Zodion App
✖ PLAYER:
Name & DW Journal: Snow,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
snow
Birthdate & Age: March 16, 22
Characters played in Zodion: Alec Campion (foepas), Buffy Meissonier (blondeandperky), and Sol Badguy (firesealed)
✖ CHARACTER:
Name: Rhys Dashasa
Canon: Bel Dame Apocrypha
PB/Image: PB, because book character.
Info links: TV tropes article
Umayma is a planet with two suns, a day is twenty-seven hours long and a week is nine days. It was settled three thousands years ago by a group of Muslims, the First Families. After that, more people arrived, but the two main countries -- Nasheen and Chenja -- both come from that initial settlement. Their religions share the exact same book, but past that there has been little they've been able to find in common. They've mostly stopped trying, and have been at war for over three hundred years.
In Nasheen, any full-blooded Nasheenian male who lives to be old enough to be drafted is. They donate their genetic material and head to the front, where they either live to forty and return behind the lines to a world almost as brutal as the front itself, or they die. Nasheen is a country run by women. In Chenja, first-born sons are exempt from the draft. Men tend to have multiple wives, and women and men both follow strict rules of modesty, although the women more so.
Rhys was born Rakhshan Arjoomand in Chenja, the only son of a mullah, a wealthy man. He had spent time as a dancer at the Chenjan Imam's court, and he hadn't learned to fight. At seventeen, his father decided that three generations of his family was too long to go without sending a boy to war. He ordered Rhys to go. Rhys refused, and he ran. Giant security bugs dragged him back to his father, and the man smashed Rhys' hands with a metal pipe. Rhys ran again, this time with the help of one of his sisters, and he made it across the border, into Nasheen. He'd passed through the front, been infected and injured by it, but hadn't fought there, and when he arrived in Faleen he had been taken in by magicians. They saw that he had talent for their work -- talent he'd hidden because it would have got him sent to the front, even without his father's demand -- and they healed him.
Rhys' life in Nasheen wasn't easy, and life outside the magician's gym was dangerous. Nasheenian women would jeer at him, or beat him, or worse, when they saw him in the streets (since he could easily be picked out by the color of his skin). Rhys wasn't even used to being around women who would look him in the eye. Still, once Rhys learned that he didn't have the talent necessary to be a magician for a First Family, he still wasn't content to stay where he was safe. He left Faleen to visit other parts of Nasheen, where the only job he could find was working at a restaurant as he continued to look for some kind of job having to do with magic that wasn't the one he'd left in Faleen. One night, when he was walking to the mosque after a late shift, three Nasheenian women set on him for being a Chenjan man. They beat him, cut his clothes off and then cut him with their knives.
After that, Rhys made his way to the nearest magician's gym and they helped him return to Faleen. Once back, Rhys returned to his old job as magician's assistant, until a former bel dame (a Nasheenian role, responsible for cutting the heads off of boys who tried to flee the front, mostly) turned bounty hunter hired him for her team, partly because she needed a magician and could afford his rates where she couldn't afford someone better's, partly to piss off the magician Rhys had been working under, and partly because Nyx likes his hands.
Rhys has worked under Nyx for the last seven years, taking care of the bugs needed to run her business and helping do other aspects of the bounty hunting business that don't involve fighting people.
When Nyx gets a note directly from the Queen of Nasheen, offering a reward for services that could be rendered, she takes Rhys rather than any of the other members of her team (which are Anneke and Khos as fighters and Taite as comm tech) because even though he's Chenjan, he's still better-educated and better-mannered than anyone else she has available.
The mission the Queen gives Nyx is to track down a missing alien, who is visiting Unayma to learn about their bugs and magic, and who could help tip the war between Nasheen and Chenja in favor of the former. Rhys is from a canon point just after this meeting.
Canon Point: God's War, end of Chapter 9
Gender & Sex: Male & Male
Age: 25
Birthdate/Sign: August 25th/Virgo.
Rhys is a man with very high standards towards himself, and everyone else. He has a tendency to be fussy, and is certainly dogmatic. He exemplifies traits of modesty and he can be very passive, despite the strength of character that is what allows him to be passive. When he disagrees with something, though, he does not hold his tongue, instead talking at length what he disagrees about.
