#endereplies

Things that are written: the entire final chapter and epilogue and about a hundred thousand words’ worth of the other chapters

Things that are not written: fucking chapter three it’s over ten thousand words of pure setup with zero payoff and on first look it seems nothing happens and editing it is hell and why did I decide to begin my fanfic career with an epic ffs

🌳 What is your OC’s favourite way to relax after a stressful day? Do they have a favourite book to curl up with? A hobby? Or do they have a nice bubble bath and have an early night to bed?

This is partly covered in the🍁 answer.

After the good stressful days, where things were difficult but paid off in the end – Pathira’s betrayal, bringing Tharaêl home, the Aged Man, bringing Nessah home, the occasional serious arguments of the household – Anne goes to the bathhouse.

After the bad stressful days – the Room of Paintings, the Living Temple, Lishari, Calia exploding at her for being all too similar to her father, Jespar refusing to let her help bury Adila, having to burn Rynéus – into the ocean Anne goes.

Until the arrival of Coarek and the armada, practically the incarnation of Nehrim following her, takes both away from her and she is left to spiral instead.

For the normal, regular stress of life as one of the Order’s hired Nehrimese arcanists and on-and-off employee of the Golden Sickle, Anne stress-eats, gorges on her favorite foods (typically an entire fresh date cake bought from Uajaan Vuul), and reads.

A lot. Really a lot.

Because one of Anne’s main issues is that, while ascension to the rank of Emissary did seemingly awaken her arcane abilities and gift her with perfect recall, it did absolutely nothing about the fact that she was an underfed, tiny weakling whose only strength was her wits. Prophethood did not come with magical muscles; nor did it make them develop any faster. Therefore, Anne’s one and only way of gaining strength – of gaining relevance and skill – quickly enough to enable her to do what she thinks she must, is extremely heavy study of the arcane.

Anne religiously preserves every interesting book she finds, to read (and so remember) as soon as she has the time. Though it is technically work, it is in fact relaxation for her, as with each new morsel of understanding of the world around her, each new spell, each new idea of how to better wield them, she becomes stronger. Freer. More likely to be able to do better next time, more likely to escape, more likely to be able to help and to matter. Every little bit of arcane skill added to her arsenal is a little bit of worry gone.

(Case in point, after the battle with the Father and seeing what Psionics enabled him to do, and after her own issues with managing Tharaêl afterwards, Anne falls headfirst into studying Psionics – with a focus on mimicking the man’s ability to use illusionary clones as decoys and cloak himself from perception. She says strictly nothing of it to her housemates, of course.)

Anne does not really have hobbies anymore. She simply no longer has the time. If anything, one could argue that her choice to maintain the vague illusion of a ‘normal’ life, working at the Sickle on 'off-mission’ days and spending evenings at home or at Yerai’s with her adopted siblings, is her hobby.

Anne’s idea of a bubble bath before sleep is simply sitting and talking, either about her own problems or those of her interlocutor. At the tavern with Jespar, at home with Tharaêl, at Yerai’s workshop with Nessah, at the Temple with Archmagister Merrâyil – anything goes, as long as she is not alone.

🍁 Where does your OC go when they need to have some time to themself? Would they ever have their own “comfort corner” filled with all the things they like? Do they have a favourite spot outside that feels like its theirs and theirs alone?

Anne has three comfort corners — of a sort.

The first is her fireplace. As the warmest, dryest place of the house, it’s where she likes to sit to read or when tired, and its lintel is where she puts all that she most wants to keep safe or most wants to remember. To the left, a wooden boat, bought from the Gatzidormatalata family in Riverville; it’s an ordinary toy, but it looks like the Morning Dew, and she has taken to using it as a shrine to Sirius’ memory. Jespar’s ridiculous green and pink Kiléan dress is folded in place of honor in the center. On it, a flute she found in the ruins of Foamville, that she caught Tharaêl trying to play once when she came back home. To the right, the small safe where she puts what money she does not entrust to the bank. And almost hidden behind it, a tiny, unremarkable wooden casket, containing the broken crystals which used to house Zar'Ah and Letho’s souls, and the black Pyrean crystal she intended to use to house Sirius’, whenever she managed to locate the place he had died.

