00 - App/Info
User Name/Nick: Naomi
User LJ: asyndeta
AIM/IM: metonumia
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Iroh, Toshiko, Shego, Merlin
Character Name: Pamela Isley aka Poison Ivy
Series: DC Comics Universe
Age: Early 30s
From When?: Gotham City Sirens #24, during the riot in Arkham Asylum - Ivy is knocked unconscious by Harley and left alone. With Arkham being what it is, it's not unlikely her life was in peril for at least some of this time.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. By the canon point she's taken from, Ivy appeared to be somewhat reformed, but it was really more of a villainous sabbatical than anything else. Selina was right in saying that she had the potential to change and be a better person, but when she learnt she was being manipulated, Ivy went straight back to trying to wanting to destroy Batman and ruin Gotham. Like, instantly. And she has possibly never addressed the fact of her constantly using her pheromones to make people do whatever she wants - everything from keeping Nygma in a semi-comatose state for weeks, to skipping on cab fare.
Abilities/Powers: On her own merits, Ivy is one of her world's most talented botanists - overlapping with other relevant fields including genetics and toxicology. She wouldn't be an instant pushover in a physical fight although it isn't her speciality. Everything else? RIGHT WELL THIS'LL TAKE A WHILE.
Plant growth: In canon there is almost no ceiling on this ability. On the Barge? Given a specific plant and a reasonable quantity of soil and water, Ivy will be able to make it grow as much as is realistically possible at an extremely rapid rate. She will lose the ability to grow whatever she feels like, or to intuitively change the properties of a given plant (so, for example, if someone gave her an average Venus Flytrap or pitcher plant she wouldn't be able to make it big enough to consume a person). Her ability to create 'hybrids' - shortlived animal or humanoid-shaped plant creatures - will be nixed completely.
Plant control: Again, almost infinite in canon but severely reduced here. In her current canon she keeps two vines on her arms as a go-to weapon and I'd like her to keep them - but she won't be able to do anything with them that a regular person couldn't with some ropes and a bit of imagination. Otherwise her 'control' will be limited to rapid growth (see above).
Natural toxicity: In canon she can kill someone in seconds, just by touching them. Here, she'll be able to render someone unconscious via prolonged contact - in only slightly less time than it would take a reasonably strong human to render someone unconscious via, say, a sleeper hold.
Pheromonal suggestion: Ordinarily Ivy can exude pheromones that can make all but the most ludicrously strong-willed people (i.e. Batman) do whatever she wants. Here, a weaker version: she won't be able to force anyone to harm themselves or others. After the first minute or so, her influence will fade rapidly if she isn't around to maintain it. Her victims will be able to remember what they went through as clearly as any other experience (whereas in canon, memories of what people do while affected by Ivy's pheromones range from foggy to nonexistent).
Toxic kiss: No longer a key part of her arsenal; Ivy's ability to control, poison or kill her victims with a kiss has been made redundant by the above two abilities. However, I'd like to keep the caveat here that kissing or sexual contact will render the above two effects slightly more potent, longer-lasting and faster-acting. (Canonically, this makes sense: historically, the weaker her powers, the more heavily reliant she was on being able to directly transfer her toxins.)
Natural immunity: Canonically Ivy is immune to almost everything - all diseases and poisons, and most drugs (but see Weaknesses below). As a purely defensive ability I'd like to keep this at full strength.
Communication: When Ivy talks to plants, essentially they talk back, and through a nebulously-defined international network of plant life ('the Green') Ivy is able to surveil and communicate long-distance using plants. I'd like to keep the first ability and nix the second entirely.
Weaknesses: Ivy can be injured/weakened with defoliants, salt and other substances that would damage plant life; chemicals exist that will prevent her from using her powers but the comics are kinda vague on what exactly they are. Without water and sunlight she will start to wither and after several weeks will seemingly die - although even at the point of being a shrivelled husk with no pulse, she can still be revived with water. I'm keeping all this.
Other: Ivy possesses the control to not necessarily be toxic to the touch, and also to normalise her skin colour. I'm also assuming that whatever light there is on deck that supports the growth of plants in the greenhouse etc. is at least enough like sunlight to sustain Ivy. Probably not enough to keep her happy though. :V
Personality:
Ivy is a child of two worlds - part human, part plant, unable to feel entirely at ease in either environment. During her travels to the rainforests of South America she craves human company, despite herself; in Gotham, she resents the thoughtless attitude of humanity towards the botanical realm. She regards the struggle of the natural world against human oppression to be a constant battle, and identifies herself as the 'guardian of the fight' - not only the defender of defenceless plant life but its champion, destroying those people and corporations who seek to exploit or destroy it. Unsurprisingly she has been branded an ecoterrorist, though some have sympathy with her motives if not her methods.
