Happy Birthday Date I Baked You A Cake (literally)

Happy birthday Date I baked you a cake (literally)

Red Strings of Fate

“Sorry for making you worry about me”

Overdue Soonas...

I definitely didn't grapple with these for hours ARGHHHH someday I'll give a character a proper background

Ooh, OCs! I'm in a patho oc group that I've unfortunately been too busy to participate in lately but I love my little (big) guy, so I'll share him here.

His name is Yonho, he's a former butcher turned botanist/agriculturalist, and he's 15 - because odonghs aren't born, they're spat out from the earth as fully formed adolescents. Yep, he's a worm NPC!

After learning how to exist for a few years he was put to work as a butcher for the Bull Project, but after doing that for a few years and realizing his labor mostly just made their greedy exploitative Böös richer, he quit and went to be a cattle herder in the steppe. He was free, but lonely, and couldn't enjoy his freedom knowing so many of the Kin were still slaving away at the meat factory. So he thought, hey, we're working there so we have money to buy food, right? So why don't we just grow our own food and we can stop working for him?

Great idea! Lots of other people thought of that before, though, and... the soil just sucks. It's terrible. Anything except twyre is barely worth growing. If they were going to stay in one area they had to depend on imports. But instead of giving up or saying they should return to being nomads he wondered if there was a reason twyre grew so well, and if they could give other plants that property. He planted the herb patches in Shekhen and started studying them, and one day when he was explaining his idea to a butcher who stopped by, they said they saw a book about something similar at a shop in town. He looked into it and found several books about plants, but they were all in Russian. So he went to some of the Kin in town and had them translate, and started trying to learn to read Russian himself so he could understand them better.

Now, a worm being interested in western science and trying to learn to read Russian is very unusual. And guess who caught wind? Vlad Jr. He immediately sought out Yonho and offered to help, saying he would give him the books he used as a child to learn to read, and would have books on agriculture imported for him. Yonho was obviously skeptical but Vlad Jr seemed better than his father and he couldn't think of a way this would hurt him so he cautiously agreed. And it worked, Vlad Jr did get him books on reading and agriculture. With his help Yonho quickly picked it up, and with a better grasp on Russian he started to speak more clearly, more like a townsperson. That was when Vlad Jr started talking about how wouldn't it be great if they could educate all the Kin and make them civilized like this? And Yonho realized he had never actually been interested in helping him, he just wanted to show they could be assimilated. He was understandably furious and while he didn't cut ties with Vlad Jr completely since having those connections is handy, he went back to Shekhen to focus completely on his twyre experiments. That's where he is during the game, and he's thrilled when Artemy frees the survivors from the Termitary and brings them there. He's even more determined to succeed now so it can be a long-term solution.

Despite being a devout Boddho boy, he really doesn't have any issues with the Town itself. Plenty of the Kin seem to like living there. It would be fine if not for the meat slave factory. And the racism. But a lot of people, especially those from the lower districts, are completely okay with living alongside them. Bar a mass departure, Yonho's staying near Shekhen and the Town forever. The Kin are his family. He's not leaving them.

Of course he believes all the steppe legends, being one himself, and he also believes the Mistresses. They've had Earth Mistresses and Mother Superiors for ages. However, he doesn't like the Dark and Light Mistresses. They're powers not native to the area, and like invasive species, they cause more destruction than good. He obviously hates the Olgimskys and thinks the Polyhedron is an abomination, so he hates the Kains too. He doesn't know much about the Saburovs but Katerina is a townborn Earth Mistress and they're not responsible for any huge destructive superstructures so he likes them best by default.

Obviously he would aid Artemy in his attempts to bring the Kin to Shekhen, but he wouldn't be hostile toward Clara or even Daniil if they were polite to him. I doubt he'd sabotage it, but he'd try to rescue the Kin from Utopian end by bringing them to a safe place in the steppe rather than inside the Polyhedron. As for quests... I'm not sure! He might ask you to get him a book or some supplies for Shekhen, or to talk to Vlad Jr for him. He would definitely be one of the worms you can trade herbs with though.

This was... already much longer than I intended it to be oops but here's the full document I made for him! And here's a drawing of him, done by the awesome @hayheadd!

A WORM OC!! IS IT MY BIRTHDAY? I LOVE HIM PLEASE MY CHILD <33 I would move the mountians and boil the seas if even one thread on his clothes gets touched by someone with malic.

Reading his backstory felt like reading a fable tale, one of those beautifully drawn bedtime stories you's obsess over as a kid. The narrative build and gradually steps he takes in order to solve this conundrum instead of just surrendering to the harsh reality.

He isn't satisfied with the current treatment of the kin. He wants his people to be turly dependent rather than subjected to borderline slavery by greedy cooperations.

It's very admirable how he doesn't give up even when his attempts fail, when the plants he attempts to grow withers, he asks why and tries to find an alternative way, searching for knowledge and information rather than simply giving up and thinking it was a foolish thing for a worm to even amount to anything.

I also like the complex relationship with Vlar Jr. Because he genuinely would help a worm if he ever caught wind of someone of someone like Yonho attempting to learn russian and actually read books. Sure, he'll do it with the intention in mind to spin this whole thing into benfiting his agenada to "uplift" and "enlighten" the kin, rather than actually understand why Yonho is doing the things he is.

But he still helps, I love that rat boyfailure man who. It is clever of Yonho to not cut off all connections since Vlad Jr. naivety or underestimation of the worms and kin can benfit him into getting even more batony books and outerworld resources with the Olgimskay's connections alone.

Ha, ironic. Taking advantage of the Olgimskay ignorance to help his own people who were wronged by them, to provide the kin even more knowledge whilst still respecting his own traditions and culture.

Because he knows the earth is a living thing, that he is a living proof of the magic in this universe and you shouldn't forgo one for the other.

Yk who else believes in steppe legends? Yulia, at least in P1. Taya also seems like she'd hold great favouritism towards the worm attempting to plant her strawberries and all kinds of fruits she's always read about but never tried.

Mother superior would definitely have his back if one of the Kin has a problem with his ways or claims it's an insult to the earth to attempt to not be satisfied with just the twyrine and swerve.

The art is so beautiful, I adore the little flowers and how accurate his clothes are to the Kin fashion ingame.

There's an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.

A "playable state" would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.

I don't think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.

Any EU citizen is eligible to sign the initiative, but only once and if you mess up that's it. You can find it here. (https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en)

Even if you're not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don't care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.