ABOUT.

[residues]

BASICS

NAME

Sister Maria Juliana

NICKNAMES

Jules

AGE

28

D.O.B.

20 December 1992

OCCUPATION

Exorcist

APPEARANCE

HAIR

Brown, very curly

EYES

Dark brown

HEIGHT

5′4″

PB

Gaia Scodellaro

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

APPEARANCE Short, slim, and distinctive in any room given the fact that she’s a nun, and a young one at that. She keeps her hair under a veil, but outside of it, it’s very curly.

CLOTHING Almost always in a full habit, light grey rather than black, but entirely covered. She wears no jewellery except for a simple set of wooden rosary beads. Often wears a dark green bomber jacket, and when she’s not on official business she wears lace-up ankle boots or sneakers rather than flat shoes.

DEMEANOR Cool, witty, unbothered by most situations. She’s probably seen worse. She laughs and jokes easily, but on the flipside, she doesn’t tend to let people in to what she’s really thinking. Her face is expressive but not revelatory.

AURAL American accent, possibly locatable to Arizona, but it’s not particularly strong.

HISTORY

world information.

Angels and demons are real and their influence on humans has been storied over the years. Some angels and demons will inadvertently ‘rub off’ their powers onto humans, either after a particularly strong interaction with one directly, or when a person or family has had a particularly longstanding relationship with an entity of some sort. Demons may try to persuade humans to make deals with them in exchange for the human’s soul, and there are ancient arcane rituals that brave humans can try, to bind a demon to them instead.

background.

Exercitus Dei is a small, zealous institution of the Catholic Church. Tasked with researching the phenomenon of celestial imbuement, Exercitus Dei has been trying for the last century to manipulate the process by which humans can develop powers, in order to create an ‘army of God on Earth’ which opposes the demonic horde which they believe is a genuine threat to the faithful. At first they selected the most faithful among their numbers and attempted to force angelic interactions, but when this technique failed to bring any results, they deemed it necessary to change their tactics for the sake of eradicating the influence of demons on Earth. Orphaned children across America were taken indiscriminately by Exercitus Dei agents, who then forced demons to possess them in an attempt to create circumstances under which powers were able to form. Many children were “overtaken” during this process, a euphemistic term meaning that the exorcism to save them was a failure and they were promptly killed by Exercitus Dei. Other children survived the exorcisms with no powers to show for it. Rarely, however, a child would make it through an exorcism and, under observation, begin to develop powers.

Jules was one such child. She was possessed at the age of seven by Aamon, a powerful demon and a Grand Marquis of Hell, and after being successfully exorcised, she subsequently developed a variety of powers. Initially regarded as a poster child by Exercitus Dei, Jules was dangerously telepathic and telekinetic, as well as possessing clairvoyant and precognitive abilities. She was sent to live at St Anthony’s in near Santa Fe, New Mexico, a convent run by nuns who had not been briefed extensively on the specifics of Exercitus Dei’s mission for the sake of safety. As a result they did not understand Jules’s importance, or the extent of her powers. Exercitus Dei was incredibly excited by her abilities, but the nuns who were tasked with looking after her were much too afraid of her to follow official guidance, and restrained and even punished her when she used her psychic abilities, something she often couldn’t control as a child. At first, she was simply locked in a dark room with limited access to food and water for days at a time, but she was also occasionally beaten across the knuckles with a yardstick or deprived of sleep for days in order to tire her out.

These punishments resulted in a significant amount of trauma, and as a result Jules lost access to her telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Despite Exercitus Dei’s best efforts, she was unable to regain them, though she retained her clairvoyance, precognitive abilities and mediumship.

Throughout her childhood, Jules was visited occasionally by Aamon. Infrequently, while she was working alone outdoors, he would appear to her in the guise of a priest, just outside the holy boundary of the convent. He never revealed his true identity to her, calling himself Father Aaron, a travelling preacher. As a child Jules was enamoured by him – he was charming and amusing, and he seemed to understand her where none of the nuns ever did. He often tried to persuade her to come travelling with him as his assistant and see the world, but she was wary enough to say no, though she desperately wanted to. As she got older, however, her distrust of him grew: he’d never aged in all the time she knew him, and nobody else knew who she was talking about when she asked if he would be coming by. After she completed her novitiate period and became a nun at the age of 18, she never saw him again for almost a decade.

