Twitchy Witchy Girl

Or you can deposit letters, presents, lost or returned things directly into the wicker clothes hamper she's left just outside her door in the 3rd floor hallway...

Name: Puli
DW username: whippetpuli
E-Mail: magicnme@gmail.com
IM: illusivetactic OR magicnme4e
Plurk: magicnme
Other Characters: n/a

Character Name: Coraline Jones
Series: Coraline (Original Novella canon, though I'm using her film version for icon visuals)
Timeline: Chapter 11, after outwitting the other mother, Coraline has fled from the Other side and locked the small door, falling asleep in the drawing room armchair.
Canon Resource Link: And away to Wiki we go!

Character History:

Coraline Jones is an imaginative eleven year old girl who is still full of enough wonder to enjoy exploring her otherwise-mundane world, until the day her life becomes a little more than just mundane. Although she is keenly observant of all the tiny details of her surroundings, she has a short attention span for sitting-down activities, becomes easily bored by television, and as an only child in a divided house full of weird grown-ups, has very few opportunities to find playmates her own age. Her well-meaning but overworked parents seem to have very little time to entertain her as they settle into new routines. With her father trying to meet important manuscript deadlines and her mother busy on the computer, a solitary and restless Coraline wanders alone around the property and meets her new neighbors.

In the last week of summer, a rainstorm interrupts Coraline's exploring of her new outdoor surroundings. Since bothering her parents earns her no positive attention, she sets out to learn the house top to bottom and finds a little locked door in the drawing room. After pestering her mother, she discovers that it opens with an ominous black key, but only has a bricked-up wall behind it. Later that night she dreams of eerie singing rats.

Eager for the rare moment where an adult will actually listen to her (and hopefully get her uncommon name right), Coraline pays visit to her new eccentric neighbors- two retired actresses in the downstairs flat, who tell her fortune and invite her to tea. They foresee danger in her future, and gift her with a lucky stone from a jar of odds and ends on the mantle. She discovers a stray cat on the dilapidated grounds, and also visits Mr. B in the attic flat above, who is training his mice to perform circus acts. Coraline is a left with very a skeptical impression- her mother, after all, thinks the old man isn't quite right in the head.

As the school year nears, Coraline becomes frustrated with her mother while shopping for her new school uniform, because she won't let her buy unique day-glo gloves. She becomes increasingly curious about the mysterious door, and while her mother leaves her alone in the house to run a few more errands, Coraline decides to fetch the key from its hiding place and investigate the door again.

This time, instead of opening up to a brick wall, she finds a cold, musty corridor to a paralell universe where everything seems too good to be true, grown ups are a lot more interesting and wildly imaginative, and her Other-Parents shower her in affection and attention! It all seems dazzling and eeriely interesting, a little too good to be true, and perhaps it is- These Other-people, all have buttons for eyes...and implore her to stay with them, if only she sews in a pair for herself.

...This doesn't sit particularly easily with Coraline, so she politely refuses and returns home a little shaken. As she waits alone in the house, her parents do not return home, so she falls asleep, still waiting. A day passes by, and they still do not return. The stray cat shows up to wake her in the middle of the night, leading her to one of the mirrors where she sees a vision of her parents, trapped, and suspects they have been kidnapped by the Other-Parents. Coraline first does the sensible thing and phones the police to report their kidnapping, but of course their answer is patronizing! Mustering her bravery, recalling a time when her father faced a wasps nest to retrieve his glasses, she and the cat venture behind the door once more to recover them.

This time, she is even more wary of her button-eyed parents' warm reception, rather like a fly that is beginning to sense the stickiness of a spiders' web. The Other Mother obtains the key from her rats and locks the connecting door, preventing her return. When Coraline tries to run away off-property and finds the edges of the world thinning, the cat explains that this is a place of the Other Mother's creation, but she cannot truly create, only weave an appealing parody of the real world. He advises that she use her wits and challenge the Other Mother, who seems to grow only more sinister in her efforts to charm her new daughter. But soon enough her sickly-sweet patience sours.

Coraline's defiance earns her a few hours discipline in a hidden chamber behind the mirror, where she discovers three spirits of children previously captured by the creature they call "Beldam". They warn Coraline that after accepting the Other Mother's false love, she will drain Coraline's soul away, like theirs. Coraline discovers that the Ghost Children's souls have been hidden as objects around the house, and that her seeing stone may be the key to finding them.

so she strikes a daring bargain with the Other Mother, to play an "exploring game, a finding-things game" to recover both her parents and the souls of the lost children. If she finds them, she'll be permitted to leave, but if she cannot, then she'll stay and sew buttons into her eyes.

This takes her on a creepy and dangerous search of the house and grounds, where the beldam's illusions begin to unravel and show their true colors. Even as the the world becomes progressively distorted and revolting, Coraline searches every perilous nook and cranny. She discovers that even the Other Father is a pathetic illusion, and feels compassion for him even as he poses a threat to her. Coraline's keen observational skills and her courage takes her far, however, and in the end she completes her scavenger hunt, rescues her real parents from a snowglobe and with the children's souls in her pocket, outwits the Other Mother and flees home through the door with the cat as a new friend.

However, the Other Mother's right hand follows her back through the corridor, to reclaim the black key before Coraline can make sure it is never, ever discovered again. As she collapses exhausted in the drawing room chair, the released souls of the ghost children appear to her in a dream, thanking her for setting them free and warning her that she is not yet free from danger. However, they reassure her that she has enough wisdom, luck and courage to bear this burden.

