User:Silkentresses

My official pic when I was with the Knights Templar... Look at this beast I found while wandering in the decimated areas of Malton... ;)

My Skills

October 25, 2006

I am good at the womanly skills of caretaking. I know diagnosis and first aid, I can both revive and make revivification syringes and I have a talent for making whatever meager scraps of food we find into a palatable meal. I can also sew and I've been told my hands are adept at most tasks. I have concentrated most of my skills in the areas of caretaking and have not had to develop much in the way of combat skills yet because I belong to a clan of warriors known as the Knights Templar. Although there is a thrill in the fight even for me, my feminine nature leans more to healing and comforting those who are fresh from the battle...

silken

THE SAGA

My name is Silkentresses.

My story begins many months ago but it is not yet over...

Monday, July 24, 2006

My Adventures in the World of the Undead -- Part 1

This is Silkentresses and this is how my story begins....

I was with my husband, Able Sentinel, passing through the city of Malton when the siege took place. No one knows quite why it happened but one eerie night the dead began to rise up from their graves and take over the city. Many people died horrid deaths. The government rushed to declare a quarantine and locked the city's borders down. Now we are trapped here, trying to survive in a city that is still filled with the undead...

Military patrol the streets and there are scientists here as well conducting experiments... who knows exactly what sort... They have come up with a way to revive those who are attacked and killed before it is too late... They continue to work tirelessly to find a solution to this nightmare...

Still the undead are everywhere... no one is safe. It is a struggle to find safe shelter and even when it is safe the zeds (as we call the undead) will often tear it down to try to pull us out into the street...

This is my husband Able's hometown. He brought me back here shortly after we married to show me where he grew up. But what started out as a newlyweds' adventure soon turned into a nightmare.

I have not seen my husband now in weeks. Feeling as passionate as he does about his hometown he joined the Malton Police Department and went off to train to fight for Malton's ultimate liberation... He left while I was sleeping, leaving me only a note... I miss the comfort of his presence and how much safer I felt just feeling him near.

Since then I have been trying to survive on my own but this city is unkind.... I have already died 5 times at the hands of the zeds (thank God for the revivication clinics run by the scientists) and then one night I was murdered by another survivor... a human survivor.... I shall tell that story soon enough but for now I am not strong enough to recount that night...

At first my days were lonely since my husband left. I dared not wander much out into the daylight because I was weak... the other survivors say it will take time to build my strength. I made short trips outside to search for supplies and tried to be in each day by nightfall to find a corner I could curl up in. Sleeping is cold and lonely without the warmth of my husband's body nearby... I miss the feel of him in my bed... even if that bed is only a cold and dark corner of a warehouse...

Most nights I am in buildings with other survivors.... mostly all men. There seem to be very few female survivors in Malton. Some got out with their children before the borders were locked down, others died before the revivifcation clinics were set up I suppose and were never brought back from the legions of the undead. I do know that I see a lot of sadness in the men's eyes here... And of course as in any place where women are conspicuously absent, there is a hardness and coldness present too... Yet they go on fighting and sometimes I wonder what for...

In the last few days I had the good fortune to make contact with a group that calls themselves the The Bounty Hunters. I believe one of them noticed I was a female alone in Malton and how often I was falling prey to the zeds. One of their members was passing through on a mission and said that I would be offered protection if I would travel to their section of the city. Their leader is a man who goes by the nick of Zero. I was told there is a statue to him in Yagoton for killing a famous Pk'er there (what the survivors call other survivors who prey on humans) in that district. His heart seemed to soften when I told him of my plight on finally reaching Yagoton for even in my efforts to get to his neighbourhood I was handicapped by my inability to get into the safer buildings along the route... therefore being left at the mercy of the zeds in the streets each night... sleeping in alleyways, in unprotected buildings...dieing on an nightly basis and then asking for my life back at whatever revivification clinic I could find in the morning. What a life for a young woman....

There are other good men I have met along the route to Yagoton... JD, Aquitaine, GIJoe, Matt, UndrCvr, Aaron Gosling, Owen Coyle... It seems to me that in such a brutal world as this one that I don't know how goodness survives and yet it does... And now for the first time since my husband left for training, I am encouraged that I might find a way to survive after all...

