I'll see what I can do about getting Sully's write-up all polished and shiny - you know, a little more detail as far as "history" goes, etc - before too much longer.
Hooray for clockwork spyglasses and such! *happy dance*
Posted on 2012-04-30 at 17:05:17.
Topic: Smuggler's Moon Q&A Subject: Coming soon...
...to a game thread near you!
I wish I was parting this weekend... would have been preferable, I think.
Loverly updates on the Stone Brothers, Celeste! Looking forward to interacting with both of these fellas.
Also, get well T_O!
And, Kriea... I'll take a roast sammich if'n ya still got one! *drools* I'm starving!!!
Oh yeah... I've a post or two in the works for you all, too, thanks to a lovely bit of collab goodness I received from Celeste and a snippet or two of inspiration from other sources...
Posted on 2012-04-30 at 16:23:09.
Edited on 2012-04-30 at 17:09:56 by Eol Fefalas
Topic: Crew of the Dawn Falcon Subject: Watching where we're going! Sullivan O’Shea (aka Sully Star-Eyes)
Sully Star-Eyes has spent most of his life (or, at least, most of it that he can remember) aboard one sand ship or another. He couldn’t tell you where he was born or, for that matter, even how long ago that might have been… he seems to know quite a bit about the slums of Vexotia and a decent bit about the city itself but whether that’s because he was born there or because he’s visited and explored frequently enough over the years to have gotten the “lay of the land” is uncertain. There is no one place in the slums or the city proper that Sully identifies as (or even hints at) being ‘home’ and, when he does visit, he seems more than a little preoccupied with leaving the place behind. Home for Sully Star-Eyes, if you ask him, has always been at the helm of a Sand Ship with the desert spreading away to the horizon all around him and the stars scattered like diamonds across the black blanket of the sky and that’s where he prefers to be…
Description: Sully is a somewhat odd-looking individual if you get a chance to really look at him… his physical build is fairly average – about 5’ 10”, weighing in at around 160 lbs or so, lean and lanky – but, despite that, there is something just a little off-putting about the man. Maybe it’s the way his black and white streaked hair seems perpetually wind-tossed, bringing to mind the way the dunes churn in beneath the paddles of a sandship or, for those who have seen pictures of such things, the way the waves once tossed themselves across the ocean… Maybe it’s the fact that Sully’s always got those dark goggles on, even at night time… or maybe it’s because, if he lifts those goggles, people get to see that his eyes are a set of featureless, pearlescent orbs colored a blue so pale that they may as well be white, and they sparkle and shimmer like the stars themselves when any sort of light is reflected from them. Additionally, somewhere along the line, Sully seems to have developed a penchant for and acquired a very modest collection of ‘pre-desert’ clothing, his favorite pieces being a pair of battered combat boots and some cargo pants that may have originally been a khaki color but have been patched with leather so extensively it’s honestly difficult to tell. He wears a leather bracer on his right arm which houses a compass and ‘nautical sundial,’ and one his left which integrates an astrolabe of his own design. Sully wears a bandolier, slung sometimes over and sometimes underneath a knee-length leather coat but, seemingly always with him, in which he carries a number of map cases, telescopes, and other accoutrements of his profession. As mentioned before, Sully, too, is rarely caught (even at night but especially in daylight) without a pair of extremely dark goggles secured over his eyes. Most often, these goggles are little more than the simple ‘sungoggles’ that they appear to be; on occasion, though (most notably when plotting courses and pointing the Dawn Falcon in the direction she needs to go) he does employ a pair that has some navigational gear included in their design (telescopic eye piece, fold-away sextant, etc)… Finally, slung from a wide belt around his waist and strapped to his hip, Sully carries a sawed-off, side-by-side scattergun that, by the looks of it, also is a relic of the pre-desert days… He doesn’t use it much, of course, as ammunition for it is harder to come by than the weapon itself was, but he does have a small stockpile of shells for it stashed away…
History
Sully came aboard the Dawn Falcon a few months after Ardis Winfall took possession of the craft. Captain Winfall and his, at the time, smallish crew happened upon a derelict sandship half buried in one of the deserts’ ever-shifting dunes and, hoping to perhaps salvage anything of use from the apparently abandoned wreck, they of course, heaved to and boarded the thing. It didn’t take them long to discover that the sand-covered hulk was exactly as empty as initial appearances had led them to believe… Ardis and crew found what they were expecting, of course – salvageable bits of tech, meager scatterings of supplies and sundries, and a desiccated corpse or two of what surely must have been crew-members of the derelict who had died of exposure, dehydration, or any of the deserts’ innumerable perils. It was what they found in the wheelhouse of the wreck that caught them off guard…
“I told ‘em… warned ‘em… let ‘em know it was comin’… I can feel it, I said… Let me steer us around it, I said… But noooooo… The Captain knows best, doesn’t he?... Steer us right into it, Sully… It’ll wash over us in no time and we’ll be no worse the wear other than a few buckets of sand that’ll have to be shoveled out of the gun pits and we won’t have to tack undue time onto the course…”
…The voice that prattled on beyond the barricaded hatch of the wheelhouse almost matched the frenetic clatter-bang of activity that could be heard on the other side…Almost… The sounds of equipment being dragged around and doors banging opened and shut were, at times, enough to drown out the frenzied chatter…
“…Hope you’re happy with yourself, now, Captain… digesting away in some shark belly, I’ll bet… Not me, though… Noooo… I’ll be staying right here until they show up… They’re coming, I know it… I can feel it… they’re…
…Hullooo?”
