IN THE NAME OF THE MOON! WRITING COMPETITION? SCHOOLKID COMP!
If you want more background on her, Embra's quest thread is here.
Name: Embralyn Naomi Matuwabe*
Her true last name is Berkowitz, but her parents had it legally changed to make their “authentic” African-mystic circus venture more convincing.
Nicknames: Embra – most people;
Em, Emmie – closer friends;
Madame Calliope – her stage name at CIRQUE.
Age: 17
Birthday: March 3rd
Sign: Pisces
Blood Type: B+
Fav. Food: Seafood (salmon and crab especially), hot tea, french fries, pickles, sweet potatoes.
Hated Food: Mushrooms, candies, cupcakes, cream cheese.
School: Meadowview
Hobbies:
Fortune Telling – Embra works at her parents' circus as a psychic. She has experience with tarot cards, crystal balls, palms, tea leaves – you name it, and she will read it and predict your future. Of course, this is 100% fabricated and something that she bases more on basic information and body language than anything else. Still, it is a cool thing to do to impress your friends, and the young teen jumps at the chance to give people a prediction of their future.
Astrology & Mythology – Her twin passions! Embra loves a good story, and mythology is chock full of some of the best. Plus, both astrology and mythology have predictive capabilities, and since Embra prides herself on her (false) ability to interpret the future, she feels that a strong foundation in these subjects will only strengthen her skill. Plus, she loves being able to throw out really random facts in the middle of a conversation, which is nicely aided by these disciplines.
Drama Club – Embra is incredibly performance-oriented, and from an early age, her mother encouraged her to get involved in the dramatic arts. She prefers the writing side of things, but she has been known to hop up on stage and act out
exactly how she imagines a particular monologue to be performed. In general, she likes to spend her free time writing out her own melodramatic tales of woe and lust, but the girl prefers an audience for her musings, making the stage a perfect fit.
Tea! – In all of her practice with reading someone’s fortune off of tea leaves, Embra has become very obsessed with the drink itself. She has started growing her own, drying it, and testing out different temperatures of water for optimal brewing. It is a project that she sometimes does with her mother, though recently (with all their bickering) it has become a solo endeavor. She has many opinions on how critical drinking tea is to your health, but hobby-wise, it is mostly something that she does in her free time.
Gemstone: Aquamarine.
Virtues:
Creative – Embra channels every ounce of her Pisces Zodiac sign in this trait. She thrives – no, is
sustained – by her creativity. Storytelling is not merely a hobby for her; it is a way of life. It is the way that she has learned to rationalize the world around her. Reality is a relative term to her. She prefers her own digested view of it. When recounting stories, Embralyn will inject them with new details and events that she has 100% fabricated just to make it more exciting. If she goes to the market and is cut off in the parking lot by an older woman, she will morph this into a rabid tale of how a disgruntled housewife (who had suddenly discovered that her husband had cheated on her with one of his students – a teenager, no less!) came plowing up to Em with fire burning in her eyes. This poor housewife mistook Embra for the treacherous teenager who had stolen her husband, and in a blind rage, rammed her car into an unsuspecting Embra! Oh, how the oranges and cucumbers she had just purchased exploded into the air, flying away in a flurry of produce! Every man, woman, and child in the parking lot froze in horror, each holding their breath until poor little Embra got to her feet and gave them all an enthusiastic thumbs up! Of course, she even managed to explain the misunderstanding to the poor housewife who agreed to take the matter to the police instead. (But I digress…) Embralyn views this contortion of the truth as a perfectly fine thing. As long as the general message is the same, why is it so wrong to embellish a
crap load little?
