Adelle

During my reintroduction to online roleplay communities in 2009, which by the way, took place at a very awesome and still ongoing place called Light of May, I created Adelle.

One of Light of May's mods, LS, is a Photoshop Master in my eyes.

Adelle... well, we can't just jump straight into her character without explaining exactly how she came about.  I can't at least, she's become such a memorable character that I couldn't just drop her after I left the game late 2010.  When I joined Light of May I decided that I was going to actually try and pursue a writing career; I decided to conduct an experiment to see whether or not I could actually write different characters.  Female characters, and good ones at that.

So I started writing.  At first, Adi, as she's so happily known as now, was a little thing.  Light of May is a supernatural game featuring vampires, werewolves, elementals, witches and sirens.  When I initially wanted to apply, I read some of the scenes since they're open to the public.  Sirens captured a part of my mind and wouldn't let go, no matter how hard I tried to shake them.

Sirens

A siren, in Light May lore, is an all female race born with a nigh irresistible urge to murder the opposite sex.  They can assume a bird form and are able to use their voices to enrapture males long enough to deal fatal wounds.  The upside of their murdering grants them eternal beauty and longevity.  The downside?  If a siren wants to live like a normal, mortal woman, resisting the urge to kill, she'll be driven by her need.

The first time I tried to write Adelle for the application, she was a short, suburban, upper-class California girl with a fetish for rapping that turned the siren song on it's head.  Her high-life style of dress mixed with a somewhat ditzy girl's version of political injustice-induced rhymes captured what I love most about writing:  The ability to bring two complete opposites into the same creation.  Needless to say, that idea was idiotic, and I hurriedly revamped her several days later.  Her background stayed the same for the most part, but I embraced what a simple, gorgeous creature I could create by merely letting her do the work.  If you've worked any job in the food industry or retail or had trouble making rent at any time in your life, you could appreciate what an aggravating slice of life Adelle became.  For the most part, her version of angst and the entire world's version of angst are two completely different things.  But try as she might, she would never understand how the rest of us felt, but would always try to relate with a story of, "Oh, one time in college. . ."  She also became quite boy crazy, bi-curious, and a dancer.  At the very least, the fact that she immersed herself into dancing and only sang as a little girl flipped the realization that she was a siren on its head.  All of the other sirens in the game knew beyond a doubt that they were sirens and it was a big part of their lives.  Adi wandered about the little town, a fictional place called Scarlet Oak(mispelled Scarlet Oaks, Scarletoaks, etc. all the time), telling everybody she deemed trustworthy that she was part of a murdering race that the government didn't understand.  She isn't exactly the smartest character I've ever created.

How Adelle developed during my time at Light of May

So not only is Adi horrible at keeping her secret, she's an amateur at her labor of fatality.  Right out of the gate, two other players linked Adelle to their characters.  A trifecta of twenty-three-year-olds, one a pink-haired, lesbian werepenguin, another a fairly normal fire elemental, and then our sweet songbird.  They were old college roomies, the first two having known each other beforehand and meeting Adelle in college.  The camaraderie brought out the worst in Adelle.  They got together over coffee and chatted about anything and everything, squealing, complimenting each others' outfits, and making out.  Okay, that last one was one time deal, and only because Adi got a call from a "hot, older guy" and snuck out during a sleepover with her lesbian best friend.  She's a horrible decision maker, and it rang true throughout her tenure at Light of May.  She often found herself in bad situations, amplified by the amount of common sense she lacked.

For instance, she got mixed up with vampires and by her own choice ended up losing her virginity to one half a millenium in age.  Luckily enough, it was against the rules of the game to turn sirens into vampires, and Adi wasn't willing to let go of her life.  Yet.  Vampires became a thing for her, and by thing I mean obsession, and by obsession I mean super obsession, if that's even a term.  She associated with more vampires than regular people, and even when she was dealing with semi-normal humans she was trying to hide the bite marks and feigning anemia to cover for her less than legitimate blood donations.  Her friends noticed, her family noticed, and then she finally found somebody somebody as crazy as she was.  Another girl, and as boy crazy as she was, Adi quickly began to fall head over heels into a sex-oriented, open lesbian relationship with a high-ranking fire elemental.  Being a young man writing a young woman, a lot of the players quickly forgot that I was even straight, because I was capable of writing Adelle so well.

