FernStone
NoriWasHere
TokyoPewPew
Framing A Moose
Cao the Exiled
Raijinslayer
Mixtape Ghost N
Estylwen
AtomicEmperor
ArkitektSorry gang, she's not a stripper. Not yet, anyway.
"Cloverfield's sweetheart."
Psychology
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"I don't bite...unless that's what you're into."
Backstory
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"Once upon a time, there was this big, scary dragon..."
Abstraction
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"Gosh, it’s so hard being this popular."
Other
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“So sweet it’s making me sick."
"Cloverfield's sweetheart."
 _______________________________________________ Paloma Ines Gilmour She/Her | 29 | English & Spanish American | 5’5” | 150 lbs _______________________________________________ Saccharine _______________________________________________ Skills & Talents "I’m always happy to take a hand." ___________________________________ [Baking] ⫻ Paloma’s passion sparked by a love of confections and an unhealthy infatuation for Noel Fielding. She’s actually quite good at it and generally finds the repetitive nature of it calming. Paloma almost exclusively bakes sweets and she’s prone to showing up to places with a sackful of sugary snacks. She’s even started posting photos of bakes online for a while. Follow her at Palomangina. Maybe one day she’ll update it. [Neat & Tidy] ⫻ She was always a bit of a neatfreak even before Paloma developed a passion for a hobby that gets flour fucking everywhere. She deep cleans her home regularly, keeps everything put away, clutterfree, and organized. She primps and preens herself constantly, always ensuring that her outfit is smooth, her hair is perfect, and her makeup is fresh. This extends beyond her own boundaries, ranging from basic good practices such as bussing her own table when she goes out to being an absolute menace who’ll lick her finger and wipe sauce off of a friend’s face. [Role-playing Games] ⫻ Yeah, yeah, yeah, but magic’s real well she still can’t be a half-orc barbarian named Swolga in real life or at the very least she doesn’t know someone with the spell for that yet. Pre-Cataclysm she used to play all the time, but a hospital getting dropped on her gaming group killed that campaign. Her attempts to persuade her friends to play have failed thus far. [Spunk] ⫻ Bravery. Pluck. Determination. Guts. Moxie. Grit. Cojones. Balls. These. Call it whatcha call it, Paloma’s got it. | Appearance ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Aw, shucks. You’re not too bad yourself." Paloma appears as a classic ingénue, an innocent little angel without a bad bone in her body, poise and politeness polished up and presented with a bow. Her face is all big, brown puppy dog eyes and chipmunk cheeks so perfectly rounded that she has grandmas vaulting over their walkers and shoving one another out of the way to get a pinch, plus a sweet little smile capable of melting even the coldest of hearts. Paloma’s long brown hair falls to her mid back. Her fair, youthful skin is heavily monitored and maintained, tackling any sign of aging through vigorous moisturizing, weird face masks, strange creams, and bulk packs of dodgy supplements. Any blemishes she cannot escape from she hides beneath what appears to be a light, tasteful amount of makeup, although in reality her scale noticeably shifts when she washes her face at night. She is a fairly average height with a curvy build. She doesn’t have any real exercise routine outside of walking to and from the bus stop and being stuck on her feet while she works, and coupled with an irresistible sweet tooth her body is more cushion than muscle. She isn’t physically weak, per se, although nobody would ask her to help lift a couch. Paloma dresses in cutesy, modest clothing, favoring sweaters, long skirts, and comfortable sneakers. Her style is quite dated, and most of her clothes are old and second-hand, but never are they damaged or dirty. Paloma finds pride in having a neat and tidy appearance, all tucked in and buttoned up. Her hair is typically tied back by a ribbon when she goes out, and she regularly wears a pair of pearl earrings she inherited from her grandmother as her only piece of jewelry. She is rarely seen in public without a pair of long, colorful gloves that accent her outfit and cover up the scars from chemical burns on her arms she sustained during the Cataclysm. Paloma has a very disarming and open presence, with expressive, curious eyes that hint at a level of mischievousness hiding behind her sweet demeanor. She hates the sound of her own voice, which she finds annoyingly high-pitched and squeaky like that of a cartoon character, and believes that it causes people to not take her seriously. Her posture is a thing of perfection and moves at her own pace, often looking around distractedly rather than focusing on the task at hand . There are people who have known Paloma for years that have never seen her without a piece of chewing gum in her mouth. |
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"I don't bite...unless that's what you're into."
MAIN GOAL ⫻ Money, money, money, money! When she was younger she wanted to be rich and famous, but as she grew older and wiser she realized the only really cool part about being rich and famous was being rich. Fame, on the other hand, is a massive hindrance. She wants a big house with an even bigger lawn surrounded by a massive privacy fence, a car whose previous owner didn’t leave a weird stain in the passenger seat, to never work another goddamn day in her life as a cleaner, to not have to deal with medical debt, and to have a harem of rich suitors, fit tennis instructors, and oiled up pool boys.
But first, she has a promise to keep.
PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Social change, a kinder, brighter world, yawn. Sure, Paloma supposes she could use her magic to usher in a better world for the future, but she’s living in the present and all it takes is a quick look at the past to see what happens to revolutionaries. She’s worked too hard to become some fucking martyr. Why break the system now that she can finally game it? Sure, she’s not an idiot, it needs a few adjustments. She supposes she could be happy with getting a smaller piece of the pie as long as she still gets a slice. Give the system a few more guidelines, a couple more checks and balances, one big smush towards the middle, maybe a few molotov cocktails through a couple of windows, just one single public execution of a bourgeois billionaire bitch. She doesn’t want to be the one to swing the axe, but she’ll get up close enough to get a droplet of blood on her face.
Still, Paloma ultimately tries to tune out these kinds of macro injustices, focusing on life at a more micro level. She lives her day by day following a personal and cliched creed of treating others how she wants to be treated, showing kindness and respect even to those who don’t deserve it, and saving her biting comments for when they are out of earshot. In short, be sweet. Nobody likes a suckup, but everybody is happy to receive a compliment. Paloma tries to stay on the latter half of the spectrum, a tad too twee but nothing that would make a person sick. And if someone doesn’t like her? Well, that’s fine. Who’d want to be liked by that cunt anyway?
