myowncompanion (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myowncompanion) wrote2016-01-03 01:17 pm
myowncompanion) wrote2016-01-03 01:17 pm
000 /// Application/Info
User Name/Nick: Naomi
User DW: metonumia
AIM/IM: metonumia @ plurk
E-mail: asyndeta @ gmail.com
Other Characters: Eggsy Unwin, Harry Starks
Character Name: Ashildr (originally, but does not remember that phase of her life; has since gone through a series of names and now calls herself Me)
Series: Doctor Who (New Who Season 9) plus the tie-in book Legends of Ashildr
Age: Physically 17-ish; chronologically 1200-ish.
From When?: Sometime after 'Face the Raven' but before 'Hell Bent'; this is a span of time covering several billion years so, for the sake of argument, early 2016. This will have to be an assumed death; since her deal with the Time Lords had been satisfied, they may well have retracted their protection of her community and placed her in danger.
Inmate: Ashildr is not what you'd call a force for evil, but she has a tendency to do the right things for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right reasons. When she does things that seem selfless and self-sacrificing, it's simply because she knows she'll survive them and the people around her won't; there's even, sometimes, a morbid interest in pushing her own boundaries in the hope of finding something that might finally end her life.
She sees mortal life as fleeting and unimportant; she has an ugly tendency to switch off from engagement in human concerns when it suits her, and really needs help from a warden to better manage herself as an immortal. (It's also worth noting that she'd be a terrible warden. Her attitude toward a mortal would be 'who cares what you do; you'll die soon anyway'; towards an immortal, it'd be 'who cares what you do, everyone around you will be dead before any of the consequences start mattering' and that's....kind of a a problematic attitude in itself.)
Abilities/Powers: Since her absorption of an alien medical kit which will 'never stop fixing her', Ashildr has very nearly lost the ability to die and is described as 'functionally immortal'. The Doctor implies that it is still possible for her to die, and Ashildr's response is that they would 'have to be fast'. I would assume that anything which would kill her instantly and do irreparable damage to her body (e.g. death by beheading, extermination by Dalek etc) will still do so. Anything else, she will be able to recover from, and I assume that non-lethal wounds will also heal significantly faster than they would in a normal human, though not instantaneously. As a rule of thumb, anything that would disable a human for a month will put her out of action for a week.
Since this is a passive/non-offensive ability and - on the Barge - only really gives her immunity to the death toll and frees her from needing a warden to request resurrection, I would like her to keep it at full strength.
At her canon point, Ashildr is bonded to the 'Raven' - a kind of spirit called a Quantum Shade - which she uses as a death sentence to those who disobey the law in the community she runs. When locked to a specific person, the Raven will kill whoever the person is locked to - or another individual who agrees to take on the death sentence. It is capable of pursuing its quarry across time and space. Obviously on the Barge, Ashildr will not have access to the Raven at all - though for its shenanigan potential, I would like her to retain the bond, albeit ineffectually. (This leaves her with a dog whistle for a dog which is several planes of reality out of earshot.)
Aptitude-wise, Ashildr puts it this way: it takes ten thousand hours to be an expert at something, and a hundred thousand hours to be the best anyone's ever been. She has had a lot of time. She has presumably been able to pick up many skills over the course of her life, many with regards to languages, weapons and combat. She also seems to remember many of these skills, through practice, though to remember the events of her life and even the names she's used she has to refer to her diaries. By way of a compromise I'd suggest that her episodic memory is human-normal but her procedural memory has developed an unusually high capacity with time.
Personality:
The original Ashildr is worth mentioning. When the Doctor and Clara encounter her in the ninth century, they find a young woman who is aware that she's an outcast; dismissed as too boyish by the girls and as 'just a girl' by the boys, she has a vivid imagination but tempers it with a sense of almost morbid realism. When asked about the outcome of a seemingly unwinnable battle, she doesn't hesitate in saying she believes they'll be 'cut down like corn'; yet she refuses to run away as per the Doctor's advice. She has a strong sense of home and family, and as per the Viking belief system she would rather die in battle than abandon her place and live on the run. She accepts an important role in the Doctor's plan, using a helmet from the Mire - an attacking warrior race - to alter their soldiers' perception without knowing that it carried the risk of killing her. In all likelihood she would have accepted that death - it's the Doctor who doesn't, and he uses the Mire medical kit to make her immortal.
