Abraxas Application
Aug. 3rd, 2021 11:47 amOOC INFORMATION
Player Name: Hats
Are you over 18?: Twice that
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: Jon Sims
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Some ovMennet
Canon: Original Character
Canon Point:
Background:
Children, gather close, link hands, and listen to the stories the stones tell us.
Before the families were the gods. Water, Earth, Light, Air, and Void were one, and they were happy together. But they wanted children, and had none. They tried to make children, each putting their essences into this vessel or that and creating life in that manner, but the new creatures were animals, thoughtless and wordless, and not children. They tried and tried. They created the crawlers and creepers and fliers, the swimmers and the tunnelers. But none of them were children. One by one, the gods ceased to be willing to try, until only Earth and Light still strove together.
Together, they created the great shifters, the enormous worms that roll beneath her surface, and make it tremble and move. And she cried out at the pain of their birth, because they too were mindless, and flung Light away so he ran to seek comfort from Air. And Earth retreated into herself, deep into the chasms and folds of her body, into the great black of her heart.
Everywhere she went inside herself, she found grief. It riddled her with cracks, filled her with holes, tied the cords of her heart into knots. And she followed those cracks and those knots with her fingers, and read them, and read aloud the word there, a word she had never known before, the name of the first Grue. And so Crux was born into her arms, from the place where six cracks meet in the heart of Earth, and she finally had the child she needed so very much.
When she came back to the surface of herself, holding her daughter, the other gods all crowded around, each wanting to hold her, to dote on her as parents. But Earth remembered all those failures, remembered the way they had, one by one, stopped sharing her nest and left her to the pain of childlessness alone, and she shielded her daughter from them, sending them away with excuses and errands again and again, keeping Crux in her own arms and hers alone.
Only Light noticed how angrily she watched them all, how jealously she guarded the infant. And so he went to her, late in the night, to remind her of how he had tried to help her until she had driven him away. Still, she spurned him, and he left in a rage that towered high, and as she had, he fled deep into his own body. It was anger, not grief, that made him search for names in his own bones until he found them. Fire, he read from the convergence of six winds, and his temper flared to life as its own soul, greedy and forever furious, and Spite, he read when six chasms yawned, and Meat were born from the places where his body invaded hers, seeking and grasping and many.
And that is how Grues and Meat came into the world, my children, before the families. But do not be afraid. Because Earth gave us teeth like obsidian, and gemstones for eyes, and hunger of our own. And Void gave us the Somes, so that the great shifters shouldn't kill us, because they are part of Light as well. Be wary the Meat, for they ally with Fire and live in Light's protection, but they are soft and blind, and they cannot speak or reason. And they are ours to eat, for when they are all gone, Earth will forgive Light for their creation, and all the gods will be happy again.
If Grues wrote history books, that would be the first chapter of every one.
Actually, they are the product of alien tinkering with human genetics, a semi-failed culling project that was abandoned on Earth centuries ago by a race that calls themselves The Shepherds. But to a grue, a stone knife is the height of technology, and stories told around the cavern are the only history they know.
Grues are a man-eating species living in the caves and deep, dark places of Earth, in a parasitic relationships with the humans on the surface. They were created to be dependent on human flesh, though can live on other intelligent or near-intelligent species if absolutely necessary, at a health deficit. So long as the species isn't herbivorous.
They have a scent which is appealing to humans, to the point of luring unwary humans away into the dark. They do not need to eat often, and they do not sleep at all. They are short-lived, with 20 being the average and 25 being an extreme outlier.
Though his Earth is current with IRL history, the humans do not know about the grues except as the roots of a series of myths and fairy tales. (To the humans of his world, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood is not eaten by a wolf, but by a Darkling, a Scandinavian boogie monster based on Grues. “Oh grandmother, how good you smell,” is a line from their version of the tale. Some doesn't know this.)
Grues are photophobic, supernaturally sensitive to light. They have eight eyes, all of them very sensitive to one spectrum or another, allowing them to see in the lightless depths of the caves. The eyes have a defensive enzyme reaction, a catalyst that is released into the vitreous humor to make it opaque under the assault of bright or sudden light, protecting the optic nerve behind. This slowly fades, over a period that can last hours or days, restoring the sight. Their fur is extremely flammable, and their skin burns to a dangerous degree almost instantly in direct sunlight or bright firelight. Light that does not come from specifically flame does not affect them as much.
Grues have five biological sexes in approximately equal proportions. Societies vary across the world, but in Some's locale, society is a tribal meritocracy, with the most productive members of any tribe in control regardless of of sex. Inters like Some, being the smallest on average and not having fangs, are very rarely the leaders, typically falling into the fifth-position in any family unit. They are, however, the traditional magic users, the Somes. Not all inters become Somes, but all Somes are inters. (Mennet is my character's birth-name, but he does not now consider it his name at all except to distinguish himself from other Somes. Some ovMennet = Some who-was-Mennet)
A Some is the emergency exit for a cave-dwelling tribe, the 'shortest path.' In the event of an emergency (and most emergencies below ground involve falling rocks or flash flooding), they can rapidly remove their tribe-mates to a safe location via a limited form of teleportation. For this reason, they are bound to remain close to the family core, in reach. An apprenticeship system ensures that they know the way to safe locales without having to go far in search of them.
