This Looks Like Fun...ask Away All Two Of You Who Might Actually Look At This Blog...lol

100ish Follower Giveaway.

Well now.

And here I thought no one wanted to read this Blog of Despair.

I believe it’s de rigeur to have a celebratory giveaway. I was originally going to do this at 100, but life has a funny way of throwing strange curve balls at you (or, in this case, impending babies). However, now it’s time for a giveaway that also gives me an opportunity to do some giving to good causes. So…

Welcome to this 100ish Follower Giveaway.

First Prize gets a 60 day digital time card code and can choose one charity to which I will donate $250 USD in your name. Good choices include Harvey and Irma relief organizations (preferably a local organization that can do a lot of focused good and needs the help), animal shelters, or Planned Parenthood. The only restrictions are that the choices can’t be mean-spirited or contrary to improving the lives and well-being of others; the charity must take donations online; and it must be a registered 501c3 in the United States.

Second Prize gets any Mog Station item of their choice under $10 and a $100 USD donation in their name to a charity. The same rules as above apply.

Third Prize gets any Mog Station item of their choice under $10.

I may increase the number of prizes if I get a big response. We’ll see!

How to Enter

~ Start (or keep) following this blog. ~ Reblog this post. Multiple reblogs don’t get you more entries, but are of course appreciated! The list of entrants will be selected from rebloggers of this post who are also followers. ~ Do not be a giveaway blog, porn bot, or anything that’s not, you know, an actual person. ~ Follow and reblog before September 30, 2017.

I’ll use random.org to pick winners shortly after September 30, 2017, then I’ll message you to work out the details of your prize.

Good luck!

Conflux, Pt. 6

“Is that…is that your starship?” Stormy asked, her voice giddy as she clapped her hands despite their circumstances.

The Commander nodded with a small smirk.  “Yeah, she can hear us.  That’s good…”

Anafenza tilted her head in confusion at this.  While the Commander tried her communicator again, she turned to Stormy.  “’She’ can hear us?  That sounded like a man on the other side?”

“She meant the ship can hear us.  Ships are always girls.”

“Ships…are always girls.” Anafenza blinked a few times but shrugged.  “I assume this is an Earth thing?”

Stormy shrugged.  “I suppose it is.  Sorry if that’s confusing.”

The Commander groaned in frustration.  “There’s too much interference here, and we can’t get far enough away from the tree to cut through.”

The other two women turned to look.  Sure enough, as the Commander had implied, the cavern was smaller now, an odd gray nothingness taking the place of the stone walls around them.

Stormy snapped her fingers, then beckoned for the badge.  “Gimme.”  The Commander and Anafenza hesitated, not understanding what she meant.  Stormy huffed, beckoning for the device again.  “It’s simple, right?  How do you cut through interference if you can’t build a better transmitter?”

The Commander squinted, her thoughts racing.  “Change the frequency?”  When the other woman simply nodded, as if coaxing her to keep trying, the Commander shrugged and shook her head.  “Um, more power? I don’t –“

Stormy snapped her fingers again and grinned, interrupting.  “More power!” She held the device in her hand, and Anafenza saw threads of electricity start to wrap around her arm, snapping and crackling as the woman manipulated the environment around them.  As she watched, a thick fog began to form above them.

Stormy looked up to the Commander.  “Ready?” When the other woman nodded, Stormy grinned.  “Here we go!” She concentrated a burst of electricity right into the device, then tapped it, eliciting the chirp again.

The Commander practically leapt forward, enthralled by the woman’s powers and forgetting for a moment to speak once the device was activated.  “St. Peter to Rafale!  How do you hear us now?”

There was a curse on the other end of the transmission.  “Prophets! LOUD and clear, Commander, how do you read?”

“Same, Rafale! I’m trapped in a collapsing pocket dimension with two other people, are you able to locate us with the signal from my commbadge and my tricorder?”

“Standby…”  There were more voices in the background now, as more people began to talk over one another.  Anafenza struggled to hear them all, until finally the first man came back onto the channel.  “We’re locked onto the tricorder now, but there is still a large amount of interference. Whatever you labeled it when you scanned it – ‘aether?’ – it’s masking your signal.  Sensors are picking up three faint life signs but they’re all registering as you.”

The Commander shook her head.  “Yeah, it’s a long story, but you’re picking the three of us up just fine.  You can’t transport through the interference?”

“We’re having trouble getting a positive lock…”

Anafenza shrieked then, pointing.  “Jess, look!”

Both women looked up, then to where the auri was pointing.  The Commander gasped.  “Rafale, we have a problem!  The dimension is collapsing faster than before!”

A female voice broke through then.  “I just picked up a massive disturbance in your tricorder readings, Commander!  The link we created here is punching a hole through your dimension and causing it to destabilize at an exponentially faster rate.”

