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Name: Yvie
Age: 25+
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→ CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Abby Kim
Age: 31
Canon: Original
Canon point: Approximately 3 years after coming home.
History:
WORLD INFO
Abby is from a shared original world, Gifted & Talented. The world is a sort of modern fantasy setting where magic is real, hereditary, and have been out in the open since the 40s after centuries of 'hiding in plain sight.' While they are out in the open and are generally accepted as part of the fabric of humanity, the Gifted (as magic users are called) aren't completely well-accepted. Since about the 1990s things have taken a positive turn, so Abby has mostly grown up in a time period where being Gifted slowly shifted from having stigma to being relatively well-tolerated by society. There is certainly room for improvement in how the Gifted are treated, but it's still not completely safe, socially or physically, to be Gifted in the modern world.

Personal History: Abby was born in 1990, and born with a Gift. While she knew that she was Gifted (or, as she calls herself, a witch) since a very young age, she had almost no interest in really training herself to use her Gift. Her parents had no investment in it either, uninterested in having a daughter who was that kind of 'weird' - especially since they'd had the Gift in their family for generations and kept it hidden as a family secret.

Abby's upbringing was relatively 'normal' - she got along decently with her parents, did well in school, and attended post-secondary school in the interests of becoming an architect after showing some promise with design and art. When she was in school, she got into a relationship with a young man who was at the top of their classes and who her parents liked very much. Everything was exactly how it was supposed to be, but Abby had an increasing sense that something was just...wrong. Wrong with her, wrong with her life, wrong with how things were going. Still, because everything about her was right according to the people around her - her parents and teachers and boyfriend - she didn't cause a fuss, didn't want to make waves or rock the boat by trying to be something she shouldn't be.

Everything changed when she was freshly 28 years old, had worked a year in a new, prestigious job, and just gotten engaged to her boyfriend of four years, Paul. In celebration of their only child's great achievements, her parents decided to rent a boat with a small crew and go on a private cruise throughout Southeast Asia, stopping at several points to have mini-vacations at various destinations. About halfway through this trip, tragedy struck - the boat was hit by a vicious storm, the captain and crew weren't experienced enough to handle the situation, and the ship started to go down fast. Abby's father and two of the three crew were killed while the boat floundered and everyone struggled to get onto the lifeboats and gather the necessary supplies to survive until they could be found.

When the storm cleared, there were four people on the little inflatable lifeboat, stranded in the middle of the ocean. In the flurry of activity, they hadn't been able to get the full complement of supplies needed and had only the bare basics of what was needed to survive. There was some water and a system to purify water, but no oars, barely any food, and very little in the interests of gathering more food - no fishing rods, no nets, nothing to catch fish or sea birds or anything else. What followed was two weeks of absolute hell for Abby and the other survivors.

The food ran out quickly, and while they rationed the water it also ran out pretty quickly, and the water purifying system could only make so much water on any given day. It only took three days for the first person to die - the last remaining crew member, who had been injured in the crash, died due to dehydration and infection during the fourth night they spent on the ocean and was given a sea burial. That left Abby, her mother, and her boyfriend struggling to survive. Though they were all uninjured, the lack of water took its toll. On the fifth day, after the first time they saw a boat sailing by in the distance that seemed not to notice their presence at all despite several flares, Abby's mother stopped drinking and refused to take more water, saying that it should go to the young people who had more life to live; on the sixth day, Abby's boyfriend revealed that he'd been saving most of the water to give to Abby, who had thought that she was getting an equal share and had been trying to encourage her mother to drink again because they seemed to have enough for all of them. On the eighth day, Abby's mother died of dehydration while imploring her to do whatever she had to do in order to survive, telling her she was proud of her and how much she loved her.

A few hours later, a plane flew overhead, and they tried again to get its attention by using the last of the flares. Unfortunately, the plane did not see their signal and after a few hours of waiting hopefully, they gave up on hope of rescue by the plane.

CW: Discussion of survival cannibalism begins here.

