Mokomoko

Newborn and bewildered. (HIATUS. Player currently experiencing temporary death. Back soon!)

Good first impressions are important

@desc: Mokomoko is a muddy brown skinned, four-and-a-half foot tall, fairly humanlike creature. Bright light brings an oleaginous purple sheen to her flesh. From a distance her most striking features are large, flanged and cartilaginous bat-like ears fastened immobile back against her long, flat skull, and a series of inconstantly glowing glyphs or runes inscribed in neon blue down her left flank and limbs.

Close to, the impression can be more startling. Her blunt-muzzled face is tipped with a large, flattened whorled nose, pricked by fourteen nostrils. Around it, over her head and neck, scarring and bubble-like nodules seem to have erupted randomly from her skin, particularly around the right side of her face, where one golden, 'x' pupil-ed eye is forced nearly shut by growths of hard, warty tissue. A fair portion of the right cheek has been eaten or torn away in a horizontal gash, revealing half an unsmiling grin of small, beautifully white, leaf-blade teeth. Her left cheek is roughly painted with a red daub of false childlike blush. Her particoloured black, yellow and brown hair is shaved back from the front of her scalp, with the remainder usually pulled back and gathered in a rough ponytail.

Slim and stocky-limbed, she wears a long, rough strip of calico wrapped around her ribs like a bandage and slung over her left shoulder, not covering her high, nectarine breasts. A dull metallic bracelet-strip hooks over her right collarbone and cups her back, trailing diagonally down until it hugs the curve of her left ribcage. Her right hand is bound into a fist by a net of thin black straps, gripping what seems to be a splintered needle-like chunk of obsidian, glowing orange with heat.

The modest curve of her hips isn't much disguised by low-slung breeches, gathered below the knee and again near the flaring cuff, which reaches nearly to her digitigrade ankles. The inner part of her trous is of rough work-cloth, patterned with vertical yellow and black hazard chevrons, while the outer legs are heavy and leathern, with steel-wire piping stiffening the fabric. The two parts are fastened together at front and back of each leg with large, neat stitches of red thread laced through them, tying in four dull-scarlet bows at her waist above the slim leather belt that keeps her trousers up.

Her hands have three blunt, clawed fingers with a thumb at top and bottom, and her feet are as prehensile as a monkey's. She has a leg-length, blunt tipped tail decorated with several black rubber 'donuts'.

Smell message: She has a subtle scent not unlike musty oranges, with faint occasional tangs of ozone or charred pork. Close up, a slight acrid smell of tar can also be perceived, but nothing that might give much clue to her mood or composition.

On being swept: Mokomoko shimmers slightly, as if her skin were the film of a soap bubble. For a moment, the world seems to bow and contract around her, a mirrored rubber sheet. Then she stops being there.

Cinfo Character: Mokomoko is a muddy brown skinned, four-and-a-half foot tall, fairly humanlike creature. Bright light brings an oleaginous purple sheen to her flesh. From a distance her most striking features are large, flanged and cartilaginous bat-like ears fastened immobile back against her long, flat skull, and a series of inconstantly glowing glyphs or runes inscribed in neon blue down her left flank and limbs. Close to, the impression can be more startling. Her blunt-muzzled face is tipped with a large, flattened whorled nose, pricked by fourteen nostrils. Around it, over her head and neck, scarring and bubble-like nodules seem to have erupted randomly from her skin, particularly around the right side of her face, where one golden, 'x' pupil-ed eye is forced nearly shut by growths of hard, warty tissue. A fair portion of the right cheek has been eaten or torn away in a horizontal gash, revealing half an unsmiling grin of small, beautifully white, leaf-blade teeth.

Cinfo background: Mokomoko was born as she is, complete and fully formed, from an inverted-vortex phenomenon that swept through Down, cocooned in an amniotic sac filled with mucus and tar. With her was born Hagfish, a living birth caul, that attempted to suffocate her and eat her face before fleeing. Since then, she has dedicated herself to doing whatever she feels like doing at the time.

