Username: Goddess Sword
Vaiki(s): Uhhh this is an intro so there are a Lot of them and there are going to be More because I have Far Too Many Vaikis but to start off:
Muireann and
Lir, the Irish duo;
Thomas and
Riley, the wannabe mechanics; and
Toshi,
Michigan,
Coraline,
Ori,
Paz, and
Branson, the bandmates!
Which Prompt: "Introduce yourself and your vaikis to the community! This is a bit of a free prompt, you can write or draw a little about yourself and your vaikis, tell us about their hobbies, personalities, etc. Whatever you want as long as it reaches the word/art requirement! You can only do this prompt once, no repeating."
Art or Writing: So! I'm Garnet, also known as Lane, Goddess Sword (and variants of that), Bill... That last one's kind of a funny story; one of my old usernames, the one I first joined with, was Bill Ciforce because I joked that, if you stacked one Bill Cipher on top of two others, you'd get the Ciforce. I had a pixel art avatar of it, but that's long since been lost to the sands of time (and of hardware failure/loss :p), though if you search Ciforce on Google Images you'll find a few other people have drawn their own renditions of the same idea, lol! Also, I'm genderfluid and use They or He pronouns!
So, I've kind of been in Vaikis for a While. That is to say, my first Vaiki was #20, from waaaaaay back on July 11, 2015, only a couple of weeks after the adopts started up themselves! And over the course of that time I have found myself with... many... many doots. Too many. Dear god someone stop me I'm tempted to get a bunch of Gold Coins and Tufts of Fur to make a bunch of designs for Vaikis who aren't even alive in the present of my characters' stories for the sake of Backstory And AMVs. Let me emphasize that - These are
entirely posthumous characters. I'm in too deep, y'all.
On that topic, why Gold Coins AND Tufts of Fur, you might ask? Well, the character in question is a dwarf Vaiki - Specifically, one of the few without fins! And the MYO rules state that they must have back fins and tail fins, but if I were to use an edit item to then
remove said back fins... -Rubs my grubby gremlin hands together- Loophole abuse, anyone?
So yeah! First Vaiki on my introduction list will be aforementioned backfinless dwarf,
Muireann! Won and purchased in a contest during the 2016 Halloween event, she's one of... I wanna say there's like, maybe five Vaikis who lack back fins? A Vaiki hailing from the Irish coast, she lived with her family on their boat much of her childhood, until a sudden storm caused the ship to crash and sink, her parents and sister all perishing with it. During her years in an orphanage, she met another Vaiki,
Lir, who himself has ties to the water, having been lead away by faeries as a child while playing in the lake where his childhood home sat long ago. He's lived so long among them that he's essentially become one of them, regularly traveling between the mortal and fae realms; and, more recently, taking Muireann along with him, who followed him after he offered a place where she can learn to face her fear of the water in safety.
Oh, on the topic of backfinless Vaikis, I actually have another!
Thomas is the second of my two backfinless Vaikis, one with a fondness for technology of all sorts who works at a theme park a few hours north of his childhood home in Manchester, New Hampshire (specifically Story Land, an actual fantasy/fairy tale/kids storybook-themed park located in Glen, New Hampshire)! "But wait," you say, "that Vaiki's not on the dwarf lines, and he has a backfin!" And that's correct! Thomas was originally a normal, albeit edited, Vaiki from the summer 2016 Vaicarnival event; after a long time of putting it off, last year I finally used a size potion I won to transfer him to the dwarf lines, and with it, a Tuft of Fur to remove his back fin. His current reference can be seen
here!
Another worker at the park is
Riley! Like his coworker, Riley has an interest in the mechanics of the rides both at his summer job at Story Land and his work in the fall at the Fryeburg Fair where he lives just across the border, but unlike Thomas, Riley is a significantly more introverted Vaiki; outside of work, he enjoys (and is fairly good at) origami, something he's tried to teach his coworker to no avail. He's currently in the process of folding a thousand lucky stars... which he (half-jokingly) plans to use to wish for Thomas's paper-folding skills to improve.
Riley's not the only Vaiki from Maine in my group, nor is Thomas the only one from the Vaicarnival event!
