#starsofdestiny

I had to go out on the evening of the 18th and I was on set for about 13 hours yesterday, so it took me a while to get back to the internet, but I'm here now and getting to feel nice about my birthday all over again.

Lazlo:

Look, the dude has a cultivation room on the bottom deck of his ship and apparently has a bad enough case of the munchies in Tactics that he wants to eat an entire giant crab for dinner, I'm just saying that he probably spent most of SIV (and Tactics) stoned off his gourd. Hey, it explains why he seems like he's off in his own world half the time...

Lazlo started learning his two-sword style from a young age, when Snowe's swordplay tutor (who also ended up teaching Lazlo, because the two of them were joined at the hip as kids) noticed he could use both hands equally well and got him to practice dual-wielding. He still practiced with two swords during his training with the Knights of Razril, though he was only allowed to wear one sword when he was on duty.

Lazlo isn't really vindictive, and he shrugs off most slights and insults, but he has his moments of being a petty dick. Snowe used to be afraid of thunder, for example, and there were a couple of times when Lazlo dropped a big pot in the kitchen during a rainstorm and Snowe nearly jumped out of his skin. It can be difficult to tell whether Lazlo's just being insensitive or whether he's actually trolling, especially since he never seems mean-spirited about any of it.

After SIV, though, he did hang out for about a month or two without bothering to tell anyone that he's alive. He needed the rest, and he really didn't want anyone to try and set him up as the ruler of anything, so he figured he'd lie low until the aftermath of the war ran its course.

Tir:

At the beginning of SI, he's fairly chatty; as the game goes on and as the war and his Rune take their toll on him, he talks less and less. By the time SII rolls around, he barely speaks to anyone, even Gremio, and his voice sounds like a thin weathered whisper. As time goes on, he almost stops speaking altogether. (Most of this is based on the fact that Tir does get fewer and fewer dialogue options as SI goes on, and that his lines get shorter and shorter.)

Tir was enough of a little terror on his own. Once Ted started to live at the McDohl household, the two of them became the undisputed champions of the Give Gremio a Heart Attack game. This game included giving Gremio the slip while he was shepherding them around Gregminster, jumping out at him from behind corners, stealing or rearranging things from the kitchen, and that one time they stole a pair of kangacorns from the stables and stampeded them down the main drag of Gregminster.

Tir and Sonya Did Not Get Along. Teo didn't introduce her to Tir until a good while after they became lovers (probably when Tir was around 10-11), because he had no idea how to broach the subject. He danced around it even when Tir and Sonya finally met, which made Sonya upset and made Tir confused and angry. Tir figured out what was going on soon enough, with some help from Pahn and Cleo, and went into an epic sulk. Teo persuaded him to be polite to Sonya, but Tir resented that his father's attention was split between him and Sonya whenever Teo was in Gregminster. Sonya loved Teo but never had any interest in being a mother to his son, which was part of the reason the two of them never married.

Tir's mother was from Gouran, the eastern region of Scarlet Moon/Toran, and was -- do the people of the Suiko-equivalent of Chinese ethnicity even have a name or purported place of origin? I don't think so. The point is that if I had to apply real-world ethnic groupings to the Suikoverse, I'd call Tir half-Chinese.

It took Tir about a year and a half to realize he wasn't aging anymore, and boy did that discovery shake him.

Ted:

For the first couple decades or so, Ted mostly stayed alive due to sheer luck and due to the Soul Eater's level one power to insta-kill almost any non-boss enemy. The souls he absorbed drove him a little crazy, though, even the ones who were trying to help -- like his grandfather, who instructed him about his Rune's power and about basic survival skills. So Ted spent a good long while hopping around from cave to cave, avoiding all human contact. His Rune kept him alive during the worst of it. He hated that.

After an initial period of weirdness settling into the McDohl household, Ted decided that this was his second shot at an actual childhood. He went a little overboard with it and tried too hard to be a kid, though, which led to him picking fights with nine-year-olds and convincing Tir to do things that are only good ideas to idiot teenage boys.

Ted's acquired a lot of skills over his many years and doesn't even remember what most of them are until he needs to use them. He forgot he knew how to fish until Aldo invited him to, for example.

Ted has almost no memories of his time on the Ghost Ship. He's not even sure how long he was there. All he remembers is the feeling of floating in darkness, and a faint sound like the clicking of bones.

Aldo:

Yes, Aldo's shy, but a big part of that shyness is that he really, really doesn't know how to talk to people. He either hangs around in their vicinity and tries to come up with something to say, or he comes on way too strong and misses all the leave me alone signals they're sending.

Aldo becomes a lot different when he's hunting -- he never fires his bow with hesitation, and his marksmanship is amazing.

Aldo wanted to become a mage when he was younger and studied Runecraft pretty extensively, but he never had the innate talent or power that some of the other students did, and eventually he stopped pursuing it as a profession.