#loreland

They start out kinda as grumpy x comedic relief. Ruby has the mentality of never trusting anyone as anyone could betray you and hurt you, and Ryan uses jokes and quips to brush off the seriousness of their 'almost dying daily' lifestyle fighting against an evil magic organization. Ruby reluctantly teams up with Ryan after he saves her life, but eventually starts warming up to him. Ryan has a nasty habit of trying to protect her even at the cost of himself, and she drills it into him to not do that. Ryan also shows his more vulnerable side after a while, to which Ruby is there to be a shoulder to lean on. Overall it's two rather broken people finding safe places to rest within the other, while also being a badass Power Couple.

They have some bumps in the road during their relationship; Ryan reveals a big secret that shatters Ruby's perception of him for a while. Ruby almost dies to an evil entity trying to possess her to kill humanity. Ryan almost dies to a different evil entity later on. But they both live!! They get a happy ending after all of it :) Which, for a while it was Ryan did just die at the end of Legends of the Cosmos (a kind of collection that CoV's the start of). But he doesn't anymore, yippee!!

Art of Ryan and Ruby. Ryan is the brunette on the left, Ruby's with the red highlights on the right. Ignore the middle guy for now he's not important lol

Risabell/ShadowCard (the second name's a new ship name I thought of legit thirty minutes ago lmao)

THIS ship is easily in my top three, maybe even my top two for CoV ships. It's got Riot, a perfectionist jester themed villain who takes joy in manipulating and making wisecracks about people, and Isabell Casimiro, no-nonsense Agent of Chaos (that evil organization that Ruby and Ryan fight) who tries her damnedest to focus on her mission and serve well.

They're great.

Riot has a habit of getting in people's personal space, and Isabell is no exception during the brief period the two work together. And she does it especially more since Riot quickly develops a crush on Isabell. Isabell kind of indulges in Riot's half advances, but she doesn't let it get more than that as relationships are often dangerous in the Agents of Chaos.

Then later, when they work together way more, it's more of them ignoring feelings and trying to not say things out loud. It devolves into messy on and offs of them bantering and flirting, then suddenly Isabell not seeming to want to do anything with Riot at all (often to put more focus on work/her job as an Agent), and then back again, all with the occasional (more than occasional) secret sex.

Eventually they do get their shit together and actually start dating, when they're in a safer place to do so. But I love the secretness and 'will they wont they' part of their relationship a lot, it's fun :D

Art of both Riot and Isabell. Riot has the purple jacket and mask, and Isabell has the black and bronze outfit <3

WorldsDuo

WorldsDuo isn't a part of any sort of WIP I'm making; it's moreso me mashing my and my partner's Minecraft OCs together for funsies. WorldsDuo is the ship for Reaper x Yoda (no, not the green guy. But fret not, Yoda is due for a name change soon as my partner reworks him. I just have no clue what it is.)

'Reaper?' you might be wondering. 'From Souls of Black?"

Yes, in fact. Only, this Reaper is a version further into the future from her SoB self. She meets Yoda after Souls of Black takes place.

And their entire aesthetic is 'doomed immortal soulmates'.

Reaper and Yoda have been through a lot of shit, both together and separately. Reaper has the entirety of Souls of Black. Yoda has the entirety of his origin story, currently called Recreance. Both face heavy losses, and when they meet, it just gets worse. They start off rocky--Reaper still has her distrustful tendencies, and unfortunately no memory of SoB or its lessons-- so they're not exactly friends. But later they slowly start becoming it. They go on a mining trip, Yoda gets possessed by sculk; Reaper has to kill him to save him. She hates and faults herself for it. She befriends his ghost. His ghost kills himself after finding out about Yoda from a book from a mysterious entity called The Game Master. Yoda doesn't hate her. She ends up accidentally helping someone who hates Yoda have him killed again. Later Yoda gets possessed by a much worse, much more evil and cunning entity, and then kills all of Reaper's friends in that World, and himself, and leaves her alone under its influence.

Then, in a new World, they actually start dating. Things go well, Reaper gets her SoB memories. They live in a nice quaint cabin together. Then it's revealed Yoda has secrets he isn't willing to share, while Reaper wants to share everything between them because she's worried about secrets getting them killed. It's a never ending argument and she breaks up with him. She hates herself for this and is nigh suicidal yet she can't die. Yoda hates himself for losing her and descends into alcoholism.