Those methods can be uncompromising and brutal. Ivy has no problems at all with taking human lives - either of her actual targets, or of innocent bystanders. By the time of her last (pre-reboot) appearance, she is powerful enough to tear apart entire buildings out of sheer rage - doubtless at the cost of many lives - and seems not to give it a second thought. For the most part she views humans the same way that she thinks humans see plants: things to be swept aside, manipulated for her own needs, or destroyed when troublesome. But that isn't a constant. She has gone through periods of bad writing taking lives purposelessly, for reasons as petty as having 'the misfortune to return my smile' - and that sadistic streak has come through elsewhere, not least when Edward Nygma came to her for protection and she responded by physically and psychologically tormenting him. Even before her transformation into Poison Ivy, Pamela was described by her peers as extremely capricious and contradictory. Recently her behaviour has been (relatively speaking) more sedate; the murders she's undertaken have been purposeful and efficient (not counting the tearing-apart-buildings incident, which comes after her canon point).
On the Barge, under stress, it's entirely possible that her tendencies towards motiveless violence might re-emerge. So too might her 'femme fatale' persona; in earlier years she revelled in her irresistibility and clearly got a kick out of seeing men fight for and over her. It made her general bearing and behaviour more seductive, more sexual. Recently - as she's grown more powerful in terms of her plant control - it's been more the case that she sees her pheromones as utilitarian. She still uses them, often, but doesn't make a performance out of it - her influence is just one weapon in an expanding arsenal. On the Barge, where she won't have access to the bulk of that arsenal, she may find herself slipping back into those behaviours so as to make the best of the weapons she does have. In normal behaviour - if you catch her on a good day - Ivy is intelligent, acerbic and eloquent. Around strangers or under stress, she's more concise; during crises (or when she's really angry) she can start sliding into supervillain talk, heavy-handed botanical metaphors and all.
However, over the years she's matured, and in particular her fixation on Batman has faded; she still recognises him as her most dangerous enemy but he's a 'hindrance' rather than an obsession. She's also allowed the occasional outing of a more maternal side: the protective, nurturing aspect of an otherwise ferocious 'earth goddess' persona. Following a devastating earthquake in Gotham, she overtook a city park and as good as adopted a number of orphaned children who drifted there with nowhere else to go. When they were incorrectly identified as hostages and the park was threatened with near-destruction, her attachment to them was such that she chose to turn herself in (hence relinquishing control over the park) rather than risk them suffering.
And then there's Harley Quinn, who by Ivy's own admission is the only human she's called a friend. After their chance meeting, Ivy sympathised with Harley because she saw herself in her: a young, intelligent woman preoccupied with an abusive man and unable to see how damaging that preoccupation was, even as he used her to his own ends. Ivy sees Harley's 'love' for the Joker for what it is: an obsession, an addiction, and essentially self-destructive. Besides protecting Harley from the Joker's influence, for Ivy their friendship is a humanising influence, preventing her from growing too single-minded about her own crusade and perhaps even allowing her to acknowledge that she herself has the potential for change. Ivy loves Harley, and even after being betrayed by her - after having those feelings used against her - Ivy was prepared to do whatever was necessary to save her friend, even from herself.
Unsurprisingly, more than anything else she hates being used - manipulated, controlled or lied to - particularly by men. This goes back to her transformation into Poison Ivy at the hands of Jason Woodrue, who seduced and took advantage of his grad student. A decade later, her dislike of men still borders on outright misandry at times - the absolute best she can summon up is disinterest - while her hatred of being used has fed into her identity as being part plant. She sees her manipulation by men as a microcosm of the natural world being exploited and oppressed by mankind - so fighting against these injustices is, for her, a deeply personal revenge. However, Ivy neither addresses or even seems to acknowledge the hypocrisy in how she herself uses her pheromones to control people (usually, but not exclusively, men) and never has even a minor crisis of conscience about how completely she strips agency from her victims. It's likely that she sees that as a combination of two things: firstly, 'paying forward' what was done to her as a necessary means of achieving her (broadly speaking, unselfish) objectives; secondly, a 'law of the jungle' mentality meaning that since she can do it there's no good reason to hold back. Plants use everything they have at their disposal to survive, why shouldn't she? There's also a defensive aspect to her power over others; being in control is the best way to ensure she isn't being controlled.
