A lot of the time, when I create a character, I have a pretty solid idea of who he or she is.  I know a good chunk of the backstory, the personality, and maybe even a story goal or two from the start.  But sometimes, it takes a little longer to get into a character’s head and really get a feel for him or her.

Annalea was one of those.  Let’s be honest, she was originally just an NPC — Threnn’s little sister, a sometime bard and confidant for my paladin.  The only reason I ever actually rolled the character was because I had a very strong image of a blonde girl in a white dress in my mind.  Woe to me when I learned you needed to be level 17 before you could equip the White Woolen Dress.  So, a-levelling we went, with Anna occasionally offering commentary in our IC channel as she melted faces.

And then she started to grow on me.  I knew very, very little about her, really.  She was generally happy-go-lucky.  She got along with her mother far better than Threnn did.  She was good at singing.  She took up being a shadow priestess so she’d be able to defend herself when she went out into the world, not out of any desire to be a true priestess.  Anytime I tried to sit down and think of her story beyond that, though, she eluded me.

Revelations about Anna have come slowly over the years, sometimes sneaking up on me and clubbing me over the head, sometimes slipped surreptitiously into the stack of ideas for other things where I’d find them, like someone snuck over to my desk and left a note when I’d stepped away.

Her very first one was the former kind: I was working on a conversation between Anna and Threnn, wherein Threnn was fretting about having children.  I’d established (in my head, at least) that their mother and maternal grandmother and so on back through their family had trouble carrying babies to term.  Anna was explaining most of them away, trying to reassure Threnn — this woman was always sickly, that one was probably preventing her pregnancies on purpose — when Threnn looked at her and said, “Anna, what about you?”

I sat back from the keyboard and frowned at what I’d typed.  That hadn’t been in the plan.  But as I explored the possibility of this bright, sunny character having such a terrible thing happen to her, and having come through it, it felt more and more right.

I left the details fairly vague.  At that point, they didn’t matter to the story, and whenever I tried to tease out the specifics, nothing came.  Nearly a year passed before I figured them out, and even that story came slowly, growing from random RP that was meant to just fill in a lull in our IC channels.

Smaller things came to light about her between that first revelation and its eventual fleshing out:  my girl had a temper.  She was in some ways stronger than Threnn believed her to be, but in others, far more fragile (Threnn, I created to be nearly unbreakable; Anna, I’ve realized, has the potential to shatter).  She got freckles when she went out in the sun without a hat, and thought she could bleach them away with lemons.

Most recently, she revealed yet another to me.  She and Tarquin were sitting in the Pig, being miserable gits together (as he phrased it), and he pulled out a cigarette.  After a moment’s pause, he offered one to Anna.

And, after a moment’s pause, she accepted it.

It’s a small thing, just a little bit of flavor added to the character.  Her smoking is only an occasional thing, not the constant chain-smoking of her brother-in-law, not even something she does regularly when drinking.  She coughed at those first couple of drags as her lungs remembered the feel of it.  A small thing, but something so very Annalea that it became instant canon.

So, how about it?  What surprises have some of your characters sprung upon you?

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