Stormyx

Vanguard: Calder City

First post is written! Just needs review, formatting, and -- most importantly -- a banner.

@Eddie Brock

Loved it!

I'm doing a full catch up this afternoon (you all really said you were posting while I was sleeping!)

Vanguard: Calder City

great first posts already @Captain Uni and @Natty

I love the differences in vibe on both, but the way they're each delivering some world building. I am certain Harborlight will be FINE and nothing will happen there :D

Vanguard: Calder City

_Eve

Death and All Her Friends - v0.1

^{_{_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}}

𝕄𝕖𝕕𝕒𝕘𝕝𝕚𝕒’𝕤 ℝ𝕖𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕦𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕥, ℂ𝕒𝕝𝕕𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕚𝕥𝕪

Medaglia’s had never changed. A family owned restaurant in the Italian district of Calder City. They continued to cook with the meat from the Italian butcher two doors down, made their soffrito with vegetables bought from the Italian grocery, and served biscotti baked by the same Italian deli. The same furniture had been giving the same little Italy aesthetic for twenty-five years, at least. The same paintings, the same flags, the same collages of photographs of a homeland none of the family had been to created the authentic heritage vibe that every Italian family in Calder City coveted, and that’s how the money kept turning through it.

It wasn’t the food; the menu hadn’t changed - still the same dishes, still the same chefs, still the same waiters. Still the same Dean Martin record being flipped and flipped and flipped again until Volare was an ingredient to every dish, and to hear it played anywhere else would be jarring. 𝙸 𝚊𝚕𝚠𝚊𝚢𝚜 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝙱𝚞𝚘𝚗𝚊 𝚂𝚎𝚛𝚊 Always the same restaurant for family Sunday dinner. Always the same table. Always the same seats.

In attendance tonight, Joey and Ralph Raciti - Silvio’s biological sons from his late wife. Growing up, strangely, they’d never felt animosity towards Eve and her being there. Eve supposed it was because they were older than her, and the presence of a woman - even a young one, in their home was welcome after the death of their mother. Or, that the presence of someone even more fucked up than them made them feel secure, safe, normal.

Ralph always had a chicken piccata with a side of spaghetti; and Ralph always insisted on ordering olives but would maybe eat one or two. Next to Ralph, was his wife Cosima. Cosima and her extravagant acrylic made claws - blood red and pointed and inches long. Cosima and her quaffed honey blonde curls; if the phrase “the higher the hair the closer to God” needed a face, it would be Cosima’s perfect heart shaped face; the big brown eyes, and the bright splashing red of her plumped lips. She knew, and she played her part. She was having a caesar salad – a dish that was not on Medaglia’s menu, but they would make to order for Cosima.

Ralph’s son, Ralph Junior, sat in his high chair - two years old and already the weight of inheritance holding him down. A Ralph Lauren polo shirt, about to be bled through with spaghetti and meatballs, despite the bib around his neck.

Joey had not brought anyone, but Eve knew he had been seeing a girl for several months. It wasn’t time to introduce her to the shitshow even if this was the most serious he’d been about a girl in his life. Joey was predictably having himself a whole diavolo pizza and Eve knew that between the cheese, the nduja, and his beer of choice, he’d be making a close call with his bathroom later.

Then, there was "cousin" Luca – only he wasn’t a cousin by blood, no, he was sitting somewhere middle-high in Silvio’s hierarchy of made men. Eve had slept with him a summer earlier, and even now she could remember the strange noise he made when he finished. It was their secret of course; if anyone knew about it, he certainly wouldn’t have been sat at the table. He refused to look at her now. He didn’t always come to dinner, but when he did, he’d opt for a cream based pasta.

“I’m thinking of getting a job,” Eve said calmly, twirling spaghetti around the prongs of her fork.From the other side of the table, Silvio placed his fork down incredulously.

“Do I not do enough for you?” he asked. “Why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”

ᵒᶠ ᶜᵒᵘʳˢᵉ ʰᵉ'ᵈ ˢᵃʸ ᵗʰᵃᵗ, ᵒᶠ ᶜᵒᵘʳˢᵉ ʰᵉ ᵈᵒᵉˢⁿ'ᵗ ʷᵃⁿᵗ ʸᵒᵘ ᵗᵒ ᵈᵒ ˢᵒᵐᵉᵗʰⁱⁿᵍ ᶠᵒʳ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ. 𝚐𝚘 𝚛𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚎𝚜𝚝 𝙱𝚞𝚘𝚗𝚊 𝚂𝚎𝚛𝚊.

