Ocera Q&A part 1

This is a document I've had lying around for a while... it's a Q&A I drafted up, with some real questions and I lot I made for myself, concerning my "Ocera suite" as I like to call, it a twinned set of novels, a bunch of a short stories, and a handful of poems and musical compositions revolving mostly around the inhabitants of the fictional planet Ocera and the people they interact with.

Some of you might care about this. Most of you won't. I don't care, I just don't like it collecting dust in my archives, eternally unread anymore.

OCERA


Q: What planet is Ruth from?
A: Some generic fantasy planet.

Q: When was Ruth born?
A: 1718 AD, some time in September. All characters have birth years but she's the only one who I've narrowed it down to the month for.

Q: What was wrong with Harz?
A: He was insane, plain and simple. Specifically, I used sociopathy (antisocial personality disorder) as a springboard. I'd say he's more of a straight-up psychopath however, as sociopaths have an easier time leading normal lives, which isn't something I see him capable of.

Q: What about the voices?
A: Oh, those? Those were outside the scope of his mundane psychosis. He didn't suffer delusions or hallucinations of any sort from his condition. They were both internal and external, and decidedly unnatural, and deliberately invoked by an outside force. HMM.

Q: How does everyone know English if they're not on Earth?
A: BEATS ME. Aka: convenience. Note that it is never referred to as 'English' outside of Earth, however. They call it something else.

Q: What happens after the end of Ocera and before the beginning of How They Met?
A: Dech stays secure in the room for a while to heal once he has control. Then he goes out and kills everyone else who doesn't surrender. He offers them all the chance to stay there under his command, or be killed. Nilah surrenders -- she teaches him the ways of being a biped (including magic, language and sex). Teliah surrenders but Dech decides to be an asshole and test the portal mechanism in the control room by incapacitating her and throwing her through the activated portal without designating an end location. She's trapped in a void/pocket dimension for hundreds of years and eventually breaks free and exacts violent but non-lethal revenge.

Q: What's the purpose of the portal-door?
A: Transporting people and resources from directly inside the building.

Q: Why was it in the same room as the Control Core?
A: Bad writing. Lawl.

Q: Why didn't it have doors?
A: Security. Safety. An airlock. Etc.

Q: Are Dech's actions supposed to be justified with Freudian excuses?
A: Dech did really reprehensible things and was a really evil person for a really long time. He CHOSE not to repent because he didn't want to admit to wrongdoing and humble himself before anyone, not even himself. However, his actions didn't just spring from nowhere. A person IS their past. Without memories, we mean nearly nothing, for there's very little of ourselves without our past to make up a personality or an alignment. Obviously there's more to us than that, if amnesiacs and Alzheimer's patients are an indication; we're not a blank slate, but our selves are not 100% randomly or genetically determined. Our personalities, in a way, are just an on-going reaction we're having to our memories at all times.

Dech would have turned out differently if not for his experiences. All of them would have. But Ruth went through what he did and for a lot longer and never turned evil. There's a strength in her to hold onto her innate "goodness" that Dech lacks. He could not do it. He could not stay strong.

On the opposite spectrum we have Harziyax who had a loving father and never had anything bad happen to him but he was insane and went totally evil anyway. So there's nothing here that dictates who's going to be bad or good in my stories.


SUNSHIELD


Q: Why did Tim go?
A: Because no one else would.

Q: Why didn't he go back?
A: Because he was ashamed and by the time he believed he'd never find Ruth, everyone else he knew was dead anyway.

Q: Why didn't Tim revive Roger?
A: You mean dig up the corpse of his nephew to MAYBE be able to revive him after his sister and parents had already been kidnapped or left town? Both failure and success would be a bad scenario there. He didn't know he could rez anyone at the time anyway. And maybe he couldn't. He got stronger with practice.

Q: What would have happened if he had found her?
A: Then Dech would've been raised in Felton, Tim would've gone to get Ruth's parents, and then stayed home to raise his daughter, and it would've been one nice, big happy family. Oh, and Teliah would've been tortured alone by Igneous for as long as either of them were both alive or until he got bored and killed her, and Richard and Monica may have been killed in the Blitz because they would've still been in London during the wars. And a lot of different people would have been born or not born, killed or not killed. Like all the people Tim revived. They didn't have another holy healer for a long time until Acire was brought in.

Q: Why wasn't Roger in the afterlife?
A: His spirit was haunting his house. Tim met his ghost in that dream, before his usual nightmare took over instead.

Q: What was up with Roger's bedroom? How much of that was Roger's memory, and how much was Tim's?
A: Funny how easily they overlap. Roger's coma was not a dreamless sleep. Harziyax was tormenting the entire town for a month by invading their dreams and injuring them in their sleep.

Q: How is Tim's granddaughter still alive?
A: His daughter Adeena married an elf, Hathel, so their daughter Avanie lives much longer than a human.

Q: Did Tim have PTSD?
A: So very, very much so, yes.

Q: What really happened to him?
A: The 'kavishirsi' individual raped him. Other Theksarsi he ran into tended to just be violent in general. Not ALL of them, but it only takes one to make you racist and paranoid. (It wasn't Harz; he never met Harz.)

Even if none of that happened, he lived in a huge, lightless cave system for 65 years with no human contact whatsoever. That will screw with your head regardless. He's lucky he still remembered how to talk after all that time.

Q: Does Tim know Oceran?
A: Yes. He picked up bits of it while living in the caves and then studied it in secret at the palace, kind of obsessively, because he hated not knowing what the things they said meant. He wouldn't admit he knows it though.

