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Aisling Seery Blog Entry |
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March 7, 2025, 12:00:14 AM 3/7/25: r/SketchDaily theme, "Free Draw Friday." Would've drawn two characters but felt cruddy all day. :/ This week's character from my anthro WWII storyline is Aisling Seery. She was nameless until today, previously known only as Turquoise Rat's mother, a minor character who doesn't appear in the main story, but she's important enough in Turquoise's development I figured I'd name her. (So Turq's surname is Seery, though his first name's still unknown.) Anyway, she's from an Irish family which fled the Potato Famine, and has a slight accent though it's been a few generations. Mainly though, she's psychic (a "sensitive"), and has passed this ability on to her son. There'll be more about her later in my art Tumblr and Toyhou.se. Regarding her design, well...red hair, a bit obviously. She and her son have the same color eyes. TUMBLR EDIT: I've broken custom here by naming such a minor character who never appears in the story (I also almost never reveal info about Trench Rats' names, a couple of exceptions being Gold Rat's and Teal Rat's first names, Arthur and Aaron). Still, I decided I wanted to give "Unnamed Mother (Turquoise)" an Irish first name...then it just felt weird not to give her a last name. Maybe someday I'll get around to actually naming everybody?--maybe even my Trench Rats will earn names? The only reason I'm reluctant is my custom of labeling profiles by actual name when available, a custom I didn't follow at first; the big examples I can think of are Adel von NN/Ratdog and Fridolin/Turtledove; Adel's profile originally went by Ratdog (his artwork still bears this title), and Turtledove's profile ended up as Fridolin as he received a first name at literally the last moment I was writing his blog entry. I don't want my color-coded Rats going by names!! So I guess time will tell... Some details about Mrs. Seery have already been revealed through her son, Turquoise (obviously not his name). She was born likely roughly around 1885 (if Turq was born around 1910). Her recent ancestors came to the US to escape the Potato Famine; although I know little about it, this is a big factor in the Seery family's past, still impacting them to this day. Mrs. Seery, as you can see from her art, is a bit on the plump side; I imagine that, despite never having dealt with the Famine herself, she suffers from some intergenerational food insecurity, and overeats somewhat. I can also very easily imagine her constantly plying her son with home-cooked food and fretting about how skinny he is. Turquoise never overeats, in fact he deals with anemia, so perhaps he should even eat more; he perhaps has the opposite reaction from his mother, to be too sparing with food lest there not be enough when needed. Turquoise deals with another aspect of this once he starts encountering victims of the concentration camps, both dead and still living; their skeletal condition strikes him dumb and reminds him a bit too much of the horror stories passed down by his relatives. The other very big factor in the Seery...um...Seerys?--Seeries?--wow I got no clue...anyway, the other big factor in their lives is their psychic abilities. The Trench Rats universe deals more closely with a sort of sci-fi theme given Projects Doomsday and Ultima Thule, though there's a definite supernatural undercurrent. The Seery family are known for being "sensitives," expressing various psychic talents; Mrs. Seery, a devout Catholic, is prone to visions of the future, though they're usually couched in religious symbolism she needs to interpret. She frequently lights candles and prays to the saints for wisdom. And then...her son falls deathly ill, barely pulls through, and begins exhibiting his own mystical abilities. Sound familiar...? In another lifetime, Mrs. Seery might have been good friends with Frau Himmel. Two pious widows, prone to visions, raising sons on their own and hoping against hope that they won't have to deal with the same. Turquoise is younger than Otto Himmel; I'm not 100% certain if his illness is indeed this, but if it's the Spanish flu, he's still a boy, while Himmel is gasping and coughing and swooning in visions of drowning while in a military hospital in Germany. (Young Otto's boyhood illness was something else entirely.) Mrs. Seery's boy pulls through his terrible fever and cough. Afterward, he starts lapsing into strange blank spells, face going slack, eyes going vacant; indeed, in the right light, they almost seem to go white and luminous like moonstones. Mrs. Seery is panicky at first, suspecting some lingering effects of the flu, until one day she thinks to ask him what he's staring at. He murmurs that he sees endless fields of poppies, and beneath them, the countless dead. Mrs. Seery has no idea what that means. She mentions it to a neighbor in her tenement. He removes his cap, presses it to his heart, tells her her boy is seeing Flanders Fields in Ypres. Mrs. Seery realizes then what exactly is happening; her boy has the talent of clear-sight, something she doesn't possess herself--she'd assumed that his vision was symbolic and needed to be interpreted