#amelieverse

OCtober 2023: Shou, the Hidden Right Hand

A disillusioned fortune teller, scholar, and mystic, studied in old poems and proverbs. Their absent-minded demeanor belies a dangerous cunning and supernatural foresight with which they have cut down empires. Agent to a mysterious benefactor known only as "The Director".

So they are decently unrelated, but I must admit I am a fan of mysterious characters who keep their eyes closed all the time.

Shou's whole deal is that they're a Sherlock-type level of perceptive and clever in addition to having extremely keen foresight, constantly seeing seconds to minutes into the future, with the capacity to sort through all those threads of fate to find the one that will give them the desired outcome. Their apparent cheerful and absent-minded demeanor is something of a cover to a very cunning, cutthroat, and ruthlessly driven personality. They can be arrogant, but they are so good at what they do that their arrogance is never unfounded.

Saint on the other hand has a much more calm and aloof demeanor that is reflective of how they are most times, but they can quickly become neurotic, especially once when things don't go the way they expect. Countless lifetimes spent repeating the same actions and interacting with the same people has given them a very keen sense of navigating very familiar situations, but they can be obsessive about making sure everything turns out just so. Compared to Shou, Saint is incredibly inflexible and significantly less in-control of any given situation.

Any similarity between the two is pretty much only aesthetic. Though, funny enough, my friend and I like to joke about this little club we have with some of our characters:

He has a character, a fox who's unwillingly immortal, incapable of dying, and has lived so long and recognizes patterns so easily that he might as well have futuresight. Despite the circumstances, he's very happy and very kind.

Saint is doomed to repeat the same lifetime forever, effectively making them immortal within a very limited scope. They somehow have less success than my friend's character in reliably reproducing patterns. Classic Sisyphus type behavior.

Shou eventually comes to have a problem where their future sight grows beyond their control. They end up living entire lifetimes within visions, growing old and finding happiness or ruin only to return to the present, losing everything they thought they'd built in an instant, repeatedly, unable to tell when reality ends and the next lifetime vision begins. They get burnt out hard, unwilling to invest themselves in anything at risk of having the rug pulled out from under them again.

Together all these characters make up a very niche club of animal people who are damned by supernatural, existential circumstance to be effectively immortal, and also always have their eyes closed.

I don't want to get back into the habit of posting nothing but sketch dumps, but here are some Pannes and a Ghenna while I get my art situation sorted out.