![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[box] application
Player Information
Player name: Tiv
Contact: PMing this journal works, but I can also be found on AIM at “devilish pretty” or on plurk at![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
lightorchestra.
Are you over 18: Yes
Characters in The Box Already: N/A
Character Information
Character Name: Elaine Felkin
Canon: Original
Canon Point: Immediately after dying for the first time.
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive: Dead!
History: The world that the story takes place in is just one of many tiny little universes, glimmering in an ocean of them. For some reason, however, it held some special qualities -- it met some special conditions for even the worst of monsters to exist in it. Or maybe this particular universe was actually a pleasant dream dreamt by a certain blind idiot god, creating a home for his children and grandchildren and so forth?
Well, anyway, the point is that in this universe, at some immeasurable point, Earth was visited by a group of aliens referred to as the Great Old Ones, and they made their home here, spreading insanity across the land with their very presence. Despite this, time and history continue more or less as you as a person from Earth know it -- kingdoms rise and fall like they really did. Religious conflicts become more widespread just thanks to the different volume of religions -- you have Christians, and people who practice Shinto, amongst others you’d be familiar with, and all of those things are crushed beneath your Estoeric Order of Dagons and your Congregation of Yog-Sothoths. Thanks to these aliens (maybe), magic exists, and some magicians may aid in wars or other conflicts, but they typically belong to churches or other organizations. People are born with a massive strain on their sanity and create ways to acclimate, thanking the Great Old Ones, in positions of power, for the lot in life they’ve been given.
Not everyone is that grateful. Many recognize the actual reality of their situation and rebel, rocking the countries of the world with further rebellions and wars. The god Yog-Sothoth exists coterminous with space and time, and as a side-effect of his church’s dealings with him, items and animals often come live and relatively unharmed (except mentally, often) from the world’s water sources. This includes humans, who must struggle to find their place in what’s often a different country entirely, flung far into the future, or even the distant past.
But Elaine? Elaine is none of these people and has no special purpose. Although she’s technically the protagonist and could become one of the more powerful magicians in the past few hundred years, she isn’t the chosen one or anything, and her place in the world, as of her canon point, isn’t anything outrageous (even afterwards it’s nothing special, really) on a grand scale. She’s just a girl in a London in an 1882 Britain on an Earth in a Solar System in a Milky Way in a Local Group in a Virgo Supercluster in a Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex in a universe in a multiverse. What does she matter? For such a big world, there has to be a huge, overarching plot for her to be put in the protagonist’s seat, right? Or hey, why not rebel dude or time traveller gal?
Nah. We’re focusing on her, and she matters very, very little, and she’s perfectly okay with that.
So, how did such a complacent person come about?
When a man and woman love each other very much, sometimes things happen. By “things,” I mean “sex” and by “woman” I mean “Nyarlathotep wearing a woman’s skin.” Even the usage of the word “love” is suspect here -- her father was the golden boy of a wealthy family and so deeply and inherently broken he fell in what he assumed to be love with the very first woman he even moderately hit it off with. Mama, on the other hand, was only following a temporary whim, and as can be expected, leaves immediately after the very, very early birth. So was Olivia Charlotte Elaine Felkin born, frail and sickly, to a single father, himself only eighteen. As you’d expect from someone so young, he handles the loss poorly for various reasons: the first being that his stability was very tenuous to begin with, and the second being a unique property of his daughter’s, the only thing passed down from her mother.
To the general public, the Old Ones are sort of like your classical gods in that they legitimately exist, physical forms and all, and are ultimately good if you appease them. People in general work hard to keep them pleased and nightmares and the occasional waking hallucinations are just a side-effect, really. Most people don’t even notice until something comes along to make it worse — think of a headache that you’ve had so long you’ve totally forgotten it, up until a noise or bright light starts it pounding. People are born used to the stress the existence of the Old Ones causes! That’s normal! Unless their presence suddenly spikes (like if you make one angry or they do so intentionally or you stare too long), it’s like it’s not even there!
Elaine and people like her, however, are the noise or bright light in this analogy. People directly related to the gods, or just general abominations, feel deeply and inherently wrong to normal humans. Not quite inhuman like one parent, but not quite human like the other. Very, very firmly lodged at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley, if you will -- in the simplest terms, her lineage makes her a constant strain on people’s sanity. She can’t turn it off. It works just by her existing in a general area, even if some are more resistant to it than others. Her father fares well at first, but the older she got, the more difficult it became to be with her. In the end, he's rarely around; he isn’t able to handle the strength of her presence, reminded all too often of the wife he lost by the fear she instils in him, on top of her face; he would occasionally make up reasons he was needed by his work or his brothers over on the mainland. Anything to get away from her, which was a fairly simple task considering she was completely house-ridden thanks to her illness. It wasn’t like she could follow him, or go outside very much at all, honestly.
So it goes without saying her childhood was literally friendless. Ignored by her only parent and being dealt with sparsely by her grandparents and the maids and her one tutor, her interactions with people were limited, which heavily affected what she learned about being a human. The Old Ones would whisper in her ears in voices no one but she could hear, blood making her highly spiritually sensitive, in exchange for much of her lucidity as a person. She suffered nightmares and hallucinations so frequently that they became her reality and she coped with them thusly. She was never unhappy with her lot in life because she never realized it was an unfortunate one, but more importantly -- she didn’t fully grasp how to be. She learned through watching her grandparents, the maids, and her father during his rare appearances that a “human” is patient, happy, smiling, polite, and cheerful, never letting their negativity show. They were, so so was she, in a shallower sense. She would drown herself in novels of all sorts, and comic books washed up on the Thames from other periods, and created a persona for herself between those imitations and those books. She would become a human, instead of the monster she always overheard them talking about. However, she never really gained any chances to test out her social skills beyond the small world she lived in.
