skittering | APPLICATION for the quiet place

OOC:

Player Name: trace
Age: 25
Contact:

watchtower

IC:

Name: lalli hotakainen
Canon: stand still, stay silent
Canon Point: chapter 11
Age: 19

Spoken language(s): finnish (or, as canon describes it, 'complete gibberish')
Username: scout (note: this will be his username even if he isn't given a scouting job)
To the Mods: nothing to speak of!

History: the canon infopage and his personal wiki

Personality:

█ lalli hotakainen is different.

He's strange, he's clueless, and as his own cousin Tuuri says, he doesn't really like anything. Basically everyone they meet in the first couple of chapters seems to reach that same general understanding of Lalli as a person. The thing is, 'strange' is the only one of those descriptive terms that actually sincerely applies - a misconception arising from the fact that the source of the descriptions (people) is also the thing Lalli is pretty much the worst at (he's so, so bad at people). You can see the problem, yeah? So anyway, from the top!

█ yes, lalli is generally pretty clueless.

It's... honestly pretty fair to assume that he has no idea what's going on around him at any given time. (It's even in his introductory bio.) This has two causes, probably equal in effect:
Lalli has had basically no education and very limited social interaction. Basically, his own personal world has always been very small, and is only incrementally larger now that they're traveling. This is pretty plain on a couple of occasions, like when he has to ask what a train is before he can follow Tuuri's request that he catch it before it leaves, or his obvious bewilderment at sight of the larger ship they intended to switch to from the smaller boat that ferried them thus far, or the time he sat down on a moving walkway like some kind of magic carpet. As far as technology and civilization go, he just... doesn't know what many things are or how to use them, nor is he learned in any kind of mathematics, literature, history, etc. So in that sense, he's literally kind of clueless sometimes. This is only compounded by the fact that due to a lack of education, he speaks exclusively Finnish, leaving him out of the loop in almost all of the nonvital conversations throughout the comic.

Lalli has a pretty obvious case of selective hearing, even if it's not always deliberate. This, to me, boils down to the fact that social interaction regularly seems to either subtly overwhelm him or be on the brink of it, so he really has to pick and choose his battles regarding what conversations to tune into. The ones he doesn't understand or doesn't care about, he pretty much just default tunes them out unless they're obviously Extremely Important, because he doesn't have the extra energy to spare for trying.
All of which brings me to:

█ he also has pretty much no social skills.

This is pretty much what happens when you're improperly socialized for most of not all of your life. Unfortunately, Lalli's a bit inept on both the 'giving' and the 'receiving' ends of the social interactions teeter-totter.

He typically recoils from unnecessary physical contact (backing out of an attempted hug from Tuuri, for example, to settle for a pat on the head), though 'unnecessary' typically just means 'initiated by someone other than Lalli', as he sees fit to pat or touch people much more frequently than he's chill with them touching him. He's come to accept Mikkel manhandling him in the name of decontamination after scouting trips, but job-related instances are some of the only exceptions he'll seem to make. Most unspoken social cues are totally lost on him - like when a couple of teammates punch his arm or shoulder in a light, congratulatory way, but after the second one, he demands for Tuuri to tell him why they keep hitting him.

But a lot of instances aren't even Lalli failing to understand how others are trying to communicate or interact with him. Pretty often, Lalli actively fails to comprehend or adhere to any kind of social graces whatsoever. Like okay, let's run down the list:
He doesn't see why it's a problem to stare at someone while they eat and then shamelessly steal their food while they aren't looking (in fact, he steals Mikkel's cookies later too).

After his first scouting mission of their expedition, his return is heralded not by a knock or a shout, but by the incessant scritching of nails on the tank-vehicle's metal door until they finally let him in.

When Reynir first shows up in a crate meant to have food and supplies, Lalli circles him for a decent few panels.

He hisses at small children who won't leave him be.

