and team violence (Christian, Mei, and Mable).  Grant and Mable are going to rig up some explosives in optimal places and Grant’s going to find a good way in for the infiltration team first and then we’re going to start in, hoping to rescue Fred without everyone getting dead.

Ren, of course, chooses this moment to grab Grant by the collar and kiss him full-on, earning a surprised (but not displeased) look from him and a very dirty look from Mable.  She tells him to be careful and he tells her “It’s better with the mask.”  And then Mable and Grant go to set up explosives for the distraction team violence will be responsible for.  They come back in the same amount of pieces we went them off in.  In the meantime, Ren muses to herself about wearing the mask or not.  She decides she’s going to.

Team violence wanders off first.  They walk into what appears (key word being “appears”) to be a run-down old Cathedral.  Inside appears to be more of the same until Mei notices and wastes a camera.  Which results in a hologram appearing–a hologram of our good friend the Marquis, the same one who put some of us (ie, Ren) through walls while we were in Japan, the same one we hoped had died in that warehouse we tried to blow up in Japan.  He advises us to get the hell out of Dodge.  He’s basically told in his dreams, we’re coming to get Fred and that’s the end of it (we’re really not sure why Christian decided to tell him that we were after Fred).  Which earned us a “bring it” and the hologram disappearing.  Mei finds the entrance to the lower levels–basically, the prison and the like–and rips the door up and open.

Violence ensues, though it’s a bit of time before we get the explosion that the infiltration team was waiting for.  As soon as we get that first explosion, Grant takes off like a shot without saying a word and the rest of us are at his heels.  Of course, we’re in the first hallway when we just barely miss getting toasted by a trap (he saved Ren, again) but with the infiltration team cut in half by a very, very heavy stone slab.  Of course…this could be both a good thing and a bad thing.  It depends on who you ask.  So Ren and Grant head off to find Fred while Grace and Ano are left to figure out another way in.

Insane violence is taking place outside.  Ano and Grace find a new way into the tunnels…but it’s not too long before they run into our old friend the Marquis.  Grace starts trying to talk to him after throwing Ano back down the hallway.  Grant and Ren reach an impasse and have two options: either they wander around blindly trying to find the prison cells or they abuse some guards and “convince” them to tell us where they are.  Grant is once again surprised when Ren’s okay with hitting the abuse the guard button.  So we run into a group of four guards.  Grant pwns three of them and Ren trains both guns on the last and makes him shit himself in fear (apparently, the punk didn’t feel very lucky).  And then she gets to see a bit of Grant’s dark side (…something tells me he’s a little surprised how okay with it she is) as he “convinces” the guard to tell us where to find the prison cells before the guard is rendered violently unconscious.

Meanwhile, topside, the demon that almost gutted Grant the day before has shown up and gotten its claws into Mable.  Thank god that Mei was paying attention, because otherwise we’d be needing another demolitions tech.  Things went from bad to worse up there because the demon has a slight edge on Mei.  Chris eventually manages to intervene and they slowly start to push the demon back.  And that’s the cliffhanger they were left with.

Somewhere between the surface and the prison cells, Grace manages to get some interesting information out of the Marquis.  Apparently, he’s been questioning a lot of the same things we’ve been questioning.  Grace finally asks him, “Why don’t you just let us take Fred and leave France and never come back.”

Marquis: “What does that get me other than killed by the Inquistors for losing my charge?”

Grace pauses, and then: “You could always come with us.”

And that’s the cliffhanger that she was left with.

Grant and Ren reach the prison block after abusing some more guards.  Grant produces a ring of keys and once again brings up the phrase, “You’re not going to like this.”

“You use that around me a lot.”

“Well, you tend to not like anything that involves danger.”

Which is true.  Danger means people are going to get hurt.  Getting hurt is bad.  But once again she surprises him.  He’s managed to lift a key ring from one of the guards, but this is a place where they lock up all kinds of bad people.  We’ve got to open cells and let some potentially very nasty shit loose.  Ren grins at him and holds out her hand for the key ring.

“You’re a better shot than I am.”

