Drusilla (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hismasterpiece) wrote2012-02-25 11:43 pm
hismasterpiece) wrote2012-02-25 11:43 pm
Entry tags:
Application
Mun
Name: Saralinda
Livejournal/Dreamwidth Username:bricks_and_bones
E-mail: saralindajones@gmail.com
Plurk: manicmanic
Current Characters at Luceti: Captain Jack Sparrow
Character
Name: Drusilla
Fandom: BTVS
Gender: Female
Age: b. 1840; is physically 20 years old, though she has lived over 100 as a vampire.
Time Period: Just after BTVS E2S10, "What's My Line Pt. 2" -- after Dru has freed Spike from the rubble and is carrying him out.
Wing Color: Black with white tips, like the most evil French manicure ever.
History: Drusilla's history here
Personality:
Insane: Angel did not just turn Drusilla into a vampire; he also made it his mission to break her mentally and emotionally. She was tortured into insanity before he sired her; Angel forced her to watch him kill off her family and a convent of nuns one by one.
Her insanity manifests in her body language to a great extent. Drusilla alternately moves about like a small, innocent child -- cradling a doll, or caring for a dead pet bird -- cocking her head to the side inquisitively, or pouting. She can turn instantaneously into an insatiable animal in her behaviors, weaving like a cobra or snarling like a dog.
This is especially seen when she kills Kendra in Becoming Part II: she lures the slayer into a trance with her snakelike movements, fascinating Kendra before slicing her throat with her fingernails.
Body language cues for insanity also include waving, ethereal, and quite graceful movements of her head, neck, arms, hands, and fingers. She can sway as beautifully as a tree in the wind, eyes closed, head thrown back in a kind of inner ecstasy that only she understands. But Dru also can have a purposeful strut and cadence to her walk, and can use her hands in a puppetlike manner -- playful and macabre. When she is upset she moans, with eyes wide and unblinking and shuddering hands.
Primarily, though, Drusilla's insanity shines through in her macabre language and manner of speaking. While she sometimes speaks lucidly to Spike (it has been noted in the BTVS wiki that it is to Spike alone that this more direct way of speaking occurs), for the most part her language is a mixture of horrors and corrupted innocence. Sing-song cadences, whispering, animal-like noises when she is agitated (whimpers, growls, snarls), and childish pouting are some of the tones her voice takes. Every word is that of a twisted child, packed with violence, lust, and odd infantile imagery. Her language reveals that she sees the world through a dark, warped mirror.
For example, in What's My Line (s2e11) she reminisces fondly about the worms in her baguette. She might call Angel "Naughty daddy!" (What's My Line). In this episode she is referred to as a "murderous child."
Ultimately, Dru's insanity twists her into a vicious monster. She enjoys torture, as in "What's My Line" when she tortures Angel with holy water. While burning him with the water, she whispers to him of his crimes against her before he sired her. I don't believe she does this because she holds a grudge about that time, necessarily. I think she's been twisted beyond caring about her murdered family. Perhaps a kind of anger about his torment of her lurks somewhere far below all the other insane layers, but here, primarily, it was a delicious psychological torture for the souled-and-sensitive Angel: his masterpiece biting back.
Stickler for Vampire Traditions: In ATS "Reunion" (S2), Angel refers to Drusilla as a "classicist," and insists that she has a high regard for performing the ceremony of raising Darla in accordance to tradition: that is, she wants to bury the other woman and celebrate her vampirism as a "rebirth." This is perhaps a twist on Dru's piety and careful adherence to Catholic traditions before she was turned. Therefore, should Drusilla attempt to turn anyone into a vampire (with player permission of course), it will be done in the most proper way possible, with a full burial and a grave.
Family Matters: Drusilla, as I mention in the Strengths/Weaknesses section of this app, is always at her strongest as part of a group. Her "family" for many years are Spike, Angel, and Darla, and in ATS she is shown to be quite motivated to reunite that family. This of course is ironic, considering it was Darla and Angel who plotted to kill off her real family in the first place. In Luceti, Dru will probably gravitate toward characters who can provide that "family" unit that she thrives on.
Sexual Appetite/Torturer: We know that before she was turned, Dru was the picture of sexual innocence and purity. Angel's goal was to completely corrupt her into "his masterpiece," and that is what he did, turning that innocence into depravity. His last act of torture was to have sex with Darla in front of the traumatized Drusilla.
