having fun with some (very) simple animation ft. kisami

god okay i’m going to talk about Kisami even though I don’t actually know if she’s going to turn up in constellations.

So Kisami came up because I actually came up with an idea for a sequel and a prequel to Constellations within dreamverse, the sequel focusing on Kastoris and her protegees Solaria and Anika (names subject to change) and the prequel… ooh the prequel. I always knew that I really wanted to write about Adri, Chrisl and Vic’s past and I know that Adri and Vic meet in uni but then i started writing and oh look it’s a New Character.

I got her name almost immediately, Kisami. Her koa (her private name to be used by family) took like a few days longer but Coriae it was. But who is she? Who is she apart from a huge influence on Adri, Chrisl and Vic’s life and their Mentor FigureTM?

I figure out then that the subject she would teach is Introduction to Magical Understanding and Analysis.

Then I spent several days having a lot of feels about the fact you never learn anything about Kisami that’s actually personal. you know she owned a secret library that would later become Lightink and yknow, the main setting for dreamverse.

Ah, then Kisami reveals her heritage! So here an in joke appears. So Kisami, in Cloudian, rhymes with an insult (kisomi) which basically means someone who is nosy and has no sense of personal space and who’s invasive. Then, you find out despite the three not knowing, that Kisami’s not actually from Cloud! Yes, she IS a spirit, but she’s not a wind spirit or a cloud spirit or faerie at all.

What is she then? Is she demonic? Is she from Dirister too? Then, it comes out that she’s half shinigami half kitsune, after several false starts. Having both the traits of a shinigami and a kitsune, Kisami has uncanny insights into two things the faerie consider very personal: death and magic. Understanding magic, which is something she’s naturally very good at and in tune with, being half kitsune, demystifies a lot that the faerie would really rather keep mystified.

And then the Angst comes, because (spoiler alert!) she dies at the climax of the prequel (which I’m temporarily calling the Waxing of the Moon) because she succumbs to a disease (and also because she’s… really old at this point when she gets to the three and her immune system to start out already wasn’t great). but see. Kisami KNEW she would die because she’s attuned to death and she Knows she’s about to die and she doesn’t want to subject any of them to it. But Chrisl’s the one treating her and she can’t tell Chrisl that she’s already going to die without evoking suspicion for Reasons.

….. aaaaand that’s what we know of Kisami so far and then we get to know MORE about her when I start writing Interactions between her and the three!

tldr:: my process involves getting to know a character by having them present several qualities to me and their Vibe, and then getting to know them better slowly through thinking about them.