Birth Name: Rosalind Gillen Naaktgeboren; Rosalind is both a Spanish name that long ago entered public arena and the name of a Shakespeare character, the latter of which it was chosen for. It means 'sweet rose', which is, I admit, freely a reference to Thomasina and her fractal maths in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Gillen is a rather hazy spelling mistake on her mother's part; in the process of dutchifying Gillian, the epidural seems to have made her think that naming her daughter something that instead spells the Dutch for 'to scream' would be a better idea. 'Naaktgeboren' is a traditional and rather embarassing Dutch surname that her parents later shortened to Naborn, but that Rose kept due to the fact that she was EMBRACING HER ROOTS OKAY - it means 'born naked'. (The Dutch, when Napoleon trundled along and demanded that they all register themselves, thought it was a hilarious joke and registered fake, silly names. Sucks on them - the names all stuck, including ones like Naaktgeboren.)
If I really get creative, her name basically means 'Rose Born Naked And Screaming'. If I tried to explain how this represents Chaos to me it would get very pretentious very quick.
Nickname: Lindy
Angelic Identity: Orfiel, angel of Chaos and worried frog DNA
Place in the Spheres: Lindy is an undergraduate at the University of London, studying her last year of women's studies with the hope to move on to a Master's. She lives near the central campus in an only slightly grotty block of flats mostly inhabited by students, a great deal of them part of the Hippie Brigade or at least good-tempered druggies. (Pros: Large amounts of laid-back peace, love and harmony. Cons: Not enough bars on the doors, and six months ago a 'wild animal' broke in and mauled one of the more un-laid-back druggies who swore up and down that it was a poison-dripping demon). She is also a full-time hippie and radical activist for animal, female, workers', students and gay rights, and any other rights she can think of or is hauled out for that week.
Age: Twenty-one
Birthdate/Astrology: November 29th, a day that nothing special happened except Madeline L'Engle was born, if that counts. Lindy's sun sign is Sagittarius; her moon is in Pisces and her ascendant is Aquarius. This makes for: "HI I AM TALKING, TALKING FOR JUSTICE! I LOVE YOU <3 HOOKWORMS!"
Likes:
- Causes; the current years-long love affair of Lindy's life, Good Just Causes For The Oppressed are her modus operandi and she spends her life fighting for them. Fighting for protection of seals. Fighting for protection of birds. Fighting for protection of women in the workplace. Fighting for protection of the poor. The fighting thereof fires her up just as much as the cause; Lindy loves handing out pamphlets and explaining earnestly the plight of coffee-growers in Bumfuck, Bolivia or wherever, militantly chaining herself to government offices in the effort to level pay for women in the workforce, picketing farms due to their use of battery hens. It's a fun social activity and lets her get the impression she is Doing Something That Matters, which she is probably not. Lindy accumulates causes like some people accumulates socks; she honestly believes in them, and can be swayed over to them just by a persuasive argument or a sad picture of a baby harp seal. As Lindy is neck-deep in the ultra-green hippie sector of the London campus, she therefore gains about three new causes per week.
- Doing things; so it's a good thing that Lindy enjoys being kept busy. In fact, she lives for being busy; there is nothing like launching her into fullscale panic like having nothing to do. Lindy is determined to fill up her days two hundred percent; when she is not writing letters to Amnesty International, she is out on the campus with her hippie friends debating marijuana legalization or how organic tomato soup might save the world. She cannot stop and relax to save her life. In her attempts to meditate and stop all the busy hurry, she just ended up even more stressed than before from trying too hard ("Are we meditating yet? D'you think I'm properly relaxed? Should we put on a CD of soothing animal noises? Want a drink?"). Eventually some kind soul taught her about yoga, so now she manages to relax while focusing the electric fusion-powered hamster wheel in her head on bending herself into horrible shapes. Rosalind has to think she is doing something or she will not succeed at it.
- Partying; a tableful of organic carob brownies, a CD full of inevitably indie British hits, lots of people to talk to and be happy with and thou? AWESOME. Parties are the sustenance of life and should be thrown with the same kind of constancy one brushes one's teeth with. Lindy likes it when she is in a place where people come together to be happy. She is drawn like a moth to a flame with bars, dance clubs, nightclubs, and long lines to go the bathroom.
- Comics; Lindy's first love. Her enormous pile of comic books (mostly American and British, rather than Japanese, though she has every Asterix and Obelix comic ever made) has been mangled, pawed and desperately loved; some of the covers have been durasealed just so that the damn things hold together. When faced with nothing else to do, Lindy has a downtime where she determinedly gets out a pile of these things and lolls around contentedly reading about John Constantine, Silver Sable or the X-Men. Or, natch, Billy Bunt And His Jolly Larks; she still has a couple of editions of bloody Beano in there and finds them hilarious.
- Fashion; Lindy is determined to soulfully own the largest and most awesomest pair of bell-bottomed trousers in London. She is also determined to be a cute hippie and not a grody one, because her mother wouldn't let her go back to campus after the first year unless she promised that she would keep on shaving. After being exposed to the horrible plights of animal-killing and slave child molestation labour, Lindy picked up her old sewing machine and some yards of fabric and was determined to make her own clothes. Thankfully, she is actually an exquisite dab hand with needle and thread and the garment production thereof, uniting wholesome sustainable clothes-living with looking cute. Thanks, sewing machine! The barter-and-trade nature of the campus means that her peers' orders for tops that look cute but don't encourage the Taiwanese children's workforce give her extra bread and butter. (Of course, Lindy hardly ever takes money, but having her fridge restocked is awesome, guys. As is people buying her copious drinks.)
