THE FELLOW CAGED
Below are character descriptions and backstories of the other prisoners. Please improvise a short piece based on these where you are being asked who and where you are then send a link to your self tape through the contact box at the bottom.
Thank you
Thank you
Name: Meredith Eddows
Bio: A woman who regards herself as very little, who has floated through her existence on the whims of others, keeping her head down, doing as she's told, attempting to avoid all forms of conflict or even notice, save in the most cushioned and cosseted manner. Perpetually weary, an insomniac since the age of twelve, the night time hours the only place where she dares allow herself to express what she cannot and never has in day light: replaying the encounters of her days; the little discourtesies, the profound insults, that her day-light self allowed to slip, that she barely even registered, imagining them as she wished they went, picturing herself in a more aggressive, assertive condition, dissecting the souls of those who frustrated her with words of scalpel-sharp precision, exposing their most intimate insecurities, that she sees as clearly as her own reflection in the bathroom mirror, telling them the secret stories they won't admit, even to themselves. Never having the courage to live as she imagines, to be the woman she wishes, hating herself most of all for it; her entire life nothing but a string of those same disappointments, a testament to her own passivity: a husband who she does not love and never has; who sits squalidly in her life with no more significance or passion than the sofa in the living room, than the willow wilting in the garden, children who barely acknowledge her, now that they've left home; who can barely disguise their impatience with her, whenever they are forced to return to the nest. Like all who find themselves within Abarise's cloisters, far more than she appears or allows herself to realise; that night-time self, a thing of wild abandon, doing far more than merely dreaming or imagining, especially in recent years: taking itself out, out into the night, losing itself in fugue states that Meredith doesn't clearly recall on waking; only that she has found herself stirring in the spare room of her family home, feet and legs coated in sludge and filth, hands the same, sometimes with the taste of meat or blood in her mouth. She has found that secret, assertive self bleeding through into her waking life more and more in recent days, a fact that she as terrified of as she is exhilarated, her marriage brought to the brink of collapse by her newfound wilfulness, her children growing more distant, none of which Meredith particularly cares about or is concerned enough with to pursue. As for what allowed her to pass through the veil into Abarise, she can't recall on waking there, or won't allow herself to consciously remember; one of those that the Surgeon's favour, her shivering, mutilated form always returned to her cell as though freshly stitched together after being flayed alive or torn apart, shivering, whimpering, rare moments of lucidity occurring as her sublimated self becomes more and more overt.
Name: Noah Dahl
Bio: An orphan, abandoned by his Mother shortly after she gave birth to him, found screaming at the top of his lungs amongst the filth and refuse on the Mersey's shores. A creature that should never have survived, the doctors and nurses attending on him treating him as a corpse in waiting, relishing the moments of silence before the squealing began again. Surviving against all expectation, but still a sickly, skinny child, cast from one temporary home to another, a mote of grit in the societal engine, no place or purpose, waiting to be ground to nothing between its wheels. Not recalling the trauma of his earliest days; only that which followed; his life a litany of neglect and abuse, his existence one of filth, that he has come to accept as his principle definition: from the earliest age, having known suffering, having known abuse, having always been apart from the systems and impositions that might have proscribed personality for him, he has been alive to the songs of Abarise, has heard the Choirs singing in his dreams and in his waking thoughts. Though he hasn't been able to determine quite what they are or even if they're actually real, he is more aware of his state and circumstances than most, and is one of those that welcomes the sadism and suffering that the Surgeon's bring, who calls to them from his cell, who reaches for them and celebrates whenever they select him for their surgeries. He is one of the few amongst those taken who does not harbour any delusion as to escape or somehow waking from this living nightmare; who does not seek or wish to.
