Way too long...

Apologies for the overly long wait between posts. The holidays were nuts, and then I've been in an odd mood and not terribly motivated to do much of anything. Thinking I may have a bit of depression, since sleeping and a loss of appetite definitely describes my last month or so pretty well.

Anyway, that's entirely irrelevant to the point here. I suppose since this will be a short post, that I'll just give some updates on various items of geekery in my life.

So, first up: Minecraft! I've been playing probably way too much of this lately. My friend Joe and I were fooling around on a survival server I was running off my gaming rig, but I got bored of vanilla Minecraft and started watching videos of Feed the Beast again, so I switched over to that and have been fully stuck in it for the last month or so. I've played FtB before, maybe spring or early summer of last year? It was fun then, and still is now, though I think I prefer it now because of changes that have been made to some of the mods, Thaumcraft in particular. As it is, I probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple dozen hours or more in my single-player world. Ironically, I happened to name the world Pompeii before I'd actually loaded it, and from my spawn point I could see a giant volcano not 200 blocks away from me. Thought that was pretty funny, so I've build my base within sight of the volcano, just across a small river from it. So far, I've delved pretty deeply into Thaumcraft, mined way too much, built machines for IndustrialCraft 2, Thermal Expansion, Forestry, and Buildcraft 2, and have an active quarry mining a 2x2 chunk area currently down to level 32 or so. I have more basic materials than I know what to do with, and my storage is getting entirely out of hand. I'll probably do up a full post on Minecraft, or at least my current world sometime soon.

Secondly, table-top gaming! I haven't run my game much the last few weeks because of way too much player absence. I only have four players, so if only one is gone I'm usually fine with continuing on, but if we lose a second in a given week, there's not really much point, so I cancel. Last week was one such week, a missing (presumably narcoleptic?) player combined with two of the others being sick as dogs meant that it made more sense to cancel, even if the two sick players were willing to tough it out for the couple hours. I'm crossing my fingers for tomorrow night, cause I really hate missing more than a single week at a time.

Other table-top news involves a project I've been periodically working on for the last few months that I'm calling Fukkit. Name may well (and probably will) change eventually, but it fits well. The idea of the game is that any time I've been in a fast-paced, high death-count game, it seems that the players and DM have a lot of fun; the game if much more relaxed and goofy, and things get out of control quickly, resulting in lots of laughs and some fun stories, which is really the point of gaming in the first place, right? In any case, the game is meant to be random, with extremely quick character generation, since the likelihood of surviving for long is extremely low. Instead of leveling like in traditional D&D, I have charts for each class (most have at least a first draft finished, though I have the priest class still to do from the beginning) that grant various abilities from mundane stat increases, to special combat abilities, to weird story things, and a few rolls (two or three, haven't nailed down a precise number yet) on the chart are granted each time a character would level. Again, I'll plan on a full post about this game soon-ish, since I'm hoping to have the basic charts and info ready for play testing by the end of the month. I think my players will get a HUGE kick out of a game like this, for reasons I'll explain when I do that full post.

Oh, and one last thing! If you enjoy watching gaming streams or haven't checked any out yet to decide that, please check out LoadingReadyLive. Loading Ready Run is a group of Canadian sketch-comedy guys (and gals) who've been making videos for years and specifically posting a sketch video every week for the last ten. They hit their 500th weekly video last summer and are continuing to do them through 2014, but the reason I mention them is that they now have a streaming program called LoadingReadyLive where various members of the crew stream for 3 or so hour shows each week. I think there's ten different weekly shows right now, all of various games and with different people, so the chances of finding something you'd enjoy is pretty good. You can find them at loadingreadyrun.com, search for their channels on YouTube or Twitch (LoadingReadyRun on both), and see the archives of their streaming shows either on their Twitch channel, or on YouTube, the channel there being LoadingReadyLive. Enjoy!

Short and Sweet

Things have gotten a bit crazy here before the holidays and I haven't had a chance to post for a week or so, unfortunately. This post will be fairly limited, but I wanted to get something posted.