- Collecting things; Lindy, though neat and tidy to a fault, is a complete packrat and can't bear throwing things away. She is forever getting trinkets, and then more trinkets, and then trinkety things to put the trinkets in, and and and. It also gives her another reason to feel guilty about her materialism. Lindy does guilty like Martha Stewart does homemaking, or tax fraud.
- Girls; after a few uninspired relationships with boys in college, in her first year at university it was impressed upon her that by not loving womyn she was betraying her own gender. (She contemplated going the way of deciding that gender itself was a repressive social construct and that the only unoppressive sexual regime was asexuality, but decided that she would miss the dates.) This is one of Lindy's Causes that turned out well; she was put on a blind date and discovered that girls were the BEST THING EVER, in a 'they are pleasantly shaped and have boobies and are infinitely desirable!' way rather than a 'I am so glad I am not silently being oppressed by the penis!' any more. Thankfully, Lindy having a sensible bone somewhere in her body, she decided that bisexuality, homosexuality and heterosexuality were repressive and compartmentalizing and decided she was kinsey scale 5. (0-6. 0 means you're Smokey the Bear. 3 means you're probably Raziel. 6 means you're James from Pokemon) She would sneer at boys for their elevated social standing and attempts to do so, but Lindy loves everybody, and guys can be enticed to give her PIGGYBACKS with their oppressive and demeaning male muscles. Wheeeee! (Basic rundown: she's into girls. Sorry, boys.)
Random Likes: Blur the band, Blur the transformer, devilled eggs, crackers and lots and lots of chilli sauce, raffia, canvas, things made out of patchwork, Don't Eat The Neighbours, henna tattoos, fairs, parades, bottlenose dolphins, freesias, icecream with chunks in it, sparkly fruit lipgloss, Tintin, The Indigo Girls, jerky, anything rainbow-coloured
Dislikes:
- Sleeping; Lindy generally takes catnaps and sleeps long lengths of time only when ill. Like a baby, she is desperately afraid that while she is sleeping something exciting is going on that she is not participating in.
- Boredom; as has been pretty evidenced by now, there is nothing that Lindy fears and hates more than being bored. When she is bored she is alone with her thoughts, and Lindy is actually not quite comfortable with her own thoughts other than the superficial 'I feel like steamed broccoli today' impulses. This does not necessarily mean she has a short attention span; in fact, she generally throws all of her interest and focus into other people and whatever they are talking about and whatever they are doing, or whatever she is doing at the time. When there is actually no intellectual stimulation whatsoever other than, say, examining the curtains or painting her fingernails in rainbows, she starts to fidget and get Silly Fingers. When she starts to get bored, her hands start moving; generally, the closest available piece of hair starts getting braided. If there is no hair, she just has a guilt attack for want of something to do.
- The jaded, angry, and sarcastic; you suck. Unless you're funny. Then you're cute! Hooray!
- Oppressors of humankind; Lindy piles up all the problems in the world and places them squarely at the feet of big business, loggers, the government, McDonald's, hunters, trappers, the Student Association and The Man, and swears to end their tyranny by having a sit-in about it. If it is not their fault, it means it is somebody else's fault, and that somebody might be her. If what she does does nothing, that means that what she is doing is not constructive, and that means that all her work has no meaning whatsoever and is equivalent to sitting in a room swinging her feet or sleeping. (This is the part where she commits suicide. In the rain.)
- The Tofu Connection; Lindy would be a vegan if it were not for her desperate appreciation for eggs and dairy. She claims to be a vegetarian, except for her desperate secret that meat makes her mouth water. Her hate for tofu is also her downfall; Lindy is suspicious of anything that calls itself 'curd' if there is no 'lemon' in front of it and maybe afterwards 'pie', and for her vegetarian meals eats a lot of mushrooms and furtively covers everything with cheese. She slips and eats meat anywhere from up to twice a month to six times a month, and still doggedly pursues her dream of being meat-free. To her credit, despite the fact that leather looks awesome, she never wears or buys it. Except for that pair of boots. But those boots are really cool, and she really respects the cow who died for them.
- Computers; well, computers dislike her. Computers freeze up around Lindy. The ATM will eat her card. Laptops explode. General bits of high-tech equipment fizzle into nothing. Technology vs. Lindy: Technology, Win.
Random Dislikes: Gooseberries, cinnamon-flavoured toothfloss, Cheez-Its, splinters
Is Neutral On:
- men oppressing her personally; Lindy is a women studies student and is generally angry at the treatment of women still lingering today, the treatment of women in history, the treatment of women in other cultures, and what males still possess over females in terms of gender inequality - however, every attempt to get mad individually (which she tries very hard at) fails miserably because her nerve melts in the face of possibly getting a piggyback.
(Of course, if you really honestly and consciously piss her off this way, injuring other people in the process, she may attempt to kick you in the teeth. Lindy is easygoing but not spineless in the face of malice. This is just in general, though.)
Hobbies:
- clothes design and manufacture; Rosalind makes a hefty chunk of her own clothes; the rest is gleaned from op shops, because God (or your non-demoninational exclamation of choice) help her if she doesn't own a big pair of bellbottoms. She loves it; her sewing machine is her battered war partner, and handsewing and embroidering gets her through all the hours when boredom might lurk elsewhere. (In fact, Lindy and her little needle tend to work everywhere; you can see touches of it where she has taken to her curtains, the sofa throw, the duvets, socks lying around.) It is her one truly beloved clutched talent; her needlework is beautiful, she's skilled and thoughtful, and her avant-garde fingerless gloves have smiley faces on the backs.
- puttering around the streets on her little moped; after her bike was stolen (and mangled by what the police claimed were angry skinheads), Lindy gave in to the hateful iron claw of gasoline and bought a clapped-out moped because it had a "No Nukes Is Good Nukes" on the mudguard. She distrusts public transport and dislikes cars; Lindy likes getting places in a hurry and often has no patience for the train system or the bus. It is more than a little dangerous for her to putter around anywhere at night, but as her other option - walking, and saving the ozone layer - would have killed her long ago, it is better for her to putt-putt.
