application
[nick / name]: Gadgets
[personal LJ name]: fiercesunshine
[other characters currently played]: n/a
[e-mail]: felidae.tigris@gmail.com
[AIM / messenger]: AIM: gadgetsandgears, Y!M: stripedgadgets
[series]: Inception
[character]: Ariadne
[character history / background]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception
[character abilities]:
Ariadne is the Architect of the team, meaning that she creates the world of the dream. This comes with a great deal of mazes, disguising boundaries, paradoxes, optical illusions, detail, thinking outside the box, and teaching others the level. She has some first aid training and seems to know how to use a gun passably well. Living in Paris, with an accent that suggests she isn’t native, it’s likely that she knows French. She is also very good at wearing scarves.
[character personality]:
Ariadne’s main role, beyond that of her position on the team, is to introduce the audience to the world Inception is set in. She has no experience with shared dreaming, other than knowing that it’s a thing that exists. Much of her time in the movie involves asking questions. Why is this like this? What purpose does this hold? How does this work? Ariadne is naturally curious, and this curiosity is what helps the audience understand just what is going on. It is that same curiosity that gets her to accept the job offer in the first place.
Ariadne only raises an eyebrow when Cobb mentions that the job he wants her for isn’t exactly legal. Even before then, she’s asking questions - “You’re not going to tell me about it?” - and her body language shows a clear curiosity toward just what this man wants (and, quite possibly, why her professor knows someone like this and is letting him approach her with illegal job offers). Though perhaps more moral than the rest of the characters (showing concern when Cobb shoots Fischer’s projections and asking if he is destroying those parts of his subconscious, as well as protesting at revealing to Fischer that his one positive relationship, that with Browning, is actually negative), she still takes the job. To perform an inception is to manipulate someone to one of the highest extents possible - to plant an idea inside them that will consume them, change them, and define them. It’s something that has killed before, though Ariadne is unaware of this until the end of the film. It is her curiosity, her drive to create, that pushes any doubts aside - her morality falls into the grey area because she wants to create things that defy the laws of physics, things that are built from nothing, and she does.
More than that, she does it well.
It is said in the film that Cobb was extremely skilled when it came to dream architecture. It is also said that Ariadne is better than Cobb was. Cobb himself says that he’s never seen anyone pick it up that quickly. It is this curiosity and skill that drives her to come back, to accept the job despite seeing part of what the insides of Cobb’s mind are hiding from the outside world. The real world isn’t enough for her anymore. Despite her best efforts to stay away, to be a good girl, to stay safe, she can’t. She has to take the risk. She has to see what she can create, reality having been ruined for her by upturned Parisian streets and shattering mirrors to create a bridge. It is this creativity and intelligence, despite any perceived moral flaws, that save the team - Ariadne comes up with the idea to follow Fischer down into Limbo when Eames and Cobb have given up, despite this being her very first job. Is it risky? Without a doubt. But it has to happen if Cobb is going to see his children again and if the rest of them are going to get paid - if they are going to succeed.
Of course, the insides of Cobb’s mind were hiding more than she knew after the shade of Mal first stabbed her, and that is why she has to come up with such a plan in the first place. Despite the others having known Cobb longer, it is Ariadne who gets past his defenses (usually in ways that piss him off, such as entering his dream without permission and going down the elevator to find out what he’s hiding on the last floor). She asks him during their first shared dreaming session if he lost track on reality, if that’s why he can’t build anymore. She riles Cobb up, but she doesn’t back down. She knows she’s hiding something and she is determined to find out what. When she does, when she finds out that the authorities think Cobb killed his wife because she thought their world wasn’t real and when she finds out that Cobb is carrying her shade, the images of their children, and a freight train around in his mind, endangering everyone else, she makes him choose. Either she goes with on the job, or he shows Arthur what she saw. Cobb picks her, and it’s a good thing he did.
