CHARACTER: Winnifred Prismall CANON: Original Character CANON POINT: Shortly before her meeting to finalize raid plans.
BACKGROUND: Winnie's world was the same as the real world, up until 1860. Around 1860, souls, it was found, could be extracted from people and placed into someone else; that someone could then absorb the soul. The absorbed soul enabled a person to live longer and cured many of the diseases scientists were struggling to find cures for. What followed was two things:
1. Scientists, now mostly freed from the constant pursuit for cures, took to discovering and advancing technology through steam power.
2. Souls were growing in demand.
Everyone wanted to live longer and be healthier. It started out innocently enough, with taking the souls of convicts and those already doomed to die. Soon, however, it wasn’t enough for the highest in society, who began to realize this and suffer the consequences -- they had to have a steady “diet” of souls, consuming/absorbing them at least once or twice a month. The older you grew the more souls you had to absorb to stay alive.
As demand grew, people found new ways to get the souls, namely by preying on the poor. Schools were set up to house, teach, and most importantly find Extractors, those rare individuals who could remove and implant the souls. The Extractors would then be taken out with handlers to seek out those who were poor and unaware to steal their souls, storing the souls within their own bodies. Extractors had no souls of their own and could not absorb them, thus posing no threats to taking any for their own. Each Extractor had a handler, and everything was provided to them by the governments of each country. Though everyone handled it differently, England kept a tight hold over their Extractors, letting them have little contact with the outside world and essentially making their lives revolve around what the government said and did.
Some other important rules to note are that souls begin going crazy after 24 hours away from their body, and one soul can last a person 20-25 days. The act of removing and implanting a soul are painless, and is done so orally-- the Extractor taps the other person’s mouth and pulls the soul out from there, then swallows the soul. Prolonged contact is not needed, just the quick touch and drawing the soul out will happen unless, obviously, the Extractor doesn’t wish to do that.
Winnie's personal backstory: Winnie was born in 1864 to very wealthy parents and is one of these Extractors, though she was one of the lucky ones to not be sent away to the schools. The death of her mother is to thank for that, for her father, unwilling to part with the girl who looked so much like her mother and unwilling to be left alone, refused to give her up and kept the fact she was an Extractor a secret from everyone. She grew up fairly normal and her life wasn’t a very exciting one. It was mostly filled with lessons--how to play piano and violin, manners, how to have a polite conversation, how to read, write, and do basic maths, and everything else she’d need to know to be the best pick when it came to courting and marriage. However, she’s had no interest in it and considers herself a spinster and “too old” to marry now. Her father used the excuse that she was sickly to keep her confined in her home, where she would read fairy tales and adventure books.
When she was young her father took in another young girl named Agnes, and the two quickly grew close. Agnes knew more about the ‘real world’ than Winnie did and spent her time telling Winnie of the outside world and all the things she never had a chance to see for herself. And the more Winnie learned, the more she became at what her friends and neighbors were doing aware of how unfair it all was.
So, she and Agnes devised a plan to become like ‘modern’ Robin Hoods. They would attend the numerous parties and sleepovers that Winnie’s status granted them access to. The parties of the rich were usually characterized by an after-dinner “treat” in the form of each guest being gifted with a collected soul by the host or hostess. Winnie would simply take the soul, though not absorb it, and the next day she and Agnes would search for the original body, assuming it hadn’t been moved or destroyed already since souls are almost always transported and absorbed within a day of their capture. Souls have a short shelf life like that. In the event of the body being unable to be found, the soul was released. If lucky, the soul would become a ghost, but if not then the soul would be forced to wither away and ‘die’.
In order to make this happen, however, Winnie had to convince her father that his careful and loving care had overcome her soulless nature. Winnie spent hours practicing her smile and making expressions, studying Agnes, her father, and the servants, trying to understand emotions and expressions. She practiced over and over until she could produce natural-looking expressions and body movements and convince her father that she was 'normal' enough to be undetected among the masses as anything more than an eccentric noble.
