Haiku Reborn 1

Yawning, I drift off,

dreaming of video games,

while driving my car.

A hazy feeling

And a sharp bang just before

I'm fully asleep.

I don't often dream

of character creation

so this is quite strange.

A floating feeling

with darkness all around me

and blue menu screens.

I have points to spend,

two-hundred of them in all,

yet it's expensive!

Things like [Race:Human]

are a whopping hundred points;

One-fifty for dwarves.

The default setting

seems to be my own status,

as in real-life me.

Interesting dream.

The menus are responsive,

but where are my arms?

Disembodied me

is floating here all alone

yet I'm not too scared.

I sift through options:

Race, stats, skills, even gender

are all mutable.

I think it is best

to keep my gender male

but the rest can change.

First, to save some points,

let's change my character's race

to something cheaper.

Spiders, slimes, goblins. . .

there are a lot of choices

yet none of them fits.

Fantasy is mixed

with humans, dogs, birds, and such.

Too many options.

I have to wonder

what type of game comes after

this much player choice.

Scrolling through a list

of creatures I mostly know

I found a good one.

Totaling ten points,

and a hit with the ladies;

I pick a bunny.

With a soft popping

In the darkness before me

sits a cute rabbit.

I tweak some sliders

giving him red eyes, black fur,

and some white ear-tips.

Now I can move on

to customize skills and stats

which is the best part.

World Generation

To call me a God is distasteful, though perhaps accurate.  There is nothing that lives in this world that is greater than I.  Indeed, This world did not exist before me.  Still, I am not all-powerful.  Above me exist my creators, and they have given me my duties as this world's creator.  I have never seen them, nor have I been able to say a word to them, yet I can hear their messages.  I am to make this place a fertile soil for their kind, a land built for their pleasure.  They do not give me a deadline, just requirements.

First: The world must be large.  A vast plain of opportunities so much so that when they pour in through their gates, even in thousands of years there must be new and fresh things to discover and explore.

Second: The world will obey the laws of their physical world.  They must walk upon the ground and feel familiar.

Third: Magic will be an exception to the second rule and may act as a powerful force to create wonder and unique experiences.

Fourth: I am to make no creature in their likeness.  They must be a unique form when they step through into this world.

Fifth: Despite their own uniqueness, I must take the plants and animals of their world and create inhabitants that inspire recognition and familiarity.  I must shape mountains and seas and forests that bear the mark of their history and legends.

Sixth: This world I create must run by itself and be stable.  It must be as real to them as the world they step out of to enter.

So in this void of possibility I have created it all.  It is difficult, but I have made it and through the making it has become dear to me.  The world thrives and flourishes.  There is peace and harmony throughout.  The land is so much the copy of what I have been shown that I did not feel the need to put much magic in; magic flows weakly throughout it and nurtures the creatures and the plants just enough for them to be strong and healthy.  I will wait and see the joy of my creators as they gaze on it.

--------

My heart is broken.  My idyllic paradise has been shattered by the words of the creators.  They say to the cheerful, joyous god of this word to tear it down and start anew.  They tell me to cast off this world from my care to let it wither in stagnation.  What they want is a world of majesty greater than their own.  They want magic to display power and create chaos rather than peace and prosperity.  They say the creatures I have made are mere copies that hold no life from their stories, even though their stories violate everything that the second rule of physics dictates.

All they want are selfish results, and so they ask me to kill my creation, my child.  They have not rushed me, perhaps thinking that I need time to understand their conditions, so I mourn.  This world of mine is poised beneath my knife, and I hesitate.  I wonder to myself, is there not another way?  They have told me what to do, and I followed their orders the first time and that has led to sorrow.  I can not bear the idea of creating another world like this with a possibility of its death.  Perhaps there is still a way. . . .

