#folia

Sylvie is a silverfish who used to live with her single mother, who loved her very dearly to the point of coddling and sheltering her. Her mother struggled financially to care for the both of them, and resorted to offering shady services in order to make ends meet. Sylvie saw many questionable strangers stay in their home for various periods of time, and her mother would often be drained and physically hurt by the time those bugs left. Sylvie soon came to view herself as a burden, blaming herself for making her mother go to such dangerous lengths just to care for her, and decided to move out as soon as she was old enough, believing that it would make things easier for her mother financially.

She ended up being right, and her mother very quickly became able to support herself through much safer work, but all it did was prove to Sylvie that others were better off without her. She became very introverted and a little emotionally detached, finding it hard to trust others and form new relationships, and mostly stayed holed up in her new home - an overturned book whose pages she ate away at until it became a house-shaped place for her to live - until she met Folia and Lilith.

Her two new friends - Folia especially - help her to be more independent, as her sheltered upbringing kept her from learning how to care for herself. They also encourage her to be as kind to herself as she is to others, and to understand that it's not an inconvenience for others to offer help.

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Folia is a walking leaf who once had herself a traditional family - she, her spouse, and their two children made their cozy home in the branches of a tall, thin tree for several years. One day, an earthquake suddenly struck, violently swaying the branches of their home until they broke from the tree. Folia and her spouse tried desperately to save their children first, but before long the whole tree snapped and toppled over. Folia was the only one to survive the fall, and was not only burdened with the task of finding and burying her family, but also with finding somewhere else to live, as many other places nearby were destroyed in the quake.

Folia traveled for several moons throughout much of Bugaria, spending many of her nights at inns or in the homes of kind and sympathetic strangers, and doing various odd jobs to feed herself when she needed to. It wasn't until she met Sylvie and Lilith that she finally found somewhere to settle down and make a new home.

Not long after they become friends, Folia comes to adore Sylvie and Lilith almost like daughters. She knows she can never bring her own family back, but her new friends give her a chance to make up for losing those she feels she could have protected.

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Lilith is an angel insect - bugs that are typically born without eyes or wings, but will produce new offspring with these features to help find a new home for the colony in times of hardship. Lilith was only born just as her colony was beginning to prepare for relocation, so she has no eyes, and although she does have wings, they are very weak and barely suitable for flying. As such, her colony deemed her unfit to help lead them to a new location and she was even shunned by a handful of her fellow bugs. Lilith took this personally and became quite a troublemaker in retaliation, picking fights with others and even stealing things in an attempt to prove her strength and ability, but it changed nothing. When her colony finally moved, they purposefully left her behind for her unruly behavior, and Lilith was forced to find her own way to a new home.

As she traveled, she kept herself afloat with prize money she earned from various fighting competitions, not all of which were…entirely legal. Despite her strength and conviction, she still came across many bugs that pitied her for her lack of eyes. Not wanting to be seen as weak by even more than her own colony, she started wearing a bandana across her face and played it off as part of her training, an intentional handicap meant to hone her other senses. It impressed plenty of bugs, as she'd hoped, including Sylvie and Folia, with whom she became fast friends.