A graduate student studying architecture, Ariadne loves what she does. She becomes rather irritated when Cobb, during his initial test, asks her to draw a maze in two minutes that can be solved in one and shoots down two mazes in a row. Once again, her creativity shows when she flips his gridded paper over and draws on the cardboard back, using circles instead of lines. While she is perfectly willing to ask questions and accept help, she knows her own skills. More importantly, she knows her designs like the back of her hand. She is a bit prone to panic at times, though she seems to get past this while on the job. In her first shared dream, however, it collapses due to her realizing that they’re dreaming. When she and Cobb go back under and she is killed by Mal, she is understandably upset, to the point that she shouts after Cobb, informs Arthur that Cobb is quite possibly insane, and storms out of the warehouse. She does come back, though, and remembering about totems, creates her own. She calls it an “elegant solution for keeping track of reality”, choosing to hollow out part of a chess bishop. Why she chose the bishop is unclear, but understandable panic aside, Ariadne is rather mature for her age - a college student who understands that not all criminals are necessarily evil and that sometimes you have to push people and get them to face their problems before things will get better. She fits in well with the rest of the team, all of which appear to be older than her, some of them by quite a bit, and none of them seem annoyed by her questions (except for Cobb when she steps right on his Sensitive Issues).
That isn’t, however, to say that she isn’t sometimes a bit naïve. While in the second level with Arthur, talking about how the projections are looking at them, the Point Man says “Quick, give me a kiss.” They kiss, and the projections are still looking at them. Ariadne points this out, and Arthur grins, saying that it was worth a shot. Afterward, Ariadne looks something between amused and incredulous. Did that actually happen? Did he actually just do that? Why yes, Ariadne, yes he did. In addition, she doesn’t ask Cobb whether or not he killed his wife. To her, Cobb is a Good Man™. She initially doesn’t think that he’s responsible for what happened to her, though… well, he actually is. Oops. Interestingly enough, her totem of the bishop is/was called "fou" (the fool) in France, the groove at the top of the piece (in 1849) interpreted as a jester’s cap. While Ariadne’s bishop doesn’t have this groove, it’s still interesting to note, especially as she is going to school in Paris. Likewise, in tarot, The Fool is said to symbolize a spirit in search of experience, “crazy wisdom”, an appreciation of beauty, and liminality. The Fool knows that there may be danger, but they go ahead anyway, just as Ariadne does.
On Her Canonmates:
★ Cobb: Cobb pushes Ariadne, both consciously and unconsciously, into almost every action she takes within the movie. Cobb is the first team member Ariadne meets and the ‘leader’ (as the Extractor and as the one who agreed to take the job in the first place), but he’s also the most visibly damaged. Ariadne is either very perceptive, very paranoid, or a combination of the two, as she is the one who discovers that Cobb has a Problem and that it’s making the projection of his dead wife appear in his dreams and blowing their cover. She thinks he’s a good man, however, and takes it upon herself to attempt to help him. She’s the only one who knows his secret in its full details, and while she pried some of his secret out of him by force, he does come to trust her with it. She worries about him throughout the movie, but at the end, she’s decided that he’ll be okay.
★ Arthur: While Cobb pushes Ariadne, Arthur teaches her with a steady hand and a smile. While Cobb let Ariadne run free in the dream world, Arthur gives her rules to follow and guides to help her along the way. Arthur is a point of security for Ariadne, and she seems to trust him just as much as she trusts Cobb. Likewise, he is fairly open with her about what he’s doing and doesn’t have any obvious emotional issues for her to latch onto and attempt to dig out of his brain. She’s more relaxed around Arthur than around the others, cracking jokes and, on one memorable occasion, giving him a kiss to try and help him hide from projections (it didn’t work out).
★ Eames: Eames is the trickster, the forger, the man who smiles and laughs but who Ariadne doesn’t really know. He’s a professional and Ariadne was rather certain that he wasn’t sure that she was a good fit for the job, since she was brand new in the world of shared dreaming, but she likes to think that she’s proved herself. He was quite helpful in describing the bits of architecture that are needed for jobs like this, helping her implement a duct system in the design for the third level of the dream. She likes to think that the jokes (or at least laughing at Arthur being knocked over) have helped them warm to each other.
★ Yusuf: As much an artist as she, though in a different way, Yusuf is somehow calming to Ariadne. They aren’t seen interacting much within the movie (except for when Yusuf is reading while Cobb dreams, and Ariadne pouts because she can’t go invade Cobb’s mind), but if nothing else, they can compare tastes on champagne. She attempted to help him with Saito when the other man got shot, and to be honest, she finds it a little distressing that the two of them might have been the only ones who knew what to do with huge gaping wounds flowing with blood.
★ Saito: He’s the man with the money, but he’s as much a newcomer as herself… well, sort of. Saito certainly seems to know how dreams work and seems to be no stranger to criminal activities, but he’s the Tourist, and there’s a tiny part of Ariadne that said “well, at least I’m being useful”… despite the fact that the job wouldn’t have happened at all if it weren’t for Saito. That aside, she was clearly worried when he got shot and went to try and help make him comfortable.
