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jynx_tsilevon) wrote2012-03-13 02:02 pm
jynx_tsilevon) wrote2012-03-13 02:02 pm
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Alyss and the Girl in Blue
A ridiculousness long introspection of the growth and development of one character.
Possible Spoilers for Last Arrival and Thirteen.
Before I met many of the fantastic people I know now, I was freshman in high school and I had five friends. Although that has no relevance to anything, it seemed like a good way to start this.
Because, in all honesty, Alyss was born my freshman year of high school.
Back then, however, her name was not Alyss and she didn’t have an almost obsessive love of the color blue. In fact, back then, she wasn’t even my character.
The original Alyss came from the book Milia 18 by Leon Uris. A book I love despite the raging love story, multiple feelings of wanting to punch the main character in the face for his decisions, and the fact that they really do beat a dead horse. I cried many times. Sign of a good book.
I read the whole thing, and the poor book is pretty worn out now. But nothing in that book stood out to me as much as a scene ¾ of the way in. It’s only about a page. Very short. But it’s never left me.
In this scene, a character who is never named sacrifices herself to give time to the few survivors. She takes a live grenade and dives under the treads of a tank, lobbing the grenade inside. She has a few more on her, because the thing blows up and blocks the street.
Her name is simply “the girl with red hair.”
I read that scene alone about nine times. The tenth I walked into the pages and rescued the girl from under the treads. I couldn’t leave her behind.
The only think I had with me at the time was a blue coat. I wrapped her up in it and brought her into my psyche. It wasn’t safer there, honestly. I just couldn’t leave her there.
And she didn’t seem to mind, in the end. She seemed content with the bit of headspace I was able to give her, and made herself at home watching me get over my social awkwardness and drown out any anxiety with loud mouth babble. I am not shy, out of necessity. The girl with red hair was so quiet and serene that I envied her like no other.
However, the two of us didn’t speak again until I was a junior. Someone introduced me to NaNoWriMo and challenged me to write. I didn’t finish a novel in a month. 60,000 words in, I was only about a fourth of the way done. I’m still working on it now.
It was about this time that the girl with red hair approached me, smiling and clothed in a blue cloak I didn’t remember seeing before. With a shy little smile she politely walked past me and into the class portrait I was visualizing while trying to get a feel for the closeness of Siazian classmates.
I credit her with the idea that all artists wear blue.
But in all honesty, I didn’t know she was there until too late. Siazia was a city I’d built to be destroyed, after all. With its skilled workers and equality, the place was a utopian school and I had a dystopian psychopath ruling the world. Its people had remained nameless so I would have lists of the dead haunting me.
And yet, that’s where she showed up again. In that moment, when I needed her most, she pushed Kenji out of the way and took the knife from Jeckle. She still didn’t save Gen, but Kenji made it. That’s all that mattered, right?
I sobbed for an hour or so after writing that. Because once again, I’d killed the nameless girl in a fit of self-sacrifice. But now she wasn’t the girl with red hair. Instead, she was The Girl in Blue.
And I made all sorts of choking, sobbing, pitiful noises when Tic showed up out of nowhere and saved my Girl in Blue.
---
The Girl in Blue remains nameless in my novel because she is really a girl who is invisible. She was supposed to be dead, was witnessed and proclaimed dead by the assassin who supposedly killed her. He checked her pulse; the poison worked quickly. She was the one girl he regretted killing.
And I’ll be honest, it’s some sort of Deus ex Machina that she survived. Because she was as dead to me as she was to Kenji and Issac and Jeckle. Dead and gone, her arm missing because Jeckle’s aim wasn’t the greatest that night.
Then the paintings appeared.
And she really wasn’t that dead at all.
The Girl in Blue is an important character in the fact that she sees everything that ever was, will be, or could be. She would be the best weapon Issac could have, but he sees her only as an Artist, a Skilled Worker that must be erased. She is important yet she is minor. A character that almost crafts the story line of my novel without actually being in it until over two (maybe three) hundred pages after she’s allegedly killed. She is the first common thread between all of my novel’s main characters, of which there are more than I would like to admit.
The Girl in Blue, given the loving nickname “Bot” (homage to her prosthetic arm) from her guardian , has almost a schoolgirlish crush on Kenji, the real main character. She bases most of her actions on keeping him alive or safe, although she can’t do much to save him from the emotional turmoil and distress that is integrated within his character. And, knowing his past, future, and present, her crush is just that. She loves him far too much to ever want to date him, and also presses certain realities to be more likely so he gets the ideal partner, if any.
