We the Lost: Application

[mourningnoonandnight]

Due to the nature of the Dolorosa's canon arc and cultural context, this application contains references to: casual infanticide and cannibalism by a humanoid alien species (presented neutrally); systematic sexual assault and mind control (presented as a traumatic event). Proceed with caution.

Player Name: Bramble
Preferred Pronouns?: They/Them
Player Contact: bramblepatch
Other characters in play? Ammond "Psymagus Waspfire" Raidie

Character Name: The Dolorosa (noncanon expanded alias: Dolorosa Mornsong)
Canon: Homestuck
Game Transplant: Monad.exe
Original App: Monad Application
Game Summary: The Monad.exe program describes itself as a peaceful, personalized artificial afterlife, hosting soul-data from all over the known multiverse in a friendly community with every comfort the deceased could wish for. While it's certainly true that the virtual environment takes the form of a comfortable apartment complex surrounded by a variety of interesting shopping and entertainment venues and beautiful natural environments, and while the various user-support programs are cheerful and welcoming, the system was not nearly ready to launch and is not capable of taking the strain of even a modestly sized population of simulated souls. The system glitches near-constantly, with results ranging from minor annoyance to widespread inconvenience, to significant physical danger, to profoundly psychologically damaging events. The entire time, while the users attempt to navigate a nonsensical and often inimical setting, the system struggles to assure them that everything is fine and specially arranged for their comfort.


How long was your character in Game: Four months
History of Character in their Game: Dolorosa Mornsong was uploaded to the Monad.exe servers at the beginning of December during a routine system update, and entered a computer system which at the time was marginally stable. There were two pervasive glitches at the time: all interior and exterior walls of the housing complex failed to render for the month, rendering the apartment buildings totally without meaningful privacy, and the beach-front area was not properly implemented, occasionally blipping out of existence altogether. However, the first glitch was mostly an annoyance and the second was easy enough to avoid, and despite additional troubling inconsistencies in her own quarters - a pervasive ocean scent, clothing with prominent red stains, and her signature chainsaw/lipstick dual-state weapon presenting as the wrong size in both forms - Mornsong was genuinely relieved to find herself in such hospitable surroundings. She had, after all, just experienced her canonical death on the orders of Orphaner Dualscar, with all of the political, social, physical, sexual, and psychological abuses on her person which led up to that event.

Furthermore, she found among her fellow users several people who she had never had reason to hope to see again. Most notably, of course, was her ward, the Signless Sufferer (in Monad's instance, named Kaskir Vantas), who from her perspective had been dead for sweeps; also uploaded at the same time as Mornsong was Sakhet Leijon, the Disciple.

Other notable contacts she made within her first system-wide update memo included the Grand Highblood, with whom she exchanged a few verbal slings and arrows and who was incensed by her successfully sweet-talking the system into changing her official designation from her wigglerhood name to her adult title, a concession that he had been unsuccessfully campaigning for on his own part for the past month, and which he never did manage to achieve. Neophyte Redglare, was an unknown quantity to the Dolorosa and a somewhat troubling harbinger of how the Signless's movement would develop in the future - although she was glad to learn that the movement had not simply died out in the sweeps after the rebellion fell, Mornsong found the Neophyte's insistence on extreme veneration of the Signless and everyone who had known him deeply uncomfortable. Confusingly, she also noted the presence on roll of new users of two other Vantases, a name which to her knowledge had never been borne by any troll other than Kaskir himself; she briefly interacted with one of them, Kankri, but aside from the fact that the boy also typed in a bright red indicating a mutant blood color, the conversation did not provide much explanation for the coincidence. She also encountered a young blueblood named Equius Zahhak, who she found naive and narrow-minded, and a number of aliens, including one Dave Strider, who somehow had some knowledge of trolls, and Asch the Bloody, who, although both he and Mornsong were too cautious to put as much into words on a first meeting, she felt confident in identifying as at least as likely to be sympathetic to her faction among the Alternians as to the Imperial forces.

Having gotten her bearings and made contact with people on the network, Mornsong set about settling in in the Monad.exe complex. She visited Kaskir at his own quarters, discovering that while she had perfect recall of her own death, he seemed completely unaware of the circumstances and method of his, and after some deliberation decided it was best not to illuminate him. She also spent some time exploring the nearby shopping district. Although she was still honestly in a great deal of shock over the end of her life, and tended to hold herself a little aloof, she was friendly enough if approached by others. While exploring, she met Cladia Kishi, a human girl in her early teens who had the dubious pleasure of being neighbors with Equius and who impressed Mornsong both with her eclectic fashion sense and with the fact that as a young adolescent she had already actively taken on child-care duties before her death. She also encountered Asch in person, and had a supremely frustrating conversation with one Henry Cooldown, during which the translation module of Monad's system kept cutting out, leaving the two momentarily mutually unintelligible.

