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For Claris: 17+ 18 + 23 /Leland: 11 + 21 /Farael: 16 + 20 /Pirossa: 9 + 13 (hope I got the right name, the Mr Golden Mask), aaannnddd for the random OC you'd like to answer this question the most: 4. Hope that's not too much ' 7 '

AHHH YESSSS I’m so excited, OC asks :D For those of you who remember this meme- I did get one other response, but I had the hardest time ever choosing a random character to answer for, but I still plan to answer it!! (In fact, I’m still open to being asked, if you do get curious.) ANYWAY, this one. There’s a lot of text here, so I’m’a put it behind a cut. If you don’t particularly care about my brain babies, I don’t recommend reading it, because it’s VERY very long.

18. What is a skill your OC wishes they had but doesn’t?She is a very skilled copyist of both text and illustrations, and a dedicated patron of visual artists, musicians, and performers. She surrounds herself with art in all forms, and so you would think she considers herself an artist and has probably composed, or written poetry, or done some kind of visual art outside of imitating what others have already done, but she feels that she herself lacks the artistic vision (she calls it "the effulgence of genius") to bring forth a truly "great" work, and so prefers to contemplate art and support and befriend artists, though she wouldn't claim to be one herself. Whether this opinion holds water is entirely up to you, but she's certainly convinced of its truth. I'll admit I definitely understand the feelings involved in convincing yourself you're a total fraud with zero artistic ability whatsoever and that you'll never have a truly creative idea, so I can't judge. XD

23. What is the one personality trait your OC is trying to get rid of and is embarrassed of? I think this elusive "undesired trait" probably changes from decade to decade and century to century. She actually does have endless amounts of time for self-improvement (and thinks a lot about it, too), so when she gets to a position where she can see her flaws clearly, she'll actually dedicate real effort to making herself a more perfect being. Early on it was cowardice and timidity; she was, by nature, a very "safe" person and preferred to choose what she believed to be the safe course of action, even if the alternative wasn't actually particularly dangerous to her (being a vampire means very little is truly dangerous to you any longer, but getting past her human hangups about what was safe and what wasn't took time). This meant refusing to take physical risks, deferring to someone else's instruction and refusing to take initiative, and conforming to the social mores she was familiar with, even when they no longer served her. Eventually that became unsustainable, so she worked to change it, and did. Later, it was about her relations with other people; she had a stint where she was manipulative and controlling to keep others from abandoning her (leftover emotional baggage from Leland leaving her because of HIS leftover emotional baggage, wheeee), and it screwed up a lot of her relationships (with Rose, Simon and Blancheflor, in particular) and resulted in exactly the thing she was trying to avoid, so she had to do a lot of work to get past that. Eventually she did repair at least some of those relationships, even if she could never be as close as she once was with them. So yeah, hers is a constant process of self-transcendence and personal evolution. Leland eventually learns to follow suit, because even though he does a lot of self-improvement talk, Claris is far better at actually walking the walk.

Leland11. Which one of your OC’s memories makes them smile in private when they recall it? I'll give you two. One is sad-ish, one is happy-ish. The sad one is of re-reading a copy of Rilke's Book of Hours in the original German, in the middle of the night, in the trenches at Verdun during World War I ("I love the dark hours of my being / in which my senses drop into the deep / I have found in them, as in old letters / the days of my life, already lived / and held like a legend, and understood"). It's a smile-worthy memory because of the resonance of the words married to a nightmarish situation, and that particular moment's later role in a significant attitude shift toward warfare and his personal involvement with it. He fought with the French army before England got involved because of his and Claris's longtime ties to France (and the actions of humans do tend to affect what vampires are able to get up to, whether they like it or not, so the two of them figure it's better to be involved in the world than not if you're attempting to pass as human within it), but at that point had more than enough war experience to feel a need to humanize enemies by carrying small reminders of their art, culture, and insights into humankind -- and this particular war, more than any other he'd been involved in up to that point, required a LOT of humanizing. WWI was pretty much the end of his involvement with human warfare, except to later assist refugees in a non-military context. To be fair, old habits die hard, and he's a warrior from way, way back. Apparently it took the advent of trench warfare to really break him of the desire to be a willing part of it.The happier one is during his and Claris's first travels to Jerusalem after the Third Crusade (late 1190s). The two of them normally tended to feed on humans separately at that point and didn't hunt in a pair unit, and while out looking for nommable humans, he came across a group of Syrian musicians performing a waslah set by lantern light for a small party of onlookers, and ended up distracted enough during the music, and afterward while talking to one of the musicians, that he didn't feed on anybody at that moment. Hundreds of years later, he came across a (contemporary, to us) recording of some of the same songs in the set, and it was sort of like that feeling when you hear a cover of a song you haven't heard in YEARS, not quite well enough to know the words, but the melody still comes back to you in snatches and pieces but never as a whole, and surprise surprise, it wasn't quite the same as it had been once upon a time. All the fundamentals of the music were still there, and it was recognizably the same song, and it was amazing to him that it had survived so long… but the original performance was a brief, transient memory that no other living person has anywhere in their mind, and it can never be reproduced or replaced or simulated.

