greatatuin replied to your post: Hey, what's cmwge? You've been posting a lot about...
infodumping is great!!! (Who’s dulcinea? Is she yours or no?)
dulcinea vii is one of the canon ones, from a campaign called The Glass-Maker’s Dragon! the default is for that character role to be filled by a boy named Leonardo de Montreal but all the premades have at least a handful of variants for the sake of customization - at absolute minimum, male/female versions for all. i’m playing the variant who is a girl and also a robot! and i get to make up a lot of stuff about the robot part because while it’s presented as an option the fine details of being a robot are never elaborated on, hoo hoo hoo
dulcinea grew up in an evil orphanage (what made it evil is absolutely never elaborated on). one day the sun abruptly went out and the world seemed doomed to cold, dark armageddon, until she tore out her own heart and used it as the power source for a machine that created a new sun. she doesn’t feel like people appreciate her enough for this. she survived the heart thing fine and it even turned out to be debatably sort of an asset when the orphanage bully stabbed her with a railroad spike and it just went through without hitting anything important. seriously, what kind of an establishment is this orphanage.
she got increasingly impatient with sleepy pastoral life and generally thinking she was smarter than everyone around her and left to seek an ominous institution called the Bleak Academy, located outside of conventional reality entirely. she studied there for awhile and learned mad science and a few terrible cosmic secrets, but the Headmaster there eventually took a sword forged of shadows and rot and blasphemy and stabbed her with it... in the place where her heart would have been. so it didn’t work. it stayed wedged in there, though, and sort of incorporated itself into her, and she’s able to draw on it for power but it comes at the price of terrible nightmares that start to leak out into the real world if she sleeps for too long. and if she ever dies the rotting, poisonous swamp that’s supplanted her dreams will be unleashed fully into the real world with apocalyptic consequences.
here’s where i start to diverge from mainline canon ‘cause leonardo de montreal just kind of shrugged and went home with a shard of nightmare-blasphemy lodged in his chest - which definitely ain’t nothin’, but - my dulcinea de montreal was mortally wounded there, and escaped but couldn’t make the long journey back to reality. she holed up in a pocket of the Outside and built a brass automaton in her image, and managed after a few iterations to successfully transfer the curse from herself to the robot. so, dulcinea vii has the caged blasphemy and the powers, and her predecessor’s memories, and she’s able to pass for human. she’s set up a lab near the docks and she’s investigating unusual, probably-supernatural weather patterns, meeting new people & awkwardly reconnecting with her creator’s childhood friends!
.....for complicated reasons, some or all of this backstory i just yammered about.. is a lie. one of her abilities is the power to erase selected memories from everyone in the world, including herself, and it’s almost certain that she’s used it before and doesn’t want to think too hard about why. it probably has something to do with how, if she wanted to, she could grow wings of feathers and blood and fire, and learn to fly. that’s not something she’s supposed to be able to do! it’s definitely not in her operating manual! but she can’t shake the idea that the option is there.
