Friddriv Alav

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[seth ghibta]

Friddriv Alav

Categorization: people> scholars> Friddriv Alav, researcher

Overview:
Friddriv Alav spurned the riches of his family and rejected his noble Avennorian roots to pursue his consuming fascination with shellfish, and all manner of mollusc life. His many writings and illustrations belie a meticulous approach to his research, as well as a reckless disregard for his own health and welfare. It appears that the entirety of his relatively short life (1636-1667 a.S) was consumed by his love of aquatic gastropods, and his writings on creatures such as the gnacker, the parasitic limpet, and the ugling are key to our understanding thereof. Sadly, his interest in the world did not extend to creatures possessed of more than one foot, and so his brine-spattered journals and an extensive collection of seashells are almost all that is known of Alav. The information in this entry is taken mostly from said writings, as well as from interviews with the few people who claim to have known him. The author hopes the reader will forgive any element of speculation or educated guessing that is required to give a coherent picture from the fragmentary, often bizarre known facts.

Appearance:
Due to his almost hermit-like habits, very few people living now can describe with any certainty Friddriv Alav as he was in person. His sister, the now Lady Fjatha Fjorian-Alav, describes him as a “clumsy, round-faced child; it was continually pointed out how childish he looked next to me, though I was two years his junior. But then I always did have an advantage over him in maturity of looks, and they say girls grow up faster than boys, don’t they? They used to say I bore myself like a grand countess, while he walked like a frog, it was so funny to tease him about it – he would puff up quite hilariously! But I did love him, of course I loved him, how dare you say I didn’t! You’re making things up! I will not have purveyors of fiction in this house!” [The interview was here curtailed, as the author was called away by entirely unrelated matters.]

In search of individuals who had known the adult Friddriv, we had to stoop so low as to trawl the seediest taverns of Ciosa, where we met an artist calling himself Terfistan Snorsk, who claims to have known Alav throughout some of his most productive years. The friendship (if one could call it that, for Alav seems not to have been a naturally friendly person) apparently grew from Snorsk’s allowing Alav to pay for his drinks, in return for a sympathetic ear to the young researcher’s theories of “mollusc philosophy”, and Terfistan even claims to have travelled with Alav for some years. As well as providing a handful of ale-splashed sketches, he was able to describe the full-grown Alav; a short, heavy-set man, somewhat flabby and very pale in complexion. With only small external ears, fair hair and skin, he had the looks of typical Avennorian nobility, at least in theory, but without the strong build or proud bearing of such.

Friddriv is reputed to have been perpetually stooped, from pacing beaches in his work, with bent back and inclined head, so that the back of his neck was often burned bright red by the injera’s heat. Certain sailors and dockworkers of Ciosa recall a crouching figure in grubby shirtsleeves and britches soaked to the hip, who could be seen wandering like a lost taenish along the shores of Ciosa, or muttering to himself in the fish-market. He avowedly talked in a hushed, hurried voice with a strong Avennorian accent, in the manner of one more accustomed to talking to himself than to others.

Personality:
Again, Alav’s reclusive habits mean that relatively little is known of his personality. His writings, though, reveal a dedicated analytical mind, obsessed with aquatic molluscs and passionate in the espousal of his theories about them. He was clearly a highly intelligent, if very shy young man, uncomfortable in the high society into which he was born, and fascinated by the life he could find on the beaches where he played as a child. This obsession seems to have taken an increasing turn towards madness in the latter years of his life, his eccentricities and hermit-like reclusiveness fuelling a downward spiral that seems ultimately to have caused his death. His landlady, a Madam Hreirek, described how his research projects became ever more elaborate, until the smell of rancid fish, brine and gnacker glue, together with repeated failure to pay his rent, caused her to intervene. On doing so, she was horrified with what she found, as she says:

“By Baveras, I never saw nothing so bad – deplorable, deplorable it was. Papers everywhere, with all sorts spilt on them anyhow, that vile glue he were always making sticking everything together, you could scarce lift your feet from the floor. And buckets of dead fish and kraken and the like, the smell would have felled a Baneg bull! Spoiled food and dirty laundry everywhere, and all, and him sprawled in that pit he called a bed, looking like he hadn’t stirred for days. Could be he hadn’t, I’ll warrant, given what I saw when I managed to rouse the boy – scalybugs all over! Well, of course I nipped round a few of the neighbours straight away, we had him out and burnt all that mess, but you could tell he were far gone – the way he screamed, all over a few sheets of paper! Well, he moved away after that, and I’m not surprised he didn’t last long. Never learnt to look after himself. If his old dad hadn’t stopped by to pay his back rent once in a while I’d have been shot of him long ago. Good sort, the old lord Alav, a real shame his son never did him justice.”
>Madam Hreirek, Avennorian landlady.