Thus, the two began their plan, struggling through it via trial and error, until the pair met a ghost who haunted the lighthouse in the port town only a few hours away from the city. It was a complete accident-- they'd heard the talk of the townspeople and Winnie had decided it sounded interesting, and so had dragged Agnes to it. The first meeting had been a disaster as Winnie's over enthusiasm didn't mesh well with Mortimer's grumpy personality, but Winnie was not deterred. She made a point to visit every day they were in town and eventually he grudgingly accepted her and Agnes's presence. After some consideration they realized that Mortimer, being a ghost, would possibly know what to do with the souls whose bodies they couldn't find. Although he pretends that it's a bother every time, he enjoys helping the souls either move on, or become and adjust to being a ghost; through him Winnie was able to find both another confidant and a way around what she had seen to be a failure to help the souls.
As Winnie interacted more with the outside world and the people in it, the more she felt moved to help them. Inspired by the heroic tales of her books, Winnie became more involved with the people of the slums, forging her own networks and connections to prepare for a revolution--a coup against the corrupt government and a chance to change the country for the better. Or, maybe, even the world.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Winnie has the ability to remove a soul from a person’s body and ‘eat’ it to store it within her own body without absorbing the soul. She can control this, so it's not like touching someone's mouth is going to automatically pull their soul from their body, but this is also a way for her to exorcise spirits or possessed people. Speaking of spirits, she CAN see and communicate with them.
She has no soul of her own and is essentially an empty shell for storage. This also makes her more susceptible to illness, her lifespan is much shorter than other humans, and she gets sick more easily.
Being soulless means most animals either actively hate her/are scared of her, or run away/freak out on sight. The exceptions are animals that are "evil" in some way, feral, and/or carnivorous/dangerous predator types. At worst they ignore her entirely like she doesn't exist, and at best they're attracted to her and will follow her or stay by her side.
Aside from that she has a rudimentary knowledge in self-defense with a blade and a pistol that she’s learned from Agnes, along with what she's learned from fencing lessons.
Winnie also possesses a photographic memory, allowing her to memorize and recall most things she reads with ease.
PERSONALITY: Eccentric, dotty, and oblivious are the three words that could best described Winnie. Being an Extractor means being able to mentally hear and speak with the souls 'housed' in her, and talking to voices in ones’ head never bodes well for one’s mental health--it’s one of the drawbacks of being a Extractor, though the well-trained are able to put up mental walls to block the voices. Still, Winnie is not well-trained and quite prone to talking aloud to thin air or getting to absorbed in the soul speaking to her. This causes her to run into things or miss entire chunks of conversation.
Winnie is also characterized by an unflappably calm and cheery disposition. When dropped into a new situation, she greets it with an excited smile and a declaration that it will be a "terribly interesting adventure."
Her curiosity can sometimes get her in trouble, as she doesn't often think everything through and tries to rush ahead to explore something further. Thankfully that's where Agnes steps in to make sure Winnie doesn't get herself into hotter waters.
Seeming loyal and kind, Winnifred loathes to lie outright, even though it’s a deemed necessity with what she and Agnes do. To make up for that, she tries to tell the truth and be honest with just about everything else and lie by omission rather than outright. Her father, being a very doting and loving father, is often the unwitting pawn in Agnes and Winnie’s adventures, in case they need money to silence someone or need to use his influence. For the most part he remains oblivious to what the two are doing with the souls, but Winnie feels a vague sense of guilt having to lie and use him.
The concept of fear is also largely lost on Winnie. It’s not that she doesn’t experience feeling scared or worried or anything like that, it’s more that it doesn’t apply to situations most people would be more wary of. For example, she’s very quick to trust someone and think them a nice person for any minor details, and is the kind of person who would walk down a dark alley without a second thought, because the idea that something bad might happen to her doesn’t even register. This is largely due to not having a soul, and therefore her emotional reactions to things are muted or otherwise nonexistent. If she had been raised in the dormitories with the other Extractors, it would be easy for her to have been changed like them-- Emotionless machines driven only by their one goal to collect as many souls as possible. Because Winnie was raised more-or-less normally, however, she's been able to grasp more emotions. The positive ones just come easier, but it's this soullessness that allows her to shrug off things that might emotionally cripple a 'normal' person and allows her to bounce back so easily.