She will never be that person again. By the mid-17th century, Ashildr - having by this point forgotten her first life and needing to be reminded of her original name - had completely given up on the people around her. She's forgotten what sorrow is like, telling the Doctor that 'it all runs out', leaving her behind She is aware that losing her children was agony and watching her loved ones fade away and die was hellish, but only because her diaries tell her so. She was indifferent towards individual human lives and described them as 'blowing away like smoke'; the criminal alter ego she'd taken up was purely to keep herself entertained, although she presumably hurt and even killed people while undertaking those crimes. She'd lived a varied life - a queen at least twice, a soldier at the Battle of Agincourt. Canon bears out that she has travelled extensively in, at least, Europe and the Middle East. When the Doctor asks her how many people she's killed total, she tells him she doesn't know, and seems to genuinely not care. The lives of other humans are so fleeting to her as to be immaterial.
Ashildr perceives her own immortality as being trapped inside her own life, the passage of time on Earth something she has to trudge through, inescapably - forever taking the slow road while she sees the Doctor flitting in and out of her life whenever he pleases. She blames the Doctor, not just for sentencing her to an endless life as a way to assuage his own guilt, but for abandoning her to an infinite life on Earth because they are too similar to travel together. The key difference between herself and the Doctor is that he sees the need for the 'mayflies', the mortals, in his life; she doesn't feel any need for the sense of perspective they provide.
Such was her desperation to be free of the Earth, which she'd travelled extensively and become bored of, that she was once willing to leave Earth with a group of aliens who practiced vivisection on human plague victims and fully intended to use her as an experimental subject on their home planet. She later made a deal with another alien to take her away from Earth, even though she knew that it would cost a human life to do so. She'd selected her (elderly and infirm, but loyal and completely innocent) servant, Clayton, as a victim - only switching to the highwayman Sam Swift because he'd been sentenced to death regardless. Even when the Doctor offers up his psychic paper as a 'pardon from Cromwell', she still killed Swift without regret - it was only when it turned out that she'd been tricked into inviting an invasion force that she showed any remorse.
This is when, abruptly and seemingly for the first time in decades, she admits that she cares about anyone at all. More precisely, Ashildr seems to care for communities, or species as a whole - things which have their own kind of continuity or immortality - far more than individual lives. This bears out into the twenty-first century; by 2015, when she's running a refugee camp in London for aliens who have, by whatever means, become stranded on Earth, there are no lengths she won't go to to defend the peace of that camp. She has a man killed - rather than jailed or exiled - for stealing medical rations to treat his sick wife; she promises the Doctor to the Time Lords in exchange for the safety of the camp, even though ultimately the universe will be a worse place for not having the Doctor in it. She places the life of one of Clara's friends in mortal danger, just as a means of catching the Doctor's attention; ultimately Clara herself is killed when she tries to outwit the Quantum Shade.
Most of her life is spent in pursuit of adventure for two reasons. The first is simply that she has to keep moving before people get suspicious. One of her husbands, she has to abandon after twenty years of marriage because he's growing suspicious that two decades and three children haven't aged her at all. When she tries to help people, using centuries of knowledge and experience, she ends up doing so amid accusations of witchcraft and has presumably survived several attempted executions, including drowning. (By the 17th century she'd more or less stopped trying.) Even her seemingly selfless acts - working in a leper colony, running the London refugee camp - are likely ways of giving herself a place where she can just stop for a while. The second reason is simply to stay stimulated. Novelty and new experiences are priceless to her. Even when she's aware of a real risk to her life, she'll give it a shot, because - what reason would she have not to? The threat of death is as much an inducement as a risk. Even when the Doctor warns her of the horrors that might be in store if she opens a portal to another world, she just sees that as another reason to do it.
