delightfully oaf-ful?
Feb. 7th, 2011 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xhesikaTons of excerpts in here, stuff that won't be posted on DA, but I think I may have posted a bit of one of the excerpts on a previous entry. I'm having a hard time making headway at this point, mostly because of the content, I can't seem to write one of the scenes without feeling sick, and although I do plan on omitting it from the final project (the chapters will jump from 49 to 51seamlessly and only someone paying close attention will notice), I do need to know what is said in order to make things work after March 0.
That being said, this is completely out of context, but heart-wrenching nonetheless:
"I’ll believe anything you tell me.”
“The sky is red.”
“And a beautiful shade.”
Playing around with the idea of Ambrosia, I've decided to push up Kamen finding the jar, and decided to actually show the discovery. Including a few bittersweet memories of Lillaine, and actually eating some of the poison himself (it isn't like it would effect him anyways.)
“It’s sweet, but not too sweet.” Artemis said with two fingers to her mouth, her eyes still searching the black waves. “It’s delicious, but disgusting at the same time. First it was stuck in my mouth, but then it moved down my throat, and I can feel it in my chest now. I feel heavy, like I’m stuck in a nightmare.” She looked at him, easily meeting his curious eyes, “What is that?”
Van Dean slowly shook his head, “I’ve never felt anything like that, I couldn’t say.”
Arrogant Kamen is someone I want to strangle a little, and I've been told others feel the same way, but it still feels good to give Van Dean a rival that he can't touch, especially with how things seem to be spiraling downwards. Artemis really seems to have become a pawn at this point in the story, and for all practical purposes she's not really doing anything except for going insane. To me this only seems to make the final action in book 1 more inevitable.
Whether there was time for this visit or not, Van Dean seemed to both anticipate it and not care, he kept a brisk pace through the halls and buttoned his coat as he walked. It wasn’t a place he was very familiar with, most of Q'ael Dan'il was still a maze to him, and the only place in the military wing that he had a good grasp of its location was Rei's office.
While the barracks themselves were in a separate wing entirely, the private rooms of higher military were quickly proving to be as hard to find as the rooms of the royal family, mostly due to the fact that they were vacant most of the week, Van Dean was almost positive Rei didn't know where his own room was.
He would have passed it over entirely had it not been for the occasional thump and rattle from the other side of one of the doors. Van Dean looked both ways down the hall before making a small knock on the door and the thump stopped.
"They don't put guards at your door?" Van Dean asked the man with the scar when he peeked out the door.
Kamen rolled his eyes and went to close the door before being stopped by Van Dean's foot, "Can I help you?"
"You could invite me in."
Kamen let the door go and went to sit back in his chair, picking up the small red ball that he had set onto it before being interrupted and continuing to throw it against the wall and let it bounce back to him, "There's water on the table, but if you touch it I'm going to throw it out afterwards."
Van Dean closed the door behind him and chuckled, "Don't you trust me?"
"Not as far as I could throw you." Kamen smirked, "Just like you don't trust me."
"You've given me too much reason not to." Van Dean smiled once Kamen met his gaze, "How was your first day of vacation?"
Kamen smirked, "They give most military personnel a day before any event to detox, get the drugs out of their system. Not High Generals, most of the time I'm swimming in rermanim."
Van Dean allowed himself a wide smile and found himself amused by Kamen’s unprofessional mood, "And you aren't now?"
"Sleep is the real drug, but you wouldn't know about that, would you?"
Van Dean reached out and snatched the ball out of the air, trying his best not to huff at the man sitting in the chair. “Why did you think I came here? To kill you?”
Kamen let out arrogant laugh, “You wouldn’t do anything that would harm her. You wouldn’t even send me away. I’m just a minor inconvenience at this point; all you can do is give me a vacation.”
Van Dean rolled his eyes and took a seat, "I'm glad you understand."
Kamen swallowed, "What about after March Zero? What then?"
"I'll kill you." Van Dean smiled, "She'll be too far away to ever know what happened to you."
Kamen sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest, "She's going to accept my offer before then." Van Dean took a deep breath and Kamen continued, "She wouldn't have before, but the closer we get to March Zero, the more she's going to start to really consider running away."
Van Dean slowly shook his head, "That's where you're wrong. Clovis loves Artemis too much already; she would never betray their trust."
