And Again...
May. 4th, 2010 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magicaddict...to say this is getting to annoy me is something of a criminal understatement.
Alantha lasted less than thirty minutes.
Yes, that's right. Before half an hour after time in, I was being carried back to the group tent, dead as a doornail, shot in the back by a spirit bolt from a player who, even though we were in broad daylight, thought I was a monster. I was reached by a healer five seconds after my death count had expired.
Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.
It's rather a cruel irony that, despite being held in a modicum of respect for my ability to portray, after six years of fest LARP, I have been unable to bring myself to enjoy anything but one of the things I am evidently and patently crap at. I go to a big system, and despite all the other options available to me, all I want to do is disappear off in front of the player party and ninj. I don't feel happy or comfortable anywhere else, and yet it seems I'm entirely unable to successfully look after myself there.
This is whiny, I know. Feel free to stop reading. No-one's forcing you to.
This was my last shot at a daggerboy for several characters, or it would have become ridiculous, so I put just about the lot into him. This was the last of what I would have considered my good ideas, and there were hooks galore for people to pick up and poke if they wanted, and to their eternal, long-suffering credit, they were. I got more attention with Alantha than I have done with any other character for years. Possibly put together. Now I'm playing some paper-thin wastrel with nothing to him and no depth to make him interesting.
Sound familiar to anyone?
Yup - through no intention of mine, my new guy is Juilin Fortrayre with a black face and a few less "dear boy"s. Bereft of any more options for a genuine scout, I'm now reduced to playing characters that poke around at its fringes, trying to get in on any form of action I can. It feels so, so forced, but it's the best I'm going to get for the forseeable future.
I'm going to go to bed, and hope my outlook improves on an event that kept failing to deliver through a combination of circumstances that at no point were the fault of the event itself. In the meantime, because it's no longer of use to me and several people have requested it, below the cut is Alantha's backstory in brief - otherwise known as all I got to write of it before he died. It might explain a couple of his more out there random acts of normalcy amongst the general nastiness.
ALANTHA
Death Aligned Drow Daggerboy
Alantha is a trained assassin, skills honed in the underdark under the tutelage of the master executioner of House Barra'z'hin, in the service of Llolth. As a Llolthite male, he is also a trained slave.
However, he wasn't always that way.
Alantha was born 214 years ago as Xantheus dal Vlos'lac'nalan Szithdrar d'Xukuth Veldrin, firsborn son of Senger Xantis dal Vlos'lac'nala, twelfth house of his home city of Shadow's Heart, in the service of Vhaeraun. The firstborn son of a Vhaeraun lord, he was groomed from an early age to take over his father's position as Lord Bloodseeker. He learned how to subjugate the weak with prejudice, control his women with an iron rod, take what he wanted by force, gain sexual pleasure in killing and torture and pay neither heed nor mind to anyone else's opinion. More than anything else, however, he was taught to hate Llolth, and all she stood for, for her machinations were the absolute antithesis of the true order of the world.
Trouble was, he didn't really agree with any of it.
To his father's utter disdain, the young Xantheus revealed himself as a great rarity in drow society, and even more so in houses of Vhaeraun: He was a pacifist, a moderate, a romantic and a bard. He was polite and well spoken, sensitive and considerate. In fact, behind closed doors, he was a complete and utter waste of time as a Vhaeraun drow.
Xantis enforced two personas on him, making him adhere to the party line in all public engagements, and only tolerating his son's pathetic failures under the most extreme sufferance when no-one else was around. Anyone to whom he showed kindness, politeness or any of his poetry was swiftly put to death, lest it get out what sort of individual the Senger's eldest could be behind closed doors. The behavioural conditioning worked, to some extent, and in spite of himself, Xantheus manifested an extremely guilty pleasure in the torture and killing of the helpless. He was pushed hard to develop this streak, to the point that it became one of his all-consuming passions (though psychoses is probably the better description), and to this day screams of pain and the sight of physical injury arouse him, a weakness that jars against his natural inclinations and for which he utterly hates himself.
From his inception as a Vhaeraun priest at the age of fifty, if the next seventy years taught Xantheus nothing else, it was that male dominance was the source of arrogance, subjugation, inequality and social stuntedness. All males were interested in was control - control of their slaves, their women, their surroundings, each other. There was no-one of the male gender who could be trusted to look beyond themselves, and they had turned him into one of them - in addition to all of his moderate qualities, he was also a violent sadist who liked nothing more than a naked slave girl screaming in agony at his feet.
