#guess who’s never emotionally recovering from this ✨

[deathbounded]

How the FUCK did I not realise you were vargorsol’s alt HFJSKKFNSNFND,,, call me a Margulis kinnie ig bc damn am I fucking blind

Due to some Personal History™️ I have with a very similar concept from an ANCIENT scrapped fic, I am kinda obsessed with Raisal’s whole Deal of. Yknow. Very Specific Parental Baggage©️. Ballas doing the old “bippity bild I am going to abandon my biological child”. The ✨Trauma✨. You know how it is

In other words want to learn more about her >:((( give us the lore. go ABSOLUTELY nuts if you feel like it I will be patiently waiting!! oc infodumps my beloved <3 (speaking of which i will get round to talking abt my little guys in response to that one ask u sent… some day… maybe……)

hehe this ask made me so happy when i saw it, thank you for asking about raisal! i appreciate it a lot C: 💜 (if you also have ballas/margulis child, they should meet up and unionize against ballas to pay for their therapy or something idk)

there she is!

anyways. raisal lore dump incoming.

[cw: implied child neglect and emotional abuse]

raisal was unplanned and lived primarily with margulis given a) the vague covertness of margulis and ballas's relationship and b) ballas's general disinterest in children (he was mostly just awkward around her and somewhat (very) blatantly jealous over the attention she got from margulis).

when the zariman children were recovered and margulis's attention diverts nearly wholly to them, raisal wasn't unused to being left on her own: margulis had always been busy with her archimedian duties and ballas is generally literal and emotional unavailable, so she spent a good amount of time on her own or with adults who don't care as much about her emotional. but raisal wasn't able to process well why margulis was spending so much more time at work especially with other children!! who she calls her children too!! "but i’m her only child!! >:OOO" and became resentful of the tenno for "stealing" margulis's attention away from her.

...in her defense she was like 6; she's doing her best.

rather than bringing this up - cause, y’know, orokin are culturally emotionally repressed - she thinks “the only way to spend time with my mother is if i play into the things she cares about” and never brings anything up, so margulis didn't really know about this issue (but if she did she’d totally 100% do something to address it).

enjoy the one scrap of raisal writing i have atm <;:)

when margulis is executed for trying to protect the tenno, it just cements this resentment (raisal knows that margulis doesn’t blame the tenno for it; she wouldn’t want her to either. yet she does, and she feels guilt for it), and she’s very, very repressed about it.

rather than abandoning her after margulis's execution, ballas takes raisal in out of a "this is the last piece of margulis i have i have to make sure Nothing Bad Happens To It" mindset (raisal looks very similar to margulis). which uh. doesn’t lead to a great parenting style; he's both overprotective and emotionally distant, which is a rough time for anyone, especially a child! basically any time he realizes he *gasp* cares for his literal child, he slams the breaks and immediately backpedals.

he also weaponizes raisal's resentment towards the tenno and her attachment to margulis in order to manipulate her into cooperating with his revenge plans, part of it involving contributing to her isolation from others (i say contributes because the stigma of having a parent executed by the jade light and your guardian being an executor makes most people wary to interact with you in the first place), so she's pretty dependent on ballas. plus, since he's one of the executors, so she never even considers running away.

ballas pushes her to become an archimedean, partially to have an insider on the archimedeans and partially so he can influence what gets designed. she later gets the "honor" of having access to continuity - which she drags her feet over as long as she can. so I guess she is blueish?? (i am not a fan of this and neither is she) she does not have a long are Because I Said So. realistically? something along the lines of "i look like margulis who the tenno are attached to, therefore maintaining the resemblance as much as possible will be of great...diplomatic advantage." i also headcanon that once a yuvan is chosen they then modify them to resemble their old body (when it was younger ofc) as much or as little as they want. which is my explanation as to why she still retails her resemblance to margulis.

i'm...not actually sure what raisal's research focus would be, but i do know she has expertise in transference research, infestation, and sentients. she has a pressure to excel at anything she picks up though, largely from orokin societal pressure.

