#ALSO HER SKELETAL FORM LIKE SPECTRE'S REMAINS

[the3rddenialist]

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[themysticmusegallery]

For funsies, I’m laying out a few verses for my muses. Not full AUs, but rather different takes on their stories, essentially what ifs or in the cases of my longer lived muses different sections of their life. I’ll be listing these in each of the applicable blogs under Verses, and these can be requested for memes or RP at any time.

Without further ado, here are a few verses for Victoria Frankenstein:

(A note, these are pretty much all sections of her long life and options for her future, but any can be adjusted to present day circumstances if it helps interaction)

Little Delia: This covers Vicky’s early life before she discovered magic proper, the cutoff point generally being her ill fated doctor’s appointment. Here she lives with her family in a much younger New York. Known as Delia Goldman, she lives without knowledge of magic or magical creatures in a fairly poor part of town. She’s an incredibly shy girl, far more comfortable with her books or her dolls than with people. She’s very smart for her age, but unless she’s infodumping she often trips over her words, and rarely if ever makes direct eye contact. Her home life is often miserable, with her parents growing frustrated with her desire to read and learn about things other than the Jewish canon, how she recoils at social interactions and doesn’t even look her elders in the eye when speaking to them. This sadly is the kind of frustration that leaves bruises. Past a certain point her parents start to burn all her books save the ones specifically talking about their religion, forcing her to make little stashes of books where her parents can’t find them, often scattered around town.

Rat Queen: After being subjected to a charlatan’s “treatment” to try and turn Victoria, then Delia, “normal”. Rather than turn her into a good smiling Jewish girl, they got a hellion. Shortly after her procedure, she ran away from home, and quickly learned of her talent for necromancy, as well as those in the city who would take her head for using such talents on humans. So she began using them on something far more accessible and readily available in the depths of New York: rats. With a horde of undead rats swarming over those who stood in her way or stealing what she needed to survive, she drew the attention of the warlock Mairon the Red and his apprentice crew, Scarlet the pyromancer firebomber, Stick the illusionist trickster, and Mole the geomancer digger. For many years she ran with this crew, for better or worse through Mole’s cowardice, Stick’s arrogance, and Mairon’s advances, until one by one her competitors vanished. One through sickness, one through sacrifice, and one through the charms of fae, till only she and Mairon remained. This particular era of apprenticeship and limitations ended with Mairon’s death at the Rat Queen’s hands, felled by his own secrets that he’d thought were safely locked away.

Victoria, the Rat Queen after her mastery of using tides of dead rodents, is young and in some ways fairly brash at this age, but you can see the cunning that would later serve her well in full warlockhood. Of her group of warlock apprentices, she’s the most strategy and detail oriented. Due to her penchant for thievery, she also is usually the one providing for the others, pulling off jobs even Stick, the group pickpocket, can’t pull off.

Necromancer Ascending: These are more or less the formative years of Victoria’s warlock career, of her building her power base and resources while acquiring knowledge and connections enough to make her respected in the magical underworld. She goes through several names through this period, things like the Bloody Doctor or Lady Moreau, only settling on Victoria Frankenstein very late into this part. In general, the end of this era can be marked by her first execution, an unknowing (at least on the White Council’s part) test of her phylactery and Crimson Engine, a method for keeping herself around even after death.

In this part of her life, Victoria is far more cautious than she would become later in life, as she does not have a method for surviving a missing head till the very end of this era. It is here that she gets a penchant for disguises and false personalities, hiding in plain sight as she begins to merge science, medicine, and magic into her own unique spin on necromancy and biomancy. She’s beginning to develop her trademark personality, but only under several layers of false faces. She has quite a bit of power, but not as much as she would wield down the line, and not as much in terms of resources.

World War-Lock: This is a section of Vicky’s life, during her relatively modern run, taken specifically during the World Wars and the White Council’s war on Kemmler and his Thule Society. In the beginning of their attempted conquest of Eastern Europe, Kemmler and his servants began to court Victoria’s favor and resources. She was, after all, a powerful necromancer in her own right with a horde of her own and inventive magics that the White Council had trouble countering. With her on their side, they would have a much easier time steamrolling over native resistance.

