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


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Comments

Vi | Arcane (2/2)

[faceblocker]

ABILITIES | POWERS:

─ Physical strength and fighting skills. Vi is a brawler, and she hits like a truck. Her style is a mix of street-fighting and boxing. She was trained by an experienced fighter when young, but tends to incorporate a scrappier style picked up from the streets along with more brutal brawling carried over from her time in prison. She can read body language and learn to adapt. She's quick and surprisingly spry at dodging a lot of hits for someone so tanky. As a teenager she was able to singularly fight off several adult goons armed only with a pair of giant metal gauntlets. In prison, she grew a reputation over time for being dangerous and not someone for other inmates to mess with; it was bad enough that the guards tried to get her transferred because they had nightmares about her. She's shown punching concrete until it cracks, and the extreme weight of the Atlas Gauntlets don't seem to slow her down, so she is strong, to say the least.

─ Acrobatics. She might be solid muscle, but that doesn't mean she's slow or clumsy. She can be fast in a fight or when fleeing danger, and parkour is something her and her fellow fissure kids grew up learning. It's something she has perfected in order to better traverse the mean streets of Zaun, and sometimes to help them get up to and around the upper city of Piltover. Once she's familiar with a territory, she's comfortable swinging from pipes and hopping around rooftops.

─ Stealth. Although she may prefer to punch or kick her way through a situation, Vi got by with thievery growing up, so she's capable of sneaking when she doesn't get carried away by emotions. She's good at finding alternate routes and open windows where necessary, and she is able to sneak into Jayce's workshop without raising any alarms. She can probably lift your wallet and be gone before you know what happened.

─ Hextech: She doesn't personally know magic, but her "borrowed" Atlas Gauntlets sport magical engineering dubbed 'hextech' that she can utilize in battle, increasing her strength to a ridiculous degree. They can resonate with her and so far can create a temporary force-field around her (she can't control it yet). They have the potential to grow stronger the more she uses them.

─ Inking. Files from her prison stay reveal that she inked her own tattoos while behind bars (though she would have had help for the ones on her back). Negligible compared to her other talents, but something fun to include.

PERSONALITY:

As someone who was raised in an oppressive underworld, Vi carries herself like a survivor. She’s angry at the world, but she wouldn’t be so angry if she didn’t care so much for those she loves. She wants them to have a better life than she has. She wants others to do more than survive; she wants the oppressed to thrive. She wants this for herself, too, but has trouble addressing it, as she learned from a young age to take care of others before herself. She also isn’t sure she deserves better. Although her anger is massive, it still manages to be outweighed by her guilt, and both are ultimately born out of grief.

Vander, her adoptive father, tried to encourage her fighting skills and leadership qualities. This included reminding her of the weight on her shoulders as the designated leader of her sister and adopted brothers. Vander had his own responsibilities to the undercity, and treated Vi as a protégé in that regard, leaving Vi to do most of the parenting when it came to the other kids. He delegated to her, and she delegated to others. As a teen, Vi was good at giving direction and keeping the peace. Acting as more of a parent than a sibling most of the time, she is quick to shut down Mylo’s bullying, and she is just as quick to check on Powder’s well-being. In her role as a caretaker to her sister, Vi exercises patience when asking her to talk, and shows affection while encouraging her that her unique skills make her useful to the group. She does everything she can to build Powder’s confidence, even if it means sharing some of the group’s past mistakes to remind her that everyone has a bad day. Vi may be a strong fighter, but she doesn’t expect everyone to be. She tells her sister, "What makes you different makes you strong," and she means it. She values different skill sets, and she has no patience for bullying. Her compassion for underdogs, or those seen as ‘misfits’, is almost limitless.

Some of these traits, such as being a team player and showing affection, have lessened from her time in prison. She has become more isolated and distrusting, both in others and herself. Although she never loses confidence in her physical abilities, Vi’s trust in herself as a leader has been shaken to its core after losing everyone she’s ever loved, except for her sister. She’s quick to distrust others just as much, because she assumes either they’ll let her down, or she’ll let them down. Her miscalculations made in trying to rescue Vander from Silco, and the failure to properly handle her sister in the fallout, still haunt her. Even though she had only been a teenager at the time, she’s never been able to forgive herself, and it only worsens when she sees where her sister has ended up. Vi’s been trapped with her regret between concrete walls for years, leaving Powder to the mercy of Silco’s manipulations. Though she is quick to blame the corruption of Piltover enforcers and Silco’s machinations for her and Powder’s lot in life, deep down she blames herself most of all. Often it’s for situations that were out of her control when she was young, but unfortunately, Vander’s reliance on her being a leader only cemented these responsibilities. Even just before he died, he told her to look after her sister, and she failed him and Powder in that regard. Her guilt has a life of its own, and it guides her steps down a path of self-sacrifice. She can’t trust herself like she used to, and she can’t risk believing in others, but she has to hold onto faith that her sister can be saved, or else she fears she’ll have nothing left.

