I used to work as a caricature artist

[pyraxis]

The raba Ua'lin and her beloved crystal.


Daria and Song have a wicked prank war going in Teiranen. He loves to sneak up on her while she's standing near the cave wall, so she jumps back and goes toren at the same time, and falls spiralling into the rock. No sense of gravity in toren form, no light in solid stone, no way of guessing which way back to open space....


And to placate those two, I give you a couple others.

The raba Vic. He's not really a raba - actually he ran away to avoid this precise fate. On Ua, tradition demands the rulers must always be female. He was not exactly thrilled at the prospect of changing his body.


Grehti Cailtoh-rsakk. A nethik-tail perking out of his ass is about equivalent to Rush Limbaugh with cornrows. :P

Comments

[jimnightmare.livejournal.com]

Wait, how can you be part sperith? Aren't speritu, like, ghosts? I thought with being dead you can only be one or the other, not like kinda dead. Or maybe it's like how Yonjuunana is kind of a robot. Oh crap! D: Maybe she's part sperith, too! She's got this whole big box of crystals in her room that she looks at!

Yonjuunana: Uh, I don't think enjoyment of shiny things is limited to being a ghost.

Sh-San: If anything, it means she is part Ra-Has. Where is this box? Let me see it.

Evan: Me too!

Yonjuunana: Sorry, Jim. You're done with writing for now. We're all running off to be distracted by shiny things! :D

Jim: D: Wait- Oh, this sucks about not having my own body here. I want to keep talking to people!

*3 to 1 vote in favor of shiny things. Back later.*

[pyraxis]

Hahahahahaha! Better be careful, Jim! The hunger is catching!

Seriously though. This gets into - dark stuff. Speritu, they're ghosts, yeah. Of toren that got drained by other speritu. They're sure-dead, their bodies are - I don't know. Don't know what happens to their bodies, if you get a corpse husk and a ghost, or if the body's just - gone. Gone, toren, heh. But the spirit, the sperith's still conscious. If you can call it that. When all they care 'bout is hunger and feeding.

Conscious still. That means alive.

And who are we toren to say - what's person and what's not? The world, they call us demons. Who are we to turn round and say speritu are not people?

That's why, when I came to Pat, I said - It's not you I'm here to talk to. She wants me to talk to the speritu.

And I - I've destroyed more speritu than I can count. I still do. When they come for you, they're all crazy-focused to feed. You can't afford to hesitate. Even if every one of them is a person.

But if you get good with a blade - if they get scared - if the first thing into your head isn't I've got to fight to live - then there's space for trying to touch any consciousness that's left in them. You strike them, hold them back so all you get is scratched up. Like a wild thing. Then you talk. With words, with telepathy, with illusions in the dreaming. And they remember. Bits of what it was like to be alive. They want it, some of them, they want it so bad, to shift back into nok - human - form. But they're trapped. You have to un-trap them.

*looks up, briefly, at Jim still there*

I can't tell you how Song came to be. Not without their book finished. Water Song. But he was the first. He's the one had us found Teiranen back in the speritu cave, not safe out under the trees. He's the one makes it open not just to toren but speritu.

[jimnightmare.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. That- that's really cool that you can do that. I mean, that's awful, the whole thing about speritu, but if you can bring them back...

I keep saying your planet is messed up because of arranged marriage, things like that, but you guys have some really amazing stuff going on. I remember back when I first met you, I was thinking you weren't gonna like me so much once you found out I'm a machine, or at least I'd get stared at a lot. But now I've met all these people here, and when new people show up in yumeza I've even stopped bracing myself for the bad reactions, because I feel so much like I'm not out of place. I don't think most people can see stuff like this. I really don't think most people would stop to think that scary ghosts might be people, too. It's like you guys can see clear.

And I'm really glad to hear that you can bring the speritu back somehow. I... kinda... know a little of what it feels like to be dead. I've been dead lots of times, actually. It's complicated. But you're right, when you know what it's like to be alive, you want it more than anything.