Jules exorcised her first restrained demon in a ‘controlled’ environment at the age of ten, and was assisting in exorcisms by twelve. For the nuns of St Anthony’s, fear of Jules’ abilities made it difficult for them to really bond. St Anthony’s is a little off the beaten track, far enough from the city that, even when Jules attempted various escapes during her childhood and time as a novitiate, she never really got to see the rest of the world before she was chased down and brought back.

Aged 20, when consulting the Mother Superior for an interpretation of a prophetic dream she’d had, Jules brought up Father Aaron. The Mother Superior inferred that he had been a message from God, trying to tell her that she must travel herself, and so Jules set out on her own, primarily in South America but also across many southern US states. She spent almost seven years like this, a somewhat nomadic detective figure, following stories of possessed individuals and performing exorcisms wherever possible. She also occasionally debunks fake possessions or hauntings.

One year ago, Jules’ entire world was rocked during the exorcism of a young man in Guatemala when she realised that the demon possessing the man was Aamon. His reappearance unearthed several repressed memories of Jules’ initial possession and exorcism as a child, and also revealed the truth about Father Aaron: he had not been a travelling preacher at all, but instead Aamon, trying to tempt her into danger again. Shaken by these revelations, Jules botched the exorcism and the young man died. Traumatised, wracked with guilt and thoroughly unsettled by the fact that the life to which she’d dedicated herself for the last seven years was a lie, Jules fled to St Anthony’s again, where she’s been for the last year. She hasn’t left the safety of the convent grounds once in all that time.

ABILITIES

EXORCISM With the power granted to her through her ordainment as a nun in the Catholic Church, Jules is able to perform exorcisms, and therefore at least attempt to banish a demon from the body of a possessed person. She's well-versed on exorcism protocols and has learned good improvisational skills and determination from long-term exorcisms, which can last months in some cases.

MEDIUMSHIP Perceiving and communicating with spirits and those who are in the afterlife, should they wish to make contact. This ability depends on the "rules" of the world she exists in, so if there's no afterlife, or it doesn't operate in the same way to hers on Earth, then she can't cross the bridge, as it were.

PSYCHOMETRY Perceiving the residual information of an object (e.g. history, maker, previous owners) or a person (e.g. discerning species, sensing other entities attached). Information about objects is easy, delivered to her in a series of images that she sees briefly. As for people, she's able to identify disguised demons from her own world by touch – upon touching a disguised demon she receives a sudden, objective knowledge of their true self. Powerful demons also change the 'atmosphere' of a room or area in subtle ways, so she is able to sense those simply by proximity. She usually sees possessed individuals as having extra shadows or indistinct blurs following them around or attached to them. Heavenly celestials have a soft white glow. Similarly to being able to sense demons by touch, she would be able to identify other non-humans (e.g. those not from her universe) by touch, but would be unable to discern their exact species. This is opt-in feature when it comes to other players' characters.

NEURO-RESIDUAL RECOLLECTION Perceiving the last moments of a dead person through touch. Through skin-to-skin contact with a dead body, Jules gets short flashes of approximately the last minute of life through their eyes, sometimes allowing her to see the precise circumstances of how they died. She's absolutely no use if the cause of death was a medical problem, and can't sense or feel anything internal in the body: it really is just seeing the last things they saw.

PRECOGNITION Under certain circumstances, she can perceive future events before they happen. For the most part, these perceptions come across as vague images or symbolic references that warn of a future problem, rather than straightforward "flash-forwards". Jules rarely understands visions like these, and must bring them to someone who is able to interpret them.

LANGUAGES Jules is fluent in Spanish, Portugese and Italian. She can also read and speak Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic; these are mostly used during exorcisms and for reading scripture.

PERSONALITY

tba.