Hero Critique Thread (Because it's about damn time for this too!)

I'm not sure, I can't say I'm really feeling her. I think you should elaborate more on her thoughts and feelings. How did the death of Timmy and the disappearance of Floyd impacted her and how does she cope with it? Does it affect how she socializes and relates to people? I'd like to see more of that stuff, it's interesting.

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So here's my protagonist for my Post-Cyberpunk/noir novel. Yeah, a detective protagonist in cyberpunk is kind of overdone but in my defense my cyberpunk novel is a mystery first, cyberpunk novel second. So far I've written most of the first chapter.

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Name: Anton Yazid Battier

Age: 38

Personality: He's a hardened apathetic cynic, who's outspoken about his sour outlook in life and apathy. He's extremely cautious with new people, to a paranoid degree, always keeping them at an arm's distance and minimizing socialization to only the necessary; he's, however, very friendly if slightly foul-mouthed with the very few people he trusts. He never loses his cool, always remaining taciturn and stoic.

He puts up a lazy facade so that nothing is expected of him, but he's actually quite hardworking; when working a case, he's focused, observant and meticulous, and is capable of committing unscrupulous acts if it he thinks it's for the greater good–he's certainly a "the ends justify the means" person, although he has his limits.

Deep down, however, he's principled and caring. The cynicism and apathy are just a means to defend himself from getting hurt again.

Abilities: Highly skilled in hand to hand and armed combat from his days in the military, and is an excellent marksman. Also quite a good detective, with a lot of Street Smarts to aid his cases.

Goals: To discover the truth behind a conspiracy involving the secretive Exalife corporation and the mysterious Delta Arcana group.

Motivation: Driving him is a noble heart that seeks to use his position to fight the corruption in the Military Intelligence Service he is part of, inherent in the system as it may be.

Role in the Story: He is our protagonist, narrator, and Knight in Sour Armor detective combined with a sort of spy (since he works for an intelligence agency and his investigations are clandestine). The Comically Serious when put near more light-hearted characters since he's almost perpetually moody and serious.

Weaknesses: Anton has no cybernetic enhancements (Boosts), unlike many of his foes. This leaves him at a huge disadvantage in the setting, where enhancements are common and kinda affordable. His physical strength also isn't quite up to par, rendering him a Fragile Speedster. He's also a Shell-Shocked Veteran implied to be suffering from depression.

Backstory: Born in 2318 to an Algerian mother and a French father, he was abandoned by his mother and neglected by his father. At age 10, he ran away from home and lived in the streets of Lyon for a while, where he met his longtime friend and The Lancer Marc Gobert, and Gisèle Chausson, another close friend with whom he has a complicated relationship. At age 18, he joined the military along with Marc, where then he fought in the drawn-out and miserable Fourth World War, serving as a spy later on. It was during the war when he developed a distaste for cybernetic enhancement technology after seeing Marc become extensively enhanced; seeing the destructive potential of military grade enhancements did not leave him with a good impression of cybernetic enhancement technology (or Boosts, as they would later be branded). During the war, he would meet his wife, Anne. After the war ended, he was recruited by the newly formed Military Intelligence Service as a detective for Internal Affairs, where he has remained since then. Seven years before the beginning of the story, he divorced Anne.

Relevant Tropes:

• The Alcoholic: Prone to drinking in excess, to cope with his several mental issues.
• Ambiguous Disorder: It's not explicitly told since he's not seeking help for it, but given that he describes a low mood, severe lack of appetite, insomnia and waking up extremely early it's implied he's dealing with depression.
• Badass and Child Duo: Befriends a teenager named Adrien Tachibana, the son of Pierre Tachibana (the victim whose murder kickstarts the whole plot), to whom he becomes more attached than he'd like to admit. Initially out of pity but later out of actual commitment, he helps Adrien with a case regarding his missing girlfriend, Célestine.
• Badass Baritone: His voice is described by other characters as deep yet smooth.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: He's always described as being in a well-kept suit, and his closet is shown to have a lot of them.
• Badass Longcoat: Wears a thigh-length duster over his suit, as is in fashion in 2356.
• Brutal Honesty: He will not sugarcoat his words, and he will not hesitate to tell the truth when necessary even if it hurts.
• Byronic Hero: Anton is not a very easy person to like or know, because he will push you apart and keep to himself. But if you get past that you have to get used to his melancholy and moodiness. That said, the other characters do show some sympathy for him, or at least some of his coworkers at MIS do.
• Catchphrase: "What a pain".
• The Comically Serious: Whenever he's working a case, his sense of humor becomes non existent and becomes single-minded. This means that when he has to interact with more humorous and light hearted characters like Gisèle, the result is a bit comical.
• Cool Shades: Wear circular red sunglasses, partly to hide the fact he's hungover, partly because it's cool in 2356.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: A firm believer in this trope. He refuses to get Boosts, as he deems them unnatural and inhuman.
• Defective Detective: Anton may be a good detective, but he's still kind of a jerk with a failed marriage behind him, who's suffering from PTSD, (probably) depression and alcoholism. He focuses a lot on his detective work because it's kind of all he has.
• Experienced Protagonist: Has already been in the MIS for almost a decade, and already knows his way around the city. This is done so that he can introduce the reader to the city and deliver some exposition and worldbuilding.
• Hardboiled Detective: Plays into this. While his deductive abilities come into play a lot and a true hardboiled detective would never be employed by the state, he nevertheless has the duster coat look and has to deal with the seedy underbelly of Lyon. And because Military Intelligence Service investigations are done clandestinely and confidentially to preserve their secretive nature, he has to rely on his street smarts to investigate the case rather than the state. And of course, there's the Private Eye Monologue.
• Fatal Flaw: His paranoia. It goes on overdrive later on as he discovers The Conspiracy, making him do some really, really bad choices.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Melancholic.
• Inconvenient Attraction: He's too ashamed to ever admit it to himself, but deep down he finds visibly Boosted women attractive.
• The Insomniac: Describes a difficulty to sleep, and is introduced as wandering the city at late hours because he just couldn't get some shut eye.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Deep down he has a drive to do the right thing and to solve the case searching for a greater good, but it's wrapped in many, many layers of cynicism and apathy. He thinks he lives in a terrible world and sets his expectations accordingly.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In the climax, he and Adrien end up freeing Célestine, who by that point has become Device 14–a weapon said to surpass the more destructive Ultra Boosted models from the Great Offscreen War such as the Vermillion Faust Units or the Judgement Bearers. Due to Célestine's mental instability, she ends up rampaging through the streets of Lyon, causing mass casualties and destruction. Great job!
• Not So Stoic: Whenever he wakes up from his PTSD nightmares, he noticeably loses his cool and he narrates being agitated from them. And when he suffers a major betrayal later on, he outright ugly cries.
• The Paranoiac: While Anton can function in society well, he is extremely distrustful of other people and will suspect their motives, and views 2356 Lyon as a Crapsack World where only the strong survive (which is, to be fair, true to an extent, as it is an hypercapitalistic world ruled over by an authoritarian government). His paranoia also makes him a bit hostile to others, and you can expect him to hold a grudge (which does not help his hostility).
• Pragmatic Hero: He's willing to do unscrupulous actions to get the job done, such as doing favors to gangs or interrogate someone at gunpoint after beating the shit out of them; he tells himself it's all for the greater good. Justified, kind of, due to the clandestine nature of his job–he doesn't have the same lawful resources a police detective would.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Suffers from PTSD from the Great Offscreen War, and in his narration mentions having recurring nightmares about it.
• Street Smart: Knows his way around the seedy underbelly of Lyon, and is friendly with gangs who otherwise would not talk to police.
• Tour Guide Detective: Kind of a tour guide to 2350s Lyon and its upper and lower echelons.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Pho. The first pages of the first chapter are him going to The City Narrows where his favorite Vietnamese eatery is located and enjoying a bowl of pho before being rudely interrupted. At the end of the chapter, he's still thinking about that bowl of pho. He just likes pho that much.
• Undying Loyalty: To his superior, Jacqueline, whom he describes as "the only good person in the MIS". Also to Marc and Gisèle.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Seems to be only capable of cultivating these relationships.
  • With his Best Friend, Marc. The two have known each other since Anton was a runaway Street Urchin, fought in the war together and Marc is one of the few people he notably relaxes his tough guy persona around. That doesn't stop them from having snark battles and bickering marathons.
  • With his other best friend and on/off Friends with Benefits, Back-Alley Doctor extraordinaire and Boost engineer Gisèle. Even though they bicker a lot and they really disagree on Boosts (Gisèle thinks they are the best thing since sliced bread), ultimately they care about each other a lot and Anton relies on her for things like getting Boost parts analyzed.

Edited by Logograph on Aug 23rd 2020 at 9:19:51 AM

I prefer to think of it as a tried and true genre. Cyberpunk detectives may be common, but this is my first time reviewing one! My first instinct is to dislike Anton, amusingly enough. Someone who likes to loudly bring attention to how much they don't like doing anything sound like someone who would get on a lot of people's nerves very quickly. Seems like a lot of effort for an apathetic person. But I guess that's the point of a Byronic Hero, eh? Be enough of a prick to keep people away. So while I don't find him personally endearing, I do appreciate the style you're going for. Though I do wonder if you'er overstating his genuine apathy. Someone who didn't care that much wouldn't put so much effort in their detective work.

It's not often we see someone working in Internal Affairs. I wonder if his cynicism is exacerbated in part from seeing a lot of people who are supposed to work for the benefit of everyone else abuse their power. His suspicion about cybernetics reminds me of Spooner, from the I, Robot film, who hates robots for his own reasons. They both have troubled pasts and difficulty living with the trauma they experienced. I also wonder if him and his childhood friends are a sort of broken Power Trio whose relationship became more prickly as life's challenges kept hitting them over the head.

Anton is a pretty classical archetype, but there's nothing wrong with that. They're archetypes because they work and people have utilized them since cyberpunk was a thing. It's how you use a character that makes them and their story worthwhile. So go for it.

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• Name: Bathsheba "Sheba" Arciniega
• Age: 20
• Personality: Serious and dutiful. Being the eldest daughter of a single mother household, and then a parentless household, she had to grow up fast to take care of her siblings and had to be much more mature than her contemporaries. A thrifty workaholic who shunned frivolities unless her friends force her out for a drink. Her demeanor, the tired bags under her eyes, and premature gray hair all give off the impression to others that she is older than she actually is.
• Abilities: A sharp memory and knack for multi-tasking and organization are what earn her a secretary position with Bu Xamoda, the Revolutionaries Commander-in-Chief. From there she becomes a close confidant and advisor to the general, giving her direct influence over all Revolutionary military operations and indirect influence in political matters.
• Weaknesses: Being judgmental and condescending often leaves her isolated in the backroom maneuvering of Revolutionary politics.
• Goals: Win the Revolution.
• Motivation: All her life she had accepted that the world was what it was. She was going to be poor. She was going to take care of her family, get married, grow old, die. Maybe she'd lose her apartment. Maybe she couldn't afford food. That's just the way life was. Then the Revolutionaries offered her something else. That this was not her fate. That it was system keeping her down. But if she wanted to have a better world not just for herself but for her family, she had to fight for it. Get up. Change the world. Her time is now.
• Role in the Story: Sheba offers a perspective from Revolutionaries who want not just political revolution to bring back democracy, but social revolution to guarantee genuine equality for all as well.
• Backstory: Sheba was born in the Centauri Sector of the Empire. Unlike the rest of the country, which was created from the old Commonwealth or settled long afterwards, the Centauri Sector was part of a separate nation entirely before it was annexed by the Empire. Due to this the Centauri Sector has a more unique cultural identity and history. Most notably is that due to genetic tampering in the early colonization period, the Centauri start losing the color in their hair very young. Sheba was born and raised in a old space colony where population expansion resulted in slapdash affair to weld more living space to the existing structure, creating a confusing hodgepodge that functioned as an urban dwelling. Her family consisted of her mother and three younger siblings. She never knew her father, and isn't even sure if he is the same man who sired her siblings. Despite that, Sheba grew up as best a child in a poor neighborhood could. Her mother instilled in her a love of reading at a young age and Sheba loved to imagine herself as the the commoner girl in those stories where a dashing knight or prince in disguise came to sweep her off her feet.
• Taking care of four children on your own is hard work however. Sheba's mom struggled despite Sheba helping at an early age. It didn't take long for Sheba to notice the family's gradually worsening position, especially when there were periods of her mother reeking of alcohol and leaving the children with their grandparents for days on end. Sheba's fairy tale daydreams eroded over time as reality demanded more of her. She took life head on, getting a job as a teenager while still remaining a model student. If she worked hard, things would get better. She didn't need a dad and she didn't need a prince.
• And she didn't need a mom either, she'd soon be telling herself after her mother walked out on the family when Sheba was 17. All Sheba found was some money and a note saying goodbye. And so the hope of work and education being enough to rise above her current lot in life proved to be as much a fairy tale as a prince coming to her rescue. She left school, got another job, and threw herself into raising her siblings, the eldest of which was still five years younger than her. And so she settled into this role of struggling parent and breadwinner, hope at least her efforts would enable her siblings to have a better life.
• Things might have stayed this way had not the high class diner she waitressed at happened to become the gathering place for the local pro-democracy group. She paid them little attention at first. Who cared about a bunch a rabble-rousers going on about the social contract and democracy and all these other fancy terms she didn't know. But one day as she was cleaning off the tables, she noticed one of them had left behind a flyer. Reading it on her break, she became intrigued at the flowery references to the Commonwealth and it's democratic government. Her love of reading kicking in for the first time in a long while, she researched what the hell this thing was all about.
• What she saw stunned her. Ancient history that had never been taught in school. The refugee exodus from a tyrannical regime. The desperate, years long voyage across the stars for a new home. The miracle discovery of a new world in a binary star system. The cultivation of a whole new civilization and its expansion across the stars. And it wasn't done by iron fisted kings and warring lords, but ordinary people working together for the common good. People electing their leaders and holding debate on law and policy for the benefit of everyone. People rising up from humble beginning to make something greater than themselves. People like her.
• So why the hell was she and so many others like her living in squalor while the nobles lived up the high life without nary a concern for those they are supposed to be looking out for? Sheba grew angry. Righteous conviction surged through her blood. The First King had brought down the Commonwealth and all his heirs had perpetuated this injustice. What were all these stories of heroes and knights and kings and queens but propaganda glorifying the squabbles of the nobility while the people suffered? Why should the commoners be reduced to hoping and praying that whoever sits on the throne isn't incompetent or a tyrant? Sheba went from waiting on the tables of this pro-democracy group to sitting in on its meetings. Work and her family kept her from being a full time member, but her presence was welcome if occasionally disruptive. As much as she liked her new friends, she couldn't help but be annoyed at their petite bourgeoisie (See? She could learn fancy words too.) attitudes. They wanted to reform the government so that they could participate and rise in social status. She wanted specific social reforms to help communities like hers and only through democracy could the actual people get a say in what the people needed.
• Tensions were rising across the Empire. Sheba and her friends were not the only ones unhappy with the corrupt Empire and its out-of-touch monarch. She watched in horror with everyone else when a student uprising was crushed by the government. The death and carnage left her subdued, suddenly afraid what her ideological choices could mean for her family. She stayed out of the subsequent protests, partly out of fear but mostly not having the time to go. Then she suddenly had much more time, as she was fired from one of her jobs for her democratic sympathies. Walking home, trying to figure out what this meant for her rent, she happened across a "parade" the local noble had organized which marched suspects arrests for expressing anti-monarchy sentiment to be extradited to prison off-colony as a warning to any others who got dangerous ideas. This turned out to be a poor idea as sullen stares turned into angry murmurs, Sheba's among them. Maybe it was because she was tired and her brain wasn't running properly. Maybe it was because she was bitter and wouldn't listen to her brain if it was running properly anyway. But Sheba was angry. Angry at the injustice, angry at her life, angry at the system, society, the world. And so Sheba expressed her anger in the most base form of political protest. She threw something.
• Sheba chucked her water flask at the security forces. Hit one on the head. The guards lunged after her, but the crowd rallied to her defense. More objects flew, then fists and and batons, then heavy weaponry. Within minutes the noble and his men were rolled over by the wave of angry rioters. More guards came in. More people fought back. Whatever plans Sheba and her friends had come up with about leading a democratic movement went out the window. The Revolution was here now.
• And thus, Sheba's story begins seven days into a revolt to take control of the colony. A revolt she accidently started.

Relevant Tropes:

• Almighty Janitor: Because of the hobbled together nature of the Revolutionary Forces position and ranks don't always see eye to eye as roles shift with every reorganizing. Initially she doesn't even have a rank and is just Xamoda's private secretary. But because nobody gets to Xamoda without going through her and he invest a lot of his authority in her, she comes to wield a vast amount of power. It isn't till much later that she is given an actual high rank and the official position of chief-of-staff.
• The Confidant: Her insights into both military and political matters leads to Admiral Xamoda talking more and more freely to her concerning the state of affairs, then opening up personally, and trusting her to issue orders and draw up battle formation in his name that he wouldn't dare allow anyone else to do.
• Cool Big Sis: It irks her that her siblings never saw her this way because she was too busy being a mom to be a sister. And she still can't be once she joins the war because she's the youngest person on Xamoda's staff. She's kinda bitter that this part of life was denied to her.
• Dark Secret: Nobody realizes she was the one who triggered the revolt on her colony and she wants to keep it that way. Partly because of the guilt at causing so much death and destruction, and partly because if the Loyalists ever find out and capture her, she's guaranteed a one way trip to the firing squad.
• First-Name Basis/ Only Known by Their Nickname: Breaks with military norms by having everyone refer to her simply as Sheba. Because not once in her life has anyone been able to pronounce "Arciniega" correctly. Especially when they're reading it off a name tag.
• Hero-Worshipper: Her cool and collected demeanor will fall apart the minute she starts talking about history. Rather paradoxically she idolizes both the Sage, a mysterious democracy advocate from a few generations ago whose firebrand arguments did the most to convince Sheba that the Commonwealth wasn't the chaotic cesspit the Empire made it out to be, and Eria Nehru, the right hand woman of the First King, who was most most responsible for reorganizing the old republic into the Empire. One for their ideals of what the state should be and one for her talents at state building.
• Honest Advisor: Xamoda trusts the fact that she likes to be right to offer him the most candid and researched opinions. And her more socially-oriented ideology and radically different upbringing offer a fresh perspective compared to his own conservative politics.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: She's put in charge of the bureaucratic affairs when the Revolutionaries take over her colony, and it's her masterful handling of the chaotic reorganization while taking care of three children that makes the changeover relatively easy. Admiral Xamoda notices her outsized role in this and adds her to his staff.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Even when officially not on the clock, Sheba and Xamoda will meet up to talk about life, the universe, and everything over drinks and strategy games. They are bonded by their mutual admiration for each other's wisdom, dignity and, increasingly, where they want the country to go after the war.
• Letting Her Hair Down: She looks vastly different when she's relaxed, doesn't have bags under her yes, and is literally letting her hair down. Which isn't very often. You'd think the grey hair would stand out more, but one very buzzed karaoke night resulted in disciplinary action against most of Xamoda's staff when he walked in on them except for Sheba because he genuinely didn't recognize she was one of the drunken revelers.
• Old Shame: Though it really doesn't matter to anyone else, Sheba's the only member of Xamoda's staff who doesn't have a high school diploma, much less have any experience in higher learning and it really bothers her because there are certain pre-war subjects she inadvertently gets excluded from when everyone hangs out in their free time.
• Promoted to Parent: With both her parents gone she took over raising her three younger siblings largely by herself. When she joins Xamoda's staff her salary is enough to pay for her grandmother to take care of them.
• The Reliable One: Her meticulous management of her family's life transfers seamlessly to managing Xamoda's life which ensures he can focus on winning the war without worrying about the day to day details of running the Revolutionary Forces.
• Shipper on Deck: She can see the mutual attraction between Admiral Xamoda and the Revolutionaries Chief Weapons Developer, Scholastica Vu, and frequently makes it so that his and her schedules require them to be together in the hopes that it'll prod them into a relationship.
• Student Council President: She was the head of the student administration before she dropped out of high school. It's her one claim to fame and seems so small and pointless afterwards that she's embarrassed to mention it. Once her fellow staffers find out they can't help but tease her for being such a goody goody.
• War Is Hell: Though she only ever once directly faced the enemy in a street battle, the bodies left an impression. Afterwards she spends much of her time on a warship where death can come from enemy weapons across space and you won't even know what hit you until the explosion and escaping oxygen collapse your lungs. She spends much of the time prior to her first space battle hiding in her room and spends much of the time afterwards vomiting from the stress.
• The Workaholic: It's actually hard for her to relax due to developing a fear that her not working would negatively impact her family. Much of Admiral Xamoda's ability to keep track of and solidify the initially fragmented Revolutionary forces across the nation can be attributed to her working around the clock.

Edited by Parable on Sep 21st 2020 at 3:44:35 AM

Well it's certainly interesting to see one of your heroes and well worth the read. Ahem, let's get started.

