Response to @Dragomer :
I would consider your case to be a special one 
. Iâm curious if you have a potential solution for fixing that feeling of disconnect though.
Response to @Night_Shade :
Itâs coming! Some variation of it anyway, though the last week or so Iâve been a busy body working on a small project for character creation (I want to change some methodology behind what I did for Shengzhang while Iâm at it and change the variables I used and the like to be more efficient for me as a writer).
Response to @AnneWest :
Summary
Personally, Iâm perfectly happy to have Ruâs death come as a complete surprise to the immortal, and to have no âpersonalâ connection to them as a reader.
Iâm glad to hear about this impression, though I think to me there also felt like a bit of an issue with the main character having no relationship at all with any of the cast left behind. It kind of brings to question for me asking âwhy does the Immortal even begin to trust any of these people?â âWhy would the Immortal even try to stay here, assuming the kid is being relatively watched?â Like if there are all these people who cared for Ru to degrees and multiple of them could reasonably watch the kid why would this responsibility fall on the Immortal? And all these questions kept bubbling up that I hadnât considered. So there is a lot of my own questions I want to answer, and a good amount of them just canât be answered the way the current story is written (to me at least, not in a satisfying way).
I guess a lot of these questions in retrospect can be answered around the simple: Ru mattered, and as the Immortal grieves they also begin to recognize there was a lot more to them as a person than you initially recognized. The âmysteryâ aspect is kind of completely unnecessary when âhumanâ emotions exist as reason enough.
I was originally planning on integrating flashes of memory the reader could stumble across, a magical âimprintâ left behind from places Ru had strong connections to where you could see flashes of their life. Not big things, not entire scenes, just snippets that give you impressions for the most part (maybe a few that hint to you more about their character).
I thought, the first time I played the demo, that it was a story about the immortal dealing with grief and unresolved feelings while attempting to raise a child that had been left behind and I was perfectly okay with (looking forward to, actually) that as a story.
Yeah I was planning on moving away from the original premise since I wasnât enjoying figuring out writing children but I think I would be more apt to now since I have a specific âmuseâ I could use. I think like I said before I was struggling with why Ru would put the child in your hands rather than, say, Zhen, who is experienced with children and grief. This led me to the conclusion that there would need to be a greater risk associated with having the child around other mortals, which lead me down the âmysteryâ rabbit hole.