Application, OOC, Info

[blackdestroyer]

Player Information
» Name: Ardruna
» Age: 26
» Journal: mirisa_ardruna
» Contact: email: ardruna@gmail.com, AIM: Mirisa Erato

Deity Information
» Pantheon: Hindu
» Deity: Kali
» Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali, http://hinduism.about.com/od/hindugoddesses/a/makali.htm, http://www.thebuddhagarden.com/kali.htm, http://www.goddess.ws/kali.html, http://www.hindunet.org/god/Goddesses/parvati_durga/index.htm, http://www.exoticindiaart.com/kali.htm, http://www.squidoo.com/mahakali
» Divine Family: {mother & father} Durga through parthenogenesis; {spouse} Shiva; {siblings} none; {children} Skanda

» Mythology: Kali is the Hindu goddess of eternal energy. She is also known as “The Black Goddess,” “She who destroys,” “Destroyer of Worlds,” “Redeemer of the Universe” and “The Shining One.” Although Shiva (also known as the Destroyer) had numerous wives, it is Kali who is his direct counterpoint. Her very name is the feminine form of Kāla, another name for Shiva, meaning “black, time, death, lord of death.” Therefore, she, too, means "Time" or "Death" (as in “your time has come”). Hence, Kāli is considered the goddess of time and change, and is a figure of annihilation. In fact, because of this association, some Hindu cosmologies see her as being the ultimate reality or brahman, and that there are no divine beings greater than Kali.

Kali is typically depicted with black skin, four arms (one holding a sword, and another holding the head of a demon she has slain, and the others encouraging her worshippers), wearing a necklace of fifty human skulls (alleged to symbolize the 50 letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, and thus represent knowledge) and a girdle of human hands (or sometimes a tiger skin) and two infant corpses for earrings. Her eyes (and she is sometimes depicted as having three) are red, as is the tongue sticking out of her mouth, and her face and breasts are often smeared with blood. Her vehicle is the jackal, and she was said to live on the cremation ground where the funeral pyres were burned. Many times, she is shown standing upon the body of Shiva, as part of a ritual which transforms it back into a living force, and denotes her as his Shakti, or the vital female force behind his power. In some instances, she is shown as having devoured Shiva’s organs and then taking him in sexual congress. All of this imagery reinforces her connections with destruction, fire, transcendence, eternity, sexuality, rebirth, the balance of light and dark, and her ultimate consumption of all things.

In Tantric Hinduism, Kali, in the form called Maha Kali (or “Great Kali”), is the first among ten fierce goddesses called the Maha Vidya who represent 10 fundamental, archetypical energies in the universe. She is the initiator of the spiritual path, destroying one’s attachments, which can weigh a person down literally and spiritually, in order to open the soul to the wonders of the universe. The Tantric Kali demands courage from her followers to confront her terrible form, defeat their sense of ego, and open themselves to knowledge, and thus become reconciled with death and to learn acceptance of the way that things are. However, in addition to beginning the spiritual path by denouncing one’s material attachments, Kali encourages spiritual evolution by awakening the Kundalini, or sexual energy (often symbolized by a snake curled at the base of the spine). She destroys the ego that would fear fierce female sexuality, and breaks the chains holding back the Kundalini’s awakening. In the worship of the lingam (male sexual organs) and yoni (female sexual organs), these are often considered direct representatives of the lingam and yoni of Shiva and Kali (though some traditions claim the yoni as belonging to Parvati, one of her other aspects). Regardless, in Tantra, the Great Kali is the ultimate absolute, the final reality, and there is nothing greater beyond her.

In the Bengali tradition, Kali is more distant than fierce. She expects her followers to be self-sufficient and to learn to get through their suffering on their own in order to learn to eschew the material world and reflect on the ultimate reality. Although she does not behave as a mother should in the Bengali tradition, ignoring the pleas of her faithful, her worshippers must come to embrace and love her as unreservedly as children, and in doing so become reconciled with death and the constant change of the universe. In return, though she ignores their daily woes, Kali is fiercely protective of her children and will bring swift fury down upon those that would harm them unduly.

According to the Devi-Mahatmya, Kali first appeared when she burst forth from the forehead of the goddess Durga (whose name means “beyond reach”) during a battle between the divine and non-divine forces. However, rather than being considered one of Durga’s offspring, Kali was considered to be the “forceful” aspect of the goddess, making her a triune entity (the third aspect being the mountain goddess Parvati). That’s right—almost literally a force beyond reach. But Kali herself had another side as well: the golden goddess Gauri.