Name: Elisha Lizowski
Bio: A teacher, a poet; a some-times imbiber of hallucinogenic drugs, a man who has spent the vast majority of his life in contented isolation, even when amongst friends and peers; a fey and unusual man, who harbours the aspect of one who expects to wake up at any moment, and find that his entire life has been nothing but an idle fantasy. Never quite still, always animated; a wanderer, a walker, a lover of rains and winds and storms, a man whom others find fascinating and often strangely intimidating in his quiescence. Spends long, long hours walking alone through unfamiliar streets and fields and neighbourhoods, imagining what it might be to meet the one that might reveal some secret to him or vouchsafe the revelation that might unravel reality before his eyes; show him the seam to tug that will cause it to split and gape, the songs he has followed through the mist of dreams all his life spilling through. Like many who find themselves in Abarise, Elisha has a secret self, though one that is far from subconscious; a state of mind that he shifts into chameleonically, in the correct circumstances; that he has conditioned himself to inhabit when needs must: Elisha is not merely submissive in his love life, not merely masochistic, but enjoys degrees of self-mutilation that would undoubtedly see him ostracised and perhaps even committed, were it to become common knowledge: having felt twisted and askew in his own skin since earliest adolescence, he began entertaining fantasies of splitting out of it, of it becoming chrysalis like, from an extremely early age, the creatures he has imagined himself emerging as ranging from bizarre, spider-like beasts to winged and draconic serpents. It wasn't until the midst of adolescence, when the tautness and stricture of his own skin became unbearable, that he began to cut himself, hardly able to stand it at first, but returning to the act again and again, every time growing in confidence and the extremity of his self-mutilation, to the point whereby his then adopted parents could not longer cope with him, nor he with them; fleeing the one point of stability he'd enjoyed up to that point, recognising it for the trap that it was. Whilst he has been able to keep this facet of himself secret from his friends, his peers et al for most of his life, he has become increasingly urgent and more overt in his experiments in recent years, such that a recent effort saw him almost exsanguinated, which was the means by which he called the Choirs through to attend him, being spirited away to Abarise, where he has lingered longer than most, by choice if nothing else, knowing more of the state and its ways than any he keeps company with, though he is sworn to a degree of secrecy and silence, as they must each follow their own paths of pain, and awake to themselves on their own terms.
Name: Juliana and Cameron Duvall
Bio: Born into a bizarre cult that dominated their Louisiana hometown, the Duvall twins were venerated by the cult as manifest angels, born from the stars under which they were incestuously conceived. Subjected from their earliest conscious moments to a bizarre battery of veneration and abuse, the pair were never children, never allowed that status of irresponsibility, the weight of not only the town's survival but of humanity's imminent ascendence to a place amongst the stars placed on their shoulders. For all the reverence with which they were treated, both their family and the towns people feared as much as they adored them, the former in particular treating them with nothing approaching affection, rather an awe and distance that bordered on terror. The eldest amongst them, the man who was both their Father and Uncle, was almost schizophrenic in his treatment of them, bowing and begging before them one moment, spitting curses at and beating them the next. The pair grew in an almost perpetual state of terror and confusion, finding solace only in one another, in the strange dreams they shared, the places they walked when they slept or lost themselves in idle fantasy: places beyond the town, beyond the house that was their home and prison, beyond which they were never allowed to walk unattended. Seeing the world in their sleeping moments; the humanity that their kin bemoaned and denied as lost, as filth, as walking sludge...not aching for them, as might be expected, but wishing to walk amongst them, to know them, to understand them; creatures so strange as to be almost alien, whose lives were so bizarre as to make them of another species. It was't until their early adolescence that they began to realise those fantasies in the flesh; slipping away from their escorts, disappearing from the rooms in which they were locked and guarded by no apparent means. Their family, the townsfolk, could do nothing to stop them; a fact that drove their parents to the beyond side of anguish, who the town elders charged with their keeping and preparation for the day when they might all ascend to like condition, when they all became children of the stars. Out in the world, the pair learned more of humanity in their few hours of transgression than they had in all their years previous, and began to garner the scope that their kin would have denied