merry Christmas klancers 🎅

//ignore me, warning for long post ahead

future lab: it’s questions tiiiime!! get out ur pen and paper bitch we got a Book To Write

Do people have glasses in this universe? if so, who makes them? are they coveted or free? cool or frowned upon? can you sidestep the necessity with magic? do people think those that need glasses are smarter (like, they study so much their eyes go bad)? do glasses look the same as ours? are there contacts? bifocals? sunglasses? are they stylish and designer or purely functional? are they even called glasses? Maybe there are no glasses. would people with poor vision just be screwed? would they again be able to solve it with magic? do some people think repairing their vision is unnatural re: boomers against tattoos and multiple piercings? are there optometrists in this universe? is it a tough position to get? to keep? are there too many or not enough optometrists?

What’s the travel like? does everyone go everywhere on foot? horseback? alternative bikes? are there cars and buggies? landboats™️? do people go skiing in winter? snowboarding? skateboarding (not winter specific)? are there special Travel Songs to pass the time faster (re: the song that goes on forever, 99 bottles of [ale] on the wall)? can you pay extra money for a long distance piggy back ride?

What do people do for fun? do people read? draw? write? paint? sing? dance? are these coveted ‘“skills”’ or just things people Do? are some hobbies considered more uninteresting/unfulfilling than others? does cooking count as a hobby or a necessity? how does the outward appearance/physical task of doing these differ in this universe? is it an art form to draw in mud and sand because it’s impermanent?**

**i actually like this one, and once you hit culture, i would like if you would have a holiday around impermanence, or temporariness, or something like that, where the celebration is to Do Art in the sand and the dirt and the mud (perhaps scheduled for the day before what is expected to be the seventh rainfall of the year or something significant like that), and people do art in all different ways of all different things - you would need to work out if this carries across all races or is (for example) human-specific. i like worldwide better, because it’s easier, but that’s boring, so it might be cute if it’s just humans (shortest general lifespan, so of course they’ll be more aware of how temporary they are), and the other races don’t really get it or care because their time is less fleeting. you would then be able to have pascal adamant about celebrating it but NOT forcing it on the others (read: the pervasiveness of xmas on modern culture and media), and maybe jancaryn participates in a different way, and she and pascal explain it to the others, and while t and s don’t see the point, isaac (half elf half human) is down and willing to pay attention and learn for the sake of learning. the significance of What is drawn in the mud/sand/dirt can also come into play, like either they draw things that ARE temporary (money, food, objects basically) to remind themselves that it will all go away eventually, or things that are LESS temporary, more abstract and intangible (so loved ones, warm hearts and full tables, that sort of thing). i like the meaning behind the second one better, and obviously you’ll flesh it out more later, but it could be cute if they explain it to isaac while s and t are off on their own adventure (after making it abundantly clear that they aren’t disrespecting p and j’s culture by doing so), and then isaac draws all their faces super cartoony (think sok/ka drawing the gang in ava//tar, really poorly drawn), and pascal’s face just Lights On Fire, and jancaryn goes ‘honey no that’s, that’s not quite—never mind, you interpret it how you think best.’ obviously room to grow, things to fix up, but i really like this as a holiday. you do of course have to think up HOW this holiday came about, gained significance and notoriety, but the end result is really cute and endearing i think (make sure you aren’t belittling any existing religions or cultures in the process though)

how’s the food? what’s the significance of it? are there any dishes saved solely for celebrations/specific occasions? why? what are the common foods to each region/race? how do these clash, especially within the main squad? say jancaryn is vegetarian, would this butt up against, say, sixer’s ideals and core foods? is this a point of tension that whoever is involved has to work through? are there culture/race-specific foods that Taste Like Home? are there staple dishes for regions? does pascal miss out on this because of Obvious Reasons? does pascal get confused when eating a Human Celebration Staple because it tastes so familiar, and jancaryn has to gently explain to him the significance of the food to their culture? does this lead to jancaryn giving him a crash course in all things Human™️? does pascal try not to feel hurt/guilty that he doesn’t already know all these things? does he think he’s failing his own culture for the same reasons? does he try to avoid learning about his culture because Backstory Reasons, he doesn’t think he deserves to participate because he wasn’t raised as part of That Culture? does he hesitate to call it His Culture?

