Satine Dubois/Azurine's Satine
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
A while back, a friend of mine, after watching me role play with my character Satine Dubois asked how on earth I could play someone like that. Then I showed them my player notes, short stories, character sketches, etc. Still, the disbelief. “You’re nothing like her!” They exclaimed, much to my delight, though that’s not necessarily true – and so because I feel like it, and I’m getting slightly addicted to Virtue Verse, I’ve decided to do an Out of Character post on playing Satine.
“So I’ve met the character, what’s the big deal? She seemed normal enough…”
Aha. Sadly, this isn’t true. Satine is far from normal, though she does hide it well. It’s hard to try and imagine how I, a small-town girl, could come up with quite literally one of the most twisted human beings on the Virtue server. A lot of people would disagree with me on that, but it’s really sad to say that almost no one has ever bothered to RP with Satine long enough to figure say that definitively. No one has ever been able to hit the nail on the head when it comes to her, and I don’t know whether to attribute this to superb role playing on my part or really bad role play on my part. I’m more inclined to think the latter, and that’s half the reason I’m posting this – to give people an OOC look at the character, as I see her.
Satine Dubois started out as a radically different character than the one she’s become today – at first she was my twisted, pseudo-stalker girl that got her commands from a small doll she always carried with her. Plus, I wanted to do those cool Ghost Widow’s moves. (I was such a n00b, shuddup.) The powerset was suggested by my boyfriend of the time, and it seemed to stick – this is after I frustratingly tried to level a mind/psi dom. I never regretted it, either; while not the best PvP set, she is great PvE wise. So Satine showed up in the D one day, looking like a model of ghost widow in a short skirt, revealing top, and the doll. I tried to fall into the character as best I could…but it just wasn’t working. I quit playing her for awhile. Most of Satine’s early flushing out came at the hands of her association with the House de Winter, and its vampire master, Valen de Winter. I bounced ideas off of the player for a period of about two months, and it slowly, the beginnings of the character came into play…
It was in this early time that I actually decided to make Satine a dhampir – I had originally just planned to make her human, but it was an interesting angle to play off of her vampire master. Along with Dreamblood, the three of us began to explore the orgins of Satine, her terrifying history, and subsequent actions. It was a blast. This was when the notebook first started to come into play…I’m not kidding, I have an entire notebook devoted to her, and I carry it with me constantly – you’d be surprised the crazed shit that comes into your head while you’re riding the bus home from school.
So I had a basis – Satine was a dhampir, the product of a vampiric rivalry that had taken the life of her mother. I twisted it as best I could, mush to the chagrin of both Valen and Dream…And with this, I developed the base of her “powers”, as well.
After Dream died and Valen left, I shelved Satine again. Brought her out as a last ditch effort to spark something in Pocket D, and met Herod Hellstromme. And I will delightedly say that Herod is the only reason I ever managed to hold on to the character. Here was another chance to bring her story out, and let it develop.
It was after Dream died the second time that I began to think that maybe, just maybe, Satine got over it a little too quickly – true, she still seems to grieve for him today – and this could be directly due to something instrinsicly “wrong” with her. Explored the idea a little bit in my head, and came up with a fully functioning personality, as it were.
In complete essence, Satine’s emotional depth closely resembles a bundt cake – very full towards the superficial layers, drizzled with a delicious, almost distracting frosting…so that you don’t notice that in the center, there is nothing.
“I’m dead on the inside, and that fact bothers me…a little bit.”
- - Satine to Col. Marcus Drake
