ilProm App
PLAYER
✧ NAME: Marion
✧ LJ USERNAME: maidm
✧ CONTACT (EMAIL, AIM, MSN, PLURK, ETC.):
E-Mail: mjianderson @ gmail.com
AIM: same as the e-mail!
Plurk: MaidM
✧ CURRENT MUSE LIST: N/A
CHARACTER
✧ NAME: Dulcie
✧ SERIES: Going Bovine by Libba Bray
✧ HISTORY:
Dulcie is a punk-rock angel with a sugar addiction, pink hair, and an inability to take situations seriously. She is a self-proclaimed messenger, although from whom she is delivering messages is never explained. Her role in the novel is to help Cameron on his quest to save the world and cure his Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Along the way she provides comic relief, dispenses wisdom, and eats Cameron’s entire supply of candy.
Very little is known about Dulcie before she meets Cameron in ‘Going Bovine’. The only allusion she makes to possibly having a past life is in chapter Twenty-Two when she tells Cameron that before she was an angel she was ‘someone else’. She is purposefully indirect and obtuse about her own past, so eventually Cameron stops asking. The only other hint given is in Dulcie and Cameron’s first meeting, when Dulcie mentions ‘missing Latin’, which implies she might have been around in a time/place where it was regularly spoken.
Dulcie first appears in the story as visions Cameron is having. He keeps seeing her out of the corner of his eye. He finally sees her properly at the pep rally his school holds him after he is diagnosed with CJ, where she is sitting in the crowd with ‘Hello, Cameron’ spray-painted on her wings.
She later appears to him in the hospital to inform him of his quest to find Dr. X, cure his disease, and save the world.
Dulcie then follows Cameron along his mission to find Dr. X, showing up now and again, Gandalf-style, to dispense information and keep Cameron's morale up.
✧ TIMELINE: Just after the events of chapter Thirty-Seven, when Cameron finds out that Dulcie can see the future.
✧ PERSONALITY:
Upon first meeting, Dulcie comes across as your stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She is bright, bubbly, and optimistic. She has pink hair. She spray paints her own wings. Everything about her is quirky and adorable.
But scratch a little below the surface, and there emerges a fragile young woman, with just as many fears and insecurities as anyone else.
Dulcie is cheerful and driven. It is her job to make sure Cameron stays on track and finishes his quest, and she does that by staying optimistic. When it seems like Cameron is loosing faith in his quest, she reminds him of all the wonderful things in the world worth saving, such as pizza, microwave popcorn, movies, and vinyl records.
She loves terrible puns. She’s pretty goofy in general, and has a very healthy sense of humour.
Part of Dulcie’s goofiness and optimism is a mask to avoid real problems or conversations. While this cheerful attitude helps her the first time Cameron is feeling down, he later starts to see through this ruse and calls her out on it. She avoids questions about what will happen to her after Cameron is cured by pretending to be an ice sculpture. She later tries it again when Cameron questions her ability to read the future. She only relents to answering the question seriously when Cameron threatens to give up the mission.
Dulcie is the sort of person who really doesn’t want to be the barer of bad news. She works so hard at being this little ball of light and happiness, so when it comes to a point where the honest answer is an upsetting one, she won’t give it.
Her ability to see the future has also shaped the way she behaves. She can see people’s entire lives in front of them. She even knows how they are going to die. It makes her feel responsible for them, even though she knows she cannot change the outcome of their lives. So instead, she has learned to accept that people just die. Part of the reason that she encourages Cameron to enjoy life so much is that she knows he doesn’t have long in the world, and wants him to enjoy every minute he has left.
It is very telling that Dulcie hates snow globes. She clearly has no fear for death (not that she needs to as an angel), but she fears a static existence. She fears being trapped, unable to live or experience the world. So to her, life in a cage is worse than death.
Dulcie is a messenger angel. It is assumed that she is bringing information to Cameron at the bequest of a higher authority. She is good at her job, but it is unknown whether she enjoys doing it or not. I think deep down she wishes she were a human with free will so she could go off and do whatever she wants.
Dulcie is never shown eating anything that isn’t junk food. I don’t think she needs to eat, but does for fun. She has a MAJOR sweet tooth. She is almost always shown eating candy or sweets.
✧ ABILITIES/POWERS:
Dulcie has the ability to instinctively read people’s past and futures. She can basically see a person’s entire life laid out in front of her. However, she hates using this power because even though she can see the future, as an angel she does not have the power to change it. She outright refuses to share a person’s future with them, and will only agree to share another person’s future when guilted into it. She has the ability to teleport, or at least disappear and reappear at will.
She can also fly, but only seems to do this in extreme situations.
At one point in the book Dulcie translates a line of Portuguese for Cameron. As an angel, it’s probably pretty safe to say that she speaks every language. (At least Earth languages).
Despite these powers, shoe doesn’t seem to have any real fighting skills. Her first instinct when being attacked is to grab Cameron and fly away. If she had any kind of offensive powers, she probably would have used them. Since she is a lower-level messenger angel, fighting probably isn’t part of her skill set.
