Lydain Pelkys (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sombercomedienne) wrote2015-09-07 01:59 pm
sombercomedienne) wrote2015-09-07 01:59 pm
Entry tags:
Synodiporia App
P L A Y E R;
NAME: Bramble
AGE: 26
PLAYER JOURNAL:bramblepatch
TIMEZONE: PST
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
bramblepatch is preferred; I can also be reached by email at raspberrywhisper@gmail.com.
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: n/a
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Lydain Pelkys
CANON: Homestuck (Original Character, based in the Childstuck AU)
POINT IN CANON: After Miracle Child chapter 28: Purrbeastie, Purrbeastie, Where Gone You Hence?
AGE: 19 years/8.77 sweeps (Alternian solar sweeps are approximately 790 days long, and juvenile trolls mature at approximately the same rate as humans)
APPEARANCE: Lydain is nonhuman but mostly humanoid. The main differences from the human norm that are apparent to casual observation are: a) the eight-inch long bright orange horns growing from the top of her head, slightly backswept and flattened at the tips into an ax-like shape and b) the pigmentation of her skin, eyes, and bodily fluids. Her skin is a flat slate grey and, like, most trolls, her hair is black. The sclerae of her eyes are golden yellow and her irises are a deep blue-violet with a few streaks of dark grey. Her blood, tears, saliva, sweat, and pretty much any other bodily fluid you care to notice all carry the same deep indigo pigmentation in various degrees of opacity and saturation. Within the troll species, the "hemospectral" blood pigmentation varies widely between individuals and is tied to a number of physical and metaphysical traits; Lydain's purple blood marks her as a member of the incredibly long-lived, notoriously unstable psychic upper class.
Other than the obviously nonhuman aspects of her appearance, she's a somewhat chubby, round-faced girl in her late teens. She wears her thick, straight black hair a little past shoulder-length with blunt bangs, and usually ties it back in a ponytail. Practically any time that she is around other people, Lydain wears white greasepaint with narrow black markings at her eyes, lips, eyebrows, and a dot under each eye. This paint is a consistent pattern and is a religious observation for her.
Lydain's uniform as a trainee subjugglator is somewhere between circus clown and combat fatigues: polka-dot black and grey cargo pants and a sleeveless top with lightly armored striped gauntlets and a ruff around her neck. Her fashion sense, when left to her own devices, is not too far off of what humans might recognize as gothic, with lolita and carnival notes: dark colors (mostly black, dark grey, and her personal shade of purple), frilly skirts and blouses, heavy combat boots. At all times, her outfit prominently features a glyph of a heavily stylized double-headed ax; this symbol is representative of Lydain herself and may be considered a part of her name.
CANON HISTORY: Like all trolls of her general historical era, Lydain grew up on a planet inhabited almost entirely by juveniles, with almost no contact with adult society - although once adults and children coexisted on Alternia, a combination of an extended period of civil unrest and an ambitious program of interstellar conquest led the imperial authorities to mandate the indefinite expulsion of all adult trolls from their home planet, several centuries before Lydain was hatched. While this may have resulted in a somewhat lawless environment for the young trolls, it arguably led to a safer childhood than they might otherwise have enjoyed. Trolls form no meaningful bonds with the young of their species, which are hatched in vast numbers and of uncertain and complicated genetic parentage. In fact, the subsapient larval form, colloquially referred to as grubs, are frequently cannibalized, both by other grubs and by post-pupal trolls. Even those individuals who survive their larval instar are left to the care of symbiotically bonded albino animal guardians known as lusi naturae (singular, lusus) and in the modern day to an automated system that supplies basic needs and rudimentary education. The only form of genetic kinship recognized among trolls is the "ancestor/descendant" relationship between two individuals of sufficiently similar physical and metaphysical type that they are given the same identifying sign. It should be noted that these recurrences in phenotype occur so rarely that the vast majority of trolls' lifespans do not overlap with the lifespans of any other trolls of their sign. It is not entirely unheard of among the extremely long-lived upper class - trolls in the blue-to-purple range may live for hundreds or even thousands of sweeps if not killed - but even among the elite, such encounters are very rare.
Lydain's early childhood was fairly typical for a troll - she survived grubhood, was adopted by a giant white penguin, and settled down for a few sweeps in a coastal city. She did not make friends easily among her neighbors; as a indigoblooded troll, she was by imperial fiat the social superior of most of her neighbors, and a member of a caste with a reputation for brutality and instability, and most trolls near her age were naturally somewhat frightened of her. By the time she was old enough to understand why the other children were cautious or hostile around her, she was mostly used to it, and wasn't inclined to make an extraordinary effort to gain their trust.
And then the circus came to town.
The Alternian circus is the social embodiment of the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, a flamboyant, violent, hedonistic religion with strong apocalyptic dogma. It is also one of the few Alternian institutions that wholeheartedly welcomes the notoriously unpredictable indigo caste - although the heyday of Circus Cultism is past, the cult maintains strong ties to the empire's exclusively indigo subjugglator force, which operates in a capacity somewhere between shock troops and secret police, and whose commander - a troll of unknown but considerable age known in most circles simply as the Grand Highblood - is both a major religious authority within the cult, and the empress's right-hand troll and chief enforcer. While the cult is now mostly based off-planet, like most institutions with any degree of history behind them, there is still a small but significant tradition of travelling bands of adolescent and child circus cultists on Alternia, one of which would make several visits to Lydain's hometown per sweep, starting from the time she was about three sweeps old.
The circus cultists were loud, and aggressive, and somewhat threatening, but they also offered the first unambiguously positive attention that the lonely little troll had ever been given. She soon began to eagerly await their visits, and by the time she was five sweeps old - about eleven years - she was joining the troupe as they traveled. From that point until she came of age at eight sweeps, Lydain spent most of the time on the road, only settling at her own hive during the dangerously intense heat of the bright seasons. After some deliberation, she settled on wearing paint in a classic whiteface design, marking her as a clown, but one inclined to take the more serious and authoritative roles in group acts. As other trolls aged out and she grew to be one of the senior members of the troupe, Lydain stepped into something of a leadership position.
And then, like all young trolls, she reached eight sweeps of age and, nominally, adulthood, and was summarily conscripted on the next pass of the training wing of the imperial fleet.
