As the character page of an extremely long web series, heavy and unmarked spoilers are ahead.
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Juniper and his Companions
Juniper Smith
Juniper Smith
A teenager from Bumblefuck, Kansas, whose main joy in life was being the DM of his tabletop group until the death of his best friend Arthur. Eight months later, he got spontaneously transported into the dangerous world of Aerb that seems to be built directly out of the games he devised.
- Broken Ace: Juniper rapidly masters anything he sets out to learn, on top of having other powers, such as attracting powerful allies. He is also a depressed teenager thrown into a grimdark world, knowing that its fate rests on his shoulders.
- Designated Love Interest: In-universe to all of his companions, as admitted by the Dungeon Master. Circumstances contrive to put Juniper in this position, and he has an achievement for having sex with all seven of them, which he is disgusted by.
- Genius Bruiser: Subverted. While Juniper the character's stat sheet has high physical and mental stats, Juniper the person actually isn't that smart, so increasing intelligence beyond a certain point does not make him smarter in a conventional sense and simply improves his recall, concentration and so on.
- Jack of All Stats: Juniper opts for a "generalist" character build, focusing on both physical combat and as many different schools of magic as he can at the same time. He is aware that this is highly suboptimal, but he's making ad hoc decisions.
- Killer Game Master: Rapidly descended into the deep and vindictive end of this after Arthur's death, culminating in the Fel Seed Incident and the final collapse of the tabletop group.
- Magic Knight: Focuses on melee combat using his bladebound abilities while supported by as buffs from as many magic schools as possible as once.
Amaryllis Penndraig
Amaryllis Penndraig / Smith née Penndraig
The most direct descendant of the Lost King Uther Penndraig. Amaryllis is a princess-in-exile who meets Juniper on a suicide mission, realizes his importance to the world, and becomes the foundation of his adventuring party.
- Crutch Character: Amaryllis worries that she's essentially that to Juniper - she is good at many things, but most of them are a result of training, and Juniper demonstrates that he can master things that took her years in hours, and she has no unique abilities, meaning she will be soon largely irrelevant. These fears come to an end when Juniper acquires a companion passive that lets her always keep up.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Capable of reverse-engineering technology from another planet and single-handedly starting a technological revolution.
- Genius Bruiser: Well-versed in international law, history, geography, engineering and many other disciplines, while also being physically fit and highly proficient in melee combat.
- Ice Queen: Practically mandatory for a significant member of the Lost King's Court. It's only after being with the party for a while that she starts making any decisions directly off her own emotions, and the whole reason she ended up in the Risen Lands is that she wasn't more ruthless.
- Identical Grandson: She's the spitting image of Uther's daughter, so much so that everyone who knew her double take upon meeting her for the first time, including Uther himself. He's convinced this is a plot thread purposefully set up to intrigue him into staying.
- The epilogue explains that this really was the case, and that she had used a few entads to periodically be reborn into the Pendraig line, albeit without her memories.
- Me's a Crowd: The reward for her companion questline is the ability to split off 30 clones of herself, identical except for the fact that they they have the same combat utility as a kitten. This being Amaryllis, they are all imminently sensible about their existence... for the most part. It helps that they can psychically sync up their experiences by concentrating for ten minutes. After circumstances force them to be out of contact for two years, two of them have become lovers and do not wish to be subsumed back into Amaryllis Prime. She syncs them anyway.
- Ms. Fanservice: While she generally dresses modestly, Juniper notes that she's practically been created to be maximally sexually attractive to him, something the Dungeon Master later reveals is literally true.
- Mystical Pregnancy: She volunteers to gestate Solace as the final part of her reincarnation ritual. Fenn dubs her the Pregnant Virgin Princess.
