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glynwarrensarchive · 5 years

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AVRIEL LORLAMIR GLYNWARREN - CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT QUESTIONNAIRE

BASICS -

1. Height?

Avi is 6’1.

2. Eye colour?

Brown.

3. Do they need glasses?

No.

4. Scars and birthmark?

He has permanent Lichtenberg figure scars climbing up his left hand and forearm that glow when his powers take effect. He also adorns a large scar across his chest from a previous battle, and lots of smaller scars on his arms and legs from regular mishaps on the farm. He has a brown birthmark on his shoulder blade that’s the size of a golf ball.

5. Tattoos and piercings?

None.

6. Right or left handed?

Right-handed.

7. Any disabilities? Physical or mental.

None at the moment.

8. Do they have any allergies?

Cottonwood pollen gives him seasonal allergies, though they were really only common in his village and aren’t found everywhere. He hasn’t discovered any allergies in Hegaehend’s environment.

9. Favourite colour?

Forest green.

10. Typical outfits?

Avi has terrible fashion sense, and still wears his farm clothes on off days. Most of his shirts have stains or tears. When he’s on-duty or in battle, his fashion sense is only slightly better. He wears elven chain with dark clothes and a simple cloak with a hood. His most high-quality item is always his shoes, of which he has two pairs. One is a steel-toed pair of work boots, and the others are impressive, longer, and light-weight leather boots that he wears in battle.

11. Do they wear any makeup?

No.

12. What weapon do they use, if any?

With one hand usually wielding his arcane focus (a homemade wand), Avi uses his other hand to hold either a shield or a battleaxe. He also has two daggers on him.

PERSONALITY -

13. Are they more optimistic or pessimistic?

Avriel is terribly optimistic. It’s not naivety, per say, but rather a stubborn refusal to accept that some things just aren’t possible. He believes in miracles, but mostly he believes that if he works hard and is brave, the world will reward him. He believes good things will come to him because he strives for them, and he believes he can make the world a better place. That, in itself, is optimistic.

14. Are they introverted or extroverted?

He is extremely extroverted. He loves talking to strangers, loves making friends, and he’s incredibly good at both.

15. What are their pet peeves?

Materialism, people who have the means to help others but don’t, bragging, closed-minded people, badly crafted vehicles and roofs, people who neglect their animals, when his nails get too long, geese.

16. What bad habits do they have?

He does everything loudly: yawning, chewing, talking. He bites his nails. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve and puts his elbows on tables. He tries extremely hard to be liked. He works himself half to death. He has a self-doubt so deep that he overcompensates with false confidence and claims that he’s invincible, when in reality he’s just not terribly afraid of injury or death.

17. Do they have any phobias?

Avriel is claustrophobic, and though he has no traceable reason for this fear he has panic attacks when faced with small and enclosed spaces.

18. How do they display affection?

Avi is very casually physically affectionate with those he cares about. He loves hugs, but more often than hugging he doles out shoulder-squeezes and hair tussles. He also believes strongly in acts of service. Rather than telling people directly how he feels, because it can be difficult for him to articulate his own emotions, he’ll do something practical to help his loved ones. That, or he’ll gift them something small but thoughtful, like the pigments his mother used to bring him from her travels.

19. How competitive are they?

He’s mostly competitive with himself. He doesn’t do much of anything to prove anything to anyone else, or to try and be better than anyone else. However, he’s always competing against his own image of himself and trying to improve in a way that’s often detrimental.

20. If they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be?

He’d make himself more powerful, more capable so it could be easier to make big changes quickly.

21. Do they have any obscure hobbies or routines?

Avi loves to paint, and is pretty good at it. He often paints little poems or sayings in the corners of his paintings to add a bit of a story to them. He also likes to whittle, and though he’s not great at it and has acquired a few scars, it’s a great way to fill his mornings and downtimes.

He still wakes at the crack of dawn no matter what. Without animals or crops to tend to, however, most of his mornings are freed up, so he spends that time wandering the streets and watching the sunset if he doesn’t have to report to his general.

BACKSTORY -

22. What are the names and ages of their close family members? Parents, siblings, etc.

Orion and Immra Glynwarren are 62 and 60 years old respectively. His brother, Efrain, is 37.

23. Is their family alive and are they still in contact with them?

Avi’s parents are alive and well, and he is in contact with them often. His parents remain supportive even though he’s sure they question the path he’s taken and worry about him a fair bit. He stays with his brother every time he’s in Khaggon. They’ve only known each other a couple of months but are very much in contact.

24. Where are they from? City, nation?

He is from a small, tight-knit farming village in Anari named Corduff.

25. Did they have a childhood best friend?

Avi’s best friend growing up and to this day is a halfling named Quoric who he met in grade school. Quoric ended up working for Avriel on his farm as they got older, and is one of the most brutally honest people he has in his life. Avi had a lot of great friendships in his village, and quite honestly was a prized member of the community, but Quoric has always been the most loyal and genuine.

26. Have they had any pets?

Plenty. He loves animals, and would have given his life to save his. He owned all sorts of farm animals for the purpose of selling their product, but he genuinely cared for them and treated them well. He also had several cats and a cattle dog at the time he left Anari, but wasn’t able to bring any of them along. Currently, his parents have an Irish Wolfhound named Ehno and he, of course, acts as though his brother’s cat Weasel is his.

27. Did they grow up rich or poor? What were their living conditions like?

Avriel grew up in a very small home that his father made beautiful, not necessarily with monetary things but with art and craftsmanship. When he was young, Avi aware that he was poor, because he never went hungry and he always had a roof over his head. However, he realized at a fairly young age that his parents spent all their time and energy on providing for him and had no time for anything else, so he became a farmhand to help them. After inheriting the farm around age eighteen, Avi made a modest profit from his land and lived more comfortably than he had growing up. He was never rich, but he made a name for himself as a great farmer and had enough to provide for his parents and his employees.

28. What is their educational background?

Avi went to grade school, and then was homeschooled by his father for three years, and then got much too busy with work.

29. As a child, what did they want to be when they grew up?

He once heard a story about a knight who single handedly freed all the slaves in a kingdom through cunning and wit and bravery, and that was all he wanted to be. Not just a knight, but a hero - cunning and witty and brave. Realistically, though, he settled on being a farmer.

30. What advice would they give to their younger self?

He would tell himself to never limit himself to the confines of normality. Just because the average person in his town was a farmer didn’t mean he had to be a farmer. Normal works just fine for most people, but he’d tell himself not to strive to be like most people.

31. Growing up, were they ever bullied or were they the bully?

Neither, really. Socially, Avriel had a very easy time as a child.

32. Who do they look up to/who is their role model?

His mother, for her bravery and adventurous nature and his father, for his idealism and kindness.

PRESENT -

33. Do they currently have a place of residence?

He has a room at the Crayhorn Estate, but travels often with Rolland’s army.

34. What is their most treasured possession?

He travels with the painting his father made him for his last birthday. It’s a scene of a phoenix flying above farmland. When he travels back home and has a more permanent place of residency in Khaggon, he plans to bring more of the painting his father made with him. He has one from every birthday since his first.

35. What is their drink of choice?

Whiskey.

36. Which king/queen are they loyal to, if any?

Right now his loyalty lies with King Rolland because he seems to need his help the most, though Queen Kaylynn will always have a piece of his loyalty.

37. Have they ever killed anyone?

Yes, but only recently after joining the army. Though he feels some guilt, he knows the people he kills have ill-will for him and everything he stands for, and he knows he stands for good. That being said, no good person can rest easily having seen someone die by their hand, so he prays to make himself feel better.

38. What was their last promise and did they keep it?

His last promise, and the promise he’s been giving to his parents since he left a year ago, was that he will return safely someday with stories that will make them proud. It’s too soon to say if he’s kept it or not, but he’s entirely convinced that he will and already has plans of visiting.

LOVE -

39. What was their first kiss like, if they’ve had one?

When he was fifteen, Avriel had his first kiss with a village girl under a cottonwood tree. He sneezed in her face afterward. They continued to date for months. The entire relationship was awkward and uncomfortable.

40. Are they in a relationship/have a love interest?

Avriel is single, and mingling. Currently, he’s getting to know Thea’s brother, Ewin.

41. Have they ever been in love?

Avi has never been in love, but he certainly thought he was. And, truly, he loved Ione - he still does. He knows the deepest parts of her and accepts every part. Avi didn’t know that platonic love could be that raw and consuming because no one had ever told him it could. He was told fanciful stories of true loves and soulmates and meant-to-bes, but he was never told stories of finding home in someone who you were not in love with, but who meant just as much to you. So while he’s never been in love in the way most people mean it when they ask, he’s never really missed the feeling.

42. Have they ever had their heart broken?

Yes, but not by somebody else. Avriel broke his own heart. He’s heartbroken over leaving Ione, over taking her for granted. He regrets always wanting something more and feeling loss because the romance wasn’t there, never fully appreciating that she was his comfort and his home. He left her to better the world - for the greater good - but he knows he broke her heart and that breaks his. He wishes he could turn back time and stop himself from trying so hard to force their love to be something from a fairytale. He wishes he’d never tried to convince her that he was someone she could settle down and have a family with.

SPIRITUALITY -

43. Do they follow a god, if so who?

Avi follows Melora, the goddess of the wilderness and the sea. His mother is a ranger, and Melora always keeps her safe. Because of the wilderness of his powers and the storms that fester around him, he prays for her to keep him safe, too. Though she’s the only god he follows, he believes all gods have validity and is interested to learn more about others’ religions.

44. What do they think happens to them after death?

He believes he will return to nature, become dirt in the ground and renew everything that has renewed him. He doesn’t really wish for consciousness after death, and is comfortable with the finality of it if he’s achieved everything he set out to achieve and can return to nature after it’s all said and done.

45. What is their spirit animal?

A lion.

#romtask #romtask 001 #abt #about #( i know i didn't do one for kit yet im trash i just needed to get in his headspace a bit and this helped me get to know him a lot )

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judgments-archive · 5 years

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★ FILL IN THE QUESTIONS AS IF YOU ARE BEING INTERVIEWED FOR AN ARTICLE AND YOU WERE YOUR MUSE.

TAGGED BY: stole it from @hyacinthsgirl TAGGING: @vermillion-eyed, @jerseydeviled (Jessie), @victeux (Princess), @pxndxrasbox (Vicky), @gokusxtsus (Kirishima), @aemiliius, @deflcresco, @lachrymosestorm, @devilkxssed, @cinneasachd (Dottie), @agricolis, @destinedhearts (May), @cachinnavi, @avellaturortem (Regina), @enchairr (Aedus), @deathsdue (Mila), @nthdivision (Momoko), @burmecias-protector, @cirocchio, @museatory (Tane), @eyecovered, @absolutelaw

1. WHAT IS YOUR NAME? “Hirahara!”

2. WHAT IS YOUR REAL NAME? “Eh? Only humans ‘n yokai ‘n spirits have ‘real names!’ I’m not any of those, so Hirahara is my real name.” He said that, and yet for a split second, it felt like a lie.

3. DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU’RE CALLED THAT? “Um... because it’s my name? It’d be weird if someone started calling me one’a the other guys’ names.”

4. ARE YOU SINGLE OR TAKEN? “Well, I’m not bein’ taken anywhere right now, so I guess I’m single!” A mischievous glint in his eye hinted that he knew what the question really meant.

5. WHAT ARE YOUR POWERS AND ABILITIES? “Ehh... don’t think I have any! We just get trained really well. But I’m a lot stronger ‘n everyone except Rokkaku-san. ‘N my teether’re sharper than everyone else’s too.” He scratched his chin in thought. “Um... well, all of us can see spirits! I can smell them too. I can also smell the blood beneath people’s skin. Oh! And we can come and go between the underworld and the modern world. Hmm...” he looked as if he might add something else to the list, then seemed to think better of it. “That’s it!”

6. WHAT COLOR ARE YOUR EYES? “Gold~!” He paired his response by using two fingers to pry his eyelids open wider. “What, can’t ya see ‘em? I’ve been told they’re too obnoxiously bright for anyone t’ miss ‘em.”