21. How does your OC handle relationships, platonic or otherwise? Do they forge bonds easily, or prefer to not get attached?At least to the second part of the question, the answer is "yes". He can either cleave to someone instantly within moments of meeting them (see: Claris), or he can go about building a relationship glacially, over the course of many many years. I think he's generally a little more forgiving with humans than with other immortals, because humans are ephemeral and there's less relative time to make a good impression on them (and vice versa). With other vampires, sometimes he lets old grudges get in the way of maintaining good relations with them; the shorter-lived among us haven't been around long enough to earn a lasting, slow-burning ire, which is why he prefers interacting with humans over vampires in general. He's sort of zen about it (or so he thinks, anyway), but there's a certain cognitive disconnect that comes with wanting to befriend people but knowing those relationships won't last long, in the grand scheme. The thing is, he's actually very selective about his long-term relationships, and the more intense, not-at-all-easygoing side of his personality comes out with people who've been around long enough to have met him before (god forbid if they've met him MULTIPLE times before).

Farael16. What was the biggest challenge (personal, physical, social, anything) your OC faced before the game/story they were created for begins? Fae is very goal and career-oriented, to a fault. He has pretty much zero work-life balance, which suits him just fine, and prior to the start of the story (where he has a fairly high rank in the Stellar Navy), he's been all about THE CAREER LADDER. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem for someone so precise and focused, but the extra wrinkle comes with the fact that his mother (Trean!) is more or less his boss. She may not be his direct commanding officer, but she's the damn Grand Admiral of the fleet, which means if you go far up enough the chain of command… well. You know. Not only that, she has a laundry list of accomplishments and victories under her belt about a mile long, so he's constantly living with the baggage of being the son of Very Illustrious Personages. They also don't have the touchy-feeliest relationship, and never have, even when he was a child; she loves him (no, seriously, she actually does), and she's actually very proud of him, but for her own reasons, she's unlikely to show it properly, and ends up being a little cold, businesslike, and generally hard on him. She was much kinder to her later two children, and when Farael was growing up, his stepfather was the resident chill parent. So yeah. Latent mom issues. Living up to her expectations is legitimately exhausting, and given that he's so dedicated to the job, it's a pretty unfortunate coincidence that he's in a position where he basically keeps having to prove himself to her.

20. What is your OC most dedicated to-their cause, their loved ones, themselves?He has some very defined principles and he's VERY rigid about them. He has a lot of innate knightly-type urges toward Defending Things That Are Good And Just, which he satisfies by doing everything exactly right and by-the-book, according to everyone else's plan for him. He did, after all, grow up in a high-status military family, so it wasn't a surprise to anyone when he went into his mother's line of work and succeeded marvelously at it. Important to note: in the context of Astral Arcana, being part of the military is a prestigious, well-regarded position with a relatively low degree of moral ambiguity. With spacefaring and interplanetary trade came a whole lot of serious threats, including malevolent illithids (they're a D&D creature- horrible tentacle-faced monsters who eat people's brains, yum ;)) from the far reaches of deep space, and among the Stellar Navy's primary duties are policing trade routes and protecting civilian vessels from pirate attacks, defending allied planets and other neutral systems from Illithid Empire assaults, and generally functioning as a peacekeeping and defense force. Someone like Fae, who's made entirely out of pure, unimpeachable, law-abiding (but not necessarily pacific) intent, can actually go into this line of work unironically and live those principles. It is equally important to note, if his job were to put him in a position where he were forced to do something that acts against his idea of what constitutes Good And Just, then he is very well principled enough to quit. Between his breakup with a fiancée several decades prior, and later meeting Rian, his devotion to his ideals by way of his job caused him to live a life that could be described as regimented, near-monastic, and more than a little aloof, if one were being kind yet honest. Of course, those same qualities also made him wildly successful at it.

