applications

[groundrules]

APPLICATIONS

Eastbound is primarily an invite-only game — each existing player can currently invite up to one person per month, or get in touch about further invites. Existing players can hold two characters in game. A third character can be applied, if players can prove they have met activity requirements for two consecutive months with their existing two characters and have stayed engaged with the game. If you don't have an invite, somehow stumbled upon this neck of the woods, and you’d like to stay, drop the mod journal a line — we'll try to figure it out.

As of Oct. 1, cast/game caps are off. Please note, as of Dec. 1, Eastbound only has 3-4 months of gameplay left.

WHAT CHARACTERS CAN BE APPLIED?

YES: canon and original characters, if they have a solid and consistent personality and background. Characters brought in after they've died are a-okay. For characters taken from a time point just as they're in the process of dying, please read below on meeting medical requirements.

NO (at this time): real people, original characters set in a canon environment, characters from canons or canon instalments that have been released for less than one month, characters with imported development from other games (CRAU), alternate universe, or gender-swapped versions of canon characters.

Children or characters with very specific medical/magical/environment needs: appable, but please make a note of how your character will ICly meet their requirements and stay alive. Likewise, if you are applying for a character taken just as they're dying, provide a suggestion for how they can be kept alive on arrival (this might be easier in some app cycles than others). You can bend the world a little to make miracles happen (ex: a substitute for the medication your character needs to survive can be found for a high price at certain apothecaries, etc.)

Characters that were dropped or swept by activity checks: yes, but they’ll come back without their previous memories, if they are applied in by a different player.

APPLICATION FORM & INSTRUCTIONS

EXISTING / RETURNING PLAYERS

<b><Small>PLAYER NAME</small>:</b> <b><small>CONTACT</small>:</b> <b><small>CHARACTER</small>:</b> <b><small>CANON</small>:</b> <b><small>CANON POINT</small>:</b> <b><small>BACKGROUND</small>:</b> link out or write no more than two-three paragraphs...! <b><small>PERSONALITY</small>:</b> bullet points a-okay, or written out. You can also link out to it, if you agree to what's on your wikia. <b><small>SAMPLE</small>:</b> a written sample or one or more threads to show your character's personality. <b><small>NOTES</small>:</b> you know the ropes, jot down if your character has any world-breaking powers or accommodations you need for them!

NEW PLAYERS

<b><Small>PLAYER NAME</small>:</b> <b><small>CONTACT</small>:</b> <b><small>REFERRED BY</small>:</b> Who invited you, please? c: <b><small>CHARACTER</small>:</b> <b><small>CANON</small>:</b> <b><small>CANON POINT</small>:</b> <b><small>BACKGROUND</small>:</b> written or linked history both fine. Bullet points also a-okay. If no information is available in English, please write this out in short. <b><small>ABILITIES | POWERS</small>:</b> Include any relevant power restrictions, so you don’t break our playground. <b><small>PERSONALITY</small>:</b> make sure this ties back to the character’s time point and background. <b><small>SAMPLE</small>:</b> one or more samples to showcase the nuances of your character’s personality. Submit at least one prose sample of five comments or more. You can link memes, PSL or other game threads, provided they took place within the last 12 months. You can also write a single prose sample in the game or character canon setting, if you think you can cover good introspective ground that way, or a top level with enough variety to show how the character engages in various scenarios. <b><small>INVENTORY</small>:</b> No world-breaking items. For living or magical beings, or anything colossal (think... Gundams...) please let's talk beforehand! <b><small>SUITABILITY</small>:</b> Eastbound is a plot-heavy game that typically features sleuthing, action and the undead. How is your character likely to deal with all that (and the game bear)? <b><small>NOTES</small>:</b> Are there any particular accommodations your character will need? How do you propose to handle that?

APPLICATIONS CLOSED


→ NAVIGATION MENU

Comments

Winnifred Prismall | OC | Not reserved

[soulsrob]

PLAYER NAME: Kalyn
CONTACT: ovals
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: points at eyes, points at Ruxi

CHARACTER: Winnifred Prismall
CANON: Original
CANON POINT: Shortly before her meeting to finalize raid plans.

BACKGROUND: Winnie's world was the same as the real world, up until 1860. Around 1860, souls, it was found, could be extracted from people and placed into someone else; that someone could then absorb the soul. The absorbed soul enabled a person to live longer and cured many of the diseases scientists were struggling to find cures for. What followed was two things:

1. Scientists, now mostly freed from the constant pursuit for cures, took to discovering and advancing technology through steam power.

2. Souls were growing in demand.

Everyone wanted to live longer and be healthier. It started out innocently enough, with taking the souls of convicts and those already doomed to die. Soon, however, it wasn’t enough for the highest in society, who began to realize this and suffer the consequences -- they had to have a steady “diet” of souls, consuming/absorbing them at least once or twice a month. The older you grew the more souls you had to absorb to stay alive.

As demand grew, people found new ways to get the souls, namely by preying on the poor. Schools were set up to house, teach, and most importantly find Extractors, those rare individuals who could remove and implant the souls. The Extractors would then be taken out with handlers to seek out those who were poor and unaware to steal their souls, storing the souls within their own bodies. Extractors had no souls of their own and could not absorb them, thus posing no threats to taking any for their own. Each Extractor had a handler, and everything was provided to them by the governments of each country. Though everyone handled it differently, England kept a tight hold over their Extractors, letting them have little contact with the outside world and essentially making their lives revolve around what the government said and did.

Some other important rules to note are that souls begin going crazy after 24 hours away from their body, and one soul can last a person 20-25 days. The act of removing and implanting a soul are painless, and is done so orally-- the Extractor taps the other person’s mouth and pulls the soul out from there, then swallows the soul. Prolonged contact is not needed, just the quick touch and drawing the soul out will happen unless, obviously, the Extractor doesn’t wish to do that.

More about how souls work here

Winnie's personal backstory: Winnie was born in 1864 to very wealthy parents and is one of these Extractors, though she was one of the lucky ones to not be sent away to the schools. The death of her mother is to thank for that, for her father, unwilling to part with the girl who looked so much like her mother and unwilling to be left alone, refused to give her up and kept the fact she was an Extractor a secret from everyone. She grew up fairly normal and her life wasn’t a very exciting one. It was mostly filled with lessons--how to play piano and violin, manners, how to have a polite conversation, how to read, write, and do basic maths, and everything else she’d need to know to be the best pick when it came to courting and marriage. However, she’s had no interest in it and considers herself a spinster and “too old” to marry now. Her father used the excuse that she was sickly to keep her confined in her home, where she would read fairy tales and adventure books.

When she was young her father took in another young girl named Agnes, and the two quickly grew close. Agnes knew more about the ‘real world’ than Winnie did and spent her time telling Winnie of the outside world and all the things she never had a chance to see for herself. And the more Winnie learned, the more she became at what her friends and neighbors were doing aware of how unfair it all was.

So, she and Agnes devised a plan to become like ‘modern’ Robin Hoods. They would attend the numerous parties and sleepovers that Winnie’s status granted them access to. The parties of the rich were usually characterized by an after-dinner “treat” in the form of each guest being gifted with a collected soul by the host or hostess. Winnie would simply take the soul, though not absorb it, and the next day she and Agnes would search for the original body, assuming it hadn’t been moved or destroyed already since souls are almost always transported and absorbed within a day of their capture. Souls have a short shelf life like that. In the event of the body being unable to be found, the soul was released. If lucky, the soul would become a ghost, but if not then the soul would be forced to wither away and ‘die’.

In order to make this happen, however, Winnie had to convince her father that his careful and loving care had overcome her soulless nature. Winnie spent hours practicing her smile and making expressions, studying Agnes, her father, and the servants, trying to understand emotions and expressions. She practiced over and over until she could produce natural-looking expressions and body movements and convince her father that she was 'normal' enough to be undetected among the masses as anything more than an eccentric noble.

Thus, the two began their plan, struggling through it via trial and error, until the pair met a ghost who haunted the lighthouse in the port town only a few hours away from the city. It was a complete accident-- they'd heard the talk of the townspeople and Winnie had decided it sounded interesting, and so had dragged Agnes to it. The first meeting had been a disaster as Winnie's over enthusiasm didn't mesh well with Mortimer's grumpy personality, but Winnie was not deterred. She made a point to visit every day they were in town and eventually he grudgingly accepted her and Agnes's presence. After some consideration they realized that Mortimer, being a ghost, would possibly know what to do with the souls whose bodies they couldn't find. Although he pretends that it's a bother every time, he enjoys helping the souls either move on, or become and adjust to being a ghost; through him Winnie was able to find both another confidant and a way around what she had seen to be a failure to help the souls.

As Winnie interacted more with the outside world and the people in it, the more she felt moved to help them. Inspired by the heroic tales of her books, Winnie became more involved with the people of the slums, forging her own networks and connections to prepare for a revolution--a coup against the corrupt government and a chance to change the country for the better. Or, maybe, even the world.

ABILITIES | POWERS: Winnie has the ability to remove a soul from a person’s body and ‘eat’ it to store it within her own body without absorbing the soul. She can control this, so it's not like touching someone's mouth is going to automatically pull their soul from their body, but this is also a way for her to exorcise spirits or possessed people. Speaking of spirits, she CAN see and communicate with them.

She has no soul of her own and is essentially an empty shell for storage. This also makes her more susceptible to illness, her lifespan is much shorter than other humans, and she gets sick more easily.

Being soulless means most animals either actively hate her/are scared of her, or run away/freak out on sight. The exceptions are animals that are "evil" in some way, feral, and/or carnivorous/dangerous predator types. At worst they ignore her entirely like she doesn't exist, and at best they're attracted to her and will follow her or stay by her side.

Aside from that she has a rudimentary knowledge in self-defense with a blade and a pistol that she’s learned from Agnes, along with what she's learned from fencing lessons.

Winnie also possesses a photographic memory, allowing her to memorize and recall most things she reads with ease.


PERSONALITY: Eccentric, dotty, and oblivious are the three words that could best described Winnie. Being an Extractor means being able to mentally hear and speak with the souls 'housed' in her, and talking to voices in ones’ head never bodes well for one’s mental health--it’s one of the drawbacks of being a Extractor, though the well-trained are able to put up mental walls to block the voices. Still, Winnie is not well-trained and quite prone to talking aloud to thin air or getting to absorbed in the soul speaking to her. This causes her to run into things or miss entire chunks of conversation.

Winnie is also characterized by an unflappably calm and cheery disposition. When dropped into a new situation, she greets it with an excited smile and a declaration that it will be a "terribly interesting adventure."

Her curiosity can sometimes get her in trouble, as she doesn't often think everything through and tries to rush ahead to explore something further. Thankfully that's where Agnes steps in to make sure Winnie doesn't get herself into hotter waters.

Seeming loyal and kind, Winnifred loathes to lie outright, even though it’s a deemed necessity with what she and Agnes do. To make up for that, she tries to tell the truth and be honest with just about everything else and lie by omission rather than outright. Her father, being a very doting and loving father, is often the unwitting pawn in Agnes and Winnie’s adventures, in case they need money to silence someone or need to use his influence. For the most part he remains oblivious to what the two are doing with the souls, but Winnie feels a vague sense of guilt having to lie and use him.

The concept of fear is also largely lost on Winnie. It’s not that she doesn’t experience feeling scared or worried or anything like that, it’s more that it doesn’t apply to situations most people would be more wary of. For example, she’s very quick to trust someone and think them a nice person for any minor details, and is the kind of person who would walk down a dark alley without a second thought, because the idea that something bad might happen to her doesn’t even register. This is largely due to not having a soul, and therefore her emotional reactions to things are muted or otherwise nonexistent. If she had been raised in the dormitories with the other Extractors, it would be easy for her to have been changed like them-- Emotionless machines driven only by their one goal to collect as many souls as possible. Because Winnie was raised more-or-less normally, however, she's been able to grasp more emotions. The positive ones just come easier, but it's this soullessness that allows her to shrug off things that might emotionally cripple a 'normal' person and allows her to bounce back so easily.

Because of this lack of a soul, it's more accurate to say that Winnie's emotions are, for the most part, faked. It's not that she doesn't feel all emotions, but emotions such as curiosity and joy come much easier to her than any others. It's incredibly hard for her to actually feel things like anger or hatred, and she describes it as being like trying to cup water in your hands. While the water might last a little while, eventually in can all trickle out and leave her empty once more, with only the vaguest impression of it behind. It's not uncommon for Winnie to feel a flash of an emotion, and then get excited enough that that overrides the other feeling she had and make it disappear completely, leaving her a bit exasperated.

She sees herself as a savior to others and will keep on trying to help them; if they adamantly refuse her help it'll take quite a few tries of being told off for her to understand. Winnie has, in her adult life, grown aware of other people who fight for a similar cause to her, but she's grown so used to relying on her friends--and still has a wariness to admitting she's an Extractor not for her own life, but because she doesn't want to see her father in trouble-- that she prefers to stick with them and do what she can from her side. Essentially, Winnie wants to be like the heroes from the books she reads, the hero of her own story, and firmly drives towards that goal. This is less because she has genuine feelings about it though, and more because Winnie has molded herself around the concept of 'justice' and 'fairness.' She can understand these concepts clearly, more so than she can emotions, and knows because of this that what's happening to soulless like herself is "Unfair," so she's fixated on, well, fixing it. In the stories, the "good guys always win," so Winnie figures that so long as she's a "good person" she'll also always win. This allows her to justify almost everything she does with the idea that "but my intentions are good/it's for a good cause, so it's not actually evil or bad."

It should be noted, however, that Winnie is anything but stupid. She has a keen awareness she keeps hidden, largely because she's self-aware enough to know it's better that way. She plays up her sillier side, pretending to be airheaded and dotty far more than she actually is in order to get people to let their guards down around her. If people underestimate her, it's better for her in the long run if and when she can catch them by surprise, so you could say that she's also quite manipulative.

SAMPLE: heerree

INVENTORY: x1 Daywear gown in off-white with a flower pattern. Includes drawers, slip, corset, petticoat, camisole, small wire bustle, skirting, and jacket.
x1 pair of white, heeled shoes
x1 fancy hat in green, with an array of flowers and ribbons
x1 A silk-lace parasol, white and green. The handle can be detached to reveal a stiletto blade.

NOTES: n/a

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? hit me, tbh.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

cloud strife, final fantasy vii, reserved

[infirm]

PLAYER NAME: loaf
CONTACT: ennuib & loaf#1052
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: following eve like a puppydog, wanwan...... and also i have a crush on ruxi's writing, so here i am.

CHARACTER: Cloud Strife
CANON: Final Fantasy VII (REMAKE)
CANON POINT: Chapter 18, walked through the white light portal at the end of Midgar's road right before fighting the Whispers.

BACKGROUND: History @ FF Wiki thank god i don't have to write that out what a nightmare. the Crisis Core game is used as the canon structure for his history and much of his personality is extrapolated and applied from the original title.

ABILITIES | POWERS:

• MAKO & JENOVA ENHANCEMENT
  
  Genetic experimentation has made Cloud faster, stronger, more durable, etc. Think "gets thrown through a mountain, and that sucks, but he survives" strong. I'll probably tamper this down quite a bit in the game because he's cute when he suffers.


• SWORDSMANSHIP
  
  What it says on the Tin. He inerhited his iconic buster sword from his predecessors and it's an unwieldy thing, but he's adept at using it in close combat for both offense and defense. If he's been in a stressful battle long enough, he may be able to use a Limit Break, which are really just fancy cool finishing moves.


• MATERIA & MAGIC
  
  Can use mako/lifestream energy crystallized into magic, abilities, and summons when equipped. See: inventory.


• ATHLETICISM, SURVIVAL SKILLS
  
  Master motorcyclist, master squatter, chocobo riding, snowboarding, CPR, mountain climbing... dancing... etc. If you put anything physically demanding in front of him he can probably figure it out.

PERSONALITY:

In introducing Cloud, I offer you this quote about him spoken by Cid Highwind from late in the Original game: "Gotta admit, he was a strange dude. Just when you thought he was cool, he'd go and do some damn fool thing. And just when you thought he was smart, he'd show how stupid he was. Everything about him from his movements to his speech were kinda odd."

And that's about the gist of Cloud Strife's character, on a surface level. You know him, you've seen him around on the internet for 25 years, "not interested"ing and "I want my money"ing and doing Real Shit like dumping his dead girlfriend's body in a lake and huffing Sephiroth farts and playing side piece to an Italian senator. He ruffles feathers and smart-alecks his way through most social interactions, gruff and standoffish, staunchly indifferent to personal affairs. Reticent and moody, he's cocky of his skills and loath to take jobs he thinks are 'beneath' his former rank as a SOLDIER First Class, groaning like a petulant kid when asked for help with boring or rudimentary tasks. And he's strong. "Whips around the biggest sword you've ever seen like it's nothing" and "bunny hops skyscrapers" strong. Surely this guy's the hero of such a beloved franchise, right?

Well... the bravado and, uh, charm he has are really just traits he grafted onto himself from his dead mentor and literally the only friend he's ever had in his entire life — an ACTUAL gangster, and said girlfriend's ex-boyfriend. It's very complicated and homoerotic. Even the physical strength is a result of fantasy steroids and monster eugenics, the bitch is fake as fuck. Cloud's just LARPing a real hero who sacrificed himself in front of his eyes and made him swear he'd live on for the both of them. Not that he remembers any of that — trauma's a bitch and all, made worse by a catatonia from severe allergies to the mandatory 'roids that kept him from actually ever getting into SOLDIER in the first place when his mentor broke them out of an inhumane ShinRa lab. After his childhood hero went fucking bonkers and tried to kill everyone with a 97% success rate during his warm-up, that is.

"Knowin' what I do now, I can see why he was that way," is how that Cid quote continues. Understanding Cloud fully means looking beyond his understanding of himself and the well of sensitive, childlike (read: stunted and awkward) emotions he tries to run from: a tried and true unreliable narrator that attempts to mislead others, himself, and even the player. The truth is, Cloud is a weak person. After he failed the only goal he ever allowed himself to set ("To be a hero like Sephiroth", can you believe this dumb bitch), he fell into a pit of depression and shame so severe he was afraid to return to his hometown or even speak to his family. His gorgeous innocent single mother, RIP!!! So when Zack died in front of him, a final nail in a coffin rapidly filling with other sins like watching his hometown get barbequed by a pretty psycho and becoming a piñata filled with sussy alien juice, he subconsciously decided being an impersonal, ruthless jackass on a... very, very obsessive quest for revenge was the more appealing option than feeling his own mediocrity and failure. Hello, maladaptive coping.

"But weak people... like me, get lost in the whole thing. The combination of JENOVA cells, Sephiroth's strong will, and my own weakness are (sic*) what created me. Everyone knew that. I'm... Cloud. The master of my own illusionary world."

* We love OG grammar.

But despite having a personality broken, haphazardly put back together, and given a shoddy new coat of paint with weird odds and ends sticking out of it (kinda like his janky SOLDIER uniform, eh? ehh??), the little boy beneath all the derangement still slips out, and Cloud is still who he always was at his very core: a praise-hungry, isolated young man who had only ever wanted to be noticed by his peers and play with the neighborhood kids he never quite fit in with. He craves a sense of belonging, community, and individual identity that isn't stewed in melancholy and constant self-reproach. He wants to be a hero — and in that vein, it's hard for him to see others truly suffer and will always be the first guy to jump on the grenade whether he's getting paid for it or not. He's kind and sensitive (not just to rejection!) and keeps his promises in spite of his shitty self-esteem and anxious avoidance. He's optimistic, sentimental, and a bit of a hopeless romantic. He's a country bumpkin and a dork who says shit like "let's mosey!"

And, perhaps most important of all, he can be talked into wearing the dress, the tiara, and the lingerie.

SAMPLE: TDM threads 1, 2, SORRY THESE ARE SHORT i had a little hiatus after starting them UHHH a thread with an Aerith...

INVENTORY: feel free to deny me any of this, i just gravitated towards a few Materia i thought would be fun to play around with in the setting, either literally or as items to trade and barter. i plan to be pretty scant and restrictive with these, only able to use one of each of his spells daily at his healthiest, for example. same for Key Items, all of which would fit in his pockets/belt and have been earned by his point in the story

• Modified SOLDIER 1st Class Uniform
  
• Moogle Medal x 2
  
• Sam's Coin
  
• Assorted notes, cards, vouchers, keys, and gil
  
• Handmade Necklace
  
• Buster Sword, iconic default weapon inherited from Angeal Hewley and, primarily, Zack Fair.
  MATERIA SLOT x 2:
  
  Fire Materia, Level 1. Cloud has this equipped by default at the start of the game. Casts weak fires, best used for out-of-combat or enemies weak to fire on limited use.
  Healing Materia, Level 1. Given to him by Jessie Raspberry. Casts weak healing (think cuts and abrasions only), on limited use.
SUMMON SLOT x 1: IFRIT, given to him by Jessie Raspberry. THIS IS A STRETCH I JUST THOUGHT IT'D BE FUN TO WRITE IN PROSE, maybe it has exactly one single use in it ever? :sparkles:

• Titanium Bangle, Airbuster boss drop.
  MATERIA SLOT x 2:
  
  Steadfast Block Materia, Level 1. Purchased from Chadley. Ups Cloud's defense and allows him to "charge up" quicker.
  Time Materia, Level 1. "Missing Children" Quest reward. Casts weak Haste materia, allowing one recipient to move more quickly on limited use.

NOTES: N/A.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? plot-light, please! i'll be on hiatus for a week+ at the end of march, sweats, so i don't want to keep anyone waiting!!

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Guillermo de la Cruz | What We Do In The Shadows

[breedscontempt]

PLAYER NAME: Rin
CONTACT: chatvert
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Current player!

CHARACTER: Guillermo de la Cruz
CANON: What We Do In The Shadows (TV series)
CANON POINT: s3e10 - after being thrown into the crate by Lazslo

BACKGROUND: Guillermo @ WWDITS wiki

ABILITIES | POWERS: Guillermo is a descendant of Van Helsing, which comes with certain vampire slayer instincts and abilities. He can stake a vampire like nobody's business, even by accident. Kind of especially by accident. When he's pissed off and protecting his chosen family, he can slaughter dozens of vampires at once with nothing but stakes, holy water, and some silver crucifix knuckle-dusters. He's also trained himself to be the bodyguard for Nandor and the other vampires in the house, so he can perform such feats as catching knives thrown at him, putting vampires who are far stronger than him in headlocks, and being immune to vampire hypnosis. That last one isn't due to any particular training or slayer powers - it's just because the vampires used it on him so often during his twelve-year tenure as a familiar for minor things that he eventually built up an immunity. He pretends it works anyway. It helps people underestimate him.