7. HAVE YOU EVER DYED YOUR HAIR? “Nah-ah!”

8. DO YOU HAVE ANY FAMILY MEMBERS? “Ehh...” His face went blank for a second, but the smile returned as usual. “Not really! But, um. Saeki ( @gokusxtsus ) helps us all out a lot, so he’s like a brother. And everyone’s always sayin’ Kinoshita’s ( @gokusxtsus ) like the big brother of the group-- the alcoholic big brother. And, w-well,” a bit of red dusted over his ears, “...I call Kirika-san ‘auntie’ a lot.” His eyes lit up. “Oh! Emily ( @aemiliius ) kinda makes me think of a big sister, too!”

9. DO YOU HAVE ANY PETS? “Yeah, Giara! He’s a... guess the best way t’ pet it is demon bull. We tried to eat him at first!”

10. TELL ME ABOUT SOMETHING YOU DON’T LIKE. “That’s easy: Pain. I hate pain.”

11. DO YOU HAVE ANY HOBBIES OR ACTIVITIES YOU DO IN YOUR SPARE TIME? “Mhhm~! I like t’ train, wrestle, read manga, listen to Saeki play the piano ‘n Tagami play the guitar, eat grass with Giara, go out explorin’, play pranks with Kirishima, make snake food-- oh! And recently, Saitou-san brought back this thing that we hooked up t’ the TV that lets you play games on it! Also, finding new things to eat is fun.” He ended his long list with an enthusiastic chomp of his teeth. “Ah-- I’ve started crafting stuff too. And Tanizaki says I spend a lot of time acting like an idiot, so I guess that’s a hobby too.”

12. HAVE YOU EVER HURT ANYONE BEFORE? “Oh yeah, all the time! I do it a lot on accident too.” A shadow passed over his face temporarily, this one inkier than the slanted darkness that typically obscured the upper half of his face. “Hmm... I still gotta apologize...” he mumbled to himself, the rest of his words too quiet to hear.

13. HAVE YOU EVER… KILLED ANYONE? “Not anyone mortal ‘n living! That’s against the rules, unless it can’t be helped.”

14. WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL ARE YOU? “A lion.” He answered this question without a hint of hesitation.

15. NAME YOUR WORST HABITS. “Umm...” his eyes narrowed. “Let’s see... I probably over-eat a lot. Ehh... I bite too much, and sometimes I can’t stop talking. I tend t’ try to grab stuff outta people’s hands without warning when I want to see it real bad. Uhh... I get told I need to be more mindful’a personal space. Mmm...” he didn’t seem to have any issue with owning up to his flaws, of which he had many-- up until again, that uncharacteristic somberness came back. “...I get outta control when I get overstimulated one too many times.”

16. DO YOU LOOK UP TO ANYONE? “Yup! Saeki ( @gokusxtsus ) since he’s so good at everything, Chris ( @hyacinthsgirl ) ‘cause she’s really fun but mature at the same time, Kirishima ( @gokusxtsus ) since he’s so responsible, Emily ( @aemiliius ) ‘cause’a how gentle but tough she is, Victoria ( @pxndxrasbox ) because she’s super cool, and I think all of us look up to Rokkaku-san ( @gokusxtsus ) as the chief.” He tipped his head to the side and rubbed the back of his neck. “I admire Tagami ( @vermillion-eyed ) a lot too, since he’s smart and really cool when he does stuff... uh, yeah! That’s it!”

17. GAY, STRAIGHT, OR BISEXUAL? “Huh?” He hasn’t quite figured out what most of these terms mean in modern language.

18. DO YOU GO TO SCHOOL? “Nope! Tagami tutors me sometimes though.”

19. DO YOU EVER WANT TO MARRY AND HAVE KIDS SOMEDAY? He blinked a few times. “I don’t think that’s possible. I--” he cut himself off and furrowed his eyebrows. “Dunno. Never thought about it!”

20. DO YOU HAVE ANY FANS? “Yup! I keep one in my room, right by my futon ‘cause I sweat a lot in my sleep during the summertime.”

21. WHAT ARE YOU MOST AFRAID OF? Hirahara cocked his head, smile going blank for a second. “We’re not really afraid’a anything, I think.” Silence elapsed for a moment. He sucked in a short breath. “I really don’t like the thought of not bein’ able to move, though. And--” the thought of being left to starve terrifies me. “I don’t like getting super hungry.”

22. WHAT DO YOU USUALLY WEAR? “My uniform!” He patted the starch green jacket of said uniform.

23. DO YOU LOVE SOMEONE? “Love someone? Well, I think I do!” His smile widened. “Saeki says it better than I do, but I like all of us! And I’ve met a lot of people I think I love, too. But um... I don’t think I really get what love means?” He saw now reason he shouldn’t admit to that, and so continued on, “Like, I know there’s different versions of it besides the marriage kind of love, but...” he trailed off and shrugged. “...ehh... I’ve gotten funny feelings about someone recently too.”

24. WHAT CLASS ARE YOU? “Huh?”

25. HOW MANY FRIENDS DO YOU HAVE? “Lots! And I wanna make more!”

26. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON PIE? “Kirika-san makes the best!”

27. FAVORITE DRINK? “Hm, I like soda a lot.”

29. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PLACE? “I can’t just choose one favorite place!”

30. ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SOMEONE? “Interested?” He cocked his head, completely at a loss. “Whaddaya mean by that?”

31. WOULD YOU RATHER SWIM IN THE LAKE OR THE OCEAN? “Either’s fine with me! Now that I think about it... I dunno when the last time I went to the ocean, so it’d be fun to go there soon.”

32. WHAT’S YOUR ‘TYPE’? “My type of what?”

33. ANY FETISHES? Cue a smile and an extremely blunt answer: “I’ve never had sex before, so how can I have a fetish?”

34. TOP OR BOTTOM? DOMINANT OR SUBMISSIVE? “Uh-- what?” He might have known what a fetish is, but he doesn’t know what any of these terms mean aside from their traditional definitions. “I... don’t know?”

35. CAMPING, OR INDOORS? “Camping~!”

36. ARE YOU WAITING FOR THIS INTERVIEW TO BE OVER? “Nope! But since it is, let me interview you now!”

#[ ⊗ ]:: ⊱ the case study of a piece of hell | headcanon

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scurvgirl · 6 years

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The Princess Ventured Into the Dark Forest

Fairy Tale AU

Part One, Two, Three, Four

Meanwhile Part One, Part Two

Worldbuilding

Serahlin Art

Past the waterfall, the forest changes. Sunlight becomes sparse as the canopy of leaves overhead thicken. The trees here are old growth and Serahlin can feel the eyes of a dozen tiny spirits watching her as she follows Huirin.

She must remain strong. Adannar is hidden away here, somewhere, and he could need her. This is a terrible place to go missing, deep in the dark part of the forest with no one but peeping spirits to watch the tragedy. She cannot just leave him be, not while she can ride after him and help him. It is the least she can do after he has done so much for her.

“How much farther, Huirin?” She asks. The mechanical deer turns its head to her. Its usual whirring noise pauses to click twice, two metal eyelids roll over reflective eye sockets. It is some sort of communication, but not one she can discern. It turns its attention back to whatever trail it’s following to Adannar, the whirring kicking up once again.

Velini snorts but follows the strange deer. It is not long until they start to noticeably ascend what must be a small mountain. The path is surprisingly sure, however, and Velini does not struggle with his footing. The trees curve over the path, only a few having roots that disrupt the packed earth and…stones? Who would lay a stone path this deep in the woods?

They come to a fork in the path, one leading up, another down. Sunlight spills down, illuminating the path that leads up, while casting the path leading down in dark shadow. Huirin, of course, heads down. Serahlin swallows and steels herself before urging Velini to continue to follow Huirin.

Thick shadows envelope them as they descend, and the forest visibly changes. She is reminded of the great tree Adannar showed her, the one housing a spirit of Content. These trees feel…they feel like that. Magical. Aware. Watching.

The leaves begin to take on iridescent and glowing hues, mushrooms even appear to be larger and brighter. And an air of tingling magic surrounds them all. The little hairs on Serahlin’s arms and the back of her neck rise at the magic. Her concern morphs into a near panic. Adannar likes to harvest alchemical ingredients – they’re for his creatures and for potions he likes to dabble in. He laughed once, saying he was no alchemist, but he can concoct some poultices and potions that are helpful. He gave her one, once, to help sore muscles. She cannot be certain, but she suspects these mushrooms and other plants are likely subjects for alchemical harvesting. He could have fallen, hit his head! Or twisted his ankle, broken his leg, his arm…the list goes on.

She keeps fighting the urge to ask Huirin if it knows anything. It could, it very well could, but that doesn’t mean she will understand what it says. Or blinks, or whirrs. She should have asked Adannar to teach her how to communicate with his creatures, that way in case something like this happened she would be able to find him more quickly. It’s no matter now, but when she finds him, she is going to sit him down and have him teach her. After he gets better, of course. If she doesn’t kill him herself, after scaring her like this.

Huirin keeps the same walking pace, and it feels terribly slow. They started the search hours ago! And still no sign of Adannar. Where is he? Heavens, she hopes he isn’t dead, that…that would be the worst.In the short amount of time they have spent together, she has come to care for him, more than she ever thought possible. Before, she had resigned herself to a loveless marriage – to a good man, but still loveless. She never dreamed that when she ran she would ever find someone like Adannar. She did not know that such kindness could lurk in such unexpected places.

Now she must return the favor. It’s the right thing to do and besides she…cares for him. Deeply. So much so that the thought of fulfilling her duty to marry Dirthamen or someone else fills her with a sour taste in her mouth and dread in her heart.

She cannot in good conscious marry someone while she feels this way for Adannar. It isn’t right. Even if it is simply political, a marriage is a marriage. She would still be connected to Dirthamen and longing for someone else.

At least hiding out in the woods means she doesn’t have to marry anyone she does not desire.

Feeling like for Adannar is exactly why she needs to find him. And why if he turns up dead or hurt, she’ll kill him for scaring her so. She’ll kiss him, then kill him. Or maybe she’ll just kiss him. Really, she just needs to find him.

They descend ever further into the darkened forest, now illuminated by glowing mushrooms and other plants she doesn’t know. Adannar had been teaching her some of the more mundane plants, focusing on the herbs and foliage that could help her. None of the plants here could be defined as mundane. Some of them even come across as hostile. Before, she would never have believed a plant could be hostile, but nothing makes as much sense as it did. Or perhaps she just sees more.

Huirin makes a clicking noise and Velini stops, dragging Serahlin out of her thoughts. The air is colder and the glow from the mushrooms darken. Some of the mushrooms even shrink back as a shadow slinks through the trees.

Velini shakes and steps back. She tries to comfort him but he is inconsolable as the shadow draws nearer. Huirin’s clicking noise grows louder before it leaps at the shadow, a light emanating from its head. The shadow shrinks back in haste, and the mushrooms grow back, lighting the pathway once more.

“What was that?” She asks, breathless and more than a little disturbed. Huirin turns to her, plates on its head reforming to the face she is familiar with. It makes a low whining noise then shakes. Right. It’s…whatever that was.

Serahlin reaches down and pats Velini’s neck, reassuring the horse even while she needs reassuring herself. That shadow is only one beast that occupies this forest, she reminds herself. Just because she has been fortunate in the forest does not mean that her experience is representative of the nature of the forest. A dragon lurks here, as do many other creatures that would see her harmed. Or worse.

Huirin chirps at them and Serahlin encourages her horse to follow it. Remember Adannar, remember that he could need her and Velini.

The path winds down but it remains a path. To where, she can only guess a terrible pit filled with bodies. Maybe this path was made by beasts that would haul their kills off to a deep part of the forest and perform dark rituals furthering their beastliness.

She has got to find Adannar if only to stop these ridiculous thoughts from polluting her mind.

Huirin turns around a bend and Serahlin follows – to see the mouth of a large cave. Long dark moss dangles, nearly obscuring the soft light emanating from the cave. Light, from a cave. It is a magical forest, she reminds herself. Huirin ducks into the cave, the moss trailing over its smooth metal body. Its pace remains that same, undeterred by the cave and moss. It is likely safe, then, or as safe as it can be.

Deep breaths, she can do this. Be brave, be brave.

She urges Velini forward and braces herself for the moss. It is soft, but in her face and not unlike unwanted touches in a ballroom. Thankfully, it is over in a heartbeat and she is free to ride tall and unhindered after Huirin.

