App for babylonwood

[prettylittledeadgirl]

I said 'I heard you were a killer'; she said 'lies, all lies,
Though it's true I'm often with a driver, on the night he dies.
For men can sometimes get confused on a road that they don't know;
They need someone who knows the way and can tell them where to go.
They need someone to steer them straight to where they're meant to be...
They need a hand to hold the map, and that's why they need me.'

The Player
User Name/Nick: Beka
User LJ: starletfallen
AIM/IM: archangelet
E-mail: beka@bekacavanaugh.com
Other Characters: none (previously Mat Wallace and Stefan)

The Character
Character Name: Rose Marshall
Character Journal: sparrowhillrose
Canon: Sparrow Hill Road
Age: 16 (but she’s been dead since 1945)
From When?: Just before setting out on the Atlantic Highway to ask a question of the Queen of the routewitches (beginning of “Building a Mystery”)

Abilities/Powers:

• The ability to shift through the various layers of twilight on the roads - it’s not well described, but it’s basically different levels of the world, where the ghosts of things are. Sometimes living people can slip into the twilight (druggies, homeless, the fringes of society, basically). She can also rise up into the “daylight”, as a ghost, since that’s the sort of ghost she is.
  
• She’s a hitcher, which means that she’s a ghost who hitch-hikes. When she gets picked up, and given a coat to keep her warm, she gets a temporary grant of life again, until the sun rises or she takes the coat off. It has to belong to someone else, and it has to be freely given. She is also able to modify her physical appearance (clothes, haircut, makeup) with a thought, though she's stuck with whatever look and clothes she was going with when she puts on a coat.
  
• Though it takes a lot of effort and concentration, she can also pull a living person down into the twilight, though it’s very hard and not a good idea or something she does on a regular basis.
  
• She is called to people who are going to die, sometimes. Usually it’s someone dying on the road - a trucker, a drag racer. So they pick her up, and she helps them get to where they’re going afterwards - she knows where their exit is - it’s a literal exit most of the time, down in the twilight, past a diner called the Last Dance that employs a bean sidhe named Emma. Sometimes she can also sense when someone might die, and get them off that path long enough to save their life.

Further information on her world can be found here.

Power Limitations: She’s… just a 16-year-old girl who isn’t in very good shape. She’s not going to be ghosty, which means she can’t do any of the supernatural things she used to. ^_^ More fun that way.
Inventory

• 1 green silk dress, ankle-length, cap sleeves
  
• 1 pair of matching pumps
  
• 1 matching hair ribbon

Personality:When she was alive, Rose Marshall was much more reserved than she is these days. Not to say she was a wilting flower, far from it, but it wasn’t proper or decorous to constantly be speaking her mind about everything. Not to mention the fact that she was one of the “poor folks”, and the other girls at school (and more than a few adults) looked down on her for that, and there was no cause to give them more reason to do that than they had. She had a temper, though, and was prone to being a bit rash when she was angry. That’s what got her killed, after all.

Now that she’s been dead more than sixty years, she’s less decorous. Though she is a good person, and a soft touch when it comes to sympathy (most of the time), she covers it most of the time with a brusque and sarcastic demeanor. When she’s hitching a ride, she generally plays sweet and relatively innocent (very easy, considering she still looks like she’s sixteen, with a peaches and cream complexion), mostly because it’s easier to convince someone you’re harmless and in need of their help that way. With people she knows, or isn’t trying to get a ride out of, she’s much more straight-forward, no-bullshit, and liable to lose patience with idiocy. This isn’t to say that she’s constantly grumpy or bitchy when she’s not playing the part of the girl needing a ride, far from it. She is a genuinely personable, kind girl - but she won’t put up with any shit. Jerking her around or getting on her nerves when she’s tired or stressed will almost invariably get snarky commentary, and possibly insults to your intelligence. With her friends, Rose can still be sarcastic, but it’s a gentler sort, usually - the sort of sarcasm and teasing you do with friends and family.

Rose is a sucker for a chivalrous boy, especially if he’s got a girlfriend - not in that she falls in love (she’s already fallen in love once, and that hasn’t changed), but in that she will go to great lengths to try to save a sweet boy who loves his girl, if she’s been called to be their psychopomp, even if rationally she knows it’s a lost cause. Mostly this is because those boys remind her so much of Gary, and she can’t help but see herself (before she died) in their girlfriends, despite not having met them. She always struggles with guilt if they end up dying despite her best efforts, and she makes sure she is as gentle and kind with them as she can be, when she leads them to the Last Dance and beyond.

