#avoidance ghoul

My fav duo, Void and Perpetua (I included my personal headcanon of him have port-wine stains bc i lowkey forgot why he wears a mask in Avoidance Ghoul 😓😓)

Voiddddd my beloved 🫶🫶

I have set dates for Void and their backstory, but some of it will be important in the sequel. What I can say is that they died in late November 2019, and some time later they were summoned topside twice (not by the Ministry) before they appear in Chapter 1 of AG (July 2025). I do have a cause of death for them though.

From Chapter 3 of Please Be The Death Of Me, there is now an established reason for the pain that Void is in! There will be more on that, I promise it gets worse (I'm sorry).

In AG they are given forearm crutches, which it should use more than it does.

Void's 'teleportation' is another thing I didn't detail, but essentially it's using air and quintessence to compress the space around them, allowing them to essentially materialise from thin air. It comes from them having difficulty walking more than them actually trying to scare people. Void isn't able to move far in one go, 10 metres at most, but they can do it repeatedly to move continuously.

When I write how the characters move I usually look at how they move on stage, the animals I base them off and other characters that inspire specific parts of their personality. For example, Perpetua's movements come from his canon onstage movements, the previous papas and Carlos Diehz's portrayal of Vincent Benítez from Conlave.

Voidling has a few movement references, but that's a whole rant in itself so unless someone does want it, I'm leaving that out.

It is implied in AG, but English isn't their first language! Before they died they lived between Romandy (the French-speaking part of Switzerland) and southern Sweden, so they would have spoken both Swedish and French as well as having learned English. My Swedish is limited, but I do speak French and most variations that come with Swiss-French.

They have/had an older sister and a younger sibling.

Full disclosure, despite Void's difficulty speaking coming partly from of my own experience, I still have a lot I need to learn in terms of sign. Void would have used LSF (French Sign Language) and SSL/STS (Swedish Sign Language) before they died, but in AG they use both SSL/STS and bits of ASL depending on who they're talking to. None of them are the sign used where I live (unfortunately) but I do make an effort to learn some of Void's dialogue in both ASL and SSL when I write it.

Most of my ghoul designs are inspired by certain animals (both real and fictional) or have characteristics of a few!! One of my favourites is Dew, whose pre-transition design was based off the strawberry squid (Histioteuthis heteropsis), and when he becomes a fire ghoul his vessel loses the colour the same way squids do when they're killed. Mist is somewhere between a glass octopus (Vitreledonella richardiand) and several kinds of jellyfish but she's about to get a proper description soon.

Void's initial design was based very vaguely on a piebald deer, but they don't hold too much resemblance to one with their current design. They do however have a very thin layer of fur, more concentrated around their wrists/lower forearms and their lower calves/ankles and where their fur is darker (the ends of their limbs, ears and tail.) Their hair was also dark before they died, (which is why their glamor has black hair) which is why the ends are still black, growing out white because their vessel doesn't create pigment in the same way its human body did.

The deer is actually where their darker eye came from!! The other is grey, a lot more human but without a black pupil. Heterochromia is very common in ghouls, so it isn't exactly a unique feature, but the difference between their eyes does affect their vision. The lighter eye can pick up more variations in colour and light than a human's, as well as any physically-manifesting magic that again, isn't fully visible to humans. The human eye can't pick up most of it because of how our eyes work, similar to how we sometimes can't fully see things like the Aurora Borealis without a camera lens, so what they can see usually appears faint and colourless.

The deer's eye can see better in the dark, but it also doesn't pick up colours as well and messes with their depth perception during the daylight. Essentially, Void sees similar to how some people do with astigmatism. The head tilt that Void is constantly doing is actually them trying to see better, with whichever eye is more useful to them at the time.

That's one of several reasons they're constantly out in the dark, because the limited light makes it easier to see without as much visual processing.

I haven't really mentioned it, but some of the ghouls have wings!! Mostly for convenience they conceal them with a glamor unless they need or want to use them. All of the air ghouls have feathered wings, somewhat adjacent to the bird I based each of them off of. Cumulus and Cirrus are both based on barn owls and Storm on a Grey Jay. I'll be so honest, Aero is based vaguely off a biblically accurate angel and there's no other context on that other than I wanted to.

There are others with wings, including Void, but there is a reason you haven't seen them mentioned yet.

+ Cut scenes/sections from AG!!

In Chapter 1, their introduction when they're asked for it is: "Void. They. It. It doesn’t matter." They don't actually use the name Void referring to themself, they meant it in the context of not knowing/not having a specific name. The sign they use has multiple meanings. 'Void' is just what Aurora interprets it as since most ghouls have similar names, and so it's actually her that names it. It's the same with their pronouns, they aren't saying "I want you to use they/them or it/its for me", it is saying it doesn't want to be thought of as anything other than the genderless way it perceives itself.

I think it was a comment that called them Voidling before I even added it in myself, but it is one of the several nicknames they got when I wrote them. I also call them voidness or voidance (the second comes from the title of AG).

I don't give that side of their personality much detail on-page, mostly because it isn't a crucial part of the way Void is viewed. I will say that it isn't something that upsets them, they like their name and understand the need for pronouns comes from practicality and not out of malice.

In the original draft of Chapter 11, Void does kill Magnin. Twice. In the span of 5 minutes.

Nienna also died in the original draft, getting killed by Magnin in Chapter 8, meaning she would have died before getting to see Lotta wake up.

Void ended up on guitar because of the song Faith, which is one of my favourite songs. Originally, they were meant to replace Cirrus on keys, but I didn't plan for Perpetua or lineup changes, because the first notes I have on AG were written in 2023.

Anyway! That's more information than I expect anyone wants to read, and it's the shorter version. Aside from what exists on ao3 this is the most I've written about Void specifically. I have an endless amount of my own Ghost lore for my AU but it's hard to include it all on-page.