Quincunx

~Other~ Minta became younger in order to fit into the Death-Obsessed Cheerful Little Girl archetype that was so popular a few years ago. As is, she is the easiest character for other people to write, provided they remember that Minta is amoral, not like a real child of her age (and remember to dot the ‘i’s in “skellie, gobbie, gnomie”). She is still regressing, and in later years will die in the body of a baby, or earlier if she is neglected.

~Relationships~ Nim the mutant drow is Minta’s “NIMMY!” and she doesn’t care who knows it or if he reciprocates. Minta “does not, not, NOT!” like Greenbeard the dwarf, although she kept bringing him presents of new and weird fungus to grow on his beard (hence the name). Boys are otherwise icky; Scorn is especially icky but was her ‘big brother’ who misled her about many facts of life. Minta is good friends with little Sweetcherrie, little Morgane, Swordmage’s Moonchilde, Signe’s Gloria, Ayshela’s Kaitlyn, Appy, Rune, and all the other sugar-fed little girls who run around the Pen. She distrusts angels and doesn’t let herself be touched by them.

~Personality~ Curious, easily changes moods. Self-centered. Minta cannot feel or express remorse, compassion; she pouts and sulks when pushed into a situation where another child might feel that way.

~Physical Description~ The little girl sported short, wavy-curly indigo hair and matching eyes in a round face. Durable child's research robes crafted out of zombified leather, with dozens of overstuffed pockets, covered her from neck to toe. Minta is waist-high to the average human and twice as quick.

~Items~ More junk than anyone could possibly inventory. Pixystix. Pixystix wrappers. Glow stix. A splinter of wood from Rydia's ark. Anti-cootie gems and sprays. Pizza paver with toppings trailer. Wooden replicas of the Platonic solids. A wind-up cyborg gnomie clockwork shield. Sparklydragon dust. A fluffy red quill, somewhat crumpled. An enchanted badger skeleton. Pop tops. A skull that floats with enough lift for Minta to sit upon and levitate. Full set of zombie-leather research protective gear. Zombie-meat crayons. Enchanted silver crayons that draw living lines. Bone chips. A tattered green hair bow. Twisted crazy straws. Vials of venom. A toolbox (English, metric, and gnomish wrenches). Powdered mana crystals. Preserved eyeball marbles & bouncy ball. Jacks. Knucklebone dice. Steel, razor-edged pizza cutter dice (d11). An unwashed wool handkerchief. Essence emeralds, each labeled with the name of its imprisoned soul. Zombie-skin trampoline. A rope swing. A darkwood dagger, naturally poisonous (one of two originally given to her). A silver circlet, engraved with distracting abstract patterns. A bubblewand that makes ultra-tough bubbles. Cuckoo clock-work that coughs up spare parts every hour. Happy Unbirthday balloons. Fireworks. Fizzypop. Kraag plushie. Vlad’s phylactery.

~Magical Abilities~ Minta combines the magic of an Archmage black mage with a Norrathian necromancer worshipping the god of disease (or “Cooties-be-gone”) in varying proportions. By far, her favorite magic is summoning magic; she whistles up skeletons, zombies, and other undead for bizarre and menial tasks. She doesn’t hesitate to make infernal pacts but rarely has her offers accepted. Her power in the quincunx is misdirection; people who have a set reaction to all other personae often reverse their opinion for Minta, and she'll happily victimize them or hide her wrongdoing while they're still confused.

~Abilities~ Minta, like most gnomes, adores creative tinkering and hardware use. She is the translator of the quincunx, with an unusually broad knowledge of languages; she can even use simple earspeak, using her fingers on either side of her head, and shrill a few badly mangled words of celestial and infernal languages.

~History~ Maralinda ran away not long after her baby sister was born, but the mage guilds shut the door in her family’s face when they came to beg assistance in finding her. Fifteen years later but only looking five years older, she wriggled out of an unbolted window and met Theodora taking the family’s sheep to the fields. Dora took her sister home again, but Minta was now a beacon for magic and weirdness; a vampire found her, and they traveled together to the court of the ruling mage, Rydia. The child dove recklessly into necromancy, forgetting to shelter her family during Armageddon, and fell head-over-heels for a three-eyed, blue-skinned mutant drow/sports equipment. She was dragged to Server One, complaining all the way through Cftm! school, but then turned herself loose on Ager One with Tzimfemme’s stolen moderator’s red quill. Rydia shipped her back to Blitz One under RagingGoat’s care, as an apprentice green mage, but she sneaked back to Ager One in time for the wild hunt. She moved to the Pen along with the quincunx, not complaining, but not understanding why they had to leave Terra. Minta eagerly took on the gnome personality in Norrath but was furious about being enrolled in the “super-duper cootiefied” Legion of the White Rose. After the KENA! faction decamped, she happily wasted time: from her expeditions, she brought back all sorts of strange fungus to add to those flourishing in Greenbeard’s dwarven facial hair; she set out as first mate to Illof’s gnomie pirate expeditions; with Destin and Fleetwood, the other Legion evils, she hunted the unicorns of the nature goddess; she ran a Norrath-wide game of tag-you’re-it and sang silly songs which everyone could hear. Eventually Rydia realized that Minta had become a LotWR fixture, kidnapped her, and brought her to the Eye of Mordor guild, where others from Terra had gathered; Minta, shocked to discover that she was the only gnomie, and that the other members mostly viewed her as a future snack, made herself into a "right-height" mascot for the guild.

