Application
Senshi: Hetaira [Companion] Astraea, Theos Senshi of Innocence
Name: Elke Au
Meaning: Elke: royal, Old German variant of Alice. Au: water valley/stream, South German.
Age: 18
Birthdate: September 21
School/Occupation: Freshman photography major at New York University
Major NPCs:
Gertrud Au (Mutti)
Elke’s mother is a topic that really stresses her out. Gertrud has undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and has an alarming habit of coming into Elke’s life and turning it upside down for the week or two that she’s visiting. She is, to be frank, emotionally (and occasionally physically) abusive, but the unreliability of her affection and attentions makes those things highly prized by Elke.
Adalbert Au (Opa)
Elke’s grandfather is an insurance broker, CEO of a moderately sized company that has been in the Au family since the early 1900s. He has a lot of stories to tell about the War. He is a strict Catholic, and is not speaking to Elke at present, though he continues to pay for her schooling and living expenses.
Hildegard Jackson Au (Oma)
Elke’s grandmother is a professional socialite, sitting on the board of many charitable organizations and having a brick with her name on it on every contributor’s wall. She is slightly more liberal than her husband, but out of respect for him doesn’t communicate overly often with Elke.
Quirin Spellmeyer (Instructor/Friend) (Quirin)
Elke’s one-time lover is the reason she’s in New York and not Munich at present. He was originally her instructor in Ancient Greek, but became protective of (and interested in) her as a result of her less than stellar home life. This affection got a little out of control after she graduated from the gymnasium, and they slept together, leading to Elke’s somewhat ignominous (yet mostly self-imposed) ‘exile’. They email from time to time.
Ivanna Morgenstern (Roommate, New York) (Vanya)
Ivanna Morgenstern, who is generally called Vanya, shares Elke’s room with her. She is a crotchety Classics major, more interested in writing papers about Greek homoeroticism than actually talking to anyone. But she will always take time out of her way to play fashion police, which makes sense, as Vanya generally looks like she tripped and fell out of a Hollywood magazine. Vanya is close friends with the RA, an older guy named Finn Derouen.
Clark Morgan (Best Friend, New York)
Clark doesn’t have a major yet, which he doesn’t mind. His room shares a wall with Elke’s, and their introduction was a little rocky mostly because he has a fondness for blaring loud music at inappropriate hours. However, they share a similar desire to socialize for dumb reasons, and can often be found in each other’s company.
History
Elke was born to Gertrud Au, an 18-year-old university student at Schwabing Hospital in Munich, in late autumn. Gertrud’s parents, Adelbert and Hildegard, didn’t approve of the pregnancy, but, being Catholic, felt that abortion wasn’t an option. Though they had no way of knowing who the father of Gertrud’s baby was (and, being of an earlier generation, feared he was a Jew or worse, black) they insisted (against her wishes) that she carry the child to term. Originally, the plan was to give the baby up for adoption. Gertrud’s parents decided to keep the child, especially since giving it up to an overloaded state care system could lead to rumors of financial instability among their social circle if it got out. Once Gertrud delivered the baby, they allowed her to return to her university in the south of France, where she stayed for the next three years. Elke was baptised in the Catholic faith when she was six weeks old.
As could be expected, Elke was mostly raised by her grandparents: Adalbert was an insurance broker, or he had been before he took over the family’s company, while Hildegard kept busy by holding charity dinners and parties for the upper class of Munich. When Elke wasn’t with one nanny or tutor (unlike many Munchen, she didn’t attend a local kindergarten; she took lessons at home, beginning with basic mathematics, literature, and English) she was with Hildegard. She learned the importance of image at her grandmother’s knee, and because of that she gained a better idea of how to look competent than actually be competent. Between Hildegard and her tutors, Elke picked up knowledge of several ‘feminine’ disciplines, most notably language, philosophy, and art. Even at six, she was a budding socialite, always pleased to be included when her grandmother took her to fancy parties that other children might find boring.
Throughout Elke’s childhood, Gertrud was a rare presence. Elke tried very hard to impress her, often going out of her way to write or send her mother little handmade gifts; however, Gertrud thought of Elke as an anchor weighing her down. Flighty, unwilling to commit, and suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, Elke’s mother was not only unwilling but unable to be there for her daughter. She turned into a source of intense anxiety for Elke. From one visit to the next, Elke had no way of knowing if she would be seeing her exciting, vivacious mother or her hostile, outright abusive one. Time with Gertrud could mean going shopping together and then eating ice cream in the garden, or it could mean going for a drive where Gertrud could not be entirely certain to stay on her side of the road. Despite her intense desire to please her mother, Elke waited for her visits with dread.
At the age of six, she attended a Catholic parochial grundschule, or primary school, the same grundschule that her mother had attended. She proved to be popular among her peers, and though she never quite picked up mathematics, she did pull a small social group together that would attend the same hort, or after-school program, and do their homework together. By this mechanic, she continually pulled down high grades and could fake her way through most mathematics examinations.
When it came time for her to enter the secondary phase of her education, she received the expected recommendation for the Gymnasium, or the ‘most intellectual’ of the German school systems. She attended a state school, though an extremely affluent and highly-ranked one, at her own request; she wanted the wider gamut of classmates and the greater extracurricular opportunities, and also to prove herself in a school that hadn’t had an Au attending it since its founding. As might be expected from her upbringing, she quickly proved herself a popular girl among her classmates. She was elected her class’s female ‘student president’, and represented them on the student council at the monthly meetings. Once she was old enough to stay out on her own and not attend the hort, she often stayed after school to participate in social clubs, or went out to explore Munich with groups of friends. Her favorite clubs were the run club (something like an intramural cross-country team) and the photography club. She also played second flute in the school orchestra, something which displeased her grandfather.
Despite her many successes in school, Elke always felt the absence of her mother very keenly. While she dreaded Gertrud’s visits, she looked forward to them almost as much, because her mother was her only possible opportunity to find out about the whole half of her family that she was missing. There was nowhere else that she could go to find out anything about her father, or where she’d come from, or if her parents had loved each other. Though Gertrud’s only comments about her father weren’t encouraging (most indicated that Gertrud didn’t even know) Elke still held out hope. She felt like her grandparents never quite accepted her because of her mother’s indiscretions, and that her father’s family was her only real hope of finding actual family.