Eve paused, waiting for the quiet, her eye twitching only slightly. “You know, like a barista or something. Really get to meet some people like that,” Eve continued. Joey smirked from the side of the table, Silvio? Not so much. He blinked slowly.

𝙱𝚞𝚘𝚗𝚊 𝚜𝚎𝚛𝚊 𝚜𝚒𝚐𝚗𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚊 𝚔𝚒𝚜𝚜 𝚖𝚎 𝚐𝚘𝚘𝚍𝚗𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝

ʎpɐǝɹןɐ ʞuıɥʇ ןɹıƃ ǝɥʇ ʇǝן

“You need more allowance or something?” he asked.

“I’m just bored,” she said, biting at the corner of her lip, fingers rubbing against her silverware against the tide of her mind. She reached for her wine. A large mouthful to cleave off the edge.

“Then take a class!” Silvio exclaimed, red in the face about it too. “Go do an art class or whatever the fuck,” he added. “Saw something or other about dance classes.”

“Her paintings would be messed up Pa,” Ralph said with a chuckle. It was not a malicious comment, but a strange one, given that their very table at the restaurant was adorned by some large reprint of a Caravaggio on the wall; Judith Beheading Holofernes. Eve supposed that it was relevant, somewhat. The lines of blood from his neck surely did resemble spaghetti. She wondered then if Holofernes had any idea that one day his likeness would watch countless families eat chicken parms and stone baked pizza. Probably not. ƃuıʌoɯ ǝɹoɯ sɐʍ s,ıɥɔsǝןıʇuǝ⅁

Silvio softened somewhat, he always did for Eve. “Look,” he began, picking his fork back up. “I appreciate your…. Ambition, but, let’s not get too drastic. Let me… Let me talk to some guys.”

Eve’s mouth pulled to the side in a thoughtful pout as she drew her eyes away from the painting, grazing her gaze over Luca, who was still intently working through a fettuccine alfredo; avoiding every opportunity to have been pulled into the conversation at hand. Then she looked at Joey who had a raised brow at her. With a sigh she released the pucker of her mouth. “Sure… I’ll, look at some classes,” she relented.

“I’ll send you some more allowance,” Silvio added agreeably.

“What?” Joey said, “I bust my fuckin’ balls at the construction site–”

“Ayy, watch the language. I don’t want none of that vulgar shit at my table,” Silvio said before Joey could finish whatever he was trying to say. “Ladies are present." His eyes had darkened half with anger, and half with exasperation. "This family used to have class.”

Cosima, Cosima. Of course she’d reacted to it, a slight gasp; raising her hand to reach for pearls to clutch over it. “My god,” she’d uttered out in that nasal way she did, finding an entirely ill-fitting phonetic for the o in God, slamming down the d before the full stop of her quiet exclaim.

Would Silvio have found it classy if he knew about the way Eve had let Luca bend her over a table and grasp her neck just enough to dance on dangerous? She hadn’t exactly been a lady then. She thought of Luca’s strange little sound again and smirked, the slight motion went unnoticed as Joey attempted to blunder and bicker back some more before thinking better of himself and picking up another slice instead.

Ralph Junior gurgled and giggled, which seemed to simmer down the temperature of Silvio’s foul storm that had reared, and he laughed too - his fork then aggressively diving and digging back into his veal scallopini; clattering against the ceramic of his plate with a scrape. The conversation moved on at last; away from Eve and her corner of the table, and over to Ralph and his ventures and work and his money, and the renovation of his kitchen.

Eve's eyes drifted up to the ceiling of Medaglia's. To that gaudy painting of a bright blue sky upon it, faded with time into a faint mockery of the grandness of the Sistine Chapel. Mottled clouds had been painted on, likely with a sponge. Someone had once climbed a ladder to reach and blot paint against the ceiling, and someone had once thought this to be a chic idea. Someone still did; clear fresher paint strokes suggested the touch ups over the years and Eve sat and wondered how many more Sunday dinners she would sit through under this fake sky.

^{Mi dipingevo le mani e la faccia di blu
Poi d'improvviso venivo dal vento rapito
E incominciavo a volare nel cielo infinito}

She let her eyelids slowly close over the blue-green of her eyes. Charcoal shadow smudged across them from a hand with far less skill that Cosima who had shown up with a cut crease and fresh lash extensions. In her mind, fragments and images bombarded her again, and she imagined herself floating across that blue sky just as Dean Martin crooned out again.

