ruth aldine (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sorrypardonyesthankyou) wrote2021-08-16 09:22 am
sorrypardonyesthankyou) wrote2021-08-16 09:22 am
(no subject)
User Name/Nick: Dove
User DW:sorrypardonyesthankyou
E-mail: athousandchurches at gmail
Other Characters: n/a
Character Name: Ruth Aldine
Series: X-Men comics / Marvel-616
Age: ~20, college-aged. Comic-book time is kind of wobbly, but in her last appearance in canon, she was written and drawn like a young adult rather than a high-schooler.
From When?: Uncanny X-Men #11 (2018) by Matthew Rosenberg, in which Ruth commits suicide.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. During her life, her relationship with her boyfriend had shades of warden/inmate interaction already - both of them were Messy, but only one of them did things like plan a date to the moon where they'd killed someone a few hours ago (and that wasn't Ruth). Ruth has a strong sense of justice + right and wrong, and she's capable of believing in the best of people - but if someone's done something terrible, she won't hesitate to say so. Canon shows us that she's someone who can inspire other people - at least one other person, anyway - to do better than they did before.
Item: A scratch-off lottery ticket. The printed message under the scratch-off paint changes based on where her inmate is / whether they're dead. It needs to be scratched off every time she wants to check.
Abilities/Powers: Ruth is a mutant--she has genetically based superpowers, as well as visible physical differences (no eyes) stemming from her mutation. She's surprisingly powerful - while her abilities can basically be summarized as "precognitive" and "psychic," here's a list of them with my suggestions for nerfing:
• Precognition: Perhaps Ruth's strongest, most notable skill. She can see the branching options of the future--sometimes clearly, frequently less so. For TLV, I'd suggest that this be something that's still there, but impossible for her to make out in any meaningful way, like the psychic equivalent of squinting at a bird flying directly against the sun. The future's obviously there, but she can't make anything out besides "that sure is a tangle of fate over there." This would be comparable to what happens when Ruth comes too close to other precognitives in canon.
• Astral projection: Ruth's ability to project herself beyond the bounds of her physical body works in a few different ways. She's able to spirit herself around the physical world, the astral plane/psychosphere, and into the minds of others. I'd like to either nerf the "Ruth can jump inside your brain" part or have an opt-in post for it + work with players OOCly any time the brain stuff comes up.
• Empathy: One of the earliest powers Ruth developed. She's sensitive to the moods of others, remarking as a little girl on her brother's discomfort in public. When Charles Xavier dies, she feels it so overwhelmingly (either directly from his death or through David Haller's explosive reaction to it--or, you know, both) that she begins to cry. Despite not having, uh, eye holes. Her empathic abilities are often wound up tightly with her precognition. At times, they cause her physical pain. I'd like to unspool this from the precog stuff and use an opt-in post + OOC communication to manage it.
• Telepathy: Ruth can read minds. Pretty straightforward. Again, I'd like to use an opt-in post + OOC communication to manage this ability.
• Telekinesis: Ruth can make things move with her mind. Also pretty straightforward. We can limit this to objects of a certain size if you'd like.
• Immunity to reality warping: Perhaps because of her other psychic abilities, she's canonically not taken in by a reality-shifting illusion that dupes many of her compatriots. We can nerf this outright.
• Psychic sight: It's made clear in various ways (her ability to walk without any evident guide such as a cane or service animal, the fact that she's read Alan Moore's Watchmen, her utter mortification when she realizes she's spying on David while he's naked) that on some level, Ruth can see through her psychic powers. This is presumably similar to Matt Murdock's abilities; however, unlike Daredevil, X-Men never really delves into how this works. It's an ability she developed later in her childhood, as her memories of her mother's kitchen are of a place she knew by touch. I'd like to keep this as it is for ease of communication + maneuvring through the ship.
• Jedi mind tricks: She can manipulate people to believe what she wants--or could, at least, at the time of her brother's execution. Given Luca's skill in tricking David into doing what he wants, he may have stolen this ability. We can nerf this outright.
