Those of you who played Cantr when I did may recognize Sylvie Dill, who spent most of her time in Zuzi. Sylvie’s life in Cantr began filled with wonder and promise, and it was very tragic for me to watch her innocence become lost and her life spiral into a despair so dark and thick that there was no escaping it. One of my greatest wishes was that I could pluck her out of time and take her back to her early days. I even tried to do that with a desperate attempt at amnesia. However, as role-players discover and know well, characters are who they are; they are products of their world. Sylvie’s soul was so tainted by her life’s experiences, even amnesia couldn’t scrub it from her.
However, plucking Sylvie Dill out of that world and inserting her into a new one has given Sylvie a second chance. Below is a backstory excerpt from the novel I’m currently working on. I hope I’ve conveyed the hope and innocence that used to define her; it’s been refreshing to have that Sylvie back. Please feel free to comment/constructively critique. You can also find this on DeviantArt here. Clicking the link will help increase my page views, which helps me out since the internet is just a massive popularity contest. If you already have an account on DeviantArt, commenting there is easier than here. 🙂
Enjoy! 
(image by Cantr player raspberrytea)
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At the edge of a field sat a lonesome, tiny cottage. Once a shepherd’s shack, then abandoned, it had been lovingly restored by its new occupant, though not in an obvious way. Old boards had not been replaced with new, but rather patched with hardened clay. The decaying roof had been covered over with sod. In fact, if one hadn’t known of the little cottage’s existence, one wouldn’t have noticed it at all. The field, abandoned with it, was overgrown with hay, wild flowers, and weeds, mostly obscuring the little cottage from the rutted dirt road that ran nearby. The parts of it that were visible looked just like the field itself, the same wildflowers growing from the sod roof.
Behind the house ran a low stone wall, and immediately behind that was a forest. The confluence of these three distinct niches meant that the universe around the tiny cottage was teeming with life. Chipmunks darted in and out of the stone wall, always on guard for the snakes they knew could be lurking just around the next stone. Crickets chirped night and day in the field, while cicadas droned up in the trees in the hot months. At dusk and dawn, deer would graze in the field, ever ready to bolt back into the cover of the forest. Woodchucks, squirrels, and foxes could be seen scurrying about. All manner of critters could be found here, from the biggest to the smallest, and Sylvie had become one of them.
She found solitude there away from town, the constant looks and insults that she received having left her in perpetual stress. She visited the tiny cottage with increasing frequency, fixing it up a little bit at a time, until, one day, she stayed there. Along with the tiny cottage, she fixed up a nearby well and had water readily available. The inside was as small as you’d expect, with enough room for a bed and a stove, but Sylvie spent little time inside. Meeps, her tabby cat, spent all his days exploring outdoors, so Sylvie thought that was the best use of her time as well. Sylvie was horribly near-sighted, which made her albinism even more intolerable. As if having no pigment wasn’t enough, she went through life squinting, and while she couldn’t see the others mocking her with their parodies, she still knew that she was an object of derision.
Meeps, perhaps due to that strange intuition that animals sometimes display, seemed to know Sylvie had difficulty seeing, and acted as her guide to the wilderness that surrounded their domicile. She would follow him into the field or forest, and while he often did not stay with her, he always returned to lead her home. After a few years, Meeps and Sylvie knew the area intimately, and Sylvie no longer required her sight, or Meeps, to get around. Meeps regarded no longer being needed with typical feline indifference. To Meeps, Sylvie was just a big white hairless cat, and cats, after all, didn’t need other cats. However, needed or not, their worlds were intertwined, and their mutual presence became greatly appreciated. Sylvie was a warm lap to lie upon and a reliable source of rubs, and Meeps was Sylvie’s only companion, and one that didn’t judge her.