Though Elke was adept at hiding the problems that she faced at home, she couldn’t hide her deep and overwhelming desire for attention and approval. Most of her teachers, older and more experienced by far, kept their relationships with her affirming, but within accepted boundaries. When things at home got terrifying—a rare occasion that always coincided with one of Gertrud’s visits home—Elke felt she could rely on her instructors to handle her a little more gently than they otherwise would have.
However, her Ancient Greek instructor, a Mr. Quirin Spellmeyer, was new to the art of teaching, and hadn’t had much experience with just where to draw the line. He treated her preferentially compared to other students, at first due to her ability level, but as her facility with languages became more obvious, he offered her private lessons after school. This wasn’t a problem, usually, as long as these were conducted within the structure of the school or of a hort. And at first, they were. Then, as Elke’s scores rose even higher than they’d already been, the other students became jealous. Rather than doing the sensible thing and opening the extra lessons to all the students in his class, Quirin took the lessons off school grounds.
This seemed to shatter some unbroken boundary. At sixteen, Elke was well old enough to consent to a relationship with anyone she pleased, and Quirin wasn’t that much older than she. Their meetings, which had then been going on for almost two years, left the pretense of practicing Greek behind. Instead they talked about the symphony, or a new movie they’d seen, or sat together in one of the little public ways along the Isar and watched the boats on the water. She confided the things that happened at home to him, though she downplayed almost all of them and never really indicated the depth of her grandparents’ benign ignorance of Gertrud’s illness, or the way that illness affected Elke personally. While the relationship couldn’t be called appropriate—he was still her instructor—it was still the first truly healthy relationship Elke had ever had with someone outside her peer group in her life, one that was in no way based on fear. Quirin was more friend than teacher.
And while she was in school, ‘under his care’ as the expression went, it stayed that way. Quirin and Elke’s relationship remained nebulously chaste, though punctuated by several incidences where nothing went much further than kissing. Elke told herself that it was because they valued their friendship too much, but if she were honest she probably would have admitted to herself that she didn’t really want to sleep with Quirin. Though she considered him in no way a father or brother figure, there was something almost sacred about Quirin that denied any attempt to think of him as something more than her very good friend. And if sometimes he took comforting her a little too far, that was fine, because at least he still cared.
She took her Abitur, the exit exams required of all German students, when she was seventeen. Though she no longer had the excuse of her Greek lessons to meet up with Quirin, she also no longer had the ‘student-teacher’ relationship to define where and when she couldn’t be seen with him. Her intentions were innocent, in that she liked the attention and praise he gave her. To be honest, she spent time with Quirin for the same reasons she spent time with her peers, and often they did the same things. He helped her compose her English-language essays for the American universities her expatriate grandmother recommended, even though at that point Elke was more fluent than he. They studied to take the TOEFL test together, spending more time together almost to the exclusion of all others—though of course Elke did still socialize with her peers. Shortly before Easter, after they’d collated all of her acceptance letters, they slept together. Only the once, but once was enough.
In April, right before the deadline to send her acceptance letters, the story of her relationship with Quirin came out. Not to the whole school, no, but to her grandparents and her mother and their social circle. The retelling had lost several details, such as the fact that it had only been once, and after she’d completed her Abitur. Common perception said she’d been sleeping with Quirin since she was sixteen. Common perception also said that that was why her grades in his class were so good. While her family was not generally church-going, Elke was still baptised and confirmed in the Catholic church, just like everyone else in her social circle. It wasn’t the age difference or the institutional relationship that shocked her grandparents’ friends, though it certainly added to the drama; it was the fact that Elke had slept with him, with no ring on her finger. In the face of social censure, her grandparents demanded she accept the place she’d been offered at New York University. Knowing that Quirin had been given a similar ultimatum to give up his position at the gymnasium or have the whole thing publicised, Elke consented. Her friendship with Quirin was essentially over, and she also had to contend with the threat that if she didn’t, her grandparents would cut her off. While she knew that her score on the Abitur guaranteed her a university placement, she also knew that her family was the only way she’d ever find out about her father. To keep the peace, and keep that avenue open, she said goodbye to her school-friends and, clandestinely, to Quirin, and began her study of photography in the fall of 2013.
Upon arriving in New York, she had to deal with a couple of huge changes; being raised in her grandparents’ household didn’t severely impede her ability to care for herself, but it did make it rough for Elke to handle living in close quarters with others. She had turned down the opportunity to have a single room, believing that she wanted to get the real ‘American college experience’. What ended up happening was she was paired with a young woman reading the Classics. Ivanna Morgenstern, call her Vanya, was a strict and prudish young woman with an overdeveloped sense of personal space. Their other roommate, Clark, who had had the sense to get a single room when it was offered to him, said “Vanya is literally the fashion police.” (This, Elke found out upon being subjected to a sardonic wardrobe critique, was true.) It ended up that Elke spent more time with Clark during Orientation, uncertainly fielding questions about growing up in Munich.
But really, there was only so long that Elke could play shrinking, least-in-sight flower, no matter what shameful circumstances she had left behind her. Within a few weeks, she had become a fixture of as many clubs and societies as she could fit into her schedule, and many she couldn’t, but tried valiantly anyway. Currently, her focus is making enough friends and acquiring enough responsibility that she doesn’t have time to worry about what her Munich social circle thinks of her. In this, she will probably not be successful. She still trades emails with Quirin and her friends in Munich, which probably doesn’t help.
Personality
The first impression people tend to get from Elke is that she’s a social butterfly and about as shallow as a teaspoon, with the emotional depth that would imply. They’re not necessarily wrong; Elke is really very social, and belongs to a large amount of clubs and social groups. She very rarely spends an entire night at home, tending to get home from her extracurriculars at around two or three in the morning and get up again for more extracurriculars at eight. This tends to run her a little ragged, and also means that she’s prone to falling asleep in weird places—like in class. Or in the library, at a desk, during study group. Usually she tries to take at least a little nap during the lunch break, but if there’s a social engagement she feels she must attend, she will. When she starts feeling actually sick, she tends to invent a reason to have a movie night in her dorm and fall asleep on the four or five friends she’s invited over for the occasion. (Elke is often a huge proponent of sleepovers.) If she’s ever in her dorm room, she has some friend over to entertain. Elke attaches a lot of value to appearances, a lot of value to the gesture of an action rather than the person behind it or the actual content of the action itself. She values presentation over fact, the beautiful lie over the hard truth. If what she’s told is agreeable to her, she’s not going to look closer or peel back the layers, because she knows from experience that the truth is going to hurt her.