- fighting oppression; Lindy regularly goes with her merry hippie group to pass out pamphlets to legalize cannabis, picket McDonald's for cruelty (and wish she had a hamburger), and get herself arrested by snowballing, chaining herself to things, helping create annoying student public disturbance and for once saying something exquisitely wrong about a policeman's mother to his face. (She was terribly contrite afterwards, but by then it was too late.)
- braiding; as her Silly Fingers tendency can testify, Lindy thinks there is nothing better to do with hair than knot it up into interesting shapes. Hair concept art! (It's rather like knitting, anyway.) Lindy's own hair is a pain; she painstakingly puts it up in braided crowns, and will willingly take to braiding up anybody else who isn't, say, bald. (It is also a really neat way to touch pretty girls' hair without being outed as, say, a stalker.)
Aspirations/Dreams: Rosalind wants to make a difference. Rosalind desperately wants to make a different. The soul-sucking greyness of London under Hell dominion tugs at her heart, and she desperately believes that this is just the product of not enough love and too much greenhouse gas.
For Lindy, anything without meaning just ain't worth doin'. Thankfully, just about everything has meaning.
NPCs
Henrika Naborn and Isaak Naborn (mother, father)
Henrika is a contract lawyer. Isaak is a calculus teacher. Both are unassuming, quiet people from the Netherlands; Isaak is rather reserved and does not suffer fools gladly, while Henrika is gentler and has a tendency to retreat within herself. Both are soft-spoken and love their only child dearly, but how they gave birth to Rosalind is a continuing mystery. They have since moved to Bath while Lindy is educated at the University of London, having been unnerved by London's crime rate and danger. They currently worry about Lindy in a variety of ways (getting herself killed, getting herself expelled, becoming a libertarian).
History
Rosalind Gillen Naaktgeboren was born in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, five pounds and a month or so premature, which just goes to show that she knows that nobody with sense wants their birthday to coincide too much with Christmas. Lindy was shown to be a forthright, excessively bouncy and exuberant child from the beginning; she was a sunny little troll, her downside was that she never walked if she could run and never ran if she could fall over and slide along on her head. She had a sweet childhood; some uncharacteristic streak of maliciousness has ensured that her parents have a number of videos of her rolling about naked or licking objects to be shown to prospective partners in the future. Ah, bless.
All in all, Lindy had a normal, carefree childhood; her only and early upheaval was her parents' decision to move to England from the Netherlands when she was about four, dislocating them from their relatives and Lindy's general tiny kindergarten friends. Her placid parents - who had had a hard enough time getting used to the shrieky little ball of energy that their daughter was, tamed only by having something sugary to suck and a toy to bang around to keep her occupied - expected her to mope; she had absolutely no reaction, in fact looking up with calculatedly adorable blankness when asked if she was going to miss people, even her aunts and uncles and grandparents. Not a really creepy reaction, mind you; her parents just dismissed it as her being a four-year-old and were privately glad that she didn't dissolve into storms of tears.
So they moved to London; they were comfortably in the lower quadrile in the upper-middle class, her parents already fluent in English and Lindy being taught the moment she stepped off the plane, even changing their slightly embarrassing last name of Naaktgeboren to the more acceptable 'Naborn' as was cheaper in England than the Netherlands. Rosalind went to nursery school, and then primary school; she was always comfortable in her academics, good but not brilliant in most areas, slightly too enthusiastic in arts and crafts. She was a genuinely intelligent little beast, but so long as her homework was handed in and her parents were all right with her marks, she didn't particularly care. Lindy liked friends and lunchtime more than work. She was a bright and cheerful follower to whichever girl lead the pack - she wore what they wore, did what they did, played what they played (and despaired with the advent of the Gameboy; she never ever ever got past that first Goomba on Mario. EVER). The intensely changeable lifestyle of a young girl suited Lindy down to a T; she would throw all her energy each time into whatever the new fashion was, the new games, the What Was In. She was vaguely unfulfilled in all areas other than clothing, which she could be extraordinarily creative in, and felt sometimes that maybe squabbling over playing knucklebones or yo-yos was maybe not the most important pastime in the world.
(She yearned to be a Planeteer, but this was regarded as too uncool for her to keep this anything but a shameful secret.)
So Lindy came home with reports saying things like, "Rosalind is a strong student who would excel further if she did not spend so much time on snap bracelets/shortening the hem of her uniform skirt/making earrings". As she grew older and went through college, knucklebones were replaced by her volunteering for every petty little job that she was able to fill and club that would take her; her lunchtimes were curtailed to a sandwich eaten on the run as she took up choir, Amnesty International (which was the exciting gateway drug to hippiedom), Duke of Edinburgh (a classically British school program where you hike up a lot of mountains), lunch monitor, prefect, etc, etc. Lindy always had her finger in something; she was well known for her beaming smile and her freaking-ferret-on-crack disposition. She finally excelled in "fabric technology" (sewing) and sociology, while her English flagged slightly and her Computer Studies sagged to the point where the teacher wouldn't let her in the lab any more because the networks kept on going down when she was in the room. She was the student found in a gaggle of girls who talked too much, had really funky hair and was the one who organized the school ball; you know. That type of girl. (She also gained an unfair reputation for being two bits short of a bob, but she was so cute that nobody really minded.)
