Character Application

[fadedpoppet]

Name: Karen Larkins
Age: 20
Appearance: Even at first glance, there seems to be something indefinably off about Karen, some unsettling but difficult to pinpoint cue that suggests she's not entirely natural or real. Perhaps it's the white-blonde hair that falls to her shoulders, straight and pale and fine enough to be nearly translucent, with narrow brows barely visible at all. Perhaps it's the washed-out silver-grey eyes that less seem to have color of their own than reflect what's around them, that always seem so distant and glassy and empty, as if they better belong to a doll or corpse than a human being. Perhaps it's her wintry pale complexion, the way her lips disappear against it, the unnaturally soft features--as though she hasn't been exposed to the elements or aged or touched by life at all, as though she were made that way, synthetic and artificial, poured and cast from a mold to exacting specifications.

Perhaps it's because she sometimes barely seems to be there at all; with her petite stature and habit of moving quietly and barely touching anything at all, she seems as though she could fade away entirely like some ghost or trick of the light. Her clothing doesn't help the matter, either; with her white hospital scrubs and gloves, Karen is wrapped from head to toe in white, and shows no skin at all from the neck down. She looks faded and out of place, ready to just vanish entirely if she's not being watched carefully.

(For reference, you can see an image here.)

Personality: In spite of Karen's life being devoted to studying what nature has given her, her personality has been nearly entirely shaped by the nurturance--or lack thereof--she's been given. For nearly her entire life, her natural disposition has been buried under pills. Anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, and sedative drugs are generally the order of the day for her, beyond whatever other chemical cocktails her keepers might feel the need to test. They keep her calm and obedient, safely blunting and distancing her emotions until any affect she may have to begin with is largely flattened, if it even manages to surface or register at all. It leaves her all but emotionally numb--barely able to feel, or even know how to or what it's like, much less why she should feel a given way at any particular time. She is a hollow child, a living doll, a blank slate ready and waiting to be molded into whatever those around her wish her to be.

That, perhaps, is the most constant and prominent feature of her personality: a calm acceptance of whatever happens to her, a ready eagerness to please, a naively blind trust of those she considers her superiors and caretakers and their intentions and goals. She has so thoroughly lacked the opportunity to develop her own personality or feel her own emotions that she barely has them at all, and instead allows herself to be manipulated and overlaid with that of others'. This stunted development leaves her oddly unbalanced in some ways; while she can be very mature and knowledgeable in the few things she does know and understand--primarily medicine and related topics, thanks to a natural curiosity and love of learning coupled with living in a hospital-turned-research-laboratory for nearly her entire life--she remains sheltered and ignorant about most things beyond that, displaying a child-like simplicity and innocence, a shallowness of experience and understanding at odds with her age.

She contently accepts what she has because it's all she's ever had, and she has yet to even consider the possibility that there might be something better for her out there, or that she might deserve it, or that her situation might be a bad one--after all, how can you miss something you've never known? She's told little more than what she needs to know, and is cared for to the point where there is little to no need for her to ever set foot outside the building unless she's being escorted. Such isolation and ready belief in whatever she's told make for nearly ideal laboratory conditions. It also leaves her ripe for abuse, exploitation, and manipulation. One hardly even has to try to be able to trick her, and beyond maintaining a good facade to keep her happy, it's hardly even necessary; it's as likely than not that she would do whatever she's asked before thinking of asking questions.

Ultimately, Karen is what she was made to be: a non-entity. She is not a person, but a resource, an instrument, a canvas--a pure and thus far untapped wellspring of opportunity and potential.

Character history:As far as Karen is concerned, she has no history--how she is is how she always has been and always will be, and things will probably remain unchanging for the rest of her life until modern medicine makes a miraculous breakthrough. But though she can't remember and rarely cares to look, she wasn't always a part of the institution she lives in. She was born to a normal, respectably middle-class couple in Los Angeles, the sort of Everymen that should have been destined for nothing more exciting or interesting than a Carribbean cruise or possible extramarital affair--certainly nothing like a Depriver child who had manifested her abilities since birth. Nobody knows whether the mother's deprivation was permanent, or simply never wore off because of how constantly a growing infant needs to be handled--for that matter, nobody knew what was wrong until it was too late, as she refused to speak to anyone about her condition--, but she struggled with clumsiness and numbness for months, as well as the inevitable injuries that resulted, and was fortunate to have a non-physical enough job--teaching at UCLA--that nothing catastrophic occurred. Her death was sudden and entirely unanticipated, even to her; even a rupturing appendix, after all, can't be noticed by someone who has completely ceased to feel.

Her father, a district manager in one of the large department stores of the city, made the effort to balance a career with being a single father--and all without sending her to daycare or hiring a babysitter, for fear of what might happen to his child if people found out about her condition. He managed, for a while and with great effort, but it took its toll; no matter how carefully he wrapped them up, one little slip was all it took to steal away his senses, and he couldn't recover fast enough from the accidents that tended to result. After so many hospital visits, his health insurance eventually investigated his account, whereupon his secret was discovered and his plan terminated. During the messy legal posturing that forced him into, a careless misstep sent him tumbling down a flight of stairs--and straight into the hospital once more, this time with a broken back. He had little choice but to accept the offer of the research agency that contacted him, exploitative though it was, considering he was unable to raise such a young child in that condition; he signed over the adoption papers to his liaison, one Dr. Larkins, in exchange for all medical, surgical, and rehabilitation bills to be paid in full.

