The curious shopkeeper

Yharnem Books & Rarities is nestled into an obscure corner of Ishgard, too far from the Jeweled Crozier for her select clients' tastes, and too far from the Brume for Hotaru's worries about her most venerable customers. A heavily built stone and slat structure, it exudes the same guarded warmth its proprietess does to strangers meeting her for the first time.To a new visitor, the shop appears to be a comfortably unfocused purveyor of anything even faintly mysterious. Multitudinous books, alchemist tinctures, apothecarian remedies, and a few curio antiques fill its shelves and spill onto the counters. A warm fire, mug of tea, and bare seating welcome most interlopers, a privilege governed by flashing violet eyes and the unearthly white glimmers within obsidian scales that seem to move on their own to unsettle the unwelcome. The scales and horns, mild exotic accent, and her curious habit of bowing to any she considers familiar mark her foreignness to the city and even the continent. Despite her strangeness, Hotaru seems unable to turn away those desperate enough to find her shop for basic medicine -- from a lanolin salve for frostbite to 'ginger stones' that will make hot water fume and emit hot vapors to clear the sinuses and lungs of a ragged cough.To those with a letter of introduction and the means to request a "consultation", however, Hotaru and her shop are purveyors of curiosities, relics, and the forbidden. A minor heretic relic? Books banned by the Church? An heirloom lost to the ice and snow in the Calamity? If Hotaru does not possess a thing, she seems able to reach into the world and find a path to its acquisition. There are limits, of course -- some things cannot go unnoticed no matter how discrete the client. She does not simply dazzle with tales, any of her "upstairs" clients can expect a thorough provenance to an artifact or curio, whether on her shelf or acquired at request.

Gallery(yet to be revamped)

OOC Basics

Hi there! I'm May, and Hotaru is my beloved muse.Yes she IS a Sailor Saturn expy, but it started as weird AU fanfiction and it's only gotten further from canon since. So those parallels you're seeing are very real, but also not something you should rely on.Most of my stories and themes around her involve horror, violence, cults, stalking, paranoia, body horror, and an obsession with world building.About that world building: I have a headcanon section on this carrd. I don't expect anyone to know it/remember it, but I'd recommend giving it a glance through for things that might come flying out of left field in case they're an issue you'd like to bring up.While I'm happy to involve and regularly might portray regressive, racist, patriarchal, classist, homophobic, ableist etc etc themes in a story, none of these are okay outside the story. I also understand it's possible to accidentally offend each other without thinking, so I try to be understanding and...Communicate, communicate, communicate! Do you not like something? Are you confused about something? Did I absolutely lose you in an insane labyrinth of my own inward referencing terms and ideas? Please! Tell me! Let's talk about it! Despite how much of a verbal steamroller I might seem on occasion, I absolutely do not mind rephrasing, re-explaining, or trying to figure something out together. I get as much sense of accomplishment from solving this as I do from things going perfectly. It's weird....Speaking of, sometimes I will rephrase things three times, or more, going in my own little circle. If it feels like I am repetitively hammering you with something... yeah, I'm sorry, you might need to stop me, or wait until I realize what I'm doing. But I really don't mean to be browbeating you.Adult themes! Other story things! I'm absolutely open to romantic and sexual themes or topics in roleplay. They do probably require some extra out of character handling/communication just to be sure we're all on the same page. There is a 'central canon' Hotaru attached to my main Free Company crowd, and depending on how a story/interaction is set up and proceeds, we may or may not be writing in a totally separated branch from that.And lastly... I can be a flake sometimes. I'm sorry. I try to communicate around it, but life, depression, and the creative process just are what they are, sadly. If it becomes a source of frustration and bad feelings, I'd rather remain friendly contacts than drag someone through it. So, communicate, please!

story hooks

Her Shop (Ishgard)
Her Friends (A museum in Ul'dah)
Her Other Home (Kugane)
That One Time She Did Some Freak Thing (too many)This section is still to be worked on.

Headcanon Lore

Ishgard - The city pre-calamity extended downwards quite a ways as we see looking over the edge in the Firmament. When the Calamity hit, many people in the lowest levels, often the most poor of the city, died or had to flee higher in the city. This resulted in the crowded and desperate state of the Brume as we experience it.Most of the lower levels remain abandoned, and together with the sewer and spillway systems below even those, form an expansive and varied "underhalls" or "deeps" or "frozen crypts", kept largely close to or below freezing by the uncontrolled aether of the maelstromWhen the Calamity struck the broader Coerthan Highlands, the population by and large fled to Ishgard. While the harvest had mostly been done and could be brought to Ishgard, malnutrition and its related diseases ran rampant. The church had to take an especially strong hand in organizing the survival of its flock through the years of rebuilding and reorganizing.We see several examples of "noble houses fallen on hard times". As above it seems that the countryside inhabitants became internal refugees in the city -- and that includes the countryside gentry. In the time since, fortunes have whithered and not all have adapted. It's my belief that many of these slowly decaying houses became a gentry military class dedicated to the Dragonsong War for a lack of other opportunities. While technically peers, they do not have anything near the resources of even the minor houses that were already urbanites pre-calamity.If we parallel the Ishgardian Church to the Roman Catholic church circa 1100 to 1500, clerics are some of the wildest and wackiest intellectuals of their era. The oldest universities were staffed almost entirely by religious officials of one sort or another, and saw an enormous amount of occult, heretical, and other esoteric scholarship and interest, regardless of the Church's public stance on the subject.Given the prominence of the Astrological Observatory in Ishgard, I believe a lot of Astrology is integrated into cultural beliefs. Auspicious days for business ventures, births, marriages, every life event imaginable are a varying concern from "frequent" to "incredibly pervasive", largely based on how much money a household could spend on astrological advice.Yharnem Moon Clan - Calling an isolated island on the periphery of La Noscea their ancestral home, but spread to every corner of the world, there are tribes of miqo'te Keepers of the Moon that call each other cousins. They protect a thousand secrets, but one above all others. Hotaru has an arrangement with them to research, advise, and dispose of artifacts they haven't the direct expertise for. The innocent, she sells as curios. The risky, she finds responsible homes for. The truly dangerous, she documents and seeks to contain them through her friends and allies.Hingan Clerical Traditions - The clerics, mediums, and mystics of Hingashi aren't that unusual. They do roughly correlate to the basic magical traditions of thaumaturges, arcanists, and conjurers; even if they do not organize themselves on these lines. The trouble comes with their lack of the higher traditions. They do not lock for monstrosities, ancient buried evils, or new ones of their own creation compared to the rest of the world, though. Instead they deal with such things through coordination and sheer numbers. Every shrine, temple, or esoteric school must coordinate and contribute to suppressing and recontaining threats that break their seals. Mass rituals are a requirement, and casualties are expected in the process of containing the greatest terrors haunting the reclusive island nation. Even though Hotaru has engaged with more advanced traditions and left the land of her birth, she still leans towards a deeply ritualistic view of magic, and believes she is just as obligated to return if a threat requires her or emerges in the vicinity of the shrine that raised her. (I realize this is not entirely congruent with Rokkon as presented in some ways, but I love it too much)Those are the major points of my headcanon. As mentioned I don't really expect anyone to KNOW them during RP, but I want to put the basics somewhere so we can discuss any direct conflicts or concerns.