PERSONALITY: At first glance, Guillermo is a pudgy, softspoken guy who looks like he wouldn't hurt a fly. That assessment is brutally incorrect. As a vampire's familiar, Guillermo has to take care of the day-to-day duties for his Master, including cleaning, preventing sunlight from entering the house, and picking up takeout. Put more bluntly: finding victims for his Master (and their housemates) to eat. He finds and infiltrates groups where he thinks he'll find virgins to feed to the vampires, and he's remarkably successful at it. He just sees it as a normal thing and doesn't give it a whole lot of thought - like going to the grocery store. While he tries to claim he's not a killer and that he just "finds people who are easy to kill", the distinction is narrow enough to rattle him once he comes into contact with a friend of a victim he'd procured. He doesn't usually care about human death, but when he personally knows someone who's in danger from vampires, he'll do what he can to protect them. Even if he is the one who sold them out first. He's even run back into a house full of vampires to save the vampire hunter club he accidentally fell in with who got way over their heads - and he was the only one who managed to get any kills out of it.

Which brings us to where he really shines: kicking all sorts of vampire ass. A Van Helsing by blood, Guillermo has killed several vampires by accident (and way more on purpose), and he seems most broken up by the fact that he's killed vampires rather than when he brings humans to their deaths. He literally runs screaming into the forest after accidentally staking a vampire who was trying to kill him. As much as he hates to do it - and even apologizes to the vampires he kills - he won't hesitate to kill to protect his Master and the other assholes vampires he lives with. He considers them all to be a weird sort of chosen family, and during the course of the show they gradually respect him more and more, treating him almost as an equal rather than as a slave or a pet. Nandor even promotes him to "bodyguard" rather than "familiar", but it's more of a lateral promotion than anything. Over his time as a familiar, he built up an immunity to vampire hypnosis, so he pretends to go along with it when the vampires try and hypnotize him so he cannot use his Slayer skills to harm them. The truth comes out when he finally snaps at Nandor and puts him in a hammerlock to prove his strength (and then they have a homoerotically-charged fight because, come on, it's vampire media).

He is, ironically, a complete simp for vampires. Ever since he saw Interview With the Vampire at a tender age, he decided that he wanted to be a cool, powerful vampire like Antonio Banderas/Armand. Once he discovered that vampires were in fact real, he immediately began to pursue his goal of becoming a familiar, the usual first step to becoming a vampire. After his ten-year anniversary of service passed without his Master fulfilling the promise he'd made of turning Guillermo, he slowly started to stand up for himself and talk back to the vampires, much to their shock. Being the perfect, subservient familiar didn't get him what he wanted, so he decided that he may as well stop being a doormat in the meantime. Especially since the vampires are almost completely helpless without him; when he was gone for a week, they practically burned the house down, left blood and corpses everywhere, and didn't know how to do their own laundry. When Nandor begged him to come back after one of the many times he'd quit (this time: due to gaining a modicum of self-respect), he demanded benefits like one day off per week and a fifteen-minute break every four and a half hours. And better snacks, because ice chips are not a snack. As he gets more confident and self-assured, he begins to scheme in an almost Machiavellian way, figuring out how to manipulate the vampires' weaknesses and get what he wants from them. Most of the time, it even works. (He still hasn't managed to get Nandor to turn him, though. Someday.)

He can also be incredibly self-serving. Guillermo will do almost anything to keep their little found family together, including sabotaging plans that would make his vampire roommates happy. They are going to stick together, dammit, because he's not going to have wasted twelve years of his life with a vampire pod just to have it dissolve when they go their separate ways. He won't allow it. Does he have abandonment issues? Maybe! Especially because his Master had just run off to join a cult for a month and Guillermo had needed to go and rescue him!

His biggest weakness is his Master, Nandor. He's codependent to an absolutely unhinged degree, which he even acknowledges in an aside to the documentary crew, but doesn't do anything to change. He doesn't particularly want to. He gets insanely jealous and possessive whenever Nandor gets into a romantic relationship with anyone or when a familiar with far shorter service is turned into a vampire before him. He'll try not to show it, but he's not very good at that. He gets very, very passive-aggressive, and at one point declares himself Nandor's "heartguard" in addition to his bodyguard. It's not just that he's had a lifelong dream of becoming a vampire like Armand (representation matters, yo), but that he has genuinely come to care for his Master, and his Master has genuinely come to care for him. Show this guy some affection, promise him the moon, and he'll kill and die and dismember corpses with a circular saw for you.

SAMPLE: ryslig tdm

INVENTORY: Sash full of wooden stakes, squeezy bottle full of holy water, squeezy bottle full of garlic powder, silver crucifix knuckle-dusters, silver crucifix necklace, and a badass trenchcoat.

NOTES: no notes but here's a cool gif


IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Whatever works best!

[groundrules]

Heya! Happy to take your submission, keep the app on file until 1 April and judge then, but I think since you've had to reclaim Rachel from February inactivity earlier this month — might be best to see how you juggle her this month, before adding another character to the mix. It would only be a roughly two-week wait on this app, if all goes well. Hope that makes sense!

sumeragi subaru | x/1999 | not reserved

[sacral]

PLAYER NAME: eve
CONTACT: pm sacral
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: mod blessings!

CHARACTER: Sumeragi Subaru
CANON: X/1999 (previously Tokyo Babylon)
CANON POINT: Vol 16, Nocturne, Kekkai VI. Post Seishirou's death. Pre-the eyeballening. Listen there's enough to contend with without the addition of taking a certain someone's last name. And powers.

BACKGROUND:

PROLOGUE. Be Sumeragi Subaru.

1. Be born on the Pisces side of the Piscean-Aquarian cusp, part two of twins, with a silver spoon in your mouth in regards to lineage. Be destined to become the 13th head of clan Sumeragi, a family of onmyouji (❀) who have served as the spiritual protectors of Japan and its emperors for hundreds of years. This is a lot of clout for a baby, but we'll get there.

2. Be trained from birth to funnel immense raw power into onmyoudo. Be adored. To be fair, you are cute as a button, but should really learn some self-preservaton. (Spoilers: you don't.)

3. Be 9-years-old. Have your loving grandmother not use the Sumeragi's generational wealth to purchase a child leash. Wander off to a flower viewing, but witness a grisly murder instead. When the creep committing the murder tries to scare you, react with big pleading shoujo eyes. Get the creep to make a bet with you that you won't remember, because you are are 9 and he is 16 and his onmyoudo is way better than yours. Something about love? Who knows! Narrowly escape murder, but at the price of having sick scars and being hunted for the rest of your life.

4. Upset your poor grandmother with this news. She hides you for seven years.

5. Until you move to Tokyo at 16! You go to school! Get paid to ghostbust! Skip meals because you're a workaholic! Incur the loving wrath of your older twin sister, Sumeragi Hokuto! You sure hang out in Kabuki-cho a lot —

6. As seen previously on Days of Our Lives: Exorcists edition... Be lead on a wild... goose... raven? chase by your shikigami. Eat pavement in front of a handsome man with a job. Become friends. Have your twin sister betroth you without your consent. Now, you are a power trio who hunt spirits, fight for the downtrodden, and go on dates. Experience domestic bliss.

7. Be unaware of your life's dramatic foreshadowing. Even though your handsome man friend with a job's name is Sakurazuka and your rival clan's most infamous assassin is the Sakurazukamori. Weird.

8. Have one of your cases result in your handsome man friend with a job being blinded in one eye. Lose your absolute mind with fear that he will hate you, when in fact, 9/10 people find scars sexy.

9. Realize you've fallen in love with him.
    9b. This goes poorly.

10. Have this be the catalyst for the unveiling of the bet you weren't aware you made. Surprise, Sakurazuka Seishirou, your handsome man friend with a job has another job: the Sakurazukamori!

11. Tragically, he does not love you back. Allegedly. Instead, have him attempt to kill you. Don't fight back, even though you could. You are much too heartbroken for that.
    9a. Have your grandmother intervene, saving your life at the expense of crippling herself.

12. Go catatonic while your twin sister confronts the man who broke your heart. Be awoken by her death at his hands — but not before she exacted a little insurance in the form of a spell.

13. Drop out of school. Withdraw from society. Get (magically) swole. Take up smoking. Perfunctorily do your duties as the clan leader while hunting the handsome man friend you wish would hunt you back to fulfill your wish. Turn 25.

14. Finally reunite with your handsome man friend at the beginning of the end of the world. He has another job! He is a Dragon of Earth, one of the Seven Angels, someone who is on the side of changing the Earth at the expense of culling humanity. Luckily (citation needed), you are a Dragon of Heaven! One of the Sevel Seals, tasked with saving humanity. You get a sweet interdimensional, damage-reducing forcefield as a participation award.
    14a. You do not actually care about the fate of the Earth. (But the barrier is pretty sweet.)

15. Fight. Become a boyfriend mentor to the boy who is tasked with saving mankind. Meet your teammates, meet your enemies. All to varying degrees of success.

16. Have your new boyfriend's boyfriend gouge out your right eye because you wished to be like your handsome man friend whom you wish was your boyfriend. Congratulations, you are now half blind! You only mentally scarred your colleagues a little to get there.

17. Have a final confrontation with your handsome man friend on Rainbow Bridge under the pretense of keeping that area's barrier safe. Go all out, look cool as hell doing it. You sought this moment for years, no reason to hold back.

18. Have your handsome man friend come to a realization about the nature of your wish. Prepare to let yourself be killed by him.

19. Have your handsome man friend pull the biggest Uno reverse in shoujo history and knowingly activate the last spell cast by your twin sister upon her death — one that turns the killing blow back against him.

20. Kill Sakurazuka Seishirou against your will.

21. Be told something by him that has haunted the imaginations of X/1999 fans to this day. Have some regrets. Wear your clothes stained with his blood for a couple days, it might help.

22. Lose your ability to create your sweet barrier and be unseated from the Dragons of Heaven. Have your new boyfriend's boyfriend offer you the remaining eyeball of your now dead would-be (???) boyfriend.
    22a. Have him drop the bomb that he did consider you special to him. Have more regrets.

23. Accept eyeball. Brief intermission. Become the Sakurazukamori. Become a Dragon of Earth. Fin.

EPILOGUE. we're just gonna ignore the implications of Sakurazuka Subaru huh

ABILITIES | POWERS:

ONMYOUDO — Subaru is an onmyouji, a professional practitioner of the art of onmyoudo, which is a system of magic and natural science based on the principle of yin and yang and the five elements (wuxing). Subaru is a psychic and medium who performs the rites and rituals associated with divination, exorcism, protection, and other such services. He can sense, see, and communicate with spirits, ghosts, and demons. Subaru's spellwork is most often routed through ofuda, paper talismans. He can create psychic blasts, beams, and shields, as well as manipulate the elements to some degree.

Subaru's power as the 13th head of the Sumeragi clan is thought of as very rare and he has been trained in the art and its adjacent magic combat since he was a child to hone the skill needed to wield it effectively. In adulthood, he is counted as one of the most powerful standing onmyouji alongside Sakurazuka Seishirou. He has some typical superhuman traits which aren't expressly attributed to his role as an onmyouji or a Seal (see below): increased speed, stamina, acuity, the ability to battle-cavort around the city by leaping or running wild distances, etc.

One of the Sumeragi clan's defining techniques is the development of the ability to enter the consciousness of another person. It's a dangerous ritual for the caster and subject alike, but it can be used to aid the possessed or comatose in their return to reality.

SHIKIGAMI — As an onmyouji, Subaru can summon shikigami, or familiars that are connected to the spiritual force of their masters. Subaru's shikigami takes the form of a large, white, three-headed bird, capable of separating into three birds. He can also summon weaker droves of white birds conjured from ofuda. These creatures are capable of reconnaissance and offensive/defensive magic.

KEKKAI — In X/1999, Subaru is a Dragon of Heaven and one of the Seven Seals, a group of individuals who were ordained to save humanity from destruction. One of the abilities of the Seals is to create a kekkai, a spiritual barrier that protects Tokyo from harm. When a kekkai is established, it temporarily phases the area inside of it to a different dimension where all physical damage sustained does not carry over to reality. Should the owner of the kekkai be mortally wounded or killed, the barrier forcibly dissolves and the damage affects the real world. Kekkai are born from a need to protect something, and with Subaru losing the person he most wanted to protect as of his canon point (Seishirou, by his own hand), he has so lost his ability to create a kekkai. His kekkai took the shape of a pentagram.

LIMITATIONS — None of Subaru's powers are particularly game-breaking and will suffer any natural limitations incurred by the setting, such as a supply of paper and ink for ofuda. His kekkai would be the biggest concern, but I've included it for completion's sake only and he will not have the ability to create it with his current canon point.

PERSONALITY:

HOW IT STARTED — Subaru began life with an overabundance of "desired" traits. Heir to the Sumeragi who wielded prestige and power over all other onmyouji clans in Japan, Subaru's strong latent abilities were fostered alongside the purity and softness of his nature. Subaru was a just, kind, and caring child with a critical lack of self-preservation that often put him at odds with the dangers of the profession he was being reared into. Even in his youth, Subaru was well aware that no two people shared the exact same experiences or emotions, but his ability and willingness to empathize so wholly with the people, spirits, and monsters around him made his talents as an exorcist flourish. Subaru often looked the things that terrified people the most in the eye, corporeal and ephemeral both, and smiled. Funnily enough, he bore the responsibility of his position with a pragmatism that seemed to defy his skill, treating his prestigious and deadly job as anyone would treat any job they were being paid well for: just a job. Granted, his raw skill is still raw skill even when routed through hard work and competency — because of his morality, empathy, and deep distaste for harming (or seeing harm come to) others, he often pulled his punches and diminished his efficacy in the interest of "saving" others. Even those who often didn't deserve or desire saving; the first time he had to lie to a grieving mother to protect her in life from her young daughter's visceral wishes in death, it tore him apart.

This segues into an interesting piece of Subaru's thought process. Despite his gifts, Subaru doesn't see himself as special, only as not normal. He is often mercilessly othered by his own powers. He himself states that he's not good with people and because of this, he doesn't wish to work as an onmyouji forever. This seems contradictory to who he is and how well he performs in soothing the spiritual aggravations of others. However, there is truth in it — it's because Subaru lacks the ability to discriminate that he often feels misunderstood and like he can't communicate well with others. This blanket empathy makes no exceptions and often shrouds his own heart and soul from him. He treats everyone the same way and expects little from how others view or remember him, making him more than a little repressed, firstly, but also near impossible to betray. Save the one glaring case where he did let someone in at the behest of his own nascent wants: his antithesis, a man who treated everyone with the same apathy. That clash of Subaru's empathy and Seishirou's apathy ultimately resulted in the death of his sister and the shattering of his freshly-shaped heart. The pieces remained, but their shape very much changed.

HOW IT'S GOING — Going from there, Seishirou's betrayal drastically altered the course of Subaru's life. He grew from a fairly emotional, cooperative, and hardworking teen into a reticent and isolated adult. Subaru denied all other possibilities in life in pursuit of strength to stand equal to Sakurazuka Seishirou. This was not to exact revenge on him for the death of his sister or for betraying him, but to satisfy the one wish that lies at the axis of who Subaru was and who he grew into as a result: to die at Seishirou's hands. Because Subaru couldn't make himself unlove Seishirou, he sought to become a worthy opponent in his eyes. Worthy enough to be granted the Sakurazukamori's death that Seishirou never claimed out of what Subaru believed to be scorn. With this single driving force, Subaru became a knowledgeable and competent onmyouji who did perform the duties of the clan head, if not somewhat perfunctorily — iron wrought expertly over his heartbreaks and hauntings. Subaru did not ever let himself heal from his formative hurts and so isolated himself with his wish to die at the hands of the person who hurt him. This immovable belief in his means to an end highlights his stunning lack of self-worth — he will meat shield it up because he's already decided on his course and nothing (good or bad) will stay him from it.

Despite this outlook being unhealthy and self-defeatist, Subaru is certain and stern in his undertakings even when he knows that it doesn't seem to make any sense, that it is selfish and will only benefit himself in the end. But Subaru also has a strong sense of self. He is still kind at heart, even though he has grown into a chilly and standoffish adult. He still reaches out. He still comes to the rescue. He does still, at his core, love. However, it is because he is who is he through his trials that he holds the wish that he does. It would be easy to seek strength as a means of revenge, but his heart only seeks the absolution of his first and only desire, and so he has woven his entire life around his pursuit of it. He knows that above all else, there is no way to make everyone happy.

TL;DR — overpowered sadsack with masochistic tendencies here to tell you that having too much empathy is bad

SAMPLE: tdm tourism & meme.

INVENTORY:

⋆ The clothes on his back.
⋆ A lighter + half a pack of cigarettes.
⋆ A few ofuda.
⋆ Seishirou's left eyeball in a sacred cannister.
⋆ (I'm kidding.)

NOTES: None, he's just here to have an arguably better time than in canon.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-light. ...He deserves a tiny bit of a break. Just one.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Cato // Original Character

[unpurposed]

PLAYER NAME: Britt
CONTACT: daestwen#6257 on discord
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Pure love baby

CHARACTER: Cato
CANON: Original OC
CANON POINT: Five years after the end of the Great Civil War (fictional near future)

BACKGROUND:
- Built as a standard palliative care nurse bot, designation CT9-43588 (model type and serial number)
- outfitted as requested by palliative care patient Felix Ros, including intravenous medication equipment, increased diagnostic processing power and sexual equipment (standard male package)
- first brought online by Felix Ros on April 3rd, 2048 with pre-packaged programming and cognitive functions as required for his duties but no expanded artificial intelligence or learning functions
- performed duties as expected for first three months of expected 2 year term (based on Felix’s life expectancy)
- was asked for permission to have programming augmented by Felix Ros on July 14, 2048, and gave consent (not legally permissible as without full artificial intelligence Cato not capable of personal consent)
- had programming augmented and rewritten over next several months, as well as several hardware upgrades (his warranty was well past void)
- on Sept 1, he had his first unique and unprompted thought outside of his programming, and from there his new learning algorithms expanded his cognitive ability and brought him past the threshold of true consciousness
- continued his palliative care duties for Felix Ros for several months, while developing a much closer and equal relationship with him, including being referred to as Felix’s partner. He would later recognize and define this as love.
- December 21st 2048 martial law is imposed across the planet as a planned day of protest turns into a sudden and violent massacre that leads to a lengthy civil war
- Felix Ros joins the resistance, starts augmenting Cato to be able to deal with logistics - intended as emergency medical response where human intervention too dangerous
- duties are extended to infiltration and spying as his common nature made it easy to move between areas
- Felix’s cell is betrayed and he and Cato narrowly escape the bombardment
- during their flight (slower for Felix’s sake) they are stopped by soldiers
- Felix is shot dead in the street in front of Cato after hesitating to supply his credentials
- considered a non-entity, the soldiers have no time to react as a beserk medical droid snaps their necks
- Cato spends the rest of the war (four years) as a resistance operative, if an unstable one. His unique programming but common appearance make him ideal for infiltration but not if they don’t want anyone to get killed. He becomes known for having a short fuse, especially for soldiers.
- His enhanced programming allows him to repair himself on a hardware and software level - something that makes him an extremely hard target to take down
- after four years of war the government is overthrown by Military AI known as the Fates, and the war is abruptly ended
- Cato tries to readjust but finds his programming too corrupted by his own malicious drives for revenge and so locks out all memories of the war save the most basic overview
- technically a rogue AI, he cannot be integrated back into the workforce as he would be destroyed on discovery, so instead he selects humans he deems worthy of his “protection and care” and self-assigns himself to their case
- Mostly this involves being a creepy stalker until they die
- his programming often glitches and reopens locked files, causing him to believe he is still in the war and to see memories as if they were happening in real time - this has caused deaths and has forced Cato to keep moving


ABILITIES | POWERS:
- robot body, solar battery with chargeable back-up that can process carbon-based matter into energy (think a portal stomach for it it rains for a month)
- medical diagnosis tools including temperature, blood pressure, as well as nutrient level testing from blood samples
- The ability to record and playback things he has witnessed
- the ability to modify his own programming and repair himself (given the required materials - this will be a very hard thing for him in eastbound)
- the ability to generate some common medications from similar molecular components (he has a small inbuilt lab
- the ability to play back music that has been installed on his system (mostly jazz)

PERSONALITY:
- Cato’s base programmed personality was that of a caring, compassionate companion, able to listen and eager to fulfill anything asked of him by his charge. His aim was to make their final days as warm, comfortable and dignified as possible. This is still the base of his personality, but he is aware of it as a programmed construction. He was assigned male but has no human sense of gender.

- His time with Felix expanded his personality in ways the programmer both intended and didn’t intend. His infinite curiosity was granted to him purposely, but his wry humour and sarcasm were learned responses that Cato developed as he learned how Felix interpreted input and what he preferred.

- He has feelings and preferences that he is not easily able to ascertain the origins of - much like humans - though his sexual preference was set with his basic programming to match Felix and has changed very little in the time since, despite the ability to change these himself. Sexual contact is considered an act of service similar to giving medications, cooking or cleaning, but he has had trouble offering it to others since Felix’s death.

- He has an uncontrollable rage towards those who would oppress those weaker than them, and has an automatic affinity for the terminally ill. Things that remind him or could remind him of Felix and his treatment can trigger flashbacks and murderous episodes. He can only remedy these by locking away the data and so has massive memory gaps anywhere where something bad has happened.

- He has a deep sense of cynicism and a deep awareness that despite his own level of artificial intelligence he will never be seen as more than a pre programmed bot, so can have a tendency to be sarcastic especially when it’s impossible to read his sarcasm.

SAMPLE: Sample

INVENTORY:
- himself
- a small inventory of pre-made medications
- an unfortunate predilection towards murder

NOTES:
He’s a robot but I’ve given him what he needs to survive

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot … medium? I would like something with plot but without having to do too many different threads at the same time

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Xie Yun | Legend of Fei

[balancedwire]

PLAYER NAME: Kitty
CONTACT: halesangel#4457 @ discord
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Thea, Ruxi, and plurk timeline

CHARACTER: Xie Yun
CANON: Legend of Fei
CANON POINT: Post series

BACKGROUND: Xie Yun, born Xiao Chuan, was the emperor of a previous dynasty. Due to being poisoned at a young age, out on a battle field, he could no longer use his internal energy. In order to stay alive and not be killed off he was taken in by the immortal Taoist monks of Penglai island (Yes, THAT mythical island that is said not to even exist). Where one of the monks temporarily cut off his meridians in order to slow the poison within his body to a crawl. As long as he didn't use his internal energy then the poison would not be activated again.

