Thought: Is a stable personality a sign of strength or merely of being set in one's ways?

This is something that's been building for a long time. For months now, my meditations have told me that there was something... well, "wrong", despite how ineffective that term is as a communication. A lot of things have been catalysts -- the people who have been ascribing my behaviour in recent weeks to a single, albeit obvious cause sell me unfairly short. Only in the last couple of days has it truly become clear to me the depths of the thoughts I have been toying with, and at last, understanding begins to dawn.

I stand at the cusp of a new rebirth. At the moment, I do not think that it will be an utterly life-changing rebirth, but it is certainly a significant moment. By my best calculations, as of on-or-about March 28th, 2006, Eric Lis 4.1 is now offline. The next few days will see the rise of Eric 4.2. Or a complete systems crash... either way, it should be exciting.

It will be a few days yet before I'm prepared to discuss exactly what the final catalysts of this change have been or what changes people can expect to see in me as a result. Until I'm good and ready, anyone bugging me about it shall be thouroughly smited. In the meantime, though, there is a related thought that I can share with all of you who are out there reading this, and if you bothered to read the first line of today's Entry, you already know what it is.

In my life, I have been many things, but "mentally stable" has never been one of them. Most of the time, I'm pleasantly eccentric, crazy in good ways. Sadly, I do have times when I'm unstable in less pleasant ways, as does everyone else. Occasional depression in an individual is not unusual, noteworthy, or special -- only a tiny percentage of people go their entire lives without at least three or four periods of measurable depression, or even dissociation and psychosis. I've had all of those -- in the last month, in some cases -- but so has literally every friend I have with two, perhaps three exceptions, and I'm not so self-deluding to think that I have any right to say something like "you have no idea what I've been going through." I do, perhaps, have a somewhat unique perspective on mental instability. For example, despite a few self-injurious periods in childhood (which I dare-say most people don't even know I even went through, but what the hell), I have never actually wished to harm myself or end my own life in the last ten years or so. There have been plenty of other people I wanted to see dead, but never myself, and that does make me somewhat unusual as the mentally-unstable go. The other and related thing which makes me unusual is, of course, my ego... even so depressed as to be nearly-non-functional, I somehow still love being me. This is, of course, merely mental instability of a different flavour, but at least it's a more enjoyable sort.

I love who I am... or perhaps now, "who I have been" might be a better phrase. I cemented my identity in most respects before I turned 18, several years before most people do so, statistically, and have thus lived about six and a half years as who I am now with only fairly small changes. While I consider this to be a good thing pretty well unequivocally, one question which has dogged me for years is: if your personality goes unchanged for a long time, does that indicate strength of identity or merely stagnation? Psychological research suggests that most people undergo frequent and severe personality changes between birth and the age of about 25, and then by late-twenties-early-thirties an identity has been formed which will then remain static for at least thirty or forty years, barring brain damage or other extreme environmental insults. For most of these people, personality stability is probably healthy. On the other hand, if one's personality fails to change when it has to -- going from job to job, single to married, becoming a parent, retirement, coping with aging and disease -- then a failure to change is clearly stagnation. I'm obviously not at a stage of life where I'm dealing with those sorts of issues precisely (although I currently have classmates who are younger than me and married), but these issues can be just as meaningful at younger ages. After all, as unhealthy as it might be for one to retain the personality of an irresponsible bachelor after becoming married, it's merely socially frowned upon, whereas if a twenty year old still has the personality of a ten year old, they're hospitalized and heavily medicated. Appropriate personality is context specific, but it can't be solely based on chronological age either. As an agent of chaos, it seems natural to me that the answer would be that a stable personality is only good up until the moment when a change is in your best interest, and then stable becomes bad.

The trick, of course, being to spot the times when it's good to change, and perhaps even more importantly, then times when its bad.

I love being me. I've enjoyed being me, and despite the pain it's brought I enjoy life far more than pretty much anyone else I know. I love life to nearly pathological levels, and as has been observed elsewhere in this Journal, that's simply a statement of fact based on scientific measurement. That said, in classifying myself these last years as Eric 4.0 and then 4.1, there has been an implicit assumption that my personality has changed before and sooner or later I would change again. I've spent years waiting patiently for the first signs of an event in my life significant enough to destroy me, just as I stole the body and memories and crushed the life out of Eric 3.0 who came before me. It is my only self-destructive urge -- the desire to see myself wiped out by a superior iteration. Today... is not that day, not by a long-shot. I remain Eric Version 4. I keep this name proudly, and rightly so. But I am changing now, to a degree that I can feel it happening daily with the power that I feel the muses speak to me, the way I feel a character form in my imagination, the way the die leaves my hand at a critical moment of the game.

I am becoming something new. Within a few days, in a very real sense, I will be gone and the only Eric most of you out there have ever met will no longer exist in the way he did before. Mere language fails to capture the sensation.

