synodiporia app.

[untailed]

P L A Y E R;
NAME:Kira
AGE: over 30
PLAYER JOURNAL: narva
TIMEZONE: CET
CONTACT: narwa
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Jackie Svensson

C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Milla Silent-Death
CANON:Werewolf: The Apocalypse
POINT IN CANON: CRAU from zhautas, a few days after game end.
AGE: Physical/Mental age: 25; Chronological age: 19
APPEARANCE: Here. In wolf form, she has green and red fur and lacks a tail.


CANON HISTORY:

Silent-Death's world is much like ours, just that unbeknownst to most regular humans, all kinds of supernatural creatures exist, including but not limited to vampires, fae, shapeshifters, etc. Among them are werewolves, called Garou.

This world exists of multiple planes. There is the Tellurian, our physical world, but also various other planes, which to Garou conceptualise as various spirit planes, some more akin to the Tellurian, some less. Garou, being half spirit and half physical being, need access to both to stay sane, but in turn also can move in both like natives.

Garou are organised in: Septs, local political entities centred around Caerns and the places where Garou who cannot be raised elsewhere (read: metis like Silent) usually grow up. Tribes, which are something like Garou ethnicities; Silent's tribe is unusual for having only wolf-born members (and the odd metis). And lastly there are packs, the smallest units, consisting of between two and ten Garou who spend much time together. Packs are action-oriented and usually have an express purpose, which can be very specific or very broad.

The overarching purpose of all Garou is to protect Gaia, the earth, and fight the Wyrm. The only tribe that is different are the Black Spiral Dancers, the "fallen" tribe, who serve the Wyrm.

Garou can be born from humans, wolves, or Garou parents. Garou born from at least one human or wolf parent grow up as wolves/humans and only enter Garou society as older teenagers after they first change. Those born from two Garou are called metis. As their birth is a result of a breach of Garou Law, their very existence is frowned upon, and as they're born in the werewolf war form, they grow up among Garou. Wolf- and human-born Garou age at the speed of their non-Garou peers until they change first in their later teens, while metis reach young adulthood at about 8-10.

Silent-Death's tribe punishes the parents, not the children, but doesn't make allowances for people living in Garou society who are children, not adults or older teenagers, so metis only survive if they can keep up with the adults from a very young age.

Silent-Death was born an grew up in a Red Talon Sept in Northern Finland. She got lucky in that one of the elders of the sept was of the opinion that metis, as much as they shouldn't happen, were still potential warriors for Gaia and should be given the tools to survive childhood. He thus made sure that she wasn't treated as more of an adult than a wolf her age would be, which got her through infancy. When she reached the age at which wolves are old enough to function mostly as adults, he taught her how to hunt small game by herself and scavenge for other foods, as she couldn't keep up with a hunting pack yet, sometimes gave her some scraps when she hadn't succeeded to feed herself for too long, and otherwise made sure she stayed alive. She still was far from an adult when he died and that meagre support vanished, but she managed to survive and managed to keep up with adults long before changing first.

After her first change, she slowly managed to gather some respect, but remained locked into the social bottom of the sept - which was what was to be expected, really, so neither her nor anyone else even so much as thought about it. She also was never asked to join a pack.

Everything changed when a pack that had a metis member passed through the sept. It was Silent-Death's first time to see another metis, and spying her chance to be invited into a pack, she tried to impress the pack really hard, even though half of them were homids and only one of them as a Talon. Beggars can't be choosers, and all. At first it seemed like her attempts to impress failed, but when the pack passed through again on their way back, they asked her to come with them.

She accepted.

The place that the pack was from was stranger and more upsetting than she could ever have imagined. It was full of humans, of streets, of houses, and of all other human things. Most Garou were homids, and there were members of tribes she'd only ever heard about, if that. The pack didn't live at the sept they belonged to, so that was another change, not living at a sept for the first time in her life. They lived, instead, in the household of the alpha's family, who owned a small house in a place that they called "far away from civilization in the middle of the forest", but compared to the wide forests that Silent-Death had grown up in... Refusing to live in the house, Silent-death joined her Talon packmate in living in the area behind the house, close by but far away enough that they could pretend that there were no humans directly next to them sometimes.

