cast
Louis Orlovsky (he/him)
16-19
Bisexual, kleptomaniac
Louis wishes his best friend was still here. Years ago, just when he had been starting to think his life was turning around, Ethan disappeared without a warning or a hint as to where he’d gone. Louis has really given up on finding anyone else who could replace that. Instead he tends to sulk around the Alaskan village his family moved to, not knowing if anything will change or if he’ll be stuck in the same miserable place forever.
One night, he tries running away, taking a bag, rope, and a handful of his mother’s money with him. But he gets caught in the act, and instead of a successful getaway, he’s kicked out with nothing and invited to never come back. If it weren’t for his odd new neighbor showing up and offering to help him find a place to go, Louis doesn’t know if he’d have found anything to help him, or died in the cold.
Ethos Ảo Giác (he/him)
16–19
Gay, autistic, ADHD
AKA: Miles
Miles is complicated. Really complicated. He’s a deity and just some dumb kid. He’s kind but arrogant. He’s a goof and altruistic, but a wanted murderer. He doesn’t know how to explain himself to Louis at first, so he simply decides not to. If he wants Louis to be his friend, secrecy is key. He messed up badly enough the last time around, and he doesn’t need that happening again. All he knows is that he won’t allow himself to leave Louis’s side, and that once he’s won them both the power to live forever, they won’t ever have to worry or split up again.
But that’s going to be hard, since Miles has made more enemies than he’s ready to face. Danger waits for him at every turn, and it’s only a matter of time before Louis’s life is caught in the crossfire — before Miles even gets a chance to tell him who he really is.
Prince Olya (they/them)
20
Aromantic
Olya does not want to think about what’s happening right now. They are far too high-strung and busy to do any introspection or deep thinking about why the Aether is the way it is. So things will go as usual, and they’ll preoccupy themselves with catching the Aether’s number one threat on the loose — Ethos. Ethos who had formerly been Olya’s best and only friend. It’s complicated. Again, they’d rather not think about it.
With no mother and a very frightened, hungry, incredibly well-armed kingdom to assuage, their only option is to act fast and with little mercy, advised by the zhuk generals closest to them. Not ideal. It would drive anyone insane, playing cat and mouse with a runaway murderer, while seeing for the first time their mother’s own “handiwork” with the Aether. They may never find the time - nor the strength - to go asking themselves how it ended up like this.
Billie Orlovsky (she/her)
16–19
Lesbian, ADHD
Billie is flighty and easily bored. When she thought life couldn’t be worse trapped in the gear teeth of public school, suddenly she was pulled out and shipped to a nowhere town in Alaska where there was truly nothing to do. The best she can do is keep finding ways to distract herself, like talking to the pretty photographer girl next door, making fun of her brother, or lounging about doing nothing but daydreaming (that gets old really fast).
Billie figured she’d have Louis around to take the brunt of their mother’s ire for life, but when she wakes up one day to find him gone, suddenly the prospect of running away herself doesn’t sound too bad. The only thing she doesn’t want to leave behind is Kira — but to be frank, after losing half her family already, the pain of losing just one more is quite numbed. And there are still plenty of things left to learn about herself, on the other side of the rift off the mountain road.
Kira Levi (she/her)
17-20
Lesbian
Kira is a strong-headed girl whose family has lived here for generations, and who occupies herself with photographing, documenting, and in all, keeping memory of her town and the people who have lived there. She’s popular among the local girls for her snark and her know-how, and yet with all her friends, underneath a veneer of confidence Kira is lonely and afraid of being left behind.
She has known something was going on in her town for a while, but wasn’t quite sure how to put it into words. She’s connected scant photos in her camera to lines of mythos, or the skeletons of supernatural creatures her mother told her about, and for years her theories have stayed many and loose — until she catches what appears to be some sort of beetle-shaped UFO chasing down two boys from her village. This, she realizes, may be a bit out of her depth.
Logos Qabow (they/them)
~4,000 years old
Genderless
Logos likes to let on that they don’t feel anything, but that isn’t completely true. While they aren’t a very sympathetic person, they’re smarmy, confident, and easily annoyed — which makes Ethos’s rebellious antics a nightmare for them to manage. To Logos, things are best static, unchanging, un-muddled by excess emotion. Which again makes Ethos a nightmare.
Logos is unmoved by most things, beyond simply petty annoyances, which makes them incredibly stubborn and the effective backbone amongst their two siblings. But while losing their little brother to the temptation of humanity was bad, losing him for good to the void below the dome shattered something within them. Logos is a stickler for rules and rigid systems, but they are also the first to admit when something is unsalvageable. Maybe if this whole lord thing doesn’t work out, humanity wouldn’t be too shabby of a fallback.