This was not particularly a hardship for Lydain; The spaceship on which she made her new home - a city-sized interstellar craft generally referred to as a barracks-carrier - was largely focused on training programs for various professions which were as close to noncombat positions as troll society gets: intelligence and legal specialists, medics and engineers. Lydain herself was inducted into the training program for the elite subjugglator force, a training program under the occasional supervision of the Grand Highblood himself - supervision that was, perhaps more frequent than it otherwise might have been, owing to the fact that one of the other trainees was Gamzee Makara, the Grand Highblood's descendant. Yeah. Remember where I said that meeting another troll with the same sign was vanishingly rare? This was kind of a big deal, and the Grand Highblood's behavior toward his younger relative frequently vacillated between lavish favoritism and obvious physical and mental abuse.
There was a strong Circus presence on the ship, and several other circus cultists among the small group of her fellow subjugglator trainees: flirty, irreverent Rossan and spacey, unpredictable Gamzee were clowns as well, while cocky, sarcastic Arsast belonged to a more obscure acrobatic sect. With a significant portion of their nominally free time taken up by circus gatherings and services, Lydain quickly befriended the other three, and reconnected with older friends and allies from her childhood. She also reached out to her classmates without direct ties to the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, although they were more of a mixed bag; stoic Staiko was a little bemused by her overtures of friendship but receptive, but Lazapi mostly preferred to keep her own company or seek out friends outside of the group, and Sephar was often openly disdainful of her classmates.
Lydain's canonpoint for this game is after her most recent appearance in the published Miracle Child fanfiction, several months after her conscription; for Lydain, this has been a mostly enjoyable and uneventful period of time. The group has had its share of interpersonal drama, of course, being seven young adults living in close proximity to other people for the first time, but most of the serious problems are either situations of which Lydain has remained blissfully unaware, or conflicts which she has been content to observe as a third party and maybe laugh at those involved. Lydain has, with limited success, been trying to encourage Staiko toward conversion to circus cultism; she thinks he seems lonely and would benefit from the community of the cult. Gamzee and Sephar developed a deeply unhealthy and unbalanced mutual hatecrush (as opposed to the healthy and productive hate-based attraction that trolls want to cultivate into a kismesissitude) and with Arsast's mediation, settled into a stable auspisticism. Lazapi, through her own very poor judgement, inadvertently brought about the death of a childhood friend, and after this event largely withdrew from socializing with her fellow subjugglator trainees.
In perhaps the most significant event in Lydain's recent life, the subjugglator trainees were granted permission to throw a small party for Staiko's ninth wriggling day (the troll equivalent to human birthdays). A few friends from outside the group visited, but the party was mostly the same group of young adults as always, only this time with more stupid party games and questionably-authorized alcohol.
One of the drinks on hand, provided courtesy of Lydain and her contacts among the older circus cultists, was a bottled mixed drink called Trance, which contained trace amounts of a drug called sopor - a mild sedative and inhibitor of psychic powers. Sopor is almost universally used topically as a sleep aid by trolls - the standard sleeping furniture for trolls is a shallow, enclosed basin of a gelatinous, sopor-laced substance - and in most cases, occasionally ingesting a little is safe. However, in certain concentrated and heat-treated forms, it is powerfully chemically and psychologically addictive, and has severely negative effects on long-term mental stability.
If you're familiar with Homestuck's canonical arc, you're probably aware that sopor pies are Gamzee Makara's drug of choice.
In this context, he'd been not only cut off from eating sopor but also placed on severely restricted topical sopor rations from the time he'd been conscripted. Under his ancestor's scrutiny and without the influence of several other traumatic elements of his canonical breakdown, Gamzee had managed to weather the worst of the withdrawal symptoms without tipping off his classmates to the fact that he was a recovering sopor addict. However, he was now terrified of relapsing - or rather, of the Grand Highblood's reaction to him possibly relapsing - and upon realizing that he'd gotten a few mouthfuls of a dilute form of sopor, he proceeded to panic. And then to allow Sephar to goad him into extremely an extremely ill-advised fight/makeout session that ended up with both of them in the emergency room. It was all kind of terrible decision central and Lydain ended up having to mop up the blood while they were off getting first-aid. She resented the heck out of this, and was not any more amused when, the next day, Sephar proceeded to disappear for several hours when she should have been in class. She eventually turned out to have been sulking off somewhere out of sight, but not before the rest of the group had already begun to formally declare alliances or neutrality in the blood feud that would inevitably have erupted if Sephar had turned up dead, by Gamzee's hand or his ancestor's.
That crisis has blown over, though, and things have mostly returned to normal within the group. Well, except for how apparently the Grand Highblood is now planning on dragging Gamzee off to meet the Empress, but to be honest Lydain's not even surprised by that kind of thing anymore.
CANON PERSONALITY: Before we get to Lydain as an individual, a few notes on cultural context:
Alternia is, on a very basic level, a warlike, oppressive, and outright dystopian civilization. The hemospectral caste system, with short-lived maroonblooded peasantry at the bottom and the nigh-immortal tyrianblooded empress at the top, produces a rigid and immutably stratified society, and it is commonplace for trolls of all social statures to resolve conflicts with bloody physical combat. Higher-status trolls have the explicit right to maim or kill their subordinates at whim, and there is a long and poorly-suppressed history of violent but ultimately unsuccessful uprisings among the lower classes. As a form of interpersonal interaction, conflict is just as highly prized as cooperation, and higher-status trolls especially are encouraged to become embroiled in intruige as complicated as they can possibly keep track of. As a member of the indigo caste, Lydain is technically outranked only by the semi-aquatic and reclusive violet seadwelling royalty and by older indigobloods. As a troll who is only barely entering adulthood, she is in practice vulnerable to aggression from most older trolls she encounters, as she has not yet reached full social maturity and even among the very rare noble castes, subadults are universally viewed as expendable.
