#elcanon

Ariadne:

14: Which demon is most frightening to them? 

already answered

16: When are they the happiest?

When she’s in the Chantry, just quietly praying. Not like anything from so hold my hand, consign me not to darkness, or even any level of desperation or need, but regular affirmations of faith. The Chantry is warm and inviting, the Chantry is home.

When she’s with her friends. Playing chess with Cullen or sparring with Bull or gossiping with Vivienne are very valuable, very important parts of her life. Her friends help her forget the whole saving-the-world business, her friends help her remember that she’s a real person worth something outside of her title, her friends help her laugh.

When she’s with Josephine; any time, but especially when it’s just the two of them - in Ari’s rooms, or Josie’s office, or in the not-private-at-all gazebo in the garden. Josephine is a spark of light in her life, always brilliant even when she’s hip-deep in muck and surrounded by demons or accidentally encounters a dragon (true story! Vinsomer was a surprise I noped out of real quick last night) or everything looks like it’s gone to hell - she thinks of Josephine, and Josephine is bright, and everything else seems a little less dark in comparison.

17: How do they feel about the mark/the anchor?

She wants it to go away. It makes her feel kind of nauseous at times, and it hurts when she’s near rifts (or Corypheus, or because it’s cold outside, or just because it feels like hurting). Even though the mark’s controlled and not glowing all the time, she doesn’t trust that it won’t start doing weird crap in the middle of the night, so she keeps it covered whenever she can (she wears fingerless gloves normally underneath the gauntlets as part of her armor - helps with avoiding blisters when doing lots of twirly staff stuff - and has a pair she wears at Skyhold; she tried the one glove look for about five minutes and Vivienne politely suggested that she might be looking for a new friend if she didn’t put the second glove on as well).

Ellara:

25: What is their favorite place within playable regions?

The Emerald Graves. It’s so green and there are so many plants. 

26: Did they feel suspicious of Dorian upon first meeting him, because of his Tevinter heritage?

She felt suspicious of Dorian because he was a strange mage standing where she thought she was supposed to meet Felix, and standing in front of a Fade rift inside a Chantry. It had squat to do with him being from Tevinter.

But then they talked and she found out more about him and now they are friends.

32: Do they get along with Vivienne?

Ellara is a very pleasant sort of dwarf, and nice to everyone. Being a dwarf and part of the Carta, she doesn’t give any shits at all about Orlais or the Chantry, and doesn’t feel like she has any right to even have an opinion on the mage/templar war because she is neither (nor has either group negatively affected her), so she and Vivienne don’t have much to talk about and have absolutely nothing in common besides this Inquisition business.

Ariadne loves the Chantry. Any Chantry, anything remotely resembling a Chantry. The golden sunburst iconography feels like coming home, for her; the world and all its troubles and anxieties - all of her troubles and anxieties - all fall away the minute she steps through the archway.

Ellara loves the garden. Her garden, specifically, but any garden will do. She likes things that grow, and the smell of fresh, damp soil reminds her of her childhood and her mother. The calm of the garden, quiet wind and bright air and the buzz of a bumblebee or a hummingbird zooming past, is her sanctuary.

but

El and Bull settle down somewhere in a nice house - small enough for her, but big enough for him - that's close to things but not actually in them (they both want a bit of seclusion from the rest of the world, but not too much). The Chargers move in down the road a bit in various combinations (Krem and Harding decide that they should have their own place, which inspires a lot of catcalling and high-fiving - and eye-rolling on the part of Harding and Ellara because tall people, right?). And Bull and the Chargers still go off and Do Things in the world and Ellara goes to work in the small building behind the house

the one filled with plants and herbs and flowers and jars, with a garden out the back, and everything she needs for poultices and potions and powders. And she sets up a little clinic and healer shop, but keeps it kind of quiet. The kind that you'd walk right by if some guy in Redcliffe hadn't been like "yeah mate, head up that road toward Ostagar and there's this blink-and-you'll-miss-it village between two hills that look from a distance like a pair of tits, ask for the dwarf - she'll fix your leg right up."

She sells some of her products in shops across Thedas - there's a bath shop in Val Royeaux that can't keep her soaps in stock and are constantly apologizing for sending additional orders her way, to which she laughs and breaks out the lye - but mostly she makes everything on site for her patients and only keeps a few standard products constantly whipped up and on the shelves.

