#oculare

character sheet and icon for my newest osteomancer oc 😎 we'll be playing through the steinhardt's guide this sunday so I figured I'd prepare

hopefully I'll have time to draw her more after comms, I wanna show off her lore but it's too unpolished atm

I get to play Watcher!Grian in D&D

I can feed two of my hyperfixations at the same time

So, my boyfriend decided they also want to dm a campaign, so we'll be running each of ours on alternating weeks. They're going to be running Steinhardt's Guide to the Eldritch Hunt, which has a ton of new races and subclasses and it's own whole setting and whatnot.

WELL, there's a race called a demidritch, with the subrace oculare, which is basically like a half biblically accurate angel thing. Lotsa eyes and gains wings at a higher level, with literally an ability called "watchers". And there's a warlock subclass with the Void patron which can make black holes and shit. AND there's a Cult Initiate background with one of the cults being, get this, Sanctum of the Abyss Watcher.

Anyway, here is the boy. Obviously named Xelqua, what else could it be?

Here's Kafka, a character I made for an upcoming Eldritch Hunt DnD campaign

#Obscutober day 5:

Sklent (n.)

Any slanting surface, as a slope

A sideways or oblique movement

A sideways glance

——

Vox and his Many eyes. he is also canonically Deaf!

Shuu raises his coffee cup as well—allowing Stefano to close the bit of distance to clink the glasses, given how much thinner the large wine glass is compared to the coffee cup. He doesn’t want to risk accidentally chipping anything. “Salute,” he echoes, his head tilting just slightly with a small smile that settles across his lips. “I mentioned coming here; I think it’s only fair that it’s my treat.”

Perhaps he lets the eye contact linger just a moment longer than he really needs to before letting his gaze drop away as he sips at his coffee, turning to face the bar a bit more. One elbow rests on the wood surface of the bar, his posture relaxed but engaged—far from tense, leaning forward just slightly with open body language.

His smile widens then as he gives a soft laugh after lowering his cup to the bar, ducking his head forward slightly just to emphasize that he wants to be out of earshot of the bartender. The eye contact returns then, red eyes flashing with some amusement. “I hope that drink’s better than the coffee. It’s a nice bar, and yet... cheap coffee. Ah, well. C’est la vie.” He waves his left hand dismissively beside him, keeping his right lowered so the space between them remains clear.

The Krimson City Headhunter had been terrorising the city for the past month or so. The moment the first kill had hit the headlines, Emil had been at Lieutenant Vankirk’s office door asking to help out on the case. The details of the case had intrigued him, a missing head, staging, and a beautiful model? This seemed more than your run of the mill killer at first. But alas, Vankirk was hesitant to have Emil help him since the last case they had worked together almost involved the killer walking free. Emil’s interview was… unconventional. He had used the killer’s desires against him to lure him into confessing… which had involved him practically using the details of the case to flirt with the subject. It was a bizarre but entirely effective method that had the killer spewing the details of his crimes in an effort to finally talk to someone who “truly understands”. However, the defense had argued this was coercion and, since a lot of the hard evidence of the case was do to what the man confessed to, almost had the whole case thrown out. Thankfully the local ADA was able to argue that what Emil did was no different than any detective deceiving someone  to catch them in a lie, but it had made Vankirk very wary of his methods. So try as Emil may, he was unable to help on this particular case.

So for the first four murders, all Emil had to go on was whatever the Krimson Post was publishing… which wasn’t much. He had the basics--that the killer’s victims were all models and all of them were being beheaded--but nothing to really help him solve the crime. He had gone back after it was announced that this killer was officially a serial killer on the loose, but he was still met with resistance. He had all but given up on trying to help when the fourth victim was confirmed to be the work of the Headhunter, but it was then that he was approached to help work on the case.

At first he thought it was just the Detectives getting fed up with the investigation going nowhere, especially since it was one of the detectives he was more friendly with who had approached him about it. But when he realised that the call was from high? He couldn’t be more thrilled about it.

He scoured over the photos that were presented to him, trying to find the similarities of each of the murders and the differences. At first it really only seemed like the heads were missing and that they were models, but as Emil absentmindedly picked up the best ‘overall’ shots to put up to compare the victims he started to see another trend.

Sure, Emil had noticed the staging before but there was something different about this. Each of them was posed carefully and meticulously. The way one of the victim’s dress was sprawled over the pavement, the way one of the victim's hands was outstretched as if she was reach for something in the distance, even the way the scenery laid around them, the lighting. Everything was so perfectly planned, perfectly placed. It seemed more than just a “well here’s what I’ve done” kind of staging, there seemed to be another motive about it.

Emil had all of the photos side by side in progressive order on the little light up whiteboard he had in his office. He was leaning against the back of his desk, peering up at them trying to figure out what the killer could have really wanted from all of them. Why were the heads removed? Was there some sort of significance there? And why make them look so… pretty? Pretty was the only word Emil could think of to describe what he was looking at. The killer had attempted to make these corpses look… pretty. But why? Remorseful posing was never given /this/ much detail. Why go through all that effort…?

