flickerflash (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
flickerflash) wrote2009-06-28 10:18 pm
flickerflash) wrote2009-06-28 10:18 pm
Evil plots n stuff.
Piles of notes and a timeline for turning Katie ~~eeeeevillll~~
Or not quite evil, but hella sociopathic and reactionary with a whole lot of dark thought and -- okay yeah, that's evil for our viewers. It's complicated.
Basically, Zane very graciously allowed me to springboard a plot I've always had an interest in running in the right circumstances, and I sort of realised that exactly the right circumstance had just sort of formed in Luceti as a result of some different events! Katie's reawakening as a fae came well timed for Ragna's plot, and I suddenly went "Ooh, this could be fun." So.
What has happened:
Three months ago, Katie was murdered by Guide as he drained her dry for sustenance. This is not a known fact; those who knew Katie know she went missing, and some definitely suspect she died, but when Katie revived she had no memory of the event or, in fact, of being one of the fae. When a changeling dies, the fae soul moves on to another newborn. The fact that the Malnosso can collect and revive people in Luceti kind of threw it for a loop, and while the Malnosso very carefully ensured the fae soul remained attached to Katie, the trauma of death and her subsequent time revived at the hands of scientists ensured the fae soul remained dormant. All memories of being a pooka were sealed away, and while Katie remembered those people she'd grown to know well in Luceti, her memory was spotty and confused at best. For much of the following time, she was just a normal human girl, and she lacked either the incredibly creative encounter or the threat to her life to spark the changeling soul back to awareness.
One month ago, the Malnosso kidnapped her and tried to start things in motion themselves. Which made for a very pleasant kidnapping, actually, because they pretty much tried drowning her in creativity and fed her on a bunch of drugs lifted from her world that were pretty much vitamins laced with pure glamour. This failed. Largely because the Malnosso did all this in a heavily scientific environment and the changeling side of Katie just went lol nope. Eventually, they sent her back to Luceti and life continued on.
Finally, on the 15th of June, Katie encountered Jilly's studio, went on a creative binge with Jilly, and re-awakened on her own. And she remembered a very important fact: that she'd died. That some jerk had killed her, she had no idea who, only it hurt, and as far as she knows nobody seems to have noticed she died. Now, this may change after the 15th June, because she could have any number of conversations where this might be broached with her-- but at the time, this is what she thought, and that's really a very heartbreaking notion for a child. Not only that, but a new awakening with glamour that had been tampered with by the Malnosso, using drugs that are often used as weapons against the fae by certain key Shadow Court members, meant that her magic flared back to life with high instability, glamour that escaped her control again and again in fits and sparks, and Katie fled into the forest to avoid accidentally enchanting most of the village, and to sort her own head out.
And there she ran into Ragna, with his poisonous seithr spreading everywhere. And her roiling glamour reached on out and sucked all of that crap in, seeding taint through her glamour at an alarmingly deep level. Given her negative bent of thinking at that point, well.
That's where it starts.
Glamour and whoops, that child is a little evil.
Glamour is magic. Glamour is used to craft the fae arts-- everything magical that Katie does, she does because she has access to that pool of power -- she expends it, then she takes it in from the creative members of the community. It's a give and take. A changeling without glamour is no changeling at all.
Dark glamour is not natural; in Katie's own world, it is power drawn from the heart of balefire in any fae freehold and then deliberately tainted through and through. It's used by the Shadow Court to influence and corrupt the more noble of the fae, because infecting someone with dark glamour is tantamount to bringing a person's Shadow to the surface and thrusting a whole bunch of addictive power into their hands. It is also usually temporary-- once you burn that dark glamour off, it's gone. The trick lies generally in getting a person to burn it all off without killing everyone they know in the process.
