5.8.2002 [Not quite 2am]

Heh heh. If me and my friends were the kings and queens of an imaginary world�

Chuck: the Morning Star
Affiliation: Light

Chuck has his city of ivory and gold in the east. He's a bright lord, but a bit melancholy and doleful. He's the champion of chaste women, but abhors a loose one. His land is rich and bountiful, full of happy citizens � a Renaissance land full of chivalry and science and discovery. He�s a fair, just ruler, and the flower girl from Final Fantasy VII lives on to sell flowers in his court.

He likes science and alchemy, but he's got a poetic soul. He wears shining white armor and rides a white stallion. His weapon, of course, is his beloved naginata.

Sigil: the sigil of the Morning Star is a fist in gleaming white mail clutching golden scales. The scales for justice, gold for honor (�good as gold�), white for purity, and the fist for the strength to back it up.

April: the Golden Orchid, the Lily of Paradise, la Belladonna (Jess and I couldn�t think of a good name.)
Affiliation: Slightly bright � because the gold that coins are beaten from is bright. (Poor April; I�ve made her Rachel�s mortal foe, heh!)

All right. I've somehow got this image of her as the sensual one. Smirk. Which is weird, because i don't actually think of her that way! But it fits her.

Anyway, April�s time period is the Byzantine Empire. She's the decadent queen on a golden throne. She doesn't wear armor, of course. She wears silk from the Orient. The arts of war have long since been lost in her empire � too crass � but no one attacks them because they're situated in a virtually unconquerable place. The empire lies in a valley surrounded by mountains that are gentle and rich on the side facing the land, but steep and rocky and treacherous on the side facing out. It's naturally defended.

Hers is a kingdom of politics and intrigue, and her weapon would be poison. Poisoned daggers, poisoned dresses, poisoned wine, poisoned perfume...

Sigil: the bird-of-paradise. Was there any doubt about that?

Rachel: the Asphalt Sylph (credit for the name goes to Chuck)
Affiliation: Rainbow (all the colors of light and dark)

First off, she doesn't have a castle; she doesn't need one. She's the leader of a pack of roaming folk. Gypsies out of Greenwich Village. They value song and jests, and they travel the land from one end to the other, making their own rules. They fight if they have to - a lot of them are great swashbuckling gallant types. But Rachel herself carries no weapon, except maybe a staff (or her blender). And she doesn't need armor. She's got her invincible KAWAII.

They cruise around and cause trouble and raise ruckus and spread the word of freedom. If we had to give her a timeframe, it'd be present day. Late 90s/early 2000s. Their home base is the desert � flat, silent, free and wild.

Sigil: Rachel has no sigil, and needs no sigil. If she had one, though, it'd be a poker hand. The joker, because she�s a wildcard. The Jack of Hearts, for flair. The Queen of Diamonds, for luck. The Ace of Spades, just because it�s cool. And finally, the deuce of Clubs, the lowest card in the deck, because her fight is for the oppressed peoples of the world.

Liz: the Lady of the Grey Eyes (like Grey-eyed Athena. Credit for the name goes to Jess)
Affiliation: Neutral (Twilight, between light and dark)

Liz is associated with learning and magic. The timeframe is indistinct. Fantasy-time. Medievalesque.

She lives in a sorceress's tower in the middle of a forest, a spire rising thousands of feet into the air. Mountains at its back, a plains before it, a lake in the mountains. The landscape would vary depending when you saw it. Idyllic in the morning, pastoral in the afternoon, dark and ominous at night, and downright magical in the moonlight. Likewise, the inside of the tower doesn't have a single defined feel. Sometimes it's murky and gloomy. Sometimes lights would float in the air and make it seem a place of ancient splendor and wonder. There are some rooms that are very cozy (or claustrophobic), and some that are very spacious and grand (or diminishingly impressive).

Liz lives at the very top of the tower with her scrolls and her owl, and the rest of the tower is filled with her disciples and her students. She loves poetry and literature, too, and she sees the inner workings of it. She wouldn't wear armor; she'd be in robes. She doesn�t carry a weapon of any sort, but she wears a circlet to help her focus her power.

Sigil: a white feather ablaze in silver against a black background. White for light, black for dark, silver for neutrality.

Jess: the Light in the Dark. The Song in the North. The Frigid Bitch in the North. (We couldn�t think of a name here, either.)
Affiliation: Neutral...for now.

Jess is the snow queen. She lives in the far, far north where summer is short � only one endless day � and winter is longer than anyone cares to count.

Her castle is made of ice and crystal rising into graceful, impossibly thin spires and peaks and edges, unsymmetrical but beautiful. It sits on a frozen island in the middle of a vast, frozen ocean. It looks close when you stand at the edge of the ocean, but it's a day away by sled, and much longer than that on foot.

