APPLICATION

[philomathean]

BASICS

name
Song Yeji (Anne)
송예지

alias
Annie (life)
Yujean Debonair,
Амазонка,
Little Herring (forums)


division
Research / Exploration

occupation
Geochemist / Explorer

age & dob
30, Sept. 4th, 1992
Virgo ☼ / Sagittarius ☾ / Scorpio ↑

pronouns
She/Her

family
Grace Yun (mother)
Brian Song (father)
Jessica Song (younger sister)
James Song (Jessie's twin)

CONCEPT

Watch out world! She's a triple threat: beauty, brains, bug.

POWERS

insect physiology;
Annie can transform into a human sized insect at will. Her insect form does not exactly mimic any known bug* but most closely resembles a cross between a cockroach and a male stag beetle: shiny, dark brown exoskeleton, six legs, long antennas, oversized mandibles, and wings tucked behind rock solid wing cases. While in this form, Annie maintains her human thoughts but with a decidedly buggy worldview. She describes the experience as similar to a mild, pleasant psilocybin trip—the kind that leads you to question your anthropocentric world view and find profound connections between mundane things. Physical damage dealt to Bug Annie does translate back to Human Annie.

*Yes, I know bugs and insects are not the same thing but Annie's an alien freak and technically neither a bug nor an insect, really. So!

enhanced insecty senses;
Annie's human form retains some of her insect physiology. Or maybe insect mentality is a better descriptor? Her brain is just built different, okay? Having a bug brain means she has some enhanced senses, as well as compulsions. Annie has an extremely acute sense of smell and a subconscious instinct to follow her nose toward food. Similar to a mosquito, she can detect carbon dioxide and locate individuals and animals based on their breath. Annie can also detect spikes in CO2 emissions more broadly. She is hypersensitive to physical vibrations and can sense movement through ground tremors from a long way off. Over time and through training at the JEF, Annie has learned to dampen these sensory inputs but she is still frequently overstimulated.

Unfortunately, being overstimulated does nothing to dull her most loathed compulsion. Annie is thigmotactic and subconsciously seeks out physical contact. Usually, she fulfills this desire by running her fingertips along walls while walking or exerting pressure on inanimate objects, but unless she consciously stops herself, she tends to invade others' personal space. She loves a crowded bar and hates wide open spaces.

loyalty manipulation;
Despite Annie's lack of intention and her denial that she even possesses such an ability, she does have the power to influence people to feel a sense of loyalty to her. Annie has to actively use her power to make it work but using her power can be as simple as internally desiring that someone like her. And who doesn't privately wish to be liked? This power only works when Annie is face-to-face with the person she is influencing and the compulsion is broken when they're apart. However, memories and feelings that were developed while under loyalty manipulation may impact a person's genuine feelings toward her. In practice, this power makes people more inclined to agree with, defend, and align themselves with Annie, although it doesn't make them find her anymore charming or appealing. It's not impossible, or even difficult, to resist Annie's unintentional loyalty buffer and those who have broken the compulsion may notice the unusual hold she seems to have on people. This power is currently unregistered with IRIS.

PERSONALITY

Positive: Brave, principled, and devoted; curious, hardworking, and intellectually motivated; sociable and fun-loving; observant and analytical; level-headed

Neutral: Cunning, secretive, flighty, goofy, idealistic, wee bit flirtatious

Negative: Conceited and vain; Annie has high opinions of her own intelligence, abilities, and beauty and will wield these qualities against others. Sick of herself; Annie doesn't really like her own personality. Acerbic and icy when annoyed; While generally bright and jovial, she has a brooding temper and can turn frigid and cutting in an instant. Jealous, petty, and withholding; Life is a competition and love is war. Annie suppresses her jealousy and finds it unbecoming, but she is deeply romantic, viciously covetous by nature, and cannot tolerate being second best to anyone. If slighted, she'll ice you out. An emotional masochist (self-diagnosed); She pursues relationships with people who mistreat her and is eager to forgive.

Likes: Knowing things, gossiping, meddling, speculating wildly.

Dislikes: Things being unbeknownst to her, denied her, or outside her realm of influence.

APPEARANCE

🪳5'6". Svelte and petite.
🪳 Thick, dark hair, dark eyes, and expressive eyebrows. Alternates between wearing her bangs styled across her forehead or pushed to the side.
🪳 Manipulatively malleable face. Can quickly turn a sweet smile into a mocking smirk with the slightest and most plausibly deniable of microexpressions.
🪳 Speaks out of the left side of her mouth and has a crooked smile. Laughs often and easily. Somehow, it feels like it's at your expense, even when it's not.
🪳 Dresses in bold colors and classic cuts. Has a very limited but high-quality capsule wardrobe. Loves her lab coat.
🪳 Clean and tidy in appearance but messy and theatrical in her mannerisms. Throws her body around when she speaks and loves to collapse melodramatically.
🪳 Smokes cigarettes (occasionally)
🪳 Is really trying to curate a "And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!” kind of vibe.