The only really notable part of Lindy's career was being more than slightly a flake when it came to emotions; she gave out love and affection and adoration in huge dollops, but when it came to dealing with grief and depression, she got a definite F. When her favourite Bobby the Fish died, she stubbornly went around telling her parents that Bobby wasn't dead, he had just GONE AWAY ON HOLIDAY, which was slightly chilling as she was a. Fourteen and b. otherwise sane in the 'denying death' business. Her parents sat her down and had a long talk ("Bobby has not gone to the Maldives, Lindy") and Lindy came away feeling extraordinarily guilty, which would thereafter be her kneejerk reflex in times of strain. She had an extreme and extraordinary aversion to sadness; she would try to jolly people out of it at inappropriate times, from everything from "my boyfriend left me" to "my grandma died". Or "your grandma died". Well, it's okay, nobody expected Grandma to LIVE FOREVER, right? Whoops. Lindy safely substituted sorrow for "guilt pangs" and "throw yourself into a workaholic frenzy".
The secret was, Lindy had loved Bobby the Fish. When he died, every night she was absolutely paralyzed and sleepless with grief, in floods of tears and unable to do anything about it, and that lack of coping absolutely ripped her to shreds. She never ever ever wanted to feel like that again; she was incapacitated for about a week, claiming sudden influenza, hiding the fact that poor Bobby's demise had ripped her up to the point where her problem was overreaction rather than underreaction. She felt things too keenly; she was the type to be kicked in the grill and socked backwards by grief, rather than coping with it, and she decided that that completely not going to do. Lindy started bottling her sad feelings like a retarded housewife with too many peaches on her hands.
Which is why, going through college, her boyfriends all lasted two and a half months each. (She generally had them for eye candy, cuddles, piggybacks, a lap to sit in during lunchtimes, someone to go out to bars with fake IDs and someone to hold in a kung fu death grip during dances; as she was quite easy on the eye, the boys didn't have much problem with this. Sure, she sometimes behaved like a rabid monkey on P and talked wistfully about political prisoners in Afghanistan, but hey, nod and smile.) The first month would be great, all lovey-dovey hearts and piggybacks and totally not too clingy let's-get-married, but the moment they wanted committment/had an argument/were found to have a fatal personality clash Lindy was wont to freeze up completely and start desperately ignoring the guy in an attempt to make him dump her. (Which prompted guilt pangs.) She has, since, grown out of this behaviour - it was hurting too many people, and Lindy loves people, and to be the source of their pain absolutely ripped her up - but boy, she changed men seasonally back then. It also never helped that she was, well, kind of gay, and the fact that make-out sessions beyond kissing generally left her stone cold ("Why are boys so angular with their clothes off? ;_;_; It is like snuggling with THE THING") were a constant source of unconscious Um Pls Dump Me And We Can Be Friends? stress.
Lindy took her O levels and her A levels, worked like a busy little bee and got good marks (as she had made a contented pact to never touch a computer again except with professional help and someone standing by to help her type), learnt that fashion was more fun when you stopped following that desperately uninspired Belinda Cottingwell and started making up your own stuff, and secured herself a place at the University of London. Her parents, who had long resigned themselves to only seeing Lindy at mealtimes and weekend mornings (and sometimes even then), broached with her the possibility of her not taking the place there, as London had gotten kind of creepy and they wanted to move to Bath. Well, dude, no. Lindy had been an independent from early on; (hell, she had changed her name back to Naaktgeboren at age 16 legally, as she was Pretentiously Embracing Her Dutchness), and thought this was the perfect time to snuggle Mum and Dad goodbye and bounce off to break free of the nest.
University shaped the Lindy of today. She joined the faculty of Women's Studies to find out how oppressed she was, and loved it; she fell in with some cute feminazis; she fell in with the ultra-left-wing screaming greenies, and Found Herself. She became far more relaxed as a person now that she had found a true and real Cause, something that made her feel like she could really do something to make the world better that wasn't the stupid little lunch-monitor duties and message-carrying; this was saving the WORLD, and Rosalind was more than up to it. Being a hippie was fun and fulfilling, and felt adult and rather hardcore and freeing. She was swept up in a sea of love with a bunch of like-minded people that agreed that the world needed another revolution and that everyone should hand out pamphlets for Greenpeace; thankfully, instead of possibly being made obnoxious for ever, Lindy became the sort of nirvana between Militant Greenie and Dopey Earth Mama. Peace and love would save the universe (when done in moderation, and usually not with three people or marijuana , it makes her cough), not burning things down or setting men on fire (unless they were kicking kittens).
Lindy's coming out of the closet also relaxed her a good deal, and kickstarted her on her way to becoming an Adult. Her relationships with women now lasted twice as long as they did with the boys of before (except, okay, when they were based solely on the girl in question having really pretty braidable hair), and her opinion on physical intimacy went from Hee Hee, Sean, You Look Totally Funny With My Glitter Apricot Lipgloss Smeared Where It Is to LET'S DO THAT AGAIN FORTY TIMES!! THAT'S AS MANY AS FOUR TENS, FOR YOUR BENEFIT!!. She tries to hang on to the vaguely Zen belief that if her true love came along with a dingle-dangle she would love him without reservation anyway, but this is basically her kidding herself, because she is into the ladiez with a single-minded open-mouthed contentedness.
She currently lives a student lifestyle which could closely be described as 'bliss'; it is a pleasantly chaotic jumble where she keeps herself busy, she feels happy and needed and worthwhile, she can spend her days tie-dyeing sundresses and fighting the dwindling of the nursing shark. She is, admittedly, still emotionally constipated as all hell and her incapacitating sadness is her Public Enemy #1, but she has learnt to deal with it in a way that hurts only her. Which is, okay, not all that good.