Katie's problem lies far deeper, due to the fun combination of everything that happened leading up to the 15th. It'll be a bit more complicated-- but for the same reason, her fall into darkness is much, much slower, as that darkness takes a hold in her glamour and just begins consuming it all from the inside out. Her human child side will get submerged by the darker aspects of her fae soul, and her fae soul? Is 300 years old, but in that time it's lived over fifteen lives -- short lives on average, because even if a changeling isn't killed by violent circumstances in their world, the human side growing to adulthood tends to make it wither away and become dormant eventually. Growing up is lethal. Many fae don't live past 25...or rather, they do, but they slowly forget they were once magical. The fae soul moves on to find a human better suited to keeping it alive.
Pull all the darker aspects of a soul like that up to the surface, and well. It's unpleasant. Not to mention a little primal. She's a pooka. Fae born from animals to begin with. And this won't be her only problem. Becuase Katie, lost for an answer to a very important question - who killed her? - will develop her own echoes.
So now we come to the important part.
What does that mean for Luceti?
Well, she's not about to go nuts and try to kill you all at once or anything. For a start, Katie's slide into losing control will actually be quite slow. For another, what she does depends precisely on the environment around her. At her worst, she's unlikely to attack an innocent human being. But she may, for example, have fun violently proving to anybody who says "I don't believe in fairies" that they're not only wrong, that was an extremely unwise thing to say. Hair trigger defensiveness and protection of herself from anything perceived as a threat, along with a great amount of selfishness and single-minded sociopathic hunger and need for glamour. Instead of just enticing people's creative sides out so she can soak up some glamour harmlessly? She will rip it out of people by force. In one of three ways.
From here, it's easier if I just go into timeline mode. Which can be halted at any time, but I'm basically writing out what happens if it goes unchecked.
July
* Katie will be mostly herself. Her thoughts may be bent slightly more negatively than usual and she will be slightly more wary and hostile with strangers. She's having nightmares, but given she just remembered she died, that's to be expected.
* She will start to develop an echo of her own, driven by nightmares and her obsessive need to know who killed her -- the only thing she can remember, which is hands that reaches out to cover her face and chest. It is extraordinarily hard to pretend not to notice a couple of evil looking hands that try to mug you on a regular basis, because she will be terrified that if they touch her she'll die all over again. Not only that, but Katie thinks if she lets it go, if she can keep it at bay long enough, the echo will take enough form she'll be able to recognise her killer. (It doesn't work that way because she never saw Guide, but Katie is hoping it's just something she's forgotten.)
* To anyone who can perceive her magical soul/aura, she will look as she normally does. Glittery/sparkly, two souls mingling, etc etc. There is a smidgeon of darkness right at the core, but it doesn't look unnatural.
* Negative glamour calls to negative glamour. Without quite meaning to, if Katie walks past those who are incredibly dark in their own ways (the twisted, the psychotic, the already dead, vampires, any villager who might fall in that category), she will draw off portions of their glamour. These villagers will be mostly unaffected by this as it's just sort of 'skimming' - they might feel a little tired, worn down, and feel the need to go home and sleep or have a good meal. Sort of like how you feel after having given blood, really.
It's this process that really sets Katie on her downward path.
* Unless someone goes right out of their way to get on her bad side, she is unlikely to attack anyone. She will be slightly more protective than usual of those close to her. In general, she will still be pretty much herself with a few minor things off.
August
* Katie will become more detached to anyone who isn't her CR and may occasionally refer to humans like they're beneath her. Her practical jokes will turn a shade more dark, her sense of humour will be nastier, and she is much more likely to react with negativity and spite to anyone who 'crosses' her (this can be anything from being outright rude to telling her she should be in bed already like a normal nine year old.) She will spend more time on her own, watching things from a distance. BRB judging you all. B| This will be interspersed with snap periods of waking up to be her normal self and wonder what she was thinking a few minutes ago. Gosh. She's just a litlte kid. Katie is worried at this point, but as a pooka she keeps it to herself. Though I can see her dropping cryptic hints to people in the right circumstances.
