Application | rubycity_rp

[occultigen]

PLAYER
Name: Alex
Age: 18+
Personal Journal: alexclusive
E-mail: gloriousrikkaidai (at) hotmail (dot) com
AIM/etc: AIM: GloriousRikkaidai

CHARACTER
Name: Meridiana Everett
Canon: Count Cain

Age: Okay, this is where things get a little wonky.

Canonically she's either sixteen or seventeen depending on how you count it. She died at sixteen, but then was resurrected shortly after and lived for the better part of a year as an undead construct called a Deadly Doll (more on that in her history section), so she's either sixteen or seventeen depending on how you want to count it.

With her CRAU canonpoint complicating the mix and the...everything, let's just call it seventeen going on eighteen.

Timeline: Her death in canon, after she's stabbed herself to prevent Jezebel from using her as leverage against Cain anymore --> a few weeks before Christmas Day, one year post-DRRP Round 3.

Items with character at canon point: Pretty much just:

> The clothes on her back
> An incredibly long pink-and-blue striped scarf
> A friendship bracelet in pink, yellow, and orange threads, with letter beads that spell out the name E-L-I-S-E
> A fuzzy red "stuffed animal" that's basically just a lump with floppy ears that, if you squint at it, might be vaguely rabbit-shaped
> A pack of tarot cards

If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: Not applicable!


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.

DANGAN ROLEPLAY R3 CRAU:

All of the above is precisely who Meridiana was when she opened her eyes following her canonical death and found herself instead in her bedroom in an enclosed hotel somewhere else in the multiverse. It's who she was when she first ventured out into the common areas and realized that she was the only one wearing corsets and petticoats, which resulted in a certain awkward hilarity and at least one occasion of her squawking at a fellow resident to stop running around in her underthings (read: a blouse and knee-length skirt with stockings) because there were men about, for god's sake. And it's the girl she continued to be for the first week or so of murderschool, because even without the threat of impending murder she was already disoriented, isolated, and friendless in a modern world that didn't make any sense to her — and for Meridiana, for whom so much of her self-worth is inherently founded in her ability to adhere properly to social norms, not knowing the social norms but being aware that they'd changed from the ones she was familiar with was an experience that was all but terrifying to her.

But gradually, her exposure to the kindness of others and her removal from the absolute shitshow that was the social culture of 1897 began to have its effects on her. Tentatively, she began to realize that the world around her was no longer strictly dictating who she had to be, and as such she started exploring the bigger questions of who she wanted to be, instead.

And through her friendships, she learned new values. She tested out assertiveness; she took liberties with contact and physical affection and discovered that no one was shaming her for it. She began to understand the harmful side of her own inclinations toward passivity, and began to develop an appreciation for a certain level of self-interest and even ruthlessness, though she always acknowledged that she doesn't always have it in her to put that into practice herself. She gained insight on what normal, healthy relationships are supposed to involve, and from that achieved a new perspective on just how flawed and ugly some of her old relationships in London had been — even ones that had ostensibly been for her own good, or at least with her best interests in mind.

For weeks of murderschool, Meridiana grew to learn how not to be a doll, and how simply to be herself, instead.

Unfortunately, that all changed when she put her faith in the wrong person, and learned firsthand the dangers of blindly trusting someone else's word without a healthy dose of realistic skepticism to go with it. It was a mistake that got her killed — and yet oddly enough, that fatal error didn't so much set her back in her personal development as it did kickstart it.

She spent a period of time in utter despair afterward, depressed and despondent and miserable from the betrayal of her trust and her feelings. But gradually she came to realize that being in a place where it's less of a social norm to freely take advantage of people like her is really only half the battle, and that if she was going to protect herself, then she needed to accomplish the other half on her own.

And so, she began to work toward remedying those faults — trying to learn to let herself be clever, and to reason through things on her own instead of just accepting what someone else tells her, and to stand up for herself rather than trying to survive by finding someone else to stand up for her instead. And in doing so, she underwent a sort of pendulum effect, overcorrecting for her weaknesses by going too far in the other direction with feigned displays of ruthlessness and skepticism that inched toward paranoia.

So really, Meridiana in a post-DRRP world is still very much a girl who's trying to figure out who she is. She's got a very good idea of who she doesn't want to be, and sometimes in trying to protect herself from being hurt again she'll swing too hard in the other direction, but the point of the matter is, either way it's not really her. She's still exploring who Meridiana Everett really is, because she's spent so long having her identity and her reactions to various stimuli all laid out for her in one way or another that she's still somewhat unsure about who she is for her own sake.