House Vlos'lac'nala was respected in Xukuth Veldrin, mainly for its ability to score points off Llolthite houses without taking too many scars in return. It was in one of these point scoring exercises, however, that Xantheus' life would change utterly, as he led a hunting party though the underdark in search of interesting quarries, and they happened upon a lone female.
A lone, Llolthite female.
Bloodlust and hatred overtook Xantheus' mind, and he led his party in a wild chase after the fleeing female, a priestess of House Barra'z'hin who had travelled too far in her own hunt of a captured Vhaeraun male released for sport. Bereft of any form of support, she was run to ground, captured, returned to Xukuth Veldrin, raped, publically tortured and brutally executed by the very drow who, if only he hadn't been conditioned to enjoy it so much, might even have been moved to mercy.
Perhaps Xantheus' fate was sealed the moment he laid eyes on the female, or perhaps as he took his hunting party beyond the city borders, but whenever it was, his actions snapped something fairly terminal in the heart of the enemy house. Marshalling their forces, they left their city of Wa'qen d'Isto and descended on Xukuth Veldrin without warning, and entirely without mercy. House Vlos'lac'nala was destroyed in one night under a concerted surgical strike - the household reduced to a bloodbath and the Senger and his sons taken from their stronghold and transported back to Wa'qen d'Isto to face the judgement of Ilharess Tierris of House Barra'z'hin.
The Senger and the other sons were killed, but in Xantheus, Tierris saw something she liked. Spitting bitter defiance in her face, Xantheus was stripped of all he owned, and dragged away bodily to await the Ilharess' pleasure. In return for the inconvenience he had caused her, he was to become Tierris' lowest slave, her favourite toy, and a tool that she would use over and over again.
All reference to his previous life in the service of Vhaeraun was banned on pain of death, for he was to be reduced far below the death that most Vhaeraun followers could expect when captured by Llolth. To complete the removal of his history from existence, she renamed him after her own design, in ridicule of the artistry, romanticism and sensitivity that, despite all his hatred and loathing, he could never entirely hide. From that moment on, he was no longer Xantheus, first son of the Lord Bloodseeker.
He was Alantha.
Alantha, property of Tierris of House Barra'z'hin. A drow named Midnight.
Alantha Jinique d'Tierris dal Barra'z'hin Szithaelar d'Wa'qen d'Isto was trained harshly in the slavery that was to become his life. He was taught how, as a male, at his greatest he could never achieve the status of the lowest female. He was taught how he was no good for anything but what his mistress chose to allow him to learn. He was taught how he had nothing to look forward to, and that he should be crawling at the feet of the Ilharess in gratitude for her not killing him as well. She taught him to experience pain so that she may experience pleasure, and to fight and kill for her amusement against whosoever she chose. All that he had subjected his slaves to was revisited upon him in violent, cold vengeance, with the knowledge that revealing his true nature as a former Vhaeraun would only lead to his death. Not only was that not worth it, but to his utter despair, the training was causing his pleasure to mutate once again. Not only did he enjoy causing and observing the pain and death of others, but he began to be aroused at his own suffering as well.
Vhaeraun had made him a sadist. Lloth had retaliated by making him a masochist.
In spite of his natural personality, which still refused to entirely die under the foulness that two opposing extremes of conditioning imposed upon him and which still reared its head to her great amusement at times, Alantha became a willing slave of the Ilharess, learning to strive for her pleasure and to focus himself on attending to her in any way he could.
Now he had been trained as a slave to know his place, Tierris decided that as well as being her personal plaything, some of Alantha's latent violent tendencies could be put to practical use. When he wasn't being played with, he was entered into training as a house assassin, and with no other course of action left to him, Alantha applied himself well. He became a dedicated student of the art of death, his consummate application to his task complementing his ingrained desire to kill and hurt. He learned of stealth and fighting styles, of poison application and delivery, of social chameleonism and natural mimicry, of psychology, of cant and secret signals, of how to read politics, people and places, of how to welcome pain and make it comfortable, of how to condition his body to die before it broke, and how to combine all of it to study, predate and put himself close to his target, and when it least expected it, to kill it.
Alantha started carrying out assassinations on Tierris' orders, while she enjoyed the deliciousness of using Vhaeraun conditioning to make a highly adept Llolthite tool. He was as good in practice as he was in theory, and used his training combined with his penchant for extreme violence to carry out some truly brutal assignments, which became known among the houses of Wa'qen d'Isto. It was obvious that one of the Matron Mothers had gained a live one on her staff, but no-one was owning up, and he was good enough to hide his tracks well.
