“Time is a precious gift. I am most honoured that you have chosen to gift me yours today.”
For my fallen oracle’s birthday this year, I wanted to dress her up in something she’d wear to a ball. She is certainly looking forward to celebrating her birthday with good music and dance, but who shall be her dance partner?🎵🎶
A bit more about her view on birthdays and some additional drawings…
After decades spent in isolation from the rest of the world, birthdays — as most people seem to conceptualize them — are a rather foreign concept to Luneth. Her old temple did not celebrate individual birthdays. Rather, all Children of the Myst shared a single day to celebrate their rebirth as devout believers of the True Destiny. Perhaps it is merely human nature to treasure the perpetual passage of time with others, to fill the spaces in between with joy.
And she was clearly not made to be human, so her birthday was unnecessary to her.
That being said, she is willing to experience these strange customs and traditions surrounding birthdays with all the new people that have entered her life since she left her old one behind.
More about the art, I edited the above photo to have a dreamlike effect. The picture below is much closer to the actual colours of her ensemble:
She already had a few art nouveau elements in her everyday outfit, so I wanted to lean into it more here. I figured if she was going to be dancing in this outfit, the details should be sort of flowy like her movements.
Her jewelry looks white, resembling pearls, but I actually used a silver pen. That effect wasn’t intentional, but I ended up liking it.
The blue around her eyes was meant to be eyeliner, but it might've ended up looking more like eyeshadow. Oh well, I like that, too.
Her eyes aren't blue, rather, they are meant to be a cool grey, reminiscent of morning fog or the goddess of wisdom's eye colour. I think the blue in her clothing pulls everything a little bit blue.
Her pose and expression were drawn with the Mona Lisa in mind, how some viewer interpret her smile as happy and others view it to be sad. Luneth does not exhibit a lot of outward displays of emotion, so her expressions are usually harder to read. I felt that the ambiguity of the expression in the painting was fitting for her because of that. She may smile but it would be so subtle that you can't be too certain whether she was actually smiling at you or if it was a trick of the light, shadows putting something there where there's actually nothing.
The blue dress and dupatta were partly inspired by one of Aishwarya Rai’s looks in a film of hers (it's the light blue dress which is apparently from Aur Pyaar Hogaya, but others have suggested the outfit is from Kuch Naa Kaho or Dil Ka Rishta, so I'm not entirely sure — I couldn't find that exact look in any of the three movies mentioned :/) and Preeti Jhangiani’s blue dress in Mohabbatein. I thought the pale blue and sparkly silver details would look so elegant on Luneth!
The full outfit is on the left and one colour test I did for the right. I really was debating between light blue and dark blue because she just looks so good in a dark royal blue, too. Ultimately, I went with the light blue because it seems to make her glow like moonlight — which is quite fitting for her name.
And finally, here are some alternative makeup and hairstyles I was thinking of for her formal look before I settled on the braid:
The last one is from her past oracle design which I was planning on redesigning anyway, but I knew that I wanted to reuse the updo somewhere because it suits her so well! Maybe I’ll use these different hairstyles in other drawings of her in more formal outfits.
Anyway, thank you for dropping by on Luneth's birthday! :D
Lenora is another one of my Touchstarved NPC OCs and also one of my favourite designs!
Pronouns: She/Her
Birthday: March 22
Height: 5’3 (160 cm)
Personality: Prickly Hermit
Likes: Sleeping in, hot drinks, romance novels (usually the ones with happy endings, tragedies tend to drain her because of what she usually encounters in her work), roses, corvids, vultures
Dislikes: Graverobbers, killers, Soulless, magic, foggy glasses, interruptions to her reading time, snakes
Fatal flaw: Fear of opening her heart and getting hurt
Other: She and the Wet Wick’s barkeep used to date.
Quote: “’Round these parts, the living are scarier than the dead.”
More about her below:
Weary, reserved, jaded, and compassionate. She’s tired, but she’s doing her best.
Lenora is the Lowtown Undertaker, the poor sod in charge of cleaning up the dead bodies strewn all across Eridia. Human, Soulless, Monsters, everything that goes bump in the night and promptly drops dead. She clears it up before it becomes a tripping hazard for the living.
She doesn’t love her job, but hey, whatever pays. And in the middle of an apocalypse, as bleak as it may sound, there is never a shortage of dead bodies to collect, prep, and bury, so…there’s job security in this line of work.
