Juniper Smith

### Aliases

"Joon", "Default", "Samuel Sterling", "Ernst Shoemacher", "Clive Horsewhistler" "Rakon"

### Titles

Advisor on Culture for the Republic of Miunun

## Physical description

### Gender

Male

**Juniper Smith** (often **Joon**) is the protagonist of Worth the Candle. A deeply troubled Earth-born human from Kansas, Juniper is transported to Aerb, a world that appears to be an amalgam of his own Tabletop Roleplaying campaigns. Juniper has access to a mysterious Game Layer superimposed on the world, which also grants him superhuman learning speeds and abilities, as well as Quests he must complete.

>
> “I want them to be real enough that I can’t tell the difference. I want that for the whole of Aerb, alright? I want to poke at the seams and find out that you thought of everything. And at the end of it, I want Arthur back. That’s the only way that this game is ever going to be worth the candle.“
>
>
>
> —Juniper, Chapter 35: "Friendship is Magic"
>

## Appearance

Juniper has very average features, with brown hair, blue eyes and an average build, to the point he was called 'the most generic man alive' by his friends. Later, thanks to the points put into PHY and SOC, he becomes handsome, taller and more muscular, even described as hulking.

## Personality

As part of his love for running Tabletop Roleplaying campaigns as a Dungeon Master, Juniper likes worldbuilding, often doing it when he needs to shut his brain off. Juniper's social skills before putting points into SOC were somewhat lacking, and he was not good at reading complexities or signals. Juniper tends to be attracted to 'damaged women'.

After Arthur's death, Juniper was not in a good place, pushing people away and laying claim to grieving Arthur at the expense of everyone else, even eight months later, somehow feeling like it was required of him. He was described as intent on infecting other people with his pain, anger and misery, and he felt like he deserved some kind of punishment for it.

Even after a long time on Aerb, he still thinks of himself as somewhat selfish, though he's also been described as often trying to be a moral person and just fumbling it. Despite everything, he's made some progress in becoming a better person, especially after his relationship with Fenn fell apart.

## Biography

Juniper was seemingly transported to the world of Aerb while passing notes in fifth period English class. He awoke to find himself in a plane, where he was dropped into the Risen Lands Exclusion Zone as part of a trial by adversity.Taking the Fall

## References

1. ↑ My uncle had one of those huge, thick motorcycles, the kind that get referred to as ‘hogs’, which the soulcycle more or less resembled.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
2. ↑ “No,” said Grak. “I’ve seen faculty, but if you’re five hundred years old that’s no surprise, it was only your apparent age that confused me.”

“I’m seventeen,” I said. I think.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 34: "Weik Handum"
3. ↑ “I’m eighteen,” I said. Immediately after I said it, I realized how petty it was.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 140: "Commingling"
4. ↑ My friend Greg had once said that I looked like someone had chosen ‘default’ for every option in the character creator, which I’d tried to laugh at but cut kind of deep. I wasn’t handsome, I wasn’t ugly, none of my features were very prominent, my eyes were blue, my hair was brown, average build, average height … After Greg had made his comment at one of our D&D games, my nickname had been ‘default’ for a while, at least until I stopped pretending to find it funny, and even after that my friends would use similar lines to trash talk me, saying that I was “the most generic man alive”, “a white bread with skim milk motherfucker”, or “the human equivalent of vanilla ice cream”.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
5. ↑ “At any rate,” said Xorbus, “Would you mind terribly cluing us in on this hulking fellow?”

I was mildly surprised to hear myself described that way, since it wasn’t how I thought of myself. If I was looking in a mirror, I would have agreed that it fit, given my musculature and height, but that wasn’t something that I thought of often, except when I noticed how much taller I was than any of the girls in my party.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 128: "An Open Book"
6. ↑ The girl’s supposed husband was a taller human, blue eyes and brown hair, handsome and muscular, wearing blue armor.” Finch sat back in his seat. “Blue armor that you’re wearing now, which matched the description given to me by the tuung guard I had interviewed not thirty minutes before.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 101: "PPROM"
7. ↑ “For me it was worldbuilding,” I said with a shrug. “If things weren’t going well with my parents, or at school, or even sometimes with friends, I could always work on my worlds. And it wasn’t really useless, because at least I was creating something, or looking up information along the way. You could, I don’t know, crochet or something.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 80: "The Princess and the Pea"
8. ↑  “Do you remember after we came down the tower in Parsmont?” asked Fenn. “I was trying to talk about serious stuff with you and you were just getting distracted by, I don’t know, random bullshit about worldbuilding. And when I told you that I was going to try to be better, you just made this token effort to support me and then blew me off like it wasn’t actually important.”

“I had other things going on,” I said. “And you said that you didn’t want me to help, so it seems like there was nothing that I could have done to win. It was lose-lose.”