As she crosses the threshold, a wave of magic comes over her and she gasps at the rush of it. Magic back home always felt cool and powerful, and tame compared to the wild swirling gusts of it in the forest. Here, magic is like its own entity, moving and shifting. And powerful.

It makes sense that the magic in the forest, and so deep into it, would have a lot of magic. Spirits form out of massive emotion and magic, if one is not present, then the spirit cannot form. Its why spirits are not common back home, and why they almost take on bodies as soon as they can. Without a well of magic present, maintaining their spirit forms is not only difficult, it’s risky. Spirits who do not wish to take on bodies back home risk shrinking into nothing or shattering from the strain to stay alive.

She knew that it wasn’t like that everywhere, but it was shocking to see so many spirits in the wood. Adannar had explained that he was the rarity. Most spirits in the wood opt to refrain from a corporeal form.

If that is so, she wonders why Adannar took on a body.

Her thoughts settle as the magic flurries away from her, allowing her to gaze in stunned awe at the cave around her. No, not a cave, a…she has no proper word for this! The walls are shined stone, swirling with blues, greens, greys, and browns. Just past the mouth of the cave, the walls turn from rounded to actual walls. The ceiling is high, and not just palace high but so high that she cannot quite make out where the ceiling is. Only that it is there.

Huirin is undeterred, but perhaps it cannot experience the incredible magnitude of this place. The magic, the obvious care that has been taken to create a palatial home…cave. Enchanted sconces light up as they walk by, blue tinted light illuminating the smooth walls.

Velini’s hoofbeats echo in the hallway, filling the otherwise silent room with a steady beat.

What is this place? Who made this?

Is this some entrance to the dwarven empire? She thought those were heavily guarded and sealed off while the surface nations battled the dragons. Perhaps they forgot about this entrance? Or maybe the age of the place marks it as different? Maybe it was abandoned ages ago due to the magical fluctuations in the forest.

Huirin stops at the end of the hallway and turns to her, its eyes mimic blinking and it makes a whistling noise at her.

“I am still following,” she asserts. It would make some sense if this was an entrance to the dwarven empire. They have crafting abilities that would fascinate Adannar considering his hobby of creating these automatons.

Huirin turns to the right, down a set of stairs, activating more lights with its descent. Serahlin dismounts and hitches Velini to a sconce holding a stone. She follows Huirin on foot, down the stairs, feeling dread creep into her. She is not that strong, if she needs to pick him up…how will she?

The stairs end and another hallway stretches before the, but now piled with stuff. There are boxes upon boxes upon dresses and cabinets and satchels…just so much stuff.

“What is all of this?!” She says, mostly to herself but Huirin takes it upon itself to make a few chirps then a low honking noise, not unlike a goose.

“Don’t take that tone with me, this is a lot of stuff…and why is fine tableware next to not so fine linens? And is that a…lamp? That’s from Veharan, across the gulf, isn’t it? Oh, and those are silks from Pah’naar! What in the world was Adannar doing down here?” She’s beginning to suspect he found this place and has gotten enveloped in snooping through all of this stuff! Where did it come from? Who collected all this?

Some of these things are seriously beautiful, and they are just…wasting away in this cave. As nice as cave it is, it is still sequestered away from everything.

Huirin chirps at her, making her realize she has stopped moving. Serahlin snaps out of her awe for everything around her and steps quickly after the mechanical deer.

The hallway curves and there are gaps in the piles of stuff. In those gaps are gigantic doors – one set of doors is open and inside is just another pile of things. Light reflects off the shinier and more valuable items, while others remain in crates and satchels. She pauses when her eye catches the light glinting off what must be a cascade of golden coins. Or a mountain of them.

All this wealth, all these things, stored away. What is this place?

Serahlin resumes following Huirin, coming to another large door that is cracked open. Huirin nods its head toward the door, then moves behind Serahlin and all but shoves her through the door.

“Excuse me!” She says, but follows his instructions and goes inside. Huirin does not follow and a heavy dread worms its way through Serahlin’s body. Whatever is in here is deterring even Huirin. Should she even be in here? The lights are dimmer and the stones in the sconces are not lighting as she walks carefully through the room.

The piles in here are much more specific, either pillows or blankets or other soft creations, making the space almost like a large bed.

A gigantic bed. For something as equally massive.

No, no, no. She has to get out of here, if Adannar truly wandered down here…he is not getting back out. A broken sob leaves her, the sound filling the space. She clamps a hand over her mouth in horror just as something massive moves in the shadows. A low rumbling echoes from the shadows making her eyes widen in terror.

Adannar deserves to be buried, deserves better than to die at the jaws of a cruel beast. And there is nothing she can do. She is unarmed, unarmored, and it has been more than a century since she has lifted a sword. And if she is not quick, she will only join her darling Adannar in his demise.

Oh Adannar, Serahlin mourns for a second before turning on her heel and running. She runs from the room and back down the hallway, past all the piles of stuff. Behind her, she hears the beast moving after her. Its breathing is loud, filling the hallway with a rumbling timbre that spurs her to go faster.

“Serahlin?” Her voice echoes through the space and horror fills her. It knows her name? How?! Heavens above, let her escape this treacherous place!

She runs up the stairs, her legs burning with protest. But she ignores it, she has to. The rumbling grows closer but she rounds the top of the stairs and rapidly unhitches Velini. She mounts her horse and spurs him into a run.

Velini charges down the hallway and out of the cave, and they are heading up the path when the earth shakes and she feels the wind at her back. It is a pushing motion followed by a pull – like when a bird takes off.

She tries to urge Velini to go faster, but they are on an incline and the horse can only go so fast. Goodness knows that he was never trained to outrun a dragon.

They reach the top of the hill when the air snaps with a sudden chill. The shadows from before surge forward, lead by a screeching white spirit with outstretched gnarled hands. Serahlin screams as the hands tear her clothes and sink into her body, causing pain to lance deep. Her vision blanks out and she only realizes Velini is throwing her too late.

He bucks wildly, throwing Serahlin, vision blurry and screaming down the hill. Her body slams into the earth and rolls. She tries to shield herself from the blows by the demon and the tumbling in equal measure.

The pain! She cannot see and as she falls, her heart races faster and faster and the demon grows stronger – sinking deeper into her.

She flails her arms back in a desperate attempt to grab hold of…something! Her hand comes up with a root that she snatches quickly, wrenching her arm and halting her suddenly. The sudden cessation of movement temporarily dislodges the demon and she gasps in relief, only for it to return with vengeance. It tears into her, forcing her to turn into herself, releasing the root. She does not move but she screams and writhes in pain.

The ground shakes and the demon hisses, its movements halting but it remains atop her. Serahlin doesn’t dare look up, only hoping for a reprieve, just…something to stop it. Stop it all. How does this keep happening? Running from monster to monster right to another monster. Is this world just so plagued that this is her fate? To be hounded and harmed and thrown to death time and time again? What a cruel fate, to never know lasting peace, to never have happiness be a constant fixture in her life. The pain of that is enough to make her sob, physical and spiritual pain surrounding her in a bubble that makes the demon screech in delight.

The dragon roars in retaliation, the sound deafening. Sudden heat fills the air and the demon is wrenched away from her. Serahlin gasps in pain of the removal of the claws but oh the relief! The pressure and pain ease, making her eyes snap open –

To see the dragon, the great and terrible dragon of the forest, pinning the demon, much larger and more solid seeming now, to the ground. It pulls its head back, golden mane moving almost beautifully with it. Its maw opens and from it spews a geyser of steam. The demon screams and shatters into a dozen dark shards.

It…killed the demon.

The dragon lifts a clawed hand and waves it over the shards. Magic fills the air as light blasts from the dragon’s palm. When it rests the hand, the shards are no longer dark but filled with soft light. It…not only killed the demon but managed to somehow purify shards? She has never heard of such a thing

Maybe…maybe it has forgotten she is here. The demon was very distracting as was the magic. Maybe, just maybe she can just…sneak away.

But when Serahlin tries to move away, she collapses against the ground, pain blooming anew in her chest. Her ribs…something is wrong.

The dragon’s head snaps towards her and the last thing she sees are its yellow eyes that are somehow vaguely familiar.

I’m so sorry, Adannar…I failed.

This is not how Adannar wanted Serahlin to discover his nature. And now she is injured on the forest floor, after witnessing him killing. He should have taken care of Torment years ago, he knows, and now she is paying for his inability to act.

A sound of torment escapes him, and he fears it just sounds…beastly. But she is unconscious now, limp and most likely internally bleeding after falling so far.

With ever so much care, Adannar picks her prone body up and murmurs a healing spell over her. It will keep her until he can heal her properly back in his home. He takes to the sky after some of the worst of the bleeding is resolved and hopes to everything good in this world that she will recover. He would not be able to handle her not, truly.

He takes her to a guest room that he has managed to clean in the recent months of knowing her. He had hoped he would one day bring her here, that she would sleep in this bed, surrounded by all the beautiful things he has collected throughout the years. He wanted to show her all of the beautiful things, to tell her stories of the people who once came to see him.

But now…she is alive, but hurt. She is surrounded by the beautiful things but all he cares about now is making sure that she is alright.

He spends the next two days laboring over her healing. He wishes she was stable enough for him to take her to Selene, but he does not even know if Selene would tolerate having someone like Serahlin in the Glass Tower. After all that she has been through…after her self-imposed isolation, he doubts it.

The first day is the worst. She has several broken ribs and one of her lungs ended up collapsing after he repaired the ribs. She lost a lot of blood to the demon and he has to replenish it somehow. He generally dislikes using spirit shards for anything other than helping birth new spirits, but he is filled with enough anger at Torment that he uses its shards to power himself to heal her. All of the shards, filling her so much with magical healing energy that it makes her hair grow even longer and her skin glow faintly.

He remembers when Torment was Composure. Brought into existence by a group of dignitaries from Veharan. But it had corrupted after the long years of isolation and the general lack of composure of everything around it. Now it will serve to bring the woman who had so exemplified its former self back to life.

The second day, Adannar cries. A poet once wrote that the reason rivers existed because dragons would cry atop mountains and the sadness had to flow somewhere. Oceans were of sorrow and sadness, of joyous triumph. It was a beautiful sentiment, incorrect but beautiful. But he does take care to cry into the river that runs under his lair, flowing from his home waterfall.

She brought so much light to this dark place. She made him feel joy again, made him feel more like himself than he has in hundreds of years. And he had only ever wanted to make her feel the same. He wants her to know the joy she has made him feel, he wants her to be surrounded by love and light and everything good. And instead, tragedy strikes.

He returns to her side, shifted into his elf form. He can feel her healing aura even down in the cellar and he worries he will shock her too badly if he remains in his true form. It is not much trouble to ensure she is comfortable. But if she asks…he will not lie. He cannot lie to her anymore, it is wrong, and she…she deserves to walk away if she wishes. He would not blame her if she did, not after…all this.

Adannar watches over her through the night, trying not to fall asleep. Sleeping in too late is what got them all into this mess. He had been resting so wonderfully, so deeply and perfectly, that he had not realized that he had not woken at the appropriate time to see her. He does not know why she decided to come looking for him, is it too much to hope that she had searched for him out of worry? And what a terrible fright to find his lair, finding him yes, but also finding something she had been taught to fear.

On the third day, Serahlin wakes. It is slow and Adannar must restrain himself from fussing too much over her.

“Memae…?” She murmurs, lifting her hand in his direction. He takes it gently between his and settles next to her.

“No, darling, it’s me, Adannar,” he tells her, smoothing hair away from her face. Serahlin blinks her eyes open, not only pink but faintly glowing with magic. And oh when she smiles it is like being bathed in holy light.

“Sweet Adannar,” she says, reaching up to his face, “if this is death, then it cannot be so bad if I am with you.”

His heart aches at the sentiment and he lets her pull him down to her, kissing her long and slow. She is warm and pliant so full of life. When he pulls back, he cups her face and regards her with the softest expression he can.

“As beautiful a sentiment that is, my dear, you are not dead, and neither am I.” Her brow scrunches in confusion and she shakes her head.

“How?”

“I healed your injuries with the shards of the demon,” he explains but her confusion remains.

