- Jun 18, 2015
- 10,109
- Gender
- Female
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Posting Status
- Irregularly
BASIC INFO
Name: Som Makara - សោម មករា Age: Around
Birthday: Sometime in January, 1970
Species: Spirit
Gender: Male
Category: School Staff - Counsellor for ghosts and the undead, Dorm Parent, Occasional teacher of Khmer language
APPEARANCE
The first impression most people have of Makara is not what he is, but what he isn't. Makara is short. While he's very clearly a grown man in his features, at his full height he's only five feet tall. A lifetime of malnutrition left him stunted, and he's very thin and gaunt. For most people, it's the most obvious 'tell' that he's a ghost - the fact that he looks so skeletal. The truth is that he looked that thin even in life, his body never able to catch up.
His face is all sharp angles, and his hair is kept shaggy, although it's stopped growing and will never reach his shoulders. His hair is dark brown, and his eyes are brown as well. While his features are generally read as asian, his skin is significantly darker than most people are expecting when they think 'asian'. His lips are slightly wider, and if he wasn't so thin, he'd have a much rounder face than he does. He looks to be somewhere in his early thirties, despite his age, and hasn't aged at all since he came to the islands.
Makara keeps his eyes down the majority of the time, and isn't one for eye contact. He walks nearly silently from a childhood spent sneaking around, and is prone to sneak up on people without actually intending to.
His clothes technically form with him when he becomes solid each morning, although if he tries he can change what he's wearing. The majority of the time he can be found wearing the exact same outfit - a dark blue collared shirt, grey slacks, and occasionally a tie, if he remembers.
His face is all sharp angles, and his hair is kept shaggy, although it's stopped growing and will never reach his shoulders. His hair is dark brown, and his eyes are brown as well. While his features are generally read as asian, his skin is significantly darker than most people are expecting when they think 'asian'. His lips are slightly wider, and if he wasn't so thin, he'd have a much rounder face than he does. He looks to be somewhere in his early thirties, despite his age, and hasn't aged at all since he came to the islands.
Makara keeps his eyes down the majority of the time, and isn't one for eye contact. He walks nearly silently from a childhood spent sneaking around, and is prone to sneak up on people without actually intending to.
His clothes technically form with him when he becomes solid each morning, although if he tries he can change what he's wearing. The majority of the time he can be found wearing the exact same outfit - a dark blue collared shirt, grey slacks, and occasionally a tie, if he remembers.
PERSONALITY
Most people who knew him would describe Makara as 'quiet'. Beyond that, most people would struggle to come up with even a single word to describe him. He speaks very little, and when he does speak it's very quiet. IF he speaks, you can bet it's going to be something important, because Makara almost never makes any attempt at small talk. He makes an attempt to be polite, and won't ignore smalltalk that is being presented to him, but he's always quick to let smalltalk drop.
What most people don't realize is that the quiet, subdued man before them is actually an improvement. His teen years were significantly worse, and he'd often go weeks without another word. It's really only been since he's come out of the academy that he's been trying to crawl his way out of the shell he put himself in. He still falls back on the habits he developed as a child, whether they're healthy or not, because growing up those habits kept him safe. He bows to authority, no matter how justified it might not be. Faced with an abusive boss, he would simply do whatever he was told. It doesn't matter if he thinks an order is wrong or not. The only thing that matters is that he obeys. He doesn't take the time to consider why he might do things - he just does as he's told.
He is, and will always be, a follower. He's not good at making his own decisions. He doesn't want to decide things. He goes along with almost any suggestion he's given, and struggles to do his own thing. As a dorm parent, he uses almost every suggestion he's given, but if he's not given any, they're not likely to have much in the way of events. It's one of his biggest struggles as a teacher, although he's yet to do much actual teaching.
Makara doesn't back down from all situations though. In situations where lives are in danger, Makara is quick to act and shows a level of violence that most people only gain from a childhood spent murdering other people. When his life, the lives of innocents, or the lives he cares about are in danger, he's brutally violent. Most people threatened with a gun are afraid. Their first concern is not being shot, not getting hurt. They believe that the person threatening them will not carry through with their threats if only they behave.
