Shelley

[snowazalea]

Name Meaning: Old English, meadow’s edge

Sculpt: Dream of Doll Tender Too

Date of Arrival: December 3, 2004 / September 6, 2023

Reason for Purchase: My first BJD’s were Dream of Doll Tender Too and Bee-a, received in December 2004. I left the hobby for a few years. When I returned to the hobby, I gradually started to re-collect my first dolls, which led to my quest to find these discontinued dolls. I found an old sales group post from 2018 for Tender Too. When I messaged the seller, he was still available, so I bought him. 

Work Needed: Eventually (far in the future), a new face-up. 

Plans for Future: Glasses, a red braid wig, Chinese clothing. 

Season: Late Summer

Age: 24

Eye Color: Emerald Green

Hair Color: Ginger

Flower: Sunflower, haughtiness

Gemstone: Spinel, revitalization

Animal: Snake, medicine

Major Arcana card: The Magician, willpower

Loves: Experimenting in laboratories, notebooks, sketching, handwriting.

Storyline:
Cristalle, post-apocalyptic

Background: 
Shelley is a kirin, a unicorn who can walk the earth for 100 years. He takes a human form and has a particular interest in science and medicine. He becomes interested in the case of Johnny, a young boy with consumption. Shelley's medicine is halfway between medical science and sorcery. 

While treating Johnny, Shelley becomes engaged to Cambriel, his older sister, who's deeply worried about her brother. Cambriel's love for Shelley is thin. Most of her feelings are caught up in her brother. Part of the reason she agrees to the engagement is to please him, hoping he will dedicate more time to saving her brother. 

Shelley becomes caught up in the intricacies of illness and the human body, and he is not nearly as concerned about saving Johnny as Cambriel wants him to be. On a subconscious level, she knows this, which is why she is frantic enough to engage herself to him and pretend to be in love with him. 

Shelley begins to experiment on Johnny, resulting in his death. Cambriel discovers the death and the obvious signs of experimentation and is grief-stricken. After burying Johnny, she commits suicide. 

Shelley is devastated at Cambriel's loss, but at this point, he still has no respect for human will, human desires, or the human soul. He embarks on a challenge to bring Cambriel back to life, using the medical knowledge and sorcery he's learned, and hoping to learn more. 

The damage of Cambriel's body means that Shelley has to substitute parts of another corpse. He digs up a corpse from a graveyard, Valentine, and fuses the bodies together. Cambriel's body sleeps for a hundred years before she awakens. She awakens because Johnny has become an angel and gathered enough energy to bring her back to life.

The woman who comes to life is not Cambriel, but Ophelia. She has the shadows of Cambriel's memories, her fears, and some appearance-related attributes and personality qualities of Valentine. She falls deeply in love with Shelley, but he sees her as a successful experiment. Shelley tells Ophelia that she is his wife who has lost her memory. However, eventually she remembers the truth and uncovers the entire story. 

Shelley has been working on the experiment in collaboration with Jude, another scientist who has discovered how to extend human life. Therefore, after a hundred years, he is still in the form of an early middle-aged adult. Jude creates a clone from the original Cambriel, but she too requires another human corpse to come to life. 

Through Jude, Shelley is betrayed to a group of werewolves, who want his science for their own and kidnap him. Ophelia goes on a journey to rescue Shelley. Once they are reunited, Shelley's hundred years is up, and his kirin form returns to the heavens, leaving a non-decaying body behind, which Jude places in a glass casket. 

Jude and Ophelia bring Shelley back to life, but he has no memories of before. His personality is entirely different and he craves a simple, honest existence in the countryside.