Misty
The Upcycler

You've been so kind and generous
I don't know how you keep on giving
For your kindness I'm in debt to you
And I never could have come this far without you
For everything you've done, you know I'm bound
I'm bound to thank you for it

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Character Origins

Misty started out as a flotsam on Neopets. Kid me joined the site, and went 'wow I love this pet, and this one, and this one' and within the same week I had adopted and created my limit of 4 pets. Misty was one of them, a flotsam from the pound that ended up being two years older than my account. I didn't mind her lengthy name _Misty_121_5732_, kid me didn't think about it being unsightly or anything. I just liked the name Misty for a dolphin-looking species. Striped paint brushes were really cheap at the time, and I wanted to paint her with something even if I had no neopoints, so striped it was.

I started drawing her in high school, heavily inspired by these long finned dolphins from the game Ecco the Dolphin. Yeah if you couldn't tell, I wasn't a horse girl, I was a dolphin girl, pfft. The long flowing fins were so fun to draw, exaggerated anatomy, Misty was almost fish-like with how bendy her design was. I entered her in several beauty contests, which on Neopets is basically an art contest where posting on the neoboards and gaining popularity is how you won. Flotsam entries were typically barren, so Misty would win pretty easily in her species category without too much effort from me.

Her design stayed the same for years, a simply colored striped flotsam with a unique silhouette. However, after I got into roleplaying, I realized that it was difficult to well, roleplay a dolphin in a world fixated on anthro characters. I tried giving her an anthro design, but it lost a lot of charm of what made her fun to draw in the first place. She didn't have much personality, it was all visuals, and drawing an anthro dolphin in a style that fit my other characters was well, difficult. Back fins don't really work if they try to lay on a bed or the floor or sit in a chair. I could've made it bend but the idea never sat right with me. A nose was confusing too. Dolphin beak? Human nose? Animal nose with holes but it's shaped like a dolphin beak? Does she breathe out of the top of her head instead?

On top of all this, I was slowly falling out of love with Neopets, joining several other petsites that didn't have dolphin-like species, and wanted my characters to look less like Neopets and more like my own creations. I was still severely lost with Misty's design and personality though, so she went without a physical design for some years, even though I did start attempting to roleplay her.

At first, I wanted her to have a 'curse' of being unable to lie, given to her by Liron, back during the whole 'all my characters are from this Egyptian-based deity war' time, where Misty had apparently called a truce to help end it. Dramatic stuff. The idea for not being able to lie was nice, basically have her go quiet if someone asked her a sensitive question or one she'd rather not speak the truth of, make her all cutesy and embarrassed, and possibly a good salesperson. But after some time, this just... never stuck. What if she didn't know the answer to something? Like how tall is Mount Everest, and she legitimately didn't know the answer, could she not answer or could she guess? Wouldn't that be a lie? The logistics of this were too impractical for me to keep up with.

What did stick was having her focus on making clothing. I had a gap in my cosplay character group, they didn't have anyone to actually make costumes, and Misty filled the role. Over time, I imagined that her home life influenced her to mend and make her own outfits to save money. Her mother would get with men for their money, live a temporary high life, then have it all come crashing down with each breakup and be struggling in poverty. This is where Misty learned to mend her clothing, and taught herself that steady hard work is better in the long run than bursts of highs and lows. But she ends up overworking herself into burnout a lot. This whole backstory was inspired by visiting an old coworker's sister's home, well really her new boyfriend? Husband's? home, so my ex could fix their computer. The home was huge, luxurious, and the lady seemed very new to the place and absolutely overwhelmed, frantically trying to clean the kitchen and unable to understand how to work the television. Her two children also seemed lost and out of place in the home, and also a low priority to their mom. This was all just a surface level observance and I haven't a clue what the actual story was behind their situation. I only visited for two days and never saw them again, but I've had it in my mind ever since. Using that as a foundation helped me flesh out Misty's backstory which also let me believably establish where her timid, hardworking personality came from.

Having her as a costume maker also made me realize that a furry/anthro world would desperately need clothing tailors (if they wear clothing). Different tail sizes, wing hole additions, cute shirts that wouldn't get tangled on horns. While Misty mostly sticks to cosplays and upcycling thrift finds, I do have her tailor costumes depending on the customer, which adds more work to her but I feel it adds to the world building.

She did eventually get a physical design, after I stopped roleplaying my characters with other people. Though she's finally anthro, I tried to incorporate a lot of her original design into her new look. Her pink stripes were replaced with slightly darker blue ones, but she wears a good bit of makeup to add that pink touch back into her design, as well as wearing lighter pastels and pink colored clothing. I eventually settled on giving her a human nose, kind of a rounded button one, to compliment her rounded face, rounded hairstyle, and so on. Instead of gemstones being embedded in her body, I gave her earrings that she can remove whenever, and her tail is still big and dramatic compared to my other aquatic characters.

Relationship-wise she hasn't been in many pairings. One roleplay idea had her with a set of twins which I guess wasn't really a pairing cause she didn't accept either of their advances. Another as a temporary cute idea with a friend's character who happened to be a fan of Misty's work, which let Misty be bi-curious for a bit, though it also didn't last long. With her current pairing, Orion, I figured they'd go well together, and I'm a fan of their size difference. Also Orion fit nicely into the nerdy convention scene, he's a total softie, and I love imagining that gentle giant help Misty sew and mend clothing while also teaching her how to ask for help instead of taking on so much work by herself.