Remilia Scarlet (AU)

PLAYER: GS
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Indeed
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CHARACTERS PLAYED: None

NAME: Remilia Scarlet
CANON: Touhou Project
CANON REFERENCE: Here
AGE: Approx. 500; 23 (AU)
GENDER: Female
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: Part-time Instructor: Economics, Elementary French, Flight

APPEARANCE: For most intents and purposes. Remilia's grown into a moderate adult height of 5'6", and a wing span of 10' and some inches. Her wings have a fairly large attachment site on her back, forcing Remilia to wear mostly backless or specially modified clothing. Her wings fold up and compact very nicely for their size, but even so, they are difficult to hide. Other notable phenotypical characteristics are her red eyes, pale skin, and the fact that she possess short claws instead of nails (true claws at the end of her finger-and-toe tips, not simply pointy fingernails).

PERSONALITY: First of all, Remilia is one of those individuals who presents several faces to the world. How she behaves in public eye is different from how she behaves in private. To a degree, she even presents a mask to herself, in an effort to believe that she's stronger than she is, has awry situations under control, or to cover up (what she believes is) weakness or vulnerability. To say that Remilia Scarlet is a proud individual would be making an understatement; her pride and exceptionally strong sense of identity often dictates her actions, as she was taught to value those two concepts highly and constructed her identity around them.

Exactly how Remilia presents herself to the world is something she manages very closely; barring when she's flustered and loses her temper, every expression, every gesture and mannerism, every inflection of her voice is carefully controlled. This facet of herself is supposed to be nothing but charismatic, elegant, and sophisticated. In a way, it's not even about how others perceive her; it's about how Remilia perceives herself. It's not unreasonable to see this side of Remilia as a rehearsed persona, or as somewhat fake, since that's exactly what it is. Her movements and smiles, while looking and seeming normal, are too practiced to have a completely natural feel to a keen observer.

Regardless of what ideal Remilia aims for with her public persona, it often falls short. Pride and arrogance usually aren't strangers. Depending on her mood, she'll sometimes make rude jabs and jokes at other people's expense, and won't hesitate to boast about a skill set of hers if the conversation touches on it. She can also be spiteful, and often has difficulty admitting when she's wrong. She attempts to cover losses or offenses with fake modesty or jest (which she often fails to do so). Half the time, she maturely responds to severe insults with condescending attacks of her own. It can be difficult to bring Remilia down from her boiling point once she hits it, and typically she storms out of the room or finds someone else to be around for a while. She doesn't hesitate to express disappointment, criticism, or complaints, though she does make an effort for her anger to appear controlled and cold, rather than explosive. This isn't as successful as she thinks it is, either.

She's much more free with herself around family, those she trusts, and those Remilia knows hold her in high regard. She'll be more blunt, both more and less patient, express more irritation and worries, and be more openly affectionate and concerned. With those she's completely comfortable around, Remilia might even drop the wealthy noble lady act altogether, allowing herself to swear, slouch, laze about, and in general doing anything she feels like doing, ladylike or not.

While she's significantly more honest around friends and family, Remilia never reaches 100% honesty. She's an incredibly guarded individual, seeing complete and utter emotional honesty as a vulnerability. It doesn't matter if others consider this a weakness or not; it's a all-or-nothing gamble that she isn't willing to take. See, Remilia doesn't mind losing when she isn't giving her all. If things went awry, she wasn't doing her best; it wasn't a result of her own powerlessness, and thus her ego remains unscathed. Putting forth everything she has and still getting a bad result, however, would be purely her own failure and would deliver a sharp blow to her valued pride, and her identity as a result. Emotional honesty, well, that's simply too risky. Even in admitting things to herself, Remilia would rather try to convince herself that she isn't feeling a certain set of emotions or concerns than face and accept them. It's much easier to blame someone or something else than be honest with yourself.

