Arkat's daddy issues

From: hcarteau_at_EW3Rs1iZnsbfb2oUMG01UHNfwizkjJPHxg1mJoxx80njuBiLAtpa95u8WQvfVbpzfKC
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:14:55 +0200

> > /// Yup, I agree with you on that one. Especially if we get rid of the
> > aldryami connection - Arkat was born a freak, but not the child of an
invading theist hero/demigod. Still wonder who his parents were though.
> >
> Bang, ten Hero Points for you.

/// Yee-ah ! Now I can go in front of the House of Death and call humakti Swords "wimps".

> In fact, this is a major question for him, and for his contemporaries.
> In the narrative on hand, from his friend TMP, we see at first-hand the
> longing for a father, but since Arkat is secondary in that story we only see
> his sideways.

/// Aah... Even Arkat had daddy issues. This is interesting. He "tried on" several father types during his whole life to check which was the One : hrestoli knight ? barbarian warrior ? non-human ? And I guess he never found out who his father was.
Another thought : his "father" was, in some way, Nysalor/Gbaji. He spent his life trying to get even with him/it for abandonning him.

> As you know, the status of Brithini children is determined by which child
> they are by the *Z6 Count*, an arcane method to calculate using both the
> mother's and father's number of previous children. In Arkat's time, the
> children were , successively: farmer, soldier, ruler, mage; then start over
> again.

/// You mean they had as many rulers as farmers ? Wow, what a strange system. But everything was possible in the Land of Logic.

> An apparently scandalous and widespread event obliquely referred to only as
> *Fourscore-and-twelve*, or more simply 82 (used as a noun, verb, and
> modifier) seems to have somehow scrambled record keeping, and resulted in a
> number of misnumbered children. Brithini secrecy is tremendous, but I
speculate this is likely to have occurred during the contemporary Mudman War, referred to in the TMP record.
//// Argh. Like I said, everything was possible in the Land of Logic. Even failures in logic. I wonder what caused the screw-up : brithini don't get drunk (do they ?) and cannot be sloppy in their tasks or they get older (don't they ?) I bet it had to to with the sunstop. What's the mudman war and who's TMP ?

>

> Arkat's origin, coming out of the forests, is well known. Everyone of these
> refugees was rigorously tested by the Brithini for purity and quality.
> Several of them were executed for impurity. They never made mistakes. Never.
/// Ah, he was "welcomed back" in his community of birth after some/a few years as a child / teenager(?) in aldryami woods. They determined with Z6 he was Horali and trained him, trying to erase the things he had learned in the woods already...

> Which is why Arkat was such an absolute bother to them--their magic could
> never prove him impure, or wrong.

/// So he definitely started as a true Brithini. So sez the faultless magics. The same which screwed up when 82-ed ?