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BALANCE - APP
Maria: You work your ass off just to add another day and end up taking three off in the process. | |
| APP HMD PATH Alex |
While I've done my best to not delve too deeply into anything I didn't need to, some topics can't be avoided while describing events/characters from this canon. So!
CW for references to prostitution and sexual assault in Maria's part of the story. And, just in case, for some of the content in the larger story that might be present in the wiki links: abuse and transphobia.
Also, due to the non-linear nature of this canon, huge spoilers for the whole thing!!
Character name: Maria Campanella
(note: while I'm including her full name, just to be clear, she won't actually be using this surname. When she's reincarnated past her canon point, she goes by the name Maria Campanella, but at this point, as her original self, she wouldn't have a surname at all.)
Age: 24
Canon: The House in Fata Morgana
Canon point: Post-death, that is, at the very end of The House in Fata Morgana: A Requiem for Innocence
History: Wiki link
While the canon is available in English, there's, unfortunately, no comprehensive wiki for it. The wikipedia link has just a few sentences, though TV Tropes does have a slightly longer summary of the premise. So I've tried to summarize the plot as briefly as I can here, in chronological order (as the canon itself is fairly non-linear):
The House in Fata Morgana is the story of a cursed mansion, where misfortune is said to fall on all who live in it. Maria is both one of the people who was caught up in its curse and one of the people involved in the events that kick-started the curse in the first place.
It began in a village in what was likely medieval Italy, when a woman, pregnant out of wedlock, claimed her child was the daughter of god. She the raised this girl, Morgana, to believe herself a saint and, when asked to prove it, claimed that drinking her blood could heal any affliction: a miracle. However, her mother, eventually growing tired of the fact that Morgana, who truly did believe all of this, refused to take any payment in exchange for her miracles, sold her off. She was then taken to France, to the home of the cruel Lord Barnier. He treated her as little more than a show dog during his extended sadistic banquets, where he was as likely to order slaves to kill each other as to take Morgana's blood for his guests.
She was, however, eventually rescued when a revolt began among the slaves of the household, led by a man from the slums, Jacopo. Jacopo then took Morgana to a brothel in the slums, where his best friend Maria lived and worked. There, she agreed to help take care of Morgana, along with all the other women in the brothel, and she made a life for herself there, dedicating her days to helping with the cleaning and cooking around the brothel, as she made friends with both the girls in it and Jacopo and Maria's other friends. She never told a single one of them about her life as a saint or her supposedly healing blood.
But the brothel was eventually the site of a bandit raid and Morgana was once again taken, though she escaped her captors not long after. She couldn't find her way back to the city she had lived in though, and ended up making herself at home in the small home of a woman who had only recently died. This all led to a series of events where, while in the city everyone Jacopo wrested control from Barnier and, eventually, as the new lord, fell deeper and deeper into his paranoia, Morgana made a quiet living bartering the old woman's wares--healing herbs and tonics and the like--and learning to make her own.
But, in efforts to help a new friend's little sister and her rapidly deteriorating health, Morgana revealed the secret of her "miracles" for the first time in years and it wasn't long until Jacopo, believing her to be an old woman near the end of her days, himself sent for her to be found, intending to lock her up in a new mansion, one he was renovating into a church. There, though he didn't particularly believe in it healing powers, he intended to use her blood in the city, in exchange for money. She died in captivity though, just before Jacopo, who had been horrified to learn her identity but too stubborn to simply let her go, had finally decided to let her go.
The ensuing chaos left everyone in the city dead and Morgana, not even knowing it had been Jacopo who had been keeping her captive, was left with an anger so great her spirit lingered in the mansion. Eventually, a young man named Michel came to reside in it, sent there by his brothers to avoid their father who wanted him dead. But his own despair at the events that had left him there was so great that Morgana's spirit was able to communicate with him, trying to convince him to curse those who had wronged him as she tried to curse those who had wronged her. She didn't succeed before his death, but the woman who had been left behind, Giselle, who had also eventually come to live in the mansion and had fallen in love with Michel (and he with her) agreed to her plan to help her with the curse, all so she could see Michel again.
Afterwards, all the souls who had been involved with Morgana's death, and the souls of those who had been close to them, were bound to the mansion, cursed to reincarnate over and over again, ending in tragedy each time. Until it was Michel's soul who came back and, with Giselle's help, he managed to get through to Morgana and, finally, break the curse.
Three key adjectives: Blunt, loyal, resourceful
Influential Events:
the slums: Maria grew up in an orphanage somewhere in medieval France. She had very few fond memories of it afterward, finding herself more frustrated by it and the nuns who ran it than anything else. She wanted a life outside of it, after all, much more than anything the orphanage and its rules could ever give her.
