4. Is your oc's environment supportive about their identity? How does this impact them?
You're really out here making me put more worldbuilding into this than Veilguard ever did. Jana's necropolitan upbringing was accepting to a fault. They identify as a corpse-in-waiting and there was a betting pool for the first year of their life over whether they were a manifested spirit (ultimately unresolved, as any definitive testing would have been destructive). Not being a woman is like, nothing compared to that. They're honestly perplexed that Taash and Shathann make such a big deal about it.
5. How did you figure out your oc's identity?
Dragon Age Veilguard had they/them pronouns as an option, there was no way Jana wasn't going to be nonbinary. And while they romance Neve, they are bisexual because.
Well.
You've seen Davrin.
6. How does your oc feel about labels? Theirs, or in general?
Jana is I think, confused-but-supportive over the Shadow Dragons' insistence on categorizing and labeling everything.
They are a Watcher (so by extension, a necromancer), but not a mage (so they cannot draw from the Fade unaided). They are human (enough for census purposes) and they are of the living (however transiently). Those are the labels they would apply to themself.
The idea that there is some kind of sharp, clean, divide between male and female and that it particularly matters if you cross over it, is as baffling as if there was a word for "person that dyes their hair".
We've Got You (Vienna Teng) - Spark/Comfort/Two Truths
Vienna Teng is one of my favorite artists, and that two-sided coin - do we rely on you, or can you rely on us - really felt like it hit right for the whipsaw of emotions at Veilguard's point of no return.
On Jana's playlist, the order is flipped from this EP - Comfort first, Spark second: the order the individual songs were released in, which happens to match the Veilguard event pacing quite well.
Two Truths, befitting its nature, is the final song.
(send me a radio + an OC and I will post a song from their playlist!)
Tumblr ate my original draft of this so let's try it again, belatedly:
Sisyphus: How does Rook react to Lucanis/Neve after The Big Choice™️
Yeah uh Lucanis totally gets the shaft in Jana's playthrough and not even in a fun way. Skipped his coffee quest because after Bellara's first quest I was so fed up with platforming and busywork I put a moratorium on doing companion chores. Took Davrin to Minrathous. It was pretty clear after that that Lucanis would never trust Jana.
Jana let him go spend time in Treviso, let him take the space he needed, but did nothing more than that.
Being one of the two companions you are then forced to aid to progress the main quest, and being unable to express any resentment or reservation over this even when Lucanis himself explicitly says he doesn't expect any help from you really sealed the deal in terms of my own salt at the game.
In my head, Jana never helped Lucanis with Zara. They let him go, again. Just like they let him go help with the rebuilding. He fights Zara and is saved only by the intervention of Illario. He never finds out that Caterina lives. They pull apart and never come back together, and in the end that absence of trust, plus some issues with faction strength, costs him his life.
Pavo: How polite/formal is Rook?
Jana is extremely polite and extremely formal. They know all the rites of remembrance, the stances and the paths to walk, the greetings for every member of the community from the newly bereaved to the most ancient of the undying.
Rook is not formal. Rook has been told that a nearly six foot tall fully armored warrior standing at perfect attention in perfect silence in the back of the room is not considered generally respectful and is in fact unnerving as fuck and possibly some kind of threat. They have been pushed to drink beer and play cards and smile through the lies. They have been instructed, in some length and detail, that no one normal says "hail".
Harding meets Rook six months before the game. She does not meet Jana until shortly after Emmrich arrives in the Lighthouse.
Hecate: What scent(s) would Spite (or any spirit) identify your Rook with?
Medea: How would someone have described your Rook as a child and/or teen?
Dear Willa,
I have arrived safely at the Grand Necropolis and you would not believe a quarter of how strange this place is. The tales do not do it justice. I swear, all Cumberland would fit inside its upper halls alone. There are no templars here, not a one, and stranger still, there are Watchers who are not mages! One showed me to my rooms - this ashen youth called Ingellvar with pitch-black hair and the softest voice. I couldn't quite tell if they were a very tall girl or a very polite boy and the rest of the conversation was so queer I entirely forgot to ask. They said they were a junior Watcher as well, though they could not have been more than twelve or thirteen, and then when I asked after their focus, for they carried no staff or orb, they laughed and said that to raise the dead was not magic at all! I told them a little of the Circle and what you and I have studied, of course, and they said they had never heard of such a place, and that if you had to go there to get magic then they didn't want any.