Possibly the least charming aspect of her personality is the sheer volume of complaining that Remilia does. She was raised as a spoiled rich kid, even with her mother's attempts to curb such behavior, and though she is socially perspective and doesn't throw tantrums, she will complain to her fullest ability. About things that don't go her way, about things she doesn't understand, about her work, about obligation, about people that anger her—anything, really. Still, Remilia will take on the mantle of responsibility when it's required of her; which, as she goes on in her adult life, is more and more frequent. After all, she's a Scarlet; she has pride. She can't really turn it down or half-ass something without damaging her self-perceived image.

She may be a brat with trouble acting her age, but it isn't as if Remilia is a truly terrible person. At her core, she is observant and cautious (and manipulative to a degree), knowing that mistakes later in her life could easily cost the family fortune and reputation. She will help others if they desperately need it, even though she'll try to dismiss the act as whimsical, and will sometimes display bouts of generosity. Despite how self-absorbed she is, the young woman does possess a moral compass, if it is dictated by family pride. Why should she, a Scarlet, have to stoop to detestable actions? She doesn't need to; she's better than that.

In canon, Remilia is (quite literally) an eternal child. As a vampire, she does not age, so her childish personality and appearance has no opportunity to grow or change. Few can tell her no and have it end well, due to her monstrous nature and power, often permitting her to be as unreasonable as she wishes. Yet, as a vampire several centuries old and the head of her household, she acts with the pride and dignity deserving of a noble lady. She is all the vampire, the lady, and the child, sometimes acting unpredictably and mostly as her whims dictate.

At the Institute, she is human, young, and very mortal. She can't toss rules out the window as she feels without consequences, she has people she must answer to (parents, teachers, mutants stronger than her), and must temper her arrogance unless she wade into more trouble than she can handle. Being human, she's naturally more inclined to empathy, and repulsed by killing. Remilia may still be remarkably self-centered, but no longer to an utterly unreasonable degree.

POWERS/ABILITIES: Animalistic phenotypic mutations, enhanced physical ability, flight. What originally started as an oddly dominant trait along the Scarlet family lineage (abnormally pale skin, varying shades of red eyes, anemia) morphed into another beast altogether, resembling "stereotypical" traits of vampires. While Remilia is still very much human she possess: short claws; sharpened dentition; enhanced strength, speed, and stamina; a variable rate of regeneration; and night vision (which does not operate in perfect dark). Remilia is also capable of wing-based flight, though her wing shape and size lends more to sprinting flight and acrobatics than distance.

The enhanced strength, and subsequent flight, is the most prominent of her enhanced abilities. Bat wings, while possessing more fine control and mobility over bird wings, are much less efficient and can experience stress up to several times the flier's body weight.

Now that she's encouraged to maintain an exercise routine, Remilia's stronger than she was previously. As a (new) benchmark, she can lift approximately a small car's weight a few feet off the ground, though she can't get it over her head or hold it terribly long. Her reaction times have also improved since coming to the Institute, making her fairly nimble if she's paying attention. Her stamina is largely the same, and is enhanced in the sense that Remilia can endure longer periods of exertion and that she can endure the stresses of her enhanced strength, but it has no impact on her pain threshold or ability to resist wounds.

Her flight capabilities is where she shows the most dramatic improvement: she's become a very agile flier, and can now carry others partial distances. Depending on her energy and environmental conditions, Remilia can carry a person or object of ~150 pounds or less during flight, though it will impact her mobility. Between ~150 and ~250, she can carry very short distances (e.g. from ground to a rooftop, or across a dangerous section of ground), but that taxes Remilia significantly.

Of course, this is all assuming she's in good health...

See, there's a bit of a downside to it all; the anemia common on one side of the family tree mutated freakishly, and Remilia now requires a transfusion of one unit of blood per every two weeks to stay in peak condition. She also needs to take a special iron supplement daily, and manage her diet nutrition carefully. If she goes too long without a transfusion or significant iron source, Remilia will progressively grow sicker, prone to anywhere from mild to severe anemic symptoms. Her physical abilities scale with this downslide, declining from above human average to below. Her ability to regenerate is also tied to her condition, and she regenerates far more quickly on days after a transfusion than the day before one. Remilia has no control over this healing factor, and her body has its own priorities for regeneration: organ tissue, skin tissue, muscle tissue, bone tissue. If an injury doesn't kill her outright, Remilia has an extremely high chance of surviving, but her body will consume a lot of resources to do so; even if she's in no immediate threat of dying, she will still need medical attention and (x) days of recovery time. Another peculiar oddity about this mutated anemia is that silver and mercury, when exposed to the body internally (ingestion) or externally (metal plating, jewelry), seems to almost completely nullify her body's ability to process iron for a time; no one has have any idea why. On the other end of the spectrum, her body possess an absurdly high nutritional upper limit for safely storing iron.

