The Pale Maiden

To give a super brief overview, Maiden is a goddess of rot and renewal. I've been describing it as "the scientifically quantifiable aspects of death." So this is in general scavengers, decomposers, and the like. Anyone involved in that good nitrogen cycle business. She also more generally just a goddess of bugs and other creepy things that humans don't like.

Playing with Maiden will often touch on the following topics:

- small gross animals Insects/Arachnids/Milipedes/centipedes/worms/grubs etc
- Death and dead things
- Parasites/sickness/infections
- decomposition
- predation/violence
- depersonalization (calling people "meat," having more interest in a corpse than a person, having a warped sense of personhood regarding herself, etc)
- body dysmorphia (not gender-related)

While Maiden ICly does not have any care regarding topics that humans may find unpleasant or distressing, I the player am here to have a good time. The last thing I want is to be bringing something into play that the other player isn't into!

Hence, an opt-out:

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Lady

AGE: 31 flavors

JOURNAL: n/a

IM / EMAIL: whimsypunch on hangouts

PLURK: somarysueme

RETURNING: Current!



〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉

CHARACTER NAME: The Maiden

CHARACTER AGE: About as old as dirt, or about as old as human civilization depending on your perspective. Looks like a young adult.

CANON ORIGIN: OC

CHRONOLOGY: n/a

CLASS: morally gray force of nature?

HOUSING: Please assign housing


BACKGROUND: The Maiden is from a planet where human beliefs shaping gods, and gods shaping humans is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question. There are countries where the line between mortal and divine is so blurred for it not to really matter; most people you meet are part monster or part divine. And there are places so staunchly atheistic and humanist in belief that gods can't even enter, and there's No Such Thing As Magic. There are places that the only gods one cares about are the local deities who may literally live next door, and places that hold unwavering to the dogmatic teachings of the central church.

But in none of these places will you find many who worship the Pale Maiden.

Because she's not quite a death god (please, Death is a classy gentleman and has better holidays than anyone). She's a god of rot, and plague, and entropy. She's a goddess of carrion-feeders, and parasites, and terrifying swarms of things. Basically: she is the goddess of all the bits of nature that scare people, in particular around invertebrates, death, and decay.

Though she is a legitimate member of the King's Family and therefor officially a figure of worship to the Church, she has neither hymns nor holidays. Her true name is not written down in any holy book, and only spoken out loud if you really need something nasty to curse with. She mostly appears as a minor figure in stories about her brother having adventures with his bff/her eventual husband/also an evil clown. Even her true genesis is under dispute: some verses seeming to say she is a legitimate heir like her brother (or perhaps is even her brother's twin), and others suggest that she is the result of a disagreement/bet between her mother and mom's twin. Divine genealogy, am I right?

Long story short she is a Big Deal goddess, who none-the-less rarely comes up in general worship. Common wisdom holds that she can perform her duties just fine without the intercession of humanity, and that humans are better off with as little of her attention as possible.

But of course every once in a while there's some edgelord (or edgelass) who looks at this half-mad deadly bug goddess and is like "YEP. THAT'S THE ONE. THAT'S MY GODDESS."

Her "canon point" is about a year earlier than Galla, where the cataclysm that will eventually send everything straight to shit is still in the ominously foreboding stages.

PERSONALITY:

In the myths where she does appear, she's often described as childlike and mild in both appearance and speech, but also deadly and unpredictable. She always prefers her creatures to humans, and is said to watch and enjoy when her husband is out sewing discord and death everywhere. She doesn't participate, but it sure doesn't seem to bother her. Still, her general disinterest in humanity (rare for her family) means that she doesn't spend much time fucking with them either. She's not out here playing mind games, or making decrees, or demanding sacrifices, or holy wars. Her main interest in humans is the corpse they leave behind.

Her first and primary concerns will always be with the health of natural cycles. She has nothing but love for all the creepy, crawly, slimy, smelly things she watches over. She's proud of the systems/lifeforms that she considers part of her personal staff. Every dung beetle on the entire planet is employee of the month. Every month.

