The butterfly elf

[kareina]

This weekend was my first experience with Live-action-role-playing, or "Lajv" as they say in Sweden. Since I have not yet made the progress in learning Swedish that I would have liked to have done by now, we developed me a character who wasn’t supposed to understand more Swedish than I have already learned. So here follows a description of my character and my understanding of the world in which the game was set:

This is a fantasy setting with elves, humans, orcs, and any number of other traditional creatures. There have been a fair number of games set here already, and the background that I have managed to sort of learn has come into existence through the previous games they have played +/- some unknown amount of off-game story line writing by one or more of the participants.

Apparently in this place the elves all know the "Old Tongue", which is represented In-Game by using English, and they also know the "Common Tongue", which is represented In-Game by using Swedish. The other species all peak the Common Tongue, and some of the individuals in some of the species also understand the Old Tongue. Therefore it was obvious that I would need to play an elf, but not just any elf—I needed to be one who has a reason for not knowing the Common Tongue. Luckily, in the history of this world there was a perfect opening for developing such a character. Just like in Tolkien’s world some of the elves here have once departed for a faraway island and later returned. In this case the island in question is the land of Maromennai, and it is located so far away that it takes 50 years to sail there. Apparently, not too long back by elven standards, about 200 years ago In-Game, most of the elves from the Calaquendi tribe departed for Maromennai, and some have only recently returned. (I gather that the other tribes of elves, some of whom had been at war with the ones who departed, were not overly pleased to have them back).

So we decided I would be Calaquendi, but not one of the ones who moved away so recently, but rather one who grew up in the nice peaceful world of Maromennai, and so never had even heard of the Common Tongue, until those Calaquendi immigrants arrived and we had a bit of problems assimilating them into our local culture—since they had come from a world torn by war and strife, and they didn’t fit well at all into our peaceful culture. Seeing the troubles caused during the transitional period my character, Kaizina, a dancer who is a devotee of the Goddess, heard the call of her Goddess to join the convoy about to sail to Escandarion, the home forest of the Calaquendi in the game world, because the Goddess felt that the ones who stayed behind were in serious need of some music/art/culture/dance to help them, so that if any more should decide to move to Maromennai they wouldn’t be so difficult to assimilate into the local culture.

This mission turned out to be rather more fraught with peril than my poor character could have ever guessed. It turns out that the war/strife/politics of the game world were rather more chaotic than anyone in peaceful Maromennai could have ever guessed, and very soon after our ships arrived and we began making contact with the locals there was a major catastrophe, which involved Escandarion, the home forest of the Calaquendi, being burned to the ground and a huge portal opening up on the site of the former Life Tree. This portal connects this world and some other place, and out of the portal poured forth demons, which all promptly went on a killing spree (though they must occasionally settled for rape, since I met at least one half-demon in game).

I am not really clear if all of that happened In-Game in a game before I started playing, or if that catastrophe is one of the off-game bits that got written into the world to make it more interesting. Either way, our game this weekend started the following winter, when all of the survivors of all the various races (nearly every other group’s home lands were also destroyed) have gathered together into the one area that hadn’t burned—a young forest that has been a “Reservation” where one of the other groups of elves have kept alive a token remnant of the humans they had once been at war with, and would have exterminated if they hadn’t been told by their god(ess?) that they were not permitted to kill all of the humans. At the start of the game representatives of every race and tribe gathered together to have a huge meeting to determine how we are all going to survive, how we will get rid of the demons, and how we can get the portal, which has been temporarily blocked, permanently shut, and how we can regrow the forest and the life tree (needless to say, these goals were held to differing degrees by each of the races In Game). This setting nicely explains why we are all camped in the middle of the woods, rather than being in a city or town or something.



So: how did the weekend itself go? (and how much can I remember sitting down to type this part a full week later?)

Well, we (lord_kjar, linda_linsefors, her mother, who flew up from the far south of Sweden for the event, and I) managed to arrive on site on Thursday 30 minutes after site opened (which is not bad considering that lord_kjar wound up having to go into work for two hours Thursday morning, despite having booked both Thursday and Friday off, so he had rather less time for packing and organizing than he’d hoped to have that day. After arriving on site we got the full impact between the difference between an SCA event and Lajv.

In the SCA it is normal for camping events to take place in an open field, and one can drive right up to the place where one will be putting one’s pavilion, set it up, unload everything into the pavilion before taking the car away. In Lajv one is camping in the forest. In this case it meant walking about 3/4 of a kilometre to get from the car park to where we were camping. In order to make this possible we did things like hang the pavilion (in its new bag, made special for this event with sturdy handles which go fully across the bottom of the bag and up the sides) from some of the pavilion poles so that it could be carried suspended between two people. It took the four of us (with occasional help from others) two to four trips each to carry our gear out to the camp (and we brought way less gear for the four of us than he and I normally do for SCA events!)

