Character Development Questions: Hard Mode
Does your character have siblings or family members in their age group? Which one are they closest with?
What is/was your character’s relationship with their mother like?
What is/was your character’s relationship with their father like?
Has your character ever witnessed something that fundamentally changed them? If so, does anyone else know?
On an average day, what can be found in your character’s pockets?
Lina- Her older brother J.J. is roughly her age, but they’re at different points in their lives. He’s married to a career woman, has a kid and a full-time job (works from home to save on child care money). She’s in grad school and has found herself single again after a two year relationship with an older woman.
Lina gets along better with her much older brother Ricky, who provides a better sounding board for her problems with their mother. They’re also at similar stages in life- freshly broken up with same-sex partners, feeling a little lost, worried about mom...
There are cousins on Lina’s father’s side, but she’s not particularly close to them. She has little in common with them.
114N- They have one surviving sibling. The only other survivor from the N collection. They go by Irene and live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. 114N does not know that Irene is still alive and believes Irene to be dead.
114N and Irene do not speak. They did not get along before Irene left/faked their death. They hated each other due to the intense rivalry cultivated by Maker and their very different coping mechanisms.
Lina- Christine is a good, but complicated woman with an alcohol problem. Her children love her, but struggle to cope with her more destructive tendencies. This is especially difficult for Lina who feels that she has a lot in common with her mother, but fears becoming her. In fact, Lina has made it her life goal to not be her mother.
While Lina doesn’t appear to have many similarities to her mother mentally or physically, there are key commonalities that make Lina particularly concerned. There’s also social expectations. Simple being related to her mother causes people to make dangerous assumptions. So, Lina hedges her bets by not mentioning her mother... Thankfully, Christine understands and gives her space and enables the ‘not like mom’ approach.
On the whole, they get along as long as it’s before 9pm, which is when Christine slips into darker moods. Lina cannot handle the paranoia, anger, and depression that emerges at those late hours. She does her best to keep her distance at night and only comes over in the event of an emergency.
114N- They have vague recollections of their mothers which they pieced together into Hollie. A robot. Their relationship with Hollie is complex and fraught, because they created her, but she is a manifestation of what little they understand to be mother. Eventually 114N decided that the only way to manage Hollie was to make her an autonomous AI. This has made things less complex, but only slightly. The power disbalance is awkward and difficult.
There is also the primordial alien goop that technically formed and nurtured the 114N using the traumatized and mutilated bodies of several children. But it’s hard to think of alien slime as a mother, particularly when it can not provide comfort or council.
Lina- Another complicated relationship. Lina used to be much closer to her father, but as she became more aware of his career choices she started to move away from him. While Lina always despised her mother’s choice of occupation, her father’s decisions always seemed logical and right when she was young and impressionable.
It was only when she was older and started to understand exactly what her father did and how it impacted other people on a global scale that she became uncomfortable. They became somewhat estranged in Lina’s early high school years. When her father’s enemies started to treat her as a way to get to him, he sent her to live with her mother, which furthered their separation.
She still loves her father and the older she gets the more she understands and respects his choices, but she still disagrees with them.
114N- They had many fathers, but only two are relevant- Maker and Voltaire.
Maker was a horrible, despicable, abusive monster with a human face and a mind full of careful, logical justifications for his actions. He was a scientist who experimented on human subjects to “further evolution.”
114N was a surviving failure of these experiments, which meant that Maker kept them for further studies and testing (unlike the successes who were handed over to the militant training branch of the organization). 114N survived the continued experiments, tests, and training to become one of Maker’s prized soldiers. Once they figured out how to extract the explosive Maker implanted in their skull, they imprisoned Maker, wiped out the organization, and sought vengeance on everyone who had ties to the organization.
Maker eventually died from 114N’s slow, horrible revenge. 114N wishes that they’d kept him alive and in agony longer, in honor of all of 114N’s siblings...
Voltaire is like Hollie, an amalgamation of fractured memories of fathers from the time before Maker. Also a robot. 114N finds him equally difficult to deal with, since he is a creation based on several father figures and the obvious power imbalance between maker and ‘father.’ But things are easier, because Voltaire is always somewhat distant. 114N actually has to go out looking for him if they want fatherly advice or time.
4. Witnessed something that changed them?
Lina- When Lina was 8 she watched one of the greatest and most loved/respected parahuman in her city die. His powers of flight failed him and plummeted to his death. She never forgot that.
That was the moment she learned that even people with amazing abilities could be hurt and killed. That was when she learned that death could even happen to people who were supposed to be heroes.
114N- Hard to pin down. There was so much horror... but it wasn’t the horror that did it. It was watching a machine mend their arm and realizing that they had memorized the machine’s precise mechanical movements and were capable of copying those movements perfectly. That was when they realized that they could defeat anyone, they just needed to watch them long enough to memorize how their opponent moved. One or twice.
They stopped losing after that. That was when they started winning and planning the destruction of the organization.
Lina- Wears stylish, affordable clothing for women, which is typically devoid of pockets (she hates this). If she does have convenient, functional pockets, she might have a few odd pieces of paper with notes scribbled on them, at least five paperclips (secret emergency lock-picking set), a stray pen, and a spare tuning fork.
114N- Has pockets, but rarely used them. All their clothes are very nice so they hates letting them get mucked up with things. The few items they do carry include a custom “Swiss Army knife”-like tool for fiddling, a shiny silver Spanish coin from the 1400s, a pencil, and a tiny notebook that they replace on a daily basis. There’s also the gloves and pocket watch, but they view those items as part of the ensemble.