Tattoo: Back of his neck, about an inch long
Suitability: Human, over 18. Also, while he's a fairly traumatized character, ultimately Zodion (even with the requirement to have sex, which he won't care for at all) is still a much kinder and gentler place than Umayma, and he will be safe in Zodion in a way he really isn't in canon. Beyond that, at a canon point a couple of years in the future, Rhys does marry and is shown to be quite sexual within that relationship, so he certainly has sexual desires and the emotional maturity to have a relationship.
Power: On Umayma, some people (called magicians) are born with the ability to alter pheromones and effectively reprogram insects at the cellular level. Rhys describes it as "examining the air, tasting it, and telling it what to do". A good magician can use insects for anything from lighting a room, communicating across large distances, using as security cameras, and reattaching or regrowing entire limbs (as well as more minor injuries). Rhys is shitty at it, and has only a provisional government license, good only while he's employed. Communicating across distances only works if there's someone on the other end to read the bugs, and therefore is a meaningless power in Zodion.
Rhys would start off with the ability to command very small insects, flies, dragonflies, crickets, and able to close very small wounds (like papercuts). Fully powered (in Zodion terms), he could command almost all the insect life that can be found in Zodion (although less of them if they're larger bugs) and do his maximum ability in canon, which is stop an infection and do the equivalent of stitches and smaller wound-closing type healing with the bugs. He will never be able to do the reattaching limbs that a normal magician in his world would be capable of. In addition to the healing, he would be able to command fireflies or glow worms to use as a light source, and be able to do commands of other bugs like using dragonflies landed on his skin to keep warm.
Personality:
As violent as Umayma is, Rhys is noticeable for his outright refusal to fight. He won't do it when God requires it of him, and he won't do it to defend himself. It's not a moral conviction -- Rhys does believe that God wants him to submit, and that submitting means fighting at the front -- but a personal one. When attacked in the streets, beaten, cut with a knife, and worse, Rhys curls up and waits for it to stop. He doesn't believe in violence. In Umayma, for most people, that doesn't matter. They fight anyway. He doesn't.
His refusal to fight is his one lapse in his submittal to God, and it's part of what he seeks to make up for by being extra diligent in other areas. When he finds himself in Nasheen, where liquor is legal and women don't practice modesty, he makes certain that the strongest thing he drinks is tea and he takes more care to cover himself. And he presses his knees against the prayer mat six times a day, asking for leniency in his judgment. Still, despite his own sins, and the fact that he's face to face with Nasheenians who can and have tried to hurt him, Rhys doesn't give Nasheenians a pass. He will engage in a debate with Nyx when he has the chance, attempting to prove her atheism wrong and to show that she should return to the Kitab. He has a sharp tongue, and he doesn't make a habit of holding it back.
"I am still perplexed as to why it is that Chenja retained the veil and Nasheen discarded it," Rhys said. "Perhaps Nasheen’s women sought to frighten away God with their ugliness." In this quote, Rhys is responding to a woman who boxes for a living, who makes a habit out of directing violence for its own sake. While Rhys is technically protected by his own role, he still takes a risk to bait the woman this way, and he does it as much to show that he can as because of his belief that he is, in fact, better than a Nasheenian. He takes the same attitude to the Queen of Nasheen, questioning her when in an audience for a completely different matter, on how she can justify barring men from serving as mullahs unless they return alive from the front. Rhys has a sense of self-preservation, but he's also spirited, feisty, and he hasn't let what he's been through grind that down.
He has been through a lot, though, and while the traditional Chenjan belief would be that he should be protecting multiple wives, what Rhys most wants in his life is someone to protect him. He has a prickly pride that tells him he should be able to go at it alone, but when women in Nasheen threaten him and Nyx is there to tell them that he is 'hers' the possessiveness both grates and is a relief. If someone else is willing to fight to protect Rhys, then it matters less that he won't fight himself. If someone else will protect him, then maybe he doesn't have to jump every time a woman looks suspiciously at the color of his skin or asks him what his accent is. He wants to feel safe, even though he values his independence over that feeling.