First up, we just had a hell of a first in my Dungeons and Dragons game. A fight between the party and a group of dessicators (undead water elementals) and salt mummies ended with both the first PC death, and the first suicide-by-fumble that I've ever seen. Adam managed to fumble, then hit a perfect 100 on the percentiles, resulting in self-evisceration. It was really funny at the time, and we spent the rest of the evening making bad puns and poor jokes about him being dead. Given that they're in the middle of a dungeon way off in the wilderness and a very long way from home, I'm going to have to come up with either a different character for Ethan to play temporarily (which could well work, the group does have two NPCs traveling with them), or a way for them to resurrect Adam. I have a group of people in my setting known as the Prime that consists of Q-esque characters, so perhaps one of them will pop in and make an offer to bring Adam back to life. It should be interesting either way.

Secondly, I follow another blog called Playing D&D with Porn Stars. Despite any possible connotations or implications, it's an extremely well-written blog and the guy who writes it (Zac something or other) is a really talented DM. In any case, the reason I bring it up is that he posted recently about a random generator that I think is a lot of fun, and my gaming group fully agreed.

It's a random metal album generator, giving you an album title, and the track names. The genius thing about it is that this works perfectly for generating the campaign name and chapter titles for a new game. For example, I just brought it up and ended up with the following:

Campaign - Wicked Spell: Master Zero
Chapter 1 - Become the Reaver
Chapter 2 - Between Solace and Suffering
Chapter 3 - Church of the Infernal Ghost
Chapter 4 - Hello Mister Doubt
Chapter 5 - Despoiled by Tranquility

Now, I don't know about you, but just looking at those in the context of campaign sections gets my brain running on overtime. Filling in a story around those names won't necessarily be easy, but it'll definitely be fun. Gives a campaign in the style of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths.

In any case, the link is here and I'd love to see what anyone else can come up with as well. Enjoy!

Movies by DC or A Lot of Wasted Money

Bit of a change from the last couple postings, but today I'm going to write about the comics juggernaut that is DC or more specifically, the giant failure that seems to be their movie studio, opposed to the grand success of their animation and TV crews.


Now, keep in mind this is just my opinion, though I know I'm not the only one who feels this way:

DC sucks at making movies nowadays.

DC is really good at making animated shows and television.

There's been at least a couple horrible DC movies in the last few years, specifically Man of Steel and Green Lantern. Now, I've never heard a single word in praise of Green Lantern from anyone, critics or otherwise. The acting, the casting, the CGI costumes that made it look like Ryan Reynolds' head was flying all over the place. Man of Steel was originally seen as "not terrible" but in hindsight seems worse and worse. A strange color palette combined with mediocre acting, a "final climax" that lasted half the movie, and a left turn to Superman's "no killing" policy that's more akin to genocide than not. And now the latest news is about adding Wonder Woman to the Batman vs Superman movie that's currently in the works, a move that seems questionable at best, since we're now entirely skipping not one but two origin stories, one of which may be acceptable, but the other hasn't been seen by anyone who isn't a huge comic nerd in thirty years. I've heard a lot of grumblings from people about them even doing the Batman vs Superman thing, so adding in another heavy hitter seems foolish at best. Especially when we're now dealing with a psychopathic Superman.

On the other hand, while I haven't  viewed a lot of it, the Justice League, Teen Titans, and series of animated movies from the DC animation studio are praised almost universally by everyone who sees them. The voice-acting crew seems top-notch, the stories are fun, and they don't arbitrarily have the heroes making decisions directly opposed to their own moralities. Likewise, the live-action show Arrow which a seemingly small number deride as being "too soap opera-y" is a ton of fun and really well done. It's just about the only show that I make sure to watch on a weekly basis (almost everything else I wait for a complete season and gorge on it via Netflix) because it's that enjoyable. The cast is well chosen, the stories are entertaining, and there are no major flaws to be problematic. I think the worst complaint I've heard of Arrow is their predilection toward using lots of different DC bad guys, which some people think is stealing those characters from other hero stories, but given the way the DC universe tends to interweave anyway, I don't see this as a problem, so long as the Arrow isn't killing off someone like Braniac or the Joker.

