Extras - Lore, page 3

CHARACTER INFO TIDBITS

BENNY

- He is hard to get to smile, but if he feels the other person is being sincere or their joke is actually funny to Benny, he might smile.

- He’s a total little shit and not always the victim despite what he might claim, but most of the time he truly does get the short end of the stick.

- Considering where Benny is right now mentally, we’re afraid there’s a lot of stuff he needs to deal with before you can see him truly happy.

- Benny didn’t have a great childhood.

- Benny is half South-Korean, half white, which is how he got the genetically near-impossible blue eyes.

- Benny’s job as a courier took him all over the known world. Alongside his courier job Benny also did odd jobs for military to get extra cash to help his mother and sometimes he got to meet military sniper teams and he picked up a lot from them. That’s how he knows how to work with a spotter. Also civilians in other zones have taught him some things. He is not as good a marksman as Wight is, but still a very decent one.

- Benny has a military ID since he is a citizen of Zeus. He also carries the courier badge (seen in chapter 2) that allows him easier access to other zones and preferential treatment in some military barracks.

- Benny takes his looks from his mother.

- Benny would never play truth or dare.

- Benny’s had crushes on girls.

- Benny is WAY TOO JEALOUS (and inexperienced in actual romantic relationships to begin with) to be able to be in a relationship with multiple people.

- Benny on how did he figure out that he was also attracted to people of same gender: “Well… I met someone.”

- Benny has done the couple of years of basic civilian school and his father taught him woodwork before he died (he later became a courier and received training for that from other couriers).

- Benny knows the situation between Modra and his ex. And he certainly knows more about Modra’s personal life than Modra knows about his, because Modra is a person who might overshare a little. They are friends and Modra has told Benny some of his most personal things, but not everything.

- Benny's favorite desserts would be cheesecake, dark chocolate and caramel. Even though caramel is his favourite, he likes bit more bittersweet things and he would love things like salted liquorice, if he’d ever got to taste that.

- Benny is more inclined to woodwork, since he likes building things rather than fixing them. He wouldn’t be able to fix a car, at least not in canon and not without help, but if you needed a chair or a bookshelf or a drawer, he could do that for you and he’d do it gladly! He appreciates functionality and simplicity, but he also takes pride in his craftsmanship and wants the product to be as good as he can make it.

- (re: Benny turning up his nose to Cotton's rifle in chapter 4) Benny used and prefers to use a sniper rifle (a Zastava M91), which differs quite a lot from a fully automatic assault rifle such as Cotton’s AK-74. Cotton’s rifle isn’t as powerful, it uses smaller-caliber ammunition, has a higher rate of fire and is not nearly as accurate as a sniper rifle would be (although it CAN be fired accurately in short bursts from shorter range). It’s a weapon best utilized from mid range (around 300 meters), while sniper rifles are (often) semi-automatic long-range weapons and best suited for taking single targets down accurately from even a thousand meters away. Both are pretty good weapon choices (for different kind of situations, though) in the kind of undead-infested world they live in: sniper rifles for headshot accuracy to definitely destroy a lone undead with a single shot from far away and the spray-and-pray mentality of automatic assault rifles to slow the undead down when there are a lot of them.

Both are fired the same damned way of course: just aim and pull the trigger, but Benny’s weapon had telescopic sights for accuracy and it had a smaller magazine which meant it had to be reloaded after a couple of shots while the AK’s magazine holds 30-45 rounds, a sniper rifle’s recoil kicks harder, etc.

It’s not that Benny can’t or doesn’t know how to use Cotton’s weapon, it’s just that he’s not used to it and prefers using a quite different weapon which he is very good at using and which has a completely different approach to dealing with his targets.

- Benny doesn't hug people often, even the members of his family. His mom has also a very reserved personality, and they hug usually only when the other one will be gone for a long time (like when Benny left to do his job as a courier) or has just returned home after a while. Who do you think benny inherited his cheery disposition from!

- Benny is usually more dominant in a hypothetical sexual scenario, but like with Cotton, it depends a lot of the person he is with. He is considerate and asks what his partner likes and he is really flexible himself.

- Benny is not angry all the time! Benny’s emotional range isn’t “annoyed to furious”. He has a short fuse and a temper to match, but if you treat him with respect, listen what he has to say, don’t mock him, don’t tell his secrets to everyone or continue to push his buttons just because you find his reactions amusing, he will not get angry with you. He is a pretty nice guy if you treat him with respect, like any other person!