- The Unfettered: Amaryllis' upbringing leaves her with an extreme commitment to any plan she thinks is likely to work, no matter how unpleasant, degrading, or morally fraught it might be. This includes intentionally kindling attraction to Juniper even though she initially disliked him, abandoning Juniper to die of his wounds, going through a time-accelerated pregnancy to revive Solace, living through a Bad Future to send intel back in time to Juniper, and advocating for sacrificing the entire party sans Juniper to become Fel Seed's brides to get him through the door to the Long Stairs.
- Wrench Wench: She demonstrates very strong technical abilities, able to build void weapons out of scrap and salvaged void crystals, and replicating modern-day Earth technology by working from guidebooks.
Fenn Greenglass
Fenn Greenglass
Half-elf archer and thief, Fenn escapes from the Risen Lands exclusion zone with Juniper and Amaryllis, and joins the party for lack of anything better to do. Eventually, she and Juniper become lovers, until their breakup and her death.
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Chaotic Neutral: As expected of rangers and thieves, and Joon explicitly calls her that. - Escaped from Hell: Ultimately, she's intentionally allowed to go to the hells once a method of escaping them is created, and this serves as the means of her resurrection.
- Give Him a Normal Life: Her main motivation for giving Nellan up for adoption, because he could pass for human and not have to live her life of thieving on the edges of society.
- Half-Breed Angst: Has a lot of issues over being a half-elf, partially from the obscene perfectionism from the elves she grew up around, partially from several humans using and mistreating her after she left the elves.
- Half-Breed Discrimination: Suffered this all throughout her life, most significantly the elves forcing her to undergo ritual scarification despite knowing the magic benefits it would convey would be quickly lost.
- Killed Off for Real: When Fenn dies, she's 'gone'. There's no known method to bring her back, and her character page and companion quest are deleted.
- Sad Clown: Fenn had a particularly horrible childhood, and the rest of her life wasn't great either, so she consciously adopts the party clown role to hide how she really feels.
- Venturous Smuggler: Fenn lived off looting and smuggling items out of an exclusion zone before she got caught.
Grakhuil Leadbraids
Grakhuil Leadbraids
Dwarf warder who joined Juniper's party as a means to pay off an enormous debt to his clan.
- The Atoner: His only reason for staying alive is to make up for the destruction of his dwarfhold, until Juniper convinces him to try and find something new to live for.
- Ambiguous Gender: Dwarves are a one-gender race. They all look male, but ascribing human male gender role behavior to Grak is a mistake.
- Barrier Warrior: Grak is the party's warder, tasked with both setting up barriers and analyzing and breaking those set up by others.
- Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Has a particularly severe version of this because he knows if he doesn't find one, he'll take his own life and be damned to the hells. This also makes him particularly vulnerable to soul magic manipulation, to the extent that he misses being brainwashed after it is removed.
- Driven to Suicide: Has been talked out of it, but he's still clinically depressed.
- Empowered Badass Normal: Grak is a more than competent fighter, but his brand of magic is not really suited for direct combat. Joining Juniper's party gradually enhances him to superhuman levels, culminating in becoming essentially permanently warded against practically anything and being able to annihilate anything with latent magic within a set distance of himself, which includes blood and bones inside people's bodies.
- Naturalized Name: After leaving the dwarfholds, he began going by Grak instead of Grakhuil to match Imperial culture.
- Survivor's Guilt: Grak ran away from home on the night of his arranged marriage, accidentally averting sharing the fate of everyone in his hometown - death to a poison gas leak and eternal damnation because there was no one left to bottle them.
The Six-Eyed Doe
Six-Eyed Doe
The last of the druidic loci, thought extinct after the ruthless experimentation of the Second Empire. The Six-Eyed Deer is trapped within an entad bottle and in desperate need of someone to set it free again, with Juniper magically identified as that person.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: Given her preferred default form, the Locus stretches the already loose sexual taboos of Aerb. Word is out to what exactly it got up to with its druids, but it definitely has some suggestive imagery in its character bio... maybe.