But in addition to guarding and guiding these systems, in some ways, she is all of these systems. If so desired, she could know what every bug is up to at any moment, or understand any number of complex in the environment. As such, she tends to view things in a very "zoomed out" way. She understands and values systems over individuals, which can come across in unsettling ways when she's trying to relate to an individual human who values their own individual human existence.

So, she likes people! She has no problem with people! She just finds them easier to understand once they're corpses. She can easily come off as careless, or even sadistic when it's more that she's just deeply inhuman. And t

That's not to say she can't or doesn't have good interactions with humans! It's a bit of a long term frustration that these systems and critters are so misunderstood by the dominant, sapient species, so she's happy to share her substantial knowledge and enthusiasm with those who think to ask her, and can make sense of her answer. The problem being that she's mentally more like a huge hive mind of bugs than she is like a single human mind. It can make it hard for her to communicate coherently with the other meat sacks.

For these reasons, she takes priests on far more rarely than any of the other canonized gods. While most of her family will select humans to carry out their will (with great power come great bullshit), she's more likely to just like and relate to a particular human enough to give them some power and drop in on their life from time to time.

Addition: In MoM, she will be forced into a human body and therefor human interaction on a scale that she's experienced before. In many of her early interactions she is likely to be mostly obsessed with discussing existing in a body, her experiences and comparing it to others. She'll be attracted most to characters who have/have had inorganic forms like droids or Cybertronians. This won't be to the exclusion of humans and other organics, but it will be a strong early preference.

Of course, she'll still be more-or-less incomprehensible to many people. Her thoughts don't organize the same way most humans do, and though she could speak more plainly if she really put her mind to it, she won't. She doesn't mind not being understood, or being feared, or just weirding people out, so she puts no real effort into seeming normal.

That said, she does have an interest in new experiences, and being away from home and her duties means she'll have a lot more time to seek them out. This will likely include an increased interest in socializing. She'll get along casually and easily with people who do choose to interact with her, though her attitude towards death and predation may result in disagreements. But it's really, really not much of a concern to her what people think of her. She isn't likely to become close with a large number of mortals. The first reason being that most will likely find her off-putting. The other reason is that she probably just won't want to have a ton of friends. But at the end of the day she usually is more-or-less easy-going. She doesn't tend to hold grudges against people (though she also won't go out of her way to correct any misconceptions that she does).

As she spends more time socializing with mortals, she'll probably developed more nuanced opinions of them and the way they organize social order. Expect her to share these observations in the most awkward way possible. In fact, expect her to play up the awkwardness of her revelations as a private joke to herself.




POWER:


Rot Godddess: Canon power! Toned down here to not be game-breaking. First and most simply, she can speed up, slow down, or reverse certain biological processes including: healing, infection, digestion, decomposition, and fermentation. She can not reverse death itself unless it's a death that real-world medical science could hypothetically reverse. (Drowned 2 minutes ago? Sure. Stabbed through the kidneys half an hour ago? Maybe. Shot in the head, or cut in half, or any of the above it's been a couple hours? Absolutely not.)



Also, has just general super strength/speed/durability to go along with being a god.
Patronage: Also a canon power, but separating out in case you need me to adjust it. She has the power to loan some small part of the powers above to mortals who are loyal to her. They need to be compatible with her both philosophically and in their actions- ie, they need to be actively doing things that supports natural cycles.
The requirements of patronage are:
Have a long term relationship with her, and gain some trust.
Be willing to take on her mark and keep it on their body always. (A token will work, a tattoo will work better.)
Do Her Work, which could be starting a compost program, moving road kill somewhere safer to eat, keeping an educational bug collection, or committing acts of eco terrorism!
In exchange they can then use a small fraction of critter controlling, rotting/healing, or knowing nature stuff.

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉

COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:


LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

Test Drive
FINAL NOTES: As mentioned above, she's a bit more used to being a big global hive mind than a person, and as such she's going to initially be a bit confused, stressed, and grossed out by living in a human body.