Brettia

Much, much has happened since I last blogged. I’ll go through the whole thing, beginning Thursday. I awoke at 4:00 AM Thursday morning, pulled on some clothes, carted a few suitcases and other items out to the car, and sleepily watched the lights go by on the dark highway as we drove north. The journey from Phoenix to Flagstaff via I-17 was completed in a mere hour and forty-five minutes, a record for us. But the longest stretch was still ahead, through the barren wastelands of northeastern Arizona and western New Mexico on I-40.

Having seen the scenery (if you could call it that) many times before, I resigned myself to my summer reading, which I am probably behind on, though I don’t like to admit it. I’ll go over all that later. Anyway, the book I was reading, In the Wake of the Plague, by Norman Cantor, is all about the effects of the Black Death on Europe. At the beginning, it was really dry and boring, but it got better and more interesting toward the end, as the author talked about different theories behind the cause of the Black Death and its political ramifications.

After I finished the book, Dad and I played stupid road games, and Zach (my brother) tried to join in, though he’s a bit slow when it comes to 20 Questions. Anyway, after much driving and some hairy moments when trying to find the right route near Espanola, NM, we reached my grandparents’ ranch in Buena Vista, Colorado, near Salida in the Colegiate Peaks area. We were all tired, of course, so we ate a dinner of lasagna and went to bed.

In the morning, everything had to be repacked, as well as lots of hanging clothes and such in large protective bags, and we were able to be off by 9:00 on the road to Denver. I should note that the whole reason for all this driving and clothes is that my uncle was getting married in Denver on the 26th, so about half a million people were all journeying from various corners of the world to attend the event. The day I rode with my dad, brother, and grandma to Denver was the 25th, Friday, also the day of the wedding rehearsal.

Upon reaching downtown Denver, and our hotel, the Magnolia, we unpacked lightly and then went out for a stroll around the 16th Street Mall, which is a pedestrianized street with buses and light rail as the only traffic. On both sides are numerous high-end shops and restaurants, and Denver Pavilions, a shopping center at the south end of 16th St, has a movie theatre, more restaurants, and a Barnes and Noble. So we walked around a bit, bought a few things (I got Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a wildly popular cyberpunk novel that I somehow haven’t read yet), and then went back to the hotel to change for the wedding rehearsal (Dad was an usher, and Zachary and I were listed as junior ushers, though neither of us really did anything).

Anyway, we arrived at the hotel with less than 45 minutes before the rehearsal would begin (and the church was several blocks away), so there was a mad dash to iron shirts and such and get ready for it. Normally, a wedding rehearsal is a pretty informal affair, but there was a dinner scheduled for after the rehearsal at a nice Italian restaurant, and for some reason we needed to be super-dressed up for that. (In the end, there really was no need, but it was interesting to have to wear a dress jacket for the first time.)

The rehearsal dinner was good, with lots of food. Once it was finally over, the adults went to a bar in the LoDo district, and everyone under 21 went back to the hotel. My 18-year-old cousin Chanel and I watched a movie in my hotel room, and she had to flee back to hers when my parents got back.

The next day, the wedding day, went from lethargic in the morning to a flurry of activity in the afternoon as the appointed time approached. I skipped out on breakfast at Sam’s No. 3 in favor of a long lie-in, but I later went with my dad and brother to Union Station and Invesco Field (at Mile High) so that we could take a picture of the Broncos’ infamous home stadium to use for a dartboard. (Both my parents and I are die-hard Chiefs fans.) We hurried back via light rail to 16th St. in order to meet up with the other men at a sushi bar while the women went to tea at the Brown Palace Hotel, near the church where the wedding was to take place. However, the sushi bar was closed, so we went to ESPN Zone instead, a big sports bar with dozens of live television feeds (even in the bathrooms) and lots of games, somewhat like Jillian’s at Desert Ridge in Phoenix.

After some really good cajun chicken sandwiches and 125 points worth of games, we went back to the hotel to change into tuxedos for the wedding. This didn’t take long, and we were soon on a bus on 16th St, zooming toward the church. Then the wedding happened. I’d describe it better, but everyone has seen a wedding, either in real life or on TV, and it really wasn’t much to talk about. The tuxedos and dresses and flowers and decorations were nice of course, but there really isn’t anything else worth mentioning. Though the wedding was almost exactly half an hour long, the pictures afterward (which I, as a wedding party member, had to be present for) were exhaustive and took over an hour to finish. When they finally were, everyone marched on over to one of the two Qwest Communications towers dotting the Denver skyline and took the elevator up to the 37th floor, where the reception was held.

