THEGAMES - app.

[reassures]

OUT of CHARACTER

Name: Seek
Other characters: n/a

IN CHARACTER

Name: Nill
Fandom: DOGS: Bullets & Carnage
Canon point/AU: End of chapter 22, CR AU
Journal: reassures
PB: Herself!
History:

canon:

DOGS wikipedia page, wikia for the original prequel volume, wikia for the series, and Nill's individual page. I also have a rundown of her in canon over here.

cr au info:

Details about the stuff she's been through can be found over here.

Presentation:

On the outside, 90% of the time Nill comes off as being very quiet and very polite, usually offering a small smile to anyone that really looks her way, even if it's a total stranger looking her way. When she was younger that was her default, her true self, a young girl that thought no ill will of anyone. It's the most natural outward appearance that she knows how to fall back to, the easiest transition. Even years later, after discovering just how awful anyone could be, that this appearance became more of a projection than a reflection of her genuine feelings. Despite this she becomes attached to people very easily, and she is always eager to help, eager to do whatever she can so the people around her can be happy.

She's a little prideful in that she always tries her best to look good. It's not uncommon for people she's close to to realize that something is wrong or that she's upset, because most of the time she is then she forgets to pay much attention to her hair, which is otherwise braided or tied with ribbons, and generally looks like she put a good amount of effort into it. Nill adores being around talkative people, because she is not a fan of silence and is largely incapable of doing much about that on her own. Once someone's in her good graces then there are very few things that she would not do for them if asked. She is extremely loyal and will never betray anyone that she cares about, even if doing so might have bad outcomes for other people involved. She absolutely hates harming anyone. Most of the time she's very honest when it comes to what she thinks of someone. If for some reason someone had done something to make Nill hate them then she is not afraid to let them know it, and she has a tendency to hold grudges against these people if they do not prove that they are deserving of better. Additionally, she usually sticks to lighter colors, pastels for cool colors and warm for when she wears darker ones. Black is only ever worn when she needs to blend into darker environments.

Due to the kind of people that she has spent most of her life around, it's very difficult for Nill to simply dislike much of anyone. She has a deep soft spot in her heart for people who are quiet or seem unhappy, even if personally she likes talkative people. Most of the time her demeanor gives off an air of quiet acceptance. She has mostly grown out of her clumsiness, but it's still very easy for her to be brought to tears, whether from sadness or happiness, or even anger, and despite having years to try to learn how to sew, she still is incapable of doing so without pricking her fingers thirty or forty times. Her nature is that of a nurturing person through and through, and her first thought and priority is always to take care of others and try to make them happy.

Motivations:

On the inside Nill hasn't necessarily changed a great deal. If she's given ideal circumstances then her outward appearance gives off exactly what she's thinking or feeling, and she's an open book.

However, it has been a very long time since Nill was last in ideal conditions. Due to time spent around a lot of people who trusted very little, it became much harder for Nill herself to trust people as well. Due to many circumstances where believing in people resulted in death or injury, Nill has learned to give her faith to people very sparingly. Though her love of others has not changed in the least, Nill no longer thinks that people work with the intent of doing good for others in mind, and she no longer believes in them as much as she used to. In many ways she has lost that about herself. Once someone has her trust though - which can be very easy to get under the right circumstances - it is almost impossible to lose it. Nill is loyal to a fault to those who matter to her and will do almost anything to keep them safe.

Due to many unfortunate circumstances, Nill has learned how to effectively lie to people. Whenever she does she does it out of a sense of keeping people safe, or keeping them happy. Most lies she tells are either to prevent people from finding out about herself or to make sure that they have what she thinks would be the best kind of life she can give them. Nill genuinely hates lying but has deemed it to be unavoidable at times for her now. Though she has begun to try to be more honest with people again and to stop trying to rely only on herself, sometimes lying is the first thing that comes to mind for her now, a developed instinct.

