Fun fact: This NPC's dialogue refers to a real-world place, the settlement of Tiksi on the northern coast of Russia, which is actually the northernmost settlement with a population over 4,000. In the original Japanese dialogue, he states that he was sent to Podkamennaya Tunguska, a tiny village in the middle of Siberia.

Either way, definitely not the Tiki branch.

 Literally anything.

 One last FFTA2 sketch!

Vasily is a cantankerous, unsociable middle-aged bangaa who used to run his own courier business before joining Clan Excelsior after they helped him out of a jam. Aside from his skills as a Cannoneer, he's also an excellent airship pilot and knows his way around machines. He's extremely emotionally attached to his ship, a mid-size freighter named the Juggernaut, which he treats like his baby (since he didn't really have anybody else in his life before he joined the clan). After he joined Clan Excelsior, they lived on the Juggernaut and used it as their home base for a while. Eventually Qrrog secured Worgen Island for them and now they all live there, but still regularly use the Juggernaut to travel around Ivalice.

While generally cynical and blunt, Vasily is a decent guy beneath all that grousing, and he's very committed to the clan and always has their backs. In canon material, most bangaa have Scottish accents, but Vasily has a Cockney dialect because he just popped into my head that way. I dunno, maybe he's from a different part of Ivalice or something. He still has the usual bangaa habit of hissing his S's, though.

There are more characters who join Clan Excelsior in later fics, but I think I'll save their portraits for if/when I ever get around to revising those.

 I can't stop drawing Clan Excelsior portraits, but I had so much fun writing these characters; they each have such strong and diverse personalities and dynamics with each other that, like my Neopets cast, it's fun to just come up with new ways for them to interact and show different sides of themselves. My FFTA2 cast was really one of the first times in my writing that my character development was personality-driven--before then, most of the characters I wrote didn't really have much to them and basically just existed to fill a role, not be interesting in their own right (a lot of characters in Skydwellers had this problem, especially in earlier editions).

Plus, I've been re-reading those old FFTA2 fics and enjoying them despite their age. I've been dealing with a lot lately and those fics are a good happy place. Nothing like a bit of lighthearted fantasy brimming with quirky characters to take you away from your stress for a bit.

Qrrog Squallhammer was the first person to join Clan Excelsior after its initial three members; his recruitment involved piracy, being eaten by a sea serpent, and one of the wildest "how I met my spouse" stories ever. But it all worked out in the end.

 Last week on Fossil Friday, Ruby Pines was teaching us how to draw Dimetrodon, and as she was blocking out the shapes, she drew in what she called "footy pebbles" for the feet. MaggieJo then commented that she wanted to see a Fruity Pebbles-colored Dimetrodon. So I just had to.

Dimetrodon are often traditionally posed in a squat crouch, but there have been fossil trackways found of what appear to be Dimetrodon footprints that show two things: no tail-dragging marks and a narrow gauge between prints. Both these pieces of evidence strongly suggest that Dimetrodon walked in an upright position, so that's how I like to depict it.

(As much as I like the idea of Dimetrodon having whiskers, a paper came out last year describing scaly body impressions that appear to have come from Dimetrodon, so it seems that sphenacodontids had scales instead of bare skin/fur like later synapsids. These guys were just a little too early for whiskers, it seems.)

 I feel bad for any kid who has a Team Rocket member for a parent, though.

 More FFTA2 OC sketching! (I know, the proportions are kind of off. I draw these late at night when I'm winding down and I'm like "yeah this looks fine" and then in the morning I'm like "no no it's all wrong" but I don't feel like going to the bother of fixing it because it's just a sketch, and here I am overexplaining everything again when I should be eating breakfast.)

Anyway. This is Tara O'Donovan Squallhammer, the main character and first-person narrator of all the fics. She started off as an overstressed, exhausted college student from modern-day Earth, who was beginning to question what she was doing with her life when she found a Grimoire in a used bookstore and it transported her to Ivalice. At first, her adventures followed a path similar to Luso Clemens, with the Grimoire recording her escapades so it could return her home when its pages were filled.

However, as Tara grew accustomed to Ivalice, made friends for the first time in her life, and realized that her job as her clan's White Mage was way more fulfilling than being on the fast track to the rat race, she began to dread returning to Earth. Finally she made the decision to destroy her Grimoire, ensuring she could stay in Ivalice permanently (or so she thought, but that's a story for a later fic).