(no subject)
.the mundane;
» Name: Jackie
» Age: 23
» Journal: wicked_chaotic
» Contact: AIM [collared pearls]
.the myth;
» Pantheon: Greek
» God(dess): Lethe
» Reference: one; two; three
» Family: {mother & father} Okeanos & Tethys ; {spouse} N/A
» Played By: Zooey Deschanel
» Human Alias: Letitia "Lettie" Ameles
» Human Age: 26 (d.o.b.: February 29th, 1984)
» Ability: Lethe causes a certain degree of absentmindedness when in close contact with others. (This can be of the flavoring that causes one to be late for a very important date or to forget about their worries and their strife. Depending upon the situation.)
» Occupation: Owner (and head pastry-chef) of a small bakery.
» History:
Lethe, or Oblivion, was one of the five rivers of Hades - or the Greek-flavored version of life after death - among them Acheron (pain), Phlegethon (fire), Cocytus (lamentation), and Styx (hatred).
As far as endings go, her's wasn't really a very terrible one. Forgetfulness was a sort of respite, really, and even if it wasn't much of one? Well, it wasn't as though you'd remember that for very long anyway. Her river flowed around the cave of Hypnos and its murmuring induced drowsiness and unmindfulness. Lethe tended to the Line of those who have paid the tolls to Charon and when they reached the front - this might've taken some time, however, as it was easy to get distracted and people tended to make it there rather out of order with regard to how they began - they drank the water to forget the memories of their past lives. And she, the girl that was the river kept their stories. It was what she was good at.
Historically, there had only been one person - other than Lethe herself, of course - who had been entirely unaffected by her waters: Aithalides, a son of Hermes. Even after drinking, he retained his memories of his past lives and of the Underworld itself. (Others certainly had to have done so in snippets, seeing as mortals sometimes claim some knowledge of lives that are not their own.) This would be something of a matter of professional pride - if Lethe had been the sort to put much stock in such things. And if she didn't think, personally, that having such complete knowledge follow you and accumulate over lifetimes was rather unfortunate.
(To be honest, after personal experience, it's more cluttered than anything else.)
Essentially, at it's simplest - because things really should be simple when they are able to - Lethe was seen as the ending that could ease the minds of the deceased by erasing their memories of their former lives and allowing them to continue with a clean slate into their afterlife. Or reincarnation. Or whatever it is that happens after they reach the front of the Line and take their drink.
She had never been precisely certain herself - and she had never really thought to ask. Until the process became rather self-applicable. Though, at that point, inquiry into the subject had become rather pointless.
» Reincarnations:
Lethe has had a small handful of personal pasts.
In her first mortal incarnation she was born what could be termed close to home. Considerably upward, but close enough. The 1300s found her as an atsinganoi in Crete, one of the traveling untouchables. Where the fact that she dreamed strange dreams and spoke strange words was considered par for the course.
There were a few times in between, but never anything noteworthy in any great fashion.
In the mid-1800s, she was part of a traveling circus. And, after the show, when the Ten-in-One had wound its way down and the various oddities and tent acts set up shop, she sat in her own small tent and patrons paid to sit with her - to share a drink - billed as the girl that could take away your sorrows.
At the time of the Second World War, she was a child of mixed parentage living in Belgium. She was spared when her family was taken, kissed on the forehead and shoved out the back door. In the time following, she forged people's documents in order to to help them disappear, their pasts erased. Forgotten. And when they found her - for such things are inevitable - she held her chin high and damned them to Tartarus.
__
Whether or not she remembers precisely who and what she is depends on the lifetime itself. She tends to remember things best when she finds them. And she remembers herself best by the same token.
Fortunately for this lifetime, Greek Mythology is something of a staple subject for the New York City Public School System. So she found herself out sometime around the fourth grade with something of a blink and a quietly startled oh.
__
Most of the excitement of Lethe's current life was over and done with right around the time she was born. Her mother, an already somewhat unstable woman, was soon-after diagnosed with dementia (affected areas of cognition may be memory, attention, language, and problem solving) and hospitalized. It was the sort of thing that bred a persistent and lasting sense of ill-feeling in her older brother and kept her father, guilty and not prepared to be the primary guardian of two small children, away from home a great deal.
After that point, she had a rather uneventful childhood for the most part. She was quiet and unobtrusive - if a bit odd and ancient in places - and did well enough in school not to be singled out for failure or excessive praise. Her father tried his best, but it was more a relationship of monetary handouts than weekend trips to the movie theater and spaghetti nights every Thursday. Which she was fine with, more or less. She took care of herself with relative ease.