Personality: Ruth's a strange girl, even in a school where one of the students is covered in eyes. Around people she doesn't know well, or with people she knows don't like her much, she's quiet and hesitant, with a vocal tic that adds polite little words into her sentence - sometimes in places where they make sense, sometimes not. On one occasion, she tries to talk to a pair of classmates, who tell her they find her creepy and want her to leave them alone. She doesn't interrupt or try to explain that she's trying to find out from them what the homework was--she just stands there, wilting a little at the critique, and lets them go.
If she gets comfortable with someone (her boyfriend David, her friend Santo, her roommate Pixie), though, she's...well, still weird, but a different weird. She's got a sense of humor and occasionally a sharp tongue--one that makes her stutter disappear. (When she's feeling annoyed or snarky enough to start calling you a smartass and telling you why you're wrong about something, she's not going to sorry-pardon-yes through it.) She's a good listener, and for a person she cares about, she'll be endlessly supportive of them, both to their face and when talking to other people - unless they do something appalling. Ruth's not a doormat; she has a strong sense of right and wrong, and she's more than capable of reading a person the riot act if she thinks they're straying into 'wrong' territory.
When she's in control of her faculties, Ruth can be unflappable, a sort of modern-day oracle. She describes herself as someone who's never surprised, and she can keep cool under pressure - in great part because she knows what's going to happen. This leads to her asking people to please help her block a knife that's going to stab at her or wandering peaceably through an active fight between mutants powerful enough to knock out walls. It can be eerie and, along with her tendency to predict terrible things about to happen, can make her difficult to spend a lot of time with. People don't usually go to oracles to make friends.
Whether she's in control or not, she's stubborn. Able and willing to keep her own counsel, she makes her own way. She frequently makes plans and carries them out without explaining herself to anyone around her. On one occasion, she uses another student's powers to put herself in a coma, causing him to think he's killed her. On another, she plans out in great detail her suicide and final words to multiple old teachers of hers, getting everyone around her to play out a complicated series of events that culminate in two rivals working together.
And it makes sense that she wouldn't bother to let others in on what she's doing. After all, she sees what's going to happen. She's spent years relying on herself: there's no evidence that she had any playmates or confidantes in childhood besides the aunt she lived with and the teddy bear she owned, and it's implied that she was kept far enough out of the public eye that all her records basically stopped around the time of her mother's death. Ruth will often explain things--at least a little--when she's asked. But people frequently don't ask the right questions, and she doesn't always proffer the information herself.
Her life hasn't been easy; no one who was nearly murdered with a chainsaw at age six is liable to have an easy life. But for a while, she had friends, a boyfriend, a supportive school environment, and a sense of a future. It's when she loses the last one that things fall apart--the terror of precognition, after all, is that you know when your time is running out. She approaches it methodically, quietly, and with a singular sort of aloneness that's easy for her to retreat to in the face of danger.
But when it turns out she hasn't quite run out of future--in fact, that her entire conception of Where She's Going just took a sharp left turn--she's going to have to decide what to do with herself. And the classic X-Men answer is to help people. So, Warden it is.
Barge Reactions: The Barge is going to be a surprise, which is going to be a weird feeling for a girl who doesn't get surprised. The best she'd expected from dying was oblivion, or maybe the possibility of coming back from the dead sometime in the future (I mean, she is a superhero). Getting dragged into an interdimensional spaceship for the dead is a new one for her.
But she's an eyeless girl who sees the future - it's not like she's never seen a weird thing before.
Deal: Avert the Bad End that Ruth killed herself to escape, whatever it was.
History: Once upon a time in North Carolina, a baby was born without any eyes. Her mother loved her, but her father left within a week of her arrival, and her older brother took his anger out on her nearly from birth. She grew up curious and sweet, but also battered: as her brother grew, he became an addict, first to drugs and then to religion, neither of which gentled him toward his sister. Eventually, in a relapse, he started a chainsaw and went to cull the girl--but their mother intervened and ultimately died for Ruth.
