Sniblet

Swords, Coats, and Anime Tropes

I think that says Tastow
It's at a map border, it's titled First Light, mountains and one of the map's many desolations are both railroading you into the woods, and it's next to a first dungeon
This is how you start every Legend of Zelda game

Swords, Coats, and Anime Tropes

Kawa/Karasu

Two Kawas

Two Karasus

Kawa/Karasu

F || About 70 (69, but Kawa won’t tell you that) || Light Elf/Dark Elf
_{"Come find me… where the waters meet dreams…"
"So maybe you should sleep in the river?"}

---

---

Personality

Kawa is terrifically neurotic and excellent at hiding it. She feels overwhelmed by a lot, but it’s a rare day when you’ll see her frown or twitch or shed a tear or really express anything. She tries very hard to be the mysterious prophet she’s supposed to be, so hard that you may never understand what she’s talking about. Which means she’s pulling it off?

Karasu is a reckless trickster and joyful manipulator. She watches what Kawa sets up and jumps at chances to knock it down. She steals things because she can and misleads people because it’ll be funny. Sometimes she fixes her own messes, but then again, there’s always Kawa for that. She’s not evil, but chaotic, and sometimes a little evil. She can also be normal… sometimes.

Appearance

Kawa is tall, slender, and pale, with piercing blue eyes that may rarely well up with frustration or internal panic, only to be swiftly concealed as she looks away, leaving a beautiful sparkling trail of tears. Her pure white hair flows to her knees when loose, but she changes up the style often. Her demeanor and outfits are, above all, ladylike: quiet composure, slow walks in fields, stares in profile; expensive dresses, flower pins, symmetry.

Karasu’s appearance has a few constants: black haired, red eyed, elf-eared woman Kawa’s age. Everything else can change each time she appears, from face shape to skin color, hairstyle, or hair length. She’s prone to poker faces and mischievous grins, and her clothes will use less fabric than Kawa’s – more casual, less modest. If she’s stolen anything shiny lately, she’s wearing it.

Biography

Elvish DNA is famously prone to radical mutation during meiosis – that’s why there are so many kinds! Kawa has had worse luck than most, in that she was born to a clan of mountain-dwelling light elf sages not as a light elf, nor a dark elf, but as a light elf and a dark elf alternating. There was no tradition for how to deal with this.
Her clan foresaw the coming plot thousands of years hence. Being the youngest and most bewildering of the clan, she was, to her dismay, sent down from the Sentinel Peaks to warn The Heroes. Either they expected her to just know or they were in too much of a hurry to get rid of her: no one actually told her who or what or where The Heroes are.
Karasu has been tagging along for their entire life, and Kawa tries pretty hard to act like she hasn’t – which means she never warns anyone, and gets embarrassed and quiet if it ever comes up. This is yet another source of endless amusement for Karasu.

Powers & Abilities

Kawa knows an eclectic mix of light/good/natural arcana, with gaps in her knowledge in a few inconvenient places. She can heal. She can’t Turn Undead. She can banish lesser demons. She can’t smite them or anything. She can talk to animals. They might listen…

Karasu is no magician, but she has a both practiced and natural sense for darkness and stealth, so she can appear in strange places. She can talk herself out of trouble, or into it, or both at once. She isn’t seasoned in any kind of combat, but has plenty of ways around it.

Kawa and Karasu are two separate personalities and two separate bodies taking turns at living the same life, to the bemusement and disorientation of most, not helped by Karasu’s occasional sabotage.
They switch at random, usually infrequently, and only when whoever’s “fronting” is currently unobserved. Kawa has more control by day, and Karasu comes out at night, but turning your back on one may beget the other at any time, and keeping watch on one means she’ll definitely stay put. They spend more or less equal time at the wheel.
When not in control, they can experience the other’s senses, but not communicate, or in any way empirically exist. For the most part, whoever’s benched will take this time to sleep.

Swords, Coats, and Anime Tropes

Kawa/Karasu

Two Kawas

Two Karasus

Kawa/Karasu

F || About 70 (69, but Kawa won’t tell you that) || Light Elf/Dark Elf
_{"Come find me… where the waters meet dreams…"
"So maybe you should sleep in the river?"}

---

---

Personality

Kawa is terrifically neurotic and excellent at hiding it. She feels overwhelmed by a lot, but it’s a rare day when you’ll see her frown or twitch or shed a tear or really express anything. She tries very hard to be the mysterious prophet she’s supposed to be, so hard that you may never understand what she’s talking about. Which means she’s pulling it off?

Karasu is a reckless trickster and joyful manipulator. She watches what Kawa sets up and jumps at chances to knock it down. She steals things because she can and misleads people because it’ll be funny. Sometimes she fixes her own messes, but then again, there’s always Kawa for that. She’s not evil, but chaotic, and sometimes a little evil. She can also be normal… sometimes.

Appearance

Kawa is tall, slender, and pale, with piercing blue eyes that may rarely well up with frustration or internal panic, only to be swiftly concealed as she looks away, leaving a beautiful sparkling trail of tears. Her pure white hair flows to her knees when loose, but she changes up the style often. Her demeanor and outfits are, above all, ladylike: quiet composure, slow walks in fields, stares in profile; expensive dresses, flower pins, symmetry.

Karasu’s appearance has a few constants: black haired, red eyed, elf-eared woman Kawa’s age. Everything else can change each time she appears, from face shape to skin color, hairstyle, or hair length. She’s prone to poker faces and mischievous grins, and her clothes will use less fabric than Kawa’s – more casual, less modest. If she’s stolen anything shiny lately, she’s wearing it.

Biography

Elvish DNA is famously prone to radical mutation during meiosis – that’s why there are so many kinds! Kawa has had worse luck than most, in that she was born to a clan of mountain-dwelling light elf sages not as a light elf, nor a dark elf, but as a light elf and a dark elf alternating. There was no tradition for how to deal with this.
Her clan foresaw the coming plot thousands of years hence. Being the youngest and most bewildering of the clan, she was, to her dismay, sent down from the Sentinel Peaks to warn The Heroes. Either they expected her to just know or they were in too much of a hurry to get rid of her: no one actually told her who or what or where The Heroes are.
Karasu has been tagging along for their entire life, and Kawa tries pretty hard to act like she hasn’t – which means she never warns anyone, and gets embarrassed and quiet if it ever comes up. This is yet another source of endless amusement for Karasu.

Powers & Abilities

Kawa knows an eclectic mix of light/good/natural arcana, with gaps in her knowledge in a few inconvenient places. She can heal. She can’t Turn Undead. She can banish lesser demons. She can’t smite them or anything. She can talk to animals. They might listen…

Karasu is no magician, but she has a both practiced and natural sense for darkness and stealth, so she can appear in strange places. She can talk herself out of trouble, or into it, or both at once. She isn’t seasoned in any kind of combat, but has plenty of ways around it.

Kawa and Karasu are two separate personalities and two separate bodies taking turns at living the same life, to the bemusement and disorientation of most, not helped by Karasu’s occasional sabotage.
They switch at random, usually infrequently, and only when whoever’s “fronting” is currently unobserved. Kawa has more control by day, and Karasu comes out at night, but turning your back on one may beget the other at any time, and keeping watch on one means she’ll definitely stay put. They spend more or less equal time at the wheel.
When not in control, they can experience the other’s senses, but not communicate, or in any way empirically exist. For the most part, whoever’s benched will take this time to sleep.

Swords, Coats, and Anime Tropes

<Snipped quote by Sniblet>

>I think we could do with an elf. Maybe one who can't be remembered because she randomly shifts between her dark and light forms, possibly with a personality change in the process?

@Zyx

I was leaning toward catgirl-chan but I have just been told by a friend that imouto characters are lame and I have to agree
I didn't really know where I was going with the elf - this helps
I'll spend maybe two hours mostly looking for good pictures and get back to you with something more coherent

Swords, Coats, and Anime Tropes

Two ideas

-Comically mysterious raven-haired/white-haired woman from the ancient race of plot devices- I mean elves ("comically" might mean no one can remember her name, no one can read her handwriting, and/or the adventurer's guild she works for doesn't remember hiring her, much to her elegantly concealed annoyance)

elf-chan

elf-chan

F || ~70 (69 this year, but she’s not telling anyone) || Light Elf/Dark Elf
_{"Come find me… where the waters meet dreams…"}

[hr ][hr ]

Personality

(elf-chan) is an ancient(?) elf. She is stuck in a permanent state of perfect composure, and dangerously addicted to speaking in riddles and vaguenesses. The way she talks, it seems possible that she knows the cycles of time, but if she did, maybe she’d know that acting this way will always just confuse people?

Appearance

Tall, slender, pale, with piercing blue/golden eyes that may rarely well up with annoyance or frustration, only to be swiftly concealed as she looks away, leaving a beautiful sparkling trail of tears. Her pure white/raven black hair flows to her knees.
Her idle animations usually involve crossed legs or folded hands. She will always wear a hideously expensive-looking dress that matches her hair.

Biography

(elf-chan) belongs to a venerated clan of elven sages who have foreseen the coming plot thousands of years hence. Being one of the youngest of the clan, not quite an adult in elf years, she was, to her dismay, sent out to warn The Heroes. But no one told her who The Heroes were.

Powers & Abilities

Vague and mysterious arcana that glows a stunning white/purple and probably involves nature or light/the welcome darkness within us all.
She is capable of foreseeing the near future, but certainly not of clearly expressing what she sees.

-The chuuni catgirl little sister who actually does have powers but they just never go her way (she poses and yells a spell name and something unrelated in the background explodes)

catgirl-chan

catgirl-chan

F || 13 || Catgirl-chan
_{"You would challenge my Superior Divine Intellect?! ANTI-PEACEU!!"}

[hr ][hr ]

Personality

She is a prideful creature; a towering ego built on goose eggs, with a soul that burns, too often, with embarrassment.
(catgirl-chan) is your chuuni little sister. You don’t have a little sister? I mean, you might as well now. Who else is going to put up with her? She’s sure she can do anything, even though she literally can’t do anything. When she fails, she was holding back, or maybe a demon possessed her left hand for a moment. When she succeeds, her pride is insufferable.

Appearance

(catgirl-chan) is an impetuous barely-adolescent neko, relieved when she’s not the shortest person in the room, and bearer of a permanent catface. Her favorite expressions are in the family of the >:3, and her tail is usually moving in some form of agitation. She likes sweaters and skirts, and wears a cloth bracelet with a power-focusing garnet hanging from it.
She looks up at her lessers with one eye concealed (for their own good) behind her upper-back-length light green hair; the eye that can be seen is blue, while the other looks more purple – but that could just be the light.

Biography

(catgirl-chan) got isekai’d. It wasn’t a truck – she fell from something trying to fly, landed in a washerwoman’s pot in a different world, and ran screaming until she realized what had happened. She’s pretty sure her powers or a demon did it.
F-family? Her family all fears her! They fear her power! That’s… why she can’t find them.

Powers & Abilities

(catgirl-chan) is uniquely awful at everything she puts her mind to. She can even do magic super badly!
With a dramatic pose, a loud invocation in nonsensical bad English, and a heaping degree of conviction, she can easily destroy anything she’d rather not! She twirls, presents an upside-down V-shape with her fingers and cries “ANTI-PEACEU” – her favorite right now – and behind her, the mayor’s roof turns into cockroaches! Run!!

The Taygete Project

Sunrise came too fast. Cherry scans her surroundings and edges toward an alley for cover.
"What I'm looking for. What I'm looking for is... a lot. The agenda is a lot. I was just going to paint today. With you? With the faith that you're real?"

She brings John into the alley. Her demeanor is changing again. She seems to be growing agitated, her eyes widening and her voice picking up pace as she looks into him.
"I- If you've been around like you say, you know- you know Taygete has an, an infestation, don't you? I'd almost want to call them leeches, but no, leeches can be satisfied. It- it's a-a different kind of parasite, a cancer. They grow and eat and drown out the body because all they know is grow and eat and kill everything they depend on until it's all desolation. They're all over the city center, they're all over history, Rome, Venice, France..."

She's gotten very animated. She stops in the middle of counting out locations on her fingers, and visibly makes an effort to untense.
"I could do this for hours. I can go on nonstop about how this city's been trembling on its knees in front of Miss Vermillion since its conception, but I can't right now. Not right here. Not at you, who has to have seen it. What I'm looking for?"

Cherry leans back against the filthy brick wall behind her. She fidgets with her braid. Her eyes smoulder.
"I don't have anything, and they've stolen the world. I'm looking for anything. A single-injection cure. A team of oncologists. At least an MRI scan to start with. This poor goddamn city was born to die. The symptoms are all around us, and nobody has the strength to move."

The Taygete Project

Cherry is silent for a moment. She takes a step back and stares, or glares at John up and down through narrowed eyes.
It wouldn't be the first time she spent days in pursuit of a complete delusion, but everything's pointing... well, it sure is pointing. This isn't a hallucination - from that assumption, what then?
Living in Herse trains one to pay closer attention to transactions than Arche or Chaldene would allow most to muster. Calculations that take an average Taygete drone tens of minutes might take a businessman just one, and they can go by as fast or faster along the well-worn thought-tracks of someone who needs to make deals and friends to survive, and can never afford to be cheated.

"Nothing to lose," she echoes. Her expression doesn't say she believes it. Her expression says she's probably never believed anything she hasn't seen, and rarely what she's seen either.
Then her eyes dart aside, almost as if regarding someone who's come up next to John.

Why won't you relax? This isn't normal. You're not normal.