I feel it's similar to how people view the SyFy network. They do great shows like Eureka, Warehouse 13, Defiance and others, but would be much better off using the money they spend on things like Sharktopus and Mega Python vs Gateroid to create other new shows, or just further enhance the ones they already have.

Just stop.

Very much yes!

Not entirely sure if there's really an end or point to all this, like I said before just my opinion, but it was on my mind, so there you go.

Second star to the right...

Yeah, so writing over the weekend didn't happen. Spent most of it with a raging headache because of the back and forth rain and cold here, which my sinuses do not appreciate even a little bit. Makes keeping my thoughts in order a bit tough, so I figured I should wait till my brain was more together. Anyhow, continuing on from Friday's post:

The party located Adam Prime's tomb within a fairly unassuming and plain graveyard, not the place you'd expect a national hero to be buried, but they weren't going to argue when it was a fairly simple task to locate it. The tomb itself wasn't all that large, just a small mausoleum make of worked stone with no real adornments or decoration. The inside looked similar once they'd broken in, just a plain stone sarcophagus set on a small dais against the back wall, the entire room only 15 foot to a side. Adam was given the "honor" of examining the actual sarcophagus, on which he found the only real ornamentation to be a small carving similar in shape to a ring he carried on a leather thong around his neck, the first ring he'd ever stolen. It was the signet ring of a minor noble's son, stolen when the little git had been drinking a bit too much and being a bit too loud about his superiority to his 'lessers." Adam had kept it as a memento, but the lock on the sarcophagus looked too similar to be coincidental. He fit the ring into the lock, heard a click, and stepped back as the entire dais shifted away into the wall, revealing a magically lit stair beneath.

At the bottom of the stair was a small room containing but a single chest, and that not even locked or trapped. Adam opened it to find a seemingly random selection of junk, a torn piece of black fabric with some white sewn into it, a red beanie cap, a walking stick, a bag of marbles, etc. No actual treasure was to be found, and after examination, the items from the chest weren't even magical.

Faced with failure, the party found a decent-looking tavern on the docks and set to drinking, looking to develop a matching set of hangovers before the long journey home. After a few drinks, a man approached their table saying "I believe you have something that belongs to me, mates."

At this point, I need to take a quick aside to point out that I've spent way too much time in recent weeks watching Once Upon a Time. It's a fun show on ABC and watching it wouldn't be a bad idea, especially if you have access to Netflix so you can start at the beginning. If you already watch it, then you know that the most recent story arc has involved a particular sea captain of renown, a man with an aversion to clocks, a hatred of crocodiles, and a very well-known nemesis who is perpetually young. That said, following any gaming story of mine will reveal that I love to take inspiration from all sorts of things. I never run a shot-for-shot copy of anything, but I do take a lot of liberties with other creative ideas that I like. Another example is that this campaign has involved a great deal of fae, up to and including Grey's mistress/girlfriend, a dryad by the name of Holly Berry (I had to, don't look at me like that), and I've wholeheartedly stolen the concept of fae from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, including the two faerie Courts and the wildfae. For those wondering, the party is entirely in bed with the Summer Court, though that hasn't yet come back to bite their collective asses. Story for another day however, so I'll get back to the most recent session.

Looky, looky...