Rhys has a finely-acquired sense of beauty. In addition to thinking the Kitab is the most beautifully written work there is, Rhys also makes the time to read poetry. Nyx's claim that beautiful things make people weak is met with a scoff. Beauty, in Rhys' mind, helps them transcend their weakness, it doesn't make them more vulnerable to it.
That beauty that he focuses on, however, is aesthetic, not sexual. Rhys does believe that there is a place for sexual attraction --and that that place was if he had not been asked to go to the front he would have had twenty or thirty wives and he would have been sexually attracted to them. Even within that context, he would not have expected any of his wives to be sexually stirred at the sight of him. Rhys was taught -- and believes -- that men's bodies are clean, closer to God, and that real women aren't "stirred to sin" at the sight of them. His experience in Nasheen has been a little different than that, with a random Nasheenian woman in the street more likely to flirt with him or grab him than a Chenjan woman who worked as a prostitute. It isn't just their sexual approaches towards Rhys that discomfits him. In Nasheen, female same-sex relationships are both common and legal, something Rhys isn't comfortable with. In the context of the world he grew up with, men should protect, and women should be protected, never mind that his own feelings about protection don't fit into that mold. Rhys does feel sexually and romantically attracted to people at various points in his book, but the relationship between them couldn't be Chenjan one, and he can't right now really imagine doing anything else.
Rhys is well-educated and well-read, and doesn't change that after spending seven years working for a woman who got kicked out of the state school for not being able to learn to read at all, and he doesn't change it even though in the world of bounty hunters that he lives in, being able to shoot a pistol is worth far more. His first tendency towards a conversation with someone he doesn't know is polite formality, although he won't continue in that mode if he's met with hostility or crudeness. He hasn't so much changed his core self in order to survive in Nasheen as he has added layers, outer ones that work to protect him from living in a hostile country.
✖ SAMPLES:
"Zodion" First-Person Network Entry:
Voice
[ That this city is godless is something that had been apparent to Rhys from the minute he saw that letter. It's something different, still, for a people to be ignorant, and for there to be no calls to prayer. Here, it seems, there are no prayers, or at least Rhys has seen no evidence of any. Do these false gods punish people for praying?
That won't stop him. God is here just as much as He was in Nasheen, and Rhys still has plenty to pray for.]
How long is your day here?
[It's not twenty-seven hours, can't be, not with where the sun is in the sky right now. He can theoretically pray by the movement of the sun in the sky, but Umayma has two suns, and Rhys wants as many facts as possible, to increase his chances of making the right determination.]
In addition, what do you do...for the cold?
[His teeth clack together as he shivers from the wind and the low temperature. The desert gets cold at night, sometimes, but not this cold, and his clothing is to protect him from getting cancer from the sun more than anything else. Rhys is unwilling to simply go to an apartment that's been designated for him, too nervous about what he might find. Too stubborn to give in just because of a little cold.]
Is there a place where warmer garments can be bought here? And any advice about what would be warm enough.
[He won't ask advice on where to live, doesn't think he can trust any answers he would get with regards to that. He doesn't like asking advice at all, but he's alone here, and he knows from his time in Nasheen just how badly being alone can go.]
Thank you, in advance, if you can help me.
I'm Rhys. It's nice to meet you all.
[If politeness will sway even one person towards feeling kindness that they might not, then it's worth it, and he'll try. The only thing he can do now is try, anyway.]
"Zodionlogs" Third-Person Prose Entry:
Rhys opened his eyes to cold, and emptiness. He flexed his fingers, and they hurt, although he couldn't tell if that was because he'd been bound or simply because of the cold. The Queen wouldn't... No, Rhys knew that she would without any hesitation abduct a Chenjan man, even one not worth sending to her Inquisitors. Even if she hesitated, her security agents certainly wouldn't. But Nyx... Nyx wouldn't let them take him, would she? Not if she had any say in the matter, and if there was anything Rhys knew about her it was that she always found a way to have a say. Rhys' body untensed a little, and he sat up.
