Aranica Petros [District Twelve]
Jan 1, 2009 14:33:58 GMT -5
Post by WT on Jan 1, 2009 14:33:58 GMT -5
[2 June 2018] Okay! I'm leaving this bio unedited, but please be aware that because of how old it is, there has been some retconning, and Aranica is (as of this note) three times her original age. A lot (!) has happened in her life. Please regard this post as her up-to-date biography, or check my character directory for the SparkNotes version.
Also: when I brought up the wolf thing, Shrimp called her Furanica, and I need to immortalize that here.
[20 May 18] There is nothing like reading your own writing from literally a decade ago, holy shit. (Posted 2009 here, but most of this is lifted directly from an earlier version on another site. Fun fact: she was originally a wolf! Seriously, there are about five alterations between versions and half of them are to clarify that she has hair instead of fur. That's part of why her backstory doesn't, y'know, make any sense. (The other part is: I was twelve.)) I'm torn between leaving this perfectly intact and excising it from reality.
Anyway, I'm definitely working on writing up a new bio. She's triple the age she started out at and has needed an update since before the last time I edited this. =P In the meantime, my old character directory is still up and here's the new one. Again, it's basic, but at least it's up-to-date.
I don’t remember my name... But you can call me Aranica.
That’s what the rocks tell me. And I trust them.
------------------------------------
Those Basic Facts
------------------------------------
Name her ]Aranica.
Nickname her ]Ara.
She is ]female.
Know she has lived for ]twelve years.
]~[.}The./F l e e t i n g/.Glimpse{.]~
Aranica doesn’t seem odd, not at first. In fact, once you get to know her, you realize that when compared with her personality her looks are almost disturbingly normal. She isn’t spectacularly large, but nor is her build petite or frail; she’s stuck right in the most average of averages, not long-limbed or stocky. Her eyes are dark amber, with no flecks of other colors, no particular trait that could possibly make them stand out from any other pair of amber eyes. One thing that is unusual is the length of her hair; in comes down below her waist, and she usually leaves it untied, so that it swings around and is really quite pretty, if a pain. That long, lush hair is entirely black, and has a distinctive shimmer when she moves under most kinds of light- the one other uncommon thing about her. Her skin stands out sharply against it, a striking contrast; she's not pale, but next to the black, she looks it.
Even so, she doesn’t exactly look normal- but that’s in the way she acts, not the way she looks. She is exceedingly clumsy, unable to walk six steps across a completely flat surface without finding at least two things to trip over. Some people are born with grace, while others learn it; Aranica was born with it, lost it, tried to get it back, and failed. Miserably. Meanwhile, she’s almost always talking- after all, it would be rude of her to ignore everyone around her. She’s been known to keep up a string of “Hello, how are you” for a whole day, talking to whatever she passes. Often when she’s sitting still it seems like she’s talking to herself, her melodic if rather overused voice rambling on and on as if talking to the empty air- which, knowing her, she might actually be doing.
]~[.}/Neurotic\.\Kindness/{.]~
Ara is a sweet girl. She really is. She likes to help others and to get to know them; it's just how she is. She's never erupted at anyone in anger, except the clouds; while she will curse and seeth at white things all day long, they only thing she'll ever erupt at another person out of is exuberance. She tends to hurdle herself at everyone she meets in a frenzy of excitement, rambling on about whatever comes to mind, and if she decides she likes someone she has and will follow them around. If they tell her to go away she'll be nice and do as they say, because she's a nice girl, but much sulking and pouting will be involved. She likes to be around others, and it upsets her that she bothers them, but she just wants to be near them- is that a bad thing?
Aranica is... eccentric. She can often be found talking when no one is around, but she's not talking to herself, she's talking to the things around her. She lives in a world of her own, where inanimate objects are alive and one is never, ever alone. Her best friends are rocks; she established a close rapport with them during her months in the cave, and is in fact honored to be an Honorary Rock. She doesn't like white things; from clouds to snow to white wolves, she distrusts them, especially the clouds- call her nephophbic if you want, but she knows they're out to get her. White rocks are okay, though. She's very wary of trees; some species, like pine and aspen trees, she knows she can trust, but an oak tree once dropped a small branch on her head while she was talking to it, and ever since then she's been wary of unfamiliar species, or those that have not proved their trustworthiness. And... well, and so on.
