(no subject)

[moonflower77]

Body language:

When addressed, she doesn't turn around or look at the other person or acknowledge their presence in any other way, which makes it difficult to determine if she'd heard one or not. Those who were familiar with her knew they had to continue talking and not pay any attention; the best strategy was to start doing something alongside her and speak as one worked, without raising one's head. Just standing there and waiting for her to respond may provoke a rude-sounding question like "What do you want?", "What are you doing in here?" "Why are you here?" or a statement like "So, talk" because she will see one as a strange, disturbing, undesirable presence. If you continue to linger, expect to be escorted out in the most unceremonious manner imaginable and have the door slammed behind you.

On the other hand, when overcome with strong emotion or excited about the topic, she may stare directly into one's face. She looks at the middle of the forehead or at the lips and the tip of the nose, not into the eyes, and doesn't really see the other person, being too absorbed in what she wants to say. The same happens if she tries to establish artificial eye contact because she's been told it was more acceptable; she can't tell when to start or stop and holds her gaze too long, which often feels uncomfortable. Hence the accusations of "staring people down".

Ironically, it's her who feels humans are staring her down. Initially, eye contact was such a traumatic experience she had a meltdown when she saw her own eyes in a mirror, and though she has grown a lot more used to it over the years, other people's eyes are still frightening - she perceives them as bottomless pits or vortices that threaten to pull her in. She makes extensive use of her (excellent) peripheral vision to avoid it whenever she can (which comes across as "squinting" or a "sly/suspicious sidelong glance"), or, when she can't, looks at the other parts of the face instead.

Azila's gaze is intent but unfocused. She appears to be looking through you or past you, rather than at you, as if she were absorbed in some thoughts of her own and didn't quite see you. It's not clear whether the quality stems from the structure of her eyes or some other physiological peculiarities and is enhanced by the bouts of melancholia, or whether it is their direct result. May range from mild (described as "thoughtful" or "wistful") to severe (described as "out there" or a "thousand-mile stare").

If she wants to concentrate or is about to say something significant, especially in the emotional sense, she stares down at the ground or over her shoulder, or, in some cases, turns around, takes a few steps away from the other person and talks with her back turned to them. Far from being a sign of contempt, this is an indication that one has her full and undivided attention and she wants to filter out any potentially distracting or confusing signals that might distort the message.

At times, she may not greet the others if she is the first to enter a room, or return someone else's greeting. She knows that this is one of the accepted rules that must be followed, and reminds herself to do so, but from time to time, she may forget because it's unnatural to her. She has no innate sense of when this has to be done, and her internal instinct tells her it's pointless - someone has come in, apparently for a reason, otherwise they wouldn't be there, she has heard and smelled them approach, so why announce oneself once more rather than start talking straight away? This is one more reason she is thought of as rude and unresponsive.

Normally she never gestures to convey feelings, but she does make hand movements that don't seem to be tied to the message in her words (not to ourselves) and uses her hands to supplement her impoverished speech.

Azila's voice prosody is strange. She tends to speak in a loud monotone, which causes others to think she is shouting even when she is not. However, the poor voice control can cause sudden rises and falls in volume (from an actual yell to a whisper) or intonation, sometimes in rapid succession. The pattern of stresses and pauses is irregular, with them positioned in a way that feels "wrong" and does not coincide with the words that carry the greatest semantic significance or mark the boundaries of a finished syntactic unit. Rapid-fire speech, where she compresses several words or sentences into a single breath without any space between them, is common, especially when she is stressed out; if she feels more sedate and wants to give her words more thought, she will speak in fragments of two or three words at a time.

The pitch and timbre may vary depending on her emotional and physical state. Azila's control over her voice weakens with strain, exhaustion or illness, which cause the odd prosodic fluctuations to become more prominent.

Her voice is perfect for reading her favorite kinds of modernist poetry - the unusual modulations create an idiosyncratic feel and it has the right combination of detachment and concealed emotion seeping or breaking out to the surface.

Most of the time, her face is flat and doesn't seem to convey any discernible emotion, except for the eyes. On occasion, however, her expressions are vivid and eloquent, almost childlike, as her control over her facial expression is just as poor.

