More Ado about Characters:
Alright, now for round 2! The following characters are all more one-offs and have no direct relation to each other quite the same was as Nell/Leonora/Barnes do, so let’s see if I can keep this under novel length.
Remy Green, aka Remy: 17 years old in current canon, and still in the last leg of high school, Remy is, for lack of any better term, a reverse werewolf: perpetually stuck in the form of a gangly wolfdog monster on all nights save the brightest of full moons. Originally just a “normal” human kid just trying to survive through graduation, her entire life wound up turned on its head when an out of control werewolf attacked and bit her while out with friends one night. He was subdued and arrested, even later charged for the negligence and violent assault, but the damage had been done and the virus passed on— in the worst ways.
Remy essentially suffered the equivalent of a severe allergic reaction and anaphylaxis during the first shift, which took hours (normal were shifts should be minutes) and resulted in her parents frantically driving her to the ER in tears. She survived, though the diagnosis— for a fragile kid with shaky self esteem— was, at the time, seemingly a fate worse than death. Despite her form, she never seems to suffer the loss of mindfulness or weakened inhibitions of most werefolk during “peak” moon periods.
Remy has since started learning how to cope with life in a new form she didn’t really want or ask for, and she has the full, unwavering support of her parents, though it’s still a lot for a teenaged kid to handle. I’m pretty sure she wound up being pulled from high school and is trying to finish out her last year and a half or so at home, though she could really use some friends she doesn’t think are “obligated” to love her like her parents are. I think she’s pretty lonely and dealing with a lot of depression issues. Luckily she’ll fall in with Wayne at some point, who’s like a sweet (greasy stoner) older brother, and he and the rest of the Losers can adopt the hell out of her as a little sister and teach her how to not give a fuck about what humans think when you’re a weirdo. She’ll earn her happy ending eventually.
Rose Lund: Absolutely 100% a retooling/transplant of one of my dearest, most beloved, super shitty/earnest self-insert characters as a 12 year old on Neopets and I have NO SHAME AT ALL. Rose is a human mage (they do exist!) around 30 or so, a pale/skinny English-Caucasian mutt with green eyes, straight brown hair, and a penchant for fancifully extra looking dyed bang fringies because she’s stopped giving a fuck. She’s one of those rare people who can strike up a conversation with just about anyone, blessed by a very… unique way with words that’s unintentionally contributed to her internet fame as a slice of life blogger about the day to day trials of pet dragon (well, wyrm) ownership.
Rose has been passionate about rare and magical exotic creatures since she was a wee girl, and developed an obsession with dragons (‘wyrms’ being the correct term for all non-sentient varieties) before she was out of grade school. In college she double majored cryptobiology and spell artistry, then upon graduation, acquired a pair of rare pygmy wyrms— from temperate and tundra subspecies— respectively, as pets, both for personal reasons and to aid in her pursuit of a master’s degree in cryptobiological husbandy.
Pygmy wyrms, it should be noted, are generally terrible pets. While only growing to approximately the size of a house cat (10-12 pounds on average) and sporting the appearance of beautifully miniaturized mythological six-limbed dragons any fantasy nut would fall in love with, they are far from domesticated, exasperatingly precocious, and have the charming habit of expelling flammable gas from a myriad of orifices when startled. They have a distinctive, vaguely musky sulfurous smell about them regardless of cleanliness and are just clever enough to ignore training commands when convenient. Imagine giving a very ornery, very clever raccoon flappy wings with a several foot wingspan, feeding it rotten eggs, and strapping a flamethrower to both ends, then rigging it all with an excitable hair trigger. That is a pygmy wyrm. Rose owns two in an apartment complex: Ice Pack (Packy), who is a pale milk white/ice blue, and Sharky (Sharkbite), who is black and burgundy/red.
Needless to say they’re the loves of her lives and she revolves around them, having garnered a massive internet following thanks to her daily posts about their antics and the realities of exotic pet care. They’re harness trained now and reasonably polite, though this is only due to years of hard work and constant reinforcement. She hopes one day to breed more biddable specimens and help contribute to the conservation of the species worldwide. Also, they’ve made her very good at anti-flammability hexes.