After her brother's arrest, the girl was sent to live with an aunt and spent six years in the quiet of a small New Jersey town. She was happy then, able to use her burgeoning psychic powers around the house, and began her education at home. Her mind began to bury the ugliest memories of her life in the South--but she recalled her brother still. When his execution was scheduled, the girl made her way back down to the prison and tricked her way inside the viewing room. Poor luck for her: at the moment of his death, her brother's spirit burst from his body and started violently at hers, stealing half her powers and leaving her mind confused and her words muddled.
And that's the Ruth who comes to the Xavier School, where she slowly begins to interact with others. The trauma she's experienced, however, along with the length of time she's spent away from much of society, makes her an odd duck even in a school full of mutants. She has a few friends, and her teachers seem to like her well enough for the most part, but she's regarded as strange and frightening by many of the other students. She's seen as a non-combatant for the most part, more of a canary in a coal mine than anything.
The one time she becomes an offensive fighter of sorts is after she meets David Haller, aka Legion (but please don't call him that). Ruth is his "nemesis," allegedly the one person who can stop him from becoming an eldritch horror that swallows up all of mutantkind. She also ends up dating him. He's her first real experience with romance, and vice versa; they both grow as people as a result of their relationship, Ruth regaining the abilities her brother took from her. When David does end up becoming the vast, sprawling blob they'd both foreseen, she goes to him, astral-projected sword and all, and helps him save the day. (David's ultimately the master of his fate--which is to have no fate, to stop himself from ever being born--but Ruth beats back the physical monster long enough that the mind inside can make its decision.) She's left with a boyfriend who exists only inside her head and memories of times that never existed for anyone else.
After that, she lives a quiet life at school. At some point, David is wrenched out of her mind; the last thing he remembers is her thinking it was inevitable, and maybe it was. Maybe she knew it was going to happen. And then, when the vast majority of her classmates and teachers disappear from the world and anti-mutant sentiment reaches a fever pitch, she starts to fall apart. Unable to tell past and future apart, and seeing vision after vision of her violent death at the hands of people like her brother, Ruth becomes suicidal. She cheats the lottery in order to buy a nice house to die in, warns both Wolverine and Cyclops of the things she's seen, and goes upstairs to kill herself in the bath.
Ruth has plenty of minor adventures that I haven't mentioned here, to spare you the tedium of "well, in issue FIVE, she--"; for the painfully in-depth version, please check out wikipedia.
Sample Journal Entry: Hello.
This is...thoughtful...but I'm not sure no that I belong here.
[ A pause. ]
And I need a different room. This one, it's not where - pardon - where I want to spend eternity. If that's really what this is. It's...really creepy, actually.
That's all. Thank you.
Sample RP:
It's a room from the house she bought to die in, one she has to swipe into with the lottery ticket that paid for it. The bathroom's--well, Ruth doesn't want to think about the bathroom in any detail right now. Everything was supposed to be over. She was supposed to close her eyes without opening them again. After all the visions, all the hiding in plain sight, she was supposed to have some kind of rest.
Standing in there, surrounded by the impersonal furnishings she bought and no sense of what's coming, makes her feel crazy. Crazy and alone. So she gets out.
Ruth starts walking, without any intention beyond getting away from the interior of her Brooklyn brownstone. Despite her blindfold, white like a flag of surrender, she doesn't hesitate or stumble. First things first: someplace new to sleep? No. She's wide awake right now, and she has the feeling she will be for a while. No, she's still wearing what she had on the last night she was alive. First things first: new clothes.
(Some small sliver of her is wondering if this is the hell that Luca always said she was going to. It's like a splinter wedged in her brain, one she'll be trying to ignore for at least the next few hours. First things first.)
The first person she comes to, she tries to flag down. It's not that hard to get people's attention, usually, when she wants it - a woman wearing a blindfold and acting like she's not isn't a common sight. "E-excuse me. Do they, um, have clothes here?"