…When Ardis and Lucas finally managed to get the hatch opened a crack and shouldered their way into the wheelhouse, they were greeted with utter darkness…
“There you are,” the frenetic voice chirped from the midst of that darkness as the Falcon’s crew tried to get lanterns lit in order to shed some light on the situation, “took you long enough, don’t you think? I figured you’d have gotten here before I got down to my last five gallons of hydro… been sitting here updating maps for days with no way to follow them and…”
…Lucas’ lantern flared to life just then, suddenly illuminating the confines of the pilothouse and evoking a pained screech from the curious looking fellow who had heretofore been hunched over the nav-table but was now scrambling to cover his eyes (were they sparkling? reflecting the light from the lanterns? weird.) with hands and goggles and whatever else might serve as, squealing, he tottered backwards and fell through a hatch in the floor behind him…
“Holy Hannah!!! Are you trying to blind me or what?!?! Turn that damn thing off so I can see!
Bah! Never mind,” the man grumbled over the sound of still more clattering, “I’ve got another set of goggles here somewhe…Ah! There!”
The man with the crazy-tossed mop of black and white streaked hair emerged from the hole in the floor, then, his eyes still noticeably sparkling in the lantern light even though they were now shielded behind at least two pairs of exceedingly dark goggles. “That’s better,” he said, glancing at Ardis and Lucas as he returned to the table and started gathering up the assortment of papers and equipment he had scattered about the thing, “minimum squintage and whatnot, right? Right.
So,” he continued, still stowing maps and gear in his bandolier and satchel as he came around the table and regarded his rescuers, “being as late as you are, I’m thinking you’re in dire need of a new navigator aboard your ship, aren’t you? Well, it turns out you’re in luck, my friends, because I’m a navigator in need of a new ship, right? This one is scuttled beyond repair, after all…”
The name’s Sullivan O’Shea, by the way,” the man, still hurriedly (and somewhat randomly, it seemed) stuffing things into his satchel, grinned at Lucas before slipping past them and out into the corridor, “or, Sully Star-Eyes as some call me… Just Sully’ll do just fine, though… Come on… I’ll help you scrap out what’s left to scrap out, here, and we can be on our way…”
Now, of course, Ardis didn’t really think he needed a new navigator, at the time… and Sully hadn’t the foggiest notion that it was the 13 year old kid and not the older, sterner looking Lucas that captained the Falcon… but, in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really matter what those initial thoughts might have been on either side of the equation. Ardis and Lucas couldn’t very well just leave this Sully Star-Eyes character there – especially given the fact that they were set on scavenging anything of use from the derelict – so they took him aboard the Falcon with all plans to leave the odd man to fend for himself in Vexotia when they next stopped there, and none to keep him aboard as even a deck hand, let alone the navigator. It was en route to Vexotia, that all of that changed, though… An unexpected and freakishly strong storm had beset the Falcon when she was less than three days out from the city and, despite best efforts, Ardis’ current navigator was unable to so much as take a bearing through the windblown walls of sand, never mind try to plot a course around or even away from it… The Falcon couldn’t afford to just sit and wait the storm out, either (fuel for the boilers was running low and the storm’s winds would certainly tear the turbines from their mounts if they tried to deploy them), not without suffering the same fate as the sand ship on which they had found Star-Eyes, anyway… So it was that, when Ardis’ navigator, despairingly resigned to their apparent fate, told the captain that this storm would likely be their end, Sully just laughed and shook his head…
“You’re seeing things through the wrong set of eyes,” he smirked at the distraught navigator, “I’d lend you mine but I’ve grown kind of attached, you know?”
He grinned at Ardis then, still a little perplexed that so young a boy was actually the captain of this fine vessel; “I told you, you needed a new navigator, there, Captain Kid. If it’s alright with you, young sir, I figure I can get us out of this just fine and maybe even get us to Vexotia without getting any of us tossed into the sands… but you’ve gotta promise to never let this yutz…” he indicated the current navigator “…anywhere near the wheelhouse ever, ever, again… it’s no wonder you were so late picking me up!”
Sully never really waited for Ardis’ answer. Instead, he simply made his way up to the pilot house, turned off all unnecessary lighting, stripped off his goggles and squinted into the storm for a long moment… “Yup… there it is,” he muttered, “and here we go!” Exactly what he was steering by and exactly where he was steering them to was lost on the rest of the crew at the time… for all they could see, there was nothing but the storm outside the safety of the hull… but Star-Eyes seemed entirely confident that he knew exactly where he was going and kept muttering about how the stars weren’t as bright as they should be but Vexotia’s energy pattern was pulling pretty strongly… a day and a half later (well ahead of the time the Falcon’s now-ex-navigator had figured they would have even if the storm had never struck) the Dawn Falcon skimmed into port with Sully at the helm... and there he's been ever since.