Midway through the month of December, Monad was struck by a suspiciously festive glitch; clumps of mistletoe would appear floating in mid-air in various parts of the city, trapping anyone hapless enough to step under them until another user rescued the victim with a kiss. Mornsong had the misfortune to be trapped in the stairwell of her own apartment building, and was surprised to be helped by Sollux Captor, the younger and historically later double of the Psiioniic, who had been a compatriot of hers in life. The Psiioniic himself, Ashvin Captor, had also arrived in Monad the previous month, although after the trauma of his centuries of life as an imperial helmsman he was avoiding the rest of the rebels. She did not manage to actually speak to him until a few days later, when he also ran afoul of a clump of mistletoe. Mornsong rescued him, and somewhat by mutual unspoken agreement, they did not discuss their respective periods of indenture and enslavement after the rebellion fell. Although Mornsong was deeply curious about what his exact fate had been - she had never heard what had happened to him in life - she did not feel comfortable asking, nor did she feel comfortable addressing her own recent history. The ice thus broken, and after a similar encounter with Sakhet, Ashvin slowly began to drift back into the rebel group, although he was still very much ill at ease due to his substantial memory loss and trauma.

"Christmas" - a holiday Mornsong had no context for - passed with the "gift" of a dead scarlet-blooded grub in her quarters, which she quietly disposed of while trying very hard not to think about it; dead grubs are very much a fact of life to those who work in the brooding caverns, but the candy-red color of the grub's flesh was a personal sore spot. January arrived with a new influx of users, a few old users "wiped" from the system (supposedly because they had "failed to mesh") and a new assortmet of glitches. Whereas the previous month's glitches had been primarily environmental and had effected all users equally, this month's were deeply personalized phenomena manifesting for each individual, running the gamit from "inconvenient" to "traumatic." Mornsong's glitch was perhaps not as troubling for a former cavern attendant as it would have been for most people; every time she entered a new room, she encountered a still-living but obviously nonviable larval troll of a randomly chosen caste. The grub - and subsequently its carcass - would persist until physically disposed of.

This was annoying but not, after all, outright traumatizing to her; many other users were a great deal more disturbed by their own glitches, especially the newcomers. Mornsong took to the announcement memo to see if she could be of any help, and made the attempt to reassure Tweak Tweek, a small human boy with massive anxiety problems. Unfortunately, when she attempted to meet up with Tweak on the now-fully functional beach, he was badly frightened by her appearance, a reaction only worsened by the system responding to his fright by warping her appearance in his eyes from "vaguely monstrous humanoid" to "truly demonic." Mornsong did her best to reassure him, but limited her contact with Tweak in the future for his comfort.

But back to the Dolorosa's personal glitch - although with her training in the brooding caverns, Mornsong had absolutely no compunction about culling the dying grubs that she was constantly inundated with and, having determined they were not afflicted with any communicable disease, using them a food source (and, in fact, found larval blood a somewhat insubstantial but satisfying way to relieve her rainbow drinker cravings), after a couple of weeks she found that they were accumulating much faster than she could consume or preserve them, and she was running out of storage space. Not wishing to let perfectly good grubsteak go to waste, she put up a public memo offering to share the bounty.

This, perhaps predictably, provoked excitement from the other trolls in Monad - particularly some of the younger ones, for whom genuine grub was a rare treat. The third red-blooded mutant troll, Karkat - who she'd observed to be a good deal jumpier and less approachable than Kankri was, or than Kaskir had been as a boy - lost a good deal of his caution at the prospect of real, fresh grub; Equius deigned to acknowledge the jadeblood, and, Mornsong thought, might even have listened to her a bit when their conversation turned to following ideals and ideas rather than rules and regulations. (Mornsong had not met Equius in person until he arrived at her quarters to pick up some grub, and had been privately amusing herself by comparing his quirk, mannerisms, and what she knew of him from Claudia to what she knew of the bloodlines of his color to try to guess his sign; she was not surprised but somewhat discomfited to find that he was, as she'd suspected, of the same sign as E%ecutor Darkleer, the troll who had carried out the Signless Sufferer's execution by imperial command.)

The memo also provoked reactions ranging from disgust to curiosity from her human neighbors; objections ranged from honest outrage (from Jade Harley) to amused shit-stirring (from Tetoro Nishizono). Although he never took her up on the offer, Charles Xavier (by this time a good friend of Kaskir's) was intrigued by the culturally accepted casual cannibalism. And a few humans (including a half-feral young girl who identified herself as Olvia, and an extremely enthusiastic young man named Alfred, who Mornsong never found out was the personification of the USA and probably wouldn't have comprehended the concept if she had) actually agreed to sample the grubs.