SECRETS ⫻ Oh, there’s a whole bunch of them. A few notches in the bedpost she’d deny until the day she dies, a couple of white lies she refuses to admit aren’t true. Bad haircuts with all photographic evidence scrubbed from the internet, nasty text messages left on blocked numbers. A few minor crimes—shoplifting some gum, sneaking into a movie, some public indecency. Sitting and conversing with hospital patients when she was on the clock and should’ve been cleaning. Promising a young girl in room 513 that when her time came Paloma would take her to the Grove and wash her in the waters of rebirth, thinking at the time that it had only been a child’s fantasy, now becoming a whole thing that might require exhuming a grave.
She also plays it coy about being adjoined.
SEXUALITY ⫻ She might flirt and tease with all of the ladies until they get the vapors, but a quick glance back through her deleted contacts shows a steady stream of Liam Hinges, Brad Bumbles, and Dan Tinders.
FEARS ⫻ The special treatment she gets thanks to her abstraction has been novel but there comes a point, Paloma is sure of it, where the constant dotting and fawning will start to lose its luster. Perhaps it already has. Maybe just a little. Still, right now she sees the Blind as good old fashioned people who deserve to live their lives and make their own choices free from her or any higher power’s meddling.
But what happens when they start to wear on her? When she can finally hush that quiet little voice that says they only like her because she got lucky? When she stops seeing people as people and starts seeing them as followers, worshippers, sacrifices? Now that she has power the opportunity to abuse it is right there just waiting for her to reach out and grasp it. Getting everything she ever wanted would just be so. Fucking. Easy. She could’ve started a weird sex cult, like, yesterday. Yet, Paloma is afraid of being that person. Even more so, she is afraid of what the world would be like if anyone else had her abstraction, and is scared to think of what other magic there could be out there.
Also, dragons have now been absolutely ruined for her forever. Thanks, Princess. Now she’ll have to switch to Pathfinder.
WHAT DID THEY DO DURING THE CATACLYSM? ⫻ Paloma was at the last place anyone would want to be when the world is potentially ending: work. She spent several hours, perhaps even days, trapped beneath the rubble of the South Cloverfield Good Samaritan Hospital, listening to the muffled cries of friends and strangers, fading in and out of consciousness from the pain and blood loss, and coping with the fact that magic and dragons were real. She hardly recommends it. If not for a chance encounter with the Samaritan that day she definitely would’ve been dead. If the rescuers had taken one more day she probably would’ve been dead. If the Cataclysm was still happening at that time then Paloma missed out on the rest of the fun, getting evaced to a hospital in a nearby town that wasn’t getting acid pissed all over it.
FLAWS ⫻ Paloma is the absolute textbook definition of a busybody, always prying into other people’s business even when nobody asked for her opinion. Often Paloma is meddling out of pure curiosity or an actual desire to help, but sometimes it’s something else. See, unfortunately she’s also a chatty little bitch, so Paloma is simply unable to resist passing along the latest piece of gossip. While her private life is a thing to be treated with respect and kept on the down-low, other people’s lives are purely a source of entertainment, especially if they’re completely fucked up and messy. Telling Paloma a secret is the same thing as telling the whole world. Call her out rumor mongering and she’s quick to go on the defensive, acting as if she didn’t know it was a secret if not outright denying that she said anything in the first place. After all, sweet little Paloma? A malicious gossip? Who would say something like that? Was it Tiffany? Well, that’s funny, because Paloma heard that Tiffany…
But first, she has a promise to keep.
PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Social change, a kinder, brighter world, yawn. Sure, Paloma supposes she could use her magic to usher in a better world for the future, but she’s living in the present and all it takes is a quick look at the past to see what happens to revolutionaries. She’s worked too hard to become some fucking martyr. Why break the system now that she can finally game it? Sure, she’s not an idiot, it needs a few adjustments. She supposes she could be happy with getting a smaller piece of the pie as long as she still gets a slice. Give the system a few more guidelines, a couple more checks and balances, one big smush towards the middle, maybe a few molotov cocktails through a couple of windows, just one single public execution of a bourgeois billionaire bitch. She doesn’t want to be the one to swing the axe, but she’ll get up close enough to get a droplet of blood on her face.
Still, Paloma ultimately tries to tune out these kinds of macro injustices, focusing on life at a more micro level. She lives her day by day following a personal and cliched creed of treating others how she wants to be treated, showing kindness and respect even to those who don’t deserve it, and saving her biting comments for when they are out of earshot. In short, be sweet. Nobody likes a suckup, but everybody is happy to receive a compliment. Paloma tries to stay on the latter half of the spectrum, a tad too twee but nothing that would make a person sick. And if someone doesn’t like her? Well, that’s fine. Who’d want to be liked by that cunt anyway?
SECRETS ⫻ Oh, there’s a whole bunch of them. A few notches in the bedpost she’d deny until the day she dies, a couple of white lies she refuses to admit aren’t true. Bad haircuts with all photographic evidence scrubbed from the internet, nasty text messages left on blocked numbers. A few minor crimes—shoplifting some gum, sneaking into a movie, some public indecency. Sitting and conversing with hospital patients when she was on the clock and should’ve been cleaning. Promising a young girl in room 513 that when her time came Paloma would take her to the Grove and wash her in the waters of rebirth, thinking at the time that it had only been a child’s fantasy, now becoming a whole thing that might require exhuming a grave.
She also plays it coy about being adjoined.
SEXUALITY ⫻ She might flirt and tease with all of the ladies until they get the vapors, but a quick glance back through her deleted contacts shows a steady stream of Liam Hinges, Brad Bumbles, and Dan Tinders.
FEARS ⫻ The special treatment she gets thanks to her abstraction has been novel but there comes a point, Paloma is sure of it, where the constant dotting and fawning will start to lose its luster. Perhaps it already has. Maybe just a little. Still, right now she sees the Blind as good old fashioned people who deserve to live their lives and make their own choices free from her or any higher power’s meddling.
