Breaking In Louise (ZnT Discussion)

... There are a lot of stupid homebrew Warcraft race concepts, but that's one of the worse ones I've heard.

...yeah, I'm gonna say no to that one. :wtf: Halkeginia isn't quite ready for that degree of fanservice.

Kirche would appreciate it though.

So how would Jarlaxle attempt to "fix" Louise?

Well, she has that abusive streak, and she has no self confidence, though some of the causes of that are obvious. And then she's got family issues.

Lots and lots and lots of family issues.


And he'd try to fix them, because apparently these days that's what he does. And then he'd try to fix Tabithas.

Well, I've sort of hit a stalling point with my "Drop a Solar Exalt into Halkeginia" idea, mainly because of the fact that the natural laws of Creation and ZnT!Earth are mutually incompatible, leading me to wonder how he's going to get by when some of his more potent spells/charms/abilities just can't function.

This is not helped by the fact that I'm still learning how Exalted works...

That's not what I asked. Making someone into a Machievallien ruler might be considered one persons idea of "fixing a character", while someone else might view that as "breaking" or "destroying" their character. HOW would he "fix" her? WHAT would he consider "success" in fixing said character? Would he try to focus on her strengths? Would he focus on dealing with her character flaws? What?

How about this: Louise summons Samus Aran.

ugh... i hate it when people mention Machiavelli in regards to governance through fear.

No one seems to realize that The Prince was meant to be a satire. He wrote numerous other books before and after saying everything that was in The Prince was an incredibly dumb thing to do, but wrote The Prince in order to satisfy Lorenzo de Medici and as a form of protest against his rule.

Except RJ never made that sort of connotation. A true Machiavellian ruler is one who balances fear with love and avoids hatred at all costs, correct?

Its one of the basic laws of human nature. It is impossible to tell the difference between someone sufficiently fanatical about something and a satirist. And vice versa.

Sort of like Landover Baptists and actual Southern Baptists.

Well, I thought about it for the 'Breaking of' thread, but the power level is probably insufficient.

hmm... has anyone thought about John Constantine as the summon? he'd be a kinda badass normal. Wouldnt take any shit from Louise either.

While he can do magic he can't really do anything truly impressive to mages, except the whole 'stick your left foot in a bucket of water, stare into a cats eyes and welcome to hell' thing.

he can do some minor divination, minor curses (he cursed his father to waste away to death), he raised some zombies once, and a golem... Also he once erased some guys memories, and he can summon demons and raise wards..

actually he can do a lot of things :/

Yeah, especially true in OoT's Link who I'm using.

The truth is that I'm being inspired by Yamahiko-Nagao's doujins: A Shadow of the Queen, Red Rose in Hyrule, White Tower, Holly Death, Boys and Girls, Legend, etc.,

He'd do the same thing he does whenever he fixes any other character. He'd figure out what all their trauma was from and attempt to fix it. He's practically a therapist these days. I don't know how he'd do it, I'm not writing the story.

No, they'd be an elected official in a republic, if memory serves. Been a long time since I've read Machiavelli, but he's pretty much against ruling through love or fear. He's big on republics.

What area's specifically are you having trouble with? I'd be wary of using a solar, though. They can get pretty destructive if they have access to any of their abilities.


You know, better than a solar would be a lunar. Have the bond work like a solar bond. You could even have the original summon pick up while the lunar's in animal form. The look on people's faces when the Zero's normal animal becomes a giant, raging force of destruction would be priceless. Giant Moonsilver hammer is optional.

No cigarettes, though. Plus, he'd need to learn the local magic to be able to find the loopholes in the rules he's used to using.

New Ika snippet (a big one, this time):
---
Ika was wandering around the courtyard, trying to find Montmorency. It seemed like hundreds of humans and an equal number of random creatures were piled into the courtyard, all talking or vocalizing in various ways.

The noise level was high and all the bodies in close proximity were making an already warm day unpleasantly hot.

She happened to be walking by some blond human when the mage spied a younger girl approaching, and casually and sneakily removed a deep purple vial of liquid from his pocket and allowed it to fall to the ground. It rolled slightly, coming to rest at Ika Musume’s feet.

To those watching, it seemed like a hellish dark bruised purple aura enveloped her briefly and her eyes glowed with a dark light. “You humans… dare to litter in front of me?”

