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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
stephen strange / mcu
Seeing that the universe is not just the universe, not just empty nothingness and lumps of floating rock but a vast multiverse teeming with life and with terror and with unfathomable beauty, his mind opened. All the curiosity, imagination and drive to learn that are innate in him rekindled. He wanted there to be more to the world than cold indifference. He wanted desperately to fight to keep hold of that unfathomable expanse, to explore the impossible, know more, and in doing so he began to recover. Through hard work, focused dedication and careful guidance, he regained control over his own life, overcame his hatred of his disability and learned that his worth was intrinsic, not tied to his hands.
Being introduced to the multiverse saved his life. It reignited his imagination and his will to live after his accident, was the stepping-off point for rediscovering himself and redefining his identity, and the beginning of a journey that would ultimately lead him to abandoning the persona he’d built up over the years so he could find out what he was capable of without it. Turns out, he actually had quite a lot to offer the world, neurosurgeon or not.
For a long time, his Hippocratic Oath was a moral code he took for granted - most notably the pledge to do no harm. Easy enough when you're a super rich neurosurgeon with a perfect surgical record, but it became flexible fairly swiftly after becoming a sorcerer and has loosened up more and more ever since. Initially he felt awful for killing a man in self-defence and vowed to never do it again, but by the end of his first movie he was sending the human antagonists off to suffer an agonising eternity in another dimension. His friend Karl Mordo's rigid morality had him leave the Masters of the Mystic Arts altogether, and Strange recognised that being too strictly bound to a personal philosophy can be as detrimental as not having one at all. By Infinity War he was making decisions which affected the lives of billions where the best case scenario still necessitated deaths and came with collateral damage in the millions (if not billions universally).
This revised code allows him a lot more flexibility of action - he'll do his best to use his tactical ingenuity and imagination to find solutions which avoid causing significant harm wherever possible, and he’ll opt for the non-lethal option where there’s a viable one every time, but ultimately he considers himself responsible for saving lives and protecting reality first and foremost and will do what he must to achieve that end no matter the personal or moral cost.
Still, he’s only human. Having had to make such a massive decision during Thanos’ attack, witnessing the consequences of his choice on the world around him has left Stephen with some pretty extreme guilt. He knows he did what was necessary, but he also knows the harm that choice has caused, and that guilt saw his decision-making skew away from risk and back into the lap of cost/benefit analysis - exactly the fear response it had taken becoming a sorcerer to grow out of in the first place.
Fear has had a grip on him since the loss of his sister. As a young man he hunted down professional progress with a fervor born of fearing the consequences of failing to succeed - in this case, an inability to save lives. It saw him sculpt himself into a perfectionist, someone with a perfect record and prestigious skill, and somewhere along the line that skill got to his head. He became arrogant. He wouldn't let the patients he determined he couldn't save past his secretary, would cycle through the scans of the grievously injured in search of the most interesting cases where his ego convinced him only he could possibly succeed. He turned his focus to research in order to ~help thousands~ and refused requests to commit himself to saving lives in the ER, gave speeches at galas and conferences, appeared on TV to discuss medical research developments-- he became addicted to the lifestyle, to his success, self-absorbed and unable to see far beyond his next accolade or dinner party.
His fear of losing all that did a number on him too. He'd wrapped his identity so completely up in the life he'd built that when he was faced with losing it he couldn't handle it. Rather than accept things as they were he underwent operation after operation, seeking out ever more experimental surgeries to fix what he'd broken. He sold everything he had and damaged his friendship with a woman who had cared for him through his recovery and whom he loved in desperate pursuit of regaining his steady hands and claiming back his life, as though his hands were his only worth.
It’s a bad habit. When backed into a corner or challenged on things he doesn’t want to have to think about, when he knows he’s wrong and doesn’t want to be or thinks he’s right and isn’t, his fear comes out as anger. He’ll lash out, use his wit to be as cruel as he can in a way that is as specific as possible to whoever it is that’s challenging him. Make his own fear somebody else’s problem. Out of practice with being vulnerable, he’ll avoid it and attack when he doesn’t feel comfortable enough with somebody or a situation to discuss things straightforwardly or confess his fear.
