warmskies | Devorah and Love

For humans, love can be an extraordinarily complicated subject, with enough books to fill a library written on the subject. It's commonly thought that there are whole varieties of "love" depending on if you're talking about an item or idea, or if you're thinking of an actual person... and if it's a person, there's even more "loves" to consider depending on their relationship in your life.

That's if you're a human.

Devorah is a dog.

To be more fair and exact, Devorah is both of the fey, and also a dog, which means her idea of "love" is just a little bit different from humans on the base level and which gets even more different considering the life that she has lead thus far.

To start with, fey are already rather possessive and selfish creatures at their core in some respects, along with being incredibly prideful even from the smallest of them. For some, ownership is love. If you really love someone or something (and, depending on the fey, the line between those two is probably really blurry), then why wouldn't you want to keep them by your side forever and make sure they can never leave?

However, as a cu-sith, Devorah was less prone to those sorts of leaps in love. As a creature that is canine in nature, while she wasn't unaffected by bouts of territoriality and selfish pride, she was far more inclined to some of the baser instincts that in some way tempered.... some of the more fey-like aspects.

And it's made some worse or weirder or both!

And that's before we get into what happens when you traumatize a dog by giving it thumbs!

However, to get back to the most core part of how Devorah experiences love, it's important to consider that, for a dog, love is all about interaction. Rather, it's the desire for interacting, and the trust that is a part of all of that. As with many beasts, reliability and constancy are important things to her. In a (fey's idea of a) perfect world, she could just stay in one place, hoard Her People, and, like any resource guarding hound, bite people's hands off if they thought about touching them.

The experiments made all of that impossible to have, and also difficult to envision after everything had happened. Thus, incredibly unwillingly, Devorah has had to rely on a shakier concept of "trust" that isn't as sturdy as, say, keeping everyone in a den in her territory. Instead, she has to rely on "connection" that isn't quite as clear cut or physical.

Well. Mostly not physical. A fey dog can only deal with so much conceptual bullshit, like taking on a last name that is also the name of the hidden town for all of the experiments. So, before she left Cavalier, Devorah made sure to do one thing:

She had the entirety of her polycule scar up her face.

That's right - she decided that the best way to stay connected to her polycule was have them make the scar she has across her cheek. For the record, she did this by having Phoi (the leader) primarily hold the actual dagger, and then her remaining two lovers put their hands over Phoi's. Yes this is as stupid as you can imagine.

This is the connection Devorah has, along with her surname, that lets her feel able to leave Cavalier and search out the cult responsible for fucking up their perfectly normal and happy bestial lives.

Anyway, if you asked Dev "how" she loves each of her polycule, the answer would just be "I just love them???", because greek nerd shit like eros vs agape is a waste of her time. However, she does interact with them in slightly different ways, which we will go into here!

But first, just to keep it clarified: the backstory!

Devorah was initially a cu-sith just living out a normal live going inbetween planes with Etherealness, and letting out Howls of Terror that drives other creatures into fits of fear and possibly die! This is very normal and totally fine to do. If you're fey. And as is the way of creatures, who fuck, she ended up taking a partner. That would be Irbon, her partner who also got trans'd, because I keep thinking this would be funny. And things were nice! Up until they were abducted in some fashion by the cult and made into experiments for purposes Devorah doesn't get.

Because she has 9 fucking INT.

So various monsters and beasts are taken into Luna for fucked up cult experiments! Devorah is one of the more successfully and Conventionally People-shaped successes, considering she looks 99% like an elf to anyone who doesn't open her mouth too wide. However, there were also other experiments in varying degree of Success (tm), and one of them is Phoi.

Phoi actually possesses decently high INT, and was well aware that there was no way that any of them trapped experiments could do anything while trapped. So, in full conniving fashion, they opted to fake it as a Nice, Passive, Devoted, Harmless creature to the cultists, and eventually was found to be useful as an assistant of sorts. This allowed them to gather more information, and be in more places than, say, a cage or cell.

Of course, they used this to connect with some chosen experiments as well, including Devorah, whereupon they worked with her to have her report everything she ever heard from the cultists and relay it to Phoi in case important information could be gleamed. Devorah, out of all of the experiments, proved to have a talent for this. After a very long con, eventually... Phoi orchestrated a full-ass breakout and riot from within the facility where the experiments were kept, which lead to a lot of cultists being horribly mauled to death! After that, the surviving experiments all made an escape, eventually finding a secret location where they could make up their own town - Cavalier.