Barge Reactions: This will not be Ashildr's first or even her third unexpected appearance on a spaceship. In short, Ashildr has seen too much and lived too long for most of the Barge to faze or even surprise her. The only things that will bother her at all are the floods and breaches, and even they will eventually fade into insignificance because they last such a brief time. She will probably spend some time believing the Admiral is a Time Lord.
(Incidentally, if anyone who remembers Arya Stark mistakes them, she might just shrug and go with it, because at some point in her life she might very well have been Arya Stark. She doesn't remember everything.)
Path to Redemption:
Any warden's first task will be to convince Ashildr what the point is of doing anything to attempt to improve herself. Ashildr will love the Barge. Alien lifeforms, the normalisation of immortality, the constant travels through time and space? Sign her the hell up. True, it's a smaller prison than the entirety of planet Earth but you know what, she'll adjust. It will take a hell of an inducement - not least the promise of a more interesting return destination than Earth 2016 - to get her to shift an inch. And that's if her first few months go well. If they don't, she could be easily drawn into plans to annihilate the Barge altogether because all she's got to worry about is her own death. Which, really, who cares?
After the initial challenge of bringing her on board with redemption as a concept, Ashildr needs to learn that - in a nutshell - the journey is more important than the destination. Life, no matter how fleeting, is more important than the fact it ends - and that her own life has meaning, even though it won't. Her own immortality - the knowledge and insight she's gained from it - can be used to help mortals, not be held aloof and disconnected. Moreover, she herself can learn to derive a sense of satisfaction and happiness from doing good. In the 17th century, she agrees to become the 'patron saint of the Doctor's leftovers', the protector of those he can't or doesn't help, but seems to do this mostly to make a point to the Doctor that he's failed her and many others. It's reactionary and - as borne out by the 21st century - guaranteed to keep her steeping in her own bitterness. She needs to have a more proactive purpose in her life, and perhaps a better gameplan than 'stay on Earth until humans develop interstellar travel'.
It won't necessarily be a hard job but it could be a very long one.
History: Ashildr at the TARDIS Wikia.
This history skips most of the Legends of Ashildr book, which itself acknowledges that the four stories within may not be entirely reliable even when they come from Ashildr's own perspective. This is particularly true of the first story, 'The Arabian Knightmare', where - living as the 'Lady Sherade', wife to the King of Samarkand who had already bored of and killed several short-lived brides, she tells a few stories which described some of her earlier adventures in the region with Sinbad the sailor, living under the name Ash El Dir. And then she poisons him.
'The Triple Knife' is mentioned in the link above and addresses the death of Ashildr's three young children in August 1348. She encounters an alien species - on whom the beak-like 'plague doctor' mask will be modelled by humans - and asks to be taken away from Earth, ostensibly as a test subject. Ultimately she chooses to stay with her children, knowing they will die only a few days later.
'The Fortunate Isles' is set in 1485 Seville, under the name Ash, she stows on board a ship - the Galgo, racing against the San Giorgio for a western route to Asia. On their voyage they pick up Piero, the sole survivor of the plague-stricken San Giorgio, who tells them of the ship's secret voyage to the treasure-laden Fortunate Isles. They agree to change their course, discovering the island, which is filled with gold and jewels as promised. After encounters with strange dog-like men, and some fatal arguments within the crew, Ash and two other survivors learn that the Fortunate Isles are in fact the Makaron, a 'time ship', created in the 30th century to create an 'intertemporal gambling experience'. All three survivors are killed; Ash revives, much to the shock of the gamemakers, and escapes the ship.
'The Ghosts Of Branscombe Wood' is set in the early 1600s; in it, Ashildr (now considering herself only 'Me') encounters a crashed spaceship, using projections of the local humans' memories of their dead loved ones to drive them away from the ship. She unintentionally begins the ship's ignition sequence but it it ultimately destroyed due to damage sustained during its initial crash landing.