[Because it should be said and I can't think of a fixed place to say it yet, much of Mokomoko's themeata/appearance (especially as a mask) should be credited to a friend. If/when I remember to get her permission to upload these drawings, I'll link to them here.]

A (mostly) thorough physical...

Mokomoko's sturdily built and mostly hairless body is a fairly uniform deep, purple-tinged shade of sepia, although the ragged hair on her head is shot through with strands of black and pus-yellow. She is about four and a half feet tall with small, high apple-like breasts and hips that have a soft, more-or-less feminine curve. Along her left flank, as well as down her left arm and leg, a series of odd, abstracted glyphs pulse irregularly with a blue-white glow, indivisible from her flesh-tone when not illuminated. She has a stout, blunt-tipped tubular tail that is about as long as, and slightly slimmer than, one of her legs. Her navel is complicated. She has a subtle scent not unlike musty oranges, with faint occasional tangs of ozone or charred pork.

Her head is perhaps rat-like, or tomb bat-like, a stretched skull with an ungainly, blunt and roman-arched muzzle ascending to a shallow brow, placing her eyes disconcertingly high in her skull. Beneath her almond left eye, a faded rosy pink marking looks like a pitiful experiment with make-up or half of a cartoonish blush. Her pupils are 'x'-shaped, expanding to diamonds in low light. Even without its more extreme cosmetic characteristics, she does not have a loveable face. While the majority of her fine, drab hair is usually gathered tightly back behind her crown, the front of her scalp is shaved, scholar-fashion, removing any chance of hair covering the mass of contusions marring her face.

Mokomoko has a 'nose-patch', in her case a slightly darker, moist and striated area of skin that aids her olfactory senses. She has fourteen nostrils, and a weird and wonderful barrage of analytical organs in her unflattering rostrum to back them up. The external spiral convolutions of her nose may even help in emitting and receiving some kind of echolocatory pulse. Her ears are large and cartilaginous, rumpled and contoured like bat ears or melting radiators. She hears real good.

Around the face and neck her flesh has been somehow mutilated, notched, scarred and covered in small erupting warty nodules. This disfigurement is particularly noticeable around the right side of her mouth where part of her cheek has been eaten away, leaving teeth and gums exposed in a humourless rictus, and around her right eye, where fleshy growths have forced her eye into a permanent squint. The absence of her cheek often causes her to fumble 'p's and 'b's, and dribble sometimes.

Her hands and feet each have five thick, powerful digits tipped with unsharp, partially retractile claws. On her hands, the fifth has separated from the other four fingers and developed into an ancillary second thumb, in the process freeing her hands from the third-finger weakness of a primate grip. Her feet are nominally digitigrade with four long, dextrous 'tingers', plus a 'tumb' sprouting from her heel-they can essentially function as slightly clumsy hands. Her right hand is bound tightly into a fist by a web of thin black straps, and in it she grips what looks like a thick splinter of redorange-hot obsidian. Sometimes the flesh of her clenched hand appears to smoke, or bleed.

...and a brief metaphysical

(Everything herin may be subject to brutal revision before a true, playahble Mokomoko emerges.)

Current best guess? Mokomoko is like a dreamcatcher. Part of her is not real, in the same way that a circle is not real, a concept inexpressible without complicated mathematics or inadequate imitation (dream-). The real part of her will be made from the flaking steel and damp-crumble concrete of Down, compressed and twisted and folded through the Puzzlebox's vast and intransigent knowledge filter until it spools up into a double helix spaghetti (-catcher). The two parts trying to exist in the same place makes a tiny skintight pocket of half-reality, which is Mokomoko. Her senses as described above, like the rest of her physical body, exist as analogies of her relationship with her environment, stimuli reaching her as slight alterations in the warp and weft of reality, as a shark reads the motions of other creatures in the water. As a highly subjective creature, she is invisible/intangible to some artificial sensory apparatus, especially when no other bioforms are nearby. This apparently includes the instantiator system, although Mokomoko can generate a similar, if cruder, effect herself by just tugging as hard as she can at the reality around her. When she makes things they are of somewhat...eccentric construction, vary wildly in function and design according to her mood, and will usually collapse into nothing as soon as she stops paying attention to them or if they get too far away.

