Seele Vollerei
Dying of Homes
Seele is dying of Homes - or, rather, of the lack thereof.
She was cast out, you see - flung beyond the Weirding Wall, into Ninuan. Into the True and Silvered Land beyond the world.
She is fundamentally a stranger there. The endless void rejects her. It has nothing but scorn for a daughter of Cneph's tainted Ash. She has no place there. She had to struggle, to learn through bitter experience how to see, to walk, to live in the Beyond. It does not offer its secrets to her willingly.
Yet when she finally fought her way back into Creation - finally found it again, in the endless confusion of Ninuan; finally cut a path through the Weirding Wall and forced her way back into the world -
The world had forgotten her. All it sees is an invader from outside. It rejects her. It cannot recognize one of its own children, because the world is wrong.
Seele has no place in worlds. She has no home in the void.
She is abandoned.
Avatar Diagram
Gorse (IX), the Key of the Yoke
Heart - MY CHAINS
- Bound to Veliona.
- Veliona has a bubble of chains, which can tie up anything (the chains aren't very strong though.)
Shadow - BURDENS
- Can't tear myself away.
- I'm afraid.
- Veliona cares about Bronya, even if she doesn't care about anyone else.
- When I retreat to my diary room, tucked away from world and void, only Veliona can find me.
- Veliona is strong when I'm weak. Veliona is confident when I'm afraid. She protects me from my own failures.
- I need Veliona's help to be useful to Theresa.
- I'm pretty sure Veliona's the reincarnated void-princess, and we just got chained together somehow.
Black Orchid (XV), the Key of the Exception
Heart - MY NATURE
- I was cast out into Ninuan, and broke through by learning how to survive there.
- I am rejected and spurned by world and void; but I do not reject them in return.
- I have a bubble of the Border Mythic, which makes Prosaic objects interact with metaphors and concepts directly.
- I know where I belong. The world will just have to deal.
Shadow - NO PLACE IN WORLDS
- I do not belong in Creation.
- I don't belong in Ninuan, either.
- I slowly fade away into nothing in places where I don't belong.
- My touch blurs the boundaries between real and false, between Is and Is Not.
- I collect altered states of λ-being, bubbles of strangeness that are out of place even in Ninuan.
- I don't care what the world says. My place is with Bronya.☆
Game Traits
Infection - Quantum Collapse
I don't think Seele really needs an Infection chart, as hers is fairly simple: as her Infection rises, she becomes less and less present, less able to interact with the things of world and void; until she ultimately decoheres entirely and becomes nothing but a discarded possibility, too improbable ever to manifest within reality.
Eide 2 - Practitioner
Eide is the Dream-of-Self, a reflection of the narrative nature of the void. It is Seele's ability to
be perceived as she wishes to be perceived.
Seele isn't, um, particularly good at this - or to put it another way, she lacks real control over that narrative. Their shared Eide is largely Veliona's plaything; Seele is in many ways an accessory to Veliona's image.
Seele's Role is probably best articulated as something akin to "Demonically Possessed," and much of her Eide's force is controlled
by that demon.
Technique - Possessed-By-A-Demon Powers aka Let Veliona Deal With It
This is a fairly simple Technique of allowing Veliona to possess Seele's body or manifest in one of her own and then do Veliona-y things, such as rending things apart with terrible claws, cleaving through throngs of enemies with a scythe, binding things in chains, or grabbing things with shadowy tendrils of night.
Flore 1 - Ghost
Creation is - or rather, should be - Seele's home. She's from the world. She is a daughter of the world.
But it has forgotten her. Because the world is wrong.
She fell into Ninuan beyond the world, and the world has forgotten who she is.
Seele has trouble connecting to Creation and the things thereof. She has trouble making an impact that is not fundamentally founded on destruction. She is alienated from this place she once called home.
But despite that, there are things in this world that she treasures, that bring her peace and joy; things she will fight for, even as the rest of the world recoils from her touch.
Treasures
Bronya Zaychik
Seele principally wields the art of Flore to guide, protect, and empower Bronya. It is by virtue of this connection that Bronya sometimes finds that glowing blue butterflies light her way; or that she can hear Seele's voice and feel her presence in times of distress.
Lore 4 - Outrider
Ninuan is, definitionally, not a place where Seele is at home. Seele has no home in either world or void. But despite the scorn of the Silvered Land, she has learned to survive there: learned to see in a land where there is no light; learned to navigate in a realm where distance and location are fluid; learned how to find those rare cast-off pieces of Creation that litter the void - and how to claim them for her own use.