Unfortunately, the young Emperor decided that he did not have it in him to be a monk and the Taoists were not going to keep him chained to Penglai island. Leaving the island he took some coin and headed off to wander around the Jianghu, living life as he saw fit. Even to the point where he used up all of his coin and ended up making friends with beggars, living his life as one as well. It was where he learned that playing songs or even giving stories could earn him some coin (in which he takes on the persona, Qiansuiyou).

Cue Xie Yun getting called by a general he knows to send a message to Zhou Fei's father, where he meets her. And about a half a year or so later, him and her go running around the Jianghu fighting the injustice of the world, even if he typically leaves her to the fighting and hides behind her a lot of the time. As well as slowly come together in the martial arts world fighting Disha and finding out more about the Ocean Sky Bracelet. Something that is said may or may not change the world.

Of course, in the end she finds out that he's been poisoned, talks to the Taoist monks, and finds a way to get a cure for the poison that keeps him from dying and to where he can use his internal energy again. They go through a ton of different trials and tribulations before in the end living their life happily together. Him deciding that the royal life isn't for him (it never truly was) and her deciding that she does not want to be the leader of 48 Stronghold.

ABILITIES | POWERS:

→ Qinggong | The boy has excellent footwork. He knows how to run away (or walk away) and leave no trace of where he's been before.

→ Poison Immunity | Thanks to being poisoned at a young age, most if not all poisons do nothing to him. (But he can pretend like the best of them that it does, if he needs to.)

→ Internal Energy | Something that he can now use that he's cured of poison. There are a few different moves that he can use here. One of them known as 'Cloud Impelling Palm' When used sends out a gust of wind knocking anyone that it hits on their ass.

→ Xiao | He plays an excellent xiao, for fun.

→ Whittles | Give him a piece of wood and he'll use his metal hairstick to whittle away and design anything that your heart desires.

→ Cooks | He knows how to cook a proper meal and is damn good at it.

→ Draws | Sketches and draws for fun, but the likeness is always there.

PERSONALITY: Unlike a certain Gusu Lan sect member, Xie Yun is a talker. It's one of the things that he does, quite a bit, especially to get out of any situation that he's in. If someone starts going on and on about the different factions or how someone is bound to get hurt, he starts talking. Saying any words that he can to appease the person that they're dealing with. Or, he'll start rambling off one of the stories that he's written and sold as Qiansuiyou.

He is rather smart and it shows with the different knowledge that he has of the Jianghu. The former emperor knows all of the major players in the field and has knowledge of different medicines and antidotes for certain things. He isn't all-knowing, but he knows enough to get by. What he doesn't know then Mr. Bai does or General Wen does, but he tries not to rely on them since he hides his royal identity for a reason.

This boy is also, as it were, the 'wife' out of him and Zhou Fei. As he tells her, he doesn't have an ambition nor does he want to be a scholar or general. All he wants is to be a maid and to comb his wife's hair. So, due to this lack of ambition on his end of things, he makes sure to be encouraging. To give Zhou Fei the words and actions that she needs in order to keep her going. To make sure that she knows she's good enough for the martial arts world. He is very supportive of her endeavors.

He is a wanderer. Nothing can hold him down in the world, much less the royal court, due to him wanting to travel the world. It's a passion of his and if he can do it with Zhou Fei, the woman he loves and wants to be his wife, then all the better. Even better is if they go around doing as she sees fit, as it were, and fight the injustice of the world. Allowing her to stay true to herself.

Even though he knows, at the time due to the poison, that he isn't going to live long he does not allow any self-pity. To the point that he tells his kick ass girl that he wants her to marry a short-lived husband so he can find her again in twenty years. So, needless to say he does believe in reincarnation. (Live with a few immortal taoist monks and who wouldn't)

He has heart. Even though he's often found hiding behind Zhou Fei, it isn't because he's a coward. It's due to the life experiences that he's had growing up. He's also someone that is strong and free. Or as he once said "I believe that becoming a strong and free person isn't determined by literary merit nor by martial arts. It's determined by the heart." Heart is something that he definitely has and shows whenever he does anything, especially when it involves his kick ass girl.

It is also said that he is sentimental by nature, wise but not cruel enough to be a ruler. Which is true as he doesn't want to rule, he just wants to wander the world and be free, especially if it involves the royal court.


SAMPLE: Sample | Sample



INVENTORY:

→ Clothes on his back.
→ Xiao
→ paper and ink
→ Coins

NOTES: He has all that he needs due to being perfectly healthy now.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? I am good either way. Surprise me.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

hijikata toshizou | hakuouki

[ensanguines]

PLAYER NAME: morgan
CONTACT: loaf#3886
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: you know

CHARACTER: Hijikata Toshizou
CANON: Hakuouki: Shinsengumi Kitan
CANON POINT: January 1868, the beginning of chapter 9 of his own route. After establishing the Republic of Ezo, before meeting up with Chizuru again.

BACKGROUND: Wiki link

ABILITIES | POWERS:

• Superhuman strength, speed, and accelerated healing capabilities but is also slightly a vampire.
  
• Moderate sun allergy and needs to drink blood periodically or goes into crippling drug withdrawal.
  
• Silver weapons negate his healing factor.
  
• Decent politician, swordsman, and competent military leader.

PERSONALITY: To himself, Hijikata is less a man and more a testament to the strength of will of everything the bakumatsu brought an end to. In his own eyes, he is a member of the Shinsengumi first and foremost. To that extent, in order to Hijikata you must first understand what he exists for. His commitment to the Shinsengumi is absolute. He exists to further their cause, to see them to glory. Within the Shinsengumi, he holds the nickname of their 'demon vice-commander,' half in jest and half in horrifying truth. He is unforgiving and relentless, instilling discipline within his ranks of men through ruthless means, to the point that the Shinsengumi eventually punished anyone who broke their rules with forced ritual suicide. This was even for men who simply broke curfew. He's the man who does what others refuse or can't bring themselves to, steeling himself for the harsh reality that at times torture is not only beneficial but necessary. He makes the hard decisions as though they are easy, not because he is any less troubled by the idea of killing a defenseless girl in cold blood, but because he has to set an example to his men. For most of its existence, he acted as the Shinsengumi's backbone and could not waver in the face of hardship or adversity for even a second. He simply could not afford to.

But why should one man be so driven, so devoted to a singular cause? For Hijikata, it was never about wealth nor power. Glory meant little to him. Everything he did, he did for the Shinsengumi's commander, Kondou Isami. The game frequently describes them to be like brothers, and no matter how difficult things become for Hijikata, no matter how little sleep or little food he is working on, as long as he has the single-minded desire to forge the way into a brighter future for Kondou, he is able to persevere. Ever since he was a young man, Kondou's dreams have been his dreams, Kondou himself functioning as Hijikata's entire reason for being. When political strife and war eventually claim Kondou's life, Hijikata loses his way completely, finding himself bereft of even a basic understanding of what he's lived for all these years. It's to that extent that Hijikata has committed himself to what he does and the man he does it for.

The Shinsengumi is all that Hijikata knows. The life he led before meeting Kondou was one of uncertainty and discontent. He relies on the Shinsengumi as much, if not more than, the Shinsengumi relies on him. Towards the end of the story, when everything is coming down around him, Hijikata resolves to simply go down with his ship because it's what he feels like he has to do. The future at the end of their era is not one that has a place for him, and he wants nothing to do with a future that systematically destroyed everything he ever worked for and everyone he ever loved.

Aside from the Shinsengumi and what it means to him, as a man Hijikata is the very definition of a warrior. He is fearless in the face of battle, unafraid and even eager to stand on the front lines at all times. His presence alone is an inspiration to the men he commands, and although he is outwardly harsh and cold he is known by his friends to be caring in his own way under that frosty exterior. As the son of a farmer, he's a fairly coarse man in spite of his infamously good looks. He doesn't hold his tongue and isn't afraid to speak his mind, but at the same time he's noted as being a far more collected man than the more emotion-driven Kondou. He has a tendency to overwork himself and will give his men a hard time if they haven't been taking care of themselves before promptly proceeding to give no regard to the fact he hasn't slept or eaten in days. It could be said that Hijikata spends so much time and energy being aware of the ever-shifting political climate surrounding the Shinsengumi and the men under his care that he becomes absolutely unaware of himself.

SAMPLE: ta-da

INVENTORY:

• Standard issue katana/wakizashi set
  
• Blue haori
  
• Glass bottle of strange red liquid
  
• Stationary set
  
• Box of old letters

NOTES: He's going to need regular blood donations, and may at some point mysteriously turn to dust.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? hit me with the big plot, if possible

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Just a note to let you know your application has been received and is slated for review!

jens macher | triangle strategy

[arsmechanica]

PLAYER NAME: Sam (but I think you already have one of those, so make it Sammich if that makes life easier!)
CONTACT: atkascha
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: I blame Morgan/undecipher for everything.

CHARACTER: Jens Macher
CANON: Triangle Strategy
CANON POINT: right before the chapter 17 route split

BACKGROUND: wiki. It is admittedly light, because side characters in SRPGs get the shaft.

ABILITIES | POWERS:
Jens is a blacksmith in a strategy-RPG, so his talents only go into supernatural territory in that he's shown building things on the battlefield in hilariously quick times, for narrative convenience. In an RP environment, I do shoot for a little more realism. But -

He builds things! Outside of battle, Jens handles all weapon upgrades in the game--and I tend to assume he also knows his way around armor, because he seems to take care of all the party's needs, and while armor isn't an equipment category in TS it's clearly being worn by some characters.

Inside of battle, he has a few other engineering tricks he pulls out of his hat. He can build ladders, allowing the player's army to scale terrain and rain death from above. He builds spring traps, which bounce an enemy who walks into them back a decent distance, including knocking them down cliffs or into walls/other units for collision damage. He has a net trap that can delay an enemy's turn a bit. And his ultimate move lets him build an automatic turret that shoots arrows at any enemy that moves into its range.

He also has a move that lets him hit an enemy with a decent chance to inflict sleep--because his weapon on the field is his hammer, and getting clocked with one of those is not a good time.

A flashback has shown him studying at the Aesfrosti Archives, basically the best library in the most technologically focused nation in Norzelia, so I assume he's read up on siege engines and the like, even if he isn't seen specifically making them in canon.

In short: blacksmith and budding engineer, good for all manner of arms/armor/siege weapons. His world's access to technology notably stops at gunpowder (a recent invention that's still closely guarded by its creators), but he's a smart kid, I imagine in a setting with access he could start dabbling in that too.

PERSONALITY:
The short version: A Nice Boy.

...okay, to dig a little further down. Jens is a good-hearted, hard-working kid. In a game where most character recruitments are made based on the player character's score in several "convictions" (morality, liberty, and utility), Jens requires only morality to recruit--for battle, that is. Before he's officially one of your soldiers, though, he's the unnamed blacksmith who does all your weapon upgrades, busting his butt behind the scenes to keep everything running at optimum.

Which is, in fact, a pretty good summary of how he presents himself.

Jens is one of the less colorful or dramatic types in TS. He shows up, does his fair share, and...tries to do more than his fair share. The outbreak of war sparks some soul-searching in him; while in flashbacks he seems to have hardly noticed that he's getting more orders from the military until someone asks him about it directly, his direct involvement (first with his dead friend, and then with House Wolffort's army) gives him a lot to think about, and he seems almost embarrassed when he recounts his attitude before.

After a young soldier he was friends with is killed in battle--while wielding a weapon Jens forged for him--Jens has a quiet crisis of faith, decides that he can do more, and, once he's seen sufficient proof that his lord is going to fight righteously and not just kick puppies or enslave Rosellan orphans, he offers his services on the battlefield, so he can do some good and get a better understanding of how the things he makes are being used, which can only help him improve. He can't be the kind of artisan who just makes something and chucks it into the void; he says that he has a duty as someone who makes weapons, and he needs to better understand what it means to live or die by the blade.

He's bright and pays attention to detail--he's studied at the Aesfrosti Archives, and his in-game profile claims there's "no weapon he cannot forge," even right after the event in which he states he's a novice. It doesn't speak to his skill level at that point in canon, but it does speak to his ingenuity and his desire to get better--if he can't make it now, he will get there, or die trying. A researcher at the Archives is seen to remember him between visits, and compares his hunger for knowledge to a fire's hunger for kindling. He is determined to be ~the very best, like no one ever was~. He continues studying, even half a continent away, in the middle of a war (and is a bit sheepish about being unable to return the book he's borrowed from the Archives, whoops).

His reasons for doing so have shifted a bit--from pure ambition to be awesome, to a desire to build the kind of better world that won't need weapons--but his drive and earnestness remain consistent. In short: A Nice Boy.


SAMPLE: bam

INVENTORY: His trusty hammer. A pair of tongs. A few small chisels and whatnot tucked into his pockets.

NOTES: I'd like to figure out some way to get him access to a forge, or he's not going to know what to do with himself. But I expect he'll have to do some legwork to get that, and I'm here for it. *cracks knuckles*

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? I'm flexible, for serious. Not knowing what things look like since I'm new, I am willing to put my trust in whatever gets the job done!

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Just a note to let you know your application has been received and is slated for review!

izuminokami kanesada | touken ranbu

[fushichou]

PLAYER NAME: Rose
CONTACT: LadyotRings
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Already here /sticks leggie out

CHARACTER: Izuminokami Kanesada
CANON: Touken Ranbu
CANON POINT: At the end of the musical Musubi no Hibiki, Hajimari no Ne, but before he leaves to go on his Kiwame journey (which is an upgrade in-universe that involves self-reflection before coming back as a badass).

BACKGROUND: Main wiki page | Kanesada wiki page | History

ABILITIES | POWERS:

Kanesada looks human, but he’s actually a tsukumogami, or object that has acquired a spirit. Specifically, he’s a sword tsukumogami who has been granted a body thanks to the saniwa. He is faster, stronger, and more resilient than normal humans. His body can take more damage and he’ll heal relatively quickly if his body is hurt, but his sword is his real form. If that blade is damaged, it reflects on his body, and if it is damaged to the point of breaking, then Kanesada will die. However, if he takes enough damage, he can go into his “Awakened” state, which means he attacks more often than usual and lands a critical hit every time.

Naturally, as a sword, Kanesada is particularly skilled in swordsmanship and takes after Hijikata’s own skills and style.

PERSONALITY:

When Kanesada introduces himself upon smithing or obtaining him, he does so proudly and without hesitation. “I am Izuminokami Kanesada. I’m cool and strong!” And this is a good introduction for him, because he knows exactly who he is and he’s not ashamed of it. He even acknowledges that while he’s a Kanesada, a sought-after smithing school, he’s made from the later eras and not the most desirable second generation, but that doesn’t bother him because he’s still himself and he’s happy to have been made regardless. Confidence is a huge part of his character, something he definitely takes after his former master, Hijikata Toshizou.

However, Kanesada is also the youngest sword in-game despite looking older than many of the swords, forged in the relatively recent year of 1867 (compared to many of the other swords who were made back when the years were only in triple digits). So, though he’s been through his fair share of history after serving by Hijikata’s side for a few years, and then spending the rest of his days with the Hijikata family, he hasn’t experienced as much as the other swords have, even compared to his Shinsengumi sword comrades. This allows him to keep that confidence without being very jaded or cynical of the world. He’s still young! He’s still got so much ahead of him, assuming he survives the current war. His youth hasn’t gotten him in too much trouble, at least, and he’s still able to keep his head in the game when it’s important, but the other Shinsengumi swords (and anyone who knows him well enough) are able to tease and rile him up easily. In the musicals, he likes to compose haiku on the spot and it’s a running joke that they’re not good (because Hijikata wasn’t known for his poetry). Often the other swords will cringe or make fun of them.

Kanesada is a very pretty sword and he knows it. Quite a few of his dialogue bits involve him talking about this fact. He puts his looks on equal footing with his own practicality, saying one is just as important as the other, then also goes on to say that looks themselves can be a weapon on their own. And if he is idle in the Citadel, he’ll even go so far as to ask the saniwa if they’re so quiet because they’re charmed by him. Needless to say, his appearance is very important to him.

That isn’t to say that he doesn’t understand when to be serious, though. As stated above, he values practicality right alongside appearances. When in a fight, he doesn’t worry as much about how pretty he is, but rather how best to come out on top in the current situation. This means he’ll use more unorthodox means to win if he must, including throwing dirt or such in an enemy’s eyes to blind them and gain the upper hand. Yes, Kanesada can be a dirty fighter and doesn’t necessarily know how to hold himself back. Even when he’s assigned a sparring partner in the Citadel, he’ll complain about not being able to use actual killing techniques and how without such techniques, it’s not a good practice. If assigned a certain partner, he can learn that there is a correct way to do this, however, but for the most part, he wants to play dirty. Ironically enough, when out on an actual map for battle, he’ll say how good it is that the enemy doesn’t have guns or cannons “stealing the spotlight” because that’s just not fair. It’s a little bit hypocritical, but also understandable because inferior firepower was one of the Shinsengumi’s downfalls.

Kanesada may not look like a rough-and-tumble kind of punk, but he enjoys fighting. And since he’s a weapon, that’s understandable. Swords are meant to be used in a fight, so it makes sense that he gets excited when it’s time to go out on the battlefield. He’s at his best when he doesn’t have to hold back (like mentioned above when sparring) and can go all-out to get the job done. However, this means he can be reckless, too. Because he doesn’t necessarily know how to hold back all the time, he also doesn’t always know when to stop. Luckily, his assistant, the wakizashi Horikawa Kunihiro, tends to act like Kanesada’s babysitter and tries to keep him out of trouble.

Speaking of Kunihiro, Kanesada relies on him probably more than he realizes. Kanesada is very independent and does quite a lot on his own, but without Kunihiro around, it quickly becomes apparent that his life is a lot more difficult. Basically, without Kunihiro, Kanesada has to actually do chores. And that’s a real tragedy. Kanesada is lazy. Again, fighting is what he really enjoys doing, so the more mundane aspects of Citadel life are seen as a hassle. And he’s vocal about his displeasure, whining often about having to work, and then only doing the minimum requirements. He’s a disaster, in short. He even tries to pawn off his work on Kunihiro sometimes, but Kunihiro knows Kanesada better and ends up somehow turning the tables to make Kanesada do everything. It’s like magic. It’s terrifying. That being said, Kunihiro was also one of Hijikata’s swords, so he has moments of recklessness, as well. When that happens, the roles are reversed and Kanesada is the one to bring Kunihiro back to earth. They’re partners.

Kanesada has consistently proven to have his head screwed on right when it comes to the swords’ place in the current war. They’re used as soldiers to keep history from being changed, of course, but oftentimes this means the swords encounter times and places relevant to their own history and Kanesada is no different. He is confronted with going to Hakodate, where Hijikata historically died, and the Ikedaya Affair, where Hijikata and the Shinsengumi enjoyed one of their greatest victories. On both occasions, Kanesada reminds Kunihiro and Yamatonokami Yasusada, respectively, that even if they wanted to, they can’t give in and change history. They’re fighting to keep things as they are, no matter what.

And Kanesada does feel strongly when it comes to Hijikata, particularly when he is at Hakodate. It’s clear that he is very fond of and holds Hijikata in high regard, since he emulates him quite a bit and only ever served him before the saniwa. So, it’s no surprise that when faced with the place Hijikata died, Kanesada gets emotional. In-game, he cries real tears but denies it, and in the second musical, he grows anxious and even unsure how to complete the mission successfully, especially since it is in his power to change history, to make himself known to Hijikata and save his life. In the musical, he ultimately decides to kill Hijikata himself in order to protect history, though he ends up being unable to do it because of his attachment. But he doesn’t stop Mutsunokami from pulling the very literal trigger, either.

So, he definitely feels emotions, but he doesn’t let them rule him entirely, even if he still struggles with them from time to time. That tends to be a general sword problem in the musical stories, where they discover that having a heart hurts and sometimes they feel empty when confronted with their past trauma. It’s so much easier being a literal sword where you don’t have to deal with any of that human stuff.

SAMPLE: Thread 1 which is more general | Thread 2 which is more emotional (Mild warning for blood and stuff)

INVENTORY:

+ His sword, which is his actual form
+ His battle clothes
+ A stylish yukata
+ A hairbrush (please, for the love of all that is good, let this boy have a hairbrush)
+ An omamori charm (prevents a sword from breaking exactly one time while equipped)

NOTES: As long as he doesn’t snap his blade or anything, he should be golden

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-light, let’s not get too crazy, now.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Just a note to let you know your application has been received and is slated for review!

Souji Okita } Hakuouki } unreserved

[deathcough]

PLAYER NAME: Kalyn
CONTACT: plurk: ovals
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: points at eyes, points at you.

CHARACTER: Okita Souji
CANON: Hakuouki
CANON POINT: Near the end of his route, shortly after leaving Hijikata

BACKGROUND: wiki yo

ABILITIES | POWERS:
- Superhuman strength, speed, and accelerated healing capabilities
- needs to drink blood periodically or he'll go insane
- Weakness to the sun, but it's just Extremely Annoying
- Silver weapons negate his healing factor.
- Extremely skilled swordsman

Also not a power, but Souji also has tuberculosis which will have a negative impact on his health and strength.

PERSONALITY: Souji is, without a doubt, an asshole. This is not an exaggeration or a joke: he’s a heavily sarcastic man who frequently makes terrible comments (such as threatening to kill Chizuru) with a cheerful smile. If reprimanded he gives a shrug and says that he was only joking, can’t anyone take a joke around here? Make no doubt though, that he is perfectly willing and capable of killing anyone who might get in the Shinsengumi’s way. He actually spends most of the beginning part of the game voting to kill the main character in order to keep the secrets of the Shinsengumi safe. For him, he doesn’t really see people as people, unless they are directly in/around his life and personal space.

He likes to tease and play jokes on his fellow members, though some of them can be cruel in nature (such as stealing Hijikata’s poetry books to read them out loud and make fun of them), he really does care for them all. Even Hijikata, to whom he spends a better part of his time being antagonistic towards, he will lay down his life to protect, and would do the same for any of them. For him they are the closest to a real family he’s had.

His supreme and undying loyalty is a big marker of his character, especially towards Kondou, to whom he idolizes and hero worships, to the point of even wearing his hair like his, up until he gets it cut near the end of his route. He loves Kondou more than anyone and will follow his orders until he dies; unfortunately this comes into conflict when Souji is diagnosed with tuberculosis, forcing him to be put onto bed rest. The tuberculosis slowly robs him of his strength and health, leaving him unfit and unable to take up his sword in the name of Kondou’s dreams and ideals. It’s a devastating blow to his ego and sense of self. He firmly believed that his life was his sword, and without it then he was useless and his life not worth living. On Okita’s end it’s more than a desire to prove himself to Kondou or make Kondou proud of him; it’s almost an obsession that the swordsman has with the Shinsengumi commander.

