Re: the Capn' Skizz story
I'd love to know how Skizz and Impulse met in this one. Especially if Impulse somehow reacts different to other people Skizz has encountered. Like did something set him apart to Skizz? Or has he had other Impulse level friends since the whole captain of the Shadow thing started? Were there growing pains as they got to know each other? Or did Impulse see Skizz for the selfless goofball he is pretty quickly?
Also just wang to say I adore the way you write their dynamic in every version and how it shifts to fit the world building while still being so recognizably Imp and Skizz. It's the most fascinating character study to me. That, along with the density of world building and detail you manage, is something I aspire to do in my own writing even half as well as you do.
Thank you so much for sharing your writing with us. It makes my day every time you share a new chapter of any of them.
The first time Impulse met the strange blind man, he was drinking the cheapest ale he could afford in the blasphemously named Gar'doran's Pits.
It had been a trying day.
His compression spell, which worked perfectly in simulation, had imploded a desk at practicals and now he was looking a disciplinary action. His professor had insisted she would argue on his behalf, but it was stress he didn't need. Living in Trillium was already prohibitively expensive, and if he failed a course this semester he would be high and dry and looking at brewing potions in his three block wide apartment to make ends meet while he re-tested.
He'd been staring morosely into the amber dregs at the bottom of his beer mug when a huge, calloused hand slapped him on the shoulder. "Hard day, buddy?"
Impulse Esvey froze.
His classmates liked to call him paranoid and okay, Impulse wouldn't disagree. When your mother was a netherborn piglin and your father a mercenary, you grew up wary. He had alarm spells stitched into every overrobe and coat he owned, things that ran tingles up his spine and made his nose twitch at the scent of strange magic or the casting of spells to muffle, silence, or control.
This man- this huge man who settled onto the stool beside him light as a whisper- had set off nary a one of them.
Which, to be frank, should not have been possible.
"Ah, leave off, Skizz," the barkeep said. "Imp's havin' a time."
"Imp?"
"Impulse," Impulse hears himself saying, watching the man carefully. "I'm Docent Impulse Esvey."
He'd started leading with 'Docent' when it became clear that not everyone in Trillium was going to be terribly welcoming to someone with abyssal blood.
"Oho, a Docent! Fancy!" the man grinned, looking almost at Impulse. He was tall and broad, with dark hair peppered white that hung shaggily around his shoulders. He was wearing a working sailor's clothes, and smelled like salt, sweat and lamp oil.
His eyes were covered by a folded bandana, which in turn had a strip of leather layered atop.
He's blind, Impulse realized. He can't see me.
"Don't you mind Skizz, lad," the barkeep said to Impulse. "Loud and a bit bumbly but he's a good sort."
"Loud and bumbly? Why I never, Ron, how dare you. And when I've come all this way, straight from the sunset cliffs after seven months at sea!"
"Come off it, Skizz," one of the regulars on the end of the bartop said, and the room laughed. Impulse expected it to be the cruel laughter he sometimes heard from classmates or large groups out in the square, but it wasn't. It was warm and almost welcoming and Skizz laughed loudest of all, a big booming joyful sound that almost made Impulse smile.
"Well," the barkeep said, "out with it. What's the projection?"
Skizz suddenly sobered up a little bit. "Early this year," he said. "At least two or three good ones before fall. Worst'll be in the first cold month, tide'll bring the waves up fifteen feet or more. Winch everything in nice and tight."
Other sailors and dock workers in the bar murmured to one another, some taking notes and others pulling out their knot-calanders to double check their departure and return dates for voyages. Impulse glanced around, bewildered.
The barkeep nodded grimly at this proclaimation and set down a mug. "Drink up, madman. You earned it."
"Why thank you, I try!" Skizz says cheerfully. He fishes around in a purse at his belt and brought out another coin. "Here." he elbowed Impulse, despite not being able to see him. "Let's get you another drink, Docent Esvey, and you can tell me all about it."
