#should I follow the ettvard needle tag I can't imagine anyone is looking at the ettvard needle tag jslkfdf

[anderstrevelyan]

Let's throw out a little WIP Wednesday before I start work, too! This is from the journalism project, aka Ettvard Needle becomes a Banite.

I'm having way too much fun creating journalist OCs to populate the Baldur's Mouth, and figuring out the voice (puns and cliches intentional—when you spend so much of your life brainstorming headlines that becomes automatic, you can't escape).

(Turns out writing what you know is really fun, actually.)

Ettvard knows the value of a name well-chosen. He’d seen it as a child, back when he had more than half a memory of what his family was called in the generations before they moved to Baldur’s Gate. Needle—he’s heard plenty of petty jabs over the years, are you serious? A tailor named Needle?, but everyone was talking about his father’s business then, weren’t they. Of course, it helped that he was good, that he knew what the common people want, a skill and a sharp eye that had the family resting in a level of wealth uncommon for the shops on the Lower City’s foggy streets. He’d considered picking something else as a man, when he began the business that made him, but it fits his new life of ink and investigations, too. It’s what he threads when he crafts a sentence, balancing fact with the fanciful phrasing that catches a reader’s eye and keeps them coming back to buy more. It’s what he does in an interview, wielding pointed questions to find the truth bit by bit. It’s what he is to the patriars and political powers of the city, a sharp threat that could deflate their years of carefully curated artifice. He knows, too, the power of a title boldly claimed. Editor. Publisher. Founder. The voice of the citizenry of Baldur’s Gate, with the ability to change their thought with a well-placed editorial, or cut something from the conversation entirely with his silence. He should have known, when he first met Lord Enver Gortash, that there was so much more lurking behind the name.