Indeed, after the catastrophic loss of the vast majority of his research, Alav seems to have become paranoid and delusional to the extent that he would allow no-one into his quarters, and stepped out only to conduct field research and to drink, if he managed to scrape together enough money.

At this point he seemed to have formed an idea of molluscs as a greater intelligence or higher state of being than the so called sentient races had achieved, and it was this unfortunate delusion, supported by visions he saw in his attempts to research the ugling, that led to the fatal mistake of allowing a parasitic limpet to bore into his leg. Though he did remove the mollusc soon after allowing it to bite, his subsequent guilt at having killed the creature prevented him from seeing a healer, and the wound soon became infected, leading to his death by blood poisoning. An unsettling first-hand account of the experience can be found at the close of Alav’s great unfinished work “Philosophie of the Molluske Race.”

Biography:

1636- Bright start – Friddriv Alav is born the first child of Sebrid and Loff Alav, a wealthy glue-merchant family of noble heritage and good repute throughout Ciosa. The infant Friddriv is much admired for his reduced ears, shock of straw-blonde hair and large pale blue eyes.

1634-9- The Family expands – Friddriv’s sister Fjatha, and two brothers Lieloff and Sjhen, are born. By the time his youngest brother Sjhen is born the shy, awkward nature of the four-year-old Friddriv is beginning to be remarked upon, and sets him apart from his more sociable siblings.

1647- A childhood discovery –The gnacker-harvesters of Ciosa’s shoreline find themselves often accompanied by the eleven-year-old Friddriv, who reputedly loved nothing more than to play on the beaches, searching for monsters under stones, and often has to be fetched back home by servants or his younger brothers.

1650 – An unwilling apprentice – At the age of fourteen, Loff Alav makes his son Friddriv an official apprentice to his business producing and selling gnacker-glue. There are indications that this early apprenticeship is a last ditch attempt to interest the heir to the family in business, as it has by now become clear that he is socially too awkward and shy to live up to the family’s reputation in other areas. Alav shows initial promise, coming up with some novel ideas for improving the receipt for the Alav glue, but is discouraged when his father declines to change his methods, wary that altering a tried and tested method will unsettle some of his oldest and best buyers.

1651 – Disgraced - After only six months as an apprentice, Friddriv leaves in disgrace after an alleged tussle with a clerk, who was taunting him for his shyness in front of girls. According to the records of the Ciosan city guard, he pushed the clerk into a vat of gnacker glue, and ran away, swearing never to return. He is caught by the watch later that day, trying to stow away on a fishing boat, and after a night in the cells is released when his father grudgingly posts bail.

1651–3 – A humble living- After turning away from his family, Friddriv goes back to the shores of Ciosa to earn his living, after several failed attempts to gain employment on a ship (there are rumours that his father paid captains not to accept him so as to keep his oldest son where he could see him, but more likely he was simply turned away because of his weak constitution and tendency to seasickness). Friddriv becomes a gnacker-picker, making his living harvesting gnackers to sell at market. It is likely he could gain a better price selling them for glue to a merchant such as his father, but his pride prevents that.

1653- A vocation at last? – Friddriv’s evenings and wages from gnacker-collecting are regularly spent at the Ragged Net inn, where he meets Terfistan Snorsk, a struggling artist of much the same age, though far more garrulous demeanour, as Friddriv. Snorsk, drawn to Alav’s company largely because the young man is easy to coax a free tankard or two from, becomes the closest Alav will get to a friend, and after hearing countless theories on molluscs and their ways, encourages him to mount an expedition, to carry out some real research.

1654- Visions of greatness- After saving up for the best part of a year, Alav and Snorsk set out to Marduran, from whence Alav enlists a fishing boat and crew to voyage north west, into the Strait of Kharamm, famed primarily for proximity to the drake-haunted Nightfog cliffs, but more importantly to Alav, also as one of the best places to encounter strange, hallucination-inducing molluscs known as uglings. Alav’s endeavours to capture and study the creatures are met with continual disappointment, as the fishermen on board think him mad to want close contact with such a creature. However, despite failing to study one at close quarters, Alav is fortunate enough to experience an ugling dream. The dream features a parasitic limpet, which he allows to feed on his own flesh, and acts as a great encouragement to the budding researcher.

