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Charlie's greeting involved inviting Astrit to come and look at her drawing, so accordingly he walked closer and took a look. Red poppies had begun to sprawl across the page. “It's meant to be Flanders fields, like the poem they showed us,” the girl explained. Astrit nodded; he could see that, now that she mentioned it. “I thought we could use them on the poster,” Charlie continued.

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Astrit said, since he felt like he ought to say something. It would be appropriate, certainly, and they would have to put some kind of effort into making their project presentable, so he was glad Charlie was already thinking about that. He hadn't been thinking about any aspect of what they were going to do yet, which suddenly made him feel behind and unprepared. His focus up to this point had been just on getting to the rendezvous to start with.

“I don’t know much about WWI,” Charlie admitted suddenly, much to Astrit's surprise. “I mean, I know what the ANZAC’s did, but all this British involvement stuff we’re meant to be researching is completely new to me, and some of it's contradictory.”

Astrit looked at her curiously. That was right: not only was she the new girl, but she had come here from a different country entirely. Australia, wasn't it? The boy, having lived in London since he was a baby, didn't know what it was like to move so far, but he had a glimpse of an idea of what such a thing would entail in that comment.

There was something else very interesting in what she had said, too. “Contradictory?” he wondered aloud. “To what?” That was something he'd like to hear. He had only ever studied in British schools, and hadn't noticed any internal contradictions in the things they were taught, but thanks to his family he had heard other stories, interesting ones that showed things in a different enough light that his family's stories and the ones he learned in school couldn't both be completely true at the same time. If Charlie knew stories like that, too... well, that would be something worth hearing, he thought.

There were a few seconds of silence. Astrit was about to propose that they go inside and start looking things up when Charlie asked a question, one that took him aback: “Did WWI really start in 1914 like our textbook says, or are there others that would disagree?”

“It started long before that,” he replied firmly, almost automatically. This wasn't something they would teach in school, for certain, but he felt completely secure that it was true. “Every side thought it was inevitable and that they were guaranteed to win. They couldn't all be right, of course, but they all assumed their enemies were deluded. Most all of Europe wanted a war, and all they needed was an excuse.” Astrit glanced from Charlie's paper to her face and then looked away. “That was one of my sister's favorite stories to tell, when we were growing up. You never heard it before?”

For me, it all started when a certain friend of mine came to me and said, "How would you like to do a Hetalia roleplay with me?" It transpired that she was playing Serbia on Manor of Fate, and the way she had built the character meant she really wanted a Kosovo to interact with. We were very close at that time, so she came to me to see if I would do it. I knew basically nothing about Kosovo at the time, except for tiny little scraps of information I'd gathered from conversations with that same friend and her sister, but she convinced me to do it, and thus Astrit was born. To make up for the fact that I hadn't known anything about the country he was supposed to represent, I ended up doing quite a lot of research, and building every last detail of his personality on some aspect of the history or culture that I ran across. (And then the comments on that first application mentioned that "you don't have a lot of cultural references," a deeply ironic statement given that at that point the character consisted of nothing but cultural references; I was just too shy to point them out.) The result has been... well, one of the strongest, loudest, most vivid muses I've ever had, who's grown ever stronger as I've learned ever more about his country and about people in general.

Era didn't show up until much later, but I'd like to mention her in conjunction with Astrit because her existence was a natural consequence of his: Kosovo has an ethnic Albanian majority, and their cultures are interlinked closely enough that it's impossible to study Kosovo without learning about Albania. As such, I got interested enough to make a standalone Albania character, too. I also used Era's creation to clarify a few points of culture that Astrit's young age made difficult to communicate in his; they share many traits to reflect the strong cultural similarities, so Era can demonstrate what those traits look like on an adult.

And then there's Feliks. Feliks is so far my only Hetalia muse to show up of his own accord for reasons unrelated to that initial choice to accept my friend's suggestion that I play Kosovo. And I do mean that he showed up of his own accord; I've told this story to some of y'all before, but about two days after I'd first read a couple of Himaruya's strips that basically consisted of "dumb Pole" jokes, I was sitting in math class and learning about the Poles who were the first to break the Enigma code (shortly before the beginning of WWII; they had to secretly send their prototype decryption machine, which they called the "bomba," and the information on how to use it to England in order to avoid losing it all to the Nazis along with their lives; it's a thoroughly awesome story), and the character just marched into my head and informed me in no uncertain terms that he didn't like certain choices Hima had made about how to portray him, "and you will do better." (Implied "or else.") There was really nothing I could say to that except, "Yes, sir." And ever since, I've been trying to play him as respectfully as possible, in honor of the fact that the vast majority of Polish people I've known either in history or IRL were made of pure awesome with extra awesomesauce.

Funny side story with Feliks: in real life, Poland has in recent years had some very weird political debates because someone decided to define "gender studies" as "boys wearing dresses." When I heard about this... well, I reckon my Feliks had already picked his side long before. It kinda fits with stuff I've written in AUs like this one, too.

Here, have a typo dump!

Merry Christmas, Queen Joselle! I hope that you enjoy my gift, which comes in two parts.

So PLOTS.

We've got a thread with Chelsea and Astrit, but how do you suppose they're going to do with getting along in the future? Like, do you think they're going to get to be very close, or not? And under what other circumstances might they meet/converse?