QoH App
Player Information
Name: Sooz
Personal Journal: furikku
Contact Info: furikku at gmail (email or gchat) is most reliable. Journal PMs are also good. My AIM is SeraFurikku, but I am almost never on unless asked for.
Other Characters: Nobody!
Character Information
Name: Jessica Boyette
Age: 17
Setting:
Typically modern Earth, only with actual ghosts and psychic phenomena, though these are still rare enough that they're about as believed in as in real life, and there's little to no scientific documentation on anything.
Jessica's experience of her world is entirely different from most people's, of course, given her "condition" as a half ghost. For her, there's a world of strange-looking, not-totally-human beings that don't exist for anyone else. The vast majority of ghosts have limited awareness of the world around them, being just a remainder of their living habits and emotions, and so most of Jessica's interactions usually involve being bumped into by oblivious ghosts that were not expecting a living person to be an obstacle. And then being berated for being an obstacle. She ignores them most of the time.
Ghosts (as Jessica sees them) have differing forms according to various factors such as self-image, age (the older the ghost, the less cohesive it tends to be), and dying circumstances (emotionally charged deaths will tend to reflect on the ghost, while more peaceful ones will have little effect). They don't necessarily stick to one place, and tend to have shortish "lifespans" outside of the few particularly determined people (generally psychics) who feel that death is too inconvenient and by God they are GOING to finish their unfinished business one way or another!
As stated before, psychics exist, but tend to be rare and not particularly powerful. (If anyone has won James Randi's challenge, they have not shared this information with the rest of the world.) Occasionally (once a half a century or so) someone with actual havoc-wreaking abilities shows up, weird shit ensues, and just about everyone wonders what the hell is going on. Other than that, the most one might expect is someone who is eerily good at card games or can flip a coin with their brain; not the stuff of heavily exciting drama.
History:
EXCITING BACKSTORY THAT JESSICA DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT
So there's a young girl, ludicrously strong psychic, has no idea about her powers other than weird shit happens around her. She has a particularly abusive family. She also has a friend- an adult woman who's pregnant- who lives in the same boarding house as her family. Young girl decides she would much rather be her friend's daughter than continue to be in her own family, and, with the logic of the young, decides that dying in a superstitious ritual will lead to the desired outcome.
What this actually leads to is the entire house and everyone in it offset from reality as the young psychic's will warps the fuck out of things, making it all one big, screwed-up ghost nest.
The place gains notoriety as a Creepy Haunted Area, aided by the gradual decay of the location, and becomes a hangout area for teenagers, as abandoned Creepy Haunted Areas tend to do. And then, further weird shit went down.
The now ghostly but still powerful young girl figured that, in order to actually become her (now also ghostly) friend's daughter, she'd have to boot out the current womb occupant. Not wanting to destroy it, she decided it'd be a good plan to get it a new mommy. She picked a "visiting" teenager who looked vaguely similar to her friend, and effected a "transfer." This was, to put it lightly, not a pleasant experience for the hapless victim, and left her rather traumatized, to the point that she required institutional care.
The result of this convoluted series of events was, of course, Jessica. Her birth mother's family quickly decided they wanted nothing to do with the baby, and Jessica was put into an adoption program.
ACTUAL HISTORY THAT JESSICA KNOWS ABOUT
It got very obvious, very quickly that Jessica was a "special needs" child, although nobody was totally certain what those needs were. She would react to stimuli that didn't exist, apparently experiencing vivid and complicated hallucinations from early on. Doctors were flummoxed; she showed otherwise normal development and exhibited no other symptoms of any mental problems.
Jessica was lucky: a well-off couple decided they had what it took to work with a potentially difficult child, and that Jessica was the child they were going with. The doctors they took her to were no more successful than previous ones at finding out her Issues. Despite an early childhood of many, many different visits to different examination rooms and offices, lots of fairly terrifying equipment, and several different medications, Jessica's condition remained inscrutable. After several years of failure, the Boyettes decided their daughter was probably not going to get any kind of useful diagnosis, and that they should simply focus on helping her grow up as normally as they could and on learning to deal with a child who had inexplicable hallucinations and occasionally wound up naked for no discernable reason.
