Perdita Meikle | Forty Seven; Elite
House: Brink Status: Infected — Increased Sight & Smell Elite Specification: Therapist Alignment: New Age Rebels
[*TW: Addiction, Substance Abuse*]
History
Perdita is Latin for “lost” but Perdita’s parents said they hadn’t known that when they named her: they just liked the character from The Winter’s Tale. It never felt like a particularly pertinent name until Perdita was thirteen and the Meikle family got into a car crash. Perdita survived. Her mother, her father, and her older brother Dakota all died, leaving Perdita alone in the world.
She was given a large sum of money, as the accident was caused by a driver of a particularly large shipping company which had wanted to avoid a court case made of one of their drivers abusing pills. While most of this money was stored away to gather interest by her sensible grandparents, who had taken her in after the accident, a chunk of it was used to send Perdita to an exclusive all-girls school that the Meikles had previously been unable to afford. She’d always been a keen student, held back by the local high school that didn’t offer much to its students, and she hoped she would find her people there. She had to, really, as she had little else to hold on to.
So Perdita, now as lost as her name, wandered into the vast school’s grounds in her neatly pressed uniform and buried herself in her studies. She was alone and frightened and her grandparents were dealing with the grief of losing their family too, so they weren’t able to offer much support. One history teacher in particular took notice of Perdita’s work, and invited her to join an elusive, extra-curricular class. Apparently, the group had been active since the school’s inception several centuries earlier, and never had more than nine or ten girls in it. Finding something to belong to did wonders for Perdita’s self esteem—a family found after the loss of her own. The girls in that class were all very close, bonded by a sense of exclusivity even in one of England’s most exclusive schools, and they kept the group very secret. Most students weren’t even aware of its existence.
It wasn’t that the girls involved did anything that necessitated secrecy. Ms. Gaumond got them together in the old, disused Latin tower (apparently none of the faculty were aware, and believed the tower was just storage) to discuss history. That was the surface of it, at least, and they all knew that if you impressed her and got a good reference, you were as good as guaranteed a place in any university of your choice. If there was an emphasis on occult history, well, that was just where their interests happened to take them.
Perdita grew particularly close to one other girl in the group, Greer, who was far more chaotic than Perdita’s own calm demeanour. Yin and yang, they liked to think, and they egged each other on, reading too much into the extra lessons, performing rituals from musty old textbooks just to see if something magical might happen. Nothing ever did, of course, but it didn’t stop them from cutting their palms open and bonding with blood: the scar of that particular misstep still sits white and raised on Perdita’s palm.
They were each other’s downfall. They skipped classes together, stole wine from the enormous cellar in Greer’s house, went to college parties and lied about their age. At the start of the academic year, Perdita’s teachers had been singing her praises. By the end of it, they were sending letters to her grandparents expressing their concern. Perdita and Greer skimmed by together with an us-versus-the-world mentality, not caring that the other students avoided their gazes, and gave them an extra wide berth in the halls, as they were rumoured to be dark and dangerous. The two girls were permitted to stay in Ms. Gaumond’s classes by virtue of favouritism rather than any particular contributions that they made, though they had more or less given up on the idea of university and didn’t care about her recommendation.
That was until Greer was admitted to rehab in their final year. Visiting her best friend in that grim hospital was a sobering experience for Perdita, both literally and figuratively. Greer had almost died, and it showed on her face. In later years, Greer would continue to struggle with addiction, but the shock to Perdita’s system was enough for her to pull her socks up. She was terrified, and after several years of bad habits, getting back on track was a struggle, but with Ms. Gaumond’s support and a truly staggering amount of nicotine patches, she managed to get into university. Now, at least, she knew what she wanted to do with her life: become a therapist. Someone to help lost kids like herself and Greer look after themselves.
Despite the intensity of their high school friendship, the two young women drifted. Perdita was focused on her degree and this time she wouldn’t be distracted. When she graduated it was with honours, which helped her to find work with a public hospital, and eventually open her own practice. When she did, she accepted all patients, but had a leaning towards young people struggling with grief and addiction.
Perdita Today
Perdita’s teenage years had been wild; if she’s being honest, she can’t remember a lot of that time. But she grew into a calm, measured adult who preferred a quiet life. She never married, somehow not quite finding the courage to start a new family. Her grandparents passed away shortly after she graduated university, and some quiet, martyred part of her thought the Meikle line should end with her. Maybe she just never learned to socialize without getting drunk. She had a small group of friends, in which she always felt like an outsider: they all had spouses and children. Perdita had a grey tabby cat called Lily, and she had her patients.
But it was fulfilment enough for her, and after a troubled youth she was quite happy with the idea of a slow, long adulthood. D-Day put a rather rapid stop to those ambitions. Sheer dumb luck allowed her to survive, as she dove into her bath and pulled the mattress over herself. In retrospect, she’s fairly sure that’s what you do in case of nuclear attack, but she’s not sure they ever released a PSA on surviving an asteroid shower. As it was, the block of apartments she lived in would go on to become Colony 12; it had been relatively unscathed, and with a lot of survivors passing through, they realized they were well located to be something of a way-point. Perdita’s calm, unshakeable attitude (as well as her doctorate), made her a natural leader for the group, someone that everyone looked to for guidance. She wasn’t sure how qualified she really was for that, but she did her best and she helped heal a lot of lost souls in the years following D-Day.
She had this lurking feeling, however, that she should be doing more. Colony 12 was so small, and there were so many people out there that needed help. Perdita largely sat tight for her cat: Lily was old, and probably wouldn’t do well if they went roaming. But when Lily died, Perdita found she had nothing left keeping her there. She requested a transfer to Colony 22 which was larger than 12—in footprint, if not in population—but it had less through-traffic and more long-term residents, which would allow her to help more people. She considered going to Colony 4, but was worried it would be too large for her tastes, and too impersonal.
Perdita is a new addition to the therapy department, having only arrived a couple weeks ago. She has found a lot of comfort in her work, and has been burying herself in that in order to avoid the NWRF. The Reforms hadn’t caused such waves at Colony 12, but here she feels very persecuted for something entirely outside of her control. It wasn’t like she asked for increased senses—the sight is a bit of a boon, as she was worried before that she might need glasses. But the increased smell is just an inconvenience that leaves her feeling faintly nauseated most of the time.
Though she’s never been politically minded, she has heard whispers of a group called the New Age Rebels, and she’d like to hear what they have to say. They seem like a sensible lot, and Perdita very much wants things to start making sense again. For all the care she offers her patients, she doesn’t extend the same courtesy to herself, and she is beginning to buckle under the self-inflicted pressure.
OPEN
