The Blog of Roon

Me: “‘Feathers’ is a damn silly last thought, by the way.”

I enjoyed this essay on why most slash involves male characters even though I, um, don’t actually read much slash. I think the author’s right on: it’s substantially a power thing.

This bit caught me where I live, though:

If there were ever a universe with two women, each magnificently strong and good at controlling themselves, though with a tinge of hatred that goes deeper than simple surface dislike (a family debt, or class hatred, or something that can’t be written off as being catty for cattiness’s sake), then I’d slash ‘em. Hell, yeah.

Aigh! This means I have to slash Renate and Dorothy Durai! Because that’s their dynamic now to a tee. But, ewwwwww!

With Alan’s usual talent for making everything More Complicated, treacherous Dorothy has managed to irritate even patient Renate past all patience—but Renate has more or less promised to try to bag Dorothy for her Faerie patroness Lyria, and Renate never gives up on a promise. For her part, Renate has been pretty smooth about not letting Durai get a handle on her, which must irk Durai exceedingly.

Which leads us to last night’s Dragonhunt session, a living example of the truism that all rules have exceptions. The rule in question is “never rape a PC,” an excellent rule indeed—but broken (though metaphorically) and intelligently so.

Back in Chapter Two, Renate stole a street gang out from under the non-twitching nose of a vampire named Linetta Jenner. It’s one of the best things she’s ever done, no matter what yardstick you choose—impact factor, audacity, moral courage, coloring outside the lines.

Jenner, however, didn’t take it well, and it turns out she puppet-mastered the vampire murders we’ve been struggling with during the Purgatory tour, purely in order to revenge herself on Renate. During the Eridu concert, she tucked Dorothy Durai out of the way (we’re not sure quite when, and we’re not sure quite how; Dorothy may have been bought off, or she may have been forcibly or opportunistically drugged, or she may have been bit, though I doubt that last) and impersonated her via illusion, pitching a gorgeous Durai-esque temper tantrum that Coris threw Renate at for lack of any better options.

(Exactly how Coris—or for that matter, the real Dorothy—will react to their roles in this little drama I am quite curious to find out, actually. There’s that damn slash again.)

Seeing a dazed, incoherent, pathetic “Durai” on the floor of her dressing room, Renate quite naturally shut the door behind her and went to help, walking right into the vampire’s deadly but irresistibly seductive embrace. She didn’t even have time or will to scream.

Aryk and Rien promptly got medieval on Jenner and took Renate to the Raphaelites for resurrection. They might have done better to let the five minutes elapse that would have wiped Renate’s memory of the event, though. Renate can accept being tricked, can accept being attacked (she invited such an attack at a previous concert in hopes of trapping the culprit), doesn’t think any the worse of Coris for sending her in there—but what she’s going to have a really wretched time with is her remembered enjoyment of the draining. No, she never consented, but is taking pleasure in it some sort of implicit consent? And what does that mean?

This is Dragonhunt canon; vampires create a dreamy, semi-sexual pleasure in their victims, sapping all will to resist. I don’t even want to argue with canon in this case, because it’s a neat coda to Renate’s troubles with her death-wish. (Sex and death; isn’t it just downright literary of us?) She just had that wish fulfilled in glorious fashion indeed. I don’t think it turned out to be quite what she’d hoped.

But wait—there’s more. The real Dorothy Durai staggered out from who-knows-where in the middle of the fight with Jenner—and recognizing Renate’s drained corpse on the floor, actually pitched in, using her bardic gift to keep Jenner from escaping Aryk and Rien. Oh, $DEITY, slash much?

What would really irritate Renate if she knew about it (in my interpretation, Renate’s soul trapped inside Jenner got a hazy impression of events after the draining, but I’m dead sure she missed this) was that Durai called her “Rennie.” Renate has this byzantine, almost Japanese thing about forms of address. Her circle of friends may call her Lady Renate or just Renate, though the latter depends on an explicit exchange of permission to drop titles. (She offers permission pretty freely, but she’s still formal with quite a few people she likes who haven’t given her leave to call them by their first names. They don’t realize they have to, of course, because Renate’s manners are far more formal than is usual in Northrock.)

Coris has settled on “Wren,” which suits her fine. (She calls him “heart” in private, because of the resemblance of his name to the Latin word—I don’t think he’s figured that out, but he hasn’t protested the monicker either.) Only Sabine, Aryk, and Rien get to call her Rennie. (And Aaron, but he mostly doesn’t. Her brother Emil used to have permission but has forfeited it, as I daresay he’ll find out one of these days.)

