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krtaps⏵ player information
name and pronouns: Bryo
age: 36
contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
compassinks
⏵ character information
name: Julie Greathouse
canon: Monster Pulse
age: 15
canon point: Postcanon
history: Julie is one of three children, in between her older sister Marnie and her little brother Pete. The Greathouses initially lived in a city high-rise, and Julie frequently heard her mother and father's loud arguments. The marriage ended when her mother got a job in Antler Pine, a small town on an island in the Pacific Northwest, and her father refused to move. Julie and her siblings went with their mother and their father fell out of contact.
Not long after they arrived in Antler Pine, Julie ran afoul of the SHELL corporation--a biomedical company conducting non-IRB approved research with funding from DARPA. SHELL was experiencing uncontrolled releases (read: sabotage) of their Arma chemical--a substance that interacted with the human body in strange, unpredictable ways. When one of the "Arma ghosts" made contact with a person, it would transform a part of their body--an organ, a limb, sometimes a combination of things--into an independent creature, which were quickly termed "monsters." The intent was to create a weapon that would turn enemy soldiers' own bodies against them. However, the monsters showed an instinctive loyalty to their original bodies.
Before her encounter with Arma, Julie was a shy, awkward girl hiding behind her big red hair. She was hanging out a boy named West--another awkward, lonely kid--when they encountered a pair of errant ghosts. One struck West, materializing his stomach. The other hit Julie, and bonded with her hair. For a short time, they were briefly held in SHELL's medical facility, but--with the enhanced abilities of their monsters--they broke out.
Julie named her monster Kera, for keratin, and passed off her baldness as having shaved her head to be more "punk rock" (an explanation her mom accepted, although she knew of Kera's existence). With her mass of "beautiful" red hair gone, a weight was lifted from her, and she started to indulge her sense of fun and impulse. She met two more kids--Bina, whose monster was her heart, and Abel, whose monster was his eye--and they wound up having a showdown with two SHELL agents, Roger Maugras and Wanda Lulenski. After Roger was hit with Arma, Lulenski killed him with a rock in panic so that his face wouldn't embody itself. Thanks to some quick (if grim) thinking, the kids blackmailed her into claiming that they had died to get SHELL off their backs, and tried to resume a semi-normal life.
From there, the group began to hang out and worked together for the next few years. Arma ghosts were still popping up around Antler Pine, and the monsters were the only things that could stop them before they yanked more kids' organs out of their bodies. Along the way they met other kids who'd been affected. There was Bea, an infant whose vocal cords were hit; the kids trained it to throw its voice so she could still use it and taught the parents how to take care of it. There was Edward, a boy from Ireland whose face had been hit, who found Kera and formed a connection with Julie for a brief but wonderful week before he returned home. There was Nancy, a disturbed teenager with a crowbar and a blood-monster. There was Violet, a strange stoic girl who started dating Abel and trapped everyone in a mindscape because her monster was her brain.
Eventually, the truce with SHELL broke down when Rjinder, one of Lulenski's colleagues, discovered the blackmail. Working together, they created the "Chakra" machine to undo the organ transformations--but at that point, everyone was too emotionally attached to their monsters to accept destroying them. Lulenski attempted to force the issue by infecting four new kids with Arma and siccing them on the group. Julie's house was attacked by a girl with a razor-sharp spine-monster, and it took a psychic intervention by Violet to put them both to sleep and get rid of them. Julie was horrified to have her own house, with her family in it, invaded.
Everyone was forced to hide in Violet's house while she put up a mental shield. Julie grew closer to Violet, recognizing that for all her stoicism and seeming confidence, she was scared and in over her head, just like the rest of them. But keeping five stressed teenagers in the same house all at once can only last so long--after some rough words and tension, West tried to talk to the SHELL kids on his own, which led to his stomach being captured.