Which got smaller with the deaths of her grandparents, by the time she was twelve. Nothing changed save for having two less people around to observe, and her life continues without incident. When she’s fifteen, it's decided that she's healthy enough, physically speaking, to go outside. She's frequently approached by suitors that see her from afar, but none of them last any longer than a few moments in the face of her condition, and her life continues without incident -- until the fall of her seventeenth year. Her father, having had a change of heart (read: trying to assuage some of his guilt. still not one so big he’ll suffer being near her for longer than five minutes) and calling himself pulling some strings for her sake, arranges for her to enroll in a university funded by their church of choice, with the caveat that she takes small, out of the way lectures and sits as far away from the others as humanly possible. With a not-fully-comprehended desire to make him happy, no reason (or means) to refuse him, and an interest in learning at this thing she's heard of called a "school," she accepts.
But nothing changes for her even after the fact. Going outside only causes her to be avoided by an even larger world than the one she used to know. She doesn't speak or make contact with anyone -- she only does her studying and listens to lectures, taking satisfaction in the fact that she's allowed to learn in a public place. This continues for months until eventually, on her way home from class, on back roads where she rarely comes into contact with others, she accidentally bumps into a young man. She doesn't get his name, but he's talkative and genial despite her condition. It's with him that she has her first real extended conversation, and it's thanks to him that her life is changed forever.
Because he reacts so poorly to her presence in the end that he decides to break her neck, killing her. Oops.
Realizing his slight mistake, though, he resurrects her with magic immediately after. Elaine has no interest in a violent death like the one she was given, so she becomes spooked by her resurrection rather than annoyed -- until she realizes. This is the first time that she has ever been hated enough for someone to lay hands on her, and her first physical contact with another human being in some time -- she's immediately endeared. She claims the boy, who is the first human to touch her or speak to her for more than a few sentences in years as her first friend, whether he has any interest in the position or not. And he doesn't, he really doesn't, but he can't bring himself to kill her a second time -- because she's just like him. So begins a story of dumb kids doing dumb things, like trying to cause the apocalypse.
But she's being taken from just before that final paragraph.
Personality: For lack of a better single word, we’ll call Elaine pure. Because of the way she was isolated, surrounded by fictionalized accounts of human nature and actual humans going out of their ways to hide their natures, she ended up a little emotionally stunted! For outward displays, she imitates what she sees, and what she sees are polite, smiling people refusing to display too much emotion. It gets watered down through the lens of her inhumanity and because all she’s doing is imitating the people she sees -- the end result is a sweet, optimistic girl who always smiles, never raises her voice (she never learned to speak properly and always sounds a little like she’s reading off a script, honestly), and always gives the impression of wanting the best for everyone she meets. Her bearing in times of hardship is noble, because as the daughter of a wealthy family, it’s her purpose to act kindly and responsibly towards people weaker than her. She clearly doesn’t get out much, so altogether you could call her outward self something of an Ingenue-type. Expectedly, she can come off as very classist and condescending because of this, but if one knows her, the obvious reasoning is due to her lack of perspective.
But like I said, it’s usually only an imitation, and she isn’t really the best at them. She’s trying so hard at this humanity thing, though! Her kindness often comes off as her being aggressively nice and basically the world’s least violent shounen protagonist. Her usual manner is casual, but rather than making her easy to talk to like she’d wanted, it comes off as unsettling and apathetic and occasionally brutally honest, thanks to her lack of proper socialization.
Her lack of lucidity plays a part too; when you live every day with several gods mumbling in your ear and hallucinations and nightmares, you start to lose a little sleep. Her boundaries are few and far inbetween and she rattles off facts like nobody’s business pretty often, but for the most part she generally assumes she’s being nice. It’s also in part thanks to her religion -- having been left alone except for her books, she developed a love for learning, and became an ardent follower of Yog-Sothoth because of that, himself considered a god of knowledge by the people of this earth. Her family was a part of his church already, but her own faith is so strong as to be subsumed into her personality and hobbies -- her approach to many things is worryingly clinical, and to her, all experiences are a part of an empirical learning method. None of these affectations are lies entirely (her thoughts on learning are in fact totally legitimate for her, they're just also inherited), because if you put on shows like this for your entire life then you’ll definitely pick up some things for real, but for most people, there are some things -- the few thoughts she’s formed independently -- to keep in mind.
For some reason or another (who’d have thunk), years and years of rejection have done literally nothing to endear her towards the human race -- at her best, she dislikes most humans, and her worst she loathes them and would genuinely burn the entire world down if she thought she could do it. Purge this wretched place of its people in God's name and make a place where she can be happy, you know. So while she has great observational skills -- the kind that would normally make her really good with people -- when she interacts with most of them, she’ll only go as deep as what she can see. She understands a reaction, but not the emotion behind it, because she can’t be bothered to look any farther. She seldom even understands her own emotions, having built herself up with books and imitations, but empathy for others is not something she typically possesses either. (though of course there are always exceptions, as we'll see later)
Resultingly, when she upsets a human, either their reasoning for being upset flies completely over her head, or she catches it and doesn’t regret a single thing. She only plays as if she does, because that’s how she’s “supposed” to act. It’s not really an actual anger she feels, though -- just a quiet, burnt out resentment (Though she’d be very confused if she really were moved enough to feel an emotion). She’d like to be liked, but she’s been hated for so long it’s not an actual expectation she has. The way she and the humans she knows treat each other is as natural as breathing. It’s surprisingly pessimistic and nihilistic for her outward personality, but that’s just how things are. She’s a monster, after all. Not a human. Why should she be granted the luxury of being treated like a human? Even if she were, life has no meaning -- she has no expectations for anything except for dying eventually, and lives every day the exact same. Completely stripping away every piece of her personality that was born as an affectation or from reading books gives you this, but it will occasionally slip through the cracks regardless, if you’re really, really paying attention to what she says.