them. Even so, they couldn't keep themselves from returning to the hearthside, no matter how urgently they tried, unable to endure the outside world for more than a few hours before finding their ways back to familiar climes, where they would summarily be punished for their transgressions. Eventual freedom was something they never wanted, never prayed for; to be like the ones outside, who whooped and barked like animals, who were so lost and lacking in purpose or meaning...but came nonetheless, when their family, their friends, their neighbours, all drank from the wine laced with their blood, beneath a moon so fat and full, a night so headywith stars, even they could believe that they might all ascend amongst them. Their place, their purpose; to act as shepherds for the rest, to guide them into the dark where they might be reborn as light and celestial fire. The town dying around them as the poisons took effect; every one expiring before their appalled eyes, until they were all that remained, still bleeding amongst the corpses of the only ones they'd ever known and loved. In that moment of quiescence, they heard the songs of Abarise clearly for the first time, recognising them as ones they'd heard their entire lives, though buried deep and distant. Together, they follow the songs out into the swamps, though the mists and trees, until they emerge in the wastelands of Forgetting. As children of Abarise, they are wholly ignorant of their natures, the myths their kin wove around them nothing but sorry echoes of the truth. Always together, never taken individually, they suffer their mutilations with more composure than many, having faced a semblance of the same their entire lives and believing themselves worthy of nothing less. Amongst the many gathered in this particular corner of Abarise, they are strange, in that they offer no protest when taken, displaying all the passivity of rag dolls, and rarely speak a word save to one another.
Name: Elizabeth Randall
Bio: Singer, song-writer, actress, composer; a woman whose ascendence to cultural icon began in her late teenage years, when a video of her playing and singing a song that she composed went viral on various video hosting sites, her life has been a whirlwind of transformations since before she even left home. Voluble, considered, clever and courteous; a favourite of her teachers and classmates alike, a girl who seems apart from the dross and the filth surrounding her, who seems to walk in her own private pool of sunshine. All a conscious and carefully cultivated mask, one that she has been wearing since her earliest years, when she first became aware of what people want from her; how to bend them to her designs and desires. From the earliest age, she has been able to wrap most people around her little finger, her Mother and father included. Exercising an almost preternatural gift for manipulation, she has surrounded herself by a myth so dense, so pervasive, it has become the accepted truth. At its core? Something even she isn't certain of any more; a thing that loathes the plastic smiles that makes her face crack on the inside, that barely hears the praise and adulation of those that proclaim love for her, save as animal bleats and farm-yard whines. So lost, so uncertain, no matter what the myth she has written and accrued insists. The only one that perceives even a fragment of the truth her younger brother, Anthony, who recalls who she was before she wove her mask, before she learned how to swaddle herself in stories. Estranged from her and the rest of the family owing to the favouritism their parents displayed, they have made cautious contact in recent years; encounters and conversations that are never anything beyond cordial, in which she has learned of the self-abuses, the dereliction, the periods of homelessness and unemployment that have bedevilled his life, that he blames her for, though he won't admit it. Learning through those conversations a little of her lost self; of the confusion at the core of the amber cloud she has woven around herself, the uncertainty, the strange songs that have informed her every moment of inspiration, but that none will ever hear, that those who have made a small industry out of her will never allow. Her way to Abarise marked in her brother's blood, she immediately found herself drawn from the wastes of Forgetting by the songs of a particular Choir; the same that echo in her own thoughts, that inform her own creations. Weeping as they take her, one of the few they favour with their attentions most profoundly; the many, many myths of self she has accrued having to be surgically peeled away, many wishing to sustain themselves as though they are souls in their own rights; states and personalities that have come to exercise degrees of autonomy and self will, however transient or unlikely. Her condition and state of mind is various, depending on recent experience; what the Surgeons have cut away or revealed in her. Sometimes she is celebratory, others despairing, sometimes sanguine, others lunatic. She sings often, songs old and new, semblances of the hymns she heard when the angels bore her here, though she can barely manage a verse or more before the blood in her mouth and throat silences them.