It was Paul who suggested that instead of throwing Abby's mother overboard that they resort to cannibalism to survive. However, when Abby quickly and easily agreed, keeping in mind that her mother asked her to do anything she had to in order to survive, Paul became upset. He had, apparently, thought that she would be more sensitive and distraught, that she would cry, that she would refuse and need to be talked into it. After a short argument, the two of them sat at opposite ends of the boat for a few hours before silently cooperating to take what they could from Abby's mother's body and start drying scraps of it in the sun.

The rest of the time Abby spent lost at sea passed mostly in a blur. Paul died a few days after her mother, only a few days before Abby was finally rescued, and she ended up having to do the same to his body as she had done to her mother's - drying strips of flesh in the sun to survive off of.

Content regarding survival cannibalism ends here.

A few days after Paul's death, Abby was spotted by a passing fishing ship and taken to Thailand, where she received medical treatment and eventually made her way home. After her ordeal, a lot changed for Abby. She realized that if she'd made some effort to train her Gift, she would have been able to do more to protect or feed or otherwise save the people she'd been with in the life raft; that maybe she would have been able to save the ship in the first place, if she were powerful enough. While working through her survivor's guilt in therapy, she started to train with her magic, found a Ritual that worked for her, and discovered that she had a relatively rare Affinity - healing. Unfortunately, she also discovered that her healing Affinity worked by taking life from the living things near the injured party, including herself, if she's not careful.

So, she's avoided doing that, mostly.

Since returning to her life, Abby has mostly been cleaning up the mess left behind by the shipwreck. Dealing with her family's affairs was part of it, but she also worked on herself and worked out the reasons behind her dissatisfaction with her life before the shipwreck. Without the pressure of wanting to live the perfect life that was planned out for her, she's come to terms with the fact that she's gay and while she still loves architecture, she's managed to find a niche in the industry that fits her better.

Unfortunately, she also gained some small notoriety in various news circles that reported on her story and mentioned some of the more sensational aspects of the incident without obtaining permission from her first. The occasional calls and requests for interviews, as well as calls denouncing her for cannibalism are the bane of her existence, but she seems not to be able to shake them. It'll be a sort of relief to be somewhere that she can be mostly anonymous again.

Personality:

Practical: Abby is unsentimental and practical, tending to approach things from a perspective of what works and what makes sense rather than tying undue emotional baggage to it. An example of this is when she was with her boyfriend in the life raft and they realized they needed to resort to taboo means to save themselves - while her boyfriend was upset and angry at her for her reactions, Abby herself didn't feel much repulsion at what they had to do. As much as she was grieving for her mother, in the moment she was able to realize what it was that had to be done in order to make sure she and Paul survived, and to do those things because she wanted to survive. And it wasn't a shock situation either, because that same line of thinking still applies to her years later. She did what she had to do and refuses to feel guilty about it, even if she's a little embarrassed that she didn't react the way people expected her to.

Emotionally Withdrawn: Abby does not wear her heart on her sleeve. Generally, she's quiet and pretty calm, an even-toned, steady presence. She doesn't express her emotions openly, and never really has - a product both of her personality and her upbringing. While she's not stoic or overly quiet, and she has no problem giving her opinion when necessary, asking her about her feelings will cause her to immediately clam up. It isn't just that they make her feel vulnerable, or that she finds them overwhelming (though both of those are true) but she also has a very hard time finding the words to express the things that are going on inside her. She struggles to name her emotions, struggles to untangle the complexities of them. Frankly, she'd prefer they just get lost so she can get on with the practicalities of life.

Self-Sufficient: When Abby was young, she relied heavily on her family for a lot of things. Money, support, approval, guidance - all of these things were provided by her parents and boyfriend, and his parents as well. Things were laid out for her very clearly and all she had to do was follow the path set up for her, the one that her family genuinely believed would make her happy, something she never really put up an argument about. However, since the shipwreck, she's had to start taking care of herself. Both parents died in the shipwreck and so did her boyfriend, whose parents never liked her much and cut off all contact with her completely when they found out how things had gone on the life raft. With the rest of her extended family in another country, she was left pretty much on her own and discovered, to her surprise, that she was very very good at taking care of herself. Her life is much easier and more streamlined since she started being self-sufficient, relying on her own skills and talents, her own opinions about what will make her happy.

