Owing to a sickly cat, only did the one week’s worth of sidequests this week. They included staying off social media for a day, making a fictional character with a backstory. and telling someone I love them even if they already know.

Within the realm of sickeningly sweet, having a boyfriend made the last one easy. Done and done! And done again.

Staying off social media seemed initially easy to me but was a bit hard for a few reasons. Telling myself not to mindlessly scroll/browse wasn’t too bad, but the first day I tried the sidequest, I also looked up the menu for a local coffee shop that just opened, and their menu was on Facebook. If that was the only way to access it, did that count against me staying off social media? I wasn’t sure so I decided to try again the next day.

The next day, I received some links from a few friends, and clicked on them without really thinking about the source. The sources were posts on social media websites. So did that count against the sidequest as well?

At that point I decided that two minor infractions across two separate days wasn’t too bad. After all, I hadn’t opened anything purposely thinking to myself that I was going to scroll through posts on social media in general.

So that leaves the fictional character with a backstory. I’m sure the purpose of the card is the make one up on the spot, but I was thinking about characters I have created in the past. The main character of a story I used to work on in high school has gone through a few different names – at first her name was Nezumi, then it shifted to Panya when I grew out of centering so many of my stories around Japanese culture due to my anime/manga influences. She is a spunky, energetic, and fun loving half-elven teenage girl with shoulder length green hair and green eyes. She is a skilled martial artist, having been taught by her father who was part of the warrior caste.

In this particular world, elves belong to an isolationist society that looks down on other cultures. They’re so strict in their control of their society that intermingling with the other races is illegal, and half-elves are targeted by the assassin caste. Panya’s mother was a young human actress who was very outspoken about the restrictions of the Elven government, which is how she met Panya’s father. After Panya is born, an assassin is assigned to her family – her mother was killed when she was still a toddler, and her father died when she was a kid/preteen. He managed to kill the assassin assigned to them when he died, so the assassin’s daughter (roughly of an age with Panya) is forced to take up his unfinished assignment.

So at the beginning of the story she is somewhat of a vagabond who finally finds a place where she decides to stay – despite the fact her assassin will catch up. The backstory is kind of tragic, but she is very upbeat despite that, and a bit of a “trickster” spirit. I used to draw her all the time, so none of these images are recent.