i am so interested in your nano characters and so annoyed that my brain has been on holiday lately so i am going to take this opportunity to request three questions you would most like to answer for as many characters as you would like to answer them for :3
hahaha hacked! i mean i can't complain given i reblogged the thing and then went away to let my head recover enough i could read the questions so i could ask you. 😂 and then i got this which was yay! this is exactly the wrong ratio of expectation to structure for me though, i get choice paralysis.
fortunately i already answered two of these so the negative space they created will guide me.
i'll do three questions for Owl and Duluth both, they being the less-developed members of the 'main cast.'
1. What’s your chosen OC’s favorite color? Least favorite?
Owl's favorite color is the specific silvered green of a sort of lamb's-ear-like nettle native to her home range--it's a color produced by having little silver hairs covering a certain green and scattering the light, so it can't exist as a pigment.
Duluth's favorite color is a deep golden bronze. He likes really saturated oranges and yellows in general, but there's a technique for gilding bronze that makes his absolute favorite color in the world.
Also not doable as a pigment?? Huh. A commonality.
Her least favorite color is. Hm. Probably some variety of rust-red. Duluth's least favorite color is black, mostly because it's what the cops used to wear.
14. Does your OC have any superstitions? Good luck rituals? Do they believe in and/or practice the arcane arts?
Neither of them does anything really magic, and to the extent that they believe in that kind of art it's mostly in a pretty pragmatic way, because on the one hand sun-stealing wizards are a real problem in the world and on the other their setting's magic system mostly runs on using written language to reinforce physical objects in specific ways, and isn't a whole lot more mysticized in that function than high-level craft techniques are in general.
Like, more, but it's a sliding scale. I think most people would consider geometry way more arcane than the more basic kinds of enchanted objects.
Owl is a werewolf and Duluth knows a little bit about runework, but those are categorized as 'having an ethnicity' and 'having a little bit of a practical education.'
Owl is very religious. I'm not sure at what point that shades into superstition? A lot of her religious obligations aren't really doable away from her family because it's a very communal practice. But there are for example words she says when she has to kill a person and different words she says when she kills for food. (Important note because there's a certain line of hysteria that insists werewolves are given to cannibalism.)
She keeps track of the moon and makes a point of laying eyes on it every night that it's visible. Technically her policy of sharing food and shelter with anyone in need is a religious principle, although no one would really even notice that. She absolutely believes the moon is aware of things to come and will communicate about it, mostly in dreams and portents. One of her parents is a respected religious figure in their community.
There's not a lot of expectation in her religion that failing to do the right things will carry consequences, and only a moderate one that doing the right things will improve the chances of good fortune--I think over time they've reacted away from that transactional kind of cosmology specifically because it's popular with their neighbors, and people do like to define themselves relative to who they're not--so not much in the way of doing specific things for luck.
Duluth is not religious at all, really, having grown up in a society where the mainstream religion was suppressed from achieving organized expression and not fallen in with any covert groups or anything growing up, but he's very polite toward anything even mildly divine just in case, basically. Which includes politely adding a pebble to a cairn in honor of a mountain any time he passes one and dropping flowers in streams and rivers to ask not to be drowned, so I guess what that works out to is he's intensely superstitious.
He worries a lot about luck and ruining it by doing the wrong things, which is largely a childhood trauma thing tbh. I hadn't thought about giving him any ritual behaviors around that anxiety but it's a good idea. I'm sure there are a lot available.
18. How does your OC feel about education? How much education do they have? Are they studious or a slacker?
Owl comes from a prominent family so there were very high expectations and a lot of access to instruction. Her astronomical knowledge is very good and her history is extensive, as is her herbalism. She can't read. She has become numerate since leaving home, but only for very basic arithmetic; she can only do the common-sense sort of division and she does that in her head.
Owl's a very determined person with a good memory and control of her focus, and learns fairly quickly, but is only moderately adaptable and (especially as an adult) isn't highly motivated to learn new things just because they're new.
Duluth was the youngest of six children, but all his older siblings and mother were dead by the time he was four, and his father had married late to begin with and started having chest pains, so he saw the writing on the wall that he'd probably die before Duluth was up to working the farm alone enough to make rent or old enough to marry, and started selling off the tenancy rights to various plots of land to the neighbors, until he had the cash in hand to buy his nine-year-old an apprenticeship to a whitesmith in the nearest medium-sized town. (I have in mind the sort of whitesmith who works mainly in pewter, rather than in modifying forged iron with things like files and engravings, but for plot reasons may switch to the latter.)
That went pretty well until his master's former apprentice and only son went missing on the road, presumed dead, and the couple started taking their grief out on Duluth. So he broke his contract and ran off at eleven, leaving him with two years' worth of training. Didn't get past the basics, really, but he did pick up some advanced things from being around and observing, which is one of the purposes of apprenticeship as an education style. This is where he gets most of his grasp of runework, the kinds of virtues his master often had occasion to set into metal.
Later he tried to steal from some people he found camping, who turned out to be wanted criminals, just like you'd expect from people camping in some woods in a society where no one had decided this was a leisure activity somehow.
This got him adopted, and Elaine made sure he learned how to read because as a fugitive it had turned out to be a valuable survival skill. (She'd resisted being taught herself lmao.)
His writing is much weaker than his reading--they're not actually the same skill for all we tend to learn them together. He also learned sword-fighting and various survival skills from his new crime family. He isn't really numerate.
Duluth is very weird about education because he associates it with both acceptance and rejection in elaborate ways. So his level of effort is often less tied to the material than his relationship with his instructor.
He got really good with a sword because Marl was his main instructor with it at a time when Marl was pretty emotionally unavailable to him, because he takes a while to warm up to people and Elaine had kind of really shaken up their whole lives by suddenly adding a twelve year old just when she was finally an adult. So Duluth got it into his head that if he was good enough at swording Marl wouldn't turn against him.
The only source of formal education, in our terms, on the continent are currently the Colleges at Glissare, on the Sun Coast. Duluth would actually do really well in a couple of those, if he filled in some gaps in his learning first, and is technically qualified since Prince Barisson knighted him for his war service, but the normal age to start there is fifteen or sixteen after private tutoring and he's twenty-one with a shoddy educational base, so it can't really happen.
He'd be too uncomfortable, and there's no obvious aim since he's not planning to go into a clerical career in either the government admin sense or the church sense, and the war is over so entering the College of War now as a decorated captain to get i.e. strategy classes from people who mostly haven't actually commanded in the field would be weird. If he wanted to take a military job with Barisson it might be worthwhile but it would be excruciating, socially. And working for Barisson is very much a fallback option in case he doesn't come up with anything more personally fulfilling to do with himself.