       It's a funny thing about falling. After the first few seconds when your stomach feels like it's moved up into your feet and your eyes give up trying tof igure out why everything's gone all zippy, the wind starts whispering in your ear like the breath of a lover and the pull of gravity stops feeling dangerous and just starts to feel like you're wrapped up in a warm blanket. There's a second there, about two and a half seconds into the fall, when it just seems like the most natural thing in the world and you can hardly imagine why you'd want to be doing anything else. The fall feels comfortable, and secure, with the promise of comfort at the end.
       That's the part that always snaps me out of it. You look down at the ground and you *know* that it's not soft, comfortable, or loving. It's big and hard and the last thing that the wind whispers to you is going to be "hah, fooled another one." Of course, it helps if, in the first place, you're falling because you got pushed... that really helps snap ideas like "fall = bad" into focus.
       My arm snaps outwards pretty much of its own volition; I don't remember firing my grapnel, but I must've done so with some presence of mind because it catches a ledge on the first try. I'm already close to terminal velocity by this point, and as the rope takes my weight I feel something tear in my shoulder -- my trapezius, probably -- and then the wind is knocked out of me as centripetal motion introduces me to its friend, Mister Wall.
       I hang on for a few seconds, face against the rough stone, forty or so stories above street level, hanging from a matte-black bungee cord which I'm pretty sure has latched onto the nostril of a gargoyle twenty feet above me. When the pain in my shoulder gets to be annoying, I reach up to steady myself with my other hand, luckily finding easy hand and footholds. The grapnel detaches and retracts into its housing and I test my shoulder experimentally; muscle feels torn, but the steel tendons have held once again and I can already feel the nanos swarming the area and reknitting muscle and collagen fibres as the control gate at the base of my skull filters out any distracting levels of pain. I take another moment to catch my breath and wipe off the spot of blood my nose has rudely left on the wall, then start to climb again.
       What can I say? It's a living.
       I'm more careful as I climb this time. It was the breeze that knocked me off the wall a few seconds before -- you get tricky crosswinds this high up -- which was good. The last time I'd been knocked off a building, it'd been a person who did it, and it's a lot harder to sneak inside when they've got alarms blaring. I'm annoyed that I have to reclimb a good six floors, but that's what god gave us servo-enhanced joints and finger spikes for. Anyway, I know from experience that my repaired shoulder will be stiff if I don't give it a light workout while the nanos do their work. I hum a little climbing music to myself -- a catchy little tune I like to call "I hate my job" -- and I've passed the spot where I lost my grip before I even finish the second verse.
       Say what you will for climbing and urban sprawl, but the view from sixty stories up in the heart of the city really is spectacular. The buildings spread out beneath me like a curtain of light, like steamrolled angels. They shine out of the darkness (my job doesn't call for me to climb many buildings during daylight hours, as you might imagine) and there are few man-made sights that are quite as lovely. Now isn't the time to enjoy the view, though, as I still have another hundred feet or so to climb before I get to the seventy-fourth floor and my objective. The winds stop being so rough when I pass the rooftop of the building opposite me, and the last fifty feet of the climb pass in a few seconds as I lope upwards. I'm not shocked to find that the window I need to enter through is armoured glass; this high up, even when they aren't trying to ensure nobody can break into their office, most people will armour their windows just to make sure they don't have an accident when a client leans against one. Bad for business, bad for publicity, and damn it, windows are expensive.
       Of course, a little armoured glass isn't any trouble for the fusion cutter in my finger. Be prepared, slogan of the boyscounts and the black-ops boys both. Hey, now there's a connection that never occured to me before... The government has to recruit their mibs somewhere, after all...
       The window safely out of the way, I give the room a quick once-over though a half-dozen lenses. Infrared shows heat traces on the floor, but nothing too recent and electromag shows me where the alarm hookups are -- none near the window, which was just sloppy. Conventional vision shows me only that the office is tasteless; I turn off my cones, which won't be much use in the dark anyway, and let my rods spare me the sight of the couch which I know, even in black and white, would be pastels if I looked at it in the light. This doesn't spare me having to look at the cheap copy of the Rembrandt hanging on the wall, but I try not to pay attention to it. You learn to accept a certain amount of suffering in this sort of work. A quick search of the office shows me that what I'm looking for isn't in the desk or hidden elsehwere in the room. I hadn't expected it to be, and I'd just used this window because it'd looked like the least secure, so no harm and no foul. A few quiet steps bring me to the door, where I snip the alarm -- sloppy again, the wires clearly visible -- and, listening for anybody outside, open it as far as I have to and slip through.
       Lights are on in the hall; light-amplification filters click off before I even have time to register that it's too bright, and colour bleeds back into the world as my cones came back on. I can hear faint snoring from one direction -- rent-a-cop -- and soft footsteps from the other -- real security. I slip down the left branch and take care of Sleeping Beauty first. Nothing permanent, mind you, but a little sedative mist makes sure he won't wake up if Ugly Wakey and I make a little noise. I move a nice, heavy chair to block the office door while I'm there, just in case. Then, back into the hallway and down the other path, where the target would be.
       I ignore the dozen or so offices between me and the end of the hall. None of them ought to contain anything important, I'm pretty sure. The last door, straight ahead of me and leading into what *has* to be a corner office reads simply "CEO", and no name, not surpsing given how often indictments necessitate changes in upper management in a company like this. I put my head up against the wood grain and audioenhancers pick out the sound of a single person inside moving back and forth quickly. When I'm pretty sure there's just the one person moving in the room, I push open the door and walk in openly like I own the place.
       Which is actually pretty dumb of me, to be honest. It never even occured to me it might actually be Mister CEO in there himself at this hour and not a second security guard. The moving-back-and-forth noise should've tipped me off that it was someone small and nervous inside, and that would've saved me the annoyance of being shot four times in the chest before I've even cleared the door frame. Light calibre, solid-core slugs hit me in the chest and send me back out into the hall and onto my back painfully. Powered armour and foam/kevlar packing mean that there's not much chance of a conventional bullet actually reaching my skin, but the impact still hurts like a swing from a baseball bat and it's damned embarassing to get shot off your feet like that. I hit the ground with a thump, palm-slapping to absorb the impact and making sure the back of my head doesn't hit the ground too hard. Then I just lie there and don't move, figuring that the gunman's going to be nervous enough to come close and check if he's done me in.
       Finally, I've called one right. I don't even have to close my eyes thanks to my mask, and I watch as he actually pockets the gun before slowly walking towards me. He's either cautious or cowardly, because it must take him at least twenty seconds to cross the fifteen feet between us while I stay perfectly still and wait for him to get close. When he's close enough for me to smell his cologne -- which I wish I hadn't -- I brace myself on the floor with my hands and give him a solid Boot To The Head. There's the satisfying sound of armour on bone and Mister CEO hits the floor like two-hundred pounds of roast beef, groaning. I take the opportunity to divorce him of his gun, his cell phone, and his emergency call button before I drag him into his office, sit him in his overstuffed chair, and tie him into it, just to be safe. I consider interrogating him, but the mess on his desk speaks for itself, and anyway, I hate waiting for them to wake up.
       The desk, though... that tells the story nicely. Travel brochures for Caymus Primaris, a ticket for a luxury liner -- the genescrape wasn't even taking his mistress with him -- about forty million credits, a suitcase full of red powder that I can only assume is the drugs I was sent to get proof of, and a plasma grenade big enough to burn out this whole floor of the building and maybe bring down the ten floors above it. I snap a few pictures of the whole mess along with Mister CEO ("get some photographic evidence, it'll last longer"), and then I slip the suitcase and powder into my carrypack, disable the grenade, and pocket a few thousand in credits for myself (I'm allowed; it's in my contract). I leave him his ticket, for all the good it'd do him now.
       At this point, loud thumping from the foyer tells me that the sound of gunfire has brought other guards running. I leg it back to the office I'd come in from just as they get the main door open with a crash, and cross the room to the window just in time for the first guard to reach the door and see me getting away. I could probably take them, but I'm not getting paid for it tonight and I need to get the drugs back intact for evidence, so I get ready to jump. Then I'm was outside, my vision filled with stars, and falling -- the bastard shot me in the back of the head before I even had the chance to jump.
       Secondary proprioceptive systems activate and, with a sense of deja-vu to go with my headache, I fire off my grapnel to catch my fall. Something tears in my arm -- my trapezius again, naturally -- but at least I meet the wall with my feet instead of my face this time.
       To the happy sound of impotent yelling from the open window above me, I begin the long climb down to the twentieth floor and my evac chute.

Warning: Free-association follows. Reader discretion is advised. Also, reader intelligence, and possibly a decoder ring for the really wordy sentences. And tea, the reader is defintely advised to have a cup of tea. The reader is lastly advised not to attempt writing disclaimers while on the cusp of the fifty-seventh hour without sleep.

I have secrets.

This isn't a very profound statement on the surface. Everybody has secrets, because most people don't have it in them to self-disclose utterly. It's a noteworthy statement from me, though, because in spite of (or possibly, because of) my deceiver nature, I make an effort to have as few secrets as possible, and for a period of about eight months ending only recently, I had no secrets whatsoever.

Let me take a moment to clarify what I mean by secrets. Over this time period, I did not blab out every personal thing I have ever been told. For one thing, that would take too long, and for another, I remember only a fraction of what you people ever tell me. What I mean is that I had no secrets of my own; there was nothing in my head which I would not have willingly shared with at least one person and the only things that did not get shared (a very small list of facts which were generally uninteresting anyway) remained hidden only because they never came up in coversation. I made an effort to share anything personal which I had held hidden. When I say secrets, I mean things that only I in the entire world know. Understandably, such thoughts are usually emotionally-loaded and rarely pleasant, but that's the nature of the things we keep inside us.

Out of everyone I know, I have two real confidants. By confidants, I mean people who 1) I feel that I can tell anything to, 2) who I trust not to misuse the information, and 3) who I actually have the opportunity to speak to regularly. There are a number of people in the world who I would trust implicitly, but except for two of them, they tend to be either inaccessible, not spoken to regularly, or even just someone with whom the relationship dynamic has never evolved into a very disclosing type. I have several friends who I genuinely care for, but there are only two who I truly talk to, and perhaps one other who I have held as a confidant in the past and still do share my thoughts with but just don't see often enough for them to be a true confidant. It's my nature to share information; I'm fully capable of keeping the secrets of others, but when I have secrets of my own, I tend to share them sooner or later, not because I'm careless with information but because I'm a big believer in the power and value of being open with others, even while lying to them through one's teeth.