Jessica's life got much more normal after that point. Or as normal as could be expected for someone with her "condition," who was adopted by a White father and a Korean-American mother, and who grew up in a house with an average of four or five shih-tzu dogs at any time. She'd been home-schooled for most of kindergarten and first grade, a byproduct of the medical testing that would've disrupted institutional forms of schooling; she started going to public school for the first time in second grade. Being more used to adults than children, Jessica did not fit in terribly well with her peers, even leaving aside the mockery-attracting aspect of her appearance. She became the shy, studious overachiever, spending more time with homework and extra credit than with classmates.
As she advanced in school, though, she opened up more, particularly because her classmates got used to her appearance and she learned to better hide her occasional ghostly interactions. She was never a popular kid or a social butterfly, but she made friends, helped people with classwork, and generally became part of society, or at least that segment of society that was under five feet tall.
During her later elementary school years, Jessica started to realise that her "hallucinations" might actually be something more substantial. She'd suspected that something might be up from her early childhood, when she'd notice things wandering around the house copying the behaviour of a recently deceased shih-tzu for a few days after said pet's death. The first confirmation happened on a Halloween field trip to a haunted historical building, when she found that the things she encountered matched closely the descriptions of "hauntings" experienced by a few people. The second was encountering the ghost of a student a few grades behind her after that student died in a car crash. By this point, she was very solidly in the mindset that We Do Not Talk About What We See, so this epiphany did not get shared with anyone. However, she started keeping a notebook of her encounters, with detailed descriptions, and would occasionally cross-reference with known deaths or historical information. This generally didn't lead anywhere interesting or useful, but she's kept it up, filling several (diligently filed) notebooks with information that many ghost hunters would give major organs for.
Middle and high school were relatively uneventful; puberty brought its usual bounty of awkwardness, which Jessica dealt with mainly by involving herself with student government (secretary two years running, vice president in 8th grade) and other extracurriculars (a few medals in Science Olympiad) instead of bothering with an actual social life. Now that she's in the start of her senior year, she's been focusing on colleges and figuring out what she wants to Do With Life. (And has the idea that she's going to track down info on her birth mother over the next summer.)
Personality:
Much of Jessica's core personality comes from her early life of too many doctor visits. She tends to be passive about unpleasant things, with an attitude of "put up with it until it's overwith," though she has no problems voicing her objections with particularly difficult things; she'll just put up with them unless someone else discontinues things. Accentuating this is a natural tendency toward stoicism and a lack of expression; unless something particularly emotional is going on, Jessica's face defaults to :| on everything. (You cannot read her poker face.)
Another, subtler trait stemming from this early influence is an internal sense that there's something inherently wrong with her that needs to be fixed; she's not 100% conscious of this, but has a tendency to keep most people at arms' length and to think of herself as a step or two lower on the status ladder than she probably ought to. (Part of her feels that if she could track down her biological roots, she might be able to find out where things come from and how to "fix" her "condition.")
As may be gathered, she's particularly shy and sensitive about her "condition," chiefly the aspect of it related to ghosts. She's not particularly worried about the appearance aspect- she treats it more as an "asshole filter" than as something to care about- but is very, very secretive about the "hallucinations," having learned long ago that nobody else gets them. If there's no way to hide things (such as when a ghost decides that it's time to walk directly in front of her), she'll brush off any questioning and insist that everything is A-OK, nothing has happened, we have always been at war with Oceania, and these aren't the droids you're looking for. The only exception to this would be someone who claims paranormal experience, which will lead to somewhat guarded questioning. (Her attempts to get in with a group of pagan classmates in high school ended embarrassingly and frustratingly for all parties when she insisted that a particular "haunted playground" had a grand total of zero ghosts and the swings were moving because of the wind).