her timeline during the old war is pretty much one big shrug aside from this, but at some point raisal researches into hybridizing sentient and infestation technologies (among other things), and starts prototyping a vessel capable for withstanding long-term deep void exposures (with the vague intention of craft a vessel capable of enduring a trip to a far-away system, not necessarily tau).

when the collapse hits, ballas takes her to this spacecraft and locks her in it in the void (it has a reliquary drive; he fucked with it & the ship's cephalon's precepts so the ship is virtually immobile) and from there she's kept on an information diet by ballas - basically she has no idea what's going on in the origin system other than what he tells her (unreliable source time, baby!).

she always had some amount of doubt regarding ballas's actions, doubts that were drawn into stark relief when he brainwashed natah which developed into feeling a need to do reparations for them. during her time trapped in the void she starts researching a transference bolt modification that could restore some semblance of sentience to a warframe. she's never able to quite verify its success though, given her limited resource access.

following this point, i have two main timelines for her:

one where she takes the lotus's place as guide/leader to the tenno, post apostasy prologue (the margulis constant)

in the other, she crosses over into the canon timeline after shit goes sideways in her own (the fold invariant) fun fact: when i was explaining a certain aspect of it to my friend, it made them remark “this fandom seems ridiculously mean to its characters” which. yeah.

there's also a secret third timeline where ballas's an actually good parent a la tiny-chubby-bird's fic but uh. tbh i haven't though about this much. maybe i should.

her attitude towards the tenno throughout all timelines goes from a wary, holding them at arm's length one to an *exasperated sigh in older sibling* one. they also keep giving her harrow chassis blueprints. why do you keep giving me these please i can't make any research progress if you keep only giving me harrow chassis blueprints.

anyways that's the gist of the raisal lore atm. there's definitely a lot that needs to be fleshed out more, especially timeline/old war era wise, but yeah!! feel free to ask any questions!! :D also here is her playlist if feel so inclined to peruse.

name trivia: "raisal" is from the yiddish name raisel, which is in turn derived from the yiddish word for rose! this was to parallel margulis being from a jewish word for "pearl." i wanted a name with flower meaning in reference to the lotus. i don't know where ballas's name is from, the closest i ever got was an austronesian word for "revenge" which. hm!

[agentharrisonofshield-a]

☩✨✪🔅💧✘💔

more & more! headcanons@lucxsnorth

((OKAY I GUESS THIS IS BETTER THAN ‘ALL THE THINGS’ >_> ))

☩: Do they practice any sort of religion? If so, is it the same as their family’s?

Currently, no, Vivian doesn’t actively practice any religion, nor does she feel any need or drive to do so.

She was not only raised Protestant by both her parents, she was raised to be an active member of the church - her mother taught Sunday School, her father was a Deacon, and as a child Vivian sang in the Children’s Choir.  Vivian began questioning her faith somewhere between 15 and 16 years old, but that didn’t stop her from attending church weekly with her father, and from being involved in everything from vacation Bible school to teaching Sunday School herself.  She did eventually begin drifting away from the church itself after turning 19, leaving it entirely upon being recruited into SHIELD, and with her father’s death, she sees no reason to rejoin.

✨: What motivates them? Is it a deep rooted passion/motivation, or is it something they struggle with from time to time?

Surviving, mostly.  And I say ‘mostly’ because Vivian could, probably, if she were careful, live a satisfactory-if-not-the-lifestyle-she’s-used-to life off of the money she inherited from her parents without really needing much more than a minimum-wage job to supplement it. 

However Vivian’s other motivation is the need to prove herself.  To the world at large, to some anonymous ‘them’, but also to herself, and her standards are… not easily reached.  She’d rather stay in a job that regularly pushes her limits - physically, mentally, emotionally, and ethically - than work retail, or any of the other jobs she sees herself as only qualified for.

Idk if ‘daring death to take her’ counts as a motivation.  I mean, it’s not a deep-down-what-gets-them-out-of-bed-in-the-morning motivation, but it sure as hell is what’s behind a lot of her choices.  At the least Vivian doesn’t care if she dies.  More often, she’s actively putting herself in situations where she could get killed.