* Her echo is developing a body to go with those hands. It looks nothing like Guide's. She was killed by someone horrible, and therefore her echo is turning into Something Horrible. It's not going to be too hard for Katie to convince herself she was killed by someone like, say, Ragna in his Beast form. (It may, in fact, bear some resemblance to him. Whoops.) At this stage, it's still not capable of doing much more than frightening her. And Katie ...lets it grow. Because she thinks it'll tell her who killed her.
* Her magical aura will be shot through with dark threading at this point. It still glimmers, but it's kind of like the glimmer you see on an oil slick, if nothing else.
* The darker echoes of those in the village will be attracted to her own, so it's kind of. Not happy in enchanted-sight land.
* Slowly she'll decide it's too much effort to get her glamour via gentle encouragement of peoples' muses. Instead, Katie will just yank it out of them wholesale and walk off. Because they aren't generating more glamour via artistic methods at this point, this will cause the people in question to feel tired, listless, washed out, and lack a single creative spark in their body for a few days. This process is called ravaging.
September
* At this point, Katie is really sliding down dark. Those of her close CR are still safe, though she will become more short-tempered and spiteful with them, and at this point she may well, if she comes across people she doesn't like, follow them and traumatise them as much as possible. That is: she may enchant them to see their worst fears, build on them, terrorise them, pull them to the height of trauma as best she can, which generates all sorts of horrifying glamour-- and then she'll yank all that produced terror-glamour right out of them, leaving them a traumatised shell of themselves for anywhere up to a week. We call this ravaging with sadistic intent. It makes for a better meal all round. She still won't kill doing this, because killing is pretty much anathema to the fae unless it's highly necessary-- you're deliberately ending a person's ability to deliver creativity to the world, and that sort of action has an adverse effect on changelings. (Until the end of September, whereif the wrong sort of person crosses her, she might indeed just decide that killing someone creatively is a good compromise. By this point, the human temperance and child that is Katie will be greatly submerged beneath dark fae instinct.)
* Her echo is fully formed and monstrous, gaining a life of its own, making it officially a nervosa. Which is like the shadow version of a chimera. Which are...what happens when echoes are given so much life they separate from the creator and become their own thing. It will be dark and shadowy and monstrous and seem to be all hands and mouths and white hair and it will happily and gleefully try killing Katie when it comes across her, but luckily at least can be distracted enough by other sources of glamour in the village that it doens't actively pursue her every day. She'll still spend a handful of nights trying to drive it away from people she (still) cares about, not to mention herself.
* Her magical aura will so very out of whack by now. Anyone capable of perceiving she has two souls will note one is greatly engulfing the other, and there's about a quarter of that life and glittering light left in the sick, burnt-orange glow that makes up the rest. Anyone vaguely sensitive to the spirit side of things may suffer nightmares about her nervosa as it prays on others across the village. But they're just nightmares. No other adverse effects.
* She'll still have moments of being herself, but toward the end of September they're few and far between and most likely lured out with love and affection, at which point she might try desperately to tell people she's in trouble; that's if most people can't tell by now. But these are unpredictably short.
October
If things get to this stage (I am definitely not averse to people fixing the issue before this!) the twin traumas of dark glamour infection and constant fighting with her nervosa will bury Katie completely. At this stage, her close CR is also at risk, though her close CR first has to register as a threat, so... if they walk around her on eggshells things may still approach somewhat normal relations. But really, at this point? The dark glamour has pulled her fae side's negative points (her Shadow, as it were) up to the surface and it's in charge, and it will likely hold all of humanity as a threat and worthy of its contempt. At this stage, she may toy with people for her own fun, will definitely seek out anyone she doesn't like to attack them --- and that will include anyone who's ever slighted her, even if Katie's forgiven them since. Her aura will have a few glimmers of light left, and that's it. And this is where she actively does seek to seriously hurt people in her removal of glamour. Because it's efficient. Not to mention fun.