Q: What's up with Igneous?
A: Let's lay out what we know of him: he came to the palace when he was 12, as a student, and never once since has gone back home, had contact with the outside, or even mentioned his life from before. He's a great artist and wizard. He's also a control freak and very sadistic. He's attractive. He sleeps with Kerrigan and Nilah and probably others, and it's usually kinky sub-dom stuff. He mind-raped Tim and constantly threatened and demeaned him, to isolate him. He did this to anyone he didn't like, really. Tim's accusations were basically me speaking through Tim to say those things.

Q: What was Ig doing in the cafeteria that day?
A: I typed that question just so I could point out that Akizu's PoV chapter mentions that not even the Grand Master has the privilege of having food delivered to his bedroom. As soon as Igneous takes over, he goes to the kitchen to order them to deliver his meals to his room. That's why in the Ocera story, his chapter starts off by mentioning he's having breakfast alone. Also no one is allowed to stay in his room overnight even if they had sex. He kicks them out once he's done with them.

Q: Why does Kerrigan sleep with him?
A: She's old, short, kinda overweight, and half her face is covered in horrible scars and she's blind in one eye. She has TERRIBLE self-esteem. It doesn't hurt that Igneous is good-looking and the dude in charge.

Q: Why are all your evil people dark-skinned?
A: Erm, oops. That was unintentional. Okay: Dech I made pale gray at first because it's a creepy, deathly color. His sister I made snow-white because... I dunno. (Note: She's also evil.) I made Harz red because... again I dunno. I didn't know anything about Theksarsi at the time. Finally I decided they're normally red, and Dech and Tel were just anomalies. Nilah is actually not Evil, she looks out for herself. She'll side with whomever's winning at the time, to save her own butt, but she'd rather not get into confrontations with anyone ever. And Igneous is actually based on a Sims 2 character I made in my family, the Stones. Igneous, Pearl, Ruby, Diamond, Emerald, etc. Each one with skin, hair and clothes to match their name. So Ig was black with black clothes. (I also made a Tree family once, and a lot of other silly theme-named families).

Q: Who ruled Felton?
A: They had some kind of democracy and maybe a council of elected officials.

Q: What's up with Pine Basin?
A: Felton was originally not near any other towns. In a RP I'm in, there was a nameless town by a lake that got destroyed, rebuilt and renamed Lakeside. I gave it the pre-destruction name of Pine Basin and decided to retcon it in as being the nearest settlement to Felton. It's where Ruth's parents moved to.

Q: Did they have any more kids?
A: Never.

Q: Did Elesonya ever remarry?
A: She was never in a relationship with anyone but Timber in her entire life. "They were each other's first and only."

Q: So what is the 'Sun'? God?
A: The sun is a giant ball of burning gases. The Sun is a deity which isn't actually the celestial object itself but is fine with the identification as such. The Moon and Stars are lesser deities of a similar nature. Their worship was brought with the Feltonites from their original kingdom. They latched onto the religion more firmly with their rural settlement.

Q: Were there any non-humans in Ruth's time in Felton?
A: Yes, elves mostly, also from their original kingdom. Gnomes, dwarves, centaurs and other things trickled in from elsewhere over the years. It remains primarily human.

Q: Why couldn't Tim summon his sword and armor?
A: The palace had a potent anti-teleport barrier on the entire building, including in-building teleportation, which included summoning and such. The only exception was the portal-door which was 'programmed' into the Control Core as such an exception.

Q: Why didn't we get any Feltonite names until Timber's story?
A: They didn't have names yet. Timber himself didn't exist until the last chapter of Ocera, and only then as Sunshield. It was fitting to leave Ruth's human part of her unnamed and undescribed. Notice she's only described after she's on Ocera, and only Harziyax is described in the Felton chapters. The whole story is kicked off because of the secrecy of names.

Q: Why all the inconsistency in who has the surname Stead or not?
A: Stead is Audrey and Timber's original surname. Audrey's husband forsook whatever his name was to take hers, just like Elesonya took Tim's. Tim was pretty much forced to adopt Sunshield as part of his deal to become a Celestial. It wasn't something he could just be in secret, he had to be branded with it in his very identity. Ellie never used Sunshield because she was just a human and had no divine powers. Adeena used Stead and her husband took on her name as well because his surname was Pickles, so Avanie is also a Stead. Ruth stopped identifying with Stead or Grace once renamed because it was also branded onto her as part of her new species.

Theksarsi have no concept of surnames, tribe names, or anything of the sort. Their gods name them through the mouths of their parents. An extra random name tacked on at the end would seem silly and sacrilegious.

Q: Why did the Sun tell Tim to go fight Dech?
A: It didn't. It was telling him to go to the Control Core since Akizu's death. It wanted Timber to take over the palace. He would've been able, too, if he had the courage to even try. All along, the Sun was merely asking him to show the courage to do the right thing, not back out at the last minute. The Sun has little patience for those too dumb to save themselves. It gives hints and nudges when it feels it's necessary, and when someone steps up to take initiative, it will reward them with power. The Sun, btw, is NOT a strictly LG entity. As an immortal in charge of a realm of death, it has an alien morality compared to our own. Our deaths really mean nothing in the long run, as long as the proper cycle of life and death take place. It's part of why it's favored by farmers and such.

Q: Are Tim and Ruth's transformations supposed to mirror each other?
A: Yes. Both are selected by a powerful being -- one holy, one unholy -- and very painfully transformed into a micro-representation of the "essence" of that being, gaining new powers and/or immunities in the process, a new name, and a very long life.