Subject: At present, the Pratchettian Full Supporting Cast is a bit up in the air.
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Posted on: 2020-04-24 02:10:13 UTC

I do know that there's a couple of people in her initial party:-


Vi Stonebuckle is a Barbarian/Grappler cross, but more importantly she's the proprietress of the Barbarian Charter... which reminds me, I should probably talk about Charters. These are the organizations that the crosses learn their skills and powers from, and they have status in the world of Mako dependent upon how many players they have in the game. In this world, the Charters are funded by donations and acquire prestige from their powerful members. The Cleric Charter's home base is a glittering cathedral complex that is almost as vast as the imperial palace in the capital city. The Barbarian Charter's base, by contrast, is a scabby-looking dive bar with boarded-up windows in the worst part of town, all mismatched furniture and sawdust on the floor and a vague but pervasive smell of stale beer. Vi runs it because... well, even she couldn't tell you why these days. Almost every cross possible has access to a higher-status Charter building, and the few times people come in are almost universally there to point and laugh at how the other half lives. She's a good person but she's been beaten down by years of fruitlessly trying to improve the status of Barbarians in the face of total indifference from the world at large. She's also the first person to be kind to Sophie in this new city that's so achingly familiar.

Meanwhile, across the street from the Barbarian Charter, there's the Mystic Charter. If you've ever been to a second-hand bookshop that looks like it hasn't sold anything since about 1946 and whose owner might actually be the skinny ginger cat glaring at you from behind a stack of mouldering tax demands, you've been in the Mystic Charter. The only difference is that there's more books on psychic studies and a whole lot more tatterdemalion vaguely-occult garbage everywhere. I really do mean everywhere, too; they cling like dying ivy to the piles of hardbacks throughout the Charter, some of which might actually be load-bearing. It's marginally less welcoming than a Siberian gulag and that's just how the Charter's head likes it. Heather Lake is a diffident person with her nose in a book almost twenty-four hours a day, because does it look like she can afford candles? Spoilers: she can't. While she's a Mystic/Occultist cross herself, she was subtly ostracized from the Occultist Charter over a period of many years. She's naturally diffident and standoffish, so it wasn't too hard for the Occultists to persuade her that she was happiest on her own, especially with the help of little telepathic nudges here and there. Tall and rail-thin and sporting the very thickest of spectacles, she's a huge nerd and is very knowledgeable about the theory of psychic abilities, which is extremely helpful to Sophie as she tries to get the hang of her extremely weird cross.

Finally, there is Lady Elodie Brightmantle, who doesn't join the party right away but instead at the end of the first arc. See, in the world of Mako, to become a royally-sanctioned adventurer you must first beat an adventurer of the royal guard in single combat in a kind of mock duel. In theory, this is so that you can prove your worth to the crown and the land. In practice, it's a means of keeping the riff-raff out more than anything else. Powerful crosses get rubber-stamped, janktacular weirdos like Sophie get laughed at by an audience of hundred of nobles before being made to fight for their lives. This doesn't sit well at all with Elodie, a newly-invested member of the royal guard. She believes in the spirit of the guard to protect the nation and the common people, rather than what it's become these days - a political entity that exists to prop up the existing, manifestly unjust power structure. She's especially dubious of Hayate, Eita, and Akemi, since they rocked up like they own the place. She's made to fight Sophie in her Honour Duel, and she's put under Akemi's influence to go absolutely ham on the comparatively green girl being tested. After that fight - in which both parties are left barely alive - Elodie volunteers to mentor Sophie, taking her on the first steps into the wider world and to help her grow in strength. She loathes what Akemi made her do, and she spends quite some time apologizing to Sophie, reluctant to accept that it wasn't her fault because that'd mean accepting that she could be so easily dominated. She's a Paladin/Fury cross, tall and muscular with a cascade of dark auburn hair, and she habitually wears plate armour and a flowing cape that covers her wings. She's stubborn and compassionate to a fault, and she doesn't like the idea of those things being manipulated. Especially not by someone from another plane of existence who did so as a borderline assassination attempt.


So yeah, those are the first three members of Sophie's new guild. These are not top-tier crosses, though they're certainly viable; there will be more that Sophie recruits by just being a decent human being, something rather alien to the terrible trio currently squatting in the imperial palace living out their by-the-numbers pandering isekai power fantasies. I don't have much more than that as yet, but there's gonna be a lot of this.

Oh hell, now I'm gonna have to actually start writing, aren't I... =]

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