In a newer World, things still suck. Reaper's trying to forget about Yoda and has adopted a son, but Yoda shows up in that World again. They are always destined to find each other. They kind of co-parent Reaper's adopted son. When said son gets infected with a parasite they argue about who will kill him if the need arises. Reaper and Yoda start mending again. Later it's revealed Yoda made a deal with the evil entity that possessed him, called The Origin, for it to handle threats in his life so he could try and live normally after never having been able to, and that's one of the big secrets he was keeping from Reaper. The Game Master's back, and both he and The Origin are taking turns whacking Reaper with the Trauma stick. Reaper hallucinating Yoda's ghost, and wanting her friend back, gets possessed and tricked into killing Yoda permanently. Reaper doesn't trust herself anymore and hates herself further for killing Yoda again. She can't ever not kill the people she loves. Yoda's ghost doesn't even remember her, and later history repeats, and he finds the book from The Game Master again and dies again to bring Yoda back. Yoda helps Reaper from a breakdown, and finally tells her his other secret: that he had a wife and son before but his wife died and he unwillingly was torn from his son. They've slowly started mending again and confronting their feelings.

Reaper reminds him of his wife. Yoda reminds Reaper of both Phoebe and Galisa. They each see both their past joys and past biggest mistakes in the other yet still want so desperately to be loved, to finally have rest from the torment that is their lives.

Many such things are left out because I'm going off the top of my head, but least of all to say their history and relationship is so complicated and sad. And I love it! :D

WorldsDuo is just... they're destined to find each other but never stay together. One of them will always die. One of them will always kill the other. Both of them wish for an end that will never come. Both of them simply want a quiet peaceful life with the other, but the Worlds seem to not want to give it to them sob

Look. They even have matching thematic art with the titles the Universe and their lives have given them. I'm gonna throw up.

----

How did you come up with Reaper as a character?

So, for those of you who don't know who wound up reading this, Souls of Black is highly inspired by the game Minecraft. And as such, Reaper honestly started out as the character I often played as. For a long time I played on Bedrock Edition on my dad's XBox, and on his account. Part of his username had the word 'Reaper' in it, which on its own is pretty cool, and so I kinda stole that for her name, lol.

Reaper as an actual character with lore, though, started say, 4, 5 years ago? I was playing on a survival world by myself, and my (not yet) boyfriend had joined, and we were just messing around. There was only one thing though: he and I are very much known for spontaneously roleplaying.

It's how Call of the Void started, and it's how this started, too. We started playing as actual characters, using our gamertags as their names: Reaper and Yoda. Eventually, the roleplay started growing and as such so did the lore. We got a few of our friends to join in on it--a lot of them came and went, but at least one of them stayed until the end and what was for what we decided was the world's finale. That world, which we affectionately named Loreland (the pinnacle of creativity obviously) was really was started Reaper as a character. And I am so ever grateful for it.

And actually, Reaper's outfit in Souls of Black was inspired by/based off of the Minecraft skin I'd made and had in Loreland:

Her hairstyle, boots, and the length of her coat were really all that I changed for Souls of Black. But, the neat thing is, her hairstyle in the photos is what I use for as a base for her current day hair :D

I have a few pictures from Loreland, very bad ones as it was me taking photos of my TV screen, but I love them very much and I'm going to explain each of them like a mother through a family photo album damnit!

I've realized some of them can't be put here because they're somehow too big. BUT I can try and share the important ones!! But be warned, yeah there's a lot, and I have a LOT to babble about hehe.

Locations

The first image is an apiary I'd built in front of my house. Self explanatory, it had three floors fillleedd with bees :3 The second image is another shot of the front of my house, thankfully done by my wonderful boyfriend.

This is what we all affectionately called 'Cobble Cave'. It was a cave across the mountain I lived on top of, and we really only used it for cobble, digging a deeper and deeper quarry in it as we did lol. I didn't want anyone living in it because it was basically our quarry, and so I put this sign here

So, Bedrock is known for its bugs, and this is one of the few that happened once. My brother and I were playing together, and while I saw rain, he saw nothing but sunshine. We thought it was really funny, given Reaper's consistent dour mood, versus his character, Gerald's, usually chipper one.

