application ♦ capeandcowl ♦ complete
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Vriska Serket
FANDOM: Homestuck, an episode of MS Paint Adventures, a kind of absurdly meta multimedia webcomic.
CHRONOLOGY: Act 5 Act 2, just before killing Tavros.
CLASS: Slightly ambiguous villain.
SUPERHERO NAME: Marquise Spinneret Mindfang
ALTER EGO: Vriska Serket, bitchy young teenager.
BACKGROUND:
First of all, forget about Earth. Forget about humans and all the things we hold dear. Instead, think of Alternia, a planet full of trolls. Mostly troll children, in fact, since the adults are all off savagely and brutally conquering the galaxy. That should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect from the trolls of Alternia.
Yeah, growing up on Alternia sure sucks. Trolls get a brief break as wrigglers when they're in their cocoons in the brooding caverns, but as soon as they pupate they have to go through dangerous trials to prove that they belong in troll society. If they survive...well, they don't have individual parents, because troll reproduction is pretty weird, and the adults are busy conquering the galaxy and stuff anyway, so they get taken care of by...something else. Specifically, a monster from beneath the surface of Alternia, known as a lusus. The young troll must feed and care for their lusus, and in turn it will protect them.
Like I said, growing up on Alternia sure sucks!
Vriska did not have all of the luck growing up on Alternia. She also did not have none of the luck. She had, in fact, some of the luck. To start with, she ranked pretty high on the "hemospectrum," the blood-color-based caste system that rules troll culture, so she was strong both physically and socially. She also had the psychic ability to control lower-caste, weaker-minded trolls as well as x-ray vision in one eye, which was quite the lucky break, since most psychic powers appear in relatively lowblooded trolls. So far, so good. The bad part comes when you find out about her lusus: a giant spider that feeds only on young trolls. Once she was old enough, Vriska would be expected to provide food for the ever-hungry monster. If she didn't, she would either be eaten herself or culled when the monster starved--the standard fate for any troll who can't live up to the standards of troll society.
Growing up with a gigantic people-eating spider monster for a mom sure sucks!
To be honest, young Vriska wasn't sure she could handle her lusus. It was a pretty big deal to be chosen by such a dangerous monster--most lusii weren't so high-maintenance--and she had a lot of pressure on her to live up to both the expectations and the reality this generated. As she approached the age when she'd be expected to feed her lusus, she became afraid that she wouldn't be able to handle it. That was when Something Important Happened.
You see, trolls don't have parents, but they do have "ancestors" who share a great deal of genetic material with them. Highblooded trolls in particular greatly look up to and attempt to follow in the footsteps of these ancestors. At this crucial time in her life, young Vriska fortuitously found the journal of the troll who was clearly her ancestor: Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, a notorious ancient pirate. From the tales told within that journal (which ranged from valuable relationship advice to softcore lesbian non-con erotica) she took her inspiration in life. She would model herself after Mindfang and strive to live up to her glory.
Naturally, Vriska grew up into a sensitive, misunderstood young woman, tormented by her lusus's terrible needs hahahaha no, I'm just kidding. She grew up into a horrible person. She enjoyed tales of apocalypses and made a hobby of the game of FLARP, a kind of extreme roleplaying. Via this latter route she procured the necessary food for her lusus. Yes, it's true: troll roleplaying kills.
It was through FLARP--which she played in the persona of her ancestor, Mindfang--that she met several of the people who would later become important in her life. She formed Team Scourge with the vicious but more justice-minded troll Terezi, and they faced off against the lowblooded Team Charge, formed by Aradia and Tavros, the latter of whom really, really sucked at being a troll. Like, he was actually a nice, timid, gentle guy. He was so nice, timid, and gentle that he drove Vriska wild with torrid hatred (a romantic emotion for trolls). So she mindcontrolled him into walking off a cliff in an attempt to kill him, which left him paralyzed from the waist down instead.
Being Vriska's hate-crush sure sucks!
In retaliation for this, Aradia used her own psychic powers to summon the ghosts of the trolls Vriska had fed to her lusus to haunt her. In retaliation for this, Vriska mindcontrolled Aradia's boyfriend, Sollux, into killing her messily. Now even Terezi was pissed off, because she thought they were supposed to only kill the bad guys (silly Terezi!), so she slipped an omnipotent being the info that Vriska was using one of his misplaced widgets to give herself the tactical advantage of knowledge. He responded by exploding it in her face, destroying her x-ray vision and one of her arms. So Vriska finally completed the revenge-chain by mindcontrolling Tavros into using his psychic powers to mindcontrol Terezi's lusus into mindcontrolling her into staring at the blistering Alternian sun until she went blind.