• Existence as striving for life/tension? For instance, is she an opposite-way-around evolutionary process? From matter striving for ideas, is she simply an idea striving for matter?
• Sometimes she will make goldfinches by accident, usually during a fit of hacking coughs, which she will have sometimes.
• There will be no dissembling in her. Her mood is mercurial, but she can only hold one view at a time, and holds it absolutely. She will have no subconscious desires, because when she experiences desires she will enact them. Perhaps something like Ed from Cowboy Bebop, but with less charm and a pronounced aggressive streak.
• She will act a catalyst affecting the progression of Gridshamanic ceremonies, and the lifecycles of things generally.
• Her urge to affect her surroundings will extend to such plans as building a Cube Tree House and starting a Puzzlebox ultracricket team.

To be revised by discussion, if ones please.

Hagfish

The caul-beast. Super-secret bubbling thoughts. Mokomoko's shadow? An objectivity police-beast?

"The Hagfish mask.

The hagfish is a cold, callous, unreconstructed villain. He would kill his mother for a dollar. His only saving grace is that his mother is already dead. He doesn't think ahead, relying on his considerable physical prowess and his abilities as a contortionist and escape artist to get him out of trouble, for he never intends to keep out of it. His mind is a cold, tarnished ball bearing that does not admit fear. The contrast between the ugliness of his behaviour and appearance and the occasional beauty of his movement should be exploited.

His brutality and cruelty are dulled by blunt, passive stupidity. His body slumps sluggishly until he has a task directly in front of them, in which case he moves his feet, shoulders and head with slow, independent writhing motions. His vision is poor, and he uses the movement of his head to surreptitiously peer at his surroundings. Keeps his arms by his sides and low as much as possible. His primitivism is such that he is barely aware of his hands at all. Fights mostly by charging, shrugs assailants off with violent fits of wriggling or shaking, uses his head and shoulders as battering weapons, but is uninterested in his opponent. Fights only to get to his objective. His most dramatic physical lazzo is that if forced to the floor he springs in to the air by way of a powerful spasm involving the violent movement side-to-side of his entire body, like a leaping salmon.

He is capable of deviousness, but only of the simple flavour of the nervous habitual criminal. An ugly androgyne, he is slow to hunger, and acts only to satiate himself, but he can be persuaded easily by money, which he accumulates to no particular purpose aside from that he understands it is desirable. Lustful advances towards attractive members of the opposite sex, and sometimes, young male masks should be carried out with a similar attitude. The offer of sex or marriage can be used as an alternate motivation for his criminality, but he is almost never married before or during a scenario. He has no honour, dignity or loyalty and changes affiliation at each whiff of better money. Where the Turkey Vulture mask plays with him as a villain, the Turkey Vulture is often his employer.

He is never caught, but gains nothing from his escapades, sloughing goods, money, anything and everything to escape justice. Prison is the one thing that holds terror for him, and this is merely a primal urge to avoid death for his own grey mind and poisonous ethics kill him if he is left caged. His poor eyesight means he is barely aware of the audience, and is startled by them if he comes close to the front of the stage."

Also, consider this a reminder to contribute stuff from John Rudlin's C dell'A handbook, especially to the Masks page. Maybe even the Hagfish could be something like a Mask. Use Turkey Vulture too?

When interesting things happen, there could be more headings

Attached files (may contain things)

• Current best visual reference [for Mokomoko]
• And some [selected details] by [Razerz] <3
• ((Temporary Chinese new year gift/'easter egg', now in clour [HAPPY YEAR OF THE COCK!]))