The Boyette family has a philosophy of practicality, and Jessica certainly follows suit there: if there is a problem, you find a solution or- if no solution seems available- a workaround. This philosophy heavily informs her social interactions; she tends to locate unfilled niches- tutor, secretary, gofer- and volunteer herself to fill them. Jessica is not a schmoozer, and doesn't work well in purely social settings; she needs some sort of goal to work toward to feel comfortable. (Again related to her internal doubts, she tends to worry that if she's not useful, people will stop liking her.) Also related to this is her speaking style- she isn't good at small talk, tending to be quiet unless she feels something is useful in the conversation, and she tends more toward the analytical than the entertaining or emotional. She is not going to be a stand-up comedian or a dazzling conversationalist anytime soon, though she does occasionally try to spice things up with a very dry joke. (Her aforementioned stonefacedness makes it difficult to tell when these jokes are happening.)
Jessica has a rather scientific approach to life: she tries to investigate things, understand how they work, and record that information for others. Her interest isn't so much one of changing things as of finding ways to go with the flow. Probably because she has personal experience with things that seem not-real, and that others can't experience, she doesn't dismiss the impossible or improbable out of hand, but thinks of it in terms of whether or not it's going to be important. (For example, she tends toward being agnostic in religion, having decided that the question of any sort of god existing has little to do with nonspiritual issues. Despite her experience of some form of "afterlife," Jessica has almost no interest in unquantifiable things like spirituality. If it has no direct influence over matters, it doesn't concern her.) Out of habit, she's inclined to be observant of setting details and thorough and methodical in investigation, and tends to feel collection of information to be useful in and of itself.
Romance is not on Jessica's radar. She isn't actively anti-love or aromantic, she's just never been comfortable enough with anyone for the idea to enter into her thinking as more than a hypothetical. She has a vague idea that probably maybe at some point there's going to be some form of intimate relationship with someone, which is supposed to end up with marriage and grandchildren and a dog or something, but it's more a distant sense of "this happens" than a goal or interest. As far as she's concerned, there are more pressing things, like making sure her GPA is high enough for a good college, obsessively cataloguing every ghostly encounter, or not stepping in dog poop.
Due to her growing up with occasional apparitions of terrifying things, Jessica tends to have a very strong stomach for the bizarre or gruesome; deadly injuries, surreal and freakishly altered humanoid forms, and just plain strange amorphous things are a fact of life to her (and may make the Gardens more than a bit unsettling to her simply by their absence). She does have fears- centipedes creep her the hell out, and she's not a big fan of enclosed underground spaces- and can definitely tell when a situation is dangerous, but horrific imagery on its own just doesn't faze her. (This makes her a sought-after partner for the squeamish when it's dissection time in science class.)
Overall, Jessica is a behind-the-scenes person. She's not interested in much recognition, just in getting things done and getting problems solved, preferably with a minimum of attention. (She doesn't actively shun attention, and appreciates recognition for her work, but feels uncomfortable with more than a "Good job" and, if applicable, a medal or certificate.) Rebellion is certainly not her thing, except in the occasional sense of "bending" a rule to get something done. She just wants a quiet life of being helpful and figuring out solutions.
So obviously the best plan here is to throw her into a magical romance garden!
Abilities:
"Ability" might be an inaccurate term, since it tends to imply control over things, which Jessica hasn't really managed all that well.
1) Incorporeality- Occasionally (usually when she's very stressed out, sleeping, or otherwise not fully in control of her faculties) Jessica will stop being solid. This usually results in anything she's holding or wearing suddenly dropping to the ground. Conceivably this could be used to "ghost" through a solid surface, though Jessica has yet to try this, both because she'd emerge naked and spectacle-less and because she does not find the idea of getting stuck attractive.
2) Ghost Interaction- Are there spirits of the dead around? They are fully visible, tangible, audible, etc. to Jessica. (She prefers to ignore them, other than occasionally walking around something in the way. In her experience, ghosts are not worth the trouble, since most don't seem to be particularly on the ball.)
Sample:
[A face that looks like someone spilled White Out on it appears on the vine.]
Okay, I've been kidnapped.
By Disney, I guess.