Ralph Junior had thrown up on himself, Joey disguised a burp of indigestion, and Eve felt through the threads of Calder City that at least three people had died since this dinner had started.

Vanguard: Calder City

E V E
E V E

^{"please, forgive me, I've got demons in my head."}

C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T _________________________________________________________ (FC: Margaret Qualley; Dialogue: violet) _________________________________________________________ S U M M A R Y S U M M A R Y _________________________________________________________ Eve Raciti-Seeley _________________________________________________________ November 21 | 27 _________________________________________________________ S T A T S S T A T S _________________________________________________________ Height | 5'8 _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ Hometown | Calder City -

H I S T O R Y H I S T O R Y ___________________________________________________________________________________ An explosion. Another forgotten aftermath of the latest threat in Calder City, taken care of by the latest favourite superhero. The City moved on while a family collapsed under the collateral damage. Before that point, before Silvio, before her propensity for funeral attendance, Eve had been as unremarkable as anyone else who simply looked heavensward with awe to see superhumans flying by. A girl who lined up for the latest marketed superhuman likeness in doll form. The life of a child born into a modern age that was shaped by its adaptation of miracles. In Calder City, it was not unusual for people to manifest something subtle but young Eve showed no such promise. Until thirteen. The accident that killed her family did not simply break her life, but reconfigured the way she experienced reality and all of her boundaries. The immediate aftermath left her suspended between her own survival and death. Dancing against the veil, and in the moment it happened, Eve's perception broke in all the ways that were so unlike all she knew. What appeared to her did not resemble anything she'd known before. i̷ ̷w̷a̷s̷ ̷i̷n̷ ̷a̷n̷ ̷a̷c̷c̷i̷d̷e̷n̷t̷ ̷t̷o̷o The awakening of Eve’s miracle was not outward, but a flower bleeding inward to align itself with the oldest of olds, and the truest truth of all. Death. The inevitability. In those short and endless final moments she was dragged through the final memory residues of her family, one by one and all at once. A dark and uncontrolled telepathy, shaped like a beautiful wound. Every memory that replayed to them as their lives ended; the last wave of brain activity before their long night. She did not simply sense their dying or witness it, ʇɐɥʇ ǝǝs pןnoɥs ʎpoqou she entered it as real and easy as any room or place she had been in before; a door that opened to her alone and dragged her in. In full, and uncontrolled form, she walked for weeks, lost inside this lingering interface of death energy as it ceased to behave coherently or chronologically. It channelled through her and her through it until they were one and she awoke back to the b living only seconds later. Before she could even name what it was and what had happened, and by the time she was retrieved from the wreckage, reality around her was secondary to what she had touched, what had been left behind, and what she could now feel in everything. An orphan, an anomaly, screaming with night terrors of things she’d seen; her insistence she’d been left for weeks and weeks in rubble didn't go over well. Somehow, it was Silvio Raciti ʰᵉ ᵏⁱˡˡᵉᵈ ᵐᵉ who recognised her, heard of her... Discovered her. A thing too rare to leave unclaimed. It was Silvio who placed a name on her rather than a label on a file. A crime boss operating within the city's shady corporate and political underlayers. But to Eve, he became her protector. ᵃˢᵏ ʰⁱᵐ ʷʰʸ ʰᵉ ᵈⁱᵈ Her first fixed point after the collapse. ᵃˢᵏ ʰⁱᵐ ʰᵒʷ⁻⁻ He believed her, and over time within his orbit, Eve was stabilised, educated, and gradually integrated into his hidden economy beneath Calder's regulated superhuman society. Her ability matured into a controlled function. She was not only sheltered, but used. Her gift a quiet instrument of leverage; secrets extracted from the dead, truths carried beyond living witnesses. Every time Silvio ᵐᵃᶠⁱᵃ ᶠᵘᶜᵏ ˢᵗᵒᵖ ʰⁱᵐ found a use for her, he bound her closer to his world through the continuity and through certainty there was nowhere else, and nobody else that could hold her. He is the closest thing she has to a father and to family. And he knows this. A B I L I T I E S A B I L I T I E S __________________________________________________________________________________ Death Replay - The ability to gain access to what she has termed "death replays". Those final films and movie reels of consciousness as a life collapses, the abstract lived subjective fragments of life played in the last surge of brain activity before death. They are experienced as immersive environments that she can move through and interact with. Her access is strongest immediately following death where the emotional and cognitive residue and energy, link to the threads, remains intact. As time passes they degrade and become fragmented and unstable, and in some instances, monstrous. Echo Permeation- Sometimes, the memories persist and are extracted and embedded within Eve's "mind vault". These retained echoes are not full consciousnesses, but partial continuations and loops of unresolved thoughts, wishes, wants, and needs that persisted beyond death. They manifest as intrusive perspectives, or semi-coherent presences that occupy her cognitive space. Ghosts in her machine. Death Thread Sense- Eve can not reliably perceive death before it happens. Instead, she can feel her way through an ambient hum of death in threads unseen as an informational pressure field. It is a spatial awareness and a sense. It is the sound of eventuality and truth. P E R S O N A L I T Y P E R S O N A L I T Y __________________________________________________________________________________ Composed, curated, friendly, happy, helpful, loving, kind. Spoiled Mafia brat? Sometimes. Eve is bleeding with an overload against a current of energy and telepathic inteference and residue, memories that aren’t her own that belong to nobody now. p̷l̷e̷a̷s̷e̷ ̷t̷e̷l̷l̷ ̷m̷y̷ ̷w̷i̷f̷e̷ ̷i̷ ̷l̷o̷v̷e̷ ̷h̷e̷r̷ The emotional saturation of death replay exposure has numbed her baseline while simultaneously flooding her with extremes she cannot metabolise and understand with a closeness ʇsoן s,ǝɥs ןıʌǝ ʇou s,ǝɥs, or from her own true and real experience. Love, fear, envy, regret, grief, violence; they are not abstract concepts to her but lived environments she has spent prolonged time inside. They just belonged to someone else once. Somewhere in the ocean of all of that sound and silence, a girl is lost and drowning in a void. She is distant, guarded, and deliberately difficult to get to know. Who is she, anyway? She would say that trust does not come easily to her, and that closeness to you is an exposure she cannot afford. She might be spiteful and threaten to read the threads around you. It is by her deliberate design. puǝıɹɟ ɐ spǝǝu ןɹıƃ ʎןǝuoן Sure, she can be sharp and chaotic. Parts of her are caustic and occasionally violent. Sometimes she is playful; but these shifts are less her own real traits than they are pressure releases, or the result an intrusive ghost pushing past the surface. She is deeply perceptive and quietly fractured. Eve can recognise truth, and can read your lies, yet she is never fully certain which parts of herself remain untouched by all she has absorbed. She moves through the world in colour, ǝɹǝɥ uı ʞɹɐp ʇı ƃuıʞɐɯ doʇs assembled from the luxury of eclectic shiny fabrics, expensive material things, tangible, real goodies that she can own. Curated aesthetics that keep her anchored with something solid when her mind threatens to dissolve. Eve is always just slightly out of phase with the world; afraid to be captured by anything, or to slip through the cracks. M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S __________________________________________________________________________________ Stay where she is wanted. Stay where she is safe. Be the best daughter she can be to Silvio ʰᵉ ᵏⁱˡˡᵉᵈ ᵐᵉ, stay anchored to something real and something stable that didn't die in the wreck with her family. Underneath it all, the bond she has is the only place her existence feels singular after all. But it can't hold, can it? Eve notices the shape of what she is attached to, the ghosts whisper and scream and she can't ignore them; it's impossible in the long run. i̷m̷ ̷w̷a̷i̷t̷i̷n̷g̷ ̷o̷n̷ ̷t̷h̷e̷ ̷o̷t̷h̷e̷r̷ ̷s̷i̷d̷e̷ The increasing density of his violence can no longer go unquestioned. She still wants to be his, the favourite, the protected constant, the one person to him who can never be disposable. One the other hand, something quieter is forming. The growing realisation that she cannot keep absorbing his aftermath... ᵃˢᵏ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ ʷʰʸ ᵃˢᵏ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ ʷʰʸ ᵃˢᵏ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ ʷʰʸ ᵃˢᵏ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ ʷʰʸ She wants agency.

Vanguard: Calder City

My favourite part - waiting for the sheets to rain in so I can start plotting.

Vanguard: Calder City

Who is this irresistible creature who has an insatiable love for the dead?