how do cultures in general clash among the squad? i mean, you’ve got a [tabaxi] ghost, two humans, a dragonborn, and a half elf, so obviously there’ll be some cultural differences, so how carefully do they need to step around each other? work out if there’s any history of conflict between, say, half elves and tabaxi, and whether that will become evident in their interactions - maybe the half elves were the antagonists, so isaac feels bad and is constantly deferring to tanra’s opinions and decisions, which annoys tanra to no end because they just want to move past it, or something like that - there’s a lot of ways to do this sort of conflict, but make sure you tread carefully, because there’s also a lot of ways to Mess Up this sort of conflict and come across as offensive

obviously humans need food water shelter air, but how does this change for the other races? what are their priorities? preferences? are any of them traditionally nocturnal? this is gonna be a little different in tanra’s case, but you should still work it out - even though they’re a ghost, habits are hard to break, so maybe they still instinctually look for a below ground cave or thicket of bushes when bunkering down for the night (for example, just broadly thinking of what a tabaxi might do). specifically, for tanra at least, you’re gonna want to figure out a [tabaxi]’s habits and preferences, then filter that through the lens of Technically Tanra Doesn’t Really Have To Worry About That Anymore

more on tanra, but ghosts are normally expected to have a way to Move On To The Next World or whatever in a lot of fiction. is tanra trying to move on? do they HAVE to? do they even want to? do they know that’s an option? do the others know it’s an option? if it is, what are the requirements? presumably it won’t be possible for them to Come Back to this plane once they move on, is everyone aware of that? since they’re functionally already dead, would them Moving On at the end be like a sort of character death? would that then be a mockery of a non-binary character? that is, pascal is trans and jancaryn is also non-binary and they’re both human, but does that make it okay to ‘kill off’ (so to speak) one of the main non-binary characters? the ratio left behind would be 1 trans dude, 1 non-binary girl, 1 [unstated] girl, and 1 [unstated] boy, but that’s still a Yikes to be killing a non-binary character - you could switch tanra to be Not non-binary, or maybe Everybody is non-cis, but this in general is a rough and rocky situation to deal with, so definitely get Multiple Trustworthy Opinions before you go around destroying everything (not to mention that like. you really don’t Have To have tanra move on. they could meet all the requirements and you build up to what should be a tearful goodbye and they’re like ‘wtf y’all i’m not moving on’ and everyone is just ‘??’ and tanra goes ‘my parents left me to die in a castle, everyone i know has presumably been dead for [thousands??] of years, i’m closer with you four than i ever was with any of them, so why would i go be permanently dead and unhappy over there when i can be kind of unalive not dead and considerably happy over here?’ situation. i don’t know. we’ll get there later, obviously it needs some work, but i kind of actually really like that chunk you just spat. so.)

sixer. my gORL. she doesn’t have enough exposition yet for obvious reasons but i feel lonely for her so sixer here’s a paragraph for u bb i lov u. work out the appearance and attitude. her motif is red, her season is fall, her whole deal is obviously fire, so does she like that or hate it? is it a stereotype to be a fiery dragonborn? does she try to rebel against it, try to immerse herself in water and get frustrated when it evaporates? what’s her deal with pascal and their kinda sorta antagonistic vibes with each other vis-a-vis the tavern scene in j’s town? is that an arc that needs to be resolved or just bad writing? an arc would be better, because you’ve kind of had her go stiff since finding out pascal is trans, but that’s bullshit because you deleted transphobia in this world (and pascal isn’t supposed to have told anyone besides isaac anyway so. go back and fix that lmao). maybe they butt up against each other just by virtue of their personalities, which i think you did really well demonstrating in the castle basement, like that whole scene just completely nailed their whole dynamic in one go which i LOVE. you need to do more of that, have them both kind of pushing back against each other, and at the beginning it’s maybe a little more on the antagonistic side, until it grows to a head and they’re forced to confront their issues with each other (and uh lab this is Your Job to figure out what those issues even are, especially before you go tying them in to this whole situation). from their it can be a sort of decrease down into still pushing back on each other, but now it’s more like friendly competition (and maybe more Serious Competition than isaac would prefer but at least they aren’t at each other’s throats anymore... much), so they’re making each other better in the process, and you still get to have that sort of clash between them the whole way through (this meaning that part of sixer’s arc and part of pascal’s arc coincide, since they both grow from and around this situation, so you NEED to make sure you resolve this if you end up including it)