(no subject)
AU (Alternate Universe) Character Application
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Joysweeper
LJ: joysweeper
AGE: 21
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Juhani, Mindelan/Keladry of Mindelan
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Janine Farehouse
SERIES: The original Dinoverse novel, with a sprinkling of the screenplay version.
PERSONALITY: Janine is thirteen years old and a rebel, with very slight Goth tendencies. Like just about all thirteen-year-olds, she’s pretty self-centered, taking some pleasure in the certainty that no one understands her. Her self-isolation can go quite far. For a while, she tried to give up her human identity and the way back to her old life.
In the middle school she attended, she was ostracized and embraced it - it hurt, but she never showed it, and in fact actively worked to keep this distance. She’d encourage other kids who saw themselves as outcasts, but always kept her distance. Tormentors and tormented alike got the brunt of a penetrating stare, but while this unnerved everyone the tormented didn’t mind that much.
She doesn’t like the thought of being one of the masses. By the point I’m taking her from she’s more likely to try to make positive connections with people than at the novel’s start, not disdaining them like she used to, and she isn’t quite as reluctant to rely on others. Even so, she still holds herself a little apart and tries to seem a bit remote, above it all. Trusting people to be there in a pinch isn’t something she’ll do easily.
Not that she can always hold the distant air. She can panic and beg for help like anyone else - but by the same token, her emotions can suddenly cut off mid panic, letting her observe and act. Of course, if she still can’t see a course of action, this calm will vanish in a flash.
She’s insulting to people who have wronged her and a bit aloof from others. While certainly not striving as hard to be moral and do the right thing as my other characters, and while being self-absorbed does blind her to some of the hurt she does, she regrets that hurt when it’s brought to her attention and then tries to make up for it. And she’ll risk her life for someone who’s done the same for her. Plus, she does genuinely want to help anyone feeling distressed and people having difficulty in general - even if it’s someone she seriously dislikes and who has wronged her. Although in that case there’s a definite vindictive edge.
She’s got a nasty, vindictive side, but feels ashamed of it when the situation’s serious. People who haven’t hurt her are subjected to fairly mild sarcasm at the most. She’s learned some tact. Nastier things come to mind and aren’t said, usually. She rubs it in a little when she’s right.
Janine is practical. “I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want to talk about this. It doesn’t do us any good. We know what’s at stake. What we have to figure out is what’s our first move,” she says once. She adjusts to changes, even radical ones, very quickly - or seems to. It’s true to some extent, but she also hates to let anyone see anything more personal than momentary panic or disgust.
When she makes friends with a real Quetzalcoatlus who’s honestly something of a troll, she loves the teasing he does except when she thinks it’s done to creatures that don’t deserve it, like a random herd of Parasaurolophus. That, she stops. She does very little trolling herself, though she’s not above scribbling on someone while they sleep.
The mind of her host, the Quetzalcoatlus whose body she’s in, is buried in her own mind, but it’s quite passive, offering little more than a general set of guiding instincts and paranoia about situations lethal to the species. These include deep water and waterfalls. And it makes her quite interested in small animals running underfoot. She can override it with some concentration. It’s a moderately bright animal, that’s all.
TIMELINE: Just before returning to her own time. So yes, she’s a Quetzalcoatlus.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND:
(One detail that fits nowhere else: The science fair takes place in the present as of publishing time, 1999. AU details are the order of the pre-science fair events and some elaboration about her relationship with her family.)
Janine had a large, eccentric extended family, but the only one she ever felt close to was her dad. He died overseas when she was in third grade, and she felt that she had to be strong to hold her mother together. She felt like her father had let her down by not coming back, even knowing it hadn’t been intentional.
In fourth grade, she moved to a new school and tried to make a good impression on the girls her own age. Candayce opened up an ink pen all over her. This was made worse in sixth grade, when her best friend decided she would rather be popular and beat up, then publically rejected Janine - then came to her in private and told her it didn’t mean anything, she’d just done it to impress Candayce, and they could still be friends if it was where no one could see.
After that she became more distant. Some kids were actually afraid of her, a little. She couldn’t be controlled. She announced her presence by swinging her keychain.
Janine projected coolness and distance, giving everyone the impression that she didn’t care what anyone thought, but she felt like someone other people had no use for. Most of her time was spent at school, at home - her mother ran a bed and breakfast, which is where they lived - or getting into trouble.
She turned to vandalism. Mostly this meant spraypainting graffiti, but she did a few other things too, like putting bubblebath in fountains and pulling fire alarms. Janine loved both the feeling of risking being caught and the idea that bare walls were calling out for adornment. She thought she was doing it all anonymously, or at most that people suspected but couldn’t prove it was her.
Really they knew, but her mother intercepted all the trouble that came at her for that, working late to pay for the damages. She was afraid of confronting Janine and possibly driving a wedge between them; their relationship wasn’t that great. In part this was of course because Janine was a rebellious teenager. Her mother worried that she’d run away, and didn’t know what to say - she was thirty years older and not very demonstrative.
It didn’t help that Janine resented her mother for not being around - she had to go out to keep Janine from getting busted - meaning that Janine had to miss school and work in the bed-and-breakfast, housekeeping. Janine did the work instead of skipping, but hated it.
