“Oh, Lilac, there you are. I was looking for you.” Sunil gave her a kind smile, leaning on his ironwood cane a little.
She hummed, giving him a curious look as she took the arm that he offered, following the man along the halls of the building he commanded.
He let them walk for a moment in silence, sharing polite nods to the people that passed them. “Hum… let’s see, would you like to come out with me for a little while? I have some business with Ace and Verilin, but I was thinking that we could get some ice cream together while you’re here.”
Lilac looked up at him for a moment before nodding with her own smile. “I haven’t been gone long.”
“You say that, but eight months at that university and this old man has missed you quite dearly.” He chuckled quietly and she rolled her eyes, as subtly as she could.
“And you are not old. Barely past forty-five.”
Sunil shrugged. “In this business, that is quite the age to be living to.”
“Still young to have a daughter as old as me, though.”
“Hmm, just barely younger than the average, give or take a few years.” He ruffled her hair a little and Lilac gave him a somewhat peeved look. “Besides, I wouldn’t have it any other way, you’re a wonderful daughter to have. Even when you leave those little poppers under my shoes to scare the hell out of me.”
Lilac smiled a little wider at the mention, flattening her hair down - leaving poppers under his slippers had been her favorite little prank to pull on the closest thing to a father that she had, as a young child.
She almost missed the soft look he gave her, but she met his gaze and gave another curious hum.
“Do you really like Kasten, Lilac?”
Slowly, she nodded, her smile turning more shy. Meeting Kasten, and Riley and Maru… it had been one of the best things in her life, really.
“Good,” he said, nodding slowly before his muddy green eyes flickered back over to her again. “... and the others, too?”
At that, Lilac bit her lip a little, nervously chewing on it. “Me and Kasten have been… talking about it.”
“Oh good, good. I wouldn’t mind a few extra in-laws, if it makes you happy.”
She felt her cheeks warm exponentially, as she stared at the ground and nodded, unable to deny the happy grin spreading over her face.
~
Sunil is 10/10 the best dad okay? He loves and appreciates his adopted daughter and will fight the sun if it would make her happy sldkgjsldkgjsd
Kasten's brain the night before he meets his three soulmates in person for the first time: I MUST do meal plans for every day of the month and make sure that everybody is getting food they like and Lilac needs some extra calories cause she literally only has ramen and yogurt cups in her apartment and sleeping arrangements need to be figured out and Riley needs access to the better zones of WiFi cause of his job and Maru will want to play the VR and maybe they'd want to go to that festival across the city on the 13th and-
Cerveny, watching him have a small crisis as he tries to figure out whether or not to buy new bath scrushies for them at 3am: Dude go to sleep
hii its been a while, but i would like a question 40 for team krml if u dont mind pls and thank u 😄 (also if its not already too much - 12 for verun, 21 for aldafa, 44 for akaira?)
Hi yes hello let me just yeet myself back into existence for this ask - some of this will be in character, the stuff that is will be in quotations ;)
Team KRML
40. What hurts you the most?
Kasten - "Not sure what really hurts me the most consistently, but. It really sucked for a while when Cerveny ran off and disappeared. I guess it's just an older brother worrying about youngest sister thing but I was really scared for her, for a while. I'm glad that her boyfriend brought her back to the family though ಥ‿ಥ"
Riley - "... People close to me getting hurt. I don't like it when I can't do anything for them."
Maru - "Getting punched in the nose hurts like a bitch, I guess. It's not as bad when I get to punch back though 😈" (*ahem*) despite her hardass personality, Maru puts a lot of emotional work into making plans with people, and when she's ghosted it makes her just want to give up on humanity altogether.