And when Bull and the Chargers come back (because they always come back, and that's straight-up fact; there's no until they didn't in this story, they just always come back), she sighs rather dramatically and rolls up her sleeves and gets to work fixing everything Stitches couldn't do on site - which is pretty much just Bull, because he's gotten fussy about letting people other than his girlfriend fix his body (to which she pointed out he'd have a lot less scars if he'd let Stitches take a look at it in a timely fashion; to which he pointed out that he didn't care)

and there's a giant bathtub inside the just-right-sized house (they took it from Skyhold, actually; the one Ellara ordered from Val Royeaux in that fic I've not written yet, specifically large enough for Bull but with a seat in it for her so she wouldn't drown), takes up an entire room; they built the house from the ground up, so the bathtub gets the room that's almost all windows and Ellara's put plants in it of all kinds

slow blink

oookay, anon. You want 35 bits of headcanon about my OCs? You got 35 bits of headcanon about my OCs. But behind a jump, because 35 bits of headcanon about my OCs is a lot of bits of headcanon about my OCs.

(also behind a jump because I’m gonna talk about sex baby let’s talk about you and me sorry there was a loooooooot of caffeine today)

She never planned to be a healer; one of her first jobs in the Carta went very very wrong and resulted in her having to hold someone’s chest together while they rode back to the main camp (in a stolen wagon); the camp’s healer saw that she had quick thinking even when she didn’t know what she was supposed to do (and, more importantly, a total lack of squeamishness) and signed her on as an apprentice.

That bow is indeed bigger than she is and she will smack you across the knees with it if you so much as think about mentioning that. And it has spikes. It’s gonna hurt.

Team No Shoes.

She’ll go out of her way to jump on crunchy leaves. Also puddles. That puddle in the middle of Skyhold’s courtyard is a favorite (no one’s addressing the drainage problem? why is there even a drainage problem we’re on top of a mountain the water has no place to go but down; most of my childhood was marked by easily-flooded basements, I am concerned about Skyhold’s lower levels because of that puddle)ANYWAY

All but one of Skyhold’s cats completely ignores her (well, most of them give her a cursory sniff and then run away; they don’t like the mark on her hand much, she smells off to them). The one that doesn’t is a fluffy white one with two different colored eyes and likes sleeping in the corner of El’s bed.

She needs glasses for reading and any sort of up close work, especially at night (she’s fine at distances and during the day). Don’t tell me glasses aren’t a thing in Thedas. They’re a thing in Thedas even though I’ve never seen anyone wearing them. And she needs them.

The masks that the people from Orlais (it’s Orlesians, right? Not just folks from Val Royeaux?) tend to wear freak her out. Bad enough that they’re all taller than her, but they obscure their faces so she really has no idea who she’s talking to? No thanks.

She’s quite good at climbing stuff. Rock faces that the game won’t let me jump up despite my party clearly walking straight up vertical she’s probably not meant to climb? No problem. No rope no problem either. She nearly gave Varric a heart attack when she went climbing up a rather precarious overhang to pluck an elfroot stalk: there was nothing between her and the ground except several hundred feet of air.

She keeps a small sketchbook with her at all times. It’s mostly drawings of plants, and the occasional landscape, and she uses it to wind down at the end of the day.

Leliana: she's in a constant state of terrorawe about Leliana. She's largely silent when working with Leliana, and defers to her judgement most of the time. (If I'd managed to get a world state imported properly this would've been the playthrough with Warden Katalin Brosca and her Leliana romance, and eventually maybe Ellara would work up the courage to ask Leliana if she could forward a letter for her, asking Kat for some dwarf-to-dwarf advice about how you deal with this whole fate-of-the-world-on-your-very-small-shoulders-thing)

Josephine: she likes Josie a lot, and they're friends. Her working relationship with Josephine is more conversational than that with Leliana, more dialogue about what's happening than simple agreement (she usually ultimately agrees with Josie's recommendations anyway, but she's more confident asking questions of Josephine than she is Leliana).

PLANTS plants plants plants plants plants

but not edible plants, someone else can grow those; she likes the other stuff, the pretty ones that will kill you and the ugly ones that will heal you and everything in between

(I have a type, and it is Short Ladies Who Are Really Interested In And Excited About One Particular Thing)

She loves to garden and grow things. Even in winter, she keeps window boxes of herbs and flowers. Part of it’s practical - she’s a healer and needs ingredients - but part of it’s the enjoyment of getting to watch something grow from a tiny seed into a beautiful flower and know that she’s the one responsible.

(She’s also constantly collecting plants when she’s off questing; much to the occasional annoyance of her party, when she doubles back and goes the long way over a hill because she thought she saw a flower)

She draws plants too, and keeps a little sketchbook with her at all times so she can draw newly-discovered (to her) ones, or a particularly pretty flower or a nicely-maintained hedge. She’s currently working on designing labels the wooden stake things that tell you what’s planted where for Skyhold’s garden.