Question:
What was your character's first, or most memorable, love affair? It can be anything from a pre-teen crush to a memorable love affair. Be sure to describe the object of your character's affection, along with the changes that your character went through in terms of feelings and thoughts about that person. Did it start out as maddening hatred? Instant love? Who fell for whom first? Was love a surprise? Assuming it has, how did it all end? How do all involved (your character, your lover, rivals, observers, etc.) feel about it now?Answer:
Lume has had two significant relationships in her life. The first was with her martial arts Sensee at the age of 16. That didn't turn out well for either of them.
For details on the relationship with her Sensee I'm going to refer you to an essay I already wrote but didn't get any karma for, so I don't feel bad about using it here.
There's also some factual information on that affair in her backstory.
After she moved to Boston, she had sort of a proto-relationship going on with a man named Joseph. Joseph owned the bar Rust where Lume was working as a bouncer. Lume was very, very touchy about his overt romantic interest, but Joseph was a decent guy and he tried to be patient with her. Eventually her twitchiness and refusal to have anything approaching an official relationship started to wear his patience a bit thin. He was killed when his bar burned down mysteriously about six months after Lume started working there. Most of the rumors in that neighborhood say that Lume was responsible, but there was no clear evidence of who or what started the fire.
In reality, Lume was not responsible for his death (though somewhere in her heart she probably feels she was). She was lucky to get out the building with her own life (she lived in a room above the bar) and had absolutely no hope of rescuing Joseph. She doesn't even know if he was still alive by the time she woke up. After that she did her best to just ignore the fact that he was dead and deny to herself the fact that she had been starting to care about him.
(My character is not normally full of so much angst and pathos... could we have some questions I can answer a bit more cheerfully?)