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Jun. 4th, 2012 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danceswithwaterNote: MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR ASOIAF SERIES BEHIND CUT. You have been warned.
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Stacey
AGE:25
JOURNAL:thepenguinred
IM: thepenguinred
PLURK: thepenguinred
E-MAIL: You’ve got this
RETURNING: May Parker and April Ludgate
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Arya Stark | No One
SERIES: A Song of Ice and Fire
CHRONOLOGY: During A Feast For Crows
CLASS: Anti-Hero
BACKGROUND:
The world of ASoIaF is much like a more high-fantasy version of feudal Europe. There are kings, lords, ladies, knights, and warring religions galore. And though it has been thought dead for centuries, there are also slowly reemerging items and creatures of magic, including: dragons, shape-shifters, and sorcerers. Really, the whole world is kind of like a different take on dungeons and dragons. One additional major difference is that ‘seasons’ are more a state of the world than a cycle as we know them. A single season can last for years, with good or bad omens being attached to each.
Arya Underfoot
Arya is the third youngest child and youngest of two daughters to Lord and Lady Stark of Winterfell. The daughter of a well-off lord (who not only assisted in winning the king of the seven kingdoms his throne, but is also a close childhood friend of that king) at her birth Arya’s life was more or less planned out for her. She would be taught to read and write, do needlework, be practised in courtesy and mild-mannered behavior, giggle over knights and heroes, then one day have a marriage arranged for her with a young lord of wealth and standing becoming a woman of her position in the world. A nice, simple plan typical of high born women of the realm, and one which began unraveling the moment Arya was able to walk.
Young Arya was the quintessential tomboy. She envied her older, and later even her younger, brothers at being allowed to practice swordplay over needlework. She ran amuck in the woods with the local children, regardless of their rank. She liked to sit with the common soldiers and chat with the blacksmiths to learn all about their lives and works. Nicknames abounded for her from Arya Underfoot (which was where she always seemed to be, no matter what part of the castle) to Arya Horseface (the mean nickname her older sister, the proper young lady that she was, gave her). Even in her family ranks she went against the grain, with her favorite brother being Jon Snow, her father’s bastard child from another woman that Arya’s mother despised. She fought constantly with her sister, Sansa, and generally ran wild. This behavior only became worse when her older brother Robb brought home a pack of direwolf cubs (the direwolf being the symbol of house Stark) and gave one to Arya. She named her after an old heroine from the stories, Nymeria.
Arya Stark
Not much changed when Arya, along with her father, sister, and a large host from their house, left Winterfell for King’s Landing, the capital city of the Seven Kingdoms. King Robert, her father’s old friend, had traveled to the north to demand Ned, Arya’s father, become the Hand (or chief advisor) to the king as the old one had died (Ned had reasons to believe that the old Hand, his former mentor, had been murdered. But Arya knows nothing of these plots, and so I’ll be skimming over those both here and throughout the history). What she did know was her younger brother, Bran, had fallen from a tower while climbing on the walls as he tended to do, and was in danger of dying at any moment. Her favorite brother, Jon, had also left Winterfell, but not to join her at court in King’s Landing. Rather, Jon, suddenly more of a liability than ever thanks to Ned’s promotion and his bastard status, was leaving to join the black brotherhood of the Night’s Watch at the Wall to the North and to spend his life defending the Seven Kingdoms from the monsters that waited on the other side. Before he left, however, Jon gave Arya one last gift: a sword, as slender and light as her, named Needle, for her very own.
The journey from Winterfell to King’s Landing predicted rather accurately how Arya’s life as a lady in training in the queen’s court would go. One day on the road, Arya and her friend, the son of the butcher from Winterfell, were playing at the side of a river. Arya demanded he help her work on her swordplay, and so the two of them were swatting each other with sticks when Arya’s sister Sansa, accompanied by King Robert’s son the crowned prince Joffrey, happened upon them. Recently engaged to the young prince, Sansa was eager to fall over herself to please him, and when he started threatening the butcher’s son for daring to raise a hand against a noble lady, she did little to defend her younger sister or her friend. The altercation ended in Arya throwing Joffrey’s fine sword in the river and Nymeria biting the prince’s hand. The punishment for that ended in the Hound, Joffrey’s loyal guard, killing Arya’s friend the butcher boy, Arya hiding in the woods and forcing Nymeria to flee into the wild, and Lady, Sansa’s direwolf, being put down due to the demands of the queen that no wild animal be allowed to travel with them.
On that happy note the family arrived in King’s Landing. Arya fit in as a fine lady about as well as a wolf with sheep. She and Sansa fought constantly. She and her father’s guards and servants, people she used to adore chatting with, fought constantly. Worst of all, she knew all of this made her father disappointed in her. After one particularly dramatic dinner, Ned discovered Arya holding Needle in her room, tears still streaming down her face, and (after making it very clear they were in danger at King’s Landing and must stick together, as well as making her swear she would never stab Sansa with the sword) Ned decided to get her a sword fighting instructor. In order to prevent anyone from knowing what was really going on, Arya claimed to be taking ‘dancing lessons.’
Arya thrived in her lessons, though they left her bruised and bloody every day. She spent her days balancing on stairs, chasing down cats to learn agility, and, of course, learning how to swing a sword. During one of her cat chasing adventures, she became lost in the dungeons of the castle and overheard two men plotting about killing her father. When she eventually reached her father, he put down her story as the imagination of a child listening to two actors practising and sent her away.
This mirth did not last long, however. Though Arya never learned what her father discovered, he told her she and Sansa would shortly be fleeing King’s Landing to return to Winterfell. At a ‘dancing lesson’ shortly thereafter, guards came and demanded she go with them to her father. When her dancing instructor pointed out it made sense for Lannister (the queen’s family) guards to be coming to get a Stark child and Arya refused to go with them, the guards become violent. The dancing instructor, an incredibly talented swordsman, gave his life to give Arya enough time to flee (apparently, she didn’t see him die, but it’s assumed). Arya ran to discover her father’s tower overrun.
Unable to get back to her family, she discovered her trunks, moved in preparation for her and Sansa’s departure, and dug out Needle, killing a stable boy in the process as he tried to stop her from running. Arya managed to flee the castle, living homeless in the gutters of King’s Landing for a few weeks. This life came to an abrupt end when, summoned by the ringing bells to the steps of the church, Arya witnessed her father executed as a traitor for trying to usurp the throne by the now King Joffrey, his father having been killed in a ‘hunting accident,’ while her sister, still engaged to the prince and now a hostage of the Lannister’s, sat besides him. She did not actually see his death, however, only heard the sword swing, as a brother of the Night’s Watch that knew her father and was in King’s Landing to recruit thieves and the like to the Wall, Yoren, grabbed her and made her look away. After this he pulled her to an alley, cut off most of her matted, filthy hair, called her a boy and took Arya along with him on their journey to the Wall, promising to drop her off at Winterfell on the way.
