Malin Lindberg (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
overlevende) wrote2016-03-05 09:27 am
overlevende) wrote2016-03-05 09:27 am
Earlier canonpoint for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
synodiporia
P L A Y E R;
NAME: Kira
AGE: 29
PLAYER JOURNAL:narva
TIMEZONE: CET
CONTACT: discord: Narva#9949 ; plurk: narwa
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Bob Laughs-At-The-Storm
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Malin Lindberg
CANON: Old World of Darkness / Vampire: The Masquerade (Fanon OC)
POINT IN CANON: Late 1999
AGE: 25 chronologically; embraced when she was 17, so if she would appear human during a jaunt, that would be her apparent age, and it's also the age that shows in those parts of her that still remain human-looking.
APPEARANCE:
Malin is about 1.70cm tall, has short-ish dark brown hair and at her pull-point will be wearing a battered, dark blue t-shirt, grey sweatpants and thick socks. All her clothes are stained with dark splatters.
Oh, and a lot about her doesn't look very human any more.
-There are bumps under the shirt on her back that upon further inspection will turn out to be spidery fingers with skin between the lowest of the digits. They're bat wings growing in, but for the moment they look more like creepy hands. She can even hold items with them if they're not too heavy.
-Her ears sit on the top of her head and resemble huge bat ears, while yellow snake scales are starting to grow over her face from both sides. At this point they cover most of her cheeks and her eyebrows. On her cheeks, little dark indentations can be seen that hold heat receptors. Her tongue is forked at the tip and slightly longer than a human's, easy enough to keep inside but threatening to dart out whenever she doesn't pay attention.
-Her torso and her upper arms and thighs are covered in thick brown (dog) fur and she has a thick, bushy (cat's) tail that is just not long enough to touch the ground when she stands.
- Her hands and feet have talons of about three centimetres length on them and look oddly discoloured and long - a bit too bony, the skin a bit too white for comfort, the digits slightly too long and oddly proportioned in comparison to the palm.
CANON HISTORY:
Malin grew up as the single child of an upper class family. Her parents were alcoholics and showed various abusive behaviours towards their daughter, though they mostly neglected her. Due to both of them being quite functional and nice out of their home life, and well, upper class, it was one of those cases where people refuse to believe such things might be possible - alcoholism and abuse only happen in poor families, right?
She got along well enough at school. Though she was neither the best student nor the most popular, she at least managed to never fail classes or ping as weak enough to be bullied.
Nobody noticed when she tried to run away for the first and second times. Or perhaps it was just that nobody cared. And nothing was better after she returned, so the third time, not long before her fifteenth birthday, she went to Copenhagen and stayed there. She managed to make a life somehow, stealing and begging and slowly falling in with drug dealing, when she fell asleep one night in a lonely corner. Only to be woken by hands on her shoulders, pressing her down and against the wall. She fought back, but it really was no use, and her last thoughts before she succumbed to blood loss were how could I nod off in a place like this.
She woke up again, alone. Her first nights were frightening, and the nights after were no better. But she survived and learned, somehow. The life of a Caitiff is never easy, but it wasn't really any worse than her existence had been before, she thought - shitty, but she'd never been a quitter.
And then things suddenly got better. She had to have done something really right for once in her life, because an older vampire, Lars Nielsen, decided to adopt her and show her the ropes. Things were looking up, for once. He taught her how to deal with her new life and new powers in better ways and finally introduced her to the Camarilla, and for a few years, things were good. Not perfect, but good.
Right up until the point when her and Lars were ordered before the Prince and Lars was accused of having not adopted, but sired her. Without permission. To this day she doesn't know if the accusation was correct, but she also doubts that it would really have mattered. The only reason why she wasn't destroyed alongside Lars was that one of the Tremere elders had requested that she be spared and given to her instead. Malin hadn't expected that to mean anything good, and it didn't.
See, this Tremere was working on some research about the beast, and a younger colleague of her's in this quest had figured that experimenting on its most visual representation, the aftermath of a Gangrel's frenzy, would be a good idea. So Malin was given to this Tremere ancilla, Lise Mikkelsen, who then kept triggering her into frenzies by all means possible, from humiliation to starving to forcing her into a fight or into committing atrocities.
Being held in check by a mix of mind control (blood bond to Lise and her junior researcher, as well as a solid amount of Dominate) and good old locked doors and shackles, Malin could do nothing but try to keep her wits together and nurture an intense hatred of Lise. Sure, she hated her assistant, their whole clan and the Prince and what they stood for, too. But the hatred for Lise was by far the most visceral and intense, the one that didn't stop at being another name for fear.
She wasn't the only Gangrel in this situation, but was the one who had been undead the longest when she ended up there. During her time in Lise's lab, two others were brought in, both of them recently turned Caitiff, but they both found ways to kill themselves very quickly.
Malin just couldn't and wouldn't. Her life had always been shit and she'd always survived somehow. She would manage to break free, eventually. She had no idea what to do after that, because she couldn't stay in the Öresund region, but she would find something for sure. Just a bit longer...