Before I speak about 'Sheba herself, I would like to once again mention how much I like the worldbuilding around her personal setting, origin and...Start Of...Light. While it is clear this is a futuristic setting with human struggles between the elder ways of nobility and monarchy vs "newfangled" democratic ideals, I also keep forgetting the Space Opera aspect of it for some reason and the setting of the crowded and overpopulated space-colony where she got her start are good to read about, both as a reminder and as a way to let the imagination go wild.

Honestly it's amazing to believe that she is only twenty years old, both because of the things she has accomplished, and the weight and responsibilities resting on her shoulders. One of those things would crush a person ten years her senior and yet she manages it so well, while actually seeming to thrive in her new environment with the Revolutionaries.

While all of your characters are inspiring (Anani the Undying Queen in particular!) there is something about Sheba's backstory that is inspiring and awesome in a different sort of way. Rather than see the twists and turns of powerful intrigues and larger-than-life heroes, we instead have an ordinary young woman just trying to do her best and upon being ground down, spring up into heights she probably didn't even imagine she could reach.

I said before that your characters all feel like people—-specifically they feel like how you or I would react if thrust into their situations, and 'Sheba might actually be the most "human" of everyone I've seen so far.

All that said, I do feel for her, especially in her backstory. The idea of suddenly having the one parent you've known just disappear without a trace, either out of inability to take the strain anymore or just plain falling out of love with the family, is heart-rending and I can't imagine what that did to her mind. Actually I take it back, I can—-it shows in her diligence and refusal to slack off or relent in her work. It's as though she cannot shake the thought that she will be like her mother and leave her family hanging—whether that is her biological family or her "new" family of revolutionaries.

The thought that she was the Unwitting Instigator of Doom for a massive revolution sort of amused me. I know it shouldn't since it's such a serious event that caused much death and destruction, but the thought of an overworked, tired victim of a politically motivated firing just losing it and causing a massive bout of chaos seems so...Joker-esque but in a good way.

As I side note, it took me a while to realize that the Revolutionaries spoken of in this profile are the same "coffee shop Founding Fathers" that you mentioned earlier. For some reason I just didn't connect the two.

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

If the monarchy would stop forgetting too, then this whole revolution thing might not have been a problem.

Sheba is definitely from a different walk of life than most of the others I've posted. So far I think she's the only one who has no immediate connection or relationship to the nobility or the workings of the government when she's first introduced and isn't even remotely involved in courtly drama. Her participation in this entire thing is almost entirely on ideological grounds, albeit aggravated by her personal/family issues.

It's funny that I didn't even consider that she might actively be trying to prove that she is not her mother, but it makes so much sense when put in that light. And hey, it can totally be funny that she ended up being an Unwitting Instigator of Doom. Maybe not haha funny, but you can certainly appreciate that dark absurdity of the situation. Heck, the other characters wouldn't even believe her if she told them since the very idea of Sheba acting out violently like that is so antithetical to who she is that they couldn't even comprehend it.

And yeah, these friends are the type of people I was referring to with that coffee shop moniker. People who are more talk than action, and their own eventual action is triggered by the violent deeds of others without their knowledge or approval until after the fact.

Time for another character from my WIP.

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Name: Candelaria Quintana

Age: 23

Personality: Candelaria is hardened, stubborn, and temperamental. Having had a difficult and traumatizing past and living in a place that forces her to be a tough, un-sympathetic person makes it difficult for her to open up to people or show her soft side. Rest assured, that side does exist and she is also incredibly loyal, brave, and against all odds, compassionate- said compassion is just buried deep down inside of her, because she can't show weakness. She's also incredibly insecure and suffers from a belief that nobody around her actually cares about her, making it impossible for her to comfortably admit when she cares about anyone else.

Abilities: Candelaria is independent, brave as hell, and talented at knife-based combat. She's a hard and loyal worker and doesn't give in very easily. In a less relevant but still interesting note, she's also a talented artist and a highly talented biker.

Weaknesses: In addition to the insecurities mentioned above, Candelaria also suffers from her fair share of flaws. She's a habitual alcoholic, using alcohol to help her survive her situation. She's also extremely stubborn, temperamental, and can act like a huge jerkass at times, pushing people away especially if she legitimately cares about them out of fear that they couldn't care less about them. She also suffers from depression, meaning she spends most of her time being unproductive and self-destructive, rather than actually doing anything unless she's handed a specific task.

Goals: She wants to get revenge on the people who'd made her life a living Hell. She also has the more personal goal of dying outside of Corrosion Plaza, where she'd been living for the past several years.

Motivation: Vengeance and personal pride. She wants to make something of her life and she earnestly wants to do good in the world.

What does he actually DO??: She's a Supporting Character and member of the rebellion, showing up mostly to interact with Emory and Silver. She acts as their loyal-but-grumpy ally and serves her gang off-screen, popping up occasionally to argue with Emory over weapons or during scenes set in Seattle. She eventually gets to leave the Plaza and bond more closely with Emory, but for a while she's just the gang's "messenger".

Backstory: In this universe, the United States government has been taken over by members of a new and extreme religious group, the Meliorists. Candelaria and her family were originally impoverished Meliorists trying to follow their beliefs and have a good life, but it all backfired on her. All her life she was told she had to serve the wealthier members of society to earn her own worth, so at the age of 16 she dropped out of school and got a job working for the Amador Company as an Alaskan gold miner. Yup, as a 16 year old girl.

She lived in a single bunk-house with several men, all of whom made her feel uncomfortable and inferior. She was treated as the bottom of the totem-pole and this was when she first had to adopt her tougher outward personality. One day, she was abandoned and almost died in a mine collapse, only to be saved by two passing rebel healers. They recruited her into the rebellion and she was given the ability to leave Alaska with a few hundred compensation dollars from Amador.

Stuck in Seattle, she sought her leader's help in getting out of that city. She spent the night in the Plaza, and was attacked by a murderous gang member, who she was able to kill with a lucky strike to the head. The leader of Bloodeye, Bruno, ended up talking to the rebel leader Gerard about her, and they came to an agreement about what to do with her, against her will- she would stay in the Plaza as the living peace treaty between the groups, passing messages back and forth between both of her leaders. Bruno, however, treated her like garbage for being willing to call him out on his poor leadership, leading her to be the person she is today.

Relevant Tropes:

• Boss's Unfavorite Employee: Not only does Gerard not give two shits about her, Bruno despises her and takes every opportunity to demean and bully her, despite that she's the only reason Bloodeye hasn't died out yet. In referring to her as the "messenger", he's able to keep her as a lower-ranked gang member while still relying on her heavily.
• The Alcoholic: She drinks every night and carries a flask with her to deal with her morning hangovers.
• Anti-Hero: Fighting for the side of freedom and justice, but is heavily flawed despite this.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: A complete jackass half the time, but cares deeply about other people and shows it through her actions rather than attitude.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Fully believes people don't care about her, and that she needs to rely on herself and only herself. Also, clinical depression leads her to be pretty crabby at times.
• Dark and Troubled Past: As mentioned above.
• Knife Nut: It's her preferred weapon. She collects them in her jacket. The first one she ever got made her feel safe in the Plaza.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Like all Bloodeye members, she sticks to the gang dress-code of a red-and-black leather jacket.
• Gayngster: This hardened Bloodeye gang member is also a lesbian.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Dies to cripple the antagonist's military and save a town of innocent people from being slaughtered.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Slowly becomes more open about her feelings and more willing to trust other people.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Very easily upset, especially when she drinks. Which is all the time.
• Deadpan Snarker: Has a very sarcastic sense of humor and uses snark to speak the truth.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 9th 2020 at 12:38:19 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Good job with your tragic heroine!

[[In this universe, the United States government has been taken over by members of a new and extreme religious group, the Meliorists. Candelaria and her family were originally impoverished Meliorists trying to follow their beliefs and have a good life, but it all backfired on her]]

Takeover by the US government by a religious group (ala The Handmaid's Tale) is an interesting staple of speculative fiction so I'm already interested. I'm curious thouhgh; if Candelaria's family were Meliorists, and thus on the winning side of whatever conflict propelled their sect into power, what happened to push them into such squalor and hard-living?

Anyway, about Candelaria herself, she's a pretty interesting if sad character. It seems, from what I've gleaned from her profile, that she is someone that's spent her entire life at the mercy of others. Whether it be the circumstances that forced her from high school and into the mines, to the most blatant disempowerment of having a deal for her future made over her head. A lot of her character arc seems to be trying to do something for herself and of her own free will, not something directly or indirectly forced by others, which is a definitely worthy goal.

Her personality definitely seems something shaped by her environment; using alcohol to deal with the amount of stress, fear for your life, degradation and who-knows-what-else she's had to put up with in that hellhole honestly seems like one of the lesser paths one could take in terms of unhealthy coping mechanisms. It is a credit to the kind of person she is on the inside that she still retains a sense of kindness and desire to help others after all of that.

Her ultimate fate is, again, tragic but I hope that at least she was able to choose to go down that final path herself and not pushed into it by an order or threat from someone else.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Oct 24th 2020 at 8:48:02 AM

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

Basically, the Meliorist Church is all about money and status, but not every follower is actually able to achieve the life. She was taught that it was the ideal and if she did everything "correctly" she'd be as rich as the most powerful members of society, but her family couldn't really achieve the dream.

Oh, and her parents emigrating from Cuba is a contributing factor too.

Glad you like her! I think she's really fun, especially the more I develop her. And don't worry, she goes out on her own terms. Her friend tries to stop her and she's like "naw man I'm doing it"

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 24th 2020 at 1:09:02 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Definitely sounds like a interesting character.

Name: Grace

Age: 14

Personality: She's very quiet, and doesn't talk much. There's few people who know her well, as she struggles to make friends and isn't at all friendly to most people. She seems very serious and focused, but her friends know that she is more lazy than you'd expect. She tries to keep detached from what is happening, knowing that she's not that powerful, but her wanting to help people tends to conflict with that.

Abilities: Grace knows her way around a lot of technology and is good at making that work to her advantage. She also has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of poisons. She's good at spotting lies and false information.

Weaknesses: She's not that great at fighting, despite all her sister has tried to teach her and struggles knowing that she might cause problems for the group with her struggling to keep up. She's also very stubborn about her decisions, and on the rare occasion someone convinces her of a lie, she'll believe it for a long time.

Goals: Her sister has been sent to save someone, someone important. She'll follow her (of course), but really wants people to know what is happening (she doesn't herself, at the moment).

Motivations: She convinces herself that she is doing it only so that she can help her sister, and others if possible, but she sees it as a way to prove herself, that she is useful.

Role in the Story: The Protagonist and narrator. Sort of The Smart Guy to the team, even if it isn't quite a traditional Five-Man Band. The sister of an assassin who has been sent to find someone.

Backstory: She doesn't have much drama in her past, despite her sister. Her family are still alive, though she doesn't see them much.

Relevant Tropes: Science Hero, No Social Skills, Gamer Chick, Braids of Action, Brainy Brunette, Brilliant, but Lazy.

What I find interesting about Grace is that, despite you naming her as the protagonist, she comes off as the sidekick in what I assume is her story. Following her sister, letting others do the fighting, not exactly being the center of attention in social settings, being lazy instead of the quintessential go-getter...it gives off the feeling of her being a passive participant in the plot.

I'm guessing that that's intentional, either as a way to kickstart her character arc and have her elbow her way into the spotlight or as to give her more of a supporting role despite being the audience's metaphorical tour guide. If that's what you're after, then cool. If not? You might want to take a look at her place in her tale, and how to make her assert her presence.

That all said, what really gets me raising an eyebrow is her poison proficiency. Is she the type of person who can make and supply it to others (like her sister), and then washes her hands of dirty deeds done dirt cheap? Does she know about poison just so she can keep herself from taking in anything toxic? How'd she pick up such a delightful hobby in the first place? To be clear, I'm not asking to try and grill or hassle you; it's just a character facet that gets my mind whirring over the possibilities and potential. Doubly so, since this is the first poison expert that comes to mind.

Whatever the case, not a bad character. Gets me interested in learning more, which is always a plus.

=======================

And so begins my vandalization of TV Tropes once more. I've already talked about this character before on several occasions, but as of a couple of months ago I've got her pretty much finalized — with her story basically 100% written. (I activate the Spell Card "Obnoxious Self-Promotion", which allows me to direct you to the Wattpad page in my signature.) Now it's time to see how far I've come — gather data, feedback, etc. for the sake of fine-tuning. Hopefully I won't have to do much more besides minor tweaks, but I'm not entirely opposed to an overhaul depending on reader reactions. I hope it doesn't come to that, though. I'm a sleepy boi.

So once again, let's take it from the top. Introducing...

Name: Rosemary "Rosie" Haywood

Theme Song (for Funsies): "Get on Your Feet" by Gloria Estefan

Appearance: 33 years old, with blue eyes so bright you'd swear they were radioactive. Plenty of long blonde hair; feathered and fluffy, natch. Not exactly tanned, but her time in a Pacific metropolis has left her a healthy, sunny shade — though even without it, she'd still have freckles splashed across her face. Tends to dress simply (at the start she's in some well-worn pants/sneakers and a tank top repping her favorite 80s band), but she could wear a suit of armor and still have a figure that stands out. Since she self-identifies as being built like a widened hourglass, she's a far cry from petite.

Also, she starts the story at over fifty feet tall. Emphasis on "starts". Insert requisite Steven Universe song here...which is, like, the third time I've made this joke, but whatever.

Personality: A gentle giant, through and through. Despite her size, Rosie at her worst just tries to live her everyday life — grocery shopping, eating burgers, sweating rent payments, the works. At her best, she's irrepressibly sweet and supportive to everyone around her. She has aspirations of being an actress, but for the most part, she's content with flashing a bright smile to anyone who doesn't run away screaming at the sight of her. Curiously, what she lacks in book smarts — which is plenty — she compensates for with raw emotional intelligence, to the point where at times it's like she's a psychic. All in all, she's a fun, friendly person to be around. At least, that's what she wants you to think...

Role in the Plot: Rosie is what happens when a giant woman walks among us — which is to say, it's a bad old time. Her living expenses in the city of Santa Infierno constantly leave her penniless. Most modern amenities — from jobs to buildings — are too small for her. She's either shunned by society, scorned, or seen as a city-stomping horror. Amidst all of that, she keeps a stiff upper lip.

All this, of course, is in spite of the fact that she's getting bigger. Why? No clue. And she's growing at a faster rate than ever before. So, when the pressure starts getting to her — a denied audition, public humiliation, a smattering of property damage, et cetera, et cetera — one bad night leads to a BIG change in her life. Literally. And seriously.

Good news is, she's not the only threat facing Santa-In. Shady arms deals — part of a scheme spearheaded by the dishonorable Mayor Pierce — are putting weapons straight out of a sci-fi movie into the hands of thugs all over. Taking away the boys' toys will give Rosie peace of mind, and fewer chances to get hit with lasers, missiles, and the occasional giant robot fist. Bad news is, Pierce is more than willing to use his craftiness and connections to make Rosie a scapegoat for what ails the city. And as it so happens? The more stressed she gets — the more her emotions run wild — the bigger she gets.

Yeah. It's gonna be a bad old time.

Powers and Abilities: Rosie would rather use her power for good; that much is true. It's also true that she's got an overwhelming amount of power, even relative to her size. At the outset alone, she's able to treat an SUV like a pillow. Conventional weapons (i.e. bullets) won't do anything to her, making those illegal arms all the more precious — but her progressive size brings with it more endurance. Half the "fun" is the arms race between the thugs and one very special little lady.

Nobody knows 100% how or why Rosie works (though there ARE in-universe explanations), but that aside, she does have some secondary abilities. She's got a healing factor that patches her up slowly when she's at rest, and her senses, already dramatically better than most, only get better as she gets bigger.

Weaknesses: Rosie;s the end result of a Sizeshifter with a bad case of Power Incontinence; she has no way to stop her growth, and can only get bigger. Worse yet, getting bigger means getting heavier, slower, and clumsier, with tons of collateral damage for her to worry about just by walking through town. She's got as big a wingspan as you'd expect, but her range is usually outstripped by the guns her enemies are packing. And there are many guns; tough as she is, if there are enough people around and opening fire on her, then she will go down eventually. For a while, at least.

Motivation: Rosie hasn't let go of her dream (for good or ill), but she has other goals in mind nowadays: living life as best she can. Making the world she loves a happier place. And, once the plot gears up in full: reconnecting with those from her past. Given that she's more than a little guilty of wrecking chunks of the town, Rosie willingly bears the weight of her responsibilities. It's all for the sake of, to paraphrase her words, "doing what she knows is right".

But doing the right thing isn't easy, especially when you're best measured in stories. No matter how noble Rosie's intentions, she can only reach out to so many people; meanwhile, the whole of society is content with giving into fear, mistrust, and flat-out hatred. As a wannabe actress, Rosie's very good at playing The Pollyanna. But she has her limits. If she's pushed too far, even Godzilla would go bug-eyed at the sight of her.

Relevant Tropes:

• Red Baron: The local DJ coined the name "Maxima" — short for amant maxima, or "biggest lover" as far as he can tell — after Rosie thrashed a crime syndicate a few years back. It's stuck so irrevocably that more people know her by "the Maxima" than her actual name.
• Square-Cube Law: Discussed. Rosie's mere existence violates the laws of physics; given the reasons behind her very being, there's a possibility she's a low-key Reality Warper.
• Walking Disaster Area: Part of the reason why she's so slow is that she's constantly making deliberate movements — all part of an effort to keep the damage she does to a minimum. Of course, each growth spurt forces a readjustment, and she doesn't always have time for it.
• Big Eater: By necessity. Thankfully (or not), one of her secondary powers lets her eat anything — steel girders, concrete, old ship hulls — and still get some nourishment out of it. Shame about the taste, though. She's got a major sweet tooth.
• Magic Pants: Averted at first; she ends up shredding her standard outfit early on, forcing the police make a temporary dress out of tarps. Played straight later on thanks to getting some of Pierce's tech — which leads to...
• Walking Swimsuit Scene: Her default costume from then on — a white bikini with pink hibiscus print on one side, along with a Flower In Her Hair for good measure. It has the uncanny ability to grow along with her and takes minimal damage, at the cost of making her look a little indecent to good boys and girls of all ages. Rosie says there's a story behind it, but most either don't believe her or don't care. She's not lying.
• Unskilled, but Strong: She's never had proper combat training, so Rosie would be lacking in finesse even if she wasn't lugging around tons of weight in each limb. On the flip side, she only needs to use that raw power and instinct to win.
• Wrestler in All of Us: She has no problems busting out power bombs, suplexes, and the odd clothesline against the giant robot du jour.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Shades of it. To wit: when trying to convince a store manager to sell her a soccer ball to replace the one she kicked into the sky:
  Rosie: Please? I'll be your best friend. I give the best hugs.
  Manager: Yeah, I'm married.
  Rosie: Pretty sure I got her beat.
  Manager: Did you just insult my wife?
  Rosie: (beat) (tilts head) Is this a trick question? If it is, I didn't study. But also, I choose C.
• Covert Pervert: Debatably; she tends to get onto some tangents, but often gets cut off before she can explain in full. Probably for the best, since otherwise it'd mean giving her a chance to describe what she could do with a camera.
• Farmer's Daughter: While she lives in pseudo-LA, she's actually from the rural, southern town of Pineford. Thanks to that, she's still got a marked accent and the requisite diction in her normal speech.
• Character Tics: Verbally, she has a habit of calling people "sweetie". Physically? She tends to hug herself whenever she's distressed...if only because there's no one out there big enough to give her what she needs.
• Hidden Depths: She might come off as airheaded and ditzy ("I've got the biggest brain ever! That must make me some kinda super-genius!"), but the sheer breadth of her knowledge of flowers — common or scientific — means she's not as dumb everyone thinks she is. Speaking of...
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Her accent and her eyebrow-raising statements (silly or sincere) make her out to be quite the idiot. Turns out her lines are often conscious choices to come off as cute, funny, or just plain endearing. That, and to pay tribute to her southern roots. When it's time to get serious, though? She drops all those pretenses and adopts an entirely different manner of speech.
• Tragic Dream: She's wanted to be an actress since she was a little girl — "little" in this case being a 9-foot-tall 8-year-old. Accommodations weren't, and still aren't, possible for her; less so thanks to the disdain for her accent and body type. The ultimate irony? She's got the potential to be an incredible actress — and an even better singer.
• Fangirl: Of 80's rock, particularly of the (unpopular) band Hot Zone. She'll regularly try to sell people on their talent, often name-checking their ballad "Summer Blossoms" — partly because it introduced her to her favorite actress-to-be, Starla Michaels, and thus kickstarted her own aspirations of stardom. Despite Rosie being a diehard fan — right down to wearing the same bikini Starla did in the "Summer Blossoms" music video — Starla herself was a D-lister at best who's long since faded into obscurity. Crucially, Starla died in a plane crash on her way to visit "her biggest fan" ...but that hasn't stopped Rosie from seeing her as a hero.
• I Hate Past Me: Cheerful as she may seem, Rosie deeply regrets how she was in the past, to the point where she still has nightmares about it. Even if she was bigger than Shaq as a child, she was a friendless, constant victim of bullying and a timid, awkward little girl. Getting away from that persona is Rosie's top priority. Granted, it's not like that's the only aspect of her past she laments...
• Peek a Bangs: With hair as long and fluffy as hers, it's only natural for it to happen on occasion. When it stays over one eye, it's a sign that Rosie's emotionally distressed — and having trouble keeping her mask on.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Rosie has a curvy build ("on the right side of plus-sized", in her words), but thanks to how physical she has to get with work/errands, her softness is well-tempered. That doesn't stop people (like the story's Simon Cowell clone, only meaner) from flat-out calling her fat.
• Gag Boobs: He may be smug and skeezy, but when Mayor Pierce says "they're bigger than her head," believe him. While they're basically proportional with the rest of her body, prior to her growth she still wears a bra "made by a cabal of rogue aerospace engineers". And over the course of the story? They cause her to 1) hack out a chunk of a building with one swing, 2) let her carry a money-filled car in her cleavage to pay off her landlord, and 3) make an entire skyscraper groan under their weight when she leans forward.
• Proud Beauty: She's not the type to boast about her appearance, but Rosie's at peace with the way she looks. She's even named her breasts Daisy and Poppy.
• Slut-Shaming: She'll get some stray looks and catcalls, but more often than not, Rosie's appearance makes her the victim of this. Whether they diss her from afar or insult her to her face (not-Simon Cowell goes on a tear), portions of the population take issue with her body before and after she goes gigantic. Incidentally, Rosie's only been with one man her entire life, and happily married to him. Briefly.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Rosie has this dynamic with everyone she meets, starting with not-Simon Cowell's gofer, the mousy (5'5") Henry. It goes forward and backward from there, the former involving her tween, 3'6" son Chase, and the latter including her marriage to the 5'10" Ralf...at least, before tragedy struck.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Rosie's fighting a PR war more than she is thugs, illegal tech, giant robots, and systemic government corruption. Once her height zooms up (and following a public mishap, itself following a night of block-busting), she spends a decent amount of the story using her size for charity, community service, or otherwise proving how charming she can be. It's not enough to change her image in full, with or without Pierce's meddling; her size makes her a threat, which is what people understand before they get word of her service and manners. Notably, a "preacher" (a conman in disguise) stages a religious rally and props Rosie up as a licentious demon enacting the end of days.
• Bullying a Dragon: What many, from villains to civilians, subject Rosie to day after day. The real killer is that for the most part, both parties know that the aggressors can get away with it. If Rosie lashes out, it'll make a bad situation worse. She's got no choice but to endure.
• Drowning My Sorrows: It takes a LOT to get her drunk, but Rosie's willing to lay down plenty of cash if it'll help her get through an average Friday night. Once she's sloshed? There's a 50/50 chance she'll either become a shambling mess who openly talks about her problems for once, or blabbers like Foghorn Leghorn.
• Stepford Smiler: In case it wasn't obvious by now, this is her real personality (or the mask for the real personality). While there's a sunny side to her, countless traumas and trials have left her a hollowed-out mess of a person. It really says a lot when some of her most common phrases are "Everything's fine!" "Don't worry. Just smile!" and "Laugh when you wanna cry!"
• Beware the Nice Ones: The only thing saving Santa Infierno from getting wiped off the map is Rosie's saintly patience and love for her fellow men. Even then, she has her limits. Bully her all you want, but bully someone else in her presence — be it a single, meek gofer or an entire hospital — and you'll regret it quickly. Push her too hard, though? Let's just say you don't want to be within a three-mile radius of her.
• The Fettered: Even with all of the hate, violence, and garbage thrown her way including a whole damn army bombing her and blasting her with tank shells, Rosie loves the world and virtually everyone in it. She believes whole-heartedly that people are generally good, and strives to be a hero — actress or not — who can put smiles on their faces.