It was such a strange welcome! If I had not seen their footsteps in the dust I would have sworn them to be a ghost. Even now I am not certain whether I have seen a true Watcher or merely one of the more well-embalmed honored dead. I shall have to ask my mentor in the morning.
Thank you again for the pomander. It is a wonderful splash of scent and color in this mausoleum. I have hung it above my desk (I have my very own desk, in my own room! No more of Fritzi's snoring!) so that whenever I sit down to my studies I shall think of you. I shall write more once lessons begin in earnest. Until then I remain,
Ever your dearest friend,
Beatrix
Andromeda: Is Rook perceived as pretty/attractive? (Feel free to brag a little, or drag them!)
Made contact with our Ringleader today, and he's got a new piece in his pocket. Rook's your type for sure - tall, dark, and Nevarran, with shoulders for days. In dire need of a nap, so you two would have something to bond over. Sensible too, which I think will be good for Ringleader. He needs someone who'll remember mission priority. I've given them the rendezvous instructions for Shepherd, and they'll follow the latest lead north. With any luck, they'll have the quarry cornered soon.
P.S. I'm not kidding about the shoulders. I'm no artist but let me know if you need a woodcut or something to make Forsythia jealous.
Tailor
Pandora: Describe a time where Rook experienced a severe negative emotion (terror, rage, guilt, helplessness, wrath, jealousy, etc!)
(WIP excerpt, endgame DAV spoilers!)
"He was Wisdom, who became Pride. Of course he had to be right. But why did he have to make me wrong?" Jana slammed their hand against the wall, shoulders heaving with each shuddering breath. "What's the point of a Watcher who can't even see?"
"He tricked all of us," Emmrich said. "I should have been more vigilant myself. This is not your fault. Don't blame yourself."
"No," Jana agreed. "It's not my fault It's Solas's. And I'm going to kill him."
"Jana-"
"Varric died! I was supposed to protect him! He was my responsibility! He was my responsibility and he died in my arms and Solas got in my mind and made me forget. He made me leave him in the Crossroads to rot and I am going to break every last bone in his immortal skull until not even the lich lords can call forth his voice so I never have to hear another word from his lying mouth ever again!"
Has your OC ever had to let a canon character down easy? Has your OC ever been rejected by a canon character? for Jana, sweet beloved crypt baby
crypt baby my beloved
Jana had to gently turn Davrin down some time during the eclipse wait, which I think was a lot harder for me than them tbh. They like him, a lot, and he is handsome and he is beautiful and he is kind, but they are not a deer and they do not want to be chased.
And Jana felt extremely rejected on a cultural level when Taash went off on them and Emmrich for being weirdos who care about corpses. It's a foundational rejection of their values and their culture and proved a swift and bitter end to the trans Tevinter field trips.
Koliva with lots of sultanas and not too much sugar, and a big big mug of hot osmanthus tea. Yes, koliva's funeral food. Jana's sometimes a walking stereotype.
47. What’s Rook’s temper like?
Jana is very slow to anger. Emotional management is a key skill for working with anyone as impressionable as your average wisp. But when they do snap, Jana's wrath is fierce, deep, and violent. They want to hurt the target of their fury, obliterate it from the face of Thedas, and are as slow to forgive as they are to reach that point in the first place.
48. A color, flower, animal, and weather to describe Rook:
Color: Malachite-green. A semiprecious stone but not considered especially valuable in Thedas, with the potential to be toxic but only if you're doing stupid stuff to begin with.
Flower: Felicidius Aria, the only flower that grows in the most lifeless regions of the Silent Plains.
Animal: Green bottlefly, considered a pest but useful forensically and for debridement therapy to treat necrotic wounds.
yay tarot asks! death, the devil, the tower, and the sun for jana and dahanal
....This is going under a cut.
Death: What part of Rook do they need to kill to become the best version of themselves?
Uh. This might sound weird, but Jana needs to kill Varric.
Specifically, the voice of Varric in their head. The voice that says they have to smile at strangers and look people in the eye, that they shouldn't talk about weird things like brain hooks or adipocere or their adoptive parents (deceased in the late Exalted Age), that they should say "hi" and not "hail". The voice that says the best weapon against the Dread Wolf is being unknown, and it's better for everyone if they try to act like a normal human person for once in their life.
Harding traveled with Jana for six months in Varric's company and only ever met Rook. It's a few months after that before she even gets a hint that Jana exists under there.
Dahanal needs to stick a knife in his rampant ego before it kills him and probably everyone else around him for good measure.
In the short term, the first speck of self-doubt Daha processes from the last like, year or three will knock his magic down to cinders for a while and his mood down well below that. He will almost certainly ugly cry about it.