The feel of London at the moment is also a source of concern. Something is wrong in the state of Denmark, and Lindy will be very very happy to learn that it is not in fact directly due to enemies of the environment. (Lords of Hell are the antiquated left-behinds of a, if worthwhile in its own way, repressive and misogynistic belief system! PLANET POWER GO)
Personality
Lindy is energy. Lindy is the spark; Lindy is larger than life; Lindy is one of the most vital, fizzing, sparklingly effervescent people in the world; Lindy is also Queen Princess of Sitting Down And Sensibly Thinking Things Through Is Hugely Uninteresting And Let Us Live Now Before We Are Dead, Which Will Probably Be Quite Soon If You Let Me Have My Way, Hey Let's Have A Party!. She is a bounding fusion-powered deeply retarded jackrabbit with a Vision. Understandably, she should be handled with protective gear and tard tongs.
A buoyant bottle of shaken-up soda if ever there was one, Lindy's main phaser setting is Hooray!, a very thick shield of sparkly cheerfulness and enormous energy that makes watching her work tend to give people a headache. Her mood is very hard to shake out of Hooray!; thankfully, she does not expect other people to be in Hooray!, or to actually keep up with her as she mows through life leaving small fires in her wake. Sure, you will come along, but you can have a sit-down once in a while and it is important you are enjoying yourself. Lindy's complaints and frustrations are either expressed in one-minute sighs or one-minute spates of anger (generally directed at amorphous objects, such as The Man or The Weather, rather than individuals) before clicking back into Hooray!. Her enthusiasm and love of life is generally catching, though some individuals will inevitably want to hit her with a bat over and over and over until she stops talking. For Lindy is a talker; her mouth and jaw muscles are exquisitely worked into power machine that does not need to take a breath, and she can in fact turn her brain almost solely to doing something else constructive with her hands as she natters on and on and on and on. Then she will eagerly listen to what you have to say, but if you do not have anything to say, she can go on and on and on and on for you. How generous.
Lindy is a people person. Humanity makes her happy. She can cope with being alone (while doing one of her twenty billion things to keep her busy), but she'd rather be with others or at least in a group setting; she likes making people happy and being part of them and their problems. Sterility and non-emotional business are generally what she fails at utterly, and an emotive issue will always win Lindy over when fighting with cool, hard logic. (Logic is for chumps.) This is hypocrisy at its finest; Lindy concentrates on other people and their problems and deftly pays no attention to her own. With other people's sadnesses she can generally be detached (which is rather telling as to how much she lets other people into her life on a deep level); with her own she completely loses the plot. She can feel pain and be comfortable with it on an incredibly superficial level - somebody's relative dying (happens a lot these days, natch), a sad story about a kitten, the ending of 'Titanic', the plight of XYZ in ZYX and the fur industry; if her arm was chopped off, she would find it hard to cry. She simply cannot deal with things that cannot be solved by being a. as cheerful as possible or b. chaining herself to a fence while chanting slogans. To let out a little of that bottling, she allows herself lots and lots of guilt; she frets about her inability to stick to veganism, her inability to save the world, her inability to make things go exactly the way she would like them to. This allows her to feel misery (I Am Bad; Boohoo This Sucks) without letting it claim her (I Am Sad; Oh God My Life Is A Black Hole Of Pain And Suffering And My Tears Will Never Stop Over This). "I Am Bad" can be gotten over in five minutes by resolving to fix things by being better in future and also doing a lot of stuff woohoo! and she can go back to being Hooray!. She even slips into naturally feeling passingly guilty about a lot of little things just to be able to feel this placebo-misery; guilt about her vanity about her hair, guilt about using a moped and contributing to the hole in the ozone layer, guilt about not being militantly green enough, etc etc etc.
This incredible sensitivity (possibly - okay, more than possibly - over-sensitivity) is what makes Lindy sign up for every cause on the planet; rather than getting involved in new things because of a short attention span like Trinny, she is sincerely seduced by a persuasive emotional argument and pictures of photoshopped baby harp seals. She is also sincerely seduced because new things are awesome; she does not discard the old, but discovery makes Lindy's heart glow. Learning the ins and outs of the plights of the native peoples of Angola or whatever satisfies a raging lust for knowledge and pioneering spirit in her; as she and her group are rather always convinced that they are revolutionary spirits and the first to set out and inform people of this new frontier of pain and oppression, she finds all this fulfilling on a number of levels, one of them intellectual. Lindy is far from dumb, even if she has the tendency to act like a kitten who just smoked pixie stix in a crack pipe.
Lindy is also saved from being a kitten who just smoked a sugar crack pipe by a number of qualities; she is completely frank, open and upfront, with a sense of humour bordering on rueful about herself; sure, she takes her stance on anti-Japanese dolphin fishing very seriously, but that doesn't mean she can't also look at her lifestyle as being one of the most hilarious things in the world, especially when she is chained to a government building and singing Kumbayah. She likes enjoying life on deep, primal, easily understood levels; she likes pretty girls and good food and parties and bars and iced tea with copious amounts of alcohol in it and piggybacks and love and Tintin and if England is doing well in the World Finals. She cares very very deeply about people; she is childlike in her displays of affection - she is very touchy-feely and cuddly and piggybacky and openly I Love You - but it is readily apparent that she is a mature adult, even if a deeply eccentric one who rides a moped that speaks out against nuclear warfare and wears rainbow bellbottoms. She is also openly and charmingly fallible; sure, she's a pacifist, but not when faced with KILLER DEATH ZOMBIES. Sure, meat relies on a system of painful death, but oh boy does it taste good ;_;. Sure, guys are oppressive male bastards, but hee hee piggyback up I love you lots <3. (You get the picture.)
