Thought a lot today about how the Crooked Moon crew is going to be subject to a breakfast at the inn they're staying at where half of the party can't even eat and I realized that I think. I THINK. Hester is going to develop an interest in cooking.
I think it is both 1) extremely in her wheelhouse to be interested in such a communal, very human ritual, and 2) extremely funny to imagine someone who has never Tasted anything to try learning to cook. I want her to find it very hard to understand the difference between salt and sugar. I want amounts to be strange concepts to her. I want her to get deeply descriptive details about food from anyone who is willing to indulge her and I REALLY wanna see what happens the first time she gets it right.
Received this absolutely stunning wing-it style commission of my Crooked Moon girlie Hester, from the incomparable @sacherali !!
To get not only a beautiful standalone piece but also a little poster of my would-be Ghostlight poster girl was such a delightful treat. Hester might not be part and parcel with her beloved ghost train currently, but she is forever thinking of the next moment she will get to see it again. :>
Check out Ali's other work and open commissions here!
This is for exactly six people on the planet, but I figured I'd share it here too. :3
~1500 words, some vague, disjointed musings on a time in Hester's life before things made sense.
“What do you remember?” the voice asks, when it stops making the nice sounds for her.
She tries to decide what remembering is. It's harder to do, now — harder in the sense that she thinks that she knew how to do it once, and so has to comb through the brief list of what she can do before she can guess at the shape of what she has. It is not the thinking, she is pretty sure, or the sitting still, or the waiting, so remembering must be the other thing — the thing that is the waiting and the sitting still and the thinking all at once.
By the time she has arrived at this revelation, however, the voice has taken her silence to mean refusal, and it asks her something else.
“What about your name?”
Relief. This is a much easier question. Her name is not remembering but a brand, a binding, something that she would know deaf and blind and unable to remember anything at all. Her mouth forms the shape of it entirely on reflex, forgetting that speaking is still harder than remembering.
“Hhhh…..haaa…”
The air shifts beside her, a sudden invisible pressure, and the voice says, very kindly, “Easy now. Take it slow.”
She tries to take it slow.
“Ha…Hhhaaa…” The hissing, panting noise she is making pushes against something flimsy and wobbling inside of her, straining to touch a piece of something that does not touch anything at all. “Ha…Haaaa—es…aest…ester. Ha….quin…”
The voice is closer now, echoing the noises in time with her, turning them into sound and then into words, mimicking her rough and drawn-out wheezing until they become something almost like a name.
“Ha….Haesss…ter? Hester? Hester….Quinn?”
Something sizzles pleasantly inside her at the question. Yes, she decides. Yes. She remembers (remembers!) that she can move a part of her body to signal something like that, and does. Something clatters down onto metal nearby, knocking lightly against her as it goes. The voice makes a muffled little noise of alarm.
“Alright, alright,” it says, a bit hurriedly, “that’s quite enough Miss Hester. I follow.” There is another dull scrape across metal, and she feels herself rocked back and forth, once, very gently. The voice hums again, sounding more like a furrowed brow this time. “Well enough, anyway. Hm. How’s about we try something else?”
The air shifts again and the voice retreats, moving backwards towards something that thrums musically when it is moved. The shivering in her insides picks up again, expectant this time. The thing that moved is the thing that makes the nice sounds, the thing that she has come to realize means that the voice is here, and that makes the thinking and the waiting and the remembering all a little bit easier. There is a brief scuffle of feet (feet?) on metal, and then the soft groan of someone sitting down. The thrumming sound comes again, this time in a shivery chorus of choir-tones, and then flinches abruptly to a stop.
“So,” the voice says, slow and thoughtful. “You understand the Common tongue. You can hear what I say. It’s just the talking that’s difficult, is that right? What about this?”
There is suddenly another sound, this one a single wavering pulse that ricochets warmly around the inside of her chest. She waits eagerly for more, but the next sound is just a repeat of the first, a hard-plucked tonnnngggg that quivers through the air, abandoned by the many-voiced chorus that usually follows. The voice rises above the sound as it twangs out a third time, leaned ever so slightly closer.
