Awww thank you so much! That's such a sweet and unexpected message, but it means the world to me, really! Thank you for making my day a little brighter ❤
(I did not know TriOC was a fandom term until now, I have to admit, but I am so glad I am all caught up haha)
And thank you so, so much for the flowers for my girlie 🥰
making up a month-city for trioc to be "from" as well (didn't grow up there but studied there/lived there as an adult) and its ofc something like. octobre - wait. i just checked to see if that was already a city and it IS, called octovern, but there's not a lot of data on it so that's perfect.
anyway! lore! cut eventually bc i'm longwinded!
originally from a much much much smaller town/village tucked in a canyon with only one (1) plant; her (single) father moved there with her as a leetl baby in a kind of stubborn exile from octovern, where he used to work at [academic institution] as a plant engineer. he didn't often discuss why he left octovern w trioc, but she eventually gleaned it was over long-term disagreement over his drive to recover, index, and teach non-plant terraforming knowledge.
the town agreed to take him in bc he could easily do upkeep/maintenance on their plant, and would do it for a steeply discounted rate since he. lived there now. everyone was happy with this arrangement.
it was mostly a farming community, as the canyon bottom had enough shelter from A Lot of the planet's harsher elements and enough water to sustain a modest farming operation.
a caravan owner contracted out about half the town out as sharecroppers, and dictated what would be grown from one season to the next + where it would be distributed.
location and the caravan's protection kept the town fairly safe and ignored. nothing dramatic ever happened, really. petty squabbles came and went, but the first 7-ish years of her life were uneventful. there were cows. it was nice.
their house was right next to the plant housing and her father set up his whole situation Inside the plant building, so she spent a lot of her youth toddling and then running around inside of it, both passively and actively learning (he homeschooled her Quite specifically and moonlighted as an educator for most of the other kids in town - they hadn't really had an established school for a decade or two since the old teacher croaked.
the caravan owner increasingly kept growing a particular crop year over year AND increasing his shares in the town/the amount of people working for him, and trioc's father warned him they would need to cycle crops or face rapid nutrient depletion. caravan owner said something along the lines of "just get the plant to fix it"
well.
the plant was only healthy through extreme effort on her dad's behalf (it had been kind of neglected before they got there), and increasing the energy demand would absolutely start sending it to the red zone, which was NOT an option for her father.
he decided to instead engineer a more desert-tolerant crop. he did as such, and accepted the possible drawbacks for fucking with nature like that. everyone started using his lab-grown seeds.
new crops did good for abt two-three years - caravan owner increased his production to a ludicrous level, but everyone was making money and happy. trioc's dad's hair went grayer and grayer.
tipping point: a little beetle drifted in with a caravan and found it quite liked this crop, actually, where before it wasn't interested. now there are millions of beetles, and a town rapidly heading towards a famine, a caravan pulling its operation and demanding to be paid back for its investment unless they can figure out how to make up the crop loss/prevent it from spreading - and if you don't, well. this is a swell little place under the caravan's protection. it would suck to find out what would happen if they Weren't protecting it anymore.
the town decides to use the plant to stave off disaster and pay the caravan owner with crops even as they all begin to go hungry. the plant goes red after only a few months and her dad begs, begs, begs them to cease and desist, sometimes kicking them out of the plant building with mild force. some in the town begin to question him as the originator of the modified seeds that caused all this to begin with.
tensions rise and rise and rise as bowls and pockets go empty. the overworked soil in the barren fields begins to turn to dust, and duststorms become more and more frequent.
trioc comes back from tending to the few remaining cows one evening to see townsfolk leaving their house with weapons in hand - she rushes home to her father's corpse cooling on the kitchen floor and Freaks Out because she's like 11 and what the fuck
he was trying to crawl out the side door towards the plant housing - to check. to see if it was alright. she rounds the corner and sees her neighbors trying to bash the door in, bc her father locked it tf down and they were originally trying to get him to open it up.
come on, kid. you know your old man's secrets. help us in here, wouldja? we're dying. your bastard of a father would rather the plant live than us. ain't that fucked? you wouldn't want us to die, would you?
she's sobbing her eyes out and completely non-verbal bc why is any of this happening, why would the people she grew up around do this - they grab her by the hair and get pretty forceful abt trying to convince her to let them in and i think she just starts scream-wailing and flat out refusing to ever ever EVER let them in when the door opens of its own volition anyway and the group drags her inside, where she promptly starts biting and writhing around to try to encourage them to leave
she manages to wriggle out and runs to put herself between them and the plant - this is all instinct, not rational thought, and the blow to the head she takes as retaliation immediately knocks her tf out.
behind her, in the red light of the plant, they all see what they've never seen before - a plant unfurling itself, bright eyes staring at them and a humanoid mouth opened in a snarl of hatred as a tiny body falls limp on the floor in front of her.
