#c: Nidilaenn

[void-botanist]

I would love to know about the elbas sitcom AU (<- big sitcom enjoyer)

Tbh it wouldn't be that different from their actual lives, lol, just played up for comedy. Also this was such a fun response to write that I did not stop myself and I just kept inventing stuff.

A lot of these characters are discussed in this powerpoint post.

Some recurring bits:

No one can remember Casper's name even when he's standing in front of them, except Nidilaenn (his kid) and Vinnek. They all call him Pa (which they do IRL) or some random name ("he has a John face"). Regardless of whether he's there or not everyone is always talking about his whirlwind romance that took him out to the Vale and left them with one less prankster. You know he always returns for the solstice episode.

People go "where's Nidilaenn" and then we immediately cut to Nid in their boat. The funny part is where the boat is this time.

"El this might be easier if you don't get so frustrated" [Ellery turns back toward the camera with the nastiest look on his face] "I'm not frustrated"

There's always a new random nonroot staying at the Yellow House to witness the shenanigans and mostly laugh them off as "wow this island is weird haha"

The nonroot is also always shocked when they find out that they were not wrong, Madge is in fact twice her husband Rigo's age, and those ages are 120 and ~60.

Madge and Rigo are only on the island half the time. The other half they're traveling the mainland and getting called back to Elbas for increasingly ridiculous reasons. While they're away someone else has to care for the lighthouse (which is why IRL they don't actually travel that much).

Herric is always meddling in something. Frequently it has a butterfly effect, where they do something tiny like borrow Milo's butter and by the middle of the episode the island is in shambles.

Herric and Urielte are the "they should just be together" couple of the series, and to be honest they don't disagree (like if they just said "nah we're friends" people would drop it but they've never said that). However they do keep coming up with increasingly silly excuses for why they won't (the real reason is Herric doesn't want to have another breakup and Urielte just doesn't give a shit about formalities).

When someone needs information, Vinnek always has a book on that. Unless it's about legal histories or contract law, in which case Milo has a book on that.

Ysa sets the mood perfectly as a bartender but never serves alcohol. Thon keeps coming up with increasingly complex names for thons juice cocktails.

While working at the docks or the lighthouse Rigo has seen sea monsters of all kinds and just shrugs it off and goes back to his book.

Madge has a bike. The island is small. She tends to ride down the lighthouse hill into town but sometimes she rides into the sea instead (Rigo: [looks up] Madge: [rides right off the end of the dock] Rigo: [goes back to his book, then does a double take]).

This would make more sense in an anime but I thought it so I'm going to say it: sometimes Nid and El grab hands and go "because the power of friendship" with the dramatic eye shine and everything.

There are as many explanations as to why Rae is missing a leg as there are islanders. Even she doesn't give the same answer every time, but she always mentions the ankle bracelet she lost.

Some episode concepts:

Some nonroot comes to stay at the Yellow House and Tirias starts spending all her time with them. Ysa and Amadjes are like "you should branch out" and Tirias is like "noooo" and all bashful about it, because the reason she's hanging around them is because they understand her obsession with an extremely niche media property that no one else gets.

A nonroot can't tell the difference between Amadjes and their cousins Amelie, Aloysius, and Asteras and convinces them all to make increasingly strange fashion choices. For some reason their dad Emil was off-island when this happens and upon his return he can't tell them apart because of the fashion.

Milo's parents Marietta and Tem come to visit and it's a series of humorously awkward interactions between Milo & Herric and Marietta & Tem, to the point that Herric will say something like "what the fuck" to Marietta (their kid) and then immediately turn to Tem and say "I find this somewhat confusing". When Milo mentions Tem to the Council they all offer their own advice: Ellery talks about not getting frustrated, Nid wants to formulate a strategy based on who swept who off their feet, Patience suggests getting kombucha-drunk with them, Tirias says to look for their passion. Somehow all of these become relevant over the course of their relationship-building.

Someone discovers that "the reason" Herric and Urielte won't officially get together is because they don't want to move into each other's houses. So they orchestrate moving one to the other, then vice versa, then into a separate third house, and it all goes really badly and they have to be moved back.

After the previous episode, Herric's ex-wife and estranged son return to demand something from them, probably money- and/or goods-related. Herric ends up moving in and/or getting the equivalent of a Vegas marriage with Urielte to fend her off. Everyone is disappointed when they ultimately undo it all.

Binna's launch is approaching and Milo is just trying to enjoy spending time with her but everywhere he goes are just silly reminders that she's leaving ("that weirdly suggestive calendar has a rocket in it!").

