Exchange of Realities

I put the emphasis on names that I do because they show up a lot for me; it’s rare that I can go even one session without having to introduce a new character. Today was no exception.

So there I am, and there’s my group. They want to talk with someone, and she’s in a meeting. They’re not going to take later for an answer, which means I need to figure out who she’s in a meeting with. I’ve got two established characters I can include in this, but I need one more.

And he needs a name. I know the general theme I’m going for, so I start with that—opening my name book to random places and seeing if I can find something in the right general area. Open, check, realize no. Open, check, realize no. Open, check. Open… ah, here we go. Arvel, Welsh, “wept over”. Perfect. Start trying to fit name to face.

Meanwhile, over in PC-Land, they’ve decided walking straight in wouldn’t be such a good idea, and that they . This is a good thing; it means they’re being tactful, which is something that took me ages to drill into them. On the other hand, it also means that I have to pull yet another new character out of my sleeve. Fortunately, this one’s a bit easier. I know it’s a firebird, after all. And fortunately for me, while I was looking for Arvel’s name, I found another one: Anka, Turkish, “phoenix”. This will do. This will do nicely.

This is actually a pretty normal session for me; I’ve gotten to the point where the book of baby names is never more than three feet away from me, because I know perfectly well that I am going to need it. Several times. In the same session. When it’s unavailable, I get steadily more inventive, and steadily more desperate; one of my longest-running characters, a woman named Tsubame, was named out of a Japanese dictionary about five seconds before she first appeared on screen, directly translated from the name I’d been given for her prior incarnation.  (Hilariously enough, nobody figured this out for a good year and a half, despite several things that should have given it away even to the people who weren’t directly interested in the language.)

At least having a system works, right?