when in fact he was seeing what was actually there. She'd rather hoped he wouldn't inherit her abilities, as bothersome as they are at times, yet here we are. She decides to teach him the best she can to make the most of his talents. Talents, plural; he has more than one. He sometimes cringes away from others when he was never particularly shy before; afterwards, Mrs. Seery often learns of some difficulty or illness these people are dealing with. She asks her son if he sees their futures, yet he claims he doesn't; rather, when he gets too close, he feels overwhelmed by pain, frustration, or grief, so much that he can barely speak or move, and to retreat is the only relief. Turquoise also possesses supernatural empathy--not merely the ability to place himself emotionally in others' shoes, but to literally feel what they are feeling. As the emotions aren't his, are out of context and thus unexpected and inexplicable, he isn't prepared to handle them and never knows what to do aside from pull back. Mrs. Seery recognizes what this is, even if she has no name for it. Her son may not be shy, but he's introverted, so it's not too difficult for him to be a loner--not just out of preference but to try to protect himself from the emotional onslaught of others--though she's rather saddened that he has to take such measures. Life would be so much easier if the Seery talents had passed over him. A man in a uniform visits the Seery apartment one day--offers Mrs. Seery an oily smile that she doesn't really like--and asks to speak with Turquoise (seriously--whatever his name is). She's anxious and confused--what does a military man want with her son?--but calls him anyway. The two talk very quietly for a while; her son furrows his brow and seems just as perplexed, but apparently amenable to whatever the man is requesting. Mrs. Seery overhears the military man say, "I look forward to seeing you there," and he holds out his hand. Her son grasps it and to Mrs. Seery it's like lightning abruptly strikes--she gasps and flinches, wondering what that was, only to notice, in the same split instant, her son and the military man both jerk away from each other as if they've been struck too--the military man blinks and gasps in surprise, as Turquoise topples to the floor. Mrs. Seery hastens forward to help him up--"Please, it's all right, let him be," she urges the military man when he leans forward and stretches out his arm--and murmuring softly, she holds his arm as he climbs awkwardly to his feet, rubbing at his head. "Is this some sort of medical condition I should be aware of...?" the military man asks; Mrs. Seery wants to know why he's asking that, when her son mumbles, "It's fine--just lightheaded. I'll be there, thank you," and the military man departs. Mrs. Seery helps her son inside, shutting the door, and sits him at the kitchen table. She pours him a glass of water and sits down, looking at him earnestly; after he takes a sip she asks what the guy wanted with him. He says the man is looking to recruit him for some sort of small, specialized military squad; "What--? Why you? You're no soldier!" Mrs. Seery exclaims. He explains that somehow, the military guy has heard of his abilities and thinks they might be useful--what for, he refused to go into specifics, though it doesn't involve combat. Turquoise theorizes it might be some sort of reconnaissance mission overseas. "But we're not at war," Mrs. Seery protests, to which he can only shrug, whatever it is, it seems important, and he feels compelled to at least offer the military guy a show of his abilities, so he agreed to a meeting. If there's some use that he can make of his talents, he wants to do so. Mrs. Seery leans forward and clasps his arm now. "You saw something," she says, "when you took that man's hand. I could feel it. What did you see?" Her son hesitates. Looks uncomfortable. "I can't say," he finally murmurs; she feels rather wounded--"You don't want to tell me?"--until he says, "No, not that, it's...I honestly can't say. The words won't come, it's like my tongue is stuck." He explains, a bit haltingly, that he literally CAN'T describe, in any detail, the specifics of what he just saw. It's like something prevents him. (NOTE that this is a new detail to explain why in following such incidents Turquoise "refuses" to provide personal info even if it could benefit the Trench Rats--makes more sense if he literally CAN'T do so. Like a psychic block.) Mrs. Seery decides to believe him, why would he lie?