Once, in the car with an older cousin, a tire had a blowout and they would have had a head-on collision with a truck if she hadn’t had the sudden presence of mind to seize the wheel.
There was a school science fair in eighth grade which she delayed a little by pulling the fire alarm. During it, Bertram - the geek boy - introduced his M.I.N.D. Machine, a “Memory INterpreter Device” designed to display preselected images off a CD when hooked up to someone’s head, though he presented it as showing people’s dreams and rigged up a lot of trash from electronics stores to make it look impressive.
Through a freak accident of plot devices and technobabble, it cast his consciousness and those of three other kids, including Janine, into the Cretaceous Period.
Their minds ended up in the bodies of four different major prehistoric creatures - the geek Bertram, an Ankylosaurus; the pretty girl Candayce, a Leptoceratops; the jock Mike, a Tyrannosaurus Rex; and Janine, a young Quetzalcoatlus.
While falling into the sea, Janine managed to calm enough to find her host’s buried consciousness and bring it up enough to turn a dead fall into a glide into the water, though that consciousness went passive after that, leaving her unable to fly. Another Quetzalcoatlus distracted a sea predator for long enough to let her swim to shore and join the other three.
They regrouped and received a message from the distant future telling them part of what they needed to do to get home. It involved having to travel to a particular place with a particular set of standing stones. Janine cut the general semipanic short by announcing that first, everyone needed to eat. She went fishing with Mike, deciding that she wanted to help him with his personal problems - hostility about one person, guilt about another - as she did.
A bit later on, when the group had stopped to rest for the night, she recreated her signature ringing key chain out of shells pierced and knotted with vine. She came to Bertram’s defense after Candayce broke a shell and blamed him - then helped Candayce make the shell bikini she’d been trying to put together.
Later, she was a little resentful about the suggestion that it was she who should find where Candayce had gone in the early morning, until Mike said that she was the one Candayce wouldn’t argue with - that Candayce was afraid of her. She helped Candayce tie her shells back on, knowing that they’d been cut off by Janine’s native quetzalcoatlus friend, which she’d named Loki.
When she noticed that Bertram wasn’t eating, she knew why - his ankylosaurus body produced a lot of flatulence. Alternating light teasing with common sense, she coaxed him into eating anyway. They’d never make it if he starved to death.
She was annoyed enough when Candayce started continuously complaining about the smell that she snapped the other girl’s bikini, ran away with it, and hurled it off a cliff. She talked Candayce out of charging her by accusing her of acting like a butt-faced dinosaur, then told her to lay off Bertram, since he had a crush on her. Candayce found this hilarious, which infuriated Janine, but before she could do anything, more Leptoceratopsians came and chased her away, then took Candayce with them.
Janine redoubled her efforts to learn to fly, loving the feeling of freedom and peace she got even in a moment’s glide. It was like her desire to sneak out and go tagging, but greater - the feeling that she was where she belonged and doing what was natural to her. Loki demonstrated, and she finally managed to glide well - and then felt curiously distant from the other kids, and flew away while they were tracking Candayce. She went cold and guided Bertram and Mike to Candayce - and then left with Loki, dropping her makeshift keychain on the ground with “GOOD LUCK” and “GOOD BYE” written on two of the shells.
She flew with him for two days, considering herself not human anymore, feeling a little panic whenever Loki wasn’t near her - he was all she had, and she needed him. For a while she felt at home, at peace, and like none of the problems she’d worried so much about before could bother her now. She made a nest in a cave, decorated it with flowers crushed into paste, and eventually started questioning her choice. Absolute freedom meant no civilization or the company of anyone who could speak, and life was dangerous even to a careful flyer.
Candayce came back for her and was nearly stampeded by some Triceratops, and Janine immediately tried to help by teasing one to veer away from her, though she was knocked down in the process. She was incredibly bitchy when Candayce was concerned, and only grudgingly agreed to help the others. On the way back, though, she was nearly struck by lightning and hurt her wing landing. Loki stopped following her, and she and Candayce had an angry, then just generally emotional heart-to-heart in which it came out that Janine’s mom knew what her daughter had been doing, that it was hurting her.
After that, the bitterness between them eased, though they still sniped at each other. While trying to find their way back, Candayce took an opportunity to try to save some Triceratops eggs which had been endangered in an earthquake. Janine joined her and managed to snap a dislocated wing bone back into place in the process. She could fly again, but not very far. Loki came back.
They got back to the others and resumed travel, Janine still more or less believing she’d prefer to stay behind. A lucky flash flood washed the others closer to their destination; Janine glided above it. Later she went to scout out the place which they were supposed to reach, and found no standing stones. She waited out the night on that plateau with Loki, then flew back.
She thought this might not be the right place, that she should scout for others like it, but was overruled. During that time she revealed her belief that life is random, and everything comes down to chance. When they reached the site and she landed, an image of the M.I.N.D. Machine appeared - and a larger Tyrannosaurus which had been stalking them grabbed her, and flung her off a cliff. She glided to safety and collapsed, then got hit by some falling rocks. Somehow she wasn’t really hurt by any of that and was able to get back to the top of the plateau.