Bio: A woman who regards herself as very little, who has floated through her existence on the whims of others, keeping her head down, doing as she's told, attempting to avoid all forms of conflict or even notice, save in the most cushioned and cosseted manner. Perpetually weary, an insomniac since the age of twelve, the night time hours the only place where she dares allow herself to express what she cannot and never has in day light: replaying the encounters of her days; the little discourtesies, the profound insults, that her day-light self allowed to slip, that she barely even registered, imagining them as she wished they went, picturing herself in a more aggressive, assertive condition, dissecting the souls of those who frustrated her with words of scalpel-sharp precision, exposing their most intimate insecurities, that she sees as clearly as her own reflection in the bathroom mirror, telling them the secret stories they won't admit, even to themselves. Never having the courage to live as she imagines, to be the woman she wishes, hating herself most of all for it; her entire life nothing but a string of those same disappointments, a testament to her own passivity: a husband who she does not love and never has; who sits squalidly in her life with no more significance or passion than the sofa in the living room, than the willow wilting in the garden, children who barely acknowledge her, now that they've left home; who can barely disguise their impatience with her, whenever they are forced to return to the nest. Like all who find themselves within Abarise's cloisters, far more than she appears or allows herself to realise; that night-time self, a thing of wild abandon, doing far more than merely dreaming or imagining, especially in recent years: taking itself out, out into the night, losing itself in fugue states that Meredith doesn't clearly recall on waking; only that she has found herself stirring in the spare room of her family home, feet and legs coated in sludge and filth, hands the same, sometimes with the taste of meat or blood in her mouth. She has found that secret, assertive self bleeding through into her waking life more and more in recent days, a fact that she as terrified of as she is exhilarated, her marriage brought to the brink of collapse by her newfound wilfulness, her children growing more distant, none of which Meredith particularly cares about or is concerned enough with to pursue. As for what allowed her to pass through the veil into Abarise, she can't recall on waking there, or won't allow herself to consciously remember; one of those that the Surgeon's favour, her shivering, mutilated form always returned to her cell as though freshly stitched together after being flayed alive or torn apart, shivering, whimpering, rare moments of lucidity occurring as her sublimated self becomes more and more overt.
Name: Noah Dahl
Bio: An orphan, abandoned by his Mother shortly after she gave birth to him, found screaming at the top of his lungs amongst the filth and refuse on the Mersey's shores. A creature that should never have survived, the doctors and nurses attending on him treating him as a corpse in waiting, relishing the moments of silence before the squealing began again. Surviving against all expectation, but still a sickly, skinny child, cast from one temporary home to another, a mote of grit in the societal engine, no place or purpose, waiting to be ground to nothing between its wheels. Not recalling the trauma of his earliest days; only that which followed; his life a litany of neglect and abuse, his existence one of filth, that he has come to accept as his principle definition: from the earliest age, having known suffering, having known abuse, having always been apart from the systems and impositions that might have proscribed personality for him, he has been alive to the songs of Abarise, has heard the Choirs singing in his dreams and in his waking thoughts. Though he hasn't been able to determine quite what they are or even if they're actually real, he is more aware of his state and circumstances than most, and is one of those that welcomes the sadism and suffering that the Surgeon's bring, who calls to them from his cell, who reaches for them and celebrates whenever they select him for their surgeries. He is one of the few amongst those taken who does not harbour any delusion as to escape or somehow waking from this living nightmare; who does not seek or wish to.
