i genuinely don’t think I’ve seen another person talk about Dream’s aura. Not really. It is one of the most interesting and kind of scary parts of his powers. It is canon that he can effectively overdose people on positivity and they can become obsessed. It doesn’t happen all the time because he is constantly on the move, but it can happen. It can make them fall in love normally too. We also see Nightmare do very similar things in the opposite direction, only his aura, much stronger, turns people in mindless killing things rather than people. Dream’s aura is much more subtle. Maybe you wouldn’t even notice it while he was there, his presence is always a calming sensation. A mood lifter from any stage of mood. But when he leaves, all that disappears in an instant. Love for him can never be guaranteed as “true” or just a hallucination of his soul. All of this weighs on him.
Color is not immune to its effects, though, I don’t think every person necessarily would act crazy because of it. I think it depends on how well a person can manage their reactions to their emotions, and how they process them mentally. I think Color doubts himself a little though, because he doesn’t like to be alone, and Dream’s departure is the most poignant loneliness one could ever feel.
Stole some of the Color lines from @malaky-nightm4r3 because they went pretty hard
This one was inspired by a post from @beepborpdoodledorp about Jax and Pomni complaining that Pomni's most important relationships and the most well written segments in the show were for Pomni putting up with Jax to the point of absurdity (but saying they did envy people who still cared about Pomni as a character and didn't hate Jax or what he represented.) Anyway, in one of my replies I compared Pomni and Jax to the story of the Zax from Dr. Seuss: Two stubborn people who refuse to budge, leaving themselves in a stalemate as the world changes around them.
After I went for a walk to Kroger, I thought of this using a slightly modified quote. Something I don't think I've seen anyone else do but I think fits them perfectly. And one that has been used against me by my own brother. XD I very much am stubborn, part of the reason I relate to Pomni even if I think her trying to help Jax will bite her in the butt eventually.
(Note: I disagree with them on some things but I appreciate how @beepborpdoodledorp can be critical without it basically being a no nuance hate fest, saying Pomni should just leave Jax to die or let the others make him suffer otherwise it's misogyny or abuse apologia like some do. They also do really good Ragapom and Funnygummy art and posts! This is not meant as hate to anybody, it was just a funny idea that came out of my replies. Also bonus credit for @quickhere-34 since they were the one I was directly replying to when I said this.)
Marinette looked back at her phone, trying to follow the directions to Cosmic Threads. She was new to Gotham, but it had been listed as one of the best fabric stores in the city. She couldn't wait to create her latest design.
As she turned the corner, she was bowled over by a group of older boys.
"Sorry!" they shouted, as the continued to run down the street.
Marinette sighed as she picked up her phone from the floor. As she picked it up, she noticed a black wallet on the floor.
'Must belong to one of those boys. I can drop it off on my way back from the store.'
Suddenly, her arm was grabbed and she was face to face with The Penguin.
'Son of a bitch! No wonder why they ran! They at least could have warned me!'
The batboys winced when they saw the girl they had run into, in the arms of The Penguin. He had his umbrella gun pointed right at her and she didn't look happy. She didn't even look scared; she looked pissed off. Once they entered the fight, it wasn't hard for him to claim her as a hostage. All it had taken was a well thrown batarang to knock the umbrella out of his hand, but he had quickly tossed her off to the side. Red Hood protected her and told her to run through a side exit and was gone. No more distractions. Marinette quickly ran out only to run into the cops.
'Looks like I can't go shopping today. Guess I might as well return the wallet.'
Marinette looked inside and saw a Gotham ID. The wallet belonged to Damian Wayne.
After Marinette had given her statements, she turned to leave. She turned towards the crowd and saw the boys from before. Marinette walked up to them and threw the wallet at them.
"Thanks for the tip, Assholes!" she shouted.
Damian picked up the wallet and looked inside, "So, how much did you steal?"
Marinette was quick to punch him in his face, breaking his nose.
"You-" he cried out.
Jason and Dick held Damian in place, as she glared at him.
"How honorable you are, Coward." She sneered.
Marinette turned away and quickly let the scene. Jason let go of Damian's shirt and started laughing. Dick called for a medic to come look at his youngest brother. Tim sighed, and looked down.
'Blood? Was she injured by the Penguin?'
Tim left to follow. It hadn't been that hard to catch up with her.
"Hey, are you okay?" He asked her.
"I'm fine." she growled and continued walking.
Tim looked her over and noticed a gash on her leg. Rapidly, he picked her up. Marinette started struggling, trying to break free.