This he can’t disagree with.  But before Ren can get the first door unlocked, Odyle shows up and starts taunting Ren.  Of course, Ren deduces that she’s here to cause trouble–big surprise.  Grant’s disappeared in the meantime, and Ren trusts that he’ll have her back if she needs him–when she needs him the most, since that’s his style.  Odyle underestimates Ren, thinking that she hadn’t made a decision on whether or not she can hurt the girl.  Ren, of course, has made her decision.

Damn guns jamming.  Odyle gets annoyed with Ren’s attempt to solve the problem once and for all and smacks her in the head with her zotty staff.  It was pain.  Odyle asks if she’s ready to do it the easy way now.  Ren shrugs and decides to play prisoner, for the time being.  And that’s where my cliffhanger was, in part.

Ano, meanwhile, has made it to Fred’s cell at about the same time as Grant, who looks at Ano and tells him that his only job now is to get the man in that cell safely out of the prison.

Grant: “I left someone behind that I have to go pick up.”

He picks the lock and dashes off.  And that’s where we cut for the evening.

We’ll have a week off next week since some of the crew will be at GenCon.  I’ve teased David about consistently giving us cliffhangers when we’re going to be off for a week.  It happens every time.

It’ll be interesting to see how all of this plays out.  Hopefully–hopefully–in our favor.  We’ll have to see.

Posted on

Torg Update – Session of 30 July 2009

So…it was a mostly a recap evening last Thursday with us chasing ourselves in circles and arguing. A lot of arguing. But then…there were four Terran/Nile Empire characters in the room staring daggers at each other and not agreeing on anything. So we go in circles.

On a lighter note, we totally got to meet Dr. Mara Hatchi-Two and Christopher Bryce (well, we kind of got to meet Dr. Bryce). And Yuri showed up again, which of course had Grace even more in knots than usual.

Of course, me being me, I don’t actually get to lecture Grant like I wanted to because it’s so bloody hard to do in front of the rest of the group. Because it is, damn it all!

So, we found out that Fred has indeed been captured and that necessitates a jail break. Which will hopefully not get us all killed, though we have very little faith in this, and here’s why: The witch-hunter that found us in Japan, the one we tried to kill by blowing up a freakin’ building? Yup, he’s the one that’s got Fred. I have no idea how we’re going to deal with him, but I’d better come up with something sometime between now and 8 eastern (probably should come up with something by 6:30 eastern, since I’ll have to discuss it with Jen in the car on the way in and pass a note to Trish before study ha–err. I mean pass a note to Trish before we try to get ourselves all killed). I really don’t want to get Ren killed–mostly because I’m not certain who I’d play (though a realm-running version of Cmdr. Brigid O’Connell or Colonel Tim McConaway could be interesting) but also because I think the party would completely disentegrate without her.

Grant made a suggestion, prefacing it with a “You’re not going to like this plan.” Which Ren didn’t, since he suggested getting someone captured so we’d have a man on the inside. Which, of course, didn’t fly very well with Ren for various reasons (one of which being that Grant would probably be the one getting himself captured). It just doesn’t seem to be a good idea to have to have two people to rescue rather than just one. That was the largest chunk of the issue. To her thinking, the group needs to stay together as much as possible. That’s just the way it is.

I have a feeling we’re in deep, deep trouble with this one. but time will tell.

Posted on

Torg update – session of 23 July 2009

Let it be known across the land that Dr. Ren Colby is a mess.

Last week, the heroic (hair-brained?) death of Albert Westin caused a major panic across the streets of Avignon, since he turned into a werewolf and lept onto the dias where the pope was standing, giving a speech that was a call to crusade against demons–demons like the scary, snarling werewolf that turned some random guy in the pope’s entourage into goo (I know he wasn’t a random guy, I’m just not exactly sure who it actually was).  Panic in the streets ensues and suddenly, there’s two groups of us seperated in a city gone insane.

