Thalia Averill Milton
Born to privileged parents in DVII some twenty-four years ago.
Her mother often declared she had been born facing backwards; that she was more concerned with antiquity than the brightness of the future. Such an odd child. Thalia remembers those words like a punctuation mark throughout her childhood, but with a faintly nostalgic pleasantness rather than dismay. An odd child indeed, but perhaps only by virtue of her context.
Thalia was not stupid, but she was not a focussed child either; much to the chagrin of parents who valued a tight regimen of schooling, were both successful in their respective fields, and had already been blessed with older daughter, Aylin. Perfect Aylin. Oddly enough, despite their very polar differences, Thalia adored her older sister; her quiet diligence, her precision and care. Her cleverness.
Thalia liked to draw, and to read – though books were not so sacred as to escape the markings of her pencil. She was an idler, a daydreamer; queen of childhood castles and purveyor of fantastical stories. Her parents did not discourage her, exactly, but they did try to impress upon her the importance of education, of hard work, and of success. It wasn’t until years later that Thalia understood why they had been concerned. It isn't something she admits to herself these days.
By the time she reached school, her interests grew to encompass both literature and history, which were academic enough subjects to satisfy her parents. Plus, she quickly found that being discovered with her nose in a textbook left her less likely be disturbed than if she was found drawing. She did not grow out of it, exactly, so much as she learnt to slide herself within the ideals of her parents expectations. Study first, idle later. She kept reams of sketchbooks, but by the time she entered adolescence had stopped trying to garner approval for her scribblings anyway. Truthfully she was not interested in the attention – she did not do it to please an audience; it was a compulsion, an obsession. A necessity.
At university, much to her parents diligently concealed disappointment, she chose to study history. It was something of a compromise, since she didn’t actually want to study for a degree at all. By then Aylin was studying to become a psychiatrist at Moscow State, so it was natural for Thalia to fly the nest in that direction. It seemed a grand adventure, and by the time the plane landed she’d half convinced herself it was what she wanted. Moscow awed her; the mix of new and old, the endless clash of ancient and stark beauty. She supposed she’d been sheltered up to then; not that her parents had been the coddling sort, but there had still been carefully wrought parameters to her freedoms. The sudden breadth of independence barely phased her, even when she became quite lost and almost didn’t make it to the university.
The fairy-tale she painted in her mind didn't end well. Despite a sometimes sharp mind, Thalia was too lacking in discipline to excel in her studies. She would spend hours in libraries, only to emerge without so much as a single written note. Then, when the time came to compose essays, she would instead find herself doodling in the margins of the pages, or staring vacuously at windows. Or walls. The reading interested her, the learning interested her - but only in the way of a collector. She hoarded the knowledge but lacked the motivation to do anything with it. Well, nothing relevant to her degree, anyway, and though she persevered for the sake of her parents (for the money they had plied into her fees, and the strings they had pulled to get her a place) it was no time at all before her grades slipped. Mere months.
And then she got sick.
Well, truth told, it had come and gone over the months since she left DVII, only to culminate severly during her first semester. Four days of absence and ignored phonecalls passed before Aylin banged on the door to Thalia’s dorm room, and found her sweating drowsily in bed, surrounded by dozens of scrumpled up pieces of paper. Flu, Thalia insisted. But Aylin was pale. Especially when she smoothed out a few of those crumpled pages.
Thalia never knew what Aylin told their parents. Drink, maybe. Drugs. Her parents wanted her home, of course, but they trusted their reliable, eternally sensible eldest daughter. It was just as well they did, for Thalia’s sake; because even she realised, somewhere amid her fevered brain, that girls died from the Sickness. And not just some of them; most of them. That or they disappeared. Aylin knew, because she had seen it, and without her intervention Thalia would have numbered among one or other of those fatal statistics – she knew that without even knowing how she knew it.
