For my future reference - more characterization exercises
I have ideas for a bunch of characters, and the vague beginnings of a scenario, but no plot as yet. If I can think of one, I may attempt to do something with these people for NaNoWriMo.
Thanks to pukingtoreador and MGS fanfiction (particularly "Ectype") for ideas related to possible side effects of tentacle-person-hood and electric powers, respectively. Warning for crack, cannibalizing earlier ideas, eccentric capitalization, a touch of fangirl Russian, and lots of tvtropes jargon.
Family legend says that one of Perun Termen's ancestors married an ice giant, which is why members of the family tend to be so tall (although Valeriya herself isn't that much over six feet). Valeriya studied at L'academie Polygnostique for several years, but got her doctorate elsewhere because at that point they didn't yet grant degrees to women. Sasha isn't the first person Valeriya's ever loved, but she is the first to appreciate Lera's more distinctive qualities. The whole electric-tentacle-person business was the unintended side effect of an experiment she performed in her student years. She keeps a detailed diary.
Despite her tendency to burn her eyebrows off with exploding experiments, Valeriya does a pretty good Death Glare. She's worn glasses since she was about ten. Valeriya keeps a pet electric eel in an aquarium in her private quarters. Tentacle-aikido is mostly for exercise - if she really wants to hurt somebody, she'll just zap them. Even before the Experiment, Valeriya was never a fashionable beauty.
What doesn't kill you had better be sure it doesn't run into you a second time. Even the Experiment's negative side effects had some good points - with the way she looked in the aftermath, her parents gave up pressuring her to stop this bluestocking nonsense and make some hapless young man fall in love with her. Her mother was a conventionally attractive woman of about average height. Valeriya's more organized than one might expect someone with her untrammeled id to be. Nowadays she mostly wears animal fibers - they're less vulnerable to stray sparks.
Sometimes she misses being able to wear lace, but it's a bit flammable for her current situation. Most of her knowledge of what happened in the first few months after the Experiment comes from notes she took at the time. Until her nervous system adjusted to her new powers, Valeriya's memory was rather unreliable. She is not afraid of needles. Valeriya doesn't know the details of Katya's upbringing, but she would approve of Katya's first attempted murder if she knew the circumstances and motivation.
Sasha is the only person Valeriya's ever trusted to help her practice projectile-deflection. As far as Valeriya knows (her memories of her early twenties are a little patchy), she is not Ekaterina's mother (or anyone else's for that matter), whatever the rumors say. Perun Termen had a habit of trying to control his children through money, which is one of the reasons Valeriya took a paying job in Experimental Weapons Design instead of staying home and doing science projects in the stillroom. Valeriya likes opera. Even if it would have simplified some aspects of her life, Valeriya doesn't really wish she'd been born a man.
If swamp dragons existed in her universe, Valeriya would probably raise them. L'academie currently has a population of mutant mice living in one of the old Natural Philosophy buildings, descended from Valeriya's test subjects. One of the more poetically inclined young officers at Bezumiya-Krepost calls Valeriya and Sasha "The Kraken and the Sylph" - Valeriya's been called worse. She's an okay singer - contralto. Poppaea tried to seduce her once, but it didn't work out that well.
Valeriya has very expressive eyebrows, when she has eyebrows at all. Since she had to have her insulated labcoat custom made anyway, she designed it for extra dramatic sweep. Poppaea might have had better luck in her seduction attempt if she'd behaved more like herself - the woman she was pretending to be was a bit of a delicate flower for Valeriya's taste. Apart from the electricity burns and patches of fine, shiny purplish-green scales, Valeriya has surprisingly soft hands. This is probably because she wears gloves almost all the time.
Valeriya doesn't dislike cats or dogs, but is more of a "dangerous marine life" person herself. It's probably to the advantage of every living creature she encounters that biology is not her primary interest. The current rudimentary state of portable power sources means that some of her most innovative creations have been impractically clunky in the hands of anyone else. "Subtlety" is just a euphemism for not making the effort. Since the Experiment, her alcohol tolerance has improved, but she sometimes has interesting reactions to normally innocuous foods or drinks.