Troll vengeance sure sucks!
Anyway, everyone was kind of alienated from Vriska after that. All the same, when the chance came to play an exciting new game called sgrub, the other trolls who were going to start it needed another player, so they invited her to join the group (which consisted of twelve young trolls all together). Sgrub was this cool game that involved rebuilding your hive, fighting monsters, exploring new lands surrounding the world of Skaia, waking up on dream planets, and gaining all the levels. Also, it destroys your planet in order to create a new universe.
Playing sgrub (or as humans would come to know it, sburb) sure sucks!
It started to suck even harder for Vriska when Aradia, whose ghost had been given a robot body, beat her nearly to death, because it turned out that old revenge-chain wasn't entirely over after all. But there's a twist! In sgrub, if you die on your "quest bed" while your dream self is still alive, you merge with your dream self and ascend to god tier, which is even better than gaining all the levels, and it gets you a seriously cool hoodie. Knowing this, the dying Vriska begged a rather freaked-out Tavros to take her to her quest bed and kill her. He did the former, but got cold feet on the latter and fled. So she slowly bled to death, and only then did she wake up as her newly god-tiered dream self (with the bonus of having her eye and arm restored).
She was pretty pissed off at Tavros after that. They had more important things to do, though, so she let it slide for the time being. They had to win the game and claim their prize of a new universe! Which they all proceeded to do. Almost. They beat the game, all right, but before they could get their mysterious reward, a rift opened up in time and space and out came an omnipotent demon bent on killing everything in sight. The trolls absconded.
Omnipotent demons bent on killing everything in sight sure suck!
The trolls wound up on a space station on some meteor in the Veil, the asteroid belt which distantly orbits Skaia, and they slowly began to recuperate from the trauma. In the process, they found out that they could, via a computer application called Trollian, view the timelines of four alien (meaning human) children on a strange (meaning familiar) planet called Earth. It turned out that these children came from the universe the trolls had created with their game of sgrub, and their session of the corresponding human game, sburb, held the key to what had ruined the trolls' session of sgrub.
Slowly, the trolls became involved in, well, trolling the human kids through time and space. Some of them even began to manipulate the kids' session of sburb. Vriska, of course, was one of those manipulators. She had to be in control, after all, even if it was only an illusion of control. She took an interest in the kids' leader, John, and guided him up to god tier himself.
Oh, yes. And in the process, she arranged the events that would lead up to the creation of the omnipotent demon bent on killing everything in sight, hereafter known as Jack Noir. She reasoned that since in her timeline, he already existed, someone had to create him, and it might as well be her, since she was clearly going to be the one to take him down.
Vriska's logic sure does suck!
To top it off, she then told Tavros what she had done, prompting him to finally decide that she really was as horrible as she'd always seemed and needed to be taken down. Before she could see whether he'd follow through on that threat, though, she was whisked away to an entirely new universe...
PERSONALITY:
BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH
There you have the capsule version that most people quickly observe. Now you get the complicated version.
Vriska Serket is a terrible, horrible, awful human being. She's bloodthirsty, virtually remorseless, and borderline sociopathic in her complete disregard for the lives of others. She loves manipulating others for the sake of her own greater glory. She's capable of appalling acts of brutality when angered. Even at the tamest of times, she revels in violence and cruelty.
Rewind! Let's fix the factual error in the above paragraph. Vriska Serket would be a terrible, horrible, awful human being. But she isn't, because she isn't human. She's a troll. And with every evil act she commits, she's actually doing her best to be a good troll.
Until very recently, Vriska was never exposed to the morality common to most human societies: a code of ethics that values compassion and empathy. She was raised to see these things as nothing but worthless weaknesses. The only values trolls are supposed to hold dear are strength and the sacrosanct nature of the hemospectrum, the set of blood colors that dictates their caste system. As a highblood, Vriska was expected and encouraged to treat those beneath her on the hemospectrum like trash.
For most trolls, it would be as simple as that: strive to be strong, respect the hemospectrum, and do whatever you need to in order to survive. Vriska grew up facing an additional complication, though. She had to learn to kill constantly and in great quantities from a young age in order to feed her lusus, a kind of monstrous guardian tasked with taking care of her as she grew up. Unlike most lusii, the giant spider that watched over Vriska fed only on young trolls...and if she didn't keep it fed, she would die herself.