Not all of Sylvie’s days were spent wandering. She had become a keen herbalist, having read a bit about it before her poor eyesight made reading too much of a bother. Nearly everything she needed for her craft could be found in the field or in the forest, and this allowed her to eck out a very modest income from those women in the town that braved associating with her. It helped that Sylvie lived outside of town, that way, none of them would be seen in her presence. Indeed, she never even saw most of her clients. They would leave a note with some money, and Sylvie would leave the medicine in a hollow stump by the road.
Today was a day for wandering, and Sylvie was sitting in the field, the tall hay surrounding her like a wall. She was watching butterflies flit about on the wild flowers as best as she could, the proximity needed for clear vision chasing off the butterflies more often than not. Sylvie spotted a fluttering motion in the corner of her eye and turned to see a red blob moving about on a pink blob. She leaned in, and, to her pleasure, the red butterfly was too engrossed in its nectar to notice her. In fascination, she watched its proboscis poking into the pink flower’s depths. She liked these butterflies the most. She called them “slow reds,” because they lumbered about and didn’t seem to care about her presence. She smiled to herself, a thousand questions circling in her head, when a brown blur shot in front of her face.
“Meeps!” She exclaimed. The tabby looked up at her, a single red wing protruding from between his lips. “It was pretty and you ate it!” Meeps smacked his jaw several times, and the wing disappeared into his mouth. He licked at his upper lip with a look of contentment.
“Yes, I know you’re pretty too, but you didn’t get pretty by eating pretty things,” Sylvie scolded. “You can eat boring, ugly things and be just as pretty.” Meeps gazed at her with a “well, you weren’t eating it” look.
Sylvie gathered Meeps up into her lap, his furry body being cradled by her skirt. The sun was shining upon him, and he was quite content. Sylvie stroked gently between his ears and shoulders. “Is that what’s going on with me, Meeps? Am I just a white butterfly in a town of tabby cats, to be swatted and eaten? If that’s so, I suppose I can’t be mad at them if I’m not mad at you.” Her slender fingers ran up his spine, stopping to scratch the base of his tail, which he enjoyed immensely. He let out a short “meep” as proof of his approval. “But it can’t be that, can it? I mean, you are a cat, and that was a butterfly, and cats eat butterflies. That’s just the natural order of things. I, on the other hand, am a person, and they are people. I’m not their food. I’m just different, and people don’t like things that are different. They think I was cursed at birth or some nonsense. Really. They see a white stag, and the men fall over themselves to hunt it, but no one wants me. “
Sylvie sighed, and Meeps turned his head around and licked the back of her hand once. She smiled at that. “Thank you, Meeps. I know you want me. I meant other people. Don’t you miss other cats?” Meeps narrowed his eyes, then licked his paw and began grooming behind his ear. “Of course you don’t. There’s so many wonderful and amazing things here for you to kill and eat. But it would be so nice to talk to someone that can speak back, maybe…someone to hold my hand while we watched butterflies.” She blushed at the thought. “Surely not everyone out there thinks of me as a freak.”
As if on cue, the sound of talking could be heard on the breeze. Sylvie turned her head in an attempt to better hear, but she couldn’t make any words out. “I hear people, Meeps. Let’s go see!” She gently removed Meeps from her lap, and he walked off into the hay, clearly having better things to do than stare at other humans. Now, one would be excused for wondering why an outcast like Sylvie would be excited at the prospect of seeing other people. After all, society had branded her a freak and cast her out. But the longer Sylvie Dill was excluded from society, the more she knew in her heart that somewhere, out there, in the big, vast world, was a place just for her. A place of learning and inquiry. A place where her contributions would be appreciated. A place where she’d be respected. So Sylvie Dill, with an optimism that only someone with faith and hope can have, strode out of the field towards the noise on the path.
Two teenage boys sat on a large, horse driven cart filled with various fruits and vegetables. They were talking amongst themselves when a poor-looking albino girl stepped out of the hay field and walked right up to them, standing much closer than was wise or proper. She squinted up at them, her eyes and cheeks squashing into her nose. They boys had been taken off-guard, but they weren’t going to show it. After all, it was just a girl.
