#aurelin

[rainbow--skies]

Hi yes please tell me about your kotlc ocs

Hello! They’re not very developed as they’re mainly used for roleplaying, but I’ll tell you a bit about each of them, and they’ll have more detailed profiles up later.

Xeria is 14, she’s female and bisexual, and her pronouns are she/her. She’s a Level 4 prodigy at Foxfire. She’s a Vanisher and a Polyglot. Usually she’s affiliated with the Black Swan in some way. Her house is called Wonderstep, and her family, the Eternales, are a family that does not exist in canon.

This is what she looks like:

Aurelin is usually roleplayed at 11 but I do have ideas for her life past that point. She’s female and a lesbian, and their pronouns are she/they. She’s a Level 1 prodigy at Foxfire. They have not yet manifested at the point I normally roleplay them, but are an Empath. She is usually used in roleplays when the conflict between the Black Swan and Neverseen have already ended. Their house is called Shadows’ End, and she is a Vacker, but very very distantly related to the ones in canon.

Here is what she looks like:

[femme-fatale-gamers]

The 30 Year Old Gamer: Better than Television

Original author: Aurelin

I have a long history of playing video games, but as long as I’ve been playing, I’ve also been watching.

During those early years of Atari in New Jersey, I remember watching my Dad play Enduro, a car racing game whose main feature (besides the race) was navigating different weather/temporal conditions. Like Mario Kart and Grand Turismo after it, your view of the game is 3rd person from the back end of your car, and you’re driving forward. The color of the screen and the amount of road you can see (visibility changes with fog, etc.) are some of the things that change in the environment. You begin with the throng of cars, and you need to end the race by making it to the front of the pack.

I would watch my Dad play this game for HOURS, and I was fascinated forever (to his credit, Dad had chops!).

In 1st grade, I had the dubious honor of watching my neighbor’s two grandsons die repeatedly while playing Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link.  I remember multiple visits to see the sleeping Zelda, the grandsons’ repeated desire to find the power glove, and my neighbor making us ice cream sandwiches out of ice cream and Oreos.

The latter-most experience was my favorite part, although I gamely read the instruction manual, hoping for a clue about the location of the power glove. Little did I know that 20-something years later, history would look back on Zelda 2 with Strong Opinions, many hailing it as a very Nintendo Hard game, and arguably, the hardest of the Zeldas.

My next memorable video game watching experience took place over the course of two X-mas visits to North Jersey to see my Dad’s best friend and his family. The son of that family had a Nintendo, and would gather his X-mas party friends (and tolerate 6 year old me) in the basement, trading off turns while playing Super Mario Bros. 2.

The son was very good at the game. He favored using Toad for his chosen character, because he was a master of the pick-and-throw.  As one might imagine, using Toad meant that his most common cause of death was insufficient jumping, a problem which was solved when every one of the son’s friends used Peach as their chosen character for their eventual turns. Eventual, because you could only change characters between levels or continues.

I remember spending all night in the basement those two years, watching the Mario 2 magic happen. I remember the music in the jar-with-the-key zones making me feel very uneasy, because I knew as soon as we got the key, those damn Mask enemies would start flying around the place and death would be imminent.

And then, some years later, after it had been out for a while, I saw Super Mario World played flawlessly. Still a young’un, in 3rd grade, I had been dragged to the hardware store with my parents.  I went to the section where there were outlets and electrical bits and bobs on display, and there were TVs hooked up.  One TV was playing some kind of strange auto-run of SMW.  No game console or game were present; it was only a video, but it showed every single level beaten each secret and alternate way, and they went to the star world, and went to all the Mondo/Tubular/etc. special zones.

I was in love, and stayed in front of that TV until my parents finished shopping and dragged me home.

And it’s that level of gameplay without character death, that feeling of made-the-jump! that draws me to obsess over speed runs and witty Let’s Plays today.  And it seems that the circle of video game viewership has gone full circle from Dad to me, and now, back to my Dad.

But that’s a story for another time...

[femme-fatale-gamers]

The 30 Year Old Gamer: Birth of a Gamer

Original author: Aurelin

What was the first video game you ever played?  How old were you when you picked up a controller for the first time, feeling that strange surge of energy as the button you pushed made that thing on the TV screen move?

Growing up in a 2 bedroom second floor apartment in New Jersey, I could stand on my tiptoes at our back window and see the Twin Towers, and on a clear 4th of July, the NYC fireworks.  But as a little kid who was a bit too curious for her own good (and once spilled soda on her Dad’s expensive stereo system), there were child-proof locks on the cabinets holding Dad’s records and electronics, and the mysterious cabinet I couldn’t see through under the TV set.