This unwillingness to see the uglier side of things tends to lend her an easy loyalty; she gives her affections easily, at the smallest of gestures, and wholly. When Elke says she trusts you, she means with her life. When she says she loves you, she means with everything she is. Elke is that friend who will get up at one thirty in the morning to pick you up from the Bronx. She will turn up to help you glue a thousand tiny beads to the trim of a skirt. And she is always up for long, emotional talks (which, of course, you will be the main contributor to). She says she loves a lot of people, which sometimes makes people assume that she’s completely insincere about it. These people get to know her and they realize that Elke really means it, usually around the time she’s gotten up at four to proofread their math paper.
Being one of those people who appears to have no issues or inner life, she of course has a very powerful personal mythology. She ignores the ugly things that happen in real life because she’s already so busy imagining bad things that could happen to her or blowing minor inconveniences up into massive issues that she doesn’t have time for the actual issues in her life. These issues (both imagined and real) do impact her relationships with people, but not usually for long; she is easily pacified after being hurt by some imagined transgressions, but she is also very easy to hurt. Often, she will still go out of her way (extremely so) for people who she thinks still want her around; but if she thinks you hate her and never want to see her again, she stays gone until you indicate otherwise.
When she gets mad at someone, she internalizes it; often there’s no outward retaliation for a perceived crime against her. What there is is a truly remarkable amount of passive aggression, backhanded compliments, and social snubs. Nothing that could be pointed to on its own as proof that Elke’s mad at you, but her actions form a pattern pretty fast and pretty unsubtly. Once confronted, Elke will try to deny her actions, but, after a few go-rounds, she can be coaxed into admitting her problem. Often, a simple ‘sorry’ and a hug is enough to return someone to her good graces. In the most extreme cases, promises of a “just the two of us” day is necessary, but—in her heart, Elke just wants to be friends with everyone, and if you’re willing to put in just a little effort, she’s willing to throw in everything she is.
Her leaps of logic in social interactions tend towards minimizing actual bad things that happen (such as instances of emotional and physical abuse from her bipolar mother: ‘She was just very excited to share the Alps with me, she didn’t mean to frighten me’) and maximizing small annoyances (‘If I’m late for class, the teacher will hate me, he won’t critique my work, and I’ll fail everything and have to go back to Munich where I’ll be a social pariah forever’). This gets her called things like ‘drama queen’ and the people who use this term for her are not wrong. She doesn’t consider herself the star of her own story, but she does consider herself an extra in others’ stories, and occasionally gets really sad about it.
Elke loves to socialize and be around people. She gets pumped up for spending time with others, especially people she doesn’t know; she creates reasons to hang out if there’s nothing in particular going on. In a classroom setting, Elke is the first one to get up for the icebreaker activity. In a social setting, she will be the first on the dance floor or the one to try to wheedle a conversation out of any wallflower that catches her attention. She isn’t hesitant about new people and she throws herself wholeheartedly into social situations. She attempts to speak the foreign language menu items at restaurants, and talks to the waiter about their Broadway ambitions. However, she’s also sensitive to the setting she’s in; she’s adept at picking up social cues, though she often over-reacts to negativity and takes it as a wish for her, personally, to go away. Her ego is easily bruised, but also easily fixed (usually). Even if she’s still hurt by something you did, after a few platitudes she will smile and pretend to feel alright about you.
Appearance
Elke must look a lot like her unknown father, because she really doesn’t look much like her mother. Her hair is pale cornsilk-blonde, work in a curly mop-top that has more in common with a loose bob than a pixie cut, for all it really straddles that line. Her skin is naturally darker than someone would expect from a pure German, closer to an olive tan than milky white. Her green eyes are round but slightly slanted, hinting at Arabic ancestry; she has a tiny, pointed nose and a round baby-face that she inherited from her grandmother. Elke is all-over smallish, standing at about 157.5cm (5’2”) and weighing about fifty-five kilograms (120lbs).
Elke is extremely image conscious. Having been accused, upon her arrival at NYU, of looking too much like a magazine cutout, she has adapted her wardrobe to match those of her roommates and best friends: now, rather than looking like an escapee from Vogue, she looks like she mugged a model for Forever 21 or H&M and stole their wardrobe. She still enjoys bright, saturated colors and big floral prints; she doesn’t go in much for stripes or geometrics, although of course if it gets her accepted then she’s all for it. She is adept at throwing together cute outfits quickly, even though very few of them match her personal tastes. If she thought she could get away with it in her social circle, she’d dress a lot older—more late-twenties socialite businesswoman than late-teens hipster art major. Though she doesn’t require glasses to correct her vision, she has a few pairs (sans lenses), firstly because all of her friends wear them and secondly because she thinks they make her look artsy. She likes to wear tall heels and cute boots (with heels or lifts) because she desperately wants to be tall. She also likes to wear tight knit hats because then her hair flips up around the hem and again—they make her look artsy.
As might be expected, Elke spends a lot of time on her hair and face—she loves experimenting with makeup, although usually she only does this with friends and sticks to tried-and-true styles for her everyday. She can pick out decent outfits on the fly, and with ten extra minutes can come up with something exciting and interesting.
Elke has a few miscellaneous scars on her hands, arms, and legs from childhood misadventure; none are particularly noticeable. She doesn’t have freckles, but she does have a birthmark on her left shoulder blade.
Fuku
The base of Astraea’s fuku is an Ionic chiton, laced under her breasts. It fades from pure white to a light spring green as it moves from the top of the fuku to the bottom. There is a pale purple bow at her back, with trailing ribbons, and a matching underskirt. The underskirt is veined with bronze thread, giving it an iridescent appearance. The edges of her sleeves and the ombre overskirt have bronze thread as a thin strip of trim. She has a bronze double circlet as her tiara, star-shaped bronze clips to hold her sleeves together, and earrings modeled after sheaves of wheat (in bronze, of course). Her shoes are heeled Grecian sandals, laced to the knee. She wears a gossamer veil over her hair.
