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[- Character Information -]

Character Name: Snake
Fandom: Dreamsnake
OU, AU, or CR AU: OU
Canon Point: She and Melissa have just escaped from the Broken Dome and have arrived back at camp, battered and a bit shell-shocked.
Journal: snake_dreamer 

World History: Actually I’m going to do this section because the book is out of print.

Snake’s world is post-nuclear-war Earth. There are still radioactive craters, and people have either retreated to domed cities (where inbreeding is rampant) where they have some cont act with off-worlders, or they make their way either as nomads or in little villages.

Healers all come from the Station, a genetics engineering lab. Healers are required to successfully produce a significant alteration on a living being: Snake made a pony that had orange and black tiger stripes, Squirrel. They heal by providing formulas and chemicals to a variety of snakes (rattler and cobra) who then catalyze the chemicals into a venom that cures.

Healers must accomplish a ‘proving year’, in which they keep a journal detailing all of their activities. Snake is on this proving year and she’s decided that she will go out into the desert, where healers hardly ever go anymore. The healer numbers have been shrinking, you see, because a proper healer also has a dreamsnake—an alien serpent from off-world, emerald green with a red mouth, whose venom induces pleasure. Dreamsnakes are scarce, and attempts at the station to clone them have only been marginally successful. (Snake’s first dreamsnake, Grass, is one she succeeded in cloning, along with four other snakes.)

Everyone in this world practices biocontrol: the ability to regulate fertility through meditation exercises that control hormones and body temperature (males raise the body temp high enough to kill sperm, females apparently delay ovulation).

If you’d like a sample of this world, the first chapter of the book is available for free online: http://vondanmcintyre.com/McIntyre-MistGrassSand.pdf

Character History:
Snake is on her proving year from the Healer’s Station. She and her three snakes have ventured into the desert to try to work her craft there—because that’s where she figures she’s most needed.

Her dreamsnake is killed by suspicious villagers. It’s not really their fault, in a way: they’re accustomed to lethal sand vipers so they act out of fear and kill Grass. Without a dreamsnake, Snake is crippled as a healer, so she decides she must turn herself back in at the station and beg for mercy. She doesn’t hold much hope of getting another dreamsnake—why would they give her one when she was so careless before?

She departs the nomads.

She first meets Jesse, a woman from Center, one of the protected cities. Jesse had left the city years ago, because she was tired of the lies. She wanted adventure. Everything they’d told her in the city about the outside world was wrong. Well…not everything. Turns out they were right when they told her the craters were deadly. Jesse got rich, you see, prospecting these craters for metals and gemstones.
Jesse had fallen from one of the horses she tamed as a sideline. Snake, without Grass, can’t do much to help her. They decide to take her to Center to ask for help. Jesse dies along the way of radiation sickness. Snake is devastated.

At a brief stop at an oasis she knows, her possessions are destroyed by a ‘crazy’. She inoculates the children of the camps before moving on, but it seems the crazy follows her, all the way to Mountainside. Mountainside is a beautiful town, filled with beautiful people. Almost too beautiful to be real, as it turns out.

The Mayor of the town got injured, and the wound is infected and gangrenous. He is brutally disappointed in his son, Gabriel, who was breathtakingly handsome, but, because he failed at biocontrol, got a girl pregnant—this was a great shame to him and his family, and Gabriel is so scarred by it that he goes robed and lets his father verbally abuse him.

Snake stops all that: Gabriel decides to leave, to find a better biocontrol teacher, given strength from his time with Snake. She also rescues a scarred girl named Melissa, who had been abused by the stablemaster. Melissa had been disfigured in a fire many years ago, and in a city of beautiful people, she stood out, so she hid, taking comfort only in the horses who didn’t care what she looked like.

Snake adopts Melissa—all healers are sterile, so they make families by adoption like this all the time—and they try to continue to Center. They’re turned away by Jesse’s brother, who at first seemed inclined to help but when Snake mentions cloning, is horrified, cutting short their communication.

They encounter the crazy again, who we discover is addicted to dreamsnake venom. He’s been following her to try to find her dreamsnake, so he could have one of his own. But he tells her he knows of a place where there are dozens of dreamsnakes—hundreds!—in the Broken Dome. North, the man who rules there, rewards his followers with dreamsnake bites, and punishes them, as he does the crazy, by denying them.

The crazy figures that if he brings North a healer, North will reward him. Snake only wants the dreamsnakes—they could help her, but more than that, could help the entire outside world. More dreamsnakes would mean more healers, and that would mean more helping.