The alpha's family had members that were mages, and that in turn sometimes made the pack get involved in mage shenanigans. Which was how Milla's fur ended up green about a month before she ended up in Zhautas. She is not happy about this, but so far nothing and nobody has been able to fix it.

She ended up in Zhautas because her pack lost a battle with a bunch of Black Spiral Dancers, being severely outnumbered and in their territory. Faced with the threat of the Dancers forcing her to become one of them, she didn't really care what Zhautas was requesting from her or offering, if it got her away from being turned into the thing she'd fought all her life.

And thus she woke up in a stasis pod one day, about to be discharged onto a strange planet.

CANON PERSONALITY:

Silent-Death is, more than anything, persevering. She survived childhood, for which she had to somehow keep up with adults despite lacking many of their abilities and resources. She can tolerate a lot of circumstances that she hates - she has been living in surroundings that she hates for years with only short periods of respite when they travelled to far away places that she liked better. She can derive emotional and mental strength from small things and let them power her through a lot.

Continuing from there, she will always try to make the best of her situation and bring herself forward in life no matter how hard it is. This especially shows in her decision to go with a pack she barely knew to a place that she didn't know at all, just because it would make her part of a pack and thus give her a chance of advancing in life.

She is loyal. To causes, to concepts, to people - if she's decided on caring about someone or something, she will do her best by them and rather die than betray them. What she is loyal to is more worthy than herself, to her, be it the Litany or her pack or the fight for Gaia - as can be seen, the bar for what she is loyal to is fairly high.

But she is also loyal to to the way in which she sees the world, though others might call this an inflexible worldview. It's not even something she decided on being inflexible about, it's just a part of how her thought patterns work due to how she was brought up. She just doesn't have the ability to conceptualize the world in a way that is different from how she was brought up, and will slot all new experiences into the existing patterns and categories.

Her having a hard time letting go of concepts, ideology or similar things - and of some she just won't let go no matter what - can make her rather prejudiced. She will, for example, not let go of the notion that humans are fundamentally a blight and need to be wiped from the face of the earth for Earth to survive, despite having lived with people who do not share that belief for a while now. She can soften ideological lines enough if necessary, like setting aside her issues with civilization enough to live nearby one if that's where her pack is, but that won't make her budge. It's more of a "bend, don't break" thing. The key point about "bending" being that she'll spring back into her original stance once the altering circumstance is gone.

That said, she's very reliable unless emotions or ideology get in her way - if she says that she will do something, like wait outside until someone returns, then she will do so even if she gets attacked for not moving. Her word can be trusted absolutely, and she will under no circumstances lie. She won't lie by omission and simply refuse to answer.

World view aside, there's two other areas in which her upbringing as a metis in a Red Talon sept have heavily shaped her.

Due to having been brought up by a werewolf tribe that conceptualises itself as a wolf tribe, and having spent her childhood in war form, which is the most aggressive and least prone to calm thinking of the werewolf form, she isn't very good at abstract thinking, can't read and write, can't conceptualise numbers and basic math, and also refuses to make a point of getting better at any of these because it's gross human stuff. She can read and write glyphs, werewolf signs, but they don't count as reading and writing. The reason why she speaks DGS is that she at first refused to learn any human language at all, and a human Kinfolk had the idea that a human language which uses movements, not spoken words, might work better for her, being closer to Garou.

She has a pretty low self-esteem, partly because growing up she was always worse than everyone else at almost all things, and her just not being old enough to be better at those things wasn't factored in by anyone, including herself. Her upbringing also instilled in her the belief in everyone having a place in life and social mobility only being allowed in certain agreed-upon ways, and the place she belongs in is at the bottom of most hierarchies. This primarily shows in her not putting herself forward when things, no matter if items, social positions, or other desirable things are distributed, because she doesn't think that she deserves them over others who might want them, but it can also show in her turning aggressive if someone tries to tell her that she has more worth - it just makes her feel like she's being mocked, and worse, it's trying to take what place in life she has from her. That's also why she clings to her identity as a Red Talon ahroun - that is what assigns her a place in life. It gives her security.

