ANIMUS APPLICATION

[untiemyhands]

Player Information

Name: Matchre
Personal Journal: scorpiontails
Age: 19
Contact Info: plurk - matchre
Other Characters Played: Sayaka Miki
Do you need an invite? no

Character Information

Character Name: Klara
Character Series: Pathologic
Character Age: Physically about sixteen is my best bet. Actually, though, she's 12 days old.
Character Gender: Female.
Original Canon
Canon Point: The end of Day 12, after her 'twin' has agreed to leave the town and Klara prepares to enact her plan to provide the town with panacea.
Background Link:

No decent wiki exists summarizing this game yet, so... Allow me to explain.

In an unnamed town in an unnamed time and country (though context clues could lead one to assume the time is early 1900s, and the place somewhere in Russia), there comes an outbreak of an awful disease. Attempts to cure this disease are useless. Attempts to contain it are useless. It is as if this sickness possesses a willful malice that erodes not only at a man's health, but his very morality. The town itself was a strange beast already, but the outbreak would devour every semblance of humanity it could settle in the veins of.

Klara is one of three player characters, the most important pieces in the coming plot - three pawns that will become queens. They're all healers in their own right, here for their own reasons. Where the Bachelor uses conventional medicine and the Haruspex employs folk remedies (and folks' organs), Klara simply has mysterious powers inherent to herself. She comes to the town (and to being entirely) by waking up in an open grave, and has no real memories to herself - simply impressions of her own nature and a name, and nothing more concrete.

She's immediately fostered by the Saburovs, one of the trio of powerful families ruling the town. Where Alexander Saburov is a severe man desperate to uphold the responsibility of his position of governor, Katherine Saburov is distant and rather ethereal. She's picturesque of her position as Mistress of the Land, a clairvoyant spoken to by earth spirits.

From her first appearance in the town, Klara's reputation amongst its populace constantly suffers. When confronted about being spotted in places she doesn't remember being, she hastily claims she has a twin running amuck in her stead, which Klara is pretty sure is a lie at first but evidence rapidly mounts to the contrary.

The Saburovs are decent to her, but very eager to take advantage of Klara's strange powers. After a test that goes... a little wrong, they ascertain she's not lying about them and immediately set her onto what will become a routine: Alexander orders her to investigate people he believes to be the cause of the outbreak, while Katherine has her continually go about about clearing names and converting people to her political philosophy, Humility.

Klara has a personal stake in defending most of the people Alexander accuses - they are nearly entirely from the list of her Adherents, a set of 'important people' preemptively ordained by the recently deceased Simon Kain. Their destinies and purposes are unclear, but defending them is integral and failing to leads them, as the Executors will so delicately put it, dying in her stead, because they are the only ones who will die for her. The Saburovs themselves are her Adherents, a warning sign considering the others are all considered criminals to some degree.

While Bachelor and Haruspex scramble about trying to find cures to the town's many wounds, Klara is mostly trying to find out her own nature. From the outset she is accused of being a thief, a supernatural creature created by the earth, an impostor, and most mundanely a liar. It turns out she is actually all of these things. As she meets more and more of the strange beings of the town, they all regard her as a fellow oddity - the indigenous sub-humans from the Steppe chant incantations to 'turn her back to clay,' the prophet with the head of a rat welcomes her as the plague that he's making a home for, and various beings of earthly origin call her their sister.

Klara both denies and embraces the identity, depending on whether it will be advantageous at the time. She appreciates her powers, but not the label of 'Plague' - she doesn't want to be death incarnate, dammit. Conversely, the plague is everything that her twin is. It's implicated that they are even one and the same person, simply different identities - and the game does have a strange treatment of other twins, a certain blurring of self. At several points, though, they meet in person, and chasing the twin away from places where she tries to settle is integral later in the game to keeping areas in the town from staying infected. The mundane explanation is Klara is hallucinating the face-to-face encounters and has an alternate personality. The supernatural explanation is that Klara's lie made them into two different people.

My plan is to play them as to an extent the same person, but maintain the ambiguity and alibi-by-proxy-of-time-constraints. If that isn't okay, then Klara's twin gets the guillotine and she'll be coming plague-bearing alternate personality free!

While her 'sister' has just agreed to vacate the town to leave room for Klara to forge her self-chosen destiny as a savior rather than slaughterer, the fact that she immediately wakes within the tower will prevent Klara from reaching the catharsis of identity she was heading for. In short, she hasn't gotten the chance to existentially affirm herself as not being the plague; and that belief - or confusion of beliefs - is vitally important. Despite all the work she's done to create a means for a widespread cure that doesn't involve axing the town's location or its beautiful bauble, the Polyhedron - Klara's also been met with constantly mounting evidence of her intended nature.

She was also met with evidence that her entire existence was a game perpetuated by two bored children, but this was nearly taken in stride - Klara's already in the business of subverting her own fate. She had surprised these children by coming to motion in their sandbox. It was simply a matter of course to say, "no, I'm not simply a plaything," in the same breath as, "no, I'm not simply a plague."