idk what lore this is violating but this plant has absolutely gone off the rails at this point, is an individual to the point that she was aware of and interested in the lives of the humans around her, and knew the Exact moment her friend/caretaker (trioc's dad) died and knew that whoever came in the building after this would be looking for a Final Harvest
the fact that trioc was being dragged in here as well and was STILL defending her... this plant has had 11 years to develop an attachment to this kid she sees every day and who hums and talks to her as A Fellow Living Being even though trioc Does Not Know about plants being humanoid beings at all (she's never seen one unfurled) and puts up drawings of cows and birds and plants from her dad's greenhouse on her tank. she loves this kid. she's not gonna let anyone harm this kid. and she's not going to let her father's murder slide, either.
idk if non-individual plants are "technically" capable of this but HANDWAVE. she extremely murderizes all of the offending party members by busting her roots out of her tank and eviscerating them. they try to hurt her but they came in here not expecting a sentient plant-being intent on killing them, so they're underprepared to say the least; the ones who try to leave get dragged back to the killing field with roots around their ankles
trioc comes to somewhere towards the end of this and is very muddled about the degree of body horror on display here - very concussed, not truly processing, she just crawls to the only 'safe' thing - the plant tank - and curls up at the base of it.
i think that the plant realizes how badly trioc is actually injured (it doesn't look like it on the outside, but that concussion is Very dangerous when you're 11 and unsupervised w/ no medical attention); even now, the plant can sense the swelling, the bleeding, the pressure - no. no. she's not going to tolerate both of the people she cares about get killed by this town's desperation.
gently, so so gently, roots pick up her little battered body and bring it inside the tank, sticking another air root down her throat to keep her breathing. the plant uses her last remaining energy - because she *is* dying, and she knows it - to heal trioc, and they have a bit of a weird brain meld situation (forehead touching etc the Whole Thing) while it's happening. surely this will not fundamentally alter anything about trioc nor leave any lasting scars.
the plant completely burns out, shattering her tank and burning off all the ?tank juice? but safely cradling trioc to her chest as her carbonized corpse begins to lose integrity and crumble under trioc's weight.
trioc remembers functionally none of these events from after the first blackout. she woke up nearly 2 days later surrounded by dried out blood and decomposing gore and dust and... ash? of the expended plant, and a massive duststorm has blacked out the suns for hours at a time. she cries until mud cakes her face and Tries to deal with her dad's body but she is. small. and traumatized.
one of her father's former colleagues from octovern had recieved a Highly concerned letter from him about a month prior to shit breaking bad and decided to come out - and found just trioc holed up in her house with her dad's dead body in the long-plundered greenhouse. she decides to take the kid w her back to octovern bc she's concerned one of the remaining townspeople will Fucking kill her if she stays here, the vibe is that bad.
but first they make a grave. and trioc makes a second smaller one next to her dad's - "for firefly,", and her dad's colleague realizes with a twinge that they had given the plant a name.
MAIN takeaways from this:
she packs all of her dad's journals and research books before they leave, and this is a mantle she steps into willingly (but not without a desperation or a sense of guilt. those are there, too, alongside the earnest desire for improvement)
being near plants is stressful now, because she can hear them. not 100% clearly, but she can. and most of the time, they're stressed out or in active pain, and she Does Not Know the true nature of plants, still, so she thinks that she's legit hearing voices (mental illness edition) when she gets too close to them
when idly doodling, she draws plant patterns. she isn't aware of their significance, just Likes to draw them.
she is so preoccupied with the pattern that she got two shoulder tattoos of her 'swirly pattern' - they cover the tops of her shoulders but don't extend very far past that.
her aversion to being near plants and her prediliction for terraforming/permaculture as a discipline has led to her earnestly trying to spread the good word about Learning How To Do Shit Without Plants. we NEED to become self sufficient. we have to. we have no other choice. you cannot build an oasis in the desert without considering the consequences, boundaries, and limitations.
she still semi-frequently has nightmares abt the Body Horror of that night with the plant - that part is the only part her brain Kind Of remembers - she's not seen anyone ripped apart to that level since, nor does she ever want to again.
in-fact, blood probably makes her a bit squeamish - which is embarrassing, so she hides it.
i truly cannot grasp trigun's timeline rn so this Will change but i think she's early 20's when she sets out from octovern on the fieldwork trip of a lifetime. maybe 24ish by the time she meets vash for the first time - has been out on fieldwork for abt a year already. this is roughly?? analogous to when.. stampede? starts??? dude i suck at timelines and stampede does Not make this easier. she Knows vash before july happens. that's my only earmark. except i also prefer og trigun timeline to stampede's so i rly rly do not know what's going on.