The result is that Vriska has blunted empathy even by troll standards. Her capacity to feel and understand her own emotions is extremely limited. She's run roughshod over any ability she might once have had to love, and even her ability to hate--just as valuable, in troll society, as love--is fuzzy and generalized due to the overwhelming amount of brutality she's needed to display most of her life. The only thing left to her is fear. She fears her lusus; she fears that she may not be able to measure up as an adult troll; she fears her own inadequacy, emotional and otherwise.
But that's not an acceptable emotion to display, so she covers it up with bluster and conniving cruelty. She takes any opportunities to puff up her own ego and prove her superiority to others. She manipulates others just for the rush of feeling like she's in charge. She does twisted and reckless things just to give herself the illusion of being in control. Actually, she's a little obsessed with being in control. Maybe more than a little.
So Vriska can do a pretty good supervillain impression, and it's not all talk--she really is ruthless and wantonly cruel. But it's all a little much. The fact is, she's also the troll equivalent of a thirteen-year-old girl. She's prone to histrionics, although less so now that she's been able to realize some of her potential thanks to the game of sgrub. She sullenly resents the society that's forced her to become such a killer so fast, as well as the people who are better at it than her, and yet she continues to strive to live up to its standards, even now that it's gone.
She's still trying to fill the shoes of a legendary pirate ancestor who wrote bad softcore porn in her journal. Actually, she's kind of pathetic.
On top of that, while she's been pushed to the brink of sociopathy and made a show of embracing it, she hasn't entirely rid herself of her ability to care about people. She genuinely wants to help her friends. Her bullying of and cruelty to them stems not just from her hidden insecurities and rather wide nasty streak, but also from a sincere desire to make them stronger, which, in troll society, is the best thing you can do for anyone. She'll gladly claim that she's only doing something to get the glory for herself, because that's the socially acceptable reason to do it (for a troll), but she may well also want to do it to protect the few people she cares about.
So that's Vriska: a vicious, bloodthirsty girl who revels in manipulation and control with a side of dramatics, but also a young teenager who's hiding a bunch of insecurities and struggling to live up to the high standards that were set for her without her consent.
POWER:
Vision Eightfold: The one peculiarity that her new human body shares with her old troll body is Vriska's bizarre seven-pupilled left eye. This eye grants her the vision eightfold, or at least that's what she calls it. It appears to be run-of-the-mill X-ray vision.
Psychic Control: In her own world, Vriska showed the ability to control the minds of those weaker in will and lower on the hemospectrum than her. When she tried to use this power on humans, she found that all she could do was put them to sleep or wake them up. Now that she's human herself, these two manifestations of the same power have merged. Vriska can at any time put someone to sleep or wake them up. However, only when she is sleeping herself can she use direct mind control. How effective her mind control is depends on how strong-willed her target is.
Luck Siphon: This is the manifestation of Vriska's DICEKIND SPECIBUS in this world. When she focuses and rolls at least one die, she can transfer another person's good luck to herself, making them more prone to accidents and other misfortune and herself more blessed by the chances of favorable outcomes in general for the next four to six hours. However, it's a capricious power and relies heavily on Vriska's self-image at any given time. Undermine her confidence while she's using this power, and all the luck will start to drain back to its original holder.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ text ]
This is according to none of the plans. None of th8m!!!!!!!!
8ut I am a generous and adapta8le person. This ridiculous squishy pink 8ody doesn't scare me. This is just the st8rt of my new conquests of aaaaaaaall the worlds, 8ecause I am
[--pushing the wrong button!]
[ video ]
[Behold a thirteen-year-old girl clutching the communicator with one hand, frantically pawing at herself all over with the other, and muttering.]
Whoever did this will pay! I can't be human!
[She gives a flip of her hair. That human gesture, at least, she seems to already know.]
As if I needed a silly machine to tell me I'm a hero. What does she think it was all for?
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
She'd fallen on the pavement. That was all. If she'd been in a proper troll body it wouldn't have left a mark on her. But in this soft human shape, when Vriska fell, the ground sliced open her knees. She ran when she saw that. That was stupid! She shouldn't have been afraid! Like it mattered what color her blood was. She was still the best, still Vriska Serket, the Thief of Light, the only troll to reach god-tier in their game of sgrub, the rightful descendant of the great Gamblignant Mindfang.
