[- OOC Information -]
Name: Allie
Do you play any other characters in Outer Divide? Not currently! Formerly, Steve Jinks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
newguy)
[- Character Information -]
Character Name: Soleil
Fandom: Original
AU or OU: N/A
Canon Point: Six years after the light (explained in world history)
Journal:afterthelight
Icon: icon!
Appearance: Soleil looks to be around nine or ten years old. She's of mixed race (the ethnicity of her PB is described as half African-american and half-Iranian) and she has dark eyes as well as dark, curly hair. She stands at around four feet tall and is rarely seen without her backpack.
[[I reordered the following sections, because it's hard to describe her personality history without first describing her world and what she is. I hope that's okay. I just thought it would be easier to read and less redundant this way]]
[- Original Character suppliment -]
World History: In spring of 2005, residents of Manhattan were subjected to a sudden flash of light. Almost immediately thereafter, a heavy fog rolled in, and each day the fog rolls back further....exposing nothing. The opposite banks of the rivers are gone, and for all intents and purposes, Manhattan is an island lost in a grey sea with a fogged-over sky. There's no electricity, phone service, or connection to the outside world. Worse, over half of the population vanished in the flash, and a good percentage of the remainder finds themselves with inexplicable afflictions or talents (for instance, one character is unable to learn to read no matter how much effort goes into teaching him, another ceases to sleep, another is able to vaguely ascertain the circumstances around a person's eventual death, one is unable to navigate and has to find his way home every day by tracing a chalk line behind him, and another becomes able to understand any spoken language). Some people think that the city's predicament is a punishment from God. Others believe that they're dead and in limbo. Still others blame biological warfare. It's really a grab bag out there.
However, after six years, life has calmed down and the citizens have carved out their own niches, purifying water and selling it from carts, raising chickens on rooftops, running messenger services, fishing in the river of left when Lexington avenue collapsed into the tunnels below it, and the like. The one thing that looms over them all is a condition they call the Forgetting (or mnemosis in a clinical context). It strikes without warning, and over the course of two or three weeks, an afflicted person develops severe retrograde and anterograde amnesia. When they've forgotten everything that made them who they were and they're unable to form new memories, they're inexplicably compelled to walk out into the fog-blanketed river, presumably drowning.
Character History: Soleil is somewhere between an avatar of the city and a true human. She's technically existed for six years, but she wasn't born as an infant: she came into the world in her present form at the moment of the light, and although she doesn't have access to the city's practically bottomless wealth of knowledge and experience, portions of her unconscious mind are thousands of years old.
She's not the only one, either: the light created dozens of people like her. For as long as people have walked upon it, the city has absorbed what human memory forgets, from languages thousands of years old to your great-grandmother's amazing recipe for crumb cake. It's easiest to think of the city's essence as a sleeping god, subsisting on these memory fragments. It's not sentient, but it needs to feed, and it feeds on the memories of its inhabitants.
The light woke the city like a bear pulled from hibernation, and just like a bear, the city woke up hungry. Soleil, along with dozens of others, were brought into existence to absorb the memories of the city's remaining populace. She and the other memory vessels speak a unique language (it's a conglomeration of every language ever spoken in Manhattan), but in OD, I imagine the translator would take care of that. She's able to understand any language, based on the premise that language is a part of a person's memory, but until OD, she's never been understood by anyone aside from the people like herself.
Memory absorbers choose one victim and follows them like a shade, like something glimped from the corner of one's eye but never fully regarded. She's not invisible, but because she's a part of the city's spirit, she's easy to overlook. Her victim begins to forget things, and after a few weeks, they're rendered completely amnesiac and are compelled to walk into the river at the first hint of morning light where, it's assumed, they drown. If she doesn't choose a new victim by full daylight, she is considered useless and the city absorbs her essence, along with all of her collected memories.
She doesn't age, nor does she need to eat or drink, and she doesn't feel cold or hot on unseasonable days. However, Soleil goes to great lengths to blend in and seem like a normal human child, so she usually dresses for the season will partake of food that's offered. Aside from not aging, this is the only tip-off a person might have that Solel isn't entirely human.