She also won't consider herself someone fit to lead, and has fully embraced the idea that she's muscle, not brain - she'll follows others she deems intelligent and morally upstanding enough to follow, or who are just the best option at the moment, and throw herself into fighting their fight, and she can work alone. But she won't make decisions for others if she can help it.

Something else she won't do is engaging with things that she considers pointless and might even discard items she is given by others but considers pointless or bad, like throwing away a mobile phone a packmate got her so she could call him if they got separated during a visit in town.

Technology just puts her on edge. She doesn't strictly fear all of it, but she certainly distrusts it to a high degree and has sometimes unreasonable worries about what it might do. It's static, it's human, it does all kinds of things you cannot see or smell or hear and that make no sense - what's not to hate?



POINT OF DEPARTURE:

Continuing on from the history section, Silent-Death woke um in a stasis pot on a spaceship and immediately hated it, because technology is icky. Luckily they had only been woken up because the ship was about to arrive, and everyone was discharged onto a planet.

More specifically, into the capital city of Nevrione, where all volunteers of Zenith's research program had been brought. Ostensibly, it was research into curing an illness that would otherwise bring about the end of the universe, but Silent-Death never believed that - as much as she'd followed Zenith away from Earth because what they were offering could not be worse than being turned into a Black Spiral Dancer, she didn't believe for a second that Zenith's plans weren't in some way sinister. Not for any good reasons initially, but because on a world that was fairly non-technological, Zenith was a very technologically advanced and involved sci-fi corporation. Also, even worse, they put a piece of tech into each volunteer's neck just below their brain, where it couldn't be removed without killing the person, which allowed them to monitor the person, including their thoughts. The same device also provided access to the network, which Silent-Death only used very reluctantly and sparingly. Later, she learned more about Zenith that made her distrust them even more, like the head scientist being a blackmailing, abusive, murderous, and ultimately insane asshole. So when after months of her being there said head scientist finally went out the deep end and the remaining volunteers finally managed to destroy most of him, she didn't trust Zenith's promise to bring them where they wanted now. Instead, she threw her lot in with a space pirate that she'd fought before, who repeatedly had tried to cross Zenith's plans. When she enters the game, Silent-Death will have been with the pirate Hoshiko and her crew for a few days. Again, not her favourite because ew, spaceships and tech, but still better.

During her time in Zhautas, three main changes happened that strongly targeted her identity.

• One was that she was required to have sex. She never actually caught on to the fuck-or-die aspect of the game, since her one friend who tempted that aspect was cagey about it and just claimed that she was ill, and Silent-Death herself considered the threat of being returned to the exact place where she'd been taken from - captured by the Dancers - enough to not want to risk disappointing Zenith on the one thing they really demanded. Now, having to have sex was a huge one for her, because she'd never considered herself someone who should mate/have sex/and so on. She is metis, after all! Infertile! So reproductive activities are something that just aren't her lot in life. She should of course support others who have them and then have offspring, but she should not participate. Right?
  
  It took her long conversations with multiple people - primarily the humans Terela and Beth and the Garou Kenzie - but eventually she came to a solution that she could work with. It wasn't a solution that made her feel good, but it was at least logical. You see, there is a rite of renunciation, that allows Garou to change their Auspice. Sometimes, people are born in one moonphase but by personality and the role that they'd like to play in Garou society feel much more like they were born in a different one. In such cases, they might decide to undergo this rite and become the Auspice that they feel like. So what, Silent-Death reasoned, if coming with Zenith had functionally been a rite of renunciation for her breed? Only humans have sex as such, copulation not meant for mating, so what if she'd renounced her breed, metis, and become homid? Not that that would be better than metis, because humans should all die and homids are by extension a bit icky. But it would allow her to work with what she had to do now. As long as she stayed on Zhautas, that remained her way of conceptualizing what was happening to her and what she had to do. Learning how sex works was a process, and she still misses most of the social conventions around it partly due to the place where she learned.
  