✪: Have they ever let a rare opportunity slip them by?

In her mind, yes - Vivian sees her dropping out of her first year of college as an insurmountable failure that she can never recover from, as if college was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that she’d been given and then let slip away.  The idea of trying again, of going back a year or gods forbid two or three years later, was unthinkable; she was too embarrassed to even think of walking in as a freshman who wasn’t 18 years old.

(This is because my muse is a fucking idiot sometimes and probably one of the issues I want to shake her over the most.)

🔅: What’s a place that holds special meaning to them? Why?

The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in NYC.  To start with, Vivian was obsessed with sacred geometry and sacred architecture as a child, and St. John the Divine is a magnificent example of it.  Not to mention the church itself (not the building) is everything Vivian thinks a church should be and more - active in their community, always looking for new programs to support, and a huge patron of the arts; Madeline L’Engle did most of her writing there, and one of the chapels showcases a triptych commissioned from Keith Haring.

As a teenager, her church’s youth group spent the night there, not sleeping in the sanctuary itself but partaking in a midnight service and meditation among the giant stone columns.  It was the last time Vivian ever felt that she’d been touched by something spiritual.

Every now and then she’ll visit the cathedral for no particular reason… but she’ll always find herself sitting down in one of the chapels, just… listening.

💧: Are there any places they avoid? If so, why?

Hospitals.  Doctor’s offices are okay-ish, but you will have to drag Vivian kicked and screaming into a hospital, and then you’re going to have to sedate her to make her stay.

Vivian never liked hospitals even as a child; her first exposure was less ‘this is where people go to get better’ as it was ‘this is where Grandpa might die’, and there was never really any effort, on her part or anyone else’s, to change that perception.

Then her father contracted hospital-acquired-MRSA and nearly died.  And then, just over a year later, the infection resurfaced, and this time he did die.  And now hospitals, in Vivian’s mind, aren’t just places where people who are going to die anyway go to die, they’re places that actively make you sick and kill you.

✘: Who do they detest the most? Do they typically avoid this person or antagonize them?

Well this could be a long list of politicians, celebrities, and other notable figures because Vivian detests a lot of people.

But the person in her personal life that she detests the most is probably her aunt.  Her ultra-right-wing, ultra-conservative, homophobic, anti-choice, anti-feminist, ‘stop being so strange’, Evangelical Christian aunt.  Vivian would hate her on principle; a lifetime of actually having to put up with her has just made that hatred simmer and reduce down to fine loathing.

Vivian’s last interaction with her aunt was her aunt chastising Vivian for not being ‘grateful enough’ that so many people had shown up to the reception after her father’s funeral.  Vivian walked out the door while her aunt was still talking, left the reception, and hasn’t spoken to her aunt since.  She only ever put up with her for her father’s sake, and with him gone, she had no further reason to pretend she even tolerated the woman.

💔: Have they ever had their heart broken? If so, why or how did it happen?

When she was 15, Vivian was in love.  Her name was Mairead, she was a year older, had strawberry-blonde hair that hung past her waist and eyes so blue they looked like the sky, and no matter what part of their genetics class Vivian got stuck on, Mairead could explain it so that it made sense, without ever suggesting that Vivian should understand it already.

There were kisses.  Lots of kisses, stolen in corners and on walks to meals and after dances and one one occasion earning the repapering of the dorm’s lounge with signs reminding students PDAs was prohibited.  There was even one last, extra-memorable night, when Mairead crept into Vivian’s room.

And then the session ended, and Mairead went home, and Vivian stayed for another class.  But there were no letters.  Or emails.  No phone calls.  Not even a ‘hey’ on AIM.  Neither one of them reached out to the other, Vivian because she was too nervous and then, the longer the silence lasted, too scared, and Mairead because… who knows?  Maybe she was nervous and scared too.  And the relationship just… ended.  

And Vivian decided falling in love was stupid and pointless and only got you hurt.