#oc tula

[lydia-too-late]

Back after the holidays y’all, I promise. In the meantime, have a Tula sketch, in full Lasombra glory.

[silkenred]

In which Silk has some strong and complicated feelings about diablery. (Who doesn't, right?)

This is Silk finding out that this chick they've been running with (and have been starting to develop kind of a fixation on for totally unsuspect reasons) ate their ex-girlfriend's soul a few years ago. What do you do when you find out someone you loved and feared and felt held but trapped by has crossed oceans of time and passed the very gates of death itself to find you again through the body of their own murderer? What do you do to that murderer when they contain everything that's left of that person? What about if you were always taught that the very act of murder-and-consumption was the highest sacrament and greatest personal attainment there is?

You freak it.

Really, absolutely no one in this scene is having a normal one, or getting out of it unscathed. (Except maybe the nice lady in the next room, whose biggest problem right now is that she's still awake and working in the dead hours just before dawn.)

It's what @lydia-too-late and I have been building to basically since this story first started slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, and so far it's so much messier and more wonderful than either of us could have hoped for! 😍

[lydia-too-late]

The summer’s been kinda tough but I’ve recently found quite a lot of joy in learning how to create digital art. I’m still very much a novice, but it just feels good to zone out and make something, you know?

Anyway, this is my OC Tula, a Lasombra who rather enjoys eating men. I talk about her a lot.

[lydia-too-late]

I drew a Luna!

Tzimisce. Or she used to be. Most recently she’s been haunting Tula from some shallow corner of the Abyss, or something like that. Diablerie, you know?

May revisit this one later.

[lydia-too-late]

[lydia-too-late]

(Another) Desert Vignette

Tula is looking up at the sky, squinting at the stars through tissue-paper clouds, the atmosphere gone faint hellfire above the distant city lights, a rolling-Earth harbinger of terrible orange-red. One may think the wildfires won. One may think of calamity. One may think: Three hours until certain death.

The suburbs dissolve beneath their feet as they venture farther from San Narciso. Out here, the scrubby hills and city repose together on the landscape. Slums somewhere, too, sloughing off the edges of everything.

"We could just run." Silk scuffs their boots. They inhale just to snort. "Hay unos veinte kilómetros, algo así. Maybe we even make it back." A leathersounding shrug. "That's a joke."​

In the moonlight, Silk's lashes cast heavy shadows over their eyes. She follows the darkness to the hollow beneath their cheekbones, between their parted lips, behind their tongue. She touches the bite marks on her wrists. Red, raw and open, glistening, but they don't bleed. They don't hurt.

The desert is always half dream. In the distance, a coyote screams into the night's silence and rouses a chorus, offering their unearthly din to the moon's slow descent. She's seen Luna there before: the tall, whip-thin silhouette on a distant hill, surrounded by her pack. But not tonight. We could just run. One of Tula's fingertips presses into her wound, splitting it obscenely open. It does not bleed, but it hurts.

(She shrugs, not-quite-smiling. "I'm sure there's a car trunk somewhere along the way…")

Her throat feels tight. She lifts her wrist to her lips, tonguing the puncture like a child, an animal. The warm, saltmetal taste sits on the tip of her tongue.

Silk is looking at her, all sleepy eyes and strange, hard beauty. Tula is looking at them too, eyes wide and rich-girl hungry above her wrist. Their jacket has fallen open, framing a starved waist and soft hips. The bones of their sternum between the halter's illusion of breasts. The excruciating shadow of hair trailing several inches below their navel. The profanity of their shorts, the way they pull tight around their hips and thighs. She wants to push them down to the ground. Make them say her name. Make them moan her name. Make them say it, say it…

Tula jerks herself back; her wrist falls away guiltily. "Just hungry," she dismisses the moment, shrugging like Silk shrugged, her shame hidden with a scowl. They could never outrun it, neither one of them.

[lydia-too-late]

OC Deep Dive - Tula Redgrave

What common/uncommon fear do they have?

One of the things I love about this story is that, despite the facade of power and prestige and allure we associate with being Kindred, the Beast is, above all, a very scared and hungry thing. Tula’s fears are many, varied, vague, and often contradictory. Sometimes the terror is impossible to name.

She is afraid of herself: primarily the capacity for violence that she struggles to control. Of her hunger and what it demands of her. Of love, because she fears she is incapable of not hurting those she loves.  She is afraid of being alone. She is afraid of never finding a place, and she’s afraid of being trapped in the wrong place.

She’s afraid of losing herself to Luna, that her memories aren’t her own. She’s fears that, since she’s turned, her face has physically changed or is changing, and she won’t know herself at all (damn that Lasombra bane!).

Exposure and attention. Heights (she’s more of a Depths Bitch). Silk’s suffering. Children. Jumpscares.

Do they have any pet peeves?

Men who tell her to smile.

People who don’t use headphones on public transit.

Lying liars and the lies they tell. 

What are 3 items you can find in their bedroom?

Welp, she’s currently holed up Las Alturas’s shittiest motel, but on the upside they gave her a real key (not a keycard) and she can turn the ancient television on, most of the time -- those are Lasombra luxuries, right??