The second of Anne’s comfort corners is the bathhouse. Whenever she feels powerless, stressed, or otherwise insecure, Anne spends the next early morning or late evening in the great bath, when the bards are absent and most clients either not yet arrived or gone. She then spends time either floating on her back, or swimming back and forth, or diving to the bottom and attempting to hold her breath for as long as possible. It’s therapy of a sort; a way of face the trauma of being thrown overboard and sinking. She did not know how to swim, then; she only learned in Ark, in the bathhouse itself, thanks to the Prophet’s ability to learn instantly. She does this to remind herself – or rather to convince herself – that she is better than the woman who was thrown off the Morning Dew, that she can beat the water now, and that whatever is stressing her is just another wave she can learn to overcome.

The third of her comfort corners is neither a corner, nor in any way comforting, but is the most efficient one. Whenever nothing is enough, when the nightmares won’t stop or her efforts won’t stop failing, Anne walks down to the coast at night, and wades into the ocean until her feet no longer touch bottom. There, she lets herself sink underwater and just screams all the pain out, confessing everything she’s done wrong to the sea until she is either too cold or too tired to stay in the water.

It’s the wrong side of the coast, but she likes to pretend Sirius can hear her anyway.

🍂 Does your OC enjoy hugs? What do they do as a show of affection for: their friends, their family, their significant other(s) or for strangers? Over all what are they like with recieving affection from others?

Anne enjoys hugs – and thankfully for her, so does Jespar, because the marketplace household is Ew No Hugs Country. Between Tharaêl’s violent startle reflexes and dislike of physical impediment, Nessah’s utter disgust for the concept of physical affection (and even greater disgust for her own inability to fully wean herself of wanting it), and their shared discomfort with skin contact, hugs are very much not on the menu! On top of that, of the people Anne considers her friends, Yerai, while eminently huggable, is always covered in metal shavings, coal ash, or oil, which makes the exercise quite unadvisable – and Archmagister Merrâyil, while a comforting presence, is way too fucking tall when one barely reaches five feet. Calia, only other potential source of hugs in a hundred mile radius, is unfortunately about as inclined to give them as the Truchessa herself, if for much more sympathetic reasons.

Bless the Wise Hermit for Jespar Mitumial Dal'Varek, really.

Anne typically shows affection in a proactive fashion: she offers help with whatever the person is doing at the time, with the effort she puts in it increasing with how much she likes the person. The 🌿 answer dives into this in more depth, as it’s more relevant there.

As for receiving it, she typically meets it as she does most anything else: with a smile.

💦 If you as the writer could erase one traumatic event from this OC’s life what would it be and why?

Honestly... none. Take any trauma out of Anne, and you doom quite a few other characters, Tharaêl included. Every last one of Anne's regrets are integral to her decision to help them and the ways in which she does so -- and, later, integral in her decision to destroy the Beacon. Case in point, alter anything along Jespar’s questline, or anything along the Rhalâta’s or Yerai’s, and off to be the necromancer-queen of some brave new world Anne goes.

Since the entire purpose of Anne was to be Waiting for Water's Prophet, and the entire purpose of Waiting for Water was to get Tharaêl to a mental state where he could manage to tank through the damage of the endgame, altering Anne's past would defeat the purpose.

...Hmm, perhaps one small thing: I would let Pigeons (Anne and Aud's barn cat) die of old age, presumably as Sirius and Anne's tagalong pet. That's about the only thing I can think of that might not generate too wide a cascade of side-effects.

🍄 What are your OCs favourite snacks? Their favourite comfort food which always cheers them up when they’re down? Favourite meal to make? Do they enjoy baking and cooking and are they any good in the kitchen?

Dates. Date cake, date pie, date paste, stuffed dates, fresh dates, dried dates -- you name it, Anne loves it. Dates are the food of the gods. Anne knows it. Just look at them. You don't even need to prepare them, they're fantastic and sugary and long-lasting all by themselves. They're good raw, they're good cooked, they're just plain good no matter what. It's like someone saw apples, thought "I can do even better", and bam, they made dates. Clearly the thing priests should start with when arguing for the existence and benevolence of the Lightborn.