Ara is also extremely agoraphobic. She grew used to enclosed spaces, comfortable with them, and now becomes extremely paranoid the moment you put her in the middle of an short grass prairie or a tundra. As long as she keeps in a cave, under the trees, between boulders, enclosed in tall grass, or something similar, she's fine, but take away her cover and she will immediately fly into a frenzy, whirling back and forth looking for the assasins, checking the sky for clouds, screaming and running back and forth in a blind panic. The only things that can comfort her then are her rocks; if she finds one she will sit next to it, or curl around it if it's small enough, and stay there, shivering and quaking, either until she is rescued by another person or some mist, or until she manages to find the courage, over the course of a day, to inch back under cover.
Outside of her neurotic habits, Aranica can be extremely intelligent. The fact that that intelligence often comes from a totally different angle than most does nothing to diminish it, and in fact sometimes adds to it- after all, isn't some fresh perspective just what we need sometimes?
------------------------------------
[.}The Others{.]
------------------------------------
She seems to ]scare away ]potential friends...
The ]rocks are her ]loyal companions.
Her ]heart is ]her own.
Aranica (NPC)
Tarok (NPC)
Born with one brother, Asoi (NPC)
------------------------------------
[.}Play It All Out{.]
------------------------------------
Born ]unwanted
The ]early years of ]crisis
]Wandering through the ]present
]~[.}L o s t.and.NEVER.\Found/{.]~
[Woo, list. Because the paragraphs are horribly-written.]
--Aranica was a woman with one four-year-old son, who is currently nameless.
--She didn't want a second child, but she ended up pregnant. Don't ask me. She was probably drunk.
--She decided to kill the baby as soon as it was born. The father intervened, stealing away both the baby and the older child and running with them.
--When Nisa was 8 (her brother was 12), their mother found them and tried to kill the children. Tarok, the father, stopped her, but at the cost of his own life.
--The brother took charge. He wanted to get rid of Nisa- he didn't know how to care for a younger child- but wasn't heartless enough to just abandon her, so he stashed her in a cave by the mines and told her to stay there. He visited her and brought her food and the like, but mostly tried to pretend she didn't exist.
--That continued for nearly four years. Nisa pretty much forgot that anyone else existed; knowledge of the outside world just kind of seeped from her mind. She forgot her own name, forgot that her brother was a real person and not just an apparition, and sunk into blankness.
--Her mind saved its own sanity by making friends for itself in the form of rocks. They called her Aranica, her mother's name, which she distantly remembered because of nightmares of Tarok screaming at the children's mother. Her brother walked in on her talking to rocks, freaked out, and fled; when he didn't come back, she forced herself to go outside for the first time in some three and a half years.
--She had to learn about the outside world all over again, which was a painstaking process. She's still very unfamiliar with most of human society; what she does know was taught to her by her employer, an elderly woman who runs a small shop. Though she's in the District records, she's never been to school- she was homeschooled as a child, so no one questioned her disappearance or the fact that she didn't return when she came back to the outside world.
--Her first experience with rain was a thunderstorm, which is why she's so afraid of clouds. Conversing with inanimate objects was her mind's way of getting around the fact that she really, really needs people in her life, but didn't have any for a long time.
Aranica didn't want children. One was plenty enough, and she had always been impatient with even that one; two was much, much worse.
This leaves the question of why she had gone and seduced that man in the first place, but that's just how she worked- she did things because she could, without thinking about the consequences. In any case, the moment she figured out she was pregnant was the moment she decided she was going to drown the baby as soon as it was born.
The father intervened. Tarok took the babies away- the older one included- before their mother could kill them, and ran. He took them to the last place she would think to look- District Twelve- and raisied them himself. He gave them as normal a life as he could, taking the best job he could find and taking care of them as best as he could, teaching them and feeding them and caring for them with all his heart. Meanwhile, Aranica searched far and wide for the three of them, driven half-insane by Tarok's intervention. She saw it as a betrayal, seared into her heart and mind. She was determined to find those children and kill them if it was the last thing she ever did.
