You could visit Seattle anyways, just not do the con. Tbh cons are always horrible disease spreaders, but if you just hang out on your twosome you'll be fine! I live in the U District (Sidewaystime will know this are), and we're all doing okay.
I really, really, really wish I could! A big reason I was withdrawing even before the announcement the con was postponed is that we’re worried travel restrictions might keep me from being able to get home, or require me to isolate upon getting home, and I can’t do that to my family.
Being a responsible adult blows. We were going to have rum drinks and go to an escape room and watch The Witcher and talk a lot about the impact of narratives. I mean we can still do the last one but it’s not the same.
Once COVID-19 is more handled I am Seattling the shit out of things.
So Pat is actually @saltineofswing‘s character, so I drew him, but Jacob filled out the questionnaire. And it’s super duper beefy - it’s pretty much an entire rundown of what the Threnghelleon muses are, how Patroklos operates, what his powerset and backstory is. So if you’re in the mood for some world building written by my better half and Co-DM, indulge. (My questionnaire for Wybjorn was filled out like five months ago, before Patroklos existed in the fiction, so I’ll take the opportunity now to say that I also am very into Pat and Wybie as a couple).
Full Name: Patroklos, Poetic Muse of the House of Camaraderie
Gender and Sexuality: Male, Bisexual
Pronouns: He/Him, but like with a couple of the other stranger members of the Threnghelen sphere of divines, probably wouldn’t be put off by They/Them
Ethnicity/Species: Patroklos is a Threnghelen Muse, a race of beings that were created by the Threnghelen Pantheon and tasked with bringing inspiration, hope, motivation, and sometimes madness to the mortals of Threnghelleon and its Dominion. The race of beings known as the Threnghelen Muse is assumed by all members of Threnghelen society (save a very select and clever few) to be some sort of lesser deity; in the same way the members of the Circle of Glory were born when Jovix Diocunigast first experienced various emotions and conceptualized various ideas, the Muses supposedly popped up when mortalkind began to conceptualize complex ideas.
This is not true.
The Muses are actually a strange race of ‘quasi-real’ beings from the Unknown that feed off of emotions and other similar existential experiences, which is hard to explain; they can’t manifest in the physical world and can only be seen by gods and other divine beings. They’re really more like tulpas than anything else. Threnghelleon has a series of Houses and Bloodlines into which the Muses are organized, based on the domain over which they hold sway (and therefore the things they feed on); the Bloodlines are Dramatic, Poetic, Sacred, Epic, and Tragic. The Houses are the House of Pain, the House of Conflict, the House of Camaraderie, the House of Love, the House of Lore (or ‘history’), the House of Innovation, and lastly the House of Fear. Muses of the Epic and Tragic bloodlines are naturally more powerful than the others due to Threnghelleon’s system of values, and Muses of the Sacred bloodline become more powerful when tasked by a divine being.
The Muses of the House of Fear are the oldest Muses on Threnghelleon... and are also the strangest and most powerful. They’re the ones responsible for creating the others, developing the lie about what their race actually is, and had some very interesting early influences on Threnghelleon. More about that another time.
Patroklos is, as mentioned above, the Poetic Muse of Camaraderie; he is Also, incidentally, the Sacred Muse of Camaraderie. It’s not super unusual for a Muse to have two domains, but Pat is a bit special because Sacred, Epic, and Tragic muses are rarely double-classed, so to speak. He also doesn’t know that he’s actually a descendent of an extradimensional eldritch thoughtform.
Birthplace and Birthdate: Some time in the early ages of Threnghelen mortal history, after the conveyance of a spark from the Flame of Kaer Rhûndor to mortalkind and before the Red Age that spiraled out of the Bloodbath of Warns. Like many other Muses, Patroklos was created when some of the members of the Circle of Glory had a ‘spark of inspiration’... in other words, the Muses of the House of Fear planted the idea in the heads of the Threnghelen pantheon. As far as the Gods know, the Muses were ‘crafted’ in a secret forge somewhere on the White Hill, aka purgatory. The truth is a lot weirder and more gross.
Guilty Pleasures: Patroklos is not a terribly guilty person. He is very Shakespearean (all of the Muses are, they’re kind of like a Shakespearean chorus) in his temperament and preferences, and has sort of a classical stage actor’s grace and manner. Patroklos is effectively a phantasm, a being that lives exclusively in the Veil who is unable to directly manifest on the Mortal Coil, and so he’s never experienced eating or drinking or sleeping or any of the things that flesh-and-blood critters require.
