Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
whomthebelltolls) wrote2025-09-10 11:16 pm
whomthebelltolls) wrote2025-09-10 11:16 pm
App for Somnia ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cultor
PLAYER INFO
Name: Reslari
Preferred Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Reslari, Reslari at Discord, or PM
Age: 36! ... Oh god I've hit 18 twice now.
Invite Link: Here!
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower
Canon: Bloodborne
Age: Unknown, but old enough to have been a college student and then moved on from that. Appears, and acts, adult.
If Under 16, why is this character a good thematic fit for Somnia?: N/A
Canon Point: Just before her boss fight with the Hunter in the Hunter's Nightmare
Wiki Link(s): One and Two. Being it's a FromSoftware game, and that wikis don't always like to speculate, information can be a little sparse since so much of her existence is interpretive, despite how much she also haunts the narrative. I am more than happy to expand.
SOMNIA-SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
1. Dreams are how Sleep chooses you. What might draw your character into Somnia— a wound, a wish, a weakness? Would they follow the dream, or run from it? Maria is already both dead and trapped in a nightmare world, even before the Hunter finds her. In truth, it's basically a Tuesday for her to be in some kind of dreamscape. However, seeing as Sleep's dream is not the one she is used to, and is not based within Kos, Kos' orphan, and the Fishing Hamlet's shared outrage, she would be very curious indeed to see the how and why of it, and to step through the door in a manner of speaking. In fact, that there is something that can unlatch Kos' claws from her and free her from the Hunter's Nightmare - even if it's just to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire of another, perhaps even worse dream - is enough to pique a curiosity she will forever deny having or wanting to indulge. She has nothing left to lose, really.
2. Somnia is a slow unraveling—of worlds, and of selves. How does your character respond to fear, transformation, and losing control? Do they fight, adapt, collapse? Denial, fighting, fleeing. Maria lost herself once in the addiction of Blood and the euphoria of violence, but she loves to pretend she wasn't so bad at that. Just ignore her completely broken moral compass about further murdering things, right? So she runs, she denies, or she fights it, but any way you look at it, she won't accept it easily. Her pride won't allow her to. She has a very distinct image of who she is as a tragic figure. That she made a terrible mistake once, and then she felt very, very bad about it, so now it's better, right? Now she's a silent sentinel preventing anyone else from making that same mistake... even though what she's protecting is already just post her mistake. Changing any of that, or forcing her to actually confront the rest of her sins - her inaction, her compliance with the further horrors, her role in the Church being what it is today - is something she battles tooth and nail against.
3. Connection is the only constant. What kind of bonds does your character form— fast and burning, slow and wary, deep and desperate? How might that shape their time in this world? Oh, it's so slow, so wary. Fighting against people prying into her mind, and secrets will be second nature to her, but this is why memshare of the linked TDM was so important: Her worst and most brutal secret is now public knowledge. People have just... seen what she did, right from the beginning. Now she no longer has to bury that as hard, because what even is the point? She might not fight connections quite as hard.
She'll still be mightily uncomfortable, though. Physical touch is one thing, but another knowing her mind is its own hell to her. However, she no longer needs to fight to the death to protect her biggest secret, and that might open doors that would otherwise be jammed shut.
4. What are two major forces in your character’s personality that are often in conflict? (Ex: logic vs emotion, power vs guilt, obedience vs rage, etc.) Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower is a big, fat hypocrite. She rid herself of her sword because she felt sick and guilty over the massacre at the Fishing Hamlet, but when the Nightmare forces her to possess the weapon again, she unhesitatingly takes it up to stop the Hunter from going to the Fishing Hamlet and doing anything within it.
There are patients in a Research Hall that, while writhing in the agony of the torturous experiments they underwent, cry out for her to hold their hands and offer them some kind of comfort. She clearly did little to nothing to stop the experiments from being inflicted upon them - what's a little comfort going to do when people's heads are literally splitting apart and melting? And even when you get to the door to her clocktower, it's closed and locked, as though she sequestered herself away from the very patients that even to that moment cried out for her help.