CANON PERSONALITY:
Malin is, more than anything, driven by a very strong will to survive. She has long since come to accept that that is the best that she can hope for, that riches and love and power are goods reserved for other people and that she can only hope to attain them in very modest capacities, if that. But she can hope for survival, she's good at that. Resilience, finding a way to persist and cash in all the little nice things that life offers by the wayside - a good film, things like that. It's not so much positive thinking, it's a mix of a resilient brain structure, habit, and a self-sufficient approach that includes the thought that if she doesn't take care of herself, nobody will.
The way she sees it, and her experience supports that view, the only times other people will care about her will be if she has something to offer them. The closest that she has ever had to friends were people who benefited from the safety of sharing a sleeping space with her, back in her street kid days. She knows that her late mentor at least benefited from her connections in the drug trade and is pretty sure that there was more. Lise cares about her guinea pig and will keep her fed and clothed in that capacity. But Malin strongly doubts that anyone ever cared about her as a person, before and without her being useful. Her parents or teachers back in Sweden certainly didn't, they just plain didn't care. Sure, people can care about someone as a person, but they will do it for people who are not her.
And the way she is now, both those things will be truer than ever. Looking the way she does, knowing what she will look like eventually, she is certain that she will never be able to expect more than survival and never for anyone to care about her as a person. As her humanity dwindles, both physically and mentally (in system terms, she's lost two dots of humanity since Lise got her hands on her), she also feels like her very personhood is slipping away, because as much as she has not experienced much of it herself, compassion was always what she considered the part of herself that wasn't just functioning, the thing that could make her enjoy the little good things life had to offer. Sure, she has used other people's compassion before, manipulated it to get what she wanted (and that has also taught her just how thin the line between compassion and placating one's guilt is - begging was a cold but eye-opening jump into the deep end), but she's never looked down on it, quite the opposite. And now she can feel it slipping away from her, both it coming to her naturally and the ability to instinctively navigate it.
It's made worse by the third important thing in her life having been taken from her: Autonomy. She hasn't been able to control her own fate in any way since that fateful day when Lars was destroyed. She could manage to kill herself if she really wanted, probably, but that is something that she would never choose for herself, and beyond that her hands are (sometimes literally) bound. And the way she is treated makes it exceedingly clear that she has no freedom at all, not in when and how she eats, not in whom she interacts with, not in where she is or what happens to her.
Knowing that she will probably be disposed of whenever Lise feels like she's done with her, all those things are in jeopardy right now, so she's not only desperate to escape that situation, she's also trying to deal with it while she cannot. And dealing with it in this case mostly means her withdrawing, trying to build a wall around herself to hide behind as well as she can. It's not working well, what with Lise's primary interest involving the tearing down of that wall more often than not, but it is the only thing that she can do right now. Slow down. Try to not think as much. Try to shove aside what human needs she has, so the acute lack of their fulfilment won't hurt as much.
Because Malin craves more than survival, more than autonomy (which in the end is so important to her because it puts the one person in control that she trusts to really want her best without ulterior motives: herself) and her own humanity, even. She craves kindness, someone caring about her. Even if it is just because they find her useful. A continued attention and affection that she can believe to be genuine could go a long, long way with her, but it wouldn't even take that much. Her belief that nobody will care about her without ulterior motives on the one hand hampers any attempt at a deeper connection because she will not let someone get that close, but it will on the other hand lead her into sustained relationships because she doesn't expect much: A person doesn't need to get behind the wall of distrust that she has built towards others' interest in forming a relationship with her. A gesture of kindness, a continued friendliness will be sufficient because Malin doesn't expect to ever get much more than that out of a positive relationship, she doesn't need to consider someone trustworthy to build a lasting relationship with them. A friendly person whom she cannot trust is better than no friendly person, so she'll work on making the relationship last even if there's no trust in it.
It bears mentioning that Malin is still fairly young and has never lived in a healthy emotional environment. She never had the chance to develop into a person with mature coping mechanisms and social strategies, especially when it comes to relationships. She knows a thing or two about manipulation but if she has to deal with others, her first attempt to deal with the situation will be to keep her head down and not attract attention. Failing that, she will typically try to please those above her station and only support those of like or lower station if she thinks she'll gain something from it herself (since she craves kindness, that could be as little as treating her kindly, material advantages aren't necessarily required). She sees no problem with kicking back when someone who isn't stronger is kicking her, or someone who is stronger and will endanger her survival cannot be appeased in any other way.
She's hypersensitive to all shifts in people's emotions and the atmosphere of a situation when dealing with those stronger than her, tries to always be five steps ahead of any of their mood shifts and will try to appease any negative shifts if she cannot escape such situations. Lars managed to get the tactic of blaming herself overly before anyone else can accuse her out of her and generally helped her hide some of her more compromising reactions to social stress, but even if they are hidden the patterns are still there. They are just better concealed.
