All right . . . I am extremely fond of Tacroy (The Lives of Christopher Chant), as I have mentioned. And I really love Sempitern Walker (A Tale of Time City), because every city needs at least one buttoned-down bureaucrat-cum-ritual-king who deals with stress by running around screaming in his underwear for a half-hour before every major ceremony. But if you want the character who went straight into my childhood subconscious and imprinted permanently on my pack of archetypes—and caused the term "slithering out" to become common parlance in my household—it's Howl (Howl's Moving Castle). Probably for the reasons that I have seen explicated online in various discussions of movie versus book: that he's self-centered and vain and cowardly ("Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!") and lies like the proverbial rug and throws the most memorable hissy fit in all children's literature when a dye job goes wrong . . . and he's wonderful. With all his faults. And besides, he's Welsh, which just rocks.