Because of this lack of a soul, it's more accurate to say that Winnie's emotions are, for the most part, faked. It's not that she doesn't feel all emotions, but emotions such as curiosity and joy come much easier to her than any others. It's incredibly hard for her to actually feel things like anger or hatred, and she describes it as being like trying to cup water in your hands. While the water might last a little while, eventually in can all trickle out and leave her empty once more, with only the vaguest impression of it behind. It's not uncommon for Winnie to feel a flash of an emotion, and then get excited enough that that overrides the other feeling she had and make it disappear completely, leaving her a bit exasperated.
She sees herself as a savior to others and will keep on trying to help them; if they adamantly refuse her help it'll take quite a few tries of being told off for her to understand. Winnie has, in her adult life, grown aware of other people who fight for a similar cause to her, but she's grown so used to relying on her friends--and still has a wariness to admitting she's an Extractor not for her own life, but because she doesn't want to see her father in trouble-- that she prefers to stick with them and do what she can from her side. Essentially, Winnie wants to be like the heroes from the books she reads, the hero of her own story, and firmly drives towards that goal. This is less because she has genuine feelings about it though, and more because Winnie has molded herself around the concept of 'justice' and 'fairness.' She can understand these concepts clearly, more so than she can emotions, and knows because of this that what's happening to soulless like herself is "Unfair," so she's fixated on, well, fixing it. In the stories, the "good guys always win," so Winnie figures that so long as she's a "good person" she'll also always win. This allows her to justify almost everything she does with the idea that "but my intentions are good/it's for a good cause, so it's not actually evil or bad."
It should be noted, however, that Winnie is anything but stupid. She has a keen awareness she keeps hidden, largely because she's self-aware enough to know it's better that way. She plays up her sillier side, pretending to be airheaded and dotty far more than she actually is in order to get people to let their guards down around her. If people underestimate her, it's better for her in the long run if and when she can catch them by surprise, so you could say that she's also quite manipulative.
INVENTORY: x1 Daywear gown in off-white with a flower pattern. Includes drawers, slip, corset, petticoat, camisole, small wire bustle, skirting, and jacket. x1 pair of white, heeled shoes x1 fancy hat in green, with an array of flowers and ribbons x1 A silk-lace parasol, white and green. The handle can be detached to reveal a stiletto blade.
Winnifred Prismall | Original
CONTACT:
CHARACTER: Winnifred Prismall
CANON: Original Character
CANON POINT: Shortly before her meeting to finalize raid plans.
BACKGROUND: Winnie's world was the same as the real world, up until 1860. Around 1860, souls, it was found, could be extracted from people and placed into someone else; that someone could then absorb the soul. The absorbed soul enabled a person to live longer and cured many of the diseases scientists were struggling to find cures for. What followed was two things:
1. Scientists, now mostly freed from the constant pursuit for cures, took to discovering and advancing technology through steam power.
2. Souls were growing in demand.
Everyone wanted to live longer and be healthier. It started out innocently enough, with taking the souls of convicts and those already doomed to die. Soon, however, it wasn’t enough for the highest in society, who began to realize this and suffer the consequences -- they had to have a steady “diet” of souls, consuming/absorbing them at least once or twice a month. The older you grew the more souls you had to absorb to stay alive.
As demand grew, people found new ways to get the souls, namely by preying on the poor. Schools were set up to house, teach, and most importantly find Extractors, those rare individuals who could remove and implant the souls. The Extractors would then be taken out with handlers to seek out those who were poor and unaware to steal their souls, storing the souls within their own bodies. Extractors had no souls of their own and could not absorb them, thus posing no threats to taking any for their own. Each Extractor had a handler, and everything was provided to them by the governments of each country. Though everyone handled it differently, England kept a tight hold over their Extractors, letting them have little contact with the outside world and essentially making their lives revolve around what the government said and did.
Some other important rules to note are that souls begin going crazy after 24 hours away from their body, and one soul can last a person 20-25 days. The act of removing and implanting a soul are painless, and is done so orally-- the Extractor taps the other person’s mouth and pulls the soul out from there, then swallows the soul. Prolonged contact is not needed, just the quick touch and drawing the soul out will happen unless, obviously, the Extractor doesn’t wish to do that.
More on how souls work can be found here!
