I met Lyssa Storm not long after I came to this Gorean realm, from IRC-Gor. She was the best female fighter on Gor. I had this idea about being a Panther-Storyteller. I didn’t know how to make an avi, do tags, and had no clue what a backpost was.
In those days Lyssa was kinda like every Panther’s big-sister. If you got into hot water, she’d usually get you out, or send somebody to get you out. In those days, women could still get judgments against men, and everybody was afraid to fight her. Plus, if you did, then you had to deal with her RT husband, who was one of the best fighters on Gor.
The first time I got into hot water on Gor it was because of her. The first time I got dead on Gor was because of her. The first person I killed on Gor was her, and I think it was the first time she was killed.
Lyssa was having an FC ceremony with her RT. A bareneck came in, and I decided to snag the bareneck, and give her to the new couple as a gift. I was too green to know that such events were no-capture zones, and people got really pissed at me because they thought I was gonna keep the bareneck myself; and I had to leave in a hurry.
Lyssa was a member of Shadow Hunters. When an envoy from Shadow Hunters came to me, and promised me safety to visit them to meet their Leader – I thought that if Lyssa was a member; it was safe to go there. It was a trap. Lyssa was offline and my first character was killed.
Then my RT husband started playing, to collect my dead character’s stuff and burn the body. I eventually brought back my character as the dead character’s twin; and the four of us became friends. We had in common that we were married couples, playing pretty-much separate lives on Gor. Lyssa’s husband helped both me and my hubby learn to fight, and we often roleplayed together.
One time she really pissed off my hubby. He had set up some roleplay with a willing woman where she was a captured Panther, staked out, and he was supposed to find her and they were going to play. Well Lyssa happened to see them on the whochat, and stepped all over the roleplay, trying to save a Panther (who wasn’t a Panther) from somebody she didn’t want to be saved from.
Then the bad thing happened. The Rencers set a trap for Lyssa. A Panther was captured, Lyssa went to rescue her. But the Panther was setting Lyssa up to be captured by the Rencers.
They tortured her for hours, as more and more people came to cheer them on. I was with her in ICQ, and it was tearing her up. When Cyruss actually hamstrung her, she got physically ill in RT, and her husband had to take over for her at the keyboard. He asked me, for her sake, to get my husband to go end it. My husband was at work, but I put on his tags, roleplayed into the Rence, and shot her with a longbow, to put her out of her misery. So me and David dualled and gender-bent, for her sake.
The next two weeks were hell. She was so angry, so hurt, so bent on revenge, so powerless to do anything. We spent hours in Q, dreaming up complex revenge scenarios.
But what happened instead, was that she decided she wanted to be a new character who was as loved as Lyssa had once been. It had shaken her to the core to have so much hate poured on her when she was tortured. She knew she had made roleplay enemies, but hadn’t realize how much some people had come to hate what she stood for, and as a consequence to hate her personally.
She wanted to be loved. So she created a FW character, named Scytale – who personified the Rencer’s ideals of what a FW should be. She became a Ubara somewhere, and we became Blood-Sisters. Heart-Sisters she called it, and put it on her tags. It was during that era that I invented the PClaw curse, “May you become a Ubara.” Because Scy was bored to tears and miserable in the role. So she resumed her rescue-roleplay, often flying on a snow-white tarn. Another time she pissed off my hubby, coming to Thentis with a tarnsman to force roleplay, rescue some woman from him, and escape. There was two of them, and only him in the Home at the time. It was ridiculous that two people on tarns could invade the Main Hall of Thentis and take a woman from the First Sword of the City – but the way the rules were then, that only live roleplayers counted; they could do it.
But that kind of behavior got her in trouble again, and Scy got collared and killed. She briefly came back as a Panther. But there were always two directions pulling at her. She wanted the excitement of being a Panther, but she wanted to be loved and respected too. And those are not compatible.
Now we both had two dead characters behind us. Jasmina and Bekka for me, Lyssa and Scytale for her. And somebody gave me a Panther Lair. We were going to be co-Leaders. But she got so much flack in Q, she backed out.
From there, she mostly played FW or slaves. But once in a while she would go feral, for a day or two. She got pregnant, split with her husband, had a baby, stayed friends with her ex for a while, and then broke up for good. I started having trouble in my marriage, broke up. All this, we spent hours in Q discussing, consoling each other.
She had such a loving heart. She really felt other people’s pain. She roleplayed with more exuberance than anyone I ever played with. It was like her actions came off the page and manifested in real-time.
Early this year, she was playing with us in the Forest Event. The old Lyssa. Fearsome, powerful, and deadly. She killed Rags’ TRC character. And then she was gone. Weeks later, we found out that she had been savagely beaten in RT and left for dead.
Her Gorean character was a kajira, enslaved to one of the Rencers who had killed Lyssa, but not happy. She roleplayed escaping to PTJ, and was going to join us. And the rest is recorded in another thread.
It’s really hard. She came back from the dead so many times. But not this time. My heart aches and tears stand at the door, waiting to flow, any time I will let them.
It’s gonna be real hard to roleplay Gor now, knowing that you will never swoop in again, Heart-Sister. But I know that can’t be your legacy, and I will have to come back.
It could have been me,
But instead it was you.
So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing,
As if I were two.
I’ll be a student of life,
A singer of songs,
A farmer of food,
And a righter of wrongs.
It could have been me,
But instead it was you.
So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing,
Until it gets through.
