Beautiful

The explosion hit hard, sending a shock through their cores, the bones of their chests rattling against their skin, hearts threatening to pound out of their chests and onto the ground. It was well in the air above them, far from being dangerous to them in any way, but it still rocked them and made their minds go blank for a moment. All they could witness was the vivid lights of the flame expanding, separating, and becoming a million tiny flickers of candle light, floating down without a wick and fading before they could ever touch the ground.

Daniel was the first to turn his head, and see the girl laying beside him. He was taken in by her appearance as the gentle flickers fell around her, illuminating and darkening her face in a thousand ways, changing with every moment, allowing him to see every bit of her face in the best light at one point or another. She glowed in the embers, vividly illuminated, as if the gods themselves were presenting her to him. For a moment, he forgot that he knew this face. He forgot her name, or where she had come from, or why on earth she was laying beside him.

Michelle turned her head next to see a boy staring at her. Who was the boy? she asked herself. And why did his eyes shine so brilliantly in the flames? The way he looked at her with those flickering eyes was like two infinitely deep pools of water, the sun reflecting on their surfaces as if they were calling her to dive in and explore their depths. Without a word, compelled, she reached out a hand to those pools, and found it laying gently upon the boy's face. But before she even had time to process the thought, she felt the caress of his own hand on her face. She had no idea where she was or why. The thought of the explosion was even melting away from her mind. All she could focus on were his eyes.

The warmth of the falling flames was quite abruptly not enough. Without words, the two scooted closer together, gently pulling their faces closer together, their hands sliding across skin and into one another's hair. Their breath was warm on each other's skin. They blushed as they realized what they could feel, but they couldn't stop. The flames fell around them, as if urging them closer.

Michelle closed her eyes first, but Daniel felt it first. Their lips as they met. The explosion of heat running through his system, like a flip turned on that pushed him further. He gripped her hair firmly and pulled her closer, his lips pressed tight against her own. She didn't fight. She clung to him, desperate for the warmth he was shooting through her.

When they pulled apart, and saw the last of the flames die out, their faces turning to darkness, they remembered what was happening.

And they kissed again.

Harpoon

The massive leviathan breached the water, sending off waves of frigid water in every direction that would easily crush a great battleship before it would ever have a chance to be flipped. Its scales shone brightly in the moonlight - brighter even than the water that it was surfacing from. Its eyes burned red, attention turned on to the gryphon hovering in the air above it, staring down at the beast below it without fear. The gryphon was but a speck of dirt compared to the leviathan, but it was his rider that gave him his fearless gaze.

Angelo stood on the back of his gryphon, precariously perched on the creature's back without a saddle, a massive spear held firmly in his left hand. It was easily as long as he was tall, steel forged with flames burning so bright it tainted the edges blue. He glared down at the sea beast which had taken his family and home from him so many years ago. The creature had surfaced just off the edge of his village. They had thought they would be safe, living up on the plateau, but the waves had risen higher than anyone thought possible. The leviathan had only deigned fit to apathetically washed as they were all washed away.

But Angelo had been out, learning to fly with his gryphon that day. Even from so many miles away, the two had heard the heart wrenching sound of the crashing waves. By the time they arrived, they had only time to watch as the leviathan sank below the water, their home wiped away as if it had never been in the first place. Everything they had ever known and loved, vanished without a trace, and the cause leaving without so much as a fond farewell.

They had trained for years after that in order to take revenge. Trained to fly, trained to hunt, and trained to fight. Angelo had learned how to wield a spear with unadulterated accuracy, able to pierce a pheasant in the heart as it dove to the ground in free fall. His gryphon learned to catch those speared pheasants before they ever hit the ground, and how to fly with free mobility without unseating his unsaddled rider. They moved as a single unit, and only pulled apart from one another when absolutely necessary.

The leviathan roared up at them, as if acknowledging that they had become a threat to it. It showed them its teeth, sharp and jagged like the stones of the sea that tore so many ships asunder, and without hesitation, Angelo leaped from his friend's back.

He drove his way down threw the air, gripping his spear with both hands and watching as he approached the impossibly tough skin of his foe. He was falling from more than a mile before the creature's head, which was now rising up to meet him. A mere few moments behind him, his gryphon dove too, prepared to tear those scales free as Angelo pierced them and lifted them from the beast with his spear.

The impact was hard, rocking Angelo's powerful body and nearly crushing his bones. But his spear drove in harder, not only piercing the first scale, but completely shattering it. Less than a second later, his gryphon's talons were driving into the exposed flesh, pushing the spear deeper and penetrating the creature's muscles. It screamed out in rage, and then they were gone, once more pulled away into the air as Angelo steadied himself on his friend's back and flicked the blood from his weapon.

It would be a long battle. And they would relish its every moment.

Of Eyes

If you haven't noticed, characters are probably the part of writing that I excel at - or at the very least, what I am most fond of. So when I tell you that this idea for a story centers around an idea for a character, you shouldn't find it surprising.

I love Alice in Wonderland, though why exactly that is I struggle a bit to explain. There is a lot of insanity and craziness in the story, but it actually follows a set of rules, with a purpose, an expectable outcome, and definable characters and characteristics. It seems impossible to understand the first time, but the more attention you pay, the clearer the events become. My favorite example of which being the Mad Hatter. I won't get into him too much, but suffice to say that he's interesting not because of the questions he asks, but why he asks them. Real world consequences in a world of fantasy - pretty interesting if you ask me.

The hatter is the inspiration behind this character of mine. His perceived insanity - no less real, but defined by a set of laws. Whether or not he was the one who set those rules or another is hard to say, but they are incredibly important to him, if to no one else. But between those rules, how does he act? It's hard to say. In one instance he may think and act in a certain way, but in the next it may be entirely different.

What if there was a pattern? An observable one, one that could be learned, but couldn't be predicted. One that you have only to know and react to, like knowing how to talk to one friend over another.

My hatter has an unknown cause for his insanity, but has eyes that give away his patterns. A man with  multiple personality disorder that changes at the flip of a switch with no discernible reason or consistency between switches. But with each personality, the color of his eyes change, and each personality is directly tied to one of the different colors.

But as an author, this presents a lot of opportunities. Perhaps too many. How many personalities does he have? Just how different are they all? Do the personalities know about each other, and if so, how thoroughly? If not, why? How did this condition occur upon him, and is there anything that can be done about it?

These are the questions I want to answer. The deeper I get into it, the harder it becomes to write. But it also makes it more interesting. I can only hope that I can somehow do it justice.

Of Randomness

When I was younger, for a very short time I played an online trading card game whose name I have long since forgotten. In a similar vein to Magic the Gathering, different cards were based upon varying elements, but it was unique in just how many elements there were. One in particular always struck with me - the element of entropy.

If you're out of the know, and couldn't guess by the title of this post, entropy is the element of randomness - in a sense. It's an actual scientific principal, and it effectively accounts for randomness in variables in mathematical equations. More or less. It's been a while.

I was definitely one of those "lol teh rando" kids, I will freely admit, and there is certainly a lot of that still in my brain. But for whatever reason, the concept of entropy hit me in a very different way - my best guess being because it was the concept of controlling it. Some time later, a friend of mine wanted to write a story with all of her friends as characters, and her better friends being the special main characters. I was fortunate enough to be one of those particular friends.

She asked me to pick an element that I wanted to control. Other friends had chosen theirs first, so more obvious choices were already gone, but I didn't have to think twice. I told her I wanted my character to control entropy. We talked for a long time about what that meant, and what that allowed my character to do, and what the downsides of it were. It wasn't that he could effect chance, so to speak. Rather, he could call upon it.

That character became a favorite of both of us. His power was quick to decide - at the snap of his fingers, a random event occurred. It could happen to him, around him, inside him, or absolutely nowhere near by. It could kill people, bring them back to life, change their appearance or mindset, or turn their head completely around. He couldn't choose what would happen or where or to whom - he just had to pray. It would even be possible to reverse what he had already done, but who knew what kinds of things he would cause in the process.

We all see patterns in nature, created by random chance. So the things that his powers did would follow some sort of pattern. But as soon as he figured out what that pattern was, whether he wanted to or not, the pattern would change.

