Profile
Meet Pretty Poison! She's an OC of a friend of mine, Brownbug, who has generously allowed me to play with her toys. I've been using her for ArtFight, and am putting her here to collate visual references and other art, and provide the written descriptions for anyone looking to draw her.
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Name: Pretty Poison
Age: Difficult to determine, since the Word Lords do not reckon time in the same way that matter creatures do. Pretty Poison has lived through many, many chapters inside the “Hand of All”. But not nearly as many as Nobody No-one.
Species: Word Lady
As a Word Lady, Pretty Poison has a symbiotic relationship with her CORDIS. The CORDIS is a complex linguistic structure, sometimes referred to as a 'Chameleon Meme', which can disguise itself within the physical universe and may be used by its occupant to translate matter. Essentially, it is a non-physical TARDIS.
The CORDIS not only projects to Pretty any tools or weapons she needs, but it also provides her with her physical avatar. As a result, she does not eat, drink, breathe, sleep, or undertake any of the other physical functions generally required by “flesh creatures”.
Pretty's CORDIS absorbs power from the rumours she spreads. The more powerful her CORDIS, the stronger and more invulnerable her avatar becomes. Similarly, however, if the link to her CORDIS were to be severed, or if the CORDIS was to be drained of energy, she would be helpless and unable to manifest at all in the matter Universe.
Planet of Origin: The “Hand of All”, a reality 45 billion dimensions away and composed of language and communication instead of matter and energy.
Time of Origin: Contemporary with Modern Gallifrey
Occupation: Renegade cogno-linguistic entity.
Physical Description: As a Word Lady, Pretty Poison is pure language wrapped up in a physical avatar. The physical avatar is projected by her ship, known as a CORDIS (Conveyance Of Repeating Dialogue in Space-Time). The more power that is available to the CORDIS, the better-defined, stronger and more invulnerable her physical form.
Now here's the thing about this one's physical appearance...she was created for a RP site where we had to have a "faceclaim" - a picture of an actor that we could use for avatars/banners/etc. - and Pretty Poison's faceclaim was Kate Beckinsale in "Underworld". Which is a rather distinctive appearance, and rather...copyrighted. I can't redesign her for AF - she's not my character - and on discussion with her owner Brownbug, we realized that having RPed her for so long (about six years) with the "Underworld" appearance, we couldn't really picture her any other way!
So here's what we're after for this one - something a little more...abstract. Conceptual. Play around a little with the idea of a being made of pure language. Whether it's a classically beautiful, humanoid, feminine form made up of words, or perhaps scrubbing the serial numbers off and hinting at that faceclaim appearance but dissolving into letters, or a humanoid outline on the page of a book but keeping her eyes (I've got a visual reference that I drew for that, and it's different to Kate Beckinsale's, so is all Pretty Poison and therefore allowed on AF!) - have a little fun with it!
Personality: Pretty Poison is confident, charming and seductive. She possesses a very restless sort of personality, always bright and sparkling and relentlessly upbeat, almost as if she's constantly on a 'high'. She hates to sit still, always running from one thrill to the next, her one main terror being that boredom will eventually catch up with her.
Her name, “Pretty Poison”, is derived from the fact that her CORDIS obtains its power from being verbally passed from person to person in the form of malicious gossip, gathering energy from the spreading and evolving rumour as it travels. When starting such a rumour, Pretty can be very sly, skillfully manipulating her listeners to ensure that her “poison” is passed on to as many people as possible.
Generally speaking, she's wholly amoral, with no sense at all of what is right and what is wrong. Everything she does is solely based on the whim of the moment. Nothing matters to her except for having fun. Her only reason for existence is to amuse herself by creating as much chaos as possible, and she cares about nothing else. The collateral damage caused to other people by her excesses – such as the numerous spectacular explosions and the lethal storms of gunfire - is never a consideration for her. As far as she's concerned, the whole of creation is a playground made specifically for her entertainment.
She's haughty and arrogant and considers the Word Lords to be superior to all other forms of sentient life. She is familiar with the concept of the emotions experienced by matter creatures, but having never previously possessed a physical body, she has never experienced them for herself, and therefore has no understanding of them whatsoever. She holds a particular contempt for the “flesh creatures” who inhabit the matter universe, and will kill in the blink of an eye if anyone gets in her way.
