#barley wasserbar

[mossiestpiglet]

Barley uses Malt as a nickname (because it would be very funny to me) and now I get to think about which characters would call them what.

Rambling about lots of characters under the cut

Barley doesn’t interact with the younger kids very often but does meet them all at various points; the kids call them Malt, except Olivia who thinks it’s funny that “Barley” and “Charlie” are so similar and that she has a new way to cause confusion.

Billy is the young kid they interact with most and he is most confused about how to refer to them because he thinks he should call them by some sort of title like he does other adults, but Barley 1) doesn’t like titles and 2) is nonbinary so he doesn’t know what title to use, so it takes a little bit of chatting for them to get Billy okay with just “Barley”.

Julia uses Barley because she just genuinely thinks it’s a pretty name.

Asa always calls them Barley Malt because he thinks it’s funny, it’s meant to be making fun of Malt’s name but they think his attempts are cute and childish.

Manfred initially pointedly tries to avoid using their name whenever possible and just Wasserbar if he can’t avoid it. When things improve he uses Malt.

Ezekiel doesn’t get the chance to learn their name at all, they kill him before the conversation gets to that point.

Bartholomew calls them Wasserbar (questionable if he actually knows/remembers their first name, they have a very confrontational relationship)

Most of the other adults, like Katya and Treasure and Lyell, just use Malt, except the Yewbeam sisters who call them Wasserbar or “Harold’s/that little thing” (they are deeply perplexed by and thus hate Barley, but Barley’s power and attitude make them too formidable to actually attack so instead the sisters just get really bitchy about it)

I think Paton would be torn because, canonically, he dislikes using nicknames (but apparently Charlie is fine??), but Barley is so similar to Charlie that I think he would eventually give up and use Malt to avoid any confusion. If it’s just the two of them, he will go back to using Barley though. Paton knows that Malt made up their name wholesale when they got summoned, but doesn’t know their old name(s) or feel a reason to ask.

Harold is the only other character besides Paton who know’s Malt picked their name just when they got here, but he actually does know their previous names because it was using his resources that Malt verified there wasn’t an alternate version of themself in this world. Harold is initially very judgy about Barley ditching a normal name/changing names a bunch, but it leads to lots of conversations on identity and autonomy and transitions. He would never actually tell other people these names, later because he comes to respect and care about Barley but initially just because he knows they could hurt/kill him. Barley considers letting him use one of these names as a private name just between them, but ultimately they know it would hurt too much to hear the names they were called in a world they can’t go back to. Harold usually calls them Barley when they’re around other people and Malt privately.