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groundrules) wrote2021-01-08 03:30 pm
groundrules) wrote2021-01-08 03:30 pm
Entry tags:
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.
APPLICATIONS CLOSED
→ NAVIGATION MENU
bai mingyu // oc
CONTACT:
CHARACTER: Bai Mingyu // Gabriel Bai
CANON: OC - Impetus universe
CANON POINT: May 2018 - One year post the (2017) disappearance of his then-boyfriend, Emmet "Fox" Martin
BACKGROUND: Mingyu's setting is a real world urban fantasy AU, based in a reality where magic has always existed and has been cultivated/developed right alongside technology. He's a second generation Chinese immigrant to Toronto, Canada, one of the major international hubs of magic society.
In Impetus, magic is traditionally passed down generationally through established bloodlines. It's its own kind of aristocracy, with each family specializing in a few select schools of magic which they improve on and build upon in their lifetimes before passing on to their children. Mingyu comes from a particularly prestigious pedigree, the Bai family, at times referred to by the media as the Bai Dynasty. His is one of the longest surviving magic families, with roots dating back to the 1300s.
Once a sprawling empire of hundreds of distant relatives, their numbers began to dwindle in the late 1800s and by the end of WWII, only two brothers remained. Of those brothers, only one married and they had a single son, Mingyu's father, who later married Mingyu's mother and had him. Once Mingyu's grandparents passed, the three of them were all that remained.
When Mingyu was 16, both his parents were killed in what, as far as Toronto police could tell, was a robbery gone wrong. This left just him, a sweet, doe-eyed teenager, newly orphaned, as the sole inheritor of the entire Bai legacy. Seven centuries of papercraft and puppetry from his father alongside a little over four centuries of divination and warding magic from his mother fell upon the shoulders of a teenage boy.
Overnight, he became a media sensation.
Mingyu took that pity and turned it into fame. He built his own empire out of the tragedy, and leveraged his mass adoration as a shield. He sold his childhood home, hired an accountant and a public relations manager, and never once looked back. He spent the next four years nurturing a sanitized blank slate of a public image, selling an idealized version of himself to maintain both his popularity and place in the public eye while holding the world at a professional distance.
For all of his followers, for all of his TV interviews and product endorsements, Mingyu led a solitary life. The media greedily consumed all he fed it, but none of it was any real part of himself. It was all a smokescreen. The charming personality, the claims to his parents' legacy, all of it. Off camera, he lived alone in an upscale loft he bought the year his parents died, practiced nothing but his mother's warding magic in an effort to safeguard all they left in his care, and whiled away the days collecting creature comforts and cooking for himself, some pale mimicry of what he lost. He took no risks and suffered no losses, a bystander in his own life. His only companion was a familiar his parents helped him create when he started high school, a little turtle made out of silk cord he named Wugui.
Then, he met Emmet Martin, better known as Fox.
In a night that would transform the rest of his life, Mingyu found him wounded in the stairwell of his apartment and did the only thing he could. He let Fox into his apartment, into his life, and nothing was ever the same again. Though Fox fled halfway through the night, they continued to run into each other in their day to day lives. First, by accident, then by design. Fox would leave him secret messages graffitied onto properties near his house, put on performance art through magic and dedicate it to Mingyu in everything but name. Mingyu, thinking himself clever, would quote poetry that alluded to foxes during interviews, grinning into the camera.
They finally caught up to each other again at the Toronto International Film Festival in fall of 2011. From there, they were fast friends, and though it took some time and shenanigans (including each of them pretending to date a female friend), the following year they exchanged heartfelt confessions on a snowy rooftop, kissed, and truly became inseparable.
For the next five years, they planned and built a life together. They brought out the best in each other, Mingyu balancing out Fox's restlessness, giving his life badly needed structure. Fox taught Mingyu a passion for magic that he'd never possessed before, slowly unearthing his parents' journals and taking up the family traditions.
By mid 2017, Mingyu was considering marriage. Would have brought it up already, were it not for the complications of his public life at direct odds with Fox's notoriety and love for slipping under the radar. But he planned to bring it up, had gone over what he would ask, what he would say a hundred times, planned a thousand different proposals to surprise Fox with. (Because it was Fox, Mingyu knew it was possible to both ask him about a marriage and still catch him off guard with a proposal all the same.)
And then Fox started acting cagey. He had somewhere he had to be and wouldn't tell Mingyu where, or what it was about, or how long he would be gone. They had a fight over this, Fox left, and Mingyu never saw him again.
Putting together the pieces after the fact, Mingyu found out that Fox had been blackmailed, taken by parties interested in creating a large magic array capable of unheard of destruction. Fox was one of the only people alive that was talented enough and versed in enough schools of magic to even attempt such a thing, and some of the world's most powerful, influential people were directly behind his disappearance.
To get Fox back, Mingyu would have to do the one thing he'd avoided all these years.
He'd have to play the game.
Since Fox's disappearance almost a year ago, Mingyu has done nothing but entrench himself in the upper echelons of magic society. He debuted himself on the world's stage, stepping fully into the mantle of heir to the Bai Dynasty. He schmoozed, he courted, he manipulated, he schemed.
He obsessed.
Finding Fox is all he has lived and breathed, to the point of creating his own dark, destructive magic, because his mother's traps and wards no longer serve their purpose to keep him safe. He is not safe, will never be safe so long as Fox is not with him. So Mingyu's immaculate defense has slowly warped into a twisted offense. Hope staved off the worst of his darkness for the first four, five months, but as despair set in so too did madness.
Mingyu as he is now believes Fox is dead, and yet he still keeps going.
It's all he can do.
