#about how alien monomon and her jellies are to this kingdom

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faint familiarity

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More Hollow Knight headcanons, this time: Monomon and Quirrel. A few of these have already come up edgewise in Refuse and Regret.

Monomon was a refugee fleeing the collapse of another kingdom and carrying with her a large number of eggs (not her own) of other Jelly Forms. She bartered her scientific knowledge with the Pale King in exchange for being able to settle in Fog Canyon. 

The Jelly tribe are sapient, though they got hit very hard by the plague because of certain quirks of their physiology- also, besides Monomon and Quirrel, they never really figured out how to use the kingdoms’ languages. They’re pretty otherworldly critters- none of them, Monomon included, have a face. Monomon’s mask and robes were something she adopted to better lay Hallownest’s populace at ease when she was among them.

Monomon practices a school of magic separate from the Soul-consuming spells of the Snail Shamans (which is originally abyssal in nature) and the practices of the Soul Sanctum (which were based on snail spells). Rather, Monomon’s magic filters Soul passively and continuously out of the environment (while less discerning it’s similar in principle to the way the Troupe usually feeds) and then refines it into spells with a heavy emphasis on encoding will into the gathered Soul via specific commands.

The harvest-and-release aspect is shared with basically all other Jelly forms, which, while their rather alien minds left them initially protected from the Radiance, all it really took to condemn nearly all of them to the plague was one heavily infected husk staggering into the canyon and their Soul leeching into the energy supply.

Natural, uninfected Jelly cores are pink in color. Like husk eyes, on infected individuals they’re stained orange.

Despite Monomon being something of a high society socialite whose intelligence and magical prowess was highly valued, she kept her personal life extremely reclusive. She discussed projects with the King often, and was one of the few people he’d seek out for a second opinion, but they were more work acquaintances than true friends, insofar as PK is any good at befriending people in the first place.

A lot of aristocratic bugs tried to wrangle Monomon as a personal tutor either for their own magical development or for their children. She turned down basically every offer, and limited her teaching to more open-source and impersonal formats.  The sole exception was Quirrel.

Quirrel was basically an orphan of fairly mysterious history. He found his way into the canyon and hid as a child, and basically never spoke to anyone about where he was before that. In fact it took several years in Monomon’s care before he actually... said anything, though, less time than it took him to start tagging after her and silently helping with whatever he could reach.

Monomon was the one who gave him the name he currently uses. He was a pretty surly, irritable child, and tended to hide whenever anyone not a jelly being showed up in the archives. PK has some faint memories of a small pale face staring at him around corners but at the time he didn’t think much of it. Whatever business Monomon has with a child is her own concern, not really his, and he was more interested in her opinion on the Vessel Theory, anyway.

He only called Monomon “mom” like. once or twice by accident while his mind was somewhere else.

Eventually in his late teens he mellowed out enough that he started attending formal events and this was about the time Hallownest officially heard of Monomon’s apprentice. The aristocrats she had turned down in the past were very, very salty about this. Quirrel discovered the unsung delight of passive-aggressive court wit. This was the official birth of his occasionally sardonic cheerfulness.

That said before he mastered the court wit he definitely brawled a few times. 

Please just imagine, for your viewing pleasure, Quirrel making the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka face, the one that became a meme. 

Monomon was the person he had the strongest relationship with, but Quirrel was able to communicate with other jelly forms and knew quite a few of them personally when they were uninfected, including Uumuu, who operated as a sort of door guard and could swim freely from the acid lake to the interior of the Archives. Quirrel actually learned electricity-generating spells from Uumuu. (sorry, did you think clearing the teacher’s archive wasn’t painful enough? here we are.)

[variablejabberwocky]

#hollow knight#fierce dryya#kindly isma#queen's garden#monomon the teacher#thinking about how Dryya's design looks so closely tied to White Lady#about how Isma doesn't quite look like the mosskin#about how alien monomon and her jellies are to this kingdom#about how her canyon used to be part of Greenpath...or of the gardens?#about the flowers unique to the gardens and their bubble-like anther at the end of their stamen#about how the jellies seem to spawn from bubbles#and those bubbles seem to spawn at times out of small roots#about the theory that these jellies were a prototype test run on the concept of containing the infection inside some sort of vessel#what exactly would've been the relationship between these three and the Queen?#pale court

faint familiarity