--so she instead asks what did he FEEL when they shook hands. Her son hesitates again, eyes going a bit glassy, before he murmurs, "I don't trust him. He's not a good person." Mrs. Seery lets out a breath--"It's fine," she says when he blinks and peers at her, "I felt the exact same thing! There's something not right about that man, I can't say why, but I feel it, I'm so glad you feel it too." She asks if he's sure he wants to meet with him again; he says he does. Despite his misgivings about the military guy, and the shadiness of this mission, still, something deeper compels him to follow through--he feels that this is just a small part of something much bigger, so much bigger that even the military guy has no idea. He has to do what he can, even if he doesn't know what it is yet. Mrs. Seery is anxious about it all but trusts his intuition. She helped him cultivate these skills, after all. Turquoise puts on his best clothes and goes to meet the military man at the recruitment office as scheduled. Mrs. Seery runs into her neighbor after seeing him off, explains to the curious man what's going on, expresses her puzzlement over how the military guy even found out about her son, it's not like they go around bragging about his talents. "Oh," her neighbor says, blushing and clutching his cap, "that'd be me, I suppose, though I didn't know anything'd come of it, honest!" He himself had crossed paths with the military guy, offered a few words of greeting and chattered a bit about his own service (they'd both fought in the Great War), then without thinking he'd mentioned Turquoise's vision of the poppy fields. The military man was skeptical and dismissive at first, yet his curiosity grew, and he'd asked where and how to contact this person. The neighbor apologizes if he overstepped, it hadn't even occurred to him that the Seerys (Seeries??) may not be interested, really he was just trying to chat with the guy. Mrs. Seery is a bit peeved by this but brushes it off, what's done is done, at least she knows now how he was "discovered." Turquoise returns that evening, glaze eyed and distracted. Mrs. Seery again sits him down, pours him hot tea, urges him to drink a bit and settle himself, before asking what happened, how did the meeting go. It takes him a while to summon the words. The military guy greeted him upon his arrival and brought him to a room where he sat at a table. He was asked to describe his talents and explain how he came upon them; all he could really say was they ran in the family and weren't really something he could control, so he wasn't sure how helpful he could be. He could pinpoint the moment they began, though--while he was sick, and hovering near death, it had felt like he'd drifted out of his body, up through the roof, over the city and across the ocean--he didn't know why or how, just that it had happened, and he'd glimpsed the poppy fields before sinking into the earth and seeing the dead. When his fever broke, he returned. The military man asked if he owned anything from overseas, from the war. Puzzled, he said no, he'd never even been overseas--but Mrs. Seery suddenly gasps and puts her hands to her mouth, interrupting him. When he looks at her, she says in a quavering voice, "I completely forgot...but our neighbor, when he heard you were sick, he gave me a rosary...a lovely little old crucifix. He said they gave it to him when he was in hospital over there before he came back home. I put it in your hand when you were so ill. You were holding it the entire time. Do...do you think...?" Suddenly, his vision of Ypres doesn't seem so strange after all. He resumes his story. Although he answered in the negative, the military guy decided to test him by placing several small objects on the table, and requesting that he pick up and handle each one, and try to describe anything he saw. He did so, feeling increasingly foolish as nothing happened each time, until he picked up the last item--a dirty, faded, black-and-white ribbon. "It felt like my heart was sucked out of my chest," he says; it was as if he were being pulled backward and up at incredible speed, wind whistling past his ears, before plummeting down to earth, into it, then abruptly letting the ribbon go and finding himself back in his seat, gasping in surprise. The military guy was staring at him across the table. "Tell me what you saw," he said, and Turquoise described, as best as he could, the awful landscape he was pulled down into, the blackened trees and blasted earth, the mud and wire and boards and wreckage. Right as he let go of the ribbon, he sank into the mud, and saw tattered cloth, a dented Stahlhelm, bones--it felt as if he merged into the corpse itself, becoming it, even feeling a lingering twinge of the soldier's last emotions, before the mud suddenly cleared from his eyes and he saw someone looming over him, pulling their arm back, just as he reemerged in the little room with the table. "What is this...?" he asked, withdrawing his hand from near the ribbon; in response the military guy reached out his own hand and set something down by the ribbon--a small black cross. "They call it Eisernes Kreuz," he said, "the Iron Cross." Turquoise realized he'd seen, as if a reversed memory from a corpse, the moment the military guy pilfered the medal from its owner's body before it sank in the mud. This seems proof enough that he can not only see things far away in the present (the decaying body under the mud), but also the past (the military guy taking the medal from a fresh corpse), as long as he has contact with a related item (this is technically called psychometry). Emotions cluster not just around people but around objects, too. His talents can be quite useful. He's offered a position in a new squad the military guy is putting together...further information, Turquoise can't give, not only because it's so sensitive (no pun intended), but because he's been given so little info himself. All he knows is he isn't expected to have to engage in