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Oz and Gerel

Summary:

Oz and Gerel (originally written Nov 2023)

He's her little goofball, and he makes her terrible hand-made trinkets and she loves them very much.

Notes:

83 and 13, that's Oz the hapless security man and Gerel the sky-pirate lady who runs the general store.

Gerel might be a bit younger than him? Unless he's younger than he seems, which WOULD do well towards explaining his rock-bottom (i wrote stone-level at first, what does that even mean wtf) self-esteem and questionable decision to rely on Goldpaw fortune tellers to help him improve his hand-eye coordination. I also headcanon him as aus-spec. Very eager, easily duped by charlatans, physically clumsy, slow to learn from repeated mistakes, all of that.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

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Aww, because of Oz having so much bad luck and stumbling around all the time, he'd totally have some kind of meet-cute with Gerel, where he walks in with a huge number of packages and drops them all over the floor. Setting it in Gerel's shop would let me build on my headcanon that Evan sells a lot of the tribute-tithed-items back to Gerel's shop, and like, might not even ask for Gold in return! (footnote 1)

Gerel can have an extra role as an unofficial minister of finance perhaps! She handles all the goods - she'd probably have a small army of staff at this point, around Chapter 3, that's when Broadleaf citizens would start appearing, including our boy Oz. (footnote 2)

And I kind of head-canon her shop as also the post office! [The Goodfellows Inn (had to check that in-game ugh) is more centrally located, right on Aranella Square, but their side-duty would be as a literal hotel, until we build New Moon Rooms (had to check that name too) with the DLC, which can only happen after we've visited every hotel, which means after we get to Dell.] So the general store has already been the unofficial tourism info center, where people go more for info than for food. With Gerel being a social butterfly, knowing everyone, she gets into the mail business because she's always passing notes along, b/c EVERYBODY comes to the general store! So it'd be real easy to start a wall of just basic small boxes, that would hold paper mail and 'package is waiting for you' notes. And the set-up could grow from there, they could get bigger mail boxes, a whole separate wing eventually!

It would be more of a 5-n-1 sort of story, where they run into each other several times and maybe Oz gets a bit besotted and gets a silly idea in his head that he should imitate her accent to win her over, and MAYBE TANI HELPS, AWW, I COULD TOTALLY SEE THAT. A very wholesome and awkward and hilarious sort of story. And the plus-one would be when Oz finally managed to ask her out, and she agrees to a date very easily, I'd say! And even if they don't last, like, that's not the POINT. They have fun being out together. She's totally chill with whatever lil fuck-ups he makes - bit of a mommy-role for her, but! She kinda seems like the type to not resent that. And her man, a little bumble-fuck, but earnest, so very earnest. INNOCENT, perhaps is what she likes in him.

The same warrior-like core determination of a sky-pirate, but absolutely none of the competence or swagger. And perhaps he will grow into more competence, or perhaps he won't, but he's big into doing Acts of Service as a love language, and honestly? I think she'd appreciate that a lot. She could probably teach him words of appreciation if that was her secondary one. i dooont think she'd like gifts lol. Cuz she does so much with STUFF for her JOB, she wouldn't think of BUYING THINGS as particularly romantic...

AHA! So maybe THE QUEST THAT OZ ASKS OF EVAN, LATER, is to teach him how to make something by hand!? And he's terrible at it?? Maybe THAT'S what he asks of Tani! Oh, maybe a lil charm-thing, like the swift solutions guy offers as a potential fetch-quest for Evan. Oooh, that'd be fun! If Tani and Batu and everyone were having THEIR OWN quest or two from each person! I'd loooove to see a second quest with every citizen but that WOULD LITERALLY DOUBLE the amount... well, plus 50%, cuz you have to do a quest to get them to join... that'd be fun as hell to write, tho!

So yeah, very wholesome Gerel being very accepting and enjoying his innocence while also appreciating his sterling backbone, and the very hapless and determined Oz bumble-fucking his way around to asking her out and making her utterly terrible hand-made gifts that NO ONE would sell, that she loves to pieces because they're FOR HER, and they're NOT useful, they're NOTHING like work, like apothecary-stocking, like first-aid (which she probably knows, probably most sky-pirates do) - they're just FUN. Pointless little ornaments - and she had SO FEW just-for-fun things, in Cloudcoil Canyon.

"I ain't about to become a collecta' or any o' that jazz wot them Dell folks get up to," she warns him one day as she puts a third misshappen pot on a high display shelf near the roof of their home. "But I love these little doodads ya bring me, Ozzie. /Because/ they're pointless. Just for /beauty!/ I ain't never had much o' THAT in me life. This's you sayin' you love me. And I hear it, loud and clear." And she smiles and hugs him close and all his vibrating, stiff-backed tension melts away, as it always does, and he thanks every lucky star he knows, by name.

