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[personal profile] tempus_frangit
OOC Information;
Name; Si
Personal Journal; [personal profile] fgks
Contact; dorkoftheuniverse @ plurk
Other Characters; Hiyoshi Wakashi [personal profile] totheheavens

IC Information;


Character Name;
“That’s sad. Not having a name. I used to have one name, but then I had to get another one.

You don’t want my name. Trust me. You really don’t. Sometimes I don’t want my name, and I’m sort of used to it by now. It would really mess you up.”



Delirium. Just Delirium. The Greeks also refer to her as Mania. Once upon a time, long long ago, she was known as Delight.


Canon; Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

Canon Point; The end of the series. After Endless Nights, when the five humans have rescued her from herself. Morpheus is dead, Destruction has truly left, and Barnabas is her best friend and keeper.



Age;

“Some say the tragedy of Delirium is her knowledge that, despite being older than suns, older than gods, she is forever the youngest of the Endless, who do not measure time as we measure time, or see the world through mortal eyes.”

Despite being as old as time itself; Delirium has always looked around 13-15 years old, and often acts it.

Appearance;

“Her appearance is the most variable of all the Endless, who, at best, are ideas cloaked in the semblance of flesh. Her shadow’s shape and outline has no relationship to that of any body she wears, and it is tangible, like old velvet.”

Save for her lithe, child-like figure, Delirium never takes on the appearance for long. Her hair is usually uneven be it in length, layer, or color. She’s gone from buzz cuts to Mohawks to dreadlocks, and from green to red to blue to orange to yellow to everything in between. She can’t seem to settle on one style or color for too long, or perhaps she can’t remember. She always has an assortment of piercings on her ears, lips, and nose. Delirium wears clothes that would not be out of place in rock concerts or a homeless shelter, usually favoring loose-fitting t-shirts or leather jackets over net shirts and tights. She is always barefoot. Another constant are her eyes: the left eye a vivid blue and the right an emerald green flecked with moving silver spots.
Delirium will also find that she’s subconsciously turned herself into an assortment of tiny and colorful creatures. During one discussion with her brother-sister Desire in the Threshold; Delirium admits to finding it difficult to “hold on” before dissolving into a swarm of butterflies. On another occasion she absentmindedly transforms herself into a hundred and eleven perfect, tiny, multicolored fish; each fish singing a different song.


House; Aside from her aforementioned habit of turning herself into an assortment of creatures, Delirium often makes things out of thin air. A few of her more minor work range from perfectly ordinary butterflies and frogs to floating, singing, water-independent fish that guide her path.
In fact Delirium was the one who began the creation of the Endless’ envoy for The Wake, a being created from mud that she christened Eblis O’Shaughnessy (after the rejection of her initial name suggestion: “Plippy Ploppy Cheese nose”). She also presents him with a giant glowing jellyfish to light his way into the dark catacombs beneath the Necropolis Litharge.

One on particular panel in Brief Lives, Delirium blows bubbles into several shapes including but not limited to: forks and various other dining utensils (such as a cup and saucer), food (donuts, ice cream), an ant, a cat, the letter a, crosses, an alarm clock, diamonds, a star, and even Toroto from My Neighbor Toroto.
Beautiful things, terrible things, things that don’t exist, things that shouldn’t exist, things that are four different objects at the same time… Whatever they are, Delirium creates them.
Power; Drawing Life


Background;

“For Delirium was once Delight. And although that was a long time ago even now, even today her eyes are badly mismatched: one eye is a vivid emerald green with silver flecks that move; her other eye is vein blue. Who knows what Delirium sees through her mismatched eyes?”

Delirium was formerly Delight, and due to some incident she woke up to find herself changed. She refuses to tell anyone the true reason, though Destruction suspects that she had her feelings hurt and as a result, went too deeply inside herself. It is suspected that this was due to her first and only marriage failing, and she interrogates her older brother Destiny about this; asking if the reason for her change was in his book. When he says nothing Delirium says that she does know, and reminds him that not everything is written in his book of destiny.

Delirium knows things, she is aware of the many different possible universes and futures. “I mean, there are so many of them of them. Like wiggly worms, millions and billions and squillions of wiggly worms, all wiggling in different ways to get to the same place,” as she puts it. Delirium seems to know what will happen to all of existence when the universe ends, something that supposedly only Death knew; she knows pathways in the Garden of Destiny that not even Destiny himself knows; and of the seven siblings she admits to knowing the most about their family. “Not knowing everything is all that makes it okay, sometimes,” she says.