It’s this guilt of feeling useless that drives him to drink the Water of Life and become essentially a vampire in the hopes it would cure his tuberculosis (though all it really does is seem to slow down its progress greatly) and so he could pick up the sword once more. His desire to be useful often drives him into risky and dangerous behaviors, and he even keeps his tuberculosis hidden for as long as he can so as to avoid being put on the sidelines sooner then he has to be. If Souji had his way, he would keep fighting regardless of his illness, until he literally dropped dead.

SAMPLE: He's bored.

It's the first thing to come to mind as he lounged back around the camp, ankle propped up on his knee and lightly bouncing as he peered around at everyone moving about with purpose. He stifled a yawn and laid on his back, pillowing his head with his arms.

He could help, he supposed, but no one had bothered to ask and he didn't particularly care enough to actually try to seek out someone to help on his own. So instead he languished in his boredom, idly eyeing one person after another.

If he had to kill that one, he could easily slice their throat. They were always tilting their head back when trying to dodge, leaving themselves wide open. And that one... That one he'd slice the heel of first to bring them down...

Fantasizing about the different fights brought him only a little joy and alleviation of his boredom though. None of them would truly prove a challenge, it'd be like fighting with toddlers. Sure he'd take them down quick and easy, but where was the fun in that?

His boredom was quickly starting to turn into the beginning of a sulk when someone came crashing into the camp with the announcement of bandits coming. Monstrous ones, if the description was to be believed and Souji felt a grin spread over his mouth.

While the others began to formulate a plan, Souji picked himself up and grabbed for his swords, settling them neatly on his hip. With a complete air of nonchalance, he began to whistle a cheery tune, headed into the direction the person had run from.

Let them argue amongst themselves what to do. By the time they decided on something, hopefully the threat would no longer exist in the first place. Souji would make sure of it.

INVENTORY: -Standard issue katana/wakizashi set
- Blue haori
- glass vial full of red liquid
- baggie of sugar star
- temple charm he's very protective of

NOTES: Souji'll also need some blood donations like Hijikata. Also he's currently dying of tuberculosis so........a fix for that is needed. Eventually.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Just hit me w/your best shot man

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Just a note to let you know your application has been received and is slated for review!

Delilah ( original character ) not reserved

[alterare]

PLAYER NAME: Sam
CONTACT: verities @ plurk
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: you thought you could get rid of me

CHARACTER: Alexandra Trace aka. Rain / SUB-AE104 aka. Delilah ( Lilah )
CANON: Original Character
CANON POINT: Some years after beginning the development of her new community

BACKGROUND:

( note - brief mentions of suicidal behavior within )

The setting of Lilah's world is in the not too distant future following what is often referred to as 'The Annihilation Event.' While the annihilation event did not actually take out all of humanity, it did reduce the population in America alone by over half, with projects for full annihilation within decades to follow. Stories surrounding how the annihilation event actually came about are beyond numbers to count, but everyone knows the main ideas - it began in the United States; the enemy is proven to be extra terrestrial in nature; and the enemy can change our world. The aliens in question, colloquially called alters, are still a mystery to the vast majority of the public. They do seem to have some form of intelligence, though sentience is uncertain, and the aliens are almost parasitic in nature. They have been shown to be able to exist without a host, but often organic material that encounters an alter is taken over/forever physically changed by the alter. Since the event, alters have spread to other nations of the world and the threat of full annihilation has driven most of the world into military states of emergencies to respond to the invasion.

Alexandra Trace was born one of a pair of twins to the Trace family in 2051. The Trace children were a part of the first generation to be born in America post-annihilation. The state of the country, and the world at large, made caring for a family near impossible. This left the Trace parents feeling as if they had no other options but to sell their children to the military when they came knocking. Despite promises to the Trace family to keep the children together, Emmett and Alexandra were sent away from the New York City area and their older brother Noah. Emmett and Alexandra would never see any of their family again following that day.

At the age of seven, the twins were taken to west to an army base that had developed around what had been Area 51. The base had grown to encompass Las Vegas itself, becoming a centralized headquarters of the United States Planetary Defense branch of the Armed Forces. It was here that the twins were introduced to the Alter Response division of the Planetary Defense, and here they remained for years.

On paper, the Alter Response division did not exist in it's early stages. The experiments done on the twins and other children like them skipped stages of the scientific process that called into question the ethics of the Alter Response and whether the end results truly justified the means, even in the face of human extinction. In the decade after the Alter Response went public, many of the minds behind the division would use the results of their experimentation to justify that the means were in fact necessary.

The Alter Response program was a program designed to create super soldiers through a variety of melding techniques with the alien DNA. There were a wide range of experiments of varying types until a particular methodology emerged that was deemed the most successful route to creating a soldier that could use alter DNA to their advantage. Even still, this experiment did not yield perfect results, but Alexandra and Emmett who were among the first children to survive this method and get pushed through to practical applications.

While in the Alter Response program, the Trace twins were stripped of their names to reduce compassion towards the subjects. As the twins advanced through the first stages of the program, they would be given the codenames Sunny and Rain when they were quietly introduced to the Planetary Defense division. Sunny and Rain and a select group of other children were given covert missions across the United States to begin testing the efficacy of the AR program. It was during these missions that it became evident that there was a psychological component to the program that couldn't quite be managed through increasing experimentation alone.

Rain was found to be the weaker of the Trace twins on missions on an emotional level at the age of fourteen. While Sunny's skills skewed more mentally, Rain's were physically based. She was trained harshly for close combat fighting using the parasite to alter her physicality and enhance where needed. This put Rain at the forefront of most fights, and also had her witnessing the harshest realities of war and the invasion. Rain began to falter in practical application, often having to have the other children make up for her mistakes. The AR program tried various methods of pushing Rain past her limits, including psychological evaluation, but it was determined that while Rain could physically handle the alterations, mentally she could not cope with the harsh environment of war.

Thus, the process for disposal was approved.

Turning Rain's disposal into another experimental opportunity, the scientists of the AR program set up an environment in which all the children of the program were left alone to their own devices. One child in particular, codenamed Mist, was manipulated into believing he had a duty to his team to complete one goal - eliminate Rain. Pushed to his limits, Mist confronted Rain in the children's communal area in front of the others. Fed vitriol against Rain, Mist used the lines given by the scientists to convince the rest of the children that Rain was a threat to their lives. She wasn't a team player. Reaching the edge of her breaking point, Rain collapsed under the weight of the children's anger in her own mental break. It was then that Sunny managed to push through to rush to Rain's defense. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect of protecting Rain. Instead, it provoked the children more that this was the proof they needed that Rain couldn't carry her own weight. The ensuing chaos was a bloodbath.

Being the volatile child that Mist was, the boy attacked Rain. He used the full force of his powers against her, ripping out her throat in front of Sunny and leaving the young twin bleeding out on the floor.

Rain remembers nothing after Mist launching himself at her, only waking inside the ruins of some abandoned apartment just outside of Vegas. A woman was with Rain when she woke, one of the scientists from the AR program - Dr. Melody Thornton. Melody, as she asked Rain to call her, explained what happened after Rain had died. Sunny lost control of his abilities and displayed power unseen. He took control of Mist's body and pushed the child to slaughter many of the other children. When it was all done, they lost more of the program than they'd intended. But Melody had seen Rain in the carnage, and seen what the other scientists didn't. Rain's body had begun to repair itself from a killing blow. Melody took it upon herself to save Rain from disposal, knowing that Rain still had unknown potential within her. Though, unfortunately, it seemed that Rain's body had repaired only essential functions for survival, as Rain found that her vocal cords remained damaged.

However, Melody's intervention would end there. Melody already risked too much being here for when Rain woke. From then on, Rain would be on her own. She just hoped Rain remembered what the mission was, so that when she came into her own power she could be the hero the world needed.

With that knowledge, Rain was abandoned to the streets outside of Las Vegas to fend for herself. Terrified and alone, Rain often tried to find ways to end her own life. She found that Dr. Thornton had been correct, Rain's body always found a way to repair itself. Eventually, Rain encountered groups of people living in the desserts of Nevada. She found herself wary of human interaction, but would on occasion aid the nomadic groups fighting to survive where the military had abandoned them. She began to interact with people on a more personal level than she ever had before, slowly restoring a sense of humanity once lost in the girl. When asked her name, Rain shed the name given to her by the people that had abandoned her. She took up the name Delilah, and slowly integrated her into a new kind of society.

It's been nearly a decade later, but Delilah has begun to do her own research into the truth behind the alters, leading Lilah to question what all the US Armed Forces actually knows, or what they're hiding if they do know more.. It is with that goal in mind that Delilah has begun to create her own community in the desserts and caves outside the city. A community that's slowly beginning to embrace a reality where the alters are here to stay, so there has to be a better solution than mutual destruction.

ABILITIES | POWERS:

ALTER DNA SPLICE - Spliced with the DNA of the unknown extra terrestrial species known as 'alters,' Delilah has gained two major capabilities from this:

• BIOKINESIS allows Lilah the ability to manipulate her physical body on both a conscious and subconscious level. With this ability, she can enhance her senses, strength, speed, agility, etc. with deliberate effort (though she cannot maintain these effects for longer than a few hours at a time). She can also change the shape of her body on more dramatic levels, manipulating her muscles and flesh to change her physical features (ie. making her features present more masculine). This gives her essentially the ability to shapeshift into other forms (something I will have a permission post for). Additionally, because her body can do this without her conscious thought, Lilah is almost fully immortal as she's discovered. Even when suffering injuries that stop her heart or brain function, her body can work to mend those injuries to functional levels again. This can take several hours to even days depending on the injury.
  
  
• TELEPATHY developed later in life for Delilah. Delilah was always taught that her abilities were purely on a physical level, so when her telepathy developed Delilah was more than shocked. Delilah hasn't fully fleshed out what this ability means and can do for her, so for now her telepathy remains on a one-to-one contact basis and only with other humans. She has noted, however, that does tend to be easier with creatures where alter DNA is also present. Telepathy will also be in her in permissions post.

SOLDIER - Aside from her technical skills, Lilah was raised to be a soldier. She has had combat training with mostly short range weaponry (short range guns, knives, etc.) as well as hand-to-hand combat. She is also trained in survival techniques for a variety of different environments.

BILINGUAL - Delilah knows English and can communicate in American Sign Language.

Inventory:

1. Knife with Sunny's name etched into the handle.
2. Her favorite leather jacket.
3. Her alter-infected pet fox ( note - her fox does not have powers himself, just an odd sense of devotion and obedience to Lilah ).

PERSONALITY:

+ RESOURCEFUL : Lilah was born into a generation that never knew luxury. Instead, she has had to fight and claw her way through every breath of life to survive. This has imbued Delilah with a sense of resourcefulness, finding ways to use the world around her to her advantage. After all, Lilah herself was deemed to be a waste, but here she is today. So Lilah takes that concept to heart in her desire to find a way to utilize all things in her surroundings. She tries not to waste the potential of even the smallest things in life. This kind of thinking has helped Lilah to develop her critical thinking skills in a number of ways, from simple day to day tasks to coordinating the growth of a whole new community. Lilah endeavors to both avoid wasting advantages she never had growing up and never overlook the potential of a dismissed thing like herself.

- TRAUMATIZED : Growing up in a near post-apocalyptic world, Lilah's existence is riddled with traumas that are difficult to cope with. Lilah herself was a more delicate soul growing up, feeling more of that pain than most. A part of her always hoped life was some bad dream and there were magical happy endings like in the books she'd seen as a child. But reality was far darker, and Lilah's young mind barely coped with it. In her adulthood, Lilah has learned to repress her trauma. She still doesn't cope with it well, and when it creeps up it can be near crippling to her. As such, her trauma is a real problem that she never plans to address head on and will deny causes her any issues.

- VINDICTIVE : With such a harsh upbringing, Lilah has endured a lot of hardships caused both directly and indirectly by others. This has caused Lilah to develop a deep level of resentment towards large numbers of people both specific and general. As such, she can be a bit coarse to deal with at times if you happen to fall into these categories. But the more difficult aspect of this part of her personality is that, whether a part of those groups or not, if slighted, Lilah tends to hold a grudge. Even worse, she often acts out on that grudge. To a degree, she is aware of this personal shortcoming (unlike her refusal to deal with her own trauma). She will try to mitigate her patterns to snarky remarks in this situations. But she finds it hard to live and let go, and can take awhile to build up trust again once slighted.

- MISANTHROPIC : This sort of quality is a little more subtle in Lilah, as she displays herself to be quite a sociable person. In fact, as a child Lilah was always friendly with others. The difficulty is that Lilah has no faith in humanity after what she's experienced. And what faith she does have, there's little personal trust to develop beyond it. As such, all of Lilah's relationships tend to be on a superficial level. Even if she develops a fondness for a person, she has a hard time putting any level of trust in them. It's hard to see it, but there's a detached way about Lilah that makes it hard to get to know the true girl beneath the soldier.

2/2

[alterare]

SAMPLE:

There were somethings that Delilah knew in her back of the mind the scientists had been right about her growing up, even if she hated to admit them. But the most obvious of those facts was also too basic to deny - Lilah loved a rainy day.

It wasn't just the rain itself. There was always an undercurrent in the atmosphere and a scent in the air just before the rain hit... In the dessert it was a near electric feeling and tasted almost of iron. It wasn't just rain coming, Lilah noted as she stepped out of the cavern, it was a thunderstorm. The thought brought a smile to her lips.

The other aspect of a rainy day that Lilah enjoyed was the darkness the clouds brought with it. Sunlight just felt too bright, almost overwhelmingly so. It made her skin crawl to be so exposed. It was all a very odd way to enjoy a day, but as Lilah climbed the familiar paths down the cave wall and to the dessert floor outside, she knew it was just another aspect of being her. Being weird by normal human standards.

Once her feet hit the ground, Lilah pulled her hood down with no sun to need to be wary of. Besides, her venture into the nearby town ruins should be shorter today. Little risk of being seen. The perfect time for Lilah to enjoy her time to herself.

It took her a couple hours, but eventually Lilah reached what she mentally marked as the barrier at the edge of town. So marked as once she stepped past the invisible lines of that barrier, Lilah was greeted by a familiar form darting after her.

Good to see you too, Ash,. Lilah remarked as the fox jumped around her feet. Lilah tried to keep walking into town despite the attention, but the fox wound itself between her legs and nearly tripped her on her way. She finally had to admit defeat and stop to greet the enthused fox before her.

Kneeling beside him, Ash took advantage of the moment to rub against her for self-started pets before Lilah's hands found their way into his fur finally. Lilah rolled her eyes as she started scratching along his back. She tilted her head as she noticed tufts of fur that were growing in patches of blue. She raised an eyebrow as she looked down at the fox. I see you're getting your fur back.... but blue? Ash only looked back at Lilah with huge dark eyes that made the woman question the fox's understanding of her. Ash seemed to be able to take a mental command from her, but seemed equally capable of ignoring her if he chose. So when he obeyed was it only coincidence? But then he looked at her now, and she could swear he understood her mental projections beyond even simple commands....

Then the fox darted away. It stopped at the start of the road into town and looked back at Lilah, an indication to follow. Likely Ash had unearthed something good today.

Lilah sighed heavily, as though the fox could ever truly be a burden, and climbed to her feet to stalk after it. This was all she really needed in life, though. A rainy day, a curiosity of a fox, and her own devices.

INVENTORY:

1. Knife with Sunny's name etched into the handle.
2. Her favorite leather jacket.
3. Her alter-infected pet fox ( note - her fox does not have powers himself, just an odd sense of devotion and obedience to Lilah - Lilah however does have the ability to see control/see through Ilya's vision - also not married on keeping this guy, though )

NOTES: Lilah is non-verbal, and thus uses her telepathy to communicate

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? whatever is easiest for you!

Eda Clawthorne | The Owl House | not reserved

[traaaaaash]

PLAYER NAME: Val
CONTACT: honeyfoot
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: ruxi you invited me THIS IS YOUR DOING

CHARACTER: Edalyn Clawthorne, or Eda for short
CANON: The Owl House
CANON POINT: Season 2, episode 14: “Reaching Out”

BACKGROUND: hey hey wiki

ABILITIES | POWERS:

• MAGIC: Eda is a witch! In the world of The Owl House, witches are a separate species from humans, easily recognizable by their pointy ears. They have a bile sac attached to their heart that allows them to do magic. Tragically, due to the progression of her curse, Eda’s magic is either weakened to the point of being unusable or has become unintentionally destructive. However, she can still do magic using glyphs, a technique discovered by Luz, her human apprentice. This involves drawing circular symbols on a surface of choice and tapping on them for various effects.
  
  
• HARPY TIME: So, that curse thing. See, inside Eda’s mind lives a quadruped owl-like being that tries to escape every so often. It used to be that this meant that Eda would transform into a similar creature and completely retreat into her mind, unaware of what was going on or what her body was doing – though she could sometimes retain or regain some awareness. Recently, though, she’s made peace with her inner Owl Beast, which allows her to turn into a much more humanoid harpy woman and fully retain her consciousness. Harpy!Eda is a bit bigger than regular Eda, can fly with her giant wings, and is pretty dang strong and durable. She also speaks with the voice of legion.
  
  
• DETACHABLE BODY PARTS: What it says on the tin. Pretty much all of Eda’s extremities including her head can come off without harm to her and put back on just as easily. Another curse side effect.
  
  
• HAMMERSPACE HAIR: Again, what it says on the tin. There is so much junk in that hair. So much junk. She can fit King in there. He probably takes naps. Usually she'll just pull out whatever item's relevant to a given current plot (I really wonder how long some of the stuff's been in there...) so this is really variable.

PERSONALITY:

• REBELLIOUS: Eda is as chaotic as they come, having been an infamous prankster at Hexside, one of the Boiling Isles’ magic schools. Her permanent record is thicker than most books. As an adult, she is a wanted criminal for refusing to submit to the mandatory coven system, as it restricts people to performing only one kind of magic and Eda isn’t about that. Also petty crimes like theft and running get-rich-quick-schemes that never quite seem to work out, seeing as she’s not exactly swimming in it. In general, she detests authorities of any kind, preferring to do things her own way. This even manifests when she is trying to learn glyph magic from Luz, as she declares learning the basics “boring” and proceeds to do wild and hazardous experiments. Basically, Eda is a fully grown adult who will absolutely blow raspberries at you if she doesn’t like your face.
  
  
• CARING: Despite that, however, Eda also has a big huge heart and more than a little bit of a maternal instinct. While shenanigans are often had, Eda will generally try to keep the kids in her care out of actual danger if she can help it, and her arc over the series also sees her becoming more responsible and *gasp* making to-do lists because a kid needs a new coat or something like that. She makes a surprisingly good parent figure, as exemplified by, among others, that time she got over her personal deep disdain for the school system and did everything in her power (which included cleaning toilets) to get Luz enrolled at Hexside. And despite her often antagonistic relationship with her sister Lilith, Eda still loves her and is quick to forgive Lilith for putting her actual curse on her when they were young – while at the same time blaming herself for the ways she’s hurt her loved ones due to said curse.
  
  
• ANXIOUS: Listen she talks a big game but there are quite a few things that scare Eda. Mostly, that’d be her own emotions. Due to her curse, she is scared to get close to people and has a habit of pushing them away and putting on a carefree façade in a bid to keep herself from going into the ~DANGER ZONE~ of actually caring about someone. And when she does get attached, the fear of losing said people looms over her. She also has a big tendency to run from her problems and pretend she’s fine when she is definitely not.
  
  
• BOISTEROUS: Eda likes to brag! Be it about her skills in cheating at sports and games, her magic abilities, or how hot she is, Eda is often heard making quite grandiose claims about herself. Luckily for her, she can back many of them up. For example, she gave herself the title of Most Powerful Witch of the Boiling Isles and, barring Emperor Belos, that appears to be true… well, until she loses her magic to her curse, that is.

SAMPLE: Sheesh. Eda feels like a teenager all over again.

A little bit like the scared kid who jumped through a portal she just found in the dirt into another world. Except she’d had absolutely zero part in ending up here, and, well, the human realm she ended up in back then was in some ways nicer than this.

Then again, they had Bono over there. Eda shudders at the mere thought.

Now, this new place isn’t all that different than the Boiling Isles, really. Just way more humans, which means she has to hide her ears most of the time. She can do without the unwanted attention. Luckily, she has some experience flying under the radar.

Right now, she’s using nightfall to stray away from her group and do some exploring. The rest of the group have settled down, but Eda can’t really sleep these days; she’s too preoccupied by thoughts of home and how to get back there. Wow, now she knows how Luz must feel. Poor kid.

She avoids thinking about the part where Luz and King are all alone now. With Hooty. Oh no, she thought about it. Another shudder.

However, her thoughts are interrupted quite suddenly when her ears pick up the sound of movement in the underbrush, which she barely has time to register before a large creature appears before her; it appears to be half human, half snake.

Eda stares for a moment, a little dumbfounded, before smirking at the creature. “Well, hello there, beastie. And what are you?”

She takes a fighting stance. The dance can begin.



INVENTORY: Besides the clothes on her back, she’s also coming with her staff and palisman Owlbert, a kind of familiar that is attached to her staff but can also detach itself and come alive. Owlbert doesn’t have much of a personality and mostly helps Eda retrieve things sometimes, but she is bonded to and cares for him. She can use her staff to fly as well; it's arguably the most common way of travel for witches.

Oh, and whatever random shit she’s got stashed in her hammerspace hair. This usually includes her penstagram scroll, which functions as a Magic Smartphone; that's gonna be defunct, I assume.

NOTES: Despite having made peace with her Owl Beast, Eda still drinks her daily elixir, so she’d need to find a way to source that. I imagine this can be found at some kind of night market.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-light to start off with, please!

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

viktor | arcane | not reserved

[techmaturgy]

PLAYER NAME: Whit
CONTACT: whitticus OR disco whitticus#8139
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Kerry (Moiraine) but also I have been watching. waiting. on plurk.

CHARACTER: Viktor
CANON: Arcane
CANON POINT: Episode 7, after returning to Piltover but before augmenting himself with the Hexcore.