Miss Charlene! Is that your mother? Tell her I said hello.
I know there's some tension between you two. If you ask me, the biggest problem is that you don't feel like you know each other. Firstly, she's human like everybody else: listen to her words, listen to her tone, and then listen to her. Put it all together, and you can even hear what she's thinking. Just like we practiced. Can you hear?
She's been everywhere. She knows so much. She has time for you, little miss, because she's so bored of learning secrets that anyone else could die for. She'll share that with you just for a promise to help, just for a breath of hope. She's suffocating. She's so tired. Can you hear that?
And besides, in that way, isn't she a little like you? _{And doesn't that make her dangerous?}

Everything is quiet more often than not at this time of morning. Noises as subtle as taking a breath to speak are audible from feet away. In the right wind and the right echo, hushed voices could carry for a block or more. Experience can teach a woman anything. Cherry answers in less than a whisper.
"We'll see."
Her eyes flick back to John. Over the course of a few seconds, the tension and suspicion in her demeanor have gradually dried up as if by miracle. She's only a little louder as she says, "We both know I have no idea where to start for my end, but it sounds like you'll let me use you until I find something. So - fine. You have my commitment if I have yours."

And?

She wants to get to know you too. Remember your manners, Charlene.

"...you can call me Cherry."
She offers her hand.

The Taygete Project

Cherry's Questionnaire

Hello, and thank you for using the Pasithee Online Services (POS) of Taygete. We ask that you participate in our short survey to help our systems improve in enhancing your experience living in Taygete. Upon completion of this survey, you will receive a 20.00 TC e-gift card redeemable for any Average Joe™ product.

1. How long have you been a resident of Taygete?
23 years
2. How satisfied are you with the POS?
I don’t use it anymore
3. What is your current profession?
Freelance artist
4. What are you most common interests using the Pasithee search engine?
I don’t use it
5. What are your favorite locations to visit in Taygete?
I can’t go anywhere.
6. How would you rate your most recent experience with Pasithee?
There’s nothing for me there.
7. What improvements would you like to see with Pasithee?
Get rid of it.
8. What are your most favorite products/services to purchase?
Not Average Joe. I’ve never drank the stuff. I don’t know why I’m doing this. Someone has to be reading this. Some real person.
9. How satisfied are you with the social incentive programs with Pasithee?
Do you realize how that phrase sounds? “Social incentive?” How can you call something that and not realize what you’re really doing?
10. Briefly describe your area of residence.
Hell on Earth.
11. How often do you use the POS?
Piece Of Shit.
12. How satisfied are you with the Pasithee online shopping features?
Once, someone in my closet whispered that it was great to be able to get whatever it wanted whenever it wanted. I don’t know who that was or what they got but good for them. Fake people like them don’t have to pay in credit and have everything they claim to own be tracked and recalled at will and get addicted to instant satisfaction. Average Joe must taste awful.
13. How would you rate the Taygete Board of Association?
Who? I’ve never met them. They don’t come down here. They don’t know people like me exist. Maybe broadly, maybe they use the term “discontented populace” or someshit. They don’t know why we are. If they really knew anything they’d have left this city, maybe took us with them.
14. Are you satisfied with our daily video ads?
Advertising doesn’t work here. We all block out the billboards and stay off of Pasithee. I remember what they used to be like. They were part of why I gave up on being normal.
15. What changes would you like to see in the city of Taygete?
Character limit’s too small.

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Please put any additional comments you would like to provide below.
The oldest star in the sky looks around and sees everyone else shining so bright and tells itself, “what a joy it must be to shine like that.” It’s growing dimmer by the day and getting settled in to die and it’s forgotten how much it hurts to burn. All its little brothers and sisters are screaming and it doesn’t know because they’re all so far away. Screaming like their world is ending and it is. Becase soon enough, they’ll cool off too, and they’ll forget and be at peace. And they’ll think too that it's an okay life. Everyone forgets and that's why everything is supposed to be okay.

The Taygete Project

_{feeling bad today for medical reasons. if i'm not making any sense, oh well}
Checking every word, every movement, every... there are no facial expressions... checking everything for any sign of a threat. It just wouldn't make sense for him to be genuine - in any sense - but everything's saying that he is. Cherry doesn't move, doesn't speak, hardly seems to breathe for a long time, staring intensely at "John Doe."
Taking him at his word is Plan Z, but by now she's getting there. What was it that he said exactly? He's some kind of ghost? She hasn't been listening as closely as what might be polite.

"Why do I see you?" she echoes, and she's aware now that she's probably talking to herself - something she'd been able to avoid doing in public for months straight.
"Why do I see anything?" she adds, quieter.
Well. She's already started.
"I see a lot that no one else does. Omens, and hints, and..." She tries prodding the apparition's shin with her foot, to see if she can. "...a lot of nonsense. You're different. I don't like that."

If she was right from the start, if he is a threat
If there are more like him
What does he want
Will spraypaint to the eyes work
Relax. Relax. Any thug she's ever met would've started something already. But what else would he want?
Circles and circles, the same thoughts again and again and again-

"I don't like this at all. No jokes. Tell me what you want."
She should really get herself a gun.

The Taygete Project

Either method works fine, though I don't imagine Cherry would respond usefully to an interview if she weren't compensated or coerced