#bc also!!! queers tend to flock together. it makes sense if one of the other guys is queer

[moonmoonthecrabking]

kinda want the netflix writers to spite the homophobes and biphobes and make min ho bi next season

[awildhanmonster]

Character Ramblings for Wyrd!

At Wyrd’s behest, I’m trying to write down a little master post of some recent characters she bullied— I mean enabled— me to create.  This is for our casual Loserverse world— i.e. the fast-and-loose All The Myths Are True low fantasy trope where a bunch of well intentioned idiots try to get by in an apartment complex for largely mythical creatures.  I’ve accidentally made up a lot of new side characters in the past month and it’s getting hard to keep track of them, so here we go!

THE HOMESTEADING SHAPESHIFTER TRIO: AKA NELL, LEONORA AND BARNES

I’m listing these three together on their own because they are an active “couple” (… trio? I’m not sure what the right polyamory term is) who all live together in a more rural part of the county on some acreage generationally owned and tended by Nora’s family line.  Their personal plot is pretty manageable (just a few acres) and a small portion of the entire property.  They have a little flock of maybe 2 dozen combined sheep and goats, some chickens, and possibly an alpaca.  The land is woodsy and picturesque with an old country house they share.  

Nell J. Harriet, aka Nell: approximately 32 years old, born intersex, happily nonbinary (pronouns are ‘they’).  The tallest of the bunch at around 6’ even, with a pale wiry frame and knobby, angular corners all over.  Jet black hair with a striking chunk of white smack dab at the front of the widow’s peak like the trail of a dog’s blaze, one solid brown eye, one split tweaky blue/brown mess.  Shifted form is a black and white border collie with (surprise!) heterochromia and a chunky white blaze cutting through the forehead right at the widow’s peak.  

Despite being born to a mother with a long family history of (gene-recessive) shifters cropping up every generation, Nell was still a surprise to everyone involved, given that their father had presumably been human.  Their mother— who I’ll call Meryl for now— comes from a fairly mundane lineage of canine shifter (while being a non-shifter Rr carrier herself) which typically manifests in early childhood and has a certain period of semi-conscious malleability during the formative years in which things like coat color, length, ear set, and other minor (external) features can be changed through great effort and trial/error before eventually “settling” into a constant, unique physical identity with time.  They heal several times faster than average humans, scar less, and tend to show greater physical resilience, taking a few seconds to painlessly and more-or-less fluidly change shape, but lack any kind of “burst healing” mechanic or unusual magical attributes.

Everyone else in the family before Nell had turned out some kind of pleasantly functional “mutt” shape in the end, but Nell erupted onto the scene as a full blown black-and-white border collie looking thing from day 1 of the change as a bouncy toddler.  Meryl could only guess that the father (long since vanished from their lives with no hard feelings, the affair was brief) was a similar, incidentally compatible shapeshifter himself, but that’s about as well as anyone can guess since he’s not around to ask.  

Nell, for their part, is exactly the kind of plucky, sunshiny, high-energy velcro person you would expect from a border collie on two legs.  They struggled in early childhood with some rough ADHD and OCD type tendencies, but managed to get through public schooling with the help of family support/tutoring, and wound up not pursuing college in favor of trying out a more rural living, instead.  They met Leonora while bouncing around odd jobs a couple years after high school and the rest is history.  They’re much happier now with a largely outdoor existence and animals to tend to, burning off the excess energy that plagued them for years without a direction prior to homesteading.  They’re one of those types who thrives with an outlet for physical and mental stimulation but loses their mind for lack of it.  As one would expect from any good BC.  The farming life is an ideal fit.  

Leonora Basso: aka Nora, but only if you’re close to her.  Approximately 34-ish, a shameless bohemian woman from a long line of shifters almost functionally identical to Raiker/Nicky’s species, with the exception of taking on the form of giant (thanks, conservation of mass) white maremma type guardian dogs instead of akbash.  Built square, stocky, and a little short (probably around 5’4’’), with olive/bronze-y skin, brown eyes, and a giant fluffy mess of fluffy, platinum white-blond hair the exact color and texture of maremma fur.  