Makara does not believe that. He's seen it happen a thousand times over, and he knows that if someone is willing to threaten a human beings life for petty reasons, they're also willing to take a human beings life for petty reasons. For him, saying 'do something or I'll kill you' is indistinguishable from 'do something then I'll kill you'. He reacts badly to it, and his capacity for violence is extreme. While he looks like the first person most criminals would chose to victimize, he's actually one of the last people you want to threaten.
As someone with no remaining family, Makara is eager to have one of his own. He never had any children, although not for lack of desire, and the students he ends up being the dorm parent for are his surrogate children. He's generally considered fairly motherly, checking in on them, making sure they're getting enough food (always a concern, despite the fact that food is plentiful), and making sure they're doing well in classes. Failures by his students are his failures, and talking to his students is one of the few times you can actually see him saying more than a few words at a time.
While never diagnosed, there's not a psychiatrist in the world that would have denied him a PTSD diagnosis as a human, although his status as a ghost makes things a lot trickier. The majority of Cambodian refugees have some amount of PTSD, and Makara's case is on the extreme end, because he wasn't just a victim, but a perpetrator. His family is all gone, and even when he might have been able to sympathize as a victim in Cambodia, he could never discuss the things he did with others. It's a shared experience he lacks, and likely will always lack - something he has to work through entirely on his own, because he refuses to discuss it.
He no longer sleeps, and no longer dreams, but flashbacks still pepper his hours. Things remind him too frequently. The way a person is standing. The size of a thin child. A certain kind of food. His reflection in a window. The very idea of childhood is deeply uncomfortable to him, simply because he didn't have one, and he tries to fill the hole by giving his dorm children one, even if many of them are far older than he was.
He refuses to talk about what happened. Someone could know him for years and never get more than five words of his personal history out of him. Even faced with another Cambodian, he couldn't really talk about it. He was one of the enemy, and he knows that very few people will be sympathetic to that.
While he's aware that he should be thankful towards the Vietnamese, who liberated him in the first place, he's not. He's had fifteen years of hating the Youns, fifteen long years of being told they were monsters who would come and kill him. Years of fighting them, of killing them, and of nearly being killed by them in turn. He's deeply uncomfortable around anyone he knows as vietnamese, and even seeing a vietnamese name is enough to make him distrustful and suspicious.
What most people don't realize is that the quiet, subdued man before them is actually an improvement. His teen years were significantly worse, and he'd often go weeks without another word. It's really only been since he's come out of the academy that he's been trying to crawl his way out of the shell he put himself in. He still falls back on the habits he developed as a child, whether they're healthy or not, because growing up those habits kept him safe. He bows to authority, no matter how justified it might not be. Faced with an abusive boss, he would simply do whatever he was told. It doesn't matter if he thinks an order is wrong or not. The only thing that matters is that he obeys. He doesn't take the time to consider why he might do things - he just does as he's told.
He is, and will always be, a follower. He's not good at making his own decisions. He doesn't want to decide things. He goes along with almost any suggestion he's given, and struggles to do his own thing. As a dorm parent, he uses almost every suggestion he's given, but if he's not given any, they're not likely to have much in the way of events. It's one of his biggest struggles as a teacher, although he's yet to do much actual teaching.
Makara doesn't back down from all situations though. In situations where lives are in danger, Makara is quick to act and shows a level of violence that most people only gain from a childhood spent murdering other people. When his life, the lives of innocents, or the lives he cares about are in danger, he's brutally violent. Most people threatened with a gun are afraid. Their first concern is not being shot, not getting hurt. They believe that the person threatening them will not carry through with their threats if only they behave.
Makara does not believe that. He's seen it happen a thousand times over, and he knows that if someone is willing to threaten a human beings life for petty reasons, they're also willing to take a human beings life for petty reasons. For him, saying 'do something or I'll kill you' is indistinguishable from 'do something then I'll kill you'. He reacts badly to it, and his capacity for violence is extreme. While he looks like the first person most criminals would chose to victimize, he's actually one of the last people you want to threaten.
