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FablePaint β Lamia Development 1
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Published: 2011-11-02 06:44:30 +0000 UTC; Views: 3843; Favourites: 68; Downloads: 39
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Description
Some development for Lamia, the minor NPC in High Society forLamia was the first High Society member (well, first sentient one, and the rest were eaten/destroyed). She's a masochistic borderline who falls for Michael despite (or because of) the danger he presents. And she knows full well how terrible he is. She saw him rape/eat her "sister" Half-Dead when he took over their mob.
Lamia herself was brutalized and discovered by The Preacher, who patched her up and attempted to exorcise her. A few days later The Cat mounts an attack on the Community after chasing The Teacher (Jack, prior to forming the Underground) there. Lamia escapes but flees the chaos rather than adding to it. Afterwards she finds Michael curled up in some hole in the ground recovering from the ass-whooping he received. He convinces her to stay the night, during which...erm....that happens. He boots her out the next day to go fetch his clothes since he doesn't want to walk around in the sunlight naked.
Their's is a strange relationship, with Lamia waffling between love and hate regularly with Michael. He's a possessive ass who sabotages any healthy relationships she tries to form, while she's an impulsive self-defeatist who makes bad decisions and rationalizes them afterwards.
Au pair!
She'll act as a recruiter for High Society and maintains a kind of order among the Half-Dead. She's empathetic, but tends to mood swings and using her sexuality as the one means of gaining some control in her life. Her Wendigo is a little power-hungry grass-snake who encourages her relationship with The Cat. Her selective amnesia (not clinical, just deep denial) helps her get through the day, remembering only the good and fading out the bad.
She likes kids, to eat them that is. Zombie children tend to get eaten by her rather quickly, which she rationalizes as a kindness to them.
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Comments: 16
Awesome way of incorporating mythology into a character. 
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Wendigo is a communal parasite that requires a larger and larger community to get things done and at a certain point it can no grow its colony on its own (to maintain sentience in its host), so it must consume new Wendigo to feed that need.
Consumption of other hosts does reduce competition, but more importantly it regulates its own presence. You don't want humans going extinct, so you need to consume zombies to prevent normal undead from thoughtlessly infecting/consuming every new host. Wendigo wants creative solutions to this problem, hence why it needs a human brain to help it think. Humans find abstract, varied solutions, like the Cat putting hosts and zombies in pens in the Facility as a way of keeping them around, ready for consumption or infection.
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Wow, that sounds like something out of a terrifying sci-fi movie about aliens taking over the world.
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The current level of devastation is probably not to Wendigo's liking. Despite who The Cat's wendigo is, not all Wendigo are so blatantly evil. Or it's questionable if it's really evil at all. It just has its own motivations and it needs to manipulate its host to get to that end. Some HD's have a healthier rapport with their Wendigo. It often struggles against the disorders it causes in its host, never really able to fully repair the mind. Wendigo doesn't think of itself as evil. It's just hungry and wants to maintain its own existence. It wants to be intelligent, it doesn't like the loneliness that comes with being a unthinking parasite.
Perhaps in the future the apocalypse will even out and some balance will be struck between Wendigo and humanity. Not in the near term though. It would take centuries of dealing to erase the memory of what's happened.
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Your ideas just get more interesting the more I hear of them.
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I can't imagine that the zombie children were very innocent themselves, especially the half dead ones.
In the end isn't most of this the case of a big dog eating a smaller one? (This is also why I wasn't 100% creeped out by the Michael/child picture, as that kid had probably eaten his way to being a half dead himself.) Or is there more to it than that? Are there any zombies that have gained sentience that can actually fool themselves into some kind of innocence?
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Half-Deads are not, by default, evil. They're compelled to eat zombies and infect/eat humans, and even if they resist their Wendigo will force them to eventually. They also are not responsible for their actions while a normal undead as they had zero control over their bodies during that time. Many, probably most, are horrified when they regain sentience. The amnesia of their time as normal undead is probably a kindness in that regard, it makes the adjustment period a little easier.
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Then I have to ask- what is the wendigo exactly? A manifestation of the worms using some old memories of the infected? A delusion/invisible friend that is a symptom they all share?
Do any realize that they are a danger to others and try to kill themselves? Or at least attempt to live in isolation? There seems to be no way for a character to redeem themselves from a human perspective, so what course is there to take? It seems a horrible existence.
You know what could be interesting? What if the preacher somehow accidentally, (perhaps not by his actions at all), "fixed" a half dead, so that they weren't driven by their baser natures, or at least they were controllable. Think of the waves of others that would try to get fixed and mob the poor guy. And so many would be after that poor one of a kind half dead, perhaps to consume it to gain its power, perhaps to quash the hope that it represents. It obviously wouldn't live long.
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Wendigo steps in before you can kill yourself. It can, in extreme situations, take over the body again. It prefers not to though since that takes a lot of energy. But it will always force its point. Wendigo is, in a sense, like being schizophrenic. Those voices never go away, and they're quite demanding.
could a HD redeem itself? How does it? well that's up to you to figure out. That's the beauty of the challenges, you can discover your own way and then create new challenges to help another person flesh out their character too. You want a redeemable HD? Make one. Make it struggle to regain its humanity. The Cat does in his own way. He fights against his Wendigo's wishes all the time; she wants him to run around like a wild animal tearing shit up. He wants to be a civilized social butterfly, a politician. They argue, a LOT. It's debatable who's really worse though.
John would love to "fix" a half-dead, but that would take months, even years of therapy. You can't just crack a code in people and magically make their minds better. There's no one event that, upon uncovering it, will make everything fall into place. It neglects everything that's happened since then that reinforces their personalities. It neglects the fact that there's something fundamentally wrong with the person (or simply different, that needs to be accepted and understood) and that they need to be just as willing to fix themselves as the therapist is.
It took me years of therapy to deal with my problems (prior even to dealing with Michael's inspiration, i had problems) and going through many psychologists to do so. What works for one person doesn't work for another. In addition, some HD would require psyche meds to get a handle on their problems. A luxury John doesn't have.
I do hope to write a scene in the far future where Michael is forceably sat down and talked to, with the intent of helping him out. It wouldn't go far, but at least it would plant a seed in his mind that maybe there's another way of treating people besides as objects to be consumed or used. But for that flower to take root, he'd have to help himself out. And given the state of his problems, that probably won't happen.
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I think you can't see the forest for the trees here. It is possible to break your habits/demons on your own, and as unlikely as that usually is, you can't deny that one in the crowd. There are some people that wake up one day and say, "No more." and they mean it. And most of these characters I'd imagine were "normal" at some point before they woke up from the undead fog one day, now possessed. They couldn't all have been crackheads and abuse victims after all. Their only problem for their entire life might only be that they're now monsters, and not of their own accord.
Perhaps an even more interesting thing about the character I outlined could be that it wasn't truly fixed, but that it had been fooled into thinking it was fixed, (and the preacher in kind), and its wendigo for some reason is playing some cruel joke on the half dead. I'd still like to think that when the hordes came to claim her she would resist its resurgence long enough to allow herself to be taken, and in some small way this act would be redemption.
It's a she now isn't it. Oh dear, now she just needs a name and a very depressing short story to go with her. I don't know if I have time for this....
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You're more than welcome to explore that concept and create a character
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Uuuuugh, you finally got me didn't you?
rabblerabblerabblerabble....
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I suppose me, but it really is too much fun to explore the fuckery he conducts.
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