Casting Form
False Human Name: Cara Bennett
Real Name: Alerie Delcroix
Age (24+): 27
Character Image: Click me! Image credit to so-xu
Key traits: Quiet // efficient // sympathetic // decisive // creative // romantic // blunt // oblivious // restrained // pessimist // stubborn // distant
Personality: If you met Cara - or rather, Alerie - younger, earlier, you’d have found a sweet, warm-hearted romantic - a little too sympathetic, a little too sweet, and a little too imaginative. But the years have whittled away at her, shutting away most of the warmth and the sympathy into… the woman she has become.
Now, she’s not cold per se. She’s quiet, but she’s much sharper, faster - efficient. For all intents and purposes, she doesn’t seem to have much time for waffling about, or for people caught without knowing what they want to do. Some might even call her uptight. Waffle about to much, and her biting, sometimes tactless comments emerge. Not that she thinks people should take it personally: she just wants to get the problem resolved. And if you don’t have an idea, you best be marching to her tune, because once she gets stuck in an idea, it’s almost impossible to budge her out of it.It takes a lot to anger her, a lot to offend her, and even more to push her buttons as she keeps a tight lid on both her emotions and acting those emotions out to others.
As for flirting and romance… perish the thought. Past experience has repeatedly cast her as the one guys and girls approach and flirt with so they can get with her friends. She doesn’t see why she should let them use her like that: if they wanted her friends, they should flirt with them, surely? Even if someone were to flirt with her, she’d shut them down and move on. No point wasting time when it’s not her they’re interested in. She has little room for self-doubt now, and she wants to live as much as she can, get through as much as she wants in her own time.
Still, that’s not to say she doesn’t have a soft side: there are still shades of the romantic in her, but she keeps this only to the few she trusts - if any. But once you earn her as a friend, she’ll stick with you thick and thin, lending you a sympathetic ear or a sturdy shoulder to lean on. You might even be treated to her wry, sometimes silly humour on her good days. If you don’t mind her no-nonsense, sometimes pessimistic tone, you might find some of the best advice you can get your hands on. That is, if you can get past her reserve to start.
Best character trait: Sympathetic
Worst character trait: Restrained
Trivia about your characters:
♠ Prefers vanilla to chocolate
♠ If she absolutely must have chocolate, she needs it dark. As in, 90% dark. She has also been known to eat 100% chocolate for the sake of it
♠ Paints in watercolours and gouache - usually in landscapes and botanicals. Quite good at it.
♠ Adores anything arts and crafts: from knitting to pottery to painting. She has expressed an interest in glass blowing.
♠ She absolutely cannot cook. At all. Anything over five ingredients is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.
♠ Cookbooks barely save her. Her home is chock full of recipe books that use five ingredients or less, and the success of those are almost always a coin-toss.
♠ However, she can make pretty good soups and hot drinks. Her speciality is a hot ginger-black-sugar toddy.
♠ Highly competitive. Will curse you out in a competitive multi-player game, has been known to tackle someone in the heat of the moment just so she can win.
♠ Very few have made her angry enough to lose her temper. Even fewer have lived to tell the tale. Figuratively. Maybe.
Current job + location: Public relations consultant, Amsterdam
Questions
Do you want a Soulmate, choose your own Romantic Interest, or neither?: Soulmate.
How good are you with children?: Some people have said children enjoy being with me, but children are generally very small adults. Sometimes with more common sense than said adults. So I enjoy their company and their honesty, just I wouldn’t want to have one anytime soon.
Are you patient?: Not very. Do or get done - there is no waffling in between, because that wastes time and everyone’s energy.
Can you work well with people?: Depends. I’ve been told I get things done, but I’m afraid not everyone likes the way I handle things. At the same time… I’m always open to new ideas. No one’s volunteered any, save for a few of my older colleagues. I wonder why, I don’t bite their heads off…
How likely are you to lose their temper in an argument?: Unlikely. I haven’t lost my temper in an argument for a while, though I will admit to needing a few good drinks after a long, exhausting day at work. What do you mean what happened last time I lost my temper? It wasn’t so bad, I think - though I have been told my shouting was heard three corridors down.
How quick are you on learning something new and adjusting to it?: Depends on the context. I like to learn new things: new techniques, new gardening methods, new foods. In work? Hm. If it doesn’t add any unnecessary effort for less results, I’m happy to pick it up as well.
How will you react in high-stress situations?: The way I always do. Go out, take a walk in a botanical garden, breathe a little, then go back in to work. If necessary, break the task down: a large task is always better when you can process it in small, edible bites. No point wasting time until it’s done and finished.