They are currently mostly applied towards Lise, whom Malin hates and fears and loves - the last of which is obviously not a natural feeling but the result of Lise having blood bonded her to herself as quickly as she could. That means that Malin can't do anything against her and that all her feelings towards the Tremere are a terrible, painful mess, but that she knows exactly how to act: Keep her head down and hope that it isn't time for another experiment.
Lars is a much more complicated matter. And one that deeply hurt her. For the first time in a very long time, Malin had really started to trust someone. He picked her off the street, he taught her a lot about vampire society and vampiric abilities (not everything, because she'd gathered a few things in her time as Caitiff, but most of what she knows), he provided her with shelter and general living arrangements that she'd not known since she ran away from her parents' house, and he mostly let her do her own thing, as long as she did a thing or two for him now and then. Things were good, better than they'd ever been. And then the Prince claimed that all of that was built on a big, fat, terrible lie, that he wasn't a mentor picking a lost Caitiff off the street but a man trying to get around requiring a permission to sire by siring and then abandoning her, only to pick her up later under the guise of charity. She still hasn't come to terms with the possibility of the Prince having been right.
Along the way of her frenzies, she has picked up a number of animal behaviours. Examples would be that she curls up and hides her head when scared or startled (and it isn't bad enough for a Rötschreck reaction), often treats her own reflection in a mirror as another person and likes to cram herself into small spaces like boxes for a feeling of safety. She can stop herself from performing all of these behaviours, but it takes her willpower to do so.
POINT OF DEPARTURE:
At the core of Malin lies a strong sense of survival, distrust and adaptable independence. At heart, she has always been and still is a street kid, even though she has learned to navigate middle and upper class society (or well, vampire society, but that's what it resembles).
Those factors would likely in some capacity come into play in an overlay, though they could take very different forms. If she was a part of a group, she'd stay in the lower ranks and try to keep her bonds to it as loose as possible, and she could easily be a vagabond or some kind of low level gang criminal.
[Addendum:]
Infiltrating would more than anything be something that Malin wouldn't have a frame of reference for. Mind control of various forms is something that she knows and the easiest way to get her to have an issue with you, but she wouldn't necessarily consider it that (of course this depends on how it was presented to her, how her experience with it was, etc, but it's probably not how she would interpret it).
It would make a big difference how much her overlays and her are alike, because the reason why autonomy is so important to her is that it puts the one person whom she trusts to actually have her best interests in mind (herself) in charge. Being intimately aware of an overlay's thoughts and inner workings, she wouldn't mind being stuck with them during or afterwards as long as they look after themselves and their own well-being and survival, especially if they are fundamentally similar to her. Because then someone whom she knows to be interested in her well-being would have been in charge, even if it wasn't strictly herself. (I'm not really planning on this, but if she got stuck with an overlay that showed self-destructive behaviour or placed their everything willingly in someone else's hands, it would freak her the fuck out and she would try to find a way to never have that happen again, likely by getting Infiltrator Persona as quickly as possible.)
That said, the question of what happens to her body during infiltrations would bother her a lot and she would definitely try to find out as much as possible about that to secure it.
She wouldn't mind being in someone else's mind, mostly because there is a clan discipline that she was working towards before everything went to shit which includes similar features (Animalism 4 allows a vampire to send their mind into that of an animal), though the lack of self-awareness would bother her - but, as detailed above, as long as the overlay takes care of themselves and she is returned to herself afterwards, it wouldn't bother her too much. She'd come out of it as herself, surviving and in charge, after all.
ABILITIES:
Mundane
- She went to school regularly until she was 14 and has that kind of knowledge. She also has a fairly expansive knowledge about drugs and knows how to generally survive without money or a support system in a big city.
- She used to be a good pickpocket and is a good fighter in weaponless and melee combat, though without rules or grace.
- She speaks Swedish (native), English, Danish (if she concentrates, you won't be able to tell that Danish is an acquired language for her) and some STS.
Vampire
- Her looks might give her a lot of disadvantages, but they also give her advantages: Her bat ears give her sonar hearing. Her tongue can smell, taste and feel vibrations better than any human sense can, though she needs to let it dart out of her mouth for that. She also has heat vision. Her fur gives her additional protection against injury and the cold and her (non-retractable) talons and her tail can be used for additional damage in close combat (aggravated and bashing, respectively).
- Animalism 3 (empathic communication with animals, giving orders to animals, calling all animals of a species that are around, cowing mortals into fear/apathy, soothing a creature to make them docile or pull them out of a frenzy)
- Fortitude 3 (greater stamina/toughness, offers a chance to absorb damage done by things that would otherwise cause grievous injuries: Fire, sunlight, vampire bites, werewolf claws, etc.)
- Protean 3 (seeing normally in absolute darkness {eyes will glow red}, making claws that cause terrible damage on hands and feet, melting into the earth)
- Dominate 1 (giving a one-word order to one person)
- Sturdier than a human would be, but at the same time she won't heal with time: She has to pointedly heal even the tiniest scratch. That in turn is a lot faster than running around with your arm in a cast for weeks, though.
