Tag: Shard-verse

Character Writing #2

(Trigger Warning: child abuse, character murder. Will mark where it stops and starts)

Let’s start with some basic stats:

Delia Troy Burton

Age: 40s
Height: Tall for a dfab person
Build: muscular
Hair: Black, straight, short
Eyes: Soft Brown
Skin: medium toned
Ethnicity: Zanchian-Anitian (Chinese-American-ish. Again, fictional world.)
Job: Chief Financial Officer (I think) at place that I can’t remember the name of. It’s a technology company.

Wild Rush Age: 40s (I think)
Height: Very tall
Build: Skinny
Hair: curly, dark reddish-brown, short
Eyes: Bright blue
Skin: Grey Ethnicity: European (I don’t remember what I’m calling that area)
Occupation: Criminal

Daisy Hart, aka Deuce of Hearts Age: 20s (at start of the story she’s 17)
Height: Average
Build: Curvy
Hair: Shoulder-length strawberry-blond, straight
Eyes: Amber Skin: Grey / pale pink
Ethnicity: European
Occupation: Student / Criminal

Name one (physical) scar your character has and where it came from: (I don’t even want to get started on emotional scars. I’d have to warn for all the things)

Delia: I haven’t really thought about it. Presumably she has some from playing sports (Lacrosse and Quoits*). Any she has won’t be major.

* Not the real one. Fictional sport.

(Trigger warning: child abuse)

Wild Rush: The grey skin is an obvious one. Aside from that, I know he’s got a scar on the back on one knee from getting hit by a belt buckle by his dad. He had a several broken bones as well. Pretty much everything has healed away to invisibility by now.

(end trigger warning)

Daisy: Again, I haven’t really thought about it. I can’t think of any that would be plot relevant (aside from the grey skin, which isn’t really a scar).

How vain is your character? Do they find themselves attractive?

Delia: She’s not vain, but she’s proud of her body. She likes how strong she is and she’s got a cute face.

Wild Rush: He’s exceedingly vain and generally obvious about it. Aside from finding himself good looking (he’s very tall and thin), he loves how talented he is at gambling, card games, and card tricks. He’s got some self-esteem issues and needs reassurances from people he cares about (mostly Daisy, also his two trusted henchmen).

Daisy: She’s not vain at all. She doesn’t think she’s attractive, but she’s quite cute. (She’s curvy and hippy, and has picked up the standard amounts of society-prescribed fat-hatred.)

What is your character’s ranking on the Kinsey Scale? (I’m going to interpret this as what is your character’s sexual orientation and history, because the Kinsey scale has some problems – it’s based on history, not on interest).

(trigger warning: death)

Delia: she’s pretty much entirely heterosexual. I think she had a normal array of boyfriends, although she was pretty focused on her career. When she met her husband, they feel head-over-heels in love and they were totally devoted to each other. Since he was killed she hasn’t dated at all. (I may have her date at some point, I haven’t decided).

(end trigger warning)

Wild Rush: He’s bisexual, or maybe bisexual and heteoromantic. Likes everybody that will give him attention. He had both boyfriends and girlfriends in high school. I’m pretty sure he briefly dated Jill (another Name Criminal). He’s very opposed to homophobia. He’s completely devoted to Daisy, but he’ll go to bars and get drunk and make out with guys. (Daisy knows and is okay with it). I can see him having a threesome with his two henchmen in the past. In fact, I *know* he’s at least gotten a blowjob from at least one of them, because they were bribing him to let them drive (he’s a scary driver. Good in the sense that he doesn’t hit anything, but scary.) He prefers to bottom (and top from the bottom) when with a guy.

Daisy: ummm? heteroflexible? Has only dated guys – dated a couple of guys in high school, then fell in love with Wild Rush.

I’m going to add one not from the list. How easily does your character make friends? Are they well liked?

Delia: fairly easily. The company she works for was founded by her and three of her (amab – I may make at least one of them non-binary) friends (One has left to do other things). I know she has at least two other good friends, RV at the animal rescue where she volunteers and Leonard, her brother-in-law. (… I should give her some close girl friends. I know there’s one that shows up asking why Delia hasn’t been out, but I can’t remember her name.) She goes to a lot of charity events and is well-liked.

Wild Rush: Not easily. He is superficially charming, but has a short temper. He’s scary and most of the other Name Criminals are scared of him. Aside from Daisy, his two closest friends are Charles and Andre, his henchmen. There are several other Name Criminals that he’ll hang out with when in prison, because they play poker. (Later he becomes friends with Delia.) He’s respected, but not liked.

Daisy: Everybody likes Daisy. She doesn’t have a lot of close friends though, but pretty much any of the other Name Criminals would help her out. She’s very sweet, charming, and likes to help people out.

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Character Writing #1

Copying this from Tumblr so they’ll all be in the same place.

I’m doing the Character Writing Challenge on Habit Rpg. I’m doing three characters. Wild Rush and Daisy Hart, who I’m also doing the OCTP meme for, and the main character, Delia Troy Burton.

(Trigger Warning: Child / Teenager Abuse.)

1) Character’s relationship with parents

(Skipping Delia and Wild Rush because I know theirs. I can’t remember the details of Delia’s – its in my notes. Wild Rush’s comes down to, he hates his family for pretty good reasons).

Daisy Hart / Deuce of Hearts: Her mom left when she was about seven. Her dad started sexually abusing her when she was 13. She ran away with Wild Rush when she was 17. Aside from that, her dad basically ignored her and did the minimum necessary. She has no idea where her mom is. Her dad is now dead (from a car crash).

(End Trigger Warning)

2) Most prominant physical feature:

Delia: Probably how strong she is. She’s very muscular from years of sports and martial arts. (I have in my notes which ones specifically. I think lacrosse and I know, another fictional First Nations* sport, as well as a fictional martial art). Physically I modeled her after some professional wrestlers.