Transformation
Astraea’s transformation begins with the phrase “Astraea, return.” Her relic, a gossamer veil, makes a momentary transition to a soft spring green light, which envelops Astraea completely and then expands and vanishes, leaving her fuku behind. The entire transformation takes about ten seconds; at the end, her relic makes its appearance again, as the veil of Astraea’s fuku.
Powers
“Celestial Purity” - Astraea’s first power is innate. It can be summed up as ‘protective aura’: People just see Astraea as helpless, pure, and good. Generally, they think she’s clean as the driven snow. Mostly, they presume she’s innocent of things that she may not be innocent of, and most people find it hard to act antagonistically towards her. Speaking from the general accepted values of good and bad, good people want to help her and bad people at least hesitate before hurting her. This power has no actual physical effect; it can’t absorb damage or deflect it. Instead, the focus is on heading off attacks by making her too dear to hurt.
“Immaculate Reflection” - Astraea’s second power is the ability to grant her protective aura to others. This isn’t a transferral of her aura from herself to someone else. It’s a completely new instance of the aura that Astraea can maintain for up to ten minutes a day, and it grants one other person Astraea’s helpless and innocent vibe. There is an added effect of damage transference: Astraea can take on the damage done to the person with whom she shares her aura. These injuries do not go away when she stops sharing her aura with the other person. She cannot use this power to defend civilians, but she can use it on senshi of any allegiance.
Explanation
Astraea, also known as Dike, called the ‘celestial virgin’ by mythology nuts, is equally associated with innocence, justice, and the stars. She was the last of the Greek pantheon to leave the mortal plane, according to Ovid. She departed during the Iron Age, whereas the other gods left during the Bronze. Because she remained among men for so long, Zeus placed her likeness in the stars as the constellation Virgo. According to Aratus, she was the last to leave and will be the first to return. Her transformation phrase refers to this particular bit of her mythology.
As ‘innocence’ is not a particularly fertile sphere (at least for me) I thought it best to go with a simple protection concept—a lot of societal taboos involve the ‘loss of innocence’, and a power that might prevent that seemed like a solid choice for a goddess associated with purity. Later on, she might get some powers which can cleanse illness from others: return them to a pure, newborn state, such as it were. But for now, I wanted to keep things simple.
Astraea’s fuku is loosely based off an earlier incarnation of her. The bodice/skirt/etc came about from the ionic chiton; Greek maidens sometimes wore veils to cover their hair. Pale springtime green is often associated with renewal and rebirth, which I thought were fitting for a senshi of innocence. I just like lavender when paired with pale green. The star decorations are meant to reference Astraea’s place as the celestial virgin.
Elke came about separately from her alternate self, but I think her continuing decisions to see people as good and well-meaning and her inability to keep an eye out for hidden motives are a good fit for a senshi of innocence.
Writing Sample
One awful night, not long after she got to New York, Elke woke up to absolutely nothing except the yellow glow of the streetlights outside her dorm window. She stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, felt her ears prick up like some kind of animal. Below her and to the side, Vanya wheezed through her seasonal allergies, a reassuring sound not unlike the whirr of a fan or the shudder of an old A/C unit (two sounds she’d become very familiar with in her relationship with Quirin), and then sneezed. In the silence, Elke waited to hear whatever it was that had woken her, but: nothing, for several long minutes that she did not count. There was nothing for it, she concluded, but to go investigate. So she slid uncertainly down the lifts of her lofted bed, only to hit the ground a little harder than she’d meant to.
“Go back to sleep, Elke,” Vanya said, her voice nasally and muffled by a pillow to the face. “It’s like, four in the morning.”
“Sorry,” Elke whispered, and Vanya harrumphed and rolled over, pulled the covers tight to her chest.
Elke didn’t go back to bed. She padded as quietly as she could to the door, where she pressed her ear tight against the wood. It felt like every fiber of her being were focused on what lay outside in the hallway. I’m being ridiculous, she thought, there’s nothing there. And there wasn’t. She couldn’t hear any other voice, any other living being, not the RA or Mori or anyone else from the floor. Just Vanya’s labored breathing and her own and underneath all that, a silence so total that it was unnerving.
“Gehen wieder schlafen, Elke,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep. Nothing there.” It was just nerves, she told herself as she hauled herself back into her lofted bed. She wasn’t used to sleeping around so many people, more used to rattling around like a pea in a too-large house. And it was just odd, that was all. She kept waiting for people to come in. “Nicht da,” she mumbled, pulling the covers up to her chin.
She couldn’t shake the idea that, just outside the door, some phantom had taken up residence once more. Elke stayed awake until golden sunlight came through the blinds and Vanya rolled out of bed to make her morning coffee. Only then did she feel safe enough to sleep.
Completed RP Links
http://forums.bloodrites.net/chaillot-38/you-can’t-bleed-what’s-already-bled/ - Jean-Isidore Lazare
http://forums.bloodrites.net/pruul-42/take-these-hands-and-hold-me-close/ - Saiph al-Kaid
http://forums.bloodrites.net/pruul-42/uncloud-the-sky/ - Saiph al-Kaid
Questionnaire
Name: Reid
E-mail: xxxxxx
Homepage: (optional)
Referred by: Uh I live w/ u
Other RPGs: Blood Rites, linked above. I play a fuck ton of guys there: Jean-Isidore Lazare, Saiph al-Kaid, Claudia Genadie, Aleister Florin, Ignacio de Leon, Iskander Khaldun, Leonide Pascal, Nova Marzena, Obscenity Falk, Robin Free, Schulyer Shepard, Sherlock Skaarsen, Sebastien Bane, and Tanner Langston are just the somewhat active ones… urp.
View Application: Sure
Name: Elke Au
Meaning: Elke: royal, Old German variant of Alice. Au: water valley/stream, South German.
Age: 18
Birthdate: September 21
School/Occupation: Freshman photography major at New York University
Major NPCs:
Gertrud Au (Mutti)
Elke’s mother is a topic that really stresses her out. Gertrud has undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and has an alarming habit of coming into Elke’s life and turning it upside down for the week or two that she’s visiting. She is, to be frank, emotionally (and occasionally physically) abusive, but the unreliability of her affection and attentions makes those things highly prized by Elke.