  Half related was a conversation that she had with Laica that just... started a thought process. It planted the idea that perhaps she shouldn't just support parents and their offspring from afar, but that she as a person could be helpful as a parent replacement to a youngster. Laica was talking about traditional adoptions, which Milla isn't thinking about, but she is now wondering if she might make a good mentor and kind of would like to try.
  
  
• When Silent-Death arrived in Zhautas, the most important tenant of the Litany had already been broken. Not by her, though. Kenzie, the other Garou that was there, had lifted the Veil - told all kinds of people all kinds of things about Garou, shown Crinos form off to everyone when she needed to fight off demons (Delirium didn't work on Zhautas). In essence, Milla had to come to terms with that she could do nothing about it, and by extension that all those rules that she'd always believed to be absolute were somehow malleable out here; and she could get used to a world where she didn't have to hide from humans. This lead to her very soon taking to constantly either running around in Glabro or in wolf form - Wolf being more comfortable but Glabro permitting her to have simply conversations while not being fully homid. Generally, she took to shifting around between Glabro, lupus and homid a lot.
  
  
• Lastly, she learned to let herself be led by people not Garou, and to use people not Garou as her social circle and people she can build close connections with - pack replacement, in a way. Because she cannot live as a loner. She needs company, people she can just sit with and lean against, people she can come to and trust to not wish her harm, people that she can enjoy spending time with - Chell and the Magic Caarpet were good to lean against, Matt told great stories and thus made her feel at home, and Kurt was good for cuddles and was good to talk to because he somewhat understood her way of thinking. When Kenzie left, she was by herself as Garou, and those people that she managed to attach herself to were partly human - less humans than their share in the volunteer population would have suggested, but still over half of her social contacts: Beth, Chell, Laica, Matt, August and Rey vs the Magic Carpet, Mokou, Ursula and Kurt. She didn't strictly change her opinion on humans, but she learned that with no alternatives, some of them can be good social links. She'd have dropped all of them in a heartbeat if enough Garou showed up, or so she told herself. But still, this was much more emotional proximity than she would ever have felt at home towards a human.

VETERAN?: No.


ABILITIES:

> Shapeshifting in five forms: Wolf, giant wolf, war form (her native form, a huge bipedal wolfmonster), furry human, human. The forms bring different physical and mental attribute values - she's much stronger and less chill in war form, fastest on long distances in wolf and best at abstract thinking in human form. She can only speak human languages in the last three forms, and only communicate with wolves in the former three.
> She can step sideways, that is, enter the spirit world and become a part of it - essentially interdimensional travel. [This was powercapped as Stationary Portals for Laughs, I'd be fine with doing that for her, too.] It works better when there is a reflective surface that he can concentrate on. She can communicate and physically interact with spirits. For playability reasons, I will say that her need to regularly enter the spirit world will be covered by being in Liminal Space fulfils, and that everything that makes the proximity of Earth's Moon deity necessary will be covered by the Arcanum Moon.
> Accelerated healing rate (one level of damage per 3 seconds), but also vulnerability to silver. Wounds that count as aggravated damage (fire, silver, werewolf/vampire fangs, etc) have to heal normally. Under certain circumstances, she can survive lethal wounds.
> Under certain circumstances, she can be super fast.
> If she loses control during a fight, she loses it badly, fighting friend and foe until she or everyone else is dead, running away madly, or in the worst case scenario abandoning the fight to rape the fallen. [I have no interest in letting this last thing happen in Syn, but it's a thing.]
> At the beginning of a battle, she can attack before anyone else manages to do anything.
> She can turn her anger into a power that she can then use to for example make herself faster.
> She can sense manifestations of the Wyrm, even in traces.
> She can lick wounds inflicted by her and they'll change to look like stabbing wounds, and any hair, saliva, blood, or other physical evidence of her disappears, too. This works no matter how large the wound is.

> She is excellent at wilderness survival.
> She is fluent in in Garou, Wolf, German and DGS, speaks sufficient Finnish and can survive in English and Russian. She can read and write glyphs, werewolf pictorial communication.