Loki went and tapped beaks with her, and she had a very sudden realization that she did want to go back to her old life, after all. The Quetzalcoatlus she was inhabiting would live out her own life with him. Bertram then realized that they didn’t have to find a place with the specific standing stones, they had to carve those stones, and Janine gave directions and chiseled them. Then, surreptitiously, she scratched “WAS HERE” into one of them - and went with the others.
But in the instant before the machine’s energy could pull her out of the pterosaur’s body and through time, back to her own…
ABILITIES:
Janine is in the body of a Quetzalcoatlus, a prehistoric reptile that can alternately be described as a stork the size and shape of a giraffe, or as one of the largest flying animals that ever lived, though she’s significantly smaller than the largest of her species.
First, a bit on size and proportions. This is a good image - she’s not as big as the Nothropi, but she’s a little larger than the blue unnamed species. She’s got a disproportionately long neck and beak and a wingspan of twenty-one feet. When on all fours her shoulder is about six feet off the ground; if she raises her head as high as possible her eye level’s about twelve feet off the ground. She can also walk on two legs, which makes her even taller and frees her hands but is vastly more awkward.
Several abilities come with that.
The first is, of course, flight. She can launch herself off a cliff or fall from a height to catch enough air, or she can unlock the ability to go airborne from a cold start by “jumping” with her wingarms. It’s not so much a supernatural ability as one that really wouldn’t occur to her easily, just like in canon, though it’s clearly possible - the other Quetzalcoatlus does it, and near the end she does too.
She can also sense air currents. Somehow. She just knows if there’s a breeze or thermal and which way it’s going, even if she’s not directly in it.
For whatever reason, she’s slightly anthropomorphic - she can cry like a human can. One claw on each wing is opposable, the fingers there are more finger than claw, and they’re dextrous enough to manipulate objects, though not as well as a human hand. They look not unlike these, awkward placement and all. She can hold a spray can in one hand, but she can’t take a grip and spray one-handed.
She can climb on all fours up or down a steep dirt cliff, and even hang by her feet from it. Janine can trawl for fish, skimming the water and catching them in her beak, or she can stand and pluck fish from shallows and small animals from the land. This means she can see the tip of her beak and has sharp binocular vision, plus a good degree of coordination, which is also demonstrated by her ability to carve stone with it and her claws.
Some disadvantages come with that too. Her wings aren’t leathery - they’ve got thin layers of muscle, blood vessels, interwoven fibers, and an embedded air-filled layer - but they’re still less than a centimeter thick. She’s got hollow bones and is lighter than a land creature of the same size, even if she’s still robust and weighs four hundred pounds. So while she’s not as fragile as the general public image of a pterosaur suggests, she’s fairly delicate for something of her size, and someone with a knife could easily inflict very serious injuries.
And it’s a big size. She can’t quite fit through a normal doorway. If she is inside and the ceiling isn’t ten feet up, she has to keep her head and neck lowered, and she definitely can’t stand on her hind legs. Her metabolism is high enough that she has to eat often, and the Quetzalcoatlus suppressed in her mind sees a lot of small animals as food. Her dexterity is limited, and while she’s covered in an analogue to fur, very cold weather gives her a great deal of trouble. Can’t exactly bundle up.
There are also abilities brought on by being projected into another creature’s body. In the book the way this is explained seems to say that they should only work on other projected people, but then it’s shown working on all kinds of dinosaurs and other creatures.
She can’t speak anything like human language, but fortunately she has one-way telepathy which sounds like human speech. Janine habitually opens her beak and vocalizes while doing it - she can be silent when speaking, or she can purely vocalize, but when she’s not making any effort she does both. The speech is “louder” than the vocalizations unless it’s a shriek or scream. She can consciously modulate it to sound older, but by and large it indicates her true age.
Like the other three, she can’t just project speech - also music and sound effects, even other voices, as long as they’re clearly remembered. These map almost perfectly to sound, and they do require some slight effort. An earworm won’t be heard by people in her vicinity unless she wants it to.
Another ability is a sort of short-range empathy, feeling someone else’s emotions like they’re her own - in fact, she has to consider how she’s been feeling to tell if they’re hers or not. She can also project, but this is more of an effort and doesn’t feel, to the receiver, like their own feeling.
A third ability, tightly connected to the second, is only available at the very shortest range, when she’s touching or almost touching someone. She can share basic images - Candayce impresses a Triceratops with the idea that she needs him to move to a certain position and hold still so that she can rescue its eggs, and she and Janine traded wordless ideas about how to do it.
Lastly, the abilities she had as a human:
She’s got art skills beyond just graffiti. Janine’s also competent at carving sculpture and painting, and general crafting.
Other eighth graders think of her as having a “soul piercing” stare which she’ll direct at them. Some hate it; one feels like she’s seeing into him and understanding. This is just their perception, really. Her stare is certainly penetrating, but what she sees is what she already knows - this person is petty and unpleasant, this one’s kind of pathetic but sweet, everyone has some ulterior motives - and people assume her reaction to being laid bare. She doesn’t do that all the time. There seems to be some kind of technique to it.
Finally, Janine has a bit of a trick memory. She tends to remember some very random trivia. She knows the scientific name of a particular Cretaceous-era tree, can similarly identify a number of other prehistoric creatures, and that an ankylosaur’s digestive system produces a lot of gas - but she doesn’t think of herself as particularly knowledgeable about dinosaurs and doesn’t know quite what she, a famous pterosaur, is, or what Candayce had turned into.
