Alicorn Sandbox

index and how to read: silmaril

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 06:53:19 GMT

Posted by: alicornucopia

Silmaril is an RP (role play) hosted on Dreamwidth and the Glowfic Constellation between me (Alicorn) and lintamande. We each play many characters. All of my Dreamwidth RP accounts (including many not used in Silmaril) belong to the Belltower community; lintamande on DW operates solely out of the lintamande account. Silmaril has also entertained guest/cameo authors Aestrix and kappa.

The short version of what Silmaril is about is that we put alternate universe versions of Bella from my fanfiction Luminosity in a wide variety of settings, some fanfictional in nature and others original, with some of lintamande's takes on characters from the Silmarillion, and see what happens. (Luminosity is a reasonable introduction to the "Bell" character template, but it is not strictly required reading for Silmaril, though it will be helpful background for the thread "overwhelm them with honesty" and its dependencies.)

Silmaril is similar in many ways to Effulgence, which is an RP with loosely the same premise that I run with kappa instead of lintamande. There is an index of RPs in this vein by assorted author combinations here. If you like any one of these you should probably read some others too.

Content warnings: Silmaril contains rape, torture, abusive relationships, references to same, and other forms of cruelty to characters. Proceed with caution. We are mean.

Each world in Silmaril may be read alone up until the point where it collides with others. Below is an index in recommended reading order if you plan to read them all. The ∞ symbol next to a section heading means that this heading was still in progress in the last listed thread within that section at last update, but you may read past ∞-marked sections without problems. You may discuss Silmaril (and other Alicorn projects) on the forum. Dreamwidth posts have comment threads under them; some prefer to read them in threaded mode, where they keep drifting off to the right, but many people otherwise prefer to read in "flat" (just click "flat", and the comments' left margins will all line up and they will be arranged in pages). Glowfic constellation pages are automatically paginated.

You can download an EPUB of Silmaril.

There is a Constellation index of Silmaril. If reading orders conflict, believe the one on this Dreamwidth page.

Elentári
Telperion
Defy Your Limitations
North
East
Shine
West
South
Kandrona
Southwest
(untitled) ∞
1. bootstrap
2. tragic literature
Unbreakable Vow ∞
1. n'ohere nakwa nha anya
2. kwesiri ịkpaso ibe ha agwa n'obi nwanne
(untitled) ∞
1. half a dozen of the other
These posts may or may not join the main Silmaril continuity, but are indexed here for your convenience.
1. fire and ice ∞
2. don't touch me

comments

galaxy of stars

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:44:34 GMT

Posted by: purposeful_glory

Loki parks in Doriath for another six years. She manages to make friends with some of the people who have things to do in accelerated perception. The Men who started as babies are full grown. The spell comes along and she refreshes everyone serving as a sorcery backup on a routine basis. She visits people between stints of work; during same she does things that she doesn't have to move around much to do. Writes a memoir. Screws around with decorative illusions. Sleeps, when absolutely necessary.

She's asleep when the quake hits. But not for very long.

comments

the stork drops, the snake swallows

Sun, 05 Jun 2016 05:45:25 GMT

Posted by: from_scratch

Akibel Mowar is on his way home from the blacksmith's when he spots it. People are shrieking and fleeing from it, which seems reasonable, as it's a fuckoff huge snake with a mirror for a face. A big mirror.

Kib can't so much flee. He can shriek - he can lurch in the direction of the nearest house and try the door - it's locked. He can amble briskly...

He can break into a run when the snake gains on him and fall flat on his face.

And he can get eaten up.

And it's too bright too bright too bright and he flings his arm over his eyes.

comments

high-energy physics

Tue, 31 May 2016 04:12:39 GMT

Posted by: warpfairy

Federation political prisons are not particularly uncomfortable. She's not going anywhere, but she can read, she's considering taking up an instrument, the only really awkward thing is that she doesn't particularly want to be supervised while she's sweating her way through her next pon farr one way or another but that's years off. That and she wishes she'd taken longer to get caught. But she was running out of the really low-hanging fruit anyway.

This is what she signed up for. She makes up imaginary profiles of people on the planets she got to, people who can live longer fuller lives with the stars in reach, one per day. One per day and she'll have loads of estimated impact left unused when she dies. Perfectly reasonable tradeoff and she can still read books.

Someone wants to interview her about Vulcan; they don't want to lose anything that anybody remembers; she gives the interview and then picks up some poetry.

comments

spear of ice

Mon, 23 May 2016 18:10:32 GMT

Posted by: purposeful_glory

Loki goes instantly where Huan tells her. She has a safety against landing intersected with solid objects, her or any of her belongings, so dramatic as it would be she can't just appear with her opponent already impaled. She has to actually stab him.