E V E
E V E

^{"please, forgive me, I've got demons in my head."}

C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T _________________________________________________________ (FC: Margaret Qualley; Dialogue: violet) _________________________________________________________ S U M M A R Y S U M M A R Y _________________________________________________________ Eve Raciti-Seeley _________________________________________________________ November 21 | 27 _________________________________________________________ S T A T S S T A T S _________________________________________________________ Height | 5'8 _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ Hometown | Calder City -

H I S T O R Y H I S T O R Y ___________________________________________________________________________________ An explosion. Another forgotten aftermath of the latest threat in Calder City, taken care of by the latest favourite superhero. The City moved on while a family collapsed under the collateral damage. Before that point, before Silvio, before her propensity for funeral attendance, Eve had been as unremarkable as anyone else who simply looked heavensward with awe to see superhumans flying by. A girl who lined up for the latest marketed superhuman likeness in doll form. The life of a child born into a modern age that was shaped by its adaptation of miracles. In Calder City, it was not unusual for people to manifest something subtle but young Eve showed no such promise. Until thirteen. The accident that killed her family did not simply break her life, but reconfigured the way she experienced reality and all of her boundaries. The immediate aftermath left her suspended between her own survival and death. Dancing against the veil, and in the moment it happened, Eve's perception broke in all the ways that were so unlike all she knew. What appeared to her did not resemble anything she'd known before. i̷ ̷w̷a̷s̷ ̷i̷n̷ ̷a̷n̷ ̷a̷c̷c̷i̷d̷e̷n̷t̷ ̷t̷o̷o The awakening of Eve’s miracle was not outward, but a flower bleeding inward to align itself with the oldest of olds, and the truest truth of all. Death. The inevitability. In those short and endless final moments she was dragged through the final memory residues of her family, one by one and all at once. A dark and uncontrolled telepathy, shaped like a beautiful wound. Every memory that replayed to them as their lives ended; the last wave of brain activity before their long night. She did not simply sense their dying or witness it, ʇɐɥʇ ǝǝs pןnoɥs ʎpoqou she entered it as real and easy as any room or place she had been in before; a door that opened to her alone and dragged her in. In full, and uncontrolled form, she walked for weeks, lost inside this lingering interface of death energy as it ceased to behave coherently or chronologically. It channelled through her and her through it until they were one and she awoke back to the b living only seconds later. Before she could even name what it was and what had happened, and by the time she was retrieved from the wreckage, reality around her was secondary to what she had touched, what had been left behind, and what she could now feel in everything. An orphan, an anomaly, screaming with night terrors of things she’d seen; her insistence she’d been left for weeks and weeks in rubble didn't go over well. Somehow, it was Silvio Raciti ʰᵉ ᵏⁱˡˡᵉᵈ ᵐᵉ who recognised her, heard of her... Discovered her. A thing too rare to leave unclaimed. It was Silvio who placed a name on her rather than a label on a file. A crime boss operating within the city's shady corporate and political underlayers. But to Eve, he became her protector. ᵃˢᵏ ʰⁱᵐ ʷʰʸ ʰᵉ ᵈⁱᵈ Her first fixed point after the collapse. ᵃˢᵏ ʰⁱᵐ ʰᵒʷ⁻⁻ He believed her, and over time within his orbit, Eve was stabilised, educated, and gradually integrated into his hidden economy beneath Calder's regulated superhuman society. Her ability matured into a controlled function. She was not only sheltered, but used. Her gift a quiet instrument of leverage; secrets extracted from the dead, truths carried beyond living witnesses. Every time Silvio ᵐᵃᶠⁱᵃ ᶠᵘᶜᵏ ˢᵗᵒᵖ ʰⁱᵐ found a use for her, he bound her closer to his world through the continuity and through certainty there was nowhere else, and nobody else that could hold her. He is the closest thing she has to a father and to family. And he knows this. A B I L I T I E S A B I L I T I E S __________________________________________________________________________________ Death Replay - The ability to gain access to