★ Fischer: Despite the fact that he’s the mark, Ariadne is concerned about Fischer throughout the movie. She voices her moral protests about his well-being several times, asking about ruining his relationship with his godfather and asking if Cobb is destroying parts of his mind. When she finds him in Limbo, she makes sure he’s okay before… kicking him off the roof to get him out of Limbo (which, in her defense, is better than letting him sit there and possibly frying his brain, but still a pretty horrible thing to do to someone).
★ Miles: Though he’s not a major character, Miles is one of Ariadne’s professors and the person who introduces her to Cobb. It’s clear that Miles thinks a great deal of her and her skills, saying that she’s better than Cobb was. Ariadne likely knows that he likes her, if nothing else, and definitely respects his opinion enough not to bail once she discovers that what Cobb wants to talk about is “not exactly” a work placement and is, in fact, illegal.
★ Mal: Mal is both everything Ariadne might want to be and the thing she hopes she will never become. Though she’s a projection, Mal haunts Ariadne almost as much as she haunts Cobb, being the one who killed Ariadne in a dream and later attempting to kill her again with a broken wine glass. She asks Ariadne questions that make her obviously insecure, and Ariadne wants nothing more than for Cobb to be rid of her for his own good. Mal shows all of the bad that can happen when you mess around with the mind, and she’s a strong warning - though perhaps not strong enough.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: Directly after the end of the movie.
[journal post]:
I could be wrong, but this doesn’t look like Los Angeles. The air is too nice, for one thing, but mostly this is just very… not-L.A. The architecture is all wrong. [ This is said in the tone of someone who knows exactly why and how the architecture is wrong and could tell you, if you’d ask. ]
This phone isn’t mine, either. You can’t even get to Tumblr on it, and I know for a fact that I had that app installed. More importantly, all my contacts are gone, so I can’t call and see if the plane took a wrong turn and we ended up in… not-Los Angeles.
If anyone is listening which I’m not getting my hopes up about, could you fill me in on where this is? I’ve got a flight to catch and some classes to catch up on back home, so I’d really appreciate it.
[third person / log sample]:
On days like today, she likes to sketch and not pay attention to gravity.
One of her former instructors - not Miles, who she has since learned is Cobb’s father-in-law, but a different, stricter, harsher man - had told her once that her head was too far in the clouds. She was creative, yes, but creativity could only get her so far - she had to pay attention to the real world, and she might as well leave her flights of fancy behind her, because it would never pay off.
She had ignored him, of course; what she sketched in her own time was her business, not his. Either way, she can’t help but feel the warm curl of satisfaction in her stomach when she builds the impossible in dreams, Escher and Penrose and illusion and paradox all tied into one. One of the team members once quipped that "There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds," and when she looks at them, confused, there was a smile and an “I read it in a book” before they moved on with their work.
Of course, she’s not building actual castles in clouds. She’s building them in dreams, and that means there are rules - mazes, hiding places, shortcuts for them and not the projections, that sort of thing. She has to consider it all as she plans the levels, gets input from the person who will be dreaming and adjusts things accordingly (something she’s having to do less and less as they continue, and it pleases her, making the curl of satisfaction burn all the brighter - she loves this, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t, and she loves exceeding at what she does). She makes blueprints that turn into models that turn into dreamscapes, and she loves it.
But sometimes, like today, she just wants to draw castles in the clouds.
Before, however, was a different story. ‘Before’ was prior to when she had met Cobb and he had taken her to a roof and had her draw mazes. The first two hadn’t been good enough, and that something she had never liked hearing (along with too short, too young, and too girly) and always drove to strike it from her record. It was this that drove her to make the third maze, and the third maze was different. She glared at him while she took his pad of paper again, but instead of doing what was expected, she let herself move away from the rules of grids and lines and draw on the cardboard backing, circles inside circles until the man said time was up.
He couldn’t solve it, and she couldn’t help the smug look that had crossed her face. It was the first time in her young life that she had been encouraged to leave behind the lines and the rules, to make her own rules to fit the situation but to do something new, something creative, something that challenged both her and other people. Later on when asked, she’ll say that the time she was ruined for building in the real world was when she turned a city upside-down. She’ll be lying each and every time. It was this, the challenge that she overcame and the license to draw outside the lines, that won her over to shared dreaming and to breaking the rules.
Before doesn’t matter. It’s that moment that made her, and it’s that moment she thinks back on when she draws her castles in the clouds.