But note that I said earlier that she tries. Oh my god, does she try. When reading, she fell in love with the stories recorded in things like shounen manga (as an example) in particular -- stories with good ends, about people who blindly accepted others even though they were monstrous, and monsters that were able to be happy, and unhappy people being able to rise above everyone else. Above all else, underneath that pessimism and that self-loathing, she genuinely does want to be cared for and adored. Even if she doesn’t believe that she deserves it, there is some part of her that wants to be happy. She models herself after these books too -- they’re the source of her tenacious attitudes and arguably a larger cause of her kindness than her family’s expectations of her, because outside of her father, who she loves mostly due to obligation but somewhat because of vague memories of being treated well when he was there, she cares for them very little.
If she actually were to be accepted, though? Around her friends (none of which she knows yet, but still important), or someone that she’d like to become one? Her kindnesses are much, much worse, to the point of being unbearable. She’s tenacious and stubborn as usual, but her compliments become noticeably more genuine (and outlandish) -- she's excitable and affectionate and lavish with her attentions. But a friend also lucks out -- not only is she incredibly overprotective, she’ll do literally anything for a person she considers such. Die, kill, whatever. It doesn't really matter what they want from her, as long as they continue to stay her friend. She has so few that she's frequently terrified of losing them, and appropriately, she rarely asks for much from them outside of their friendship. In her opinion, she scarcely even deserves that much, so she certainly doesn't deserve more. All give and no take is what'd make her most comfortable, in other words. No take. She can't even comprehend taking.
But she's often a little too lavish with her giving. Incorporating her own interpretations of the concept of Noblesse Oblige into her interpretations of the concept of the shounen hero, at her worst she can and will act in the place of her friends, try to do their thinking for them, and so on -- in general, just very, very stupid smothering and lone wolf work. It becomes her responsibility, she thinks, as a protagonist or leader or noble or simply as their friend, to protect them no matter what the cost, and they don't necessarily need to know that! Her intentions are seldom explicitly bad, but living a life where she was seldom permitted to make her own choices makes it easy for her, with her issues empathizing, to remember that people typically do make choices of their own. A life bereft of anyone to rely on makes it easy for her to forget that, when she has friends, she can rely on and talk to them instead of going off on her own.She didn't jump off the roof in high school without telling anyone or anything, but I'm not saying she wouldn't do it either.
However anything more intimate than friendship is up for debate -- as a result of familiarization with other denominations of her religion, her opinions on sex are incredibly relaxed, but her lack of self-esteem and experiences have left her terrified of romance. She's an affectionate friend, but is less than interested in being touched herself, and genuine romantic interest immediately garners shock and disbelief, because no one could ever love her. There must be some mistake. A lapse in judgement or madness or someone trying to humor her, because in all the city, in all the country, in all the world and universe there are millions of women more normal and stable and beautiful and intelligent than her. Even if those feelings were genuine, she feels mild discomfort at the idea of accepting, because she knows that her life is bound to be a short one (and she honestly would like it that way), and she would feel wrong placing someone who genuinely loved her in a situation where they'd lose her. She's heard that her father gradually went downhill after losing his wife, and saw her grandmother do the same after losing her husband, so she's generally gathered that monogamy, and marriage and romance in general, are to be avoided.
Items on your character at canon point:
- Her clothes: a royal blue and coral walking dress and a red knit scarf, plus the obvious shoes and underwear.
- A book filled with notes from a physics class.
Abilities, Strengths and Weaknesses: Being secluded in her house for so long, she’s had ample time to work on her mind and develop hobbies.
- Her memory and observational skills are excellent when she applies them -- she’s also good with numbers, physics being her favorite subject and current area of study. Fluent in French in addition to English (and the language the Old Ones speak, but her accent is atrocious. pesky human tongue and vocal cords), but can read Latin, Greek, German, and Coptic well with the help of a dictionary or another person.
- Speaking technically, she is capable of fighting with a sword. That is, she owns a sabre and knows the theories, but her constitution doesn’t allow for much.
- Her potential with magic is considered to be on the level of a prodigy in a general sense, but at current canon point there's not much here -- brought down by her pessimism, she has no real desire to pursue the path of magic and can only do simple things, like small strength buffs and healing cuts.
(if she did, for the sake of it coming up later, she has a natural inclination towards a type given the non-indicative name of Causality. This is essentially the setting equivalent of Blood Magic in how well-received it is, because Causality users are all either descended from or tainted by the Old Ones (not that the public knows this) and are resultingly mostly bugfuck insane and hated by the people.
It’s a blanket term for “HP Lovecraft shit that ignores spatial and physical and temporal laws”; These abilities are limited only by her imagination, and she has a naturally inquisitive personality so she’s bound to tinker with and modify her abilities herself, but she notably learns to use it in a few ways: using her shadow, she can “eat” things, sending them either to a hammerspace inside her shadow or directly into her stomach or destroying them altogether. Things in the hammerspace can be propelled out at varying speeds. But most importantly, she can wear clothing underneath her clothing, no matter how improbable it is.)
On the other hand, as you read earlier, she’s been mentally and physically frail since she was born!
- Her lungs and immune system are both weak, and she seldom doesn’t require bedrest upon overexerting herself. Even if she can get up and move around when necessary, her physical skills are hideously atrophied from lack of use -- hence her lack of fencing ability despite knowing the theory and application. If left alone, she would've lived for about eight more years.
- Less than great vision; approximately 20/70.