User DW:
sorrypardonyesthankyouE-mail: athousandchurches at gmail
Other Characters: n/a
Character Name: Ruth Aldine
Series: X-Men comics / Marvel-616
Age: ~20, college-aged. Comic-book time is kind of wobbly, but in her last appearance in canon, she was written and drawn like a young adult rather than a high-schooler.
From When?: Uncanny X-Men #11 (2018) by Matthew Rosenberg, in which Ruth commits suicide.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. During her life, her relationship with her boyfriend had shades of warden/inmate interaction already - both of them were Messy, but only one of them did things like plan a date to the moon where they'd killed someone a few hours ago (and that wasn't Ruth). Ruth has a strong sense of justice + right and wrong, and she's capable of believing in the best of people - but if someone's done something terrible, she won't hesitate to say so. Canon shows us that she's someone who can inspire other people - at least one other person, anyway - to do better than they did before.
Item: A scratch-off lottery ticket. The printed message under the scratch-off paint changes based on where her inmate is / whether they're dead. It needs to be scratched off every time she wants to check.
Abilities/Powers: Ruth is a mutant--she has genetically based superpowers, as well as visible physical differences (no eyes) stemming from her mutation. She's surprisingly powerful - while her abilities can basically be summarized as "precognitive" and "psychic," here's a list of them with my suggestions for nerfing:
• Precognition: Perhaps Ruth's strongest, most notable skill. She can see the branching options of the future--sometimes clearly, frequently less so. For TLV, I'd suggest that this be something that's still there, but impossible for her to make out in any meaningful way, like the psychic equivalent of squinting at a bird flying directly against the sun. The future's obviously there, but she can't make anything out besides "that sure is a tangle of fate over there." This would be comparable to what happens when Ruth comes too close to other precognitives in canon.
• Astral projection: Ruth's ability to project herself beyond the bounds of her physical body works in a few different ways. She's able to spirit herself around the physical world, the astral plane/psychosphere, and into the minds of others. I'd like to either nerf the "Ruth can jump inside your brain" part or have an opt-in post for it + work with players OOCly any time the brain stuff comes up.
• Empathy: One of the earliest powers Ruth developed. She's sensitive to the moods of others, remarking as a little girl on her brother's discomfort in public. When Charles Xavier dies, she feels it so overwhelmingly (either directly from his death or through David Haller's explosive reaction to it--or, you know, both) that she begins to cry. Despite not having, uh, eye holes. Her empathic abilities are often wound up tightly with her precognition. At times, they cause her physical pain. I'd like to unspool this from the precog stuff and use an opt-in post + OOC communication to manage it.
• Telepathy: Ruth can read minds. Pretty straightforward. Again, I'd like to use an opt-in post + OOC communication to manage this ability.
• Telekinesis: Ruth can make things move with her mind. Also pretty straightforward. We can limit this to objects of a certain size if you'd like.
• Immunity to reality warping: Perhaps because of her other psychic abilities, she's canonically not taken in by a reality-shifting illusion that dupes many of her compatriots. We can nerf this outright.
• Psychic sight: It's made clear in various ways (her ability to walk without any evident guide such as a cane or service animal, the fact that she's read Alan Moore's Watchmen, her utter mortification when she realizes she's spying on David while he's naked) that on some level, Ruth can see through her psychic powers. This is presumably similar to Matt Murdock's abilities; however, unlike Daredevil, X-Men never really delves into how this works. It's an ability she developed later in her childhood, as her memories of her mother's kitchen are of a place she knew by touch. I'd like to keep this as it is for ease of communication + maneuvring through the ship.
• Jedi mind tricks: She can manipulate people to believe what she wants--or could, at least, at the time of her brother's execution. Given Luca's skill in tricking David into doing what he wants, he may have stolen this ability. We can nerf this outright.
