Exchange of Realities

What good would a whole riff on secondary characters be if I never showed you how I did it?

So for today, I’ll introduce you to Shizuyo the ferret.

Shizuyo pic based on Geronimo, from http://ferrets.today.com

Cute, isn’t she? Shizuyo is a doubly supporting character; she’s the familiar of Amaya, one of the group’s regular NPCs. Despite this (or perhaps because of it; Amaya and Shizuyo were both cameos from a game I’d been in before), she’s almost as well-developed as some of the less regularly used NPCs, despite the fact that communication with her is difficult (nobody in the group speaks ferret, and while Shizuyo’s decent with a writing implement, it wreaks havoc on her grammar).

So what made Shizuyo?

Her purpose, when she was first created, was “be the familiar”. Pretty straightforward, right? The image I had of her was of, well, a small, dark-furred ferret, usually seen on someone’s shoulder, gnawing their hair. It was one of her distinctive features, after all—it was a bit of a bad habit, but in all the time she’d been with Amaya, she’d never broken it. Her other was an incident that had happened in the game from which she had been cameoed, when she had somehow managed to wrestle down a tiny god who had evaded capture from all of her teammates. So an early question for her was “What would that do to an intelligent ferret’s ego?”

I didn’t really have an impact-emotion chosen for her, not in the beginning; instead, she tended to be a mirror of whatever Amaya was feeling (sometimes even when Amaya didn’t want to admit it).

So now come the questions. (Note: some obvious lines of questioning are omitted due to not having been covered in game. I need to keep a few surprises.) Why does she still chew hair? Difficult question. I’d call it stress, I think, particularly when she’s stressed either in place of or because of worry about her human. Since this happens a lot, it gives me plenty of chances for her to nibble. Hmmm…. not much more I can do with this. Yet.

All right—let’s go with the Question. “What would subduing a small god do to an intelligent ferret’s ego?” Expand it, obviously. How does its expansion manifest? High self-confidence; Shizuyo is a firm believer in ‘give me a plank of the right length and a fulcrum and I will move the world.’ And a bit of a tendency to grandstand. …hold that thought!

What’s it like being a familiar? You feel what your human feels, to a certain degree. The good news is that it can help you stay lucid, keep your mind on their level rather than the one you were born with. The bad news is that it can be hard to maintain self-control when they’re not even your emotions. Imagine being told to stop hair-chewing by your human when it’s being triggered by her stress. Is there anywhere else we can go with this? ….combine having a bit of a sense of the more subconscious emotions with the tendency to grandstand, and you might be getting a little bit of your (ordinarily subtle) human’s wish to stand out. How does this manifest? Well, there’s the time she and Amaya get roped into visiting a tailor to get them ready for a party—the end result is that Shizuyo shows up better dressed even than the PCs. (I’ll admit, I hadn’t quite intended for her to upstage them.)

Equally important—what happens when your human is starting to move towards possibilities that really don’t fit with your outlook? For Shizuyo, this is a rather important issue; due to some complicated metaphysical stuff, her human has a connection to some rather powerful dead things, and they want to go from just connection to full-fledged employment. Amaya keeps quiet about this. Shizuyo worries. What’s she going to do? Ask for help. Who do you ask? Ordinarily she’d say Amaya’s prize student, but she’s really busy with her own thing. Who else, then? Well, that crazy group that rooms with said student might be able to help….