#Kaijja

[akpaley]

Made smooth and slick of seas and strands Tides that turn at your commands A heartbeat held by heavy hands

More Kaijja character writing. Roughly 1200 words on the beginning of her romantic relationship with the flesh god.

---

He does not mind solitude, but when you lack other obligations he does not mind your intrusion either. It is perhaps not usual, but it is natural to be fascinated with a god. You intrude often. You call it an extension of work, and the two of you do work through problems together. He was surprised, once upon a time, when he inflicted experience on you to demonstrate the severity of his edicts and you, not unshaken but still engaged, asked if he felt such detail in the experience of every person he faced. He had not been asked to use his power as a tool of empathy, not after imposing such suffering, not in centuries, but it is commonplace between you now. You wonder to what extent he can feel you enjoy it, even when it is excruciating. And the intellectual exercise is useful. Many times simulation of similar encounters has helped you watch for signs of tension, has made you more perceptive to the way your interlocutors conduct themselves and react to you. It is practical, and there is a quiet selfish pleasure in understanding the way he sees and feels the world.

Mirjat tells you it is unusual for Iokhar's Advocate to be his friend, or even to like the man, and you understand that but you do not relate. He is beautiful when he attempts to be terrifying, he is rational when he cannot intimidate, he is deeply intensely perceptive, and in his own stoic way he is oddly soft. Perhaps kind is a better word. He cares much more deeply than he shows. There is a selfish little thrill in that as well, knowing that you have brought out in him qualities most others never see. Knowing that you surprise him, a man who can feel everything but your thoughts just standing across from you. You accomplish a great deal in your tenure, but it is this that most often produces that quiet sense of pride.

He shows you change. In theory this is to make a point, but the point is unnecessary. You are not asking about something of immediate importance. It is after hours and you are asking about a story, about old scripture, from a primary source. This is not uncommon, and alongside speaking in words he chooses to sate a curiosity he knows you will have. When he has pulled you back together into the right shape you grin up at him. He studies you, near expressionless, and says "This is inappropriate." It is the strangest declaration of love you will ever receive, and you see it for what it is immediately. It should shock you, but somehow it does not. You agree. The evening ends with a veneer of stoic professionalism.

You will talk about it the next day. You will talk about it for the next week. You will see a degree of begrudging openness from him that you will not realize has been kept from you until you see it for the first time. You seek counsel, as is the responsible thing to do, but find that there is very little doubt as to the choice you will make. Mirjat appeals to your career, to the work that you've done, to the work that you might still do, and you find the arguments that have driven you all your life unconvincing.

You split your evenings between discussions with Iokhar and your own private consideration. You know the thrill of new intimacy will cloud your judgment, and he does too, but you both recognize that no matter what decision the two of you make your relationship will change. The idea of a purely professional relationship absent discussions of philosophy, history, art and other work feels galling, having experienced a relationship that is mutually irreplaceable. Later the idea of being irreplaceable to him will raise warmth in your chest and bring a smile to your face, but in that week while you assess it is simply a fact to be weighed. You are problem solving. Your feelings are data, but you do not have time to feel them fully. Only that they tell you what you want. You will resign with two weeks left in the season and half a term unfinished. It will take you most of the remaining two weeks working with your Clericy to choose Devadas as a successor, swear him in as Kalidas, and get him up to speed.

You already spend a great deal of time working during the on season, but for the better part of two weeks private time is practically nonexistent. This is a major adjustment, expected by no one, and by the time Iokhar leaves Kalidas must be prepared to represent him fully in the Council of Advocates. Anything you knew, anything you were working on, must be written down in such detail that it can be picked up where you left off. While you will join the Clericy of Iokhar, thus becoming available as a resource, it will take another month for the Clericy of the Petitioner Saints to determine this is the appropriate course of action and you must prepare for the contingency in which your full abdication from governance is determined necessary. It is not until the final night that you and your god finally have proper time together again. You sit quietly for much of it. He holds you and seems unpracticed, which to be fair you are as well. A decade is not a short time. A century and a half is longer. Yet, for all that, the mere ten months in front of you suddenly seems very long indeed.

