application :: a_facility
OOC Information:
Name: Man-D
Age: 19 well, on the 27th. Close enough.
AIM: live the kind
MSN: ninja_zila [at] hotmail.com
E-MAIL: elvenmagic92 [at] gmail.com
IC Information:
Name: Adah Price
Fandom: The Poisonwood Bible
Timeline: Immediately before the ants attack, when she is hiding in the bushes and listening to Axelroot’s radio, trying to decipher the code she hears.
Age: 15
Appearance: Around 5’5” and slightly too skinny for her age, Adah Price seems unremarkable on first glance. She isn’t particularly alien or strange -- actually, she’s entirely human. Brown hair to her shoulders and boring brown eyes, most people overlook her when they see her.
Adah has a ‘disability’ (it’s disproven later in the book) called hemiplegia, which hurt the entire left side of her body when she was an infant. Because of this, she drags her right leg behind her, and favors her left hand when doing things.
Because Adah is from a book, I will be using a PB that mostly resembles this description.
Abilities:
Nothing.
Well, nothing superhuman. Adah is extremely intelligent, and learns very quickly. She picks up languages at an astounding rate for someone who doesn’t talk. She can even outsmart predators, escaping from a lion with nothing more than an interesting story to tell. She creates codes for her writing, and is a talented artist.
Also, she’s really good at staying out of sight and invisible when she needs to. Spying is kind of her expertise.
Personality:
On the outside, Adah Price seems to be the epitome of a troubled, or possibly “special needs,” child. She is quiet, almost too much so- she sets quotas on the number of words she may use in a month, so she doesn’t speak much. She prefers herself to the company of others, often staring mutely at someone when they speak to her, or not paying attention at all. In fact, most people load their secrets onto her, because they think she can’t speak.
Part of this is caused by her disability, her Hemiplegia. Half of her body is weaker than the other, which she secretly resents and yet subtly finds comforting at the same time. Adah walks with a limp, dragging half of her body behind her. Part of her brain is also messed up- she likes to say that it was the “rash impulse portion” that got destroyed at birth. Most people see this and think that she is slow, when she is anything but. Adah enjoys going slower than the other girls sometimes, for it leaves her alone with her thoughts. But she wishes that sometimes her sisters wouldn’t rush ahead- for example, when Leah leaves her alone in the jungle and rushes home, allowing for a lion to tail Adah all the way back to their house.
But the inner Adah is much more complex. On the inside, Adah is bursting with thoughts and ideas about the world and those who live in it. She is curious, always trying to learn new things and new ideas. She asks the Congolese to teach her their language, and studies their speech patterns and how words fit together in certain ways to create different ideas. Adah is a fan of languages- it is said in canon that she and her twin sister Leah both excel in spelling bees, even passing their older sister. Adah has also learned how to read, write, and even speak fluent French, though she doesn’t care to speak it much. She is said to enjoy numbers- their repetitive motions and similarity pleases her. She is quick at doing math, often stunning other people. Adah is also an avid reader, and reads books first forward, and then backwards. While the other girls are sailing onto other books, Adah takes her slow time reading every word backwards. In addition, she also likes to spell things backwards, and create backwards words and palindromes. Her disability allows her to think of things in different ways, and by far she is the most creative and crafty of the Price sisters.
When it comes to her twin sister, Leah, Adah has a love-hate relationship. On one hand, Leah is her twin, and a part of her family. She will always be devoted to her sister, even when she doesn’t feel like being devoted at all. But on the other hand, she sees Leah as the usurper of her power, the one that turned to her in the womb and said “you’ll come out disfigured and I’ll come out healthy, okay?” The two are essentially exact opposites of each other, each lacking what the other has. Adah envies her sister for having two perfectly healthy sides of her body, and resents that she always tries to get on her father’s good side. While her twin tries to earn all the praise, Adah is stuck trailing on her coattails as the other gifted kid who doesn’t speak much. She makes no attempt to keep this resentment hidden from Leah.