The Barge won't come as a huge surprise to her conceptually. Obviously, incarceration in Arkham is nothing new to Ivy; more relevantly she, as well as dozens of other supervillains, were temporarily dumped on an alien planet relatively recently. She will, however, take the Barge much more badly than either of these places, what with its combined lack of obvious sunlight and near-total inescapability.
Path to Redemption:
What's 'wrong' with Ivy can be broadly swept into two categories. Firstly, she needs to learn that humans have as much a right to exist as plants and while her cause might be just in some ways, her methods are insane and counterproductive. Secondly - and more significantly - her hideous control issues need to be untangled and resolved.
She does have some history of doing the right thing, most notably her lengthy truce following a massive earthquake in Gotham, during which she actually provided the ravaged city with fresh produce and cared for orphaned children on the condition that they and she were left alone. During the Gotham City Sirens arc she essentially took a break from villainy while helping Selina Kyle to recuperate from her clash with Hush. Even though it's rare for her to have the motivation to actively do good, she's not without the potential.
Her 'triggers' - her experiences with Jason Woodrue, relationship with Harley, and most of the paragraph above - are best touched on lightly, if at all, particularly in the early days of her relationship with her Warden. Honesty is the best policy ; she will not respond well to even the slightest suspicion that she is being manipulated.
History: Much as I hate to be lazy, honestly Wikipedia can say all this more eloquently than I ever could.
Sample Journal Entry:
[Video: Ivy is sitting cross-legged in the CES. There's a yellowish vine winding its way up her arm, growing at a rate that is barely noticeable to the casual observer. Her voice is calm, almost dryly academic, but there's an undertone of restrained anger.]
This is cuscuta europea - the European dodder vine. An unusual breed, in the plant kingdom: it has negligible levels of chlorophyll. Unable to make food for itself, it is parasitic by necessity - a seed will grow towards a likely host, penetrating its stems to absorb its nutrients. Unlike more aggressive parasites, the host survives, though inevitably weakened.
Still, the names it's attracted....'Devil's hair'. 'Hellbine'. Humans are so predictable in attaching the idea of 'evil' to a plant that simply does what it must, in order to thrive. It's simply one part of an ecosystem that has been exploited and mutilated by the hands of men.
But when a human wraps himself around something stronger, slowly crippling it for his own purposes, he does it out of choice - out of greed. He knows the damage he's causing and simply doesn't care. What would you call that?
[She looks directly at the screen, and her anger surfaces.]
The Wardens here outnumber the Inmates. Maybe you'd like to fill us in.
Sample RP:
The 'light' that shone on the Barge was to real sunlight what hydroponic lamps were to the real sun. They performed the same job but that didn't make them the same thing. A plant wouldn't much care about the difference; Ivy supposed it was her human aspect that made her resent its artificiality. She longed for a blue sky, studded with clouds - she wanted to turn her face to a real sun and feel its warmth on her skin.
What she had done, then, was not out of malice but desperation. Killing the idiot she'd found on deck and taking his Item hadn't troubled her for an instant; her Warden had long since robbed her of more subtle means. Crossing over the threshold and walking into true sunlight - something infinitely more like true sunlight - had been more than worth the heavy-handed takedown she'd been subjected to a few hours later.
Zero was -- tolerable, compared to other tortures. The wardens of Arkham had been extremely sparing with her access to sunlight at times, either out of simple cruelty or believing that weakness would make her more pliable when their shrinks came to call. Not that Ivy necessarily distinguished the two.
Five days into a week's sentence. She ran a hand along her forearm. Her skin had yellowed a little; the texture hadn't changed yet but by the seventh day she knew it would feel tighter, easier to bruise. Lethargic, she waited for the Warden on shift to pass by her cell before climbing onto the top bunk and lying down, eyes falling half-shut. It would have been less painful all round to bat her eyelids, toe the line, pretend that she was 'better' and earn her way into the CES - but this time, her anger and pride had won out over her more manipulative instincts. This, here and now, this was worth it.
