[brev's kalon development thread]

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workshop three, day two

I missed this day rip

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workshop three, day three
w/ workshop three prompt



Workshop Three - Writing Prompt

Kalon Name: Beauregard
Link to Kalon: original page
Prompt:
Beauregard has two best friends; his oldest friend, Jonquil, and his work friend, Kendall. Beauregard met Jonquil through work as well but many, many years ago, when Jonquil was just beginning to grow his gun empire and Beauregard stumbled out from beneath his father's shadow. They were both in their early twenties and desperate to find an ally, even if Beauregard would never had admitted it; and they met and became fast friends and remained fast friends as the years went by. Beauregard visits Jonquil frequently and even entertains his two adopted kids, Seneca and Ezekiel. He's considered their uncle, despite there being no blood relation between them, but he doesn't argue against the nickname. In fact, while he would never say so, he actually finds it somewhat endearing. Jonquil would do anything for Beauregard and has recently attracted a hacker to their cause, which does help Beauregard significantly in the field. They talk often and see each other at least weekly; their safehouses are only a block away from the other, and they trust each other with the location. Jonquil is one of the only people in the world that Beauregard doesn't worry about. Jonquil would never give him up, not for anything.
His second best friend, Kendall, he met more recently. They're in the same line of work, both being assassins, and met on a shared case where they were perhaps intended to kill each other. Rather Kendall became overly attached to Beauregard, declared him his friend, and left him alive. They've been in contact since then, although it only became an actual friendship with the last few months. Kendall doesn't have many friends and he lives a quiet, mild life; so he doesn't act completely 'normal' in terms of a friend, and he's liable to call Beauregard at any hour of the day to ask random, unimportant questions. Beauregard tolerates these calls because unbelievably he likes Kendall, and he's even willing to get out of bed at three in the morning to google where octopuses can taste. Like Jonquil, Kendall now knows the location of all of Beauregard's safe houses, and has given him all the locations of his own in return. Kendall is physically affectionate to Beauregard, something Jonquil has never been, so Beauregard has had to adjust to the little touches and hugs and hair-ruffles as well.

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Workshop Three - Day Three Exercise

Kalon Name: Beauregard
Link to Kalon: original page
Besides their best friend, who else is your kalon friends with?
Apart from Jonquil and Kendall, Beauregard is friends with Finch, Jonquil's children Seneca and Ezekiel (although he considers them to be more nephews than 'friends') and Caligula "Gaius" (owned by apathetic). Apart from those few, Beauregard does not have the time nor inclination to maintain any sort of friendships; and with Gaius, Beauregard is more interested in acquiring him romantically than keeping him as a friend.

What qualities does your kalon look for in a friend?
Beauregard has a rather eclectic group of friends so there are no real traits that he looks for in them, except perhaps persistence, as it is usually his friends who forcibly befriend him. Beauregard doesn't usually have the interest or the time to make friends with someone, with the exception of when he's working a job, in which case he's not interested in actually being friends but convincing them to trust him with whatever he's after. So probably loyalty, persistence, humor.

What qualities does your kalon dislike in a friend?
Beauregard likes mild people, so he's somewhat annoyed by the energetic and the over-eager. It doesn't mean that he wouldn't be able to make friends with someone like that; it just means that he wouldn't really want to. He doesn't like people who talk loud too, or laugh loud, with few exceptions made. Anyone who is squirrelly as well, Beauregard will immediately feel put off by. He doesn't want to befriend someone he can't eventually trust with the truth of his job.

Would they risk their life to save a friend? A stranger?
He would risk his life to save a friend and in some situations, maybe a stranger. Beauregard likes the thrill of his job, the challenge of it; so he would save a stranger if it made his life more interesting, but not for any moral purpose beyond that. How he feels about his friends is more complicated. Beauregard would certainly risk his life to save Jonquil or Kendall, although he would also trust that both could take care of themselves; and he has risked his life before to save Finch. But new friends, or friends who don't know what he really does, those people would be easier for him to lose.