The operation to rescue Guuzy didn't go smoothly. Julie, firm in the belief that her Kera was invincible (she was, after all, just hair--she could regrow when cut and had no weak points to strike), confronted Enid, a little girl with a head-monster. Her opponent lit a single match and threw it into Kera. Julie just managed to put her out and was locked up. When she called Violet for help, she found that Violet was almost in a state of panic over trying to cope with everyone else running into just as much trouble as Julie had. Julie managed to trick Enid (who was really only five or so) into allowing her to escape. Unfortunately, she was swiftly recaptured by Rjinder and Lulenski in the deep lab, as was everyone else. Things got even more chaotic when the Director of SHELL came in and began arguing with Lulenski and Rjinder over their secret research and Lulenski tried to force West into the machine. In the chaos, Kera broke out and freed Julie, Enid was knocked into the machine and restored, and then everything went even more pear-shaped when the SHELL employees came to blows with each other and Rjinder's skin-monster went on a rampage. Left alone, Julie, West, and Bina's heart-monster destroyed the machine so nobody else could be forced into it. Meanwhile, in the fight aboveground, every single Arma ghost--and there were dozens, if not hundreds--was released into Antler Pine, and the whole sorry situation became national news.
In the aftermath, SHELL was repurposed into a ghost-fighting operation. They brought the kids in as heroic fighters, outfitting them with signal watches and uniforms, since their monsters were the only thing that could fight the ghosts. But Julie soon withdrew. She was still too terrified of what had almost happened to Kera, and too upset to explain her behavior to her friends. At the same time, she was starting to have confusing feelings. She made friends with an old pal of Bina's who they'd had an awkward encounter with ages before, and after years of vocally disdaining "girly" things, Julie started experimenting with dresses, wigs, and makeup. One conversation with West ended in an argument. Another with Violet started poorly, but ended better, as Julie was able to both explain herself and express her confusion. When the ghosts started getting feral, Julie eventually returned to the fray by saving West and his boyfriend from a new liver-monster. And on the same day, Bina died from an external injury to her heart, and had to be recombined with it in an imperfect process that turned her into an alien-looking amalgamation of both.
It was a confusing, upsetting time. Before anyone could really adjust, Lulenski--in hiding since the lab disaster--combined herself with the dying Rjinder's skin, and the murdered colleague she had tried to regrow, in a final bid to "fix" everything. The result was a hundred-foot colossus determined to wipe out all traces of Arma research--which meant the whole island of Antler Pine. Julie led the argument with everyone's parents about letting them fight the colossus. Bina, traumatized and willful and more powerful than ever, had to be talked down from trying to take the thing down on her own. Once again, it was Julie who cut through, insisting on going with. The fight with Lulenski took place inside her own massive body, against the many hostile organ-monsters she now carried within her. In spite of everything, they were overwhelmed and dragged into Lulenski's core, forced to hear Lulenski explain everything that had gone into her many poor decisions. Still firmly entrenched in her feelings of rightness, Lulenski aimed to kill all the monsters still on Antler Pine, then let the kids kill her and take the whole island with them, finally purging it all.
Violet came to their rescue, the only one Lulenski had never known about. Arriving in a stunning form, she forced Lulenski's mind back to her first day at SHELL, before everything had gone so terribly wrong, forcing her to relive her memories up to the present without the layers of rationalization and fear that had built up over the years. With her illusions shattered, Lulenski begged for help. With their combined power, the kids blasted Lulenski's brain with energy, collapsing her massive body back into a normal--if permanently altered--person. Following the battle, Bina was able to separate herself into human and heart again.
In the aftermath, West opened up to Julie about his troubled family life, which he had largely kept hidden from the group. Julie and Violet's families grew closer towards a blended family due to the divorced Ms. Greathouse and the widowed Mr. LeBlanc's romantic relationship. The government promised money to the kids and their families for all they had gone through under DARPA authorization and funding (albeit not hurrying on the payments).
abilities: Julie herself is an ordinary 15-year-old girl. She's springy and energetic.