- Word is very much in when it comes to what it got up to with Juniper, though - they did. To be fair, he had taken the form of a male Locus to help expand her territory, and neither of them went in knowing that would happen.
- Genius Loci: Although it manifests as a six-eyed deer, the locus is the entire location currently contained in the bottle.
- Measuring the Marigolds: Inherent to the nature of druidic forces is the intuitive and the immeasurable, which means investigations of such forces in ways that are measurable represent a lethal threat to the locus, and it was this very attitude that caused a mostly-accidental genocide of the loci by the Second Empire. Solace goes so far as to bar members of the party from interacting with the locus when they act in a way that is "poisoned by calculation".
- The Speechless: Being a deer-shaped god, the locus either cannot or does not speak, and only sometimes gives any nonverbal communication when spoken to.
- Wrong Context Magic: Druidic magic is inherently divorced from the normal magical system of Aerb and indeed lacks a governing system altogether. For that reason the locus is capable of accomplishing almost anything, so long as it isn't systematized. This includes blocking Fel Seed's explicitly-unblockable powers, at least for a time.
Valencia the Red
Valencia the Red
A non-anima (mortal without a soul), born as a magical experiment, Valencia has been prone to possession by infernals for her entire life. Joining Juniper's party allowed her to eventually be able to kill any infernal who attempts a demonic possession, thus making her the first threat to the hells in hundreds of years.
- Anti-Magic: One of the few upshots of being a non-anima, and part of what makes them so deadly. To the locals, magic is anything that interacts with the soul on some level (everything else counting as psuedo-magic), so she's effectively immune to the majority of magical attacks and some of the nastier cursed entads. The biggest drawback is that this also applies to healing magic, so she can't bounce back nearly as quickly as the rest of the group.
- The Atoner: Towards Juniper after breaking his relationship with Fenn right before her death, after which she becomes much more cautious with using infernal wisdom and stops using it on Juniper entirely.
- Blank Slate: Early on, Valencia has essentially no life experiences save repeated possession. This leads to her relying on knowledge taken from infernals, which is tainted by their nature and outlook on mortals. She's also treated as spiritually blank by reality due to lacking a soul, which is why she defaults to human in spite of an elven father.
- Cursed with Awesome: Normally non-anima live a wretched existence, hunted by the whole world and tormented by frequent possessions. Once Valencia becomes immune to possession, not only is she able to freely steal the knowledge and experience of infernals for her own use, but she also becomes an ideal wielder for most cursed entads as they usually target the soul.
- Fangirl: Huge fan of the Harry Potter series, which doubles as the first work of fiction she has ever read.
- Glass Cannon: She can't benefit from healing magic, so any wounds she receives have to be mended the old fashioned way. They mostly deploy her infernal gifts in social situations rather than as a combatant.
- Never Given a Name: As she was only an experiment to her father, he never named her. A combination of this and having no soul for the game layer to work with means it initially calls her "[Null Pointer Exemption]", until Juniper names her Valencia.
- Relationship Sabotage: Intentionally triggers Juniper and Fenn's breakup by way of infernal wisdom, and even she isn't sure whether she did it out of a genuine knowledge they were doomed to break up anyway, so that she could make Juniper available for her own affections, or just because infernal wisdom is oriented towards destructive outcomes.
- The Soulless: She's normal in every way, she just has a hole where a soul should be. Demons and devils like to crawl inside of it.
- Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: After getting her Loyalty 10 bonus, not only can infernals not possess her, but they can't leave her either, and are "eaten" by her instead. As infernals are normally immortal, this quickly sends the hells into a panic trying to figure out what's killing them.
- UnSorcerer: She can't learn any magic, can't use any magical items that require a person to use them, and any magic that affects a person doesn't affect her either.
Bethel
Bethel/Kuum Doona
The sapient fortress Kuum Doona, formerly Uther Penndraig's base of operations, has spent the last five hundred years horribly torturing invaders and absorbing the magical effects of their entads. Upon being given the ability to leave the pit it's been transported to, Bethel joined his party as a companion.
