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Personality:

+ Respectful
Catharsis does her best to be polite and respectful while she’s directly interacting with others. She takes great pains to make sure that Book Children and other City People alike feel welcome and comfortable in her workshop, and she speaks very carefully and politely; her carefully-chosen words contrast rather sharply with her jagged font.

Unfortunately, she has this tendency to wander off in thought mid-sentence, or to become so focused on her work that she forgets the usual pleasantries and niceties. It's not that she means to be rude when she stops talking and reaches for some paper to sketch on -- she just doesn't want to lose that spark of inspiration.

+ Creative
The driving force of her work. Catharsis is not gifted with words; her careful, polite speech comes from a lot of thought and effort. However, she is especially clever mechanically, with quick, precise hands and an active imagination. She reads voraciously, and takes ideas from everything she reads, mixing them together and putting her own twist on them in order to create something new.

+/- Focused
This is both a blessing and a curse. When inspiration strikes (in bursts, as it tends to do), she will drop everything and begin work immediately, or as soon as she possibly can. While this drive is what got her so far in the first place, it is also a problem, because she forgets to eat, rest, or take breaks while she works.

- Absent-Minded
If any City Person could be said to have the memory of a goldfish, it would be Catharsis. She remembers ideas and facts perfectly well -- it’s people she has trouble with. For the first few meetings, she’s likely to ask after someone’s name repeatedly, and take a few moments to remember who they are; with time and repetition, she’ll remember more readily. Her ideas tend to strike her at random moments, and she’ll drift off while she’s thinking about that, even if she’s in the midst of a conversation -- her absent-mindedness will always overwhelm her natural politeness. It’s not that she means to do it -- though she doesn’t actually seem to care much about fixing it. This causes her a lot of problems when it comes to making friends, as her absent-mindedness is easily mistaken for lack of interest or caring.

- Morbid
Catharsis is both afraid of and fascinated by death. She reads murder and horror stories with especial interest, and is drawn to scenes of death and injury. Of course, she can’t exactly do anything to help, but she’s riveted by such scenes, and will stand by and watch in fascination. She’s often uneasy, and unsettled by her own fascination with death.

Thoughts on the Forest: Dark, cold, frightening, and bare -- a place of death, and birth.
Thoughts of Book Children: Fascinating, new, and full of unusual details. She’s endlessly curious about the Book Children, and will often ask them to tell her their stories, and if she can use their stories as inspiration for new clockwork creations.
Thoughts on City People: She treats other City People with the same careful respect as she treats anyone else, though she has no strong feelings about them and much less curiosity than she shows towards Book Children.

Physical Appearance: Catharsis is based on a lionfish. Her hair is longer in front than in back, and just reaches her shoulders in front. She wears a vest and shirt, with the shirtsleeves tucked up past her elbows, and a ruffled cravat. Her pants are open at the outer sides and laced shut, and are tucked into her boots. She has lionfish fins starting at her wrists and pointing up towards her elbows, ending at her mid-forearms; at her ears, pointing back; and at her hips, pointing down towards her knees (hence the laced pants, which she leaves open to accommodate the fins).

History: When she was newly-formed, Catharsis met one of the many clockwork pets in the city -- a four-legged messenger, carrying bundles of scrolls. She followed it out of curiosity, and found herself in Eyncastor, on the doorstep of an eccentric inventor. When he emerged from his workshop to find a young City Person playing with his clockwork pet and examining its workings, he let her stay. She became an errand girl, and eventually his apprentice. Clockwork mechanics became her main focus, and long after he had retired to rest, she was up tinkering and improving.

He was an eccentric man, prone to shouting when particularly frustrated, or when he'd made a discovery, and he kept all his things in a state of organized chaos. Only he knew the capricious rules that governed where spare parts were located, and even after several years, Catharsis had difficulty finding things she needed. He was also prone to fits of rudeness or unprovoked nastiness, even towards her, and lost more than one customer to the storms of his moods. She grew to dislike mess and disorder, the boldness and spikiness of the shouted word, and the cost of indulgence in temper, and strove to make sure that she would be the exact opposite. Still, for all his quirks and faults, he was her mentor, and she cared for him in quiet ways.

But like all City People, he grew old, and one day, she followed him down and watched him enter the Forest. After his death, Catharsis took over his work, and began establishing her name as an inventor in her own right. She loves both purely functional clockwork pets -- after all, efficiency is in itself beautiful -- and aesthetic clockwork pets, though as a new inventor (albeit one whose mentor had a good reputation) she doesn’t make many of the latter just yet.

And open to crits! <3 I'll work on some art of her when I can snatch some time.

Ahh, thank you, Trundle <333 I should've elaborated on that >u< It's part of her history, I can't believe I forgot it! *adds in*

And haha, that would be fun biggrin Cat would trade automaton-time for stories!

Hi Maxx! Thank you so much for the insightful crit <33333

1. You're absolutely right; she's socially awkward, but capable of focusing intensely on her work. However, her absent-mindedness will always overwhelm her politeness; she doesn't mean to be rude, and when she's firmly in the present, she isn't. Her imagination just tends to run away from her.

2. I wrote it in that she tends to find beauty in efficiency, as well as in aesthetics -- so with functional creatures, her creativity tends to manifest in the ways she makes them more efficient or more elegantly simple.

I've hopefully clarified some of that in a few edits <3 Gonna go and submit this!