1654-63 – The adventuring years – Alav’s whereabouts become hard to trace in this period, as he seems to have travelled a great deal, in search of rare and unusual molluscs to record. The accounts of Snorsk, who accompanies him on some of his travels (though usually only as far as the last inn, where he stays “to maintain a base camp”) are rather jumbled, but point to Alav visiting areas as far flung as the Icelands coast, where he studies burning sea-slugs, the Noarian caves of Tarannoar, and even a brief excursion to the Scattershand Shoals, purportedly to study the fabled shark-eating razorshell, though it is cut short by a quarrel, in which Snorsk takes off and leaves Alav without enough funds to continue. Alav’s notes – or those which survive – bear testament to an astonishing outburst of productivity, and his studies not only of the rarer molluscs but of everything, both aquatic and terrestrial (as well as, in the case of the Thaelon flying snail, airborne) that caught his interest are among the most profound and perceptive   to date.

1664-5 – Return to the gnacker – Penniless after his long travels, and still unused to supporting himself, Alav is forced to return to Ciosa. By this time his father has long resigned himself to Friddriv’s chosen path, and with Lieloff’s resounding success as the new head of the family business, and Fjatha’s highly prominent marriage to another wealthy merchant’s son, he feels no great chagrin at having to pay for Alav’s rent and living expenses. Friddriv’s writings, however, suggest he saw this as a terrible humiliation, and he cuts off relations entirely with the rest of his family, though he remains grudgingly accepting of occasional financial aid from his father. At this point the already shy Friddriv becomes increasingly reclusive, and having severed his tentative friendship with Terfistan Snorsk, Alav seems to have buried himself entirely in his work, which focused mainly on the habits of his first passion, the common gnacker. It is probably towards the end of 1665 that Alav begins his last and arguably greatest work, his “Philosophie of the Molluske race.”

1666-7- The vision fulfilled – Around halfway through writing the Philosophie, Alav becomes reclusive to the point of self-isolation. He incurs an infection of dream-lice, and has to be forcibly removed from his quarters. A large proportion of his notes are burnt in the purge that ousts the lice, and whether it is the trauma of losing so much of his precious work, or the lasting effects of the dreamlice, from then on Alav’s sanity begins to vanish altogether. Nonetheless, his account of the experience, and his further writings, including the entirety of his work on parasitic limpets, carried out in a final burst of productivity in the spring of 1667, are shot through with his characteristic clarity of observation, despite occasional glimpses of the troubled, paranoid mind that produced them. After moving to new lodgings, Alav comes into possession of several larval parasitic limpets, and is able to raise them to full size. No doubt remembering the ugling dream of ten years previously, he allows the creature to attach to his flesh, in order to study the effects upon himself. However, the pain this causes is far greater than anticipated, and he is forced to cut the creature out. Three weeks later, he dies of blood poisoning, leaving the “Philosophie of the Molluske Race” unfinished. The fact of his death is not known until the body is discovered by the compendiumist Seth Ghibta, who had come across his writings and hoped to enlist his help in describing the aquatic creatures of Caelereth. His landlady said that he had not been down from his room for nearly a week, but also that this was quite normal, in as much as the term could be applied to Friddriv.

Importance:
The eminent compendiumist Shabakuk Zeborius Anfang once remarked that “If Santharia only had more researchers of Alav’s commitment and courage, our knowledge of Uglings would no doubt long ago have moved beyond the sorry state of fragment and conjecture that we have presented in this report.”

Whilst referring to such an invaluable collection of knowledge as Shabakuk's report on the ugling as being in “a sorry state” is not without its irony, the point stands; Friddriv Alav represented a researcher in the archetypal form, absolutely dedicated to his studies. It is perhaps therefore inevitable that such passion should eventually be overtaken by obsession, but ultimately, given the inestimable worth of his surviving works, it seems we lost a great asset to our understanding of the creatures of the deeps when Friddriv Alav died.

Amongst his many accounts of the habits, appearance and uses of various molluscs and similar creatures, he was the first to record the defense mechanisms of gnackers, a behaviour that indicates far greater intelligence than is usually attributed to these shellfish. His drawings of the mouthparts of parasitic limpets have formed the basis for new kinds of scalpels and saws, of great use among gnomish artificers in need of the most delicate tools. He is purported to have discovered a rare kind of flying snail living in the Thaelon forest (though the nature of his notes suggests that may have been a liquor-induced hallucination, and further expeditions are required to verify his claims) as well as several subspecies of common freshwater and saltwater mollusc.