- The Atoner: It takes extensive therapy from Valencia, but she eventually adopts this attitude towards her many crimes by the time she rejoins the party, including her assault of Juniper.
- Deconstructed in the epilogue, as Bethel continues to take a penitent attitude and not enjoy herself several years into the establishment of heaven, long past when any member of the party still expects it of her or for the most part even cares. It takes some rather ruthless criticism from B-Side Juniper and an offer to be her consensual torture victim to convince her to take a different tack.
- Barrier Warrior: Bethel is a warder, owing to the amount of warder gear she has eaten over the years.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: Opinions towards Bethel vary over time but are decidedly mostly negative, and in the end only Amaryillis and Valencia make any effort to stay in cotact with her.
- "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization: A combination of this and her inhuman nature is what leads Bethel to rape Juniper, as she is accustomed to interacting with mortals based on their biological signatures over their words.
- Entad Romance: She quickly forms a bond with Ropey, much to the befuddlement of their biological companions. They eventually get married, which in this case means Ropey is permanently subsumed into Bethel's structure. The rest of the group isn't really sure what to make of it, but go along with it easily enough once they understand it's mutual and entirely consensual.
- Sapient House: Bethel is very much concerned with being a house that people live in as well, which causes her internal conflict due to her sadism driving others away and external conflict due to being the party's most powerful member.
- Skewed Priorities: As an entad, Bethel's sense of what's important is very different from that of mortals. For example, she didn't care that Uther ruthlessly used her for sex - she hates him because he threatened to force her to assimilate new entads which would disrupt her idea of self.
- Token Evil Teammate: Bethel has no concern for human morality whatsoever, and has developed a strong sadistic urge by the time she meets the party.
- What Measure Is An Entad: Entads are legally classified as property, even when they possess self awareness. Since the number of self aware entads is maybe around 200 and their degree of sapience can vary wildly, there's not a whole lot of political pressure to change the status quo, especially when each case would have to be judged individually. Bethel is understandably upset by this mindset, and it probably goes a long way to explaining why she's so murderous.
Raven Masters
Raven Masters
Ell [note , head of the Infinite Library and one of Uther's knights. She also looks suspiciously similar to Juniper's short-term girlfriend Maddie.
- Badass Bookworm: Raven is a librarian.
- Badass Normal: Her species doesn't give any abilities useful in combat, and she doesn't know any combat magic, but is quite formidable because of her excellent skill as a swordsman and five hundred years of combat experience. Turns out she does know two combat magic schools, but both are now excluded.
- Exposition Fairy: Uther used to call her one when they were adventuring. Over time she became increasingly indignant about it, especially after getting access to print outs of earth websites and she got to read the tvtropes entry.
Party Allies
Oorang Solace
Oorang Solace
The last druid on Aerb, currently traveling with Juniper's party as a means to restore her locus.
- Born-Again Immortality: The secret to her advanced age, despite crantek not living any longer than humans. Though it's not meant to work on anything other than a natural death, the party works around it to restore Solace after she is killed.
- Green Thumb: She a druid and a flower mage.
- Guest-Star Party Member: She's not actually one of Juniper's companions - that's the locus. For that reason, she also doesn't become as close to the party as most other members, described by Juniper as more of a coworker than a friend.
- The Hecate Sisters: Meets the party as Matron, is reborn and grows into the Maiden, and is eventually cursed by the locus to become the Crone for trying to control it.
- Shipper on Deck: Seems to consider having two given characters sleep together a very good resolution for conflict.
- Surprisingly Sudden Death: The Sulid Isle Prison's defenses blast her apart, killing her instantly only a short time after she first joins the party.
Juniper's Tabletop Group
Uther Penndraig
Uther Penndraig/Arthur Blum
The Legendary Lost King, Uther has achieved numerous heroic feats and ushered an era of peace and prosperity before vanishing from Aerb 500 years before the start of the story. Seems to have been based on one of Arthur Blum's characters.