As someone with no remaining family, Makara is eager to have one of his own. He never had any children, although not for lack of desire, and the students he ends up being the dorm parent for are his surrogate children. He's generally considered fairly motherly, checking in on them, making sure they're getting enough food (always a concern, despite the fact that food is plentiful), and making sure they're doing well in classes. Failures by his students are his failures, and talking to his students is one of the few times you can actually see him saying more than a few words at a time.
While never diagnosed, there's not a psychiatrist in the world that would have denied him a PTSD diagnosis as a human, although his status as a ghost makes things a lot trickier. The majority of Cambodian refugees have some amount of PTSD, and Makara's case is on the extreme end, because he wasn't just a victim, but a perpetrator. His family is all gone, and even when he might have been able to sympathize as a victim in Cambodia, he could never discuss the things he did with others. It's a shared experience he lacks, and likely will always lack - something he has to work through entirely on his own, because he refuses to discuss it.
He no longer sleeps, and no longer dreams, but flashbacks still pepper his hours. Things remind him too frequently. The way a person is standing. The size of a thin child. A certain kind of food. His reflection in a window. The very idea of childhood is deeply uncomfortable to him, simply because he didn't have one, and he tries to fill the hole by giving his dorm children one, even if many of them are far older than he was.
He refuses to talk about what happened. Someone could know him for years and never get more than five words of his personal history out of him. Even faced with another Cambodian, he couldn't really talk about it. He was one of the enemy, and he knows that very few people will be sympathetic to that.
While he's aware that he should be thankful towards the Vietnamese, who liberated him in the first place, he's not. He's had fifteen years of hating the Youns, fifteen long years of being told they were monsters who would come and kill him. Years of fighting them, of killing them, and of nearly being killed by them in turn. He's deeply uncomfortable around anyone he knows as vietnamese, and even seeing a vietnamese name is enough to make him distrustful and suspicious.
POWERS
Makara has no name for what he is. He knows he is no longer human, if he ever really was. But he knows his purpose - he is Kampuchea's anger given form, her vengeance against those who hurt her. For the first few years of his afterlife he existed only at night, all but blinking out of existence with the rising of the sun. He has few memories of this time period, and was moreaction then thought.
At night, he's still like that. Incorporeal, with a smudged looking outline. Most of the time he looks the same as he does during the day, the self he might have been if he'd reached his thirties. When angered or agitated, that nicely shaped self falls apart, and he changes and flickers between all his different selves - a gaunt but innocent child, a hardened child soldier, and a freshly murdered nineteen year old, still showing the wounds that killed him. The more upset, the more likely he is to change - he can't truly choose what he looks like, beyond trying to keep himself in his usual form to avoid upsetting people.
Despite being naturally intangible at night, Makara can choose to touch things if he wishes. It requires, depending on the kind of touch, either rational focus or true anger. During his nights in Cambodia, he killed like this - tormenting and strangling those who had drawn his anger, and he's still capable of such things on the islands, although he has no more desire to.
Since his arrival on the islands, Makara has become more present during the day. At first it was simply being there, but over time he eventually managed to take a solid human form. He lives and breathes, passing as human, and the most obvious tell that he's not is actually not a tell at all - he looks very gaunt, a trait so often associated with ghosts, but the truth is that he's always been gaunt do to a lifetime of malnutrition. Each morning, he solidifies - a body seeming to form from nothing. As the sun falls, his body simply fades out, and he returns to his ghostly form. He doesn't sleep, and instead wanders the school at night. He has no need to eat, although he sometimes does just to try and fit in.
As a ghost, Makara cannot be killed. Any injury he takes is gone when he returns to his intangible form, and he's perfectly healthy (if skinny) when he returns to human form each morning. If he ever dies during the day, it simply forces him into his ghostly form immediately, and his body dissolves to nothing, returning as usual the following morning.