But what happens when they start to wear on her? When she can finally hush that quiet little voice that says they only like her because she got lucky? When she stops seeing people as people and starts seeing them as followers, worshippers, sacrifices? Now that she has power the opportunity to abuse it is right there just waiting for her to reach out and grasp it. Getting everything she ever wanted would just be so. Fucking. Easy. She could’ve started a weird sex cult, like, yesterday. Yet, Paloma is afraid of being that person. Even more so, she is afraid of what the world would be like if anyone else had her abstraction, and is scared to think of what other magic there could be out there.
Also, dragons have now been absolutely ruined for her forever. Thanks, Princess. Now she’ll have to switch to Pathfinder.
WHAT DID THEY DO DURING THE CATACLYSM? ⫻ Paloma was at the last place anyone would want to be when the world is potentially ending: work. She spent several hours, perhaps even days, trapped beneath the rubble of the South Cloverfield Good Samaritan Hospital, listening to the muffled cries of friends and strangers, fading in and out of consciousness from the pain and blood loss, and coping with the fact that magic and dragons were real. She hardly recommends it. If not for a chance encounter with the Samaritan that day she definitely would’ve been dead. If the rescuers had taken one more day she probably would’ve been dead. If the Cataclysm was still happening at that time then Paloma missed out on the rest of the fun, getting evaced to a hospital in a nearby town that wasn’t getting acid pissed all over it.
FLAWS ⫻ Paloma is the absolute textbook definition of a busybody, always prying into other people’s business even when nobody asked for her opinion. Often Paloma is meddling out of pure curiosity or an actual desire to help, but sometimes it’s something else. See, unfortunately she’s also a chatty little bitch, so Paloma is simply unable to resist passing along the latest piece of gossip. While her private life is a thing to be treated with respect and kept on the down-low, other people’s lives are purely a source of entertainment, especially if they’re completely fucked up and messy. Telling Paloma a secret is the same thing as telling the whole world. Call her out rumor mongering and she’s quick to go on the defensive, acting as if she didn’t know it was a secret if not outright denying that she said anything in the first place. After all, sweet little Paloma? A malicious gossip? Who would say something like that? Was it Tiffany? Well, that’s funny, because Paloma heard that Tiffany…
Backstory
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"Once upon a time, there was this big, scary dragon..."
Her life was boring.
What else is there to say? Things didn’t turn out right. Grow up, go to school, attend college, dropout, get a job, sprinkle a good group of friends and smattering of boyfriends that seemed good at the time. Somewhere along the line something went awry. Or maybe it didn’t. She doesn’t know. Maybe the fact is that growing up in the Southside of Cloverfield means she was destined to achieve mediocrity. It wasn’t like she didn’t have ambitions or lacked dreams. They just fizzled out. It wasn’t like she had a bad family who didn’t support her. They just became background noise, strangers she saw for holidays and cookouts. Rent became a thing. Groceries became a thing. Her life became work, fuck around, sleep, repeat. Her job wasn’t too bad either, even if it was just cleaning the hospital. Just slap on some headphones, pull on some gloves, and scrub up some bodily functions. Her life was, well, it was happening, she guessed. Paloma wasn’t necessarily unhappy, not all of the time anyway. She was just bored.
Escapism became the key to enjoyment. Binge watching reality baking contests, imagining herself as a competitor getting that coveted handshake for her crumb game being on point, ignoring the smell of burnt cookies in the garbage. Delving into fantasy tabletop roleplaying games with her friends, slaying dragons and bedding princesses or bedding dragons and slaying princesses, depending on how much of a chaos gremlin she wanted to be that evening. Experimenting with an acceptable amount of drugs, none of that scary shit that involved injections or having a DIY chemistry set, but the fun kind that made the world kaleidoscopes and rainbows. Fall in love again and again, believing from the first kiss that each one was going to be the one, tucking and rolling out of the relationship the second the road got even a bit rocky. This was her life. Do it forever until she got stabbed in an alley or fell and broke a hip at the age of ninety.
Work was the biggest source of her boredom. Pop music and murder pods could only entertain Paloma for so long before she got tired of the same chord progression or by-the-numbers family annihilation. She started talking to patients in the hospital—not in the sense of the normal pleasantries she’d have about the weather or the game as she swapped out their trash bags or removed their dinner trays, but real, in-depth, sit down and get to know these strangers type discussions. All patients in hospitals are lonely, even those who have a family that came and visited. She thought she could ease that loneliness, even if just a little, even if it meant having to put up with that sinking feeling when she got to work and one of her tasks was to deep clean the now vacant room of one of her favorites.
See, the floor Paloma cleaned wasn’t the one where patients were sent to get better. It was the final cheap motel room, complete with free cable, a weird smell, and the view of the back of a billboard for a gentleman’s club. Most of the people there were elderly, or they were at the very least so hollowed out by the inevitability of their demise that they appeared old. So perhaps that’s why it was so shocking to her when she entered Room 513 and saw a young girl, no more than ten, who didn’t look all that sick aside from a scar on the side of her head. Paloma felt bad for the girl and, admittedly, she was curious. Why was she at the South Cloverfield Good Samaritan and not the Children’s Hospital?
Room 513 proved to be a tough nut to crack, not even answering Paloma the first time she introduced herself to the kid, but Paloma wasn’t about to back down. She visited Room 513 daily, choosing to talk to her if the kid wasn’t going to talk with her. She even came in on her off days, showing up with homemade baked goods and games to play. Eventually the kid asked Paloma why she was doing this, and from that day forward Paloma was in. She got the kid to dish out her life story. At the time Paloma assumed Room 513 had to be on some heavy duty painkillers or had some kind of brain damage with the shit she was talking about, rambling about this place called the Grove and its magical waters. Room 513 confided in Paloma that she wanted to see the Grove again. Paloma said she’d see what she could do, and so she came up with a plan that would end up killing three of her closest nerd friends.