Among the piles of notes that were found in his room are accounts of visions caused by uglings and dreamlice, making him one of the few people to have experienced both, and sketches of every manner of seashell imaginable, in meticulous detail. Though his field of study was not one invested with great glamour, romance or significance, Alav’s efforts prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is fascination to be found in every facet of the disk, however apparently mundane.

(picture: I was wondering if I could do an ink sketch of Alav, as might be scrawled in some far-flung bar by a mildly sozzled Terfistan Snorsk? It wouldn’t really follow the usual guidelines for compendium pictures, but then Alav is hardly likely to have had a proper portrait done.)

[Drasil Razorfang]

I doubt anyone will have a problem with you creating a researcher, especially if he's already been referenced in your entries.

[Ta`lia of the Seven Jewels]

If you are as good with describing people  as you are with slimy things

Looking forward to your submission!

[Deklitch Hardin]

As a person mod, I wait with baited breath for your person entry, Seth! I'm sure it'll be full of slimy Seth goodness

Dek

Edit: Friddy has been added to the resource list and has been marked as reserved by you, Seth

[Altario Shialt-eck-Gorrin]

Make him a slimy person and you'll be fine.

[seth ghibta]

oh I think he can't help but be a bit slimy. Thanks Dek! I'll get writingthis directly. hopefully this thread'll stop me forgetting.

[Shabakuk Zeborius Anfang]

In execution of my cherished office as People Moderator, let me herewith pronounce that I, also, appro …

Hey, you’ve written the whole blooming entry already!

All right, time for comments, then …

Overview:
Friddriv Alav spurned the riches of his family (say somewhere in this sentence or elsewhere in the overview that it’s a noble Avennorian family that Alav comes from) and rejected his inheritance to pursue his consuming fascination with shellfish, and all manner of mollusc life. His many writings and illustrations belie a meticulous approach to his researches (I think ‘research’, like ‘information’, is a word that hasn’t got a grammatical plural; simply say ‘research’ here?), as well as a reckless disregard for his own health and welfare. It appears that the entirety of his relatively short life (1636-1667 a.S) was consumed by his love of aquatic gastropods, and his writings on creatures such as the gnacker, the parasitic limpet, and the ugling are key to our understanding thereof. Sadly, his interest in the world did not extend to creatures possessed of more than one foot, and so his brine-spattered journals and an extensive collection of seashells are almost all that is known of Alav. The information in this entry is taken mostly from said writings, as well as from interviews with the few people who claim to have known him. The author hopes the reader will forgive any element of speculation or educated guessing that is required to give a coherent picture from the fragmentary, often bizarre known facts.

Appearance:
Due to his almost hermit-like habits, very few people living now can describe with any certainty Friddriv Alav as he was in person. His sister, the now Lady Fjatha Fjorian-Alav, describes him as a “clumsy, round-faced child; it was continually pointed out how childish he looked next to me, though I was two years his junior. But then I always did have an advantage over him in maturity of looks, and they say girls grow up faster than boys, don’t they? They used to say I bore myself lie a grand countess, while he walked like a frog, it was so funny to tease him about it – he would puff up quite hilariously! But I did love him, of course I loved him, how dare you say I didn’t! You’re making things up! I will not have purveyors of fiction in this house!” [The interview was here curtailed, as the author was called away by entirely unrelated matters.]  

Trawling the seedier bars of Ciosa yielded an artist, calling himself Terfistan Snorsk, who apparently would occasionally buy drinks for the hard-up painter, in return for a sympathetic ear to his theories of “mollusc philosophy”, and even travelled with him for some years. (Splendid name for your artist. But as a whole, this sentence is muddled: your “who” grammatically refers to Snorsk, not to Alav. Also, we don’t really know at this point who it is that’s trawling the bars of Ciosa. Maybe say something like: In search of individuals who had known the adult Friddriv, we (or: this researcher?) had to stoop so low as to trawl the seediest bars (taverns?) of Ciosa, where we met …”) Terfistan, as well as providing a handful of ale-splashed sketches, was able to describe the full-grown Alav; a short, heavy-set man, somewhat flabby and very pale in complexion. With only small external ears, fair hair and skin, he had the looks of typical Avennorian nobility, at least in theory, but without the strong build or proud bearing of such.