This seems to have had a large impact on her personality as a vampire. She is sexually promiscuous and is not above sleeping around. In fact, at one point she has sex with Angel behind Spike's back; later, after she and Spike flee to South America, she has an affair with a chaos demon.
She has been described in the wiki as relatively affectionate for a vampire and is very touchy-feely. This can be seen in nearly any scene with her longtime lover, Spike: the two are usually all over each other with kisses and caresses in Season 2 of BTVS. Dru exhibits this behavior to her victims as well as loved ones, as seen in the Angel torture-scene, where she caresses him as she burns him.
Dru also uses psychological torture to get to Giles, causing him to see her as Jenny Calendar and thus reveal the secret of how to continue with the ritual of Acathla in "Becoming." Therefore, her insanity does not have a bearing on her intelligence. She tortured him with a vision of his lost love and got the information Angelus needed to end the world.
Drusilla is famous for preying on the most innocent and weak. She is fond of killing children. This will honestly be the most difficult part of the character for me and I have no intention of having her kill or harm any children in Luceti. I'm not willing to go that far with the character.
Strengths:
Physical: Because she is an older vampire and has been around for over one hundred years, Dru is stronger than the typical BTVS vamp. (The theory in that canon is that the older the vampire, the stronger the vampire.) Her demure, waifish looks are misleading in this respect.
Also, Drusilla has razor sharp fingernails, proved when she slit Kendra's throat enough to kill her in the Season 2 finale.
Like any other BTVS-verse vampire, Dru will go "game face" when she feeds or fights: her forehead goes bumpy, and her eyes narrow and turn yellow and catlike. Powerful fangs can bite through the skin and muscle and veins of a human neck.
Mental: The BTVS wiki lists Dru's mental abilities as "Clairvoyance, telepathy, aura-reading, precognition, and hypnosis." It is the precognition that initially attracted Angel to Dru; as a girl, she worried that these powers meant she was evil. In Luceti, Dru would be able to see future events but probably not as clearly as she does at home.
Telepathy is the ability to communicate mind to mind, without using spoken words. Wikipedia defines it as "the transmission of information from one person to another without using any of our known sensory channels or physical interaction." This could include the transmission of feelings as well as thoughts, and is demonstrated when Dru "becomes" Jenny Calendar for Giles as she tortures him.
Hypnosis is an important weapon for Drusilla. When she kills Kendra -- the only slayer that she is known to have killed in the series -- Drusilla first hypnotizes the slayer before slitting her throat.
She seems to be of above-average intelligence, especially given the way she can manipulate others. In addition to the aura reading, she also practices Tarot card reading -- evidenced, again, in "What's My Line".
Emotional: Dru seems to be attracted to other "visionaries." At least, when she decides she wants a "pet" and chooses William/Spike, it is his "visionary" capacities as a poet that she first mentions in conversation with him. This emotional category is probably principally a weakness for her, as I will elaborate on below. However, committing horrible crimes does not have any negative impact on her emotionally. She takes great pleasure in such things.
Weaknesses:
Physical: Dru is not as strong, physically, as Spike or Angel: Angel because he is her sire and therefore older and stronger. In canon ("What's My Line"), Spike is able to physically overcome her and drive off with her at the ending. She cannot bear sunlight, holy water, the touch of a cross, and the barriers that are presented at the entrances to homes. Dru can only enter a home if she's invited.
Mental: This vampire is INSANE. This has an impact on how she communicates with others, as most of the things she says become intricately threaded mind-games and riddles. Worries about the slayer, Spike, and negative visions of the future can send her off into agitated gibbering. Her mind has been broken and twisted. This is not to say that she is not intelligent, but that she doesn't perceive the world the way a sane person would. She was broken by torture in canon more than once -- both during Angel's masterpiece scheme and her capture and torture by an Inquisitor pre-Sunnydale.
She is strongest mentally when part of a gang of other like-minded evildoers, and has a need to be part of a "family unit" of some kind -- perhaps in a sick homage to the loss of her human family at the hands of Angel.
Emotional: Drusilla isn't terribly stable emotionally, as she often presents herself as a whining, pleading child one minute and a snarling animal the next. Her visions can sometimes upend her mood, especially if they spell disaster to herself or to those she "loves." Aura reading, too, can upset her; when she sees the slayer "all over Spike" down in South America, she becomes visibly distraught and upset.
