s o l i t u d e {OPEN} coma plot

I'M SO TIRED

Username: bitteronyx
Character's name: Seladore Maurer
Age: 15
Gender: Female

How were they comatized?: Hypoglycemia, caused by Seladore's untreated Type 1 Diabetes, combined with malnourishment, that finally resulted in her feeling so hungry, and so tired, that it was just easier to lie down and sleep...

What was their coma "world"?: An infinite underwater paradise, complete with impossibly massive sea monsters, bizarre dreamscapes and sometimes, even other people, who fade in and out like reflections on the surface (which is always just out of reach)

How long were they in a coma for?: Eight months, nine days and sixteen hours

How are they coping?: Seladore is convinced that she's still in her coma, seeing everything as if through the surface of the Waterworld. She sometimes responds to familiar faces but is usually silent, afraid that if she opens her mouth to speak then she'll drown. Her walk is heavy, almost in slow motion (like she's wading through water) and her eyes have a sort of glazed appearance that really shows that she's not all... there.

Character ideas:

Out of all of Seladore's memories of the world before, the clearest are the smells. First, salt and raw fish on fingers as the baby girl was hastily fed slimy mussels out of their shells. Next, the damp, foul smell of urine – her own, hours old and saturated in the dress which she wore almost all the time as an infant. Sometimes there’s a grassy perfume, and a distinctive cologne that mingles with it; but that never came too strongly, muffled by the locked door between her room and her mother’s. These weren’t the smells of District Six, not at all. Seladore was born in another District, something she remembers very little of spare its lingering odours. The creaking of pier wood as it protested against the tide, and the heavy clank of gears in a fishing trawler, hoisting catch of the day to the surface. One, two, three, Four. Seladore could count the number emblazoned on the District Emblem on the fingers of one pale hand.

They didn’t know what it was that made the little girl the way she was. Some people are just born without all their parts in order – that was the general consensus. Prone to vomiting and headaches, and often not even having the strength to move, her mother became more and more unable to cope. Even at eight years old, Seladore was only as large – and as light – as a fishing trap. People were starting to whisper when they saw her on her way to school: “like a shadow, she is; like her mother doesn’t feed her at all; and do you hear what they’re saying now? the father; Jagger Libertine; yes, the very same.” The man in question wasn’t happy – he couldn’t be sure if the rumours were true, but he wasn’t convinced they were a lie either. The mother was mortified, humiliated and wretched. The child had to go.

It wasn’t so much the smell of the sea fading that convinces Seladore now that this Waterworld wasn’t the same as that, but the citrusy membrane of scent that covers everything she breaths in now. It’s too clean, too… artificial, to ever match the odour of the damp sack that she lay curled up in for the duration of the stowaway journey by cargo hold. Six itself stank of bodies close together, of industrial pollution unlike anything in her last Home. If poverty was olfactory, this is how it would manifest itself – she was sure. For three years, she ate out of bins, slept in alleyways, hid from the white-armoured phantoms that patrolled mercilessly. Then, for some time, a matronly woman took her in and gave her a grass mat to sleep on and hot broth twice a day. Always the same thin, murky puddlewater, but at least it was something else. The woman smelt of butter, as if it seeped from her pores as thickly as she must have slathered it on all her meals. Her fingers were gentle when she washed Seladore, tied up her hair for her when the nausea came back, soothed her after a particularly painful dizzy spell. However, as soon as the girl turned twelve and the Peacekeepers started to prepare for the annual census, she was out the door and back to where she, as far as the new Mother was now concerned, belonged.

District Six is renowned for its hospital care and medical developments, and Seladore began to acknowledge this in her second spell on the streets. Wandering from doorstep to doorstep she watched children in wealthier homes have inoculations and check-ups. The connection wasn’t difficult to make: more protection, less deaths. Perhaps, if Seladore could administer a treatment to herself, her horrific symptoms would pass, finally. For a time, she considered picking up the needles out of the gutters and gambling a cure, but now thirteen-and-a-half she knew better. What she really needed was access to the medical facilities, which was absolutely impossible. Long and hard, Seladore thought, scouting out the different entrances and exits, the timed patrols and the access granted to different ranks of jobs. It was a huge plan, and a flawed one, too, but Seladore kept it up like a game. What had she to lose?

However, the hours that Seladore could bear to keep alert were waning. Her brain buzzed, her stomach growled; she no longer had anything to heave up or let loose. To anyone who bothered to spare her a glance, she must have already looked like a corpse, a stretched, deflated balloon of a fourteen-year-old. No hope. No redemption.

Ultimately, it was luck that saved Seladore Maurer. Her project, her plan meant that when she eventually let her eyelids droop and her muscles go slack – (when she finally broke through the surface of her Waterworld) – she did so on the front doorstep of the only facility in the whole of Panem that could possibly save her. Diabetes – Type One – hypoglycaemia – malnourishment – it was all diagnosed, and soon Seladore was hooked up to wires and detectors and machines that didn’t penetrate her ocean land with their beeping and whirring. Safe, finally, not to be exiled or cast away ever again- or so she thought.

The alarm ripped through her like a buzzsaw and tipped her Waterworld on its side so it drained like a fishbowl. As much as she tried to reject it, she didn’t have the strength. There wasn’t enough resistance in her to keep her asleep and submerged. Seladore was back in the world she hated, surrounded by human beings, the creatures that betrayed her so many times before. Who wouldn’t trust a lionfish, or a giant turtle? But who could ever trust a walking, talking, warm-blooded beast like this?

The Waterworld didn’t come back all at once for Seladore, but bit by bit. First, a trickle, a bubbling brook that she could dip her toes into and spin into sand-clouded whirlpools while she waited for the insulin to drip into her system. Then it was a regular flow, warming her ankles, calves, knees. Reality began to blur out of focus, faces rippled and voices were distorted. And through it all, Seladore didn’t struggle or panic. She slipped back into her liquid bubble in sheer bliss.

Now, she wanders around the Clinic whenever she’s not hooked up to her drips, always looking but never really seeing what’s there. When she meets new people, she looks first at their hands and then at their necks, and when she neither finds webbed fingers nor gills, she adds them to her list of people never to trust. Anyone, at any moment, could fling her out the door again and leave her to find her way from scratch. The Waterworld keeps her safe. She won’t let anyone take it from her again.

Why do you want to be in the plot?: Because lord almighty i love this idea and the face claim and i've been dying to use her for so long and also you're flawless and wow plot yes amaze wow i love it !!"1!1!2!!”!1!