Curious Listener – Embra loves a good story. For this reason, she will sit and listen to you for days on end rambling about whatever tale you decide to share with her. It is all fodder for her churning brain, something that she can later pull from and add in to one of her own renditions. A person who doesn’t often like to open up might find Embra a bit easy to talk to; she shows general interest in the events of other people’s lives and will ask the questions needed to pull more and more information out of them. However, while she is easy to talk to, there is a bit of danger to pouring out your heart. (Check out the flaws for more…)
Cheerleader – Being around sad people is frustrating. They don’t want to hear about stories. They don’t want to run around and eavesdrop on people. They just want to be sad. Embra really hates to see anyone upset and so she will do all that she can to cheer them up, especially if they are a good friend. Her typical mode of accomplishing this is to tell them a really distracting story, or to just get them to laugh. Oftentimes, she will try to predict their future, substituting in really happy and wonderful things in place of what she might really think. Sometimes she will make fun of the people that they hate for their entertainment. For characters who would hate this kind of approach, she will be incredibly annoying.
Also, I thought this was worth noting. Embra is not excessively CHIPPER. This trait simply applies to when people are being wet blankets. She doesn’t run around trying to make everyone feel better all the time, but in situations where their emotions are being distracting, she will turn on her “CHEER UP!” function and get to work.
Intuitive – As a professional liar (of sorts), Embra is very good at sniffing out other liars. A fish can recognize another fish, so to speak. She might not know what exactly is amiss, but if you try to deceive her, she will sense that something is up, even if she can’t put her finger on it. She is very, very good at reading people. Since she was eleven, she has been working at her parents’ circus as a fortune teller, giving her lots and lots of experience with reading people. Embra is particularly tuned into to nonverbal communication (body language, changes in pitch, etc.) as these are the things that she uses to make her predictions of people’s future seem more plausible. So if you want to lie to her… you should try to text her about it. Or you can try to pull one over on her by making whatever deception/lie it is a really
good story, or simply by being very self-aware and controlling any signs that might give you away.
Flaws:
Compulsive Liar – On the reverse of her virtue of creativity is this negative trait. Embra loves a good story – and she doesn’t care what she has to say to invent it. And because she never sees the harm in a little invention, she tends to be confused by those who accuse her of being a liar. It isn’t
lying; it is
improving. Hey, it isn’t her fault that most stories are boring anyway! However, this tendency of hers to transform stories into something else leads to trouble. She tends to be the source of many, many, many rumors at the school. It is not necessarily something she does intentionally to hurt people’s feelings, but it happens quite frequently. With her own past, Embra tends to change her story daily – one moment claiming that she was rescued from murderous ransom-demanders, the next spinning a tale of her years growing up on a farm. The girl can’t keep her story straight, and when in doubt, she simply lies MORE. And if she gets caught in a lie… she tells another. It is a very destructive cycle and one that Embra does absolutely nothing to correct.
Opportunistic – Embra likes to have an easy life. She likes it when things go her way. (Who doesn’t?) But she sometimes takes it to a level that others don’t. Embra will jump at any opportunity to get what she wants, even if it means putting a friend at a disadvantage. Let’s say Embra and your character are heading to the mall to buy this particular kind of cake that you both love. However, you decide to run to the bathroom really quickly, leaving Embra to wait in line. If there is only one piece of cake left, chances are that Embra will buy it and inhale it before you come back. Then she will tell you that they are all out when you return. It is not precisely that she is
selfish, but more that she has the ability to rationalize her selfish actions as the “logical” thing to do. Afterall, SHE waited in line while you did something else. And if she had waited to buy it, someone else might have gotten it! Clearly, a higher power wanted
her to have the cake since you were not around to intervene on your own behalf. Only later would it occur to her that she could have just cut the cake in half. Basically, she might not betray you directly, but she will certainly consider her own satisfaction as more important (unless allowing you to get your way will give her some other kind of satisfaction that is more worthwhile).
