TBB BOTM OCTOBER: THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT BY SA'S OWN GENERAL BATTUTA

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > TBB BOTM OCTOBER: THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT BY SA'S OWN GENERAL BATTUTA

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm happy to answer questions and talk about poo poo, if that's not weird.

I've been doing an author's commentary that digs into some of the subtler stuff happening in the book. It's full of spoilers, so save it until you're done!

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 15:36

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 16:15

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Hedrigall posted:

I stayed up until 2am to finish this last night. Great book. Soul-crushing, but great.

Battuta, I have some questions! (We can use this thread like a bastardised AMA right?)

1) What's the deal with the Mother of Storms? (very minor spoilers about something that doesn't affect the plot at all)The few descriptions we get are tantalising, and I need to know what that expedition (mentioned in the letter at the end) found. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be an overtly fantasy element in a book which otherwise has no such elements, but I seriously got some Cacotopic Stain vibes from it. Is it going to be prominent in the sequel?

I can't tell you exactly, that'd ruin it! One of my goals with the book is to find stuff in real life that feels uncanny, impossible, and otherworldly ��the eerie mundane. (This is why the southern Oriati territories have a bunch of natural fission reactors, ecosystems adapted to radioactive water, and a religion around cancer: it could happen, with a little geological and timescale jiggering, but it's not something that actually occurred very widely Earth.) But there may also be supernatural elements out there! Who can say?

quote:

2) Also, what exactly are the Stakhi mansions? I think at one point it's mentioned that they're underneath the mountains in the north, so now I'm picturing huge Moria-like underground kingdoms.

Imagine a low-budget Moria meets Andean terrace farms � I try not to do easy analogies for real-world civilizations, but it's a beautiful and harsh place with a lot of ingenuity on display, both above and below ground.

quote:

3) Have you made any map, even a sketch on a napkin, of the wider world beyond Aurdwynn? I'd love to see what the shape of the land looks like.

I have a general outline, but I haven't written it down. When I need art I turn to my partner, who's really good at this stuff. She did the map for this book!

quote:

4) Could you tell us more about your other projects that you mentioned in the Clarkesworld interview*? Both Exordia and Durandal sound really cool, I need them now. I'm hoping for cool alien races in both.

Exordia is a crazy space opera set in a universe that's just discovered a physical basis for morality, left over by whoever built the place (and apparently died in the process without quite wrapping up the loose ends). A race breaks out to get the keys to the system, so that the winner can define themselves as universally good. You can read a short story based on the opening [url=http://www.shimmerzine.com/anna-saves-them-all-by-seth-dickinson/]here.

The other one (which I'm calling Titanomach right now) is about a really depressed young Indian woman who manages to open a wormhole and jump through as a way to get out of her lovely life ��but her half-sister follows her through. They end up on a huge starship trapped in orbit around an alien megaconstruct, and because the crew is infected with a mental virus and the ship's AI has gone megalomaniacally insane, they have to take command of the ship and try to get it home. Kinda Portal meets Marathon meets Narnia.

quote:

5) Tangential question, what are your favourite alien races in SF, and your favourite fantasy races in fantasy? Doesn't have to be limited to just books.

Oh man! I think the Scramblers from Blindsight have to be first, but I also had a weakness for the aliens of David Brin's Startide Rising growing up. Nancy Kress' Fallers were pretty terrifying, as were the MorningLightMountain guys in one of the Peter Hamilton novels. When it comes to alien machines, Reynolds is great at freaking me out. My interest in fictional aliens is mostly in the parallax they can provide on humanity � challenging our assumptions about whether our brains are really optimized, adaptive, or inevitable.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2015 17:21

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ah, the month is almost over! I'll never be this famous again!

I think it's important to leave a wall between writer and reader so that the reader has room to interpret the text without the author drooling all over. But whatever gently caress that, I'll talk about some poo poo.

I'm curious how many people picked up on/cared at all about the more subtle threads in the book. I tried to bury the plots of other novels in the story, then make Baru resolutely ignore them (because she's so focused on her goal). Part of the idea was to reward rereads, part of the idea was to seed future stories that would be interesting, but mostly I wanted the novel to illustrate that the world was bigger than Baru.