Normal things that would upset sane, good people -- murderous, tragic things -- bring her enjoyment. She has no soul, and therefore no conscience: a true sociopath.
Samples
First Person: Why have you snuffed out that candle? I like it lit. Brings out the sharp points in your eyes, love. Your sharp wicked points in those candy blue orbs! Maggots in the jelly, and isn't the charwoman cross? Here...shhhhhh...I'll light it again, duck, and you can be in my eyes and I in yours. Now stop that! Don't rattle your chains! It sets off all those tinkling bells in my brain. Don't make me quiet you before our play is done.
Third Person: The pale woman moved through the item shop like a bride carved from ice. She slid more than walked, daintily-slippered feet making no sound on the floor while her dress whisked behind her with the sound of frozen water and silk. Drusilla was here to touch and to collect. Already around that marble neck she'd draped a half-dozen silk scarves. They represented India and China and Japan and Russia and that small village nestled into mountains where they harvested the hair of the chamois, dodging bruising horns to forge unspeakably soft and decadent fabrics.
North of Romania, then. The old villager had taken pride in the patterns she had shown the young foreigner, and Drusilla had strangled her with her own wares. There was poetry in it. She'd stood among the burning of that village just as she was standing now: exotic wool tucked close against her cheek as one long, tapered finger played a pattern upon it. She could hear music in the whisper of fingertip against wool; it joined with a fainter, tinkling music coming from somewhere in the back of the shop.
Roused from memories, the vampire drifted toward the enticing sound and plucked from the shelf a music box, nearly run-down. The woman curtsied and the man bowed. When she wound the key, they spun and circled each other in another dainty pattern and the mirror caught it all.
Drusilla hummed a countermelody to the tinkling tune as she swayed along with the tiny dancers. Her voice was thin but pretty. She wasn't aware it was Schubert's Notturno; if anyone had asked her she would point them toward the stars, which did such lovely musical things. Always.
With eyes closed, she twirled in the narrow aisle between shelves piled high with what so many found needful. Drusilla saw none of it. There was only a grand, tiny ball and music to be conducted with the ebb and flow of narrow white arms and blue-veined wrists. The dancers twirled more and more slowly, and the woman slowed, too, puddling on the floor when the box ticked over its final note.
"Prima, mademoiselle and sir," she murmured through lips that curved up happily. "Prima."
Name: Saralinda
Livejournal/Dreamwidth Username:
bricks_and_bonesE-mail: saralindajones@gmail.com
Plurk: manicmanic
Current Characters at Luceti: Captain Jack Sparrow
Character
Name: Drusilla
Fandom: BTVS
Gender: Female
Age: b. 1840; is physically 20 years old, though she has lived over 100 as a vampire.
Time Period: Just after BTVS E2S10, "What's My Line Pt. 2" -- after Dru has freed Spike from the rubble and is carrying him out.
Wing Color: Black with white tips, like the most evil French manicure ever.
History: Drusilla's history here
Personality:
Insane: Angel did not just turn Drusilla into a vampire; he also made it his mission to break her mentally and emotionally. She was tortured into insanity before he sired her; Angel forced her to watch him kill off her family and a convent of nuns one by one.
Her insanity manifests in her body language to a great extent. Drusilla alternately moves about like a small, innocent child -- cradling a doll, or caring for a dead pet bird -- cocking her head to the side inquisitively, or pouting. She can turn instantaneously into an insatiable animal in her behaviors, weaving like a cobra or snarling like a dog.
This is especially seen when she kills Kendra in Becoming Part II: she lures the slayer into a trance with her snakelike movements, fascinating Kendra before slicing her throat with her fingernails.
Body language cues for insanity also include waving, ethereal, and quite graceful movements of her head, neck, arms, hands, and fingers. She can sway as beautifully as a tree in the wind, eyes closed, head thrown back in a kind of inner ecstasy that only she understands. But Dru also can have a purposeful strut and cadence to her walk, and can use her hands in a puppetlike manner -- playful and macabre. When she is upset she moans, with eyes wide and unblinking and shuddering hands.
Primarily, though, Drusilla's insanity shines through in her macabre language and manner of speaking. While she sometimes speaks lucidly to Spike (it has been noted in the BTVS wiki that it is to Spike alone that this more direct way of speaking occurs), for the most part her language is a mixture of horrors and corrupted innocence. Sing-song cadences, whispering, animal-like noises when she is agitated (whimpers, growls, snarls), and childish pouting are some of the tones her voice takes. Every word is that of a twisted child, packed with violence, lust, and odd infantile imagery. Her language reveals that she sees the world through a dark, warped mirror.
