This character belongs to Soi.
O' voice-eating devil to whom love is brief - whose heart is mildew and whose nature is grief.
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DESCRIPTION
HWI-185's posture draws from her feline heritage. Her stride is low and slinking - as if she could pounce in an instant. Appropriately, her limbs are sturdily-built and powerful. She is also not a particularly large subject, being as tall as a natural IceWing at the shoulder and a few heads longer. Berith's frame alludes to that of a vicious, raptorial beast - hunched and predatory.
Berith bears a smooth coat of fur - one that is primarily grey with hints of pale lemon-yellow. The elliptical patterns dotting her cheeks are of rich near-gold fur. The Bondborn's ears are large and fennec-like. They are highly flexible and expressive, serving as indicators of her current mood. She possesses no conventional horns - in their stead a single, spiraling black horn sprouts from her forehead. Her padded paws end in unnaturally straight, needle-like claws, carved from dark bone. Her many-rowed, puncturing teeth are also composed of this substance. Berith's eyes are round and inset - a passive yellow drowned out by the spiraling kohl markings that underline them.
Berith's wings are swept and massive, exaggerated by the Bondborn's overall average size. The thin, spear-like digits of the wings support dark green membrane, vast and vaguely metallic. Her tail is long and whip-thin, with yellow ring markings looping around it.
A crackling stripe of black fur runs along Berith's sides, from the base of her head to the base of her tail. This dark region is densely inlaid with peach-coloured spots of a peculiar description. The midbanded gemstones resemble the compound eyes of an arthropod, as if a thousand creatures are peeking out of the inky blackness. Occasionally, one will seem to move or squint, its gaze flickering around the room.
In her true form, Berith's eyes disappear, leaving empty sockets that leak streams of black smoke. She grows to a monstrous scale, although she remains shorter than the largest subjects. Her flesh and bones twist and reshape themselves, distorting her cat-like proportions into a taller and vaguely deer-like visage. Her fur becomes wilder and fiery, rolling and curling even when there isn't any wind.
The eyes running along her side become unmistakeable. They gain a sort of eerie depth, as if they have become more "real", more present within this dimension. The bug-eyes are no longer subtle with their activity - spinning in their sockets, adjusting to light, and occasionally coming to rest their sight on the beings that reside in this world.
The Bondborn's jutting horn splits in two and blossoms outward, forming a demonic crown that resembles the straight antlers of a procervulus. A halo of spinning grey fire forms in between the prongs, seemingly held fast in midair by the black bone. Her wings expand and lose their membranes, the digits becoming spindlier and sharper. They are too heavy to be lofted above Berith's shoulders, and instead trawl behind her as some facsimile of a cloak.
BEHAVIOUR AND MENTALITY
Distant and apathetic at heart, Berith generally tries to avoid interaction with the other subjects. When such conversations are forced, Berith comes across as simple or oblivious more often than not. The Bondborn is “domesticated” so to speak, socially far closer to the staff of the facility than any other subject. She is more in touch with her inherent artificiality and more responsive to instructions. She has no natural desire to be free.
Berith demonstrates little curiosity about the world around her. She is highly intuitive, and can understand concepts very well, but generally has no desire to learn. She actually exhibits very few desires at all, almost no interests nor goals, and prefers to just do what authority figures tell her to. Her desires are usually fleeting and, if not, are quickly abandoned in the face of staff disapproval.
Though she does have a hard time in social interactions, Berith can occasionally form bonds with other subjects. The relationships Berith forms are incredibly strong, and the Bondborn will take great care to protect them. This is unintended, and would be disastrous if not for the Bondborn’s poor and selective memory. On occasion, Berith's memories will simply "reset", causing her to forget most of her life experiences and relationships up to that point in time. Staff instructions and conditioning persist however, no matter how many resets occur. This makes maintaining unauthorized bonds impossible, and ensures Berith's loyalty is always to the staff.
Though usually quite apathetic, the Bondborn seems to panic and feel immense stress as she approaches a “reset”. In most iterations, Berith tends to view “resets” as something akin to death. She tends to become somewhat more hostile towards staff after becoming aware of an approaching reset, though will usually remain one of the most obedient subjects.
As her “death” approaches, Berith begins to act restless and unruly - adopting the traits of a free agent. She also tends to become closer to other subjects, her fears of socialization and interaction seemingly forgotten. At this stage, her behaviour bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the “original” Berith - what she was like before her memory loss manifested itself.
Despite her detachment, Berith values life in every iteration and will resist instructions that lead to the death of a sapient being. Her characteristic emotionlessness is forgotten whenever she witnesses the death of someone she feels close to, replaced by an all-consuming mournful obsession. Her “resets” are crucial to maintaining her emotional state, allowing the dragons around her to be replaced without the Bondborn grieving. She has never been given the opportunity to learn loss and learn how to cope. That would be... dangerous.
Berith lives life through a meticulously designed, constantly adjusted filter. And though she has never expressed any anger openly, researchers can't be sure what's going on in her mind. Truthfully, the Bondborn can't help but feel a sort of melancholy when faced with it all. While introverted, she is by no means an isolationist. She is actually very bitter about her social ineptitude - a crushing loneliness weighs down her mind most hours of the day. Any and all progress she makes - any added grace to her words, any feelings of friendship and romance, any good experiences with her fellow subjects - is undone in a few painfully short months. She avoids social interactions because she doesn't know how to deal with them. She will never know how.