While her entire narrative is basically "screw destiny, I'm doing it a different way than you said I could," Klara's final solution to the game's plot - and by extension, her personal path in life - are not without sacrifices. The entire premise of her cure, in fact, is built on a hill of bodies: Klara's her Adherents, extraordinary people brimming with potential above the common ragdolls, are to have their blood altered through her power and subsequently martyred so that it can be used as an ingredient for large-scale amounts of Panacea. It is implied in her ending cinematic that similar sacrifices must continue to sustain the town's strange compromise of the heaven of man's transcendence and the earth of their origin.

Personality: Klara is wily, cunning, and self-preserving. She will lie through her teeth when necessary, sometimes lie anyway when it's not, and wring the truth for every twist she can afford to put into it. Omitting information is one of her favorite tactics. She's boastful, too - playing on people's fears of her has been advantageous. Lines like, "I am Klara, a notch on the point of the spear of destiny!" or "You have no idea who you're talking to, serf, I'm the soul collector," are not out of character for her.

Her inhuman origin often shows in how she interacts, though speaking in riddles and veiled statements is simply part of the native tongue to the town she's been in. Yet Klara can be empathic. Usually, though, she couldn't afford to be too kind, simply from the slew of factors set against her. Despite this, her Adherents are all criminals for a reason - Klara believes at her very core in the power of redemption. If she did not, then I think her outright defiance of her nature would simply not have happened at all. People have to have the power to change; because at least she's certainly not going to sit back and accept the verdict of what she is according to the Law.

Outwardly, her twin comes off as the kinder of the two - and the more emotionally open one, quick to ask for supplication and quick to warmly praise her few supporters. They're both tricksters, it's just the twin is the one that's accepting of herself and thus less guarded toward everyone else. For the majority of the game, the tales you hear about her exploits are of a girl who can win over at least some hearts, even as hell is constantly wrought on your collective reputations.

Klara is excitable and easy to order around, likely because of her habits of ingratiating herself to people. The game's mechanics are focused around a) keeping your physical condition stabilized and b) running countless errands for others, so it's pretty much ingrained behavior. She doesn't lick boots, though, and she's one of the farthest things you can find from spineless.

In fact, Klara is very judgmental. She will launch accusations and form opinions practically from the first few lines she's spent talking to someone, which is pretty funny considering her own troubles with other people's opinions. Inwardly, she owes little loyalty to people - especially now, after the Saburovs have just thrown her out on her ear after claiming she was part of their family and their heir just the day before.

Her twin is closer to their inhuman nature than her - again, it ties into acceptance. Klara, by her title of thief, is trying to steal a life for herself she wasn't entitled to. It's not confirmed who came first - Klara or the sister. Perhaps Klara is what humanity was within her sister that gave her pause in bringing about so many deaths, or perhaps Klara's first lie had enough power to separate herself from her purpose. Considering the game's regular painting of the fourth wall, it could even be a meta-reason; the plague was all that existed at first, but the will of the player caused Klara's dissent.

Abilities: Let's be short: Klara is inhuman. Supernatural senses should tick her as "not human," even though she looks entirely like one. As she comes from the earth and her memories are formed from the memories that have seeped into it, to magical divining she comes off as earth-like in place of human-like. Mundane means says "human, but kinda strange," as the Bachelor ascertained from a quick blood test.

Her aforementioned powers work like so. She can heal by laying her hands upon the ailing, but this works by changing their very blood into something stronger, and described as the game as 'bull-like.' It's been shown to work on normal wounds like bullets or cuts, but the change is permanent. This ability makes her a bit hurt herself to use. I'm gonna say it induces anemia, to follow on the blood theme. Klara is quite familiar with the blood-changing aspect of this power.

Relating back to blood again, she can wave her hands at someone and cause them to start violently spraying blood like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. This isn't an instant kill, but IS an instant "holy shit" moment.

She has the ability to hypnotize someone for a brief time into answering questions with what they believe to be the truth, but it has a complex ritual surrounding it - first, she has to know a secret about the person, one that they would mind someone knowing. She calls these secrets "hooks." She also needs to know their real name - no nicknames work. The victim of the hypnosis usually doesn't recall the hypnosis itself, lucky to Klara.

The verbal aspect of the hypnosis is as follows: "Do you hear metal tinkling on my chest? Those are neither keys nor picklocks; those are my special tiny hooks," is usually said during the lead-up. Then, she puts the knowledge she's gained of them beforehand to work - "Name, Name, I know (their secret). Would you agree to get close to me? Will you let go, submit into the depths... And give unto my questions your honest, unbiased answer?"

Hypnotized characters answer questions simply, with feelings laid bare.

Finally, she can make a sudden flash of light happen around her, like a lightning strike. It doesn't actually DO anything other than look impressive.

Sample Entry: Here's one that's a bit short and another so hopefully they pile up into being enough.