OOC: Character Questions

[henrik_paulsen]

[Memething that's been going around: Ask me questions about my characters! I'd be happy to answer for both Henrik and Yujao, with the caveat that I may answer insufficiently, or in less than timely fashion, or just plain incorrectly. This goes double for asking 'what X thinks about Y,' because character thoughts change frequently.]

Comments

[henrik_paulsen]

Annelise is the youngest of the Paulsen siblings, a tall, plump, heavy-limbed woman with a broad, girlish laugh; she is a woman who grew up climbing trees and reading (and hiding) books on mysticism and magic. Her brothers would try to encourage her to stop reading things their father didn't approve of, but they also colluded with her in concealing what she read, and so their admonitions never stuck. She wanted very much to be like her older brothers, to catch up with them and to play with them and to follow them to school in Copenhagen; alas, this was not in the cards for her. Instead, she developed a social circle of budding mystics and female scholars, whom she'd entertain by reading Tarot cards and tea leaves. After Christer's death, Henrik and Theodor went to her to serve as their medium in contacting their dead friend--and he decided, in his mechanical-minded way, to live in her mind, since his was currently interred. The experience left her shattered and disoriented, and over a period of a month or so, it splintered the remainder of the family.

She has difficulty recognizing at which point in her life she's living. On the experiential level, it's difficult for her to process whether she's a child or a grown woman, or whether something horrible has just happened (the death of her mother in her childhood, the death of her father shortly before she went mad), or where she is spatially. (She also has someone else's memories mixed in with hers, memories of a boyhood she never lived through and languages she never learned and machines she never built, and this is also very difficult to process.)

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No husband! Just a fiancee, whom Yujao calls her 'wife.' Xi-An Lasai is, in many superficial ways, much like Scarlet. She's a savvy businesswoman who has difficulty recognizing other people as people; she was raised to the hereditary, rural upper classes (unlike Yujao, whose equally upper-class family is almost aggressively urban). She is the very pinnacle of ruthlessness and discretion. She also likes yellow dresses, and puts table scraps out for stray cats, and has all but adopted her nephew as a beloved son.