Rosette (App Update - June 2019)

Howdy! It's that time again! Another update to Rose's app and artwork! I haven't completed all the text for her bio yet, but there is a very important section that I wanted to get updated before the window closed.

I'll let y'all know when I update again with more details in the other sections of her bio!

Terms of Address:

Rose (nickname, most people she’s met pre-marriage use this one)

Rosette (given name, less common)

Rosie (nickname, even less common)

Rosette Füeller (documented full name)

Lady Füeller (title and surname, she's not fond of it despite her husband's insistence on introducing her as such to new people)

Tai Ying (courtesy name, husband only)

Age: 61 (as of 1894)

Born March 27, 1833

Entered Sybal-Heim November 15, 1854 without a time skip

Physical Age: 21

Height: 5’6”

Hair: Brown

Eyes: Brown

**Faction: Conservative Disciple**

When Rose first entered the city she was bitter, angry, and had significant trouble figuring out who it was she wanted to be since it wasn't something she'd had a chance to sort out in her previous life. Her first decade was particularly difficult, and she was very much the spoiled youngest daughter with no direction of a very rich family. However, the Insurgents weren’t able to heavily influence her to the extreme side of the spectrum and further pushed her away with the actions of their more extreme members. This gave her a chance to settle down and figure out what it was she wanted and to slowly develop into the happy shopkeeper she is today.

Her marriage to Wen Ta Yeh helped solidify the shift in her views from insurgent to disciple. Their marriage was rocky to start, but they love each other dearly and with his help she has been able to find the love and companionship she did not think she’d have an opportunity to experience. Befriending Theo, Tris, and others in power also helped deflate her uneasiness around those with authority and she doesn’t feel the fear and resentment of keeping her feelings hidden from them.

She still gets homesick, thinks that sometimes the government doesn’t always make the best decisions, and if she met Basileus at night she’d go full-on feral cat mode. But she is no longer bitter towards the city like she once was.

That being said - Rose understands that there are people who are unhappy with the city and do not want to be there, but she strongly believes that this is no reason to instill fear into the lives of people who are happy. There are better ways to share grievances about the city than causing mayhem and chaos, and she is not afraid to be vocal about it. In fact, she frowns deeply upon extremism from either side as it clearly causes major swings in actions from both groups. She will take any opportunity to listen to anyone that is unhappy and she hopes to be able to make the city at least a little more tolerable for those that would do anything to leave, even if she doesn’t quite know how...yet.

Occupation: Shop Owner

Rose’s pride and joy is the Rosen Bridge: Clockworks and Trinkets, her shop in Ambrotos that does clock repair and carries items like music boxes, clocks, and small gifts from different cultures in addition to allowing space for local artists to display and sell their wares. Given the centrality of timekeeping to sybalian life and Rose’s passionate work ethic, she has made quite a name for herself with a clientele that stretches from the lowliest bar bum to the highest levels of the ministry.

Her professional life underwent a bit of a change when she identified the structural unsoundness of the Heilig estates’ massive clock and became one of the major architects of the 1892-1893 renovation, splitting her time between working there and working in her shop. During her belated honeymoon in early 1893, she moved her workshop from the Rosen Bridge to the Wen Estate to spend more time at home, and for a few months after the Sybal Gala stopped working entirely. Now, though, she is back to work, and has even become the personal mechanic for Minister Tristine Serral’s prosthetic leg. New, exciting projects are on the horizon.

Sybal Form:

Der Alptraum (lit: The Nightmare), The Sapling Shade

When Rose’s first day in the city turned dark, she turned even darker - into a formless being of pure shadow. Essentially a cold, white-eyed, black cloud that moved by swiftly gliding along the ground, she could stretch and compress her gas-like form, often into a shape resembling an imp or into grasping tentacles, and more rarely into a solid body or razor-sharp weapons when she had enough energy and concentration. This energy came from the use of her power, and without draining a victim she would run out of vigor an hour or two into the night. Even at the best of times she was barely strong enough to lift a chair, and even when apparently noncorporeal she was vulnerable to injury from cuts and blows. Worst of all, the light burned her; moonlight alone caused her the equivalent of first-degree burns. Screaming in pain proved to be one of the only ways she could vocalize, as she can’t speak, only chirp, hiss, and huff, among other animalistic noises.

