#praeteria

[the-colony-roleplay]

Siobhan “Von” Whitmer | Nineteen;  Survivor

House: Delma Security Class: 2 Status: Infected - Praeteria

History

Siobhan—more commonly known as ‘Von’ because she got tired of people mispronouncing her name—grew up in her brother’s shadow. And try as she might, she was never quite able to escape its shade. She already had a chip on her shoulder because she was adopted, while Caelan was their parent’s biological child, but the first time Caelan skipped a grade, she had it in her to be happy for him. The second time, she was a little bitter, but figured she’d get over it. But when he got into a school for advanced learners, she was pissed. And when he went and got himself expelled? She was absolutely furious. It was bad enough that he was always finding a way to outshine her—that her straight-A report cards, her rosettes for equestrianism, her part in the school play, never seemed to be enough and were always dwarfed by her brother’s accomplishments—but to have him take none of it seriously? To just take it all for granted? God, it was way too fucking much.

Of course her parents were supportive of her, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew it was difficult for them to get too excited about her getting second place in a show jumping contest when Caelan had just gotten into university at the age of fifteen. It was why she took to the internet: online, she could be whoever she wanted to be. She didn’t have a brother, she was twenty years old, she was cool, she had a boyfriend.

The truth was that she was thirteen years old with a talent for makeup. She knew how to make herself look a bit more mature—she could pass for seventeen, even eighteen—and she found out that young girls on the internet could get pretty popular. For the first time in her life, people were telling her that she was beautiful, perfect, someone to be admired. Social media was like a magic wand, granting her wishes she never saw to fruition in real life. She had fans and followers. Young girls wanted to be her, boys wanted to date her—and some men, too. Looking back now, she still shivers at the thought of how creepy some of it was, but at the time it just felt good to be the centre of someone’s attention, even the older men. She never actually did anything; she was smarter than that, and the thought alone made her squirm. But she couldn’t help but indulge in the attention, anyway. It was enough to sit there looking pretty and giggling stupidly at whatever they had to say. They may not have gotten what they wanted, but Von did.

In fact, by the time she started middle school, she was an expert at getting what she wanted. You might even say she was happy. Caelan had gone to England for his internship, so she more or less had her adoptive parents’ full attention, and her teachers liked her because she worked hard. Her classmates liked her too—because she was pretty and in middle school, pretty translated to popular. She lapped up the attention boys gave her, and if they bought her an ice cream, she might even give them a flirtatious smile or wink. Not that she needed their chump change; Von had learned early on that men on the internet would pay good money for something as innocent as a photo of her batting her lashes and holding up a sign with their name on it. They’d ask for more, but she never gave it to them. She had some self respect, after all.

For once in her life, Von felt like she might actually do something with her life, might actually be someone. Unfortunately, she would never find out, because a few months into 7th grade, having only just turned fourteen, the world ended.

Von Today

When the asteroids came, she was at the stables. It was just her and a few other girls, and they watched in horror as buildings burned around them. The horses all bolted, and so did Von. She ran the four miles back home to find the whole block on fire. She couldn’t get close, and had to watch in a tearful panic as her home burned down. She didn’t know for sure if her parents were inside, but she had a sinking feeling that they were.

Like most people, she wandered. The headaches started early, and she broke into abandoned houses in desperate search of painkillers. It was a difficult few months in which she lost too much weight and felt horribly ill—which she assumed was thanks to trauma and malnutrition—and she had to rely far too much on the few survivors she had joined up with. None of them thought her symptoms were anything beyond the expected difficulty of life after the Falling, but they soon realized that what Von was suffering from, was the onset of her Praeteria.

They wouldn’t have that name to put to it for some time, but it wasn’t long before she became essential to the survival of their little clan. With her newfound ability to go entirely unnoticed, she could scout out locations to make sure they were safe, and steal food right from under another clan’s nose. No one else in her clan could do anything like that, and this, combined with her fierce and bossy personality saw her becoming a bit of a leader in spite of her youth. She’d lied and said she was older when she first met them, anyway—bit of a force of habit, really. But now they saw her as critical to their new, turbulent worlds, and often the only reason they had enough food to go around, and she thrived under the respect that got her.

Over the years, they met many passing groups of people. They heard that Colonies were coming together, if they needed a safe haven. Von decided on everyone’s behalf that they didn’t. She said it was because this was their new start and they didn’t need anyone controlling them, but the truth was she enjoyed the power of being in charge. She knew that if they joined a Colony, she’d just be some insignificant, nobody kid.

