Aerta Ferham of Lacerta (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thevineintervention) wrote2012-01-29 09:28 pm
thevineintervention) wrote2012-01-29 09:28 pm
ESSAYINGLY!!!
OK!!! FINALLY ESSAYING ON AERTA!!!! This shit is going to be so incoherent but whateverrrrr I will get it down on that page LIKE A WINNER.
SABRA: her world, it used to be a big fantasy world, with all kinds of things like gods and monster and heroes and super-powers and head monsters and giant shining crystal cities, and amazing dirty steam-punk cities. EVENTUALLY their sun began to die, and the people went underground at the behest of the gods, hoping they could wait out their star's "wrath." Things got worse and worse until thousands of years later we have AMNESIA MURDERCAVE. But Aerta wasn't around for that part! She was there when it was a fantastic beautiful world.
LACERTA was the nation of half-breeds and hippies. They lived mostly in the forest and in the foothill's of the great mountain range, and sometimes on the coast. They were a mix of agrarian and hunter-gathers. The main concepts of their culture are "informality." They had very (very) personal relationships with the local gods. Due to this inter-breeding of humanity and the supernatural world, it was very common in Lacerta for families or individuals to have an inhuman aspect, such as plant, or beast or bird of water or ethereal.
They are also notorious hedonists. Drug use, both ritually and recreationally is highly widespread. Most "festivals" are just orgies, and they believe pretty much all sex is a beautiful thing. (My personal headcanon says that due to genetic dissimilarities, many Lacertans couldn't knock each other up if they WANTED to, hence casual sex not being so very much a concern.)
LACERTAN MAGIC depends basically entirely on one's born techniques. If you are born able to use a magic, hey, awesome! If you're not, then eh, it's not a big deal. You probably have other talents! There was a lot of interactions with smaller gods. For example, your farm needs a bit more water? Head over to your river, bring it some nice booze, let it talk about it's family a lil', and it'll probably help you out. However they do not ask for the intercession of "higher" gods. The Higher gods would have been part of the main pantheon- basically the equivalent of the Olympians. Almost any "Judge" from Sabra would fall into the category of "higher" god.
KOLOTHA is one of the higher gods. In fact she's one of the highest gods. She's the wife of the King of the gods, but that's not even where her power lies. She's the "weaver of fate." So she determines the lifespan of each mortal, and sees that things progress according to the greater patterns of the cosmos blah blah. She does care for mortals, and does give them (particularly heroes) great gifts and wisdom. HOWEVER, when paired with her brother, Corpus the Surgeon, she takes on an added aspect of "perfect balance" in all deals struck.
So while calling on Kolotha or Corpus for magic is not necessarily a bad idea, you should be very, very, very well-learned in the kinds of deals they strike before you do so. For example, a middle-aged mage from a country of scholars who has been studying his whole life? He can probably make it work. A derpy little girl with no concept of magic following any rules? That's a bad, bad plan.
So when Aerta's mother was sick and interceded to her and was like "HEY KOLOTHA HEY KOLOTHA CAN I HAVE MIRACULOUS HEALING POWERS??? I'LL CHANGE MY MOM'S FATE :D PLEASE I'LL BE UR BEST FRIEND :)" the goddess was less than amused.
AERTA'S CURSE: So to start with, she did in fact get basically miraculous healing powers! Little to nothing was beyond her skill. A broken bone was no biggie, most deadly illnesses she had totally in the bag! Except . . . she had no choice about how to use this power. Basically she got blasted in the head by Kolotha's will, and the will of a god is going to be pretty overwhelming to start with, but especially so for a grieving child! Aerta could always feel, instinctively, who was fated to live and who was fated to die. She was willed by Kolotha to stay in her hometown. People would come form all over, hearing of her power, and beg to be saved. Some she was allowed to; many, many she was not allowed to. Aerta was never given the benefit of knowing why she would be made to save some asshole, but a child she had to let die. It all kind of sucked.
So! On the one hand, Aerta became very, very obedient to Kolotha's will. There wasn't much else for her to do! Kolotha whispered "jump" and Aerta already knew exactly how high. It wasn't that her powers just wouldn't work without Kolotha's permission, it that the god's will was just so overwhelming that it wasn't in her to rebel. In fact, the only act of rebellion she ever truly managed was just to hope- for a while- that eventually she would not be Kolotha's tool. Then the guy who made her hope that got burned to death in the sun so that was rad. She got pretty used to not being the one who makes the choices in her life. She also got used to having an external force to hide behind as a justification of what happens and what she does about it. From Aerta's perspective it really was all pretty much "well that's just the way it is, there's not much to be done about it."
She also became a really, really good greif counselor.
