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Hey there friends!

I hope you all had a great Christmas. I'm actually quite excited for the new year coming around since I get to sit down and log the good and bad things in my year to weigh them out. One of the things I've resolved to do this year is learn to draw a bit since that's really something that I feel the lack of almost every day.

Overall I'd say the year was full of ups and downs even though the downs had the upper (lower?) hand most of the time. There have certainly been some things, even a lot, which I feel gratitude for, most notably getting back into writing and Japanese.

I really want to look at the night sky ere clouds arrive to hide the stars <3

Happy holidays <3

A follow-up to my question about Leeva: what do they actually look like? I've been imagining a ten centimeter tall sprite but I've just realised that may not be most accurate.
Also, is it problematic that I wrote Ramår into meeting Rizali's party in the night-time?

Also, my parents forced me to get my hair cut and now I have damn dysphoria, bloody brilliant lads
'Yeah, that cut you had made you look between a boy and a girl' yeah no shit that's why I had it
Leaving the hairdresser's and walking in the street gave me fecking anxiety, I'm never doing that again.

Oh shet, now I'm wondering if Ram shouldn't be furry like. To be fair, it might make more sense since just a felt vest shouldn't keep them very warm in the snow and frostlands.

Anyways I'm thinking of writing a post but since I'm going on holidays I figure I probably won't put it up for a while. As for Ram's answer to Leeva, what language did Leeva actually address them? Common tongue or something else? This may be my first real dialogue in writing yet <3

Wait, have y'all finally moved?
I really haven't kept up recently, that's amazing! Congratulations

Is that Denver? That's absolutely stunning like, I wish I could take photos like that here

I've been wondering.
Is the Discord server still a thing? I can't manage to find any links to it wheresoever so I figured I'd just ask

Aye, it's all really thanks to you, Kyrie. You make this place so damn welcoming

Top of the evening to ya, Rea!

I don't recall ever describing Ramår's physical appearance in much depth at all, if I'm honest. It just didn't strike me as actually important.

███████¹ However, I've been figuring them as a young person of ambiguous gender, with curly ginger hair.
███████   They wear a fairly long, oversized vest of dark green felt. They're also rather short, but other than that
███████   I'm not sure I have a single clear physical representation of Ram. Us enbies transcend our physical ids.
███████   As for their voice and accent, they speak in a medium-pitch voice, and love overstressing the English /r/.

They also use an accent similar in most ways to a Kerry Irish accent and have a strong tendency to use the interjections 'aye', 'so' and sometimes 'like' at the beginning or end of sentences, or between independant verb clauses.
They adore using relative/interrogative directional adverbs like whithersoever or elsewhence, and they also often use 'yon' instead of 'that'.

Thanks for including me in that post, by the way. Now I just have to think of something to say to fecking Leeva. I really like reading about them, by the way. The writing style you use to convey their emotional and perceptive particularities is really refreshing and eldritch <3

¹I'm actually not that big of a fan of the enby flag? I don't usually like purple in flags but here it doesn't really look bad, it's just the black is too.. depressing?

Thanks a lot, Kyrie!
I actually didn't mean to post it this early and couldn't delete it afterwards so I just edited it as it was there :p I also significantly reworked the dialogue (monologue?) and downplayed the unwelcome aspects of Ramår's personality so that they now just have a few misconceptions about hillsfolk.

I must admit I wasn't feeling so sure about the whole 'torchlight' arc. Does Keagan's party actually have torches in their possession? I'm pretty glad they're only 90 minutes into the forest, that allows Ram to blend into the story much more realistically. (At the very first I was meaning to make them walk about twelve hours in a straight line in the forest so with hindsight I'm glad I reworked it to not specify the time they spent looking for everyone) <3

Anyways thanks for that!

Ireland
California
Venice
Vietnam
Hungary

Name five plants you would like to see in your own garden or greenhouse.

[Wherein one encounters strange folk, and a glance of torchlight catches one's eye.]

Wherein one encounters strange folk, and a glance of torchlight catches one's eye.