“Hey Doc?” Emil’s thoughts were interrupted by Detective Riviera, the same Detective that had brought him in on the case. “Hey sorry to interrupt, but uh… Forbs is on lunch and they just called in a triple down by fifth so we’re kind of short at the moment and here’s this uh… photographer guy who says he might be able to help with identifying the victim? Stefano something or other? Could you do me a solid and interview him? He’s in interview one.”

Emil laughed. “Sounds like you already expected my answer to be yes, Detective.” Emil gave Riviera a knowing smile.

“I mean… when do you ever say no?” the Detective countered. “To you? Not often.” a coy smile as Emil was gathering up his case files and more… respectable pictures of the victims to show the… ‘photographer guy’.

“I rest my case.” Riviera said as Emil pushed back him into the bullpen, the psychologist rolled his eyes.

“Have fun on your case, Riviera.” Emil said with a shooing kind of wave as he made his way over to the interview room. He took a second to collect himself, pulling off the glasses he forgot he was still wearing, and pushing his way into the cozy, but small, interview room.

12. How are they bodily expressive? How do they use nonverbal cues such as their posture, stance, eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and hands?

Kuja is an actor. Everything he does in public is performative -- he knows what he wants people to see and gives it to them. Admittedly this is in part because he’s also a bit of a childish drama queen and likes to act, but it’s also because he likes having the power to control how people see him.

He’s very bodily expressive, though, gesturing and standing a certain way and very openly expressive, though it’s all curated. 

Even when he’s not acting, he’s still pretty expressive, if not more so. When he’s not performing for the public’s sake he’s possibly even more gesture-y and loud and childish and open with his emotions. In fact it’s...how childish he is comes right up to the surface and makes him seem almost more innocent.

18. What kind of person could they become in the future? What are some developmental paths that they could take, (best, worst, most likely?) what would cause them to come to pass, and what consequences might they have? What paths would you especially like to see, and why?

Well, it depends on if he’s alive, lol

If, as I write it, he survives the Iifa Tree’s collapse? He’s dying -- he doesn’t know when, but he knows his timer’s running out. Knowing that, and knowing how much he never knew about what it meant to live -- and understanding, of a sort, what it might mean...he wants to live. He wants to do something worth it while he has the time. He wants to spend what he has left...doing something he wants to do for himself, and maybe-- maybe spend it with the one person who ever seemed to actually care (his brother).

He wants to live what’s left of his life to the fullest -- and he wants to learn what that really, truly means. It might humble him, it might make him softer and more genuine, and it might even begin to teach him how to be human for real, push him out of the childish state he’s been trapped in for lack of learning.

21. What kind of relationships do they tend to intentionally seek out versus actually cultivate? What kind of social contact do they prefer, and why?

He...doesn’t seek any relationships out?? He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t think he needs any! He has people he uses and manipulates for his own ends, like the people in Treno he gets money and power from, the people he sells his black mages to, the people who he charms into doing things for him of giving things to him. He has no real relationships, only shallow “they have / can do something I need”....things.

However, he’s...strangely, weirdly kind to certain people, even if he doesn’t understand why himself. 

As for prefer, he’d honestly prefer to be alone, because most people he deals with he doesn’t like: it’s only in recent time (see: post-game) that he’s beginning to find that he’s softening towards some people, and that he doesn’t actually want to be alone.

24. How do they present themselves socially? What distinguishes their “persona” from their “true self”, and what causes that difference? 

He’s 90% persona, honestly. 

The charming, manipulative, eloquent performance he puts on is for the benefit of everyone around him, everyone he plans to use and everyone he convinces himself he doesn’t need. He has the power to control what people see, and he uses that to the fullest extent. He absolutely uses peoples’ perceptions of him and shows them what he wants them to see because he’s very bent on not letting anyone have power over him in any way.

But their true self is a lot more childish -- more childish, even, than his usual performative self -- and a lot more...insecure. A lot more frightened. He genuinely doesn’t understand so much about life and about emotions and about being a human -- and so much of his formative experience with it was deeply terrible -- so he’s fairly insecure and frightened, and the type to lash out when he’s cornered or confronted by it. 

TL;DR he’s a frightened, insecure child with a temper that pretends to be a lot more adult than he is -- he can be very charming and manipulative, of course, but he’s a good actor.

40. What do they wonder about? What sparks their curiosity and imagination, and why? How is this expressed, if it is?

A LOT. 

He doesn’t know so much, and he’s just now realizing how much -- even before this, though, he devoured any kind of information that was something he hadn’t known before, but now it’s almost desperate.

He asks tons of questions, and he tries so hard to learn and find out things he doesn’t know, because now he knows there’s so much to learn and he wants to know it all before he dies. He doesn’t want to miss anything.

holds joseph’s hand. he’s helping.