Personality: Eccentric, dotty, and oblivious are the three words that could best described Winnie. Being an Extractor means being able to mentally hear and speak with the souls ‘housed’ in her, and talking to voices in ones’ head never bodes well for one’s mental health--it’s one of the drawbacks of being a Extractor, though the well-trained are able to put up mental walls to block the voices. Still, Winnie is not well-trained and quite prone to talking aloud to thin air, getting to absorbed in the soul speaking to her. This causes her to run into things or miss entire chunks of conversation.
She is, however, the type of person who is very poor at multi-tasking. Sometimes she will be so interested in a conversation, or a book, or any little old thing, that she’ll end up dunking her keys into her tea or something.
Winnie is also characterized by an unflappably calm and cheery disposition. When dropped into a new situation, she greets it with an excited smile and a declaration that it will be a “terribly interesting adventure.” Even when her dress caught fire the first day she met Mortimer, she simply laughed it off and kept speaking amiably; when Agnes asked how she could be so calm, she simply looked at the spreading fire and stated, “Well, it hasn’t gotten close enough to my skin to hurt me, and it’s only a dress! Though some water would be quite lovely, as I don’t wish it to get too far..."
As stated before, Winnie be can very forgetful. For example, she often forgets that Mortimer is a ghost and will go to hug him or pat his arm, only to go right through him; she is always surprised by it every time. She's a bit childlike in that way, as she finds everything very exciting and regards everything with a wide-eyed state of wonder, curiosity, and amazement. Her curiosity can sometimes get her in trouble, as she doesn't often think everything through and tries to rush ahead to explore something further. Thankfully that's where Agnes steps in to make sure Winnie doesn't get herself into hotter waters.
Loyal and kind, Winnifred loathes to lie, even though it’s a deemed necessity with what she and Agnes do. To make up for that, she tries to tell the truth and be honest with just about everything else. Her father, being a very doting and loving father, is often the unwitting pawn in Agnes and Winnie’s adventures, in case they need money to silence someone or need to use his influence. For the most part he remains oblivious to what the two are doing with the souls, but Winnie feels awful having to lie and use him, often unable to look at him when they need something.
The concept of fear is also largely lost on Winnie. It’s not that she doesn’t experience feeling scared or worried or anything like that, it’s more that it doesn’t apply to situations most people would be more wary of. For example, she’s very quick to trust someone and think them a nice person for any minor details, and is the kind of person who would walk down a dark alley without a second thought, because the idea that something bad might happen to her doesn’t even register. This is largely due to not having a soul, and therefore her emotional reactions to things are muted or otherwise nonexistent. If she had been raised in the dormitories with the other Extractors, it would be easy for her to have been changed like them-- Emotionless machines driven only by their one goal to collect as many souls as possible. Because Winnie was raised more-or-less normally, however, she's been able to grasp more emotions. The positive ones just come easier, but it's this soullessness that allows her to shrug off things that might emotionally cripple a 'normal' person and allows her to bounce back so easily.
Winnie is someone who lived a very sheltered existence. For the longest time she didn't have an idea of the suffering others went through, or gave much thought to the lower class-- they were simply outside her realm of understanding. It wasn't until Agnes that Winnie began to glimpse under the rose-tinted glasses that she'd previously adopted. When Winnie made statements about, "and then we went to our summer home it was dreadfully stuffy-- Oh, but you'd understand all about that, wouldn't you?" It was a shock when Agnes eventually revealed that no, she had no understanding of that because she was raised differently.
After much poking and prodding, Winnie was able to pry the truth of Agnes's life from her and for the first time the ugly reality was colliding with her fantasy of the world. It troubled her quite a bit, both the shock of her own ignorance and the fact that this wasn't a big secret-- all the adults in her life and most of the people her own age too were perfectly aware of what was going on, and most seemed content to let it stay that way (this isn't to say Winnie was the first to have radical ideas of reform or to put a cease to the soul trafficking, only that she wasn't privy to these other ideas and the people she interacted with personally were content with it).