Special Notes: N/A
User LJ: asyndeta
AIM/IM: metonumia
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Iroh, Toshiko, Shego, Merlin
Character Name: Pamela Isley aka Poison Ivy
Series: DC Comics Universe
Age: Early 30s
From When?: Gotham City Sirens #24, during the riot in Arkham Asylum - Ivy is knocked unconscious by Harley and left alone. With Arkham being what it is, it's not unlikely her life was in peril for at least some of this time.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. By the canon point she's taken from, Ivy appeared to be somewhat reformed, but it was really more of a villainous sabbatical than anything else. Selina was right in saying that she had the potential to change and be a better person, but when she learnt she was being manipulated, Ivy went straight back to trying to wanting to destroy Batman and ruin Gotham. Like, instantly. And she has possibly never addressed the fact of her constantly using her pheromones to make people do whatever she wants - everything from keeping Nygma in a semi-comatose state for weeks, to skipping on cab fare.
Abilities/Powers: On her own merits, Ivy is one of her world's most talented botanists - overlapping with other relevant fields including genetics and toxicology. She wouldn't be an instant pushover in a physical fight although it isn't her speciality. Everything else? RIGHT WELL THIS'LL TAKE A WHILE.
Plant growth: In canon there is almost no ceiling on this ability. On the Barge? Given a specific plant and a reasonable quantity of soil and water, Ivy will be able to make it grow as much as is realistically possible at an extremely rapid rate. She will lose the ability to grow whatever she feels like, or to intuitively change the properties of a given plant (so, for example, if someone gave her an average Venus Flytrap or pitcher plant she wouldn't be able to make it big enough to consume a person). Her ability to create 'hybrids' - shortlived animal or humanoid-shaped plant creatures - will be nixed completely.
Plant control: Again, almost infinite in canon but severely reduced here. In her current canon she keeps two vines on her arms as a go-to weapon and I'd like her to keep them - but she won't be able to do anything with them that a regular person couldn't with some ropes and a bit of imagination. Otherwise her 'control' will be limited to rapid growth (see above).
Natural toxicity: In canon she can kill someone in seconds, just by touching them. Here, she'll be able to render someone unconscious via prolonged contact - in only slightly less time than it would take a reasonably strong human to render someone unconscious via, say, a sleeper hold.
Pheromonal suggestion: Ordinarily Ivy can exude pheromones that can make all but the most ludicrously strong-willed people (i.e. Batman) do whatever she wants. Here, a weaker version: she won't be able to force anyone to harm themselves or others. After the first minute or so, her influence will fade rapidly if she isn't around to maintain it. Her victims will be able to remember what they went through as clearly as any other experience (whereas in canon, memories of what people do while affected by Ivy's pheromones range from foggy to nonexistent).
Toxic kiss: No longer a key part of her arsenal; Ivy's ability to control, poison or kill her victims with a kiss has been made redundant by the above two abilities. However, I'd like to keep the caveat here that kissing or sexual contact will render the above two effects slightly more potent, longer-lasting and faster-acting. (Canonically, this makes sense: historically, the weaker her powers, the more heavily reliant she was on being able to directly transfer her toxins.)
Natural immunity: Canonically Ivy is immune to almost everything - all diseases and poisons, and most drugs (but see Weaknesses below). As a purely defensive ability I'd like to keep this at full strength.
Communication: When Ivy talks to plants, essentially they talk back, and through a nebulously-defined international network of plant life ('the Green') Ivy is able to surveil and communicate long-distance using plants. I'd like to keep the first ability and nix the second entirely.
Weaknesses: Ivy can be injured/weakened with defoliants, salt and other substances that would damage plant life; chemicals exist that will prevent her from using her powers but the comics are kinda vague on what exactly they are. Without water and sunlight she will start to wither and after several weeks will seemingly die - although even at the point of being a shrivelled husk with no pulse, she can still be revived with water. I'm keeping all this.
Other: Ivy possesses the control to not necessarily be toxic to the touch, and also to normalise her skin colour. I'm also assuming that whatever light there is on deck that supports the growth of plants in the greenhouse etc. is at least enough like sunlight to sustain Ivy. Probably not enough to keep her happy though. :V
Personality:
Ivy is a child of two worlds - part human, part plant, unable to feel entirely at ease in either environment. During her travels to the rainforests of South America she craves human company, despite herself; in Gotham, she resents the thoughtless attitude of humanity towards the botanical realm. She regards the struggle of the natural world against human oppression to be a constant battle, and identifies herself as the 'guardian of the fight' - not only the defender of defenceless plant life but its champion, destroying those people and corporations who seek to exploit or destroy it. Unsurprisingly she has been branded an ecoterrorist, though some have sympathy with her motives if not her methods.