The Consummate Silhouette, The Twilit Paragon

Over the course of her belated honeymoon, Rose’s sybal solidified into a set form and has since remained that way, the only traces of her amorphous past being the smoky shadows emanating from her hands, feet, and ears. She is a gorgeous woman roughly the same height and build as during the day, with differences including emotive elfin ears, bound feet, and longer hair that blows in the winds of her husband’s sybal. Her hair has changed from black shadow to a softly glowing violet and her vulnerability to light has diminished to minor discomfort. She is still cold, light-weight, and physically weak - at about the peak of her old form - and her unfamiliarity with having a completely solid body means she is still learning to walk and reliably grasp objects, but her new appearance is something she’s finally starting to be proud of.

Since Rose had entered the city she had hidden away her sybal, and initially after her change Ta Yeh kept her cloistered in line with his Confucian-Sybalian views that a wife’s sybal should be a sight largely reserved for her husband. Only recently has Rose convinced Ta Yeh to take her out to explore the city at night under his watchful eyes, including festivals, stargazing, and meetings with friends who had not yet had a chance to introduce themselves in their sybal forms.

Sybal Power: Alpdrücke (lit: Elf pressure)

What truly earned Rose’s sybal the title of Der Alptraum was her power: an ability to sense, manipulate, and feed on particular emotions to prey upon the happiness of others.

Passively, she senses the presence and strength of desire in nearby sybals, though she doesn’t know what those desires specifically are; in her amorphous form, pronounced enough desires could cause her to unknowingly shift her appearance into shadowy versions of them, but now there’s no indication to her or to anyone observing.

The active uses of her power can be separate or simultaneous, but they all require direct physical contact, and the extent of their effect on victims depends on how hard Rose is straining them and on how long the contact lasts. At most, the supernaturally altered emotions can last 24 hours, but the trauma of the experience can last a lifetime.

• She can sap a victim’s will, which is the only mentally resistible element of her power. This carries with it a sensation of physical weakness, which can intensify into paralysis, and if the victim completely succumbs they fall into a deep slumber for up to an hour.

• She can inject anguish and fear into the victim, which will manifest in sedated victims as dreadful nightmares and in the worst cases can cause traumatic flashbacks even in still-conscious ones.

• She can drain positive emotion and take it for herself, but only in proportion to negative emotion she has injected. In her amorphous form, doing this amplified her strength, vigor, and shape-shifting prowess.

She hasn’t used her power actively since marrying Ta Yeh and is too scared of hurting anyone to try investigating if her sybal change has affected it.

Sybal Temperament: Feral

Der Alptraum was equal parts fearful and aggressive, viewing the sybals around her as frightening monsters, sustenance to drain, or both. The more miserable Rose was feeling at the time, the more the scale would tip towards the latter, and Der Alptraum would try to hunt down sybals for gratification. Rose locked herself up at night to prevent this, lonely as it was, but her absentminded nature meant there were always a few “escapes” per year. Her love of the forests was also amplified, making the Aionios Woods one of Der Alptraum’s favorite hunting grounds.

Her love of the forest, to her surprise, also extended to Ta Yeh’s sybal. When they lost track of time one night and met each other’s sybals, she was demure instead of frightened and  affectionate instead of aggressive, taking a youthful delight in his company and the stories he told her before she peacefully fell asleep after running out of vigor without any urge to hunt to replenish it. After they were married, they discovered her sybal to be playful and devoted, if dimwitted and [negative adjective], and their hour together before she fell asleep every night was a precious one.

After her sybal change, she is essentially “full” at all times and no longer falls asleep, though she concealed this from him for several months to avoid demanding his time. Even with a humanoid body she still has no nudity taboo and dislikes the weight of clothing.