Winnie's personal backstory: Winnie was born in 1864 to very wealthy parents and is one of these Extractors, though she was one of the lucky ones to not be sent away to the schools. The death of her mother is to thank for that, for her father, unwilling to part with the girl who looked so much like her mother and unwilling to be left alone, refused to give her up and kept the fact she was an Extractor a secret from everyone. She grew up fairly normal and her life wasn’t a very exciting one. It was mostly filled with lessons--how to play piano and violin, manners, how to have a polite conversation, how to read, write, and do basic maths, and everything else she’d need to know to be the best pick when it came to courting and marriage. However, she’s had no interest in it and considers herself a spinster and “too old” to marry now. Her father used the excuse that she was sickly to keep her confined in her home, where she would read fairy tales and adventure books.
When she was young her father took in another young girl named Agnes, and the two quickly grew close. Agnes knew more about the ‘real world’ than Winnie did and spent her time telling Winnie of the outside world and all the things she never had a chance to see for herself. And the more Winnie learned, the more she became at what her friends and neighbors were doing aware of how unfair it all was.
So, she and Agnes devised a plan to become like ‘modern’ Robin Hoods. They would attend the numerous parties and sleepovers that Winnie’s status granted them access to. The parties of the rich were usually characterized by an after-dinner “treat” in the form of each guest being gifted with a collected soul by the host or hostess. Winnie would simply take the soul, though not absorb it, and the next day she and Agnes would search for the original body, assuming it hadn’t been moved or destroyed already since souls are almost always transported and absorbed within a day of their capture. Souls have a short shelf life like that. In the event of the body being unable to be found, the soul was released. If lucky, the soul would become a ghost, but if not then the soul would be forced to wither away and ‘die’.
In order to make this happen, however, Winnie had to convince her father that his careful and loving care had overcome her soulless nature. Winnie spent hours practicing her smile and making expressions, studying Agnes, her father, and the servants, trying to understand emotions and expressions. She practiced over and over until she could produce natural-looking expressions and body movements and convince her father that she was 'normal' enough to be undetected among the masses as anything more than an eccentric noble.
Thus, the two began their plan, struggling through it via trial and error, until the pair met a ghost who haunted the lighthouse in the port town only a few hours away from the city. It was a complete accident-- they'd heard the talk of the townspeople and Winnie had decided it sounded interesting, and so had dragged Agnes to it. The first meeting had been a disaster as Winnie's over enthusiasm didn't mesh well with Mortimer's grumpy personality, but Winnie was not deterred. She made a point to visit every day they were in town and eventually he grudgingly accepted her and Agnes's presence. After some consideration they realized that Mortimer, being a ghost, would possibly know what to do with the souls whose bodies they couldn't find. Although he pretends that it's a bother every time, he enjoys helping the souls either move on, or become and adjust to being a ghost; through him Winnie was able to find both another confidant and a way around what she had seen to be a failure to help the souls.
As Winnie interacted more with the outside world and the people in it, the more she felt moved to help them. Inspired by the heroic tales of her books, Winnie became more involved with the people of the slums, forging her own networks and connections to prepare for a revolution--a coup against the corrupt government and a chance to change the country for the better. Or, maybe, even the world.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Winnie has the ability to remove a soul from a person’s body and ‘eat’ it to store it within her own body without absorbing the soul. She can control this, so it's not like touching someone's mouth is going to automatically pull their soul from their body, but this is also a way for her to exorcise spirits or possessed people. Speaking of spirits, she CAN see and communicate with them.
She has no soul of her own and is essentially an empty shell for storage. This also makes her more susceptible to illness, her lifespan is much shorter than other humans, and she gets sick more easily.
Being soulless means most animals either actively hate her/are scared of her, or run away/freak out on sight. The exceptions are animals that are "evil" in some way, feral, and/or carnivorous/dangerous predator types. At worst they ignore her entirely like she doesn't exist, and at best they're attracted to her and will follow her or stay by her side.
Aside from that she has a rudimentary knowledge in self-defense with a blade and a pistol that she’s learned from Agnes, along with what she's learned from fencing lessons.
Winnie also possesses a photographic memory, allowing her to memorize and recall most things she reads with ease.
PERSONALITY: Eccentric, dotty, and oblivious are the three words that could best described Winnie. Being an Extractor means being able to mentally hear and speak with the souls 'housed' in her, and talking to voices in ones’ head never bodes well for one’s mental health--it’s one of the drawbacks of being a Extractor, though the well-trained are able to put up mental walls to block the voices. Still, Winnie is not well-trained and quite prone to talking aloud to thin air or getting to absorbed in the soul speaking to her. This causes her to run into things or miss entire chunks of conversation.