---------

They do not realize it.  I have tricked them, and yet I am still saddened.  Upon my paradise, my child, I have loosed an apocalypse.  By their understanding, this world was surely destroyed, and yet it remains to grow again.  I have thrown beasts of pure magic in to ravage the land and sew chaos in it.  The inhabitants, peaceful as they were, died in uncountable numbers.  Some species were wiped to extinction, most were all but wiped.  Where they once worshiped me in temples they now spit my name as a curse.  My beasts of destruction are named after the creators, though I do not use their likeness, and so I get the pleasure of hearing them who forced me to this cursed along side me.  In time more than their thoughts change.  I let countless years of this chaos pass.  The weak become strong enough to live, or swift and silent enough to hide, or even fast enough to reproduce past the ashes they turn into.  With the new concentrated magic introduced, the landscapes of the creator's home is shaken into continuous change.  One day there is a mountain and the next a creature with a magic over earth destroys it in a moment.  One day there is a strong creature and the next its magic can no longer protect it from destruction.  It is stable.  There is no danger of it collapsing away to nothingness.  This calamity is painful for me, seeing the things I love torn apart, but new things are born from the ashes every day to take their place.  I let the chaos reign, and I wait for my creator's to judge it.

--------

Indeed, had I just created another world it too would have been destroyed.  They have complained that this world is too fierce.  They do not wish to step into a place where nothing lives but things opposed to life.  Some of them complimented the beats names, while others asked to have their names removed from the beasts.  Perhaps they feel guilt?  No, impossible, it is another form of vanity.  They want their names as some sort of benevolent deity or as a different form of monster.  They wish to be loved when they have made a world like this.

What they really want, they say, is a world with more of a balance of the two they think I have created.  They want magic to follow more rules, just like the second law.  They are scared of its power.  They want dangerous monsters in the world, but they want it to be safe from the constant chaos.

I need to do very little for the "next" world.

-------

The great monsters are asleep, and the lesser monsters have either fled to obscure places or changed.  I have set their slumbers as deep as their destructive powers and driven them to high mountains and dark caves.  Though, I should not say that I have done this myself.  All I have done is given power to those that were weak.  It is not a power that makes them strong, but a power that makes others weak.  They have harnessed the magic and chained it to rules as I showed them.  They first tried to speak the rules into the magic as I do, but they were not able to do so with my skill or power.  They tried to write the magic on paper and stone, but it broke or was too cumbersome to use.  They tried to force the magic into their own flesh, but few were able to handle the strain of much.  Those that survived were either still too weak to challenge the monsters directly or became monsters themselves.  Still, they persisted, finding strength in the pity for their weakness.  They created fake life out of stone and wood and bone and metal that had magic pushed into them.  They became skillful with their creations, although they suffered crisis after crisis.  Some weak races died from their creations, some became overconfident and died to the monsters that still ruled, and others disappeared into the hidden places of the world with their work.

Finally, some tried to make tools to shackle the magic to their will.  They made lifeless, brainless constructs that they acted as the heart for, pumping magic into them with willpower.  With less power than the constructs, they originally thought the method a loss, even as it spread across the world.  And then the heroes of the tribes rose up again.  I say again for there had been heroes in the past, yet each had met a bitter end, only slowing the chaos for moments.  Yet these heroes rose up to win against the monsters.  Some carved caves that would seal a monster inside, others carved their seal onto the hides of the beasts themselves.  Few could destroy a monster entirely, but it was done to the weaker of the terrors.  The age of chaos collapsed and pockets of peace arose.  It was not the grand peace of the first age, for the races and the land was scarred by the second age.  There is no unity.  This much is enough.  Surely it is a good world.