When the children were eight, she found them, but Tarok, always close at hand, fought her off. She ran, frightened, but not before stabbing him in the heart, killing him.
And so the older of the two siblings, Aranica's twelve-year-old brother, took charge. He put little Nisa away in a small cave near the mines of their District, and she stayed there, because he had told her to and she wanted nothing so much as to make her brother happy. Really he just wanted to be rid of her, but didn't have the heart to kill her, or to abandon her- which was practically the same thing, she was so helpless at that point- so he just put her where he wouldn't have to deal with her and went on with his life, forgetting about her as much and as often as he could.
Slowly, Nisa started to retreat into her mind. The cave was small, and dark, and lonely, and while she wanted to make Asoi happy she also yearned for light and for companionship. The few moments each day when he brought her food were the highlight of her day; she lived for those moments, when she could see him appear and leave, and know that she wasn't alone in the world. Eventually, even that grew to not be enough, and she began clinging to him when he entered and shying away when he left, wanting desperately to follow but unable to bring herself to go out into the world. She started to spend her time at the farthest, darkest part of the cave, finding a kind of- not happiness, but contentedness, in the closed space, the black silence. She began to ignore the world, staring into the darkness at nothing, letting it fill her vision, her mind, her memories.
Then one day, a rock spoke.
The girl- she had long since forgotten her name, and pretty much everything else as well, clinging only to those memories that were absolutely necessary- yelped in surprise. The rock continued to speak, and a another joined in. Excitedly she returned the favor, talking about everything she could think of, thrilled to have friends at last. She began to wander through the rest of the cave again, making friends with all the rocks she could find. One day they began to call her by name- Aranica, they called her, saying that once she had called out the name during a nightmare and they had presumed it was hers.
Asoi, frightened by his sister's new habit of talking to inanimate objects, began to stay away more than ever. At last he fled, swearing that if Ara wanted to live, she could do it on her bloody own.
And she did. When the food stopped coming she cautiously ventured from the cave, rock after rock encouraging her, calling her over to them, drawing her farther out. She slowly grew used to being in the open again- never completely open spaces, but under cover- and the whole world began to open up to her. She learned things- that clouds were not to be trusted, that grass was usually kind but bushes could be testy. She made friends, she made enemies- mostly clouds- she met and scared away other people, and she began to support herself, finding a job in a shop. It’s not much, but it’s enough to get her by, which is better than a lot of District Twelve citizens can say.
And so she goes.
That’s what the rocks tell me. And I trust them.
------------------------------------
Those Basic Facts
------------------------------------
Name her ]Aranica.
Nickname her ]Ara.
She is ]female.
Know she has lived for ]twelve years.
]~[.}The./F l e e t i n g/.Glimpse{.]~
Aranica doesn’t seem odd, not at first. In fact, once you get to know her, you realize that when compared with her personality her looks are almost disturbingly normal. She isn’t spectacularly large, but nor is her build petite or frail; she’s stuck right in the most average of averages, not long-limbed or stocky. Her eyes are dark amber, with no flecks of other colors, no particular trait that could possibly make them stand out from any other pair of amber eyes. One thing that is unusual is the length of her hair; in comes down below her waist, and she usually leaves it untied, so that it swings around and is really quite pretty, if a pain. That long, lush hair is entirely black, and has a distinctive shimmer when she moves under most kinds of light- the one other uncommon thing about her. Her skin stands out sharply against it, a striking contrast; she's not pale, but next to the black, she looks it.
Even so, she doesn’t exactly look normal- but that’s in the way she acts, not the way she looks. She is exceedingly clumsy, unable to walk six steps across a completely flat surface without finding at least two things to trip over. Some people are born with grace, while others learn it; Aranica was born with it, lost it, tried to get it back, and failed. Miserably. Meanwhile, she’s almost always talking- after all, it would be rude of her to ignore everyone around her. She’s been known to keep up a string of “Hello, how are you” for a whole day, talking to whatever she passes. Often when she’s sitting still it seems like she’s talking to herself, her melodic if rather overused voice rambling on and on as if talking to the empty air- which, knowing her, she might actually be doing.
