FR application
Player name: Karin
Journal:
likeaswift
AIM/Plurk: ricksonjacket/finalprogramme
Email: lingeanare at gmail
Other characters: George Smiley
Character name: Una Persson
Age: Uncertain, but definitely an adult.
Canon: Michael Moorcock's Multiverse.
Canon point: The Multiverse canon being a weird thing with an extremely jumbled timeline, we'll just say that we're taking her from "now", i.e. after all the events of the Cornelius novels and stories (including "Firing the Cathedral"), the Metatemporal Detective stories, and The White Wolf's Son-to wit, after a great struggle for the Balance between Law and Chaos has occurred across multiple planes and the Balance has been properly restored. All in a day's work, in other words; sometime around the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Totem: Her chronometer. It looks like a man's chronograph wristwatch, but has a few extra buttons and some of the dials are marked in strange ways. Under normal circumstances, the dials reflect the passage of linear time; when affected, they show something similar to a megaflow disruption.
Weapons: A .45 Smith & Wesson pistol and a Sheffield army clasp knife. She also has an old-fashioned brass trench lighter. Technically not a weapon, but you never know.
Abilities/powers: Una is a time-traveller, but this is completely irrelevant and/or useless in this setting; the net effect is that she has no significant powers. She does have more resilient psychic defences than the average human, but a truly determined and trained psychic could still cause her a great deal of trouble. She's had military training and is in good physical condition; she's a good shot and can defend herself well in hand-to-hand combat.
Location: The main building and chapel of the Convent of the Poor Clares in Ladbroke Grove. This blog post has pictures. Two storeys tall, peaked roofs, tall windows. The interiors are clean and plain-the main building has plaster walls, wood floors, small rooms (each with a regulation bed, crucifix, nightstand, prie-dieu, and Bible), a dining room (with a long trestle table and benches), a kitchen, and a scullery. For the chapel, refer to the description from Survey of London, vol 37: The architect of the new convent was Henry Clutton, and the contractors were Jackson and Shaw. The buildings were economical and austere, being generally two storeys in height, of picked stocks with occasional bands of Staffordshire blue bricks, and with stone dressings to the chapel gables. They were grouped round a central cloistered court and flanked by walled gardens.
The principal entrance was from Westbourne Park Road, and was set in a one-storey linking block beside the chapels, which provided the principal element in the whole group. As the convent was occupied by an enclosed order, it was necessary to have two chapels, one for the nuns and the other for visitors. Clutton arranged the altars back to back, the movements of the celebrant's hands during Mass thus being visible to both the nuns and the visitors.
Personality: Intelligent, adaptable, a quick study. Does not suffer fools gladly and will not play dumb. Rejects cruelty and brutality committed for their own sake. Intensely loyal to her friends and does not like to leave jobs half-done. Closest to her friends/lovers Jerry and Catherine Cornelius; has had many lovers of both sexes. Not quite as prone as Catherine to occasional fits of hedonism, though they do happen, usually when she's reached the end of her tether with someone or a bunch of someones. She loves music, especially music-hall and jazz standards; she has been known to occasionally burst into song just for the hell of it. (Sometimes this is not a good thing; the worse her mood, the more bawdy, raucous, and politically incorrect her song choices get.) While not as much of a clotheshorse as some of her canon-mates, she is always well-dressed, usually with a slightly military flair.
She's described in one story as being "designed for crisis"-the kind of person who needs constant excitement (even in the form of misadventure or catastrophe) to feel properly alive. On one hand, it means she's very good and level-headed when things are going pear-shaped. On the other, she gets terribly, terribly bored when all is well and she has nothing else to do.
Her cynicism about human nature and society is tempered by a kind of optimism and idealism. She has groused that people in the main are thick and sheeplike, that democracy is a scam, and civilisations would be better served by a government composed of the intellectual elite, but at the same time, her struggles in various times and places have always been driven by the idea that people can and should be better than they are.
Politically, Una is basically an anarchist. She wants people to realise their own potential, to throw off the shackles put upon them and, more importantly, those they put upon themselves. Over the course of her long life, she has failed or been thwarted as often as she has succeeded (if not more so), but she doesn't stop trying: "pursuing her lonely, optimistic, explorations; searching for one world where tolerance and intelligence were paramount and where they existed by design rather than accident."
