Hey guys! For those of you that missed it in our Skype group chat, and for those following us, this is an announcement to say that WBS will be going on an INDEFINITE HIATUS. We have no intentions of letting WBS go, we’ve put blood, sweat, and tears into this RPG and we all hold it too close to our hearts to say goodbye to it forever, but the fact of the matter is that sometimes, real life happens. We’ve all hit a sort of crux in our lives and are just both mentally and physically unable to put in the proper time to a RPG in general. This is not permanent. This is temporary. It may be a few months from now, or it may be more, there’s no way to really tell but we are NOT gone for good. This isn’t goodbye, this is just a “see you soon!”
Hello, lovelies, just popping in to say that we’ll be closing the submit at 12 PM EST tomorrow and will be accepting sometime thereafter, so get any applications in if you’re thinking of applying!
The King’s voice rings out across Caesar’s Square, calling the attention of High and Low Houses alike. Even Red Servants stop to listen to their monarch, though their faces show more barely concealed disdain, as opposed to the varied expressions of the Silver Elite. Aurelian addresses them all, Red and Silver both, from behind diamondglass. It’s a new addition to his podium, a shield that was erected only a day ago, and his family and all the Sentinels stand behind him in a show of power. When he speaks, he speaks clearly, carefully, with the smooth and precise pronunciation of a liar. He tells them all that the explosion at the docks was nothing more than a training exercise gone awry. He tells them that his brother’s death was nothing more than unfortunate accident. He tells them that The Scarlet Guard is no threat to the Flame of the North. He tells them all, rich and poor and Silver and Red, that the Calore family burns on.
What he does not tell them, what he does not know, is that the Rebellion brews under the surface, no matter what lies he feeds the population of his kingdom. Nothing can stop the rising of the dawn, not even Aurelian’s flames. Dozens upon dozens of Scarlet Guard operatives listen to the speech, wearing servant uniforms, wearing hooded cloaks, wearing the garbs of shopkeepers. They all listen, they watch, and they learn, ready to report it all back to their commander when the sun sets that night. And what a report it is –––––– the King, in all his infinite wisdom and strength, is holding a party for his youngest daughter. Long overlooked and barely recognized as a princess, Helene Calore has never been on the receiving end of the lavish sort of occasion that the whole country throws for the birthdays of her eldest siblings, and so she jumps at the chance to finally have a festival of her own.
She does not know or realize –– or perhaps she does, and merely does not wish to see –– that this carnival is not about her at all, but about changing the narrative of what is happening in Archeon. It is a calculated move, and for many, it works. Within hours of the announcement of the festival to start the next morning, the halls of Whitefire are alive with the prospect of a party that will let the younger members of the Elite free from the walls once more. Many of the boys are already planning on just how to sneak out to some of the Lower Houses’ more tawdry late night affairs, while most of the girls discuss ribbons and dresses. Only a few of the sharper minds see this for what it is: A POWER PLAY.
The carnival will start on MARCH TWENTY EIGTH at 1:00 PM PST and will last for the next two weeks. Reds and Silvers alike are welcome to take part in the festivities. While most of the Silvers may not be excited about the prospect of the Reds mingling through Caesar’s Square, the fact remains that all players will be free to interact with one another for the duration of this event. There are games to be played, things to be bought, and dances to be held for both the nobility and the poor. Enjoy the festivities while they last, kids. Nothing is as it seems in Norta, and there is no such thing as a straightforward good time.
In order to properly celebrate Princess Helene Calore’s birth ( and if you’re in the Guard, gather more intel, ) the festivities have been EXTENDED. This aspect of the event will last another 10 DAYS, bringing us to Monday, April 25th. This will also be extended in gameplay, so where you place your threads can either be in day ONE through day FIVE of the Carnival. Due to this, the Guard will be STAYING in Archeon. They’ve found temporary homes among hidden operatives within the city. Aurora, Darian, Flynn, Leon and Cosima will be staying with Emmett’s family, who lives right off of Whitefire Palace. The rest of the Guard will be scattered around with various spies. The members staying together are as follows:
Congratulations, ELLE, you have been accepted for OCTAVIAN CARROS!! Elle, first of all, we gotta talk about that beautiful fc change because Jack O’Connell??? Love of my life??? Yes???? Thank you???????? Honestly, I could rant for about a million years about how poetic your writing is and how much I adore it, so we’re going to spare me and you both that embarrassment, but I do need to say how much I appreciated the depth that you put into the Carros family clan. It was wonderful to see that alongside the mythology references, and I can’t wait to see our own personal Achilles, Heracles, Jason, etc, on the dash!!!
