1. What drew your character to their LI and vice versa?
For any pairings you feel you don't write enough about!
I don’t write nearly enough about Gisele/Urianger so here we go
Not to sound like a hipster but Gisele was attracted to Urianger from the very start of their acquaintance, even before his ShB ~glowup~. She’s a very bookish sort to begin with, which is not something he at all suspected of an adventurer, and it was the thing they bonded over most in the beginning. It helps of course that Gisele is very melodramatic and a hopeless romantic and so she was absolutely in love with Urianger’s poetic way of speaking. That it was ~archaic~ didn’t bother her in the slightest; if anything it made her feel better, because people were constantly commenting on her strong accent making her sound “old fashioned”*. And the feeling was very much mutual, which was a strong contributing factor for why they began having such ridiculously long conversations. She never had any problem understanding him either; sometimes, after a while, she would begin to unwittingly mimic him, even.
Urianger was so flustered by her, constantly, and her teasing him so much didn’t help in the slightest. But he was always intensely curious about her, from the very moment they met he found her incredibly alluring. It wasn’t just her looks, though that was very much an important part of it. It’s Gisele’s mind that Urianger was drawn to, as much as her physical body, how clever she was, the depth of conversation he could have with her about anything from tawdry bodice ripping literature to dense texts of arcane theory and esoteric philosophy.
And dear gods did he admire her skill with the arcane, how she made the most difficult things look so easy because of her strong intuitive sense for not just the mechanics of spellcasting but the underlying principles of aether manipulation. Urianger considers himself an omnidisciplinary mage, same as she does, and so he understands very well just how difficult it is to master these disparate skill sets. He watched in fascination and total admiration as Gisele grasp concepts that it took his peers in the Studium with all their expensive tutors ages to understand, if ever. This combined with how educated she sounded was one of the reasons that Urianger was utterly fascinated by Gisele’s unknown origins and why he was absolutely convinced for the longest time that she was a product of the Sharlayan colony. There was no way she’d gone without formal education, in his mind. (Of course, it all fell into place for him later one, when they discovered the truth.)
But they really did talk about all of these things, and more--they could and did talk for hours, alone in the library after everyone else had gone to bed, burning the midnight oil so to speak. Sometimes even until sunrise. She was just as drawn to Urianger’s mind as the reverse, but for Gisele it was a little different; always, there was this underlying current of nostalgia in doing this, a strange feeling of comfort and safety that gave her deja vu a lot. It made sense later on, after she got her memories back, because she realized those talks reminded her of the best times she had in the Circle, talking shop and being a nerd with her friends and lovers. It wasn’t all shop talk with Uri of course! She flirted outrageously and shamelessly with him, as is her wont. Gisele was always teasing him about just what was under his robes and the like. Asking if he had any ~spicy~ literature recommendations (and he did!). Things like that. Urianger was constantly flustered by her in the beginning, I have to be clear. And Gisele reveled in it.
*[Gisele’s accent is quite odd. Most of the time she speaks with a fairly thick fantasy Parisian-with-a-dash-of-Senegalese accent; it’s because her first language is Orlesian and her mother’s accent speaking the King’s Tongue was very strong, though with Dalish cadence and I pegged her clan as sounding Senegalese rather than Welsh. But because she was raised in the Circle around Fereldans, she has a bit of upper class British cadence at times to reflect that, as well as because she began code switching very early on because of being teased so badly there for being Orlesian. But being around Leliana so much made it come roaring back with a vengeance. To most Eorzeans she sounds like an old Elezen grandma, endearingly old-fashioned. To Coerthans she sounds Ishgardian. To Ishgardians she sounds like a noble of the Pillars, which broke their brains at first given that she’s not from there, especially since Ishgardien is very close to the Val Royeaux dialect she grew up speaking, though some of the Dalish slang is beyond them.].