She has the kind of wisdom and long view that come with having lived for a very long time and seen a lot of the world and humanity: "I've fought in a thousand wars and have served many individuals and have been as depressed to witness the behaviour of those individuals in periods of enlightenment as I have been impressed by the nobility of men and women during periods of darkness. I cannot believe that temperaments are changed by conditions, only that they are modified.". She is a defender of the Cosmic Balance, which is both a metaphor and an actual mystical concept/object that represents the forces of order and chaos that keep the multiverse ticking along. Neither is good or evil in and of themselves, but excesses of either lead to stagnation, and Una tries to ply her efforts in ways that will avert the domination of one or the other. Thus sometimes she plays for the forces of Law, other times for Chaos. Being an anarchist, she's a little more Chaotic than Lawful by nature, but she can put that tendency aside for the larger good of the Balance.
Of course, being human, she still has her bad qualities. She can also be a real jerk when she's in a bad mood, deliberately taunting people with their weaknesses or pretending to wholeheartedly espouse views that she normally despises. While generally slow to anger, she will shout a lot when she's upset with someone. She has a tendency to believe that everything would go more smoothly if the people around her would just bloody well do what she says. She can be moody, waspish, and sometimes just a little bit mad. She is also prone to fits of memory slippage and amnesia, a possible side-effect of being a time-traveller (linked, perhaps, to a psychic defence mechanism that allows a traveller to assimilate fully into whatever era they're visiting); this can manifest as a kind of personal vagueness or forgetfulness of where she is in time and space.
History: Una's origins are lost in time; she's spun tales of a Swedish father and an English mother, long dead (killed in a tragic ballooning accident, she once claimed), and she has vague memories of childhood, but they may very well be notions of what one should remember, based on images in film and books.
(I have an embarrassing amount of headcanon on what her actual childhood was like, but we'll leave that aside for now.)
What is known, then: After an initial career as an actress and singer, with a stint in music-hall as well (though that may have come later, subjectively time-wise if not objectively), Una became a politician, activist, and revolutionary. Every now and then she goes back to the theatre, but inevitably throws it over again to get back into the politics and warfare game. At some point as well, she became a member of the League of Temporal Adventurers. This loose group of scientists and adventurers explore the multiverse and keep track of the flow of time and dimension (the "chronoflow" and the "megaflow"). Occasionally they are called to fish rogue travellers out of time streams where they shouldn't be, or to facilitate repairs in the megaflow. Her friends and associates in the League include Lord Jagged of Canaria, Lt. Alvarez, Karl Glogauer, and Oswald Bastable.
In the 1960s, she became acquainted with Jerry Cornelius. She has been his frequent ally and lover, and has also been lover to his sister, Catherine, and antagonist to their brother Frank. Jerry and Catherine are Una's closest friends, and there is a time-stream in which she (literally) played Harlequin to Jerry Cornelius's Pierrot and Catherine Cornelius's Columbine, waking the latter from a deep drugged sleep (or, as some would have it, death itself). It is possible that the Corneliuses learned the knack of time-travel from her.
Her travels throughout history and the multiverse have taken her many, many places. She sided with Kerensky and was part of the First Petrograd Women's Battalion, and was thrown out after that movement collapsed. She has successfully avoided long-term positions of leadership several times. She travelled across a post-apocalyptic Europe, bringing word of what she saw to unwilling listeners back in England. She fought against Josef Djugashvili, who called himself the Steel Tsar; and was the mistress of Cicero Hood, the "Black Attila", who fought to free the slaves in an alternate twentieth-century United States. She is a friend to Count Zodiac, also known as Zenith the Albino, and as Elric -- and may have even borne his children. She was friend and advisor to Gloriana, queen of Albion. She has picnicked at the End of Time with the vastly powerful, decadent, and carefree people who reside there. Much of her time has been spent in one version or another of Central or Eastern Europe, but England is more or less her home, or at least the home of the people she cares most about.
The lady has gotten around, in other words. The exact order of these adventures is unclear, and possibly the veracity as well, but her biographer, friend, and collaborator Mr Moorcock says that as far as he knows, her accounts of events are "the most objective, the most accurate." Most recently, she has spent some time in an alternate twenty-first century America, travelling with Jerry to deliver some rough justice to certain Texans.
3rd person sample: Waived.
1st person sample:
Someone I knew long ago would have called this place a world of Chaos-yes, that's with a capital C, if you must know. Chaos isn't inherently good or evil, but it can be used to good or evil ends. I wouldn't think to impose morality here, though. My point is-a world that is constantly in flux, as this one is, is as good as stagnant. An excess of Order would be no better, of course; that way lies rigidity, repetition of empty ritual, no space for growth or change. But you cannot grow or change when you're constantly flailing about in Chaos either; you spend all your time reacting and not nearly enough doing. Why are we, as a community, so resigned to Chaos? Surely there must be an alternative, and in that alternative, a way out.
[Originally posted at http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/97286.html - comments go there.]