Arry the Orphan Boy
Told to pose as a boy, Arya called herself Arry during this journey. Arry didn’t manage to get along with people much better than Arya had. Still shaken from her father’s death, confused, recently informed her father was supposed to have been banished to the Wall rather than executed, and now surrounded by criminals that would sell her to the queen as the traitor’s daughter if any knew who she was, it’s rather understandable that Arry didn’t make the best company. While the rest of her belongings had been stolen during her time being homeless, Arry still possessed Needle, which drew interest from several of the slightly older boys traveling with her to the Wall. She got into a few fist fights, had to be beaten a time or two by Yoren, but more or less managed to keep things together.
She did grow a little close to one of the older boys, a boy named Gendry that everone called the Bull, as well as become tolerated by a boy named Hot Pit and his friend Lommy Greenhands. Most of the closeness began to grow when the King’s Guard tracked the group down at an inn and demanded that Yoren hand over the boy they were looking for in the name of the queen. Arry, convinced it was her, gets Gendry to hide with her, and is then shocked to learn it is Gendry they are looking for, though the boy doesn’t know why. With this odd bond of both being hunted between them, Arry starts to tolerate his company a little better.
Knowing the queen is after them now, the group leaves the main roads and continues their long, slow journey towards the Wall. Not too much time passes before they come to a burned out village, a casualty of the now ignited war between the North (lead, Arry learns, by her eldest brother Robb) and King’s Landing and the Lannisters. Unable to find a way to continue that night, they hole up in the husk of a neighboring town. It is there that a knight in service of the Lannister’s and his men find them, and a fight breaks out. Yoren and nearly every other man is killed during the fight, with only Arry, Gendry, Hot Pie, Lommy, and a little girl they had found on the road earlier escaping before the building they were in was burned down. Before she escapes the burning building, Arry throws an axe into a wagon of prisoners that were destined for the Wall but deemed too dangerous to be allowed out of chains, allowing the three men, Jaqen H'ghar, Rorge and Biter, to escape death as well.
The small group of Arry, Gendry, and Hot Pie, leaving the injured Lommy behind for a moment, returned to the village the next night to confirm everyone was dead and to bury Yoren before moving on, continuing their journey north towards the Wall and, unknown to any but Arry, Winterfell. Coming upon a, for once occupied rather than abandoned, village, Arry and Gendry leave the group behind to scout. They have a conversation about how Gendry knew Arry was actually a girl and Arry revealing her real identity as Arya Stark on the way, cementing her trust in the older boy. On reaching the village, Arry discovers it to be occupied by Lannisters, with their men torturing locals to death while interrogating them for the locations of Northern men, Dondarrion (a rebel lord), treasures, and anything else they feel like asking for. The Lannister men captured the far less stealthy Gendry in short order, leaving Arya to get Hot Pie and attempt a rescue.
This proves to be a mistake, as Hot Pie was even worse at stealth than Gendry, ending up in both of them being captured by the Lannister men and Needle being taken from Arry. She discovers that the Lannister men are led by Ser Gregor, a knight of the Lannisters and brother to the Hound. Hot Pie leads the men to Lommy, where they kill the injured boy. Gregor then takes the three along with him on his march to Harrenhal, an ancient castle, with his servant The Tickler torturing some random villager to death every day along the way. During this time Arry thinks of herself as a lamb, a meek, helpless, stupid thing that could do nothing but follow along and hope she wasn’t slaughtered too. During this time Arry begins saying her nightly prayers, listing the names of the men and women she hated to herself every night before she slept.
Weasel/The Ghost of Harrenhal
On arriving at Harrenhal, Arya gave her name as Weasel and was assigned as a servant girl in the castle under a man named Weese, scrubbing floors and helping in the kitchen and whatever else was needed of her. Her time was spent with regular beatings and often seeing the other servants die around her, resulting in Weese being very quickly added to her nightly prayer list. As a servant, she overheard a great deal of gossip, including where her brother, now the self-proclaimed King in the North, was currently marching to, giving her the idea to run and join his ranks. If only she could find a way out.
Shortly after her own arrival, the three men she helped free from the burning wagon back when Yoren was killed turned up at Harrenhal, now sworn men of the very knight that had fought the Night’s Watch. She thought they didn’t recognize her, but that night one of the men, Jaqen, came to her sleeping nitch. He told her that by saving the three men that night she had snatched three sacrifices to the Red God. He was there to offer up three others in their place. Arya need only name the names and Jaqen would kill them. She takes a few nights to think on it then, after hearing the man laughingly tell a story of raping a woman, gives the name of one of Gregor’s men. Three days later the man was dead, and Arya renamed herself the ghost of Harrenhal.
Weese was next on the hit list, though Arya grew to regret throwing away the request on such a pathetic man, no matter how much she hated him. Shortly after, men in the service of her brother Robb are taken captive and held at Harrenhal while awaiting negotiations for ransom. Arya hatches a plan to rescue them, particularly the lord among them who would know her, and then either overthrow the castle or make an escape. Gendry and Hot Pie refuse to help her, both citing that either way they are in service to one lord or another, so what was the difference to them? She then turns to Jaqen, who states that too many would die in her plan; she should name her last name instead and let him be on his way. She gives him his own name, demanding that he kill himself if he won’t help her, and in exchange for having his name unspoken he agrees to help her escape. To do this he, along with his two companions, takes Arya down to the guards protecting the cells of the prisoners, where the four of them pour boiling hot soup on the guards and kill them, and then freeing the northerners in the dungeon.
Glover, the northern lord, soon takes the castle as his own and, not knowing who Arya is, makes her his cup bearer as thanks for her part in the rescue. In the meantime, Jaqen informed Arya his debts were paid to her and then, before her eyes, changed his face into that of a different mans. She demands to be taught how to do it, but does not wish, as Jaqen demands, to travel across the ocean to the Free Cities with him in order to do so. He gives her a coin instead, telling her that if she ever wishes to leave the Seven Kingdoms behind and make that journey to learn, she need only give it to a captain from the city of Braavos and say the words ‘valar morghulis.’
