and it's hard to dance with a devil on your back

Player Information:

Name or Handle: Iddy/Hanne
LJ: banerry
Email: Zieglerfan719@gmail.com
AIM/ MSN / Plurk name: ihdreniel @ plurk
Any current characters here?: N/A

Character Information:

Character Name: Vriska Serket
Age: 6 solar sweeps/13 human years
Canon: Homestuck

Appearance:
Like all other trolls, Vriska has grey skin, fang-like sharp teeth, and yellow-orange horns (hers are shaped like a claw and stinger respectively). She doesn't really care much about her appearance, and she generally always wears the same thing: jeans, red sneakers, a black t-shirt with a blue Scorpio symbol on it, and a thin jacket with the left sleeve ripped at the shoulder (in-game, she'd probably try to pick up similar clothes). She has a long, bushy mane of hair that she likely doesn't brush much. She wears eyeglasses, though the left lens is covered by a patch because her eye was blown out (her left arm was blown off at the same time; she has a metal prosthetic in its place). She also always wears bright blue lipstick and eye makeup, and sometimes blue nail polish. (She does not, however, always drink blue milk. Ew.)

Personality:
Vriska is screwed up. So, so screwed up. In fact, in a group of teenagers from a crapsack world that seems to thrive on fundamentally screwing kids up for life, she's one of the worst. Her Freudian excuse is pretty obvious: she was raised from a very young age to lead her fellow troll children to their deaths, so as to feed her custodian and avoid dying in some way herself. Even before that, she was reading a journal filled with murder and rape, and she believed that this was something she needed to emulate in order to be strong. She routinely hurts and kills those that she calls friends. And the society that she comes from tells her that this is all perfectly okay.

She comes up with an excuse for anything and everything, mostly in order to take blame off of herself. She relentlessly bullies Tavros (a sweet, shy boy who-- usually-- wouldn't hurt a fly), then later says that she was just trying to make him "strong" so that he wouldn't be executed for being useless. She users her powers to hurdle him off a cliff, then brushes it off as punishment for continued weakness. Killing one troll and blinding another? She was locked in a revenge cycle that they started, and not retaliating would have counted as losing. Helping to create the series' main antagonist? Fate said he was going to be created anyway, and she wanted to have a hand in it so that it would be all the more impressive when she defeated him. Knowingly sending a clueless human boy to his death? It was for his own good because she knew he would come back to life stronger than ever, and telling him he would die ahead of time would have just caused him needless fear. And so on, and so forth. There's nothing that she doesn't have a justification ready for, and none of them don't involve attempts to get her off the hook for any number of terrible misdeeds. The thing is, a lot of the time, she's not just bullshitting-- she truly believes these justifications, and doesn't understand why barely anyone wants anything to do with her. She generally figures that other people just don't get it, or that it has to do with all the "bad luck" she's had since she lost her eye and arm (bad luck is yet another thing that she blames a lot of her problems on). She tends to go back and forth between appearing to have high self-esteem and low self-esteem-- she has a strong tendency towards bravado that she definitely seems to believe to an extent, but she insults and beats herself up on occasion, too.

Basically, what Vriska wants most in the world is to be a gigantic Mary Sue. She wants it all: all the power, all the gaming levels, all the skill, all the relationships (but only with people who are ~*awesome*~ enough to deserve a relationship with her, of course). She thinks she's much more cool, suave, and manipulative than she actually is, and she envies people who can use and trick others without the liberal use of mind control. She openly tries to shape her entire life around the experiences of her ancestor, who was a true Alternian troll in every sense of the word (that is, she was a rampant murderer with no regrets or misgivings). Really, though, she's just kidding herself-- she may be capable of horrible things, but we do see in canon that she can and does feel regret, such as when she feels terrible for killing Tavros later on in the series. This is something that actually causes her quite a bit of insecurity at times; she won't admit it easily, but she worries that she isn't a good enough troll largely because she thinks she doesn't cause enough destruction and mayhem. This is part of the reason that she goes so overboard at times (later, she acknowledges that she was "trying too hard"). It clashes quite a bit with her desire to be a strong perfect badass troll, and probably what causes her more internal conflict than anything else. Still, while Vriska might not be as hard and uncaring as she sometimes wants to be, she's definitely not an overall nice person, even deep down. She's capable of niceness, and more than once we see her try to make it up to the people that she's hurt-- she tries to make amends with the spirit of a girl she killed by collaborating with another troll to give her a robot body, for example, and she makes Tavros a rocket car to ride around in after she causes him to lose the use of his legs. Still, even that is mostly because she just can't stand the idea of someone she kind-of-maybe-sort-of-cares-about-a-little-bit not liking her enough (or hey, not hating her enough-- if she gives a shit about someone one way or another, she isn't content with just plain dislike or apathy; their hate must burn with the fiery passion of a thousand suns). As we see when she makes sure that she had a part in creating the series' big bad, Vriska very much wants to be important. For the majority of her life, famous and infamous sound equally good to her-- being lauded for heroic deeds and brave, self-sacrificing feats would be awesome, sure, but so would being feared by everyone for being a terrifying and merciless killer. It's only towards the very end of her life that she starts thinking that she would like to change and be known for good things. Unfortunately, her arrogance gets in the way there. She assumes she'll be able to brashly rush in, take her enemy by storm, and earn the love and admiration of her fellow trolls once she's inevitably won... despite the fact that a girl who can see the future tells her that such rash actions would only end up getting them all killed. In the end, Vriska still won't back down and listen to reason (she believes the future-seeing girl is wrong or lying or Just Doubting How Awesome Vriska Really Is or EXCUSES EXCUSES EXCUSES), and said girl makes the executive decision to kill her to save the lives of everyone else. Despite the fact that she has truly good intentions, Vriska's own personality ends up being her downfall.

Background:
Wiki page!

Canon point:
After coming on to Tavros in the Land of Maps and Treasure, but before Aradia kills her. This is fairly early on in her timeline, before a lot of her major development and maturation, and I chose this point because I thought it'd be interesting to see how this setting would affect that. At this timepoint for her, which side she would join (if any) would really be up in the air: the Republic could get to her first and convince her that All The Glory lies in helping them, or Sith could appeal to her background and misguided desires to be fearsome and violent. Maybe she'd join one and then later change her mind. Maybe she'd get involved in other work. Maybe she'd go off and live with Jolee Bindo, becoming a hermit. Basically, I think this canon point would make for the most interesting way to play her.

Special Abilities:
Like many trolls on the higher end of the blood color hemospectrum, Vriska is psychic (I think this might correspond to the Jedi Mind Trick in the Star Wars universe? but she'd be a civilian so idk). If someone has a weak or otherwise easily-controlled mind, she can worm her way in and get them to do her bidding. (However, canon does show that this doesn't work on humans-- so far, she can only put them to sleep.) Apparently, she can also read minds, though this ability is never demonstrated and is really only mentioned in a couple of throwaway lines. Based on her mind-controlling powers, though, it's probably safe to say that it only works on weak-minded non-humans. At this point, these are all the innate powers that she has. Trolls in general are also physically stronger and more durable than the average human, though the extent to which they are isn't really revealed.

Sect:
If accepted, I'd like to start playing her just as she's dragged from her universe, meaning she wouldn't have had time to join any special sects yet. So Civilian it is!

Job:
N/A, but eventually she'd probably be all about swoop racing (... or gambling on swoop racing).

Samples:

First Person:
[the video feed pops on to show a strange-looking young girl-- she can't be more than twelve or thirteen-- grinning cockily at the camera]

Soooooooo. A little flutterbeast told me that there's a big war going on, that both sides are desperate for new recruits, and that you dragged meeeeeeee in with the hope that I'd grace one of your factions with my presence!

[her grin widens, showing her pointy fangs]

I'm happy to assure you that your prayers have been answered. I, the esteemed Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, am here to share my skills, kills, and sweeps of experience with one of your lucky armies!

Problem is, I haven't quiiiiiiiite decided which one to join yet.

That brings us to my reason for appearing before you now: you have to persuade me to join your side! Be convincing! Tell me about the cool advantages and benefits I'd get with you. Lay it all on me! Do you want me?




The answer should be yes, by the way. You should want me a lot.

Third Person:
Though she had originally been pretty disoriented and annoyed at being swept away from the Medium (geez, couldn't they at least ask first?), Vriska found herself quickly acclimating to her new surroundings.

It really helped that this place was awesome.

She'd been here for less than a day, and there was already so much she wanted to get into; so many irons in the fire. The racing games looked cool, as did betting on them. Fighting in a war didn't sound that bad, either; it was basically what she was doing at home. Overall, the only thing she was really pissed off about was the fact that her sylladex had been taken away upon arrival. How could they expect her to be able to fight or defend herself as well if she didn't have her dice? And having to carry stuff around by hand was so annoying.

Still, she told herself it didn't really matter that much. She was the best, inventory system or no inventory system. And first things first, she had to make sure that everybody else knew that, too. Her introduction to this place had to be good. She'd seen enough to know that there were some really powerful, impressive people here, and that meant that she had to really tout her own horn-- more than usual, even!-- if she wanted them to take notice.

Luckily, she knew just the sort of thing to say to make that happen. After this, they'd all be fighting over her, no question! Everyone would want a piece of Vriska Serket (... or Marquise Mindfang, because there was no way that she wasn't going to be using her ancestor's name and FLARPing persona for this). It'd be awesome.

With an overconfident grin and thoughts of grandeur running through her head, Vriska switched on the video feed and set it to record.

Anything Else:
Homestuck is that dreaded canon that pisses people off because all the characters type in gaudy-colored Courier, and most of them have annoying typing quirks. For the comfort of other players, most in-game posts would be done in voice/video format. In addition, I'd only reply to other people with text if they told me beforehand that they were cool with it.

Anon commenting is ON, and I'm not going to take your crit any less seriously if you decide to take advantage of this (or if you're just a lurker or something)- unless, of course, your purpose for remaining anonymous is to simply bash and offer no advice on how to improve. Concrit isn't trolling in my mind; "LOL GTFO U SUXX0R" is.