He regularly falls asleep or even walks away while others are talking to him, as if they aren't even talking.
His lack of social graces actually simplifies things a lot in this sense: because he has no real social standards to uphold, what would for most people be tempting speculations ('what would happen if I....') are just... his actions. He just straight-up does them. He also makes absolutely zero effort to be nice to other people. That's not to say that he isn't nice to some people - it's just the behavior that they naturally inspire in him at the moment. For the most part, aside from the select few people he is actually somehow a little attached to, he ignores everyone that he can ignore and is kind of a rude butt to everyone he can't ignore. He has no issue saying that someone/something is stupid and he doesn't like them/it. He can also be a petty little shit. The one instance coming to mind is after he basically saves their asses and has to sleep it off for like 70 pages, has a dream that he woke up to a shower of appreciation, then actually woke up and was basically unnoticed. Though the others did nothing wrong, he basically punishes them off and on for ten or fifteen pages. He put a dead rodent in Mikkel's cooking, fur and all, and when Emil notices him alone and brings him soup, Lalli flips the bowl of soup up in Emil's stunned face. Honestly, he just doesn't know how to properly express that his feelings are hurt so he just pulls this shit like a child. He's also this petty with Reynir, stemming from insecurities we'll talk about in a bit.

Though it may sound counter-intuitive, the language barrier really just helps him deal with this. It's easier to just blanket ignore people you can't understand and aren't expected to be able to successfully communicate with regardless.

It's also worth noting that most of the time, he doesn't actually care that his social skills are strongly lacking. Oh, he knows he's 'unsocialized', Tuuri well-meaningly won't let him forget it. It's just... not on his list of things that are important enough for him to work on, at least not yet. So far, Lalli has always been pretty okay with himself, or at least insurmountably resistant to changing himself in any way. However, at the canonpoint from which I'm taking him, he's kind of at the cusp of some pretty big (if outwardly subtle) adjustments in the chapters to follow. He's coming from just after the aforementioned 'sleeping it off for 70 pages' - specifically after the dream, which I want to talk about a little bit here because it's basically one big wishful thinking dream sequence and thus kind of a look into his psyche.

█ so let's talk about the dream.

What we get from this dream is:
He 'wakes up' to Emil, welcoming him back with a smile. Not Tuuri or Onni, but Emil. We'll talk more about Emil later, but suffice to say for now that Emil is the only individual you see truly meeting Lalli's idiosyncrasies halfway, and he's actually helping Lalli make a ton of progress within himself. His dream-self waking up to Emil means (in my interpretation) that as resistant as he is to change overall, part of him is actually drawn to whatever new facets of self Emil's friendship is drawing out of him.

Emil says that the others were worried about him, and the fact that it isn't followed up by some sort of urgent scouting job that they were worried he wouldn't be conscious to undergo implies that they were worried about Lalli... as a person. Like he's more than just a scout to them. More on this later too, but it's pretty obvious (especially in his negative interactions with Reynir, the only other mage) that he's got an underlying fear that if he doesn't maintain his quality of work as The Scout-Mage, he's nothing to anybody.

Sigrun congratulates him on a job well-done and stops her playful punch half-swing to pat his shoulder instead. The typically somewhat brash team leader is not only telling him he did his job perfectly (see the above point), but she's also considering him on a personal level and adjusting her treatment of him accordingly. The fact that this is in Lalli's dream means that he sincerely cares about possibly one day being able to connect to Sigrun (another human being!) on a personal level, even if it's kind of a pipe dream because she super Does Not Get Him.

Reynir's entire contribution is basically "I realized my hair is stupid and I want to cut it off". He doesn't even get a deep, meaningful part in Lalli's dream because Lalli is pretty much too busy subconsciously calling Reynir a stupid dumb idiot who is stupid. See also: Can be petty.

Tuuri, attempting to translate for Lalli, says "how much they appreciate and admire everything you do for us". Just to drive the point home that Lalli is appreciated and valued, because that's the one resonating thread throughout this entire dream. But!

As a final twist, Lalli says, "I know, I understood. You don't need to translate for me." with a little bit of a smile. A smile. This boy hasn't smiled in front of another human being so far in the entire 800+ page comic, in my recollection (and I just reread it twice for this app), and he's smiled all of twice total in private. His ability to understand their words and to smile here really hits home with a sort of latent desire to finally Be A Human Being Who Can Connect To Others, even if he has no idea how to achieve it and honestly doesn't even fully recognize that it exists. Either way, he wakes up into reality with an arm outstretched, reaching for the dream.

