What’s your IGN?:
nylu
What's your Discord Tag?:
nylu
Do you have any alternative accounts?:
puppyfangs
Do you have a functioning microphone?:
I do. It's not often used, but I do have one.
How old are you?:
20.
Have you worked in teams like this before?:
Yes, I have.
nylu
What's your Discord Tag?:
nylu
Do you have any alternative accounts?:
puppyfangs
Do you have a functioning microphone?:
I do. It's not often used, but I do have one.
How old are you?:
20.
Have you worked in teams like this before?:
Yes, I have.
Do you have any previous experience?:
I do. Both in and out of teams, I've dedicated many hours of my life to reading and refining my craft, and I found the best way to do so is to write alongside others and learn from them. I doubt I'd be writing the way I do today had I not made the conscious choice to do so.
What do you believe is your writing strong suit?:
My strong suit in writing is storytelling; although I don't mind other forms, I feel more inclined to it than to any other. Most of my time in literature is spent on fiction rather than other genres, anyway.
Why are you interested in joining the Lore Team?:
I'm looking for a hobby to spill my focus on, as I feel I have extra time outside my job, school, and other personal endeavors. Lately, I've found that I don't spend as much time as I'd like on creative writing, so that's something I've been meaning to change. This would be a perfect outlet for that, and I'm also very interested in this server and its future. If accepted, I'd like to contribute what I can.
How did you learn about the server?:
Through friends.
What unique contributions can you bring to the server?:
I have a particular fondness for writing in settings specifically like this, much more than any other. I've been writing for well over a decade, and that fondness has only grown in the past four or so years, as I've found myself working to improve my writing to the highest degree realistically possible for me. For that, I feel I can confidently express what I want to write and proofread for peers (grammatically/structurally, at the very least; writing is a subjective matter for me, and there is no "universal" way to do so).
Write a short story of a Self-Made Yokai you can find roaming throughout the island:
Nibi no Kitsune: Fox of Two Tails [679 words]
The Ueda Bridge had always been notorious for the quiet it held. Not in any picturesque sense, no. Its silence was the kind that prickled at the skin like static, an unnatural stillness that seemed to exist in pure spite of the world around it. It was never known as a crossing, but rather a demarcation line.
On one side lay Norowarejima, notoriously immaculate and meticulously tended. The town had always been kept with an almost obsessive exactitude, streets swept clean and wooden facades polished until the sun itself resented them. The air carried the sterile sweetness of overwatered lilies, while behind paper screens and lacquered doors, decrees and family names held more weight than the people who bore them. On the other side lay the Ueda farm. There, the earth had long since forgotten how to be fertile. The fields were saturated in uneven soot, decay becoming the wildlife’s native dialect. Everything felt wet with something that was not quite water, and the air tasted of corrosion, as if the land had been hemorrhaging for generations and not one hand dared to cauterize the wound.
Straddling both: The Ueda Bridge.
Yumiko Ueda had taken it upon herself to keep this crossing standing, at the very least. It rested upon rust-bitten copper pylons driven into crumbling stone, jutting from the earth like the teeth of some skeletal beast. Whenever she crossed it, she could hear it groan beneath her, as if it resented the footsteps.
She wished she were the sort to feign ignorance, too. The sort who could look upon the rot that festered and call it earth, that way she could turn her eye from the field and pretend not to know its name. But she had only ever felt good with smoke in her lungs, each plume situating a root beneath her tissue, destined to bifurcate into another. So instead, she befouled herself with the starkness of knowing, even as the annual smoke of the burning fields suffused her lungs.
It was on the eve of an early morning that a sickness began to fester beneath the bridge. No one could say whence it came, for no physicians were willing to tend to it, nor any elder willing to claim they had seen its likeness before. The first omen was found among the moss and overgrown verdure beneath the bridge: a fox, rabid and half-rotten, body twisted into the reeds as though the earth refused to take it in. Yumiko, the prying young girl she was, came upon both the fox and the sickness that festered within it. By the time the Ueda family noticed her absence, it had already been weeks. She had wandered into the Ueda fields, a fox nestled within the nooks of her frail arms, and died alone. But her family did not mourn her disappearance.
Yumiko’s father, Yoshida Ueda, died three months after his daughter's passing. His final will entrusted the family’s field to his son–the same land the Uedas had once cherished before years of resentment and neglect rendered it to the invasion of weeds and gullies. However, his son did not live long enough to inherit it. A month after Yoshida’s death, grief toppled on top of sickness and took his son as well, and month by month, the family sickened. One by one, they began to succumb.
