Anaconda With Sword
Known as SpectralDragon in other worlds.
Hours with Author Commentary
The Anaconda: Shameless self-insert. A snake with a sword, everyone's favorite thing. More seriously, Anaconda's kinda an exemplar of the ideal lifestyle. Who doesn't want to wander around, staring at things endlessly, all while being a giant snake that can devour annoyances? She took on a life of her own with the addition of backstory, which is what every good self-insert does. I should not be this proud of her, but here we are and here I am.
The Bright-Delver: Shared custody with SRN. An attempt to squish a foil between the Snake Tail with Appendages and the Anaconda while still keeping thematic similarities and making the Delver an Hour in her own right. Ended up having to tilt more towards the latter than the former, but it worked out well. I'm probably leaning way too far into "Hour of Wholesomeness" for her, but considering that Mansus...
The Great Serpent: SRN has visitation rights. This one I still need to work on more. Trying to cram aspects of all three serpentine Hours into one big snakey melange is tough. Leaving Anaconda mainly out of the equation helps, but there's still more work that needs to be done here before I can really be proud of this one. I just haven't had the motivation to beat this guy into shape with a wrench yet.
The Succulent Glow: This guy's just an asshole. I'm not sure that it has either the ability or the reach to catalyze a large event in any of the histories, but like any good opportunist, it's going to take advantage of everything it possibly can. Unrepentant, self-serving, opportunistic assholes are surprisingly difficult to force into making dramatic power plays. Well-intentioned extremist Anaconda actually lends itself more to that, somehow.
The Worm Funktastic: Based off of my friend, who is worms. I know it reads like a giant shitpost, and the relationships section absolutely is a giant shitpost, but the rest of it actually got serious really quickly. Not sure how much I really want to squish Funky into the main universe and histories, however. It just kinda wants to play jazz and be a worm. That's a respectable goal, but kinda hard to work with here.
The Princess Prominent: Can a cat break into the Mansus? If that cat became an Hour, what would happen next? Apparently, the answer to the first question is "no," but no one can stop me from answering that second question anyways. So here we have the Princess Prominent, the Creator and the Destroyer, the Devourer and the Hoarder, the Keeper of Secrets and the Consumer of Minds. Fun times for the whole family.
Judgement (Rough Draft in progress- no peeking, or Anaconda will get you)
It was not one large event that alerted the Kingdom to what had happened. It was merely several, small events. The morning had dawned with an unseasonable chill, frost riming the windows and doors. The birds, the insects, even the creeping mice- all had fled, or stayed huddled in darkened corners, refusing to make a single sound. The children, perhaps more sensitive to the subtle wrongness of the morning, were subdued and silent, hungering for nothing and wanting only sleep. Even the grand arts of the occult were muted somehow, as if something else had dampened their fire. In fits and pieces, the populace trickled towards the palace, not yet frightened. The horror came when they passed the outer gates, and found every door, every window, every mousehole, even every crack that permitted the passage of the tiniest spiders- all were locked, closed off by arts that no magi outside the palace could break. An Hour's personal attention had become fixed upon the palace, and nothing would enter or exit until it alone decided that would be so.
After days of silence and icy doors that would succumb neither to breaking nor lockpicking, the locks shattered on their own. Slowly, carefully, the first of the crowd entered the palace, prepared for anything. Almost anything, for what they saw in the halls was a charnel house that seemed sprung from the dreams of a madman. The servants, the nobles, the magi of the court- all had been hunted down, their eyes and tongues removed, and pinioned to the walls by the bones of their fingers. All the mirrors had been shattered, the reflective blades of weapons blackened and matted, even the perfect surfaces of statues and ornamentations had been scratched and twisted to refuse reflection. (Meatgrinder activities here). In the great throne room, the face of the King had been nailed to his throne with his own teeth. Along the wall behind the throne, a bloody message was writ: Don't do it again.
(Any Hours that want to claim or disavow this event, speak thy piece here). Perhaps it might have been the Ferryman itself, reminding mankind that no mortal or immortal could cheat it of its rightful property. The solitary Hour of Stealth itself might have turned its blade against the false King, although its devotees knew nothing of this until it happened. Yet again, certain faceless and nameless spies whisper of the "second palace" in their strange passphrases, where an "empty assassin" and the "third hill" bear more importance than merely codewords.