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I SWEAR, it has it out for me. *shakes head, hides behind barrel* I have carried an umbrella in my backpack for the last two weeks. The day it finally rained? I gave it to my dear parental unit in the morning because they wanted to take a look at how it worked.

XD now I don't have to crash everywhere!

By the way, have you seen Death Parade? It's quite good, if a bit dark.

I'm happy to be here. *noms chocolate*

I mean, there's no specification in there that the words have to be *good* words, is there?

Besides, you're right. I only meet the goal about half the time. XD

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong - and is exponentially more likely to if you happen to draw attention to the idea that it can't go wrong.

"It's funny," she said. "Usually I'm the one having that effect on people. But I could never draw Derik out like this, either. I think it's the similar betrayal and bereavement... and drink."

"I can hear you, you know," said Derik, looking at her from under his brows. "I'm drunk, not deaf."

She jumped. "Er. Sorry."

He rolled his eyes and turned back to Thoth. "There's more, if you want to know. Less awful—almost funny, really. D'you want to know how I lost my eye twice in one day?"

You'd be foolish not to.

Although as a gamer, I'm a bit more concerned with the Random Number God.

Too many examples to even share by this point. For me, it's no longer deniable that reality runs on authorship.

—doctorlit, mere player on the stage

"He's usually a lot... colder. Very distant. Not so much right now. Maybe it's the alcohol."

Thoth nodded at Derik. "I am glad that I could assist. Thank you for telling me your tale."

This evening, I was in an Overwatch group and I was ABOUT to say "This team looks perfect," then I stopped myself because I knew if I said it we would definitely fail within the first five minutes. After making this decision, I found myself thinking, "Wait a minute. That's the Ironic Overpower, isn't it. This is reality. But still..." And this happens all the time.

Anyone else?

Welcome to the Board! Here, have some chocolate, and enjoy your stay!

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Welcome to the show, Quincy.

Have an altimeter from Aircraft Spruce. http://www.aircraftspruce.com/menus/in/altimeters.html Then you can land gracefully next time!
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I'm doing it, although I'd prefer not to share details in public because to do so would be mixing anonymity modes.

I find that usually the hard part isn't generating the words, the part I find the most difficult part is actually paring them down after I'm through and remaining on course without going all over the place. NaNoWriMo usually gives me a good excuse to just toss that out the window and just go completely hog wild on everything. Usually the editing is where I have the most fun, but I've taken to viewing NaNoWriMo as the time where you find the pieces that you'll be writing, and editing the next month as a matter of when I get to actually put them together. A lot of parts naturally won't get used, but I view that as being perfectly fine, since just because some of my ideas won't get used this time around, it won't mean I won't get to use them in the future.

My first drafts will always be a little disjointed but that's to be expected. I'm looking forward to it.


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Rather than doing NaNo proper, I'm dedicating this month to sewing things. Gonna do a weighted blanket and first drafts for a costume for cons next year.

I'm a huge manga fan and I really loved death note. I'm not that into Lord of the Rings (please don't kill me) but I did play dragon age a little bit. Since you liked death note, I highly recommend Code Geass and No Game No Life if you haven't watched them. They both have different premises, and No Game No Life is a lot less serious, but I think you would really enjoy them.

"Those are good words... very good words. Thank you, Thoth."

Gall grumbled something that sounded suspiciously like "get a room," though not so loud that she thought anyone would notice. She thought about taking off in Alex's wake, but didn't. She was learning things. Uncomfortable, mushy things, but things might be worth knowing anyway.

Jenni wanted to say something to Alex, but what was she going to say? It was all right? It wasn't. She decided to catch up with him another time and make sure he was okay. For now, she did her best to pretend she wasn't quietly weeping, and tilted her head inquisitively at Tom.

(( Poor Alex. ∗pats kid∗ It's not your fault writers are all a bunch of sadists. ))

Alex looked like he wanted to sink through the floor and disappear. "Derik, I'm so sorry. I wouldn't have—he gestured at his costume, his face red. "If I'd known, and I... oh, god."