"I, uh, I'd prefer not to," Impulse replied. Skizz inclined his head, still smiling. "Alright," he said, "but get another drink anyway. You sound like you need it."
-
Skizz, Impulse would learn, was a mystery to both the customers of Gar'doran's Pits and the surrounding docks.
"Always comes in dressed like a sailor, smellin' of the sea," one patron told Impulse, "but who'd take work from a blind man wiv' no magic to his name?"
"No magic at all?" Impulse had asked, and the sailor had shaken her head. "Not a drop," she promised him.
The barkeep, a fellow named Ron, didn't know much more, though he could enlighten Impulse regarding Skizz's strange proclamation.
"He comes in just before the storm season," Ron told the Docent, "and gives us the forecast. First time he did it I threw him out. Crazy beggar, I thought. Only then he was right. And he was right the year after that. And the year after that."
Ron put a freshly cleaned glass away. "Now most of the shipping companies around here start sendin' men in for the first three or four days. Sure as clockwork, Skizz shows up. He tells us the weather, I give him his drinks. He stays in port for the first week of the season and then he's gone."
The whole thing was utterly bizarre. "If you needed weather interpretation, the Scholia-" Impulse began, but Ron barked a laugh.
"You think anyone around here has the kind of money it would take to get a weathermage from the Scholia? No, lad. We have Skizz. It's fine enough."
-
No one knew where Skizz went when he left Trillium.
Impulse hit a wall on that front. No one was willing to talk and the few who did admitted that while they'd all tried to follow the blind sailor, they always lost him the moment they neared the docks. Despite having neither shield nor cloaking spell, it was as if Skizz vanished into thin air.
Impulse considered this, carefully, and then...
He decided to leave it be.
-
Docent Esvey became Neophyte Esvey, and then Adept Esvey. For a week each year, he would go to Gar'daron's Pits in the evening, and he would spend time with his friend Skizz.
Skizz was either very well traveled or he was a fantastic liar. He knew so much about places Impulse had heard about and some he had actually visited. They spent an evening waxing rhapsodic about the Celestial Observatory on the Watcher Isles, where Skizz claimed he 'wasn't precisely welcome, but wasn't outright banned, either'.
Impulse had just passed his Neophyte exams when he learned about Skizz's love of music, and the two had entertained the bar with an impromptu performance that had made Impulse happy and homesick at the same time, longing for his mother's war drum and his father's bone flute.
Sometimes they discussed Skizz's lack of magical gear- an oddity in Gar'daron and absolutely in Trillium, the beating heart of magic study and advancement in the region.
"Never felt the need," Skizz said, and that was that.
Skizz had a lot of boundaries like that. Impulse didn't ask how he understood his surroundings but others did and Skizz's answer changed every time. How did Skizz get coin? Where did he live, when he wasn't sleeping in a room above the bar? Was there anyone waiting for him, out in the big wide world?
Impulse wanted to know, but he wanted his friend more.
So he never asked.
-
When Impulse successfully passed his final Scholia Exams- when he became at last Savant Impulse Esvey- Skizz brought him a gift.
He asked Impulse to open it in his room upstairs and Impulse was happy he had when he unwrapped his present- a thick cuff of gold, carved over with arcane symbols. Some were to steady his hands, some were for protection, detection, dispelling.
The borders of the cuff were carefully etched with his mother's Sounder's symbol, the cracked tusk within a blaze of fire.
Skizz, uncharacteristically nervous, said into the silence, "I, uh, guessed. Going by what you told me, you know? And if it's overstepping, I'm sorry, I'll take it back, but you said your mother left for your father, and I know how piglins feel about gold, and-"
Impulse threw his arms around Skizz and wept. Skizz hugged him tight, smelling like lamp oil and salt and the sea.
-
The storm had come just as Impulse warned the captain it would, and he was going to die.