Lilac - "Ah, well... I'm not sure." Don't mind her, she's quiet. But Lilac, given her quiet nature, gets rather easily hurt when people lash out at her after gaining her trust. She's a sensitive bean with trauma so raised voices scare her, and having a friend direct their anger at her makes her retreat into herself 😔
(Also kudos to you for picking an angsty question, I've been in the mood for it, lmao) buuut, onto the next~
12. What’s your favorite thing to do?
Verun - "I might be boring honestly, but I do really enjoy just sitting around and napping with my boys fjdbdjdbekfb. It's nice to be lazy with them :'D"
21. What’s your biggest desire?
Aldafa - "... I don't have a lot of desires outside of living." (She really wants to have a family but she is ms loner and it takes months and months to even create a decent friendship with her so like, rip... She'll get there though. Eventually.)
44. What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done?
Akaira - "Depends on how honest an answer you want :3 I've done plenty of scary shit in my life... Unwilling cliff jumping, for example. Gotta run from those baddies xD" Truth be told the scariest thing she's done is agreeing to work with a certain... Agency... To keep her neck from the noose. It was a perilous time for her, she doesn't like to talk about it. She's got plenty of other, more fun tales though.
Thanks for tuning into this regularly scheduled programming of my character bullshit-
(But really in character asks are fun I have found)
Okay so part of me doing OCtober has been me partially trying to figure out how to get better at writing character voices.
So, just to get some thoughts out of my head and onto (digital) paper, here’s some explanation on how I write the individuals of team KRML.
Have fun, this is gonna be a long one.
Kasten
So, for Kasten, the biggest thing to remember that he grew up in a large family - he’s flexible, and there’s not a lot of people he doesn’t get along with. Unless it’s someone he himself does not like, he will always put an effort into making friends.
I use a lot of kind of ~shiny~ descriptors for him. His smiles are bright, his voice is warm. A very extra kind of character, with lots of idle movement all the time. He talks with his hands, he’ll act out what he’s saying when he’s telling a story. He likes to wave with his entire body, wide movements to grab people’s attention.
His headspace is rather cluttered, usually with things have almost nothing to do with the situation at hand. If left idle he’ll overthink, and often in social situations he’s closely keeping tabs on people’s reactions. He’ll notice when someone goes quiet or gets overwhelmed, or if someone is close to actually letting loose and having a good time, and his little observations will become part of his thoughts and his actions. Writing with him tends to become wordy, though usually not in large paragraphs of description - he talks a lot, venting his thoughts into the open air when he doesn’t keep them in check, like when he’s nervous, and will effectively fill any silence he’s put into if the other person doesn’t want to talk. He rambles, though he only stutters when he’s under emotional stress (flirting with that one girl he really likes? Or is he crying, or too angry to put proper sentences together?). He ends up having a lot of ‘parenthesis’ thoughts, or things that end up branching off into other thoughts.
“Maybe I’ll rent a movie tonight (does Lilac like horror? I know Maru does but Riley is picky) or maybe I’ll just get that hot chocolate mix that we ran out of.”
Riley
As a general thing, Riley is not social, and doesn’t just have friends - he has ‘contacts’ because as much as he hates to admit, he’s an edgy child that refuses to believe that he actually has people he cares about. He’s been through a lot in his life - he doesn’t like to admit that he’s touched by it, that it affects him, but it does.
Personally, I use a lot of dark descriptors for Riley. His personality, the sound of his voice, the way he seems to glower are all dark and kind of rough around the edges - he doesn’t socialize well, partly because of his past and partly because he’s simply awkward in a way that doesn’t make him seem socially awkward. He stands still, watching, seeming ultimately aloof.
In general his headspace is almost... utilitarian, is the best way I can think to describe it. Clean cut, thoughts smoothing from one and into the next as simply as possible. There’s no far-fetched jumps until he starts getting into situations he’s very uncomfortable and kinda nervous with. He tends to stand around and watch people, noting their posture, their expression, the words and tone people use, mostly making sure that they aren’t about to try to like, attack him or anything. He is incredibly sensitive to people’s posture in particular, very familiar with the way most people will clench their jaw or tense up just before throwing a punch. His dialogue is often stiff, and he has a penchant to be brutally honest simply because uh... sorry Riley, but he’s really not creative enough in the subject to be able to give white lies or anything close to. He doesn’t really stutter ever, unless something has really surprised him (*Kasten thumps down to the floor in front of him out of nowhere* “u-uh. Are you alright?”). He tends to think before he talks, or he’ll just deign to not talk at all depending on his mood. He doesn’t like interrupting people or being interrupted, so if you talk over him he’ll just kind of stand and glare until you go quiet so he can finish his thought. Sometimes he will space out when he’s really bored, becoming almost completely unaware of his surroundings and what’s being said until someone gets his attention again.
“Homework needs to be done, then I need to clean out the kitchen and make sure Maru gets out of her room some, and we can all hang out together for a while.”
Maru
Seems the worst at socializing, but... technically she’s just behind Kasten on that. She just doesn’t see the point of keeping friends around. She has people that she is fine hanging around with, and then she has the (very few) people that she’s actually close to. She’s not exactly friendly, but most of her casual friends/acquaintances end up being like, college frat boy type guys.
Sharp and harsher descriptors belong to Maru, my dudes. She tends to snap at people, her words are often grumbles and growls, and when she truly laughs she tends to cackle - never, under any circumstances, will she ever giggle. Again, she can socialize, but she usually just doesn’t bother, and that makes her seem rather unapproachable to most people.
Her headspace is uh... violent? Internally her emotions tend to slingshot, where she’ll be generally fine until she notices something that annoys her or something of the like, and she’ll end up bristling at some slight that this person (or the universe in general) puts upon her. But then she’ll calm down... until the next little thing. If people thinks she swears a lot out loud, they should see the vocabulary that she has internally because hoo boy, there’s no stopping her. In dialogue she doesn’t have much of a filter, especially when she gets angry. There comes a point where she can’t really stop her mouth from running, which often enough lands her in trouble. The only reason that she hasn’t learned to keep her mouth shut is because 1) fuck authority figures and 2) she can and will back up her words with a fight. The only time that she actually holds her tongue is when it’s with someone she actually cares about or when she has more important things to do than yell/get yelled at by someone. She can be brutally honest, but tbh it very much depends on the person that she’s talking to. She will pay attention only as much as she feels she has to, and if she’s not interested in something/someone, she will make it very clear that she doesn’t care.
“God, okay, guess I’m just going to have to be fucking social because no one will leave me the fuck alone, god damn.”
Lilac
Sorry Lilac, but she’s the most socially useless in the group alwekjlasdkg. She will just about do anything to avoid actually talking to people, though she’s nearly incapable of simply ignoring someone trying to get her attention. Luckily for her, in most universes there’s someone* to talk for her (cough cough even if it’s magical talking animals cough cough).
Always, Lilac is accompanied by subdued descriptors. Her smiles are soft, her voice is quiet, her movements are always as small as she can make them. There’s nothing jarring or surprising about her little habits, and she tends to keep a low profile as much as possible.
For Lilac, despite her quiet and careful exterior, her headspace is cramped and just absolutely crammed with all sorts of thoughts. Usually they’re a lot of observations, keeping tabs on her surroundings, watching the way people move around her. It’s a nervous habit of hers that leaves her with an incredible sense of spatial awareness, which becomes what clutters her head. She will space out while focusing on these things, forgetting to focus on what’s being said, until someone snaps her out of her thoughts and gets her attention again. Lilac will quietly memorize the schedules of the people around her, sometimes using the knowledge to avoid people, sometimes using it to make sure that she can just hang out without being a bother. She tends to feel guilty over small things, and will apologize a few times quietly and then continue to apologize to them mentally because she just doesn’t feel like they understood how sorry she is. She stresses out over small things, and it’s easy to make her stutter if she’s actually in a state where she feels okay enough to speak for herself - most of the time anything that will fluster her or surprise her enough to make her stutter will make her go silent, at which point one of her magical companions will have to speak up for her.
“I’m not sure if I can actually do this... there’s too many people to keep track of, how am I supposed to get through an entire day of crowds?”
* in most worlds I have her in, Lilac has two main animal companions that she will summon to talk for her - a spunky hummingbird named Syren, and a much more chill house cat named Patel. If she’s in a world where there’s no magic, then the closest thing she gets is Kasten learning to talk for her when she gets overwhelmed.
ANYWAY that’s my precious team KRML. I really need to do some character studies more often, it’s always interesting to take a more in-depth look of all of them.
Lilac ran, laughter in her lungs as she led the other three behind her. Away from the docks of the Glowing Isle, away from the lights of the port city. She knew every step of the way as if she had never left the glowing forests of her home, as if she had never stepped foot on the faraway land of Ferhgrin.
Maru shouted from the back, asking her to slow down, but there was too much momentum in her footsteps, too much feeling pent up in her lungs. There was a dark corner in her eyes, in just a slightly different spot every time, and she stopped only for a moment, grinning at Kasten that followed the closest.
And then she leapt, the bottom dropping out of her stomach as she fell into the shadows, stumbling out into a dark clearing, where the trees overhead wove their branches into a thick canopy that only let mottled star-and-moonlight shine through. In the moments before Kasten and inevitably Maru and Riley followed, she howled out to the creatures she knew were listening for her, like a wild thing in a wild place.
And when Kasten stumbled out of the shade portal, holding onto Riley who held onto Maru, a howl rang back to her, far but rapidly coming closer.
Lilac ran to the center of the clearing to wait, eyes wide and bright in the eternal twilight that this place stayed in. Kasten followed after her, his fingers brushing against the inside of her arm.
“Lilac? What are we waiting for?”
She shushed him quietly, a smile on her face. On the edge of the clearing the brush started to move aside, a dark shape stalking closer. Then another, and another, until five creatures stood in front of them.
A panther, two wolves, and two massive horses.
The bigger of the wolves stepped up to Lilac and bumped his head against her hip. “Welcome home, Lilac.”
Kasten smiled just slightly as he watched Lilac’s eyes finally slide closed, her body relaxing almost completely - she never truly relaxed. Not that any of them ever did, honestly. But quietly he felt a difference tonight, something that whispered that sleep tonight would be peaceful.
For all of them.
It was the first time he had seen Lilac asleep, honestly. She was always the last one to fall asleep and the first one to wake up, or she would disappear outside of the bounds of the school and the city for the night and leave him to worry about where she had gone, if she would be alright on her way back.
But that was happening less and less recently, until now. This moment, leaving Kasten with Lilac’s head in his lap, Maru slumped against his shoulder and Riley sitting beside him on the ground, head tilted naturally into the hand Maru held out in her sleep.
There were lines of tension in all of them - the way Lilac’s hands stayed curled into fists, the way Riley’s jaw remained firmly set, the way that Maru’s legs would occasionally twitch. For Kasten it was the constant low thrum of his heart, thumping in his chest hard enough that he was scared it would wake the others.
But in the quiet of the room, with the television screen dimmed down and the speakers muted, Kasten tilted his head back and whispered a quiet prayer to all the gods that would possibly listen, hoping that someone would listen. He only wanted to hold onto the memories of this night, the sound of his friends’ breathing, the warmth pressed to him on all sides. He wanted to love and be able to be loved by the hearts of the three around him.
Lilac shifted, just barely, and Kasten froze for a few moments, his breathing pausing in his throat as he hoped and prayed that she hadn’t woken up.
But then she settled, and he smiled, wanting to run his hands through that pale purple moonglow hair.
A voice that sounded like a woman from his dreams whispered to him.
“Sleep now, my love. Nothing will change til the morning.”
Kasten smiled, head leaning to set against Maru’s. Warm, and solid, a heart to love beside him, below him, so close to touch.
Just a touch of tenderness and he would melt beside them, always.
~~~
Just in case yall didn’t know, team KRML is my top ot4. They’re precious children T~T
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Not this night. Not with the way that Kasten had been smiling, Maru finally softening up and laughing from the belly as he joked around.
But the way Kasten had smiled, so softly as he told stories, acted out moments that he had with his siblings, his family - something in him had reacted, and not in a way that it should have. Riley found himself running himself in circles, teeth biting at old scabs that should be healed by now. He missed them, hated that he did, hated that he still found himself imagining what it would be like to be a brother to her. The one he had lost, the one he hadn’t been there for.