=======================

And that's that. Whoever's unfortunate enough to read...that...feel free to ask me questions. I held back some details by virtue of not spoiling or even alluding to plot details, so let me hear everything that's on your mind.

Thanks in advance. And feel free to appreciate my Yugioh reference. I've been playing a lot of Duel Links lately.

My Wattpad — A haven for delightful degeneracy

Well Rosie certainly not a boring character, I will lead off with that! I'm not sure how often you get this (so forgive me if I'm beating a dead horse) but she reminds me of the protagonist of Monsters vs Aliens...or at least I think the giant woman was the protagonist, I'm not entirely familiar with the movie as a whole.

While Rosie's adventures and personal trials and tribulations are fascinating and something I'll get to in a moment, I have to admit that I like what I see when it comes to how she interacts with her world, and the world itself. You paint a very good example of how someone with superhuman abilities like hers would have issues functioning in a modern society, and even better, how she would deal with those struggles. There's no dramatic monologues about maintaining a heroic presence among the people in the face of hatred like Batman or overwrought attempts at Aesops about inclusivity like the X-Men. Just the plain everyday understanding that many people are going to be shocked, annoyed and all sorts of other things by a fifty-foot-tall woman and the attendant accidental damage she might cause, while the woman herself is just trying to be the best person she can be, like most of us.

Anyway, that's about the most I can muster for deep character/world analysis for now, my apologies. The rest are honestly just questions, I apologize if they are pesky but I'm interested in her.

I noticed that her backstory is conspicuously missing and I'm curious now if that is on purpose considering what you said about avoiding spoilers. Are superpowers like hers a common thing in this universe? How did her parents/family deal with the fact that their daughter was a...superhuman who grew prodigiously from an early age?

Finally, the way you wrote it seems a little unclear but it seems like she had a son at some point? Does she still have contact with this child and her ex-husband, and is that what you mean by "connect with others from her past" as a part of the plot?

There are probably others, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

Oh and one more thing:

[[Whoever's unfortunate enough to read...that...feel free to ask me questions.]]

Trust me when I say that your entry is nothing compared to the desecration I have planned for this poor unsuspecting forum . By the time you read this, you'll have an idea of what I mean. And it's fine! I like long entries about characters; they give a greater sense of the person you created and give a better chance to comment and question certain aspects of the story. Plus they're just plain entertaining.

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

Oooh, a response! Thank you kindly. Makes me want to do a little dance...but I won't because it's late and/or I don't want to break something. Anyway, I'll take things point-by-point.

• Actually, you're one of the rare few to bring up Monsters vs. Aliens. You're right in saying that the XL-leading lady was the protagonist there; the thing is — and this is something proven right here in this forum the last time I posted an earlier version of Rosie — when it comes to giant heroines, it's slim pickings. I've spent more time than I care to admit trying to find resources/reference materials for a story starring a giant heroine, but turned up A) nothing, B) a brief gimmick and thus inadequate, or C) the inevitable. Basically, I'm pulling a Thanos here.

• It's true that Rosie has to deal with a lot of hate thrown her way, which is intentional on my part. I'd be lying if I said it didn't concern me, though — like the reactions of the populace are too lopsided, or unrealistic for the sake of making Rosie pure woobie-bait. If I get the chance someday, then I'd like to better represent the "yea" side of the argument in a sequel...and of course, have things go WAY too far in the opposite direction.

• I can tell you upfront that superpowers are utterly nonexistent in this story. Outside of Rosie and the tech the bad guys are using, which are powered by the same energy source, i.e. "CHAOS" everyone is more or less grounded in reality. By the same token? The next-tallest person in the story tops out at 6'7".

• There's a dream sequence in Chapter 5 that gives the audience a glimpse of Rosie's school life, but that's about it for a direct view of her past. I have the sequence of events strung together in my head, but outside of a couple of offhanded mentions in-universe, I'm leaving that off the table for now. I'll say this, though: when it comes to her family dealing with their giant daughter? They did so poorly. Rosie reveals later on in a Q&A that her mom died giving birth to her, while her father died prematurely from overwork and stress from taking care of her.

• Well, I was trying to downplay it to make it a bit of a surprise in the story (and keep the post a semi-reasonable length), buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut...that son of hers? Yeah, he's actually the deuteragonist. They used to be together as a family, but stuff happened and they've been apart for a good five years. Then the plot happens, and they've got no choice but to reconnect. Given all that and more, maybe I'll post about him here at some point and elaborate. As for the husband? Let's just say life got in the way of love. Until it didn't.◊

Whatever the case, thanks for suffering through my post. I've got 100K+ words to get uploaded on Wattpad — if I go that far — but it's nice to know that I'm at least doing something right if my creations aren't making anyone bleed from every orifice and speak in tongues.

And now I'm off to upload some more. Because only cowards have normal sleep cycles.

My Wattpad — A haven for delightful degeneracy

Wow, you replied faster than I thought. Thanks for answering my questions though, it was informative.

1. I'm glad I was spot-on. You're right; giant woman aren't really "Main Protagonist" material for some reason, though I have to admit I've never actually gone out of my way to find a story where one is feautred.

2( Ok, technically 3) I just took for granted that the enhanced tech the villains utilized would hurt her where ordinary weapons wouldn't, simply because it was advanced weaponry and there needs to be something that can endanger your hero(ine) or they will become an invincible bore that no one cares about. I really did not expect an actual explanation for the phenomenon. It's fascinating that their power source is the same. So I guess it's like an inversion of Like Cannot Cut Like. I wonder if exposure to that power in the womb or as a baby had any influence on her.

4. Concerning her mother and father and their fate...I thought about saying this when making my original comments, but now it seems even more appropriate. Rosie's story seems like a slightly darker take on the children's book Swamp Angel. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's about a young girl born in the (I think 1800s) south who is for no apparent reason a giant. She goes on to use her giant-related powers to help people and all that. Describing Rose's childhood and the strain her condition put on her parents makes me think of that story and how it's like Swamp Angel but with a bit of Reality Ensues.

5. Well that's interesting. I'm curious if he has the same or similar powers to his mother (though I imagine that he probably doesn't if superpowers are as nonexistent in this world as you say). I wonder who he's been staying with since Rosie's obviously not taking care of him and her late husband is, well late.

[[Whatever the case, thanks for suffering through my post. I've got 100K+ words to get uploaded on Wattpad — if I go that far — but it's nice to know that I'm at least doing something right if my creations aren't making anyone bleed from every orifice and speak in tongues.]]

It's all good—-a Brown Note or two every once in a while builds character . Anyway like I said, I have no room to complain anyway since mine is...immense. But good luck with your uploading.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Oct 30th 2020 at 10:48:48 AM

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

Because I've been extensively posting the villains in a particular arc from a setting of mine, I thought I'd post a hero(ine) from there.

• Name: Mary-Jo Becker

• Age: 23

• Appearance: Jo is a tall pale young woman standing 5'7 in height, with a rail-thin and lanky physique. Her face is long and angular with gaunt cheekbones, and her deep-set eyes are a haunting near-colorless shade of gray—-a marked trait of the Becker family. Jo keeps her black hair cut short, and it tends to be unkempt and tousled most of the time. After her transformation into a white porzite tree and the restoration of her human form, all her body hair was left snow-white. Jo seldom smiles, her facial expressions are either anxious frowns or utterly blank, except for her constantly roaming and wary eyes. When her rare smiles do occur, they are faint and wistful. Her usual attire consists of tank tops, baggy jeans and flats or alternately overalls and heavy protective gloves and boots when working. Most of her clothes are worn and shabby, and are often stained with dirt, dust or oil. Like all of the Beckers, she speaks with a heavy accent associated with Sulvey, the Radiant Union province where her family resides. After she officially joins the Guild of the Triumvirate, Jo wears the distinctive ring that marks membership to the organization on her left ring finger.
  • In her petrified form Jo was much smaller the average white porzite tree, standing only nine feet tall, with a slender trunk that twisted in a way that caused her to lean slightly to the right. She had seven upswept branches that curved downward at the top. The entire tree was made entirely of perfectly smooth and reflective white crystal, and pulsed with soft inner light like a silent heartbeat. As Jo’s entombed mind grew close to shutting down completely, these pulses grew weaker and weaker. The small stature of the tree was because she was injected with a smaller amount of liquid white porzite than what is usually used on Beckers by members of Elizabeth Mourner’s staff, and her odd right-leaning posture was due to a brutal spinal injury inflicted on her in the harrowing minutes before her petrification.

• Personality:

Mary-Jo is a strong-willed young woman with a keen sense of curiosity about the world around her. Her other traits include a fondness for working with her hands, birdwatching, and chain smoking. Unfortunately, the emotional and physical pain she has suffered in her life has inflicted an array of psychological scars that negatively affect her behavior. Jo once had a strong desire to experience the world outside the boundaries of the Becker homestead and the vast wooded swamp that surrounds the ancient family property…but her three years of torment as a white porzite tree, and the betrayal that led to her fate, have pushed her to bitterly embrace the ideology held by her family—that Kishlaith is a cruel place and that its people harbor a malevolent hunger to exploit the Becker bloodline’s “gift”.

As a result, Jo finds it difficult to trust anyone who is not of her kin and is ever-watchful for any signs of ill-intent by people around her. She stands ready to defend herself at a moment’s notice, to the point of stealing and hoarding kitchen knives and other utensils and tools in her quarters to use as weapons in an emergency. She tries to avoid interacting with others for the most part, making her seem aloof and unfriendly. When talking to people, she is often terse and blunt and will not hesitate to tell people when she no longer wishes to speak or simply walk away from the conversation if she feels uncomfortable. Other times she will stop the conversation when she feels troubled by its direction and then restart it hours or days later when she is ready, without regard for the time that has passed. Jo will not hesitate to lash out with physical force if she feels sufficiently threatened or more rarely if her temper flares up. Despite her feelings about the world, Jo has a soft spot for children. Having often aided in taking care of the children born to her cousins, she cannot bring herself to feel any hostility towards kids even if they hail from outside her family. She is quick to offer them help and very polite and soft spoken towards them.

Jo has an uneasy opinion of the GOT. While she understands that the fraternity of adventurers played a major part in saving her, she finds it difficult to let her guard down around them, because their large and diverse membership means she cannot easily differentiate those who are trustworthy and those she feels warrant suspicion. Their repeated interrogations about her origins and how she became a white porzite tree make Jo even more anxious, since she feels her answers could potentially leave her family open to even more danger. She tries to handle her relations with the GOT’s members on a case-by-case basis, but she openly dislikes the organization’s medical team, due to being forced through painful and often embarrassing physical therapy to relearn how to use her restored body, along with numerous vaccinations that agitated her newfound dread of syringes and needles. Her misgivings for their members and outrage at her treatment by their medical staff aside, Jo is aware that she is stranded in the dangerous and unfamiliar outside world she once fantasized about, and the Guild of the Triumvirate is her only solid anchor while she tries to mentally and physically recover from her ordeal, and decide her next move in defeating the “true enemy” that has hunted her kin for generations.

She expresses a distinct level of trust in Mia Aimms, a powerful mage and one of the co-founders of the GOT. It was Mia who freed Jo from her crystalized state and saved her sanity, a debt she knows she can never repay, and she is shaken by the revelation that Mia risked her life to accomplish the task. Furthermore, she feels a connection to Mia through the numerous little things the mage did for her while she was petrified, such as reading to her, singing to her or just carrying on one-sided conversations about her day-to-day life. This along with Mia’s moral support during her physical therapy has made Jo feel safe enough around her to let her guard down and share small snatches of information about her family and even some stories from her childhood. She appreciates Mia’s own stories and tries to respond positively to Mia’s attempts at rekindling her interest and curiosity about Kishlaith’s wonders. This said, her trust in Mia is fragile and easily damaged by even the smallest of white lies, something Mia had to learn the hard way. Their relationship is further muddled by Jo’s growing romantic feelings for the older woman which intensifies her long-conflicted emotions towards her sexuality and fear of once again opening up to someone.

Jo’s relationship with her family is a complicated one. Her father’s position of leadership in the clan heaped high expectations on her shoulders from birth, and her interest in the World Beyond the Woods often made her a target of harsh verbal and physical punishments from her parents and other relatives. She was often frustrated with her relatives for being content to ignorantly live and die within the confines of the family property, without ever questioning why. She sometimes saw herself as the only one truly interested in improving life for the Beckers, and resented her relatives for hindering her efforts to potentially benefit them all. Her resentment even began to include the revered Godfather Isaac, the family’s eternal guardian, for his support of the isolationist tactics and paternalistic way of treating her relatives.

Repeated failures to carry her pregnancies to term and the slow realization that she was a lesbian made Jo feel defective and useless to her family. She is confused and guilt-ridden over her sexuality since she considers it part of whatever Abnormality prevents her from performing her obligation to help continue the bloodline. This guilt only sharpens the grief she feels for her lost potential children. Receiving a savage beating only a Becker could survive from her husband and subsequently cursed as an Abnormal for her single reckless attempt to act on her same-sex attraction, pushed Jo to physically isolate herself from her kin despite still loving them. Her fantasy of exploring the World Beyond the Woods devolved into desperation as she began to view leaving the property as a cure for her terrible misery. This, combined with her deep loneliness from her self-imposed separation from her family, made her foolishly trusting towards outsiders and willing to accept friendship and even a romance from one of them.

Despite these harsh aspects, she feels a strong sense of love and devotion towards the Becker family as a whole. From childhood this has manifested as a determination to protect her loved ones, serve the clan’s interests, and perhaps see her family finally break free from their stagnant lifestyle of persecution, hiding and fearful murder. She felt a great sense of unity and closeness among her many, many cousins and felt loved and cared for by her aunts and uncles. She often aided in looking after the children of her family when not doing other chores and truly liked the task. While her relationship with her mother and father was strained, Jo does care for her parents. She dislikes the favoritism her older brother received growing up, but also looks up to him and trusted his insight enough to seek his recommendation on the cousin with whom she should bear children as her reproductive duty to the family approached. She will not tolerate any insults or even criticism of the Becker family by anyone, even if those remarks are made on her behalf or in her defense.

Finally, Jo is haunted by her petrification and the events that led to it. She suffers from vivid recurring nightmares of the moment her “friends” held her down and injected her with white porzite and will sometimes experience outright flashbacks to her years of immobile sensory deprivation. There are awful moments where she wonders if she is still petrified and if her rescue and second chance at life is all an elaborate hallucination. Jo dislikes being completely still and is often in some manner of motion, wringing her hands, tapping her feet or cracking her knuckles. The sight of syringes and needles causes her severe anxiety that can rapidly escalate into panic, making vaccinations or administration of drugs difficult. In her worst moments, Jo will furtively inflict minor injuries on herself, so the pain can reassure her that she really has regained her body. She feels nothing but bitter hatred for the three teenage outsiders who tricked her into false friendship and romance and then petrified her, describing the trio as “fuckin’ monsters”. Jo is very self-conscious of her white hair post-petrification, since the Beckers have always viewed family members marked with it as agents of looming tragedy. However, she fiercely refuses any offers to help dye it back to its original black, for fear of her family finding out and punishing her for deceit.

• Abilities: Jo spent years working in the Becker homestead’s Garage as part of a team responsible for stripping usable parts from the machines and vehicles belonging to her family’s dead attackers and victims, and using the raw materials to perform repairs to the buildings and homes of the property. So, while she is not formally trained, she is an experienced mechanic and handywoman, with a particular skill at salvaging and repurposing machine components. Like most Becker children, Jo was taught several vital skills from an early age—namely how to shoot guns to hunt or defend herself, how to survive in the wilds outside the homestead with just a knife, methods of improvising weaponry, how utilize stealth to hide and escape pursuers, and familiarity with the system of coded flares the Becker family uses to detect and track intruders into their territory. She has a very good sense of direction and knows the swamps of Sulvey like the back of her hand, often able to tell exactly where she is in the tangled wetlands by using seemingly obscure or unnoticeable objects as landmarks. This knowledge of the area is so strong that she can immediately tell where she is even after the natural changes to the land over the years she has been absent. Jo is a strong and capable swimmer, particularly in the swamplands of her home. She can hold her breath for an extended period of time, track and follow people silently under the water and even carry more than one person with her while swimming. If forced to, she can perform many of these aquatic actions almost fully clothed. She is good with caring for children, able to keep track of several at once, keep them entertained, and speak with them in ways they will understand. As with all Beckers, Jo was born with abilities known within the family as “Alan’s Gift”—side-effects of their ancestor Alan Becker's spell to imprison the white porzite’s central intelligence within his bloodline. Her wounds heal more quickly and thoroughly than is natural for any living creature, without so much as a scar. Cuts and bruises vanish within minutes while deeper lacerations, broken bones, or missing fingernails and teeth will be perfectly restored in hours. She can even regenerate severe organ damage over a period of weeks, provided she survives the initial injury. Although Jo cannot regrow limbs, appendages or digits, these body parts can be reattached and restored to full function in a matter of days no matter how long they have been missing. She is also durable enough to survive the separation of multiple limbs, provided bleeding is stopped in time. Jo is capable of short but powerful bursts of inhuman strength. This enhanced strength allows her to leap incredible heights, lift or throw things three times her weight and size, bend metal, snap the bones of others like twigs, and deal severe damage with bare-handed blows even through dwarven and Thasmian crafted armor.
  • Appallingly, as a white porzite tree Jo’s regenerative capacity was increased tenfold. Any damage she suffered, from cracks in her body, missing chunks, and even whole branches, would repair itself within minutes. This meant she could literally be harvested for white porzite crystals forever with little danger of destroying her. The “Becker strain” crystals made from the broken-off shards of her petrified form were incredibly potent and amplified the preexisting powers of people who consumed them, while also driving the users into violent madness and crystalline mutations faster than most white porzite on the black market. For an unknown reason this also allowed Anja of the Revenge Trio to exercise just enough mental control over these corrupted individuals to form a crude army for the group to use against the Solinri Empire’s House Cavar.