The stranger sat down with them, introducing himself as Captain Jones, and again stating that he felt they had something of his, a piece of black cloth. A bit tipsy at this point, the party became somewhat paranoid (normal operating procedure for these guys) and wanted to know how he thought that. He offered to lead them outside for a moment and show them, which they agreed to. The entsupposed to access that tomb would have been able to, which meant he was perfectly willing to ferry the group to the actual resting place of Adam Prime's treasure, which he himself has buried. He finally introduced himself again, this time giving them his more common moniker of Captain Hook, revealing his missing left hand which he'd concealed in his coat up to this point, capped with a silver hook.
ire group stepped out of the tavern and down the docks a block or so, where the captain stopped a gestured to a docked ship. The wind whipped up, unfurling the ship's flag, the traditional skull-and-crossbones with a slice missing, perfectly matching the cloth they held. They admitted they'd stolen it from Adam Prime's tomb, though the grave robbing itself didn't seem to bother Jones at all. He claimed to have been a long-time friend of Adam Arlington, to the point where he'd been asked to safeguard Adam's remaining wealth upon the man's death. He mentioned that only someone who was

I realize I'm being more long-winded than necessary here, so I'm going to try to speed things up a bit. The party boarded his ship, the Jolly Roger, and they left immediately. After three days, they were woken with a sudden lurch of the ship, then made it to the deck to find Hook standing at the wheel laughing into a storm as the ship swirling it's way into the Maelstrom, a half-mile wide perpetual whirlpool in the middle of the Sea of Storms. The ship almost pitched over as the water sucked it down, the party all but flung overboard, when suddenly the storm was simply gone, the ship righted, and the party finding themselves staring at placid blue waters and sunny skies with barely a cloud. Hook gestured to a series of small, tropical islands, welcoming them to Neverland.

At this point, the party spent a day and night at the shanty-town the pirates inhabited, then sailed with Hook to another island in the chain where he claimed to have hidden Adam's treasure. Three days of hacking their way through thick jungle got them to a massive slab of stone long overgrown with vines and moss. At Hook's direction, Adam and Thrusk hefted it out of the way, an underground ruin now accessible. They descended, exploring a bit till they came to a room with obvious signs of habitation, which Hook claimed shouldn't have been there. They heard voices in the next room and charged in after taking a moment to set up magical preparations. Small, primitive humanoids (picture halfling-sized native americans) were in the room, and fought back with spears and slingshots.

I'll pause here to acknowledge the amazing combat performance of the group caster. Zur spent his moment before battle buffing himself with spells that gave him a pair of extra arms, and made his swords much more likely to critically hit than normal, among other things. During the battle he focused on a single redskin, but managed two different crits in successive rounds, the first a slash to the face so bad it made the creature permanently lose charisma points, and the second a decapitating blow, sending the creature's head across the room. Given that he's usually in the back and slow enough to not accomplish much beyond buffs in a lot of combats (and the party druid has a tendency of killing whatever Zur sets himself up to go after a moment before he strikes almost every time), this particular combat was really fun and a huge ego boost for him.

The rest of the session was fairly straightforward, one of the redskins escaped into the jungle through a different access point into the ruins, and the party was unable to track him through the thick jungle, so they finished exploring the area, locating the hidden cache Hook had left well enough hidden that the redskins weren't able to find it. The deal they'd made as a group was that any magical items found in someone's Prime tomb would be the property of that person, but any straight valuables (coins, gems, etc) would be split evenly among the party. This particular cache was a good deal of coinage, and a single magical item in a fancy box, a version of the Deck of Many Things, to be exact. The deck was secreted away before Narus could pull more than a single card, and the effect wasn't anything immediately visible, so Adam has agreed to leave it be till later.

And that's where things lie for now. I haven't entirely decided what's next, though I have a few days still before next session, and I do have several ideas for a bit further out, including the group's first encounter with the forces of the Bone Queen, and a surprise visit from a representative of the Winter Court, but I'll get more into those once they happen. Don't want to spoil anything!

Accidental Summons and a Captain

So yesterday was Thursday, which means I ran my D&D game last night, so I suppose that's a good topic for today.

The game is 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons, with a few house-ruled modifications, like the inclusion of the Pathfinder Critical Hit deck, and a few custom feats or modified rules that we've changed based on finding things not working properly, or working in ways that don't seem sensible.

