Café de Nuit

Mistmaster wrote: Mon Jan 26, 2026 12:47 pm Buddy I feel for you. But, I grant you no one is going to eat you alive for making lore mistakes. I litterally created my own alternate universe and people have been supportive and useful. So do not worry and just do your best.

I know. It's less about fear of being eaten alive by readers and more about my inner need for perfection. But thanks for the encouragement.

Now the rest of the familly.
I'm thinking about Hellena ~ she and Bevel are very close. What can be her personality beyond 'the friendly tomboy'?
Maybe...
Maybe I'll build her as an antithesis to her darklord aunt. If Invana is an expert manipulator who pretends to be (or is cursed to appear like) a spoiled, shallow girl, Hellena looks tough and tries to act serious while on business, but deep down she's a very silly person ~ not stupid, just silly.
Let's say that as a child she drew dresses in her notebook during lessons ~ that is, when she didn't manage to run away to the woods. Was accidentally poisoned a couple of times when scratched by the wrong bush, but she got better. Her father, Anton, always thought she's irresponsible and pressed her to grow up, which only made her more unruly out of spite. But when he died, she had to take over the business and help raising her little brothers, so ironically she had to become the mature, serious woman he wanted her to be ~ If only she knew how to. Over ten years passed, and she still didn't get the hang of it. She fakes it til she (hopefully, one day) makes it. The sad part is that she wants to and could improve stuff in the company ~ both financially and ethically ~ but never dares to try, because she thinks being a good businesswoman means being like her father and uncle and she needs to imitate them, and is simultaniously afraid of investing in the business her full creativity, because this means turning the facade into reality. Maybe that's also why she acts masculine ~ she works in a very masculine world, and needs to show she's 'one of the guys' to fit in. It's not a personal preference or act of feministic rebellion, it's part of the mask. However, she's afraid of what this mask might do to her ~ what she knows it's doing to Bevel. They share this burden, they took it together for the sake of their family ~ but she finds the times to lift the mask off, while Bevel internalised it, sold his soul to it.

I have some more to think about the family (for example - is Solo behind Anton's death, or he's too obvious of a suspect? ).
But now I realise that's a bit of an exaggeration. After all, these are the people Bevel is going to be away from in my framestory.

What I really need to figure out is Bevel as a narrator.
What would his 'voice' be like?
Very cynical, to begin with. Not edgy, just a person who genuinely lost faith in people.
He'd very emotionally repressed, which will make for a boring narrator - I think I can balance it by establishing that he intended these notes to be private - his diary, or a letter to someone he deeply trusts - and thus allows himself a little more freedom of expression, but I do want to build some tension in that regard until the point in his character arc where he finally opens up.
The hard part would be to get him interested in examining and recording the domains he visits. He's a businessman, not a scholar. I heard Brandon Sanderson say once that the way to worldbuild around an uncaring character is to create circumstances that force them to care, and I think I'll go with this advice: Bevel might not feel like exploring, but he'll have to if he wants to survive and get back home. And he'll write it all down to get it in order, to make sure he knows the rules before he starts breaking them.
And he *is* going to break them. He'd be the kind of hero that cheats his way through every problem. I think he'd defeat a dragon at the climax... by poisoning it.

While we're at the plot -
I think Bevel will start all terrified by the alien land he found himself in. But the second he starts figuring things out, the opportunist in him will raise its head. He'd start thinking not only how to get back home, but also how to get back home rich.
And this path of action will be his bane. Greed will over and over again lead him to make mistakes even the silliest hero would know to avoid, as well as to fail a few power checks (I love the idea that his curse will slowly transform him into a dragon, but I need to think how to get to that from the power he canonically has from his first failure) - until at last some major failure forces him to realise how much of an idiot he had been. His luck is that it's going to happen a few good steps before darklordhood, when he can still make things right - which, surprise, he's actually going to do! I'm here for the redemption arc!
Another plotline I had in mind was pacts. According to Gaz 4, Borcan folklore considers deals with the devil perfectly legit as long as the you manage to pay him back, and I think this is a sick character trait for Bevel. He'd know he's swimming with sharks, but keep thinking he can bargain with them. The second he stops being scared of the monsters, he'd start making business with them. Sometimes it will work, and sometimes it will get him in so much trouble...

Then there's the question of how much he knows well enough to report about. Like, I think his mom taught him his tree types, but what would he do with unfamiliar species?
How would he even know the languages of another cluster? I'd have to refer to this.
Once he does start figuring things out, I think he'll give the domains' economy a much larger section.
Anyway, there's not a chance in the world he's familiar with our standard Gazetteer format: in-world, it had only been used so far by dark wizards, and I don't think it was ever widely published. This is actually nice, because I have an excuse to design a different format that might fit better the things he will focus on.