"It's just their way of trying to frighten me," she muttered to herself where she huddled in an alleyway. "It won't work! They're a whole race of useless wrigglers. I'm not scared of anything they or their pathetic 'Porter do to me." She had her arms around her knees. They were getting smeared with that awful bright candy-red blood. She wasn't shaking or anything. If there was one thing Vriska was good at--and she was good at a lot of things!--it was hiding when she felt fear. Not that she felt fear right now. Not that she was suddenly haunted by images of what would be done to her back home, before sgrub, when the cull came, if they'd ever seen her with this color blood. Not that she was wondering if her lusus would have eaten her on the spot if she bled red.
She wasn't.
"It's just because they stuck me in this human body," she said to herself reassuringly. And she followed that thought, a smile started to form on her face. The humans had been baffled when she'd mentioned the hemospectrum to them--one had said something about all their blood being the same color. If that was true, it meant they were all lowbloods. Not only were they lowbloods, they didn't even try to compensate for it! A halfway respectable redblood, like Aradia had once been, would have learned to fight and defend herself, would have honed her psychic abilities to their utmost to survive in a world that was out to cull her. That was where the real essence of troll strength lay--something those of even higher blood than Vriska herself didn't realize, because they were safe in their comfortable purple bubbles. These humans, though...they didn't even try to be strong. And that was why she deserved to own them all, and she'd prove it, too.
How had a race like this produced someone like John Egbert? wondered a small voice at the back of her brain. She pushed it aside. She didn't have time to be thinking of John now! She had better things to do. Like planning her conquest of this miserable species from within. She could start small. That was all right. These people wouldn't know what hit them if she didn't. Besides, even her little gestures of strength had style.
Like, for example--
Vriska stood up and glanced out of the alleyway. One of those stupid human taxis (they even got others to transport them! Pathetic!) was turning a corner just a little too fast. The driver thought he knew what he was doing. He thought he'd be fine. It was up to Vriska to show him why he was wrong. She reached out with her mind
and put the driver
to sleep.
Vriska smiled. She felt better already.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
Yeah, I plan to LJ-cut Vriska's obnoxious text and use voice or video posts when I can.
CHARACTER NAME: Vriska Serket
FANDOM: Homestuck, an episode of MS Paint Adventures, a kind of absurdly meta multimedia webcomic.
CHRONOLOGY: Act 5 Act 2, just before killing Tavros.
CLASS: Slightly ambiguous villain.
SUPERHERO NAME: Marquise Spinneret Mindfang
ALTER EGO: Vriska Serket, bitchy young teenager.
BACKGROUND:
First of all, forget about Earth. Forget about humans and all the things we hold dear. Instead, think of Alternia, a planet full of trolls. Mostly troll children, in fact, since the adults are all off savagely and brutally conquering the galaxy. That should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect from the trolls of Alternia.
Yeah, growing up on Alternia sure sucks. Trolls get a brief break as wrigglers when they're in their cocoons in the brooding caverns, but as soon as they pupate they have to go through dangerous trials to prove that they belong in troll society. If they survive...well, they don't have individual parents, because troll reproduction is pretty weird, and the adults are busy conquering the galaxy and stuff anyway, so they get taken care of by...something else. Specifically, a monster from beneath the surface of Alternia, known as a lusus. The young troll must feed and care for their lusus, and in turn it will protect them.
Like I said, growing up on Alternia sure sucks!
Vriska did not have all of the luck growing up on Alternia. She also did not have none of the luck. She had, in fact, some of the luck. To start with, she ranked pretty high on the "hemospectrum," the blood-color-based caste system that rules troll culture, so she was strong both physically and socially. She also had the psychic ability to control lower-caste, weaker-minded trolls as well as x-ray vision in one eye, which was quite the lucky break, since most psychic powers appear in relatively lowblooded trolls. So far, so good. The bad part comes when you find out about her lusus: a giant spider that feeds only on young trolls. Once she was old enough, Vriska would be expected to provide food for the ever-hungry monster. If she didn't, she would either be eaten herself or culled when the monster starved--the standard fate for any troll who can't live up to the standards of troll society.
Growing up with a gigantic people-eating spider monster for a mom sure sucks!