Patience's teenage grandkids come to visit and everyone is super impressed by them because uep twins are rare. They use this to their advantage. Everyone also wonders whether Patience knows what's going on, because of course they pull the most nonsense when she's not around, but she knows exactly and she thinks it's incredibly funny to play the doddering old lady.

Rae gets into a dispute with the owner of the Evly radio station she runs a weekly music show on. Madge (her sister) and Tirias (who regularly plays on the show and also has technical knowledge) decide to team up and start an Elbas radio station. This turns out to be a lot harder than they expect. It would be fun if they managed it though because then we could have a radio station set.

The port authority of Port Danziger, which is several hundred miles away on the mainland, approaches the Council and suggests they pay for docking rights even though that doesn't make any logistical sense. Nidilaenn sets out to discover whether it really is that far to sail (answer: yes) and encounters a variety of nonsense situations on the way.

A new arrival asks about Rae's leg. She says it was a sea monster. We then discover that the sea monsters only Rigo seems to notice are in fact real, but don't really hang around the island because there's not much meat there. The new arrival does not succeed in locating Rae's fabled ankle bracelet.

Following the previous episode, a human sneaks meat onto the island, which causes a massive uptick in sea monster activity. Something something an entire suitcase getting dramatically thrown into the ocean. NO MEAT ALLOWED goes unexplained into the visitor rules and the mainland press has a field day with it.

Casper returns for the solstice episode without his wife (the one who swept him off his feet and caused him to move away). He says it's because he wanted to spend time with Nid, but Nid becomes increasingly suspicious that something is off. They get sent on a wild goose chase wondering if Casper ever even got married only to discover that their stepmom was late because she was bringing a surprise for them.

Vinnek gets haunted by the ghost of Fira past, and while the moral of the episode is that they have to remember the good times they had with Fira and stop getting on the network to listlessly search for Fira, there's a lot of snarky humor on the way. Depending on when this takes place, there will also be the ghost of Casper past (not intentionally a reference lol the importance is that Casper was and is a good friend of Vinnek's who also left the island) and potentially the ghost of Dez past (another friend who left).

A paranormal investigator shows up and insists the lighthouse is haunted. Everyone says no, the lighthouse is not haunted. Eventually the investigator turns out to be right, though the spirits haunting the lighthouse are just chilling and that's why no one thought it was haunted.

Rae, Tirias, and Ysa team up to turn the pub into a club for Jes's birthday, with the heavy bass he so loves (he's deaf). Unfortunately they instead succeed at blowing out Ysa's custom skylight and invoking the ire of Ellery, one of the few people on the island who has ever been to a club. In the course of putting in a new skylight they hatch a better plan: a sort of silent disco-esque setup where they will not shatter the skylight a second time.

For some reason Haskell has to leave the island for a bit and asks Nid and El, who have been considering having kids for a while, if they would watch Lacey. I feel like everything that happens after that is just par for the course for having a 4 year old around but still it seems like even Nid will have changed their mind about kids. When Haskell gets back and is like "haha hope that didn't put you off of sprouting" the two of them are like "nah. we'll survive it with the power of friendship" with the whole solidarity clasp and everything. Then the shine fades and they say, "in five more years maybe".

Tirias becomes obsessed with a wedding shoot he found on the network and starts bothering Ysa and Jes about it. They misunderstand and think what he wants is to get married when in actuality he just wants to have an event for wearing a princess dress. By the time they get on the same page Ysa and Tirias are practically standing at the altar (I don't actually know how Elbas weddings work but you get the idea). But in the end Tirias gets what he wants and they don't actually get married...probably.

I think there should be a season devoted to Dez being there too, with episodes such as:

The rootspace episode, where Dez figures out how to decode the chemical messages of rootspace and becomes obsessed with sharing rootspace with people ("for the love of god Dez PLEASE use your words I'm tired").

The radio show episode, where Dez becomes the synth.

The toilet humor episode, where Dez discovers that one of Elbas's imports is literal shit, which goes into the dirt beds they root into at night. Have I mentioned Dez doesn't really get toilet humor? Uep and neriem, however, do on some level, even though that's not how their digestive systems work.

The laugh scale episode, where Dez notices that making serious Milo laugh is a particular point of pride among the Council. The Council in turn notices that Dez has never once laughed and try to figure out what would make him do so. 50/50 chance they either realize he can't/doesn't laugh OR some random apparently nonhumorous thing happens at the end of the episode and Dez snickers, which is enough of a laugh to celebrate.

The prank episode, where Dez takes the role of the answering machine that has a bunch of snippets of someone's voice to remix except he has extensive recordings of most islanders, which makes it extra fun. He starts pranking people with Nid but as people discover the prank they join in, and after a few days everyone on the island is in on the prank and there's no one left to bother. But then Casper shows up.