Her tentacles are the "elongated flexible extra limb" kind, not the "phallus or ovipositor in a stick" kind. They're at least as sensitive as human fingers and a lot more flexible, but the lack of branching ends makes some kinds of fine manipulation a bit difficult. At boarding school, she had a running feud with the Libby, who apparently considered her some kind of competition, never mind that Valeriya cared more for her long-term plans than for her place in the school's pecking order. She drinks a lot of tea, although less than Ekaterina. Like Ekaterina, she's not great at sitting still, although not to as great an extent as Katya and more of a pacer than a fidgeter.
Valeriya smells like ozone, lavender soap, hot metal, and oil of lemon. With a few prominent exceptions (such as her current boss, the colonel), Valeriya tends to find people intensely annoying rather than hate them (not that this does the objects of her ire much good). She's learned how to create a personal "bug zapper" field, which comes in handy during the summer. When she was a student, Valeriya taught herself to cook (mostly simple things). Some of the weird equipment in her lab is vodka filtration/purification apparatus - the local stuff would be undrinkable without the extra processing.
Beautiful as Sasha is, Valeriya is most attracted to her brand of ever-so-slightly-warped joie de vivre. Sometimes she wishes Ekaterina would lighten up a little - the poor girl always seems so tightly wound. Sasha has Valeriya pretty much wrapped around her finger. She hates being caught in the rain. If it wasn't for the hideous complications it would bring about, Valeriya would have fried her current boss by now.
Recently, Valeriya began making an effort to be less intimidating towards her subordinates - it doesn't do to have them so jumpy that they drop delicate equipment at sudden noises. If her current boss ever uses his authority to hurt or seriously inconvenience Sasha, then that man is going to be a fly in a bug zapper, hideous complications be damned. Intimidation is great in its place, but Valeriya actually prefers to have sex with people who aren't terrified of or horribly squicked by her. Valeriya loves chocolate. When she takes over the world, she's going to repeal the sodomy laws.
Some of the less poetically inclined soldiers have just nicknamed her Sparky. Humans are apparently more sensitive to tentacle-beast ichor than mice - none of her test mice developed electrical powers on anything near her scale. The experiment was actually an attempt (which worked) to cure a chronic medical condition with some of the substances in tentacle-beast body fluids. Now that she's used to her particular Experiment-induced weirdnesses, she wouldn't want to be normal if it was offered. She loses respect for women who let men push them around and don't put up some sort of fight.
Valeriya doesn't read a lot of fiction, but when she does she can become deeply over-invested in true rabid fan style. Women's suffrage is something she approves of in theory, but it's not a big concern for a Future World's Dictator currently living under an absolute monarchy. Mostly due to her self-centered view of the rest of humanity, she's less influenced by common religious and ethnic prejudices than many of her contemporaries - what matters is their usefulness now, not what their ancestors did. This does not mean that she treats everyone according to a reasoned assessment of their personal merits. It's a cliche, but Valeriya really does like girls with spirit.
She carries odd stuff in the pockets of her lab coat. It baffles her how, in many ways, the colonel is no more conventionally virtuous a person than she is, and yet he still doesn't seem to have much fun in life. Her increased metabolism from twenty extra pounds of muscle tissue is welcome now that she's a prosperous woman approaching midlife and has a mostly sedentary job, but it was awfully inconvenient for a poor university student. The immediate adjustment period after the Experiment was not smooth, to put it mildly. Valeriya, to her great annoyance, once irreparably scorched a very nice set of sheets in her sleep.
Valeriya knows that the colonel uses Sasha as a kind of leash at times, but considers her more than worth it. Before the Experiment, she cared about impressing more established scientists, but now she normally doesn't bother. Fortunately for everyone, Valeriya doesn't suffer from PMS very much. She doesn't hold with the idea of Cosmic Horrors - creatures are just creatures, no matter how powerful and weird. Although she'd never admit it, Valeriya is not completely unsquickable.
