Application | route_29

[occultigen]

Player
Name: Alex
Personal Journal: alexclusive
E-mail: gloriousrikkaidai (at) hotmail (dot) com
AIM/Plurk/Etc.: MSN: fortunes_wings (at) hotmail (dot) com
Timezone: EST
Current Characters in Route:
Carmen Sandiego (doitrockapella)
Parker (nostabbing)
Kyouko Kirigiri (freshprints)
Schuldig (aufsassig)

Character
Name: Meridiana Everett
Series: Count Cain/Godchild
Timeline: End of Volume 5, Chapter 5, following her death.
Canon Resource Links:
Count Cain/Godchild at Wikipedia, which briefly mentions the overarching series plot and references the Deadly Dolls.
A written-out character history, because she and her series definitely fit the "so obscure there's basically nothing about her" bit; she's the love interest of one adventure (spanning two volumes) of the manga, which is also her only appearance.

Personality:
In Kaori Yuki's Count Cain/Godchild manga, the various characters are often heavily associated with a representative card of the Major Arcana that tends to illustrate their role, their history, or their personal arc throughout the plot; in chapter one of volume five, sidebar information from the author indicates that Meridiana's representative tarot card is the Wheel of Fortune, and so it is through this lens that her personality is best examined.

Superficially speaking, the Wheel of Fortune seems like the natural card of choice for Meridiana; the narrative introduces her as a stoic, picturesque fortune-teller who has recently become the sensation of Victorian London's society affairs. She is often invited to parties because of her ability to tell fortunes and make predictions for the social elite who find themselves entranced by such occult mysteries, even while decrying such things as nonsense and fairy tales. And indeed, for a large portion of Meridiana's early appearances, she is presented as lifeless and cold, aloof and untouchable; she comes off as more of a doll than a living person, pretty and poised to do as she is directed without any independent will of her own.

However, the message of the Wheel of Fortune is also that "everything changes", and Meridiana is certainly no exception. Indeed, the stoic princess she appears to be when she is first introduced is a far cry from the girl she was in life: a lively, spunky girl from a middle-class family who was renowned for her beauty and really rather vain because of it. Over the course of her appearances in the manga, Meridiana's journey details the personal struggles that simultaneously reveal how she ultimately fell from the heights of her life to the quiet doll we met in the beginning, and chronicles her rise once again to regaining the life and personality she'd once had.

A major theme of Meridiana's story is that she is a girl who is frequently moved by the whims of circumstances beyond her control. As the first confirmed appearance of one of DELILAH's deadly dolls, she was forcibly resurrected from the dead to be a pawn for the organization's schemes; it's implied that she served as a test subject for certain aspects of the process, and that she mostly exists to be observed as a means of gaining data for future deadly dolls projects (of which there are several). Once resurrected from the dead, Meridiana becomes unable to survive on her own — she depends on the doctor who raised her, Jezebel, for weekly treatments that sustain her physical body, and in a more grotesque sense she depends on the blood and organs of the girls being murdered to act as donors for her. In a metaphorical sense, once Jezebel learns that the protagonist of the series has fallen in love with her, he uses Meridiana as a tool and a means by which to inflict more trauma upon him. Even actions that she thinks she has taken independently — escaping from the house where Jezebel has his base of operations, most notably — are later revealed to be actions she was manipulated into. As she exclaims in horror, "I...I'd wanted to cut all your strings...all this time, have I just been your marionette?!"

However, Meridiana's unfortunate role as someone else's marionette is not unique to Jezebel; the narrative also reveals that her first death occurred as the result of a failed "lovers' suicide". Meridiana, a girl from a middle-class family, had fallen in love with the eldest son of a marquis — a titled young man well above her station. When it became clear that his family would never let him marry a girl from such a vastly different social class, Meridiana took the rebuff hard and, as Jezebel taunts her, "chose to die rather than face reality." It's implied that the "lovers' suicide" she tries to complete was the son's idea; wanting to be rid of her, the son convinced Meridiana to climb a tower and leap off together with him, and then let her fall to her death while he utilized a means of saving himself to avoid the same fate. Consequently, an overarching theme in Meridiana's life is her tendency to be taken advantage of by others, and to let her flaws be used against her to manipulative effect.