Within Alternian society, the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs is both tolerated and feared because of their close ties to the subjugglators and their predominately highblooded demographics. Circus doctrine encourages instant gratification, physical and social aggression, and a strong awareness of memento mori; none of these attitudes are ones that put one's neighbors at ease, although even among the unbelieving general populace many trolls find the excesses and dramatics of the Circus intriguing. Thus, even with the implicit threat they represent - and really, there aren't a lot of things on Alternia that don't carry some implication of threat - the general attitude toward Circus cultists among trolls is not entirely unlike some human attitudes toward human circus performers. Interesting, but not entirely respectable; often charismatic, but likely to be dishonest or unreliable; free-spirited, unless they're actually on the run from something. They're perpetual outsiders in a culture that already has all of the chaos and instability it can feasibly stand, not to be trusted, even if they are formidable and highly-ranked enough to demand respect.
Within the Circus, the cult is divided into a loose coalition of different sects, factions, and organizations, most of which are identified by the trappings of different kinds of performances. Although there is not an official ranking or hierarchy of these factions, the circus show is equal parts celebration, worship service, and jockeying for power among the different acts. Clowns are common, and are further divided into different schools and styles of clowning; there is something of an informal hierarchy among clown factions with, as a general rule, the dominant and more serious factions wearing simpler and starker styles of paint. Lydain, as a classic whiteface, represents a faction prone to taking leadership among clowns, a less flamboyant style of clowning. Although she is not above participating silliness and ridiculous antics, she's more apt to take the role of straight man to another's bumbling fool; her sense of humor is more dry than outrageous, and she generally maintains some degree of dignity.
Lydain is fundamentally a social creature, but does not take for granted that others will accept her presence; she tends to be friendly but a little aloof when approaching new people, and is cautious about where she lays her trust and her loyalty. She is most comfortable when maintaining a network of casual acquaintances and a few trusted friends. Lydain is protective of her friends and can be expected to come to their aid in cases of conflict, whether the confrontation is verbal or physical; she is more cautious about being drawn into her acquaintances' fights, although if the person in question is a sufficiently valuable contact her help can be bought. She tends to assume that most major conflicts will, sooner or later, come to blows, and if she does not have a very good reason to be involved, she would really rather be elsewhere when they do.
If cornered or provoked, she won't hesitate to use physical force, and as much as is necessary to neutralize her opponent. She prefers not to kill or maim if she does not have to, but this is more out of a desire to avoid feuds and revenge-cycles with the person's friends than it is out of any particular intrinsic value she places on the sanctity of life. If she feels it practical, she has no qualms about eliminating an enemy in a very final way; similarly, if she believes it the kindest option available, she will not hesitate to deliver a mercy kill. She has killed other trolls in the past, mostly in defending herself and people she cares about, and she fully expects to need to kill again at some point in the future - among other things, her duties as a subjugglator will almost certainly include assassinations and counterrevolutionary missions. In some individual cases, she feels regret that the conflict was allowed to reach the point where mortal combat was necessary, but she does not feel any particular guilt over having killed.
Lydain seeks entertainment with a determination that is, quite literally, religious; she is perfectly capable of staying on task when necessary, but in her down time she's nearly always doing something or planning something. She isn't flighty, but neither does she intensely focus on one thing in particular for extended periods of time, especially if shes passively consuming it; she'll happily watch a movie that's been recommended to her, but she doesn't have the attention span to marathon a season of a TV show in a weekend. She particularly enjoys multiplayer traditional games, both cooperative and competitive, especially ones that involve a fair amount of strategy or planning rather than simple luck. She's nearly always got a pack of playing cards on her, and she likes trading card games and pen-and-paper strategy or roleplaying games. The one major exception to her play all the games tendency is that she doesn't have any history in Alternia's high-stakes LARPing scene (FLARP being the game of choice for most of those trolls), as while she isn't adverse to an element of danger, she was always a little wary of the extremely high mortality rate among FLARPers.
Like most trolls, Lydain is pansexual and polyamorous, although she conceptualizes the polyamory within a strict framework of different forms of romantic relationships. These relationship models are referred to as "quadrants," because there are four of them and they can be easily represented on a two-by-two grid. The cliffnotes version:
- Flushed romance or matespritship, represented by a heart, is a positive-emotion-based romantic-sexual relationship, and is roughly analogous to how humans usually conceptualize romance.
- Pale romance or moirallegiance, represented by a diamond, is a positive-emotion-based nonsexual romance based on mutual emotional support and social restraint.
- Caliginous romance or kismesissitude, represented by a spade, is a negative-emotion-based romantic-sexual relationship usually characterized as an intense rivalry with a consensual physical/sexual component.
- Ashen romance or auspisticism, represented by a club, is a negative-emotion-based nonsexual romance wherein an unusually destructive or unhealthy pair of potential kismeses allow a third party to mediate and prevent a full-fledged caliginous relationship from developing.
The positive-emotion-based quadrants are generally referred to collectively as "red romance" and the negative as "black romance." On the other axis, the sexual romances are referred to as "concupiscent" and the nonsexual as "conciliatory." Troll romance is complicated and obnoxious and although Lydain does not currently have any committed relationships in any quadrants, that just means she feels the cultural imperative to pair up in at least the concupiscent quadrants and preferably the conciliatory ones as well.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: The Childstuck AU can be said to have diverged from Homestuck canon at two points; both are accurate, from different perspectives.
From the perspective of the canonical Alternian Sgrub players, a group which includes Lydain's classmate Gamzee and eleven other trolls of various castes who he knew before conscription, the AU begins to splinter in mid Act 5.1, and diverges entirely at [S] Cascade. In an offshoot timeline, Sollux discovers that if he combines his hacking skills with his Mage of Doom powers, with a little input from players of Time and Space, he can rewrite local temporal causality, retrieve their dead friends from the dreambubbles, reinsert the entire team in their home universe, and cancel out the destruction caused by the beginning of the Sgrub session that effectively wiped out the rest of the troll species (mortally wounding the local cosmic horror and prompting a psychic death knell on a frequency that effects the entire species will do that). The twelve of them were returned to Alternia with their memories of the game intact, and they proceeded to spend the next two sweeps trying to deal with being a kid and growing up (it's hard, and nobody understands). And then they actually had to grow up, and several of them managed to dodge conscription and run off to be rebel freedom fighters and try to overthrow the Empress and put Feferi on the throne instead, as one does.