It also occurs to me that after the events of the last few weeks, the number of real confidants I have has probably dropped to one, for which I blame the Universe rather than any one (or two) individuals. It's certainly not an issue of a lack of trust, but, well, the Universe sucks.

What all of that has to do with secrets is fairly simple. For months now, I'd been quite proud of myself because, as near as I could tell, I no longer had any real secrets. Oh, certainly there are plenty of facts and details that I would never tell most people, but for about eight months I had no secrets that had been told to no one. Between the two people in the world that I really talk to and self-disclosures I made an effort to make even to less trusted people, I no longer had one single deep dark secret which I had never told anyone. To one person or another, I made a point of telling everything from my oldest memories to my darkest sins, my hopes and my fears, the most unique and unusual aspects of my physiology and the little eccentricities and mental instabilities that even I, proud as I am of most of my psychological imbalances, tell almost no one about. In some few cases, people never even realized the depth or significance of what was being shared with them, but generally it was an open and acknowledged effort on my part that I was sharing my secrets. The whole purpose of the exercise was to tell everything I could to people; I'm a liar and a weasel, but I'm also obsessive about self-understanding, and so trying to live without a single secret that had not been shared with at least one other person was an enticing experiment and, in the end, a very valuable thing for me to do. Interestingly, for all the knowledge I'd saved up over the years, it took me only a few weeks to unburden myself entirely of all the secrets I'd accumulated, and for months that followed I obtained no new secrets without sharing them with at least one person.

That's over now. I've had secrets again for about two weeks and, despite numerous opportunities and trusted individuals, I haven't shared them. I still like the idea of being utterly self-disclosing, but there are thoughts which, ironically, the people I trust most would be among the last I would tell. This is a feeling I'm sure most people are already well aquainted with, and even I've felt that way in the past; this is a noteworthy feeling only because it comes at the end of a period of having no secrets at all. You can lift a ten pound weight easily after holding and putting down a twenty pound weight, but lifting five pounds always feels heavier if you haven't carried anything for a while.

It's always been very interesting to me how we decide who we can and cannot tell things to. In my second year at John Abbott, people began telling me deep, personal things. People who barely knew me and had no reason to trust me began to open up to me and share their most personal thoughts with me. I had no clue why and still don't understand it, but in the years since I've been told twenty or thirty times that I'm an excellent listener and (despite everything that people would no doubt begin to think if they knew me better) I seem to be trustworthy. This will be an excellent skill to have if I end up in psychiatry, but I doubt I'll ever understand it. I find this particularly ironic since I have such a hard time deciding who I can trust myself, utterly lacking as I am in interpersonal accumen. Because I have a hard time reading people, it can take me upwards of four or five years of constant association with someone before I persuade myself that they genuinely like me and they aren't just being nice for ulterior motives, and if anything, that problem has only gotten worse in the last year. Psychological assesments have always measured me as being just barely sub-clinical on scales of paranoia, and the margin by which I'm below the label of "personality disorder" has shrunk every time I've been tested. Despite the continual growth and improvement of my social circle in the last six years, I trust fewer and fewer people in that circle every year. As we near the April/May period which is traditionally the happiest two months of my year, the number of people I will feel comfortable sharing that time with approaches a record low.

This is exactly why I made a point of sharing every secret I had with those I do associate with. I've always had this curious problem of being able to *know* one thing but *believe* the exact opposite, and sharing my secrets with those around me did, for a long time, help me trust them and accept that they trust me. Sadly, that's all gone to hell now, and outside of six or seven people I find that I trust those around me less nowadays than I have in a long time. And so, I've got secrets again. It's a mixed blessing.

Of course, it goes without saying that those of you reading this Journal are among my most trusted confidants and closest friends, in addition to being unusually intelligent, wise, clever, and nifty people one and all. Would I lie?

In any given society, there is a distinction made between "high" culture and "low" culture. In ancient times, low culture was the sort which pandered to the emotions of the audience rather than giving them the blood and barbarism they wanted. At the dawn of civilization, high culture was the persuasive and the evocative, while low culture was anything that could be appreciated without studying it. In modern culture, we find ourselves somewhere in a curious mixture between the two. We glorify barbarism and shameless emotional manipulation if and only if it fits arbitrary conditions of being artistic. In particular, old tends to be accepted by the cultural elite as being synonymous with good, while new ways of telling the same stories, often without the dishonest veneer, is scorned as crass, vulgar, and worst of all, new.

The only significant distinction between opera and MTV is the age of the art form and the price of admission.

I defer in this matter to authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (which is a bad habit, but one which is extremely hard to break), who argue through the medium of their character of Pendergast that "Opera was the television of the nineteenth century: loud, vulgar and garish with plots that could only be called infantile." They further argue that opera is little more than music accompanied by sets, costumes, melodrama, sex and violence. Unlike the character in question, I don't particularly see any of this as negative (although I've never enjoyed an opera by anyone other than Mozart). However, I do think it's a shame that people who put out thousands of dollars for a single evening of the opera will deride those who will spend an hour of their lives watching reality television for free. Particularly when, on top of everything else, the people who go to the opera are paying to watch reruns of episodes they've already seen. At best, it's hypocrisy. At worst, this is institutionalized elitism with a dash of inferiority complex for flavour.

I dislike opera. I find it loud, tasteless, and generally annoying. I also dislike most modern television, particularly those works which are most thematically similar to opera. If i enjoyed one or the other, I would probably not see much similarity between the two; only from the outisde, looking in with equal contempt for both art forms, can I objectively suggest that they are more similar than the rabid fans of either side would have you believe.

Consider cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force in life, as it helps drive the indefatigable human capacity for rationalization. Cognitive dissonance helps you take facts which are inconsistent with your world view and allows you to change either 1) your perspective or 2) the facts to suit your needs. This is the force which is theorized to be at work in hazings and initiations; when you endure suffering to join a group, cognitive dissonance drives you to conclude that, if you suffered to join, it must be worth while. They torture you when you join the military because once you get past the boot camp stage, you'll have convinced yourself that being in the army must be *really* worth it. So too with opera. Individuals who attend the opera will usually pay a ridiculous amount of money for the priviledge; naturally, whether they enjoy the show or not, the human instinct is to look back after the fact and decide that it must have been a hell of a show.

Similarly, anybody who endures an hour of reality television will naturally look back upon that soul-sucking, life-wasting, torturous experience and decide they must have enjoyed it. Such is the power of rationalization.

What separates opera from equaly barbaric pastimes, then, is simply the institutionalization of it. It's very old, and it's all too easy to assume that a story or piece of music which comes down with us through centuries must be good, even when other much worse stories have been with us for as long or longer. The age of opera as an art form gives it an illusion of respectability, which allows it to charge more for the same show and thereby enhance the illusion of exclusivity and class. In contrast reality TV and other such biohazards have been with us for only a very short time, and are basically free if one doesn't count the time spent on commercials. This gives them the illusion of being widely available and, as such, low class. In truth, though, they're much the same thing, and in and of themselves probably worth about the same level of respect.

As opposed to, for example, comic books.

I don't actually have any heroes. No, for once I'm not talking about identities and avatars... I mean that there's nobody in the world who I would think of as someone that I idolize, want to be, or pattern myself after. There's nobody in the world who I'd pay tremendous amounts just to meet and no person whose accomplishments drive me to match and exceed them. There used to be, but I seem to have misplaced them.