- As far as mental weakness goes, she’s prone to bouts of intense paranoia, hallucinations, and nightmares thanks to how well she hears the Great Old Ones’ voices. Now, she is used to this, because she’s lived her entire life this way, but sudden spikes or dips in her SAN stat are incredibly disorienting and disturbing for her in ways a hallucination or bout of paranoia would be!
- Because of these nightmares, which have gotten worse within the past few years and are frightening in a visceral way despite her being used to them (because they're, you know, nightmares), she no longer sleeps voluntarily, and the fact that she's constantly sleep-deprived shows in a few of her behaviors. Passing out without notice, staring off into space, and so on.
- However, these elements of her mental state are partially innate to her setting -- that is, no voices, no… well, no hallucinations, at least. Assuming, of course, that there are no Lovecraftian horrors here; she’ll be incredibly disoriented upon arrival regardless, because she’s never known anything but her perception of the world.
(Speaking of things innate to her setting, her sanity draining ability won't be coming into play here either for clear reasons, but I'm definitely open to playing with it later if others are interested.)
- For the more mundane, however, her pessimism runs so deep she takes the words of the people who loathe her completely to heart, being completely incapable of even considering herself a human. She has no real expectations for her life except to eventually (soon, she hopes) die a painless death from illness in her bed, and then quietly fade into obscurity.
- She places no faith in herself or in her abilities despite any posturing otherwise, and actually expects herself to fail at everything that she does.
- Her poor self-image leads to a severe lack of self-preservation and the occasional deep downward spiral of self-hate, on top of being far too attached to the people willing to actually accept her friendship. One word from one friend could send her crashing down completely, without fail.
Fortunately, at current point she has no friends.
Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample:
A thread
Another thread
And another thread.
These are from a slightly later canonpoint, but her personality and style of speaking are basically unchanged -- if given the chance to talk to others, this is approximately how she acts. Let me know if you want more or other samples!
Prose Log Sample: Objectively speaking it was, Elaine notes with all the passion of a droll lecturer, a nice day outside. There was relatively little smoke in the air, nearly to a point where breathing comfortably didn't seem entirely infeasible -- so she takes a deep breath. The oxygen enters and exits without irritating her throat or lungs; she doesn't cough this time. Not even once. The smoke that was present gave the sky a mottled blue color -- with the curtains opened, the sunlight that shone through the windows was so bright it blinds her, searing white and hot and painful and scorching her retinas.
No.
Wait. That's not quite right -- that's not quite right, she thinks, but her condition, her unfortunate illness that made certain she would only see this scenery through her window, always did make her see things. As usual, she gives several blinks of her eyes before the imaginary blindness and pain disappears. She doesn't even bother with that gesture for the shadows lurking in the edges of her room in her peripheral vision.
Or the gossiping voices of the maids. (How could he be happy waiting his entire life for a dead woman? Is that why he keeps it alive? I worked here when he was a boy, she is nearly the mirror image of her mother. Madness drives us to such awful lengths, oh Lord...)
Or the scent of black tea and her father's tobacco coming from the study.
It's simply that she knows (assumes) none of these are real. There were no lectures today, so she wasn't allowed outside -- that meant that her father would be out today. Her mother is dead. At night, he sheds his precious dignity like snakeskin and wails for her in his study. Their maids, the maybe-real maybe-fake maids possibly constructed by her condition, blame her – her existence and presence has driven him mad. He treats her like a human or a valuable pet, so his fate is to suffer the way a human who loves monsters should. Like an animal.
She can hear them more, again today, outside the music room once she reaches it. Something abstract like wildfire or boiling water rises in her chest from time to time. She's never sure what to make of it, if it is her condition or something else -- but it makes her want to strike them. She knows, she assumes that they would never really say these things, but all the same she wants to wrap her hands around their throats until their faces turn blue, reach into their stomachs and pull out their entrails, burn them, behead them.
Even assuming they've said nothing against her father, even if they may not be real, she wants them to die. But the door is too heavy for her to open on this side without exhausting herself, and her voice rarely comes when called for. She simply plays the song indicated for her from inside her animal cage.
The other side of the piano bench is cold to the touch. If she is an animal, then what sort of animal would she be? Elaine thinks, maybe, that she is a cockroach. She crawls about in the dirt and in this house and elicits disgust and refuses to die for some reason only understood by the Old Ones. Only understood by God. Like on a cue, light coughing fit rocks her body – doubled over her piano, nails making small scratches against the grain, her lips curl into a slight smile. The notes hit as she fell were E F B C D G A.
Yes, that is the sound that one makes when falling over a piano in the position that she did. If she did it a few more times in different ways, it’d be possible for her to learn every potential combination of sounds available for her to make, she thinks. The prospect doesn’t actually interest her. She knows she doesn’t have any ear for music, the key placement changes and the gods murmur as she plays, guiding her fingers north, flat flat flat, but a lady must be able to do something. This is a meaningless exercise, but learning to play this instrument well could be helpful –
But before she allows herself the luxury of fantasizing, of thinking of piano recitals and her proud, crying father and a crowd of cheering, sobbing friends all moved to tears by the sheer soul of her song (a lie, the thought was there, it’s already far too late), she stops. Why would learning to play the piano make her a human? Why would learning to play the piano give her friends or attention? She broke it down logically -- if she were a talented pianist, she would have the attention she wanted, but that level of prestige, as she’s read (she thinks of Chopin), does not guarantee her positive relationships with others. Her father’s work does not allow him to leave for something as trivial as piano recitals. If it were that simple, then she wouldn’t be in this situation. Children are not born with zero potential playing an instrument. If playing the piano could make her a human girl, then she already would be. This exercise is pointless. These thoughts are meaningless, this facade is meaningless, she thinks -- she’s wasting her time.
But when she passes the maids in the hall on her way to retire back to her bedroom (they stopped speaking when they saw her for some reason, eyes wide, mouths in taut frowns, but she doesn't bother to blink them away) her smile is a bright mask, nailed and hammered against her face.