Yes, he’s angry. Yes, we’ve established him as this guy with a very short temper and anger issues. No, that’s not the entirety of his character. That’s the starting point from where he can start growing as a person.

- Modra and Benny have known each other for a long time. Both were just kids when they first met. When Modra was a kid, he wandered around Zeus, like curious kids do. One day he ran into a group of kids who were playing together and he wanted to join in on their game.

But since the group of kids were from the poor districts and Modra was obviously not one of them, he wasn’t welcome. Modra who just wanted to find more friends, stayed and after a while noticed another kid hanging around the group, but not with them.

That kid was Benny, and since he was an outsider as well, Modra wanted to befriend him. And they’ve been friends ever since.

- Originally Benny was straight-up reading Harry Potter books, but that got cut from the comic so his fav book series is left unnamed, but it's about a young boy learning he can do magic and going to a school for it and having adventures.

- Benny's name in Hangul is ? ???

COTTON

- Cotton is short for Cottonmouth, his military callsign, and it sort of had a reason for it, because in very, very early character drafts Cotton was very different person and would have short temper and lash out aggressively, sort of like the snake in question. The character he became is nothing like that, but the name stayed.

His real name Tristan obviously comes from the Celtic tale of Tristan and Iseult (which is also argued to be based on a Persian legend, and Cotton is Persian/from Iran). Canonically his mother chose the name because the story was one of her favorites. His last name, Khouri, is explicitly in use by Christian Arabs.

- Cotton dislikes his real name (because he doesn’t like the grim tale it comes from) and has wished his friends would call him by his military callsign ever since he’s had one (first Heron, and after that Cotton, shortened from Cottonmouth).

- Wight and Cotton would've been a terrible couple, they’d have probably fought a lot, which Cotton can’t really handle. He generally hates fighting and either tries to stop it with jokes or distance himself from it.

- Cotton takes after his father re: his looks, but his personality is his mother’s.

- In truth or dare Cotton would play mostly with truths.

- The wounds on his face were nothing but scratches. Deep enough ofc to leave permanent scars, but not bad enough to leave more than the kind that fades a lot with time.

- Cotton had a wife, Irina. They married at nineteen and Irina died at thirty-one in a zombie attack. When he says it's "ancient history", he really means that he's over Irina, although her death haunted him for years, enough to make him leave Nyx for a while.

- Cotton hadn't been with men before he married Irina but he had found guys attractive before and didn't consider himself entirely straight. After Irina he's been exclusively with men. Or a man: he's only been with Wight.

- Hope you like candlelight dinners and bad dad jokes, because that’s what you’d get for going on a date with Cotton.

- Cotton isn't artistically gifted but that doesn't stop him from doodling dicks on his maps.

- His favorite animal is DOGS OF ALL KIND (except the kind that attacks you in the wilds and tries to kill you).

- His favorite color is red.

- Amir Khouri from chapter 1 extras was Cotton's grandfather, making his family a first generation military family and therefore well-respected. Until he shot his second-in-command and ran away with a sniper team under his command, of course, but the Khouri line either way ends with him: he was the only child.

- Cotton feels like he needs people to protect and take care of, otherwise he feels useless and empty. He REALLY needs a person who doesn’t need to be taken care of so that he can actually relax and kick his mother hen habit. That person is Jenn.

- Cotton's eyes are hazel brown.

- Cotton's a Leo

- Cotton has almost 20 years worth of military experience and seeing all kinds of shit. He was a very high-ranking officer (colonel) in a leader position and he’s been through horde attacks, seeing people he knows getting infected and executed on the spot and he’s HAD TO keep calm through whatever came at him. In a military operation if the person in charge loses their cool or shows signs of fear, everything goes to shit very quickly. In tough spots where his friends are also concerned, he tries to remain calm no matter what comes. For their sake.

- Cotton has done the mandatory 8 years of military training, (he didn't have very good grades though). He chose basic combat training as his specialization but was quickly scouted as someone with leadership potential and an officer candidate.

- Cotton is usually rather submissive in bed, letting his partner take the lead, but it also depends on his partner and their wishes and preferences. His wife for example was the more dominant one in their relationship in what came to sex. Cotton likes talking things through with his partner beforehand so that there will be no nasty surprises whatsoever. He’s super considerate of his partners and adheres to their wishes and has no qualms about saying no to stuff he knows he doesn’t enjoy. 100% service top or bottom, whichever way he swings with a partner.