“Can you do that? Can you make that noise? Not the same sound, mind, I’m just looking for the same — yes, exactly right.”
She hadn’t even realized she was doing something, but some old instinct had made her reach down for the shivery, rattling piece inside her that her voice could not reach, and now her insides ring in harmony with the thrum. The sound comes again and she immediately joins her own noise to it, adjusting the shape until the quavering matches. The voice laughs, sounding genuinely pleased.
“Good. Good! That there’s a G. Any time you wanna tell me that I’m right about something, you make that noise, understand?”
She does, and makes the noise to show it. The voice laughs again.
“Alright, then. Same with this one. This is for when I’m wrong.”
The sound this time is lower, deeper, shivering right at the very center of her. Matching it is even easier this time, and some distant part of her thrills when the voice comes again and she can hear it smiling.
“Very good. You’re a natural, Miss Hester. We could probably make a fine songsmith out of you, if we could just work out how to get you upright again. You willing to answer a few questions now?”
She is, and she tells the voice so, trilling the agreed-upon sound — the G, she remembers — so forcefully that it cracks somewhere high up in her chest. The voice chuckles.
“Alright, then. Let’s start simple. Do you know where you are?”
This is patently not simple, but she has no way of telling the voice so. Instead, she makes the lower sound, the one that is their no. The voice hums.
“Thought as much. You certainly gave me enough of a fright when I found you that I can’t imagine you were trying to get here. Well, Hester Quinn, it is my duty and my privilege to welcome you properly aboard the Ghostlight Express. You know what that is?”
There is a faint tug somewhere in the place where remembering happens, a tiny thrust of recognition that says she has heard those words before. Remembering is still mostly a thing that she has to decide to do, though, and it takes a few long, sticky moments before she realizes that she doesn’t know any more than the words. But that is not a no or a yes, and for a moment, she is paralyzed with indecision.
Eventually, with effort, she makes the sound of the yes, and then drags it slowly down until it sounds more like the no. The voice’s laugh this time is a short, barking thing, like it hadn’t expected to laugh at all.
“Well!” it says approvingly. “No one can say you’re not innovative, at least. No, I don’t suppose you would. The old girl and I don’t spend much time out in your neck of the woods, even just for passing through.” There is a pause, and she can feel the air shift like the voice has moved away again, leaning back ever so slightly like it needs more room to see. “Though maybe that’s being a bit presumptive. You are from Druskenvald, aren’t you? From Picco, or thereabouts? Certainly seem like you’re one of Blinski’s —”
(Dark. Light. Smears of color underfoot. Smears of color overhead. Wind like a banshee howling. Crashing. Crashing. So loud it shakes the stuff inside. So loud that she does not hear the sound of something banging out the no, the no, the yes and the no, again and again and again and again. Yes. Yes. No. Nonono —)
She flings herself backwards, cringing, dragging the long and hideous tangle of things that she cannot quite move, that barely know what to do with her sudden, inexplicable terror, back as far as they will go. A number of very important somethings go scattering away from her like a bomb going off, rattling away into the blackness. Metal shrieks. The world revolves. The back of her (back?) hits something flat and solid, and whatever is juttering around inside her chest and her throat suddenly tears open like a mouth, like a maw.
(Light again. Light so bright it burns. Hands that burn. An eye that burns, that burns, that burns. A hole. A gap.
No no no no —)
“Hester, Hester, easy!” In front of her, a low shape moves within the darkness, but she cannot see for the burning of the light, can’t move for the burning in her chest, so she opens her mouth and howls, making the noise that is the no again and again and again, making it pour out of her mouth and her eyes and her chest and her throat, making everything listen. Something inside her resists, straining, so she reaches down into the wrenching, rattling thing and cracks it open with both hands, pulling it to pieces just so that she can make more noise come out, just so that they can hear her.