Player name: Tiv
Contact: PMing this journal works, but I can also be found on AIM at “devilish pretty” or on plurk at
Are you over 18: Yes
Characters in The Box Already: N/A
Character Information
Character Name: Elaine Felkin
Canon: Original
Canon Point: Immediately after dying for the first time.
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive: Dead!
History: The world that the story takes place in is just one of many tiny little universes, glimmering in an ocean of them. For some reason, however, it held some special qualities -- it met some special conditions for even the worst of monsters to exist in it. Or maybe this particular universe was actually a pleasant dream dreamt by a certain blind idiot god, creating a home for his children and grandchildren and so forth?
Well, anyway, the point is that in this universe, at some immeasurable point, Earth was visited by a group of aliens referred to as the Great Old Ones, and they made their home here, spreading insanity across the land with their very presence. Despite this, time and history continue more or less as you as a person from Earth know it -- kingdoms rise and fall like they really did. Religious conflicts become more widespread just thanks to the different volume of religions -- you have Christians, and people who practice Shinto, amongst others you’d be familiar with, and all of those things are crushed beneath your Estoeric Order of Dagons and your Congregation of Yog-Sothoths. Thanks to these aliens (maybe), magic exists, and some magicians may aid in wars or other conflicts, but they typically belong to churches or other organizations. People are born with a massive strain on their sanity and create ways to acclimate, thanking the Great Old Ones, in positions of power, for the lot in life they’ve been given.
Not everyone is that grateful. Many recognize the actual reality of their situation and rebel, rocking the countries of the world with further rebellions and wars. The god Yog-Sothoth exists coterminous with space and time, and as a side-effect of his church’s dealings with him, items and animals often come live and relatively unharmed (except mentally, often) from the world’s water sources. This includes humans, who must struggle to find their place in what’s often a different country entirely, flung far into the future, or even the distant past.
But Elaine? Elaine is none of these people and has no special purpose. Although she’s technically the protagonist and could become one of the more powerful magicians in the past few hundred years, she isn’t the chosen one or anything, and her place in the world, as of her canon point, isn’t anything outrageous (even afterwards it’s nothing special, really) on a grand scale. She’s just a girl in a London in an 1882 Britain on an Earth in a Solar System in a Milky Way in a Local Group in a Virgo Supercluster in a Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex in a universe in a multiverse. What does she matter? For such a big world, there has to be a huge, overarching plot for her to be put in the protagonist’s seat, right? Or hey, why not rebel dude or time traveller gal?
Nah. We’re focusing on her, and she matters very, very little, and she’s perfectly okay with that.
So, how did such a complacent person come about?
When a man and woman love each other very much, sometimes things happen. By “things,” I mean “sex” and by “woman” I mean “Nyarlathotep wearing a woman’s skin.” Even the usage of the word “love” is suspect here -- her father was the golden boy of a wealthy family and so deeply and inherently broken he fell in what he assumed to be love with the very first woman he even moderately hit it off with. Mama, on the other hand, was only following a temporary whim, and as can be expected, leaves immediately after the very, very early birth. So was Olivia Charlotte Elaine Felkin born, frail and sickly, to a single father, himself only eighteen. As you’d expect from someone so young, he handles the loss poorly for various reasons: the first being that his stability was very tenuous to begin with, and the second being a unique property of his daughter’s, the only thing passed down from her mother.
To the general public, the Old Ones are sort of like your classical gods in that they legitimately exist, physical forms and all, and are ultimately good if you appease them. People in general work hard to keep them pleased and nightmares and the occasional waking hallucinations are just a side-effect, really. Most people don’t even notice until something comes along to make it worse — think of a headache that you’ve had so long you’ve totally forgotten it, up until a noise or bright light starts it pounding. People are born used to the stress the existence of the Old Ones causes! That’s normal! Unless their presence suddenly spikes (like if you make one angry or they do so intentionally or you stare too long), it’s like it’s not even there!
Elaine and people like her, however, are the noise or bright light in this analogy. People directly related to the gods, or just general abominations, feel deeply and inherently wrong to normal humans. Not quite inhuman like one parent, but not quite human like the other. Very, very firmly lodged at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley, if you will -- in the simplest terms, her lineage makes her a constant strain on people’s sanity. She can’t turn it off. It works just by her existing in a general area, even if some are more resistant to it than others. Her father fares well at first, but the older she got, the more difficult it became to be with her. In the end, he's rarely around; he isn’t able to handle the strength of her presence, reminded all too often of the wife he lost by the fear she instils in him, on top of her face; he would occasionally make up reasons he was needed by his work or his brothers over on the mainland. Anything to get away from her, which was a fairly simple task considering she was completely house-ridden thanks to her illness. It wasn’t like she could follow him, or go outside very much at all, honestly.
So it goes without saying her childhood was literally friendless. Ignored by her only parent and being dealt with sparsely by her grandparents and the maids and her one tutor, her interactions with people were limited, which heavily affected what she learned about being a human. The Old Ones would whisper in her ears in voices no one but she could hear, blood making her highly spiritually sensitive, in exchange for much of her lucidity as a person. She suffered nightmares and hallucinations so frequently that they became her reality and she coped with them thusly. She was never unhappy with her lot in life because she never realized it was an unfortunate one, but more importantly -- she didn’t fully grasp how to be. She learned through watching her grandparents, the maids, and her father during his rare appearances that a “human” is patient, happy, smiling, polite, and cheerful, never letting their negativity show. They were, so so was she, in a shallower sense. She would drown herself in novels of all sorts, and comic books washed up on the Thames from other periods, and created a persona for herself between those imitations and those books. She would become a human, instead of the monster she always overheard them talking about. However, she never really gained any chances to test out her social skills beyond the small world she lived in.