Oooh, maybe he actually becomes a pretty good astronomy teacher! For the kids!? Because he spends so much time with Goldpaw star-readers, he'd learn a LIL something! And just SEEING the open sky is a wonder, to him from BL, so spending time outside, in the dark secret hours where the rush is less pronounced, he'd like that. He might get to collab with Hydropolitans, to talk about navigation by the stars - hah, if the group of the kids ever gets to go out to sea for a practical, then HE'D HAVE SOME OF GEREL'S MEDS ON HAND FOR SEASICKNESS, AWWW. Cuz he would totally get sea-sickness, let's be real, that's just his luck! :P

So perhaps a good fanart is the two of them holding hands on a hill on a picnic blanket at midnight, looking at the stars. Gerel would know a good number of them too, after all, being a sky pirate living under the open sky... that'd be a cute scene too, if she brings Oz up north to the Sky Pirate Reunion gathering, and he's just so vibratingly-ecstatic about everything, and fucks things up, and NEITHER of them go in a flying machine - aha, perhaps she's bad at it? Or, she's mediocre, but just doesn't like it, and is happy to stay landed for him - and they get very drunk and she insists on him sleeping in a bedroll on the ground beside her, near the smoldering ashes of the bonfire... that'd be a good fanart bit too. hah, he HAS seemed a bit 'chasing around a toddler' esque, huh... and he'd be aware of that! he'd want to grow past it! and perhaps on the way home from that get-together, they'd be talking about it, and come to the idea of him learning star positions n shit, and that'd be a great new direction for him! (footnote 3)

Notes:

(1) Evan DOES start to wonder to Roland what he can DO with all the Kingsguilders that he has collected... Perhaps there's a non-gameplay use for them.. Construction, maybe? All those houses we don't PERSONALLY build, that spring up around every new Level of the kingdom. Schools, too, I'd guess. Paying for the construction workers from Capstan and other places?? But the real currency worldwide is Guilders, not KG... hm. It could be, a local currency? IN ADDTION to the world-wide currency of standard-gold aka guilders? Like how that one town in Oregon does it, they sell wooden tokens that can circulate locally, but they make MORE money from selling them as souvenirs to tourists, i think. (citation needed) There's also paying citizens to leave their 'day job' to work on a particular project for the kingdom, like when you ask them to research specific things in-game. Maybe KG is like, larger gold coins? Like gold bars? That are exchanged between kingdom treasuries and simply aren't seen or touched by non-court-officials? Anyway, more about Gerel! (end note 1)

(2) Broadleaf's plot needs more focus on the labor dispute, in my opinion. It doesn't seem to be AS AFFECTED as Goldpaw's citizenry was by the six-rolls, like, that one woman and child in the square saying they can only afford gruel. Or the way, in Hydropolis, that everyone is scared of TALKING, because of Leander's ever-present eyes. Cuz those two places, the overall citizenry was AFFECTED BY, but unaware of, the true dastardliness of the ruler's plans. The statue manipulation scheme Goldpaw wasn't widely known. The Hydropolis queen doing the constant magical upkeep, also not widely known. All they SAW was the tax rate being high, and the rules being extremely harshly enforced, respectively. So i feel like, only a very small circle of Broadleaf citizens would KNOW about the perpetual fission reactor, or, if it HAD been advertised, few would know about the inhumane working conditions. The major talking point would be the protests, and various citizens having various opinions about it. Or, since that's still too simple, there could even be a resistance force that was doing direct action to smash the machines and prevent the perpetual fission reactor from being finished! Now, realistically, the best thing to do with robots is to make sure they fail HARMLESSLY, to design them so that, if anything goes wrong, they shut down. That's a good Luddite move, just turn them off! Make people spend tons of man-hours diagnosing and fixing the robots - instead of putting people's lives at risk by making the robots go rogue and kill humans. There even WAS a side-quest like that in-game, I think, one ran off into a cave, and we had to defeat it.
(end note 2)

(3) It's my personal mission to give each of the BL cops a new lease on life - they can have a sunset period, where they transition away from the hyper-vigilance they were trained into in Broadleaf. They could become mercenaries for hire, bodyguards, army men, or the like, but I'd like for all of them to at least have a CHOICE in leaving the demanding, physical-labor kind of lifestyle. My headcanons on the BL cops will be lore discussed elsewhere. (end note 3)

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