Stuff Happens

I missed what has been coming to be my traditional Monday update. I lost all Monday. I slept in, missed my classes, and spent the whole day indoors. I consider the day completely wasted, with absolutely nothing useful coming from it except for the fact that I got my laundry done. (The dryers at my apartment complex suck completely and require two cycles, at $1.50 per dryer per cycle, to dry my clothes. I’m just going to bag them up next time and take them to my friend’s place at Lakeside or Hume, it’s cheaper.)

So Monday was a blowout. Tuesday was somewhat better, though. Made it to my class, and I set up a couple of interviews for today with two professors of economics that I’m hoping I can turn into some kind of story on the economic crisis we’re going through. Here’s hoping I don’t completely demonstrate my ignorance on the subject in front of these scholarly men. Though I doubt I can successfully bluff to high-ranking professors.

Last weekend was pretty interesting. Saturday I spent at the Reitz Union, setting up a game of D&D with a couple of guys I met last Wednesday, Brett and Harold. I’m running the campaign, and I wanted to oversee their character creation and set up a world with them.

They took different approaches. Brett made a bard, a singer and storyteller, and exploited every trick he could find in the rulebook to increase his Perform ability, which allowed him to fascinate people with story and song. One particular instance concerned his desire for a device called a songblade, a musical sword that would make his performing better, but only when he was wielding it:

Him: Can I use it?
Me: Sure. Don’t you play a two-handed instrument, the lute?
Him: Er...I could grip the blade in my teeth.
Me: ...Okay, but then how are you going to talk to people once you’ve got them fascinated?
Him: ...
Harold: Why don’t you pick up a one-handed instrument?
Him: Like what?
Me: A harmonica?
Him: *glares* No, how about...storytelling. That doesn’t require either hand.
Me: True. But then you don’t get the bonus for a masterwork instrument. And don’t even try to convince me that masterwork dentures count, or something.
Him: All right, but then...
Me: ...How about this.
Him: What?
Me: Masterwork puppet pals.

I successfully convinced him that he could use all of his bonuses if he had a puppet on one hand and used it to help his storytelling. I did not quite mention how silly this would make him look, but I figure the NPCs will act appropriately. The things people will do for a +2 circumstance bonus.

Harold was more subtle. He didn’t go for the “overpowered twink” concept, preferring instead to build a mechanically inferior but flavor-aligned character – a creeping crawling rogue who climbs and jumps. He showed me several neat items that I’d never seen before, like finder’s chalk (fades from view after a minute, but can be seen hours later with a special finder’s lens) and finger-blades (used to cut purse-strings and open pockets more easily). I do have this terrible feeling that he’ll suddenly reveal this incredibly overpowered character that he’s quietly been constructing with innocuous items. Sigh.

But the fun part came when I wanted to design the city that the campaign would be taking place in. I decided one thing about this city that would set the tone for, basically, everything:

The city is 300 miles wide and long. Roughly.

Though it has been pointed out to me that at this point it is less a city and more a dense, walled country, I don’t care. I like the idea of a city stretching hundreds of miles in every direction, because of the sheer number of things that it can contain. Between me and two friends, we brainstormed the following concepts:

- The Mountain District. This is an actual mountain that was in the path of the city’s expansion, and rather than go around it, they built over it. And through it. It’s covered and honeycombed with passages, buildings, and homes.
- The clear idea that there could be people who were born, lived their whole lives, and died within the city without ever knowing there was anything outside. Obviously, these wouldn’t be the people who lived near the walls or the docks.
- The Forest District. This is a massive forest, cultivated by the city’s druids who demanded an area within the city that was set aside for nature. It’s about twenty-five miles on a side. We further wondered – could there be people who were born, lived their whole lives, and died in the forest without ever knowing it was in a city?
- The Street of Cunning Artificers. It’s all clockwork. You can’t see the sky for the smoke and the freakishly tall buildings, and cogs and gears litter the streets. This place will be a lot of fun.
- The Mages’ Guild, also a college, which has served as the basis for more and more interesting senior pranks on the part of its students over the years. One year, the entire Guild went invisible, and stayed that way for the better part of a decade.
- The Upside-Down District, a place a few blocks on a side that is upside down, the buildings resting on a patch of sky about eighty feet up and stretching down to the ground. This is also the result of a senior prank from the mages, but the people living there got used to it and put big piles of cushions at the gates in and out of the district so they can enter and leave without splattering on the cobblestones. This just goes to show that people can really get used to anything.
- How does a city this big get food, we asked? Clerics casting “create food and water” and magical ever-full cauldrons of stew would only go so far, so Matthew decided that there was an army of mages who only cast “stone to flesh” constantly, and that there would be: meat mines. Turn the stone to meat, mine it, process it, sell it. The Mountain District used to be the Mountain Range District, but the other mountains were finally mined out a couple centuries ago.

There’s more, but you get the idea. The only thing I haven’t thought of for this massive, epic city is one thing: a name. I am really, really bad with names, and it occurs to me that a city like this deserves an amazing name. I don’t want to just reuse a name from some other work of fiction, don’t want to call it Ankh-Morpork or Mechanus or Gondor, this city deserves better than that.

And yet I have nothing. Anyone gots a suggestion that they came up with themselves (or at least didn’t crib from somewhere written down, if someone else said it I guess that’s okay), then I want to hear it. Comment with one. Call me. Email me. I need a blasted name for this blasted blasted city.

It’s weird. Since I talked to Mike and Victoria told me she read what I’d wrote, we all agreed that limiting our contact was truly for the best, as our personalities just clashed on several levels. Since then, our contact has been much more tranquil and pleasant than usual, what little there has been of it. I suppose whatever works, works.

Last night, Anne-Flore’s (my roommate) friend Anna had her 25th birthday, so I cooked her and Anne dinner. Technically, her birthday was Monday, but she’s celebrating all week, so this worked. It’s the first time I’ve ever made a meal with more than one course. I made:

A shrimp cocktail, which I did by the supremely complex route of boiling shrimp (a little too much, I fear) and putting them in a bowl with ice, and opening a bottle of cocktail sauce
A salad, by which I mean I bought a bag of “European” salad greens and some random vegetables (olives, grape tomatoes, broccoli at Anne’s request) and mixed them all into a bowl
Those good frozen yeast rolls, which actually turned out really nicely
And I tried a new recipe with some tilapia, Tilapia in Garlic Butter, which was a little tricky

It was well-received. Mincing garlic is hard without a mincer, and I think I got a little too into it, shredding it with a knife into miniscule bits that I could hardly see. Also, I resent buying bottles of three different spices just to use “a dash” or “a pinch” of one or the other. It’s expensive.

Honestly, as far as how it tasted, I more or less had to take their word for it. This is my problem, and why I’ll never be a good cook – I can barely taste. I know I like those yeast rolls, and shrimp is shrimp, but the fish, I had to believe what they told me. It didn’t taste like anything much to me, but they assured me that it was good. This could have been them being charitable, but I don’t really have a reason to doubt them.

Meh.