Then, when she was twenty-two, her (half-)brother was born - the product of one of those in-hospital 'accidents' that don't get talked about and tend to get certain parties quietly fired - and, as her mother was (quite naturally, as far as Lethe had been concerned) deemed an unfit guardian, Lethe - fresh out of culinary school and with a barely-opened shop - had started baby-proofing her apartment.
And she's been raising him ever since. Raising him with some - possibly significant, though it's likely too early to tell such things for certain - degree of stumbling in the process, but raising him all the same. (Very technically speaking, her father is. But, once again, it's something of a combination of guilt money and 'A very important business trip. You understand, Letitia.' And her elder brother left home as soon as he was old enough and wants nothing to do with the whole affair.)
So she and Harrison (who is four now, and hearing-impaired) live in an apartment above her bakery - a tiny little affair, kept afloat by mostly by word-of-mouth and death-by-chocolate cupcakes. There are a great deal of neon-colored sticky note reminders all over the walls. (And ceilings. And refrigerator. Next to the crayon-drawings of hell-gates.) Harry likes the colors. Lethe likes the reference points.
» Personality:
You know that girl in school that sat quietly in the corner, potentially reading a book stashed into the opening of her desk? The one that no one really seemed to talk to, but - at the same time - no one was ever really certain why they hadn't? She was a nice girl, sweet and actually kind of pretty when you took the time to look, but no one ever really seemed to take the time.
Lethe's what that girl grows up to be. Probably a bit more well-adjusted, but she blames that on having done this whole thing a couple times before.
Generally speaking, Lethe is pleasant and hard-working, if unpracticed in the fine art of advanced social interaction. She doesn't mind being noticed, not precisely, but she won't go out of her way to be the center of attention. (The latest pastry can do so better than her in the first place. And it's far more welcome to it as well.) It isn't so much that she's shy as it is a marked preference for being overlooked. It's easier. Far more comfortable and worn-in. She has a few friends, but none very terribly close. There's a persistent sense of guilt for not-exactly lying by omission. One cannot be themselves, not entirely, when being themselves in a truthful manner would make people think that you belonged in an asylum.
And she's visited those. They're not entirely pleasant places. But if someone is not friends with you, then who are they friends with? And this is no longer a time where people so easily believe in strange things.
The river Lethe was a final resting place for stories. For left behind lives. And after years of knowing herself, and pieces of her own left behind lives, the woman Lethe has become can be strange and slightly ill-fitting in places. She's remembered what she was for so long that she's never really wondered if she's mad like her mother. She probably should have, she knows, but the way she is has become natural. Questioning it seems unnecessary, and she isn't really the sort to question. And, in some ways, she's much more comfortable being different than she is with fitting in. She doesn't exactly know how to do the second one with any great confidence.
She's incredibly respectful and well-mannered, yes - sometimes overly so, with the deference of someone better suited to being told what to do - but her tendency toward formal phrasing and habit of using vocabulary better suited to classic literature or, at the very least, someone's grandmother makes her oddness readily apparent. It usually leaves her a few steps off of the expected social mark and, more often than not, she forgets that she should correct that sort of thing.
Lethe remembers useless things (occasionally ones that she has no business knowing in the first place), scraps of months-old conversations, the precise time and date of a doctor's appointment someone had attended three years ago, and facts that she's certain that she never read in her school textbooks. She holds on to the immaterial things that she's given instinctively.
But as nice as being able to summon up the fact that George Washington preferred raspberry jam to grape, absentmindedly correcting your history teacher in the third-grade or writing 'utterly ridiculous, fanciful nonsense' on essays doesn't necessarily win you any favors and endear you to the faculty. At least not when one is taking the Social Studies regents exam. There are figmented and fragmented stories of lives and people trapped neatly in her skull and she herself sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.
As a result, she fairly lives off of sticky note reminders and messy, scribbled-on wall-calendars. She's flighty in places - constantly over-tipping in taxis and losing track of her glasses on the bridge of her nose - and unorganizedly jumbled in others. Managing herself and a small child (especially one with special needs) requires a good deal of juggling and concentration. And concentration can take some doing in their household.
» Journal: withwhisperlow
» Sample Journal:
Well.
Back to work then, I suppose.
I must admit that I have always found it rather disconcerting how all of the holiday things just disappear. It is all very sudden, considering how long everyone seems to take in getting ready for them. And then, just - gone. Overnight, almost. Onto new things. People do forget so quickly.