For the first hour or so, I somewhat enjoyed the reception. There was the small fact that there seemed to be more people at the reception than at the actual wedding (about 200 attended, as far as I know), but otherwise it was fine. Since I had built the website for the wedding, everyone knew me as the “website guy” or the “15-year-old child prodigy” or “that kid who know computers good”. I didn’t mind this back at the rehearsal dinner, but it was beginning to get on my nerves by the reception. Eventually I just tried to avoid having to talk to people, preferring to eat or drink or ride elevators up and down with my cousin and brother. The kids (my cousin, brother, and I) left at 11:00, since all of us, even Chanel, who was 18, were getting bored with the whole thing. I think we’d come to the conclusion that weddings, and all events tied to them, are more for adults than for children or teenagers, and that the only reason that we were invited to come was so that our parents could show us off. So we were of course thankful when it was all over.

But the night didn’t end there. We watched a movie on HBO in my room for a while, and Zachary was being dumb and goofing around with a soccer ball. Even after repeated warnings from my cousin and I, he idiotically jumped from one bed to another and injured his mouth on my big toe, which happened to be there at the time. I was somewhat annoyed at this point, since my toe hurt just as much as his mouth probably did, and I had warned him that if he didn’t stop screwing around, someone would get hurt or something would get broken.

But when he started whimpering and crying like a baby, curled up in a ball on the bed, acting like I had been the one who had injured him, that was the final straw. I promptly told him that he might as well stop trying to be a victim and get me in trouble, since it had been his fault in the first place. He retorted that I should have moved my feet. I told him he shouldn’t have jumped. He went quiet at this point, knowing that I was right, but he continued to cry and act like he was mortally wounded, though I don’t think he even bled. I went back to watching the movie, ignoring him and telling him to buck up every once in a while. Eventually, after he had convinced himself that all his problems were my fault, he jumps on me, knocking off my glasses but otherwise leaving me uninjured (he’s pretty weak, even for an eleven-year-old). My cousin Chanel left at this point, not wanting to get into the fray.

I went and washed off my glasses in the bathroom, checking them for scratches, and when I came back, Zachary was preparing to leave. Everything is my fault, he shouts at me, no one loves him or cares about him, he hates it here, he wants to go home. Still seething somewhat from his inability to take responsibility for hurting himself, I almost wanted to just let him go. But what would happen when my parents returned and found he had run away? That didn’t sound like a good prospect, so I made to restrain him. He fled and caught an elevator, leaving me to stand there shocked in the hotel room, wondering what to do. He had never run away before, and now here I was with the task of getting him back to the room before my parents had noticed. Before going after him, I called down to Chanel in room 338 immediately, telling her what had happened. She agreed to help look for him, and we met in the lobby. We checked both exits from the hotel out to the street, but we didn’t see him. Now somewhat alarmed, I suggested we check the hotel fitness room, where we had gone earlier, before watching the movie.

He wasn’t there. The man at the front desk hadn’t seen him either, so Chanel and I went back up to my room, up on the 6th floor. And there Zach was, waiting for an elevator. He made to get into the elevator as we stepped out of it, determined to get away. My sudden rush of relief was eclipsed by frustration at his will to get away from me as I held him by his arms and tried to drag him back to our room. He threw another tantrum, kept saying how no one liked him and everyone thought he was stupid (he doesn’t do much to keep them from thinking that, I told him), and how his life was horrible. There followed a mildly embarrassing scene (we were still by the elevators) where I had to try to talk Zach out of his intentions with my cousin looking on, chuckling. I told him all this stuff about how people did care about him and love him and whatever, though I didn’t really feel like I meant it.

Zach was eventually subdued, and Chanel left and Zach and I went back to our hotel room. He went into the bathroom and stayed there for 15 minutes, crying or sniffling or something. I offered him a half-drunk Dr. Pepper that was in the fridge, but he refused it and lay down, crying, on the bit of floor space between one of the beds and a window. I left him there, knowing that he wasn’t going to listen to me. After another 15 minutes (during which I read a book), Zach got tired of breathing dust and clambered into bed, obviously still angry because I had seen that he wasn’t “man enough” to spend the whole night down there in pitiful, sniffling, silence.