Ren, of course, is on drugs and bleeding from the neck after trying to hack the GodNet.  So render her (and me) halfway to useless for most of the session.  I was largely comic relief for quite a wihle (for all the seriousness of the content of this week’s session…most of us laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe).  Mercifully, she’s with…the newly dubbed “Team requires Adult Supervision”–two of our Nile characters, Grace and Mable (Molotov Dolly).  Of course, being on drugs and blood loss…Ren isn’t exactly adult supervision at this time.  The three ladies end up trying to work their way back to where we were staying without incident.  But when does anything ever happen to us without incident?  That’s right, next to never.

In the meantime, Grant, Anotep, and Mei have been left to their own devices in the courtyard where the speech was being held.  Thank god Grant was there, because if he hadn’t been, I don’t think that we’d have ever seen Anotep and Mei ever again.  They start threading their way through the crowds, also trying to get back to our lodgings.  Also like the ladies…nothing goes according to plan.

Yeah, so that's what Mei, Ano, and Grant ran into
Yeah, so that's what Mei, Ano, and Grant ran into

Grant, Anotep, and Mei get lost in some side streets that are more like alleyways–a result of Grant’s attempt to steer Mei clear of people, which were pushing her to the brink of a complete and total meltdown.  At a point, as things start to get damper and cooler, they stop and Mei asks Grant if he’s sure they’re going the right way.  He tells her very slowly that they aren’t, but he’s not looking at her — he’s looking at something else.  And it’s ugly, and it’s in armor, and it wants to eat their faces.  Badly.

So Mei comes up with a plan–and it wasn’t a bad plan, considering she was in powered armor.  She was going to pwn it in the face as a distraction so the “squishies” (Anotep and Grant) could run and then she was going to bring up the rear and keep herself between them and the fugly.  Brilliant plan.  It would have worked, too, if Grant’s hero gene hadn’t flared up again.

For the record, when he wakes up…Ren is either going to slug him or jump his bones.  Maybe both.  Either way, there’s a lecture in his future.

Mei was in the process of stabbing the ugly in the face and Anotep had started to run when Grant takes out his pistols and starts his run.  He runs up Mei’s back, steps on her head and jumps, firing down on the ugly as he’s flipping in mid-air and lands behind the thing.

He’s wearing no armor.

This thing has claws.

And it used them on Grant.  It whirled, plunged its claws into his belly, and slams him against the wall.  He goes down, unconscious and bleeding.  Mei is like “Shit.”

I’m flailing at the other end of the table, unable to do anything since I’m nowhere near where they are.

Continue reading “Torg update – session of 23 July 2009”

Posted on

What I’ve been reading

So over the course of the past week or so, I’ve had the opportunity to do a bit of pleasure reading, which is a welcome relief from everything else in my world. The house has been quiet and I haven’t felt incredibly guilty about taking some “me” time to curl up with a good book–or three, in this case. In this case as well, I’m reading something that’s a touch different from my standard fare. I tend to generally keep to fantasy universes for my pleasure reading unless it’s a shared universe such as Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battletech. The sole exception to this has been Jack McDevitt‘s Alex Benedict series, which straddles the line between mystery and science fiction (don’t ask my why I like it so much–it’s probably the beautiful relationship between Alex and his assistant/pilot, Chase).  Coincidentally, in hunting down his web site, I found out that he’s released a fourth book that I’m going to have to pick up when it’s released in paperback (I can’t justify buying the hardcover since it’s out of stock at my local Borders).

Fantasy novels in author-created universes tend to be what attracts me, though in the past few days, I’ve found at least one science fiction series that I’m going to have to start following.

I discovered LE Modesitt Jr.‘s work purely by accident when I picked up The Chaos Balance on a whim at the drugstore–my family had been nagging at me to read something other than the Star Trek and Star Wars novels I’d become addicted to–and my affair with the Saga of Recluce began.  I never did make it all the way through The Chaos Balance, but Fall of Angels got me hooked on the series completely.  I kept reading until after the release of Scion of Cyador and never quite caught up again after that (I don’t know, something about Hamor doesn’t really interest me the way Candar and Recluce did).  Then, the first summer I was home after graduating from college, I picked up one of Modesitt’s science fiction works (as well as a couple books of the Corean Chronicles)–it was The Ethos Effect.