Who else is here, and what are we supposed to be building?
http://community.livejournal.com/testrun_box/181776.html
Name: Sooz
Personal Journal: furikku
Contact Info: furikku at gmail (email or gchat) is most reliable. Journal PMs are also good. My AIM is SeraFurikku, but I am almost never on unless asked for.
Other Characters: Nobody!
Character Information
Name: Jessica Boyette
Age: 17
Setting:
Typically modern Earth, only with actual ghosts and psychic phenomena, though these are still rare enough that they're about as believed in as in real life, and there's little to no scientific documentation on anything.
Jessica's experience of her world is entirely different from most people's, of course, given her "condition" as a half ghost. For her, there's a world of strange-looking, not-totally-human beings that don't exist for anyone else. The vast majority of ghosts have limited awareness of the world around them, being just a remainder of their living habits and emotions, and so most of Jessica's interactions usually involve being bumped into by oblivious ghosts that were not expecting a living person to be an obstacle. And then being berated for being an obstacle. She ignores them most of the time.
Ghosts (as Jessica sees them) have differing forms according to various factors such as self-image, age (the older the ghost, the less cohesive it tends to be), and dying circumstances (emotionally charged deaths will tend to reflect on the ghost, while more peaceful ones will have little effect). They don't necessarily stick to one place, and tend to have shortish "lifespans" outside of the few particularly determined people (generally psychics) who feel that death is too inconvenient and by God they are GOING to finish their unfinished business one way or another!
As stated before, psychics exist, but tend to be rare and not particularly powerful. (If anyone has won James Randi's challenge, they have not shared this information with the rest of the world.) Occasionally (once a half a century or so) someone with actual havoc-wreaking abilities shows up, weird shit ensues, and just about everyone wonders what the hell is going on. Other than that, the most one might expect is someone who is eerily good at card games or can flip a coin with their brain; not the stuff of heavily exciting drama.
History:
EXCITING BACKSTORY THAT JESSICA DOESN'T KNOW ABOUT
So there's a young girl, ludicrously strong psychic, has no idea about her powers other than weird shit happens around her. She has a particularly abusive family. She also has a friend- an adult woman who's pregnant- who lives in the same boarding house as her family. Young girl decides she would much rather be her friend's daughter than continue to be in her own family, and, with the logic of the young, decides that dying in a superstitious ritual will lead to the desired outcome.
What this actually leads to is the entire house and everyone in it offset from reality as the young psychic's will warps the fuck out of things, making it all one big, screwed-up ghost nest.
The place gains notoriety as a Creepy Haunted Area, aided by the gradual decay of the location, and becomes a hangout area for teenagers, as abandoned Creepy Haunted Areas tend to do. And then, further weird shit went down.
The now ghostly but still powerful young girl figured that, in order to actually become her (now also ghostly) friend's daughter, she'd have to boot out the current womb occupant. Not wanting to destroy it, she decided it'd be a good plan to get it a new mommy. She picked a "visiting" teenager who looked vaguely similar to her friend, and effected a "transfer." This was, to put it lightly, not a pleasant experience for the hapless victim, and left her rather traumatized, to the point that she required institutional care.
The result of this convoluted series of events was, of course, Jessica. Her birth mother's family quickly decided they wanted nothing to do with the baby, and Jessica was put into an adoption program.
ACTUAL HISTORY THAT JESSICA KNOWS ABOUT
It got very obvious, very quickly that Jessica was a "special needs" child, although nobody was totally certain what those needs were. She would react to stimuli that didn't exist, apparently experiencing vivid and complicated hallucinations from early on. Doctors were flummoxed; she showed otherwise normal development and exhibited no other symptoms of any mental problems.
Jessica was lucky: a well-off couple decided they had what it took to work with a potentially difficult child, and that Jessica was the child they were going with. The doctors they took her to were no more successful than previous ones at finding out her Issues. Despite an early childhood of many, many different visits to different examination rooms and offices, lots of fairly terrifying equipment, and several different medications, Jessica's condition remained inscrutable. After several years of failure, the Boyettes decided their daughter was probably not going to get any kind of useful diagnosis, and that they should simply focus on helping her grow up as normally as they could and on learning to deal with a child who had inexplicable hallucinations and occasionally wound up naked for no discernable reason.