He didn't bother to look around right away, instead he tasted the air and searched for some kind of bug to make contact with. If he was still in the palace he should at least have been able to feel the Queen's security, even if he couldn't control them, but it wasn't like that. There were a few scattered midges he could feel, but no swarms, nothing large at all, and not even much of the small ones. He called one to him, to see if he could. It wasn't a strong enough insect to do anything, not call for help or keep him warm or heal even a tiny wound. And it felt wrong when it settled on his palm, like it was missing something, or he was.
Nyx still hadn't arrived, so Rhys decided to look around the room. He was surprised to find that he could move freely. His body still felt stiff, but not injured, just uncomfortable. He ordered the midge to his shoulder and rubbed his hands together. He could see his breath in the air.
"Nyx!" he shouted, just in case.
No response, but he wouldn't pretend that he'd expected anything more. She'd probably be upset with him if he kept standing in front of this stone slab, so he moved toward the center of the room. There was a sharp pain -- separate from the cold -- coming from the back of his neck, so Rhys lowered the hood of his burnous to try to catch sight of it in the mirrors. His hand hovered above the marking there for a moment, then he dragged his fingers along it, trying to rub it off. It didn't even smudge, but he kept trying for a long moment.
Rhys wasn't a man who believed in asking God for things -- the whole idea seemed distasteful to him, what was important was that they submitted, not what favors they wanted God to grant them. Still, there were certainly things he wanted, and a little guidance, some kind of explanation of where he was.
"Nyx!" he shouted again.
Still silence.
There was a podium, with an envelope and a device. Rhys ignored the device for the moment, in favor of removing the letter, and reading it. It was in Chenyan, a weird touch that had Rhys' heart beating in his chest before he even got through the first sentence. What he read there wasn't particularly calming, either. "For his dedication he'd been chosen." Yeah right. The letter didn't get any more believable after that, but Rhys folded it up neatly, and tucked it into a pocket of his burnous. He might need it, later, or he could at least use it to start a fire. He might need one to keep warm.
He pocketed the device as well, without looking at it yet, and headed for the door. "Nyx!" he called out one more time, as he headed down the path.
Name & DW Journal: Snow,
snowBirthdate & Age: March 16, 22
Characters played in Zodion: Alec Campion (
foepas), Buffy Meissonier (blondeandperky), and Sol Badguy (firesealed)✖ CHARACTER:
Name: Rhys Dashasa
Canon: Bel Dame Apocrypha
PB/Image: PB, because book character.
Info links: TV tropes article
Umayma is a planet with two suns, a day is twenty-seven hours long and a week is nine days. It was settled three thousands years ago by a group of Muslims, the First Families. After that, more people arrived, but the two main countries -- Nasheen and Chenja -- both come from that initial settlement. Their religions share the exact same book, but past that there has been little they've been able to find in common. They've mostly stopped trying, and have been at war for over three hundred years.
In Nasheen, any full-blooded Nasheenian male who lives to be old enough to be drafted is. They donate their genetic material and head to the front, where they either live to forty and return behind the lines to a world almost as brutal as the front itself, or they die. Nasheen is a country run by women. In Chenja, first-born sons are exempt from the draft. Men tend to have multiple wives, and women and men both follow strict rules of modesty, although the women more so.
Rhys was born Rakhshan Arjoomand in Chenja, the only son of a mullah, a wealthy man. He had spent time as a dancer at the Chenjan Imam's court, and he hadn't learned to fight. At seventeen, his father decided that three generations of his family was too long to go without sending a boy to war. He ordered Rhys to go. Rhys refused, and he ran. Giant security bugs dragged him back to his father, and the man smashed Rhys' hands with a metal pipe. Rhys ran again, this time with the help of one of his sisters, and he made it across the border, into Nasheen. He'd passed through the front, been infected and injured by it, but hadn't fought there, and when he arrived in Faleen he had been taken in by magicians. They saw that he had talent for their work -- talent he'd hidden because it would have got him sent to the front, even without his father's demand -- and they healed him.