OK SO HERE'S THE OTHER HAND: Aerta's life was not by any stretch all sadness and bleakness. Yeah, from her perspective free will was an illusion, and one she was not even afforded the comfort of. Yeah, a lot of people came to her asking for help and she had to let them die. Yeah, there were even some people she was allowed to help that she didn't know how to. (Razzy and Buttercup.) But! BUT!!! Her life really wasn't all that bad. The choices Aerta could make she took full advantage of. She decided for herself very solidly that she was still going to enjoy her life, no matter how heavy her Kolotha shit got. She was going to flirt with (and sleep with) as many cute boys as she damn well could. She was going to sample every drug she had time for. She trolled the atheists, the asexual, dream-harassed her brother. So the hand she was dealt didn't have a lot of lulz? She made her own.
SO NOW SHE'S IN THUSIA and basically her first instict is "WHY WOULD YOU UNDEAD ME 8( 8(" and hearing that her planet is dead, she is on a new one, the feeling of "Y U DO THIS" only continues! She loved her world, and her friends, and her family. If the gods of Thusia had asked her permission, she would have politely declined the invitation to exist. But she is very, very conditioned to be the gods' bitch. And so being called here, and she has to fight in a war she doesn't particularly want to, well, that's not so totally unexpected for the kind of shit that has happened to her!
Kinda aside note here, in specific to the man-versus-nature theme. While, yeah, she is a dirty hippie that lived in harmony with nature and boom-de-yada, she doesn't really have anything like the modern concept of "man-made calamity is fucking up nature" like we do. She gets along well with people from more developed nations, even ones that have subjugated nature. Lacertans avery very, very much against picking sides. They are also totally honest about how brutal nature is. Frankly, from her perspective if bears could build cities and kick people out of them they probably would! And the disaster that destroyed her world was 100% natural. There was nothing humanity did to cause it, and nothing the could have done to stop it. So when she sees plants and nature having destroyed humanity, "maybe humanity deserved it," really isn't a thought that comes up.
If she were really, really pushed on her thoughts on the war, they would probably come down to "humanity already lost. Why are the gods still fighting?" but she can't really bring herself to out-right question the gods, at least not yet. She's just been simply too conditioned to obeying them. When Dellen was saying to her "those trees out there aren't your trees, this world isn't your world," there was a little part of her that wanted to be like "y-yeah well UR NOT MY REALMOM GOD" but nope, her feet aren't under her enough to get to that.
AND THAT'S REALLY, BASICALLY, WHERE SHE IS RIGHT NOW. She doesn't particularly WANT to be alive, but she is. She had some very firm concepts of what death was like, but that was all sort of dependent on HER WORLD NOT BURNING UP IN A SUPER NOVA. So even though she was someone who was very comfortable of death, she's now uncertain and scared of what that means for herself and for all the people of Sabra left behind.
And then all her gods are here! AND THEY ARE MOE AND SAD!?!? Or they are irreverent and happy that the world is dead.
Basically everything is confusing and terrible. It's been a good week or two since she got here and she really barely has it put in order which end is up. So she's compensating by sticking to things that are familiar and she knows how to deal with. Aella has been boosted from "good friend" to "MY FAVORITE FUCKING PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE" she's turned up the flirting and derping. She's tripping a lot of balls. She's spending a lot of time comforting people on loss. These are the things she knows how to do! Even taking a task from Leedin to do some weaving. She's not particularly GOOD at weaving, but she knows how to do it, and doing something for the will of a weaver-goddess is less confusing than not. Sooooo. Yup.
Probably to get her feet further under her, she may start poking people about all the infinite sad they are carrying. SHE KINDA WANTS TO START POKING ALL HER DUMB LITTLE HEROES because derp your whole team sure did get wiped out. :(
OH OH AND ANOTHER THING idk where to put this. But when she went to talk to Del she was basically expecting to hear "WHELP THIS IS THE SITUATION YOU ARE IN RIGHT NOW THIS IS YOUR DESTINY DEAL WITH IT" I mean the fact that the higher gods were even THERE and you can TALK TO THEM was kind of exciting for her. '-'
Except then Del was like "this is probably hard :( I'm sorry :(" Also Dellen was like "YOU HAVE TO MAKE CHOICE" and also "YOU SHOULD HAVE HOPE."
And Aerta doesn't have any idea wtf she is supposed to do with choice and hope. So she's just. Ignoring that.
My god that is TL;DR as hell. AND ALSO I HIT 1000 COMMENTS so this is also a question meme that I will actually answer this time. You can re-ask from the last one if you like I won't judge you :|a
SABRA: her world, it used to be a big fantasy world, with all kinds of things like gods and monster and heroes and super-powers and head monsters and giant shining crystal cities, and amazing dirty steam-punk cities. EVENTUALLY their sun began to die, and the people went underground at the behest of the gods, hoping they could wait out their star's "wrath." Things got worse and worse until thousands of years later we have AMNESIA MURDERCAVE. But Aerta wasn't around for that part! She was there when it was a fantastic beautiful world.