Then you get the second layer to that: The Fishing Hamlet massacre was caused by her and other collegiate scholars researching a scientific inquiry. They slaughtered the villagers en masse, desecrating their corpses to try to find evidence of what caused the piscine metamorphosis in the first place; literally torturing and killing people for science and answers to the questions of human ascension. And what is happening at the very Research Hall that Maria joined after the massacre? Torturing and killing people for science and answers to the questions of human ascension, of course. This place would even later come to host the Orphanage and the Choir in more "modern" Bloodborne times, which continue the horrific experimentation for science and answers to the questions of human ascension.
She clearly carries a lot of guilt about what she did, but it's almost like her pride refuses to allow her to truly admit to her own fault in it, even if she killed herself over it. Maybe because killing herself was running away from all of it.
Oh yeah, she's also a coward. A noble, gentlemanly, self-sacrificing coward. She didn't try to rectify the Fishing Hamlet massacre, she didn't try to save the patients in the Research Hall. She doesn't even admit that she was part of the massacre in the village: you more or less have to infer that yourself. Instead, she threw her sword away after the massacre, and ran. She killed herself over her guilt - she ran. She tries to kill you, the Hunter, before you learn what she did. She's running. But she calls it "liberating you from your wild curiosity." Like she's the one doing you a favor, instead of trying to soothe her own guilt. She's playing the hero, but she was actually a villain the whole time. Hypocrite!
VESSEL SELECTION
Which Vessel Type are you choosing: Token or Offering? Offering
Why does this Vessel type feel appropriate for your character? Literally because Bloodborne is gothic Victorian werewolves and the people of the city find said wolfing out to be a terrible fate they fight hard to avoid, but cannot because of their own choices. More personally, Maria is one of the few characters that were able to keep a human form so metamorphosing would freak her out, and challenge her preconceived knowledge and biases about Beasts and things that look like them. Even more metaphorically, she's already been a blood-drunken, violence-addicted, unthinking beast of prey and she needs to face that. Or lean into it, I feel a worse villain arc is just as likely as a redemption one.
Choose one OR list three subclass options within your chosen Vessel type that you think would suit them: Lycan
Samples: A toplevel with some threads below it!
Name: Reslari
Preferred Contact:
Age: 36! ... Oh god I've hit 18 twice now.
Invite Link: Here!
CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower
Canon: Bloodborne
Age: Unknown, but old enough to have been a college student and then moved on from that. Appears, and acts, adult.
If Under 16, why is this character a good thematic fit for Somnia?: N/A
Canon Point: Just before her boss fight with the Hunter in the Hunter's Nightmare
Wiki Link(s): One and Two. Being it's a FromSoftware game, and that wikis don't always like to speculate, information can be a little sparse since so much of her existence is interpretive, despite how much she also haunts the narrative. I am more than happy to expand.
SOMNIA-SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
1. Dreams are how Sleep chooses you. What might draw your character into Somnia— a wound, a wish, a weakness? Would they follow the dream, or run from it? Maria is already both dead and trapped in a nightmare world, even before the Hunter finds her. In truth, it's basically a Tuesday for her to be in some kind of dreamscape. However, seeing as Sleep's dream is not the one she is used to, and is not based within Kos, Kos' orphan, and the Fishing Hamlet's shared outrage, she would be very curious indeed to see the how and why of it, and to step through the door in a manner of speaking. In fact, that there is something that can unlatch Kos' claws from her and free her from the Hunter's Nightmare - even if it's just to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire of another, perhaps even worse dream - is enough to pique a curiosity she will forever deny having or wanting to indulge. She has nothing left to lose, really.
2. Somnia is a slow unraveling—of worlds, and of selves. How does your character respond to fear, transformation, and losing control? Do they fight, adapt, collapse? Denial, fighting, fleeing. Maria lost herself once in the addiction of Blood and the euphoria of violence, but she loves to pretend she wasn't so bad at that. Just ignore her completely broken moral compass about further murdering things, right? So she runs, she denies, or she fights it, but any way you look at it, she won't accept it easily. Her pride won't allow her to. She has a very distinct image of who she is as a tragic figure. That she made a terrible mistake once, and then she felt very, very bad about it, so now it's better, right? Now she's a silent sentinel preventing anyone else from making that same mistake... even though what she's protecting is already just post her mistake. Changing any of that, or forcing her to actually confront the rest of her sins - her inaction, her compliance with the further horrors, her role in the Church being what it is today - is something she battles tooth and nail against.
3. Connection is the only constant. What kind of bonds does your character form— fast and burning, slow and wary, deep and desperate? How might that shape their time in this world? Oh, it's so slow, so wary. Fighting against people prying into her mind, and secrets will be second nature to her, but this is why memshare of the linked TDM was so important: Her worst and most brutal secret is now public knowledge. People have just... seen what she did, right from the beginning. Now she no longer has to bury that as hard, because what even is the point? She might not fight connections quite as hard.
She'll still be mightily uncomfortable, though. Physical touch is one thing, but another knowing her mind is its own hell to her. However, she no longer needs to fight to the death to protect her biggest secret, and that might open doors that would otherwise be jammed shut.
4. What are two major forces in your character’s personality that are often in conflict? (Ex: logic vs emotion, power vs guilt, obedience vs rage, etc.) Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower is a big, fat hypocrite. She rid herself of her sword because she felt sick and guilty over the massacre at the Fishing Hamlet, but when the Nightmare forces her to possess the weapon again, she unhesitatingly takes it up to stop the Hunter from going to the Fishing Hamlet and doing anything within it.
There are patients in a Research Hall that, while writhing in the agony of the torturous experiments they underwent, cry out for her to hold their hands and offer them some kind of comfort. She clearly did little to nothing to stop the experiments from being inflicted upon them - what's a little comfort going to do when people's heads are literally splitting apart and melting? And even when you get to the door to her clocktower, it's closed and locked, as though she sequestered herself away from the very patients that even to that moment cried out for her help.
Then you get the second layer to that: The Fishing Hamlet massacre was caused by her and other collegiate scholars researching a scientific inquiry. They slaughtered the villagers en masse, desecrating their corpses to try to find evidence of what caused the piscine metamorphosis in the first place; literally torturing and killing people for science and answers to the questions of human ascension. And what is happening at the very Research Hall that Maria joined after the massacre? Torturing and killing people for science and answers to the questions of human ascension, of course. This place would even later come to host the Orphanage and the Choir in more "modern" Bloodborne times, which continue the horrific experimentation for science and answers to the questions of human ascension.
She clearly carries a lot of guilt about what she did, but it's almost like her pride refuses to allow her to truly admit to her own fault in it, even if she killed herself over it. Maybe because killing herself was running away from all of it.
Oh yeah, she's also a coward. A noble, gentlemanly, self-sacrificing coward. She didn't try to rectify the Fishing Hamlet massacre, she didn't try to save the patients in the Research Hall. She doesn't even admit that she was part of the massacre in the village: you more or less have to infer that yourself. Instead, she threw her sword away after the massacre, and ran. She killed herself over her guilt - she ran. She tries to kill you, the Hunter, before you learn what she did. She's running. But she calls it "liberating you from your wild curiosity." Like she's the one doing you a favor, instead of trying to soothe her own guilt. She's playing the hero, but she was actually a villain the whole time. Hypocrite!
VESSEL SELECTION
Which Vessel Type are you choosing: Token or Offering? Offering
Why does this Vessel type feel appropriate for your character? Literally because Bloodborne is gothic Victorian werewolves and the people of the city find said wolfing out to be a terrible fate they fight hard to avoid, but cannot because of their own choices. More personally, Maria is one of the few characters that were able to keep a human form so metamorphosing would freak her out, and challenge her preconceived knowledge and biases about Beasts and things that look like them. Even more metaphorically, she's already been a blood-drunken, violence-addicted, unthinking beast of prey and she needs to face that. Or lean into it, I feel a worse villain arc is just as likely as a redemption one.
Choose one OR list three subclass options within your chosen Vessel type that you think would suit them: Lycan
Samples: A toplevel with some threads below it!
Inventory
1: Resting on a bench is a needlecase, worn leather stitched with crimson thread. The needles within never rust, and when one pricks, wounds close with alarming speed. The case smells faintly of saltwater and gunpowder.