Activate my galldang account already.

Signed up fer Wolf Quest--figgered I oughtta at least try it out. And now they say it may take a few hours to a few days to activate my account.
Why can't you guys just do click-activated account codes like everyone else and let me get playing already?
Anyways.
More random character blather.

*yawn* Oookay then, so fer a while I been wanting to get into older characters. Because there's more to life than sixteen to twenty-two year olds, though teen fiction would have you believe otherwise.
So I have decided to make a huge ginormous leap in my maturity as a writer and make my newest character a THIRTY YEAR OLD. FUCK YEAH. A WHOLE DECADE OLDER THAN MY STARTING POKEMON USUALLY IS. WHOO!

So for those heads that my pokemon joke thing zoomed right over, don't feel bad. I'm pretty sure I'm not too sure I get it either. What I think I'm trying to say is that usually I have my characters and their stories start in their teens and early early twenties at the latest. Which is pretty much what EVERYONE does. Get it? Starting pokemon? Because it's the pokemon you start with? At the beginning of yer pokemon journey?
I'm still not entirely sure that makes sense. I think I'm pushing it with that one.

ANYWAYS.
Uh. I still haven't quite figgered out his name, but for now, we'll call him...Tulio. Because Tulio is an amazing name.
He's getting to his mid-thirties and has long, wavy brown hair and...I dunno. Vaguely violet-blue eyes. Personally I think the thirties tends to be the prime of someone's life--dammit this lamp keeps wobbling and it is /irritating./ Let's see if that--yeah I think that helped. Okay. Like I was saying. Thirties. Someone's prime. Because it's that point where you're (I think) getting the serious hang of life. You 're experienced and know how to handle situations, but you're still young enough to have that youthful vitality. Drama isn't such a big deal anymore as you've matured, and you're learning to appreciate the little things while still being young enough to get out there and live.
However, for Tulio(I need to change his name. I know I already have a Tulio somewhere. Howsabout...Elwend. I like that) for Elwend, the mid-thirties is past his prime. This is because he's a prostitute, and he's starting to get wrinkles.
I know I have too many prostitute dudes. I don't think YOU guys know how many. But like...five? Don't worry, I'm going to downsize. Ninety percent of the time their stories never amount to anything and they fade away, so don't worry about it.
Elwend is still young, healthy, and beautiful, but he's starting to get that aged look. And in a huge city, fresh meat is always at the ready, so there isn't much reason for the brothel to hang onto him any longer. He's good friends with the matron, and there are some customers that find his slightly aged appearance charming, so the matron says she'll let him stay until those customers run out(he gets beyond charmingly aged.) But she's giving him a clear heads-up--start looking for another source of income.
Elwend has done this for his entire life, having been born and raised in the brothel, which is pretty sad. He doesn't know how to do anything else and he feels he's beyond being able to learn how to do anything else. As he loses his smooth skin and flawless beauty, he feels older than he actually is and depressed. Elwend basically begins to mentally prepare himself to die in the streets after he's kicked out of the brothel.
On what Elwend knows it one of his last days, he finds a strange animal out in back of the brothel. It's a beast unlike any he has ever seen--and beyond, as Elwend soon discovers when it starts talking to him.
The animal is what those few that know of it call a Thylacus gargantus, or giant Tasmanian tiger(which doesn't actually exist. I made it up. It's very similar to a Tasmanian tiger, just much bigger, with some other tweaks to it). It's a creature thought to be long extinct, yet there are small numbers of them surviving on the other side of Zhatica(the world this takes place in). These animals are a race of intelligent beasts, but are dying out as they are forced to survive in a habitat not meant for them.
This creature, Baragas, is not interested in the plight of his species, though. He is old, and weakening. When Elwend finds him, the beast is half dead as it is from a fight with a large pack of wild dogs. Baragas is concerned only with his daughter, who was captured some years ago and sold to a travelling freak show. Baragas is desperate to find her before he dies and see her safely back to their home beyond the edge of the green world.
He beseeches Elwend to help him, hoping Elwend will understand what it's like to feel useless, to feel old. Elwend is basically expecting his life to end soon anyway, so he figures he may as well end it with an act of kindness. He agrees to accompany Baragas and help him, to be the animal's eyes and ears among the human beings he must avoid.
Elwend doesn't tell anyone he's leaving. He just ups and goes.
Beyond that I don't know details of his story. He and Baragas find the daughter, called Samzaris, and leave the city. Their journey spans a few years and a war. During this time, Elwend finds something to live for--he begins to hope that, beyond the city that knew his past, having somehow escaped a life he'd never even meant to leave, he will find love. And he searches for it.