I have an unusually clear memory of a conversation I had with a cousin of mine many years ago. Sadly, I no longer have any clue how long ago this took place, but given how long ago she was in the relationship which sets the memory's context, it must have been somewhere between 6 and 8 years ago, certainly before the generation of Eric 4.0. Her boyfriend at the time was studying to become an astronomer, and had had the opportunity to a few days before to meet Stephen Hawking (or possibly Carl Sagan, or Niehls Bohr for all I recall or care). The boyfriend had related to my cousin that meeting this eminent scientist had been a defining moment of his life and that he had met his life's hero. I began to observe that I could understand, and that it was would be the equivalent of me meeting... and then i sort of trailed off, because I couldn't think of anyone who I would get that excited to meet. Nobody still alive, anyway.

In earlier stages of my life, of course, I've had several heroes. It would be reasonable to say that, in my youngest days, I idolized my brother, and the developmental effect which this had upon me should be quite obvious anybody who has met both of us. I didn't really think about such things for over a decade, largely due to a lack of interest, and the story resumes around grades 10 and 11 when I began to begin asking The Questions. Around the time that i finished high school, I has compiled a lengthy list of heroes for myself, including such worthies as Joshua Norton, Pierre Trudeau, Bill Gates, and Oscar Wilde. Interestingly, I selected these men *before* I began the dceiver I am today, which suggests that I was on the path of the sophist long before I began to do so conciously. I don't know when exactly these people stopped feeling like heroes to me, and I wish I could put a date (or even year) to when it happened. I went from feeling that these men -- these weasels -- were the people I admired and wanted to be just like, to feeling that they had many traits and eccentricities worth developing myself but not feeling that any one of them, in and of thesmelves, were really that special.

Nowadays, I will, from time to time, ponder who my heroes are and/or have been, and I keep coming up empty. There are men and women who I admire, but nobody who I really think of as a hero or an idol. There's no one I want to be except for myself and variations thereof, which actually depresses me a little bit for some reason. I feel as though there should be people I pattern myself after more explicitly -- fictional characters, at least -- but hours of meditation continually fail to reveal them to me. It's entirely possible that I'm simply unconcious of the current influences in my life, but I like to imagine that this isn't the case. More likely, I've simply become sufficiently egocentric that while I'm fully capable of seeing that there are people superior to myself, I've lost the capacity to admit that I want to make vast changes to myself in emulation of them. And, of course, it's simply possible that I've evolved beyond the need to have heroes in my life; I can feel good enough simply being myself, without wanting to be anyone else but without losing the ability to pick and choose characteristics of others that I'd like to have.

The possibility occurs to me that I do still have heroes and idols, and that I've simply internalized them as the Avatars of my personality. This rings falsely to me, though. While I believe that each of the characters in question are personalities that exist within me, I don't actually *want* to be any of them, certainly not to the degree that most gamers I've observed have a character of two they would gleefully become mind, body and soul. In my case, each character again has traits (and powers) I'd want for myself, but none of them are the sort of creature I want to be, in their worlds or my own. I evolved beyond the capacity of any of my own creations being my idol, again, when I became as egocentric as I am today. By definition, these are all characters I have inside me, and they possess weaknesses and flaws they could never imagine. They are within me and thus they must be less than me... why on earth would I then want to be one of them? That's not to say that I wouldn't give nearly anything for the sort of power which they hold, but it does mean that I'd rather be a powerless me than a powerful them.

So who do you want to be today?

In the 41st millenium, the finest examples of humanity are the space marines. Genetically enhanced, armed and armoured in the finest technology available, and each and every one of them utterly devout to their cause and chapter, the space marines are an example of the heights which humanity can reach and the power it can bring to bear against its enemies. Honour, duty, power, and devotion... these are the traits which exemplify a space marine. Of course, ten thousand years is a long time, and given enough time, some of even the most devout, dedicated, and stable ideals tend to become a bit strange. Even amongst the proudest chapters of the space marines, some fall to madness, others fall to chaos, and others just become silly.

Imperium records no longer tell where the Crustulum Mortis chapter came from. They did not have their own primarch, to be certain, and so must be a sucessor chapter to some other group of marines, but their origin is unclear and will likely never be recovered. There are only a handful of Crustulum Mortis still active in the Imperium, and even other marine chapters have often not heard of the Crustulum Mortis' existence. The chapter cruises the spaceways and the Immaterium at the very fringes of the Imperium abroad their mobile fortress/strike cruiser, the Clibanus Di Perditio, searching out the enemies of Humanity and guarding the Imperium's borders. They are forgotten and alone, but they are still space marines, and their devotion to the Emperor is faultless. Many are the would-be invaders who the citizens of the Imperium never even hear of, simply because they are wiped out when they crash upon the defenses of the Crustulum Mortis.

According to legend, the chapter holds one priciple sacred above all others: the power of putting things inside other things. All things in the universe, they argue, are one thing inside another thing, and most commonly, a soft thing inside a hard thing. A human, the librarians of the Crustulum Mortis say, is a soft soul inside a hard body. A space marine, they say, is a soft human body inside hard powered ceramite armour. A bolt is an explosive in a steel case, and a bolt gun is simply a rack of bolts inside a launcher. Even the Emperor himself, the divine god-ruler of humanity, is an inconceivable psychic power and divinity inside a frail body which is itself encased, quite naturally, in the Golden Throne. The only things which are not one thing inside of another thing are blasphemous warp things, such as daemons, who are composed solely of warpstuff and so have nothing inside them; which illustrates their utter wrongness and why they must be destroyed.

Up until this point, the chapters beliefs are reasonable, though unusual, and do not separate them greatly from many other chapters of marines, many of whom, for example, venerate the armoured shell they wear. What separates the Crustulum Mortis from their battle-brothers in other chapters is instead the symbol they choose as the utmost example of one-soft-thing-inside-one-hard-thing-ness, and thus the Crustulum Mortis, the Pies of Death, wander the galaxy far away from all other marine chapters.

If any living human knows the origins of the Crustulum Mortis, it would be the chapter master, Lord Pyrus Malus Ferrus, and he chooses not to share the story. Known to be at least four hundred years old and rumoured to have lived through the Horus Heresy itself, this ancient space marine wears power armour so old that its design and mark is unrecognizable. Resembling something akin to a cross between a terminator and a techmarine, the armour bears the scars of countless battles and bears mute testament, not only to the power of a soft thing inside a hard thing, but also to the righteousness of one who pulls the two hundred or so hard things out of one soft thing and then sets the remains aflame. Pyrus Malus Ferrus rules the chapter with strict adherence to the codex astartes which would make an ultramarine proud save only for the mealtime rituals; where other space marine chapters subsist primarily on nutrient gruel to keep themselves in prime physical form, Pyrus Malus Ferrus actively encourages a moderate amount of fresh fruit be eaten with each meal. Ostensibly, this is to remind the battle-brothers of the Emperor's bounty and the purity of life untouched by the ruinous powers; in actual fact, Pyrus Malus Ferrus simply enjoys grapes. Questionable though the chapter master may be in some respects, he none-the-less commands the absolute dedication of all of his marines, and has never hesitated to take the battlefield personally in the face of an enemy which normal marines would have no hope of defeating. Against seemingly invulnerable foes, be they demon, xeno, or witch, Pyrus Malus Ferrus is a wonder to behold as he wades into the thick of battle with a power weapon in one hand and a plasma cannon in the other.

Second only to the chapter master himself in the chapter's chief librarian, known only as "The Baker" (and sometimes "Tom," although no one knows why). A giant even by space marine standards, the Baker towers over his battle brothers by a full head and radiates psychic power. Six feet of purity seals wrap around the Baker's neck like a scarf. The Baker is more augmetic than human after centuries of warfare and the weight of years and the cost of channeling the warp has reduced the Baker to a shadow of his former mighty self in all ways but sheer height. The Baker has not faced an enemy in battle as a warrior in decades, but does not hesitate to take to the field to use his fading powers in support of his battle brothers, even knowing that each time he touches the warp could be his last. In the quiet time sbetween battles, though, the Baker's primary task is that of teacher, educating newly recruited warriors, young marines, and even veteran warriors in the art of battle, the teachings of the Emperor, the secrets of the codex and the words of the primarchs. The Baker's role is to take the marines of the chapter and shape them into the greatest marines they can be, and knowledge, the aged librarian teaches, is one of the most important things for a marine to have inside him.

