#amelieverse

[opashoo]

OCtober 2023: Shou, the Hidden Right Hand

A disillusioned fortune teller, scholar, and mystic, studied in old poems and proverbs. Their absent-minded demeanor belies a dangerous cunning and supernatural foresight with which they have cut down empires. Agent to a mysterious benefactor known only as "The Director".

Shou is nonbinary transfem (they/them)

The non-english text is in Caravan, a conlang I've been working on for about two years now. It reads from right to left:

"Hafii tokshj an, sa ejvo sheta-yjramea no / an im hafigaa eta shehn lumateh mu goro hjkkj."

There are monsters in the mountain, and we would seek shelter [from them] but / we will not find rest in the valleys.

EDIT: So I'm really indecisive and decided I really liked a dark background and no white outline, so I've replaced the original with that version. The original is below.

[opashoo]

Is your Saint based on your oc (i think) Shou? If thats how they're named

So they are decently unrelated, but I must admit I am a fan of mysterious characters who keep their eyes closed all the time.

Shou's whole deal is that they're a Sherlock-type level of perceptive and clever in addition to having extremely keen foresight, constantly seeing seconds to minutes into the future, with the capacity to sort through all those threads of fate to find the one that will give them the desired outcome. Their apparent cheerful and absent-minded demeanor is something of a cover to a very cunning, cutthroat, and ruthlessly driven personality. They can be arrogant, but they are so good at what they do that their arrogance is never unfounded.

Saint on the other hand has a much more calm and aloof demeanor that is reflective of how they are most times, but they can quickly become neurotic, especially once when things don't go the way they expect. Countless lifetimes spent repeating the same actions and interacting with the same people has given them a very keen sense of navigating very familiar situations, but they can be obsessive about making sure everything turns out just so. Compared to Shou, Saint is incredibly inflexible and significantly less in-control of any given situation.

Any similarity between the two is pretty much only aesthetic. Though, funny enough, my friend and I like to joke about this little club we have with some of our characters:

He has a character, a fox who's unwillingly immortal, incapable of dying, and has lived so long and recognizes patterns so easily that he might as well have futuresight. Despite the circumstances, he's very happy and very kind.

Saint is doomed to repeat the same lifetime forever, effectively making them immortal within a very limited scope. They somehow have less success than my friend's character in reliably reproducing patterns. Classic Sisyphus type behavior.

Shou eventually comes to have a problem where their future sight grows beyond their control. They end up living entire lifetimes within visions, growing old and finding happiness or ruin only to return to the present, losing everything they thought they'd built in an instant, repeatedly, unable to tell when reality ends and the next lifetime vision begins. They get burnt out hard, unwilling to invest themselves in anything at risk of having the rug pulled out from under them again.

Together all these characters make up a very niche club of animal people who are damned by supernatural, existential circumstance to be effectively immortal, and also always have their eyes closed.

Fun fact, Saint and Shou are also both nonbinary transfems (Saint is agender, and I'm not sure what Shou has going on). They also both speak Yongasabi. The barest basis for Yongasabi was derived from the worldbuilding project that Shou is from, then developed and completed in the context of Rain World. Now that Yongasabi is a complete language, I've also returned it to its original context and given it to Shou.

[opashoo]

This is from last year but I never finished or posted it, so here's some Panne

[opashoo]

Just in time to see off the Year of the Tiger

[opashoo]

Pardon the silence, most of what I'm doing is progress on multiple projects and studies. In the meantime, Amelie doing her werehare thing

[opashoo]

Doodling my fantasy characters in pinups is funny. Rumi's some kind of fantasy polearm wielding ex-commando from the mountains, but she can do swimsuits too.

[opashoo]

"Rogue" doesn't fit quite right. "Ruffian" is more her speed.

[opashoo]

I don't want to get back into the habit of posting nothing but sketch dumps, but here are some Pannes and a Ghenna while I get my art situation sorted out.

For reference, Pann is saying "Zhimaau, zhimaau!" (Sorry, sorry!) and the lady is responding "Era hen-zmi" (You're okay.)