"Hey! Put me down! Help! Help!" Mari began to scream, as Tim took her back to the crime scene.
"Hey!" Tim called out, "She needs medical attention. She's just stubborn!"
"I can take care of myself" Marinette cried out.
"Oh, really?" Damian questioned, as he held a cloth to his nose, "What were you going to do? Stitch yourself up?"
"Yes." Mari answered.
Damian recoiled in shock. He looked her up and down. The gash was the length of her inner calf and appeared deep.
"I doubt you have the medical training to handle something of that magnitude." Damian declared.
"And I doubt you know how to be a gentleman!" she replied, "Oh, wait! You already proved that."
Damian glared at her as Drake hesitantly set her down.
"I can do it myself." Marinette explained.
"I can't allow that!" the EMT stated
"I was brought back against my will and do not wish to receive medical attention." she spoke, crossing her arms.
"Where are your parents?" the EMT questioned.
Marinette smiled, "Isn't emancipation the best."
The Wayne boys and the medical attendant looked at her in shock.
"Can anyone look after you?" they asked, "I have to accept you refused treatment, but I'd rather not have you go later to a hospital for blood loss."
Marinette rolled her eyes and picked up the cleaning solution from the ambulance. After she sprayed the solution on her, she grabbed the stitching needle with the thread. She quickly and easily stitched herself up. She wrapped her leg with cotton and gauze.
"Like sewing a shirt." She quipped.
Marinette hopped off the back of the ambulance and walked away.
Damian quickly grabbed her hand. Mari turned and glared at him.
"You are right. I should have spoken up as we rushed by, even grabbed your hand." he stated, "Let me do the honor of walking you home."
"I don't know." Marinette spoke, "You might attract more rouges along the way."
"Dinner then?" he suggested, "Come have dinner with us and I can make sure you are given a ride home."
She sighed, "You're not gonna stop until you redeem yourself, are you?"
"I'm told I stubborn." Damian declared.
Marinette looked at him and relented.
"Fine, but if I don't go home by seven, I'm calling the cops for kidnapping." she answered, "I'm already behind work because of you and have to get up earlier to get what I need now."
"Your injury won't hinder you?" he questioned, "Can't your boss give you a break?"
"I'm my own boss." Marinette smiled, "I do comission work from my own home. I was on my way to Cosmic Threads for some fabric."
"Maybe I can pay for your fabric then." Damian inquired.
Marinette winced, "I take hours to shop. I know exactly what I need and I'm picky when it comes to the quality of my work. It also won't be a frugal purchase."
Starfinder Character Concept: A Borai, an Almost Marooned One
“Death is for quitters. Yon hungry ghost can eat its own foot.”
Okay. Marooned Ones are fucking cool? Sci-fi horror makes me happy, nautical space undead, the remnants of spacers left to die slowly in derelict ships and on barren asteroids. Bearing signs of their stubborn attempts to stay alive, motivated by fury and a desire to share their lonely ends with the living. They like to lure in ships, cull out one member, and arrange for them to be stranded/marooned/abandoned in their turn, so that the Marooned One can watch them suffer as they suffered, until their victim finally dies and becomes another Marooned One themselves. So if you’re exploring an abandoned space hulk, looking for salvage, you might find yourself separated out from your crew, and lured somewhere they won’t find you again …
And then there’s the Borai player race. Which, again, is a space undead. Well, half-alive, half-dead. Some of them come from Eox, or result from botched resurrections, but others were ‘people who were simply too stubborn to fully die when their time came’.
… The Marooned One lured her there, and her ship left like the idiots they are, but fuck that space ghost, and fuck her crew, this bitch is not going down. If I have to become undead, I’m gonna do it on my terms, and you can shove yourself out an airlock. Not that it’d make any difference to you, Mr Already-Dead, but it’s the thought that counts. Death is for quitters. I’m not going down just ‘cause you got lonely out here.
Basically, I want a scrappy borai who became only half-undead out of sheer spite for the creature who stranded her. A spacer, a salvager, who doesn’t give a good goddamn about your tragic end, how dare you try to drag her down too. Just for that, she’s not going to go. She’s just not going to die. No. Fuck you.
For the class, I figured mechanic. She’s a spacer, and she’s a salvager, and she’s a stubborn-ass survivalist, and she’s just going to build her way out of death.
Character Concept: Bertha Mourne, the Almost-Marooned-One
Neither alive nor dead, but just too stubborn to quit. She’s going to be an ex-human borai, so we’ll get Skilled as well, for an extra skill rank per level. It’s been a few years since she ‘died’, and she’s in her fifties now, but she still looks 47. One benefit of being half-dead, you don’t show the passing of time as much.