Addie, the other siren trying to come to terms with what she was.

When Addie appeared one day, I got about ten instant messages within five minutes asking what I thought about the new character.  I played it safe and told everyone that I thought she would be a good addition to the game, and could possibly be yet another ridiculous tangent of plot Adelle could become entangled in.  Addie was short for Addison Rose, as Adi was short for Adelle Ryndana(don't ask, it's a story in itself).  Little did I know that Addison Rose was Adelle, just 10 years in past and hitting both puberty and her siren urges at the same time.  Now I know it seems like I drew a conclusion pretty quickly, but the players I was close with started sending me profile and history details concerning the character that made it clear that they were pretty much the same character.  Addison Rose was completely devoid of understanding the siren lifestyle, Adelle the same.  Beyond that, many of their character traits and even their names and nicknames were similar.  Of course, to top it all off, the player of the newcomer siren messaged me and wanted to start a plotline where Adelle was a horrible teacher to her protege.

I happily obliged.  I mean, why not?  She was offering to let Adelle impress her ridiculous-at-best-morals on a young fellow fledgling.  Adelle's voice wouldn't shut up about teaching somebody so utterly impressionable.  But her morals concerning killing were lackluster at best, which made her ludicrously under qualified to take anyone under her proverbial wing.  Regardless of her inadequacies, the apprenticeship started, and then quickly ended because nobody but myself could stand the actual player.  In the middle of it all, there was a grand scene where Adelle discovered the little bird about to kill in public and whisked her away to kill somebody in private in the next town over.  While cackling.  Crazily.  I personally got nominated for an award that month for a quote of crazy.

By the time this was going on, I played two other characters for plotlines with other players.  One never got off the ground due to being quite eccentric and almost spoke entirely in riddles.  The other was a 12 year old girl from a Finnish family that I was asked to play by a friend.  She was a water elemental in a well off family that loved being the baby and loved misbehaving.  When her mother got pregnant, she started devoting her life to ending that baby before it began.  Being a pre-teen was never as dark as this.

Although I enjoyed playing the girl, she isn't my character.  If I ever had the time to get back into roleplaying, I'd ask to play her again in a heartbeat.  Nevertheless, Adelle is mine, and by the time I was ready to say farewell to Light of May and have my life complicated again by a real job, she didn't feel like my creation anymore.  She was real, more real than I could've ever imagined her being, and between her and the little girl I was writing, I felt like I'd accomplished my mission of convincingly writing a female character.  I learned how to realistically portray an adolescent as well.

After Light of May

But try as I might, there was no moving on, and as my brain would have it, she started developing a story of her own.  I hear that this ends up happening to writers all the time.  A character breathes a life of their own and jumps off of the pages in a way that warrants a sequel, or during a rewrite becomes an entirely different character.   A favorite author of mine, Dan Abnett of Warhammer 40K, X-men and Gaunt's Ghosts fame, once said that in writing one of the books, he lost the novel when his hard drive crashed.  During a rewrite an almost benign villain became an outright murderer.  Of course the story's plot changed to accommodate the character's new found villainy, but the body of work was bone-chilling and benefited from the change as a whole.

This is how I feel about Adelle.  She started out sweet and innocent enough, but a year later saw her becoming engrossed in multiple twisted plotlines and taking on a life of her own.  Although I came up with excuse for her to leave the small town of Scarlet Oak and "move on" with her life, Adelle thought it was time to find out who she was and either fulfill her bloodline's birthright outright, or get somebody to end it.  She started by trashing her apartment, making it look like a hunter was tracking her and fled.  She took on a life of her own and decided she was starting a new story in a new town.