Which got smaller with the deaths of her grandparents, by the time she was twelve. Nothing changed save for having two less people around to observe, and her life continues without incident. When she’s fifteen, it's decided that she's healthy enough, physically speaking, to go outside. She's frequently approached by suitors that see her from afar, but none of them last any longer than a few moments in the face of her condition, and her life continues without incident -- until the fall of her seventeenth year. Her father, having had a change of heart (read: trying to assuage some of his guilt. still not one so big he’ll suffer being near her for longer than five minutes) and calling himself pulling some strings for her sake, arranges for her to enroll in a university funded by their church of choice, with the caveat that she takes small, out of the way lectures and sits as far away from the others as humanly possible. With a not-fully-comprehended desire to make him happy, no reason (or means) to refuse him, and an interest in learning at this thing she's heard of called a "school," she accepts.
But nothing changes for her even after the fact. Going outside only causes her to be avoided by an even larger world than the one she used to know. She doesn't speak or make contact with anyone -- she only does her studying and listens to lectures, taking satisfaction in the fact that she's allowed to learn in a public place. This continues for months until eventually, on her way home from class, on back roads where she rarely comes into contact with others, she accidentally bumps into a young man. She doesn't get his name, but he's talkative and genial despite her condition. It's with him that she has her first real extended conversation, and it's thanks to him that her life is changed forever.
Because he reacts so poorly to her presence in the end that he decides to break her neck, killing her. Oops.
Realizing his slight mistake, though, he resurrects her with magic immediately after. Elaine has no interest in a violent death like the one she was given, so she becomes spooked by her resurrection rather than annoyed -- until she realizes. This is the first time that she has ever been hated enough for someone to lay hands on her, and her first physical contact with another human being in some time -- she's immediately endeared. She claims the boy, who is the first human to touch her or speak to her for more than a few sentences in years as her first friend, whether he has any interest in the position or not. And he doesn't, he really doesn't, but he can't bring himself to kill her a second time -- because she's just like him. So begins a story of dumb kids doing dumb things, like trying to cause the apocalypse.
But she's being taken from just before that final paragraph.
Personality: For lack of a better single word, we’ll call Elaine pure. Because of the way she was isolated, surrounded by fictionalized accounts of human nature and actual humans going out of their ways to hide their natures, she ended up a little emotionally stunted! For outward displays, she imitates what she sees, and what she sees are polite, smiling people refusing to display too much emotion. It gets watered down through the lens of her inhumanity and because all she’s doing is imitating the people she sees -- the end result is a sweet, optimistic girl who always smiles, never raises her voice (she never learned to speak properly and always sounds a little like she’s reading off a script, honestly), and always gives the impression of wanting the best for everyone she meets. Her bearing in times of hardship is noble, because as the daughter of a wealthy family, it’s her purpose to act kindly and responsibly towards people weaker than her. She clearly doesn’t get out much, so altogether you could call her outward self something of an Ingenue-type. Expectedly, she can come off as very classist and condescending because of this, but if one knows her, the obvious reasoning is due to her lack of perspective.
But like I said, it’s usually only an imitation, and she isn’t really the best at them. She’s trying so hard at this humanity thing, though! Her kindness often comes off as her being aggressively nice and basically the world’s least violent shounen protagonist. Her usual manner is casual, but rather than making her easy to talk to like she’d wanted, it comes off as unsettling and apathetic and occasionally brutally honest, thanks to her lack of proper socialization.
Her lack of lucidity plays a part too; when you live every day with several gods mumbling in your ear and hallucinations and nightmares, you start to lose a little sleep. Her boundaries are few and far inbetween and she rattles off facts like nobody’s business pretty often, but for the most part she generally assumes she’s being nice. It’s also in part thanks to her religion -- having been left alone except for her books, she developed a love for learning, and became an ardent follower of Yog-Sothoth because of that, himself considered a god of knowledge by the people of this earth. Her family was a part of his church already, but her own faith is so strong as to be subsumed into her personality and hobbies -- her approach to many things is worryingly clinical, and to her, all experiences are a part of an empirical learning method. None of these affectations are lies entirely (her thoughts on learning are in fact totally legitimate for her, they're just also inherited), because if you put on shows like this for your entire life then you’ll definitely pick up some things for real, but for most people, there are some things -- the few thoughts she’s formed independently -- to keep in mind.
For some reason or another (who’d have thunk), years and years of rejection have done literally nothing to endear her towards the human race -- at her best, she dislikes most humans, and her worst she loathes them and would genuinely burn the entire world down if she thought she could do it. Purge this wretched place of its people in God's name and make a place where she can be happy, you know. So while she has great observational skills -- the kind that would normally make her really good with people -- when she interacts with most of them, she’ll only go as deep as what she can see. She understands a reaction, but not the emotion behind it, because she can’t be bothered to look any farther. She seldom even understands her own emotions, having built herself up with books and imitations, but empathy for others is not something she typically possesses either. (though of course there are always exceptions, as we'll see later)
Resultingly, when she upsets a human, either their reasoning for being upset flies completely over her head, or she catches it and doesn’t regret a single thing. She only plays as if she does, because that’s how she’s “supposed” to act. It’s not really an actual anger she feels, though -- just a quiet, burnt out resentment (Though she’d be very confused if she really were moved enough to feel an emotion). She’d like to be liked, but she’s been hated for so long it’s not an actual expectation she has. The way she and the humans she knows treat each other is as natural as breathing. It’s surprisingly pessimistic and nihilistic for her outward personality, but that’s just how things are. She’s a monster, after all. Not a human. Why should she be granted the luxury of being treated like a human? Even if she were, life has no meaning -- she has no expectations for anything except for dying eventually, and lives every day the exact same. Completely stripping away every piece of her personality that was born as an affectation or from reading books gives you this, but it will occasionally slip through the cracks regardless, if you’re really, really paying attention to what she says.
