So... just got back from my first regatta (more like gatta go fast, amiright?). It was a good time and we even got back at a Reasonable Hour but unfortunately I'm tired anyways. I'm just coming out of another f**king cold, too, and had to stay home from school on Friday because of it... basically I'm super behind on homework and I haven't been able to write anything. It's probably quite lucky I got all that writing in on Thursday, right? 

While I wasn't feeling well enough to pull up another chapter, I did do some (quick, kind of shitty) sketches of some of my Dreamland characters who I guarantee almost no one remembers exist. Some of them I've never showed off here before, while others are just on the more obscure side.

Since I've been doing this series for so long, there's a lot of ways characters can fly under the radar. In some cases (Blossom, Cherry, Kairu) I just fail to give them any meaningful impact on the reader (these are usually characters who I end up cutting or revising later), while others such as Zinnia (below) end up transforming so dramatically that they're no longer identifiable as the same character. There are also just a lot (A LOT) of characters who exist in supporting lore or alternate universes and have no meaningful bearing on the plot nor on the characters in the main canon, and since they're never mentioned, they might as well not exist. Regardless I love all my kids.

idk man it's late have some characters

Ozzy was a character made about two years ago for a friend who I'm... no longer friends with. I've definitely mentioned him and the more personal story behind that so I won't dwell on it. 

Ozzy has never had too much of a personality outside of being curious and naive, but I also like how his design and what I have planned for him lends him a kind of special softness. He's a genuinely nice guy who lives a peaceful life in a peaceful time. Perhaps a librarian or something similar, but he'd be the one who does all the read-ins with pups and does community outreach and the like. He tends to trip up with scheduling and the like, so someone always has to read and re-read his papers, but he has nothing but best intentions at heart- he's just a bit of a scatterbrain sometimes.

Holly was another character who was sort of co-designed by a friend, but she's much, much older than Ozzy. In fact, she's from back when Dreamland was sort of a group effort between friends (all of whom are no longer involved). Other characters from the same "time period" as her would include Indy, Rose, Ivy, Daisy, Nat, Rye, and Lotus. In fact, she's one of the only two of the main characters from that time period who hasn't been reincorporated into the main lore. I always planned on sticking her back in there somewhere but she doesn't seem to fit anywhere.  The best place for her, far as I could discern, was as a fashion designer in the mid-fifties Princess-wise, bringing back a more avante-garde fashion sense (collars???) back from her voyages in Ceilvyr to Opphemria.  Even then it seems kind of unfair that out of all the old characters, Holly ended up completely alone. They don't seem to work as well when they're not working off someone. :/

To remedy that, I did end up giving her an agent: he appears in the first "scrapped characters" book but I never extrapolated on his character. Anyways his name is Lime and he's Holly's agent. He believes in her almost as much as Holly, the unstoppable badass, believes in herself, and does his best to carry forth her vision even when it looks like there's no way she's going to turn a profit. He calls her "girlfriend" and is way too genuine and nice to be a real agent. 

I actually have no clue how being an agent would even work in Dreamland given their society so these two are on the shelf until I get more worldbuilding done 

Did you forget Shine? I didn't forget Shine. I just shoved her to the side a little since Avery gets pushed off a cloud far earlier in TSBS as opposed to Double Rainbow, meaning Shine and Avery never meet or become friends. It's similar how to Snow Hare's later abduction in TSBS inspires Spritz, who knows her and her morals better, to stay and defend the equality they fought for together rather than go after her in the new canon. Both these characters still exist (Rain appears in the revised The Cities Have Fallen and Spritz and Torch end up corresponding anyways, even becoming close friends) in the new canon, they're just not shown in TSBS because of certain... consequences. 

Butterfly effect?

Anyways, TSBS!Shine ends up becoming a lieutenant in the Pegasus Canira armies. Not just the one on their cloud, mind you, but part of the Thunderflock, a huge, interconnected web of Pegasus Canira groups. She's excited about this.

In the fourth grade, I tried to ditch Rena in favor of an edgy, spiky-furred bastard named something along the lines of Ghost. This marks one of several times I tried to get rid of my terrible child (Torch was edging her out as my main character for most of sixth and seventh grade, but TCHF bought her back) until I realized I would probably be stuck with her until the end of time because it's been something like eight or more years.

Anyways, this is my friend's main character during the time I was using Ghost predominantly, but since she had next to no personality besides being somewhat sassy I have no idea what to do with her. She was from this long period of time when Canira (or their predecessors) could be whatever we wanted and we were like "hey let's make one whose powers are literally just being red" and THUS SCARLET CANIRA WERE BORN. MAKING SENSE IS FOR CHUMPS 

Through some miracle of Pokemon-esque bullshit evolution Scarlet Canira could eventually move into a series of fire-based Canira. The last remnants of the evolution system can be seen in Double Rainbow, where evolution wasn't canon but that was how the original "virtue forms" came to be, in case you're curious. It's kind of hilarious how elaborate this gets but yeah all my old books are like this... and all my new books... just references going back years upon years...

in case you don't think i'm still doing it: "marie" 

man almost none of this actually has to do with ruby does it

I was thinking of bringing her back as Epanza's sister- Epanza definitely got featured in this art book or the last one but she's a Pandemonium Canira (they start weak but store the souls of the recently deceased to use to power their attacks) who gets hired by the Opphemrian government because FUCKIT, THERE ARE NO RULES AT THE END OF THE WORLD. 

I mean Ruby wouldn't ever come up in-book but hey at least she gets to exist. Give her a pat on the back she tried

I DEFINITELY mentioned Pentri, though, even if I was obsessed with her in eighth grade and that was just a liiiittle bit before I started doing art books. 