If someone is very obviously wrong and could put the team in jeopardy, how would you react?: Jeopardy… how? If it’s a deadline or would jeopardise client-company relationships, tell that person that they’re wrong, explain how, build a solution. And if they don’t accept they’re wrong? I’m not risking my neck for that, so if need be… do the work for them. Or speak with a supervisor about your concerns. Don’t name names, obviously, because you’re not out for blood, you just don’t want the business to tank.
Day-to-day // Departurei. ran out of all the meaning
“Cara, the information’s here.”
The redhead didn’t look up. She was in the middle of taking down one more thought in her brain, keeping it neat, straight, orderly, and she’d be damned if she lost the train of thought. The seconds ticked by, and she felt the presence of her co-worker next to her - but she could wait. She wrote a few more words, penned in the full stop, and set down her fountain pen.
“The social media stats?”
The brunette met her eyes, and Cara waited a few moments more. She saw the brunette swallow, eyes darting between her and the door, as if waiting for someone to come in, and sighed.
“Thank you Laurel.”
She deftly, lightly tugged the file out of Laurel’s hands, glancing at the file and flipping through what was in the folder. It was clean, unmarked, graphs and statistics filling the pages. Some of the sections had been partitioned, divided as humans were wont to do, showing her exactly where she needed to be, what she needed to find. It seemed complete enough for her purposes - that would do, until she found a new set of things to look into.
She glanced up, and found her colleague still stood by her desk, rooted in place. Cara blinked.
“Is there something you needed?”
The woman startled, and her back went stiff, straight.
“N-no! I was - just here in case you needed… clarification?”
That was awfully considerate of her colleague. Cara let herself smile, faint, but there was a warmth in it she hoped she could convey.
“I’ll be alright. I’ll get the preliminary report done within the week.”
She’d never seen anyone bolt out of her room so quickly before, but then again - most humans seemed wary to be in her presence, to be handing files to her. Cara frowned, propping her head up on her fist, thinking it through, mulling it. In the back of her mind, she could feel something throbbing: not quite a migraine, but something that didn’t - feel right. Feel proper. Jangling about, loose change that needed to be sorted, to be organised -
Sorted where? It didn’t fit, this didn’t fit, she didn’t fit.
Cara wasn’t a stranger to that train of thought, to not fitting. Most of the time she felt like an imposter in her own skin, staring at the mirror to see this woman stare out, looking too old for the lack of experience she had. She remembered feeling strange for preferring sketchbooks and notebooks in her hand instead of the textbooks, magazines that proliferated at her secondary school; she remembered feeling too childish in her pinafore dress while everyone else at her first workplace wore sleek sheath dresses and elegant sleeves; she remembered people looking askance at her when she asked why a solution was that way.
But it wasn’t that, was it? It wasn’t just about carving her own niche and feeling comfortable in it. This went deeper, that even this niche wasn’t a fit, that it was a -
She shook off the thoughts with a grimace. It would do her no good to dwell on these thoughts now: the report was due the end of the week, and she still needed to run it through her direct superior for his signing off. Not that Cara was worried about that part: Keane seemed to trust her well enough, and she hadn’t had any large disasters on her watch… yet. She would keep it that way.
So she pushed the last of thoughts away, and sat down to work. The statistics were straightforward, the analysis even more so: their client had made a faux pas, but it wasn’t difficult to recover from. Positive engagement was hard, but the first thing they’d need to do was to staunch the bleeding. After all, humans had short memories, shorter than they liked to think they had, and it’d be buried after one news cycle, two - maybe three, if it was particularly shocking. There’d be social media, of course, but it would simply smoulder until the next big burst.
So… empty. Hollow, even.
Wait, that wasn’t right. She was a pessimist, but she wasn’t that much of a cynic. She gave the tea in her mug a startled glance, and wondered if some of the tea leaves had accidentally acquired a hallucinogenic, even metaphorical property. Yet the tea still smelled of ginger, of fruits, and the teabags didn’t seem like they’d been tampered with. She took another sip, felt the sting of the heat ground her and - kept going.
Except the sensation didn’t stop there. Sometimes, in those off moments where she let herself lapse, she would reach for something and be startled that her hand came into contact with solid, hard metal. Sometimes, the window would waver, as if being seen through a heat wave, as if it wasn’t corporeal, as if it wasn’t real. Even her friends - her colleagues seemed stranger than normal.
No, they were still lovely. Fine. But as Cara sat at the bar table, listening to the conversation flow and babble around her, their expressions seemed placid. Pasted on, even. She’d seen that once before, in a poorly acted play where everyone gave it their all and far too much.
“ - Ara? Cara?”
She startled, and blinked back into where she sat. Her friend Pasha was nudging her, a touch of worry in her eyes, and Cara met the gaze even, cool. This was Pasha, wasn’t she? Friend from university, sat through all those all-nighters, one of the few who understood why she felt out of place.