Because of situations in which she has been utterly helpless or a potential detriment to the safety of others, there is also a streak of self-hatred inside her. The first person that Nill learned to hate was herself because of how powerless to protect others she has been, where so many others have been hurt in order to protect her. She has also killed people, twice to make sure they never did horrible things again, and a few times while acting as a soldier for Exsilium. The first two she does not regret, nor does she have sympathy for, but it would be impossible for her to ever forget the people she killed while in Exsilium. There will never be a second in her life where Nill would be able to like herself for these things, and not even trying to justify it as protecting her loved ones has made that possible.

Despite herself, NIll is also bitterly angry with some of her friends that have died or wanted to return to their own worlds. Though she does her very best not to think about it sometimes she believes that if they had loved her like she loved them then they would not have been so stupid, they would have stayed with her. They would have returned from the last time they died and they wouldn't have left her there alone. They wouldn't have left her behind. While she misses Heine she's also terrified of meeting him again, because she's afraid he'll be from a time in her world that she doesn't know, confirming her worry that she is no longer part of the world she came from and that another "Nill" exists who is living that life, which would effectively mean that Heine left her behind as well.

Setting:

Living in a world like the Games is going to be utterly devastating for Nill at first. Two of the worst experiences of her life were essentially exactly what the Games do constantly, and she'll be completely sick with the idea of it, let alone having to live it again. Nill never killed anyone in either of the games that she had to live through, and she actually survived one of them simply by staying as far away from any other living being as possible at the time. She'll do the same within the Games for as long as she can. Nill does not want to compete in something as horrific as that ever again, and she would gladly die before hurting someone in the name of sick entertainment.

She might end up hurting someone in order to protect a third person, however. If it's someone she cares about then she might even go so far as to trying to make sure they win.

The transition to living in a world where she is incapable of using her telepathy to communicate with others is going to be very difficult for her as well. Nill hasn't really had to use gestures or scribbled notes to communicate with people in a long time, and she'll need to learn how to trust again without being able to tell immediately what someone's intentions might be. She has spent the better part of her life trying to have control over what happens to her, and having lost that almost entirely again is going to have her badly shaken for a long time.

If given the chance she will stop at nothing to try to assist with a possible downfall of the Capitol.

SAMPLES

First Person Thread:

[Nill hasn't been a stranger to death for a very long time. Twice before the Arena she had felt her life leaking out of her body. Twice before the Arena she had been forced into such awful positions that to this day she's not sure how she made it out of them. Those times she had escaped, sometimes before her demise, sometimes because of her demise, but the sensation of waking up and inhaling for the first time in your second life never ceases to be jarring; it always feels more like drowning than breathing. Nill coughs and sputters, and curls in on herself when she's aware enough to manage as such, her wings folded down against her back, her face tucked tightly against her knees, taking up as little space as possible on the cot she's woken on. This should not be familiar to her but it is, and Nill's whole being shakes with it as she tries to remind herself of how to breathe again. Bit by bit, piece by piece, Nill's breathing goes from anxious gasps to shuddering, tearless half-sobs, and eventually evens out to something that's still too fast, but at the very least no longer sounds like she might drop dead again.

Even with her eyes tightly closed Nill can see the cold body of a little girl she had come across in the Arena, burned into the backs of her eyelids, and every time she tries to lift her head, to move at all, the nausea hits her like a tidal wave once more, and once again she can barely sit up to look around her. The sound of a dial tone rings in her ears, and it's almost an hour before she can finally lift her head again. Two more on top of that before Nill can even bring herself to touch the recording device she's been left with, let alone using it. Her fingers skim over it, assessing, and in a moment of sorrow and anger she lifts it above her head and throws it hard against the ground. She smashes the lens, makes it as useless as possible with the energy she had left to do so, until the guards filter gas in through the vents in the walls. Before she knows it she wakes up again on the same cot she woke on the first time, and the recorder has been replaced, now sporting a heavy duty case.

Nill's final straw catches fire when no matter how hard she tries she finds herself unable to pry the case apart, and angry, anguished tears gather in the corners of her eyes, spilling over immediately.