She will seek out the highly creative, and as per what she does in more innocent times, encourage them to create. And then, when they start to paint, or cook, or whatever it is they do, she will deliberately infect them with her own glamour, dark to the core, which will mix with their produced glamour. And this will lead to the biggest burst of creativity they've ever had. They will continue to paint/cook/dance and they won't be able to stop, burning up their own reserves and becoming miniature glamour factories, and this will keep going until they go straight past the limits of physical endurance and collapse into a coma for weeks (no glamour left whatsoever, Katie stole it all) or someone interrupts the process and sedates them for their own good.
This process goes beyond ravaging and is called rapture, and it is forbidden throughout fae society. The Shadow Court are the only practitioners, normally. It provides a veritable storehouse of glamour and as such Katie will only end up doing this maybe once a week.
Ways to halt all this in its tracks
* The nervosa is a creation born of Katie's nightmares, obsession, and glamour, but it is still an echo. Destroying it, while it won't solve everything, will at least bestow strength and clarity and some balance. Katie may then have an idea herself, while she still has control, about what to do. But she'll need help to pull it off. It's just...getting that information across.
* Anyone who is capable of cleansing the soul in some way will also halt or pause the process. They will also be able to note that the lighter glimmer of Katie's soul is being suffocated by the dark, so somehow drawing off the darkness will help.
* So will killing Katie again. 8| If it comes to the point you have to kill a small child to free her/stop her attacking people, that's nasty, but so be it. She'll still require an awakening when she comes back and won't remember any of this, but at least she'll be lacking the specific circumstances that led to this and so it won't happen again.
* Ideally, though? The best way to to fix it is to burn the darkness out of her glamour. It can be done in one of two ways: by inducing a rapture in herself (somehow) so that she drains herself absolutely dry, not just her active magic-using glamour but her passive this-makes-me-a-fae stuff. That will land her in a coma, but she will recover from it.
* The other way is by invoking stress in her to the point shelimit breaks taps into the Wyrd in desperation, cloaking herself in pure, raw magic from the Dreaming to attack people, which will quite literally burn away the taint with its sheer overwhelming raw purity. She'll burn through it all in a matter of moments, enchant everyone in the vicinity, destroying negative echoes in the vicinity, destroying every single mark of taint in the vicinity, and then pass out and be a wreck for a day or two. (Anyone in a coma from her attacks will probably wake up at this point as glamour just streams through the village.) This does involve either attacking Katie or someone she still cares about at this point, but it's probably a few steps up from killing her.
* It's also worth noting that dropping her into the tunnels dampens Katie's fae side completely, leaving you with a confused and upset little girl. This is known to a few people, I believe. But unless she gets kept down there forever, eventually she'll have to leave and the resultant glamour rushing back in will be ...fun. But! It is a way to pause everything while stuff gets worked out.
------
This all sounds pretty complex, so I'm really wondering if it's viable, honestly. Basically this plot involves:
* All of Katie's CR that wants to be involved
* Victims at all three stages
* People trying to help those victims in the third stage
* The highly spiritually aware
* Anyone whose magic/skills involve dreams
But in the end, involves anyone who damn well wants to be involved, no more, no less. It can be easily kept to a small group of people, because Katie certainly won't be trying to blow up the village or anything-- she attacks people individually when she does at all.
People I can think of off the top of my head that she may specifically target at some stage just because:
* Dist
* Robert
* Anyone way too scientific for their own good, come to think of it
* Keiichi
* Haruhi
* Ragna
* Wolfwood
* ...possibly Norrington
She will NOT harm
* a child
* anyone who's part cat (just... in case there are some somewhere.)
Generally, anyone else is up for grabs with the exception of one person. And that's Katara. Because Katie swore an oath of debt to her forever ago, and Katara has healed the damage from cold iron twice. Katara is exempt from all horribleness.
Anyone who wants to be involved on whatever level is fine-- whether they're attacked, traumatised by their own memories, forced into neverending cycles of creativity, trying to help a small child, or are totally okay with attacking a small child. The long scope of this plot and Katie's slow descent mean we've got plenty of time to involve people naturally along the way.