She’s chill, with admirable patience for things that warrant it and a long fuse for small annoyances, though she’s also the only member of the three to ever knock someone’s teeth out, so take that with a grain of salt.  Like any good guardian dog, she’s placid until you start messing with her flock— literally or metaphorically.  Then she’ll be the one to quietly walk across the bar and slam your head into the table.  She met Nell during a trip to the inner city by complete happenstance when the two hit it off over conversation, during which she invited them to come visit her farm over a public touring weekend, and within weeks wound up dating.  Their relationship was exclusive up until Barnes came along  and none of them are quite sure how it happened, but they’ve never been in a better place.  

Chancellor Barneston Augustine-Kingslay, aka Barnes: and ONLY Barnes, okay.  Repeat his full name N E V E R or he’ll just, seriously, die.  Of embarrassment.  The youngest of the bunch at around 27-28 or so, Barnes was adopted by his (human) parents as a (human, presumably) infant, and had a perfectly normal (human, presumably) childhood until one day when his mother came in and found that her napping four year old was suddenly a napping 40 pound maine coon cat— or at least, what LOOKED a whole lot like one.  Needless to say, the following week was a scramble of buying every “Help!  My Child is a Shapeshifter, What Do I Do!” parenting book off Amazon and learning how to cope with a toddler who could suddenly vault over double stacked safety gates unaided, but they learned how to adapt, and life continued on happily for the little family anyway.  He’s an average sort, and arguably handsome to some: about 5’8’’, not especially pale or tan, hazel eyed, and sporting what looks like perpetually dark-ticked mouse brown hair, cut short.  He performed well enough in public school with a mostly human peer group who went largely unaware of his “talents” and even went on to earn a bachelor’s in business/finances/something akin, which seemed like the thing to do.  He wouldn’t describe himself as unhappy in his accomplishments; by every metric he was doing fine in life, and could easily figure out a career in some white collar job that paid his bills well enough.

He just couldn’t shake a certain feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction about the idea, and wound up making a habit of weekend demos and classes to see what else was out there in the world: one of which happened to be a sheep shearing weekend out at the Basso Homestead.  On a whim, Barnes attended a demo headed by none other than Leonora while she was using a feisty ram (named Ramses) to walk visitors through the shearing process, Ramses was being fighty, Nell wasn’t around to help wrangle him, and Barnes, thinking he was capable, volunteered (despite Nora warning him repeatedly that rams were pretty feisty) to help hold him down.

… Needless to say he earned a spectacular nut shot via ram horns in the groin and wound up sitting out the rest of the day with an ice pack and a lot of sympathy, but it got him talking to Nora, and then Nell, and the three of them just gelled in a way that kept bringing them back together.  He’s realized in hindsight that he’s much happier in the suburbs than the big city, and enjoys putting his schooling to use by handling the home taxes and business numbers.  

(Fun fact: years later, when it Ramses got too big for his britches and was sent to the abattoir, they were given part of him by the Basso family and cooked a roast to celebrate the asshole sheep that brought them all together.  Ramses was delicious.)

Barnes, incidentally, still has no idea just WHAT kind of shifter he actually is thanks to being a doorstep baby/anonymous adoption acquisition by the foster folks— aside from a giant 100+ pound country cat, that is.  He’s observed that his shift is nearly as swift as Leonora’s, though there are queer persistences that he seems to have (pierced ears not healing instantly or trying to close after a change) that she lacks.  Coupled with the fact that he seems to be a magnet for comically mundane/irritating paranormal activity, he’s put in his research (mostly as a boredom hobby, not a necessary pursuit) but keeps drawing blanks on potential labels for his identity.  The TRUTH of the matter (which he’ll probably never know in canon) is that he’s actually a cait sith— born in the form of a cat, rather than a human, and bewitched by his mother to retain a human form as long as possible in the hopes that it would get him a better chance at finding loving parents.  His shifting has a much heavier magical component to it than his SOs, though he has no real sense for it, and it’ll probably just be a mystery the rest of his life.

Wow, yeah, this got super long!  I’ll make a separate post for the other losers I’ve made up lately, though these three are the most fleshed out so far.