Adalbert Au (Opa)
Elke’s grandfather is an insurance broker, CEO of a moderately sized company that has been in the Au family since the early 1900s. He has a lot of stories to tell about the War. He is a strict Catholic, and is not speaking to Elke at present, though he continues to pay for her schooling and living expenses.
Hildegard Jackson Au (Oma)
Elke’s grandmother is a professional socialite, sitting on the board of many charitable organizations and having a brick with her name on it on every contributor’s wall. She is slightly more liberal than her husband, but out of respect for him doesn’t communicate overly often with Elke.
Quirin Spellmeyer (Instructor/Friend) (Quirin)
Elke’s one-time lover is the reason she’s in New York and not Munich at present. He was originally her instructor in Ancient Greek, but became protective of (and interested in) her as a result of her less than stellar home life. This affection got a little out of control after she graduated from the gymnasium, and they slept together, leading to Elke’s somewhat ignominous (yet mostly self-imposed) ‘exile’. They email from time to time.
Ivanna Morgenstern (Roommate, New York) (Vanya)
Ivanna Morgenstern, who is generally called Vanya, shares Elke’s room with her. She is a crotchety Classics major, more interested in writing papers about Greek homoeroticism than actually talking to anyone. But she will always take time out of her way to play fashion police, which makes sense, as Vanya generally looks like she tripped and fell out of a Hollywood magazine. Vanya is close friends with the RA, an older guy named Finn Derouen.
Clark Morgan (Best Friend, New York)
Clark doesn’t have a major yet, which he doesn’t mind. His room shares a wall with Elke’s, and their introduction was a little rocky mostly because he has a fondness for blaring loud music at inappropriate hours. However, they share a similar desire to socialize for dumb reasons, and can often be found in each other’s company.
History
Elke was born to Gertrud Au, an 18-year-old university student at Schwabing Hospital in Munich, in late autumn. Gertrud’s parents, Adelbert and Hildegard, didn’t approve of the pregnancy, but, being Catholic, felt that abortion wasn’t an option. Though they had no way of knowing who the father of Gertrud’s baby was (and, being of an earlier generation, feared he was a Jew or worse, black) they insisted (against her wishes) that she carry the child to term. Originally, the plan was to give the baby up for adoption. Gertrud’s parents decided to keep the child, especially since giving it up to an overloaded state care system could lead to rumors of financial instability among their social circle if it got out. Once Gertrud delivered the baby, they allowed her to return to her university in the south of France, where she stayed for the next three years. Elke was baptised in the Catholic faith when she was six weeks old.
As could be expected, Elke was mostly raised by her grandparents: Adalbert was an insurance broker, or he had been before he took over the family’s company, while Hildegard kept busy by holding charity dinners and parties for the upper class of Munich. When Elke wasn’t with one nanny or tutor (unlike many Munchen, she didn’t attend a local kindergarten; she took lessons at home, beginning with basic mathematics, literature, and English) she was with Hildegard. She learned the importance of image at her grandmother’s knee, and because of that she gained a better idea of how to look competent than actually be competent. Between Hildegard and her tutors, Elke picked up knowledge of several ‘feminine’ disciplines, most notably language, philosophy, and art. Even at six, she was a budding socialite, always pleased to be included when her grandmother took her to fancy parties that other children might find boring.
Throughout Elke’s childhood, Gertrud was a rare presence. Elke tried very hard to impress her, often going out of her way to write or send her mother little handmade gifts; however, Gertrud thought of Elke as an anchor weighing her down. Flighty, unwilling to commit, and suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, Elke’s mother was not only unwilling but unable to be there for her daughter. She turned into a source of intense anxiety for Elke. From one visit to the next, Elke had no way of knowing if she would be seeing her exciting, vivacious mother or her hostile, outright abusive one. Time with Gertrud could mean going shopping together and then eating ice cream in the garden, or it could mean going for a drive where Gertrud could not be entirely certain to stay on her side of the road. Despite her intense desire to please her mother, Elke waited for her visits with dread.
At the age of six, she attended a Catholic parochial grundschule, or primary school, the same grundschule that her mother had attended. She proved to be popular among her peers, and though she never quite picked up mathematics, she did pull a small social group together that would attend the same hort, or after-school program, and do their homework together. By this mechanic, she continually pulled down high grades and could fake her way through most mathematics examinations.
When it came time for her to enter the secondary phase of her education, she received the expected recommendation for the Gymnasium, or the ‘most intellectual’ of the German school systems. She attended a state school, though an extremely affluent and highly-ranked one, at her own request; she wanted the wider gamut of classmates and the greater extracurricular opportunities, and also to prove herself in a school that hadn’t had an Au attending it since its founding. As might be expected from her upbringing, she quickly proved herself a popular girl among her classmates. She was elected her class’s female ‘student president’, and represented them on the student council at the monthly meetings. Once she was old enough to stay out on her own and not attend the hort, she often stayed after school to participate in social clubs, or went out to explore Munich with groups of friends. Her favorite clubs were the run club (something like an intramural cross-country team) and the photography club. She also played second flute in the school orchestra, something which displeased her grandfather.
Despite her many successes in school, Elke always felt the absence of her mother very keenly. While she dreaded Gertrud’s visits, she looked forward to them almost as much, because her mother was her only possible opportunity to find out about the whole half of her family that she was missing. There was nowhere else that she could go to find out anything about her father, or where she’d come from, or if her parents had loved each other. Though Gertrud’s only comments about her father weren’t encouraging (most indicated that Gertrud didn’t even know) Elke still held out hope. She felt like her grandparents never quite accepted her because of her mother’s indiscretions, and that her father’s family was her only real hope of finding actual family.
Though Elke was adept at hiding the problems that she faced at home, she couldn’t hide her deep and overwhelming desire for attention and approval. Most of her teachers, older and more experienced by far, kept their relationships with her affirming, but within accepted boundaries. When things at home got terrifying—a rare occasion that always coincided with one of Gertrud’s visits home—Elke felt she could rely on her instructors to handle her a little more gently than they otherwise would have.