Kamen gave Van Dean a hard glare, "Then I'll kidnap her."
Van Dean laughed, "You wouldn't. You hold your oaths too high. You'd sooner fall onto Necrosis than force her into something." He seemed to hum to himself, thoroughly amused by his own thoughts. "She would feel forced, and she'd beg and cry for you to leave her. You wouldn't be able to stand it."
Kamen crossed his arms over his chest and watched Van Dean inspect the small red ball in his hands. He thought over what had been said for a few seconds and then grimaced with a slow shake of his head; he’d seen Artemis beg Van Dean too many times and felt sickened at the thought of her feeling like she had to do the same with him. “I would.” He had Van Dean’s attention now, and the violet-eyed man looked at him quickly, “If it would save her from you, I would throw her over my shoulder and block everything out.” Kamen swallowed, “In fact, I think I might do that tonight.”
Van Dean let out a small hum, “Impossible, I’m leaving from here to meet her at the docks. My parents have been pestering me to bring her for a visit.” He stood from the chair, grimacing at it as if it were sub-par. “So I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else to play chess with all night.”
Kamen looked up at him slowly without raising his head, “You’re still playing around with her head?”
“That information I acquired from Pandomé,” He straightened out his coat and cuffs, the ball still in his hand. “I apologize for your father that is all. But hear me now; if you continue to pester Artemis about running away I’ll eat your heart.”
Van Dean tossed the ball to Kamen, using such force that should have broken bones. Kamen instead caught it without a second thought and gave him a small smirk and making a single remark before continuing to bounce the ball against the wall, “Be nice.”
Somehow it seems like the roles of Kamen and Rei have become a little jumbled, once Kamen's got no reason to play nice with Van Dean he reverts to the Kamen from the original story, the guy playing hello kitty island adventure on a stake-out and panicking while sliding through Gorgosa on a rope into a death-march (jesus, were the original shenanigans really this wacky?). It works though, he melds perfectly with his Victor Covington persona, and becomes a little more gritty than the oath-bound tragic hero.
He had never known Q'ael Dan'il to be so boring, and quickly realized how much he had taken for granted Artemis' spontaneous "adventures", and although several of their exploits came to mind, none of them seemed to be quite as much fun alone. It would seem that the only thing worth doing was to catch up on the past few years of lost sleep.
Kamen let himself fall backwards onto the bed, High General's quarters were a little more elaborate than the rest of the white-walled barracks, and he couldn’t remember a time when he had actually sat down to inspect the ceiling. He stared at the picture of a green tower and made a face at its grotesque thorns, it could almost be mistaken for a plant if not for the window and strange spiral moldings on the roof. After a few moments of looking around the tower at the other pictures, he seemed to give up on deciphering the story, the myths of Buenae were not something he knew much about outside of the Culling of Ivan, or Celeste's emergence from the forest called Jannah.
Van Dean undoubtedly wanted him to stay put, but spending a week in one room was just simply not something Kamen would agree to. "Vacation, not solitary confinement, right?" He said to himself with a small grin.
After stuffing Artemis' holodex into his pocket he followed it with his hands, and carrying the same mischievous grin, he pushed open the door stopping only grab his gloves before closing it behind him.
Kamen glanced down the hall both ways, normally he would have gone left to get to Rei's office, but he was quite certain that Van Dean had meant for him to stay put, and if Pandomé happened to be lurking he could be certain that she would waste no time in outing him.
He turned right, and meandered idly to the end of the corridor and the around the corner to a spot that he had inspected only on paper, said paper however, had not been thorough enough to prepare him for what the barrier would be at this set of hash marks. The large painting upon the wall bore a plaque that clearly stated "Eeleanor the Great", but at first sight Kamen could have sworn that he was being met by a picture of Artemis. Eeleanor stood tall, clad in armor he had seen once before on the man in the painting now hanging in Rei's office.
After looking both ways down the hall and making sure that he was the only one within the vicinity, he ran his fingers along the side of the painting and pulled out on the small gold latch that had been folded down. He made a small half-smile to the portrait before pulling on it and disappearing into the passage behind it.
