Character Profiles

Character Profile – Morviah Hlaalu

Kris Takahashi Character Profiles No Comments

Behind the icy veneer, in the privacy of our bedrooms and in our most intimate of thoughts, all mortals turn to those emotions that are timeless.
– Morviah Hlaalu

I’m a sucker for old timey movies.  Not the movies themselves – I would rather french kiss a werecroc than sit through two hours of prehistoric cinema – but the idea of the classic film.  The black and white aesthetic.  Film noir cool.  The leading man with a cigarette in one hand, a shot of whiskey in the other, and a dame on his lap reading him the news.

I’m a sucker for those old romances.   That high society class.  Grace Kelly.  Lauren Bacall.  I’m a sucker for Ingrid Bergman, leaning over a table with those glassy eyes, imploring the piano man to play it again.  Play “As Time Goes By.”  Part of me wonders if Sam should just say, “Fuck you, Miss Ilsa, I play what I want,” but the other part of me gets completely sucked in.

Morviah Hlaalu was written in one of the self-deluded dream fevers where my entire mental state was locked in the 1940s.  I had Ingrid Bergman in my head and Dooley Wilson in my ears, and while it was an era full of war and turmoil and hills of beans that didn’t amount to anything, the fundamental things would outlast all of them.  Those are the things that mattered.


Morviah’s story is about love in a time of war.  It’s about two people finding each other and the world conspiring to keep them apart.

It couldn’t have happened anywhere other than Windhelm.   The atmosphere of the city is cold and bleak.  The Nord/Dunmer dynamic, and its connection to the racial strife of the 50s and 60s stretches to literally every corner of the city – even the name New Gnisis Cornerclub sounds like a title for a jazz album.  There’s tension, and there’s animosity.  So when Morviah drops a flower and Balrund lifts it off the ground, it’s supposed to mean something.   Somehow, through the cracks of hard, uneven stone, love finds a way to bloom.

Or something like that.  With the story written and Dooley Wilson now having moved into my ear and watching TV on the cushions of my cochlea, the next task was to find an actor.  Most of the existing roster was good, but their voices were relatively young, more Audrey Hepburn than Katharine.  Morviah required a more regal, authoritative voice.   It was by chance, when listening to Lila Paws‘ recording of Anum-La, that she snuck her normal voice into the track, just to announce the line number.  I’d probably corresponded with her for months and listened to her do half a dozen characters prior to that, and it wasn’t until then that I actually heard her real voice.

It was as if she was there, giving me that look, asking me to play that song.  A man waits his entire life to see that look, but thankfully, I didn’t have to wait that long.

Character Profile – Relic

Kris Takahashi Character Profiles 6 Comments

When Jay33721 approached me with an idea for a droid powered by a black soul gem, I had my doubts. Not in the validity of the idea, the authenticity of the voice or any other of the eleven flavors of awesome he provided, but it needed a writer to make it an even dozen. I didn’t know jack shit about computers. When a voice actor’s computer got stricken with a virus, I told her to stick a Tylenol in the USB slot and check its temperature in the morning.

Fortunately, about a week later Roarian was getting involved in doing some scripting for the mod. As a programmer with enough fanfiction to build a bridge to Mars, it seemed like a good match, and it was. When I got the script, I realized just how much my pathetic modding skills were limiting my NPCs. At the time, I didn’t even know how to condition for race, and Roarian was accounting for race, sex, class, and what color tunic the player liked to wear on Loredas mornings.

Not to mention as a programmer, Roarian could involve the player in ways my monkey brain could only dream of. With Relic, Roarian was able to devise a quest that centered around  three separate personalities – good, evil, and damaged. Taking this idea further, Jay used his editing skills to make three separate voice types, with the damaged one stuttering to emphasize its brokenness. Moreover, the player’s ability to use Dwarven smithing would factor into the result, as well as the player’s moral alignment. Yet the most brilliant aspect Roarian included was adding the Briarheart script to Relic’s soul gem, which meant stealing it would strip it of its very life force.  When I tested it and the droid crumbled to the floor, I had to pinch myself to keep from squealing like a little girl.

As an editor, most of the script was beyond my knowledge, and that’s a good thing.  Subroutines? I don’t even know what a subroutine is. I diversified some of the player questions, but for the most part left everything as is. The one thing I did feel needed to be changed, however, was a single word.

Meatbag.

Roarian included it as an homage to the great HK-47. Although I had some concern that people would consider Relic an imitation, given our droid had 3 distinct personalities, any argument that the two were identical would be specious. My larger concern was with the term “meatbag” itself. After all, when HK-47 used the term repeatedly, he didn’t sound like a droid, at least not to me. He sounded like a human being pretending to be a droid.  That distinction is important.

Human beings are very visual people. Outwardly, all we see is the flesh and flab. That’s why we think a robot would mock our inherent softness, our distinct lack of metal. Except there’s one problem with that. The actual composition of human beings is roughly about 60-70% water. Not flesh, not fat, but water. A robot would not look at the math and call us bags of meat. A real robot would not make such a terrible miscalculation.

Hence, Relic wouldn’t either.  Roarian made the slight alteration, and with that, our metal maybe-monster was born.