okay wait if Sly doesn't kill people, where does he get bodies from instead?
steals em
the graevyàrd is the most familiar and low-risk of course, but if he's feeling confident and wants to skip the bodily toll he will sometimes try to steal them out of funeral homes, morgues, or crematoria. lemonville is better for this since there is so much weird and paranormal shit happening constantly it's unlikely for him to be blamed for the thefts over any other thing.
there was probably one life where he managed to befriend one very superstitious, very amoral funeral director who would let him take bodies in exchange for magic spells benefiting them. that has to be the easiest his job has ever been and he always yearns to recreate that situation and of course it never fucking works.
I don't think you've posted the family recipe drama lore and now I'm intrigued
oh man. so sly's ENTIRE tragic backstory huh.
so, sly was born into a family that was WEIRDLY religiously strict for people who made their living doing evil magic witchcraft. (they named him sebastian.) it was a pretty abusive situation, so regardless of how much each one of them really believed in jesus, they often used religious guilt and threats of hell and sin to control him (and each other). they also attended church as a way to keep up their reputation as normal, morally upright people in their community.
they sold mellified man under the guise of medicine, and it needed to be a family business because they believed it needed to rest in honey for 100 years before it would work, so grandparents would lay honeyed bodies in the ground for their grandchildren to dig up and sell, and so on.
as i mentioned, sly had a great uncle who was something of a reclusive black sheep for whatever reason. sly barely knew him, but when he passed away when sly was just reaching adulthood, he ended up with his journals; i'm not sure if it's because he explicitly left them in sly's name, or because they just slipped through the cracks as his family was dealing with all his possessions. regardless, the journals showed sly that his uncle had been secretly experimenting with the age-old mellified man recipe, trying to improve it in various ways, one of them being a recipe to stall aging. his uncle couldn't live long enough to see the results of his experiments, but sly could; he soon dug them up and discovered that they were successful.
he tried to keep this a secret, but eventually someone found out and spread it to everyone in the family. his mother in particular was repulsed and horrified by the idea of living forever, and instructed him to burn the pages. not everyone in the family totally agreed with this take however. it led to kind of a schism – some people obviously wanted the recipe for immortality, but others felt that it was either too dangerous or too blasphemous to have around. the naysayers more or less outnumbered the people who wanted it, but those people were often more conniving or frenzied.
miraculously, sly was able to keep the journal out of everyone’s hands throughout this, but he was an enemy of all sides. even the people who “agreed” with him – as in, thought the recipe ought to be used – he couldn’t trust, and many of them he didn’t even like, much less wanted to spend eternity alongside. however, there were two people that he genuinely loved; twin cousins who were one or two years older than him, who were his playmates as children, and who were more like brothers to him than his distant older siblings ever were. after one or two months of this conflict, one of them pulled a knife on him, the other tried to stop him, all three got in a fistfight which ended when sly shoved one of them down a flight of stairs, at the bottom of which he cracked his skull open and perished.
after that horrific night, the next events are a bit blurry to sly. the entire family was in uproar, and the remaining twin wanted him dead. he moved out as fast as he possibly could, marrying a childhood friend of his named Melissa (who he had previously been being pressured to marry by both families) in order to better support themselves and live more inconspicuously than living on his own. (he might have also been charged with murder and narrowly avoided conviction, or the family might have erred to keep their business away from the legal system as much as possible, i’m not currently sure.)
once safely away, he spent a while recovering from not only this last trauma, but also the lifetime of abuse he had suffered, while making ends meet. after a period of rest and healing, he began taking the youth solution and stalled his age at 25. he ultimately decided to open his own business - the same health-restoring mellified man recipe, but this time instead of goopy medicine, the product would be delicious and attractive - a candy. he saw that his family’s business was still in shambles - fights had broken out, bridges had been burned, and the product supply suffered immensely - and those who depended on their medicine rapidly flocked to sly’s business instead. it wasn’t long before he had driven the last of that family into the ground. it was his righteous capitalistic revenge. he never spoke to them again and as far as he knows, they all died out, or at least after a certain generation the mellified man knowledge was no longer passed down. he was officially “the last of his kind.”
he stayed in that town with melissa for around 15 years. their marriage was cold and unsatisfying for obvious reasons; they were both gay, but hid it from each other. sly was too afraid to come out to her, and felt intense guilt at letting her down as a husband, as he still cared for her very much as a friend. she never knew the secret of his healing candy. eventually, too crushed under the weight of too many things he had already been dishonest about to be honest about one last thing, he picked up his things and disappeared from her life in the middle of the night, taking on a new name and a new life in a new town (Lemonville), where no one knew his face hadn’t changed in 15 years, and tried not to think about anything that had ever happened to him in his hometown.