“That does not make any sense. Huirin lead me into the dragon’s lair when I asked him to take me to you.” It is only then that she looks around and recognition dawns on her face. He is leaning back as she sits up, fear and shock bleeding off her.

“I…” she stops then turns to him, her once soft gaze now knowing and fearful, “you?”

He nods slowly, “I did not know how to tell you.”

“You…you…you lied to me?” She accuses, and he flinches. She is right, he lied and he has no recourse.

“I was afraid,” he says, unsure of how else to explain.

“You? You were afraid? You are a dragon!” She says, horror creeping into her voice. “You could have killed me!”

“I would never hurt you,” he says quickly.

“I don’t know that!” She responds just as quickly. He cannot meet her gaze, all he feels is shame for letting it go on for this long.

“Once, when the times were different, and my kind were not hunted or turned into storybook villains, I would have not hidden it. I was…afraid that you would know and refuse to know me, refuse any help I have to offer. It was wrong of me, selfish and wrong and I am so, so sorry.”

She draws her blanket around herself and moves into the corner of the bed as far away from him as she can get.

“You were never in any danger from me,” he says softly, “please, I…was afraid if you knew you would inform knights or someone.”

“So you lied?!”

“I did not mean for it to go on as long as it did. But I also did not expect to become so enamored with you, either, and I couldn’t…I was wrong.”

She is quiet for a long time, staring at him with the same horrified expression. He cannot tell what the worse crime is – being a dragon or lying about not being a dragon. But he knows that he never wanted this, and that his concealment has only made everything worse.

“So it is my fault that you fell in love with me and you couldn’t tell me the truth?” Her voice is low and sharp and it cuts him to down to size.

“No! It is my fault, I place none of the blame at your feet. I am…I was so wrong, and I have no preconceptions of your forgiveness.”

“I…can leave? I am not your prisoner?” She asks and that hurts too, to think that she ever thought he would be capable of such a horrid thing. He nods slowly.

“If it is your wish to leave, then I will not stop you, and neither will any of my creations. I will ensure your safety out of the forest even. You should not have to pay for my mistakes.”

She falls silent and he can see her thinking, coming to a conclusion that will hurt, but one he will respect.

“That is what I wish,” she murmurs. He nods and steps back.

��Very well. You may dress and then either I or Huirin can take you to your horse,” he says, keeping as much emotion from his voice as possible.

“I would prefer Huirin,” she replies and he nods again.

“It will be arranged. I hope you find all the happiness and joy your heart desires,” he says, leaving the room. He wants the last word to be kind and good and he cannot stand the thought of anything else. If she leaves, he wants her to remember as fondly as possible under the circumstances.

Adannar leaves her room and finds Huirin. He gives the deer instructions to wait for Serahlin then to take her to Velini. The horse had suffered some minor injuries but those had been easily healed. He has primarily rested and eaten in the past few days, and now he can take his rider back…to wherever she wishes to go.

Melancholy and heartache fill him so intensely, he must retreat to his rooms. But a restlessness takes hold, as well as a greediness to see her one last time. He moves from his rooms to the atrium, it is up higher into the mountain, with a great lift that allows him to rise quickly to the top of the mountain if he does not wish to don his true form. The glass ceiling opens like a flower and he steps out onto a small balcony, just in time to watch her ride out of his lair and into the forest.

Even now, his magic reaches out to her, surrounds her in a protective shield from whatever may threaten her in the forest. She will be protected in this place, even as she runs from it. And he will love her, even as she scorns him.

#fairy tale au #serahlin #adannar #serannar #evermore plays in the background #i played it on repeat for pretty much all of adannar's pov #which i feel is a little obvious #we've moved to the 'beauty and the beast' part of the 'snow white meets beauty and the beast' description #i have in my head and in my drafts #this was a rough write for me. soooo much description work #also just remember that after 'evermore' comes 'mob song'#my writing

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bellringermal · 7 years

Note

I have a low key headcanon that gherman used to craft things like dolls in his spare time before the hunters workshop perhaps as a means to make extra money, albeit smaller ones for children, which explains why he made such a lifelike doll so easily and maybe even why he's good at making clothes and weapons for hunters

Daisy and I have a pretty similar headcanon :)

Gehrman was always fascinated by small, pretty things since childhood. He used to cut figurines from newspapers and make little toys out of straw and scraps of clothing that he then had to keep hidden in a box under the floorboards because his father would’ve considered them girly and infantile.

[Pic from “Andersen. Zhizn bezlyubvi” because obscure period dramas are my jam. And if you read some of my posts before, you probably know that my fan fiction, from which 90% of my lore theories stemmed from, is a massive mixture of period dramas/gothic novels/historical figures’ biographies and even fucking Tchaikovsky ballets that I like very very VERY much.)

He hadn’t the worst childhood ever, but it was tough for a scrawny, quiet boy like him to be forced into combat training at such a young age. When he got hired at Byrgenwerth (and escaped his father’s clutches, so to speak) he could finally do whatever the heck he wanted in his free time and Dores and Edmund, being respectively a scholar and a handyman, encouraged his love for books and for tinkering with anything within range.

In our story, Master Willem selects his students and assistants because of their special talents and is (to an almost unbelievable level :P) able to ‘see greatness’ in them even before said greatness manifests. Willem is, to put it simply, a talent scout :P That is why he often recruits extremely young people like Caryll (9) and Micolash (14) only to then groom them into loyal students while enhancing their innate abilities.

With Gehrman, it was no different. And when many of his ‘hobbies’ became an integral part of his job, he began to take them really seriously and actually devoted entire years of work and research to the development of the spring mechanisms that made trick weapons possible and basic hunting gear, reason why all future hunter uniforms are based on that first model that he made out his own everyday clothes. When asked about his profession, he doesn’t see himself as a ‘weaponsmith’ but as ‘something more akin to a clockmaker’.

He obviously has his own (quite creepy) collection of little dolls and carillons but he keeps it in his room reason why not many of his students are aware of it, just like they don’t know about his secret stash of cheap romance novels :P. The rough instruments of death that he crafts at the workshop with Archibald’s assistance are in stark contrast with the delicate clockwork toys that are found on his desk next to the tiny tools and watchmaker magnifying glasses.

[Pics from “Nutcracker the motion picture” 1986]

Lil extract from my fanfic below the cut because I think I’m getting decent at translating this crap XD

[Picture from ‘Crimson Peak’. Thomas Sharpe lil workshop in the attic. It’s a trope and I love it.]

As she looked around, Maria could see that that wasn’t the workplace of an amateur. Screwdrivers, pincers and labeled boxes brimming with bolts and stain springs of any size filled the dustless shelves of cedar wood as two big oil lamps lit the quiet, humble room of the First Hunter uniformly projecting their glow on the desk. The floral wallpaper was almost completely hidden by three huge cork boards covered in blueprints and heavy metal chains ran down from the ceiling just like they did in the actual Workshop. But instead of dangling siderite blades, what floated over the noblewoman’s head were cogs as big as those she has seen on the pedestal of the Lunarium’s telescope.

It was then that she remembered that Gehrman was also asked to keep the elevator at the edge of the woods in working order so that students could get from Yharnam’s outskirts straight to the college without venturing too far into the forest.

How many tasks was that man assigned to, again? Hunter Chief, groundskeeper, weaponsmith, handyman… Master Willem better be paying him generously, she thought as she wondered if her teacher’s room was always that organized and clean or if he had tidied it up for the occasion.

No matter the answer, it felt like something WAS out of place. Actually, it felt like something was missing. As she scanned the shelves, one in particular caught her eye. Like the others, it was perfectly clean but instead of harboring meticulously organized tools and parts it was empty except for one small, bizarre shiny thing that Maria mistook for a golden egg at first glance. She took the weird object in her hands only to discover a small key inserted in its round side. A wind-up toy? She herself owned a few of those when she was little, one had the shape of a carousel and its curtains lifted once the key was turned, revealing a row of tiny running horses. What was hidden inside that golden egg? A mechanical goose, perhaps? She knew the fairytale by heart.

Won by her own curiosity and without even asking herself why stern old Gehrman would even possess such a thing, she turned the key three times, balancing the egg on the palm of her gloved hand. When the mechanism clicked, she realized that something was not working as intended since the petals in which the golden-finished surface was split into could barely move. Perhaps it was broken, or some parts were missing. Still, the tiny clockwork prisoner trapped inside the shell kept bouncing and clicking inside the egg, almost begging to be freed. She gently pressed upon the tip, parting the petals with her thumbs as a twinkling sound filled the silent room with a familiar tune. It was the central portion of a folk song often sang during weddings and Spring celebrations. Finally free from its golden shell, a graceful female figure now danced on the huntress palm. The little automata was unpainted and naked, clearly unfinished, with only a ribbon tied around her metal torso, probably marking her waist point before a dress could be made for her. Her hair was cast in copper, each lock finely chiseled.

Gehrman snatched the toy from her fingers before she could even realize he had entered the room. How did she remain oblivious to his presence for so long, she didn’t know, but the entrancing dance of the little figure was most likely to be blamed.

“I-it’s not finished! Don’t look at it!”

“Have you made it?” She asked with a smile, seeing how he cradled the little thing in the cup of his large, bony hands. “It’s lovely. I am no expert, but it looks really well made.”

He nervously brushed the back of his head “Well… thanks.”

“I didn’t know you were into such cute little things. It… suits you. Somehow.” The ballerina was still spinning on her pointy feet when the First Hunter placed the carillon on the shelf and turned to the desk.

“Have you brought your gun, Maria? Let me see what’s wrong with it.”

She blinked. She had almost forgotten why she came to the hunter’s room in the first place. “Oh, yes I believe the flintlock is broken. Or at least parts of it.“

“Let me see it.” She handed the Evelyn to her teacher, but her attention was still on the little doll. “Have you made more of these?” She asked as the mechanism came to a stop and the ballerina froze in place, her body tilted in a slightly unnatural position.

“Of what?”

Maria raised an eyebrow, unamused. “Wind-up toys, Gehrman.”

The silver screwdriver he was using to remove the flintlock from the beautiful wooden frame of the Cainhurst gun shook between his fingers, but a warm smile appeared on his lips. “It’s a guilty pleasure of mine.”

Maria rested her back against one of the shelves “Why ‘guilty’? I know people that would pay a fortune for stuff like this.”

“I guess I could devote myself to it once I retire. If I don’t get killed first.” “Gehrman’s toyshop, mh? Doesn’t sound bad. You could make tiny stain hunters and beasts that open their jaws and roar. I used to steal my cousin’s stain soldiers and wooden swords. Why do boys always get the better toys?“

“Not fond of your dolls, I presume.”

“I had so many, but truly cherished only one of them, Janice, a brunette. She was engaged to one of Ghislain’s stain officers even if she was almost three times his size. Perhaps he went to war because he was afraid of her.”

Gehrman chuckled, as his capable hands carefully replaced the gun’s splinter “I’m not sure about that, as our dear Konrad proves, some men really like their women tall.”

Maria sat down on the desk next to him to watch him work, oblivious to the sudden blushing of his cheeks now that her well-toned thighs were so close to his elbow.

“Janice really looked a bit like Gratia now that I think about it. Now… why don’t you tell me where you hid all your other creations? That empty shelf is really suspicious, you know?” She teased him, crossing her legs.

It was in moments like that that Gehrman questioned his own judgemental skills. Was she truly flirting with him or was it all just wishful thinking?

He snapped out of confusion bringing back his attention to the Evelyn “You have a good eye.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“I stored them all in the drawer right under the shelf. Not so imaginative. Nor that far from their original placement.”

She didn’t move, her eyes wandering on the First Hunter’s angular face. “Why have you hid them?”

“At times I just feel more comfortable around machines than people.” he admitted, letting out a long sigh. “At times I even prefer beasts to people.”

Maria threw her head back, dangling her legs like a child on a swing. “Don’t we all?”

He moved the gun closer to the oil lamp “…it should work now. But let’s wait till it’s morning to try it. We don’t want to scare everyone to death by firing a few shots so late at night.”

“Definitely not. Thank you so much, Gehrman.” She took the short musket from the man’s hand and placed it back in her holster. “So, about that drawer…” “FINE! I’ll show you.” He blurted and Maria returned his slightly annoyed glance with a smile.