She hadn't wanted to die. She hadn't wanted to hurt anyone in the Arena either, and yet both of those things had happened, and she could still feel the pain where the skin on her arm had been shredded, where a giant wolf had nearly pried one of her wings from her back, where something sharp had finally found an artery. She was used to dying, to her loved ones dying, but it made it no less painful, no less awful. There was never a single instance in her life in which she wanted to live this kind of life, no matter how much this kill-or-be-killed might resemble her own broken world. Nill hiccups miserably, and lays down on the cot they have given her as she closes her eyes, pointing the angle of the recorder away from her, just in case it's on and she can't tell. No one comes into the room, and Nill does not move again.

Hours go by, and Nill doesn't lift her head until she's nearing the 21 hour mark in the room. There are rumors, she's heard, whispers of what happens if the Tributes stay longer than the patience of the Capitol will allow, and as much as she hates this, as sick in her soul as this has left her, she doesn't want to keep laying there until they decide to pump poison into the room instead. She finally has her strength back, has cobbled together the resolve that she can manage to manifest in the setting she's in right now. It will need to be enough. The doctors (if that's what they want to call themselves) have been "kind" enough to leave her a recorder with a working video function, and after a moment she flicks it on.

The camera catches a glimpse of a pale looking young woman, her pallor more that of someone that's about to puke than someone who is recording a message that a good chunk of the public might see at some point. The tear tracks, though smudged, are still visible on her cheeks, her eyes still red-rimmed, and Nill never once opens her mouth. Instead she lifts her free hand, and she starts signing out a few words in clumsy sign language, rusty from years of disuse and an imperfect education of it to begin with. She uses specific letters more than she does single words, but she's careful with forming them.]

I A M N O T D O N E Y E T

[Her mouth is set in a straight line, close to a grimace but embers burn in her eyes. It's the most defiance of this that she can manage in the state she's in right now.

Nill didn't want to hurt the other tributes. Causing pain was not something that she had ever taken joy in, never would take any joy in. Even though some people in the world certainly deserved to die, and she had played a part in that more than she would ever want to admit, there was never joy in any of it. It did not make the hurts they had inflicted go away.

But some day -- some day-- the people running this show were going to look her in the eye, and they would realize they had made a very big mistake in reviving her.]

Prose:

The most unfamiliar thing about all of this is the way that the Capitol tries to prepare you at first. The way that they corral everyone into rooms so that they can all train together in order to kill each other, probably some day very soon. That part, more than anything else, is the most difficult. There are some people in the room around her that she recognizes, and some that she has never seen in her life, but most of them look the same as she feels, even if only slightly; defiant, worn, miserable.

Many are good at not showing it. For the most part, Nill has gotten good at that too when she doesn't want someone to know what she's thinking. But it doesn't mean she can't feel it, that she can't see the misery of this in the air like smoke, because she can nearly taste it.

In the training room Nill doesn't pick up any weapons. She remains sitting off to the side, quiet and relatively composed, even if she looks far from happy. She stays there for a long time, watching the people around her, and trying not to seem as though she's making a point to remember anything. (She is.) Anyone that looks her way gets a hesitant but gentle smile in return and a brief but not unwelcoming flutter of her tiny wings, before they settle once more against her back. Very few people actually come over.

It's not until almost halfway through the training session that Nill stands, and walks across the room to some of the children who have yet to talk to many people,who are inexperienced, who need the help. Her smile is small and kind, and she makes a gesture that she hopes they will understand as her not being able to speak. Even if they don't understand, they don't ask, and Nill sets about doing her best to show them the kind of foods they can eat if they need to, spelling out good places to hide, how to not be seen. Nill knows little about food in the wild, but she knows how to hide and to survive, had for years before she learned how to keep herself alive as well. Maybe these children could do it too. When one asks her what they should do about the others, she carefully spells out on the ground with her fingertip, "STAY-AWAY."

And that, the children understand.

To say that Nill's demeanor changes when she enters the room with the judges wouldn't really be accurate. Outwardly, very little about her shifts, but there are slight differences in the way she holds herself, the faintest signs that this is a much different situation. There is no kindness around her eyes, no upturn to her lips when one of the judges looks her way. Her session is only a few minutes long, but Nill remains near the door she had come in through. She folds her wings flat against her shoulder blades, and her hands behind her, and she leans back against the wall, watching the people behind the barriers as they eat, or make a bad joke, or smile, or do much of anything.

