Luminescence

By Key Gear

• May 13, 2013




Age: 10 - 13 (Uncertain)

Gender: Female

Species: Unicorn

Personality: Her work ethics are beyond reproach. She will apply herself to the most tedious of tasks with as much diligence and energy as she can muster. She does not believe that she is above any type of respectful work. She does not like to owe others. She does not like to be owed, and will often refuse repayment for loans. She refuses all but the most strongly offered or desperately needed gifts, because she believes that she must repay others for what she is given. <br /><br />She is intensely curious, and she will ask many, many questions if given the opportunity to. She desires knowledge, seeking it with what is occasionally wanton abandon. Due to her nature, this may sometimes lead to dangerous situations for herself and others. She may not have normal limitations on what she is willing to do in order to learn or experience something once it has become a target of her curious mind.<br /><br />While she is a pony that many consider to look fashionable and she appreciates compliments on her appearance, she takes little or no notice of the appearances of others. Instead, when she sees them, she sees their behavior and their words. She has a poor memory for faces but an excellent memory for behaviors. Similarly, she tends to overlook the appearance of the things that she possesses, focusing mainly on their actual contribution to her lifestyle. In this way, she is a minimalist. She prefers to carry no objects of importance and to assign no importance to any object. Instead, she exists as she is, trusting in her magic and hooves.<br /><br />She, herself, is a proud pony, but arrogance is not the source of her pride. The source of her pride is her strength and her knowledge of it. In everything that she does, she applies herself to the utmost. She has tested the extents of her strength and abilities many times, pushing herself to her limits and discovering that it was possible to expand them. Her pride is internally focused; she has faith in her ability to survive and to endure.<br /><br />Her pride is not externally focused. She does not believe herself to be inherently above any other pony. It isn't even a conscious thought for her to decide this. She is well read, and she is aware of how the great may become suddenly lower and the less great may be suddenly elevated. As a result of this observance, she has accepted that all ponies are inherently equal regardless of who or what they are. Nopony is a unique and beautiful snowflake, all are flawed and all fall short of perfection. Similarly, all ponies are capable of the highest levels of nobility.<br /><br />As a direct result of her viewpoint, she demands respect from all those that she interacts with. If the highest princesses of the land are to be addressed respectfully, then this is what she will demand for herself. At an early age, she learned of a fictional hero that she resembled. As a result, she adopted the demeanor of royalty for herself to use as a mask. When she is in public or among strangers, she carries herself with a dignity that is vastly beyond her years. Permission is generally required to call her by anything other than her given name. She will demand apology for perceived slights, without relenting with anything less.<br /><br />She does not merely demand respectful treatment for herself. She demands respectful treatment from herself to others - friends, allies, and complete strangers. Unless somepony has proven themselves to be an enemy, she will gladly extend to them the respect that they extend to her, most times. For her enemies and those that are even somewhat hostile, she gives them nothing but her rage, oftentimes without limitation on her words or actions. With this said, she is not a crusader. She will not step into the affairs of others needlessly. She evaluates every situation for self-benefit.<br /><br />In line with this, she will not willingly take any action to lower herself in her own eyes or those of others. In social settings, she preemptively distances herself from any that might somehow mock or humiliate her. While she is capable of enduring such treatment, she has no understanding of why it is given to her and her efforts to understand frustrate her sensibilities. Relating to this, she avoids physical contact in most cases unless she has absolute trust in the individual. Even her parents were reluctant to hug her, but some strangers, she willingly accepts.<br /><br />She has strong beliefs in what is right and what is wrong, but her beliefs are not based on what other ponies would consider correct. All ponies are equally flawed, so she has concluded that there is no good and no evil within the dimension she inhabits. Instead, there is light and there is shadow. There are those that seek to control and those that allow others to exist freely. She considers the illuminating light and freedom to be the highest point of what is right, and to her, the concealing shadows and those that seek to control others represent the lowest point of what is wrong.<br /><br />Among strangers, in crowds, and in other unfamiliar settings, she speaks purely dispassionately and analytically, limiting her statements and remarks to simplistic, efficient dialogue. She does this to limit the ability of others to read and gauge her own emotions. She is very careful to carry herself in such a way so as to not demonstrate unintentional weakness. She fears being deceived or taken advantage of in any way. By projecting an air of strength, she decreases the risk of this occurring. To self-justify her demeanor, she assigns artificial importance to gestures that show emotion - smiles, laughter, even frowns. Based on the thought that these expressions should be conserved, she limits them. A rule that she readily abandons on occasion.