Anne's Fiction Corner

I may still be pretty much useless on the computer, but with the help of dictation software and a whole lot of painkillers, I'm unconquerable nonetheless. Today's story is Qualities of Heat, starring Sophia Archimedes with appearances by Geoff Matheson, Mitchell Gozer, Marcus James, Sangria Tecuhtli and everybody's favorite mysterious Aztec Scion. It is a tale of expectations versus reality, reason versus passion, and what happens when violent temper collides with unexpected outcome.

Skeins of Fate won the voting this time (although it was pretty close), so they're up next! We're down to just two to vote on now, so let the rivalry begin!

• If you vote for Eastern Promises, you're voting for stories from the nineteenth-century band in a world of colonialism and industry - Leona Middleton, Samuel Vanderbilt and Paniwi Bayteru of the Netjer, Faruza Alinejad and Yadi of the Yazata, Mohini Misra and Padma Billingsworth of the Deva, James Howard and Alvin de Lafayette of the Anunna, and many more. They're currently fighting corruption among local authorities, learning what other cultures have to offer them and finding ways to survive no matter what the cost.
• If you vote for Strawberry Fields, you're voting for stories from the wild-eyed Celtic band - Dierdre O'Riordan, Seamus McMann, Jude Shriver and Auggie MacDonough of the Tuatha de Danann and Alaina Bertrand and Ignatius Rex of the Nemetondevos. They're currently gearing up to challenge the combined might of the military and their shadowy puppeteers, while reaching out to their kinsmen around the world.

And off we go!

Cross-Universe Teotl!

New art time! This time, we have a really neat treat: GriffinGuy24, who many of you know and love from the Onyx Path forums and our own comment threads here has done some artwork of not only our own characters, but with his own Scion Alan Lord guest starring with them. Alan and our own Aztec PCs have obviously never actually met, since they're in different games, but he created some imagined scenes of what interacting with them might look like.

In this one, Alan tries to do some sciencing, but Maquicelotl is just as big a pain in his ass as he is in Geoff's. Jaguars are territorial creatures. There ain't room enough for them all on this pyramid.


In this one, Alan, who is all about being in touch with nature, tries to mediate between Yoloxochitl and her axolotl nahuatl, with whom she never gets along because she has no Animal Ken or Animal boons and is basically salamander kryptonite. It seems to like him way more than it likes her.


And in this one, Eztli has gone into Courage Extremity, so Alan, who is built to soak a lot of hits but doesn't have the hierarchical clout to try to pawn the job off on someone else, has been sent by the pantheon to let her knock him around until she gets it out of her system. In the back, their nahualli are similarly embroiled.

Basically, all of these are adorable, and we love the look into what it might be like if the characters of these games collided! And of course, you know I can never have enough Aztec deities running around here. Thanks for these, Griff!

Two Guys, a Girl and Rampant Bloodletting

Question: Hey, I was reading some of your fiction about Geoff lately (awesome job, by the way!) and it got me thinking about Jay Ortiz. It seems like he hates Geoff, but is that only because of the Norse thing? Is it possible that Sangria might have something to do with it? (wink, wink)

I see what you're doing with that winking there, questioner. It's hard to say, actually - Jay is a pretty mysterious guy.

He has plenty of reasons to dislike Geoff without anyone else needing to get involved; Geoff set in motion the violent takeover of Jay's homeland and people by foreign powers, which is not something anyone forgets easily. Of course, Geoff didn't mean to do that and was very upset about it when he found out about it, but that doesn't make it any better. In fact, it might make it worse - seriously, you got my family and home blown up not because you were trying to but just because you're stupid?

And of course Geoff doesn't really help the situation much, since he dislikes Jay right back (watching two high Charisma characters trying very hard not to like one another is pretty hilarious, by the way. Every few minutes they almost give each other the finger guns and then overcompensate with violent hatred). Geoff's angry with Jay for blaming him for crimes that he personally didn't commit even if his family did, and for his obvious opposition to Geoff wherever he can get away with it. Fiction hasn't caught up to the post-Ragnarok landscape yet, but Jay most recently caught Geoff at a really, really bad moment and implied that he didn't actually care about his family, so even though they're getting along a little better now that they're both gods, there's not a lot of love lost on either side.

