![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Empah App
Player: Kalyn
Contact: Plurk: Lordlings, AIM: Lordception
Age: 25
Current Characters: n/a
Character: Winnifred "Winnie" Prismall
Age: 24
OC Type: Pure
Point Taken:
World Building: Winnie's world was the same as the real world, up until 1860. Around 1860, souls, it was found, could be extracted from people and placed into someone else; that someone could then absorb the soul. The absorbed soul enabled a person to live longer and cured many of the diseases scientists were struggling to find cures for. What followed was two things:
1. Scientists, now mostly freed from the constant pursuit for cures, took to discovering and advancing technology through steam power.
2. Souls were growing in demand.
Everyone wanted to live longer and be healthier. It started out innocently enough, with taking the souls of convicts and those already doomed to die. Soon, however, it wasn’t enough for the highest in society, who began to realize this and suffer the consequences -- they had to have a steady “diet” of souls, consuming/absorbing them at least once or twice a month. The older you grew the more souls you had to absorb to stay alive.
As demand grew, people found new ways to get the souls, namely by preying on the poor. Schools were set up to house, teach, and most importantly find Extractors, those rare individuals who could remove and implant the souls. The Extractors would then be taken out with handlers to seek out those who were poor and unaware to steal their souls, storing the souls within their own bodies. Extractors had no souls of their own and could not absorb them, thus posing no threats to taking any for their own. Each Extractor had a handler, and everything was provided to them by the governments of each country. Though everyone handled it differently, England kept a tight hold over their Extractors, letting them have little contact with the outside world and essentially making their lives revolve around what the government said and did.
Some other important rules to note are that souls begin going crazy after 24 hours away from their body, and one soul can last a person 20-25 days. The act of removing and implanting a soul are painless, and is done so orally-- the Extractor taps the other person’s mouth and pulls the soul out from there, then swallows the soul. Prolonged contact is not needed, just the quick touch and drawing the soul out will happen unless, obviously, the Extractor doesn’t wish to do that.
More on how souls work here!
Backstory: Winnie was born in 1864 to very wealthy parents and is one of these Extractors, though she was one of the lucky ones to not be sent away to the schools. The death of her mother is to thank for that, for her father, unwilling to part with the girl who looked so much like her mother and unwilling to be left alone, refused to give her up and kept the fact she was an Extractor a secret from everyone. She grew up fairly normal and her life wasn’t a very exciting one. It was mostly filled with lessons--how to play piano and violin (though she has no talent in either), manners, how to have a polite conversation, how to read, write, and do basic maths, and everything else she’d need to know to be the best pick when it came to courting and marriage.However, she’s had no interest in it and considers herself a spinster and “too old” to marry now. Her father used the excuse that she was sickly to keep her confined in her home, where she would read fairy tales and imagine herself as a sort of "modern" Rapunzel, waiting for a perfect happy ending.
When she was young her father took in another young girl named Agnes, and the two quickly grew close. Agnes knew more about the ‘real world’ than Winnie did and spent her time telling Winnie of the outside world and all the things she never had a chance to see for herself. And the more Winnie learned, the more horrified she became at what her friends and neighbors were doing. So, she and Agnes devised a plan to become like ‘modern’ Robin Hoods. They would attend the numerous parties and sleepovers that Winnie’s status granted them access to. The parties of the rich were usually characterized by an after-dinner “treat” in the form of each guest being gifted with a collected soul by the host or hostess. Winnie would simply take the soul, though not absorb it, and the next day she and Agnes would search for the original body, assuming it hadn’t been moved or destroyed already since souls are almost always transported and absorbed within a day of their capture. Souls have a short shelf life like that. In the event of the body being unable to be found, the soul was released. If lucky, the soul would become a ghost, but if not then the soul would be forced to wither away and ‘die’.
This was until the pair met a ghost who haunted the lighthouse in the port town only a few hours away from the city. It was a complete accident-- they'd heard the talk of the townspeople and Winnie had decided it sounded interesting, and so had dragged Agnes to it. The first meeting had been a disaster as Winnie's over enthusiasm didn't mesh well with Mortimer's grumpy personality, but Winnie was not deterred. She made a point to visit every day they were in town and eventually he grudgingly accepted her and Agnes's presence. After some consideration they realized that Mortimer, being a ghost, would possibly know what to do with the souls whose bodies they couldn't find. Although he pretends that it's a bother every time, he enjoys helping the souls either move on, or become and adjust to being a ghost; through him Winnie was able to find both another confidant and a way around what she had seen to be a failure to help the souls.
As Winnie interacted more with the outside world and the people in it, the more she felt moved to help them. Inspired by the heroic tales of her books, Winnie became more involved with the people of the slums, forging her own networks and connections to prepare for a revolution--a coup against the corrupt government and a chance to change the country for the better. Or, maybe, even the world...
Personality: Eccentric, dotty, and oblivious are the three words that could best described Winnie. Being an Extractor means being able to mentally hear and speak with the souls ‘housed’ in her, and talking to voices in ones’ head never bodes well for one’s mental health--it’s one of the drawbacks of being a Extractor, though the well-trained are able to put up mental walls to block the voices. Still, Winnie is not well-trained and quite prone to talking aloud to thin air, getting to absorbed in the soul speaking to her. This causes her to run into things or miss entire chunks of conversation.
She is, however, the type of person who is very poor at multi-tasking. Sometimes she will be so interested in a conversation, or a book, or any little old thing, that she’ll end up dunking her keys into her tea or something.
Winnie is also characterized by an unflappably calm and cheery disposition. When dropped into a new situation, she greets it with an excited smile and a declaration that it will be a “terribly interesting adventure.” Even when her dress caught fire the first day she met Mortimer, she simply laughed it off and kept speaking amiably; when Agnes asked how she could be so calm, she simply looked at the spreading fire and stated, “Well, it hasn’t gotten close enough to my skin to hurt me, and it’s only a dress! Though some water would be quite lovely, as I don’t wish it to get too far..."
As stated before, Winnie be can very forgetful. For example, she often forgets that Mortimer is a ghost and will go to hug him or pat his arm, only to go right through him; she is always surprised by it every time. She's a bit childlike in that way, as she finds everything very exciting and regards everything with a wide-eyed state of wonder, curiosity, and amazement. Her curiosity can sometimes get her in trouble, as she doesn't often think everything through and tries to rush ahead to explore something further. Thankfully that's where Agnes steps in to make sure Winnie doesn't get herself into hotter waters.
Loyal and kind, Winnifred loathes to lie, even though it’s a deemed necessity with what she and Agnes do. To make up for that, she tries to tell the truth and be honest with just about everything else. Her father, being a very doting and loving father, is often the unwitting pawn in Agnes and Winnie’s adventures, in case they need money to silence someone or need to use his influence. For the most part he remains oblivious to what the two are doing with the souls, but Winnie feels awful having to lie and use him, often unable to look at him when they need something.
The concept of fear is also largely lost on Winnie. It’s not that she doesn’t experience feeling scared or worried or anything like that, it’s more that it doesn’t apply to situations most people would be more wary of. For example, she’s very quick to trust someone and think them a nice person for any minor details, and is the kind of person who would walk down a dark alley without a second thought, because the idea that something bad might happen to her doesn’t even register. This is largely due to not having a soul, and therefore her emotional reactions to things are muted or otherwise nonexistent. If she had been raised in the dormitories with the other Extractors, it would be easy for her to have been changed like them-- Emotionless machines driven only by their one goal to collect as many souls as possible. Because Winnie was raised more-or-less normally, however, she's been able to grasp more emotions. The positive ones just come easier, but it's this soullessness that allows her to shrug off things that might emotionally cripple a 'normal' person and allows her to bounce back so easily.
Winnie is someone who lived a very sheltered existence. For the longest time she didn't have an idea of the suffering others went through, or gave much thought to the lower class-- they were simply outside her realm of understanding. It wasn't until Agnes that Winnie began to glimpse under the rose-tinted glasses that she'd previously adopted. When Winnie made statements about, "and then we went to our summer home it was dreadfully stuffy-- Oh, but you'd understand all about that, wouldn't you?" It was a shock when Agnes eventually revealed that no, she had no understanding of that because she was raised differently.
After much poking and prodding, Winnie was able to pry the truth of Agnes's life from her and for the first time the ugly reality was colliding with her fantasy of the world. It troubled her quite a bit, both the shock of her own ignorance and the fact that this wasn't a big secret-- all the adults in her life and most of the people her own age too were perfectly aware of what was going on, and most seemed content to let it stay that way (this isn't to say Winnie was the first to have radical ideas of reform or to put a cease to the soul trafficking, only that she wasn't privy to these other ideas and the people she interacted with personally were content with it).