Troubled: While Abby likes to keep her life easy and simple and streamlined, and while she has been seeing therapists to deal with the aftereffects of what happened to her, there is a deep well of trauma still inside her that hasn't been healed. She tries her best to address it and go through all the steps to integrate it into her experience per her therapists, but that primal, urgent sense of fear and grief and anger is still there lurking inside her. She's aware of it almost always, and lives in a near-constant state of fear that the delicate balance of her life is going to tip and that trauma is going to overwhelm her and make her incapable of taking care of herself. Since she prefers to keep her feelings to herself, unfortunately, this means that it can manifest in strange ways, like defensiveness over topics around food and eating, or a driven determination not to talk about her experiences, or a tendency to make inappropriate jokes about her past in an attempt to make it seem like she doesn't care as much as she does.

Facetious: Abby tends to be casual and flippant in how she speaks and often in how she treats people or connects with them. Since she prefers not to talk much about how she's feeling, she also has a hard time forming deep connections with people because they cannot, intrinsically, understand most of who she is since she won't share it with them. Because of this, she'll speak sarcastically even when she doesn't mean to, she'll make bad cannibal jokes instead of actually opening up about what she's feeling, she'll brush off concerned friends instead of asking for help.

Suitability: Abby doesn't have a particularly strong drive to go home or to leave - she didn't like where she was very much and at least this place gives her something to do. She'll also start to enjoy learning about all the creepy stuff, and her tie to her Entity will actually be a draw as well. Basically, she has no reason to leave, and staying is more interesting.

Powers/Abilities: Abby is Gifted, which means she can do magic spells through use of a ritual. Unlike in video games or tabletop games, there aren't really any specific power sets or limited types of magic that she can do. However, there are limits. In Abby's specific case, she hasn't been training in use of her Gift until the past few years when she's been taking community courses to learn to hone her Talent. Relatively speaking, she's still pretty much a newbie when it comes to casting spells, and most of what she can do is relatively simplistic and either tends to be the types of spells that would be handy to use every day, like spells for levitating heavy items, finding lost items, lighting a small fire, or spells that would have helped her and the others in the life boat to survive their ordeal, like a spell that purifies salt water, one to stun underwater animals so they float to the surface, or versions of magical flares or noisemakers.

However, Abby does have an Affinity, which is an ability to access a type of magic most other Gifted can't. In Abby's case, she can heal other living things, but at the cost of taking the "life" she is restoring from other living things nearby, sometimes including herself. Because of the steep price, this is not an ability Abby ever really uses, and couldn't be convinced to except in a pinch or if she could learn how to modify the spell so it only takes life from willing targets.

In order to do any magic at all, Abby must have a short length of string or cord which she twists around and between her fingers and/or knots to perform her Ritual. She cannot cast magic spells without a piece of string, thread, cord, rope, or anything similar.

Entity Affinity: So, there are a couple of options here, depending on whether you'd rather go with the Entity that she's most comfortable with, or most afraid of...if the mods want to make this call for me, I'm totally fine with that.

The Flesh is the Entity that could take her on because of her history of survival cannibalism. Humans are meat, and she knows that intimately and on a level not a lot of people do. She also has next to no guilt about having eaten human flesh, and is more upset with the fact that she's not upset or guilty about having survived off the dead bodies of the people she was with. It's not something she's comfortable talking about, but it is a place she's grown somewhat...comfortable in, over the past few years.

The Vast would be the Entity she's the most afraid of. While she was on the ocean, she had a very very strong sense of how small she was in that huge, empty space. Several times, she saw ships or planes and tried to signal to them only to have them not notice her at all, despite being in a red boat, and that really drove home her complete insignificance in the face of how giant the ocean was. She has a very strong sense of large, empty spaces being almost personified into a thing that will swallow her whole at a moment's notice, and since her family is mostly gone now, she's not certain anyone would really care if she was gone, isn't certain that her absence would make any kind of difference.

Inventory: T-shirt, hoodie, jeans, socks, sneakers, backpack containing some architectural sketches, an architect's tool kit, wallet, cell phone, spool of waxed string, several shorter lengths of knotted waxed string, the usual purse stuff (tampons, compact, nail clippers, pencils, journal, etc.)

Samples: TDM top-level, TDM thread, TDM thread