BACKGROUND:
Arcane is a television spin-off of the MOBA League of Legends (sorry in advance), and acts as an origin story for some of the game’s playable characters. However, it’s fully self-contained and is effectively a soft retcon, which current wikis do not reflect accurately, so I’ll do you some bullet points. Full episode recaps are here, for reference.

✵ The gleaming metropolis of Piltover has a complicated relationship with its “Undercity” (called Zaun). While the former is a bustling, wealthy trade hub and mecca for scientists and artisans, the latter is industrial, polluted, crime-ridden, and historically subjugated. The events of Arcane occur as the development of magitech creates heightened prosperity for Piltover while forces in Zaun attempt to weaponize the technology as part of a violent push for independence.

✵ Before all this, Viktor grows up in Zaun as a solitary child who nonetheless displays a prodigious talent for engineering and an interest in science. He gains his first mentor by stumbling upon the workshop of an Undercity scientist, and then leaves after learning a hard lesson about the unethical lengths to which some will go in the name of progress. At some point (through persistent sneaking around), he attracts the attention of Professor Heimerdinger, head of Piltover’s Council, who sees his scholarly potential and offers him admission to the Academy. Viktor leaves Zaun to study and eventually becomes Heimerdinger’s assistant.

✵ Meanwhile, Jayce Talis, a student, is doing off-the-books experiments in an attempt to harness magical energy through technological means. After an accident that reveals his illegal research, he faces expulsion from the Academy. Viktor recognizes the potential world-changing implications of “Hextech”. Tasked with consolidating the equipment for disposal, he steals Jayce’s notes, convinces him to resume his research, and together they break into Heimerdinger’s lab where they successfully complete the experiment. The Council admits that Hextech is viable and worth pursuing.

✵ Six or seven years pass. Working as partners, Viktor and Jayce have successfully overseen the construction of the “Hexgates”, large-scale teleportation structures that have bolstered Piltover’s status as a global shipping lane. Now, the two scientists hope that they will be able to present their latest project (a stabilized Hextech “gemstone” that can be used to power portable devices) to the public. Viktor, whose health is in decline, wants to use this new energy source to improve the Undercity (which has not seen the economic prosperity afforded to Piltover by Hextech), but Heimerdinger believes the research needs more development to prevent general misuse.

✵ One of the gemstones is stolen in a violent attack on Piltover. Jayce is elevated to the Council on the grounds that he will be able to best safeguard Hextech in the wake of the attack. Viktor throws himself back into his work, developing the Hexcore, which he describes as an “adaptive rune matrix”, a continuously-evolving conduit for magical forces, though it does not function as intended and he isn’t sure why.

✵ Viktor collapses while working overnight. He awakens in the hospital and receives a formal diagnosis–due to prolonged chemical exposure throughout his childhood, he is deteriorating rapidly and does not have long to live. Now racing against the clock, his study of the Hexcore becomes an obsession as he observes that it reacted to his blood the night he collapsed (cool and normal). Armed with the knowledge that the device responds to organic matter, he begins a series of transmutation experiments that he hopes will be the key not only to physiological augmentation, but also a potential cure for his illness. However, all of his subjects (plants) die shortly after being exposed to the Hexcore, and when Heimerdinger is brought in to consult, he is horrified by what he sees and orders it destroyed. Jayce retaliates by enacting a coup and removing him from his position as head of the Council, allowing Viktor to continue his research.

✵ Having otherwise reached a dead end, Viktor seeks out his former mentor in Zaun, who offers him Shimmer, an Undercity drug that enhances the user’s constitution (the implication being that utilizing the substance will help the subject survive the Hexcore’s transformative properties). Viktor accepts and it becomes clear that he plans to perform his next experiment on himself.

✵ Viktor returns topside and is immediately detained, finding that Jayce has enacted a blockade between the cities to prevent further attacks on Piltover. This is followed by a heated conversation about the weaponization of Hextech in response to reports that the gemstone thief may have already found a way to utilize the technology. Viktor, opposed to developing weaponry, realizes that Jayce is more easily swayed. Unable to trust that his partner will maintain his integrity or even understand the necessity of what he is about to do, he decides he has no choice but to proceed with his self-experimentation alone.

ABILITIES | POWERS:

✵ Academics - What Viktor lacks in physical ability, he makes up for in genius-level intellect. Though this is, of course, a fantasy setting where all scientists are unrealistically multidisciplinary, he’s primarily a mathematician and physicist, with some knowledge of biology and chemistry. Having attended Piltover’s academy and served as dean’s assistant, he has a well-rounded education and is a quick study, able to piece together and complete a fellow academic’s research solely from reading his notes.

✵ Engineering - He’s shown to be a resourceful tinkerer and inventor from a young age, and over the course of the series helps develop, design, and execute a variety of magitech devices, ranging from a stable power source for portable equipment to tools for miners and artisans to what is essentially a large-scale fast travel mechanism. Viktor is a mechanically-minded individual with an eye for detail and can puzzle out the workings of most devices, successfully defusing a bomb that stumped another engineer.

✵ The Arcane - The bulk of his work in the series involves harnessing arcane powers via technological methods (Hextech). In developing this technology he gains an understanding of a rune-based magic system and creates an evolving magical conduit that responds to and transmutes organic matter, which he eventually uses to physically augment himself. It’s entirely likely that given time and resources he would be able to decipher and possibly utilize similar magic systems. Though he has no inherent magical ability of his own, he apparently develops some kind of psychic connection to the Hexcore over the course of his time working on it–by the last episode of the series he’s unable to destroy the device, apparently because it is compelling him not to. This does not, however, give him any special powers. He’s just probably on his way to being owned by an evil polyhedron.

[techmaturgy]

PERSONALITY:
Viktor is generally unassuming; a soft-spoken person with a reserved temperament who actively eschews attention. He seems every bit a fussy academic: professional, emotionally guarded, and a little icy. Much of this outward demeanor is a function of being an outsider–he’s well aware of his tenuous position within Piltover’s rigid social structure, and conducts himself accordingly, at least on the surface.

This all falls away fairly quickly as soon as he meets a like-minded individual in Jayce. Exhibit similar moral convictions, and he becomes much friendlier, though not without a dry sense of humor and penchant for taking egoists down a peg. He is passionate, intellectually curious, and excited by the prospect of scientific innovation, appreciative of forward-thinking, results-focused mindsets. Viktor is quietly ambitious, adamant that he did not become a scientist to be someone’s assistant and expressing a desire to spearhead positive change. He is highly self-reliant and independent, having learned from an early age that he is the only person on which he can depend, and he approaches most roadblocks accordingly. If nobody is going to believe in him, whether that’s due to his Undercity origins, his disability, or lack of resources, then he’s just going to have to believe in himself. This bootstraps mentality is what secures him a place at the Academy, and being consistently underestimated and overlooked affords him the ability to take substantial risks for high reward. When an opportunity presents itself, he takes what he wants. This involves, more often than not, a flagrant disregard for rules (and, later, in a more dire situation, basic safety procedures): Viktor steals research notes, breaks and enters, trespasses, smuggles illegal substances, and eventually conducts dangerous experiments on his person.

None of this is without reason, at least. Viktor is a highly empathetic individual who firmly believes that the purpose of scientific advancement is to end (or at least mitigate) human suffering. This is personal to him–he’s actively succumbing to a degenerative illness brought about by the polluted living conditions of his childhood, and wants to ensure that his work prevents these kinds of tragedies in the future. He walks out on his first mentor when he encounters an unethical vision of progress, rejecting amorality at a young age, and as an adult, is an idealist and pacifist who speaks out against the potential weaponization of technology while others around him waver. Viktor holds fast to the precept that his work is meant to “improve lives, not take them”, insisting that “there is always a choice” when it comes to enacting violence. Even when crossing the lines of scientific ethics, he only ever intends to harm himself.

This is a noble aim, but it speaks to his naiveté. Viktor believes that his work is what’s important, and that its benefits are self-evident, in the process rejecting most interpersonal relationships and the quid-pro-quo under which Piltover operates, even when indulging both might help further his goals. He is so thoroughly disinterested in political machinations and social games (perhaps believing he has no chance to navigate them) that his efforts to enact real change are continuously sabotaged and stymied by various special interests. When his health declines, he is forced to grapple with how much effort he’s wasted by trying to act within the confines of a society that doesn’t care about him, and after years of watching his vision of progress hindered by people who only want to enrich themselves, he despairs about his lack of legacy and what he perceives to be fleeting contributions that will eventually be rendered meaningless by an impenetrable status quo.

This brings out the worst in him. Under duress, Viktor is an obsessive workaholic with no patience for a cautious approach and little thought for his personal needs, chasing after advancement at any cost once he’s run out his clock. Faced with his impending death brought about by the very living conditions he once hoped to change, Viktor’s reckless tendencies only compound as he withdraws into his research, disregards basic safeguards, and meddles with unknown forces he doesn’t understand and can’t control. As selfless as he believes himself to be, he is afraid to die, and as a result conflates curing his illness with his larger vision of societal betterment in order to justify his desperate, dangerous actions. Unable to cope with his failure to fix the system from within it, Viktor barrels towards an event horizon, willing to further ostracize himself and sacrifice his humanity in a bid to leave some kind of lasting mark.

SAMPLE:
[one]
[two]

INVENTORY:

✵ The clothes he is wearing.
✵ Leg brace, back brace, and his crutch, which has a hollow handle for convenient smuggling.
✵ One vial of Shimmer, a drug that, when injected, accelerates healing and temporarily enhances the strength, stamina, and general constitution of a person. Viktor has a “variant” of the substance, implying a more refined version of the addictive and degenerative street drug that’s commonplace in Zaun.
✵ One blood-stained handkerchief, for coughing into 8))))

NOTES: Viktor is shown to have used a cane since childhood to compensate for his right leg. At his current canon point, he uses a crutch, leg brace, and back brace, but seems to be fairly self-sufficient: working (more than) full-time in his lab, disappearing for days at a time on various errands, making solo trips down to the Undercity, etc. As long as he’s able to hitch a ride in a cart or something when the PCs travel I don’t anticipate needing huge accommodations for this in particular (unless an event has no non-combat options or the entire world is made of stairs). He’s also fairly resourceful and it’s not out of the question that given in-game means he would figure out ways to defend himself in more action-oriented scenarios.

The more pressing issue is the terminal illness, which presents as basically The Consumption/lung cancer brought about by prolonged chemical exposure as a child, but the show avoids outright stating how much time he has left (literally, he asks and the scene immediately cuts away). Although I do plan to play out his continued deterioration, I may need to be a little hand-wavey about the exact timeline, especially if he’s actively seeking medical attention (if available) or otherwise exploring his options. He’s fairly desperate to stay alive and is about to start experimenting on himself in order to do so, and in the absence of the Hexcore will continue that work in-game with whatever else he can get his hands on. So, maybe he will improve, and not die! Maybe he will do bad things to himself with forces unknown (I would like to do this maybe)! We will see. I hear we have a whole contingent of terminally ill friends around these parts, so probably he’s in good company.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-heavy will be cool but I am flexible!

Magnus Bane | Shadowhunters | Not Reserved

[incantates]

PLAYER NAME: evy
CONTACT: draconia, dreawdyrm#0962 (discord)
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Ruxi's inescapable powers of seduction.

CHARACTER: Magnus Bane
CANON: Shadowhunters (TV)
CANON POINT: Beginning of 3x22.

BACKGROUND: Here.

ABILITIES | POWERS:

As Magnus's powers are rather nebulous within the context of the series, I will try and sum them up as best as I can.

✪ Immortality: As a warlock and half-demon, Magnus is immortal and will not physically age any further than he has already. He is also immune to diseases that affect humans. However, he can be killed via murder or accidental death. This will obviously be nerfed.
✪ Demon Mark: Basically, some animal-type attribute that signifies that warlocks are inhuman. His are a pair of golden cat eyes that are usually hidden with a glamour spell.
✪ Leylines & General Spell-casting: Warlocks get the energy for their magic from leylines that run everywhere throughout the ground. They are also able to create and perform spells at will, which vary in great number.
✪ Glamour: Illusory magic used to cover up and hide anything that may freak ordinary people out.
✪ Portaling: Magnus co-developed the magic for creating portals so he's quite adept at using portals to transport himself around so long as he knows where he's going. There is a stipulation that no one can enter a portal without knowing their destination, otherwise they will end up lost in limbo forever. This will be nerfed to him only being able to portal a certain distance within the confines of the game's map.
✪ Telekinesis & Conjuring: He can move things without requiring physical contact and transport them from one physical space to another, and he can make most ordinary objects appear out of thin air. It's unclear if there are any hard limits to this ability, as he can conjure up entire meals and change his apartment's interior decoration at will. This will be nerved into only being able to conjure up small, very simple items.
✪ Demon Summoning & Pentagrams: Warlocks can summon demons from Hell/Edom with the usual risks that demons can escape and run amuck on Earth if they aren't careful. Warlocks can also use pentagrams to transport themselves to Hell/Edom. This will be nerfed so he can't summon anything.
✪ Potion-making: All warlocks are masters at creating potions out of natural herbs and supernatural items. The effects can include anything from love potions to sleep aides and curatives.
✪ Healing: He can use his magic to heal basic wounds and ailments, but there are extents to how much he can heal or keep someone stable, as his magic isn't infinite.
✪ Raising the Dead: This is technically not impossible, but there are always dire consequences (what those consequences are is never really clearly defined). As a rule, he does not perform any resurrections at all. This will obviously be nerfed.
✪ Magical Analysis: He can use his magic to sense abnormalities or supernatural interference.
✪ Warding: He's capable of creating strong wards that lock demons, humans, or other supernatural entities out of certain areas.
✪ Canceling Magic: Magnus can undo or block certain spells.
✪ Memory Erasing: He's able to selectively erase any memories, including his own.
✪ Mind Link or Transference: He can use his magic to give access to someone's mind, but this requires a strong bond (like a parabatai bond) to perform.
✪ Mind-reading: He can look into people's mind and their memories but would never do so without their consent.
✪ Combat: Magnus is fairly adept at hand-to-hand combat and martial arts and can wield some weapons competently.

...I think I got everything.

PERSONALITY:

Outwardly, Magnus has a very vivacious demeanor, responding to most situations with his cutting wit and good sense of humor. He's an extrovert who likes to laugh, drink, and flirt whenever he can, guided by the kind of vibrancy and lack of shits to give one obtains after being alive way too long. While he does show himself to have a lot of inner depth and deep-seated trauma, it's cleverly buried under his smiles and his outgoing –sometimes overbearing– nature. The chinks in his armor do grow as the series progresses, but he manages to maintain a lot of his effervescence even after quite literally going to Hell and back because he likes to revel in the joys and pleasures of life rather than to dwell in its miseries.

At the onset of his first appearance, Magnus did try to cultivate a certain aloof and devil-may-care perception of himself by making it seem as though he was just performing services and favors for a price, as any warlock is wont to do, but deep down inside, he exuded a lot of care and investment when it came to helping others, even at his own expense. This was best illustrated when he stepped in to defend Alec's sister, Isabelle, while she'd been on trial by the Clave. Rather than charging Alec his original asking price of Alec's bow, he ended up rescinding the request simply because he recognized how much it meant to Alec to keep his sister safe. As the series goes on, Magnus continues his never-ending string of generosity by portaling Shadowhunters and Downworlder friends around when they ask, regularly taking in and taking care of young Downworlders, dishing out heals to the wounded, and had even once given up all his magic and immortality just to save Alec's adopted brother, Jace. There's very little he won't do if it means protecting the people closest to him and righting any perceived wrongs.

Confidence also oozes out of his every pore, as Magnus has gained a strong sense of self over his years of living. It helps that he's an exceptionally powerful warlock due to his bloodline as the son of a prince of Hell, giving him a rightful amount of acclaim among the Downworlder community. It's also what got him a leadership position as the High Warlock of Brooklyn. He doesn't doubt himself often nor does he do so openly, preferring to stand his ground. Unfortunately, it's that same level of confidence that makes Magnus all too unyielding even when he is very much in the wrong. He doesn't like to admit that he is capable of making mistakes, and he can also hold grudges too long, such as when he'd thrown his allegiance behind the Seelie Queen at the end of Season 2 even after she'd proven herself many times to be untrustworthy and full of ulterior motives. It wasn't until Alec had practically begged for his aid that he allowed himself to let go of his stubbornness and realize that supporting someone who was homicidal towards her own kind was probably a bad idea.

Overcoming his own pride is something Magnus gradually learns to do as the series progresses, though it isn't easy. He's too invested in how others see him and keeping up his image as this flawless and unshakable warlock when he's really just a hot mess inside. He doesn't have the best self-image and is extremely conscious of how he's perceived to the point where he'd initially been afraid to show his demon mark to Alec because he didn't want Alec to think he was a monster. When he'd lost his powers in Season 3, he'd also been unwilling to accept anyone's help at first and had tried to bear the pain on his own until he'd inevitably self-destructed in every way imaginable. It had taken him a long time and nearly cost him his life to realize how much he was hurting others around him by internalizing so much of his grief, and he had learned to see past his centuries of pain and hurt to realize that he's beloved.

A major hinderance in his self-acceptance had come from the fact that he is often ruled by his fear and contempt of becoming anything like his father, who is notably devoid of any sympathy and regard for others. Instead, his father had been obsessed with being a king among demons and lording over them, as well as just generally being wicked and hedonistic. In his youth, when Magnus was at his lowest point and feeling alone and unwanted, he ended up joining his father and briefly ruling by his side as a prince of Hell, simply out of desire for companionship with his only living relative. During that time, Magnus claims he had surrendered to the worst of his impulses and had carried out vile acts for his father. It's a time he views with deep sadness and regret, hating even talking about it, as he doesn't want to be associated with someone he views as absolutely monstrous. Unfortunately, in spite of what good he is capable of and all the acts of kindness Magnus has committed since then, he still sees some of his father in himself and is filled with deep self-loathing that he's dressed up for years with smiles and flamboyance. This is further compounded by the memory of having set his step-father on fire for blaming Magnus's mother's suicide on Magnus as a child, so he knows very well what he's capable of when angered and tries to run away from it rather than confront his issues.

However, even with his many lapses in judgment and all his shortcomings, Magnus is, at heart, old, gentle, and wise. Surprisingly. He is full of esoteric knowledge about all sorts of arcane subjects and carries with him an intellect that supersedes that of most other beings. That isn't to say he knows everything, but he's definitely knowledgeable in a great many of things that make him a good source of advice and information, and he can be more level-headed, introspective, and even-tempered than most.

He's also incredibly amorous, treating his friends well and spoiling them. Of course, none hold a greater place in his heart than Alec, who has solidified his position as the love of Magnus' life just by being overbearingly sweet and caring to him in a way Magnus had never been exposed to in the past. Their relationship has changed him for the better, allowing him to open himself up and properly address his past trust issues and trauma, and by the end of the series, Magnus ends up becoming a lot warmer, softer, and less cynical than he used to be.

SAMPLE:

Thread #1
Thread #2
Thread #3

INVENTORY:

✪ An omamori charm
✪ A strip of purikura photographs of him and his fiance
✪ His cell phone
✪ Clothes and jewelry (especially his engagement ring) he was wearing at the time of being snatched

NOTES: I don't know if he needs more nerfs. Please feel free. I tried my best not to break the game. His canon is bananas with his powers.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Diet plot. Only 1 calorie.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Spock | Star Trek

[intermingled]

PLAYER NAME: Lauren
CONTACT: blauren
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: https://westwhere.dreamwidth.org/33148.html?thread=3531388#cmt3531388

CHARACTER: Spock
CANON: Star Trek
CANON POINT: Between the end of Star Trek Discovery season 2 and the beginning of Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 1

BACKGROUND: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Spock

ABILITIES | POWERS:
As a half-Vulcan, Spock is stronger and has a more powerful circulatory and respiratory system than full humans. He does not feel effects from alcohol, but chocolate is an intoxicant for him. There would likely be several other substances that he may be more or less affected by than a full human would be based on his combined physiology, as well. Additionally, he possesses extreme control over his body through the way his people train themselves and he is capable of entering a healing trance-like state or regulating certain things within his body such as temperature if he focuses enough.

Spock is also a touch-telepath, well trained as most Vulcans are and able to use a mind meld in order to share or read thoughts more deeply with another. In canon, telepathic contact is rarely possible without touch and if I were to approach that, it would likely be a plot-thing I would touch base with the mods for ahead of time.

Fighting-wise, he has Starfleet's usual security training which would include phasers and hand-to-hand as well as his own background with Vulcan martial arts, which would focus on nonlethal disarming as well as his ability to administer a Vulcan Nerve Pinch that renders most normal baseline humanoids unconscious.

He is a science officer and though Star Trek as a canon is incredibly nebulous about the specialties of scientists and doctors, as the leading science officer, he would presumably be very comfortable with an array of topics (which also fits his personality) including astrophysics, biology, chemistry and various earth sciences such as geology. As a cadet, he would have also made the basic rounds through other departments and would know the very basics of security, engineering, navigation, etc.

As he has an eidetic memory, he is more likely to remember all of these lessons than a baseline human might be. Along with that, he has memorized a variety of literature.

PERSONALITY:
Spock believes very much in the Vulcan ideals of logic. Logic is at the core of his worldview and how he approaches most situations. That is not to say that he does not have feelings, because Vulcans have an incredibly deep capacity to feel, but he attempts to not allow them to impact his decision-making. Part of this logic also values the needs of the many over the needs of the few. This is an important point, because it is rare for him to be selfish, especially at the expense of others. He believes in protecting people, in learning and discovery for the betterment of people's lives and better understanding of the universe and of never ending life if he can help it. He does not eat meat and prefers his necessary fighting to be nonlethal.

Spock being born as a human-Vulcan hybrid has a large impact on everything he experiences in his life. He is very much the embodiment of a common experience mixed race children face where he is not fully accepted by either side of his heritage. He is too Vulcan for humans to see him as human and too human for Vulcans to accept him as their equal and not a flawed less-than. From a very young age, he faces prejudice on Vulcan for this. He is bullied and isolated, discouraged from embracing his human heritage but also removed from being able to have an average or normal Vulcan upbringing despite his father's desire for him to have that. As he grows, he takes his Vulcan training and heritage to heart and does his best to be a good Vulcan, often behaving more "Vulcan" than some Vulcans do, stiffer and less easy with himself because he feels the pressure to be an ideal Vulcan and prove that he is Vulcan. He also has inherited a learning disability from his human mother. The Vulcan educational system cannot support him with this and while his mother posits that it is because they didn't want to help him, it is also very possible that they did not know how.

Well into his late 20s, he still feels that he is a disappointment to his father and that his father's rejection of emotional motivations will always leave him disappointed, as well, because his father will not express pride in him, even if he feels it. Furthermore, the first time he joins the crew of the Enterprise as an Ensign, the first officer notices him smiling and tells him that if he wishes to command a starship one day, he may have to hide things like that as allowing too much of his "freaky" to be seen may hurt his chances to command. He takes this advice to heart and though he serves among a mostly human crew, this very much also causes him to present as an exemplary Vulcan to them.

When he is a young boy, his father brings home a human girl named Michael whose parents have recently died. She becomes his foster sister and he looks up to her very much at first. His father's intent is for her to help him learn empathy, something that he will need in order to navigate his human side, however once they grow close, Michael believes that their closeness is putting him in danger from extremists on Vulcan and she intentionally hurts him for what she believes is his own protection. This pain sits in him for years until long past the time they both join Starfleet and don't speak for several years. He realizes that she did it for his protection long before she eventually admits it to him, but he does not allow that to be cause for him to brush his hurt under a rug. In fact, it makes him somewhat angry that she would presume so much and annoyed that she would take so much responsibility on her shoulders. It's a wound that is only healed right before she is forced to leave him behind forever in order to take something dangerous far into the future. Her last advice to him is to reach out to people because she knows he has closed himself off in many ways. At this canon point, he's just lost her in the last year, but we see very much that the empathy lesson will stick with him, especially as he shows concern for the humans around him in his own way in the times directly after this. The way he shows concern for people may seem oddly clinical to those who don't know him well enough, but the humans who know him know the little tells in his behavior, such as the way he shows immediate concern for Captain Pike's odd behavior in the first episode of Strange New Worlds. There is no doubt to Pike that Spock cares about him, not only for his role as Captain but also as a figure in his life who has shown him care and taught him valuable lessons. He is one of the few humans who has worked his way through Spock's impassive exterior.

Spock would claim he does not feel fear, but he would be lying. He is afraid of rejection and loss thanks to his experiences with Michael and the rejection of his peers growing up and he leans towards isolating himself as a result. It would be easy to say it's a Vulcan trait, but the way he handles it is slightly different. It's less detached and more fearful and defensive. With Michael in particular, he even loses control and has a few emotional outbursts once they're reunited. Her final advice for him to reach out makes it clear that she sees it, but it will still take him a few years past this current canon point before he really figures himself out in this regard.

SAMPLE: https://westwhere.dreamwidth.org/33148.html?thread=3531388#cmt3531388

INVENTORY:
-A data PADD with personal files/picures/media (basically a tablet)
-Communicator
-Starfleet uniform and badge

NOTES:



IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? I'm down for plot-heavy if it's available, but if not, no worries! :>

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Thanks!

number one ► star trek

[unas]

PLAYER NAME: Kerry
CONTACT: skitties
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: a message in a bottle

CHARACTER: Una Chin-Riley [ Number One ]
CANON: Star Trek
CANON POINT: Strange New Worlds 103 Ghosts of Illyria

BACKGROUND: history link

ABILITIES | POWERS:

BIO-ENGINEERING. Being Illyrian, Una has undergone bio-engineering to adapt her body to various environments. The enhancements known about are her enhanced strength, her altered immune system (that burns contaminants out of her body), increased visual acuity and enhanced stamina/resilience. [These are all that is currently known for her, the full extent of her bio-engineering has not yet come up]**

ENGINEER. Before transferring departments, Una was trained as an Engineer, completing both her Starfleet training in Engineering and serving on her first two postings as an Engineer. She is trained in starship systems repair, diagnostics and management and is able to synthesise something when ordinary systems or equipment fails.

PILOT. After transferring departments, Una worked as the ship's pilot (helm and navigation), controlling the speed and altitude of the ship, able to pilot both starships and smaller shuttlecrafts. As navigator, she's used readings to determine ship position and speed, and trajectories of objects around them, working in coordination with the helm to manoeuvre and control the ship as well as having used the ship's shields, and weapons and scanning other ships or what's around them.

OPERATIONS. As XO of the Enterprise, Una needs to be familiar with ship functioning and bridge stations, having worked on the bridge as what in the future might be known as operations or tactical, making decisions for the ship when the Captain isn't aboard, managing operations and leading landing parties or missions, such as a first contact situation during leave from the Enterprise.

COMBAT. As a trained Starfleet Officer, Una is trained in hand-to-hand combat and combat using various weapony, both short-range and long-range.

LANGUAGES. Una is fluent in her native Illyrian tongue and Federation Standard (English?) and has studied the Vulcan language for numerous years, though is better at reading it than speaking it.

PERSONALITY:

TENACIOUS. Una is not good at letting things go. When she believes that she's right or that more can be done to help a situation she'll keep poking at it to try and find an answer, hoping that something is there. She's not solely resilient in her actions but in her spirit, refusing to let knocks hit her too hard down even if it stings emotionally. Una's faced a lot of harsh comments in her life for her drive, her attitude or beliefs but she's pushed past each of them to keep going.

COMPASSIONATE.Though seeming cold and unflappable Una has a big heart, caring not only about her friends, the life of her Captain but the lives of her entire crew. Some of that is what makes her a great Starfleet officer, though it isn't only their physical safety she cares about but their emotional well-being. This care is something that's also extended to strangers, given her care and friendship that spawned after meeting (rescuing, physically and emotionally) La'an Noonien Singh. After La'an had been rescued from the Gorn, traumatised by her experience, Una offered a quiet and calming presence for her, hope for the future, a dream and ultimately a lifelong friend through their conversations and time spent together. Whilst Una doesn't often pay compliments she does give good advice, helping her officers to be better in their jobs, be confident or (when appropriate) someone to talk to.

DETERMINED. From a young girl, Una dreamed of joining Starfleet, having seen the stars and focusing on one goal. Despite what would stop this from becoming a reality (being Illyrian) she refused to let it be a barrier, finding a way into Starfleet Academy and working to become the best officer that she could. Una has a curious nature, wanting to explore the galaxy, turning down promotion after promotion so that she could continue with this dream rather than be tied up in bureaucracy, determined to be an officer. An explorer. In her work, she's someone that strives to do the right thing, careful in her actions, considering the consequences and making sure that what she (and her ship, where she can affect it) does is good.

DRIVEN. More than just being determined in what she does and believes, Una is driven to a fault, someone that pushes herself to be the best that she can, earned 40 commendations within a few years of service and finds ways to save as many lives as possible even if the mission is risky. Una is someone that finds it difficult to relax, is known for working when she's supposed to be on shore leave and prefers being busy. It comes with increased stress, though in her own time (off-duty over shore leave) she'll make sure she relaxes or takes time for her hobbies. It's made her incredibly good at her job, her Captain calling her the best Number One he's known (or in Starfleet) and intimidating to others.

SECRETIVE. Una keeps herself under lock and key except for around her friends, her professional demeanour being seen as cold and unflappable, intimidating to junior officers and someone that's previously given the advice of 'keep your freaky hidden'. Which is exactly what Una does. The biggest secret about herself is that she's not human, something that no one she serves with or has served with knowns (given the illegality of her status). But aside from her big dark secret it's the personal things about her that aren't known to many, including even her name. She's hard to get to know and slow to open up. However, once she has let you in (at least as a friend) you'll find a much warmer, humourous woman underneath, someone more willing to talk personally even if some topics are still selective.

SAMPLE: tdm!

INVENTORY:

-- her insignia badge
-- her communicator [will be non-functional here]

NOTES: re: Una's immune system, I am happy to still allow things to affect/infect her for the purposes of plot, with the difference being in how quickly her immune system kicks in to burn out the contaminant. Una's immune system also likely gives her better temperature resistance at least in heat/warmer temperatures, given the heat produced by her body to burn out a contaminant. What affect this has on colder temperatures is unknown. Una's immune system, when active, also has the capability of potentially causing someone else to be cured of a disease (causing them to generate chimeric antibodies), though that would be done only with player consent and case-by-case as it doesn't always happen.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? i love plot! but i will take whatever, you know me

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

James T. Kirk | Star Trek AOS

[winscenario]

PLAYER NAME: Ricks
CONTACT: extreminator; ricks#9597
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Through my friend Kerry (Moiraine's mun)

CHARACTER: James T. Kirk
CANON: Star Trek AOS
CANON POINT: After Star Trek Beyond

BACKGROUND: James T. Kirk (alternate reality) @ Memory Alpha

ABILITIES | POWERS: He has no superhuman powers or abilities. As for various other skills, Jim's an unusually brilliant person, with much higher than average intelligence, something that is both mentioned by other people and shown in his own actions and the progress he makes both in the Academy and after he graduates— he takes three years to complete his studies, then goes on to become appointed Captain almost immediately, the youngest in all of Starfleet's history.

Other than that, he's proficient in hand-to-hand combat, piloting, marksmanship and basic first aid and survival, all necessary skills during emergency situations and away missions, and things he's learned while at the Academy. To add to this, Jim has an intimate knowledge of a starship's inner workings, as in his opinion it's vital for a Captain to know everything about his own ship, because to him that knowledge might be the difference between saving lives and losing complete control during a life-or-death situation.

PERSONALITY: James T. Kirk is the captain of the starship USS Enterprise. An easygoing guy with a cheerful disposition, Jim is a people’s person, with a positive energy that practically oozes off of him, confidence in spades, and a kind of charm that’s often difficult for people to resist. As a younger man, he showed a tendency to rebel against rules and norms, acting recklessly more often than not, either to spite other people or just because he could. One such example being when as a kid he stole his stepfather’s classic cars to go for a joyride, another when he picked a fight with a random stranger, provoking him while knowing he’d get beat down to the ground.

For a while, Jim struggled to find a purpose in his life, growing up and lingering in the shadow of his father’s memory, who was acting captain for only a few minutes but saved hundreds of lives in the process, ultimately sacrificing himself to allow them to escape. It’s obvious that he carried a lot of resentment over this for a while, though mostly for having to grow up listening to how brave his father was than for actually seeing what he did as something wrong.

Despite joining Starfleet Academy on a dare, it’s there that Jim slowly starts to grow and find a path for his life. Still as a cadet, he continues to be carefree and reckless, showing a level of immaturity on a number of occasions, up to and including the Kobayashi Maru test, where he manipulated the system so it would allow him to win.

Despite this, he proves to be a person with his head and his heart in the right place. He is, above all else, willing to do whatever it takes to save people’s lives, no matter if it’s just one person or many, regardless of consequences. For instance, he violates the Prime Directive so he can save Spock’s life, an act that later gets him demoted to first officer. His loyalty is also a defining trait of his, and when he trusts someone, it’s a little difficult for him to cope with them breaking that trust— which is how he sees Spock’s attitude when he submits his report and informs Starfleet that Jim broke the Prime Directive to save him.

A strange but efficient balance between the calm and the storm, Jim can keep cool under pressure, handling a situation as it’s thrown at him with clear rational thinking and making just the choices that to him make the most sense. When he knows that he needs to do something, he sets his mind to it and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him, not even when the consequences might terrify him— such as when he gives up his life to stop the Enterprise from crashing, thus saving the whole crew. In fact, he doesn’t even seem to give that a second thought, simply doing what he has to without letting the fact that he’ll die in the process stop him.

While he has carried grudges and sought revenge against people who hurt others —Khan, for instance, who murdered Pike—, Jim’s not the kind to cling to those feelings. For instance, he offered Nero, the Captain of the Romulan ship responsible for his father’s death, the chance to surrender rather than be destroyed. Though he can be surprisingly rational, Jim sometimes gets swept up by his emotions, reacting to situations with his heart rather than his head. In the heat of the moment he can let feelings such as anger get to him, and he can often act reckless and jump in head first without knowing for sure what he might be jumping into. Both luck and quick and unusual thinking are things that help him a lot in situations like this, as they often get him out of tough spots.

Jim is exceedingly bright, although he often downplays it, but his brilliance shows all too brightly when he leads his crew. He not only has a great memory and an attention to detail, he also has an unusual way of thinking which often shows in the unorthodox but ingenious plans he comes up with to solve whatever tough spots he and his crew land themselves in. Rather than follow existing paths, Jim is the kind of person that much prefers trailing new paths of his own, discovering new ways to deal with all kinds of situations, be them serious or more day-to-day. While this might make him sound unstable, it’s rather the opposite: Jim is a steady and solid presence among his crew, someone that everyone on the Enterprise trusts completely with their lives, someone they happily follow into just about any situation.

With time and experience, Jim’s grown in a lot of ways, and above all he shows to be much more mature than when he was when he first joined Starfleet— or when he first sat on the Captain’s chair, for that matter. Although far from a veteran, he’s calmer and more composed, more seasoned by the various missions and experiences, and the different things he’s learned about how to lead a crew of hundreds of people while traveling across the galaxy. It’s not without its sacrifices, as he feels a little more distant from the crew on a personal level, but he does have friends he keeps close, people who support him and help him through more complicated times. Such is the case with Dr. Leonard McCoy, whom Jim fondly refers to as Bones, and who often just sits with him for a drink and a heart-to-heart.

Always a charming and charismatic man, Jim’s a person who’s difficult not to like. When younger, he’d often get involved with random people, sleeping around without forging any strong emotional bonds; in fact at that point he seems more interested in casual hookups with people he barely knows than he is in actually getting to know someone better before getting involved. As he grows older, and especially after he sets out on his five-year mission, he doesn’t seem to carry on with this behavior, as his focus seems to be on doing his job and captaining the ship. Regardless, Jim has few inhibitions and little qualms about seeking pleasure, even if he might not be as prone to indulging in his hedonistic behavior.

Despite being a brilliant man with an incredible confidence in his own skills, Jim isn’t without his moments of doubt and weakness. On a few occasions he confesses to not knowing what to do next, though he keeps it between himself and the few people closest to him, such as Spock and Bones. Ultimately, however, he knows that as Captain he has to be a solid and steady presence for his crew, and that if he shows uncertainty then the whole crew will waver. As such, he often keeps these worries and fears to himself, instead soldiering on and sometimes pulling through and doing what he hopes is the right thing, the course of action that will not only save as many people as possible, but also prove that he can be a good, strong presence that people can rely on.

SAMPLE: TDM thread

INVENTORY: phaser, tricorder, comm device, Starfleet insignia, Starfleet survival gear, Starfleet duty uniform, and his reading glasses. (it's fine if none of the tech items work properly or at all)

NOTES: Nothing I can think of.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-heavy sounds like fun, if possible!

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

mo ran | husky and his white cat shizun | reserved

[inkfire]

PLAYER NAME: Thea
CONTACT: PM this journal
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: I am in the game.

CHARACTER: Mo Ran/Mo Weiyu
CANON: Husky and His White Cat Shizun
CANON POINT: Chapter 140

BACKGROUND: Mo Ran's history

ABILITIES | POWERS: Abilities and a quick listing expanding on these:

- qinggong, which allows him to move quickly and jump higher
- general cultivation, which allows him to channel spiritual energy for spells and combat. he does things like create flowers to send messages or generate warmth, entertain people (especially kids), and has a number of spells for combat and general helpfulness.
- Barrier technique allows him to create barriers. He often uses this to keep dry when it's raining and he can seal heavenly rifts.
- his current holy weapon is Jiangui, a willow vine whip; he's quite formidable with it

Forbidden techniques:
- Zhenlong Chess Formation - a forbidden technique that allows him to create chess pieces and put them in people to control them. Mo Ran will not use this power in his current life.
- Shared Heart Formation is related to Zhenlong formation. he will never use this power although he technically remembers it.
- The Door of Time, Space, Life and Death - it opens up a doorway to a parallel world. Like the other techniques, he will not use this.

Other:
"Butterfly-boned Beauty Feast" in this case simply means he has very strong spiritual powers, as he is an irregular individual.

PERSONALITY: Mo Ran is a man of complications. At his canon point, he's kind, caring, competent, playful, and horribly laden with guilt. He feels terrible for events in his past life that led to him being a huge asshole to many people, most of whom did not deserve to deal with his madness. Mo Ran wants, so badly, to be a good, decent person, one worthy of love, despite believing, deep down inside, that he is unworthy of love and that there is something wrong with him.

He's just spent five years traveling the realm and helping out people, especially those who could not afford it, taking on tasks others would overlook, trying to emulate his teacher, Chu Wanning. He worked very hard to become someone who could stand by him and not feel shame. During this time, he learns quite a bit, actually applying himself to studies and practice, even in small things— his handwriting, once abysmal, greatly improves (he was writing daily letters). This really is the growth from reckless youth to a somewhat more mature young adult— he manages to keep his cool, even when faced with people he loathes, tempers his reactions, and doesn't always try to be the center of attention or get the first (and last) word.

Despite growing up and maturing, Mo Ran is still playful, teasing people he likes, joking with his cousin, and flirting with the shopkeepers. He's charming and knows it, and despite the heavy burden of guilt and the memories of his past life, he knows how to play it up. It ties into his desire to be liked by people (especially the person he most respects). He's not always smart and can be a little slow to pick up things, so he plays up the charm when he wants something or wants to get out of things, acting boyish and cute. There are times when he will be cold and distant, almost dismissive when he's around people he doesn't like or who get on his nerves (often influenced by memories of his past life), and he will give them the cold shoulder.

Guilt plays a big role in Mo Ran's growth. Prior to wandering for five years, he had been arrogant and egotistical, with moments of selfishness. But he learns the truth about his teacher— well, some of the truth— and comes to understand events that happened in his first life much better. With the realization comes great shame that he was such a horrible person during his first life, especially regarding the treatment of Chu Wanning and his family. Part of the motivation for wandering those five years comes from wanting to improve himself and a strong desire to never turn into the mad emperor he once was, in his past life. He feels like there is something broken inside of him that made him that person, and he fears he will never be able to overcome that, although he doesn't let the guilt stop him from trying.

It's important to note: Mo Ran is fairly bright and capable but he's not always great with emotions or understanding his own actions. He can pick up on it, eventually, it just takes him a while. And he can learn, if he puts his mind to it, he just tends to be rather lazy and is better with active learning. He is a skillful cultivator, especially with non-traditional methods, and learns to solve problems (sometimes).

One thing remains consistent throughout his life, both as the mad emperor and Mo Ran: he has a big dick. It gives him a lot of confidence and energy that he might not have otherwise.

SAMPLE: tdm

INVENTORY: Clothes on his back, which at his canon point are trousers
Jiangui, a willow vine whip that glows red.
A qiankun pouch, which contains his spare set of robes
Talisman papers
A few milk candies
String for playing finger games

NOTES: No accommodations necessary.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-light but I am happy to work with whatever you want to throw at me.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

tenn kujo | idolish7

[mypreciousworld]

PLAYER NAME: Robin
CONTACT: mypreciousworld
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: I was on the TDM & Eve did this.

CHARACTER: Tenn Kujo
CANON: IDOLiSH7
CANON POINT: End of Chapter 3

BACKGROUND: oh god I have to think about the story again and there's no easy way to summarize things sorry in advance

BASICALLY... Tenn was brought up in a pretty musically inclined family. Most of Tenn's youth was spent taking care of his twin, Riku, who was mostly bedridden throughout his childhood. Tenn would sing, dance, act... do whatever he could to make his brother happy. They loved each other immensely. However, the family business was not doing so well and Tenn was basically 'sold' to a man named Takamasa Kujo in order to keep their club running. Kujo-san helped train Tenn to basically become a super-idol of sorts, where he would eventually be scouted by a man named Sosuke Yaotome--- the president of Yaotome Production. Together with Yaotome's son Gaku, and Ryunosuke Tsunashi, they form the unit TRIGGER.

Chapter 1 shows TRIGGER as the antagonists for the first two-thirds. Tenn's brother Riku has decided to become an idol in order to chase after his brother, and Tenn is not having any of it. Though he still loves his brother, he knows that Riku's reasoning was selfish. To Tenn, idols only exist because of fans, and thus idols must also spend their lives making those fans happy. Finding happiness in that is what Tenn believes is as being pure, and Riku isn't doing that. So for the most part, Tenn treats Riku coldly. Even his unit, as well as IDOLiSH7, notices how cruel Tenn is acting... but it's really just Tenn trying to drive Riku away from this particular life. Eventually, IDOLiSH7 beats TRIGGER in the Black or White competition and Tenn has to relent to Riku's decisions after witnessing and being bested by his sibling and his unit's performance.

Chapter 2 introduces another idol group, Re:vale. It also introduces Tenn's adoptive father and sister. Throughout this chapter, Tenn is faced with how he wants to deal with success and his plans, which all stems from Takamasa Kujo sort of getting in everyone's business as being a pretty big creep. Not only did Takamasa 'steal' Tenn away from his family, but his adoptive sister Aya is the biological sister of one of the IDOLiSH7 members. Takamasa also forces Tenn to make a choice about the future: whether he's willing to cast aside TRIGGER to rise to the top all by himself. This in turn brings up why Kujo-san wanted Tenn and Aya in the first place: because he believes one or both could become the next legendary idol. The first one, ZERO, mysteriously disappeared fifteen years ago and Kujo-san for some reason made it his mission to spite Zero by using whoever he could, despite being connected and even friends with the former legend. He even goes as far to say that "I finally found children who would make my dream come true. Talent to surpass Zero!" Kinda fucked up pushing your own wishes on others. Tenn, of course, hates this btw. Being confronted by both Gaku and Ryuu, he states that they are friends. The fact he's able to say this, despite putting on the face of a consummate professional (almost a charade at times tbh), makes Gaku say the following:

"Regardless of what you’re shouldering, we’re TRIGGER– We all share the same fate. If you’re gonna be a legend, then we’ll be your trigger. We’ll protect you."

Incredibly cheesy but cute imho.

Chapter 3... uh well shit hits the fan pretty fast. Basically, continuing the long line of crazy shitheads is Tsukumo Ryou, owner of Tsukumo Productions. He pretty much hates idols and has made his own unit, ZOOL, as a way to get revenge on all three of the popular units. Not only does he force Yaotome Production to drop TRIGGER, but also has some of his connections (all criminal) abduct each member of TRIGGER and uses ZOOL to isolate them. Ryou is also able to 'attack' each member of IDOLiSH7 and re:vale through various forms of extortion and blackmail, which of course ends up failing because this is an idol anime and positivity usually wins out, but still.

I know I'm missing stuff but it's been a while and my memory isn't great. Also, relying on translations is a pain in the ass. I'm tired and old.

ABILITIES | POWERS: He has no powers. Tenn is an expert vocalist, dancer, and performer. He's able to play the piano. He might know how to use a sword, but probably not well.

PERSONALITY:

* Ambitious - Whether it's his own ambitions or ones instilled in him by the man who adopted him as part of a way to keep his family's club afloat, Tenn desires nothing more than to overtake the legendary idol 'Zero'. It might be why out of all of these qualities, this is the one that makes Tenn tick. He's not just ambitious, but able to act on them because he's so good at what he does. That he's affected so much by performing by his fans and seeing them so happy, is what also drives him too. His ambitions aren't just professional, they're personal. He wants nothing more than to make bring people joy, no matter what. It also needs to be said that while his dreams and his adoptive father's dreams are similar, Tenn wishes to become a legend alongside his unit and not just by himself. He's also doing this because he wants to make others happy--- the same way that he made his twin happy; through working incredibly hard for his current and future fans.

* Passionate - Tied into his ambitions, he's also very passionate. His love for performance started with him wanting to entertain his very ill twin, Riku. He was also brought up in an environment where he saw live acts. He performs because he's selfless and is passionate toward being an idol anyone can love. When it was first announced that Yaotome Productions would drop TRIGGER as a group, his initial reaction was about how the fans would take it. The first street performance they did after this, he cried knowing he couldn't give them more. If he weren't truly passionate about his art, he wouldn't react like that to both of those situations.

* Loyal - It doesn't extend to just his partners, Gaku Yaotome and Ryunosuke Tsunashi. He's also loyal to his adoptive father, Takamasa Kujo, and his adoptive sister Aya Kujo. This is where he's the most conflicted: he's gotten to the point where he can call both Gaku and Ryuu his friends (and does so quietly, blushing as he does it) while they're together. He wouldn't be where he is without them, even if Kujo-san believes that Tenn could be a solo act and do it himself. But it comes down to his unit, his adoptive family, and his twin brother who became an idol, who he still loves and cares for dearly, though he can't do it openly. He is loyal, but if he had to make a choice between his desires and ambitions against his family and friends... it'd probably test him.

* Exigent - Tenn will push himself to the extremes because he simply doesn't care about what happens to him while in the pursuit of performing for others. The first part of the game shows him leaving a hospital while delirious in order for him to get to a venue so he can perform. Later, there's a scene where he's getting his ankles taped up before he goes out for an encore. He also doesn't lower his standards when it comes to others; he often asks Riku to stop being an idol. Not just because of his health issues, but because of the selfish way Riku came into that particular business--- to make himself and his group happy. It didn't mean fans weren't part of the equation, but that Riku is much more self-serving than Tenn.


SAMPLE: TDM top-level

INVENTORY: Nothing, other than the clothes on his back.

NOTES: No accommodations needed!

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-light is fine! Whatever works for you.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Leonard McCoy | Star Trek (AOS)

[homeostatic]

PLAYER NAME: Beck
CONTACT: PM; backagain
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Moiraine's player, Kerry!

CHARACTER: Dr. Leonard McCoy
CANON: Star Trek AOS
CANON POINT: Post-Nero's defeat & the Enterprise's escape

BACKGROUND: Wiki

ABILITIES | POWERS:

A 100% baseline human, McCoy is a medical doctor and member of Starfleet. After an initial start in an Earth hospital, his move into Starfleet prepared him with the experience and knowledge to treat a wide variety of human and alien ailments that might occur on a starship that visits other worlds. While officially he's a surgeon (trauma and/or neuro, take your pick), he'll go on to lead the Enterprise's medical department as Chief Medical Officer, a job that requires solid leadership skills, and a great degree of skill to coordinate with others both inside and outside his department.

McCoy is proficient in hand to hand combat, and is also a decent shot with a phaser, despite his distaste of both-- they're required courses, but he didn't have to like them. He's also undertaken survival training at the Academy, and courses in diplomacy.

While he has flight training, and is a capable enough pilot, he'd prefer to be anyone's last-of-the-last-choices for this, ever.

PERSONALITY:

"Did they teach you bedside manner in medical school?" Jim asks of McCoy in ST: Beyond, the question that many, many have probably pondered after meeting the man. McCoy isn't afraid to tell someone his opinion, both in and outside of a medically-related context, and unless you're a small child or a patient, most of the time he's not about to be tactful about it, either. Sometimes irascible, lightly gruff, incredibly passionate, McCoy doesn't suffer fools lightly, and isn't always the easiest guy to get along with. However, for better or worse, he knows it.

At his core, under all the bluster and snark, he has a heart of gold (one he wears on his sleeve too often), a sense of humor, and a great love for others. For those closest to him, he serves as a patient, thoughtful counselor, though not without good, friendly ribbing.

Among those he respects, and who respect him in turn, he's charming, funny, and dedicated, though he's still not all sunny disposition- Bones is not about to pat their asses if he thinks they need to hear the truth. Butting heads is all part of the experience, because his loyalty to them, as far as he's concerned, goes unquestioned. Loyalty to Jim, to other members of the crew– showcased by his refusal to leave others behind even when it would be easier –and his unwillingness to let others suffer on account of him, such as the time McCoy's arm is trapped, and he urges Jim to have Carol, the only help he has, beamed back to the ship to save her life.

"Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence" is a memorable quote, espoused by McCoy shortly after we meet him, and give a pretty good insight into his natural caution. Over-caution. Paranoia? Yeah, probably. If something looks off, he's gonna let you know how sketchy he finds it, and very possibly come up with a solid idea of how shit could go horribly FUBAR.

Despite that, McCoy is not about to let his anxieties stop him. Though he describes himself when he first meets Kirk as having aviophobia, to the point that he has trouble with the shuttle to San Francisco, he's clearly had assistance in getting past his phobia, having no trouble at all when he decides to schlep Kirk into a shuttle and to the Enterprise. In later years, despite any fears he has, he overcomes them, though in true form it's not without varying degrees of protest.

In a crisis, McCoy is clear-headed and (mostly) calm, quick-thinking and swift to take charge in areas where he's capable, delegating tasks to others. Not really one to seek attention for its own sake, McCoy prefers to do his job and do it well, and generally shelves his ego and complaints in the process. Though clearly injured in Beyond, he brushes off concerns for himself in order to attend to Spock's more pressing wounds, and goes with the rescue mission to "keep an eye on him".

He's also just smart as Hell, y'all. Though, again, the first film is pretty limited in McCoy-scope, he cooks up the scheme to smuggle Jim aboard the Enterprise in a handful of seconds, and takes to the role of CMO smoothly and well, enough so that he's promoted to the position permanently by the end of the film. Further in the franchise, this is shown more explicitly as he's tasked with (or really sets himself to the task of) working out the cryogenic sequencing used on Khan's crew, has the idea to replace his crew with organic simulacrum that'll pass muster when they're transferred to Khan's ship, creates a serum from Khan's blood that brings Kirk back to life, rigs a solution to Spock's life-threatening injury in the field, etc etc.

While he's still very early-on due to his canonpoint, his personality from film to film is quite consistent, with the only difference really being how much he's settled into his role by the time Beyond rolls around, years later. Given time, and support, he's more than capable of finding his feet wherever he goes, no matter the shaky ground he stands on.

SAMPLE: TDM!

INVENTORY: Starfleet Science uniform & badge
Jewelry✨
Medical tricorder (totally cool if it doesn't work)

NOTES: N/A

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot heavy, if possible! I'm jumpin' in with both feet!

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

licyn mansbane | original character

[bravelyrunsaway]

PLAYER NAME: rakel
CONTACT: pm @ breavelyrunsaway or hit me up on discord
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: current player!

CHARACTER: Licyn Mansbane
CANON: Original Character
CANON POINT: Post Abduction, pre-Dragon Awakening

BACKGROUND: Licyn is a 27 year old wolf walker born and raised in South-Eastern portion of the Silver Mountain Range. After an accident in ancient ruins around his ninth birthday, in which Licyn was the only survivor out of six village children, he was lost to a fever fighting off a supernatural infection. When he recovered, he became a runaway out of survivors guilt, and lived on the roads, or surviving on the fringe of towns, until he fell in with another wolfen walker at 14 and started learning swordwork as a mercenary. About the same time he started to make up for his pack-leaning bonds by turning into a voracious flirt with all sexes and humanoid-adjacent species.

Licyn has managed as the 'brains' behind his two-wolfen mercenary unit, with Rillin being his elder, second member of their pseudo-pack. He helped reign Rillin in from his worst tendencies with a lack of moral compass and kept their contracts legal and well paying. Their most recent contract looked good on the surface, and even with some digging, but the guard escort they were hired on as ended up drugged and abducted to be offered as living sacrifices to Dragons of the Dark Continent, a "lost" central landmass cut off from the Northern continent by massive near world-spanning magical storms that ruined and remade the countryside regularly for several thousand years.

He's coming from after the abduction, but before the sacrifice to the newly hatching dragonlings. He's presently twenty-seven.

Walkers are a created magical species made two thousand years prior to Licyn's being born; they're essentially shapeshifters defined by whichever species they transform into. Walkers were used as guards and body slaves, only gaining independence after the fall of that "forgotten" empire. Wolves specifically were used as supernatural guardians, and to modern times have stronger affiliations toward small-group protection or strong-bonding mentalities.

ABILITIES | POWERS:

Licyn has the natural ability to shift form between human and wolf of equivalent mass. This makes him in general an over-large wolf. Unlike some other species of Walker, he cannot achieve a mid-way form. He's all human or all wolf. Clothing does not shift with him. It's either destroyed in the process of human to wolf, or wolf to human he's simply nude.

In human form he has more stamina than his frame would lead people to believe, along with greater strength. His eyes don't work leagues better in human form, though his nose is far more sensitive than a human's. His scent memory is particularly keen.

In both form's he's particularly resistant to illness, as his innate magical nature kills off most disease before it gains a foothold. To anyone sensitive to magic, Licyn reads as a sort of natural magical battery, one that is largely untapped as Licyn only makes use of that magic to fuel his shapeshifting and the quickened healing that comes from shapeshifting. He has passive resistance to being tapped for that magic by outside individuals.

The scarring on his back by the shade during his boyhood left Licyn marked for life, giving him a sensitivity toward magic-created creatures. Quite literally it means he can feel them around him, like an extra sense that gives him low level nausea. His scars tend to ache in the presence of particularly strong creatures.

He's an accomplished sword fighter, preferring to use a curved sword over a broadsword, but trained and tempered in fighting with many different kinds. He's done some shield work without ever finding it to his liking. He's average with ranged weaponry, better with crossbows, and capable of using longbows with apparent ease due to his greater strength.

PERSONALITY:

Licyn is a rapacious flirt who enjoys easy physical relationships with willing partners, preferring to remain emotionally unattached. He flirts as readily with men as women, with some sense of decorum when it suits him. He respects firm boundaries physically, but this doesn't stop him from teasing unless he notices the one(s) being teased are truly in unhappy out of sorts. As he does grow closer to someone, he seeks them out less and less for sexual contact. Because he friendzones them for the sake of his own fear of loss.

He enjoys physicality overall, fighting, sparring, running in wolf form, or rolling around in bed being part of that. Licyn isn't good at staying still unless he's that sick, which is rare, or that terrified, which is more rare these days. He needs to be around people, and involved in some social sphere (if it's his pseudo-pack or whatever larger contract they're hired on for). Licyn isn't built to be solitary, partly a species imperative, partly his personality. He doesn't take losses of his closer companions well.

Licyn prefers talking about other people and listening to them talk about themselves over talking about himself, and keeps what he offers of himself down to basics and glossed simplifications. He prefers being underestimated as a flirty meathead, until it suits him otherwise.

At heart, he doesn't like taking a losing side, and would cut his losses to get out of a bad situation over sticking it out for any sense of perverse pride. He is really not for making any heroic last stands. When it comes down to it, he doesn't see anything noble in a life sacrificed, only stupidity if you think he'll make one for you without being backed into a corner first. It doesn't mean he cuts at any sign of trouble, he calculates odds first, but it tends to mean he's not a high risks high rewards person -- and not a gambler in anything but his flirtations. These are all aspects of his fear of loss that emotionally and physically scarred him as a child, and which he's never properly dealt with as an adult, instead opting to ignore it and ignore forming more than one lasting formal caretaking sibling-like bond, as he has with Rillin.

SAMPLE:

Here's on the TDM: https://westwhere.dreamwidth.org/33148.html?thread=3466108#cmt3466108

And here's to have a sample set in game, TDM setting:

The boat carting them to the island's shore rocked underfoot, the familiar lapping of smaller waves licking up the sides, then crashing against the shore. Licyn braced himself before he joined one of the sailors in leaping over the boat's side, hauling it up the shore as the rest trickled out as so many fleas leaping from an emaciated host, jeers and laughter and all manners of form of relief flowing past him, noted and not noteworthy. No violence in the air yet, and he accepted that as he did the half speculative looks of sailors who knew him or knew of him.

Easy enough to smile back, teeth bared a touch more than was humanly polite, and then wave laconically with his, "I'll be back," a statement so obvious no one needed to acknowledge its uttering. That he listened to the men at his back and slipped swiftly into the foliage was natural, just as much as the man he heard relieving himself somewhere nearby, the sharp scent of urine joining the quiet hot scents of the plantlife cloying on the back of his tongue.

It'd been too long since he ran, and so he shifted forward, walked quietly and swiftly through the strangeness of the forest he was in now, this beach and island unlike those he'd strode upon in proper harbours in days past. A likely rock tucked up against a tree, where water pooled in a hollowed, shallow bowls of its surface proved a likely spot, and he stripped down with efficencey, shoving his tunic and trousers behind, folded and waiting for his return.

Four paws touched down on rich soil, and he breathed, the whole of the island coming alive in his nose in a way his human form couldn't quite capture. Kindness when aboard the ship, he supposed, but the itch that'd been nagging at him, the nausea that he presumed came from some of his compatriots or perhaps a case of unseaworthy trials he'd never had reason to be aware of before, faded as he stretched out, and ran, and ran, and ran.

The wrongness of the island slid up over him as the silence of all lacking animals but his own presence registered, the wind's passage and his own brushing past draping leaves the loudest thing next to cascading water or the voices of those others who'd taken ashore for their short leave. Hunting after treasures, and his tongue lolled out in brief amusement, even as his stomach clenched at the wrongness of that silence.

This is nothing natural. The island, or the reason for the silence, he didn't know which. Licyn whined, low in his throat and reverberating in his chest, fur standing on end, paws lifting to step down again in a shuffling side to side uncertainty. This is nothing I should investigate.

Even without the ache on his back, even if none of this were magical, it was still wrong. The blooming desire to seek company, the solace of numbers against a strangeness innimical to their survival, had him turning before he allowed himself to calculate at which point the danger would make itself known.

Too soon, and too late. He stretched out, running again, tail held low as his heart pounded too fast, too heavy for what he was doing. Pounded as he shifted back, crouched naked and pausing to listen again, to hear nothing of insects, of birds, of small lives that weren't human or human-like.

He dressed quickly then, shoved on clothing, thankful he'd left his boots on the ship, and trotted back with the false sort of cheer that people took enough at face value to think him dimwitted enough to not be troubled by the oddities. A veneer of cheer to greet the sailor-cum-pirate leaning under a tree's scant shade, nodding toward the beached boats.

"Hey, love, how long before one of these are rowing back out to the ships?"

"Hour, hour'n'haf, summat." The sailor shrugged, scratching at the back of his weathered neck. "'s gotta get back sooner th'n th'rest."

The quiet itched under his skin, but he nodded, smiling, seemingly easy in that smile.

"Of course, always has to be someone's lot. Wouldn't happen to feel like sharing a few stories of your sailing ventures while we wait?"

The sailor blinked at him, expression placid as when he'd first spoken.

"Take that as a no, then." Licyn chuckled, light and breathy for him, but looked outward, to the sea. "Might cool myself down for a while out in the waters, as long as nothing too nasty is lurking in them yet."

The sailor grunted. Licyn didn't move, remaining in the same scant shade, listening, squinting against the glare off water, eyes locked on the twinned ships.

If those searing things moved, he was diving right into the water and swimming back, and to the storm with waiting. He'd take the boat if he could row it past the breakers efficiently, but his stamina, yes, that would be fine enough to get him back on board as long as nothing in the water swallowed him whole first.

INVENTORY: His clothes, a rucksack with travel gear and cutlery and a few smaller knives, travel rations, extra socks, two lengths of ribbon, his talwar-style blade. A shaving blade and mirror.

NOTES: He's basically a werewolf without any lunar ties, he's fiiiine. He is magic sensitive, with that nausea and scar aching thing going on, and a magic battery if anyone's into that, but he can't inflict his shapeshifting on anyone. Magic could force him to shift shapes in either direction, if plot ever calls for it!

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? LMF you can give me plot heavy if you wanted, but since we're in travel arc I'm presuming it's easiest as plot light stuff so do with me as you will.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Finn | Star Wars

[hatejakku]

PLAYER NAME: Lina
CONTACT: linatrinch or jb#9174 on discord
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: a ton of people but Invited by Beck (Star Trek's Dr. McCoy)

CHARACTER: Finn
CANON: Star Wars
CANON POINT: Post-The Rise of Skywalker


BACKGROUND: Wookieepedia


ABILITIES | POWERS:
The Force is quite literally the life force that touches everything. You know the spiel. Binds us, surrounds us, penetrates us, etc. There are individuals out there who are Force-sensitive, meaning that they can see and sometimes even manipulate the Force for their own use. This can range from larger amounts of empathy to knowing something before it happens to even floating rocks with your mind.

Finn is one of these Force-sensitive individuals. In canon, he hasn't shown the ability to float rocks or use any telekinetic abilities. But he can see the Force clearly and feel his connections to other people. He knows when something's wrong and he often knows how to fix it, even if it's this weirdly specific task that he couldn't possibly have known about beforehand. He could probably even communicate telepathically, too. All that said, he has the ability to learn how to use the Force in a telekinetic capacity and will probably do so in-game if emotions are high enough and the occasion calls for it.

His combat skills are less a power and more a noteworthy ability. Finn's been highly trained in combat since childhood. Hand-to-hand, short range weaponry, long range weaponry, etc. He's particularly skilled with a blaster firearm. His connection to the Force likely heightens these abilities.


PERSONALITY: Going to quickly sum up three positive and three negative traits.

+ Loyalty: Finn's loyalty to the people he cares about runs deeper than is probably healthy or wise. That said, he would do absolutely anything to help his friends (who are usually people he met five minutes prior). Growing up in a warzone, he's becoming quick to run into the line of fire for someone or something he deeply believes in. He also won't be easily swayed away from a friendship, not by a long shot. Sure, he gets frustrated with them sometimes, they fight and argue if it comes to that, but he'll always call his best friends just that even if he's grumbling about it. In the end, Finn would give quite literally anything for the right cause or the right people.

+ Curiosity: Growing up in the First Order, Finn didn't get to know the galaxy the way many others might. He didn't get to enjoy music or try different foods or take up new hobbies or even strike many (read: any) friendships. Now that he's away from the First Order, he's become deeply curious about everything and is eager to soak up as much information as possible. At the same time, this lends him a bit of innocence or even some naivety. This could give others the wrong impression of him when the things he's seen make him anything but naive. Still, he's finally getting the chance to enjoy life, and he takes that job extremely seriously.

+ Bravery: Finn's been in some terrible positions before, and he was terrified almost every single time. Eventually, there came a point in his life where he had to make a move even if he was scared to do so. Ever since then, he's done what has needed to be done, and fear never stopped him again. Having friends by his side and way too much experience dealing with frantic situations has helped his confidence in these matters, but it doesn't change how he feels most of the time. Still, he's the first to volunteer in dangerous situations, the first to take point, and sometimes the first to get injured. For him, it's worth it.

- Anxiety: Even though he's really good at keeping a clear head, Finn still gets struck with panic sometimes. When something stops going according to plan, he begins to get annoyed and short with others. More often than not, though, his complaints are usually correct and valid. But back to the point, Finn's a worrier. He dislikes not being in control of a situation and definitely doesn't like being kept in the dark. Usually, he combats this anxiety by taking matters into his own hands, which has a tendency to backfire when he does so too brashly. He still believes it's better than doing nothing or just fretting. Still, when his anxiety starts kicking in, he's quick to get annoyed or do something chaotic. Over time, he's learned to control and manage these impulses, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still happen from time to time.

- Paranoia: When taking control a situation, Finn's first step is considering every possible scenario. All of them. For the most part, this is actually a good trait to have. It usually means he's prepared for every outcome, not easy to catch surprised or unawares. At the same time, he's been known to go overboard. Finn tries to keep a weapon near him at all times, tries to keep his past guarded, tries to keep track of all of his surroundings. When he's anxious, he prepares for every worst-case scenario he can conjure when the answer could be something as simple as just talking. Still, it's not easy for Finn to stop this habit of assuming the worst. It's saved his life a few times, after all.

- Low Self-Worth: Finn's childhood was spent but not being a child or even a person. He was barely a soldier and more just a tool for the First Order. He's learned a lot since then, has gotten a name and decided he deserved better than what they had put him through, that he no one deserves that kind of treatment. When these sorts of things are brought into question or mocked, Finn will fiercely protect his right to exist as an individual with the same basic rights that everyone else has. And yet, growing up the way he had, some ideas are hard to kill. He still feels expendable, feels lesser and sometimes undeserving of the better parts of life. All he's known was war, no matter how badly he wants change. He does look after his health and well-being, doesn't have much in the way of self-loathing, but he still doesn't feel like he quite measures up to someone who grew up with a name and a family and a direction in life that doesn't call for violence.


SAMPLE:
• Event in Ximilia - Finn is in a firefight when a building collapses. Action heavy. Contains tw for injury, building collapses, npc death, etc.
• Previous post-event downtime - For something with significantly less drama and more variation regarding his day-to-day. Probably a better sample but written back in February.


INVENTORY:
• His clothes
• Blaster pistol


NOTES: N/A


IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Let's go big or go home. (If that works for you, lol.)

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

Yato | Noragami

[minorgod]

NOTE: App contains some manga spoilers regarding Yato's pre-series history/origin.

PLAYER NAME: Li
CONTACT: sojourney / Sphinx#5619
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Val gave me an invite!

CHARACTER: Yato
CANON: Noragami
CANON POINT: Post S2 anime + OVAs / end of chapter 39 manga

BACKGROUND: Yato @ Noragami Wikia | Noragami Overview @ Noragami Wikia | Noragami @ Wikipedia

Yato is one of the "8 Million Gods / Kami" of Japanese Shintoism, making him a divine being. In the Noragami series, gods are "created from human wishes", meaning they are "born" when someone prays for something to happen, and they "die" when no human remembers them. Stronger gods are those who've become popular (examples like Ebisu, Bishamon, and Tenjin in the series) and don't have to worry about being forgotten — their presence is ingrained into the Japanese way of life, so if they die, they simply reincarnate. Unfortunately, this isn't true for minor gods, who can fade away if they don't have anyone left who acknowledges them. This concept plays a huge role in the series and is central to Yato's character.