Gehrman rose from his chair, suddenly reminding the young woman of his impressive height. Considering his quiet and reserved behavior, it was easy to imagine him as one of those small fellows who always get trampled upon in boisterous crowds, but his appearance didn’t fit such a mental image at all.

He crossed the room and pull out a key from the pocket of his sage green vest to open the mysterious drawer. “Promise me you won’t laugh.”

Maria tilted her head “I can’t promise such a thing. Your expression is already pretty hilarious to look at.”

He sighed again, slowly opening the drawer. It was well worth the risk. After all, Maria looked even prettier when she smiled.

#anon ask #headcanons #gehrman the first hunter

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crowsent · 5 years

Text

On Creativity

I’ve always liked writing. And since I’m working on bolstering my confidence, I’ll go ahead and say that I’m good at writing. I can use unique voices, switch perspectives, write decent fight scenes. By all means, I can write well.

But writing’s also a hobby. I don’t write because I have to. It ain’t an obligation. I’m allowed to enjoy what I do. I’m allowed to use words to escape this world and live in a different one, even for just a few precious moments. Forget Earth and forget me; I can be a Quirkless boy struggling with his identity, I can be a young woman struggling to master her Semblance, I can be a half-ghoul juggling my own concept of morality with a world that tells me that my existence is apprehensible.

I can be allowed to break away from the identity of LOSAS and be someone different.

Writing is fun for me. I enjoy it, I enjoy seeing ink on the page or words on the screen. I enjoy spinning out a thread and watching a tapestry come to life. And after years of doing it, that tapestry is pretty damn good. It’s got colours, clean lines, and a compelling vibrancy that makes others look.

But I’m not the only person who enjoys writing.

Someone might write and write and never be satisfied with what they create. John Doe can build a planet of ash and cinders and tear it all down because it’s grey and flat. Jane Doe can paint a human being and kill it in a single sentence because of a flaw that threw the whole story out of rationality.

Alex might spin a thread and create a tapestry of their own. But there is no life, no colour, and muddled stitches that obscure where the line ends and another begins.

And all these people should still be allowed to create.

Just because I’m good at writing doesn’t mean that I should be the only one allowed to write. It doesn’t mean that other good writers should only be the ones allowed to write.

We don’t have one giant inkwell and pen and pass it around like the olympic torch.

We SHOULDN’T have one giant inkwell and pen and pass it around like the olympic torch.

People should be encouraged to write. Everyone should write at LEAST one story just for kicks, shits, and giggles. Who cares if your story is about a majestic unicorn who discovered the meaning of friendship because of an overly persistent frog that sang off-key to them for three whole pages? Make your story about a soldier who had his entire family murdered and is out for revenge. Make it about your OTP making cookies at ass-o’clock in the morning.

WRITE.

For one, it encourages creativity and creativity, I think, is one of the most beautiful things about human beings. Sure, as a species we collectively fucked over the Earth, drove some species of animals and plants into extinction, and created a system that fucked up the economy and squandered the morality and softness of our people.

But we also created organizations to try and rectify these problems we created: wildlife preservation efforts, shelters, food drives. We break and we make our mistakes (HA) but we also try so so very hard to fix them and learn, and move forward.

Creativity, I think, is more than just building a planet of ash and cinders or creating your own human conjured from the depths of your mind. It’s self-expression, an outlet for you to express feelings that you normally wouldn’t be able to put into words.

For me, words are how I express my feelings. If I tried talking to an actual human being face to face, I’d accidentally bite my tongue and die over the pronunciation of the word “pronunciation”. But when I write, it’s easier. When I write, I can look at everything that’s wrong with our planet from an objective standpoint and simultaneously remind myself that it’s not the end.

I am much better with written words because it gives me time to think and revise. I can’t do that in real life. I can’t pause a conversation and proofread the absolute bullshit I am about to spew from my mouth.

But some people are much more comfortable with speaking. Where I express myself with flowery words and purple prose dense and loquacious to the point of idiocy, some people like to use their words, hear themselves speak to others and see the faces of everyone who listens to them.

There was a man I knew who we shall call ‘Vaughn’. Now, Vaughn wrote, not as much, not as confidently, but he wrote. He was always hesitant when sharing his writing. So was I, but that was a product of my social anxiety and not my lack of confidence in my work.

Vaughn did not have this social anxiety. He saw his work, his prose, and genuinely believed that it did not compare to others. Never said it aloud, but when he read prose, his feet fidgeted, he held the paper (or computer) in front of him to hide his face, and he spoke faster and faster, as if trying to get the words out so he wouldn’t have to speak. And when he finished, he’d sigh, nod and smile at the reception, and hurriedly urge all of us to go next.

That’s only for prose though.

Near the end of the year, he gave us all this big performance; slam poetry.

And let me tell you, I was fucking enthralled.

If I heard his poems on a street, his delivery, the way his voice shifted with every word and how he moved almost like I dance, I would fucking listen to every word. Even if I was late to work, or even if my arms were laden with groceries, I would fucking stand on that street and listen with my jaw on the floor.

Pretty sure I didn’t breathe during his performance. It was amazing. And he had a lot of fun. His leg wasn’t fidgeting, he didn’t cover his face. He owned it.

It’s obvious he has a passion for writing and performing, and speaking until his voice was hoarse.

And he was a damn creative man.

A creative man who, for some reason, felt like his prose wasn’t as good as his slam poetry. Which, okay, I’ll admit, I enjoyed the poetry better, but it didn’t mean that his prose was bad. It was just rough around the edges, like mine, like everyone in that class.

So I thought, why the fuck would a man this dedicated to his craft, this passionate about reciting a poem that grabbed my fucking soul and booked it, this excited to share with us his creation, feel as though his prose wasn’t good enough.

With his poem, he was very open to criticisms and praise alike. But with his prose, he seemed resigned and withdrawn, like criticism was the only option. Of course, I was curious and my social anxiety got strangled by my curiosity and it was silenced with a garotte because I just HAD TO KNOW.

When I asked if he would be doing anymore writing after that year, without that specific class pushing us to write everyday, he said, with the certainty and confidence of a man who had a noose around his neck: “Yeah, but I probably won’t write prose anymore.”

And his reasoning. The reasoning. “I’m not good at it.”

Okay. Fair enough. Some people don’t enjoy writing prose and prefer other forms of creative self-expression. Maybe he just prefers slam. Maybe he wasn’t that into prose.

But I heard this man, this beautiful, brilliant, creative man, go into a spiel about his work. How he planned to write it, the dark twists he’ll take. His one goal in prose was to make his writing creepy and edgy. And he was so fucking excited about it. Big smile, bright eyes, the excited hand movements that almost took out my glasses in a one hit knockout.

I refuse to believe that a man this excited to talk about his work wasn’t interested in writing.

That got me thinking: why in the fuck would he stop doing something he clearly enjoyed doing?

The question eventually shifted to this.

Why do people stop creative pursuits?

Why do people stop writing angsty poems and edgy creepypastas?

Why do people stop making up silly songs in the shower?

Why do people stop painting their rainbow sparkly OCs?

Why do people stop OC/Canon shipping?

Why do people stop cosplay?

Why do people stifle their creativity?

This of course, ties back to the first paragraph I’ve written. I enjoy writing. I’m good at writing.

John and Jane and Alex enjoy writing. They don’t live up to the standard others have for “good” writing.

I am encouraged to keep updating that fanfic I have.

They are encouraged to stop. Find something they can do better. Move on.

Why does my writing, considered good by other people, give me a pass to keep writing while others who don’t meet that standard are encouraged to stop?

It makes absolutely no sense. A crab doing the macarena makes more sense than that. A cheetah that’s slower than a snail crawling through molasses makes more sense than that.

Why should we stop people from creating? From exploring their minds and expanding on their interests?

Why is it, that when it comes to writing, or drawing, or sewing, or literally any creative pursuit, we only endorse it when the person is “good?”

If creativity is about self-expression, then the quality shouldn’t matter. I should be allowed to write even if the first word I ever put to page is “Y’all’d’ve.” If I want to make my fanfic about my OC being swept off her feet by a hunky, glittery vampire, then by all fucking means, I should be allowed to write.

No one should be telling me to stop writing.

Creativity is a part of us, something intrinsic and unique and just as integral to our development as a person. It doesn’t have to be writing either.

Someone singing terribly off-key to their favourite song at a karaoke bar should be allowed to sing off-key to their favourite song.

Someone who makes cat-shaped cookies and had the batch come out like a monstrosity from hell should still make cat-shaped cookies if they want to.

Someone who writes with shifting tenses, has no concept of verb choice, and utterly butchers canonical characterizations should still be allowed to write.

As someone who does write fanfiction (plus other things) and publish them, feedback is important to me. Without it, I can’t grow as a writer, and I enjoy talking to all the people who take the time to comment on my latest work.

But I am not obligated to keep up the quality or coherency or consistency of my fics.

If, at some point, I decided to take the plot in a direction way the fuck out of left field, I can do that. I owe no one an apology. I wrote the fanfic, I choose to do what I want with it.

It’s terribly unfair for people to commandeer what I can and can’t do with my writing just as it’s unfair for people to commandeer what people can and can’t do with their creativity.

Let’s take singing.

I enjoy singing. I like to sing. I enjoy taking popular songs and butchering it to hell and back.

I am not a good singer.

I can’t hit high notes.

I can’t hold notes.

I have next to no control over my voice.

But I love to sing. And I should be allowed to sing. Just like how John and Jane and Alex should be allowed to write.

We look at Creativity not as something to do for fun, but as something to do for productivity. Why bother creating your own alien planet if it’s full of inconsistencies? Fuck all your feelings and the happy endorphins releasing in your head, this planet’s not good enough.

Fuck that OC you just wrote out the whole backstory for, it’s too damn edgy and not written with enough nuance.

Yeah fuck you.

At no point in time should you ever attempt to police a person’s creativity. It’s something that’s for THEM to explore. To discover. To enjoy.

Think of all your favourite shows, your favourite music, your favourite plays. All of that happened because of creativity and hard work. You see critically acclaimed novels with the accolades and praises. You don’t see the first draft with the dozens of lines rewritten in red ink. You don’t see the first drafts with entire pages crossed out.

People don’t churn out masterpieces in a day.

And even if they did, that should not be the standard. There shouldn’t be any standard to creativity.

If you want to try out knitting for the first time and end up with a mess, then congratulations! you tried out knitting for the first time. If you enjoyed it, then go make yourself another knitted item. Clothing. I don’t knit so I wouldn’t know.

People should stop assigning value to their creative pursuits. Sure, it’s fun when people give your compliments, but it’s also fun to let loose and just enjoy yourself.

I just talk about writing a lot, because it’s what I’ve done for years and something I can do confidently. I’m not perfect, there’s still some bumps, but if you ask me if I can write better than I can draw, I will nod my head so damn fast it’s going to roll of my shoulders.

That said, I should still be absolutely allowed to draw even though it’s been 84 YEARS AND I STILL DON’T KNOW HOW TO DRAW A HAND

Creativity is something that we should embrace. Even if what we create doesn’t turn out ‘good’ or if we’re not happy with it, we should still create and create and create.

It’s a good stress relief. It opens up our minds to new worlds, new possibilities, new passions, new hobbies. It can be used to talk to people. It can be used to improve yourself as a person. It can be fucking used for unorthodox solutions to some of your problems. Thinking outside the box.

And even though I can not, for the life of me, hit a single god damn note in Hamilton’s ‘Satisfied’, I will still sing the fuck out of it when it comes on in my playlists.

And even though Vaughn’s prose didn’t flow as well as his slam poetry, he should still continue to write if he enjoyed it.

It’s not about being good at it. It’s about having fun while you do it.

TL;DR: Let people be creative

#text #losas talks #creativity #on subject

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newstfionline · 6 years

Text

The Spy Who Came Home

By Ben Taub, The New Yorker, May 7, 2018 Issue

Shortly after an evening nap, Patrick Skinner drove to the police station in the Third Precinct in Savannah, Georgia, wearing ill-fitting body armor. It was late December, and bitterly cold, and he figured that the weather would bring fewer shootings than usual but more cases of domestic abuse. “Summertime is the murder time,” he said. He had come to work early to tape together his body camera, because the clasp was broken.

