Neko

Cal isolates and raises his two younger brothers, Rae and Lem, in a pocket dimension. Frightened of the bare rock that is Faidia pre-settlement, Cal first attempts to isolate with May, but she resists him and runs away (she doesn't like his vibe, and she prefers to live alone already).

After he finds Rae & Lem as very young babies, he imprisons them, hoping to keep them forever as his personal property. Due to this and the disinterest of his sister May in the two new children, he delays the development of his family and their planet for thousands of years, and nearly kills them all. It is only by Lem's actions that the elementals are saved and life comes to thrive on Faidia.

Cal has wide interests including computers, biomechanics, and animal husbandry. In the modern era of the comic, he takes care of a herd of lorriams on May's farm, harvesting their wool and milk and making cheese. He struggles with his abusive behaviors towards his family, anxiety about his continued survival, and his eating disordered behaviors. He dreams of feeling loved and important and finding a way to feel settled in his family despite how he has behaved up until now.

Darcy and Lem are dating in the present day of the comic. Darcy has worked in leftist cells in the past to eradicate monarchy from Faidia, and has skill with a knife. She is the current operator of Barlowe's bar.

She is a trans woman and transitioned both during her original mortal life and as an immortal (Lem asked her what she'd like her body to be when she ascended). She has also spent time living both as a human (in a colony) and as a Faidian pegasus, living wild in the woods.

Ell is certainly naive in some ways, and her colleagues don't always take her seriously because she expresses herself so exuberantly. However, she has plenty of relationship and parenting experience, and can handle some things better than the others, even if she's not a super-skilled magic-user. She and Funa are in a long-term situationship.

Ell is a strange elemental in that she appears to lack a dyad partner.

Eke reveals in Grayling 10 that Ell has a dyad partner, we simply don't know where it is, or the nature of it. It might be in another dimension, they just don't know. This makes Ell's magic so dangerous, it is inadvisable to use it until they know more.

Once the dust settles and the other elementals realize their hand in Fola's behavior, he is treated more as everyone's communal child, and his "delayed adolescence" reflects this. To this day he's still acting out, disobeying or ignoring orders, running away, and even taking mortal victims in his magic experiments. To put it another way, he's turned out to be a mix of Lem and Cal's influences that are very difficult to square with each other.

In order to help develop Faidia, Lem created clones of himself after leaving his childhood home. Some of these clones are disparate individuals who just have his face, like Fern, but there are "true" copies of Lem, clones who share his magic and help him do his work when his family failed him. There have been innumerable Lems, and many of them have died either by suicide or misadventure. There have been a few Lems that were freed by the others because they married into mortal families and wanted to lead mortal lives, and there are those members who have had to carry the torch for a very long time. The Lems all share memories back and forth with each other using their invention, a computer called the egregore.

For a long time, the only person both his family and the public were aware of was "Tower Lem," the Lem living in the main Faidian city occupying the seat. These days, there are 3 individuals serving as is "Lem": Hy (the original), Lemojo (the first clone), and the last Tower Lem (the most recent clone), who has transitioned to being a woman. In the current state of the comic, Lem doesn't need anymore clones, and he's trying to recover/taper off his use of self-harming methodologies in his pursuit of getting work done.

Since being kicked out by his brother, Lem has had chronic experiences with housing instability. He is forever wrestling with addictive behaviors and suicidality.

Through his clones, Lem has experienced nearly everything a mortal or immortal can under the sun! He's become old and died, he's become a woman and had babies, he's become all sorts of animal. He was curious about it all, did it all, & recorded everything carefully, only for a lot of those journals to rot away in time (one of the motivations leading him to create the egregore). All these experiences conveyed vital wisdom, of course. This aspect of him is very Tiresias coded.

Lem's animal form, a Eastern green mamba, is not one he uses often around others because of the whole snake-brain and venomous aspect.

While she was initially against life existing on Faidia, once it does she accepts and embraces it, and eventually steps completely into her role despite her earlier reservations and beliefs. Despite her initial indifference, May does care deeply about right and wrong, and she reforms her own behavior when she discovers how much Cal has manipulated and lied about the situation in their family.