All around them the wind howled, the rain pelted, and there was something out there in the dark- a second ship. It had been dogging them as the clouds rolled in and now the captain was praying to every god Impulse knew and a few he hadn't heard of as their sails were ripped from rigging and the mast ominously groaned.
Stupid, Impulse thought to himself as he clung to the rope affixing a pile of barrels. Stupid, stupid. Skizz had warned that the third storm of the season was going to be a ship killer. Mother had said to wait until after the season passed but then the journey would be twice as long and he hadn't wanted to wait.
Stupid boy. No wonder they named you Impulse.
The lookout went first. Impulse didn't see it but one of the deckhands did, screaming and pointing up. He looked up just in time to see- nothing.
The coxswain was next and Impulse did see him, speared through the chest with an impossible dagger of shadow that dragged him off the side of the ship, screaming.
One by one the crew were picked off. Impulse desperately cast a shield but it fizzled, unable to find a foothold in anchors that hadn't been charged for months, maybe years. Impulse readied his war spells, watched the terrified captain get dragged away from the helm-
and the storm stopped.
Stopped dead.
The air went still. The clouds became lighter. All around them the sea still raged but it was as though they'd entered the eye, tranquil and calm.
This let Impulse see the attacker in full.
It was a three masted galleon, black as black could be. The wood actually looked burned. Impulse could see no shields, no anchors, no sigils whatsoever but the ship floated unmoving beside the Righteous Dove.
Impulse stared. How could he not? The ship was of a style that had not been built for almost three hundred years. No wonder there were no augments on her hull- she was too old for them.
He could see the corpses of the captain and crew, hanging from the black ship's rigging.
Impulse reached for his axe when he saw the plank drop between the decks with no one to move it.
The weapon clattered from his fingers when the black ship's captain crossed on the narrow bridge as easily as if it were a wide country lane. An impressive feat, to be sure.
Because Impulse knew him to be blind.
Skizz stepped lightly onto the deck of the Righteous Dove, adjusted the hat on his head, and sighed.
"Imp," he said in the yawning silence of the unnatural bubble of calm, "didn't I tell you to wait another month?"
Impulse opened his mouth but before he could speak another black streak- somehow both corporeal and incorporeal, not a tentacle nor a whip or chain but having aspects of all three- lunged towards him, growing out of the side of the black ship.
"ABSOLUTELY NOT," Skizz boomed, and there was Power in those words. The tentacle shattered apart. More rose like snakes from baskets out of the railing of the ship and Skizz turned to face them.
This let Impulse see the tentacle that was seemingly growing out of the back of his friend's head, attached to the ship somewhere beyond the gangplank.
The tentacles all lunged and as Impulse watched Skizz's shadow rose like a shroud behind him, slithering over the man and engaging the tentacles, wrapping around them and dragging them down.
It was over in second. Another tentacle rose but did not attack, instead hovering at the railing's edge. This one was..twitching. Almost pouting.
Skizz snorted. "Enough," he said. "You've had your fill. You don't need to get fat."
He looked back over his shoulder at Impulse. "You okay?"
It was the look that let Impulse see one of Skizz's eyes.
It was a pit of blackness. There were sparks within- lights? Galaxies? The reflection of moonlight on water? Whatever they were, they weren't eyes. Skizz's eyes were gone.
He was weeping blood.
It didn't seem to bother him.
Impulse slowly, slowly, stood up. "So." he heard himself say. "Is this your ship?"
Skizz cracked a grin.
"Kind of." He said. "Now. You're out a captain and a crew and a ship here in a minute. That's the rules. Get caught in the storm, you're hers."
Not mine.
Hers.
"But," Skizz continued, "you aren't a sailor. You're a passenger. So. Where can I take you, Savant Esvey? the Shadow is at your service."
Impulse's jaw worked.
"Is there a bar over there?" He asked, and Skizz laughed.
Impulse got the notion that the waving, wagging tentacle laughed, too.