Anyhow, I didn't want to talk about general rules today, but more about this campaign specifically. This particular game's been running for about a year and a half now. The characters all started at first level and have worked their way up to 8th, with each of them hitting that new level within the last two sessions or so (their XP has a bit of a spread to it due to player absences and magic item crafting).

I suppose I need to mention the actual backstory of things, cause it's a bit convoluted and the rest of the game won't make much sense without it. The story opened with "It was a dark and stormy night." This was followed by a series of quick snapshots describing where everyone was during this cold, rainy evening:

Zur Kroaten, a fledgling wizard, sitting in a rented inn room attempting to study his meager few spells.

Adam Arlington, a pickpocket, hiding out under the eaves of a dive bar, hoping to spot a likely target.

Narus Lacorin, a druid, huddled under the protective boughs of a fir tree with his wolf companion, trying to stay dry.

Grey, a trained marksman, relaxed comfortably in his yurt, delicately caring for his bow and checking his arrows for wear or damaged fletchings.

Thrusk Runeblood, an archaeologist and swordsman, sits hunched at a table in a dimly lit library, poring over a torn and aged tome.

A particularly loud clap of thunder sounds, a boom they could each feel deep in their chests. Lightning flashed, but this time each of them saw the massive, sparking twist of light headed straight for them, and before anyone could react, they each blacked out. They found themselves waking in cots, all together in a small stone room, none of them recognizing one another. A note on a table simply stated "We didn't mean for this to happen, we're sorry."

I'm going to skip a bunch of further exposition here and explain what the players, after six or eight months of playing finally figured out. A cabal of highly skilled wizards were worried about a woman known as the Bone Queen who was rapidly conquering the entire continent. The greatest heroes and warriors of the day had gone up against her and her armies, only to be cut down. These wizards developed a plan to reach back in time and pull into the present copies of the greatest legendary heroes, who could then defeat the Bone Queen. This plan went wrong. The ritual they created to pull forth these legends didn't work properly, and instead of gathering together a party of ancient heroes in their prime, the wizards instead found themselves standing over the unconscious bodies of those heroes at the very beginnings of their careers, barely more than untrained children. Not knowing what to do, the wizards left these poor souls with some basic equipment and an apology note, hoping they'd be able to simply go out and live normal lives. So, with no other direction or any explanation for how they got there, after the party woke up and got themselves somewhat put together, they wandered out as a group and have spent the last year and a half off on various adventures.

Now, something that needs to be said about this group is the staggering level of paranoia they tend to exhibit. They also voice their concerns out loud and so as a good DM, I make sure to keep their awful musings in mind. Their newest idea was something even I hadn't thought of, and it's been a lot of fun: They've discovered through various research and run-ins with people that their original selves still lived out their lives as they should have, some of them over a thousand years earlier. This led Dillon, the player of Zur, to think that any of them who are dead have likely left tombs behind, along with possible vast piles of treasure and/or magical items, all it would take would be to find these final resting places and loot them. The general consensus of the group is that this isn't grave-robbing, since they're technically like a reincarnation of these deceased heroes anyway, making the treasures technically theirs anyway.

A bit of research and some questions asked of various contacts, and the group was able to locate the first of the tombs, this one belonging to Adam Arlington (or Adam Prime, as the group refers to their original selves). A lengthy boat trip later found the group in the appropriate city, where Adam Prime appears to have been some sort of Robin Hood figure, assisting the poor under a tyrannical monarch, then working to depose this monarch and help rule the mostly democratic country afterward.

I'm actually running low on time this afternoon, due to plans with the wife in a bit, so I'm going to pause here for now and pick it back up with Adam Prime's tomb, hopefully over the weekend. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading! I know the narrative is somewhat convoluted and likely confusing as hell, so feel free to ask for any clarification or whatever if needed and I'll do my best to answer.

Beginnings?

