Rice Lord Sake
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Second Vineyard Story for June 2022 (ft. some new characters!)
🕑 Added 2022-07-19 03:13:07 +0000 UTCThis one was interesting. Being a fight scene honestly made it a bit less engaging than the other story - I don't do fight scenes very often so I'm still not used to them, which does make it a little harder to get super excited about - but it was still fun to work on and it's opened the door for some new fun things to build on from here.
I needed a more freeform magic system than the elemental one Toravon works on, so I went ahead and just made a whole new world entirely. I'm not sure just yet why practically-naked mages duel with full bladders for spectators, but since I have the world and characters established, I have plenty of room to explore that. Plenty of room to explore other stuff the magic system can do too, since I didn't really get to show off very much of it here.
The hardest part of writing this was naming the characters, though. I eventually managed to settle on naming characters after birds, which I think is pretty cute - and anyone who's read the Warriors series might even pick up on a bit of influence from there on the actual structure of character names - so when I do stuff with this world in the future I don't need to worry about naming conventions and can just go look up different types of birds to see if any would make for a good name. Could even just name everyone in this world after animals and just use different types of animals for different cultures, and there's a surprising amount of stuff I can do with that. In this case, we're mostly following someone named Sparrowclaw, and her opponent is named Swanwing. For now, anyways - if conventions change later, I'll come back to this and change their names out for the new ones, but I kinda like them so I think I'll be sticking with this general naming scheme.
Anyway, yeah, here's this. Took longer to get out than I was hoping (but creative energy never really works how you want it to anyways) and definitely not my best work, but it was a very fun foray into writing fight scenes, which are rare for me, and it's introduced a fun new world. This, like the Seren and Kira one, is something I'd like to revisit later for a more feature-length recounting of events, but that's not going to be for a while since I need more practice writing fights first.
(Also I'm pretty sure I said I would have Serenade finished before putting this out, which clearly didn't work out. Hoping to get it done soon-ish, though, but we'll see how the universe feels about that or whatever.)
Comments
Eisotopius
Yeah, they're some odd-looking names, especially since this is the very first time that sort of convention has been introduced in my works. Swanwing in particular still looks kinda strange, but I think as I expand more on the world and do more with it it should look a lot more normal. And the color-of-the-magic thing I just thought was pretty cool since it lets me just hint at the character's bladder being full rather than having to outright say it, and hints like that are always fun; like knowing the person is full is a little secret you have to figure out.
Ray Tracer
I really enjoyed your description of the fight scenes and how the color of one's spell signifies how powerful the spell is and thus how full someone's bladder is. At first I that names seemed weird to me, but they had grown on me by the time I finished the story.
