Naunet

"What?" Gridania. The name sounded familiar, but in the same way some distant fact learned off-hand from some overheard conversation might. In short, it did very little to dispel the man's confusion, but he couldn't hold it against his aged savior - because he was pretty sure that spindly figure had been the one to find him. Buried. Alive. The one who called himself Thal shuddered and finally moved to push himself upright. His muscles groaned a protest, as though the limbs hadn't been used for years. He wondered if they hadn't, because he couldn't remember a time of even existing prior to this moment. This thought confused him further, and he resigned himself to the feeling with another, instinctive laugh. Sitting up now, the unearthed miqo'te stretched his spine forward, hearing and feeling with some satisfaction as a few joints popped. There was a moment after this where he froze, grappling with a confusing fear that his action had somehow snapped every rib in his chest into multiple pieces, but it passed almost immediately. The man shook himself, clumps of mud crumbling from his body at the gesture, and then squinted up at the thin form. "Seeing as I just crawled out of what I think was my own grave... I'd like to stay in one piece, yeah."

This place smelled ancient, the man who thought his name Thal thought - so many layers of scents, of rot and green and stone and blood and something unidentifiable, that it left him dizzy and he closed his eyes against it. The hungry shadows of the strange forest around him followed, pressing against his eyelids, waiting. He shuddered and then, without thought, laughed, his mouth twisting into a crooked grin. The expression felt natural, if strange in this situation. "Understatement of the era," the man muttered, ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, and then spit out more dirt. He opened his eyes again and dragged a hand up through his hair, wearily shaking out some of the mud clumping it and in his ears. "I don't... where am I? This isn't..." He blinked and let the sentence fade, not entirely sure what he had intended to say. Whatever this place wasn't, he didn't know either.

I linked that in my earlier post, Liadan. xP

Well, depending on how you want to RP the switch psychologically... You could just RP a legitimately transgender character who goes through great lengths to get their body to match their mind. It would be a simple matter of not feeling comfortable talking about the issue to explain away why it hadn't come up earlier.

That he couldn't find the sun seemed a strange, unnerving thing to the man, and blue eyes rolled up to take in the impossibly large trees arcing up into nothingness and casting great, vaulting shadows. He searched for even just a pinprick of light but could find none. The aged voice spoke again, from behind, and the matted, rusty hair atop the unearthed man's head shifted to reveal the high set, fur-covered ears of his race straining back as though anchoring to the words. It took several moments of shuddering breath before his still disoriented mind made sense of the questions, and when he finally did, he found nothing but silence in his own mind to answer. The muscles along the man's back, thick and defined as one who put their shoulders to considerable work constantly, shivered and flexed as he brought his hands, still caked in their own grime, up to wipe at his face, spitting out lingering clumps of dirt lodged between his teeth. The taste they left behind was bitter at the back of his throat. A voice? A name? Grimacing, the unearthed man rolled onto his back so that he stared up into the dizzyingly dense and dark canopy above and came to the second coherent realization since had come aware: He could only answer one of the two questions. His tail twitched uselessly on the ground next to him as he worked his jaw and finally croaked out, "I don't... know," voice low and crackling like rocks grinding against one another. He coughed, spat out some more persistent grains of dirt, and strained the emptiness of his thoughts for anything, any sign, any sound. The effort left his skull pounding but came with the reward of a single note almost entirely engulfed by the shadows of the Shroud: "Thal... I think my name is Thal."

Unfortunately, there's been no word since the initial response that basically boiled down to, "It's something we intend to work on in the future."

No. We don't have to be treated like little kids. So they're perfectly willing to ignore all the sexual innuendo (and sometimes, blatant sexual talk) that goes on amongst NPCs, provide an emote system which can be manipulated to do some hilariously obscene things (see a screenshot posted previously in this thread as an example), and generally imply through the story that they're not afraid to shy away from mature themes... But letting players lay down wherever they want is far too risque. Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on that. The introduction or not of /doze will have zero bearing on ERP, I can guarantee that. Would we probably get funny-sexy screenshots with folk using the /doze? Likely, but we already get that with all the other emotes in the game. Hell, one of my FC members spends an inordinate amount of time doing the female miqo'te /stretch so she can bury her face in other characters' boobs. This one single emote warrants no more control than any other emote in the game.