- Cotton was a very loyal soldier. He had a VERY clean record before the events that led to shooting Crow and deserting; he was a Colonel after all and had an entire company under his command. He was respected among his fellow officers for his leadership and tactical skills and only sneered at occasionally because he was too lenient towards his soldiers (example: Wight).

Unless he had a very good reason, he would not have deserted. If he was unhappy he would go through the official ways to cut his ties to the military — which is possible, but it’s essentially an honorable discharge. His loyalties lied so deep that he didn’t leave the military even when his wife was KIA and for a while he didn’t know what to do with his life.

- Cotton is the biggest out of the group but has probably the worst tolerance for alcohol. He's not a drinker.

JENN

- Jenn and Cotton have the kind of friendship where they understand each other 100% of the time. When Jenn is high-strung, Cotton cracks a bad joke which almost always calms Jenn down a little. In the comic Jenn has casually offered to punch Cotton if he started to panic in that little hole in Io and she ACTUALLY punched Cotton when she thought he was being an idiot. Jenn's been throwing little playful insults Cotton's way all through the comic and Cotton knows she doesn't mean them and we've also seen Jenn COMFORT Cotton (that little hole in Io, the end of chapter 9) and show affection towards him. They are best friends, which is also what Wight told Modra.

- The way I write Jenn's dialogue is a very deliberate: I try to use a different kind of voice for every character, and Jenn is supposed to sound very formal (even when she's upset and cursing) or even "robotic". I chose to do this by occasionally not using contractions.

- Jenn goes by her real name (or rather a shortened version of her real name) because she wished to leave everything military-related behind her.

- Jenn enjoys reading history occasionally, but mostly she reads “classic” novels and specifically chooses books written by women. Her favorite author would be Virginia Woolf.

- Jenn and Wight both take a lot after their mother, but Jenn has her dad’s more rational personality.

- Jenn would, even drunk, scoff at the idea of truth or dare.

- I named Jenn before I gave Wight a real name, so for him I chose a name that sounded similar to hers. Their last name Reid was also just something that sounded “right” for them and doesn’t have any special meaning. And since Wight was named Wight, it was easy to choose "Spectre" as Jenn’s callsign.

- After getting over her apprehension of romantic relationships, Jenn wouldn't scoff at the idea of polyamory. She wouldn't of course take part in any sexual activities because of her complete lack of interest, but her being in a romantic relationship with multiple partners isn’t a completely outlandish idea.

- Jenn has never had a crush on anyone before and she doesn’t think about this kind of stuff AT ALL. This is mostly because she has always taken care of someone else and hasn't allowed herself to actually have or experience things.

- Jenn has always been serious. Since her and Wight's parents died when she was only 7, she had to grow up VERY FAST so that she could take care of Wight. She barely had a childhood.

- On being on the road: "It’s draining. I’d prefer not to do travel, but I don’t really have a choice. There’s really nothing new to see and you’re never really at ease because the moment you stop being mindful of your surroundings, that’s the moment you start being in danger.”

- On hoped for the future: “You can always assume my biggest worry in any given situation is my brother. It’s not that he can’t take care of himself, quite the opposite, I just… can’t… I want to be there in case something unexpected happens. Something he can't handle. You never know what can happen on the road; that is the most infuriating thing.

"If the military were to suddenly pull our warrants and Crow’s undeniably selfish if perhaps a little bit rightful vengeance became a non-issue, I still wouldn’t settle until I found Haven. And when I do, that is where I would stay. This is the only stupidly idealistic goal I have, but we’re talking hypotheticals after all.”

- Jenn’s easily the most well-educated out of all the characters.

- Jenn is wearing what looks impractical for traveling, but she prefers the freedom of movement and, having walked in heels all her adult life, she doesn't feel unsteady in her boots either. He leggings and coat are very warm wool.

- Jenn's neutral about sex. She’s never had any interest in it and she doesn't find that strange. She's comfortable in feeling that she isn't interested in sex at all. She has given some thought to romance, but hasn't ended up in a relationship because she didn't find herself interested in the potential romantic partner. She was more interested in keeping the friendship. She isn't counting out the possibility of finding a romantic partner.

JERRY

- Jerry's original accent is Ulster Irish, but spoken like someone who’s lived in the U.S. for a while and became acclimatized to local dialects. He has the rising intonation at the end of sentences and rhoticity so his slightly-Irish accent likely sounds like that.