Kera is a monster born of Julie's hair. Organ-monsters have enhanced superabilities of their ordinary properties. As living hair, Kera can grow rapidly, stretch, hamper opponents by becoming a giant ball of floof, and fly. She also has sharp teeth. Likewise, as hair, Kera doesn't have much internal structure to speak of--she can be struck and even cut with no harm to herself. She can hide herself by pretending to be a particularly shaggy rug, clothing, or blanket. Kera's one real weakness is fire.
personality: Julie Greathouse is a little ball of chaos. Years of shyness and the half-internal, half-external pressure of being "the girl with pretty hair" literally fell away when her hair did. With the situation coming immediately with the circumstance of being pursued by a creepy government-funded organization, Julie reacted by letting loose. She operates on impulse, as quick to start a fight as she is to declare someone a friend (which is very quickly). She's free with her opinions and although she's grown to not blurt out her immediate judgment of a person right away, she still comes to quick conclusions. Her way of treating her situation like a fun adventure both helped her new friends come to terms with it and irritated them for her seeming flippancy.
Sometimes, she can say the wrong thing, so much so that Abel yelled at her for refusing to think before she opened her mouth. But sometimes, she can really say the right thing, like when she said that Bina got the monster she did because of what a big heart she already had. Julie is almost always quick to say what she feels, whether she's angry at someone or trying to pep them up. However, Julie has matured a lot over the three years she and her friends were dealing with SHELL and Arma. She's grown more thoughtful and observant of others, being the first to figure out that Violet's blank face was hiding a lot of insecurity, and the person West eventually opened up to about his tense family situation.
Julie's uncertainty bubbles up in strange ways now and again. She can get jealous and possessive of her friends, and has sometimes followed the counterproductive impulse to hold tight and try and "claim" a person. At one point she calls herself the "master of mistakes." She tries to learn from what she's done wrong. After the disastrous attack on the SHELL lab that almost killed Kera, Julie uncharacteristically hid her feelings because they were so awful she couldn't talk about them.
samples:
TDM toplevel with two threads.
name and pronouns: Bryo
age: 36
contact:
⏵ character information
name: Julie Greathouse
canon: Monster Pulse
age: 15
canon point: Postcanon
history: Julie is one of three children, in between her older sister Marnie and her little brother Pete. The Greathouses initially lived in a city high-rise, and Julie frequently heard her mother and father's loud arguments. The marriage ended when her mother got a job in Antler Pine, a small town on an island in the Pacific Northwest, and her father refused to move. Julie and her siblings went with their mother and their father fell out of contact.
Not long after they arrived in Antler Pine, Julie ran afoul of the SHELL corporation--a biomedical company conducting non-IRB approved research with funding from DARPA. SHELL was experiencing uncontrolled releases (read: sabotage) of their Arma chemical--a substance that interacted with the human body in strange, unpredictable ways. When one of the "Arma ghosts" made contact with a person, it would transform a part of their body--an organ, a limb, sometimes a combination of things--into an independent creature, which were quickly termed "monsters." The intent was to create a weapon that would turn enemy soldiers' own bodies against them. However, the monsters showed an instinctive loyalty to their original bodies.
Before her encounter with Arma, Julie was a shy, awkward girl hiding behind her big red hair. She was hanging out a boy named West--another awkward, lonely kid--when they encountered a pair of errant ghosts. One struck West, materializing his stomach. The other hit Julie, and bonded with her hair. For a short time, they were briefly held in SHELL's medical facility, but--with the enhanced abilities of their monsters--they broke out.
Julie named her monster Kera, for keratin, and passed off her baldness as having shaved her head to be more "punk rock" (an explanation her mom accepted, although she knew of Kera's existence). With her mass of "beautiful" red hair gone, a weight was lifted from her, and she started to indulge her sense of fun and impulse. She met two more kids--Bina, whose monster was her heart, and Abel, whose monster was his eye--and they wound up having a showdown with two SHELL agents, Roger Maugras and Wanda Lulenski. After Roger was hit with Arma, Lulenski killed him with a rock in panic so that his face wouldn't embody itself. Thanks to some quick (if grim) thinking, the kids blackmailed her into claiming that they had died to get SHELL off their backs, and tried to resume a semi-normal life.