However, she can be injured, killed, and suffocated/drowned just as easily as anyone else. I wouldn't consider this a superpower--she can't walk into burning buildings and emerge unscathed, for instance--but she doesn't get hypothermia and doesn't feel temperature the way others do.
Once one of Soleil's kind has absorbed their maximum capacity for memories, they lose their concept of self and retreat to the subways, where they live out a quasi-feral life haunted by the dozens of lives they've stolen. Soleil has quite a while to go, but she constantly worries about this happening to her. Unfortunately, the language barrier prevents her from seeking help.
I'm taking her from pre-canon (can you use that term for an OC?), but in the story she was created for, she chooses the chain of people whose memories she steals in order to attach herself to someone who was granted the ability to understand any spoken language (one of the light's unpredictable gifts). She believes that if she can guide him, he might be able to end the cycle. The problem is, because she's chosen him, she has to continue to take his memories at the same time she's trying to get him to help her free her. I want to take her from before this point, because I want her first opportunity to communicate to be in-game.
Personality: True to her pre-adolescent form, Soleil can be petty and immature if she thinks it's needed. Although the city's wisdom is a part of her, it's not the wisdom of old philsophers: it's much closer to the wisdom contained in a crowded subway car at rush hour. An important thing to note is that although Soleil understands what she is and what her responsibilities are, she doesn't have access to the memories she's stealing...this is what keeps her from becoming one of the feral subway-dwelling humans. She understands that it's her fault, but the ability is like a strong magnet in a dark room. She knows something is being taken, but she can't see what. Occasionally, she has flashes of powerful memories, but she has no control over these (in game terms, I'd ask players if there's anything they'd actually like her to see). Most of her understanding about the way people work comes from watching the way they (and those around them) deal with their irreversible memory loss.
Soleil keeps a collection of pre-light "artifacts," of which she's extremely proud. These artifacts consist mostly of old magazines, train stubs, sales flyers, broken radios, books she can't read, and other detritus she picks up along the way. She carries them around in a Dora the Explorer backpack, and anyone looking to make a deal with her will find that she's far more willing to negotiate for a postage stamp than something of actual value. Because she has no true history of her own, she's constantly searching for one, and Soleil didn't exist in the pre-light era. She's relentlessly curious, and she doesn't care about veracity. The quickest way to become her friend is to make up stories about the lives of the families in magazine advertisements. With no memory of the time before the light and fog, simple things like clouds and airplanes and televisions are utterly foreign to her. She's never seen sunlight, and was given her name by a fisherwoman who noticed that a strange girl always waited at the makeshift pier while the sky lightened the day after someone drowned.
She hides it well, but Soleil can be very selfish and manipulative. She does what she has to do to accomplish her goals. She tricks the protagonist of the story into helping her, and doesn't reveal until the last few chapters that she's been leeching his memories all along, as well as leeching the memories of people close to him in order to get to him. At her canon point, she won't help anyone out of the goodness of her heart, but she'll gladly help in exchange for stories or personal details. Hers is a life without narrative and she desperately wants to borrow one, whether it's true or not.
Powers/Abilities: So, living embodiment of a city...you'd expect her to have lots of useful powers, right? Nope. Soleil's obligation to harvest memories is tied to her connection to her home city, and in OD, she would be free of that curse. Soleil is not psychic...in fact, OD will be the first time she's been able to speak to 'real' people and have them understand what she's saying. This is also probably where I should point out that she's not able to read or write. It's not a mental block for her like it is for some characters in her world, but she never had the opportunity to learn and her understanding of language has always been highly unconventional.
Possessions: Soleil would be wearing her backpack, a discount-rack Dora the Explorer deal filled with useless stuff: American magazines circa the mid 2000s, some photographs ripped out of encyclopedias, coupons, advertisements, coins, and the like. The only useful thing she carries with her are two candles, matches, and some string for her forays into the abandoned subway system.
Arrival: I'd rather she didn't wake up on the ship, because that would lead her to believe that her life in 2011 Manhattan was over and she wouldn't have to worry about returning. If possible, it'd be cool if she could take a raft into the fog surrounding her world, then pass out and wake up somewhere in the OD universe?