- Easily hurt by sunlight and fire, has to sleep during the day (her humanity rating is 5), doesn't breathe, has no body heat, cannot eat/drink anything but blood.
- She can psychologically bind someone to herself by feeding them some of her own blood - in the case of mortals, that will also make them immortal and give them supernatural abilities (and it will make animals more intelligent), as long as she keeps feeding them blood in regular intervals.
Not so much an ability: Each of the vampire clans has a curse resting on them, challenging them mentally, socially or in acquiring food. Malin's clan curse gives her an animal characteristic every time she frenzies, every third of which sticks permanently. Those can be physical, but also mental and behavioural. A frenzy is the loss of control to the beast inside each vampire, making them mindlessly fight to remove the trigger (the flight reaction counterpart to this is called Rötschreck).
INVENTORY;
- A t-shirt, sweatpants, socks
- a battered wristwatch
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?
Her and Laughs have very little overlap. They are from the same tabletop game universe (though the metaplot development in their universes differs), but from different gamelines (VtM vs. WtA). While Malin has never been out of Scandinavia, Laughs has never been in Scandinavia. Malin's social circle consists of vampires and people living in Copenhagen and Sweden, while Laughs's social circle consists of werewolves, wolves and a few human kinfolk living in southern Germany and Finland. Laughs wasn't even born yet at Malin's canon point.
In game, they would have no inherent interest in interacting: Laughs, knowing that he can't permanently off the vampires around, would elect to stay away from them in hopes that they can't manipulate him that way smh, and Malin would stay away from the fucking lupine because seriously, you can't trust a lupine to not reconsider tearing you apart smh. I also feel like they would fall into very different niches, CR-wise as well as Jaunt-experience-wise.
M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
Death would be an option because Malin is caught in the process of experiencing slow, inescapable loss that cannot be turned back, that is both a psychological transformation (as she's losing humanity) and deep physical change (as she's gaining more and more animal characteristics). She's not yet at the point of good-bye or sadness, because she has had no opportunity to grieve yet, but that will come.
Strength could be it because Malin is a PRO at perseverance. Compassion is an important emotional capacity to her, even if she might not have especially large amounts of it herself.
Magician works because Malin is practical to a fault. She isn't a dreamer and will aim low, but she will focus completely on a goal which she has set for herself (like survival), showing great determination, concentration, precision and initiative to reach it. A year into the future from when I'll pull her from, she'll be able to focus all of these and lace them up with hatred and overcome a triple blood bond, turning all of that into the energy to take action and kill Lise. She can also be quite manipulative when she wants to be, a skill that she acquired in her street kid years and polished later, though she's still a bloody beginner when compared to older vampires.
Hermit is also possible as Malin is a fairly withdrawn and quiet person. She has learned how to not draw too much attention for fear of it being a kind that would impact her negatively and the recent changes in her appearance will amplify that tendency. She's not a loner in the strictest sense as she does like being around people (if she thinks that they are safe for her to be around), but she's a loner at heart, not letting anyone come too close due to her conviction that they will drop her the moment she stops being useful. On top of that internal isolating factor, she's spent over a year in seclusion now, having had little and much less positive contact with others.
VETO: Moon and Sun (Laughs and Kitty's Arcana).
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE:
Thread! She's taken from a later pull-point and only recently gained the ability to look human again here.
PROSE SAMPLE:
The kid - what had his name even been? She didn't know - was gone. Had somehow managed to make his way out into the sun, she heard one of the temporary assistants say. It made sense. There was no other way out of here, no way but Final Death. Lise would not be stupid enough to let her get away, wouldn't risk setting someone free who had all the reason in the world to take revenge on her one day. No. As much as Malin couldn't give up hope that she would somehow get out of this alive, as much as she couldn't just give in, she was very aware that the Tremere would dispose of her once this was done. Whenever that would be. However she would look like at that point.
She curled up in her corner of the pitch-black room, closing her eyes against the darkness. The way in which this situation would almost inevitably end wasn't something that she liked to think of, but there was so little else to think of in this place, especially now that the kid was gone again. She couldn't think about hunting, because she couldn't do that here. Couldn't think about finding shelter, because she had this room that was both a prison and safely tucked into the ground far away from the sun. Couldn't think about going to the cinema or reading a book or having to deal with business or anything else, because she didn't get to do anything of that kind here.
There was nothing here, nothing but dread and hunger and sometimes voices outside the door that she would listen to desperately even if they spoke of her, talked about her like a lab rat, like a thing, because at least that was something. At least they existed outside of her head. It was for the same reason that she both feared and longed for the times when the heavy iron door would open, because while nothing good ever came out of that, it at least brought light into the darkness, brought people, brought her out of the cell.
