The Granite Knight

Angel of Fortitude again

Another Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Interlude by Rip van Mason

And here's the second and only other one so far!

Interlude II of IX – Horizon – From the personal journal of Glass Spider, playwrite

To HAYDEN SORROWS, she is always the vampire. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her parasitic species. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Natalie Coutourier. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect guardian and tutor that Coterie Coutourier could envision, but as a care-taker he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the wishing heart, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable tools for writing fiction about such three dimensional characters as the cast of the Harry Potter books, or for drawing humans into inequity or inspiring mad scientists to defy the laws of God and Man. But for the predators, the Old Ones, to admit such intrusions into their own admittedly delicate and finely adjusted temperaments was to introduce a distracting factor that would render them mortal. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Natalie Coutourier, an outsider of a dubious and questionable lineage.  I had seen little of my good friend, Hayden, in the past few years. With my apotheosis into a higher order of being approaching ever closer, an ever more incredible amount of minutia was made attendant upon me- assuring my mortal fortune, deleting records of my birth, placating the Seven Saints of Eternity, selecting stagehands and backdrop painters, hosting School talent shows, destroying the impious agents of Lee Scathing, teaching the choir new blasphemous chants and motivating my own human cultists to have the ritual completed on time- while Sorrows, who loathed all forms of religion and ceremony, buried himself in his duties, occupying his incredible faculties and exceptional powers of observation by offering his services as a youkai of private inquiry. From time to time, I heard some vague account of his doings: of his summons to the Disciplinary Committee for the inquiry into the history teacher that instigated the French Revolution, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the death of young Baldur and most recently mere rumours of the mission which he had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the Titov Shrine Family. Beyond these signs of his activity, which I merely shared with the rest of Horizon, I knew little of my former friend and master. One night, I was returning from a hunting trip into the sewer system, where I had found undue difficulty in killing the Mystery known as Unicorn, when my journey lead me through Fortitude and past the Blakely House. Remembering the once-commonly used ritual to bring myself to my companion’s door, I was suddenly seized by a need to present myself before Sorrows, and perhaps assure myself he was in no way working against my ascension. I chanted the ancient words, marked the borders of the lead gate with the petals of a tulip, rosemary for remembrance and a dash of ashes, bowed to the Guardian of the Threshold and bypassed the trapdoor into the Mausoleum of Shades, that nightmare realm of the dead, the mad and Those Who Burrow Below. As always, I found the small rooms within the rambling mansion unchanged. Sorrows’ Draco Malfoy posters were neatly hung in frames, his alchemical equipment in partial disarray, his typewriter mid-sentence on his latest attempt to master writing YA fanfic, his black valet’s outfit hung impeccably beside his crumpled bed clothes. Sorrows himself was unchanged, the tall, spare figure pacing his rooms in deep contemplation. Sorrow’s manner was not effusive but he was, on the whole, I think, pleased to renew my acquaintance. Ceasing his movements around the carpet, he gestured to a chair and a box of cigars. “It seems being an object of dark worship suits you, my dear Glass Spider,” he remarked, “I think your aura is distinctly more tinged with blasphemy.” “Sorrows! It’s not a matter I speak about.” “I fancy your plan for apotheosis is at hand, then? That would explain your frustrating dealings with those credulous nincompoops of the Cult of the World Tree. How did you get those pompous twerps onside, anyway?” “Old friend, I do say…” “Ah, they defy your naming magicks, but you seek to coerce them with the unicorn blood you were hunting for!” “Hayden, this is too much! If I was not completely certain I was immune to scrying, I should think you had been using potent divinations upon my person!” “Bah! Scrying,” his voice carried infinite disdain, “Who needs to see from afar when the evidence is right here? I see it, I deduce it. The matter is simplicity herself. Given your manner of dress is rather megalomaniacal, even for a member of the School Council, and you openly wear that shard of Hayashi glass in your forehead, it seems unlikely you are trying to hide your plans from the Headmaster, so you must have a cult backing you, in defiance of common practice of our pre-Christian kind.” He rubbed his long, nervous hands together. “You have a string of holy titles jotted down on your cuffs, a mortal habituation you have acquired despite your infallible memory for names. One of the names is clearly Yggdrasil - hence my observation you are consorting with the holy men of the Tree. And when a man comes in smelling of virgins’ blood with mud from the sewers on his heel, the distinct bulge on a sanctified dagger in the top pocket of his robe, proclaim me an idiot if I don’t declare him the conductor of a unicorn hunt.” I could not help but laugh at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. “When I hear you give your reasons,” I remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my spider eyes are far superior to yours.” “Quite so,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into the ghost of an armchair, kicking up a small cloud of dust. “You see perfectly, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. My dear Glass Spider, if gods and demons wold put in that sort of effort, it would not now be this fallen human age!” I could not resist a smirk, “Not a human age for much longer, of course.” Hayden waved his hands airily, dismissively. ‘That is between the Seven and the Thirteen, I suppose. You know I have no time for politics. By-the-way, since you are interested in these little problems, and since you are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you may wish to chronicle this.” There was something very strange in all this. Sorrows had never once asked for me to chronicle his adventures, and valued his privacy and the privacy of Blakely House above all other affairs. “You have probably never heard of Antiente Skulle?” said he. “Never.” “Aye, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!” he cried. “The liche pervades Horizon, and not even the School Council has heard of him. I tell you, Spider, in all seriousness, that I could continue to live in the quiet fashion which is most congenial to me, and to concentrate my attention upon training Mistress Natalie and writing Harry Potter fan-fiction if it were not for Antient Skulle!” Something about his pale, worn face told me that his nerves were at their highest tension. He saw the question in my eyes, and, putting his finger-tips together and his elbows upon his knees, he explained the situation…