Reason for Playing: Soleil's an interesting match for OD, and I wavered for a long time about whether she would work best in the setting. At first glance, she's not a great fit: she's a kid with a kid's abilities. What's important is her determination, and the fact that it's not directed toward returning home or making it into the dome. Returning to a city, any city, would be like returning to a slave master, condemning herself to a few more years of memory theft and then continuing life as a feral monster when she exceeds her capacity. To avoid that, Soleil will manipulate and sabotage plans, possibly even trying to work with the Authorities. The common good is less important to her than her personal survival, and she finds that most people underestimate a girl who barely looks ten. This seemed like an interesting path to take a character, so I decided to give it a try.
[- Writing Samples -]
First person: [this would be before she realized that she could talk....I hope it works? I didn't think I could write a network sample without someone to play off of]
[Soleil has absolutely no idea what this thing is, and the broadcast expression on her face is one of confusion and fascination. It doesn't seem to occur to her that others might be able to see her as well--she's used to being unnoticed, and surely people with moving-box-pictures (there's a word for them, but she's forgotten it) have better things to do than look at her. They can look at anything. Anyone.]
[It's been three hours since her companion walked into the river, but Soleil isn't suffocating. She isn't disappearing. She puts down the phone to look at her hands, but they're perfectly opaque. Dirt under her nails, knees scraped. It's possible that she's dead, she supposes, but do the dead breathe? Bleed? Does the Hudson die when it vanishes into the fog?]
Third person:
Soleil was already there when Noah opened the door the next morning, her elbows on the rust-reddened handrails and her attention on the empty street. Morning was windless and the fog slow in evaporating. It had no tendrils, no streams, only a still haze like the sky pressing down. Soleil spun and snatched her pink backpack by the handle, then they set off. The end of the avenue was buried in white, always moving forward. Though it would have made sense to do this indoors, Noah didn’t offer to take her to the apartment and she didn’t ask. They crouched in an alley and Soleil unzipped the bag.
“What do you want to know?” Noah asked as she shuffled through the brochures. They were worn, edges soft as if owned for months rather than days.
“Everything.”
“I can’t tell you everything. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know.
“You were out there, though.”
“The world’s a big place,” Noah said as she passed him the stack.
She seemed to consider this, lips pursed and pale. It was long seconds before she spoke. “Pretend you do remember it, then. Tell it like you were there.”
Noah looked at her for a moment, then looked down to the stack in his hand. He placed it on the cracked cement and paged through, removing the faces and bodies without context: smiling housewives, couples nestled together on sofas. Things with no need of explanation.
“Here,” he said, flattening a flyer for treatment for impotence. A man and a woman, hands locked, left two trails of footsteps behind them in soft white sand while the wind tugged at her dress.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the beach,” he said. Water like slightly tinted glass, shattering against she shore and throwing off shards of foam.
“Have you ever been to one?”
“I don’t think…“ Noah’s voice trailed off as her eyes fixed on his, filled with unspoken accusation. With Soleil, telling the truth was not an option. “Yes. Every summer. My sister and I picked up-“ another language hesitation, as he searched for the word in her native tongue “-seashells.”
“What’s that?”
“Animals live in them,” he said with a shrug. “Ocean animals. When one of them dies its shell gets left behind, like an inside out skeleton.”
“That sounds gross," she said, wrinkling her nose. "How big is the…” she started, moving her fingers down to the pale-crested waves. “The water?”
“The ocean? Really big.”
“How big?”
“Maybe a million Hudsons without the fog,” he guessed.
"What about all the blue?" she asked, brushing her hand over upper portion.
"That's the sky."
Soleil examined it from all angles, holding it inches from her face and then at arm’s length. “Did it all drain out of the hole?”
Noah raised his eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“What?” she asked.
“The hole?”
“This one.”
Noah didn’t answer, and after a second of waiting, Soleil looked away and towards the ground. “It’s not like it matters where it went,” she said with a deep frown. “I was just curious.”
Noah returned to the papers but her silence was tense, and when he looked up he saw Soleil still fixated on the flyer, both hands gripping it as she squinted with her head still tilted in concentration.
“No,” he finally said. “That’s not a hole. That’s the sun." Then, a few seconds later, "It means the same thing as your name.”
