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Mar. 6th, 2016 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
definitely_velmaPLAYER
Player name: Steph
Contact: underwater.owl@gmail.com, UndrwO
Characters currently in-game: Bruce Banner and Bob Saginowski
CHARACTER
Character Name: Malavika “Veek” Vishwanath
Character Age: Mid to late twenties.
Canon: 14 and the Fold by Peter Clines
Canon Point: post-canon.
History: This will be very concise: Veek was a blackhat hacker who has a day job doing data entry in LA and by night procures database and credit card information for pay. It’s pretty mild and unglamorous. That is, until her strange as fuck apartment building began getting stranger. Green cockroaches and flickering lights, an apartment that stayed freezing cold no matter how you heated it, one room where everyone who stays there commits suicide-
Rather than a ghost story, it turns out that the building is a machine designed to prevent the rise of the monsters that inspired HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu. The investigation into the machine comes from the perspective of Nate Tucker, who moves in and meets Veek, the local nerd who has already been in trouble with her superintendant for poking around the place. Veek is the one who notices the fact that the building is off the electrical grid and not connected to the city. She's able to say definitively that there's no recorded history for the place online.
Because Veek plays the role in the group of the seasoned investigator, most of the major new discoveries about the apartment's history come from newly introduced group members with different skill sets, while Veek fumes a little about things like not having thought of going to the library. The plot of the book unfolds as a slow reveal of more and more peculiar and unsettling features of the apartment. There's an elevator shaft in the basement that goes on forever. There's a tunnel that leads down and down for days- that Veek can't explore because of her asthma but that the other characters head down and report back leads to a series of electrical stations that apparently run on geothermal energy- that the building is off the LA power grid because it plugs into the earth's core.
Last, and most unsettling, there's apartment 14, the one the book is named for. Veek, Roger, Tim, Xila, Mrs Andrews, Debbie and Clive gather to explore it one afternoon. They send the super off to the grocery store as a favour to old Mrs Andrews, who pretends her hip is acting up, so that they can break in to 14 and see why it's all locked up. Not only does it have four padlocks on the door, but the frame itself is painted over; they have to slit it with an x-acto knife to get in, and budget time to re-paint it before the guy gets back. When they throw it open, Nate and Xila, who are standing closest, are immediately sucked in to what is apparently outer space. They manage to hang on to the doorframe, but Mrs Andrews flies past them and to her death in a strange star system. Roger, Clive, and Tim manage to drag Nate and Xila out, and Veek manages not to get herself sucked to her death, and to help close the door behind them and then to help run and find new paint, since the can they'd brought with them went off into space. She's just generally along in an acerbic support capacity for such doings.
One of the more mechanically oriented men in the group, for example, finds a keyhole in the wall of a room that once turned, shows them the control panel for the building. The rest of the exploration of the building is an ensemble cast event (with between five and seven involved characters) none of whom Veek gets along with spectacularly well.
One of the neighbours, Andrew, actually turns out to have been a plant. He's secretly the member of a doomsday cult that wants to destroy the building and let the monsters through; the cult succeeds in damaging the machinery, and everyone in the apartment building is plunged into an alternate reality where earth has been consumed and destroyed by flying squid/whales that scream in booming telepathic voices about how humanity are cattle. Veek tags along as a capable second in command of sorts while Nate continues to lead this part of the plot- it's a little jumbled, actually. First they sort of stand in the control room and yell, then the superintendant is ripped out the window by tentacles, then Veek, Nate and two friends Roger and Tim jump on bicycles to go find him and explore the world out there. They discover that he is definitely horribly dead, and so turn around to peel back, only to have Tim killed en route. Veek, Nate and Roger peel back into the building, hotly pursued, and manage to repair the machinery and flip back all the switches that the doomsday cultists threw. After narrowly succeeding in repairing the machine, the group manages to get home.
Veek now works as a paid government employee in the apartment building, monitoring the machinery, making sure all the building levels remain at zero, and essentially that the fabric of reality doesn’t crumble. We see her very briefly in the sequel wearing an MIB style suit and out recruiting other people who have been involved in interdimensional skullduggery to come work at the building and join her group.