- Which is just bad writing. But it can be excused by saying that her memory’s a bit odd. She sees a lot of things, and some random facts will be retained very well, others will be forgotten normally. Janine would be quite inconsistent at Trivial Pursuit.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Above
BIRTHDAY LOG: Yes. Dude, you’d think those squirrels would be bored of me by now. You think it might be serious? They're nuts.
DREAM:
She was walking home when she saw the wall and stopped to look it over. It was a fine smooth stretch of concrete, completely bare and smooth and bright in the afternoon sun. Brand new, she thought, swinging her keychain so it chinked.
It was calling her, all bare and new like that. Like an untouched canvass. She wasn’t supposed to do this, but who would be hurt? Who would know it was her? There was even a little breeze to keep the fumes down, and no one would miss her if she spent time here. No one would miss her at all.
Frankly, her life was old tapes. It wasn’t worth getting upset about. Better to erase them for something new.
She smiled to herself, a little bitterly, and took off her backpack. This would be fun.
She broke out and uncapped both big cannons, her German Fat Cap and the Magnum 44 black, and started the fill, blackening as much of the surface as she could cover, then finding a trash can, upending it, and standing on it to reach higher. She was barely a teenager and short for her age, and she hated that blank space above what she could reach on her own. It told everyone that the tagger was just a kid.
The fumes swirled around her. She covered as much as she could, coughing once or twice, and backed up to survey it. Much of the wall was now a black going from glossy to matte as it dried, with some paint dribbling down and an edge of pale unmarked concrete above and to both sides of the whole.
She put the big ones away, raked her lank black hair back with one hand, and started in with her Monstercolors, the vivid ones made overseas just for tagging. Ultramarine and Atlantis Blue, Flesh 4 and Saturn Red, and all the others.
There was nothing in all the world better than doing this, the thrill of putting her mark out on something, of doing something she knew was illegal and could be caught doing. But she wouldn’t be. She never was. Being truly anonymous, not having to worry about what anyone thought, or anything but the paint… She was happy.
She sang quietly to herself as she worked, her voice hardly louder than the hiss of the spray.
“Little wing, broken wing, fly in your heart, soar in your soul, believe that all things are possible, and you will be made whole…”
Eventually she pulled back again and surveyed her work. Went up again to correct a little detail here or there. All in all - she liked it. It was a real burner. Something that would catch the eye from clear across the street, maybe further. It seemed to stand out from the wall.
It was abstract, of course, an interwoven tangle of illegible shapes which might have started life as words or a repeated phrase. Most of it was red and black and blue, but there were little jags of other colors to make it interesting. Something about the shape of the whole thing managed to suggest something winged, with a long neck or tail. Maybe a bird. Maybe just an umbrella or a gingko leaf.
Not bad. There was just one thing left to do. She capped all of her spray cans and brought her key chain out of her jeans pocket, glancing in passing at the steel wolf’s head of the key ring. Then, before the top layer of paint was truly dry, she leaned in and carved her tag in the corner. Not her name. She wasn’t stupid.
Her tag. It was a little like an arrow pointing up, a little like something winged. Flicking the paint off of the key she’d used, she backed up one final time and looked at the piece.
Funny, she hadn’t thought of it like that before. Not when she’d been painting it, not when she’d pulled back to see the whole thing at once. There was a bit of an illusion of movement to it. But it was almost like the vague bird shape wasn’t flying so much as falling towards her, or she towards it.
JOURNAL SAMPLE:
[The writing’s in what looks like marker. She’s got a really fat marker in hand, but since her journal is larger than normal, the script looks like it’s written in a more standard-sized marker, and it’s only a little larger than usual. The writing itself is a little clumsy and awkward. It would seem to be in all caps except that capital letters are definitely taller than the others.]
That’s some tree. Is this really an oak? Does it start dropping giant acorns?
So. I’m Above, and I think I had the wrong dream.
[There’s a pause and some blotches. Hard to tell if they’re false starts or pentaps.]
I’m hoping clothing’s not mandatory here, because they don’t make anything my size. You’re all either tiny or I’m a lot bigger than I thought. It’s weird.
I’m probably bigger. Anyone have a tape measure?
[She puts her tag at the end, the arrowlike shape from her dream.]
ASPIRATIONS: I was hit by powerful nostalgia for this book, and specifically this character. I like Janine, self-absorbed but goodhearted minor delinquent-turned-giant-flyer that she is, and I liked her character arc. The desire she had to leave her human life behind and embrace Quetzalcoatlus-hood, the mixing of childish and young adult traits, her sense of isolation… As a human that isolation is due to a vicious cycle of being teased, hardening inside, and then both rejecting and being rejected by others. I’d like to play with that.
She’s fairly mature for thirteen, but she is thirteen, and self-centered and stubborn in their way. Most of my characters are mentally in their twenties at the least, usually older. I’d like to try playing someone younger.
This would also be one of the few characters I’ve considered who would have difficulty finding a job - because of her shape, really. If she was human she’d end up in Housekeeping and doing a pretty good job at it, complaining now and then but being competent. There are limited options available, and I actually think that for a while she wouldn't take a job, just live off fish.
And she is a Quetzalcoatlus, and I love those things. Seriously. They’re huge and fascinating and awesome.
