when you gaze long into an abyss

Hirune is book-smart, and knows a lot of stuff, in general. She is also quite thoughtful, and not one to act rashly but rather think things through. This, of course, has its cons, but she tends to get into less trouble on the whole as a result. She is also a decently experienced melee fighter, since her hive is surrounded by horrible giant crawly things.

Hirune at first comes off gruff and standoffish. Actually, not even at first--she really just kind of is like that. It's how she rolls. She is frustrated with everything and the fact that No One Gets It, and sort of just takes that out on everyone around her. If she could be kismeses with Society, she would be. She is that nerd kid who sort of decides that because no one appreciates her they just all suck because clearly the problem is not that she only talks about weird stuff that most people aren't very interested in.

She is, however, a deep thinker, and even if she doesn't evaluate her own attitudes toward others as thouroughly as perhaps she ought, she really does care about the people who she lets get close to her. She's harsh with people for their own good--they won't change through coddling and headpats. At heart, Hirune wants to build things that will last, but the Alternian Empire is not interested in change nor innovation, only conquest, and even the society of their children reflects that.

So she's pretty much done with everyone else, save for the few people she've met on Trollian that she's taken a liking to. The prickly exterior keeps people at arm's length, so even her friends can't get too close--and thinking pessimistically keeps her expectations low for when she is inevitably disappointed. She tries to invest herself only in people that she thinks won't disappoint her, but she can't help it--she likes a good project.

Hirune is reclusive and has made a home for herself in a high tower in the middle of a forest with her lusus, a giant fruit bat. Her isolation is self-imposed; as a younger girl, Hirune lived among other trolls, but became easily frustrated with others' disinterest in the topics she liked to talk about: philosophy, sociology, the direction of society. The fact that she didn't make friends easily was part of it, but that she mostly decided was that Other People Were Assholes.

Her disgust with the rest of her people was only compounded by her discovery of an extant copy of the Disciple's writings--which led her to quietly become a devotee of the Sufferer. So she set herself up in isolation to ponder the mysteries of the universe in privacy and quiet and away from all those jerks. She has turned her hive into an observatory, where she studies the night skies and searches the emptiness of space for an inkling of meaning. Or something. She also just kind of likes space, but it has a lot more gravitas if you say it that way. She communicates with the rest of the world only through Trollian, via which she has made several friends, reads books, and is, despite her misgivings about this being Another Stupid Frivolous Thing, about to play this game called Scrib...