From there, the group began to hang out and worked together for the next few years. Arma ghosts were still popping up around Antler Pine, and the monsters were the only things that could stop them before they yanked more kids' organs out of their bodies. Along the way they met other kids who'd been affected. There was Bea, an infant whose vocal cords were hit; the kids trained it to throw its voice so she could still use it and taught the parents how to take care of it. There was Edward, a boy from Ireland whose face had been hit, who found Kera and formed a connection with Julie for a brief but wonderful week before he returned home. There was Nancy, a disturbed teenager with a crowbar and a blood-monster. There was Violet, a strange stoic girl who started dating Abel and trapped everyone in a mindscape because her monster was her brain.
Eventually, the truce with SHELL broke down when Rjinder, one of Lulenski's colleagues, discovered the blackmail. Working together, they created the "Chakra" machine to undo the organ transformations--but at that point, everyone was too emotionally attached to their monsters to accept destroying them. Lulenski attempted to force the issue by infecting four new kids with Arma and siccing them on the group. Julie's house was attacked by a girl with a razor-sharp spine-monster, and it took a psychic intervention by Violet to put them both to sleep and get rid of them. Julie was horrified to have her own house, with her family in it, invaded.
Everyone was forced to hide in Violet's house while she put up a mental shield. Julie grew closer to Violet, recognizing that for all her stoicism and seeming confidence, she was scared and in over her head, just like the rest of them. But keeping five stressed teenagers in the same house all at once can only last so long--after some rough words and tension, West tried to talk to the SHELL kids on his own, which led to his stomach being captured.
The operation to rescue Guuzy didn't go smoothly. Julie, firm in the belief that her Kera was invincible (she was, after all, just hair--she could regrow when cut and had no weak points to strike), confronted Enid, a little girl with a head-monster. Her opponent lit a single match and threw it into Kera. Julie just managed to put her out and was locked up. When she called Violet for help, she found that Violet was almost in a state of panic over trying to cope with everyone else running into just as much trouble as Julie had. Julie managed to trick Enid (who was really only five or so) into allowing her to escape. Unfortunately, she was swiftly recaptured by Rjinder and Lulenski in the deep lab, as was everyone else. Things got even more chaotic when the Director of SHELL came in and began arguing with Lulenski and Rjinder over their secret research and Lulenski tried to force West into the machine. In the chaos, Kera broke out and freed Julie, Enid was knocked into the machine and restored, and then everything went even more pear-shaped when the SHELL employees came to blows with each other and Rjinder's skin-monster went on a rampage. Left alone, Julie, West, and Bina's heart-monster destroyed the machine so nobody else could be forced into it. Meanwhile, in the fight aboveground, every single Arma ghost--and there were dozens, if not hundreds--was released into Antler Pine, and the whole sorry situation became national news.
In the aftermath, SHELL was repurposed into a ghost-fighting operation. They brought the kids in as heroic fighters, outfitting them with signal watches and uniforms, since their monsters were the only thing that could fight the ghosts. But Julie soon withdrew. She was still too terrified of what had almost happened to Kera, and too upset to explain her behavior to her friends. At the same time, she was starting to have confusing feelings. She made friends with an old pal of Bina's who they'd had an awkward encounter with ages before, and after years of vocally disdaining "girly" things, Julie started experimenting with dresses, wigs, and makeup. One conversation with West ended in an argument. Another with Violet started poorly, but ended better, as Julie was able to both explain herself and express her confusion. When the ghosts started getting feral, Julie eventually returned to the fray by saving West and his boyfriend from a new liver-monster. And on the same day, Bina died from an external injury to her heart, and had to be recombined with it in an imperfect process that turned her into an alien-looking amalgamation of both.