HISTORY

Annie was born in San Francisco, CA and raised in the River Oaks area of Houston, TX. Her mother is the CEO of an extremely lucrative, family-owned, multinational construction and engineering company. Her father once served as general counsel for the same company before ‘retiring’ — he is now the president of a small liberal arts college. They had their three children in quick succession and Annie immediately embraced her role as eldest daughter, with all its anxieties and resentments. She and her siblings had an intense, yet contentious bond; their rivalries started early and never quite ended. While their parents didn’t necessarily encourage this behavior, they didn’t discourage it either. Ambition, intelligence, and savoir faire were highly valued in her family.

Insatiably curious and precocious, young Annie took every opportunity her family’s wealth had to offer her. She remembers the first decade of her life as a whirlwind of science camps, museum visits, and personalized passion projects coordinated by her private tutors. She attended an elementary school with ‘University’ in the name but missed school more often than not to travel with her parents.

In July of 2003, it was on one of these family business trips to Prague that Annie was exposed to irradiation from a newly formed rift. Her transformation was instantaneous. One moment she was a ten year old girl and the next she was a 50 pound insect. It took 17 hours for her to figure out how to shift back, which is the longest she has spent in her Liminal Bug form since. She emerged from the experience with a profoundly altered world-view and a one way ticket to an IRIS run boarding school in Abilene, TX.

Annie thrived at the Lyndon B. Johnson Educational Facility. The school attracted an eclectic and eccentric staff who fostered her deep love of learning and rewarded her curiosity. She developed close relationships with several of her teachers, most especially Ms. Kholodenko, who taught Russian Lit. She played on the volleyball team as a setter, joined Model UN and the Yearbook Committee, founded the Philomathean Society, and dominated the speech and debate circuit with her debate partner, Isaiah St. Germaine. In short, she crowned herself as Queen of the Nerds. Partially due to her loyalty manipulation powers and partially due to the disproportionate number of losers at JEF, Annie was quite popular. Yet she had few close friends and a string of disastrous romantic relationships.

The only JEF alum that Annie (knowingly) remained in contact with after graduation was Isaiah. She went on to pursue a degree in geochemistry at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO. The time she spent away from her family at boarding school had significantly altered her relationship with her own economic privilege and she wanted to try her hand at striking out alone. She paid her own way through college by working early morning shifts in a brewery and doing work study as a lab assistant. In retrospect, her time in Colorado was one of the loneliest periods of her life. She was working hard and playing harder, without allowing herself to actually connect with anyone. Annie transformed herself into an insect with increasing frequency during this time, which was both enlightening and anxiety inducing in equal parts.

After receiving her bachelors, she found herself falling back into the family fold and she spent a few years working as an environmental impact consultant at her mother’s company. She naively thought she was going to single handedly revolutionize the industrial engineering space and be the champion of alternative energy projects worldwide. If truth be told, the corporate world was activating for Annie and she was mesmerized by the complex social politicking her parents engaged in every day. Even though she had a knack (and a power) for getting her way and forcing through environmental initiatives, she quickly became disillusioned with the lack of impact she was making despite being as successful as possible within the constraints of her position.

So, she left to study deep-sea methane hydrate phase transitions at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, CA. It was around this time that she became especially active on a few environmental advocacy messaging boards that she had been casually tracking since her teen years. Her work at Scripps convinced her of something that her insect brain had known since she was ten — the human race was on the verge of a catastrophic extinction event that only immediate, decisive, and transformative action could prevent. And she’d already tried working within the system, so what was a little bug to do! Lose her mind, that’s what. Annie thought and dreamt endlessly of melting methane hydrate complexes, bubbles of methane gas pulling apart from their crystalline ice structures where they had once been trapped at the bottom of the sea. Gurgling and frothing through the inky black of the ocean out into the atmosphere. She poured her heart out to an anonymous friend on the message boards but having an outlet to vent to did little to ease her stress.

Annie abruptly quit her job at Scripps and sought sanctuary at Enodia, where she relaxed back into the familiar embrace of Liminal antics. Researching the Riftlands provided her with a different seemingly unsolvable problem to occupy her mind. She drowned out her existential dread by leaning hard into life's little pleasures and gained a reputation at the station as the resident party planner. Then the blip happened and Annie was thrown back into the real world. She moved back to Houston and began working at her mother's company again. This time, with a far less positive attitude. Using insider information gained in her capacity as an environmental impact consultant (and the daughter of the CEO), Annie gained access to blueprints and other sensitive information concerning he four natural gas "city gates" that the company had helped construct in southern California. She was able to convince her anonymous messaging board friend turned co-conspirator to destroy infrastructure at one of these gates, using their powers as a Liminal -- aka blow up a pipeline. "The resulting gas shortage caused two days of blackouts throughout the LADWP and SCE service areas and spurred emergency orders to alter CAISO electricity auction rules so solar/battery generation could stabilize energy market prices. Although technically a disaster, commentators on the event noted it had materially, if briefly, shifted the balance of the Californian energy system in favor of clean energy." Cool!

Annie is returning to Enodia post-blip in a great mood!

NOTES

🪳 Reads the featured article on Wikipedia every single day like it's the morning news.
🪳 Has a brown, short-haired tabby cat named Tussy Marx.
🪳 ENFJ-T

OOC

COLLEEN . PST . LIM JIYEON . DISCORD: colleen#8102

code