Well, I
finally drew a version of Barnaby that didn't make him look like a twit, but that's not what I wanted to show.
Let me take you by the hand and lead you
through the streets of London to 2006, where I was much more active in the RP server AeonRO than I am today. Aeon is where I played the first iteration of Autem, from when she was nineteen or twenty-one or thereabouts, back when I was still calling her Yubi.
It was grand, but by the end, she had gotten stuck in a rut. In fact, so had the whole server, in a tangle of world-wide plots that didn't quite get resolved. When it was agreed that the best thing to do was restart the setting and begin from a blank slate, I thought, "Wouldn't it be great to revisit this character? See how she would end up if she actually grew up with a family and never had to experience a loony war?"
Thus was born Yubi, the scrappy seventeen year old Star Gladiator from Hugel. Hobbies include being a dork and running around being even more of a dork.
(Macromedia Flash, early/mid 2006? I've misplaced the original file.)At the time, I was doing a lot of collaborations with guy called Ebb. Ebb is, in no particular order, a wench, a guy who can hold his booze, and a maniac that, if there was any kind of Big Brother, would have been arrested and shot years ago. We once had our rogue characters serenade an ooshy-gooshy couple with an improvised WILL HE OH WON'T HE song. A version of his rogue dumped rotten dead fish into a communal bathing pool that a group was using for, um, purposes.
One day Ebb asked me if I'd roleplay with his character Infernus the Everburning. A sadomasochistic freak with a philosophy that boiled down to "if you can't handle the pain I dish out, then you
deserve to take it." Infernus was plotting to collect students to train and eventually wreak havoc all over the place.
You see where this is going.
(really quickass Painter doodle, just now)So... um... in three or four days of roleplay time, I managed to get her kidnapped, half-drowned, stabbed with dragon teeth, dumped in a haunted coal mine, and finally brainwashed into Infernus's disciple, Lucine the Everbright.
In my defense, I thought she'd escape. Or get rescued(the kidnap happened right in front of an active character's house).
The moral of the story is, I cannot be trusted with a happy ending. Ever.
EDIT:p.s. Oh, the punchline? At the same time that this was going on, I was managing a plot for a different group of people intent on getting revenge on the Schwarzwald nation for... something or other. Don't remember. It might have had something to do with the army of metal golems I had trash Prontera in Rune-Midgard, but I don't know if that happened before or after this plot. Anyway, a wizard and a couple of assassins decided to target one of the smaller less-defended Schwarzwald cities, blow things up, cause a scene, then run.
Which city did they pick? Yup, Hugel.
I don't
know if "Lucine's" family survived through that or not, but I do know that most of Hugel's men were killed in the assault, so take it how you will.