Their careless habit of polluting the oceans was why she was here. She could not let such a brazen show go on in front of her. This required action!

She pulled out a plastic bag and dropped the vial into it, resolving to throw it in the trash at the first opportunity.

Montmorency appeared as if by magic and grabbed Ika by an errant tentacle as she walked past, sending her down on her butt. “Was that one of my fragrances you just stuffed in that bag? How dare you try to throw away something I created with my own hands like it was some kind of trash?” she hissed.

“But the blond boy was the one littering,” Ika sulked, feeling put-upon.

“What? Guiche did?” Montmorency was working up into a good head of anger, herself.

“How dare you malign me in front of my girlfriend?” Guiche protested, his ears perfectly-attuned to the sound of a pissed off female. It was a survival trait of the Tristainian playboy.

Ika blinked. “I don’t even know what’s going on anymore,” she admitted.

“Fight me, familiar,” he commanded.

“Guiche!” Monmon protested, momentarily forgetting her own anger in shock.

“It is legal,” Malicorne pointed out. “The Accords prohibit nobles to fight another noble, not human versus squid.

“Oh ho,” Ika crowed. “The human thinks he has a chance against me! I accept!”

“This evening, in the courtyard!” Guiche said passionately, his pride hurt.

Monmon wondered how it had all gone wrong as her familiar and her boyfriend prepared to battle each other.
---
Guiche was scowling and swishing about dramatically on his side of the impromptu dueling ring. Ika was smiling and waving, playing to the crowd.

Montmorency was scowling at both combatants. “You‘d better not hurt each other. Even if Guiche can be a jerk, I still like him.”

“Don’t worry,” Ika assured her, utterly confident. “I’ll just teach him not to pick a fight with a superior being.”

Malicorne had stepped up to be the impromptu referee. Best seat in the house, after all. “Very well. We fight until unconsciousness or surrender. Or death, I guess.”

“In one corner, dot mage Guiche da Gramont, runic name the Bronze!” a fair number of cheers, mixed in with a few boos. Guiche flicked his hair and posed with his rose wand.

“In the other, Ika Musume, familiar of Montmorency the Fragrance!” Ika waved her hands wildly at the crowd, garnering her own cheers. Her cheering section was entirely made up of young women, it should be noted.

“Aaaand begin!” Malicorne said, before shooting up into the sky out of harm’s way.

Guiche gestured, and metal humanoids shot up from the ground almost instantaneously. “This is why I am called the Bronze,” Guiche told Ika with an air of superiority. “My bronze Valkyries shall teach you why you should not have challenged me. You may give up at any time.”

He had, of course, conveniently forgotten that he had been the one to challenge the girl.

The three Valkyries were humanoid golems in armor with detailed etchings. Each held a different weapon in their armored hands. Guiche was the top earth mage among the second years in both speed and eye for detail, and his Valkyries were well-formed and battle-ready.

Ika sniffed haughtily, and her hair-tentacles wiggled in anticipation.

“Go… whatever-your-name-is! Beat that stupid womanizer!” Louise called energetically, vicariously enjoying the thought of one of her fellow noble tormenters suffering public defeat.

Ika blinked and turned to look back into the crowd, trying to see where the heckling had come from.

“No, idiot, face forward!” Montmorency groaned.

The bronze Valkyries spread out and charged, weapons spinning into attack positions. Ika Musume’s tentacles lashed out like whips without her seeming to notice; tentacles wrapped up two of the Valkyries around the waist and one was lassoed into the air by the ankle. One, the Valkyrie armed with a broadsword, cut free. The other two sturdy bronze golems were crushed like soda cans with twin tortured screams of rending metal.

“Ow!” Ika whined, one of her tentacles having been cut in twain cluing her in that she should be paying attention to the fight.

The free Valkyrie charged lightly over the grass, but Ika caught it easily, this time gripping it by the sword arm. The golem was dragged high into the air before jackknifing back into the ground with a tremendous slam. The golem was getting back to its feet unburdened by the grievous dings and crushed sections in its armor, but Ika repeated the feat and it did not get up again.

Guiche swallowed. His Valkyries weren’t blocks of metal, but crafted armor animated by his magic. This made them light and graceful while still ensuring they needed more of a blow to damage them than the average soldier could muster. But being so light on there feet meant that Ika had no problem swinging them around.