This foray into dreamland was important to walk you through because a: I would've mentioned it like fifteen billion times otherwise as I scattered the above info into other sections (hey, remember that dream? it's back, X also happened) AND b: This dream is the immediate couple of pages before Lalli's canonpoint, so it's the precise psychological state in which he arrives.

█ he has ways of reconciling with the world.

Like I said: The vast majority of the civilized world, he either doesn't understand or it doesn't understand him. It's a disconnect that Lalli has long since learned methods to deal with. He investigates shit in his own way, at his own pace, typically alone. He honestly prefers being alone, because nature is where he is truly in his element. He works alone whenever possible (even if others would rather he not), and in fact, he prefers to do now what he's always done: Scout at night, deliver his report, sleep through the day when other humans are awake. This limits the amount of time spent awake in a populated world he doesn't understand or enjoy.

If at all possible, he wears clothing that covers as much of him as possible. Even when he's just in a regular jacket or sweater, he zips or pulls the neck all the way up and ducks his chin down into it so that just his eyes and nose stick out. On the one hand, it's definitely cold enough outside to warrant bundling up, but that's far from the only reason he does it, especially when many of his layers of clothing are ineffectually thin. Along those lines, he also kind of physically closes in on himself when he's overwhelmed. He ducks his head, and oftentimes his hands come up to his face to sort of 'hide' himself in. Hiding is not an uncommon strategy in general - like I said, he sleeps all day a lot of the time. When they're awake, he wanders off on his own when possible and hangs back from the group a little bit otherwise.

When Lalli does engage with something, it's typically broken down into the most practical and black-and-white terms. The Engineer's Flowchart comes to mind as a good example of Lalli Logic, though obviously neither duct tape nor WD40 exist in their canon. But in the very beginning, when he finds out they are, in fact, heading out into the world, his only question for the person who hired them is "can I go home?". When the answer is no, he sleeps under the table because fuck it. Similarly, during the briefing for his first scouting mission, his entire assessment of their location is "a weird scary foreign country" and that's all he needs to know. Lalli is not an individual who will discuss semantics with you. Hell, he isn't even an individual who will contemplate semantics, most of the time. Things are very 'this is how it is' with Lalli and his worldview.

So based on everything so far, he isn't necessarily the kind of bro you'd choose to bring along on an expedition into terrifying parts unknown, is he?

Let's change that.

█ lalli is an amazing scout.

Like, I feel like that's an understatement. He is basically fearless, as far as actual danger is concerned. And the fucking things they're up against? Not exactly B-movie scary, even discounting their ability to infect you and turn you into one of them. But that's barely a blip on Lalli's radar, until the thing they're up against is at least three times his size. In group expeditions into dark and creepy places, most of the crew are jumping at shadows but Lalli will regularly go off on his own in order to stealthily find and destroy whatever's lurking in the dark so that his allies never know they were even in danger. There are times when the exact thing the team's afraid of is stalking them and Lalli (the only one who knows it's there) is pretending not to see it, baiting it along, closing doors carefully behind him until the right opportunity arises.

On top of that, he's actually incredibly perceptive to the things that actually matter to him. Between his mage abilities and his natural perception capabilities, he can basically sense when something's nebulously wrong in the air or when danger is lurking nearby, and he can do so long before anyone but the resident cat even begins to suspect. It's to the point where everyone has a pretty solid sense of personal security as long as Lalli 'doesn't look scared'. As such, he's more than willing to go on scouting trips with other people, because most of the trip is spent pretending they don't even exist - tailing them or even poking ahead of them but fully immersed in the environment, not his companions. It's also worth mentioning that when he does tune into a conversation, he's perceptive enough to get an immediate read on generally what the mood is and what's happening, regardless of language barriers.

And in fact, being briefed on a mission is about the only time he listens when long strings of words are coming at him. He retains that shit. Similarly, reporting after a scouting mission is one of the only times he'll actively talk to someone at length. It helps that in these scenarios, he's exclusively discussing his job and the results thereof, so he's not expected to actually talk-talk to anyone. Also, while he typically can't remember more than a quarter of what Tuuri says to him, he can remember incredibly elaborate scouting routes and never takes more than an initial passing glance at a map.