» Sample Roleplay:
Mornings, she has found, especially the mornings after an extended holiday - extended being a relative term most usually relegated to her having more than a weekend's length of time to herself (also a relative term, but she'd take it) - were difficult.
There was, after all, the need to reestablish routine.
And routine, the already somewhat precarious thing that it tended to be, stood little to no chance against the veritable torrent of demolished wrapping paper and shedding pine needles, twinkling fairy-lights and discarded cardboard boxes.
So this morning was a disorganized whirlwind: She'd very nearly tripped out of bed (fumbling for her alarm, hair in her eyes and oversized sweatshirt slipping from her shoulder) and had banged her elbow in the shower. The zipper to her dress - red, and (now) no longer seasonally appropriate - had stuck at the small of her back and no manner of twisting seemed to want to unstick it once more.
Lethe was all flusteredly wild curls and flushed cheeks by the time she reached the kitchen and managed to catch a piece of hastily buttered toast between her teeth.
The door to Harrison's room was opened with a determined tilt of her chin, hoping to usher him out of bed with as little struggle and fanfare as possible, only to find him fully dressed and Batman bag (filled with coloring books, action figures, and video games) already on his back smiling brightly at her. His elbow bent, hand forward and fingers dangling floorward, before flapping themselves back and forth in a repetitive, 'Late. Late. Late.'
She laughed, her eyes crinkling and her fingers, free once more after her own bag had been successfully hoisted onto her shoulder, sketching out a bemused reply of, 'For a very important date.'
The White Rabbit's monologue continued ('No time to say: Hello! Goodbye!') as she ushered him to the kitchen, sliding another piece of bread into the toaster and snagging the Nutella from the cupboard, and wound itself to a stop ('I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!') as she caught the slice as it popped up and snagged the knife from the tray of washed dishes.
The boy, sitting on the counter - which was, strictly speaking, against the rules - and swinging his feet, fluttered tiny hands at the sides of his head, waving them in silent applause. She curtsied in reply, tweaked the tip of his nose, and shoved the considerably less health-conscious breakfast into his crookedly grinning mouth.
It was important, after all, to do all that one could to correctly reestablish the daily routine.
» Name: Jackie
» Age: 23
» Journal: wicked_chaotic
» Contact: AIM [collared pearls]
.the myth;
» Pantheon: Greek
» God(dess): Lethe
» Reference: one; two; three
» Family: {mother & father} Okeanos & Tethys ; {spouse} N/A
» Played By: Zooey Deschanel
» Human Alias: Letitia "Lettie" Ameles
» Human Age: 26 (d.o.b.: February 29th, 1984)
» Ability: Lethe causes a certain degree of absentmindedness when in close contact with others. (This can be of the flavoring that causes one to be late for a very important date or to forget about their worries and their strife. Depending upon the situation.)
» Occupation: Owner (and head pastry-chef) of a small bakery.
» History:
Lethe, or Oblivion, was one of the five rivers of Hades - or the Greek-flavored version of life after death - among them Acheron (pain), Phlegethon (fire), Cocytus (lamentation), and Styx (hatred).
As far as endings go, her's wasn't really a very terrible one. Forgetfulness was a sort of respite, really, and even if it wasn't much of one? Well, it wasn't as though you'd remember that for very long anyway. Her river flowed around the cave of Hypnos and its murmuring induced drowsiness and unmindfulness. Lethe tended to the Line of those who have paid the tolls to Charon and when they reached the front - this might've taken some time, however, as it was easy to get distracted and people tended to make it there rather out of order with regard to how they began - they drank the water to forget the memories of their past lives. And she, the girl that was the river kept their stories. It was what she was good at.
Historically, there had only been one person - other than Lethe herself, of course - who had been entirely unaffected by her waters: Aithalides, a son of Hermes. Even after drinking, he retained his memories of his past lives and of the Underworld itself. (Others certainly had to have done so in snippets, seeing as mortals sometimes claim some knowledge of lives that are not their own.) This would be something of a matter of professional pride - if Lethe had been the sort to put much stock in such things. And if she didn't think, personally, that having such complete knowledge follow you and accumulate over lifetimes was rather unfortunate.
(To be honest, after personal experience, it's more cluttered than anything else.)