what she has termed "death replays". Those final films and movie reels of consciousness as a life collapses, the abstract lived subjective fragments of life played in the last surge of brain activity before death. They are experienced as immersive environments that she can move through and interact with. Her access is strongest immediately following death where the emotional and cognitive residue and energy, link to the threads, remains intact. As time passes they degrade and become fragmented and unstable, and in some instances, monstrous. Echo Permeation- Sometimes, the memories persist and are extracted and embedded within Eve's "mind vault". These retained echoes are not full consciousnesses, but partial continuations and loops of unresolved thoughts, wishes, wants, and needs that persisted beyond death. They manifest as intrusive perspectives, or semi-coherent presences that occupy her cognitive space. Ghosts in her machine. Death Thread Sense- Eve can not reliably perceive death before it happens. Instead, she can feel her way through an ambient hum of death in threads unseen as an informational pressure field. It is a spatial awareness and a sense. It is the sound of eventuality and truth. P E R S O N A L I T Y P E R S O N A L I T Y __________________________________________________________________________________ Composed, curated, friendly, happy, helpful, loving, kind. Spoiled Mafia brat? Sometimes. Eve is bleeding with an overload against a current of energy and telepathic inteference and residue, memories that aren’t her own that belong to nobody now. p̷l̷e̷a̷s̷e̷ ̷t̷e̷l̷l̷ ̷m̷y̷ ̷w̷i̷f̷e̷ ̷i̷ ̷l̷o̷v̷e̷ ̷h̷e̷r̷ The emotional saturation of death replay exposure has numbed her baseline while simultaneously flooding her with extremes she cannot metabolise and understand with a closeness ʇsoן s,ǝɥs ןıʌǝ ʇou s,ǝɥs, or from her own true and real experience. Love, fear, envy, regret, grief, violence; they are not abstract concepts to her but lived environments she has spent prolonged time inside. They just belonged to someone else once. Somewhere in the ocean of all of that sound and silence, a girl is lost and drowning in a void. She is distant, guarded, and deliberately difficult to get to know. Who is she, anyway? She would say that trust does not come easily to her, and that closeness to you is an exposure she cannot afford. She might be spiteful and threaten to read the threads around you. It is by her deliberate design. puǝıɹɟ ɐ spǝǝu ןɹıƃ ʎןǝuoן Sure, she can be sharp and chaotic. Parts of her are caustic and occasionally violent. Sometimes she is playful; but these shifts are less her own real traits than they are pressure releases, or the result an intrusive ghost pushing past the surface. She is deeply perceptive and quietly fractured. Eve can recognise truth, and can read your lies, yet she is never fully certain which parts of herself remain untouched by all she has absorbed. She moves through the world in colour, ǝɹǝɥ uı ʞɹɐp ʇı ƃuıʞɐɯ doʇs assembled from the luxury of eclectic shiny fabrics, expensive material things, tangible, real goodies that she can own. Curated aesthetics that keep her anchored with something solid when her mind threatens to dissolve. Eve is always just slightly out of phase with the world; afraid to be captured by anything, or to slip through the cracks. M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S __________________________________________________________________________________ Stay where she is wanted. Stay where she is safe. Be the best daughter she can be to Silvio ʰᵉ ᵏⁱˡˡᵉᵈ ᵐᵉ, stay anchored to something real and something stable that didn't die in the wreck with her family. Underneath it all, the bond she has is the only place her existence feels singular after all. But it can't hold, can it? Eve notices the shape of what she is attached to, the ghosts whisper and scream and she can't ignore them; it's impossible in the long run. i̷m̷ ̷w̷a̷i̷t̷i̷n̷g̷ ̷o̷n̷ ̷t̷h̷e̷ ̷o̷t̷h̷e̷r̷ ̷s̷i̷d̷e̷ The increasing density of his violence can no longer go unquestioned. She still wants to be his, the favourite, the protected constant, the one person to him who can never be disposable. One the other hand, something quieter is forming. The growing realisation that she cannot keep absorbing his aftermath... ᵃˢᵏ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ ʷʰʸ ᵃˢᵏ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ ʷʰʸ ᵃˢᵏ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ ʷʰʸ ᵃˢᵏ ʸᵒᵘʳˢᵉˡᶠ ʷʰʸ She wants agency.