• Weaknesses: Her maladaptive response to her various traumas have taken a toll on her mental health and overall quality of life. Jo’s hypervigilance and paranoia prevent her from making close friends by repelling people who have genuinely good intentions towards her. This even strains her relationship with Mia at times, something she really doesn't wish to happen. The depression from the resulting lack of companionship just worsens her overall state of mind. Jo is functionally illiterate when it comes to reading and writing Kishlaith's languages and lacking in a lot of basic knowledge of the world's affairs and history. Her difficulty reading leads to several awkward situations which make her bristle at being humiliated, but more dangerously, her inexperience with Kishlaith beyond her kin’s small world means she is liable to make mistakes and blunders that will prove lethal without being looked after. Jo is not a trained fighter by any stretch of the imagination, and has only killed once before. This means that she can be quickly outmaneuvered by skilled combatants, made easier by her hesitation to instantly go for a deathblow. The Becker family's regenerative power, though astonishing, does have limitations. Wounds that distress vital organs are likely to kill her from shock and blood loss before Alan's Gift can repair the damage. This means that injuries to certain areas of her body will still need some first aid or healing magic, just not the amount needed for an ordinary person. A severe beating will result in a slower overall recovery due to the sheer number of injuries that must be fixed by the Gift. She has a lower tolerance for pain than most people since her regeneration ensures she never has to suffer it for long, and she will rapidly loose composure if subjected to uncomfortable or outright painful stimuli for an extended period of time. Alan’s Gift does not give any protection against infectious diseases and so she is just as susceptible to them as any other human. Jo is one of the Beckers whose prodigious strength comes in unpredictable bursts with little consistency. The power can fade as rapidly as it rises up, leaving her literally holding a burden too great for her to bear. Because she is part of the Becker bloodline, she bears their most devastating weakness. Even the smallest exposure to white porzite through ingestion, injection or even through a tiny break in her skin will cause her body to undergo an instant transformation into a tree-like formation of white porzite, with her soul held captive within this regenerating crystal structure forever. Jo will always have this vulnerability, and even being returned to human form does not protect against another transformation in the future if she is exposed again.
  • Though her petrified form boasted extraordinary regeneration, this could be overcome by any assault that disrupted the structure of her tree and scattered her pieces in a single blow. This could be in the form of a targeted explosion from powerful weapons, magics or physical attacks dealt by someone with sufficiently enhanced strength.

• Goals: Jo wants to free her family from their isolated lifestyle and the never-ending fear of being abducted. To accomplish this, she believes she must confront the force behind their oppression—what she calls the "true enemy"—and put an end to it. Despite everything she has been through, there is a part of Jo that still clings to her dream of exploring the world beyond the Becker homestead to see what it has to offer...and she wants her rescuer Mia to be by her side while she fulfills this dream. Upon discovering the “true enemy’s” identity in the form of the vampire socialite Elizabeth Mourner, Jo devotes herself to aiding the GOT’s efforts to take down the old monster, even though her reasons and the Guild’s reasons somewhat differ. As Jo spends more time with the GOT, she develops a desire to overcome her trauma so that she can obtain something similar to the friendships she sees around her, and so that she can be the partner she thinks Mia deserves.

• Motivation: She has a natural sense of curiosity that was left unsatisfied by her inability to leave the swamp around her family’s property. Growing up with the semi-regular kidnappings of family members by powerful armed intruders to their territory stirred a deep wrath towards whatever force from the outside was responsible, and gave her a desire to fix the problem however she could. Her issues with being a lesbian stem from an ill-informed belief that her sexual orientation is part of whatever caused her many miscarriages and resulting inability to help continue the Becker bloodline. Being severely beaten and labeled an “Abnormal” for expressing her sexuality humiliated Jo and led her to seek out companionship and bonds with outsiders. However, her experience of betrayal and petrification by those same outsiders led to her distrust of all outside her family. Seeing the affection and solidarity the Guild of the Triumvirate members hold towards one another and their continued patience and compassion towards her—as well as their genuine outrage at her family’s situation—motivates her to seek treatment for her mental issues so she can accept their offers of friendship without fear, and embrace a romantic relationship with a woman she has come to deeply trust and admire.

• Role in the Story: Mary-Jo Becker is the girlfriend of Mia Aimms, with their connection slowly evolving over time. She was first introduced in her petrified form as a mysterious object that functioned as the source of the white porzite being dispersed across the Solinri Empire’s troubled southern colonies by the so-called "Revenge Trio"—three teenage orphans eager to exploit the accursed crystal’s corrupting power to turn the anti-Solinrian civil unrest in the region into rampant bloodshed and chaotic revolution against the Empire. After being collected by the GOT in the wake of the Revenge Trio’s downfall and mysterious disappearance, Jo was studied by Mia who was interested in uncovering the crystal tree’s true nature to prevent further tragedies, and eager to pass the time in her partly self-imposed exile from the GOT. After it came to light that the “tree” held an imprisoned and conscious human soul, Jo became the focus of an obsessive rescue operation by Mia who saw it as an act of redemption for her previous unsavory deeds, and perhaps a way to die performing an act of mercy. Upon returning to human form Jo becomes a Mysterious Waif taken under the wing of the GOT, with the mystery behind her origin deepened by her lack of understanding about much of Kishlaith’s basic history and customs, innate supernatural abilities and stubborn refusal to talk about her past. During the conflict with Elizabeth’s Mourner’s criminal syndicate to save Kishlaith from sliding into a terminal world war between the Solinri Empire and Thasmian Dominion, she finally opens up about her background and how it relates to the current situation, after which she begins to make a sincere effort to become part of the Guild. Jo is the one to finally strike the true deathblow to the horribly weakened and begging Elizabeth. Following the fragmentation of the vampire’s organization, she becomes an “ambassador” of sorts between her family and the GOT and Mages Guild.

• Backstory:

• Mary-Jo was born in the year 1994 on the Becker property, a village of ramshackle houses and outbuildings hidden deep in the Sulvey swamps, a remote province within the wilderness of the Radiant Union. Her Daddy, Laurence Sr., was the clan’s latest Grandfather, the patriarch responsible for control of the family and the maintenance of order within their small secluded world. Her Mama, Arlene, was Laurence Sr’s wife and the eldest daughter of his late brother who had been drawn to her uncle’s domineering nature, protective ferocity on the family’s behalf, and near-legendary status as one of the few Beckers to have broken free of the World Beyond the Woods and returned to the family.

• Jo was one of nine survivors out of seventeen potential new additions to the family that year, with the other eight either stillborn or deformed Abnormals deemed unfit for family membership. These births came at a difficult time for the Beckers. An usually harsh Sulvey winter had nearly frozen the swamp and made hunting, farming and fishing nearly useless. This left the family without a means to feed their livestock or replenish their food stores. The frigid temperatures tested their ability to even keep their homes warm enough to survive, and a disease outbreak had taken many lives and debilitated the survivors. Weakened by the hardships, they were unprepared for the usual onslaught of invasions from the World Beyond the Woods. Each clash resulted in tragedy as family members were incapacitated and then stolen away, never to be seen again. So, while every surviving baby was celebrated, the occasions were tinged with mourning for the ones who had been born dead or whose deformities condemned them to death…and for the captured relatives the living infants would never meet.

• One long-lasting side effect of the 1994’s harsh winter of which was a chronic food shortage. Although they tried their best to ensure the children did not go hungry, the adults were not as lucky. Fights routinely broke out at the communal meals shared by the homestead, and many resulted in violence. A hand being stabbed with a fork or knife could rapidly escalate into lost teeth, broken bones or gouged out eyes. The family’s potent homemade alcohol intensified these fights, and screams from the homestead’s Penalty House were a regular occurrence as numerous combatants were punished for their assaults on other family members.

• All of this stirred resentment for the current Grandfather’s leadership. His detractors picked apart every aspect of his reign—from his lack of foresight in preparing for 1994’s unusually grueling winter, how he had underestimated vicious determination of the World Beyond the Woods, and even the fact that he had fathered only one child, his son Laurence Jr, the bare minimum of his responsibility to contribute to the bloodline. With Jo’s healthy birth, this particular criticism was suppressed even if the other disapprovals remained. From an early age, Laurence Sr and Arlene impressed upon their daughter that any poor behavior on her part would give fodder to her Daddy’s enemies and destabilize his ability to guide the family—a potential disaster as they tried to endure the remaining years of Godfather Isaac’s absence. These warnings were always accompanied by the praise-filled tales of her older brother, Laurence Jr, and the pride he brought their parents with his innovations in service of protecting the family and his continued achievements as he grew into adulthood and married.

• Hearing her brother applauded by her parents and many of her aunts and uncles fed a sense of jealousy towards Laurence Jr for stealing the attention of their parents and relatives. This was worsened by the grim and subdued nature of her household; Arlene and Laurence Sr’s moments of affection towards her were sparse and mostly dependent upon how well she performed her chores and survival training. On the other hand, they were quite vocal in their disappointment when she made mistakes and never failed to fervently punish wrongdoing. At other times her Mama and Daddy ignored her entirely, preferring to speak to one another in hushed tones about the state of the homestead and the family in general, and ways to remedy it. The neglect hurt her, and it was made worse by seeing how involved many of her aunts and uncles were in the lives of her cousins. Even after beating them bloody for misbehavior, they forgave as fast as the wounds healed, and took interest in their development.

• Apart from this, Jo’s childhood was no different from other girls born into the Becker family. She was put to work helping her aunts and female cousins with cooking, gathering herbs from the swamp for flares and medicines, cleaning and scrubbing their small homes, feeding the livestock, and mending and sewing clothes. The only pleasure she took from this last chore was when a particularly difficult problem compelled them to bring out the few ancient sewing machines circulated among the family. Jo was fascinated by the worn but well-polished machinery and dreamed of taking at least one of them apart to look at how it functioned. She made this dream a reality one daring day, which resulted in a mixture of outrage and some laughter by her aunts and a badly broken nose and several missing teeth when her Mama was informed of the dismembered machine.

• After this incident Laurence Jr began to bring Jo to the workshop he maintained in the Garage, where a team of uncles and male cousins labored around the clock to strip salvaged machines of their usable parts and turn the remains down into raw materials for repairs around the Becker property. Watching her brother assemble scraps into functional and deadly traps for the swamps or seeing him occasionally repair or even create new torture devices to be used in the Penalty House fascinated her. Seeing the Garage team strip the metal carcasses of boats, cars, guns and other strange devices from the World Beyond the Woods made her desperately want to work with them. The sessions with Laurence Jr lessened Jo’s jealousy towards her older brother. She would look forward to their time together and would even sleep at the house he shared with his wife, her Aunt Lucille, when she simply grew tired of the dour atmosphere that permeated her home.

• When she was not doing chores, or watching her brother labor over his creations Jo played with her cousins, under the supervision of aunts and uncles who shared the responsibility of looking after the children. These adults were also responsible for imparting to them the history of the family and training them in skills they needed to become useful members of the community and defenders of the Becker property. These leisure times with her cousins and the training sessions under her uncles and aunts were among the highlights of Jo’s life. She enjoyed the company of the other children and the training sessions were exciting challenges. The relatives who taught these lessons often made them fun…although her Uncle Jim did have a habit of teaching the children to swim by lining them up and bodily hurling them one-by-one into the deepest depths of the swamp so they could all figure out their own way to keep afloat and alive, and would only step in if his method accidently knocked them out or broke their bones.

• Their education included the legend of how the clan’s ancestor Alan Becker had saved the world from a terrifying and unknown threat, and how the Bright King himself had rewarded Alan’s service by blessing his bloodline with the healing powers and robust strength the family enjoyed all the way to the present day. But it was the stories of the World Beyond the Woods that captivated Jo the most.

• The adults followed Alan’s heroic tale with stories about the cruel nature of the World Beyond the Woods. The people who lived there were ruthless devils who constantly plotted against each other. But their bodies were as weak as their thoughts were malicious, and that was why they wanted Alan’s Gift for themselves. It was their greed that had driven the revered ancestor’s descendants to retreat into their current position. The stories were for more than just conveying information to the next generation—they were also a way to mourn the memories and lives of those who had been taken by the other world’s raiders and never seen again.

• Although her elders presented the World Beyond the Woods as evil, Jo felt more curiosity than revulsion. Many of the devices used by her family or taken apart in the Garage had come from that strange realm, and she found herself wondering about the people who had used them. But not just the people, she wondered about the lands outside the swamp—what it would be like to travel to those places and see what animals and plants resided there. But she quickly understood that those questions were frowned upon when she encountered surprise and teasing from her cousins and reprimands and some physical punishments from her aunts and uncles when she persisted. The reactions from her Mama and Daddy were even worse and left her ears ringing with their furious reprimands and with injuries that took nearly a day to heal.

• Inevitably the family’s everyday life would be disrupted by invasions from the World Beyond the Woods. Blasts of colored smoke from the flare guns would rise from the distant trees as the family members hidden within the swamp pinpointed the position of any interlopers. Red smoke was for mostly unarmed travelers and jet black was for the malicious and well-equipped raiders who regularly threatened the family. Regardless of their type, these outsiders were condemned to death, and Jo would watch as her uncles and some of her aunts would grimly arm themselves with guns and swords. Some would board the family’s boats and others would slip silently into the water to encircle the outsider threat in a pincer attack. A tense silence would fall over the entire property as the sounds of gunshots and clashing blades would drift up from the smoke plumes, and everyone waited in dread to see which of their loved ones would not return—especially from battles with the raiders. But inevitably the enemies would be wiped out or retreat with captured family members as always. The corpses of the outsiders would be used to feed the livestock and their guns or vehicles taken to the Garage, while any lost family members were mourned as fallen heroes.

• Everything changed late one summer afternoon when Jo was eight. The younger children were being taught to fish by their Aunt Caroline, who took groups of them out to the swamp to practice. Jo was among the last group taken out that day, and as they prepared their rods to fish, they were confronted by a foreign boat that quickly cut off any escape attempt. Aunt Caroline reached for the shotgun she kept onboard and commanded the children to leap overboard and swim to the nearest solid ground and then run back home, but they were too shocked to move and many began to cry. Jo took in the sleek armored craft and its passengers who consisted of humans like them, and short men and women with beards and craggy stonelike flesh that she knew to be dwarves. It was the first time she had seen outsiders in person and fear now merged with her curiosity as she saw their eager expressions and the powerful guns pointed in their direction. The outsiders shouted at them in barely comprehensible words, commanding them to throw their weapons overboard. When Aunt Caroline did not obey, one of them shot Jo’s cousin Franklin in the leg and shattered his kneecap. Seeing her cousin suddenly screaming and writhing on the boat floor in a growing pool of blood sent Jo and the other children into true panic and Jo fell to her knees at the boy’s side with the other kids, staining her homespun pants and tunic with blood. One of the female dwarves held out a heavy hooked chain and commanded Aunt Caroline to secure it to their boat in order to tug them further into the swamp and away from the Becker property’s vicinity.

• Before Jo had even had time to add her own panicked questions to those of her cousins, Aunt Caroline threw the shotgun down and seized the bearded creature’s wrist rather than the chain and ripped her arm from her body while she cursed them as devils of the outside world. As the outsider reeled back, screaming, her fellow dwarves opened automatic fire on the boat over the protests of the humans. Jo and her cousins screamed Caroline’s name as they watched their aunt struck in the head, chest and stomach by multiple rounds, splattering the children with blood. Now several of the kids obeyed her last order and began to dive off the boat, but others tried to stay with the wounded Franklin whose leg had only just begun to stop bleeding. Jo hesitated to abandon her cousin, but she was too terrified at the sight of her aunt’s corpse less than a foot away.

• She was going to leap off the boat, but one of the humans jumped across the gap between boats and landed among them. The man advanced with a handgun pointed at the remaining children in one hand, while ordering them to get on their knees. But he tripped over Aunt Caroline’s body as he advanced and, in that moment, Jo acted on pure instinct. Grabbing a bait knife from the floor, she stabbed it into the outsider’s chest. Even at her young age, Alan’s Gift boosted her strength to force the blade through flesh and bone and into his heart. The shocked outsider coughed blood into her face while wildly firing his pistol. Two of the bullets hit Jo in the shoulder and hip, making her fall to the floor in pain and the man’s corpse landed on top of her.

• The sounds of battle were blotted out by a deep, inhuman roar of absolute rage. The raiders began to scream in terror and fire up into the sky before something descended upon their craft from the air. Jo watched in disbelief as the crew of the boat were attacked by a massive winged creature. It completely ignored their frantic barrages of bullets, pleas for mercy and even their prayers to the gods as it tore them to shreds one by one and savagely tossed their remains into the swamp. Pain, shock and blood loss stole Jo’s consciousness and she passed out as the creature began to advance towards their bloodstained boat. The last thing she felt was the corpse of the man she stabbed being pulled off her small body like it weighed nothing.

• Jo woke up in the Aid House with her bullet wounds steadily healing under a coat of numbing herb-paste and her parents both at her side. Arlene embraced her and demanded to know if she was alright, barely able to speak through tears. Laurence Sr, for his part, shakily held Jo’s hands and commended her bravery and quick thinking in defending her cousins. As Jo fearfully asked what had happened, her Daddy explained that Aunt Caroline was indeed dead and that Franklin was further in the Aid House waiting for his leg wound to heal. But the good news was that her other cousins were alive and unharmed…and that the Godfather had returned to them; he was the one who had brought the children back to the homestead. Not understanding, but too numb with shock to even really enjoy her Mamma and Daddy’s uncommon affection Jo just nodded along. After her wounds healed, her parents brought her to the center of the homestead where she saw the entire family was gathered around a cloaked teenage boy with luminous eyes and a kind smile on his scarred face.

• It was soon made clear by the reactions of the adults that this was Godfather Isaac, the everlasting shield of the family and harbinger of prosperity and safety. She was shocked to see some of the toughest adults openly weeping like children as they looked at him with adoration, her Daddy among them. Laurence Sr fell to his knees and tearfully told Godfather Isaac that he had done his best to look after the family and wept over his failures. The Godfather gently hushed her Daddy and assured him he had done well. He then promised that the Becker family was safe now, and apologized to them all for his absence and the hardships they had suffered during those times. What followed was a small procession as the children born during Godfather Isaac’s absence were lined up and presented to him. Their guardian commented favorably on each one and when he reached Jo, he also congratulated her for the act of defense on behalf of her family. As she mumbled out her thanks and met his glowing eyes, she realized that these were the eyes of the beast that had ended the outsiders on the boat.

• Peace settled over the Becker homestead in the following years. There was less arguing, fewer fights and the adults laughed and joked more. Food became plentiful as the Godfather set to work; he would roam the swamp and return with an impossible abundance of slaughtered animals to be eaten and stored. When the signal-smoke of impending invasion arose, Isaac personally dashed into the woods with blurring speed and the Godfather’s roars overlaid the inevitable screams and gunshots before they quickly went silent. He would return from these incidents with the enemy’s weapons and entire boats and even land vehicles for the family to strip and use as they pleased. But his most unbelievable feat was occasionally leaving the swamp entirely and traveling into the World Beyond the Woods, returning with guns, generators and other devices. Whatever manner of creature he was, the Godfather never grew tired, never slept and was always available with a kind word or assistance with a task.

• Jo’s relationship with her Mama and Daddy slightly improved as the full weight of the clan’s fate left their shoulders. She received much praise and approval among the family for her actions against the outsiders, and when she was thirteen this support let her realize her dream of working among the men in the Garage. Dismantling the machines and using their salvaged parts for homestead repairs was exhausting and dangerous work. Jo temporarily lost several fingers over the years, and learned to keep her hair short after getting it caught in spinning propellers and engines, but it was worth it. Handling the machines from the other world fascinated her and satisfied her enjoyment of working with her hands. Sorting through the occasional books or photos left in the cars and boats showed her pictures of bizarre lands and happy couples and families just like hers—nothing like the violent devils who killed Aunt Caroline. The contradiction confused Jo and, still haunted by that day, she wanted to know about the outside world than ever before and perhaps even see its features for herself. If there were such happy and kind-looking people there, who had attacked her family? Perhaps they had a Grandfather who directed their actions, and it must be this leader who told them to hunt her loved ones. If that Grandfather of the outsiders, this “true enemy” could be confronted.…perhaps her family could live in peace and maybe even return to the World Beyond the Woods without fear.

