#kaijja

[akpaleyreblogs]

I love having roleplayed my way into putting a stupid fucked up love triangle into a game that didn't have one

[brandongamesall]

Okay, going back to telltales the walking dead for a little bit, I wanted to discuss one aspect of rhe first season. Why do we actually think Duck is annoying?

1. Biggest one I'll give everyone is he's the reason for the biggest first disaster. Him running over Shawn's leg is a big no no. But he's just a kid. That's honestly one of the worst attributes people give him. That one mistake he has to tell his dad every day (Kenny said himself) that he feels bad about it.

2. I will also give you that he does speak way too much. But then again, he's a kid. That makes sense. Everyone that I have seen play TWD for the first time always hears ducks voice for the first time and cringes. (I did too LOL)

3. Then, last, I will give you the most miniscule thing. He blamed clementine for the bugs in the pillow without evidence. It doesn't matter that she fesses up afterwards. He had no right claiming Clem on it.

4. Last but not least, he got bitten. Such a burden to bear and he ultimately got Kaijja killed.

Yeah, nevermind. I answered my questions

[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.

[akpaleyreblogs]

I think these got harder to circulate when you could no longer modify the original post, but yeah I'm game.

Last song: Ordinary Town by Tracy Grammer. I'm on a music I listened to in high school kick just now.

Favorite color: Midtone blues, goldenrod, reddy/orangey pinks.

Currently watching: Don't really have a show just now. But I will be watching OFMD as soon as the full season is out.

Last movie: Watched The Devil Wears Prada recently. Solid film. Very successfully sells me on relationship chemistry, which is not the point but I enjoyed.

Sweet/savory/spicy: Varies by mood. Right now it's savory and spicy I think.

Relationship status: Married to my romantic partner with also a queerplatonic relationship that is deeply important to me.

Current obsession: I think about BG3 a lot right now. It's been a while since a video game got me that good. I have many many comic scripts to illustrate. Also inevitably whomever my current d&d character is, which right now is Kaijja, a middle-aged divorced politician blood magic paladin of a war god whose guiding principle is an "everyone gets their needs met" flavor of justice. I've enjoyed playing her, but she is not an easily describable character.

Last thing googled: I google a lot of neighborhood associations for work right now, but the MOST recent thing I googled was "weasel with human face" for a bit.

Uh. I think most people I would tag who live on here have been tagged. @ashilean, @fantasy-creatures-rated, @somnolentreader, if you feel like it play the game?

I was tagged by @cat-dragoness, but the reblog chain was getting long, so new post!

Last song: I haven't actually listened to anything yet today. Last thing I listened to last night was Andrew Peterson's Light for the Lost Boy album, which is my current going-to-sleep music.

Favorite color: Blue or purple, depending on the day.

Currently watching: I've been on-and-off watching FMA Brotherhood, Leverage, Critical Role Campaign 2, Phineas and Ferb, and a Fairy Tail rewatch for a while now.

Last movie: North by Northwest, but that was back in July. Whoops.

Sweet/savory/spicy: Sweet, mostly? But also savory depending on my mood. Never spicy.

Relationship status: Happily single, but also crushing on my own characters and a little bit on Quincy Morris.

Current obsession: There's this book called Song of the Selkies that came out a couple weeks ago, and I read it pre-release, and I only just this week managed to think about anything else.

Last thing googled: How to make a circle cape. Hobby Lobby has fleece on sale, and I've been thinking for a while about making the cape equivalent of my favorite fleece jackets, and I am So Tempted.

Tagging @as-dreamers-do, @invisiblewashboard, and @o-lei-o-lai-o-lord (and whoever else wants to do this).

[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]

Oh Sensation Sharp and snapping Long companion Hold me close Tell me I am bleeding slowly Torn to pieces Broken bones For all of that is just Sensation To hold, to love To live, to know

So the above artwork is a visualization of the above poem, but this whole thing is also... more than that?

Kaijja as a character in her current form draws a lot from my experiences with pain therapy and managing a chronic pain disorder. Half the prompt for her magic was this set of gifs and the other half was my experience of the psychological element of pain. Which is to say that pain is a response to a certain kind of nervous system activation and how manageable it is often depends on whether your brain thinks there's actually something wrong that needs fixing. Pain in erotic circumstances (not a thing I'm into, but) is often converted to pleasure because brain perceiving strong sensation as pleasurable and pain is strong sensation. I have dealt on and off with a chronic pain disorder for years now, and it is never so bad as when my nervous system is highly activated and I am afraid.