While she is fallible on the rather sensible things, once Lindy does get an idea in her head, it is in there for ever and not about to be taken out without a pneumatic drill. Sure, she is swayed by student poverty every week, but this is an argument that goes with her worldview; when there's an argument that goes against her worldview, it pings gently off her mind wall and rolls away down on the floor. Whoops, no, not changing my mind! This is never helped by the fact that she is a Doer, and the moment the idea settles in her head she is going to go out and do something about the idea rather than think about it. (As said earlier, logic is for chumps, especially when somebody out there is HURTING or something and Lindy ought to do something NOW). The world, she believes, is going steadily downhill by people's inability to love more openly, care more deeply, and do shit about it more quickly. (The argument is whether chaining yourself to a building will do one whit of difference, but this is one of those things that is stuck in Lindy's brain as sincerely No Whoops This Is Cool And Awesome And Has To Do Something AND IF IT DOESN'T MY LIFE IS A LIE.) More people should Do Shit, and she will encourage people to Do Shit if they are involved, whether it is going out and killing that huge dripping dragon-beast or getting out the house and having an awesome party and cutting your hair different.
Lindy loves a lot and feels extraordinarily deeply, which means she hurts extraordinarily deeply, which is why hypocrisy is such a day-by-day thing she lives with (if you love a lot you lie a lot o/~); she functions perfectly well in society, though, which means that you will only notice this tendency of hers if you are close to her. And lots of people aren't close to her. Lindy has a huge amount of friends, hippie (mostly) and non-hippie (not so mostly), adores them and spends time with them and cares about them and what they are doing and what makes them tick, but God help her she never lets them in to herself and shows them her vulnerabilities. This gives the certain impression that she is a tiny bee-like superhuman mote of energy, running around gathering everything up in her hands and full of the sweet milk of human kindness but none of the gludgy human coffee-leavings of exhaustion or pain; it can be hard to actually answer the question Do I Really Know Lindy?. However, she's so openly loving and sweet and bouncy that this doesn't really matter to most. Sure, she loves you. She's just not going to burn and break on you. That Would Suck, Okay? This is generally why her girlfriends never blossom into something more permanent with her - they do start to get the rather jarring feeling that they only know so much of Lindy, who ostensibly loves them, and it is an unsettling feeling not to know your partner's woes and tears.
So, there's Lindy. The world is going downhill for the want of love, and she is going to do something about it. Unlike Gabriel, whose motives are entirely humanitarian and martyr-flavoured, Lindy doesn't keep her hands busy just to save the world - Lindy keeps her hands busy partly for a rather more selfish reason, to stop herself going BATSHIT NUTS.
Pros: Enthusiastic, cheerful, buoyant, frank, sweet, energetic, determined, hands-on, free-spirited, hard-working, independent, more than vaguely endearingly adorable, self-aware
Neutral: Deeply emotionally involved in everything, workaholic, idealistic, fun-loving, eccentric, luddite, fallible, boundless source of energy, easily persuaded emotively, slightly erratic
Cons: Stubborn, hypocritical, somewhat overbearing at times, emotionally constipated, coping mechanism monster, a complete fucking hippie, guilt fiend, shoots then talks
Appearance
Hair: Rosalind's main vanity; her hair falls in soft waves to the small of her back, and is brilliantly coloured enough to attract parrots or make you hurt when you wake up with a hangover. Her base colour is a mix of rather vibrant, pinkish tangerine-orange, akin to the colour one gets inside pink grapefruits; it mingles with strawberry-pink, that rather reddish sweet colour, making her into not so much a "strawberry blonde" as a "strawberry whatthefuck". It is streaked in a few places with a cool lavender, which came out of a bottle. Her hair is a sunset that melted and set gloppily in the heat.
Lindy makes her hair manageable by braiding the fuck out of it. The main body is braided into a dutch crown that sits semi-flat on top of her head; three long, slim braids are ribboned as accents that loop within each other at the back. It creates four medium-sized loops that touch the nape of her neck; one loop stretches the width of this and dips slightly lower. At front, four slightly shorter-cut pieces of hair remain; two pieces are left as bangs to softly frame her face, and the other two are braided up to rest in front of her ears as short elf-locks going about two inches past her lobes.
Lindy's Hair From The Front
Lindy's Hair From The Back (thanks, dreamweaverbraids.com!)
Eyes: A rather clear, vibrant, orangey-citrine; Lindy claims she has orange-and-lemon-juice eyes. They are set slightly wide apart in her face, making her look perpetually awake or startled if she opens them too wide. The ring around the iris is particularly dark.
Face: Lindy has a rather combination oval face, bordering heart-shaped, firm little chin and high forehead and a distinctly Dutch peaches-and-cream complexion. She has a generous rosebud mouth with dimples for Big Smiles; in fact, her face is perfect for Big Smiles. Straight nose (only slightly retrousse) with faintly flared nostrils, that make her look vaguely kittenish; artistically plucked and arched eyebrows - Lindy is Cute. In fact, she is rather desperately Cute. She is kind of like a hippie milkmaid, fresh-faced and sweet. For facial jewellry and accoutrements, her ears have two holes each in them, from which generally hang homemade bead earrings; her mouth is also constantly smeared with glittery lip gloss in a variety of colours. She generally does not wear any other makeup. (Except for, well, rainbow nailpolish.)
Build: Standing at a whopping 5'4", Lindy is like a fistful of pipecleaners in terms of limbs; she has long arms and long legs and small, capable hands, and distinctly outsize feet; she has long, narrow feet with extra-wiggly toes, her trick being that she can peel a banana with them. Her curves tend towards gentle, but she gives the appearance of being quite lush - her skin does not cling to her ribs and her bones. Her constant movement ensures a nice measure of tone, but little healthy-glowing Lindy looks like she does in fact enjoy dairy products. Her cup size is only the lower echelon of B, but she has asstacular hips and a trim little waist. She is small and soft and sweet and cuddly like a cupcake. (She is nowhere near as desperately hot as Sandalphon, though. Is it just me or is Kerensa the HOTTEST WOMAN WHO HAS EVER EXISTED? It is a Mystery.)