Elwend knows what full-blown love is supposed to look like, but he's not certain about how to find it or recognize it in its earlier stages. Because of this his initial attempts at it aren't too successful. He and the beasts take up in a caravan of players, and he tells them that Baragas and Samzaris are just exotic wolves, and quite tame. Sammy isn't too happy about playing tame, but she goes along with it. Elwend thinks he and the star player, a younger woman known as Durram, are falling in love as time passes. He certainly feels like he loves her. But he begins to notice things--she doesn't linger in bed with him before or after intimacy, she doesn't show her affection for him in front of others, and when he tries to show how he feels about her, she looks at him funny like he's doing something ridiculously out of place. When Durram suggests they engage a few others in sex for fun, Elwend protests(he's done it before, but he wants the ideal love life--exclusive), and she lays it out for him plain as day--he's not a lover, he's a fun way to kill time.
Elwend hasn't really been dumped before(though you can't really call it getting dumped, since he wasn't in a relationship to begin with, though he thought it was--hell, it's too complicated to have a singular term for itself)and he's badly hurt and confused. Baragas feels sorry for him, though Sammy just thinks he's another idiot human. However, Baragas is sort of in charge of their travelling plans, so he insists they move on and leave the caravan behind. Elwend agrees readily, and so they do, though Sammy sort of secretly misses the younger children that held her in awe and would crawl all over her.
After that, they move onto a city and try to figure out how they're going to get over the edge of Zhatica to its other side(Zhatica is like a coin with two faces. It's tilted, so one side is always facing the sun, and the other is always in darkness.) Most of Zhatica doesn't even believe there is another side--they think you just fall off if you cross over the edge(Zhatica's principal of gravity is like Earth's--a core at the center of it creates its gravity field, so if you walked over the edge, your feet would still stick to the ground.) However, there are a few explorers that have gone over and brought back some neat shit, and a whole secret black market has developed specializing in other-side things--the other side is mainly lit up by dozens of volcanoes, so it's extremely rich in minerals, and exotic slaves--there are whole different races on the other side, and having one or two enslaved iskeor is a mark of extreme wealth and status.
So Elwend and Baragas and Samzaris take up with a skyrate crew--aeroships are the only way to get over to the other side, because the edge of Zhatica is surrounded by a massive skirt of swirling clouds, and right near the edge, they're all thunderstorms and hurricanes. The edge of Zhatica is lost in zero visibility to anyone on the ground, so the only way to get there is fly out past the storms, dive straight down into the miles of clouds--filled with flying creatures, many of which can and will eat dinky aeroships on purpose or by accident--and hope you'll pop out on the other side.
The skyrates Elwend and Baragas and Sammy take up with are very unsavoury. A traditional piratey crew. During their journey, one of the crew recognizes Sammy and her dad for what they are and tells the pirate captain. They decide to take Elwend and sell him into slavery and sell the beasties as exotic pets.
But shit happens, like a storm or something, and wow I lied when I said I didn't know details. The skyrates have to crash land on one of the many hundreds of random rocks in orbit around Zhatica in its ocean of clouds, but of course they crash on the ONE DAMN ROCK inhabited by crazy primitives that worship the giant flying serpent god, which isn't really a god, it's an amphitheatre that requires a sacrifice every month.
LUCKILY FOR ELWEND, when they crash, in the confusion he and the beasties manage to slip away BUT OF COURSE get caught by the islanders. He's not sure what's going on for a long long time and the beasties are kept subdued by these shaman guys. They keep him shut up in this temple with nothing but water, something like bread, and a lot of hallucinogenic incense constantly burning. Elwend tries to keep clear of it, but eventually breathes enough in to start going loopy. Then he sees the narrative carvings on the temple walls, which detail the process of the sacrifice, and he puts two and two together and gets kermudgeon, because that's what happens when you're stuck in a primitive remote island temple tripping on incense.
Eventually they take him out and tie him to a big stone rock and wait for the amphitheatre to come and eat him. The pure air and bits of skeletons lying around sober El up relatively quickly and he remembers the temple carvings as a sort of half-dream, realizing that, though he doesn't remember how he knows, he does know that he's pretty sure a giant flying snake is going to come and eat him.
The beasties choose now to come out of hiding. They try and free him and while they do they explain that they lured the natives away to the skyrate crew that's still there and they feel there's a reasonable chnace of the two groups killing each other right about now. A blunderbuss goes off in the distance and now they're pretty sure they're killing each other right about now.
