Glitterbark

Ahhh, Wayhaven Chronicles by @seraphinitegames​ is releasing soon! I’m so excited. In honor of it, I whipped up a little bio for my detective, Laure Oriani.

OOH these are nice! I think my favorite is the third on the left, but it's tough to decide!

i love @seraphinitegames Wayhaven Chronicles and i am fully committed to the idea of creating detectives (or in this case re-purposing an established OC *cough*) for all of these Adorable Vampires. Here’s my interpretation of Morgan, and her Detective, Miyamoto Tsuru - or, as most of Wayhaven calls her, Detective Crane!

Crane is a Huge Freakin’ Weirdo who actually genuinely likes Morgan from the beginning. While Crane shuts down her advances and in general seems not to be affected by her heavy-handed flirtation (at least, on the surface) Crane often chooses to spend time with Morgan because she knows how to Shut Up and god, sometimes Crane just wants some peace and quiet. The world’s too loud and busy, and the fact that Morgan is a-ok with just not talking while they’re in the car for two hours is really nice. As a detective, people basically want to do nothing but talk to Crane... being with Morgan is like a break! And she could use a break, with all of these vampires around having arguments and blatantly lying to her face.

Crane’s aware pretty early on that something Extremely Weird is going on, but is just quietly collecting her facts until she can reveal that she’s not a moron. She’s actually very smart in an intuition based way: she often gets these gut feelings that are likely to pan out well. Though Crane didn’t want to become a detective, she really is suited to the job, and many in Wayhaven have a lot of trust in her due to her reputation as a kind, sincere, and diligent officer. She’s a bit.... mm. Not as educated on the science department, but hey, that’s what Verda is for, right? She has people around to make up for her deficiencies. 

Crane is incredibly composed, with a default facial expression that’s extremely difficult to read and a way of speaking that’s kind of flat and distant. Upon interacting with her further, it becomes clear that she can’t actually turn that off - she really just genuinely doesn’t know how to express emotion well, and that’s a bit of a sore spot with her. She knows she’s not a “”normal human””, even beyond her mother and her weird blood stuff. She has trouble connecting with others because of it, and it meant that her childhood was very lonely. She found that she resonated much better with birds, and developed an extreme fascination with them - and in the present day, has an apartment devoted mainly to her birdkeeping hobby and has a bizarre wealth of information about birds stored in her weird little head. She loves talking about them, looking at them, and feeding them, and she always has a bit of birdseed in her coat that she stops to feed “the locals” with.

Morgan may or may not roll her eyes at this.

Crane’s first - and only - romantic relationship was with everyone’s “favorite reporter”, Bobby. This went spectacularly poorly for Crane, because she’d thought - for once!! - that she’d found someone who understood her eccentricities and liked her for them. Crane is trusting and easy to take advantage of, which Bobby did to great effect, getting mountains of information out of her, and earning that Bobby was using her that way really damaged Crane’s ability to trust. This ties into her whole... deal with Morgan.

hello i have completely fallen in love with @seraphinitegames‘s interactive novel Wayhaven Chronicles, a hella well written story where not only can you choose what gender your protagonist is (including being NB!!) but you can also choose their sexual orientation which affects the LI’s genders. finally i’m not limited to the singular “gay option” and can pursue whoever my heart fancies!! like Ava, hard-ass muscle girl who can pick me up, thanks.

*fans self*

Anyway, my detective is ~Laure Oriani~, a scary lady with control issues a mile wide. She hates being belittled and talked down to, and she’s worked incredibly hard to always be the smartest person in the room... so she’s not particularly pleased by this quartet of vampires making a monkey show of her first investigation. She’s sarcastic, smarmy, confrontational, too intelligent for her own good and, overall, completely enamored with her own opinions, making her a complete pain in the ass to deal with.

Poor Ava. She really doesn’t deserve this.

Laure does have the occasional redeeming quality, like valuing the safety of Wayhaven above all else and being an extremely hard worker who functions well even with zero sleep. Despite her outstanding arrogance, she tries not to be rude or dismissive to the townsfolk, though... there were definitely times when Tina had to elbow her and tell Laure to cool it a little. Ava kind of brings out the worst in her though, at least in the beginning - she reminds the detective of all of her weaknesses and everything she wishes she could be.The rest of the team sighs audibly in the background as they bicker and posture around each other.

I know I’ve been basically radio-silent about the Thaumatale folks, but that’s because I’ve just been kinda quietly figuring out what the original fiction version of Gifts of the Magi will be like!

Monsters will still exist, although in a different form, as they’re strange creatures whose bodies are covered with an odd form of runic markings called “Script’ that were sealed away in the Tower long, long ago. 

Crane is practically unchanged, but the monster she ends up befriending is an extravagant, hopeful author named Thistle. Despite loving the idea of “writing the classiest manuscript known to mankind!”, Thistle has absolutely zero taste and also has, at best, a cursory understanding of human writing. He’s also got very little experience with the real world, making his plots incoherent and unbelievable, and his prose is... heartfelt, but thoroughly unpolished and in dire need of a thorough spellcheck. Basically, he’s That Dude in your Creative Writing Class with more enthusiasm than good sense, but at least he’s having fun, right?

Thistle can’t decide what his aesthetic is, so he often oscillates between everything he’s interested in. He thinks dresses are very pretty, and both loves dressing up and trying to get Crane to dress up - but his expansive wardrobe is a total mish-mash of colors and styles.  In keeping with his eclectic tastes, he can’t even decide what genre he wants to write, and the ideas he produces often are bizarre mash-ups of the latest things he’s read.

Still. He’s not totally clueless. He’s actually got quite a bit of latent talent, and he’s got a surprisingly keen reading on people. One thing that shines in his work are his characters, and he’s truly a man that loves people. While not being self-aware enough to capitalize on his strengths, his experiences with Crane start shifting his world view, and help him realize that at the heart of every story, there must be love.