LACERTA was the nation of half-breeds and hippies. They lived mostly in the forest and in the foothill's of the great mountain range, and sometimes on the coast. They were a mix of agrarian and hunter-gathers. The main concepts of their culture are "informality." They had very (very) personal relationships with the local gods. Due to this inter-breeding of humanity and the supernatural world, it was very common in Lacerta for families or individuals to have an inhuman aspect, such as plant, or beast or bird of water or ethereal.
They are also notorious hedonists. Drug use, both ritually and recreationally is highly widespread. Most "festivals" are just orgies, and they believe pretty much all sex is a beautiful thing. (My personal headcanon says that due to genetic dissimilarities, many Lacertans couldn't knock each other up if they WANTED to, hence casual sex not being so very much a concern.)
LACERTAN MAGIC depends basically entirely on one's born techniques. If you are born able to use a magic, hey, awesome! If you're not, then eh, it's not a big deal. You probably have other talents! There was a lot of interactions with smaller gods. For example, your farm needs a bit more water? Head over to your river, bring it some nice booze, let it talk about it's family a lil', and it'll probably help you out. However they do not ask for the intercession of "higher" gods. The Higher gods would have been part of the main pantheon- basically the equivalent of the Olympians. Almost any "Judge" from Sabra would fall into the category of "higher" god.
KOLOTHA is one of the higher gods. In fact she's one of the highest gods. She's the wife of the King of the gods, but that's not even where her power lies. She's the "weaver of fate." So she determines the lifespan of each mortal, and sees that things progress according to the greater patterns of the cosmos blah blah. She does care for mortals, and does give them (particularly heroes) great gifts and wisdom. HOWEVER, when paired with her brother, Corpus the Surgeon, she takes on an added aspect of "perfect balance" in all deals struck.
So while calling on Kolotha or Corpus for magic is not necessarily a bad idea, you should be very, very, very well-learned in the kinds of deals they strike before you do so. For example, a middle-aged mage from a country of scholars who has been studying his whole life? He can probably make it work. A derpy little girl with no concept of magic following any rules? That's a bad, bad plan.
So when Aerta's mother was sick and interceded to her and was like "HEY KOLOTHA HEY KOLOTHA CAN I HAVE MIRACULOUS HEALING POWERS??? I'LL CHANGE MY MOM'S FATE :D PLEASE I'LL BE UR BEST FRIEND :)" the goddess was less than amused.
AERTA'S CURSE: So to start with, she did in fact get basically miraculous healing powers! Little to nothing was beyond her skill. A broken bone was no biggie, most deadly illnesses she had totally in the bag! Except . . . she had no choice about how to use this power. Basically she got blasted in the head by Kolotha's will, and the will of a god is going to be pretty overwhelming to start with, but especially so for a grieving child! Aerta could always feel, instinctively, who was fated to live and who was fated to die. She was willed by Kolotha to stay in her hometown. People would come form all over, hearing of her power, and beg to be saved. Some she was allowed to; many, many she was not allowed to. Aerta was never given the benefit of knowing why she would be made to save some asshole, but a child she had to let die. It all kind of sucked.
So! On the one hand, Aerta became very, very obedient to Kolotha's will. There wasn't much else for her to do! Kolotha whispered "jump" and Aerta already knew exactly how high. It wasn't that her powers just wouldn't work without Kolotha's permission, it that the god's will was just so overwhelming that it wasn't in her to rebel. In fact, the only act of rebellion she ever truly managed was just to hope- for a while- that eventually she would not be Kolotha's tool. Then the guy who made her hope that got burned to death in the sun so that was rad. She got pretty used to not being the one who makes the choices in her life. She also got used to having an external force to hide behind as a justification of what happens and what she does about it. From Aerta's perspective it really was all pretty much "well that's just the way it is, there's not much to be done about it."
She also became a really, really good greif counselor.
OK SO HERE'S THE OTHER HAND: Aerta's life was not by any stretch all sadness and bleakness. Yeah, from her perspective free will was an illusion, and one she was not even afforded the comfort of. Yeah, a lot of people came to her asking for help and she had to let them die. Yeah, there were even some people she was allowed to help that she didn't know how to. (Razzy and Buttercup.) But! BUT!!! Her life really wasn't all that bad. The choices Aerta could make she took full advantage of. She decided for herself very solidly that she was still going to enjoy her life, no matter how heavy her Kolotha shit got. She was going to flirt with (and sleep with) as many cute boys as she damn well could. She was going to sample every drug she had time for. She trolled the atheists, the asexual, dream-harassed her brother. So the hand she was dealt didn't have a lot of lulz? She made her own.