“Yes Pash?”
“Oh, good, we thought we lost you there for a little bit.”
You did, Cara almost answered, but she bit that back. Instead, she gave the woman the faintest hint of a smile.
“Work. What’s the matter?”
Pasha thrust the menu at her, worry forgotten (so fleeting, such short human memories, really), and grinned.
“Drink up! We finished a long week at work!”
It certainly felt like it, even as Cara ordered herself a fizzy Moscow Mule. She’d felt like she was drifting all week, but she didn’t know whether to chalk it up to the workload, or the strangeness she’d had all week: the feeling that everyone around her seemed… dream-like. Distant. Incorporeal, even, like she was dreaming all the time, stuck in some strange, detached loop where she was just watching things.
“Certainly long enough,” Cara said finally, squashing the thoughts. “I don’t think I’ve seen the sunset the past week…”
“Says the one pulling near all-nighters.” Pasha tipped the glass to her, grinning over the rim. Cara returned it, feeling it plaster over the cracks, the doubts on her face. Again with that hollowness, that emptiness, the jangling in the back of her head. “You think you’ll get a better week next time?”
Pasha almost looked like she wavered, a split second of heat wave shimmer - then it was gone, like a glitch snapping back into place. Was she in a simulation, of sorts? It didn’t go away, not even as she sipped at the ginger fizz, alcohol burning down her throat.
You don’t belong here, a voice murmured in her head. You’re too real for this. All of this. All of these… connections.
Another sip of Moscow Mule. Another moment passed, but the feeling grew stronger, more empty. Cara blinked at the drink beneath her, up to the lights in front of her, and was dazzled by its brightness, its glow, its artificiality - dreamlike. Fabricated.
Lies.
“Cara? You’re still here?”
Cara looked at Pasha, her smile now fading into a frown. It was like looking at a mannequin, a doll, perfectly posed and puppeted. But deep inside, Cara knew she couldn’t say that. Not without sounding like a complete madwoman.
“I think I’m more tired than I thought,” she said finally, settling on the most plausible explanation. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She gave Pasha a smile, a hug, but even that made her skin break out into goosebumps, as if her subconscious knew something she didn’t. The taxi ride home was - worse. As she made her way home, she felt odder, stranger - sick, even. Like the only thing that grounded her now was taking one step after another towards the rented apartment in Amsterdam, and even then, she felt she was unmooring from everything around her.
The answer came to her like a bolt of lightning as she sprawled on her bed, still dressed in her blouse and slacks. A thought, clear as day, that everything around her - about her - was a lie. Fabricated. That this was human, human, human, and she - wasn’t.
This was the life she’d known, the life she’d grown up in. This was the life she was trying to shunt into a niche, so she could live a little, learn a little. But if this life wasn’t real, if all she knew was - false - what else was she? What was left?
ii. a box labelled jigsaw
Not much changed the next morning Cara woke up, except for the unshakeable emptiness that had taken up permanent residence inside her. She still showed up to work, pulled on her clothes, bought her coffee at the little store around the corner. She greeted her colleagues good morning, nodded to her boss, made small chat with the cleaning lady who'd come in to help wash her mug.
Small, insignificant things she'd not looked at, cared about before, things that were meant to be routine. But every time she looked, every time she spoke to one of them, it felt like someting was missing - they were missing something that made them real. Even if in her head, she knew they were as real as she was, her gut told her everything up till this point... all those moments, those connections, had been put there in her head.
She ought to mourn it. Mourn all of - this. The connections fading. Realising the people she loved, grew to love was no longer relevant to her. Then to that corollary then - who put those feelings there? Who put those connections there? And who the hell could put those sort of connections there?
Cara really ought to be worried about this, but - she didn't. She couldn't. If anything, while she felt empty, hollow inside, her thoughts were clearer, more coherent than they had been in all week. At least it was a resolution of sorts, wasn't it? But this resolution didn't have a solution, and really, who could she even talk about all this?
She might've picked her family halfway across the globe - well, the only surviving one at any rate. Her half-sister Camille, single-handedly responsible for instilling some sort of thought or sense in her to get her onto this side, this career, this - life, really. Cara had been remiss in texting her back, given the workload, but even now... she was semi-convinced that was a lie that had been placed in her head. Besides, texting out "You're not real" would either be chalked up to an uncharacteristic bout of angst, or become a prelude to a ribbing match or an argument, not resolve anything.
So Cara buried herself in work. Slammed herself through as many reports, papers as she needed to finish, even if her gut was screaming at her that none of it mattered, that even that portion of her life was fabricated. Even if her career was, the paper and the fountain pen she'd kept with her seemed real enough. Solid. They didn't waver, nor did they feel like props or puppets put in place.