The idea was a sweet one: run a little one-shot for Room 513 with Paloma’s friends, making her out to be the hero of the story, where she returns home to this place called the Grove and saves it from goblins. Okay, so the premise was simple and basic, but the girl was ten. Paloma poured her heart and soul into the game session. She drew maps, painted a little Room 513 mini, and baked a thematic Grove cake. She showed up to the hospital with her friends and set about to give Room 513 the funnest, nerdiest night of her life. Then, just like in every other previous game that Paloma tried to Dungeon Master, the session immediately went off the rails as the craziest thing happened—only this time, it wasn’t because of something in-game.
And to think, up until this exact moment in her life Paloma always thought it would be so cool to see an actual dragon.
Therapy. Medicatation. Doesn’t matter. Paloma can still sometimes hear the screams from that night. Her memories are a bit muddled from the concussion she suffered when the hospital came down. She can remember diving forward to grab Room 513 and run, twisting just in time as the floor above came down, the agonizing pain when the acid splashed her forearms ripping a scream out of her throat before something cracked against the back of her head. She can remember being buried, blinded by such a bright light she thought she had permanently lost her vision, unaware that the Samaritan had adjoined with her the moment she went to protect Room 513, realizing only later that it was the only reason she made it out alive. She can remember Room 513’s feeble voice comforting Paloma, when it should have been the other way around, telling her that it would be okay, promising her that if something were to happen to Paloma then she would take her to the Grove and have them bring her back. Because you would do the same for me, said Room 513. I would, said Paloma. It had been a question at the time.
Promise?
I promise, said Paloma.
The light got dimmer after that. Paloma would be one of the first ones rescued, rushed away to a hospital in a neighboring county for intensive medical care for her injuries and chemical burns, resulting in a lengthy stay, seemingly insurmountable medical bills, and a chance at life that her friends and Room 513 never had the opportunity to receive. When Paloma awoke from her coma the world was so much stranger. Everyone was so happy to see her—literally, everyone, not just the people she would expect—and she kept seeing streams of light, which she reported to her doctor but the scans and the tests came back showing no kind of cerebral or vision damage. Maybe a side effect of her medication? And the strange wisp of air she’d catch out of the side of her eye when she passed by a reflective window? Was that too a side effect?
She started to get a little freaked out by how nice everyone was being to her. Sure, she was always nice to others, but Cloverfield was full of assholes. Was this a bit? A weird, mean, fucked up prank? And why was hardly anyone talking about the actual dragon? Even when she snapped at people they still treated Paloma like she was an absolute sweetheart. It was driving her mad. And then, after having tried to ignore them for a few weeks, she followed one of the streams of light and quite literally bumped into someone who didn’t immediately apologize to her profoundly and excessively dote on her to make sure that she was okay.
This person turned out to be another Paranormal, and would serve as a kind of sherpa guiding Paloma into the world of magic. Around the same time she would begin to familiarize herself with that wisp she saw, an Apparition she called the Samaritan, who during the day would keep quiet but at night fill her head with gut wrenching, nightmarish memories of an impossible promise she had made with a young girl whose name Paloma had never even bothered to learn. And as Paloma went about learning ways the Samaritan could help her achieve this stupid promise of hers, as well as dipping more than just a toe into the world of magic, she couldn’t help but to sometimes think that maybe she missed her life when it was boring.
What else is there to say? Things didn’t turn out right. Grow up, go to school, attend college, dropout, get a job, sprinkle a good group of friends and smattering of boyfriends that seemed good at the time. Somewhere along the line something went awry. Or maybe it didn’t. She doesn’t know. Maybe the fact is that growing up in the Southside of Cloverfield means she was destined to achieve mediocrity. It wasn’t like she didn’t have ambitions or lacked dreams. They just fizzled out. It wasn’t like she had a bad family who didn’t support her. They just became background noise, strangers she saw for holidays and cookouts. Rent became a thing. Groceries became a thing. Her life became work, fuck around, sleep, repeat. Her job wasn’t too bad either, even if it was just cleaning the hospital. Just slap on some headphones, pull on some gloves, and scrub up some bodily functions. Her life was, well, it was happening, she guessed. Paloma wasn’t necessarily unhappy, not all of the time anyway. She was just bored.
Escapism became the key to enjoyment. Binge watching reality baking contests, imagining herself as a competitor getting that coveted handshake for her crumb game being on point, ignoring the smell of burnt cookies in the garbage. Delving into fantasy tabletop roleplaying games with her friends, slaying dragons and bedding princesses or bedding dragons and slaying princesses, depending on how much of a chaos gremlin she wanted to be that evening. Experimenting with an acceptable amount of drugs, none of that scary shit that involved injections or having a DIY chemistry set, but the fun kind that made the world kaleidoscopes and rainbows. Fall in love again and again, believing from the first kiss that each one was going to be the one, tucking and rolling out of the relationship the second the road got even a bit rocky. This was her life. Do it forever until she got stabbed in an alley or fell and broke a hip at the age of ninety.
Work was the biggest source of her boredom. Pop music and murder pods could only entertain Paloma for so long before she got tired of the same chord progression or by-the-numbers family annihilation. She started talking to patients in the hospital—not in the sense of the normal pleasantries she’d have about the weather or the game as she swapped out their trash bags or removed their dinner trays, but real, in-depth, sit down and get to know these strangers type discussions. All patients in hospitals are lonely, even those who have a family that came and visited. She thought she could ease that loneliness, even if just a little, even if it meant having to put up with that sinking feeling when she got to work and one of her tasks was to deep clean the now vacant room of one of her favorites.
See, the floor Paloma cleaned wasn’t the one where patients were sent to get better. It was the final cheap motel room, complete with free cable, a weird smell, and the view of the back of a billboard for a gentleman’s club. Most of the people there were elderly, or they were at the very least so hollowed out by the inevitability of their demise that they appeared old. So perhaps that’s why it was so shocking to her when she entered Room 513 and saw a young girl, no more than ten, who didn’t look all that sick aside from a scar on the side of her head. Paloma felt bad for the girl and, admittedly, she was curious. Why was she at the South Cloverfield Good Samaritan and not the Children’s Hospital?