She survived. Thanks to Aylin, thanks to the screwed up drawings scattered about her bed that day – thanks to a lineage of screwed up drawings, in truth – and thanks to a Russian called Yana who had been coolly convinced Thalia was a demon. Months of fugue followed. Thalia never went back to her course, and used the remaining of her parent’s funding to rent a small studio apartment. She went to great pains to forget the clutches of the Sickness, and to forget the psychiatric unit where Aylin interned. But most of all she forgot the face she had been sketching for years; forgot that, as it turned out, the face belonged to a real woman.
There were worse places to recover than the heart of the new world, and Thalia adapted. With no job and no qualification, it was natural to turn to the one thing she was good at. Her first major sale was the portrait of a woman surrounded by the ethereal glow of sunrise; except, in Thalia’s mind, it was not the sun at all, but the woman. It was bought by a religious zealot, who for obvious reasons believed it a religious painting, and from there her reputation trickled steadily upwards. Six years later her apartment is bigger and she rents a small studio. Thalia’s art sells well and she is rarely without commission, but her income can be erratic. The majority of her sold work consists of paintings, though she still keeps piles of sketchbooks and sometimes does portrait commissions. She specialises in realism, at least in style. Plenty of her work features the abstract and fantastical, and much of it has an ethereal quality that has become her signature.
-*-
Her temperament is full of jagged edges and contradictions, like a thousand souls stuffed in one body. She’s sensory, compelled by beauty and typically indulgent to her own whims. Intuition forms a greater part of her rationale, not that she’s incapable of logical thought so much as she’s learnt the value of trusting her instincts. For the most part she’s laid-back and adapts easily; quite content to watch things unfold naturally and to be swept alongside for the ride. In fact her sense of calm is infectious, or at least the way she is self-assured without the overbearing of arrogance. She’s the kind of person who gives the distinct impression they know what they’re doing, even when out of their depth, though composure should not be confused with being sensible, especially if pushed beyond the bounds of her integrity; a point at which she is often misjudged (despite the similarities in appearance, she is not her level-headed sister).
There are times when cracks mar the surface of the Thalia she recognises as herself; when it feels like a great big thumb presses down on her mind, and the pressure of it is crushing. In these moods she’s either unfathomably distant or grievously short-tempered, hardly like herself at all. Usually it’s the prelude to a project, to clear her head. Even in her best moods it isn’t unusual for Thalia to spend great gaping breaches of time alone, lost in work or study, though she’s not a loner by nature. She doesn’t spend much time socialising with other artists, perhaps because – although it’s an intrinsic part of her life – she does not define herself by it. Otherwise her haunts are as varied as her fleeting interests, and she isn’t especially selective of her company – depending on the whim of the day. Her obsessions sometimes include people, though she tends to form no lasting attachments. It’s a big city, after all.
She's grown to have little true fear – at least for her safety. When her survival depends on it, Thalia finds a way to defend herself. A way that makes her feel like a burning sun, so sweet and alive and dangerous. She side-steps the memory of these moments, just as she side-steps the other anomalies in her life. Thalia hears lots of things; she might be classed as eccentric, but she knows not to advertise some forms of peculiarities.
Desc: Brown hair worn long to the waist, wavy and haloed with frizz. 5'2''. Porcelain pale and on the delicate side of plain. Naturally expressive with wide grey eyes. Fond of jewellery – fond of anything beautiful, really – though she tends to dress simply. A mural of tattoos decorate her back, the main feature of which is a woman in the art nouveau style, surrounded by poppies.