Those methods can be uncompromising and brutal. Ivy has no problems at all with taking human lives - either of her actual targets, or of innocent bystanders. By the time of her last (pre-reboot) appearance, she is powerful enough to tear apart entire buildings out of sheer rage - doubtless at the cost of many lives - and seems not to give it a second thought. For the most part she views humans the same way that she thinks humans see plants: things to be swept aside, manipulated for her own needs, or destroyed when troublesome. But that isn't a constant. She has gone through periods of bad writing taking lives purposelessly, for reasons as petty as having 'the misfortune to return my smile' - and that sadistic streak has come through elsewhere, not least when Edward Nygma came to her for protection and she responded by physically and psychologically tormenting him. Even before her transformation into Poison Ivy, Pamela was described by her peers as extremely capricious and contradictory. Recently her behaviour has been (relatively speaking) more sedate; the murders she's undertaken have been purposeful and efficient (not counting the tearing-apart-buildings incident, which comes after her canon point).
On the Barge, under stress, it's entirely possible that her tendencies towards motiveless violence might re-emerge. So too might her 'femme fatale' persona; in earlier years she revelled in her irresistibility and clearly got a kick out of seeing men fight for and over her. It made her general bearing and behaviour more seductive, more sexual. Recently - as she's grown more powerful in terms of her plant control - it's been more the case that she sees her pheromones as utilitarian. She still uses them, often, but doesn't make a performance out of it - her influence is just one weapon in an expanding arsenal. On the Barge, where she won't have access to the bulk of that arsenal, she may find herself slipping back into those behaviours so as to make the best of the weapons she does have. In normal behaviour - if you catch her on a good day - Ivy is intelligent, acerbic and eloquent. Around strangers or under stress, she's more concise; during crises (or when she's really angry) she can start sliding into supervillain talk, heavy-handed botanical metaphors and all.
However, over the years she's matured, and in particular her fixation on Batman has faded; she still recognises him as her most dangerous enemy but he's a 'hindrance' rather than an obsession. She's also allowed the occasional outing of a more maternal side: the protective, nurturing aspect of an otherwise ferocious 'earth goddess' persona. Following a devastating earthquake in Gotham, she overtook a city park and as good as adopted a number of orphaned children who drifted there with nowhere else to go. When they were incorrectly identified as hostages and the park was threatened with near-destruction, her attachment to them was such that she chose to turn herself in (hence relinquishing control over the park) rather than risk them suffering.
And then there's Harley Quinn, who by Ivy's own admission is the only human she's called a friend. After their chance meeting, Ivy sympathised with Harley because she saw herself in her: a young, intelligent woman preoccupied with an abusive man and unable to see how damaging that preoccupation was, even as he used her to his own ends. Ivy sees Harley's 'love' for the Joker for what it is: an obsession, an addiction, and essentially self-destructive. Besides protecting Harley from the Joker's influence, for Ivy their friendship is a humanising influence, preventing her from growing too single-minded about her own crusade and perhaps even allowing her to acknowledge that she herself has the potential for change. Ivy loves Harley, and even after being betrayed by her - after having those feelings used against her - Ivy was prepared to do whatever was necessary to save her friend, even from herself.
Unsurprisingly, more than anything else she hates being used - manipulated, controlled or lied to - particularly by men. This goes back to her transformation into Poison Ivy at the hands of Jason Woodrue, who seduced and took advantage of his grad student. A decade later, her dislike of men still borders on outright misandry at times - the absolute best she can summon up is disinterest - while her hatred of being used has fed into her identity as being part plant. She sees her manipulation by men as a microcosm of the natural world being exploited and oppressed by mankind - so fighting against these injustices is, for her, a deeply personal revenge. However, Ivy neither addresses or even seems to acknowledge the hypocrisy in how she herself uses her pheromones to control people (usually, but not exclusively, men) and never has even a minor crisis of conscience about how completely she strips agency from her victims. It's likely that she sees that as a combination of two things: firstly, 'paying forward' what was done to her as a necessary means of achieving her (broadly speaking, unselfish) objectives; secondly, a 'law of the jungle' mentality meaning that since she can do it there's no good reason to hold back. Plants use everything they have at their disposal to survive, why shouldn't she? There's also a defensive aspect to her power over others; being in control is the best way to ensure she isn't being controlled.