(...at this point in her adventure, Coraline awakens in Wonderland's mansion. She arrived in February of 2008 and was a plucky resident for a year and ten months, already well primed for dealing with people in mirrors and an ever-changing old house to explore every inch of. She's spent a majority of her time there making friends and reluctant parental figures while always trying to find a reprieve for her boredom, taking advantage of the closets, wandering the forest and checkerboard hills and trying to find 'room number infinity' among the endless expanding hallways. She has been an Honorary Gryffindor and a Precocious Protagonist, a victim of heartless in the hedge mazes and more over the course of many whimsical and weird and sometimes horrific events. Because of her memory event, the mansion has 'eaten' one of her important memories and so she's forgotten the word 'button' and cannot be retaught it, this will continue to linger just off the tip of her tongue, lost forever.)

She may one day yet return home to her still-disinteresting but beloved parents, and find her eccentric neighbors relieving company. She may one day very soon find that she is not quite out of the woods, and that she must outwit the spidery hand of the Other Mother one last time by tricking it close to a very deep overgrown well. Coraline can and will. She is, after all, quite the extraordinary girl.


Abilities/Special Powers:

Coraline is rather mundane, although she does have a tremendous sense of plurk and courage when facing the supernatural. She has a sense of adventurous curiousity and wonder, but there's very little special ability involved in resisting the Other Mother's mirrored illusions. Coraline had only her wits and the help of a talking cat, the advice of some Ghost Children, and one potentially magical artifact in her possession...

- The Stone (with a Hole in it) This is a magical object given to Coraline by Miss Spink. It can reveals hidden things when you look through the hole in its center. In mirrors, the stone glows green and may show a firey trail to hidden objects. Looking through the stone reveals a glowing treasure amid a world of grey. In the film version of Coraline, it is green and triangular. Rumored to be useful when encountering "Bad Things" as well as "Lost Things", it presumeably functions as a Hag or Adder Stone.

"...believed to have magical powers such as protection against eye diseases or evil charms, preventing nightmares, curing whooping cough, the ability to see through fairy or witch disguises and traps if looked at through the middle of the stone, and of course recovery from snakebite. According to popular conception, a true adder stone will float in water."


Third-Person Sample:

The fireworks were over, and the all balloons had been popped, or had otherwise floated down limp and sadly to be kicked around the halls by her favorite pair of yellow wellingtons. Maybe there had been one too many sweets consumed over the course of consecutive days, enough to feel slightly queasy once the sugar crash set in. But she wasn't feeling tired at all. How could she be, with so much excitement still lingering in the air?

The first thing Coraline did after the parties were over was take stock of what had changed around the mansion- the Original one. She'd peeked in an uncovered mirror really really quickly, fearful of who could be lurking on the other side, to find that she herself hadn't changed very much at all. Even her hair didn't need a trim, despite knowing that if she'd really been asleep in some kind of coma for six years, she should be a very sickly-looking teenager by now. (She'd seen a worrisome medical show about that once on TV, about a girl who'd been asleep in a hospital for months... but not years.)

Still, Coraline felt a little like Rip Van Winkle as she tiptoed into rooms left unlocked, filled with new intriguing occupants by the looks of things, people she'd certainly never met before. All of them were probably just as weird and fascinating as the ones she dimly remembered from before her long sleep. The hardwood floors were still the same, and the candles in the great entranceway still smelled vaguely like a smokey church funeral service she'd been trotted out to once. The pool was still there, the winding hedge maze that still gave her the chills, the rolling checkerboard hills and the beach and the forest. Nothing seemed too out of place but a brand new set of people to meet. Coraline circled through it all twice, a funny sense of dreamlike deja-vu trilling around in her chest.

In fact, trying to remember home felt even further away than before, harder than closing her eyes and visualizing all the ins and outs of this place. That was awfully troubling. So to tackle the funny feeling of guilt away, Coraline found colored pencils and paper on the shelves in her closet and drew herself a map of the flat where she'd lived so very briefly with her parents- all twenty windows... or was it twenty-one?. All fourteen doors, including that one in the drawing room. She pinned it on the wall above the place where she slept, and laid flat on her back to stare at it for a long while, fidgeting with the blue pencil in her hands until she felt that too-familiar itch to get up and do something. Go somewhere. Find something to fill the day.

First-Person Sample:

[A small, plucky girl with a bright blue bob steadies her video, waving a little shyly. This might be less awkward if she wasn't so certain she was going to have to reintrouduce herself to a great many people, and explain the very peculiar circumstances of her absence. Had she been absent, all this time? Was her soul trapped, like the ghost children? Nervous worry flinches briefly across her face, but soon resolves itself into a determinedly friendly smile.]

Hello again Wonderland? It's me, Coraline. Probably a lot of you don't know me yet, 'cause I didn't really recognize... well, almost everybody at the parties, really, but maybe I just got lots and lots of memories munched, so... if you could help me figure out who you all are, maybe, that would be nice?

I'm a girl from the past, which means... I'm not-new here!

Maybe I'm new for you, but... I guesssss [Here's another uneasy wince of a face] A couple.... years happened, overnight? [Sh shrugs, and tries not to look too embarassed. Maybe nobody will think she's a liar? Or say "That's nice, Caroline dear."]

Maybe I time-travelled, but that's never happened to me before. Plenty of weirder things have happened here, but usually after a little while it goes back to normal...-ish.

So could anybody please tell me what's been going on lately? Before the parties, I mean. I've been awake for those, but I'm not sure what happened before then. Last I remember, it was just past Christmastime.