Karen was perhaps two and a half years old when the papers were signed, and she was soon transferred to the facility she calls home. The routine was simple and easy to fall into, and easy to explain even to a young child: men and women in laboratory coats were Good People. She could trust them, because they cared about her and wanted to help her, so she should always do as they said. They would take care of her and help her, and she mustn't be bad or disobey, or try to leave without one of them with her--she was very sick, and they didn't want her to hurt anybody, or anybody to hurt her, because most people outside didn't like sick people. But as long as she was very good, and helped them learn, then everything would be okay; someday, they would learn enough about her sickness to be able to make it all better. All she had to do was be a good girl, and they would take care of everything.

Needless to say, the idea of being sick and dangerous was a very scary one to such a young child; she would have listened and done as they asked her even without the drugs they pumped her full of. And so it went; Karen was a model subject, and cooperated with everything asked of her, no matter how esoteric, painful, or frightening the procedure, or how oblique or opaque the rationale behind it. She passively gave herself over to study, and accepted the hospital as her home, the staff as her--sometimes distant and cold and generally uncaring--family, things and people to be cherished and seek to please for affection and approval, any attention and warmth she could get. She learned as she lived, asking questions whenever the currently presiding doctor or technician was indulgent enough to explain things to her or provide her with access to study materials, or even let her help with equipment and procedures--by now, though she has no formal training, she has likely picked up on enough to be a potentially competent medical caregiver in her own right.

It's a boring life, as painful and lonely and occasionally traumatic as it might be, but Karen doesn't mind it. After all, someday soon, she won't be sick anymore, and nobody else will have to be, either. Once they make her better, maybe she'll be able to go out and see the world, and finally be able to make them proud.

Powers and Abilities: For general information on Deprivers, see the World Summary section. In her specific case, Karen deprives people--completely but temporarily--of the full range of their tactile sense if she has skin-to-skin contact with them. This includes touch, pressure, pain, heat and cold, bodily positioning and movement, finer motor control, balance, and sense of direction. It tends to leave people completely numb, clumsy, disoriented, and with the unnerving feeling of floating helplessly beyond their own control without being able to feel the anything around them, much less themselves; the effect often makes people unable to release their tension, or limp enough to have difficulty applying the proper kind of strength or motion to anything; either way, while not as obviously debilitating as blindness or deafness at first thought, the effect can cause victims to incur serious injury if they aren't careful, and makes more skilled or delicate tasks almost impossible.

The effect varies in length from about a day to a week, with no obvious rhyme or reason as to who it effects longer or why; nevertheless, all victims are capable of seeing the trademark prismatic blue aura around Deprivers, once they have been deprived themselves. Normally, recovery is complete with no after-effects, though prolonged and repeated exposure might lead to a gradually more permanent loss.

World Summary: Karen's world is a realistic modern setting, much like our own--in fact, it essentially is our own in nearly all particulars, save for the sudden development (or at least, recent discovery) of a terrifying new disease, Sensory Deprivation Syndrome. In this world, SDS and the public uproar and controversy surrounding it are basically the new AIDS scare, with a dash of X-Men for flavor. Not only is it terrifying, debilitating, life-changing, and life-threatening for any who are affected by it, but it is equally if not more so for those afflicted with it. Deprivers (SDS-carriers) could be anyone, anywhere, and could do any kind of harm to their victims that one could imagine. At the same time, they are feared and misunderstood, shunned and ostracized and discriminated against for something they don't want and can't control. It's a dangerous and isolating disease, and even previously normal, healthy adults or helpless infants alike can manifest the symptoms and become Deprivers without warning.

This public health crisis is perhaps one generation old, two to three decades since its discovery at best--and certainly less than that since the public has possessed widespread awareness of it. Neither the government nor society in general knows what to do about it, much less what it is; ignorance, myth, superstition, and outright prejudiced propaganda float freely even as "experts" scrambling for information try to combat it all and shed the light of understanding and acceptance over the issue, which has become a hot button debate topic and political platform ranked right up there with stem cell research, capital punishment, and abortion. The government has hastily passed a scant few laws to try and provide damage control, regulation, and federally-funded research, which have thus far provided only limited help or assurance. By and large though, local governments have been left to handle things as they see fit, and these sensibilities can vary considerably, often influenced by individuals rich, charismatic, influential, and powerful enough to spread their opinions and get their way. The government itself hasn't even managed to look up from its own issues for long enough to communicate officially with the rest of the world about this, or consult their opinions. The scientific community, as of yet, seems to be the only group making the effort to connect and share information internationally.

Karen's position is one uniquely sheltered, for the most part, from public opinion and prejudice. She experiences almost all of the social climate indirectly, filtered through the limited lens of the professionals she meets every day. On the other hand, she is intimately tied into the system generating policy and information as well, without being able to purposely influence it herself. As a lifelong subject of the largest government-sponsored Depriver research institution, she has been an important source of information, and too valuable to be allowed exposure to outside influences that could wreck their carefully constructed laboratory experiments. Thus, she has remained largely isolated and sheltered, carefully trained up into a specimen that would most benefit both the scientists and doctors that handle her, and the politicians and government workers that are affiliated with the project.

And yet, life as people know it goes on. No matter how many religious fundamentalists of any stripe proclaim this situation as a sign of the Apocalypse and God or Satan's fury, no matter how many crazy survivalists and hysterical moralists declare this to be the result of society decaying and unraveling and take to the bomb shelters or media pulpits, no matter how many half-cocked pundits insist that the world is facing a crisis-level epidemic of Bubonic Plague proportions.... life still goes on, the wheels of society are still turning, and people are still able to get through the day. SDS is definitely the current generation's big issue, and is poised to affect culture in a very big way, but it nevertheless shares space with more normal concerns, such as the dismal state of the economy, whether the government is fighting or perpetuating various societal ills or just screwing everyone over indiscriminately, whose religion is better, and the endless struggle to keep up with the latest trends.