We had been sharing a bed, the other one, that I was now reading on, belonging to my parents. Knowing that Zach wasn’t going to want me sleeping next to him after his little fit, I read another chapter, made sure he was asleep (and not secretly planning to run away again), and went to bed in my parents’ bed. My mom and dad didn’t try to move us when they came back, and they haven’t said anything about it. Now, however, I’m beginning to wonder if Zach got up and let them in when they returned (they didn’t have a key), and then told them everything, probably making it seem like I was the guilty party. He’s the kind of kid who would do that. My hypothesis was reinforced when my mom remarked after he got me a Dr. Pepper today, “He’s such a good brother, isn’t he?” with enough fervor that it made it sound like I wasn’t a “good brother”.

Sure, I was kind of mean to him when he was having a nervous breakdown, and I do have a tendency to rag on him a bit, mainly because he does such stupid and irrational things sometimes. But even then, I don’t think that makes me a “bad brother.” I really try to be nice to him sometimes, to do things for him, but then he does something to irk or hurt me, and that kindness is converted into a desire for vengeance. Up until about a year ago, I would try to execute on that desire within seconds of the wrong that was committed. But lately, maturity, I guess, has come in the way, and the desire is no longer there. Even then, my parents see what’s going on, and, as recently as in Kohl’s a week ago, my dad told Zach that if he didn’t stop tormenting / touching / annoying me, I could do whatever I wanted to him and my parents would look the other way. Now, I’m no jock, but beating up a sixth-grader isn’t exactly hard, especially when you know him well enough to anticipate what he’ll do. So Zach stopped after that. But that wasn’t enough to keep him from starting up again the next day, and the next, and the next.

Someday, maybe I’ll run away just to not have to put up with him. I have no problem with my parents, or with anyone else I know, but Zach and I are just never going to get along. Thank God I can graduate in three years (or maybe two, if I try really hard).

So that was that. And Zach came to me Sunday afternoon (when we were back at my grandparents’ house) and said he was sorry, but he still is just as bad as he always was. Maybe the problem is that I’m too sensitive, but since there’s no way I can fight back against him without my parents punishing me somehow, it doesn’t take long for my blood to get to the boiling point. Maybe the problem is that my parents punish me for annoying / hitting / antagonizing Zachary, but they don’t punish him for doing the same to me. Even when they know I’m only fighting back, I still get yelled at.

Anyway, getting back on track here, Sunday was just a travel day, so we didn’t do anything remarkable. Oh, but we did find some wood which we used to dam up the irrigation ditch running next to the garage, but the dam doesn’t hold water very well. Someday we’ll do a full damming project and divert the water around the dam construction zone so that we can build a better one. I dunno if my grandparents would appreciate having a lake, though. Enough water flows through the ditch that a small one could form overnight.

Monday, today, began early, since we had to get up and get ready to go whitewater rafting. We ate lunch (we being about 20 people all staying at the Ricketts ranch at once) at the rafting place and got into the river at about 12:30. Only 14 actually rafted, the others preferring to stay behind and watch the two young children, Aden (2), and Sophia (0.5). Of course, I went rafting. The area of the Arkansas River that we went down had Class 1-3 rapids, which are about as high as you can get without being 16. Since Zach and this fifth cousin of mine, Scott, are both 11, we won’t be doing any Class 4s anytime soon.

Anyway, I rode in a raft with my dad, Zach, Scott, Scott’s dad Bruce, this guy named Jeff, and someone else whose name I’ve forgotten. The guide was in the back with Scott, steering the craft and shouting orders to us lowly paddlers. I make her sound like drill sergeant (spl?), but Ally was actually pretty nice, and she got us through the rapids in one piece, which is always good. We went over stretches of water called by such names as “Big Drop”, “Zoom Flume”, and “Toilet Bowl,” and we emerged generally unscathed. Toilet Bowl was the only problem area.