"I would hear your voice when I am gone," he tells you, and it is less vulnerability than simple truth.

"I'd love to hear yours too," you say with irony, "but I suppose one of us will have to wait."

"I will not shirk my duties," he says, "But--"

"I would not ask you to." He pauses and then drops the apology. "Come back next season with stories for me." You smile as if this is a usual farewell, a friendship set aside to be picked up where it left off upon his return.

Very calmly, he takes your hand in his and matches his gaze to yours. For the first time you can feel the sensation of his own body mapped to yours, and you feel his quiet simmering hunger for you, individual fibers of his being humming beneath his skin for touch that a human lover could never even pretend. You feel it in the strands of your own muscles, suddenly yearning to rise up from beneath your skin and embrace the man in front of you. It is nearly overwhelming. Your breath catches and you do not dare break his gaze for fear it might stop. His voice is a low rumble in his chest. "I will." 

It is a greater promise than you asked for. It will stick with you during the long months of his absence, haunting your prayers and quiet moments and intruding on your activities unprompted.  

Upon his return, he will admit that this was the point.

[akpaleyreblogs]

As a person who engages with gender primarily as a set of social roles that get constructed in cultures for reasons, I am very interested in RPing in fantasy settings that imagine restrictive gendered social roles but like. Not the way my culture does it. Different ways. Ways that also make it costly to disobey norms, but the norms are different.

The problem is that I run D&D for an all nonbinary group of people and don't want to impose a fun tax. And I play D&D with a group of people who is much less interested in this idea than I am as far as I can tell. And saying "hey I want to explore gender the way I relate to gender in a game, and the way I relate to gender is inherently about people telling you what they want you to be for reasons that might have made sense in aggregate or for the people in power but are restrictive and uncomfortable for the individuals they don't successfully mould into fitting them" is like. That's a really big ask! It's a huge imposition for players who aren't all in on the gender as culture that we explore and fit with or friction against. It's a big ask for a game master to develop an interesting discriminatory cultural schema and set of expectations and apply it to you in interesting ways.

It's just. One of the most interesting base things to worldbuild about for me. It's fascinating as a structural set of mechanisms and thinking about it when constructing societies and characters is interesting and I wish it weren't so... awkward to try to do something with it when you're the only person interested in engaging with that? How does your society construct gender, what are its reproductive norms, how does it decide who to claim is aberrant, how does it treat them, and what does that say about its values? How you generate people is one of the most core questions a society needs to answer. Demography matters. The pressures that exist depending on the reproductive needs of a pre-industrial society? They matter! How does your culture meet them? How does it enforce them? How does that turn into social roles that go far beyond what they originally needed to do?

I have made an active choice in developing Kaijja's homeland that most people have kids. Having kids makes you more credible. the imagery of pregnancy is culturally powerful. The deep history of that culture comes out of (my admittedly limited knowledge of) common interactions between adoption of agricultural resource hoarding behavior and gender relations, and there's all sorts of other stuff built on top. One of the few pieces of worldbuilding I did for their land empire neighbors was a stricter and dramatically more patriarchal than the setting in general set of gender norms. It's unlikely to come up in the campaign, but writing a bit of her ex-husband's relationship with culture as a... let's call it second generation immigrant, though it's more complicated than that, is in part about navigation of finding the things he wanted and didn't want about different communication and gender and family construction norms between the two cultures. I have had explicit conversations with my DM about what transgender people mean culturally in these cultures.

Roleplaying any of the expectations that come out of that is excruciatingly awkward. Because I realized the moment that one of the other PCs was nonbinary that their player did not sign up for my nonsense, and making a thing of the gender of her character without her having consented ahead of time was not a kind thing to do or a good idea. I got a little ways into that, decided it was uncomfortable and a horrible idea, and stopped. Sometimes we make character choices based on our own boundaries, and should.