And given the nature of the timeline, I will basically keep people informed regularly on where we're up to if necessary.
Feedback and suggestions are incredibly welcome-- I don't want to tread on toes, there might be somethign I've missed, or you might think there's something that could happen that would be totally awesome for one of your characters. Comment away!
Or not quite evil, but hella sociopathic and reactionary with a whole lot of dark thought and -- okay yeah, that's evil for our viewers. It's complicated.
Basically, Zane very graciously allowed me to springboard a plot I've always had an interest in running in the right circumstances, and I sort of realised that exactly the right circumstance had just sort of formed in Luceti as a result of some different events! Katie's reawakening as a fae came well timed for Ragna's plot, and I suddenly went "Ooh, this could be fun." So.
What has happened:
Three months ago, Katie was murdered by Guide as he drained her dry for sustenance. This is not a known fact; those who knew Katie know she went missing, and some definitely suspect she died, but when Katie revived she had no memory of the event or, in fact, of being one of the fae. When a changeling dies, the fae soul moves on to another newborn. The fact that the Malnosso can collect and revive people in Luceti kind of threw it for a loop, and while the Malnosso very carefully ensured the fae soul remained attached to Katie, the trauma of death and her subsequent time revived at the hands of scientists ensured the fae soul remained dormant. All memories of being a pooka were sealed away, and while Katie remembered those people she'd grown to know well in Luceti, her memory was spotty and confused at best. For much of the following time, she was just a normal human girl, and she lacked either the incredibly creative encounter or the threat to her life to spark the changeling soul back to awareness.
One month ago, the Malnosso kidnapped her and tried to start things in motion themselves. Which made for a very pleasant kidnapping, actually, because they pretty much tried drowning her in creativity and fed her on a bunch of drugs lifted from her world that were pretty much vitamins laced with pure glamour. This failed. Largely because the Malnosso did all this in a heavily scientific environment and the changeling side of Katie just went lol nope. Eventually, they sent her back to Luceti and life continued on.
Finally, on the 15th of June, Katie encountered Jilly's studio, went on a creative binge with Jilly, and re-awakened on her own. And she remembered a very important fact: that she'd died. That some jerk had killed her, she had no idea who, only it hurt, and as far as she knows nobody seems to have noticed she died. Now, this may change after the 15th June, because she could have any number of conversations where this might be broached with her-- but at the time, this is what she thought, and that's really a very heartbreaking notion for a child. Not only that, but a new awakening with glamour that had been tampered with by the Malnosso, using drugs that are often used as weapons against the fae by certain key Shadow Court members, meant that her magic flared back to life with high instability, glamour that escaped her control again and again in fits and sparks, and Katie fled into the forest to avoid accidentally enchanting most of the village, and to sort her own head out.
And there she ran into Ragna, with his poisonous seithr spreading everywhere. And her roiling glamour reached on out and sucked all of that crap in, seeding taint through her glamour at an alarmingly deep level. Given her negative bent of thinking at that point, well.
That's where it starts.
Glamour and whoops, that child is a little evil.
Glamour is magic. Glamour is used to craft the fae arts-- everything magical that Katie does, she does because she has access to that pool of power -- she expends it, then she takes it in from the creative members of the community. It's a give and take. A changeling without glamour is no changeling at all.
Dark glamour is not natural; in Katie's own world, it is power drawn from the heart of balefire in any fae freehold and then deliberately tainted through and through. It's used by the Shadow Court to influence and corrupt the more noble of the fae, because infecting someone with dark glamour is tantamount to bringing a person's Shadow to the surface and thrusting a whole bunch of addictive power into their hands. It is also usually temporary-- once you burn that dark glamour off, it's gone. The trick lies generally in getting a person to burn it all off without killing everyone they know in the process.