As the legend goes, Kali’s husband Shiva, whose skin is covered with white ashes, was teasing Kali for her black skin. Angry and ashamed, she practiced asceticism until she was granted the boon of a golden skin underneath her dark exterior. Returning to Shiva, she shed her black skin like a snake, and her fierceness along with it, to reveal the golden skin and benevolent maternal figure that came to be referred to as Gauri, and became the mother of Skanda by Shiva. In some versions, the cast-off skin itself became the manifestation of Kali.

In that battle where she first came into being, along with Durga and the Matrikas, Kali battled the demons Chanda and Munda, and, after they were vanquished, faced the demon Raktabija. Things only got worse when every drop of Raktabija’s spilled blood became a duplicate of him. Finally, Kali was able to destroy Raktabija by sucking all the blood from his body and putting all his duplicates in her mouth. From that point forward, Kali was imbued with a nearly insatiable bloodlust.

In the aftermath, after Raktabija’s defeat, Kali was so swept up in her killing spree that she began to destroy virtually everything in sight. To stop her, Shiva placed himself under her feet, and when Kali discovered her husband’s body on the battlefield, she stuck out her tongue in dismay and astonishment, and proceeded to attempt to reanimate him (hence the visuals in the art).

In a similar tale, Shiva asked his wife Parvati (one of Kali’s triune aspects) to defeat the demon Daruka. To do so, Parvati manifested as poison in Shiva’s throat, and burst from his mouth in the form of Kali. With her flesh-devouring retinue, Kali slew the demon and drank its blood, becoming so intoxicated by battle fever and bloodlust that she continued to rampage, nearly destroying the world in the process. To stop her, Shiva manifested as an infant on the battlefield, lying amongst the corpses. Deceived by Shiva’s illusion, Kali stopped to aid the helpless, crying baby, bringing him to her breast to suckle him, and calming in the process.

Afterward, when evening approached, Shiva approached Kali and performed the dance of creation (called the Tandava) to please her. Kali was so delighted, that she joined in, along with her attendants. Of course, the dancing of Shiva and Kali was not always creative. Their mad dancing also has the power to destroy the world if it gets too far out of control.

Another story tells of a dance contest between Shiva and Kali. After her defeat of the two demons Sumbha and Nisumbha, Kali lived in a forest, away from her tradition home on the cremation grounds. Along with her attendants, she terrorized the other inhabitants in the area and disrupted their lives on a daily basis. One of these was a worshipper of Shiva, who, unable to perform austerities in Shiva’s name due to Kali’s distractions, complained to Shiva about the matter and begged him to rid the area of Kali and her destructive forces. When Shiva went to confront her, Kali threatened him, insisting that the territory belonged to her and she would not leave it. In response, Shiva challenged Kali to a contest of their dancing skills, and whoever lost would leave the forest. He won when he performed the Tandava, a feat she was unable to do herself. Defeated, Kali was forced to control her disruptive habits—one of the few instances where she acknowledged Shiva as superior rather than the other way around.

Character Information
» Played By: Laila Ali
» Journal: blackdestroyer
» Current Name: Ciara Talbot
» Birthdate: 10/27/1977
» Height: 5’10”
» Distinguishing Marks: Pierced ears, has a tattoo on her back of an embattled tiger and five-toed Chinese dragon making a circle around the figure of the Egyptian god Anubis. Also has a skull tattooed on her right shoulder. Southern drawl.
» Family: {mother & father} Amita Talbot, unknown father; {marital status/spouse} single/NA; {siblings} sisters Shaina and Mimi; {children} none; {pets} 2-year-old Rottweiler named Ratri and a pet rattlesnake named Sankar.
» Occupation: Prize fighter
» Currently Residing In: Las Vegas, Nevada
» Ability: As the goddess of time and change, the reborn Kali can manipulate time in two ways. She can achieve a “bullet-time perception,” wherein she slows down time around her in order to more easily perceive the details of her surroundings in that moment. She can’t actually DO anything except observe in this state, however, and performing it fatigues her. With additional effort, she can actually turn time back by one hour in order to change something, but doing so exhausts her so much it is impossible for her to do it more than thrice a day. In either case, manipulating time to any sort of unfair advantage for herself results in severe karmic consequences.

» History: Kali's first reincarnation took place in 516 CE in Constantinople as Morissa Tertia. Her mother was a "black widow," whose husbands kept having mysterious accidents, and young Morissa learned much from her mother. At the age of 16, she was to be married off, but the Nika riots had thrown the city into chaos, and her betrothed killed in them. It was another three years before Morissa was married, and she died in childbirth.