At night, he's still like that. Incorporeal, with a smudged looking outline. Most of the time he looks the same as he does during the day, the self he might have been if he'd reached his thirties. When angered or agitated, that nicely shaped self falls apart, and he changes and flickers between all his different selves - a gaunt but innocent child, a hardened child soldier, and a freshly murdered nineteen year old, still showing the wounds that killed him. The more upset, the more likely he is to change - he can't truly choose what he looks like, beyond trying to keep himself in his usual form to avoid upsetting people.
Despite being naturally intangible at night, Makara can choose to touch things if he wishes. It requires, depending on the kind of touch, either rational focus or true anger. During his nights in Cambodia, he killed like this - tormenting and strangling those who had drawn his anger, and he's still capable of such things on the islands, although he has no more desire to.
Since his arrival on the islands, Makara has become more present during the day. At first it was simply being there, but over time he eventually managed to take a solid human form. He lives and breathes, passing as human, and the most obvious tell that he's not is actually not a tell at all - he looks very gaunt, a trait so often associated with ghosts, but the truth is that he's always been gaunt do to a lifetime of malnutrition. Each morning, he solidifies - a body seeming to form from nothing. As the sun falls, his body simply fades out, and he returns to his ghostly form. He doesn't sleep, and instead wanders the school at night. He has no need to eat, although he sometimes does just to try and fit in.
As a ghost, Makara cannot be killed. Any injury he takes is gone when he returns to his intangible form, and he's perfectly healthy (if skinny) when he returns to human form each morning. If he ever dies during the day, it simply forces him into his ghostly form immediately, and his body dissolves to nothing, returning as usual the following morning.
BIOGRAPHY
He was born sometime in January, 1970, in a small village in Cambodia, not far from the Vietnamese border. He had loving parents, and a sibling or two (he can no longer remember). He was five when the soldiers came, and he was driven out of his home. He was six when he last saw his parents, and nine when he killed for the first time.
The less he thinks about it the better.
He remembers his own history in bits and pieces. He tries not to think about it. Everything is unclear - did he have a sibling? Two? What did his parents look like? Everyone wore the same clothes at that point, and that meant everyone just ran together, a mess of men and women in black pajamas. He was a soldier, as so many other boys his age were. He helped the real soldiers, and he did their dirty work, and before long he was a soldier himself. He isn't even entirely sure if he is Som Makara. There are no records, no birth certificates. He doesn't know if anyone from his childhood is still alive, and even if they were, they likely wouldn't recognize him.
He was a soldier even after the Khmer Rouge fell from power. He was a killer, a monster. A ghost in the woods fighting a war he had no true stake in, long before he'd even died. He was rescued - saved from the woods- when he was fourteen. Still a boy, the vietnamese soldiers who saved him returned him to his village rather than executing him as they did so many other soldiers.
He was not fit for civilian life. He had no place in it. The only life he'd ever known had been life as a soldier, and the villagers did not care for him. The village had changed too much for him to recognize it, if it had even been his home in the first place. He kept his mouth shut, tried to blend in, and tried not to let anyone find out.
They did find out. He was nineteen when they found out, and nineteen when he died, the villagers taking revenge on him for all the people they'd lost under the Khmer Rouge.
He isn't quite sure when he came back. His best guess is sometime in the early 90s. His memories of the early years of his return are even foggier than the early years of his childhood. He was a wraith, an angry ghost, his own country's anger given form. The Khmer Rouge still existed, backed by outside countries despite all the things they'd done. They existed in pockets, hiding in the woods and isolating themselves. They still brought terror to those who remembered, and yet continued to exist, clinging to what power they had.
He brought them hell. He slipped through the woods as a ghost, seeking them out wherever they hid. Some he killed, strangling in the night, half-tangible and impossible to kill. Some he drove mad. Some he simply drove from the forest, and let the villagers take care of. In 1996, there was a mass defection of the remaining soldiers, and intense infighting between those remaining. In 1998, Pol Pot died, and the remaining leader of the party surrendered.
As a new millennium dawned, the Khmer Rouge ceased to exist.