• Unfortunately, while Godfather Isaac’s presence brought peace, it also brought a worsened intolerance for any questioning about the World Beyond the Woods. Her questions and newly formed ideas about the outside were harshly rebuffed when she dared voice them as usual. Any trinket from the outside that was not a machine or potential raw materials was ordered to be destroyed. At one point her Uncle Kenny caught her trying to save a burning family photo album that had been taken from under the seat of an outsider's vehicle. He cut it to shreds with a hunting knife and threw the pieces back into the flames while threating to eject her from the Garage team if she ever did something like that again. And of course, her Mama and Daddy berated her for these misbehaviors, accusing her of embarrassing them in front of the Godfather. The family’s aversion to even investigating details about the World Beyond the Woods was maddening and more than once she found herself guiltily blaming their benefactor for this state of ignorance.

• But other problems joined her forbidden interest in the outside. The topic of boys often came up around her female cousins as they grew older and would gossip to each other about which of their male cousins and uncles they liked and dreamed of settling down with. Despite getting along with her male cousins, Jo had never been attracted to any of them…if anything, she found herself regularly daydreaming about the girls around her, particularly a cousin named Millie. Jo was disturbed and confused by these feelings and knew her girl cousins already viewed her as slightly odd because of her Garage job and interest in the World Beyond the Woods, so she simply pushed the fantasies from her mind and played along with their talk of guys. As she grew close to her sixteenth birthday, it was made clear she was expected to fulfill the obligation of producing children for the Becker bloodline. Jo believed in this duty and truly wanted to be a mother…but she could not bring herself to accept offers of marriage from any of the men and finally turned to her brother to recommend a man to her, blaming an inability to choose for herself.

• Though bemused, Laurence Jr selected a cousin named Tyler after some pondering, since Tyler had an interest in Jo and had a similar job to hers, though in the homestead’s Boathouse rather than the Garage. Jo accepted Tyler’s proposal and the two of them quickly married and built a small house together. Jo became pregnant within a year, and she looked forward to motherhood, even if she had never developed an attraction to her husband like she had hoped she would. However, Jo soon miscarried and continued to do so as the years passed. Each loss deeply hurt her and she grew depressed and Tyler grew more resentful. He blamed Jo’s strenuous job in the Garage for the failed pregnancies and demanded that she quit. To compromise, Jo limited her time there and instead spent her empty hours helping to look after the young children born to her cousins, taking solace in this new occupation. But the miscarriages continued and one day during an intense argument Tyler slammed her head into a wall, breaking several bones in her face. After this he began to unpredictably batter her when his frustration with the situation grew too intense or he was simply feeling angry about something. He often ranted that he had been tricked into marrying an Abnormal who hindered his duty to continue the bloodline, though he never dared say this in front of Laurence Sr.

• Jo spent less and less time in the home they had built together in order to have a respite from Tyler’s temper, often roaming the swamps and drinking heavily when she wasn't working or looking after kids. One particularly bad night as she staggered drunk through the property, her cousin Millie noticed her and tried to escort her home. They had reached the front door of her and Tyler’s house when Jo drunkenly gave in to her crush on Millie and kissed her. Before either of them could react to what she had done, Tyler kicked down the door, knocked Jo the ground and inflicted her worst beating yet. It took several people to pull him off her as he screamed in rage at her unnatural act of infidelity. Upon being taken to the Aid House, Jo drifted in and out of consciousness as Alan’s Gift slowly repaired her broken bones, missing teeth, damaged eyes, and badly bruised kidneys. Sometime later Laurence Sr arrived, acting as both Grandfather and as her parent, and Jo was initially happy to see him.

• Her Daddy informed her that Tyler had been dragged to the Penalty House to have his hands confiscated for at least a month as punishment for his attack on her, and that they would both undergo a period of separation before being allowed to be together again. As she began to thank him but explain that she never wanted to see Tyler again, Laurence Sr demanded to know if she truly had kissed Millie like the rumors spreading around the property said. When Jo confirmed it was true, her Daddy became quiet. In a voice that was both cold and truly sorrowful Laurence Sr mused that although he loved Jo, he did not understand her. He feared that her interest in the outside world, her inability to bear children and now her perverse act towards her cousin all pointed to her being an Abnormal that had been accidently been allowed into the family. But there was nothing to do about that now, and he stressed that she must work hard to overcome her defects, if not for herself, then for the sake of her Mama’s peace of mind and the family as a whole.

• Something in Jo snapped at that moment and she acknowledged his words with cold politeness before asking him to leave. Hours later, when she was healed enough to limp, she left the Becker property and headed into the swamp with only the clothes on her back, a hunting knife and rifle, and flare gun. She barely even knew where she was going, only that she needed to get away from the homestead for a while. Being looked at with pity for her inability to reproduce, Tyler's beatings, and now the thought of her family seeing her as defective for her ill-advised kiss with Millie was intolerable. Jo wandered the swamp for weeks until she reached its outer edges, staying alive by hunting for her food using her knife and rifle. Some of her injuries still tormented her; the pain in her kidneys was pure misery and it was weeks before she could even see out of her left eye. Several times she was tempted to return home in shame just to gain access to the Aid House’s numbing medication. But she pressed on, and eventually came upon an abandoned trailer half-submerged in the swamp, which she made into a shelter while she recovered. It occurred to Jo that she was close to the border between the Becker’s land and the World Beyond the Woods and she often entertained a fantasy of fleeing her problems and entering the other world. But she stayed put, bound by fear and her sense of obligation and love towards her kin.

• Sometime into this lonely self-imposed exile, Jo saw something she had no words for. A flying machine that drifted above the swamps with whirling propellers atop its long and armored body. Jo found herself tracking it as it lowered itself amidst the trees. Following its trail, she found the machine was gone, but three human teenagers, two boys and one girl, sitting around a campfire and tents. Jo knew that she should open fire on them with her hunting rifle or at least fire her flare gun to signal the presence of trespassers but she did not want to bring her family or Godfather Isaac down on them just yet. She remained hidden for days, secretly watching their activities and was captivated. They didn’t act much different than her family and she grew more and more hesitant to condemn them to death.

• It became clear that the group was aware of her when she began to find neatly wrapped offerings of food and supplies near the trailer. Eventually the girl of the trio showed herself, her hands raised to show she was unarmed. She introduced herself as Anja and in confusion Jo found herself introducing herself too. Unsure of how to proceed with an outsider who wasn’t a murderous invader, Jo stood dumbfounded as Anja offered Jo more of their food and an invitation to visit their camp. Jo reluctantly accepted it and slowly the boys appeared and introduced themselves as Lars and Bushemi. It became clear that Lars was the leader of the trio and he explained that they were adventurers hired to search the region for a rare type of tree native to the swamp.

• Jo found herself talking with them more and more and letting her guard down. They were nothing like the terrifying outsiders that had killed Aunt Caroline so long ago; Lars always had a joke up his sleeve and Bushemi, although shy, was continually eager to serenade them with his guitar. And when Anja clasped Jo’s hand one day and told her she was beautiful, Jo returned the compliment, and soon found herself locked in a soft kiss with the outsider girl. Her following romance with Anja felt more natural than anything she had ever experienced with Tyler and Jo treasured her new friends. When she gathered the courage to ask them about the World Beyond the Woods, their stories confused her but let her know the world out there was bigger than she could have imagined. The flare gun lay forgotten in her trailer and her obligations and issues with her family were pushed to the side. However, Anja often brooded and more than once she suggested that Jo should return to wherever she had lived before meeting them. When this hurt Jo’s feelings, Anja assured her that she cared for Jo but she just believed the trio’s presence wasn’t good for her and that she was better off staying in her swamp.

• When they turned on her, she was taken completely off guard. Jo returned to her shelter from a day of hunting, to find that her flare gun had been completely dismantled. That was her only warning before Lars leapt from the shadows of the trailer’s single room and tackled her to the floor. Bushemi kicked Jo’s rifle out of reach and quickly removed the knife from her belt before retreating to the sidelines, away from the struggling. Lars simply ignored her demands to know what he was doing, and told Bushemi to hurry up. The other boy complied by putting together a strange needle-like device that he quickly filled with glowing white liquid. Jo was now pleading to know why her friends were attacking her, but they did not answer until Anja stepped through the open trailer door. Jo begged her for help but was shocked when Anja expressed disbelief rather than horror and demanded to know if they were “Really doing this right now?”.

• Lars immediately ordered Anja to inject Jo with the liquid, forcing his hand over her mouth to muffle her cries. When Anja refused and demanded Lars do it himself, the two began to argue as Jo wept in terror and continued to plead against Lars’ hand for Anja to make him let her go. When Bushemi firmly handed Anja the needle, pure animal instinct took over and Jo’s strength let her throw Lars off her, and she took advantage of his shock to kick him right through one of the trailer’s rotted walls.

• Jo took off running past the rigid and shuddering Anja, and only made it to the edge of the deeper woods before Lars tackled her again and knocked them both into the mud. Before she could counter again, he slammed his elbow into her lower back, snapping her spine and paralyzing her legs. As the chaos unfolded, the familiar roar of Godfather Isaac filled the air and sent birds scattering into the sky. Bushemi went gray with fear and pleaded with Anja and Lars to stop playing dominance games with each other and just perform the injection before something he called “the Becker Family’s Watchdog” killed the three of them.

• Anja shuddered all over and then wrenched Jo’s head back by her short hair and plunged the needle into her neck, heedless of her struggles. As the liquid entered her veins, Jo felt as if her entire body was at the mercy of a swarm of biting and stinging insects. She sucked in a breath to scream at the terrible pain but all sight and sensation was suddenly obscured by a white void. She no longer felt pain…but neither did she feel any sensation at all, and she had no voice to release her intended scream. Struggling was useless because she had no limbs to kick or thrash. She was fully merged with the white void around her, and the only voice she had left was the one in her mind. She used her mental voice to beg Lars, Bushemi and Anja to reverse what they had done to her, or for an explanation for their actions but there was no response. The white void soon rang with Jo’s silent cries and curses against her “friends” and pleas for her family to save her. She cried for her Mama and Daddy and all her aunts, uncles and cousins, Tyler included. Finally, she called for Godfather Isaac and even the Bright King himself. Yet no one came to her aid.

• There was no way to tell time, so every second was a disorienting eternity. Countless eons without stimulation or movement, or even the respite of unconsciousness, wore upon Jo. She began to hallucinate more and more; sometimes these would be nightmarish images of the Becker property destroyed by grinning raiders who rounded up her relatives and dragged then away screaming. But more often she just imagined a loving life with Tyler surrounded by the cute and well-behaved children she had borne for them.

• These dreams and nightmares would eventually dissolve and then she would go back to screaming for help. But her lucid periods grew rare and Jo found herself becoming more lost in these visions as her mind began to shut down. Jo's consciousness was eventually so depleted she did not notice when a real voice spoke to her. When she did understand this voice, it took a long time for her to muster up the will to even attempt to speak back…which of course did not work. But the voice continued to speak to her, calling itself "Mia". Mia's presence came and went, but it never abandoned her for long. The mysterious voice would sing to her or carry out odd one-sided conversations or speak randomly about things that made no sense. But the presence of another person changed things and slowly Jo came to love and hate Mia. Hearing the words of a real person was like cool water after years of thirst...but listening to Mia and trying to hang onto her every word, made her unable to sink into a mindless haze, and therefore all the more aware of her horrible situation.

• Sometimes Mia would tell her to not lose hope and swore to rescue her someday. Jo would try to ignore these promises as best she could. She had long ago given up any hope of freedom from her nightmarish prison. Her screams for help were mostly hollow habit at this point, and she could barely remember what it had been like to have a body. Then one day, without warning, she felt sensation for the first time in forever. Tugging and fierce pain that made her try to struggle away from it, but without a body, there was no fighting. These sensations grew stronger and stronger until the white void shattered and fell away like old glass. Jo found herself sprawled upon a stone floor, shuddering uncontrollably and as weak as a newborn. And only now was she able to release that scream she had begun so long ago.

Relevant Tropes:

• Abusive Parents: Jo's parents, Laurence Sr and Arlene had a very limited tolerance for misbehavior or even mistakes of any kind. They did not physically neglect Jo's needs, but they often made parental affection contingent on how well she performed chores or survival training. At other points they simply ignored her no matter how she did, in favor of discussing strategies and plans with one another. At his worst, Laurence Sr outright suggested his daughter was an "Abnormal" for her homosexuality and curiosity about the world outside the Becker property and chose to say this while she was recovering from a bout of domestic violence that left her barely alive. While not a justification for their behavior, Laurence Sr and Arlene spent Jo's early childhood under extreme stress from a devastating food shortage, constant threat of raiders, and the possibility that a sizeable chunk of the homestead would turn against his leadership. Because parents are judged for the behavior of children, their treatment of Jo was a desperate way of addressing what they saw as one more vulnerability in Laurence Sr's regime. Jo does not resent her parents for their behavior towards her as much as she feels sorrowful that she did not get to experience much of the affection and warmth her cousins and even her older brother did when growing up. Upon her return to the Becker property she is able to reconcile with her father and share sorrow over the loss of Arlene and Laurence Jr to Elizabeth’s Procurers. Though he is furious with her for bringing outsiders to the family’s sanctuary, it is clear that he is too relieved that at least one member of his immediate household has lived to bring the full fury of his station of Grandfather down on her.

• Action Girl: Despite possessing great strength, Jo wasn’t much of a fighter prior to meeting the GOT; she could certainly throw punches and powerful kicks and maybe dodge a few attacks. But that was the extent of her knowledge of combat, gained from watching violent fights break out on the homestead, a good deal of them fueled by alcohol. Being Unskilled, but Strong is partially why Lars was able to subdue her so easily and even break her spine moments after she kicked him through a wall. Upon making one of her first friendships in the GOT in the form of the former assassin Saris Alemaran he teaches her several bare-handed techniques and ways to hone her ability to quickly improvise weapons to deadly effect.

• Afraid of Doctors: Jo didn't even know what a medical professional was prior to entering the outside world. The closest equivalent on the Becker property was the Aid House team with their numbing herbs for wounds and homemade glue to help with limb-reattachment, and midwifery skills for childbirth. Anything else was unnecessary due to the family's inherent regeneration ability. Upon being revived from her petrification, Jo found herself barely able to use her body and surrounded by mysterious outsiders who were forcing her through all sorts of painful and humiliating exercises while claiming to be trying to help. Her inability to really comprehend what was going on only increased her terror, confusion and anger, which made her violent and uncooperative. It was only Mia personally deciding to oversee Jo's rehabilitation that calmed her down, but even that didn't help once the syringes came out.

• Afraid of Needles: Hypodermic syringes and medical equipment that make use of needles cause her great anxiety. Prior to being injected with white porzite by Anja, Jo had never seen a syringe before and the trio's actions left her with a fear of medical needles permanently imprinted in her psyche. Trying to use a syringe or intravenous line on her will quickly send her into fight-or-flight mode. Combined with her on-and-off Super-Strength, this makes trying to administer drugs to her or simply give her vaccinations a tedious and outright dangerous endeavor for medical staff. During her early days in the GOT's custody she critically injured a nurse by hurling him into an opposite wall when he tried to administer painkillers during her physical therapy, and she later fractured the leg of a doctor while trying to escape a vaccination. Ultimately the only way Jo receives the vaccines she needs to protect her from the wider world’s diseases is from Mia performing the injections, following a doctor's instructions by phone, since she is one of the few people Jo trusts. Even then it is an incredibly tense situation and Mia’s slight dishonesty about some side-effects of the vaccines deals a temporary but significant blow to Jo’s trust in her.

• Affectionate Nickname: The young woman’s full name is Mary-Jo Becker, but her family simply refers to her as “Jo”. For a long time, she firmly insisted on being called Mary-Jo by everyone, Mia included, since she wanted to reserve the privilege of using her nickname for family alone. As time went on and she developed friendships in the outside world, she started to allow her nickname to be used more widely. Ultimately, she stops caring about which variation of her name people use when they address her, but it is one of her last emotional walls to fall. Prior to letting them refer to her as “Jo”, she was given the moniker of “our Mysterious Guest” or “Attic Lady”, the latter in reference to her staying in one of the attic rooms of Mia’s empty family mansion and less charitably to the habit of locking mentally ill family members in such spaces in ages past.
  • Anja’s own nickname for Jo is a nasty subversion that goes right along with the Honey Trap that was their relationship. She would call Jo “my treasure” while they were being affectionate, and told Jo the reason behind the name was that she hadn’t expected to find such a lovely and attractive woman in a miserable place like the swamps of Sulvey, making her a truly valuable find. In reality, Jo was the treasure they were looking for in terms of what she could provide them via petrification, and this name was Anja’s way of reminding herself harshly of the mission. Not that it really helped.

• Age-Gap Romance: Jo is 23...or technically 20 since she neither aged nor was she able to experience life during her three years of petrification. Mia on the other hand is at the end of 27. Considering that Jo is a mostly clueless newcomer to the wider world, who lived in near-squalor in the swamps of Sulvey, while Mia is a prominent mover and shaker in society, the age-gap is the least of the contradictions between them. Similarly, her relationship with Anja occurred while Jo was 20 and Anja was 15, although Jo’s naivete and inexperience with the ways of wider Kishlaith and any kind of romantic relationship apart from her marriage to Tyler shifted the power dynamic in the teenager’s favor.

• And I Must Scream: Jo suffered this fate for three years after her presumed "friends", Lars Bruhne, Anja Cooper, and Bushemi Velda injected her with liquid white porzite. The fragment of the white porzite intelligence carried within her was kicked into overdrive by the injection, and the hideous result was Jo’s soul being trapped inside a tree-like formation of white porzite woven from her own crystalized flesh and blood. This left her fully conscious, but unable to move, see, speak or even feel sensation. She was close to madness after five months of this torment, and spent the years drifting between hallucinatory psychosis and increasingly rare moments of lucidity. She suffers from significant PTSD symptoms due to this ordeal and the betrayal which led up to it. When she finally opens up about her past and speaks about this experience, first to members of the GOT and later on in therapy, she has to stop to collect herself several times, and is shaking uncontrollably by the time she is finished. Jo’s experience serves to illustrate the true horror of the white porzite trees, and only underscores the horrendous reality of the many hundreds Elizabeth Mourner has in her possession.

• And the Adventure Continues: After becoming a part of the GOT and aiding them in taking down Elizabeth Mourner, Jo has officially defeated the “true enemy” of her family. However, the Evil Power Vacuum left by Elizabeth in the criminal underworld has left many splinter factions eager to hunt the Beckers down to make their own white porzite-dealing empire. Furthermore, she has seen the outside world and knows the wonders that exist out there and the horrors that threaten it…and she has friends now, and someone she truly loves. Eventually Jo embraces the best of both worlds, becoming a part-time member of the GOT while returning to the homestead to be with her family at other times, in hopes of helping them also connect with the lands and people beyond their small world. But she never again returns to being bound to the Small, Secluded World.

• Aroused by Their Voice: At first, it’s more soothed by a voice but later played straight. Jo only knew Mia as a distorted and disembodied voice that did its best to calm her mental anguish, begged her not to lose hope, and even promised to rescue her. Jo's first encounter with Mia in the flesh was while she was struggling to relearn how to simply sit up in bed again, and fighting mightily with the doctors and nurses. Hearing Mia speak to her did not ease her physical discomfort, but it automatically made Jo's anger and fear subside before she had even turned to look at the woman herself. In the following months Mia finds that her voice has a deep calming effect on Jo and can get her to persevere against pain and fear to continue her treatment. Later on, when they do enter a relationship, they...experiment a little with Mia just using her voice to seduce her girlfriend.

• Arch-Enemy: For much of her childhood and all of her teen years, Jo struggled to connect the violent attackers who killed her Aunt Caroline and wounded her and Franklin with the pictures of happy and loving people she saw in her brief glances at magazines and photos from the outside. Her only way of making sense of it was that the entire World Beyond the Woods must be run by a Grandfather or Grandmother like her family, and this ruler of the outsiders forced otherwise good people to commit atrocities against her family. She labeled this evil leader the “true enemy” in her mind and figured that if this person could be confronted or killed, then the Beckers could enter the outside world without danger, and she would be able to explore it to her heart’s content…and most importantly none of her relatives would ever be abducted or killed again. Jo eventually identifies Elizabeth as the “true enemy” behind many of her family’s problems, but she is also forced to confront a harsh truth: Kishlaith’s evil does not stem from the vampire alone, or any single person, but from the desires of hundreds of thousands of people and the decision made by many of them to disregard morality and decency while seeking out their goals.

• Armor-Piercing Question: In the lead-up to them finally entering into an official relationship, Jo nervously tries to warn Mia that her homosexuality and inability to have children make her a defective Abnormal and she feels she owes Mia a warning about that before they move into anything serious. Mia simply questions whether that makes her also broken and deformed on the inside as well, since she certainly is attracted to Jo and has never had any interest in men either. It brings Jo up short and she can’t even really think of a response. Of course, she eventually says no, which leads into Mia explaining to Jo, without judgement, that she has a truly serious issue with her self-esteem, something Mia can emphasize with.