Is it easy or hard to earn their trust? Why?
Understandably, very hard. Beauregard lives a life shrouded in secrecy; he's an assassin, he's broken many laws, he doesn't actually exist as a person in most countries. He can't very well trust everyone he meets. Mostly Beauregard requires some exchange of information as a show of trust; tell me where all your safehouses are and I'll tell you where mine are. If burned once Beauregard is unlikely to give someone another chance.

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Workshop Three - Day Three Exercise

Link to Thread: xxx

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workshop three, day four



Workshop Three - Day Four Exercise

Name of Kalon: Kitana
Link to Kalon: adopt page
Describe their pet/companion:
Kitana's closest companion and best friend is her great grey owl, Viktor. He's edging on eleven years old now and they've been together for his entire life. He's quite a large bird, seeing as great greys as one of the biggest owl species in the world, and stands at 24 inches high and weighs in at a little over two pounds. He's got luminous yellow eyes and an eerie stare and he tends to sit on Kitana's shoulder or arm, his head swiveling this way and that to see everyone they pass. They go everywhere together; he sleeps perched on her headboard even, so they are not separated even then. Six months ago he lost a leg in a gunfight he accompanied Kitana on (as she's a palace guard in Burya) and ever since then Kitana has been overwhelmingly worried about him. She mother-hens him something terrible and the rumors surrounding their relationship, that they can understand one another, that Viktor is an extension of her soul, have only worsened.

How did they meet their pet/companion?:
When Kitana was twelve years old, she got lost.

She had grown up beside the woods, grown up in them, lost in daydreams below their leaves, dappled with their gentle shadows. She grew confident there, grew knowledgeable, grew brave. She was always a fearless child, always worrying her mother with her long days spent among the trees, prodding her to shouting when the hour grew late. She never feared them; she never had cause to, in the beginning.

But when she was twelve, Kitana finally went too far. She wandered into a part of the woods she had never seen before, a half-day's hike from her home, a place speckled with berry bushes and tall, bright wildflowers. She spent the evening there making flower crowns for all the trees and when she recognized that the sun was beginning to set, she turned to go home. Except, of course, she had lost her way; she'd lost all her landmarks, all the familiar trees and rocks and streams. She stood in a clearing she had never seen before and picked a direction and started walking.

Kitana was born in Burya, where the winters came harsh and frigid; and as the sun dropped so too did the temperature, bringing goosebumps to her bare skin. She chuffed her shoulders and kept walking as the sunlight lengthened into shadows and then into stumbling dark and when finally she began to understand that she was lost, truly lost, did she start to panic.

The cold got worse. Her goosebumps progressed to teeth-chattering progressed to a shivering that made her bones ache. Her fingers went tingly and then they went numb and she knew instinctively that she would soon need to find a place to hide. Growing up in Burya, Kitana had learned early that the cold could kill. Her parents had always told her, in emergencies look for a place to stay warm.

But Kitana was in the middle of the woods and there were no houses nearby, no fireplaces, no warm homely mats. She had stopped chattering then, the cold changing into that bone-deep cold that made her feel incorporeal and weightless, when she heard a small, quiet cheep. She stopped, tilted her head, got down on her knees without hesitation; and there, tucked into a narrow crevice beneath a tree's enormous roots, lay a chick.

Kitana gently took the fledgling and ignored his bites and crawled in beside him, wedged herself into the tight space as far as she could go, until her breath warmed the close air and her chattering quieted. The bird sat annoyed in her hands, looking at her with the yellow eyes of the great grey; and she could not help but kiss him, risking a bite to the mouth, laughing in the hard-edge of hysteria, knowing somehow that she would have died if she had not found him.

She found her way home in the morning, when the sun warmed the forest and her skin, and she carried the bird to her parents and said he was hers. "His name is Viktor," she told them, sitting at the kitchen table with her chapped skin and dirty knees, persuading the chick to eat a scrap of meat. "And he saved my life."

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Workshop Three - Day Four Exercise

Link to Thread: xxx

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and reserving this just in case aha