I've decided that El is tied up with chains because the beasties can't get him free and he's almost wishing the skyrates would come and get him right now.
LUCKILY AGAIN FOR ELWEND there is a whole nother crew of skyrates led by Captain Ninetails, a woman so named because her choice weapon is a cat-of-nines whip. She's a pretty hardcore woman. Anyways, she and her crew have been getting into the exotic end of the black market and amphitheatre scales are pretty popular right about now. So she and her crew have been hunting the amphitheatre mother lode, which also happens to be the islanders' god snake thing. Right as the amphitheatre's coming in to eat its usual sacrifice(which it doesn't actually need anymore cause it's friggin huge but it's a tasty snack and very reliable, so it always takes a brief detour in its usual migratory patterns, which is kind of ironic because if the islanders stopped chaining people up there it would probably stop coming by and they'd have nothing to worry about anymore) the skyrates swoop in and start shooting it down. The scout in the crow's nest spies El and tells the captain and the captain comes swooping down and rescues the poor bugger, and his beasties with him.
They throw him and Sammy and Baragus in the brig just to keep them out of the way during the hunting and they lure their prey into a massive net hanging around these floating rocks and zippity zay, they kill it, harvest it's scales(they have a bunch of other crews with them to help that were laying in wait around the net)and it's good times all round.
But Ninetales doesn't want to stop there. The amphitheatre as it turns out is female and she wants to find its nest--they have a zoologist on board, who came along to help them track the amphitheatre, and she's able to tell them that the snakey just gave birth. Ninetales wants the eggs to sell. In the temple, after they clear out the incense so people don't get high and walk off the edge of the island and DIE, they find carvings showing the snakey's nest lying on the other side of Zhatica.
So El and the beasties get a ride after all. Along the way El and the captain get friendly--she's in her thirties herself and realistic so she has no problem with his age--and along the way El starts talking about staying with the captain.
Ninetales turns out to be this weirdly religious person though--not like normal religious, weird religious. She has some weird ideas about commitment. For instance, she's unhappy about El's past, which he tells her about in the beginning when she asks about his and the beasties' story. Ninetales basically doesn't want to have a serious relationship with a whore because she feels it means he will never truly belong to her. But it's okay, to her, to have a fling with him. Yeah, Ninetales's logic is kind of loopy.
So El gets rejected again. So he does something stupid and gets off with the beasties.
El is now in completely uncharted territory, in a part of the world so different it might as well be its own universe. He's surrounded by pockets of poisonous air, active volcanoes, and animals that are constantly hungry.
Yes. Love makes fools of us all. Especially the scorned. Ninetales goes on to find her eggs, and he travels with the beasties to help them find their pack.
When El gets sick after a geyser of poisonous gas nails him, the beasties, who care about him after everything they've been through, track down a tribe of iskeor and entrust him to them. They move on to find their pack and leave El with a goodbye passed on through word of mouth from his iskeor caretakers.
El is hurt that his only friends in the world left him with strangers, and bitter even though he knows they're anxious to get home to their family. By now El is entering his late thirties and is further embittered by his fading beauty. He practically throws himself at the chief of the tribe, and when she rejects him, he goes after her daughter, who isn't seduced herself, but enjoys having a little fun with a member of a race her people have never seen before. To her, El has exotic appeal.
The chief is pissed, partially because of jealousy, partially because her daughter is also betrothed, so she's pissed at her daughter for being unfaithful, but instead takes it out on El. She sends him off with an old crone on something like a pack horse. She says she's sending him to a place where the ships will find him, though usually when they send people off like this they're expecting them to die.
El makes it to the skyrate port, but the crone dies shortly after they arrive. Her body is tossed on a garbage heap. El is terrified of the same thing happening to him, and it's strange to him that at the beginning of his journey he was practically nonchalant about it. Coming within an inch of being devoured alive can really get the heart kicking, I guess. Make you appreciate yer life and all that.
He needs money to get home and does a little whoring around. It's not too hard because this place is so desperate people will take anything they can get. He even sleeps with a survivor of the first skyrate crew he and the beasties sailed with. She sort of apologizes for trying to sell him into slavery--her own close call on the island lost her a leg and gave her some new vitality herself. El sort of waves it off, past caring about much of anything now. All he wants is to go home, wherever that is. He's thinking about applying to work at a kitchen washing dishes. After everything he's been through, he hasn't learned much about jobs, but at least he's not just giving up anymore. El doesn't know what he wants but he does know he's not ready to die, not yet.