- Jerry’s been with both women and men before.

- Jerry could have an open relationship, but only with the explicit consent of all parties involved.

- His freckles cover most of his body.

- He's Sagittarius

- Jerry has good tolerance for alcohol and he is a pleasant drunk, but at some point he gets really touchy-feely. He loves to hug and cuddle when he is drunk.

MAVERICK

- Re: the picture on the safehouse's wall, seen in chapter 2: Maverick was very timid and didn't speak a lot even then and he annoyed Ramona a lot while coloring the picture, because he kept asking questions about what color things are and then specifically finding the right crayon or colored pencil or whatever (by reading what it said on the side) so that he could get the colors JUST RIGHT. Ramona felt rightfully bad when Maverick finally handed her the drawing and said "Aww goddamn you drew me a fucking picture". Then she fell silent for a moment and after a while patted Maverick awkwardly on the head, saying a quiet thanks.

She secretly hang onto it for years, cherishing ot.

Mav, being the little shit that he is, now finds the sentimentality dumb and hates the drawing.

- The lines on Maverick's cheeks are there to better visualize his facial structure (high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, angular jaw), so no, they’re not nasolabial folds, they’re too high up for that.

- Maverick has deuteranopia (red-green color blindness). It affects him some, but not enough to seriously hinder his abilities. He’s not completely deficient in seeing colors: like most colorblind people he just has hard time discerning one color from another and can therefore sometimes accurately tell what color things are when they’re in certain kind of environment. His deuteranopia still falls to the more severe area of the spectrum, so he has particularly hard time telling colors apart.

He’s learned to memorize things based on e.g. shape rather than color (if he’s tailing a person he knows to look at details on e.g. their clothing rather than ‘the color of their hat’) and his other senses, particularly hearing, are keener in result, and he knows to ask specifics on those when needed. It still does make him overlook things sometimes. He feels like it’s a huge annoyance when he does realize it affects his abilities, so most of the time he attributes his colorblindness-related failures to something else, like he does with pretty much everything because he’s a little shit who feels like owning up to one’s mistakes is a weakness. Other than that he doesn’t really mind the condition much: it’s the way he’s always seen the world so he’s become perfectly used to it. Out in the wilds it’s very rarely a problem because darker things stand out from all the snow pretty clearly so he’s never had difficulty dealing with the undead, but he seriously dislikes entering previously-unknown places during daytime.

It’s also possibly part of the reason he’s so bad with firearms and aiming and prefers to use close-range weapons like baseball bats or other blunt objects if he has to deal with the undead.

Also he feels like he actually sees a little bit better in the dark and prefers working during the night anyway, so it works out most of the time.

- Maverick attempts to hide his smiles and often hurries to frown instead, feeling a smile might just reveal a weakness. You’d be hard pressed to catch him smiling sincerely and unguarded.

- Maverick has amazingly good situational awareness and it's hard to catch him off guard. He’s that way even when he’s at home and the chance someone were to sneak up on him is pretty damned unlikely, but… old habits die hard and I’ll just say being hyperaware of his surroundings has been his lifeline for most of his life and something he’s based his career on as an errand boy and spy for the local crimelord. So don’t try to scare Maverick: he’s jumpy, he knows someone’s there, and he has lightning-fast reflexes.

- Maverick tends to misunderstand concern and caring as pity and condescension.

- He has zero tolerance for dumb puns and dad jokes.

- Maverick takes after his biological mom.

- In truth or dare Maverick would probably play and have fun being a little shit until the bottle's pointed at him and he’d have to do something or tell a secret, at which point he would probably just ragequit noisily

- Maverick’s name is based on both the literal meaning of the word and all trickster-like characters in fiction who bear the same name. He chose it himself: before Maverick he was called Weasel, which was a name Ramona called him.

- Maverick uses the same last name as Ramona (Taylor) when needed. His real names are not known.

- Maverick’s first crush was a girl a couple of years older than him.

- Maverick's eyes are gray (from the turquoise side of color wheel), the exact color I use is (#AAB5B1). In real life they’d be the kind of eyes that basically end up looking green or even blue depending on light/what he’s wearing/what colors dominate his surroundings/etc.

- Maverick draws sometimes, he's decent at it, and he designed his own tattoos.

- Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne is Maverick’s favorite book.