Where “comfort food” is concerned... well, as a former forest rat turned street urchin, Anne can and will eat anything, and is very used to meals the likes of cattail root, beetles, and tree bark or pine needle soup. Any food prepared for her without effort on her part will cheer her up by default. Date cake will still get the best result, of course.

(As long as no one else intends to eat any of it, that is. Putting date cake in the vicinity of Anne and expecting it to survive for more than five minutes is a wild dream. It will disappear into her stomach. Plate and cutlery possibly included.)

If asked to prepare a full meal by herself, Anne is likely to make some sort of variation of "plate of boiled cereal or legume" + "vegetable roasted on the coals" + "egg boiled with the cereal if eggs are available". Except for breakfast -- breakfast is always raw, because she can't be arsed to cook first thing in the morning, and so tends to be composed of bread, more bread, an extra slice of bread, and fruit if she has any.

She can eat meat, but will almost never cook it, and only by boiling when she does. She cannot stand the smell of roasted meat in her house.

Anne has no idea how to bake. As a child, she was the elder sibling, and so in effect "the boy" in her father's eyes. She learned to forage and hunt, not cook; that was her sister's job, learned from their mother. She later learned basic cooking with Sirius through sheer necessity, but by then they never had enough ingredients at hand to bake anything -- and now that she is in Ark and essentially the "provider" of the family, the task has fallen to Tharaêl and Nessah. All in all, Anne can cook a large variety of individual ingredients, but will practically never take the initiative of mixing them. Give her two eggs, a piece of pork, and some mushrooms, and she will serve you grilled pork and mushrooms with two boiled eggs -- not a mushroom omelette.

🌾 Describe your OC through the eyes of someone absolutely head-over-heels in love with them

Dammit I wanted to read other people answering this not answer it myself why do you do this to me

This one is genuinely hard. From where I stand, Anne seems such an unwise person to love that it's hard to put myself in the place of someone who would. She does have qualities, even genuinely good ones, but she always takes everything so far that they're also her flaws, and the rampant lying complicates things quite a lot. She meshes well with Jespar due to how compatible their relative issues are (and how forgiving they are of each other's fuckups due to having been there themselves), but that's about all I can imagine. Anne is the sort of person best experienced in small amounts at a time.

All in all, I think that what would most stand out to someone is her... well, righteousness is definitely not the right word, not when she also lies all over the place and raises the dead left and right without caring for permission! But the fact that what virtues she does have, she sticks so determinedly to.

Steadfastness, perhaps? Responsibility? She cannot be trusted to always say the truth or to always follow the wisest course of action, but she can very much be trusted to always be trying her level best, and to always be attempting (if with wildly varying chances of success) to do right by those she loves and those who depend on her.

The "quality" that would most stand out would likely be her dedication to being merciful, out of pure conviction that somebody has to be, and that with Sirius gone the task must fall to her. If you directly asked her, somewhere none but her and you could hear, if she really thinks Jespar will ever fully live up to his responsibilities, she would reply that she doubts it. Is Calia wanting to be a Keeper worth risking her demon's rages? No, no it's not. Will Esme ever find Tara? The girl is almost certainly dead, and Esme almost certain to kill herself in the attempt. Can Tharaêl ever hope to atone for what he's done? Are you kidding, you can't undo mass murder. Is Nessah worth helping? Fuck if Anne knows, she's mostly a pile of issues varnished with a coat of Rhalâs.

But is she going to act exactly as if they were worth every last bit of effort, like Sirius once did with her, just so someone somewhere actually gives them the chance to be better? Because each other is all that the lonely ever have, and all the Rocios and Fathers of the world can go fuck themselves?

Yes. Yes she is.

And she’ll smile doing it, too.

🌿 What way does your OC show that they care without using words? What way do others show your OC that they’re cared about without using speech?

