-----------------------------------SWEETHEART---------------------------------- Age: 6(pup) Gender: Male Nation: Fozle Role: Pup Extra: - Completely blind; consequently, he rarely manages to guess someone's position exactly right, and ends up staring past another creature unintentionally Backstory: The young pup has been an orphan for as long as he can recall. This doesn't strike him as anything particularly peculiar; he is far too young to be able to grasp any reasons why this would be different, since it's all he's known. In truth, Sweetheart was simply born to parents who didn't have the proper salary to afford the expense of raising a pup. They left him tucked up in a few blankets on the side of the road a few streets down and made as if nothing had happened. To this day, they don't know what became of him, and wouldn't recognize him even now, since he's grown into his colors. He would have died in those blankets, but there were a few fellow creatures who would move him out of the harsher weather when those times came and give him food he needed to live. However, this unintentional plan the creatures near him on the street came up with was not as effective as a full-time parent was. Sweetheart was scrawny and could barely stay alive even after he was mobile. He was completely blind from birth, and everything he interacted with he encountered by smell or hearing. This did lead to a few entertaining incidents with attempts to befriend boxes or old bits of machinery, but ultimately, the struggle to find ways to get food or find shelter that he couldn't recognize was overpowering the mild entertainment of the thing. He slowly began to figure it out after almost starving. This thing that he figured out was that if he followed the smell of creatures that had food and squeaked at them intently, he would sometimes get bits of what they were eating. As a consequence of never having known his parents, he has little concept of the idea of parents being a part of life. He had no name given to him, and he didn't bother to come up with one, since he didn't have any words when he was aware enough to start recognizing a name someone could give him. However, he did notice that before some creatures would give him food, some of them would make cooing noises or call him "sweet thing" or "sweetheart". Although these were not actually names, and instead just casual pet names anyone would say to a baby, Sweetheart decided that this was his name, and would begin to react with a chirp whenever somebody said the word. It took him far longer to start learning words than it would a creature raised in a social and regular environment with parents to give words meaning. As such, Sweetheart can say his own name--the first word he learned--and he can say a few select words that other creatures say frequently to him or in passing conversations he hears. "Food", "here", "want", "hug", and "pup" are some of the few words he knows that he uses most frequently. He's beginning to recognize the word "please" from those who ask that he say it before they give him food. His speech is garbled and hard to understand among the other series of babbling squeaky noises he makes, much like any toddler, even though he is old enough that he should know more words than he does. Sweetheart stays within the few streets he has committed to memory so that he doesn't get lost thanks to not being able to recognize landmarks. As such, it's become a regular thing to see Sweetheart running at older creatures with food that he can smell squeaking "WANT PLEASE FOOD NOW FOOD" at the top of his lungs. He's getting plumper by the week, but Sweetheart is still completely unaware of how a normal life would be like, and incapable of voicing many ideas he would want to share. However, although he doesn't know the words or understand the feeling, having to go home to his nest without anyone else to be around upsets him, and he's been chased out from wherever he was nesting at the time a couple of times for keeping other creatures up by squeaking and wailing all night. Amidst his goal to get food from creatures, as that's almost all he's known, Sweetheart does tend to cling to them even after they've given him food, trying to follow them and cuddle up against their legs in the hopes that he'll get something comforting after the attempts. No luck yet, but Sweetheart couldn't recognize rejection if it slapped him in the face, and he's perfectly willing to try it on the next creature that gives him food.
