[Requiem] Background Stuff

[meltedcandle.livejournal.com]

Some random historic background stuff for my current Requiem character and vaguely in line with the September challenge thingy.

( Turning points )

September Challenge - Mortals

[lslaw.livejournal.com]

What is a person? Beyond the physical, a person is a mass of contradictions; an assemblages of thoughts, feelings, ideas and memories, co-existing and conflicting, cancelling and combining to form an apparently coherent whole. A person is both complex and complicated, with motivations diverse and often irreconcilable.

But not Chloe.

Chloe Willis is, at all appearances, simple. She appears to be a true amnesiac, with barely a year of memories. Such a loss without massive brain damage seems unlikely, yet movement and speech are unimpaired and she possesses a full and functional vocabulary, even if she has no recollection of where she obtained it. She writes songs, which come to her in dreams. And, of course, she believes herself to be from the future.

We as humans shape our relationships according to ourselves, seeking to create a hollow in another person's being into which we can fit ourselves. Chloe does not. Chloe has not grounding, has no 'self'; she takes people as they are and connects to no-one, not even herself. Unlike most amnesiacs she not only has no conscious wish to know where she comes from, but no unconscious desire to unlock those truths. She sublimates all to her sense of mission; he belief that she has been sent from the future for a reason she is not allowed to know. However, she already seems convinced that there is something off in her mission; in her own words, her song - the world-saving song of the future - is 'wrong', but she doesn't know how.

Lacking anything else, Chloe is sustained by the conviction that her amnesia has a purpose. Were her mission from the future shown to be a delusion, I do not think her mind could cope. She needs something else to take its place, some other memory of another life, before she could survive such a revelation.

Of course, every so often I find myself believing that she really is from the future, so great is her conviction given the absence of memories to contradict this belief. If I didn't know better...

But I do know better.

Don't I?