So, I created this blog almost two years ago now and never really did anything with it. I've always wanted to, but never seem to have the motivation or inclination to bother. I've decided that needs to change. I keep telling myself I'd like to be some sort of writer, and I have a lot of crap in my head to get out in one way or another. I want to do something regularly, even if it's just to force myself to stick with something regular and scheduled like this. The initial intent here will be to post say, three times a week. I'll leave it open to allow for more than that, but I'm going to aim for at least those three. They won't even necessarily be long posts, just getting something down in text will accomplish something, I hope. We'll see where it goes.

As for content? Well, this is my little space, so honestly, whatever I feel like writing about. I suppose a good jumping off point would be to write a bit about myself in an effort to get out some possible ideas for postings and give anyone who might actually stumble across my little slice of web an idea of who they're reading and what makes me tick. So let's start there.

Basics, hmm? I'm a 29 year old Caucasian male from Buffalo, NY. I've spent the last five years living in Aiken, SC, just across the border from Augusta, GA. I have a wife whom I met in college and who is almost as much a geek as I am. We just bought our first house about a month ago and have spent the weeks since learning all the fun things that come with being a homeowner, rather than renting some apartment. I went to university for IT, though the program ended up being nothing more than programming which I hate, so I am otherwise a self-taught PC tech with several certifications that I haven't used outside of my own personal machines in at least a few years. I currently work as a property manager for a small apartment house in addition to being the bread-baker for my family's tea/coffee bar and bakery. While breads are time consuming to make, even with all the commercial equipment we have, I've gotten into a groove with it, so my brain rarely has to do much, leaving way too much time to think and daydream. I love music (with the exceptions of most scream-o, country, and being entirely out of touch with most pop), and love playing the piano, though I haven't done much of that in recent years. I'm also into home-brewing, which has so far netted me five bottles of awfully tasty mead that knocked a bunch of friends on their asses.

Onto geekier things. I got into Magic: the Gathering as a pre-teen, fell out of playing during high school, and got back into it when friends started pulling out decks in college. I have a collection way too large to be reasonable, and it drives my wife crazy. I've always been an avid reader, mostly of science-fiction and fantasy, which easily led into my love of Dungeons and Dragons (as well as most any RPG) when I finally got a chance to learn to play about 11 years ago. My friend Joe is the guy who taught me to play, using his heavily home-brewed version of 1st Edition. After three months, I had so many adventure ideas bouncing around my head that I needed to try running some on my own, leading me to go out and pick up the (new at the time) 3rd Edition core books. My first campaign opened with 7 players and a sketched out dungeon on a piece of loose leaf that failed so utterly that I gave the DMing thing up for at least a month while I tried to figure out what the hell I was actually doing. I tried again a few weeks later, this time with just my friends Kara (now my wife) and Ashley, who were also new enough to D&D that they wouldn't have any sort of preconceived notions of how the game should go, so I could feel things out and run it the way the three of us felt it wanted to go. Things went swimmingly from there and I've been running games ever since. The last several years have been games for (mostly) the same group of guys I gamed with in NY before I moved, we just do it on Skype now. Seems to work well, except when one of our internet connections craps out, but that doesn't happen too often. I mentioned being into Magic, and my favorite aspect of the game now is variant play-styles. I absolutely love Commander (EDH), have a lot of fun playing around with things like the Wizard's Tower, and have even made myself a nice Pauper Cube, though straight up 60-card constructed duels are still a lot of fun. Oh, into a lot of board games as well. Kara and I got into a weekly board game night while we were still living in NY and it stuck, so now we have a 6-foot by 4-foot bookshelf absolutely buried in various games and more that won't fit the shelves. Video gaming's a big thing for me as well. I play Dungeons and Dragons Online with Kara and Joe, run a tiny Minecraft server for myself and a couple friends, and have a staggeringly large Steam library. Was replaying Far Cry 3 before I started writing this tonight.

Well now, I think that about covers it. If you're looking for the TL;DR version, it goes something like: Massive geek, plays way too many games and talks too much.

I'll be posting here pretty regularly, with any luck, so feel free to ask me just about anything, I'm typically an open book.