similarly - they meet and part ways multiple times before falling into a cadence. i think there's about a year where they're near one another more often than not - not dedicated traveling companions, but plenty of og trigun episode type of beats and stretches of a month or two where they Are pretty much just traveling together. please have mercy on me for this level of self-indulgence
she's doing more than just rainmaking - this is intended to be an end-all, be-all proof of concept for a comprehensive permaculture system she's spent years developing to improve the lives of literally everyone on the planet. if people build their settlements carefully and do xyz and transition to alternate energy sources, the dream can become a reality. i feel like vash is deeply intrigued by this but he's not an ecologist even if he has the brains for it, so sometimes he's just following her around watching her do surveys and sweettalk townspeople into giving her a chance and so on.
she also has a fiance in octovern (a slightly more academically-minded fellow, but someone she trusted with her dreams and her vision) - she writes monthly reports about her results and findings for him and he's compiling them for her into a work fit for publishing all across the planet (this is her believer brain dreaming of the best possible future) - he supported her plan to do this loooong fieldwork assignment, and the agreement was they would get married when she returned to octovern and then publish the book.
she is reminded of this every time she starts feeling a bit too comfy with her occasional travelling companion despite all the inherent ridiculousness AND blatant danger and yes she feels Stupid every time. what kind of behavior is thisssss. who is she. get it together.
her Constant road companion is a little robot-drone named zip; she (the robot is a girl, she has arbitrarily decided) carries rainmaking chemicals du jour up to clouds as needed and is strapped with all sorts of meteorlogical and other sensors, cameras, meters, etc. quite literally trioc's most prized 'possession' (it's kind of like a star wars droid but not with the shackled intelligence aspect... just very smart and well-trained pet energies. you understand)
again timelines ESCAPE ME and when it comes to wolfwood i prefer the og trigun timeline way more, but she met wolfwood a few years ago on an earlier rainmaking tour of only a few months (before she got engaged) and was getting pretty harshly evicted from a town (under threat of getting shot for being a fraud) when he eased the situation for her and they went on to another town together. she was trying to embrace living in the moment at that point in her life so they did have a roll in the hay and she is embarrassed about it and stubbornly pretending Not to be if he brings it up (read: teases her about it) years later lmfao. she probably saw wolfwood first before meeting vash and this meeting only happened because ww caught her trying to sneak away before he could notice her. cue most annoying but charming man on earth awards.
also clearly there are time skips here and there. at some point After july gets mcfucked, her engagment doesn't work out bc she gets to find out that her fiance has actually been compiling her research for the explicit purpose of only taking what he thinks is useful to him and mocking the rest with his peers. he stands to gain a lot from pilfering her research and dated her with the intention of doing so - and has notttt been acting like an engaged man in her absence.
obviously she immediately breaks it off with him, but that means she can't use any of the information he stole and also she's basically forced out of the same institution her father left. cycles repeating forever. he doesn't return any of her stuff from their shared apartment. she breaks in and takes it back while he's gone because she's not leaving her entire life behind with this asshole, but she is sobbing the whole time she's stealing her own stuff from her own home.
she's really very fucking upset about that for a long time. deleteriously so.
i literally cannot physically figure out anything else regarding timeline tn because. frankly. it gives me a headache. and i haven't finished the og anime yet anyway.
she smells like cinnamon
her favorite fruit is oranges - hasn't had one that measures up to her dad's greenhouse-grown ones, but maybe someday
her regular field outfit is some ridiculous goofy dune shit but she likes to wear a yellow sundress while in a town and not under active threat. it's the only other article of clothing she has besides all her Pure Utility field items lmao
has a gun and Is bad with it. hopes just having it will be enough of a deterrent. zip also has a little shock feature that it's used more times than she's ever fired the gun, but if push comes to shove she Will protect herself.
hm overthinking footwear choices and trioc has some weird specialized boots that have like huge hoka-esque bases to spread her weight out on the sand because she fucking hates the misery of running/walking on sand and can't Really avoid it, only alleviate it. also good for shin kicks and leaving comical-looking footprints
her name is darcy tanis because i am finally using that name :) a common alternate name (one in use since childhood) for her is zip, off her middle name (zipporah, Yes, Really) - but she's picky about who gets to use that. most people can use tanis if they don't know her well, and darcy if they're on friendly terms. tanis the rainmaker is probably the most common "x the y" name given to her once she's spent enough time making the rounds to various settlements out on her fieldwork trips. when she eventually gets a bounty slapped on her as well, that's also the title given on posters/other literature.
her little drone is named bec(querel) just bc she likes the name of that unit of measurement. unsure if the inhabitants of gunsmoke know about the earth scientists or even care - darcy would, but she's been a sponge all her life for that type of thing.