Pathos Motus (she/her)
~14,000 years old
Genderless, feminine, sapphic
Pathos is so emotional she literally melts. The water you see at the bottom of the dome she lives in is her…shedding. Even though her job is to sway her subjects in the right direction, the safe direction, she herself is quite easy to manipulate. A “tall cup of water,” you could call her, Pathos loses it quick if she feels touched, shocked, betrayed, or cheated. And she’s scary when she loses it. WOMEN, AM I RIGHT? /j
While a sympathetic and easily moved soul, Pathos is also deep in the game of the Aether, unwilling to listen to any voices telling her that this game is evil. Her tears, remnant, are literally used to kill. Willfully ignorant and compliant, she will deny any criticism of the realm or her place in it until it’s far too late. Of her siblings, Logos may be quick to be callous, but Pathos is the last one to turn her back on the murderous system that eats her own people alive. Only took 14,000 years :)
Queen Pavlova (she/her)
~100 years old
The one who started it. Pavlova is the (formerly) reigning ruler of the Aether, and did a bang-up job making sure she had plenty of gold, bread, fruit and wine for herself while those on the outskirts of the main Ethereal island had nothing. She didn’t necessarily invent bad government practices, but she was unlucky enough to rule at the moment Ethos started finding out the Aether’s dirty secrets.
Mother to Olya, Pavlova is overall a very neglectful and careless person. Her justification for much of this neglectful policy is “give them a grape, they’ll take the whole vine”—that is to say, the poor will grow greedy and lazy if given proper aid. To everyone’s surprise, it was a lord who ended up taking her life when an argument over the wellbeing of the Aether went too far. Who will take over now?…give it some time.
The Judge (It/Its)
Ageless/immortal; reformed ~500 years
Boundless deity
AKA: “God”
If you’re looking for God this is the closest thing you’ll find in the Cosmos. The Judge is limitless, all-encompassing, and is the very source of life through all the Cosmos. It witnesses all from Its chamber in the Apex Sector, and provides power to every happening in the universe (such as the birth of lords, or the gifting of a nimbus). Every couple hundred years It breaks down and takes new form, which can result in a change of appearance, disposition, or gender. This upsets Miles in particular, who doesn’t see why it’s acceptable for The Judge to change Its whole thing all willy-nilly, but not for him, who was born with a singular, unchanging purpose.
It’s difficult to give a succinct history of The Judge since It sort of IS history, having been present through everything. It likes birds, and has plenty of pet falcons roaming each sector, waiting to catch someone doing something naughty. This is not something It does within Its jurisdiction as arbiter of life, death and justice; just for fun. It’s allowed to be a jokester once in a while, since It spends basically Its entire existence sitting in a bubble with no one to talk to.
the highest fantasy i will ever write :)
When We Live Forever surrounds two friends on the loose, Miles and Louis, as they navigate different dimensions and evade the militaristic insect ship police force of the Aether. it involves lots of homosexuality, neurodivergence, emotional baggage and SHHHHH! secrets... im going to fix this paragraph later
WWLF is a project i have been working on for about 5 years now and is constantly going through new waves of ideas & revamps. to the left are the most up-to-date character sheets i've made, and IMO, the most refined everybody's designs have gotten so far. :) one of my goals with this story is to meaningfully & appropriately incorporate aspects from multiple worldly cultures into the worldbuilding, characters and plot, and though i'm a long way from reaching that goal right now i'm determined to get it right and make smth truly beautiful. hopefully some of my inspiration shines through the designs for characters like Ethos, Logos and Pavlova.
the characters' profiles are now visible via clicking their image!!! :)
skyesu's WWLF workshop!!!
Right is a (long) 1-page comic I made for an assignment, briefly summarizing Miles's arc! Condensing his story into exactly 1 (long) page was really challenging and even more challenging was making it make any sense to anyone but me. But it worked, somehow, and now we have gays! :3
Above: Early in new!Miles's development, I started thinking of him as just a manic pixie dream boy whose #1 job was to enchant and confuse (mostly confuse) Louis. His highly whimsical energy entranced me. So I made these doodles of him, trying out different gendered Hmong clothing for him, and ended up settling on an outfit reminiscent of the one on the left (masculine). I tried to incorporate the star and soul symbols from that one into his later character sheet.
I associate his fashion with that of the Green and Black Hmong groups of SEAsia. (example pictures below, courtesy of hmongembroidery.org and theartofhmongembroidery blog) Alex Yang's art of Hmong clothing and the respective groups they belong to also helped me out a lot!!!