No, she wasn't surprised that the kid had taken his own life. But she just couldn't. Survival had always been the only thing that she had, that was hers. She couldn't let go of it for as long as it was still her choice.
NAME: Kira
AGE: 29
PLAYER JOURNAL:
narvaTIMEZONE: CET
CONTACT: discord: Narva#9949 ; plurk: narwa
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Bob Laughs-At-The-Storm
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Malin Lindberg
CANON: Old World of Darkness / Vampire: The Masquerade (Fanon OC)
POINT IN CANON: Late 1999
AGE: 25 chronologically; embraced when she was 17, so if she would appear human during a jaunt, that would be her apparent age, and it's also the age that shows in those parts of her that still remain human-looking.
APPEARANCE:
Malin is about 1.70cm tall, has short-ish dark brown hair and at her pull-point will be wearing a battered, dark blue t-shirt, grey sweatpants and thick socks. All her clothes are stained with dark splatters.
Oh, and a lot about her doesn't look very human any more.
-There are bumps under the shirt on her back that upon further inspection will turn out to be spidery fingers with skin between the lowest of the digits. They're bat wings growing in, but for the moment they look more like creepy hands. She can even hold items with them if they're not too heavy.
-Her ears sit on the top of her head and resemble huge bat ears, while yellow snake scales are starting to grow over her face from both sides. At this point they cover most of her cheeks and her eyebrows. On her cheeks, little dark indentations can be seen that hold heat receptors. Her tongue is forked at the tip and slightly longer than a human's, easy enough to keep inside but threatening to dart out whenever she doesn't pay attention.
-Her torso and her upper arms and thighs are covered in thick brown (dog) fur and she has a thick, bushy (cat's) tail that is just not long enough to touch the ground when she stands.
- Her hands and feet have talons of about three centimetres length on them and look oddly discoloured and long - a bit too bony, the skin a bit too white for comfort, the digits slightly too long and oddly proportioned in comparison to the palm.
CANON HISTORY:
Malin grew up as the single child of an upper class family. Her parents were alcoholics and showed various abusive behaviours towards their daughter, though they mostly neglected her. Due to both of them being quite functional and nice out of their home life, and well, upper class, it was one of those cases where people refuse to believe such things might be possible - alcoholism and abuse only happen in poor families, right?
She got along well enough at school. Though she was neither the best student nor the most popular, she at least managed to never fail classes or ping as weak enough to be bullied.
Nobody noticed when she tried to run away for the first and second times. Or perhaps it was just that nobody cared. And nothing was better after she returned, so the third time, not long before her fifteenth birthday, she went to Copenhagen and stayed there. She managed to make a life somehow, stealing and begging and slowly falling in with drug dealing, when she fell asleep one night in a lonely corner. Only to be woken by hands on her shoulders, pressing her down and against the wall. She fought back, but it really was no use, and her last thoughts before she succumbed to blood loss were how could I nod off in a place like this.
She woke up again, alone. Her first nights were frightening, and the nights after were no better. But she survived and learned, somehow. The life of a Caitiff is never easy, but it wasn't really any worse than her existence had been before, she thought - shitty, but she'd never been a quitter.
And then things suddenly got better. She had to have done something really right for once in her life, because an older vampire, Lars Nielsen, decided to adopt her and show her the ropes. Things were looking up, for once. He taught her how to deal with her new life and new powers in better ways and finally introduced her to the Camarilla, and for a few years, things were good. Not perfect, but good.
Right up until the point when her and Lars were ordered before the Prince and Lars was accused of having not adopted, but sired her. Without permission. To this day she doesn't know if the accusation was correct, but she also doubts that it would really have mattered. The only reason why she wasn't destroyed alongside Lars was that one of the Tremere elders had requested that she be spared and given to her instead. Malin hadn't expected that to mean anything good, and it didn't.
See, this Tremere was working on some research about the beast, and a younger colleague of her's in this quest had figured that experimenting on its most visual representation, the aftermath of a Gangrel's frenzy, would be a good idea. So Malin was given to this Tremere ancilla, Lise Mikkelsen, who then kept triggering her into frenzies by all means possible, from humiliation to starving to forcing her into a fight or into committing atrocities.
Being held in check by a mix of mind control (blood bond to Lise and her junior researcher, as well as a solid amount of Dominate) and good old locked doors and shackles, Malin could do nothing but try to keep her wits together and nurture an intense hatred of Lise. Sure, she hated her assistant, their whole clan and the Prince and what they stood for, too. But the hatred for Lise was by far the most visceral and intense, the one that didn't stop at being another name for fear.
She wasn't the only Gangrel in this situation, but was the one who had been undead the longest when she ended up there. During her time in Lise's lab, two others were brought in, both of them recently turned Caitiff, but they both found ways to kill themselves very quickly.
Malin just couldn't and wouldn't. Her life had always been shit and she'd always survived somehow. She would manage to break free, eventually. She had no idea what to do after that, because she couldn't stay in the Öresund region, but she would find something for sure. Just a bit longer...