But, Patroklos is very fond of watching people; the Muses have nothing to do with their time besides watch people, and if that sounds creepy it very much is! Patroklos is very nosy, he likes to eavesdrop and is a bit of a gossip, and watches people he likes more than he probably should. Whenever Patroklos and Wybjorn talk, because it’s usually in a dream, Patroklos usually goes on one ‘You won’t remember this when you wake up, BUT’ tangent and gossips about stuff he shouldn’t. Patroklos likes to watch people living their lives and going about their day-to-day. It’s something he, as an incorporeal spirit, doesn’t get to experience, and so he lives vicariously through others.
Phobias: Dying! Patroklos is in kind of a precarious spot right now. Threnghelen Muses can be killed, it’s just very very hard to do – and not only that, you have to kill them not once but twice. First, a Muse must be killed, usually by a divine being or enchanted weapon. They then become a Choral Spectre, trapped in the Veil or the Astral Plane, and they slowly lose the ability to leech energy off of their associated domain. In this state, a Muse is not only vulnerable to all of the nightmarish beings in the Unknown (where thoughtforms are made as real as anything in the Unknown can get), but also slowly starves to death. Patroklos is Once-Dead after appearing to Ethem-Cailo in a dream and trying to convince him to return to a more righteous path, and Ethem-Cailo had a tantrum and accidentally ‘smashed’ Patroklos with Mjolnir. Now, Patroklos is trapped in the Unknown, hiding from both the Helmsman and the many ghosts, horrifying Leviathans, and other monsters that the Glorious Incandesca attracts as the Wild Hunt skips from dimension to dimension.
Patroklos is also deathly afraid of being forgotten, as most Muses are; this sort of ties into his fear of death, but a ‘Forgotten’ Muse will eventually become a Choral Spectre and die anyway. Patroklos and the other Muses of Camaraderie were mostly utilized by Ethem-Cailo during his glory days as the God of Aspiration, but Patroklos saw less and less play as time went on and Ethem-Cailo became more bitter and nasty until he stopped being called on by Ethem-Cailo at all. By the time the Wild Hunt rolled around most of the Muses went undirected by the Gods, doing whatever weird bullshit they wanted and inspiring mortals however they saw fit, and Patroklos was kind of seen as an oddball by his siblings because he never indulged that chaotic impulse and preferred to be summoned before meddling in the mortal world. As a result? Not a ton of friends.
What They Would Be Famous For: Patroklos is, as all beings in the Threnghelen Pantheon, revered by the mortals of Threnghelleon. Patroklos was one of the more popular Muses of the House of Camaraderie, especially before and after the Red Age, and had a couple of shrines devoted solely to him – an honor usually bestowed only upon Epic and Tragic Muses, and Muses that were direct children of one of the Circle of Glory. This is partially because of his frequent partnership with Ethem-Cailo; the two were very good friends, and Patroklos was the Muse responsible for helping him with the famous Squiring of Raske Callhand – an extremely famous championship boxer/wrestler and the first mortal to receive a favor from the gods.
Additionally, Patroklos was one of the main Muses who helped Ethem-Cailo to develop the Art of Bardic Knowledge ability, by which an individual can tap into the poetic narrative of a ‘real-world’ event and verbally convey it with a magical visual accompaniment. The other involved Muses – the twin children of Awnrah, Feste and Fidele, Epic and Tragic muses of House Lore – were plenty helpful and ostensibly more powerful than Patroklos, but Patroklos put in the most time and effort on the project, who really wanted to bring Ethem-Cailo’s vision to life. As a result, he is usually cited as one of the primary creators of the art, even to this day.
What They Would Be Arrested For: Trespassing, evading/resisting arrest. Probably can’t get ARRESTED for this per se, but he might be the type of person who could get in hot legal water for breach of nondisclosure contract.
OC You Ship Them With: Wybjorn, full stop. Patroklos had a thing for Ethem-Cailo way back in the day, an unspoken crush that he never acted on and then squashed when Ethem-Cailo began so aggressively and pointedly denying his attraction to men after the Raske Callhand Fiasco. He never really got over it, even when Ethem-Cailo joined the Wild Hunt and started becoming a shittier and shittier person; Patroklos sees Wybjorn as another chance to connect with an old friend, in a way, and Wybjorn has a lot of the best aspects of Ethem-Cailo that made them such good friends in the first place. When Wybjorn tells Jovix-Cailo that Jovix-Cailo is the one who ‘stole his life’, and not the other way around, Patroklos is one of the things included in that umbrella. Now that Wybjorn is free of Ethem-Cailo’s influence and is developing into his own person, Patroklos can reforge a relationship with a person he has missed dearly, and who has in turn missed him just as much.