Personality:

+: Friendly, hard-working, charitable, supportive

+/-: Extremely forgiving, energetic, occasionally goofy, occasionally mischievous, absentminded

-: Hot-headed, stubborn, impulsive, alcoholic, workaholic, sometimes naive

History:

Rebellious Heiress

The second daughter of the wealthy Füellers, who profited greatly from the rise of technology in the early 19th century German Confederation, Rose’s auspicious birth was followed by an inauspicious childhood. Her mother fell into a depression and blamed demonic possession of her newest daughter, whipping her to drive it out until Rose’s father discovered this and put a stop to it. Even so, Rose grew into a rambunctious ball of energy that would regularly sneak away from her caretakers to go play and fight with other kids in the nearby woods, to read her favorite fairy tales, and to dive through the estate’s massive collection of books on engineering. Her father even hired a tutor one year to try to sate her interest in machines, but afterwards it was back to the “proper lady” lessons she hated. Arguments about her unladylike behavior compared to her elder sister intensified as she approached marriageable age, but it wasn’t until a near drowning accident and the subsequent battle with pneumonia permanently tarnished her health that she submitted to them with any seriousness. She began to feel completely trapped, and her reputation had put off so many suitors that even as a Füeller her marital prospects were shoddy. After a particularly bad fight with her family, Rose ran off into the woods again, but this time they took her to Sybal-Heim.

Demon in a Bottle

If anything, the city was an even more demeaning cage, even if her health problems were resolved. In her sybal she found confirmed every bad thing her mother had ever said about her, and worse. She took up the bottle to drown her sorrows, and developed a crippling addiction. Taking a carpentry apprenticeship to support herself, it wasn’t until she started working towards a shop centered around her passions that things started looking up for her. Once it was open, she toned down her alcoholism in favor of workaholism (though she is still very much an alcoholic), and she started to make a number of friends. Marron O’Taite is her nearest and dearest, but she also struck up close friendships with Amynta Amenos, Edwin Einhardt, and Hoshimoto Kenshin, and even a brief low-key romance with Adien Nivtal.

Dragon’s Princess

Her life changed dramatically when her sybal met Ta Yeh’s and he fell in love with her, taking her stark change in feral behavior as a sign that they belonged together, and proposed to her. She accepted, and they were wed little more than a month later. Rose was quite happy with her change in lifestyle - even if a return to being concerned about proper behavior took some getting used to, especially the end to her frequent bar visits. Not long after their first anniversary, Rose showed her first signs of a sybal change, prompting a month-long belated honeymoon that finished the job. All was going blissfully until Rose learned that Ta Yeh had offered to take Deyri as a concubine, which threw her into a deep depression for months.

Additional Info:

• Rose isn’t unfamiliar with street fights and has been in a bar brawl or two. She has no issues fighting back, or even hitting first, as her assault charge (the only thing on her criminal record aside from public drunkenness) can attest to, but she’s no professional fighter - yet. She briefly received samurai training under Hoshimoto Kenshin and has more recently taken up fencing alongside her husband - and has proven to be a quick study.

• Rose has a trifecta of phobias: rivers and other large bodies of water, after her near drowning; doctors, due to all the unpleasant time spent around them in her state of sickness; and the dark, what with all the monsters like her it must be filled with.

• During the Riots of 1894 she received a wound that scarred over her left eyebrow. She personally does not mind the scar and makes no special effort to hide it unless her husband is present, in which case she will cover it with her hair (she will only use make-up if absolutely necessary).

• Since her poisoning during the lockdown at the Immortal Harvest Banquet on Nov. 3, 1894 she has been uneasy in large crowds and will jump if touched unexpectedly, particularly on her shoulders.

• There are a few pieces of jewelry that she wears every day:

• A jade ring carved to reassemble her husband's sybal that contains a permanent seed-pearl conjured by Basileus; her engagement ring

• A golden band; her wedding ring

• A pearl-inset jade hairpin split in half between herself and her husband as a declaration of monogamy

• A bracelet with…

• A Lapis Lazuli stone from Marron

• The key from Theo's pocket watch (that he no longer needs)

• A custom wave pendant from Yuliana