She lives by the Lowtown cemetery, located on the outskirts of Eridia. Her place is kind of an apocalyptic bunker, since it’s so close to the Wastes.
She’s skilled with traps since she usually has to fend off mages and Soulless from the cemetery. She can also hold her own and several others in a fight. I imagine she’d be a great partner to have in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Her weapon is her trusty shovel!
Currently in the middle of a midlife crisis, which is. Great. Perfect timing, really, in a dying world and all.
Used to date the Wet Wick’s bartender before all the weirdness with the Adderstone. She doesn’t exactly trust Leander or his gang, but she acknowledges the good they do in Lowtown. She would just rather they stay out of her business and she’ll steer clear of theirs.
As an NPC OC, I imagine MC would be able to meet her if they visit Lowtown’s cemetery. She tries to chase them off at first, mistaking them for a graverobber, but once that misunderstanding’s cleared up, she apologizes for the scare — seems almost flustered about it.
She would give the MC a few sidequests related to her job, like picking up some ingredients to make embalming fluid or identifying any corpses stumbled across in Lowtown — human, Monster or otherwise. Maybe it would lead to a wider murder mystery as a sidequest storyline.
Underneath her prickly exterior, she’s a softie. She’s actually quite socially awkward — an unfortunate side effect of decades spent with one’s only company being corpses or graverobbers that you have to chase away.
She isn’t the kind of person to turn away someone in need, but she would awkwardly stumble through offering a hand.
She sees someone looking like they’re on the verge of tears, would start to walk off because nope, not her problem, she is not dealing with this — then stop and heave a deep sigh. “I’m gonna regret this…Okay, do you need help, or…something? Are you in any hot water?”
Lenora is also a romantic at heart who loves cute and fluffy romance novels. She would like to find true love of her own — but she’s grown quite cynical over the years and doubtful that it's in the cards for her.
Probably the kind of woman to write poetry and doodle joint tombstones in her journal. But she’d be too embarrassed to share any of these daydreams with anyone. Well, maybe with her avian friends that pay her a visit from time to time.
She writes love letters and poems to precious people in her life, though many of them have remained unsent. It’s similar to journalling for her — most of the time, she does it to get the thoughts and feelings out of her system, but she doesn’t necessarily want to share them. Still, she can’t bring herself to burn the letters, either. She keeps them in a safe somewhere in her home.
Another questline for her could be a romance plot, helping her come out of her shell and pursue a relationship with one of the people she has written a love letter to:
Lucille, an old childhood friend who had left Eridia decades ago to become a travelling bard. Lucille had asked Lenora to run away with her before leaving, but Lenora chose to stay in Eridia instead of taking her chances out in the Wastes. The two grew apart over the years, but Lucille had recently returned and invited you and Lenora to a performance of hers. You can convince Lenora to attend or you can attend her performance on your own. Either way, that evening, Lenora digs out the letter she’d thought about giving to Lucille all those years ago, right before the latter had left Eridia, revisiting those memories — and from there, she’d accidentally put the letter with the rest of her mail to be sent out.
MC would help her plan for their first date, which goes pretty well…until you start putting the pieces together and realize that the one behind the murders throughout Lowtown is Lucille, or rather, the monster wearing her face.
You can choose to confront the shapeshifter alone, in which “Lucille” reveals that she is a parasitic monster from the Shroud that also devours the memories of the forms they take. She has retained Lucille’s memories upon killing and assuming her form — that, coupled with the time she’s spent with Lenora has caused her to develop genuine feelings for the undertaker. You can choose to tell Lenora the truth, keep her secret, or kill Lucille yourself.
Killing Lucille and choosing to keep the truth from Lenora will cause her to think she left, and Lenora once again closes her heart to the possibility of love. Killing her and choosing to tell Lenora the truth will break her heart, and she will appear to shut the world out once again — but she will gradually move on.
If you choose to keep Lucille’s secret, the mysterious deaths will remain unsolved, but Lenora will pursue a serious relationship with her. Visiting Lenora after the questline, she seems happier than she’s ever been, far less lonely than when you first met her. She lets you know that she hasn’t stopped investigating the suspicious deaths — indicating that their happy life together might soon come to an end — but for the time being, she morbidly remarks that the deaths are giving her some job security.
If you choose to tell Lenora the truth, depending on previous choices made throughout her quest, she will turn Lucille over to the Senobium to face justice for her crimes; she will kill Lucille, heartbroken at the loss of her friend for a second time; or she will break up with Lucille and give her a choice to leave Eridia of her own volition, have the freedom to figure out who she wants to be instead of the ghost of someone Lenora once loved.
