A character from my ongoing web novel,
Revolving Door!
Pala is a minor! Please don't use her in NSFW games.
Personality
To Pala, there's no such thing as "too strange". New knowledge excites her easily, the more bizarre the better, and when something excites her, it will consume her, heart and soul.
Expressive, honest, blunt, and very forgetful, Pala speaks and acts in a manner that can be hard to keep up with. She has an obsession with drawing, and is never seen far from her sketchbook. Her notebooks are full of sketches of things that interest her: an odd dented pot on the roadside, the shape of a baluster, other oddities in daily life that would go missed by most. These are interspersed with an array of distorted maps of places around the island of Havaiki.
Having little regard for what's considered normal, she tends to behave however she pleases, earning her a reputation among her schoolmates for being eccentric. She loves spaces possessing a liminal charm—empty shops at night, school hallways after hours, bare rooftops. She is convinced that she possesses a sixth sense that allows her to perceive the physical space of Havaiki as a rippling and tattered fabric, but most think these are delusions, and are frightened rather than excited for her.
Teachers and employers know Pala to be diligent and imaginative, with boundless excitement for her interests. Many adults connect with her surprisingly well. But others, especially of her age, are afraid they don't understand her well enough to relate. Though she does her best to forge bonds, none of them ever seem to stick, and she has but a single close friend in Fen.
Story
Pala is smart, curious and artistically-inclined. The last of these traits would possibly be what most people would find outstanding, if not for…well, the rest of her personality. At around the age of eight she began to experience strange, and often sickening, sensations while travelling from place to place: sometimes, spaces she passed through seemed to stretch, warp or tear, as if she were a design woven into a rippling piece of fabric, and every so often she would suffer spells of nausea as a result.
Describing these experiences to others only ever resulted in two things happening: her parents took her to the mental clinic at once; her schoolmates labelled her a lunatic and treated as such. She began instead to keep a record of these perceptions in the form of maps of places she frequented, distorted as she perceived them to be.
The only person who ever believed her was Fen, whom she met by coincidence in school one day. He was the only other student who seemed to share in her nonchalance for bizarreness and was not in the least surprised by her mannerisms. They became fast friends, and defended each other against the rest of the students, helping each other through their difficulties and darkest moments.
During summer on the year she turned sixteen, Pala took up a job at the Promenade Hotel, where she works under her manager, Kalani, lighting up the hotel facade with pictures that often double as coded jabs at their rivals across the river, the Red Lotus Hotel.
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