Time began to lose its meaning thanks to their nomadic lifestyle, but they found some semblance of contentment. And then some months ago, Von was out scouting and saw a group that she now recognized as crusaders. She and her clan had told them no before, and they’d tell them again. She trailed after them, unseen thanks to her Praeteria, and watched as they flagged down her clan. But this time it was different. There was tension in the air, and an argument broke out. There were new rules, a new government, and nobody was allowed to live out in the Wastes anymore. Like it or not, the choice was no longer theirs, apparently. Von had never pretended to be a hero; she watched as her friends were taken in against their will, and she followed. After all, how important could she really feel if she were all alone again?

If, and only if, she deemed the Colony safe, she would allow herself to be seen. She watched from outside the front doors, sneaking in and seeing what life was like under this ‘new government’, and she realized that people like her, people with special abilities, were hated by most of the people in power. But without her clan, Von wasn’t sure how long she could survive out in the wastes. It was also difficult to turn her nose up at the Colony now that she saw it: there was hot water, good stocks of food, real beds. After a few weeks of hesitating, she turned herself in. The Colony officials gave her a full health check and ran her name through the database. Von had assumed all of her family were dead—there had been so much death—but she was informed that day that her brother Caelan was still alive, living in a Colony over in England.

Von had never had a good relationship with him; she knew he’d tried over the years to be good to her, but she was bitter and petulant and never quite got over feeling like an outsider in her own family. Now, however, he was all she had, and she found that she wanted her big brother. She immediately put in a transfer request, asking that they not message ahead to let Caelan know she was coming. Von didn’t fully trust that the journey was safe, so she’d rather her appearance be a pleasant surprise. It took a few months to arrange her transfer, but eventually they put her on a ship headed for the Atlantic, and after nearly two months of travelling, she’s finally arrived and ready to begin her new life in England with the only family she has left.

OPEN

RELATED BIOS: CAELAN ‘KIP’ WHITMER

[the-colony-roleplay]

Nadia Chasen | Twenty Nine;  Survivor 

House: Unregistered Citizen Security Class: N/A Status: Infected - Praeteria

History

Nadia’s parents moved from Israel to France when she was just a baby. The commune of Rochefort-en-Terre offered them everything they had wished for—a quaint tourist town, something out of a painting. They opened a small cafe together, with his baking and her charm as the main draws, and settled in to raise their family. Nadia was born first, and from the start she was a smiling, well-behaved child. Her two younger sisters, Irit and Rachelle, were born over the next few years and the Chasen family lived in relative peace for most of Nadia’s childhood.

She began taking an interest in art, and at sixteen started an official apprenticeship with one of the painters in the village, proving to be quite skilled. Her bright smile and cheerful demeanor enticed many, but Nadia’s focus was always more on helping her family with the cafe or continuing with her art. She made friends quickly, but rarely took romantic relationships seriously. Really, she didn’t long for much more than to help provide beautiful things to the community, to brighten the days of those around her in whatever way she could, and to do her best to help her parents keep her sisters out of trouble. If a neighbour was ill, Nadia would show up with an armful of fresh flowers and a care package of baked goods and sweet wishes for their health. In the evenings she would go out dancing with Irit and Rachelle, or serve cocktails at the local bar and flirt with young backpackers passing through. In every way, she was the darling of the town.

She had just begun to entertain the idea of maybe settling down and finding a partner, building her own family, when D-Day happened. The town’s population was decimated, but the survivors quickly banded together and tried to make the best of it, none more firm in that than Nadia. Her mother had died during the Falling, but her father and sisters had survived, and resolved to lean on each other for support. Her family helped form the bedrock of the community of survivors. They were planning on searching out communication with the outside world, maybe relocating to a larger city if they could, when a second tragedy found them.

A few months into their rebuilding efforts, a group came to town. The inhabitants of Rochefort-en-Terre hadn’t experienced the wilder side of the world ending—a tight-knit community, they were naive to the ways the apocalypse had affected others. Without hesitation, they offered to share what they had with the strangers. Their reward: a massacre during the night.

Nadia had been ill for a while before, a mysterious illness that plagued her with headaches and kept her bedridden with no apparent cause, but during the attack her infection fully manifested for the first time, and concealed her. In shock, she witnessed the rest of her family, friends, and neighbours butchered mercilessly. Such violence, such relentless cruelty, was something she had never experienced first hand, and it threw her completely out of her normal reality. After the fire the looters set had consumed the rest of her home and the bodies of her loved ones, she had nothing left, inside or out. The news of the existence of praeteria had yet to reach the region, but Nadia realized that for whatever reason, she couldn’t be seen. So like a phantom, she followed them.

Mostly she only observed at first, numbly watching the looters as they wore the clothes they’d been given in charity, ate the food they’d taken, and spoke about her life and home as though it had been some great conquest to destroy. She ate scraps off their plates and silently listened to all of it, sitting among them at their campfire.