The Barge won't come as a huge surprise to her conceptually. Obviously, incarceration in Arkham is nothing new to Ivy; more relevantly she, as well as dozens of other supervillains, were temporarily dumped on an alien planet relatively recently. She will, however, take the Barge much more badly than either of these places, what with its combined lack of obvious sunlight and near-total inescapability.
Path to Redemption:
What's 'wrong' with Ivy can be broadly swept into two categories. Firstly, she needs to learn that humans have as much a right to exist as plants and while her cause might be just in some ways, her methods are insane and counterproductive. Secondly - and more significantly - her hideous control issues need to be untangled and resolved.
She does have some history of doing the right thing, most notably her lengthy truce following a massive earthquake in Gotham, during which she actually provided the ravaged city with fresh produce and cared for orphaned children on the condition that they and she were left alone. During the Gotham City Sirens arc she essentially took a break from villainy while helping Selina Kyle to recuperate from her clash with Hush. Even though it's rare for her to have the motivation to actively do good, she's not without the potential.
Her 'triggers' - her experiences with Jason Woodrue, relationship with Harley, and most of the paragraph above - are best touched on lightly, if at all, particularly in the early days of her relationship with her Warden. Honesty is the best policy ; she will not respond well to even the slightest suspicion that she is being manipulated.
History: Much as I hate to be lazy, honestly Wikipedia can say all this more eloquently than I ever could.
Sample Journal Entry:
[Video: Ivy is sitting cross-legged in the CES. There's a yellowish vine winding its way up her arm, growing at a rate that is barely noticeable to the casual observer. Her voice is calm, almost dryly academic, but there's an undertone of restrained anger.]
This is cuscuta europea - the European dodder vine. An unusual breed, in the plant kingdom: it has negligible levels of chlorophyll. Unable to make food for itself, it is parasitic by necessity - a seed will grow towards a likely host, penetrating its stems to absorb its nutrients. Unlike more aggressive parasites, the host survives, though inevitably weakened.
Still, the names it's attracted....'Devil's hair'. 'Hellbine'. Humans are so predictable in attaching the idea of 'evil' to a plant that simply does what it must, in order to thrive. It's simply one part of an ecosystem that has been exploited and mutilated by the hands of men.
But when a human wraps himself around something stronger, slowly crippling it for his own purposes, he does it out of choice - out of greed. He knows the damage he's causing and simply doesn't care. What would you call that?
[She looks directly at the screen, and her anger surfaces.]
The Wardens here outnumber the Inmates. Maybe you'd like to fill us in.
Sample RP:
The 'light' that shone on the Barge was to real sunlight what hydroponic lamps were to the real sun. They performed the same job but that didn't make them the same thing. A plant wouldn't much care about the difference; Ivy supposed it was her human aspect that made her resent its artificiality. She longed for a blue sky, studded with clouds - she wanted to turn her face to a real sun and feel its warmth on her skin.
What she had done, then, was not out of malice but desperation. Killing the idiot she'd found on deck and taking his Item hadn't troubled her for an instant; her Warden had long since robbed her of more subtle means. Crossing over the threshold and walking into true sunlight - something infinitely more like true sunlight - had been more than worth the heavy-handed takedown she'd been subjected to a few hours later.
Zero was -- tolerable, compared to other tortures. The wardens of Arkham had been extremely sparing with her access to sunlight at times, either out of simple cruelty or believing that weakness would make her more pliable when their shrinks came to call. Not that Ivy necessarily distinguished the two.
Five days into a week's sentence. She ran a hand along her forearm. Her skin had yellowed a little; the texture hadn't changed yet but by the seventh day she knew it would feel tighter, easier to bruise. Lethargic, she waited for the Warden on shift to pass by her cell before climbing onto the top bunk and lying down, eyes falling half-shut. It would have been less painful all round to bat her eyelids, toe the line, pretend that she was 'better' and earn her way into the CES - but this time, her anger and pride had won out over her more manipulative instincts. This, here and now, this was worth it.
Special Notes: N/A