Journal:
likeaswift
AIM/Plurk: ricksonjacket/finalprogramme
Email: lingeanare at gmail
Other characters: George Smiley
Character name: Una Persson
Age: Uncertain, but definitely an adult.
Canon: Michael Moorcock's Multiverse.
Canon point: The Multiverse canon being a weird thing with an extremely jumbled timeline, we'll just say that we're taking her from "now", i.e. after all the events of the Cornelius novels and stories (including "Firing the Cathedral"), the Metatemporal Detective stories, and The White Wolf's Son-to wit, after a great struggle for the Balance between Law and Chaos has occurred across multiple planes and the Balance has been properly restored. All in a day's work, in other words; sometime around the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Totem: Her chronometer. It looks like a man's chronograph wristwatch, but has a few extra buttons and some of the dials are marked in strange ways. Under normal circumstances, the dials reflect the passage of linear time; when affected, they show something similar to a megaflow disruption.
Weapons: A .45 Smith & Wesson pistol and a Sheffield army clasp knife. She also has an old-fashioned brass trench lighter. Technically not a weapon, but you never know.
Abilities/powers: Una is a time-traveller, but this is completely irrelevant and/or useless in this setting; the net effect is that she has no significant powers. She does have more resilient psychic defences than the average human, but a truly determined and trained psychic could still cause her a great deal of trouble. She's had military training and is in good physical condition; she's a good shot and can defend herself well in hand-to-hand combat.
Location: The main building and chapel of the Convent of the Poor Clares in Ladbroke Grove. This blog post has pictures. Two storeys tall, peaked roofs, tall windows. The interiors are clean and plain-the main building has plaster walls, wood floors, small rooms (each with a regulation bed, crucifix, nightstand, prie-dieu, and Bible), a dining room (with a long trestle table and benches), a kitchen, and a scullery. For the chapel, refer to the description from Survey of London, vol 37: The architect of the new convent was Henry Clutton, and the contractors were Jackson and Shaw. The buildings were economical and austere, being generally two storeys in height, of picked stocks with occasional bands of Staffordshire blue bricks, and with stone dressings to the chapel gables. They were grouped round a central cloistered court and flanked by walled gardens.
The principal entrance was from Westbourne Park Road, and was set in a one-storey linking block beside the chapels, which provided the principal element in the whole group. As the convent was occupied by an enclosed order, it was necessary to have two chapels, one for the nuns and the other for visitors. Clutton arranged the altars back to back, the movements of the celebrant's hands during Mass thus being visible to both the nuns and the visitors.
Personality: Intelligent, adaptable, a quick study. Does not suffer fools gladly and will not play dumb. Rejects cruelty and brutality committed for their own sake. Intensely loyal to her friends and does not like to leave jobs half-done. Closest to her friends/lovers Jerry and Catherine Cornelius; has had many lovers of both sexes. Not quite as prone as Catherine to occasional fits of hedonism, though they do happen, usually when she's reached the end of her tether with someone or a bunch of someones. She loves music, especially music-hall and jazz standards; she has been known to occasionally burst into song just for the hell of it. (Sometimes this is not a good thing; the worse her mood, the more bawdy, raucous, and politically incorrect her song choices get.) While not as much of a clotheshorse as some of her canon-mates, she is always well-dressed, usually with a slightly military flair.
She's described in one story as being "designed for crisis"-the kind of person who needs constant excitement (even in the form of misadventure or catastrophe) to feel properly alive. On one hand, it means she's very good and level-headed when things are going pear-shaped. On the other, she gets terribly, terribly bored when all is well and she has nothing else to do.
Her cynicism about human nature and society is tempered by a kind of optimism and idealism. She has groused that people in the main are thick and sheeplike, that democracy is a scam, and civilisations would be better served by a government composed of the intellectual elite, but at the same time, her struggles in various times and places have always been driven by the idea that people can and should be better than they are.
Politically, Una is basically an anarchist. She wants people to realise their own potential, to throw off the shackles put upon them and, more importantly, those they put upon themselves. Over the course of her long life, she has failed or been thwarted as often as she has succeeded (if not more so), but she doesn't stop trying: "pursuing her lonely, optimistic, explorations; searching for one world where tolerance and intelligence were paramount and where they existed by design rather than accident."
