Ava Godspell

''"I have no place in this world. It holds no interest for me. To partake in such an existence would be to commit to atrophy." ''

Stern, strict, and sharply disapproving, Ava Godspell is notorious for her cool, severe bearing and total lack of sensitivity. But she is one of the Divine Crusaders' most promising researchers, rumoured to possess an unparalleled intelligence that is rivalled only by her unchallenged austerity. The young woman hails from London, and certainly hasn't left the English "stiff upper lip" behind, and is rarely ever without her arrogance and formal sense of decorum. Even more strangely, she likes to work tirelessly, keeps to herself, and is private, almost jealous, of the secretive nature of her work. She keeps strange hours, strange comrades, and even a stranger fashion sense, preferring to tomboyishly dress straight out of the Victorian era, her ensembles complete with wrinkled blouses and suspenders. Those who have heard of her comment on the woman's many eccentricities, her connections to the mysterious group Amalgam, and, most unusual of all, the strange, steely set of "jewellery" she wears at her temples...

Background Information
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Personality Traits
Ava is thoroughly and impossibly obsessed with the past. She believes wholeheartedly that the "simpler" times of the nineteenth century in the CE was humanity's golden era, and that life can only flourish absolutely in an age of reason that lacks complicated and unnecessary technology.

To her, the present age feels no more than a perpetual, pulsing tumour on her mind, reminding her constantly through her own madness that human beings were never made to live in such an artificial time. Nothing feels right about this time to her; she is constantly discomfited by it, forced to grit and endure and even find physical pain in present space-time where others merely... happily survive within it. Beyond all, she believes wholeheartedly that she has no place in this world -- in this time -- and that ultimately, beyond her own pursuits, she'll never be happy with this existence.

With all she's suffered, Ava is surprisingly and almost refreshingly austere. As both a British woman and one utterly obsessed with its past, she has modeled herself tirelessly on the "Victorian sensibilities", which dictate pragmatism, ration, reason, and one's strong moral character. She's blunt and arrogant, unable to be phased easily, and suffers from an indomitable sense of superiority.

Ava, on the most, is a "cooler" sort of personality that can become down-right icy when exasperated. Considering herself a genius matched only by a few handfuls of others, she has little patience for the "intellectually inferior", having no time and no desire to slow herself down to match the average mind. One of her biggest pet peeves is to explain any of her theories out loud and at length; Ava prefers people who do not need to be told.

Of course, on the contrary, she seems to have a bit of a complex around others who dare to rival her intellectual power; Ava knows it's quite possible to come into contact with those who are superior to even her mind, and the thought in itself is disconcerting and even crippling. This is particularly to be seen in her future interactions with other Whispered, especially those who are more "successful" and have created obscene amounts of Black Technology on their own. Ava, on the contrary, has not, and most of her Whispers remain stuck in a purely theoretical stage. This weighs rather heavily on her pride.

Part of her "stiff upper lip" bravado is Ava's bearing of unnecessary sharpness and social abrasiveness. She's not the "sensitive" type that boasts any sort of innate understanding into the human soul, and prefers hard facts and logic over softer emotions and passions. Excessive emotionality even has the ability to fluster her, Ava really unable to possess any understanding beyond her own stuffy confusion. She can be particularly harsh when others pick up on this and insist on teasing her about it, with the young woman inevitably losing her patience and letting her frustration have her shout one of her usual, often-heard: "Don't be an idiot!!" or "Must you persist in total stupidity!!"

However, when it comes down to it, Ava is broken. Certainly, she's been repaired to a cognitive level where she is able to think, interact, socialize, and manage a decent amount of comfort in daily life, but her mind is like a glass vase. Once you break it, you can painstakingly glue every shard back together, but it will never be the same. Its parts will never fit perfectly.

Due to her lifetime of experimentation, torture, and the excessive use of electrical charges within her brain matter, Ava is mentally fragmented. She's holding herself together, but her sanity is changed irreparably, and she'll never be able to achieve real and total peace.

Frankly, her mind is a mess. Her continued symptoms are sporadic but many: seizures, cluttered thoughts, manic depression, volatility, memory fragmentation and loss, and even self-destructive behaviour.

She suffers from a paralyzing degree of amnesia, most of her memories before Amalgam either foggy or missing entirely. She does remember brief hints and glimpses of PROJECT CASSANDRA, but the details are always blurred and questionable, and most of her own experiences have been ruthlessly repressed for the sake of her own emotional stability, as well as due to her PTSD. She literally cannot remember anything about her childhood, her family, or the person she was before a NOAH: the only real link Ava has left with her past is her name.

Due to her neurological damage, she even has difficulty forming new memories. The deficit is subtle at best, where Ava is liable to forget names, faces, or even old conversations, and has taken to recording almost everything she does as a solution to her impairment. She has long and far-reaching records since her beginnings in Amalgam, and keeps a daily diary as a personal necessity. Subsequently, one of Ava's private desires is to somehow retrieve her lost memories and reclaim some sense of self.

Her mania and depression may be the most pronounced of all her symptoms: despite her stern bearing, Ava is astoundingly volatile. Much of it hinges on her own self-worth, which thrones exclusively on her own Whispers and staggering genius. She is livid and restless at times when she is able to work, having been Whispered to with some new mathematical breakthrough or design, where she ultimately forgoes food, sleep, social contact, and even her own health to work tirelessly for days on end. On the other side, without anything to do, without a Whisper to keep her mind occupied, Ava falls hopelessly into a depressive state, listless and apathetic, and unable to find much joy in all else.

Just as well, her genius is a voracious one, and its gluttony to learn and dissect new subjects cannot be satisfied. Without a constructive outlet, Ava would quickly and easily become the epitome of "genius falling into madness", unable to do anything but turn her desperate intelligence onto anything around her in the hopes to find new "projects" or means to occupy her mind. Left alone for too long, and she may try performing neurosurgery on herself.

Even then, Ava is astoundingly and unapologetically eccentric, almost the archetypal "loner genius" who has dismissed much of the world in favour of her own mind. Her environment and life almost directly reflect the state of her mind: congested, cluttered, and hopelessly disorganized, filled to the brim with odd and errant objects that have all briefly, at some time, won her full attention. She has a way of leaping from project to project, passion to passion, with no real algorithm predicting her unstable behaviours. It doesn't help that her unusual personality does its best to keep the young woman rather lonely, and has taken to the quirk of talking to her own self. Not just random remarks, but full, drawn-out, meaningful conversations. She'll even have entire dialogues with random objects strewn around.

Of course, when she believes no one is watching.

Her Victorian obsession certainly does not help her reputation as an eccentric; on the side, Ava is a devoted hobbyist, dedicated to collecting and surrounding herself with artifacts and replicas from the past, unstoppable until she's turned her entire environment and workspace into a period movie. Studied up on every surviving detail of the Victorian era, the young woman even strives to dress the part, though her sense of fashion is far more tomboyish and fortunately lacking of any potential corsets.

Past her austerity and eccentricity, there are lingering senses of sadness and anger delineating Ava. She's disconnected enough from her own neuroses to realize, almost gravely, that there is something wrong with her, and her rare moments of cognizance and sobriety from her mental states only provide evidence. She knows that she's broken, and she hates that even she hasn't developed the ability to parse her own brain and be able to escape her own mental difficulties. She wishes them gone; knowing that they impede her of ever having a normal life, but at the same time, Ava realizes she's unfixable.

It's left her impossibly angry.

Talents & Abilities

 * Ava is a Whispered human, with an unrecorded intelligence and intuitive insight into unforeseen technology. Her specialization is chiefly in the fields of special relativity and quantum field theory.


 * Ava, unfortunately, does not receive Whispers as frequently as her kind do.


 * Ava's problem was circumvented by a radical experimental surgery transecting the entire associative cortex of the brain with conductive, nanofilamented wire.


 * Ava's pretty little set of "jewellery" at her temples are actually electrodes.


 * Ava offsets her neuroses with a lot of tea.


 * A lot. Of. Tea.

Logs
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