One snowy day, when I was 2 or 3 years old, my Dad brought home a box with stuff in it, opened the cabinet under the TV, and hooked some things up. Under the TV, I would come to understand, was his Atari 2600 and a shoe box full of video games and instruction manuals. In the box he brought home were a special control pad with game-specific overlays for the right buttons to push, and an entire series of Sesame Street video games to go with it.

Alpha Beam with Ernie, Big Bird’s Egg Catch, Cookie Monster Munch, and Oscar’s Trash Race became my new world.

I would sing along with Turkey in the Straw as I made Big Bird catch eggs under twisty chutes below his pet chickens, getting way too excited to catch a golden egg, progressing from difficulty level to difficulty level. What was once a push-the-button left, move one chute left, became push-the-button-left, move one step left. And then, a whole different ballgame required memorization and critical thinking when the chutes briefly flashed before going invisible.

Oscar’s Trash Race had me picking the appropriate Grouch to wiggle down to the street to collect their favorite junk, Alpha Beam made me collect uppercase and lowercase letters, matching them with Ernie and Bert’s space ship docking bay compartments.

Cookie Monster Munch was a bit special, because it was my first exposure to video game adrenaline of any kind. The normal plot had you navigating a maze to collect cookies. But hard mode, sweet baby Link in Hyrule, hard mode… The maze was invisible.

I’m not sure how 3 year old me felt so much anxiety, but navigating an invisible maze was terrifying.

But I gained courage. And I gained hand-eye coordination. And as time progressed, in those early pre-school, Kindergarten, and 1st grade years (and beyond!), I moved on to the other games in Dad’s shoebox.

My early days as a gamer would later be defined by Arcade Pinball, River Raid (sometimes playing versus my little sister when she became old enough!), Enduro, and best of all, possibly foreshadowing the D&D-playing geek I’d grow into, ADVENTURE.

But that’s a story for another time...

[femme-fatale-gamers]

The 30 Year Old Gamer: Hip to Be (a) Square

Original author: Aurelin

When I was a young’un in 2nd grade, I had found a comfort zone while paying my Dad’s Atari 2600.  I understood how to navigate the myriad problems facing my Sesame Street allies and together, we learned and prospered.

So I moved on to grown-up games.  I started to play Adventure.

Adventure was a game which, before I got my grubby little paws on it, had already left its mark on my Mom and Dad.  Though they would, no doubt, consider it a footnote in their relationship, my parents played Adventure together when it was new and drew maps of the blue maze and the darkened catacombs.  As a lady gamer who regularly games with gamer boyfriends, I find this fact to be the most awesome thing imaginable.  My parents… watch me relate to them.

The premise of Adventure is fairly simple.  You must find the golden chalice and get it into the golden castle.  Don’t get eaten by dragons.  Along the way, you find gold, black, and white keys to open the castles of the corresponding color, you find a sword (which looks like an arrow) to kill the dragons, a bridge to help you cross through the walls of the maze, and a magnet to draw items closer to you.  There is also a bat who can swap/steal your objects.  You can hold one object at a time.

You are a square.  Literally.

Long before we were pretending to be Mario, before we were thrown for a loop by Samus, and chronologically, before Big Bird et al. were programmed, we were a square.  That square was all of us (take note, my custom Bioware PCs!) in its complete lack of detail.

I only played the easiest level, though, so my adventures concerned dragons, swords, the maze, and the black and gold things, and consequently, I never experienced the second and third levels.  These contained more areas and were home to what is, arguably, the first instance of an Easter Egg!

What I remember the most about Adventure was how I was horribly scared of being eaten by a dragon.  In the decades before Dragon Age, in which my detailed, womanly, rogue Cousland would be led to victory against a number of crazily rendered big-ass dragons, I was a square who was moving away from little dragon-shaped squiggles which looked like duck sea monkeys.  I was terrified of the three dragons and carried the sword with me everywhere I went.

I’m pleased to report that I slayed the yellow and green dragons a handful of times, and did indeed beat the first level of Adventure more than once.  I pwned that blue maze.  I was very proud of myself, and wouldn’t you know it, it wouldn’t be the last time I’d be proud of beating a video game.  No matter how many times I lead my fancy pants party to victory against the Archdemon in Dragon Age, I will never forget wielding my little arrow against the sea monkey critter in Adventure.

However, between beating things on Atari and beating things on the Sega and all that came after, there was a lot of watching video games in my future.

But that’s a story for another time...