Hi-Note Gallery

Magritte and Rafael on their…second favorite instruments.

Raf and the violin are like man and limb, but in the recent...decade-ish...he's been playing guitar a lot more. He is fond of the bass, in particular.

Margie started on the keyboard piano due to a lack of other options and is technically more savvy with digital sounds/music than any traditional instrument... but she picked up brass winds shortly after high school--specifically trumpet and trombone.

Of those options, the ol' trombonie is definitely her favourite. It is very...her.

Rafael was already training to preform in competitions by the age of 5, and by the age of 13, he was an award winning violinist. His career then turned towards making him into a musical icon within popular culture, and he hit the peak of his career at 16 as a "pop musician with a classical background". He successfully brought Ephrem Records out of the classical niche and into the pop cultural sphere, enduring his teen years as an international celebrity before attending Juilliard--where he had hoped to find respite from his manager's/mother's control and gain some autonomy.

And then he endured the most difficult years of his life. At 23 years old, he's burnt out, exhausted beyond imagining, and with a shiny new personality disorder diagnosis to boot. Finally, at 30 years old, he's settling into himself; just beginning to recover from the near decade-long burnout, no longer wishes he was dead, and is experiencing what it's like to be loved in a manner that is both unconditional and unmotivated by guilt for the first time in his life.

Margie had a pretty...typical(?) small town Canadian weird girl upbringing. At 5 years old, she loved bugs and dinosaurs, and was always tracking mud and dirt everywhere. She quickly becomes known as the weird girl[derogatory] by her peers, which kind of forces her to find and value pastimes that do not require friends.

As soon as she was allowed to get a gameboy, she became a fast nintendo fan. In particular, she loved Kirby and Donkey Kong. The music from those two franchises would be what initially gets her into making music herself, and by the time she's 13, she's learned how to play all her favorite songs on her new portasound keyboard. At 16 years old, she embraces cringe and gives up trying to win the approval of her peers. She also spends a ton of her time on LiveJournal and MySpace to learn about music--and goes down the circuit bending rabbit hole.

After high school, Magritte elects to moves out once her parents make it clear that they'll not let her just stay home and "focus on her musical career" all day. It turns out to be the right choice for her, and she travels until she finds a new place to call home; A place that nurtures her love of music and celebrates her eccentricities.

Cortes is still upset that "giant horn" never became vogue after the Cambrian period. After holding out all this time, she finally had to admit it was never gonna become a biological trend in the scenes that mattered to her...

She's also been a chronically lazy shapeshifter. Humans have, so far, received her best effort yet. Largely, that's because Raf is too unsettled by her voice mimicry for her to intergrade successfully by relying on vocalizations (as she had been able to with porpoiseds) , and she'd rather put in the extra bit of effort towards creating a slightly more convincing physical shape than suffer the intricacies of human emoting without the help of vocalizing.

We were asked to draw what they’d look like in the present year (2024). And so, here is a 44 year old Raf, and a 36 year old Margie!

An expressive bunch

cuddle puddle.

Nostalgic photos.

We haven't said much about Magritte's musical career, mostly because there isn't much to be said about it, yet. At the time the story takes place, she hasn't been to school for it, she's won no awards, preformed in only small venues, etc.

The bulk of her audience is actually found online, where she posts her work and process and such under the username "Stampy Ptarmigans". There, she's been growing a small but enthusiastic little audience over the years. Her video recordings, for the most part, had never been very high quality--she's only ever been able to work with what she had on hand...and that was never very much. Her patience/enjoyment for editing videos in post is virtually nil--she'd usually post what she had without much post-production fussing. She did, however, make sure that the music was recorded with separate equipment from the mobile phone she took the videos with...most of the time.

It wasn't until Raf started offering to properly help her plan, set up, process, and polish her video recordings, etc, that her videos began capturing the attention of viewers at the more exponential rate he'd have expected music of her quality to see. Loving the appeal and draw of the more planned/polished/processed videos, Magritte began to lean into that a lot more heavily with Raf's help and knowhow. But at the same time, there was an aspect of the impulsive, sloppy little jam sessions and improvised recordings that she didn't want to stop making and sharing. And so, her channel features both, her unpolished recordings being referred to as 'sketches' or 'doodles'. Viewers seem to care a lot less about her little 'sketches'--but they're her favorite to make and post.

The glossy, 'high production' appeal of the other videos, though...the attention they garner to her channel and her work is...undeniably very, very encouraging. She has to admit that Raf's attention to aesthetic detail and his certain level of pride in presentation has rubbed of onto all her recordings, over time... At the very least, you do need to make sure the lighting is good..!

On the island, a fifteen minute walk from the cottage, by the bay--there is a normal looking little house that sells home-made ice cream from sunrise to sunset. You gotta go and ring the doorbell, and they'll serve it to you right there.

The strawberry rhubarb ice cream is easily their best flavor, and these three are easily their best customers.