(Metal and wire and string and hair and hands and eyes and things that pry and squeeze and rip and stab and peel and tear and nothing at all, nothing at all, the light pushing in, the light pushing in, the dark that cannot hide or crawl or run run run runruNRUNRUNRUN —)
Her mouth is a cavern, a void, good for nothing more than the wailing, tearing note that pours out of her and goes on forever and ever and ever, that breaks something inside over and over again until it is splinters, until it is gone, until the everything is gone, until —
In the dark, something touches her, and the whole world goes black.
—
Some time later, (an hour? a day?) she realizes that she is awake again.
In Which Hester Remembers That She Likes Spirits Better Than People Of COURSE I'm gonna want something from this one!
The minute I saw that you had a Hester running around your WIPs, I was like OH! SAME HAT!
Though mine is a 7ft tall haunted doll who loves trains and who I am playing in my wife's folk horror tabletop game, so I think they are...maybe a little different LOL. This piece is one I started writing after our last session, where a bunch of things turned my generally good-natured gal into a bit of an anxiety-ridden mess. I wanted to try something a little weird with the formatting, so all of the disparate scenes are being written up as if they're sub-headers in a report of why she's having such a no good, terrible, awful bad day. Starting with this one!
Saint belongs to @themilokin :>
The list of things that are ruining Hester’s perfectly nice day are as follows; —
— (1): Saint is binding spirits and throwing up black ichor all over the floor of her lovely train car.
Admittedly, Hester is more upset about the former than she is about the latter. The ichor certainly looks worse — black as pine pitch, with a faint oil-slick sheen that flashes in a greasy rainbow of colors as Saint heaves long, ropey strands of it across the floor — but it is also not entirely real. Even as she scrambles backwards away from the foul puddle pooling at their knees, Hester can see the edges of it starting to evaporate, the roiling black turning into smokey grey as it crumbles to join the low bank of Shroud still curling over the floor of the luggage car. In a few seconds, it has become something more like a miasma than a puddle, barely more corporeal than some of the Ghostlight's passengers.
The spirit, on the other hand, had been very real.
“What was that?” Hester demands as she staggers to her feet, not quite shrieking but getting closer to it with every word. “What did you do? What are you doing?”
“Circle,” Saint croaks between bouts of heaving, swatting a feeble hand at the air to shoo her away from the glistening red ritual circle in front of them. As if she needs the warning; Hester’s whole chest had cringed away from it the very second she had stepped within arm’s length, reflexively curling inward against the vortexing current of something trying to pry something precious and vital out of her. She takes a dutiful step back, but fixes her longest, hardest stare down at Saint, as if that alone can coax them to stop vomiting up little gobbets of black muck and tell her what they’ve done.
A3. what abilities do they have that they’ve worked for?
There's a long, long list that could go here, but the one I think Hester would recognize most is the act of physically playing music.
Her magic is obviously a derivative of that, but the MAGIC part of it came much more intuitively than the act of learning to play did. She put a lot of effort and time into learning what to do with her hands, what music was SUPPOSED to sound like, the conventions that came along with it. She has always been a very deft hand at mimicry, but the act of CREATING and DOING was something she had to work very hard to get right. It's part of why her go-to instrument is the guitar, and not the fiddle or the banjo like her mentor - she still very much considers herself to be suited most for playing backup to him!
C1. how do they sit in a chair?
Done!
G5. what parts of others do they envy?
Physically? Hester is really envious of the squishy non-constructs and their ability to feel things in intensity.
Cause here's the thing. Hester is, as I've said before, a little divorced from her own body. She thinks it has appealing features, but it was also MADE to have appealing features. She was made, after all, to be liked on sight. (I mean, she was made to be liked on sight by her CREATOR, which has its own issues, but it was the base concept he worked from.) So she's not really...precious about appearances. She isn't envious of what other people look like.
She IS, however, very jealous that other people can do things like feel the warmth of a fire at a comfortable, non-dangerous distance, or can enjoy a nice bath, or can taste things that aren't blunted by their own lack of ability to taste. She is distantly aware that these can also backfire, but even the idea of having to grapple with a Too Much intensity is still interesting to her, and she does wish that she knew what it was like. Being able to feel just A Little Bit of something is kind of worse than not knowing it exists at all, in some ways!
N2. what have they never done that they want to do?
This list is endless. Hester is hungry for all sorts of experiences, and the only way that she has found that really works for her to HAVE those experiences thus far is to get them second-hand from stories that people are willing to share. That has worked very well for her so far, but I get the feeling that her removal from the Ghostlight will show her exactly how much that does not compare to having the experiences herself. So she's gonna be uhhhhh really fucking annoying about poking into all sorts of things, I fear.
For a specific example, though, I think she'd really LOVE to see some of the other provinces in Druskenvald! Kalero and Enoch come to mind immediately, but she'd probably go anywhere just to see what it was like once.
Y5. what’s your favorite thing about them?
That Hester is SO deliberate. It is so fascinating to play a character that stops and turns every little thing over in her hands before acting on it, that has less reflexive outbursts and immediate responses to everything. Part of this is because I have been blessed with a party who all are very invested in their characters and thus help drive the plot along so that I feel like I can sometimes sit back quietly in the background with Hester and let her stew over things, but part of it is also just because she's still figuring everything out! She still has to be very purposeful in what she does because nothing comes easily! And as someone who wishes I felt confident enough to ask for and take the time for that sort of reflection for the day to day, it's nice to have an outlet for it!
Plus, it's just fun to do her quiet, intentional, deliberate character voice and physicality. I like that I can just stare straight ahead sometimes while she decides what she wants to do because it's in character. I like that this only adds to her energy.
For Hesterrrrr 6, 10, 16, 19, 22, 35, 37, 48, 53! (More inbound bc i'm a freak for this creepy doll)
6. What is your character’s opinion on nobility? On authority?
A general sense of wary respect. Hester knows that people who wield power can often apply that power to the people they rule over (see: her) so she is pointedly very polite and respectful and a little bit afraid of them. Hell, she knows that people in positions of power can sometimes wield that power in destructive ways without realizing it, or in ways that they think are helpful to their subjects, even if they very much aren't! So she prefers to simply not be in their line of sight.
I think she has only been as Chill about traveling with the Druskenvalds as she has been because 1) her fucking TRAIN is GONE and she's SAD ABOUT IT, and 2) they seem to be at least somewhat powerless at the moment. That's enough for them to worry about for her to think that they won't notice her!!!
10. If your character had time to pick up any artisan’s tools, game set, instrument, etc., what would it be?
Hester would probably LOVE to learn any gaming set, but I really, really think she'd enjoy getting handed a set of cook's tools to play with. Desperate to know if the haunted doll who can't eat can learn to make halfway-decent food.
16. If your character wasn’t whatever class they are, what would they be instead?
Grave cleric. I KNOW, I KNOW, but LOOK! In terms of function, they're both support classes, they both deal heavily with dedication to the dead, and Hester is 100% susceptible to being coaxed to follow the teachings of just about anything that aligns with her worldview.
It just so happens that, in canon, the first person who ACTUALLY did that was a bard!
19. Where in the world does your character most want to visit?
She doesn't know it yet but KALERO!! Hester wants to go to the province where the dead are celebrated! Where stories are made and told as part of local custom! I'm afraid that if she ever did go there, she would probably annoy everyone by Never Leaving LMAO.
22. What animal best represents your character?
Hester is a house cat, but specifically one of those vaguely unsettling kinds of cats that sit in a corner and watch you a lot? The ones that are totally fine otherwise! Like, they like people and are generally very affectionate and when you pick them up they start purring and all of that, but then like. You catch 'em watching you from the corner at 3AM, and you say their name and they just slow blink at you?
Like that. That kind of cat.
35. Why is your character’s lowest stat their lowest (the in-character reason, not “because there’s no reason for a wizard to have 16 strength, duh”)?
WISDOM/STRENGTH TIE!! She's got a 10 for both. :>
The strength is easy to explain - she's a doll! I'll touch on this probably fairly soon, but Hester is actually mostly hollow. She's not so fragile because she's more like plastic than porcelain, but she doesn't have a lot of OOMF behind her shape to really give her any physicality.
The low wisdom is because she has heard a lot of stories about the world, and she remembers basically all of them, but her experience is uhhhhh significantly lacking. If it isn't about the Ghostlight, or vague generalities about Druskenvald, she only knows what she's been told!
37. What stereotypical role would your character play in a high school AU/if they attended a normal high school? (Nerd, jock, bully, goth, etc.)
We've discussed this before, but weirdo, previously-home schooled nerd who really likes trains and being in band. Only meets the party through Breakfast Club style shenanigans. Probably has the same energy as Rhonda from Trick r' Treat.
48. What aspect of your character’s future are they most curious about? (If they could know one thing about the future, what would it be?)
Hester would really like to know if her train is coming back. :')
She knows what the Vagrant said about coming back after he got the Ghostlight all fixed up, and she believes him, but... Hester is also very painfully aware that she was really only on it by his grace, and by the fact that she was polite and respectful enough not to make him throw her off yet. Now that she's already off, I mean...that's a very clean, easy break to make. So she's a little anxious to know for sure if her life will ever be HER kind of normal again.
53. What is your character’s favorite spell? If they don’t use spells: what is their favorite personal weapon/combat maneuver/skill/etc.?
It's not REALLY a spell, and I haven't been able to show it off yet, but Hester's bardic inspirations come with the added benefit of getting a Helpful Little Guy to provide some fun extras for her party! She's going to be very excited when channeling them finally works. :>
Otherwise? Shatter. It sounds like the Ghostlight's call when Hester uses it, and it's a teeny tiny bit of comfort for her and her alone to think that it's still protecting her. :> Horrifying for anyone else though. That shit sounds scary as FUCK.
Nuance! Hester is EXCELLENT at doing fiddly little things with her hands, and she's got a LOT of dexterity, but she doesn't have a lot of...what I'd call visually creative experience. Like, she would be incredible at mini painting just for the steadiness of her hands, but I don't thinks he'd know how to make them LOOK nice, aesthetically. That said, she does have experience with smith's tools thanks to all of her time on the Ghostlight, so in terms of being crafty in the TINKERING sense, she's actually pretty good!
tl;dr, she's great at functional crafting, but not so much at the aesthetic stuff.
10. Do they need their hands occupied a lot? If so, what do they do?
Also nuance. Hester is a hand talker, and she's always gesturing or posing with her hands thanks to uhhh you know. lots of stuff. but she also has the very uncanny habit of going completely still when something isn't actively requiring her attention. Just full ragdoll, Toy Story style going inanimate. Being a construct means that Hester's sense of time is very different from a mortal person's, so she will sometimes space out for looooong stretches of time without seeming to need any sort of distraction.
But she does prefer to have stuff to occupy her!
18. Morning person or night owl?
Night owl for sure. Obviously this is with the understanding that the day/night cycles in Druskenvald and on the Ghostlight are....unusual.... but Hester's natural sense is to be up and moving when the "daylight" hours are waning. My fellow players know that I use one of those incorrect quotes generators to make stupid little jokes about our little guys, but I will say that this might as well be canon in my mind.
Hester:
- What is your character's favorite physical trait they possess?
- What does your character smell like?
- What would it take for your character to give up an item they really like?
- Is there a skill your character doesn’t know they’re bad at?
Wyn:
- What does your character smell like? (I think this is such a good question expect it again)
- What would your character do if they were suddenly caught in the rain?
- Is there a habit your character has that they learned from someone else?
Tritchet:
- What does your character smell like?
- If your character could splurge on a particular garment, what would it be?
- Which mealtime is your character's favorite?
These RULE, thank you Jayne!!! <3
Hester
What is your character's favorite physical trait they possess?
What a delightfully difficult question this is LMAO. I won't get into exactly why, but Hester doesn't have a strong attachment to her own body, which means that she tends to have sort of middling feelings about her appearance?? It just doesn't mean much to her.
That said, she does like her hair. She likes that it's long and that she can go through the ritual of braiding it over and over again. It's self-soothing, and it gives her hands something to do when she feels very disconnected with them. Which is, incidentally, also usually the reason she reaches for her guitar.