~Minta~ / ~Minta Rose~ ~Brief Description~ Gnome. Neato necro gnomie girl.

(Tzimfemme looks puzzled for a moment.) I suppose the cinquain structure can jump languages, haiku structure did after all, and it is at once structured and unstructed, to make a good lesson. Might borrow this idea for language practice.

Tzimfemme popped the Lobotomy out of a mini-portal and grimaced as she took the weight of the hand-and-a-half version in only one hand, but gesticulated around the orchestra members with little loss of meaning. Pale-faced and cowering, they shrank away from her, but she herded them around the tuba from which Wyvern's tail and left wingtip protruded. The naked mage prodded a barrel-chested member into the tuba player's seat, tapped the mouthpiece of said instrument, and glowered. The tympanist shook his head. Tzimfemme prodded more forcefully, tapped twice, and doubled the glower. The tympanist sighed, laid aside his drumsticks, and blew into the tuba; Standard Forms G, 108, and Pi^2 shot into the air, and Tzimfemme ceased prodding while the tympanist made his escape. She thought for a bit, sizing up the remaining orchestra, then intimidated a reedy bassoon player onto the chair. He filled his lungs, exhaled into the tuba, and blasted out Wyvern (now missing the left sleeve of his Taxedo) with a B flat. The orchestra's heads moved in unison, following the almost parabola of Wyvern flying up, then down, smashing into two unsuspecting people. Tzimfemme chuckled, low in her throat, and advanced on the site. The orchestra scattered. "Well, well, well," she observed, after pushing Wyvern off of the heap and sorting out Mynx and Akallabeth from underneath. "Two people trying to leave the thread with only the minimum contribution. Pillars of the community! Eligible to participate in the Celebrity Gyrfalcon Costume Contest, at the least!" The naked mage clamped one hand on Mynx's right shoulder, the other on Akallabeth's left. "Don't wriggle," she added, and thought about Gyrfalcon's celebrity. The Cabaret Room slipped out from under the trio and a smoking ruin glided to a halt in its place. Tzimfemme toed a discarded cloak, then grasped it with her toes and flipped it to Mynx, explaining "Gaze of Eternity, outside the cathedral." Again the background floated away, to be replaced by the battered and blood-spotted deck of an ocean-going vessel. "Gaze of Eternity. . .the Leaping Lobster? Something ludicrous," she mused aloud, twining her foot around traveling gear and raising it up to Akallabeth, even as the ship sailed into nothingness and the Cabaret Room reassembled itself. "Go forth and contest!" announced Tzimfemme, propelling them towards the stage with two firm pushes before circling back and taking a seat near the door. She propped her feet up on the table, with a copy of aforementioned story in her hands, and started to read. "Fancy picking this up on one of the authors' birthdays," thought the naked mage. "Good day to remind myself of an author's worth."

I read a bit of self-deprecation (not so rare, but useful) into that poem, but then it's faintly. . .humorous? Self-mockery with the shadow of a real "on some level, we're all being ludicrous" smile, on top of the pain? At any rate, this poem was an enjoyable read on a topic which does not usually produce poems that I enjoy.

This one is a zinger. We take pride in our collections but don't tend to ask our collectibles for permission. There's only one point I would change: We made our way down the line, To what appeared to be the back. A few lines later, you did the same thing with slightly better phrasing. The second line can definitely be removed, perhaps the first one as well. I don't fully understand why "mainly" isn't italicized. All it does is make me think the collectibles were sexual conquests--was that your intended effect?--and to this collector's mind, the poem works just fine without that implication.