When it comes down to it, he really and truly cares about being a scout, and about living up to others' expectations of his ability to fulfill that role. In short, Lalli doesn't fail. If it seems like he's going to, he won't accept an 'everyone makes mistakes' or a 'you'll get it next time' - he'll fucking solve it, whatever it takes. A key example of this (referred to above as 'saving their asses') was when he mapped the expedition team a route into a big city, but the snow was deeper than anticipated and his mapped route was impossible to navigate once they arrived. Instead of letting them turn back, he ran himself ragged to find an alternative route, eventually resorting to clearing out a very dubious cave with every ounce of mage ability he has. He then returns to the team and tells them the new route before sleep finally claims him. His first smile of the entire comic is at this point, some 300+ pages in, when he exhaustedly realizes he's not failed everyone after all.

Note that he doesn't actually 'care what people think of him'. He doesn't care, for example, when Emil doubts he's a mage at all in Book 1, nor does he really care when most people assume he's lazy or weird. What he cares about is that when people count on him to do his actual job - one which is basically 75% of what keeps them alive at all, out in the Silent World - then he actually does that job. This definitely stems from a particular incident in his past, in which he failed to properly fill out a scouting report (he literally just wrote 'yes' - like, yes what?? come on, Lalli) and it got a number of people killed. What's worse, his cousin Onni implies in that same flashback that their grandma (who had trained Lalli in scouting and Finnish magic) had been killed by 'just one mistake' too, so this is kind of a reoccurring theme for Lalli... One which solidifies his determination to persevere in any scouting/mage job he's faced with. And actually, one of the few things that outright irritates him aside from blatantly doubting his scouting ability is when others try to oversee or hinder him doing his job. Which, for the record, doesn't just apply to official missions. 'His job' is any situation in which his abilities as a scout or a mage will keep his people alive and safe, whether or not they or anyone else ask him to do so and regardless of who may actually be in charge of the situation. When a giant attacks the train on which they're riding, the staff are rushing to herd everyone back to bed and Lalli marches past the guards, pinpoints the giant before it even breaks through, and points directly to it's location.

█ finally, lalli cares about his people.

By 'his people', I mean individuals with whom he actually forges a connection. Like, he'll protect the entire group, but he won't actively show that he kind of might care about anyone but a select couple of people.

Which means it's time to talk about Emil, the only person outside of his family that Lalli has verbally acknowledged that he cares about. Lalli starts off approximately as prejudiced against Emil ("the messy Swedish person") as he is against pretty much the rest of the population. But despite his general strangeness and lack of decorum, Emil fails to dismiss Lalli like so many others have, instead trying to meet him halfway from the beginning. When Lalli steals his sandwich, he simply gets up and gets them each another one. Also, when Emil's family's children swarm Lalli and he's clearly uncomfortable, Emil outright scolds them for it. On top of that, pretty early in the story you'll find Emil beginning to turn to Lalli to vent when shit's stupid - like when his explosives are confiscated in Customs - and Lalli doesn't understand a single word of it, but y'know what? He does actively go through the motions of listening, which is more even than he offers his own cousin a lot of the time. Emil is also the only one to make an effort to patiently work his way back to Lalli when the mage is angry and isolating himself shortly after his canonpoint, which is kind of Big.

Emil proceeds to be the only person whom Lalli proactively responds to in any way. When they're bunked together on the train, he says goodnight and pats Emil's head (voluntary human contact!), and when he senses the troll preparing to attack the train, he urgently gives Emil a seatbelt to hold onto before clinging tightly to his own. Almost more surprisingly, once the troll attack is over and they're back in bed, Lalli notes that Emil is visibly shaken and fixes Emil's hair the way he's noticed that Emil likes it. Comforting him in the only way Lalli really knows how. Later, when Emil is visibly distressed over a dog-beast that followed him home to die, Lalli takes some pretty painstaking efforts to do the proper mage ritual to allow the dog's spirit to ascend and be reborn. All of this occurs with the language barrier firmly in place between them. Their communications almost entirely limited to gestures, body language, and facial expressions, but Emil doesn't really seem to mind and the simplicity of that in contrast with verbal speech is kind of refreshing for Lalli.

