EAT YOU ALIVE.

        ✞          「    early mornings before anyone else has risen, watching the sun spill over the horizon with a dash of orange and reds and yellows that warm from within, a cup of coffee held between clasped hands as if in prayer, a bone-deep tiredness that cannot, will not, be sated by mere sleep    」          ciswoman.   she/her.   ╱   now   nobody   in   lafleur   is   saying   MEI  VANCE  is   trouble,   but   nobody's   exactly   rushin'   to   defend   them   either.   folks   have   been   talkin'   about   the   twenty-seven   year   old   nurse   since   the   day   they   rolled   into   town.   seems   there's   always   some   new   story   about   how   they're   allegedly   a   halfling   and   have   been   here   for   six months.   i   don't   put   much   stock   in   every   rumor   that   floats   through   this   shithole,   but   with   a   self-reliant,   evasive   &   compassionate   reputation   like   theirs,   something   tells   me   we   only   scratched   the   surface   of   the   havana rose liu   wannabe's   story.   

stats.

name: mei vance

age: 27

pronouns: she/her

species: halfling

sexual orientation: bisexual

romantic orientation: biromantic

family: parents passed at a young age / raised by her maternal grandmother, who is now deceased / only child

about.

trigger warning: death / grief / assault / blood

mei had no recollection of her parents. she knew of them only through the stories told to her, peering into someone else's memory. they lost their lives in a car accident. it was quick. they felt no pain. mei remembered tracing their faces in the images they left behind. she had the slope of her mother's nose and a grin like her father's. though she did not know them, she carried them within her - at least, that is what her grandmother said. her lao lao raised her on her own from a young age. mei's earliest memories are of holding her gently weathered hand in her own.

as she grew older, so did her grandmother, but she never struggled to keep up with mei. mei, for her part, was an easy child to raise. she was studious and never caused any trouble. in her free time, she liked to volunteer at her church and sing in the choir. once she graduated, mei worked on getting her nursing degree so she could better care for her grandmother and those like her. she never dreamed of anything beyond her little town. she didn't need to. it was a charmed life.

some time after completing her degree, she was offered a job at their local hospital and even landed herself her first real partner. all seemed well - until one call changed her life. she was in the middle of her shift when her grandmother's friends told mei she had missed church that morning. immediately, alarm bells rang in her head, for her lao lao had never missed a sunday in all the time she knew her. mei rushed to her home during her lunch break. looking back, she would remember the walk there more than anything that happened after. her grandmother was gone. she felt no pain.

it was all a blur. the ambulance. the funeral. the wake. for the first time in her life, mei knew the full weight of a loss, and she spiraled in a way that was unprecedented for the young vance. it was as if all the pent-up rebellion and frustration mei had ever felt reared its head. she was absent from work. she stayed out late. she broke up with her partner. drowning her sorrows in liquor became the only way to numb the pain of her lao lao's loss, feeling, for the first time, truly alone in this world. she would have continued down her self-destructive path were it not for one fateful night.

it was an ordinary evening at an ordinary bar. she had been there countless times before, but he was new. his eyes bored into her like he saw right through her. knew what she made of. it frightened her. when she left, he trailed after her like a predator stalking its prey. he pulled her into an alley and wrapped a hand around her mouth. she thought this was it - until a beam of light appeared and shot him backwards. he hit the brick wall with a loud thud before sagging to the ground, motionless. mei could see blood gushing from the back of his head, but she didn't check to see if he was still breathing. instead, she stared down at her hands and realized that light had come from her.

no one ever found out about their encounter. she had left the scene long before the police arrived and decided it was a robbery gone wrong. she packed her life into a bag and drove as far as her car would take her, which was how she ended up in lafleur. no one knew much about the young vance; only that she seemed nice enough and was welcomed help as a nurse in their local hospital. while they grappled with the new stranger in their midst, mei grappled with all these new voices in her head - cacophonous whispers and thoughts not of her own that trailed constantly through her mind. it was like she could hear what others were thinking - only, that couldn't be true, could it? she hoped arriving to lafleur would help her uncover more answers about her family, especially her mother, who once called it home.

tldr: sweet girl lives in her perfect bubble until she gets attacked, igniting powers she didn't know she had. she kills a man (oops!) and splits town, ending up in lafleur, trying to uncover more about this newly revealed side of herself.

wanted connections.

your personal nurse: your muse keeps getting hurt, somehow, someway. and every time, it's mei who is there to patch them up. mei doesn't pry on the why's or how's. she's a steadying presence for your muse, and your muse, in turn, has come to be someone she feels comfortable being around, even if only in this capacity.

welcoming committee: your muse welcomed mei into town when she first moved in six months ago. she was grateful but wary, and your muse could tell she liked to keep others at arm's length. for some reason or another, your muse wants to crack that shell and get to know more about her, much to mei's chagrin.

roommate: hey, times are tough. that's why your muse and mei are roommates. your muse had an ad on craiglist or whatever the 2008 equivalent is, and they decided to open their home to the girl who had nothing more than a backpack and two trash bags full of... something.

ex-partner: (for muses who have been in lafleur six months or less): your muse and mei were partners. it was an easy kind of love, one that didn't require much effort. things were going well. they were talking about moving in together, but then mei's grandmother passed, and mei lost herself someplace your muse couldn't follow. maybe they came to lafleur to find mei. maybe they were also looking for a new beginning. either way, there are a lot of unanswered questions between the two.