Carriage: When she is moving it is usually at a ZOOM; when she is not, her entire body still tends to move. When she is embroidering she will sit indian-style and wriggle her toes; when she is just sitting normally and talking she will start stretching herself and bending her legs and popping her thumbs. Her step has a definite bounce to it; she is comfortable and has enough control that her long limbs do not make her look like a spidertard and is casual and happy in her gait.
Voice: A light, breathless alto, Lindy retains a slightly Dutch flavour in her definite British accent. Though generally bilingual, she hardly ever peppers anything she says with Dutch unless she is cursing. It is pleasant to listen to when she speaks, which is a good thing because you're going to be hearing her speak a hell of a lot. Her words tend to flow all over each other and bubble over like she is a small creek. She laughs a lot.
Clothing: Hugely colourful, distinctly hippie. Long, homemade, brightly-patterned skirts; bell-sleeved peasant's tops, modified fifties-era sundresses, bellbottoms, trailing scarves. Classic homemade hippie mingles with some of the tenets of modern fashion; her style is eclectic, sometimes incorporates way too many rainwbows, and rather cute, just like her. Lindy likes stylin' and has little sense of: "dressing subtle", "business casual" or "you look like a slightly deranged flower child".
Abilities
- Tinker Tailor; Lindy is honestly extraordinarily good in the realm of making clothes, designing clothes, embroidering things on the clothes, and needle and thread in general. She has tiny, exquisite mouse-stitches, and a taste that borders on the "weird" but always manages to turn out charming, retro and sort of cutely unique. (This is okay, because it would be bad if she actually looked as retarded as she was.)
- You Can Do What With Your Legs; Lindy has been into yoga for a while now, and though she would desperately envy Gabriel's latent ability to stick her big toe under her rib, she can hook both of her legs behind her head and will do this if even given the slightest hint of interest. In fact, she will do this even if given no hint of interest.
Color
Deep rose red: #990033 for reference.
Symbol
The symbol for Chaos is, natch, the symbol for peace and order turned upside-down; two hollow circles placed on top of each other like the first two balls of a snowman, the bottom one bigger than the upper, with the bottom having a dot placed centrally within it. On top of the upper circle is a tiny cross.
Key to the Kingdom
Orfiel's key is a weighty, medium-sized key in rose red laquer, veins of gold and lavender running all through it; the head is a delicate, stylized three-round traditional key 'clover' head; the end sharpens to a rather pointy pick with six small, fragile little fins of interlocking teeth sticking out. Rosalind wears this around her neck on a thick piece of topaz velvet. There are also three holes in the stem, just above the sharpest point of the pick.
Voile
The base of Orfiel's voile is a rose-red sleeveless tunic, v-necked and pleated down to her calves; it is slit in the middle high up to her ribcage, just underneath her breasts, letting it fall open to reveal her midsection. A thin yellow-gold chain goes around her neck and wrists; connected from each wrist to the chain is a length of violet-blue material, full enough so that it creates a billow down to her knees, with two other lengths of the same fabric attached to the back of the chain to trail freely down on the ground. The two pieces left to trail start unwinding their own cloth as they touch the ground, unfinished and unravelling hanging threads.
So, not to leave her in ostensibly just her knickers; Orfiel gets a rather kicky little pair of gingham shorts, paler violet-blue and red-pink check. These shorts are more like boxer shorts than anything else. Yeah, Angel Orfiel, a-battlin' in her PJs.
For some reason, her gloves are fingerless little lace-edged mittens - both lacy rose-red, trimmed in gold - and loses complete dignity in her footwear; she only gets to wear thick, lace-edged socks, orange-gold in colour. Well, at least her toes will be warm. Her hair is in its usual braided crown; thickly tucked in the crown braid, however, are a selection of bluebells and red rosebuds. Her only other accessories are a pair of plain wrap-around gold bracelets on both of her upper arms.
Wings
A shade under-sized pair of ye olde whiteys, with no colour variation; however, Orfiel's wings seem to be perpetually hung with uneven garlands of bluebells and rosebuds, that break and scatter every battle and reform every time she re-voiles.
Weapon
She'd hurt herself with it.
Climbing The Sephiroth
"Crown!" Orfiel's ribbon unknots from her neck and the key jumps on her finger; "Wisdom!" and it starts to twirl until it is a blur. "Understanding" and the twirling starts to generate what looks like electricity, bright-red sparks of it, that creep along her arm; by the time she gets to "Mercy" they have swallowed her whole body and she looks like a sparkler. "Strength!" and the cloth billows out from her wrists and neck, with the chains appearing; they settle at "Beauty," and some of the sparkles mingle and dance blue-violet all over her body. "Victory" sees the wings erupt next, out of her back in a haze of blue and red and green sparks; "Splendor" and her tunic appears, along with her shorts and socks and wrist-bracelets. "Foundation" has the key twirl back to fasten around her neck again, somehow still managing to spin, and she turns a quick pirouette; "Kingdom" all the sparks fall off her, her halo momentarily shimmering above her head, and the lights die down. And then you get epilepsy.
Gifts
Infinity Is A Rubber Band - If Orfiel has been affected by something that changes her too physically - for instance, if she is turned into a frog - she has much better fight against the attack, and if it hits, with a fair bit of concentration she will be able to flip back to her old self. Of course, chaos being what it is, there is always the chance that this will backfire and she will change into a winged horned frog with a smoking jacket.
Attack(s)
Orfiel's power is complicated. Bear with me.
