Hali
Hali (pronounced hah-LEE) is the sort of spunky chaotic good type of character, working to save people while also never missing a chance to snark at the bad guys. She can come off as a bit abrasive to people she's just met, but if she counts you as a friend, she'll be more than happy to fight for you too!
She is a hybrid anthro animal person, a cross of cat, monkey, rabbit, and squirrel. She has abilities and quirks related to each of those types of animals, as well as water manipulation and dream magic.
Hali became a Janitor for the Janitor Menagerie as a young teen, after an Interloper messed up the Storyline she lived in and she got involved in that incident to stop him.
Appearance
She is an anthro animal, with characteristics of cat, monkey, rabbit, and squirrel. She wears a beret on her head and a bandana around her neck. She wear a shirt, vest, cargo shorts, and has gloves for both her hands and feet. She has goggles as well, though only uses them for serious fights.
Personality
As mentioned, she can be described as a chaotic good sort of character, with a go-getter attitude and a love of adventure. Due to what she's been through, she hates Interlopers, and the main reason for her working with the Menagerie is to put a stop to people like them and help save other stories. In general she hates people who think they can change and control things without considering (or otherwise just ignoring) how other people feel about it.
She can also be described as confident, brave, and loyal. She likes to run and jump and explore, and she hates having to stay in one spot or do one thing for too long. It gets boring too quickly!
She'll snark at bad guys and Interlopers during fights, though she also snarks at her own friends sometimes. The latter is in a much more friendly manner. She’s also very much the kind of person to be honest even if it’s harsh, but she’ll be particularly brutal with her honesty to someone who is being rude or mean, especially if they’re rude against someone who’s weaker or can’t defend themselves. She has a great sense of justice, although this may lead her to unnecessarily butt heads with others.
Hali tends to be adventurous and wants to tackle problems head on, and ends up being rather reckless sometimes. However, if there’s real danger ahead, she always makes sure to be careful, especially if other people could get hurt. She knows from her own experiences when she was younger that being head-strong and standing up for yourself is important, but you have to be careful that it doesn’t end up doing more damage than good. As a result, Hali is usually the first to point out when someone else being reckless is going to hurt themselves and/or others.
After a lot of adventuring and heroics, she likes to relax. Whether it be with friends, loved ones, or just on her own, she takes her need for relaxation after a lot of work very seriously.
Abilities
She has a Magifact called the Dewclaw Weapon. It is a shapeshifting weapon that Hali usually uses as various types of hammers, big and small. As a result, she usually refers to it specifically as the Dewclaw Hammer. When not using it in battle, she keeps the Dewclaw Hammer on her person as a necklace, hidden under her bandana.
Besides her Magifact, Hali's abilities can be grouped into 3 major topics based on her associations: Anthro, Water, and Dreams.
Anthro
She has abilities based on the animals that make up her ancestry.
- Cat: Sharp teeth, good eyesight even in the dark, excellent balance and able to land on her feet
- Monkey: Prehensile tail, good agility/dodging, heightened cleverness
- Rabbit: Excellent hearing, great jumping and dashing, good sense of smell
- Squirrel: Good climbing ability, sensing danger nearby, excellent memory
- On the note of the cat eyes, Hali’s eyes change the same way as a cat's. That is, the pupils get bigger when she’s happy/focused on something or someone she loves, etc, but narrow when she gets mad/scared/etc.
Water
She can manipulate water in all of its states: liquid, ice/snow, and steam. This is a natural ability (more like a superpower than magic or psychic powers) that has occurred for generations in her father's family.
- This ability includes manipulating the water that is in other things, such as plants and people, but this can be harder for her to pull off.
- She can also use water to attack, such as high-pressure blasts of water or freezing enemies into place
- Unlike magic, it doesn’t drain any sort of ‘magical energy’ from her. However, as a downside she needs to have some sort of water, even bits of water molecules in the air, to manipulate. This is because she isn't able to just conjure it up from thin air like with magic.
Dreams
She has various magical abilities related to dream, which comes from her mother's family. These do rely on actual "magical energy" in order to be used, though most of the time she doesn't push them too far for a lack of energy to be a concern.
- She has prophetic/strange dreams, though she has difficulty in understanding them most of the time.
- She can also manipulate the real world via her dreams, basically like astral projection. However, this means leaving her body behind while asleep, which could be dangerous in certain Stories.
- Projecting like this also allows her to see and interact with ghosts, though she has to be careful that said ghosts aren’t hostile. Thankfully they aren’t able to posses her body while she’s out and as long as she sticks relatively close by.
- Can enter the dreams of others while astral projecting, and even change said dreams. Sometimes she’ll change dreams in order to prevent nightmares, or even cause them in those who deserve it.
- Hali can also change or recover memories while inside another person’s dreams, but changing them is more difficult to do.
- She can outright steal the dreams/nightmares of other people. The stolen dreams can then be released in the real world as a sort of ‘energy bomb’ attack.
- When she is daydreaming, she can cause objects from said daydream to manifest in the real world. However, these objects are basically made of dreams, making them effectively the same as illusion magic. Thus they can’t really be interacted with and will disappear soon after. She often uses this as distractions in battle. When she was younger, she did this a lot by accident, but by now has gotten it under control.
History
As a young teen, Hali was once the "main character" of a Story about anthro animals, with the main Storyline focused on a plot involving dreams and lost melodies of a scattered kingdom, which were used to stop a great evil in the past. Unfortunately, due to an Interloper coming into the Storyline and trying to change things to suit his own tastes, he caused her to no longer be the main character. This of course also caused a lot of other instabilities in the overall Story.
While the Janitor Menagerie tried to intervene to stop the Interloper and fix the Story, Hali tried to fix it herself (still not being aware about the nature of Stories nor the Janitor Menagerie) by trying to track down the Interloper and beat him up. Said Interloper even tried to kill her after she tried to fight him. However, she managed to stop him thanks to a Janitor that jumped into the Storyline to fix things as well.
She was still no longer the main character, but thankfully she and the Janitor managed to work together the stabilize the story afterwards. At that point, Hali insisted on knowing what the hell was going on. The nature of Stories was thus explained to Hali, now that she wasn't a main character, since she deserved to know after everything that had happened. She thus became a Janitor herself, to help prevent such incidents from happening again.
She learned English when she was around 11 years old, so she has a bit of an accent. Spanish is her first language, and she's skilled at coming up with creative insults in Spanish.
Hali is in a polyamorous relationship with Ryan and Frida. They’re all from the same Story. In the original version of said Story before the Interloper incident, Frida was her rival-turned-friend, while Ryan was a "runaway royalty" type of character.
Gallery
The following is a gallery of major images featuring Hali.
Full image of Hali.
Notes on Hali's design.
Hali's weapon of choice, the Dewclaw Weapon/Hammer.
Trivia
- Hali is a combination of an old Klonoa fan character, specifically a cousin of the main character Klonoa, and an old Sonic fan character who was a cat with a tail that could change shape. The former is where Hali's personality came from, while the latter was the basis for Hali's current design, with changes to make it less Sonic-like.
- If Hali had her own theme music, it would sound something like the battle music for Baladium, from Klonoa: Door to Phantomile.
- Her goggles are prescription, specifically for her nearsightedness. She uses goggles instead of glasses because she finds them a lot sturdier. However, she's stubborn and usually doesn't put them on unless she has to, such as for a fight.
- In terms of hobbies, Hali really likes sports. Not competitively, but mostly just for fun. Soccer is probably one of her favorite sports to play with her friends.
- Her middle name was originally going to be Corona. However, once the COVID-19/Coronavirus Pandemic got bad, her middle name was changed to Celestina.