To be honest, young Vriska wasn't sure she could handle her lusus. It was a pretty big deal to be chosen by such a dangerous monster--most lusii weren't so high-maintenance--and she had a lot of pressure on her to live up to both the expectations and the reality this generated. As she approached the age when she'd be expected to feed her lusus, she became afraid that she wouldn't be able to handle it. That was when Something Important Happened.
You see, trolls don't have parents, but they do have "ancestors" who share a great deal of genetic material with them. Highblooded trolls in particular greatly look up to and attempt to follow in the footsteps of these ancestors. At this crucial time in her life, young Vriska fortuitously found the journal of the troll who was clearly her ancestor: Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, a notorious ancient pirate. From the tales told within that journal (which ranged from valuable relationship advice to softcore lesbian non-con erotica) she took her inspiration in life. She would model herself after Mindfang and strive to live up to her glory.
Naturally, Vriska grew up into a sensitive, misunderstood young woman, tormented by her lusus's terrible needs hahahaha no, I'm just kidding. She grew up into a horrible person. She enjoyed tales of apocalypses and made a hobby of the game of FLARP, a kind of extreme roleplaying. Via this latter route she procured the necessary food for her lusus. Yes, it's true: troll roleplaying kills.
It was through FLARP--which she played in the persona of her ancestor, Mindfang--that she met several of the people who would later become important in her life. She formed Team Scourge with the vicious but more justice-minded troll Terezi, and they faced off against the lowblooded Team Charge, formed by Aradia and Tavros, the latter of whom really, really sucked at being a troll. Like, he was actually a nice, timid, gentle guy. He was so nice, timid, and gentle that he drove Vriska wild with torrid hatred (a romantic emotion for trolls). So she mindcontrolled him into walking off a cliff in an attempt to kill him, which left him paralyzed from the waist down instead.
Being Vriska's hate-crush sure sucks!
In retaliation for this, Aradia used her own psychic powers to summon the ghosts of the trolls Vriska had fed to her lusus to haunt her. In retaliation for this, Vriska mindcontrolled Aradia's boyfriend, Sollux, into killing her messily. Now even Terezi was pissed off, because she thought they were supposed to only kill the bad guys (silly Terezi!), so she slipped an omnipotent being the info that Vriska was using one of his misplaced widgets to give herself the tactical advantage of knowledge. He responded by exploding it in her face, destroying her x-ray vision and one of her arms. So Vriska finally completed the revenge-chain by mindcontrolling Tavros into using his psychic powers to mindcontrol Terezi's lusus into mindcontrolling her into staring at the blistering Alternian sun until she went blind.
Troll vengeance sure sucks!
Anyway, everyone was kind of alienated from Vriska after that. All the same, when the chance came to play an exciting new game called sgrub, the other trolls who were going to start it needed another player, so they invited her to join the group (which consisted of twelve young trolls all together). Sgrub was this cool game that involved rebuilding your hive, fighting monsters, exploring new lands surrounding the world of Skaia, waking up on dream planets, and gaining all the levels. Also, it destroys your planet in order to create a new universe.
Playing sgrub (or as humans would come to know it, sburb) sure sucks!
It started to suck even harder for Vriska when Aradia, whose ghost had been given a robot body, beat her nearly to death, because it turned out that old revenge-chain wasn't entirely over after all. But there's a twist! In sgrub, if you die on your "quest bed" while your dream self is still alive, you merge with your dream self and ascend to god tier, which is even better than gaining all the levels, and it gets you a seriously cool hoodie. Knowing this, the dying Vriska begged a rather freaked-out Tavros to take her to her quest bed and kill her. He did the former, but got cold feet on the latter and fled. So she slowly bled to death, and only then did she wake up as her newly god-tiered dream self (with the bonus of having her eye and arm restored).
She was pretty pissed off at Tavros after that. They had more important things to do, though, so she let it slide for the time being. They had to win the game and claim their prize of a new universe! Which they all proceeded to do. Almost. They beat the game, all right, but before they could get their mysterious reward, a rift opened up in time and space and out came an omnipotent demon bent on killing everything in sight. The trolls absconded.
Omnipotent demons bent on killing everything in sight sure suck!
The trolls wound up on a space station on some meteor in the Veil, the asteroid belt which distantly orbits Skaia, and they slowly began to recuperate from the trauma. In the process, they found out that they could, via a computer application called Trollian, view the timelines of four alien (meaning human) children on a strange (meaning familiar) planet called Earth. It turned out that these children came from the universe the trolls had created with their game of sgrub, and their session of the corresponding human game, sburb, held the key to what had ruined the trolls' session of sgrub.