Shun —: known only by her first name, a kitsune who moved into the apartment complex fairly recently with her pet pipe fox, Yuzu. It should be noted that kitsune are particularly long lived among mythicals, though how long exactly that is tends to be hotly debated and unknown by all but the foxes themselves. What is known is how they are extremely slow to age after reaching their peak maturity/fitness, with certain individuals reported over 500 years old and, apparently, showing very little of their age beyond a massive swath of grown tails (nine being the highest on known record). Kitsune typically grow to around 30-40 lbs, outwardly resembling a much large. leggier, more willowy silhouette than traditional foxes, and will begin life with a single tail that splits or “buds” and multiplies over time.
Neurologically they are fairly unique among mammals, possessing a kind of distributed intelligence throughout the body that can give the tails a “mind of their own”, so to speak, in much the same way as octopi or other related cephalopods do. In fact, due to the extremely slow rate of cell death/turnover, a severed kitsune tail will continue to move and attempt “functioning” for weeks, even years by some reports, under correct conditions. Which I’ll get into shortly.
Swerving back to Shun herself, she’s an artist by trade who zigzags between traditional and digital freelance work for a living. Conservation of mass is still in place for humanoid shifts— which all kitsune can voluntarily assume— with predictably small, delicate, androgynous bodies that rarely get above 4’5’’ or so in stature. Features like pointed ears or slit pupils/exposed tails can be morphed or shown as desired, though the chronic perception of being childlike or “cute” regardless of how old they are is a pretty common occurrence. Shun is no stranger to this either, and hates shopping for clothes at non-mythical-specific places because she has to do so in the *really* young children’s department for anything to fit.
Back on the subject of pipe foxes, though— Shun is a kitsune with 3 and 3/4 tails. She had an unspecified accident several years ago in which she lost the final quarter of her fourth tail, but managed to retrieve the piece after several weeks of searching, at which point it was already trying to become a pipe fox. Pipe foxes (at least in this world) are the result of a severed kitsune tail’s survival instincts going horribly wrong (or right) and attempting to restructure themselves for survival, and the amount of tail there (i.e. how much was separated from the body) will determine what becomes of it, though the “starting” process is pretty identical no matter what you do.
If a severed piece of tail has no food, eventually, with time, it will die. If, however, you keep it somewhere safe (like a drawer) and you present it with food (which could be, I don’t know, a chicken leg), it will sense it, and you will see the start of a small, gaping fanged mouth begin to grow from the stump. Once this has formed, the tail will wriggle itself to its prize and devour everything it can, sustaining it. Keep feeding the tail and it will continue to grow legs, organs, features, and a face— though not necessarily in that order. Eventually, you will have a small— usually mouse to rat sized— beautiful white magic fox, prized heavily by black market collectors for its splendor and apparent luck giving properties. A true quarter-tailed pipe fox will live somewhere between 5-40 years, unpredictably. The distributed intelligence of the tail will reform/conglomerate into a brain relatively on par with a modern pet dog, possibly smarter (or much dumber) depending on your luck.
If, however, there is MORE than roughly a quarter tail chopped off, with more of the nervous tissue and mass intact, the pipe fox resulting may appear larger and more robust. Many exotic buyers have been lured into purchasing these creatures from traders without realizing, and years later the unlucky recipient will find their precious fox’s skin suddenly flaccid on the ground like a shed cocoon, having erupted into 75 tinier pipe foxes that will summarily swarm the accessible property to spirit off with literally anything they decide is valuable, never to be found again, often raging like an infestation for days or WEEKS before vanishing forever.
Rumor has it that feeding an entire severed tail will result in 75 tiny pipe foxes bursting forth from the cocoon shell that will each burst into 75 more bug sized foxes each, resulting in a plague of nigh biblical proportions. But that’s never actually been confirmed on record.
Needless to say the kitsune have a lot of protocols for dealing with severed tails and will usually destroy half-formed pipe foxes of unknown origin on the spot. Shun keeps Yuzu as a pet due to being intimately aware of the little rat-sized creature’s origins, and she still had to sign SO many extra insurance papers and wavers before the complex would let her move in.
I am not good at keeping it short, am I? Wow. Well, there you have it! I’d be happy to answer any extra stuff I forgot too if someone has a question. I do love these nerds.
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