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Joysweeper
LJ: joysweeper
AGE: 21
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Juhani, Mindelan/Keladry of Mindelan
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Janine Farehouse
SERIES: The original Dinoverse novel, with a sprinkling of the screenplay version.
PERSONALITY: Janine is thirteen years old and a rebel, with very slight Goth tendencies. Like just about all thirteen-year-olds, she’s pretty self-centered, taking some pleasure in the certainty that no one understands her. Her self-isolation can go quite far. For a while, she tried to give up her human identity and the way back to her old life.
In the middle school she attended, she was ostracized and embraced it - it hurt, but she never showed it, and in fact actively worked to keep this distance. She’d encourage other kids who saw themselves as outcasts, but always kept her distance. Tormentors and tormented alike got the brunt of a penetrating stare, but while this unnerved everyone the tormented didn’t mind that much.
She doesn’t like the thought of being one of the masses. By the point I’m taking her from she’s more likely to try to make positive connections with people than at the novel’s start, not disdaining them like she used to, and she isn’t quite as reluctant to rely on others. Even so, she still holds herself a little apart and tries to seem a bit remote, above it all. Trusting people to be there in a pinch isn’t something she’ll do easily.
Not that she can always hold the distant air. She can panic and beg for help like anyone else - but by the same token, her emotions can suddenly cut off mid panic, letting her observe and act. Of course, if she still can’t see a course of action, this calm will vanish in a flash.
She’s insulting to people who have wronged her and a bit aloof from others. While certainly not striving as hard to be moral and do the right thing as my other characters, and while being self-absorbed does blind her to some of the hurt she does, she regrets that hurt when it’s brought to her attention and then tries to make up for it. And she’ll risk her life for someone who’s done the same for her. Plus, she does genuinely want to help anyone feeling distressed and people having difficulty in general - even if it’s someone she seriously dislikes and who has wronged her. Although in that case there’s a definite vindictive edge.
She’s got a nasty, vindictive side, but feels ashamed of it when the situation’s serious. People who haven’t hurt her are subjected to fairly mild sarcasm at the most. She’s learned some tact. Nastier things come to mind and aren’t said, usually. She rubs it in a little when she’s right.
Janine is practical. “I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want to talk about this. It doesn’t do us any good. We know what’s at stake. What we have to figure out is what’s our first move,” she says once. She adjusts to changes, even radical ones, very quickly - or seems to. It’s true to some extent, but she also hates to let anyone see anything more personal than momentary panic or disgust.
When she makes friends with a real Quetzalcoatlus who’s honestly something of a troll, she loves the teasing he does except when she thinks it’s done to creatures that don’t deserve it, like a random herd of Parasaurolophus. That, she stops. She does very little trolling herself, though she’s not above scribbling on someone while they sleep.
The mind of her host, the Quetzalcoatlus whose body she’s in, is buried in her own mind, but it’s quite passive, offering little more than a general set of guiding instincts and paranoia about situations lethal to the species. These include deep water and waterfalls. And it makes her quite interested in small animals running underfoot. She can override it with some concentration. It’s a moderately bright animal, that’s all.
TIMELINE: Just before returning to her own time. So yes, she’s a Quetzalcoatlus.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND:
(One detail that fits nowhere else: The science fair takes place in the present as of publishing time, 1999. AU details are the order of the pre-science fair events and some elaboration about her relationship with her family.)
Janine had a large, eccentric extended family, but the only one she ever felt close to was her dad. He died overseas when she was in third grade, and she felt that she had to be strong to hold her mother together. She felt like her father had let her down by not coming back, even knowing it hadn’t been intentional.
In fourth grade, she moved to a new school and tried to make a good impression on the girls her own age. Candayce opened up an ink pen all over her. This was made worse in sixth grade, when her best friend decided she would rather be popular and beat up, then publically rejected Janine - then came to her in private and told her it didn’t mean anything, she’d just done it to impress Candayce, and they could still be friends if it was where no one could see.
After that she became more distant. Some kids were actually afraid of her, a little. She couldn’t be controlled. She announced her presence by swinging her keychain.
Janine projected coolness and distance, giving everyone the impression that she didn’t care what anyone thought, but she felt like someone other people had no use for. Most of her time was spent at school, at home - her mother ran a bed and breakfast, which is where they lived - or getting into trouble.
She turned to vandalism. Mostly this meant spraypainting graffiti, but she did a few other things too, like putting bubblebath in fountains and pulling fire alarms. Janine loved both the feeling of risking being caught and the idea that bare walls were calling out for adornment. She thought she was doing it all anonymously, or at most that people suspected but couldn’t prove it was her.
Really they knew, but her mother intercepted all the trouble that came at her for that, working late to pay for the damages. She was afraid of confronting Janine and possibly driving a wedge between them; their relationship wasn’t that great. In part this was of course because Janine was a rebellious teenager. Her mother worried that she’d run away, and didn’t know what to say - she was thirty years older and not very demonstrative.
It didn’t help that Janine resented her mother for not being around - she had to go out to keep Janine from getting busted - meaning that Janine had to miss school and work in the bed-and-breakfast, housekeeping. Janine did the work instead of skipping, but hated it.