Slowly, the trolls became involved in, well, trolling the human kids through time and space. Some of them even began to manipulate the kids' session of sburb. Vriska, of course, was one of those manipulators. She had to be in control, after all, even if it was only an illusion of control. She took an interest in the kids' leader, John, and guided him up to god tier himself.
Oh, yes. And in the process, she arranged the events that would lead up to the creation of the omnipotent demon bent on killing everything in sight, hereafter known as Jack Noir. She reasoned that since in her timeline, he already existed, someone had to create him, and it might as well be her, since she was clearly going to be the one to take him down.
Vriska's logic sure does suck!
To top it off, she then told Tavros what she had done, prompting him to finally decide that she really was as horrible as she'd always seemed and needed to be taken down. Before she could see whether he'd follow through on that threat, though, she was whisked away to an entirely new universe...
PERSONALITY:
BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH
There you have the capsule version that most people quickly observe. Now you get the complicated version.
Vriska Serket is a terrible, horrible, awful human being. She's bloodthirsty, virtually remorseless, and borderline sociopathic in her complete disregard for the lives of others. She loves manipulating others for the sake of her own greater glory. She's capable of appalling acts of brutality when angered. Even at the tamest of times, she revels in violence and cruelty.
Rewind! Let's fix the factual error in the above paragraph. Vriska Serket would be a terrible, horrible, awful human being. But she isn't, because she isn't human. She's a troll. And with every evil act she commits, she's actually doing her best to be a good troll.
Until very recently, Vriska was never exposed to the morality common to most human societies: a code of ethics that values compassion and empathy. She was raised to see these things as nothing but worthless weaknesses. The only values trolls are supposed to hold dear are strength and the sacrosanct nature of the hemospectrum, the set of blood colors that dictates their caste system. As a highblood, Vriska was expected and encouraged to treat those beneath her on the hemospectrum like trash.
For most trolls, it would be as simple as that: strive to be strong, respect the hemospectrum, and do whatever you need to in order to survive. Vriska grew up facing an additional complication, though. She had to learn to kill constantly and in great quantities from a young age in order to feed her lusus, a kind of monstrous guardian tasked with taking care of her as she grew up. Unlike most lusii, the giant spider that watched over Vriska fed only on young trolls...and if she didn't keep it fed, she would die herself.
The result is that Vriska has blunted empathy even by troll standards. Her capacity to feel and understand her own emotions is extremely limited. She's run roughshod over any ability she might once have had to love, and even her ability to hate--just as valuable, in troll society, as love--is fuzzy and generalized due to the overwhelming amount of brutality she's needed to display most of her life. The only thing left to her is fear. She fears her lusus; she fears that she may not be able to measure up as an adult troll; she fears her own inadequacy, emotional and otherwise.
But that's not an acceptable emotion to display, so she covers it up with bluster and conniving cruelty. She takes any opportunities to puff up her own ego and prove her superiority to others. She manipulates others just for the rush of feeling like she's in charge. She does twisted and reckless things just to give herself the illusion of being in control. Actually, she's a little obsessed with being in control. Maybe more than a little.
So Vriska can do a pretty good supervillain impression, and it's not all talk--she really is ruthless and wantonly cruel. But it's all a little much. The fact is, she's also the troll equivalent of a thirteen-year-old girl. She's prone to histrionics, although less so now that she's been able to realize some of her potential thanks to the game of sgrub. She sullenly resents the society that's forced her to become such a killer so fast, as well as the people who are better at it than her, and yet she continues to strive to live up to its standards, even now that it's gone.
She's still trying to fill the shoes of a legendary pirate ancestor who wrote bad softcore porn in her journal. Actually, she's kind of pathetic.
On top of that, while she's been pushed to the brink of sociopathy and made a show of embracing it, she hasn't entirely rid herself of her ability to care about people. She genuinely wants to help her friends. Her bullying of and cruelty to them stems not just from her hidden insecurities and rather wide nasty streak, but also from a sincere desire to make them stronger, which, in troll society, is the best thing you can do for anyone. She'll gladly claim that she's only doing something to get the glory for herself, because that's the socially acceptable reason to do it (for a troll), but she may well also want to do it to protect the few people she cares about.
So that's Vriska: a vicious, bloodthirsty girl who revels in manipulation and control with a side of dramatics, but also a young teenager who's hiding a bunch of insecurities and struggling to live up to the high standards that were set for her without her consent.
