Gestral Beach Survivor

Purposefully left looking unfinished so she'll always be reminded she's imperfect and incomplete. I also tried to make it so that the human aspects of her look (skin and hair) lowkey make her look more unpleasant than if she was a full-on monster but I may be speaking from a place of massive bias

The dark blue ink on her face is always dripping, so she looks like she's crying. It's meant to be a mockery of her Paintress mask (her real world sign of power) while also making her private feelings of grief outward and thus make her look kind of pitiful

White skin in connection to white Nevrons, since their colour marks them as failures.

Cracks on skin for 1. the slight resemblance to what her parents look like in their Curator/Paintress forms 2. to further add to the imperfection motif and 3. to sort of suggest she HAS cracked under all the pressure and she couldn't handle it

Took the neck symbol design from her concept art and added them on her wrists to resemble chains. Chroma attached to them gives the impression of marionette on strings. I'm throwing her a bone and making it visually extremely clear that she's resisting so strongly that you can't even hide it.

DISCLAIMER this really could not happen. I don’t even know if it’s possible to erase overpaint in this setting. I’m making things up as I go and I’m generally more interested in using it as a pClea character study than as a solid independent story.

General overview

Une Vie À Rêver type of “best of both worlds” setup, which obviously couldn’t happen in the game. The canon divergence begins when instead of fighting pClea head on they do a tactical retreat to discuss their options.

The solution to freeing pClea from Clea’s grasp is to remove the overpaint rather than paint her over again. This is entirely made up by me and somewhat based on art restoration procedures. It also borrows from Maelle’s Gommage and what happened to her with the whole Alicia/Maelle merging.

Essentially, pClea is reassembled with almost-Gommage by Maelle and she just hopes it’s going to be enough because she has no experience with this. Telling my 16-year-old to perform a brain surgery and hope she doesn’t scoop out half of pClea’s brain in the process.

Maelle does manage to remove enough of the overpaint to severe Clea’s direct tie to pClea, but there is still a lot of overpaint left. This is why pClea ends up looking fairly monstrous.

Like Maelle in ACT 3, pClea now remembers both lives she has lived. The difference is she has now lived most of her life essentially as a Nevron compared to the time she lived as human, and she still retains some distinctively nonhuman qualities because the restoration was so barebones.

I’m a monster freak and incredibly self indulgent about it so half of the fun of this AU is to imagine how she’d think and feel and interact with the world according to those nonhuman aspects of her. pClea writing can be borderline xenofiction if you open your heart <3

Painted Verso, Alicia and Clea get to live, and their immortality is eventually removed so they can have a normal human lifespan. The AU generally centers around the painted siblings trying to get pClea used to regular living in the aftermath of a tonally very different “Life to Paint” ending*. A lot of it happens in the painted family manor but also in Lumière.

*Maelle initially stays in the Canvas, but eventually leaves by her own choice. I like to imagine that helping the remaining painted family and watching them struggle on despite everything convinces her that healing is possible, even if it was just the scars in her heart. So this is almost like a transition from Life to Paint ending to Life to Love, but the Canvas gets to stay. Because I say so. Why am I even trying to explain an ending that literally could not happen.

Also here’s some quick pClea primers

I’m interpreting her through the lens of her having been a type of (Clea’s) Nevron, and a lot of here is based on my observations + dialogue on both regular and White Nevrons.

At the very start she doesn’t speak or make any voluntary noise whatsoever. It takes her weeks to make Any kind of purposeful noise, months before she says a single word, and years for her to have an elaborate and fluid conversation with someone. She and pAlicia understand each other well non-verbally.

She’s not as strong as she was when working for Clea but she’s still stronger than a regular human, and she can summon spectral Nevrons in a limited capacity. Nevrons still recognize her as something almost like them and related to their Mistress, but she isn’t able to meaningfully control them. However, Nevrons generally don’t try to hurt her.

She’s dealing with several problems and a lot of them are not easy or quick fixes. The world has changed from the one she remembers before her overpainting, both of her parents are gone, she’s struggling with her own identity and how people perceive her, and she’s just generally very overwhelmed with a lot of things after so many years of solitude. But she’s fighting back because it would piss Clea off and it gives her strength to continue :)

Simon will be there (though not at the start) but my focus is less on romance and more on them sort of resetting their relationship and “starting over” because they both have been altered to a dramatic degree. I like the idea that they could help and support each other trying to overcome a problem that’s very unique to them.