From the perspective of Lydain, along with literally everyone who isn't a canonical Sgrub player, the AU diverges on the evening of Karkat's sixth wriggling day. This is when, contrary to canon, they were not suddenly killed by meteoric bombardment and/or Vast Glub. It's a safe bet that none of them will ever have any idea what kind of bullet they all dodged there. No one on the Sgrub team is exactly in any hurry to talk to anyone outside the group about that time they caused the end of the world, except then they didn't. Alternian culture isn't kind to the mentally ill.
A final note on the AU: Homstuck's canonical terms for the different castes of the hemospectrum did not appear in the comic until several months after I had started writing Miracle Child. I have, for the purposes of the AU, chosen to stick with the popular set of fanon terms I was using when I started writing. Thus, instead of the canonical:
- Rust, Bronze, Gold, Olive, Jade, Teal, Cobalt, Indigo, Purple, Violet, Fuchsia
I have chosen to use:
- Maroon, Brown, Yellow, Green, Jade, Teal, Cerulean, Blue, Indigo, Violet, Tyrian
I am aware that Indigo appears in different positions on both lists, but to be quite honest you will take my Indigo Makaras from my cold dead hands and I can't be held responsible if Andrew Hussie is making poor writing choices; Lydain is of the same caste as Gamzee, not Equius.
On infiltration jaunts Lydain will generally gravitate toward, and be shaped by, either cliquish subcultural groups or religious organizations, as appropriate. She will retain her basic distant friendliness and her tendency toward seriousness, but the general ethics and values of her new "cult" will generally have a profound effect on how she views the world and relates to other people. It is also probably safe to assume that most infiltration jaunts will place her in non-troll contexts; without an Alternian upbringing, Lydain will be significantly less inclined to depend on violence, and less likely to anticipate it from other people, unless the setting she's been transplanted into places a similarly low value on intelligent life.
ABILITIES:
- Chucklevoodoos: The typical psychic abilities of indigo trolls. Includes:
-- Fear mongering: Lydain's primary psychic power is a form of empathy and emotional manipulation specific to fear. She's unable to actually read minds, and she can't do anything with emotions not related to or involving fear, but she can tell when people around her are experiencing emotions related to fear or anxiety and she can direct, sooth, or exaggerate that fear at will. She can also instill fear in people who were not previously afraid, although in this case she's most adept at specifically inspiring dread rather than any other form of fear.
-- Dream manipulation: In theory, Lydain has the potential to view and manipulate other people's dreams when she herself is asleep or in a trance state. In practice, intentionally invoking this power or doing anything other than getting passively swept up in someone else's dream requires lucid dreaming, which Lydain has never been able to get the hang of. So technically although she's capable of dream manipulation, she doesn't know how and would have a difficult time learning.
-Troll physiology: Probably not technically a power, as she's pretty typical for a young adult of her species. There are a few ways that trolls differ from the human norm that are worth mentioning, though:
--Sturdy: Trolls can survive massive physical trauma which would send a human into shock or kill the human outright; in canon, trolls often succeed in walking off massive blood loss and the loss of one or more limbs with minimal medical attention.
--Night vision: Although trolls can function at light levels that are comfortable for humans, they are an inherently nocturnal species and have much better vision in the dark than humans do.
--Low core temperature: I'm not sure this one has any real practical benefit, but an indigblooded troll's body temperature is noticeably cooler than a human's (and noticeably cooler than most trolls; "cool colors" isn't just an artistic term for trolls). She can handle hot weather a little better than a human, I guess, but she's also more vulnerable to cold.
- Sylladex: technologically-assisted hammerspace pocket and inventory management system. Lydain typically carries ten captcha cards, allowing ten different storage slots. Lydain uses a basic Array Fetch Modus, which allows her to retrieve any item at will.
--Strife Specibus: specialized Sylladex cards for weapons, allowing for safe and convenient storage and easy access. Each can hold several weapons, although they must be of the same type of weapon; Lydain currently has one set to the clubkind abstratus (blunt objects) and one set to the hatchetkind abstratus (axes).
INVENTORY;
Clothes:
- Subjugglator Novitiate Uniform (pants, shirt, ruff, gauntlets, boots)
- (in sylladex) 1 outfit of civilian clothes (skirt, blouse, camisole, bloomers)
Weapons:
-nightstick
-baseball bat
-throwing ax
Misc:
- white and black greasepaint pots
- deck of cards
- permanent marker
- smartphone
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? If challenged to a rap battle, Lydain will rap in iambic pentameter. She may break out full sonnets. I am very sorry.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE:
Synodiporia Test Drive #12: Lydain and Thorne construct a Cards Against Humanity/Morally Questionable Diversionary Squares deck.
PROSE SAMPLE:
Lydain pauses, and reminds herself that she actually rather enjoys Rossan's company. She reminds herself that he is both more predictable and more easily lead than any of the other circus folk in their immediate circle, that he doesn't seem to mind when other people brush off his jibes and come-ons. She reminds herself that his quick wit and willingness to commit to slapstick complements her dryness and sense of comedic timing. She reminds herself that she's confident of where his loyalties lie and that's more than she can say for a lot of the trolls she considers friends.
Of course he's also, you know, Rossan, but on the balance there's probably a good many worse things he could be. To her knowledge, he hasn't attempted to bite anyone in the throat lately.
Mirth, she hates that's a thing that she can seriously count in someone's favor. Not having bitten anyone in the throat in the past few hours.
She looks up, and her hand tightens around the wad of soapy towel in her hand, foam tinted with purple just a little less blue than that under her own skin. The difference is subtle, not even a full step up the hemospectrum; Lydain isn't sure she'd have been able to tell if she didn't know exactly whose blood she was mopping up, anyway. Which brings her right back around to Rossan's question: why is she the one cleaning up after this bullshit? She sighs.
"If you want to grab a sponge, I'd be glad to let you do it. Sephar won't be in any shape to do anything about it for a while, and then she'll probably spend the morning sulking," Lydain groans. "I'd rather not have anyone official have any reason to ask why the communal hygieneblock is covered in our classmate's bodily fluids, you know?"
She can tell from the look on his face that he doesn't know; Rossan's paint has always been more expressive than concealing, and Lydain's not sure how he functions like that. Her own white and black paint is a welcome facade, a barrier between herself and the world, and she likes it that way. She rolls her eyes, and waves him off with a soap-and-blood streaked hand. "Go away, Rossan. You're not in the least entertaining."