Rhys' life in Nasheen wasn't easy, and life outside the magician's gym was dangerous. Nasheenian women would jeer at him, or beat him, or worse, when they saw him in the streets (since he could easily be picked out by the color of his skin). Rhys wasn't even used to being around women who would look him in the eye. Still, once Rhys learned that he didn't have the talent necessary to be a magician for a First Family, he still wasn't content to stay where he was safe. He left Faleen to visit other parts of Nasheen, where the only job he could find was working at a restaurant as he continued to look for some kind of job having to do with magic that wasn't the one he'd left in Faleen. One night, when he was walking to the mosque after a late shift, three Nasheenian women set on him for being a Chenjan man. They beat him, cut his clothes off and then cut him with their knives.
After that, Rhys made his way to the nearest magician's gym and they helped him return to Faleen. Once back, Rhys returned to his old job as magician's assistant, until a former bel dame (a Nasheenian role, responsible for cutting the heads off of boys who tried to flee the front, mostly) turned bounty hunter hired him for her team, partly because she needed a magician and could afford his rates where she couldn't afford someone better's, partly to piss off the magician Rhys had been working under, and partly because Nyx likes his hands.
Rhys has worked under Nyx for the last seven years, taking care of the bugs needed to run her business and helping do other aspects of the bounty hunting business that don't involve fighting people.
When Nyx gets a note directly from the Queen of Nasheen, offering a reward for services that could be rendered, she takes Rhys rather than any of the other members of her team (which are Anneke and Khos as fighters and Taite as comm tech) because even though he's Chenjan, he's still better-educated and better-mannered than anyone else she has available.
The mission the Queen gives Nyx is to track down a missing alien, who is visiting Unayma to learn about their bugs and magic, and who could help tip the war between Nasheen and Chenja in favor of the former. Rhys is from a canon point just after this meeting.
Canon Point: God's War, end of Chapter 9
Gender & Sex: Male & Male
Age: 25
Birthdate/Sign: August 25th/Virgo.
Rhys is a man with very high standards towards himself, and everyone else. He has a tendency to be fussy, and is certainly dogmatic. He exemplifies traits of modesty and he can be very passive, despite the strength of character that is what allows him to be passive. When he disagrees with something, though, he does not hold his tongue, instead talking at length what he disagrees about.
Tattoo: Back of his neck, about an inch long
Suitability: Human, over 18. Also, while he's a fairly traumatized character, ultimately Zodion (even with the requirement to have sex, which he won't care for at all) is still a much kinder and gentler place than Umayma, and he will be safe in Zodion in a way he really isn't in canon. Beyond that, at a canon point a couple of years in the future, Rhys does marry and is shown to be quite sexual within that relationship, so he certainly has sexual desires and the emotional maturity to have a relationship.
Power: On Umayma, some people (called magicians) are born with the ability to alter pheromones and effectively reprogram insects at the cellular level. Rhys describes it as "examining the air, tasting it, and telling it what to do". A good magician can use insects for anything from lighting a room, communicating across large distances, using as security cameras, and reattaching or regrowing entire limbs (as well as more minor injuries). Rhys is shitty at it, and has only a provisional government license, good only while he's employed. Communicating across distances only works if there's someone on the other end to read the bugs, and therefore is a meaningless power in Zodion.
Rhys would start off with the ability to command very small insects, flies, dragonflies, crickets, and able to close very small wounds (like papercuts). Fully powered (in Zodion terms), he could command almost all the insect life that can be found in Zodion (although less of them if they're larger bugs) and do his maximum ability in canon, which is stop an infection and do the equivalent of stitches and smaller wound-closing type healing with the bugs. He will never be able to do the reattaching limbs that a normal magician in his world would be capable of. In addition to the healing, he would be able to command fireflies or glow worms to use as a light source, and be able to do commands of other bugs like using dragonflies landed on his skin to keep warm.
Personality:
As violent as Umayma is, Rhys is noticeable for his outright refusal to fight. He won't do it when God requires it of him, and he won't do it to defend himself. It's not a moral conviction -- Rhys does believe that God wants him to submit, and that submitting means fighting at the front -- but a personal one. When attacked in the streets, beaten, cut with a knife, and worse, Rhys curls up and waits for it to stop. He doesn't believe in violence. In Umayma, for most people, that doesn't matter. They fight anyway. He doesn't.