She found out the hard way that she could be seen while she slept, because they caught her once. However, the instant she woke and found herself bound and captured by them, her Infection caused her to vanish, right before their eyes. After that, she learned to conceal herself carefully when she needed to rest.

It didn’t take long for her to change, fundamentally. Later she would scarcely remember deciding to take action, or questioning the morality of it. Her faith in humanity had disintegrated, and all she could think was—they will do worse, again and again. She started killing them off one by one during the night while they slept. It didn’t matter if they posted a lookout, or slept in shifts, they always awoke to find a body. During the day she watched with cold detachment as their paranoia and fear grew. Their numbers dwindled, and eventually the ones who remained were afraid to even close their eyes, convinced they wouldn’t open them. Sometimes they were right. The last man standing was the one who’d murdered her sisters, though by the time he died he’d lost most of his mind, convinced he was being haunted.

Nadia wandered the Wastes after that, without much direction, living off the remains of the looter’s supplies. Slowly, she began to recover some scraps of rational thought, enough that she realized she was no vengeful spirit, just a woman no longer observed. She managed to locate one or two other clans, but her Infection became much more unpredictable. Always quite expressive in her emotions, she was now positively erratic. Most other survivors she encountered could see her at random moments—and they did not react well. She thought for a while that it might be best if she survived on her own, and ended up in the ruins of the city of Rennes. She was a savvy scavenger, competent and practical with the sparse resources she found, but scraping by was by no means easy. When clans passed by, she would take small amounts of food from them when she thought they could spare it, but she did begin to feel the stirrings of conscience and guilt.

Several years passed in this virtual seclusion before she found a clan that had something she hadn’t seen in a long time—community. A large group, that had adapted to wandering slowly through the Wastes and hadn’t felt the need to join a Colony. They had grandparents with them, and children. In her loneliness, she was fascinated by them. Despite her now frightening appearance, she enlisted the aid of a few of the smallest to adopt her. She would appear to the children when they were on their own, and they would feed her, talk to her. The adults assumed she was just a game, a flight of fancy that the children spoke about. She began to recover a bit of her old self, gradually. In a way, she was part of the group—except to the adults, who thought they knew better.

With the purging of the Wasteland, Nadia followed her clan to Colony 16 in Nantes, where they rejoined society for the first time. It was a huge change being among so many people again, but she had learned if she controlled her emotions somewhat, she could better control her Infection. She took her time to observe, wandering through the Colony like she belonged there, while no one could see her. The realization that the NWRF was aware of people like her shocked her completely, and when she figured out what their stance was on these so-called Infected, she was given extra incentive to stay hidden. Deep down, she knew they were an old evil under a new name, and nothing more.

There were some perks, however. Namely, training sessions. She sat together with a group of fellow Praeterics, and learned about her ability. She discovered there were Empaths who might sense her, and that she could be seen on camera, and even some ways to refine her control. On her own, she began to practice becoming visible when she wished. She thought it was going fairly well—she would simply pretend to be a member of the Colony for a few minutes at a time, and then vanish again at the next opportunity. With so many people coming and going through the port, no one asked her too many questions. With each interaction, she began to remember what it felt like to be treated normally.

Her mistake came when she finally introduced herself to the clan she had come in with. They were shocked to learn the figment the children had talked about so fondly was someone who had truly lived with them, known them so intimately for months without their knowledge. After some heated discussion, they decided to turn her in.

Nadia fled, hiding on a trading vessel that was preparing to launch. She had no idea where it was headed, or how long the journey would be, just that she needed to find a safer home.

Nadia Today

The ship docked in Colony 22 in January of 2163, and Nadia immediately began taking stock of her new surroundings, exploring and following various colonists to get her bearings. She is aware that even in her Praeteric state, there are still risks. But this is not her first time avoiding detection. She alternates her sleeping areas, mostly staying wherever it is warm and undisturbed during the night. When she does appear, she knows how to blend in and mimic the behaviour she sees around her. Most will probably think she’s simply a newcomer that they don’t know much about yet, but she could’ve been observing them for quite some time.

Despite her experiences, she seems quite harmless, if a little emotional at times. She’s sensitive and shows her emotions quickly, though they can change rapidly and she will often disappear to get away from things she doesn’t wish to confront. Though she still struggles with coming to grips with everything that happened to her, and everything that she did as a result, what she longs for most is a sense of belonging and safety. She thinks of her Infection as her greatest strength, as something that both saved her life and granted her justice against those who hurt her, but she hasn’t used violence against another person since then. The very idea of the Games, of pretending to fight against other citizens in the name of survival, makes her sick to her stomach. Accustomed to feeling extraordinarily lonely and separated from others, she counters that by fostering a false sense of intimacy with people she observes, whether they want her to or not.

CLOSED; Original Character