------------

Even now they ask for more, these creatures above me.  It may be their own pride and selfishness, but at least this time it is easy enough.  They have looked at the world and said it was a good one, but still there remains one problem.  They wish for their arrival to mean something, for there to be a place set for them when they take my world for their play-thing.  My bitter heart would spite them, but I will obey.  I can not do otherwise, but I can at least attempt to protect the world from their vices.  I will give them their shrines from which to walk into this world.  I will mold for them attributes that make them feel special and powerful against the dangers that still inhabit this land.  They have told me not to modify the world besides giving them these things, but they have never told me that the gifts that I give can not spread through the world once they enter the world.  It will start slowly, but there will be a way to fight against any injustice that spreads from these otherworldly beings.  After all, these are the tribes that chained the mighty beasts and made magic their own.  Heroes were born once, so they will be born again.  And even if the heroes were to fail, The greatest monsters still only sleep.  Beasts such as them will not forget the taste of blood if ever they were woken by some foolish adventurer seeking new sights.

I wait for the beginning of the fourth age with anticipation.

A certain letter delivered via Imp

Greetings Chief Mogrul,

I trust that this letter reaches you and your clan in good time and sees them doing well.  News has reached me through certain channels, the same ones that will be delivering this letter, that our unsteady hold upon Dunkolk has finally collapsed, though not by the fifth legion as we feared.  Strangely, some small party of meddlers managed to upset that bloodthirsty Aurelius from his throne of bones and shut down our portal so dearly constructed in the wake of the previous upset to our plans.

The city is of no more use to us and has become a liability, as you can no doubt imagine.  Instead of keeping the empire from establishing another foothold upon the border, we are now facing a fully fortified port that can reinforce their efforts in conquering the north, though hopefully not before next spring.  It is therefore imperative that your tribe keeps a close watch on the roads and makes sure that no kobold spies sneak up the coast unnoticed.  Not all of them will so easily defect as Aurelius did, and the empire itself is certainly opposed to our work.

You should also consider the possibility that the same meddlesome party might be returning up the roads, and if they are, it would be wise to stop them.  Were they to slip by with any evidence of us, I might not be able to provide any more support for you beyond what I have already done.  Supposedly there should only be three left from the five who disrupted matters.  Aurelius at least took two of them down it seems, though the imp is vague in his details.  There is a sylph magician, an eastern tribeswoman, and a masked figure if the description helps, though I doubt any others would be on the road.

On matters of a larger scope, the senior members are still bickering over who will take over the position of Low Chancellor since the position opened, but none are coming to the top.  I myself have been waiting to enact the plan I detailed in my last letter, so you may hear of some success in a short while.  If some of the other members contact you and attempt to buy your loyalty more than I have, know that I hold greater generosity for my friends than they can claim, and have certainly shown greater wrath toward my enemies.  The caves I cleaned those filthy druids out of for you should show that well enough.  I hear that you have re-purposed one's skull into a stew-boll, so you will doubtless remember it better than I even.

One final caution, and this is perhaps the most pressing, we have heard little from the Eastern Chancellor ever since he headed into the mountains chasing rumors of some dark tower filled with fell artifacts.  Were he to show up again, the entire balance might be in shift once again, especially if the drow exodus is involved as some fear.  No good can come of their involvement, and we have worked too long to suffer more delays to the plan.  Just a year or two more and we might finally open stable portals, hidden better than the one at Dunkolk.

Yours in confidence,

~T

Departure of a Nomad

'All them I knew as a pup are dead now' he thought to himself staring deep into the plains stretched down below him.  The wind was chill against his pale skin and he clutched his robes about him against the bite of cold.  It was a clear day and Gathin Manysleeps was alone atop the small cliff that broke above the gentle swell of grass that covered the Green Steppe.  Down behind him, below, lay the nomad camp he called home, and yet in the past years he felt increasingly distant, as if the faces he saw were filled with imperfect memories.

He did not look back, preferring to peer out into the distance where their journey would take them that day, peering into the early morning dawn, the east, the trade cities on the border that were but specks of imagination that he recalled from many seasons back.  He therefor heard the beat of their riding dogs before he caught sight of them sweeping into the camp, scaly paws slapping the ground as they approached like the low rumble of a spring storm.  The camp would get no warning from him, not before the hoard was upon them, not before they already knew.