Just off the top of my head:

Heingyl Ri's plan to take over Aurdwynn.

The true identity of the actress in the bar (this one's super easy).

Exactly which vengeance-crazed individual killed Duke Sahaule, and why Baru presumes it was done!

Xate Yawa's motives throughout the novel (pretty explicitly revealed), and the identity of her backer.

The fate of Xate Olake's daughter with Tain Ko.

The identity of the man with the iron circle that Tain Hu mentions, although it'd be a mad stretch to guess this one just from the textual evidence.

Exactly what brought down the Tu Maia heartland.

The scientific error that drives Masquerade eugenics.

I'll try to remember if I dropped any other threads!

# ¿ Oct 23, 2015 19:56

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Nah, they didn't have those constructs. I'm sure people would have socially recognized tastes, but it'd be more like 'I like vanilla ice cream' than 'I am a vanilla-eater'.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2015 19:00

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Super good posts.

I don't know if I'm overstepping here in deploying Authorial Intent: I hope not. but I see the tragic queer narrative as the final boss of the story - the last cultural script Baru must confront. The whole novel is a series of stock fantasy narratives (colonizers arrive; feudal Game of Thrones power struggle; tragic queers; each one usually written from the perspective of the colonizer, the feudal lord, the straight person) into which Baru is deployed to claim power, subvert the story, and take over. It's a reaction to the argument that there are certain stories in which you couldn't write a queer woman of color as a protagonist because she'd be too oppressed to have agency - Baru is always able to find a way to claim agency and act as a driving protagonist, it just comes at increasing personal cost, because the forces she's fighting against wouldn't be worthy opponents unless they could inflict punishment on those who defy.

The Masquerade uses a conditioning game on its prisoners: provide hope, take it away, repeat, until the prisoner falls into a state of learned helplessness, conditioned to believe that a happy ending is impossible. The Masquerade tries to use this same game on Baru, teaching her that queer relationships always end in tragedy, forcing her to reenact the dissolution of her family. Baru constantly 'solves' the Masquerade's challenges by both enacting and subverting them - is she supporting them, or fighting them? Where's the line? Is Tain Hu's death a transformative moment of hope, or a final surrender?

And the book itself is structured to perform the same conditioning game on the reader. Do you see the ending as a continuation of the cycle, or an end to it? Do you walk away with a sense of hope, or profound despair? Has the Masquerade convinced you that its logic is total and inescapable? Do you believe that Baru can ever retire happily with a wife and a legacy she's proud of? Or does she finally love Big Brother?

I think it's important to note that the final act is almost wholly driven by Tain Hu. We don't know how she was captured. Is it possible that she turned herself in so that she could get back to Baru and fulfill her vows both to the Fairer Hand and to Vultjag? Yeah, definitely, even if the text doesn't outright confirm or deny it. But either way, Tain Hu was able to learn from and deploy Baru's own skills in manipulating information to force Baru's hand. Through her conversations with Apparitor, she made herself the Throne's primary control over Baru, and then she put herself in a position so that Baru could remove that control. She also got it on record that Baru was lesbian, so Baru no longer has to conceal this fact from the rest of the Throne, hopefully giving her a chance to move forward into more open emotional space. As a reader of (my own) text, I'm embarrassed to admit I'm a little moved by Tain Hu's resolve and dedication.

I do wish that I had more explicitly highlighted the happy queer relationships in the book, like Tain Hu's friendships with her other lovers. At the time I wrote it I felt that Baru would subconsciously deny recognition of these relationships as part of her own psychological self-defense. It was very hard to try to illustrate Baru's character with this kind of negative space, using things she didn't see as information. I hope I managed to show that the tragic queer story is a story enforced by Masquerade power, a story vulnerable to subversion and defiance, not a story intrinsic to the logic of the world itself.