• Awful Truth: As Jo comes to understand just how vast and alien the world outside the Becker property is, she is forced to face many hard revelations regarding her family and their situation. Her kidnapped relatives have not been imprisoned or had Alan's Gift "stolen" like the legends say. Instead they have been subjected to the same suffering that she underwent, many of them for centuries...all so that certain people can either amplify their powers, or just get high. A fair number of those killed by her family and Godfather Isaac were innocents who meant no harm, or didn't even know the Becker homestead existed. The Becker family's "refuge" is not secretive, at least not to their enemies. Elizabeth allows the family to exist there by keeping the swamps of Sulvey free of major development and intrusion from the nation that owns the province via generations of Corrupt Politicians under her thumb. She structures the hunts around Isaac's absences, in order to allow for easier harvesting and to give the family time to breed, ensuring her supply of white porzite never runs out. The final truth is perhaps the one that shakes her the most—-her ancestor Alan Becker was not a man beloved by the Bright King and her family is not blessed, but cursed. Alan contaminated their bodies and bloodline when he desperately sealed the "core" of a parasitic monster into his family in a bid to save the world from it. He was then betrayed by one of his comrades who exploited this act to make himself rich. The myth exalting Alan as a blessed hero was fabricated by his dear friend, “Godfather” Isaac Marsden, because the Type 3 vampire felt it was cruel to tell the “children entrusted to his care” that their lives had been ruined centuries before they were even born because of Alan’s foolhardy and frantic act. He created the idea of a righteous protagonist who had brought health and strength to his clan to give them a sense of comfort in their deprivation.

• Awful Wedded Life: Jo felt no physical attraction to Tyler or any man, but she got along him in the same general way she did most of her male cousins, and didn’t mind settling with him to fulfill her duty and desire to have children. But her inability to bear offspring turned their relationship into a nightmare and both of them grew miserable with one another in their own way. Had Jo's father not inadvertently driven her away from the property with his musing that she was an Abnormal, she would have pleaded with him to use his power as Grandfather to annul their marriage and let her try again with someone else.

• Berserk Button: Harm or malevolent intent towards her family. In true Becker fashion, Jo has deep Undying Loyalty towards her kin and will do anything it takes to ensure that they are safe and protected. Even making pejorative comments about the Beckers or their homestead is enough to infuriate her, though she expresses this anger differently depending on who the commenter is. It doesn’t matter if the negativity is expressed on her behalf, she automatically defends them without a thought. When the GOT team accompanying Jo arrives in the Sulvey swamps and begin to comment uneasily about the squalor and dilapidation around them, she coldly reminds them that they are entering her home and would do well to remember that. Similarly, she does not take kindly to declarations of what a scumbag her ex-husband was, reminding those who insult him that he is still her cousin and a part of her family above all else.

• Berserker Tears: She sheds these twice while meeting agents of her family's oppression. The first is Ulfrik, a dwarven vampire and former Gardener from one of Elizabeth's facilities, who comes to the GOT for aid with his own Heel–Face Turn. When he confesses that he has spent the last 80 years turning Becker family members into white porzite trees, Jo immediately grabs him and tries to rip off his head while her tearstained face is contorted in pure rage, only failing because her powerful strength deserts her as she starts to twist his neck. The second time is against Elizabeth Mourner herself, when the badly injured vampire attempts to persuade her to spare her life, and regales her with a speech about how similar the two of them are. Jo impales her with her improvised spear while nearly weeping in the whirlwind of emotions she feels at putting down the monster that has stalked her family for centuries. On the other hand, she is far calmer at other times when encountering members of Elizabeth’s organization in the time between these two events. It is understandable since Ulfrik was the first agent of the Mourner cartel she had ever met, while Elizabeth herself is the root of her family’s woe.

• Big Brother Mentor: Jo’s brother Laurence Jr was older than her by ten years and served as a mentor of sorts. After she was punished for taking apart one of the family’s few sewing machines to find out how it worked, he brought her into his own private workshop in the Garage to watch him work on the traps he created for patrols to strew around the swamps. The sessions not only validated Jo’s interest in tinkering with mechanical devices and putting parts together, it also acted as a bonding exercise with the brother she had begun to envy due to the favoritism shown to him by their parents. His capture and petrification at the hands of Elizabeth’s organization in the years she is gone devastates her. Laurence on his end loved his little sister even though he found her quite odd at times, and when he learned of what Tyler had done to her, he was overcome with rage at his cousin and guilt for having recommended him to Jo. It was only the realization that giving Tyler a taste of his medicine would result in his own punishment that barely held him back.

• Big, Screwed-Up Family: From an outsider's point of view, the Becker clan takes this right Up To Eleven in terms of their numbers and depravity. There are enough of them to fill a small village…which is exactly what they have constructed deep within the untamed wilds of the Radiant Union, living off the scraps of the modern world. Their only means of procreation is incest to the point that the practice is seen as part of everyday life. Children are regularly struck brutal blows for misbehavior without anyone batting an eye, and they regularly torture those who break the laws of their settlement. Worst of all, they brutally murder anyone who travels into their swamp, regardless of whether those intruders are actually trying to attack the homestead or just passing through. They then cut apart these corpses in the same building they prepare their food, and use the remains to feed their livestock. The final horror sees them exalting Type 3 vampire as their protector and symbol of peace and safety. Even understanding Isaac’s relative benevolence and the fact that the Beckers were driven to this lifestyle by the predatory and cruel actions of the vampiric sociopaths Rudolph Valtir and Elizabeth Mourner doesn't lessen the disgust and horror felt by several GOT members and later Mages Guild envoys during their stay at the Becker homestead, and Mia herself is dismayed at seeing the environment Jo grew up in. On the other hand, Becker's do have a functioning "society" and deeply care for one another as a family, with loyalty and love for their kin deeply engrained into their upbringing.

• Book Dumb: Jo can’t read any of Kishlaith’s languages and sees written or typed words as meaningless scrawls. She can write, but it's merely copying sentences using memorization, with no understanding of what they mean. She certainly can’t create any coherent messages on her own. Worse than that, she has little to none of the basic historical knowledge expected of even the most uneducated of people in the world. This turns into one of several issues that strains her relationship with Mia, though it isn’t Jo’s fault. Having come from a family of scholarly mages, who prized knowledge and understanding above all things, even morality, Mia abhors ignorance. Jo’s lack of knowledge compels her to teach the younger woman to read and write, and Jo’s reluctance and resistance to learning eventually pushes Mia to say some harsh and genuinely cruel things to her in the heat of frustration.

• Body Horror: She went through this twice.
  • After being injected by Anja, Jo instantly began to transform into a white porzite tree. This involved hundreds of semi-solid tendrils of white porzite suddenly appearing and agonizingly twisting and wriggling beneath her skin. They then tore their way out of her flesh before eventually encasing the tattered fragments that remained of her body. These pieces then quickly rotted away within the tree over the first few days she spent petrified, leaving it clean and gleaming pure white. The experience was so horrifying and painful that Jo’s mind repressed and seamlessly “edited” that part of her memory—in her conscious recollection she was injected, felt a moment of terrible pain and then found herself in the white void before she could even scream. She only relives the true memory among her other nightmares of past trauma.

  • The second incident occurred when Mia rescued Jo by "reading" her soul while it was trapped inside the white porzite tree and recreating an entirely new body to house it, based on the physical information she got from the soul. This cost an incredible amount of aura energy and nearly killed Mia—in fact, Mia intended for it to kill her as a way to end her life while performing an act of mercy. However, she involuntarily held back and did not devote all of her power to the spell. Because of this, Jo was not complete when she came out, with her new body missing most of its skin. Mia having contacted GOT-aligned medical staff prior to performing the spell is the only reason that she did not die of shock or infection, since they were able to arrive on the scene and give appropriate first aid to both of them. Jo lacks any scars from this since her regenerative abilities replaced the lost tissue completely.

• Butch Lesbian: Jo has short unkempt hair and prefers mostly masculine clothing. While staying with the GOT and living in the outside world in general she wears jeans and tank tops, with her only female-exclusive clothing being a pair of flats. When she lived on the Becker homestead, Jo preferred the homespun tunics and pants worn by males when the women and girls almost uniformly wore dresses. She also dislikes any kind of makeup, though this is more due to not understanding it than deliberate choice. She enjoys manual labor and projects that allow her to work with her hands and she chain-smokes, shoots guns, and is a skilled survivalist. This puts her somewhat in opposition to Mia who presents as a far more "ladylike" Lipstick Lesbian. On the other hand, Jo has a far more nurturing and “feminine” personality than Mia does, with caring for children and eventual motherhood being high on her list of interests and priorities in life.

• Cannot Spit It Out: For quite some time neither Jo or Mia are able to admit to each other that they wish to enter into a relationship. They hover around their desire, existing as awkward but affectionate roommates for a long time, since Mia took Jo into the Aimms manor as a temporary measure while the GOT figured who and what she is. On Jo's part, she struggles with her fear of destroying her bond with Mia by trying to turn it into something more, on top of her feelings of defectiveness and a fear of being hurt yet again. Mia second-guesses her motivations constantly and wonders if her attraction to Jo is because of her avid interest in the arcane mystery of the younger woman's abilities and origin. Predominantly she fears simply using Jo and casting her aside when she's done, but also feels that she isn't particularly worthy of love due to the betrayals and trauma she caused her own friends in the Guild only a few years prior.

• Car Fu: One of the many things that Jo originally held back from the GOT members was that she could drive cars, though not well. Part of her job in the Garage was to drive the “scrap” vehicles away from the building so they could be torn apart for parts in a field around back. So, while she isn’t able to safely drive on a road, or even through the swamps, she has a basic idea of how to move forward and backwards and can start cars without their keys. She kept this information away from the Guild in case she needed to hotwire and use one of the organization’s cars to escape to…anywhere else, should they prove treacherous and hostile. During her first mission against Elizabeth with the GOT, Jo is allowed to tag along but ordered to stay in the car while they abduct and torture one of the vampire’s allies, an Upper-Class Twit involved with illegal underground fighting, along with white porzite dealing. When he evades the team sent after him, Jo drives the car forward and slams into him at full speed, horribly injuring him but accomplishing the goal.

• Cigarette of Anxiety: Jo has been a smoker since she was 14, with her cigarettes consisting of hand-rolled models filled with tobacco grown on the Becker homestead. Upon her arrival in wider Kishlaith she smokes far more often than she did before, due to the abundance of cigarettes and tobacco in general and because smoking always calms her nerves, and she is often on edge. Mia repeatedly asks her to stop smoking several times, finally explaining that any cancer she develops will be nearly impossible to treat by medical or magical means because of the high possibility the tumors will share in her regenerative abilities. This explanation has little success; Jo makes a half-hearted attempt to quit for Mia's sake, it doesn't last, and she continues to smoke well into the future.

• Cigarette Burns: These are among the injuries Jo inflicts on herself to overcome the overwhelming anxiety that she is not really free but simply experiencing an incredibly detailed hallucination. It's a quick and easy method since she has no shortage of cigarettes and forcing the lit end of one into the underside of her forearm provides the pain necessary to convince her she truly has regained her body, and it lets the wound go unnoticed while it rapidly heals. This is one of the hardest methods of self-harm for her to stop since she has easy access to the "tools" needed to accomplish it.

• Convenient Coma: Justified since it was a medically induced coma that could be reversed with the appropriate drugs and steps. Jo was placed in one shortly after Mia pulled her out of the white porzite tree due to her horrific injuries and extremely incoherent and combative state. She remained in this coma for at least several weeks while Mia herself recovered from the nearly fatal energy drain she suffered as a result of reconstructing Jo's body from the "blueprints" she obtained via scanning her soul within the tree.

• Cold-Blooded Torture: The Becker family's method of punishing members who break the homestead's laws are...draconian to say the least. The Penalty House is an entire building devoted to inflicting pain and mutilation upon lawbreakers. At best, one can look forward to being imprisoned in a cramped dirty cell with stagnant standing water for weeks with little food. At worst the House supplies punishments like such as suspension from the ceiling by hooks in the flesh, and other such torments. One of the most common punishments for deliberate harm inflicted on a family member is "confiscation" which involves hacking off limbs and storing them to be reattached later after a period of time decreed by the Grandfather. Jo was never on the receiving end of the harsher punishments, but her habit of collecting memorabilia from the World Beyond the Woods got her locked up several times, once for around a week and a half. She describes the humiliation and discomfort of being cramped into a cell barely tall enough to stand straight with foul water up to her knees and constant torment by mosquitoes

• Cynicism Catalyst: Jo was curious about the World Beyond the Woods despite the dark tales portraying it as a domain of devils bent on kidnapping her family members and stealing their bloodline's powers. Even seeing one of her aunts murdered in front of her was not enough to fully see it as pure evil. She held a great deal of interest in how the people there lived, and finding family photos and magazines depicting scenes of beauty and love made her believe that a corrupt leader was forcing the people to act in a repulsive and cruel way. This is why she didn't report Lars, Anja and Bushemi when she saw how benign they seemed. Their sudden betrayal made her fully embrace her family's code of hating and fearing outsiders while cursing her curious and optimistic past self as a fool. It takes a very long time of being treated with kindness and understanding for her to feel comfortable around members of the GOT. Even then, she is still anxious around people she does not know, and she dislikes being in crowds or foreign places without a "safe" person with her.

• Damsel in Distress: An unknown one, though definitely true to the trope. Jo spent the entire conflict between the Revenge Trio and the Solinri’s Empire’s House Cavar, having been captured and turned into the teens’ personal source of white porzite. However, neither the imperial army or GOT knew of her existence until the trio mysteriously vanished on the eve of the final attack upon their hideout by imperial and GOT agents. Even after this, Jo was just regarded as an arcane object of unknown origin with most of the GOT opting to destroy her. It is only Mia's desire to learn more about her tree’s nature that saved her from being blown apart by Edvard, via a specifically designed dwarven demolition bomb. Though Jo isn't particularly bothered by the revelation of how close she came to being destroyed, considering what she was enduring at the time.

• Defrosting Ice Queen: Jo starts out extremely distrustful of the Guild of the Triumvirate's members apart from Mia, who she clings to physically and emotionally. She coldly rebuffs most attempts at getting to know her, even resorting to violence at some points, and harshly shuts down any questions about her origins. After being treated with consistent kindness and sincere attempts to include her in various activities, Jo begins to warm up enough to lose her outright hostility, though she remains somewhat wary. Watching the friendship and affection the Guild members demonstrate for one another, and for their own families and loved ones steadily makes her aware of just how homesick and lonely she is, and instills a desire to be included in the bonds they share. When she finally opens up about her past, she is astonished to see many of the adventurers expressing sympathy and even outrage on her behalf and for her family’s situation. This is what finally gives Jo the resolve to get her mind "fixed" so that she can be the kind of friend she sees all around her. Later on, she even starts to become more comfortable with going out in public, and expressing some of her old curiosity about the world.

• Destructive Romance: It never comes to this, but Simon Travers, the GOT's leader and Mia's childhood friend, was wary about the possibility of Mia creating one when she confided in him about her desire for a relationship with Jo. Despite Jo making some progress at the time, he warned Mia that Jo’s neediness had the potential to poison any attempt at romance over time. He continued that Mia was so interested in Jo's mysterious origins and abilities that she should be careful about reducing the young woman to just another arcane anomaly to be studied and then cast aside when the mystery had been unraveled. The warnings exasperated Mia, but she took her lifelong friend's advice to heart and abstained from any overt romantic advances until Jo was more emotionally stable and she herself had done more soul-searching to determine what attracted her to the Guild’s “mystery guest”.

• Domestic Abuse: Tyler was initially as distressed as Jo was by her inability to carry pregnancies to term. However repeated failures to give him—and the family—children made him resent her, since he felt she hindered him from fulfilling his own duty to help keep the Becker bloodline going. Tyler believed her job in the Garage was stressing her body and grew increasingly furious when Jo tried to negotiate rather than simply obey his demand to quit her position entirely. This frustration finally caused him to violently smash her face into a wall during an argument. After this, he would hit her frequently whenever they fought over completely unrelated things, or violently curse her and shake her if he found his anger at their childless situation boiling over. Jo grew to dislike Tyler for the physical and emotional pain he caused her, but she was beaten down by guilt for her lost pregnancies and increasing struggles with her attraction to women. That left her without the motivation to do anything but avoid him when he was angry. Seeing his "defective" wife kissing another person, another woman, literally at his front door was the final straw for him and Jo only survived the destruction of Tyler’s fragile self-control due to the actions of bystanders and the family's Healing Factor.

• Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off!: What many would consider violence against children is commonplace on the Becker property. Most think nothing of striking a child with a closed fist to the point of knocking out teeth, or whipping them bloody and raw with a belt or homemade switch. There isn’t any more malice behind these actions than there is for any other adult in Kishlaith punishing a child. The family’s healing abilities ensure that this damage will fade quickly with no lasting physical effect, while ensuring a lesson is taught. During her days looking after the children of her cousins, Jo handed out physical punishments more or less the same as any other adult when she felt it was appropriate. She always followed up with an explanation of why she had hit them and firm warnings not to repeat their misbehavior. When she is looking after children not from her family, Jo has to occasionally resist the urge to smack some “sense” into them if they misbehave, since her family’s legends have already let her know people of the outside world are “fragile”. If anything, she actually tends to treat non-Becker children with kid-gloves and constantly worries that they will be hurt or killed.

• Drowning My Sorrows: After repeatedly miscarrying her potential children and suffering worsening verbal and physical abuse from her husband, Jo began to partake heavily in the potent moonshine produced on the Becker property, far more than the usual amount she would throw back after a hard day’s work in the Garage. It wasn’t enough to completely affect her day-to-day life, but she spent many nights in a drunken haze to dull her emotional pain. This led to her kissing her cousin Millie in an intoxicated attempt to act on her hidden crush. Jo does this for a while when staying with Mia and the GOT; she drinks three entire bottles of wine from the Aimms manor’s cellar when suffering her first vivid post-traumatic flashback to her betrayal and petrification and later orders drink after drink in the bar of the GOT’s headquarters to quell her sorrow and homesickness when thinking of how much time has passed since she was last home, and the events and birthdays and milestones that she has missed. Mia is patient with her and explains what a terrible coping mechanism it is. Certain members of the Guild are not as polite and express disgust or find it slightly humorous...or perhaps worse, take it in stride since it just reflects their own substance abuse.

• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Before petrification Jo had jet black hair to go with her pale skin. A pale complexion and black hair are traits that every single one of the Beckers share without exception. What keeps them—including Jo herself—from being an example of Raven Hair, Ivory Skin is that they are mostly gaunt, haggard and rather wild-looking due to their isolated lifestyle, poor genetics and prolonged periods of malnutrition.

• Fantastic Racism: Not so much racism as fantastic xenophobia. The Beckers are wary of what they refer to as the World Beyond the Woods and the people who live there. All of their stories passed down to the younger generations paint the outside world’s citizens as unvaryingly backstabbing and ruthless creatures to be feared. Jo did not fully believe in this propaganda despite seeing their vicious nature with her own eyes. It was only when she truly became a victim of Kishlaith's white porzite trafficking that she developed the same distrust for anyone not within her family, combined with an overwhelming terror at the realization that she was entirely alone in the outside world and at the mercy of its citizens.
  • The Becker family is on the receiving end of this trope from several individuals, and it is played brutally straight. When Anja hesitated to inject Jo with the white porzite, Lars became livid and demanded "Are you telling me you’ve become attached to one of Mourner’s inbred cows or something?". Elizabeth’s Procurers, former adventurers tasked with hunting the Becker family, see them the way one would regard dangerous game animals, although their leader Syor Harel sees them similarly to Lars—penned livestock protected by a particularly vicious guard dog that he considers his true prey.

• The Family That Slays Together: Groups of mostly male Beckers regularly patrol the Sulvey swamps and act as hidden lookouts for outsiders wandering the area. There is no escape once they’ve locked onto you; the swamps are tangled and disorienting for those unfamiliar with them, and the Beckers use their lifelong knowledge of the land to move silently through the vegetation and even beneath the water around their victims to cut off any hope of running. With the addition of Laurence Jr’s traps, it’s all too likely that you may escape a group of hostile armed men only to run into a homemade landmine or find your legs cut to ribbons by spring loaded blades buried in the mud and grass. The Beckers grimly ignore pleas for mercy when carrying out these killings, although some will occasionally whoop with laughter when their prey makes a particularly stupid blunder in their haste to escape. Worst of all, they are superhumanly strong and can recover from injuries pretty quickly, drastically increasing the difficulty of a fight. Whether you are a lost traveler or one of Elizabeth’s Procurers, coming under a surprise attack like this is still jarring and frightening. Jo herself didn’t participate in any of these assaults on outsiders apart from killing a Procurer with a knife to defend herself and her cousins in her childhood, but she and the rest of the Garage team were a part of the aftermath. They were tasked with the salvage of weapons and items from the dead and of course taking apart their boats and cars or keeping them for family usage. Even before working in the Garage, part of Jo's chores with the other women and girls was feeding the livestock with scraps of meat that were made from butchering the corpses of the family's slain enemies and victims.