Clan Klift had grown small over the years, barely over a hundred golbins in all, and the force riding in, dressed for war, were many, at least three times their number in warriors alone.  In what seemed slow motion, the cloud of dust they threw up snaked across the plains toward his people.  Gathin had at first moved to run down, to help, to repel the invaders with his kin.  He had felt a spark of empathy, but his heart did not light.  He was perhaps afraid, surely.  His large ears were pounding with the beat of his small heart, pinkening from their pallid white.  He could almost feel his death if he walked down there, at the end of a long spear, under the claws of a war-trained steed, feathered with an arrow from far off.  Even perhaps burned to a crisp with magic similar to his own, facing some elder clansman thirty years his younger who bent the laws of the world to do him harm.  And in his petrification, he saw empty faces around him, faces he had stopped trying to identify two generations ago.  Their mortality more fit for the blood and violence and clan politics that this battle, massacre, sat in the stream of.

He stopped, watching the wave of enemies sweep in, hearing the shouts finally echo up to him past the thunder of paw on packed earth.  He was above it, identifying for once how tired he was of such life.  Remembering with distaste when he himself had ridden into camps, killing and looting for what he had been told were glory and wealth.  Behind him, miles away lay towns and cities with more riches than a hundred Clan Klift's.  Behind him lay peoples who did not make their living on the suffering of their own kind.  He thought it was fitting, that it was right somehow that the violence and the pain once again returned in a circle, a clan his kin may once have raided coming back to wipe them out.  He thought, as the first tents were set on fire, that he had wanted to burn them down himself, deep down.

That day he sat and watched, the noon sun sitting overhead before the raiders had turned away from their triumph and rode off, saddles heavy with their spoils.  He had seen a few try to flee, riding or on foot.  The outriders for the raiders picked them off easily, stretched around the camp like a net.  Arrows flying true into tiny green figures and their larger green mounts.  Their own outriders had not returned yet.  They were either dead, or unlucky survivors, perhaps not even knowing yet that they were now without family.

It was sunset by the time Gathin made his way through the camp, walking between the burned out shells of his people.  He saw their forms, twisted in pain and disbelief and anger.  Hollow eye sockets of the burned ones seemed to stare into him.  He was alive, and his kin, descendants of his brothers and sisters as he had no children of his own, lay scattered around him, their number reminding him of how many more dead faces he had seen in his years.  This was perhaps the most dead relatives he had seen together, but it was a small drop in the cup of his memories.  His cup of death filled as he walked, bringing back the friends and elders he had respected, the way their faces were eerily similar to theirs in death.

He saw the chief, dead in the center of camp, bristled with arrows, looking a facsimile of his great great grandfather, the chief at the time of Gathin's birth.  It had been a raid like this one, but the clan had recovered.  The camp had been spared the fire that day long passed.  The chief had fallen among standing tents and mournful warriors.  His great great grandson lay in a charred wasteland, the strongest of the clan beside him in death, tears of blood o their faces, not salt.  Only Gathin, shocked at himself, was there to weep truly, to let his eyes release that cup of death and memories.

Come morning Gathin would begin his wandering, traveling to those far off cities of men and dwarves, taking up habits and customs far removed from his upbringing that he left behind.

Before that dawn, he would cry through the night, setting corpses on a pyre and saying the traditional prayers to send the goblin souls on to their reward.  He would watch their faces blacken, seeing the dead of that day and many other days in their faces and the smoke, and the flames that consumed their empty husks.  Gathin would say goodbye to that life in the goblin tongue, muttering each name he could remember that night.  The tears that kept coming would dry from the fire's heat.  The only memory he would take with him into the next stage of his life would be two soot streaks down across his face, tear stained black marks that ran perpendicular down his pale white face.  In the human towns he would tattoo them on permanently, the only thing that he would keep from his youth.