Room 513 proved to be a tough nut to crack, not even answering Paloma the first time she introduced herself to the kid, but Paloma wasn’t about to back down. She visited Room 513 daily, choosing to talk to her if the kid wasn’t going to talk with her. She even came in on her off days, showing up with homemade baked goods and games to play. Eventually the kid asked Paloma why she was doing this, and from that day forward Paloma was in. She got the kid to dish out her life story. At the time Paloma assumed Room 513 had to be on some heavy duty painkillers or had some kind of brain damage with the shit she was talking about, rambling about this place called the Grove and its magical waters. Room 513 confided in Paloma that she wanted to see the Grove again. Paloma said she’d see what she could do, and so she came up with a plan that would end up killing three of her closest nerd friends.
The idea was a sweet one: run a little one-shot for Room 513 with Paloma’s friends, making her out to be the hero of the story, where she returns home to this place called the Grove and saves it from goblins. Okay, so the premise was simple and basic, but the girl was ten. Paloma poured her heart and soul into the game session. She drew maps, painted a little Room 513 mini, and baked a thematic Grove cake. She showed up to the hospital with her friends and set about to give Room 513 the funnest, nerdiest night of her life. Then, just like in every other previous game that Paloma tried to Dungeon Master, the session immediately went off the rails as the craziest thing happened—only this time, it wasn’t because of something in-game.
And to think, up until this exact moment in her life Paloma always thought it would be so cool to see an actual dragon.
Therapy. Medicatation. Doesn’t matter. Paloma can still sometimes hear the screams from that night. Her memories are a bit muddled from the concussion she suffered when the hospital came down. She can remember diving forward to grab Room 513 and run, twisting just in time as the floor above came down, the agonizing pain when the acid splashed her forearms ripping a scream out of her throat before something cracked against the back of her head. She can remember being buried, blinded by such a bright light she thought she had permanently lost her vision, unaware that the Samaritan had adjoined with her the moment she went to protect Room 513, realizing only later that it was the only reason she made it out alive. She can remember Room 513’s feeble voice comforting Paloma, when it should have been the other way around, telling her that it would be okay, promising her that if something were to happen to Paloma then she would take her to the Grove and have them bring her back. Because you would do the same for me, said Room 513. I would, said Paloma. It had been a question at the time.
Promise?
I promise, said Paloma.
The light got dimmer after that. Paloma would be one of the first ones rescued, rushed away to a hospital in a neighboring county for intensive medical care for her injuries and chemical burns, resulting in a lengthy stay, seemingly insurmountable medical bills, and a chance at life that her friends and Room 513 never had the opportunity to receive. When Paloma awoke from her coma the world was so much stranger. Everyone was so happy to see her—literally, everyone, not just the people she would expect—and she kept seeing streams of light, which she reported to her doctor but the scans and the tests came back showing no kind of cerebral or vision damage. Maybe a side effect of her medication? And the strange wisp of air she’d catch out of the side of her eye when she passed by a reflective window? Was that too a side effect?
She started to get a little freaked out by how nice everyone was being to her. Sure, she was always nice to others, but Cloverfield was full of assholes. Was this a bit? A weird, mean, fucked up prank? And why was hardly anyone talking about the actual dragon? Even when she snapped at people they still treated Paloma like she was an absolute sweetheart. It was driving her mad. And then, after having tried to ignore them for a few weeks, she followed one of the streams of light and quite literally bumped into someone who didn’t immediately apologize to her profoundly and excessively dote on her to make sure that she was okay.
This person turned out to be another Paranormal, and would serve as a kind of sherpa guiding Paloma into the world of magic. Around the same time she would begin to familiarize herself with that wisp she saw, an Apparition she called the Samaritan, who during the day would keep quiet but at night fill her head with gut wrenching, nightmarish memories of an impossible promise she had made with a young girl whose name Paloma had never even bothered to learn. And as Paloma went about learning ways the Samaritan could help her achieve this stupid promise of hers, as well as dipping more than just a toe into the world of magic, she couldn’t help but to sometimes think that maybe she missed her life when it was boring.
Abstraction
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"Gosh, it’s so hard being this popular."
TYPE ⫻ Aberration (Adjoined)
ABSTRACTION ⫻ The Samaritan, a protective, guiding spirit that can mass influence the behavior of people and apparitions.
ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Although it takes its name from a nearly two thousand year old parable about showing kindness strangers, the Samaritan is a relatively new apparition. More than just acts of charity and kindness made manifest, the Samaritan is an apparition born from the anxiety and desire felt by people to appear to others as if they were kind, generous, and caring—less love thy neighbor and more what would the neighbors think. Budding in the late 19th century with the rise of philanthropy, the Samaritan grew throughout the time of radio and television before fully manifesting with the advent of social media. The Samaritan has no real physical manifestation outside of its host, appearing as a kind of wispy, ethereal entity with no definable form.
While the Samaritan is a proper capital G “Good” spirit that wants to do good, its grasp on morality is flimsy at best. Perhaps, as a newer apparition, it is simply naive. After all, it’s the creation of the guilty voice that makes you donate your change to charity at a fast food burger joint operated by people not making a living wage and the reason you deleted your Instagram after being ridiculed for not waiting the proper (and unknowable) amount of time required before following up your thoughts and prayers post with a thirst trap. Regardless, for the time being the Samaritan lets its host be its moral compass as it gains more knowledge of how the world works. Since the host is serving as the Samaritan’s baseline for good, the host won’t be compelled in any way by the Samaritan to act against their nature. However, the host does get a “gut feeling” when the Samaritan doesn’t like what they are doing.
