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Ulla ([personal profile] neverwaitslong) wrote2020-07-31 12:53 am
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User Name/Nick: Tri
User DW: [personal profile] tricia868
E-mail: tricia868 at gmail dot com
Other Characters: Taura

Character Name: Ulla
Series: When Water Sang Fire / Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse
Age: unknown? a relatively young adult.
From When?: At the end of her story, when people have begun seeking her out to make bargains, but before Roffe and Signy's children are all born and grow up and seek her out.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate! Ulla was very lonely in her childhood, then made exactly two (2) friends. One of them used and betrayed her with no regrets, and the other one, who Ulla loved and trusted and did her best to protect, had regrets but betrayed her anyway. She has trust issues a mile high, several boatloads of righteous anger, and a thirst for revenge. All of these can be impacted by gradually forming connections with other people, including a warden.
Item: N/A
Arrival: She was brought to the Barge unwillingly.

Abilities/Powers: Ulla is both fantastic singer and composer and a very powerful magic user. Her people's magic works through song. Ulla has an instinctive grasp of the best ways to compose songs to optimize the power in them, and she approaches music and magic creatively. Some of her invented spells were sung using an entirely different scale than the ones used by other mermaids (called sildroher) for centuries. Because her songs so thoroughly break with tradition, some people find them jarring or off-putting, but they can't argue with the results.

Ulla does a number of things that ought to be impossible. Creating life that will keep on living once the spell is not longer sung is incredibly challenging, but she and Signy sang whole beautiful gardens into being and populated them.

Weather magic is a particular talent of hers, though of course she won't have access to it when she first comes on board. Weather magic is supposed to require more than one person to enact the spells, but Ulla once used a magic mirror to amplify her own magic and her own voice, singing with her reflection rather than another of her own kind.

She can also, like any of her kind who know and can manage the spell, cut into her tentacles and perform a very painful magic that turns her human; the knife is supposed to become unusable if touched by anything of the land, but Ulla managed to improvise a transformation spell even after her knife was destroyed and she was left for dead. Because the knife and the spell were warped and different, Ulla was too, afterward. She was no longer a mermaid, with a fish's tail. Instead, she grew a long black eel's tail. Either the Admiral will have to force a transformation and keep her human for the start of her time here, or the Barge will have an eel-tailed witch slithering through its halls.

Ulla is naturally graceful, though it takes a little while to find her metaphorical feet if she grows actual ones.

Personality: Ulla hates needing people. After her first time singing with Signy, she expected everything to stay as it always had - with everyone ostracizing her, wondering if her mother had managed to reproduce with a human, judging her. So it came as a shock when her talent overcame any reluctance that Signy had to associate with her. It also came as a brief flash of resentment; she hated that she had to be grateful. That the power to change her life for the better was entirely in Signy's hands.

Ulla was always ambitious. She wanted to earn the respect that no one was willing to give her. She knew she was talented, and she knew that one of the few chances for her to earn acceptance was to be so good that she gained a place as one of the court singers. Signy was both her first and dearest friend and a support to her goals. The two of them individually were good. Together, they were incredible. Ulla handled the innovation and a lot of the raw power, and Signy had a knack for following along, for weaving in and out of Ulla's unusual melodies without missing a beat. They were two nothing-girls, but on the prince's birthday, they tried things that had never been tried before, which is always a risk. Ulla warned Signy that people wouldn't understand, and held her hand to brace her as everyone winced at the sound of music sung in an entirely new scale. But their spell was successful beyond anyone's expectations, and they got all of the acclaim and attention they'd hoped for. It was a stepping stone for both of them, hoping for a better life.

Ulla is vengeful and angry and nursing deep hurts and grudges because she loved Signy just as deeply. The betrayal was unforgivable because only one person in the world had the power to hurt her that way. She'd never let anyone else sink their hooks into her so thoroughly. Signy meant the world to her. She watched as Signy fell in love, and knew that Roffe didn't return Signy's feelings. Ulla was dispassionate enough to see what was coming, but cared so much that she was desperate to avoid seeing Signy's heart break.