:words:

# ¿ Nov 1, 2015 06:46

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm glad you can't patch books, I'd be tweaking sentences left and right! Last month I put out another installment of this mod I work on (for the old game FreeSpace 2), and while the ability to go back and rework systems you're not satisfied with is great, I think it's a much better idea for games than books.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2015 22:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ceebees posted:

I finished this yesterday and thought myself clever for guessing before the ending that Baru had not yet committed enough treason to be the Traitor, and that there was only one prize left to deliver. But i missed every one of those posed questions entirely so... good job hiding things in her blind spots, i suppose.

The other character i was reminded of at the end was Zakalwe; that almost-perfect ruthlessness, with one tiny flaw of humanity that keeps them just barely above total sociopathy. But where that was about the use of weapons, this seems to be the forging of them. So if you want 'some random nerd on the internet made an offhand comparison to Banks' for a dust jacket, i suppose there you go.

Anyway, it was a fascinating read, even if i am somewhat unable to quite describe my reaction as "enjoyment". Has your corporate overlord delivered a schedule for the mythical Next Book you can share, and in it, will our newly minted Agonist be prot- or ant-?

Any comparison to Use of Weapons is a good comparison! I'll get Tor to put you right on the cover :v:

I'm glad you liked it! I am still working on the second book and hope to have it out in fall 2017.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 02:03

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Affi posted:

But that is two years from now

It was supposed to be out this next fall but after crunching really hard working on Destiny I got super depressed and that set me back about a year

I've thrown about 300,000 words on this second book, which is more than twice the length of the first one! Fortunately this latest draft seems to be sticking...

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 03:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I will do it for you son

It seems like Ri seduced Bel Latheman (the banker), manipulated Nayauru into jumping into the war too early, used Latheman to wreck Governor Cattlson's finances, then, once Cattlson was out of money and Parliament was on his rear end to kill the rebellion without wasting more time and funds, she forced Cattlson (and her dad) to go die at Sieroch, leaving her and Latheman married and in charge of the province.

The actress in the bar is plainly Nayauru.

Duke Sahaule the Horsebane is killed at Haraerod by the scar-faced soldier woman from the bar in Act 1, who lost a horse to him a while ago and who has been on a crazed quest for horse vengeance.

Xate Yawa has been offered exactly the same deal as Baru, but by (presumably) Hesychast or Renascent, not Itinerant.

Xate Olake's daughter with Tain Ko...aaaah, I shouldn't spoil that one. You can track her down very quickly if you're sharp-eyed.

The man with the iron circlet is related to the story of Duchess Erebog. Tain Hu killed him in a forest skirmish when she was young.

The Tu Maia heartland fell to a species of beetle that ate the poo poo out of their cash crops.

Masquerade eugenics are Lamarckian.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 06:21

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Here is a random rough draft scene from the sequel, and I do mean rough, it's all pretty basic sketch-level writing. I just like the :unsmigghh:

factor

quote:

There was a patient in the Rainbow Room.

Cosgrad Torrinde, Hesychast, stood over the vivisection table. He�d painted the lines of incision on the subject, first across her scalp, then down her torso (to check the spine). He�d diagrammed the plan of his surgery on sketch paper. Heated and bathed his instruments.

He lifted the scalpel. He �

He hesitated.

The woman on the table smiled at him, halfway wry, halfway forgiving, all impossible. Sapian had shattered nearly every functional joint in her body and yet she kept her cheer. The stitches that had saved her life (a temporary reprieve, admittedly) had been done without any ether or anesthetic.

She was a ruin. She was smiling. The colossal tumor that swelled up from her right temple displayed creases and complex structure under the alcohol wash. A throbbing spiderweb of veins clogged her shaved scalp.