Years of wandering the galaxy have inevitably taken their toll upon the chapter. Once they were no doubt a full and powerful force, but in the forty-first millenium, only a few hundred marines remain, and precious gene-seeds are lost in every combat. Soon, perhaps in a mere five or six hundred years, there will no longer be enough marines of the Crustulum Mortis to make up a full company, and not long after, there will be too few of them to make a full battleforce. After this, it will be only a matter of time before they are reduced to a unit, a squad, a kill-team, and then none of the Crustulum Mortis will remain. Perhaps before this happens, they shall return to Imperial space and rejoin the other marine chapters, replace their lost gene-seeds, and receive the recognition they deserve for their battles. Until that day, though, the fringes of human space have no lack of foes to fight, for, after all, in the grim dark future, there is only war. War, and the occasional celebratory pie atop a pile of bolt-riddled xeno corpses.

Eric's Note: Gimmel is an interesting case, as my characters go. We've all played characters who got away from us, characters who clearly want to develop along lines we didn't expect, and no matter what we do with them or what choices they make they seem to keep gravitating back to cxertain behaviours and traits we didn't see coming. it's a very surreal experience, because on the one hand you know that you're controlling a character, but on the other hand, time and again, they just end up doing what you didn't think you'd made them do. This was the feeling I had with Gimmel, who despite my every effort over months of gameplay simply kept doing things I didn't realise I was doing, and by the end of the campaign it really felt as though he was out of control and that I as the player was only attending the game as a formality. Ironically, it was that exact feeling of discomfort and incomprehension which ended up being at the core of Gimmel himself, who eventually adopted so many false identities that I could feel that he was starting to go mad in game when the campaign ended. It's just as well the game ended when it did, because I really didn't know how much longer I'd be able to keep playing a character who refused to do what I was trying to make him do. His eventual death didn't happen in game, but as I left the last session, i just knew, beyond doubt, that this is what would eventually happen to him... he's probably the only character I've ever played for whom I didn't have to pause and wonder how his life would end.

I'm sure a psychoanalyst would have a field day with this.

Gimmel wasn't actually one of the characters who got space during A Certain Point of View Month, but I thought that once I was writing character portraits I may as well give him his alloted column inches at long last.

So anyway...

Athas is not a world conducive to happy, healthy, caring people. The endless sands which stretch beneath the dark sun breed civilizations where water is worth more than life and where survival, by any and all means necessary, is paramount. Few and far between are the people who would sacrifice their own well-being to aid another, and in the great merchant houses, such people are even less common.

Some are born with muscles atop their muscles; Gimmel Quikctongue of the merchant house of Va'av was born with skin on his fat. A small, chubby, and lethargic child, Gimmel shied away from the physical activities favoured by other youths and gravitated quite happily towards the more cerebral arts of his house. From an early age, he was called Quicktongue, because he had a gift for persuasion and fast talking that rivaled many of the finest merchants in the house. In early childhood, he was buying and selling between the other children to obscene profit. In late childhood, he was taking the gold of other youths in a series of betting rings on the gladitorials contests. By adolescence, he was taking the early profits of his competitors in sales and scams both legitimate and malicious. By the time that he was inducted into the merchant class officially upon his eighteenth birthday, he had already amassed a modest but respectable "fortune" far in excess of his age and status. All signs predicted that his career in the merchants districts would be rich and profitable.

Gimmel's greatest enemy, though, was ever himself. Far more than the profit, he enjoyed the game and contest of merchantry, and would stopp to cheating to sela a deal long before it became a necessary step. With others of his age, his tricks were innovative and cunning and made him sucessful, but once he was dealing with older and experienced merchants, he was little more than a talented amateur. The first time he was caught trying to cheat a customer, he was reproved by his house. The second time he was caught, he was threatened with explusion from the guild of merchants. The third time he was caught, he might have faced a stern but light sentence save only that his victim had been a high-ranking clerk in service of the dragon-king. Instead of displeased merchants setting his sentence, it was a wrathful defiler.

For all his other faults, of course, Gimmel was no fool. By the time the guards came for Gimmel and knocked on his door, he was through his window, two blocks away, and still accelerating.

Gimmel had never been much for physical activity, however, and the guards caught him without breaking a sweat. Beaten severely, he was brought before the defilers and sentenced to the salt mines in the desert, effectively a death sentence. His pleas fell on deaf ears and his previous offenses made his house unable to intercede on his behalf... Gimmel Quicktongue was dragged away to die.

Againats all logic, though, Gimmel thrived in the desert. The hard work beat him into shape quickly, and he was wily enough to obtain the rations of other prisoners to preserve his own life. Where stronger men strained and died, Gimmel exercised for the first time in his life and turned himself into a strong, wiry worker. He resolved that he would not die in the sands, and began to scehme how he might escape. He befriended another prisoner, a mighty Thri-Kreen, and together, when a great sandstorm fell upon the mining camp, they made their escape.

What followed was a tumultuous journey through the lands. Seeking shelter from the desert, the two stumbled upon a druid, and stayed with him for a short time, and when evil clerics, worshipers of the forces of fire, came to kill the druid, they were forced to fight alongside him in their own defense. Thus did Gimmel make an enemy of the cult, who persued him for some time. They hunted him when he crossed the desert to find the clerics of water, the cult's enemies... they hunted him when he fled into the jungles, where the dedaly halflings held sway... they hunted him even into the cities, risking the wrath of a dragon-king in their pursuit of him. Unable to use his own name, Gimmel was forced to use a variety of pseudonymns in his travels, and over several months came to be more comfortable using those identities than his own.

In truth, Gimmel had never had the constitution or mental fortitude for adventuring; the constant danger, the loss of companions to enemy blades, the near deaths by hedydration beneath the burning sun, and the need to constantly change his identity eventually took a severe toll on the mind of Gimmel Quicktongue. When he and the Thri-Kreen parted ways, even Gimmel was no longer sure who he was, and he went into the cities. Becoming increasingly unstable and unable to differentiate between himself and his aliases, Gimmel left a string of false records and, later, bodies through the cities. Cunning enough to stay steps ahead of temporal authorities and angry mobs, Gimmel could not long evade the watch of the dragon-kings and their defilers, and he was tracked magically. In one of the major cities, Gimmel worked a complex confidence game, taking tens of thousands of gold from a neighbourhood, and the defilers interferede, revealing his plans. Unable to flee and lacking the mental faculties escape, Gimmel was caught by the mob and, in finest frontier justice, torn apart.

The Kingdom of Varotia is a rich land with many cultures, peoples, and faiths. Amongst these faiths are counted the churches of the True Demigods, mortals who have ascended to godhood; the gods common gods, those divinities worshiped far and wide and which hold the greatest influence upon worldly events; and the lesser gods, those gods with smaller followings and smaller congregations, or simply those gods who do not seek temporal power in the mortal world. One of these faiths -- a lesser known one in Varotia, but a church whose hand stretches far across the land none-the-less -- is the church of Yohan. Yohan is a strange god, a god of joy and whimsy but also capable of harsh anger and destruction when aroused. Primarily a god of music, poetry, and creation, Yohan's church teaches that for music and laughter to exist it is implicit that those forces which oppose such things must be crushed, utterly and without mercy. The Hunters of Yohan are a strange league, dedicated to this teaching... poets and artists, they are trained primarily to heal the sick but also to go forth and destroy evil wherever it may lie, particularly the undead who they are taught are the very antithesis of life and music. Cantrel Foolsbane was one of these hunters... a curious man for a curious god, a man who should have become a follower of any god but Yohan but who served Yohan's good as no cleric ever had before.