Sample Journal Entry:
I understand the theory. I do.
One's life is ended, prematurely. It's tragic, I suppose, but it's a consequence of the morally bankrupt way in which you've chosen to live your life. One more wave dying on the shore, having overlapped so many others. But then you're scooped up, by a man in a ship who offers to give you a second chance, on the understanding that you use it well.
Your second chance. Incalculably precious.
But what if you make a mess of it, and you come back, again? Your second chance becomes your third, fourth, tenth, hundredth. He won't let you go. Every misstep, every mistake, it doesn't matter - the Admiral will just dust you off and try again.
When does it become too much? When does it get to be that the only chance you want is a chance at a clean death?
Sample RP:
Ashildr - this is the name the Admiral uses to refer to her, so she occasionally and reluctantly answers to it - is fascinated by the culture of the ship. The Barge has a yet more ephemeral population than what passes for geographical mobility in the twenty-first century. Nobody has stayed here for more than five years; most people are gone within one, vanishing without trace. It's strangely fascinating, how quickly the history of the place becomes mythology, when a 'generation' of Barge passengers lasts about the lifespan of a small rodent.
The Heart Of The Barge. Little is known about it, save that its visitors are annihilated, haunted as they suffer the toll. She gathers this from scraps of rumour, the written histories on the network, and that tiny number who remember it from experience. A handful have breached the place, only to burn away too fast to effect any worthwhile change. To plunge a blade, so to speak, into the heart. To end the life of the ship.
She's survived ordeals which should have killed her. She's already lived through feeling her heart burnt out of her like an overloaded battery. Could the Mire mend her, faster than the Barge can kill her? It's a curiosity, and a challenge, and the possibility of some form of escape. And these are catnip to Ashildr; irresistible. She cannot slow her pace past the engine room; she cannot bear the temptation.
"These excursions fail because people die," she says to her companion. It's not a question. "Have you tried it with anyone who can't?"
User DW: metonumia
AIM/IM: metonumia @ plurk
E-mail: asyndeta @ gmail.com
Other Characters: Eggsy Unwin, Harry Starks
Character Name: Ashildr (originally, but does not remember that phase of her life; has since gone through a series of names and now calls herself Me)
Series: Doctor Who (New Who Season 9) plus the tie-in book Legends of Ashildr
Age: Physically 17-ish; chronologically 1200-ish.
From When?: Sometime after 'Face the Raven' but before 'Hell Bent'; this is a span of time covering several billion years so, for the sake of argument, early 2016. This will have to be an assumed death; since her deal with the Time Lords had been satisfied, they may well have retracted their protection of her community and placed her in danger.
Inmate: Ashildr is not what you'd call a force for evil, but she has a tendency to do the right things for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right reasons. When she does things that seem selfless and self-sacrificing, it's simply because she knows she'll survive them and the people around her won't; there's even, sometimes, a morbid interest in pushing her own boundaries in the hope of finding something that might finally end her life.
She sees mortal life as fleeting and unimportant; she has an ugly tendency to switch off from engagement in human concerns when it suits her, and really needs help from a warden to better manage herself as an immortal. (It's also worth noting that she'd be a terrible warden. Her attitude toward a mortal would be 'who cares what you do; you'll die soon anyway'; towards an immortal, it'd be 'who cares what you do, everyone around you will be dead before any of the consequences start mattering' and that's....kind of a a problematic attitude in itself.)
Abilities/Powers: Since her absorption of an alien medical kit which will 'never stop fixing her', Ashildr has very nearly lost the ability to die and is described as 'functionally immortal'. The Doctor implies that it is still possible for her to die, and Ashildr's response is that they would 'have to be fast'. I would assume that anything which would kill her instantly and do irreparable damage to her body (e.g. death by beheading, extermination by Dalek etc) will still do so. Anything else, she will be able to recover from, and I assume that non-lethal wounds will also heal significantly faster than they would in a normal human, though not instantaneously. As a rule of thumb, anything that would disable a human for a month will put her out of action for a week.
