MEGIDDO, Sanja Anya

[satori]

"Only eighty people there were, in our village. Honest men and women all, or so they would have you believe. I should know the truth. It was I who saw the worst of them, and it was I who killed them all."

SANJA ANYA MEGIDDO
Sanja. 1207 (died at 20). Female. Pansexual. Ghost. Neutral. Deborah Ann Woll. Satori.

A story of spirits is like a prism. Many-sided, and for everything put through it, many more components come out. Their life, their death, their life after death, the lives of those associated with them, the histories of places and people she has haunted. So you wish to know about Sanja Megiddo? I cannot tell you all the details, but I can give you a few pieces, which could be said to be stories in their own right. A few colors, but not the full spectrum, if you will. Shall we go?

The Village: A tale of beginnings.
You'll find a small town. But don't go hangin' 'round. 'Cause hate lives in a small town, 'Least that's what I have found.
A dozen centuries into the past, there was a village of eighty, good men and women all. It had no name, for a name was meaningless to a village that was a whole world to its residents. They knew that there were things outside. The Bulgarian Empire came and went from the lands north of the Danube where they lived. Traders occasionally passed through, looking for a place to say and buyers for their goods on a longer journey, but otherwise their small village was unknown to the world. For the eighty men and women who lived in the small village, the outside world was a thing that only existed when it came knocking. Any other time, they were alone, and they liked it that way. It was here, in this small farming village, that a baby girl was born who would become known as Sanja. She had no family name, as family names were nearly unheard of for peasants at the time.

But no story of a small town is interesting without a dark secret, and like all good small towns this one had many. Let's take a look at the village. Imagine a spring morning in 816, as the sun creeps up above the nearby forest. The man next door is drawing water from a well. The village chief is settling a dispute between a farmer and a visiting trader whose goods have been ruined by livestock. The trading post owner is discussing this year's crop with a couple more farmers during downtime, while another local man idly browses his wares. Down the street, a couple of housewives are exchanging idle gossip. And in one particular home, a girl of now eleven years named Sanja is learning to cook stew.

Except, none of that is quite right. It is not until we take a closer look that we see everything in a new light, a light that paints everything in colors completely different from what we know. As the man at the well draws water, he drops something foul-smelling into the water below. The village chief forces the farmer to admit that he commanded his livestock to pilfer the trader's goods, leaving a confused trader to wonder what was going on. The trading post owner distracts the farmers with conversation while wiping away the remains of spilled poison he had been planning to drink that night, while the man browsing his wares pockets a couple knives that had been on display. Despite their conversation, the housewives glare at each other with an intensity only ever reserved for bitter enemies. And in the home of a family of witches, Sanja is not cooking but brewing her very first potion.

It was a town of dark secrets. Some of them were known, but others went no farther than the people who kept them. And none of the villagers cared, so long as it didn't hurt them. But then, one day, it did.

The Visitor: A tale of exposure.
Speak my friend. You look surprised. I thought you knew I'd come disguised. On angel wings...in white. I can make your dreams come true. What a couple...me and you. On journey through the night.
Fast forward five more years. Unknown to the rest of the village, Sanja has awakened the witch-borne power of foresight. Unknown to Sanja, her mother has been discovered to be a witch, and is now feared by the town as the first of many secrets dragged into the light. And unknown to both Sanja and the rest ot the village, a visitor from a mansion outside the closest thing they could call a neighboring town has come calling. For weeks, all they could see of the strange new arrival was a frequent visitor, in a different skin each day, claiming to be a trader passing through but always walking through town as though he knew it perfectly. Every now and then he would appear to miss a day, but the observant bystander could notice a villager taking a different path through town than usual, or even appearing in two places at once. This trend would continue for six weeks until a stormy week in what the Julian calendar called Maius, now known as the month of May. With no way of leaving town for several days, the visitor stayed in town, and as the first night passed, the villagers slowly worked out who and what he was. The faerie visitor countered by exposing the secrets of the people he had interacted with: the shifter farmer who used his livestock to attack and steal from traders, the bitter rivalry of a couple housewives that had gone so far as the murder of each others' husbands (a pair of deaths that had before been attributed to the harsh winter months before), the casual thief who had now amassed a small armory in his cellar, and of course, the precognitive powers of an attractive young maiden named Sanja. But regardless of what he said, he only showed interest in Sanja. Young witch Sanja, who never wanted trouble from the other villagers but was labeled as the reason for the faerie's appearance in record time.

