#adeptsverse

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A Rock and A Hard Place

(I lost the original source for the dialogue prompt “Get out of my office” so have a snippet of Lindsay Pilot being herself and Evvy being Done With Her Shit (TM) ) Officer Evanesca Rochelin of the AEGIS did an obvious double take when she saw me installed at her desk with my feet up, sipping coffee at the crack of dawn. Her progression from surprise to incredulousness to irritation was almost worth the sleepless night.

“Pilot,” she said with an absolute flatness of tone, “What do you think you’re doing? And why is there a big dirty rock on my desk?”

The rock in question, nearly the size of my skull, was technically made of cement and busy shedding flecks of dried mud on Evvy’s case files, just like my shoes. I spared it a glance, since it was going to be the most appreciative part of my audience, then took another sip of awful station coffee from Evvy’s mug. 

“You know the company I suspected of embezzling the money out of city funds by cutting corners building bridges?” I asked, not taking my feet off her desk.

“I don’t keep track of your hare-brained hunches.” Evvy looked like she was debating whether it was worth it to shove my feet off her desk and dump me out of her chair.

“Well, you said you couldn’t justify opening a case on this one unless I brought you some concrete evidence,” I replied, swallowing a grin.

Evvy, clearly undercaffinated, just frowned at me, so I pointed at the chunk of cement. “Behold! Your concrete evidence.”

There was a beat, and then the corner of Evvy’s mouth trembled. “Pilot,” she said sternly, “Get out of my office. Now.”

I dropped my feet to the ground and tipped her an ironic salute on my way out, then stuck my head back through the door on impulse. “Let me know if you need any more help,” I told her “I’m sure that it’s going to be a heavy case load, and you’ll have to move quickly to cement your case…”

I ducked the pencil that she threw at me and left, heading determinedly in the direction of home and a thorough bath.

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Guns or Swords? Non-magical combat tropes.

I’m comparing and contrasting three worlds here, because I think it works neatly. This is... mostly rambling, not advice. Carmena

The first is the world of my Fairy Tale Police Procedural, which is extraordinarily loosely based on the late 15th century. (About as loosely based as Discworld is on... anything.) Fireworks exist, but guns don’t... at least in any reliable and accurate form. But they have crossbows. Somewhat expensive, but accurate, deadly, and long range. And they have laws about who can carry a sword in public, when, and if it needs to be sealed for people’s protection. The guard is usually armed with batons, on the theory that criminals should be captured alive, and that weapons for the guard are for self defense against someone attempting to slug them or pull a knife. Could you kill someone with a baton? Absolutely, but in theory a heavy stick isn’t something where every time you use it you’re probably intending to kill your target. Telmide (One out of many Adeptsverse worlds...)

Guns exist. Machine guns exist. There are still less guns in 1920′s Cygnathium than there are in modern chicago, and Lindsay’s knowledge of guns pretty much boils down to which end points away from the shooter. That said, she doesn’t precisely go up against the mob (at this point) so I’ll deal with how she reacts to a gun pointed at her when I come to that bridge. Full disclosure: Lindsay’s gun ignorance dates back to an argument I had with my high school creative writing teacher, who insisted that every author needed to know all about guns so their characters could identify them, and I strongly disagreed, given that sometimes your character has never interacted with guns in their life. Then again, I’m 90% certain he didn’t realize it was possible to write a story about a demisexual lesbian detective in an alternate history 1920 with magic, because his hatred of genre was well established.

Rishathsverse

Projectile weapons punch holes in ships, and weapons with gunpowder are an explosion or fire risk even when unloaded. An electricity based stunner will take down most varieties of aliens, and the lethal amount of shock will depend on their size and anatomy, so you can use a stunner as a nonlethal weapon if you don’t set it to maximum. You can also seriously fry any exposed control systems with an electrical weapon, at great risk to yourself, considering that might be what keeps the oxygen flowing on this ship. For this reason, most spacefarers keep knives on hand - both as a close quarters weapon that they know can’t damage the ship, and because they’re a more useful emergency tool than a stunner. You will probably never be boarded outside of a star system, but if you damage or disable your ship in interplanetary space you can be just as dead as if you’d done it traveling above light speed. The cheapest method of ensuring a relative lack of weapons at any spaceport remains metal detectors, so a lot of boot knives are advanced ceramics. Stunners and guns are still present on several planets and you never know on the way down exactly how things might have changed in the weeks or months you were in transit. Estella never uses her knife to intimidate anyone, because Rioch, for all his pretty feathers, has a velociraptor style killing claw on each foot and generally doesn’t wear any protective shoes or socks unless he has to.

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bloop bloop blop blip bloop

*Starts yanking characters out of a hat at random.*

Eight Valoricus is allergic to ragweed. 