[void-botanist]

Happy STS! If your characters went out to karaoke, which song would they belt out at the top of their lungs?

Finally getting to this one! My mind remains full of Elbas Island so if we pretended that they know Earth music:

Milo: the idea of him doing Barbie Girl with Binna, where he is Barbie and Binna is Ken is just too funny to not be the answer.

Nidilaenn: Major Tom (Coming Home).

Ellery: Poor Unfortunate Souls. He wants to be dramatic about it and he wants you to understand how dramatic he's being about it.

Patience: Hollaback Girl. You know Mel is singing backup.

Mel: Last Dance by Donna Summer.

Tirias: she literally cannot sing so she would either put on a song everyone knows (All Star) and let them sing it while she hams it up or announce that this is a rendition of John Cage's 4'33". These two things get different responses from the audience but they are functionally the same thing.

Ysa: Friends in Low Places by Garth Brooks.

Rae: Any Way You Want It by Journey.

Madge: Sucker by Jonas Brothers.

Rigo: Break My Heart by Dua Lipa.

Haskell: no, I don't do karaoke, no...well, I guess... Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

Lacey: the most heartfelt rendition of Mary Had A Little Lamb you've ever heard.

[void-botanist]

Find the Word: TFA x 3

@autumnalwalker tagged me three times since I last caught up with my tags, which means I get to share with you an assortment of snippets from TFA versions, past, present, and even sequel.

I'll pass the tag on to @vacantgodling, @kingkendrick7, and @outpost51 plus anyone wants to join in. Your words are maybe, never, possibly, and joking.

blue (present)

Aside from her bloodlessly pale silicone skin, she was wearing a dark blue tailored uniform that had slightly darker spots where its Niievosk patches had probably once been, and her hair was pulled back into what looked like a black silk bonnet, to the point that only a sliver of bright red was visible along her forehead.

humor (past)

All he knew so far was that Red was: - not a mushroom person (which left five other possibilities, though mushroom law was lenient toward tree people, so only four likely possibilities) - a hoot (an unclear term; probably an indicator that ey shared Quint’s sense of humor) - a mychanic (elevated risk of em appraising him as a machine) - an active astronaut (cool and interesting) - probably disorganized (sixty unlabeled boxes with insufficient storage space) - possibly impulsive (sixty unlabeled boxes with insufficient storage space) - the child of a potentially wealthy family (perhaps they had racked up so much debt they had to sell the ‘literal mansion’). In other words, not that much.

admit (present)

Or maybe Zel’s brother the astrogeologist had come to visit. That would be a good surprise. Well, at least until he had to admit that he was Zel’s comment moderator and was the one who always liked Zalen’s comments. But Zalen had to know that, right?

offense (sequel)

“I don’t want him to go because he’s an android. I mean, that’s why it’s possible for him to go at this point, but I just want someone to go. Someone I can trust.” “I know.” Funny that that’s what he got offended about—a vague, unintended implication that he was being speciesist, and not the fact that she was chastising him.

moon (present)

He paused to figure out what area of his picture to work on next. The station was mostly blocked in at this point. He decided to put in the details later and get started on the pale moon behind it. Slipping a thread skein out of its little paper label, he unwound it a bit and folded over its free end to thread the fold through the eye of his needle. If his calculations were right, he would probably need all that was left of this skein. But that depended on his threading pattern, and he still wasn’t convinced he’d found the most moonlike one.

alone (present)

“But ultimately, I think Elbas feels more like home. And a big reason for that is Nid. I don’t think they would have a good time in the Confluence, even if they wanted to go there, and they never really have. I don’t want to go without them. And I don’t want to leave them living alone again.” “It’s the ultimate faux pas in a house with two front doors,” Pax added.

shout (past)

She fully settled her glasses back in place with a look he���d seen only once before, when she was on the phone with her mother, holding back all the obscenities she then shouted into the living room once she hung up. No, it wasn’t quite the same face. There was something less hard about this expression, even though her jaw was set in the exact same way. “Dez, can we talk outside?”

sway (past)

She rousted herself from bed, in the process knocking the book she’d been reading when she rolled over to rest her eyes onto the floor. Picking it up, she zipped it back into her bag, then pulled back the window cover. Her window just happened to face south, giving her a partial view of the dark shapes of the fifth Akkanswl below. The sun hadn’t quite come over the horizon yet, so everything was bathed in a dim, diffuse light. She watched her view sway slightly as the airship completed its mooring.

acknowledge(d) (past)