[personal LJ name]: fiercesunshine
[other characters currently played]: n/a
[e-mail]: felidae.tigris@gmail.com
[AIM / messenger]: AIM: gadgetsandgears, Y!M: stripedgadgets
[series]: Inception
[character]: Ariadne
[character history / background]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception
[character abilities]:
Ariadne is the Architect of the team, meaning that she creates the world of the dream. This comes with a great deal of mazes, disguising boundaries, paradoxes, optical illusions, detail, thinking outside the box, and teaching others the level. She has some first aid training and seems to know how to use a gun passably well. Living in Paris, with an accent that suggests she isn’t native, it’s likely that she knows French. She is also very good at wearing scarves.
[character personality]:
Ariadne’s main role, beyond that of her position on the team, is to introduce the audience to the world Inception is set in. She has no experience with shared dreaming, other than knowing that it’s a thing that exists. Much of her time in the movie involves asking questions. Why is this like this? What purpose does this hold? How does this work? Ariadne is naturally curious, and this curiosity is what helps the audience understand just what is going on. It is that same curiosity that gets her to accept the job offer in the first place.
Ariadne only raises an eyebrow when Cobb mentions that the job he wants her for isn’t exactly legal. Even before then, she’s asking questions - “You’re not going to tell me about it?” - and her body language shows a clear curiosity toward just what this man wants (and, quite possibly, why her professor knows someone like this and is letting him approach her with illegal job offers). Though perhaps more moral than the rest of the characters (showing concern when Cobb shoots Fischer’s projections and asking if he is destroying those parts of his subconscious, as well as protesting at revealing to Fischer that his one positive relationship, that with Browning, is actually negative), she still takes the job. To perform an inception is to manipulate someone to one of the highest extents possible - to plant an idea inside them that will consume them, change them, and define them. It’s something that has killed before, though Ariadne is unaware of this until the end of the film. It is her curiosity, her drive to create, that pushes any doubts aside - her morality falls into the grey area because she wants to create things that defy the laws of physics, things that are built from nothing, and she does.
More than that, she does it well.
It is said in the film that Cobb was extremely skilled when it came to dream architecture. It is also said that Ariadne is better than Cobb was. Cobb himself says that he’s never seen anyone pick it up that quickly. It is this curiosity and skill that drives her to come back, to accept the job despite seeing part of what the insides of Cobb’s mind are hiding from the outside world. The real world isn’t enough for her anymore. Despite her best efforts to stay away, to be a good girl, to stay safe, she can’t. She has to take the risk. She has to see what she can create, reality having been ruined for her by upturned Parisian streets and shattering mirrors to create a bridge. It is this creativity and intelligence, despite any perceived moral flaws, that save the team - Ariadne comes up with the idea to follow Fischer down into Limbo when Eames and Cobb have given up, despite this being her very first job. Is it risky? Without a doubt. But it has to happen if Cobb is going to see his children again and if the rest of them are going to get paid - if they are going to succeed.
Of course, the insides of Cobb’s mind were hiding more than she knew after the shade of Mal first stabbed her, and that is why she has to come up with such a plan in the first place. Despite the others having known Cobb longer, it is Ariadne who gets past his defenses (usually in ways that piss him off, such as entering his dream without permission and going down the elevator to find out what he’s hiding on the last floor). She asks him during their first shared dreaming session if he lost track on reality, if that’s why he can’t build anymore. She riles Cobb up, but she doesn’t back down. She knows she’s hiding something and she is determined to find out what. When she does, when she finds out that the authorities think Cobb killed his wife because she thought their world wasn’t real and when she finds out that Cobb is carrying her shade, the images of their children, and a freight train around in his mind, endangering everyone else, she makes him choose. Either she goes with on the job, or he shows Arthur what she saw. Cobb picks her, and it’s a good thing he did.