Finding Rei's office was no great feat, with the light from the holodex, and a photographic memory it was only moments before Kamen found himself with the holodex positioned strategically in his mouth, pushing up on the door with the discreetly positioned Clovinian royal seal that Kamen had seen countless times on the collar of Rei.
Once inside Rei's office he brushed the dust off of his shoulders and made a face at the vacancy before testing out the chair behind the desk. It was comfy enough, and he immediately understood why everyone who entered the room eyed it. Of course more interesting than the chair was the stack of newspapers on the floor that reached up to just below the arm, and on a whim Kamen picked one up, unable to remember the last time that he had actually sat down to read the newspaper.
Rei seemed frozen in the doorway.
"I'm not really "delightfully oaf-ful", am I? Is that even a word?" Kamen scowled at the paper.
Rei quickly shut the door, "How did you get in here?"
"The passages." He squinted at the paper, "Really though, they make me sound like some kind of jolly human giant."
Rei snorted, "Have you looked in a mirror lately?"
Kamen scratched the five o'clock shadow on his chin, "I know, I need to shave."
"Well, yes, but not that." Rei rolled his eyes, "Give a High General a vacation and they have nothing better to do than infiltrate their boss' office and sit in my big comfy chair." He shook his head, “You guys are stalkers.”
“You guys?” Kamen looked back at his newspaper, "Besides you let Artemis sit here all the time. Hey, did you know they're opening a tea garden just south of the city? It's going to be a controlled climate."
"Great, go there and give me my chair."
Kamen looked at Rei for a few seconds before reaching into the bottom drawer on the right and pulling out a pink sticky sweet dumpling wrapped in plastic before standing up and going to lean by the window to eat it.
"I was wondering where all my chocolate went to." Rei moaned.
"The sauce in the cherry cordials was really good; it had a little bit of a bite though."
"That was liquor." Rei said flatly.
Kamen paused mid-bite on the dumpling and then shrugged, "Where do you get chocolate like that?"
Rei glared at him, "A gift from Alladair Udit."
Kamen swallowed slowly, "Send him my regards."
Rei sighed and slumped into his chair, quickly inspecting his desk for anything else that Kamen might have gotten into, "Why don't you take a mechafly and go see the city? When was the last time you did something like that?"
Go to the city, by himself? Kamen shrugged, he had never gone to the city alone, and the thought of doing so now left a small pang in his chest. However the idea of stealing a mechafly for a joyride was slightly appealing.
That being said, this is completely out of context, but heart-wrenching nonetheless:
"I’ll believe anything you tell me.”
“The sky is red.”
“And a beautiful shade.”
Playing around with the idea of Ambrosia, I've decided to push up Kamen finding the jar, and decided to actually show the discovery. Including a few bittersweet memories of Lillaine, and actually eating some of the poison himself (it isn't like it would effect him anyways.)
“It’s sweet, but not too sweet.” Artemis said with two fingers to her mouth, her eyes still searching the black waves. “It’s delicious, but disgusting at the same time. First it was stuck in my mouth, but then it moved down my throat, and I can feel it in my chest now. I feel heavy, like I’m stuck in a nightmare.” She looked at him, easily meeting his curious eyes, “What is that?”
Van Dean slowly shook his head, “I’ve never felt anything like that, I couldn’t say.”
Arrogant Kamen is someone I want to strangle a little, and I've been told others feel the same way, but it still feels good to give Van Dean a rival that he can't touch, especially with how things seem to be spiraling downwards. Artemis really seems to have become a pawn at this point in the story, and for all practical purposes she's not really doing anything except for going insane. To me this only seems to make the final action in book 1 more inevitable.
Whether there was time for this visit or not, Van Dean seemed to both anticipate it and not care, he kept a brisk pace through the halls and buttoned his coat as he walked. It wasn’t a place he was very familiar with, most of Q'ael Dan'il was still a maze to him, and the only place in the military wing that he had a good grasp of its location was Rei's office.
While the barracks themselves were in a separate wing entirely, the private rooms of higher military were quickly proving to be as hard to find as the rooms of the royal family, mostly due to the fact that they were vacant most of the week, Van Dean was almost positive Rei didn't know where his own room was.
He would have passed it over entirely had it not been for the occasional thump and rattle from the other side of one of the doors. Van Dean looked both ways down the hall before making a small knock on the door and the thump stopped.
