Noe

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personality

the goodest boy. he's a flower witch. he's renowned for making bouquets so beautiful that they lift the mood of any room they're in. some say they're so effective at brightening spirits that they must be magical because they are. noe is a lot like his bouquets. sometimes when he's particularly delighted nearby flowers will spontaneously burst into bloom, even in the dead of winter. he's usually pretty soft-spoken, but when he gets excited he has a hard time controlling his volume.

noe tries to get to know a lot of his customers, especially regulars. that's just the kind of person he is. he also has a bit of a knack for convincing people into buying a couple flowers for themselves, especially when he can tell that they're going through something where they might just need a little bit of a supernatural push to help them out.

he has a sympathetic link with all flowering plants within a certain distance, due to essentially sharing a life force with nature itself at this point. when he's, for instance, cutting flowers for his shop, he's able to block the pain out enough that it doesn't interfere with either his profession or his magic. however, when he's not the one controlling the action, he can end up being caused phantom pain equivalent to what nearby plants are being subject to. for this reason, he's not a very big fan of being around running lawnmowers, for instance, and he almost fainted once when he was talking to a woman who was weeding her garden.

background

noe doesn't like to think about his past. it's been a long time, but he was raised by his aunt and uncle after his parents passed away. he was fairly neglected, because he already had three cousins at the time. he was frequently made to do housework, sometimes through physical force. as he grew older, he started spending more and more time away from the house in order to get away from the stress. in particular, he would go to an abandoned walled garden nearby, often knitting or reading while he was there. he would take care of the flowers, doing his best to identify issues with pests or disease and studying up on how to treat them. his visits became much more frequent in later years, as his uncle became sick and stayed at home more often, meaning his treatment of noe got worse as well. 

after a particularly violent evening, noe ran away from his aunt and uncle's house. he began to live in the garden itself, specifically in a small, run-down caretaker's cottage in the back corner. life was difficult, especially at first, but for some reason, he was always able to find enough to eat regardless of the season. it was around this time that he began to notice the first signs of newfound magical abilities, and he did what he could to practice. there were a few grimoires present in the cottage in which he lived—sometimes, new ones would appear, which noe often mentally attributed to fairies—which he pored over near-obsessively, and from this he cultivated his magic.

as his magic grew stronger, his aging slowed more and more. it took him a couple decades to even realize nothing was different about him even though people on the streets grew and changed much faster than he did. at some point along the way, noe decided he wanted to try to help people (more out of something to do with his time than any sort of altruistic desire). after much effort, he managed to obtain the supplies needed to open a small flower shop. business was pretty good, especially as rumors spread that the flowers from his shop functioned as good luck charms and things like that. at first, he hadn't intentionally put magic into his flowers and bouquets, but when he realized it was happening anyway, he figured it might be a good idea to be just a little more attentive to what kind of meaning the flowers he was selling and arranging held.

notes abt his magic

noe's magic is general ability to manipulate plants of any kind, just in general. however, because his magic ability is most closely linked with that of green witches, he is also able to use the meanings of flowers in flower language in order to grant charms & boons & things to others (or himself). he's studied extensively in order to become extremely aware of what basically every flower he comes across means. his greenhouse has therefore garnered somewhat of a reputation for having hard-to-find flowers among its selection, and his bouquets tend to include some non-standard choices set alongside the normal flowers like carnations or roses. 

trivia

• he's friends with quite a few magical beings and other people associated with magic ability. he's probably subtly drawn to them by his own powers, but he doesn't realize it.
• due to ligature scarring around his neck, he tends to wear chokers. i'm sorry. i'm sorry. i'm sorry.
• the gardens he tends for his shop look incredibly different than the ones he tends for his own pleasure. he has an entire bed of dandelions, clover, and other wild flowers like that because he can't bear to completely uproot even weeds without replanting them.