It's rude, very rude, but it does the trick. Lydain returns her attention to what she's doing before until he goes. Maybe she'll apologize later. Maybe she'll have another drink and then apologize. That sounds like a plan.
NAME: Bramble
AGE: 26
PLAYER JOURNAL:
bramblepatchTIMEZONE: PST
CONTACT:
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: n/a
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Lydain Pelkys
CANON: Homestuck (Original Character, based in the Childstuck AU)
POINT IN CANON: After Miracle Child chapter 28: Purrbeastie, Purrbeastie, Where Gone You Hence?
AGE: 19 years/8.77 sweeps (Alternian solar sweeps are approximately 790 days long, and juvenile trolls mature at approximately the same rate as humans)
APPEARANCE: Lydain is nonhuman but mostly humanoid. The main differences from the human norm that are apparent to casual observation are: a) the eight-inch long bright orange horns growing from the top of her head, slightly backswept and flattened at the tips into an ax-like shape and b) the pigmentation of her skin, eyes, and bodily fluids. Her skin is a flat slate grey and, like, most trolls, her hair is black. The sclerae of her eyes are golden yellow and her irises are a deep blue-violet with a few streaks of dark grey. Her blood, tears, saliva, sweat, and pretty much any other bodily fluid you care to notice all carry the same deep indigo pigmentation in various degrees of opacity and saturation. Within the troll species, the "hemospectral" blood pigmentation varies widely between individuals and is tied to a number of physical and metaphysical traits; Lydain's purple blood marks her as a member of the incredibly long-lived, notoriously unstable psychic upper class.
Other than the obviously nonhuman aspects of her appearance, she's a somewhat chubby, round-faced girl in her late teens. She wears her thick, straight black hair a little past shoulder-length with blunt bangs, and usually ties it back in a ponytail. Practically any time that she is around other people, Lydain wears white greasepaint with narrow black markings at her eyes, lips, eyebrows, and a dot under each eye. This paint is a consistent pattern and is a religious observation for her.
Lydain's uniform as a trainee subjugglator is somewhere between circus clown and combat fatigues: polka-dot black and grey cargo pants and a sleeveless top with lightly armored striped gauntlets and a ruff around her neck. Her fashion sense, when left to her own devices, is not too far off of what humans might recognize as gothic, with lolita and carnival notes: dark colors (mostly black, dark grey, and her personal shade of purple), frilly skirts and blouses, heavy combat boots. At all times, her outfit prominently features a glyph of a heavily stylized double-headed ax; this symbol is representative of Lydain herself and may be considered a part of her name.
CANON HISTORY: Like all trolls of her general historical era, Lydain grew up on a planet inhabited almost entirely by juveniles, with almost no contact with adult society - although once adults and children coexisted on Alternia, a combination of an extended period of civil unrest and an ambitious program of interstellar conquest led the imperial authorities to mandate the indefinite expulsion of all adult trolls from their home planet, several centuries before Lydain was hatched. While this may have resulted in a somewhat lawless environment for the young trolls, it arguably led to a safer childhood than they might otherwise have enjoyed. Trolls form no meaningful bonds with the young of their species, which are hatched in vast numbers and of uncertain and complicated genetic parentage. In fact, the subsapient larval form, colloquially referred to as grubs, are frequently cannibalized, both by other grubs and by post-pupal trolls. Even those individuals who survive their larval instar are left to the care of symbiotically bonded albino animal guardians known as lusi naturae (singular, lusus) and in the modern day to an automated system that supplies basic needs and rudimentary education. The only form of genetic kinship recognized among trolls is the "ancestor/descendant" relationship between two individuals of sufficiently similar physical and metaphysical type that they are given the same identifying sign. It should be noted that these recurrences in phenotype occur so rarely that the vast majority of trolls' lifespans do not overlap with the lifespans of any other trolls of their sign. It is not entirely unheard of among the extremely long-lived upper class - trolls in the blue-to-purple range may live for hundreds or even thousands of sweeps if not killed - but even among the elite, such encounters are very rare.
Lydain's early childhood was fairly typical for a troll - she survived grubhood, was adopted by a giant white penguin, and settled down for a few sweeps in a coastal city. She did not make friends easily among her neighbors; as a indigoblooded troll, she was by imperial fiat the social superior of most of her neighbors, and a member of a caste with a reputation for brutality and instability, and most trolls near her age were naturally somewhat frightened of her. By the time she was old enough to understand why the other children were cautious or hostile around her, she was mostly used to it, and wasn't inclined to make an extraordinary effort to gain their trust.
And then the circus came to town.
The Alternian circus is the social embodiment of the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, a flamboyant, violent, hedonistic religion with strong apocalyptic dogma. It is also one of the few Alternian institutions that wholeheartedly welcomes the notoriously unpredictable indigo caste - although the heyday of Circus Cultism is past, the cult maintains strong ties to the empire's exclusively indigo subjugglator force, which operates in a capacity somewhere between shock troops and secret police, and whose commander - a troll of unknown but considerable age known in most circles simply as the Grand Highblood - is both a major religious authority within the cult, and the empress's right-hand troll and chief enforcer. While the cult is now mostly based off-planet, like most institutions with any degree of history behind them, there is still a small but significant tradition of travelling bands of adolescent and child circus cultists on Alternia, one of which would make several visits to Lydain's hometown per sweep, starting from the time she was about three sweeps old.
The circus cultists were loud, and aggressive, and somewhat threatening, but they also offered the first unambiguously positive attention that the lonely little troll had ever been given. She soon began to eagerly await their visits, and by the time she was five sweeps old - about eleven years - she was joining the troupe as they traveled. From that point until she came of age at eight sweeps, Lydain spent most of the time on the road, only settling at her own hive during the dangerously intense heat of the bright seasons. After some deliberation, she settled on wearing paint in a classic whiteface design, marking her as a clown, but one inclined to take the more serious and authoritative roles in group acts. As other trolls aged out and she grew to be one of the senior members of the troupe, Lydain stepped into something of a leadership position.
And then, like all young trolls, she reached eight sweeps of age and, nominally, adulthood, and was summarily conscripted on the next pass of the training wing of the imperial fleet.