In the same fashion that Vhaeraun conditioning had taught his moderate mind to hate the males in the ascendancy there, so the Llolthite conditioning earned Alantha a hatred of females for his trouble. They were determined to manipulate, denigrate and connive their way to power, and use every form of proxy they could find to get themselves there. They could not be trusted beyond the distance that their weakest, most pathetic slave could throw them, and deserved no more of his respect than males.
This world of violence and death carried on for a good many years, and in truth, Tierris only made one mistake in her systematic destruction of the pride of Vhaeraun. She believed that she was dealing with a drow that complied with the rules of what it was to be drow, and directed her conditioning at the portions of his personality that paid respects to Vhaeraun himself. She believed that by breaking that part of him utterly, she would create a willing and able slave that would serve until such time as she grew weary of him, or a task she gave him proved beyond his abilities.
She hadn't figured on his having layers.
With every murder, his sense of injustice grew. His idealism was fuelled as he watched the conditioning his father had beaten into him being forcibly replaced by his mistress' new agenda. His hatred of females grew to be every bit as encompassing as his hatred of males. His skills sharpened every time someone fell under his blade.
One day, some ninety years after his capture, he used it all.
As Tierris slept, sated from an night of the wildest debauchery in which Alantha had been both the victim and the entertainer, he applied the most lethal new in-house poison in the arsenal to his blades, and delivered it to her via four hundred and thirty seven separate knife wounds stretching from the crown of her head to the balls of her feet. The poison was toxic enough that she was paralysed after the second blow, and dead by about the seventh.
He knew that to stay in the underdark was suicide, and to delay was madness. If he were found, he would be killed, and if he stayed, he would be found. Taking no more than his weapons and the clothes he was wearing, he stole away though the assassin's passages his own training had taught him, and had disappeared from Wa'qen d'Isto long before anyone else was aware that anything was amiss.
His destination was the surface.
Alantha lasted less than thirty minutes.
Yes, that's right. Before half an hour after time in, I was being carried back to the group tent, dead as a doornail, shot in the back by a spirit bolt from a player who, even though we were in broad daylight, thought I was a monster. I was reached by a healer five seconds after my death count had expired.
Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.
It's rather a cruel irony that, despite being held in a modicum of respect for my ability to portray, after six years of fest LARP, I have been unable to bring myself to enjoy anything but one of the things I am evidently and patently crap at. I go to a big system, and despite all the other options available to me, all I want to do is disappear off in front of the player party and ninj. I don't feel happy or comfortable anywhere else, and yet it seems I'm entirely unable to successfully look after myself there.
This is whiny, I know. Feel free to stop reading. No-one's forcing you to.
This was my last shot at a daggerboy for several characters, or it would have become ridiculous, so I put just about the lot into him. This was the last of what I would have considered my good ideas, and there were hooks galore for people to pick up and poke if they wanted, and to their eternal, long-suffering credit, they were. I got more attention with Alantha than I have done with any other character for years. Possibly put together. Now I'm playing some paper-thin wastrel with nothing to him and no depth to make him interesting.
Sound familiar to anyone?
Yup - through no intention of mine, my new guy is Juilin Fortrayre with a black face and a few less "dear boy"s. Bereft of any more options for a genuine scout, I'm now reduced to playing characters that poke around at its fringes, trying to get in on any form of action I can. It feels so, so forced, but it's the best I'm going to get for the forseeable future.
I'm going to go to bed, and hope my outlook improves on an event that kept failing to deliver through a combination of circumstances that at no point were the fault of the event itself. In the meantime, because it's no longer of use to me and several people have requested it, below the cut is Alantha's backstory in brief - otherwise known as all I got to write of it before he died. It might explain a couple of his more out there random acts of normalcy amongst the general nastiness.
Death Aligned Drow Daggerboy
Alantha is a trained assassin, skills honed in the underdark under the tutelage of the master executioner of House Barra'z'hin, in the service of Llolth. As a Llolthite male, he is also a trained slave.
However, he wasn't always that way.
Alantha was born 214 years ago as Xantheus dal Vlos'lac'nalan Szithdrar d'Xukuth Veldrin, firsborn son of Senger Xantis dal Vlos'lac'nala, twelfth house of his home city of Shadow's Heart, in the service of Vhaeraun. The firstborn son of a Vhaeraun lord, he was groomed from an early age to take over his father's position as Lord Bloodseeker. He learned how to subjugate the weak with prejudice, control his women with an iron rod, take what he wanted by force, gain sexual pleasure in killing and torture and pay neither heed nor mind to anyone else's opinion. More than anything else, however, he was taught to hate Llolth, and all she stood for, for her machinations were the absolute antithesis of the true order of the world.
Trouble was, he didn't really agree with any of it.
To his father's utter disdain, the young Xantheus revealed himself as a great rarity in drow society, and even more so in houses of Vhaeraun: He was a pacifist, a moderate, a romantic and a bard. He was polite and well spoken, sensitive and considerate. In fact, behind closed doors, he was a complete and utter waste of time as a Vhaeraun drow.
Xantis enforced two personas on him, making him adhere to the party line in all public engagements, and only tolerating his son's pathetic failures under the most extreme sufferance when no-one else was around. Anyone to whom he showed kindness, politeness or any of his poetry was swiftly put to death, lest it get out what sort of individual the Senger's eldest could be behind closed doors. The behavioural conditioning worked, to some extent, and in spite of himself, Xantheus manifested an extremely guilty pleasure in the torture and killing of the helpless. He was pushed hard to develop this streak, to the point that it became one of his all-consuming passions (though psychoses is probably the better description), and to this day screams of pain and the sight of physical injury arouse him, a weakness that jars against his natural inclinations and for which he utterly hates himself.
From his inception as a Vhaeraun priest at the age of fifty, if the next seventy years taught Xantheus nothing else, it was that male dominance was the source of arrogance, subjugation, inequality and social stuntedness. All males were interested in was control - control of their slaves, their women, their surroundings, each other. There was no-one of the male gender who could be trusted to look beyond themselves, and they had turned him into one of them - in addition to all of his moderate qualities, he was also a violent sadist who liked nothing more than a naked slave girl screaming in agony at his feet.
House Vlos'lac'nala was respected in Xukuth Veldrin, mainly for its ability to score points off Llolthite houses without taking too many scars in return. It was in one of these point scoring exercises, however, that Xantheus' life would change utterly, as he led a hunting party though the underdark in search of interesting quarries, and they happened upon a lone female.
A lone, Llolthite female.
Bloodlust and hatred overtook Xantheus' mind, and he led his party in a wild chase after the fleeing female, a priestess of House Barra'z'hin who had travelled too far in her own hunt of a captured Vhaeraun male released for sport. Bereft of any form of support, she was run to ground, captured, returned to Xukuth Veldrin, raped, publically tortured and brutally executed by the very drow who, if only he hadn't been conditioned to enjoy it so much, might even have been moved to mercy.
Perhaps Xantheus' fate was sealed the moment he laid eyes on the female, or perhaps as he took his hunting party beyond the city borders, but whenever it was, his actions snapped something fairly terminal in the heart of the enemy house. Marshalling their forces, they left their city of Wa'qen d'Isto and descended on Xukuth Veldrin without warning, and entirely without mercy. House Vlos'lac'nala was destroyed in one night under a concerted surgical strike - the household reduced to a bloodbath and the Senger and his sons taken from their stronghold and transported back to Wa'qen d'Isto to face the judgement of Ilharess Tierris of House Barra'z'hin.
The Senger and the other sons were killed, but in Xantheus, Tierris saw something she liked. Spitting bitter defiance in her face, Xantheus was stripped of all he owned, and dragged away bodily to await the Ilharess' pleasure. In return for the inconvenience he had caused her, he was to become Tierris' lowest slave, her favourite toy, and a tool that she would use over and over again.
All reference to his previous life in the service of Vhaeraun was banned on pain of death, for he was to be reduced far below the death that most Vhaeraun followers could expect when captured by Llolth. To complete the removal of his history from existence, she renamed him after her own design, in ridicule of the artistry, romanticism and sensitivity that, despite all his hatred and loathing, he could never entirely hide. From that moment on, he was no longer Xantheus, first son of the Lord Bloodseeker.
He was Alantha.
Alantha, property of Tierris of House Barra'z'hin. A drow named Midnight.