However, her Ancient Greek instructor, a Mr. Quirin Spellmeyer, was new to the art of teaching, and hadn’t had much experience with just where to draw the line. He treated her preferentially compared to other students, at first due to her ability level, but as her facility with languages became more obvious, he offered her private lessons after school. This wasn’t a problem, usually, as long as these were conducted within the structure of the school or of a hort. And at first, they were. Then, as Elke’s scores rose even higher than they’d already been, the other students became jealous. Rather than doing the sensible thing and opening the extra lessons to all the students in his class, Quirin took the lessons off school grounds.
This seemed to shatter some unbroken boundary. At sixteen, Elke was well old enough to consent to a relationship with anyone she pleased, and Quirin wasn’t that much older than she. Their meetings, which had then been going on for almost two years, left the pretense of practicing Greek behind. Instead they talked about the symphony, or a new movie they’d seen, or sat together in one of the little public ways along the Isar and watched the boats on the water. She confided the things that happened at home to him, though she downplayed almost all of them and never really indicated the depth of her grandparents’ benign ignorance of Gertrud’s illness, or the way that illness affected Elke personally. While the relationship couldn’t be called appropriate—he was still her instructor—it was still the first truly healthy relationship Elke had ever had with someone outside her peer group in her life, one that was in no way based on fear. Quirin was more friend than teacher.
And while she was in school, ‘under his care’ as the expression went, it stayed that way. Quirin and Elke’s relationship remained nebulously chaste, though punctuated by several incidences where nothing went much further than kissing. Elke told herself that it was because they valued their friendship too much, but if she were honest she probably would have admitted to herself that she didn’t really want to sleep with Quirin. Though she considered him in no way a father or brother figure, there was something almost sacred about Quirin that denied any attempt to think of him as something more than her very good friend. And if sometimes he took comforting her a little too far, that was fine, because at least he still cared.
She took her Abitur, the exit exams required of all German students, when she was seventeen. Though she no longer had the excuse of her Greek lessons to meet up with Quirin, she also no longer had the ‘student-teacher’ relationship to define where and when she couldn’t be seen with him. Her intentions were innocent, in that she liked the attention and praise he gave her. To be honest, she spent time with Quirin for the same reasons she spent time with her peers, and often they did the same things. He helped her compose her English-language essays for the American universities her expatriate grandmother recommended, even though at that point Elke was more fluent than he. They studied to take the TOEFL test together, spending more time together almost to the exclusion of all others—though of course Elke did still socialize with her peers. Shortly before Easter, after they’d collated all of her acceptance letters, they slept together. Only the once, but once was enough.
In April, right before the deadline to send her acceptance letters, the story of her relationship with Quirin came out. Not to the whole school, no, but to her grandparents and her mother and their social circle. The retelling had lost several details, such as the fact that it had only been once, and after she’d completed her Abitur. Common perception said she’d been sleeping with Quirin since she was sixteen. Common perception also said that that was why her grades in his class were so good. While her family was not generally church-going, Elke was still baptised and confirmed in the Catholic church, just like everyone else in her social circle. It wasn’t the age difference or the institutional relationship that shocked her grandparents’ friends, though it certainly added to the drama; it was the fact that Elke had slept with him, with no ring on her finger. In the face of social censure, her grandparents demanded she accept the place she’d been offered at New York University. Knowing that Quirin had been given a similar ultimatum to give up his position at the gymnasium or have the whole thing publicised, Elke consented. Her friendship with Quirin was essentially over, and she also had to contend with the threat that if she didn’t, her grandparents would cut her off. While she knew that her score on the Abitur guaranteed her a university placement, she also knew that her family was the only way she’d ever find out about her father. To keep the peace, and keep that avenue open, she said goodbye to her school-friends and, clandestinely, to Quirin, and began her study of photography in the fall of 2013.
Upon arriving in New York, she had to deal with a couple of huge changes; being raised in her grandparents’ household didn’t severely impede her ability to care for herself, but it did make it rough for Elke to handle living in close quarters with others. She had turned down the opportunity to have a single room, believing that she wanted to get the real ‘American college experience’. What ended up happening was she was paired with a young woman reading the Classics. Ivanna Morgenstern, call her Vanya, was a strict and prudish young woman with an overdeveloped sense of personal space. Their other roommate, Clark, who had had the sense to get a single room when it was offered to him, said “Vanya is literally the fashion police.” (This, Elke found out upon being subjected to a sardonic wardrobe critique, was true.) It ended up that Elke spent more time with Clark during Orientation, uncertainly fielding questions about growing up in Munich.
But really, there was only so long that Elke could play shrinking, least-in-sight flower, no matter what shameful circumstances she had left behind her. Within a few weeks, she had become a fixture of as many clubs and societies as she could fit into her schedule, and many she couldn’t, but tried valiantly anyway. Currently, her focus is making enough friends and acquiring enough responsibility that she doesn’t have time to worry about what her Munich social circle thinks of her. In this, she will probably not be successful. She still trades emails with Quirin and her friends in Munich, which probably doesn’t help.
Personality
The first impression people tend to get from Elke is that she’s a social butterfly and about as shallow as a teaspoon, with the emotional depth that would imply. They’re not necessarily wrong; Elke is really very social, and belongs to a large amount of clubs and social groups. She very rarely spends an entire night at home, tending to get home from her extracurriculars at around two or three in the morning and get up again for more extracurriculars at eight. This tends to run her a little ragged, and also means that she’s prone to falling asleep in weird places—like in class. Or in the library, at a desk, during study group. Usually she tries to take at least a little nap during the lunch break, but if there’s a social engagement she feels she must attend, she will. When she starts feeling actually sick, she tends to invent a reason to have a movie night in her dorm and fall asleep on the four or five friends she’s invited over for the occasion. (Elke is often a huge proponent of sleepovers.) If she’s ever in her dorm room, she has some friend over to entertain. Elke attaches a lot of value to appearances, a lot of value to the gesture of an action rather than the person behind it or the actual content of the action itself. She values presentation over fact, the beautiful lie over the hard truth. If what she’s told is agreeable to her, she’s not going to look closer or peel back the layers, because she knows from experience that the truth is going to hurt her.
This unwillingness to see the uglier side of things tends to lend her an easy loyalty; she gives her affections easily, at the smallest of gestures, and wholly. When Elke says she trusts you, she means with her life. When she says she loves you, she means with everything she is. Elke is that friend who will get up at one thirty in the morning to pick you up from the Bronx. She will turn up to help you glue a thousand tiny beads to the trim of a skirt. And she is always up for long, emotional talks (which, of course, you will be the main contributor to). She says she loves a lot of people, which sometimes makes people assume that she’s completely insincere about it. These people get to know her and they realize that Elke really means it, usually around the time she’s gotten up at four to proofread their math paper.