You see, Toilet Bowl is a huge whirlpool, as you may have guessed already, and in order to pass through it, you have to go directly into from the left, over a small drop, and then paddle quickly to avoid being capsized or sucked around in circles. We paddled as furiously as possible, but the left side of the raft, the side that I was on, got pulled over to the base of the small drop. The left-siders couldn’t paddle, since the drop was rocky and the water going over it shallow, so the raft was sucked underneath it slightly, flooding the left side with water and tipping the raft so that the right side was partly in the air. Being on the doomed left side, I dragged myself in my clumsy life-jacket over to a rope that went down the center of the raft and grabbed it to keep my from falling out. Somehow, the paddling of the right side and the shifting of the weight of all of the left-siders (everyone did the same as I did) got us out of the spot, and we were safe. None fell out of the boat, but I was soaked thoroughly from the chest down from being on the low, flooded side of the raft. Being wet felt pretty good, until it became overcast.

Sunburnt and wet, but happy after 12 miles of rapids and perilous drops, we boarded the rafting company’s big gray bus and were driven back to the company’s office upriver. The journey was dangerous in itself because the windows kept fogging up with everybody’s breath, and the driver could barely see as he negotiated the dirt road as it wound up a small mountain, around cliffs and such. This was no Butterfield Canyon (a place in Utah where my dad almost drove us off a thousand-foot drop), but it would have been bad to drive off the road all the same.

Since I’m posting this, we obviously made it home alive, in time for a quick tip in the hot tub and then a dinner of barbecued brisket and beans and potato salad and Texas toast. Not bad. And after dinner was a killer game of basketball, with Bruce (Scott’s dad) and I against my brother, Jeff (a thirty-ish friend of my uncle’s), and Scott. Zach was labeled “Kobe” by Jeff because he never passed to anyone and couldn’t seem to make any shots, but I was on fire for fifteen minutes or so, in which I sunk shot after shot before burning out, the high mountain air making me desperately short of breath (the ranch is at 8000 feet, surrounded by the highest concentration of 14,000-foot peaks in the U.S.). All in all, it was great, and it was nice to see Zach getting made fun of by an adult for a change.

Even after an eventful day, I’m no worse for wear, though my arms are sunburnt pretty bad. It’s funny, my right arm is burnt worse than my left because it was the one in the sun for most of the time (I was on the left, the river flows south), so my “tan,” if you could call it that, will be somewhat uneven. Oh well.

Before I go to bed, which in my language actually means get into bed and stay up reading for four more hours, I’ll leave you with a quote:
“Gimme beer! Gimme Die Coka!” - Aden, who is two years old, throwing a fit at dinner. It was funny.

Update

July 1, 2004, will mark one year of Organon.

The urge to strangle myself is rising. I just finished looking through my offline copy of the CSHS website. I am beginning to organize pages, group them into sections, delete unnecessary ones, etc. I thought that this task would be easy, just a simple pruning of pages with some renaming and reorganization. Nope.

I copied the entire site to a folder on my computer via FTP. Then I proceeded to make a new directory structure, and I started opening each and every page to check whether it was worthy of making it into the newly reorganized site. I have been forever traumatized. First, I began noticing that all the teacher pages I had opened so far were blank, with no information except for the teacher’s name and a link to go back to the main teacher listing. Upon checking all teacher pages, I found that not a single one of the 70+ teacher pages had even the tiniest shred of content or useful information whatsoever. Those found their way into the Recycle Bin very quickly.

Then I started to notice other pages that looked like excerpts from the district’s massive student handbook. I was later shocked to realize that someone had wasted their time putting the entire student handbook into HTML format with a separate page for every section. The complete idiocy of this baffles me. Is this person one of the slower few that have not yet heard of the almighty PDF? Of course, those pages (all 50 of them) will go as soon as I find a PDF copy of the handbook.

Among other atrocities on the server were two 15+ megabyte video files (which most people probably wouldn’t have the patience to download), dozens of graphics that were no longer in use, lots of remnants from the mediacenter pages that are no longer under our jurisdiction, and these really annoying _vti_cnf directories that FrontPage has to drop everywhere possible to work correctly. This heresy must be destroyed! I call upon the papal armies to try and burn these heretics of web design and site management! Let Jakob Nielson die of a stroke after viewing only a single page! Let Zeldman and Shea and Cederholm and all those other gods strike down the creators of this digital horror, so that it may never again strike anger and fear in the hearts of lowly mortals such as myself.

INFLAMMATORY POST ALERT! (Oops…too late.)