When you are thinking about pain all the time and experiencing sometimes very severe pain all the time and you are aware of that psychological piece but your thinking self still can't quite internalize that nothing is actually physically wrong with you, the concept of erotic pain becomes something of a power fantasy. Imagine you could feel this way, register all the sensations, and be able to treat the whole thing with the kind of joyous curiosity or even pleasure that would make this experience empowering instead of scary. Imagine that instead of making your world smaller this kind of sensation could expand it.

Kaijja was always going to be some kind of flesh paladin, but a lot of what is very core to her comes from that power fantasy, the pain that makes me visualize things moving under my skin or my flesh peeling away being both true and also beautiful. Kaijja isn't someone who doesn't experience pain, but the type of neutrality I have spent the last couple years learning and still don't have all the way down is her default. The bodily warning systems are sometimes informative, the texture of the sensations is interesting, and through the last decade or so she has been conditioned to find the extremes of both erotic. When Kaijja is in too much pain to function well it's because the experience is overwhelming and distracting, not excruciating.

Which presents a problem when the cause of that kind of overwhelm is suddenly actual bodily harm instead of being safely taken apart and reassembled by someone who loves you, and all of your instincts still say this is interesting and lovely and you should settle in and ride it out. When you are aware that there is a difference between your body signals and actual reality and on an emotional lizard brain level you can't tell the difference.

This poem is about not being able to tell the difference.

It is also about me. Not being able to tell the difference.

I don't think it would be so gentle as it is if it weren't also a kind of soft, self-soothing reflection. For her, it's the quiet acknowledgement that this is real. For me, it is the gentle reminder that it is not. A statement that I am in love with the wondrous thing of living, even when the hard parts speak to me from underneath my skin.

[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]

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]

Happy new year, it's time to post a bunch of stuff from last year

[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]

Kaijja's slightly complicated love life has been made more complicated by the fact that Kavsa's dead wife was, in fact, undead and still around, raising important questions like "why the fuck would you promise to stay with me if I die if you couldn't bend your oaths for your actual wife?"

If you want to read about Kaijja's divorce, a couple thousand words about that under the cut.

Summer winds its way through the Issanari, the sun tilting south in its journey from Al Anar to the distant western shores. Your band of votaries mend structures, resolve disputes, carry the news and cure the sick. Dawn prayer comes early and sunset prayer late. The child in your belly grows and you administer prayers for safe childbirths and safe sex with special reverence for the stories and scripture. From the way you speak of it Jean would think the petitioner saints invented motherhood. You accuse him of taking you literally, which he is, and he accuses you of attempting poetry, which you are. You imagine leaving your daughter summers of poems, gathering a collection of fleeting moments to remember and show her when she has her first child. This was what it was like. This was you.

You sit together amidst the scattered light beneath the trees, resting your tired body while somewhere across the golden grass Tanvi waters the quards. Jean has looped an arm around your waist, fingers lightly touching your belly as he softly enumerates all the work he looks forward to suffering at your side and things he cannot wait to show the child within. 

"Give me some time to finish growing the little one first, hmm?" You quirk your lips at him and he pulls you to the side until your head rests in his lap. You reposition to lay on your back and look up at him, still holding his hand. "What are we going to name her?"

"Her?" He smiles warmly. "How do you know it's a girl?"

"I was visited by Saint Adja herself, she told me so in a dream." You laugh together at the ridiculousness of presuming to know the future and imagine your daughter laughing with you. 

Jean no longer wants you to hunt for pests or drive off predators, and you easily relinquish tasks that you never had talent at to begin with. A wyvern harasses a community deep in the northern hills and you tell Jean and Tanvi to make preparations while you ride to ask assistance from the folk you know cultivate the forest upriver. You can feel his relief, but he insists on riding you to the edge of the wood before sending you on your way. More contentious are the tasks you will not relinquish. You don't need to investigate rumors of a demon, he says, you met Shiral's band two days ago, send word and let them handle it. It turns out to be a medial, but Jean is furious with you for leading the ride to meet it. Were it actually a demon you doubt he would have been able to convince it to leave himself. That's not the point, he tells you with uncharacteristic tautness in his voice, you could have been killed. The fact that you could also be killed if your quard spooks and you fall seems unconvincing, as much as the reality that you are, in fact, fine. 