SO NOW SHE'S IN THUSIA and basically her first instict is "WHY WOULD YOU UNDEAD ME 8( 8(" and hearing that her planet is dead, she is on a new one, the feeling of "Y U DO THIS" only continues! She loved her world, and her friends, and her family. If the gods of Thusia had asked her permission, she would have politely declined the invitation to exist. But she is very, very conditioned to be the gods' bitch. And so being called here, and she has to fight in a war she doesn't particularly want to, well, that's not so totally unexpected for the kind of shit that has happened to her!
Kinda aside note here, in specific to the man-versus-nature theme. While, yeah, she is a dirty hippie that lived in harmony with nature and boom-de-yada, she doesn't really have anything like the modern concept of "man-made calamity is fucking up nature" like we do. She gets along well with people from more developed nations, even ones that have subjugated nature. Lacertans avery very, very much against picking sides. They are also totally honest about how brutal nature is. Frankly, from her perspective if bears could build cities and kick people out of them they probably would! And the disaster that destroyed her world was 100% natural. There was nothing humanity did to cause it, and nothing the could have done to stop it. So when she sees plants and nature having destroyed humanity, "maybe humanity deserved it," really isn't a thought that comes up.
If she were really, really pushed on her thoughts on the war, they would probably come down to "humanity already lost. Why are the gods still fighting?" but she can't really bring herself to out-right question the gods, at least not yet. She's just been simply too conditioned to obeying them. When Dellen was saying to her "those trees out there aren't your trees, this world isn't your world," there was a little part of her that wanted to be like "y-yeah well UR NOT MY REAL
AND THAT'S REALLY, BASICALLY, WHERE SHE IS RIGHT NOW. She doesn't particularly WANT to be alive, but she is. She had some very firm concepts of what death was like, but that was all sort of dependent on HER WORLD NOT BURNING UP IN A SUPER NOVA. So even though she was someone who was very comfortable of death, she's now uncertain and scared of what that means for herself and for all the people of Sabra left behind.
And then all her gods are here! AND THEY ARE MOE AND SAD!?!? Or they are irreverent and happy that the world is dead.
Basically everything is confusing and terrible. It's been a good week or two since she got here and she really barely has it put in order which end is up. So she's compensating by sticking to things that are familiar and she knows how to deal with. Aella has been boosted from "good friend" to "MY FAVORITE FUCKING PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE" she's turned up the flirting and derping. She's tripping a lot of balls. She's spending a lot of time comforting people on loss. These are the things she knows how to do! Even taking a task from Leedin to do some weaving. She's not particularly GOOD at weaving, but she knows how to do it, and doing something for the will of a weaver-goddess is less confusing than not. Sooooo. Yup.
Probably to get her feet further under her, she may start poking people about all the infinite sad they are carrying. SHE KINDA WANTS TO START POKING ALL HER DUMB LITTLE HEROES because derp your whole team sure did get wiped out. :(
OH OH AND ANOTHER THING idk where to put this. But when she went to talk to Del she was basically expecting to hear "WHELP THIS IS THE SITUATION YOU ARE IN RIGHT NOW THIS IS YOUR DESTINY DEAL WITH IT" I mean the fact that the higher gods were even THERE and you can TALK TO THEM was kind of exciting for her. '-'
Except then Del was like "this is probably hard :( I'm sorry :(" Also Dellen was like "YOU HAVE TO MAKE CHOICE" and also "YOU SHOULD HAVE HOPE."
And Aerta doesn't have any idea wtf she is supposed to do with choice and hope. So she's just. Ignoring that.
My god that is TL;DR as hell. AND ALSO I HIT 1000 COMMENTS so this is also a question meme that I will actually answer this time. You can re-ask from the last one if you like I won't judge you :|a
no subject
Uuuh, I think you would enjoy the villain-guy from this very weird book called Music of Razors, which is a pretty short read and I would f'ing love to see it RPed from. There's also the old guy from Dogs: Bullets and Carnage. Was he mellow? I feel like he probably was.
Or you can be a cool kid and make your own. :D MAKE IT EXACTLY THE CHARACTER YOU WANT!!1!
Are there any kinds of characters you want MORE of?
no subject
Same question at you!
no subject
Maybe . . . more high fantasy characters? I'm not sure why but I am enjoying how many we have that aren't from "modern earth." I like modern earth to be the minority '-'a
Do you have any sekrit wishes for Thusia or plot or gods-to-be-made or CR?
no subject
I would also secretly enjoy Allen's harem beginning to date each other if such a thing is even possible. :|a
I just remembered once upon a time I wanted to app homestuck but now there seem to be new characters all over the damn place. (I left off around the time John and Rose found their parents so idk what is happening.) PIMP SOMEONE(S?) AT ME :|a