This was not particularly a hardship for Lydain; The spaceship on which she made her new home - a city-sized interstellar craft generally referred to as a barracks-carrier - was largely focused on training programs for various professions which were as close to noncombat positions as troll society gets: intelligence and legal specialists, medics and engineers. Lydain herself was inducted into the training program for the elite subjugglator force, a training program under the occasional supervision of the Grand Highblood himself - supervision that was, perhaps more frequent than it otherwise might have been, owing to the fact that one of the other trainees was Gamzee Makara, the Grand Highblood's descendant. Yeah. Remember where I said that meeting another troll with the same sign was vanishingly rare? This was kind of a big deal, and the Grand Highblood's behavior toward his younger relative frequently vacillated between lavish favoritism and obvious physical and mental abuse.
There was a strong Circus presence on the ship, and several other circus cultists among the small group of her fellow subjugglator trainees: flirty, irreverent Rossan and spacey, unpredictable Gamzee were clowns as well, while cocky, sarcastic Arsast belonged to a more obscure acrobatic sect. With a significant portion of their nominally free time taken up by circus gatherings and services, Lydain quickly befriended the other three, and reconnected with older friends and allies from her childhood. She also reached out to her classmates without direct ties to the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, although they were more of a mixed bag; stoic Staiko was a little bemused by her overtures of friendship but receptive, but Lazapi mostly preferred to keep her own company or seek out friends outside of the group, and Sephar was often openly disdainful of her classmates.
Lydain's canonpoint for this game is after her most recent appearance in the published Miracle Child fanfiction, several months after her conscription; for Lydain, this has been a mostly enjoyable and uneventful period of time. The group has had its share of interpersonal drama, of course, being seven young adults living in close proximity to other people for the first time, but most of the serious problems are either situations of which Lydain has remained blissfully unaware, or conflicts which she has been content to observe as a third party and maybe laugh at those involved. Lydain has, with limited success, been trying to encourage Staiko toward conversion to circus cultism; she thinks he seems lonely and would benefit from the community of the cult. Gamzee and Sephar developed a deeply unhealthy and unbalanced mutual hatecrush (as opposed to the healthy and productive hate-based attraction that trolls want to cultivate into a kismesissitude) and with Arsast's mediation, settled into a stable auspisticism. Lazapi, through her own very poor judgement, inadvertently brought about the death of a childhood friend, and after this event largely withdrew from socializing with her fellow subjugglator trainees.
In perhaps the most significant event in Lydain's recent life, the subjugglator trainees were granted permission to throw a small party for Staiko's ninth wriggling day (the troll equivalent to human birthdays). A few friends from outside the group visited, but the party was mostly the same group of young adults as always, only this time with more stupid party games and questionably-authorized alcohol.
One of the drinks on hand, provided courtesy of Lydain and her contacts among the older circus cultists, was a bottled mixed drink called Trance, which contained trace amounts of a drug called sopor - a mild sedative and inhibitor of psychic powers. Sopor is almost universally used topically as a sleep aid by trolls - the standard sleeping furniture for trolls is a shallow, enclosed basin of a gelatinous, sopor-laced substance - and in most cases, occasionally ingesting a little is safe. However, in certain concentrated and heat-treated forms, it is powerfully chemically and psychologically addictive, and has severely negative effects on long-term mental stability.
If you're familiar with Homestuck's canonical arc, you're probably aware that sopor pies are Gamzee Makara's drug of choice.
In this context, he'd been not only cut off from eating sopor but also placed on severely restricted topical sopor rations from the time he'd been conscripted. Under his ancestor's scrutiny and without the influence of several other traumatic elements of his canonical breakdown, Gamzee had managed to weather the worst of the withdrawal symptoms without tipping off his classmates to the fact that he was a recovering sopor addict. However, he was now terrified of relapsing - or rather, of the Grand Highblood's reaction to him possibly relapsing - and upon realizing that he'd gotten a few mouthfuls of a dilute form of sopor, he proceeded to panic. And then to allow Sephar to goad him into extremely an extremely ill-advised fight/makeout session that ended up with both of them in the emergency room. It was all kind of terrible decision central and Lydain ended up having to mop up the blood while they were off getting first-aid. She resented the heck out of this, and was not any more amused when, the next day, Sephar proceeded to disappear for several hours when she should have been in class. She eventually turned out to have been sulking off somewhere out of sight, but not before the rest of the group had already begun to formally declare alliances or neutrality in the blood feud that would inevitably have erupted if Sephar had turned up dead, by Gamzee's hand or his ancestor's.
That crisis has blown over, though, and things have mostly returned to normal within the group. Well, except for how apparently the Grand Highblood is now planning on dragging Gamzee off to meet the Empress, but to be honest Lydain's not even surprised by that kind of thing anymore.
CANON PERSONALITY: Before we get to Lydain as an individual, a few notes on cultural context:
Alternia is, on a very basic level, a warlike, oppressive, and outright dystopian civilization. The hemospectral caste system, with short-lived maroonblooded peasantry at the bottom and the nigh-immortal tyrianblooded empress at the top, produces a rigid and immutably stratified society, and it is commonplace for trolls of all social statures to resolve conflicts with bloody physical combat. Higher-status trolls have the explicit right to maim or kill their subordinates at whim, and there is a long and poorly-suppressed history of violent but ultimately unsuccessful uprisings among the lower classes. As a form of interpersonal interaction, conflict is just as highly prized as cooperation, and higher-status trolls especially are encouraged to become embroiled in intruige as complicated as they can possibly keep track of. As a member of the indigo caste, Lydain is technically outranked only by the semi-aquatic and reclusive violet seadwelling royalty and by older indigobloods. As a troll who is only barely entering adulthood, she is in practice vulnerable to aggression from most older trolls she encounters, as she has not yet reached full social maturity and even among the very rare noble castes, subadults are universally viewed as expendable.
Within Alternian society, the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs is both tolerated and feared because of their close ties to the subjugglators and their predominately highblooded demographics. Circus doctrine encourages instant gratification, physical and social aggression, and a strong awareness of memento mori; none of these attitudes are ones that put one's neighbors at ease, although even among the unbelieving general populace many trolls find the excesses and dramatics of the Circus intriguing. Thus, even with the implicit threat they represent - and really, there aren't a lot of things on Alternia that don't carry some implication of threat - the general attitude toward Circus cultists among trolls is not entirely unlike some human attitudes toward human circus performers. Interesting, but not entirely respectable; often charismatic, but likely to be dishonest or unreliable; free-spirited, unless they're actually on the run from something. They're perpetual outsiders in a culture that already has all of the chaos and instability it can feasibly stand, not to be trusted, even if they are formidable and highly-ranked enough to demand respect.
