#midnight mirrors

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it's finally (officially) here! this is marena's updated/current design - complete with a brand-new badass look and name LOL for her vampire sword! i super love how this came out actually. optional notes UTC!

🎨 ram

her lore is basically still exactly the same as it's always been! i'm hoping i can bring myself to showcase more of her smug, moody, and histrionic sides since well. she Is me after all

i decided to give her Symbiotic Vampire Sword a new name. it may not sound As Cool Now but he is known as alexei... i thought it was fitting to name him after a tsarevich with a bleeding disorder LOL

her epithet in-game would be "the last grand countess", which. is another half-nod to the romanovs don't mind me. i imagine there are not a lot of dhampirs left on jarilo-vi or probably in the entire hsr universe so i thought "the last" was a fun note to add, and instead of being "the grand duchess" she'd be a countess because well. vampire stuff

if you noticed the little lotus charm on the top of her sleeve before this bullet point I Love You. for those who didn't notice it before - i still love you but it's a little nod to fugue!!!

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i never actually posted this OOPS this is ruffian, my insert for uma musume! huge thank you to risurisu on vgen for Once Again Doing Me A Solid and designing her beautifully! have some Lore utc

she's based off of my favorite racehorse of All Time Since I Was A Little Girl, an american filly named ruffian who was undefeated in all of her races up until she had a horrific and fatal accident in her last race :[

ruffian is an umamusume from america! she was a superstar racer, but she began to suffer from chronic illness - severe fatigue, balance problems, muscle weakness, tremors (basically what i have LMAO). regardless, she continued to try and push herself past her limits, still remaining undefeated - but in what turned out to be her final race, her illness caused her to suffer a career-ending injury on the track. she now walks with a cane as a result, and to help mitigate the balance problems and muscle weakness that her illness causes.

as part of her recovery plan, she moves to tracen academy! at first, the other umamusume have pretty much two opinions of her: either idol worship, or that she seems deadpan and haughty. in reality, she's just very... overwhelmed. she doesn't know how to deal with it, and she certainly doesn't know how to deal with the memories of her racing career that she'll never be able to resume.

for her lore with fuji kiseki, on her first day ruffian ends up seeking refuge in the theatre room of tracen academy and that's where she meets her! she's kinda hiding in there and fuji notices her and asks if she's alright and it's. the first time she's been treated as an equal in either direction since her arrival. so she confesses that she finds the entire thing super overwhelming and fuji sympathizes with her and they get to talking about musicals and ruffian calms down a lot. fuji checks in on her some more over the next few days and they end up getting Quite Close

i have less details about her lore with air groove though LMAO i can't remember where i wrote those down. i think i ended up deciding that if she's with guru she's on the student council?

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forgot that i got My Me back but here's the updated ref for my re99 insert! the infamous windsong kisser, of course. nothing SUPER crazy changed but i did want to update My Me since my hair is blonde and also shorter now

🎨: vanee

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did you know that ruffian's original appearance was actually supposed to reflect my own? therefore i decided to get her updated too :] i actually did have the thought too that the horse she's based off of was often photographed as having pale/"blonde" tips on her muzzle LMAO

🎨: vanee

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no rbs on this one because i'm waiting on the artist (runescratch) to send me the final/any tweaks (although if you have any comments, the replies are open!) but i couldn't put off posting her any longer LOL here's atticus! she's my insert for my ship with galbrena from wuwa! current lore UTC if anyone care. if anyone gaf

i need to properly catch up on WuWa Lore but so far what i've got is that she's an curator of sorts of this huge historical archive somewhere underneath (?) rinascita. most don't know of the existence of the archive and she doesn't leave it all that frequently, but she's actually a very friendly and outgoing person, she's just a homebody LMAO. she doesn't consider herself all that smart, though - she just has a lot of "assorted knowledge." jack of all trades, master of none and all that

since her lore is still very much a WIP, this is all subject to change later but i'm thinking that she meets galbrena because she stumbles upon atticus's archive and atticus offers her a rest and a safe place to stay. she doesn't get visitors often, so she ends up talking a lot to galbrena and the latter finds herself Getting Attached

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i'm genuinely getting dizzy with excitement at finally getting to post this!! finally, she's here - the third (AND HOPEFULLY LAST. dear lord.) iteration of my insert for windsong! meet elodie "watch eyes" karkowski, an arcanist and researcher at laplace scientific computing center, specifically the rehabilitation department!