Delirium resides in her realm of chaos, which is possibly easier to access than her brother’s realm of Dreaming, and is quite close. Though it can be visited, most human minds weren’t made to comprehend her domain. It is evident that at times even Delirium herself doesn’t have a full understanding of her own realm. She often misplaces things in it, such as her gallery and her dog, and has once retreated and hidden herself in its vastness. In this fragile state not even her siblings would have been able to enter her realm and leave with their sanity intact, and so five insane humans are summoned by Dream, Matthew the raven, and Barnabas. The five are sent inside Delirium’s realm to find and rescue a “lost little girl who’s hurting.” At the end of Endless Nights, the mad quintet finds her at last, having followed the shoal of fish she’d liberated. Those few who have made the journey have been incapable of reporting back more than the tiniest of fragments, though it is hinted that an insane person entering her realm would leave it unscathed, and quite possibly sane.




Personality;

“I’m not a person.”


She's insane and she knows it. She is insanity.

Delirium tends to disregard certain facts of life, certain laws. She prefers to ignore the laws of physics and her companion, Barnabas, often implores her to be mindful of them. She remembers (sometimes), but she very rarely follows through.

Delirium is easily distracted and can never hold on to anything, be it a conversation or an object or even a person, for too long. She loses her train of thought as easily as she finds a new one, completely unrelated to the first. Sometimes she will confuse words that sound vaguely similar, such as “turquoise” and “turtle.” She tends to prattle on and on and on about mundane things that have happened in the past, be it her past or someone else’s entirely. Occasionally she will babble about the future (as all of the Endless possess prophetic knowledge), but no one ever realizes this until they come to pass. An example would be during their visit to the Suffragette City nightclub to talk to “the dancing woman” about Destruction, wherein Delirium is pleased to hear that Tiffany and the dancing woman “aren’t dead or exploded or anything,” as they would have been in later pages if Tiffany had not managed to escape. The dancing lady, revealed to be a goddess of love named Astarte, danced her last dance; effectively destroying the club and killing everyone except for Tiffany. She also foresaw this somehow, and hoodwinked a man into giving the dancer “lots of dollars” because she knew Tiffany would be the sole survivor of the incident.

Delirium also has a tendency to spout embarrassingly true facts that most people tend to avoid mentioning in an already-delicate situation. She is also very temperamental, easily set off by the simplest of things. She hates being made of, and will either burst into tears when teased or will retaliate with some form of reality-bending revenge. During her search for Destruction, an unfortunate and aggravated police officer pulled her over for reckless driving so she caused him to see invisible bugs on his body “for all his life and forever and always.”Her older brother Dream, who was with her at the time, asked her if it was necessary and Delirium says she doesn’t tell him how to do his job. She reminds him that he’s done “lots worse than that. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots.”

On a similar note, she tends to show her gratitude in similarly disconcerting ways. A little girl once told her she was pretty, and in thanks Delirium did something, making it so the child would “always be happy forever and ever more.” Several other events such as offering the fairy Nuala a word that meant both green and red at the same time and offering a crazy old man a number of rewards for helping her locate a lost Barnabas shows that Delirium is thankful for whatever help she receives and is eager to help others as well. Knowing Delirium however, this may not entirely be a good thing.


Her sentiments on a particular matter shift almost instantly, as demonstrated in her abrupt remorse at the death of their hired driver, Ruby, during their search for Destruction. A split second later she grins and says “I get to drive.” Her emotions vary as much as her appearance; she may start off stuttering and hesitant one moment then excited and as vibrant as her hair the next. Another instance in the beginning of Brief Lives she saunters off into the rain, singing and claiming she needed “a change;” and later on in the same volume she admits to being afraid of change.

Delirium is curious and has a habit of asking questions, particularly about the names of things. She does this quite often, no matter the circumstance; and usually the objects she inquires about don’t have specific names used to address them with, such as “the word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you’ve forgotten the name of the person you’re introducing them to as well.” However on one occasion she asks for the name of the jelly in peoples’ eyes (vitreous and aqueous humor), and on another she wonders what the word is for “the thing that lets you know time is happening” (to which Dream answers “change”).

In the comics, her speech is illustrated in a whimsical manner: with uneven words and lettering against a multi-colored gradient, squiggly speech-bubble. Though there are times when she can straighten herself out, become symmetrical for a moment and speak sense. Her speech-bubble smoothens, the letters align themselves and the background colors aren’t as bright as they usually are. In these rare moments, Delirium thinks and speaks sense. But the effort “hurts very muchly,” and she very rarely attempts it.

Delirium does not like to be touched, unless you’re one of her siblings. She “did this stuff” to someone she met at a club. He had tried to kiss her, and she made it so he only ever saw colors. “Real pretty colors though,” she adds as an afterthought.
Her scatterbrained personality notwithstanding, Delirium can be very determined when she remembers how to be. According to Desire once she has managed to finally wrap her head around an idea, she refuses to let it go and that is a terrible danger within itself, such as when Delirium sought to find her prodigal brother Destruction.

Despite her obvious insanity, Delirium is still vaguely aware of the things happening around her. She does however; tend to confuse the past with the present and the future, and vice-versa.

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May 2012

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