Nan
She is soon turned over from being Glover’s to Lord Bolton’s cup bearer, and Arya once more changes her name as the lord couldn’t have a girl called ‘weasel’ attending him. She claims to be Nymeria, Nan for short. In short order, any Lannister men that weren’t worth a ransom were executed by the new lord, their heads put on pikes, and any servant that had seemed too welcoming to the Lannister host is brutally punished.
While pouring wine at one of the lord’s war councils, Arya learns that Winterfell has been taken over by some enemy while Robb was off fighting Lannisters, with her two younger brothers having been put to death. She quickly decides she can no longer bear to play at servant, and hatches a plan to escape the castle and, now that Winterfell is lost, flee to the much closer castle of her uncle on her mother’s side, Riverrun. She lies to Gendry and Hot Pie, telling them that she’s overheard plans that all servants were to have a foot cut off to prevent them from running, and convinces them to join her in the escape. Gendry steals them some swords and, after murdering a guard in the dead of night, the three of them escape into the wilds on horses Arya stole.
Arya
One flaw in her brilliant plan was, of course, that she had no real idea how to get to Riverrun. Maps look a lot different than the actual land, but the three muddled on as best they could for a time, with Arya having her first wolf dream (in which part of her mind ran along with her old direwolf Nymeria) on the way, showing she, like the rest of the Stark children, is a warg. The three are found by a group of, to put it simply, vigilante lords, knights, and whoever else will join them, called the Brotherhood Without Banners, led by Dondarrion. One of Ned Stark’s former guards is among them, who identifies Arya almost immediately. They are taken to the brotherhood’s hideout as a result. Very quickly, Hot Pie opts instead to stay at a nearby inn as their baker, and Gendry then settling as a blacksmith/freedom fighter with the brotherhood.
On the way Arya learns that Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, has escaped from being held hostage by her brother Robb and is running loose. While at the hideout, she learns about the Red god and his priests, and that some men, through the right magics, can be brought back from the dead. She also discovers that the Hound, having fled King’s Landing, has been captured by the group and is to be put on trial for his evils. Arya accuses him of murdering her friend the butcher boy a year past, and he, as is his right as a noble, chooses trial by combat rather than waiting for the groups ‘justice.’ The Hound wins, much to Arya’s disgust, and is released.
Arya travels with the brotherhood for a time, their plan being to ransom her to her family at Riverrun. Unfortunately, the Red god sends his priest visions that Riverrun will soon be under siege by the Lannisters, and that Arya’s brother and mother will be involved in some kind of wedding rather than at the battle. The brotherhood decides to turn away from Riverrun and discuss what to do, but Arya will have none of it. Leaving Gendry and Hot Pie behind, she flees from the brotherhood until she is apprehended by Hound, who had been trailing the group since his release.
The She-wolf
Arya attempts to escape several times from the Hound, ending in him tying her to her saddle during the day and binding her and wrapping her up in a saddle blanket at night. Rather than take her to Riverrun, the Hound takes Arya to the Twins, where her uncle is getting married with her mother and brother in attendance. They arrive and, posing as merchants, get across the bridge to the castle at the Twins. They arrive too late, however. Thanks to a series of events Arya is utterly unaware of, the Frey family, who held the Twins, use the wedding as bait for her brother and mother and, once the marriage was consummated, slaughtered every Stark and Northern man in attendance. Arya arrives just in time to see the flames and would have rushed in in time to see her mother murdered, but the Hound strikes her on the back of the head and carries her away from the carnage.
With the main two people he wanted to ransom her to dead, the Hound decides to take Arya to the Eyrie, where her mother’s sister rules. Ayra insisted on going back to the Twins until she had another wolf dream where Nymeria found her mother’s body, naked and with the neck split from ear to ear, floating in the river by the Twins. This forces her to accept the finality of her mother’s death, and to give up on any desire to escape.
Soon after she and the Hound find themselves at an inn where several of the men from Arya’s prayer list, including the Tickler, happened to be staying as well. There she learns King Joffrey had died, as well as that Sansa had been married to Tyrion Lannister, though she doesn’t believe the second part. Thanks to the Hound being his charming self, not to mention a known traitor to the crown, a fight soon breaks out in the inn, ending in the Tickler and his group being killed and the Hound badly wounded. Arya herself kills the Tickler, screaming at him the same questions he had asked the villagers he tortured as she stabbed him over and over. One of the men had Needle, Arya’s sword, on him, returning the blade to her hands once more.
The Hound’s wounds soon become infected, and while he’s at death’s door Arya draws Needle on him. He accepts his death at her hands but, at the last moment, she refuses to give him the gift of mercy and instead takes her horse and goes, leaving him to die a slow, painful death of infection or be eaten by wolves. She rides to the nearest port town and attempts to negotiate passage for herself to travel to the Wall to find her brother Jon, but has nothing to pay with. Finally, in a last act of desperation, she finds a Braavosi captain and hands over the coin Jaqen had given her, reciting the words. He takes her on board without question, and Arya travels out of the Seven Kingdoms to Braavos.
Salty
While on the voyage to Braavos, Arya is confused why crew memebers give her gifts and seem determined that she know their names, while they never ask hers in return. She doesn’t push it, however, and the journey to Braavos is a relatively uneventful one. On the way she learns the meaning of the words Jaqen had told her to say: all men must die.
The captain of the ship rushes her off the moment they reached Braavos, and then Arya was on her own. The oar man who brought her ashore left her at the entrance to a temple and, deciding she has nowhere else to go, Arya bangs on the door and once more presents the coin Jaqen had given her and says they words, thus allowing her entrance. There she discovers a temple of the dead and dying, filled with alcoves where men could come to take a sip of poison and die in peace. One of the priests, who Arya comes to call the Kindly Man, finds her as she is exploring and he explains she is the House of Black and White, a temple to the Many-Faced God. To death. She tells him her real name and, after proving she does not fear death, is accepted into the temple as a servant.
No one
In the temple she helps clean the dead bodies of people who came there to die, scrub the floors, work in the kitchen, general servant work. At night she still says her prayers, until the Kindly Man overhears her and asks what she was doing. After her explanation he explains that a servant of the Many-Faced God could have no self, that everything must be given up to him. She could not learn their art of death then use it for revenge. Arya Stark had no place there. With nowhere else to go, and no want to leave the temple, Arya swears she can be no one, that she can give up Arya. Part of this process is getting rid of all her worldly possessions, few that she had. She throws all of them into the rivers of Braavos, save for one thing: Needle. That she can’t give up as it represents too much of who she is. Arya opts to hide Needle instead, but I will be taking her from the moment she decided to keep Needle, with the sword therefore arriving in the City with her.