His refusal to fight is his one lapse in his submittal to God, and it's part of what he seeks to make up for by being extra diligent in other areas. When he finds himself in Nasheen, where liquor is legal and women don't practice modesty, he makes certain that the strongest thing he drinks is tea and he takes more care to cover himself. And he presses his knees against the prayer mat six times a day, asking for leniency in his judgment. Still, despite his own sins, and the fact that he's face to face with Nasheenians who can and have tried to hurt him, Rhys doesn't give Nasheenians a pass. He will engage in a debate with Nyx when he has the chance, attempting to prove her atheism wrong and to show that she should return to the Kitab. He has a sharp tongue, and he doesn't make a habit of holding it back.
"I am still perplexed as to why it is that Chenja retained the veil and Nasheen discarded it," Rhys said. "Perhaps Nasheen’s women sought to frighten away God with their ugliness." In this quote, Rhys is responding to a woman who boxes for a living, who makes a habit out of directing violence for its own sake. While Rhys is technically protected by his own role, he still takes a risk to bait the woman this way, and he does it as much to show that he can as because of his belief that he is, in fact, better than a Nasheenian. He takes the same attitude to the Queen of Nasheen, questioning her when in an audience for a completely different matter, on how she can justify barring men from serving as mullahs unless they return alive from the front. Rhys has a sense of self-preservation, but he's also spirited, feisty, and he hasn't let what he's been through grind that down.
He has been through a lot, though, and while the traditional Chenjan belief would be that he should be protecting multiple wives, what Rhys most wants in his life is someone to protect him. He has a prickly pride that tells him he should be able to go at it alone, but when women in Nasheen threaten him and Nyx is there to tell them that he is 'hers' the possessiveness both grates and is a relief. If someone else is willing to fight to protect Rhys, then it matters less that he won't fight himself. If someone else will protect him, then maybe he doesn't have to jump every time a woman looks suspiciously at the color of his skin or asks him what his accent is. He wants to feel safe, even though he values his independence over that feeling.
Rhys has a finely-acquired sense of beauty. In addition to thinking the Kitab is the most beautifully written work there is, Rhys also makes the time to read poetry. Nyx's claim that beautiful things make people weak is met with a scoff. Beauty, in Rhys' mind, helps them transcend their weakness, it doesn't make them more vulnerable to it.
That beauty that he focuses on, however, is aesthetic, not sexual. Rhys does believe that there is a place for sexual attraction --and that that place was if he had not been asked to go to the front he would have had twenty or thirty wives and he would have been sexually attracted to them. Even within that context, he would not have expected any of his wives to be sexually stirred at the sight of him. Rhys was taught -- and believes -- that men's bodies are clean, closer to God, and that real women aren't "stirred to sin" at the sight of them. His experience in Nasheen has been a little different than that, with a random Nasheenian woman in the street more likely to flirt with him or grab him than a Chenjan woman who worked as a prostitute. It isn't just their sexual approaches towards Rhys that discomfits him. In Nasheen, female same-sex relationships are both common and legal, something Rhys isn't comfortable with. In the context of the world he grew up with, men should protect, and women should be protected, never mind that his own feelings about protection don't fit into that mold. Rhys does feel sexually and romantically attracted to people at various points in his book, but the relationship between them couldn't be Chenjan one, and he can't right now really imagine doing anything else.
Rhys is well-educated and well-read, and doesn't change that after spending seven years working for a woman who got kicked out of the state school for not being able to learn to read at all, and he doesn't change it even though in the world of bounty hunters that he lives in, being able to shoot a pistol is worth far more. His first tendency towards a conversation with someone he doesn't know is polite formality, although he won't continue in that mode if he's met with hostility or crudeness. He hasn't so much changed his core self in order to survive in Nasheen as he has added layers, outer ones that work to protect him from living in a hostile country.
✖ SAMPLES:
"Zodion" First-Person Network Entry:
Voice
[ That this city is godless is something that had been apparent to Rhys from the minute he saw that letter. It's something different, still, for a people to be ignorant, and for there to be no calls to prayer. Here, it seems, there are no prayers, or at least Rhys has seen no evidence of any. Do these false gods punish people for praying?