Jessica's life got much more normal after that point. Or as normal as could be expected for someone with her "condition," who was adopted by a White father and a Korean-American mother, and who grew up in a house with an average of four or five shih-tzu dogs at any time. She'd been home-schooled for most of kindergarten and first grade, a byproduct of the medical testing that would've disrupted institutional forms of schooling; she started going to public school for the first time in second grade. Being more used to adults than children, Jessica did not fit in terribly well with her peers, even leaving aside the mockery-attracting aspect of her appearance. She became the shy, studious overachiever, spending more time with homework and extra credit than with classmates.
As she advanced in school, though, she opened up more, particularly because her classmates got used to her appearance and she learned to better hide her occasional ghostly interactions. She was never a popular kid or a social butterfly, but she made friends, helped people with classwork, and generally became part of society, or at least that segment of society that was under five feet tall.
During her later elementary school years, Jessica started to realise that her "hallucinations" might actually be something more substantial. She'd suspected that something might be up from her early childhood, when she'd notice things wandering around the house copying the behaviour of a recently deceased shih-tzu for a few days after said pet's death. The first confirmation happened on a Halloween field trip to a haunted historical building, when she found that the things she encountered matched closely the descriptions of "hauntings" experienced by a few people. The second was encountering the ghost of a student a few grades behind her after that student died in a car crash. By this point, she was very solidly in the mindset that We Do Not Talk About What We See, so this epiphany did not get shared with anyone. However, she started keeping a notebook of her encounters, with detailed descriptions, and would occasionally cross-reference with known deaths or historical information. This generally didn't lead anywhere interesting or useful, but she's kept it up, filling several (diligently filed) notebooks with information that many ghost hunters would give major organs for.
Middle and high school were relatively uneventful; puberty brought its usual bounty of awkwardness, which Jessica dealt with mainly by involving herself with student government (secretary two years running, vice president in 8th grade) and other extracurriculars (a few medals in Science Olympiad) instead of bothering with an actual social life. Now that she's in the start of her senior year, she's been focusing on colleges and figuring out what she wants to Do With Life. (And has the idea that she's going to track down info on her birth mother over the next summer.)
Personality:
Much of Jessica's core personality comes from her early life of too many doctor visits. She tends to be passive about unpleasant things, with an attitude of "put up with it until it's overwith," though she has no problems voicing her objections with particularly difficult things; she'll just put up with them unless someone else discontinues things. Accentuating this is a natural tendency toward stoicism and a lack of expression; unless something particularly emotional is going on, Jessica's face defaults to :| on everything. (You cannot read her poker face.)
Another, subtler trait stemming from this early influence is an internal sense that there's something inherently wrong with her that needs to be fixed; she's not 100% conscious of this, but has a tendency to keep most people at arms' length and to think of herself as a step or two lower on the status ladder than she probably ought to. (Part of her feels that if she could track down her biological roots, she might be able to find out where things come from and how to "fix" her "condition.")
As may be gathered, she's particularly shy and sensitive about her "condition," chiefly the aspect of it related to ghosts. She's not particularly worried about the appearance aspect- she treats it more as an "asshole filter" than as something to care about- but is very, very secretive about the "hallucinations," having learned long ago that nobody else gets them. If there's no way to hide things (such as when a ghost decides that it's time to walk directly in front of her), she'll brush off any questioning and insist that everything is A-OK, nothing has happened, we have always been at war with Oceania, and these aren't the droids you're looking for. The only exception to this would be someone who claims paranormal experience, which will lead to somewhat guarded questioning. (Her attempts to get in with a group of pagan classmates in high school ended embarrassingly and frustratingly for all parties when she insisted that a particular "haunted playground" had a grand total of zero ghosts and the swings were moving because of the wind).
