Finished with Ari a few days ago and finally glazed and nightshaded him up for posting. I’m a little disappointed by his blandness so far, but I think that’s just a symptom of being new and not really having opinions or particularly strong personality yet
Ari is meta-wise like two months old, being a byproduct of Alex’s El Flamenco adventures and my thought of “it would be so fun to make Alex fight his evil clone.” Several problems came up with that, mainly that A) Ari isn’t evil and B) Alex would absolutely first befriend and adopt anybody he perceives as family. So Ari ended up actually getting adopted into the Macintosh household (which only fucks up the the entire future timeline, good job me)
At the current point in canon, Ari is about five months old (one month of which he spent living in the lab that made him, mostly of his own volition. Alex offered. A lot.) and is suffering the consequences of A) being incredibly curious about everything because he doesn’t really understand how the world works yet and he really wants to know, and B) mostly being left alone or with Everett because both parents work and Alex is at college, but Everett is a commuter student and so is home a lot, so Ari mostly just hangs out with him and watches a ton of educational YouTube videos and documentaries. The trouble mostly comes from the fact Everett keeps sneaking out to go do stuff and Ari will just. Tag along, half the time not telling anybody, including Everett herself. Which is further a problem because Ari gets caught up in whatever adventures, but doesn’t actually get to fight or participate on account of not actually being on contract with God because he’s not technically descended from anybody to put him on the contract with, and Everett hates God personally with a burning passion, and so has been fighting to keep Ari off any contracts with God period, and Ari has yet to rebel against that.
(This does lead to the problem on my end as God in this circumstance that I can’t really expand on Ari yet because I can’t just drop him in situations and see what happens until after he signs a contract, and he hasn’t fucking done that yet. I’m not worried about it yet, because I think with exposure to the rest of the Dragonsong family he’ll figure out everybody’s having pretty drastically different experiences and Everett’s have just sucked which is why he hates them so much, but Ari’s tone is much lighter, and he really does seem to enjoy what he sees, so I think he’ll sign up eventually. But in the meantime I just kinda have to suffer. Like, cmon dude, I’ve got a cool sword for you…)
Ari, as mentioned, is officially a clone of Alexander, who was then grown to be an equal match to him. The immediate first problem was the fact that Alex has no set form, and so the identical match thing was immediately out the window. Ari is relatively similar to Alex’s usual El Flamenco form, but not the same. Ari notably also has different powers— power-mirroring rather than straight shapeshifting, though it took until meeting Everett to figure that out. What is the same though is both Ari and Alex have epilepsy, which Alex thought was hilarious when they first met and Ari just froze in the middle of threatening him. The second problem was that a week-and-a-half-old clone can’t match the sword skills of the guy who’s been doing swords for the last twelve years. Alex then taught him the basics of shapeshifting, explains epilepsy, and then spends the next like month asking Ari to run away from the lab and join him in the outside world and getting denied, until Ari finally decides to go in mid-November. Then he just gets adopted into the Macintosh family like he had always been there. At this point, Ari has settled into the house itself, but is still trying to figure out the wider world. Honestly if I didn’t want to send him to space so much I might make him an anthropologist. But he’s got this nice stars motif that plays super well with both Alex’s sun thing and Everett’s black thing that I could very easily spin to eclipse if I wanted to
So yeah. Having great fun with him