From Borai we’re going to get darkvision, a +1 racial bonus to saves against various conditions, immunity to negative damage, no penalties from energy drains, and the ability to be healed and resurrected like a still-living person, though we can also be affected by both things that affect the living and things that affect undead.
Description:
A short, stocky ex-human woman, apparently middle aged, wearing battered but well-maintained spacer gear. When she was more alive than she is currently, her skin was a light brown, and it's still trying to be, but there's a definite grey undertone now, and black veins web across her features. Wires, too. Her eyes are brown, sharp, and tired, and her normal resting expression could politely be described as ‘set’. And less politely described as ‘pugnacious’.
Theme: Crisis Refugee
I’m going to theme it slightly differently, it’s less that she was thrown somewhere by the Drift Crisis, and more than she was marooned by a Marooned One on a derelict ship for a while, became half-undead, and now has no place to go because of the leeriness around borai. It’s not that her homeworld is physically unreachable anymore (she’s from the Diaspora, I just like the Diaspora), it’s that it’s socially unreachable now. Like many of the half-dead, she is looking for somewhere new to call home, but in the meantime she’ll stubbornly carve out a space for herself. And, maybe, find a better crew, one that won’t abandon her.
So at first level, we’re going to get +1 to Con, Survival as a class skill, and we can reduce the DC of culture checks about new/unfamiliar cultures.
Class: Mechanic
A space scrapper, salvager and engineer, Bertha wasn’t going to let a little thing like a derelict ship and a homicidal undead stop her from going anywhere. While the limits of her resources on the ship did result in her not-quite-death, she did eventually manage to hijack the distress beacon the Marooned One had used to lure her ship in in the first place, and get a mostly-dead shuttle out to meet them without that undead arsehole interfering, and managed to augment herself to survive long enough for a new ship to reach her.
I did flipflop a lot on exocortex vs drone. A drone would make sense for a starving salvager who wanted access to places she maybe couldn’t go herself, but … The thing with borai is, it’s a physical metamorphosis. Which kind of makes me want to have her focus on herself? Trying to rebuild herself to try and survive, to get via machinery what flesh couldn’t manage. So … I think exocortex. When she felt herself starting to fail, she started trying to mechanically arrest the process. It didn’t work, and in the end it was raw stubborn that actually stopped her slow slide into death, spit and vinegar more than ingenuity, but hey. She tried.
So as a baby exocortex mechanic, we get proficiency in light and heavy armour, small and longarms, basic melee weapons, grenades and shields. We’ll get Skill Focus in a skill via our exocortex memory module, which we can change every level, but for the minute I think we’ll put it in Perception to help compensate for our Wisdom, and because she was stuck on a ship with a hostile undead, so she built her exocortex to help her track her surroundings. We get a bonus to Computers and Engineering, and a Custom Rig, which counts as personal comm, hacking kit and engineering kit all rolled into one. The Custom Rig can be external, but it can also be an augmentation, in brain, eyes or arm. Given how we’ve already gone with exocortex, I think we’ll install it in our arm. Bertha wanted everything she needed to be part of her, if at all possible.
Starting Feat: Toughness
We’re surviving on spit and vinegar here. We’re still even as barely alive as we are on raw stubborn. Of course it’s toughness. Bertha’s made of leather and spite and homemade wiring over here.
Summary:
I’ll be honest, I saw that one line in the borai description, someone just too stubborn to fully die, and it merged with the Marooned One in my head, and Bertha’s entire character concept fell out whole cloth. She’s smart, yeah, but more than that she’s just plain stubborn. This undead jackass wants her to die? Well then she’s just gonna not.
I do also want to play with the whole … borai searching for a home and acceptance, and the crisis refugee theme of relying on and helping others, and the Marooned Ones dying alone, that their rage and their grief is that no one came and they were left to slowly die alone, and have her … decide to be stubborn about that too. Her crew flew blithely off without her and left her to die, but sod that. She’ll find a new crew. A better one. One that won’t. People flinch from her mostly-dead ass? She’ll find someone who doesn’t. She’s not welcome in her old home anymore? Well, time to find an unclaimed asteroid and build a town there. Not a house, a town. She’s not dying alone. She’s not dying full stop, but she’s also not dying alone. She plans to be stubborn about this.
And if she sometimes wonders how much difference there is between that and the Marooned One luring people towards itself, well. She’s not planning on letting people slowly die, so she’s already a step up, right?
So. Bertha Mourne. The almost, but not quite, Marooned One. Heh.