For example, in What's My Line (s2e11) she reminisces fondly about the worms in her baguette. She might call Angel "Naughty daddy!" (What's My Line). In this episode she is referred to as a "murderous child."
Ultimately, Dru's insanity twists her into a vicious monster. She enjoys torture, as in "What's My Line" when she tortures Angel with holy water. While burning him with the water, she whispers to him of his crimes against her before he sired her. I don't believe she does this because she holds a grudge about that time, necessarily. I think she's been twisted beyond caring about her murdered family. Perhaps a kind of anger about his torment of her lurks somewhere far below all the other insane layers, but here, primarily, it was a delicious psychological torture for the souled-and-sensitive Angel: his masterpiece biting back.
Stickler for Vampire Traditions: In ATS "Reunion" (S2), Angel refers to Drusilla as a "classicist," and insists that she has a high regard for performing the ceremony of raising Darla in accordance to tradition: that is, she wants to bury the other woman and celebrate her vampirism as a "rebirth." This is perhaps a twist on Dru's piety and careful adherence to Catholic traditions before she was turned. Therefore, should Drusilla attempt to turn anyone into a vampire (with player permission of course), it will be done in the most proper way possible, with a full burial and a grave.
Family Matters: Drusilla, as I mention in the Strengths/Weaknesses section of this app, is always at her strongest as part of a group. Her "family" for many years are Spike, Angel, and Darla, and in ATS she is shown to be quite motivated to reunite that family. This of course is ironic, considering it was Darla and Angel who plotted to kill off her real family in the first place. In Luceti, Dru will probably gravitate toward characters who can provide that "family" unit that she thrives on.
Sexual Appetite/Torturer: We know that before she was turned, Dru was the picture of sexual innocence and purity. Angel's goal was to completely corrupt her into "his masterpiece," and that is what he did, turning that innocence into depravity. His last act of torture was to have sex with Darla in front of the traumatized Drusilla.
This seems to have had a large impact on her personality as a vampire. She is sexually promiscuous and is not above sleeping around. In fact, at one point she has sex with Angel behind Spike's back; later, after she and Spike flee to South America, she has an affair with a chaos demon.
She has been described in the wiki as relatively affectionate for a vampire and is very touchy-feely. This can be seen in nearly any scene with her longtime lover, Spike: the two are usually all over each other with kisses and caresses in Season 2 of BTVS. Dru exhibits this behavior to her victims as well as loved ones, as seen in the Angel torture-scene, where she caresses him as she burns him.
Dru also uses psychological torture to get to Giles, causing him to see her as Jenny Calendar and thus reveal the secret of how to continue with the ritual of Acathla in "Becoming." Therefore, her insanity does not have a bearing on her intelligence. She tortured him with a vision of his lost love and got the information Angelus needed to end the world.
Drusilla is famous for preying on the most innocent and weak. She is fond of killing children. This will honestly be the most difficult part of the character for me and I have no intention of having her kill or harm any children in Luceti. I'm not willing to go that far with the character.
Strengths:
Physical: Because she is an older vampire and has been around for over one hundred years, Dru is stronger than the typical BTVS vamp. (The theory in that canon is that the older the vampire, the stronger the vampire.) Her demure, waifish looks are misleading in this respect.
Also, Drusilla has razor sharp fingernails, proved when she slit Kendra's throat enough to kill her in the Season 2 finale.
Like any other BTVS-verse vampire, Dru will go "game face" when she feeds or fights: her forehead goes bumpy, and her eyes narrow and turn yellow and catlike. Powerful fangs can bite through the skin and muscle and veins of a human neck.
Mental: The BTVS wiki lists Dru's mental abilities as "Clairvoyance, telepathy, aura-reading, precognition, and hypnosis." It is the precognition that initially attracted Angel to Dru; as a girl, she worried that these powers meant she was evil. In Luceti, Dru would be able to see future events but probably not as clearly as she does at home.
Telepathy is the ability to communicate mind to mind, without using spoken words. Wikipedia defines it as "the transmission of information from one person to another without using any of our known sensory channels or physical interaction." This could include the transmission of feelings as well as thoughts, and is demonstrated when Dru "becomes" Jenny Calendar for Giles as she tortures him.