These are a couple of pictures I drew several (holy crap years ago.  Sticking them on Tumblr to share them with an associate.

I was in an Exalted phase at the time so I did a bit of Homestuck/Exalted fanart.  That's John Egbert as the Unconquered Sun and Dave Strider as Ligier, the Green Sun, Fetich Soul of Malfeas.  I tried to do a Jade(As the Maidens) and a Rose (As one of the Deathlords) but couldn't quite get things working...  

I think the John is my favorite.  Lil' Cal Malfeas is a bit hard to decipher.

"An Unreliable Narrative" - A Prototype Welcome to Night Vale Quest Set for Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (Part 1)

Okay, so I've been thinking about Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, and I've been thinking about Welcome to Night vale, and I've been thinking about how to combine Chuubo and Night Vale together. More specifically, I've been trying to think about Chuubo Quest Sets and just how tricky they are to make.

If you don't follow Welcome to Night Vale, it's one of the most popular podcasts ever, about(and I'll use the cliche description everyone uses from the first episode) "A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep": http://commonplacebooks.com/welcome-to-night-vale/

If you don't follow Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, it's an unreleased Tabletop RPG written by Jenna Moran, designed, primarily, for playing Miyazaki-inspired games, but its same sense of normalcy among the strange definitely can fit:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1710667762/the-chuubos-marvelous-wish-granting-engine-rpg

As a fun exercise that no one will ever get any use out of, I thought I'd mess around a bit with making a Cecil Quest Set, which I am going to tentatively call the Unreliable Narrative Quest Set.

Alright, so let's break down a Cecil Arc. In my mind, the Cecil Arcs of Welcome to Night Vale typically traverse a certain path:

Reporting: Cecil dispassionately observes and reports even momentous events, as if they are completely external to him.

Editorializing: Some crisis or issue strikes Cecil/Night Vale causing him express fear or concern OR state opinions that clash with official opinions

Becoming the Story: Cecil is, personally, drawn into events, whether it be physically, emotionally, or merely by association.

Human Interest: Cecil has some sort of personal revelation, emotional catharsis, or transformative event

A Return to Normalcy: Cecil settles back in, the revelations of the past ignored or integrated.

Now, for various reasons, I'm pegging Cecil as being on a Storyteller Arc, generally. The most obvious is the nominal relationship, but the authorship abilities of the Storyteller Arc, and the slow burn character development of its Quest set both fit the character, in my mind. As, Ms Moran said, he's almost a background character-type, not a lot of actual growth along his path for most of the story, except, perhaps, in short bursts.

Basically, the Storyteller Arc is as follows...

Doing your thing, being cool

Continuing to do your thing even as things start getting messy

Facing things outside of your expertise

Go for the gold, the biggest prize

Fall back to earth, rebuffed by your earlier overreach

It's not exactly a map, but it's not too far off. The overall shape of the Arc feels similar.

I think I should go to bed now... But I'll come back to this, i think. Maybe. 

Well, maybe not.

A Boy and His Star...

The Angel of Fortitude and Chibi-Sa'a Lingurth.

The most intriguing part? We ALREADY have a Best Friend! Who IS this guy?

Over on RPG.net, I’m in a PbP game of the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (an RPG by jennamoran) campaign Glass Maker’s Dragon (I play Natalie Coutourier, the Vampire Prodigy) [You’ll need to have an RPG.net account to click that link].

The game is being HGed by the...

Terrible doodle. Just... Awful.

Why do I do this?  There's no particular reason....