Being one of those people who appears to have no issues or inner life, she of course has a very powerful personal mythology. She ignores the ugly things that happen in real life because she’s already so busy imagining bad things that could happen to her or blowing minor inconveniences up into massive issues that she doesn’t have time for the actual issues in her life. These issues (both imagined and real) do impact her relationships with people, but not usually for long; she is easily pacified after being hurt by some imagined transgressions, but she is also very easy to hurt. Often, she will still go out of her way (extremely so) for people who she thinks still want her around; but if she thinks you hate her and never want to see her again, she stays gone until you indicate otherwise.
When she gets mad at someone, she internalizes it; often there’s no outward retaliation for a perceived crime against her. What there is is a truly remarkable amount of passive aggression, backhanded compliments, and social snubs. Nothing that could be pointed to on its own as proof that Elke’s mad at you, but her actions form a pattern pretty fast and pretty unsubtly. Once confronted, Elke will try to deny her actions, but, after a few go-rounds, she can be coaxed into admitting her problem. Often, a simple ‘sorry’ and a hug is enough to return someone to her good graces. In the most extreme cases, promises of a “just the two of us” day is necessary, but—in her heart, Elke just wants to be friends with everyone, and if you’re willing to put in just a little effort, she’s willing to throw in everything she is.
Her leaps of logic in social interactions tend towards minimizing actual bad things that happen (such as instances of emotional and physical abuse from her bipolar mother: ‘She was just very excited to share the Alps with me, she didn’t mean to frighten me’) and maximizing small annoyances (‘If I’m late for class, the teacher will hate me, he won’t critique my work, and I’ll fail everything and have to go back to Munich where I’ll be a social pariah forever’). This gets her called things like ‘drama queen’ and the people who use this term for her are not wrong. She doesn’t consider herself the star of her own story, but she does consider herself an extra in others’ stories, and occasionally gets really sad about it.
Elke loves to socialize and be around people. She gets pumped up for spending time with others, especially people she doesn’t know; she creates reasons to hang out if there’s nothing in particular going on. In a classroom setting, Elke is the first one to get up for the icebreaker activity. In a social setting, she will be the first on the dance floor or the one to try to wheedle a conversation out of any wallflower that catches her attention. She isn’t hesitant about new people and she throws herself wholeheartedly into social situations. She attempts to speak the foreign language menu items at restaurants, and talks to the waiter about their Broadway ambitions. However, she’s also sensitive to the setting she’s in; she’s adept at picking up social cues, though she often over-reacts to negativity and takes it as a wish for her, personally, to go away. Her ego is easily bruised, but also easily fixed (usually). Even if she’s still hurt by something you did, after a few platitudes she will smile and pretend to feel alright about you.
Appearance
Elke must look a lot like her unknown father, because she really doesn’t look much like her mother. Her hair is pale cornsilk-blonde, work in a curly mop-top that has more in common with a loose bob than a pixie cut, for all it really straddles that line. Her skin is naturally darker than someone would expect from a pure German, closer to an olive tan than milky white. Her green eyes are round but slightly slanted, hinting at Arabic ancestry; she has a tiny, pointed nose and a round baby-face that she inherited from her grandmother. Elke is all-over smallish, standing at about 157.5cm (5’2”) and weighing about fifty-five kilograms (120lbs).
Elke is extremely image conscious. Having been accused, upon her arrival at NYU, of looking too much like a magazine cutout, she has adapted her wardrobe to match those of her roommates and best friends: now, rather than looking like an escapee from Vogue, she looks like she mugged a model for Forever 21 or H&M and stole their wardrobe. She still enjoys bright, saturated colors and big floral prints; she doesn’t go in much for stripes or geometrics, although of course if it gets her accepted then she’s all for it. She is adept at throwing together cute outfits quickly, even though very few of them match her personal tastes. If she thought she could get away with it in her social circle, she’d dress a lot older—more late-twenties socialite businesswoman than late-teens hipster art major. Though she doesn’t require glasses to correct her vision, she has a few pairs (sans lenses), firstly because all of her friends wear them and secondly because she thinks they make her look artsy. She likes to wear tall heels and cute boots (with heels or lifts) because she desperately wants to be tall. She also likes to wear tight knit hats because then her hair flips up around the hem and again—they make her look artsy.
As might be expected, Elke spends a lot of time on her hair and face—she loves experimenting with makeup, although usually she only does this with friends and sticks to tried-and-true styles for her everyday. She can pick out decent outfits on the fly, and with ten extra minutes can come up with something exciting and interesting.
Elke has a few miscellaneous scars on her hands, arms, and legs from childhood misadventure; none are particularly noticeable. She doesn’t have freckles, but she does have a birthmark on her left shoulder blade.
Fuku
The base of Astraea’s fuku is an Ionic chiton, laced under her breasts. It fades from pure white to a light spring green as it moves from the top of the fuku to the bottom. There is a pale purple bow at her back, with trailing ribbons, and a matching underskirt. The underskirt is veined with bronze thread, giving it an iridescent appearance. The edges of her sleeves and the ombre overskirt have bronze thread as a thin strip of trim. She has a bronze double circlet as her tiara, star-shaped bronze clips to hold her sleeves together, and earrings modeled after sheaves of wheat (in bronze, of course). Her shoes are heeled Grecian sandals, laced to the knee. She wears a gossamer veil over her hair.
Transformation
Astraea’s transformation begins with the phrase “Astraea, return.” Her relic, a gossamer veil, makes a momentary transition to a soft spring green light, which envelops Astraea completely and then expands and vanishes, leaving her fuku behind. The entire transformation takes about ten seconds; at the end, her relic makes its appearance again, as the veil of Astraea’s fuku.
Powers
“Celestial Purity” - Astraea’s first power is innate. It can be summed up as ‘protective aura’: People just see Astraea as helpless, pure, and good. Generally, they think she’s clean as the driven snow. Mostly, they presume she’s innocent of things that she may not be innocent of, and most people find it hard to act antagonistically towards her. Speaking from the general accepted values of good and bad, good people want to help her and bad people at least hesitate before hurting her. This power has no actual physical effect; it can’t absorb damage or deflect it. Instead, the focus is on heading off attacks by making her too dear to hurt.