For centuries, the estates of House Cantrel and the city around them had been a city-state unto themselves. The lords Cantrel had ruled wisely and justly for generations; devout worshipers of Yohan each and every one of them, they relied extensively upon the clerics whose temple sat at the center of their city. The wisdom and goodness of the clerics had never driven them upon an unwise path, and the lands flourished. The name of Cantrel was blessed by the people and the church, and one child of that line in each generation would go into the church and become one of the clerics who helped guide the land. As their sons and daughters had been great leaders for generations, so too had they produced some of the finest clerics, champions of goodness, masterful healers of the sick of poets who could bring a tear to stone. House Cantrel itself was a house of generous nobles, who took in many a weary traveler and brought aid and comfort to the cold and hungry.

One night, for their kindness, they were repaid in blood. A passing stranger who they invited into their home was, beneath his rags, a vampire as cruel as any of his kind who walked the land. Evil and capricious, the vampire toyed with the Cantrels, torturing and draining them. Only the youngest of the line, Roland, was spared; away for the night that the traveler was invited in, he returned home with the next sunrise only after the others were slain. Arriving to find the vampire asleep, bloated, and content amidst the blood and corpses of his family, Roland hurried to the mantlepiece where his father's ancestral weapon rested. A magical testubo which had been passed down from lord to lord, its enchantments had slain many a beast, and the vampire's tough skin was no match for it; Roland battered the creature to pulp, and battered the pulp until it was ash, and scattered the ashes. When the clerics of Yohan came to deal with the dead, they took young Roland to live with them. Another of the Cantrel line would come to rule the land, and Roland would be the one of that line to join their ranks in that generation. With him, Roland took the tetsubo which was his by right, and went to become a servant of the gods.

But Roland's heart had been hardened. Yohan's clerics were joyous in their prayers, chaotic and artistic, but Roland was cold, and methodical, and had no tolerance for whimsy. His aptitude for philosophy and magic were unparalleled, and so he became a full priest in mere months, and his talent with the lute and harp exceeded that of most of his teachers, but he was a cold man, supremely unsuited to serve the god into whose service he had been sworn. Impatient with petitioners, Roland was sent to teach other young neophytes. Here, though, Roland was an even greater disaster. He could teach the teachings of Yohan as few others and no other teacher taught their pupils so quickly, but he had no patience for wrong answers, and would show his displeasure with a mighty bellow of "you're WRONG!" and a swift strike with his testubo. In a few months, the testubo had been named Educator by the students, and the name pleased Roland. At the same time, his students gave him a new name, Foolsbane, and this too pleased Roland. Unsuited to serve people and too cruel to teach the neophytes, there was a third branch of the church of Yohan, and Roland was invited to consider it as his path. Roland became a hunter.

Roland's training was threefold. First, he was taught magic. All clerics of Yohan had the healing magic, but the hunters learned combat spells as well, and with his great aptitude for the craft, Roland was himself taught even more advanced and devastating magic, normally the purview of mages. He could heal the sick with a touch, but so too could he rip knowledge from an enemy's mind and hurl fireballs into the heart of evil. Second, he was taught the bestiary. The hunters had unparalleled knowledge about the nature of monsters, and the hunters filled their minds with the habits and abilities of evil creatures. Roland devoured these texts and soon knew more about the enemies of good than they did. Thirdly, Roland learned the way of war. The tesubo was the holy weapon of Yohan, and so he studied Educator as the other hunters studied their own staves. Such was Educator's powerful magic that it parctically wielded itself, and Roland was soon the deadliest fighter of his class. Thus prepared, Roland took his hunters name. All hunters chose the name by which they would be known, having left behind their old lives in service to Yohan. Roland dropped his given name but kept the proud name of his family, and adopted as well the name his students had whispered in dark corners. Cantrel Foolsbane set forth from the training grounds to seek out evil, shed light into its dark corners, and beat it about the head with hevay objects.

Mere months into his travels, Cantrel passed through Varotia and met his destiny. He was led by a floating crystal into a church where he met a half dozen other adventurers, each of whom, they were told, had a destiny. The three worlds of the plane were in danger, the crystal told them. Their own world, known as Wyvern; an entire other world which existed upon the floating crystal the donut-shaped plane of Torus; and a third world, the equally-donut-shaped Red Torus which itself was on the other side of Wyvern, seeking evil men and women to help collapse the worlds. Reluctantly, Cantrel was drawn along. In his quest, Cantrel amassed great power. He aquired golden armour, able to turn aside the strongest blows. He found a mage who vastly enhanced Educator until it held the power of an artifact itself. He aquired even the power to become a great dragon, containing the power of a god within himself with which to battle the forces assembled by the Red Torus. Cantrel met many strange folk as well, in his journey across the worlds -- Laam Cheop, the master of Moosedirection; Lorthok, the semi-lierate Goblin sage; Pendal, the appropriately named Bard of Certain death, who plunged to his death from atop a mountain and might have lived had not sixty-four llamas fallen atop him; and the champions of the Red Torus, each of whom was a counter to a champion of the Blue Torus, among them the werebear cleric Tremalas who Cantrel slew with his bare hands. Years passed, violent years where the fate of the worlds was in the balance. When good triumphed, and the armies of evil had been crushed, Cantrel's companions set off for further adventure but Cantrel, disliking all of them, set off in the opposite direction.

For several more years Cantrel quested. He gathered around him a small group of young hunters and taught them the ways of the hunter while venturing about the land on the trail of monsters and undead. He burned the vampire-king of Blackspire; he crushed the lich of the Rising Tide; in single combat and with his first blow, he shattered the skull of the orc Warlord Thmurglok. Age began to catch up with Cantrel, however, as did the odds, as he persued ever deadlier prey. In battle with the Dreadbullywug, Blipopaghna, former champion of the Red Torus, Cantrel lost an arm and was near-mortally wounded. It was one of his students who lifted Educator from Cantrel's own severed hand and beat the Bullywug to death with it while another young hunter cast healing magics to save Cantrel's life. Magic could have restored Cantrel's arm and strength -- he could have cast the spells himself -- but he kept the wound and retired from adventuring, returning to his old church. Educator he left with the student who had lifted it and proven himself worthy to wield it, and Cantrel himself, mellowed by his years and experience and able now to speak to students without hitting them save for when they said something truly stupid, spent the last years of his life training others to go forth, to bring joy to the people, to bring healing to the sick, and above all, to bring fire and heavy objects onto the heads of the evil.

In his sixty-eighth year, Roland Cantrel Foolsbane passed on, his soul going to its honoured place at the side of Yohan, there to berate the stupid for all eternity.

Background: It is, without a doubt, a human world. The elves deny this and the dwarves contest this, and countless races work actively to change this, but for now, the humans rule the world through numbers, initiative, and power. This is indeed strange, for though they are clever and strong, it is a fallacy to believe that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, or even that they are the most evolved race alive now. There are other races, far older than humans, who are to humans what humans are to apes. Most of these races have long since retreated from the more populous areas of the world, either because their power waned, or lesser species threatened to destroy them, or simply because they like their privacy. Some races flee th Prime Material entirely and go off to distant planes, while others go to the hearts of volcanoes or the depths of oceans where weaker species cannot go. Still other races, who dislike such extreme measures and have yet to withdraw totally from the world of men, long ago moved far to the North, where the bitter winds kill all but the hardiest humans and where prey is too scarce to support large communities. Far to the North where fur means more than steel armour, the werebeasts make their nations.