Name: Elisha Lizowski
Bio: A teacher, a poet; a some-times imbiber of hallucinogenic drugs, a man who has spent the vast majority of his life in contented isolation, even when amongst friends and peers; a fey and unusual man, who harbours the aspect of one who expects to wake up at any moment, and find that his entire life has been nothing but an idle fantasy. Never quite still, always animated; a wanderer, a walker, a lover of rains and winds and storms, a man whom others find fascinating and often strangely intimidating in his quiescence. Spends long, long hours walking alone through unfamiliar streets and fields and neighbourhoods, imagining what it might be to meet the one that might reveal some secret to him or vouchsafe the revelation that might unravel reality before his eyes; show him the seam to tug that will cause it to split and gape, the songs he has followed through the mist of dreams all his life spilling through. Like many who find themselves in Abarise, Elisha has a secret self, though one that is far from subconscious; a state of mind that he shifts into chameleonically, in the correct circumstances; that he has conditioned himself to inhabit when needs must: Elisha is not merely submissive in his love life, not merely masochistic, but enjoys degrees of self-mutilation that would undoubtedly see him ostracised and perhaps even committed, were it to become common knowledge: having felt twisted and askew in his own skin since earliest adolescence, he began entertaining fantasies of splitting out of it, of it becoming chrysalis like, from an extremely early age, the creatures he has imagined himself emerging as ranging from bizarre, spider-like beasts to winged and draconic serpents. It wasn't until the midst of adolescence, when the tautness and stricture of his own skin became unbearable, that he began to cut himself, hardly able to stand it at first, but returning to the act again and again, every time growing in confidence and the extremity of his self-mutilation, to the point whereby his then adopted parents could not longer cope with him, nor he with them; fleeing the one point of stability he'd enjoyed up to that point, recognising it for the trap that it was. Whilst he has been able to keep this facet of himself secret from his friends, his peers et al for most of his life, he has become increasingly urgent and more overt in his experiments in recent years, such that a recent effort saw him almost exsanguinated, which was the means by which he called the Choirs through to attend him, being spirited away to Abarise, where he has lingered longer than most, by choice if nothing else, knowing more of the state and its ways than any he keeps company with, though he is sworn to a degree of secrecy and silence, as they must each follow their own paths of pain, and awake to themselves on their own terms.
Name: Juliana and Cameron Duvall
Bio: Born into a bizarre cult that dominated their Louisiana hometown, the Duvall twins were venerated by the cult as manifest angels, born from the stars under which they were incestuously conceived. Subjected from their earliest conscious moments to a bizarre battery of veneration and abuse, the pair were never children, never allowed that status of irresponsibility, the weight of not only the town's survival but of humanity's imminent ascendence to a place amongst the stars placed on their shoulders. For all the reverence with which they were treated, both their family and the towns people feared as much as they adored them, the former in particular treating them with nothing approaching affection, rather an awe and distance that bordered on terror. The eldest amongst them, the man who was both their Father and Uncle, was almost schizophrenic in his treatment of them, bowing and begging before them one moment, spitting curses at and beating them the next. The pair grew in an almost perpetual state of terror and confusion, finding solace only in one another, in the strange dreams they shared, the places they walked when they slept or lost themselves in idle fantasy: places beyond the town, beyond the house that was their home and prison, beyond which they were never allowed to walk unattended. Seeing the world in their sleeping moments; the humanity that their kin bemoaned and denied as lost, as filth, as walking sludge...not aching for them, as might be expected, but wishing to walk amongst them, to know them, to understand them; creatures so strange as to be almost alien, whose lives were so bizarre as to make them of another species. It was't until their early adolescence that they began to realise those fantasies in the flesh; slipping away from their escorts, disappearing from the rooms in which they were locked and guarded by no apparent means. Their family, the townsfolk, could do nothing to stop them; a fact that drove their parents to the beyond side of anguish, who the town elders charged with their keeping and preparation for the day when they might all ascend to like condition, when they all became children of the stars. Out in the world, the pair learned more of humanity in their few hours of transgression than they had in all their years previous, and began to garner the scope that their kin would have denied