Exchange of Realities

This week, I talked about familiar as character prop. My best example for that isn’t Shizuyo, though she does pretty well on her own; rather, it’s a little fellow named Chiko.

Chiko was designed for my primary RPG character, Tuyet, from the species up. What I began with was a foot-long gliding lizard, with elemental inclinations towards air (enough so that technically he might qualify as a flying lizard, given the extent to which he can steer). He got a bit stranger from there, though. Chiko’s species, which I called dasan for reasons I can’t even remember, communicate through dreams, consider mental propagation to be at least as important as physical, have large social groups in which there’s a matriarch and two alpha males (one for the mating, one for the teaching), and can create fascinating displays, both visual and auditory, with their gliding flaps.

Where a lot of the fun lay was in his personality. To begin with, Chiko had a rather interesting way of looking at the world. He was convinced that Tuyet was a dragon, and (in situations where he was allowed to talk; there were a few where Tuyet had finally managed to convince him that silence was the best approach) was not afraid to remind people of this fact. Stepping on others was his way of establishing dominance, rather like a bearded dragon in that regard; he did this a lot, particularly since most of the people he stepped on didn’t realize that was what was going on.

The contrasts between master and familiar were legion. Where Tuyet thought like a politician, choosing her words carefully, Chiko spoke first and considered it later. Where Tuyet considered temptation a nuisance and was far more interested in mental stimulation than physical, Chiko followed his instincts first and his common sense second, seeking out new tastes and experiences and making his disappointment clear when they were removed (I at one point, when a feast he was trying to enjoy was explosively interfered with, had him chasing grapes through the air with no success and end it by keening over a discarded cabbage leaf).

Occasionally, this contrast even came in handy. Tuyet had some odd side-senses, a long story in and of itself but fortunately applicable through her familiar—and since one of them was taste-based, using her sense-bond with Chiko as a vector was practically the only way she could convince herself to use it in many situations. At one point, she and an opponent of hers got into a verbal standoff due to bruised dignity and mixed messages, and it might not have ended had it just been them involved, but the little lizard got up in the other guy’s face, explained the social context, and finished “And what are YOU going to do about it, huh?”

And the little guy showed a lot about Tuyet’s attitude; her having learned to understand his odd idioms, her willingness to deal with her scaled backup’s general immaturity, that sort of thing. Particularly useful given the contrast from when I last played her, when she was still at the point of reputation by association and as a result a tad uptight about the behavior of her immediate subordinates.

In fact, it got to the point where the GM and at least part of the group was agreeing that any given dark, serious scene probably “needed more Chiko”. And given how much fun he was to write, what could I do but oblige? Using Chiko didn’t just give me a character prop, but allowed me to write a voice I could never have used on the original character; what’s not to like?