WELCOME TO THE SILVER ELITE.
OOC -
Name/Alias: Elle
Preferred Pronouns: she/hers
Age: 22
Timezone: GMT
Activity Level: Until roughly May 13th I’m going to be at about a 6, hopefully at least every other day, because I have 2 big assignments and a dissertation to get finished yikes. But after that much higher!
How did you find us?: Originally I believe it was a reblog of one of your ads on the dash of my main blog.
Other:
Shit!! Also please could I request a face claim change to Jack O’Connell? Love you lots!!
IC-
Desired Character: Octavian Carros
Ships: Entirely chemistry based, here. I’d really like to throw Octavian in a few threads with people and see what happens. I really like his friendship with Sabina and Victoria and could definitely see something developing there, as his bio states, but I also am not consumed by like total desire for it will basically be happy to go with the flow u feel? See what his jam turns out to be
Also I know Gerard is hung up on Diana and/or Alessa, but I’m just saying - if Alessa wins Queenstrial and leaves Gerard out in the cold then I am very, extremely, wonderfully up for angry hate sex in cupboards…..
Character’s Sexuality: Bisexual, definitely! He’s just open to anything, man. He’s grown up in such a nurturing and positive environment that he’s ready to love anyone and anything. He does tend to gravitate towards girls more, just because he’s grown up in quite a female-dominated environment and finds himself most at ease there. However, the one time he’s been properly head over heels in love was with a guy, so it really is all to play for.
He’s also very open to the idea of polyamory (obviously), due to the incredibly positive environment he grew up. If he met two people that felt the same way then that would be great for him and if the chemistry’s there I’ll be over the moon to go for it.
However, I think I’ve sort of built him up in my head in a way that makes me think he’ll probably (though not definitely) end up in quite an intense relationship with a single person. He just has this idea of there being one person who’s going to know him inside and out, every little part of him, and he wants that almost claustrophobic closeness to a single other human. That desire drives him quite a lot, and is another reason he finds it difficult to actually fall in love, though he loves people very easily if that makes sense? But just that romantic all-consuming passionate love: that tends to escape him.
Why are you interested in this role?
First of all, I’ve been kind of absently thinking about Octavian for a few weeks without even really realising I was doing it. I’m relentlessly drawn to earnest puppy types no matter how much I try to stamp it out of myself, and the addition of his internal conflict about trying to realign his goals with the reality of what he has to do to achieve them just suckered me. I started thinking about picking him up seriously last week, and having been encouraged by Tessa and Meha I just….I cannot resist any longer I’m ready to let him Fuck Me Up
So there’s also His Greek/Roman mythology fixation!! That’s my son. I LOVE those mythologies and the idea of this muscular, tough-looking Feats champion being a TOTAL fucking mythology nerd makes me so happy. I’m dangerously fond of that aspect of him. I really love the idea of him curling up with all those books as a child, forcing one of his parents to read him stories over and over again. I have two minor headcanons on this point: firstly is that he’s still got the first ever copy of The Iliad that he ever read, annotated by some ancient hand, and it’s so battered and well-read he has to keep elastic bands around it to stop the pages falling out. He keeps it on his bedside table and when he’s nervous about something he’ll pull it out and read a few books within it to settle himself down. Secondly is that he wants to learn more about the War that changed everything, just so he can find out whether it would be possible for him to ever see some of the historical sites the myths mention. It’s one of the main things he’s doing in Archeon outside of his training—trying to find a person or a book that can give him an answer.