“Immaculate Reflection” - Astraea’s second power is the ability to grant her protective aura to others. This isn’t a transferral of her aura from herself to someone else. It’s a completely new instance of the aura that Astraea can maintain for up to ten minutes a day, and it grants one other person Astraea’s helpless and innocent vibe. There is an added effect of damage transference: Astraea can take on the damage done to the person with whom she shares her aura. These injuries do not go away when she stops sharing her aura with the other person. She cannot use this power to defend civilians, but she can use it on senshi of any allegiance.
Explanation
Astraea, also known as Dike, called the ‘celestial virgin’ by mythology nuts, is equally associated with innocence, justice, and the stars. She was the last of the Greek pantheon to leave the mortal plane, according to Ovid. She departed during the Iron Age, whereas the other gods left during the Bronze. Because she remained among men for so long, Zeus placed her likeness in the stars as the constellation Virgo. According to Aratus, she was the last to leave and will be the first to return. Her transformation phrase refers to this particular bit of her mythology.
As ‘innocence’ is not a particularly fertile sphere (at least for me) I thought it best to go with a simple protection concept—a lot of societal taboos involve the ‘loss of innocence’, and a power that might prevent that seemed like a solid choice for a goddess associated with purity. Later on, she might get some powers which can cleanse illness from others: return them to a pure, newborn state, such as it were. But for now, I wanted to keep things simple.
Astraea’s fuku is loosely based off an earlier incarnation of her. The bodice/skirt/etc came about from the ionic chiton; Greek maidens sometimes wore veils to cover their hair. Pale springtime green is often associated with renewal and rebirth, which I thought were fitting for a senshi of innocence. I just like lavender when paired with pale green. The star decorations are meant to reference Astraea’s place as the celestial virgin.
Elke came about separately from her alternate self, but I think her continuing decisions to see people as good and well-meaning and her inability to keep an eye out for hidden motives are a good fit for a senshi of innocence.
Writing Sample
One awful night, not long after she got to New York, Elke woke up to absolutely nothing except the yellow glow of the streetlights outside her dorm window. She stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, felt her ears prick up like some kind of animal. Below her and to the side, Vanya wheezed through her seasonal allergies, a reassuring sound not unlike the whirr of a fan or the shudder of an old A/C unit (two sounds she’d become very familiar with in her relationship with Quirin), and then sneezed. In the silence, Elke waited to hear whatever it was that had woken her, but: nothing, for several long minutes that she did not count. There was nothing for it, she concluded, but to go investigate. So she slid uncertainly down the lifts of her lofted bed, only to hit the ground a little harder than she’d meant to.
“Go back to sleep, Elke,” Vanya said, her voice nasally and muffled by a pillow to the face. “It’s like, four in the morning.”
“Sorry,” Elke whispered, and Vanya harrumphed and rolled over, pulled the covers tight to her chest.
Elke didn’t go back to bed. She padded as quietly as she could to the door, where she pressed her ear tight against the wood. It felt like every fiber of her being were focused on what lay outside in the hallway. I’m being ridiculous, she thought, there’s nothing there. And there wasn’t. She couldn’t hear any other voice, any other living being, not the RA or Mori or anyone else from the floor. Just Vanya’s labored breathing and her own and underneath all that, a silence so total that it was unnerving.
“Gehen wieder schlafen, Elke,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep. Nothing there.” It was just nerves, she told herself as she hauled herself back into her lofted bed. She wasn’t used to sleeping around so many people, more used to rattling around like a pea in a too-large house. And it was just odd, that was all. She kept waiting for people to come in. “Nicht da,” she mumbled, pulling the covers up to her chin.
She couldn’t shake the idea that, just outside the door, some phantom had taken up residence once more. Elke stayed awake until golden sunlight came through the blinds and Vanya rolled out of bed to make her morning coffee. Only then did she feel safe enough to sleep.
Completed RP Links
http://forums.bloodrites.net/chaillot-38/you-can’t-bleed-what’s-already-bled/ - Jean-Isidore Lazare
http://forums.bloodrites.net/pruul-42/take-these-hands-and-hold-me-close/ - Saiph al-Kaid
http://forums.bloodrites.net/pruul-42/uncloud-the-sky/ - Saiph al-Kaid
Questionnaire
Name: Reid
E-mail: xxxxxx
Homepage: (optional)
Referred by: Uh I live w/ u
Other RPGs: Blood Rites, linked above. I play a fuck ton of guys there: Jean-Isidore Lazare, Saiph al-Kaid, Claudia Genadie, Aleister Florin, Ignacio de Leon, Iskander Khaldun, Leonide Pascal, Nova Marzena, Obscenity Falk, Robin Free, Schulyer Shepard, Sherlock Skaarsen, Sebastien Bane, and Tanner Langston are just the somewhat active ones… urp.
View Application: Sure
Results
Excellent application, full of strong details and reasoning throughout! Your verdict is Accept. More detail in the fuku description is recommended. Additionally, you are cleared to assist with story editing if you wish to.
Requests for clarification are below.
History
- Why did playing second flute displease her grandfather? (This detail was present in an earlier iteration of the application?)
- What specifically was the housing situation initially that made Clark roommate to two girls? (Or is he just their dorm neighbor?)
Fuku
* What length are the elements of her fuku (chiton, overskirt, underskirt)?
* What is the placement of the double circlet on her head?
- How many clips on her sleeves?
- How high are her heels?
* What length is her veil?
- Consider where some elements of small detail might be added (pattern, adornment).
Explanation
- Explain the usage of Hetaira.
Requests for clarification are below.
History
- Why did playing second flute displease her grandfather? (This detail was present in an earlier iteration of the application?)
- What specifically was the housing situation initially that made Clark roommate to two girls? (Or is he just their dorm neighbor?)
Fuku
* What length are the elements of her fuku (chiton, overskirt, underskirt)?
* What is the placement of the double circlet on her head?
- How many clips on her sleeves?
- How high are her heels?
* What length is her veil?
- Consider where some elements of small detail might be added (pattern, adornment).
Explanation
- Explain the usage of Hetaira.