However, Agnes views Winnie as fragile and needing protection from the further harsh truths of reality, and so has a tendency to pull Winnie out of situations before she has to deal with the consequences of her actions. As such, she holds a firm belief that if she just tries hard enough, things will change. If she pushes and, eventually, talks freely about it and advocates openly, she fully believes that things will change from her enthusiasm alone-- "If they see how much I believe it, why, of course they'll fall in line as well!" This is, of course, not the reality of the situation, but Agnes and those close to Winnie don't want to see her disillusioned, finding her blind optimism a breath of fresh air and something to protect. While this is damaging in the long run, as they can't protect her forever, Winnie is a bit stronger than they believe. When the dam finally breaks and she has to confront the consequences for the first time it'll be devastating for her, of course, but she's been going at it for so long that she doesn't know how to do anything else except to think "but if I try hard enough, it'll get better and it'll work."
She sees herself as a savior to others and will keep on trying to help them; if they adamantly refuse her help it'll take quite a few tries of being told off for her to understand. Winnie has, in her adult life, grown aware of other people who fight for a similar cause to her, but she's grown so used to relying on Agnes and Mortimer--and still has a wariness to admitting she's an Extractor not for her own life, but because she doesn't want to see her father in trouble-- that she prefers to stick with them and do what she can from her side. Essentially, Winnie wants to be like the heroes from the books she reads, the hero of her own story, and firmly drives towards that goal.
It should be noted, however, that Winnie is anything but stupid. She has a keen awareness she keeps hidden,largely because she's self-aware enough to know it's better that way. She plays up her sillier side, pretending to be airheaded and dotty far more than she actually is in order to get people to let their guards down around her. If people underestimate her, it's better for her in the long run if and when she can catch them by surprise.
Abilities: Winnie has the ability to remove a soul from a person’s body and ‘eat’ it to store it within her own body. She can control this, so it's not like touching someone's mouth is going to automatically pull their soul from their body, but this is also a way for her to exorcise spirits or possessed people. Speaking of spirits, she CAN see and communicate with them.
She has no soul of her own and is essentially an empty shell for storage. This also makes her more susceptible to illness, and her lifespan is much shorter than other humans.
Being soulless means most animals either actively hate her/are scared of her, or run away/freak out on sight. The exceptions are animals that are "evil" in some way, feral, and/or carnivorous/dangerous predator types. At worst they ignore her entirely like she doesn't exist, and at best they're attracted to her and will follow her or stay by her side.
Aside from that she has a rudimentary knowledge in self-defense with a blade and a pistol that she’s learned from Agnes.
Alignment: Daimonia. Winnie is all about joy, namely in that she tries her best to make others happy and gets happiness from doing so. While negative emotions tend to roll off her shoulders, Winnie clings to the positive ones she's been able to learn and nurture, and joy/happiness is her favorite. She's always smiling and being cheerful and upbeat.
Other:
⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample: (Sample taken from the Intro Log for April!)
Some people might have looked on the unflattering bee costume as unfortunate or weird at best; Winnie was not one of these people. Oh it was unflattering, sure, but Winnie had been so utterly enamored by just how ugly it was that it circled all the way around to being charmed by it. "It's so ugly!" She laughed and turned, trying to get a good look at herself--was the a stinger, too?--and laughed again.
"How ridiculous! I love it. I just go right up to the bees then?" She wanted to make sure and smiled brightly, approaching the swarms with a practically radiating aura of cheer. Think happy thoughts? She could do that.
"Come now, little bees! I wonder if this is what a queen bee feels like? It's like having my own little entourage! It's only too bad this couldn't be a nice dress, I think I'd look quite nice in yellow. Perhaps not yellow and black, but a nice cream colour, perhaps?" Winnie babbled on to the bees, watching them buzz around with delight. "How charming! Is it possible to keep bees as pets? if all that's required is to keep a few happy thoughts in your head, I could do this!"
It was a little strange that they seemed to accept her so readily in the first place--most animals didn't, but it probably had something to do with them responding more to emotions and the pheromones emitted from the costume. At least, that's what she suspected, it was the only logical explanation. She led the first group of bees to the keepers, then immediately went back to collecting more. "I don't know why everyone's so frightened of you, you're all so precious! I suppose the thing about bad thoughts and you turning on everyone might be true, but I can't imagine you actually-- Oh dear."
Someone else seemed to be having trouble though and Winnie watched the person who'd caught her eye be chased off by the bees, shrieking all the while. "Well. That's certainly not helping them any." The buzzing around her started to get a little angrier as Winnie ignored them, her own emotions shifting to pity and disapproval at the other persons' clear lack of preparedness. The noise got her attention at least and she instantly beamed a smile at the bees. "Of course, none of you would do that! Of course not, perish the thought, lovelies! I wonder if I could train some of you to sit on my bonnet with thoughts alone?"