Katie's problem lies far deeper, due to the fun combination of everything that happened leading up to the 15th. It'll be a bit more complicated-- but for the same reason, her fall into darkness is much, much slower, as that darkness takes a hold in her glamour and just begins consuming it all from the inside out. Her human child side will get submerged by the darker aspects of her fae soul, and her fae soul? Is 300 years old, but in that time it's lived over fifteen lives -- short lives on average, because even if a changeling isn't killed by violent circumstances in their world, the human side growing to adulthood tends to make it wither away and become dormant eventually. Growing up is lethal. Many fae don't live past 25...or rather, they do, but they slowly forget they were once magical. The fae soul moves on to find a human better suited to keeping it alive.
Pull all the darker aspects of a soul like that up to the surface, and well. It's unpleasant. Not to mention a little primal. She's a pooka. Fae born from animals to begin with. And this won't be her only problem. Becuase Katie, lost for an answer to a very important question - who killed her? - will develop her own echoes.
So now we come to the important part.
What does that mean for Luceti?
Well, she's not about to go nuts and try to kill you all at once or anything. For a start, Katie's slide into losing control will actually be quite slow. For another, what she does depends precisely on the environment around her. At her worst, she's unlikely to attack an innocent human being. But she may, for example, have fun violently proving to anybody who says "I don't believe in fairies" that they're not only wrong, that was an extremely unwise thing to say. Hair trigger defensiveness and protection of herself from anything perceived as a threat, along with a great amount of selfishness and single-minded sociopathic hunger and need for glamour. Instead of just enticing people's creative sides out so she can soak up some glamour harmlessly? She will rip it out of people by force. In one of three ways.
From here, it's easier if I just go into timeline mode. Which can be halted at any time, but I'm basically writing out what happens if it goes unchecked.
July
* Katie will be mostly herself. Her thoughts may be bent slightly more negatively than usual and she will be slightly more wary and hostile with strangers. She's having nightmares, but given she just remembered she died, that's to be expected.
* She will start to develop an echo of her own, driven by nightmares and her obsessive need to know who killed her -- the only thing she can remember, which is hands that reaches out to cover her face and chest. It is extraordinarily hard to pretend not to notice a couple of evil looking hands that try to mug you on a regular basis, because she will be terrified that if they touch her she'll die all over again. Not only that, but Katie thinks if she lets it go, if she can keep it at bay long enough, the echo will take enough form she'll be able to recognise her killer. (It doesn't work that way because she never saw Guide, but Katie is hoping it's just something she's forgotten.)
* To anyone who can perceive her magical soul/aura, she will look as she normally does. Glittery/sparkly, two souls mingling, etc etc. There is a smidgeon of darkness right at the core, but it doesn't look unnatural.
* Negative glamour calls to negative glamour. Without quite meaning to, if Katie walks past those who are incredibly dark in their own ways (the twisted, the psychotic, the already dead, vampires, any villager who might fall in that category), she will draw off portions of their glamour. These villagers will be mostly unaffected by this as it's just sort of 'skimming' - they might feel a little tired, worn down, and feel the need to go home and sleep or have a good meal. Sort of like how you feel after having given blood, really.
It's this process that really sets Katie on her downward path.
* Unless someone goes right out of their way to get on her bad side, she is unlikely to attack anyone. She will be slightly more protective than usual of those close to her. In general, she will still be pretty much herself with a few minor things off.
August
* Katie will become more detached to anyone who isn't her CR and may occasionally refer to humans like they're beneath her. Her practical jokes will turn a shade more dark, her sense of humour will be nastier, and she is much more likely to react with negativity and spite to anyone who 'crosses' her (this can be anything from being outright rude to telling her she should be in bed already like a normal nine year old.) She will spend more time on her own, watching things from a distance. BRB judging you all. B| This will be interspersed with snap periods of waking up to be her normal self and wonder what she was thinking a few minutes ago. Gosh. She's just a litlte kid. Katie is worried at this point, but as a pooka she keeps it to herself. Though I can see her dropping cryptic hints to people in the right circumstances.
