AMITYVILLE ACADEMY ENROLLMENT FORMName: Hunched Sick and Old Like Nerves Caught in a Graph*
Nicknames: Nerves
Gender: Fluid, indeterminate. Unformed have no fixed gender but may be gender-responsive to the situation at hand.
Age: Indeterminate. Very young relative to other Unformed in its skulk.
Faction: Monster
Race: Unformed (Skindancer†/Fish Speaker/Bonethief/Acolyte of the Red Sea of Entropy--they have a lot of names over the way it comes from)
Natural Ability: Indiscriminate Acquisition - As the name suggests, the Unformed don't have defined physical shapes; however, a part of their ongoing cycle of maturation involves acquiring a stable physical form. The pieces they use to make up that form doesn't ... really matter, as essence of the Unformed predates categories dividing animal from vegetable from mineral, monster from undead from ghost from reaper. Anything object they take into themselves, provided they've traded fairly for it, bonds to them and influences their final physical shape.
(In RP terms, I'd like to keep a separate counter of items Nerves has traded for -- 5 or 10 or whatever its artist deems reasonable as influences -- and not advance it until it's met its maturation counter for that year as well as the year points. 9_6/)
Personality: Curious. Acquisitive. A ruthless businessperson but not above learning a thing or two. Oddly naive about the Shaped world. Nerves is not from around Amityville but at the same time it's awfully desperate to fit in despite its carefully maintained air of alien strangeness; after all, it's come a long way from home to escape a situation it found untenable and is in no hurry to go back there.
Even so, living in among the Shaped isn't all it had anticipated it would be, either. The peoples of Halloween who live near the border of the Red Sea of Entropy are familiar with the Unformed, the same a human neighborhood might be with a strange but harmless local cult. They know their cant, their behavior, the inability of the young ones to keep a proper Shape; they come out on Trading Days to give the elders near apotheosis trinkets in return for oddities from the Sea.
Here, Nerves is another oddity among oddities and it isn't sure it likes that, especially when it means explaining itself--or being in competition for its goods and services. The Formed should recognize it for what it is without it having to say a word. They should know the value of its goods! It shouldn't have to be reduced to shilling to make a trade, surely...
...It's going to be a long three years.
Why are they enrolled in Amityville Academy? While they are not by nature particularly organized (in fact it's sort of antithetical to their entire being), the Unformed who live within Halloween's borders have formed into loose trading aggregates known as skulks to maximize their business opportunities with other entities and speed the rate at which senior Unformed can reach apotheosis. Unfortunately, Nerves was a very junior Unformed indeed and did
not like the idea at all of having to wait centuries or even millennia to advance through the Formless politics of its skulk, so it packed up its assets and went inland. Amityville sounded like an excellent combination of business opportunity and introduction to the world of Formed behavior.
FEAR Ability: Unshaping - The ordered minds of Formed beings do not take well to being exposed to the uncluttered Nothing that the Unformed represent. Nerves can enforce the horror of being uncreated on others if it focuses, though right now this is limited to a mild creepiness. As it becomes more Shaped itself and its Shapelessness is shifted into its FEAR--and it refines its own control of its abilities--victims of its Unshaping will feel as if they are being ripped apart by the Nothing.
Physical Description: Nerves is tall and slim and short and fat and has six arms or one arm and two arms and four legs and two legs and long hair and no hair and ears like a donkey and a tail or three tails or no tails or--
Wait, start again.
No one can quite agree on what they see when looking at Nerves except that it's wearing a burnoose and robes of no particular color that wrap it from head to toe and has a place to look out of and a suggestion of hips and shoulders. It carries a walking stick and is burdened with dozens of silk ropes at all times, from which hang a number of vials and pouches and jars. Many of them swirl with golden sand or thick crimson water.
Eye Colour: Artist's choice. There always seem to be more of them than you remember, and they glow.
Hair Colour/Style: Artist's choice. It can't make up its mind whether it's hair, fur, feathers, or tentacles.
Skin Colour: There's no skin visible under the burnoose and robes.
Clothing Style/Colours: A burnoose and heavy desert robes of creamy white and dark brown. Braided silk ropes and various "trade goods" as described above, artist's choice on how exotic they are, though the sand and the water should be present.
Extra: Nerves sometimes has more than two arms and two legs and they're definitely not human. Sometimes they've got hooves or tentacles or claws. Sometimes they don't. They're always covered in bandages to conceal whatever skin might show, even if they're obviously mechanical or otherwise not...fleshy.
References: Coming~
*
From W.D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle.†
Local term; not to be confused with the the variety of Skindancers that are solid-bodied shapeshifters. See next post.
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