And indeed, she has her flaws: while described as being "more beautiful than any living person, with a smile that bestows eternal bliss unto those who lay eyes upon her", Meridiana is also very vain about her looks and has a lot of her self-worth invested in being the quintessential example of a Victorian lady — despite the fact that she's from a middle-class family and suffers the social consequences of it from the upper echelon of society as a result. Jezebel, in lecturing her, calls her a "self-serving narcissist"; she clearly doesn't take slights and criticism well, and can often make choices rooted in strong emotion that later act to her detriment — and sometimes even death. Naturally, this investment in her beauty proves to be an ironic echo once she is resurrected from the dead and becomes "a monster escaped from her grave" who has "eaten the entrails of total strangers"; while physically speaking she still has all of the beauty she did in life, that physical aesthetic is hollow and sustained only by virtue of the monstrous actions she is forced to take (and indeed, forced into) in order to stay that way. This leads her to a great deal of understandable self-loathing, and none moreso than when one of the girls killed to sustain her proves to be none other than the protagonist's fiancee (and her rival in love) — a fact Jezebel makes certain to tell her about, once he's already completed the operation to transplant the fiancee's organs into Meridiana's body.

Suffice to say, Meridiana is a lovely, once-average Victorian girl who (like any character in a Kaori Yuki manga) is now struggling with a veritable motherlode of issues. She has now died twice, and both times for the sake of a man she loved; she has been resurrected from the dead specifically to be someone else's pawn, used and manipulated by her own emotions; she has suffered through a weekly string of bullshit Victorian occult experimentation including but not limited to blood transfusions, organ transplants, and whatever the shit is going on here for the sake of being kept alive long beyond a point when she should've been dead; and perhaps most egregiously, just minutes before her death, she discovered that the person acting as "Jack the Ripper", who had been working with Jezebel to murder the girls that eventually became Meridiana's blood and organ donors, was none other than her own mother.

However, even in the midst of all this adversity, Meridiana displays some notable moments of character that truly demonstrate that fire and determination she'd had in life. Several times over the narrative (despite being unknowing manipulated into at least one of them), Meridiana asserts herself with notable bravery and self-confidence. At one point, while Jezebel is attempting to keep her tied down literally by her hair (which is very long, and at the time braided, acting as a symbol of her vanity), Meridiana gives herself a Dramatic Haircut and hacks her braid off at the shoulders, yelling that "[s]taying here is just as bad as being dead! ...And I won't let even one more person die because of me! Yes, all the things [Jezebel had] said were true! But I'm never going to pity myself and run away again — I'm going to fight back! That's what it truly means to be alive!" Later, when she knows Cain is still in love with her despite mourning his fiancee, she tries to drive him away from her for his own sake by acting confident and nonchalant, claiming that she "hate[s] obstinate men" and doesn't want him to chase after her when she leaves — which, naturally, he does. Later still, when the protagonist's beloved sister is missing and the protagonist comes to Meridiana to insist that she tell him where Jezebel's base of operations can be found, Meridiana demands to come with him and so adamantly refuses to be left behind that the protagonist eventually relents, arming her with a cane sword and taking her along on what he knows may be a perilous, and even deadly, venture. Finally, just before she dies, she repeats her earlier convictions to Jezebel and Cain both, stating that "this time...[she] control[s her] life itself" and that she'd rather die than allow the protagonist to be hurt on her account, insisting, "I'm...not a doll...anymore".

Hence, the Wheel of Fortune speaks volumes about Meridiana Everett, the apparent first of DELILAH's deadly dolls. She is a girl upon whom external factors have always acted; she is a girl who, when faced with adversity, has at times forgotten that things always have the potential to get better. She is a girl who once rode high on the wings of youth and beauty, only to be brought low by scorn, rejection, and manipulation. And, over the course of her narrative, she is a girl who remembers the lesson that the Wheel is intended to teach: that the possibility still exists to adapt and overcome, and that the Wheel is always turning, even for someone who has hit rock bottom.

