mask or menace: application

[sweetbirthdaybaby]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Rica
AGE: 34
JOURNAL: N/A
IM / EMAIL: ricamarch#3742 / baratiesbest@gmail.com
PLURK: reveillez
RETURNING: I was here a year ago with Jughead Jones and Suzie Dickson!

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Nadia Vulvokov.
CHARACTER AGE: 36.
SERIES: Russian Doll.
CHRONOLOGY: s1e7, after dying in the deli.
CLASS: Hero.
HOUSING: Random, please!

Caution: Russian Doll is a show that deals with some really dark subjects, such as death, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and child neglect. These topics will come up throughout this application.

BACKGROUND:

Although Nadia is the protagonist of the show, there aren't a whole lot of details given about her life up until everything goes pear shaped. We know that she was born and raised in modern day New York that looks identical to our own. We know that she's of jewish decent but not practicing, that her father is never even mentioned and that her mother Lenora suffered from some undefined mental illness.

When Nadia was little she'd ride around in her mom's car, going from one deli to the next, filling the car up with watermelons until there wasn't any room left. For a while, watermelons were the only thing she and her mom would eat. One time, her mom locked herself in the bathroom and when she finally came out she smashed every mirror she could lay her eyes on — Nadia shards of glass in her hair.

We know that some time after that Nadia started living with Ruth. The show never makes it clear exactly who she is - a blood relative or maybe a close family friend - but she offers a much better home than Nadia's mom ever could. Some time after that Lenora dies. Again, it's not entirely clear how it happens, though it wouldn't be a stretch to interpret it as suicide.

Nadia grows up. She becomes a software engineer, she gets a cat called Oatmeal who has a habit of wandering off. At some point she starts a relationship with John, who is a married man with a pre-teen daughter. A year later - six months before the show starts - they break up. Nadia's 36th birthday comes around. Her friend Maxine throws her a party. She drinks, she smokes a heroin-laced joint, she hooks up with this pretentious guy called Mike and then, when she's crossing the street to catch her run-away cat Oatmeal, she's hit by a taxi and dies.

And then she comes back to Maxine's bathroom where it all began and everything starts over. The urgent knocks on the bathroom door, Maxine's cheery "sweet birthday baby!", the joint, it all plays out again and no one seems to notice aside from Nadia. This starts a cycle of frequent deaths and every time, she comes back to that bathroom. Understandably freaked out Nadia tries to make sense of her situation but every explanation she reaches for — from ketamine cancer joints to yeshiva student hauntings and plain old mental illness — somehow ends in another death. Drownings, cellar doors, repeatedly falling down the stairs, car crashes, freezing to death in the street. Nadia's gone through it all and nothing changes.

Until her tenth death - plummeting elevator - when she meets Alan and finds out that she's not alone in this death spiral. After finding out that they aren't alone in dying and coming back, Alan and Nadia team up to figure out this mystery. Alan is more on the line of purgatory punishment while Nadia, ever the pragmatic, bets on it being a glitch in the system. If they can figure out where the glitch is, they can reprogram it and finally move on with their lives.

Finding it together is no easier than finding it alone, but they do learn that not only have they died the same number of times, they also seem to die at the same time. Going by Alan's line of thought that this is moral punishment, they both try to set things straight but nothing seem to work - and things are starting to get weirder around them. Nadia's cat Oatmeal and Alan's pet fish Boba Fett disappeared early on, but now people are going missing as well. Nadia's party is emptier with each loop. The situation is turning desperate. Alan finally brings up that he doesn't remember his first death and Nadia immediately latches on to this as the key to their mystery. She goes with him as he recreates his first loop, helps him confront Beatrice, ends up having sex with him (and give his shoes to a homeless man she has repeatedly befriended). The night ends in an argument. Nadia chokes to death on a chicken bone.

When Nadia comes back in Maxine's bathroom, the mirrors are gone. She reconvenes with Alan and he confesses that he now remembers how he died the first time: he threw himself off the roof. Nadia remembers that she did see him before they met in the elevator - he was in the deli when she was buying condoms for her mediocre tryst with Mike, not long before she was hit by a taxi. Maybe the glitch is caused by them neglecting to help each other that first day? Shortly after this Nadia runs into a whole new kind of problem - she starts seeing a ghost of her younger self, and each time she dies. The last time she comes face to face with the ghostly girl that no one can see, and dies in the deli from a vicious nose bleed. This is her canon point.

(I have a more detailed run-down of every single loop Nadia goes through over here, should you need supplemental information. )

PERSONALITY:

"It's my bad attitude that keeps me young."