Personality: Ruth's a strange girl, even in a school where one of the students is covered in eyes. Around people she doesn't know well, or with people she knows don't like her much, she's quiet and hesitant, with a vocal tic that adds polite little words into her sentence - sometimes in places where they make sense, sometimes not. On one occasion, she tries to talk to a pair of classmates, who tell her they find her creepy and want her to leave them alone. She doesn't interrupt or try to explain that she's trying to find out from them what the homework was--she just stands there, wilting a little at the critique, and lets them go.
If she gets comfortable with someone (her boyfriend David, her friend Santo, her roommate Pixie), though, she's...well, still weird, but a different weird. She's got a sense of humor and occasionally a sharp tongue--one that makes her stutter disappear. (When she's feeling annoyed or snarky enough to start calling you a smartass and telling you why you're wrong about something, she's not going to sorry-pardon-yes through it.) She's a good listener, and for a person she cares about, she'll be endlessly supportive of them, both to their face and when talking to other people - unless they do something appalling. Ruth's not a doormat; she has a strong sense of right and wrong, and she's more than capable of reading a person the riot act if she thinks they're straying into 'wrong' territory.
When she's in control of her faculties, Ruth can be unflappable, a sort of modern-day oracle. She describes herself as someone who's never surprised, and she can keep cool under pressure - in great part because she knows what's going to happen. This leads to her asking people to please help her block a knife that's going to stab at her or wandering peaceably through an active fight between mutants powerful enough to knock out walls. It can be eerie and, along with her tendency to predict terrible things about to happen, can make her difficult to spend a lot of time with. People don't usually go to oracles to make friends.
Whether she's in control or not, she's stubborn. Able and willing to keep her own counsel, she makes her own way. She frequently makes plans and carries them out without explaining herself to anyone around her. On one occasion, she uses another student's powers to put herself in a coma, causing him to think he's killed her. On another, she plans out in great detail her suicide and final words to multiple old teachers of hers, getting everyone around her to play out a complicated series of events that culminate in two rivals working together.
And it makes sense that she wouldn't bother to let others in on what she's doing. After all, she sees what's going to happen. She's spent years relying on herself: there's no evidence that she had any playmates or confidantes in childhood besides the aunt she lived with and the teddy bear she owned, and it's implied that she was kept far enough out of the public eye that all her records basically stopped around the time of her mother's death. Ruth will often explain things--at least a little--when she's asked. But people frequently don't ask the right questions, and she doesn't always proffer the information herself.
Her life hasn't been easy; no one who was nearly murdered with a chainsaw at age six is liable to have an easy life. But for a while, she had friends, a boyfriend, a supportive school environment, and a sense of a future. It's when she loses the last one that things fall apart--the terror of precognition, after all, is that you know when your time is running out. She approaches it methodically, quietly, and with a singular sort of aloneness that's easy for her to retreat to in the face of danger.
But when it turns out she hasn't quite run out of future--in fact, that her entire conception of Where She's Going just took a sharp left turn--she's going to have to decide what to do with herself. And the classic X-Men answer is to help people. So, Warden it is.
Barge Reactions: The Barge is going to be a surprise, which is going to be a weird feeling for a girl who doesn't get surprised. The best she'd expected from dying was oblivion, or maybe the possibility of coming back from the dead sometime in the future (I mean, she is a superhero). Getting dragged into an interdimensional spaceship for the dead is a new one for her.
But she's an eyeless girl who sees the future - it's not like she's never seen a weird thing before.
Deal: Avert the Bad End that Ruth killed herself to escape, whatever it was.
History: Once upon a time in North Carolina, a baby was born without any eyes. Her mother loved her, but her father left within a week of her arrival, and her older brother took his anger out on her nearly from birth. She grew up curious and sweet, but also battered: as her brother grew, he became an addict, first to drugs and then to religion, neither of which gentled him toward his sister. Eventually, in a relapse, he started a chainsaw and went to cull the girl--but their mother intervened and ultimately died for Ruth.
