Entry#1
Two soldiers in the Fox Company Leon and Elyan are my friends.
Lue'Atha explained to me there is a rumor that my chirurgery was to receive a bodak arm and become a pale master, some type of advanced necromancer.
Ugh... I want to clear my name somehow. Some day.
People are stupid. It isn't undead.
I was down on my luck, crippled, with no money, and no friends while stuck in a bad country when a chirurgeon took pity on me. He used the latest advances in medical science and alchemy to give me the arm of a convict who was facing execution so that I might be whole again. The graft didn't completely take perfectly but I feel sensations through it and it is as though it were my own arm for all intents and purposes because he was just that skilled. He managed to transfuse the organ with my own blood first and get the nerves and muscles to reattach, the ligaments to mend and merge correctly between the graft and my body. It is a marvel of the most advanced technology in the core, using only the latest most cutting edge research in the life sciences. Sure it has blackened fingernails and is somewhat deformed... but I am physically whole.
It took me some time to retrain myself in delicate fine motor tasks. This is very much superior to having to utilize an unwieldly series of prosthetics though.
I wonder if someday in the near future it will become common practice for chirurgeons to give people (specifically the victims of violence, veterans of wars, and those injured in factory accidents) convict limbs. The most freshly executed make an ideal donor since the body, as the chirurgeon had explained it to me, has not had much time of decay in which to rot.
I am ever so sick of people jumping to the worst possible conclusions, looking down on me and spreading these lies about my character deliberately while excusing their own vile actions done on purpose for the most petty and childish of reasons.
Maybe they just don't understand complex morality as well as those of us who strive to stay in the middle? It is likely hard for them to wrap their minds around, being unpracticed in using their reasoning muscles.
Many people are satisfied with being told by others what it is they should regard as right and wrong.
Indeed... Taking your first steps towards choosing your own morality, not needing to strictly follow what direction a church, elders or your community want an individual's moral compass to point bothers authoritarians and those who are ever fearful in the conventional sense.
I too am fearful but more of the known than of the unknown, for the unknown, she is truly fascinating.
Entry#2
By day I sweep the streets. Lovely Lazula's stipend means I don't have to be a garbage collector but I find this makes the perfect unassuming cover to learn things since when you are a lowly civil servant in unglamorous uniform it makes most people try to ignore you.
At night Elyan and I clean the street of human filth of the living sort... Gangs. We joke that both are much needed types of cleaning to keep the city of Port A Lucine a nice place to live. Except... This is that sort of half joking half serious type of remark because we enjoy doing it. It serves the republique in a way the regular soldiers of the fox company and our gendarmes do not.
They don't dare brave the sewers and Ouvrier. For the average person traversing the widow's walk of Quartier Marchand at night is to invite swift death. Not so for my friend and I! Heh.
Entry#3
Wait... Is the arm the chirurgeon gave me undead? When I am pricked I bleed red blood and do not ooze ichor. It is very uncanny to look at. I will keep wearing long sleeves and a glove over that hand except for when in the private company of my closest and most trusted friends where it is safe.
I am no necromancer. Undead repulse and bore me.
I have *NO* interest in having skeleton or zombie servants and do not manipulate the energies of life and unlife.
I alter perceptions. I am an illusionist, who oui, also dabble in a bit of practical evocation.
I do non create monsters. I do non exhume corpses.
I can make somebody believe they are being attacked by a phantasm sometimes but I save that attack spell for only the most desperate of situations. It is a ghastly enough hallucination that a person if they are weak-willed can die of fright and even if they do non it still cause them to hurt themselves. Those who are of the strongest wills can shrug it off. Hmm.
Entry#4
There is still the lonely misery and the being determined to clear my name. I will be a somebody, Ezra dammit!
You are the last Du Mal Pierron. The family curse ends when you do but there are others whom would be just all too eagerly willing to snuff it out for you. They don't understand! They think I am going to hurt them, predict I will and respond accordingly to this false stimuli. No, I use my gifts to do something to help people. I only use my magic to help.
I wish I had an arcane teacher. It would make the pursuing wizardry easier.
Leon and I try some field exercises just for fun this morning. He is a ranger but he have experience with being around arcanists so he give me some recommendations on which ward spells he feels are most useful to allies and which attack evocations he think are useless to hold onto.
Note to self: Being a for the most part self taught wizard, my spellbook is not very large in its variety yet. Even coming across an interesting lower circle spell, the process of adding it and memorizing is still not quite second nature to me yet. However, the spells I do know, I understand pretty well how they work, what to use them for and some of the applications of combining them.
A shelegarn's persistent blade for example, with displacement and blade weave cast on it and a shield makes for a tougher, much trickier to hit darting animated knife than the regular version.
Also, the order you give somebody ghostly visage and invisibility seems to matter... So typically do invisibility last?
Only creatures capable of feeling the sensation of fear are hurt by phantasmal killer. It has no effect on constructs. Unsure if it can effect undead.
Entry#5
I yearn for the touch of a woman and for social contact.
There are dry spells. Those moments though when it does still happen, they are precious. I tell myself my tormentors felt they had been doing the right thing to bully me. As disgustingly trite and flawed as the beat a person down that they might "know their place" at the bottom of an artificially established hierarchy is, we play the little game.
Now when I am insulted I try to passively resist. This frustrates them more and shows people the depths to which a spoiled brat is willing to go to "win" an argument by "shaming" their opponent into backing down, supposedly.
The more responsible people dislike it when they recognize this in themselves. It creates a certain dissonance I guess between their internal view of themselves and what their actions betray.
Mondieu! I sound like an alienist.
Perhaps those books on phrenology, abnormalities in personality and mental diseases I read at the university in the college of medicine had a deeper impact on me than I thought.
I have some discussions of philosophy and research plus investigation with Elyan, Hector and Zarcice.
The world, people's minds and so too even the horrible things in both are all so very interesting.
The realm of ideas is potentially free from class divisions. This freedom to be able to discuss things with one another without excessive fear of being persecuted for being viewed as somewhat odd is part of what makes Dementlieu the most elegantly advanced place in the Core. Or so we tell ourselves.
It is the greatest gift.
That everyone from the son of a lord to a lowly factory worker can be afforded some education shows just how great we Dementlieuse are.
Margin notes: I am not a bad man. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not!
I'm not a bad man but I am also not a good man.
