Imojen Fairbanks

By --Thunder Bolt--

• September 1, 2013




Age: 15

Gender: Female

Species: Non-Pony

Cutie Mark: In RP's where Imojen is turned into a pony, her cutie mark will be the alchemical symbol for the Philosopher's Stone: a circle surrounding an equilateral triangle with a square inside it that sits on its base and touches the sides with its upper corners, which in turn contains a circle whose diameter is equal to the square's side length.

Personality: Though Imojen usually wears Goth clothes, she exhibits an irrepressibly bright, cheerful personality, as if in mockery of the dark, spooky image a Goth is supposed to present. She is friendly to everyone--even people who make fun of her--but has difficulty finding or keeping friends because she refuses to conform to any clique or social type, and her weird personality quirks tend to embarrass people who might otherwise let themselves be seen with her. She is a joker and a prankster, but her pranks aren't designed to hurt or humiliate people--rather, they're more like "practical Zen koans" intended to make people think, jolt out of their "normal world," or just wonder, 'What the heck was that?!'<br /><br />Imojen is deeply mystical, though her spirituality does not recognize a separation between the spiritual and material worlds. She delights in the weird, the bizarre, and the unorthodox. She deliberately makes herself a center of Fortean High Strangeness. Imojen frequently has mystical experiences, and sometimes talks to her kiwi bird Tulpa, Myakiznak, in public. <br /><br />In game-worlds where the paranormal is real, she is a Weirdness Magnet: If there's anyone in the party to whom the ghosts/ufo aliens/cryptids/etc. would appear, it is her. If there is to be a materialization of ectoplasm or a rain of fish from a clear sky, she's at the center of it. <br /><br />Though she has fully accepted and embraced her weirdness and has plenty of confidence and self-esteem, there is also an inner loneliness that is only rarely apparent. Normally, she works to transmute her pain into comedy.

Backstory: Imojen's parents were oriented toward success and projecting the image thereof. Her father was a prominent real estate developer, her mother a successful realtor. Imojen was supposed to be the trophy child who made their family complete. <br /><br />Imojen was born with an unusual birth defect: her toes are fused together into two "segments," big toe and index toe in one, the rest merged in the other, with a deep split between them. As a result, she has "cloven" feet which require custom shoes. Her feet impair her balance somewhat, making it more difficult for her to do things like run fast or perform ballet moves. Imojen's feet made her a laughingstock among other children from a young age. Adopting a "lemonade from lemons" attitude, she decided to hold her freak flag high, take the stage and make people laugh on purpose.<br /><br />Her parents made various attempts to nudge her toward being a "normal" child. Ballet and gymnastics classes failed on account of the effects her feet had on her balance, and the acting classes had too many other odd kids for her parents' purposes. Then, she was given a chemistry set. She took to it immediately, and started learning everything she could about chemistry. Her parents were just about to settle for having a Junior Scientist for a daughter when her little laboratory started to look more like something Merlin might have, than that of a proper lab-coated young scientist. Imojen had begun to add a study of alchemy to her chemistry. She also started to dabble in other areas of the occult, such as tarot, sacred geometry, and a wide-ranging interest in the paranormal.<br /><br />Seeing their daughter turning into an even bigger embarrassment was the final straw for a marriage already stressed to the breaking-point by constant competition between two high-achiever egos. The custody battle in their divorce was the opposite of the usual, as each parent tried to foist her off on the other.<br /><br />The pain was too much for her to endure, so Imojen ran away. For awhile she lived on the streets, until she ended up joining a quirky hippie co-housing group. There, she found support for her mystical leanings, growing into a kind of Zen-animist street shaman. She learned how to make LSD and DMT, and grow psilocybin mushrooms. She learned Chaos Magick, including the techniques for creating egregores and Tulpas.<br /><br />Imojen's dream is to start an alchemical-psychadelic Mystery School.