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[quote][color=blue]Field of Zombies, Stainsberry
Mufasa twisted to the left and downward, allowing Stainsberry’s sword to strike the vampire man-bat in its right deltoid, causing it to shriek in agony—forcing Stainsberry to wince in pain at the sound—and interrupt its flight sending it back towards the ground. Those half-bat-half-vampire things were a pain to deal with; fortunately, there were not that many of them.
A loud whistling sound came from above them even as Mufasa began twisting both his neck and entire body to see what the noise was. Stainsberry noted an expression of extreme surprise on what he could see of his mount’s profile, causing him to painfully twist his own own helmeted head, struggling to see what was coming at them. He blinked, there was a giant flaming rock about ten feet away heading directly at him.
The world suddenly went fuzzy as Mufasa shifted them to the aethereal realm just as the meteor impacted the two companions. Stainsberry’s virtual breath was knocked out of him as he and his mount were dragged by the meteor’s aethereal momentum towards the ground. He felt the tingling sensation as his aethereal form passed through the meteor’s core to emerge from the other side on top of the crater on the ground below.
Non-living objects had no physical presence on the aethereal realms, but they did present resistance. This was why one could walk upon the ground, or the water in the aethereal realm; however, one could, with force of will, pass through these objects—typically walls and doors. In this case the resistance of the meteor, with all its momentum had dragged he and Mufasa down to the ground with itself. Being immaterial they had both passed through the meteor as it impacted with the ground and its resistance.
Of course, since both he and Mufasa were animus beings, they were solid to each other and ended up getting tangled up in each other’s limbs and Stainsberry ended up being unseated, which in turn, returned him to the physical realm, even as dirt and body parts began raining down on them from the explosive impact. Mufasa quickly followed; the two found themselves sitting in a very large crater in a pile of meteor and undead debris. The meteor’s impact had cleared a roughly circular region of the battlefield in twenty-foot plus diameter.
A loud yowling came from his left where a D’Warg with crushed rear legs wailed in pain. Apparently, the meteor had crashed into a battle between D’Wargs and vampyrs. He guessed vampyrs given the large number of broken teeth in the area. He cracked open his visor to get more air, even as he noted a few mangled vampyrs struggling to rise. It was doubtful they would be much of a threat unless one stepped directly in one’s mouth.
“Here lad, I’ve got you!” A familiar voice came from behind him. Stainsberry got to his feet to see Thrinarv kneeling beside the injured D’Warg. “Nasty injury! I know you’ll regenerate, but let me speed it along.” The priest said.
“Thrinarv! Well met!” Stainsberry exclaimed, pleased to see his friend.
The priest looked up from the D’Warg upon whose hands were placed for healing. “Well met Stainsberry! Great fun is afoot!” The dwarf chuckled.
“So, you are with the D’Wargs?” Stainsberry asked.“I am moving around throughout the battle to wherever I can be of assistance with my healing or other services.” Thrinarv nodded, “And of course, a good bit of skull bashing!”
Stainsberry shook his head. “I bet the priests of the Five are jealous that you are completely unfettered in your priestly duties!”
Mufasa snarled and suddenly a vampyr behind him screamed in pain as the lion disemboweled him. Stainsberry gave his companion a thumbs-up for guarding his back. He noted that Thrinarv had a holy aura surrounding himself and his patient that seemed to keep the Unlife at bay.
“It is mighty convenient to have one’s god sitting on the same planet just a thousand or two leagues away. Much closer than the Outer Planes—or the lower ones, for that matter.” Thrinarv agreed.
The dwarf suddenly frowned. “The two of you survived crushing by shifting to the aethereal?”
Stainsberry nodded. “Mufasa was thinking fast! If it had been up to me we’d both be on the other side of that meteor.” He pointed to the ground below them.
“So, the interdiction does not apply to the aethereal realm.” Thrinarv noted, standing up; his patient fully healed and read to munch more vampyrs.Stainsberry blinked in thought. “Well, that is fortunate.” He frowned, “however, I am not sure that is unexpected. The aethereal realms are very tightly bound to their corresponding material realm. That’s why we tend to refer to them as realms rather than planes. I know most wizards are sloppy in their terminology and talk about the aethereal plane; however, there is no single aethereal plane. Every material plane has its own aether, and you can’t travel to other material planes via one. You can, however, travel between planets. Slow going, but it does avoid the problem with vacuums.”
Thrinarv grinned, “You know you are preaching to the choir. We do study this in our seminary.” The priest told him. Another vampyr screeched in pain as Mufasa dispatched it.
“I said wizards get it wrong! Not priests. Please note, I am taking my own colleagues to task!” Stainsberry grinned at the priest before pulling his visor down, preparing to return to battle.
“To victory!” Thrinarv shouted as Stainsberry moved to remount Mufasa.