First, I have to chime in with Cerulean on cutting out Ye Olde diction; your poems are written in the present day's language and the dabs of archaic speech are like mysterious French words inserted into a sentence as a whitewash of erudition. If you must write with it, write entire poems with it; thou couldst either lose thyself in Renaissance-era adjectives, or you could use neither 'thee' nor 'thou' and the poem compose with all verbs and sentences in order inverted. For now, prune your Pen poems vigorously and return them to the present day. There's a rough strong-weak syllable meter in the poem as it stands. I'll chop gracelessly at the lines and try to wedge them all into that pattern, with little regard to the content (it's easier to tweak content once the meter is in place, oddly enough): Still waters ripple in the wind Will you once again be friend --the second line has to be spoken oddly at "once again" to fit the meter, and might need tweaking. Honesty compels the truth be told --perfect, and not just for the meter I once again fear to be so bold --the phrase "once again" is a problem again. It has different stress than it did before. To risk my heart in such a way To once again have such dues to pay --. . .you know what? "once again" is just going to have to go. It's a recurring hiccup in the rhythm. The pain of loss I cannot bear Upon my soul this burden does wear. --"Upon my soul I feel it wear" perhaps, it keeps the meter and the rhyme, although it changes the meaning more than Cerulean's suggestion. I once did call you friend --I would change "did call" to "had called", a more modern usage. Then you abandoned me in the end --"in the end" doesn't fit the meter. at the end of the couplet, and done only once, it might be forgivable; also at the end of this extra-long line, it stands out too much. you could shorten the line elsewhere to save the rhyme, instead. "You left me lonely in the end"? "I was abandoned in the end?" The trust that I once felt Feels like a crooked hand you dealt --I don't care if it's cliche. you reworked it into something good. And I can no longer know --this only fits the meter if it's spoken oddly. remove "and", and the problem vanishes. Whether you be friend or foe --archaic usage of "be" leads to a cliche not used well. I'd throw out the entire line before "foe" and re-write it. maybe move the concept of 'now' from the previous line down to this one? To be friends you say you desire But in your heart what doth conspire? --the longer length of these two lines is the only part to keep. the archaic and the cliche run too deep to be rooted out. maybe return to the water metaphor of the first line? do still waters run deep?

"Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons!" ----- "No sounds echo" echoes oddly and draws attention to itself. You could keep it as-is or regain your meter with "No sounds are heard", although you may then have to replace "through" in the next line. "Bullets absorbed/Seem still to bite" is the only unclear image. I try to picture bites in marshmallow fluff* and other soft substances, and they're not violent enough to convey the message; I cannot overcome the contradiction between absorbed, disappearing bullets and jagged, bitten edges. I'd keep the first line and rework the second because I prefer the image of invulnerable marshmallow warriors. It's your call as to whether they're invulnerable or not. "Their anger showing," can change to "Their anger shows," and regain the meter without compromising the meaning. ----- I flickered between possibilities, went through most of the ones already listed, tried to envision the thunderclouds at war but decided the poem was too solid to imply clouds, wondered if it were the army of General Winter due to the silence and decided that it was plausible. *What Sweetcherrie wrote about.

My potential misunderstandings--input from other readers on these points will be welcome. I have had some trouble, juxtaposing the 'thick', indoor-evoking carpet with the dandelions and wind despite the dash telling me not to do it; then I thought, "It's the welcome mat", but I don't describe those as thick. Rough, tough, soiled, maybe heavy-duty, but not 'thick'. If the poem is set inside, where is the window? Are the dandelions set into a vase on the table (and drooping--dandelions wilt very quickly after picking)? I read "rendering" and think "boiling down and purifying", properly, but between that line and the next, I've already gone back and replaced it with "purifying", "refining", or some less concrete verb. However, I do like how that line begins on a strong syllable, and many of the substitutions didn't start with a strong syllable. When I go to the last verse and work backwards from the destination, the verb changes into "enticing" or "guiding" or another verb which implies motion.

~Other~ Rosemary is an odd case. Most people can’t write her, but those that can give me the cold creeps for their accuracy, either in actions or in speech. (Nobody has done both. Look up Knight in the “Chronicles of Terra CD Contest” to see an example of someone who understood the ideas.) Her speech steps around nouns; in ordinary situations she’ll use adjectives and keep close to what she means to say, when the situation is unbalanced she’ll use only pronouns and be nearly incomprehensible.

~Relationships~ All relationships are predetermined—their places in the spiral do not change. Only someone at the zero-point, the center of a different spiral, could be treated as an equal. In practice, this means she’ll only be forward towards people who are far above her actual powers. People of the Pen were mostly of the eighth arm of the spiral, too far distant to be involved.