Friddriv is reputed to have been perpetually stooped, from pacing beaches in his work …with bent back and inclined head, so that the back of his neck … (? – suggestion), with the back of his neck often burned bright red by the injera’s heat. Certain sailors and dockworkers of Ciosa recall a crouching figure in grubby shirtsleeves and britches soaked to the hip, who could be seen pacing like a great gull (when I imagine a great gull, the first thing I think of is not a bird walking along a beach, but a bird flying; also, when gulls walk, they hardly pace, or do they? Is this really the best image here?) along the shores of Ciosa, or muttering to himself in the fish-market. He avowedly talked in a hushed, hurried voice with a strong Avennorian accent, in the manner of one more accustomed to talking to himself than to others.

Personality:
Again, Alav’s reclusive habits mean that relatively little was (better: “is”, I think) known of his personality. His writings, though, reveal a dedicated analytical mind, obsessed with aquatic molluscs and passionate in the espousal of his theories about them. He was clearly a highly intelligent, if very shy young man, uncomfortable in the high society into which he was born, and fascinated by the life he could find on the beaches where he played as a child. This obsession seems to have taken an increasing turn towards madness in the latter years of his life, his eccentricities and hermit-like reclusivity (reclusiveness, or: reclusive habits) fuelling a downward spiral that seems ultimately to have caused his death. His landlady, a Mrs. (is “Mrs” a title or address used in Santharia? I genuinely do not know!) Hreirek, described how his research projects became ever more elaborate, until the smell of rancid fish, brine and gnacker glue, together with repeated failure to pay his rent, caused her to intervene. On doing so, she was horrified with what she found, as she says:

“By Baveras, I never saw nothing so bad – deplorable, deplorable it was. Papers everywhere, with all sorts spilt on them anyhow, that vile glue he were always making sticking everything together, you could scarce lift your feet from the floor. And buckets of dead fish and kraken and the like, the smell would have felled a Baneg bull! Spoiled food and dirty laundry everywhere, and all, and him sprawled in that pit he called a bed, looking like he hadn’t stirred for days. Could be he hadn’t, I’ll warrant, given what I saw when I managed to rouse the boy – scalybugs all over! Well, of course I nipped round a few of the neighbours straight away, we had him out and burnt all that mess, but you could tell he were far gone – the way he screamed, all over a few sheets of paper! Well, he moved away after that, and I’m not surprised he didn’t last long. Never learnt to look after himself. If his old dad hadn’t stopped by to pay his back rent once in a while I’d have been shot of him long ago. Good sort, the old lord Alav, a real shame his son never did him justice.”
>Mrs. Hreirek, Avennorian landlady. (Fantastic passage! If you change “Mrs” above, change it here, too.)

Indeed, after the catastrophic loss of the vast majority of his research, Alav seems to have become paranoid and delusional to the extent that he would allow no-one into his quarters, and stepped out only to conduct field research and to drink, if he managed to scrape together enough money.

At this point he seemed to have formed an idea of molluscs as a greater intelligence or higher state of being than the so called sentient races had achieved, and it was this unfortunate delusion, supported by visions he saw in his attempts to research the ugling, that led to the fatal mistake of allowing a parasitic limpet to bore into his leg. Though he did remove the mollusc soon after allowing it to bite, his subsequent guilt at having killed the creature prevented him from seeing a healer, and the wound soon became infected, leading to his death by blood poisoning. An unsettling first-hand account of the experience can be found at the close of Alav’s great unfinished work “Philosophie of the Molluske Race.”

Biography: (You start the biography by writing in the present tense, but from 1657 you turn to past tense, which you then retain until the end, with a few sprinkles of present tense mixed in. Decide on one tense and use it throughout. I’d say present tense works well, and there’d be less to change, too.)
1636- Bright start – Friddriv Alav is born the first child of Sebrid and Loff Alav, a wealthy Ciosan glue-merchant family of noble heritage and good repute throughout Ciosa. The infant Friddriv was much admired for his reduced ears, shock of straw-blonde hair and large pale blue eyes.

1634-9- The Family expands – Friddriv’s sister Fjatha, and two brothers Lieloff and Sjhen, are born. By the time his youngest brother Sjhen is born the shy, awkward nature of the four-year-old Friddriv is beginning to be remarked upon, and set him apart from his more sociable siblings.

1647- A childhood discovery –The gnacker-harvesters of Ciosa’s shoreline find themselves often accompanied by the eleven-year-old Friddriv, who reputedly loved nothing more than to play on the beaches, searching for monsters under stones, and often had to be fetched back home by servants or his younger brothers.