Anybody else had just better damned well use her proper title. She’s corrected archdemons on this point. Dorothy Durai, of all people, making free with the name reserved for her sister, her adopted brother, and her most intimate friend—well, that’s just beyond offensive.

And, of course, incredibly slashy. Dammit. Grrrrr. As if that weren’t slashy enough, we’ve got a damaged, vulnerable heroine in Renate and a cynical, opportunistic manipulator in Dorothy—with a fully canonical mutual suppressed attraction. The slash just oozes forth.

Resolving the incredible oozy slashiness of it all will have to wait, as Our Heroes have a new problem: another of those annoying Rocks o’ Power has turned up, and we’ve got a three- or four-way race on for it. As usual, Renate isn’t keen on any of the easy answers. If she were, she’d already have signed up with the shadowy “Soleil” (one race entrant) merely because he/she/it is openly and really quite effectively anti-dragon in a dragon-controlled world.

Renate, however, heavily suspects that there’s more to Soleil’s motives than that, and she simply won’t sign on blind. She’s been used by some really talented users just a wee bit too much. If Soleil were mortal, she might be a touch more willing to give him/her/it the benefit of the doubt, because she’s received much generosity from mortals with no expectation of return. Anybody else? Had better lay out cards on the table, dammit, or she’s not playing, because non- and immortals in this game have proven themselves over and over again to be users.

Not that she shuns them; she can’t. Nor does she always turn down a quid pro quo deal, or she wouldn’t have signed on with Lyria. But Renate will always ask questions of a non- or immortal first—and then shoot if necessary.

Come to think of it—nah, Durai’s mortal. One bad apple. No matter how I scrub my brain, though, I can’t get rid of the slash now!

Renate has a Grand Plan for chucking a monkey wrench into the Purgatory tour. IM commentary on it from Aryk’s player, Matt:

Matt: Would we actually be able to get them to do that? Because if we could that would be hilarious!
DorotheaSalo: dunno
DorotheaSalo: we’ll see how persuasive Renate is
Matt: Ha ha, that’s awesome.
Matt: Serve ‘em right, too.
DorotheaSalo: but, hell, how *else* do you take down a rock band?
Matt: We could kidnap [band member] Hermit.
DorotheaSalo: LEGALLY.
Matt: Oh, legally, right.

Glad somebody likes my plan…

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Renate has another plan.

Okay, I admit the last time I had a flash of screaming genius, it worked out okay. This plan, however, depends not on Renate’s friends, but on a bunch of crazy wannabe-terrorist thugs in Eridu. If it backfires, it’ll backfire big.

Right, so here’s the situation. Renate is working security on the Purgatory tour of the Silver Coast. The wannabe-terrorist thugs, who call themselves the Knights of Destiny, got to the concert venue in Eridu and made nuisances of themselves. Purgatory’s Heaven bodyguard, Darm Sobredaño, suggested to Renate that they strongarm the Knights into something so stupidly violent that even the corrupt Eridu police would have to arrest them.

Renate was not pleased with this plan; not only does it endanger Eridu (the Knights not being terribly careful with crossfire), but it scores Purgatory big pity points if it works. Darm as much as admitted that was part of his reasoning. So our Rennie made a counteroffer. Let me talk to them, she said. I’m one of theirs. They’ve had their fun already. Maybe I can convince them to back off.

Darm chewed on that, and bought it. Much to the good of Rennie’s plan, mind you. Mua-hahahaha.

If this works, it’ll be a beautiful, beautiful thing. The big bad Heaven knight, outwitted by a no-account little backwoods farm girl. Purgatory goes down in flames. Sleazy promoter Hadley Domingo burns right along with ’em. And best of all, Renate will have broken neither the law nor her word. I’m talkin’ beauty, do you hear me?

If it works. Which it may not. And Darm wants to take Renate out somewhere he can talk to her privately, which frankly scares the daylights out of me. What can he possibly want? But she’s a game little thing, so she’s going to dress up pretty and go along.

She’ll have to depend on Darm to keep vampires off her. The Purgatory tour has been marred by two murders, both done by vampires. And it just so happens that Purgatory has a vampire on staff. Rennie established through a fairly solid logic chain that Purgatory’s vamp didn’t do it—and somebody (not sure who yet) on the local Camarilla-equivalent did. Also not sure whether the frame-up was for convenience or in malice; could be either. Rennie being Rennie, she went straight to the press, and the Camarilla is, shall we say, less than pleased.