But note that I said earlier that she tries. Oh my god, does she try. When reading, she fell in love with the stories recorded in things like shounen manga (as an example) in particular -- stories with good ends, about people who blindly accepted others even though they were monstrous, and monsters that were able to be happy, and unhappy people being able to rise above everyone else. Above all else, underneath that pessimism and that self-loathing, she genuinely does want to be cared for and adored. Even if she doesn’t believe that she deserves it, there is some part of her that wants to be happy. She models herself after these books too -- they’re the source of her tenacious attitudes and arguably a larger cause of her kindness than her family’s expectations of her, because outside of her father, who she loves mostly due to obligation but somewhat because of vague memories of being treated well when he was there, she cares for them very little.
If she actually were to be accepted, though? Around her friends (none of which she knows yet, but still important), or someone that she’d like to become one? Her kindnesses are much, much worse, to the point of being unbearable. She’s tenacious and stubborn as usual, but her compliments become noticeably more genuine (and outlandish) -- she's excitable and affectionate and lavish with her attentions. But a friend also lucks out -- not only is she incredibly overprotective, she’ll do literally anything for a person she considers such. Die, kill, whatever. It doesn't really matter what they want from her, as long as they continue to stay her friend. She has so few that she's frequently terrified of losing them, and appropriately, she rarely asks for much from them outside of their friendship. In her opinion, she scarcely even deserves that much, so she certainly doesn't deserve more. All give and no take is what'd make her most comfortable, in other words. No take. She can't even comprehend taking.
But she's often a little too lavish with her giving. Incorporating her own interpretations of the concept of Noblesse Oblige into her interpretations of the concept of the shounen hero, at her worst she can and will act in the place of her friends, try to do their thinking for them, and so on -- in general, just very, very stupid smothering and lone wolf work. It becomes her responsibility, she thinks, as a protagonist or leader or noble or simply as their friend, to protect them no matter what the cost, and they don't necessarily need to know that! Her intentions are seldom explicitly bad, but living a life where she was seldom permitted to make her own choices makes it easy for her, with her issues empathizing, to remember that people typically do make choices of their own. A life bereft of anyone to rely on makes it easy for her to forget that, when she has friends, she can rely on and talk to them instead of going off on her own.
However anything more intimate than friendship is up for debate -- as a result of familiarization with other denominations of her religion, her opinions on sex are incredibly relaxed, but her lack of self-esteem and experiences have left her terrified of romance. She's an affectionate friend, but is less than interested in being touched herself, and genuine romantic interest immediately garners shock and disbelief, because no one could ever love her. There must be some mistake. A lapse in judgement or madness or someone trying to humor her, because in all the city, in all the country, in all the world and universe there are millions of women more normal and stable and beautiful and intelligent than her. Even if those feelings were genuine, she feels mild discomfort at the idea of accepting, because she knows that her life is bound to be a short one (and she honestly would like it that way), and she would feel wrong placing someone who genuinely loved her in a situation where they'd lose her. She's heard that her father gradually went downhill after losing his wife, and saw her grandmother do the same after losing her husband, so she's generally gathered that monogamy, and marriage and romance in general, are to be avoided.
Items on your character at canon point:
- Her clothes: a royal blue and coral walking dress and a red knit scarf, plus the obvious shoes and underwear.
- A book filled with notes from a physics class.
Abilities, Strengths and Weaknesses: Being secluded in her house for so long, she’s had ample time to work on her mind and develop hobbies.
- Her memory and observational skills are excellent when she applies them -- she’s also good with numbers, physics being her favorite subject and current area of study. Fluent in French in addition to English (and the language the Old Ones speak, but her accent is atrocious. pesky human tongue and vocal cords), but can read Latin, Greek, German, and Coptic well with the help of a dictionary or another person.
- Speaking technically, she is capable of fighting with a sword. That is, she owns a sabre and knows the theories, but her constitution doesn’t allow for much.
- Her potential with magic is considered to be on the level of a prodigy in a general sense, but at current canon point there's not much here -- brought down by her pessimism, she has no real desire to pursue the path of magic and can only do simple things, like small strength buffs and healing cuts.
(if she did, for the sake of it coming up later, she has a natural inclination towards a type given the non-indicative name of Causality. This is essentially the setting equivalent of Blood Magic in how well-received it is, because Causality users are all either descended from or tainted by the Old Ones (not that the public knows this) and are resultingly mostly bugfuck insane and hated by the people.
It’s a blanket term for “HP Lovecraft shit that ignores spatial and physical and temporal laws”; These abilities are limited only by her imagination, and she has a naturally inquisitive personality so she’s bound to tinker with and modify her abilities herself, but she notably learns to use it in a few ways: using her shadow, she can “eat” things, sending them either to a hammerspace inside her shadow or directly into her stomach or destroying them altogether. Things in the hammerspace can be propelled out at varying speeds. But most importantly, she can wear clothing underneath her clothing, no matter how improbable it is.)
On the other hand, as you read earlier, she’s been mentally and physically frail since she was born!
- Her lungs and immune system are both weak, and she seldom doesn’t require bedrest upon overexerting herself. Even if she can get up and move around when necessary, her physical skills are hideously atrophied from lack of use -- hence her lack of fencing ability despite knowing the theory and application. If left alone, she would've lived for about eight more years.
- Less than great vision; approximately 20/70.
- As far as mental weakness goes, she’s prone to bouts of intense paranoia, hallucinations, and nightmares thanks to how well she hears the Great Old Ones’ voices. Now, she is used to this, because she’s lived her entire life this way, but sudden spikes or dips in her SAN stat are incredibly disorienting and disturbing for her in ways a hallucination or bout of paranoia would be!