The Boyette family has a philosophy of practicality, and Jessica certainly follows suit there: if there is a problem, you find a solution or- if no solution seems available- a workaround. This philosophy heavily informs her social interactions; she tends to locate unfilled niches- tutor, secretary, gofer- and volunteer herself to fill them. Jessica is not a schmoozer, and doesn't work well in purely social settings; she needs some sort of goal to work toward to feel comfortable. (Again related to her internal doubts, she tends to worry that if she's not useful, people will stop liking her.) Also related to this is her speaking style- she isn't good at small talk, tending to be quiet unless she feels something is useful in the conversation, and she tends more toward the analytical than the entertaining or emotional. She is not going to be a stand-up comedian or a dazzling conversationalist anytime soon, though she does occasionally try to spice things up with a very dry joke. (Her aforementioned stonefacedness makes it difficult to tell when these jokes are happening.)
Jessica has a rather scientific approach to life: she tries to investigate things, understand how they work, and record that information for others. Her interest isn't so much one of changing things as of finding ways to go with the flow. Probably because she has personal experience with things that seem not-real, and that others can't experience, she doesn't dismiss the impossible or improbable out of hand, but thinks of it in terms of whether or not it's going to be important. (For example, she tends toward being agnostic in religion, having decided that the question of any sort of god existing has little to do with nonspiritual issues. Despite her experience of some form of "afterlife," Jessica has almost no interest in unquantifiable things like spirituality. If it has no direct influence over matters, it doesn't concern her.) Out of habit, she's inclined to be observant of setting details and thorough and methodical in investigation, and tends to feel collection of information to be useful in and of itself.
Romance is not on Jessica's radar. She isn't actively anti-love or aromantic, she's just never been comfortable enough with anyone for the idea to enter into her thinking as more than a hypothetical. She has a vague idea that probably maybe at some point there's going to be some form of intimate relationship with someone, which is supposed to end up with marriage and grandchildren and a dog or something, but it's more a distant sense of "this happens" than a goal or interest. As far as she's concerned, there are more pressing things, like making sure her GPA is high enough for a good college, obsessively cataloguing every ghostly encounter, or not stepping in dog poop.
Due to her growing up with occasional apparitions of terrifying things, Jessica tends to have a very strong stomach for the bizarre or gruesome; deadly injuries, surreal and freakishly altered humanoid forms, and just plain strange amorphous things are a fact of life to her (and may make the Gardens more than a bit unsettling to her simply by their absence). She does have fears- centipedes creep her the hell out, and she's not a big fan of enclosed underground spaces- and can definitely tell when a situation is dangerous, but horrific imagery on its own just doesn't faze her. (This makes her a sought-after partner for the squeamish when it's dissection time in science class.)
Overall, Jessica is a behind-the-scenes person. She's not interested in much recognition, just in getting things done and getting problems solved, preferably with a minimum of attention. (She doesn't actively shun attention, and appreciates recognition for her work, but feels uncomfortable with more than a "Good job" and, if applicable, a medal or certificate.) Rebellion is certainly not her thing, except in the occasional sense of "bending" a rule to get something done. She just wants a quiet life of being helpful and figuring out solutions.
So obviously the best plan here is to throw her into a magical romance garden!
Abilities:
"Ability" might be an inaccurate term, since it tends to imply control over things, which Jessica hasn't really managed all that well.
1) Incorporeality- Occasionally (usually when she's very stressed out, sleeping, or otherwise not fully in control of her faculties) Jessica will stop being solid. This usually results in anything she's holding or wearing suddenly dropping to the ground. Conceivably this could be used to "ghost" through a solid surface, though Jessica has yet to try this, both because she'd emerge naked and spectacle-less and because she does not find the idea of getting stuck attractive.
2) Ghost Interaction- Are there spirits of the dead around? They are fully visible, tangible, audible, etc. to Jessica. (She prefers to ignore them, other than occasionally walking around something in the way. In her experience, ghosts are not worth the trouble, since most don't seem to be particularly on the ball.)
Sample:
[A face that looks like someone spilled White Out on it appears on the vine.]
Okay, I've been kidnapped.
By Disney, I guess.
Who else is here, and what are we supposed to be building?
http://community.livejournal.com/testrun_box/181776.html