“There are a number of problems with your relationship,” said Valencia, taking the reins. “Fenn, you often want Juniper to act of his own accord, even when you’ve either expressed disinterest in his help or advice, or actively told him that you didn’t want it, even when you did. Juniper isn’t terribly good at reading those complexities.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 116: "Therapy"
9. ↑ “You like damaged girls. This house is close enough,” Amaryllis replied.

“I don’t think that I would characterize myself as being into damaged girls,” I said.

“Sorry, damaged women,” said Amaryllis.

“That’s not the correction I was going to make,” I replied with a roll of my eyes.

“There’s a reason it’s a running theme in your companions,” said Amaryllis. “Do you need me to go down the list of tragic backstories? My father, dead when I was two, my mother, killed when I was ten, Fenn, born to a severely broken home and detested by most of the common folk, not to mention the elves, Grak an exile from his home, fleeing an arranged marriage -- and I agree fully with Fenn’s word for Valencia. ‘Joonbait’. It’s very appropriate. I won’t judge you for having an instinct to protect those who have been hurt -- in some sense it’s noble -- but you shouldn’t deny it when it’s plain for anyone to see.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 95: "Time Enough"
10. ↑ I had maybe done the same when Arthur had died. I’d been depressed and angry and a complete dick to a lot of people, but at least some of that was because I felt like it was required of me. The term Arthur would have used was ‘performative’, or maybe ‘virtue signaling’.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 119: "Depths"
11. ↑ I stared down at my stew. After Arthur had died, I’d fucked things up. One of the ways I’d fucked things up had been by pushing people away, and laying claim to grief at the expense of everyone else. Tiff had tried to tell me that she was in pain, and I had brushed her aside, telling her that it was nothing compared to what I felt.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 119: "Depths"
12. ↑  It was pure, naked hostility, and it was almost cathartic, given how much I deserved it. “Yeah,” I said.

“Jesus fucking Christ Juniper,” said Craig. “Do you know, if it had been anyone else, I would have been okay with it? Tom? Fucking great guy, salt of the earth, probably too good for her, and she’d break his fucking heart without meaning to, but I wouldn’t have had a problem with it, except that it would be stupid. Even Reimer would at least have been the best boyfriend she’d ever had, though that’s not saying much, because she’s dated some real fucking losers. But you?” He clenched his fists in front of him like he wanted to grab me and shake me to death. “You are such a fucking cancer on everyone around you. You’re a sad sack piece of garbage just fucking intent on infecting everyone around you with all the pain, anger, and misery that you can squeeze out. And fucking why? ”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 120: "Deceptions"
13. ↑ Maybe I would have, but I would have had a lot of selfish thoughts first. In my eyes, Amaryllis was suffering by virtue of being a better person than I was.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 101: "PPROM"
14. ↑ “You wanted to save Val,” said Amaryllis with a shrug. “It wasn’t the right choice, but you were at least trying to be a moral person and save one of the members of our party. That’s what I mean when I say that I can count on you. You don’t always do the right things, but usually you’re fumbling in the direction of following your own moral code.”

“... thanks?” I asked.

Amaryllis nodded. “I could probably have phrased that better, but if you wanted me to beat you up so you could feel like less of an asshole, I thought you probably wouldn’t care if I left the sugar off my words.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Incidentally, I don’t really feel much better. It just felt like I deserved it.”

“For Fenn, or Maddie, or Tiff?” asked Amaryllis. “Or someone else?”

“All of it,” I said. “Mostly Maddie. Raven isn’t her, but there are things they have in common. Looks, for one, but some mannerisms too, the way she speaks. I just think back to it, and hate myself a little more.”

“She was two years younger than you?” asked Amaryllis.

“It wasn’t that,” I said. “I mean, it was partly that, but she was Craig’s sister too, and I didn’t really like her, I was just looking for a life raft.” I paused. “It was like I was trying to rebuild my life in the dumbest possible way, at the expense of her emotional wellbeing.”

“You’re not really that person anymore,” said Amaryllis.

“Yeah?” I asked. “Even in the last two weeks there are a lot of things I would have done differently. All the fights I had with Fenn, before the end … just little, unthinking things.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 124: "Fight Club"
15. ↑ “And … what does that mean?” I asked. Step one of getting back on the right footing with Fenn was, after all, treating her more seriously. I had no idea how things were going to look between us going forward, but I could at least see the shape of things.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 117: "Beast of Burden"
16. ↑  “There’s some personal stuff,” I said. “Things we had to work out together, or, um,” I tried my best to be a better person than I had been in the past. I owed that to Fenn. “I don’t think I should be the one to tell you. If or when you ask her about it, just let her know that I said I wanted to respect her privacy?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 127: "Full House"