- The Ace: Uther excelled nearly at everything he tried to do and was universally revered by his subjects.
- Ambiguously Evil: During his later years, he caused a lot of harm to the people around him, and this didn't make it into the history books. Determining just what his motives were is part of what drives Juniper to find him.
- Broken Ace: Once he started to realize the nature of narrative cycles, he became increasingly brutal and ambivalent to the world around him until he vanished.
- Earn Your Happy Ending He deages, has his memories wiped, and finally makes his way back to Earth after fulfilling his narrative purpose to the Dungeon Master
- The Good King: His role in Anglecynn, and to a lesser extent the First Empire.
- Inferred Survival: Uther's legacy is so strong that a good deal of people assume he really is still alive somewhere, having vanished suddenly without suffering a defeat. He's been stuck halfway through the Long Stairs for almost the entire 500 years, hidden by an entad.
- Refusal of the Call: Initially decides not to "play the game" and instead joins a traveling theater. The Dungeon Master responded accordingly.
- Renaissance Man: Uther possessed something he referred to as "The Knack", the ability to quickly master nearly anything he sets out his mind to do, being it combat, magic, politics, poetry or drama.
Arthur Reimer
One of Joon's players, and a munchkin at heart.
Tiffany Archer
Joon and Arthur's crush, also a member of his tabletop group.
Tom
Craig
Maddie
Other Characters
The Other Pantheon
Dungeon Master/Mr. Dice Guy
The presumed creator of Aerb and operator of Juniper's game, the Dungeon Master's aloofness and apathy towards the suffering of the world leave him as Juniper's ultimate antagonist.
- Foil: To Juniper, which the Dungeon Master directly makes reference to. As the Dungeon Master eventually reveals this is the whole reason for Juniper's existince, as the Dungeon Master created him, Juniper the character in the web serial, as a way to explore his own character. As such, he was made specifically to be a foil to the Dungeon Master and to the other characters
- Killer Game Master: He makes it clear to Juniper that there are no safeguards for him and he'll be allowed to die if he fails.
- Powers That Be: If there is a true god of Aerb, he seems to be it, albeit claiming to stay hands-off most of the time.
The Layman
A figure who is called in to judge if things count or not, for the DM and June.
- Rules Lawyer: His entire job. But he has other things going on.
Antagonists
Larkspur Prentice
Larkspur Prentice
One of Amaryllis's numerous cousins and an early enemy to the group.
Auman
Auman
A gold mage from Baren Jewel.
Doris Finch
Doris Finch
A woman who can clone herself and became an Enpersoned Exclusion constantly in a civil war with herself.
- The Ageless: Some quirk of her duplication power seems to be keeping her copies at a physical age of 35.
- Alas, Poor Villain: She's a bitch with an almost pathological betrayal streak, but as time goes on she's shown more and more to know exactly how bad she is but is lacking the support she needs to become something better. The group ultimately decides to try and help her despite the quest text, and the DM agrees.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: People are often surprised to find out that she's a fairly intelligent person, just one who is stuck in a loop of self-destructive behavior she lacks the internal discipline to break.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: One of the major reasons people don't like Doris Finch is the fact that they all betray themselves whenever they feel they can get away with it.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Since Doris clones are the only permanent creation of her magic, the easiest way to get a meal is to spawn a clone in a death trap. No one is particularly happy about this, but it's what they have to work with.
- Human Resources: Doris' cloning only effects whatever she has on her for 24 hours, but the clone stays. Naturally, clothes and food tend to be made from Dorises who are cloned and quickly killed for meat/leather/bone.
- Me's a Crowd: Deconstructed. The original Doris mocked her clone when the 24 hour limit was up and she ended up naked, and refused to give her any food or clothes. The Clone then killed the original.
