I was a candle

You can make them in the Wicket using Taste of Lacre, a Skyglass knife, amber, quirks, and second chances. They’re a fairly potent Companion; +7 to all stats. There’s more to it than that, though.

You can teach them things on an opportunity card; this builds Noman Knows, which can be used to leech Extraordinary Implications out of them, or built all the way up to 15 to make them melt into an Elemental Secret as they say their last words to you. Raising Noman Knows costs a little of your quirks (yes, even this year, after the revamp), or alternatively you can use a 5-action Ambition specific option. The Ambition option provides a few minor rewards, but less Noman Knows, so you probably should just avoid it. The exception to the rule is the Hedonist option, which instead raises Hedonist by a little.. at the cost of some Austere and a few items.

Every week when Time the Healer hits, they lose some Noman’s Friend. Noman’s Friend is basically their health bar; you can heal them with Tears of the Bazaar from your inventory or with pails of snow and Taste of Lacre on the opp card, but if Noman’s Friend hits 0, they melt to nothing. You can also use a noman to substitute for you if you die, instantly melting it but saving you from death.

Basically, this means you want to buy a Noman as soon as possible; the price will increase over the course of January. It’s best to buy one straight after Time the Healer if you can, to maximise its lifespan. If you’re trying to get it to last to the end of the Feast of the Rose, though, then… well, you’ll probably want to buy it as late as possible, so your noman get hits by less Time the Healers. Trying to get a noman to last that long is a severely hardcore challenge run, though; unless you’ve been specifically preparing for it, you’re probably better off not bothering.

If you manage to get a noman to survive all the way to the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, you can bring it along to the Panopticon and use it as a talking point on how love is sacrifice, then get it memorialised in a tattoo. However, getting a noman to last that long is nightmarishly difficult; the amount of Noman’s Friend lost decreases every week, but it’s also extremely random. It’s possible to end up getting blindsided by an unexpectedly high result; additionally, the amount of Friend regained from Tears is random too, so a string of bad rolls may leave you in hot water. Or cold water. Because your noman will have melted. 

Given that the ability to feed a noman Tears at Friend 0 was removed, you’d need an appallingly large and tragic collection of Tears to manage it. We’re probably talking something akin to 3 or 4 Tears per week, maybe 6 or 7 as February rolls in. Unless, of course, the process is made somewhat more gentle to accommodate for people trying to make their noman last. Doubtful, though; expect losses of 30-50 during January, and up to 70 or 80 during February.

You may think “hey I’ll just leave getting a Noman to the last minute to improve my odds”; this is probably a good idea, if you’re determined you want to try, but keep in mind that the price of generating a noman increases as Christmas comes to an end. The final price is 15 Taste, which is pretty lofty. Even if you buy it as late as possible, you’d still need to get it to last… probably 3 or 4 weeks to bring it to Lilac. A risky business, all told. Still, the Panopticon may be available earlier this year, or later, or not at all. Who can say? Noman knows.