The biggest tell that Anne cares is long hesitation before an action or answer. It means that she is taking the person fully into account, and weighing how to react in the way that will most benefit them. Of course, that can result in a lie, should Anne ultimately decide that the person will most benefit from that. Which can in turn result in harm rather than help, if the person is sensitive to being lied to. But the lie will have been made with the intent to help, not for Anne’s own benefit.

The second-biggest tell is the more obvious one: Anne will invest time to help. Often, that will take the form of direct assistance, though not always where the person can see it. She can, for example, spend weeks researching a specific subject or pursuing a specific item in silence, if she knows the person she cares for likely wants or needs it. Likewise, if overhearing someone she cares for say that they wish they could have done one thing or regret doing another, Anne is likely to take it upon herself to go and do that thing for them. This can, of course, backfire horribly, as it leaves her to barge into other people's business without invitation.

All in all, Anne is extremely interventionistic (which becoming Fleshless has only worsened). Sometimes for the better, when she has accurately gauged the person's actual desires; sometimes for worse, when she projects her own desires on the person.

As for how to show her that she is cared about, the one she most appreciates is what she herself does for other people: finding things done for her. Waking up in the morning to find her armor waxed, answering a summons from the Temple to find Jespar and Calia have already researched the objective... anything that shows the person valued her time and tried to help her. Whether or not Anne appreciates the thing done in and of itself is of little importance to her; what she loves is that she was considered worth making the effort for.

Case in point, Nessah may cook the most tasteless sludge known to mankind, but all that Anne will ever see is that she always cooks three bowls.

She treasures Jespar's dress for that exact reason: it was an initiative of Jespar's, bought with his own money without expectations of reimbursment, to help her, a complete stranger, gain access to an area from which she was barred, with no intent beyond helping her handle her arcane fever. She never wears the dress, but considers it the most valuable thing in her house, short of course of its other inhabitants.

(Thankfully for Anne, said other inhabitants are more practical than her, and would rescue her safe first should the house catch on fire.)

🌹 Where in the world does your OC feel most at home? Is there any reason why? If it’s not the place they were born, where were they born? Is there a certain somebody that makes them feel at home where ever they may be? What does home mean to them?

Anne is not attached to the concept of a home as a place; due to her own childhood house having been rather unwelcoming and Ostian even less so, she is very much a "people are home" person. She attaches herself to someone, and considers them her place to return to. As a child, anywhere was home as long as her little sister Aud was there; as a young woman drifting through Ostian, any place was home as long as Sirius was with her. In Enderal, the house she bought on the marketplace was only a building, stocked and prepared but not properly lived in yet; as there was no one home, Anne treated it more like a warehouse, to simply pile things in until she needed them. Save for the attic, always kept duly clean, as a promise to herself that it would be Sirius' room once she had returned him to life.

Now, her "home" is Tharaêl and Nessah, for better and for worse. Tharaêl is very aggressive, and Nessah an actual devout Rhalâim; an astute person could say that Anne has reproduced her own childhood home around her with her as the adult this time, and debate the sanity -- let alone healthiness -- of the situation.

(Which Jespar does, and Anne counterattacks to by pointing at his issues with his own family, leading to the one, and mercifully only, genuine big argument of the relationship.)

Anne would love to consider Jespar home, but cannot bring herself to. She sees him as a drifter; someone who flees, yes, but also someone who loves the road for its own sake, curious to see new sights and experience new things. She cannot pin him down to Ark, where he is so clearly uncomfortable; nor can she uproot her adopted siblings, who are just barely learning to have roots again at all. So, Tharaêl and Nessah being in more need of direct support, Anne puts them above Jespar in her order of priorities -- and is quietly ashamed of it.

Jespar says nothing, but he understands; he wishes he could have done the same, back when Adila was the unstable young person in desperate need of assistance. He finds Anne's wish to respect his freedom, and her insistence on standing by her adopted family, some of her most endearing traits.

He would be a lot less understanding, and a lot more worried, if he realized that Anne's adopted family is composed of two former Voices of the Father, and that several arguments have resulted in blades being drawn. But Anne is as Anne does, and so of course, she lies to him.