Tomorrow they have a plan for me.... But tonight... tonight I die again....

THE REALITY...

And now a reality installment on playing the game as a female....

Sunday, July 30,2006

Being a Woman in the High Testosterone World of Male Gaming ;)

I thought I would write a bit about a different type of game adventure I am having... Only this one doesn't take place just within the confines of the acutal game itself. No this one includes even the "oc" (out of character) interactions with other game players.... male game players.

I've always known that gaming was a BIG male preoccupation, I think most girls would agree with me there. Through the years more and more girls have gotten involved though. Heck I remember even when the men used to vastly outnumber the girls on the electronic bulletin boards ("bbs's").... I was in that minority back then. There were like maybe 15 guys for every girl on a BBS...sometimes more.... Until bbsing became more of a unisex leisure activity....

So when I joined the online gaming world I'm in now (thank you to my guy RiP who wanted me to participate with him,) I just sort of assumed that it was also very much a unisex environment. I was wrong apparently. I've since found out that it's largely male still.... Yes there are females in the game but many of the men feel that the "females" are often only men pretending to be females. Even then, there aren't nearly as many females it seems as there are males in the gaming world....

Hence when I joined a yahoo group for the game I am playing, it turned out that there only seemed to be a couple of us females who were active in the group (and the other was a lot less active than me.) Being the talkative, prolific kind of girl I am (just ask my guy lol) I immediately got involved in conversation and generated more..... Now some of the members thought this was much needed new blood and an infusion of life into the group whose conversations had been steadily declining since the inception of the group last year. Others began to protest that the normally pretty quiet group was having too much conversation now...

As things began to heat up with those who protested my talkativeness (hey I'm a chick, I need to talk ;) lol) one of the members (I'll call him "CB") who had taken a particular disliking to me figured out when my character would be sleeping in the game (meaning I was not active and had run out of "action points" to do anything) and sought out my location in the game, entered the building and made some threats about how he was going to sexually assault or rape my character while no one was around to see or help me... My husband in the game had been separated from me physically for some time so my character was used to travelling alone. But luckily for me I had another gaming friend (Bobandabit) in the same building with me who stepped up to the plate and put an end to that... Still I was pretty shocked... I never saw that coming... Kill me yes, lots of killing characters in the game, but I never expected to have someone who disliked me seek my character out and threaten rape just to cause some sort of humliation or perhaps intimidate me off of a gaming list...

I in turn let the group know what had happened and what ensued was a lot of outrage from some of the more principled guys in the group who also found CB's actions to be a little outrageous. There was written exchange between many members, warning CB what was going to happen to his character if he made any kind of sexual threats in the game again... He of course responded with venom...

Later that night he sought my character out again, while she was sleeping, and murdered her in her sleep (what they refer to as "PK'ing" -- a frowned upon but more common activity in the game and one that gets you put on a PKing list for eventual execution by "bounty hunters" who seek the offenders out ....)

I again reported what CB had come back to the scene to do... This time he was told his character would be hunted down and killed by other members of the group for the 2 offences he committed.... He of course again responded with venom but also gave a very political type speech about how we misinterpreted his very sexually tinged remarks earlier on because of our "dirty minds." lol ....

That has been one of the big experiences I have had so far in the world of male gaming.... It's not all bad though! After all, yes I had one man who crossed a line but at the same time I had many men in the group who stood up and said STOP. I think that's pretty darn good because after all, I could've become toast had they all decided to have a little fun with a female in the game..... I'm glad that all but one f them took the higher road. :)

What other things have I experienced as a female playing in a male-dominated environment? A lot of help, a lot of males offering assistance and a protective presence in the game ... the kind that a big brother would offer.... :) Being checked on and rescued at every call for help and even when I don't call for it... being accompanied throughout by other players who want to see me prosper in the game. :) Some were even so concerned for my character's safety the night of the threats that they stayed with me in the building, risking their own characters getting killed... some have stayed with me ever since for the most part.

To all my "big brothers" in the game I thank you for giving me such a good experience in the male gaming world even if there are people out there like CB that I still have to watch out for.... Don't worry, we'll give him his just desserts eventually, we have it all planned, right guys? lol... ;)

silken :)