Zeke, his eyes whirling violet, dug his claws into Alex's shoulder, making small chirps of distress.

"I'm just gonna..." Alex gestured awkwardly away from the group before shuffling off.

((That seems like a good place for him to bail—especially because I don't want him running into someone else before it's time.))

"I am sorry for your loss. I do not know your pain. I cannot. But I can remember your story. We can learn from it. And the dead can be remembered. We cannot do more. We should not do less."

Tom looked at them. He scratched his head. "You know, I've never really seen Thoth like this..."

"Oh, all right." With a sigh of capitulation, Derik sank down onto the seat again. He glanced at Alex, but since he'd gone off in conversation with Tom, there wasn't much point in saying anything to him. It was fine. Fine. He took off his green domino mask and rubbed his face, particularly the scarred right side. With the mask off, it was easier to distinguish the blind milky-blue eye from the functioning hazel one, slightly bloodshot. "My tale, my tale," he muttered to himself. "Does it start at the beginning, or the end? There are things I remember that never happened, but they did; things that weren't true, but are. Jenni—" he turned toward her "—how should I start it?"

"You could start when we met, I think," she said, drifting closer. Having been there, she had never heard him speak fully of his recruitment, and she was curious to hear his account.

He nodded. "Yes. Yes, that's fine." He looked up, not at anyone in particular, but into the distance of remembrance. "It was the Hatching. Alanna and I were on the hot sands with Yunith and my Skepnadth, watching over the eggs. It was a proud clutch! But they always were—with such parents, how could they be anything but? What a pair! Yunith, living statue of pure gold; Skepnadth, night-black marbled with bronze. Which he shouldn't have been." Derik's brow creased. "There are five colors, not... but..." He shook his head. "But there we were. There was a queen egg, even though all the Weyrs had a full complement, and a particularly large one at that. At the time my only concern was finding a match for her, but Alanna had everything well in hand—she usually did." His mouth twisted with bitterness. "I remember holding her that day... tall, beautiful, proud. Her hand on my shoulder." He reached up to touch the spot. "She was mine. I loved her. Nothing else mattered." He lapsed into silence.

"That was when I saw you," Jenni put in. "I was there in the viewing gallery with Agents Supernumerary and Ilraen. Oh, I was so angry!"

"Yes, and you made a commotion. I remember that. Everyone looked, and I saw three harpers I didn't know, but I thought nothing of it. I thought nothing much of anything. The four new candidates had come up to us, bowing quite prettily to the sires of the clutch, and Alanna kept the girls near us, near the queen egg. These four had been Searched at the last moment by Yunith herself, a thing unprecedented in the history of Pern. Travelers from another world—but it wasn't the first time we'd had such."

Jenni explained, "It was a crossover with Harry Potter. He's talking about Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny; they'd transported themselves over in a magical accident. Sirius Black and an OC called Roma Lupin were already there. Sirius got there after falling through the Veil. I still have no idea how Roma was supposed to have arrived. They'd both Impressed somehow, even though Sirius at least must have been too old." She shook her head, still irritated by the idiocy of that fic.

"The four newcomers shortly did, too," Derik went on. "That's too much to tell, but suffice to say I now know it was utter nonsense, every moment of it. I mean," he chuckled, "honestly, the rattlesnake-hide bronze. We don't have rattlesnakes on Pern! And there I stood, smiling like an idiot, at least until the gold egg hatched out a little green-gold sport from one end. That was a shocker even then. But Alanna felt she might clutch like a gold, so we decided to train her up as a junior queen, and all was well again. The egg hatched a proper gold from the other half—I say proper, though she wasn't really. Shards, looking back on it I feel like such a benighted fool." He leaned back and sank down in the chair, looking away. "I had two eyes then—how could I not have seen it was all wrong? I was a harper, I knew all the teaching ballads, I—"

"Derik, hush," Jenni said gently. "You were never at fault. That was why I had to get you out of there."