The shift supervisor--a tall corporal with a slight paunch--stood at a lectern. “Good mornin’, mornin’, mornin’,” he said. It was 10:31 p.m. Speaking through a wad of tobacco, he delivered a briefing on criminal activities from earlier in the day, then listed vehicles that had been reported stolen. “Look out for a cooter-colored truck,” he said.

The walls of the briefing room were sparsely decorated. There was a map of each beat within the precinct--an area, more than half the size of Manhattan, that includes Savannah’s most violent neighborhoods--along with a display case of various drug samples and a whiteboard listing police cars that were out of commission. One had overheated, two had been wrecked in accidents, and two others had broken headlights. A sixth car was labelled “unsafe for road.”

“What does ‘unsafe for road’ mean?” a cop asked.

“That’s all our cars,” another said.

Most patrol officers drive old Ford Crown Victorias, several of which are approaching two hundred thousand miles on the odometer--”and those are cop miles, where we’re flooring it at least twice an hour,” Skinner told me. Officers complain about worn tires, dodgy brakes, and holes in the seats where guns and batons have rubbed impressions into the fabric. Many cars run twenty-four hours a day.

Skinner, who is forty-seven, is short and bald, with a trim beard, Arctic-blue eyes, and a magnetic social energy that has the effect of putting people around him at ease. He wears humor and extroversion as a kind of shield; most of his colleagues know almost nothing about his life leading up to the moment they met.

At around 3 a.m., a call came in: a “strange vehicle” was idling in someone’s driveway, in the Summerside neighborhood. The caller gave no address and no description of the car.

Though Skinner had completed his training just two months earlier, he already knew every road in the Third Precinct. On slow nights, he tried to memorize the locations of Savannah’s traffic lights and stop signs, so that he could visualize the quickest route to any call. Darren Bradley, who went through training with Skinner, said, “When they gave us the sheets with police signals and codes”--a list of nearly two hundred radio call signs--”he looked it over once and had it in his head.”

As Skinner approached Summerside, a white Camaro with tinted windows pulled out and came toward him. Cars registered in Georgia don’t have license plates on the front, but, as the Camaro zoomed past, Skinner glanced into his side mirror, memorized the rear-plate number from its backward reflection, and called it in.

Georgia’s law-enforcement-training program does not teach recruits to memorize license plates backward in mirrors. Like many of Skinner’s abilities, that skill was honed in the C.I.A. He joined the agency during the early days of America’s war on terror, one of the darkest periods in its history, and spent almost a decade running assets in Afghanistan, Jordan, and Iraq. He shook hands with lawmakers, C.I.A. directors, the King of Jordan, the Emir of Qatar, the Prime Minister of Singapore, and Presidents of Afghanistan and the United States. “I became the Forrest Gump of counterterrorism and law enforcement,” he said, stumbling in and out of the margins of history. But over the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.

Meanwhile, American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.” In time, he came to believe that the most meaningful application of his training and expertise--the only way to exemplify his beliefs about American security, at home and abroad--was to become a community police officer in Savannah, where he grew up.

“We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ “ Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s hard--and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What does that mean?”

No military force can end terrorism, just as firefighters can’t end fire and cops can’t end crime. But there are ways to build a resilient society. “It can’t be on a government contract that says ‘In six months, show us these results,’” Skinner said. “It has to be ‘I live here. This is my job forever.’” He compared his situation to that of Voltaire’s Candide, who, after enduring a litany of absurd horrors in a society plagued by fanaticism and incompetence, concludes that the only truly worthwhile activity is tending his garden. “Except my garden is the Third Precinct,” Skinner said.

“I’ve never been a senior anything,” Skinner said. “Always a rookie.” In 1991, when he was nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard; he spent two years carrying out search-and-rescue operations, followed by three years working on an icebreaker in the Hudson River.

He met his wife, Theresa, in the Coast Guard, and in 1999 she was assigned to a position at headquarters, in Washington, D.C. Skinner, who had spent the past couple of years working as a waiter and a flight attendant while finishing his college degree, joined the Capitol Police, but his graduation ceremony was interrupted by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Before the debris settled, Skinner had faxed an application to the C.I.A. In the following weeks, the agency received more than a hundred thousand applications; it took months to sift through the pile.

The Capitol Police temporarily assigned Skinner to plainclothes duty in the Senate. On January 29, 2002, he accompanied Mayor Michael Bloomberg to President George W. Bush’s first State of the Union address. They sat together as Bush spoke of an “axis of evil” made up of rogue states “and their terrorist allies,” setting the stage for the invasion of Iraq.

Later that year, Skinner left the Capitol Police and became an air marshal. One day, he got a call from a blocked number. “You applied to work for the government?” the caller asked.

The caller was a recruiter for the C.I.A. “He asked me some rapid-fire questions--’Is the Indus River north or south of Kashmir?’ ‘What was the date of Partition?’ ‘Name five towns in the occupied West Bank’--basically to cross me off his list,” Skinner said. “But I knew all the answers, because I had sat on airplanes for the past six months, doing nothing but reading newspapers and The Economist.”

In the summer of 2003, Skinner joined the C.I.A.’s third post-9/11 class, as a prospective case officer, working under diplomatic cover. He refuses to discuss the training program--the agency doesn’t officially acknowledge its existence--but much of it can be pieced together from memoirs by former spies.

Training begins at the C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, where aspiring case officers develop cover identities to facilitate clandestine work abroad. After a few months, they are sent to the Farm--a sprawling, wooded campus in southeastern Virginia. There, for about nine months, the students inhabit an increasingly complex role-playing scenario, in which the Farm is a fictitious unfriendly country and the instructors serve as teachers, tacticians, sources, border guards, and officers of a hostile intelligence agency. Case officers rarely steal secrets themselves; instead, they recruit well-placed foreigners to pass along information.

Students practice their recruitment skills at fake embassy parties. Each is assigned a target from the host country, and is tasked with carrying out conversations that play to the target’s interests and hobbies; by the end of the evening, students are expected to have elicited their assets’ contact details, which are used to begin a delicate, months-long process of recruitment. The next day, they receive feedback on their approach. They lose points for tells as minor as drinking beer from a bottle; diplomats typically use a glass.

Students are trained in tactical skills that they hope they’ll never need. During the driving course, known as “crash and burn,” they learn how to avoid obstacles at high speeds, how to behave at checkpoints, and how to smash through barricades. They practice navigation and hand-to-hand combat, and spend days hiding in the mud while being hunted by armed instructors. They are taught to jump out of airplanes and to handle explosives, foreign weapons, and the gadgetry of secret communications.

They also spend hundreds of hours outside the campus, skulking through suburban Virginia and Maryland, crafting surveillance-detection routes, on foot and in rental cars. Each student scopes out sites at which to meet with the asset from the embassy party, then devises ninety-minute paths to the locations, through congested areas and isolated roads, with regular stops at gas stations and shops, in order to obscure the real objective, which is to draw a surveillance team into view. Every year, the agency wrecks several rental cars; students spend so much time staring at their mirrors that they sometimes lose sight of what’s in front of them.

The C.I.A.’s fixation on area familiarization has shaped Skinner’s approach to policing. He begins each shift by driving the perimeter of his beat, then working his way inward, sometimes heading the wrong direction down one-way streets to insure that he does not fall into familiar patterns. On slow nights, he parks at the scenes of unsolved robberies that took place weeks earlier and imagines which escape route the thief would have taken, so that next time he can go straight to wherever the thief is headed.

In the Third Precinct, many establishments that stay open past midnight are robbed at gunpoint several times a year. “People thank cops for their service, but they should be thanking McDonald’s workers,” Skinner told me. “They’re way more likely to have a gun in their face than I am.” He added, “The only place that doesn’t really get hit is the late-night liquor store. People are thinking, If this place gets shut down, how will we get in drunken fights?”

One night, Skinner and I arrived at the site of a mystifying car wreck near Candler Hospital, on the southern edge of the precinct. Someone, while driving out of a parking lot, had launched a Ford Taurus more than twenty feet up a grassy knoll and into the hospital’s sign. The front seat was covered in blood, but there was no one around. In the back, Skinner found diapers, an empty bottle of the opiate hydrocodone, an extra set of license plates, and a driver’s license showing a thin white man in his late twenties, with dishevelled brown hair.

Candler Hospital is on a busy highway, surrounded by strip malls and residential streets. Skinner narrowed his search to three likely spots, based on the cold weather and the apparent extent of the driver’s injuries. He drove two blocks to a McDonald’s, and the Walgreens next door, and told employees to look out for “Shaggy, from ‘Scooby-Doo,’ but drunk and bleeding.” Skinner explained, “He’s not embarrassed that he’s a poor driver--he’s running from a D.U.I.” By sobering up before turning himself in, the man could avoid alcohol-related charges.

Skinner’s third hunch was that the man had gone north on Habersham Street--heading back toward town, to be picked up by a friend. At 2:41 a.m., medical personnel at Candler called the police; Shaggy had been picked up, drunk and bleeding, at a gas station on Habersham, and was now in the E.R., shouting expletives and trying to attack the medical staff.

In the summer of 2004, Skinner completed his C.I.A. training and was deployed to Kandahar, an Afghan city near the border with Pakistan, where the agency was operating out of the former home of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban. Kabul had fallen three years earlier, but Al Qaeda’s leadership had found refuge in the mountainous border areas, and Pakistani intelligence was quietly supporting the Taliban. C.I.A. officers, confined to Afghanistan, struggled to recruit assets who could penetrate jihadi networks in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. Access was not the C.I.A.’s only obstacle; elsewhere in Afghanistan, the agency was using National Geographic maps from the nineteen-sixties, with names for landmarks and villages that didn’t correspond to those used by the locals.

People in Kandahar often sought Skinner out, hoping to trade secrets for cash. “We were temporary-duty officers, and they knew our rotations,” he told me. “They’d have a story of how, in Quetta”--just across the Pakistani border--”they had seen bin Laden, Zawahiri, Captain Marvel--all these people. And if you just got there you’re, like, ‘Holy [cow], I’m the best case officer in American history!’ And you give them five hundred bucks and write it up for Langley.” By the end of his rotation, Skinner had heard the same discredited stories dozens of times.

Douglas Laux, a case officer from Indiana, had studied Pashto, the language spoken in southern Afghanistan, before deploying to Kandahar, in 2010. When several walk-ins gave him the name of the same Taliban fighter, he asked one of them how everyone had suddenly learned it. “He informed me that the local Afghan radio stations in the area regularly broadcast the names of individuals the U.S. military wanted information about,” Laux writes in his memoir, “Left of Boom,” which was heavily redacted by the C.I.A. The military knew this but had neglected to inform the agency, and walk-ins had been cashing in for years.

Espionage hinges on human relationships. “The best assets I ever ran weren’t in it for money,” Skinner said. “They had this urge to be part of something bigger. It wasn’t patriotism--they just wanted to be part of a high-functioning team.” But most assets could be trusted only in a very narrow context, and locals routinely sought American firepower to back them in personal or tribal disputes. “They might tell you it’s to help their country--they know we love to hear that--when it’s actually revenge,” Skinner said.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. military was trying to defeat the Taliban and install a new government, while the C.I.A. was primarily focused on killing members of Al Qaeda. At times, Special Operations Forces and intelligence officers coördinated on highly effective raids. But tactical successes are meaningless without a strategy, and it wore on Skinner and other C.I.A. personnel that they could rarely explain how storming Afghan villages made American civilians safer.

They also never understood why the United States leadership apparently believed that the American presence would fix Afghanistan. “We were trying to do nation-building with less information than I get now at police roll call,” Skinner said. Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Each raid broke the country a little more than the previous one. “So we would try harder, which would make it worse,” Skinner said. “And so we’d try even harder, which would make it even worse.”

The assessments of field operatives carried little weight with officials in Washington. “They were telling us, ‘Too many people have died here for us just to leave,’” Skinner recalled. “ ‘But we don’t want to give the Taliban a timeline.’ So, forever? Is that what you’re going for? They f---ing live there, dude.”

Skinner spent a year in Afghanistan, often under fire from Taliban positions, and returned several times in the next decade. He kept a note pinned to his ballistic vest that read “Tell my wife it was pointless.”