Now this is my WONDERFUL home, god I love it so much. This image isn't wholly accurate, because some of the underside stairs on the roof, on the left side, were missing, because for the entire world I'd forgotten that I hadn't put any there. Unfortunately my boyfriend fixed that before he took the photo lol

This image pertains to him, actually, or rather his character, Yoda. This is Yoda's house, which was essentially a bunker underneath mine, inside of the mountain.

This was on the east side of my mountain, where a few buildings were. This bridge is one I'd just built and was rather proud of, with the building behind it being a courthouse that was used...a few times, actually. We put one character under house arrest for murder, with the ghost of the victim as the judge--

Finally, this is a work in progress shot of a shop I'd built. Essentially it sold music discs--mellohi being my and then Reaper's favorite. My love for music discs started hers, honestly, but that only fuuully shows up in current day Apocryphal SMP. It does a little bit in Souls of Black, I'll admit. But I feel they have a few more pressing problems than finding strange music discs.

Lore?

This is Reaper's attic; in it was where she kept a lot of keepsakes and gifts from other characters, as well as two of her journals, which were used to essentially keep tabs on other characters, as well as it being a diary of sorts. This, along with me usually using book and quills one way or another in every world, helped along the idea of Reaper's journal in SoB :)

And here's a few of said entries. The first is after Yoda's first canon death--caused by Reaper herself, because she saw killing him as the only way to sever the sculk's connection to him that was controlling his body. The castle mentioned was another building near the courthouse, and was there before it, actually. And the ghost... well, he's important and will come later :)

The second image is an example of her notes on a half human, half Enderman character named Sir Evan II. He was the final friend that stuck around for Loreland's finale, as well as my brother joining in.

Here is the ghost of Yoda, named Ghoda. And this is his first meeting with a natural pink sheep, the first we found on Loreland, which he decided to bring home and into the lore and name him pal.

Pal has become something of a running bit, yet an endearing one all the same. Any pink sheep found on a world with me in it is usually the first one found on it. It sounds rigged but I can assure you it really isn't 😭😭. But I always see it as pal looking for Reaper again in any world, hehehe :33

Now, in Reaper's sort of lore timeline, Loreland actually happens after Souls of Black--hence the reason her outfit doesn't really change between them. But now I get to talk about the inspiration behind Souls of Black itself... I'll try not to get too emotional, haha. Again, it's something I hold very dear to me, because it's really the reason Souls of Black exists at all.

Souls of Black's Inspiration

As I mentioned, for the longest time I played Bedrock Edition of Minecraft. And on Bedrock, you have a few select servers you can choose to play on. And there was one I loved a lot, for the sole fact that I could play survival mode with new people, when my friends weren't up for it or weren't available, or if I just wanted a new experience, really.

This server was called Lifeboat, and its Survival Gamemode was the entire reason Souls of Black exists today.

Playing on the Survival Mode on Lifeboat was always an... experience. You spawn in a normal Minecraft world, only, people have been here before. Blocks litter almost the entire land, spread around sporadically. Towers of various materials loom everywhere, left behind by people trying to escape others who'd kill them for no reason. Trees would be left floating, and old bases were left across the world, looted and half destroyed for their resources and contents.

You might've already seen it, but a lot of these things are things I translated into the world of Souls of Black. Those towers? The fight pillars in-canon. The old bases became what are known as Remnants in SoB. Lifeboat servers also have chests full of supplies that spawn, and that mechanic is in SoB too, one of the very first ones you see. But what really inspired the story itself was an adventure I had on it four years ago, one that I've been working on ever since.

That adventure started like any other on Lifeboat: I spawn in, and instantly started sneaking around. The main reason was because, like in SoB, people tend to kill other people a lot, and it could quickly just become not fun if it happened right after you spawn in. It wasn't fun at all, really, but right after you just got there was a lot worse.

As I was sneaking around, I was glancing at chat occasionally, just out of curiosity. And I saw people struggling. People being killed or just wanting company. Unfortunately, even with my sneaking, I did end up getting in people's line of sight, and per usual they had better gear than I did. And so I died. But, I spawned in where Reaper starts in Souls of Black, a sort of mountainous area with a forest at the base.