"They don't put guards at your door?" Van Dean asked the man with the scar when he peeked out the door.
Kamen rolled his eyes and went to close the door before being stopped by Van Dean's foot, "Can I help you?"
"You could invite me in."
Kamen let the door go and went to sit back in his chair, picking up the small red ball that he had set onto it before being interrupted and continuing to throw it against the wall and let it bounce back to him, "There's water on the table, but if you touch it I'm going to throw it out afterwards."
Van Dean closed the door behind him and chuckled, "Don't you trust me?"
"Not as far as I could throw you." Kamen smirked, "Just like you don't trust me."
"You've given me too much reason not to." Van Dean smiled once Kamen met his gaze, "How was your first day of vacation?"
Kamen smirked, "They give most military personnel a day before any event to detox, get the drugs out of their system. Not High Generals, most of the time I'm swimming in rermanim."
Van Dean allowed himself a wide smile and found himself amused by Kamen’s unprofessional mood, "And you aren't now?"
"Sleep is the real drug, but you wouldn't know about that, would you?"
Van Dean reached out and snatched the ball out of the air, trying his best not to huff at the man sitting in the chair. “Why did you think I came here? To kill you?”
Kamen let out arrogant laugh, “You wouldn’t do anything that would harm her. You wouldn’t even send me away. I’m just a minor inconvenience at this point; all you can do is give me a vacation.”
Van Dean rolled his eyes and took a seat, "I'm glad you understand."
Kamen swallowed, "What about after March Zero? What then?"
"I'll kill you." Van Dean smiled, "She'll be too far away to ever know what happened to you."
Kamen sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest, "She's going to accept my offer before then." Van Dean took a deep breath and Kamen continued, "She wouldn't have before, but the closer we get to March Zero, the more she's going to start to really consider running away."
Van Dean slowly shook his head, "That's where you're wrong. Clovis loves Artemis too much already; she would never betray their trust."
Kamen gave Van Dean a hard glare, "Then I'll kidnap her."
Van Dean laughed, "You wouldn't. You hold your oaths too high. You'd sooner fall onto Necrosis than force her into something." He seemed to hum to himself, thoroughly amused by his own thoughts. "She would feel forced, and she'd beg and cry for you to leave her. You wouldn't be able to stand it."
Kamen crossed his arms over his chest and watched Van Dean inspect the small red ball in his hands. He thought over what had been said for a few seconds and then grimaced with a slow shake of his head; he’d seen Artemis beg Van Dean too many times and felt sickened at the thought of her feeling like she had to do the same with him. “I would.” He had Van Dean’s attention now, and the violet-eyed man looked at him quickly, “If it would save her from you, I would throw her over my shoulder and block everything out.” Kamen swallowed, “In fact, I think I might do that tonight.”
Van Dean let out a small hum, “Impossible, I’m leaving from here to meet her at the docks. My parents have been pestering me to bring her for a visit.” He stood from the chair, grimacing at it as if it were sub-par. “So I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else to play chess with all night.”
Kamen looked up at him slowly without raising his head, “You’re still playing around with her head?”
“That information I acquired from Pandomé,” He straightened out his coat and cuffs, the ball still in his hand. “I apologize for your father that is all. But hear me now; if you continue to pester Artemis about running away I’ll eat your heart.”
Van Dean tossed the ball to Kamen, using such force that should have broken bones. Kamen instead caught it without a second thought and gave him a small smirk and making a single remark before continuing to bounce the ball against the wall, “Be nice.”
Somehow it seems like the roles of Kamen and Rei have become a little jumbled, once Kamen's got no reason to play nice with Van Dean he reverts to the Kamen from the original story, the guy playing hello kitty island adventure on a stake-out and panicking while sliding through Gorgosa on a rope into a death-march (jesus, were the original shenanigans really this wacky?). It works though, he melds perfectly with his Victor Covington persona, and becomes a little more gritty than the oath-bound tragic hero.
He had never known Q'ael Dan'il to be so boring, and quickly realized how much he had taken for granted Artemis' spontaneous "adventures", and although several of their exploits came to mind, none of them seemed to be quite as much fun alone. It would seem that the only thing worth doing was to catch up on the past few years of lost sleep.
