January's Featured Thread is The Stinking City!

[Gossamer]

Avari graciously provided us, being last month's winner, a thread to feature this month. The Stinking City For the first featured thread of 2012, I've chosen to feature "The Stinking City," a solo flashback thread by Drayton set in the anarchist city of Sunberth. As a player of a thief character myself, one of the first things that I did when I began playing in Mizahar was to look for threads involving other thieving, larcenous characters. One of the first that I stumbled upon was Drayton's "The Stinking City," and it remains among my favorite threads in the forums to this day. Brief but memorable, this account of yet another day attempting to eke out a living in crime-ridden Sunberth contains wonderfully evocative descriptions of the city in all its squalid glory and manages to capture the city's lawless, merciless spirit in the thoughts and actions of its main character, the teenage thief Eleanor Drayton. Clever, street-smart, and engagingly flawed, Drayton stalks through the grimy, unsavory streets of Sunberth on a stiflingly hot summer day at the beginning of the thread, absorbed in thoughts of the city's foulness and the cheering prospect of a profitable target for thievery. From the first post to the thread's end, the character of Drayton is never portrayed as anything but mercenary, calculating, and utterly self-interested. Her appearance, when she catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror, is far from attractive, with her gaunt face, dirty skin, auburn hair full of split ends, and eyes expressively described as the color of pond scum and brackish water. Unprepossessing, unrepentantly out for herself, and a thief to boot, Drayton seems like an unlikely heroine for any story. Yet, she arouses the reader's sympathy with her sharp wit, resourcefulness, and quick thinking during the execution of the theft. Having heard of a merchant who kept his goods in his house, rather than in a rented warehouse, Drayton arrives at the merchant's home and studies the layout of the alleyway. A convenient pile of crates below a window provides her with an easy, if treacherous, method of entry, and she falls to work breaking into the mysterious merchant's house to steal his goods. If she succeeds, Drayton will have the means to survive through another season or two in Sunberth - another season of the scant food, the poverty, the desperation, and the stink. But if she fails, well, the citizens of this chaotic and unruly city are definitely not well-known for their kindness or generosity towards thieves who try to steal from them. "The Stinking City" showcases Drayton's skill for powerful description and places the character of Drayton in an utterly ordinary (for Sunberth) situation that reveals her cunning, her wit, her suppressed longing for a better life, and her vulnerability and struggle to survive day by day in one of the most dangerous cities in Mizahar. In the present day, Drayton seems to be breaking away from thieving and is even seeking out steady employment to raise her fortunes. This thread, in its depiction of the harsh realities of survival in Sunberth, tells us why a thief in Sunberth would be motivated to move past a life of crime and make a better life for herself in ways that don't involve locks and keys, crates and alleys, and the perils of getting caught in the act of stealing from the rich and powerful.

[Cheshire]

Congrats Drayton!

[Bolden Denusk]

Well done Drayton