<br /><br />As part of this defensive barrier, she will often take proactive steps to humble those that appear intimidating to her. She, herself, is intimidated by no pony, and she will look anypony in the eye regardless of their size and their strength. Once drawn into a conflict with an enemy bent on her destruction, she will not surrender and she will not back down. Instead, she will use every possible tool at her disposal to defeat an opponent, or she will fall trying. She does not believe in personal cowardice.<br /><br />She will not keep secrets. She is open and shares with those that have questions for her. If she is asked a question, she will gladly answer, even to perfect strangers, regardless of what the question is. She will not answer very many, though, because the intense curiosity of others concerns her. Only an enemy probes without ceasing, she cannot trust even her closest allies when they continuously question her nature. This is especially true because her own nature is, many times, beyond her understanding.<br /><br />She is a tabula rasa. While she has her own nature and demeanor, she also adopts the behaviors and mannerisms of those that surround her, usually focusing on a single individual. She does not do this purposefully. It is the unconscious result of her hunger for newer, different experiences and knowledge. Even as a foal, she evidenced the practice of duplicating the actions and behavior of others. She will take such duplication far enough to adopt speech patterns, accents, habits, nervous tics, and whatever else she can observe. Sometimes, this habit of duplication results in others believing that they are being mocked, but she never intends harm. In fact, she only rarely notices her own actions.<br /><br />Her pantomiming of the actions of others is a part of her natural process of understanding. She does not have empathy in the conventional sense of the word, but she has trained herself to look at a situation and analyze it in line with all inputs. She considers the emotions of others to be a valid input into her thinking process when she is looking at a social problem or situation. She is intensely imaginative, and she uses her imagination and her intelligence to "simulate" the empathy that others receive naturally.<br /><br />Many times, to understand another, she will create a version of them in her mind and interact with them, observing how they respond and making note of their actions and their thoughts. In this way, she is often able to understand and predict the actions of others with frightening accuracy. Unfortunately, this "pseudo empathy" fails when her detachment from the emotions of others leads to a disjoint between the expected and observed behavior. When this disjoint occurs, her demeanor becomes hostile, even to those that are hurting, because she is frustrated with their inability to comply with her own perception of their behavior.<br /><br />Because of her way of dealing with others, she very strongly prefers only interaction with those that are extremely consistent in their mannerisms. Those that are mercurial cause her tremendous stress. With every rapid change, they cause her to feel frustration, agony. Eventually, she begins to lose control of her own emotions, which she often struggles to understand and deal with. When she has judged the cost of dealing with another to exceed whatever benefits are offered, she discontinues contact immediately and distances herself.<br /><br />Once she has been burned or offended, she remains wary of the source of the affront for quite some time. Once something has attracted her fury, she bears a grudge against it for a long period of time. She does not believe that others can change easily. Instead, she believes that only a tremendous and tragic event or some other great force can change those around her. Once she has drawn a conclusion about another pony, she will proceed as though it is true unless she observes a dramatic change in their circumstance.<br /><br />She has an active, unpredictable mind and pattern of thought. She does not have the ability to consciously focus on things, but rather she relies on subconscious thought and observation to guide her actions. When presented with a difficult problem, she will only rarely study it. Instead, she prefers to feel her way around the problem or to simply leave. She has faith that, eventually, her natural subconscious thinking will provide her with a solution without the need for excessive thought.<br /><br />The tradeoff of her active subconscious is that she suffers from a constant lingering boredom. As a result of this, she seeks to amuse herself by finding sources of mental stimulation. This amusement can take any form - daydreaming while staring at a wall, building with blocks, playing games. When no alternative is available, her amusement may take harmful forms - destroying things valued by others, harming innocent creatures, and even worse things. (In an RP, she must be taught the value of caring for others before she is able to restrain her destructive impulses.)<br /><br />She is, as previously mentioned, deeply imaginative. Almost constantly, she envisions dreamlike worlds and imagines herself to exist within them. These worlds draw from anything and everything that she has read or experienced, and she has read an incredibly vast amount of fiction. As a direct result of this, she has the ability to be a great storyteller, but she lacks the patience necessary to tell any story of value or length. Instead, she prefers to keep her thoughts to herself unless invited to share in a mutual exchange.