What we see in the friendship between Emil and Lalli is what happens when someone treats Lalli like a normal human being without being deterred by his strangeness or making him feel even stranger for it. Emil recognizes Lalli's needs (for the most part) and tries to accommodate them without babying him, and in return, Lalli has begun to step out of his comfort zone in a way that he only really feels comfortable doing with Emil thus far.

But Emil is far from the only person he cares about. His family (consisting of Onni and Tuuri, his two cousins) is very important to him - and in fact, is kind of his lifeline through the first book, before he gets to know Emil a little bit. Onni is also a mage, and though he opted to stay behind instead of joining them on the expedition, Lalli consults him as often as possible in their semi-shared mage dreamscape. He trusts Onni implicitly, and with both that and language barriers in mind, Onni is basically the one person that Lalli can kind of be passably conversational with. Onni is the one who asks him if he's made any friends, to which Lalli admits that he's maybe made one, though he doesn't name any names.

The other half of Lalli's remaining family is his cousin Tuuri, a fellow protagonist and member of their expedition. This is kind of a difficult relationship to put your finger on, because the way she seems to care about him and lead him around in the first book, you'd think they're almost sibling-level close... But regularly throughout the comic, you find out that she doesn't really know him that well and that she doesn't know how to get through to him when he's mad, aside from leaving him alone for literally months on end (which she has apparently done). It seems to me like she has a specific way that she's taken to mothering Lalli and she isn't sure how to go any deeper than that, and in turn, he kind of tunes her out and shuts himself away from her a lot of the time. This isn't to say they don't care about each other - it's incredibly obvious how much she cares about him, and when something Not Good happens to her after his canonpoint, he's deeply fucked up over it - just that despite caring, they have little in common and don't quite know how to relate.

Abilities/Skills: So Lalli's general skillset can be divided up into two key categories: Mage and scout. He uses his mage abilities while scouting, so there's a pretty big overlap, but I'm dividing them here for the purpose of clarity! Also, I'll be making note via ( ! ) how I feel like this will come into play specifically in The Quiet Place. Apologies for all of the detail - abilities/skills just seemed pretty important to the mod team in the info pages so I want to be as thorough as possible. Anyway, here we go:

█ finnish mage

( A disclaimer: A lot of the magic in Stand Still, Stay Silent is based in the local mythos and belief system - in Lalli's case, Finnish beliefs - and is somewhat nebulously explained at best. So I'm going to explain as best I can based on what we've got to work with. )

There are two types of mages in this world, with different abilities, different origins of power, and arguably different goals. Finnish mages "possess the ability to control elements of nature and to see and affect the actions of certain spirits", and in the next few bullet points, I'll summarize how that seems to shake out for Lalli.

SPELLWORK - By performing an incantation in which he invokes a God, a benevolent spirit, or a force of nature, Lalli is shown to have some influence on the world around him. Key examples include:
A spell to invoke the protection of the moon, seen here and translated into English here. Upon conclusion, clouds uncover the moon, and Lalli appears to be satisfied with his handiwork. (It's worth noting that his magic is far from infallible - that night, a giant monstrosity did indeed attack their train, though no one was killed so it went about as good as it possibly could have.)

A spell to invoke the Kallohonka and allow the spirit of an infected dog-beast to return to the sky and be reborn, seen here. I'm not positive if the elaborate gore pattern he enacted in the rest of the carcass or the act of wearing the skull on his head as he climbed a tree are part of it? I'm going to assume 'yes', at least to Lalli.

A spell to banish the spirits from inhabiting or interfering with their radio, found here and translated here in a couple of slightly-varying ways. It's worth noting a couple of things: a) This seems to be less a 'spell' than a frustrated death threat, as best I can tell, though I'm not going to discount actual magic in at least helping banish the troll, and b) his threat is quite literally to send his own spirit to hunt them down'. See 'luonto' below for more on this - I just wanted to draw attention to it here.
All in all, not a terribly thorough compilation of examples, but this is all we currently have to work with.