1650 – An unwilling apprentice – At the age of fourteen, Loff Alav makes his son Friddriv an official apprentice to his business producing and selling gnacker-glue. There are indications that this early apprenticeship is a last ditch attempt to interest the heir to the family in business, as it has by now become clear that he is socially too awkward and shy to live up to the family’s reputation in other areas. Alav shows initial promise, coming up with some novel ideas for improving the receipt for the Alav glue, but I discouraged (gets discouraged?) when his father declines to change his methods, wary that altering a tried and tested method will unsettle some of his oldest and best buyers.

1651 – Disgraced - After only six months as an apprentice, Friddriv leaves in disgrace after an alleged tussle with a clerk, who it appears I’d say delete ‘it appears’. Doesn’t sound good, and it’s clear from the context that this is all second-hand information.) was taunting him for his shyness in front of girls. According to watch records (Be more specific, maybe? “… records of the Ciosan city guard”?) , he pushed the clerk into a vat of gnacker glue, and ran away, swearing never to return. He was caught by the watch later that day, trying to stow away on a fishing boat, and after a night in the cells was released when his father grudgingly posted bail.

1651–6 – A humble living - After turning away from his family, Friddriv goes back to the shore (which shore? The shore near Ciosa?) to earn his living, after several failed attempts to gain employment on a ship (there are rumours that his father paid captains not to accept him so as to keep his oldest son where he could see him, but more likely he was simply turned away because of his weak constitution and tendency to seasickness). Friddriv becomes a gnacker-picker, making his living harvesting gnackers to sell at market. It is likely he could have gained a better price selling them for glue to a merchant such as his father, but his pride prevented that.

1656- A vocation at last? –Friddriv’s evenings and wages from gnacker-collecting are regularly spent at the Ragged Net inn, where he meets Terfistan Snorsk, a struggling artist of much the same age, though far more garrulous demeanour, as Friddriv. Snorsk, drawn to Alav’s company largely because the young man was easy to coax a free pint (Come on, this is not Britain. No pints sold in Ciosa. Tankard? Mug? or two from, becomes the closest Alav will get to a friend, and after his hearing countless theories on molluscs and their ways, encourages him to mount an expedition, to carry out some real research.

1657- Visions of greatness- After saving up for the best part of a year, Alav and Snorsk set out to Marduran, from whence Alav enlisted a fishing boat and crew to voyage north west, into the Strait of Kharamm, famed primarily for proximity to the drake-haunted Nightfog cliffs, but more importantly to Alav, also as one of the best places to encounter strange, hallucination-inducing molluscs known as uglings. Alav’s endeavours to capture and study the creatures were met with continual disappointment, as the fishermen on board thought him mad to want close contact with such a creature. However, despite failing to study one at close quarters, Alav was fortunate enough to experience an ugling dream. The dream featured a parasitic limpet, which he allowed to feed on his own flesh, and was apparently a great encouragement to the budding researcher.

1658-63 – The adventuring years (I like this passage, but I wonder whether five years are not a bit too short to do all the things you report Friddriv to have done in this period of his life. Travel in Santharia takes time. If you don’t want to put the date of his death back, you could move previous dates backwards in time? – Alav’s whereabouts become hard to trace in this period, as he seems to have travelled a great deal, in search of rare and unusual molluscs to record. The accounts of Snorsk, who accompanied him on some of his travels (though usually only as far as the last inn, where he would stay “to maintain a base camp”) are rather jumbled, but point to Alav visiting areas as far flung as the Icelands coast, where he studied burning sea-slugs, the Noarian caves of Tarannoar, and even a brief excursion to the Scattershand Shoals, purportedly to study the fabled shark-eating razorshell, though it was cut short by a quarrel, in which Snorsk took off and left Alav without enough funds to continue. Alav’s notes – or those which survive – bear testament to an astonishing outburst of productivity, and his studies not only of the rarer molluscs but of everything, both aquatic and terrestrial (as well as, in the case of the Thaelon flying snail, airborne) that caught his interest are among the most profound and perceptive  to date.

1664-5 – Return to the gnacker – Penniless after his long travels, and still unused to supporting himself, Alav was forced to return to Ciosa. By this time his father had long resigned himself to Friddriv’s chosen path, and with Lieloff’s resounding success as the new head of the family business, and Fjatha’s highly prominent marriage to another wealthy merchant’s son, he felt no great chagrin at having to pay for Alav’s rent and living expenses. Friddriv’s writings, however, suggest he saw this as a terrible humiliation, and cut off relations entirely with the rest of his family. At this point the already shy Friddriv becomes increasingly reclusive, and having severed his tentative friendship with Terfistan Snorsk, Alav seems to have buried himself entirely in his work, which focused mainly on the habits of his first passion, the common gnacker. It is probably towards the end of 1665 that Alav began his last and arguably greatest work, his “Philosophie of the Molluske race.”

