App for Crossroads

[phobophage]

Player name: Kaja
Personal Journal: kajarainbow
Other Characters Played: N/A

Character Name: Deimonea
Character Canon: Original

Personality:
From the very beginning, the Queen created Deimonea to be inquisitive and independent, and Deimonea carried those qualities beyond her expectations. Present her with a mystery and she will seek to unravel it. Attempt to control her, and she will seek to escape it.

Deimonea tends to directness in going for her desires. She has no real sense of embarrassment or shame, though what she considers the stupidity of her earlier carelessness and wastefulness still rankles on her. She can be rather gluttonous in fulfilling her desires and will often ignore others' complaints.

One particular mystery she's taken an interest in is the workings of the minds of Dreamers. She understands fear easily and naturally, but the other parts of Dreamers' thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are intriguing to her. And she's never before had a chance to observe Dreamers in their natural habitats, instead of in the surreal disruptions of their routines experienced in dreams.

Deimonea preys on fear as a Nightmare, and has no regrets about it. Her encounters with Berry taught her some self-restraint, but she still enjoys savoring the fear she causes in others. As much, she rarely makes any effort to ramp back her inherent creepiness, since the nervousness that causes in others are like tasty little popcorn snacks to her. At night, she prowls dreams creating and feeding off nightmares.

And yet her interest in Dreamers causes her to be fairly friendly and even cheery, since she's found interacting with them to be one of the best ways to learn about them. Rudeness doesn't particularly bother her, since her main criteria of 'fun company' are interesting people, and she appreciates honesty and fearlessness. Braveness is one of the better ways to make her think of a person as more than just someone to frighten.

As such, her demeanor can sometimes switch quickly between creepy and friendly. To her there's no particular disparity between those behaviors. Sometimes scaring someone is just her way of making a cheery hello. After all, the only social norms she knows are those of dreams, which can be wildly inconsistent and arbitrary.

Deimonea tends to prefer nonlethal solutions simply because every dead dreamer is one less food source, though this doesn't stop her from using illegal or immoral nonlethal methods. But Berry's taught her that any Dreamer might turn out to be unexpectedly interesting. As such, she's been learning to treasure their potential.

She lacks certain normal human reactions. For example, she's largely indunated to fear and so tends to react to terrifying situations with more caution than fear.

Like most Dreams, she might seem bizarre sometimes to people from less surreal worlds, sometimes following seemingly irrational dream logic in her behavior (and giving justifications that make sense only if you're high or in a dream). Bizarre events are more matter of course for her, while mundanity seems rather surreal to her. But she's gotten this far by being resourceful and eventually she will adapt.

From the very start of watching the Queen's creation of the Dream World, Deimonea's had a high interest in creative expression and even her dream of one day creating worlds is just the ultimate expression of that. Because of the exceptional visualization required to create the level of details in the dreams she creates, she's got a fair deal of artistic ability.

A lot of her curiosity is directed toward opening up new artistic methods, including learning to understand the workings of reality so that she can play more directly with that reality (for example, taking an interest in the physical sciences). By understanding how the world works, she hopes to unlock the secrets of creating a new world, however immeasurably long that will take her.

History:
Deimonea was born during the creation of the current Dream World, as the Crystal Queen drew her out of the primordial dream-foam, assembling her from the salvaged nightmare-remnants of a long gone feverish dreamer. She floated with the other Dream Worlders waiting for the remaking to be completed, until the Queen's labors attracted her attentions. She escaped from the pen she was confined in for her safety and narrowly avoided getting woven into the underside of the Dream World by a preoccupied Queen.

Watching the weaving, she learned much. About the workings of the Dream World, what it was made out of, how it was put together. This gave her a better understanding of dreams than most Dreams and awareness of how to manipulate them in ways that only the Queen and the most powerful Dreams and Dreamers could.

Deimonea ran freely, causing havoc amongst the Queen's creations, until the Queen finally noticed and plucked her out to force her to work on designing nightmarish landscapes. From this prison Deimonea escaped too, by tricking another Nightmare into performing her tasks.

Deimonea's life thereafter was a life of responsibility evasion, casual hedonism, and terrorization of everything in sight. A Dream Savior named Berry put an end to this, forcing Deimonea to see the larger picture of her interdependence on the Dreamers, the other Dreams, and the Dream World itself.

Deimonea was pulled into a team with Berry, teasing her and being teased in return. The two of them played a part in the first Dream War against the Adversaries, completing covert missions and dropping in to help out other Dream Saviors. In the final assault on the Adversaries' three castles housing dead Queens and a King from the three previous destroyed Dream Worlds, Berry was scattered across the dreamscape from using a massive combination attack to destroy a castle.

For a fair while, Deimonea gathered up Berry's scattered essence to reassemble her. She'd come to think of Berry as her first good friend, and it was an interesting challenge. Finally, after returning Berry to coherence and having only the occasional patrol to mop up Adversary remnants, Deimonea started working on a better understanding of the Dream World in an attempt to learn how to create her own version.

Setting Info:
Link to setting writeup

Canon point: After the end of the Dream Savior War.

Abilities/Powers:
She can travel into and through dreams freely. Within them, she can warp and shape them fairly casually. She can even create minor dream entities (essentially mook-level entities).

She can present all kinds of illusions to others. Even her very appearance is itself an illusion. Any powers that completely negate illusions or reveal "true forms" would show a horrifying amalgam of nightmares in a vague humanlike shape. Of course, illusions can be at least somewhat ignored if one figures it out.

Those with weak minds (i.e. likely not most player characters), she can drop into a sleepwalking state, manipulating their actions while they're trapped in a dreaming state. However, such sleepwalkers can be woken by anything that would ordinarily wake them up (including sharp impacts and pain).

Because of her nature as a Nightmare, she will generally sense when others're feeling fear and closely related emotions and can understand the details of that fear (things like what they're feeling afraid about at that moment). With deeper digging, she can discover a person's hidden fears.

While she holds physical existence thanks to being drawn directly from the Dream World by the gate, her body is essentially amorphous, able to take on a variety of shapes and lacking organs or any biological needs. As such, it takes extensive damage to really hurt her and even an apparent death might not be actual. The most effective method of killing her would be outright destruction of the body.

But inside a dream, the laws of dream physics apply and defeat is through psychological rather than physical methods.

Intended Guild:
Seekers of Artistic Expression. While Deimonea has personality elements that would fit into the Diamonds or Scholars, her most ultimate ambitions lay within creative endeavors and much of her life history consists of seeking personal expression and independence.

Notes/Other Info:
N/A

Sample Post:
http://planar-crossroads.dreamwidth.org/567.html?thread=44343#cmt44343
http://planar-crossroads.dreamwidth.org/567.html?thread=47671#cmt47671