Personality: Veek is a forthright and abrasive woman who has a hard time getting along with people when she bothers to try. On multiple occasions throughout the book she’s aggressive enough that people call her a bitch- though some of this is likely behaviour a woman can’t get away with that a man could. When we first meet her, the protagonist Nate asks her “What does Veek stand for?” and she answers, “Malavika Vishwanath, don’t try to pronounce it you’ll just piss me off.” That’s pretty characteristic of Veek.
Her family is from India, but Veek has lived in LA long enough to speak perfect English, with maybe only a very slight accent. People often mistake her for being Arabic. She's an atheist who lives alone and has little patience for being preached at, or for the periodic racist bullshit that other characters in the apartment building throw at her. She's actually not hugely political though- her inner narrative reveals some pretty condescending and nasty thoughts about other women. I think she has a tiny bit of that crass internet troll culture in her, though she's a little to grown up to go full-out with it out loud and in polite company. You could really see her blasting away irreverently on a message board.
Once you get past her prickly exterior, she’s a- relatively good person. She’s on the side of curiosity and exploration, and is game to take risks when it comes to uncovering truths. She’s the original explorer, the one who has been trying to figure out what is going on with the apartment building before Nate arrives- when he moves in and starts unravelling the building’s mysteries, he goes to Veek, who has already done a lot of the legwork ahead of him. She’s thoughtful, observant, and methodical- though not precisely intuitive. In many cases Nate is able to make jumps past her that she couldn’t get to with her imagination. Veek is more of a brute force, technologically oriented data cracker.
She worked illegally contributing to credit card fraud, which she acknowledged wasn’t great, but also had standards when it came to her work- she never did anything that could put anyone in danger in terms of her hacking. It was a job to Veek, and one she set about reasonably responsibly. Also in terms of her technologically interested side, Veek has a generous streak to her; she has a broke, naïve neighbour who brings her a computer to fix, that Veek basically entirely rebuilds for her and then refuses to charge her for, because she can tell the girl is kind of in trouble. She also runs internet for the building; wifi for everyone for a very reasonable few bucks a month.
Physically, Veek isn’t a competitor with a lot of the hero types in her book or in the city of Hadriel. She’s around a hundred and ten pounds, and has asthma attacks that rule her out of some of the exploring and charging around that her canonmates do. She’s not out of shape, though- she can bike out into danger when she needs to, can take a punch. Even when she gets beaten and thrown around by superhuman doomsday cultists, and ends up bleeding from her nose and eyes after the psychic attacks of the not!Cthulu alpha predators, Veek is gamely up again, teeth gritted, doing what she needs to. She makes up in grit what she lacks in physical heave.
There is one other interesting element to this not-quite-protagonist aspect of Veek. As I mentioned, she's been living in the weird apartment building for longer than Nate, but it's his coming in that cracks the mystery, despite her having been at it longer. One, he is more intuitive than she is, but two, he really provides a foil to her in terms of his ability to engage the whole apartment building. The neighbours who Veek snipes with are willing to let Nate into their apartments to check out what's odd about them. Nate also takes bigger risks than Veek does. When the old superintendant, Oskar, threatens Veek with eviction for trying to explore too much, she backs down. Nate keeps going with it, risking his very cheap rent and tenancy, while Veek is more paralyzed by knowing that the consequences to going on might be dire. The more affable, gutsier Nate just makes more of a leader than she does. She is, however, absolutely indispensable and keen support.
One of the running jokes in the book between Nate and Veek is that she's definitely the 'Velma' character in their scooby gang. It's true- she wears glasses, and has short hair and dresses almost exclusively in unisex oxfords over black pants, and is described as more hawkish than pretty. She is, however, the primary love interest in the book. Nate has to decide whether he's going to be Shaggy or Fred- and ends up announcing that he'll be Shaggy, and falling in love with Veek (who, when he tells her so in bed, yells 'oh for Christ's sake!' with characteristically excellent social skills. Luckily he forgives her and they end up together.)