The morning of January 22 found the TVs in everyone's quarters tuned to stations showing locations around the settlement, each showing a gruesome torture and murder scene playing out between two members of the community in real time. The network was abuzz as the rest of the users attempted to determine whether these broadcasts were real and if so, where they were taking place. One of the torture victims was Ashvin, the Psiioniic; Mornsong, Kaskir, and Sakhet rushed to try to rescue him, but were unable to find and breach the room where he was being held in time to prevent him from being "killed". Of course, this being a digital afterlife in the first place, "death" didn't stick, but the experience was deeply unpleasant and disheartening for everyone involved.

Mornsong had not yet fully bounced back from that ordeal when the first week of February came and with it a new glitch - this time everyone's physical representations would bear the visible marks of their death "until the bug was fixed." Of course, by this point most people understood the pattern well enough to realize that no real fix would come until the next month's system update. Although the fatal wounds did not cause their bearers any real pain, in many cases they were uncomfortable and disabling. The Dolorosa, blind in one eye, short of breath from a punctured lung, and rather profoundly embarrassed by her condition and heartsick, mostly retreated from public life for several weeks. She fully intended to keep to herself until the problem corrected itself.

Then in the third week of February, the pain response from the fatal wounds suddenly kicked in, sending the Dolorosa spiraling downward from "careful invalid" to "feral, half-crazed wounded rainbow drinker" as she went into shock. She stalked and attacked several of her neighbors; never managing to track down a troll (her desired prey), she toyed with humans before retreating to her own rooms to hide in abject confusion and misery.

When the March update came, returning everyone to relative health and wholeness, it wiped Kaskir Vantas, the Signless Sufferer and Mornsong's son, from the system.

It was almost a relief when Ashvin reacted first, posting belligerent demands as to Kaskir's location and, when that had no effect, attempting to bait the operating system into wiping the entire player base. Attempting to talk him down, and to offer what empty reassurances she could to Sakhet, served to distract her from her own profound distress. The first time that she'd lost Kaskir, she'd at least understood why, even if it had been totally unjust and unnecessarily cruel; this time, she had neither the empire to rail against - even the closest thing that Monad had had to Imperial representation, the Grand Highblood, had been wiped months earlier - nor the pressing business of surviving her own fall from grace. She attempted to maintain face despite her grief, attempted to take the reasonable and polite tone with the system which months ago had gotten her some small concessions. This gained her nothing except, perhaps, the pity of the other users.

For her part, she was beginning to suspect a truly malign agenda behind the system - "failure to mesh" with the community was still the official explanation for wiping users, but Kaskir had been nothing if not a community-builder, and others on the list of March's fallen included Charles Xavier (Kaskir's friend and definitely another natural leader) and Mabel Pines (who although not someone Mornsong had known personally, had been visibly active in welcoming and working with others). Mornsong could not comprehend why so many leaders and organizers were being lost while violent and disruptive users were allowed to persist, unless someone behind the system actually was more interested in discord and suffering than in peaceful community building.

Frightened by these conclusions, and still badly shaken by the previous month, Mornsong continued to avoid most of her neighbors as she attempted to regain her composure. March was another month of personalized glitches, although this time they only lasted a week and not everyone's took effect at the same time. Mornsong's took the form of manacles binding her hands in front of her, indestructible, irremovable, and a clear visual reference to the irons used in executions by the Alternian Empire - both a significant inconvenience and a cruel reminder of Kaskir's absence. Her glitch took effect on the night of March 16; March 17 saw the system implement a Saint Patrick's Day celebration that, among other things, involved everyone waking up extremely drunk and becoming more sober the more alcohol they imbibed (with the promise of proportional hangovers the next day). Thus inebriated, Mornsong loosened up a little to joke around with a few people on the announcement memo, mostly her close friends.

The April update wiped Dolorosa Mornsong from the Monad.exe system, at which point we will presume that Zephyr managed to get their fuzzy little hands on Dolorosa's data and implement it in their Meadous.