Anya’s lives have not happened in chronological order, based on the time periods when they take place... probably. Anya doesn’t exactly remember the order.Lindsay Pilot used to have more than fifty library cards which she had kept track of throughout her childhood travels, in case she needed them again. She never had much room to carry books with her, though.Rioch’s favorite human food is smoked fish, and he regards all dishes that contain eggs with thinly disguised suspicion.

Joan Walczak, from The Magic Fades, is left handed, and I found this out about ten minutes ago.

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14. which character’s name do you like the most? please!

I think my favorite out of all my characters’ names is probably Rihan. I’ve revised the Veldons’ world / worlds so many times, and the most recent one was in 2013 when I was taking a history of spanish culture and civ course and reading the spanish language wikipedia articles on the reconquista. It was at this point that I updated the Veldon girls’ name spellings to better fit their world’s new background. I’d never been terribly fond of Rihan’s name - at the beginning, the Veldon sisters were 1) triplets and 2) named Thea, Rhea (yes like the bird) and Ailea, because i thought I was clever. I was very hesitant to change Ailea’s name to Aliyah (largely because the enormity of what I didn’t yet know to do convincing worldbuilding was starting to sink in.) But Rihan’s name just... fit. And with it, she settled into the remade Velidion like a dandelion into a flowerbed that you will never get it out of again.

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Pride month collided with my attempts to learn to actually draw / color pictures, so have a picture I spent way too much time on today: Lindsay Pilot (Left) and Aliyah Veldon (right) in June pride gear.

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Worldbuilding Compare and Contrast: Languages / The Common Tongue.

Since the last compare/contrast in my three main worlds was so popular, have another!

Adeptsverse (Reige)  There are a lot of languages wandering around Reige. I’m not enough of a polyglot to construct them (nor do I have decades to do so in,) but their equivalents in our world would be a version of Latin rapidly devolving into various dialects of Spanish, which is in the most common use, a slowly evolving offshoot of Arabic, which is used by nobles and the educated in the Veldons’ area, and various dialects and languages used by pockets of the common people - Iberian languages, Hebrew or Aramaic, and probably a language from their version of Morocco. There isn’t one language that is the standard for everyone, though - it’s a case of one empire having brought one language and it slowly giving way to another. (Note that since Velidion is in an alternate history where nothing has the same name and there are none of the same people, but broad societal strokes such as where cities are built, weather patterns, the evolution of religions and socieities  are very similar, Velidion is in the equivalent of south-central Spain.)

Telmide has a lot of languages too, but they’re a less linguistically interesting pastiche of 1920′s america. Carmena There’s certainly a common tongue in Carmena and the surrounding area, but half the cast is bilingual - Bernice, Rouge, and Hazel grew up in communities that were bilingual, speaking the common language and another, and Livius just absorbs languages like a homely sponge.

In the case of Carmena, the somewhat unified language is less a case of an empire receding and more a case of a society where a specific group of people with their specific language gained power, and now most business is conducted in their language unless it’s strictly within a community that has another mode of communication.

Carmena is also technically a city state, whereas Velidion is a principality - areas like The Dales are totally independent of Carmena, and most of the villages just outside of it enough that they haven’t been swallowed up by the city rule themselves unless they request assistance. Depending on the village (and it’s demographics) they may speak the common language and be swayed towards the philosophies that are popular in Carmena. Rishathsverse

Finally a common language that doesn’t have to do with conquest! Trade is a constructed language that was specifically made so that a variety of species, with varying languages and mouthparts, could use it to trade, with as little ambiguity as possible. As such, it started out... not terribly creative. There were a lot of nouns, prices, descriptions of physical properties, and a handful of rote greetings that translated mostly to “I respectfully wish to do business with you,” and “I am satisfied with our transaction.” But it spread. It spread slowly but surely, and people adapted it so they could actually use it to live with instead of just do business, so it ended up a terrifying creole of loanwords with several thousand synonyms for the emotional and intellectual context it left out. It turned out useful even for members of the same species - a mixed nation crew of Achoho would use it just as often as a crew of humans who spoke various first languages. On the Rishaths, Estella and Rioch have mangled it further for daily use - they speak a mix of Tet Achohoi, English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Trade, along with a variety of words borrowed from other languages. Some of their favorite precise words for relationships come from Chaladean, because Estella has a weakness for Chaladean soap operas.

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@perringwrites was kind enough to draw Aliyah “Allie” Veldon and Lindsay Pilot for me, in period appropriate clothing no less!

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New Year, new sketches of my favorite OC’s. Will I ever do anything in color or not in pencil? Probably not. Top: Aliyah “Allie” Jihanet adn Veldon. Referenced from Leem Lubany. Bottom: Lindsay Marie Pilot. Referenced from Natalie Dormer, with lots of alterations.