When Paloma uses the Samaritan’s abstraction it is almost entirely subtle.The Blind and One-Eyed Opens see nothing and do not feel the influence, the compulsions coming to them in a way that feels natural. Those with Emotional Fields feel like someone is watching them and can get the sensation that something is trying to scratch through their defenses to suggest how they behave, but there is no obvious immediate tell that the source of the influence is radiating from Paloma. The abstraction works as an aura radiating off of Paloma, influencing those who can feasibly sense her. The aura can extend even through technology, affecting those who see her on a screen or hear her on a phone. She can add aspects to the aura or suppress them as wanted.
Everyone’s Sweetheart ⫻ Paloma’s version of the Samaritan’s default aura. Those affected by the aura are compelled to treat Paloma with familiarity and friendliness, as well as willingly and happily help her with reasonable things. This aura does not mean people are forced to notice Paloma or go out of their way to approach her (unless she is clearly in duress or if they were inclined to in the first place), only that when they do they will be nicer or more forgiving to her than they would be to most other people. This part of the aura is always on and cannot be suppressed by Paloma, but can easily be resisted by Emotional Fields to the point its lingering presence is almost unnoticeable.
The main aspect of the Everyone’s Sweetheart aura is that while up nobody—human, apparition, or animal—can deal intentional direct bodily harm to Paloma. This aspect of the aura is so powerful that it fully bypasses Emotional Fields. While a Paranormal could still threaten Paloma with violence, actual attempts to harm her do not work—they pull the shot at the last moment, fire it over her head, or blast someone else. This part of the aura is also always on, but it is immediately suppressed for several seconds by the Samaritan if Paloma attempts to do anything violent herself, allowing for people to act in self-defense.
Good Influence ⫻ A secondary aura Paloma can turn on while Everyone’s Sweetheart is active. It is essentially mind control or powerful suggestion magic, although those under the aura of her Good Influence behave as normal until they receive commands. She can issue direct, complex commands to individuals by speaking with them, or subconsciously influence the masses to follow a simple order by putting out a mentally ordered “vibe check” through her aura. The orders do not need to necessarily be reasonable to the recipient, who retroactively see them as momentary whim, but they must be phrased in a way to make them sound good-natured or well-intentioned. While this allows Paloma to tweak her Good Influence if she ever wants to be shiesty, the Samaritan will outright prevent the aura from being used to incite violence, cause direct harm to the recipient, or are obviously cruel. This does not mean Paloma cannot use the Good Influence to put people in dangerous situations.
Good Influence has a lingering effect that allows it to last once the recipient has left Paloma’s aura, lasting for a full 24 hours. This lingering effect can be extended indefinitely by exposing the recipient to one of Paloma’s auras again, resetting the day counter each time. The aura can be resisted by Emotional Fields. While Paloma can attempt to punch through the Emotional Field by “pulsing” her aura, this triggers the self-defense clause and suppresses Everyone’s Sweetheart, leaving Paloma vulnerable for retaliation.
For example, say Paloma was in a bodega and witnessed an armed robbery. She could command the robber to put down the weapon, go home, and reconsider their life while influencing the crowd to do nothing so that nobody tries to play the hero and gets shot. After that, she could command the cashier to give Paloma the money in the register as a reward for stopping the robber, then the very next day the robber, who the Good Influence has lapsed on, would revert to their nature and go out to rob another store. Alternatively, say the robber was Paranormal and resisted Paloma’s influence. She cannot command the crowd to rush them to stop the robbery, but she could command them to try to secretly call for the police even though it could harm them if they were to get shot by the robber when they mistook a reach for a phone as a reach for a gun..
The Bystander Effect ⫻ A secondary aura Paloma can turn on while Everyone’s Sweetheart is active. The Bystander Effect draws upon the roots of the Samaritan being created from people’s anxiety to appear upright and moral rather than a true drive to do actual “good”. By activating the Bystander Effect, Paloma can effectively shut down people in her aura and render them in a stationary, catatonic state. As long as they remain in Paloma’s aura, Bystanders are effectively frozen in time and space, resuming as if nothing has happened once she suppresses the Bystander Effect. Notably, people cannot be physically harmed in any way while under the Bystander Effect, although it doesn’t mean that they cannot be released from the effect while in a perilous situation.
For example, someone driving their car hit by the Bystander Effect would lose control of the vehicle and it will crash. However, they wouldn’t be harmed by the crash, but they could be harmed when they tried to crawl out of the aftermath. Alternatively, the car goes careening out of Paloma’s aura and the driver is released from the Bystander Effect moments before it crashes.
Paloma can use the Bystander Effect on crowds or individuals. If targeting individuals, Blind will ignore the bystanders as if they were never there.
She can pair it with Good Influence, giving detailed commands to crowds of bystanders before dropping the Bystander Effect and allowing them to follow her orders. She can attempt to use it offensively, but the spell will have to break through someone’s Emotional Field and it triggers the self-defense clause of Everyone’s Sweetheart, leaving Paloma vulnerable. Alternatively, she can use it defensively on others to protect them from harm, assuming they let her through their Emotional Field. However, the Samaritan is unable to determine Paloma’s intentions, meaning that she still momentarily loses her defenses. Paloma cannot use the Bystander Effect on herself.
The Messiah Complex ⫻ A secondary aura that the Samaritan, not Paloma, turns on while Everyone’s Sweetheart is active. The Messiah Complex creates faint, trailing streams of golden light in the air around Paloma that guide her to people in her aura that are in need of help that Paloma is, in some way or another, capable of providing. The Samaritan is still in its infancy as an apparition, so the consistency and urgency on which this operates is very hit or miss. She’ll get pings ranging from the cliched, like a kitten stuck in a tree, to the bizarre, like a dweeby teen in need of a prom date to impress his friends. Pings will also sometimes be downright criminal, like the mafioso looking for a cleaner to help dispose of a body, to actual targets in need of life saving, like highlighting a dude choking on a meatball sub.
Most of all, though, it is just annoying, as the lights get very distracting. Paloma can ask the Samaritan to suppress it, which it does temporarily, sometimes for several hours but occasionally for a few minutes before turning it back on much to her chagrin. The Messiah Complex can also serve as a kind of danger sense. Since the light is typically faint, a blinding halo of light trails can serve as a sign that Paloma is about to stumble into some real rough shit.