Essentially, at it's simplest - because things really should be simple when they are able to - Lethe was seen as the ending that could ease the minds of the deceased by erasing their memories of their former lives and allowing them to continue with a clean slate into their afterlife. Or reincarnation. Or whatever it is that happens after they reach the front of the Line and take their drink.
She had never been precisely certain herself - and she had never really thought to ask. Until the process became rather self-applicable. Though, at that point, inquiry into the subject had become rather pointless.
» Reincarnations:
Lethe has had a small handful of personal pasts.
In her first mortal incarnation she was born what could be termed close to home. Considerably upward, but close enough. The 1300s found her as an atsinganoi in Crete, one of the traveling untouchables. Where the fact that she dreamed strange dreams and spoke strange words was considered par for the course.
There were a few times in between, but never anything noteworthy in any great fashion.
In the mid-1800s, she was part of a traveling circus. And, after the show, when the Ten-in-One had wound its way down and the various oddities and tent acts set up shop, she sat in her own small tent and patrons paid to sit with her - to share a drink - billed as the girl that could take away your sorrows.
At the time of the Second World War, she was a child of mixed parentage living in Belgium. She was spared when her family was taken, kissed on the forehead and shoved out the back door. In the time following, she forged people's documents in order to to help them disappear, their pasts erased. Forgotten. And when they found her - for such things are inevitable - she held her chin high and damned them to Tartarus.
__
Whether or not she remembers precisely who and what she is depends on the lifetime itself. She tends to remember things best when she finds them. And she remembers herself best by the same token.
Fortunately for this lifetime, Greek Mythology is something of a staple subject for the New York City Public School System. So she found herself out sometime around the fourth grade with something of a blink and a quietly startled oh.
__
Most of the excitement of Lethe's current life was over and done with right around the time she was born. Her mother, an already somewhat unstable woman, was soon-after diagnosed with dementia (affected areas of cognition may be memory, attention, language, and problem solving) and hospitalized. It was the sort of thing that bred a persistent and lasting sense of ill-feeling in her older brother and kept her father, guilty and not prepared to be the primary guardian of two small children, away from home a great deal.
After that point, she had a rather uneventful childhood for the most part. She was quiet and unobtrusive - if a bit odd and ancient in places - and did well enough in school not to be singled out for failure or excessive praise. Her father tried his best, but it was more a relationship of monetary handouts than weekend trips to the movie theater and spaghetti nights every Thursday. Which she was fine with, more or less. She took care of herself with relative ease.
Then, when she was twenty-two, her (half-)brother was born - the product of one of those in-hospital 'accidents' that don't get talked about and tend to get certain parties quietly fired - and, as her mother was (quite naturally, as far as Lethe had been concerned) deemed an unfit guardian, Lethe - fresh out of culinary school and with a barely-opened shop - had started baby-proofing her apartment.
And she's been raising him ever since. Raising him with some - possibly significant, though it's likely too early to tell such things for certain - degree of stumbling in the process, but raising him all the same. (Very technically speaking, her father is. But, once again, it's something of a combination of guilt money and 'A very important business trip. You understand, Letitia.' And her elder brother left home as soon as he was old enough and wants nothing to do with the whole affair.)
So she and Harrison (who is four now, and hearing-impaired) live in an apartment above her bakery - a tiny little affair, kept afloat by mostly by word-of-mouth and death-by-chocolate cupcakes. There are a great deal of neon-colored sticky note reminders all over the walls. (And ceilings. And refrigerator. Next to the crayon-drawings of hell-gates.) Harry likes the colors. Lethe likes the reference points.
» Personality:
You know that girl in school that sat quietly in the corner, potentially reading a book stashed into the opening of her desk? The one that no one really seemed to talk to, but - at the same time - no one was ever really certain why they hadn't? She was a nice girl, sweet and actually kind of pretty when you took the time to look, but no one ever really seemed to take the time.
Lethe's what that girl grows up to be. Probably a bit more well-adjusted, but she blames that on having done this whole thing a couple times before.
Generally speaking, Lethe is pleasant and hard-working, if unpracticed in the fine art of advanced social interaction. She doesn't mind being noticed, not precisely, but she won't go out of her way to be the center of attention. (The latest pastry can do so better than her in the first place. And it's far more welcome to it as well.) It isn't so much that she's shy as it is a marked preference for being overlooked. It's easier. Far more comfortable and worn-in. She has a few friends, but none very terribly close. There's a persistent sense of guilt for not-exactly lying by omission. One cannot be themselves, not entirely, when being themselves in a truthful manner would make people think that you belonged in an asylum.
