Post by Deleted on Sept 22, 2015 20:50:40 GMT -6
||| OCTAVIA MELODY |||
Avatar Vector by alexiy777 and Profile Vector by Kooner-cz
Basic Information
Name: Octavia Melody
Age Group: Young Adult
Gender: Female
Species: Earth Pony
Occupation: Professional Cellist
Talents: Tonal Memory, Aural Skills
Skills: Cello Performance
Physique: Earth Pony Average
Coat Color: Goldish Grey
Mane Color: Dark Grey w/Highlight
Eye Color: Grayish Mulberry
Other Details: Tends to wear a formal collar with event-appropriate bow tie. As a Canterlot Earth Pony, her coat & mane are more voluminous and hold a Winter-coat for twice as long as other Earth Ponies. However, she extensively uses products and grooming in addition to mindful diet and regular exercise in order to maintain a sleek silhouette.
Personality
Octavia's demeanor is often systematic, especially when she's at work. Her behavior to peers and strangers is so methodical that she gives an impression that if she had her way, she would put life to a time signature and divide the world into a flat rhythm of quarter notes, that her heart would be a perfect clockwork metronome, and that her eyes would see flawless performances in colorful synesthesia while all mistakes were disease-stricken grey. In short, she is polite to others, but if her mind is on something, especially a task, she is coldly focused, and if her focus is broken when she is like this, she can be especially irate towards others. Personalities that are much more extemporaneous and lively than hers get received with interest or annoyance, and often the latter. However, this methodical tendency comes from a place that is not so unfriendly.
She is a musician without mitigation, a true audiovert who neither gains energy by being with or away from other ponies. An entire day away from Alicia, her cello, feels like a day trapped on her back on the desert sand under the burning sun. There is no event more relaxing to her than a concert, feeling to her as though she has dressed up to lounge about in front of the elite and the humble alike. The world is lively, calm, and decipherable through the lens of music, the grander the event the greater she feels afterwards, and if she's among friends or others whom she has developed a pleasant relationship, her demeanor is open and smoothly impassioned ... unless that same light behavior receives too much attention, in which case she straightens her tie and returns to her civil reserve, not a hair out of place.
History
Octavia was born into the Melody house, a narrow townhouse nestled in a cracking, but cozy end of Canterlot's Commontown district, a neighborhood of healthy potted plants on window sills and the smell every morning of fresh-baked bread from the modest, but friendly Prench cafe at the end of the street. Her parents operated the family business of lutherie, the craft passed most recently to Octavia's mother. It was not a surprise really, but a hope that Octavia would be a lover of music, a hope turned to family pride when Octavia became a humming, singing, pot-thwacking, bird-mimicking filly who just could not go without some kind of music in her day, and there was never something that could make her so upset that a duet between her parents could not soothe. It was when she went to school that Octavia found the patches of trouble.
As it turned out, Canterlot wasn't like her home, warm and full of music. School was filled with the next generation of Canterlot's middle and upper classes, who were to the rest of Equestria princesses and princes all living at the literal peak of Equestrian opulence, and at that height, Octavia realized, frankly, that bits, branding, and burnish all were what mattered. Her collar was made of duller cotton then it should have been. Her bowtie was only silk where Prench silk/linen blends were the truly esteemed fabrics, you see! And of course, the Unicorns, all taught by private tutors in magic, were the most popular. Being barely wealthy enough to be in the school while being an inveterate music nerd and an Earth Pony?! It was a formula for being at the bottom section of the school's social barrel, and there, she took on a reserved attitude.
This disparity between her home and the rest of her day made everything about home all the sweeter, and she needed that longing to galvanize her, because at the time, she was trying to learn to play cello while she learned how to make them from her mother and sell them from her father. Like many other instruments, everything about the cello required precise control and fine, fast movements ... all difficult demands to make on an Earth Pony standing on their hind hooves. the better part of a year, it was a ghastly struggle. The strings screeched at her, she dropped the bow when she wasn't snapping hairs, and if her forelegs weren't burning in pain, her hind legs were. Was her talent just listening to music? She wanted badly to get that deep, perfect tone out from her instrument into the world, vibrating her ribs. One day, it finally happened.
The extended family decided there was no better place for the whole Melody clan to be for the week of Hearth's Warming than Octavia's family's townhouse, and so, for one freezing, white week of the year, every single hour saw music made. Her cousin's side of the family brought stomp-worthy tunes, and the ones from abroad displayed all sorts of foreign music. But on the last night of the week, Hearths Warming Eve, it was little Octavia's turn. She stood, balanced with her companion and fiend, and brought her bow to the strings. For the first time, a perfect measure of rich sound flooded the parlor, and with her eyes full of bright fire from the hearth and dim snow outside the window, she performed a perfect rendition of We Wish You a Merry Warming. In front of her whole family, a mulberry treble clef appeared on her flank at last.
Many years later sees Octavia Melody as a part-timer in the family shop, not too many years away from being expected to take over for her mother and her tiring hooves. The cello that she won her cutie mark with sits in the living room on a stand of her apartment in a slightly nicer part of the Commontown district next to the stand where she puts Alicia, her full-size that she herself made, and her companion to symphony halls, classy lounges, formal parties, and sometimes, a cafe set with her friends, some of those same ponies she had shared the dank pit of the old school's metaphorical barrel with. Asked how she feels about things, most of the time she replies with a tone of polished silver that she's doing well, but lately, her phrasing and execution in pieces have taken to a sleepy sorrow, and her answers aren't always so confident.
Roleplayer Information
Nickname: Ink "Inky" Script ( ♓ )
Age: Just in time to sing "Turbo Lover"
Gender/Preferred Pronouns: Female, She/Her
How did you find us?: Equestria Daily
Sample Roleplay
She gave the wide burgundy curtain a deliberate look from end to end, and her heart sank into a lull. She walked the rows of stools and chairs in a pond of scarlet bow ties and fur so obsessively tended that she was, to the keenest eye, a league of shine and the pursuit of classical perfect less; she knew it, and still, as she approached her seat and neared the curtain, her breaths surfed back and forth like sea foam glistening on a cold October harbor's night. She sat, her music stand just nearly hiding the back of the mane of the first-chair cellist seated in front of her. Octavia gave a smirk. King for a day ... it was a thought that came bitterly, but with the curtain at her right, there was just the truth and the task. She made sure the music was ready that she and her neighbor would share, gave her bow a scrutinous look, then closed her eyes, ears falling.
Her body just slightly leaning on Alicia and her smooth varnish, she was, for a moment, so much like a sleeper lucid. And then the quiet washed over them all, bows, mallets, hooves and brass, steel, and wood all still. As the curtain raised, Octavia's ears rose, her chest filled, and she gave a glance to the rows and rows of tassels, ties, cravats, curls, and Prench fashions entrenched. Money ... all of them, either made of money or certainly keeping up the appearance of that being the case ... normally, it would have got under her skin, but nomatter what they had, she had the stage, and tonight, they were all her guests. The conductor walked out onto the stage, and all those gloves and pedicured hooves applauded. Octavia watched him raise his wand in amber magic, and all thought fell into silence. The wand fell into motion, and her bow drew across time.