An incredibly inconvenient power, and yet an incredibly powerful one. One that would lead to a character who was incredibly happy, incredibly funny, but also incredibly sad. All of which would be amplified by his cultural upbringings.

It's such a good character, with such a good balance and so many possibilities, and I can't help but want to take it for myself. Which is kind of ironic to say, given that it's literally based on me. Even events in the character's life, as my friend writes it, are based on events in my own life. It would be hard for me to ever write a character in that style without it coming out very similarly to what she would write.

One day, if she ever finishes that tall tale, I would love to not only read it, but write my own expanded story of it. To write fanfiction of myself. How crazy would that be?

Stats

I've made it no secret how much I enjoy RPGs, though I perhaps haven't talked much about my preference for JRPGs over WRPGs. That kind of statement makes absolutely no sense to someone who doesn't know much about video game RPGs. To put is simply, a Western Role Playing Game is, appropriately, what people in the US are more like to think of - games like Dungeons and Dragons or the Elder Scrolls series. Japanese Role Playing Games are things like Final Fantasy.

The main difference is in how leveling up works. In JRPGs, leveling up gives you a pre-determined set of stats - your health goes up in generally the same way, your attack and defense go up in generally the same way. It's all dependent on the character and what their set levels are going to be. WRPGs, on the other hand, leave the stats entirely up to the player. A level up gives the player character a certain number of points that can then be distributed among their stats as desired, and frequently characters are additionally given some form of reimbursement - if they mess up their stat distribution, or decide later on they want to play in a new way, they can retract all of the points they have spent from their level ups and do it all over again without having to start over from the beginning.

Either way, in both the levels and the stats you gain from them are incredibly important, and because of that your stats are always easily accessible. A page full of numbers which may not mean much at first glance, but defines how a character acts, how it plays, what it's capable of, and what situations it is able to get in and out of. The skills they have, the skills they're capable of having, be it for combat or conversation. Everything is determined by that sheet of numbers.

I may not be a big fan of the way WRPGs play - never being sure of if I'm leveling my characters correctly is a big turn off for me - but I love the concept of that stat sheet. At times, I consider trying to make such sheets for my characters in stories. Having something in front of me to refer to on just how good my character is at different things would be supremely useful. Determining as the story goes when they have accomplished something worthy of a level, and where the points from that level are going to go. And it might not mean much to most people, but to be able to show someone how that character progressed through their levels and stats - I think -  would be a very cool and interesting way of viewing a character.

Unfortunately, doing that would also require knowing what a single point in a stat would mean. What is a single point in strength? What does it change? What does it allow? There's nothing about that that is consistent from game to game, nor even from person to person. After all, a person may have great strength in their arms, but very little in their legs. How would that equate on a stat sheet? Poorly, probably. You could try to equate that difference through the use of endurance instead, but they might still have incredible muscular endurance - just in the top half. But maybe that goes into willpower. What else can willpower do? What else does it effect?

It's a complicated matter, and the more complicated you make a stat sheet, the harder it is to read. You have to find a good balance. Kind of like when you're writing a character in the first place.

Odd couple

Ran climbed out of the hunk of junk that was now his spaceship. He had had to leave in a rush thanks to the invading forces of the Florans, and with little fuel he was lucky he had made it just through the warp jump. The fact that his once beautiful ship was even close to remaining in one piece was a miracle, and one that he thanked his gills for. As he saw the surface of this foreign planet rushing up to meet him, he was certain that he was never to see the light of day again.

But the planet seemed remarkably peaceful. At least that much was like his home. If he had landed on a world already ravaged by the Floran... There were too many variables that were out of his control. He had to stop thinking of them, and focus on the more immediate issues. Like food. Surely somewhere near by there would some sort of fruit or vegetation growing, and he would not have to lower himself to the disgusting level of hunting. He was much too fragile for that.

As he walked the planet's surface, being careful to observe his surroundings and create a mental map of where he had been, he prayed that he had not been the only one to escape. He did not see any shooting stars in the skies, or hear the sounds of other ships crashing, so it seemed that he was to be alone on this planet. There were few creatures even that inhabited the forest, which meant that he had little competition when he finally came across a grove of wild plants.