Untrustworthy – Embra cannot be trusted with a secret. Period. It is incredibly hard for her to keep her mouth shut, especially when it is really
really juicy. Throwing a surprise party? Don’t tell Embra. Just put her in your car, drive her there, and only once you have her in a secure location where she cannot run her mouth is it safe to let her know what is going on. Even her best friends are not immune to this! Secrets are especially spectacular stories because they are things that people don’t want known. Embra relishes in letting people know that she knows something that they don’t, and she loves to make people work to get it out of her, which isn’t very hard at all really. This, combined with her compulsive lying, makes Embra a very hard person to trust. In fact, most people probably don’t trust her as far as they can throw her. If she isn’t lying to you, she is telling your secrets, and her moments of honesty and reliability tend to be few and far between. I like to think of Embra as a Cassandra character – a woman from Greek myth who always predicted the future accurately but was cursed by no one ever believing her. Or, if you prefer a more folk-ish analogy, she suffers from The Boy Who Cried Wolf curse.
Nosey – Embra wants to know everyone’s business. Sure, on one hand, she is genuinely curious about the life experiences of others, but on the other, it is just really interesting and great material for her to use in her own stories. She will go to great lengths to uncover your secrets, especially if she knows you are keeping something from her. This can get her into a great deal of trouble, depending on WHO is the focus of her investigating. (HI, NEGAVERSER! PLEASE DON'T KILL ME.) She will berate, stalk, eavesdrop, and otherwise harass you until she finds out what she wants to know. Anything that seems like a secret that is worth keeping… that is even more desirable to her. Her pursuit of the information is fool-hardy and extremely forceful. It will no doubt get her into trouble… or worse.
Physical Description:
Hair: The texture of her hair is, in a word, poofy. If she did nothing to it, the girl would have an impressive afro – a look that her African mother and half-African younger brother sport proudly. Dry, rough, and airborne, her hair springs from her head in every which way, begging to be controlled. Sometimes, she simply wears a scarf in her hair, allowing the massive poof to stand at total attention, but usually, her style of choice is two big puff ball pig tails high on her head with a brightly-colored scarf serving as a headband. A few stray pieces hang around her face, but they are pretty short and curl in tight corkscrews. As for color, it is a very pale teal shade. (For reference, significantly lighter and paler than Linarite, but still darker than Polaris.)
Eyes: Vibrant purple with a darker ring of color around the outer edge.
Face: Rounded features – lips and nose especially pronounced. Thick freckles across her nose and cheekbones. A bemused smirk playing across her mouth. A mischievous look in her eyes.
Body: Being of mixed race (Half-African, Half-Jewish), Embra’s skin is light cocoa in hue, leaning towards a darker shade. She got her mother’s curves, but her father’s gangly height. She stands at about 5’10”, on the tall side for a girl.
Fashion: Uniform: She always wears a scarf in her hair, usually folded into a headband that ties at the nape of her neck. Her colors of choice are teal, purple, and golden yellow. Underneath her skirt, she wears leggings that go to mid-calf, but over the leggings, she wears leg warmers that start at her knee and extend to her shoe, flopping over it. So, basically, all of her legs are covered by some kind of material. She tends to have golden bangles around her wrist, or an arm cuff, and always has on a pair of dangling earrings. Since she subscribes to many different faiths and schools of thought on the future, it is likely that she would incorporate a lot of those themes into her outfit. (i.e. cross earrings, Evil Eye-patterned leggings, zodiac markings on her headband, Star of David buttons on her legwarmers, etc.)
I’m not terribly good at visualizing, but I imagine that she would have a golden yellow scarf headband. Her tights would be teal, perhaps with the pattern of the Evil Eye on them, and her legwarmers would be purple with gold accents. If these colors look weird, I would trust the artists to correct them to something more attractive-looking.
Everyday Wear: Embra tends toward bright colors that make a statement. She often wears long coats of African influence (that are actually just props from her job at CIRQUE), but pairs them with jeans or a skirt and leggings. Embra does not understand the concept of "less is more" and so she frequently looks like she fell into a stack of laundry and then just left the house. She isn't untidy, per se, but she is not put-together either. Her outfits tend to be a strange compilation of all the fabrications that she has made about her past with slight highlights of the truth. She tends to wear more clothing, as opposed to less, and typically has some kind of bohemian flair to her ensemble.
THE STORY ENTRY
Entry!
For Embralyn Matuwabe, Halloween was a week-long celebration. Each day was an opportunity to play dress-up and embrace every dramatis persona in her repertoire. And besides, when your parents were professional circus freaks and conmen, there were a wealth of disguises to choose from – just open any closet!
On Monday, she prowled the hallways of Meadowview as a lioness, growling at those who shot her dirty looks. On Tuesday, she came as a calculator with real Chanukah lights strung on the inside to make her buttons light up. On Wednesday, she decided to go back to her roots and dressed as a fairy princess; she even wore the very costume she had donned in the fifth grade (plus an added skirt to make up for her sharp height increase). On Thursday, it was time to be poetic. She came as Ophelia. Dead Ophelia. Unfortunately, she got sent home for “indecency” before second period. Apparently it wasn’t funny to act out a suicidal drowning in the school fountain.
Some people just don’t get art, you know? But today was Friday –
real Halloween.
And it was time to pull out the
big guns.
Walking down the swiftly darkening street toward the subway station, Embra’s gait was marked by the methodic
click, click, click of her heeled boots. They extended to her knee and were tied off with purple ribbons. On her arms, she wore matching white gloves – too elegant to actually belong to her, probably something pilfered from her mother’s old wardrobe (the kind of thing Mrs. Matuwabe wore when she was Nicodee Ullrainey and living in a posh borough in the north). Embra’s outfit was her normal school uniform with embellishments: purple ribbons tied to the ends of her skirt, a scarf wrapped over her shoulders, a massive bow tied just above her backside. Twin tufts of pale teal hair poked out from a crudely fashioned headband, stray hairs curling in tight twists at her neck and ears. Massive moon and star earrings dangled noisily in each earlobe.
She was the most magnificent knock-off Sailor Senshi to ever stalk the streets of Destiny City.
The Halloween costume had been a stroke of pure genius, if Embra could say so herself, which, of course,
she did. It was ironic, artistic,
and current event related! Despite the stares and gaping looks it brought, Embra relished in the attention and had spent her entire day telling anyone who would listen about her brush with one of the strange costumed fighters that seemed to hide in the narrow alleys and dark corners of their very own Destiny City. Of course, it was complete fabrication – Embra had only heard rumors. But to a girl with a creative bone as thick as Embra’s, a rumor was all she needed to spin a particularly enthralling tale of triumph and intrigue.
Only when her throat grew thick and stretched from talking, her stomach sick with sugar, and her unicorn-decorated pillowcase heavy with candy did she decide to venture home. Home? Bah. Her parents were nothing but opportunist slave-drivers who cared more about Embra helping sell their little CIRQUE scheme – a plot created to convince all attendees of its authentic magical properties – than about what she really wanted. (Or perhaps that was just her rebellious teenage mind talking.
Whatever.) In the past month, she had done all she could to stay far, far away from home for as long as possible, which grew increasingly more difficult when your friends decide to get mad at you for no reason at all.
As if on cue, her cellphone buzzed in her pocket. With a free hand, Embra flipped it open and read a text:
omg I can’t believe you told Ken what I said! Does confidential mean nothing to you??? Don’t bother texting back, I won’t answer. It was from Ryline, a friend of hers from the Drama Club. Oh… but what had she said? Embra stared hard at the glowing screen of her cellphone, tapping a painted nail against its side, as if it would find the memory for her. Ken… something about him… using steroids? Yes, that sounded familiar. Oh yes, that was right! Ryline had mentioned that her boyfriend Ken had been acting really mean lately and that he was probably on steroids or something, trying to get good enough to start on the lacrosse team.
