Stormsong

Once, Stormsong was a perfectly normal comparatively-innocent Mossflower weasel – well, not normal in that he wasn’t anything like as violent as weasels usually are in Mossflower, but otherwise. Anyway, he reached the rank of captain in the Nighthunt horde in the epic fanfic Vengeance Quest (rated R for violence and sexual references, NSFW but still good) and seemed to be doing fine. His author also seemed to be doing fine, as Agents Laburnum and Foxglove were pleasantly surprised to find when they discovered the main character, the squirrel Riala Goldentail, was in fact worthy of being left alive.

-SPOILERS FOR VQ AHEAD.-

Unfortunately for him, Nightdeath Longclaws, leader of the horde, did not take kindly to the discovery of his healer’s, ahem, alternative orientation, and chose to allow thoroughly gruesome things to be done to him, culminating very quickly in his painful death. Agents Laburnum and Foxglove took pity on him and saved him from this, along with Subcaptain Skyfire, who was intended to be slain by the official heroine Riala Goldentail (whose lack of a capital offence probably contributed to the agents’ desire to do something worthwhile while in the fic, since there was nothing to kill). He’s taking to Bad Slash work fairly well; he has excellent lung capacity and a good dramatic voice for the traditional exorcism shouts, amazing paw control after years of lute-playing and surgery, and as a healer he’s good at telling what is and isn’t physically possible in the NC-17 parts.

Rumour has it that in his darker moments Stormsong considers finding the co-ordinates for VQ and going back because a horrible death is preferable to what’s currently happening to him. The list of HQ mishaps so far includes: PTSD and graphic flashbacks for a trauma which technically didn’t happen to him; other people thinking the aforementioned situation is funny; working in the Bad Slash department, to which his official introduction was several of the sections of That Series; being persuaded to foster Molly Rath and Moses Taggson; being forced to explain to Agent Drake, among others, that he is not engaged to Skyfire; being stalked by practically every female mustelid in the Official Fanfiction University of Redwall, both students and staff (several of whom have just started reading VQ and therefore he can’t tell them exactly why he wants them to back off for fear of spoiling the fic); and the fact that thanks to his semi-Shakespearean dialect a lot of the people he meets can’t understand half of what he says. It’s unknown why he’s become so unlucky, but the generally accepted theory is that the Laws of Comedy require any character who thinks they have dignity to be singled out and have said dignity systematically removed. Research into the Laws of Narrative also suggests that the suffering he would have experienced had he stayed for his official death built up and must be released over the course of his newly-elongated life, hence the sudden influx of bad luck. He copes via music therapy with his beloved lute, the support of his new friends, regular help from Doctor Freedenberg, and a slowly-increasing addiction to absinthe and Bleeproducts (not at the same time, he isn’t actually suicidal).

He actually doesn’t mind having Molly and Moses around nearly as much as he pretends. He has Molly under better control than Skyfire does, generally by giving her sweets or shiny objects as a bribe to shut up. Much to his embarrassment, she addresses him as “Uncle Stormy” in public – in his words, “What? ‘Twas this or ‘New Daddy’.”