While Valeriya normally doesn't have much time or inclination for fancywork, she invented a few forms of foil-and-wire arts and crafts when she was first learning to use her powers with some degree of finesse. By the standards of her time, Valeriya's private quarters are seriously underdecorated - adapting everything to her particular issues is complicated enough without bringing in a bunch of tchotchkes that collect dust. Like most of her countrymen, she likes mushrooms, but she prefers to gather and cook them herself - less chance of some smartass slipping in an amanita that way. The moral implications of creating superweapons have never concerned her - it's not as if they're pointed at people she likes. She's sped up the development of rubber glove technology in her world by at least twenty years.
It would be nice to have more time to do things just For Science. Valeriya isn't exclusively attracted to slightly crazy, sadomasochistic, blonde, androgynous Genki Girls - she just really likes Sasha. The people attracted to Valeriya post-Experiment tend to be kinky as corkscrew macrame or have ulterior motives. She can pick Sasha up with just her tentacles. Unfortunately, her current plans are somewhat hampered by her lack of a nigh-unlimited, easily accessible personal fortune.
Valeriya's a poetry fan. Her own work, which nobody but Sasha has ever seen, is not great, but she's no William Topaz McGonagall. By strict clinical definition, Valeriya is not a psychopath - she has all the essential emotional capacities, just not properly arranged. Pre-Experiment, she was usually a little less demonstratively moody, although she was never exactly stoic. Once, Valeriya managed to get into a rather heated argument about literature with a prisoner in the middle of an interrogation (this made more sense at the time).
When Valeriya's mother was pregnant with her, she encountered both a giant squid and a thunderstorm while on a sea voyage. Valeriya loves her motherland, but sometimes considers it remarkably poorly run. Her powers can have unfortunate effects on her coiffure. If faced with a Sadistic Choice, Valeriya's preferred option would be to fry the hell out of the person making her choose. Before the Experiment, her handwriting was neater than it is now, although she was never a candidate for any penmanship prizes.
Thanks to pukingtoreador and MGS fanfiction (particularly "Ectype") for ideas related to possible side effects of tentacle-person-hood and electric powers, respectively. Warning for crack, cannibalizing earlier ideas, eccentric capitalization, a touch of fangirl Russian, and lots of tvtropes jargon.
Family legend says that one of Perun Termen's ancestors married an ice giant, which is why members of the family tend to be so tall (although Valeriya herself isn't that much over six feet). Valeriya studied at L'academie Polygnostique for several years, but got her doctorate elsewhere because at that point they didn't yet grant degrees to women. Sasha isn't the first person Valeriya's ever loved, but she is the first to appreciate Lera's more distinctive qualities. The whole electric-tentacle-person business was the unintended side effect of an experiment she performed in her student years. She keeps a detailed diary.
Despite her tendency to burn her eyebrows off with exploding experiments, Valeriya does a pretty good Death Glare. She's worn glasses since she was about ten. Valeriya keeps a pet electric eel in an aquarium in her private quarters. Tentacle-aikido is mostly for exercise - if she really wants to hurt somebody, she'll just zap them. Even before the Experiment, Valeriya was never a fashionable beauty.
What doesn't kill you had better be sure it doesn't run into you a second time. Even the Experiment's negative side effects had some good points - with the way she looked in the aftermath, her parents gave up pressuring her to stop this bluestocking nonsense and make some hapless young man fall in love with her. Her mother was a conventionally attractive woman of about average height. Valeriya's more organized than one might expect someone with her untrammeled id to be. Nowadays she mostly wears animal fibers - they're less vulnerable to stray sparks.
Sometimes she misses being able to wear lace, but it's a bit flammable for her current situation. Most of her knowledge of what happened in the first few months after the Experiment comes from notes she took at the time. Until her nervous system adjusted to her new powers, Valeriya's memory was rather unreliable. She is not afraid of needles. Valeriya doesn't know the details of Katya's upbringing, but she would approve of Katya's first attempted murder if she knew the circumstances and motivation.