And so, when push came to shove, she did the unforgiveable. She participated in the murder of an innocent. Roffe said he was a criminal, but if she'd been anything but desperate she would have seen the lie for what it was. And he and Signy both left Ulla for dead, to carry the secret of what they'd done to her grave as the two of them built a life together.

Ulla has the kind of bone-deep stubbornness to find a way out of hopeless situations, fueled by ambition or by love or by bitter rage. She's clever enough to find unconventional solutions, and determined enough to see them through whatever the cost. Growing up with slow-moving ambition taught her patience. The kind of patience that can wait a generation for revenge. Signy's betrayal broke something in Ulla. She has no one now, and nothing to keep her warm save the hope that someday she can return that terrible favor.

Barge Reactions: Ulla will not react well to being on land with her tail, or to being human with no ability to change back. She can get by either way, but she likes to have control. She'll be initially very nervous about her own vulnerability without her magic, hiding as much of her skittishness as possible under a layer of aloof calm. Breaches and floods may open chinks in her armor, and let people start getting close to her, or they may just make her furious. The initial adjustment is going to be a hard one. She'd just gotten used to being alone, and to having control over her entire environment.

Path to Redemption: Ulla will at first be both reluctant to accept help because she doesn't trust in altruism and believes everything comes with a cost, and reluctant to trust anyone's good intentions. She trusted exactly one person before, and look what came of it. She'll probably never be sweet and kind and benevolent, but if anyone is patient enough to earn her trust, there's the possibility of turning her and her power to a less vengeful and more positive direction. Trust is absolutely key. I think that in order to earn her trust, people will need to offer her not just help but vulnerabilities of their own. She is observant and willing to pry at people's weaknesses without remorse, but wouldn't know what to do when faced with someone who offered them up of their own volition. She would probably find it foolish, but also find herself less willing to exploit those weaknesses.

Giving her back her magic and some semblance of control will also be important, but should be done with caution until she has some motivation not to hurt the people around her.

She was ambitious all her life, and she may need a new, constructive ambition. She went from craving acceptance and recognition to craving revenge. Roffe teased her, calling her "hungry Ulla." She doesn't know what it's like to live without hungering for something.

Deal: N/A

History: Link

Sample Journal Entry: [She looks and sounds aggrieved. Grudging. But everything comes with a price, and this is such a small one to pay in exchange for what she could potentially gain.]

I promised I would do this, so tell me about the music of your worlds. Or about the magic.

The two are one and the same, at least for my people. You shouldn't choose a song because it's pretty. Pretty songs make for easy spells. Nothing new, nothing different. Everyone knows how to sing a pretty song, just as everyone knows how to do easy magic. If you spend half of your efforts seeking an audience's approval of the song they hear, you aren't paying close enough attention to what your song could do. Your spells will be as boring as your songs. Most people never realize that, even among the sildroher.

Sample RP: Otherworldly singing, following none of the usual rules of composition, drifts across the deck and through the upper halls of the ship for some time. And then it ceases.

It is inconvenient as well as dangerous to be a sea witch on a ship that sails somewhere other than the ocean. To be braced for discovery, for human swords drawn. She can get by, her long eel's tail slithering along the deck behind her, but Ulla is seething, quietly furious that her songs have no power, that she has no knife and no magic to make herself human long enough to find an escape. She waits, wary and angry, knowing that for the first time in a long time, she isn't armed against anyone who might come.

She hasn't tasted fear in years, but she feels it now.

Later, once she's had the chance to hear an explanation of what's befallen her, Ulla can be found by the pool, nose wrinkled in disdain at the smell and the inherent containment of it.

Or in the Enclosure, most of her submerged in the frigid sea along a rocky northern shore, the top of her head just barely visible among the waves as she watches you approach. Or outside the Enclosure, waiting for someone she can convince to let her in. Knowing, in the way of someone who has offered countless bargains, that help doesn't come for free.

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