That won't stop him. God is here just as much as He was in Nasheen, and Rhys still has plenty to pray for.]
How long is your day here?
[It's not twenty-seven hours, can't be, not with where the sun is in the sky right now. He can theoretically pray by the movement of the sun in the sky, but Umayma has two suns, and Rhys wants as many facts as possible, to increase his chances of making the right determination.]
In addition, what do you do...for the cold?
[His teeth clack together as he shivers from the wind and the low temperature. The desert gets cold at night, sometimes, but not this cold, and his clothing is to protect him from getting cancer from the sun more than anything else. Rhys is unwilling to simply go to an apartment that's been designated for him, too nervous about what he might find. Too stubborn to give in just because of a little cold.]
Is there a place where warmer garments can be bought here? And any advice about what would be warm enough.
[He won't ask advice on where to live, doesn't think he can trust any answers he would get with regards to that. He doesn't like asking advice at all, but he's alone here, and he knows from his time in Nasheen just how badly being alone can go.]
Thank you, in advance, if you can help me.
I'm Rhys. It's nice to meet you all.
[If politeness will sway even one person towards feeling kindness that they might not, then it's worth it, and he'll try. The only thing he can do now is try, anyway.]
"Zodionlogs" Third-Person Prose Entry:
Rhys opened his eyes to cold, and emptiness. He flexed his fingers, and they hurt, although he couldn't tell if that was because he'd been bound or simply because of the cold. The Queen wouldn't... No, Rhys knew that she would without any hesitation abduct a Chenjan man, even one not worth sending to her Inquisitors. Even if she hesitated, her security agents certainly wouldn't. But Nyx... Nyx wouldn't let them take him, would she? Not if she had any say in the matter, and if there was anything Rhys knew about her it was that she always found a way to have a say. Rhys' body untensed a little, and he sat up.
He didn't bother to look around right away, instead he tasted the air and searched for some kind of bug to make contact with. If he was still in the palace he should at least have been able to feel the Queen's security, even if he couldn't control them, but it wasn't like that. There were a few scattered midges he could feel, but no swarms, nothing large at all, and not even much of the small ones. He called one to him, to see if he could. It wasn't a strong enough insect to do anything, not call for help or keep him warm or heal even a tiny wound. And it felt wrong when it settled on his palm, like it was missing something, or he was.
Nyx still hadn't arrived, so Rhys decided to look around the room. He was surprised to find that he could move freely. His body still felt stiff, but not injured, just uncomfortable. He ordered the midge to his shoulder and rubbed his hands together. He could see his breath in the air.
"Nyx!" he shouted, just in case.
No response, but he wouldn't pretend that he'd expected anything more. She'd probably be upset with him if he kept standing in front of this stone slab, so he moved toward the center of the room. There was a sharp pain -- separate from the cold -- coming from the back of his neck, so Rhys lowered the hood of his burnous to try to catch sight of it in the mirrors. His hand hovered above the marking there for a moment, then he dragged his fingers along it, trying to rub it off. It didn't even smudge, but he kept trying for a long moment.
Rhys wasn't a man who believed in asking God for things -- the whole idea seemed distasteful to him, what was important was that they submitted, not what favors they wanted God to grant them. Still, there were certainly things he wanted, and a little guidance, some kind of explanation of where he was.
"Nyx!" he shouted again.
Still silence.
There was a podium, with an envelope and a device. Rhys ignored the device for the moment, in favor of removing the letter, and reading it. It was in Chenyan, a weird touch that had Rhys' heart beating in his chest before he even got through the first sentence. What he read there wasn't particularly calming, either. "For his dedication he'd been chosen." Yeah right. The letter didn't get any more believable after that, but Rhys folded it up neatly, and tucked it into a pocket of his burnous. He might need it, later, or he could at least use it to start a fire. He might need one to keep warm.
He pocketed the device as well, without looking at it yet, and headed for the door. "Nyx!" he called out one more time, as he headed down the path.