“You can’t get a lock, Nizeri?”

“Negative; M’Ral is coming up with a plan but we can’t make it happen in the next ten seconds. Cut power; use your tricorder to send data bursts.  We’ll send you a message when we have a good idea what to do on our end.  I’m sorry, ma’am!”

The Commander looked at Stormy, then swatted the communicator badge out of her sparking hand.

The grey Nothingness slowed its progress consuming the cavern, and the women all let out the collective breath they’d been holding.  Stormy shook her head.  “Now what?”

Anafenza spoke up instead, certain of the answer.  “We come up with a way to get out of here.”

The Commander nodded. “Boosting the signal definitely helped, but we need a quick solution.  While they work on a way to lock onto us, it would help to make it easier for them.”

“A beacon of some sort,” Stormy said, and the Commander nodded.

Anafenza looked at the other women.  “If the aether is causing the interference, what if we gave your ship a way to better navigate the flow of it to find us?”

“Not just a beacon, but a map?”  The Commander tapped her chin and nodded.  “How would we do that?”

“My linkpearl.” Anafenza brought her hand up to her horn, feeling for the small jewel embedded there.  “It uses the flow of aether to communicate; your ship could use the flow the linkpearl uses to break through the conflicting aether here and find us easier.”

“That just might work,” the Commander said.  “Alright…let’s get to work, ladies.”

Preferences Quiz!

Open curtains | Closed blinds

Stray dog | House cat

People | Pets

Outside | Inside

Half-empty | Half-full

Sing | Dance

Shoes | Sandals (Neither, come on!)

Cash | Credit

Hike | Drive

Casual | Elegant (Nothing?)

Center | Corner

Sword | Shield

Airship | Boat

Fizzy | Flat

Garnished | Plain

Extra salt | Extra pepper

Spicy | Mild

Orchestrion | Traditional music

Opaque | Transparent

White lies | Complete truth

Blunt | Subtle

Noisy | Silent

Books | Music

Familiar | New

Youth | Experience

Spoon | Fork and knife

Knife | Baseball bat

Void | Ocean

Bow and arrow | Blow dart

Love at first sight | Slow burn

Freckles | Dimples

Long eyelashes | Long fingers

Soft lips | Sensitive neck

Stubble | Thick hair

Slow dance | Intimate conversation

Candlelight dinner | Stargazing

Tagged by: @little-purple-thundercloud  :)

Jess had a great sword that she could summon (literally pull it from her aether, out of thin air) called Blood Thorn. This was tied to her family's bloodvine curse, and the blade was identical to other female members of her family (it was the same blade). Now that the curse has passed on to Ana...well...we'll see when she summons it what happens to it. Ze's daggers aren't named, though he has considered rather silly ideas like "Thunder" and "Lightning," to go with his Stormcrow persona.

Does your character have a named weapon?

I don’t mean just the in-game weapons, but does your character have a family weapon that has a name? Do they have a relic they found? Or did they name it themselves?

You seem familiar

@eightswordsparrow dunno if you saw this... 💙

🌻Summer Poetry Free-For-All at Palazzo Aldenard

🌻 When: Wednesday May 20th 8:00pm EDT

🌻 Where: Mist 7 Plot 15 Room #3 Balmung

It’s an early summer poetry free-for-all! Bring us your slam poetry, embarrass your lover with endless haiku, settle a score with an old-fashioned Ishgardian hymn battle! 

Acoustic performances, acapella, throat singing and performances of the like are all welcome!

Sign up when you show up! We can’t wait to see you!

Michael Cunningham, from “The Hours,” originally published c. 1998

Conflux, Pt. 4

“So if we don’t find a way out of this…we go back to our homes, yeah?”

The Commander shook her head.  “No, I don’t think that’s how it works.”  She looked around the small cavern, then turned to look at the dark tree in the center. “This dimension will just continue to shrink until it completely collapses in itself.”

“And if we’re inside, we just…disappear.” Anafenza stated this as a matter of fact, to which the Commander nodded in confirmation.  She swallowed the lump in her throat.  “Ok…how do we get out then?”

The woman shook her head. “Maybe it’s as easy as just finding a portal of some sort…somewhere that connects directly to our dimensions. Otherwise?  I…really don’t know.”

Stormy was standing closer to the tree.  She reached out to it, fascinated by the clouds of dark fog roiling off of it.  “What is this?”  She turned to the other women, then looked at Ana.  “You said you recognized it?  It represented your soul?”

Anafenza nodded.  “I…have seen it before in dreams, yes.  I had taken to interpreting it as my life force, my soul.  The vines…are the curse I bear, choking out my life, taking control.”