- Polluted Wasteland: Her exclusion zone is a desolate waste from centuries of low grade warfare and as a by product of her Human Resources tech base.
- The Power of Blood: Having a limitless supply of her own blood has allowed portions of the Dorises to figure out some parts of Blood Magic. This culminates in opening a portal to the elemental plane of blood and becoming a blood fueled demi-god.
- Self-Duplication: Doris Finch learned how to do this when she was nine years old. Unfortunately she grew up to be a total bitch with a bad case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, and there are now about nine million of her in the exclusion zone that she and her power are restricted to, all of which are constantly at each other's throats.
- Self-Inflicted Hell: Her exclusion zone ended up as one because of her Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and self-loathing.
- The Starscream: To Herself.
Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle
Elisha Blue/Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle
An Enpersond Exclusion Necromancer who tried to sell and market zombies.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Tries to sell zombies to factories and when it turns out the people inside are aware, rants that people wouldn't care because only money matters.
- Deal with the Devil The devils are one of the few groups willing to do business with him after the truth of the zombies comes out.
- Didn't Think This Through: His letter to the outside world got him publicly boycotted by everyone.
- Never My Fault: Constantly berates and blames everyone for his failed ventures.
Harold
Harold
An extra dimensional entity responsible for numerous doomsday cults.
- Apocalypse Cult: His standard approach is to form one and try to make it stick. Fortunately for the rest of the world, he's not particularly good at it. Unfortunately, Aerb is such a screwed up place that he doesn't have to try particularly hard to find sympathizers.
- Eldritch Abomination: He presents himself as a man in armor on fire, but when delving into his soul/spirit, Joon likens him more to a planet than a person. Its non-human perspective is actually a hindrance most of the time, as it fails to optimize the resources available to it and often ignores the advice of its more rational cultists. It's eventually revealed that its physical presence on Aerb is some sort of small jar made of flesh.
- Hive Queen: Of the "assuming direct control" variety. It can either focus its attention on a single member of its cult or influence the group as a whole, with very little finesse in between.
- Spell My Name With An S: To be clear, it's name is Harold, and it's not the herald of anything. Or at least, Harold is the name Uniquities gave it. What, if anything, the entity and its cultists call it is never clarified.
The World Lords
The World Lords
A group of powerful monsters seeking to enter the world. Supposedly if three of them were ever present at once they would be able to destroy Aerb and all its associated dimensions.
- Expy: They are all inspired by Lewis Carol's poem Jabberwocky, in a conscious attempt to make the worst cinematic universe possible.
- Noodle Incident: They were the last creation of Joon's before Arthur's death and the subject of the gaming group's final session.
The Manxome Foe, aka Fel Seed
- Body Horror: One of its main themes.
- Fate Worse than Death: Not only is being one of his brides a fate worse than death, it's also widely considered a fate worse than the majority of Aerb's hells.
- For the Evulz: Largely his motive for doing anything - he just straight-up takes pleasure in the chaos and suffering his actions cause, and his immense power leaves him without any idea that he might suffer the consequences.
Word of God says he has an extreme case of "Affluenza" due to the Dungeon Master protecting him. - Ret-Gone: Thanks to some Mome Rath bones and a copy of the Vorpal Sword, Fel Seed is killed so hard even so much as his name is scrubbed from the knowledge of Aerb.
- Villain Sue: Fel Seed was an in-universe example in Juniper's campaigns, born from Juniper's despair about Arthur's death... which makes him an Invincible Villain in Aerb, even by the standards of the serial's villains.
Mome Rath
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: It has a passing resemblance to a colossal spider, and is so large it hosts an ecosystem of smaller creepy crawlies on its body.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: One of its main themes. If you get more than a mile away from it you forget it ever existed, an effect also weaponized by many of its parasite beasts.
The Jubjub Bird
A 500 foot tall bird that might or might not have been summoned at some point far in the past. If it was, it was presumably defeated sometime thereafter.