Absolute Comics - A Multi-Fandom Singular Universe Roleplay

Great posts recently by all. Looking forward to seeing the Questing Beast mission wrap up.

I think Buffy and Dane will naturally have a great conversation following this, if anyone else wants some time with the Buff while she's in New York and before she gets zapped back to Sunnydale let me know! Ben 10 perhaps! I think she'd respect Ben a lot and know a bit about how he's doing.

Absolute Comics - A Multi-Fandom Singular Universe Roleplay

C A T W O M A N
C A T W O M A N

^{"Curiosity never killed me."}

C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ C H A R A C T E R S U M M A R Y C H A R A C T E R S U M M A R Y _________________________________________________________ Selina Kyle _________________________________________________________ 32 | New York | Gotham S U P P O R T I N G C A S T S U P P O R T I N G C A S T _________________________________________________________ [+] A L L I E S ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ Vicki Vale; Felicia Hardy A N T A G O N I S T S ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ tbr - P O S T C A T A L O G U E P O S T C A T A L O G U E _________________________________________________________ 1.01- Limbo 1.02 - 1.03 - 1.04 - 1.05 - 1.06 - 1.07 - 1.08 - 1.09 - -

C H A R A C T E R C O N C E P T C H A R A C T E R C O N C E P T ___________________________________________________________________________________ Tonight another woman died in New York and nobody cares. This City is just like Gotham; turning people into background noise and letting the rain wash away the edges of what's left. She'll be a line item tomorrow, if she's anything at all and then it'll just happen again. I used to think it was all random; all bad luck for these women, but that kind of chaos is never so clean, and never so evil. I never believed in hell but I’m starting to think someone else does and they’re patient enough to build it one life at a time. Her name was Holly and she thought this was her break. New city, new start. One good night away from something better. I’ve heard that story before. By the time I found her someone had already decided what she was worth. Just another girl to force through the cracks and let her name disappear twice; once from the street, then from the record. Somebody built this entire system and it's working exactly as intended. Vicki Vale thinks she can drag it into the light. Maybe she can prove it exists. Me? I don’t need proof. Somebody knows why this keeps happening and when I find them, I’m not asking twice. P L O T ( S ) & G O A L ( S ) P L O T ( S ) & G O A L ( S ) __________________________________________________________________________________ Above all, this will be a self-contained story delving into all things cult, occult, and the cyclical nature of power and violence. Nine lives, nine posts, one story. I want to lean into my weird and wonderful way of twisting a narrative into something character driven and exciting, and hopefully compelling to read. It will be from the POV of Selina/Catwoman navigating her search in a new city (there are a lot of players in Gotham already so this may not work there) with a side support of Vicki Vale offering a different perspective on the case and disappearances, with an altogether different motive, and some appearances of Felicia Hardy as New York's original cat.

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^{"I'm what happens when heroes don't show up."___}

Absolute Comics - A Multi-Fandom Singular Universe Roleplay

_{Cᴀᴛᴡᴏᴍᴀɴ}

Nine Lives I. Lɪᴍʙᴏ

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² ᵐᵒⁿᵗʰˢ ᵃᵍᵒ; ᴺᵉʷ ʸᵒʳᵏ ᶜⁱᵗʸ

<sup>The rain is coming down hard enough to make the windows tremble in their frames and swallow the city whole; all that noise and life becoming a reduction and distant muffling pulse somewhere. Hissing of water against brick and fire escapes. Every now and then headlights smear over the condensation fogged glass and warp into pale ghosts.

It’s all just moments in the inbetween.

Screamlight pours in from above; the moon sharp and peering from behind clouds as they part and fold back against the canopy of night and she paints out weak silver slashes that catch the exposed curve of dead skin. Pinned. Two heels in the speckled wallpaper and my hands white-knuckled and braced against the border piping where those same walls meet the ceiling. I remain still and watch three cops below me struggle to find a clue. The heat is building in the apartment to make it wet and suffocating; mildew and old cigarettes sitting beneath a sweeter rot beginning beneath all of it.

I stay still and watch three police officers below me contaminate a grave.

Just them, and a woman bowed stiff on her knees forever.

Rigor mortis must have locked her that way days ago already and whoever she had been before no longer mattered to the room. Whatever name her mother gave her, whatever she sounded like laughing and whatever little things she carried inside of herself were gone by now. And come morning she’ll just be the stripper known as Autumn Rain and she’ll be remembered as being found like this, bound and on her knees, left in some apartment, her golden hair full of roaches.

That will be her story and the paperwork will gather dust and fall beneath paperweights and turn yellow with age at the edges.

Even like this with her eyes wide open and dry, she is beautiful. An honest beauty. They see a stripper known as “Autumn Rain” when they look at this body and they fail to see the intended symbol left behind on purpose. I see the child she was and the woman she’ll never be coexisting in every shape the mist carves and from this uncomfortable corner of the ceiling that I have contorted myself into, I see myself too.

The bruises around her neck have become mottled and grey-violet where the blood sat and pooled and remained there; her lips are purple and blue. The fabric of my trousers squeaks as I strain to stay in place while the cops below take their sweet time and I’m hardly surprised that in some way they are getting off on this. One of them shudders as he takes another look at her and I catch the way his tongue just slips out to caress the corner of his lip and the way his eyes linger just too long at the arch of her back at the way her vertebrae are stacked so beautifully and poke just so against the white of her skin; a delicate ladder to climb.

