The Battle

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

Grinwipey floated over Jyondre’s head. Each pair of tentacles held a club of gnarled and spiked arken-wood, and his remaining tentacle curled and knotted in rude gestures that no prime species but the aerial cephalopod Khtsoyis is capable of making for reasons of both politeness and flexibility. He lashed out once, twice, thrice, and his blows struck Jyondre’s shoulders once, twice, thrice.

Jyondre twisted and leapt, his triangular tail thwacking against an ottoman. His sabre danced in an intricate pattern, slicing through the tassles hanging from the chandelier. His dagger, at least, wound up embedded in Grinwipey, just next to one of the writhing eyestalks.

And Grinwipey retaliated in a fury of clubs hammering upon Jyondre from every direction. In a few instants, Jyondre fell.

The Aftermath

“Your win, Wipey,” said Jyondre, lying on the floor, searching his pockets for a handkerchief to stop his bleeding nose.

“Yeah, yeah. You got in a promoculous poke though,” said Grinwipey. He pulled Jyondre’s dagger out, and squeezed the wound closed with the innate Khtsoyis healing magic. “And if that chande-liar were m’aged and vicious auntie, you’d've cut off one of her tents right nicely.”

“Well, thank you kindly for agreeing to spar with me. Yerenthax wants me to learn to fight people who aren’t quite so gentle on me as she feels obliged to be since we got married.”

“It’s not married you are. You’re her boy-toy toy-foy,” said Grinwipey.

“Tofyof,” said Jyondre. “And that’s just the legal part of it. When we make the new city, she and I will get actually married.”

“Tofyof, cloth-woth, concubine, or little bit of wrong-species fluff to keep her warm at night,” said Grinwipey. “Me, I think I’m gonna find me a wife when I get back home. Hopefully a different one than the last one, I still got the bleeds in m’kidneys from our divorce proceedings.”

Jyondre flattened his ears. “Really? It’s been over a year…”

“What, do you doubt my dibblematic dictum?” said Grinwipey with a snort. “Not only was she a most imposing woman who had quite a way with a pair of flails, she hired a defense attorney — maybe he was an offense attorney? — with a flaming sword! To chase me out of my own home!”

“I’m surprised Sythyry didn’t heal you, though.”

“Oh, that. Well, zie did, but there’s some wounds that can’t be healed by salves nor sorcery. They need salsa and sambuca, salami and slivovits!”

Jyondre sat up. “And a spouse?” He took the cloth off his nose to check for blood, and clapped it back on before he spotted his tunic.

“Spouse, that’s a good word right there. A spouse, or at least a slut. But a Khtsoyis! It’s not like I haven’t had any offers here, mind you, I’ve had them out the drammo, but they’re all from twoozy little plungermongers and I’m begging your pardon for using such language.”

“I prefer being called ‘traff’ for loving outside my own species, but I’m not in a position to be too fussy about language.”

Grinwipey wiggled his free tentacle. “Is that thing done dripping blood yet? I don’t want you still bleeding when you see Yerenthax! She’d squoosh me to sporridge if I broke you for her!”

“She understands about live-weapon sparring, Wipey. She’s half hill barbarian,” said Jyondre.

Comments

[rowyn]

Besides, Strayway is the perfect environment in which to learn. Every day is an adventure!

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[Everyone on board, except Sythyry and Vae, has substantially improved many skills. -bb]

[foomf.livejournal.com]

I would think Sythyry has greatly improved several skills, most notably the skill of Not Bringing Doom Upon Everyone Simply By Existing.

Or to be more polite about it, Sythyry has learned to notice things and be more polite about them, which at least reduces the impact of the inevitable.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[Technically, Sythyry has gotten nearly as many experience points as anyone else, but they don't do as much for zir as they do for Quendry anymore. -bb]

[foomf.livejournal.com]

[That's the trouble with level-scaling XP systems. They create a "game balance" but they don't model learning. If this were a skills-based system, Sythyry would have gained significantly in the "social anthropology" skills, pardon the use of a speciesist term.

By investigating inter- and intra-species affectional and sexual attractions and bonds in a more objective, scientific fashion, zie has already gone far beyond the highly tainted and over-filtered understandings of a hyper-abstractionist professor who should be more, rather than less, knowledgeable.

In fact, by ignoring and denying the evidence presented by students that showed the flaws in the theory he actually lost skill in that area and increased it in "CYA-PYT" -- cover your academics, protect your tenure -- and thus increased his short-term fitness as a Windbag Academician.

In contrast, Sythyry has developed a more objective model, which still suffers from two or three significant failures: it over-generalizes by assuming there is one model that covers all Primes, when there may in fact be several; it has weak predictive quality; it still attempts to categorize affectional and sexual transactions by the same metric; it still attaches derogatory (or laudatory) social-construct value judgements to behavior patterns. But it's a dramatic improvement over the previous model in that it no longer attempts to apply a single behavioral model to a complex behavior-set.

I suspect that zie would benefit by learning to model simpler abstract systems - "playing" with scientific analysis first before attempting the very difficult work of deducing the complex system of Prime social affectional interactions.

And once zie has a more robust scientific model, then it's possible to identify the philosophical elements and generally attach them to respective nodes in the interactions map, in a way that identifies the toxic nodes, and the beneficial nodes, as well as identifying the socially proscribed nodes by species. Recognizing when social proscription and social acclaim are at odds with toxicity and benefit can then make it more clear to society-at-large that there is injustice or actual harm.

Incidentally, the Hanijwhatsis (can't look up city name) tofyof laws were exceptionally good at identifying the problematic side of inequity of power. That set of nodes is especially toxic to a society and to its members.

And finally ... we seem to be focussing more on the return to the travelling, and the Vacation. Where does this all fit in the story of the Rassimel Prince and his stolen body?]

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[World Tree is a skill-based system. I don't track skills for Sythyry characters though. Sythyry did get social-knowledge sorts of skills, both for that episode and for travelling and seeing lots of different places. Other characters got similar amounts of experience. Sythyry had a higher skill level in most topics than most of the other characters, and required experience is quadratic in level, so zie didn't get as many skill points as others. -bb]

This bit of Inconnu's adventurous life took a day or two on the way back to Barency. Saza is still at work developing the proper rituals.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

[Ah, I see... and I knew it was a skills system, but it's still an xp-scaling system, which is still the problem (in my mind anyway;) ... It's not the quantity, but the quality, of any given experience, that determines whether it contributes to a skill. And that's rather hard to model in a game, so falling back to a quantitative model is at least "fair" for any given situation.]