INVENTORY:
- Clothes
- A communication implant in her head

ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? Same as Laughs and Malin, Silent-Death and Jackie are from different times, places, and social circles, and also different timelines. Silent-Death was born after Jackie's final death. They've never met, and would never wish to interact due to species differences.

M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:

Silent-Death could be Chariot's or Emperor's for the exactly same reason: Inflexibility. She can bend slightly to not break from her circumstances, but she will not depart from loyalties, traditions, ideologies, matters of pride, or concepts she believes in. She rather suffered the indignity and discomfort of having to tolerate humans near her than give up the notion that they are fundamentally tainted blights that need to be wiped off the earth. She rather accepts all kinds of disadvantages from being unable to read, write, handle technology or spend extended time in a human form, than abandon her Pride in being a Talon who cannot do those things because they are gross Weaver crap. She rather went through a complicated process of conceptualizing herself as having renounced her breed and switched to homid than to simply accept that maybe under the new circumstances in Zhautas a metis was supposed to have sex (this change has since been rescinded because she left the circumstances of being forced to have sex every so often). In all of this, she is practical enough to survive and preservere. But she'll rather hate the situation she's living in and take small prideful victories away from it than arrange herself with it to get along with it better. And she can be prideful and aggressive enough about that to insult others on the way, like telling a Victorian that wearing clothes is her own ideological problem.

Or she could be Death's or Judgement's for the reason that she's going through a deep change that led to a new beginning of sorts - the new beginning has happened, but the change is still ongoing. There's three primary changes.

Living in a place that contained no other Garou, she has learned to function without them and actively build the kind of connections with individuals that she would normally find simply based on being of the same species. This included her learning, at long last, how to build meaningful relationships with non-Garou, and this does at times include humans. She considers those temporary, born only out of her recognizing that she needs a connection to others to survive, and would drop them in a heartbeat if she got to have a Garou pack again; her opinion on humans hasn't actually changed. But it's still a huge step from, at most, tolerating their presence.

The second change is the seed of an idea that Laica Hawke planted in her: What if her helping to protect pregnant bitches and cubs growing up is similar in worth to lupus and homids siring or bearing cubs? This is so fundamental because her own infertility is a strong cornerstone of her general belief that she is significantly less worhty than any lupus could ever be, and changing her mind on this could well be a game changed in her feeling of self-worth.

Lastly, Silent-Death is not sure if she can go home. If she went home would she be returned to the exact time and place that she was in when Zenith took her to Zhautas? Then she would have to do anything to not return. But if she doesn't return... what could ever be her purpose in life, except survival? So she feels a certain need to change and adjust. Somehow. Just that there's no direction that she would want to adjust into.


VETO: Hermit, because that's Jackie's.


S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE:

[She looks very, very uncomfortable when the camera is angled towards her, and peers at the screen that is now showing something that is apparently called Skype. Which might be true, but what it actually shows is a middle-aged woman. She lacks and eye and scarring suggests that she lost it to a fight. After a few long moments, she prompts: Colin Stormfinder tells me that you are the one who saw the inscriptions?]

I did, [Silent-Death breaks her uncomfortable silence, throwing a quick glance towards Bob Laughs-at-the-Storm, who nudges her encouragingly. Well, if he thinks that it is okay to say things through this Weaver box...] They were up under the ceiling. Some were glyps. On one end there was one that wasn't. [The woman tilts her head and asks: How do you know that it wasn't? It might just have been one that you didn't know.

Silent-Death frowns, her shoulders tensing.] It wasn't. I would have known if it was. Glyphs look like glyphs. It didn't look like one. [Why would someone have finished with a different symbol? ...What did the glyphs read? And what did the sign look like?

Silent-Death is glad about the follow-up, because how is she supposed to know about the whys of some stranger? It is unfair to field that question towards her. They should field it towards the Ragabash right next to her, really.] They warned to not enter, and that there was a disturbance of unknown source. But there was none. ...I don't know what the sign looked like. It was hard to look at. [I see. Thank you.

She quickly moves out of the range of that camera, and then further away into a corner of the room that feels safe. She'd rather be in that box as briefly as possible.]

PROSE SAMPLE: Milla on the tdm.