Additionally there’s his ready heart—he just wants to love things and understand them and make real connections with people and he seems to have been foiled at every turn since leaving home. He goes in with such absolute earnestness and willingness and it doesn’t always work out, but that doesn’t stop him trying. He thought in Gerard he’d finally found somebody who could really understand him, in a way nobody has ever been able to, but he managed to fuck that one up without realising he was doing it so he’s doubly miserable at having lost what he perceives as his first real chance to make a connection like that. He’s very very good at encouraging other people to spill their souls to him but he struggles to do the same in return. He’s kind of convinced himself that they wouldn’t care or they wouldn’t be able to understand, so instead he does a lot of listening. So with Gerard it would have been perfect—somebody who could really get him without him having to try. But alas here we are.
And, look, he’s just so fucking—he had the world built up such a certain way in his head. He came from this incredibly loving, open, supportive household where he thought he could achieve all his dreams, become the same gilded champion as his father and be happy forever. But the reality is slowly crushing him, and because it was what he always wanted he feels like he’s betraying himself (and his family, in a way) by not enjoying it. So that makes him even more miserable, because he’s feeling guilty about feeling guilty, and it’s just this big old spiral of shame when he lets it consume him.
Not to say he’s unrelentingly grim, because that’s not how I picture him at all—he believes very strongly in putting his best face out to the world, both to make other’s lives easier and to not feel like he’s burdening people with his problems—but just to say that there is that undercurrent of unhappiness eddying about beneath his surface quite a bit. Add that to the fact that he feels like people look at him in a particular way or expect him to be a certain way—because of his physicality and his talent in the ring—and it just makes this big old dissatisfied heave at his heart. He feels like people just look at him and see his victories, only ever want to talk about his skill in the Feats, and having come from a family that valued his mind and his heart as much as his strongarm talent and his fighting ability, it’s pretty tough.
My child just wants someone to curl up under the stars and talk about Greek myths with him oh god
Para Sample:
pt i. / Blood and sand. That’s what Octavian Carros sees when he closes his eyes in the dark. Silver pooling on yellow-brown, misshapen limbs and soft caved-in mouths making noises like prayers. Sometimes he wakes up in the night sick with it. By the morning, he’s convinced himself it was all a dream.
This was always going to be his life. All he ever wanted, from the first time his mother laughingly dandled him on her lap at one of his father’s feats, Adah leaning over to press ice to his lips, Delilah pushing the hair back off his head. Arenas weren’t pain and glory, back then. Arenas were his family, the hot sun, the roaring crowd. Arenas were a bright gleaming gift just waiting to be unwrapped.
If you asked him, that’s what he’d say he misses the most. Not their shady mansion home or the little pool in the Sun Courtyard or his sprawling bedroom—no. He misses the hard benches of the small arena beneath his buttocks, his father victorious on the sand, three women pressing close around him, laughter shared across them all.
This is what he wanted. All he ever wanted.
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pt ii. / The first time he broke a heart he was fifteen years old.
“You’re going to do such damage,” Delilah had whispered into his hair once, curled around him protectively on a chaise longue, “You’re going to cause so much heartache.”
He’d hated the idea even then, ten years old and not a drop of pain yet caused. At fifteen, the proof before him, a sweet blonde Red girl curled up sobbing his arms, he’d hated it even more.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said when he went to his mother that night, “I never meant to hurt her.”
She’d taken him in her arms and cradled him and hummed soothing nothings against his scalp and she hadn’t said what everybody but him saw. How he looked at girls like most people looked at the night sky—awestruck and humble, like he couldn’t wait to climb inside them and find out every tiny thought that ticked through their heads. That it was no surprise at all they handed their hearts over without hesitation—they knew, as she knew, that Octavian was so ready to love everything, enormously and endlessly. Tatiana Carros was selfish that night. She wasn’t ready to take that wonder away from him. To dislodge that unready swelling heart out of her son.
When she spoke to her husband later, lying in bed together, Pallas had laughed. “He looks at everybody like that,” he’d said. “That’s just who he is.”
Since that first girl, they’ve come thick and fast. He never means for it to happen, ever—it’s just that when somebody talks they’re so interesting, there’s so much going on inside their heads, and he wants to know them utterly. He forgets not to be so interested until it’s too late and they’re looking at him with their lovely eyes shining and he thinks—oh.