Once, in the car with an older cousin, a tire had a blowout and they would have had a head-on collision with a truck if she hadn’t had the sudden presence of mind to seize the wheel.
There was a school science fair in eighth grade which she delayed a little by pulling the fire alarm. During it, Bertram - the geek boy - introduced his M.I.N.D. Machine, a “Memory INterpreter Device” designed to display preselected images off a CD when hooked up to someone’s head, though he presented it as showing people’s dreams and rigged up a lot of trash from electronics stores to make it look impressive.
Through a freak accident of plot devices and technobabble, it cast his consciousness and those of three other kids, including Janine, into the Cretaceous Period.
Their minds ended up in the bodies of four different major prehistoric creatures - the geek Bertram, an Ankylosaurus; the pretty girl Candayce, a Leptoceratops; the jock Mike, a Tyrannosaurus Rex; and Janine, a young Quetzalcoatlus.
While falling into the sea, Janine managed to calm enough to find her host’s buried consciousness and bring it up enough to turn a dead fall into a glide into the water, though that consciousness went passive after that, leaving her unable to fly. Another Quetzalcoatlus distracted a sea predator for long enough to let her swim to shore and join the other three.
They regrouped and received a message from the distant future telling them part of what they needed to do to get home. It involved having to travel to a particular place with a particular set of standing stones. Janine cut the general semipanic short by announcing that first, everyone needed to eat. She went fishing with Mike, deciding that she wanted to help him with his personal problems - hostility about one person, guilt about another - as she did.
A bit later on, when the group had stopped to rest for the night, she recreated her signature ringing key chain out of shells pierced and knotted with vine. She came to Bertram’s defense after Candayce broke a shell and blamed him - then helped Candayce make the shell bikini she’d been trying to put together.
Later, she was a little resentful about the suggestion that it was she who should find where Candayce had gone in the early morning, until Mike said that she was the one Candayce wouldn’t argue with - that Candayce was afraid of her. She helped Candayce tie her shells back on, knowing that they’d been cut off by Janine’s native quetzalcoatlus friend, which she’d named Loki.
When she noticed that Bertram wasn’t eating, she knew why - his ankylosaurus body produced a lot of flatulence. Alternating light teasing with common sense, she coaxed him into eating anyway. They’d never make it if he starved to death.
She was annoyed enough when Candayce started continuously complaining about the smell that she snapped the other girl’s bikini, ran away with it, and hurled it off a cliff. She talked Candayce out of charging her by accusing her of acting like a butt-faced dinosaur, then told her to lay off Bertram, since he had a crush on her. Candayce found this hilarious, which infuriated Janine, but before she could do anything, more Leptoceratopsians came and chased her away, then took Candayce with them.
Janine redoubled her efforts to learn to fly, loving the feeling of freedom and peace she got even in a moment’s glide. It was like her desire to sneak out and go tagging, but greater - the feeling that she was where she belonged and doing what was natural to her. Loki demonstrated, and she finally managed to glide well - and then felt curiously distant from the other kids, and flew away while they were tracking Candayce. She went cold and guided Bertram and Mike to Candayce - and then left with Loki, dropping her makeshift keychain on the ground with “GOOD LUCK” and “GOOD BYE” written on two of the shells.
She flew with him for two days, considering herself not human anymore, feeling a little panic whenever Loki wasn’t near her - he was all she had, and she needed him. For a while she felt at home, at peace, and like none of the problems she’d worried so much about before could bother her now. She made a nest in a cave, decorated it with flowers crushed into paste, and eventually started questioning her choice. Absolute freedom meant no civilization or the company of anyone who could speak, and life was dangerous even to a careful flyer.
Candayce came back for her and was nearly stampeded by some Triceratops, and Janine immediately tried to help by teasing one to veer away from her, though she was knocked down in the process. She was incredibly bitchy when Candayce was concerned, and only grudgingly agreed to help the others. On the way back, though, she was nearly struck by lightning and hurt her wing landing. Loki stopped following her, and she and Candayce had an angry, then just generally emotional heart-to-heart in which it came out that Janine’s mom knew what her daughter had been doing, that it was hurting her.
After that, the bitterness between them eased, though they still sniped at each other. While trying to find their way back, Candayce took an opportunity to try to save some Triceratops eggs which had been endangered in an earthquake. Janine joined her and managed to snap a dislocated wing bone back into place in the process. She could fly again, but not very far. Loki came back.
They got back to the others and resumed travel, Janine still more or less believing she’d prefer to stay behind. A lucky flash flood washed the others closer to their destination; Janine glided above it. Later she went to scout out the place which they were supposed to reach, and found no standing stones. She waited out the night on that plateau with Loki, then flew back.
She thought this might not be the right place, that she should scout for others like it, but was overruled. During that time she revealed her belief that life is random, and everything comes down to chance. When they reached the site and she landed, an image of the M.I.N.D. Machine appeared - and a larger Tyrannosaurus which had been stalking them grabbed her, and flung her off a cliff. She glided to safety and collapsed, then got hit by some falling rocks. Somehow she wasn’t really hurt by any of that and was able to get back to the top of the plateau.
Loki went and tapped beaks with her, and she had a very sudden realization that she did want to go back to her old life, after all. The Quetzalcoatlus she was inhabiting would live out her own life with him. Bertram then realized that they didn’t have to find a place with the specific standing stones, they had to carve those stones, and Janine gave directions and chiseled them. Then, surreptitiously, she scratched “WAS HERE” into one of them - and went with the others.