Toshi has some interesting traits, namely her reflective fur, claws, eyes, and skin! Her personality is also somewhat like a mirror; she tends to reflect the personalities of those around her, and has struggled with her identity for a long time as a result. She's slowly figuring herself out, but still struggles with not really feeling
real at times; her bandmates are doing their best to support her through this, though!
With regards to her bandmates, Toshi has a few - Though she's the lead singer,
Michigan is the real head of the group, having formed it after an accident in which he lost the lower half of his right leg and decided that he needed to do something special with his life; anything can happen, and if everything were to end tomorrow, Michigan knew he wouldn't be content with just being an average person with an average life. He's now the drummer of his own band, and though it's small-time, he's determined that they'll make it big one day! On a meta level, Michigan was one of the MYOs I created after trading in a few of the Vaikis I never was able to find a place for; he was inspired by the then-somewhat-recently released Lake Effect Kid EP by Fall Out Boy, with his name drawing from the lake that Chicago sits on the coast of, and his colors being drawn from Super Fade in particular, the bright pinks matching the synthetic music during the verses and the blues going with the louder, almost sort of brassy instrumentals of the chorus!
Coraline is the other founder of the group, a childhood friend of Michigan's who specializes in the keyboard! She's much more introverted than her cofounder, and struggles somewhat with anxiety - Luckily for her, she tends to take a backseat to the aforementioned drummer and lead vocalist, who are more the faces of the band than she is. When not performing, she enjoys tea (particularly mint tea, which Toshi is happy to brew up to share with her) and a round of video games to wind down!
Along with the topic of video games comes the fourth member of the band,
Ori! Having grown up alongside an older brother with pretty nerdy tastes, Ori developed a love for all things retro as a kid, and grew up combining his nerdy interests with a natural creativity and affinity for music, making songs first on Mario Paint Composer, then with Vocaloids, and eventually with his own Midi Fighter. His creations caught the eye of Toshi, who brought him up to Coraline shortly after joining the group, who then brought him up to Michigan from there, and things sort of spiraled from there into him having a consistent gig as the group's synth and chiptune composer! In meta, this decision was influenced by the fact that I'd recently gotten into I Fight Dragons after vaguely knowing about them for years from a cover of theirs being featured in a Nuzlocke I followed, and while looking more into them I discovered that the frontman of the group actually went to school with the frontman of Fall Out Boy, the band from which Michigan was inspired! Basically, shoutout to Chicago bands.
The band's final and most recent member, their guitarist,
Paz, actually has some history with another member of the group; she and Toshi met online during high school and had a brief relationship. Things didn't work out and they ultimately lost contact, which made things a little awkward when, after being recruited by Michigan when he heard her playing her guitar on the streets for the pigeons, she discovered that her ex was the lead singer of the band. Just the tiiiiiiniest bit awkward. The two ultimately reconciled, and now consider themselves friends, but those first few weeks... hoo boy.
That said, there is one other member of the team who, although not a musician himself, has contributed a lot to the group's success thus far - The animator of their music videos,
Branson! A Vaiki whose blood is more coffee than iron at this point, Branson grew up watching animation from all parts of the globe, and spent much of his childhood in Brookline drawing, be it pausing frames to redraw them himself or simple bouncing balls on pads of sticky notes. With the help of loans and scholarships, he eventually went into the animation business proper, albeit as a freelancer... though finding work wasn't always easy, and he more often than not found himself working retail by day and spending his nights finishing up projects for his followers online, telling himself "it doesn't matter if I only get three hours of sleep tonight, there's a Dunkin right down the street." It was ultimately a project he did for fun, an animation set to one of the group's songs, that landed him a consistent gig animating the music videos for the band's songs, after an email (which he rather expected to be a takedown request) from Michigan expressing interest in his skills. Truthfully, it's kind of a pain working with the guy at times - He's had to redo countless shots due to Michigan changing his mind about something halfway through the process - but it's work that he enjoys, and Michigan aside, the other members of the band are pleasant people. (The fact that Paz, the generous and well-off Vaiki that she is, is more than willing to pay for the work he was made to scrap, helps significantly as well.)
Word Count: 1637 (30 tokens for 400 base + 30 tokens for 1200 extra)