So, eventually, she ran away from the orphanage and settled in the slums of a large city, though it's never named in the story (with the events later on in canon, the implication is that this city was lost to history). There, when she was twelve years old, a man attempted to assault her, but she was rescued by a boy a little older than herself, Jacopo. He soon became her closest friend and, with his help, she and a group of other girls built up a brothel they intended to run themselves, without having to answer to anyone but themselves.
With how much she'd hated living in the orphanage, this was Maria's first true taste of home and where she began building the family she wanted with her friends.
While the rest of the girls who started it up eventually either moved on or died, loyal as she was to both it and the people in it, Maria remained with the brothel from start to finish.
She knew, really, that it wasn't a safe line of work. She knew she'd likely be better off if she left and she did, in fact, at one point, advise another girl to only stay with the brothel for exactly as long as she had to in order to gain whatever money she needed, and no more. She deserved a better life than what she could have in the brothel, Maria reasoned.
The thing is, she just never thought of herself having a better life as an actual option.
the first revolt: The city was ruled by a cruel and sadistic lord, however, and eventually, it was Jacopo himself who lead a revolt in the lord's mansion, freeing a large number of slaves. In the aftermath of it, Maria came to meet two of the slaves Jacopo helped free: Morgana and Gratien. And, shortly after, a woman named Ceren joined the brothel.
And she was happy. As time passed and they all slowly helped draw Morgana out of her shell, as they grew closer to Ceren, they, too, became part of what Maria considered her family. Though Jacopo and Gratien didn't live with them, as only women lived in the brothel, they were constant fixtures in her live as well.
Maria might have been rough-spoken, and often downright rude to them, but she truly cared about every single one of them.
This was, however, perhaps the last truly peaceful and happy period of her life. The peace was shattered by a bandit raid on the brothel, which left her as one of the only survivors, with Ceren and Morgana captured and presumed dead.
She'd never felt so helpless. But the only future she could see in front of her was one where she picked up the pieces that were left and carried on. There was no other choice, as far as Maria was concerned.
the second revolt: Picking up the pieces and carrying on with her life was exactly what Maria attempted to do. The problem was, however, that Jacopo didn't agree.
Though she warned him against it, pleading with him to just do as she was doing, Jacopo wanted nothing more than to take ensure something like the raid on the brothel never happened again, no matter what it took.
This led to a chain of events that ended with Jacopo, after being found by a woman who (falsely) claimed he was her illegitimate son by the previous lord, overthrowing Barnier with Gratien's help and becoming the new lord. His intentions were for him to improve life in the slums, along with the whole city.
While she was doubtful of Jacopo's new position, she still took the time to teach herself to read and write, hoping to be able to assist the new lord. Maria loved her friends, after all, and Jacopo was her best friend. She was loyal enough, and trusted him enough, to believe he'd keep his word.
But as time went on and nothing in the slums improved, and as none of Jacopo's old friends, Maria included, were contacted in any way, she only grew more and more doubtful and worried for Jacopo. This culminated in what was, unbeknownst to Maria, an assassination attempt on Gratien's part, leading to Jacopo having most of his old friends killed.
Seeing their heads displayed in the town square, the heads of men she had known as either her own friends or Jacopo's, things finally began to irrevocably shift for Maria. Her trust wavered, her doubts finally overpowering her own worries.
Had she been wrong to trust him, even in this? Did the Jacopo who had been her best friend even exist anymore?
losing family: She had no contact with Jacopo in the years that followed. There was no way for her to know what he was thinking, why he acted the way he did. All she saw was the results. She saw a lord who grew more and more paranoid, who might not have been cruel and sadistic in the way Barnier had been, but who become a tyrant in his own right, the city held in a tight grip. And while the city itself might have flourished somewhat even under his iron rule, the slums stagnated.
Her trust in her best friend wavered even more.
It was by the time that Jacopo had some nun (one of the girls she had grown up with, though Maria wouldn't find this out before her death) giving out some "miracle elixir" in exchange for tithes at his new mansion turned church that Maria had finally had enough. It was too much. It was all the opposite of everything Jacopo had ever talked about wanting.
Telling herself that he was no longer the man she once knew and that she was simply attempting to stop an old friend from falling even further, Maria began to plan an assassination attempt. Years ago, she could never have imagined doing it, but even if it cost her her life, she decided it would be worth it, as long as she got to stop him. It would be her last favor to him. Maybe it would even be her last chance to speak to him, before the deed was done.
She failed, however. And, in return, she didn't get any answers or even lost her life. All she saw was a man she didn't recognize with her friend's face and was left with a broken arm, courtesy of Jacopo's bodyguard, for her trouble.
It was shortly after that Jacopo was killed by an angry mob at a festival, when the truth of his "miracle elixir" is discovered: blood. It had been blood, from a witch he had kept locked in a tower in the new church, a girl. And who could this girl be but Morgana, having survived the raid on the brothel and escaped her captors, making a living the past few years by taking the place of an old witch who had passed away, selling her stock of medicines in exchange for supplies.