Sasha is the only person Valeriya's ever trusted to help her practice projectile-deflection. As far as Valeriya knows (her memories of her early twenties are a little patchy), she is not Ekaterina's mother (or anyone else's for that matter), whatever the rumors say. Perun Termen had a habit of trying to control his children through money, which is one of the reasons Valeriya took a paying job in Experimental Weapons Design instead of staying home and doing science projects in the stillroom. Valeriya likes opera. Even if it would have simplified some aspects of her life, Valeriya doesn't really wish she'd been born a man.
If swamp dragons existed in her universe, Valeriya would probably raise them. L'academie currently has a population of mutant mice living in one of the old Natural Philosophy buildings, descended from Valeriya's test subjects. One of the more poetically inclined young officers at Bezumiya-Krepost calls Valeriya and Sasha "The Kraken and the Sylph" - Valeriya's been called worse. She's an okay singer - contralto. Poppaea tried to seduce her once, but it didn't work out that well.
Valeriya has very expressive eyebrows, when she has eyebrows at all. Since she had to have her insulated labcoat custom made anyway, she designed it for extra dramatic sweep. Poppaea might have had better luck in her seduction attempt if she'd behaved more like herself - the woman she was pretending to be was a bit of a delicate flower for Valeriya's taste. Apart from the electricity burns and patches of fine, shiny purplish-green scales, Valeriya has surprisingly soft hands. This is probably because she wears gloves almost all the time.
Valeriya doesn't dislike cats or dogs, but is more of a "dangerous marine life" person herself. It's probably to the advantage of every living creature she encounters that biology is not her primary interest. The current rudimentary state of portable power sources means that some of her most innovative creations have been impractically clunky in the hands of anyone else. "Subtlety" is just a euphemism for not making the effort. Since the Experiment, her alcohol tolerance has improved, but she sometimes has interesting reactions to normally innocuous foods or drinks.
Her tentacles are the "elongated flexible extra limb" kind, not the "phallus or ovipositor in a stick" kind. They're at least as sensitive as human fingers and a lot more flexible, but the lack of branching ends makes some kinds of fine manipulation a bit difficult. At boarding school, she had a running feud with the Libby, who apparently considered her some kind of competition, never mind that Valeriya cared more for her long-term plans than for her place in the school's pecking order. She drinks a lot of tea, although less than Ekaterina. Like Ekaterina, she's not great at sitting still, although not to as great an extent as Katya and more of a pacer than a fidgeter.
Valeriya smells like ozone, lavender soap, hot metal, and oil of lemon. With a few prominent exceptions (such as her current boss, the colonel), Valeriya tends to find people intensely annoying rather than hate them (not that this does the objects of her ire much good). She's learned how to create a personal "bug zapper" field, which comes in handy during the summer. When she was a student, Valeriya taught herself to cook (mostly simple things). Some of the weird equipment in her lab is vodka filtration/purification apparatus - the local stuff would be undrinkable without the extra processing.
Beautiful as Sasha is, Valeriya is most attracted to her brand of ever-so-slightly-warped joie de vivre. Sometimes she wishes Ekaterina would lighten up a little - the poor girl always seems so tightly wound. Sasha has Valeriya pretty much wrapped around her finger. She hates being caught in the rain. If it wasn't for the hideous complications it would bring about, Valeriya would have fried her current boss by now.
Recently, Valeriya began making an effort to be less intimidating towards her subordinates - it doesn't do to have them so jumpy that they drop delicate equipment at sudden noises. If her current boss ever uses his authority to hurt or seriously inconvenience Sasha, then that man is going to be a fly in a bug zapper, hideous complications be damned. Intimidation is great in its place, but Valeriya actually prefers to have sex with people who aren't terrified of or horribly squicked by her. Valeriya loves chocolate. When she takes over the world, she's going to repeal the sodomy laws.