The second incarnation was as Kira Chernyaev, a candlemaker's daughter, in 1527 Moscow. The 1547 Great Fire of Moscow destroyed her family's home, but it was during the ensuring riots when Kira was killed in the uproar.

Incarnation Number Three happened in 1640 Japan when she was reborn as Yamashita Ankoku, an undertaker's daughter. She died at the age of 17 in the Great Fire of Meireki.

She was again born in 1840 Georgia. She became a camp follower in the Civil War, and after Sherman's March to the Sea, she moved north to a small town just south of Green Bay, Wisconsin. She bore witness to both the Great Chicago Fire and the Peshtigo, Wisconsin fires of 1871.

Finally, on October 27, 1977, Kali was reborn as Ciara Talbot in Biloxi, Mississippi. To say that she had a difficult and troubled youth would be an understatement.

Ciara was born to a poor single mother, never knowing her dad. Two younger sisters would follow her, but all three were effectively fatherless. To try to support her family, her mother worked as a secretary at a funeral home, but the pay was too meager to cover all their bills. Unable to afford daycare, young Ciara and her sisters often were brought to work with their mother and told to keep quiet and out of trouble while they were there. Ciara took a rather morbid interest beyond her years in the goings-on of the funeral home, and often tried to sneak off to watch embalmings and cremations.

Not long after she entered the school system, Ciara was diagnosed with ADHD, and although she was a bright child, she struggled academically. In order to try to pay for Ciara’s treatment, her mother took on a second job, barely even seeing her daughters in the course of a day, but the money more often had to go things like basic necessities of groceries, rent, school supplies and such, with rarely enough left over to cover medicines. More often than not, Ciara went untreated, either because they couldn’t afford her pills or because she refused or forgot to take them. Things only got worse as time went on.

Like most children, Ciara was subject to schoolyard taunting, about being poor, about having no father in her life, about being an ADHD kid—whatever cruelty of the day the other children could come up with. Ciara didn’t take kindly to it, and she fought back verbally and physically. She got called down to the principal’s office countless times for fighting.

Before much longer, it wasn’t just picking schoolyard fights. It became Halloween nights with pranks that went overboard with eggs, toilet paper, rocks and other paraphernalia. It became graffiti painted on a building or a car. She loved being creative with her acts, and took an odd sense of pride in the havoc she wreaked as a kid.

By the time she was twelve, she’d fallen in with some friends at last, but they were a ragtag bunch of ne’er-do-wells, petty vandals and hooligans. They weren’t organized well enough to be a true gang, but they created enough minor trouble to give the police a headache and annoy the neighbors. Scrappy little Ciara, despite her tender age, was already considered the toughest one of the lot and was their unofficial ringleader. She learned a great deal from them, especially a love of street dance.

Adolescence brought its own set of troubles. Like any teenager, she wanted to be able to have and do the same things as all her peers. Unfortunately, money remained tight. So, Ciara tried to find ways to bring money in. Her criminal record made it tough to find the usual minimum-wage jobs available to a girl her age, so Ciara looked for other ways to make money. Ultimately, she found them on the wrong side of the law. Sometimes, it was fencing stolen goods. Other times, delivering, or even using, drugs. For about a year, she even prostituted herself. And her destructive habits never stopped; she still committed acts of vandalism and even arson a few times. It was in her adolescence that Ciara started feeling like she could sense other people within her mind and discovered she could play with time somewhat, and sometimes she was able to use it to get away with her crimes. Ultimately, though, it caught up with her time and again. Ciara spent more time in and out of juvenile detention centers than she did in high school, leading her to end up dropping out.

Through it all, however, Ciara was fiercely protective of her little sisters, doing her part in raising them whenever their mother couldn’t be around. She beat up any kids who picked on them. She taught them how to rely on themselves and protect each other, and, ironically enough, how to stay out of trouble.

When she was nineteen, Ciara was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia, and told that the odd feelings of having other people in her head and her time abilities were nothing more than hallucinations. She began a treatment regimen, and her counselors and case workers did what they could to help her channel her destructive tendencies into something more positive. Ciara still loved to dance, but preferred modern and street dance to the likes of ballet. She also took up boxing and found she had a talent for it. She began competing in tournaments and found it a much healthier outlet for her violent impulses, and a way to more easily control them, even though they occasionally still got out of hand.

After a few years, Ciara began to make a name for herself on the boxing circuit, going by the persona The Destroyer, fighting in more prestigious tournaments in bigger cities. Eventually, she moved to Las Vegas and became a successful professional prize fighter, turning her life around. She was clean, on successful treatment for her mental health problems, and making enough money to support herself comfortably. She worked to get her GED and eventually started taking classes at the University of Nevada. Very recently, she completed a bachelor’s degree in modern dance. She is proud to finally be living life positively.