Wild Rush: His grey skin. He was in an accident which interacted with some other stuff, and basically he’s got grey skin. Aside from that, his bright blue eyes.

Daisy: She usually also has grey skin (because of spoilery reasons). Aside from that, probably her amber eyes or her strawberry blonde hair.

* It’s set on a fictional world, but things kind of correspond. I don’t remember what I was calling them exactly. It’s in my notes.

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30 Characters Challenge #7 – Lee DeLoreo

Here’s the last of my entries for the 30 Characters Challenge.

Name: Lee DeLoreo
Hair Color: Ash-blond (with red dyed stripes)
Eye Color: Grey
Skin tone: Pale

Lee DeLoreo is the events organizer for several charities, including the Friends of the Greyhound. He has the annoying tendency to name drop, usually unnecessarily, but all the publicity he gathers is for charity.

DeLoreo is a minor character for my comic series, The White Knight, but may show up more than I planned since the main character does a lot of charity work.

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30 Characters Challenge #5 – Swordcat

Name: Leon Smith / Lenxoli, aka Swordcat
Hair Color: Red
Eye Color: Yellow
Skin Tone (fur): Gold

Leon Smith was a fairly ordinary man. Divorced with shared custody of his daughter, Melinda. He preferred to spend his time camping, hiking, and fishing, well away from people. It was on a camping trip that he found a strange sword in the debris from a recent landslide. He made the mistake of picking it up and found it had a personality of its own, Lenxoli.

Lenxoli had gone somewhat mad after the destruction of its home planet, floating in space for countless eons, and laying buried on Earth for millions of years. It wants nothing more in the universe than to recreate the civilization it came from. The first two steps, in whatever order necessary, are to destroy the hairless beasts and uplift the felines, the creatures that are most like its makers.

It meant to completely overwrite Leon’s mind, but didn’t quite succeed. An unexpected side effect was for Leon to change from a grumpy misanthropist to someone who wanted nothing more than back scratches, good food, and a nap in a sunny space.

The sword itself grows  from dagger size to full-length sword. (The two swords as drawn are in scale to each other, I believe). Lenxoli’s mind is connected to the sword which is usually kept in the mental institution freezer, which helps quiet Lenxoli. The staff otherwise find Leon quite pleasant to deal with, especially compared to many of the other inmates.

Swordcat is a villain for my comic series, The White Knight.

I was trying to find a way to make him look fuzzy without having to draw lots and lots of hair, because I’m don’t draw that fast and I need ways to get out pages of the comic (when I make it) without each page taking forever. I use Manga Studio. With Swordcat I tried using the Brush Pen which has a little bit of texture for his skin. It showed up better in the giant version (duh, I know). It wasn’t a successful method from the time saving stand point either, because to preserve the texture I had to paint in all the blacks – without completely blacking them in – instead of using the Fill tool. Oh well, I had fun.

The swords on the bottom were drawn several years ago, which is why they’re shaded. I’m trying to get away from that shading style because, again, it takes too long. And, yes, the eye on his back is correct. It shifts to stay upright. And it’s watching you.

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Nano progress

(Trigger Warnings: Claustrophobia, horror, injury, mental illness)

I know I said I’d post some writing, and here you go. This is from November when I was trying to mostly work on a comic series called The White Knight.

This was a bit of a character study. Eric Ryddatz, aka Techrat, has some serious mental problems. When I get around to finishing stuff with him, I’ll get an actual computer guy to double check the error messages Eric throws up when he’s freaked out.

Eric frowned, a slight tightening of the corners of his mouth. He could see the key just through the hole in the wall. He was not going to fail HER (they had asked why she was female if he thought women were illogical, but she was mother, lover, guardian. He could make her perfect if he tried hard enough and she could make the world perfect.) His breath was faster, his heartbeat skipping, his palms sweaty, his stomach lurched. Fear. (Alexithymia, they called it, an inability to distinguish emotions, and they made him learn symptoms, like the glitches and error codes he learned to make HER perfect, but he couldn’t remove them, not as long as he was subject to hormones and glands.)

He tried to control his breathing, envisioning neat rows of zeroes and ones. He was afraid. It was nothing; an irrational phobia, but it was just a hole, not one of the cuffs locking down on his wrists, grinding flesh against bone.

Zeroes and ones. Beautiful, logical, perfect.

He stuck his hand through. He could reach the key that would let him out. Let him back to HER.

He did not scream when the wall closed on his wrist. Others would have. He did not curse or struggle wildly, like others, less rational people would have. His eyes widened and he broke into a sweat, his heart pounding like a walking tape drive. He tried to pull his arm free, squeezing his hand as small as he could. He could hear the key drop to the floor over the pounding in his ears. Biology, weak and imperfect.

He made no noise, but his lips were moving, reciting commands like prayers.

System Error. Abort, Retry, Fail? Retry.
I/O Error. Abort, Retry, Fail? Retry.
GPF. Abort, Retry, Fail? Retry.
C-x C-e
Buffer Overflow. Abort, Retry, Fail?

His eyes were burning. Sweat in his eyes. He could feel his skin tearing as he tried to free his hand. Contaminants. Weakness that could fail HER.

Kernel Panic.
HCB.

The lights went out and the neat white on black letters behind his eyes broke into neon blurs.

He was not like others. He did not scream. He did not swear. If it was because his throat locked down so he could hardly breathe, that was irrelevant. If his methodical attempts to escape had changed to frenzied thrashings that pounded bone against concrete, he did not notice because that was when the sounds began.

Chittering dry sounds, that crackled like static.

He did not scream, but his computer prayers changed to purely human pleas to HER, as he collapsed, his biology too weak to even hold him up.

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