She has the kind of wisdom and long view that come with having lived for a very long time and seen a lot of the world and humanity: "I've fought in a thousand wars and have served many individuals and have been as depressed to witness the behaviour of those individuals in periods of enlightenment as I have been impressed by the nobility of men and women during periods of darkness. I cannot believe that temperaments are changed by conditions, only that they are modified.". She is a defender of the Cosmic Balance, which is both a metaphor and an actual mystical concept/object that represents the forces of order and chaos that keep the multiverse ticking along. Neither is good or evil in and of themselves, but excesses of either lead to stagnation, and Una tries to ply her efforts in ways that will avert the domination of one or the other. Thus sometimes she plays for the forces of Law, other times for Chaos. Being an anarchist, she's a little more Chaotic than Lawful by nature, but she can put that tendency aside for the larger good of the Balance.
Of course, being human, she still has her bad qualities. She can also be a real jerk when she's in a bad mood, deliberately taunting people with their weaknesses or pretending to wholeheartedly espouse views that she normally despises. While generally slow to anger, she will shout a lot when she's upset with someone. She has a tendency to believe that everything would go more smoothly if the people around her would just bloody well do what she says. She can be moody, waspish, and sometimes just a little bit mad. She is also prone to fits of memory slippage and amnesia, a possible side-effect of being a time-traveller (linked, perhaps, to a psychic defence mechanism that allows a traveller to assimilate fully into whatever era they're visiting); this can manifest as a kind of personal vagueness or forgetfulness of where she is in time and space.
History: Una's origins are lost in time; she's spun tales of a Swedish father and an English mother, long dead (killed in a tragic ballooning accident, she once claimed), and she has vague memories of childhood, but they may very well be notions of what one should remember, based on images in film and books.
(I have an embarrassing amount of headcanon on what her actual childhood was like, but we'll leave that aside for now.)
What is known, then: After an initial career as an actress and singer, with a stint in music-hall as well (though that may have come later, subjectively time-wise if not objectively), Una became a politician, activist, and revolutionary. Every now and then she goes back to the theatre, but inevitably throws it over again to get back into the politics and warfare game. At some point as well, she became a member of the League of Temporal Adventurers. This loose group of scientists and adventurers explore the multiverse and keep track of the flow of time and dimension (the "chronoflow" and the "megaflow"). Occasionally they are called to fish rogue travellers out of time streams where they shouldn't be, or to facilitate repairs in the megaflow. Her friends and associates in the League include Lord Jagged of Canaria, Lt. Alvarez, Karl Glogauer, and Oswald Bastable.
In the 1960s, she became acquainted with Jerry Cornelius. She has been his frequent ally and lover, and has also been lover to his sister, Catherine, and antagonist to their brother Frank. Jerry and Catherine are Una's closest friends, and there is a time-stream in which she (literally) played Harlequin to Jerry Cornelius's Pierrot and Catherine Cornelius's Columbine, waking the latter from a deep drugged sleep (or, as some would have it, death itself). It is possible that the Corneliuses learned the knack of time-travel from her.
Her travels throughout history and the multiverse have taken her many, many places. She sided with Kerensky and was part of the First Petrograd Women's Battalion, and was thrown out after that movement collapsed. She has successfully avoided long-term positions of leadership several times. She travelled across a post-apocalyptic Europe, bringing word of what she saw to unwilling listeners back in England. She fought against Josef Djugashvili, who called himself the Steel Tsar; and was the mistress of Cicero Hood, the "Black Attila", who fought to free the slaves in an alternate twentieth-century United States. She is a friend to Count Zodiac, also known as Zenith the Albino, and as Elric -- and may have even borne his children. She was friend and advisor to Gloriana, queen of Albion. She has picnicked at the End of Time with the vastly powerful, decadent, and carefree people who reside there. Much of her time has been spent in one version or another of Central or Eastern Europe, but England is more or less her home, or at least the home of the people she cares most about.
The lady has gotten around, in other words. The exact order of these adventures is unclear, and possibly the veracity as well, but her biographer, friend, and collaborator Mr Moorcock says that as far as he knows, her accounts of events are "the most objective, the most accurate." Most recently, she has spent some time in an alternate twenty-first century America, travelling with Jerry to deliver some rough justice to certain Texans.
3rd person sample: Waived.
1st person sample:
Someone I knew long ago would have called this place a world of Chaos-yes, that's with a capital C, if you must know. Chaos isn't inherently good or evil, but it can be used to good or evil ends. I wouldn't think to impose morality here, though. My point is-a world that is constantly in flux, as this one is, is as good as stagnant. An excess of Order would be no better, of course; that way lies rigidity, repetition of empty ritual, no space for growth or change. But you cannot grow or change when you're constantly flailing about in Chaos either; you spend all your time reacting and not nearly enough doing. Why are we, as a community, so resigned to Chaos? Surely there must be an alternative, and in that alternative, a way out.
[Originally posted at http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/97286.html - comments go there.]