The shape of her eyes and the miniature wrinkles at the corners, coupled with her tendency to look sideways without turning her head, tend to exaggerate mischievous or distrustful moods, and, more often than not, dour ones, or create an illusion of that frame of mind even when it's not there, which may lead to miscommunication.

On the other hand, the way her face is set enhances sunny moods. She has a unique way of smiling only with her eyes and the very corners of her lips. Though subtle, the smile transforms her face; the little wrinkles around her eyes, which at other times serve to make her more stern, start to look like laugh lines, her entire countenance brightens and begins to glow.

When she forces herself to smile the "regular" way, showing her teeth, because this is what most non-altered humans do and find acceptable, the result is very unsettling. One can tell the smile is not her own and doesn't belong on her face, no more than it would on the monitor of a computer; that, in itself, can send shivers down one's spine. The unnatural, inauthentic quality gives a whole new plane of meaning to the phrase "frozen/plastered-on smile". When Initran caught her practicing that smile in front of a mirror for the first time, he told her to just stop, for Heaven's sake, unless she wanted to give someone a heart attack. He apologized at once, but his instinctive overreaction gives one a good idea of how uncanny she can look when she takes the attempts to adjust too far and forces herself to convey emotion in certain human-like ways not because she has a genuine internal need to do so, but because someone else was insisting on them being the most appropriate.

She no longer has any tear ducts or glands and cannot cry; the movements of the facial muscles associated with sobbing are foreign to her. In extreme distress she may dry-sob, but this is more of a convulsive movement that comes with a high fever and full-body shaking. Shock, whether physical or psychological, will produce a semi-catatonic state - her movements slow down, become sluggish and hesitant, and she eventually freezes for a long time with a vacant look on her face and a fixed stare. If the shock is severe, she will also crave a quiet, close, dark space, trying to burrow into the ground or to crawl into some narrow crevice or hole that reminds her of an assimilation or regeneration cocoon.

Despite the overall alienness of her body language, some of Azila's nonverbal signals can be recognized as signs of constant disorientation, shock or fright and go beyond the usual non-verbal signs of anxiety. She has a wide-eyed, alert look and her pupils are permanently dilated; this has prompted more than question about whether or not she was in pain, because she looks as if she were stoically trying to endure a concealed wound or chronic illness (well, she is, but the pupil size as such has no connection to the post-separation syndrome). There were at least three or four cases where she had started, shuddered and stumbled a few paces backward, or pressed her back into the wall and gasped when addressed, although there had been no reason for doing so. On occasion, seemingly out of nowhere, her voice starts to tremble and her hands shake. It's not uncommon for her to give others thousand-mile stares as if she had just seen an apparition.

At the opposite extremes of the emotional continuum, she may make two signals that are distinctively T'elX. In distress, she may make a regular kneading motion with her fingers, flexing the claws. This is an instinctive response to psychological strain, similar to some cats' purring and/or kneading when in pain, and a way to recreate the rhythm of the T'elχ "internal chorus", which came and went in waves. When she was wounded by the shepherds during the T'elχ-human confrontation, just before she lost consciousness, she was seen clenching and unclenching her fists in this fashion; this was due to the whiteouts more than to her own injuries - the lashes of searing, blinding pain she felt as beings who were one with herself were being destroyed (the composure she had managed to retain in the face of this was remarkable - until she collapsed, her true state of mind showed only in these self-calming hand movements and a glum, tense expression).

Her fingers also made these mechanical flexing movements throughout the first few weeks after separation, when she was on the brink of death and had next to no self-awareness, during the final days of the solitary desert hike, and in the hours following Initran's death.

The gesture, which is accompanied as it is by a slight frown and a fierce gleam in Azila's eyes, is frightening, or at any rate not a comfortable sight. The fact that it is reminiscent of a cat's kneading - a warm, cute image - produces a cognitive dissonance, as every other nonverbal signal indicates that her state of mind is anything but pleased or happy. So, if she starts to show increasing signs of internal unease and tension, which culminate in her starting to scrape the surface of the table, demonstrating her massive black talons, it's a sign that something has gone seriously wrong indeed.

The other signal is a sign of excitement, elation or delight - a short, low, subdued hiss, like a forceful but brief breath that lasts no more than a second and is expelled through an open mouth. It is usually doubled and is quite different from the loud explosive sound made by someone like Ibrahim Tanko. Most people are unlikely to qualify it as a "hiss" and simply have a brief baffled response - more or less "hey, what on Earth was that?" It can also produce a certain delayed cognitive dissonance owing to its similarity, on second thoughts, to a cat's hiss, which most certainly does not signify a happy state.

The most startling part, perhaps, is that Azila may turn toward whoever she has been talking to, which she rarely does otherwise, and breathe the two hisses directly into their face.

Azila has no sense of physical boundaries, and none of the instinct that tells us not to touch other people without their permission. This was a serious problem during the first three or four months after de-assimilation, when she was prone to what amounted to the roughest and most rude form of manhandling - she would shove people out of the way, grab them by the shoulder or forearm and force them to turn around to see the direction she was pointing in. If told to "bring someone in", she hauled them in like a sack of grain; "seeing them out" meant pushing them out of the room as if they were a prisoner or detainee, or presented a security risk. Whenever she wanted to feel the texture of someone's skin or garment, she would reach out and run her hands over their faces or hair, or grab and hold onto their clothes, rubbing the fabric between her fingers.

When she was explained that such raw physicality was unacceptable, she went to the opposite extreme. These days, is reluctant to engage in any physical contact, even when she is close to the person and the circumstances call for it, because she is unable to tell from the context whether or not it'd be welcome and appreciated and, just to be on the safe side, prefers not to do anything that might offend. On occasion, one can see her reaching out to place a hand on someone's shoulder or knee in reassurance, and then go still, uncertain of how to continue; unless she hears an explicit statement of consent, like "go ahead, it's fine, you can touch me", she is likely to pull it back. People who were well-acquainted with her would tell her outright whether they wanted to be touched or not, and in which specific situations, to make sure she knew how to act around them.

In addition, some of her body language comes across as supremely confrontational, even when she is calm. A good example is her abit of cornering people - after entering a room, she will start to advance on somebody in rapid strides until her chest almost touches theirs, tilting her head to the side at an angle that suggested a threat or aggressive desire to prove a point, and making what seemed to be sustained eye contact. The other person would end up pressed against a wall, feeling as if he or she were about to be attacked. To an observer, Azila's movements were identical to those of a cat engaged in a nose-to-nose yowling match with a contender for the same territory just before a fight breaks out and the two roll down the road locked into a screaming ball with tufts of fur flying in all directions. Another example is her walking right up to another person, almost making contact with them, and giving them a head-to-toe look as though she had X-ray vision; a little longer, one thought, and she would order one to remove one's jacket, turn one's pockets inside out and raise one's arms, and pat one down as a security guard would have done during a strip-search. Still another is her slow circling around someone else, scrutinizing them from head to toe, as if assessing how much of a security risk they posed; again, this came across as predatory and ominous, and more than one person reported sensing her stare on their back in a way that brought shivers down their spine. The unsettled, insecure feeling would usually persist until she was gone from the room; her presence was so intimidating it made one shrink into one's shell.

After she was explained how unpleasant these behaviors were and what a strong negative response they produced, Azila has made every effort to eliminate them. However, when she is too anxious or concerned about her friends, or in some other state where she cannot fully control her actions, all her social self-conditioning vanishes and they surface again, to her own frustration and that of others.

Azila doesn't shake hands. Normally, she doesn't stretch out her hand in the first place, but if another person does try to shake it due to some misunderstanding, she may take serious offense. The act of rubbing fingers and palms is sexually charged and has a profound intimate meaning to her, and, as such, is a form of foreplay or at least special gesture to be reserved for her mate. She and Initran would massage each other's hands on a regular basis and eventually turned it into a unique private ritual of their own, almost an art - a dance performed with their hands only. Since Azila remains faithful to him to this day, she isn't keen on the thought of repeating that gesture with anyone else.

In the most likely scenario, she will perceive an attempt to shake her hand as making sexual advances on her - perhaps nothing short of outright sexual assault. She will throw off the other person's hand, in a rather violent way, and respond with an angry "Leave be!", "Hands off (us, this body)!" or just "Hands!" - her tone and manner will make it quite clear what she is referring to.