Hypnosis is an important weapon for Drusilla. When she kills Kendra -- the only slayer that she is known to have killed in the series -- Drusilla first hypnotizes the slayer before slitting her throat.
She seems to be of above-average intelligence, especially given the way she can manipulate others. In addition to the aura reading, she also practices Tarot card reading -- evidenced, again, in "What's My Line".
Emotional: Dru seems to be attracted to other "visionaries." At least, when she decides she wants a "pet" and chooses William/Spike, it is his "visionary" capacities as a poet that she first mentions in conversation with him. This emotional category is probably principally a weakness for her, as I will elaborate on below. However, committing horrible crimes does not have any negative impact on her emotionally. She takes great pleasure in such things.
Weaknesses:
Physical: Dru is not as strong, physically, as Spike or Angel: Angel because he is her sire and therefore older and stronger. In canon ("What's My Line"), Spike is able to physically overcome her and drive off with her at the ending. She cannot bear sunlight, holy water, the touch of a cross, and the barriers that are presented at the entrances to homes. Dru can only enter a home if she's invited.
Mental: This vampire is INSANE. This has an impact on how she communicates with others, as most of the things she says become intricately threaded mind-games and riddles. Worries about the slayer, Spike, and negative visions of the future can send her off into agitated gibbering. Her mind has been broken and twisted. This is not to say that she is not intelligent, but that she doesn't perceive the world the way a sane person would. She was broken by torture in canon more than once -- both during Angel's masterpiece scheme and her capture and torture by an Inquisitor pre-Sunnydale.
She is strongest mentally when part of a gang of other like-minded evildoers, and has a need to be part of a "family unit" of some kind -- perhaps in a sick homage to the loss of her human family at the hands of Angel.
Emotional: Drusilla isn't terribly stable emotionally, as she often presents herself as a whining, pleading child one minute and a snarling animal the next. Her visions can sometimes upend her mood, especially if they spell disaster to herself or to those she "loves." Aura reading, too, can upset her; when she sees the slayer "all over Spike" down in South America, she becomes visibly distraught and upset.
Normal things that would upset sane, good people -- murderous, tragic things -- bring her enjoyment. She has no soul, and therefore no conscience: a true sociopath.
Samples
First Person: Why have you snuffed out that candle? I like it lit. Brings out the sharp points in your eyes, love. Your sharp wicked points in those candy blue orbs! Maggots in the jelly, and isn't the charwoman cross? Here...shhhhhh...I'll light it again, duck, and you can be in my eyes and I in yours. Now stop that! Don't rattle your chains! It sets off all those tinkling bells in my brain. Don't make me quiet you before our play is done.
Third Person: The pale woman moved through the item shop like a bride carved from ice. She slid more than walked, daintily-slippered feet making no sound on the floor while her dress whisked behind her with the sound of frozen water and silk. Drusilla was here to touch and to collect. Already around that marble neck she'd draped a half-dozen silk scarves. They represented India and China and Japan and Russia and that small village nestled into mountains where they harvested the hair of the chamois, dodging bruising horns to forge unspeakably soft and decadent fabrics.
North of Romania, then. The old villager had taken pride in the patterns she had shown the young foreigner, and Drusilla had strangled her with her own wares. There was poetry in it. She'd stood among the burning of that village just as she was standing now: exotic wool tucked close against her cheek as one long, tapered finger played a pattern upon it. She could hear music in the whisper of fingertip against wool; it joined with a fainter, tinkling music coming from somewhere in the back of the shop.
Roused from memories, the vampire drifted toward the enticing sound and plucked from the shelf a music box, nearly run-down. The woman curtsied and the man bowed. When she wound the key, they spun and circled each other in another dainty pattern and the mirror caught it all.
Drusilla hummed a countermelody to the tinkling tune as she swayed along with the tiny dancers. Her voice was thin but pretty. She wasn't aware it was Schubert's Notturno; if anyone had asked her she would point them toward the stars, which did such lovely musical things. Always.
With eyes closed, she twirled in the narrow aisle between shelves piled high with what so many found needful. Drusilla saw none of it. There was only a grand, tiny ball and music to be conducted with the ebb and flow of narrow white arms and blue-veined wrists. The dancers twirled more and more slowly, and the woman slowed, too, puddling on the floor when the box ticked over its final note.
"Prima, mademoiselle and sir," she murmured through lips that curved up happily. "Prima."