But Sangria? Well... to tell you the truth, Jay's not a very tell-you-about-his-inner-struggle kind of a dude, so exactly what he thinks about her is still a mystery, even from the players in the game. She's not a particularly pleasant person to be around, nor is she fun to have a conversation with, so it's unlikely that he secretly fell in love with her and hates Geoff's guts for stealing her away or anything like that (although it is tempting to make an awesome Mexican telenovela out of the situation, isn't it?). But she is one of his people, and furthermore a daughter of one of the Tezcatlipocas, making her the only crown princess of the pantheon at the moment opposite his crown prince. It's entirely possible that he's offended as shit that she ended up married to some Norse dude, and the fact that that happened because said Norse dude knocked her up by accident probably doesn't help matters all that much. And now there are white people all up in his country all the time, imprisoning and using his countrymen, and if there's one thing Jay hates above all others, it's people who restrict the freedom of others. (And, even though he tries his best only to do it when it's for her own good or the good of others, Geoff restricts Sangria's freedom a whole lot, too.)

It's actually possible, although never confirmed, that Jay and Sangria might have been meant to be married at some point; it would be a very smart political alliance that solidified the supremacy of the Tezcatlipocas, and the two of them make a fantastic team, with Jay directing everything through his amazing social powers and Sangria carrying out his orders with wrecking-ball efficiency. Nobody was expecting Geoff to wander in and make a completely different alliance. We don't know that for sure, of course, but it's a solid bet that Huitzilopochtli and/or Tezcatlipoca had some plans for one or both of their kids' eventual matrimony, and the introduction of a surprise Aesir might very well have made them start over at square one. Jay still isn't married, although whether that's because he likes being single or for some other motive nobody has ever asked.

But yeah, Jay's probably not nursing a broken heart behind the scenes or anything. He just doesn't like the guy, and he's got lots of reasons for it.

Ironically, it's actually Geoff that occasionally gets jealous of Jay and Sangria, not the other way around. She tends to just do what Jay says instead of arguing with him the way she does with Geoff, and there have been times that the two of them connected on an Aztec-blood-bonding level Geoff couldn't that irritated him.

Also, Chicahua at one point told him he wanted Jay to be his dad instead of Geoff (although really, the kid does that all the time). Cue the angry, testosterone-laden glaring.

The Jaguar Who Delivers

Several people have asked to see a character sheet for Jay Ortiz, that world-famous breaker of hearts and causer of strife. He's an NPC, meaning that he doesn't currently have his own page on the website; we're considering overhauling out NPC section soon to make it more relevant for the game and more interesting to read through, but in the meantime, here's a character sheet for Jay - now Maquicelotl, the God of Freedom.

In all his magical, ruining-your-life glory.

Our players can feel free to look if they want, too, but knowing his current stats won't make him any less likely to ruin everything.

A Force for Awesome

Question: How does your gaming group even deal with an antagonist like Jay Ortiz? He seems like someone who could easily drive players up a wall!

Oh, he does. Being driven to fits of frothing, impotent rage is a very important part of the Jay Ortiz experience.

Dealing with him in the game itself really depends on what they're doing at the time - sometimes violence erupts, sometimes political chaos erupts, sometimes they just silently hate on each other from across the room - but outside the game, the players love that guy. One of the most fun ways of making sure a group doesn't get mad about NPCs is to make sure that the NPCs are themselves fun to have around; if they have developed personalities and do interesting things, even if the PCs hate their guts with all their might, the players usually welcome seeing them come into the game. The thing about Jay is that he always makes the game interesting and fun when he shows up, and players love characters that do that, even if they want to see them dismembered and buried in a shallow, unmarked grave.

If you think Jay Ortiz drives players crazy, you should see them try to deal with god-level Colin. I thought Sowiljr's player was going to have a stroke last time he had to try to talk to him for more than a few minutes.