Bolstered by this cheerful thought, her mind quickly dismissing the distressed person to focus on making bees the height of fashion, the bees settled again and followed her to the keepers once more.
no subject
She is, however, the type of person who is very poor at multi-tasking. Sometimes she will be so interested in a conversation, or a book, or any little old thing, that she’ll end up dunking her keys into her tea or something.
Winnie is also characterized by an unflappably calm and cheery disposition. When dropped into a new situation, she greets it with an excited smile and a declaration that it will be a “terribly interesting adventure.” Even when her dress caught fire the first day she met Mortimer, she simply laughed it off and kept speaking amiably; when Agnes asked how she could be so calm, she simply looked at the spreading fire and stated, “Well, it hasn’t gotten close enough to my skin to hurt me, and it’s only a dress! Though some water would be quite lovely, as I don’t wish it to get too far..."
As stated before, Winnie be can very forgetful. For example, she often forgets that Mortimer is a ghost and will go to hug him or pat his arm, only to go right through him; she is always surprised by it every time. She's a bit childlike in that way, as she finds everything very exciting and regards everything with a wide-eyed state of wonder, curiosity, and amazement. Her curiosity can sometimes get her in trouble, as she doesn't often think everything through and tries to rush ahead to explore something further. Thankfully that's where Agnes steps in to make sure Winnie doesn't get herself into hotter waters.
Loyal and kind, Winnifred loathes to lie, even though it’s a deemed necessity with what she and Agnes do. To make up for that, she tries to tell the truth and be honest with just about everything else. Her father, being a very doting and loving father, is often the unwitting pawn in Agnes and Winnie’s adventures, in case they need money to silence someone or need to use his influence. For the most part he remains oblivious to what the two are doing with the souls, but Winnie feels awful having to lie and use him, often unable to look at him when they need something.
The concept of fear is also largely lost on Winnie. It’s not that she doesn’t experience feeling scared or worried or anything like that, it’s more that it doesn’t apply to situations most people would be more wary of. For example, she’s very quick to trust someone and think them a nice person for any minor details, and is the kind of person who would walk down a dark alley without a second thought, because the idea that something bad might happen to her doesn’t even register. This is largely due to not having a soul, and therefore her emotional reactions to things are muted or otherwise nonexistent. If she had been raised in the dormitories with the other Extractors, it would be easy for her to have been changed like them-- Emotionless machines driven only by their one goal to collect as many souls as possible. Because Winnie was raised more-or-less normally, however, she's been able to grasp more emotions. The positive ones just come easier, but it's this soullessness that allows her to shrug off things that might emotionally cripple a 'normal' person and allows her to bounce back so easily.
Winnie is someone who lived a very sheltered existence. For the longest time she didn't have an idea of the suffering others went through, or gave much thought to the lower class-- they were simply outside her realm of understanding. It wasn't until Agnes that Winnie began to glimpse under the rose-tinted glasses that she'd previously adopted. When Winnie made statements about, "and then we went to our summer home it was dreadfully stuffy-- Oh, but you'd understand all about that, wouldn't you?" It was a shock when Agnes eventually revealed that no, she had no understanding of that because she was raised differently.
After much poking and prodding, Winnie was able to pry the truth of Agnes's life from her and for the first time the ugly reality was colliding with her fantasy of the world. It troubled her quite a bit, both the shock of her own ignorance and the fact that this wasn't a big secret-- all the adults in her life and most of the people her own age too were perfectly aware of what was going on, and most seemed content to let it stay that way (this isn't to say Winnie was the first to have radical ideas of reform or to put a cease to the soul trafficking, only that she wasn't privy to these other ideas and the people she interacted with personally were content with it).
However, Agnes views Winnie as fragile and needing protection from the further harsh truths of reality, and so has a tendency to pull Winnie out of situations before she has to deal with the consequences of her actions. As such, she holds a firm belief that if she just tries hard enough, things will change. If she pushes and, eventually, talks freely about it and advocates openly, she fully believes that things will change from her enthusiasm alone-- "If they see how much I believe it, why, of course they'll fall in line as well!" This is, of course, not the reality of the situation, but Agnes and those close to Winnie don't want to see her disillusioned, finding her blind optimism a breath of fresh air and something to protect. While this is damaging in the long run, as they can't protect her forever, Winnie is a bit stronger than they believe. When the dam finally breaks and she has to confront the consequences for the first time it'll be devastating for her, of course, but she's been going at it for so long that she doesn't know how to do anything else except to think "but if I try hard enough, it'll get better and it'll work."