And she's visited those. They're not entirely pleasant places. But if someone is not friends with you, then who are they friends with? And this is no longer a time where people so easily believe in strange things.
The river Lethe was a final resting place for stories. For left behind lives. And after years of knowing herself, and pieces of her own left behind lives, the woman Lethe has become can be strange and slightly ill-fitting in places. She's remembered what she was for so long that she's never really wondered if she's mad like her mother. She probably should have, she knows, but the way she is has become natural. Questioning it seems unnecessary, and she isn't really the sort to question. And, in some ways, she's much more comfortable being different than she is with fitting in. She doesn't exactly know how to do the second one with any great confidence.
She's incredibly respectful and well-mannered, yes - sometimes overly so, with the deference of someone better suited to being told what to do - but her tendency toward formal phrasing and habit of using vocabulary better suited to classic literature or, at the very least, someone's grandmother makes her oddness readily apparent. It usually leaves her a few steps off of the expected social mark and, more often than not, she forgets that she should correct that sort of thing.
Lethe remembers useless things (occasionally ones that she has no business knowing in the first place), scraps of months-old conversations, the precise time and date of a doctor's appointment someone had attended three years ago, and facts that she's certain that she never read in her school textbooks. She holds on to the immaterial things that she's given instinctively.
But as nice as being able to summon up the fact that George Washington preferred raspberry jam to grape, absentmindedly correcting your history teacher in the third-grade or writing 'utterly ridiculous, fanciful nonsense' on essays doesn't necessarily win you any favors and endear you to the faculty. At least not when one is taking the Social Studies regents exam. There are figmented and fragmented stories of lives and people trapped neatly in her skull and she herself sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.
As a result, she fairly lives off of sticky note reminders and messy, scribbled-on wall-calendars. She's flighty in places - constantly over-tipping in taxis and losing track of her glasses on the bridge of her nose - and unorganizedly jumbled in others. Managing herself and a small child (especially one with special needs) requires a good deal of juggling and concentration. And concentration can take some doing in their household.
» Journal: withwhisperlow
» Sample Journal:
Well.
Back to work then, I suppose.
I must admit that I have always found it rather disconcerting how all of the holiday things just disappear. It is all very sudden, considering how long everyone seems to take in getting ready for them. And then, just - gone. Overnight, almost. Onto new things. People do forget so quickly.
» Sample Roleplay:
Mornings, she has found, especially the mornings after an extended holiday - extended being a relative term most usually relegated to her having more than a weekend's length of time to herself (also a relative term, but she'd take it) - were difficult.
There was, after all, the need to reestablish routine.
And routine, the already somewhat precarious thing that it tended to be, stood little to no chance against the veritable torrent of demolished wrapping paper and shedding pine needles, twinkling fairy-lights and discarded cardboard boxes.
So this morning was a disorganized whirlwind: She'd very nearly tripped out of bed (fumbling for her alarm, hair in her eyes and oversized sweatshirt slipping from her shoulder) and had banged her elbow in the shower. The zipper to her dress - red, and (now) no longer seasonally appropriate - had stuck at the small of her back and no manner of twisting seemed to want to unstick it once more.
Lethe was all flusteredly wild curls and flushed cheeks by the time she reached the kitchen and managed to catch a piece of hastily buttered toast between her teeth.
The door to Harrison's room was opened with a determined tilt of her chin, hoping to usher him out of bed with as little struggle and fanfare as possible, only to find him fully dressed and Batman bag (filled with coloring books, action figures, and video games) already on his back smiling brightly at her. His elbow bent, hand forward and fingers dangling floorward, before flapping themselves back and forth in a repetitive, 'Late. Late. Late.'
She laughed, her eyes crinkling and her fingers, free once more after her own bag had been successfully hoisted onto her shoulder, sketching out a bemused reply of, 'For a very important date.'
The White Rabbit's monologue continued ('No time to say: Hello! Goodbye!') as she ushered him to the kitchen, sliding another piece of bread into the toaster and snagging the Nutella from the cupboard, and wound itself to a stop ('I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!') as she caught the slice as it popped up and snagged the knife from the tray of washed dishes.
The boy, sitting on the counter - which was, strictly speaking, against the rules - and swinging his feet, fluttered tiny hands at the sides of his head, waving them in silent applause. She curtsied in reply, tweaked the tip of his nose, and shoved the considerably less health-conscious breakfast into his crookedly grinning mouth.
It was important, after all, to do all that one could to correctly reestablish the daily routine.