Character experiment

[sodalitas]

I am going to post a background/prelude for a character. I'm hoping someone will post how they see this character now - what happened to this character, what did they become? I am actually hoping multiple people will post characters and see how different they are, based on the same background.

I plan on posting more character seeds like this and I hope others will too, and in the process we can experiment with different types of characters and learn how what we see in our heads when we put our characters down in writing matches what others see.

 

[cats]

Sounds fun and I am game.

 

[sodalitas]

Prelude: Amaya

A piece of this below I had written previously and sent to Maid of Marvels who was going to use it for a post. As far as I know nothing came of that, but if it has been used then I apologize for re-appropriating it

She remembers being happy: as a child, playing along the shore with other children; her first kiss with Wilden, the handsome son of a fisherman who could always be found by the river’s edge, waiting for his father and brothers to come back with the day’s catch. He was shy and considerate, and so was his kiss. Lying in the grass and watching the ships come into port; their exotic smells and sounds bringing excitement to the dreary daily village life – a reminder that there were other places than here, the temporary convergance of the worlds of adventure and of banality. The night she took her first man under the large oak tree crowning Fennet’s Hill, a young sailor from – well, somewhere else. She doesn’t remember where, or much else about that night other than that she could see the entire village from the top of the hill, that he was neither shy nor considerate, and that it was everything she had wanted.

She doesn’t remember what it feels like to be happy, to not have every emotion colored by a burning core of wrath, but she remembers that she was happy. She was glad she couldn’t remember what it felt like. It made it easier to live without it.

When the war broke out her town was one of the first to fall. Probably that was why no one saw it coming. At first the unique-looking ships brought the same excitement that usually came with new, or seldom-seen, travelers. Many meandered their way down to the docks to get a first glimpse of some new wonder. And that it was – in a terrifying, world-changing way. These were no merchants, but a raiding party from a nearby kingdom she had never heard of, sent in a brutal retaliation of some courtly offense in some noble’s hall regarding things that mattered little in the world of dirt and fish and toil. Until now, as a chain of events resulting from that one offense crossed two kingdoms and many miles to land monsters at the door of a village neither party to the offense had ever heard of.

Some of the fisherman managed to grab hooks and clubs from the fishing equipment but none of them were warriors steeled to the idea of killing another man. She watched as Wilden took a rusty axe blade to the shoulder, biting through muscle and snapping his collar bone. He screamed in agony, dropping to his knees, and the bandit yanked the blade out and over his shoulder, a trail of blood and pulp following the arc of his swing, before reversing the movement and bringing the blade again into the same gash as one would chop wood. The force of the blow drove the blade through his chest and destroyed his heart before getting lodged in a mess of ribs. He tried to free the blade but managed only to lift Wilden's lifeless body a few inches, his corpse refusing to let go of the implement of its death, his near-detached head bouncing in horrific motion to the bandits' useless attempts. Finally the ribs broke and the body slid to the ground amidst a pool of blood and viscera. Enraged, the bandit smashed the heel of his boot into Wilden's once-beautiful face, crushing skull and destroying brain, before spotting another fleeing fisherman and launching into pursuit.

She saw it all happen, her mind feebly attempting to afford her some degree of protection against the reality of what was occurring by throwing up a makeshift dam of denial and misinterpretation, making her feel she was in a dream; but after a few moments it came to the conclusion that she was in danger, and it reluctantly allowed reality to break through and flood her with understanding and terror. She ran, and she hid, and she cried silent tears. She did permanent damage to her left hand as she bit deep into her knuckle to keep from screaming, or perhaps it was to make herself focus on something other than what was going on outside her hiding spot. She didn’t leave for an eternity; not to eat, not to urinate, not to see if it was finally safe, even long after the last screams had died away.

Her fear may have done what the raiders did not; but she was eventually found by survivors and pulled, weak with starvation and mad with fever, out from her hiding spot and back into a ghostly mirror of her previous world. She never found her mother, a fact that has made dealing with her loss at times both infinitely-more and infinitely-less bearable.

The occupation was tame enough, in retrospect. There weren’t any widespread murders or rapings, but the threat of a reoccurrence of the previous slaughter was omnipresent, and the populace made of themselves ghosts and shadows.

And hers was a dark shadow, indeed. She joined some few others in talk of rebellion, whisperers in the dark. At the beginning each mouth voiced its own thoughts, and nothing could be heard but the quiet noise of a thousand tiny whispers. But over time she whispered more, and others whispered less, until hers was the only whisper heard in the darkness. And it was as the roar of the river itself.

Old Milla knew how to mix herbs to deaden wombs and to break fevers, but she knew some other recipes as well, and none of the foreigners seemed to notice they were the only ones into their cups that night. Those that didn’t sleep from Milla’s drought were caught unawares by the sudden attack of the thoroughly-cowed townsfolk, and less of the town joined their families in the ground that night than any had expected.

She hung them from the oak until it seemed that the majestic tree would be pulled to the ground by the weight of them all. The rest they flung on the ground below, to lie among the acorns. She stood there on the hill, staring at the macabre display and listening to the creak of branch and noose even as the rest of the townsfolk filed away down the path to the village, the intensity of their anger dulling in the silence of the aftermath.

Her anger did not dull. She had thought that by defeating her enemy she would find a measure of relief; that her world in some way would return to normalcy, that the broken spirit inside of her would be fixed. It wasn’t fixed, nothing was fixed.

She stood alone, waiting for an end to the rage, for the desire for revenge, so that she could follow the other townsfolk down to the village and join them in rebuilding their lives.

She waited.

She cried, and she waited.

She turned and walked down the path – not to the village, for there was nothing for her there. She walked down a crooked trail that led around the hill, the trail that led to the woods.

The hunter’s path.

Now it's your turn. What becomes of her?

 

[cats]

Thats much larger then I expected. I'll digest it tonight and come back to it in the mourning.

 

[cats]

Sorry for the delay.

I would basicly have her start wondering from town to town, finding other towns ocupied and helping the rebels there. I didn't get a good feel for her age, but if she is still young then she gains false hope her mother is alive and wonders about looking for her, if she older now then she has become a bit of a leader. She spurs on the rebels in any and every town with verble knives designed to cut at there tolerence of the ocuption. Her goals arn't just to spur but to spark rebelion.

 

[sodalitas]

Ok sounds good, inspired by your reply here are some different ways I can envision her character:

From town to town she flits, sowing dissension and organizing resistance. Over time she has contacts in most major centers. She has become the Mistress of Whispers, the head of a large underground network of rebels which fight their own war, striking against the invaders with assassinations and guerilla tactics, then melting into the night.

A lone vigilante travelling the kingdom, her damaged left hand throbs whenever she sees people being victimized, the sign that she must draw her blade and deal destruction. She leaves signs of her passing like the oak tree wherever she goes, brutal reminders to their captors that even in victory they are not safe.

The pirate queen, she gathers men to her calling and takes to the waters, attacking the raiders as they leave the safety of their encampments. Her crew are hardened and dangerous men who provide a near-endless bounty of corpses to the water spirits.

Alone and directionless, she searches for some measure of the family and the life she has lost; but everywhere she goes she meets only victims or victimizers. Every passing town is merely another example of violence and pain, and her empathy for all the people of the kingdom only deepens with every experience. She provides whatever help she can, and soon comes to be known for her compassion and unconditional offers of help. People speak of the Lady of Tears, and those that meet her inevitably come away with lessened burdens, as she somehow seems to take their pain into herself - granting to others a relief of suffering that she will never know herself.

I'll post another I've been working on the last couple of days soon.

 

[sodalitas]

Prelude - Lock

He was dreaming that the grocer on 3rd street had just put a crate of wilted fruit out back of his store, and he was stuffing the pockets of his dirty, oversized jacket full of the sweet treasures. His dream-self took a large, juicy mouthful of the stuff and the stomach of his waking-self moaned in jealous protest, thrusting him back to reality and shattering his wonderful illusion.

“Get up, boy! Time to work!” shouted Worm, giving his side a forceful shove with the toe of his boot.

“Go to hell,” he responded, but even still he rose, kicking off the tattered blankets that did double duty as his bed and roof.

Worm moved on, waking up the others with the same measure of repect, and they all shuffled sleepily out of their shanty, hunger leading them to the city streets. Not all of them were street-touched like Worm and himself, but there were a few. The others were either new additions or didn’t believe in the city spirit. Still, as long as they agreed to help the shamans they were welcome.

He took up position at his usual corner, outside a Second Cup where he could accost the ordinaries on their way to work. Someone was already there today, some kid a few years older than Lock, getting in the everybody’s way and practically demanding change. He was a poser, some middle-class kid skipping school and slumming for a lark. Lock could tell plain as day – the flesh of the guy’s cheeks didn’t have that drawn look that accompanies periods of prolonged starvation, and he looked at people’s faces as he begged, meeting their gaze as if he were on the same level they were. The dirt was only barely on him, he wore the street as he did some designer shirt – and, probably, for just about as long. Lock wore the street like skin. More in fact, the city had permeated his skin and worked its way into his muscle and bone. Lock was the city.

He walked up to the kid and stared at him. He was a good head shorter and half the size of the newcomer, who told him to piss off and continued his appeals for “Change? Change?”. Lock continued to stare, saying nothing and doing nothing. In a few moments the boy picked up his cup, looking at the contents with disgust, and walked off. Lock owned the corner, and he sat where he belonged.

After the morning rush he took the offering to the shamans. It wasn’t his offering, it was collected from the ordinaries. Not that they understood - he knew that every dime and quarter that was dropped into his hat came with a suspicion that the money was going to feed some drug addiction, with guilt that instead of helping some kid it was going to end up contributing to the diseased culture of the city. They wouldn’t understand it was going to save the city.

He crossed 3rd, glancing longingly at the grocer’s storefront, before entering the alley. He tossed the hat to Worm, who was collecting similar bundles from others. Most of them wandered off to find their own coins after that, but Lock went to find the shamans. All three were huddled at the entrance to an alley, their backs to a dumpster as they watched Twitch across the street. Lock sat down next to them and waited, in case one of them needed an errand run or a message delivered. Silently, he joined their observance.

Twitch was deep in the rambling now, his perceptions working outside of normal reality, searching for the clues that the city was sending out for its children. Each random, miniscule happening may be part of the message: words overheard from a conversation, when the background noise of the street happened to stop for a moment; the reflection of an advertisement on a passing bus through a puddle at his feet; the letters of a neon sign blinking in and out, turning normal words into syllables of power. As each sound, each phrase brushed his senses he uttered it, a continuous stream of nonsense that every now and then would result in a surge of power coursing through his body as he hit upon a meaning. That was always accompanied by a flailing limb or a sudden jerk of the head, or some other physical reaction that the shamans could see from their vantage.

The ordinaries always shunned him when he was in the rambling- this mad street dweller flinging his arms around and spitting out nonsense. But he and the others watched from across the street, huddled under their roughspun and stained blankets which let in most of the weather but did manage to take the edge off. They made note of the sounds accompanying his flailings and spoke them as one, loud enough to hear each other but not so loud as to call attention to their efforts, a whispered chorus of the city’s message.

beepyiptheintorgasitexdingeeebrownsevenisdubshoohuhthreatyeslittlecorpblueend

“What is this threat?” questioned one of the shamans.

justfourtheywoofburncallsaraloudnotthemwhackheycellplopvizorangelicklichohshutco

Twitch was starting to tire. It took a great deal of concentration to stay attuned to the voice of the city for so long, but this message was important. He hoped Twitch could last.

“What must we do?”

shoveonegulphamustyellowtenbegcoughinlastnickasadforquestlalalaheunderzipatellninelonegodoublecanveryactstopgooreadythem

He was shaking now, his movements more pronounced. He almost lost his balance twice and seemed on the verge of falling over. He looked drunk, and people were starting to point and stare.

“Where can we find him? What is his name?”

Twitch uttered one final sound and fell to the ground, and Lock wasn’t sure if he was still alive. It was only then that he noticed the shamans were looking at him, appraisingly. And that’s when he registered Twitch’s final sound.

Lock

 

[sodalitas]

So not much biting here, not sure if the premise sucks or if I couldn't explain what I was thinking of.

The kind of thing I was thinking is this: take Lock, the last post. I was kind of wondering if someone was writing a story with this character, what kind of character do you see him as?

Someone might say, I see him as a street shaman, using magic by opening up himself to the whispers of the city and being able to do things like disappear from pursuers by having the alleys swallow him up, summon rats and stray dogs, etc., acting as a street prophet.

Someone else may say, he ends up leading a band of urban adventurers who take on a big mean corporation who is intent on taking over the city (industrially/financially/etc) and in the process destroying the living spirit of the city.

Someone else may say, knowing he has a destiny he gets off the street and becomes a cyberpunk hacker who can tap into not only computer networks but electrical and mechanical systems of all kinds.

Hasn't anyone done something like create a character for a thread that dies, and wonders what other people might have seen their character as being, had the thread continued? Especially if the character is not easily portable to another thread because they are tied up in the environment of the thread, like if it's a unique world?