1666-7- The vision fulfilled – Around halfway through writing the Philosophie, Alav’s reclusiveness reaches its height (‘the heights of reclusiveness’? … Hmmm! How about: “… Alav becomes reclusive to the point of self-isolation. He incurs an infection of dream-lice, and has to be …), when he is afflicted with dreamlice, and has to be forcibly removed from his quarters. A large proportion of his notes were burnt in the purge that ousted the lice, and whether it was the trauma of losing so much of his precious work, or the lasting effects of the dreamlice, from then on Alav’s sanity began to vanish altogether. Nonetheless, his account of the experience, and his further writings, including the entirety of his work on parasitic limpets, carried out in a final burst of productivity in the spring of 1667, are shot through with his characteristic clarity of observation, despite occasional glimpses of the troubled, paranoid mind that produced them. After moving to new lodgings, Alav came into possession of several larval parasitic limpets, and was able to raise them to full size. No doubt remembering the ugling dream of ten years previously, he allowed the creature to attach to his flesh, in order to study the effects upon himself. However, the pain this caused was far greater than anticipated, and he was forced to cut the creature out. Three weeks later, he died of blood poisoning, leaving the “Philosophie of the Molluske Race” unfinished. It was two days after that before the body was discovered, by a compendiumist (Who! Tell us! Also, if his body wasn’t discovered for a while after his death, how do we know exactly when he died? Was the discoverer of the body skilled in forensics and could work out the hour of Friddriv’s death?) who had come across his writings and hoped to enlist his help in describing the aquatic creatures of Caelereth.

Importance:
The eminent compendiumist Shabakuk Zeborius Anfang (Charmed!) once remarked that “If Santharia only had more researchers of Alav’s commitment and courage, our knowledge of Uglings would no doubt long ago have moved beyond the sorry state of fragment and conjecture that we have presented in this report.” (*sobs* So true!)

Whilst referring to such an invaluable collection of knowledge as Mr Anfang’s . (“Mr” again. Hmmm. Dek likes to say “Master Anfang”, which tends to embarrass humble old Shabakuk. Maybe a simple “Shabakuk” would suffice?) report on the ugling as being in “a sorry state” is not without its irony, the point stands; Friddriv Alav represented a researcher in the archetypal form, absolutely dedicated to his studies. It is perhaps therefore inevitable that such passion should eventually be overtaken by obsession, but ultimately, given the inestimable worth of his surviving works, it seems we lost a great asset to our understanding of the creatures of the deeps when Friddriv Alav died.

Amongst his many accounts of the habits, appearance and uses of various molluscs and similar creatures, he was the first to record the defense mechanisms of gnackers, a behaviour that indicates far greater intelligence than is usually attributed to these shellfish. His drawings of the mouthparts of parasitic limpets have formed the basis for new kinds of scalpels and saws, of great use among gnomish artificers in need of the most delicate tools. He is purported to have discovered a rare kind of flying snail living in the Thaelon forest (though the nature of his notes suggests that may have been a liquor-induced hallucination, and further expeditions are required to verify his claims) as well as several subspecies of common freshwater and saltwater mollusc. Among the piles of notes that were found in his room are accounts of visions caused by uglings and dreamlice, making him one of the few people to have experienced both, and sketches of every manner of seashell imaginable, in meticulous detail. Though his field of study was not one invested with great glamour, romance or significance, Alav’s efforts prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is fascination to be found in every facet of the disk, however apparently mundane. (That’s a fascinating and elegant summary of Friddriv’s significance!)

(picture: I was wondering if I could do an ink sketch of Alav, as might be scrawled in some far-flung bar by a mildly sozzled Terfistan Snorsk? It wouldn’t really follow the usual guidelines for compendium pictures, but then Alav is hardly likely to have had a proper portrait done.) (I’m all for it! To all who don’t know it yet: Apart from her gift for writing that she is known for on this board, Seth is also an extremely talented artist. Of course, I don’t call any shots as far as guidelines for, and approval of, pictures are concerned.)