“Hi, I’m Sylvie Dill,” she said in a mousey voice, a smile barely discernable through the squint.
“What’re you doin’ out in the middle of a hay field?” the taller of the two boys asked.
“What’s wrong with your skin and hair?” the shorter one asked.
Sylvie took another step closer, trying to get them into focus, and the boys, who had been dangling their legs off the side of the wagon, now pulled them in behind the perceived safety of the wagon’s sides. “I live around here, and I was born this way. I don’t know why.” She put her small hands on the side of the wagon and peered in at the produce. “Why did you stop? No one stops, unless they want my medicine.”
“Our wagon broke an axel. Father went into town to fetch a wainwright,” said the shorter boy.
“Oh, that’s unfortunate,” Sylvie said, looking under the wagon but not able to see the damage.
Testing a hunch, the taller boy grabbed an apple from the cart and casually tossed it into the field. At the sound of the rustling, the boy exclaimed “what is that?!”
Sylvie turned, obviously not able to see herself. It was an odd noise, not familiar to her. The taller boy leaned down to the other and whispered. “She can’t see!”
With an exchange of sly grins, they both began throwing apples into the hay, Sylvie turning this way and that until she overheard their giggles. She turned back to them, a frown on her lips. “You’re tricking me.” It was at that moment, the same moment the words were coming out of her mouth, that a tomato exploded on the front of her blouse. Sylvie stood in shock, fingers picking at the tomato skin stuck to her shirt.
“Oi, you done missed the grass and hit her,” said the tall one.
“Well, she was in the way, and look, she has some color to her now!”
The boys laughed. “Maybe we can turn her into a rainbow,” said the taller one. Laughing, they jumped out of the cart and surrounded her. Sylvie looked from one to the other, her curiosity having turned to fear. She couldn’t run, because she’d not find her way back to the tiny cottage. “Here, try some blueberries!” The taller boy took a handful of blueberries and smashed them, smearing the purple mess all over her back. Sylvie tried to stop him, but the shorter one did the same with smashed strawberries when she turned.
Sylvie was powerless, and she couldn’t flee. Even if she walked slowly enough to find her way back to the tiny cottage, she didn’t want them to know where it was. So, with resignation, not wishing to give them any sport, Sylvie huffed. “Fine, have your fun.” She sat down along the side of the cart path and, setting her jaw, let the boys to it without further protest.
A short while later, shorter than she had expected, the boys stopped their game, and Sylvie sat saturated in fruit juice, seeds, and pulp. The boys had realized that their father would kill them for wasting so much produce tormenting a hermit, and now they waited with increasing angst on the wagon. Sylvie sat there and stared at them.
“Oi, go on now, go away and leave us be!”
“If I leave, you’ll follow me,” Sylvie stated.
“Nuh ah, we won’t,” said the shorter boy.
“But you’ll make up lies about me to your father to justify wasting his fruit. I wish to state my side of it.”
“It was a bear!” the taller boy exclaimed. “A bear came to the wagon, and got into the fruit, and you came down and chased it off!”
Sylvie rolled the lie around in her head. She wanted the boys to get into trouble for what they did, but, as far as she knew, their father was as big of a jerk as they were. There was no guarantee that an encounter with him would have a satisfying conclusion. Conversely, being made out to be a hero would have its benefits, even if it was a lie. Neither solution was satisfactory to Sylvie, but, given that their father could do far worse to her than fling fruit, she decided to cut her losses, accept the lie, go back to her tiny cottage and pray that they stuck to their word.
Sylvie nodded to them, stood, and slowly made her way back to the tiny cottage, stopping now and again to make sure they weren’t following her. Meeps greeted her at the door with a curious expression. Her color and smell were all wrong. Sylvie shut the door and bolted it. She slipped out of her soiled clothing, and scooping up Meeps into her arms, sank down onto her bed and began to weep.
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Sylvie in the Downpour
(anonymous Cantr player)
Douglas Roberts - The Part Time Writer 