- Because of these nightmares, which have gotten worse within the past few years and are frightening in a visceral way despite her being used to them (because they're, you know, nightmares), she no longer sleeps voluntarily, and the fact that she's constantly sleep-deprived shows in a few of her behaviors. Passing out without notice, staring off into space, and so on.
- However, these elements of her mental state are partially innate to her setting -- that is, no voices, no… well, no hallucinations, at least. Assuming, of course, that there are no Lovecraftian horrors here; she’ll be incredibly disoriented upon arrival regardless, because she’s never known anything but her perception of the world.
(Speaking of things innate to her setting, her sanity draining ability won't be coming into play here either for clear reasons, but I'm definitely open to playing with it later if others are interested.)
- For the more mundane, however, her pessimism runs so deep she takes the words of the people who loathe her completely to heart, being completely incapable of even considering herself a human. She has no real expectations for her life except to eventually (soon, she hopes) die a painless death from illness in her bed, and then quietly fade into obscurity.
- She places no faith in herself or in her abilities despite any posturing otherwise, and actually expects herself to fail at everything that she does.
- Her poor self-image leads to a severe lack of self-preservation and the occasional deep downward spiral of self-hate, on top of being far too attached to the people willing to actually accept her friendship. One word from one friend could send her crashing down completely, without fail.
Fortunately, at current point she has no friends.
Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample:
A thread
Another thread
And another thread.
These are from a slightly later canonpoint, but her personality and style of speaking are basically unchanged -- if given the chance to talk to others, this is approximately how she acts. Let me know if you want more or other samples!
Prose Log Sample: Objectively speaking it was, Elaine notes with all the passion of a droll lecturer, a nice day outside. There was relatively little smoke in the air, nearly to a point where breathing comfortably didn't seem entirely infeasible -- so she takes a deep breath. The oxygen enters and exits without irritating her throat or lungs; she doesn't cough this time. Not even once. The smoke that was present gave the sky a mottled blue color -- with the curtains opened, the sunlight that shone through the windows was so bright it blinds her, searing white and hot and painful and scorching her retinas.
No.
Wait. That's not quite right -- that's not quite right, she thinks, but her condition, her unfortunate illness that made certain she would only see this scenery through her window, always did make her see things. As usual, she gives several blinks of her eyes before the imaginary blindness and pain disappears. She doesn't even bother with that gesture for the shadows lurking in the edges of her room in her peripheral vision.
Or the gossiping voices of the maids. (How could he be happy waiting his entire life for a dead woman? Is that why he keeps it alive? I worked here when he was a boy, she is nearly the mirror image of her mother. Madness drives us to such awful lengths, oh Lord...)
Or the scent of black tea and her father's tobacco coming from the study.
It's simply that she knows (assumes) none of these are real. There were no lectures today, so she wasn't allowed outside -- that meant that her father would be out today. Her mother is dead. At night, he sheds his precious dignity like snakeskin and wails for her in his study. Their maids, the maybe-real maybe-fake maids possibly constructed by her condition, blame her – her existence and presence has driven him mad. He treats her like a human or a valuable pet, so his fate is to suffer the way a human who loves monsters should. Like an animal.
She can hear them more, again today, outside the music room once she reaches it. Something abstract like wildfire or boiling water rises in her chest from time to time. She's never sure what to make of it, if it is her condition or something else -- but it makes her want to strike them. She knows, she assumes that they would never really say these things, but all the same she wants to wrap her hands around their throats until their faces turn blue, reach into their stomachs and pull out their entrails, burn them, behead them.
Even assuming they've said nothing against her father, even if they may not be real, she wants them to die. But the door is too heavy for her to open on this side without exhausting herself, and her voice rarely comes when called for. She simply plays the song indicated for her from inside her animal cage.
The other side of the piano bench is cold to the touch. If she is an animal, then what sort of animal would she be? Elaine thinks, maybe, that she is a cockroach. She crawls about in the dirt and in this house and elicits disgust and refuses to die for some reason only understood by the Old Ones. Only understood by God. Like on a cue, light coughing fit rocks her body – doubled over her piano, nails making small scratches against the grain, her lips curl into a slight smile. The notes hit as she fell were E F B C D G A.
Yes, that is the sound that one makes when falling over a piano in the position that she did. If she did it a few more times in different ways, it’d be possible for her to learn every potential combination of sounds available for her to make, she thinks. The prospect doesn’t actually interest her. She knows she doesn’t have any ear for music, the key placement changes and the gods murmur as she plays, guiding her fingers north, flat flat flat, but a lady must be able to do something. This is a meaningless exercise, but learning to play this instrument well could be helpful –
But before she allows herself the luxury of fantasizing, of thinking of piano recitals and her proud, crying father and a crowd of cheering, sobbing friends all moved to tears by the sheer soul of her song (a lie, the thought was there, it’s already far too late), she stops. Why would learning to play the piano make her a human? Why would learning to play the piano give her friends or attention? She broke it down logically -- if she were a talented pianist, she would have the attention she wanted, but that level of prestige, as she’s read (she thinks of Chopin), does not guarantee her positive relationships with others. Her father’s work does not allow him to leave for something as trivial as piano recitals. If it were that simple, then she wouldn’t be in this situation. Children are not born with zero potential playing an instrument. If playing the piano could make her a human girl, then she already would be. This exercise is pointless. These thoughts are meaningless, this facade is meaningless, she thinks -- she’s wasting her time.
But when she passes the maids in the hall on her way to retire back to her bedroom (they stopped speaking when they saw her for some reason, eyes wide, mouths in taut frowns, but she doesn't bother to blink them away) her smile is a bright mask, nailed and hammered against her face.