- Maverick‘s favorite thing to do is to sit on some rooftop after sunset watching stars and preferably drinking hot cocoa (which is rare and expensive, so he doesn’t get to do that part often). He also genuinely enjoys sneaking and spying and doing the little things that make him feel useful, even if he might whine about them to keep up appearances.

- Mav doesn’t really care about the custom but Ramona gets him cake and some kind of present around mid-November for reasons.

So obviously he's a Scorpio

- He’s had a couple of (entirely unrequited) crushes.

- On sexuality: "Anyway Mama is a raging lesbian so she understands and supports me and she knows gender plays no fucking part in whether or not I find someone attractive.”

- Imagine this teenage jerk with a compulsive need to put others down and boast his own skills and greatness, doesn’t that alone spell a little bit like “loser”?

- Maverick never went to any schools: he was taught to read and write by Ramona and the only reason he’s not completely uneducated in other matters is because he used to read a lot when he was a kid, and not fiction but history books, encyclopedias, car-repair manuals, anything he could get his hands on.

- Mav has an industrial piercing (but it's hidden under his hair). You need to be more careful with piercings and tattoos in this world, of course, but industrial, while it can take a very long time to heal, really doesn't take any more effort to keep clean than any other piercing: just keep it under running warm water for some time every day and don’t let shit touch it (also the tattoo artist who’s done all of Maverick’s body modifications is of the “occupation’s run in the family since the apocalypse” type, so he probably knows about saline soaks too). Maverick has enough patience to take care of THAT sort of vanity stuff, only because infections can get super nasty and it’s way easier to just wash the piercing a couple of times a day than get antibiotics afterwards. Ramona had to help him with adding some sort of ointment when the tattoo on his back was fresh because it’s pretty hard or at least really annoying trying to reach back tattoos on your own.

- Mav has two piercings in each earlobe and an industrial in his left ear. Including those he has a grand total of eleven piercings. HAVE FUN WITH THAT.

- Mav has quite a few tattoos and I don’t think he’ll be stopping there. He likes to design his tattoos himself and they’re of things that have some personal meaning to him. Basically his tattoos look like this giant patchwork of unrelated but meaningful pictures.

- Maverick is wearing super-impractical clothing for cold climate on purpose because it reflects his character.

- Mav helps Ramona at the inn, doing a lot of janitorial work he’s not particularly good at (but he tries!) and manning the desk or counter occasionally when Ramona is busy and doesn’t have any other help at hand (because face it Maverick just isn’t the kind of a guy you’d want behind a receptionist’s desk or serving you drinks at the bar). He helps a lot of other people too, running all kinds of errands from getting groceries to elderly people to delivering messages between individuals. GOOD GUY MAVERICK. He just likes being useful and feeling validated by gratification. Moreau also uses him for stuff like spying on the military, because he’s actually good at that.

- Ramona doesn’t like Maverick hanging out with Moreau’s people (which basically means she wants him to stay out of the drug-dealing business and the bars Moreau owns), but she and Moreau have a complicated relationship that occasionally includes a dumb amount of one-upmanship and Moreau isn’t above doing that by using Maverick (since she knows he can get some jobs done better than some of her thugs). And while Maverick most of the time respects Ramona’s wishes, he tends to do as Moreau says because in the end Ramona doesn’t get as mad at him as she gets mad at Moreau.

Also you don’t really say no when Moreau asks you for a job. She doesn’t particularly like that. She’s that kind of a mob boss.

- Mav is somewhat ambidextrous but prefers to use his right hand.

- You can probably guess where Maverick has picked up the kind of language he uses (hint: it’s Ramona). It doesn’t mean Ramona isn’t enforcing any rules on her son’s behavior and it doesn’t mean that Maverick doesn’t respect his mom at all.

- Mav has quite a lot of freedom and Ramona doesn’t berate him for his language, for example. But Ramona says that he’s not allowed to drink. Or smoke. Or do drugs or spend too much time with Moreau’s people. He’s “too young”. And I use quotation marks with because there are no laws to follow regarding e.g. drinking in Hades (which is not governed by the military and is mostly under martial law with Moreau as a questionable peacekeeper, and maybe the legal drinking age in military zones is something other than 18, like 21 in the US for example), but it's something Ramona wishes Maverick wouldn’t do. Maverick respects her so much that he does as she says. It has nothing to do with his actual age.

- Mav would like to think that he could hold his liquor but as usual he’s just all talk and dumbass boasting: he’s a really skinny 18-year-old who has never been drunk: his tolerance is INEXISTENT.