So she stabs him, spikes him from there. And hollows out Lævateinn and channels ice into the wound.

comments

yeah that happens if you turn into a vampire

Sun, 22 May 2016 02:00:06 GMT

Posted by: cross_and_bow

(prologue)

Bella slips into the school by a side door; she just saw a thing and she thinks she's seen it in a book before and thinks it's supposed to be mostly harmless but before she wakes Giles up over probably nothing or kills a likely neutral demon she wants to check.

And she pushes into the library.

comments

applied theology

Wed, 18 May 2016 05:23:00 GMT

Posted by: subtly_artistic

Bella's house gets done, and she fills it up with things. She experiments with magic, and theorizes when she has more data to work with; when she runs out of her steadily increasing mana supply for a day she studies Quenya. One morning she sits bolt upright in bed, realizes she has not seen a single wheel since she got here, and runs off to Mahtan to explain the concept, which is, it turns out, new.

When Fëanáro is feeling sociable she hangs out with him. He finishes his novel. (In it, the school turns him over to social workers and adopt him out, he escapes his foster family, he encounters a dragon and talks his way past it with stories about Arda, he studies wizardry and is unreasonably effective at it, when the dragon opens a portal to Arda he sneaks through too and the Valar slay the dragon, he fixes his mother with magic, and then he masters planar travel himself and conquers Bella's plane.) He finishes his typewriter, too; Bella's of the opinion that it would have been easier if he made vowels separate instead of consonant-hats, but it works okay like so. She acquires one when there is more than one, and learns to type, because crystal balls are a long time coming.

She has made some progress, though. She finds the common thread in dud combinations that produced an aura, and successfully decomposes all her original spells into pieces and begins to make new combinations. Most of these are trivial like the increased character limit arcane mark. Reverse-engineering her undead-damaging spell, though, gets her (small) arcane healing well in advance of when she was expecting to have that down. So anybody who lives on her block and cuts themselves cooking breakfast can knock on her door - or that of anybody who's getting the spells as she turns them out - and get that seen to without bothering a Maia.

Once a month she sees Miriel. Bella doesn't have any ideas that land any better than "forget you forgot something". But forgetting the contents of that foolish, foolish oath is at least a holding pattern that lets Miriel pretty much live her life, so, therapeutic success? ...Bella makes sure to remind Fëanáro that he is very adorable and lovable and adored and loved.

comments

interplanar studies

Mon, 02 May 2016 23:04:06 GMT

Posted by: subtly_artistic

This is the wrong building. She could have sworn the RA said "take a left at Emily, first on your right", and Bella did exactly that, and here she is and the rooms in this place don't even seem to be numbered, it's all letters and names. She's not going to find Intro to Subtle Therapy in Room 206 like that. Maybe the RA meant take a left after Emily, not before Emily? Maybe she was supposed to go the other way around the quad and approach Emily from the other direction? She's going to be late.

Bella tries to get out of the letter-named-rooms building to go ask Emily for directions, but that's not a stairwell after all, and there's someone shouting at her not to come in and she flinches back and clonks her elbow on the door and boots or no boots she's down and she -

- is falling -

comments

worth an oat

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 04:29:37 GMT

Posted by: alicornucopia

In this soup kitchen sits a nun in partial habit, sipping water and frowning at a desk. It is very irregular for adults who aren't volunteering to be at the soup kitchen. It is very irregular for expensive electronics to be in the soup kitchen. The volunteers do seem to know her; they call her "Carlotta".

comments

leave of absence

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 03:25:03 GMT

Posted by: purposeful_glory

Loki is not technically banished. This is just - giving her mother space. To think. About what to do with her wayward child. She will be called back in a few years for a more permanent decision. Midgard's nice enough, anyway, and Sigyn's coming along.

The Bifrost lights up in all its colors and -

- this might be Midgard, but it is not a part of Midgard she ever saw and not the place she was expecting to be dropped, and there is no Sigyn with her.

She holds Lævateinn ready as a glaive. Maybe her mother feared her sorcery and thought she'd best be sent somewhere deadly under the impression she was meant to survive the trip -

comments

veritable

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 02:41:28 GMT

Posted by: dark_light

Isabella ascends to cruising altitude gently to let Luca keep up, and gently accelerates west.

comments

and in my hands place honesty

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:06:31 GMT

Posted by: dark_light

The sugar runes scatter.

The lights flicker.

And the witch is holding -

comments

hazmats

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 01:46:48 GMT

Posted by: keep_busy

Annie is on her trike on her way to school.