Fortunately, his latest outing helped to pull him back from the descent into the worst of his old habits. His trajectory was mirrored back at him when another version of himself chose to kill a child, America Chavez, in order to prevent her being used by then-unknown evil forces, telling her that in the grand calculus of the multiverse her death was worth more than her life. The grand calculus of the multiverse - distant, analytical, impersonal. When it came time for him to make the same choice, he chose not to take the ability to save the multiverse into his own hands by taking her life but instead encouraged America to take control of her own power. It was a risk that paid off considerably more than his killing a child and continuing to fight against a woman who massively outguns him could have. With this outcome, a lesson learned: it’s worth the risk to put your faith in other people. Going forward, he’ll be more ready to consider relying on the strength of others and to hand over control when his aren’t the best hands to hold it. Hopefully. Sometimes. We’ll see.
Stephen’s a serial self-sacrificer when it comes to achieving his potential. Since sacrificing almost all of his worldly wealth to try and regain the fine motor function in his hands which he went on to sacrifice again when sorcery equipped him with the power to do so, he’s put himself bodily between cosmic entities and his own dimension to die untold times in a time loop of his own creation, acted alone to make decisions about the fate of the universe and felt the weight of the choice he made every day since, dreamwalked into his own corpse earning the damnation of his eternal spirit, let his relationship with his ex go dormant and not sought out anyone new in spite of his growing isolation and unhappiness. In short, he’s been slowly giving up pieces of his own humanity to grow in his potential as a sorcerer for years, and there are very few places he’ll draw the line so long as he thinks the growth will be worth the cost: and so long as the cost is to himself, and not to others.
An excessively emotional but also terrified nightmare man with such previous hits as ‘I told my ex-girlfriend on her wedding day that I’m sorry we didn’t work out’ and ‘I told an alternate universe version of said ex-girlfriend who I’m probably never going to see again that I love her in every universe and I’m single because I’m scared of emotional intimacy’, it’s unsurprising that the man has a child’s drawing of a wonky-looking smiley face where his emotional wellbeing ought to be. There was a time when keeping himself on emotional lockdown served him - as far as switching out integrity for success could be called a service - but between being dressed down by the one-time love of his life for his inability to give up control and running into an alternate self who was so unhappy that he traveled the multiverse possessing other Stephens and having them kill themselves to put them out of their misery… it’s time to run some course correction.
By the end of Multiverse of Madness he’s working on it, starting to push past his own discomfort with emotional vulnerability to try for honesty, opening up to and offering support to Wong to acknowledge for the both of them that saving the world doesn’t buy you happiness, but it’s going to be a long road. All told, he’s a man on the self-improvement highway. Stubborn, arrogant and domineering at his worst, playful, curious and compassionate at his best, he does a lot of flip-flopping between the two, but he’s getting there. Capable of kindness to strangers, cruelty to friends, really bad jokes at inappropriate moments, both good and terrible mentoring of youths who he invariably ends up helplessly fond of either way, friendship with sentient outerwear, professionalism in the face of universal calamity, wonder at the new, and owning novelty mugs, Stephen Strange remains a forty-something wizard man out here doing his best to be good at his job without forgetting that he’s still only human.
SAMPLE: tdm. If there’s not enough variety here lmk and I’ll write something up or try to dig up some meme threads!
INVENTORY:
His wizard robes
His wizard boots
His wizard belt
One Cloak of Levitation, recently patched (this cloak is sentient and capable of self-directed levitation, it flies him around and occasionally tries to suffocate people for him)
One sling ring (two-finger ring, tool for portal creation)
The Eye of Agamotto (this amulet once opened sheds light on magical/extra-dimensional stimuli within its ‘eyeline’, making them visible to onlookers. will need Stephen to open it or teach someone how to open it to use - this has basically the same function as opening his third eye, only it can be used to show hidden stimuli to more than one person.)
A comms & translation amulet as of the tdm
A desert suit as of the tdm
A little blobby friend as of the tdm
NOTES: n/a! Miraculously I have nothing else to add.
IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? I’m happy to just sail in off the back of his tdm arrival if that’s okay!
APPLICATION RECEIVED
ACCEPTED
Thank you for your application!
ADMIN
NOTES
INTRO