Our camp was only for the Caliquendi (and a human student attached to one of our scouts), so there were about ten of us in our camp, most of whom slept in our pavilion (which, in the game belonged to lord_kjar’s character. The rest of us in the Caliquendi camp were scouts who had their bed rolls tucked under single-person lean-tos.

On Thursday we had just enough time after arriving on site to bring out the pavilion, set it up, and set up the bedding for lord_kjar and I before we had to turn around and do the one hour drive back to town so that we could run the first session of the SCA dance practice held at the University. I had advertised to the student choir we sing in, and one of our members forwarded the information to the Exchange Student facebook group, and, as a result we had two students for the class, plus lord_kjar and I. One of the students comes from Italy, where he does 19th century ball dancing, so I also invited him to join the Swedish Folk dancing. The other comes from France, and sings in our choir this term, too. There were a number of SCA folk who said that they would normally have come to dance, but they didn’t feel they had the time/energy to go out to the Lajv to set up, then come back to town, and then return to the event. Ok, so it was kind of hard for us to do, too, but dancing was fun, and it pleased me to stop by home and grab a shower (felt good after all the sweating we had done carrying pavilion, poles, wooden chests, etc. out to the camp) before heading back to site.

We arrived at the pavilion shortly after our camp had started a meeting in the pavilion to introduce their characters to one another (Thursday was for set up and informational meetings, and we were to start the game in character when waking up on Friday morning), so we participated in that, I did my yoga, and we went to sleep around midnight.

Soon after waking the next morning my beloved musician started his morning playing, and I put on my “wings” and begun to dance. The other dancer in our camp did the same. Wings? You ask? Well, things like the dancers use in this video. Showing me this video and saying that she had a vision of the Calaquendi dancers using wings like this when they dance (though with a bit less middle-Eastern flavour to the dance) was what talked me into becoming a Calaquendi in the first place. In my case I managed to adapt my oldest UFO (unfinished object) to make some silk wings.

Back in 1988 I was living with my SCA parents, who had a lot of books. One of their books was a costume book from the 1920’s. Being young and inexperienced (and not really doing the math) I thought the book must be a good source of information, since the 1920’s were closer to the middle ages that we are, and I decided I wanted to make a bliaut as was described in that book, since the picture was pretty. The description of the dress spoke of pleating fabric in to the body and then wearing a fitted coat over it to get the full skirts and the narrow waist. Therefore, when my SCA parents gifted me with 11 yards of a heavenly midnight blue silk fabric I started sewing my understanding of that description. For the body I sewed two fabric widths together (the selvage edge was very narrow so I was able to do a whip stitch over it with very tiny stitches and then open it up to lay flat with no overlap of fabric at all) and then sewed it shut into a tube. To that I attached the long angel wing sleeves, which I pleated tight over the upper arms and left the rest hanging.

When I was nearly done with all of the pleating (but before I had hemmed the dress) an article came out in the Tournaments Illuminated (the SCA quarterly journal that contains articles of general interest) discussing the bliaut and how the interpretation in 1920’s costume book was probably totally wrong, and why, and presenting the author’s opinion of how it was much more likely to have been made. This kind of discouraged me, and I set the unfinished dress aside to work on later. Every so often in the years (decades!) since I have taken it out, fondled the lovely fabric, and put it back into its bag. I have considered taking it apart and re-making it into a bliaut using a more modern interpretation of how they are made, but have never gotten around to it.

So, when I saw my friend’s wings before this event I suddenly got inspired—why buy commercially made wings out of polyester when I can have homemade ones of midnight blue silk? So I opened up only the center seam of the UFO, then hemmed the bottom and sewed channels into the bottom part of the front opening into which I slid slender plastic tubes as handles. To wear the wings I throw the part that had been sleeves over my shoulders, then cross them over my body, wrap the ends around my waist, and tie them as a belt. Then I can grab the sticks and when I spin and dance the silk flutters beautifully around me. This is ever so much more comfortable than my friend’s wings, which is meant to attach to a collar around your neck (instead she pins that part to the mantle of her hood).

After our morning warm-up dance and music she, I, and our musician wandered off to some of the other camps to “spread the goddesses music” to others, and we had much fun doing so. There were at least six distinct camps at the event, each of which had a pavilion or four and some unknown number of people living in them. On this morning we made it to several of them, and encourage people to dance with us. One of the camps, where the culture and costume is (at least partially) inspired by real world gypsies, they did come out and dance enthusiastically, but other races were much more reserved and stern looking as they stubbornly didn’t dance.

After dancing and visiting with people in other camps (and being slightly frustrated that I couldn’t go hug some friends who live far away and I hadn’t seen in months because my character didn’t know their characters, and they were playing races who would have no reason to appreciate a random elf coming up to hug them) we wandered back to camp on time for lunch (cooked, as were all meals, over open fire).

Another huge difference between SCA events and Lajv: At SCA camping events if there are no buildings with plumbing available they organizers bring in commercial portable toilets, and a truck comes around each day to empty them. Here each camp dug its own toilet pit. Ours was dug between a few trees, and some spare rope used to tie a log to the tree trunks, so that we could sort of sit down over the pit, rather than needing to squat. They also wrapped a green plastic tarp around the tree trunks surrounding our pit so that one couldn’t see into it from a distance (this in addition to having that set of trees surrounded by dense vegetation, so there would have been a fair bit of privacy without the tarp). We had the toilet paper hanging from more rope, and a plastic bag over it to keep it dry when it rained (which it didn’t do till Sunday). I didn’t see the other camps toilet pits, so I don’t know what they did.

The rest of Friday during the day we hung out in camp and got to know the other Calaquendi, and wandered a bit more sharing music and dance with the other camps. Friday evening, around sunset, was the big meeting of all of the people, to discuss the problems we all share with the common threat of the daemons and how we will all survive, etc. The email I got before the game explained to me that, of course, people want a leader to be named to govern the combined races to ensure our common survival, and that we Calaquendi are agreed that the ruler of all should be the King of the Calaquendi (who wasn’t actually going to be at the meeting). It also said that the King had told me, personally, that he didn’t actually want the job of ruling everyone, that he would rather devote his energy to restoring the forest that had been burned down.

During the day on Friday the other Calaquendi asked me if I would be the spokesperson for our camp, since I was second oldest in the group (my character was 7000 years old, the eldest was 10,000, and the others were youngsters in the 200 to 700 year old range) and the oldest was still grieving for the recent death of his wife. I agreed to be the spokesperson, and lord_kjar’s character agreed to be my councillor and translator at the meeting (every group was to send two people to the meeting: a speaker and councillor).
Of course, neither I nor my character is very good at understanding the “common tongue”, so I could only follow bits of what the other people at the meeting were saying, and lord_kjar is not gifted in the art of translation, which didn’t help me follow all that well. However, after a bit of hearing the others talk about war topics I interrupted and gave them a passionate speech about the importance of peace and how my home island has known peace for many, many thousands of years, and how I had only ever known peace in the full 7000 years I had lived, and encouraged them to become more peaceful. I very deliberately did the full speech in one go, without giving my translator time to translate short bits while he could remember them, and instead left him to try to paraphrase the bits he could remember, which he sort of managed to do.

After that the rest of them returned to speaking, and one of the spokespeople for one of the other groups stormed out of the meeting (I still have no idea why, since I couldn’t follow what was being said at the time) and I got bored. Eventually the meeting ended and people returned to their own camps. I gathered that we were meant to discuss things amongst our camps and there would be another meeting the next evening. However, after all of that in-game political stuff (and not understanding most of it), I was very tired, so I went to bed at only 21:00 while people sat outside my pavilion and chatted by firelight late into the night.


Saturday morning was much like Friday, with dancing in camp, fire-cooked porridge and hard boiled eggs for breakfast, wandering to other camps to dance for them, and then my character decided that since the goddess had so obviously decreed now to be the time of berry harvest, I would accede to her wishes, and I took a bucket up the hill behind our camp to pick blueberries. I managed to work my way slowly half way up the hill (and half-filled my bucket) before getting quite hungry for something more substantial than blueberries, so I returned to camp and enjoyed lunch with the other Calaquendi before returning to the hillside, where I managed to pick (and eat) my way fully to the top of the hill (from which there were lovely views of the forest in all direction, and especially lovely views of the rock cliffs to the west of where we were camped).

After dinner we gathered once again for meeting, but this time I got to be the councillor and one of our scouts was the spokesperson for our group, and lord_kjar got to stand behind me and translate. He did a much better job being only a translator instead of also needing to pay attention to what was being said, and as a result I followed a bit more of the meeting, though still nowhere near all of it. During this meeting the issue of who should rule all of the people was finally raised. When it was my spokesperson turned to me and said “It should be our king, right? I thought for a moment about the fact that he had told me that he didn’t want the job, remembered the old saying about how those who want power can’t be trusted with it, decided that since he didn’t want the job that meant I could trust him to do it without becoming corrupt, so I replied “yes”.

That meeting included one highlight: The spokesperson for one of the groups had been dominating the conversation, and the chairman of the meeting (one of the Neutral Mages, who happens to also be a Calaquendi) told her that it was the turn of another group to speak now, and she cast him a Look and said that she was speaking now, and kept going. I heard after the event from a friend in her camp that they had been having some internal politics with some people saying that she should be their Jarl, and others saying that it should be someone else. However, when she managed to keep control of the meeting despite the wishes of the chairman everyone in her camp relaxed—they all understood that, yes, this woman is, indeed, strong enough to be their Jarl. Even I, with my limited understanding of Swedish, saw and understood her dismissal of the chairman!

Just as with the day before, when the meeting ended I was very, very tired, and so went to bed around 22:00 while everyone else in my camp went over to the human’s camp to party. They didn’t come home till around 2:00 in the morning, but I needed the sleep. I could have gotten up to go join them when I did my midnight pee run, but since I didn’t actually know where the human camp was I opted to just go right back to sleep, which was probably sensible.


Sunday morning started like the others, with breakfast and dancing in both our camp and other camps, but then when the others went down to the meeting (which was scheduled for early in the day), I remained in camp with our druid (linda_linsefors’s mother, who was one of us Calaquendi and camped in the pavilion. linda_linsefors, on the other hand, played her Sigram (another type of elf—they tend to be much grimmer and more war like than the Calaquendi) character and so was in another camp) to cook lunch for everyone (which was the first time all weekend I had done any cooking, which is not surprising—another difference between my SCA experience and Lajv—I normally pre-cook food and bring it all ready to eat at a moment’s notice—I never cook on site) as an excuse to not attend another meeting I wouldn’t understand.

Around the time that the soup was cooked and we took it off the fire to keep till everyone else was ready (and I ate a bowlful to test it) we heard a shout from the meeting area, but it was just far enough away (about half a kilometre) that I couldn’t tell if it was joyful or disappointed, or war like or what). Shortly thereafter lord_kjar ran back to camp to tell us that the event was officially over and that we should come join the group photo, so we did (yet another difference between Lajv and SCA—there were zero cameras during the event—no one’s characters know about them!)

It was such a relief to finally be able to hug friends that I had seen at a distance all weekend but had no in-game reason to talk to their characters! So many people came up to me and told me that it was “so hard to not understand you”—they had been playing people who couldn’t speak the old tongue, and so while the player was fluent in English, their character couldn’t understand. I on the other hand, had no difficulties at all pretending to not understand everything, since, actually, I didn’t! One person said that during my speech at the first meeting his character wanted to make a comment to the person he was standing next to in response to something I had said, but then he remembered that his character couldn’t understand, so he was forced to wait till my translator spoke, and then the translator didn’t mention that part!

I am told that the humans call each of us Caliquendi dancers "butterfly elf". This made me smile. I was also told that my character has been chosen to be the Calaquendi representative to the new council that will be governing everyone while we are trying to rebuild enough places for all of the races to live. Gee, you miss one meeting, and they seriously punish you...

After lots of hugs and group photos and visiting with old friends and chatting out of character with new ones from the weekend we returned to camp for lunch and packing up. It had rained that morning, so I was content to let the pavilion stay up as long as possible to let it dry a little, but even so, it was MUCH heavier to carry out than it was to carry in. We managed to carry everything back and get it loaded into the rental trailer around 17:30 and then visited with others for a bit before finally driving to the nearest town, where we joined lots of others from the event at the pizza place. (The restaurant had nothing on the menu I recognized as food, so I grabbed some cheese and an orange from our cooler, and called that dinner.)

By the time we finally got home that night sun had set and the grass was wet with dew (plus or minus rain?), so we spread the wet pavilion out in the floor of the shed for the night and carried everything else into the house.



We set up the pavilion in our yard to dry Monday evening after work and a local friend, who lives in an apartment, came over to do the same with theirs. However, they accidently left their poles at home, so instead we hung it from the rafters inside of our shed to dry there—out of the sun, but neither would it get rained on whilst drying.

Tuesday we had choir, Wednesday I went to dinner with the teacher of the short course that I had arranged for this week for work (and while I was out they took down and put away the pavilion), Thursday was SCA sewing night, and tonight lord_kjar had a work party to attend, so I am finally making time to type up all of the above (well, the part about the history of the world I wrote on Monday, the rest was today). No doubt I have forgotten much that could have been included, but this is already long enough (seven pages in Word) so I had probably better just post it…