A graduate student studying architecture, Ariadne loves what she does. She becomes rather irritated when Cobb, during his initial test, asks her to draw a maze in two minutes that can be solved in one and shoots down two mazes in a row. Once again, her creativity shows when she flips his gridded paper over and draws on the cardboard back, using circles instead of lines. While she is perfectly willing to ask questions and accept help, she knows her own skills. More importantly, she knows her designs like the back of her hand. She is a bit prone to panic at times, though she seems to get past this while on the job. In her first shared dream, however, it collapses due to her realizing that they’re dreaming. When she and Cobb go back under and she is killed by Mal, she is understandably upset, to the point that she shouts after Cobb, informs Arthur that Cobb is quite possibly insane, and storms out of the warehouse. She does come back, though, and remembering about totems, creates her own. She calls it an “elegant solution for keeping track of reality”, choosing to hollow out part of a chess bishop. Why she chose the bishop is unclear, but understandable panic aside, Ariadne is rather mature for her age - a college student who understands that not all criminals are necessarily evil and that sometimes you have to push people and get them to face their problems before things will get better. She fits in well with the rest of the team, all of which appear to be older than her, some of them by quite a bit, and none of them seem annoyed by her questions (except for Cobb when she steps right on his Sensitive Issues).
That isn’t, however, to say that she isn’t sometimes a bit naïve. While in the second level with Arthur, talking about how the projections are looking at them, the Point Man says “Quick, give me a kiss.” They kiss, and the projections are still looking at them. Ariadne points this out, and Arthur grins, saying that it was worth a shot. Afterward, Ariadne looks something between amused and incredulous. Did that actually happen? Did he actually just do that? Why yes, Ariadne, yes he did. In addition, she doesn’t ask Cobb whether or not he killed his wife. To her, Cobb is a Good Man™. She initially doesn’t think that he’s responsible for what happened to her, though… well, he actually is. Oops. Interestingly enough, her totem of the bishop is/was called "fou" (the fool) in France, the groove at the top of the piece (in 1849) interpreted as a jester’s cap. While Ariadne’s bishop doesn’t have this groove, it’s still interesting to note, especially as she is going to school in Paris. Likewise, in tarot, The Fool is said to symbolize a spirit in search of experience, “crazy wisdom”, an appreciation of beauty, and liminality. The Fool knows that there may be danger, but they go ahead anyway, just as Ariadne does.
On Her Canonmates:
★ Cobb: Cobb pushes Ariadne, both consciously and unconsciously, into almost every action she takes within the movie. Cobb is the first team member Ariadne meets and the ‘leader’ (as the Extractor and as the one who agreed to take the job in the first place), but he’s also the most visibly damaged. Ariadne is either very perceptive, very paranoid, or a combination of the two, as she is the one who discovers that Cobb has a Problem and that it’s making the projection of his dead wife appear in his dreams and blowing their cover. She thinks he’s a good man, however, and takes it upon herself to attempt to help him. She’s the only one who knows his secret in its full details, and while she pried some of his secret out of him by force, he does come to trust her with it. She worries about him throughout the movie, but at the end, she’s decided that he’ll be okay.
★ Arthur: While Cobb pushes Ariadne, Arthur teaches her with a steady hand and a smile. While Cobb let Ariadne run free in the dream world, Arthur gives her rules to follow and guides to help her along the way. Arthur is a point of security for Ariadne, and she seems to trust him just as much as she trusts Cobb. Likewise, he is fairly open with her about what he’s doing and doesn’t have any obvious emotional issues for her to latch onto and attempt to dig out of his brain. She’s more relaxed around Arthur than around the others, cracking jokes and, on one memorable occasion, giving him a kiss to try and help him hide from projections (it didn’t work out).
★ Eames: Eames is the trickster, the forger, the man who smiles and laughs but who Ariadne doesn’t really know. He’s a professional and Ariadne was rather certain that he wasn’t sure that she was a good fit for the job, since she was brand new in the world of shared dreaming, but she likes to think that she’s proved herself. He was quite helpful in describing the bits of architecture that are needed for jobs like this, helping her implement a duct system in the design for the third level of the dream. She likes to think that the jokes (or at least laughing at Arthur being knocked over) have helped them warm to each other.
★ Yusuf: As much an artist as she, though in a different way, Yusuf is somehow calming to Ariadne. They aren’t seen interacting much within the movie (except for when Yusuf is reading while Cobb dreams, and Ariadne pouts because she can’t go invade Cobb’s mind), but if nothing else, they can compare tastes on champagne. She attempted to help him with Saito when the other man got shot, and to be honest, she finds it a little distressing that the two of them might have been the only ones who knew what to do with huge gaping wounds flowing with blood.
★ Saito: He’s the man with the money, but he’s as much a newcomer as herself… well, sort of. Saito certainly seems to know how dreams work and seems to be no stranger to criminal activities, but he’s the Tourist, and there’s a tiny part of Ariadne that said “well, at least I’m being useful”… despite the fact that the job wouldn’t have happened at all if it weren’t for Saito. That aside, she was clearly worried when he got shot and went to try and help make him comfortable.