There's no doubt that Nadia is a tough lady and it's a well-deserved toughness that she wears with pride. She refuses to take shit from anyone, including the universe, and she's not shy in letting a person know if something about them offends her or if she doesn't agree with their life choices. There's no filter to her most of the time, she speaks her mind and she does so loudly, not always thinking about the consequences.

Some of this stems from a genuine dislike of other people. Other people suck. They disappoint, they fail, they hurt her, they don't know how to help her. Humanity as a whole is one big mistake and Nadia has yet to learn how to forgive anyone for being part of that mistake, least of all herself. As a kid she escaped into books when things got tough and maybe it's the beauty of fiction that has made her so disillusioned by reality. She demands that other people understands her and her needs and when they don't - well, just proves her point. Other people are garbage.

The attitude also functions as armour. Nadia doesn't see herself as deserving of love and so it's easier to push people away than let them in and either be disappointed by their inability to help, or scare them off with how genuinely broken she is. It's easier to tell someone to fuck off than to ask them to stay. The biggest evidence of this is John - she broke up his marriage and then, when things got serious and she was supposed to meet his daughter, she ended the relationship. Now, six months later, they're still clearly not done with each other but Nadia's deep fear of intimacy keeps her from embracing what could be. At one point she asks John to help her during a moment of true mind-shattering terror and he says that he could, but chances are she'd tell him to fuck off as soon as he got there. She can't accept help. She can't.

That said, she does genuinely care about her friends. She may be rough but she's also funny and judging by how many came to her birthday party and how many she had a friendly interaction with, she's not lacking in the friend department. They're just kept at arm's length, aside from maybe Maxine and Izzy. She loves her friends and as people are starting to disappear, the thought of losing Maxine and Izzy scares her as much as being in this situation in the first place. She may not care about her own well-being but if the well-being of her friends is threatened? Then shit is really real.


"Look at you now, chasing down death at every corner."

Nadia is what you would call a reluctant survivor. She made it through a rough childhood and somehow she still here and now she's not sure that was the best outcome. She's not suicidal, she's a lady with a death wish and that typically puts her on a self-destructive path. She drinks way too much, smokes enough to have the lungs of a man twice her age, tries every drug available to her in any combination she can think of, isn't too picky about who she has sex with and whether or not that sex was safe for her emotionally or physically. She doesn't look both ways before crossing the street. She's reckless with herself in every way she can and while she isn't trying to kill herself, she isn't really making a huge effort not to.

This, just like her inability to accept help, stems from a belief that she's undeserving of love. She says that she'll be surprised if she lives to her low-seventies, or that she thought about marriage but figured it wasn't for her, that she'll settle on the one when she's 60 and it'll just mean the one I'll die with. There's no romance in her, just pragmatism and casual relationships with little consideration for the consequences. Sleeping with married men is fine in her book, because romance is a myth anyway.

Feeling that she's undeserving of love doesn't mean that she doesn't want it, though. When John wants them to get back together he phrases it in a way that makes her think he just wants a warm body to sleep with and although that's usually her MO, hearing it from someone else makes her mad. She wants to be proven wrong, about people, about love, about everything. She wants to be handed a reason for her to stay alive, but she's too scared to accept it when it's there in front of her.


"We don't use that word in this house. Never have, never will."

All of this is about her mother, of course. Lenora had an undisclosed mental illness - when Nadia asks Ruth what her diagnosis was, Ruth responds "don't confuse your mother with her damage" - that made Nadia's childhood volatile to say the least. Despite growing up with a licensed therapist, Nadia has yet to let go of her childhood trauma and all that comes to a point on her 36th birthday. Lenora never made it to 36. Nadia is now older than her mother ever was.

There's a lot to unpack when it comes to Nadia's mother. First there's the neglect of course, the unstable living conditions - Nadia mentions off-handedly how the only things her mom gave her was a Metro card and an eating disorder and while it's delivered as a joke, Lenora's disordered eating influenced a big part of Nadia's childhood. There was a period where they didn't eat anything but watermelon and although Ruth tried to get Nadia to eat something else, she refused out of solidarity with her mom. She did a lot out of solidarity or a desire to protect Lenora, even though it killed her on the inside. Going with her mother's obsessive whims was easier than to fight back and that worked for awhile.

For awhile. So much of Nadia's guilt stems from her believing that she abandoned her mother and as such is responsible for her implied suicide. At some point social services stepped in and asked if she wanted to live with Ruth instead and although Nadia said she wanted to stay with her mom, in her heart she wanted to go. Of course, given how unstable Lenora was, Ruth won the custody battle. Nadia got what she secretly wanted and then her mom died.

