Post by DIANA REID on Aug 24, 2012 22:32:35 GMT -5
...diana beth reid*
*Nature, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest, --
Her admonition mild*
[/size]*Nature, the gentlest mother,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest, --
Her admonition mild*
...basics*
name...[/b][/size] Diana Beth Reid
nickname...[/b][/size] Her father once called her Di, like the princess, but that was long ago.
age...[/b][/size] Nineteen
gender...[/b][/size] Female
grade...[/b][/size] None
occupation...[/b][/size] if the above doesn’t apply (or even if it does), tell us where you’re working to earn the bucks.
hometown...[/b][/size] Calhoun Falls, South Carolina
sexuality...[/b][/size] Heterosexual
personification...[/b][/size] Mother Nature
status...[/b][/size] Awakened
face claim...[/b][/size] Joan Smalls[/blockquote]
...appearance*
physical...[/b][/size]Diana is about 5'10", so very tall for a girl. She has dark hair that can get wild if she doesn't spend a good amount of time working on it every day. She tends to put in the extra effort to get up early and straighten it. Her eyes are also very dark and soulful.
clothing style...[/b][/size]
Working at Burberry, Diana gets her employee discount off on some fairly nice clothes. She tends to wear nice clothing and especially conservative outfits. She wants to look professional and classy. It's the ultimate antithesis of the wilderness that tries to escape from deep inside. Same thing with make-up: Diana figures that she might be able to suppress the creature within her if she buries it in the furthest thing from natural beauty that she can. Eyeliner and foundation are a must.
defining traits...[/b][/size] Diana tends to wring her hands a lot when out in public. It just sort of happens as a nervous tendency. When she finally gives in and goes into a park for a dose of the natural world she tends to just blend in with everything else, as if she just belongs there. [/blockquote]
...personal info*
personality...[/b][/size] You always have that little tinge of fear in everything you do. It's got to do with that... that power that rests inside you, that part of you that manifested itself back when you were only seven years old. You had been fascinated by the marvels it could show you, the beauty that it could unearth for you, but you learned quickly, so very quickly, that the power could kill just as fast as it could amuse.
Ever since then you have been plagued by the dreams, and plagued by that feeling of conflict and dissonance. No matter how painful it is for you to see the trees and remember that terrible morning, no matter how badly you want to cry when you think of that lake and how much you want to run and never look back when you think of gliding across the water again, you can't help it. That power has its grip on you, has got its gold fast within you and you can't help but keep going back.
That's why you moved to the city, to run and hide. To try and seek refuge from the beast within that was called to the hills and the woodlands and the lakes and the rivers. It was the best you could do to try and lock yourself away inside a city of steel and cement, the furthest thing from grass and water that you could find, but even there it's no use. The dreams just keep getting worse, more vivid, more angry.
It only speaks to you in the sounds of nature, the sounds of the world untouched by humans, and the longer you go in that city the more vicious the noises get. It used to be that you would be spoken to with the voices of a thousand blades of grass bowing in the wind, or the songs of birds in the forest, or the babbling of a brook as it flowed into the soft peat moss that had grown rich from its source. Now however, you are plagued by the angry roar of a tornado beginning to twist in the middle of the flatlands; the battle cry of a wildfire ripping through the forest and consuming all the shrubs and creatures screaming in its path; the cries of angry lionesses and wolves and bears snapping at their prey, teeth gnashing in your head. The only thing that soothes the roar inside your head is by giving in to its demands and submitting to spending a day at a park or a zoo, trembling at the memories but finally alone in your own head.
That's what you want more than anything, just to be alone and to move on from this passenger that seemed to have taken up residence in your mind without any form of invitation. You want to get away from the memories and from the past. You want to live a normal life, so you try desperately to pretend like everything's alright. As if the mere fact that you work in retail and have an apartment in a city is enough to make you like the other people when you know it never will.
You lost the faith that had been such a part of you long ago. You don't understand how people can believe in a higher power when you know for a fact that there is something much stronger, much more primal, much more wicked deep inside you that only surfaces to haunt you with visions of the past and with visions of your own loss. You knew once you saw your father floating there you would never be able to go back to another sermon and listen to another man preach about how the great man in the sky was formulating the world for the better.
You never know how to act around other people. You're not quite that good at masking your inner conflicts, and that tends to put people off. You're lucky you got a job, to be honest, and it's only the that you're just there to fold the clothes back up and ring up purchases that keeps you afloat financially. Anything requiring more people skills than that and you would be a goner.