And of course, she's still healing from the trauma of everything she's been through, both back in canon and in murderschool alike. She's earned her happy ending, at this point; now that she's got it, she just wants to use it to figure out how to live as her own person, to begin with.


Background:
Meridiana Everett is (or was) a girl from a middle-class family in Victorian England, who is described by her mother as being "more beautiful than any living person, with a smile that bestows eternal bliss unto those who lay eyes upon her." Naturally, her mother is a little biased in this respect, particularly since she's describing Meridiana while in mourning for her.

The story Meridiana's mother initially tells, for the sake of maintaining her daughter's good reputation in society even after death, is that she was struck by a car a year ago and killed instantly. However, this is a lie that is ultimately revealed in a moment of unchecked emotion; as it turns out, her mother is lying about the cause of her death because a year ago, at age 16, Meridiana fell in love with a man far above her station (a man that we later find out is the future marquis of Rotterdale — a pretty lofty title for the lover of a middle-class girl) and committed suicide by jumping off a white tower in the hopes of being together with him in death. However, the aforementioned future marquis of Rotterdale was in fact a right proper jackass and used a trick to fake his half of the suicide, betraying Meridiana and letting her die alone while he abandoned her and returned to his household.

Some unknown (but probably short) period of time after Meridiana's suicide, she was found and raised from the dead by the antagonists of the series, a corrupt underground organization called DELILAH. One of DELILAH's trademarks over the course of the series is the creation of "deadly dolls" — using occult rituals and inhumane medical techniques to raise the dead and summon the deceased's soul back into its renewed body. From context, we learn that DELILAH's choice of Meridiana for this project was largely a coincidence; her summoning was a test run of the Deadly Dolls project (reinforced by the fact that she is the first of the Deadly Dolls we see in the series, though she's far from the last). Presumably, the reason she was chosen for the project is because she had a mother who would do anything to see her daughter alive again, which was useful to DELILAH because a Deadly Doll's body must receive regular transfusions (and sometimes "baptisms") of blood, and occasionally outright organ transplants, in order to sustain itself. Thus, believing that being resurrected as a Deadly Doll was saving her precious daughter's soul from an eternity condemned to hell for being a suicide, Meridiana's mother willingly became "Jack the Ripper" for the sake of her daughter, killing girls with similar blood types and physical attributes as her now-undead daughter for the sake of keeping her sustained as a deadly doll. It's implied that the first of these casualties was in fact Meridiana's best friend from childhood, a servant girl named Elise Carson, who mysteriously diappeared right around when she did herself.

As a side note, the deadly doll process is also shown to come with an unusual quirk — the process of growing a new body and summoning a soul back into it traditionally comes with the side effect of granting the deadly doll supernatural powers of some variety; for Meridiana, that power is implied to be the ability to see into people's souls, sense their feelings, make predictions about their futures...general fortune-teller Victorian occult bullshit. It's difficult to pin down a specific name for the kind of psychic Meridiana is shown to be (for example, she's not precisely clairvoyant, but she's not exactly a medium, either), but we do know a few things about the ability. One is that she has to come in contact with the person in order to see things about them; another is that she can only do it adeptly when she's a blank slate who is largely devoid of feelings. Her own emotions can get in the way of her ability to perceive things, tainting her predictions with her own personal fears and biases.

But speaking of general fortune-teller Victorian occult bullshit, that's exactly how Meridiana starts making a name for herself in London society — and how she ultimately encounters the protagonist, Cain Hargreaves. Up until that point, Meridiana is depicted as a cool, emotionless young woman with a strong air of mystery about her; when her mother murders a hapless suitor right in front of her, she doesn't even blink as the blood spatters across her face, but merely wipes some of it off and licks it off the back of her hand. (Hey, unholy abominations gotta eat, too.) However, meeting Cain and touching his hand apparently sets off some kind of true love red-string mojo deep within the sub-cockles of Meridiana's cold black heart, because all of a sudden she finds her ability to feel things mystically awakened, and that's how she embarks on the process of trying to remember who she is, the past she's forgotten, the girl she once was, and most significantly, how she died.