~Personality~ She is a response to madness, narcissistic and convinced she’s the holy prison of innumerable demons, and speaks more obliquely as the situation goes further out of control. When everything is in equilibrium, she has a saleswoman’s personality and tries to sell or barter her silver work. Rosemary cannot feel grief or be unsure of herself; her substitute responses depend entirely on who provoked the situation.

~Physical Description~ Her overskirts and mantle glowed sunshine yellow, embroidered with constellations of glittering silver beads, and reflected the light painfully. Beneath that, the tunic was navy blue like a midnight sky, and her skin was deathly pale, suffocated lilac-pink on the lips. Beneath that, her eyes glazed and her mind celebrated the onslaught. The eyes blossomed from brown to gold as she rebuked someone intangible, then darkened again. With the darkening, she faded, leaving the shell as a four-foot-tall blonde woman who'd barely passed adolescence.

~Items~ Longbow with arrows, regular and silver-tipped. Silver beads and jewelry of all sizes and descriptions. Silversmithing tools—awl, stylus, hammer, set of scales and weights. Hanging from her belt: Keys. Wooden tiles with a number on one side and a letter on the other, in a pouch. Hand abacus. A silver goblet. A mirror engraved with the spiral, clockwise and counter-clockwise. A crescent-moon pendant enchanted to conceal the wearer.

~Magical Abilities~ She can make herself invisible and sometimes be able to conceal others along with her. Rosemary can see through similar concealment, read auras. . .and minds, intruding her own thoughts. When aggravated her soul can depart her body and travel astrally, appearing as a gust of pink with petals of silver and black. She can mimic someone else's looks imperfectly, and calm or excite the onlooker's emotions. Sometimes Rosemary's words can incite psychotic fits of terror. During the time she spent at the Pen, she could also paralyze a person with eye contact, turning her pupils bright gold. Her power in the quincunx is transferrence, which can either briefly snatch the victim's persona into her possession, or inflict all of her twisted perspective upon the victim. As noted, this sometimes backfires, and her soul temporarily vanishes into the victim.

~Abilities~ Rosemary is an accomplished jeweler and secret locksmith, who conceals her lock-picking tools among her jewelry supplies. She is proficient with the longbow, preferring to hide, aim, and slowly fire rather than fire the “hail of arrows” which the English employed. She’s barely literate, yet extremely quick with mental computation, and thinks in numbers where a saner person would use words.

~History~ The King of England did not care where the Jews went, so long as they left the country. The ship on which Rose’s family sailed foundered off of the north shore of modern-day France; the Christians who found the shipwrecked children placed them with people who were deeply in need of penance. Rose d’Englesche worked long hours for a usurious silver-smith before Maria Annika took her arrowheads and her life, renaming her Rose-Mary and turning her loose. Confused, but still mostly sane, the new vampire blundered into others and went along with them; they opened the door to their meeting-place to find it slathered with blood, and a smiling severed head sitting on their couch. It took months of work by the scholar vampire, Nicolae de Carpathienne, before she was coherent again. She was trying to plumb her visions when her tiles spelled out Nocturne, the name of darkness. Not long afterwards, she vanished—prisoner of a were-spider, abducted to another plane of life. In desperation, Rosemary tried to lift her spirit out of her body; she succeeded, but did not retain the link between body and soul, and drifted onto a plane far distant than anywhere vampires knew. Tzimfemme had a fever dream on the road to Rydia’s realm, and sacrificed ghouls and zombies into a fleshcrafted carriage for the one who was to come after her; Rosemary saw the spider-legged dais and did not try to avoid her fate again. Tzimfemme joined her to Minta and set Rydia to teaching them both. Rosemary tried, but failed, to prevent Minta from losing her soul in her necromantic studies. They wandered from Blitz One, fighting an underground guild, to Server One, where they joined Calculus for the Masses!, and Rosemary discovered how to plumb her visions with numbers. She was nearly stable. . .but then the quincunx went to Ager One in reply to Tzimfemme’s distress. Rosemary flourished in the mad atmosphere, and began to speak of the spiral and prophesy in impenetrable tercets. She nearly drank Tzimfemme’s soul, and during the wild hunt of the quincunx, Rosemary did commit that unforgivable deed. When the quincunx moved to the Pen lands, she dwindled away in the calmer environment; during the magical confluences of the Quincuinox, Rosemary found and seized the lost connection to her body, and reunited with it. She will not walk in the astral plane again, no matter what the cost.

~Rosemary~/~Rose-Mary d’Englesche de Carpathienne d’Abydos~ ~Brief Description~ –OUT OF PLAY– Vampire. The astral amaranth.