More than anything in the world you just want someone else who understands you. Not someone romantically, you don't think. Not necessarily. Just someone who can understand the pain, the difficulties, the insanity and the implausibility of your life. Someone who wouldn't look at you funny if you seemed a bit apprehensive about going to a park. Someone who would be gentle and help guide you through it all. You've given up hope on ever being thought of as anything but crazy if you mentioned the constant wildlife soundtrack in your mind, but a friend is all that you could wish for in the world.
life until now...[/b][/size]
It had always been so easy for you. Well, not easy, your family wasn't the richest in town and when times were tough you got by on the charity of others, but easy for you to be happy. Easy for you to smile and laugh and generally be just like all the rest of the kids. You had always thought that you were just like them, or at least, back when you were just in kindergarten and first and second grade you had no reason to suspect otherwise. Then you were just another little girl who occasionally got her feelings hurt but for the most part were just a bundle full of sunshine, like everyone else.
You were the only child, but that had never mattered much. Your family felt perfect just the way it was. Your father would seem to constantly be laughing his deep, booming laugh and your mother would smile demurely. The three of you lived just on your small little plot of land in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, but had belonged to the family for generations. You would work with your mother in the garden in the mornings, checking on tomatoes and squash and pulling weeds, and you would tag along with your father in the afternoons. It had been perfect.
You can still remember back then. How happy you would be going into the big church where your daddy preached. How happy he seemed when he would be giving what he thought was the Good Lord's words to his flock. You remember how bright and colorful everything was, how the whole church seemed to rock with life and with vibrant emotion when everyone raised their voices to sing and worship. You remember how the older women used to cry during his sermons, and wondering how they could get so emotional about your daddy's words, and if you too would one day cry that much in public.
You didn't know back then.
You remember how his pride and joy had been that small little canoe that the entire congregation had gotten him for his fortieth birthday as a thank you for the work he'd done preaching in the small town. You remember the hot summer days when you'd go out on the lake, when you'd look out at the trees and feel so giddy and want to jump about and go from side to side so badly but he had told you that you had to stay calm and stay in your seat otherwise you'd flip the boat so you would just sit there consumed by your little girl excitement.
He would row you around the lake and point out all the things that would have missed you if he hadn't been there. He'd point at the kingfisher as it dove down below the surface for what seemed like an impossibly long time before it finally broke the surface once more with a wriggling silver fish in its beak. He'd steer the canoe under the sweeping branches of willow trees planted alongside the shore, where you would marvel at the way the branches braided themselves overhead. He'd point out how the mountain reflected on the surface of the water so very beautifully, and once, just once, he took you out on the lake in the middle of the night at the end of summer during a full moon, the weekend before school began again and you would enter second grade. You had your breath taken away that night, when it felt like you were gliding through the stars themselves and everything was bathed in warm moonlight.
You could have never imagined that moonlit ride, where you could have sworn you were being steered across the surface of a mirror by your father's strong hands, was the last time you would ever ride with him.
You were only seven years old. You had no idea that you were any different from the rest of the kids before then, but after that night, that first dream, you would never forget it.
You had been tucked in that night just like any other, and you had asked your sweet mother, who had always seemed just as happy as you had been, who had always smiled just as often as you did, who had never looked prouder than when she was sitting and listening to your daddy's sermons, where your daddy was. She had replied that he had gone out on the lake that night, and no matter how distressed you were and how badly you wanted to go with him, you just couldn't because it was a school night.
You had gone to bed angry that night, wishing you were at the lake. Wishing that you were there with your father and that you would get to be at the lake one last time before school began again. You fell asleep still angry and wishing more than ever.
You would never forget it. You had been a fish. A small, graceful fish cutting through the water. It was a part of the lake that you had never seen before. It was the one part that had always been alien to you: the world below. You had only ever seen from up above but now you knew, it could never have been anything else. You knew, you just knew without a doubt that the soft blues and greens that mingled in what must have been the dawn's early rays siphoning through the water column were your lake. The lake that you and your father had spent all summer on.
The excitement had been overwhelming. You felt free. You couldn't wait to tell your father about what it was like, to point out where you had swam and for once be the one who could sound smart. You loved every part of it. You loved the bright scales and darting motions of other fish, you loved the cool feeling of the morning water, and how clean everything was.
Then, without meaning to, you saw it. The dark shadow at the edge of the lake. You were intrigued, and more than a little curious. You swam closer, and as the shadow got bigger you could only imagine what it could be. You were sure that no matter what it would be enough to make your father smile once you told him. Anything you said seemed to make him happy.
Then you got close enough to recognize the face.
Your father floated hazily, distorted, eyes staring blindly ahead and mouth hanging open like he wanted to say one last thing, to you, to the lake, to anything. Like he had one last sermon to give but was cut off before he could get it out.
You woke up screaming.
Your mother came and comforted you for a few minutes, but you could tell that she was already more than a bit concerned. You asked where daddy was and she told you that he still hadn't come back. She said that you still had to go to school and that he would be home before you knew it. She was trying to be strong for you.
You knew that he wouldn't be home, though. You had seen it. You went to school because you knew that you were the one that had to be strong for your mommy, who still didn't know, but when you got home you saw police cars in the the driveway and your mother crying in the door. She knew then.