At the point when she'll be coming into Route, she's hit about as rock bottom as it gets. It only seems fair, therefore, to give her a shot at climbing her way back up to the top once again.

Strengths/Weaknesses:
✔ Attractive — As discussed above, Meridiana is canonically exceptionally pretty, with (formerly) long blonde hair and lovely blue eyes. While not precisely a skill in and of itself, being incredibly pretty does tend to come with certain undeniable social advantages, and it's definitely something she's very proud of. She takes good care of herself, she keeps up on styles and trends, and in a bit of a Cinderella fashion, she can usually manage to achieve a level of personal appearance that lets her compete with girls from families with considerably more money and status than hers — kind of a big deal, given the time period she comes from.

✔ Determined — When the chips are down, Meridiana doesn't waste any time in setting her mind to a course of action and following through on it. Though her time period and social context influence her behavior in that she tends to be somewhat passive in the presence of men and she's not necessarily the type to leap to take initiative from the get-go, she's also not shy about taking action when it's clear it's necessary. When pushed into a corner, she's quite decisive, and she will act to attempt to mitigate harm to others, particularly if it appears as though they're going to be injured on her behalf. As she says before her death, she's tired of people being hurt on her account, and she's quick to stand up for herself when it looks as though she (or someone close to her) is in imminent danger.

✔ Fiery — When the protagonist inadvertently does something that risks impugning her honor (tripping and falling on her in a garden), Meridiana's response is to sit up and slap him across the face, accusing him of having no manners; as she is still suffering from amnesia about her pre-doll life at that point, this instinctive reaction brings her some surprise, and she recalls that "in the past...[she] really was this kind of a girl!" While in terms of taking action she often defers to the men in her life, she's certainly not unwilling to assert herself when she feels the occasion calls for it; she'll talk back, exercise a quick wit, or refuse to shy away from a confrontation without a few sharp words of her own.

✔ Charismatic — Before her lovers' suicide, Meridiana was the subject of many male admirers, and somehow even managed to snag enough of the attentions of a marquis's son (someone well above her own social station) to appear in pictures with him and spend a great deal of time together. She clearly knows how to conduct herself like a charming, engaging companion in accompaniment to her beauty, and when she tries she's fairly good at making people like her — or at least concede that she's a sweet and pleasant sort of person to be around.

✔ Mannerly — She's a well-behaved girl, and fitting in is clearly very important to her. She's therefore well-versed in societal conventions — albeit Victorian-era ones — and is fairly adept at handling herself in a social setting; once she gets used to contemporary manners and norms, she'll likely waste no time settling in and handling herself just as well as she would've in her own era: polite, courteous, and giving all indications that she's very well-bred, despite how some might think her social station would suggest otherwise.

✘ Undead — HOO BOY, WELCOME TO THE ISSUES. Quite possibly the most, uh, egregious weakness in her lineup is actually a series of issues all tied to the fact that she's a sixteen-year-old girl who committed suicide, was unwillingly resurrected from the dead, put into an artificially-constructed body that isn't capable of sustaining itself on its own, and kept alive through some pretty grotesque medical procedures including but not limited to receiving blood transfusions and organ transplants. The fact that these transfusions and transplants come from the corpses of innocent people that her own mother is murdering for the sake of keeping her alive is just kind of the icing on the cake, really. While the physical problems directly relating to being a Deadly Doll will naturally be mooted in Route, I would still like her to keep some of the more natural physical symptoms — frailty, anemia, a tendency to faint — and of course she'll still have the memories of all those past traumas to haunt her. Her first week in-game, therefore, may prove to be quite anxious for her if she doesn't realize she's not a doll any longer; a week is the maximum length of time she can live on her own without receiving a life-sustaining procedure, so she may very well spend the latter half of her first week waiting to literally fall apart and fearing the "hunger" that always accompanies the need for sustenance.