Victoria wasn’t quite so eager. Kemmler and his society of necromancers, to her, stood for everything wrong with warlockdom. Far from “freeing themselves from the shackles of white magic”, they too often bound themselves up in ancient knowledge that clearly didn’t help their inventors to survive and, to her, pointless goals like ruling the world. Still, they were true to their word as far as necromancers tended to go, so she gifted them a few bits of technical knowhow and magical weaponry. Nothing world ending, of course, she saved those for funsies, but potent knowledge and items nonetheless. After a sustained silence on their end, Victoria made a surprise visit to see how her knowledge and weaponry were being used.

It was only then that she learned where the Thule society were getting their bodies to reanimate: the mass graves of the Holocaust. Now, Vicky will often point out that is not a good Jew. In many ways she’s almost the antithesis of that faith, forsaking most if not all of the Law and only celebrating the customs or traditions of the faith when convenient or if she were bored. One could even argue she carries some resentment for the faith due to the harsh orthodox treatment she recieved as a child. Even then, even through all that, deep down she still thought of these other Jewish people as her people. And to see them used like this, as puppets when they’d already suffered so much at the hands of the Nazis...

Perhaps it was one of the many selfish strains that tend to force Victoria into altruism from time to time, perhaps it was a shining moment of righteous clarity, but this revelation snapped something inside the necromancer. She did bring her horde to bear in Europe, but not as Kemmler and his lackeys had intended. Instead of turning them against the White Council, her monstrosities tore through the ranks of Holocaust dead, giving them “final rest” in Vicky’s eyes. She came in as a clad-in-black spectre of death against the Kemmlings, one of the few times she played into stereotypical necromancer style, calling down bolts of fire and earth on her foes from atop Bahamut, her largest zombie and her own personal mobile fortress.

While she did her share of fighting, she made sure to leave the thickest fighting to the White Council. After all, if Kemmler fell by her own hand, what would the Wardens think of it? Simply more infighting to take advantage of, and so she would get targeted as well. So began a very odd and tacit alliance between herself and the Council, rarely if ever acknowledged in word, only in the odd action on the battlefield.

Here, Victoria’s passions and fury are laid bare. She’s horrified and enraged that her own knowledge and tools were used to manipulate her own people when they’d already lived through the worst of humanity, and the magic she slings in this war is a major indication of this. She brings the worst in her arsenal to bear, and is much more flagrant about its use than she might otherwise be.

Deus Ex Thanatos: This is one of the major endings I have in mind for Victoria. Here, hounding from the White Council has hit its peak, annoying and frustrating Victoria into taking a route she might not have ordinarily taken. Finally snapping and wishing to shed any viable connection the White Council could use against her, she goes through a ritual ascention, using countless fossils to make countless microfractures in the time space continuum connected to the Great Dying, the Permian Extinction, one of the largest extinction events in Earth’s history. Taking in a massive amount of power into herself, reaped from the countless life forms dying on the other side of time, she ascended into godhood. Victoria the Necromancer became Victoria the Death God.

Of course, this came with its own set of problems. While she was largely rid of the White Council as an annoyance, she now had to deal with pantheons of other gods who didn’t take to the upstart very well.

So now you’ve got an even more confused, frustrated, unstable, emotional Victoria, who can incidentally command immense power and is unintentionally starting an underground cult among fledgeling necromancers.

Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak: Here, while Victoria wasn’t pushed as hard as her previous verse, she still expanded her knowledge of forbidden magics and pushed her powers forward. Unfortunately, this consistent push towards the dark arts is starting to take its toll on her soul and her body’s reaction to it. Past a certain point, her artificial bodies begin to break down before she says so, leaving an ambulatory rotting corpse before long. While she tries to remedy this by making bodies at a faster rate, but soon that became ineffective as the decomposition accelerated. At its climax, its all she can do to have some semblance of a human face on a skeletal body. At this point, she has become a true lich, fully undead with permanently glowing eyes and barely any flesh aside from a synthetic face.