The preferred weapon of the Taliban--and of most insurgencies, worldwide--is the Kalashnikov, a Soviet-developed assault rifle that can penetrate a person’s torso from more than half a mile away. Last year, Bradley McClellan confiscated a Kalashnikov and several pistols from two juvenile pot dealers in Savannah. Although police-issue bulletproof vests can stop rounds fired from a handgun, they are useless against assault rifles. “After seeing what little kids can get their hands on, I went out and bought hard plates,” designed for use in war zones, McClellan told me. The plates cost him more than five hundred dollars--a week’s salary.

The prevalence of high-powered weapons in America is creating an arms race between citizens and the authorities. Each year, dozens of cops are shot dead, and officers kill around a thousand members of the public--often after mistaking innocuous objects for weapons or frightened behavior for threats. Meanwhile, peaceful protesters are increasingly confronted with snipers, armored vehicles, and smoke and tear gas. In the past twenty years, more than five billion dollars’ worth of military gear has been transferred from the military to state and local police departments, including night-vision equipment, boats, aircraft, grenade launchers, and bayonets. “If we wanted an mrap”--a military vehicle, designed to protect soldiers from ambushes and mines--”we would just have to submit an application to the federal government,” Skinner told me.

According to David M. Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, American policing is practiced more as a craft than as a profession. “The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options. When Skinner joined the police force, everyone in his class was given a pistol, but none were given Tasers, because the department had run out.

At Georgia’s state police-training facilities, the focus is “all tactics and law,” Skinner told me. Officers are taught that “once you give a lawful order it has to be followed--and that means immediately.” But the recipient of a “lawful order” may not understand why it’s being issued, or that his or her failure to comply may lead to the use of force. There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category. It is up to the officer’s discretion to shape these interactions, and the most straightforward option is to order belligerent people to the ground and, if they resist, tackle them and put them in cuffs.

“This is how situations go so, so badly--yet justifiably, legally,” Skinner said. Police officers often encounter people during the worst moments of their lives, and Skinner believes that his role is partly to resolve trouble and partly to prevent people from crossing the line from what he calls “near-crime” into “actual crime.” The goal, he said, is “to slow things down, using the power of human interaction more than the power of the state.”

“The de-escalation calls are so much more draining for me than grabbing people,” he told me. “My head is humming during the call. It’s exactly--and I mean exactly--like the prep work I used to do for the agency, where you’re seeing the interaction unfold in the way that you steer it.” As a case officer, Skinner drew flowcharts, mapping out every direction he thought a conversation might go. Now, he said, “instead of having a week to prepare for the meeting, I have as much time as it takes to drive up to the call.”

Skinner always drives with the windows down: he tries to maximize the number of encounters people have with the police in which they feel neither scrutinized nor under suspicion. “You sometimes hear cops talk about people in the community as ‘civilians,’ but that’s bs,” he said. “We’re not the military. The people we’re policing are our neighbors. This is not semantics--if you say it enough, it becomes a mind-set.”

During several searches and a house raid, I noticed that Skinner was the only officer who kept his gun holstered. One night, at 4 a.m., an alarm was triggered at his mother’s former high school; officers found an open door. Three of them stalked the premises with their pistols drawn. Skinner used his flashlight. He told me that, because they were all looking in different directions, having guns drawn only increased the likelihood that they would accidentally shoot one another.

And then there are the calls where the violence has already taken place: a murder outside a gas station, a gang shoot-out with multiple casualties, a domestic-abuse case in which a man beat his girlfriend unconscious after she told him that he needed to help with the bills. We visited the woman in the hospital, where a nurse stood by as Skinner took a police report. The bones in her face were broken, and the left side was so swollen that it looked as if there were half a grapefruit under her skin. She could hardly speak, except to say “yes,” “no,” and, even more quietly, “I feel like it’s probably my fault” and “I’m pregnant.”

The following night, there was a lull in calls. As we drove through quiet streets, Skinner noted the eerie beauty of Savannah’s twisted oak trees, draped in Spanish moss and cloaked in fog. Then he noted the date, and went silent. It was December 30th--the eighth anniversary of the worst day of his life, the second-deadliest day in C.I.A. history.

After 9/11, the Bush Administration authorized the C.I.A. to use an array of abusive techniques, referred to as “enhanced interrogation,” on suspected Al Qaeda militants. Employees of the agency also kidnapped suspects and took them to third countries, where interrogations were outsourced to foreign intelligence services with abysmal human-rights records. That way, the C.I.A. could claim to have no knowledge of specific allegations of torture.

Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate is America’s closest counterterrorism partner in the Middle East. The U.S. funds and equips its operations, and the C.I.A. shares a counterterrorism center with the G.I.D., on the outskirts of the capital, Amman. According to Human Rights Watch, between 2001 and 2004 the C.I.A. transported at least fourteen terror suspects--often wearing only diapers and blindfolds--to a G.I.D. detention facility, where some of them were tortured until they confessed to crimes.

In 2006, after another deployment in Afghanistan, Skinner was assigned to work at the C.I.A. station in Amman. He was relieved to be moving with his wife to a posting in a peaceful country. The agency’s use of black sites, rendition, and torture had become the subject of intense public scrutiny, and the enhanced-interrogation program, which relied heavily on contractors, had been scrapped. According to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, the torture sessions had extracted no actionable intelligence.

Skinner, like most case officers, got results through “rapport-based elicitation.” “You can build great relationships with some unsavory people,” he said. “In any terrorist group, there’s dysfunction, usually some jealousy. It’s literally a job--they get a salary. So you’re looking for the guy who feels underappreciated.”

In late 2008, the National Security Agency traced a prominent jihadi blogger to a desktop computer in a working-class neighborhood of Amman. The blogger posted grisly footage of American soldiers dying in Iraq, and he interpreted the words of bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as if he had inside knowledge. “The speculation among his most ardent online followers was that he was a Saudi and very likely a senior official within Al Qaeda,” Joby Warrick writes in “The Triple Agent,” his meticulous account of the case. The C.I.A. shared the blogger’s address with the G.I.D., and the case was taken up by one of Skinner’s close associates, a thirty-four-year-old Jordanian captain named Sharif Ali bin Zeid.

The man behind the computer--a young doctor from Jordan named Humam Khalil al-Balawi--seemed like an improbable fanatic. He spent his days treating women and children in a Palestinian refugee camp, and his evenings with his wife and daughters. He was a pious, mild-mannered introvert, with no apparent real-world jihadi connections, yet online he wrote as if he were plotting a suicide attack.

One night in January, 2009, the G.I.D. raided Balawi’s home and brought him in for interrogation. When they released him, three days later, “he was almost unrecognizable,” Warrick writes. “Jittery, sullen, distracted.” In the following weeks, bin Zeid took Balawi out for coffee and expensive meals. He thought that Balawi seemed malleable and weak, and that his online status within jihadi circles could be used in counterterrorism operations. If his help led to the capture or the death of high-level Al Qaeda members, bin Zeid told him, the reward would be staggering: the Americans were offering twenty-five million dollars for information that led them to Zawahiri.

In February, Balawi proposed to bin Zeid that he go to Pakistan’s tribal areas, make contact with members of the Pakistani Taliban, and ask for their help in setting up medical clinics. This cover would allow him to move freely within Taliban territory, and to send bin Zeid intelligence reports.

Bin Zeid brought Balawi’s plan to Skinner, and their agencies discussed it at length. Balawi had jihadi credibility, but he had no training in codes or tradecraft, and the agencies agreed that he would probably be found out and killed. Nevertheless, should the young doctor somehow pass along actionable intelligence against Al Qaeda, the C.I.A. would have drones ready to strike. In recent years, the agency’s vocabulary had shifted: a “target” was no longer someone to be recruited; it was somebody to be tracked, kidnapped, rendered, or killed.

On March 18th, Balawi left Amman. Two months later, he e-mailed bin Zeid that the Taliban had accepted him, and that he would serve as a personal physician to its leadership. In June, the C.I.A. assigned Skinner to a posting at the American Embassy in Baghdad, and Balawi’s file was transferred to his colleague and friend Darren LaBonte.

In late August, after months of silence, Balawi sent an encrypted video file that showed him in a room with one of bin Laden’s closest associates. Intelligence analysts were stunned. “You have lifted our heads in front of the Americans,” bin Zeid wrote to Balawi. It was the first time that the C.I.A. had ever penetrated Al Qaeda. Soon afterward, Balawi sent bin Zeid an e-mail saying that Zawahiri had sought him out to treat his diabetes. Bin Laden had been in hiding for so long that the C.I.A. believed that Zawahiri and Al Qaeda’s head of finance, Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, were actually running the group. But there had been no confirmed sightings of Zawahiri since 2002. The C.I.A. director, Leon Panetta, briefed President Obama on Balawi’s access, and the agency decided to try to debrief Balawi in person, at the C.I.A. annex at a U.S. base in Khost, Afghanistan.

In early December, LaBonte and bin Zeid left for Khost, where they met with Jennifer Matthews, a twenty-year agency veteran, and eleven other C.I.A. officers and security contractors. LaBonte preferred one-on-one debriefings, often in the back of a moving car, but Matthews and her bosses in Langley had decided to give Balawi a full welcoming committee. Since the meeting would take place a few days after Balawi’s birthday, Matthews instructed the base chef to bake a cake. The base was guarded by Afghan forces, but, fearing that they might report Balawi’s presence to the Taliban, Matthews ordered them to leave their posts.

Before the meeting, LaBonte was exchanging messages with Skinner, in Baghdad. LaBonte was upset with the C.I.A.’s disregard for its usual methods. He had argued with Matthews, and had sent a cable to the Amman station, but was rebuffed. A Jordanian intelligence officer warned the C.I.A. that bin Zeid had become too attached to his asset to make dispassionate assessments, but he, too, was ignored. The President had been told that the meeting was about to happen; no one wanted to hear that it shouldn’t.

As Balawi’s car approached the base, LaBonte told Skinner that he had to go.

The car weaved through three unmanned barriers and approached the C.I.A. annex, where Matthews, LaBonte, and the others were waiting outside with Balawi’s cake. Balawi had some difficulty climbing out of the car. He started limping toward the greeting party, muttering a prayer, and then reached for a detonator attached to his wrist. There was enough time for everyone to understand what was about to happen, but not enough time for anyone to run away.

The explosion killed the driver, bin Zeid, and seven C.I.A. officers and contractors, including LaBonte and Matthews. In martyrdom videos that were released after the attack, Balawi explained that Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives had worked with him to pass along exclusive and accurate information, in order to win the C.I.A.’s trust.

The agency, in its desire to kill Al Qaeda targets, had overlooked a fundamental rule of espionage: that an ideologue can’t be turned, “even if he is offered the sun in one hand and the moon in the other,” as Balawi said in one of the videos. Coercion can work, but it also inspires revenge. Months later, an internal C.I.A. investigation described the attack as the result of “systemic failure” within the agency.

“We were chasing down this irresistible bait--this guy had actual, no-joke access to Zawahiri, the most wanted person on the planet--and we fell for it because his intel was real,” Skinner told me. He added, “Those of us who make it out of these places--we’re not better, we’re luckier.”

In Baghdad, Skinner was mired in politics and violence. It had been six years since the American invasion and subsequent dismantling of the Iraqi Army had led to a full-blown insurgency. Skinner had spent many evenings in Amman drinking Johnnie Walker Black with Iraqi tribal sheikhs, trying to recruit their support. “These guys had fled the war and stolen all the Iraqi money,” he told me. “We would try to develop them as assets for what became ‘the surge.’” In 2007, Bush sent an additional twenty thousand troops to Iraq to quell the insurgency, but, two years later, car bombs were killing hundreds of civilians in Baghdad each month. The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, was stacking the security forces with loyalists who carried out sectarian massacres. “We were focussed on Al Qaeda,” Skinner said. “He was focussed on Sunnis.”

In June, 2010, Skinner completed his posting in Iraq. He and Theresa bought a house with a small garden in Savannah, near where he’d grown up. He took an extended leave of absence from the C.I.A., and then resigned. In 2011, he joined the Soufan Group, a private-sector intelligence-analysis firm that employs retired American and British security officials and spies. As the director of special projects, he advised governments and corporations on matters of geopolitics and risk, and offered public analysis in the form of unsigned “intel-briefs,” congressional testimony, and interviews with journalists. In 2014, when the Senate Intelligence Committee released its findings on the C.I.A.’s use of “enhanced interrogation,” Skinner wrote an op-ed for Time, describing torture as an “indefensible tactic” that is designed “to produce false confessions for propaganda purposes.”