combat, though he isn't entirely sure WHAT he'll be doing. He still needs to meet physical requirements, enlist, and go through training, however...and he plans to do so. He doesn't trust the recruiter whatsoever, but a pressing feeling tells him he needs to do this, for some bigger reason. He hands his mother the letter of recommendation the recruiter has provided him, signed by Sergeant Major Revell. The approximately zero people who read this blog should know the following general events, Turquoise is recruited along with a handful of others to go behind German lines for reconnaissance purposes, Alpha Squad is pinned down by enemy fire after one member is captured, the newly formed Trench Rats First Battalion rescues and incorporates them, they receive their color-coded nicknames, they rescue the newly named Doomsday yet lose Teal. War. The attack on HQ, where Turquoise's talent saves his entire company. A new sergeant and corporal. Turquoise is tapped to use his empathy to detect both enemies and allies. When he's nearly killed by a mystery weapon, he meets a young woman who guides him back to his body. He later meets her in reality; her name is Nixie, and she's just like him. Turquoise and Nixie go through a lot during the course of the war, and gradually grow close. By the war's end (when Turquoise learns how Revell himself is among the enemy), they're a couple. They know everything about each other, and just understand everything. They can literally just sit holding hands and never have to say a word. Nixie has no family left; she loses her parents in an attack on their farm, after which she herself needs rescuing from the Nazis. Turquoise is perfectly content to stay with her in Germany, but after a time, she herself brings up the subject of his mother, in the United States. She can feel that Turquoise misses her, and suggests that he return home. Turquoise can't bear the thought of leaving Nixie behind, and so asks her to come with him. Mrs. Seery is waiting anxiously on the dock when the ship arrives. Takes a bit to finally spot her son in the crowd; she exclaims and hurries to him, hugging him hard. He rather awkwardly introduces Nixie; he'd mentioned her in the letter he wrote informing his mother of his return, though he hadn't said much by way of explanation. "Hallo, Frau Seery, good to meet you," Nixie says slowly in her stilted English; Mrs. Seery's eyes grow wet and although she's always heard the Germans are a staid, aloof sort, she can't help herself, and hugs the surprised Nixie tight too. She bustles the two home, makes them comfortable. Brings out the special dinner she's prepared, cabbage and corned beef. "Kab-badge...?" Nixie echoes, puzzled; Mrs. Seery sets the dish before her and she grins from ear to ear. "Ah!--Kraut." Mrs. Seery stiffens, eyes widening; "Kraut...?" she says uncertainly to her son, who says, "That must be their word for cabbage," and she relaxes. Nixie is quite perplexed indeed when she explains that "kraut" is a bad word here, and why; "You call us 'Kraut'...?" she asks, furrowing her brow, it's such a weird epithet. "Not me," Mrs. Seery is quick to say. With that misunderstanding averted, they sit down to dinner, and Mrs. Seery puffs up with a bit of pride when Nixie tells her how delicious it all is. Later, a visitor: Their neighbor has stopped by to greet Turquoise and welcome him back, and also to pay respects to Nixie. Mrs. Seery and he share a few words before he departs. As night arrives and Nixie politely asks where she might sleep, Mrs. Seery blushes and tells the two it's all right if they share a room, she knows they care about each other. As they're turning down the bed Nixie inquires, "Your neighbor and your Mutter...?" "No," Turquoise says, to which Nixie replies, "Ja," and he realizes it hadn't really been a question. Turquoise furrows his brow--"Really...?" Looks toward the door and back. "Are you sure...?" he asks, knowing it's a dumb question. "Don't need clear seeing to see how they look at each other," Nixie says. Turquoise wonders why his mother didn't say anything; Nixie makes an amused sound and says, "We share a room, her face go like a beet; you think she just say she like him? She worry you will...what is word...?" "Disapprove," Turquoise says, and "Disapprove," Nixie echoes. He asks about it the next day and Mrs. Seery blushes like a beet again but admits that, while he's been gone, she and the neighbor have grown close. "Nothing inappropriate!" she insists, though obviously there are feelings. He tries to put her worries to rest, since it's been so long since his father died, he hardly remembers him; Mrs. Seery's eyes grow misty, she still misses him, but "It's been awfully lonely with you away, and he's been so kind to keep my spirits up all this time." "Is always good to find someone who care," Nixie says, and Mrs. Seery grasps her hands--Nixie flinches and nearly pulls away, yet nothing happens. Mrs. Seery smiles from ear to ear and Nixie gingerly smiles back. I don't know yet if Turquoise and Nixie remain in the US or if they return to Germany. If the latter, I know it'd be bittersweet, though at least Mrs. Seery wouldn't be all on her own again. [Aisling Seery 2025 [Friday, March 7, 2025, 12:00:14 AM]] |