I’ll list literally every item she owns:

One pair of Walmart jeans (lighter wash, baggy, low-slung)

Silk's slutty fake leather shorts

Five black shirts: 2 identical tank tops, 1 cropped tshirt, 1 sleeveless mock turtleneck, 1 lace-overlayed bodysuit, all cheap as hell

An oversized purple t-shirt that just says "Las Alturas" (purchased at a convenience store, so you know it’s good)

Black stompy boots

Cosmetics: Lotion, soap, comb, blush, lip gloss (someone get her some curl cream, please)

Notebook & Pens

Ethel's 70s-era honeymoon snapshot: a round-corner print, muted colors, grainy

Odell’s gun

What do they notice first in a person?

If she’s not in pursuit of a goal or objective, nothing. She can be remarkably disengaged. 

Otherwise, what she notices corresponds directly to why she’s looking. Prey? Their capacity to resist, escape, fight back. An associate? Their mood, their desires, what they need from her. She's a very practical observer, unless there's an emotional connection. Then she can be full-on obsessive, noticing every little detail.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how high is their pain tolerance?

What is average for a vampire? 12? Probably about there. She has no affection or affinity for pain, but she endures. Knowing that most injuries won’t kill you dulls the panic that accompanies pain, making it overall less traumatic. The only pain she really fears is hunger. Emotional pain is a different story, but a similar simmering constant.

Do they go into fight or flight mode when under pressure? (or freeze and fawn)

Flight if it’s not important, fight if it is. She’s got some Potence, so she might as well use it. 

What animal represents them best?

Wild red fox. (Not those urban foxes who don’t give a fuck.) Red hair, sleek, skittish, rarely seen. Not very social, except in small groups.  Hunted by assholes. Difficult to domesticate. Horny? Horny. 

How would a stranger likely describe them?

“Who?” -Timothy Cooper

“Yeah, not bad. Nice lips. But she’s pale as fuck.” -Odell Brown

“Affectionately, a pain in my ass.” -Salvador Santos

“She’s very…” “…fucking…” “…intense.” -Megan, Meghan, Meagan 

“The skinny white girl with the Xanax eyes?” -Stella Benjamin

“Fascinating, perhaps useful. We’ll find out, won’t we?” -Miel

*nervous sweating* -Lamb

Do they have any hobbies?

Reading, mostly: nearly anything, but she has a soft spot for Magical Realism, literary fiction, queer fiction, short stories. Idle doodling. Research, when she has cause. Watching television, when she can. 

Tagged by @porcelainseashore -- thank you so much! <3

[lydia-too-late]

How has the Lasombra clan curse been for Tula? Does she miss technology or has it not been too bad going without phones and computers and etc? How does she get herself presentable when she needs to?

Ahhh, thanks so much for asking!

It’s not not awful, hahaha. There’s a lot of facets to this particular bane — the logistical limitations of inaccessible technology, the constant danger of breaching the masquerade, and the lack of ability to ever see oneself — and she struggles with ALL of them. It’s terrific fun to play and write though; one of the first things @silkenred and I established for this story chronicle is that we love chaos and hardship because it’s SUCH fertile ground for creativity. 

So, logistically, this bane is far more manageable with resources, something which sweet Tula is notably lacking, bless her heart. When she was first turned, her Sire, as a means of control, was a source of resources, but did not provide her with resources of her own. For example, Evelyn’s ghouls attended to her grooming and small necessary tech tasks, but Evelyn did not teach her how to make her own ghouls. To this day, she has a general idea of how it’s done, but she’s not keen on the specifics and she’s never attempted it herself. Navigating unlife independently, the bane is a constant problem. Hard to find a source of income/job that requires no technology (the only reason she managed as a bartender Otros was because her boss Sal is a ghoul (to a local baron) who Knows What’s Up). Hard to make lasting connections when you can’t be easily connected-to. Hard to keep up the guise of normality when you’re completely disconnected from most media and culture. And when she was migrating cross-country? She had to use PAPER MAPS, for fuck’s sake.

I don’t think Tula is necessarily ethically-opposed to ghouls, but she doesn’t have a strong desire for one, even if they’d make her life easier. While she was more transient, it seemed like a liability more than anything else: too much joint dependency and unwelcome company. Now that she’s been in Las Alturas for several months and is establishing something akin to stability, the part of her that wrangles with her own monstrosity knows that things shouldn’t be easy for her. She should be alone, hidden away: she does not belong in this world. Hooking up with Silk — and finding a place to belong — began to heal that, but then she confessed all the Luna stuff and they parted ways (in a scene that may or may not have included a gun in her mouth and to Silk’s head).  It’ll be interesting to see where she goes from here.

I think not being able to see herself, being instead faced with a profoundly obscured reflection, is psychologically the most difficult aspect for her. It creates a significant disconnect with herself, and a block to her interactions with others. She has a sense that her appearance has changed as a kindred, but she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t know what other people see when they look at her and can’t let go of the fear that it’s becoming monstrous or strange or just not Her. Since diablerizing Luna, she’s been dogged by the terrifying possibility that she’s turning into Luna, both internally and externally. Ironically, the only glimpse of herself she’s gotten since her embrace is from Luna’s memories: the vision of her own snarling face in the moments before she went in for the kill. It’s not exactly flattering.

So, in short, she’s Not Doing Great and could probably stand to talk to someone about it. Unfortunately, she can’t contact a therapist and she’d probably end up eating them anyway.

Not showing up on a security camera, though? That's fucking great.

Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to blab about some of Tula’s many hang-ups!