It's always cold in her land. During the brief summer, the flowers bloom between the cracks in the ice, but the ice never actually melts, and once the sun sets the frost kills everything quickly, seals everything into a perfect, lifeless beauty.

Jess does not wear armor. She, naturally, wears fur. Her weapon is a slender, curved sword that looks like ice and cuts like the cold. Her people are slender, graceful and cool-eyed folk who don't speak much. They are cultured and elegant, but capable of startling cruelty (but you can't call it that, because they don't do it out of viciousness).

Sigil: a butterfly, clear and brittle as glass (or ice, or diamond). Beautiful, cold, and cutting.

Nellie: the Carnivorous Rose (credit for the name goes to Liz)
Affiliation: Slightly dark?

Nellie...is a Germanic barbarian queen from the Dark Ages. She can drink like a man, fight like a man, belch like a man, and rule like a man. She's quite the babe, but no one says that to her face anymore because the last few that tried got their tongues cut out.

For a barbarian, she�s quite accomplished. She's raised a crude city of stone and has a whole host of rough warriors, proto-knights, ready to defend her and her city to the death. Her peasants are a robust people, too. If and when an army invades, they pick up their pitchforks and fight. Running for cover is for the weak.

Nellie wears mismatched armor, but wears it with a flair of her own. Leather and plate, mail and chain. Her weapon is a double-edged broadsword, but her real weapons are her two half-tamed wolves: big gray bristly creatures that tear people's throats out.

Sigil: Nellie�s sigil is, contrary to some�s expectations, nothing bloodstained or bony or crushed or mauled. It�s some sort of flower; some big, bold, poisonous and thorned flower. Not quite a rose � wilder than that. Deadlier.

Damon: the Wyrm in the West
Affiliation: Dark

Me. Smirk. I am the dark tyrant in the west. Mine is a world of postapocalyptic industrialism.

My castle, black steel and weeping concrete, sits over a molten river that pours into the rocky sea in a great shower of steam, and that steam is harvested to provide some of the energy for my dark city. The rest comes from radioactive reactions deep beneath the ground, from the burning of coal � and from the burning of the dead.

The entire kingdom is one interconnected sprawl of a city � a hive of a hundred million people mindlessly slaving away in a nightscape dominated by massive steel pipes and twisted towers and endless smokestacks belching foul fumes into the atmosphere. No one ever sees more than a wan shadow of the sun. The sky is crisscrossed with buzzing high voltage power lines. Transportation comes in the form of monorails raised on ugly steel tracks and hovercrafts humming down bleak, dark streets. In some parts of my land, the ground have been so thoroughly raped and pillaged by generations of war and industry that all that remains is infertile, rotting wasteland. No one who enters those wastes ever comes back out.

I'm me. Well, a slightly darker me. In court, I'm very grim. I sit and scowl on my black iron throne. However, I have a Queen (and I suppose we can pretend it's Angelina, but it actually doesn't matter that much anymore). With her, in private, I'm different. More like myself. More whimsical, more of a dreamer, someone who knows the beauty of music and the light of the stars before I drowned them in my rule.

But my armor definitely does not shine.

Jess: *laughs* it's acid corroded right?

Damon: *laughs* nah, i've had to change it a bit

Damon: i gave that suit away to maelduine *grump*

My armor is now pitted steel, rough steel - the way it is with no polishing, and if it cools too fast. The texture feels like concrete. It's black, of course. Nonreflective black. A lot of angles and edges. It matches my iron throne.

My weapon would be a one-edged greatsword. A crude, cruel weapon. A lot of sharp angles and edges, no curves at all. And black, through and through.

Sigil: the Wyrm, of course. You won�t believe how long it took me to come up with the obvious. The rusted biometallic centipede/dragon that coils on a bed of bones, so huge that the bones seem so many grains of sand. The one that lashes powerful and steady and so damn fast into the sky, with the thousand legs and the million black teeth in an insect�s mandibles which flare open and screams and laughs and hisses and whispers the names of its infinite followers.

That one. Smirk.

Relations of the Kingdoms:

The Morning Star�s Kingdom lies to the east. My sprawling empire yawns to the west. The Carnivorous Rose stalks the northern tundra, and beyond that, where no plant life can grow, the Winter Queen rules the end of the earth. To the south, the Asphalt Sylph�s desert stretches wide and past that, the mountains rise up sharp and forbidding, hiding the rich valley in which the Decadent Empress reigns supreme. Right in the dead center, backed by a mountain and surrounded by a forest, is the tower of the Lady of the Grey Eyes.

By principle, Chuck and I are opposed, but probably stalemated. Rachel will probably try to bring down April's decadent rule, but she'll never get over the mountains. Liz is very, very, very carefully unallied. Nellie attacks everyone equally, and Jess sits on her icy throne in the north and watches. She�s definitely not neutral � but no one knows which way she'll jump in the end.

...and that�s the end of tonight�s madness. Heh.