All in all: Brilliant! It’s another eloquent entry from you, Seth, and amid the general inventive prose contains some particularly shiny gems, such as the first-person accounts by Friddriv’s sister and Friddriv’s landlady. Moreover, it's a detailed account of a troubled personality, and is flavoursome in its depiction of the relations and conflicts within a noble Avennorian family. Aura!

[Deklitch Hardin]

(“Mr” again. Hmmm. Dek likes to say “Master Anfang”, which tends to embarrass humble old Shabakuk. Maybe a simple “Shabakuk” would suffice?)

I call you 'Master Anfang', out of deep respect for your wisdom, great intelligence, gnomishness and, most importantly, age, Master Anfang. growing up among the Black Butterfly Rovers as I did, i was told to treat my elders with respect, and to my young eyes, there is no one around, who is more worthy of respect in the area of age than yourself, Master Anfang. I do, of course, say all of that to you with the greatest deal of respect that befits a compendiumist as learned as yourself, Master Anfang.

[Ta`lia of the Seven Jewels]

A true Seth entry! 

[Shabakuk Zeborius Anfang]

I call you 'Master Anfang', out of deep respect for your wisdom, great intelligence, gnomishness and, most importantly, age, Master Anfang. growing up among the Black Butterfly Rovers as I did, i was told to treat my elders with respect, and to my young eyes, there is no one around, who is more worthy of respect in the area of age than yourself, Master Anfang.

Calling me senile, are you? You just wait, young whippersnapper. I'll get Valan to lend me his stick!

[seth ghibta]

  Thankyou for comments! sorry about the jumbles in syntax, it was written all in a lump of revision-avoidance. I'll get them fixed as soon as possible, mister master Anfang, milord, yeronner sir. ^w^

[seth ghibta]

aaaand edited. A biit cagey about mentioning Ghibta by name in one of "her own" entries, but in the text of the Philosophie it's heavily hinted that she's come across all his notes and feels she should organise them somehow, so it seemed to fit.

[Deklitch Hardin]

In your quote attributed to his sister, you said the following in part:

They used to say I bore myself lie

I think that you need a 'k' in lie between the i and the e to make it like.

An excellent entry otherwise, Seth ... I have nothing else to add, myself. I'll let Master Anfang read over your corrections for any final thoughts.

Master Anfang: Of course, I'm not calling you senile, you old windbag! I have too much respect for my elders than to do something like that! Of course, as I'm not even 20 summers old yet, you do appear to me to be decidedly ancient ... though not as ancient as Valan, of course.

Dek

[Valan Nonesuch]

*Valan momentarily looms behind Deklitch*

"When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not!"

Two points to make for Seth:

The last paragraph could use a break, probably at "Among the notes." It's a little text heavy as is.

Also, I'd be happy to try to colour your sketch if you'd like.

[seth ghibta]

both corrections made!
as for the picture, I was fooling around with inks today and did this - not sure how well it'd colour, and not even sure this is a final version, as it looks unnervingly like a younger version of one of my lecturers.
still, this is the kind of thing.

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[Altario Shialt-eck-Gorrin]

Last 10 Shouts: Altario Shialt-eck-Gorrin 29 May 2013, 17:07:40 Ughh.   Better hold off, Art.  I've go some editing to do. Altario Shialt-eck-Gorrin 29 May 2013, 15:46:18 Talia !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  *Shakes fist in the air*   Artimidor Federkiel 29 May 2013, 10:03:27 But well, I see you already made an own post - I'll take that one as well then Artimidor Federkiel 29 May 2013, 10:01:15 No, not necessary... Just wanted to make sure that the text you want to integrate is the final version Just leave the rest there! Altario Shialt-eck-Gorrin 28 May 2013, 03:57:46 Do you need me to remove the rest of it?  It was supposed to be a full blown entry, but still gathering facts for the other stuff.  I'll move the stuff to be integrated into its own entry.   Artimidor Federkiel 27 May 2013, 22:46:17 No problem there - are you sure that you've posted the final version? Text on the site is about a year old... Altario Shialt-eck-Gorrin 27 May 2013, 16:59:45 Art, I want to submit my Antislar Overview, Appearence, Territory and People sections for uploading on the next update, please. No rush with what you have going on, however. Artimidor Federkiel 23 May 2013, 17:14:39 If it works, sure! Altario Shialt-eck-Gorrin 23 May 2013, 16:47:05  Art, is this your little way of forcing me to do an entry? Irid alMenie 23 May 2013, 14:01:26 I see the board has been deactivated. Lets hope for a quick solution!

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