Bloodslash Revisted by Nathan Westlake

Know the difference between IC and OOC. We cannot stress this enough. It’s easy to feel what your character is feeling. It can be easy to feel slighted, hurt or angry when all does not go well for your character. Know the difference! When Stinky the Warrior farts on you, her player is most likely having a good time. When Prissy the Priest slaps Stinky with a glove, her player is probably not really angry.

—Role Play Etiquette #7 of The Twilight League

http://www.guildportal.com/ContentControls/Support/InfoSectionViewer.aspx?GuildID=23574&GuildInfoSectionID=32729

Bloodslash was nothing special as far as Orcs go, although I might have thought he was. If you were to glance at him during some typical activity, like bashing in the head of a young human boy, you would see a burly green bipedal creature, with jagged fangs, bushy black eyebrows, and small glowing red eyes. Nothing out the ordinary. If you were to ask him why he engages in such violent activity, he would probably say, “Gumm’shulk, upukum kluk-kluk juy.” Lurking in Bloodslash’s past, you see, is the tragic story of an eight-season-old peon, returning from training just in time to see his father killed by human bandits, and receive a scar on his face. Bloodslash needs revenge! And apparently I liked helping Bloodslash get it. Hey, who am I to question teenage tastes? At least I wasn’t the one whose eyes glowed from bashing in little kiddie brains. Glow more, I should say.

It’s kinda weird, really, how IC (in character) and OOC (out of character) motives mix and match. I remember once, for example, Bloodslash was wearing a huge, dirty brown trenchcoat, sneaking through the streets of Fieldsknoll. Frankly, it couldn’t have made sense to him. For my part, there was some really phat lewtz (good loot) that you could buy from one of the town shops, and after getting a hold of it, I would have been able to show it off to my friends (“Look how much +stam. and + agi. this blue footwear has!”) and it would have helped me kill opposing players, so I could laugh over their pixilated corpses. But Bloodslash is an Orc. Wouldn’t he rather kill the human in front of him instead of more humans later? It’s a sad fact of life that the stereotypical Orc has a very small frontal cortex, and uses it rarely even so. Now if I’d just been one of those worthless “light rpers” or non role players, this would all have been much simpler. But how would I have justified this to myself then? Laughing over pixilated corpses gives a very real adrenaline rush, but so would jumping out a plane without a parachute, so I must creating a real character, writing a monstrous endless interactive story . . .

Oh well. Maybe he was sneaking towards “The Felt Connection,” because his feet hurt, and he needed a new pair of comfy sandal. It would make much more sense for Blood to be “terrorizing!!!” but I guess we can stereotype-bend. Enough of that, we’ve got an Orc who just opened the door of the plushest shoe shop in town, and is waddling in.

Now usually when Bloodyboy walked into this store, he bared his fangs with menacing etiquette, and said to the mostly deaf old shoemaker, “Grrr, juy gasent guk!” The store owner, being human ic, wouldn’t be able to understand me speaking through Bloodslash, because Blood speaks in Orcish. But we still had a thing going.

Todd—the store owner’s name was Todd—replied with something like, “Oh, no, no! Please, take these shoes instead!” (I say something like, because I never actually knew what he said.)

After some ominous shuffling and trying-on-of-shoes: “Grrr.”

“Oh, those aren’t right? Try these then! Don’t eat me! These are twice over enchanted for extended durability, made with the most tender calf’s skin, and have a thick red velvet lin—ah, red is very man—Orcly! Definitely a deep bloody red.”

After sufficient grrring has taken place to satisfy the requirements of ic orc to human interaction, and a suitable pair is found for pwning (killing other players really well), Blood accidentally drops a few gold coins on the floor and leaves. Maybe in his mind, Blood has done a fine job of terrorizing.

But this time, no one was in the main room of the shoe shop. Blood just saw a couple of overturned shoe displays, and heard two voices coming from the other side of a door. I’ll tell you what they said, of course, but I should mention that I only found out what it was later.

“I, I can’t do anything for you!” Todd’s voice was a barely audible whisper. There was a pause. He gurgled in pain. “I swear, I swear. I’m a truthful, generous old man. Damnit, if you only lived here, you’d know—” Todd’s words drifted into abrupt whimpers and jagged sobs of pain before going on. “Killed my younger brother. I sent all the money to his wife, I, no, no!”

Blood knew, he knew, even as he was listening that any real Orc would just find a nice pair of shoes, and get out. Maybe kill the two humans along the way. That would be proper. But Todd really was such a nice contact, and maybe . . . well, this wasn’t a random shoe run, it was a serious role playing session. I lost myself in it, and let Bloodslash find his own way. So instead of doing what was proper, Bloodslash found himself quietly inching towards the door. His muscles were tensing, and his eyes growing redder. When he heard the muted scream of pain, he just about ripped the door off its hinges. But then he heard a voice he’d heard somewhere before.

It was a woman’s, and it sounded damaged. Husky in a brutal way. “But I did live here, old man.” Something squished and popped with a gruesome sound. “You were probably the one who killed him, so you could laugh while his wife starved.”

Suddenly, the door was slammed open, and Blood had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. A woman was dragging Todd into the store by his hair. The woman had on a tight red leather jacket, and black pants. Her hair was short and slightly oily, and some of her face was hidden by a bandit’s mask. Blood-red velvet. You could see the muscle in her arms, and dark tanned neck, and thighs. When Blood saw the red coating her hand and her knife, it sent a shiver through us. She had green lipstick, and she smiled.

“An Orc.”

Maybe he heard what the woman said, in any case, Todd lifted his face. Strands of his long white hair fell over it, covered in gore. Blood sloughed off the man’s chin, streaming from the gaping blackish red pits where his eyes used to be. It made my chest tighten, and made him bite his lip. A chunk of eyeball hung near Todd’s mouth, the cord knotted in his hair. Those lips. Blood could see them smiling at him, just like his father’s had.

Then the woman gasped, and before Bloodslash could react, she was a couple inches away from him, looking at his scar. She was breathing heavily on his neck, and when she brought the knife up to his lips, Bloodslash licked it before he could stop himself. It cut his tongue, and some of his own blood oozed onto it, turning it an ugly brownish color.

Todd’s head turned from side to side looking for help, deaf, blind, and alone in his own home. “Please, help me, she—”

“I killed your father.”

Bloodslash did not understand their words, but I thought I understood their meaning.

The woman licked Bloodslash’s blood off the blade, and carefully slide the knife down my pants. We watched Todd crumple in on himself, as we let the woman cut the pants open, kneel, and bite.

I was just a kid, 13, 14 maybe, when I role played as Bloodslash. It made sense in terms of Bloodslash’s story for him to have that sadomasochistic sex in a pool of blood, thrusting in time with the dying screams of a friend. Right. I used Bloodslash. I was young, and the line got blurry. It felt like a bandit-lady slid a knife down my jeans, and sliced them open. I figured it was okay, though, because it wasn’t really me having perverted sex, it was only Bloodslash doing that. I’m still not sure how much I was a blood-drenched Orc, ejaculating through a green penis.

For all I know, the lady was really a 45-year-old homosexual child molester, just hoping I was a 13-year-old boy, and Todd was a ten-year-old whose mind was more savagely brutalized than Bloodslash’s when his father was killed.

It’s kinda weird though. Some of the details of what happened still turn my stomach, I’ll admit to that, but other details still make me shiver, and make my chest tighten, and my lips part, slightly. It’s a different kind of alive, and I’d never give it up for the “real” world.

One last thing. These days, I play the woman in blood-red leather, and I never tell anyone my name.