In other news, Renate and Lyria had a little chat, in which they drew up the first plans for establishing Lyria’s religion. I had been afraid that I’d have to turn Renate into a fire-breathing evangelist, which doesn’t suit her one bit, but in fact I don’t. All I have to do is recruit people with dreams—and I’ve got two or three in mind already. One is a former member of the demon evangelists we defeated along with the Ruido Grande. Another… is Dorothy Durai, and I’m really not sure how that’s going to play out, because there’s a really weird kind of, um, go-away-closer thing going on between Dorothy and Renate, so weird it bewilders even me. Just weird. But Lyria says she’ll help with the Dorothy-wrangling, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

The third candidate… had better wait until Lyria’s a bit stronger, I think. But she definitely fits the profile, oh, yes…

Renate finally did lose her temper with Aryk, confronting him with his poor judgment, unsteady temper, and unpredictability. They parted brass rags, Renate informing Aryk that she simply couldn’t trust him—but not for long, as Aryk’s angel Ricard quietly vanished to set up a test of character for Aryk.

Justifiably worried, Aryk went after him, and Renate went after Aryk, only to find the Church inviting Aryk to test himself against Kahan in Kahan’s own Demon World domain, the Red Palace. Offered the choice to go with him or stay behind, loyal Renate naturally went. To do otherwise would be to dishonor Godfrey’s hair-raising chase after her in her prologue, never mind what it would mean to Aryk.

Kahan did his level best to get under Aryk’s skin, by way of breaking Aryk down enough to stop him thinking. A representative sample:

Alan: “You’re here because the Church once saw promise in you, but now thinks that promise is running out. They think you’re an incorrigible loose cannon who can’t follow orders, has no fixed morality, and cheerfully reinterprets events to keep himself on the side of good no matter what happens.”
Alan: “They send people to me because they hope I’ll turn them to my side, thus giving them some opponents they can actually kill for a change.”
Alan: “I got wise to that centuries ago, though. I’m not convinced you’re Kahanite material. For one thing, you can’t rap.”
Aryk: “That’s…. I…. Fuck you!” Aryk balls up his fist.
Alan: “For another, you’re lousy with the comebacks.”

Renate called Aryk to order, whereupon Kahan started in on her. I think she gave as good as she got—little Rennie’s enviably hard to rattle in a social situation—but y’all can decide for yourselves:

Renate: “Aryk,” Renate says, calmly. “Language. And temper. Don’t prove him right.”
Alan: “Finally, you let women boss you around.”
Renate: “Mm. Terrible thing, that, indeed.”
Aryk: “Language, Rennie? Did you forget where we are?”
Renate: “I know where we are, Aryk. It’s a place where they want you to lose control. Think about that.”
Alan: “Just kidding,” Kahan says, laughing.
Alan: “This one’s a damn sight better than you in every category except the rapping.”
Alan: “We beings of Order are androgynous, did you know that? I just take on a male form and mannerisms because some time in the First Age, there got to be this stupid tradition about what men do and what women do.”
Alan: “Turned out, hitting things with big pointy rocks was a Man thing, so I ended up stuck this way.”
Renate: “How sad.”

I don’t know, but I suspect that Kahan’s wry compliment to Renate at Aryk’s expense was sincere, as far as it went. He definitely treated her with respect through the rest of the conversation. By his lights, she might well be a fairly desirable convert; she has definitely held to a strong ethic thus far, even when it’s cost her to do so. I think, though, that her ethics are too ambiguous, too difficult to articulate, too susceptible to constant re-evaluation to fit Kahan’s strict straitjackets. They aren’t well-suited, Renate and Kahan. Just as well.

Kahan turns out to be an unbridled individualist. I expect his faith is popular in Andragar, because they tend to measure everything by the individual also. (I hope Renate meets the Mute Lord, Dian Dan Shi, sometime. That’ll be an interesting conversation—assuming the Mute Lord knows sign language.) Renate has a far better and more nuanced sense of social context, social effort, and balancing individual and group needs; I shall have to figure out how to bring that into the action, because I myself think it’s an Andragarian weak spot. Perhaps some work on emergent behaviors…

Kahan also discussed heresy and schisms in the Church, and I plan to have Renate address that with Aryk. Heresy and schisms are disruptive, certainly, and they create confusion—but Renate differs from Kahan (or, at least, Kahan’s line to Aryk) in thinking them universally to be avoided. She in fact believes they are necessary to change, to adaptation, to growth—whereas Kahan the Uber-Lawful-Neutral, no doubt, considers them evidence of wishy-washy wobbling.