When you descend alongside the Second Son, lightning drawing back into the earth, you return a symbol. When in a month people you have never met speak your name, it will be for this moment and they will not bother to undercut its virtue. The entire rest of your life will be predicated on what you have done today. Jean cannot even look at you. 

Autumn brings storms, but not like this. Lightning shouldn't strike upward, so there's no fight as you curve your path into its shadow, but the silence is tense and worried. As you near the center you can feel the air crackle, sharp and angry against your skin. The quards bleat in agitation as you bring them to a stop in the settlement at the base of the hill, a small collection of wooden structures spread across three dirt roads. Your companions dismount quickly. Tanvi helps you down off your own testy animal and you feel a clip of static as your feet touch the earth. People stand close to the buildings, hum of nervous chatter playing against the cracking thrum of lightning arcing off the hill above. You issue orders quickly. 

"Split up, find out if anyone's hurt. Go." 

Jean hesitates. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to find out what happened." His eyes linger on you, not quite trusting you not to do something foolish and extreme, so you don't tell him what you're going to do. Instead you say "It's fine, love. I'll be careful," and he goes. 

Once both are out of sight, you will slowly climb the hill, lightning arcing between streaks of red earth all around you. You are not nimble under the best of circumstances, but you are not afraid. You can see yourself in your mind's eye, the image of motherhood ascending through crackling purple death for these people, and you know this will only ever happen once. You are too you not to become a story. 

For what it's worth, Tanvi thinks going home was probably a good idea anyway. "You'll have a community there. The three of us could raise the kiddo on the road, but it's harder." She would know. 

"I have stood by while you did terrifying deadly things, but it's not just your life you're risking anymore. He could have killed you both and there would have been nothing either of us could do about it." Anyone but Jean would be shouting right now. Instead his voice is hard and rough, deriving emphasis from speed rather than volume. 

"Folk are safe and a man lives and I am fine," you answer in soothing tones. "I knew I was going to be."

"Kaijja, you could not possibly have known that. Fuck the scripture for one moment, I know you know what gods are. That man is more dangerous than any demon. He could kill you in pique and forget you ever existed. Damnit, you're lucky he didn't kill you by accident!" He has bypassed the argument that you did not know it was a god at all and a demon might not have been so conversational.

"He wasn't going to kill us." You smile. "Ishxaar is powerful and careless and an ass, but he is still a person."

Jean looks at you with despair in his eyes. "People kill each other, Kaijja."

He doesn't seem to be getting the point, so you reiterate. "Look, Jean, I knew. I felt it. It was right and I was right. Call it fate or intuition or whatever you want, but--"

"I call it gambling, and you will stop doing it with our child's life." In fifteen years of knowing each other it is the first time Jean has ever snapped at you, so you comply.

Your mother is thrilled. She cheerfully rearranges her home to accommodate the two of you, enlists you in spinning thread, and chats to you about parenting you and your siblings in exchange for stories from your travels. Your siblings and friends (yours, theirs, your parents'--your parents' home has always been a parade of friends) make or bring you things--clothing outgrown by your little brother's kid, food from the market and the herds, dry bone and scrap wood for your own crafts. Your father delights in feeding the procession. Your siblings adopt Jean into their routines when he is not out in the community doing votary work, and he blooms as he always does with your family. 

For your part you try to handle the transition gracefully, moving from care to transcription work when spending your days on your feet becomes a problem. At some point the people around you refuse to let you walk up to the cathedral to do it and bring the paper and scripture to your parents' home. You grill them for news and draw them into discussions of stories and scripture and natural philosophy. In what is going to become a theme, you do not like putting aside your work no matter how necessary it is for the child that you rest. Stillness has never been your forte, but as everyone will not stop reminding you, your body is currently doing quite a lot of work. You're just going to have to figure out how to let it. 

You lodge another strike against your motherly intuition by joyously welcoming a son, tiny and screaming and dark like his father. Your parents coo over the little boy while you and Jean insist on speaking to the infant like a tiny adult. "Saiif," your sister tells the baby, "Your parents want you to grow up to be the most erudite child in all the land. I think you should disappoint them by fucking off to be a shepherd in the mountains," and laughs when your mother tries to chase her out of the room for swearing at a baby. 