“Damn.” Thon acknowledged someone behind him and started on a drink with the subtle theatrics of a seasoned bartender, despite the fact that everything that went into it seemed to be some kind of juice.

upstairs (past)

“Yeah,” Anni said, taking the bag of food to the kitchen counter. “Sintii’s upstairs, and I’ve just started working with her. Though it took me an hour just to get her disk to mount correctly.” Julian chuckled as he slipped off one boot. “Off to a perfect start, then.”

coarse (past)

He sent it off to the cover nodedress available on Mizzat Keh’s faculty page. Despite the fact that this was not the first time he’d sent a message to a cover nodedress, it still felt weird and oddly impersonal. Maybe Mizzat would reply to him directly from vis real address—which had to be for vis own internal server, right? He’d never seen a picture of vim with an external node. And vi had been turned on only ten years ago, nowhere near long enough that vi couldn’t have internal metal network connectivity. Maybe it was vis coarse segment displays that made vim seem less modern.

darkened (side scene with Vinnek & Ellery)

They looked the same as always, big rimless glasses, flowers hanging loose around their face under leaves just starting to darken into summer color, gold inset watch on their left wrist reflecting the overhead lights.

unison (past)

“I don’t want to be here if nobody wants me here when they think about it,” Dez said as he reached the hot seats and received the link to the application Vinnek had just messaged him. It was a straightforward document that repeated everything they’d said in the meeting more clearly, and maybe more importantly, let him use the nice fancy signature he could do when he didn’t have to write it with his hand. “We want you here,” Ellery and Nidilaenn said almost in unison.

[void-botanist]

📂📂📂📂📂📂📂

Elbas Islanders I promised and Elbas Islanders you shall get! This bunch is all tree people but about half of the total population is mushroom people. Both species live for 150-200 years so if some of these ages seem weird, that's why. (I also totally borrowed from your folder ask format because I thought it worked well.)

I realized I never introduced the current Council for realsies so here they are first:

Milo Elviret

45, he/him, magnolia (Magnolia virginiana)

Lead Councillor and legal compliance chair; grandkid of one of the island's founders

Would be a lawyer on the mainland if he'd actually taken the bar exam instead of becoming a legal compliance officer for a research airship and then moving to Elbas, where he immediately got swept up in its legal and philosophical history. Lives with Binna, his best friend and fellow flower gardener, and her dad. Extremely fond of cookies.

Ellery Bastien

46, he/him, fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus)

Logistics chair and treasurer; Vinnek's kid and Nidilaenn's queerplatonic partner

Typically seen in babydoll dresses but his closet contains multitudes that he couldn't bear to part with after moving back to Elbas from the mainland. Constantly a little sharp and critical, with infinite capacity for sarcasm, but also the kind of person who always keeps his word. Lives on one side of a divided house with Nidilaenn on the other.

Nidilaenn Archimbault

47, they/them, redbud (Cercis canadensis)

Maritime chair and secretary; Ellery's queerplatonic partner

Loves all things sailing and has acted as the island's unofficial ferrier for years. Has never had a comfortable trip to the mainland because of their strong sensitivity to scents, but wants to one day visit their dad out in the Vale. Also wonders if wearing a bikini top as your only top is the kind of thing that gets you weird looks in the Vale.

Tirias Nenatopol

51, she/he, sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua)

Custodial chair; Ysa's live-in partner

A measly 6' 7", making her the second-tallest person on the island. Can't speak vocally but is quite talkative (and flirtatious, though really only with her partners). Her pride and joy are the secondhand paint coloring and mixing machines her sister sent over from the mainland.

Patience Gaenlan

94, she/they, dogwood (Cornus florida)

Social services chair; co-manager of the island's nonroot hotel

Connected to Elbas through her wife, Mel, who she met in the course of being an activist organizer on the mainland. Is blind and navigates with a purple cane she sometimes jokingly compares to Mel, who is a mushroom person and therefore also purple. Has swirling carvings from left wrist to chin, the result of many decades of carving and healing.

And now some related characters:

Vinnek Bastien

72, they/them, fringetree

Archivist; Ellery's parent

Wearer of massive rimless glasses and t-shirt dresses. Connoisseur of all things Calennec, Dez's favorite cartoon/comic character. Currently going through personal winter and slowly losing all their leaves.

Ysa Tilly

55, thon/thon, tulipwood (Liriodendron tulipifera)

Pub bartender and manager; Tirias's partner

Seven feet tall, with a thick build to match. Used to bartend with actual alcohol back on the mainland, but now serves mostly people who drink anything but (thonself included). Thons showmanship and liquor bottle collection haven't gone away though.