Since this is a passive/non-offensive ability and - on the Barge - only really gives her immunity to the death toll and frees her from needing a warden to request resurrection, I would like her to keep it at full strength.
At her canon point, Ashildr is bonded to the 'Raven' - a kind of spirit called a Quantum Shade - which she uses as a death sentence to those who disobey the law in the community she runs. When locked to a specific person, the Raven will kill whoever the person is locked to - or another individual who agrees to take on the death sentence. It is capable of pursuing its quarry across time and space. Obviously on the Barge, Ashildr will not have access to the Raven at all - though for its shenanigan potential, I would like her to retain the bond, albeit ineffectually. (This leaves her with a dog whistle for a dog which is several planes of reality out of earshot.)
Aptitude-wise, Ashildr puts it this way: it takes ten thousand hours to be an expert at something, and a hundred thousand hours to be the best anyone's ever been. She has had a lot of time. She has presumably been able to pick up many skills over the course of her life, many with regards to languages, weapons and combat. She also seems to remember many of these skills, through practice, though to remember the events of her life and even the names she's used she has to refer to her diaries. By way of a compromise I'd suggest that her episodic memory is human-normal but her procedural memory has developed an unusually high capacity with time.
Personality:
The original Ashildr is worth mentioning. When the Doctor and Clara encounter her in the ninth century, they find a young woman who is aware that she's an outcast; dismissed as too boyish by the girls and as 'just a girl' by the boys, she has a vivid imagination but tempers it with a sense of almost morbid realism. When asked about the outcome of a seemingly unwinnable battle, she doesn't hesitate in saying she believes they'll be 'cut down like corn'; yet she refuses to run away as per the Doctor's advice. She has a strong sense of home and family, and as per the Viking belief system she would rather die in battle than abandon her place and live on the run. She accepts an important role in the Doctor's plan, using a helmet from the Mire - an attacking warrior race - to alter their soldiers' perception without knowing that it carried the risk of killing her. In all likelihood she would have accepted that death - it's the Doctor who doesn't, and he uses the Mire medical kit to make her immortal.
She will never be that person again. By the mid-17th century, Ashildr - having by this point forgotten her first life and needing to be reminded of her original name - had completely given up on the people around her. She's forgotten what sorrow is like, telling the Doctor that 'it all runs out', leaving her behind She is aware that losing her children was agony and watching her loved ones fade away and die was hellish, but only because her diaries tell her so. She was indifferent towards individual human lives and described them as 'blowing away like smoke'; the criminal alter ego she'd taken up was purely to keep herself entertained, although she presumably hurt and even killed people while undertaking those crimes. She'd lived a varied life - a queen at least twice, a soldier at the Battle of Agincourt. Canon bears out that she has travelled extensively in, at least, Europe and the Middle East. When the Doctor asks her how many people she's killed total, she tells him she doesn't know, and seems to genuinely not care. The lives of other humans are so fleeting to her as to be immaterial.
Ashildr perceives her own immortality as being trapped inside her own life, the passage of time on Earth something she has to trudge through, inescapably - forever taking the slow road while she sees the Doctor flitting in and out of her life whenever he pleases. She blames the Doctor, not just for sentencing her to an endless life as a way to assuage his own guilt, but for abandoning her to an infinite life on Earth because they are too similar to travel together. The key difference between herself and the Doctor is that he sees the need for the 'mayflies', the mortals, in his life; she doesn't feel any need for the sense of perspective they provide.