🌻 What little things do they notice about people or the world around them that make them happy? What tiny little treasures do they find in the normal every day that makes the world seem a little brighter for them?

All those small incarnations of life holding on and triumphing against all odds. Tiny plants managing to bloom inside cracks on dry rock walls. A rare butterfly landing on the tallgrass in Thalgard. The fireflies drifting along the cliff roads to the Aged Man's house. The windswept orange trees in the Starling City.

People enthusiastic about their work, happily seeing to their tasks without envying or disparaging others. Marita Rotang, Yerai Dal'Terrowin, Magistra Yaela, Archmagister Merrâyil, even Tarhutie Leklerk -- those sorts of people make Anne's day anytime she runs into one of them. She sees them as the living, breathing proof that the world is inherently worth striving to save, no matter what anyone else does. One Marita, in her eyes, would be enough to redeem an entire city of Nataras and Coareks.

Contingent to that, Anne likes to see passion, whatever it happens to be directed at, whichever form it takes. She likes the way Jespar's eyes, voice, and entire demeanor brighten whenever he thinks of traveling to a new place. She likes Calia's bouts of annoyance at the inaction of people. She likes how Tharaêl concentrates on things to the point of losing himself in them. She likes Nessah's insistence on following Rhalâim rules even as the Rhalâta abandoned her (and even as Anne herself finds the rules ridiculous). She likes Esme's unwillingness to give up on finding Tara, Rynéus' love of butterflies, and Maél's insistence on donating to charity. Passion is what Anne relates to in people; the moments she feels she most understands them.

someone else with rooftop headcanons! :D

Absolutely, and high five! Because there is no way Tharaêl would not investigate every possible escape route in what he considers enemy territory, or not prefer the literal high road when it’s the only place that gives him as wide a berth as his Voice’s uniform got him in the Undercity.

Just look at him in the houses or the tavern. He’s always on the balcony. When he’s not being completely extra by sitting on top of dressers.

Betcha he took top bunk back in the orphanage.

@mirogeorgiev:

"And then the Temple happened."™️

I mean, let’s be real, that’s the Prophet’s life story.

I lived in Ostian, and then the (Creator’s) Temple happened.

I moved to Enderal, and then the (Sun) Temple happened.

I was helping an alchemist find her son, and then the (sunken) Temple happened.

I was in the Undercity, and then the (Rhalâta’s) Temple happened.

I was helping someone take down the Rhalâta, and then the (Old) Temple happened.

I was helping a friend find their girlfriend, and then the (Veiled Woman’s) Temple happened.

I was living my life, and then the (Living) Temple happened.

I was trying to save the world, but then the (attack on the) Temple happened.

Bone - When was the first time you ever witnessed death? How did it impact you?“…Well, I grew up on a farm, and my father was a hunter, so death was an everyday thing. No killing, no eating. And there was – but you mean people, right? Yeah, people. A neighbor, from rabies, when I was… I think seven or eight? Honestly, I was less impacted by his death than by the consequences of it. So many animals were put down. People too. The Temple even… condemned some houses, just in case it would spread. It wasn’t a good year, even by Ostian standards.”

Honey - Have you ever considered marrying someone? What is your opinion on marriage in general?“Between you and me? No, and I don’t care. But just in case someone is overhearing this, why, yes, I fully expect to become Mydame Dal'Varek at some point. Marriage in the eye of Malphas is supremely important, and simply has to take place within the Sun Temple’s walls. No expenses should be spared, and considering my rank and the nobility of my future husband, my dress will simply have to be twice as eye-gougingly colorful as the entire Blue Island Coalition. I have standards. And appearances to maintain. And possibly even a Truchessa to embarrass.”

Jumpsuit - Have you ever been arrested/ in trouble with authority?“…Um. No. Sort of.”“…”“…Wait, if the Rhalâta is the law in the Undercity, does messing with the Rhalâta count as being in trouble with authority? Because if so, then boy do I have trouble with authority. My house is full of it right up to the ceiling.”