]~[.}/Neurotic\.\Kindness/{.]~
Ara is a sweet girl. She really is. She likes to help others and to get to know them; it's just how she is. She's never erupted at anyone in anger, except the clouds; while she will curse and seeth at white things all day long, they only thing she'll ever erupt at another person out of is exuberance. She tends to hurdle herself at everyone she meets in a frenzy of excitement, rambling on about whatever comes to mind, and if she decides she likes someone she has and will follow them around. If they tell her to go away she'll be nice and do as they say, because she's a nice girl, but much sulking and pouting will be involved. She likes to be around others, and it upsets her that she bothers them, but she just wants to be near them- is that a bad thing?
Aranica is... eccentric. She can often be found talking when no one is around, but she's not talking to herself, she's talking to the things around her. She lives in a world of her own, where inanimate objects are alive and one is never, ever alone. Her best friends are rocks; she established a close rapport with them during her months in the cave, and is in fact honored to be an Honorary Rock. She doesn't like white things; from clouds to snow to white wolves, she distrusts them, especially the clouds- call her nephophbic if you want, but she knows they're out to get her. White rocks are okay, though. She's very wary of trees; some species, like pine and aspen trees, she knows she can trust, but an oak tree once dropped a small branch on her head while she was talking to it, and ever since then she's been wary of unfamiliar species, or those that have not proved their trustworthiness. And... well, and so on.
Ara is also extremely agoraphobic. She grew used to enclosed spaces, comfortable with them, and now becomes extremely paranoid the moment you put her in the middle of an short grass prairie or a tundra. As long as she keeps in a cave, under the trees, between boulders, enclosed in tall grass, or something similar, she's fine, but take away her cover and she will immediately fly into a frenzy, whirling back and forth looking for the assasins, checking the sky for clouds, screaming and running back and forth in a blind panic. The only things that can comfort her then are her rocks; if she finds one she will sit next to it, or curl around it if it's small enough, and stay there, shivering and quaking, either until she is rescued by another person or some mist, or until she manages to find the courage, over the course of a day, to inch back under cover.
Outside of her neurotic habits, Aranica can be extremely intelligent. The fact that that intelligence often comes from a totally different angle than most does nothing to diminish it, and in fact sometimes adds to it- after all, isn't some fresh perspective just what we need sometimes?
------------------------------------
[.}The Others{.]
------------------------------------
She seems to ]scare away ]potential friends...
The ]rocks are her ]loyal companions.
Her ]heart is ]her own.
Aranica (NPC)
Tarok (NPC)
Born with one brother, Asoi (NPC)
------------------------------------
[.}Play It All Out{.]
------------------------------------
Born ]unwanted
The ]early years of ]crisis
]Wandering through the ]present
]~[.}L o s t.and.NEVER.\Found/{.]~
[Woo, list. Because the paragraphs are horribly-written.]
--Aranica was a woman with one four-year-old son, who is currently nameless.
--She didn't want a second child, but she ended up pregnant. Don't ask me. She was probably drunk.
--She decided to kill the baby as soon as it was born. The father intervened, stealing away both the baby and the older child and running with them.
--When Nisa was 8 (her brother was 12), their mother found them and tried to kill the children. Tarok, the father, stopped her, but at the cost of his own life.
--The brother took charge. He wanted to get rid of Nisa- he didn't know how to care for a younger child- but wasn't heartless enough to just abandon her, so he stashed her in a cave by the mines and told her to stay there. He visited her and brought her food and the like, but mostly tried to pretend she didn't exist.
--That continued for nearly four years. Nisa pretty much forgot that anyone else existed; knowledge of the outside world just kind of seeped from her mind. She forgot her own name, forgot that her brother was a real person and not just an apparition, and sunk into blankness.
