I spent last night and most of today laughing with my friend about the stories we used to write and draw and roleplay and act out and just generally Make together.  We were both howling about it and so I started redrawing some of the characters I made for a story we concocted on a camping trip together in June of 2001.   My friend brought along a baby names book she had bought in the grocery store check out line which we consulted like a sacred text to give all these people names that were ~meaningful~ to the story.  

I tweaked them both to not be painful to look at because 2001 me was armed with Crayola everything and Anime.  Colors and shapes could become alarming. 

The top one is Akira, who is the genderless reclusive village ‘elder’ despite looking very young.   Akira has just always been there and no one has questioned it for decades.  Akira is able to do magic, though I literally can’t remember how many people in the town know this at the start.  Most people are kind of low-key afraid of Akira and just kind of happy they don’t have reason to interact. 

The bottom one is Marlon, from an important family and one of the two prominent scholars on the history of the people who founded his society in the mountain and the one in the river at the base of the mountain.  He’s very invested in history but also kind of vain about himself and his heritage and spends a lot of time on his hair and collecting fancy wine.