Wiki Links: Thalia | Nimeda | Lethe
RP History
[*]Scoping for Ink (Rune, Aria, Manix)
[*]A Window to the Past (Michael Vellas)
[*]Home Sweet Home (alone)
[*]Glimmers of Dream - Dream (Nimeda, Jon Lttle Bird, Bear (NPC))
[*]Blood and Ink (Rune, Seth)
[*]Dreams of Fire (Katya, Dane, Jon Little Bird, Drayson)
[*]Chasing Phantoms - Dream (Nimeda, Jon Little Bird, Bear (NPC))
[*]Duelling Dragons (Rune, Aria, Lucas, Sergei (NPC))
[*]Nightmares - Dream (Nimeda, Calvin)
[*]New Beginnings (Calvin)
[*]Shadows for the Shy (Adrik Ivanov, NPC goon)
[*]The Pain of Loss - Dream (Nimeda, Nox)
[*]Somnium (Aylin PPC, Calvin)
[*]Aegri Somnia - Dream (Nimeda, Calvin)
[*]The dark sea - Dream (Nimeda, Mara, Jon Little Bird)
[*]Somnium Evigilantis - (Calvin, Emily)
[*]Depressed (Dane Gregory, Ilesha)
[*]Distindendae - Dream (Nimeda, Mara)
[*]Cabaret and Candy (Raffe, Nox)
[*]A New Page Turned (Aylin PPC)
[*]Imagination Alighting Everywhere (Aylin PPC)
[*]Caerus (almost) - Dream (Nimeda, Grey Lady, Tristan, Mara)
[*]Painted Dreams (Nox)
[*]Astral Dreams (Nox, Carmen NPC)
[*]Luck (Almost) - (Koit and Eha NPCs, Nox via phone/text)
[*]Interlude - Dream (Nimeda, Soren)
[*]Alluvion - Dream (Nimeda, Noctua, Tuuru)
[*]Silvanus (Philip)
[*]Mind Playin' Tricks on Me - Dream (Nimeda, Marcus/Malik)
[*]Soteria - Dream (Nimeda, Tristan)
[*]Interlude II (Philip, Nox (text))
[*]A Solivagant Soul (Nox (phone), Sage (text))
[*]Wanderlust (alone)
[*]Liars (Kemala)
[*]Tiberinus - Dream (Nimeda, Noctua)
[*]Nepenthe - Dream (alone)
[*] Wanderlust (latter half) (Tristan, Sierra)
[*]The Little Jewel - Dream (Auri (npc), Soren)
Born to privileged parents in DVII some twenty-four years ago.
Her mother often declared she had been born facing backwards; that she was more concerned with antiquity than the brightness of the future. Such an odd child. Thalia remembers those words like a punctuation mark throughout her childhood, but with a faintly nostalgic pleasantness rather than dismay. An odd child indeed, but perhaps only by virtue of her context.
Thalia was not stupid, but she was not a focussed child either; much to the chagrin of parents who valued a tight regimen of schooling, were both successful in their respective fields, and had already been blessed with older daughter, Aylin. Perfect Aylin. Oddly enough, despite their very polar differences, Thalia adored her older sister; her quiet diligence, her precision and care. Her cleverness.
Thalia liked to draw, and to read – though books were not so sacred as to escape the markings of her pencil. She was an idler, a daydreamer; queen of childhood castles and purveyor of fantastical stories. Her parents did not discourage her, exactly, but they did try to impress upon her the importance of education, of hard work, and of success. It wasn’t until years later that Thalia understood why they had been concerned. It isn't something she admits to herself these days.
By the time she reached school, her interests grew to encompass both literature and history, which were academic enough subjects to satisfy her parents. Plus, she quickly found that being discovered with her nose in a textbook left her less likely be disturbed than if she was found drawing. She did not grow out of it, exactly, so much as she learnt to slide herself within the ideals of her parents expectations. Study first, idle later. She kept reams of sketchbooks, but by the time she entered adolescence had stopped trying to garner approval for her scribblings anyway. Truthfully she was not interested in the attention – she did not do it to please an audience; it was a compulsion, an obsession. A necessity.
At university, much to her parents diligently concealed disappointment, she chose to study history. It was something of a compromise, since she didn’t actually want to study for a degree at all. By then Aylin was studying to become a psychiatrist at Moscow State, so it was natural for Thalia to fly the nest in that direction. It seemed a grand adventure, and by the time the plane landed she’d half convinced herself it was what she wanted. Moscow awed her; the mix of new and old, the endless clash of ancient and stark beauty. She supposed she’d been sheltered up to then; not that her parents had been the coddling sort, but there had still been carefully wrought parameters to her freedoms. The sudden breadth of independence barely phased her, even when she became quite lost and almost didn’t make it to the university.