That year, isis captured the Iraqi city of Mosul and beheaded aid workers and journalists on camera. As the United States became consumed with fear of the group, Skinner grew uneasy in his role. He fielded phone calls from reporters who seemed more interested in citing a former C.I.A. officer than in what he had to say. “One journalist called me up and said, ‘My deadline is in ten minutes, but isis is bad, right?’” Skinner recalled.

In March, 2016, while visiting his aunt in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he gave a lecture on terrorism at the local World Affairs Council. “We have become the most fragile superpower ever,” he told the audience. While Al Qaeda aims to carry out what its operatives call “spectacular attacks,” he explained, isis obsesses over creating a “spectacular reaction.” As an example, he recounted an incident in Garland, Texas, in which two wannabe jihadis were killed after attempting a raid on a provocative anti-Muslim convention. The men had no coherent affiliation with isis; they merely followed its instructions--which have been widely disseminated by the American media--to post online that they were acting on behalf of the group. “If you strip the word ‘terrorism,’ two idiots drove from Arizona and got shot in a parking lot,” Skinner said. The real threat to American life was the response. “We shut down cities,” he said. “We change our laws. We change our societies.” He went on, “We’re basically doing their work for them.”

“Getting killed by isis in Savannah is like expecting to get hit by a piano falling from an asteroid,” Skinner said. “It’s insane. Day to day, it’s the people who are kicking in doors and stealing cars who are actually making life unbearable.”

Skinner became increasingly consumed by the incongruity between his words and his actions. He felt like a “fraud,” he said. He preached that insurgencies arose out of the failure of local policing, yet he didn’t know a thing about the gangs operating a few blocks away. “We have people that are disappearing into the cracks of society,” he said. And they can be helped only on an individual basis. “Then you have to scale that support to a neighborhood. And then to a city.”

Because local police departments pay poorly, “the people who have been trained to do this work best are never going to be doing it,” Skinner said. According to a study by Brown University, since 2001 the average American taxpayer has contributed more than twenty-three thousand dollars to veterans’ care, homeland security, and military operations in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “I used to spend more money on meals and entertainment for a couple of sources in Amman, each year, than the Savannah Police Department has to spend on cars,” Skinner told me. “And whatever the American people got out of my meals in Amman had way less impact on their lives than what was happening down the block.”

In October, 2016, one of Skinner’s closest friends in the C.I.A. was killed by isis forces in Afghanistan. Skinner was despondent. A few months later, he left the Soufan Group and joined his local police force, taking a pay cut of more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.

For the Savannah police, the biggest obstacle in gaining the community’s trust is the city’s history. Savannah is around fifty-five per cent black, and Georgia practiced segregation well into the second half of the twentieth century; after Skinner completed his training, he was startled to find that many interactions he had with older black men began with them reflexively putting up their hands.

One night in late December, at around 3:30 a.m., a few blocks south of Cuyler-Brownsville, a young black man ran into the road and urged Skinner to pull over. He said that he’d been at the home of a girl he “hangs out with,” and either she had stolen his watch or he had misplaced it--he wasn’t sure. He reeked of alcohol, and couldn’t remember the woman’s name or address, but he gestured in the direction of the housing projects a few blocks over. Skinner asked for the man’s name and date of birth, to run a quick check for outstanding warrants. “Anthony,” the man said, before hesitating and adding “Greene” and a date of birth.

Skinner drove around the block. “He definitely just gave me a fake last name,” he told me. “People don’t usually lie about their first name.” Skinner pulled over and typed “Anthony Greene” into a police database on his onboard laptop. No record. Then he tried “Anthony” and the man’s date of birth, and found “Anthony Jackson,” who had been charged with dozens of crimes, including lying to police officers about his identity, and jailed at least thirty times. The photograph on the screen showed the man we had just met. In a corner of the screen, there was a small notification: “Alias: Anthony Greene.” Jackson was on probation, but he didn’t have an outstanding warrant, and, apart from apparently lying to Skinner, he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Skinner returned to the corner, and explained to Jackson that he couldn’t find the watch without knowing where the woman lived. Jackson nodded and thanked him. “Listen, buddy, next time don’t give me a fake name, O.K.?” Skinner said.

“I didn’t!” Jackson called out. “I got an I.D.” He stumbled into the road, handed Skinner his driver’s license, and shouted his Social Security number.

If the driver’s license was fake, he’d have to arrest him. But a different database showed that the license was authentic, and that it belonged to Anthony Greene. And yet a search of the Social Security number he had given Skinner led straight back to Anthony Jackson.

“He’s his own legal doppelgänger!” Skinner exclaimed. “He’s two people, but neither of them is wanted--which is insane, because literally everyone in this neighborhood is wanted.” After a few minutes of cross-checking databases, he walked back to the man, returned his license, and apologized.

In the next few days, Skinner kept bringing up the case. “Imagine if he had been belligerent, or there was a warrant out for one of him,” he said. “We had all the time in the world. But, even with these vast databases of information, we came out of that interaction with zero knowledge. Maybe negative knowledge.” He shook his head. “We’ve invaded countries on worse information. But, if the C.I.A. taught me one thing, it is to always be acutely aware of the tremendous amount I don’t know.”

On New Year’s Eve, locals launched fireworks out of abandoned lots, and Cuyler-Brownsville erupted in celebratory gunfire. Shots fired into the sky take about forty-five seconds to hit the ground. Less than ten minutes into 2018, two other officers, parked a few blocks over, fled Cuyler-Brownsville when bullets took out a street lamp overhead. All through the neighborhood, pavements and doorsteps glistened with brass shell casings. We heard hundreds of rounds--from shotguns, pistols of all calibres, a Kalashnikov. At the corner of Fortieth and Florance, there was a scrap of crime-scene tape, from an incident the week before.

At 12:11 a.m., Skinner was dispatched to the site of a burning car. But, before he got there, another call came in, and he was sent to the Live Oak neighborhood to investigate more gunfire. “You can commit felonious aggravated assault with a firearm for fifteen minutes,” Skinner joked. The city has installed a costly but discerning gunfire-detection network, called ShotSpotter, with receptors in high-crime areas; that night, ShotSpotter was so overwhelmed that it was operating on a lag of around five hours.

It often falls to the police to handle what Skinner calls “the social work of last resort.” One night, as the temperature dropped into the twenties, he spotted a person in dark clothing skulking through an empty parking lot, near the site of a recent unsolved robbery. He pulled into the lot, and as he got closer his headlights illuminated an aging black woman with a sunken face, wearing a Santa hat and a leopard-print jacket. “You doing O.K.?” Skinner asked.

“I was trying to get to Walgreens,” she said. She looked at the ground and spoke slowly, in subdued, raspy tones. “Everybody mad at me,” she said.

“They’re not too mad at you, are they?” Skinner said.

“They say I’m a troublemaker.”

“You’re not a troublemaker. What’s your first name?”

“Norma Jeane.” She was too cold to make it to the Walgreens, she said, and so Skinner told her to hop in the car. After he closed the windows and turned up the heat, Norma Jeane lit up. “I’m named after Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “I’m gonna be a superstar.”

She launched into tales from her past, with characters and events entering and vanishing from her story as spontaneously, it seemed, as they had in her life. As a young child, she said, “I took my brothers with me, and we got baptized” at a church on May Street, just north of Cuyler-Brownsville. “They say, ‘Where are your parents?’ And I said, ‘They’re both alcoholics.’ “ The rest was a chronological blur, a half century of hardship, arguments, scarcity, and violence. As we approached Walgreens, the McDonald’s next door caught her attention.

Skinner asked if she was hungry, and she asked if he would get her some pancakes and sausages, since she hadn’t eaten all day. Skinner pulled into the drive-through. “If I sit down, it hurts,” Norma Jeane said. “Feels like I got polio. That’s why I keep walking. I know how to walk, and I ain’t scared. I never been scared. I been walking these streets since I was five.”

When Norma Jeane mentioned that someone had once given her a calico cat, Skinner asked for its name.

“I didn’t know no better name than Calico,” Norma Jeane said.

“That’s awesome--I have an orange cat named Orangey,” Skinner replied. “He’s so mean, though. I usually just call him Mean Cat.”

“Oh, boy, I love cats! I turn cats into dogs,” Norma Jeane said.

Norma Jeane carried a wooden cane and a black handbag, in which she kept her Bible, an empty pickle jar that she used as a wallet, a cracked cell phone with no battery, a magnifying glass, and an old bottle for Seroquel, an antipsychotic medication used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She said that the pills made her sleepy, so she’d stopped taking them long ago. She also has diabetes, but she couldn’t afford health insurance or treatment. “I haven’t taken insulin in three years,” she said.

Norma Jeane’s food arrived. It cost a little more than six dollars. Skinner paid with a twenty and put the change in Norma Jeane’s pickle jar. “I wish I could have a dill pickle, but I ain’t got my teeth on,” she said. “I love them Hot Mama pickles, sour pickles . . .” She trailed off.

“Where are you gonna spend tonight?” Skinner asked.

“I could go--what time is it?”

“It’s two-forty-one in the morning.”

“I’m trying to think,” she said. “I got to go where it’s clean. You know someplace I can go?” As a warm city in the Deep South, Savannah attracts many homeless people, but its overcrowded shelters had locked their doors around dusk. “I need to go to a Waffle House,” she concluded. “It’s open twenty-four hours. I’ll go in there and play the jukebox.”

Skinner notified the precinct of the plan, and pulled into the Waffle House parking lot, on Abercorn Street. Norma Jeane walked over to a booth in the corner. Then she took off her Santa hat and started messing up her hair, pulling strands so that they’d stick out in all directions. “This way, everybody gonna think I’m crazy,” she said. “No one gonna come up to me, this way. No one gonna hurt me.”

Back in the car, Skinner explained that part of his motivation in helping Norma Jeane was to prevent an emergency call, three hours later, of a homeless woman freezing to death. “Think of all that went wrong in this country for Norma Jeane to be sitting in the car with us,” he said. Although schizophrenia affects a little more than one per cent of Americans, it’s a factor in a high percentage of police calls. A few hours earlier, Skinner had checked on a schizophrenic man who calls the police multiple times each night, reporting paranoid hallucinations; the department can never ignore a call, because he is the legal owner of a .357 Magnum revolver, and officers told me that he once tried to execute an intruder in his front yard. At times, Skinner feels as if the role of a police officer were to pick up the pieces of “something that has broken in every single possible way.”

“A huge amount of what police actually do is support and service and problem-solving,” David M. Kennedy told me. “And part of what’s so inside out is that most of that activity is not recognized.” Police officers are increasingly filling the gaps of a broken state. “They do it essentially on their own, usually without adequate training and preparation, often without the skills they need, and overwhelmingly without the resources and institutional connections that it would take to do those things well.”

Twenty-seven hours after we left Norma Jeane at the Waffle House, another cop radioed in an E.M.S. call. A fifty-nine-year-old homeless woman, dressed in a Santa hat and a leopard-print jacket, was freezing to death.

In February, Skinner began a permanent beat, from 2:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Residents have begun to get used to him. In March, during a foot chase in Cuyler-Brownsville, two women--one of whom he’d put in handcuffs the previous week--started cheering for him from their porches. “Go, Skinner, go!” they shouted, laughing. He’d lost sight of the suspect by then, and asked if a young man had just run past. On a block where the police never get tips, the women helped him narrow the search.

One recent Saturday night, two drunk men sitting in a park waved Skinner over. One of the men was trying to console his friend Kenneth, whose girlfriend had kicked him out and taken away his car keys. Suddenly, Kenneth stood up and reached for Skinner, to embrace him. Skinner hugged back.

A few minutes later, Skinner described the scene to an officer-in-training. She was aghast. At the police academy, cops are trained how to position their bodies when interacting with members of the public--one shoulder forward, gun hip always out of reach.

“I know--I lost tactical advantage,” Skinner told her.

“Yeah!” the trainee said.

Skinner smiled. “I’m not looking for tactical,” he said. “I’m looking for strategic.”

#Patrick Skinner #Savannah GA #CIA to police officer

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