Lens On: Mr. Bends

So a little while ago I posted about Mr. Bends.  He lives in Blue Holly Wrath (aka Blue Holly's Wrath,) a town I created in my head after my roleplaying group fell apart and I needed to have a place to store my cast of OC's.  At the time, Mr. Bends didn't exist.  The star players were, and still are, remnants of that original cast, but after a while a standing quirk I have with my characters threw up the idea that they'd need some sort of curse-breaker in town.

The thrust of Blue Holly's Wrath is that it's where heroes who do not want to hero, or who currently cannot hero, go.  Sometimes they go to recuperate, sometimes they go there to retire.  The quirk I have is that all of my OC's really need to have some sort of day job.  A skill, a craft, or a willingness to do something that people will regularly pay for.  It irks me to no end when an adventure's only job is "adventurer."

I also wanted to give my favourite OC, "Illiandi Bondsmiller," someone he'd like to deny citizenship to but, at the end of the day, couldn't.  Undead folks bug that guy to no end for obvious reasons as well as personal ones, and I thought it would be fun to introduce an undead that was unassuming, hard working, and necessary to have around.  That Mr. Bends is a gem-cutter (sortof) wasn't enough to really justify him - roleplay communities are full of characters that make endless bead and bauble stuffs, so I started to think about where he was getting his gems from.

Blue Holly's Wrath is a tiny little seaside town inside a free-floating liminal bubble.  It drifts around and settles up against other realities for short periods of time and has a minor population change while the gates are open.  This makes most supplies tricky to obtain, so I figured that he'd have to get them from the population themselves, somehow.  After all, most heroes have enchanted blades and sacred stones and whatnot.

This, in turn, coincided with a recurring dream I have where I expel and illness or sadness by physically ejecting a pearl-like object (usually by sneezing!) and I decided to just hand that over to a zombie who wouldn't think it too disgusting to deal with.  After that, everything started to settle into place, including how he has to be sort of relegated to a side-alley.  My own psychiatrist is down a long, narrow alley gated at both ends by wrought iron, so I figured he could be, too.

I like it when things I write come from the dog-ends of experiences I've really had, or fragments of unconscious obsessions I've never been able to pin down.  I also like Mr. Bends.  I think he could be a useful side character in many stories, because so much of what he does and is can be frowned on by different communities, and because he's ultimately so useful.  I hope he shows up again in my writing some day.

Sometimes my writing comes to me problem first, or setting first, or character first.  I think Mr. Bends is one of those that cropped up from the setting rather than on his own, since he was formed largely by how he'd fit in, or not, with the people and place around him.