This van labeled HAZARDOUS MATERIALS is also on its way to school.

The van hits a patch of black ice. It goes spinning, it turns over, it slices itself open on a wrought-iron fence with spikes, and it disgorges boxes which smash open on the pavement. Some of them skitter clear into the slush.

Some of them - along with most of the van - land on Annie.

There is a whirl of bewildering pain and confusion -

- and she falls to the ground, injured and in more kinds of discomfort beyond that and moaning.

She slowly starts to heal before the eyes of her sole witness.

comments

hatchery

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:54:14 GMT

Posted by: chanuphis

The next alchemy class of their second year, they arrive to the lab to discover that each of them has an ordinary chicken's egg (brown) and another box of miscellanea.

Slughorn explains, when everyone is assembled, that alchemy with an egg is actually where phoenixes are speculated to originate; but no one has the recipe any more and there haven't been new phoenixes for centuries. They will not be making living things today. But the eggshell is a good base from which to appear lots of possible objects; alchemy doesn't like to conjure things into existence in plain sight but is quite willing that new things appear inside eggshells, cocoons, geodes, and similar. Their eggs have been pre-drained of their interiors for this purpose, although some recipes use full eggs.

As last week, they are invited to come up with recipes on paper for review by the professor before trying anything. Known possible results available with this set of ingredients include wooden, decorated eggs nested inside the shell; a shellful of small sharp teeth (the commonest source of hens' teeth, as they have encountered once or twice in potions); successively smaller eggshells the smallest of which holds a blob of mercury; and a perfectly hardboiled egg which can be arbitrarily flavored by exact details of the process. But they are welcome to aim at another result as long as their procedure looks safe.

comments

where you think you're going

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 04:45:41 GMT

Posted by: from_scratch

Here is a demon. The demon is in his swimming pool.

He doesn't swim naked, so he takes the summon anyway.

with Suranse triplets (kappa)

with XCOM randos (Rockeye)

comments

laws what laws

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 07:01:46 GMT

Posted by: dark_light

Here is a bar. At it is a girl, late teens - ? - dressed in wide bands of black silk tied ragged edge to ragged edge in a neat pattern. There's a small owl on her shoulder and a stack of napkins at her elbow and she's nursing a cup of something steaming and spicy.

comments

miles to go before i sleep

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 02:36:49 GMT

Posted by: middlingalong

Karaoke is a charming old Earth pastime in which music which normally has lyrics is played without them and supplying vocals is left as an exercise to the participant. Ivan was coaxed into going by a local handing out drink vouchers for the bar which offers the activity, and there he got slightly tipsy, sang the only three Barrayaran songs in the entire catalogue, made out with a somewhat drunker girl, got her number, and stumbled home while some Earthling was stumbling through interminable verses of some song. It has not been a bad evening.

comments

this is crazy

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 03:15:04 GMT

Posted by: from_scratch

Cam is watching a new recording of Atriama, tail swishing in the gap in his couch, and doesn't stop to pause the show when he feels a summons go by.

comments

high temperatures

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:45:49 GMT

Posted by: chanuphis

Miranda and Sadde were both promising enough in Potions last year that Slughorn has consented to run a junior alchemy tutorial for them, once weekly, on top of their other course load. He informs Sadde that if Sadde's other grades are as uninspiring as they were last year, the alchemy tutorial will be the first thing to give to allow him more time to complete other work; but since Slughorn thinks this is a failure of motivation and not competence they can try with the Alchemy section anyway. (Miranda's coursework is impeccable.) One other second-year from Hufflepuff and two third years also fold into the class to make it somewhat more worth Slughorn's time. They are supposed to read four chapters of a book called Ye Alchymeste's Waye before their first class on Friday evening and the entire book is written like that, but then on Friday they are going to - without any direct wandwork - turn a whole oyster into a pearl, so.

This year also sees the two of them invited to something called the "Slug Club".

comments

delta v over delta t when there is no t

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:46:46 GMT

Posted by: ertia

In a bar, there is a girl.

She looks like she has saved up all of her decadent and slothful impulses for a solid decade and is indulging them all at once. She is sprawled on a couch with a book she's only half-reading, and an ice cream sundae, and smiiiiiiling.

comments

blood sweat tear

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 22:45:51 GMT

Posted by: imeanforever

He's moving her to a different court to see if it'll improve her attitude. She's allowed to fly. It's been a long, long time since she was allowed to -

She is only allowed to fly to her destination, not anywhere else. She notices that she is not where she should be, that she cannot progress to where she was told to go, and she careens out of control when her wings won't flap anymore, and she crashes.