Which is just to say that like. Even when given maximal control over things and only really doing stuff in my own domain, this is not something I really get to explore without really broad buy-in because no one not buying in will do gender norms to me, and I don't want to do them to anyone who's not bought in as either a PC or a GM.

But I am very interested in exploring what different gender norms and societal reproductive needs do to the people living under and in them. And I am interested in doing it through roleplay because running RPGs is my main writing medium and because feeling what it is like to be part of and subject to systems is interesting. But oh boy do I not have any idea how to have a useful conversation about that or find a group of people who are similarly interested in the kind of weird sociological approach to that that I'm interested in. I think in general I assume people are less interested in engaging with oppressive social systems in RPGs than I am. It's probably true. I don't KNOW it's true, but probably. I've read the literature about the fun tax. Most people I know are pretty queer. So I assume. I mean like, I should probably ask, I know my sibling is queer but also interested in gender as culture as a setting element. It happens. But it's a tremendously awkward ask to make if the answer is no.

So instead I'm writing a page long ramble and posting it on the internet where maybe someone or maybe no one will read it. Maybe I'm just talking. Maybe the people who exist on here will tell me if they have feelings one way or another without me having to directly ask. Maybe this is an expression of anxiety. Who am I kidding, this is definitely an expression of anxiety. But maybe that's all it is.

[parrots-ug]

FDC kicks off exercise to nominate EALA MPs

FDC kicks off exercise to nominate EALA MPs

By Mary Blessing Ahairiirwe, NATIONAL: The Forum for Democratic Change has on Monday January 24, begun the nomination exercise to identify the party’s flagbearers for East African Legislative Assembly elections(EALA) scheduled for this year. According to the party president, Patrick Oboi Amuriat, the exercise that begins today Monday January 24 will end tomorrow Tuesday 25, January, with…

[akpaley]

Overwhelm.

[akpaley]

Can one pray to you through another? Would you permit me this heresy If I promised your words would still Find me Wanting

This was supposed to be a doodle and then I kept staring at it the next day and going "maybe I just do ONE more thing" and that's been the last two weeks.

[akpaley]

Intimate Kaijja and Iokhar doodles that I have been sitting on because I feel weird about it.

[akpaley]

A collection of Kaijja doodles I've gotten around to scanning.

[akpaley]

K: Here and alone I would eventually retain nothing. Not Issanar, not Iokhar, not my colleagues or my siblings or my values or my son. // V: You can’t fight change, whatever kind it may be. I think I chose it before I ever set foot in this city, though I don’t think I realized it then.

Forgetting.

[akpaley]

All my various design work for Kaijja, my body horror paladin current D&D character. I owe a lot to having like. Looked at the stuff @panelperday does midway through this process and switched from the stuff at the bottom to much more shapes and silhouette focused design. She's not in heavy armor yet and it remains to be seen if I use something like the designs I have here or if I design full plate that resembles her normal silhouette more closely.

[akpaley]

D&D party for the new game I'm in! These were a lot of fun to do.

Top image, left to right: Dextro (@fantasy-creatures-rated), Fin (@you-mustbeliving), Vistana (@somnolentreader), and Kaijja (mine).

[akpaley]

Iokhar returns to you as promised. You are early. You laugh at how you spent your afternoon envious of Kalidas' audience. Would you have preferred he serviced your needs before his duty? You ask him which of your needs he is prepared to service.

I liked the energy of the sketch for this but also basically every step of this image took fucking forever. You don't want to know how many attempts were made at covering up the walls and railing before I bit the bullet and just figured out how to do them properly.

Anyways.

I'm currently sitting on a small collection of Kaijja drawings that are, I guess I'll say significantly hornier than this one, and given that this is unusually sexy for where my blog tends to live I don't know if those will end up getting posted, even though none of them are like. Outright smut. Just nudity and the general presence of sexuality. If they do it will probably also be under the cut under some other Kaijja related thing.