AU HISTORY: Remilia was born to the Scarlets, your typical wealthy family that owns a lot of land and has a quiet hand in a number of business fields, in Nantes, France. (Typical except for the seemingly-dominant genetic trait of pale skin and varying red eyes, that is. It's amazing what minor mutations people are willing to dismiss as 'genetic oddities' if you're influential enough.) Her parents were surprised, but accepting of their winged daughter, and proceeded to raise their firstborn child as planned—after seeing to the medical issues that tagged along with her mutations, of course.

Special arrangements had to be made to regularly see to their daughter's curious "anemia." Quiet arrangements that wouldn't alert their business partners to the fact that their daughter was a mutant; as accepting as the Scarlets were (considering their mutant-spotted family tree), the global economic and political scale had a long way to go. Soon enough, with the advice of a private physician, they hammered out a schedule of supplements and transfusions, adaptable for all stages of life. Then, claws started developing, Remilia's wing growth started outpacing her own, and her teeth grew in sharper than they had any right to be. (Thankfully, the child's teeth seemed resistant to cavities, because dentist visits were adventures. Not the good kind.) And, both fortunately and unfortunately, the child was clever.

In short: She was something of a hellion at a young age. By the time she was four, many employees working on the mansion grounds had to be given a substantial raise to keep them there.

While her mental growth did very well and her academics developed at an above-average level, Remilia soon learned when she could throw a successful tantrums. Between her claws, teeth, and abnormal strength, no employee was willing to say 'no' to the girl anywhere near arms reach; even then, it's not exactly good form to give in to her every demand, or to run away in the other direction, and the child always seemed to make her selfish demands when Mr. and Mrs. Scarlet weren't around. And for those luckiest attendants: Remilia would pick favorites and spend most of her time with them—her primary source of social interaction—if her parents had to leave or couldn't play, for whatever reason. For a time, the brat's favorite "game" had been to hit a ball from one of the balconies overlooking the orchard as far as she could, then order a handful of staff to go chase after it. At least she usually gave the winner some kind of reward. (She didn't grow out of that game until sometime in her teens.)

She got better, though; from an early age, Remilia's parents took to instilling a deep sense of familial pride in the girl. She started comprehending the scope and responsibility of the family business and their long lineage of success. Remilia took to this sense of pride soon enough, and her mother, ever the hawk, was diligent in seeing that the child never went over the acceptable limits of haughty. The Scarlets bore their name with grace, not vanity. Regardless, Remilia's behavior did notably improve, though it was very much a work in progress. ("Acting her age" would be a problem to plague her well into adulthood.)

Sometime when Remilia was five, her sister was born. It was well and good at first, and when Flandre got older, Remilia would have someone to play with! Except things quickly grew complicated. The elder girl never understood what the fuss and worry was about for while; she was too young to understand more than 'something bad happened' first, then 'something worse happened', then 'something bad' kept happening on occasion. Most puzzling where the periods when Remilia couldn't see Flandre for a while. How was she supposed to be sisterly when Flandre kept disappearing?

Aside from the commotion centered around her sister, Remilia's life marched peacefully on. At ten years, Remilia had to be assigned an attendant both to spare her from boredom and to ensure that the child would stop jumping off things in an attempt to fly (at this age, her attempts resulted in a few-foot-rise at best, and a slightly-slower-painful-fall at worst). She progressed well with private tutors. When Remilia turned twelve, her father addressed her seriously about gearing her education in the direction of taking over the family business. She was the firstborn, it was traditional, etc, etc, and Father Scarlet intended to raise Remilia the way his mother raised him, and her father before that, and...