Any former Brettia members reading this post, and anyone who wants to join, go to http://fafner.brettia.com (inside joke) for the new forum. Things are a bit different, and I need your help to make it as good as it was the first time around (or better).

It be mah burthdae. Ahm feeftein yars oald. Er att leezt ah weel bee att fyve oh nyne ptoonyte.

It’s kind of weird how you look forward to your birthday with great anticipation for the first ten years or so of your life, but then after that, it’s just another day. Sure, you get gifts and people are nice to you like always, but I guess it just gets old after a while. The 15th really isn’t one of those super important birthdays like 0, 1-10, 13, 16, 18, 21, 30, 40, etc., anyway. I don’t get any new privileges, no laws are different for me now, I’m not changing schools (hopefully), I’m not free…the only thing this birthday really gets me is the ability to look back over the past year since my last birthday and sort of reflect on all that has happened.

And a busy year it has been. In only twelve months time, a new Harry Potter book was released (I only note this because it came out on my birthday last year, which was kind of cool), I went to Europe with my old 6th/7th grade math teacher and my two best friends (one of which is now somewhat estranged, though I don’t have anything against him). Before that, I went to Colorado for several weeks, and I successfully neglected my AP World History summer homework. Then high school started, and though I had a bit of a rocky start (problems getting textbooks, registration, etc., because of the Europe trip), everything had improved by September or so, and I settled in for the ride.

Halloween came, and we (my friends and I) had a Almond Joy/Mounds war at Dylan’s house which spilled into the neighborhood streets. After being pelted numerous times, we played video games (Mario Party) and watched Conan. November was accompanied by cooler weather and harder assignments, and not much happened then. Some of my dad’s family came out from Missouri for Thanksgiving, and it was then that I missed the only day of school that I was absent for that year, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving weekend. Thanksgiving dinner was good as usual, and we had fun with my aunt and uncle and the two cousins, Riley (11) and Nate (2). I’m not sure that they had the best time, since there seemed to be some tension in the air sometimes, probably caused by the difference in lifestyle and activities and climate between Missouri and Arizona.

With Thanksgiving was also the end of my first year of PHP programming, in which I went from not knowing a variable from a constant to a near mastery of the syntax of the language. Beginning in December, I wrote a nearly complete blogging system that got butchered and pulled apart later when I started messing around with its internals. Christmas came and went, and I don’t remember it being a particularly good one (I got lots of clothes). I went to Colorado again for the latter half of Christmas vacation, and then the new semester began and it was back to work.

By this time all the teachers expected students to be familiar enough with the workings of the class and with the methods of testing and such, and the workload was increased again slightly. We started doing chemistry in biology, which was a welcome change as the class was beginning to descend to the lowest depths that it had been at all year. Spanish just piled on the projects, and we were introduced to the horror known as communication cards, where we have to speak in Spanish on a particular subject to the teacher to earn signatures. Honors English became a bit more interesting and fast-paced, and it was at this time that the idea was first suggested for me to move to an independent study English course.

February was a blur, and the first quarter of the second semester ended in mid-March. This was also about the time that Tyler was exiled from my little ring of friends, and I let it happen, though I wasn’t particularly happy about it. At the end of March was spring break, and the second weekend of spring break was when I finally conquered my fear of roller coasters and ended up riding Goliath, the highest (and possibly fastest) coaster in the world, three or four times. The only problem with that particular ride was that you felt like you were going to be decapitated as the train entered a tunnel at the bottom of the longest drop (about 250 feet).

April rolled around, and the end was in sight. I worked harder than I ever had until April 29th, when one of my better presentations kicked major butt in world history. After that, it was all downhill from there, and I could feel summer calling me. But before summer cam finals, and, though I wasn’t worried about them, I knew that my grades on those tests wouldn’t be great, since I never do very well on them. And then….it was like being in a crowded, loud room and having everything suddenly fall silent. School was over. There was no more homework, no more tests, not for 86 days. It was silent euphoria.

After getting over this, I started working for CSHS on the website. I found the work enjoyable, but by some strange combination of events, I was suddenly depressed beyond all reason, and everything I wrote was full of despair and unhappiness. An email from a friend’s father shook me out of my depression, though all it was was a simple link to a Wikipedia article on melancholia. After that, I was fine, but still recovering somewhat. The recent redesign of Organon reinforced the fact that I did indeed have skill in building and designing websites and that if clients couldn’t accept or grasp my higher level of expertise, it wasn’t my fault.