How did they change from their canon personality wise (Please explain what caused it to happen?)
Mornsong is both more secure in her sense of self than she was on entering Monad.exe and more psychologically fragile than she was; at the time of her canonical death, although Mindfang had by no means managed to totally brainwash Mornsong into her willing lover and sycophant, the pirate's repeated psychic and sexual assaults were beginning to wear away at her, and Mornsong was clinging to her own identity and values mostly by sheer willpower. Mornsong's stay in Monad.exe, therefore, with the relative freedom within the system and the company of people she'd not only loved but devoted her life to for as long as she'd been able to, allowed her to get her feet under herself again, metaphorically speaking. On the other hand, even with these steadying influences, her stay in Monad.exe - especially the final two months - was incredibly traumatic in it's own right. While the Dolorosa's confidence in herself and her own senses has grown, her trust in her surroundings has been severely compromised. She is, perhaps a bit less outgoing than she once was, quieter and more withdrawn, prone to isolation which can only be compounded by the fact that she does not yet feel ready to seek out romantic or sexual relationships; while she's still got a maternal streak a mile wide and a tendency to informally adopt the young, she's a bit more inclined to overprotectiveness than she used to be. She's also more cautious about her surroundings, to the point of being a little paranoid.

How did they change from their canon physically (Please explain what caused it to happen?):
Due to the artificial nature of physical existence in the Monad.exe system, and the intention of making users as comfortable as possible, the Dolorosa is in a good deal better physical shape than she was at the time of her death. Although the extended lifespans of all but the lowest castes of trolls means that many trolls of middling or higher blood do not significantly visibly age for decades or even centuries at a time, even a rainbow drinker shows the signs of rough living conditions and poor health after a few sweeps, and she had much less opportunity to take care of herself during her enslavement than she had even as a fugitive and a rebel. Mindfang noted - with some surprise - Mornsong's undamaged horns and teeth, but still, by that point several sweeps of poor nutrition, limited opportunity for physical exercise, and physical abuse had led to a notable degree of physical atrophy and newly healed injuries. Dolorosa Mornsong's current appearance is much more that of the desert matriarch than of the galley slave. She did not acquire any new lasting marks, characteristics, or physical injuries while in Monad.exe.

Powers:
As a jadeblood of the Virgo line, Mornsong has an unusually high tolerance for light and heat for a troll; this is unlikely to give her much of an edge on humans or other diurnal species, but she's resistant to both the short and long term physiological dangers of prolonged sun exposure, and she can see perfectly clearly under conditions that would seriously damage the vision of most trolls. Her vision in low-light conditions is slightly but not substantially less acute than is typical for her species.

As a rainbow drinker, she's disproportionately strong for her size and has somewhat increased reaction times - both beyond what she'd be able to physically train for, but not significantly; thing "Captain America" level super-human, not "Superman." Her size is already pretty substantial, too: she stands a little more than six and a half feet tall, not including horns, and she's fairly broad across the shoulders and hips. She can shake off an astounding amount of physical damage, even for a troll; given enough time, and access to adequate nutrition (both ordinary food and the blood of healthy trolls), she can recover from most injuries that don't involve significant trauma to the heart or brain. The final trick in the rainbow drinker arsenal is that she can bioluminesce at will, producing a soft, even, moderately bright light from her skin and eyes. Occasionally she will glow reflexively, when under stress or in response to an external threat, but if able to concentrate, she can dim or extinguish the light at will.

Possessions:
- Her wardrobe: a number of finely made dresses and robes, ranging from "classy, yet practical and understated" to "ridiculously ornate" in style; many of the garments appear to have been carefully reconstructed from portions of two or more dresses of similar style.
- several pieces of ornate silver jewelry with a variety of colored gems. No piece of jewelry displays gems in olive green, mustard yellow, or bright red.
- records of the rebellion, not in the form of the Disciple's writing (or at least not mostly) but rather in the form of scrapbooks of correspondence, propaganda, and news coverage contemporary with the rebellion.
- her giant lipstick/miniature chainsaw weapon combo. In this glitched form rendered by Monad.exe's servers, the item is awkward and inconvenient to attempt to use in either form. It amuses her.
- approximately enough frozen cuts of grubmeat and frozen jars of grub blood to three-quarters fill the freezer portion of a standard refrigerator/freezer combo. Ten pounds of dried grub jerky. All forms of preserved grub show a wide distribution of blood colors.

Please provide three samples from your previous game, at least one will have to be third person with context:
Sample One: Redglare and Mornsong disagree as to the appropriate level of veneration toward the Signless. And toward the Disciple. And toward the Dolorosa herself.
Sample Two: Dolorosa Mornsong and Henry Cooldown attempt to have a pleasant chat, despite obnoxious glitches. A good example of how situational glitches work in Monad.exe.
Sample Three: Equius does not seem to understand the difference between "placing an order" and "accepting an offer." Mornsong's willing to humor him, anyway.

Notes: Fritz and I have already discussed Iz's headcanon-based history with the Signless; I'm planning to run with the groundwork Fritz has established, although Mornsong won't immediately recognize Iz as the same individual, nor is she completely sure that either younger version is the same individual as the adult troll she would know as the Grand Highblood later in her own life. She suspects, knowing that the Capricorn bloodline is relatively uncommon, but she is not certain and won't assume.