This was going rather less well than he had envisioned. Time to open up the taps and really work for it.

He waved his rose wand hither and yon, and nine Valkyries emerged, the full complement he could currently create. He had forgone the piercing and bludgeoning weapons for swords and pole arms with cutting blades on the end, having learned from his first batch’s sole victory.

If it could be called that, seeing as the injured tentacle was already starting to grow back, the regenerating inch of wiggly muscle easily differentiated by being a pale blue instead of the more solid blue of Ika Musume’s other prehensile limbs.

Within moments, those nine golems were being hefted into the air by tentacles, being swung around and crashed into each other with reckless abandon. Most of the students were covering their ears, half-deafened by the crashing and squealing of metals.

“This is fun!” Ika giggled, the architect of this cacophony acting like a small child playing with action figures.

“Damn!” Guiche snarled as his Valkyries were literally played with. He magicked up a bronze blade for himself and waded into the melee, hoping the familiar would be too engrossed by dismantling his Valkyries to pay him much mind.

He successfully dodged between flying Valkyries until he was within striking range, and lashed out with his sword. He’d just cut her a little, get her to acknowledge his winning the duel.

Unfortunately for him, nine tentacles occupied with his golems still left one tentacle for him. Guiche was arrested in mid-swing. Guiche went up in the air, then Guiche went down. He hit the ground hard enough to comically bury him upside down in the hole his first Valkyrie had created in the ground from the top of his head to his chest.

With their master defeated, the fight went out of the Valkyries, the golems sagging and falling back into the dirt from which they were formed. Ika had demolished Guiche's marshaled forces with only a few slashed tentacles as casualties, which would be all better within the hour.

Dead silence. “Well,” Ika said to the watching students, throwing out her modest chest childishly, fists resting on her hips proudly. “And let that be a lesson to all of you, that squids are way cooler than you humans.”

This victory proved her mettle as an invader, obviously. She giggled internally, not wanting the watching humans - watching in awe, obviously - to see it. Hee, mettle.

“That was awesome,” Kirsche had to admit.

Monmon was gaping, still not quite adjusted to suddenly having one of the most obviously powerful familiars in school. It was like summoning a frog and then finding out that what you thought was a frog was actually a dragon or a manticore or something equally impressive.

“Why did that stupid Montmorency get such a cool familiar and I got stuck with you?” Louise berated her own human familiar.

Saito shrugged. “Sorry I don’t come equipped with tentacles. But would you really want something like that in your room at night?”

Louise pondered that. “No, I guess that might be kind of creepy,” she admitted. “Still better than being worthless, though!”

I just had a hilarious thought, Louise summons Kruppe (Malazan series) on his ass. OCP?

no cigs for him? easily done just find some weeds and a smoking pipe like in the lord of the rings. in a few years smoking will become a fashionable vice....

They have tobacco (Osmond uses a fairly fancy pipe, after all.) The nobles would be upset with him wasting paper to burn tobacco, so he'd have to get a pipe (or just make his own.)

Hey guys, posted up a Bioshock/ZnT crossover in http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthread.php?p=5431836#post5431836

Was it ever said how Saito would have returned to Earth (if he wanted to), or have the novel translations not reach that point yet?

Well, I've now got over half a dozen ideas for a familiar scampering around in my head, so I'm just going to put them down here for you chaps to peruse and debate over. And to keep me from forgetting any of them. Who they might be paired with romantically is marked in red.

• Jedi - Siesta, Tiffania, Cattleya
• Solar or Lunar Exalt - Harem that consists of the following or any combination thereof: Louise, Siesta, Tiffania, Matilda/Foquet, Cattleya, Eleonore, Kirche, Tabitha
• Colonial Marine - Kirche, Siesta
• Assassino from AC:B - Siesta, Cattleya, Matilda/Foquet
• Wolf Soldier from Too Human - Kirche, Siesta
• Grey Warden - Kirche
• Cyborged human from the Terminator 'verse
• Blacklighter from Prototype, not Mercer. I'll probably have this on the back-burner until Prototype 2 comes out.

No Henrietta?

Wales survives in each one. Those two love each other so much that I decided they deserve to be together. What can I say? I'm a big softy when it comes to genuine love. Warms the heart it does.

So am I, but she seemed pretty genuinely interested in Saito too, so...