After her brother's arrest, the girl was sent to live with an aunt and spent six years in the quiet of a small New Jersey town. She was happy then, able to use her burgeoning psychic powers around the house, and began her education at home. Her mind began to bury the ugliest memories of her life in the South--but she recalled her brother still. When his execution was scheduled, the girl made her way back down to the prison and tricked her way inside the viewing room. Poor luck for her: at the moment of his death, her brother's spirit burst from his body and started violently at hers, stealing half her powers and leaving her mind confused and her words muddled.
And that's the Ruth who comes to the Xavier School, where she slowly begins to interact with others. The trauma she's experienced, however, along with the length of time she's spent away from much of society, makes her an odd duck even in a school full of mutants. She has a few friends, and her teachers seem to like her well enough for the most part, but she's regarded as strange and frightening by many of the other students. She's seen as a non-combatant for the most part, more of a canary in a coal mine than anything.
The one time she becomes an offensive fighter of sorts is after she meets David Haller, aka Legion (but please don't call him that). Ruth is his "nemesis," allegedly the one person who can stop him from becoming an eldritch horror that swallows up all of mutantkind. She also ends up dating him. He's her first real experience with romance, and vice versa; they both grow as people as a result of their relationship, Ruth regaining the abilities her brother took from her. When David does end up becoming the vast, sprawling blob they'd both foreseen, she goes to him, astral-projected sword and all, and helps him save the day. (David's ultimately the master of his fate--which is to have no fate, to stop himself from ever being born--but Ruth beats back the physical monster long enough that the mind inside can make its decision.) She's left with a boyfriend who exists only inside her head and memories of times that never existed for anyone else.
After that, she lives a quiet life at school. At some point, David is wrenched out of her mind; the last thing he remembers is her thinking it was inevitable, and maybe it was. Maybe she knew it was going to happen. And then, when the vast majority of her classmates and teachers disappear from the world and anti-mutant sentiment reaches a fever pitch, she starts to fall apart. Unable to tell past and future apart, and seeing vision after vision of her violent death at the hands of people like her brother, Ruth becomes suicidal. She cheats the lottery in order to buy a nice house to die in, warns both Wolverine and Cyclops of the things she's seen, and goes upstairs to kill herself in the bath.
Ruth has plenty of minor adventures that I haven't mentioned here, to spare you the tedium of "well, in issue FIVE, she--"; for the painfully in-depth version, please check out wikipedia.
Sample Journal Entry: Hello.
This is...thoughtful...but I'm not sure no that I belong here.
[ A pause. ]
And I need a different room. This one, it's not where - pardon - where I want to spend eternity. If that's really what this is. It's...really creepy, actually.
That's all. Thank you.
Sample RP:
It's a room from the house she bought to die in, one she has to swipe into with the lottery ticket that paid for it. The bathroom's--well, Ruth doesn't want to think about the bathroom in any detail right now. Everything was supposed to be over. She was supposed to close her eyes without opening them again. After all the visions, all the hiding in plain sight, she was supposed to have some kind of rest.
Standing in there, surrounded by the impersonal furnishings she bought and no sense of what's coming, makes her feel crazy. Crazy and alone. So she gets out.
Ruth starts walking, without any intention beyond getting away from the interior of her Brooklyn brownstone. Despite her blindfold, white like a flag of surrender, she doesn't hesitate or stumble. First things first: someplace new to sleep? No. She's wide awake right now, and she has the feeling she will be for a while. No, she's still wearing what she had on the last night she was alive. First things first: new clothes.
(Some small sliver of her is wondering if this is the hell that Luca always said she was going to. It's like a splinter wedged in her brain, one she'll be trying to ignore for at least the next few hours. First things first.)
The first person she comes to, she tries to flag down. It's not that hard to get people's attention, usually, when she wants it - a woman wearing a blindfold and acting like she's not isn't a common sight. "E-excuse me. Do they, um, have clothes here?"