Such was her desperation to be free of the Earth, which she'd travelled extensively and become bored of, that she was once willing to leave Earth with a group of aliens who practiced vivisection on human plague victims and fully intended to use her as an experimental subject on their home planet. She later made a deal with another alien to take her away from Earth, even though she knew that it would cost a human life to do so. She'd selected her (elderly and infirm, but loyal and completely innocent) servant, Clayton, as a victim - only switching to the highwayman Sam Swift because he'd been sentenced to death regardless. Even when the Doctor offers up his psychic paper as a 'pardon from Cromwell', she still killed Swift without regret - it was only when it turned out that she'd been tricked into inviting an invasion force that she showed any remorse.
This is when, abruptly and seemingly for the first time in decades, she admits that she cares about anyone at all. More precisely, Ashildr seems to care for communities, or species as a whole - things which have their own kind of continuity or immortality - far more than individual lives. This bears out into the twenty-first century; by 2015, when she's running a refugee camp in London for aliens who have, by whatever means, become stranded on Earth, there are no lengths she won't go to to defend the peace of that camp. She has a man killed - rather than jailed or exiled - for stealing medical rations to treat his sick wife; she promises the Doctor to the Time Lords in exchange for the safety of the camp, even though ultimately the universe will be a worse place for not having the Doctor in it. She places the life of one of Clara's friends in mortal danger, just as a means of catching the Doctor's attention; ultimately Clara herself is killed when she tries to outwit the Quantum Shade.
Most of her life is spent in pursuit of adventure for two reasons. The first is simply that she has to keep moving before people get suspicious. One of her husbands, she has to abandon after twenty years of marriage because he's growing suspicious that two decades and three children haven't aged her at all. When she tries to help people, using centuries of knowledge and experience, she ends up doing so amid accusations of witchcraft and has presumably survived several attempted executions, including drowning. (By the 17th century she'd more or less stopped trying.) Even her seemingly selfless acts - working in a leper colony, running the London refugee camp - are likely ways of giving herself a place where she can just stop for a while. The second reason is simply to stay stimulated. Novelty and new experiences are priceless to her. Even when she's aware of a real risk to her life, she'll give it a shot, because - what reason would she have not to? The threat of death is as much an inducement as a risk. Even when the Doctor warns her of the horrors that might be in store if she opens a portal to another world, she just sees that as another reason to do it.
Barge Reactions: This will not be Ashildr's first or even her third unexpected appearance on a spaceship. In short, Ashildr has seen too much and lived too long for most of the Barge to faze or even surprise her. The only things that will bother her at all are the floods and breaches, and even they will eventually fade into insignificance because they last such a brief time. She will probably spend some time believing the Admiral is a Time Lord.
(Incidentally, if anyone who remembers Arya Stark mistakes them, she might just shrug and go with it, because at some point in her life she might very well have been Arya Stark. She doesn't remember everything.)
Path to Redemption:
Any warden's first task will be to convince Ashildr what the point is of doing anything to attempt to improve herself. Ashildr will love the Barge. Alien lifeforms, the normalisation of immortality, the constant travels through time and space? Sign her the hell up. True, it's a smaller prison than the entirety of planet Earth but you know what, she'll adjust. It will take a hell of an inducement - not least the promise of a more interesting return destination than Earth 2016 - to get her to shift an inch. And that's if her first few months go well. If they don't, she could be easily drawn into plans to annihilate the Barge altogether because all she's got to worry about is her own death. Which, really, who cares?
After the initial challenge of bringing her on board with redemption as a concept, Ashildr needs to learn that - in a nutshell - the journey is more important than the destination. Life, no matter how fleeting, is more important than the fact it ends - and that her own life has meaning, even though it won't. Her own immortality - the knowledge and insight she's gained from it - can be used to help mortals, not be held aloof and disconnected. Moreover, she herself can learn to derive a sense of satisfaction and happiness from doing good. In the 17th century, she agrees to become the 'patron saint of the Doctor's leftovers', the protector of those he can't or doesn't help, but seems to do this mostly to make a point to the Doctor that he's failed her and many others. It's reactionary and - as borne out by the 21st century - guaranteed to keep her steeping in her own bitterness. She needs to have a more proactive purpose in her life, and perhaps a better gameplan than 'stay on Earth until humans develop interstellar travel'.