Sphere - λ-Waylets
The creation of the world was not a particularly clean process. Nor, for that matter, is Ninuan's ongoing war against the world.
Both have left debris behind. Bits and pieces of broken worlds, adrift in the Nothing. Sundered from Creation and not part of Ninuan, they are abandoned, forgotten, and alone.
These inverse waylets are Seele's Sphere; and it is from these bubbles of almost-reality in the Lands Beyond Creation that she claims her Arcana.
Arcana - Altered States of λ-Being
Seele collects these bubbles wholesale, and can wield them as tools: overlaying a bubble's nature over the local area and causing its properties to displace or append to those of the local reality.
The Bubble of Chains
This bubble belongs more to Veliona than Seele. It is a universe of binding chains; a world made of endless links of red-stained iron. Veliona can impose it into the world to, well, bind things in chains.
The Bubble of the Border Mythic
This appears to be a lost fragment of the Border Mythic - that strange enchantment upon the Earth that hides the miraculous behind a veil of gross physicality. Seele can wrap an object in this bubble, allowing it to act on both sides of the Border Mythic at once - effectively, causing the object to act on metaphors and concepts directly.
Wyrd 1 - Wyrdling
Wyrd is the Dream-of-Being. It is the self beneath the self, the true face of the story Ninuan is using the Strategist to tell. It is a measure of how deeply a Strategist understands their own fate and nature.
This is complicated in Seele's case by the fact that she is a unique existence that no one really knows how to deal with. She clearly has
some measure of a Strategist's Wyrd - of their fated, fatal entanglement with both world and void - but she's also estranged from it; rejected by the Silvered Land where it should hail and welcome her as one of its lost princesses.
Seele's Wyrd is tangled and confused, even to the dustcloaked sages of the Not.
Sanctuary - The Diary-Room
Strategists are, normally, poisoned by Creation and driven back into the Beyond. Seele is too, but she's also
poisoned by Ninuan and driven out of the Silvered Land.
Her Sanctuary is … somewhere. It's not really clear
where it could be, not when both Is and Is Not reject her.
But there is such a place.
A dark room, with a chessboard-patterned floor and a blue diary and a vase of white flowers. It's small. It's cramped, especially if Veliona manifests.
But it is Seele's place. It does not reject her. It is safe. It is here where she retreats when everything becomes too much. It is here where she reconstitutes herself when she ultimately dissolves under the scorn of world and void.
Destruction - The Decohering Wyrd
Seele's power of Destruction confuses the nature of things. They become less real - or more real, for λ-things of the void. It becomes difficult to pinpoint where they are, what they are doing, or how they can possibly have an impact on the world. At its worst, her Destruction causes something to dissolve into a strange smear of probabilities across infinite timelines, utterly incapable of affecting any of them.
Ability 2 - Casual
Seele is … not amazing at
doing things. At living. At engaging with the world in a fashion not predicated on terrible destructive magics of the endless void.
She can manage. She can accomplish tasks, she can take care of herself. But she's not
good at it. She lacks the ability to
focus - to be present, to pay attention, to not drift off or get distracted. Focus is effortful, for her. It's not precisely
hard, but it's not something she can do without trying - without having to explicitly
make an effort.
Gifts
Calcifying Gifts
Unblemished Guise
It is extremely difficult to identify Seele as an Excrucian: to the extent that she can be identified at all, she reads - even to miraculous senses - as a daughter of Creation. Unless she goes and does something
obviously Ninuanni, there's no sign that she has anything at all to do with the void.
You can even see her eyes (n.b. normally, the eyes of an Excrucian appear as windows into night and falling stars, for reasons)! It's weird.
(Lesser Misdirection; Action; Local; One Trick; Rare)
Gifts of Fugue
Superposit
Seele can draw upon her Infection to avoid other forms of unpleasantness. In response to a supernatural attack, Seele can invoke this power: to anyone who can directly perceive such things, she ceases to be a discrete existence and instead becomes a distributed cloud of potentialities.
She
appears to suffer from the effect - but as soon as she is no longer being observed, she collapses back into congruence with this timeline, discarding the alternate possibility in which she was harmed.
(The Cliffhanger Rite; Action; Self Only; Complete; Rare)
