Sigh, the creation of the Pilot Manga area seems to be a little behind schedule, so I need to break down these workblog entries into smaller chunks, otherwise I will be talking about what kind of pencils I use (none) and how I prefer to set up my laptop by the time Zephyr Dray is actually put online.

But I will start to talk about the main characters.  I earlier mentioned that I had worked out the main characters over one frantic lunch. I usually think in the terms of worlds, rather than characters, and in many ways that is how I started thinking about Zephyr (Skytrain or Dray, depending on what point in its evolution you want to start talking about.)

But what characters I needed came out of what kind of story did I want to tell.  We have the Appalachia mountains and early America, so it quickly became obvious that environment just screams for stories about the frontier.  But it isn't an empty frontier and the first iteration of the story was about flight, movement, travel.  The only people that have to continually are the merchants, the folks that bring finished goods to settlers and in return take raw material back to the cities.

So a merchant. But let's face it, TokyoPop's audience is not older folks looking for business lessons, so I needed characters that were younger.  Zephyr Dray could have a single main character, but since I was thinking of this an action story, if there was just a single main character, he would have to focus, so to speak, on the action elements.  All of the other elments of the story (the political and social aspects) would get short shrift, especially since I wasn't feeling like I could go all pulp hero like and have a single character be all knowing.  Especially since these were younger characters, still trying to find themselves (ohh, metaphor for the frontier)  I didn't want it be 2 main leads, because then everyone would expect a romance subplot, or there would be slashing of the characters (in my head if nothing else, I was warped by early X-Files fanfic, back when the X-Files was good)

Okay three main characters.  Gotta give everyone something specific to do, otherwise fall into the character trap of having a character hang onto someone's arm and say that they are awesome.  The readers should say that a character is good, not another character.  In gaming, characteristics of players are often carved up into three areas, physical, mental and social.  Okay, one character to kick ass, one build an ass-kicker and one character to take the names.

All men or all women would have been unbalanced.  So two of one and one of the other gender.  Immediately the inclination was that reverse expectations and have a woman kick ass.  Contrast with another woman in the more traditional role of the social lead.  That leaves the guy to build things

And this, this is me piecing out a though process that probably took less than a minute.  Not that I haven't had reason to go back and revisit this decision, but the balance of three characters so far has worked out in every iteration of the story so far, allowing me to tell every variation of the Zephy Dray story.  Every time I think  a character doesn't have a place in the story, something opens up and with very few cosemtic changes everything works out, either as well or better than I hoped.

So what the hell were the characters names?!?  Who were they?