And that was when I decided to group up with the people I saw struggling. See, Lifeboat's got a mechanic where you can essentially request to teleport to a person, and they can accept. I told a few people they could, and they all grouped up with me, and together we really just started going around the world and deciding on a place to live. We all worked together, and at first we just made a really cute farm:

It was something that brought us together, more. Something that was like 'yeah, we're friends :)'

The other fun fact about it, is: those people's usernames are direct inspirations for the characters that Reaper's friends with. Wolf and Coder's names were direct inspirations-- those words were part of two of their usernames. Phoebe's name came from a user with 'FBI' in their name, and me trying to mash the letter's sounds together into a name. Galisa's name was originally Galaxy, due to that being part of another person's user. But I recently changed it to Galisa for that more medieval-y feel that SoB has going on, lols.

Unfortunately, shortly after we actually finished our base, someone in diamond armor came and started killing us over and over, and started burning the forest with lava. We got separated (but teleported to one of the others, and ended up with a new person that one of the others found, in a mountain base that the person had.

Now, throughout this entire adventure, I was half in roleplay mode, especially because novel-esc things just kept happening. At this mountain base, the previous guy who'd killed us before came back and apologized, and promised to help us get better armor and gear. It was all well and good until eventually, more diamond armored people came around.

The worst part? They were hackers. Kept teleporting around, flying, being invulnerable. They attacked the base and blew it up, I think, and left us running away. Previously, FBI had left the game, and I think a few others had too after we were ambushed. So it was the previous murderer, Galaxy, and I, I remember.

I think the murderer left the game at some point, so at the end it was just me and Galaxy. The two of us roamed the land, trying to decide what to do next. We made graves for the others, and I was in full rp mode at that point. I think Galaxy went off on her own, or maybe left the game. Because at the end, I decided enough was enough. For nothing but dramatic effect, and because I thought it made sense, I had Reaper find a pool of lava... and jump in.

Now, is that the ending of Souls of Black? No, I know that for sure. I'd previously toyed with that idea, but decided it just didn't fit, fully.

A lot of the above events inspired SoB, and a good portion of its plot. Other times, more recent ish ones, that I've been on Lifeboat again, I met other people who inspired more characters for the novel. And I just think that's amazing. How... my favorite game, ever since my childhood, has evolved into a full blown novel (idea) from one simple adventure.

Whew, that was a lot, but I hope you enjoyed that regardless :). Time for the other questions!

How does she affect the story? / How does the story affect her?

I'll be honest, I'm not too sure on how to answer the first part, but I'll try my best!

I can't say much without spoilers, but I guess she's the reason Souls of Black happens in the first place. Her one act of kindness towards Wolf and Coder ultimately bring rise and light to other darker areas of the world and plot, which thus help the characters eventually stop them. Though, on that note, Doc is also partially responsible for the story happening, or, at least them being able to stop the overall antagonistic plot. He discovers information that's helpful to them later on.

For how the story affects her? I'll be so honest, 'trauma' was my first answer. Because even current day Reaper very much is affected by the events of Souls of Black. But even though bad shit does happen, Reaper ultimately became a better person out of it. She grows and learns the so very important lesson that people can be kind and good, and will do so if they can. She learns to let herself be loved, to know that she can be loved, and gains an aspect of confidence she didn't really have before.

Are there any characters in other media similar to her, whether from intentional inspiration or coincidental similarities?

You know, I tried thinking about this. Because a good few of my other characters have clear inspirations: Ruby Darkshine with Carmen Sandiego, Sam Allen with Percy Jackson, Sapphire with Aang, Riot with Rascal from Glitter Force. But actually, I don't think Reaper has like, a clear one. There's only one I can name that really seems right: Technoblade.

You might have heard his name before. Technoblade was a Minecraft Youtuber, and one a lot of people, including myself, admired. I especially enjoyed his character on the DSMP, an witty anarchist with dry humor and who could easily overpower most other opponents via mainly preparation. I think that's where a lot of Reaper's personality stems from, even if not 100% intentional. So, yeah. Technoblade :)