On the second night, ten of the now eighty-six villagers died. The trading post owner finally gave in after five years of going back and fourth and drank a lethal amount of poison. The housewives appeared to have killed each other, while seven others wandered out into the rainy night and were found dead in the streets the next morning. Another intended victim survived until the next victim, mumbling her drive to feel the faerie's embrace one more time. On the third night, eight more died in the same way. On the fourth, a group of villagers claimed Sanja to be responsible, and tried to kill her in the night only to fall victim to her magic and drown in the streets. By the fifth night, the entire town had turned against Sanja, and where once they would sooner have killed the visitor than give up one of their own, they now all but begged him to take her away. Then, just to make sure Sanja was under no illusions that she might still be wanted, the visitor finally did so on the seventh night, after her family was killed and her house burned to the ground the day before.

Fire and Madness: A tale of payment and repayment.
Bells toll all over town, burn, burn until it's all gone. Game over, what was a bad joke is now a reality show...
Although the faerie had initially set his sights on Sanja for her magic and precognitive powers, he soon used Sanja for whatever desire he had, be it as a servant, a fortune teller, or love doll. He fed off her emotions until she became so addicted she could never dream of running away, then took advantage of this addiction to control her absolutely. For four years she allowed him to do just that, appearing to lose all will of her own. The faerie grew in wealth and power, taking advantage of Sanja's foresight and the weak influence of the Bulgarian empire that supposedly owned the surrounding lands to seize control of several nearby towns, including the village that had sacrificed her to get rid of him. But in her head, Sanja held on to her will, and slowly began to resist. Then, one day, she fought back.

It started simple. She shut away her foresight and spoke instead of sinister omens and predictions of disaster made up at a moment's notice. The faerie would catch on eventually, after two weeks confusion at the sudden reversal of fortune, but by the time he did, it was too late. Sanja hid herself away once he had figured it out, waiting for him to come and make her pay. And pay she did, in stolen blood. The faerie came to her in his true, terrifyingly grotesque form, a form Sanja already knew well. Then there was a flash of a knife, and payment was dealt. The faerie who had enslaved her was no more.

But Sanja was not done. Not from killing a single man, when an entire village had betrayed her to put her in his care. And so she came to them next, in the dead of night, and set fire to as many buildings as she could reach. Those few who tried to escape she killed, but most died in their sleep as their houses burned. Then, as the morning light began to creep above the trees, she threw herself into the still blazing fire to join them in death.

So would the story end, for most people. Even a witch is not immune to death. But for some of us, death is not the end, but only a transition. Perhaps an old soul is exchanged for a new, or else the remains of a shattered life continue on into undeath. Such was the case for Sanja, who one day later pulled herself out of the ashes of her makeshift funeral pyre and discovered that she no longer had physical form. Sanja was dead, but she lived on as an evil spirit, who took on the names of her mother and the fairy who enslaved her, becoming Sanja Anya Megiddo.

Haunting: A tale of evil spirits.
How about a body at moonlight, how about a body at home, how about a body at moonlight, how our body's alone
Centuries passed in the blink of an eye for Sanja. Residents of Megiddo's mansion which she now haunted would come and go, and usually the 'going' part was due to Sanja either scaring them off or driving them up the wall. For most of this time she was a being of vengeance, thriving off of chaos because she came to believe that burning down her hometown with everyone still in it just wasn't enough to satisfy her. She would rarely do physical harm to her victims, although occasionally particularly troublesome homeowners had to be dealt with, and her favorite way to do so was a bit of telekinesis and the knife she had killed Megiddo with. During times when her mansion started to gather a poor reputation, she would disappear off to some nearby town, hire someone to have it fixed up a bit, and haunt someone else until the rumors died down and someone was willing to buy the place again. Repeating this process, Sanja preserved her home and a steady supply of human victims across time. Around her, Bulgaria was conquered by the Byzantine empire, then reclaimed. Her home, in the more weakly controlled northern lands, became a part of Wallachia, then was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, and then finally Romania. And then, after over a thousand years of undeath, Sanja finally encountered a human resident she had no idea what to do with.