Perhaps schism and heresy aren’t the best change mechanisms the Church could conceivably come up with, but it’s what they’ve got, and rather than focusing on condemnation of the change mechanisms, she thinks Aryk should pay attention to the potential changes. We’ll see how that flies with him. (And I’ll see if we can’t turn Kahan’s stiff-necked changelessness against him. That should be possible.)

She’s also going to try to win Aryk back to the Church proper, which he’s rather down on at the moment. She may or may not succeed, but she thinks she needs to try; she now knows that Ricard, being intertwined with Aryk’s soul deeply enough to share his confusion, can’t really work on convincing him.

Aryk, notably, didn’t commit so much as a single bobble the entire rest of the conversation. He kept his temper, reiterated his faith, and resisted both Kahan’s casual insults and Kahan’s considered blandishments. Renate hasn’t had a chance to tell him so yet, but she is just wildly proud of him for how he handled himself.

The interview ended with the news that Rien had learned of their whereabouts and come hell-for-leather after them, only to be waylaid by his own particular demon enemy, Ghoster the trickster. As it turned out (the next session), Coris went with Rien, and Ghoster had a chamber of illusionary horrors ready for both of them—Aryk dead at Kahan’s hands, and Renate broken in spirit and permanently maimed.

Ghoster, however, overreached himself in his desire to see Rien strut his stuff; “Renate” focused her attention entirely on Rien, ignoring her lover Coris. (I, playing “Renate,” asked Alan whether Ghoster knew of Renate and Coris’s brand-new affair. He said no. So I played that up, as a clue.) Rien smelled a rat, Coris agreed, and the jig is up—until the real Renate and Aryk bust in next session.

She’s going to be ragingly furious. The lying whoreson, to use her likeness to torture people she loves! Aryk may have to hold her back for once, which will be an amusing change.

I think Monrroyo is about to wrap, unfortunately. It started off well, but it’s not dealing well with my scattered attention span (job-hunting is a cast-iron bitch), and I haven’t done a very good job at involving several players with the game.

I may be able to resuscitate it later, with some fresh blood and more work on my part to help the group pull together, but I don’t think this incarnation is going to last. Advice on plug-pulling etiquette would be helpful at this point…

I’m not calling it a failed experiment. I’m thrilled with the amount of inter-player drama we didn’t have (zero drama, in fact), and I got some very good writing out of a couple of people. But as new GMs will, I didn’t do the best work possible with what I was handed. So it goes.

Rennie and her pals have just fended off a fairly well-planned but otherwise inexpert kidnapping attempt on Rien. The deal is, a bunch of nobodies from nowhere are hunting Rien for (prophesied) reasons vague and very possibly nefarious—but it’s clear as the proverbial bell that Rien is not actually the one they want. The trick is going to be convincing them of that, preferably before they damage Renate’s pet Mage Knight.

Aryk abandoned a fourteen-year-old girl for whom he was specifically responsible in order to pitch in with the fight, which is about to earn him an epic telling-off from a horrified Renate. (I cleared this with Aryk’s player, of course, because I really don’t approve of drama.)

Coming up: the return of Dorothy Durai (which implicates Aryk as well as Renate this time), more happy-fun kidnapping attempts I shouldn’t wonder, Renate trying her sweet best to charm a Heaven Knight without going too far, Aryk growing the heck up finally (I dearly hope!), Rien coping with his jealous streak, and… possibly… a turning point in Renate’s life.

In case Renate defies my expectations and actually does manage to do herself in, her backup is one Tancred Lasalle, Sealed Librarian of the University of Eldorado.

He’s actually a bit of a prick just at the moment, I’m afraid. Over-intellectual, tunnel-visioned, self-centered, melodramatic. His one saving grace is that he does love honestly and well.

That’s his problem at the moment; a spell gone horribly awry sent the woman he loves into parts unknown in Chaos. At the moment he’s trying to pick himself up enough to think straight—he’s insulted her uncle, repeatedly and once violently snubbed her uncle’s security chief (now assigned to him as bodyguard), and completely failed to recognize the usefulness of the people under his nose. (I said he was self-centered and tunnel-visioned. I wasn’t kidding.)