PERSONALITY:
Arya is, at her core, the quintessential tomboy. One of only two of her siblings to actually take after her father rather than her mother in looks, Arya has never been as pretty as her older sister Sansa, nor does she have any interest in making herself so. She loathes needlework, most social niceties, learning the names and histories of lords and ladies, singing and playing instruments, and pretty much everything else assigned to a classic lady fair. She would by far rather practise her swordplay, or archery, or go hunting with her brothers and friends than any of that. While her mother had begun to despair of her, her father more or less accepted the facts about his daughter (in his way), allowing her to have a sword fighting teacher and, with some complaining, allowing her to train by chasing cats around the castle or standing on her hands on the stairs. This, of course, adds up in Arya being a bit of a daddy’s girl as well as a tomboy, who idealized her father even when he was alive, and does so to an even greater extent now that he is dead.
Along with this more classically masculine associated nature comes an unavoidable stubborn streak, which, all in all, is the core of the source of Arya’s ability to withstand all she goes through over the course of the series. Arya is a survivor. She is not fearless, she is in fact very often afraid enough that she must remind herself how damaging that fear is, but she is willful and stubborn enough to refuse to simply lay down and die. She always has some kind of a goal to work towards, no matter the situation. First it was the simple fun of learning swordplay, then reaching Winterfell (or, if possible, her brother Jon on the Wall), then it was revenge against all those that had harmed her and the ones she cared for. Rather than praying for her safety or for someone to save her at night, Arya lists the names of all those she wants to see dead for what they have done as her prayer. Though there may be times when she nearly despairs as she can’t see how she can achieve her goals and simply lives doing what must be done to survive in the meantime, she always manages to hang on long enough for fortune to present itself. Or for a chance to make her own fortune, as the case may be. Luckily for her, a very strong clever streak runs right alongside her stubborn one, allowing her to not only survive the world, but impact it as well.
Along with all this comes a deep-seated sense of loyalty, one which has been very heavily influenced by her nearly painfully noble father over the course of her short life. First and foremost, this loyalty is to her family. Though there are certain members of it she likes better than others (her bastard brother Jon will always be her favorite, while she and Sansa fought constantly, for instance), they are all Starks and she would fight and kill for each of them. This loyalty extends to those around her, as well, and not necessarily only to people she likes. The boys that travel with her to the Wall, and later are all captured by enemy forces with her, are all recipients of her loyalty even when they slow her down or nearly get her killed. Though she doubts it herself at times, she has her father’s sense of justice for the most part which plays into this as well. For instance, she is willing to risk her life to throw a means of escape to a pack of murderers rather than let them burn to death, with this personal version of nobility tending to have its own rewards and punishments over time.
These traits combined, unfortunately, don’t leave Arya with much when it comes to long term planning. While she has her goals, as previously stated, they tend to remain more vague eventualities. For the most part, Arya lives in the moment and this tends to regularly screw her over. Her temper very easily gets the better of her, and she’ll snap out insults and proclamations she may not even particularly mean, simply so that she can be the ‘winner’ of a conversation at that moment. Along with this, she can become very easily frustrated with her current situation if it is not what she wanted, beating herself up over being a failure for letting whatever is happening happen rather than putting it into a more long-term perspective. Much of this, naturally, comes from the fact she is eleven. Hind-sight and realistic appraisal of a situation tends to come with age.
Arya also doesn’t have much in the traditional sense of arrogant pride. She certainly has pride and stands up for herself and nurses wounds, but she doesn’t see herself as intrinsically better than anyone simply because she is of noble blood. Kings and Queens murder and sin as much, if not more, than common butcher boys, after all, and her bastard brother has proven to be nobler than the high born ward her father cared for over the course of a decade. Therefore the idea of superiority by birth alone is one she finds hard to swallow. This also means she doesn’t have much issue doing what must be done in order to survive, even eating worms when lowly street urchins turned their nose up at the idea simply to have the strength to continue her journey.
POWER:
Faceless Woman
Arya has shape shifting abilities. She can change her features, voice, and size to that of another person or animal. The only thing that doesn’t change with all this is her scent, which remains distinctly her own to any animal or person capable of detecting that kind of subtle difference. When changing her appearance to that of another human, Arya’s physical abilities are limitless (meaning she could shift into a person far taller or fatter than herself), though, of course, whether she actually acts like that person is another matter. When it comes to animals, however, she can only change into creatures of equal or lesser size to herself. So while she could become a raven, she could not turn into a polar bear. The only exception to this is that she can turn into a direwolf, the sigil of her house, with the wolf standing at about the size of a small horse.
Warg
Arya can ride the senses of animals, leaving her physical body behind has her mind takes over a near-by animal. Her body is vulnerable while her mind is ‘away’ and if she rides an animal for too long it is possible for her to starve to death, assuming nothing else kills her first. She can only latch onto the mind of an animal she can physically see in her human form. While she can control that animal, her mind also takes on some of the animal’s characteristics during that time. Killing and eating a human doesn’t sound so bad to a wolf, for instance, or as a cat she may decide to push an important mission she wanted to accomplish aside in order to take a short, several hour long nap in the sun.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
Someone said they were dead. I don’t mean here. I don’t care about stupid people killing each other here. I mean where they’re from. They were dead there and then the machine brought them here and now they’re not. Those dead.
[There’s a small pause as she gnaws her lip. She has to know- she has to. But it still feels like giving up too much personal information.]
Is it true? Can she really bring people back? Even if they’ve been dead a long time? Even...even if they cut off their head and put it on a pike. Even if they were burned? Even then?
Don’t lie to me. I mean it. I only...I must know. I have to.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
“They don’t change every year. That’s stupid.”
But it was true. No matter how much she tried to point out the totally stupidity of seasons changing not just once or twice, but four times. Every single year, no one would listen. And, truly, she couldn’t show them much scorn for it. Her own arguments would have sounded mad to her if she wasn’t the one making them, as mad and silly and stupid and wrong as the ones the rest of them made back at her. The last summer, the one she had been born in, had lasted for years. A decade. One of the longest in living memory. And it had lasted that long because...because...
Because it had. It was stupid to ask why, never mind how a single season could last so long. That was simply what they did. The motto of her House, of who she really was, the house of Arya Stark, may have been Winter is Coming, but it was a truth that had always been more frightening because you never knew when. You only knew that, as happy and good as things may be now in the summer, one day it would end and only death and cold would surround you. Surround the world. Having winter every year, only a few, known months of cold and pain with a promise of a quick return to life and warmth...
Stupid. That’s just what it was. Life wasn’t like that at all.