Patroklos also risked his life to bring Wybjorn back from the boundary to the White Hill after Jovix-Cailo almost killed him in the massive battle at the end of the Hunt, painstakingly breaking into the afterlife to drag Wybjorn’s soul away from death like some kind of super-romantic Orpheus and Eurydice bullshit. As seen in this illustration. If Patroklos had been noticed by Yawg-Cherogmoth, Keeper of Souls and guardian of the afterlife, he would have been exorcised with extreme prejudice.
OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Ethem-Cailo killed him, on accident, in a dream – which as described above has actual consequences for a Muse. But aside from that, Patroklos spent a LOT of time hiding from the Helmsman and other gods who could see into the Veil or the Astral Plane; if the Helmsman had caught a whiff of Patroklos skulking about in the Unknown while the Incandesca traveled from dimension to dimension, he probably would have pulled Patroklos apart just for funzies. Wybjorn was also genuinely concerned that Corvicarius, the Head Bitch In Charge God Of The Unknown Everywhere on Road-Prime, might just squash Patroklos like a bug for having rode in with the Wild Hunt and being a foreign being. Corvicarius assured Wybjorn that, especially because Patroklos helped save Wybjorn, Patroklos was safe so long as he didn’t fuck around with anything too important.
Favorite Book/Movie Genre: Anything with an extremely strong through-line of friendship and camaraderie. Patroklos enjoys a good romance as much as the next person, but he just loves it when two characters have that Unbreakable Bond and don’t need to have a romantic tryst in order to validate their relationship or dedicate their lives to one another. It’s literally the equivalent of fine dining to him.
Least Favorite Book/Movie Cliche: When someone is only providing love, friendship, and support with a clear sexual or romantic motivation. That shit is scummy. He also doesn’t like when one person has a painful crush on their best friend, but lets it go untended and then dies or loses their chance and has to live with the heartbreak. That one just hits kinda close to home.
Talents and/or Powers: The Muses all have a really peculiar selection of powers, and Patroklos is no exception. Most of the Muses’ powers are more suited to subterfuge and manipulation, and don’t really lend themselves to an out-and-out fight.
For starters, Patroklos’s natural state is one of invisibility and intangibility; if Patroklos somehow makes his way into a physical body he’ll lose his ability to become invisible, but the ability to become intangible is one he’ll never lose. Even then, he’ll still be very talented in the art of astral projection.
As a Muse of the House of Camaraderie, Patroklos has an affinity for ‘inspiring’ others in ways that bolster friendships and forge bonds. Individuals may find, while Patroklos is around, that diplomacy becomes much easier to achieve, group infighting is at a minimum, and compromise becomes easy. He is good at soothing tense situations and his suggestions, as they pertain to building positive bonds/smoothing over aggression/stabilizing relationships, are supernaturally difficult to ignore. But that’s not all he can do – it’s just what he prefers to do. All Threnghelen Muses are capable of, effectively, performing inceptions on people; planting a seed of an idea in someone’s mind, so seamlessly and flawlessly that they can’t distinguish it from their own idea, is the truest and most sinister power of a Threnghelen Muse, and Patroklos has used this power to his advantage and the advantage of Ethem-Cailo liberally in the halcyon days of Threnghelleon’s society. A Muse’s silver (golden) tongue is nothing to underestimate. At their most powerful they could even ‘inspire’ oh, I don’t know, the most powerful and Glorious god in the universe...
Otherwise, Patroklos has a minor ability to manipulate certain probabilities; he can influence events to maximize the amount of ‘camaraderie’ that is displayed by the individuals involved, such as altering the path of a bullet just enough to keep someone from dying in the act of sacrificing themselves for another, or ensuring that a strike made to avenge or protect a fallen comrade hits true. He could influence the ease with which someone rushing to the aide of a friend or loved one arrives at their destination, or keep someone with ill intentions (or bad timing!) from screwing up a tender moment between friends by impeding their progress. This power is relatively weak and can be easily superseded by more powerful divine domains – such as Glory’s ability to never lose, or Derog’s influence on the outcome of a conflict, or Ethem-Cailo’s ability to ensure someone achieves their aspirations. But this particular ability skyrockets in effectiveness when he is tasked by a divine being... which is why he and Wybjorn/Ethem-Cailo made such a good team.