He thought a moment, then picked up the narrative again. "Before the Hatching Feast, Skepnadth and I decided to look in on Yunith, make sure she'd eaten and was resting well. A queen doesn't leave her clutch when it's near to hatching, so she fasts until it's over," he explained. "She had returned to her weyr, and Skepnadth went up ahead of me. He told me two strangers was there, bothering her. I came up the stairs in a hurry, and there was this woman." He indicated Jenni. "Something was odd about her, but neither of us could place it. We went down to the Bowl to avoid disturbing the dragons any further, and she opened my eyes. She reminded me of everything I should have known, but couldn't think of for the fog in my head. She told me what was really happening. Mary Sues—a blight on the universe worse than Thread. Eaters of living ideas, was that what you said?"

Jenni nodded. "Leaving behind only the shiny dead bits to decorate themselves."

"I was one of those," Derik said. "An ornament. An affectation. Not even my name and face were my own!" He leveled a resentful look at Jenni. "You didn't care about me for myself—you cared about him."

She flushed guiltily. "To begin with, maybe. But it was a dragonman I had to win over, not a Phantom. Erik would have been easier to convince."

"I'm not him. I'm not, I'm not."

"I know, hon. We all know."

"Well, mostly," Gall said dubiously. She'd never heard the whole story, either, so she'd hung around to listen.

Jenni shot her a repressive look.

"You haven't seen what I've seen," the Viking protested, but she shut up again.

"The point is," Derik cut back in, raising his voice somewhat more than necessary, "my whole life was a lie, and my only choices were to stay an ignorant thrall and die, or to give up everything I thought I knew and live to find some other purpose for myself and my dragon. I chose the latter, because it was my duty to Pern. Because a dragonman must fly when Threads are in the sky. So I said I would help save Pern from Alanna and the rest." His tone was agitated, self-mocking. "So that's what I set out to do. I went to the Hatching Feast, like I was supposed to. I sat beside her, and I watched, and I waited. The plan was—ah, it went so wrong." He hunched forward, covering his face with both hands. "It never should have come to dragons fighting dragons, but Alanna—Yunith—they went wild. I tried to stop it, we both did." His shoulders shuddered. "He was so brave. My fine bronze. And she killed him. Yunith, his mate, attacked him like a wild feline.

"Ilraen—Ilraen had become a gold dragon himself to keep the Weyr under control, that was the plan, but he couldn't control the morph quickly enough. You can't have a dragon without a rider, it's not possible. He tried to save Skepnadth, but by the time he killed Yunith and the rest of the Sues were under control, it was too late. At least... at least I got to say good-bye before he went between."

(( Stopping there, though it's not quite the end of the story of how Derik became Derik, because good lord that's a long post already, it's taken all day because I actually had work to do at work today (go figure), and I don't have much more time before I have to leave for home. And, well, Derik needs a minute, too.

(( I hope it makes sense, but not so much sense that nobody feels like asking questions about the weirder bits. {= ) ))

"So, um, funny story? There's no processed sugar where I come from? So whenever I eat candy, I get... really weird. Just as a head's-up."

"It is not much stranger than anything else the multiverse has come up with."

"After you, then?" he asked.

In response to Anne's explanation of Henry's speech patterns, he said "That would explain why Henry sounds like several hundred years of intense linguistic blending, at least by my world's standards as I know them."

"Safer holiday too, without inspiration from a centuries or millenia old one, and no greater than usual opportunity for baleful rituals for wannabe Voldemort or actual monsters, humans or not."

"Well, we could always try minor pranks on other people to live the 'trick' part, since the treats are all around," Richard said, waving an arm in the direction of the buffets. "Just remember. Dibs on the caramel and red berries ones. Oh, and the ones with dark chocolate."

... 600,000 words a year? That means you're topping a million every two years!

Or did you mean that you don't hit the target each month...? ^_~

hS