Long-term, comprehending that he's not some uniquely powerful freedom-fighting superhero dealing the Maker's holy vengeance to the savage invaders, and worst of all, has possibly even killed someone who wasn't an unforgivable monster, is the only way he'll ever find out who he is besides Viago's firebird.
The Devil: What type of demon is most likely to target Rook? Why?
Daha would be targeted by Pride, because, well, see previous paragraph.
I wouldn't have known what demon would get Jana before endgame. But now I can safely say that it would be Rage. The rage of a mother bear separated from her cubs, the rage of a patriot at their nation's surrender. The rage of a being denied its purpose at its root, and with nothing left to them except to ruin.
(the rage of a Watcher, denied the chance to mourn.)
The Tower: How does Rook respond to unexpected catastrophe?
Dahanal panics. He's a bit high strung. Which as often as not means fire, on account of the magic. Which rarely helps the panic, especially if other people start panicking as well, so you can just imagine the positive feedback loop. At least if the unexpected catastrophe involves a monster of some manner, he can throw the fire at it. Burning his problems to a crisp generally makes him feel better.
The Sun: What is Rook passionate about? How do they fuel that passion?
Like most Watcher's, Jana's life revolves around death. Their interests lie not in the elaborate embalming that is performed on royalty and nobility, but in the rites most useful for tending to the so-called 'lesser' dead - people who can offer nothing to the Necropolis except their bodies, and so in death are put to work. The best methods for defleshing, which bones to annotate with identifying markers, the best place to store auditory ossicles, whether or not to articulate the hyoid, the philosophical question of if or when identity is lost and how that relates to when to shift from repair and replacement to commingled constructions like Manfred...
They don't talk about it much with the rest of the Veilguard. Apparently it's 'creepy' and 'not dinner table conversation'. They definitely helped Davrin hang all those bones in his room though. Nonhumanoids aren't their forte, but you've never wasted a day by articulating a skeleton.
Daha would say anything worth doing is worth doing with passion, but that's a line just as canned as "the Crows rule Antiva, and Treviso will be free." On the rare occasion he's left to his own devices and neither training nor on a contract, he loves drama (both interpersonal, and like, the theater), wine, gambling (he thinks he's lucky, but what he probably is is mildly telekinetic), and also body modification. Cantori blood magic reshaped his flesh and allowed him to transition into the man he wanted to be, and it's hard to look at that and not want to keep poking.
Of course, Viago is boring and won't let him learn blood magic at that level (overreliance on it could reduce his affinity for the Fade, and therefore cut down on his firepower), so whenever they're not in Treviso he has to rely on more mundane options like piercings, tattoos, and contouring. Dahanal definitely has some kind of twelve-step "get ready with me" beauty routine back in Salle, and to be fair given the amount of acne he's got, he's probably got a good reason for at least six of them.
Oooh ok, how about Temperance and the Tower for Jana 👀
Temperance: What does Rook do to deal with the stress of their situation?
In the Necropolis, if they were getting tired or stressed, Jana would take some food (boiled wheat or a few fruits) and either seek out the counsel of their parents (a childless couple from the Exalted Age - Jana was found on the step of their tomb), or find a quiet path - the borders of a less-trafficked tomb, a garden back way - and walk it until it ends, or someone finds them. The Necropolis's shifting architecture is unpredictable, but Jana's rarely found it kept them for too much longer than they needed to be down there.
When traveling with Varric, neither of those things were an option so they just kind of... didn't? Rook will keep all their stress here and then they'll die and go home. Yeah, that sounds like a workable plan.
After Weisshaupt, Rook tells everyone off for infighting and then vanishes. Emmrich's the one who finds them, asleep under a blanket on the floor of their parents' tomb next to a mostly-eaten bowl of koliva. He knows where to look for Jana after that.
The Tower: How does Rook respond to unexpected catastrophe?
Combination of muscle memory and Watcher training - dive for cover and observe from a safe distance. An unexpected catastrophe in the Grand Necropolis is the absolute worst time to start freaking out (fear) or giving up (despair) since that is the one thing guaranteed to make things worse in 100% of situations.
Once Jana's got some idea of what's going on, their response might be to act (if they think they can handle it), get out (especially if the Necropolis is exhibiting dimensional instability), and/or get help (if this is a problem requiring training or magic they don't have).
Since Jana's pretty clear-eyed about their odds of taking out two deities with a well-aimed shield throw, during most of Veilguard the plan is a mix of Get Out and Get Help.