One of the things about Rose, though she doesn’t talk about it, is that she’s still head-over-heels in love with Gary. She doesn’t know for certain why it’s never faded over the years - maybe it’s just something from life that she clings to, maybe it’s something about her that can’t change, or maybe he was just the one she was meant for, but she is. Thinking too much about him is heartbreaking for her, and she dreads the day when she will inevitably be called to play psychopomp to him - she’s done it for many friends and family in the decades since her death, and she has no doubt that she’ll be called for him as well. She deals with this by not thinking about Gary as much as she can. In some ways, she is still sort of a teenager - her emotions tend to be pretty intense, so avoiding the heartache that comes from thinking about Gary is a coping strategy to avoid despair and depression, for her.

She is not fond of being talked down to or patronized based on her apparent age and will get confrontational or snarky if someone does, unless she has a strong incentive (usually some reason not to piss the person off) to hold her tongue. And even then, her mouth sometimes gets the better of her.

She doesn’t usually feel lonely, hitchhiking along the ghost roads, because that’s what she’s meant to do, as a ghost, but sometimes she does get lonely - it’s usually when someone she knew in life passes on past the Last Dance, or when a ghost she knew/guided finally leaves the ghost roads to move on, leaving her behind. She wants to move on, in a lot of ways, but taking that exit is also frightening to her, and she knows that she’s not meant to take it yet. She has unfinished business with Bobby Cross.

Bobby Cross is a complex person in her "life”, for all that she has only run into him that once, and run far from him ever since. She hates him, for killing her and countless other innocent people, in order to keep himself forever young and alive. She’s deeply disgusted by him, because the idea of destroying someone else to get what you want is not an attractive one to her - it’s downright evil. She considers Bobby to be the most evil person she’s met or heard of. And she is deeply, deeply frightened of him. Rose doesn’t fear much. She might fear a certain spirit or situation if she comes across it, but there’s not much of anything that she’d say she’s scared of. One of them is the Halloween tradition of being forced back into the world of the living for a day to be hunted (if she’s killed, she’s truly dead, not even a ghost anymore, if she escapes she gets to stay a ghost for another year. If she ever killed one of her hunters, she’d get to live for a year, and then kill a ghost the next year, and the next, and the life would never be truly hers - she’s never been interested in that option). She doesn’t think about it most of the year, but then Halloween rolls around and she spends a day running and shaking and cursing that she wasn’t very athletic when she died. Over the years, she’s managed to find some good hiding places that she can hole up in for the day, until she’s a ghost again, so it holds less fear than it did, but there’s always the chance, and it sets her temporarily-alive heart pounding every year.

But the one thing that she is really, truly terrified of, that would wake her up in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming from a nightmare, is Bobby Cross. The most terrifying thing she can imagine is him catching up to her and destroying her soul to keep him young and racing the roads, in that infernal car of his. She gets even a whiff of Bobby Cross being nearby, and she will take off in the opposite direction as fast as she can.

History: Rose Marshall was born in Buckley Township, Michigan on March 17th, 1929 to Ruth and Robert Marshall. She had two older brothers, a strict but loving mother, and a father who thought she hung the moon. They weren’t rich, but they weren’t dirt poor, either, and Ruth didn’t have to work, and the Marshalls were happy.

When Rose was six, her daddy didn’t come home from work one day, and Momma wouldn’t stop crying after one of Daddy’s friends stopped by. Her brothers didn’t go to school for a week, and eventually Rose came to understand that Daddy’s heart had stopped working, and he’d gone to heaven to be with God. She cried and asked God every night if her daddy could come home, but he never did.

After that, Ruth Marshall got a job waitressing, working the night shift at the diner. Money got tighter, and the few nicer things that they’d been able to afford before became a thing of the past. As they grew up, both of her brothers got their own jobs, and used the money from those jobs to buy their own cars, once they were old enough. Her oldest brother Arthur taught her to drive when he got his car, even though she could barely reach the pedals, and she loved the feeling of the car’s engine vibrating through her body, the wind through the windows. That was a love she’d carry throughout her life, and beyond.

When she was 15, a little bit before Christmas, she started going with a Senior named Gary Daniels. He played on the football team, and his family was much better off than Rose’s. His parents both thought he could do better than her, but he calmly listened to their protests and went back to his car, the diner, and his Rose. Rose turned 16, and Summer and the end of the school year arrived. She’d scrimped and saved and babysat more than she’d’ve liked to save for her perfect dress, bought at the department store with matching shoes on sale. She lightened her hair with lemon juice and was prepared to do whatever it would take that night to make sure Gary wouldn’t get tired of her after graduation - he was her ticket out of Buckley, and on top of that she was more than halfway in love with him.

But then, while her mother was at work and her brothers were off doing something in Arthur’s car, Rose found herself stood up, waiting on the porch for a date who apparently wasn’t going to show. Angry, and not knowing that Gary had been held up by a flat tire on his way to pick her up, Rose grabbed her other brother’s car keys and took off for the prom to confront Gary for standing her up. She took the three-mile, one-lane winding twisted road that ran along the side of Sparrow Hill. And while she drove, angry and broken-hearted, another car came up behind her and ran her off the road.

