Come back, Lupe.

"Flowers for your girlfriend?" Aerith offered.

What even... would she like? It's all desert and canyon and stuff, out where she lives.

"You're right. I wouldn't care for flowers," Lupe finally interjected, swatting away Aerith's bouqet. "I think they're frivolous, and so is your friend."

... right. I hadn't expected this to be a romantic reunion, exactly.

...

Lupe the Wolf was a complicated person. On the face of it, she's... (I wretch to say this)... an... 'innnnnnn--'

... an indigenous... figure. *sighs*

Okay, look, she's no Princess Tinyfeet. But it's no mystery that she wears feather headdresses and runs around in... are those moccasins? I can't really tell.

Lupe: "They're leg wraps!"

I still wasn't satisfied.

Lupe: "Why won't you listen to me, they're leg wraps!"

I had a bit of trouble with listening to people, to be frank.

An aside: What I do is a little bit different to character writing.

Aerith: "Is it really wise to ignore two women who are trying to chat with you?"

... they needed to understand. The audience.

When I come up with a 'character', it isn't because I put a lot of pain-staking time into 'designing' them to play out a scenario, like a thought experiment.

Instead, I often 'dream' the character. Often it's based on another character, in another story or scenario, 'crashing' into a different story or scenario, and then the clockwork just sort of runs on its own--features and traits 'merge', and something new gets created, like Gil Alastor, who is aesthetically and character-wise, a bizarre fusion of Jill Valentine, Maggie Byrde, Momo Hinamori, and then some. A lot of my own written characters are consequentially, very flat, and the strange scenarios are what move them along, since I don't usually want to waste people's time with weird second-hand characters that have a lot of melted-together traits. Sometimes something weird happens, mind you, and I get a Goddess of Thorn and Fang, but that's usually as the product of interfacing with a character-creation tool or a lore handbook for creation of deific figures, or something (and it's not like I ever properly introduced them, anyway).

But Lupe and Aerith here were simpler things. Here, I was torn between listening to my own heart, and trying to learn more about existing characters, as I wrote their interactions with me.

Aerith winced. "You do realize we're still in the story, right? This is bad form."

It was just... the pain and frustration hadn't yet subsided.

Lupe chimed in over Aerith: "I'm... not certain what you're trying to accomplish here. You weren't trying to woo me?"

That would be 'literally' romancing the noble savage.

Now, on the one side, that was a tired thing. Something I'd tell myself I'd grown out of.

And on the other, I was trying to go back and piece together clues, as to how it'd gotten like this.

But it didn't seem fair to Lupe not to love her. I was not that beyond...sane feeling. Not beyond love.

I held her, as best as a flesh thing can hold a drawing-thing. Or at least, the image. In my mind's eye, I held her.

It's just, Lupe... this is more complicated than anything Sonic would ever deal with.

"You're lying, aren't you. I can tell." She whispered, dejectedly.

Maybe, Lupe, but I'm trying to undo the lies. Can you be patient with me?

...I sighed. This was a silly project. Talking with my characters. "MY" characters. There was a conceit. I hadn't even written Lupe. I just 'intuited' her unhappiness. It was 'my' unhappiness, that I'd buried somewhere.

Lupe nudged me out of my trance. "Yes, Avery. But you'll have to promise me something?"

...what was she even going to say? I'd had moments like these, where the words just sort of popped into my head, and I still had a hard time placing a finger on what was really going on. But I tried to listen.

Lupe continued, with a humdinger of a request:

"You must never insist that I am just a character, if I'm going to be something important to you."

...that... that was a big demand.

So... I couldn't ever self-deprecate about caring for her, again. Was that... crossing a line? Into too-serious territory.

I guess this was the price of loving my characters.

It wasn't right. I needed to sort something out, first.

"I'll stifle that impulse, but it's just... not good for me to let you control me, Lupe."

Lupe chastised me: "Control is something a man surrenders to a woman he loves."

... I... did I love her, really? Like, in that way? This purple wolf from a comic book?!

...a jumble of voices overtook me.

No, that's silly.
Or, You're obsessed,

and equally unhelpful epithets, all designed to protect some vulnerability of mine elsewhere.

Fundamentally, I loved a cartoon. Was it THAT much, my love, or was it just how her eyes were drawn: Far-away, and contemplating... something?

The Wolf With the Faraway Stare.

... I was looking for something honest in myself... that I was revealing before complete strangers.