Pirossa (that is indeed the right name!)9. Is there an object (or several) that your OC can’t live without? What is it/are they?There are two. The first one, and probably the most obvious, is the gold mask. Even if he's not wearing it on his face, he usually has it on his person, for several reasons. The first is largely related to honesty and deception. The gold masks worn by Khedephi Martians (Pirossa's home culture) don't typically emote; Pirossa specifically had a clockwork mask made so that it could give the impression of varying, shifting facial expressions. Sometimes he chooses to let it mirror the real expressions he's making beneath the mask; other times, the mask's expressions are calculated to mislead and trick others, and aren't at all reflecting the way his face looks underneath. As much as he might come across as flighty, callous, or devil-may-care toward other people, he actually has a lot of very big feelings, and doesn't necessarily want anyone else to know what they are. He doesn't wear it 100% of the time, but it's very important to his image and the impression he makes on others, whether that impression is true or false. The second reason he wears the mask so often is cultural and needs a little historical context, which I'll try to keep short. Mars was the first planet militarily colonized by the young Terran Empire, before they really knew much about what they were doing with interplanetary relations; although many Martians were in favor of the colonization, others opposed it violently and were subjugated, provoking anti-Terran sentiment. In the centuries since, the Empire has acknowledged its mistake and made formal apology and reparations to the various Martian peoples (which of course doesn't make the history go away). Mars remains a staunch ally politically, but the cultural pride and protectiveness felt by many Martians, Pirossa included, still lingers (a similar real-life analog is Scotland's relationship to England, in that they're both part of the UK but there's a fraught conflict history and a distinct sense of Scottish national/cultural identity. Not the only example, of course, but one that readily comes to mind). Pirossa considers the Khedephi gold mask a quintessential statement of cultural identity. Even when he's not wearing his, he's generally mindful not to show the inside of the mask to other people; it's considered poor form among his people.The second object he can't live without is a toe ring made of Martian rock, which he wears on the "ring toe" of his right foot (like the ring finger, you know? The second one from the right), so he always technically has one foot on Martian soil.

13. What would your OC choose to do in the Trolley Problem? The Transplant Problem?Is there a "refuse to answer" option? ;) I think the idea of being responsible in situations like those thought experiments would send Pirossa into a cold sweat, not that he'd ever admit it. If he were just asked the questions,first he'd argue that the outcome would totally depend on his mood at the time, so he can't possibly answer properly. Next, he'd try to alarm the questioner by asking "why don't we go find a trolley and six people and find out?" If he were forced (say, at gunpoint) to take some course of action (and I'm assuming the variants are off the table, and we're just dealing with the unmodified problems), he'd pull the lever and save the five people at the expense of the one in the Trolley Problem. There's also a significant probability that he might just start pulling the lever back and forth really quickly, in order to let fate decide who lives and who doesn't. In the Transplant Problem, he'd elect to let the sick patients die rather than kill the healthy one. He resents having to answer, because he believes his answers reveal a certain underlying goodness that he doesn't want to be expected to live up to in the future.

Random - I'm gonna go with Lili the werewolf girl for this one, because she's totally got a set answer. Kind of spoilery maybe? 4. How would your OC like/prefer to die?Lili dies exactly the way she would have wanted to: cleanly, spiritually, and fulfilled after a long, hard life of accomplishing incredibly difficult things. (She actually survives through the Ragnarok storyline, and dies many years post-story.) Among the werewolves and other Fera, or shapeshifters, the spirit world (and, subsequently, the afterlife) is a known reality, and it's also known that the people she lost in the battles of the Apocalypse all ended up in some pretty prime real estate therein. So basically, she's all on board with eventual death, as soon as she's done establishing a safe nation for the Fera. Which she does, because she's a badass grizzled werewolf queen who knows how to get shit done. By the time she's done laying down a code of laws, building up a massive yet ecologically-friendly city hub, sanctifying the holy sites, adopting children, carefully spending metaphysical energy to renew the growth of plant life in strategic locations, and generally doing all the things (important to note: she has the help of some very well-chosen counselors on these endeavors. She might be spearheading the efforts, but she can't do all of it alone), she's an awesome old lady who's outlived almost all her close friends and companions. She spends the last of her spiritual energy to give an extra boost to the land around her city complex, and her physical body just kind of… evaporates. Nicely. No mess. With the support of the rest of the ruling council, the throne passes to Lili's adopted daughter, who was trained for this responsibility since childhood. She proves a worthy successor and rules with compassion and wisdom. Meanwhile, Ascended!Lili gets a full spirit escort as she passes into their realm permanently, where she's reunited with everyone who went before her. Warm fuzzies and afterlife love bunnies for all. Exactly as she would have wanted it to happen.

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