Patroklos is capable of appearing to people in dreams and, while doing so, can control their level of lucidity and what they do or don’t remember about what occurs while he’s visiting – as I mentioned earlier, he starts a lot of really catty gossip digressions with ‘You won’t remember I said this when you wake up, BUT–‘.
When it comes to stuff that doesn’t have to do with his House or Bloodlines, Patroklos is an incredibly powerful teleporter – he can teleport almost indefinite ranges across spacetime and, more impressively, interdimensionally. Patroklos teleported from The Veil outside of Road Prime all the way to the Threnghelen afterlife without making a pit-stop in the Threnghelen mortal coil, which is an extremely difficult and precision jump that he was able to pull off (there and back, in fact) intuitively, without assistance, and without screwing up.
(Fun fact: when a Threnghelen muse teleports, their body goes first, and their eyes and teeth go last – so for a moment as their body fades away like a ghost, their giant golden eyes and teeth remain hanging in midair before they, too, disappear.)
Patroklos is technically a race of being native to the Unknown, and not hailing from any particular planar cluster; as a result he has an innate knowledge of how to travel in the Unknown. Which might not sound very impressive, but consider: the Unknown is a literal nonsense place, where the laws of physics conditionally rely on the perception of the individuals moving through it. The Unknown works off of dream logic and is endless. If you get lost in the Unknown, you are doomed to wander aimlessly forever until you forget who you are, where you came from, and what you were doing in the first place. So, the ability to intuitively find your way in the Unknown is an absolute necessity to traversing it.
Touching on the above, Patroklos can also just... make people get lost. He discovered this ability while hiding from monsters in the Unknown. You could be standing in your front yard and walk to the mailbox... and then you’d find yourself saddled with the unsettling horizontal vertigo of not knowing where you are or where to go, and wander the perimeter of your lawn for an hour and a half until the fugue state wore off and everything was suddenly familiar again.
Patroklos is also a talented shapeshifter, capable of transforming into a near-flawless imitation of any person that he has seen before, regardless of how much taller or shorter they are (within reason); he can also mimic voices so long as he’s heard them, and although it’s not part of the power set Patroklos is a naturally gifted mimic – he’s good at picking up body language, verbal and physical tics, and mannerisms, and that’s just a personal trait of his. The one problem with his powers: no matter who he changes into, his insides will always be made of gold. This is an ability that didn’t see much play back when the Muses were confined to Threnghelleon, but out in the Unknown any advantage is an advantage. Patroklos does have a ‘True Form’, additionally; it’s something rather terrifying, to the point that Patroklos explicitly told Wybjorn not to look at him while he tore his way into the White Hill to save his soul from crossing over. Based on the horrific ripping, grinding, and clicking noises, Wybjorn gauged later that obeying this request was the right choice.
(We’re almost done here, I promise, but I’m a perfectionist with this stuff.)
As long as Patroklos is in a spectral form, he is actually capable of possessing a mortal or a weak enough divine being or manifested spirit. It’s a difficult thing to maintain, and he can’t do any of his other tricks while possessing someone, but even in his current state it’s very doable.
LASTLY, Patroklos is one of the best in the game at utilizing Bardic Knowledge. By invoking Bardic Knowledge, Patroklos is capable of tapping into the ‘narrative’ of an event, a conflict, or the history of a person/place/thing. In this way Patroklos has a sort of limited omniscience; he can ‘feel out’ how things are going to go, or why things have happened, especially as it pertains to interpersonal conflict between friends. Like a lot of stuff that is related to or touched by the Unknown, Patroklos is very good at Knowing Things He Shouldn’t as a general sense, but it has a lot to do with the choral element of his being and his Bardic Knowledge – the narrator needs to know a lot of what is going on, and when Patroklos inhabits the role of the Unseen Narrator he can grasp the narrative in a very complete way, even if he isn’t completely omniscient. This is also helped by his ability to invisibly watch people from the Veil and his ability to move from place to place almost instantaneously.