Over the course of this journey of self-discovery, we learn more about the girl that Meridiana once was, as she evolves from a stoic ice princess into a fiery young woman with a sharp tongue who isn't afraid to slap a man for a socially improper action, but who cares deeply and fervently about the people she loves. She demonstrates a surprising resilience of character on more than one occasion; after Cain's fiancee is murdered and used as one of the sacrifices to sustain her body, Meridiana says to hell with this horrorshow and escapes her captors by making a rope out of bedsheets and climbing out the window. When the arc miniboss tries to stop her by catching hold of her long, beautiful hair, she doesn't hesitate in cutting it off at the shoulders to facilitate her escape. When she runs into Cain again, she tries to dissuade his interest in her by brushing him off, and as she walks away from him she starts to cry and monologues silently about how she just has to maintain her act for a little longer, until she can get away, so he'll believe the lie and won't see her break down from her anguish about it. Furthermore, when Cain is ready to rush into certain peril to save his sister's life, Meridiana insists that he take her with him, knowing full well how dangerous it will be — and ultimately saves his life twice while she's there, once by taking a hatchet to the back for him, and another time by stabbing herself through the chest to keep him from being blackmailed into sacrificing himself for her, instead.

However, in true "doll" fashion, we find out just before her death that most all of her rebellious and courageous actions were in fact part of a greater manipulation on the part of her former captor, who intentionally let her escape and, among other things, took steps to allow the protagonist to draw the (incorrect) conclusion that she was in fact Elise Carson and not Meridiana Everett at all. Though she tries her best to stand on her own two feet, she's still very much the pawn of the men around her; an undead abomination, a test subject, and a tool to strike despair into the heart of the protagonist, because in Kaori Yuki works we fridge all the women for the sake of manpain, boy howdy.

However, she does get her one final act of defiance, albeit a fatal one. Rather than allowing the protagonist to make a hideous bargain in which he trades his eyes for a cure that will prevent her impending demise, she takes matters into her own hands and stabs herself through the chest before the exchange can be completed. As she dies (for the second time, technically), Meridiana makes certain to point out that she'd rather die than be anyone's pawn, and that she refuses to let the arc miniboss use her as a way of getting at Cain (he and the miniboss have Personal History) ever again. After being manipulated, deceived, and betrayed by the men around her for her whole life, Meridiana finally gets a shot at taking control of her own destiny, and makes the knowing choice to die a second time so that the man she loves can go on living — a stark contrast to her first death, where she wanted to die alongside one. It's a bittersweet, melancholy end for an incredibly brave girl who's been fucked around for basically her whole life and witnessed horrors that no one should ever be exposed to, who dies finally managing to reclaim some scrap of pride and dignity in the face of everything she's lost.

DANGAN ROLEPLAY R3 CRAU:

As noted above in her personality section, Meridiana unfortunately did not survive to the end of the Hotel Life of Mutual Killing; she died in the sixth week, when she noticed the familiar symptoms of her body's deterioration beginning to take effect, but for some reason the headmaster of the game refused to sustain her body any longer, the way he had been prior to that point. Where once Meridiana would have accepted her fate quietly and simply steeled herself for her impending demise, her personal development over the course of the game had instilled in her a powerful desire for things to be different, and the urge to have a chance to just live.

Ironically, this ended up leading to her own undoing, because her willingness to take affirmative steps toward trying to preserve her now-fragile life allowed a fellow resident of the hotel to manipulate her into committing murder on a technicality. Aware of her condition, and her need to bathe in blood and undergo organ transplants to keep her body functioning, he knocked unconscious a mutual classmate of theirs but lied and told her that the classmate was actually fully dead. Claiming that he had accidentally murdered the classmate himself, the manipulator convinced her to save herself by harvesting the "dead" classmate's blood to try and preserve her body, which would be a horrific and traumatic experience but not, by the technical rules of the game, a damning one. Unfortunately for Meridiana, the classmate wasn't dead at the time she began the process of harvesting, and as such the kill went technically to her — which made her the culprit of the case, a fact even she remained oblivious to until the eleventh hour at trial.

Meridiana was then summarily executed and spent a while in the afterlife, until such time as the survivors managed to find a way to resurrect all of their dead friends, and she was restored to life.

And then she moved to not-France and set up a bed and breakfast, and damn if she doesn't deserve the break at this point, all things considered.