Lost Dream: A tale of neglect.
Sometimes I feel I don't have the words. Sometimes I feel I'm not being heard. And then I fear I'm feeling nothing more.
Around the dawn of the twentieth century, a wealthy couple and their teenage daughter purchase a mansion a mile out of the nearest town in Romania. They quickly find out that the building is haunted, but after such a hefty investment are unwilling to leave simply because of that. Struggling to put up with the evil spirit that has invaded their lives and strives at every turn to make them miserable, they begin a fight that would last until after their deaths. If they tried to pretend the spirit wasn't there during the day, she would wake them up with a loud racket in the dead of night. If they tried to exorcise her, she would come back as soon as they let down their guard. Salt could keep her at bay for awhile, but the spirit knew the mansion better than the family, as only a thousand year resident could. Eventually, they received a tip about how to force a ghost to move on, by finding the bones, salting them, and burning them. They searched everything they could find of the mansion and found several sets of bones, only for them to turn out to be previous residents other than the evil spirit. A local expert in folklore recounted a story that had been passed down, a tale of payment and repayment now a millennium past, of how a young girl was enslaved by an evil nobleman after being betrayed by her hometown. But after burning to the ground and wearing away from a thousand years of neglect, there was no trace left of the unnamed town where Sanja grew up. But eventually, they were forced to give up on account of dying while on a trip.

Something that Sanja had nothing to do with, thank you very much.

By this time, the daughter was an adult and perfently content with living on her own in a haunted mansion. And by the time she was on her own, she had long since gotten used to the evil spirit always lurking just out of site. Indeed, the only thing that bothered her for awhile was the sudden absence of her parents desperately trying to get rid of it. With her entertainment suddenly robbed from her, Sanja began to realize she had just been going through the motions for most of the last thousand years, and that she had no real reason to haunt humans anymore other than for fun. With her sheer age the 'evil' that made her an evil spirit had slowly fallen away, leaving only a being of mischief who had long since forgotten why she was evil in the first place. The final affirmation of this came when she considered returning to her old standby of killing a particularly troublesome resident, and found herself unable to bring herself to do it.

Of course, the depression that being flat out ignored had brought on may have had something to do with that too.

In the outside world, World Wars I and II came and went. The boundaries of countries all across Europe changed dramatically, but Romania was still Romania. Eventually, the owner of a solitary mansion in the middle of an uninhabited forest died, leaving behind a lonely evil spirit who no longer had the will to try and attract anyone else. The mansion fell into disrepair and was eventually overtaken entirely by the forest, forgotten by the world of humans. The spirit moved on, passing in and out of the realms of supernatural beings hiding their existence from humans, and every time denying that she had ever been human. Rather than claiming to be a ghost or an evil spirit, she was "just a soul", an ethereal existence that had never held any physical form. After all, a ghost is defined as the spirit of a living being who lingers until their business is done and they can move on, but the spirit had forgotten her old life, and with that lost any chance of moving on. Now more than ever, she wanted to finally end it all, only to be faced with the undeniable knowledge that doing so was no longer possible.

Eventually, she found her way into a town at war, with all manner of beings fighting just outside the sight of humans, and decided to give living a try one more time. After all, in an environment where everyone a given person met could be a potential enemy, simply ignoring someone, even a wandering soul, could be fatal. And besides, it looked like fun.