[akpaley]

This is Iokhar, the war and justice god Kaijja is in a relationship with.

Plus bonus sequence from session zero in which Kaijja fails to take spear lessons particularly seriously because make the sleight of hand check to kiss your lover while he's fighting you is way more fun and you know he's going easy on you anyways.

[akpaley]

More Inland Sea doodles.

Braid woman is named Irit and I love her but I especially love watching her and Vistana shamelessly flirt. They should get together so she'll hang out with us more.

[akpaley]

Inland Sea doodles of Kaijja and Vistana, plus a drawing of much younger Kaijja and her ex-husband Jean. Kinda fun figuring out how to age her down while keeping her recognizable given the limits of my style.

[akpaley]

You should know better than to compare your god to a man's dead wife, but you've done it anyway and he understands.

I did this in mid April and have held off posting it until other players learned that "get drunk and complain about the church with your coworker" involved a one night stand. At this point I'm pretty sure that one's become clear even if it's not been said in as many words.

A lot of writing about this sequence under the cut.

Did you want to read about the morning after a weird one night stand? I wrote almost a thousand words about one, so you can if you want. Content warning for the really obvious shit like we're out here discussing sex, so if you aren't about that you've been warned. Nothing explicit though.

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Kavsa is already awake when you open your eyes in the dark of the morning, gazing up at the ceiling of his cell, warm body steeped in the smell of wine and sex. It is unclear whether this was a good idea, or at what point you decided it was for that matter. He's striking, a fact that was supposed to stay inside your head but has slipped out into reality somewhere between whatever lost line of thought led to your unstable head on his arm and your fingers intertwined. Or maybe it was the moment you all but admitted you could feel his erection. That was probably the turning point. It felt very natural at the time. 

Now you lay against him and make small talk until one of you figures out how to broach a discussion of what has transpired. You miss your god. This feels almost like a crime, though you cannot name a victim. He turns to hold you, hand against the small of your back. His hands are warm and strong and gentle except where the metal of his rings brushes cool against your skin. "Do you want to stop?" No, you want to be held. You want the security, the connection, the care those hands show you. If only your bodies fit together right. If only it was Iokhar asking in jest, already knowing the answer.

You are aware this is a common thing amongst soldiers and sailors and votaries all. Sex born of close quarters, isolation, and raw animal needs. What the Adrari will not condone in the household they make no effort to regulate in war camps. Desire does not bow to regulation in a pressure cooker. Except yours. You make choices. (Everyone makes choices, your teachings chide you.) Your needs are governed by discipline, and where they are not special and joyous you can handle them yourself.

Except here is Kavsa, featured in your lonely fantasies primarily for his proximity and handsome Kerweni features. Intense, honorable, always working Kavsa. He is a good man. Kind, steady. Somewhere in your gut you feel he deserves better than this. You lay out your motives and he admires you. "Remarkable woman," he calls you. Disclosure of your curse is met with almost heartbreaking concern in his rough voice. Is this friendship or has intimacy created something new and stranger? You do not love him.

When you are sixteen you needle the quiet thoughtful boy who will someday be your husband with questions you don't quite actually mean. He has arrived later to religious schooling than your local peers, or even many of the ones from more distant communities, but he thinks deeply and is usually right when he speaks at all. He also, to your frustration, refuses to be drawn into argument or debate. He asks sharp questions but will not present his own ideas until they are ironclad. Jean has no issue making friends but has very few. You decide to become one of them and pry him open like a clam to expose the soft world beneath his carefully considered exterior. When you are nineteen you will kiss him, because if Jean has to make the first move you suspect you will still be mutually pining at the unimaginable age of twenty-five. 