As Ramår was brushing through the tall grass of the plains, they suddenly noticed a wisp of golden smoke rising above from behind a mound yon northward, in striking contrast with the darkness of the night sky.
As they were eager to find shelter ere long, they started towards the source of the smoke with haste. As they approached it, they espied torchlights carried by people resembling hillsfolk and setting directly for the forest.

Wary of approaching the woods again, their wind having been put up by their first encounter with its edge, they elected to remain near the village, rather than go after the people nearing the forest; but they wouldn't enter the village either, as the burgh's people, they noticed, were nothing like themself. They were unusually tall for hillsfolk, and their skin was dark; they burned birch bark to make crude tar, their beer was made of barley, and the wood of their houses had been stripped of its bark, which reminded Ramår of a West Tsunna saying:

   'Only Hillsfolk, black and dark, ever strip an oak-tree's bark.'

Feart of faring near a village alight with such unkept fire (as the Tsunnas have a fear of flames over all else), and afraid of the people who might dwell there, Ramår stealthily made their way towards the village's wood pile, hiding in the grass behind the mounds, seeking to discern what those torch-wielding people were doing in the nightly forest.


The village's wood pile was kept nigh from the forest, since the townsfolk seemed to thrive on the harvest of timber from the woods' edge. They hid behind some birch-tree trunks as a party of lumberjacks passed close to them, having felled some mountains' worth of timber and bringing it back in the still of night. The lumberjacks, who had been soaking in taverns all evening, had a few hearty laughs as they carried the hefty trees past Ramår.

   Aye, sure, Fishie's bound tae have trouble getting am trees back up by mornin' so! one of them said.
   —Aye, Siànoin, sure we'll be faine laike! T'ain't laike we had'nt have rent more so 'afore!
   —Yae, she'll grow back sure, does every naight, can ever be done 'bout it nothin.

After eating some birch-bark from the felled trunks near them, Ramår recognised that they were beyond the unnatural, linear border of the woods. Their tiredness and the smoke surrounding them dulling their instincts, they neglected to hasten back into the plain, wierdly not experiencing the same visceral, instinctive reaction as in their first encounter. As they had been moving towards the forest, they had noticed the torchlight fading out of sight. Though their first instinct had been to hurry after them, their second one had been to stay and wait for the lumberjacks to leave, so as not to cause any trouble. When at last Ramår could come out of hiding, the light had long fallen out of sight, and their memory was too clouded to accurately recall whither they had gone.


Managing to muster enough courage to try and go deeper into the forest to follow the torch-wielding hillsfolk despite their tiredness and thirst, Ramår hasted into the brush, and came to a grove of oaks, the middle of which was a circular clearing with a faerie ring at its center. They looked around but, despite their eyes being accustomed to the forest's darkness, they could not manage to pierce the dense foliage to spot the orange light of the torches. They resolved to consult their enchiridion, wherein one could find a pharmacopeia, a concise handbook of botany, and advice concerning foraging and life in the wild. They tore out a few of the tome's pages, the title of the first of which was:

   'Whither one goes, when lost, to find their hearth.'

They quickly skimmed over the first few paragraphs, marveling at the phosphorescence of the lichen-paper which allowed for reading in the deadest of night.

   Aye, there she is. Sure the night's deep enough to find them. Nae where can I find a low branch, so?

After a bit of searching around, they found a branch low enough for them to climb on. Fighting to keep their balance, they managed to summon enough strength to carve some horizontal scotches to use as grips. They steadily made their way to the top of the oak, then paused for a moment and tried to pick up the smell of the torches' smoke nearby.

   Oth, that damn tar's too smoky to taste any other than ash here, 'tis so.

The smell of the torches' smoke being thwarted by that of the burning birch-sap, they sat down, their faint resolve at last dying out.