( ! ) Especially in cases in which he's attempting to influence the natural world or performing some sort of spiritual rites, the verbal incantation is a necessary part of the process, which in itself severely limits his ability to do spellwork in The Quiet Place.

SEE & INFLUENCE DARK SPIRITS - Many Finnish mages can perform basic spells, so the ability to see and interact with spirits is the primary means to determine who is and isn't a mage. 'Spirits' in this scenario includes your traditional concept of a 'spirit', but also includes the dark and twisted spirits of beasts, trolls, and giants (which I'll collectively refer to as 'the infected'), whether or not they still have a corporeal body. Some of the forms this takes in canon:

Their first night on the train cruising through the Silent World, Lalli senses the presence and inevitable approach of what turns out to be a violent giant. The voices of infected spirits are rarely deciphered as actual words, typically represented as unnatural black speech bubbles filled with staticky black chicken-scratch. The incident is shown here from pages 157 through 165. You'll see Lalli kept awake by the giant's vocal static in his head, then what looks like the oppressive presence of the giant encroaching right before it actually attacks. He proceeds to show that he's able to locate precisely where it is through the hull of the train.

Also seen in 'spellwork', early in the expedition he hears the voices of spirits clogging up their radio line. (This is audible only to him, and Tuuri is visibly confused as to why the radio isn't working.) He then proceeds to threaten the spirits and they evacuate the radio lines, showing some form of influence over them.

Whenever they investigate a dangerous and abandoned structure, Lalli is always the first to perceive a dark entity nearby, often without any way to have tangibly noticed their presence aside from his general mage senses.

( This is after his canonpoint, but I take what I can get. ) At one point, Emil is unable to continue fleeing across a sheet of thin ice, so Lalli turns back in order to protect them. Shown here is Lalli facing off against the biggest giant thus far, and over the following couple of pages you witness him essentially holding his ground and carving a path through the giant, after which it falls into pieces and Lalli himself is plunged into unconsciousness (shown as him falling into his dream world, which is discussed below).

A couple-hundred pages earlier and before the tragic loss of his cousin (though still after his current canonpoint), he's shown to fear some debateably less threatening spirits, and Onni is forced to dive to their rescue in spirit form rather than Lalli taking them on himself, all of which leads me to say that I feel like the strength of this particular maneuver stems from the intensity of his lingering sense of loss + the intensity of how much he cares about Emil, his only remaining friend, whom he's protecting from certain death. ( ! ) This leads me to tentatively say that I feel like if he begins to strongly care about anyone here in The Quiet Place, his ability to deflect/cut through dark spirit-like entities to protect them would be significantly stronger than just doing so to protect himself.

FEEL & GUIDE NON-INFECTED SPIRITS - As Finnish mages are tasked with the primary job of guiding the spirits of the infected to the afterlife, it's safe to assume that he has a number of burial rites and soul-guiding rituals (like the Kallohonka) in his repertoire. We just... haven't really seen him do so in canon all that often, due to the nature of their jobs and his primary role as a scout. The closest we see to Lalli dealing with a non-infected soul is when Tuuri dies, when he waits with his forehead against a tree for hours until he can feel her soul find its way to the afterlife.

This isn't really explained, but it also looks as though Lalli can feel when a loved one dies. I'm not sure if there's a proximity range associated with this ability, or how much he has to care about someone before he can feel their death. In theory, I think he'd be able to feel the same for Emil and maybe Onni (unless thwarted by distance). It also appears to briefly choke him, as he's clutching at his throat. I'm not sure if this means that he feels the death they died (Tuuri drowned), or that the shock of it simply took his breath away. Hopefully, canon offers more details on this soon.

( ! ) In The Quiet Place, I probably wouldn't do a ton with this unless modplot gave me an opportunity, except maybe to have him feel it in an instance in which close CR (assuming he gets any) happens to die.