LIMITS ⫻ Paloma’s aura typically fills the room or the immediate area, but it essentially expands out from her as far as people can sense her be it by sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, or even extrasensory means. Her aura can be expanded through live footage or loudspeakers and be diminished by anything that would muffle/drown out her voice or obfuscate her presence. In general, the effects of her auras immediately end when she can no longer be sensed, with the exception of Good Influence which lasts for at least 24 hours. The Blind do not notice her aura either influencing them or leaving them, but the Paranormal can sense a difference in the air when they are within Paloma’s aura. Thus, while she doesn’t give off any clear indication that she is using an abstraction, any Paranormal paying attention would be able to notice that the vibe changed when Paloma walked in.
Everyone’s Sweetheart protects Paloma against intentional bodily harm. She can still be accidentally harmed by others or be a victim of collateral damage. Generally, she is as vulnerable as any other Paranormal to mental abstractions. As previously mentioned, it is also suppressed if Paloma ever attempts to do something violent herself or attempts to use her abstraction to brute force through an Emotional Field.
While under the effect of Good Influence, people will still behave like their normal self outside of following their orders. Good Influence can only have one lasting effect rolling at a time. Any new commands replace the last ones. As previously mentioned, Good Influence cannot be used to cause obvious physical harm to others or to the influenced, and cruel and unusual effects are typically negated by the Samaritan. Good Influence bounces right off of Emotional Fields unless Paloma tries to brute force it, leaving her vulnerable to retaliation.
The Bystander Effect can cause (usually) unintentional and catastrophic accidents when carelessly used out in public. The Bystander Effect bounces right of Emotional Fields unless Paloma tries to brute force it, leaving her vulnerable to retaliation.
On top of already being inconsistent, The Messiah Complex is purely reactive, not predictive. Something must have already put a person into a state of need before a trail to them lights up.
WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)
ABSTRACTION ⫻ The Samaritan, a protective, guiding spirit that can mass influence the behavior of people and apparitions.
ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ Although it takes its name from a nearly two thousand year old parable about showing kindness strangers, the Samaritan is a relatively new apparition. More than just acts of charity and kindness made manifest, the Samaritan is an apparition born from the anxiety and desire felt by people to appear to others as if they were kind, generous, and caring—less love thy neighbor and more what would the neighbors think. Budding in the late 19th century with the rise of philanthropy, the Samaritan grew throughout the time of radio and television before fully manifesting with the advent of social media. The Samaritan has no real physical manifestation outside of its host, appearing as a kind of wispy, ethereal entity with no definable form.
While the Samaritan is a proper capital G “Good” spirit that wants to do good, its grasp on morality is flimsy at best. Perhaps, as a newer apparition, it is simply naive. After all, it’s the creation of the guilty voice that makes you donate your change to charity at a fast food burger joint operated by people not making a living wage and the reason you deleted your Instagram after being ridiculed for not waiting the proper (and unknowable) amount of time required before following up your thoughts and prayers post with a thirst trap. Regardless, for the time being the Samaritan lets its host be its moral compass as it gains more knowledge of how the world works. Since the host is serving as the Samaritan’s baseline for good, the host won’t be compelled in any way by the Samaritan to act against their nature. However, the host does get a “gut feeling” when the Samaritan doesn’t like what they are doing.
When Paloma uses the Samaritan’s abstraction it is almost entirely subtle.The Blind and One-Eyed Opens see nothing and do not feel the influence, the compulsions coming to them in a way that feels natural. Those with Emotional Fields feel like someone is watching them and can get the sensation that something is trying to scratch through their defenses to suggest how they behave, but there is no obvious immediate tell that the source of the influence is radiating from Paloma. The abstraction works as an aura radiating off of Paloma, influencing those who can feasibly sense her. The aura can extend even through technology, affecting those who see her on a screen or hear her on a phone. She can add aspects to the aura or suppress them as wanted.
Everyone’s Sweetheart ⫻ Paloma’s version of the Samaritan’s default aura. Those affected by the aura are compelled to treat Paloma with familiarity and friendliness, as well as willingly and happily help her with reasonable things. This aura does not mean people are forced to notice Paloma or go out of their way to approach her (unless she is clearly in duress or if they were inclined to in the first place), only that when they do they will be nicer or more forgiving to her than they would be to most other people. This part of the aura is always on and cannot be suppressed by Paloma, but can easily be resisted by Emotional Fields to the point its lingering presence is almost unnoticeable.
The main aspect of the Everyone’s Sweetheart aura is that while up nobody—human, apparition, or animal—can deal intentional direct bodily harm to Paloma. This aspect of the aura is so powerful that it fully bypasses Emotional Fields. While a Paranormal could still threaten Paloma with violence, actual attempts to harm her do not work—they pull the shot at the last moment, fire it over her head, or blast someone else. This part of the aura is also always on, but it is immediately suppressed for several seconds by the Samaritan if Paloma attempts to do anything violent herself, allowing for people to act in self-defense.
Good Influence ⫻ A secondary aura Paloma can turn on while Everyone’s Sweetheart is active. It is essentially mind control or powerful suggestion magic, although those under the aura of her Good Influence behave as normal until they receive commands. She can issue direct, complex commands to individuals by speaking with them, or subconsciously influence the masses to follow a simple order by putting out a mentally ordered “vibe check” through her aura. The orders do not need to necessarily be reasonable to the recipient, who retroactively see them as momentary whim, but they must be phrased in a way to make them sound good-natured or well-intentioned. While this allows Paloma to tweak her Good Influence if she ever wants to be shiesty, the Samaritan will outright prevent the aura from being used to incite violence, cause direct harm to the recipient, or are obviously cruel. This does not mean Paloma cannot use the Good Influence to put people in dangerous situations.
