Okensha

Update, March 30, 2005: I have an idea I don't know what to do with. Advice is appreciated. See below, in "What's the big idea?"

Intro babble

Hihi! I'm Okensha and I'm still fairly new to the wiki. It's pretty addictive. (I've almost been late to work twice now because of it!) It's also really helping my roommate's efforts towards getting me interested in Exalted, and maybe someday we'll drum up some players and have an actual game. Anyway, it's the NexusProject that has gotten me to actually contribute, since it's an understandable little format. I've never wikied before, so I needed to pick an entry point.

I intend to check BestPractices occasionally, to keep my mind aware of Wiki etiquette. If you see me doing something I shouldn't, feel free to point it out to me; just please be gentle, I'm new. Also, please don't be offended if I correct a typo or spelling mistake.. I'm just sort of compulsive that way, and I believe having the correct spelling makes reading go smoother. I'll try not to go wild.

As I understand more about Exalted, I hope to contribute more. I've been reading manga and superhero comics since before I pupated, and playing rpgs since long before that, so I suppose that will influence my take on the setting. I suspect that all these years of reading fantasy and science fiction novels, and playing various video games, will also influence me, and I'm tickled to have already spotted some very familiar fighting Charms on here. ;) I'm also interested in history from many places and periods, but Bronze Age stuff and hero-tales from Southeast Asia seem to match Exalted well in my mind; applying mythology from pretty much anywhere is also fun. (Eventually this "my influences" paragraph will grow so enormous I'll cave and make a list.) And did I mention my shameless addiction for bad action movies like "Surf Ninjas" and "Double Dragon"? Another inspiration for me is music -- sometimes it just gives me ideas, insight, or images. Picture a group of Abyssals drunkenly jamming to Guns'n'Roses' "Dust and Bones"...

As a personal aside, Okensha is something I came up with, oh, years ago. I needed a character name on the fly, so I just flipped one of my nicnames (Ash-neko) backwards. Perhaps someday Dan Okensha will be seen in Creation.

Contact: I basically disappear on Friday afternoon and reappear Sunday evening, because of my work schedule. Email me at mercifulscorpius @ hotmail.com (without the spaces, of course) if you feel the need. :)

My Nexus Project Contributions

Put here by request of a friend who wasn't sure how to find my stuff. (Although that should be easier now that a section of the Index is the entries catalogued by author.)

• TheNexusProject/TheBlueCrow
• TheNexusProject/GuenSilYeong
• TheNexusProject/TheRedCat
• TheNexusProject/ShunasWell
• TheNexusProject/RednailsKiln
• TheNexusProject/DarqueChocolat
• TheNexusProject/QuartzCathedral

... Maybe someday I will put a list of the easter eggs in each of these entries. ;) (Shuna's Well doesn't have one, though. Unless you count the fact that "Artelian" is maybe one letter off from "artesian", but that was a fluke...)

What's the big idea?

Okay, so I have an idea, and I think I could make it an entry for the LexiconOfElderDays, or the basis of a line of TheGodBlooded. Or both, maybe. Write the Lexicon entry as sort of the history and have a link to it from the parentage?

Anyway, basically it was raining and I had this idea for an interesting little place where they have a priestess of a storm god - specifically, a male deity of storms with rain and wind and lightning, of strength and bravery in battle and at the hunt. I admit I was mostly thinking of the priestess when the God-Blooded idea came up, and I thought a Lexicon entry on one of them would be fun, say from the perspective of a rather condescending First Age visitor, with an afternote from a translator that the community in question lies in ruins and local lore has it that this has something to do with a fight between a Solar and a god. And then I had an idea which amused me and would create many god-blooded back in the First Age, many of whom probably have descendents wandering around. (Especially as they seem to have been interbreeding...)

Here's the idea, from memory, since for some reason today opening Word (or Netscape, even) equals BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!!!

Setting: A community (somewhere in the Southeast, maybe?) which is concerned mostly with farming and defending itself from its neighbours. Mostly cultivated fields, some sparse forest, a marshy area where the residents braved the hazards of poisonous water serpents to gather wild edible marsh plants. The place is inhabited until shortly before the Usurpation. The people are mostly farmers, but there's a real cult of the warrior - due in no small part, of course, to the god they worship. Few males grow up here without being trained to hunt and fight, and women are free to learn as well. There's a small council of elders, but the real power of this little autonomous area is the priestess.