CANON PERSONALITY:
Malin is, more than anything, driven by a very strong will to survive. She has long since come to accept that that is the best that she can hope for, that riches and love and power are goods reserved for other people and that she can only hope to attain them in very modest capacities, if that. But she can hope for survival, she's good at that. Resilience, finding a way to persist and cash in all the little nice things that life offers by the wayside - a good film, things like that. It's not so much positive thinking, it's a mix of a resilient brain structure, habit, and a self-sufficient approach that includes the thought that if she doesn't take care of herself, nobody will.
The way she sees it, and her experience supports that view, the only times other people will care about her will be if she has something to offer them. The closest that she has ever had to friends were people who benefited from the safety of sharing a sleeping space with her, back in her street kid days. She knows that her late mentor at least benefited from her connections in the drug trade and is pretty sure that there was more. Lise cares about her guinea pig and will keep her fed and clothed in that capacity. But Malin strongly doubts that anyone ever cared about her as a person, before and without her being useful. Her parents or teachers back in Sweden certainly didn't, they just plain didn't care. Sure, people can care about someone as a person, but they will do it for people who are not her.
And the way she is now, both those things will be truer than ever. Looking the way she does, knowing what she will look like eventually, she is certain that she will never be able to expect more than survival and never for anyone to care about her as a person. As her humanity dwindles, both physically and mentally (in system terms, she's lost two dots of humanity since Lise got her hands on her), she also feels like her very personhood is slipping away, because as much as she has not experienced much of it herself, compassion was always what she considered the part of herself that wasn't just functioning, the thing that could make her enjoy the little good things life had to offer. Sure, she has used other people's compassion before, manipulated it to get what she wanted (and that has also taught her just how thin the line between compassion and placating one's guilt is - begging was a cold but eye-opening jump into the deep end), but she's never looked down on it, quite the opposite. And now she can feel it slipping away from her, both it coming to her naturally and the ability to instinctively navigate it.
It's made worse by the third important thing in her life having been taken from her: Autonomy. She hasn't been able to control her own fate in any way since that fateful day when Lars was destroyed. She could manage to kill herself if she really wanted, probably, but that is something that she would never choose for herself, and beyond that her hands are (sometimes literally) bound. And the way she is treated makes it exceedingly clear that she has no freedom at all, not in when and how she eats, not in whom she interacts with, not in where she is or what happens to her.
Knowing that she will probably be disposed of whenever Lise feels like she's done with her, all those things are in jeopardy right now, so she's not only desperate to escape that situation, she's also trying to deal with it while she cannot. And dealing with it in this case mostly means her withdrawing, trying to build a wall around herself to hide behind as well as she can. It's not working well, what with Lise's primary interest involving the tearing down of that wall more often than not, but it is the only thing that she can do right now. Slow down. Try to not think as much. Try to shove aside what human needs she has, so the acute lack of their fulfilment won't hurt as much.
Because Malin craves more than survival, more than autonomy (which in the end is so important to her because it puts the one person in control that she trusts to really want her best without ulterior motives: herself) and her own humanity, even. She craves kindness, someone caring about her. Even if it is just because they find her useful. A continued attention and affection that she can believe to be genuine could go a long, long way with her, but it wouldn't even take that much. Her belief that nobody will care about her without ulterior motives on the one hand hampers any attempt at a deeper connection because she will not let someone get that close, but it will on the other hand lead her into sustained relationships because she doesn't expect much: A person doesn't need to get behind the wall of distrust that she has built towards others' interest in forming a relationship with her. A gesture of kindness, a continued friendliness will be sufficient because Malin doesn't expect to ever get much more than that out of a positive relationship, she doesn't need to consider someone trustworthy to build a lasting relationship with them. A friendly person whom she cannot trust is better than no friendly person, so she'll work on making the relationship last even if there's no trust in it.
It bears mentioning that Malin is still fairly young and has never lived in a healthy emotional environment. She never had the chance to develop into a person with mature coping mechanisms and social strategies, especially when it comes to relationships. She knows a thing or two about manipulation but if she has to deal with others, her first attempt to deal with the situation will be to keep her head down and not attract attention. Failing that, she will typically try to please those above her station and only support those of like or lower station if she thinks she'll gain something from it herself (since she craves kindness, that could be as little as treating her kindly, material advantages aren't necessarily required). She sees no problem with kicking back when someone who isn't stronger is kicking her, or someone who is stronger and will endanger her survival cannot be appeased in any other way.
She's hypersensitive to all shifts in people's emotions and the atmosphere of a situation when dealing with those stronger than her, tries to always be five steps ahead of any of their mood shifts and will try to appease any negative shifts if she cannot escape such situations. Lars managed to get the tactic of blaming herself overly before anyone else can accuse her out of her and generally helped her hide some of her more compromising reactions to social stress, but even if they are hidden the patterns are still there. They are just better concealed.