“To victory my friend!” The knight magus returned.[/color][/quote]
OH…and small teaser from Book IV
Grob, Stainsberry and Talarius discussing the Abyssscape in Grob’s front yard.
[quote]
[color=blue]“Do we have any idea of how long this piece of—the Abyss—is going to stay here?” Vicar General Grob Darkness Slayer asked Sir Stainsberry, Knight Magus of the El Ohîm who, along with Sir Talarius was staring at the very large circular region of extremely hot red desert that occupied the space that had once been a a grassy field with a small ruined village and the short term encampment of a hundred thousand plus Unlife; the remains of a quarter million undead army.“To be honest, I’ve never used the spell.” Sir Stainsberry replied. “I have read about it, of course, but everything I know is theoretical.”
“Is it going to flip back?” Talarius asked.
“It should, either when the person who cast the spell releases the region, or flips to a new region. At either point, we should get your very badly used field back.” Stainsberry told Grob who simply grimaced, his armor’s high collar making it hard for him to shake his head in dismay.
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[/quote]He cured it.
Let me check to make sure on that, I know I didn’t do that one “live” but I think I mentioned it as being done off camera.
It appears that way. Not sure exactly how old she is, but don’t think she’s over 4K. I mean, Gastrope’ sort of thinks she looks about that old but….
But she is definitely more attractive than any of the female liches so…
Yes, I would definitely do alpha and beta assuming I do alpha.
I actually have program/project I started developing after book 2, but finally stopped due to it ate too much of my free time for the entire beta reading process.
The base program is an author tool, a WinForms app that has all the tools for authors (e.g. Office replica) plus character and location database, timelining. It’s all version controlled and eventually will be scene based with the ability to arrange scenes in chapters and then produce different “versions” with different orderings whatever.
It’s all database driven and thus multiple people can access the documents and edit/comment/revise if it’s put on the web. Original vision was a web based one for all beta readers and a winforms/OSX version for the author and editors or heavier users.
People could either host it on a local server or on a cloud server; or better, I’d host it for them in my cloud and charge a small subscription fee. Like Evernote and similar products.
I actually have a crude version of the Office clone working (I use DevExpress components) and it would be easy enough to secure for the web. But I still need to do revision stuff, character database, all the other stuff.
Something like that would be great for alpha readers because we could all share and store notes/comments and see revisions.
Anyway, yeah, I’m amenable to it. and yes, it would be a smaller group of more committed people.
It’s also consistent with my original goal which is to encourage fan fiction via this site (or a newer version of it). And eventually do some MZB/Mercedes Lackey style collaboration/story collections etc.
Yes, I actually think that’s what he’s going to do.
I’m sure he’d like to convince Damien to hook up, but can pretty much bet he won’t. Being a warlock of a “foreign power” would probably be a conflict of interest with his seat on the Council (which is part of governing body of the Council States)
Regular mana pools, the gems, contain a fixed amount of mana, like a battery. Nearly all magic items that have spell like affects use them, and they have to be recharged. Hence we saw Stainsberry’s staff run out of juice.
Wizards will almost always have a personal mana pool linked to them, it’s a gem that’s usually on a pendant or ring. You can only “safely” have one linked to you at a time without risking feedback. Part of what Exador and Ramses did with the obelisks was figure out a way to have a series of mana pools, with only one linked at time. As the first pool rand dry, it was automatically disconnected and another one reconnected. This is actually an amazing piece of Wizardry that is quite revolutionary, and, if he was still hiding as a wizard, he might have released it to the world as part of his competition with Lenamare.
Now, Vaselle, I am sure has a personal mana pool, but he’s also got his link to Tom (similar to, but stronger than) the shaman’s link. So he can pull mana from Tom, who pulls it from Mount Doom and that is basically a godpool. So it’s a crap load of mana.
The limitation, however, is the skill of the wizard. This is a bit different then for an animage. With wizards, you don’t want to try to cast too powerful of a spell using tons of mana because you can screw it up and things go “boom” The loose term for it is “fumbling the spell” If you are going too far beyond your abilities you can get yourself and a lot of other people killed.
The difference with an animage is that their skill limits how much they can channel and if things are too difficult the mana isn’t channeled, it can fumble but usually isn’t that big of a deal (although with certain disciplines it can be). Wizards, however, use “prepackaged recipes” that pull in all the mana upfront, if you get it wrong, at a stage after the mana is pulled in–KABOOM
So for Vaselle, pulling on Mount Doom he could in theory do spells more powerful than he has the personal mana for but then he risks fumbling.
Well, there is technically more to it than that; that’s just the most obvious thing. And for Vaselle, it’s one of the most obvious priestly sort of things.
He is a familiar to Tom. Tom can completely inhabit his body and take control or share control. If Tom is willing/assisting, Vaselle can pretty much do anything Tom can do. He can literally be an “avatar” in the “divine presence on earth” sort of respect, or the James Cameron move sort of thing.
In theory, warlocks could also figure out a way to feed mana to their masters as well.
In popular mythology (in Astlan and elsewhere) warlock perform sacrifices to offer up mana and animus to their demon.
It’s really just a question of time and what Tom can do, Vaselle can do and what they can learn together.
At the moment, their mutual ignorance is the main limitation. That and Tom’s moral squeamishness.
I like it too, I went to add it to the list to find it was there. I literally don’t remember it being there!
Not sure what will fit in there, depends on what fits into IV.
There are a number of major issues to resolve yet.
Not the least of which is the back burnered Nyjyr Ennead plotline. Lots of bad blood there.
I also need to think about whether or not I want to pull the Seas of Astlan plot back into this. This was the storyline from HH Beta about the brigands that stole the book. They have very interesting tie outs/cross over with both the Nyjyr Ennead and the Storm Lords
So as we know right now, we have the following groups:
Freehold & Lenamare & Jehenna
Exador/Ramses/Bess (on and off with Bess at moment)
Storm Lords
Mount Doom
Aodh/Lilith/Sentir Fallon
The Five Siblings
Hilda & Crew (maybe different from 5S, maybe same–Beragamos got some splainin to do)
The Nyjyr Ennead
Oorstemoth/The Inferno
Sammael vs Melissance and her hubby.
The Tribunal (& Stainsberry)
The Grove/Nimbus
The Olympians (maybe)
Sutakh, the Baron (Lords of Chaos), Dysnomia & Eris’ other children
Djinn
And to some extent yet to be determined House Narthan (Into the Wilds)
The Orcs and their restoration of glory (which is technically Doom but will be a source of pressure for Tom)Not sure if I want to bring the brigands back in, might spin that off completely, still dealing with Storm Lords and Nyjyr Ennead
There is a lot of background with the Nyjyr Ennead, Sutekh and the Storm Lords that we haven’t touched, which is where the brigands were supposed to come in. That may all be in Seas of Astlan and kept out of the main story line. I have no problem pulling secondary groups in to the side books, such as the Storm Lords and the Nyjyr Ennead.
So there are lots of balls in the air. It’s the characters and their interactions that determine where we go. It’s a question of how much gets covered in Book IV.
I actually think we got a lot covered in III, most of the players are now on stage. Most of the rest should be there by book IV’s end.
This is why I am not sure if the total number of volumes is 6 or 7 or maybe 9? Don’t like 8. Either want a “2 or 3 trilogies” or a prime number. So 6,7,9,11
And that’s also where the side books come in, trying to keep that number down and the “core story” of Tom moving along at a good pace.
That actually is something I’ve been thinking about.
In theory, originally, beta demons, like their mortal equivalents “Beta Readers” begin reading after the first draft of the book.
For Book II, that was the case. It just so happened that the beta readers yawned so stupendously that the first draft ended up being like 80-85% of the finished book.
For Book III, I had a schedule that I had to be on to get a year end release and on the editor’s schedule and I got swamped in August/September with my day job. Hence the only 75% finished. That was not expected.
That being said, just like in Book II, the Beta Demons had great inspirational effect on the story line and ended up moving it to a different place. Specifically, on thing where I was stuck, just discussing it with Beta Demons gave me ideas on how to move forward.
So, I have thought about “Alpha Demons” for the entire process.
But the rub is this: It’s a long and inconsistent haul for everyone. Mainly because I tend to write in spurts due to my job. So the can be lots of down time.
Ideally, at some point in the future, once I reach a “break even” where I can get 60 to 70% of my income from writing and can spend 60% or more of my time writing I’d be writing continuously and Alpha Demons would not have long stretches of boredom as I try to eek out some money to eat on.
As it is, Oct/Nov/Dec I’ve nearly done book exclusively, which tends to make one hungry while waiting for the book to go on sale and royalties to come in (it’s odd how writing has a very similar feast or famine income schedule, just like consulting). So I am probably going to have to dig in to doing “day job” stuff for a few months starting in January.
Also this time around I am trying to finish 2 books, CoA:ITW and Vol IV. So there will be periods (e.g. 2 to 3 months) where I am almost exclusive on the other book (I think: I say this because even though they join up, the narrative tone of ITW is very different, initially, it’s a bit more “Jane Austin” if you will due to being told from the point of view of a rather pampered prince who has to rough it)
Whatever the schedule I really would like to get CoA:ITW out by August if I can and then by overly optimistic thinking Vol IV a year from now, but realistically it may be March for vol IV.
So anyway, I am open to suggestions, if there are people interested in an alpha process, we can consider that. Possibly a combined CoA:ITW/DoA:??? alpha.