She also does an excellent impression of an ice sculpture.
✧ TIME OF ARRIVAL: Day
✧ MASK DESIGN: Here
✧ PLACE OF SOLACE: A small, cosy one-bedroom loft apartment.
SAMPLES
✧ FIRST PERSON: ~150+ words
[The portal opens with the video function. A small, pixie-ish face behind a multi-coloured mask. is squinting into the screen. It pulls back a little to reveal a thatch of pink hair in messy spikes.]
Look, I'm not completely sure why I've been dragged here suddenly. I'm sure it's for something totally important, too! But I kinda sorta thought that I would be staying on the Dr. X case. I'm supposed to be watching Cameron. If I'm not THERE, he might...
So let me know! I don't usually just end up places without knowing why or where.
[She sets her device down on a nearby surface. The wider angle shows a young woman wearing torn fishnets, doc martens, and a pleated kilt. On her torso is a shiny riveted breastplate. With her free hands she rummages around under her armour and finally pulls a hand back triumphantly with a colourful packet in her hand.]
I can totally exchange information for jelly beans!
[She leans over, her hands resting on her knees and gives the camera her most imploring look.]
I just... I really need to get back.
[She reaches her arm out to switch off the device. As she does, two white blurs move from behind her back. Coming from her shoulder-blades are a set of white feathery wings. They open like a flower, almost coming unfurled before the video clicks off.]
✧ THIRD PERSON: 300+ words
Okay, so maybe that particular conversation could have gone a little better.
Dulcie watched Cameron’s retreating back as he stormed away, determined to ignore her and re-join the rest of his friends around the bonfire.
With a sigh, Dulcie slumped onto the (only slightly damp) grass. She fished around inside her bag of jellybeans before finding two pink ones and popped them into her mouth. Usually ingesting any of kind of sugar would fill her immediately with all sort of lovely butterfly-like feelings, but today they just weren’t doing the trick.
She sighed again, and rolled over onto her side. She shouldn’t be feeling guilty. She had only told Cameron exactly what he’d asked her to. He’d wanted to know what would happen to ‘the Goon Brothers’. And she had told him, simple as that.
Why didn’t people ever listen to her when she told them something was a bad idea? She was an angel after all. Despite the pink hair and the combat boots, she was actually good at her job.
Because really, being an angel wasn’t everything it was cracked out to be. Sure, you got immortality. But Dulcie could give a whole lecture on how isolating that felt sometimes, how disconnected from life and everything in it that breathed and changed and grew and did all the other things she couldn’t. Then there was the future.
When Dulcie would sit down and think about it, actually think about how much she knew, it terrified her. The thought of knowing who every person was, and where they were going. It was a terrifying prospect. Her mind felt so FULL so much of the time. All these little people inside her brain, living out their lives. Finding love, falling out of love, living, dying.
More stuff out of her reach.
And there was nothing she could do about it. She knew, instinctively, how every person she met was going to die, and had absolutely no control over the outcome. The weight of that. It could drive an angel crazy if you let it.
So, immortality? Sucked. Clairvoyance? Extra-suck, with a side helping of guilt.
Then there was the grand finale. The cherry on the top of her fantastically difficult job.
Cameron.
Dulcie was no spring chicken. Okay fine, for an angel she guessed she was still at the kids table. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t seen and done a LOT of stuff in her day. Difficult stuff. Stuff that made her feel like ripping out her own heart and dashing it on the pavement if it would just end the ache a little bit.
But Cameron. He was something new.
She’d done dying kids before. Been there, done that. She’d sat in uncomfortable plastic hospital chairs while heart monitors beeped away in her ears. She’d held hands as the last breath slipped out of ten-year-old bodies. Yes it was hard. But it was life.
She’s even done moody teens. Aggressive, snarky, full of hormones. Angry at the world, but really angry at themselves. She’d been sworn at, punched, bitten, kissed, and every combination.
And she’d helped them. God dammit, she’d made them better. She’d helped them get whatever issues they had and find that spark inside themselves they needed to cure cancer, or run for president, or whatever tiny little flap of a butterfly’s wings she had to push forward into the world on that particular day.
But there was something about the combination of the two in Cameron that pushed this particular mission over the line for her.
Dulcie sat herself up on her elbows to watch Cameron by the fire. He was talking to Middle Guy. Keith. She saw Keith laugh at something Cameron had said, doubling over as he clenched at his stomach, holding in peals of laughter and looking so damn alive that it hurt to look at him. She watched Cameron storm away.
Dulcie got to her feet and brushed herself off, a few blades of grass stuck to her tights.
Back to Cameron, and back to work. She hoped that she could hold it together long enough to help Cameron complete his mission and save the world. She was trying to play the happy-go-lucky girl, the one who had it together. But something about Cameron forced that out of her, leaving her raw and empty with nothing to say. Nothing but the truth.
She hoped that was enough for him.