It had been the storm, they said. The storm had come in the middle of the night, swept in from the sea and in the chaos the canoe had capsized, they said. You didn't care what they said. You couldn't get that vision out of your head, that vision of him floating there, eyes wide open, strangled of his last words of advice.
Years passed, and you weren't that happy little girl any more. The church community had been supportive for a while, but soon they moved on to a new pastor. You didn't go back to church again. The two of you had tried, gone to a few sermons after the funeral, but the happiness didn't seem right. The color and vibrance was wrong when the last man who had last conjured up such excitement was slain by the God they praised, taken before his time.
Your mother cried much more often now, and she often didn't try to hide it. You knew why she cried, and you tried to just leave her by herself when it happened. Over the years, the garden became overgrown with weeds and choked with vines as it was left untended, haunted by memories of your father. You could never go back to that lake again. You had seen more than you would ever want to as the fish that night.
By high school, you had mostly learned to move past it. You could still have a life. You had friends and could go to parties and the movies together. Your mother was not so adjusted. You knew that she never truly could let him go. While you went to school and brought home average marks and a boyfriend or two, your mother always seemed sad. She worked at many different odd jobs, trying to keep the two of you afloat.
It was during your senior year that finally everything broke down. Your mother had taken out a second mortgage on the house to pay back some other bills and pay for the therapist that she'd been going to see to help her, but now she couldn't pay it back. You were working at the time as well, just a salesgirl at the movie theater, but it was hardly a large paycheck. They said that you would lose the house. The house that had belonged to your father's family for three generations. The house that you had lived in all your life and that your mother had moved into when she was just a young girl in love with your young father.
You found out in December the decision the bank had reached. It was in May, just after graduation and contemplating what you would do after high school and where you would get a job, that you went to bed and had another dream.
You were a bird. A dusty cardinal flying high above the South Carolina landscape, looking down at the earth drenched in light cast by the dawn. Everything was tinged a rosy color. You flew for what seemed like ages, riding the winds and feeling a part of the sky. Finally you saw one dot on the land below and knew that it belonged to you. Your house, at the end of a long dirt road with wildflowers in grassy fields all around.
You dove down to the earth, flying along the dirt road as your home grew larger and larger before you. You had no purpose, just the need to see your house a bit closer. The enormous magnolia tree spread before you, dominating your view. Its flowers were just in bloom and already you could smell the sweet scent on the wind.
Te sun rising slowly behind you cast the rosy tinge on one thing that stood out from the rest of the pastoral scene. You knew it didn't belong there and more than anything else in the world you wanted to get away, pretend you had never seen it, pretend it had never happened, but you were drawn closer.
Your mother hang there, a wooden chair from the kitchen knocked over on the ground. The strong rope was pulled taught, tied tight around the branch above. Your mother wore a dress that had hung unseen in the closet for years, last worn in church before your father died. It was vibrant green, the same color as the soft, soulful leaves that sprouted up above.
Your mother looked peaceful at last, her eyes closed and her smile directed at you, as if she knew you were looking. She swung gently in the metallic sunlight, more restful than you had seen her in years.
When you woke up this time there were no screams. There was no crying. You got up and packed your suitcase, went out to the garage and tried very hard not to look at the magnolia tree as you drove off from Calhoun Falls for the last time, searching for a place that would bring no memories of that tree or that lake.
the present...[/b][/size] You went to new York City, where you thought you could bar yourself from any memories. What you did not expect was that this seemed to anger whatever spirit lived deep inside you. You were haunted nightly by dreams of lands you had never seen. Dreams of the trees of the rainforests being chopped down. Dreams of the rhinoceroses of the plains being shot for money. Dreams of rivers being dammed and polluted and dreams of people being slaughtered by the ferocious howling winds of a hurricane and the terrible rumbling of earthquakes.
You try to live a normal life. You try so very hard, getting a job as a sales girl, wearing the clothes of any other urban socialite, wearing the make-up of the glamorous girls, the walk of a confident woman, but none of it matters. At the end of the day you belong to that spirit that seems so very bent on forcing you to see the worst possible visions it could concoct. That is your lot in life, as you move against your will to the park, where it can reach some console from the iron and cement city you have brought it to.
other notes...[/b][/size] Diana doesn't know that it's Mother Nature that is inside of her making her see all these visions. Also, Mother Nature isn't intentionally cruel, just primal and incapable of putting things into words, so she speaks through visions and nature sounds. Diana, naturally, doesn't know WHAT the fuck is going on and freaks out because of it. She hates the visions and was scarred forever by the scenes of her parent's deaths, which were meant by Nature to be a gift of closure and allow Diana to see from a different perspective. [/blockquote]
...literature*
title... Mother Nature
backstory... Mother Nature is a concept that is old as dust. The personification of the natural world as a loving and tender mother, helping along all life and coaxing along humanity when she can. The quote above comes from Emily Dickinson's poem "Mother Nature".
...the roleplayer*
tell us about you...[/b][/size] This is Becket [/blockquote]