Then, disaster struck when my mom got in a car accident. Thankfully, no one was injured, but both cars involved (my mom’s 2003 Toyota Sequoia SUV and the other driver’s 2004 Toyota 4Runner) were badly damaged. We still don’t have the Sequoia back from the shop, but it sure will be nice when we do, because it sucks to have to cram ourselves into my dad’s Jeep whenever we go anywhere.

And that brings us to today, June 21st, 2004, the first day of summer, Father’s Day (some years), and the end day of the Gemini period as far as the zodiac goes. Though I’m technically half and half, I’d much rather be Gemini than Cancer, so Gemini it is.

So what’s coming up? What does the near future hold for me? I’ll be gone for two weeks in Colorado and Montana for my uncle’s wedding (he’s a Denver stock broker), and then it’ll be crunch time to get all my summer work done by August 16th. Then there’ll be school, and Jim and I have already agreed that we’re both going to be dead and buried by the end of this school year, as bad as our work loads are going to be. But what else do we have to do, anyway? We’ve also agreed that we have four years of government-funded education to exploit at our will, so we might as well work as hard as we can and get as much out of it as possible.

2004-2005 will also be the year of the new CSHS website, which will hopefully be much better than the current one. I posted a vision on our group site a while ago, and who knows if it will come to anything, but maybe it will. I’m also working on learning to use Linux (specifically Fedora Core 2), and I want to learn Python to help me with PHP (the languages are similar but also very different).

As far as birthday plans go, I don’t have much going on. I went to see The Terminal with Jim yesterday at the Harkins Cine Capri, which isn’t as great as it’s made out to be. The movie, however, was better than I could have hoped, and Tom Hanks did a great job with Krakozhian Viktor Navorski’s Eastern European accent. Tonight we’re having over our pastor, his wife, and their three kids (they’re moving in a few days), and we’re having lasagna. It’s almost as if it isn’t my birthday at all, but, as I said before: I really don’t mind.

Another week, another redesign. WordPress is so much easier to use when it comes to redesigning pages that I can’t help but put out a new design twice a month or so. I’m not completely happy with the sidebar, but it works for now. The images at left are randomly chosen on every page load, so reload the page and see which one you get. My favorites are the one with the dark-looking alley and the bridge one. I found all nine images at stock.xchng, a website that distributes royalty-free stock photographs for print or Web use. It took about two hours to resize, crop, grayscale, and tweak the levels on all the images, and then a little longer to add the organon text. I’m getting better with Photoshop: I figured out how to make lights look brighter (especially in the case of the Petronas Towers image) by CTRL-clicking on the red channel, inverting the selection (CTRL-I) and using Image -> Adjustments -> Levels to make dark areas darker.

Background

This was one of my best posts on Brettia, one that first appeared on the Meeting of Friends RP thread but was almost lost for good after the database got deleted. Luckily, I had saved it before posting it because it was so long.

The two characters here are Ildran Holth, boy chancellor of the nation of Benelux, and Banyal, the graceful elf guide. They are members of a six-person party sent by Lord Alifendul, leader of the elves, to find six ancient relics before the Emptiness (a supremely evil being) could get them. The party has divided into pairs to investigate three tunnels inside a temple thought to house one of the relics.