Abilities:
The major "skill" that Meridiana has, really, is the fact that she is to some degree psychic — although thanks to Kaori Yuki shoujo bullshit, there really isn't a standard set of rules and guidelines for how her powers precisely work. We do know that by touching objects or people, Meridiana can sometimes experience visions about them, which suggest that it's something vaguely like psychometry; at one point in canon she allegedly "reads someone's heart" to discern their true motive, and another time she seemingly has a vision of an impending nasty future for another character. However, these visions are usually fairly vague and often metaphorical rather than concrete; she might perceive a "dark shadow" over someone's future, but be unable to go into more specifics about what that shadow might be, or the form it might take in practice. Additionally, her powers tend to get somewhat disrupted if she can't maintain a clear head, which is why they were much more accurate as an emotionless and identity-less Deadly Doll than they would be as a living breathing girl with an identity of her own.

Typically in game settings, I like to have her powers manifest most strongly through the ability to do exceedingly accurate tarot readings, which renders things a little less of a direct infomod and a little more of an unsettlingly accurate but still archetype-driven fortune telling. In Count Cain, characters with supernatural predispositions tend to be portrayed as being able to give accurate tarot readings as their powers manifest through the cards, and at least one character is shown capable of fortune-telling events in realtime as they unfold through the use of her cards. However, given the themes in the series, it's very likely Meridiana is skilled at giving tarot readings for people even without her powers being involved; we know that she was taken to society parties specifically to tell fortunes to the social elite as an entertainment, and tarot cards tend to be the go-to fortune-telling mechanism of choice in general in the Count Cain series, as they are also one of the predominant motifs in the series overall.

Other non-magical abilities involve the full skill set you might expect from a middle-class Victorian girl of some breeding; she can sew, she can cook, she can dance, she knows rules of etiquette, fan discourse, floriography, and so on.

Meanwhile, left over from murderschool, she does have the advantage of translator microbes, which render her effectively a polyglot because, well, translator microbes. The downside of her leftover time at murderschool is the fact that wormhole-jumping has a weird side effect of turning your blood bright magenta pink, so god forbid she pops a nosebleed, it'll be Pepto-Bismol City everywhere.


Network/Actionspam Sample: Meridiana on the Ruby City Test Drive!


Prose Log Sample:
The thing that nobody ever mentions about the tales told on the pages of storybooks is that lives aren't much like stories at all, because they never come to a conclusion where the pages of a storybook do, and there's much too much of life to adequately sum it all up in a sentence as simple as "happily ever after".

They do live. Living is the important part, even without the irony of how many times they've collectively been dead instead. "Ever after" is another of those things that remains to be seen, because of course there's no telling what the future might hold — unless, of course, a time-traveling Dave shows up to inform them in advance, and even then the nature of stable time loops makes any deviation from that all but impossible anyway.

But the hardest is "happily", because they're not always happy. There are days that are melancholy, days that find Dave huddled under a mountain of blankets or Meridiana jolting awake in a cold sweat. There are days when memories catch up, when letters arrive for Silver from Japan or a poor choice of movie cues up on the television programming. There are days when it isn't easy. There are days when someone still goes to sleep crying, or wakes up with tears on their face.

For Meridiana, there are the days when Dave is gone to save some other world. She does her best; she tries to be strong and brave and steady. But when the lines overlap and her memories catch up and she wakes up shrieking only to find that Dave isn't there, still out of reach somewhere too far away to comprehend —

Those days, she works out the math down to the second, how many until the instant when Dave is due to be home, and lies awake with her eyes damp and her hands folded across her chest and her lips silently counting.

Today is one of those days. It's been a bad night, but the number of seconds until Dave comes back is growing slimmer and slimmer all the while. She barely bothers to dress, because it's not as though she has plans to go out; she only pulls on a robe over the oversize shirt of his that she wears as a nightgown while he's gone, and puts her feet into slippers, and wanders outside to sit on the rustic wooden swing that a few of their friends hung from their tree one autumn afternoon, so as to watch the sun come up.

Dave will be home soon — she hopes. If everything's gone as it should, he will.

It's the thought that everything might not have gone as intended that sends a chill down her spine, and as she curls her fingers around the thick prickly ropes and sways forward and back in suspension, it occurs to her that of all things, she's just been through a long Thursday night heading into the dawn of a Friday, and she can feel her breath catch in her throat.