As I described as part of the original “Nonna” story, that was a written back-story for a new character I “rolled up” to play with a D&D group. After a few sessions, though, Things Happened™ (mostly real-life stuff intervening on everyone’s time), and we couldn’t really continue. However, I had somewhat grown fond of Nonna Torsdottir and wanted to do more with her (read: tell more stories about her). [Anyone who possibly had any other thoughts regarding what I meant there … please consider yourself *BONK*ed and banish yourself to the Horny Room™.]
[I discussed this, somewhat, in my post “Another Beginning?“, in case you think you’ve read something about this already. Had to search that one up myself since I was sure I’d already written about this.]
So, as I mentioned previously, I had contemplated a sort of … “Fafhrd and Gray Mouser“-ization of the character. I already had the Barbarian character (Fafhrd), but I needed her pair. For reasons which should be plainly obvious if you read Nonna, I knew her pair character had to be female, without question. Also a much more serious-toned character, given Nonna’s … propensities towards alcohol, shall we say?
So – Who’s The Other Character?
But — I didn’t want to just flat out rip off Leiber and have a Thief as the other character. Additionally, there’s another author I’ve ready recently, Paul S. Kemp, who’s written several books in his Egil and Nix series. These two characters are (to use very wide-covering descriptions), a warrior-priest (no, not a paladin!) and a thief. Since I enjoyed reading those books as well, I didn’t want to just toss in a Priest / Cleric as the other character either.
Yes, I realize I was probably overly-limiting myself with these somewhat arbitrary restrictions, but … well … have you met me??
*ahem*. Be that as it may … I realized that the only real (good) choice was a magic-user of some sort.
They Meet
One interesting aspect (since, apparently, I seem to do a lot of coming up with something in my head and then going “Oh, but how did they get there? And what happens next?”) was that I had their initial meeting (at least the first minute or so) already mapped out in my head. I had no idea how either of them got to that point, or what happened after that, but, given the personalities I was envisioning for both of them, I absolutely knew how they meet (and, to a certain extent, also why).
But, before I could actually get there (and figure out how they got there and the ever popular “Ok. What next?” part), I needed to write this other character.
Finally It Came Together
I hadn’t wanted to just use some sort of Bog-Standard™ magic trope for my Mage, studying endless “Players Handbooks” and such. [Yes, almost all of the TTRPGs (TableTop Role Playing Games) have well-defined magic systems with spells for each character level and all sorts of other … well … boring stuff.] It works if you’re an author writing within a pre-defined universe (and, seriously – I’m not hating on any authors who do; some of that stuff is plain ol’ fun; Hell, read any of the Drizzt Do’Urden books and you’ll see that existing universes can be fun to read about), but I’m creating my own world / universe.
[Yeah, yeah … Nonna is a half-elf and “comes from” a TSR (D&D) universe, but I’ve moved past that now.]
I’d had an initial idea for how the new character’s magic would “work”, but it never really felt right and the way I’d imagined it made it too … convoluted … for me to feel comfortable writing about it and using it in interesting ways.
Seriously – this troubled me for quite some time and, honestly, prevented me from going any further.
Until a few days ago… when I realized as much as I had grown somewhat (overly) enamored of my initial concept, I had to toss it out the window and probably use something a bit more … semi-standard-ish.
Enter Helene Fabry
Ok, so that is her “working name” (although likely to remain the one I use for her). I’m a couple (two) of scenes into the rough-draft stage of writing her back-story (in much the same way that Nonna’s story is hers). [Apologies to both of my characters, but they both have elements of “tragic back-story”, at least in the sense that both have had Shit Happen™ to them.]
One thing that does strike me, as I’ve finished the initial pass on the second scene, is that I feel like I’ve been a bit influenced by many of the (translated) Japanese Light Novels that I’ve read recently. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but I can definitely “sense” it and at least some of the “vibe” is there.
For the moment, I’m constructing this as a … “second chapter” to Nonna, but (here) won’t be posting it that way. I suspect, once I get Helene’s story written and done and move on to their meeting, etc., I will more “officially” – at least in the sense of my Scrivener construction / organization – migrate it to a book format, rather than retaining the Short Story overall structure. But that’s at least a week away from even being something I need to consider.