She is far more aware than she lets on - often figuring out the state of her memory mere weeks after a reset. While naturally uninterested in the world around her, Berith is very curious about the workings of her own mind. She is always trying to find ways to sneak memories through resets - desperately clinging onto her relationships as authority tries to snatch them away. The Bondborn has seen little success with these endeavours.
Internally, Berith remains a very similar character no matter how many resets she goes to. She is and will always be herself - someone who understands the world through colour and images, who values and loves life, who respects authority, who is hard to befriend but harder to drift away from.
She does enjoy having a higher purpose as a subject of the End Guard, and would never entertain open rebellion against the staff. But this is the only part of her that matters, the only part that she is always aware of. The rest of her is irrelevant at best and inconvenient at worst - blemishes that the staff would gladly scrape off. She has never once even entertained the desire to be free. Because she can never be free. Not really.
Berith thinks a lot, but has nobody to speak to and no inkling of how to speak at all. She has no choice but to be indifferent to the world, while the world returns the favour. Not apathetic by choice, but by design.
Some nights, the Bondborn can't help but scream at the injustice of all of it. Sleep-deprived, with bloodshot eyes, Berith will just incomprehensibly yell at her reflection for hours. Her horn, pointed at her mirrored image, ensures that none of her seething reaches anyone's ears but her own.
And the world around her sleeps well.
CAPABILITIES
Berith is agile and flexible, like a cat, and can gracefully land on her feet from almost any height. Her flying is clumsy at best, and Berith relies on simply leaping great distances to get where she needs to be. She has been observed stabbing her talons into surfaces in order to hang on to them.
Berith’s most crucial power lies in her fast-growing, spike-like talons. The "spring and latch" musculature of her forelimbs is specifically designed to allow her to strike as fast as possible, putting enemies under the influence of her powers before they can react. The Bondborn has often described her power as the power to “undo” instinct. By making contact with a spike, she can dull one’s instinctive aversion to death. A longer period of contact can increase the severity of the effects, and it also seems to be more effective on larger targets.
Someone under the influence of a spike may see an approaching attack and feel so apathetic that they do nothing to defend themself. Or, a fleeing enemy may simply stop in the act. Even in minor doses, the spikes can quickly cause a threat to stop resisting.
Berith’s horn is the focal point of her reality warping, which manifests through the ability to disrupt communication. By pointing it at a living being within a certain distance, she can make it such that anything they say is incomprehensible to others. The Bondborn generally can’t maintain this ability for more than a few minutes at a time.
While in her true form, Berith becomes far larger and stronger, but is less agile as a result. The distortion and elongation of her limbs makes her more surefooted and slow - strutting rather than prowling. Her spikes grow at an even more rapid rate and break off with little resistance.
The upper limits of all of her abilities are increased to unknown levels. Her ability to warp communications can now affect an area around her, while her spikes work faster. Berith's powers massively widen in scope and scale just by being in this state, and the Bondborn seems to grow more powerful the longer she remains as her true self. Though only speculation at this point, some researchers believe that her heightened awareness allows her to comprehend the forces behind her powers, and realize secrets long lost to her.
In this condition, Berith’s state reflects her feelings of disconnect from the world, becoming one of partial non-existence. It's as if she is just barely managing to maintain her presence in reality. The Bondborn will sporadically disappear at times, an alternate world where she doesn't exist coming into being for a few moments. Her true form is also completely imperceptible to cameras and other artificial sensors - only sapient beings can understand her presence.
HISTORY
Berith was considered a problematic subject during most of her development, though the Bondborn herself doesn’t know why. She has never asked questions about it due to her apathetic nature, but often feels the slightest twinge of curiosity when it gets brought up. To her, she has always been the way she is.
Over a decade into her development, Berith suffered her first amnesic episode. It was the perfect opportunity to properly re-educate and recondition the rebellious subject. The new Berith had had no aspirations nor interests - no existing loyalties, which ensured obedience and a willingness to work with staff members.
Roughly fifteen years into her development, Berith started etching names into her spiral horn. Handlers were encouraged to ignore it - the habit didn't seem to have any bearing on her admirable performance and confronting her about it may have created a problem where there wasn't one. This, in hindsight, was a mistake.
After her shaky first decade, Berith has redeemed herself. Those working with her have often described the Bondborn as a near-perfect subject. While far from the most powerful subject, the Bondborn’s powers have a unique utility, and her responsiveness to instructions makes her dependable. Her unwillingness to kill was disappointing, but her capabilities proved better suited to non-lethal incapacitation anyways.
More recently however, “resets” have been becoming marginally less effective. The Bondborn has described feeling a sense of deja vu in certain locations and when hearing certain names. This is worrying, and staff are now advised to keep detailed notes of even the slightest changes in Berith’s behaviour.
RELATIONSHIPS
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ADDITIONAL
Berith carves the names of those she considers “friends” into her horn. This habit is almost instinctual at this point, and the Bondborn will do it even at stages where she’s unaware of her memory loss.
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Even through resets, fish is always her favourite food.
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Berith spends very little time in her true form.
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Berith will occasionally use the name "Babel". While in her true form, she responds exclusively to Babel.
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Berith isn't in the Breeding Program, and no plans have been made for her to join in the near future.