✘ Easily Manipulated — As discussed at length in her personality, Meridiana is frequently the pawn of the people around her. She doesn't always have the best judgment when it comes to people (as shown when she thinks Jezebel is in love with her, for example), and it's not all that difficult to provoke her into a course of action if one knows the right buttons to push. Though she does try her best, she's simply not particularly Machiavellian about such things, and she runs the risk of having someone she trusts take advantage of her because she simply doesn't see it coming.

✘ Impulsive — In classic Romeo and Juliet fashion, Meridiana does not always exercise good judgment when she's emotional or upset. If she feels as though she's been slighted, or something damages her honor or self-esteem, she'll sometimes let her emotions get the better of her. In its benign instances, it comes in the form of slapping a gentleman (and an earl at that — someone notably above her in social standing) across the face without a second thought; in its most horrifying, it leads her to consider a "romantic" lovers' suicide the optimal solution to receiving the news that she has no ability to marry the man she loves. Though canon shows that she has the potential to work past this particular flaw, having regretted many of her past impulsive decisions, her second death is still founded on the snap decision that it would be better for her to kill herself than to let the protagonist come to harm on her behalf, so...there's that.

✘ Vanity — The classic downside to Meridiana's good looks; because she's used to being thought of as pretty and charming, she can also be pretty vain about her looks and doesn't always take the thought of being slighted well. This also extends to more general instances of rejection not necessarily involving her physical apearance; she can't stand being laughed at or not taken seriously, and she's liable to have overly emotional reactions to her bruised pride if and when it happens.

✘ Old-Fashioned — There's really no way around this one; Meridiana's from Victorian England in a year that's somewhere around 1897. [post-acceptance edit; I goofed on my math, she's from 1897, not 1887.] From context, it appears as though she was raised on the outskirts of London as opposed to in the city proper: she grew up in "a white house next to the lake, not far from which is a tower", which itself is in a forest and presumably somewhere near the Marquis of Rotterdale's land. Either way, she's definitely the product of her time period and all of the drawbacks that come with it — she'll know what a phone is, for example, but anything much more advanced than that is likely to throw her for a definite loop, at least in the beginning.


Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Breeder!
Starter: BANANASAUR Tropius, please!
Password: Spring Rolls!

Samples
First Person Sample:
[It's clear from the way, once the camera comes on, that Meridiana is still adjusting to the notion of video and the recording camera set into her Gear; even after the feed begins, she still sets down the device on some solid surface — probably propped against the wall, really — and makes a face at it for a few seconds before she ever begins talking. It also seems, from the way her lips are pursed, that she doesn't like the way it's positioned. Indeed, after a moment, she steps forward again and adjusts it a little more, so that it now reveals what appears to be the interior of her room at the Violet City inn as viewed from the top of the bureau.

Finally a little more satisfied, she retreats and sits primly down on the edge of the bed, which is neatly made. And indeed, she makes a pretty picture, save for looking a bit...frazzled, from the way that her hair is standing on end in places.

A few moments into the feed, the reason for that becomes apparent as well — as a tiny Mareep hops up onto the mattress next to her and snuggles in to her side.]

There's a little rhyme, the sort for children: "Mary Had a Little Lamb"? About the little girl whose lamb followed her to school — "Mary had a little lamb, his fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go"?

[She glances down at the Mareep at her side.]

I never once thought I'd end up like Mary, myself! But I did, this one followed me all the way home, and...

[As if on cue, a spark of static electricity escapes the Mareep, giving the girl on the feed a light shock; understandably, she jumps with a brief cry.]

Oh! Naughty thing, don't do that!

[She flashes a scowl at the little Mareep.]

We'll have to think of a better rhyme for you, won't we! I think it ought to go something like, "Mary found a little lamb, and didn't heed good warning; that little lamb gave her a shock, and it stung straight 'till morning!"

[...Oh, right, she's still filming. Um. Don't mind her just trying to smooth down her hair and give in to the subconscious urge to make herself presentable once more.]

