Cordelia Harper

'Cordite'

Played by: Syrmaticus

INFORMATION

Mortal bee, female, 23

Aliases: Cor
Nationality: British
Residence: London, United Kingdom
Employer: British Museum of the Occult
Function: Administrative & Exhibit Assistant
Twitter: @lilcordite

• Buzzing Lore Entry •

• Black Signal Lore Entry •

• Brief •

• OOC Notes •

Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT - initiate the blue-eyed signal - RECEIVE - initiate the forlorn frequency - THIS TOO SHALL PASS - initiate the faith protocol - PRAY FOR US NOW - initiate the Jerusalem syntax - WITNESS - Cordelia Harper.

Do you see the trees in a forest, sweetling? The wind blows and they rustle. Can you see which mourns each fallen leaf? Which clings to what leaves remain, because spring may not come again?

The trees in London rustle loud, far too loud. For some saplings it is always winter.

Initiate the cupule cadence.

A seed is planted in English soil. It grows in the shadow of church steeples, its branches draped in wooden and silver echoes of miracle. The axes come and two great oaks fall. The sapling remains. The wind is still and still it rustles. How can it not? Its roots run deep in green and pleasant land - by choice as much as by nature. The one begets the other. Man chooses as their natures bid, sweetling.

Initiate the shadows and silence spectrum.

Have you seen where shadows dwell under the noonday sun? Don’t look. She doesn’t want you to see. She is comfortable there, like the sapling after the rain. Your eyes are light that burns, precious, burns. O ELBERETH! GILTHONIEL! Don’t look. The solace there is not for you. Yes, sweetling, there is solace in shadows, in silence, in solitude. The canopy casts great shadows. At night she looks up to it, beyond it. What are the stars to a tree? Does the tree wonder where the sun has gone? For some saplings it is always night.

She embraces the silver glint in the night. Is it like the glint of the falling axe? She whispers the sweet nothings, so sour on other tongues. She whispers, but does she hear? There is only silence. The wind blows and the leaves fall, but the little tinkling echoes remain. They have hung there so long. They have become leaves.

She embraces the fire that burns oaks. The fire that man’s mind put in man’s hand. It smells of iron and death, of dark satanic mills. Every crack of its thunder burns the shadows. Why? Shadows are comfortable. Does the tree wish for the hurricane? No. Something else. We see it, sweetling. So should you, even if you don’t look.

Initiate the photosynthesis prerogative.

Hearing is the absence of silence. Shadows are the absence of light. For some saplings there is more than soil and air.

Sssssssssssssssssssssssss - I am the heretic codex - let me in.

Say a little prayer for you. Say a little prayer for you-you-you.

You like that, Chuck? The warm wet warmth of a far-away thought, of someone caring? Is it warmer than what’s leaking out of you as you lie there all alone?

Sure it is.

Look at her. Little Goldilocks in glasses, praying at her bedside. Praying for you. Aw. Lil’ Cor-Cor-Cor. So sweety. So goody. Kid in a man’s world. Beautiful, isn’t it? Ever wonder if this apple’s as golden on the inside? Ever feel like taking a knife to that shiny peel and scrape-scrape-scraping it back?

Maybe you should, Chuck. Maybe you’ll find that the riper the fruit, the more the maggots. Isn’t it funny when the apple hides the worms from itself? When it would rather be a seed again?

So sad, clinging to the past. But you know what’s worse? Did the honeyed buzz-buzz-buzz tell you what’s much worse? They tell you so much. But I bet they don’t tell you: clinging to past lies is much worse.

That’s right. Lies, Chuck.

Look at her. Four-pointed lie around her neck. Dragon of a million more in her hands. Every time it spits flame it adds another. I CAN DO THIS. I NEED NOTHING ELSE. THE LORD GOD-GOD-GOD TEACHETH MY FINGERS TO FIGHT AND MY HANDS TO WAR. What’s it say about a girl when a lie’s her lifeline, eh?