Within the Circus, the cult is divided into a loose coalition of different sects, factions, and organizations, most of which are identified by the trappings of different kinds of performances. Although there is not an official ranking or hierarchy of these factions, the circus show is equal parts celebration, worship service, and jockeying for power among the different acts. Clowns are common, and are further divided into different schools and styles of clowning; there is something of an informal hierarchy among clown factions with, as a general rule, the dominant and more serious factions wearing simpler and starker styles of paint. Lydain, as a classic whiteface, represents a faction prone to taking leadership among clowns, a less flamboyant style of clowning. Although she is not above participating silliness and ridiculous antics, she's more apt to take the role of straight man to another's bumbling fool; her sense of humor is more dry than outrageous, and she generally maintains some degree of dignity.
Lydain is fundamentally a social creature, but does not take for granted that others will accept her presence; she tends to be friendly but a little aloof when approaching new people, and is cautious about where she lays her trust and her loyalty. She is most comfortable when maintaining a network of casual acquaintances and a few trusted friends. Lydain is protective of her friends and can be expected to come to their aid in cases of conflict, whether the confrontation is verbal or physical; she is more cautious about being drawn into her acquaintances' fights, although if the person in question is a sufficiently valuable contact her help can be bought. She tends to assume that most major conflicts will, sooner or later, come to blows, and if she does not have a very good reason to be involved, she would really rather be elsewhere when they do.
If cornered or provoked, she won't hesitate to use physical force, and as much as is necessary to neutralize her opponent. She prefers not to kill or maim if she does not have to, but this is more out of a desire to avoid feuds and revenge-cycles with the person's friends than it is out of any particular intrinsic value she places on the sanctity of life. If she feels it practical, she has no qualms about eliminating an enemy in a very final way; similarly, if she believes it the kindest option available, she will not hesitate to deliver a mercy kill. She has killed other trolls in the past, mostly in defending herself and people she cares about, and she fully expects to need to kill again at some point in the future - among other things, her duties as a subjugglator will almost certainly include assassinations and counterrevolutionary missions. In some individual cases, she feels regret that the conflict was allowed to reach the point where mortal combat was necessary, but she does not feel any particular guilt over having killed.
Lydain seeks entertainment with a determination that is, quite literally, religious; she is perfectly capable of staying on task when necessary, but in her down time she's nearly always doing something or planning something. She isn't flighty, but neither does she intensely focus on one thing in particular for extended periods of time, especially if shes passively consuming it; she'll happily watch a movie that's been recommended to her, but she doesn't have the attention span to marathon a season of a TV show in a weekend. She particularly enjoys multiplayer traditional games, both cooperative and competitive, especially ones that involve a fair amount of strategy or planning rather than simple luck. She's nearly always got a pack of playing cards on her, and she likes trading card games and pen-and-paper strategy or roleplaying games. The one major exception to her play all the games tendency is that she doesn't have any history in Alternia's high-stakes LARPing scene (FLARP being the game of choice for most of those trolls), as while she isn't adverse to an element of danger, she was always a little wary of the extremely high mortality rate among FLARPers.
Like most trolls, Lydain is pansexual and polyamorous, although she conceptualizes the polyamory within a strict framework of different forms of romantic relationships. These relationship models are referred to as "quadrants," because there are four of them and they can be easily represented on a two-by-two grid. The cliffnotes version:
- Flushed romance or matespritship, represented by a heart, is a positive-emotion-based romantic-sexual relationship, and is roughly analogous to how humans usually conceptualize romance.
- Pale romance or moirallegiance, represented by a diamond, is a positive-emotion-based nonsexual romance based on mutual emotional support and social restraint.
- Caliginous romance or kismesissitude, represented by a spade, is a negative-emotion-based romantic-sexual relationship usually characterized as an intense rivalry with a consensual physical/sexual component.
- Ashen romance or auspisticism, represented by a club, is a negative-emotion-based nonsexual romance wherein an unusually destructive or unhealthy pair of potential kismeses allow a third party to mediate and prevent a full-fledged caliginous relationship from developing.
The positive-emotion-based quadrants are generally referred to collectively as "red romance" and the negative as "black romance." On the other axis, the sexual romances are referred to as "concupiscent" and the nonsexual as "conciliatory." Troll romance is complicated and obnoxious and although Lydain does not currently have any committed relationships in any quadrants, that just means she feels the cultural imperative to pair up in at least the concupiscent quadrants and preferably the conciliatory ones as well.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: The Childstuck AU can be said to have diverged from Homestuck canon at two points; both are accurate, from different perspectives.
From the perspective of the canonical Alternian Sgrub players, a group which includes Lydain's classmate Gamzee and eleven other trolls of various castes who he knew before conscription, the AU begins to splinter in mid Act 5.1, and diverges entirely at [S] Cascade. In an offshoot timeline, Sollux discovers that if he combines his hacking skills with his Mage of Doom powers, with a little input from players of Time and Space, he can rewrite local temporal causality, retrieve their dead friends from the dreambubbles, reinsert the entire team in their home universe, and cancel out the destruction caused by the beginning of the Sgrub session that effectively wiped out the rest of the troll species (mortally wounding the local cosmic horror and prompting a psychic death knell on a frequency that effects the entire species will do that). The twelve of them were returned to Alternia with their memories of the game intact, and they proceeded to spend the next two sweeps trying to deal with being a kid and growing up (it's hard, and nobody understands). And then they actually had to grow up, and several of them managed to dodge conscription and run off to be rebel freedom fighters and try to overthrow the Empress and put Feferi on the throne instead, as one does.
From the perspective of Lydain, along with literally everyone who isn't a canonical Sgrub player, the AU diverges on the evening of Karkat's sixth wriggling day. This is when, contrary to canon, they were not suddenly killed by meteoric bombardment and/or Vast Glub. It's a safe bet that none of them will ever have any idea what kind of bullet they all dodged there. No one on the Sgrub team is exactly in any hurry to talk to anyone outside the group about that time they caused the end of the world, except then they didn't. Alternian culture isn't kind to the mentally ill.