Pentri showed up for a while in the now-unpublished "Dreamland Tales" collection of short stories, written after TCHF because I needed more excuses to talk about my kids but hadn't done something along the lines of this book yet. 

Her aptitude is that her spots, which are vividly colored, change with the timelines. There will be small changes overtime due to natural timeline splits and the passing of time, but a major change indicates that an important event that will change the world as everyone knows it has occurred or is occurring. In many timelines, she never even realizes this is her aptitude and lives her life thinking she just got something so lame she never figured out what it was, but she has an uncanny knack for appearing just where the trouble is in worlds where there's trouble to be had.

I mean, this is Dreamland. There's trouble to be had everywhere.

She's also got a paintbrush-esque motif going on. She's such a dorky optimist, I adore her.

Following on the theme of characters whose stories have a lot to do with timelines, Marcecee is dead.

No, really, that's how her story starts. After she dies.

(Kind of sucks to know everything you did in your life was irrelevant enough for people to preface your story with your death, doesn't it...?)

Marcecee is in next to all universes nigh irrelevant, but after her death, she becomes part of an inter-dimensional squadron of lawkeepers, sort of an antithesis to the likes of Orcafin and Indy (but mainly Orcafin). There she unravels paradoxes, tangles with eldritch gods and pacts, and struggles to figure out the very meaning of Dreamland's eccentric and erratic soul-based afterlife. 

As she goes further and further into a strange web of stories, she finds out that her answers might lie before her beginning- in her life, where her one important act (on a single timeline, no less) was to give a dangerous renegade advice they didn't want to hear, which they later killed her for. Finding said criminal might be the only way for her to fix everything... or die (again) trying.

Calypseleen (great name I know) was Orcafin before Orcafin was Orcafin.  Back before Double Rainbow was written, for a long time the Obsidians were not a hivemind but rather a society with individual will still bound to the Queen. This didn't prevent them from doing a terrible job at it, so many of the lackey Obsidians were written as somewhat bumbling or incompetent (see again Double Rainbow; Dark Rainbow-1). Calypseleen was an experiment who made it up the ranks of the Obsidians' own command due to her sheer grit and lust for blood (as well as being incredibly hard to kill) and was set to take an important position but due to her non-Obsidian composition, she was denied it and threw a glorified temper tantrum before flipping the Obsidians off. When she ended up in Dreamland, there were several attempts on her life before everyone realized "Hey, she IS really hard to kill" and since interrogation wasn't working the Princess formed an uneasy truce with her in which she would give out information in return for her freedom. Since no one could trust her not to flip out on civilians it was somewhat of a tumultuous... thing... but hey I was in sixth grade my writing skills were shaky enough to not care that everyone just went with it.

I was not able to make her design any less edgy than it was then because I'm just too damn tired right now but I do find the idea of a puppet/doll filled with flesh disturbing enough that I might get back to her too. Even though the new Obsidians are far less likely to bargain with prisoners, I do think there is a way I could squeeze her in somewhere. Just what kind of sadistic act would she have to commit to convince even the Obsidians that she was worth keeping around, though? Yikes.

Axiom is an angels. She is caused by a very certain set of conditions- namingly, that the Princess is destined to be barren. Since all possibilities are equally valid within the multiverse and thus must occur, there are universes where the Princess does have children because it is an event that could occur, despite being an impossible one.

Thus, she's a paradox child. Angels can't leave their timeline until their paradox is resolved, and since the Princess and Axiom's circumstances of birth aren't going to change, she's always stuck in her home timeline. 

The weird thing is that Axiom is a Nyuhenge while The Princess, her only guaranteed parent, is a Canis. She doesn't change species or even appearance depending on the father. Supposedly this is in part in strange, cruel cosmic punishment for the Eighth Princess's murder of Agate, the first Nyuhenge, with whom she shared a relationship, but it's just as likely that Axiom just felt like being a Nyuhenge, thus she was.

The Princess usually doesn't take well to learning that her child is an angels and that she's likely bought the interdimensional paradox control down on her peoples's heads.

Aura is one of the children Torch and Dark Rainbow had in the original original draft of Double Rainbow. This draft of Double Rainbow was only ever written in parts (the surviving part being around Dark Rainbow-8, where she first meets Torch outside of the Factory) and is much longer and more complex than Double Rainbow. Marcecee and Calypseleen both featured prominently at parts in this draft. You might think this complexity would be better for the story... you would be so, so wrong. It was a mess of bad crossovers, nonsensical writing, and there was essentially no end. The story just went on as long as Dark Rainbow stuck around and the Obsidians were still there to occasionally be somewhat of a nuisance. Avery and Spritz were also beyond side characters. The entire thing was an overcluttered mess of "what just happened and who is this guy and why are we here".
Aura never ended up with much of a personality and likely will never come back. 

So, to quote from WAY earlier, I mentioned Zinnia being one of the characters who changed enough to be unrecognizable, and I  also mentioned that Lotus was one of the characters from one of those first batches who stuck around.

Well... not quite.

Originally, one of the "main" characters of that group, albeit one of the less important ones, was Violet, whose personality traits included being Kind of Nice and Liking Plants, a Little, I Guess. 

Later, Violet was revived as Zinnia, a plucky gardener who sets out on an adventure (!!!) to save several worlds by aimlessly wandering around with some mediocre companions until they find an apocalypse to avert because hey, it's the f*cking Chronaverse, those used to be pretty much a dime a dozen. 

Zinnia's "grandmother" was originally planned to be the first Canis of Hope but then since Zinnia didn't fit into the new canon established by Double Rainbow, she became the Canis of Hope, but by the time I got around to writing The Gardenkeeper's Daughters Natrina had changed enough as a character that Zinnia didn't work quite as well as a complement to her. Instead, I revised her a little bit and ended up with Lotus. 

bye