However, Agnes views Winnie as fragile and needing protection from the further harsh truths of reality, and so has a tendency to pull Winnie out of situations before she has to deal with the consequences of her actions. As such, she holds a firm belief that if she just tries hard enough, things will change. If she pushes and, eventually, talks freely about it and advocates openly, she fully believes that things will change from her enthusiasm alone-- "If they see how much I believe it, why, of course they'll fall in line as well!" This is, of course, not the reality of the situation, but Agnes and those close to Winnie don't want to see her disillusioned, finding her blind optimism a breath of fresh air and something to protect. While this is damaging in the long run, as they can't protect her forever, Winnie is a bit stronger than they believe. When the dam finally breaks and she has to confront the consequences for the first time it'll be devastating for her, of course, but she's been going at it for so long that she doesn't know how to do anything else except to think "but if I try hard enough, it'll get better and it'll work."
She sees herself as a savior to others and will keep on trying to help them; if they adamantly refuse her help it'll take quite a few tries of being told off for her to understand. Winnie has, in her adult life, grown aware of other people who fight for a similar cause to her, but she's grown so used to relying on Agnes and Mortimer--and still has a wariness to admitting she's an Extractor not for her own life, but because she doesn't want to see her father in trouble-- that she prefers to stick with them and do what she can from her side. Essentially, Winnie wants to be like the heroes from the books she reads, the hero of her own story, and firmly drives towards that goal.
It should be noted, however, that Winnie is anything but stupid. She has a keen awareness she keeps hidden,largely because she's self-aware enough to know it's better that way. She plays up her sillier side, pretending to be airheaded and dotty far more than she actually is in order to get people to let their guards down around her. If people underestimate her, it's better for her in the long run if and when she can catch them by surprise.
Abilities: Winnie has the ability to remove a soul from a person’s body and ‘eat’ it to store it within her own body. She can control this, so it's not like touching someone's mouth is going to automatically pull their soul from their body, but this is also a way for her to exorcise spirits or possessed people. Speaking of spirits, she CAN see and communicate with them.
She has no soul of her own and is essentially an empty shell for storage. This also makes her more susceptible to illness, and her lifespan is much shorter than other humans.
Being soulless means most animals either actively hate her/are scared of her, or run away/freak out on sight. The exceptions are animals that are "evil" in some way, feral, and/or carnivorous/dangerous predator types. At worst they ignore her entirely like she doesn't exist, and at best they're attracted to her and will follow her or stay by her side.
Aside from that she has a rudimentary knowledge in self-defense with a blade and a pistol that she’s learned from Agnes.
Alignment: Daimonia. Winnie is all about joy, namely in that she tries her best to make others happy and gets happiness from doing so. While negative emotions tend to roll off her shoulders, Winnie clings to the positive ones she's been able to learn and nurture, and joy/happiness is her favorite. She's always smiling and being cheerful and upbeat.
Other:
Sample: (Sample taken from the Intro Log for April!)
Some people might have looked on the unflattering bee costume as unfortunate or weird at best; Winnie was not one of these people. Oh it was unflattering, sure, but Winnie had been so utterly enamored by just how ugly it was that it circled all the way around to being charmed by it. "It's so ugly!" She laughed and turned, trying to get a good look at herself--was the a stinger, too?--and laughed again.
"How ridiculous! I love it. I just go right up to the bees then?" She wanted to make sure and smiled brightly, approaching the swarms with a practically radiating aura of cheer. Think happy thoughts? She could do that.
"Come now, little bees! I wonder if this is what a queen bee feels like? It's like having my own little entourage! It's only too bad this couldn't be a nice dress, I think I'd look quite nice in yellow. Perhaps not yellow and black, but a nice cream colour, perhaps?" Winnie babbled on to the bees, watching them buzz around with delight. "How charming! Is it possible to keep bees as pets? if all that's required is to keep a few happy thoughts in your head, I could do this!"
It was a little strange that they seemed to accept her so readily in the first place--most animals didn't, but it probably had something to do with them responding more to emotions and the pheromones emitted from the costume. At least, that's what she suspected, it was the only logical explanation. She led the first group of bees to the keepers, then immediately went back to collecting more. "I don't know why everyone's so frightened of you, you're all so precious! I suppose the thing about bad thoughts and you turning on everyone might be true, but I can't imagine you actually-- Oh dear."
Someone else seemed to be having trouble though and Winnie watched the person who'd caught her eye be chased off by the bees, shrieking all the while. "Well. That's certainly not helping them any." The buzzing around her started to get a little angrier as Winnie ignored them, her own emotions shifting to pity and disapproval at the other persons' clear lack of preparedness. The noise got her attention at least and she instantly beamed a smile at the bees. "Of course, none of you would do that! Of course not, perish the thought, lovelies! I wonder if I could train some of you to sit on my bonnet with thoughts alone?"
Bolstered by this cheerful thought, her mind quickly dismissing the distressed person to focus on making bees the height of fashion, the bees settled again and followed her to the keepers once more.
Questions: