a little more juju

Character Phobia(s)

Oooooh, this should be fun, but I’m having a hard time choosing which of the characters I haven’t talked about yet. You know what? Somehow I’ve gotten almost to the end of this challenge without talking a bit about Innis Bergonne, a character I invented well before 2016 (which is when I started writing Paradiso, at least in its first incarnation): she was heavily modeled after Heero Yuy from Gundam Wing and she ended up being a freedom fighter for a bunch of colonies that were built … somewhere. I can’t really remember everything that I wrote over twenty years ago.

Anyway, Innis is pretty different from who she was back in the early 2000s; before she was just very introverted but deeply caring, and now? Well, this woman is hell-bent on revenge and sabotage; she’s brutal and borderline sociopathic, but so much of that is related to her trauma (not that that’s an excuse!). But that’ll have to wait until the book is published.

But as far as her phobia goes …

This isn’t really a spoiler, but Innis’ story begins when she wakes up in my version of a bacta tank (like the one that Luke is emerged into in The Empire Strikes Back after his battle with the wampa – God, I’m such a nerd) with nothing but a tube down her throat. Understandably, she freaks out and tries to figure out how to escape, but it’s only through the actions of Dr. Elizabeth Cerval that the tank is opened. So not only does she have a tremendous fear of drowning – or just not being able to breathe, which is fair – her biggest phobia is tight enclosed spaces, even bunk beds in space ships. When she is transported from Mars to the space station Paradiso, she refuses to take a nap in the crew quarters, where the beds are tiny recesses into the wall, and instead sleeps in the cargo bay on top of some padded crates, much to the annoyance of the captain.