Saiif doesn't particularly like to sleep, much to your household's chagrin, and you often spend nights wandering the dark of the city with Jean and the restless baby, telling the stories of the stars. Your little brother's four-year-old asks his fathers absurd questions about the new cousin with the grave sincerity of a child tasked with helping the adults. The parade of friends through your parents’ home doesn't stop, but now it comes with parenting advice. You are regularly shooed out of your own home to work or pray or spend some time together. Often, you talk about Saiif anyway. Increasingly, you return to your work.

And then one day during one of your little exiles Mirjat finds you at the bath house, soaking in the warm waters. She joins you in the water and, after a bit of chat, your old mentor informs you that the Herald to Iokhar is intending to retire next year. Does she have any idea yet who the candidates might be to replace him? With things getting complicated in the North it's going to need to be someone who's not afraid to stand up to a difficult god. Ideally someone with an eye to conflict resolution and the record of deeds to prove it. Inevitably unexpected folk will put their names in the ring, but the Clericy always has a shortlist. Who are they going to ask? Well, the Clericy of the Petitioner Saints was thinking about you.

When you share the news with Jean that evening he is uneasy. You have been so wrapped up in planning how you might run a campaign that you had not considered he might not be equally enthusiastic about the thing. When he finally speaks on the matter it is to ask, "Are you certain this is a good idea?" He is concerned that your ties to Adrar--You don't have any--Your husband and son are visibly Adrari. For all that Jean is a votary of Issanar, for all that his parents will never meet Saiif, Jean is Adrari. He does not want the attention your candidacy would bring. He does not want to parade Saiif about to the communities you must convince, does not want your son to be the subject of strangers' scrutiny before he is old enough to speak for himself. 

You chew on that for a little while. You concede Jean’s trepidation is warranted. Perhaps if it were Kahili things would be different, but you want to be Herald to Iokhar, and Adrar is still very much a live security issue for communities in the North. But this will only ever happen once. While Heralds can be unseated, it is rare, and even with advocates of difficult gods oft serving fewer terms, you will never be a more salient figure than you are now. The Clericy has put your name forward because they expect you would be well suited, and they suspect that in the current environment you would win. This is your opportunity to shape the world, to serve your people, to do great works and be part of a lineage that reaches all the way back to the Petitioner Saints. Jean agrees, but he does not want his traditions to become politics. He will not be forced to prove he is Issanari enough to those who would have kept him out if they could. He will not expose Saiif to the same. Your conversation goes in circles for weeks, but ultimately there is no solution to find. You can do this, but he cannot do it with you. You will have to choose.

Later you will argue through tears of rage that Jean cannot leave Tanrilar, cannot take away the son you have barely seen since he started speaking. You will rail against the consequences of your actions as if you had not made the choices, and Jean will listen. Eventually when you have run out of things to say you will fold your arms and lick salt tears from your lips and the man who was your husband will say his piece with a calm but absolute resolve. "I've known you for a long time, Kaijja. For years I enabled you while you took terrible risks and made wonderful things. Now you can do more of both, and I am happy for you. But Saiif is never going to be your priority. So I am going to do what is best for me and for our son." His voice softens, gentler but no less certain. "I love you Kaijja, but this is stronger than your gravity. I promise you will always know where to find us."

You know even then that he is right, but in that moment you will argue and hurl vicious insults regardless, and he will stand there taking it until you have run yourself ragged and worn your voice to sandpaper. It will be almost another year before you apologize. 

Many years later still, over tea Jean will remark without malice that your relationship with your god is kind of perfect. "All the power and love with none of the inconvenience of daily compromise." 

"I compromise!" you complain, smiling.

"Not when someone doesn't convince you that you'll like the new outcome anyway." 

"Not when I don't have to," you'll finally be ready to concede. 

[akpaley]

Recent Inland Sea doodles. I did. A lot of trying to draw Kavsa this go round. I'm on a produce reference materials for a number of NPCs I care about project and unfortunately that man's face looks a very specific way in my head and drawing it is hard. Also this is comedically the second time I've asked for a proper description of a Kaijja love interest and gotten told most muscular human being alive, so I guess I've been informed by the game master what my character thinks is hot.

[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.