Of course, more people were beginning to look askance at her processing her work at even faster speeds than before. She saw no reason to explain - and on more than one occasion, now crept out of her room to go out, breathe. Because that hollowness meant she had nothing left, and her mind would sometimes scrabble to find what she was missing.
The same way the realisation and the feelings had suddenly come, so had the solution too. Her colleagues and her were coming back from a meeting - a presentation, she remembered. She'd sat back in a corner of the room, listening to the client's concerns (so banal, so... dull, now that she thought about it), asking questions that poked, prodded, exposed any weaknesses. Even if it felt like play-pretend. They'd crossed a street, Cara had cracked a tiny smile at the suggestion they all go get buzzed to forget what they had to sit through even though it was two in the afternoon -
It wasn't obvious at first. The streets were still relatively crowded at this time of day, people going to and fro fo their errands: work, lunch hour, picking up squalling children, even getting nearly bowled over by an adorable looking Saint Bernard that was a tiny, tiny bit out of control. But as the group walked back to their office, Cara - noticed. That had been the best way to describe it, because there was no way on earth she could explain the sensation.
All it took was for her to turn the corner, peer over the sea of people, and realise they were parting. As if someone had put a traffic cone in the middle of the throng, and no one wanted to get anywhere near close to it. And in the centre of the parting was -
A woman. Cara could start with that. But Cara had never seen a woman dress like that in the middle of busy Amsterdam, and she'd seen plenty of weird people in her life. Mostly during those Halloween parties. This one: heavy gold adornments hung from her hair, and she had an ornate, gold-white cloak thrown over her shoulders, a hood over her head. It looked beautifully crafted. Heavy. Expensive. But most striking were her eyes - they almost glowed in the hood's darkness, matching the bright green gemstone glinting on her ear.
Once Cara looked, she was caught - transfixed. Nothing could've torn her gaze away, because something finally settled the roiling in her gut, reassured her 'Yes, this is what you're looking for'. This woman didn't seem like a mannequin put in place to appease her, to keep her content. She felt... like she was there. Not someone who would dissipate if Cara so much breathed the wrong direction.
The woman didn't speak. She didn't need to, because a voice rang out in her head. It was a voice Cara had never heard before, but it felt like she was speaking with - reuniting with a very old friend.
"We need you," the voice said, echoing in the jangled mess of her mind. "Astrid needs you. Come home."
Her gut told her that was right, that fit. But her mind - the only part of her that seemed to have some sense of function and self-preservation - had so many questions. Where was home? What sort of home? Camilla?
A moment, and she felt a sense of - not upset. Wherever, whoever that sensation was from, it was like a teacher who looked at a bright student, who told her "You know that's not the answer, try again". But she couldn't answer the question if she only had half the puzzle pieces. That, and what the hell was an Astrid? A person, right? It had to be a person?
But Astrid tolled like a bell, resonating with her, like Cara knew, and that Cara was worried about this stranger's safety. She took one, two steps towards the strange woman in the crowd, barely hearing her colleagues' startled shout, seized by a desperation for - answers, for familiarity -
What happened then, Cara didn't understand. She didn't remember a thing, because one moment she was making her way to the strange, hooded woman with the shining, brilliant green eyes, the next someone had taken a bloody jackhammer to her head. Well, a jackhammer and a moving van, apparently, because Cara woke up in her own bed, still dressed in her meeting clothes, surronded by the things she'd set up for her a temporary home.
On her bedside table were three things: a slip of paper, a plane ticket, and a key. Those felt real too, and the cold, heavy metal weight gave her more comfort than any of the work she'd done in what felt like weeks. She scooped up the paper, and read off it: the first was an address. The other looked like - a bank account, of sorts, one that she was quite sure she'd never registered for.
Finally, she reached the name of the bank account holder. There it was, typewritten in bold, clear black, was "Alerie Delcroix".
Something else clicked. Another puzzle piece. Something that had lain forgotten, but had all the familiarity of digging through an attic and coming away with a childhood toy she'd loved. This was hers, far more intimately than she'd realised. It was her name. Alerie. Not Cara. She tasted it on her tongue. It seemed to roll off smoother, though where the French surname had come from... she had no clue.
The plane ticket was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, but she could manage that. Besides, she doubted anyone would miss her. Maybe she'd text Camille, her sister not-sister, but... would she miss her too? Cara - Alerie, give yourself your proper name - doubted it. So she spent the rest of the day packing - all into her suitcase, her work clothes, her laptop, her books, her oversized white seal plushie, and her fountain pen. She called in sick off work, then took a cab from her rented flat to the airport.
Home, a part of her thought, and she felt the relief that came with it. She was headed home.
Done! Bit rushed, but most of it should be there.
Last edited by Jadis (29/10/2020 at 00:13)