POWER:
Vision Eightfold: The one peculiarity that her new human body shares with her old troll body is Vriska's bizarre seven-pupilled left eye. This eye grants her the vision eightfold, or at least that's what she calls it. It appears to be run-of-the-mill X-ray vision.
Psychic Control: In her own world, Vriska showed the ability to control the minds of those weaker in will and lower on the hemospectrum than her. When she tried to use this power on humans, she found that all she could do was put them to sleep or wake them up. Now that she's human herself, these two manifestations of the same power have merged. Vriska can at any time put someone to sleep or wake them up. However, only when she is sleeping herself can she use direct mind control. How effective her mind control is depends on how strong-willed her target is.
Luck Siphon: This is the manifestation of Vriska's DICEKIND SPECIBUS in this world. When she focuses and rolls at least one die, she can transfer another person's good luck to herself, making them more prone to accidents and other misfortune and herself more blessed by the chances of favorable outcomes in general for the next four to six hours. However, it's a capricious power and relies heavily on Vriska's self-image at any given time. Undermine her confidence while she's using this power, and all the luck will start to drain back to its original holder.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ text ]
This is according to none of the plans. None of th8m!!!!!!!!
8ut I am a generous and adapta8le person. This ridiculous squishy pink 8ody doesn't scare me. This is just the st8rt of my new conquests of aaaaaaaall the worlds, 8ecause I am
[--pushing the wrong button!]
[ video ]
[Behold a thirteen-year-old girl clutching the communicator with one hand, frantically pawing at herself all over with the other, and muttering.]
Whoever did this will pay! I can't be human!
[She gives a flip of her hair. That human gesture, at least, she seems to already know.]
As if I needed a silly machine to tell me I'm a hero. What does she think it was all for?
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
She'd fallen on the pavement. That was all. If she'd been in a proper troll body it wouldn't have left a mark on her. But in this soft human shape, when Vriska fell, the ground sliced open her knees. She ran when she saw that. That was stupid! She shouldn't have been afraid! Like it mattered what color her blood was. She was still the best, still Vriska Serket, the Thief of Light, the only troll to reach god-tier in their game of sgrub, the rightful descendant of the great Gamblignant Mindfang.
"It's just their way of trying to frighten me," she muttered to herself where she huddled in an alleyway. "It won't work! They're a whole race of useless wrigglers. I'm not scared of anything they or their pathetic 'Porter do to me." She had her arms around her knees. They were getting smeared with that awful bright candy-red blood. She wasn't shaking or anything. If there was one thing Vriska was good at--and she was good at a lot of things!--it was hiding when she felt fear. Not that she felt fear right now. Not that she was suddenly haunted by images of what would be done to her back home, before sgrub, when the cull came, if they'd ever seen her with this color blood. Not that she was wondering if her lusus would have eaten her on the spot if she bled red.
She wasn't.
"It's just because they stuck me in this human body," she said to herself reassuringly. And she followed that thought, a smile started to form on her face. The humans had been baffled when she'd mentioned the hemospectrum to them--one had said something about all their blood being the same color. If that was true, it meant they were all lowbloods. Not only were they lowbloods, they didn't even try to compensate for it! A halfway respectable redblood, like Aradia had once been, would have learned to fight and defend herself, would have honed her psychic abilities to their utmost to survive in a world that was out to cull her. That was where the real essence of troll strength lay--something those of even higher blood than Vriska herself didn't realize, because they were safe in their comfortable purple bubbles. These humans, though...they didn't even try to be strong. And that was why she deserved to own them all, and she'd prove it, too.
How had a race like this produced someone like John Egbert? wondered a small voice at the back of her brain. She pushed it aside. She didn't have time to be thinking of John now! She had better things to do. Like planning her conquest of this miserable species from within. She could start small. That was all right. These people wouldn't know what hit them if she didn't. Besides, even her little gestures of strength had style.
Like, for example--
Vriska stood up and glanced out of the alleyway. One of those stupid human taxis (they even got others to transport them! Pathetic!) was turning a corner just a little too fast. The driver thought he knew what he was doing. He thought he'd be fine. It was up to Vriska to show him why he was wrong. She reached out with her mind
and put the driver
to sleep.
Vriska smiled. She felt better already.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
Yeah, I plan to LJ-cut Vriska's obnoxious text and use voice or video posts when I can.