#THREAD NO. 26 LUCINA (OKAY I PULL UP)

[swiftscion]

The Ethereal Ball is done, but as you're leaving, you see flocks of people making for a barely-trodden little footpath leading partway down the mountain. Should you follow it, the sound of music and hollering would begin to swell, until you are greeted with a barebones but extremely lively party with a large bonfire and no shortage of entertainment. Dancing, singing -- both far more boisterous and free than anything the Ball offered -- is plentiful, and it only seems to be getting started. There’s even a fun axe-throwing game set up between the trees. Better take advantage of the party now - those clouds overhead look ready to snow. [Grants Axe +1]

Partying she can take and dancing she can leave, but competitions are the flame that fuels Larcei's silken wings. Like a moth she is drawn to them--a very violent and hotheaded moth. Every flutter is filled with fervor, every twitch of her antennae ready to surge forward and claim victory. Some might think it odd that she skips every other element of the afterparty, but looking to the woman at her left slides a coy grin over her mouth. She's already done all the dancing she could have ever wanted, with the person it matters most to.

Besides, being reverted to her academy uniform means she's hardly in the right outfit.

So instead of to the dance floor, Larcei walks Lucina toward the logging game. "Been a while since we went head-to-head," she chides, as if every interaction with her is not doing precisely that, "so let's go! Loser has to pay for dinner tonight."

The scion grabs herself a pair of axes, and hands one to her butterfly with a wink. Such a silly excuse to go on yet another date, but she knows there isn't a bone in Lucina's body that would reject.

And so, while she has the momentum, Larcei decides she'd throw first.

Once the other weapon is handed off, she turns and angles herself at her target. Wind up, pull back, and release...! The axe hurls through the air with a satisfying swoop, but when it lands, it is just barely off-target. A little sour, but not totally far gone. Still, it brings to the raven-haired's face a tiny scowl. This would've been the part where her excellent result served as an addition to her challenge--begging the other to try to beat it--but a throw like this is hardly anything to brag about.

Still, her eyes are on the Exalt, feet shuffling quickly out of the way.

"Just don't expect this kinda mercy on my next throw."

//starter for @exclted

✢⁎. okay i pull up

[iturbide]

hmmmm 1, 9, 25, 26, 29 and 30

haha whoops i wrote a novel again

Author Asks

1. Where do you typically get your ideas?

I guess when it comes right down to it, I get my ideas from asking questions.  Sometimes they’re silly questions, like “I love this narrative but what if it was Fire Emblem?” (Cursed Fate, Heart of the Moon, the Promare AU), sometimes they’re speculative questions like “how different was Lucina’s timeline compared to the revised one” or “why does Grima act that way in the game when they should hold all the cards?” (Future Built), sometimes they’re ‘what if’ type questions like “what if Robin was raised in Plegia?” (Crown of Shadows/Shrouded Throne), and sometimes it’s just a matter of asking “what happens next???” at the end of a completed story (Across the Bridge, Scourge Post-Canon which was literally me going “holy fuck Bany I love this what do you mean there’s no more here’s a loose three-arc concept and a downpayment of 10k words”).  This may explain why most of the series I write for are ones that make me ask questions, because if I’m not wondering I’m not creating.

9. Do you tend to have an external narrator or use one of the characters?

Oh, embedded characters all the way.  I think it’s amazing what people can do with external narrators and omniscient perspective, but I’ve always had the most fun picking a character and writing from their view.  It helps to build out the world and the characters in interesting ways, because every individual looks at things slightly differently, up to and including themselves.  Robin in Future Built tends to be one of my favorite examples of this: since we follow him exclusively through the first several chapters, we get a pretty strong sense of him as a high-strung young man who’s constantly trying to feign calm, though he often worries he fails at it; once we switch over to Chrom’s perspective in the Ferox chapter, we realize that Robin is significantly more adept at his act than he gives himself credit for, because Chrom finds him unreadable and even impassive, verging on emotionless.  Narrator’s bias is a delight.

25. How do you create an original character?

OH THERE ARE LOTS OF WAYS.  In stories where I have a solid understanding of the plot and need specific roles filled, I’ll often design original characters specifically for that part in a story, using the niche as a mold and filling in everything about them (this is how most of the kids in Project: Elements came to be).  Especially in original works where the plotline may not be as strong but the overall world concept is, I’ll start with personality or concept seeds and grow out from there (this is how most of the Starships crew came to be).  It is…also not uncommon for me to be playing games with generic recruits and make them characters based on random coincidences in battles (this happened a lot with Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance okay).  also there’s a not insignificant number of ‘original characters’ I have that were just dragged out of their actual canon and evolved whoops

26. How do you go about world building?

Worldbuilding is an arcane and mystical thing and honestly I kind of go about it in the same way that I approach story ideas: asking questions.  For existing properties like Fire Emblem, a lot of the questions tend to be rooted in things the game shows (for example, why was Gangrel king in Awakening and not Validar?) or doesn’t show (what does the Grimleal faith actually look like, since I refuse to believe that Validar’s cult is representative of all Grima’s worshippers?), teasing out threads of consistency through the larger context.  For original work, a lot of it starts with setting: understanding the world itself, what rules it follows and how it operates, and then digging into how the populations within that world work with or against those rules, with cultural contexts developing based on environmental factors (such as, for example, how a population in a colder region necessarily acts and interacts differently with the world than a population from a temperate or desert region).  Basically it’s a ton of who, what, when, where, and especially why questions.  This becomes especially fun when you throw it at friends and they start asking you the questions.

29. How do you plot your stories?

Recklessly and with abandon.  And it actually depends a lot on the length of the story: for shorter stories (anything I can reliably predict a chapter count for), I’ll usually chart the whole thing out in some form or another, planning the major beats of each chapter, maybe even doing an actual outline; for bigger stories, I tend to leave things a lot more loose, and usually start grouping by arcs rather than chapters, defining each one by either major events (like with Future Built, where Arc 1 is through the end of the Ylisse-Plegia War ending in Gangrel’s death, Arc 2 is from the ensuing peacetime through the war with Valm, Arc 3 is the ensuing peacetime and ends with Everything Goes Wrong) or by the general theme of what’s going on (like with the Post-Scourge, where Arc 1 is the whole fallout and associated investigation into the Parnassus Incident, Arc 2 is the transition and settling period where Galo and Lio both try to adjust to the major upheavals in their lives, and Arc 3 is all about change and growth once things finally stabilize).  From there it’s mostly just about defining the timeline of events, writing things out, and getting things grouped so that each chapter feels complete.  But regardless of how I do the planning, I always have the ending in mind: without an ending I really can’t write the story (which is part of why I have a ton of AU ideas with nothing but piecemeal snippets written, because I like the overall concept but don’t have a complete story arc with ending in mind, so I can’t make real progress on them).

30. How do you edit your stories?

I abandon them and go on vacation.  Fairly literally, too: once I finish something and decide that it’s done as a draft, I’ll put it aside for at least a few days (sometimes a week, sometimes longer, it depends on what else is going on and how much validation I’m craving); when I do finally go back to it, having fully disconnected and pulled my head out of the proverbial storytelling weeds, I’m better able to see areas that need to be smoothed out, words that need to be varied, inconsistencies that need to be addressed, etc.