does sly play music in his store and if so is it like whatevers on the radio or stuff he likes or etc
good question i have honestly never thought about it
tbh it is probably like... some funk/disco oldies station. on the actual radio too, not muzak. but he might put on different genres if he gets in a special mood obviously. but he's a bit of a tech idiot so i don't think he subscribes to pandora or any of that shit
Is there liiiiike a storyline for moth Taylor? All I've really seen about that au is What The Fuck He Gets So Moth and that it Sucks so I am cuoriouose about it
OK this is probably gonna be another long one though it's much less serious lol ^^;
so this au began bc it was just a cutesy thing to look at and byona loves drawing characters as cute bug people btw etc etc. so the story around the "onset" is a little weak. but here's how everything developed in my head:
One Day (inciting incident tbd) taylor started feeling ill and wrapped himself in a comforter cocoon and more or less went comatose for like a week (rel, his roommate, thought nothing of this) and when he popped out he had little baby hawk moth wings and antennae and a higher than average amount of pale green fuzz.
obviously he was terrified and had no idea why this occurred. he confided in rel and sly but if anyone else knew he was sure that the government would snap him up to be imprisoned and experimented on for his whole life, so he avoided being in public and always put on heavy hats and coats when he had to.
as with all these "oc become a cute animal person" aus there's like a week where they all just dick around and have fun finding out about the funy animal features, like the attraction to lamps, addiction to honey and sweet nectars, vibrating in the night etc. he also gets a very small amount of future-vision on account of mothman reference, but not for anything hugely important, like knowing when an object is going to fall, when a car is coming, where satellites are in the night sky etc.
then the fun and games come to a stop when they suddenly realize he's shrinking. panic ensues as they realize the transformation is still ongoing, albeit at a slower rate. there's a middle part of the story here where idk what really happens but they go around investigating trying to find out why this happened and how to stop it.
at some point doc, laa, and mod are let in on the secret. taylor's heightened mothman Insight actually lets him see laa's zombie features for the first time (send another ask if u don't know about the "laa's screw & stitches are invisible" gag/plotpoint). mod offers to amputate taylor's unwanted parts (he covets unusual body parts) and taylor is seriously tempted but eventually dissuaded by sly.
taylor finally figures out that this transformation was triggered by the activation of dna that was implanted in him when he was a child and he was visited by a kaleidoskull (mine) that he thought was an alien (it is, just a bit More). again somehow through Plotpoints Yet To Be Determined he finds it and is able to enter two-way communication with it on some kind of a Plane.
he tries to convince them (begs really) to reverse the effects, remove the dna and turn him back into a regular human. unfortunately it turns out they did that to him because they thought it was really funny and clever, and they are still finding it really entertaining for him to slowly turn into an entire hawk moth and die in like a week. taylor tries to change their mind using logic and moral arguments, but fails desperately because they don't have the same moral values as humans whatsoever.
luckily for him, sly came along, and, fueled by rage and desperation to save his partner's life, and surprising everyone present, drew a fucking handgun on the thing. taylor was shocked and quite upset, but the kaleidoskull immediately burst into laughter. they were not at all threatened, but found the idea of being threatened with a gun by a human so absolutely fucking hysterical that they had no choice but to reward them with one wish and acquiesced to their demands.
and so taylor was saved and restored to his original body! thus ends the moth boy arc. and just to be clear, my kaleidoskull isn't evil, they just have highly alien morals and are mostly motivated by what they find funny, entertaining, or delightful, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad for humans. they probably don't see death as a bad thing because they know what lies beyond, or maybe we're just like bugs or pets to them, who knows.
i was wondering what sly's shop is called + what it looks like- i haven't found much on it other than that it Exists fdhdskd
i still am not sure of a name 😅 when i do think of it i would love for it to have the initials S.B. but it's really hard lol
i've also never drawn the outside of the place but i have some floorplan sketches & also some photos of good inspo for what his interior decor is like:
overall a lot of dark rich warm colors, a lot of old wood, and a lot of orange/gold lighting. it's a little cluttered but a bit less than this place. he sells both handmade candies like this place ^ and also retail/brand name/prepackaged candies in good measure