...I'd feel awful about giving it away after it followed me like that, but I just don't know what to do with it, is all!

[And so, with that polite request posed to the network at large, she gets up again and walks over to shut her camera off.]

Third Person Sample:
Meridiana doesn't understand how or why she's been given another chance at life; she only knows that all things considered, it probably isn't going to last her very long.

It's pleasant enough — albeit a little strange — to travel along the path through the woods on the back of her...well, she's not sure what to call it, exactly. The people she'd spoken with over the telephone shortly after she'd arrived, they had called it a Tropius. It's an unfamiliar word in her mouth, but she's really not sure what else she might apply to it instead; "beast" seems harsh for such a gentle and sweet-tempered creature, and she'd heard someone suggesting "pocket monster", as well, but such a large thing couldn't possibly fit in her pocket, and to think so would just be silly.

Besides, while may be a monster in these woods, it's certainly not her Tropius.

It's a blessing that it's around, though, because Meridiana is sure that traveling to the next town would be nothing short of an ordeal, walking so far through the woods on foot in her borrowed finery. Even riding beneath the shade of Tropius's leaves, which keep the errant beams of sun from overhead off her face, she still finds herself tired and weak during the hottest part of the day, and is sure her body wouldn't bear it nearly so well if she were forced to walk the whole way.

Would she rot away faster, she wonders, if she were put through that sort of exertion? Once, she might've tossed her head and insisted that a proper lady ought to ride in comfort, anyway, but she's only a proper lady by virtue of what she's borrowed from others, really. Marriage would've earned her a borrowed title from her husband the marquis or the count; the lovely fine dress she wore had been borrowed from a noble lord's closet (and to think, she'd never asked where he found it, or whose it might've really been). And her life...

Yes, even her life was borrowed from someone else, wasn't it? So many girls killed for her sake...and in the end, what good was it really?

She's afraid, of course, of what she's sure will come to pass in the next few days. Soon enough the hunger will set in again, and she'll be forced to make a terrible choice — will she give in to it again, here, so far from home and the awful procedures that were performed time and again to perpetuate her hold on life a little longer? Of course the thought makes her afraid; her mother's cleaver and the doctor's scalpel are nowhere to be found, here. She'd be forced to kill someone herself, some innocent unsuspecting girl, and even then...

Well, it'd only be a matter of time even then, wouldn't it?

It's not that she's afraid of the death she knows is coming, not any moreso than any person would be of something equally imminent and unavoidable. She's died twice already; she'll die again, and so be it.

No, she thinks as she lays her aching head on her arm, as the solid body of her Tropius sways back and forth in a bobbing motion beneath her as it continues walking along down the path. No, it's not that she's afraid of death, not really.

What she's afraid of, Meridiana thinks with tired resignation, is that the hunger will consume her, become too unbearable to resist, and once again she'll become the unwilling pawn of something that seeks to control her. If she can't resist it, people will die — no, more people will die, and she'll be even more of a monster than she already is.

Still.

Tropius, as if sensing her melancholy, pauses in its stride and draws to a halt, craning its long neck back around to look at her where she's lying on its back. When it draws back the wide leaves that are shading her and sees how pale she is, its odd reptilian expression turns sad, and it drops its head down far enough to bring its bananas into the reach of her pale white fingers.

Poor Tropius, Meridiana thinks with a brief upswelling of affection for the creature and its tender concern. Bananas won't stave off the hunger she's desperate to avoid at all.

And yet, she still reaches up and plucks one from its chin, which seems to please it; a few moments later, the bobbing of its stride resumes, and they are on their way once again.

Well, Meridiana thinks as she peels her fruit and takes a thoughtful bite that — to her surprise — tastes delicious, and really does settle something in the pit of her stomach; well, if she really is to die in the next few days, then there's no sense in being gloomy in the time she has left.

No, she decides firmly — decides, for herself, adamant and determined and in control of her own choices for once — no, for now she'll be happy, and whatever may come...so be it.