The Post

Ildran and Banyal walked slowly down the dark tunnel, following it as it snaked into the bowels of the labyrinth-like temple. Ancient, indecipherable runes covered the tunnel walls, adding to the eerie feeling of the darkness. When Banyal, for all her grace, walked into a wall, Ildran pulled out his Iceblade, murmured a few words, and watched as the tip glowed, giving off a faint light, just enough to illuminate the area around the pair. They kept walking.
After nearly an hour of stumbling over the uneven tunnel floor, they came to a cavernous room, almost as big as the Great Forges of the Noble Order of Doom in Calyth. It seemed like some sort of cave, like one might see stalactites growing from the high ceiling at any moment. Stretching across the middle of the room was a crack in the floor. From the tunnel opening, it seemed small, but as Banyal and Ildran approached, they found that it was nearly twenty feet across, too far for Ildran to attempt to levitate or for Banyal to jump. They looked at it in silence for a moment, unsure of what to do.
Suddenly, the artificial light at the tip of Ildran’s sword went out. All was dark and silent. “Ildran, what happened?” Banyal called out. When no one replied, she tried again. “Ildran? Where are you?”
Then something clattered on the floor across the crevice from Banyal. She turned toward it, straining to see in the darkness. Another sound, this time behind her, something rustling like leaves in autumn. Banyal whirled around and came face to face with Ildran. She almost shrieked aloud in surprise. “Ildran,” she whispered, “what’s going on? I’m the guide here; where did you go?”
“Ildran is not my name,” he said, completely ignoring her question.
“What? Of course it is. Now come on, we need to cross this gap.”
“‘We’ is no longer appropriate,” said Ildran. “I will cross the gap.”
“What is wrong with you? Of course we’ll cross the gap, otherwise one of us would be…left behind.” Realization dawned on the wise elf. “You don’t mean to-”
“Yes, I do,” said Ildran. “Since I am about to do this thing, and am confident in my ability to be successful, I’ll tell you a little bit about ‘what’s wrong’ with me. Actually, it would be more correct to say ‘what’s right’.”
Banyal just stared in disbelief at what she had heard. She had been adventuring with a madman all this time…
“You see, I finally saw the truth,” said Ildran quietly. “You elves have been advertising your ‘light’ for far too long. It’s made you all idiots.”
“The Light is the only truth in our world,” said Banyal, “and you can never change that.”
“Perhaps not, but I can block it out. Just as the shadow of the moon sometimes blocks out the sun, I can block out the Light. I can make darkness fall upon the world, I can make people see how things really are, undistorted by Elvish teachings.”
“What do you mean?” asked Banyal warily.
“You know that I was imprisoned in Algebra a few months back,” said Ildran.”
“Yes.”
“I was not truly imprisoned, for I stayed of my own free will. Sure, I broke out and killed a few citadel guards in Asmptote, but that was all prearranged. That stupid oaf of a magician Tim and those bumbling fools, Kylo and Navarro, thought they were rescuing me. They were just helping me along. They got me back into Benelux where I gave Watlin some instructions before taking up Alifendul’s offer.”
“If you had all these plans, why did you come with us?” asked Banyal, slowly backing away from Ildran.
“Had I stayed in Benelux, I would not have remained in power. Things were not as secure as they are now, and some politicians were wondering if a sixteen-year-old boy can lead a nation. They soon will find that I can do that and more. Anyway, I had Watlin pretend to ‘usurp’ the Chancellery from me, set up the corrupt Vlarik, which I trust is doing its job, and begin gearing up for war.
“That of course put self-important Lunan and our ‘ally’ Ryfgaoa on alert, so now they’re all ready to fight us. I cannot yet reveal the surprise that awaits them in battle, but I promise, it will be worth all this work. It’s too bad you won’t live to see it.” With that, Ildran drew the other of his twin sabers and lunged at Banyal, who had her back to the crevice. Knowing he had her cornered, Ildran crossed his swords and conjured a ball of fire. As soon as it was large enough, he threw it up into the air and batted it at Banyal.
It seemed all was lost for the elf, but she kept her cool and called up a fierce wind using her wind-catcher jewel, literally blowing out the fireball. Swearing under his breath, Ildran moved in for physical combat. He whirled his sabers, coming at Banyal like a hurricane in full fury. She quickly had the Blade of Fusilith in her right hand and the Greenwood Sword in her left. As Ildran came, hacking at her with all his strength, she parried and turned, getting his back to the crevice. She thought she had him now, but Ildran, demonstrating the same acrobatic skill he used killing the spiders, Ildran leaped over her head and turned in the air, putting her between him and the crevice again.
As Ildran landed heavily, Banyal quickly turned around, but she was too late. Ildran stood directly in front of her now, an easy target, but Banyal was transfixed by his hypnotic red eyes, smoldering like embers and giving off a light of their own. The elf dropped her swords. She continued looking up at Ildran, unable to remove herself from his stare. He stepped forward slowly. The elf stepped backward. ‘”Ildran…” she said quietly. “Don’t do it.”
“I told you, my name is no longer Ildran,” said the boy. “I am…Usul…the legendary bringer of death, blighter of the land, opposer of Light. Be afraid.” And he lunged with the Iceblade, spearing Banyal straight through the heart. But she was so under his influence, she did not even scream. Ildran/Usul withdrew his blade, letting the dead elf’s body fall into the unfathomably deep chasm. The boy chuckled. He laughed. His laughter filled the room, echoing throughout the tunnels and all around the temple.
Then he retreated back the way he had come, muttering to himself. His twin sabers were stowed back on his back, the elf’s blood still coating the lower half of one, its once liquid form now solid ice.