For a time following the scream and the old, unfamiliar voice, there came nothing but the ragged, wheezing sounds of strangled lungs gradually going accustomed to a now steady supply of air. Still half-sitting in the dirt, the not-corpse now identifiable as a man bowed over, coughing and gagging until something thick and wet dislodged from his throat. It sank into the disturbed soil and left behind an old, coppery taste in the man's mouth. Nothing seemed to come after it, however, and the minutes ticked by as he followed the command of that strange voice. Calm and breathe. The man gradually grew aware of his limbs and a dull tingling there, as though the circulation had been cut off for some time and was now rushing back into place. He flexed dirt-caked hands, feeling a soreness in his fingers and shuddered at a sudden recollection of awakening beneath that grave. He recalled thinking of fire, but could not pinpoint why; it left him with the heavy weight of dread and a strange sense of inexplicable resignation. The dirt shifted around the man as his body moved in a renewed desperation, seeking to escape fully whatever trap had sought to consume him. In the shadows, he caught glimpses of a lurching, gangly tree that, at another glance, became the thin form of a person, shriveled and bowed. Legs kicked, weakly at first and then, as the soil loosened, with sudden fervor until his whole body burst free of the grave, leaving him to roll away to one side and pant against the ground. A low groan escaped the man's throat, raspy as though he hadn't spoken in years. Chapped, dirt-stained lips moved as though to form words, perhaps of thanks or confusion, but nothing could quite make it in the face of the shadows, with a once-grave at his back.

I seriously have no words to properly convey the amount of stupid in this policy.

Another limb sought to join its brother through the soil, clawing with a vicious force at clumps of dirt and grass and rock, seeking the void that seemed a chilling relief to the fire burning in its chest. Its mouth opened, heedless of the earth that pressed in, tasted age and rot and a damp sickness on its tongue, and then coughed into the oppressive shadow, pushing up further from the grave. Above, the monument stacked carefully at the grave-head wobbled as the soil churned. When unknown fingers wrapped spindly bone about its freed limb, it was as though a curse had been dispelled. Vague memories scattered at the touch, fleeing to far corners unreachable and leaving behind only a sharp terror and the keen awareness of one buried. Alive. The not-corpse gripped the hand that had found it until its muscles ached in the same way its lungs screamed for air, and it was with this leverage that it managed a great heave that dislodged much of the soil packed down around it. A body lurched up from the grave, still buried waist down, painted in mud and grass and old blood. Wild eyes, impossibly blue in the ominous, angered shadows of the Shroud, rolled about in confusion as its mouth hung open, gasping for air it could finally take in. It coughed and sputtered and did nothing but try to breathe.

Oh! Can I snag a spot? :3 Here's a reference: And another. I hope they're good enough. ^^;

The corpse beneath the monument twitched and moaned in time with the groaning fury of the Shroud. The soil that swaddled it both gripped desperately at flesh and bone, seeking to contain and restrain the nightmare that had been forced upon it, and shuddered away, repelled viciously by the profane shadows that wrapped its shallow grave. Fungi seeking to carry out their inexorable duty of reconstitution withdrew their many hyphae from the corpse's form, and even the tiniest of microbe could find no purchase on its sick flesh. The corpse beneath the monument drew a ragged breath. Dirt filled its mouth, its nostrils and ears, pressed in at the corners of its eyes, compressed ribs that still felt the memory of being crushed under a metal terror but no longer felt that pain. Oxygen fled that place, and in its absence there came desperation. The corpse saw fire above, blood below, heard the screams of hundreds, no, thousands in their death throws - crushed, flayed, burned alive beneath the mighty heat of a falling sky. Fingers curled in the dirt, pushing up towards the fire, fearing more the blood below and the ill shadows that wreathed its scent than whatever purifying oblivion would greet it in the flames. They clutched and clawed and tore at the earth that had inexplicably swallowed it until the corpse felt certain nothing but polished bone remained. With its remaining, meager air, it expelled a sound of a dying beast into the pitiless heart of the Shroud. A sudden surge of frenzied strength bore through its limbs, and with that sound it broke through the earth to the fire raging above. But no blinding, blazing agony greeted its grasping hand, only cool air and emptiness, like a void.