�It�s strange,� she said, in really terrible Aphalone, �to cut a waking body. I know. I know you want to drug me. But that�s not your plan, is it? You need me conscious.�

�I don�t want to do this.� He felt the ridiculous, laughable wish for little silver eye-shields on his mask, so that he could blink. Those Judiciary riot masks had lenses, didn�t they? He should get a lensed mask. �I�m not sure I can do this.�

�Give me the scalpel,� the woman suggested. �Bind yourself to this table.�

She wouldn�t even be able to stand. Probably. �You�ll kill me.�

�I�ll make you live forever,� she said, and then, in a voice with (Cosgrad chose his words carefullly, to master himself) extreme and troubling physiological effect, she said NA U VO AI E HAS AH ATH

Cosgrad smiled behind his mask, and felt terribly sad. To listen to her any longer would be dangerous; if she had the art he feared, she might be able to program his flesh using even subtle signals. Gestures. Small sounds.

�I don�t see any evidence of immortality,� he said. �You don�t respond to hypnosis at all. Coaxing and icon splitting don�t suggest that you contain multiple sets of memories or personalities.�

UNDIANATH she said A UT LI-EN

�I hear you, even if I don�t believe you,� he said, chilled, for just an instant, by the superstitious thought that old Undianath the sorcerer surgeon was in there, with a flock of other minds. �But I do agree that the tumor is obviously potent. It blocks your pain response. You haven�t felt any of it? None of it?�

�I can feel it.� She tried to shrug but the bones were broken. What happened beneath her skin made Cosgrad wince. �I�m not moved by it. The pain is asymbolic. Like watching water boil. You know it happens but you do not feel it. And it has been that way since I took the life into me and it grew.�

Cosgrad disciplined himself. With a firm tug he tightened the brace that kept her skull in place and set to work. The first incision split the rind of the tumor and the flesh inside was red-black.

�If I damage it,� he murmured, �will you feel all the pain again? I don�t want that.�

�No,� she said, shortly, and then, a little later, as he completed his dissection, �but thank you. You�re a kind man, for a monster.�

�You know I can�t send you home.�

�It�s all right. Before I went out on mission I had a seed taken, to grow in my child. I will live on in her; this body I am now, here, this is just a branch to be pruned.� She made an impatient motion with her eyes. �Proceed, please. I�m tired of being afraid.�

Cosgrad reached up to the ceiling and pulled down the truth impaler.

The mechanism cupped her skull. With his breath held Cosgrad adjusted the screws to align her skull perfectly, perfectly, in the device�s sights. He still suffered something like a 40% failure rate, and even after running through a few hundred of the Abhuman Crimes inmates as test subjects, he couldn�t say why. Imprecision might be one answer. Variance between individual brains would be another, and that he couldn�t solve. Certainly there was an argument to be made for introducing the stylus slowly instead of traumatically, but Cosgrad was afraid that a slow entry would paradoxically do more damage, leaving ragged tears instead of a clean punch, and oh, stop thinking, do it, do it.

�I�m sorry,� he said, and fired.

The ripfire fuse detonated the explosive and the truth impaler fired a lance of sterile steel down through the top of her skull, piercing the brain, annihilating the specific areas that two centuries of phrenologists and surgeons had pinpointed as Falsehood Control. The backstop caught the rod and stopped it sharp, still lodged deep in her brain. There was no shrapnel. The rod did not go astray from its guides.

He checked her pulse. Stable. Probably the concussion would knock her out.

Patient�s ability to lie hopefully degraded, Cosgrad recorded.

She would lose so much else, too. Oh, the wit of her, that spark of laughing defiance, that would go ��she would snarl and curse and behave like a child. All her civilization stripped away by the rod. Worse than lobotomy.

More necessary.

She blinked. Cosgrad yelped in fright. She was still awake. The impact and trauma hadn�t even knocked her out! She must be final stage, terminal stage, not even sleeping. His dissection of the Immortata implant had revealed massive cranial disruption, so perhaps it had actually knocked out her ability to lose consciousness somehow � somehow �

AIA U NA she said, and then �There are certainly a lot of things in my skull now, aren�t there? Ah, I can�t see. It�s a shame. You were so beautiful.�

Cosgrad unfolded his folio of questions. He blinked at them. They were urgent and important and impersonal. He was supposed to stay impersonal. He wasn�t supposed to get attached, ever, ever again. Tau-indi had been one mistake too many.

But.

