#thanks for sending me an ask btw!! i've missed drafting silly hcs abt rain world :)

[sage-the-unwise]

I wanna hear some thoughts on my pathetic baby loser failson (beloved) five pebbles

oh hell yeah i love hate love this guy and i have SO many thoughts

so, some fun hcs for starters (only one and a half of which pertain to him in canon, the others are just vague sketches of what his vibe is like):

he would like tame impala but only partially in a male manipulator way

if he were a smoker i think he'd vape and then switch to menthols (something tells me he'd be the kind of guy to start smoking because he thinks it looks cool)

hes transmasc coded. real he/they energy

his construction suffered pretty extreme budget cuts due to the political controversy surrounding his placement over the Anointed Citadel (there was a defund five pebbles campaign led by the spiritual leaders there lmao) and thus he is noticeably smaller than the other iterators

he'd be a pretty great poet, and would make a killing in clout off posting poetry to instagram if that existed in rain world lmao (if his iterator comrades appreciated it, he'd post poetry to one of their global message boards, but not many of them care for artistic pursuits. he'd get a temp ban for wasting space)

if you dug through enough pearls in garbage wastes you'd find the equivalent of amateur tumblr poetry from 2012, all written (and some partially scrambled) by pebs himself. before moon's collapse, NSH made it a project to get their hands on some of it so they could make fun of him by reading it aloud in vc. that never panned out

pebs and NSH would've collabed to produce shitty soundcloud rap, but they'd have a falling out over the duo's artistic direction and they'd split up. pebs would try to produce his own backing tracks, fail at it, and give up, and NSH would go on to make insane 120 bpm hyperpop you could mosh to and open for 100 gecs

and now for some sad character analysis:

i think pebs has like, very big feelings and not a great grip on how to handle them. he isn't maliciously selfish but he experiences his own pain as so all consuming that he forgets that his actions affect other people and simply follows his impulses without much thought. this obviously doesn't excuse his actions - he's harmed his friends in some very real, tangible and painful ways and they should hold him accountable for that (were i to write a 5p recovery arc he would definitely get taken to task by the others, who are also Messy. it would perhaps be a very dramatic fight, but i think if their heads were clear enough and moon had some means of communicating with them you could get a good approximation of what restorative justice might look like for a bunch of alien supercomputers).

it's also implied that he's like the baby of the group, or is at least younger, and therefore has had less time to get to know everyone else and establish himself as part of the local group's regular social dynamic, so i would imagine he has insecurities about that which might fuel his impulse to isolate when he feels Bad. which was, of course, disastrous on one particular occasion. i think he feels deep guilt over that and it's eating him (like the rot), but he has no idea how to express his remorse, or that the person he killed has been revived and can be talked to directly (if only via slugcat messenger). i've always read moon as someone who, in pursuit of being the group big sister/mom friend, learned to repress her feelings in order to preserve group cohesion at all costs. i think a conversation between the two of them would either be really explosively messy (timeline where moon learns to let herself feel things and be angry) or it would have the longest silences you've ever heard (timeline where moon does not learn to stop repressing her emotions). either way it would take a while for them to make peace with each other, but i think they could pull it off. neither of them want to spend the rest of eternity lonely and bitter.