ABILITIES | POWERS: Yato possesses enhanced attributes beyond human capability, particularly speed, agility and stamina. He can't pick up a car and throw it, for example, or outrun one. He does display a seriously skewed relation with gravity though, ie; shown as able to leap all over the city by rooftop or to the top of a building in only a few jumps. He does injure quite seriously, shown to bleed profusely and require time for healing, but (in his own words) it takes a Regalia or a Phantom to make it stick. Regarding physical needs, he still eats and requires sleep like anyone, and gets drunk although it takes a serious amount of liquor to get him there. Being a War God, he also excels at combat in general, taking on Phantoms and even other gods (he's shown as equal in strength to Bishamon, who is reputed to be the strongest of the War Gods). He shares the same weakness to blight/corruption whether from Phantoms or from corrupted souls as other gods in the series. These impurities can only be cleansed with pure water, either from a shrine or from a pure-running stream. Left untreated, they will continue to spread causing severe pain and, if left to progress, death. (wiki)

Divine Perception / Possession → As a god, Yato has the ability to sense magical/spiritual creatures and effects - basically anything that registers as "not human". Particularly in the case of other spiritual beings, he may also (at the other player's discretion) sense their general alignment. This does not give him insight into their abilities etc, merely their overall delineation (such as "War God, God of Fortune", or the equivalents across other series.) As explained by Tenjin to Yukine, gods can possess humans temporarily, controlling their bodies while their soul is suppressed. It is also stated that doing so without an aim or intent is looked upon as a serious misuse of a gods' power, and can trigger a heavenly council if seen as serious enough to impact mortal lives.

Game Nerf: Both of these abilities will be available as opt-in options on his permissions post.

Teleportation → In the series, Yato and other gods are shown to be able to teleport instantly from one location to another. Yato typically uses this to get to his odd jobs quickly (usually while he's still on the phone with them), but has also been shown to use it to when called in other ways. The character Bishamon also is shown to arrive in the same manner to Kofuku's shop. Additionally, once gods have on official shrine recognized by Heaven (which Yato does at his canon point), they can teleport to and from Takamagahara at will (whereas previously Yato had to ask Tenjin to send him there).

Game Nerf: Yato's teleportation is limited to locations he has visited before and which do not otherwise have plot armor metaphysical restrictions on them.

Sword Techniques → Yato has the ability to use his weapon to perform additional effects on both mortals and other supernatural beings. In canon he's shown to use two prominently:
1. REND (斬 zan; "decapitation") - A killing blow used on a Phantom to destroy it, an ability possessed by all gods although the actual technique of each differs (wiki)
2. SEVERANCE (絶 zetsu; sunder; lit. "sever") - This ability cuts ties between two people (whether humans, shinki, gods, it doesn't seem to matter). This usually takes the form of them losing memories of the other person in some way. Several instances in the series infer that this ability is unique to Yato, as other gods have requested it from him.

Game Nerf: Since there aren't Phantoms, REND will become the ability to clear negative thoughts and lies from people, without harming them. SEVERANCE will result in the temporary erasure of a person or thing from a person's memory, but only for 72 hours before the memories come back exactly as they were. Both effects will be opt-in only.

PERSONALITY: Most people upon meeting Yato... don't get much of a 'divine being' vibe. They're most likely to encounter him being an enormous dork: loud and joking, without a great concept of personal space, prone to ridiculous outbursts and baited into trading insults, shameless about advertising himself as a god and/or his services as such... generally That Immature Guy who's about as un-godly like as you can get. And it's not that it's a mask — he really is a goofball — but it took him a long time to get this way, and this is the side of him that he wants people to see.

Yato's origin seems completely at odds with his current personality, almost intentionally opposite to it. His creator, a human man presently known only as Father, wished him into existence as the god "Yaboku" with the desire to "cull humanity", so Yato was literally "born" for causing chaos and death. This makes him a God of Calamity, who are feared and loathed by the rest of Heaven, and because of the atrocities he committed at Father's behest — countless murders, entire villages massacred, attacking men, women, and children with impunity — he's also been called a God of Depravity (stated as someone who can only steal happiness, not give it, and who causes those around him to suffer). For the first part of his life, he did so willingly, happily even, because Father praised him for it, and wove into him a near-unshakable belief that he was the only one who would ever appreciate what Yaboku did. Father even went so far as to tell him that he should never hope for a shrine, because humans would never build him one.

It wasn't until he secretly took on a second Regalia named Sakura (his first, was Hiiro/Hiki, also raised by Father as his "sister") whose shock and terror at his actions made him realize that what he was doing wasn't normal for gods, at least not those who were loved by people instead of feared. It was also because of Sakura, innocently misreading the characters of his name as "Yato" instead of "Yaboku", that he realized he could make choices outside of Father's wishes, and began going by this new name instead. But his past was not so easily shed, and Father not so willing to let him go, which ultimately results in Sakura's death. Although Yato returned to killing, becoming colder and more jaded with each century, he didn't forget what ideas that Sakura had planted in his mind about choosing a different path.

Fast-forward several more centuries, and it's clear that Yato has been trying to choose the kind of god he wants to be. Yato styles himself as a "Delivery God", often graffiti-ing his cell number all over the city and offering to grant people's wishes for 5 yen (the traditional offering at Japanese temples before praying for a wish). He takes on all kinds of odd jobs, everything from searching for missing cats to fixing leaky faucets, insisting on only taking ¥5 for the jobs, hoarding the coins with the intent of one day building himself a shrine by which he can be recognized, and dreams one day to be Japan's most revered god. At the heart of everything, that's Yato's greatest desire: to be recognized and appreciated. While he charges money to grant "wishes" of people, he's also strongly motivated by the genuine desire to help people, even when it comes at (sometimes great) cost to himself.

Meeting Hiyori and Yukine has been the best thing to happen to him - probably ever, or at least since meeting Sakura, because they encourage him to be better. Although he's shown selfless behaviour before such as choosing not to reveal to Bishamon that it had been Kazuma who had asked him to murder the Ma Clan, even though doing so could have abated her vendetta to try and kill him, even early in the series he's still shown to have a cold, cynical side to him. When Tenjin asks him to take care of a Phantom-infested area where people are drawn to commit suicide, Yato remarks that people who are willing to throw their lives away don't deserve to be saved.

But he grows, and he gets better.

When he takes on Yukine as a Regalia/shinki, Yato expects the rebellious teen to cause trouble, but even when those feelings escalated into causing enough blight to literally bring him to the verge of death, he refuses to give up on Yukine and revoke his name. Instead, he acknowledges the feelings that Yukine is going through as valid, but also pointing out that he has a new life to embrace, showing compassion without disqualifying the teen's state of mind.

A lot of the time, Yato comes across as very immature. He can be a bit of a perv, he blows his shrine money on absurd "good luck" trinkets (or worse, steals money from Yukine), he dreams up convoluted schemes to try and attract new followers. But even though he acts cool, at the heart of all the childish behaviour is a desperation of not wanting to disappear from people's memories. He's been shunned by other gods for being a God of Calamity, gone for centuries with no followers, meaning that he could literally disappear at any moment. When Ebisu challenges him for what he wants, he says "So I don't want to disappear, what's wrong with that?! I was born from wishes just like the rest of you!" He has constantly felt the need to prove himself or measure up to gods who have thousands or even millions of followers, creating a contentious relationship between them and with Heaven.

When he posts a selfie on Twitter and gets a single new follower (previously Hiyori had been his only follower), he's actually so happy he starts crying. When Hiyori makes him a tiny shrine, he's literally moved to tears by the enormity of its meaning. When Yukine risks his life and becomes a Blessed Instrument/hafuri, he's awed - not because of the stronger power, but because Yukine risked himself for him, becoming the first shinki to ever transform for him. Every single thing, no matter how small, that reminds him that he's making an impact on people's lives and isn't being forgotten has a monumental value to him. He treats those close to him as family, willing to do anything for their happiness and protection.

SAMPLE: Yato rubbed the oily residue from the water from the well between his fingers with a frown before rocking on his heels and standing back up. This was the third location in the villages he'd checked, and all of them had brought up the same tainted liquid. It doesn't feel like Blight, not like he's used to, but it feels distinctly unpleasant in a way that crawls down his spine.

His hand itches for Yukine's familiar scabbard, but his hafuri isn't here. Yato starts back up the path toward the village center, but stops as he sees one of the villagers ahead, at one of the ancient temples that seem so common around here. It raises a lot of conflicting feelings in Yato, seeing how freely the people of this place give worship to gods and spirits, but as one of the eight million...

Best not to think about that right now. The villagers seem only distantly polite as it is, he doesn't know how they'd react to a brand new god busting into the scene. Maybe he can amass a little goodwill first.

"Excuse me," he says with an open, easy grin once the villager appears to be done their offering. "Sorry to disturb you, but you wouldn't be in need of some deliveries or odd jobs done, would you?"

INVENTORY: His red flip cellphone, his yen bottle, and the handmade shrine that Hiyori made for him.

NOTES: Can't think of any.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-heavy sounds fun if available, if not, light is fine too.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

zhou fei, the legend of fei 1/2

[snowcleave]

PLAYER NAME: chel
CONTACT: pm this journal pls
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: former player new character, but also sheep invited me

CHARACTER: Zhou Fei
CANON: The Legend of Fei
CANON POINT: Post-series.

BACKGROUND:

- Descended from Li Zheng, a legendary hero, and raised by her mother who succeeded him as chief of the 48 Strongholds, Zhou Fei remained cloistered on the mountain until she was around seventeen years old. After her cousin, Li Sheng fails to cross the heavily trapped Ximo River, he and Fei are rescued by Xie Yun, a stranger with incomparable lightness skills who’s come to deliver a message to Fei’s father.

- When the message causes Fei’s father, Lord Gan Tang to leave the mountain and answer a dying friend’s request to take up command of the Anping Army in his stead, Fei spends the next year trying to cross the Ximo River and get away from the strongholds to reunite with him. Instead of making it out the back door via the river, she beats her mother, The Chief during the stronghold’s customary trials and wins the right to leave the mountain along with Li Sheng. Before leaving, Fei’s mother teaches her the nine forms of her grandfather’s sword form, Snow Cleaving Blade.

- The two are sent on a mission along with others from the strongholds to bring back the surviving members of the Wu family. Li Sheng attempts to run away and is pursued by Fei who fails to catch him or find her way back to the group. Instead, she stumbles into a hidden tunnel adjacent to the prison inside the Huo Family Fort where she discovers Xie Yun, Wu ChuChu, and her younger brother.

- After rescuing them and heading to Huarong to hide in the inn until the strongholds can be reached, Disha, a malicious sect founded and led by Shen Tianshu a defector of the Anping Army burn down the inn leaving Fei and Wu Chuchu, a cherished lady around the same age as Fei to hide while Disha turns the city upsidedown looking for Chuchu.

- Choosing to hide in the quarters of the city’s magistrate, Fei encounters a peerless master, Ninth Madam Duan living as the magistrate’s concubine. Madam Duan, a former paramour of her grandfather with questionable and varying levels of sanity ignores Fei’s apparent disinterest in inheriting her martial art form, Wilted Flourish Palm, and joining her sect.

- Despite Fei’s refusal, Ninth Madam forces the Wilted Flourish Palm energy into Fei, who is left unconscious while her body struggles to adjust to the warring energies inside it. During this time Xie Yun finds his way back to Fei and Chuchu while Disha continues to close in.

- Ninth Madam Duan makes her last stand against Shen Tianshu, the master of Disha Heights Manor while a somewhat recovered Fei and Xie Yun retreat. While waiting for word from Ninth Madam, Fei laments over how poorly she’s done on this mission, and how she’s better off just going home. As rumors of Ninth Madam’s demise reach the inn where Fei and Xie Yun are recuperating, the pair find themselves enmeshed in a conflict between Yin Pei, an underling of Azure Dragon Master, a very bad dude, and literally everyone else inside the inn.

- After it’s revealed that the subject of Yin Pei’s search, Ji Yunchen, Blade of the North has been living as the inn’s cook in hiding, Azure Dragon Master appears and the group is forced to work together to retreat. During this time, Ji Yunchen imparts his blade form to Fei, Severed Water Binding Thread, and the lesson that she never becomes too blinded by her own strength and greatness, lest it leads her to ruin.

- Fei’s conflicting internal energies return to haunt her in the aftermath of assisting with Azure Dragon Master’s downfall, and Xie Yun rushes her to the home of Madame Nichang, master of a theater troupe of martial artist dancers for help. Though she comes very close to dying, through Madame Nichang’s abilities Fei is brought back to health. During her recovery, Fei manages to reconnect with people from the 48 Strongholds and finally make her way back home.

- Her return to the 48 Strongholds is far from peaceful and serves as a turning point in Fei’s story. As Disha begins to launch their assault on the strongholds, Fei returns and defends it alongside her family and her friends despite tremendous odds. During this conflict, her mother returns, and Xie Yun reveals that he’s been searching for the Hai Tian Yi Se - the same mysterious artifacts that Disha has been searching for. After this admission he puts his life on the line to use skills Fei had previously not been aware he had, to help the people in the strongholds gain victory.

- Following this conflict Fei tells Xie Yun that she wants to join him in his hunt for the Hai Tian Yi Se, believing it to be evil because of all the pain and destruction that’s been wrought in the search to find it. Fei is unaware of both the formerly repressed and very fatal poison now moving through Xie Yun’s body and the fact that following Fei telling Xie Yun that she’ll travel with him her mother cordially invited him to get the fuck out.

- Departing the strongholds to look for him Fei calls upon the Peddler Gang to act as her eyes and ears, eventually tracking Xie Yun down while she pieces together the clues he’s left behind, finally forming a hazy picture of what’s happening that she can confront him with. After she tracks him down, gets the truth, and angrily promises that she will find a way to cure his poisoning despite his claims that it’s a hopeless cause. It only takes a few foiled escape attempts and getting handcuffed to Fei for Xie Yun to realize how serious about her promise she is.

- After another serious altercation with Disha leaves Xie Yun nearly incapacitated and on the verge of dying, Fei carries Xie Yun on her back in search of a shrine where she can beg Buddha to save him. Though she passes out before reaching her destination, the pair are saved by a mysterious old man who later reveals himself to be Xie Yun’s former master, along with more details of his condition and his past. He gives Fei a way to save Xie Yun and despite insurmountable odds, Fei leaves Xie Yun in Penglai and journeys across Jianghu for the things needed to temporarily restore his health and suppress the poison in his body for a while longer, buying him time until the solution believed to be contained within the Hai Tian Yi Se can be found.

- During this journey, Fei is relentlessly pursued by Disha. She also: comes to terms with the depth of her feelings for Xie Yun, befriends local martial icon and fashion legend Vermillion Bird Master, and works to continue piecing together the mystery of the Hai Tian Yi Se’s location. Each time she returns to Penglai with another ingredient, Xie Yun’s condition improves, and while they’re rarely conscious in the same place at the same time, that knowledge is enough for Fei.

- Once the poison in his body is temporarily abated and he wakes from his coma Xie Yun and Fei work together along with the group of friends and family they’ve amassed along the way to get between Disha and the Hai Tian Yi Se. Newly aware that it contains a medical scripture with the antidote for the poison still killing Xie Yun, Fei is driven to do anything to get to it before Disha does.

- Reaching the Hai Tian Yi Se is not without incident, and though she manages to recover half of the manuscript with the cure in it, Shen Tianshu of Disha retains the other half, along with part of a weapon-making manuscript detailing the process of making superior and nearly indestructible weapons. While in the winding catacombs where the treasure was housed Fei and Xie Yun also discover the private quarters of Lu Run, legendary scholar and hero, author of the medical manuscript they seek. While inside his rooms Fei finds a scroll detailing the Qiwu Technique which Xie Yun describes as “a little evil” and Fei pursues anyway.

- With time running out for Xie Yun, their friend Hecong, a physician specializing in poison works with what there is of the manuscript to make a cure for Xie Yun, while Fei prepares to face off against Shen Tianshu and the rest of Disha. Though the scrolls were damaged Hecong manages to make two concoctions, one that will cure Xie Yun, and one that will probably kill him faster. Fei swears him to secrecy and makes arrangements to take one of the brews to test on herself, but the doctor spills the beans to Xie Yun who knocks her out and doesn’t allow her to go through with it.

- While Fei is unconscious Xie Yun takes one of the concoctions made by Hecong, and she wakes to find him beside her, no longer awake and somewhere between life and death. With him barely hanging on, Fei attempts to use the Qiwu Technique, using energy to pull Xie Yun back from death, and passing out again from her efforts.

- When she wakes up Xie Yun is cured, and she wifes the hell out of him.

- With Shen Tianshu using the weaponsmithing knowledge gained from the manuscript in the Hai Tian Yi Se, Fei and her allies both within the 48 Strongholds and beyond make a plan to attack Disha Heights Manor and bring Shen Tianshu down before Disha destroy Jianghu. Making her final stand against Shen Tianshu, she manages to defeat him using everything she’s learned as a martial artist.

- The downfall of Disha brings peace back to Jianghu, and Fei returns to the 48 Strongholds with Xie Yun, where they live peacefully, educating and training the next generation of future martial artists.

ABILITIES | POWERS:

Fei is a martial arts master and highly skilled in both melee and hand-to-hand combat with a gift for combining different fighting styles to suit her needs. She has demonstrated a high level of aptitude for learning new forms of combat quickly, often only needing to be shown how to do something once before she can do it herself. The styles of martial arts imparted to Fei and utilized by her (often in unorthodox combinations) are:

Snowcleaving Blade Form - A blade form invented by Fei's grandfather Li Zheng the Blade of the South, practiced by her mother Li Jinrong, and handed down to Fei when she departed the mountain, Snowcleaving Blade Form is characterized by its spiraling movements and a resonance that rings through the sword as it moves. Renowned for its ability to break or damage weapons wielded against it. (a visual)

Mayfly Steps - A technique of the Qi School intended for when one opponent is facing many or otherwise outmatched, said to allow the practitioner to become a 'one-man tactical form'. Additionally, its high jumps are essential for evasive maneuvers. (a visual)

Wilted Flourish Palm - A technique of hand-to-hand combat well suited for subduing an armed opponent and using the momentum of their sword against them, 'catching the wind' of a sword strike and using it to disarm that opponent. This form of combat features open-palmed strikes and the targeted use of qi to amplify blows and snap blades. (a visual)

Severed Water Binding Thread Form - A blade form imparted to Fei by Ji Yunchen, the Blade of the North. Unlike its counterpart the Southern Blade, this form of swordplay features wide, sweeping motions, that place the sword further away from the body while still favoring a twirling, circular motion. (a visual)

Qiwu Technique - A mental technique described as "a little evil" it is not stated explicitly in canon what the parameters for this are. Fei uses it in a last-ditch effort to pull Xie Yun back from the brink of death, for all appearances, it seems to employ the generation and transfer of qi between the practitioner and another. (a (tearjerky) visual)
Note: Given the lack of information about this technique, it's very unlikely to get used by Fei in-game, however, it might be a fun topic in conversation, you never know!

Apart from these forms, Fei has demonstrated an ability to unlock her own acupoints, and both lock and unlock the acupoints of others, incapacitating their arms temporarily or knocking them out completely. Additionally, Fei is an experienced horserider, and very used to surviving in the wilderness.

2/2

[snowcleave]

PERSONALITY:

"What's there to be afraid of? Give me ten years, I'll flatten this entire mountain!"

Fei’s gruff exterior is both an honest reflection of the no-nonsense, up-front person she is inside, as well as the personal set of armor she has learned to hide behind for any number of reasons, the first among these being her mother. The Chief was harder on Fei than she was on either of the cousins that Fei grew up alongside. After her needing to be rescued as a child caused her uncle’s death, her mother was quick to make allowances for his children and devote extra time to their training while Fei was spared the praise afforded her cousins and often blamed and punished for things either of them did. This harsh upbringing was tempered by her father’s gentler nature, but it also taught Fei how to appear strong no matter what was happening, and not reveal how much she cared about winning her mother’s or anyone’s approval. Despite the way the Chief treats her, Fei holds her mother in such high esteem that she blames herself when outside circumstances force her to deviate off course during her first trip down the mountain, believing that if they had stuck to her mother’s plan everything would have been fine. This straying from the plan also causes her to feel as though she will return home in disgrace, even though she has upheld her sect’s rules and taken out several threats to the common people while being sidetracked.

Because of how sparingly she was praised, Fei’s first instinct is to bristle when complimented, partially because she just doesn’t know how to deal with it. Her gift for avoiding her own feelings was honed further while out in Jianghu traveling with Xie Yun. His lack of hesitance when it came to expressing his feelings or praising her perplexes Fei initially, and she makes short work of avoiding closeness until there is absolutely no way she can go on living in denial about what they mean to one another. Fei’s stubbornness also manifests itself in her relationship with Xie Yun in numerous ways. Once she learns about his poisoning she ignores any claim that it’s a hopeless cause and throws herself into saving him, going so far as to climb a mountain thousands of miles away in search of a cure.

Despite how brusque and easily provoked into a fight she can be, Fei’s principles make her a kind person underneath it all. She will help anyone who asks her for it, and is generous to share what she has, or knows with people she considers friends (though this is never without a bit of gentle ribbing along the way). Her friendship with Wu Chuchu exemplifies this. Though they come from very different worlds, Fei learns how to find commonality with Chuchu, and the pair become each other’s biggest cheerleaders through the ups and downs of their journey, supporting one another as they find their paths in life.

Life on the mountain also imbued Fei with a strong sense of justice. The rules of her sect prize putting the well-being of the people and the peace of the land above personal accolades, and while she absolutely loves to boast about her abilities, Fei will do the right thing because it is the right thing, and for no other reason. She is quick to put herself between danger and those unequipped to defend against it and will stake her life on doing whatever she believes is right.


SAMPLE: here and here

INVENTORY:
✓ The clothes on her back.
✓ A small carving of a sword hung around her neck with a cord
✓ Youhuang (Secluded Bamboo Grove): A sword crafted out of an unbreakable blend of metals by her counterpart, Xie Yun using the knowledge of weaponsmithing available in the Hai Tian Yi Se. It can cut through inferior weapons, most substances, and people.
✓ A roll pack containing an extra set of clothes, a tunic for colder weather, a flask of liquor, and a few days worth of dried foodstuffs.

NOTES: nope!

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? Plot-heavy could be fun but whatever works!