But in the instant before the machine’s energy could pull her out of the pterosaur’s body and through time, back to her own…
ABILITIES:
Janine is in the body of a Quetzalcoatlus, a prehistoric reptile that can alternately be described as a stork the size and shape of a giraffe, or as one of the largest flying animals that ever lived, though she’s significantly smaller than the largest of her species.
First, a bit on size and proportions. This is a good image - she’s not as big as the Nothropi, but she’s a little larger than the blue unnamed species. She’s got a disproportionately long neck and beak and a wingspan of twenty-one feet. When on all fours her shoulder is about six feet off the ground; if she raises her head as high as possible her eye level’s about twelve feet off the ground. She can also walk on two legs, which makes her even taller and frees her hands but is vastly more awkward.
Several abilities come with that.
The first is, of course, flight. She can launch herself off a cliff or fall from a height to catch enough air, or she can unlock the ability to go airborne from a cold start by “jumping” with her wingarms. It’s not so much a supernatural ability as one that really wouldn’t occur to her easily, just like in canon, though it’s clearly possible - the other Quetzalcoatlus does it, and near the end she does too.
She can also sense air currents. Somehow. She just knows if there’s a breeze or thermal and which way it’s going, even if she’s not directly in it.
For whatever reason, she’s slightly anthropomorphic - she can cry like a human can. One claw on each wing is opposable, the fingers there are more finger than claw, and they’re dextrous enough to manipulate objects, though not as well as a human hand. They look not unlike these, awkward placement and all. She can hold a spray can in one hand, but she can’t take a grip and spray one-handed.
She can climb on all fours up or down a steep dirt cliff, and even hang by her feet from it. Janine can trawl for fish, skimming the water and catching them in her beak, or she can stand and pluck fish from shallows and small animals from the land. This means she can see the tip of her beak and has sharp binocular vision, plus a good degree of coordination, which is also demonstrated by her ability to carve stone with it and her claws.
Some disadvantages come with that too. Her wings aren’t leathery - they’ve got thin layers of muscle, blood vessels, interwoven fibers, and an embedded air-filled layer - but they’re still less than a centimeter thick. She’s got hollow bones and is lighter than a land creature of the same size, even if she’s still robust and weighs four hundred pounds. So while she’s not as fragile as the general public image of a pterosaur suggests, she’s fairly delicate for something of her size, and someone with a knife could easily inflict very serious injuries.
And it’s a big size. She can’t quite fit through a normal doorway. If she is inside and the ceiling isn’t ten feet up, she has to keep her head and neck lowered, and she definitely can’t stand on her hind legs. Her metabolism is high enough that she has to eat often, and the Quetzalcoatlus suppressed in her mind sees a lot of small animals as food. Her dexterity is limited, and while she’s covered in an analogue to fur, very cold weather gives her a great deal of trouble. Can’t exactly bundle up.
There are also abilities brought on by being projected into another creature’s body. In the book the way this is explained seems to say that they should only work on other projected people, but then it’s shown working on all kinds of dinosaurs and other creatures.
She can’t speak anything like human language, but fortunately she has one-way telepathy which sounds like human speech. Janine habitually opens her beak and vocalizes while doing it - she can be silent when speaking, or she can purely vocalize, but when she’s not making any effort she does both. The speech is “louder” than the vocalizations unless it’s a shriek or scream. She can consciously modulate it to sound older, but by and large it indicates her true age.
Like the other three, she can’t just project speech - also music and sound effects, even other voices, as long as they’re clearly remembered. These map almost perfectly to sound, and they do require some slight effort. An earworm won’t be heard by people in her vicinity unless she wants it to.
Another ability is a sort of short-range empathy, feeling someone else’s emotions like they’re her own - in fact, she has to consider how she’s been feeling to tell if they’re hers or not. She can also project, but this is more of an effort and doesn’t feel, to the receiver, like their own feeling.
A third ability, tightly connected to the second, is only available at the very shortest range, when she’s touching or almost touching someone. She can share basic images - Candayce impresses a Triceratops with the idea that she needs him to move to a certain position and hold still so that she can rescue its eggs, and she and Janine traded wordless ideas about how to do it.
Lastly, the abilities she had as a human:
She’s got art skills beyond just graffiti. Janine’s also competent at carving sculpture and painting, and general crafting.
Other eighth graders think of her as having a “soul piercing” stare which she’ll direct at them. Some hate it; one feels like she’s seeing into him and understanding. This is just their perception, really. Her stare is certainly penetrating, but what she sees is what she already knows - this person is petty and unpleasant, this one’s kind of pathetic but sweet, everyone has some ulterior motives - and people assume her reaction to being laid bare. She doesn’t do that all the time. There seems to be some kind of technique to it.
Finally, Janine has a bit of a trick memory. She tends to remember some very random trivia. She knows the scientific name of a particular Cretaceous-era tree, can similarly identify a number of other prehistoric creatures, and that an ankylosaur’s digestive system produces a lot of gas - but she doesn’t think of herself as particularly knowledgeable about dinosaurs and doesn’t know quite what she, a famous pterosaur, is, or what Candayce had turned into.
