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All contents copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999 Merengue.
Caucasian female, hair just a microshade dark of blonde, clear blue eyes, and a wry smile. Resembles nothing so much as her cat, Shashi.
Merengue is friendly and perhaps too outgoing, ready to butt into any conversation if she feels she has something to say. She is very tolerant, and can be extremely patient when she wants to. (She once rode four hundred miles in the back seat of a tiny car, next to a cousin with a 200-decibel voice who suffered from verbal diarrhea, and remained pleasant the entire time.) If you get her angry, which is difficult, she can take a lot before losing it, and even then is more apt to apologize than flame. As a general rule, she finds it impossible to hate: she tends rather to feel sorry for her opponents. The Beast of Purple is the most notable exception to this rule. She is also extremely verbose and tends to use a thousand words rather than a picture.
Her sense of humor is dry and a bit bizzare, sort of a cross between Monty Python and The Far Side. She loves Italian food, Good BooksTM, Good MusicTM (her tastes are rather eclectic, though), and, contrary to her temperament, is apt to go truly ballistic when she sees the innocent suffer, especially cats, dogs, and children.
Merengue is a very powerful telepath, and frequently uses music and the deeper emotional facets of the blue register (see below) to get her point across. She possesses an uncanny empathy for others' feelings, motivation, and psychology apart from her psionic prowess. She is also a psychology buff.
Merengue is good with any kind of weapon that aims. Her signature weapon is the SporkSaberTM, a stainless-steel spork with four lightsaber-like tendrils, one extending from each tine. They are retractable, like the original lightsaber, but unlike the original are limp like spaghetti and to be controlled by telekinesis.
She works well either as part of a group or solo. She can both take orders and give them, though she prefers to follow her own instincts and work on the sidelines.
She can't morph yet, but she is able to teleport herself and travel suitless in space without ill effect. She can bend time in a minor sort of way and has a tenuous grasp on the shape of space.
Merengue knows the inner workings of human physiology like the back of her hand and is able to heal most minor wounds with only her mind.
Merengue has no knowledge of magic and has a tough time sensing it, save in the mind of her opponent and when it becomes manifest in the physical world. By that point, however, it's almost too late.
If you kill her, she will die. She hasn't yet recovered her old technique of seperating soul and body without ill effect.
Without her SporkSaberTM, she is virtually helpless in hand-to-hand combat and prefers to flee and attack mentally, or talk her way out of a situation.
She has no telekinetic ability, with the notable exception of her SporkSaberTM.
When people throw things at her, she ducks.
She has a lazy streak, and despite good intentions, will often procrastinate until the 11th hour, 45th minute to do what is absolutely vital.
She can't drive, but she can make do in a spaceship if you don't hassle her.
Merengue was born nearly four centuries of her personal reckoning ago, in a universe she has never since seen. Her mother placed her as an infant in another dimension, under the tutelage of beings who taught her much in the ways of interdimensional travel and manipulation of dimensional fabric. For the following three centuries of her personal time, she fought her way into the leadership of an inter-universal organization which is nameless, secret, and thoroughly corrupt. She made great advances in reforming it and calming it down, but was betrayed by her youngest son and forced to flee for her life.
She compressed her being into a single cell and artificially impregnated a woman living in the city of Chicago in 1981. In 1982, she was born, the second in a sibship of three. All memory of her former life she forcefully suppressed before her birth, but as she approached puberty they began to return, sporadically and in disconnected chunks. Merengue still cannot remember a vast portion of her past, and has even forgotten her former name.
One day, soon after she re-discovered her considerable psionic powers, she was channel-surfing and stumbled upon that show we all know and loathe, B'h*rnii and F'hrennds. Up to that point, she had regarded the Nagenta Nightcrawler from the Netherworld as just another infantile show for kids with nothing better to do. However, looking upon It through the clearer lens of direct mind-to-mind interface gave her a whole new perspective.
There are six colored "registers" that comprise the bandwidth of any dimension; they will be explained in detail later on. By far the most vital, however, is the purple register, for it is on this frequency that all life resonates. It was instantly and frighteningly clear to her that the Saccharine Saur was a kind of purple black hole, feeding off of the vitality and creative energy of the beings around It, making them willing, moronic servants and rendering itself more powerful. Something in her gut screamed, "NO!!!"
As soon as she could, Merengue searched everywhere for an organization like the Jihad, dedicated to the overthrow of the Diabolical Dinosaur. If not, she was determined to begin the crusade by herself.
Fortunately, as soon as she went on-line, she hit the jackpot. After cruising around the Jihad sites for an afternoon, she whipped off an application to the Verthandic Rangers. It was there, she reasoned, that her skills as a field manipulator could be best put to use.
The registers are the component parts of a dimension, and are as follows:
The red relates to matter and chemical interactions between various different kinds of matter;
The orange pertains to motion, gravity, and nuclear energy;
The yellow deals with the "pure forces," such as light;
The green corresponds with the curve of time and the shape of space;
The blue is the channel for all mind-to-mind communication, and is the resting place of any Functioning CerebrumTM,
And the purple is the river bed on which life flows, the mysterious sub-text to all living things.
A universe is defined by the nature of its registers, and the registers are in turn defined by the nature of their universe. If they are crudely manipulated or inordinately drained, a universe will disintegrate. Therefore, B'h*rnii the Bloated Beast is not only endagering the lives, fortunes, and sacred honor of the beings in our dimension, It is also threatening our very existence.
She has several basic quotes that she'll tack on at the end of a post, usually either to illustrate a point or show off. Her best original quote to date: "The major difference between the truth and a lie is that the truth doesn't go away when no one believes in it any more."
Her battle cry, usually shouted psionically and laced with mental venom, is "MOXIE!"
The walls of her bedroom are plastered with Far Side cartoons. She says it helps her keep a good perspective on life.
She is a singer, songwriter, and poet of some description, although she has not yet been published.
it is spread out before me, like
- no, not like anything
there is no parallel to a city at night
cartesian coordinates drawn in fire
random colored points between the gridlines
towers rise in the third dimension
stone faces turned outward
in silhouetted tessellations
randomly lit windows
and behind each window is a pair of eyes
they are there for their own concrete reasons
eyes turned inward
here and there, smoke rises
the streetlighted tracelines shimmer in the haze
crawling stars in red and white cars coming and going
and within each star is a human face
going where they're going for their own concrete reasons
eyes looking inward
I feel I could jump from this window and fly
above the gray-mauve clouds to the obscure horizon
my heart precedes me
but I am one lighted window
one pair of eyes looking out
on a city that does not see itself
huddled against the cold
hiding behind the lights
earthbound