Thewerebeasts are a fractitious people. Each and every one born with the instincts of the hunter, they are oathe to live together in large groups. Instead they form small communities, miniature city-states bordered by wooden pallisades made to keep out the snow more than any flesh-and-blood enemy. The werebeasts thrive in these bitter colds; they can endure temperatures far lower than most species, and when the depths of winter get too deep even for them, they grow skins of fur, or scales, or blubber, or simply hibernate and await the warmer days. Far to the North, they live a primitive existence, rejecting more advanced comforts by choice in favour of the simple, pure, animalistic life. Still, as with any people, some among the shapeshifters have the wanderlust in their eyes orthe hunger for higher-thinking flesh in their bellies, and so the leave home and go South, South into the human lands, and from there spread all across the world. Many of the werebeasts who travel the world do so easily, and live and die as adventurers, settle down to live, or return far Northand rest with mate and cub and den. The werebeasts have one great weakness, however, and this is their hunger... predators, they kill to live, and some, far too many, become addicted to the kill. They kill for pleasure and not for food. Worse, they attack but allow their prey to escape, such that their pure animal and beast nature is transfigured into an uncontrollable curse in those bitten or clawed. The werebeasts of the North call these addicts raveners and many of their people are trained specifically to hunt and kill their own kind, to stop the depredations of the raveners from disrupting the Great Feast.

One such hunter of hunters was Sebastian Pran-Dar, Son of Pranestius Het-Dar.

Among the werebeasts there are many bloodlines... it is said that for every animal which feeds upon flesh, there is a bloodline of werebeasts who may take its form. Though wolves and bears and tigers are the favourites of human bards, there are other bloodlines just as deadly. The totem of the Dar clan was the weasel, and its forms and skills were theirs. The Dar clan could take the form of a normal animal, mere inches long, or grow to their hybrid form, a tower of muscle and claws and fangs and fur seven feet high. In their most human forms, they had a brownish cast to their skin, with pale bellies and deep brown hair. Their green eyes shone faintly in the dark and their eyes had the slightest peak to their tips. The hunters of the Dar clan were brave and clever, and unrelenting of prey once they had set their jaws into it but once. The Dar clan was a proud clan among the werebeasts, and they raised their young as hunters.

Sebastian Pran-Dar was born to one of the werebeast nations, the city of Lycan, one of the oldest and proudest of their nations, which had stood since its founding by a wolf clan millenia before. Sebastian's father was one of the city's great hunters, and his mother a tinkerer and builder of devices. He was raised to appreciate both sides of his Pure nature: the animal ferocity and the humanoid mind. He was raised by his parents until he could crawl and hunt, and then, with the other young, went to the feet of the storytellers to learn the legends of his people. In his sixth year he entered the Shkawla Akhawtneek, where he studied the langages, sciences, and philosophies of his people and of the human world. Sebastian was taught the history of his people as it had been passed down... that in time before counting they had walked in one form as the humans do, but the endless milennia had seen them grow and develop into a greater species which combined the greatest strengths of human and animal, making them the true Pure People. Inspired by these teachings, Sebastian threw himself into the study of both sides of his nature, and within a few years had excellend both in his studies and in becoming one of the finest predators of Lycan. In reading about the outside world, however, Sebastian learned the wanderlust which often afflicted his people, and grew to love the stories of the great adventurers who roamed the Southern lands. He hungered to see the lands he had only read about, and go to the cities where the snows of his homefland were as foreign as desert sand was to him.

When the time came, it was natural to Sebastian that he should go out of the werebeast lands as a hunter of the Raveners. The Hunt called to him, but so too did the curious lure of gold and the strange ways of the other races.A year spent training to fight his own people blooded him and at last, not yet twenty winters of age, he left Lycan and went South.

Sebastian Pran-Dar journeyed. Driven on by tales of the adventurers he'd read about, he chose his direction randomly, following tales of quests and rumours of need. Caring little for the human rules of morality and more than willng to hutn and kill any prey, Sebastian became a bounty hunter and assassin. Following rumours of ravener activity from kingdom to kingdom, he took odd jobs hunting odd men, and quickly developed a reputation in the underworld for his occasionally brutal efficiency. After several years, his travels and reputation brought him into the employ of Virrar crysthalus, lord of the Telepaths, for whom he performed many jobs of dubious justice and was paid well for them. His work brought him into conflict with the dread golem, Ragon, against whose machinations Sebatian risked limb and sanity. And with the passing years, many deviant werebeasts fell to Sebastian's claws and fangs, their bloodlust no match for his own savage cunning.

As he grew to middle age, Sebastian grew tired of the life of collecting bounties. Decades in the human lands had taught him an appreciation for their way of seeing the world, and he grew to have distaste for the brutal methods he was forced to use. Slowly, with time, sebastian gravitated away from hunting for profit and towards hunting for good... the parasitic seed of heroism had taken root in his breast and taken him. Having little need for the gold he'd aquired, he began to quest, not for profit, but simply for adventure. Though he enjoyed hismelf immensely for years thusly, with time Sebastian felt his killer's instinct waning... after some forty years of travels, Sebastian traveled back North, stopping in the temperate lands far short of his home, and put his ill- and nobly-gotten gains to the purchase of an inn. Bringing some of his own people South to join him, Sebastian quitely retired from adventuring, and lived as a warm, satiated weasel should for the last years of his life.

On his tombstone, Sebastian's epitaph read: It is easy to be a hero when you're functionally indestructible.

Image and Equipment: Ageing only slowly due to his species' natural recuperative abilities, Sebastian spends most of his life in peak physical shape and with little change to his physical appearance. His favoured clothes are several black bodysuits brought with him from Lycan, enchanted to adapt to fit him whatever size he takes and resistant both to the tears and stains inevitable to a hunter. Over his years of adventuring, Sebastian adapts these suits in several ways, weaving lengths of garrotte wire into the cuffs where they could be pulled out and concealing lock-picking toos in the sleeves. A small belt-pouch carries the few essentialy Sebastian required while traveling, and anything else he requires he will typically hunt, scrounge, or craft himself. Sebastian presents an odd picture as he travels from town to town since he wears no armour and carries no obvious weapons; more than one of his roadside campfires has roasted the meat of people who sought to take advantage of this.

Sebastian's green eyes glow faintly in the dark, and have slitted pupils rather than round, marking him as obviously inhuman to anyone who looks closely. A long ponytail of brown hair, tied back with a leather thong, hangs down to just pas his neck. Whenever he finds himself standing with nothing else to do, sebastian will often begin flexing various muscles unconciously, giving an observer the strange impression that he is preparing to pounce on something and is simply trying to decide what. Sebastian grins practically all the time, but he rarely shows teeth, because his eye teeth end in sharp points and that sort of thing can put people on edge.

Roleplaying Notes: You are, first and foremost, a wereweasel. You can travel with humans and enjoy their company, but they are prey and you ae a hunter. You treat them with respect, in your own way, and any who earn your trust can expect you to fight by their side to the end. On the other hand, they're still only humans, and they have their place on the food chain. You dislike standing still... the animal in you wants to always be doing something, whether's its prowling or napping. That said,you're as much a civilized human as you are an animal, and you don't *have* to kill and eat everybody, especially if you aren't hungry. You can have friends, and you can enjoy a night carousing in the tavern as much or more than any human. The wilderness has its endless appeals, but so too does a warm hearth, a dozen mugs of fine mead and a a bard performing at a respecful distance away.