* Her echo is developing a body to go with those hands. It looks nothing like Guide's. She was killed by someone horrible, and therefore her echo is turning into Something Horrible. It's not going to be too hard for Katie to convince herself she was killed by someone like, say, Ragna in his Beast form. (It may, in fact, bear some resemblance to him. Whoops.) At this stage, it's still not capable of doing much more than frightening her. And Katie ...lets it grow. Because she thinks it'll tell her who killed her.
* Her magical aura will be shot through with dark threading at this point. It still glimmers, but it's kind of like the glimmer you see on an oil slick, if nothing else.
* The darker echoes of those in the village will be attracted to her own, so it's kind of. Not happy in enchanted-sight land.
* Slowly she'll decide it's too much effort to get her glamour via gentle encouragement of peoples' muses. Instead, Katie will just yank it out of them wholesale and walk off. Because they aren't generating more glamour via artistic methods at this point, this will cause the people in question to feel tired, listless, washed out, and lack a single creative spark in their body for a few days. This process is called ravaging.
September
* At this point, Katie is really sliding down dark. Those of her close CR are still safe, though she will become more short-tempered and spiteful with them, and at this point she may well, if she comes across people she doesn't like, follow them and traumatise them as much as possible. That is: she may enchant them to see their worst fears, build on them, terrorise them, pull them to the height of trauma as best she can, which generates all sorts of horrifying glamour-- and then she'll yank all that produced terror-glamour right out of them, leaving them a traumatised shell of themselves for anywhere up to a week. We call this ravaging with sadistic intent. It makes for a better meal all round. She still won't kill doing this, because killing is pretty much anathema to the fae unless it's highly necessary-- you're deliberately ending a person's ability to deliver creativity to the world, and that sort of action has an adverse effect on changelings. (Until the end of September, whereif the wrong sort of person crosses her, she might indeed just decide that killing someone creatively is a good compromise. By this point, the human temperance and child that is Katie will be greatly submerged beneath dark fae instinct.)
* Her echo is fully formed and monstrous, gaining a life of its own, making it officially a nervosa. Which is like the shadow version of a chimera. Which are...what happens when echoes are given so much life they separate from the creator and become their own thing. It will be dark and shadowy and monstrous and seem to be all hands and mouths and white hair and it will happily and gleefully try killing Katie when it comes across her, but luckily at least can be distracted enough by other sources of glamour in the village that it doens't actively pursue her every day. She'll still spend a handful of nights trying to drive it away from people she (still) cares about, not to mention herself.
* Her magical aura will so very out of whack by now. Anyone capable of perceiving she has two souls will note one is greatly engulfing the other, and there's about a quarter of that life and glittering light left in the sick, burnt-orange glow that makes up the rest. Anyone vaguely sensitive to the spirit side of things may suffer nightmares about her nervosa as it prays on others across the village. But they're just nightmares. No other adverse effects.
* She'll still have moments of being herself, but toward the end of September they're few and far between and most likely lured out with love and affection, at which point she might try desperately to tell people she's in trouble; that's if most people can't tell by now. But these are unpredictably short.
October
If things get to this stage (I am definitely not averse to people fixing the issue before this!) the twin traumas of dark glamour infection and constant fighting with her nervosa will bury Katie completely. At this stage, her close CR is also at risk, though her close CR first has to register as a threat, so... if they walk around her on eggshells things may still approach somewhat normal relations. But really, at this point? The dark glamour has pulled her fae side's negative points (her Shadow, as it were) up to the surface and it's in charge, and it will likely hold all of humanity as a threat and worthy of its contempt. At this stage, she may toy with people for her own fun, will definitely seek out anyone she doesn't like to attack them --- and that will include anyone who's ever slighted her, even if Katie's forgiven them since. Her aura will have a few glimmers of light left, and that's it. And this is where she actively does seek to seriously hurt people in her removal of glamour. Because it's efficient. Not to mention fun.
