#lodee

Florian is very happy :) He had a pretty rough time after we saw him in Such Familiar Distance with an owner who wasn't cruel but who just really didn't care about him except as an object and he had several years of thinking he would Never Love Again and Love is Fake, etc, until he met his now-husband. I haven't worked out exactly how they met, but Florian's husband is an extremely buff former gladiator who fell hard head over heels for him as soon as they met and had to convince Florian that he was serious about a long term relationship. The first time they had sex, Florian told him that it was going to be a one time hookup with no strings attached (and then it was looooooove)

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“No loyalty, either of them,” Julius complained as he gestured widely with his cup.  “Marcus and–and–”

“Kallius,” his friend said nastily, catching Lodewyck’s attention across the bar.

“The slut,” Julius agreed.  Lodewyck drank his piss-thin southern excuse for beer and watched them.  Julius wore some patchy ragged beard like a mask, clearly trying to make himself look different than the last time he fucked Lodewyck back in that muddy, incestuous little village when he'd been visiting Marcus.

The other one complained nastily about Kallius at length as Lodewyck pretended not to listen.  Stuck up, ambitious, conceited, vain and lazy.  Nothing Lodewyck didn't agree with, of course, except for maybe the laziness; Marcus had always liked a bit of a bouncing and moaning show more than Lodewyck’s knees cared for, so Kallius must have had to do more than a bit of wiggling.  But it also wasn't the sort of thing Lodewyck cared for in the filthy mouth of some pinch-assed whiner.

1. Who is their hero?

Kal: definitely Joost.  

Marcus: it was Maecenas until he met Calla, and then finding out what she was like sent him into a tailspin.

14. What is their idea of perfect happiness?

Kal: I don't think he knows? He's kind of fundamentally unsatisfied with himself, so probably being in a situation where he could work on getting/getting better at something where his ambitiousness was rewarded.

Marcus: he just really wants all the domestic bliss. If he felt like he had room to do his writing without hiding it he'd be perfectly happy to be a househusband.

15. What would they ask a fortune teller?

Kal: whether he would be the same person if he'd grown up with his family 

Marcus: will their hypothetical future children be happy 

16. If your character could travel through time, where would they go?

Lodee: the future 

Teunis: he'd think he wanted to go back to a mythic pre-helotage past, then he would feel like he should go back in time and do an assassination plot to change history, and then he'd go back to when his parents were young and happy.

17. What sport do they excel at?

Lodee: He strikes me as one of those obnoxious marathon guys, you know the type

Well! I'm definitely putting Lodee cursing Marcus at some point in the past on my to-do list now!

And like, Lodee didn't not curse Marcus the night he came over for tea--Kal asked him not to and Lodee only said he didn't curse Marcus' dick. Marcus also spent the whole night being disrespectful, so who's to say he didn't deserve a little light cursing for a few weeks while he was contemplating his many misdeeds.

I did think about either making Lodee's supernatural stuff plausibly true in-story, but it felt too divergent in tone. But I do like the idea that everyone is in a slightly different genre, like Lodee has this whole other shamanic journey thing going off page like he's from that Brittania show while Kal and Marcus are in a Rome/Downton mashup.