headcanon for headcanon
* Luke hates the food in Grand Chokmah. Fish is a staple there, the city's kind of sitting right on the sea after all. There's basically nothing that he's willing to eat.
* He used to be able to eat rappig meat :\ Visiting Engeve and hanging out with Peony's pets changed that pretty fast.
* Luke's hair is attempting to be brown in an extremely terrible dye job, since his hair and eyes are distinct markers of Kimlascan royalty. He wanted to chop off the lot and be done with, but he wasn't allowed to because red hair is a sign of Kimlascan royalty and carelessly cutting it is tantamount to lèse majesté. (basically trying to explain away how, as a replica, his hair would also just disappear into fonons when cut, but apparently no one ever realised this over the course of 7 years? really? really?)
* Peony thought that Guy was referring to Malkuth's responsibility in causing the fall of Hod, which is why he agreed so easily to restore House Gardios and is also working out territory. He has always thought that the destruction of Hod was an ugly decision and a country's betrayal of her own people. Guy was actually just referring to the lack of military aid before and after the Hod massacre, he assumes that it was Duke Fabre who caused the fall.
* Even though Daath is supposed to be a neutral country, Mohs has not been very subtle about courting Kimlasca's favour recently, another reason why Peony's willing to believe Luke and Guy.
* Guy considers Luke another victim of Kimlasca and House Fabre. While he respects the Lady Fabre, he thinks Luke is wasting his time if he wants to help Kimlasca. He's supportive up to a point, but when Luke was moping due to the one-sided detailing of Kimlasca's war atrocities in the books he's read, he was mostly like, 'well, that's what Kimlasca does'. It's Peony who explained to Luke that history can be biased and both nations have done things they're not proud of.
* Guy's standing in the House of Lords is extremely low. He has no money, no land, the people who know the truth behind Hod are nervous, and the people who don't think he's just the emperor's yes-man.
* Kimlasca's keeping Luke's second disappearance a hush, and considering that very few people know what Luke looks like, it's actually Guy who is an extremely wanted man in Kimlasca.
* Luke's studies have hit a roadblock because the further back they go, the more texts are written in Ancient Ispanian.
* Asch actually sent him a history of Daath when he complained about that in a letter. Except it's written in Ancient Ispanian because Asch is a jerk.
* Luke isn't really that slow or bad at putting things together, but his education is so patchwork that he just often doesn't have the pieces to come to the right conclusion. Hence jumping to things like Asch = obvs my (possibly illegitimate) cousin!! It makes more sense than replicas, okay!
* But he does not enjoy theoretical or abstract topics and he is hilariously awful at anything involving maths. Despite being pretty good at managing the party's supplies and finances. If you put it on paper he just flounders.
* Luke's assumed name, Edel Gardios, is derived from the flower Edelweiss in grand Malkuthian naming tradition (flowers and gemstones? really? really?). It signifies purity and nobility and was the work of about 10 minutes on wikipedia i guess. Also, there aren't really that many flower names that can be given to a guy and Luke is not nearly self-assured enough to pull off a name like Peony.
* Luke has osmosed enough about formal Malkuth court manners while hanging around the court to do a passable imitation. He doesn't find much use for this skill except to occasionally skeeve Jade out.
* Asch is the one who ends up with short hair. It was chopped off during the confusion around the fall of Akzeriuth and taken to King Ingobert as proof of Luke fon Fabre's death in Akzeriuth in order to spark the foretold war. Presumably he'll make it more spiked and angry than how Luke's hair ended up in the game.
* The person who actually did it was Sync, not Van, because he's nominally still working for Mohs at that point and also canonically... kind of a vicious little troll... but Asch doesn't clarify that point because he's still pissed off that Sync got the drop on him.
* Asch never syncs his and Luke's fonslots. Pre-game they communicate by messenger pigeon, and Asch joins the party after Akzeriuth, so there's no real need. The big bang effect is delayed.
* Asch and Luke also have a habit of deliberately picking the most vicious messenger pigeons they can find when they send notes to each other. Pegging pre-game events as taking ~a year and a half or so, they've been communicating for close to a year before Akzeriuth, but the only time they met in person was the first meeting in Daath.
* While they were communicating by letter, Asch constantly got on Luke's case about his terrible handwriting and his left-handedness (presuming the fonic language is read left-to-right, writing left-handed causes smudges and since Asch was trained out of it, they're probably still pretty medieval about that) and Luke is actually open to working on one or the other, but trying to fix both at the same time would just be counterproductive, seriously, Asch :|
* Arbitrarily, the distance between Daath and Grand Chokmah is three days by bird, so they average communications about once a week. /geography handwave because OKAY if you adhere to the in-game map in the first place, Auldrant is a torus.
* Asch's mindset is not so much 'inferior replica :E' as 'you're my replica, the only reason you can't do anything that I can is because of laziness, which I will beat out of you'. And he does. Sometimes literally.
* Before Akzeriuth, Luke genuinely thinks that he and Asch are cousins. His mental family tree is that Asch is Natalia's illegitimate half-brother, making him too closely related to marry her and too redheaded to be convenient, especially after Luke was incapacitated after the kidnapping. So Luke does acknowledge it's kind of his fault Asch was driven out of Baticul. ...the only part of this theory that he shares with Asch is that he thinks they're cousins.
* When things settle down, Luke's pretty mad that Asch never told him that he was a replica when they've been talking for over a year. Considering that Luke actually confided a fair amount in Asch.
* Luke actually feels more responsible for the 200 people who died in Engeve than he does about Asch or Akzeriuth. He thinks it all sucks and he does feel responsible but Engeve is really the only thing that came about due to his own decisions.