Maria didn't know anything about any witches, about any supposed magic blood, about just what Jacopo had been thinking. But the very last of her trust in him, if indeed any had been left, disappeared then. Her best friend truly was gone.
And as loyal as Maria was, the opposite was just as absolute. Once she'd decided she no longer trusted someone, there was no turning back.
However, a plague began to spread across the city, with the people believing it was the witch's revenge, in the form of a curse. When she was identified as an old friend of Morgana's, other townspeople attempted to capture her. Due to her broken arm, she was unable to escape and, in the hopes of appeasing the witch, they locked her in the mansion's cellar.
There, as she was weakened more and more by lack of food and water, she carved a warning in the floor of the cellar (laughing to herself about the fact that she was "a whore who could read and write.") In her last moments, she realized that she, too, had caught the plague. It was a hallucination of herself with her friends, back in the slums and happy, that accompanied her as she succumbed to the illness.
the virgin mary: Note: this one's past her canon point and I only include it to show not only what Maria is capable of under the right circumstances, but where her development can go.
There was, indeed, a curse, binding all the souls who had been involved in Jacopo's to the mansion where Morgana had died in, cursed to reincarnate over and over again, and to have their lives end in tragedy each time.
While Maria had nothing to do with Morgana's death, her soul was bound to the mansion as well, simply because she was meant to be part of Jacopo's curse. She reincarnated in Sicily in the 1800s as Maria Campanella, granddaughter a capofamiglia. There, she became friends with Jacopo once again. But her trust in him began to erode much sooner when, in efforts to have his family take over, his father had her father and grandfather killed.
It shattered, irrevocably, when she moved to the United States after he did, years after her family was left with nothing. He said the best he could do to help her was make him a maid in his mansion. The very same mansion from medieval times, of course.
It's canon that events that affected people deeply enough can leave a mark on their souls, carried over even into their next lives, though they won't remember why. So it's likely that the betrayal she felt in her first life was so profound that it was that very same impression left on her soul that prevented her from giving Jacopo the benefit of the doubt as long as she did the last time.
But perhaps more importantly than that? In the 19th century, Maria's resentment and anger toward Jacopo had time to fester. It wasn't only a few years of confusion followed by betrayal this time. This time, it was practically half her life. And when they reunited?
Well, why should Jacopo get to have the cushy life with the pretty little wife, when it was all built on what she would have been able to inherit if she weren't a woman, after all? His life was built on her family's corpses. Everything he had was what she believed she should have.
In her quest for revenge, Maria was much more ruthless than she had been in her original life. She manipulated both Jacopo and his wife, Michelle, all to make Jacopo suffer for his and his father's wrongdoings, making them both believe she was their only ally, all while lying to them the whole time. She encouraged Jacopo to believe that Michelle was cheating on him, all while telling her that Jacopo had never loved her.
She even jokingly called herself "the virgin Mary," while speaking to Michelle, because she was just so good and couldn't have possibly ever wanted anything but Michelle's happiness.
In doing so, she had no other goal in mind than simply seeing how far she could take it and how much she could ruin Jacopo's life, as her own had been ruined. Michelle was little more than collateral damage for her and, indeed, she did try to convince him to divorce Jacopo more than once. That would have suited her purposes just fine as well, after all.
Her actions, in the end, managed to exacerbate the shaky situation between Jacopo and Michelle to the extent that, in the end, Michelle was driven to the end of her rope, simply wandering away from the mansion, barely coherent and never to be seen again, in the end.
Maria died again shortly after, however, when in the middle of confronting Jacopo he once again got the upper hand on her and shot her fatally.
Link to Samples: Link to Sample 1; Link to Sample 2;
Chosen path: Cleric
3 Abilities:
○ Channel Divinity: You feel the presence of your god with you and can use it to cause an aura of healing around you, once per day, that can bring a person back up to half their health.
○ Acolyte: Wherever you go in a city, you're always able to find a temple that will take you in and provide room and board to you.
○ Proselytize: You are extremely good at spreading the word of your god to other people. Providing guidance to them can help them become more amicable to your cause.
Why this path?: Honestly, it's because I thought it was ridiculously unfitting.
To elaborate, in her first life, she hated the nuns she grew up with. In her second life, however, while trying to ingratiate himself to Jacopo's wife, placing herself as her "only ally" in the mansion, a virtuous maid looking only to help the mistress of the house, she jokingly called herself "the virgin Mary," even though the whole time she'd been plotting behind Jacopo's back and, ultimately, only helped exacerbate the situation that likely led to Michelle's death. (Also in contrast to the self-deprecating manner she used to refer to herself being a prostitute in her first life.)
So, honestly, I just it'd be interesting to have her face actually being a cleric, so to speak.
blurb code by photosynthesis