She sees herself as a savior to others and will keep on trying to help them; if they adamantly refuse her help it'll take quite a few tries of being told off for her to understand. Winnie has, in her adult life, grown aware of other people who fight for a similar cause to her, but she's grown so used to relying on Agnes and Mortimer--and still has a wariness to admitting she's an Extractor not for her own life, but because she doesn't want to see her father in trouble-- that she prefers to stick with them and do what she can from her side. Essentially, Winnie wants to be like the heroes from the books she reads, the hero of her own story, and firmly drives towards that goal.
It should be noted, however, that Winnie is anything but stupid. She has a keen awareness she keeps hidden,largely because she's self-aware enough to know it's better that way. She plays up her sillier side, pretending to be airheaded and dotty far more than she actually is in order to get people to let their guards down around her. If people underestimate her, it's better for her in the long run if and when she can catch them by surprise.
Abilities: Winnie has the ability to remove a soul from a person’s body and ‘eat’ it to store it within her own body. She can control this, so it's not like touching someone's mouth is going to automatically pull their soul from their body, but this is also a way for her to exorcise spirits or possessed people. Speaking of spirits, she CAN see and communicate with them.
She has no soul of her own and is essentially an empty shell for storage. This also makes her more susceptible to illness, and her lifespan is much shorter than other humans.
Being soulless means most animals either actively hate her/are scared of her, or run away/freak out on sight. The exceptions are animals that are "evil" in some way, feral, and/or carnivorous/dangerous predator types. At worst they ignore her entirely like she doesn't exist, and at best they're attracted to her and will follow her or stay by her side.
Aside from that she has a rudimentary knowledge in self-defense with a blade and a pistol that she’s learned from Agnes.
Alignment: Daimonia. Winnie is all about joy, namely in that she tries her best to make others happy and gets happiness from doing so. While negative emotions tend to roll off her shoulders, Winnie clings to the positive ones she's been able to learn and nurture, and joy/happiness is her favorite. She's always smiling and being cheerful and upbeat.
Other:
Sample: (Sample taken from the Intro Log for April!)
Some people might have looked on the unflattering bee costume as unfortunate or weird at best; Winnie was not one of these people. Oh it was unflattering, sure, but Winnie had been so utterly enamored by just how ugly it was that it circled all the way around to being charmed by it. "It's so ugly!" She laughed and turned, trying to get a good look at herself--was the a stinger, too?--and laughed again.
"How ridiculous! I love it. I just go right up to the bees then?" She wanted to make sure and smiled brightly, approaching the swarms with a practically radiating aura of cheer. Think happy thoughts? She could do that.
"Come now, little bees! I wonder if this is what a queen bee feels like? It's like having my own little entourage! It's only too bad this couldn't be a nice dress, I think I'd look quite nice in yellow. Perhaps not yellow and black, but a nice cream colour, perhaps?" Winnie babbled on to the bees, watching them buzz around with delight. "How charming! Is it possible to keep bees as pets? if all that's required is to keep a few happy thoughts in your head, I could do this!"
It was a little strange that they seemed to accept her so readily in the first place--most animals didn't, but it probably had something to do with them responding more to emotions and the pheromones emitted from the costume. At least, that's what she suspected, it was the only logical explanation. She led the first group of bees to the keepers, then immediately went back to collecting more. "I don't know why everyone's so frightened of you, you're all so precious! I suppose the thing about bad thoughts and you turning on everyone might be true, but I can't imagine you actually-- Oh dear."
Someone else seemed to be having trouble though and Winnie watched the person who'd caught her eye be chased off by the bees, shrieking all the while. "Well. That's certainly not helping them any." The buzzing around her started to get a little angrier as Winnie ignored them, her own emotions shifting to pity and disapproval at the other persons' clear lack of preparedness. The noise got her attention at least and she instantly beamed a smile at the bees. "Of course, none of you would do that! Of course not, perish the thought, lovelies! I wonder if I could train some of you to sit on my bonnet with thoughts alone?"
Bolstered by this cheerful thought, her mind quickly dismissing the distressed person to focus on making bees the height of fashion, the bees settled again and followed her to the keepers once more.
Questions: