Q's for Alla: 10, 12, 13, 25, 28, 41 & 44
10. Do they like children? Do children like them? Do they have or want any children? What would they be like as a parent? Or as a godparent/babysitter/etc?
(Interested parties want to know, perhaps?)
Alla really likes children, and she is really good with them. She spent a lot of her childhood dealing with her gaggle of younger siblings and cousins and her matter-of-fact interactions are something that children really love. She doesn’t speak down to children and, yes, while she may occasionally traumatize children by gutting fish in front of them, you know. That doesn’t happen too often!
She doesn’t really have any... proactive interest in being a mother, but she does love being an aunt. Or godmother. Or older and super tough cousin who gets all of the older and less tough cousins out of tricky situations. And, you know, when I first made Alla up, I imagined she wouldn’t want kids at all, but the more I’ve gotten to know her, the more I’ve realized that a large portion of her identity derives from her drive to protect people. She wants to nurture, to guard, to help see people made better (see: useless siblings). So I think that, while she wouldn’t necessarily feel an intense need to be a parent, it’s something she might like to do one day.
Alla is very much the sort of person who would help a sad orphan child out of an ugly situation, and then decide that, if no one else was going to help poor orphan child, well, by the Maker, she would. She could never leave the helpless unaided.
Plus, I can totally see her raising this gaggle of little tough warrior children and being so enthusiastic about everything they loved and it’s really cute and ow my heart.
12. What is their favourite food?
Stuffed pheasant, which is basically all the good First Day feelings in one delicious bird. Wild fowl are her favourite.
13. What is their least favourite food?
Her mother likes to order in really fancy and really stinky Orlesian cheeses to impress dinner guests. Alla thinks that, if something doesn’t smell like you’d want to eat it, you shouldn’t eat it, and so runny cheeses that smell like death are decidedly on her do not eat list.
25. What do they find funny? Do they have a good sense of humour? Are they funny themselves?
Alla has a great sense of humour! She’s not especially the sort to crack jokes, but she is delighted by... a soldier’s humour? Really dark quips, dirty jokes, and clumsy innuendo will all set her to snorting and laughing. Leonid is very, very, very shocked by all of this.
Alla is really more of the one-liner kind of joker. She is also definitely the sort of person who occasionally tries to tell a long-winded joke, only to get halfway through and realize she missed a crucial detail, or to stumble over the punch line, or suddenly forget half of it. Which she wouldn’t be embarrassed about: she’d think her failure at telling a protracted joke was very amusing, especially if it annoyed a certain brother.
28. What is their biggest fear? What in general scares them? How do they act when they’re scared?
Alla’s biggest fear is failing to be where she’s needed when she’s needed. She considers it her job to keep her errant siblings safe; it’s her duty, she decides, to save everyone she loves, even if that means saving them from themselves. Her greatest fear is that she won’t be able to. That she’ll fuck up and her loved ones will pay.
I think the closest we get to seeing a properly scared Alla is in “the hollow breath of war,” when she thinks Leonid might be dead. So wide-eyed, launching into action, mind stuck in a desperate iteration of please Maker don’t let this have happened. Being powerless to intervene and keep people safe is her nightmare.
41. What’s their sexuality? What do they find attractive? Physically and mentally? What do they like/need in a relationship?
Alla is super gay and also -- and I know this isn’t a sexuality, but I think it’s important -- she is just super into women being awesome and doing things and living their lives and being happy. She is a cheerleader and entirely believes in the power of ladies to be the best.
Okay, but if we’re speaking to her sexual and romantic attraction, this has really shifted for Alla. On the one hand, she has all of these grand romantic notions about, you know, saving people and protecting people, and so she’s drawn to that sort of dynamic, in which she gets to put a lady up on a pedestal and, you know, be a knight in shining armour courting the lady’s favour.
ON THE OTHER HAND, nothing makes Alla quite so enamoured as women who are super badass. Her first girlfriend, Siobhan, was as tough as Alla and could keep up in battle. She was the first person Alla really trusted to have her back entirely, and that is something Alla needs, I think, on a deeper level.
Because while it’s all well and good to be like, ah yes I will keep you safe from all the evils of the world, that’s also not realistic. It’s also draining. It is, I think, kind of unhealthy.
Fighting side-by-side and being in an actual partnership of equals? That is what Alla needs, and it is what she wants. Sometimes she just gets swept up in the artificial romance of the narrative about, you know, knights and ladies. And then she sees a badass woman being super competent and capable and smart and tough, and that’s it for her. Head over heels, chest full of butterflies.
44. What is their favourite season? Type of weather? Are they good in the cold or the heat? What weather do they complain in the most?
How pertinent! Alla doesn’t like the cold. It makes her want desperately to be whiny, and it’s painful for her to repress that. She hates being cold because it makes her feel stiff and slow and awkward, and also because ice and also because cold toes and also because no one to snuggle with under blankets. Winter, she has decided, is the worst and she can’t think of a single reason as to why anyone would ever willingly live in a place that was cold for more than, like, a few weeks. At the most.
She loves the summer. Alla was born in August and that is absolutely her time. She always went off to Markham in the summers as well for training, and that was incredibly liberating and important for her. She’s not put off at all by getting gross and sweaty and would always rather feel too warm than too cold.