A final note on the AU: Homstuck's canonical terms for the different castes of the hemospectrum did not appear in the comic until several months after I had started writing Miracle Child. I have, for the purposes of the AU, chosen to stick with the popular set of fanon terms I was using when I started writing. Thus, instead of the canonical:
- Rust, Bronze, Gold, Olive, Jade, Teal, Cobalt, Indigo, Purple, Violet, Fuchsia
I have chosen to use:
- Maroon, Brown, Yellow, Green, Jade, Teal, Cerulean, Blue, Indigo, Violet, Tyrian
I am aware that Indigo appears in different positions on both lists, but to be quite honest you will take my Indigo Makaras from my cold dead hands and I can't be held responsible if Andrew Hussie is making poor writing choices; Lydain is of the same caste as Gamzee, not Equius.
On infiltration jaunts Lydain will generally gravitate toward, and be shaped by, either cliquish subcultural groups or religious organizations, as appropriate. She will retain her basic distant friendliness and her tendency toward seriousness, but the general ethics and values of her new "cult" will generally have a profound effect on how she views the world and relates to other people. It is also probably safe to assume that most infiltration jaunts will place her in non-troll contexts; without an Alternian upbringing, Lydain will be significantly less inclined to depend on violence, and less likely to anticipate it from other people, unless the setting she's been transplanted into places a similarly low value on intelligent life.
ABILITIES:
- Chucklevoodoos: The typical psychic abilities of indigo trolls. Includes:
-- Fear mongering: Lydain's primary psychic power is a form of empathy and emotional manipulation specific to fear. She's unable to actually read minds, and she can't do anything with emotions not related to or involving fear, but she can tell when people around her are experiencing emotions related to fear or anxiety and she can direct, sooth, or exaggerate that fear at will. She can also instill fear in people who were not previously afraid, although in this case she's most adept at specifically inspiring dread rather than any other form of fear.
-- Dream manipulation: In theory, Lydain has the potential to view and manipulate other people's dreams when she herself is asleep or in a trance state. In practice, intentionally invoking this power or doing anything other than getting passively swept up in someone else's dream requires lucid dreaming, which Lydain has never been able to get the hang of. So technically although she's capable of dream manipulation, she doesn't know how and would have a difficult time learning.
-Troll physiology: Probably not technically a power, as she's pretty typical for a young adult of her species. There are a few ways that trolls differ from the human norm that are worth mentioning, though:
--Sturdy: Trolls can survive massive physical trauma which would send a human into shock or kill the human outright; in canon, trolls often succeed in walking off massive blood loss and the loss of one or more limbs with minimal medical attention.
--Night vision: Although trolls can function at light levels that are comfortable for humans, they are an inherently nocturnal species and have much better vision in the dark than humans do.
--Low core temperature: I'm not sure this one has any real practical benefit, but an indigblooded troll's body temperature is noticeably cooler than a human's (and noticeably cooler than most trolls; "cool colors" isn't just an artistic term for trolls). She can handle hot weather a little better than a human, I guess, but she's also more vulnerable to cold.
- Sylladex: technologically-assisted hammerspace pocket and inventory management system. Lydain typically carries ten captcha cards, allowing ten different storage slots. Lydain uses a basic Array Fetch Modus, which allows her to retrieve any item at will.
--Strife Specibus: specialized Sylladex cards for weapons, allowing for safe and convenient storage and easy access. Each can hold several weapons, although they must be of the same type of weapon; Lydain currently has one set to the clubkind abstratus (blunt objects) and one set to the hatchetkind abstratus (axes).
INVENTORY;
Clothes:
- Subjugglator Novitiate Uniform (pants, shirt, ruff, gauntlets, boots)
- (in sylladex) 1 outfit of civilian clothes (skirt, blouse, camisole, bloomers)
Weapons:
-nightstick
-baseball bat
-throwing ax
Misc:
- white and black greasepaint pots
- deck of cards
- permanent marker
- smartphone
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? If challenged to a rap battle, Lydain will rap in iambic pentameter. She may break out full sonnets. I am very sorry.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE:
Synodiporia Test Drive #12: Lydain and Thorne construct a Cards Against Humanity/Morally Questionable Diversionary Squares deck.
PROSE SAMPLE:
Lydain pauses, and reminds herself that she actually rather enjoys Rossan's company. She reminds herself that he is both more predictable and more easily lead than any of the other circus folk in their immediate circle, that he doesn't seem to mind when other people brush off his jibes and come-ons. She reminds herself that his quick wit and willingness to commit to slapstick complements her dryness and sense of comedic timing. She reminds herself that she's confident of where his loyalties lie and that's more than she can say for a lot of the trolls she considers friends.
Of course he's also, you know, Rossan, but on the balance there's probably a good many worse things he could be. To her knowledge, he hasn't attempted to bite anyone in the throat lately.
Mirth, she hates that's a thing that she can seriously count in someone's favor. Not having bitten anyone in the throat in the past few hours.
She looks up, and her hand tightens around the wad of soapy towel in her hand, foam tinted with purple just a little less blue than that under her own skin. The difference is subtle, not even a full step up the hemospectrum; Lydain isn't sure she'd have been able to tell if she didn't know exactly whose blood she was mopping up, anyway. Which brings her right back around to Rossan's question: why is she the one cleaning up after this bullshit? She sighs.
"If you want to grab a sponge, I'd be glad to let you do it. Sephar won't be in any shape to do anything about it for a while, and then she'll probably spend the morning sulking," Lydain groans. "I'd rather not have anyone official have any reason to ask why the communal hygieneblock is covered in our classmate's bodily fluids, you know?"
She can tell from the look on his face that he doesn't know; Rossan's paint has always been more expressive than concealing, and Lydain's not sure how he functions like that. Her own white and black paint is a welcome facade, a barrier between herself and the world, and she likes it that way. She rolls her eyes, and waves him off with a soap-and-blood streaked hand. "Go away, Rossan. You're not in the least entertaining."
It's rude, very rude, but it does the trick. Lydain returns her attention to what she's doing before until he goes. Maybe she'll apologize later. Maybe she'll have another drink and then apologize. That sounds like a plan.