Name: Allie
Do you play any other characters in Outer Divide? Not currently! Formerly, Steve Jinks (
newguy)[- Character Information -]
Character Name: Soleil
Fandom: Original
AU or OU: N/A
Canon Point: Six years after the light (explained in world history)
Journal:
afterthelightIcon: icon!
Appearance: Soleil looks to be around nine or ten years old. She's of mixed race (the ethnicity of her PB is described as half African-american and half-Iranian) and she has dark eyes as well as dark, curly hair. She stands at around four feet tall and is rarely seen without her backpack.
[[I reordered the following sections, because it's hard to describe her personality history without first describing her world and what she is. I hope that's okay. I just thought it would be easier to read and less redundant this way]]
[- Original Character suppliment -]
World History: In spring of 2005, residents of Manhattan were subjected to a sudden flash of light. Almost immediately thereafter, a heavy fog rolled in, and each day the fog rolls back further....exposing nothing. The opposite banks of the rivers are gone, and for all intents and purposes, Manhattan is an island lost in a grey sea with a fogged-over sky. There's no electricity, phone service, or connection to the outside world. Worse, over half of the population vanished in the flash, and a good percentage of the remainder finds themselves with inexplicable afflictions or talents (for instance, one character is unable to learn to read no matter how much effort goes into teaching him, another ceases to sleep, another is able to vaguely ascertain the circumstances around a person's eventual death, one is unable to navigate and has to find his way home every day by tracing a chalk line behind him, and another becomes able to understand any spoken language). Some people think that the city's predicament is a punishment from God. Others believe that they're dead and in limbo. Still others blame biological warfare. It's really a grab bag out there.
However, after six years, life has calmed down and the citizens have carved out their own niches, purifying water and selling it from carts, raising chickens on rooftops, running messenger services, fishing in the river of left when Lexington avenue collapsed into the tunnels below it, and the like. The one thing that looms over them all is a condition they call the Forgetting (or mnemosis in a clinical context). It strikes without warning, and over the course of two or three weeks, an afflicted person develops severe retrograde and anterograde amnesia. When they've forgotten everything that made them who they were and they're unable to form new memories, they're inexplicably compelled to walk out into the fog-blanketed river, presumably drowning.
Character History: Soleil is somewhere between an avatar of the city and a true human. She's technically existed for six years, but she wasn't born as an infant: she came into the world in her present form at the moment of the light, and although she doesn't have access to the city's practically bottomless wealth of knowledge and experience, portions of her unconscious mind are thousands of years old.
She's not the only one, either: the light created dozens of people like her. For as long as people have walked upon it, the city has absorbed what human memory forgets, from languages thousands of years old to your great-grandmother's amazing recipe for crumb cake. It's easiest to think of the city's essence as a sleeping god, subsisting on these memory fragments. It's not sentient, but it needs to feed, and it feeds on the memories of its inhabitants.
The light woke the city like a bear pulled from hibernation, and just like a bear, the city woke up hungry. Soleil, along with dozens of others, were brought into existence to absorb the memories of the city's remaining populace. She and the other memory vessels speak a unique language (it's a conglomeration of every language ever spoken in Manhattan), but in OD, I imagine the translator would take care of that. She's able to understand any language, based on the premise that language is a part of a person's memory, but until OD, she's never been understood by anyone aside from the people like herself.
Memory absorbers choose one victim and follows them like a shade, like something glimped from the corner of one's eye but never fully regarded. She's not invisible, but because she's a part of the city's spirit, she's easy to overlook. Her victim begins to forget things, and after a few weeks, they're rendered completely amnesiac and are compelled to walk into the river at the first hint of morning light where, it's assumed, they drown. If she doesn't choose a new victim by full daylight, she is considered useless and the city absorbs her essence, along with all of her collected memories.
She doesn't age, nor does she need to eat or drink, and she doesn't feel cold or hot on unseasonable days. However, Soleil goes to great lengths to blend in and seem like a normal human child, so she usually dresses for the season will partake of food that's offered. Aside from not aging, this is the only tip-off a person might have that Solel isn't entirely human.
However, she can be injured, killed, and suffocated/drowned just as easily as anyone else. I wouldn't consider this a superpower--she can't walk into burning buildings and emerge unscathed, for instance--but she doesn't get hypothermia and doesn't feel temperature the way others do.
Once one of Soleil's kind has absorbed their maximum capacity for memories, they lose their concept of self and retreat to the subways, where they live out a quasi-feral life haunted by the dozens of lives they've stolen. Soleil has quite a while to go, but she constantly worries about this happening to her. Unfortunately, the language barrier prevents her from seeking help.
I'm taking her from pre-canon (can you use that term for an OC?), but in the story she was created for, she chooses the chain of people whose memories she steals in order to attach herself to someone who was granted the ability to understand any spoken language (one of the light's unpredictable gifts). She believes that if she can guide him, he might be able to end the cycle. The problem is, because she's chosen him, she has to continue to take his memories at the same time she's trying to get him to help her free her. I want to take her from before this point, because I want her first opportunity to communicate to be in-game.
Personality: True to her pre-adolescent form, Soleil can be petty and immature if she thinks it's needed. Although the city's wisdom is a part of her, it's not the wisdom of old philsophers: it's much closer to the wisdom contained in a crowded subway car at rush hour. An important thing to note is that although Soleil understands what she is and what her responsibilities are, she doesn't have access to the memories she's stealing...this is what keeps her from becoming one of the feral subway-dwelling humans. She understands that it's her fault, but the ability is like a strong magnet in a dark room. She knows something is being taken, but she can't see what. Occasionally, she has flashes of powerful memories, but she has no control over these (in game terms, I'd ask players if there's anything they'd actually like her to see). Most of her understanding about the way people work comes from watching the way they (and those around them) deal with their irreversible memory loss.
Soleil keeps a collection of pre-light "artifacts," of which she's extremely proud. These artifacts consist mostly of old magazines, train stubs, sales flyers, broken radios, books she can't read, and other detritus she picks up along the way. She carries them around in a Dora the Explorer backpack, and anyone looking to make a deal with her will find that she's far more willing to negotiate for a postage stamp than something of actual value. Because she has no true history of her own, she's constantly searching for one, and Soleil didn't exist in the pre-light era. She's relentlessly curious, and she doesn't care about veracity. The quickest way to become her friend is to make up stories about the lives of the families in magazine advertisements. With no memory of the time before the light and fog, simple things like clouds and airplanes and televisions are utterly foreign to her. She's never seen sunlight, and was given her name by a fisherwoman who noticed that a strange girl always waited at the makeshift pier while the sky lightened the day after someone drowned.
She hides it well, but Soleil can be very selfish and manipulative. She does what she has to do to accomplish her goals. She tricks the protagonist of the story into helping her, and doesn't reveal until the last few chapters that she's been leeching his memories all along, as well as leeching the memories of people close to him in order to get to him. At her canon point, she won't help anyone out of the goodness of her heart, but she'll gladly help in exchange for stories or personal details. Hers is a life without narrative and she desperately wants to borrow one, whether it's true or not.
Powers/Abilities: So, living embodiment of a city...you'd expect her to have lots of useful powers, right? Nope. Soleil's obligation to harvest memories is tied to her connection to her home city, and in OD, she would be free of that curse. Soleil is not psychic...in fact, OD will be the first time she's been able to speak to 'real' people and have them understand what she's saying. This is also probably where I should point out that she's not able to read or write. It's not a mental block for her like it is for some characters in her world, but she never had the opportunity to learn and her understanding of language has always been highly unconventional.
Possessions: Soleil would be wearing her backpack, a discount-rack Dora the Explorer deal filled with useless stuff: American magazines circa the mid 2000s, some photographs ripped out of encyclopedias, coupons, advertisements, coins, and the like. The only useful thing she carries with her are two candles, matches, and some string for her forays into the abandoned subway system.
Arrival: I'd rather she didn't wake up on the ship, because that would lead her to believe that her life in 2011 Manhattan was over and she wouldn't have to worry about returning. If possible, it'd be cool if she could take a raft into the fog surrounding her world, then pass out and wake up somewhere in the OD universe?
Reason for Playing: Soleil's an interesting match for OD, and I wavered for a long time about whether she would work best in the setting. At first glance, she's not a great fit: she's a kid with a kid's abilities. What's important is her determination, and the fact that it's not directed toward returning home or making it into the dome. Returning to a city, any city, would be like returning to a slave master, condemning herself to a few more years of memory theft and then continuing life as a feral monster when she exceeds her capacity. To avoid that, Soleil will manipulate and sabotage plans, possibly even trying to work with the Authorities. The common good is less important to her than her personal survival, and she finds that most people underestimate a girl who barely looks ten. This seemed like an interesting path to take a character, so I decided to give it a try.
[- Writing Samples -]
First person: [this would be before she realized that she could talk....I hope it works? I didn't think I could write a network sample without someone to play off of]
[Soleil has absolutely no idea what this thing is, and the broadcast expression on her face is one of confusion and fascination. It doesn't seem to occur to her that others might be able to see her as well--she's used to being unnoticed, and surely people with moving-box-pictures (there's a word for them, but she's forgotten it) have better things to do than look at her. They can look at anything. Anyone.]
[It's been three hours since her companion walked into the river, but Soleil isn't suffocating. She isn't disappearing. She puts down the phone to look at her hands, but they're perfectly opaque. Dirt under her nails, knees scraped. It's possible that she's dead, she supposes, but do the dead breathe? Bleed? Does the Hudson die when it vanishes into the fog?]
Third person:
Soleil was already there when Noah opened the door the next morning, her elbows on the rust-reddened handrails and her attention on the empty street. Morning was windless and the fog slow in evaporating. It had no tendrils, no streams, only a still haze like the sky pressing down. Soleil spun and snatched her pink backpack by the handle, then they set off. The end of the avenue was buried in white, always moving forward. Though it would have made sense to do this indoors, Noah didn’t offer to take her to the apartment and she didn’t ask. They crouched in an alley and Soleil unzipped the bag.
“What do you want to know?” Noah asked as she shuffled through the brochures. They were worn, edges soft as if owned for months rather than days.
“Everything.”
“I can’t tell you everything. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know.
“You were out there, though.”
“The world’s a big place,” Noah said as she passed him the stack.
She seemed to consider this, lips pursed and pale. It was long seconds before she spoke. “Pretend you do remember it, then. Tell it like you were there.”
Noah looked at her for a moment, then looked down to the stack in his hand. He placed it on the cracked cement and paged through, removing the faces and bodies without context: smiling housewives, couples nestled together on sofas. Things with no need of explanation.
“Here,” he said, flattening a flyer for treatment for impotence. A man and a woman, hands locked, left two trails of footsteps behind them in soft white sand while the wind tugged at her dress.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the beach,” he said. Water like slightly tinted glass, shattering against she shore and throwing off shards of foam.
“Have you ever been to one?”
“I don’t think…“ Noah’s voice trailed off as her eyes fixed on his, filled with unspoken accusation. With Soleil, telling the truth was not an option. “Yes. Every summer. My sister and I picked up-“ another language hesitation, as he searched for the word in her native tongue “-seashells.”
“What’s that?”
“Animals live in them,” he said with a shrug. “Ocean animals. When one of them dies its shell gets left behind, like an inside out skeleton.”
“That sounds gross," she said, wrinkling her nose. "How big is the…” she started, moving her fingers down to the pale-crested waves. “The water?”
“The ocean? Really big.”
“How big?”
“Maybe a million Hudsons without the fog,” he guessed.
"What about all the blue?" she asked, brushing her hand over upper portion.
"That's the sky."
Soleil examined it from all angles, holding it inches from her face and then at arm’s length. “Did it all drain out of the hole?”
Noah raised his eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“What?” she asked.
“The hole?”
“This one.”
Noah didn’t answer, and after a second of waiting, Soleil looked away and towards the ground. “It’s not like it matters where it went,” she said with a deep frown. “I was just curious.”
Noah returned to the papers but her silence was tense, and when he looked up he saw Soleil still fixated on the flyer, both hands gripping it as she squinted with her head still tilted in concentration.
“No,” he finally said. “That’s not a hole. That’s the sun." Then, a few seconds later, "It means the same thing as your name.”