★ Fischer: Despite the fact that he’s the mark, Ariadne is concerned about Fischer throughout the movie. She voices her moral protests about his well-being several times, asking about ruining his relationship with his godfather and asking if Cobb is destroying parts of his mind. When she finds him in Limbo, she makes sure he’s okay before… kicking him off the roof to get him out of Limbo (which, in her defense, is better than letting him sit there and possibly frying his brain, but still a pretty horrible thing to do to someone).
★ Miles: Though he’s not a major character, Miles is one of Ariadne’s professors and the person who introduces her to Cobb. It’s clear that Miles thinks a great deal of her and her skills, saying that she’s better than Cobb was. Ariadne likely knows that he likes her, if nothing else, and definitely respects his opinion enough not to bail once she discovers that what Cobb wants to talk about is “not exactly” a work placement and is, in fact, illegal.
★ Mal: Mal is both everything Ariadne might want to be and the thing she hopes she will never become. Though she’s a projection, Mal haunts Ariadne almost as much as she haunts Cobb, being the one who killed Ariadne in a dream and later attempting to kill her again with a broken wine glass. She asks Ariadne questions that make her obviously insecure, and Ariadne wants nothing more than for Cobb to be rid of her for his own good. Mal shows all of the bad that can happen when you mess around with the mind, and she’s a strong warning - though perhaps not strong enough.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: Directly after the end of the movie.
[journal post]:
I could be wrong, but this doesn’t look like Los Angeles. The air is too nice, for one thing, but mostly this is just very… not-L.A. The architecture is all wrong. [ This is said in the tone of someone who knows exactly why and how the architecture is wrong and could tell you, if you’d ask. ]
This phone isn’t mine, either. You can’t even get to Tumblr on it, and I know for a fact that I had that app installed. More importantly, all my contacts are gone, so I can’t call and see if the plane took a wrong turn and we ended up in… not-Los Angeles.
If anyone is listening which I’m not getting my hopes up about, could you fill me in on where this is? I’ve got a flight to catch and some classes to catch up on back home, so I’d really appreciate it.
[third person / log sample]:
On days like today, she likes to sketch and not pay attention to gravity.
One of her former instructors - not Miles, who she has since learned is Cobb’s father-in-law, but a different, stricter, harsher man - had told her once that her head was too far in the clouds. She was creative, yes, but creativity could only get her so far - she had to pay attention to the real world, and she might as well leave her flights of fancy behind her, because it would never pay off.
She had ignored him, of course; what she sketched in her own time was her business, not his. Either way, she can’t help but feel the warm curl of satisfaction in her stomach when she builds the impossible in dreams, Escher and Penrose and illusion and paradox all tied into one. One of the team members once quipped that "There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds," and when she looks at them, confused, there was a smile and an “I read it in a book” before they moved on with their work.
Of course, she’s not building actual castles in clouds. She’s building them in dreams, and that means there are rules - mazes, hiding places, shortcuts for them and not the projections, that sort of thing. She has to consider it all as she plans the levels, gets input from the person who will be dreaming and adjusts things accordingly (something she’s having to do less and less as they continue, and it pleases her, making the curl of satisfaction burn all the brighter - she loves this, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t, and she loves exceeding at what she does). She makes blueprints that turn into models that turn into dreamscapes, and she loves it.
But sometimes, like today, she just wants to draw castles in the clouds.
Before, however, was a different story. ‘Before’ was prior to when she had met Cobb and he had taken her to a roof and had her draw mazes. The first two hadn’t been good enough, and that something she had never liked hearing (along with too short, too young, and too girly) and always drove to strike it from her record. It was this that drove her to make the third maze, and the third maze was different. She glared at him while she took his pad of paper again, but instead of doing what was expected, she let herself move away from the rules of grids and lines and draw on the cardboard backing, circles inside circles until the man said time was up.
He couldn’t solve it, and she couldn’t help the smug look that had crossed her face. It was the first time in her young life that she had been encouraged to leave behind the lines and the rules, to make her own rules to fit the situation but to do something new, something creative, something that challenged both her and other people. Later on when asked, she’ll say that the time she was ruined for building in the real world was when she turned a city upside-down. She’ll be lying each and every time. It was this, the challenge that she overcame and the license to draw outside the lines, that won her over to shared dreaming and to breaking the rules.
Before doesn’t matter. It’s that moment that made her, and it’s that moment she thinks back on when she draws her castles in the clouds.