They are currently mostly applied towards Lise, whom Malin hates and fears and loves - the last of which is obviously not a natural feeling but the result of Lise having blood bonded her to herself as quickly as she could. That means that Malin can't do anything against her and that all her feelings towards the Tremere are a terrible, painful mess, but that she knows exactly how to act: Keep her head down and hope that it isn't time for another experiment.
Lars is a much more complicated matter. And one that deeply hurt her. For the first time in a very long time, Malin had really started to trust someone. He picked her off the street, he taught her a lot about vampire society and vampiric abilities (not everything, because she'd gathered a few things in her time as Caitiff, but most of what she knows), he provided her with shelter and general living arrangements that she'd not known since she ran away from her parents' house, and he mostly let her do her own thing, as long as she did a thing or two for him now and then. Things were good, better than they'd ever been. And then the Prince claimed that all of that was built on a big, fat, terrible lie, that he wasn't a mentor picking a lost Caitiff off the street but a man trying to get around requiring a permission to sire by siring and then abandoning her, only to pick her up later under the guise of charity. She still hasn't come to terms with the possibility of the Prince having been right.
Along the way of her frenzies, she has picked up a number of animal behaviours. Examples would be that she curls up and hides her head when scared or startled (and it isn't bad enough for a Rötschreck reaction), often treats her own reflection in a mirror as another person and likes to cram herself into small spaces like boxes for a feeling of safety. She can stop herself from performing all of these behaviours, but it takes her willpower to do so.
POINT OF DEPARTURE:
At the core of Malin lies a strong sense of survival, distrust and adaptable independence. At heart, she has always been and still is a street kid, even though she has learned to navigate middle and upper class society (or well, vampire society, but that's what it resembles).
Those factors would likely in some capacity come into play in an overlay, though they could take very different forms. If she was a part of a group, she'd stay in the lower ranks and try to keep her bonds to it as loose as possible, and she could easily be a vagabond or some kind of low level gang criminal.
[Addendum:]
Infiltrating would more than anything be something that Malin wouldn't have a frame of reference for. Mind control of various forms is something that she knows and the easiest way to get her to have an issue with you, but she wouldn't necessarily consider it that (of course this depends on how it was presented to her, how her experience with it was, etc, but it's probably not how she would interpret it).
It would make a big difference how much her overlays and her are alike, because the reason why autonomy is so important to her is that it puts the one person whom she trusts to actually have her best interests in mind (herself) in charge. Being intimately aware of an overlay's thoughts and inner workings, she wouldn't mind being stuck with them during or afterwards as long as they look after themselves and their own well-being and survival, especially if they are fundamentally similar to her. Because then someone whom she knows to be interested in her well-being would have been in charge, even if it wasn't strictly herself. (I'm not really planning on this, but if she got stuck with an overlay that showed self-destructive behaviour or placed their everything willingly in someone else's hands, it would freak her the fuck out and she would try to find a way to never have that happen again, likely by getting Infiltrator Persona as quickly as possible.)
That said, the question of what happens to her body during infiltrations would bother her a lot and she would definitely try to find out as much as possible about that to secure it.
She wouldn't mind being in someone else's mind, mostly because there is a clan discipline that she was working towards before everything went to shit which includes similar features (Animalism 4 allows a vampire to send their mind into that of an animal), though the lack of self-awareness would bother her - but, as detailed above, as long as the overlay takes care of themselves and she is returned to herself afterwards, it wouldn't bother her too much. She'd come out of it as herself, surviving and in charge, after all.
ABILITIES:
Mundane
- She went to school regularly until she was 14 and has that kind of knowledge. She also has a fairly expansive knowledge about drugs and knows how to generally survive without money or a support system in a big city.
- She used to be a good pickpocket and is a good fighter in weaponless and melee combat, though without rules or grace.
- She speaks Swedish (native), English, Danish (if she concentrates, you won't be able to tell that Danish is an acquired language for her) and some STS.
Vampire
- Her looks might give her a lot of disadvantages, but they also give her advantages: Her bat ears give her sonar hearing. Her tongue can smell, taste and feel vibrations better than any human sense can, though she needs to let it dart out of her mouth for that. She also has heat vision. Her fur gives her additional protection against injury and the cold and her (non-retractable) talons and her tail can be used for additional damage in close combat (aggravated and bashing, respectively).
- Animalism 3 (empathic communication with animals, giving orders to animals, calling all animals of a species that are around, cowing mortals into fear/apathy, soothing a creature to make them docile or pull them out of a frenzy)
- Fortitude 3 (greater stamina/toughness, offers a chance to absorb damage done by things that would otherwise cause grievous injuries: Fire, sunlight, vampire bites, werewolf claws, etc.)
- Protean 3 (seeing normally in absolute darkness {eyes will glow red}, making claws that cause terrible damage on hands and feet, melting into the earth)
- Dominate 1 (giving a one-word order to one person)
- Sturdier than a human would be, but at the same time she won't heal with time: She has to pointedly heal even the tiniest scratch. That in turn is a lot faster than running around with your arm in a cast for weeks, though.