FINAL NOTES:
Arya will have her plain clothes and her sword Needle on her upon arrival.
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Stacey
AGE:25
JOURNAL:
thepenguinredIM: thepenguinred
PLURK: thepenguinred
E-MAIL: You’ve got this
RETURNING: May Parker and April Ludgate
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Arya Stark | No One
SERIES: A Song of Ice and Fire
CHRONOLOGY: During A Feast For Crows
CLASS: Anti-Hero
BACKGROUND:
The world of ASoIaF is much like a more high-fantasy version of feudal Europe. There are kings, lords, ladies, knights, and warring religions galore. And though it has been thought dead for centuries, there are also slowly reemerging items and creatures of magic, including: dragons, shape-shifters, and sorcerers. Really, the whole world is kind of like a different take on dungeons and dragons. One additional major difference is that ‘seasons’ are more a state of the world than a cycle as we know them. A single season can last for years, with good or bad omens being attached to each.
Arya Underfoot
Arya is the third youngest child and youngest of two daughters to Lord and Lady Stark of Winterfell. The daughter of a well-off lord (who not only assisted in winning the king of the seven kingdoms his throne, but is also a close childhood friend of that king) at her birth Arya’s life was more or less planned out for her. She would be taught to read and write, do needlework, be practised in courtesy and mild-mannered behavior, giggle over knights and heroes, then one day have a marriage arranged for her with a young lord of wealth and standing becoming a woman of her position in the world. A nice, simple plan typical of high born women of the realm, and one which began unraveling the moment Arya was able to walk.
Young Arya was the quintessential tomboy. She envied her older, and later even her younger, brothers at being allowed to practice swordplay over needlework. She ran amuck in the woods with the local children, regardless of their rank. She liked to sit with the common soldiers and chat with the blacksmiths to learn all about their lives and works. Nicknames abounded for her from Arya Underfoot (which was where she always seemed to be, no matter what part of the castle) to Arya Horseface (the mean nickname her older sister, the proper young lady that she was, gave her). Even in her family ranks she went against the grain, with her favorite brother being Jon Snow, her father’s bastard child from another woman that Arya’s mother despised. She fought constantly with her sister, Sansa, and generally ran wild. This behavior only became worse when her older brother Robb brought home a pack of direwolf cubs (the direwolf being the symbol of house Stark) and gave one to Arya. She named her after an old heroine from the stories, Nymeria.
Arya Stark
Not much changed when Arya, along with her father, sister, and a large host from their house, left Winterfell for King’s Landing, the capital city of the Seven Kingdoms. King Robert, her father’s old friend, had traveled to the north to demand Ned, Arya’s father, become the Hand (or chief advisor) to the king as the old one had died (Ned had reasons to believe that the old Hand, his former mentor, had been murdered. But Arya knows nothing of these plots, and so I’ll be skimming over those both here and throughout the history). What she did know was her younger brother, Bran, had fallen from a tower while climbing on the walls as he tended to do, and was in danger of dying at any moment. Her favorite brother, Jon, had also left Winterfell, but not to join her at court in King’s Landing. Rather, Jon, suddenly more of a liability than ever thanks to Ned’s promotion and his bastard status, was leaving to join the black brotherhood of the Night’s Watch at the Wall to the North and to spend his life defending the Seven Kingdoms from the monsters that waited on the other side. Before he left, however, Jon gave Arya one last gift: a sword, as slender and light as her, named Needle, for her very own.
The journey from Winterfell to King’s Landing predicted rather accurately how Arya’s life as a lady in training in the queen’s court would go. One day on the road, Arya and her friend, the son of the butcher from Winterfell, were playing at the side of a river. Arya demanded he help her work on her swordplay, and so the two of them were swatting each other with sticks when Arya’s sister Sansa, accompanied by King Robert’s son the crowned prince Joffrey, happened upon them. Recently engaged to the young prince, Sansa was eager to fall over herself to please him, and when he started threatening the butcher’s son for daring to raise a hand against a noble lady, she did little to defend her younger sister or her friend. The altercation ended in Arya throwing Joffrey’s fine sword in the river and Nymeria biting the prince’s hand. The punishment for that ended in the Hound, Joffrey’s loyal guard, killing Arya’s friend the butcher boy, Arya hiding in the woods and forcing Nymeria to flee into the wild, and Lady, Sansa’s direwolf, being put down due to the demands of the queen that no wild animal be allowed to travel with them.
On that happy note the family arrived in King’s Landing. Arya fit in as a fine lady about as well as a wolf with sheep. She and Sansa fought constantly. She and her father’s guards and servants, people she used to adore chatting with, fought constantly. Worst of all, she knew all of this made her father disappointed in her. After one particularly dramatic dinner, Ned discovered Arya holding Needle in her room, tears still streaming down her face, and (after making it very clear they were in danger at King’s Landing and must stick together, as well as making her swear she would never stab Sansa with the sword) Ned decided to get her a sword fighting instructor. In order to prevent anyone from knowing what was really going on, Arya claimed to be taking ‘dancing lessons.’
Arya thrived in her lessons, though they left her bruised and bloody every day. She spent her days balancing on stairs, chasing down cats to learn agility, and, of course, learning how to swing a sword. During one of her cat chasing adventures, she became lost in the dungeons of the castle and overheard two men plotting about killing her father. When she eventually reached her father, he put down her story as the imagination of a child listening to two actors practising and sent her away.
This mirth did not last long, however. Though Arya never learned what her father discovered, he told her she and Sansa would shortly be fleeing King’s Landing to return to Winterfell. At a ‘dancing lesson’ shortly thereafter, guards came and demanded she go with them to her father. When her dancing instructor pointed out it made sense for Lannister (the queen’s family) guards to be coming to get a Stark child and Arya refused to go with them, the guards become violent. The dancing instructor, an incredibly talented swordsman, gave his life to give Arya enough time to flee (apparently, she didn’t see him die, but it’s assumed). Arya ran to discover her father’s tower overrun.
Unable to get back to her family, she discovered her trunks, moved in preparation for her and Sansa’s departure, and dug out Needle, killing a stable boy in the process as he tried to stop her from running. Arya managed to flee the castle, living homeless in the gutters of King’s Landing for a few weeks. This life came to an abrupt end when, summoned by the ringing bells to the steps of the church, Arya witnessed her father executed as a traitor for trying to usurp the throne by the now King Joffrey, his father having been killed in a ‘hunting accident,’ while her sister, still engaged to the prince and now a hostage of the Lannister’s, sat besides him. She did not actually see his death, however, only heard the sword swing, as a brother of the Night’s Watch that knew her father and was in King’s Landing to recruit thieves and the like to the Wall, Yoren, grabbed her and made her look away. After this he pulled her to an alley, cut off most of her matted, filthy hair, called her a boy and took Arya along with him on their journey to the Wall, promising to drop her off at Winterfell on the way.
Arry the Orphan Boy
Told to pose as a boy, Arya called herself Arry during this journey. Arry didn’t manage to get along with people much better than Arya had. Still shaken from her father’s death, confused, recently informed her father was supposed to have been banished to the Wall rather than executed, and now surrounded by criminals that would sell her to the queen as the traitor’s daughter if any knew who she was, it’s rather understandable that Arry didn’t make the best company. While the rest of her belongings had been stolen during her time being homeless, Arry still possessed Needle, which drew interest from several of the slightly older boys traveling with her to the Wall. She got into a few fist fights, had to be beaten a time or two by Yoren, but more or less managed to keep things together.
She did grow a little close to one of the older boys, a boy named Gendry that everone called the Bull, as well as become tolerated by a boy named Hot Pit and his friend Lommy Greenhands. Most of the closeness began to grow when the King’s Guard tracked the group down at an inn and demanded that Yoren hand over the boy they were looking for in the name of the queen. Arry, convinced it was her, gets Gendry to hide with her, and is then shocked to learn it is Gendry they are looking for, though the boy doesn’t know why. With this odd bond of both being hunted between them, Arry starts to tolerate his company a little better.
Knowing the queen is after them now, the group leaves the main roads and continues their long, slow journey towards the Wall. Not too much time passes before they come to a burned out village, a casualty of the now ignited war between the North (lead, Arry learns, by her eldest brother Robb) and King’s Landing and the Lannisters. Unable to find a way to continue that night, they hole up in the husk of a neighboring town. It is there that a knight in service of the Lannister’s and his men find them, and a fight breaks out. Yoren and nearly every other man is killed during the fight, with only Arry, Gendry, Hot Pie, Lommy, and a little girl they had found on the road earlier escaping before the building they were in was burned down. Before she escapes the burning building, Arry throws an axe into a wagon of prisoners that were destined for the Wall but deemed too dangerous to be allowed out of chains, allowing the three men, Jaqen H'ghar, Rorge and Biter, to escape death as well.
The small group of Arry, Gendry, and Hot Pie, leaving the injured Lommy behind for a moment, returned to the village the next night to confirm everyone was dead and to bury Yoren before moving on, continuing their journey north towards the Wall and, unknown to any but Arry, Winterfell. Coming upon a, for once occupied rather than abandoned, village, Arry and Gendry leave the group behind to scout. They have a conversation about how Gendry knew Arry was actually a girl and Arry revealing her real identity as Arya Stark on the way, cementing her trust in the older boy. On reaching the village, Arry discovers it to be occupied by Lannisters, with their men torturing locals to death while interrogating them for the locations of Northern men, Dondarrion (a rebel lord), treasures, and anything else they feel like asking for. The Lannister men captured the far less stealthy Gendry in short order, leaving Arya to get Hot Pie and attempt a rescue.
This proves to be a mistake, as Hot Pie was even worse at stealth than Gendry, ending up in both of them being captured by the Lannister men and Needle being taken from Arry. She discovers that the Lannister men are led by Ser Gregor, a knight of the Lannisters and brother to the Hound. Hot Pie leads the men to Lommy, where they kill the injured boy. Gregor then takes the three along with him on his march to Harrenhal, an ancient castle, with his servant The Tickler torturing some random villager to death every day along the way. During this time Arry thinks of herself as a lamb, a meek, helpless, stupid thing that could do nothing but follow along and hope she wasn’t slaughtered too. During this time Arry begins saying her nightly prayers, listing the names of the men and women she hated to herself every night before she slept.
Weasel/The Ghost of Harrenhal
On arriving at Harrenhal, Arya gave her name as Weasel and was assigned as a servant girl in the castle under a man named Weese, scrubbing floors and helping in the kitchen and whatever else was needed of her. Her time was spent with regular beatings and often seeing the other servants die around her, resulting in Weese being very quickly added to her nightly prayer list. As a servant, she overheard a great deal of gossip, including where her brother, now the self-proclaimed King in the North, was currently marching to, giving her the idea to run and join his ranks. If only she could find a way out.
Shortly after her own arrival, the three men she helped free from the burning wagon back when Yoren was killed turned up at Harrenhal, now sworn men of the very knight that had fought the Night’s Watch. She thought they didn’t recognize her, but that night one of the men, Jaqen, came to her sleeping nitch. He told her that by saving the three men that night she had snatched three sacrifices to the Red God. He was there to offer up three others in their place. Arya need only name the names and Jaqen would kill them. She takes a few nights to think on it then, after hearing the man laughingly tell a story of raping a woman, gives the name of one of Gregor’s men. Three days later the man was dead, and Arya renamed herself the ghost of Harrenhal.
Weese was next on the hit list, though Arya grew to regret throwing away the request on such a pathetic man, no matter how much she hated him. Shortly after, men in the service of her brother Robb are taken captive and held at Harrenhal while awaiting negotiations for ransom. Arya hatches a plan to rescue them, particularly the lord among them who would know her, and then either overthrow the castle or make an escape. Gendry and Hot Pie refuse to help her, both citing that either way they are in service to one lord or another, so what was the difference to them? She then turns to Jaqen, who states that too many would die in her plan; she should name her last name instead and let him be on his way. She gives him his own name, demanding that he kill himself if he won’t help her, and in exchange for having his name unspoken he agrees to help her escape. To do this he, along with his two companions, takes Arya down to the guards protecting the cells of the prisoners, where the four of them pour boiling hot soup on the guards and kill them, and then freeing the northerners in the dungeon.
Glover, the northern lord, soon takes the castle as his own and, not knowing who Arya is, makes her his cup bearer as thanks for her part in the rescue. In the meantime, Jaqen informed Arya his debts were paid to her and then, before her eyes, changed his face into that of a different mans. She demands to be taught how to do it, but does not wish, as Jaqen demands, to travel across the ocean to the Free Cities with him in order to do so. He gives her a coin instead, telling her that if she ever wishes to leave the Seven Kingdoms behind and make that journey to learn, she need only give it to a captain from the city of Braavos and say the words ‘valar morghulis.’
Nan
She is soon turned over from being Glover’s to Lord Bolton’s cup bearer, and Arya once more changes her name as the lord couldn’t have a girl called ‘weasel’ attending him. She claims to be Nymeria, Nan for short. In short order, any Lannister men that weren’t worth a ransom were executed by the new lord, their heads put on pikes, and any servant that had seemed too welcoming to the Lannister host is brutally punished.
While pouring wine at one of the lord’s war councils, Arya learns that Winterfell has been taken over by some enemy while Robb was off fighting Lannisters, with her two younger brothers having been put to death. She quickly decides she can no longer bear to play at servant, and hatches a plan to escape the castle and, now that Winterfell is lost, flee to the much closer castle of her uncle on her mother’s side, Riverrun. She lies to Gendry and Hot Pie, telling them that she’s overheard plans that all servants were to have a foot cut off to prevent them from running, and convinces them to join her in the escape. Gendry steals them some swords and, after murdering a guard in the dead of night, the three of them escape into the wilds on horses Arya stole.
Arya
One flaw in her brilliant plan was, of course, that she had no real idea how to get to Riverrun. Maps look a lot different than the actual land, but the three muddled on as best they could for a time, with Arya having her first wolf dream (in which part of her mind ran along with her old direwolf Nymeria) on the way, showing she, like the rest of the Stark children, is a warg. The three are found by a group of, to put it simply, vigilante lords, knights, and whoever else will join them, called the Brotherhood Without Banners, led by Dondarrion. One of Ned Stark’s former guards is among them, who identifies Arya almost immediately. They are taken to the brotherhood’s hideout as a result. Very quickly, Hot Pie opts instead to stay at a nearby inn as their baker, and Gendry then settling as a blacksmith/freedom fighter with the brotherhood.
On the way Arya learns that Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, has escaped from being held hostage by her brother Robb and is running loose. While at the hideout, she learns about the Red god and his priests, and that some men, through the right magics, can be brought back from the dead. She also discovers that the Hound, having fled King’s Landing, has been captured by the group and is to be put on trial for his evils. Arya accuses him of murdering her friend the butcher boy a year past, and he, as is his right as a noble, chooses trial by combat rather than waiting for the groups ‘justice.’ The Hound wins, much to Arya’s disgust, and is released.
Arya travels with the brotherhood for a time, their plan being to ransom her to her family at Riverrun. Unfortunately, the Red god sends his priest visions that Riverrun will soon be under siege by the Lannisters, and that Arya’s brother and mother will be involved in some kind of wedding rather than at the battle. The brotherhood decides to turn away from Riverrun and discuss what to do, but Arya will have none of it. Leaving Gendry and Hot Pie behind, she flees from the brotherhood until she is apprehended by Hound, who had been trailing the group since his release.
The She-wolf
Arya attempts to escape several times from the Hound, ending in him tying her to her saddle during the day and binding her and wrapping her up in a saddle blanket at night. Rather than take her to Riverrun, the Hound takes Arya to the Twins, where her uncle is getting married with her mother and brother in attendance. They arrive and, posing as merchants, get across the bridge to the castle at the Twins. They arrive too late, however. Thanks to a series of events Arya is utterly unaware of, the Frey family, who held the Twins, use the wedding as bait for her brother and mother and, once the marriage was consummated, slaughtered every Stark and Northern man in attendance. Arya arrives just in time to see the flames and would have rushed in in time to see her mother murdered, but the Hound strikes her on the back of the head and carries her away from the carnage.
With the main two people he wanted to ransom her to dead, the Hound decides to take Arya to the Eyrie, where her mother’s sister rules. Ayra insisted on going back to the Twins until she had another wolf dream where Nymeria found her mother’s body, naked and with the neck split from ear to ear, floating in the river by the Twins. This forces her to accept the finality of her mother’s death, and to give up on any desire to escape.
Soon after she and the Hound find themselves at an inn where several of the men from Arya’s prayer list, including the Tickler, happened to be staying as well. There she learns King Joffrey had died, as well as that Sansa had been married to Tyrion Lannister, though she doesn’t believe the second part. Thanks to the Hound being his charming self, not to mention a known traitor to the crown, a fight soon breaks out in the inn, ending in the Tickler and his group being killed and the Hound badly wounded. Arya herself kills the Tickler, screaming at him the same questions he had asked the villagers he tortured as she stabbed him over and over. One of the men had Needle, Arya’s sword, on him, returning the blade to her hands once more.
The Hound’s wounds soon become infected, and while he’s at death’s door Arya draws Needle on him. He accepts his death at her hands but, at the last moment, she refuses to give him the gift of mercy and instead takes her horse and goes, leaving him to die a slow, painful death of infection or be eaten by wolves. She rides to the nearest port town and attempts to negotiate passage for herself to travel to the Wall to find her brother Jon, but has nothing to pay with. Finally, in a last act of desperation, she finds a Braavosi captain and hands over the coin Jaqen had given her, reciting the words. He takes her on board without question, and Arya travels out of the Seven Kingdoms to Braavos.
Salty
While on the voyage to Braavos, Arya is confused why crew memebers give her gifts and seem determined that she know their names, while they never ask hers in return. She doesn’t push it, however, and the journey to Braavos is a relatively uneventful one. On the way she learns the meaning of the words Jaqen had told her to say: all men must die.
The captain of the ship rushes her off the moment they reached Braavos, and then Arya was on her own. The oar man who brought her ashore left her at the entrance to a temple and, deciding she has nowhere else to go, Arya bangs on the door and once more presents the coin Jaqen had given her and says they words, thus allowing her entrance. There she discovers a temple of the dead and dying, filled with alcoves where men could come to take a sip of poison and die in peace. One of the priests, who Arya comes to call the Kindly Man, finds her as she is exploring and he explains she is the House of Black and White, a temple to the Many-Faced God. To death. She tells him her real name and, after proving she does not fear death, is accepted into the temple as a servant.
No one
In the temple she helps clean the dead bodies of people who came there to die, scrub the floors, work in the kitchen, general servant work. At night she still says her prayers, until the Kindly Man overhears her and asks what she was doing. After her explanation he explains that a servant of the Many-Faced God could have no self, that everything must be given up to him. She could not learn their art of death then use it for revenge. Arya Stark had no place there. With nowhere else to go, and no want to leave the temple, Arya swears she can be no one, that she can give up Arya. Part of this process is getting rid of all her worldly possessions, few that she had. She throws all of them into the rivers of Braavos, save for one thing: Needle. That she can’t give up as it represents too much of who she is. Arya opts to hide Needle instead, but I will be taking her from the moment she decided to keep Needle, with the sword therefore arriving in the City with her.
PERSONALITY:
Arya is, at her core, the quintessential tomboy. One of only two of her siblings to actually take after her father rather than her mother in looks, Arya has never been as pretty as her older sister Sansa, nor does she have any interest in making herself so. She loathes needlework, most social niceties, learning the names and histories of lords and ladies, singing and playing instruments, and pretty much everything else assigned to a classic lady fair. She would by far rather practise her swordplay, or archery, or go hunting with her brothers and friends than any of that. While her mother had begun to despair of her, her father more or less accepted the facts about his daughter (in his way), allowing her to have a sword fighting teacher and, with some complaining, allowing her to train by chasing cats around the castle or standing on her hands on the stairs. This, of course, adds up in Arya being a bit of a daddy’s girl as well as a tomboy, who idealized her father even when he was alive, and does so to an even greater extent now that he is dead.
Along with this more classically masculine associated nature comes an unavoidable stubborn streak, which, all in all, is the core of the source of Arya’s ability to withstand all she goes through over the course of the series. Arya is a survivor. She is not fearless, she is in fact very often afraid enough that she must remind herself how damaging that fear is, but she is willful and stubborn enough to refuse to simply lay down and die. She always has some kind of a goal to work towards, no matter the situation. First it was the simple fun of learning swordplay, then reaching Winterfell (or, if possible, her brother Jon on the Wall), then it was revenge against all those that had harmed her and the ones she cared for. Rather than praying for her safety or for someone to save her at night, Arya lists the names of all those she wants to see dead for what they have done as her prayer. Though there may be times when she nearly despairs as she can’t see how she can achieve her goals and simply lives doing what must be done to survive in the meantime, she always manages to hang on long enough for fortune to present itself. Or for a chance to make her own fortune, as the case may be. Luckily for her, a very strong clever streak runs right alongside her stubborn one, allowing her to not only survive the world, but impact it as well.
Along with all this comes a deep-seated sense of loyalty, one which has been very heavily influenced by her nearly painfully noble father over the course of her short life. First and foremost, this loyalty is to her family. Though there are certain members of it she likes better than others (her bastard brother Jon will always be her favorite, while she and Sansa fought constantly, for instance), they are all Starks and she would fight and kill for each of them. This loyalty extends to those around her, as well, and not necessarily only to people she likes. The boys that travel with her to the Wall, and later are all captured by enemy forces with her, are all recipients of her loyalty even when they slow her down or nearly get her killed. Though she doubts it herself at times, she has her father’s sense of justice for the most part which plays into this as well. For instance, she is willing to risk her life to throw a means of escape to a pack of murderers rather than let them burn to death, with this personal version of nobility tending to have its own rewards and punishments over time.
These traits combined, unfortunately, don’t leave Arya with much when it comes to long term planning. While she has her goals, as previously stated, they tend to remain more vague eventualities. For the most part, Arya lives in the moment and this tends to regularly screw her over. Her temper very easily gets the better of her, and she’ll snap out insults and proclamations she may not even particularly mean, simply so that she can be the ‘winner’ of a conversation at that moment. Along with this, she can become very easily frustrated with her current situation if it is not what she wanted, beating herself up over being a failure for letting whatever is happening happen rather than putting it into a more long-term perspective. Much of this, naturally, comes from the fact she is eleven. Hind-sight and realistic appraisal of a situation tends to come with age.
Arya also doesn’t have much in the traditional sense of arrogant pride. She certainly has pride and stands up for herself and nurses wounds, but she doesn’t see herself as intrinsically better than anyone simply because she is of noble blood. Kings and Queens murder and sin as much, if not more, than common butcher boys, after all, and her bastard brother has proven to be nobler than the high born ward her father cared for over the course of a decade. Therefore the idea of superiority by birth alone is one she finds hard to swallow. This also means she doesn’t have much issue doing what must be done in order to survive, even eating worms when lowly street urchins turned their nose up at the idea simply to have the strength to continue her journey.
POWER:
Faceless Woman
Arya has shape shifting abilities. She can change her features, voice, and size to that of another person or animal. The only thing that doesn’t change with all this is her scent, which remains distinctly her own to any animal or person capable of detecting that kind of subtle difference. When changing her appearance to that of another human, Arya’s physical abilities are limitless (meaning she could shift into a person far taller or fatter than herself), though, of course, whether she actually acts like that person is another matter. When it comes to animals, however, she can only change into creatures of equal or lesser size to herself. So while she could become a raven, she could not turn into a polar bear. The only exception to this is that she can turn into a direwolf, the sigil of her house, with the wolf standing at about the size of a small horse.
Warg
Arya can ride the senses of animals, leaving her physical body behind has her mind takes over a near-by animal. Her body is vulnerable while her mind is ‘away’ and if she rides an animal for too long it is possible for her to starve to death, assuming nothing else kills her first. She can only latch onto the mind of an animal she can physically see in her human form. While she can control that animal, her mind also takes on some of the animal’s characteristics during that time. Killing and eating a human doesn’t sound so bad to a wolf, for instance, or as a cat she may decide to push an important mission she wanted to accomplish aside in order to take a short, several hour long nap in the sun.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
Someone said they were dead. I don’t mean here. I don’t care about stupid people killing each other here. I mean where they’re from. They were dead there and then the machine brought them here and now they’re not. Those dead.
[There’s a small pause as she gnaws her lip. She has to know- she has to. But it still feels like giving up too much personal information.]
Is it true? Can she really bring people back? Even if they’ve been dead a long time? Even...even if they cut off their head and put it on a pike. Even if they were burned? Even then?
Don’t lie to me. I mean it. I only...I must know. I have to.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
“They don’t change every year. That’s stupid.”
But it was true. No matter how much she tried to point out the totally stupidity of seasons changing not just once or twice, but four times. Every single year, no one would listen. And, truly, she couldn’t show them much scorn for it. Her own arguments would have sounded mad to her if she wasn’t the one making them, as mad and silly and stupid and wrong as the ones the rest of them made back at her. The last summer, the one she had been born in, had lasted for years. A decade. One of the longest in living memory. And it had lasted that long because...because...
Because it had. It was stupid to ask why, never mind how a single season could last so long. That was simply what they did. The motto of her House, of who she really was, the house of Arya Stark, may have been Winter is Coming, but it was a truth that had always been more frightening because you never knew when. You only knew that, as happy and good as things may be now in the summer, one day it would end and only death and cold would surround you. Surround the world. Having winter every year, only a few, known months of cold and pain with a promise of a quick return to life and warmth...
Stupid. That’s just what it was. Life wasn’t like that at all.
FINAL NOTES:
Arya will have her plain clothes and her sword Needle on her upon arrival.
