Is he a Human or a Gaunt?

[Maldeus]

I have a character named Sing. This character is either going to be a regular ol' human, or else he's going to be a custom race called a gaunt. Tall, thin, pale, bloodsuckers with unusually long arms and fingers, no hair, and catlike eyes. They typically dress in trenchcoats, robes, and victorian era dresses. Considering his line of work ("adventurer"), Sing'll probably end up in the former most of the time.

Sing, himself, is a withdrawn, introverted person. He seems detached and apathetic towards everything because he's dying inside, because the world (like pretty much all of my fictional worlds) sucks. Those of you who recall my earlier posts on TS2.0 may remember that it's basically a gameworld except it's not a game. You kill monsters to get better items to kill bigger monsters in an endless cycle of death and struggle, and Sing takes to it poorly. Also, Sing is almost certainly going to end up romantically involved with a human character named Chime, because they don't really have any options other than each other. Everyone else is pretty hard and calloused.'

So this leads me to my question: Should Sing be a human or a gaunt?

[Deleted]

I really love the imagery with that name. I got the visuals as soon as I read the word Gaunt even before the desctiptive sentence. The world too sounds interesting.

Sing, to me, doesn't sound like a Gaunt name right off the bat. It would help to know more about the character though as the name makes him sound like a positive character.

Would Sing's species be relevant to the plot? Would it explain his character or how he reacted to events? How are Gaunts viewed in this world? Would it make his relationship with Chime more poignent or just more difficult, or not make a difference at all? Is there going to be more that two main-ish characters?

[Maldeus]

I ended up making him a gaunt, because this is a NaNoWriMo thing and I really needed to just get going on it. To answer your questions, though:

Sing's species is irrelevant to the plot, because they don't get near the lands of the gaunts or the werewolves (two species who are at one another's throats), and no one else really cares, not even werewolf adventurers.

Most species' NPCs react a certain way because they were raised in their culture, but as an adventurer, Sing was spawned in a Muck Pond, fully grown, so his personality is pretty much a wildcard.

Gaunt society is viewed as elitist, possibly power-hungry, and definitely predatory. Again, though, none of this applies to gaunt adventurers.

Gaunts and humans are sexually incompatible, so on a physical level the relationship is obviously going to become strained when they hit the point where they'd want to get in bed with each other but can't. Gaunt society looks down on gaunts who interact with other races for any purpose other than business, but Sing is, again, an adventurer, so he exists outside of gaunt society from start anyway, and isn't likely to care much what they think about his choice of girlfriend.

And yes, there a grand total of four other main characters, who each take turns trying to kill each other at different points in the plot. Speak is a stoic human (possibly felyne, who are basically anime cat-people) wizard who specializes in offense and hates to see the group take courses of action he considers unwise (usually he's right, but it takes the others a bit to catch onto this). Cutter is a fiery human (possibly werewolf) knight who traded his soul for demonic power at the climax of a Samhain quest last year, and has since come to regret it (the whole "power at any cost" thing was mostly a phase he went through). Command is a charismatic human necromancer who's basically bent on world domination, and whose philosophy on power can be summed up as "if you have to choose between being loved and feared, you've already lost." Whisper is an enigmatic human (possibly felyne, clockwork, gaunt, or werewolf, he's so covered up it'd be hard to tell anyway) rogue who is undyingly loyal to Command and very rarely speaks.

[Deleted]

Very cool characters. I can totally relate to Cutter, just hate it when I trade my soul for power. I like the concept of spawning like computer game characters, I hadn't thought it would be that close to a game. With the upgrades in weapons etc. is the ultimate goal death? Not the characters goals obviously, but the game's goal. They just keep fighting tougher and tougher monsters til they die?

All these wrimos are so interesting I'd love to see the end products

Edit: Just rethought about 'not compatible' and now can't get horrible thoughts out of my head. Is it like a corkscrew, grow out of his back, they pollinate instead of breed. Too many questions

[Maldeus]

Heheh. Gaunts have holes leading straight into their bloodstream near where their neck meets the left shoulder, which are usually covered by retractable skin flaps. When sexually aroused, the flaps retract and the gaunts can suck each others blood (this is one of the reasons why they love tall, thick collars so much). This obviously doesn't really provide any nutritional value to either of them, but it does allow the male to impregnate the female. It's actually not necessary for the male to suck the female's blood at all, but it's tradition to do so, mostly because sucking blood while having your blood sucked is, being the gaunt version of sex, extremely pleasurable. Incidentally, because the mothers don't have vaginas, gaunt babies have to make their own holes on the way out of the womb, chest-burster style.

[Deleted]

You're a sick man Maldeus