He doesn’t get his own heart broken until he’s twenty one. The boy’s older than him, a lower Silver, with hands like sly foxes and a smile that makes Octavian’s stomach fold over. He wants to know him more than he’s wanted to ever know anybody. And more than that—he wants the boy to know him.
They’re lying in bed one night, the covers kicked off, the moonlight filtering through the curtains, and a rough-tipped finger is tracing the shape of his mouth.
Tell me what you’re thinking, murmurs the boy. Your eyes are so far away.
I’m thinking about the Romans, says Octavian. I’m thinking about my accomplishments. The first Octavian built an empire, he whispers as the finger stills. He realigned the stars and what do I have? What can I do but hurt people?
The boy is gone one week later. Adah and Tatiana hold him until he stops crying, wrecked and wild, pressing comfort with kisses against his skin.
“You were just a champion to him,” Delilah tells him when he makes it down to dinner, his eyes still rimmed with red, “That’s all he saw, the fool, and so when you showed him all the worlds inside you he wasn’t ready. That’s his fault, my love, not yours.”
-
pt iii. / When people ask him about what motivates him, the answer is always the same. “My father,” he says to every curious fan, every tender lover, every disillusioned opponent. “I just want to measure up to my father.”
It’s easy to have such a concrete goal. To match a father’s achievements. To know, every time he puts another Silver into the dirt, that he’s doing precisely what his father did. The pride in that makes the shame much smaller.
It’s not the whole truth, though. The whole truth is a trickier animal—how do you explain to somebody who’s never even heard of Ancient Greece that you want to be like Achilles, Diomedes, Theseus? That it’s not enough to beat a few Silvers in fights—that he’s ready to live forever, his name handed down generations, sung back and forth over campfires, too big to be captured on paper.
He wants to be his father but he wants to be much more than that.
He wants to be a legend.
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pt iv. / He’s struggling in Archeon. He didn’t know you could be starved of touch until he came here.
He’s used to casual contact at all hours of the day—a hand across hair, elbows against one another, legs sprawled across each other, casual kisses littered across any exposed bit of skin. Now the only time he gets touched is when he’s in the arena, taking a fist to the gut or knocking a man cold. There’s the smallest part of him that has started to value that. To value the punches. At least it’s contact, he thinks in his weakest moments. At least I know I’m real when they’re hitting me.
I love you, he writes home, Everything is so big here. Everyone’s in such a hurry. I love you. I miss you.
He doesn’t write, I want to come home. He doesn’t write, I hate this.
All his heroes went places they thought would be gilded gold and found them rotting wood. And they all looked the challenge square in the eye and said, I can build something out of this. I will make a legend out of what I do here. So this is what he’ll do. Archeon is his Troy and he is eager Achilles, chomping at the bit. Aeneas would never have hungered pitifully for his mother’s touch. Jason never paused to consider his own loneliness.
Besides, what was he doing at home? Festering in his own dissatisfaction. Assessing his victories and finding them hollow. Planning which tiny arena to travel to next, which Silvers to knock about so easily, hoping against hope that one of them would give him the challenge he so desperately needed. Spending any minute not training in the library buried in books from before the War, Adah tripping through to scold him for wasting away inside, Delilah grilling him at the dinner table: who did you read about today, Octavian? What new hero have you got for us?
It was not enough, no matter how much he wanted it to be. Archeon was always calling.
But he misses his mother, Adah, Delilah. And he misses his father, those quiet evenings dissecting his victories—Pallas lifting up his bruised knuckles and inspecting them, one by one, turning his hands back and forth in silent contemplation. Octavian never had to explain himself. Never had to say, “I keep the bruises to remind myself what I’m doing when I hit someone. What damage I cause.” Just Pallas’ touch, steady and sure. The rock-solid certainty of his presence.
He feels so cold in Archeon. People here don’t touch like that.
Extra: Here is my son’s mock blog! I’ve got a graphic up there already along with some inspo posts, and I’m going to be adding drabbles and graphics to it between now and the submit closing if that’s okay?