Either way, if Lenora knows the truth, she will close the case on the unsolved killings and give closure to the victims’ loved ones and families. The quest ends at the cemetery, where Lenora holds a vigil for the victims. Their loved ones gather to light candles for those they lost. The family of one of the victims directly thanks you and Lenora for finding the truth and providing them with closure. In a private moment later, Lenora lights a candle with you, and she reflects on life, death, and her disillusionment with the world and the people in it. She confesses that she no longer wants to close herself off and acknowledges you as a true friend for reminding her that love is worth the pain of loss.
In addition to her sidequest, I think she could have some interesting connections to the other LIs, too. Interacting with the Adderstone when she clears up bodies on the street, Leander expressing some concerns about the suspicious deaths. MC and Lenora consulting Kuras for his insight about the bodies. Vere and Mhin's monsterhunting knowledge giving MC clues into what "Lucille" truly is.
And Lucille's ability to absorb the memories of her victims similar to the workings of the Seaspring. Princess being suspicious of Lucille right off the bat, growling at her. It could be partly Princess's natural instincts (that's clever girl!), but it might also be Ocudeus sensing another entity made up of several minds. And Ais, picking up on that, warning Lucille not to step out of line with the sparrow.
She’s friends with the ravens that hang out at the cemetery, much like Mhin with their strays. She has named them — some of them can actually say their names so that’s pretty cool.
Working name ideas for her raven friends: Lady Elizabeth, Sir Corvus Blackfeather the Second (his father got eaten by one of Ais’s Soulless — she still carries a grudge against him for that), Lord Umbra Darkwing…
Also friends with the vultures that scavenge the Wastes for carrion and such, since she lives close by. I think Lenora would feel a certain kinship with them, both being connected in some way to the dead.
While drawing Lenora, I listened to “Sucker” by Marcus King, mostly for the vibe rather than the lyrics. Actually, I drew her before the updated demo came out so the lyric, “One by one, all these bloodhounds keep coming.” used to feel pretty fitting for her feelings about Leander’s gang.
Her zodiac sign is Aries
Enneagram is 6w5
MBTI is ISTP
Here’s her full design:
She isn’t an MC, but I still gave her a specific shape like the MCs have. You can see hearts all over her design in the thorns and buckles. I also liked giving her rose motifs often paired with prickly thorns. Love disguised in sharp things. It’s fitting for her compassionate yet guarded personality.
I read a study once on the fuel efficiency of various types of commuter vehicles (car, bus, train) on a per person basis and the number of people needed riding public transit to match the "efficiency" of cars is shockingly low. A bus needs to carry like 3-4 people to be fuel efficient, and trains require 2-3 per train car. Both often carry two dozen or more during peak hours, more than justifying any perceived requirements for efficiency for the train or bus to provide service the entire day.
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
It was flagged as "Eksplicit", shadowbanned, and every reblog turned invisible. The flagging is also unappealable (unless that is an error, thanks tumblr)
Happy Trans Day of Invisibility from your tumblr mods!
Only found out because I tried to reblog with an update from your local trans unicorn siblings!
I cannot even LINK to my old comic without every new post getting deleted.
And yet, we will CONTINUE to exist, and grow, and find each other. We will be visible up to and beyond our own deaths. Because we stand for love. We love ourselves and each other and that just makes us stronger.
The original post was pardoned, but the shadowban still persisted and every reblog was hidden from the dash and flagged explicit. I'm not sure if it recovered by now, or if it's always going to be at risk of banning.
So whatever staff reviewed my complaint agreed that it wasn't explicit. So thank you for that, moderator. This highlights that the problem starts with bad actors reporting anything they don't like, and that it's a tossup if your appeal is seen by a bot, a normal human, or a bigot.
I'm grateful I can still touch people and spread positivity. Many of my queer siblings, brothers, and sisters - especially trans sisters - can't say the same.
But no matter what happens, we will always have each other. Every letter in our alphabet is a pillar holding up a beautiful world that only stands if we're all in it together. The rest of society may call you a monster, but it calls me one too. Maybe you won't hear it from the rest of them, but listen and you will hear it from me.
“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”
Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.
“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”
Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.
“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”
You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?
One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.
The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.
And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.
And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.
It's that time of year again! As usual, you can pick from any of the prompts or mix-and-match! This year we're looking at May 24th- May 30th. I'll reblog the rules shortly.