The book was and still is amazing, even reading it again.  I finally picked up a paperback copy for myself a few weeks ago but hadn’t read it because I was waiting on getting to read another book–this one for the first time.

The Parafaith War is set in the same universe as The Ethos Effect, though the latter book takes place more than three hundred years later.  And it was every bit as good as The Ethos Effect.  It centers around an Eco-Tech officer by the name of Trystin Desoll, an outsider despite his family being amongst the founders of the Eco-Tech Coalition.  The Ethos Effect centers on a similar character, though by no means the same, in Van Cassius Albert, a RSF officer who’s too good at what he does and is very clearly an outsider amongst his fairer, lighter-skinned peers.  Both men have to make hard decisions about the fate of the universe they live in, and both pay a price for making the ethical choices they make.  Both books are amazing and I highly recommend them because they’re a good read–so long as you’re not afraid of a little social commentary and intellectual stimulation during your science fiction experience.

Then, in browsing through books on Amazon (I try not to buy on Amazon, though I’ll occassionally use it to check release dates and the like), I came across another series that was often purchased by people who bought LE Modesitt Jr.’s science fiction.  It happened to be Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series.  So yesterday, I picked up the first book, Dauntless, after work and started reading it after I got home.

The humor in The Lost Fleet: Dauntless mixes well with the darkness and desperation of the situation the ship of the book’s name finds itself in.  I do not often find myself laughing or shaking my head and smiling–physically reacting to and interacting with–novels I read.  It’s a very rare thing for me.  But this is what I found myself doing as I began to learn more and more about the situation John Greary, sudden commander of this lost fleet, finds himself in.  I’ve already decided that I’ll have to pick up the rest of the series when I go to work tomorrow.  It’s been a wonderful read thus far and I’m looking forward to making it all the way through–and finding out if Black Jack Greary can actually live up to the reputation that was built around him while he was in cold storage.  He’s sort of a science fiction King Arthur sort of figure–which makes it even more amusing for someone like me to be reading it.

Posted on

Torg update – session of 16 July 2009

So another one bit the dust.  We all saw Albert’s imminent demise comimg as players, though probably not quite in the spectacular fashion he went out.  Though I get ahead of myself.

We start out on the pilgrim road to Avignon with a potential crusader against the technodemons.  He’s rabble-rousing and building a peasant army as we go, Ren is getting sicker and sicker to her stomach as we skirt along the border of Germany and France, where the evidence of slave raiding is quite clear.  She knows what that looks and feels like.  This, of course, means she gets more and more quiet and withdrawn as we move along the border.  Grace asks what’s wrong and Ren lies through her teeth.  Of course nothing’s wrong!

So, at one point as we’re getting closer to Avignon, Grace wanders away from camp to clean her weapons.  She proceeds to get into a fight with the Executioner we met before, who apparently wants to know what we’re up to before he kills us all.  In the meantime, ignorant of Grace’s straits, Ren pulls Mable out into the woods to talk about Allison, who Ren wants to know more about.  This is going to have to be played out via e-mail a bit since Liz doesn’t know much about Allison (David’s the one with all of that information).  We end up stumbling upon the aftermath of the little duel between the Executioner and Grace but don’t learn very much about the situation.

We make Avignon a few days later, and it’s a seething mass of humanity so thick you can barely move in the streets.  Amotep keeps going on and on about how awful and disease-ridden it is, saying that slaves in Egypt aren’t treated this badly (Grant turns to Ren at her eyeroll and says “Well, it’s true.”).  Ren doesn’t disagree that it’s bad, she just chooses not to dwell on how bad it is.  We eventually make it to our quarters in a less dirty area of the city and settle in for the night.  Much to Mei’s chagrin, she’s been informed that the pope is giving a speech the next day that’s essentially going to be the call to crusade against the technodemons and that we’re all going to go listen.  All right, minor wrench in our plans, since part of the reason we’d come to Avignon was to continue our hunt for DeSoto.  So…we come up with yet another plan.  We decide that while we’re at the speech, before the speech, Mable is going to swoon and Grace and Ren are going to drag her off to go lay down–of course, we’re not going to actually go lay down, we’re going to go hack the GodNet to see if we can get a lead on where DeSoto is.  The others are going to stay and listen to the speech because we really don’t have a way to get them out of it.