(i wanted to go with blue colors again for the same reason as last time - in case anyone's forgotten, it's because i associate yellow + green with windsong, and red with vila, so i wanted to have colors that go well with my love and with my best friend!)

(huge, HUGE thank you to risurisu on vgen for doing this design for me, and helping me out with some of the key points!! i seriously can't thank her enough.)

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(art by risurisu on vgen!)

she's arrived at the bureau - sinner MBCC-S-505, liebling! (did she once go by another name, i wonder? shalom might know... these two seem awfully close.)

(notes/some Lore UTC!)

-her sinner code number is a reference to an arctic monkeys song. if i believe, it's a shalieb song. 😌 (there doesn't seem to be all that much rhyme or reason to sinner code numbers except for the ones that are references LOL. so i said. why not?)

-her sinner power is that she's able to use flowers as a healing device, which also has the side effect of "she has an incredible green thumb and flowers rarely die or even wilt under her care." this has made her quite a popular gardener in eastside, especially amongst the rich, powerful, and famous, and i thought it was a nice touch since shalom really likes flowers but has a really terrible time keeping them alive. :')

-speaking of her flowers, the ones on her legs are actually a mobility aid for her! she frequently deals with swollen ankles, varying levels of leg pains + aches + weakness, poor balance, and fatigue - among other things, that's just what directly affects her legs. while her flowers can't seem to totally cure her issues, wearing them does help her stay upright and out-of-pain enough to do her job as a gardener.

-for those of you who don't know PTN lore: shalom is a victim of human experimentation, and had a procedure (the hush procedure) done upon her to "sever her emotions." (it's basically a lobotomy... my poor lovely. thankfully, as of canon events, she's quietly and surely beginning to re-ignite her ability to feel these severed emotions!) per canon, before becoming the hush, shalom was actually extremely rebellious and would attack the people that experimented on her.

-i thought about it and experiments never have Just One Person like. that is never how it works. so, liebling was in the same experimentation group as shalom. she was far more passive than shalom, but always admired her rebellious nature, and followed her everywhere, becoming close with her. of course, once shalom had the hush procedure done, she never came back. however, following that, all of the other test subjects were released. after being freed, liebling found that her power had awakened, and she was now a sinner.

-shalom had originally forgotten, as a side effect of the hush procedure, that there were others in the group. but as her emotions rekindle, so do some memories. she begins to remember flashes of faces, but none more haunting to her than the face of someone she remembers by the name of elodie - a scared girl, slightly younger than she, with blue-grey eyes, who always clung to her and kept her company. going through records and experiment logs, she does find proof of elodie's existence - but once shalom had undergone the hush procedure and everyone else was released, all records of elodie cease to exist further. it becomes a haunting obsession.

-liebling has long-forsaken her real name - elodie - as a mark of her own failure, that she was powerless and hopeless to do anything to help or save shalom. she's assumed this whole time that shalom had been killed, presuming her dead. she took upon herself the name "liebling" - for the life she must live is dear.

-we meet again completely by chance. shalom decides to take a night walk during a heavy rainstorm, because she can't sleep. the only other person out and about is a woman wearing a rain jacket, tending to a garden. and of course, since shalom loves learning about people and observing them, she can't help but ask her about the flowers. she catches a glimpse of the gardener's eyes... and stops dead still. (we're reunited at last.)

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ooo wait before i go to bed @cel-dmg thank you for drawing jasper "jax" "miss thang" valentine she came out sooooo cute. :)

(also tagging @hiswillowtree since this particular Ely Thang is her oc's girlfriend!)