Some of the less poetically inclined soldiers have just nicknamed her Sparky. Humans are apparently more sensitive to tentacle-beast ichor than mice - none of her test mice developed electrical powers on anything near her scale. The experiment was actually an attempt (which worked) to cure a chronic medical condition with some of the substances in tentacle-beast body fluids. Now that she's used to her particular Experiment-induced weirdnesses, she wouldn't want to be normal if it was offered. She loses respect for women who let men push them around and don't put up some sort of fight.
Valeriya doesn't read a lot of fiction, but when she does she can become deeply over-invested in true rabid fan style. Women's suffrage is something she approves of in theory, but it's not a big concern for a Future World's Dictator currently living under an absolute monarchy. Mostly due to her self-centered view of the rest of humanity, she's less influenced by common religious and ethnic prejudices than many of her contemporaries - what matters is their usefulness now, not what their ancestors did. This does not mean that she treats everyone according to a reasoned assessment of their personal merits. It's a cliche, but Valeriya really does like girls with spirit.
She carries odd stuff in the pockets of her lab coat. It baffles her how, in many ways, the colonel is no more conventionally virtuous a person than she is, and yet he still doesn't seem to have much fun in life. Her increased metabolism from twenty extra pounds of muscle tissue is welcome now that she's a prosperous woman approaching midlife and has a mostly sedentary job, but it was awfully inconvenient for a poor university student. The immediate adjustment period after the Experiment was not smooth, to put it mildly. Valeriya, to her great annoyance, once irreparably scorched a very nice set of sheets in her sleep.
Valeriya knows that the colonel uses Sasha as a kind of leash at times, but considers her more than worth it. Before the Experiment, she cared about impressing more established scientists, but now she normally doesn't bother. Fortunately for everyone, Valeriya doesn't suffer from PMS very much. She doesn't hold with the idea of Cosmic Horrors - creatures are just creatures, no matter how powerful and weird. Although she'd never admit it, Valeriya is not completely unsquickable.
While Valeriya normally doesn't have much time or inclination for fancywork, she invented a few forms of foil-and-wire arts and crafts when she was first learning to use her powers with some degree of finesse. By the standards of her time, Valeriya's private quarters are seriously underdecorated - adapting everything to her particular issues is complicated enough without bringing in a bunch of tchotchkes that collect dust. Like most of her countrymen, she likes mushrooms, but she prefers to gather and cook them herself - less chance of some smartass slipping in an amanita that way. The moral implications of creating superweapons have never concerned her - it's not as if they're pointed at people she likes. She's sped up the development of rubber glove technology in her world by at least twenty years.
It would be nice to have more time to do things just For Science. Valeriya isn't exclusively attracted to slightly crazy, sadomasochistic, blonde, androgynous Genki Girls - she just really likes Sasha. The people attracted to Valeriya post-Experiment tend to be kinky as corkscrew macrame or have ulterior motives. She can pick Sasha up with just her tentacles. Unfortunately, her current plans are somewhat hampered by her lack of a nigh-unlimited, easily accessible personal fortune.
Valeriya's a poetry fan. Her own work, which nobody but Sasha has ever seen, is not great, but she's no William Topaz McGonagall. By strict clinical definition, Valeriya is not a psychopath - she has all the essential emotional capacities, just not properly arranged. Pre-Experiment, she was usually a little less demonstratively moody, although she was never exactly stoic. Once, Valeriya managed to get into a rather heated argument about literature with a prisoner in the middle of an interrogation (this made more sense at the time).
When Valeriya's mother was pregnant with her, she encountered both a giant squid and a thunderstorm while on a sea voyage. Valeriya loves her motherland, but sometimes considers it remarkably poorly run. Her powers can have unfortunate effects on her coiffure. If faced with a Sadistic Choice, Valeriya's preferred option would be to fry the hell out of the person making her choose. Before the Experiment, her handwriting was neater than it is now, although she was never a candidate for any penmanship prizes.