<br /><br />Despite her lack of overall empathy, she seeks friendship from a select few that earn her trust. Ponie that she has become familiar with and comfortable with are the recipients of not just her friendship but her love. Despite her apparent coldness and presented dispassionate nature, she is a strongly and tremendously passionate pony. Unfortunately, her lack of trust in others and her need to preemptively defend herself result in this passion being tightly and strongly contained. <br /><br />She evaluates those that she encounters, testing them to discern if they are suitable friends. Usually, within a short amount of time, she reaches a conclusion. Like a container under pressure, the friendships that she allows receive the the full blast of her contained passion. Once she forms a connection with another, it exists with a frightening intensity. She is beyond loyal to those that she loves, and she intensely loves all of her friends. While she is not naturally trusting, she believes that her analytical approach to evaluating other shields her from mistakes in her rapid evaluations of friendships.<br /><br />Unfortunately, there are many flaws in her approach to friendship. Due to her lack of empathy and her "mental models" of the behavior of others, her intense friendships can lead directly to her being taken advantage of. She will sometimes completely mistake the intentions of a friend and aid them in taking a path that she would not have otherwise allowed - shadows, secrecy, and control of others. Besides this, her belief that all ponies are equal manifests in her considering all friends to be equally valuable, sometimes leading those that have known her for longer to question her commitment as she gathers new acquaintances.<br /><br />Among her friends, as she becomes more comfortable with them, she allows her true demeanor to shine forth. Her speech becomes loving, emotional, eloquent, and intelligent. Her thoughts express a wistfulness and a wandering. Her demeanor varies from standoffish to strangely and awkwardly jocular. In fact, her true nature is downright mercurial, no doubt owing to how many ponies she has observed and duplicated the behaviour of, and it is ironic that she herself can be so seemingly unpredictable despite her dislike of unpredictable ponies. The only thing that remains consistent across her many faces is that she remains oddly distant, seeks to share amusement or activity, and allows herself to appear ridiculous.<br /><br />Her distance is a product of trust. She trusts no one, not even those that she loves. She fears allowing others to hurt her. Because of this, her distance, even with those that she loves is sometimes tremendous, even to the extent of her avoiding even minor physical contact. Her desire to share amusement or activity is part of her desire for her friends to do well, she considers amusement important for this. Her willingness to sacrifice some degree of her carefully maintained dignity is a result of her desire for friends to do well. She will play the part of the harlequin, doing whatever she can to lift the spirits of those closest to her, even if it requires her to humiliate herself somewhat.<br /><br />Despite her apparent maturity and often tremendous intimidation of others, her wistful, dreamy nature give her the ability to approach the world with the perspective of a young foal. She sees things, all things, as something of a game, with winners, losers, rules, and points. In such a case, she may break the rules for amusement. At the same time, sometimes she sees things as a painting or empty canvas. In such a case, she may draw a mustache on the painting or canvas, for amusement. Sometimes she sees things as they are, but from a different angle. In such a case, she will smash the angle and make it a straight line to see what happens.<br /><br />Ultimately, her greatest weakness and strength is her friends. Her love for them is often irrationally intense. If she judges a recently met pony to be worthy of her consideration, then she begins to elevate the trust that she places in them. There are no constraints on who the pony may be, their background or experience. Once she has judged, then she will not believe them to be anything other than a friend until they have, either unintentionally or intentionally, hurt her tremendously. At such a point as this, she crumples completely. All of her pride and strength are nothing in the face of such a betrayal, she feels the pain, amplified a thousand times over.<br /><br />At these times, she turns within herself, and she sees all of her flaws. She is aware of her lack of empathy. Once betrayed, she punishes herself for this by attempting to crush her own emotions. The result is to build the darkness within her, causing her to experience a fear and loathing for herself and for the friend that betrayed her. The result of this is a desire to destroy both herself and the betrayer. She will seek, immediately, to do so, with every possibly tool and method at her disposal unless she is saved from the edge of darkness. <br /><br />Due to her distance and cloaked nature, once her state of darkness has been reached, only tremendous forces can bring her back. Even still, the hurt continues. She takes years to recover from slights that others would brush off instantly. Even then, sometimes her mistakes in judgement torment her. When she is under extreme stress or she feels intense pain, mental representations of these instances and other mistakes haunt her, resulting in some apparent delirium when she is unable to control herself and attempts to fight back against apparitions that are only apparent to her.<br /><br />Her mercurial nature, seeking of amusement, intense passion, inability to intrinsically grasp her own emotions or those of others, and belief in the equivalence of all ponies make her a fairly chaotic pony. With the wrong circumstances or a bad influence, she is capable of harming all - even those that she loves. Within any RP game, it is essential that she find a strong guardian, otherwise she may become transparently evil. Beneficially, she is naturally inclined to latch onto those that are more grounded in their own identities and in that which she values - light and freedom.