It's entirely possible that many miqo'te living in the cities are maintaining their family tribe dynamics simultaneously. Remember, "tribe" doesn't automatically imply some isolated group of individuals far out in the wilderness. Perhaps that N' or K' or W' or whatever prefix miqo'te NPC you see in town is just one of a whole family who live and make a living in the city as a unit. I know Twinflame has got a sort of mafia-esque dynamic going with one of his miqo'te's tribe. Food for thought! Just cause a miqo'te is in the city, doesn't mean they've forsaken their tribe's way of life!

I've shown off these shots to some of the folk around here before, but I'm just so very proud of them I just find them so deliciously sexy. Ahem. There's a reason Twin and I have spent so much time on our cat boys lately. :3 Let's show just a liiiiiiitle more hip bone, hm, K'thalen? Mmm yeah...

I can't get enough of your style.

Yes! Whenever someone MTs into FC or LS or party chat or whatever, we get all disappointed that the MT wasn't sexy enough.

I'm sorry, friend who shall remain anonymous unless you don't wish to. I had to share this. Epic mistell mania:

As long as you've got over 3k HP, you're fine.

One could say the same about the new /doze for miqo'te. I've laid down in that pose before. Can only hold it for a few minutes before my shoulders and neck start screaming at me. It is not relaxing!

No, it's just Yoshi being overly paranoid about offending anyone. For the exact same reason we can't whisper in dungeons, because people might use that as a way to be ~mean~ to each other, oh no! He has literally said that they're hesitant to implement a /laydown or whatever because people might do dirty things with it.

No, I don't think I am. We asked for a /sleep or /laydown equivalent, and what do we get instead? An adjustment to the /doze emote (which I'm pretty sure is safe to say will be temporary, just as the regular /doze is) which, for miqo'te at least, can't possibly be used to mimic sleeping. They could have easily taken the animation that already exists, but Squee's so paranoid of "innappropriate images" (maybe they shouldn't put the miqo'te girl in a bikini while posing, the hypocrites) being made with the emote that we get some watered down version bound by arbitrary restrictions.

It's not what I rolled my character to be. This emote is bad for two and maybe three reasons. 1) It's restricted to beds (and potentially just to beds in FC housing), 2) That miqo'te pose, and possibly 3) It may actually work like the regular /doze and only be a temporary animation that stops once it's played through. What is so wrong with wanting a simple /sleep toggle that actually looks like sleeping (like the lalafell one does)? The animation freaking exists in the game already: But no, once again, Squeenix takes something that folk have been asking for and implements it in the most annoying way possible that doesn't actually meet what had been asked for.

Eeyup. I'm not too pleased with Sqee on this one.

Inorite. It would be quite possibly the best thing ever. It might even be almost enough to make me forget we don't have wardrobe slots. Almost. I WANT SEASONS! D:

The best we can do is try to make sense of what we're given. You mean the water running to/from the oasis, right? To be fair, we don't really know what's beyond that western edge of the zone. The best we can do is try to make sense of what we see. Due to high evaporation rates in deserts, perennial rivers need to have their source in upland, nondesert areas; it's possible that the land and climate beyond the edge is more conducive to consistent precipitation and (possibly?) snowmelt. It's also important to keep in mind that though, yes, water provides for concentrations of life (and certainly this is the case with the stream in northern Sagolii, as there are animals galore), the soil composition is very important in determining plant life. It takes a special plant to survive in very sandy soils, and it's possible that when the rains do hit, as is typical with deserts, they hit with fury, leading to much erosion and preventing the establishment of advanced ecologies. [edit] Another note: We don't get to observe seasonal changes in-game. It's entirely possible the stream leading to the oasis dries up for part of the year, isolating the Forgotten Springs pools until either the next rainfall.