Kismet

[align=center]((After breaking up with her, Astrid left this letter to Alice before leaving for Coerthas.)) [/align] My Dearest Alice, Let me start by saying what is most important. I love you, Alice. With all of my heart. I know that my actions have said anything but in your mind, but my heart will always be yours. Even if I never see you again, even if you find someone else, even if whatever affection you had for me darkens and fades into utter hatred… I shall continue to love you forever. Why did I leave? Your life comes before all else in terms of my priorities. Even before my own. Confident that my outbursts of rage were worsening and could not be contained, I grew worried that I would cause you physical harm. I do not know when, where, or why I might snap. I have already hurt two people that are dear to me... You are different, however. You are, quite literally, my everything. I could not bare it if I spilled any amount of your blood. The best way I could prevent this scenario from ever happening was to stay away from you. I had to leave. I did not feel comfortable being in your proximity if I had no way of knowing when I might go insane. Knowing this, please do not blame yourself. I have never been angry with you. You have only improved my life, and now that I have forcefully ripped you from it... I will worsen as a person. Remember when I told you that we do not complete one another? That instead, we made each other better? Without you, I am worse than being incomplete. I am nothing. Will you open this letter right after you wake up? Will you open it days or weeks from now? Or perhaps in years? Maybe never. Should you forever leave it sealed, that is alright. I completely understand your decision to never read it. You must be thinking, ‘this person is horrible for breaking my heart and leaving me all alone’. Why should you read this, right? Why should you waste your time with the words of a woman who made you weep so deeply? However, I needed to write this letter. On the off chance that you may actually read it. To assure myself that I did not leave without conveying my honest feelings. To hopefully convince you that my intentions were nothing but good. But if you never forgive me for what I have done for the rest of your life, that is fine. I understand. I do not deserve to be forgiven. Please take care of yourself, my darling. I love you more than you could possibly ever know. I’m very sorry, Astrid

[align=center]~15th Sun of the 2nd Astral Moon, 1578~[/align] [align=center](3/15/14)[/align] I tried my hardest. I really did. I do not know why I randomly have these berserk fits when I blank out. No one knows. I cannot even find evidence of anyone else in the world with this issue. I've gone to so many people, tried all kinds of things. Nothing works. Not even warriors, the masters of controlling one's rage, could help me. I am alone in my battle. I refuse to hurt Alice because of it... so I left her. What a strange thing to write. She would not let me go. Clinging to me and begging me to stay. It hurt so, so much to see her cry. To literally shove her away from me. I think she actually cried until sleep took her. Otherwise, she likely would've kept crying forever. I am disgusting. I have done what I promised I would never do. I caused her pain and I left her. The times I have told myself that I didn't deserve her... I was right. How dare I think things could've worked out between us? How dare I? I left her a little over half of my personal savings and the keys to my house. I won't be needing them any longer. My new home is in Coerthas now. A small, freezing, and... worst of all... lonely cabin in the snowy mountains. I quit my job as a bodyguard. I quit my job as an alchemist. I wanted to erase myself. For making Alice cry, I shouldn't exist. How can I? If I don't have her anymore? Sleep will not come to me. I brought a pillow with her scent on it with me. It smells like her hair. How can I sleep knowing she's not here? Not in my arms? Cold. It's too cold, here. I miss you, Alice. ...I miss you. ~ ((The writing is rushed, sloppy. The ink is also heavily smeared. Tiny, dried wet spots litter the parchment.))

Nope. I'm the other Kismet that makes fart noises in Mumble, talks about Elin Mystics making cute little "le poop" balls, and does a creepily accurate impression of the Pomf =3 song. More seriously... yes, I'm that Kismet. The cool one that everyone tolerates loves. :3

*hugs you* <3

There are... so many things I want to say about this thread. I just... I can't even... Where do I start? Maybe the Hosts/Hostesses volunteering know about the potential for harassment and are okay with it? Who's even telling the truth? If it's not an RP event, why even post it here? Most of my thoughts are somewhere in line with Liadan's. This whole thing just gives me bad vibes.

