TL;CR MEME

[retellers]

1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.

Comments

[soulus]

It started with a deal to let Hansa pet Rupe. Hansa's payment—information about the barrier—was already something Rufus knew, but there was no condition that the information he received in exchange had to be new, so he took it for what it was. He thought Hansa was unnecessarily sociable in what he deemed a lousy imitation of a business transaction, which was mostly just a ploy to avoid getting friendly with anybody, and was of the opinion that this exchange went on way longer than it should have. But at least it established what Rufus was all about, which helped them settle into a CR of give and take.

For all that Rufus pushed back, this was probably the most conversational CR of his for the first few weeks. Hansa was relentless when it came to chatting and striving for two-way communication. When Rufus voiced that it was safer to have no expectations, Hansa insisted there were benefits to having them and listed all the best things that come for free. Of the list, family and love were what sparked Rufus' irritation, because it wasn't that he thought they didn't exist—but that he had had them, lost them, and was now still living with the trauma of those losses.

Hansa was one of the participants who defended him valiantly at trial when Rufus was on the verge of being scapegoated. It bothered him how much Hansa was sticking his neck out for him: They were still strangers, and recent canon had reminded him that people will typically take advantage of those at a disadvantage. Hansa insisted, yet again, that his was a genuine act of kindness and that he didn't expect anything in return, which Rufus had a difficult time believing.

There was a lot of insisting on Hansa's end. More importantly, he never pushed to the point that he became irritating. Rufus did not mind Hansa's company! In fact, Hansa got more of Rufus' natural banter than most—if not all—of his CR.

Part of that was because Rufus felt a little guilty the first time Hansa voiced his dissatisfaction over their current arrangement. In Rufus' mind, there was nothing wrong with selling himself in the sense that his body was the tool to carry out his services. He also thought that Hansa was wrong for saying that he was "not a bad guy to be around": By this time, he had already attempted to use him for the secret task and knew that he was the one committing the wrongs.

That didn't stop him from attempting to use Hansa again. The breakdown of his shared emotions was like this: he hesitated on and had doubts about using Hansa again, but wanted to attempt it for the sake of the role, which drudged up some self-reproach for being the bad person he was, while all of that did nothing to erase his wariness of people as a whole. In the end, he seized the opportunity and was pettily annoyed when Hansa misinterpreted his emotions. But he did manage to share a memory like the task demanded.

What he didn't foresee was how Hansa would latch onto the factoid he shared about sitting in the dark. There was a lot of focus on his happiness and fairness—two facets of his life Rufus had ignored for most of his years—but he always resisted Hansa's offers of help for similar reasons as the above. He believed that their relationship was artificial, because he had feigned opening up for the sake of his role.

Emet-Selch's trial and execution rubbed him the wrong way, and the covering put him off of Hansa for a while. At the end of the day it wasn't personal, though, and he separated Hansa from Emet-Selch easily enough. Things made more sense after he heard about the child. He felt for Hansa then, but chose not to get too emotionally close.

There weren't so many opportunities to use Hansa after that, so Rufus cruised with him and indulged him with the occasional lore. Between the child and their discussion of different kinds of wildernesses, he came to understand Hansa better—but not enough for him to feel they were closer for it. Hansa had his loved ones while Rufus, ever distrustful, was there for his personal benefit as the Pawn, which was why he felt guilty again when there was another moment of dissatisfaction during sandwich time.

Keeping Hansa at an arm's distance so as not to deepen this relationship was Rufus' way of being responsible for his deception. He was deliberately cold anytime there was insistence of there being a friendship, though he truthfully would not have minded Hansa's feral episodes.

He received Hansa's security report from the computer, by the way. Nice chainsaw.