They gathered around it, looking at the massive trunk that reached to the top of the cavern, branches spreading outward just before hitting the ceiling.  “How poetic,” the Commander commented, pulling her scanning device out again.  She waved it around the tree, frowning.  “I…am not picking up anything except…an energy that my tricorder can’t identify. I can successfully scan the rocks in the cavern and the two of you but this…it’s as if it’s not even there.” She snapped the device shut again before reaching a hand out to feel the tree.  Stormy did likewise, though Ana stayed away from it, as scared as she was of it.  “It’s cold,” the woman commented, feeling the solid surface of the tree beneath her hand.

Stormy pulled away and turned again to Anafenza, crossing her arms over her chest.  “Something still isn’t adding up.”

The other women looked at her curiously, waiting for her to continue.

She motioned to the Commander.  “Both of us are ‘Jessica St. Peter.’  We look nearly the same, we have nearly similar histories, abilities, quirks, personalities.  But why are we all here?  If this pocket dimension was formed because we all have something in common, then why, specifically, are you here, Anafenza?”

Anafenza winced, and shied away from the girl’s withering gaze.  “I…I don’t know.  I knew a woman who called herself Jessika at one point…Jessika Saphir.  Her real name was Jessielle though, I think.”

The other two Jessicas looked at one another and nodded.  “It’s a start.”  Stormy turned back and pressed more.  “Why did she use a false name, do you know?  Were you close to her?”

Anafenza bit her lip and shook her head.  “I…don’t know all the details.  I know her family had been accused of…heretical activities in her home city of Ishgard, and they fled to avoid being killed.  Her house – Vingesang – doesn’t even exist anymore because of it.”

“Vingesang?”  The Commander looked puzzled.  “That’s…an odd name.”

“Familiar sounding, yeah,” Stormy commented.  “French?”

“It sounds like it, yeah,” the other woman confirmed with a nod.

Anafenza just shrugged. “It is an Ishgardian Elezen name.”

“Another race on your world?”

Anafenza nodded.  “Tall, long-limbed, pointy ears.  Very regal.”

Stormy smirked, before looking at the Commander again.  “My French is not that great; my JD has been trying to teach me but, sadly, I haven’t picked up too much.  Do you know what it means?”

The Commander shook her head, but instead pulled out her tricorder, tapping a few buttons, and then repeated the word, “Vingesang.”  She held out the device’s screen for Stormy and Ana to see.  “Vine of Blood…Bloodvine?”

Stormy recoiled, her eyes wide, and stared at Anafenza.  “You have got to be kidding me…Bloodvine?!”

For as surprised as Stormy was, Ana was equally confused.  “You…know this word?”

Stormy nodded slowly. “It was…the name of the boarding school my…my girlfriends went to, in the Isles.  The Bloodvine Academy.”

The Commander laughed, smiling bright.  “There’s one connection, then.  Bloodvine, and this other Jessika.  But that doesn’t explain why you’re here, Anafenza.  Were you two lovers?”

Anafenza shook her head. “No…I hardly knew her.  I…I mean…”  She fidgeted, fretting over telling these women the real reason why a third Jessika wasn’t here with them.  “It wasn’t my fault!  My mind was taken over, I couldn’t stop myself!”

The Commander nodded slowly, her eyes showing she was putting the dots together.  Stormy, however was having a harder time.  “What did you do, Ana?”

“I killed her,” Anafenza admitted flatly, and she winced to see Stormy pull away from her, eyes wide, electricity dancing across her fists.  “I was trying to kill someone else and…Jessika was in my way.  And I killed her for it.  This was…years ago.”  Ana wiped her eyes, feeling more tears come out of shame.

Stormy looked to the Commander, then back to Anafenza.  “Are you here to kill us too, then?”

“Jessiy!” The Commander chastised her, moving towards Anafenza.  “She’s just as confused as we are about all this…And she was being brainwashed to do it.”  Still she looked to the auri girl with a slight hesitation.  “You’re free now, right?”

Ana nodded, and the older woman moved closer to embrace her.  “Alright…so another connection, albeit tenuous.  But even then, you shouldn’t be here with us.  But you have to be the key to this; what else are you not telling us, Ana?”

Stormy took a deep, calming breath.  “Why is she the key?”

The Commander motioned with a nod of her head to the tree in the center of the cavern.  “I don’t recognize that, do you?  She did; it’s tied to her.  There is something that binds all three of us together, and it’s obviously not just our names or histories.  This third Jessica had a connection to us through ‘Bloodvine,’ what else could there be I wonder?  Anafenza has to be the key to this.”  She ran her hands softly through the auri’s hair, comforting and soothing.  “And I think, if we can begin to understand how we all fit together, we can understand how to leave this place before we die here together.”

Random thoughts while playing Shadowbringers...

...Ana would totally have a crush on Alisae if they ever met IC.

I will do my best...I can promise that?

Reblog this if you promise to your RP Partners that they can safely tell you they want to drop a thread without you being rude or manipulative about it