The theme from Pharos Sirius is definitely my favorite dungeon BGM. Garuda and Titan (in that order) are my favorite boss fight themes. As for my favorite map theme, it would have to be the one for Coerthas (there used to be a vid of it, but it got taken down, grrr). This is also another favorite (albeit a cover). I remember hearing the melody a LOT back in 1.0 and I never got tired of listening to it. Now, there only a few cutscenes it shows up in... And possibly somewhere in the Black Shroud? Not entirely sure. Regardless, I think it's ridiculously beautiful, despite the simplicity of the arrangement. iFE6eR9jHIs

Personally, I handle the "wearing one-of-a-kind Job gear ICly" issue like this: they're either wearing a replica, or something that just happens to look kind of similar. Easy! Do I wear my WHM robe on Astrid? You betcha! I worked hard to get her butt to 50 so of course I'm wearin' it! But she does not call it an official White Mage robe, or claim it was passed down to her from somebody, or anything else like that. She won't even call it a Conjurer's robe. I've demoted it down to something as mundane as possible. It's just a nice coat she wears for chilly weather. It's white with red accents and has a hood. That's it. ICly, I keep things as simple as that. Whether it looks just like the actual WHM robe or not is something I leave up to the RPer, but I keep my emotes about it (if any) intentionally short and vague.

Ridiculously high quality stuff. Love your style!

Fallgourd Float seems to get a handful of RPers wandering through it every now and again (not just the tavern there, but Fallgourd as a whole). I also find people now and again all over Gridania (the Botanist's Guild being a personal favorite of mine that I occasionally find others in). The Bismarck in Limsa Lominsa gets some activity now and then, too. Other than that... I'm not sure. FFXIV encourages a lot of talk-n-walk RP, so the most random RP encounters I've had have actually been while I was on the go. I can say that, for the record, I usually see RPers in the Ul'dah and Gridania Adventurer's Guilds a LOT.

I was honestly afraid of the kind of responses this thread would get when I saw the title... But I do RP that Astrid is a White Mage, so I thought I'd offer my two cents. For anyone here that RPed in GW2, there's a group your character could join called the Order of Whispers. It's essentially a spy organization. Typically, if you're an RPer and you're an OoW member? You just... don't tell anyone. Unless a) they find out through RP, b) they're a fellow OoW member and you give them OOC permission to recognize your character, or c) you join a guild full of OoW members in which situation B just becomes larger scale, basically. Long story short: Astrid keeps it a secret. (Just as Liadan suggested in her first post.) Does Astrid run around Gridania shouting that she's a White Mage? No. Only in the most extreme of emergencies (one such emergency being when her girlfriend was accidentally sliced across the chest by a marauder) does she use WHM abilities (which she would pass off as normal CNJ abilities if questioned anyway). And even then she gives herself pretty strict guidelines for when and when not to use them (typically no more than 3 active witnesses is one example). Otherwise, she doesn't touch them. As for how she became a WHM, I'm treating it as though she was taught the art by a mentoring WHM. White Magic has not been wiped out though it is now a forbidden art and it is more than likely that Raya-O-Senna and her little brother aren't the only WHMs left in existence. If I'm still RPing in FFXIV months from now, I will be treating Astrid as an actual SCH ICly, too. I have an even better explanation for that -- the character of a friend of mine who was RPing as a SCH was killed ICly, so Astrid (with the help of another character acting as her off-screen mentor) will be learning the abilities directly from his grimoire. Do I think this is the best way I could handle things? Nah. Do I find it to be a fairly logical solution that's not too farfetched? Yeah.

Simply gorgeous work. Never stop making such lovely art, please!

^This. Worded exactly how I handle it with Y'raja and Lhei. *nods*

I am deeply sorry to hear that. I thought it was odd when I looked at his post on the Linkshell page and saw that he changed the title to closed... Two of my buddies are in your guild, so if you need support in contacting/reporting him or just help in passing the message along, I'll do what I can.