Large, multicolored fruits grew on curving, twisting vines, and popped easily loose from their home and into Ran's mouth. He could feel the skin and juices flowing down into his stomach - he hadn't fully appreciated just how hungry he had become. He reached out and tore the food loose with a vigor, blind to what he was doing until a face appeared from behind one of the plants.

The instant he laid his eyes on it, Ran leaped back in terror, brandishing the last fruit he had picked like a knife as though it might offer some measly form of protection. The green skinned Floran had been hiding amongst the greenery, and was staring at Ran as he backed himself into a tree.

"D-don't come any closer!" he yelled out at it fruitlessly. The Floran was already approaching him, head cocked to one side. "I won't let me take you like you took my home!"

"Hylotl is acting ssstrange," said the Floran, her voice giving away her gender. "Floran hasss not ssseen life in many cyclesss. Floran hasss been alone."

Ran didn't know that he believed her. Her face and her body language seemed innocent enough, but he knew how the Floran were - cruel and evil, ready to devour any in their way. "I won't be eaten by you!" he called out once more.

"Nazoma doesss not eat Hylotl. Met Glitch lady. Ssshe taught Nazoma how to live on outssside. Nazoma now only eatsss mindlesss beassst."

Ran hesitated, unsure. He had heard that the Floran and Glitch got along because the Floran could not consume the Glitch's metal body. But did that kindness extend out any further? He doubted it. "And what constitutes a mindless beast?" he asked, his voice still shaking.

The Floran giggled abruptly. Ran had never seen a Floran laugh innocently before. "Hylotl isss cute. What Hylotl'sss name?"

There was a long pause. "...Ran," he finally offered.

"Nazoma like Ran. Nazoma travel with Ran?" She looked down at the plants around her and grabbed a larger fruit, pulling it away from the vines and offering it like a peace treaty.

Slowly Ran took the fruit from her hands. He was surprised to see her smile as he did. There was something different about this one. He wasn't sure what had happened... But he was going to find out.

"Yeah," he said. "Alright. Let's travel together."

Competition

I don't enjoy being put into competitive positions. It's not that I'm a competitive person - it's that I'm too competitive, and I'm too angry. And not just the yelling, crying, rage quitting kind of angry, but the violent kind of angry. It sounds weird and almost kind of disturbing, but I can feel it in my muscles when they scream for me to strike out, and to fight. I want desperately to get into a fight - it's not enough just to punch, but to be punched as well. I can't accurately describe it, but it's like a pulling my muscles that can't possibly be ignored.

When I get mad, that second part that wants to be hit back goes away, draining into the need to punch. When I get mad, I want to destroy whatever - or whoever - it is that's making me angry. It took me years to be able to control that urge and to stifle it down when it comes up. But the thing that brings it out of me more than anything else is playing video games - and, unfortunately, some of my favorite games and the ones that are most popular among my friends. Fighting games, like Super Smash Brothers, or party games, like Monopoly. To say I want to flip tables is to seriously understate the feeling.

A younger me would have quite literally walked up behind my friend's head while we were playing and violently punch them in the back of the head. Even before I started training in martial arts, I was stronger and faster than most of my friends, so even if they tried to fight back, as much as I hate to say it, I was usually the winner. I honestly don't know how I managed to have friends at the time in the first place, and I especially don't know how some of those friends continue to hang out with me today.

In sports it's not quite as bad, mostly because that anger can be focused into the game itself. When I played lacrosse, getting angry meant that I played a better defense, that I threw the ball harder and faster, and I became a lot more aggressive in my attempts to gain control of the ball. All of which are the exact kinds of things you want in a lacrosse player - especially a middie.

But games... Getting angry just makes you play dumb, and play sloppy. You hit the buttons harder, which means you're hitting them slower, so you usually don't get the hits in that you want, which only serves to make you angrier. And that, of course, leads to worse gameplay, which makes you angrier, ad infinitum.

So I have to take breaks from playing. Do things like, I dunno... write about how angry I get while playing games with my friends.