Adah also lacks what the majority of her family has in abundance: faith in God. After an incident in Sunday school where she realized that God had a rather pick and choose method of selecting Christians, she found that she no longer believed in the mystic deity that the rest of her family so fervently worshiped. She often mocks him, using the capital He but making fun of him in the same sentence. The same goes with her father- instead of calling him dad or sir, she names him Our Father, a reference to his profession. It sets her apart from her sister’s devotion to their father, and makes her less personalized to him. She doesn’t want to be a part of his world, and so she alienates herself from it without saying a word. Adah is sarcastic, almost mocking of the contradictory world of her family. The only time she seems in earnest about anything is when she speaks of knowledge, or learning, or the Kilanga people. All her thoughts about her family are cloaked in a veil of cynicism.
History:
Adah grew up in Bethlehem, Georgia -- a small, conservative town full of typical 1950s citizens. A twin in a family with four daughters, Adah was used to being left behind. She was typically thought up as mentally retarded, because she was born with hemiplegia, or the disfunction of part of her brain. This left her left leg completely useless. However, she was far from stupid - her twin Leah says that Adah sped away with all the academic prizes in high school.
Her father, a strict and somewhat violent preacher, forced all his girls to believe in god. When she was younger, Adah brought up the question at Sunday School - why did people who didn’t know god have to go to hell? After being punished for impudence, she realized that she no longer believed in god, or any deity. When her father told their family that they were moving to the Congo, Adah was rather apathetic. It was a crazed dream of his, and she was forced to follow it. This didn’t mean that she had to enjoy it -- Adah was content to let the entire year of their stay pass by her without making a judgment on anything.
Upon arrival in the Congo, the Price family learns that nothing is as it seems. Their traditional ideas are out of place in such a strange world, and Adah learns to adapt to the jungle rather quickly. She becomes the only member of her family actively learning Kilongo, or the language of the Congo citizens, and befriends a boy named Nelson. He teaches her the language of the Congo in exchange for lessons in English.
While out exploring the jungle, Adah comes across some hidden secrets. She discovers the news that the American forces are planning to attack the Congo, as well as the fact that Eben Axelroot (the pilot and general sleazebag responsible for taking care of the Price family) has been influential in helping to orchestrate a coup. She also gets into some trouble -- when her twin, Leah, leaves Adah behind on the path to the river, Adah is tracked by a lion. Only with some convenient help from a nearby animal and a bit of outsmarting does she survive. However, she doesn’t let her family know she’s still living until after she’s watched them react. Adah is a fan of sitting still and watching the world go by. She spies on Axelroot and gauges the reactions of her family whenever anything interesting happens to them.
Roleplay Sample - Log:
Her notebook filled up quickly, it seemed, with picture after picture sketched of her family, but mostly of the Congo wildlife. Trees there grew in abundance, as did wild fruits and exotic plants. Even Methuselah posed for a picture before he got eaten- hope is the Thing with Feathers, after all. Adah would flip back and forth through her sketchbook, looking at old pictures, turning them around to see them at different angles.
Her favorite was a picture of her sister, for an inexplicable reason. Not only because it was a mirror image of her- a mirror image if I wasn’t different and left behind- but because her sister looked different compared to her daily, do-well self. Leah’s face was drawn up in concentration- she had been planning the meals for the next day, if Adah recalled correctly. Though Adah still thought this was out of the norm, she couldn’t tear it out. The other faces she hid in the back of the book. Her family, the zoo animals on display. But Leah’s she kept in its place, safe from tearing.
Now, she picked up her pencil, chewing slightly on the tip (a habit she had learned in secret, one that distinguished her from her God-loving sister before Leah had cut her hair) before placing it on the slightly yellowed paper. The heat of the Congo was getting to her book- its edges were deteriorating, but Adah didn’t seem to mind. She stared intently at the plant in front of her, some sort of vine that grew the most magnificent violet flowers. It was so beautiful, and yet, she could not bring her self to be convinced that some Holy Being had created it. Even if her father told her so, Adah knew she could only believe what sat in front of her.
Roleplay Sample - Journal:
Hello.
[It takes a long time for something else to show up. The person behind the screen -- she hates showing her face -- enjoys the time she takes.]
This is not the Congo.
I’ve never seen this before. Though my sisters aren’t here. Will it be silent? Or louder?
Questions? Comments? Crazed and creative statements? Those go here.
CRAZED AND CREATIVE STATEMENTS uh I don’t really have any, except...Adah doesn’t speak in canon, and tends to not write a lot when she’s writing in the presence of other people.
Reviled did I live, said I, as evil I did deliver.
Yeah, palindromes are cool I know.