There's also resentment. Nadia wears a necklace made of a krugerrand that her Holocaust-surviving grandparents brought with them to the US. Originally, there were more of them, to a value of 152 780 dollars and 86 cents but Lenora spent it all aside from this last one. That was Nadia's college fund that went to God knows what - water melons? - and she can't forgive her mother for wrecking her future like that, for stealing her childhood.

All of this trauma has of course left her scared of losing her mind just like her mom did. During one of the loops, Maxine tells her to stop acting so crazy and Nadia freaks out. After crashing in the ambulance on the way to the psych ward, Nadia gives the krugerrand a kiss and says "No one locks us up", an echo of what her mom most likely said at some point in her life. Despite this fear she's not as reluctant to seek help, most likely because Ruth is a therapist, but at the same time she's desperate for any other explanation. She can't be crazy. She can't turn into her mom.


POWER:

Nadia's powers are inspired by the cycle of dying and resetting she and Alan are trapped in back in their own world. She canonically explains it as a computer code that glitches, causing them to die and reset, reliving that night and however long they manage to survive over and over again until they can find and solve the glitch. I've tried to translate that into a superpower that works for the game setting, and give her a little more agency over how it functions.

SAVE POINT

• Nadia will be more prone to accidental deaths than the average person, but her power will "reset" time to a point three minutes before when the nanites would register her as dead and her body will simply disappear from the scene of the accident. She will still experience the death and any witnesses will remember seeing her die, but she won't have to go through resurrection and port-outs.

• When dying from an accidental death, Nadia will reset at the physical location where she last looked in a mirror. Temporally she'll be three minutes in the past. Any injuries she would have acquired from the accident will be gone. Injuries and illnesses from before the accident will still remain.

• Reckless behaviour such as excessive deaths, drug/alcohol abuse or other death wish activities will make her power glitch out. This can result in hallucinations, disappearing objects, wounds remaining even after a reset and accidental deaths resulting in true deaths.

• Intentional deaths, such as suicide, murder or deliberately putting herself in a dangerous situation will always count as a true death in game, going through the regular death procedures.

• ImPorts who can sense death (or similar) will have a hard time getting a sense of Nadia, as she has both died and not died a total of 21 times by her canon point.


PAST LIVES

• If she's about to die in a way she's died before, Nadia can get a premonition that something bad is about to happen. This can manifest as a bad feeling, a sudden desire to be somewhere else or a full-blown flashback to the last time she died in this particular manner.

• With time, she could learn to control this power and extend it to people around her, allowing her to warn them and save their lives should they be about to die in a way she has died before.

• Conditional - if Alan is in the game she will automatically get premonitions if he's about to die, as long as he's in her physical vicinity. This would of course depend on permission from the player, but I want to get this in early!


SENSORY LINKED

This is a joint/shared ability with the apping Alan unvariable

• While Nadia and Alan are no longer connected by their loops and will no longer die at the same time, they are still metaphysically and intrinsically connected. In game this will manifest as being able to feel, see, hear, taste and/or otherwise experience what the other is experiencing. This will mostly be triggered by emotional distress or physical exertion, such as having sex, alcohol/drug use, death or near-dying, exercise, fighting (verbal/physical) or similar situations where the adrenaline is running high.

• At first this power will be involuntary and may even trigger during mundane activities. With time they may be able to learn how to block it out or even deliberately activate the link between them. For example, if one of them is missing the other can try to activate the link in an attempt to find them.

• Emotional experiences will be the easiest to share. Physical sensations such as taste, smell and touch are more difficult and auditory/visual sensations will be difficult, especially if there isn't an emotional or physical sensation to go with it. For example, Alan may be able to share the taste of the cake he's eating, but it would be a lot harder for Nadia to send him a visual of the guy she's having sex with unless there's also a strong emotional/physical component.

• The second hand experience will not be as strong as the Original Experiencer will feel it. For example, if one of them is really drunk the other may just feel a buzz.


〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

[ The feed opens on a small woman with huge, red, curly hair. Black clothes, harrowed expression, smoking a cigarette as if trying to get back at it for an imagined slight. She's had some time to come to grips with this whole situation, but that doesn't mean she's any less pissed off about it. ]

Hey. Let's play a little game, eh? [ Her voice is whiskey-rust and three packs a day, thick New York accent with a hint of yiddish. ] Would you rather - you know the one, I give you two choices and you pick the one you'd rather do. Alright. Here goes.

Would you rather... be in Florida or get hit by a taxi? Oh, here's a good one- would you rather be in Florida or get killed by a falling HVAC unit? Would you rather be in fucking Florida or choke to death on a chicken bone?

I got my answers and it sure as shit isn't Florida.


LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

HMD