What does your character smell like?
Currently? A little like burnt plastic, thanks to a still-lingering injury from that THING that showed up in the Ghostlight's engine car. But usually, she's got either a very weirdly distinct lack of any strong odor, or she smells a liiiiiittle bit like grease - specifically, that kind of grease that you'd use on something like a brass instrument's tuning slide as a lubricant. More Vaseline than cooking grease, you know?
For reasons. :>
What would it take for your character to give up an item they really like?
FOR IT TO GET BLOWN UP, APPARENTLY.
In all seriousness though? Someone else would have to really need it. Hester hasn't really OWNED anything in her life, so the things that she's really attached to, she's REALLY attached to. But she's also got a moral code that involves comforting the lost and lonely (it's what she was made for!) so if she were convinced that giving up something of hers would further that goal? She would (begrudgingly) do it.
So it's a good thing she's not surrounded by charisma casters who are good at being convincing! :)
Is there a skill your character doesn’t know they’re bad at?
Hester has not yet realized that, despite her experience with music and tinkering and dancing, she is NOT an artist. Don't ask her to draw anything. God help you if you give her paint.
Wyn
What does your character smell like?
You know the way a damp forest smells after rain? Not just the petrichor, but specifically like when a decaying log gets sodden through with rain, and there's that very strange mix of rot that's been muted by the clean smell of wet earth, and it's not quite MUSKY, but there's something both pleasant and also vaguely dead in the air? A little bit like that. Despite the ever-present sense of heat that she's always giving off, the growths on her horns mean that Wyn always kinda smells a little like slightly damp, slightly rotting vegetation.
Which, you know. That's gotta be nice for SOMEONE LMAO.
What would your character do if they were suddenly caught in the rain?
Nuance. If there's nearby shelter, she will absolutely make a break for it. Wyn doesn't particularly LIKE the feeling of sodden clothes, and she'll avoid it when she can because, you know. Ick.
THAT SAID. Sometimes you get caught out in a storm and there's nothing you can do about it, so you just kind of accept that you're gonna be soaked, and then? That's when her sense of younger sibling mischief comes out. Because Wyn, despite all of her poise and charm, is absolutely still someone who would "innocently" flick her tail across a puddle just to splash whoever was foolish enough to walk beside her. She is not above retaliation in a mud-flinging fight. Hell, she's not above STARTING it.
Sometimes, you fight off the omnipresent specter of your own death by being a little bit irreverent about it!
Is there a habit your character has that they learned from someone else?
Wyn started raising her hand when she wanted to ask a question in the middle of a conversation in a lighthearted mimicry of our wizard. Now she's started doing it on reflex. Yes, she's mad about it LMAO.
Tritchet
What does your character smell like?
Like sun-warmed sandstone, but with a very slight edge of...I'm not even sure how to describe it except kind of like when you go into a reptile house that only has desert reptiles. Something warm and alive and a little bit animal.
Ultima Thule made it worse! Don't worry about it!
If your character could splurge on a particular garment, what would it be?
Tritchet likes the act of outfit coordinating so much that I think she's very hard-pressed to feel attached to ONE specific kind of garment tbh! She doesn't really suppress her urge to buy whatever she thinks is nice, so I think it's actually way, way more likely that she would spend a really exorbitant amount of money on a specific set of clothes for someone else.
For example. I have the distinct feeling that Onion both sees no point in owning and is too practical to ever buy herself a really nice, well-cut, tailored suit or suit jacket, and I can see Tritchet commissioning one with EXACTING detail just for the pleasure of seeing her sister wear something NICE FOR ONCE.
Which mealtime is your character's favorite?
DINNER!!! Though mostly just because that's the one that she always suggests meeting other people for. There's also this general air of no-holds-barred when it comes to what you can and cannot have for dinner. Breakfast for dinner is a thing. Lunch for dinner is a thing. Tritchet really likes not being limited by convention, so the idea that she can just have whatever she's craving is really appealing to her.
Also, yeah, it's just the one meal of the day that people seem more regularly available to meet her for. Thus, her favorite!