But that didn't erase the fact that the cult was still an issue in general, even if they'd escaped, and beasts are not immune from holding a grudge (esp fey beasts like Devorah). So Dev was chosen out of all of the group as someone who not only had proved herself to remember important information very well, but because she has a stupidly high Charisma stat and can mostly lie to people better so that she fits in.

And then she got plastered at a tavern and accidentally made a party, and met the god of death, and went into a time loop a couple of times. But that's unimportant for her relationships with her polycule she left back in Cavalier.

PHOI

So you know how multiple times in Final Fantasy XV, the gang just turns to Ignis and is like "please help us, lone brain cell", and Ignis does everything from managing the accounts to driving the car to coming up with ways to lie to border security?

Phoi is the polycule/Cavalier's Ignis.

Relatedly, very pissed off that I secretly made an Ignis-coded OC to play in Gaia Online pokemon gijinka roleplays, and Callie still 100% accurately typecast me for him when I finally got into XV. Fuck this. But that's neither here nor there.

As with many of her relationships, Devorah's bond with Phoi is very much reliant on the trauma which occurred during their time as trapped experiments. However, with Phoi, it's almost a bit more special, because Phoi was the one who basically held everyone's lives in their hand for that long-con plot. With Phoi, even though it is not longer as reliable and relatively simple as it might have been in the past, Dev is a little more willing to rely on the more vague concept of "trust even when we're not together".

Phoi proved themself to be extremely capable and reliable during the long con that lead to the break out, and they've continued to prove that they have a good head on their shoulders in leading their town to being self sufficient. Devorah might not like being away from her 'pack', but if there's anyone she feels able to trust would ever still be there even after she left, or through whatever fucked up bullshit Devorah goes through again... It's Phoi.

Phoi 100% made the name for Cavalier, and so Devorah feels some explicit connection to them through taking that as her last name as well.

Would let Phoi put a collar on her.

Used to be a Minun in the gijinka rps. Genderfluid, and indicates to those they care about what the gender of the day is by wearing different little accessories. An ideal world for them would involve all members of the cult trapped in place while they took a sledgehammer to their kneecaps and then their skull. Probably working on figuring out to what the degree the experiments fucked everyone up and how that will effect their future lives (diseases, health, if people can make families etc)

IRBON

Much like Devorah, Irbon has no god damn brain in him, but he's doing his best. Certified himbo.

Irbon is notable in that he was effectively Devorah's mate before everything went to shit, and there is a lot of relief on both of their ends that they somehow managed to make it through cult bullshit together. Much of their relationship is built on this shared past, and that they are both cu-siths at the core of them no matter what the experiments might have done to their physical form. They find a lot of familiarity in one another, despite everything having changed. That's the form their love takes: familiarity and relief.

Please understand while he is a himbo, he is also a fey dog, and so would bite someone's hand off if it got to that point.

THYST

Out of the gang, definitely the more relaxed and casual of them next to Devorah, despite trying to be a bit of an edgelord at times. Whereas Phoi is consistency and reliability, and Irbon is familiarity and comfort, Thyst is definitely the kind of love that falls more on relaxed and enjoyable bullshit. They're also more inclined to being able to bounce back from fuckery surprisingly easily, much like Devorah can. In some ways, has a very ephemeral view of things - probably part of all the trauma from being experiments, but also because some creatures can be weird like that. So very much "take charge of things you enjoy right now, because they might not be around forever"

Dev and Thyst would both use the really expensive china in the cupboard to eat Kraft Mac N Cheese, essentially, because what else are you going to do with it

Nonbinary, and used to be a Gengar in their original incarnation!

And that's the gang, how Devorah loves, and her weird issues that comes from being a fey dog! Probably she should learn that she doesn't need to have her lovers stab her in the face as a love mark? But it's probably way more funny for her to be this fucked up about things.

Additionally, I feel a part of her story (and that of Cavalier as a whole) is a mixture of either learning how to get back to the lives that were robbed from them (DEV WANTS HER TEETH TO MAUL PEOPLE, HUMAN TEETH SUCK) and also finding a way to make their place in this new existence they've essentially been forced to have. Devorah's more fey-like emotions and thought processes are important to her, even if they might not exactly be normal or healthy by Civilized Society (tm)'s standards.