Heh. They don’t tell her. They don’t tell her what she’ll look like with weeping wounds in her hands, with a flaming-ever-turning sword in her grasp, with the wings over her head that aren’t all white and gold. It’ll break her, Chuck. I’d tell her, but it’d break-break-break her.

And she’s so much more fun with all that praying and wishing she was seed-not-seedy, don’t you think?

Keep looking, Chuck...

Appearance

Standing about 160cm tall, Cordelia is a slight, delicate-looking woman who could vanish quite easily in a crowd. She wears her dark blond hair to neck length, and few jewelry or ornaments.

Many have remarked that the first thing they notice about her is her eyes, which a poetically inclined ex-colleague once likened to "Uncut sapphires long left / To mercy of wind and sand". They peer out at the world from behind plain square glasses: tired, unfocused, as if she is perpetually distracted by something only she can see.

Personality

Cordelia is the model of a stereotypical introvert: timid, awkward, conflict-averse and armed with an online persona far more outgoing and witty than she is.

Her reclusive lifestyle and lack of any real circle of friends have done no favors for either her understanding of the world or her interpersonal skills. Compounding this is an almost pathological shyness. She doesn't talk a lot, and when she does, it is often without much thought; surprise and even hurt tend to follow if others take offense.

Past all that, however, she is a good-hearted person who is always up for reaching out a helping hand. That is, if she can push it past the social anxiety first.

RP Hooks

• Guns. Cordelia is an amateur gun enthusiast, and was formerly an active member of several London-based shooting clubs. This hobby is what earned her her nickname, 'Cordite', from teasing co-workers.
• Mundane life. She is very attached to her pre-Bee life - it's an anchor to sanity for her - and still struggles to hold down a mundane office job when not on Templar duty. Her work experience includes five years as an admin assistant at a small London-based web firm called Mag-314 Solutions, and, currently, Admin & Exhibits at the British Museum of the Occult.
• Religion. She was raised a very devout Catholic.
• Inter-Society collaboration. She resents the Secret War between the factions, and strongly believes that, in the fight against cosmic evil, everyone is on the same side.

SEE ALSO: SWL Cor-mics (scenes and moments from Cordelia's life in comic strip form, made with in-game screenshots).

• Playtimes: weeknights and weekends, GMT/UTC plus 8.
• Will RP in-game and via Twitter tweets and DMs. No long-form, MUSH-style RP out of game.
• RP preferences: adventure/mission, plots, shades of gray. No ERP or permadeath. I also do not consider the game's story missions in-character (since all players share them), and do not acknowledge any RP directly tied to these.
• Lore-adherent (in-game content is king), but willing to bend it within reason.

Latest developments (post-Season 1):

Cordelia's life and worldview was upended at the close of Season 1, after a fateful encounter in Orochi Tower. The revelation of her past deaths, and of the true nature of angels, left her lost and embittered - and shattered the religious beliefs she had lived by since childhood.

In the wake of the encounter, she made a suicidal trip to the Hell Dimensions, which was ended only through a friend's intervention.

What happened to her in the Tower has yet to be fully revealed, but the changes it wrought on her are far more than behavioral: formerly an arcanophobe and lacking in any magical ability whatsoever, she now possesses a strange form of blood magic that she cannot fully control. It seems to be a direct manifestation of her anima, appearing as stigmata from her hands in response to as-yet-unknown subconscious triggers; fearing and detesting it, she is never seen without gloves or some sort of hand coverings.

Standing about 160cm tall, Cordelia is a slight, delicate-looking woman who could vanish quite easily in a crowd. She wears her dark blond hair to neck length, and no jewelry or ornaments except for a crucifix chain at times. Many have remarked that the first thing they notice about her is her eyes, which a poetically inclined ex-colleague once likened to "Uncut sapphires long left / To mercy of wind and sand". They peer out at the world from behind plain square glasses: tired, unfocused, as if she is perpetually distracted by something only she can see.