That's really Veek all over; she's a hardass nerd who thinks a bit too much like a machine for her own good, doesn't make friends easy, but has grown up to a stage in her life where the people she knows and really goes for are odd enough themselves that they either forgive her or are attracted to her for her very nail-sticking-out-ness. The kind of kid who had the shit presumably kicked out of them in highschool but has since blossomed into an intelligent, ferocious protagonist, who takes no prisoners.
Inventory: One gun! Nothing else.
Abilities: Asthmatic tiny human. Hacking abilities?
Flaws: The temper on her, and her total inability to manage nice smalltalk! Veek is genuinely a super abrasive lady.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample:
Her first week in Hadriel, Veek keeps expecting that someone from home is going to manage to pull her back out. Somewhere, somewhen, Nate is flipping every switch imaginable, is running iterations of the Albuquerque door program over and over again, peeling through time and space to try to find her. She expects to be rescued.
It takes about that long for the rest of what she knows about interuniversal travel to sink in, through the pretense she keeps up in her head that she is experienced with this, that she understands this; the multiverse is big. It’s tremendous, it’s unfathomable, and they have only really managed to scratch the surface of it. Just because she lives with people who have survived brushes with nightmares like this before, just because she herself has survived them before, doesn’t mean that they have any more control over what’s happening here than anyone else does.
It’s the hot-hands fallacy. Veek survived turning off the machine the first time; Veek survived turning off the machine on purpose that second time; Veek is no more likely to survive being shafted off to the city of Hadriel for that being true. Veek is, in fact, lucky to begin with that she didn’t go the way of Oskar or Tim, or the scientists lost to the door project. Maybe that’s why she’s here? Maybe, just maybe, she has been tempting fate.
She logs onto the network on night number nine, and spits out, rapid and not bothering at all with any pretense at honey;
“Who’s doing what to get out of here? Are we all just drinking and crying and going minute to minute, or does someone have anything resembling any kind of a plan?”
Fuck sweetness, honestly. It isn’t flies she’s come here to catch.
Player name: Steph
Contact: underwater.owl@gmail.com, UndrwO
Characters currently in-game: Bruce Banner and Bob Saginowski
CHARACTER
Character Name: Malavika “Veek” Vishwanath
Character Age: Mid to late twenties.
Canon: 14 and the Fold by Peter Clines
Canon Point: post-canon.
History: This will be very concise: Veek was a blackhat hacker who has a day job doing data entry in LA and by night procures database and credit card information for pay. It’s pretty mild and unglamorous. That is, until her strange as fuck apartment building began getting stranger. Green cockroaches and flickering lights, an apartment that stayed freezing cold no matter how you heated it, one room where everyone who stays there commits suicide-
Rather than a ghost story, it turns out that the building is a machine designed to prevent the rise of the monsters that inspired HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu. The investigation into the machine comes from the perspective of Nate Tucker, who moves in and meets Veek, the local nerd who has already been in trouble with her superintendant for poking around the place. Veek is the one who notices the fact that the building is off the electrical grid and not connected to the city. She's able to say definitively that there's no recorded history for the place online.
Because Veek plays the role in the group of the seasoned investigator, most of the major new discoveries about the apartment's history come from newly introduced group members with different skill sets, while Veek fumes a little about things like not having thought of going to the library. The plot of the book unfolds as a slow reveal of more and more peculiar and unsettling features of the apartment. There's an elevator shaft in the basement that goes on forever. There's a tunnel that leads down and down for days- that Veek can't explore because of her asthma but that the other characters head down and report back leads to a series of electrical stations that apparently run on geothermal energy- that the building is off the LA power grid because it plugs into the earth's core.