Kamen let himself fall backwards onto the bed, High General's quarters were a little more elaborate than the rest of the white-walled barracks, and he couldn’t remember a time when he had actually sat down to inspect the ceiling. He stared at the picture of a green tower and made a face at its grotesque thorns, it could almost be mistaken for a plant if not for the window and strange spiral moldings on the roof. After a few moments of looking around the tower at the other pictures, he seemed to give up on deciphering the story, the myths of Buenae were not something he knew much about outside of the Culling of Ivan, or Celeste's emergence from the forest called Jannah.
Van Dean undoubtedly wanted him to stay put, but spending a week in one room was just simply not something Kamen would agree to. "Vacation, not solitary confinement, right?" He said to himself with a small grin.
After stuffing Artemis' holodex into his pocket he followed it with his hands, and carrying the same mischievous grin, he pushed open the door stopping only grab his gloves before closing it behind him.
Kamen glanced down the hall both ways, normally he would have gone left to get to Rei's office, but he was quite certain that Van Dean had meant for him to stay put, and if Pandomé happened to be lurking he could be certain that she would waste no time in outing him.
He turned right, and meandered idly to the end of the corridor and the around the corner to a spot that he had inspected only on paper, said paper however, had not been thorough enough to prepare him for what the barrier would be at this set of hash marks. The large painting upon the wall bore a plaque that clearly stated "Eeleanor the Great", but at first sight Kamen could have sworn that he was being met by a picture of Artemis. Eeleanor stood tall, clad in armor he had seen once before on the man in the painting now hanging in Rei's office.
After looking both ways down the hall and making sure that he was the only one within the vicinity, he ran his fingers along the side of the painting and pulled out on the small gold latch that had been folded down. He made a small half-smile to the portrait before pulling on it and disappearing into the passage behind it.
Finding Rei's office was no great feat, with the light from the holodex, and a photographic memory it was only moments before Kamen found himself with the holodex positioned strategically in his mouth, pushing up on the door with the discreetly positioned Clovinian royal seal that Kamen had seen countless times on the collar of Rei.
Once inside Rei's office he brushed the dust off of his shoulders and made a face at the vacancy before testing out the chair behind the desk. It was comfy enough, and he immediately understood why everyone who entered the room eyed it. Of course more interesting than the chair was the stack of newspapers on the floor that reached up to just below the arm, and on a whim Kamen picked one up, unable to remember the last time that he had actually sat down to read the newspaper.
Rei seemed frozen in the doorway.
"I'm not really "delightfully oaf-ful", am I? Is that even a word?" Kamen scowled at the paper.
Rei quickly shut the door, "How did you get in here?"
"The passages." He squinted at the paper, "Really though, they make me sound like some kind of jolly human giant."
Rei snorted, "Have you looked in a mirror lately?"
Kamen scratched the five o'clock shadow on his chin, "I know, I need to shave."
"Well, yes, but not that." Rei rolled his eyes, "Give a High General a vacation and they have nothing better to do than infiltrate their boss' office and sit in my big comfy chair." He shook his head, “You guys are stalkers.”
“You guys?” Kamen looked back at his newspaper, "Besides you let Artemis sit here all the time. Hey, did you know they're opening a tea garden just south of the city? It's going to be a controlled climate."
"Great, go there and give me my chair."
Kamen looked at Rei for a few seconds before reaching into the bottom drawer on the right and pulling out a pink sticky sweet dumpling wrapped in plastic before standing up and going to lean by the window to eat it.
"I was wondering where all my chocolate went to." Rei moaned.
"The sauce in the cherry cordials was really good; it had a little bit of a bite though."
"That was liquor." Rei said flatly.
Kamen paused mid-bite on the dumpling and then shrugged, "Where do you get chocolate like that?"
Rei glared at him, "A gift from Alladair Udit."
Kamen swallowed slowly, "Send him my regards."
Rei sighed and slumped into his chair, quickly inspecting his desk for anything else that Kamen might have gotten into, "Why don't you take a mechafly and go see the city? When was the last time you did something like that?"
Go to the city, by himself? Kamen shrugged, he had never gone to the city alone, and the thought of doing so now left a small pang in his chest. However the idea of stealing a mechafly for a joyride was slightly appealing.