Good Influence has a lingering effect that allows it to last once the recipient has left Paloma’s aura, lasting for a full 24 hours. This lingering effect can be extended indefinitely by exposing the recipient to one of Paloma’s auras again, resetting the day counter each time. The aura can be resisted by Emotional Fields. While Paloma can attempt to punch through the Emotional Field by “pulsing” her aura, this triggers the self-defense clause and suppresses Everyone’s Sweetheart, leaving Paloma vulnerable for retaliation.
For example, say Paloma was in a bodega and witnessed an armed robbery. She could command the robber to put down the weapon, go home, and reconsider their life while influencing the crowd to do nothing so that nobody tries to play the hero and gets shot. After that, she could command the cashier to give Paloma the money in the register as a reward for stopping the robber, then the very next day the robber, who the Good Influence has lapsed on, would revert to their nature and go out to rob another store. Alternatively, say the robber was Paranormal and resisted Paloma’s influence. She cannot command the crowd to rush them to stop the robbery, but she could command them to try to secretly call for the police even though it could harm them if they were to get shot by the robber when they mistook a reach for a phone as a reach for a gun..
The Bystander Effect ⫻ A secondary aura Paloma can turn on while Everyone’s Sweetheart is active. The Bystander Effect draws upon the roots of the Samaritan being created from people’s anxiety to appear upright and moral rather than a true drive to do actual “good”. By activating the Bystander Effect, Paloma can effectively shut down people in her aura and render them in a stationary, catatonic state. As long as they remain in Paloma’s aura, Bystanders are effectively frozen in time and space, resuming as if nothing has happened once she suppresses the Bystander Effect. Notably, people cannot be physically harmed in any way while under the Bystander Effect, although it doesn’t mean that they cannot be released from the effect while in a perilous situation.
For example, someone driving their car hit by the Bystander Effect would lose control of the vehicle and it will crash. However, they wouldn’t be harmed by the crash, but they could be harmed when they tried to crawl out of the aftermath. Alternatively, the car goes careening out of Paloma’s aura and the driver is released from the Bystander Effect moments before it crashes.
Paloma can use the Bystander Effect on crowds or individuals. If targeting individuals, Blind will ignore the bystanders as if they were never there.
She can pair it with Good Influence, giving detailed commands to crowds of bystanders before dropping the Bystander Effect and allowing them to follow her orders. She can attempt to use it offensively, but the spell will have to break through someone’s Emotional Field and it triggers the self-defense clause of Everyone’s Sweetheart, leaving Paloma vulnerable. Alternatively, she can use it defensively on others to protect them from harm, assuming they let her through their Emotional Field. However, the Samaritan is unable to determine Paloma’s intentions, meaning that she still momentarily loses her defenses. Paloma cannot use the Bystander Effect on herself.
The Messiah Complex ⫻ A secondary aura that the Samaritan, not Paloma, turns on while Everyone’s Sweetheart is active. The Messiah Complex creates faint, trailing streams of golden light in the air around Paloma that guide her to people in her aura that are in need of help that Paloma is, in some way or another, capable of providing. The Samaritan is still in its infancy as an apparition, so the consistency and urgency on which this operates is very hit or miss. She’ll get pings ranging from the cliched, like a kitten stuck in a tree, to the bizarre, like a dweeby teen in need of a prom date to impress his friends. Pings will also sometimes be downright criminal, like the mafioso looking for a cleaner to help dispose of a body, to actual targets in need of life saving, like highlighting a dude choking on a meatball sub.
Most of all, though, it is just annoying, as the lights get very distracting. Paloma can ask the Samaritan to suppress it, which it does temporarily, sometimes for several hours but occasionally for a few minutes before turning it back on much to her chagrin. The Messiah Complex can also serve as a kind of danger sense. Since the light is typically faint, a blinding halo of light trails can serve as a sign that Paloma is about to stumble into some real rough shit.
LIMITS ⫻ Paloma’s aura typically fills the room or the immediate area, but it essentially expands out from her as far as people can sense her be it by sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, or even extrasensory means. Her aura can be expanded through live footage or loudspeakers and be diminished by anything that would muffle/drown out her voice or obfuscate her presence. In general, the effects of her auras immediately end when she can no longer be sensed, with the exception of Good Influence which lasts for at least 24 hours. The Blind do not notice her aura either influencing them or leaving them, but the Paranormal can sense a difference in the air when they are within Paloma’s aura. Thus, while she doesn’t give off any clear indication that she is using an abstraction, any Paranormal paying attention would be able to notice that the vibe changed when Paloma walked in.
Everyone’s Sweetheart protects Paloma against intentional bodily harm. She can still be accidentally harmed by others or be a victim of collateral damage. Generally, she is as vulnerable as any other Paranormal to mental abstractions. As previously mentioned, it is also suppressed if Paloma ever attempts to do something violent herself or attempts to use her abstraction to brute force through an Emotional Field.
While under the effect of Good Influence, people will still behave like their normal self outside of following their orders. Good Influence can only have one lasting effect rolling at a time. Any new commands replace the last ones. As previously mentioned, Good Influence cannot be used to cause obvious physical harm to others or to the influenced, and cruel and unusual effects are typically negated by the Samaritan. Good Influence bounces right off of Emotional Fields unless Paloma tries to brute force it, leaving her vulnerable to retaliation.
The Bystander Effect can cause (usually) unintentional and catastrophic accidents when carelessly used out in public. The Bystander Effect bounces right of Emotional Fields unless Paloma tries to brute force it, leaving her vulnerable to retaliation.
On top of already being inconsistent, The Messiah Complex is purely reactive, not predictive. Something must have already put a person into a state of need before a trail to them lights up.
WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)
Other
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“So sweet it’s making me sick."
Paloma playfully refers to the Samaritan as Sammy, unless she’s upset with it, in which case she calls it Sam.
Currently, she works in the slightly nicer hospital on the Northside of Cloverfield but still lives in a rough part on the Southside. Well, rough for other people, perhaps.
Currently, she works in the slightly nicer hospital on the Northside of Cloverfield but still lives in a rough part on the Southside. Well, rough for other people, perhaps.
