Rourke

Rourke is a mute Siol who travels with Rally, seeking something ineffable within the multiverse they inhabit.

Bright but reserved, whimsical and intelligent, she is mainly hampered by her selective muteness in most social situations, needing to communicate mostly by gesture, facial expressions etc. Rally always effortlessly understands what she's trying to communicate, even without words.

Appearance

Rourke has the appearance of a teenage girl. She's 5'4 and slightly pudgy. She usually wears a purple hoodie, plaid skirts of various colors and dark (usually blue) shorts or pants. She has a pair of green headphones she usually wears around her neck. In overstimulating environments, she will put her headphones over her ears and her hood over her eyes. Her eyes are blue.

Her hair is aquamarine by an intentional genetic modification in her family history, giving it color by way of microscopic structure. It changes color as the possessor ages, in her early life it was cyan, fading to more and more yellow as time passes. This was inherited from her father, who has yellow hair in adulthood.

Personality

Rourke is a bright and energetic girl, interested in all manner of subjects, things and people, but with an extreme case of selective mutism. While she can be confident and hang out with other people, she needs Rally to speak for her. It doesn't appear to be much of a point of friction for her in forming friendships with others, however, and she's always happy to have Rally along, treating him as a co-conspirator.

She rarely gains the ability to talk around people other than Rally, but when she does it indicates a deep bond. She must invariably leave these people behind, however, because of her nature as a Siol.

Powers and Abilities

Programming/Computer metaphor

Like Rally, Rourke studied The Book of Now and Forever, gaining the ability to impose her will on local reality using a computing metaphor. She has memorized many hundreds of lines of 68k assembly, and the basic process to create a "basic" 68030 CPU out of gas molecules from the local atmosphere and use it to run her aetherial "programs."

Like all Now and Laters, she can summon GUIs that corresond to objects in the environment, displaying various information about it and allowing those parameters to be changed on the fly. As she used an ancient Macintosh Color Classic to run the programming exercises in the Book to prepare her nervous system for ascension, her "windows" have taken on the appearance and theme of that operating system.

This is considered marginally safer than attempting to manipulate reality directly. The formulaic, algorithmic nature of this method tends to prevent several deadly classes of mistake, though it's by no means safe.

Prayer

Rourke is also a practitioner of prayer. She has a greater affinity for the personifications of underlying forces than Rally, so he typically delegates the task of gating to and from different realities to her. Faith is a much safer way to travel than logic, especially to realities who are averse to being entered without explicit permission.

Intuition

Rourke is able to feel the nature of another person's soul just by briefly interacting with them. She passes this information along to Rally, who is able to use it to manipulate others. While they try not to take more than they actually need to survive, and often try to make it right with those they "borrow" from in this way, they are forced to accept a certain amount of compromise as part of their reality. They are, after all, interdimensional con artists from any point of view.

Muteness

Rourke can only speak when she can't be overheard by anyone she distrusts. This is an involuntary effect, and applies whether the untrusted individual can hear directly, through a camera or any other listening device. She can intentionally make a recording for others to hear, but only when nobody's present while it's being made. Otherwise, she can't be recorded either. This is often used tactically by the duo to verify they're not being spied upon.

Glamour

Glamour is a technique that allows Rourke to blend in with any situation. It operates on the subject's expectations of what they would see in any situation. It also works on passive recording devices, resolving what will appear on the recording according to the expectations of the person viewing it.

Dream

Rourke's Siol dream was of an old man in ragged clothing gathering stars by plucking them out of the sky, and placing them in a rolling cart as he walked around an empty beachside town at dusk. She felt one of the stars was her, and she felt it bodily as she was placed in the cart. At length, the old man finished his task and rolled his cart to a machine shop.

Creative Notes

Her muteness I want to use to reduce the amount of dialogue I write-- otherwise I might get preachy with her and I want to keep the mood light and whimsical.