You get the picture. The thing is, though, Remilia took right to it. Even at such an early age, she had already began to take her pride as a Scarlet seriously; she was eager to earn her place in the family line. Her mother started her on a second language shortly after and increased the pace of her tutoring. Once she had a good command of English, Mother Scarlet introduced her to Latin ("prudent for the study of an educated young woman!"), then the basics of Chinese, German, and Japanese—for countries they had business contacts in. The next number of years saw Remilia introduced to public speaking, etiquette, economics, political science, accounting, etc, as she progressed. The ultimate goal was to have the firstborn Scarlet entirely ready to manage the businesses by 25, in the incident something happened to the senior Scarlets; they all hoped a take over wouldn't need to occur so soon.

There was also the problem that Remilia was an obvious mutant. She'd been briefly introduced to close and mildly trusted business partners during her teenage years when her wings could be disguised or effectively covered (namely, outdoor winter charity events). It was common knowledge that the Scarlets had a daughter, but one that largely stayed out of public view, let alone two mutant daughters. Remilia would have to wait until global politics became more accepting of mutants, or face substantial hardships.

While the senior Scarlets had always remained publicly neutral on the mutant issue, they did acknowledge that something had to be done. Very quietly, they began edging towards support on the matter; anonymous or very well disguised donations to pro-mutant causes, slowly forging more partnerships with mutant-friendly businesses, the like.

Remilia grew wonderfully into a young woman. However, she did express concerns about her sister; the exceptional familiar pride of the Scarlet fostered extremely strong nuclear bonds. As Remilia grew older, she finally started to understand what was happening to Flandre, and why she'd been taken into isolation so often. Her sister's mutations were stronger than her own, more unstable, and extremely dangerous. The elder sibling would spend time with her when possible, even if they didn't always get along well. Eventually, Flandre seemed to have half-way decent control over her mutations. Or at least, enough that she could begin to interact in certain environments, such as an overseas mutant school. After discussion, Remilia and her parents agreed that it would be best if she accompanied her little sister; it wouldn't due to have Flandre feeling abandoned, or isolated yet again. Remilia, an adult herself, could easily act as the family's representative in regards to the youngest Scarlet and watch over her, and it'd be a good experience for Remilia, to boot. Interacting with people who weren't family, staff, or individuals from the internet would be healthy for her.

Then, well, sentinels and the Phoenix and stasis happened.

Released three years later, and none too at peace with the assault that felt like yesterday and the missing three years of her life, Remilia gladly returned home to France to be with her family. Naturally, the attack and worsening political environment prompted a number of tense conversations within the Scarlet family. Eventually, she and her family decided on how to proceed:

The sisters would return to Xavier's school; Remilia would cease to hide her wings in public; Remilia would not immediately go to work in the Scarlet family's business, and instead pursue other opportunities for an undecided number of years; the Scarlets would wholeheartedly support the Institute when needed.

Having finished her college courses at the school before the Phoenix Incident, Remilia invested in a couple teaching courses before returning to the United States. She had been a TA before, and had practically taken over one French class; why not make it official? Remilia was still highly conflicted about the X-men, and this provided her with an alternative.

NETWORK SAMPLE:
[Voice]
I want to make something very clear.

[Remilia's voice was calm, but the sort that belied a coming storm.]

I. Am. Not. A. Vampire.

I've put up with this nonsense for far too long. Mirrors tacked outside my room and my classroom, garlic cloves stuffed into my inbox next to silver necklaces—[which she did actually get an allergic reaction to, but like hell would anyone else learn that]—crosses drawn on due papers; things that try my patience, but tolerable.

But I absolutely draw the line at having soybeans thrown at me. Kirisame.

I know who many, if not all, of the offenders are; you're all fortunate I'm not a spiteful person. But, if anyone gets the wise idea to projectile-launch beans or garlic or water at me from this point forward, so help me I will find a way to make you regret it.

It stopped being amusing two—[no, that's not right]—five years ago.

[She hoped that slip-up wasn't too noticeable.]

LOG SAMPLE: Test Drive thread