---

with Miles (kappa)

with Minus (kappa)

comments

break room repair world

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 21:50:35 GMT

Posted by: alicornucopia

Several meta layers up, there is a... room.

As a courtesy to those of its occupants who prefer rooms, it does have a modality in which it presents itself that way: a room, with as many chairs as it needs, and a bulletin board, and a vending machine with candy and chips and concepts sold for nothing to anyone with the right prerequisites.

On the bulletin board, if one chooses to perceive it as a bulletin board (and not as a wiki or a flower or an ineffable cloud of information or an eternally malleable clay tablet) people whose only common trait is that they get to come here leave each other notes.

Notes about physics, about magic, about grand sweeps of narrative. Notes from people desperate to fix a never-ending heap of problems, smug about the condition of their homes, curious about the wider omniverse. Signed with names and sigils and "you ought to know who I am". Terse or verbose or nested with as much meaning as interests the reader.

In the vending machine, if one chooses to perceive it as a vending machine (and not a basket or a fruiting tree or a file repository or a crystalline fractal) are many things... and they have notes connecting them to their reviews on the bulletin board.

This one, for instance. She (it's usually, but not invariably, a she) has fairly glowing reviews from most of her previous purchasers. Here is what you need to install her; here are some things that are recommended for best results but optional especially if you just want to use her as a beacon for her other instances; here are some things she comes with as add-ons you can take or leave; here is what she is good for. The reviewers who don't like her are annoyed that theirs was too good at it, if you read between the lines. Well, that and the fact that if your universe is unpleasant enough sometimes these critters figure out how to flip you off and leave before they figure out how to solve all your problems. (There is a tangent thread about alternative solutions to similar problems which come bundled with stronger irrational attachment to their homes, but they have more stringent installation requirements.)

They come in these colors and styles; you will need to compensate for the following standard-issue drawbacks in some way if you require services of them that intersect with those areas of disability; they are only rated for upbringings of the following severity and are less likely to hate you if you stay thoroughly under that limit and less likely to fail at important goals if they are given opportunity to self-educate; if you have a way to generate them as instant adults they can begin work immediately but on the standard trajectory age six is the absolute earliest and teens is customary...

There is a chart (if one chooses to perceive it as a chart) of template interactions that have been tried before, but a lot of the more interesting accessory and companion templates are out-of-network for some visitors. What a pity.

comments

no field to revolutionize

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 03:40:55 GMT

Posted by: hatchedplan

It is a lovely Saturday morning. Feathered children are watching cartoons; furred adults are eating brunch; scaled teenagers - one scaled teenager in particular, actually - is arguing with the proprietor of a magic shop.

"How did these items get made if there's no way to learn magic? Are the magicians homeschooling their children and not writing any books? How did you learn?"

"Half this stuff is antiques," says the shopkeep. "Look, asking me a dozen times isn't gonna make the answer more to your liking. I don't have Hogwarts in the basement, deal with it."

"But where do you get the stuff that isn't antique - who made the Avalon itself? - isn't anybody panicking about the medallion supply? -"

"Kid, nobody knows how to make medallions."

"But some people apparently know how to make luck charms and protection amulets!"

"I'm not going to give out my suppliers' personal information. I wouldn't do it even if you weren't annoying."

"There have to be books -"

"Does this look like a library to you?"

comments

double witch

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 23:33:31 GMT

Posted by: chanuphis

This is not a shouting match, but it could get that way any moment now.

"I'm not impugning your quality, Mr. Ollivander, but if you don't want to sell me a wand -"

"I have sold you a wand, Miss Swan, and if you say it does not suffice for your purposes I do not see how else I could possibly interpret you."

"Only in quantity!" she says. "I just want two."

"With an attitude like that you might one day find yourself in possession of two pieces -"

"That's exactly the sort of reason I want a second! If you won't sell me one -"

"I have sold you one, good day, Miss Swan!" Ollivander turns to the next customer. "Pardon her. What can I do for you today?"

comments

princex

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 05:50:46 GMT

Posted by: purposeful_glory

In the largest city on Asgard is the second-largest marketplace. (There is a smaller city with more of a commerce focus. Still.) In it, Asgardians are buying and selling objects. The aesthetic is premodern but the technology is high and the magic subtly prevalent; everyone is LARPing their very hardest that they are primordial forces of nature with only pointy sticks and their wits, and the electronics are gracefully hiding while the spellcraft props up the illusion.

Here is an Asgardian with a pointy stick, her wits, and more magic buzzing along in her than any other person for miles around. This is particular notable because she's a she. The more conventional amounts of magic locally had are all found in men.

She's not doing any magic right now, though, she's talking to a paper-seller.

comments