The crazy turns her over, and North, a giant albino, we find has a huge grudge against healers, because they could possibly have helped him years ago when he was a child. He hates to be reminded he could have been normal. He takes Melissa from Snake and they are reunited in the cold tunnels under the dome, where there are, indeed, hundreds of dreamsnakes. Who are attracted to body heat. Snake nearly dies holding Melissa up out of their way—Melissa is afraid that she will become addicted, like the crazy, to not remembering her scars and ugliness.

She climbs free and escapes with Melissa after a final confrontation with North.

Personality:

Snake is courageous and resourceful and more than a little headstrong. She’s not afraid to express her opinions, or show emotions. She cries when Grass is killed, and is more upset that the villagers don’t seem to be able to show emotion or mourn than her own grief.

She realizes she’s a healer at heart after Jesse, even without her dreamsnake, she can’t suppress the urge to try to help people. And we see this again and again in canon: Jesse, Gabriel, Melissa—she wants to fix things, make things better.

She stands up to the Mayor, both about his son and himself—he’s the Worst Patient Ever, and while all his servants are terrified of his temper, she blasts him for being an idiot and possibly damaging his own healing.

Yet she doesn’t hold grudges: it’s to the Mayor she must turn to get Melissa, and despite his temper and family issues, he’s a good mayor, who really does want the best for his people. When he hears Ras has been abusing a little girl, Melissa is instantly transferred to Snake’s guardianship and Ras is forced to see a ‘mender’ (psychologist).

Though she nearly despairs several times, Snake is a survivor, always picking up the pieces and finding something to do. Even when Jesse’s dead and she and Jesse’s friends have parted ways, Snake continues toward the city, on hope alone, because doing something is better than sitting around doing nothing. Even in North’s pit in the Broken Dome, she sets her mind to escaping, climbing, arduously, out of the rocky chasm.

Despite all this, her most intimate relationships seem to be with her snakes. She has lovers, but always seems a bit distant with them—Gabriel is, in a sense, a fragile child to her. She is most equal, believe it or not, with Melissa, her adopted daughter—she listens to Melissa’s opinions, and they split tasks and chores. Melissa’s had a brutal life compared to Snake’s own, and Snake values this perspective.

She’s independent, so she’s not much of a follower.

Powers/Abilities:

Snake is a scientist, as much as a healer. She created Squirrel, her tiger pony, and she was one of the few who successfully cloned dreamsnakes, so she clearly understands genetic manipulation and cloning.

She is also a healer—she can cure tumors and illnesses, inoculate against viruses and poisons, with a few hours’ preparation. Give her a venomous creature, and she can create an antitoxin if given a lab. (She talks about this in canon as though it’s no big deal). It’s clear in canon that North (the giant albino) could have been helped or cured by healers, so that’s another sign of what she can do.

She’s also immune to most poisons—at worst, they’ll make her flu-ish. This is because she’s spent years building up resistance to them.

Possessions:

Her snake case, with Mist and Sand in it and her starter catalysts and salves, the dreamsnake in her pocket, and the clothes on her back. Also, her belt-knife.

Arrival:

On the ship, please?

[- Writing Samples -]

Network Sample:
My journal.

[The voice has that tone of suppressing panic. She needs her proving-year journal.]

Has anyone seen it?  It's useless to anyone but me. 

[A pause. She hates admitting she needs it, but it's true.]

I could offer...something as trade. 

Please don't have burned it.




Log Sample:

Snake sat on the top of the ship, looking off to the domed city.  It all seemed so familiar that she had to remind herself, almost forcefully, that this wasn't home.

Yet everything she heard kept making her wonder: a long-past war, a domed city that inbred, feeling that any outside contact was a threat and contamination, Mutations, loss, isolation. Travelers from another world. It was too similar, sometimes. 

But just familiar enough that the unfamiliarities leapt out at her: there were no nomads who refused to tell you their names.  There were no dreamsnakes, except the one that wriggled, gently, in her pocket as the morning sun struck her. 

She'd just won, back where she'd come from. She'd just fought her way free, but more than that, she held the knowledge that would save everyone--how to breed dreamsnakes, naturally, purely, organically. The secret had been so simple, all along.  For all their science in the Station, they'd simply never thought beyond how humans worked. They'd simply never thought beyond two and into three.

So simple. And she had the secret, knew the secret, and...there was no one to tell. 

It felt like despair, a snuffed-out oxygen squeak, to realize that they might never know, because the knowledge she'd fought for was gone.  How many would die because she'd had whatever misfortune that ended her here? 

No, Snake, she told herself, shaking her black curls. No. Despair is not for now. There are people in the other city who need you.  If you can't comfort yourself, at least you can comfort them.