#it’s a Mili kind of night I was looping Iron Lotus for the Carmen answers and String Theocracy for Balthazar

[outeremissary]

🍒📀💙 for Balthazar and 📙🍇🌸 for Carmen?

From this prompt list! I really enjoyed these, so thank you! And it was nice to talk about Carmen as well.

Balthazar

🍒 What kind of things do they expect from their relationships? Does this differ between platonic relationships and romantic ones? Is your OC “demanding” or a door mat? What kinds of things do people expect from them in a relationship?

This one is fun because it changes drastically over the course of Kingmaker. Get changed by the power of friendship, idiot. If you’d asked Balthazar in the past what he wanted from a friendship he’d have said advantage, and what he wanted from a romantic partner was obedience. And he’s never been a doormat. He’s generally been as demanding as he felt he could get away with. When he was younger he took a great deal of pride in his ability to get anything he wanted through his connections. He learned his friends and partners like marks, and used them just the same. To him it felt fair. He felt that he’d been denied more than enough by the world at large, and that he was always giving these companions what they wanted from him: the exotic thrill of having an angel on their arm or at their parties, someone to gawk at and banter with. He was sharp and fun and pretty. It was what they expected, and he gave them what they wanted.

Time and experience have changed him. What he wants now is to feel respected and to have others place their trust in him. Awakened to a hunger for genuine connection that had been there all along, there’s not really any going back. The desire for those things is pretty consistent across his friendships and his romantic relationship, although in his relationship there’s a much stronger desire to also be understood. And although he wouldn’t want to face it, he’s also afraid of people he's begun to care for leaving him… it’s the last thing he wants, letting go of people he values. Over time he’s become a bit better at meeting people halfway with his expectations. He was good at folding on his demands to play it safe before, but being more earnest about compromise is new. As for what others expect of him… more than anything, to be worthy of that trust when it counts.

📀 How easy is it to shock your OC? To confuse them? To lie to them, to manipulate them? How are they with feelings of trust? Can your OC be trusted?

Well, I can certainly say that he’s embarrassingly easy to deceive for someone who’s so mistrustful and so skilled in deception. Consider it a fault of pride- when he’s confident that he understands someone, he tends to put them out of mind and miss hints at their motives. Up until then, he’s guarded and attentive (maybe to the point of paranoia), although how much good it does him varies wildly- his expectations of betrayal are just his own cynicism as often as they’re good instinct. I think he’s not easily shocked- he’s seen a lot of nasty things in his life, so there’s not a lot that shocks his senses. Although he’s as susceptible to being snuck up on as any ordinary person, haha. Confusion is similar. He grasps new situations fairly well, so really throwing him requires either a pretty significant contradiction to previous assumptions or a lot of unfamiliar technicality. I suppose that’s an ordinary level as well…

In terms of trust, he doesn’t extend it easily. He’s lived a life where trust hasn’t been very rewarding. Most of the adults in his life when he was young weren’t really unconditionally trustworthy or attentive to his needs, and when he was older he suffered some very nasty betrayals that undermined a lot of his faith in other people. And of course, there’s the fact that he’s not trustworthy at all himself! He’s built a life on using people’s weaknesses against them and leading them astray. Knowing that playbook so well, it’s hard not to see it everywhere.

Although perhaps for a small number of people, he’s really quite trustworthy after all.

💙 What did your OC want to be when they grew up and why? Did they have any lifelong dreams or ambitions they never got to work on or are they currently working to achieve this dream? Has their life taken a very unexpected turn and put all these plans on hold for a while or have they given up on any dreams?

Ah, this is an easy one. When he was just a boy still playing dressup with the landlady’s kids, what he wanted more than anything was to be a prince. Just like a fairy tale, you know? Balthazar grew up relatively poor. The situation was never desperate, but it could be tight, and he felt deprived of a lot of opportunity relative to people he knew. The disparity between Absalom’s high society and the lower classes is also pretty readily observed. There was such a powerful element of fantasy to being wealthy and glamorous, as well as commanding the attention and affection of others (especially before his celestial heritage began to manifest, he was bullied fairly frequently as a child). When he became older he started to think that was a fairly stupid dream. No one just “becomes” a prince, and the position of any kind of leader is precarious. He wanted to believe that he was above that naivete- what strange tricks fortune plays.