She watches, and Nill thinks to herself; These are the people who will watch as those children use weapons to win their favor. These are the people that will be responsible for all the deaths in the Arena, even if they are not the only people truly behind it. The ones in the room above her are directly involved. They are names and they are alive, and though Nill does not know who many of them are, she will not forget their faces, the way they look completely nonplussed now when only an hour ago Nill watched a girl who couldn't have been more than fifteen years old run out of this room in tears.

By the time she moves away from the wall she's taken up residence against, there are only about thirty seconds left of her session. Many of the judges have stopped paying attention to her and are more occupied with discussion of the catering, the people coming next, whether they should use a classic strategy this time around or go for something a bit more original. Very few actually watch as she walks over to the weapons rack, or notice her pick up the set of throwing knives.

The few who do are the only ones that see how accurate her aim is when she throws them at the barrier, right at the heads of several people not paying attention. They're only deterred by the sparks of the barrier as the knives are thrown away and half across the room.

For a handful of seconds all eyes are on Nill as she glares up at them, angry tears shining in her own, her wings flared out behind her in a half-instinctual gesture that makes her seem bigger than she really is. She makes eye contact with as many of them as she can before she turns on her heel, stifling a hiccup as she wipes at her eyes with the heels of her palms and quickly leaves the room.

After this round those people would not remember her face, even if she survived. No doubt they wouldn't remember any of them if they didn't need to, and they would recall even less if she didn't survive. But Nill would remember the faces of those children for as long as she lived, for as long as they kept bringing her back, and she would not forget the faces of the people who sent kids to march to their deaths.

What is your character scored:

About a 7. While she has no canon abilities outside of being a natural empath, she spent a lot of time making herself stronger and more capable with weapons. This will automatically have a draw back from the start due to being physically younger from being in the Port after her time in Exsilium. Additionally, her powers when not nerfed would likely remain the ones she had in Exsilium, and info for that can be found over here. She was at about stage 3 when she left.

Even without access to these abilities, Nill is not helpless. In fact she has made a point of making sure that she's capable of defending herself without access to her powers, as the need has actually arisen on more than one occasion. She has made sure that she knows how to use most hand-held guns, and has experimented with enough different kinds that she knows roughly how to estimate for kickback even on models that she would be unfamiliar with. Her aim is extremely good, and though its obvious that she lacks the ability to take kickback as well as she could, she also knows how to make sure the bullet will still hit the target despite that. However, she has almost no experience with rifles, and while she could probably figure it out without too much work it would definitely be a detriment to what she would be capable of.

Because she has also been in situations where she's needed to make due with what's around her, Nill has also learned how to handle knives. Her aim with knives is also extremely good, making her a force to be reckoned with if someone coming after her is relying on strength as opposed to weapons. Nill is fast, and if she can keep distance between herself and a potential attacker then she can definitely win a fight. But what she has in distance skill she can't make up for up close. She's pretty good at using a knife up close if she needs to, especially if she can use her telepathic abilities to mess with someone's reaction time, but if she's disarmed and is incapable of finding something else to defend herself with then she would be at a severe disadvantage. While she's definitely gotten stronger over time she's still not really built for fighting, and it would be relatively easy for someone to physically overpower her.

Her wings are also an issue. If Nill knows she's going to be in a dangerous situation then more often than not she'll try to keep her wings hidden under a jacket so that they're less of a target, but if she's unable to do that and someone has the time to injure one of her wings badly enough then it can severely mess with her sense of balance. She would also be very susceptible to almost any kind of mental warfare that the game makers might try to use.

As for crowd likability, it's likely that her stylists would try to use her wings as a way of gaining crowd favor, possibly by saying that Nill is similar to the people of the Capitol because she has "a physical enhancement" of some kind, as well as the fact that Nill is rather pretty. She could also be seen as someone going into the games with a disadvantage due to her muteness, which could have her played up as an underdog.