Yes, I did fashion it so Bot doesn’t end up alone. She also has a crush on the last Engineer. They are very happy together. He spoils her rotten.
And yes, anticlimactically, Bot’s real name is Alyss. It’s only mentioned once, perhaps twice, in the novel. At the very end. She paints it on a wall. It’s whispered at her wedding.
At any other moment in time, she goes by Bot. The Girl in Blue. The Artist. Headmistress (Spoilers, sweety).
---
I had this all planned out, solid, and then Drakonlily asked if I wanted to join Last Arrival.
This wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, it was wonderful. I was fresh into Role Playing again, having been incredibly enamored by another strong, silent woman that decided to enter my headspace. Elfé and the Girl in Blue became friends instantly, something I probably should have noticed and been weary of.
Anyhow, Drak asked me to join, so apparently I’d done something right while playing the estranged daughter to her fatherly assassin. We had a few laughs, at least.
Last Arrival was pitched to me about the time that I was trying to write for Thirteen again. Bot was up in my headspace, chatting with Elfé about something or other. It might have been art. Both my eco-terrorist and my artist love to paint.
Never the less, the idea was overheard by the two girls, and when Elfé realized this was a place she couldn’t tread (you’re not my original character, dearest. I stole you and ran), she pushed Bot forward. And Bot was eager to come. To shed her hiding place and be Alyss again. I explained the rules to her and she asked if her ability would come into the new world with her. Her ability to see the future, the past. Certain thoughts. Things such as that.
I turned around and asked Drak.
“Sure.” She said. “But what’s the price?” And I was floored. I started to push Alyss back into headspace. No, I insisted. I’ve hurt you too much.
And Alyss slid her hands over her eyes and I noticed the blood too late to stop her.
In a way, I feel bad for Drak. She had to sit and unwittingly listen to arguments between Alyss and me while I was filling out the character application. Well, Alyss formed before the character application was completed, so I had to pester Drak with questions about what information she actually needed to know. To Drak’s credit, she was amazingly patient, incredibly informative, and never once called my questions stupid. Even though I had like sixty.
At the start of the beta, Alyss and I went in the youngest character and writer pair. My sister would eventually join, but her age got bumped up because of the glorious Feymous, her spacy and lovable scientist.
Alyss had changed on me. She was no longer the confident Girl in Blue or the reckless girl with red hair. Although she carried both their traits, physically with the red hair and emotionally with the obsession with the color blue, she was strikingly different than her two predecessors.
For one, she’s almost unabashedly naïve. And really, that may be a fault of mine. But within the first week of beta, I had coined “Blind Kitten Syndrome” as a sickness that Alyss inadvertently had. How else could she endear herself to everyone? And I mean everyone. So far, the only people she hasn’t endeared herself to are Devlin (because of mutation overload), Zev (because they’ve never met), and Alpha.
I cannot say much about Last Arrival Alyss. She’s already changed very dramatically in the two months she’s been alive. My original plan was for her to be a blind Seer, a girl who read fortunes with startling accuracy just outside the Library, all together strikingly unimportant but there if the characters wanted someone quiet to talk to.
Instead, she inserted herself into the fabric of things on accident, a realization we’ve both made and worried about excessively. She is somehow invisible but needed and seen. We don’t know how that happened.
I often end writing for Alyss by seeing the same visual. She is standing in a dark room, lit only by candles. Around her, organized in an ancient way, are her Tarot cards. And she stands in the center, completely at peace. Her eyes may be bleeding, but she’s always smiling.
I can’t help but selfishly look at this and thing. Alpha, you may run this city. You may know every nook and cranny, may have the world in the palm of your hand. But it’s this invisible girl in blue that protects its people, watching over them from the very shadows you create.
But there is something that scares me about Alyss. And it’s not The People. The People, which is a manifestation of her fear of all the things that go bump in the night. Probably part of the price of her mutation. Neither of us know for sure, we just know that They are always there, waiting.
The thing that scares me about Alyss is not her lack of self-worth, either.
She did inherit something form Bot and the girl with red hair. Something I’ve tried to remove each time another adaptation of this character appears.
The girl with red hair dove under a tank to save her friends and family.
The Girl in Blue stood in front of a knife, then stood in the face of a psychopath, to save the world.
Alyss…what are you doing? Please…please put your deck away and just stay safe.
My only problem with Alyss is that I am scared she’s going to die for something that wasn’t her fault.
Possible Spoilers for Last Arrival and Thirteen.
Before I met many of the fantastic people I know now, I was freshman in high school and I had five friends. Although that has no relevance to anything, it seemed like a good way to start this.
Because, in all honesty, Alyss was born my freshman year of high school.
Back then, however, her name was not Alyss and she didn’t have an almost obsessive love of the color blue. In fact, back then, she wasn’t even my character.
The original Alyss came from the book Milia 18 by Leon Uris. A book I love despite the raging love story, multiple feelings of wanting to punch the main character in the face for his decisions, and the fact that they really do beat a dead horse. I cried many times. Sign of a good book.
I read the whole thing, and the poor book is pretty worn out now. But nothing in that book stood out to me as much as a scene ¾ of the way in. It’s only about a page. Very short. But it’s never left me.
In this scene, a character who is never named sacrifices herself to give time to the few survivors. She takes a live grenade and dives under the treads of a tank, lobbing the grenade inside. She has a few more on her, because the thing blows up and blocks the street.
Her name is simply “the girl with red hair.”
I read that scene alone about nine times. The tenth I walked into the pages and rescued the girl from under the treads. I couldn’t leave her behind.
The only think I had with me at the time was a blue coat. I wrapped her up in it and brought her into my psyche. It wasn’t safer there, honestly. I just couldn’t leave her there.
And she didn’t seem to mind, in the end. She seemed content with the bit of headspace I was able to give her, and made herself at home watching me get over my social awkwardness and drown out any anxiety with loud mouth babble. I am not shy, out of necessity. The girl with red hair was so quiet and serene that I envied her like no other.
However, the two of us didn’t speak again until I was a junior. Someone introduced me to NaNoWriMo and challenged me to write. I didn’t finish a novel in a month. 60,000 words in, I was only about a fourth of the way done. I’m still working on it now.
It was about this time that the girl with red hair approached me, smiling and clothed in a blue cloak I didn’t remember seeing before. With a shy little smile she politely walked past me and into the class portrait I was visualizing while trying to get a feel for the closeness of Siazian classmates.
I credit her with the idea that all artists wear blue.
But in all honesty, I didn’t know she was there until too late. Siazia was a city I’d built to be destroyed, after all. With its skilled workers and equality, the place was a utopian school and I had a dystopian psychopath ruling the world. Its people had remained nameless so I would have lists of the dead haunting me.
And yet, that’s where she showed up again. In that moment, when I needed her most, she pushed Kenji out of the way and took the knife from Jeckle. She still didn’t save Gen, but Kenji made it. That’s all that mattered, right?
I sobbed for an hour or so after writing that. Because once again, I’d killed the nameless girl in a fit of self-sacrifice. But now she wasn’t the girl with red hair. Instead, she was The Girl in Blue.
And I made all sorts of choking, sobbing, pitiful noises when Tic showed up out of nowhere and saved my Girl in Blue.
---
The Girl in Blue remains nameless in my novel because she is really a girl who is invisible. She was supposed to be dead, was witnessed and proclaimed dead by the assassin who supposedly killed her. He checked her pulse; the poison worked quickly. She was the one girl he regretted killing.
And I’ll be honest, it’s some sort of Deus ex Machina that she survived. Because she was as dead to me as she was to Kenji and Issac and Jeckle. Dead and gone, her arm missing because Jeckle’s aim wasn’t the greatest that night.
Then the paintings appeared.
And she really wasn’t that dead at all.
The Girl in Blue is an important character in the fact that she sees everything that ever was, will be, or could be. She would be the best weapon Issac could have, but he sees her only as an Artist, a Skilled Worker that must be erased. She is important yet she is minor. A character that almost crafts the story line of my novel without actually being in it until over two (maybe three) hundred pages after she’s allegedly killed. She is the first common thread between all of my novel’s main characters, of which there are more than I would like to admit.
The Girl in Blue, given the loving nickname “Bot” (homage to her prosthetic arm) from her guardian , has almost a schoolgirlish crush on Kenji, the real main character. She bases most of her actions on keeping him alive or safe, although she can’t do much to save him from the emotional turmoil and distress that is integrated within his character. And, knowing his past, future, and present, her crush is just that. She loves him far too much to ever want to date him, and also presses certain realities to be more likely so he gets the ideal partner, if any.
Yes, I did fashion it so Bot doesn’t end up alone. She also has a crush on the last Engineer. They are very happy together. He spoils her rotten.
And yes, anticlimactically, Bot’s real name is Alyss. It’s only mentioned once, perhaps twice, in the novel. At the very end. She paints it on a wall. It’s whispered at her wedding.
At any other moment in time, she goes by Bot. The Girl in Blue. The Artist. Headmistress (Spoilers, sweety).
---
I had this all planned out, solid, and then Drakonlily asked if I wanted to join Last Arrival.
This wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, it was wonderful. I was fresh into Role Playing again, having been incredibly enamored by another strong, silent woman that decided to enter my headspace. Elfé and the Girl in Blue became friends instantly, something I probably should have noticed and been weary of.
Anyhow, Drak asked me to join, so apparently I’d done something right while playing the estranged daughter to her fatherly assassin. We had a few laughs, at least.
Last Arrival was pitched to me about the time that I was trying to write for Thirteen again. Bot was up in my headspace, chatting with Elfé about something or other. It might have been art. Both my eco-terrorist and my artist love to paint.
Never the less, the idea was overheard by the two girls, and when Elfé realized this was a place she couldn’t tread (you’re not my original character, dearest. I stole you and ran), she pushed Bot forward. And Bot was eager to come. To shed her hiding place and be Alyss again. I explained the rules to her and she asked if her ability would come into the new world with her. Her ability to see the future, the past. Certain thoughts. Things such as that.
I turned around and asked Drak.
“Sure.” She said. “But what’s the price?” And I was floored. I started to push Alyss back into headspace. No, I insisted. I’ve hurt you too much.
And Alyss slid her hands over her eyes and I noticed the blood too late to stop her.
In a way, I feel bad for Drak. She had to sit and unwittingly listen to arguments between Alyss and me while I was filling out the character application. Well, Alyss formed before the character application was completed, so I had to pester Drak with questions about what information she actually needed to know. To Drak’s credit, she was amazingly patient, incredibly informative, and never once called my questions stupid. Even though I had like sixty.
At the start of the beta, Alyss and I went in the youngest character and writer pair. My sister would eventually join, but her age got bumped up because of the glorious Feymous, her spacy and lovable scientist.
Alyss had changed on me. She was no longer the confident Girl in Blue or the reckless girl with red hair. Although she carried both their traits, physically with the red hair and emotionally with the obsession with the color blue, she was strikingly different than her two predecessors.
For one, she’s almost unabashedly naïve. And really, that may be a fault of mine. But within the first week of beta, I had coined “Blind Kitten Syndrome” as a sickness that Alyss inadvertently had. How else could she endear herself to everyone? And I mean everyone. So far, the only people she hasn’t endeared herself to are Devlin (because of mutation overload), Zev (because they’ve never met), and Alpha.
I cannot say much about Last Arrival Alyss. She’s already changed very dramatically in the two months she’s been alive. My original plan was for her to be a blind Seer, a girl who read fortunes with startling accuracy just outside the Library, all together strikingly unimportant but there if the characters wanted someone quiet to talk to.
Instead, she inserted herself into the fabric of things on accident, a realization we’ve both made and worried about excessively. She is somehow invisible but needed and seen. We don’t know how that happened.
I often end writing for Alyss by seeing the same visual. She is standing in a dark room, lit only by candles. Around her, organized in an ancient way, are her Tarot cards. And she stands in the center, completely at peace. Her eyes may be bleeding, but she’s always smiling.
I can’t help but selfishly look at this and thing. Alpha, you may run this city. You may know every nook and cranny, may have the world in the palm of your hand. But it’s this invisible girl in blue that protects its people, watching over them from the very shadows you create.
But there is something that scares me about Alyss. And it’s not The People. The People, which is a manifestation of her fear of all the things that go bump in the night. Probably part of the price of her mutation. Neither of us know for sure, we just know that They are always there, waiting.
The thing that scares me about Alyss is not her lack of self-worth, either.
She did inherit something form Bot and the girl with red hair. Something I’ve tried to remove each time another adaptation of this character appears.
The girl with red hair dove under a tank to save her friends and family.
The Girl in Blue stood in front of a knife, then stood in the face of a psychopath, to save the world.
Alyss…what are you doing? Please…please put your deck away and just stay safe.
My only problem with Alyss is that I am scared she’s going to die for something that wasn’t her fault.
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