Last, and most unsettling, there's apartment 14, the one the book is named for. Veek, Roger, Tim, Xila, Mrs Andrews, Debbie and Clive gather to explore it one afternoon. They send the super off to the grocery store as a favour to old Mrs Andrews, who pretends her hip is acting up, so that they can break in to 14 and see why it's all locked up. Not only does it have four padlocks on the door, but the frame itself is painted over; they have to slit it with an x-acto knife to get in, and budget time to re-paint it before the guy gets back. When they throw it open, Nate and Xila, who are standing closest, are immediately sucked in to what is apparently outer space. They manage to hang on to the doorframe, but Mrs Andrews flies past them and to her death in a strange star system. Roger, Clive, and Tim manage to drag Nate and Xila out, and Veek manages not to get herself sucked to her death, and to help close the door behind them and then to help run and find new paint, since the can they'd brought with them went off into space. She's just generally along in an acerbic support capacity for such doings.
One of the more mechanically oriented men in the group, for example, finds a keyhole in the wall of a room that once turned, shows them the control panel for the building. The rest of the exploration of the building is an ensemble cast event (with between five and seven involved characters) none of whom Veek gets along with spectacularly well.
One of the neighbours, Andrew, actually turns out to have been a plant. He's secretly the member of a doomsday cult that wants to destroy the building and let the monsters through; the cult succeeds in damaging the machinery, and everyone in the apartment building is plunged into an alternate reality where earth has been consumed and destroyed by flying squid/whales that scream in booming telepathic voices about how humanity are cattle. Veek tags along as a capable second in command of sorts while Nate continues to lead this part of the plot- it's a little jumbled, actually. First they sort of stand in the control room and yell, then the superintendant is ripped out the window by tentacles, then Veek, Nate and two friends Roger and Tim jump on bicycles to go find him and explore the world out there. They discover that he is definitely horribly dead, and so turn around to peel back, only to have Tim killed en route. Veek, Nate and Roger peel back into the building, hotly pursued, and manage to repair the machinery and flip back all the switches that the doomsday cultists threw. After narrowly succeeding in repairing the machine, the group manages to get home.
Veek now works as a paid government employee in the apartment building, monitoring the machinery, making sure all the building levels remain at zero, and essentially that the fabric of reality doesn’t crumble. We see her very briefly in the sequel wearing an MIB style suit and out recruiting other people who have been involved in interdimensional skullduggery to come work at the building and join her group.
Personality: Veek is a forthright and abrasive woman who has a hard time getting along with people when she bothers to try. On multiple occasions throughout the book she’s aggressive enough that people call her a bitch- though some of this is likely behaviour a woman can’t get away with that a man could. When we first meet her, the protagonist Nate asks her “What does Veek stand for?” and she answers, “Malavika Vishwanath, don’t try to pronounce it you’ll just piss me off.” That’s pretty characteristic of Veek.
Her family is from India, but Veek has lived in LA long enough to speak perfect English, with maybe only a very slight accent. People often mistake her for being Arabic. She's an atheist who lives alone and has little patience for being preached at, or for the periodic racist bullshit that other characters in the apartment building throw at her. She's actually not hugely political though- her inner narrative reveals some pretty condescending and nasty thoughts about other women. I think she has a tiny bit of that crass internet troll culture in her, though she's a little to grown up to go full-out with it out loud and in polite company. You could really see her blasting away irreverently on a message board.
Once you get past her prickly exterior, she’s a- relatively good person. She’s on the side of curiosity and exploration, and is game to take risks when it comes to uncovering truths. She’s the original explorer, the one who has been trying to figure out what is going on with the apartment building before Nate arrives- when he moves in and starts unravelling the building’s mysteries, he goes to Veek, who has already done a lot of the legwork ahead of him. She’s thoughtful, observant, and methodical- though not precisely intuitive. In many cases Nate is able to make jumps past her that she couldn’t get to with her imagination. Veek is more of a brute force, technologically oriented data cracker.
She worked illegally contributing to credit card fraud, which she acknowledged wasn’t great, but also had standards when it came to her work- she never did anything that could put anyone in danger in terms of her hacking. It was a job to Veek, and one she set about reasonably responsibly. Also in terms of her technologically interested side, Veek has a generous streak to her; she has a broke, naïve neighbour who brings her a computer to fix, that Veek basically entirely rebuilds for her and then refuses to charge her for, because she can tell the girl is kind of in trouble. She also runs internet for the building; wifi for everyone for a very reasonable few bucks a month.
