Hey so I’ve been sitting on this animatic for like actual months
I wanted to be able to properly explain the lore, and I finally have a minute (it’s been a busy couple months…), so here’s the (mostly) complete life story of Catrina Noche El Dorar, my third TWST oc!
For important context, she’s twisted from the marigolds in Coco, and her Unique Magic, “Golden Blessing”, allows her to offer another person a glowing petal infused with a blessing or curse of her choosing, with conditions attached if she decides, which will go into effect as soon as the petal makes contact with the person’s skin. If a conditional blessing/curse’s conditions are broken, the effect ends. It is very physically taxing and produces a lot of blot, but, luckily, Catrina has a very high blot tolerance. Or, at least, she did.
The first section shows Catrina using her UM to bless her parents, giving them the strength to keep working hard to provide for what little their family has. She is an only child who grew up in very harsh conditions, including serious poverty and famine. Her family didn’t have much, and Catrina’s UM (which developed very early under the pressures of her life) was a saving grace to them in a village where very few people had any magic at all, let alone as strong as hers. They used her UM often, and she even offered it to their friends and neighbors to help them all get by, using it multiple times a day more often than not.
Catrina, because of the physical and magical stress of using her UM so often and the negative feelings that were caused by her upbringing and hometown culture, overblotted very young. She was maybe nine when it happened, and it was bad. Unlike some other overblots, she wasn’t aggressive, just sorrowful and inconsolable, crying blot and wailing for hours on end, unable to be touched by anyone around her due to the flurry of petals and blot surrounding her like a protective shield.
Catrina is eventually brought down from her overblot, passing out like most others do. She wakes in a hospital with a hole in her memory and a struggle to even lift her fingers. She nearly died during her overblot, using all but a drop of her magic before being taken down, and her body hurts in ways she didn’t know was possible.
This is where a bit of personal worldbuilding and headcanons come in.
I think overblotting would effect children much worse than adults due to underdeveloped magic pools and the volatility of young magic (another headcanon), and so Catrina is not only drained of her magic, but her magical scope adjusts to the drain. What used to be cantrips become difficult spells, and her UM becomes nearly impossible to use even once a week without blacking out or risking overblot. She has almost nothing left of her magical reserves, and that doesn’t even begin to touch on what happens to her body and the permanent physical effects and health issues that follow the incident.
Naturally, she is scared. She’s alone in a strange, sterile, hostile place, and is eventually discharged into the hands of…well, she can’t quite remember (something like glowing blue and metal arms, but she’s not sure). STYX cleanses her mind and drops her back at the hospital, expecting her family to come collect her, but…no one appears.
Here comes another bit of worldbuilding;
Catrina’s village is situated in a strange little desert-like area between the Shaftlands and Briar Valley (IT’S NOT AN ISLAND YOU CAN’T CONVINCE ME), and it’s very old-school. There’s little magic, even less technology, and the people are very closed-minded. Superstitions run rampant, from not crossing under a ladder to no black cats to no broken mirrors. Overblotting especially is considered a terrible omen, a moral failing on the part of the overblotter, and those who return from such a terrible fate are branded as less than human, infected by the darkness that once consumed them and unable to be called a person anymore. The village used to kill such people, but Catrina is just a child, and times have changed, so they instead abandon her to the hospital staff, letting them take her instead of returning a cursed child to their home to eventually corrupt them all.
Catrina doesn’t stay at the hospital, however. One way or another, she’s left to wander alone, cold, broken, scared, and believing herself to be a terrible creature just waiting to escape her human skin and mind. She stumbles, eventually, on a bare-brick cottage with a woman’s shadow in the window. Catrina is crying and exhausted and can’t bear to walk another step, and she collapses on the lady’s front step. The woman, a kind older lady with no blood family to speak of, frantically pulls her inside, lays her in bed, and nurses her back to health.
When Catrina is conscious again, the woman introduces herself as Cecily (or Cici) Godmẹ. Catrina manages to tell most of her own story between sobs and stopping for sips of water to soothe her torn-up throat, and, when she’s finished and only sniffling, Cici offers her a place to stay.
“I serve the people of the nearby town,” she says, “as an apothecary and as a guide. You could stay and help me, and I would care for you like my own child.”
With no choice, and feeling almost magically comforted by the woman’s word and home, Catrina agrees.
“Lord, I’m Five Hundred Miles From My Home”
Catrina grows up there, in “Godmother Cici”’s home, surrounded by love and warmth, and integrated into the community of the nearby Shaftlands town. She grows into a kind, outgoing young lady, and is regarded widely as a sister, daughter, and role model by the locals, even if she still sees a monster dripping black ink every time she passes a mirror or catches a glimpse of the petals etched into her skin.
Eventually, to her and Cici’s delight, she is invited to study at Blue Fairy Charm School (a fan college belonging to @aurora-starshine ). Her lack of magic, which has bored a hole into her heart and soul every day from that fateful one until even now wouldn’t matter. She wouldn’t feel jealous when Cici lifted something off a high shelf with a wave of her glass wand or whispered a spell for mending flesh to a skinned knee because none of it would matter. Catrina herself could shine at BFCS, rather than her loss breathing down her neck again.
She accepts, naturally, and is whisked away by a silver carriage. When she opens her eyes again, she’s wearing a beautiful gown (the BFCS equivalent to ceremonial robes) and kneeling before her future peers. It’s important to note that I don’t believe the creator of BFCS has posted anything about the dorm sorting ceremony for the college beyond the robes/black carriage equivalent, so I took some liberties here.
Catrina lifts herself onto her knees and gazes at herself in the mirror. The petals painted across her skin as a souvenir from “that fateful day” jump out at her once again, but she settles, eventually, on her own eyes. The color, the swirling emotion, the fluttering eyelashes, and she is transported mentally back to her village.
She faces, on the cold stone floor before the mirror and wand, her new home, but she cannot help but reflect on her old one. The one that rejected her. She wishes, so badly, that she could have shared today with her parents, that they would have wept for joy at her acceptance rather than sneering at the concept of her survival. She wishes for the sand, the heat, and the friends she left behind. She wishes for their love and comfort, most of all.
But that isn’t her world anymore.
She sits on the cold stone, before the mirror and wand, before hundreds of other girls waiting to welcome her as one of their own, and her gaze towards herself, for the first time in years, softens.