The Mods of LifeAftr (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lifeaftr_mods) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
aftr_ooc2018-07-07 08:53 pm
lifeaftr_mods) wrote in aftr_ooc2018-07-07 08:53 pm
Entry tags:
New Island: Umui
NEW ISLAND: UMUI
The votes are in, and the slight majority favors the promise of ores and metals for harvest. And the Storyteller, content to oblige that desire, has disappeared for the first week of the month to fulfill it. And come July 10th, a new silhouette will grace the horizon - and our Locations page.
Transportation
The Storyteller is...subdued, perhaps more than usual, as they inform travelers that there is an open mana pool on the new island, making it available for travel. They can assure the lack of any immediate threats that they can perceive - no civilization, no predators, nothing at all. With that assurance in mind, the mana pool will take characters to the C1 square, should the characters choose to arrive via that method.
The Storyteller issues the name of this new land in the form of a dream, prior to its materialization:
Where the Weeds Take Root
Those of you who were here for the arrival of Ziziphus may find this island to be eerily familiar, at first: the rolling hills are thick with green-gold waves of grass, rippling in the odd breeze. And, the more they look, the more striking those similarities may seem; for like Ziziphus, the island of Umui boasts a great variety of flowers. Across nearly every square foot, a new crop of them springs.
And there's a silence. Strange, absolute. There appears to be no marked difference in the landscape...though certain dark blots on the horizon appear to be rising hills. Or perhaps strangely-shaped buildings, if they're anything like the derelict shape lumped not far from the mana pool. While it appears to be in significant ruin, it certainly was a building of some sort, once.
As always, we'll have a thread for questions and comments, and we encourage you to make use of our Mod Contact page for private correspondence!
( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )
no subject
Player: jazzy
Character Themes: Taako does not have a super obvious elemental association like Lup-- his magic specialisation is transmutation, which is not canonically really tied to traditional alchemy but I'm super gay for alchemy and he DID make the Philosopher's Stone so I think of it like that regardless and no one is gonna stop me. So, functionally, he gets all the elements, but more specifically and in keeping with the twin theme, he still gets a kind of fire. In chemistry, any change or reaction but particularly the application of heat is represented with a Δ, a delta. Likewise in math/physics, for any kind of difference, change of state, etc. I don't know the origin for sure but I'd give 50/50 odds it's because an upwards triangle is the alchemical symbol for fire, which is just the O.G. chemical change. It's important to me that they both share this symbol but in very different usages. (Ren seems to have developed an association of the twins with the sun and moon, which is adorable. and the moon being a symbol of change makes that even better imo)
(here in island hell he's shackled to the element of water and ice, both in terms of his surroundings and his extreme reliance on it in spellcasting. Water's also another big symbol of change, but that's just alchemy for you, they all are technically.)
His government assigned sin from the judgey-world is, I think they landed mostly on greed? He started with so little and never stops wanting more and is never satisfied, etc etc. The relic he made obvs does transmutation, and is most often misused giving the wielder what they want, to horrible consequence. A child turned a whole town into candy; when it tries to tempt people it offers to turn things into gold and diamonds, etc. And of course the judges were pretty right, Taako does just steal shit, he wants the finer things, he likes luxury and is concerned with Getting Paid, he's a classic earth sign there. He stole silver flatware, he stole gold (and shoes), he stole diamonds and gems (admittedly for a real good reason tho). His relic turned a whole lab into pink tourmaline. Associations with any precious metal or gem are, I think, valid, but those in particular.
More emotionally speaking but still in keeping with greed or want as a theme, he just isn't good at letting go. Like Lup, now that there are meaningful people in his life, he means very much to keep them, because the idea of losing people is horrifying to him after having lost Lup so thoroughly for a decade. He doesn't want to lose people, he doesn't want to lose himself, he's tired of losing.
Despite often alienating or being alienated by others, he still forms connections more quickly than he intends to or likes. And in the absence of that possibility, the flip side is that he just doesn't care and won't want to, because it would be a waste. All the doomed people on a hundred worlds, he calls 'talking dust.' I think of him as someone who...cherry picks, however inadvertently, people he cares about and puts them above the general populace, and I think the whole Stolen Century and gaining the IPRE intensified this quality. Without Lup's more developed compassion, this theme of family and bonds means he can have some pretty scarily black and white thinking about others and whether they matter. Which is to say, mostly people don't matter, but when they do they do. (The idea that it's different for anyone else, that this Special Person status isn't necessarily reciprocal, can be threatening and even very upsetting for him to realise--Lucretia's ideas in that regard were different from his and he's still feeling some kind of way about it.)
Obviously cooking is a big thing (this is just alchemy you did fire to and can eat so of course it is). It started as a way for the twins to make themselves useful, indispensable even, (a concern that still crops up, especially in the survival situation of early LifeAftr days) but it serves other purposes too. It's a cautious way to display affection, it's a great way to get positive attention, it gives him control over something, it's an avenue for self expression. He was initially not super thrilled with the idea of cooking here, however irrationally, because he spent a long time thinking his food poisoned a lot of people right to death. That didn't turn out to be the case, and due to necessity and I guess just logic he's gotten past it a lot here in LA, though it took him a little longer given how fucked up and untrustworthy magic is here.
Poison as a concept probably deserves its own bulletpoint. When they had to pick animal masks for a thing, Taako chose the mongoose and cited their resistance to poison. He knows now how Lup died when she got umbrella'd--also poison. When Guzma tried to sell him spider poison and even advocated /eating things that had been killed by it/ he was pretty horrified. It's an awful flip side to a lot of things he's about, it's unsurprising that he's not a fan.
(he also chose the mongoose for being unexpectedly fierce. i'd say doing the unexpected is also kind of his thing.)
He is pragmatic to Lup's idealism, cautious and evasive to Lup's recklessness and bravery, disinclined to trust in general and self-absorbed to a fault, much more than she is, but in general they balance each other out. Having her erased from his memories of his life left the memories of himself alone much clearer, which exacerbates the selfishness, self-absorption, and general assholishness, as well as his extreme self-reliance and occasionally very strong belief that he's the only person who can get things done.
Even though he now remembers growing up with Lup and always having at least her and later the whole IPRE to rely on, he also still remembers how it felt not to have that. He doesn't like being really and truly alone (though he will certainly bribe the entire camp to leave if he can, these days) and he feels strong sympathy for people who grew up similarly or are similarly alienated (see--Ren). He still remembers being dumb, sneaky, and lonely, even if that self-perception turned out to be distorted.
He would say he doesn't have a favorite color, but he's a liar and it's purple.
no subject
COOPERATION
WILL BE YOUR DESIGNATED HANDLER
FOR THE DURATION
OF YOUR STAY