W Y N D
P O E N A V I D S O N ◼ 1 1 N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 ( 1 8 ) ◼ F E M A L E
“Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin.”
//STATS:◼ HEIGHT | 5'4"
◼ WEIGHT | 91lbs
◼ BUILD | Malnourished
◼ HAIR COLOUR | Black. Streaks of red in the front.
◼ EYE COLOUR | Amber
◼ 'VOICE' TEXT COLOUR | Hexcode 8B0000
◼ OTHER | Often wearing dark, thick eyeliner, mostly to distract from or mask the heavy bags beneath her eyes. She has blemishes and scratches up her arms where she compulsively picks her skin.
//DESCRIPTION:Poe is a haunted girl, nervous and in a constant state of exhausting alertness. Her clothes are simple and dark, jeans and tough boots, often wearing large, baggy jumpers and hoodies that swallow her up, serving to both cover her picked-at arms, and help warm her too-skinny frame. Her eyes have the look of someone who's tired to their bones, and dark bags beneath them only emphasize her apparently exhaustion.
"Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold."
Poe remembers little of her pre-Aegis life, but the scraps she gets aren't pleasant, and she's smart enough to understand contextually that her apparently long-term presence in Aegis facilities doesn't speak to a healthy, well-balanced adolescence. Flashes of an extended but dysfunctional family, of a mother at times both nurturing and frightening, of a father desperate and well-meaning but ill-equipped. Whatever her own struggles, Poe is certain she is far from the first to have battled with them.
Most of Poe's accessible memories are of time in Aegis facilities; she's a 'lifer', no doubt, and has bounced through 4 separate facilities across the United States so far, with both the properly-filed paperwork and without - most recently definitively without. She came to them younger than most, and has stayed with them longer than most - making and losing friends along the way, but for the most trying to survive her own mind, fighting against twisting corridors of paranoia, anxiety, and phantom phobias.
▼ M O T I V A T I O N / O B J E C T I V E:
“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.”
More than anything, Poe seeks understanding. Her own mind being simultaneously so familiar and so alien is disconcerting at best, and while she's in full control of her faculties and thoughts and movements and motor functions, there is ever-present paranoia that she remains subtly influenced by the dark corners of her psyche, strings being pulled by a self behind the self. In the most literal terms, she cannot trust her own mind - and how do you find peace when such a fact defines your existence?
Despite its inherent fundamentality to Poe's nature and very being, she cannot help but be deeply frightened of the Finite Passage; who would not be, when your own mind is so innately unknowable? Through her lengthy stay with Aegis she has sought to conquer the intrinsic secrets of the labyrinth, poring through her own mind to reveal what it is hiding from itself; success has been limited, if it comes at all. The issue is looking for something that doesn't want to be found, in a place that doesn't want you - itself - both - to find it.
▼ A B I L I T I E S / S K I L L S:
"What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn't reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky."
//ABILITIES:◼ The Finite Passage | Poe's mind is, literally, a labyrinth. It is an eldritch, shifting space that she has dubbed 'The Finite Passage', and despite its alien nature to anything approaching humanity as we know it, it is as intrinsically a part of Poe - intrinsically Poe herself - as the colour of her eyes or the the whorls of her fingertips. It is reflective of and adaptive to Poe's mental state at any given time, and she has both absolute dominion over it, and no possible idea how to control it.
The Finite Passage manifests in two ways, but contains myriad peculiarities within itself. Poe can dive into herself, using her own mind as a portal to find herself on the otherside in the midst of the dark stone corridors of the labyrinth, or she unfold her mind into the world around her, spooling the labyrinth out of herself to imprint itself across actual reality and eventually subsume her, her surroundings, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.
Upon entering the labyrinth, Poe can navigate its corridors to find an exit out into any point, disappearing into herself and finding the right escape to reappear anywhere else on the planet. However, how easy an exit is to find is very variable, dependant on knowledge of destination, navigation ability, and even Poe's own mental state.
There are several other 'unique' aspects of the Finite Passage, as a result of its dual nature as both a representation of Poe's psyche, and its own seemingly-alive eldritch space; but Poe understands these even less than the superficial travel functions of the labyrinth, and is afraid of what true exploration of the Finite Passage's depths might uncover - as such, she avoids it completely.
//SKILLS:◼ Perceptive, Agile, Survivable | Poe's fear and paranoia has honed her senses toward anxiety-driven perceptive peaks, constantly scanning and processing hundreds of elements from her surroundings ever second, keeping her alert, aware, and well-tuned to even the subtlest details around her. Her lithe frame has afforded her some agility and light-footedness, and from her experiences across her life - inside and outside Aegis facilities, even inside the Finite Passage itself - she has learnt extraordinarily well how to survive.
//LIMITATIONS:◼ Exhausted, On-Edge, Frightened | Poe's constant alertness has a side-effect: an in-parallel constant exhaustion, her brain always in overdrive analysing every possible detail and threat, wearing her down every minute until she has little-to-no energy to do much of anything else entirely. She's always on-edge, quick to irritability and pessimism, and lives in a sustained state of fear that colours her every interaction.
//WEAKNESSES:◼ Memory Failure, Autophobia, Paranoia | A side-effect of the Finite Passage, her own physical location isn't the only thing that can lost within its labyrinthian sprawl - memories can and do and have gotten lost as well, and without knowing where they are, or even that they're missing at all, Poe can't recall large chunks of her life. Due to the Finite Passage being an intrinsic part of her psyche, her fear of its unknown nature also deviates simultaneously into a fear of herself and a fear of isolation, both of which cause her no end of struggle. Finally, what little she does understand about the Finite Passage and its psychic properties has devolved into paranoia about Aegis and those around her, and about the 'self behind the self', an 'other' Poe she believes is secretly manipulating her from within her own subconscious and the depths of the labyrinth.
//SUPPORTING CAST:▼ ALLIES◼ None | Yet...
▼ FRIENDS◼ None | Yet...
▼ ENEMIES◼ None | Yet...
//STOMPING GROUNDS◼ Aegis Facilities | Test
//PARAPHERNALIA◼ None | Due to how Poe ended up in the Alcatraz Aegis facility, she failed to bring any belongings with her. Until such personal items can be transported across the continent, she's starting from scratch.