Because if he can't save Fox, then he's sending every last person even tangentially involved to accompany Fox to the next life.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Specializing in trap and warding magic from a young age, Mingyu has since branched out into several other magic disciplines.
Currently, he is skilled at
- creating protective wards and area based traps through papercrafts and talismans
- offensive/defensive/regenerative magic through use of paper talismans
- transfiguration of silk cord into exact replicas of any item he's familiar with the properties of
- divination through incense and meditation
- ability to read an object/location's past through touch via a tattoo enchantment on his wrist
- enchanting physical objects
- memory alteration
- physical puppetry of a single subject he has line of sight of
He also has several tattoos imbued with magic. Two are currently dormant/useless as they are two halves of one tracking spell; a magpie on the back of his left hand and a fox on his left wrist. A small crescent moon tattoo on his left temple prevents him from remembering his dreams. Last but most notably, he has a blue lotus blossom on his inner right wrist. When activated, its petals unfurl to reveal a bright green eye which will show both Mingyu and his target any memory Mingyu asks for as though they are living it. He cannot prevent the subject from also seeing what he sees, and if any injuries are sustained by the subject in the memory, both parties will sustain a facsimile of that injury. Minor wounds are mirrored exactly, while major trauma such as amputation manifests as pain and a deep laceration at the amputation site. Mingyu is not a tattoo artist, but is able to assist in the creation of magically enhanced tattoos through the creation of magic inks.PERSONALITY: Mingyu's public facing persona is polished and sanitized for public consumption. He has a smile he's learned to weaponize, never met a question he couldn't dodge, and maintains a carefully maintained blank slate of a personality for onlookers to project their own fantasies upon to maximize his popularity. The world knows him as a charming, composed young man who is kind and generous, thoughtful and gentle. At the same time, there are presumptions of his talent and capabilities. By all accounts, Bai Mingyu is the ideal heir, studious and dedicated, tragic and beyond reproach.
In private, he is far less ambitious. Before meeting Fox, he had an inherent dislike of magic. He associated it with his parents and everything they were involved in, leading up to their death. He practiced only what made him feel safe, what could be used to keep himself and his inheritance secure. Up to the age of sixteen, Mingyu was a bubbly, outgoing, happy boy who thrived under the care of his loving parents, and after sixteen he became a shut-in, a recluse who spent all his time and energy simply trying to survive. Depression and anxiety dogged his every step, weighed him down so heavily he couldn't imagine and didn't want anything more than the careful life he eked out for himself in the shadow of his family's legacy.
He changed when he met Fox. He found joy again, learned to take risks again. Fox gave him hope, balanced him out, put him back on track of being the responsible, promising young man he'd been prior to his parents' deaths. Allowed to stay on this track, he may have been able to join his public persona with his true self, bridging the gap between the two by gaining a real appreciation of his family's magic, properly taking up the mantle of Bai family heir, and slowly offering up real, substantial parts of himself with the world instead of his usual bland, inoffensive non-answers.
But that didn't happen.
Losing Fox, losing his family a second time in his young life, changed him again, this change far more drastic than anything that came before. Some light in Mingyu went out, and his increasing desperation and despair came to color everything he did, everything he saw, everything he felt about the world.
Mingyu as he is now, rapidly coming up on the one year anniversary of Fox's disappearance, is more wounded animal than man. He remains an impeccable actor, able to summon a too-polished smile at a moment's notice. Years of practice in front of the camera makes him capable of projecting whatever image he feels will benefit him most in the moment. Behind that shining princely demeanor, however, is something far darker.
Depression has turned to a deep self-loathing, anxiety turned to bitterness and resentment. He blamed magic for the loss of his parents, but he blames himself for the loss of Fox. He's crossed lines in his search for Fox he knows he can't come back from. He's burned bridges, sacrificed morals, opened a pandora's box of magic as it should never be used. Though finally utilizing the full extent of his talents, the divide between who he presents himself to be and who he truly is has grown more stark than ever, and he has no hope and no intention of reversing this. Mingyu as he is now has only one singular goal, and he will do whatever it takes to reach it.
Outside of the high stakes of his setting, Mingyu is a fairly bitter, sarcastic, and somewhat scathing person, unable to resist the ability to let loose and tell people what he really thinks. He's rude and apologetic, unafraid and in fact largely unconcerned about the hurt he may cause because he's had to get very comfortable with the idea of collateral damage. At the core of it, however, he remains a lonely young man, lost somewhere inside himself. His callousness comes primarily from the fact he's given up on himself. It doesn't matter what he does or says, who likes him and who doesn't (provided of course that they are of no real use to him), or what happens in his day to day because he doesn't matter. Where he ends up doesn't matter.
There is only one thing that matters, and that's Fox's rescue or revenge.
SAMPLE:
link 1
link 2
INVENTORY:
NOTES: He's just a cultivator with Instagram and Twitter stans.
APPLICATION RECEIVED
ACCEPTED
Aaaaaaaaall aboard… the absentee caravan! Thanks for applying and welcome to the game.
A few loose ends, for your pleasure:
ADMIN
NOTES
no subject
Re: the nerfs. Works for me! Just spritz me with ye olde water bottle when you need him to calm down. Full disclosure is I 100% wrote the latter power to be as sexy as possible when prying out cagey character trauma from other people. The silk cord thing can just be unreliable no prob and he doesn't use it much to begin with. (I.e., I forget he has that power, because it's not as sexy as making people bleed.)
Whose dick does he have to suck to get some nice gloves instead of having to cosplay a JRPG protag as drawn by Akira Toriyama?
no subject
HMMMMMMMMMMMM stay tuned, I think I have an opportunity in mind, to combine the good (blind) favour Xiao Xingchen will get with Mingyu's glove needs.