maixan — 30 Uncommon Character Development Questions #2, 21, and 22! (would love to know more about them too!)
!!!!!!!! oh you're an angel thank you!
firstly, some visual ref courtesy of the lovely @alainaewins which answers the first question pretty easily:
2. Does your character have any noteworthy features? Freckles? Dimples? A scar somewhere unusual? etc.
Nearly the entire right half of their face is covered in severe burn scars, a souvenir from the starship crash that should have killed them. There is no eye behind the patch, only a solid black prosthetic that's simply there to keep the socket from collapsing. They also have a variety of facial and ear piercings, and if you ever caught them in a sleeveless shirt (extremely unlikely) you'd see more scarring on their right shoulder and a tattoo on their left bicep that appears to depict an eclipse: a circle of solid black, broken at the edges by the light bursting from behind.
21. Your character has been granted 3 wishes; what would they wish for and why?
What is the difference between a prayer and a wish if you have no god to pray to?
Followers of the Devourer believe that death is the true culmination of their worship, that they are meant to burn themselves along with everything else. Any of their peers would be proud of a death like this, surrounded by the corpses of ships and sentient beings alike, a field of debris made partially by their own hand, but as the cockpit alarms signal critical failure after critical failure and the fuel tank to their right begins to ignite, Maixan sends out one desperate final thought to whatever or whoever might be listening: Please. I don't want to die.
A scavenger crew finds them floating among the debris hours later; no helmet, no oxygen, half their face burned away in the explosion that destroyed their ship and yet somehow, impossibly, alive. The healing they receive is blasphemy, an unconscionable repair of something meant to be destroyed, and yet... The longing that had sprung up in the face of their imminent demise remains, an animal waking from hibernation, hungry and blinking in the sunlight.
22. Does your character trust people right off the bat or does it take them some time to warm up to someone?
Absolutely not - they spent half their life in a cult devoted to bringing about the complete destruction of the universe, because someone they should have been able to trust brought them into it when they were too young to get away. Now they're a fugitive, a deserter, and if any member of the cult gets close enough they're guaranteed a gruesome and painful death so they’re rightfully wary of other people. On the other hand, they’re a group-oriented kind of person; they don’t function well alone, and being around/traveling with other people means trusting them at least to some degree.
(There was an incident, in one of my last sessions with the group I wrote them for, where the party was fighting a cultist who’d recognized Xan and had been targeting them aggressively through the entire fight. He pulled out an acid pistol which melted a hole straight through a tree and when he aimed it at Xan, one of their party members JUMPED IN FRONT OF THEM. I almost cried at the table. That was the closest they came during active play to really trusting any of the other PCs, and it still breaks my heart that we didn’t get to explore that relationship.)
some additional visual ref, bc i love u for asking this! *smooches*