�What�s your name?� he asked, instead.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 15:50

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Affi posted:

Could you put up your different builds and uses for those builds? Like what different medics do you use and why? I know you've done a lot of this in the different posts but yknow gathering it in one place would be really cool.

I think I build my poo poo wrong. When given the choice of crit immunity I always take it basically. Because I'm terrified of crits and pretty much every infantry and assault gets extra conditioning too.

Engineers go one of two paths and don't touch the other crap and medics are just.. I have no idea what to do with them besides sticking a medkit on them and making them officers...

Ditch the infantry and all that poo poo, don't worry about crits. Focus on teching up infrastructure systems like bureaucracy (to track food/population/labor and reduce corruption), ideology (to maintain loyalty over widely dispersed populations) and hygiene (to reduce attrition and unlock surgery). The goal is to rush for control of the market and gain control of all the factors necessary for the opponent's build to work. Engineering is great for keeping aqueducts and the like running but you should be sure it's secondary to good economics (and then you'll get a nice spiraling takeoff).

It's weak to rushes in the short term but your win rate will go way up and I guarantee it'll change the whole meta.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 00:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

19th century's a bit premature. Torpedoes were in play during the Islamic Golden Age, and naval mines were around by the 16th century too. The Masquerade and Oriati are right on the edge of a transition towards cannon armament (which also happened in the late 16th/early 17th in our world), but right now the Masquerade's incendiaries are much better, and since they won the last war with firestarters they're doctrinally attached. Nor is the Masquerade's scientific and economic knowledge super 20th century ��it's again drawing a lot on the Islamic golden age, Indian Ocean trade circle communities, and financial gambits as old as Ancient Egypt.

Speaking of literate people (sorrrrry I couldn't resist), the sentence about putting up notices reads right like this, at least in my manuscript (maybe it got fumbled in page proofs?)

quote:

Jurispotence Xate Yawa ordered a bulletin posted on every door in Aurdwynn and read to the illiterate in every market and square:

A lot of the research that went into the book involved creating situations that felt anachronistic but still made structural and technological sense, to show how our own narrative of history is shaped by the way we remember the origin of innovations and social mores (Taranoke's society is largely based on some tribes in the Amazon). Next book will be going even harder on the things-that-feel-unrealistic-but-totally-could've-happend!

I've never read Neveryon or 'Diving into the Wreck', alas.

Thank you for the comments!

# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 00:17

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Kids who go through Masquerade schooling, whether in a basic form or the full residence treatment, will tend to be more literate than their parents, and if kids can read posted notices the parents can't, you're (in the Masquerade schema) helping draw them away from their existing cultures and making them, literally and figuratively, intermediaries between the two. Plus you can hopefully get them involved in reporting on their parents and earning rewards.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 05:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Thank you! That's great to hear.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 05:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I say BAH-roo, if, uh, that makes sense? Soft a, emphasis on the first syllable.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 06:05

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

GB, I don't know if you play Magic at all, but I was watching a pro (LSV) stream and he started talking about books and said he really liked Lies of Locke Lamora, so I asked if he'd read TTBC and he said "that was one of the books I read on my last trip and honestly I think it was the one I enjoyed the most."

So I guess there's like 1400 people on Twitch who just heard it get recommended and hopefully at least one of them buys it!

Whoa, that's awesome! What a good thing to hear.

Here's some random poo poo, spoils the end of the first book

quote:

As the firestorm burnt up everyone who�d trusted and believed in him, as the monsoon rain of rocket arrows and incendiary bombs lit his ships like screaming human skewers, Awoharo Abd tried his very damndest to die.

He had to leap into the sea, now. He absolutely, no procrastination, no excuses, no second chances had to die: if the Falcresti took him captive, which they would, and if they tricked him into admitting who he was and who had sponsored his fleet, which they could (being a nation of absolute loving snakes) then Awoharo would doom two hundred and ten million people in Oriati Mbo, the heart of the world, his beloved home.