• Fish out of Water: Jo has never left the boundaries of the Becker property and its surrounding swamp. Her only knowledge of anything outside came from family legends and secretive glances at pictures in magazines or photos to give her even a hint of what the outside world was like. Not only had she never left her home, she hadn’t even been in the rest of the province of Sulvey, let alone the rest of the Radiant Union. After being petrified and kidnapped, she was taken out of the Radiant Union and to an entirely different continent. Jo is familiar with some machines and devices around her, but others are completely foreign to her. She is overwhelmed by the sheer size of the world in general; a small town seems like an endless expanse of dwellings and packed multitudes while a city is like a terrifying and incredible labyrinth of stone and steel, filled with impossibly tall alien structures. But more than the physical aspects, she is ignorant of the history and cultures of the world's nations, the political intrigues and relations between its groups and organizations, and its famous figures and reviled evils. The GOT members all take turns trying to teach her about these aspects, some on purpose and some just by way of trying to start up conversations or include her in things. It has...mixed results, though all of this does begin to reignite the spark of curiosity that Jo has carried within her since childhood.

• For Want Of A Nail: If Falco had been less eager to sadistically punish the Revenge Trio for their insolence towards Elizabeth’s underworld edicts, and put more effort into actually locating the source of their unsanctioned white porzite supply, Jo would have been transported to a Garden facility to languish forever and would have gone irreversibly insane. But Falco and his enforcers were satisfied with apprehending the three teens and missed the secret passage in their hideout that led to the chamber where Jo’s tree was contained. This let the GOT find her on their final sweep of the place, and put her feet on the road to recovery. This of course led to her slowly becoming friends with their members and when Elizabeth began to manipulate conflict between the Solinri Empire and Thasmian Dominion, Jo’s backstory gave the GOT an entirely new angle to investigate when it came to the vampire’s activities in order to take her down.

• Friend to All Children: When Tyler began to pressure her to quit her job in the Garage, Jo compromised by limiting her hours there and spent the rest of her time assisting the aunts and uncles responsible for training and looking after the family’s children. She developed a rapport with many of the kids born to her cousins, and was quite popular with them since she just played with them rather than inserting training and education into the fun. Jo genuinely enjoyed taking care of them, but would feel a hollow pit in her stomach when they would return to their parents, pointedly reminding her that she was “Always an aunt but never a mama”. Even at her most distrustful of outsiders, Jo is quite kind to kids when she comes across them and bears none of the unfriendliness she shows to adults, since she firmly believes that Children Are Innocent. If she finds herself watching over kids not from her family, she is extremely protective and is frightened they will hurt themselves since they lack the healing powers and strength of the Beckers. When Jo returns to the Becker property in the company of GOT members, many of the kids who remember their Aunt Mary-Jo are delighted to see her and while several are nervous due to her white hair, many evade their elder’s attempts to restrain them and come up to greet and hug her. It pushes her to tears, prompting questions from them about why she is crying.

• Gayngst: Jo figured out that she liked other women pretty early on in life, and actually developed a crush on her cousin Millie. But without any context or understanding of what that meant, and with the expectation that she would settle with a man and reproduce, she suppressed the feelings as best she could. Her failures to fulfill the "reproduce" part of her obligation to the family and her husband's abuse weakened her resolve and made her longing for Millie worse, and she suffered dearly when drunkenly acting on that desire. Her short-lived romance with Anja was nothing more than a Honey Trap that led to greater horror than she had ever imagined. Though Jo feels both attraction and romantic love for Mia, she is afraid of actually moving into a relationship, partly because she still feels that she is defective and broken for her interests, and because every time she has allowed herself to give in to same-sex romantic affection, she has wound up hurt.

• Has a Type: Jo’s ex-girlfriend Anja and her current girlfriend Mia are both shorter than her, have long hair, and prominent Roman noses. They also happen to both be mages, though Mia is far more adept at the arcane arts than Anja who merely dabbled. The last part is just coincidence however, since Anja never showed Jo any of her magical abilities while they were “dating”.

• Healing Factor: Jo and her family can heal minor injuries in minutes and severe trauma to their bodies will be restored without so much as a scar within hours to days. They can even regenerate damage to their vital organs or grow entirely new ones provided they are kept alive long enough to be able to do so. The Beckers believe this power to be a blessing from the Bright King bestowed upon their lineage as a reward for their ancestor Alan’s service and devotion, hence the term "Alan's Gift". The real reason behind their rapid healing is because the white porzite central intelligence is bonded to their bloodline. One side-effect of the bond is that the central intelligence fixes the human bodies of Alan’s family in the same way it repairs and regrows the white porzite crystals around the world that are parts of its true physical form. The regeneration can be overwhelmed by a “surplus” of injuries, resulting in a slower recovery; Tyler’s last attack on Jo inflicted so many wounds that it took her weeks to fully recover.

• Heroic BSoD: Jo utterly loses it when she finds out from her father that her mother and brother have been "captured" in the three years she has been missing from the Becker property. It's even worse since she now knows that Arlene and Laurence Jr are not merely prisoners, but have been subjected to the same madness-inducing ordeal she was condemned too. And since her rescue was a million-to-one shot, it is likely they will stay frozen in helpless torment for all eternity until someone destroys their white porzite trees. While Mia tries to empathize with her, having lost both her own parents to evil, Jo finds that she cannot compare Mia's deceased parents to her worse-than-dead mother and brother...and deep down, Mia knows this. In the end, this is one of the things that lets Jo and Laurence Sr sit down and have a hear-to-heart conversation, since he is aware of the truth behind what happens to captured Becker family members, having gone through it himself.

• Hillbilly Horrors: The Becker family are ultimately a Deconstruction of the trope, but certainly do their best to play it straight. They live in dilapidated dwellings in an isolated and swampy area, within a region of Kishlaith that bears similarities to the Deep South. They are very inbred and they violently attack and kill anyone who enters into their territory and use the corpses of their victims to feed their livestock before scavenging their weapons and other possessions. Their fear and distrust of anything outside of their swampy domain is a rancid stew of hostile paranoia, ignorance and outright superstition. Where the deconstruction occurs is that they have a justified reason for their behavior. They are subjected to regular attacks by mysterious invaders who continually kidnap their loved ones at random, never to be seen again. Suffering this for centuries has instilled hatred and fear for anything not from their swamp and their policy of radical self-defense condemns any non-Becker found within their domain to death. Even their severe inbreeding is understandable when one appreciates that they have no contact with the outside world in any way, so they are forced to reproduce with one another, to the point that they have long ago lost any misgivings about the practice and see it as simply the way things are done. In many ways, Jo’s encounter with the Revenge Trio was actually an inversion of this trope—a group of teens were stalked and spied upon in a swampy region by a hillbilly-type character…only for the teens to turn out to be the true monsters.

• Icy Blue Eyes: Another trait shared by all the Beckers is their unique eye-color. The irises of their eyes are a strange light shade of gray that borders on white. It gives them a piercing gaze and adds a haunting element to their features regardless of how pretty or ugly they are. Jo’s eye color is one of several things that unfortunately gives her away as a Becker to those who are all too knowledgeable about the family and its particulars. it is later revealed that these eyes are not original to Alan's family, but a result of the white porzite's central intelligence slowly altering the bodies of his descendants over the ages, a mutation that has been made easier by their constant inbreeding. It is something that worries Isaac immensely, though he keeps it to himself having no one to speak to about it.

• Incest Is Relative: Everyone on the Becker property is related and their isolated status and fear of the outside world means inbreeding has been their only method of reproduction for hundreds of years. Jo’s father and mother are uncle and niece respectively, a pairing that isn’t common but not even close to unheard of on the Becker homestead. The practice of inbreeding has become such a basic aspect of their lives that when Jo is told how dating, marriage and reproduction work in the outside world, she can only wrinkle her nose in faint disapproval of people from different families intermarrying and losing the “integrity” of their bloodlines. The Becker’s practice of inbreeding, combined with the taint of the white porzite central intelligence has blighted the family with a horrendous number of stillbirths and birth defects. The latter issue has become so common that the family even has a name for those born deformed. They believe that allowing “Abnormals” into the family will supernaturally weaken the health and wellbeing of the other members and so any infants found to have deformities are slain moments after birth.

• In Love with the Mark: Jo being the “mark” in this example. Apart from misgivings about the danger inherent to their mission, Anja originally had no moral qualms about the plan to create their own white porzite tree from a member of the Becker family, since she viewed them as violent savages, twisted by centuries of inbreeding, and good for little more than the resource their bodies provided. She drew Jo into a false relationship for several weeks in order to lower her guard while her partners scouted the area to ensure that they could petrify the young woman without any interference. But Anja found herself gradually becoming all too aware of her “girlfriend’s” basic humanity. She began to cryptically advise Jo to get far away from them, hoping that she would leave and the three of them could just find a random Becker to petrify. Unfortunately, Jo didn’t get the hints and when Anja confided her internal conflict to Bushemi, he immediately reported it to Lars. At that point Lars decided that they needed to speed things along while also testing Anja’s dedication to their larger endeavor in a truly brutal fashion. It should be noted that while Lars and Bushemi were at least temporarily sobered by what they did to her, Anja suffered the deepest pangs of guilt for the rest of her life, especially because her mage training gave her enough of a sixth sense that could sense Jo’s trapped soul within the tree...and knew she was still awake and aware.

• Locked into Strangeness: Jo was born with black hair, but upon being returned to human form, all of her body hair was left snow white. Seeing this for the first time results in her destroying the mirror that revealed the change. The reason behind her reaction is that one of the Becker legends speaks of "white-haired specters", family members marked by the World Beyond the Woods with white hair and cursed to carry tragedy among the family. The truth behind this tale is that one of Elizabeth's early methods of locating the Becker family's members was to reverse the petrification process and let the victim go free...and then have them followed back to their loved ones, using their distinctive white hair as a guide. Despite her discomfort at this change, Jo refuses to let anyone dye it back to black since she sees it as deceit, which she is both morally opposed to and fearful of whatever punishment would fall on her head for lying to the family about such a thing.

• Lotus-Eater Machine: As Jo’s mind began to break down over the three years she spent petrified, she began to vividly hallucinate. Some were horrific nightmares but they increasingly became visions of her idealized life, having settled down with a non-abusive Tyler and giving birth to many well-behaved and adorable children who were a credit to the family. These hallucinations became more and more detailed each time her mind lost its grip on reality, signaling that her sanity would have eventually been lost forever, even if her body was restored to human form. As it is, the detailed and realistic nature of some of these visions makes Jo occasionally question her reality and surroundings, causing her to turn to Self-Harm to convince herself she is in the real world.

• Major Injury Underreaction: Jo expresses an appropriate amount of pain and distress at the immediate moment of incurring an injury, but she has little to none of the unease about the wound that most people would have. Instead she treats any damage as painful but temporary inconveniences she will have to endure with clenched teeth until her regenerative powers eliminate it. During the final battle against Elizabeth, she rips apart the lid of the vampire's final armored coffin with her bare hands to get at her family's enemy. The effort works, but wreaks havoc on her hands. The sharp metal shards cut her palms to the bone in some areas and badly slices the tendons in her fingers. She grimaces and grunts while doing this, but it's hard to tell if it's from the pain or merely the effort of ripping through such powerful armored wood even with Becker strength.

• Most Definitely Not Accompanying Us: Several times after the conflict with Elizabeth begins in earnest, though it is played for drama rather than the usual laughs. Once it is revealed that not only is the ancient vampire trying to start a catastrophic world war for her own ends, but that she is responsible for the white porzite trade in Kishlaith and consequently the Becker family’s deplorable condition, Jo insists on being at the forefront of any efforts to end her reign of terror. However, it’s also become clear from the GOT’s investigations and Jo’s own testimony that any exposure to white porzite will turn her back into a petrified crystal tree. Since Elizabeth’s organization features a heavy white porzite presence, it is deemed absolutely out of the question for her to expose herself to such danger, especially since it’s clear Mia will attempt to unpetrify her again, something that is guaranteed to be fatal for her a second time. Jo does eventually wear down those who refuse her with a mixture of passionate pleas to let her help fight against the one who has done so much damage to her kin, or outright threats to just follow them anyway, which would leave her unprotected and without backup. The only time this is played for laughs is when Simon, Edvard and Mia make a decision to send a team of envoys to contact the Becker family at their homestead. They deny Jo’s request to come along out of pure habit…only to realize the absurdity of the refusal.

• Naked on Revival: Mia's reconstruction of Jo's body did not include the clothes she was wearing; in fact, her homespun tunic, pants and shoes had been torn to shreds by her transformation into a white porzite tree long ago. She was completely nude when Mia pulled her new body out of the faded and crumbling remains of her tree. It runs headlong into Fan Disservice territory when you add that the incomplete nature of the spell left her missing most of her skin and she was screaming in pain and confusion.

• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Possibly overlaps with The Farmer and the Viper. Most members of the Becker family would have fired their flare gun at the sight of Anja, Lars and Bushemi and brought the nearest family patrol or Isaac down on the three teenagers. But Jo decided to simply observe them and then lost all thoughts of reporting them when they befriended her. Her reward for not condemning them to death was being forced into a hellish situation and harvested repeatedly over the years for the Power Crystal the three needed to achieve their dream of rebelling against the forces that held the southern colonies in an iron fist.

• No Ontological Inertia: The moment Mia removes Jo's restored body from the white porzite tree, the entire crystal structure noticeably loses its light and begins to degrade, becoming brittle and flaky like shale. By the time an hour has passed, it has crumbled mostly to dust and the remains of its trunk is barely holding a solid shape. Justified, because the crystal that made up the tree's "body" was being generated by the fragment of the white porzite central intelligence within Jo's soul, the fragment having gone into overdrive by being exposed to the white porzite she was injected with. Removing her soul from the tree, within a new body, caused it to immediately fall apart.

• No Ms Bond I Expect You To Dine: Elizabeth invites Jo over to one of her many properties, her town house in the Nurense city of Sul-Marie, giving the reason that she was an interesting new face in the GOT and as a socialite and member of the Idle Rich she wishes to get to know potential movers and shakers. Ironically Jo is urged to accept by Mia who sees it as an opportunity for her to branch out and become more comfortable in the wider world. During the nighttime dinner Elizabeth flawlessly plays her usual role as a wealthy Friendly Neighborhood Vampire and asks all sorts of questions about the young woman that seem innocuous on the surface...but she is covertly fishing for information on how Jo was petrified, how much she knows about her family's situation, and most importantly if she has told the GOT anything that would make them a threat to her organization and setup. Much later when the GOT and Elizabeth's organization are at each other's throats, Mia repeatedly beats herself up about what could have happened if Elizabeth was less pragmatic and had less restraint.

• Non Sequitur: Jo creates these through an odd habit of stopping conversations when the topic has become too uncomfortable for her to deal with at the moment...only to randomly start them up again, right where she left off hours or even days later. For example, when Mia was once forced to use magic to restrain Jo from hurting someone in a fit of panic and is apologizing to the extremely incensed young woman, Jo complains that the sensation felt like a whole-body variation the painful leg cramps induced by early pregnancy. When Mia is understandably confused and asks whether Jo has ever been pregnant, she immediately swings the conversation back to how being restrained against her will makes her feel violated and unsafe. A few hours later she interrupts a conversation with Mia about the secret passages in the cellar of the Aimms manor with the explanation of her failed pregnancies and the toll it took on her marriage. Weirdly, this has little to do with the traumas she has suffered; it's been a habit of hers from childhood onward and seems to be an engrained personality trait.

• Parental Title Characterization: Even as a young adult Jo refers to her parents as Mama and Daddy. It is the same for all Beckers who do this their entire lives.

• Perpetual Frowner: Jo's facial expressions range from pinched and anxious or just mournful and listless, even when she's not actively in any sort of distress. Her smiles are rare, but are so faint and wistful that they give her face tragic beauty.

• Pet the Dog: When GOT co-founder Edvard Frisk's 6-year-old grandson Olaff gets lost in the organization’s headquarters and stumbles upon Jo. Rather than turn the young dwarf away with her usual cold demeanor she immediately asks where his parents are, and upon confirming that he is lost, she guides him back to his worried parents and grandfather since she has memorized enough of the castle's layout at that point to know where to find them. It emphasizes the part of her that is a Friend to All Children and shows the rising numbers of GOT members who thought she was either just crazy or a Jerkass that she has another side to her.

• Protect This House: Jo is forced to do this when the Becker homestead comes under attack by the near-literal army of cartel enforcers gathered by Falco Alborne in his attempt to end the conflict between the Beckers and Elizabeth and punish Isaac for his acts against the organization. She bands together with her family members and the group of GOT members who were there at the time to help defend the homestead against the largest invasion the family has ever seen. She is terrified of being petrified again but the thought of any of her relatives undergoing what she went through is more horrifying to her than once again being crystalized herself. Fortunately the Big Damn Heroes entrance by GOT backup and House Darus forces renders this a moot point.

• Robbing the Mob Bank: Jo was turned into a white porzite tree when the Revenge Trio did this. People who are aware of the Becker family's existence and what their bloodline can be used for, also understand that they are "owned" by Elizabeth Mourner, and have been since time immemorial. She alone decides when they are hunted or when they are left alone to renew their numbers, and she controls everything pertaining to the white porzite trade across the sister continents of Kishlaith. Lars, Anja and Bushemi had this knowledge, but they also knew the vampiric crime boss would never allow them to use the powers of white porzite the way they wanted—let alone grant them an entire tree to supply the enormous amounts they needed for their plans to succeed. So, they entered the Sulvey swamps during the "off season" and went after the first Becker family member they could find. While they enjoyed a period of success, their conspicuous activity in the southern colonies was more than enough to alert Elizabeth, who sent her fledgling Falco Alborne to punish them for their act of “poaching”. Which he did…quite painfully.

• Stay in the Kitchen: Duties and chores on the Becker homestead were split rather rigidly by gender—the men performed the manual labor, hunting, repairs, and defense against outsiders while the women cooked, cleaned, gathered and made herbs into numbing medication or dyes for the colored smoke for flare guns, tended the animals, and made new clothes. On the other hand, the family took a pragmatic approach; if a woman was particularly skilled at a certain “male” chore or task, then she would be allowed to take part among the men, though she was expected to keep up without complaint. This is why Jo was allowed to work in the Garage, helped along by her killing of an outsider at the tender age of 8.

• Stunned Silence: Jo cannot even speak let alone move for several minutes after overhearing a furious argument between the three Guild founders Simon, Edvard and Mia that reveals a truth Mia kept hidden from her—by all rights, the spell Mia devised to free her from the tree should have killed the mage. In fact, Mia had full knowledge that what she was doing would likely end her life, and had put her affairs in order for several months beforehand in preparation for the end. The realization that Mia fully intended to die saving her, a complete stranger, triggers a flood of emotions that push her beyond the ability to speak. On a lighter note, Jo spends a lot of her time in complete shock while taking in the sights and features of Kishlaith as a whole, from cities to foreign vehicles, to foods she didn’t even know were possible to make.
  • Jo’s mere presence as Mia’s “date” at a charity ball for the World Vampire League inflicts this on Elizabeth Mourner herself when she comes into contact with the GOT’s members for the first time at the formal party. Seeing Jo’s eyes and general physical features lets her know that she is looking at a Becker, who is walking around in Kishlaith proper. Secondly Jo’s white hair shows her that the young woman was once a white porzite tree and she has been freed from that state—something should be impossible since Elizabeth stopped her “catch, release, and track” strategy some time ago. Of course, being Elizabeth, she quickly collects herself, but her mind is racing with all sorts of possibilities and she uses her guise as a Socialite to approach the young woman with a few innocuous questions designed to produce some rationale for her presence.

• Super-Empowering: An extremely sinister and involuntary example on Jo’s part. While helpless and imprisoned within her own crystalized flesh, she was an eternally self-replenishing source of white porzite crystals, which magnify the physical and arcane prowess of anyone who consumes or even keeps the crystals on their person for long periods of time. Drawing upon white porzite’s power also bestows a feeling of invincibility and immense wellbeing, which is something the Revenge Trio took advantage of when liberally distributing it to the stressed and struggling people of Solinri's southern colonies. However, like all white porzite, it eventually drove its users aggressively insane before mutating them into grotesque inhuman forms as their bodies and minds were steadily overrun by the cursed mineral’s corruption. For reasons not fully understood, Jo's particular variant of white porzite allowed Anja to take command of these monsters by screaming and concentrating upon what she wanted them to do. It is a crude and imprecise control, but it was enough that the Revenge Trio were able to create a depraved parody of a "revolutionary army" to achieve their dream of attempting to liberate the southern colonies from House Cavar, using masses of unwittingly tainted citizens as ready-made living weapons.

