People of Flavor and Flair: Person Feeding a Baby in a Stroller

In our inaugural ‘People of Flavor and Flair‘, we’ll be digging deep into a person you may have stumbled upon in your own worldly navigation. Whether in the park or at the mall, attending museums or just standing about in mid-tier hotel, the ‘Person Feeding a Baby in a Stroller‘ is out there, waiting to be observed, analyzed, and detailed thusly.

At the most general description, this person is next to a bassinet, carriage, or stroller. They may be sitting or standing, of any gender, make, or model. They exude a sense of guardianship, though they may not be the parent. The being has a baby bottle or other food item (portable baggy of cereal here, small bowl of fruit there) outstretched or thrust toward a carriage, within which sits a baby only a handful years old or less. The child reacts in a setting-appropriate way: accepting it hungrily or barfing and screaming—entirely up to the eye of the beholder, truly.

The Attendant

Emotionally, the attendant is doing the minimum of taking care of their focus: a young child. There’s feeding involved, and the foodstuff is stuck into the craw of the thing mewling from within it’s confined space, pink, beige, brown, or other that it might be.

A sharply held wrist might signal frustration or focus, while a limp one shows fatigue or thoughtlessness. Otherwise, is the sustenance being plucked by ginger fingers from a basket, bag, or cup? Or are handfuls of it being offered up by a clueless, oafish fist?

The act of sitting shows a slight more focus to the task, or just additional exhaustion. Standing, alternatively, provides more action—are they about to bolt from the scene if this all goes awry? Why are they so amped up that they decided to avoid finding a seat to do their strange bidding? Is their attendance to the child alarming if discovered? Or is the closest seat already smothered in grandmothers, equivalently engaged with their own babes?

It can be assumed the attendant is the most stand out detail—as long as it is observable by mortal eyes. The next largest feature would be the contraption they dutifully oversee.

The Stroller

The stroller, pram, bassinet, or carriage anchors the baby to time and wealth. It may be an antique wicker style, with its oversized wheels of metal spokes and rubberized tires. It may be a more modern thing of steel beams covered in stitched canvas, a shade pulled over to block sun or rain. Additionally so, the thing could be almost entirely plastic, splashed with an expensive brand, with small rotary plastic wheels for navigating city streets or large air-filled tires for beaches or hiking.

We’re all well aware of certain green babies in floating armored bassinets, but all terrain tires on a steel-crete bucket, its adjustable plexiglass sunshade adorned with the dust of freeze-dried grainfruit is perhaps a little more affordable to your average nerf herder.

With the stroller part of this ensemble cast established, let’s move on to the real meat and potatoes of the character: the child.

The Child

One of the unwritten rules of life is to never look back. History was written as therapy for the writer, not for the reader. And when you inevitably break this rule, well, you may see strange babies.

At our core, we’re most familiar with soft-skinned cherubs of our our makes and models. These defenseless things require such rigorous care for an amount of time that exceeds whole generations of other creatures lifecycles. Smaller, chubbier versions of our own kind, they drink fluids consistently until they can eat, and when they do, it better be small or soft enough so that they don’t endanger themselves with their own survival. The human species is truly a wonder.

In comparison, the chest-burster from Aliens is not any of that, yet is still technically a child as long as your definition is simply time based. Happening on an android, lovingly feeding a chest-burster cradled in a Walmart bag would be a horrifying twist on this character. If it was just a human baby, you’d simply be compelled to understand that Walmart just sells these kinds of things now.

Ultimately, we expect the child to be defenseless in this case—in need of the kind of care the attendant is providing. Otherwise, the tot might be lashing out in defiance. An ancient being cursed with eternal youth does not need another Cheerio, old man, and be damned if they will suffer these slights much further.

Either way, the baby may be the most flexible and enjoyable part of this character. The swivel gun to the message that you’re trying to portray. To finalize this message, and make sure it isn’t just a grab bag of random features you are posing to your characters, we need to filter all these items through the setting.

The Setting

For humor, the person is a detective without children of their own. Confused and unconfident about the activity, they’re simply trying to keep the thing quiet as the rest of the crew investigates the grisly double homicide.

For the weird, the attendant is otherworldly or unusual in this scenario. A potted plant’s vines wrap themselves around the bowl, offering its own seeds to the hungry child. The refrigerator is violently purging itself of ice cream, a treat the psychokinetic baby is enjoying thoroughly.

For horror, the person is undead or a poltergeist, whose motivations would be entirely unknown given that it isn’t their baby. Or perhaps flip these possibilities to the baby , which drives one to ask the morbid question ‘Why feed a ghost baby?‘ What’s your answer?

The setting is what ties all these parts to your whole. Ultimately, the ‘Person Feeding a Baby in a Stoller‘ is serving some sort of purpose in your narrative. Is this person intended to be flavor to a chase, and thus the details are limited, blurred out by the action camera aesthetic? Or are the details prevalent for setting flavor? Are you delivering a punch of fear prior to the reveal of something worse?

Examples

The Wizard’s Weird Familiar: Walking with speed through the lower city, you pass a wizened sorcerer standing center to the street. Suited in a knee length striped robe, atop which flows a grey beard colored by budding flowers, his eyes are focused downward to a small wood-craft carriage containing a small bipedal lizardkin. His outstretched hand holds a metal disc, from which he plucks small berries, proffering it to the child. They remain completely unaware of your rapid approach. You’ll need to stress your reflexes to avoid colliding with this ignorant magical disaster.

A Twisted Closet: Your hand rests on the small wooden knob of the bi-fold closet door. The space beyond that slatted thing is pitch dark, but the sound inside—faint sounds of fluid glurping and splishing—has your chest tight. You start slowly, pulling the knob toward you as the deep black void spans open. Peering inward, you see a bassinet at a distance almost beyond the possible, among a spot of light whose source is unplaceable. A bottle, held aloft by means unseen, emerges from just beyond—the apparent source of the offending damp noises. Are you striving forward, careless of your surroundings in abject fascination? Or do you quietly back out and away from the riveting strange? Either way, you’ll need to overcome being frozen in place, washed with familiar fear.

Characterization is all about adding that unexpected flair to the otherwise familiar activity to get your characters to think. So give the baby a .38 Special and make the stroller an AI-driven technical marvel and have the attendant peeling a banana at gun point. It’ll be a surprise, I assure you.

Congratulations, ‘Person Feeding a Baby in a Stroller‘. May you find the rest you so desperately deserve.

People of Flavor and Flair is a recurring post type, providing a detailed description of a type or style of person. These characters are intended for re-use in your preparation of one-off sessions or even as critical characters in larger campaigns. They may even be part of a whole, describing a player character or just a portion of the backstory narrative.