Physically, Veek isn’t a competitor with a lot of the hero types in her book or in the city of Hadriel. She’s around a hundred and ten pounds, and has asthma attacks that rule her out of some of the exploring and charging around that her canonmates do. She’s not out of shape, though- she can bike out into danger when she needs to, can take a punch. Even when she gets beaten and thrown around by superhuman doomsday cultists, and ends up bleeding from her nose and eyes after the psychic attacks of the not!Cthulu alpha predators, Veek is gamely up again, teeth gritted, doing what she needs to. She makes up in grit what she lacks in physical heave.
There is one other interesting element to this not-quite-protagonist aspect of Veek. As I mentioned, she's been living in the weird apartment building for longer than Nate, but it's his coming in that cracks the mystery, despite her having been at it longer. One, he is more intuitive than she is, but two, he really provides a foil to her in terms of his ability to engage the whole apartment building. The neighbours who Veek snipes with are willing to let Nate into their apartments to check out what's odd about them. Nate also takes bigger risks than Veek does. When the old superintendant, Oskar, threatens Veek with eviction for trying to explore too much, she backs down. Nate keeps going with it, risking his very cheap rent and tenancy, while Veek is more paralyzed by knowing that the consequences to going on might be dire. The more affable, gutsier Nate just makes more of a leader than she does. She is, however, absolutely indispensable and keen support.
One of the running jokes in the book between Nate and Veek is that she's definitely the 'Velma' character in their scooby gang. It's true- she wears glasses, and has short hair and dresses almost exclusively in unisex oxfords over black pants, and is described as more hawkish than pretty. She is, however, the primary love interest in the book. Nate has to decide whether he's going to be Shaggy or Fred- and ends up announcing that he'll be Shaggy, and falling in love with Veek (who, when he tells her so in bed, yells 'oh for Christ's sake!' with characteristically excellent social skills. Luckily he forgives her and they end up together.)
That's really Veek all over; she's a hardass nerd who thinks a bit too much like a machine for her own good, doesn't make friends easy, but has grown up to a stage in her life where the people she knows and really goes for are odd enough themselves that they either forgive her or are attracted to her for her very nail-sticking-out-ness. The kind of kid who had the shit presumably kicked out of them in highschool but has since blossomed into an intelligent, ferocious protagonist, who takes no prisoners.
Inventory: One gun! Nothing else.
Abilities: Asthmatic tiny human. Hacking abilities?
Flaws: The temper on her, and her total inability to manage nice smalltalk! Veek is genuinely a super abrasive lady.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample:
Her first week in Hadriel, Veek keeps expecting that someone from home is going to manage to pull her back out. Somewhere, somewhen, Nate is flipping every switch imaginable, is running iterations of the Albuquerque door program over and over again, peeling through time and space to try to find her. She expects to be rescued.
It takes about that long for the rest of what she knows about interuniversal travel to sink in, through the pretense she keeps up in her head that she is experienced with this, that she understands this; the multiverse is big. It’s tremendous, it’s unfathomable, and they have only really managed to scratch the surface of it. Just because she lives with people who have survived brushes with nightmares like this before, just because she herself has survived them before, doesn’t mean that they have any more control over what’s happening here than anyone else does.
It’s the hot-hands fallacy. Veek survived turning off the machine the first time; Veek survived turning off the machine on purpose that second time; Veek is no more likely to survive being shafted off to the city of Hadriel for that being true. Veek is, in fact, lucky to begin with that she didn’t go the way of Oskar or Tim, or the scientists lost to the door project. Maybe that’s why she’s here? Maybe, just maybe, she has been tempting fate.
She logs onto the network on night number nine, and spits out, rapid and not bothering at all with any pretense at honey;
“Who’s doing what to get out of here? Are we all just drinking and crying and going minute to minute, or does someone have anything resembling any kind of a plan?”
Fuck sweetness, honestly. It isn’t flies she’s come here to catch.