To reach this goal of making a better life for her sister, Vi rarely hesitates. Her courage is reactive (like so many of her traits). It can be useful in a fight, but at times, this breeds impatience, especially when emotion clouds her judgment, or she gets too cocky (such as when she kicks in a door before Mylo has a chance to pick the lock). She isn’t shaken by much, and can remain remarkably cool-headed when under threat, which is shown when another teenager threatens her with a knife and she just stares him down, or when a thug tries to corner her in an alley and she just notes his slick duds (which she promptly steals for herself). She rarely fears for herself. When afraid for others or overcome with emotions she never learned to deal with, however, Vi can get temperamental and careless. She fails to notice how easy it is to break into Silco’s warehouse to rescue Vander, until it’s too late. When overcome with grief, and partially guilt at discovering Powder’s hand in killing their adopted family, Vi strikes her and calls her a ‘jinx’. She immediately regrets both reactions, but the damage is already done. Before she can try to fix either situation, everything is taken from her, and she’s left without a healthy way to cope or anyone to comfort her.

Unsurprisingly, this all culminates in her rage being one of her most visible traits, to the point where someone might dismiss her as nothing but a ‘rage against the machine’ type. Vi never really had someone teach her how to deal with her emotions, since Vander had his hands full running his bar, the Lanes, and trying to keep peace between Zaun and Piltover. He did his best, but what Vi learned from him was to put others first. Even her calls for rebellion as a teenager weren’t for herself as much as they were for Powder’s future. She was taught how to take care of others, not how to be taken care of. As such, many of her own desires have been suppressed since childhood, except for that anger. When she’s emotional, it’s easiest to let this resentment and bitterness take the lead, because she at least knows how to use that. She knows how to fight, and that she knows she can do well. After losing her family and being arrested, Vi buries her kindness because there’s nobody left to share it with. At least, not within the prison. She still wants to find her sister and make things right, so she exercises a frightening amount of violence against the guards and other inmates to try and free herself or get information on Silco. She would even keep trophies of the weapons that other inmates tried to use against her, revealing a pride in her physical prowess over others. It can be a great strength, like when she uses it to initially overpower Silco’s lieutenant (Sevika) in a fight, but her tendency to get carried away or too reactionary with her emotions can also be a great weakness, leading Silco’s lieutenant to seize the moment and overpower her. Sometimes, it gives her tunnel vision.

This doesn’t mean that Vi only thinks with her fists. Under pressure, Vi has been shown to assess and adapt to tough situations. After realizing that they’ve been trapped by Silco and his men, Vi analyzes their surroundings and delegates jobs for Mylo and Claggor while preparing to hold the line for them. Later, she is initially caught off-guard by Sevika’s chemtech arm, but after a couple missteps, she focuses her attacks on Sevika’s weak points and uses the environment against her bulky frame by luring her into a narrow space. When given the chance, she understands how to use social connections and stealth to get information. After an enforcer (Caitlyn) frees her from prison, Vi takes her to a local eatery so that she can not only enjoy a good meal for the first time in years, but also to figure out where to go next. From there, she reconnects with a brothel’s madam to find out information on Silco and his lieutenant. While there, she reminds Caitlyn that if she wants information, she can’t expect others to give her what she wants; instead, she should “let them think she has what they want.” Vi encourages deception if it’s necessary, though she would rather tell someone exactly what she thinks to their face. "You're hot, cupcake," is her bold answer when Caitlyn asks just what she has that she can use.

This is also a rare moment where Vi lets some of her flirtier nature peek through, though to take it further than that would lead to intimacy, and that is something Vi has become frightened of. This ties back to her fear of letting people down, of losing them because of it. As such, it’s much easier for her to put up walls and keep them at a distance. With Caitlyn, who she first assesses to be just another self-serving enforcer, this is easy at first. She brushes her off as “like all the others”, at least until she begins to see just how much empathy Caitlyn holds. Vi has lived all her life for her sister, so she doesn’t know how to fit someone else into that narrow focus, but her feelings for Caitlyn grow despite. She shares a personal story from her childhood when they’re alone, and when Caitlyn’s safety is threatened by Powder (now going by Jinx), Vi makes the heartbreaking decision to get Caitlyn to safety and let her old friend Ekko confront Powder instead. In the moment, she chooses Caitlyn, but she doesn’t see it that way. She still wants to save her sister, but she isn’t willing to sacrifice Caitlyn to do so. Vi eventually rejects Caitlyn’s attempt to get closer, putting her walls back up so that she can regain her focus again: saving Powder. This doesn’t go as planned, since she chooses Caitlyn yet again when Powder kidnaps them both, then asks Vi to kill Caitlyn for the sake of their sisterhood. In Vi’s mind, she would do anything for her sister, but not that. But she isn’t rejecting her sister, and is heartbroken that her sister sees it as a betrayal.