LUONTO - Lalli, as most Finnish mages appear to, has a Luonto (wiki), which by my understanding is a fragment of his soul which can also be sent outside of him in the shape of an animal. His takes the form of a lynx, and it functions kind of like a mix between a guardian spirit and an extension of his own mage abilities. (This is what he threatened to send after the infected spirits plaguing their radio!) It can be seen in action when he has to prove he isn't a failure and clear a cave of potentially living infected husks much more quickly than he could do on his own, all of which is shown here and then here before it disappears, leaving him incredibly weak and bleeding from the eyes and nose. This marks his Luonto leaving him for a time, which leaves him just enough strength to haul his tired ass back home and report back on the route he's cleared before he goes basically comatose for multiple chapters and crucial story events until it returns to him just before his canonpoint.

( ! ) This feels like it would translate pretty much as-is to The Quiet Place, if he ever had any reason to use it. It's kind of a last resort, since it seemed to take him very much out of commission for a long while when he did utilize it.

DREAMSCAPE - When any mage (Icelandic or Finnish) falls asleep, they enter a tangible dreamscape. All mages seem to have an individual 'haven' into which they appear when they fall asleep, different and seemingly personal for each mage but universal in the promise of relative safety. Mages are able to journey outside of their haven through a sort of overarching dreamscape and into another mage's haven (Lalli's is shown here through page 214), and others can journey to enter theirs, where the mages are able to communicate over a seemingly unlimited distance and with no language barriers. In fact, this seems like a fairly regular and reliable thing, as Tuuri implies early on that Lalli's dreamscape was how they primarily intended to communicate with Onni while they were gone.

However, the dreamscape acts different for each type of mage. Finnish mages, for example, can't enter one another's havens without being allowed in, while Icelandic mages (like Reynir) are able to waltz through others' havens without even realizing barriers were supposed to be present. Also, Icelandic mages seem to have a form of animal guide in their dreamscape, while Finnish mages do not.

The dreamscape is not, overall, a safe place. Spirits in unrest are shown to encroach on Lalli's haven a couple of times, and he's forced to use his own magic to keep them out. Also, when he ventures to visit Onni in his cousin's haven, Onni tells him not to return to his own haven that night because something in the dreamscape (unspecified to us but known to both of them) was looking for them again. Along those lines, there's one occasion during his 70-page nap in which Reynir sees a host of threatening spirits approaching their tank and Lalli senses it all the way in his dreamscape, growing increasingly restless and finally outright shrieking without waking up. In his dreamscape right at that moment, he witnessed the same host of spirits approaching the borders of his haven. All of this is to imply that as far as infected or dark spirits are concerned, the boundaries between dreams and reality aren't quite as concrete.

In very recent canon (the last ~20 pages), it's implied that he can enter the sleep of a non-mage as well. Rather than a haven, however, they simply have... a dream. Which he suddenly features in.

( ! ) Full disclosure, I would really really love for this dreamscape to continue to be a thing in The Quiet Place, at the very least as far as his haven is concerned. It would be kind of spectacular for me if you made the overarching dreamscape here in Reims be something entirely different than he's used to, and I'm totally okay if it's impossible to navigate outside of his haven for now or forever, if it comes down to that. (Regarding his ability to enter dreams: It has only happened once, so I don't feel like I have enough information to use that in-game even if I wanted to. If we do get enough information, I don't plan to utilize this outside of an extremely rare and pre-planned occasion with some kind of very close CR - in canon, it was the product of a dire situation and it was Emil's dream he entered.)

TELEPATHY(?) - Okay, this is a weird one, and literally 300 pages after Lalli's canonpoint, but I'm listing it because it's something he's shown to technically be able to do. Somehow. So when Lalli protects Emil from that incredibly large giant, he's once again knocked drained to unconsciousness and thrown into his dreamscape. If you peruse the next few pages, you'll see him leaving through a nebulous door in the side of his haven and entering what turns out to be the dream that Emil is having at the time. Lalli tells him that he's dreaming, and that Lalli's going to be "staying here for some time" until he "finds out how to get back where he belongs", which I'm assuming means that his luonto is missing once again.

When Emil wakes up, Lalli is still unconscious... but when he starts talking to himself, the unconscious scout answers, and proceeds to talk to him easily (and with no language barrier, like in the dream) henceforth through the most recent page. There are a few details to note here - firstly, that the one time Lalli is really shown through all of this, he's pictured sitting on the couch from Emil's dream, implying that he's still taking refuge in Emil's head. Additionally, he can see everything Emil sees and hear everything that Emil hears - and since Lalli's inside his head, the both of them are now able to see infected spirits, a first for Emil.