May is still an anti-natalist and won't have children of her own, but she does have large family networks because she's married many times over the years. She keeps a large farmhouse and invites her friends & family over frequently. She is also a huge supporter of the arts and hosts both musicians and visual artists frequently in her home. When Cal and Rae are being rehabilitated, they stay with her.

After her life was ruined, Nacre was forced to live in a spaceship and work scams to get by. She was recruited by the Glow Worm Network, a criminal organization that used loopholes in the elemental system to steal aether from thousands of planets. She targeted Faidia for this scam, and this is how she and Hylemanerial met.

Arduc was one of the most successful planets outside the main 5 (Reesel, Eighvor, Prolk, Thremset, Hulim) in the early days of elemental history. They made early gains by being extremely progressive for the time, and popularized many conventions that contradicted what the empire of the time was teaching. Their education module malfunctioned early in their development, and the elementals of Arduc took it into their own hands to defeat and remove the module from power so they could rule themselves.

Sadly, there were hidden costs to this, costs which ended up being Sutiyen's to pay.

Viv was the one to step up and educate Fola when it was discovered his memory transfer did not go as planned. He's hasty to help others and sometimes this can lead to misunderstandings, but he is earnest and will doggedly pursue doing the right thing. He has a lot of reservations and criticisms about the primaries, and the idea of magic in general. In spite of this, his scrupulousness guarantees he's always on time and does good work.

For a time, Viv was in a relationship with Funa and Ell. They ended up breaking up with Viv because he was a little more needy than they could handle. Viv is deeply interested in domestic life and maybe raising kids. The women are simply more interested in their work.

Viv's family history as a prince set him up to be the target of Lemanerial's ire. In ancient times, Lem had tried to get Viv's father, a pirate king, to abdicate his throne and rule in accordance with Lemanerial's wishes as life elemental of the planet. He normally wasn't very controlling, but in cases of violence he had to step in, and he often used deceitful tactics to trick mortals into doing what he wanted.

After many failed attempts with agents, Lem attempted the feat himself, courting both the king and queen and dripping honey in their ears for years to convince them to renounce the throne and change to a different form of government. All this effort on his part, and in truth, deep attachment to two people he got to know very well, went to waste. The gambit ended disastrously with the king accusing Lem of duplicitousness. He banished Lem from the kingdom when he discovered Lem had clones created and he wasn't dealing with the "genuine" demi-god.

A little while later, locusts descended and consumed the kingdom's food stores, leaving them destitute, without friends and starving. Bitter & utterly dispirited with the whole situation, Lem let them die, Old Testament style.

Taken all together, what occurred was that Lem repeated his experience with Cal/Rae with Viv's parents, and he himself had walked right into it thinking it would "work out" again, that he could make everyone happy again, and it ended as badly as it possibly could due to sunk cost. Viv's father was an abusive authoritarian like Cal, and Viv's mother was a "passive but secretly just as bad an enabler" like Rae, and they both played him like a fiddle in a triangulation game, just like he had been played as a child before.

Meanwhile, Viv, as a prince with his own lodgings, only witnessed his parents' abusive behaviors occasionally, and Viv had numerous siblings for them to focus on as well. Viv even met Lem briefly at the court once or twice, but when he was only 17-18 years old, and actively saw Lem as some weirdo trying to penetrate his family life for no good reason.

Viv grew up respecting and loving his parents, only to discover their foul behavior very late in life (and some of the revelations of their behavior haven't been entirely shown to him yet even in the present day). He has a very "adult" attitude about it all and expects Lem to be the same, which Lem is infuriated by, because Viv did not experience the abuse the same and has so little sympathy for him.

Due to this unfortunate series of events, Viv and Lem are basically destined to never get along together. This is in spite of the fact that in naturally occurring element relations (how an element impacts their host's thoughts and behaviors, analogous to hormonal urges like hunger or thirst), life and water are heavily attracted to each other. It's kind of a shame, too; in another life, they would have liked each other a lot.