them. Even so, they couldn't keep themselves from returning to the hearthside, no matter how urgently they tried, unable to endure the outside world for more than a few hours before finding their ways back to familiar climes, where they would summarily be punished for their transgressions. Eventual freedom was something they never wanted, never prayed for; to be like the ones outside, who whooped and barked like animals, who were so lost and lacking in purpose or meaning...but came nonetheless, when their family, their friends, their neighbours, all drank from the wine laced with their blood, beneath a moon so fat and full, a night so headywith stars, even they could believe that they might all ascend amongst them. Their place, their purpose; to act as shepherds for the rest, to guide them into the dark where they might be reborn as light and celestial fire. The town dying around them as the poisons took effect; every one expiring before their appalled eyes, until they were all that remained, still bleeding amongst the corpses of the only ones they'd ever known and loved. In that moment of quiescence, they heard the songs of Abarise clearly for the first time, recognising them as ones they'd heard their entire lives, though buried deep and distant. Together, they follow the songs out into the swamps, though the mists and trees, until they emerge in the wastelands of Forgetting. As children of Abarise, they are wholly ignorant of their natures, the myths their kin wove around them nothing but sorry echoes of the truth. Always together, never taken individually, they suffer their mutilations with more composure than many, having faced a semblance of the same their entire lives and believing themselves worthy of nothing less. Amongst the many gathered in this particular corner of Abarise, they are strange, in that they offer no protest when taken, displaying all the passivity of rag dolls, and rarely speak a word save to one another.
Name: Elizabeth Randall
Bio: Singer, song-writer, actress, composer; a woman whose ascendence to cultural icon began in her late teenage years, when a video of her playing and singing a song that she composed went viral on various video hosting sites, her life has been a whirlwind of transformations since before she even left home. Voluble, considered, clever and courteous; a favourite of her teachers and classmates alike, a girl who seems apart from the dross and the filth surrounding her, who seems to walk in her own private pool of sunshine. All a conscious and carefully cultivated mask, one that she has been wearing since her earliest years, when she first became aware of what people want from her; how to bend them to her designs and desires. From the earliest age, she has been able to wrap most people around her little finger, her Mother and father included. Exercising an almost preternatural gift for manipulation, she has surrounded herself by a myth so dense, so pervasive, it has become the accepted truth. At its core? Something even she isn't certain of any more; a thing that loathes the plastic smiles that makes her face crack on the inside, that barely hears the praise and adulation of those that proclaim love for her, save as animal bleats and farm-yard whines. So lost, so uncertain, no matter what the myth she has written and accrued insists. The only one that perceives even a fragment of the truth her younger brother, Anthony, who recalls who she was before she wove her mask, before she learned how to swaddle herself in stories. Estranged from her and the rest of the family owing to the favouritism their parents displayed, they have made cautious contact in recent years; encounters and conversations that are never anything beyond cordial, in which she has learned of the self-abuses, the dereliction, the periods of homelessness and unemployment that have bedevilled his life, that he blames her for, though he won't admit it. Learning through those conversations a little of her lost self; of the confusion at the core of the amber cloud she has woven around herself, the uncertainty, the strange songs that have informed her every moment of inspiration, but that none will ever hear, that those who have made a small industry out of her will never allow. Her way to Abarise marked in her brother's blood, she immediately found herself drawn from the wastes of Forgetting by the songs of a particular Choir; the same that echo in her own thoughts, that inform her own creations. Weeping as they take her, one of the few they favour with their attentions most profoundly; the many, many myths of self she has accrued having to be surgically peeled away, many wishing to sustain themselves as though they are souls in their own rights; states and personalities that have come to exercise degrees of autonomy and self will, however transient or unlikely. Her condition and state of mind is various, depending on recent experience; what the Surgeons have cut away or revealed in her. Sometimes she is celebratory, others despairing, sometimes sanguine, others lunatic. She sings often, songs old and new, semblances of the hymns she heard when the angels bore her here, though she can barely manage a verse or more before the blood in her mouth and throat silences them.