route application!

[timelymaid]

Player
Name: Lucy.
Personal Journal: fleeting.
E-mail: ilovelucille89@Gmail.com.
AIM/Plurk: lucylovespluto for both!
Timezone: EST.
Current Characters in Route: Nope!

Character
Name: Aradia Megido.
Series: Homestuck.
Timeline: End of Act 6 Intermission 3.
Canon Resource Links: Here!

Personality:

To understand Aradia, you have to understand her past to a reasonable degree. She is (or was, as in Route she'll be inexplicably human) a troll, and grew up on Alternia. Alternia is very different from Earth in all its other-world iterations, and is a great deal more violent and stark than humans might be used to. All the adults left Alternia long ago to go conquer the universe, so young trolls were raised by lusus, horrifying beasts found in the ceremonial brooding caverns once the young trolls have completed their many dangerous trials (because life on Alternia starts out at 100 miles an hour). Alternia is also very caste-divided; Alternia is ruled by a hemospectrum, and Aradia's own burgundy blood puts her at the lowest rung of the ladder (mutants such as Karkat Vantas nonwithstanding). Aradia is probably a lot more desensitized to violence than many humans would be, and she's been through a lot in her relatively short life.

For a long time Aradia Megido wasn't able to feel much at all. She was dead for the majority of her storyline, until her dreamself was murdered - and ironically enough her second death was the required catalyst to bring Aradia back to life. Things that once mattered to her before her period of being a ghost (and a frog and a robot) just didn't matter as much during those times. She remembered that she did once feel things, and knew enough to know she wished her old friends could be happy, and to wish she could feel things for them, but being dead had a way of sort of...negating all of who she once had been in all but the most superficial of ways. The voices of the dead that had been with her for her entire life became louder than ever after her own life ended, and Aradia was little more than a pawn in the larger game. That was a fact she came to resent, as shown in a conversation with herself, where Aradia noted that they - all the Aradias from all the timelines and times - were still obeying the will of the dead, and that the voices they now listened to were simply their own instead of the general dead.

When she was younger - and alive! - Aradia was enthusiastic about her various pursuits; archaeology was chief among them, but she was also fond of roleplaying with her friends and watching movies, particularly Troll Indiana Jones. In addition to using a whip (whipkind!) Aradia seemed prone to going on solo adventures of her own, eagerly rushing into anything that seemed interesting. When a meteor crashed near to her hive, Aradia immediately went to go and check it out, unearthing several intriguing plot-relevant artifacts. She was shown to be much more social and cheerful than her post-death counterpart, speaking familiarly with several of the others (Sollux, Kanaya, Terezi and Tavros in particular seemed to number among her friends). All of these interests returned full-force once Aradia regained her ability to be interested - and she regained her ability to care about the lives of her friends once again, in a real sort of way rather than a wistful longing for something that had once been true.

She's gained a variety of new interests as well, almost all of them related to the dream bubbles she now travels through and death itself, as she was dead for quite some time. She states that she had to come back to life in order to serve as a guide for the dead. While dream bubble navigation is pretty much impossible for most of the ghost-denizens of the veil, Aradia is capable of it in her role as Maid of Time. She takes to her role as afterlife guide with an almost overwhelming amount of gusto, guiding several of the others in the combined human/troll group through her very first dream bubble and then showing up several other times during the intermissions to offer directions to wayward spirits. On a significantly more weird note she seemed happy enough to suggest a "corpse party" - more commonly known as a funeral - for the collection of bodies on the meteor (trolls being somewhat violent in nature). Everyone else was...less than thrilled with the suggestion, and it seems that over her long stint of being dead Aradia has gained a sort of casual acceptance towards death, since no one is ever really dead after dying. Her dream bubble travels have sort of only enforced that notion.

After such a long period of not being alive Aradia seems to be even more determined to enjoy her new state, and informs someone who asks that she is very much alive - and that she intends to stay that way. That statement has a lot of weight in her canon in particular, where death is a very real concern, and Aradia has no lives to spare at this point, although she can only die permanently in a heroic or just way. Far from the cynical and obsessed with temporal inevitability and how doomed they all were, Aradia encourages others to keep their spirits up and have hope. She also appears to be doing her own thing for the first time, listening to only her own voice rather than the voices of the dead. Aradia exudes a sort of happy self-confidence in both herself and the outcome of their story, which is pretty much a complete one-eighty from her former demeanor.

She's ceaselessly cheerful in every appearance she's made since ascending, regardless of the situation - when holding off Jack Noir to give those on the meteor time to escape, for example, Aradia smiles the entire time. That move was in and of itself an example of Aradia's bravery and returned sense of adventure and caring for her friends. If she had died there, it would most certainly have counted as a "heroic" death, and therefore it would have been a final death. And Aradia very clearly cares about people again. Aside from going to Vriska's aid (...sort of, since she refused to fight, but she did go over when Vriska asked, despite their past), Aradia put herself in harm's way to aid the meteor's escape. She also playfully banters with the others in dream bubble memories, and seems to be spending her time hanging out with dead or mostly dead friends when she isn't playing guide to the afterlife.

