Somewhat inspired by the reaction I got to Ruins of Melancholy.
Parker “what did I do” is not an appropriate reaction to a hug from a friend.
oscyllarus replied to your post: Within universe, how do creatures like Agents and…
so what about hat?
Hat is another “just liked the way it sounded” one, though for different reasons. Smudge just didn’t care what humans called her and didn’t feel like translating, Hat specifically wanted to keep them from knowing something that personal.
Magiphages make theirs up, and sometimes do so while in the process of coming into existence, permanently imprinting the name into the spell in their bodies, making it an unchangeable reality for them. Some magiphage’s names are combinations of past generation’s names, they inherit them like it’s an eye color or some such, it was written in the spell material so it ended up in the mix.
Agents come up with thought-names for themselves, made up of sounds, sights, sensory experiences and feelings (basically anything that can be thought of or remembered). Other Agents shape an Agent’s name with their input as well.
Names change with the Agent, though they tend to build rather than change completely. A young Agent’s name might be just a few notes of bird song or the image of a single flower, and slowly it accrues into a complex scene, a bird perched on a dead tree singing that song in bright sunlight, that flower blooming out of snow.
Verbal Agents may try to translate this name into a name that can be spoken outloud or may come up with something totally unrelated. Non-verbal Agents often acquire names in unusual ways, and some guide the name they are given by responding to names they actually like being called and totally ignoring those calling them names they don’t like. But others just do not care, and their spoken names are about as related to them as the names we give wild animals.
Parker’s name is an example of a translation. His “real” name is something like a memory of being in a place full of trees and manicured-looking green lawns.
Smudge’s name is an example of just making something up - her thought-name is totally unrelated, she just likes the way “Smudge” sounds.
The Autumn Man’s name is an example of guiding others into a name. Since he is non-verbal, he can’t communicate what his name is or choose a translation. Humans just called him whatever they wanted to call him, and were usually just being obvious (The orange man, the man with one eye) - when someone finally called him The Autumn Man he was so surprised that someone got close to his name that he perked up and looked them right in the eye. That caused the name to catch on.
“Ruins of Melancholy”
Parker spent almost a hundred years in the ocean, isolated and exiled, before he finally just gave up. He did not feel that he could keep going. He beached himself, entirely intending to let himself rot there and die.
But he’d beached himself near a town, and he was soon found by a man named Ernest.
When Ernest found him, he was already so broken and listless he figured he was going to die and there wasn’t much he could do about it.
So he just stayed with him. He visited him, talked to him. He picked out debri and dirt that fell into his broken, wounded body.
And that was enough.
If I fits, I sits.
I was thinking about when Parker lived in the ocean. Parker wasn’t suited to it really, despite reforming his body for the environment, because he was totally unlike the Agents that live there by choice.
The Agents that live in the sea are enormous, calm, serene beings that aren’t terribly interested in communicating outside themselves. Their contentment leads to them having a clear open connection to magic and being vastly powerful, which is also why they are so big. Their bodies border on being so big, and containing so much magic, that they can be rather mentally disorganized. Having enough brains for multiple people and trying to orchestrate the whole thing as a unit. They spend more time “talking” to themselves than to others and they prefer it that way.
When Parker lived in the ocean, he couldn’t really relate to these Agents, nor they to him.
While on land, his bad attitude and negative emotions had pissed off so many of his kind, in the ocean he barely registered. In fact, he would sometimes follow one around until he was noticed, because their calm totally dwarfed any emotion he could have - like following someone around listening to loud music because you have tinnitus and the music drowns it out. They were just “louder” than him.
But he never really got used to the fact that they either ignored him, or on the odd occasion when they noticed him, waved him away like a fly.
I figured it’d be good to have a sculpt of Smudge’s antlers so I could reference it in the future for weird angles. Antlers are hard to sculpt.
Hi ho Silver! Away!
“Youth”
Agents physical forms are a reflection of their minds, their mental history, their feelings about themselves and their own personal symbolism. Older agents are fairly stable in their identities, so their appearances are stable as well - but young Agents, young agents are something else entirely.
When they break out of their larval bodies, they are exhilerated by their new senses and emotions, and full of curiosity about the world and themselves, having no set identity or symbolism, everything is in constant flux as they make new discoveries and change their minds.