Then as they sat there, astride a branch, they noticed a glance of golden light, much like the one they had seen leaving the village not so long before. They jumped to their feet, and jumped from tree to tree to catch up with the light. A young and dynamic, yet unexperienced sylvan, they eventually fell through a piece of particularly dry foliage. They noticed some charred, cooled embers on the ground, and signs of a party of folk passing by. Now detecting the smell of smoke more particularly, they hastened through the brush, following the trail of ash, until at last they could espy, a few steps away from them, what seemed like a peculiarly sundry company of woodsfolk.

By the way, I've been working on Ramår's second post, and I'm trying to figure out how I want their character and personality to evolve through the course of AVftS. They're actually extremely condescending right now, too much for my liking if I'm honest, though I'm also figuring that could make for some opportunities for some character development (albeit a somewhat bland one).

I'm afraid my post is wayyy too long and has wayy too little dialogue. As Ramår's a rather secretive person, afraid of the people of Ceadaichte Mòir, I only have as of right now a few lines of dialogue from three lumberjacks at the edge of the forest, whom Ramår actually hides from and doesn't interact with. Anyways I hope that's not too much of a problem with y'all.

If everything goes well with it I'm hoping to be able to put the post up tonight! I felt really inspired by everything that's gone on since my last one.

Yeah, just have them {having} seen the lights of the party {...} and been following them since that moment.

Sure, that sounds fairly easy to work out. Is it known how far into the forest the party is as of today, in terms of days' walk from Ceadaichte Mòir?

Hey there friends!

So I've been reading up about the progress which has been made, and was wondering if I could perhaps put up a post about Ramår ere long.
As I've figured most of the dramatis personae are now in Kingfisher Forest, I was imagining perhaps they could notice lights vanishing into the forest, then contemplating the options of entering the forest or staying at the village, and ultimately choose to venture farther than just the edge of yon forest.
I would imagine Ramår's herbalist training and enchiridion of natural philosophy might perchance come quite in handy at some point in the near future.

As for the empire on the other side of the forest, I really like how the ideas concerning the treeline blend in with its pseudo-established characteristics. How wide is the forest supposed to be?
Vis-à-vis the motives of the military establishing a tree-based line of defence, although Kyrie's assumption seems reasonable, perhaps the forest (once) acted as a perennial, pseudo-natural border beyond which people were too afraid to go.
As well as setting in stone (well, wood) the borders of the nation, the military might also have been using it to shield people against the potential dangers of lurking into the area, percase due to some pollution, sickness, or (more likely, considering the magical properties of the forest, at least at its edges) some curse set on the land, and perchance even anterior to the settlement.
Pioneers exploring further and further may have at length recieved a wretched predicament from settling in the area, which was then planted. Maybe they aren't trees at all, but rather people who might've suddently been...entified? All of this is a bit of a stretch to be sure, please correct me if there's a canon explanation I missed.

Sorry again if my prose is too verbose <3
/C

Yeah, that certainly was pretty shitty on your roommate's behalf, Alexis .
Hope you've been doing better since.

Hey friends!

I haven't been feeling well lately\ I've been figuring out a lot of stuff about how I relate to different people in my life. I feel like this week has been overwhelmingly positive and I've just had a great day.

Sorry I absented myself so long! Hope everyone's been doing well
/C

[Ramår - 16]

Rea, I absolutely loved that post <3 I loved how in-character it was

Thanks for the tl;dr, Luca. Still up for a collab post?

Ramår - 16 a Sylvan enbie who explored to far from home and now might(?) be near Ceadaichte Mòir?

Yeah, I hadn't payed much attention to the geography of AVFtS so I pictured Ramår and Tsunpar rather in the vicinity of Ceadaichte Mòir and the Forest.

I'd love to hear more about the worldbuilding behind the village, Kyrie. Worldbuilding everything to the smallest detail is the best. Peat bogs

/C

That is a... very good point.

In that case, absolutely! I wasn't sure what kind of technology Ceadaichte Mòir had so I just settled on a bonfire. Villages have those, right?

Doing a collab post would be most practical, Luca. Unfortunately I'm dreadfully bad at writing dialogue . But I'd be delighted to get an entry into CM as swiftly as possible :3