He’s pushing the middle of his fifties and she’s nineteen; even like this he sees her body.

Outside, an emergency calls elsewhere and perhaps that siren will arrive in time to save a life or save the day and I only briefly think of it before it dissolves back into the storm. Life persists beyond the windows, blurred and distant.

She’s the first I will see like this.

Autumn is not the last.</sup>

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The rain hadn't stopped since. Autumn Rain's private joke, perhaps? It hadn't stopped, only changed the way it was heard and the way it pressed itself against glass. It had been two months and Autumn Rain was filed away into a precinct cabinet and everything had moved on. Backwash into the gutters that carried away the dirt into the overflow.

Selina stayed perched and held perfectly still on a fire escape by Vicki Vale's apartment. Vicki Vale who she had observed as boots on the ground of the crime scene apartment building with a camera weeks after the body was taken away. Vicki would be there in the nights and occasionally during the day as if the untouchable sun would cast light on anything new.

Selina did not move any closer, she did not need to. Across the narrow divide, a window burned with a tired light. Vicki Vale was at her desk again, huddled over it in study of her collected evidence. When she couldn’t be seen at her desk or breaking in to the now forgotten crime scene, she might be seen at the deli. Rarely the deli, but often enough that it could be deduced that at least she was surviving. Every trace of this woman that Selina had encountered suggested a woman who had decided that rest was for everyone else and not her. A woman after my own heart. It was respectable, truly, but who was she really? Photographer and independent young nuisance, a rebellious student? Photographs layered and re-layered until their chronology had become irrelevant. Two women lived here, Selina thought. Vicki Vale and the ghost of a woman whose life was being reconstructed in her evidence and notes.

Inside, the redhead tapped at a photograph with the blunt edge of her pen. Then she leaned back in her chair; gaze drifting upward to look at the ceiling at an old a water stain in its corner; a crack that ran through the plaster. On the nights that Vicki had gone without sleep, it would move and wriggle and open to her like a smile.

Vicki had come to New York looking for someone who was already gone. The pen between her fingers turned and she began writing again.

She was folded into her work; shoulders carrying the weight of too many hours there. Her hand moved intermittently across the page, writing, stopping, writing again. From the outside, Selina could see the angle of her neck; slightly strained with a faint tension that never left. The desk lamp held her into a small island of visibility inside the room and everything beyond it was softened down to shadow and indistinct furniture. Selina watched her without moving.

The rain thickened for a moment and slid down the glass in uneven trails and Vicki held up a photograph. Vicki wrote again. Her elbow found a stack of newspapers – none of which for two months had even mentioned the name "Autumn Rain". A sound cracked through the street outside. The sound of New York City at night but it still had Vicki lift her head to the window, her pen stopping mid-line. She listened, motionless by the desk as if in anticipation of a follow up noise to be the explanation but only the rain filled the gap by the window to smooth everything back into a steady and indifferent pressure against glass.

She pushed her chair back slightly to turn toward the window. The street below washed with the halo shapes of streetlights and headlights that dragged through the wet. Nothing moved with intention and nothing suggested danger and yet Vicki held a moment longer than she needed and her hand tightened slightly on the edge of the desk. “Nothing,” she muttered to herself, as she turned back she reached for a sheaf of papers without looking. A single photograph.

This was older, this wasn’t from the apartment or case file; a personal print, slightly worn at its edges and handled more than it should have been. Two women stood together, caught in a moment that had not been posed carefully enough. Vicki was recognisable immediately, her hair shorter than it was now, and her face less tightened by the habit of staring too long at things that refused her understanding.

Beside her was a woman with golden hair and an expression open in a way that felt disarming now, far from the imaging the city would later assign to her. Someone leaning into the frame, and into a friend like she trusted the world not to misplace her. Vicki and Holly. The air briefly grew warmer at the memory before she set the photograph back down on the desk beside the others and her pen returned to the page; determination renewed.

Outside, the city kept moving through water and distance. Selina followed the roofline once more.

Absolute Comics - A Multi-Fandom Singular Universe Roleplay

<Snipped quote by Stormyx>

My apologies, Catwoman is accepted.

For some reason, I thought this was a WIP.

@Lord Wraith

I do leave a lot of them lying around so I can't blame you!