It was a confusing, upsetting time. Before anyone could really adjust, Lulenski--in hiding since the lab disaster--combined herself with the dying Rjinder's skin, and the murdered colleague she had tried to regrow, in a final bid to "fix" everything. The result was a hundred-foot colossus determined to wipe out all traces of Arma research--which meant the whole island of Antler Pine. Julie led the argument with everyone's parents about letting them fight the colossus. Bina, traumatized and willful and more powerful than ever, had to be talked down from trying to take the thing down on her own. Once again, it was Julie who cut through, insisting on going with. The fight with Lulenski took place inside her own massive body, against the many hostile organ-monsters she now carried within her. In spite of everything, they were overwhelmed and dragged into Lulenski's core, forced to hear Lulenski explain everything that had gone into her many poor decisions. Still firmly entrenched in her feelings of rightness, Lulenski aimed to kill all the monsters still on Antler Pine, then let the kids kill her and take the whole island with them, finally purging it all.
Violet came to their rescue, the only one Lulenski had never known about. Arriving in a stunning form, she forced Lulenski's mind back to her first day at SHELL, before everything had gone so terribly wrong, forcing her to relive her memories up to the present without the layers of rationalization and fear that had built up over the years. With her illusions shattered, Lulenski begged for help. With their combined power, the kids blasted Lulenski's brain with energy, collapsing her massive body back into a normal--if permanently altered--person. Following the battle, Bina was able to separate herself into human and heart again.
In the aftermath, West opened up to Julie about his troubled family life, which he had largely kept hidden from the group. Julie and Violet's families grew closer towards a blended family due to the divorced Ms. Greathouse and the widowed Mr. LeBlanc's romantic relationship. The government promised money to the kids and their families for all they had gone through under DARPA authorization and funding (albeit not hurrying on the payments).
abilities: Julie herself is an ordinary 15-year-old girl. She's springy and energetic.
Kera is a monster born of Julie's hair. Organ-monsters have enhanced superabilities of their ordinary properties. As living hair, Kera can grow rapidly, stretch, hamper opponents by becoming a giant ball of floof, and fly. She also has sharp teeth. Likewise, as hair, Kera doesn't have much internal structure to speak of--she can be struck and even cut with no harm to herself. She can hide herself by pretending to be a particularly shaggy rug, clothing, or blanket. Kera's one real weakness is fire.
personality: Julie Greathouse is a little ball of chaos. Years of shyness and the half-internal, half-external pressure of being "the girl with pretty hair" literally fell away when her hair did. With the situation coming immediately with the circumstance of being pursued by a creepy government-funded organization, Julie reacted by letting loose. She operates on impulse, as quick to start a fight as she is to declare someone a friend (which is very quickly). She's free with her opinions and although she's grown to not blurt out her immediate judgment of a person right away, she still comes to quick conclusions. Her way of treating her situation like a fun adventure both helped her new friends come to terms with it and irritated them for her seeming flippancy.
Sometimes, she can say the wrong thing, so much so that Abel yelled at her for refusing to think before she opened her mouth. But sometimes, she can really say the right thing, like when she said that Bina got the monster she did because of what a big heart she already had. Julie is almost always quick to say what she feels, whether she's angry at someone or trying to pep them up. However, Julie has matured a lot over the three years she and her friends were dealing with SHELL and Arma. She's grown more thoughtful and observant of others, being the first to figure out that Violet's blank face was hiding a lot of insecurity, and the person West eventually opened up to about his tense family situation.
Julie's uncertainty bubbles up in strange ways now and again. She can get jealous and possessive of her friends, and has sometimes followed the counterproductive impulse to hold tight and try and "claim" a person. At one point she calls herself the "master of mistakes." She tries to learn from what she's done wrong. After the disastrous attack on the SHELL lab that almost killed Kera, Julie uncharacteristically hid her feelings because they were so awful she couldn't talk about them.
samples:
TDM toplevel with two threads.