It won't necessarily be a hard job but it could be a very long one.
History: Ashildr at the TARDIS Wikia.
This history skips most of the Legends of Ashildr book, which itself acknowledges that the four stories within may not be entirely reliable even when they come from Ashildr's own perspective. This is particularly true of the first story, 'The Arabian Knightmare', where - living as the 'Lady Sherade', wife to the King of Samarkand who had already bored of and killed several short-lived brides, she tells a few stories which described some of her earlier adventures in the region with Sinbad the sailor, living under the name Ash El Dir. And then she poisons him.
'The Triple Knife' is mentioned in the link above and addresses the death of Ashildr's three young children in August 1348. She encounters an alien species - on whom the beak-like 'plague doctor' mask will be modelled by humans - and asks to be taken away from Earth, ostensibly as a test subject. Ultimately she chooses to stay with her children, knowing they will die only a few days later.
'The Fortunate Isles' is set in 1485 Seville, under the name Ash, she stows on board a ship - the Galgo, racing against the San Giorgio for a western route to Asia. On their voyage they pick up Piero, the sole survivor of the plague-stricken San Giorgio, who tells them of the ship's secret voyage to the treasure-laden Fortunate Isles. They agree to change their course, discovering the island, which is filled with gold and jewels as promised. After encounters with strange dog-like men, and some fatal arguments within the crew, Ash and two other survivors learn that the Fortunate Isles are in fact the Makaron, a 'time ship', created in the 30th century to create an 'intertemporal gambling experience'. All three survivors are killed; Ash revives, much to the shock of the gamemakers, and escapes the ship.
'The Ghosts Of Branscombe Wood' is set in the early 1600s; in it, Ashildr (now considering herself only 'Me') encounters a crashed spaceship, using projections of the local humans' memories of their dead loved ones to drive them away from the ship. She unintentionally begins the ship's ignition sequence but it it ultimately destroyed due to damage sustained during its initial crash landing.
Sample Journal Entry:
I understand the theory. I do.
One's life is ended, prematurely. It's tragic, I suppose, but it's a consequence of the morally bankrupt way in which you've chosen to live your life. One more wave dying on the shore, having overlapped so many others. But then you're scooped up, by a man in a ship who offers to give you a second chance, on the understanding that you use it well.
Your second chance. Incalculably precious.
But what if you make a mess of it, and you come back, again? Your second chance becomes your third, fourth, tenth, hundredth. He won't let you go. Every misstep, every mistake, it doesn't matter - the Admiral will just dust you off and try again.
When does it become too much? When does it get to be that the only chance you want is a chance at a clean death?
Sample RP:
Ashildr - this is the name the Admiral uses to refer to her, so she occasionally and reluctantly answers to it - is fascinated by the culture of the ship. The Barge has a yet more ephemeral population than what passes for geographical mobility in the twenty-first century. Nobody has stayed here for more than five years; most people are gone within one, vanishing without trace. It's strangely fascinating, how quickly the history of the place becomes mythology, when a 'generation' of Barge passengers lasts about the lifespan of a small rodent.
The Heart Of The Barge. Little is known about it, save that its visitors are annihilated, haunted as they suffer the toll. She gathers this from scraps of rumour, the written histories on the network, and that tiny number who remember it from experience. A handful have breached the place, only to burn away too fast to effect any worthwhile change. To plunge a blade, so to speak, into the heart. To end the life of the ship.
She's survived ordeals which should have killed her. She's already lived through feeling her heart burnt out of her like an overloaded battery. Could the Mire mend her, faster than the Barge can kill her? It's a curiosity, and a challenge, and the possibility of some form of escape. And these are catnip to Ashildr; irresistible. She cannot slow her pace past the engine room; she cannot bear the temptation.
"These excursions fail because people die," she says to her companion. It's not a question. "Have you tried it with anyone who can't?"