Alantha Jinique d'Tierris dal Barra'z'hin Szithaelar d'Wa'qen d'Isto was trained harshly in the slavery that was to become his life. He was taught how, as a male, at his greatest he could never achieve the status of the lowest female. He was taught how he was no good for anything but what his mistress chose to allow him to learn. He was taught how he had nothing to look forward to, and that he should be crawling at the feet of the Ilharess in gratitude for her not killing him as well. She taught him to experience pain so that she may experience pleasure, and to fight and kill for her amusement against whosoever she chose. All that he had subjected his slaves to was revisited upon him in violent, cold vengeance, with the knowledge that revealing his true nature as a former Vhaeraun would only lead to his death. Not only was that not worth it, but to his utter despair, the training was causing his pleasure to mutate once again. Not only did he enjoy causing and observing the pain and death of others, but he began to be aroused at his own suffering as well.
Vhaeraun had made him a sadist. Lloth had retaliated by making him a masochist.
In spite of his natural personality, which still refused to entirely die under the foulness that two opposing extremes of conditioning imposed upon him and which still reared its head to her great amusement at times, Alantha became a willing slave of the Ilharess, learning to strive for her pleasure and to focus himself on attending to her in any way he could.
Now he had been trained as a slave to know his place, Tierris decided that as well as being her personal plaything, some of Alantha's latent violent tendencies could be put to practical use. When he wasn't being played with, he was entered into training as a house assassin, and with no other course of action left to him, Alantha applied himself well. He became a dedicated student of the art of death, his consummate application to his task complementing his ingrained desire to kill and hurt. He learned of stealth and fighting styles, of poison application and delivery, of social chameleonism and natural mimicry, of psychology, of cant and secret signals, of how to read politics, people and places, of how to welcome pain and make it comfortable, of how to condition his body to die before it broke, and how to combine all of it to study, predate and put himself close to his target, and when it least expected it, to kill it.
Alantha started carrying out assassinations on Tierris' orders, while she enjoyed the deliciousness of using Vhaeraun conditioning to make a highly adept Llolthite tool. He was as good in practice as he was in theory, and used his training combined with his penchant for extreme violence to carry out some truly brutal assignments, which became known among the houses of Wa'qen d'Isto. It was obvious that one of the Matron Mothers had gained a live one on her staff, but no-one was owning up, and he was good enough to hide his tracks well.
In the same fashion that Vhaeraun conditioning had taught his moderate mind to hate the males in the ascendancy there, so the Llolthite conditioning earned Alantha a hatred of females for his trouble. They were determined to manipulate, denigrate and connive their way to power, and use every form of proxy they could find to get themselves there. They could not be trusted beyond the distance that their weakest, most pathetic slave could throw them, and deserved no more of his respect than males.
This world of violence and death carried on for a good many years, and in truth, Tierris only made one mistake in her systematic destruction of the pride of Vhaeraun. She believed that she was dealing with a drow that complied with the rules of what it was to be drow, and directed her conditioning at the portions of his personality that paid respects to Vhaeraun himself. She believed that by breaking that part of him utterly, she would create a willing and able slave that would serve until such time as she grew weary of him, or a task she gave him proved beyond his abilities.
She hadn't figured on his having layers.
With every murder, his sense of injustice grew. His idealism was fuelled as he watched the conditioning his father had beaten into him being forcibly replaced by his mistress' new agenda. His hatred of females grew to be every bit as encompassing as his hatred of males. His skills sharpened every time someone fell under his blade.
One day, some ninety years after his capture, he used it all.
As Tierris slept, sated from an night of the wildest debauchery in which Alantha had been both the victim and the entertainer, he applied the most lethal new in-house poison in the arsenal to his blades, and delivered it to her via four hundred and thirty seven separate knife wounds stretching from the crown of her head to the balls of her feet. The poison was toxic enough that she was paralysed after the second blow, and dead by about the seventh.
He knew that to stay in the underdark was suicide, and to delay was madness. If he were found, he would be killed, and if he stayed, he would be found. Taking no more than his weapons and the clothes he was wearing, he stole away though the assassin's passages his own training had taught him, and had disappeared from Wa'qen d'Isto long before anyone else was aware that anything was amiss.
His destination was the surface.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 05:05 pm (UTC)Hope you're feeling a bit better after a good nights sleep.
And hope you give your new guy a chance to develop - who knows, sometimes the 'thrown together to fill a gap' characters turn around and surprise us with the direction they end up taking :)
See you at leek.
W
no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 09:20 pm (UTC)I can see some possible futures for the new guy, but it's all at the surface and there's nothing deeper. Makes him a bit of a damp squib from here.
We'll see how he goes.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 07:37 pm (UTC)I love that back story, must say I'd feel happier writing character back ground after reading it.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-04 09:35 pm (UTC)