Grim

            The only noises were the crackling fire and the whispers of the all-but nonexistent breeze through the tree leaves. The crickets and other night sounds had fallen silent. Taygrim Maurok, known simply as Grim to those few who knew him, looked about with his eyes only, keeping his head still. He set the kriss he’d been sharpening down on his crossed legs, next to the small piece of parchment he had with him at all times. He caught the split-second glint of firelight off of steel, estimated the intruder to be about thirty feet to his right, then lifted his blade and began sharpening it again. He saw another flash of light, closer this time and called out.

            “Think carefully of what you are doing, friend. Turn around and you may find easier prey tonight.”

            The silence returned, as if the would-be assailant was trying to decide whether Grim was bluffing. Grim sighed, already knowing how this was going to turn out; he’d already lived though the same scenario countless times.

            A moment later, the attacker leapt from the foliage. Grim dove forward, rolling to the other side of the campfire, the flipped up onto his feet. He spun around, facing his opponent. The bandit was of average height and weight, wearing leather armor and wielding a short sword. He shifted weight from one foot to the other, obviously nervous.

            “Give me all your valuables!” The man demanded. He waved his short sword toward Grim. “I can always just take them with you lying on the ground if you want!”

            “I already told you that you should go away. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will defend myself if you press this. You have one more chance. Turn around and walk away.” Grim spoke in a low voice, desperately wishing the bandit would listen to him and just leave, though he knew it wasn’t going to happen. As he spoke he moved his right arm out to the side as his left hand slipped the scroll piece back into his belt pouch. He slowly closed his fingers as the darkness of the night began to shift and bend in his grasp. A kriss coalesced in his hand, blacker than pitch, a seeming duplicate of the one he'd been sharpening, now laying beside the other side of the fire.

        The thief dove toward Grim, sword whistling through the air. Grim stepped to the side, deflecting the stroke with the flat of the shadow-kriss. He quickly pulled the weapon down, slicing along the criminal's chest. The man shrieked in surprise, anger and pain. He saw in Grim's eyes no fear, no worry, only a deep sorrow, and his own stupidity. His eyes flashed with the realization that this "prey" may not have been as helpless as he appeared. He held his free hand to his chest, feeling the blood run out, then took one more look at Grim and his shadow-weapon and fled into the night, dropping his sword.

         As the man stumbled through the underbrush, Grim only shook his head, a frown on his lips. He opened his hand, the shadow-blade dissolving back into the darkness. The same story. He'd lived it for the better portion of the last decade. He absentmindedly rubbed the tattoo on his wrist, the mark that resembled a deep blue eye pierced by a black dagger. The Shadow-Kin had accepted him not quite nine years ago, and he would never change that, though sometimes his solitary life became rather lonely.

         Grim layed down near his fire as the flames died down. He all but disappeared as he rolled over, pulling a blanket of shadow over his body. He slept soundly, though when he awoke after about eight hours of sleep, he still felt tired, an oddity he'd been experiencing for the last several months. He rose and kicked the last few embers out, then ran his hand through his long, loose black hair. The grey streak from his right temple had a stick tangled into it, which he gently pulled out and tossed aside. He made sure his parchment piece and kriss were in his belt, then began heading toward the forest edge.

         An hour or so later, after picking some mushrooms for breakfast and eating them as he walked, he suddenly heard a noise, as of someone else walking through the forest. He quickly slipped to the side, pressing his back up against the trunk of a large tree, standing in its shadow.

         He watched as a girl slowly went by, moving her head oddly. Grim's brow furrowed as he thought. Perhaps her sight was impaired. Then he noticed her hair, it was pure white. This was the girl he had been told of, the other Keeper! His heart began to quicken with excitement. He moved his hand into the black of the tree's shadow, creating a kriss of darkness, as he had the night before. As the girl walked past his tree, Grim leapt out, slamming her into another tree and holding the shadow to her throat, allowing it to press, but not cut. A warning to stay still.