Winnie is also characterized by an unflappably calm and cheery disposition. When dropped into a new situation, she greets it with an excited smile and a declaration that it will be a "terribly interesting adventure."
Her curiosity can sometimes get her in trouble, as she doesn't often think everything through and tries to rush ahead to explore something further. Thankfully that's where Agnes steps in to make sure Winnie doesn't get herself into hotter waters.
Seeming loyal and kind, Winnifred loathes to lie outright, even though it’s a deemed necessity with what she and Agnes do. To make up for that, she tries to tell the truth and be honest with just about everything else and lie by omission rather than outright. Her father, being a very doting and loving father, is often the unwitting pawn in Agnes and Winnie’s adventures, in case they need money to silence someone or need to use his influence. For the most part he remains oblivious to what the two are doing with the souls, but Winnie feels a vague sense of guilt having to lie and use him.
The concept of fear is also largely lost on Winnie. It’s not that she doesn’t experience feeling scared or worried or anything like that, it’s more that it doesn’t apply to situations most people would be more wary of. For example, she’s very quick to trust someone and think them a nice person for any minor details, and is the kind of person who would walk down a dark alley without a second thought, because the idea that something bad might happen to her doesn’t even register. This is largely due to not having a soul, and therefore her emotional reactions to things are muted or otherwise nonexistent. If she had been raised in the dormitories with the other Extractors, it would be easy for her to have been changed like them-- Emotionless machines driven only by their one goal to collect as many souls as possible. Because Winnie was raised more-or-less normally, however, she's been able to grasp more emotions. The positive ones just come easier, but it's this soullessness that allows her to shrug off things that might emotionally cripple a 'normal' person and allows her to bounce back so easily.
Because of this lack of a soul, it's more accurate to say that Winnie's emotions are, for the most part, faked. It's not that she doesn't feel all emotions, but emotions such as curiosity and joy come much easier to her than any others. It's incredibly hard for her to actually feel things like anger or hatred, and she describes it as being like trying to cup water in your hands. While the water might last a little while, eventually in can all trickle out and leave her empty once more, with only the vaguest impression of it behind. It's not uncommon for Winnie to feel a flash of an emotion, and then get excited enough that that overrides the other feeling she had and make it disappear completely, leaving her a bit exasperated.
She sees herself as a savior to others and will keep on trying to help them; if they adamantly refuse her help it'll take quite a few tries of being told off for her to understand. Winnie has, in her adult life, grown aware of other people who fight for a similar cause to her, but she's grown so used to relying on her friends--and still has a wariness to admitting she's an Extractor not for her own life, but because she doesn't want to see her father in trouble-- that she prefers to stick with them and do what she can from her side. Essentially, Winnie wants to be like the heroes from the books she reads, the hero of her own story, and firmly drives towards that goal. This is less because she has genuine feelings about it though, and more because Winnie has molded herself around the concept of 'justice' and 'fairness.' She can understand these concepts clearly, more so than she can emotions, and knows because of this that what's happening to soulless like herself is "Unfair," so she's fixated on, well, fixing it. In the stories, the "good guys always win," so Winnie figures that so long as she's a "good person" she'll also always win. This allows her to justify almost everything she does with the idea that "but my intentions are good/it's for a good cause, so it's not actually evil or bad."
It should be noted, however, that Winnie is anything but stupid. She has a keen awareness she keeps hidden, largely because she's self-aware enough to know it's better that way. She plays up her sillier side, pretending to be airheaded and dotty far more than she actually is in order to get people to let their guards down around her. If people underestimate her, it's better for her in the long run if and when she can catch them by surprise, so you could say that she's also quite manipulative.
SAMPLE: hopefully this all works. finger guns.
INVENTORY: x1 Daywear gown in off-white with a flower pattern. Includes drawers, slip, corset, petticoat, camisole, small wire bustle, skirting, and jacket.
x1 pair of white, heeled shoes
x1 fancy hat in green, with an array of flowers and ribbons
x1 A silk-lace parasol, white and green. The handle can be detached to reveal a stiletto blade.
NOTES: n/a