Nevertheless, she's also very unpredictable – if she is amused or entertained by someone, she will spare them and perhaps even help them, for as long as her interest is piqued.
She has a very strong sense of curiosity, and different people and things often intrigue her on the slightest pretext. On the other hand, however, she has a very short attention span and tends to get bored with extreme rapidity, with often disastrous repercussions.
In summary, Pretty Poison is like an extremely powerful and destructive child, who has never learned any self-control or restraint. She does precisely what she wants, when she wants, no matter how destructive, and cares nothing for anyone's opinion.
Backstory: There are countless billions of dimensions, some of them incomprehensibly different to our own. Beings from these distant dimensions obey very different laws of physics and are generally forbidden to cross into other dimensions.
Pretty Poison was “authored” inside the Hand of All, a pocket reality 45 billion dimensions away from this one, and which is composed of language and communication, rather than matter and energy. This is the home of the Word Lords, a species of cogno-linguistic entities.
From the beginning of her story, Pretty Poison was always an outsider, rebelling against the complex linguistic structures and formalised syntax which regimented the stories of the other Word Lords. During her earliest chapters, the senior Word Lords attempted to curb her wildness and irresponsibility by limiting the power source of her CORDIS to the spread of gossip and malicious rumour. Since, in the restrictive society of the Word Lords, there was very little gossip to be found, she remained weak and repressed, growing more and more frustrated and angry, her constant craving for amusement and entertainment unfulfilled.
During her long search for rumour to fuel her CORDIS, Pretty began to come across odd snippets of information. Never anything concrete...just indications, covert and buried...incomplete whispers about a Word Lord who had been expelled many chapters ago from the Hand of All, out into the unknown arena of the matter Universe.
A being known as Nobody No-one.
Fascinated, she became determined to find out all she could about this mysterious exile. But the more she hunted through the billions of words contained in the Hand of All, the more she realised that nearly every reference to Nobody No-one had been systematically deleted. She was unable to discover precisely why he had been banished – just that he had.
By now, curiosity was bordering on obsession. To her people, tampering with the story of another Word Lord was one of the greatest crimes it was possible to commit. And yet it appeared that somebody had considered it necessary to virtually erase Nobody No-one's history. Whoever he was – whatever he had done – he had been the only Word Lord ever to escape the restrictions of the Hand of All.
And if he could do it, so could Pretty Poison.
From that point onwards, she began to hoard and store all the energy she could find, gradually priming her CORDIS until it was powerful enough to breach the dimensional barriers, and at last she managed to escape out into the matter universe.
At first, she was bewildered and overcome by the tremendous size of it, compared to the much smaller Hand of All, as well as the challenges of adapting to a physical existence. After a time, however, she began to realise the sheer potential for chaos in her new story, and she set about joyfully wreaking havoc wherever she went.
She had achieved her first objective – to be free. Now all she needed to do was to achieve her second.
To find and meet Nobody No-one, the most infamous Word Lord of them all.
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Art permissions:
Fine for a bit of violence and destruction, although nothing too gory or graphic please - go more on the fantasy-violence side of things, I think.
'Shipping is fine with Nobody No-one, who is a canon character, and in RP she had a bit of a fling with the Valeyard. I can't post images I don't own, but those two are easy enough to find on google - Nobody No-one is on the cover of a story called "Forty Five" (the one with the wild, purple hair and red glowing energy weapon, and he also sometimes wears the Fourth Doctor's scarf); and the Valeyard is from "Trial of a Time Lord" (the evil space-lawyer with the long, flowing black and silver robes and collar). 'Shipping the three together is also fine (well, not for time and space, but fun for us!). Saucy, sassy and seductive, but not blatantly sexual - as in, like, no nudity etc. - they more tend to do things in the metaphysical anyway - none of them are particularly physical beings.
Her avatar can't be damaged - at least, not in a way that looks like a person being injured/wounded - but go wild with things like disintegrating into words or something, that might be fun.
And it's a no to nudity, self-harm, suicide, abuse, gore, bodily fluids or medical procedures.