�You�ll never take me alive,� he said, hiding under his ship�s toppled sails. You only got one chance to say a thing like this. It deserved a little rehearsal. �You�ll never take me alive. You�ll never take me alive. You�ll never take me alive! All right. gently caress. gently caress. Do it. Do it! Death and glory!�

Snarling in defiance he leapt out from under the sailcloth, his rapier loose in his back hand, and vaulted up onto his galley�s fighting rail. �You�ll never take me alive!� he roared, and then he made the terrible mistake of looking down before he leapt.

Beneath him, the sea burnt.

Blue-hot chemical fire drifted on the waves, vicious, viscuous, burning everything, cooking up a sautee smell of seawater and charred lumber and boiled fat bursting out through blistered dead skin and incinerated hair popped eyeballs chips of toenail off bloated severed feet bobbing across entire square miles of this flaming holocaust the crews of forty-one of Awoharo�s warships tossed into a loving wok and stir-fried �

Awoharo couldn�t jump. He couldn�t. Call him a coward and a traitor to two hundred ten million, but there are limits to courage, there are footnotes to the code of bravery: and fire is the first of them.

A sailor at the bow of Awoharo�s flagship leapt into the sea. �No!� Awoharo screamed, �stop!�

But too late, gravity had him, a graceful dive and he went down through the gel and up again, coated in flame, the Burn sticking to him everywhere even beneath the water, as if it smelled Oriati flesh and hated it, and it burnt even underwater, it fed on the air in his clothes. He screamed soundlessly because the fire was eating all the air that came out of him. He screamed with his face tipped back to the sky: and the Burn went down his throat.

Awoharo Abd rearranged his list of the worst possible ways to die, and with a sob of shame he stepped back from the rail. He could hang himself ��or fall on his sword, if he could aim it right �

Or he could die in combat, like a proper champion.

Like bloody gulls the tall redsailed Falcrest ships circled the kettle where they�d corralled and massacred Awoharo�s fleet. Past the two enormous torchships, Abd could see the city of Treatymont, blackened stone and iron brooding against the high beauty of the far Wintercrests. There was nothing else to see: Falcresti warships, a Falcrest city, and Falcrest fire. Awoharo�s other ships had been sunk, all nineteen of his Syndicate Eyota fast-attack galleys, all twenty-three of the rebel Duke Unuxekome�s fleet. Nine Falcrest ships had annihilated forty-three of his. Abd had only survived for the same reason he desperately needed to die: the Falcresti knew which ship he was on, the Oriati commander, and they wanted him as prisoner.

�Well, Kindalana,� he whispered, looking at his rapier, �you were right. It was a trap. I love you, I�m sorry, and please give Tau my apologies.�

So much for helping the people of occupied Aurdwynn liberate themselves. So much for Baru Cormorant, the great hope of the people.

So much for the seed of immortality growing in Awo�s back. It would never carry his soul down through millennia. He�d sold himself for nothing.

Awoharo Abd put up his rapier and advanced down the length of his ship, calling out in challenge. A squad of enemy marines roped aboard from the rigging of a Masqurade frigate: behind them, the sleek ship caught its own ropes on fire in the sea of flame, and now she tried to pull away, sailors pouring jars of their own stale piss on the catchfire.

�That�s right!� Awoharo taunted. �Some Navy, fighting with your own bottled piss! I bet you drink it too! Come on, take out your little knives! Have at you! Have at you! I am Awoharo of the House of Abd, master of ships, champion cat gambler, and I challenge you to mortal up-fuckery!�

Six Masquerade marines stared back at him. Red masks stuffed with chemical filters against the smoke. Armored bodies webbed with grenades and devices. Eyes invisible behind dark inhuman lenses as omniscient and indifferent as krakenfly eyes. Awoharo beckoned to them. You could get a good death, swordfighting: you could take them on one by one until at last they had to shoot you with their crossbows. Awoharo had ten years under a swordmaster and three years real fight experience. He may have been born a merchant, but he�d learned how to bleed.