The priestess: There's only ever one priestess at a time. They don't train their replacements; the knowledge of what a priestess must do is imparted to them by holy writings, the community's knowledge, and the god himself. The priestess must begin her service as a maiden and observe several restrictions on her life, such as a special diet, and having to remain celibate (with one special exception - see below). She leads the god's followers in worship and sacrifice, she communicates the god's wishes, she maintains the temple and the Holy Trinity of Spears (these are holy objects). The god fills her with bloodthirsty prowess in battle to protect the community, and the god responds to the elaborate rain-begging ritual she performs, which involves little in the way of clothes and lots of ecstatic frenzied dancing and singing. Sometimes the god and the priestess would get carried away enough that she's carried off by the winds, only to calmly walk back into the temple a day or two later. Few of these priestesses lived long; many died in battle, a few screamed to the sky until the god struck them to death with lightning, and one or two never came back when the winds took them. It usually takes less than a week for another maiden to step into the role. Wild, energetic, stubborn, but curiously serene; that's the usual priestess.

The children of the storm: There is another duty that the god calls upon his priestess to perform. Some priestesses never got this particular call, some got it several times. Most were called upon once or twice. You see, the god has a certain passion for handsome young men skilled in the arts of war and the hunt. When he has set his eye on one such a youth, he rages a mighty storm across the land and summons his priestess. In this, too, she must communicate his wishes. Taking up one of the holy spears, eyes aglow with the will of the god, she seeks out the youth in question and informs him that he will be the god's lover. No is not an option unless the youth chooses to fight her to the death. Most go willingly. What happens next? Well, the youth wakes up the next morning in the temple with memories of a night of mind-blowing sex with a being too beautiful for any mortal who has not see him to comprehend; the impossibly red hair, the golden skin, the flashing eyes too glorious to gaze upon directly... The priestess serves the youth a breakfast of the prescribed foods, and informs him he's pregnant. Most of the priestesses did this just as the poor guy was gulping down water. And most would then let him panic a bit before explaining that the god has generously decided to preserve his manly beauty, and the priestess will carry the baby to term for them. The men and the priestesses always maintain that she was not involved in the sex, but I'm sure you can see the obvious speculation. Anyway, the children are given into the care of their 'real' mothers to be raised. (Interestingly, while pregnant, the priestess is more powerful and practically invulnerable in battle.)

So, that's the premise. The whole place was destroyed when an acquisitive Solar tried to round up all those handsome young men and the god fought back...

Like I said, I'm not sure where to go with this. Comments are welcome.

Random Things

Pondering what Exaltation might be like for different individuals, I wrote this snippet on the 15th of January. I also started what's turning out to be a bit of a saga, but I'm not posting that. Yet.

In Creation, there is a dancer, moving to the rhythms of the drums, of the people, of the gods. A body made of flesh and bone and blood pulses with the spark of awareness that reaches past the self to the other, and sees the interconnectivity like a changing web overlaying shifting glows that are the Essence of life. The sun grows heavy and bright as striving skin slick with sweat ripples over muscles pushed past exhaustion into exhilaration, dancing for the people with the people in, of, around, and about the people. A shaft of the heavenly brilliance strikes the dancer, and comprehension breaks through ecstasy into enlightenment, new eyes opening a new vision onto the patterns and rhythms of Creation. Exalted.

---

• http://www.issendai.com/ I find this website useful and fun. If you click on 'Japan' and then 'Geisha Names' you'll get a list of actual geisha names, which can be useful for just grabbing for a character.

Comments

"Pupated"? You are awesome. (Nice to see someone else compulsive about spelling and typos ... I got a couple of yours here <grin>, but your NexusProject entry was the first one I've ever not felt the need to edit, so well done.)
~ Shataina

Thanks. *laugh* I thought I had missed a few things here, I typed this up pretty quick. And I've always thought puberty was much like changing from one sort of bug to another, quite different bug - at least, that's how it felt. *grin* -Okensha

^_^ Looking forward to what you come up with! -Suzume

Thanks! So far I don't understand the rules well enough to do crunchy bits (though I have some ideas - just can't figure out the mechanics yet). And hopefully soon I'll get to play the game. *hopes* -Okensha

Sorry, I'll clarify that note. New entries can't be written anymore -- Voidstate's note was from when the game was still in session, which it is obviously not anymore. As for writing the entry, I've found it's pretty easy to subvert existing phantoms, and will sometimes give new ideas to twist into whatever you're originally working with -- a lot of the existing phantoms have very little, if anything, defined about them besides what kind of noun they are (e.g. "person" or "place").
~ Shataina

Thanks. I took musing about that non-option off the page. I may look into using an existing phantom link. -Okensha