Rose Marshall died that night. She turned into a hitch-hiking ghost - able to come up from the “twilight” of the ghost roads (the roads that used to be and have passed away) into the daylight, to catch a ride, sweet-talk someone out of a jacket, and borrow a life until the sun rises. Over the years, she found out why she’d been killed, and that she was lucky to be a ghost - she’d been driven off the road by a monster of a man named Bobby Cross, who fed ghost souls of the road to his car, so he could stay young forever. Rose was supposed to be one of his ghosts, but she came to herself too quickly, and her first ride, her first borrowed coat and borrowed life came from none other than Gary Daniels, and they managed to avoid Bobby Cross that night, sharing kisses and just driving, until Gary dropped her off at her house, and she disappeared.

The next few decades were nothing much to speak of. She met plenty of people and learned plenty of things about living in the twilight. She was befriended by the bean sidhe waitress working at (and practically running) the Last Dance Diner, right before the exit to… well, whatever comes after when a ghost moves on. She became a psychopomp of sorts, when she was called to it, guiding the souls of the drivers, the racers, the hitchhikers to the end of the line, but never going with them when the time came. There were times when she could save them, if they’d listen, and she always did her best. It wasn’t always good enough, but there’s only so much one little hitchhiking ghost could do. And always, always, she ran away from the slightest hint of Bobby Cross.

And then, then she had a run-in with the bitter love left behind of one of the lives she’d tried, and failed, to save. The woman had taught herself to be an exorcist, and caught Rose in a Seal of Solomon, planning to torture Rose’s spirit until the sun came up before banishing her to hell. Lucky for Rose, Tommy (the dead man in question) had become a ghost - a racer, haunting one stretch of road, usually, and usually down deeper in the twilight than Rose went. But he came, and saved her, and drove her as far as he could in the twilight before his nature forced him to turn back for his own road.

Three miles more, and Rose stopped on the edge of the Ocean Lady, the old, original Atlantic Highway, that was like a goddess to the Witches and Spiritualists of the road, the routewitches and trainspotters and ambulomancers, and somewhere along the line was where the Queen of the routewitches held her court. While they drove, she saw Tommy’s eyes, the realisation that the road wasn’t forever. She’d seen many ghosts - riders, racers, hitchhikers, and more - fall onto the ghost roads and then move on, and she was still around. Because of Bobby Cross. Because she needed revenge, and because ghost roads needed to be rid of him. The Queen of the routewitches could tell her how to beat Bobby Cross, most likely, if she could get an audience. But the Ocean Lady wasn’t safe, and the dead weren’t meant for the routewitches’ court.

And on the cusp of that decision, she came to Babylon Wood.

First Person Sample: *The screen just shows a bit of woods and sky, like it’s been set down on an uneven surface. There’s a bit of rustling, like a skirt* *muttered* Stupid thing…

*A blonde teenager in a green party dress, very out of date (though possibly so out of date as to be “retro”) comes into view* Look, I don’t know where this is or who brought me here, but I really don’t appreciate being forced into my damn prom dress, especially if you somehow can keep me from the twilight. I got sick of this dress a long time ago.

If you could just send me back to Maine and call it done, I’d really appreciate it.

…Hello?

Prose Sample: Three miles walking gave Rose plenty of time to think about what she was doing. The Ocean Lady wasn’t safe for the dead - too many ghosts of her own packed onto those slowly unspooling miles. Rose knew she didn’t have to walk the Ocean Lady, she didn’t have to ask the Queen how to beat Bobby Cross. It probably wasn’t a good idea anyway, her going up against Bobby Cross. He’d been at his trade longer than she’d been running from him, and no matter what she did, odds were that he’d get his way in the end, and she’d meet the fate he planned for her all those years ago.

And yet here she was, walking toward the start of the old Atlantic Highway, headed for a destination that she might never even find, or be able to stop at. She might get there and find that the Queen won’t (or can’t) answer her question. It didn’t seem likely, but it wasn’t impossible…

She stopped on the edge of the highway, her insubstantial, imagined sneakers nearly toed up to the border of the road. Once she stepped on the Ocean Lady, there was no turning back - she’d go until she reached the court, or the end of the highway, or the ghosts of the road overwhelmed her. Rose took a deep breath, though she didn’t need it. This was her last chance to change her mind, to go back to avoiding Bobby Cross until the day she moved on and took the exit past the Last Dance, and not worry about being a hero.

That’s when the ground felt like it opened beneath her. There was a sensation like losing her stomach on a carnival ride, the rustle of silk, the brief scent of rosemary and sugary perfume, and Rose fell into darkness.

Special Notes: Rose’s entire canon is a series of 12 short stories available at the Edge of Propinquity archives, linked above.