El manages to pay for passage. The night before he leaves, Samzaris tracks him down. She's sporting a few new scars. She hasn't been able to go back to her old life--she can't just go back to barely surviving on scrawny prey and chewing dead trees for moisture when the water hole goes dry. Her time in the world has made her thirsty for travel. So she sneaks into the cargo hold and goes with him.
Back on the other side, El and Sammy stop off in a city for a while. Sam is eager to travel, but El just wants a breather for a while. While sitting in a small tavern a woman comes up to him and asks him if he'd let her paint him.
Her name is Nerith. She's a fledgling artist, and already making a name for herself in the city. She's been commissioned by a few nobles and whatnot. She wants to paint El because he has a traveled, worldly look about him--a sort of sorrowful experienced look, and she's fascinated by it, desperate to capture it on canvas. El is in his thirty-eighth year now, and she's in her early twenties.
I suppose it's worth mentioning at this point that El is feminine like all my guys and all the women thus far have been pretty masculine. As per usual.
So El goes back to her studio. He asks why she's painting him and she promises that if she finishes her painting of him before nightfall, she'll tell him. She does, on both accounts. They have some wine and she pays him for his time. While he's there El sees an amulet on her neck, carved in the shape of a Tasmanian tiger. Nerith tells him that on her mother's side she's part foreigner, from a culture of people that believed the mega-tasmanians had divine powers, and worshipped them. They spend the rest of the night swapping stories, her telling him about legends, him telling her about his travels.
She wants to feature El in this really huge project she's working on. He stays the week with her, living with her in her studio, and she pays him each day, though he starts insisting she doesn't have to as she feeds him as well--and when he introduces her to Sammy, deciding she's trustworthy, she feeds Sammy too and is in total childlike awe. She loves Sammy, and begins this huge painting of him and Sam together.
Nerith is invited to this party and invites El to be her escort, but that night he gets sick and has to stay behind. She goes alone. El realized the day before he's really in love with her, even though it's only been a few days, and he's shying away from telling her after all the bad luck he's had and because he feels foolish about it.
But he decides while she's gone that night he's gonna tell her anyway. And then the next day he wakes up and she's not back, and he waits, and waits, and starts getting a really bad feeling.
He just stays there and waits, not sure what else to do, and then the landlady comes up--she met him the other day--and tells him the news.
Nerith and some other partygoers were touring the nobleman's house they were partying at and were shown some area that was under construction. A drunk wandered out on some dangerously unsteady scaffolding. Nerith tried to coax them off it, then went out herself to help them. As they reached safety, the platform gave way. Nerith shoved the drunk partyer off in time, but she fell several hundred feet. She died instantly when she hit the ground, her spine broken and skull shattered.
El doesn't know what to do. Grief-stricken, in shock, he just stays in the apartment. Days pass, and he knows some sick part of him is still waiting for Nerith to come back, to walk through the door and smile at him and show him the latest little bit of jewelry she thought he might like. She left her amulet there because she was worried she'd get drunk and lose it. El sleeps in her bed curled up, clasping it to his chest.
On the fourth day he still hasn't eaten anything. Sammy is disgusted with him and stalks off. While she's gone, a friend of Nerith's, a noblewoman, comes by to take Nerith's things--she doesn't want them getting sold off by the landlady.
She lets El keep the amulet and few pieces of Nerith's clothing, but he needs to leave. She lets him stay at her place. The noblewoman is married, and her husband isn't too happy about it, with good reason. The noblewoman argues with her husband a lot, and he walks out for a while one night. She goes to El with a bottle of wine. They get drunk, and he tries something with her, but after a little making out she decides she isn't willing to really cheat on her husband and leaves. She basically kicks him out after that.
And now El is back where he started. Useless, on the street, with nowhere to go. He still has Nerith's money, but he's given up on life again. Sam comes back fer him, unwilling to leave him behind--she knows he needs a good kick in the ass, she's just not sure how to kick humans in the ass when it's not literal. El feels even more despair now--he found what he wanted, but he lost it before he could have it.
War is on the country's horizon, and El finds himself caught up in a drafting sweep. He doesn't exactly resist--not much point. Sammy stays with him as the army gathers on the front and prepares itself. El is assigned to assist the golem-carver--a woman that carves bodyparts for golems out of wood and stone and such to build warbeasts. Her skill with the craft reminds El of Nerith's artistry, and he seeks comfort in the woman, though she isn't serious about things--but then again, neither is he.
