ADELE

Adele is a young woman from another dimension. Where she comes from, it's no secret that there are lots of alternate realities, because her world--Ailashuo, sometimes just called Ailao--is a sort of crossroads, being so centrally located and so highly populated by rather knowledgeable people. Adele has been training for all of her short life (nineteen years) to do two things: To become a masterful prophet, and to travel to the human dimension.

Adele's teacher, Tabitha, has been instrumental in raising her and training her, and she is trying to teach Adele everything she can to make her able to succeed when she goes to the human world in one year's time. Because the pool they travel through disrupts memory, Adele can count on not remembering very much at all, so sometimes she thinks her teachings are pointless since she'll forget everything, and she's understandably upset at the prospect of leaving the only home she's ever known for a total unknown. Tabitha is in the process of teaching Adele to internalize and make "second nature" certain habits so that they will survive her trip through the pool to help protect her and inform her when she arrives.

Adele's race has the highest rate of people with prophetic abilities in all of the known dimensions, and though prophets are still a tiny minority they are at least recognized and very respected and established. If a child is born with blood-red hair (as Adele was), he or she will be tested for prophetic abilities and sent for training if the tests are positive. Their parents try not to get too attached to them since some of them get whisked away for study and end up living in prophet hives, and then others (like Adele) end up leaving their world forever. It's a hard life, but very respected and envied by those without the gift.

People with prophetic abilities can do many different kinds of predictions, tend to have true dreams, and have the ability to control the destination of the special water portals. Adele is very gifted even for a prophet, and her teacher recognizes that and chose her to train for a position in the human world establishing a prophet network there. Hopefully she will be able to locate and train a few very rare human prophets and help establish their presence in that world.

Adele mostly speaks the English language taught to her by Tabitha, but she also speaks her home dimension's language of Shioan. Her people aren't "Shioan" though; her dimension was "settled" by people from a nearby dimension called Shio, and they're not even sure if they had a language or a culture before being settled by outsiders. In any case, Dimension Shio is close enough to Adele's world for people to remember their language, and the human world is close enough to Adele's dimension for the same. She can't count on much else, but she plans to at least be able to communicate.

So far, the Negative One storyline simply depicts Adele's struggle to accept her fate and deal with the sadness and joy it brings to her life and her family, and the future will depict her studies, her issues, and her eventual passage through the pool, and on to adventures in the human world.

My favorite Adele pictures (click on the small pictures to see large, good quality scans):