Reincarnation
It's strange that there's a mansion in the middle of an uninhabited forest to begin with. The girl who lived there hardly ever came to town. But, awhile ago I saw a girl who looked like her daughter. Why do I say that? Well, since the girl looks like she did when she was young.
In the present day, or at least a date somewhere near it, in Romania, a mansion from medieval times lies abandoned and in disrepair. You could try to find it if you like, but you'll likely only stumble across it by accident. After all, the only existence left who knows where it is has moved on, leaving only the remains of her previous activity in the mansion left to prove she ever existed at all. Her remains, and even the village they once lay in the ruins of, are long gone, decayed into dust and carried away by the wind. She could come back, if she has reason to. After all, she's the only one left who knows where it is.

Meanwhile, in the town of Manuka, you might come across a girl who looks like she isn't quite there. A girl with fiery red hair and icy blue eyes, and skin so light you could swear it was see-through. Sometimes it is. A girl dressed in all white, or all red, or sometimes nothing but undergarments, but whatever she wears it fades into nothing around the edges. A girl with a charming smile or a fierce glare, and a knockout figure to match. But you won't see that at first. She'll look bored, or depressed, or lost in thought, and then she'll see you, watching her, and all of that will melt away like it was never there. And the only way to get rid of her is to pretend she doesn't exist, but maybe you don't want that at all. She certainly doesn't. Because this is a girl who has forgotten life, and is trying to remember what it feels like, in every sense of the word. Her name is Sanja Anya Megiddo, and despite being over twelve hundred years old, she's a new girl in town. Go on, say hello. I'll wait.

But if you do, be warned. She may be an evil spirit no longer, but she's still a trickster at heart.

app by kel <3

rp sample

Yes...she was certain she knew this one. How long ago had it been...five years? Six? Maybe even seven by now. Whatever the case, at the time she had been too young to even join military service in most countries, and yet had already made enough of a name for herself that people on opposite sides were seeking out her services. They'd meet Matchstick, a middle-aged man who looked like he'd seen more of the war than most people saw of even World War 2, who would arrange a price and act as a go-between for the client and who they usually thought was another man like him. Most people never knew Elve was a young girl until they met her, and some of them didn't even get that far. But what was always the most surprising was not that Elve was a young woman, but that she was a young woman who had seen more conflict than Matchstick looked like he had.

The truth was, she had killed so many people she couldn't remember most of them anymore. But the ones who survived, or who she thought might have survived...she always remembered those. They were the few, and the lucky. In a way, they were like her. And this one...she had been hired to sabotage an American operation in the sandbox -- she couldn't remember which one anymore, there had been so many -- and had needed to get past him to reach her objective. He'd looked much more lively then, almost like he enjoyed being on the battlefield. More than anything else; more than the stubborn refusal of peace talks to make any progress, or the dissonance between her hatred of the sound of gunfire and her willingness to own and use as many weapons as she thought she might need, or even the man who had requested his own assassination, people like that confused her. Maybe that was why she couldn't kill him.

She had shot him, yes. She remembered a fifty cal round tearing through the man's arm, and she remembered eavesdropping on chatter after completing her mission claiming that he was in critical condition, but in that moment before she squeezed the trigger, she had hesitated. She had had a perfect shot, and in a moment of weakness had let it slip away, and settled for an imperfect one instead. And now here he was, all the joy gone from his eyes and what she immediately saw as either leather gloves or hard, black shells over his arms.

Elve always wondered how people who survived her felt. Did they wish they had died instead? Did they hate her, or did some part of them know that like her weapons she was just a tool to be used? What would they do if they suddenly found their almost killer right in front of them? Now, finally, she had her chance to find out.

And just like that, Elve was next to the man. She kept enough distance to hopefully not be perceived as 'too close', but at the same time stayed close enough that there was no doubt who she was talking to. "Hey there," she said, giving her usual childlike, innocent-looking smile. "You seem a little out of it, are you okay?"

Okay, so Elve wasn't actually all that good at starting conversations. But once the other person was saying something, anything, she could manage.

[JURATE]