I am pretty sure that I did not refer to them as official servers I think Jana was referring to Edgar's post. Either way, Jana is correct.

Just ignore them. You can do this either mentally, or physically by utilizing your blacklist feature. Not much else to it than that, honestly.

I wish I had any idea what that is. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dolan

Some people do all of that and still want to change their character later on, though. Character death during RP, noticing that there's one little thing you just can't stand, wanting to try out something new, or just flat-out no longer liking the character concept are some examples. While not everyone agrees, I know that I personally HATE losing significant leveling/money acquisition/item gathering process made on a character. If they're like level 20 and below? No big deal. If they're maybe level 30-35 or higher? Yeeeeah, I'm not deleting all that hard work. All of that aside, knowing that we only get ONE item restore, I would personally not use it on a makeover. I had friend who did it because he deeply wanted to and thought it over for some time. But I wouldn't, especially since we cannot purchase name changes yet.

Naunet's screenshots are the screenies of the year, all years.

The spoiler doesn't bother me, cuz I already knew, but there ARE spoiler tags you could use... Just sayin'. :lol:

But honestly Gilgamesh and Balmung have nothing to do with each other. We are both RP servers but we cannot really RP with each other. We are similar worlds but have no connection with each other. All this communal discussion place ends up doing is making it harder for the Gilgamesh community to stay connected within this maze of Balmung. Balmung seems very populous and always growing but I believe it will be difficult for Gilgamesh to grow unless we can stay connected and handle ourselves. It simply annoys me that people try to say they do not want to divide the community but really what is keeping this section blended going to do? Show how successful Balmung is doing compared to Gilgamesh then everyone will want to switch to Balmung. It also makes it harder for Gilgamesh to stay connected. Maybe because you all are Balmung players you do not understand very well but Gilgamesh does not seem to benefit at all from this layout. I want to see my server grow and be successful like yours but it is difficult to do with the system we have now. We will never get a bigger community unless we can show some organization and work ourselves to make the community bigger. Separation of forums will not foster growth in Gilgamesh's RP community and having a communal discussion forum does not foster decay. Players themselves are the cause of a community's decline or flourishing. Something as insignificant as how these forums are organized has nothing to do with how large or how willing to collaborate Balmung's population is. Likewise, if you really feel that Gilgamesh is having so much trouble "staying connected within this maze of Balmung" and "will have difficulty growing unless it can stay connected and handle itself" as you say, that is the fault of the community itself. It's not the fault of a lack of a Gilgamesh-only subforum.

If our RP community was waaaaaay bigger, then I would support this idea. We do not have the numbers of... let's say GW2RP, for example. For the size that RPC is right now, a communal discussion place seems to work just fine.

I can't speak for others, but I play with everything turned on. My immersion just isn't broken that easily. I find myself looking at either the chatbox, the face of the character I'm talking to, or my own character a majority of the time anyway. If we're walking or fighting, I just know it's the inevitable that I'm going to see non-RPers during that, so I don't let it bother me. If I can ignore griefers, I can ignore a silly little FC tag. But that's just me.

It doesn't matter to me all that much. For the sake of keeping things organized and relevant, it's nice if the tag echoes the FC title. Makes for easier identification sometimes. But does it have to? Nah. My immersion isn't broken that easily, lol.

Some artists will take in-game money as payment. There are few I've seen right here on RPC that list those sorts of rates instead of (or in addition to) real money rates. If that isn't an option either... Maybe you could buy a gift Visa from a store, then pay online with that instead? Or maybe mail them a gift card (depending on the amount)? Regardless, your best bet is speaking directly with the artist(s) themselves to learn what they would prefer. Discuss possible alternative options with them. I'm sure you can work something out!

Dogberry, that gave me a fantastic laugh. Thank you, lmao. XDDD