Here, she fluctuates unpredictably from lamenting over her past appearance and her lack of need for bodily restrictions when it comes to magic. Here, she often truly seems insane, swinging between sad and angry and maniacal laughing in odd intervals. It is here, I think, where she could truly become not just an antagonist, but truly evil as her humanity slips away.

Victoria Redeemed: In this verse, as described in a long-ago Hundred Years meme, Victoria has renounced her ways. Possibly as an opposite reaction to her mind snapping in the other two verses, she finally seems to see the light and basically burns her home and work to the ground, laying to rest the thousands upon thousands if not millions of zombies therein, including her ever present Lassie. Of course with the built up magical energies of that place it may as well have been a nuke without the radiation, thankfully with a series of fake threats she managed to drive everyone else away.

Feeling she needed some isolation to get herself back on a better track, she went far away from her normal stomping grounds and found herself a little plot of land nestled in Oregon, with a peaceful cabin and a plentiful garden. She rarely if ever practices magic, and even then its usually to give the plants a little boost in bad growing years. She’s even given up smoking and drinking, which didn’t come easy but so far she’s clean. Only once she’s relatively confident in her abilities to abstain from black magic will she start to reach out to others.

She has no phylactery at this point, but neither will she avoid justice being sought. She knows she’s done terrible things with magic, but she would like to do some good before she finally goes.

[catherinewarnesartblog]

Artist Analysis: Pauline Darley

Pauline Darley is a photographer based in Paris, France. Working across the board with celebrities, musicians, companies and then her own portfolio of work. All her work adopts a similar style with natural beauty and people but featured on a harsh coloured backdrop. All of her work that she makes herself is featured in series. These series she calls stories, meaning each series tells a story either related to the individual, her or o one at all. I will be focusing on her story she made with model Clementine Levy called ‘She has waited too long’ made in 2012.  The title makes the viewer think about what she has been waiting for. And why time and waiting has been interpreted as dying and becoming skeletal remains. This series is about the essence of time and withering away.  She has so much that she waited so long for that a spectre of beauty on her body became a permanent reminder of living and dying. Its printed on her naked body forever as a reminder of the endless time waiting. Its so vague leaving the viewer with many unanswered questions yet also content with the unknowing of the story.

A little bit about Clementine Levy. She arrived in Paris back in 2008 with the ambition to model for many big companies. For years she worked for designers such as Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Hermes or Givenchy. She then made it to TV and moved swiftly into being a DJ for major parties like Jean-Paul and American Apparel. In 2015 she published a colouring book to raise money for Alzheimer’s research. Artists from all over came to help such as David Lynch, Charlotte Le Bon etc. And finally into the year of 2017 she settled down with her florist and barista courses and opened her first coffee ad flower shop named Peonies. It’s the first of its kind mixing coffee shop with flower bouquets.

The medium is photographs. They were made for a commercial piece in association with magazine called Ever. The series adopts a general colour scheme for a skeleton piece, using blacks, whites and greys. This monotone saturation in the photos adds to the aesthetic of withering away much like herself. The photos are becoming old and discoloured. It adds to the feeing of the pieces and overall creates more atmosphere in the pieces.

Though the work doesn’t show any form of texture or shape as its fairly plain it does show depth especially in her skin. It looks as if she is sunken and being suffocated by own skin. This is ever more present when shown on the websites of the magazine and Pauline Darley as the scale of the work really puts this into perspective. It takes the whole screen up forcing you to see the detail in the makeup. The viewers see the work in both a beautiful aspect but also depressing. This is the main reason both Clementine and Pauline’s work was chosen to be researched by me. My skeleton photoshoot was less studio based and more in the natural world and surroundings. I chose this series due to the professional aspect of a skeleton photoshoot but also due to what it was preaching. About pressuring the standards of natural beauty in everyday magazines. How a stunning model can become skeletal. I believe this is what the work can be related too. The natural beauty standards of our society today. I was exploring this too but obviously the ideas of changing oneself. I hoped viewers would see my work in both a beautiful way but in a depressing way too with the nature of the photos.