Nolin in action
Peter Frampton is partly my fault-- I tried to paint a miniature for Kidcthulhu of Nolin a long time ago, and I'm a terrible miniature painter. We joked afterwards about how it looked like an aging rocker--someone too old to be playing the teen hearthrob, but who was trapped in his own legend. (This was after Cadrienne and Arcade had retired and gone on to have "grown up" lives and we teased Kidcthulhu that it was time for Nolin to settle down from the adventuring life and get a haircut and get a real job. Thank goodness he/she didn't listen to us.)
Kidcthulhu, bless her heart, still uses that miniature, and it does look a bit like your painting, if you squint and pretend that it was painted really well by somebody with a lot of talent. The miniature has long hair and looks a bit like Peter Frampton, anyway. Black leather hat and clothes, red leggings, high black boots with deeply folded over cuffs, lute slung across the back, and big black gauntlet gloves, I think. Short black cape with red lining, maybe--I remember KidCthulhu wanted him all in black and I begged her to let me put some color in it. I painted the hair cherry red for the fire because I have no artisitic subtlely--I didn't know how to paint blond flame, and I only had one jar of red acrylic.
So your amazing psychic connection to P'Cat's game is working fine: you correctly identified his miniature surrogate on the battlemap, and your rendition is 1000-fold better. If only I had done a better job of the source material!
So, to try to make up for the false lead, I've been all over the web trying to find a better still for you, but none of the stills captured what I was trying to show, and then I remembered: you're in Berkeley, or close enough to it.
So here's the deal: go take in a House Jacks concert.
Sat. Oct 5 Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse
1111 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA
info: (510) 548-1761
It'd be worth doing anyway.
And the drummer, Wes Carroll, he moves the way Nolin ought to. It doesn't show up in the stills, but I remember we saw him perform in Boston about seven years ago (when he was with Five O'Clock Shadow) and I spent the whole performance thinking, Damn, it's Nolin. Really him.
Except, Nolin doesn't do vocal percussion, of course, and Wes is a god at that. I'm sure Kidcthulhu didn't conciously model anything on him (even though I think they worked in the same office once upon a distant past when he had a day job other than being a musician) but there is something in the eyes, and something in the intensity, and something in the charisma, the proud confidence without arrogance--the audience rapport. The musical precision. The mask between what is out there for the audience and what is held inside for his own private use.
I can't explain it. The physical resemblence is there, too, I think--it wouldn't lead you astray, but it's not the important thing about it.
Nolin has a face you could trust. There’s stuff inside him he may not share, but he’s not hiding anything devious or mean--anything that would be about anyone else. Just hiding stuff from himself, mostly. What’s on the surface is all genuine--he’s never been one for phoniness.
And no matter how folk tease him about his way with the ladies, Cadrienne always thought of him as a “safe date.” He’s too transparent, really, to be up to anything you couldn’t read a mile off. And the anger in him is all directed inward, so even when he loses his temper, he’s never really mad at his friends--only his own inability to make them see reason, impatient to be doing what he thinks is right. Mad at foes is a whole different matter--but even so, his inner tendency towards self destruction is behind a lot of his combat decisions.
Was. All that was before the Phoenix. And Telay.
It’s been so long, and he’s grown so much and I’ve been away--it’s hard for me to say what drives him now. But that was how I knew him then.
And there is something else about Nolin I can't quite explain how to picture--something about being on fire without flaming, without smoldering, without raging inferno-- the way banked coals sleep in their white ashes when the flames have died down and the grill is hot enough to sear meat even though you can't see the fire much. And then suddenly the way fireworks are hot, or roiling vast explosions. And then it all gets banked down again.
Alix was like wildfires--forests and cities burning and leaping, consuming itself in the joy of destruction and power--an accident desperate for an excuse to happen. Tomtom plays with fire for the joy of the thing--like a juggler. Mirata was like the precision of an oxy-acetelyne torch, and Cadrienne gave herself over to that like a willing human sacrifice desperate for immolation. Dylrath lives in a room full of fire by pretending it isn't there at all.
Nolin isn't like any of those.
The fire is inside him like his rage at his father, like the knowledge of his own mistakes, but most of the time he is like a cheerful campfire, a torch, a tame, useful domestic thing. Until it isn't. Until he needs it, and it needs to be let out, and they are one thing. One fast, humongous, white hot flying exploding terrible thing. And then, when it's over, he is himself again with amazing speed. Only Nolin. Sad, funny, lovable, bitter, skeptical, joking, put upon, hard working, charismatic old Nolin.
Does that help?