The fairy-tale she painted in her mind didn't end well. Despite a sometimes sharp mind, Thalia was too lacking in discipline to excel in her studies. She would spend hours in libraries, only to emerge without so much as a single written note. Then, when the time came to compose essays, she would instead find herself doodling in the margins of the pages, or staring vacuously at windows. Or walls. The reading interested her, the learning interested her - but only in the way of a collector. She hoarded the knowledge but lacked the motivation to do anything with it. Well, nothing relevant to her degree, anyway, and though she persevered for the sake of her parents (for the money they had plied into her fees, and the strings they had pulled to get her a place) it was no time at all before her grades slipped. Mere months.
And then she got sick.
Well, truth told, it had come and gone over the months since she left DVII, only to culminate severly during her first semester. Four days of absence and ignored phonecalls passed before Aylin banged on the door to Thalia’s dorm room, and found her sweating drowsily in bed, surrounded by dozens of scrumpled up pieces of paper. Flu, Thalia insisted. But Aylin was pale. Especially when she smoothed out a few of those crumpled pages.
Thalia never knew what Aylin told their parents. Drink, maybe. Drugs. Her parents wanted her home, of course, but they trusted their reliable, eternally sensible eldest daughter. It was just as well they did, for Thalia’s sake; because even she realised, somewhere amid her fevered brain, that girls died from the Sickness. And not just some of them; most of them. That or they disappeared. Aylin knew, because she had seen it, and without her intervention Thalia would have numbered among one or other of those fatal statistics – she knew that without even knowing how she knew it.
She survived. Thanks to Aylin, thanks to the screwed up drawings scattered about her bed that day – thanks to a lineage of screwed up drawings, in truth – and thanks to a Russian called Yana who had been coolly convinced Thalia was a demon. Months of fugue followed. Thalia never went back to her course, and used the remaining of her parent’s funding to rent a small studio apartment. She went to great pains to forget the clutches of the Sickness, and to forget the psychiatric unit where Aylin interned. But most of all she forgot the face she had been sketching for years; forgot that, as it turned out, the face belonged to a real woman.
There were worse places to recover than the heart of the new world, and Thalia adapted. With no job and no qualification, it was natural to turn to the one thing she was good at. Her first major sale was the portrait of a woman surrounded by the ethereal glow of sunrise; except, in Thalia’s mind, it was not the sun at all, but the woman. It was bought by a religious zealot, who for obvious reasons believed it a religious painting, and from there her reputation trickled steadily upwards. Six years later her apartment is bigger and she rents a small studio. Thalia’s art sells well and she is rarely without commission, but her income can be erratic. The majority of her sold work consists of paintings, though she still keeps piles of sketchbooks and sometimes does portrait commissions. She specialises in realism, at least in style. Plenty of her work features the abstract and fantastical, and much of it has an ethereal quality that has become her signature.
-*-
Her temperament is full of jagged edges and contradictions, like a thousand souls stuffed in one body. She’s sensory, compelled by beauty and typically indulgent to her own whims. Intuition forms a greater part of her rationale, not that she’s incapable of logical thought so much as she’s learnt the value of trusting her instincts. For the most part she’s laid-back and adapts easily; quite content to watch things unfold naturally and to be swept alongside for the ride. In fact her sense of calm is infectious, or at least the way she is self-assured without the overbearing of arrogance. She’s the kind of person who gives the distinct impression they know what they’re doing, even when out of their depth, though composure should not be confused with being sensible, especially if pushed beyond the bounds of her integrity; a point at which she is often misjudged (despite the similarities in appearance, she is not her level-headed sister).