That was what this was about? Oh, come on! Embra had only (quite innocently!) decided to act out what HULK KEN might look like if he overdid it on the steroids... and it had only been in front of the Drama Club! Was that really a reason to be—
Embra’s rambling thoughts were cut off midstream as she tripped – well,
face-planted – on the sidewalk. Her cellphone skittered across the ground and the fallen teen made a low groan in her throat.
”That was not a prat fall,” she murmured to herself, laughing. All this focus on the cellphone and Ryline’s misplaced anger had taken Embra’s attention off her own two feet, apparently. Picking herself up, she turned over into a sitting position, fussing at the black scrapes on the knees of her boots. And then… something caught her eye. It was a yo-yo. A silver yo-yo. Leaning forward, she grabbed it, lifting it to her face for a better look. It stuck, and she yanked a little harder. A pale hand flopped onto her foot, the string of the yo-yo wrapped around its finger. Embra would have screamed, but her eyes adjusted quickly. She hadn’t tripped over her own feet after all! In the dimly lit street, she could make out the outline of a person, a boy not much older-looking than herself. It was no wonder she had missed him. He had on an all black uniform with black hair and black skin and – wait a minute.
Inching closer, Embra crawled forward on hands and knees, leaning over the unconscious figure. He… this guy… he looked just like… one of those
Negaverse people. She slipped a gloved hand toward him, fingering the edge of his militant jacket. This was no bargain barrel knock-off. Embra knew a lot about cheap costumes – her parents owned a circus, for crying out loud – and this was
no costume. She gasped, quickly darting two fingers to her lips to press back any more sound. In a flash, she darted to her cellphone, flipping it open so that the soft blue glow illuminated her face. Every citizen of Destiny City had been told precisely what to do in this situation. Call the police. Report it. Any normal person would do just that!
Unfortunately, Embralyn Matuwabe was
far from normal.
This opportunity was once in a lifetime, and Embra did not believe in coincidences. Crossing to a low brick flowerbed, the dark-skinned teen propped her cellphone up against it, clicking a button toward the top. She returned to the prone Negaverse figure, brought her face inches from his own, and… smiled? A bright flash lit the space between Embra’s cellphone and where she kneeled by the Negaverser. A series of several flashes pounded out at a steady pace, and each time, Embra switched to a new pose: her arms wrapped around him, blowing a kiss, holding her first out as if she had just delivered a finishing blow, her foot resting on his chest in victory, miming a kick into his side, shooting peace signs. It was an impromptu photo shoot, and this Negaverser was the unwilling star attraction.
”Pics or it didn’t happen!” she announced with a wide grin, heading back to her cellphone to check the quality. No one could call her a liar now! She had
photographic evidence. Her mind was churning fast, cooking up story after story to go with the photos. Would she claim to be a secret Sailor Scout? Or would she play the role of a lowly human who had defeated a Negaverser single-handed? How many people would she claim to have saved? Embra was practically skipping when she headed back to the unconscious man, hoping to get one last close-up shot of the pair of them. After that, sure, she’d call the police, let them deal with it. But there was no reason that she couldn’t have her fun first! Wiggling down onto the ground next to the unconscious Negaverser, Embra carefully rolled his head toward her so that it appeared as though they were staring at each other. Yes, this would be the perfect shot – a stare-down between the evil baddie and the bringer of his doom. Embra could barely contain her smiles.
Lifting the cellphone, camera setting ready to go, she narrowed her eyes in preparation for the pose, whispering a near silent,
”Say cheese!” Her finger pressed on the button, the flash began to blink.
”Cheese…” The flash went off in a blinding light, and when the glare faded away, Embra found herself staring into the open (and angry) eyes of the formerly-unconscious Negaverser.
She shot to her feet, dropping her pillowcase of candy in panic. A rainbow of treats exploded on to the gray sidewalk, but Embralyn was long gone. Her scream of terror echoed down the empty street, her heeled boots
click, click, clicking, and the purple ribbon at her back flapping like a flag behind her.