She will seek out the highly creative, and as per what she does in more innocent times, encourage them to create. And then, when they start to paint, or cook, or whatever it is they do, she will deliberately infect them with her own glamour, dark to the core, which will mix with their produced glamour. And this will lead to the biggest burst of creativity they've ever had. They will continue to paint/cook/dance and they won't be able to stop, burning up their own reserves and becoming miniature glamour factories, and this will keep going until they go straight past the limits of physical endurance and collapse into a coma for weeks (no glamour left whatsoever, Katie stole it all) or someone interrupts the process and sedates them for their own good.
This process goes beyond ravaging and is called rapture, and it is forbidden throughout fae society. The Shadow Court are the only practitioners, normally. It provides a veritable storehouse of glamour and as such Katie will only end up doing this maybe once a week.
Ways to halt all this in its tracks
* The nervosa is a creation born of Katie's nightmares, obsession, and glamour, but it is still an echo. Destroying it, while it won't solve everything, will at least bestow strength and clarity and some balance. Katie may then have an idea herself, while she still has control, about what to do. But she'll need help to pull it off. It's just...getting that information across.
* Anyone who is capable of cleansing the soul in some way will also halt or pause the process. They will also be able to note that the lighter glimmer of Katie's soul is being suffocated by the dark, so somehow drawing off the darkness will help.
* So will killing Katie again. 8| If it comes to the point you have to kill a small child to free her/stop her attacking people, that's nasty, but so be it. She'll still require an awakening when she comes back and won't remember any of this, but at least she'll be lacking the specific circumstances that led to this and so it won't happen again.
* Ideally, though? The best way to to fix it is to burn the darkness out of her glamour. It can be done in one of two ways: by inducing a rapture in herself (somehow) so that she drains herself absolutely dry, not just her active magic-using glamour but her passive this-makes-me-a-fae stuff. That will land her in a coma, but she will recover from it.
* The other way is by invoking stress in her to the point she
* It's also worth noting that dropping her into the tunnels dampens Katie's fae side completely, leaving you with a confused and upset little girl. This is known to a few people, I believe. But unless she gets kept down there forever, eventually she'll have to leave and the resultant glamour rushing back in will be ...fun. But! It is a way to pause everything while stuff gets worked out.
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This all sounds pretty complex, so I'm really wondering if it's viable, honestly. Basically this plot involves:
* All of Katie's CR that wants to be involved
* Victims at all three stages
* People trying to help those victims in the third stage
* The highly spiritually aware
* Anyone whose magic/skills involve dreams
But in the end, involves anyone who damn well wants to be involved, no more, no less. It can be easily kept to a small group of people, because Katie certainly won't be trying to blow up the village or anything-- she attacks people individually when she does at all.
People I can think of off the top of my head that she may specifically target at some stage just because:
* Dist
* Robert
* Anyone way too scientific for their own good, come to think of it
* Keiichi
* Haruhi
* Ragna
* Wolfwood
* ...possibly Norrington
She will NOT harm
* a child
* anyone who's part cat (just... in case there are some somewhere.)
Generally, anyone else is up for grabs with the exception of one person. And that's Katara. Because Katie swore an oath of debt to her forever ago, and Katara has healed the damage from cold iron twice. Katara is exempt from all horribleness.
Anyone who wants to be involved on whatever level is fine-- whether they're attacked, traumatised by their own memories, forced into neverending cycles of creativity, trying to help a small child, or are totally okay with attacking a small child. The long scope of this plot and Katie's slow descent mean we've got plenty of time to involve people naturally along the way.
And given the nature of the timeline, I will basically keep people informed regularly on where we're up to if necessary.
Feedback and suggestions are incredibly welcome-- I don't want to tread on toes, there might be somethign I've missed, or you might think there's something that could happen that would be totally awesome for one of your characters. Comment away!