Chaos only affects organics; Orfiel's power is centered around people, specifically the angels and the Lords of Hell, not the surrounding scenery or inanimate objects. It can only be casted once per battle; if it has an effect that has a 'length' - such as transformation - it generally lasts until the battle is over and the angel has devoiled, or Orfiel has devoiled. Orfiel can basically alter and change the spine equation that forms reality around a person or persons - the type of equation that deems that a tree will have two branches or three branches, for example, or whether a person actually exists. As it works with Rosalind's mind, the former is too subtle and the latter is uncomprehendable for a mortal - it draws on Orfiel's mind as a human for what part of the equation should be altered, and she does not choose what happens. The attack in itself may sound all-powerful, but a human mind (even one which is a reincarnated angel's) is such a random, complex thing that the effects are more often laughable or work against her than wreaking holy damage. To simplify things, I will divide the attack into three equation-changing categories.
POSITIVE
The effect will be positive - either positive for the angel/s it affects, or the Lord of Hell it affects. Something about their power structure or physical structure will be altered in a way that they become stronger or more effective; Lindy's mind cannot really comprehend ultimate power, as a mortal, so nobody is going to end up with this. What she can comprehend, however, are the blissful hyperboles from her comic books. Maybe one or all of the angels will suddenly be granted all the powers of Spiderman. Maybe they will suddenly be able to RUN REALLY FAST, or spit fireballs, or have springs for feet, or their powers will get an extreme boost. Or maybe the Lord of Hell will suddenly be like Spiderman, or have skin that is impenetrable, or be invisible, and the only way to end the effect will effectively be for Orfiel to exit the battle. Though these things sound pretty cool, many of them inevitably have backlashes - the angelic body was simply not built to be able to run really fast, and after the battle you're going to have somebody with broken legs; you're not meant to have upped powers, you're not meant to be able to spit lightning, or have springs for feet, or be able to teleport. It is extraordinarily physically taxing, and what's more, the fabric of your equational self has been momentarily pulled to pieces; you're going to feel the hurty the farther from reality you are pulled. If all that happens is that your attack gets upped - something close to your natural state - you are not going to feel it too much; if you suddenly start firing lasers from your eyes, you are going to get a reality hangover.
There is also the sensibility clause that, no matter how cool it is to be able to fire lightning from your fingertips, you are going to hit somebody you do not want to hit as you are pretty unschooled in this. There is also the very possible clause that, okay, mutant stags will come to your aid if you just hum a few bars of the national anthem, but you can't FIGURE THIS SHIT OUT UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE.
NEUTRAL
Completely useless stuff happens, like an area-wide gender swap, or your angel wings turning into butterfly wings, or you go completely bald, or you have a desperate urge to caress lamp-posts or shrubs. This is also the area with the margin for completely fucked up stuff to happen, though - for example, momentarily having your personality replaced with your Holy War personality and memory for the extant of the battle, with the same add-on negative physical effects of pulled reality the more fucked-up the stuff is.
NEGATIVE
Your body suddenly has the same property and weight as lead. Your powers fizzle out. Your weapon is suddenly made out of marshmallow. Whoops! This can be anything from "Your shoes are uncomfortably back to front" to "YOUR POWERS REBOUND AND HIT YOURSELF," with the same warning for the pulled reality pain corollary, etc, etc.
Orfiel's mind cannot actually comprehend the equation of, "YOU DIE" or "YOU TRANSCEND" or things like that; she is a mere mortal, natch? That kind of reality-pulling would break her brain. She simply can't go that far.
I figure that the way to work this out during battles - unless it is figured out prior, for a plot contrivance - is dice. I roll who it affects (LoH or angel), then for which of the three categories the effect is in, then from 1 to 9 on a scale of how hard she bends reality. <3 (1 is, say it was positive, "you can jump ten inches off the ground!" or "you look more appealing to the opposite sex!". 9 is, "YOU CAN MAKE ROCKS FALL FROM THE CELESTIAL HEAVENS.")
OKAY NOW ON WITH THE ACTUAL POWER SHIT.
Pandemonium Rearrange - The reworking of reality cannot be countered, unless you are maybe the Angel of Order or something; however, this attack sucks or backfires so bad usually that you do not really need to worry about dodging. It can, as said before, only be cast once per battle. (And no, Lindy can't cheat this by running away, un-voile'ing, and coming back; it is generally on a 'once every day' basis.)
Orfiel touches her lips with two fingers, then touches those fingers to her symbol; she murmurs "Pandemonium Rearrange!" and slams her free fist up into the air. Immediately, an exquisitely complicated rose red pattern-grid appears on the battlefield surface. It dissipates after a second; everything glows momentarily blinding bright red, and then that glow too disappears into twinkling dying deep rose glitter. Whoever is chosen by the power immediately has their symbol stamped over by Orfiel's chaos symbol glowing on their forehead. If they, well, still have a forehead.
People will learn that you should not let Orfiel attack unless it is the last resort, or if you are safely cowering behind large objects.
NPCs
30000 angry, militant hippies.
Past Lives
Had a baby bee-girl. Married Kamael, the cutest priestess alive. Mummied lots more little girls, a little boy, and was the funnest stepmom around. Lead around a gang of militant hippies called the Union. Kamael died with Baby Girl. Orf cries. A lot.
Name
TAMI TAMI FO FAMI BANANA FANA etcetc
Contact information
Email: aliaguardian@yahoo.co.uk
Homepage: http://www.two-sins.com
Experience
WHAT IS AN RPG? ;_;_;
Chaos is a byproduct of LIFE for me. Which is why, uh, yeah, hopefully not steppin' on your toes too hard there, Gabriel. (Her fuku was originally green until I realized that there was just too much parallel and I decided to make her into liddle ole Rose Red.)