In short, Aradia is a cheerful, determined person who has very good reasons to be cheerful and determined. Her past is long and troubled, and she's come out through the other side of that. And she's determined to continue being on the other side, okay?

Strengths:

♈ Tech-savvy to the same degree as most of the other Trolls; she's at least familiar enough with technology to rock the pokegear.

♈ Adventurous! Aradia spent most of her childhood involved in very active live-action roleplaying, independent archaeological digs, and all-around outdoorsy things. Travelling as a trainer should present her with no big problems physically.

♈ Adaptable. She seems perfectly happy to roll with things these days.

♈ Social. Aradia enjoys talking to people nowadays, and that will probably help her to fit into this new place more easily.

♈ Comes from a society where pitting creatures against one another in battle is a-okay. This is basically Fidus spawn, right?

Weaknesses:

♈ Has a certain blasé attitude towards death given her stint of being dead and her new role as guide to the dead, uh. This may not mesh well with some people.

♈ Picking things up and carrying them around in a "normal" manner will be super weird to her. How do you not captchalogue stuff, guys?

♈ She's not really up to date on a bunch of human specific terminology or customs, so that will probably go swimmingly.

♈ May be overly willing to accommodate people at times or go with whatever happens.

♈ She'll probably be a little bit too reckless at times, whoops.

Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Breeder.
Starter: Gastly.
Password: Scrambled eggs!

Samples
First Person Sample:

text;
this is rather odd!!
i had actually expected to be somewhere else
other than where i am currently i mean
dream bubble travel is not a precise science but i am usually much better at it
as in i normally go where i am meant to go!

although logically speaking if i am here i am meant to be here
it is just that i thought i was meant to be elsewhere
this isnt even a dream bubble

and while my new companion is very sweet i find that i am missing
everyone
since we were more or less all there just a little while ago
i am also missing my horns and my general biology
and i believe this woman is claiming to be my human lusus??
she is quite nice regardless of the fact i do not remember her
which i feel a little bad about so i pretended i did
and she gave me this!!!

i have not had to ask for directions in a very long time this is very nostalgic
so i hope i am doing this properly!!
if anyone can offer up more information that would be lovely :)

my companion and i will continue to get to know one another in the meantime!!

Third Person Sample:

Waking up in a different place hadn't phased Aradia too much at first. She was used to the world changing around her, as she passed through dream bubbles or they passed through her. She could immediately tell she wasn't in one of those, however; it had something to do with the feeling of the place, the inherent...reality of it, maybe. And when she'd gone to rub at her eyes she'd seen her hands, seen how pale they were, and that had been a surprise. Not enough to scream or worry, because she wasn't about to slip back into doom-and-gloom mode after overcoming so much, but it had been startling. Then her "Mom" had come in (it'd taken a moment or two to recall that was a human word, the word for a female lusus who was biologically related to you) and she'd been chided for sleeping in, and so Aradia had gotten out of bed and gotten dressed and she'd eaten weird human food for breakfast while her mother scolded her about her hair and brushed it back for her, twisting the scrunchy around three times before it stayed put. The comb hadn't caught on any horns because there weren't any to be found.

Her face in the mirror of the ablution chamber - bathroom - was weirdly human. Pale skin, freckles, blunt, rounded teeth. Aradia spent ten minutes just feeling her teeth, curiously, before Mom rolled her eyes and asked if she was done brushing yet. So she'd finished that up, and then Mom, who had been nothing but nice all morning, gave her a bunch of supplies and said she'd miss her, and shoved her out the door.

Which made about as much sense as anything else that had happened since she'd opened her eyes, so Aradia went with it, returning that last hug and wondering if humans weren't lucky with their lusii.

There were other people wandering around outside, but Aradia ignored them for the moment, sitting on the front step of the place that wasn't her house, and flipping open the pokegear she'd been given. It was fairly intuitive to use - touch screen keyboard, text entries, seemed pretty easy overall - and so she tapped out a message before shutting the electronic device again, setting it down on the step beside her.

Gastly - because that was apparently what her new friend was, according to Mom - bobbed in the air in front of Aradia, saying his name over and over again. That seemed to be his way of communicating, and she half wondered if she could figure out how to speak Gastly. There had to be a lot of lingual overlap there, though. Gast-gast probably meant about ten hundred different things. "Or the way you move when you talk could be involved, too!"

This mild observation earned her another, "Gast-gastly!"

"Hm." Waiting for the pokegear to alert her of a message - and, hopefully, answers - Aradia propped her chin on her hands and examined the little ghost-creature who had been following her around all morning. "Do you have a name? Or am I meant to give you one? I've never been a lusus to anyone, you know. And that seems to be the role you wish me to take. But I have been a guide, so that I can do." The ghost bobbed around some more, and Aradia felt that it more or less understood her words. It seemed fairly sweet-natured.