- Which is just bad writing. But it can be excused by saying that her memory’s a bit odd. She sees a lot of things, and some random facts will be retained very well, others will be forgotten normally. Janine would be quite inconsistent at Trivial Pursuit.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Above
BIRTHDAY LOG: Yes. Dude, you’d think those squirrels would be bored of me by now. You think it might be serious? They're nuts.
DREAM:
She was walking home when she saw the wall and stopped to look it over. It was a fine smooth stretch of concrete, completely bare and smooth and bright in the afternoon sun. Brand new, she thought, swinging her keychain so it chinked.
It was calling her, all bare and new like that. Like an untouched canvass. She wasn’t supposed to do this, but who would be hurt? Who would know it was her? There was even a little breeze to keep the fumes down, and no one would miss her if she spent time here. No one would miss her at all.
Frankly, her life was old tapes. It wasn’t worth getting upset about. Better to erase them for something new.
She smiled to herself, a little bitterly, and took off her backpack. This would be fun.
She broke out and uncapped both big cannons, her German Fat Cap and the Magnum 44 black, and started the fill, blackening as much of the surface as she could cover, then finding a trash can, upending it, and standing on it to reach higher. She was barely a teenager and short for her age, and she hated that blank space above what she could reach on her own. It told everyone that the tagger was just a kid.
The fumes swirled around her. She covered as much as she could, coughing once or twice, and backed up to survey it. Much of the wall was now a black going from glossy to matte as it dried, with some paint dribbling down and an edge of pale unmarked concrete above and to both sides of the whole.
She put the big ones away, raked her lank black hair back with one hand, and started in with her Monstercolors, the vivid ones made overseas just for tagging. Ultramarine and Atlantis Blue, Flesh 4 and Saturn Red, and all the others.
There was nothing in all the world better than doing this, the thrill of putting her mark out on something, of doing something she knew was illegal and could be caught doing. But she wouldn’t be. She never was. Being truly anonymous, not having to worry about what anyone thought, or anything but the paint… She was happy.
She sang quietly to herself as she worked, her voice hardly louder than the hiss of the spray.
“Little wing, broken wing, fly in your heart, soar in your soul, believe that all things are possible, and you will be made whole…”
Eventually she pulled back again and surveyed her work. Went up again to correct a little detail here or there. All in all - she liked it. It was a real burner. Something that would catch the eye from clear across the street, maybe further. It seemed to stand out from the wall.
It was abstract, of course, an interwoven tangle of illegible shapes which might have started life as words or a repeated phrase. Most of it was red and black and blue, but there were little jags of other colors to make it interesting. Something about the shape of the whole thing managed to suggest something winged, with a long neck or tail. Maybe a bird. Maybe just an umbrella or a gingko leaf.
Not bad. There was just one thing left to do. She capped all of her spray cans and brought her key chain out of her jeans pocket, glancing in passing at the steel wolf’s head of the key ring. Then, before the top layer of paint was truly dry, she leaned in and carved her tag in the corner. Not her name. She wasn’t stupid.
Her tag. It was a little like an arrow pointing up, a little like something winged. Flicking the paint off of the key she’d used, she backed up one final time and looked at the piece.
Funny, she hadn’t thought of it like that before. Not when she’d been painting it, not when she’d pulled back to see the whole thing at once. There was a bit of an illusion of movement to it. But it was almost like the vague bird shape wasn’t flying so much as falling towards her, or she towards it.
JOURNAL SAMPLE:
[The writing’s in what looks like marker. She’s got a really fat marker in hand, but since her journal is larger than normal, the script looks like it’s written in a more standard-sized marker, and it’s only a little larger than usual. The writing itself is a little clumsy and awkward. It would seem to be in all caps except that capital letters are definitely taller than the others.]
That’s some tree. Is this really an oak? Does it start dropping giant acorns?
So. I’m Above, and I think I had the wrong dream.
[There’s a pause and some blotches. Hard to tell if they’re false starts or pentaps.]
I’m hoping clothing’s not mandatory here, because they don’t make anything my size. You’re all either tiny or I’m a lot bigger than I thought. It’s weird.
I’m probably bigger. Anyone have a tape measure?
[She puts her tag at the end, the arrowlike shape from her dream.]
ASPIRATIONS: I was hit by powerful nostalgia for this book, and specifically this character. I like Janine, self-absorbed but goodhearted minor delinquent-turned-giant-flyer that she is, and I liked her character arc. The desire she had to leave her human life behind and embrace Quetzalcoatlus-hood, the mixing of childish and young adult traits, her sense of isolation… As a human that isolation is due to a vicious cycle of being teased, hardening inside, and then both rejecting and being rejected by others. I’d like to play with that.
She’s fairly mature for thirteen, but she is thirteen, and self-centered and stubborn in their way. Most of my characters are mentally in their twenties at the least, usually older. I’d like to try playing someone younger.
This would also be one of the few characters I’ve considered who would have difficulty finding a job - because of her shape, really. If she was human she’d end up in Housekeeping and doing a pretty good job at it, complaining now and then but being competent. There are limited options available, and I actually think that for a while she wouldn't take a job, just live off fish.
And she is a Quetzalcoatlus, and I love those things. Seriously. They’re huge and fascinating and awesome.