--Her mind saved its own sanity by making friends for itself in the form of rocks. They called her Aranica, her mother's name, which she distantly remembered because of nightmares of Tarok screaming at the children's mother. Her brother walked in on her talking to rocks, freaked out, and fled; when he didn't come back, she forced herself to go outside for the first time in some three and a half years.
--She had to learn about the outside world all over again, which was a painstaking process. She's still very unfamiliar with most of human society; what she does know was taught to her by her employer, an elderly woman who runs a small shop. Though she's in the District records, she's never been to school- she was homeschooled as a child, so no one questioned her disappearance or the fact that she didn't return when she came back to the outside world.
--Her first experience with rain was a thunderstorm, which is why she's so afraid of clouds. Conversing with inanimate objects was her mind's way of getting around the fact that she really, really needs people in her life, but didn't have any for a long time.
Aranica didn't want children. One was plenty enough, and she had always been impatient with even that one; two was much, much worse.
This leaves the question of why she had gone and seduced that man in the first place, but that's just how she worked- she did things because she could, without thinking about the consequences. In any case, the moment she figured out she was pregnant was the moment she decided she was going to drown the baby as soon as it was born.
The father intervened. Tarok took the babies away- the older one included- before their mother could kill them, and ran. He took them to the last place she would think to look- District Twelve- and raisied them himself. He gave them as normal a life as he could, taking the best job he could find and taking care of them as best as he could, teaching them and feeding them and caring for them with all his heart. Meanwhile, Aranica searched far and wide for the three of them, driven half-insane by Tarok's intervention. She saw it as a betrayal, seared into her heart and mind. She was determined to find those children and kill them if it was the last thing she ever did.
When the children were eight, she found them, but Tarok, always close at hand, fought her off. She ran, frightened, but not before stabbing him in the heart, killing him.
And so the older of the two siblings, Aranica's twelve-year-old brother, took charge. He put little Nisa away in a small cave near the mines of their District, and she stayed there, because he had told her to and she wanted nothing so much as to make her brother happy. Really he just wanted to be rid of her, but didn't have the heart to kill her, or to abandon her- which was practically the same thing, she was so helpless at that point- so he just put her where he wouldn't have to deal with her and went on with his life, forgetting about her as much and as often as he could.
Slowly, Nisa started to retreat into her mind. The cave was small, and dark, and lonely, and while she wanted to make Asoi happy she also yearned for light and for companionship. The few moments each day when he brought her food were the highlight of her day; she lived for those moments, when she could see him appear and leave, and know that she wasn't alone in the world. Eventually, even that grew to not be enough, and she began clinging to him when he entered and shying away when he left, wanting desperately to follow but unable to bring herself to go out into the world. She started to spend her time at the farthest, darkest part of the cave, finding a kind of- not happiness, but contentedness, in the closed space, the black silence. She began to ignore the world, staring into the darkness at nothing, letting it fill her vision, her mind, her memories.
Then one day, a rock spoke.
The girl- she had long since forgotten her name, and pretty much everything else as well, clinging only to those memories that were absolutely necessary- yelped in surprise. The rock continued to speak, and a another joined in. Excitedly she returned the favor, talking about everything she could think of, thrilled to have friends at last. She began to wander through the rest of the cave again, making friends with all the rocks she could find. One day they began to call her by name- Aranica, they called her, saying that once she had called out the name during a nightmare and they had presumed it was hers.
Asoi, frightened by his sister's new habit of talking to inanimate objects, began to stay away more than ever. At last he fled, swearing that if Ara wanted to live, she could do it on her bloody own.
And she did. When the food stopped coming she cautiously ventured from the cave, rock after rock encouraging her, calling her over to them, drawing her farther out. She slowly grew used to being in the open again- never completely open spaces, but under cover- and the whole world began to open up to her. She learned things- that clouds were not to be trusted, that grass was usually kind but bushes could be testy. She made friends, she made enemies- mostly clouds- she met and scared away other people, and she began to support herself, finding a job in a shop. It’s not much, but it’s enough to get her by, which is better than a lot of District Twelve citizens can say.
And so she goes.