For see, this grueling sickness did not perish with Yumiko. It lingered pungently within the fields, fastening itself to the Ueda bloodline with such a galled tenaciousness. It was whispered that the young girl who contracted it first swore her family to fall as she had, that the illness would cling to their descendants so long as their name remained. Children thereafter were ushered away from the bridge that connected the fields to Norowarejima, lest they wander too near the place where Yumiko had succumbed. And it was not long before the children of Norowarejima began to whisper of a two-tailed yokai wandering the fields–a tail for the fox that had carried the sickness, and a tail for Yumiko, the girl who sent her family into damnation with it.
Write a quick event based on Japanese pop-up cafes/restaurants/stores:
Tanabata (a traditional festival)
As the last vestiges of summer light swallow the horizon, two lovers are said to meet once more, permitted only this single night each year to cross the sky and find one another beneath the stars. In Norowarejima, this occasion is celebrated with wishes of their own. Inhabitants inscribe their hopes upon tanzaku and hang them from bamboo, every strip carrying a wish for whatever their heart may yearn for.
By nightfall, the streets are lined with bamboo heavy with color, and quiet aspirations of the island’s people. Children weave beneath the decorations while families gather beneath the evening sky, in hopes that tonight’s stars are listening.
How would you write the atmosphere of the image provided below? (Byakuyakoku Shinto Monastery):
Those who enter the Byakuyakoku Shinto Monastery are greeted with a thousand frigid pinpricks, snow adorning the folds of cloth and skin in equal measure, for the cold knows no lenity to this hushed shrine. Still, its visitors are offered refuge in the shrine’s oasis from the incessant churn of the city, where the city holds its breath.
Because today, the shrine is known for its serene seclusion, set among snow-laden trees atop a mountain peak. And no one is turned away from the shrine, as it belongs not to the privileged nor the devout alone, but to all who will seek its refuge, as it has always belonged to the city that shelters it. It is renowned throughout Norowarejima not just for its sanctity, but for the services rendered within its walls and the people who devote themselves to providing them.
More importantly, the monastery offers succor to those burdened by suffering. Norowarejima has long been notorious for misfortune and calamity alike, both serving as kindling for the spirits permeating the city’s shadows. Thus, the Byakuyakoku Shinto Monastery serves a purpose beyond the solace of its people; its presence is a benefit to the island itself, for it is an anchor amid its unrest, keeping balance between the living and spirits from slipping into disarray.
You have been tasked to write an in-lore influential character in the history of Norowarejima. Who and what would you create? Provide some insight on the character!:
This is a passage from a popular recent memoir by a student of Yamada Tomoya, who passed away at age 82.
Professor Tomoya was a finicky character, that man. Despite his somewhat young age at the time, he walked with a perpetual limp, leaning upon a hickory forearm cane that he never seemed to part ways with. The strands upon his head were plentiful but lackluster, perpetually disheveled, and permanent eye bags seemed to spite the flesh beneath his eyes. I remember him refusing to actually answer whenever we asked what had left him in such a state. He would merely dismiss the question with some halfhearted remark and return to whatever he had his veined hands on, thin as pressed leaves.
Our general consensus, however, was that he suffered from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, as one of our classmates had a grandfather who suffered from the same such affliction. Whether that was truly the case, I cannot say. Tomoya was never particularly fond of speaking about himself.
It was never his reputation as a renowned scholar that fascinated Norowarejima, anyway. Though he taught courses in sociology, Professor Tomoya was, by profession and aberrant obsession alike, an anthropologist. He had devoted years to the study of human customs and the peculiar traditions that became the marrow of our ways. He authored several books on his research, though few of us had ever bothered to read them beyond the passages he assigned us in class. His writing was dense, sometimes almost maddeningly so, wandering through generations of oral tradition and obscure cultural practices with a forbearance only a man of his ilk could muster.
More often than not, he spent his office hours hunched behind his desk, and we could never tell what for. He never called his writings books, nor did he let his students see his pages. Sometimes he’d usher us out his uncannily large door, and sometimes he’d simply stare at us through the rim of his spectacles until we students found something (or someone) else to pester.
Many of his books and studies have received awards, none of which I ever bothered to read until his recent passing. It is strange, in retrospect, how little I understood the magnitude of the man sitting behind that desk. Today, his name appears in nearly every academic discussion on the study of human behavior, even on the mainland of Japan, where his work has become a frequent reference among scholars far beyond Norowarejima. I had only known him as Professor Tomoya, and only after his death have I begun to see I’d been sitting in the presence of a man whose work would likely outlive him.
Additional Notes: N/A
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