The marine with the black slash of an officer across his mask yanked a gas grenade off the rip ring at his chest. The mechanism failed. The grenade�s chemicals didn�t burn, nothing happened. �Good one!� Awoharo jeered, leaping over bodies, kicking aside splintered wood, nimble and free with his rapier. He�d dance around these brutes, he�d poke them to death, quickfooted, hadn�t Kindalana loved his dancing? �Don�t be embarrassed! Happens to the best of us! Come on over here, I�ll show you a weapon that works!�

The marine officer stepped back, shrugging. He said something in Aphalone so muffled by his mask that Awoharo heard it only as a low sinister diagnosis. Like a doctor pronouncing the patient dead: to the patient�s face.

The rest of the marines walked straight at Awo, shoulder to shoulder, crouched a little against the roll of the ship.

�Sophisticated loving tactics!� Awoharo bellowed, as a huge sheet of fire roared up across the sea behind him, a slick of cooking oil catching alight. �Come on, form an orderly queue, who wants it first, my blade is lined with moral fiber and if I prick you you�ll realize what a thug you are! Form a ��

The first marine proceeded straight onto his sword.

Awoharo stabbed the marine in the eye and the point of his faithful rapier skittered sideways off the marine�s steel cheek, sticking in his shoulder rig where the man grabbed the blade in his glove and hooked it on steel knuckle claws and twisted til the rapier bent.

�gently caress,� Awo said, in bemusement.

He went for his belt knife. The marines were too quick. The first punch hit like a shot of tequila and Awo went down on the pitching deck under stamping feet and steel truncheons. For a few moments he felt like the lead drum at his own funeral.

When they let up he threw his last defiance at them. His last weapon.

�Ayamma,� he whispered, and then, shouting into the face of the man cuffing him, into the indifferent red masks and the sea of burning corpses and the whole tyrannical loving design of Falcrest and its faceless Emperor, shouting with all he had left, the secret terrible bargain he�d made, �I am a thousand lives, you poor fools, it grows in me, a-ut lien, I have the immortata, the cancer grows!�

�The gently caress is he saying?� the marine asked his officer.

�Tunk superstition,� the officer growled. �This one goes straight to Apparitor.�

He dropped a bag over Awoharo�s head, shoved a gas grenade inside, cinched the bag shut, and yanked the grenade�s ripring.

At least it wasn�t the fire. At least it wasn�t the fire.

# ¿ May 19, 2016 05:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Hopefully! If it survives the editing process.

Poldarn posted:

Another question from the peanut gallery:

Do you have a HEMA background? Cause I do and your swordfight scenes were legit.

Thanks! I'm glad to hear it. I don't have a HEMA background but I did just enough krav maga to realize what a clumsy rear end in a top hat I am (which played into the hand-to-hand fights), and I did a lot of HEMA research to get the sword bits right. Some of the choreography's just a straight rip of demo fights on Youtube.

RiotGearEpsilon posted:

Hey, as long as I've got you in the thread - are the Clarified at all inspired by / derived from the Dunyain from the Second Apocalypse sextet?

Not directly! I think Bakker read some psychology, I come from a psych background, there's maybe some convergent evolution. IIRC the Dunyain are superhuman manipulators with perfect conditioning and eugenically tuned biology. Uuunfortunately humans are really hard to breed effectively because our generations are so long, and because humans are evolved as cultural sponges: we start picking up prestige cues and complex techniques even as infants.

The Clarified are a bit more of a down-to-earth take on the concept of the eugenically produced, psychologically conditioned superhuman: they're great at their specialized tasks, but they're kind of weird and glitchy and they tend to break down catastrophically because, really, it's not super easy to condition someone for absolute enthusiastic loyalty and performance and then get that conditioning to stick long term. All the alleged genetic superiority will get explored more, I hope, but claims of superhumanity should be evaluated critically!

# ¿ May 20, 2016 07:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

One of the artists who worked on Skyrim is livestreaming a paint of Tain Hu. Holy poo poo it is really good :stare:

# ¿ May 30, 2016 21:33

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

# ¿ May 30, 2016 23:47

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 16:15

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Today's progress!

# ¿ Jun 2, 2016 23:54

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > TBB BOTM OCTOBER: THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT BY SA'S OWN GENERAL BATTUTA