Why Someone Might Love Them: Patroklos is unfalteringly loyal, has a great (if slightly strange) sense of humor, and is extremely supportive and optimistic. He’s really FUNNY. He’s got a rapier wit and has a very complex grasp of wordplay and humor. He’s very charming and crafty, but he is not very pretentious or self-inflated and is quite humble. In familiar company he’s boisterous and fun-loving, even if he’s a little shy around new people. He’s very good at conveying information and loves to tell stories. Patroklos has big theatre kid energy, he’s very dramatic and playful. He tends to be very earnest, is open with his feelings, and listens very well, but he’s not blunt and does his best to phrase things positively instead of negatively.
Why Someone Might Hate Them: Patroklos is a HUGE gossip. A detrimentally huge gossip. Although I think he could keep his lip zipped if somebody told him some kind of huge secret I think he would have a really hard time keeping it to himself. Patroklos usually gets away with this because he can make people forget the stuff he tells them but that’s only when he’s invaded somebody’s dreams. The downside to him having a very open and earnest personality is that he doesn’t hide his feelings well, which can be problematic if he’s also too shy or humble or nervous to voice an issue he has. He’s kind of noisy, which can rub people the wrong way – not everybody has a high tolerance for loud and high-energy people. He also goes through moods where he can be very eldritch and strange, displaying his fickle and fae nature and doing weird shit just to amuse himself (‘Here, hold this’, he says apropos of nothing, and pulls a live centipede out of his coat and hands it to you). He is absolutely the type of person who points and laughs when somebody does something dumb or embarrassing and wouldn’t be above talking circles around someone because It’s Funny.
How They Change: Patroklos has gotten quieter, for sure. He’s matured a lot after his ordeals in the Unknown, and although he hasn’t lost his goofy side he has become much more mild-mannered and melancholy. He’s also taken quite a hit to his bravery; I wouldn’t call him a coward, but he’s become much more practical and keen to avoid fights, for obvious reasons. When he lived on Threnghelleon he was very immersed in their culture, and since being trapped in the Unknown his strange side has really taken over. Patroklos doesn’t really miss his home, although he does miss some of his siblings and the people he was friends with. Overall, though, Patroklos is a very new character; I only created him about halfway through the campaign when we were kinda fishing for more content to stretch it out with. How he’s going to change is largely contingent on how he’s treated and what happens to him; Wybjorn is going to go on a very romantic quest to figure out a way to return him to life, so I’m sure that will also have an effect on him.
Why You Love Them: Patroklos is just a lot of fun! He’s kind of swashbuckling and dramatic – all the Muses are named after Shakespeare characters, and I did it on purpose to inform the kind of feel I wanted them to have. They’re kind of meant to evoke that strange, ethereal, fun weirdness that some of that old theatre stuff is so rife with. I also really enjoy playing around with his weird-ass powers and his nebulous, lovecraftian undertones and behaviors. Patroklos is also a really cool character to bounce Wybjorn off of, he brings out certain qualities in Wybjorn that I think are a bit underplayed when Wybjorn is in other situations where he’s not the main character and provides a very interesting pathos to play around with between these two ancient beings that, in some ways, have wrapped all the way back around again to young men.
The first time Finn spars with another Resistance infantryman, he breaks the guy’s arm, and then looks confused as to why everyone is yelling at him. “Sorry,” he says, looking mostly confused, maybe a little amused. “I thought we were sparring.”
“Sepsis,” Major Calonia says, without a trace of humor in her voice. Finn is straight-faced, his lips pinched so tightly that they’re nearly grey. “It doesn’t hurt,” Finn insists, his body taut when Calonia digs a finger into the swollen, reddish area. He doesn’t even flinch---but then, when has Finn ever flinched?
“Don’t---don’t report me for reconditioning, okay?” Finn begs Poe, even thought they’re both drunk, and Finn has spent the past half-hour talking about how Rey fucking smells, and that maybe, just maybe, the Resistance won’t win because he’s seen---you’ve seen it too, Poe, you know how strong the First Order is, maybe virtue isn’t enough? “We don’t recondition people, buddy,” Poe says, and his nails maybe scrape a little over the nape of Finn’s neck,and maybe Finn shivers. “We’re the Resistance, remember? Good guys.”“Okay,” Finn breathes, but his mouth-eyes-hands are hard, unconvinced. “Okay.”
Q: How many people can you kill in sixty seconds? A: It’s less than Finn. Poe and Rey have done a study. It’s less. Just---trust them.
Every man considers himself an agent of his convictions. But there is a great danger in coming up against a man who genuinely acts on them. Namely, he knows exactly what he is against. He is unlikely to compromise. And at the end of the day, he will not go back. Not ever, no matter what you offer.