I have a Grand Vision for how he’s going to get her back—but I’m more than a bit hazy on implementation details. Shall have to work those out as I go along, I’m sure.

I owe Monrroyo posts. I have no energy to write them. I’ll do it tomorrow. Sorry, guys.

Renate gets into the most awful trouble with the best of intentions. She’s just gone and gotten into a love-affair that is Not Going To End Well. At All. I’m torn between hoping it’s short, hoping they at least manage to keep some kindness for each other—and just plain dreading the imminent trainwreck.

Yeah, okay, so she’s managed to land Coris finally, slippery fish that he’s been. As is her way, she was completely honest with him about their prospects: she’s a noblewoman, which translates in practice to “political-marriage pawn,” and she has her own ideas about what political ends her marriage might serve.

Sure, the uber-feminist thing for her to do would be to reject hundreds of years of history in favor of True Love, and that does seem to be what Coris wants of her. But I’m intentionally playing it a little more layered than that. She knows political marriage is a raw deal, but honestly, who doesn’t have to cope with raw deals now and then? If it’s what she has to do to justify her status, obey her dearly-loved father, and further her people’s ends, then so bloody well be it; she accepts the necessity. Especially if she also takes a bullet for her sister Sabine’s sake—Mad Stephen of nearby, traitorous Glenworth being a cogent example of this possibility.

So she can’t promise anyone a lifetime; she certainly hasn’t promised Coris one. In her heart of hearts, she judges that the affair may indeed be a lifelong one on her part, owing to her extremely jaundiced estimation of her own life expectancy. (An estimation I don’t necessarily share, mind you.) She will give him whatever she can, while she can, as long as she can. But duty comes first, if death doesn’t beat it to the punch.

Sad to say, Coris is very not getting it. It makes sense, really, that a man who has freed himself of serious political and personal obligations to wander the world a free spirit would expect Renate to do the same—but she put her priorities firmly in order when she was sixteen, and she chose Karlbotel, with all that that choice implied.

Worse still, Coris appears to have a potentially quite nasty jealous and possessive streak. “Well, if it comes down to it, I could always kill the other guy,” he said of the prospect of Renate’s political marriage, the exact amount of jest in the statement not precisely defined. This is less frightening in Dragonhunt-world than one might think, because of the easy availability of resurrection magic (and that’s precisely how Renate answered: “Eh, well, what are Raphaelites for?”), but that doesn’t make it a good thing, not at all.

Not least because Renate is not the kind of girl it pays to be possessive of. That’s what I think is going to wreck them, if Coris can’t get over it. Sexual fidelity she can give him, if that’s what he wants. (It’s an open question at this point whether they’ve actually done the deed. If they haven’t, I daresay they will, Rennie being the total snugglepuppy she is. And I’m assuming the Alchemist’s Guild does birth control—I expect Dragonhunt women have running jokes about “monthly dues.”) But if he can’t cope with her vivid and profound emotional ties to other men and women, well, they just won’t make it.

Which brings us to Rien, who took the news rather badly, if by “badly” we mean “total emotional meltdown.” He’s another one who wants to own her completely; it’s why she’s kept a small but definite distance between them, and she had to tell him so. And he still didn’t get it. Well, fairer to say neither of them quite gets what’s going through the other’s mind.

In her world, nothing’s really changing just because she’s become Coris’s lover. She is still terribly fond of Rien. She would still lay down her life for him without a moment’s thought. She will still care for him, watch out for him, be his friend and his advisor. She still won’t sleep with him—but she never has and never planned to.

But he can’t see it that way… and neither can Coris… and they’d just better not fight over her, because she’ll tick them both off for it. Her heart is big enough for both of them and more; are theirs big enough to share her, let her be her gentle, loving self?

Part of an IM conversation with Adrian (Rien’s player):

Dorothea: “There’s more to learn about Dorothy Durai,” says Alan. Can I kill him now?

Skaarjj: Yes

Skaarjj: Yes you can

Dorothea: Can I kill him good?

Skaarjj: especially since he sent *me* the message “You won’t see Ander yet, but he will turn up when you least expect him.”

Dorothea: heh

Skaarjj: so yes, kill him good, and with much prejudice

Dorothea: I’ll leave something for you.

Skaarjj: oh good… send me pieces by registered mail and i’ll jump on them some

Dorothea: will do