I wanna wrap this up.
The people the country is warring against are headed in battle by necromancers and whatnot. A powerful necromancer takes a mega-Tasmanian tiger skeleton from a museum, grows flesh on it, and fills it with the soul of a person that had a beast-soul that could handle the body(sometimes a person themselves is more similar to an animal in spirit than they are a human being.)That soul turns out to be Nerith.
The country loses and the necromancers take over. Nerith recognizes El when the necromancer likes him and keeps him as one of her slaves. She wants to die--to finish her journey to the afterlife that was so rudely interrupted. The body is dying, very slowly, but very painfully, and Nerith knows she can't live life again anyway. She manages to reveal herself to El and when an insurgence topples the necromancer's short-lived reign of three years, Nerith's body is fatally wounded by them, even though she tried to help. El extremely reluctantly lets her die, and burns the body so that she is released from it and moves on.
He's early forties now I think. He and Sammy, both scarred deeper than ever, move on. El stays with the golem lady because he doesn't know what else to do and because he needs someone more than ever after Nerith. She finds out about Nerith after he "mentions" her at a somewhat poor time to do so. He explains and she's not mad at him for that time, but she realizes he's with her because he's needy. She takes advantage of him for it more and more often to the point she starts hitting him and he doesn't fight back.
One day she sends him to a market in a city to pick up parts for her golems. The war gave her a bit of name and she's got a steady business now. But while he's there he passes through the slavers' market and sees an owner beating on one of his slaves. She's something more than human, obviously much stronger than one, and hitched up to pull his cart full of something or other. He's torn her back open to the bone in places. El intervenes and buys her off the guy before the man can beat her to death. The man complains how he bought her a few months ago and hasn't been able to break her at all.
The woman is in her early thirties herself and there is a dark fire in her eyes that unsettles El. She has patches of scales on her body and half of her head, covered in them, has no hair. She has sawed-off horns on her head and a short tail. He takes her back to the golem woman, who smacks him around for wasting her money.
El and Sammy and the slave leave that night, El taking most of the golem woman's money.
They skip town and wander off into the desert. They run into a wizard who manages to release the (dragon-hybrid)slave's rune-sealed chains. The three move on.
The dragon lady tells El about herself and he tells her about himself and they befriend each other. The three keep moving and find themselves in a very small country on the edge of Zhatica, so small no one knows about it. It's actually made up by a collection of tribes that have their own kingdoms--one of them is the tribe Nerith's mother descended from. Feeling they're the only ones they can trust, El and them side with them. There's an uneasy peace between the kingdoms right now, though, so siding doesn't say much about anyone.
During this time El tries to help the dragon woman heal from her treatment by the human race and open up some. She gradually does. They develop feelings for each other. El begins to heal over the loss of Nerith, and his past bad luck with women. He trusts her now.
Then war breaks out for the second time in his life. The dragon woman, who has always felt without a home and without a place, feels the need to pay back the hospitality Nerith's tribe has shown them. El does not understand this, and begs her not to go to war--he will not go himself, as he has seen enough.
She can't write, but she sends him things. Clothes from ransacking the enemy, and jewelry, and little statues of their foes' deities. El doesn't believe in multiple gods himself, but he does like the pretty little carvings.
And then things stop coming. The war gets worse. El becomes miserable out of his mind with worry and fear. He's terrified of losing love again. Absolutely terrified.
And finally, the war is ending. The dragon woman comes home.
Without an arm.
Well, most of an arm. She has a shoulder and part of a bicep...and the freaky thing is that her arm is growing back.
Her dragon heritage is regenerating her body, slowly but surely, and the arm is covered in scales, tipped in claws. She is scarred after war and what she saw and did, but in the end, she is proud of having repaid her adopted country--she feels at home, but she is deeply saddened by the price paid.
And now she is afraid of El's reaction to what's happening with her body. She thinks he will be afraid. She is estranged from him because of this--if he's going to break things off, she wants to begin preparing herself to already be as detached as possible when it happens.
But El doesn't care. All he cares is that she's back. She came back. She's there. And he loves her. An arm is an arm to him. He finally manages to "convince" her of this when it's finally grown back, taking her to bed with him--starting with her arm.
Sammy stays with them as they marry, and then finally leaves herself. She is rested and ready to continue her journey--she is young and feels like it again, restless. Both are sad to see her go, but understanding.
I don't really know what happens after that. I think they keep dogs after Sammy leaves, because they miss that animal presence. Maybe they have kids.
Who knows. Que sera, sera.