There are times when cracks mar the surface of the Thalia she recognises as herself; when it feels like a great big thumb presses down on her mind, and the pressure of it is crushing. In these moods she’s either unfathomably distant or grievously short-tempered, hardly like herself at all. Usually it’s the prelude to a project, to clear her head. Even in her best moods it isn’t unusual for Thalia to spend great gaping breaches of time alone, lost in work or study, though she’s not a loner by nature. She doesn’t spend much time socialising with other artists, perhaps because – although it’s an intrinsic part of her life – she does not define herself by it. Otherwise her haunts are as varied as her fleeting interests, and she isn’t especially selective of her company – depending on the whim of the day. Her obsessions sometimes include people, though she tends to form no lasting attachments. It’s a big city, after all.
She's grown to have little true fear – at least for her safety. When her survival depends on it, Thalia finds a way to defend herself. A way that makes her feel like a burning sun, so sweet and alive and dangerous. She side-steps the memory of these moments, just as she side-steps the other anomalies in her life. Thalia hears lots of things; she might be classed as eccentric, but she knows not to advertise some forms of peculiarities.
Desc: Brown hair worn long to the waist, wavy and haloed with frizz. 5'2''. Porcelain pale and on the delicate side of plain. Naturally expressive with wide grey eyes. Fond of jewellery – fond of anything beautiful, really – though she tends to dress simply. A mural of tattoos decorate her back, the main feature of which is a woman in the art nouveau style, surrounded by poppies.
Wiki Links: Thalia | Nimeda | Lethe
RP History
[*]Scoping for Ink (Rune, Aria, Manix)
[*]A Window to the Past (Michael Vellas)
[*]Home Sweet Home (alone)
[*]Glimmers of Dream - Dream (Nimeda, Jon Lttle Bird, Bear (NPC))
[*]Blood and Ink (Rune, Seth)
[*]Dreams of Fire (Katya, Dane, Jon Little Bird, Drayson)
[*]Chasing Phantoms - Dream (Nimeda, Jon Little Bird, Bear (NPC))
[*]Duelling Dragons (Rune, Aria, Lucas, Sergei (NPC))
[*]Nightmares - Dream (Nimeda, Calvin)
[*]New Beginnings (Calvin)
[*]Shadows for the Shy (Adrik Ivanov, NPC goon)
[*]The Pain of Loss - Dream (Nimeda, Nox)
[*]Somnium (Aylin PPC, Calvin)
[*]Aegri Somnia - Dream (Nimeda, Calvin)
[*]The dark sea - Dream (Nimeda, Mara, Jon Little Bird)
[*]Somnium Evigilantis - (Calvin, Emily)
[*]Depressed (Dane Gregory, Ilesha)
[*]Distindendae - Dream (Nimeda, Mara)
[*]Cabaret and Candy (Raffe, Nox)
[*]A New Page Turned (Aylin PPC)
[*]Imagination Alighting Everywhere (Aylin PPC)
[*]Caerus (almost) - Dream (Nimeda, Grey Lady, Tristan, Mara)
[*]Painted Dreams (Nox)
[*]Astral Dreams (Nox, Carmen NPC)
[*]Luck (Almost) - (Koit and Eha NPCs, Nox via phone/text)
[*]Interlude - Dream (Nimeda, Soren)
[*]Alluvion - Dream (Nimeda, Noctua, Tuuru)
[*]Silvanus (Philip)
[*]Mind Playin' Tricks on Me - Dream (Nimeda, Marcus/Malik)
[*]Soteria - Dream (Nimeda, Tristan)
[*]Interlude II (Philip, Nox (text))
[*]A Solivagant Soul (Nox (phone), Sage (text))
[*]Wanderlust (alone)
[*]Liars (Kemala)
[*]Tiberinus - Dream (Nimeda, Noctua)
[*]Nepenthe - Dream (alone)
[*] Wanderlust (latter half) (Tristan, Sierra)
[*]The Little Jewel - Dream (Auri (npc), Soren)
![[Image: thal-banner-scaled.jpg]](http://thefirstage.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/thal-banner-scaled.jpg)