Before meeting his Uncle, and before his diagnosis, Raf maintained a very...pessimistic opinion of people, and read a lot of negative things into people's behaviors and words. Largely informed by his experiences throughout his childhood. Typically, he kept his thoughts to himself, unless something really triggered a defensive outburst. He didn't engage in gossip out of fear that it'd be used against him. He believed that he ought to be nice/kind to people--for the sake of appearances, to avoid being talked about behind his back, to win trust, and because he would have liked someone to exercise kindness with him. But he himself could (and often would) find a personal slight against him in anything anyone did around him. And he'd keep track of it for himself. It was a score he tallied only for his own reference, and would affect how he interacted with people.

To anyone who knew him better than an acquaintance (which was to say--not many), undiagnosed Raf was a very quiet, very mercurial sort who could occasionally grow very upset, very suddenly, over seemingly nothing at all. To anyone else, he was a charming glad hander who could work and room and was very entertaining to be around, unless he Didn't Like You. In which case, he'd quietly, subtly shoulder you out of his life, usually via passive aggressive means.

Then he moved to Vancouver, met his Uncle Bill, realized there was something really very wrong with himself, and reluctantly got his formal diagnosis. Around the same time he was diagnosed, he started dating Lacey.

Him and Lacey got on real fast, largely because Lacey seemed to get him. She had come from similar hardships regarding exploitative, controlling parents, and had bucked against them at a much earlier age. She agreed with Raf that everyone was just out to get their pound of flesh from everyone else, and knowing that--made people exhausting to deal with. The two of them bonded over their similar traumatic experiences and their shared bitter outlooks...and they began finding small validation in sharing their thoughts and observations with each other about the world around them--the thoughts and observations that were mean and cruel, that they had kept to themselves up until they found each other. Thoughts and observations that were often based on vibes and gut feelings more than anything that was actually observable. And they'd agree with each other's negative verdicts and poor opinions, because it felt good.

But--being with someone who tells you just how poorly they think of everyone else...quickly gets you wondering if they think poorly of you, too. Or, at the very least, it makes you want to ensure that you never do anything to win their negative judgment. Avoiding anything that they deem as stupid or tacky or embarrassing, and so forth.

Anyways, therapy ends up being pretty good for Raf, and over the course of two years, he does start curbing these behaviors and monitoring his thoughts more strictly. And as he does this more and more, Lacey finds him more and more annoying to navigate. Raf begins to take on a more mediating voice when it comes to indulging critical/snarky observations and remarks, and Lacey begins to feel like he's kinda turning on her and growing weird and distant. That, as well as a handful of other things, gets them fighting a lot more...and more passionately. They've always had pretty bombastic yelling matches from time to time, but it becomes a near daily occurrence during the final year of their relationship. By the time they break up, Raf has already decided on the kind of person he wants to be, that he doesn't want his PD to be his personality and has been making steady strides towards that goal.

tfw ur roommate shows off her neat party trick [a very long tongue that produces a highly aphrodisiac seafoam. The myths and legends didn’t come from nowhere, you know…]

She has very tiny ears.

Rafael's mother is not dead, and he hasn't seen her in over a decade--but she still manages to haunt him like a ghost. A nightmare.

We cannot overstate just how much Margie loves Kirby. Like, she is balls deep in that Kirby lore. You bought Super Smash Brothers 64 for Pikachu or Link, she bought it for Kirby.

Kirby's Dream Land was one of the first games she ever owned. Clutching it in her little 7 year old hands, the fun characters, sunny vibes, and hyperactive soundtrack enchanted her in a manner that only Donkey Kong Country(1 & 2) could match. She'd leave her game boy on and just listen to the music on loop for hours.

She tried to follow the narrative continuity the best she could through Dream Land(1, 2, and 3), Adventure, and Crystal Shards, but only really got up to speed once she started getting access to the internet around the age of 12, and she's been lost in the poyo void sauce ever since.

Kirby is the reason she got into music, it's why she'll be moved to tears if she ever sees a King Dedede[aka: any normal peguin] live in the flesh, and it's why the dashboard of Raf's car is slowly being overtaken by the little waddle dees she has been collecting.

Because as much as she loves Kirby himself, Margie loves--LOVES--waddle dees.

Ever since Crystal Shards, something inside of her decided she just needs to adopt every waddle dee she can find. While growing up, she accumulated quite a collection and had to leave them all behind when she moved out. But now that she has her own perma place to stay, her own room, She's been rebuilding her waddle dee army.

Raf acts the unwilling victim to this waddle dee invasion of his home and car...but he is guilty of purchasing the little guys for her, on the rare occasion when he finds one in the wild. Raf is complicit in the waddle seige.

On the other hand, she has very limited knowledge regarding pokemon. Still, someone had asked which pokemon the trio would each partner up with, and Jiggly Puff would absolute be Margie’s top pick.