I found a neat extension for Firefox today: Firesomething.

Walrus wasn’t in the list of animals though. I added it, of course.

(Wondering what I’m talking about?)

First, get Firefox! Get it now! Don’t protest, don’t worry, don’t even breate, just GET FIREFOX! (The link is at the top of every page.) Then get the extension I mentioned from Mozilla Extension Room; it’s easy to download and install. Oh, and don’t try the “I’m a Mac user” ploy on me. It’s fully cross-platform, Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, Solaris, BeOS (maybe).

While you’re at it, get Thunderbird for email too. http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/. FREE!

“There are 10 kinds of people; those who understand binary, and those who don’t.” - Random forum person.

Well, to all who shared that year of Brettia with me, I present a gift: Word 2003 compiled version.

I read a lot of the RPs and stories that were posted there as I archived them, and I was amazed at the quality of writing that we achieved. For 8th graders, we did pretty good (did you catch that one?). Of course, we posted during first semester of our freshman year, too, but it was obvious then that Brettia was already in decline. I did word counts on all 36 files that make up the archive, as well, and the results of that are stored in an Excel 2003 file in the archive.

To me, it was amazing when I did the final word count: 218,232 words, about 650 pages. Wow. Sure, it took over a year of work, but all in all we were only really posting for about six months because of lags in the summer and during breaks. I think I probably accounted for about one-third of that 218,000, as one of my stories, the Second Algebra War (don’t ask), made up 30,000 words, and others that I started or participated heavily in racked up 10,000-20,000 words each. It’s just too bad that all the stories are unfinished, so they could never be seriously published.

I’m happy to say that my period of being devoid of optimism has ended. My mood changes hourly; all part of being a teenager, I guess, though it’s slightly annoying. Organon is a good outlet for my rants, though, so at least no one, save for those poor souls who read this, had to experience my outpouring of unhappiness and distress firsthand.

I’ve read about 1600 pages in the past week, as I just finished reading the 5th Harry Potter book fifteen minutes ago, and I read the fourth earlier, as I noted, I believe, in a previous entry. Both of these I read earlier, back when they were first released, but, as with all good books, I ended up reading them again to refresh my memory. As I write this I wonder whether people would think it immature to still read Harry Potter books, to go to the movies, etc. But I find I really don’t care. There’s no better defense for my actions than that: I just don’t care.

This was something I learned in middle school. Back in 6th grade, just like everyone who wasn’t super-popular, I had a few run-ins with various bullies and others who thought it enjoyable to poke fun at me (and others). But this didn’t last long, as I just took the “grin-and-bear-it” stance, which wasn’t very entertaining for them. I realized that, as annoying and mean and stupid as people can be, it’s never worth it to stoop to their level and fight back. Not because of the possible punishment for doing so, but because it would trigger a continuous bombardment of insults and threats. How did I know this? Because I saw other people lose control and try to lash back at their oppressors, and they failed horribly. To this day, one of those people is still ridiculed.

Does not fighting back make me a pushover? Maybe. But at least I’m a big pushover. And I’ll always know, deep down, that no matter how hard someone tries to get to me, I’ll always be better than them.

I really have no idea why I wrote this, or how I veered so horribly off of the subject I began with. I’ll come back later when I have something more interesting to say.

“You’re still goin’ strong.” - WordPress, which displays a random quote at the top of the posting page. This one is strangely relevant.

Wikipedia Rocks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholia
Emailed to me by a friend’s father. Thanks. Now I have a word to describe the condition of our society (and perhaps myself): anomie.

I think this is all a weird, uncontrollable mood swing. I’ll be dancing among the rainbows with unicorns next week.

Update

Comments are enabled for new entries. Feel free to blast me with your fury and wrath, or to lay wreaths of flowers upon my shoulders.