Even after forty years and more in human lands, you have yet to shake the last vestiges of your Northern accent and speech patterns, and you have a habit of ending sentences with the word "yes" for no apparent reason which has infuriated more than one companion. That's hardly your oddest or most infuriating habit, though.... at heart, you live for the hunt and for adventure, giving you something fo a swashbuckler's attitude to life and danger. This is only exacerbated by our werebeast nature; since standard weapons can't actually hurt you, you're all too happy to charge into the midst of a sword-wielding mob and let yourself be stabbed ten or fifteen times as you rip them apart with your claws. It's probably a good idea not to let traveling companions see that until they've gotten to know you, though.

Before I get on with today's Entry, theres a minor issue which I feel I ought to address here. As roughly half the people reading this already know, I broke up with my girlfriend (quite amicably) a little over two weeks ago after close to ten months. Several people have since asked me if, since I'd written a rather inflammatory post when the relationship started, I was going to write anything tying up loose ends, saying if the people who predicted that the relationship would be a bad one were right or wrong, and so forth. From this moment on, anybody who asks anything like that is going to get a smack in the head. As far as I'm concerned, all anybody not directly involved needs to know is that 1) it ended well and we're still friends and 2) I regret nothing. Beyond that, as I've been known to observe in the past, my thoughts are not for mere humans to know. Now really, anybody else who bugs me about this will suffer.

On to more important things.

Over the course of the last month, I had a lot of fun. For those who didn't figure it out, the past month's Entries were a thought experiment. The purpose was to see if I was capable of creating 10 entirely different viewpoints on good and evil, and furthermore, compose them in 10 distinct writing styles. Overall, I think the experiment was a sucess. Most importantly, I had fun doing it and it gave me a full month of content to churn out without having to think of a real topic. Secondary to that, I think I did a decent (though not great) job of giving each piece a distinct voice and outlook. It wasn't perfect, but it was only the first time I've ever tried somehting on this scale.

I've often wondered whether or not I truly play characters who are really different from each other. Not counting storyteller characters and NPCs, I've played characters from every D&D class except for monk, about half of the clans from V:tM, several types of superheroes, two professions in Paranoia... the list goes on. In that time, I've played most of the classic party roles, from a No Brain the Barbarian to a few Tim the Enchanters. Every type of character has certain perks to playing it and each can be fun in its own way. looking back, though, the characters who I remember well, and who i played in long term games, all tend to have a lot of things in common. Sure, I've played appropriately barbaric barbarians and even one mute Malkavian (he didn't know sign language and had to communicate exclusively through level 4 Auspex... I spent a lot of willpower in that game), the vast majority of my characters have one trait it common: glibness.

I can't play a stupid character for long. Literally, I can't. Dialogue comes too easily to me. I've tried my utmost, but at some point in the last eight years I lost the ability to just sit passively at a table and let other characters do all the talking, because I, out of character, can come up with clever things to say faster than most other players. I don't even try to build low-wis-low-int characters anymore... I can't play them according to what their stats dictate that they ought to be. To the best of my recollection, with only one exception, every character I've run as a player in any meaningful and longer-than-one-session game since my second year of CEGEP (call it about six years ago) was glib and, usually, deceptive. By my count, that's about 10 out of 11 characters I've played during that time. I didn't want to do things that way... it's just how things went. Every player has a few real-life personality traits that they have the hardest time exorcizing from their characters, and these two are mine. The only exception to this was a paladin I played in a short Ravenloft storyline... he was crafted that way because I knew I'd only have to play him for one or two sessions, and I had a miserable time playing him anyway. Even when I create a character and design him to be totally grounded, steady, normal, boring, average, quiet, and passive, as I did for a W:tA game a few years back, the character inevitably becomes talkative and more clever than he ought to be from the points I spent.

There is a certain argument to be made that characters have a tendency to take on lives of their own and go where they want to go, regardless of what their stats are, but for the most part I think I just have trouble keeping my mouth shut.

This is why I felt that the A Certain Point of View exercise was interesting. Most of the characters had very similar speech patterns... there's only so much you can do to differentiate characters in a few hundred words, especially if you can't swear. Looking back now, all ten of the characters did have a distinguishable writing style, albeit sometimes only in small ways. Whether it's placement of words, use of contractions, talking up to the reader or down and so on, lots of little things can differentiate the way two characters talk. Obviously, since I wrote these, I'm very sensitive to the personalities I was trying to bring forth with the words, so it's entirely possible that nobody besides me really sees much difference between them. I'd love to get some feedback on that, but i don't have high hopes for it. In my opinion, though, the experiment was, on that front a sucess... maybe not a huge success, as Cantrel, Neyrr, and Virrar all sound pretty similar, but a success none-the-less. It was, after all, my first time trying this, so presumably I'll get better at working with different voices with time.

In terms of the points of view, this was harder for me. It's relatively easy to give different speech patterns to characters -- since I was only using characters I'd really enjoyed playing, their different speech modes came naturally to me. Philosophy, on the other hand, is harder. I have a hard time coming up with logical arguments to support either good or evil that sound different from each other, so the heroes all tend to sound alike and the villains all tend to sound alike. This is exacerbated with characters like Ragon, who by all rights don't have very complex views of good and evil in the first place, and while I could certainly have posted an Entry that consisted entirely of twelve words (four of which would have been laughter), it wouldn't have made very good reading or very good space-filler. While a lot of the characters were saying basically the same thing about good and evil itself, I feel that it's the aspects of the question which they focus on which really separates them. At heart, Cantrel and the Spirit are both saying the same thing, that for good to vanquish evil some people have to give up their own peace and be warriors. On the other hand, for Cantrel, the issue is all about sacrifice and accepting your place in the war between good and evil, whereas for the Spirit it's entirely an issue of undoing past wrongs and choosing to use your talents for good. Similarly, Cantrel and Flynn both focus entirely on the battle of good verus sevil being ubiquitous and eternal and that everyone fights it in their own way, but Cantrel is a pillar of armoured order and Flynn is a manic, borderline psychotic pirate. It's possible for two characters to say the same thing without *sounding* the same, and that's the part which is exciting to write.

In books, one of the hardest things for an author to do is to make characters sounds different. The single most visible sign of a bad book is that if you pick it up and read a few snippets of dialogue, you can't really tell who is speaking... no characters have their own voice or thoughts, because the author isn't good enough to give them any. On the other hand, the truly great authors are the ones who can have dozens of major characters in a novel, and somehow, every single one sounds entirely different from the others, such that you can open the book to a random page and be able to tell who's speaking just from the sentence structure and the words chosen. The Star Wars novels are an excellent place to see this, and the 21-book New Jedi Order in particular. Here we see dozens of novels all focusing on essentially the exact same cast of characters, written by a large number of different authors. In some of those books, it's obvious that the author only cares about getting the story down on paper... every characters talks the same way, and when a character in print differs from their personality on screen, it's painfully obvious. On the other hand, when some of the authors write the series, you could practically be watching them on film. Luke Skywalker *sounds* like Luke Skywalker, and he's written perceptibly differently from anybody else. It's a rare gift when an author can do this... I've seen very few who can. In my opinion, some of the finest authors ever to live are men like Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and the tragically little-known Matthew Woodring Stover. The only meaningful thing that separates these men from other authors is that their characters are different from each other. Even William Goldman, who as most of you know is the author of my single favourite book of all time, didn't fully bring to life the characters of The Princess Bride the way Stover does in Blade of Tyshalle.

I don't bring characters to life like that either. But I'm working on it.

So, that's why I spent an entire month working on this project. It was, in my biased opinion, a month very well spent. And you haven't escaped from it yet, either, because while working on it I realised that I've got at least three characters who somehow never got the character portrait space that they deserved to get, so you can expect some of those in upcoming Entries. Bwa ha ha ha!

Sigh... you know you're in university when you've been trained to have more to say *about* your prose than *during* it...