New birds begin to join the morning chorus. If Kavsa is also thinking of truer lovers he shows no sign of it. You should know better than to compare your god to a man's dead wife, but you've done it anyway and he understands. If only you had faith prayer would be heard in these circumstances, these words--your questions, your desire--should be for Iokhar. Kavsa does not have Iokhar's broad chest and powerful build, but you trace the features he does have anyway, desire and intimacy intermingling with the dissonance. 

In the early days of your first full season with your godly lover you bask in afterglow and ask him when he knew. "Before you did, I imagine. But it was hardly the strangest of your tells. And not a problem, alone." You are not surprised to learn you are hardly the first colleague to find him attractive. You shouldn't be surprised to learn that he can feel your arousal. You had considered the possibility and found it alluring in the soft unserious way you had considered all of your attraction until the moment it became real. "And how long have you known for yourself?" you ask, smiling. "Longer than responsible," he answers. "But," he turns to hold your gaze. "When it was serious you knew immediately."

You fuck Kavsa again in the frail gray before the dawn, sober and fully responsible for your actions. You want it, and he knows you can feel his wants. It is not serious, but you are both living in the pressure cooker. You play for normalcy, but with the gentle out of the approaching dawn he declines to tell you if he was in love with the friend he last sought this from, and you leave with a deep ambivalence. You do not want Kavsa to love you. This pleasure is not special or joyous. It is raw desire and holding tight to what is warm and present and alive in this broken place. As with many things of late, you wish you could discuss it with Iokhar, but you cannot and if only one prayer of many makes it to his ears it would be wrong for it to be this.

---

I live in a cool reality where my DM is not uncomfortable with either my writing about or posting D&D related sexual content involving NPCs. It is still a weird feeling thing to do, so also have a bunch of vague thoughts.

I feel a little weird about this being the first instance of Kaijja writing that's getting posted. It's definitely not the first one I've written. Maybe I'll post the stuff I feel less weird about at some point. I think it's stronger writing. But this is the one that's relevant to this particular piece of art so this is the one you get.

Engaging with sexuality (in the horniness direction as opposed to romance) is new and novel and interesting and also I live between hi I'm ace and fluster at the speed of fucking light and hi this character is extremely comfortable with this topic and I am figuring it out.

Along the lines of contrast between the character and the human person: It's interesting writing a person who naturally trends monogamous coming out of a culture where several person relationships are pretty normative and so there's no cultural taboo against doing this thing. Script flipping and all that. This vaguely vibes relationship violation to Kaijja. It's not. She could full ass get married to Kavsa and as long as Iokhar was properly informed and introduced and all that shit it would be fine. It's certainly fully within Iokhar's rights to get married to someone else and it probably wouldn't even bother her that much (though he's a god and there are limits to the amount of ownership one can reasonably exert over a creature that's twenty times your age with all kinds of divine obligations). But this feels weird for Kaijja and she can't use the structure of monogamy to process that both because that's explicitly not what her relationship is (even though to my knowledge neither she nor Iokhar has other partners at the moment) and because there's a little bit of a cultural superiority thing here, even though she probably wouldn't explicitly think of it as such. Her people's neighbors are much more conservative about sexual behavior and family structure. We're Better than hangups about how people do that stuff. There must be some Other reason this feels weird.

Part of the flesh magic Kaijja is copying from Iokhar is a kind of proprioception for other people's bodies if they're close enough. Mechanically in combat this is the Blind Fighting fighting style. I spend altogether too much time thinking about it as an element of stuff like insight proficiency though. A really big element of this character's concept was a human trying to engage with something fundamentally inhuman on its terms, and the kind of blending of the god's perception of reality into the person's at the edges as a result. I tend to write that kind of stuff reasonably euphemistically when I'm not explicitly going for embracing the body horror of it, but it's very There.

I feel a little silly about posting my character writing here, but I like writing about this person's weird interpersonal dynamics and experiences so. Probably more of it at some indeterminate point when I have relevant art to throw it under I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[akpaley]

An experiment.