So the next morning, we go to the speech almost before the sun’s up.  Mable isn’t going to have a hard time faking a faint in her outfit, since she can barely breathe (she gets a promise that we’ll loosen her ties after we’re out of the crowds).  We actually get primo “seats” for this speech–we can actually see that there’s figures on the dias from where we’re standing!  Mable fakes her faint and the three of us beat feet further away to find a place to do our hacking.  We eventually find our way to a saint’s shrine that has a terminal that Ren sneaks in to try to access as the speech begins.

Problem.  There’s no keyboard.

So Ren sneaks back out and tells Mable and Grace that we need a new plan.  Mable asks why and Ren brings her inside to show her.  Mable looks at the apparatus for a few minutes and finally says that we don’t have any other choices–Ren’s going to have to improvise a head jack for herself to get into the computer, which is an idea that Ren’s wholly uncomfortable with.  But she does it anyway, since someone’s got to and she’s the only one with a chance at success.

So she novacanes herself up and stabs a needle into the back of her neck with some wires attached with Mable’s help and then she’s in the GodNet.

…and God talks to her.  It’s kind of scary.

And of course, the OS and organization of this computer system makes no sense.  So Ren starts working at trying to sort through that mess so she can start trying to find the information she needs.

In the meantime, Albert has moved forward in the crowds listening to the speech, having seen someone on the dias he recognized (and apparently needed to kill).  And someone starts tapping on the back of Mei’s armor.

Ting ting ting ting ting!

“Stop it!”

Ting ting ting ting ting!

“Stop it!”

Ting ting ting ting ting!

“Stop it!” 

She finally turns around and there’s Odette, but it’s not Odette, it’s her evil half.  And she taunts Mei.  This is very amusing, since Mei is played by Odette’s former character (and David plays a very, very bad Odette.  Which is fine, since we’re dealing with Odayle, Odette’s evil half).  Of course, Amotep is staring at this mess very confused and Grant is the color of a bedsheet since he can’t do a damned thing without blowing all of us.  Odette finishes her taunting of them and then bounces off to come find where we are.

And a few minutes later, Albert makes his move.  Trish drops a martyr card, goes RAWR PUPPY and leaps up onto the dias, turning one figure up there into goo.

Then proceeds to be obliterated by energy weapons fire.  Chaos and panic ensues.  Chaos and panic Ren can feel on the GodNet.  So she starts to pull out.  As she’s pulling out, she hears the obnoxiously endearing voice of an old ally, our good friend the Tachicomas:

“Hey!  Where’d you go?!”

And then she’s out demanding to know what’s going on.  Grace tells her Albert just got himself killed.  Ren utters a string of explicatives and tries to get back onto the GodNet, but the node is dead–like the system’s shut down as a security protocol in the midst of the panic.

And then Odette finds us.  She taunts Grace, wondering aloud if Odette was ever real, is she in the back of Odayle’s head screaming to get out, to make Odayle stop.  Grace isn’t sure what to do.  Odette/Odayle taunts Ren.  Ren counters.  She taunts us all.  Frederico DeSoto comes up in the midst of the conversation.  Odette/Odayle says she really didn’t care much for him anyway and skips away.  Ren laughs.

“Lying is a sin.”

And then we stumble out into the mess to try to find the others, or our way back to our lodgings.  We’re not sure which yet.  I’m bleeding from the neck thanks to my attempt to hack the GodNet.  I’m muchly looking forward to Grant’s reaction to that.  As Jen said in the car…at least it’d get them talking again.

 

…and as a side note…there was a zepplin that looked Nile when we arrived in Avignon.  Grant and Mable both confirmed that it could be from there, but it wasn’t anything they knew about.  So we’ll have to check that out.  Soon…