In the end, Vi is harder on herself than anyone, and to mirror this she makes too many excuses for Jinx’s terrorism. Vi sees her sister’s behavior as her own failure to be a better sister, mother, friend, leader. She will never stop blaming herself, nor stop seeking something that can never be recovered. Her sister is gone, but she can’t say goodbye, because she’s too frightened of knowing what comes after. To survive such a fallout, she would need to accept a reality she isn’t prepared for.

SAMPLES:

─ Eastbound!TDM. Oh the yearning, oh the guilt.
─ Eastbound!TDM. Lil cranky around the Twelfth Doctor.
─ Apocalypse How!TDM. Slaughtering some ocean zombies.
─ Abraxas!TDM. Bar fighting and makin friends.

INVENTORY:

─ Her grimy clothes.
─ Atlas Gauntlets (right one is busted).

NOTES: If she's separated from Caitlyn, she will probably ignore that and just go to wherever Cait is situated. She can be sneaky when she wants to avoid attention, but can also draw attention if her temper gets the better of her, so who knows how long it would last before she got into trouble.

IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? I can go either way, so whatever helps things flow! The Vi in me is stronk.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

[groundrules]

[groundrules]

Heya — she's a good time, happy to have her.

One thing: we don't have a Caitlyn in game or apped at present, so we may have to decide Vi's citadel affiliation on irrespective of her. Since you have Vanessa in Minaras, putting Vi in with the dragons could help give you better access to plot from both directions. However, Minaras is closer to what Vi had going on back home. What's your preference?

[faceblocker]

Let's go with Eidris for this gal, so I can touch every corner of Serthica with my grubby hands.

[groundrules]

We've now had a Caitlyn in this round — since you've chosen different citadel alignments, would you like a common intro?

As a heads up: I'm asking the Caitlyn player the same thing. Both of you would need to agree to a common intro for it to happen.

[faceblocker]

By common intro, you mean like they're linked? That's totally cool with me, if it can work with the different alignments!

[groundrules]

Yeah, the intro'd be in the Mouse House, where everyone is recovering from the Unwinding — I figured common intro, since different alignments means fewer chances for Vi and Caitlyn to hang out at first.

[faceblocker]

Got it! Sounds good to me.

ACCEPTED

[groundrules]

Thank you for your application!

ADMIN

When you have a second, have a last read through the game rules and comment to the TAKEN LIST.

Join eastbound, lostcompass, westwhere. Feel free to make an OOC intro post on lostcompass, if you want, or wait for the intro & CR meme due up on 16 October!

All game updates are posted on lostcompass, but you can also follow eastbound. You’ll get a private message with an invite to the informal game discord server, once you comment to the Taken List.

If you’re not already served on that front, we have some custom codes to help you set up a character inbox or permissions post. Both are entirely optional, and feel free to customise at will!

Your character is exempted from activity requirements this month.

We are now in Arc IV: Sethica, and our latest game-wide event was The Unwinding. Your character can reach out to NPCs for investigations at any time. You can also handwave they’ve been brought up to date with the Arc Story So Far by party member NPC Karsa, if you so choose.

NOTES

Your character receives one of the shiny new Arc IV pocket watch translators and communicators, allowing written, video and audio interaction. It contains an inevitable clock portion, whose beat seems to get louder as time ticks towards 6:00 and 18:00. A sharp, tinny alarm rings at these times.

Vi is formally assigned to Eidris, where she is a dragon veterinarian: to everyone’s relief, dragons are immensely resilient, you’re mostly called in to examine and treat their sniffles with the same two-three pre-prescribed sniffles. Enjoy adorable dragons nipping your ankles.

Vi’s pre-assigned network username is magic wand.

INTRO

Vi joins the party at the end of the the U n w i n d i n g event. She wakes with everyone else in the Mouse House orphanage run by Ma’am Mariol, while the group negotiates its safe return overground.

Since Vi and Caitlyn are likely to remain birds of a feather, staying together, they can both experience the vast hospitality of the Mouse House. In exchange, Ma’am Mariol only asks the duo to run the occasional errand — picking up groceries, walking the children to the doctor’s or schooling, etcetera.

While on one such (milk, it’s always milk!) commission, Caitlyn and Vi might catch a glimpse of a few drunk men roughhousing in a small, dark alley. Their conflict progresses from name-calling to light punches to a proper brawl, until one drops a small wooden box (think: 20x20cm ) marked for the delicate use of the incense diffusers strewn across the Mouse House.

If Caitlyn and Vi retrieve the box when the men have gone and open it, they will find half of the contents comprise leaves, roots and flowers of foxglove, wisteria, passion flower and valerian — a not impotent blend of sedatives and plants that can lead to memory loss. Some of these herbs have already been ground in a small sack, prepared for use in the diffusers.

The box bears the insignia of one of the Minaras governmental medical facilities found overground.