• Super-Strength: Jo is strong enough to lift up a small car both hands, bend metal and throw full grown adults around like a ragdoll. Despite weighing 117 lbs compared to Lars Bruhne's 210, she was able to hurl him away from her with enough strength to smash him through a wall and stun him. When working in the Garage, it was not unusual for her to carry large machine parts slung over her shoulder or lift a disabled vehicle with only one other cousin helping her. Even as a child Jo's strength was enough to drive a dull bait knife through the body-armor, flesh and bone to stab the heart of the Procurer menacing her and her cousins. All of the Beckers have this enhanced physical power from birth, though it exists in varying degrees. Jo's comes and goes; it can last for a few hours to a few days and then suddenly leave her with the amount of strength expected of a woman her height and weight. Or it can come in spurts lasting only a few minutes. This isn't unusual, which is why she wasn't considered an Abnormal for this trait alone.

• There Are No Therapists: Mercifully averted. It is clear early-on that she has mental health issues, but the extent of them and their cause are a mystery since she won't talk about herself or her past to anyone for a long time. Because of that, Jo is forced to deal with her hypervigilance, and other symptoms for a long time until she decides to get help so that she can accept the offers of friendship around her without fear and be a better partner to Mia. Once she makes this decision, she is referred to a psychiatrist who specializes in treating the victims of supernatural/magical crimes. It goes roughly at first due to Jo's misunderstandings of how mental health professionals work, and her reluctance to talk about herself. When she does open up not only about her petrification but about her family life prior to that incident, she is diagnosed with PTSD and depression not just from being turned into a white porzite tree, but from the neglect and abuse she suffered in her home situation. The therapy actually helps over time, and while Jo has both her good days and her bad days, she becomes able to make and keep friends with those who offer and gain a meaningful job as a mechanic for the GOT's fleet of cars and handywoman on the Aimms estate.

• Villains Want Mercy: Upon being faced with Jo standing above her in the agonizing sunlight with an improvised spear made from a broken pipe and crushed shard of metal, Elizabeth manages one final gambit by catching the young woman with her Hypnotic Eyes. She cannot exert any precise control over Jo’s mind since she is badly weakened by the day, but she is able to command Jo to freeze in place while she begs her to reconsider killing her. She stammers out her backstory as she begs for mercy and tells Jo that the two of them are alike; young women who just wanted to see the world and rise above the circumstances of their births and were subjected to suffering because of it. She furthermore promises to “be good” and never bother the Beckers again if she is just allowed to live the life Rudolph saved so long ago. Jo responds by simply slamming the spear into Elizabeth’s chest and driving it home using her foot.

• What the Hell, Hero?: A very soft and respectful version but Jo does demand of Isaac why he never told her family the truths about the outside world or the real reason behind their powers. Isaac is shocked by being asked these questions but eventually apologizes to her and states that even with all his strength, he could not protect Alan's family from an organization so wide-reaching and powerful and determined as Elizabeth's cartel. So he simply made a "paradise" for the Becker family, isolated from Kishlaith's predators. A place that would give him a better hope of saving them from extinction. He goes on to reason that his falsification of Alan's story was to give them hope and a sense of being special to ease their discomfort and deprivation.

• Wrench Wench: She was fascinated with the intricacies of mechanical devices from an early age, to the point that she destroyed one of her family's only sewing machines as a child just to see how it worked on the inside. Her brother Laurence Jr shared this interest and nurtured it in her by letting her watch him make traps and occasional torture devices for punishing rule-breakers. Jo finally gained a place in the Garage, salvaging parts from machines or jerry-rigging cars to make them able to function long-term without their keys and regular maintenance. Uneasy with the idea of simply staying with Mia as a lodger, Jo eventually starts to fix things around the Aimms manor before moving on to the cars belonging to Mia's deceased parents, and then to the weapons of a few GOT members. She finally becomes an on-and-off mechanic who fixes various devices around the headquarters for a small fee. It is pretty much a dream job for her and one she takes great pride and joy in.

• You Can't Go Home Again: One of the many reasons for Jo’s cascade of despair and terror when she finds herself within the outside world. It rapidly occurs to her that she doesn’t even know where she is in relation to her home, and even if she did know, she can't ask to be taken back to the Becker property because that would lead outsiders right to her family’s sanctuary. All her hair has turned completely white, marking her as tainted by the World Beyond the Woods and ensuring that she will be looked at with distrust by her kinfolk for the rest of her life. When she finally does go back to the Becker property with news about the true nature of the enemy hunting them, her fears are shown to be well-founded. A lot of her family express fury and horror that she brought outsiders with her, and see her hair color as proof that she is being controlled by the outside world. Although they calm down once it becomes clear that the GOT means no harm and only wish to help, Jo finds herself unable to ignore the squalor and deprivation of her home that she never noticed before. She has even less tolerance for the willful ignorance of her family members than before, and finds their scorn for anything and anyone from the outside all the more appalling. So, while she is eventually able to return home, and goes on to divide her time between the Becker homestead and traveling Kishlaith, her relationship with the place is never the same although her love for her family never wavers.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Nov 3rd 2020 at 6:02:29 AM

Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace

My face when◊ I see how much you posted. I mean, I thought I was bad for throwing up 2K-3K-word posts. If I'm bad, then you're two steps short of the devil.

Anyway, let's get started.

If I had to describe Jo with one word, it would be "heavy". Word count aside, this was an incredibly dense read, with lots of material that makes me tug my collar nervously. This is apparently a story with incest, abuse, mutilation, inbreeding, homophobia, and indoctrination, just to name a few. That's overlooking the supernatural elements (body horror, yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!). And that's overlooking the sneaking suspicion I have that you've still got more cards in your hand to play. I mean, this is just an overview, not the full story with the proper context/execution of ideas. It can still get worse.

What I'm getting at here is that that heaviness — depending on the audience — can be a blessing or a curse. I'm trying to see things the way others might, but since I can only speak for myself with any level of certainty, I'll do so. In general, my thoughts were "this is pretty interesting" when going through Jo's overview (and as a rule, getting me to say something is "interesting" counts as a major point in something's favor). On occasion, though? There were other times — this niggling, tiny voice in the back of my head — when I'd go "Hoo boy, laying it on a little thick, aren't we?" The sheer amount of oppression, grief, and darkness built into Jo is undeniable. By design, no doubt, and I'd neither fault you for it nor ask you to make any overhauls to compromise your vision. I just think it's worth remembering that your content is...well, not going to be for everyone. Hard to focus on evil vampires and tree mutations when incest is a key part of the worldbuilding.

Of course, the mitigating factor for all of this is the actual, 1:1 story. It's all in the execution, and I suspect that there's more to your creation than unrelenting pressure and heady themes. Humanity, levity, a spark of life, color — not enough to dilute that pressure entirely, but certainly something to keep your work from being curiously reminiscent of Resident Evil 7. Worst-case scenario? Jo stops being someone who participates in the story, and is just someone that bad things happen to. Again, I'm sure you've dodged that scenario, but I thought I'd toss that out there just in case.

But to put focus back on Jo? Yeah, I like her. She's clearly and rightfully busted, but the fact that she still soldiers on in her own way is pretty admirable. Even in this little overview, I got a clear sense of how damaged she is, and what lengths you're willing to go to to portray her issues. From nervous tics to overall goals, all the way down to her worldview (both refreshingly pure and decisively twisted), she's a character I wouldn't mind following on her journey, especially if it means helping her reach a happy ending. A merry little pile of neuroses like her deserves nothing but the best...or, failing that, a big hug.

As someone with more than a passing interest in putting combat into stories (blame it on a past and present full of fighting games), I'm more than a little intrigued by Jo's fighting skills. Or lack thereof. Giving her raw(ish) power without the skill to use it makes for a good balance, though what really gets me going is imagining her mental state in a fight. Given the kind of person she is, I have a hard time seeing her keeping her composure in a lot of skirmishes, possibly even against enemies she could and should be able to dispatch easily. Is she the type to crack under pressure? Or maybe the type who gets more dangerous when she's backed into a corner? Regardless, plenty of potential to be had.

Lastly? Given who Jo is, I'm excited by the prospect of her relationships and what they mean to her. Chief among them, the one she has with Mia. I've got no qualms about a mutual romance, but I wonder if it's simply that. Not that I'm complaining, mind; it's just that from an outsider's perspective, there are moments when it seems like Jo's got codependency issues. Granted, it almost seems like she's the type who'd latch onto anyone who doesn't wail on her (after getting over her distrust and paranoia), but defining the relationship with Mia is going to be especially fruitful. Is there some level of Florence Nightingale Effect there? Is it strictly pure and healthy for once in Jo's life? What's Mia's take on it all? That's something I'd like to see proven and executed in the story proper.

And that's about all I've got for now. So there's no confusion, I'll be straight with you: this was a good showing. A LONG showing, yes, but comprehensive enough to not only show what Jo's about, but inspire confidence in her. I approve. As if my proverbial thumbs-up is worth a damn, but whatever.

And now I go back to whatever it is I do.

My Wattpad — A haven for delightful degeneracy

Took me long enough, but here I am with my review of Jo!

Not sure what it says about me that after several warnings about the content of this character bio the first thing that popped to my mind after reading this was that the relationship between rapid healing and the harsh corporal punishment administered by the Becker family would make for some great black comedy. I'm reminded of Angel Beats, where the characters can't die and so a lot of the comedy occurs from them getting killed in stupid, usually self-inflicted ways. Heck, at one point the leader literally starves everyone to death out of frustration with a failed mission. I'm just imagining Jo and some cousins in the Garage getting into an argument and one of them storming off in a huff, and right after that cousin makes some snide remark under their breath Jo chucks at a wrench at their head. Yeah, it'll hurt like crazy, but he'll get better. No permeant harm, no permeant foul. Head trauma for a regular person, painful slapstick for these folks. "Can I have my arms back?" "No." "How about now?" "No!" "... Now?"

On to Jo herself. I think she handily beats Liz for World's Biggest Chew Toy. A young woman fated from birth to be hunted like an animal and forced to live on what can charitably be called a homestead cut off from the entire world. Surrounded by family who are forced to be hyper paranoid and suffering from Lord knows what kind of genetic disorders that spawn from years of inbreeding. When you said she's resistant to learning to read, I just couldn't help but think of her taking apart the sewing machine and her time in the Garage and what she wouldn't give to have the schematics for all these machines and the ability to actually read them. Honestly that aspect of her life hits me on a different level, not being able to read. It's a skill we take so much for granted, but I for one cannot imagine my life without it. Then we get to the more brutal aspects of her life. I cannot imagine what it must be life to see your aunt get murdered while people were attempting to kidnap you. To live with that seared into your memory and live with the knowledge that it could happen again at any point in the future. I do have more experience with abusive relationships so I can understand to a point being trapped in marriage that happened when she was too young with someone who was definitely wrong for her, even discounting incompatible orientation.

What I find the most interesting about her is the manner in which her Post Tree Stress Disorder manifests. She already wasn't a mentally healthy person to begin with, I doubt any of the Beckers are with the way they live, but getting that happen to you certainly brought more stress to her mind. Being afraid of needles because due to associating them with what happened to her. Burning herself to make sure she's still in reality. Substance abuse to just dull the stress and emotional pain she goes through everyday. I very much like the fact you included a therapist because I feel like you took the extra effort to understand what was going through Jo's mind and what was causing her issues so that you could better guide the process to healing and coping. And I highly praise that revenge against Elizabeth Mourner isn't the end all be all to her life. That it isn't an insta-cure to her issues, gratifying though it may be, and she still needs to go through the process of getting better. It's a level of realism you don't always see in many stories. There is a certain level of irony in that without going through all that horribleness she wouldn't have gotten the closure of bringing Elizabeth to justice nor the psychiatric help for her issues that were present even before she was turned into a tree.

I am glad to see that even despite all that trauma Jo's personality can still be coaxed out even from diametrically opposing reasons. Having a soft spot for little kids didn't go away, nor did her hobby of casually hotwiring cars apparently. It's interesting that despite having a life before becoming a porzite tree she clearly hadn't lived and in that sense she's a fresh perspective on the world and everyone in it. If this was a video game she'd be the stand in for the player that all the other characters have to explain every perfectly normal thing about the world to. Which amuses me even more because as I typed that I realized the other characters probably have to explain video games to Jo. And how to drive, and how to fight, how to use a phone, how to buy groceries, how to use a credit card. It's actually interesting that all her strengths, both in skills and supernatural abilities, only marginally prepared her for the vaster conflict against Liz and didn't prepare her at all for just having a normal life. But hey, when you close yourself off to the rest of the world, don't be surprised when the black ships come sailing into your harbor.

I've made my feelings about Mia known elsewhere so I'm not going to comment further on her relationship with Jo. Has a Type is probably the only trope listed that could be expanded on though.

I enjoyed reading this profile. It was certainly a very different take on the world than the fantasy adventure and noir atmospheres of the villains who share this world.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Jun 24th 2021 at 7:54:09 AM

Hiya! I'd like to have your opinion on of of my two protagonists for a story i'm making, which is a Zombie Plague story taking place in renaissance era england.

Name: Eleanor

Age: 16

Race: Caucasian

Appearance: long,blonde hair, green eyes, Slim, but athletic, due to running and jogging around town for her errands and odd jobs as well as her parkour skills. Wears ragged commoner clothing. Think Eilonwy from disney's black cauldron, but more lower class.

Background: She comes from a lower class family living in a village located in the outskirts of Gravenbirch, A fictional Town in the West Midlands. She runs errands and does odd jobs to provide for her family, and she occasionally steals food from the market place.

Personality: Determined, Opportunistic. Can be headstrong and a little bossy, but is a sweet person in general.

Role in the Story: one of the two protagonists

Motivations: Her desire For adventure, but also Improving her family's fortunes

Goal: Find the Celtic Treasure buried beneath stonehenge so that She can sell it to the highest bidder to get her family out of financial misery. She doesn't know where stonehenge is, though, due to her never leaving Gravenbirch. In fact, she starts the story by going to her uncle's downtown library to find a map that contains stonehenge's location.

Abilities: street smarts, Parkour, good sense of direction.

Weaknesses: Stubborn and headstrong (i think they mean the same thing, but whatever...), gets anxious and stressed when in trouble or under pressure. Lacks experience in combat.

Hobbies: reading the history books that her librarian uncle gave her when she was a child. She loves reading, especially treasure hunt stories and books on The former celtic warrior queen Boudicca, her idol. She also plays football with her Younger brothers and their friends.

So, what do you think?

Edited by kinnikuniverse on Nov 29th 2020 at 12:48:15 PM

You need to criticize the character posted above you first.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Oh ok, sorry.

So, that alice girl, her mana heart, does it work similarly to iron man's heart? Can she also recharge her heart with a plug or something?

Lolitas don't really do anything for me. Though it's mainly because of personal preference, and i know that this supposed to be a doll version of alice from aloce in wonderland.

The setting is interesting, though. You refere to an apocalyptic event taking place 700 someting million years ago, yet it clearly takes place in the future. I like that very much, that you call something that is considered ancient,yet is clearly a piece of sci-fi futuristic technology. I like that "alien technology considered ancient by the aliens" trope. Adds to the whole "we don't know what's out there" feeling of outer space.

Magic and scifi, in the same setting, i always thought it was contradictory. It's one of the reasons why i don't really dig star wars...then again, dragon ball has both, and i dig it, so i'm being hypocritical here.

Also like that the dolls are seemingly named after classic litterature.

Edited by kinnikuniverse on Nov 29th 2020 at 3:02:31 PM

It's fine, just edit your post to include a critique of the other character first.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

> "So, that alice girl, her mana heart, does it work similarly to iron man's heart? Can she also recharge her heart with a plug or something?"

Her mana heart is rechargeable on its own as it derives mana from the planet Venus itself. That said, the rate at which her heart recharges depends on how much strain and damage she takes, as well as the amount of mana spent. Also, her mana heart is essentially what keeps her "alive" so to speak, so if it gets completely destroyed, she would die for good.^note No, this is not foreshadowing any plot twists or anything. Just speaking generally of how the Dolls work in my story.

> "Magic and scifi, in the same setting, i always thought it was contradictory. It's one of the reasons why i don't really dig star wars...then again, dragon ball has both, and i dig it, so i'm being hypocritical here."

I know from a western perspective, this can sound weird and downright incomprehensible to some, since most people have a very ghetto-esque view that magic should never be included in science fiction. But considering my story takes cues from Japanese Light Novels and RPGs (where magic and sci-fi are the norm), this can work. Plus, I want to make the Dolls as very otherworldly as possible, and I find that including magic which is so illogical and beyond human comprehension is the best way to do that, since it also avoids the typical, cliched "aliens just have more advanced technology than humans" approach. It should be noted that humans by that point already have advanced Cyberpunk-esque technology. It's just the Dolls are supernatural by comparison with their Clock Punk Magitek.

> "Also like that the dolls are seemingly named after classic litterature."

Yeah, I figured that since they're essentially space Victorian dolls, giving them names that reflect on the literature at the time or similar was appropriate. I'll go into more detail about Alice's sisters later on separate profiles, but Narnia's name is derived from the location in The Chronicles of Narnia, while Cosette's name is derived from the titular character in Les Misérables.

Anyway, thanks for the critique. I'll critique your character sometime after dinner, since I don't have enough time to write one now. Plus, this post is already getting bloated as it is.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Nov 29th 2020 at 1:01:10 AM

Ok, so now for Eleanor's critique.

A very good female lead all around. I love how she's not afraid to dip into adventure, and her knack for treasure hunting really reminds me of those early 20th century treasure hunt stories. I take it she must come from a very poor background if she has to do a lot of hard work all the time.

However, there is one thing that's missing from her background: the zombies. Where do they fit in with her circumstances? Is she traumatized from some event that involved them somehow? Did they kill or infect her parents? Are they the primary reason why she decides to go on a treasure hunt? It's important to have some connection between your character and the setting at large, because without it, Eleanor is just some run-of-the-mill treasure hunter with no context for her actions.

Also, can you list tropes for her character?

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Nov 29th 2020 at 3:34:46 AM

Well, yeah, she faces one at the beginning of the story, but i don't really know if i should explain it, since i fear that i will spoil things...

That's why spoiler tags are a thing. Observe!

To use spoiler tags, write them like this.

---

[[spoiler:Example text]].

Well, come to think of it, the opening scene is not really a spoiler, since it sets up what the characters are gonna face. So yeah, here's what i've thought:

One night, She arrives in downtown gravenbirch and goes to the library where her uncle works. Upon arriving, nobody answers when she knocks on the door. Thankfully, due to her knowledge of gravenbirch, she knows an entry from the back alley.

Once she sneaked into the library, she finds his uncle's desk, which was full of parchments, books and notes on the fabled treasure if the celts, which, according to the notes, contained not only remnants of the celts civilization, but also something dangerous that should remain hidden, as well as maps showing the location of stonehenge and the many rumoured locations of the treasure.

Suddenly, she heard footsteps, turning around to see a zombie, more precisely, her Aunt Edith, co-director of the gravenbirch library. Sensing that something was not right, eleanor walked back, Her anxiety creeping up on her as aunt edith didn't answer her questions and was lunging at her with her inhuman screams. Scared shitless, eleanor slugs the zombie right in the jaw out of fear, knocking her down.

She immediately took the maps and notes and flew at the door, opening the lock and taking a breather, wondering what the hell just happened, and where was her uncle and if he was OK...only for the zombified edith to grab her ankle as she opened the door, tripping and falling on the floor as the zombie pinned her.

That's where, seemingly out of nowhere, a sword plunged into the zombie's throat, killing it instantly as blood splurted onto eleanor's face.

The badly traumatised eleanor got back up on her feet with help from his saviour, a Rookie Soldier (or knight in training? I dunno.) named Percival, or Percy, the second protagonist of the story. He has his own story, and i could post his character profile, too.

Anyways, he calms her and, seeing variuos zombies coming out of all corners, asked eleanor if she can help him get out of town, as he's never been to gravenbirch before stopping here during his current voyage to manchester. (as seen in his story). Back to her senses, she accepts, and, with her street smarts, good sense of directions and deep knowledge of the town, the two manage to navigate their way out of trouble...of course, not without encountering other infected, with eleanor's lack of experience in combat almost getting her killed if it wasn't for percy saving her.

In the end, they find a safe spot, where they properly introduce themselves and have a small talk, with percy even showing her the basics of swordfighting and eleanor showing him the map and notes on the stonehenge treasure, only to realise in comical horror that a few of the notes were ripped by the zombies during their encounters.

Unfortunately, the peace didn't last long, as the weapons shop nearby was engulfed in flames after a mysterious explosion (this is related to a side character's story). The flames, combined with the strong winds that day, spread the fire all across town, forcing Eleanor and percy to go their separate ways, percy telling her to meet him at the cathedral north of town, where he stopped to pray earlier today. But, as percy ran towards the cathedral, Eleanor quickly ran towards her village, wondering if her family was ok. Thus begins her journey into the world of survival horror... (insert RE 2 racoon city theme here. BWAAA, BWA BWAAAAH...)

So yeah, that's what i've written. Though i wonder i should just instead have eleanor and percy staying together for the first half of the story and separate them in the middle...

Also, i don't really know how to do a trope list

Edited by kinnikuniverse on Nov 30th 2020 at 2:33:57 PM