Of course, in terms of lifelong goals he never did give up on wealth and power. As a young adult he spent a lot of time cozying up with affluent friends and making something of a socialite of himself. His scholarly pursuits were also generally directed at finding ways to better harness his inborn abilities or to find entirely new paths to power and influence- history is full of very successful ruthless, ambitious magicians, after all.

It's really the embodiment of Balthazar’s luck that he’s found his dreams both entirely derailed and somehow fulfilled in ways he’d given up on being possible. On the one hand, all those ordinary paths to his goals were completely annihilated by the circumstances under which he was forced to leave Absalom, but somehow it really is possible to trip and fall directly onto a throne.

Carmen

📙 What kind of subjects (of conversation, of discussion, in school or whatever) does your OC find interesting or engaging or that they can talk for hours about? What kind of stuff do they just find fun?

What things bore your OC to tears and they couldn’t care less about? Why?

Oh, there are a few things she could talk quite extensively and knowledgeably on, although she’s more of a listener than a speaker… She can talk quite a bit about strategy and martial technique, of course, but that’s more business than anything. She does enjoy talking about her horse June though, and about animals in general. She enjoys peaceful natural scenery and likes to hear about it. She likes to know about the quiet daily routines people have. She has a frivolous fondness for tea and if you got her going she could probably go on about it with all the knowledge and passion of a connoisseur. Idle chatter about mundane things actually brings her a lot of joy. She wants to know about the bedroom that’s being repainted or the fence that had to be mended after the sheep broke loose the week before. She likes to know where children go to find brightly colored stones. It makes her happy to hear when the stray down the street had puppies and people have been leaving out food for them. She doesn’t see herself as a part of that world anymore and she doesn’t regret leaving the chance for a normal life behind, but she never wants to lose touch with what she fights for.

As for things that bore her? Politics are at the top of the list. She couldn’t care less about the social maneuvers of aristocrats and private interests. She pretty much let Konomi just do whatever she wanted unless it was really inconvenient. It seemed like the path of least resistance and she did not care what was going on there. She’s also not very interested in business enterprises or the high theory of anything- she found that academic in Kenabres pretty irritating and she doesn’t have a lot of patience with Nenio either. Things that seem abstract and disconnected from the lives of most people just don’t matter very much! I suppose she’s very socially oriented in that way. And although it’s a bit outside of the prompt, there’s nothing she hates with more of a passion than people who talk about the lives of others like expendable items.

🍇 Day or Night? Sun or Rain? Summer or Winter?

Day, sun, summer, easy. In some indescribable way she’s a fire person, you know? Like, not in a literal sense, but if you’ve ever seen an anime or comic that represented characteristics of someone’s personality or martial prowess with fire, it’s like that. She’s a fire person. Like a blaze that’s both cold and hot at the same time. Or maybe it’s more like a raging inferno struggling to break through a shell of cold control. On a somewhat related note, the most recent song added to her playlist was Iron Lotus by Mili.

🌸 What does your OC’s voice sound like? Their laugh? Are they good at singing? Do they have an accent?

Her voice is easy to describe. It’s husky and deep, with a lot of carrying power without yelling. Although when she does shout, it’s a sharp bark. Her tendency to speak with unflinching authority probably gives her speech a lot of sensual qualities that she’s completely unaware of. As for accent, she’s got a very rural north Andoren accent. Imagine the fantasy equivalent of a thick country drawl. She can suppress it, but she prefers not to.

Her laugh is sharp and rough- there’s nothing especially refined about it, and her genuine laugh is quite loud. But that’s a very rare thing. She doesn’t really chuckle, although she will give a sort of half smile and “heh” that are the closest she comes. She’s not really good at singing in a technical sense, but she’s got plenty of talent joining in on the singalongs soldiers have at the tavern or around the campfire after several drinks.