She didn’t have a name in his mind anymore.
But now Maru was sitting back with a small frown on her face, Kasten seated on the floor in front of Riley while Lilac sat on the couch somewhere behind him. So concerned for a wretch like him.
“Riley, really…” Kasten pouted up at him. “Was I making you uncomfortable? What was it, can you tell me? I don’t want to-”
“It was nothing,” he interrupted, not harshly. But there was enough bite to it to make Kasten pause.
He saw the questions brimming in the other boy’s eyes, the questions on the tip of his tongue, but Kasten simply sighed and stood up, pausing for just a moment before holding his arms out. “Wanna hug?”
Riley frowned for a moment - almost too long as Kasten started to draw away - but he stood up and gave a tiny nod. He knew that if he didn’t give him a hug, Kasten would only get more concerned and would probably keep bothering him about what was wrong. And Kasten smiled, wrapping his arms around Riley and tucking his face against his shoulder. It was an awkward thing, Riley setting his own arms around the other lightly, not sure where to put his hands.
But as stiff as he was, Kasten squeezed him and murmured to him. “Feel free to talk to me if you need, okay?”
Riley simply hummed, not look at him as he stepped back and sat down again, arms folded. They were all silent for a while longer, before Maru cleared her throat.
“So, anybody want to play like, Uno or something?”
Queue a dramatic gasp from Kasten. “Maru, are you trying to destroy friendships?”
“Based on the fact that I don’t have friends, yes.”
Kasten stood in front of the doors to the school, among the crowd that was currently milling around him, people saying goodbye to family and hello to new friends. Alone he stood, packed bags lying around his feet as he watched everyone else with a half smile.
His family couldn’t be here, which pained him, but they had already said their goodbyes at the airport back in South Drohon - they knew why he decided to come here, to Alteria Academy. He wanted a taste of normal life, a life where people coming home with blood on their hands wasn’t a normal occurrence. Just to see what it was like. See if he could make a few friends, maybe even fall in love like his romantic heart wanted to.
His hand brushed over his arm, feeling the soft material of his dress shirt, fingers pressing to the glowing mark just under the light material. Maybe he’d meet his soulmate.
“Room 201?” A woman in front of the doors called out, and Kasten took a deep breath, glancing at the piece of paper in his hand to make sure he hadn’t gotten his room number wrong.
And then he walked up, hitching his bag more securely up on his shoulder as he dragged his suitcase behind him. Up to the woman, who took the confirming paper from him with a nod and the barest hint of a welcoming smile, and waited for the three other students that were to join him.
A dark haired boy with serious eyes and a tail dragging behind him, flicking as he met Kasten’s eyes - a halfie. Half direnil, half human, probably.
Then a girl with dusty brown hair, scarred knuckles and a perpetual frown seemingly stuck on her face, growing deeper as he offered her a smile.
And one more - a girl with long, ethereally light purple hair, eyes of ice blue. Kasten felt himself nearly swoon at the sight of the dria girl, the way she shyly nodded to the woman who turned with a wave to lead them through the school to their dorm rooms.
The woman was explaining something, probably stuff about the rules and their class schedules, but Kasten wasn’t paying attention, too taken with the people gathered around him. If these were the people he had to room with, he was in for some chaos - he was to be with these people almost every day, excluding the summers, for the next five years. He’d read through all the rules and such while on the plane here, anyway.
If he had anything to do with it, the next five years would be… interesting.
~~~
Anyway, howdy hey my dudes. Guess what, I’m going to be writing three of these short things by the end of today as part of this and. Hoo boy. I’m going to be using my own personal worldbuilding project, Liura (I’m pretty sure I have stuff for it tagged on my blog), for this month of OCtober. Probably going to be posting them on ao3 as well if anybody would prefer to read them on there :3 also for ease of understanding I might... have to put up some sort of doc on Liura, cause explaining halfies and direnils and the whole soulmate thing for dria can get kinda uh... confusing.