Notes:
It's not exactly easy to tell exactly how old Sully might be and he's never really said anything about his age, himself. Despite the white streaks in his hair, he doesn't usually appear to be more than somewhere in his mid-thirties, though... although, on occasion, especially when he's lost himself staring off into the sky, he can look much older.
He'll often refer to people by nicknames he's given them as opposed to their 'given names'. He refers to Ardis as Captain Kid, for example... He certainly wouldn't call Elly "Shorty" any more than he would call Maggie "Ginormama", but he might come up with things like "Li'l Bit" or "Cog" if he decides "Engie" (which he likes a lot, mind you) wasn't fitting somehow.
He's kind of hyper where thought and speech patterns are concerned (as exhibited in the "History" bit, above)... Prone to talking to himself as rapidly and randomly as he might when talking to others... uses his hands quite a bit when he talks.. etc... even when piloting the ship, he's constantly making minor adjustments to this control or that...
Posted on 2012-04-30 at 15:28:30.
Edited on 2012-05-02 at 17:22:24 by Eol Fefalas
Kri - sent you a PM with a rough character concept and a couple of questions (or question-like phrases, anyway)... Lemme know what, if anything, you want me to change or tweak, etc and, once that's done, I'll put some polish on the guy and post him up on the crew thread.
Edit: In fact, I just went ahead and tacked up the little bit that I sent your way on the Crew thread, anyway... If you need me to make changes (and when I get around to finishing things off) I can always edit, right?
Posted on 2012-04-30 at 15:24:47.
Edited on 2012-04-30 at 15:27:11 by Eol Fefalas
Also, I'm pretty sure I can pump my own stomach... *glances warily in the Doc's direction*... Just gotta make sure I drink enough to get the pukes, yeah?
Posted on 2012-04-30 at 13:24:13.
Edited on 2012-04-30 at 13:24:33 by Eol Fefalas
Topic: Smuggler's Moon Q&A Subject: And, I'm available...
...for collabs if needed, too. Technically, Halfpenny is an "open NPC" and can be played by whichever player may need the wee quartermaster in a post but, if you'd like someone else to play/collab Halfpenny along with you... *raises hand*... I c'n do that... Same for Maast if Chess can't get to him... etc..
Nice post, by the by! Well done, bravo, pip-pip, cheerio, and a hearty Cap'n Crunch to ye!
Posted on 2012-04-28 at 00:25:50.
Topic: Funny how thins work, innit? Subject: *trickles in*
I've got some batteries available that aren't doing anything but taking up space in the junk-drawer, Chess... feel free to help-selfy if available energy hits nil, yes?
*oozes out*
Posted on 2012-04-27 at 18:06:30.
Topic: Brewing my own beer... Subject: Sweet!
That means that there's hope that Ohio will repeal it's "you can't get a fish drunk on Sunday" law!
It's about time, I think...
...Gotta wonder, though, what were all those fish doing that caused the state to disallow them a bit of drunken revelry?
I'm back and forth between writing up some Voodoo stuff for Celeste and pondering forthcoming posts that'll get our loverly little boat skipping across the bounding main... We's gonna have a wee bit of fun very soon! ...er... I mean
Posted on 2012-04-27 at 13:54:40.
Topic: Funny how thins work, innit? Subject: Oh sure....
...I see how it works, lad! Get th' crew all blustered up an' talk th' cap'n in tae slippin th' moorin's an ' where's the gunner gone? Off intae th' drink!!!
No worries, Chess... it happens... frequently... we'll be about when you get time and, of course, if it comes to it, Maast can be NPC'd if he's needed, aye? Take care of you, mate... we'll cover things here.
Congrats on 500.
Posted on 2012-04-27 at 10:50:50.
Topic: Smuggler's Moon Q&A Subject: No problem...
...I kinda figured everyone was busy and had other things going on. As I said, no pressure... just giving the thread a little nudge.
Posted on 2012-04-27 at 10:21:11.
Topic: Smuggler's Moon Q&A Subject: LOL
I can relate... sorta... and no rushy-rushy or anything for any of you intended... just nudging the thread and reminding you all we're still afloat, aye?
Not a "Johnny Holestocking had slogged his way back on board only minutes ahead of Captain Hawkes and, given the look of the man, Johnny figured that there would be at least a few hours sleep assured... That's what Johnny got for figuring... "
Or even a "Mungo see captain. Mungo eat meat. Captain yell. Mungo fight when done eat meat."?
Do I need to post more, perhaps?
Posted on 2012-04-27 at 01:55:23.
Topic: weeked fun Subject: Shooting a bow while riding down a hill in a wagon?!?!
Ooooh.... Can I go next?
Posted on 2012-04-26 at 20:17:21.
Topic: weeked fun Subject: Fun indeed!
Glad all is well, despite the initial "panic" and such!
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