( ! ) I have no idea what in the fuck I'd ever do with this, it's so circumstantial and specific, but he's shown to do it so I wanted to mention it.

█ scout by occupation

Lalli has a few skills that have developed for or from his job as a night scout for the Finnish military, including:
He's extremely fast. Not inhumanly fast, but about as fast as a human can feasibly be.

His senses are very, very keen. He can smell something wrong from an exceptional range, let alone his sharp senses of sight and sound.

He has quick, almost cat-like reflexes, which often just reads as 'jumpy' in a populated area but is extremely useful in the field. He's shown to be light enough on his feet to sprint effortlessly across thin ice, while Emil (who isn't much larger than he is) breaks through in the first couple of steps.

He may be slim (boy's basically a noodle), but he's kind of in great physical condition. He's shown to have endurance (most of his scouting missions are largely long-distance running to cover more distance), strength (he does a lot of climbing and is able to easily haul his body weight up sharp hills and rocky faces), and flexibility (just... this).

He can shoot a gun, as assumed by the fact that he carried a rifle for his initial night scout job.

He is very good with a knife, able to get the jump on a beast or troll and stab it through the head with minimal difficulty.

Very keen memory for scouting routes - even in new areas, he barely glances at a map and can still rattle off pretty much an entire topographical description of the entirety of the surrounding area.

Samples: ( using the test drive for inspiration! )

█ for the network

❰ "hush little baby, don't say a word, Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don't sing, Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring. And if that diamond-"

he doesn't let the message finish. instead, he's already pulling together a message of his own, tapping silently but precisely at letters that he honestly has no idea how he understands. but he does. and he's already forgotten that most of the town is listening to some kind of nursery rhyme when he sends his own message: ❱

Something's out there. I can feel it. What is it? None of these people will tell me.

█ new network sample (to anyone from home)

Onni -

Or Tuuri or anyone else from home. This is my second report. I don't like to write but I don't know what else to do with them. I would save them and tell you out loud, but I feel like I might be here too long for that. Long enough to forget.

The town is Reims in some foreign place called France. I have a map now. I think I found home but they call it something else. I don't remember what. If that is home then this is far south of that. (Avoid town hall. They don't like me there. That's where I got the map.)

I've scouted every day since I got here. No sign of infection. Weird for buildings this old and broken. Maybe I haven't gone out far enough yet. I've walked everywhere with sand, but every time I step off of it, people wave their arms and pull me around. I want them to stop touching me, so I stay on the sand. I might try at night when no one is there to pull on me.

Nothing moves here except for the doors. Everything is fixed into place. I noticed it before but assumed it was just where the new people were.

They still won't give me back my clothes. It's stupid. I'm a scout. My clothes never made noise in the first place.

█ for a log

❰ the natives may have fled, but lalli doesn't. he's used to people bustling and rushing around him. and now they're all gone, which he prefers regardless. oh, right - they seemed scared. that might be important to note. they always seem scared of something, but this was more so, and at an unusual hour of day.

they also all ran the same direction, which makes this easy enough: lalli continues to walk in the opposite one, deeper into the forest. but something doesn't quite feel right, and his steps are light and careful, utterly soundless despite the foliage underfoot. he can feel the air around him going stagnant, settling incrementally. and then, in the corner of his eye, he sees it: the figure, cloaked in shadow.

one hand drops to the handle of his knife, while the other tugs the collar of his jacket that much higher over his mouth, and he's shooting a glare at the stranger who was not invited and who definitely needs to go away -

- but instead, the stranger gasps.

lalli's eyes narrow, and he shakes his head very visibly at the stranger and its stupid creepy grin. and it does it again. this time, lalli's spine creeps at the sound, and his eyes dart left and right to make sure nothing else is around. he needs to go, but this person (thing?) is blocking his path. so he does the only thing he can think to do: he draws his knife in self-defense, and without warning, he sprints full-tilt at the stranger. past the stranger, hopefully. so he can get far, far away before whatever happens... happens.

he may wonder exactly what's out here, but this isn't when or how he wants to find out. ❱