» Personality: The reborn Kali remains a volatile creature. Having once been a triune goddess with a flip side, she still sometimes feels mental “bleed-through” from her other aspects Durga, Parvati and Gauri, which do help temper her somewhat, but she is still the Black Goddess at heart.

Kali’s first priority is almost always herself, and she typically has little regard for others. She speaks her mind when she talks, typically with very little filter between mouth and brain, not especially caring whom she might offend with her opinions and profanity-laced speech. She can be narcissistic and callous at times, only worried about her own affairs and not how it might affect anyone else. Charity is not a virtue she often subscribes to—anyone asking for help will typically receive a shrug and a “Not my problem” from her.

Having clawed her way from the bottom to the top, the self-sufficient Kali firmly believes a person needs to be able to pull themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps in order to succeed, not ask for handouts or entitlements. She doesn't like asking for help, convinced she can manage on her own, and she is not known for showing much in the way of gratitude. This is not to say that she is entirely uncaring, though. She does have a soft spot for children, a surprisingly tender maternal side, and is extremely protective of the select few she cares about, particularly her little sisters. No one messes with Kali’s loved ones without answering to Kali herself.

She has an addictive personality, and often needs constant stimulation in some form or another to feel properly alive. She’s an admitted adrenaline junkie with a rather morbid fascination with death, and she has a voracious appetite for all kinds of pleasures, including food (she especially likes rare meat) and sex (which she likes rough). The one thing she doesn’t feel any particular need for is physical objects—she only owns what she feels is absolutely necessary at the time, and frequently gets rid of anything she feels is superfluous. Although Kali is smart and creative, she gets bored and frustrated very easily, and has to work hard to keep from lapsing into destructive tendencies. Even so, she’s been known to switch things up at random just for the pure sake of change, and she enjoys being on top of ever-changing trends, throwing out the old and running with the new. She also has a violent temper and can easily get carried away when fighting, leaving a wake of broken things behind her. It takes a great deal of self-control to pull her out of a rage. Her medications have lengthened her fuse somewhat, but she can still go off unpredictably at times, and she is quick to answer a slight with a threat of violence.

Romantically, she's never really had much in the way of relationships, just some short-term flings is all. She tends to dominate her partners, metaphorically chewing them up and spitting them back out. She doesn't give much affection, but takes their emotions and sexually ravishes them until she gets bored and casts them aside without a second thought. She's been known to break up with guys "just to see what they'll do." She won't find a fulfilling and meaningful relationship until she finds someone who can stand up to her and dish as well as he takes.

» Other Notes: Ciara is officially straight, but she likes to experiment and break the norms, so she wouldn't take issue with being with another woman.

Every now and again, she'll find herself recognizing scraps of foreign languages she's never learned (Russian and Japanese, in particular), but she has no idea why. She assumes she must have "just heard it somewhere."

Kali does not yet know her divine self, believing as she was told that all hints of her goddess nature are nothing more than hallucinations.

» Sample Journal: Got a rematch coming up in the next tourney. Little Miss Hotshot. I've heard her trash-talking about me. Thinks it'll be an easy one-two bit. Oh, hell no. Man, bitch is goin' down. She is gonna wish a TKO comes early, but, naw, I'm gonna pound the shit out of her. Knock her punk ass to the fucking ground. Make her bleed and cry. See what she's really made of. And then I'm gonna destroy the little fucktwat.

Ain't nobody makes a fool outta this mama bear. The Destroyer got her name for a fucking reason, and I'm gonna prove it. Bitch ain't gonna know what hit her.


» Sample Log: The day seemed to begin normally enough. Up early for a run, then hit the gym for some weight-lifting. Eggs for breakfast, but, man, she could really go for a steak or something later that day.

Ciara checked her email after hitting the shower.

"Fucking spam." She deleted several messages in a row, but one kept popping back up. She frowned. "What the hell, motherfucker?!" she yelled at the screen. Finally she opened it. "No, really, what the fuck is this?"

Her trainer walked by.
"Yo, Mitch--you seen anything like this before? This some new fuckin' scam they're doing these days?" she demanded, pointing at the screen.

"Nope. Just delete it," he said, shrugging. So, Ciara tried. Next thing she knew the printer leapt to life, spitting out a copy of it.

"Okay, bitch. What the fuck? I'll deal with you later." And Ciara stormed off to the practice ring.