- Easily hurt by sunlight and fire, has to sleep during the day (her humanity rating is 5), doesn't breathe, has no body heat, cannot eat/drink anything but blood.
- She can psychologically bind someone to herself by feeding them some of her own blood - in the case of mortals, that will also make them immortal and give them supernatural abilities (and it will make animals more intelligent), as long as she keeps feeding them blood in regular intervals.
Not so much an ability: Each of the vampire clans has a curse resting on them, challenging them mentally, socially or in acquiring food. Malin's clan curse gives her an animal characteristic every time she frenzies, every third of which sticks permanently. Those can be physical, but also mental and behavioural. A frenzy is the loss of control to the beast inside each vampire, making them mindlessly fight to remove the trigger (the flight reaction counterpart to this is called Rötschreck).
INVENTORY;
- A t-shirt, sweatpants, socks
- a battered wristwatch
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?
Her and Laughs have very little overlap. They are from the same tabletop game universe (though the metaplot development in their universes differs), but from different gamelines (VtM vs. WtA). While Malin has never been out of Scandinavia, Laughs has never been in Scandinavia. Malin's social circle consists of vampires and people living in Copenhagen and Sweden, while Laughs's social circle consists of werewolves, wolves and a few human kinfolk living in southern Germany and Finland. Laughs wasn't even born yet at Malin's canon point.
In game, they would have no inherent interest in interacting: Laughs, knowing that he can't permanently off the vampires around, would elect to stay away from them in hopes that they can't manipulate him that way smh, and Malin would stay away from the fucking lupine because seriously, you can't trust a lupine to not reconsider tearing you apart smh. I also feel like they would fall into very different niches, CR-wise as well as Jaunt-experience-wise.
M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
Death would be an option because Malin is caught in the process of experiencing slow, inescapable loss that cannot be turned back, that is both a psychological transformation (as she's losing humanity) and deep physical change (as she's gaining more and more animal characteristics). She's not yet at the point of good-bye or sadness, because she has had no opportunity to grieve yet, but that will come.
Strength could be it because Malin is a PRO at perseverance. Compassion is an important emotional capacity to her, even if she might not have especially large amounts of it herself.
Magician works because Malin is practical to a fault. She isn't a dreamer and will aim low, but she will focus completely on a goal which she has set for herself (like survival), showing great determination, concentration, precision and initiative to reach it. A year into the future from when I'll pull her from, she'll be able to focus all of these and lace them up with hatred and overcome a triple blood bond, turning all of that into the energy to take action and kill Lise. She can also be quite manipulative when she wants to be, a skill that she acquired in her street kid years and polished later, though she's still a bloody beginner when compared to older vampires.
Hermit is also possible as Malin is a fairly withdrawn and quiet person. She has learned how to not draw too much attention for fear of it being a kind that would impact her negatively and the recent changes in her appearance will amplify that tendency. She's not a loner in the strictest sense as she does like being around people (if she thinks that they are safe for her to be around), but she's a loner at heart, not letting anyone come too close due to her conviction that they will drop her the moment she stops being useful. On top of that internal isolating factor, she's spent over a year in seclusion now, having had little and much less positive contact with others.
VETO: Moon and Sun (Laughs and Kitty's Arcana).
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE:
Thread! She's taken from a later pull-point and only recently gained the ability to look human again here.
PROSE SAMPLE:
The kid - what had his name even been? She didn't know - was gone. Had somehow managed to make his way out into the sun, she heard one of the temporary assistants say. It made sense. There was no other way out of here, no way but Final Death. Lise would not be stupid enough to let her get away, wouldn't risk setting someone free who had all the reason in the world to take revenge on her one day. No. As much as Malin couldn't give up hope that she would somehow get out of this alive, as much as she couldn't just give in, she was very aware that the Tremere would dispose of her once this was done. Whenever that would be. However she would look like at that point.
She curled up in her corner of the pitch-black room, closing her eyes against the darkness. The way in which this situation would almost inevitably end wasn't something that she liked to think of, but there was so little else to think of in this place, especially now that the kid was gone again. She couldn't think about hunting, because she couldn't do that here. Couldn't think about finding shelter, because she had this room that was both a prison and safely tucked into the ground far away from the sun. Couldn't think about going to the cinema or reading a book or having to deal with business or anything else, because she didn't get to do anything of that kind here.
There was nothing here, nothing but dread and hunger and sometimes voices outside the door that she would listen to desperately even if they spoke of her, talked about her like a lab rat, like a thing, because at least that was something. At least they existed outside of her head. It was for the same reason that she both feared and longed for the times when the heavy iron door would open, because while nothing good ever came out of that, it at least brought light into the darkness, brought people, brought her out of the cell.
No, she wasn't surprised that the kid had taken his own life. But she just couldn't. Survival had always been the only thing that she had, that was hers. She couldn't let go of it for as long as it was still her choice.
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