Makara had lost his reason for existing, but rather than fading, he was becoming more real each day. He was becoming visible, and finally solid during the daylight, rather than ceasing to exist. Even during the nights he was becoming more obvious, more together. He feared passing on to whatever afterlife there might be, and began to search for something else. Something more.
The Manta Carlos Islands were his something more. He found them almost by chance, following another spirit that was much older, and much less tangible than him. Finding a place there was easy, although finding a job took a bit more work. He didn't really need money, and had no need of material possessions. He didn't eat. He didn't sleep. But he was eager to help, if only to absolve some of the guilt he carried.
He began a new life - as a sometimes teacher of Khmer, as a counsellor for the students of Starlight Academy who could not truly be counted as alive, and as a dutiful dorm parent, looking after those with no families to speak of.
The less he thinks about it the better.
He remembers his own history in bits and pieces. He tries not to think about it. Everything is unclear - did he have a sibling? Two? What did his parents look like? Everyone wore the same clothes at that point, and that meant everyone just ran together, a mess of men and women in black pajamas. He was a soldier, as so many other boys his age were. He helped the real soldiers, and he did their dirty work, and before long he was a soldier himself. He isn't even entirely sure if he is Som Makara. There are no records, no birth certificates. He doesn't know if anyone from his childhood is still alive, and even if they were, they likely wouldn't recognize him.
He was a soldier even after the Khmer Rouge fell from power. He was a killer, a monster. A ghost in the woods fighting a war he had no true stake in, long before he'd even died. He was rescued - saved from the woods- when he was fourteen. Still a boy, the vietnamese soldiers who saved him returned him to his village rather than executing him as they did so many other soldiers.
He was not fit for civilian life. He had no place in it. The only life he'd ever known had been life as a soldier, and the villagers did not care for him. The village had changed too much for him to recognize it, if it had even been his home in the first place. He kept his mouth shut, tried to blend in, and tried not to let anyone find out.
They did find out. He was nineteen when they found out, and nineteen when he died, the villagers taking revenge on him for all the people they'd lost under the Khmer Rouge.
He isn't quite sure when he came back. His best guess is sometime in the early 90s. His memories of the early years of his return are even foggier than the early years of his childhood. He was a wraith, an angry ghost, his own country's anger given form. The Khmer Rouge still existed, backed by outside countries despite all the things they'd done. They existed in pockets, hiding in the woods and isolating themselves. They still brought terror to those who remembered, and yet continued to exist, clinging to what power they had.
He brought them hell. He slipped through the woods as a ghost, seeking them out wherever they hid. Some he killed, strangling in the night, half-tangible and impossible to kill. Some he drove mad. Some he simply drove from the forest, and let the villagers take care of. In 1996, there was a mass defection of the remaining soldiers, and intense infighting between those remaining. In 1998, Pol Pot died, and the remaining leader of the party surrendered.
As a new millennium dawned, the Khmer Rouge ceased to exist.
Makara had lost his reason for existing, but rather than fading, he was becoming more real each day. He was becoming visible, and finally solid during the daylight, rather than ceasing to exist. Even during the nights he was becoming more obvious, more together. He feared passing on to whatever afterlife there might be, and began to search for something else. Something more.
The Manta Carlos Islands were his something more. He found them almost by chance, following another spirit that was much older, and much less tangible than him. Finding a place there was easy, although finding a job took a bit more work. He didn't really need money, and had no need of material possessions. He didn't eat. He didn't sleep. But he was eager to help, if only to absolve some of the guilt he carried.
He began a new life - as a sometimes teacher of Khmer, as a counsellor for the students of Starlight Academy who could not truly be counted as alive, and as a dutiful dorm parent, looking after those with no families to speak of.
EXTRA INFO
- Cambodia uses family name given name, so his given name is 'Makara'.
- Makara means 'January'.
- He suspects his real name is 'Sann', but isn't entirely sure.
- He speaks Khmer, English, and French. His english isn't very good.
- Despite being fluent in Khmer, he's almost illiterate. He hides this, and opts to teach almost everything verbally while trying to teach himself to read better than he does.