Backstory: Her father's name was Wave, her mother's name was Radiant Light. Her father and mother were both earth ponies, and they were a young couple when she was born. Only a few months after her birth, her parents did not believe that she was a normal pony. She glowed slightly in the night, and she was a unicorn. Her parents were intelligent, reasonable ponies. Her father was a specialist in electronics but worked as a carpenter and woodworker for the town. Her mother was a curious, intelligent librarian. <br /><br />When she first began to glow at just a few months of age, her parents immediately took her to the local hospital, thinking that she was ill. The doctors, all of them, expressed confusion because her symptoms were unlike any that they had ever seen. Her parents were certain that something was still wrong with her, so they took her to many specialist. Finally, they found the one that was able to describe the nature of her problem. Luminescence was, unlike other unicorns, gifted and cursed with the unusual ability to channel magic with her whole body but without the ability to fully deactivate this gift. Her parents were happy to have an answer, but they had no idea what to make of it.<br /><br />What the doctor did not tell them, because he had no way of knowing, was that the young foal felt some residual pain from this. It was a mental pain more than a physical pain, but the difference was only semantic. The foal grew up differently than others. Her demeanor was, from the beginning, strangely silent as she watched her surroundings, moving sparsely and avoiding other foals. Shortly after she reached 3 years of age, her mother gave birth to another foal, a normal earth pony, Luminescence's sister.<br /><br />She had always wanted another young pony to play with, but Luminescence was tremendously discouraged with her first sister. The newborn foal seemed stupid. Luminescence did not grasp that she herself had been the same when she was a young pony. In absolute disgust, she turned away from her sister at an earlier age. Her parents noticed this and tried, in vain, to get their foals to see from the same perspective. Luminescence refused. Her parents were confused, blaming their foal's unsuaul nature to the unusual magical trait that she had.<br /><br />Despite themselves, her parents favored the newly born foal, leaving Luminescence to her own devices in most cases, because her mother was often too busy working to spend much time with her. Wholly oblivious to this change in her situation with her father, Luminescence simply spent more time with her great grandparent, an elderly unicorn named Sage Rose. Despite her age, Sage was wise, youthful. It was from Sage that Luminescence began to learn the importance of stories. She would sit for many, many hours listening to the beautiful stories that Sage would share.<br /><br />Encouraged by her mother, Luminescence began to read at an early age. When Sage suffered from a setback in her health, Luminescence experienced and recalled sadness for the first time. The elderly unicorn was no longer able to share her stories. Unable to deal with the emotion of sadness and loss, Luminescence threw herself into the stories contained within books, losing herself in them, reading at all hours of the night and day. Her favorite stories were those of noble lands, far away.<br /><br />From these books and stories, her worldview began to take shape. It was, of course, based on fiction, but she lacked the perspective needed to understand this as she ravenously tore through book after book, burying the sadness that she had never dealt with under a wall of words. By the time she went to school, she had already adopted her cold presentation, her worldview, her total demeanor. She began in classes so far ahead of her classmates in her understanding of how the world worked that, again, she was frustrated and set herself apart.<br /><br />It was at this time that the mockery began. The other students would mock her relentlessly. She confronted her parents and demanded that they address her unfair treatment, but the years during which she had been isolated from them had blinded them to the change in her demeanor. They were, at best, confused by her way of talking and carrying herself. They offered advice but they took no direct steps to remedy the problem. Confused, Luminescence turned, again, to imagination as her refuge. <br /><br />She endured a year of relentless mockery, ignoring those around her as best as she could, focusing her mind on building and describing things that, many times, were not there. Still early on in her life, her father fell terribly ill. Again, faced by an emotion that she did not understand, Luminescence drifted further into her own world, but this time, she did not reemerge. Instead, she ran away from home in the night. Using the knowledge of the world that she had built up in her many readings, she began to travel Equestria, learning what she could, working at simple jobs to earn bits. <br /><br />She lacked any and all sense of direction. She drifted, both in her direction of travel and in her actions. In her direction of travel, there were few places that she had not seen by the age of 11. In her actions, there were few actions that she had not experimented with to some degree by the age of 11, or at least have watched others experiment with. To her, they are all experiences, observances on the nature of existence. She seeks to gather more, and she seeks friendship, but her complex personality intereferes with both of these ends. This personality is the direct result of her unfettered escapism into fictional stories and worlds, a habit that she is no longer able to do without.