Forty-odd years ago (three generations, by grue standards), the volcano known by humans as Mount Saint Helens and by grues as Missing-Light erupted, caving in many of the local caverns and killing many whole tribes. Before that eruption, there was inter-tribe raiding and occasional killing. Paranoia hasn't yet faded, though the cease-fire has lasted. The only regular interaction between tribes is occasional group-hunts, seasonal swapping of storytellers, and arranged marriages. Intermarriage is the norm, but always results in the new five-set settling in the tribe with the lowest numbers, for good.
Magic aside, their technology level is relatively stone-age. Once in a while, human technology (spun and woven rope and cloth, for instance, and wood- and stone-working) filters in, but on their own, grue technology progresses quite slowly. Their 'written' language is currently in the process of moving from being an intricate tally-work of knots in twine to rudimentary carved hieroglyphs. They have not, yet, found a reason to invent or borrow the wheel. They see no value in paper or things written on it.
They have a strong sense of art, almost entirely tactile. Music is uncommon and entirely ritual, dedicated to one of their five gods (Earth, Water, Air, Light, Void), combining singing with simple bone pipes and drums. No use for visual arts in the lightless caves. Storytelling is a daily ritual, and storywalks, a complicated sort of art installation, are revered. Scarification is common, but never casual. Magic is most often tied into the marks, occasionally into storywalks.
Some ovMennet himself was born 31 years after the eruption, the fourth of nine children, in the River-Eaten tribe of the Shaking Walls caverns. He was chosen to be a Some when he was two by his parent Some ovKepim, and has been raised so ever since. He was marked with his Name at four, a detailed scarification on his back that allows him to teleport. At seven, he became an adult and was made responsible for the home-bound, the very young and very old of his tribe. His parent Some ovKepim remains responsible for the out-bound, the able-bodied adults and older children. There is one more Some in his tribe, ovBorit, but he's only three. Some tries not to play favorites among his siblings, cousins, and niblings, but it's definitely Some ovBorit.
Some knew the exact shape the rest of his life would take. He was promised into a relationship with four other young grues from three other tribes, but he was the lowest-status of the set, and knew he was kind of a pity-choice, included because his tribe was severely underpopulated and needed the new hunters. When the highest-ranked member of the betrothal was killed hunting, it fell apart. He only ever even got to meet one of the others, a female named Shan from the next-nearest tribe.
It took two years to arrange that betrothal, and with its collapse, Some, already 9 and approaching midlife, realized how little he knew about the world. He'd never been farther away from his cavern than someone could walk on a single full belly. He met fewer people in his life than he had fingers. He'd never been on a hunt, or seen the surface, even though it is no so high above River-Eaten that he couldn't reach it.
Some prayed to Void, the trickster and the god of Somes for guidance before asking his parents if he could, just once, go with a hunt and see the surface. He never expected them to say yes, but they did, and he went with the hunters on their very next expedition.
But when he met the creatures they hunted, and one screamed, he understood its cries for help. And he saved it, and took it back to the surface, and never returned.
Suitability: Some is burning (lol) to learn as much as he can. About anything. He'll do great in any setting he can throw himself into learning things, and he'll align himself with whoever seems willing to teach him and isn't openly cruel.
Powers:
Teleportation - Some can teleport under three conditions: 1) The scars on his back are undamaged and uncovered. 2) He has been from point A to point B before, via the real world. His magic has to know the route, so to speak. 3) He's carrying less than ~5x his own weight. Being attached to something however tenuously counts as carrying it. Tie a string between his wrist and a doorknob; he may as well be carrying the whole house, and he's not going anywhere. This power is subject to fatigue.
Dark Vision - Each pair of his eight eyes sees a different part of the spectrum, resulting in vision that extends far, far outside the range of visible light. As long as darkness is the lack of light and not the presence of obstruction, Some can see. He is, however, mostly colorblind except in cases of vivid red.
The Draw - Grues have a faint nonspecifically-appealing scent, the purpose of which is specifically to soothe and lure humans on his world. If it works on humans of other worlds, I will leave up to individual players.
Sleeplessness - There is no such thing as an unconscious state for grues. They can't sleep, pass out, or be knocked unconscious, though things that would do so to a human are probably still incapacitating to a grue in some manner.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Some wasn't even there for the most impactful moment of his life. He heard about it later, weeks later when his parent, Kins the Storyteller, asked him to follow her to the chamber where she kept her bones – it was a private space, one of the only ones in the tribe, and his hackles rose slightly as he stepped inside.
She sat him down, sat with him flank to flank, and put two arms around him as she told him that Sella, the hunter from the Sky-Bone tribe, had been killed on the surface.
He sat still, letting his parent stroke the fur between his shoulders, but he didn't think he needed comforting. Those were his first thoughts – why do I feel so little? Sella was supposed to have become his partner, before this year's icing, along with three others from two more tribes. “What- does Kerk now?” he asked, thinking of the only one of the arrangement that he'd actually met. Kerk was from Rattle-Slope, the next-nearest tribe to River-Eaten. Close enough that they'd visited each other a few times.
“Yes...” There was a hesitance in her voice, and something Some wasn't sure he'd ever heard from his gentle parent before, outside of her stories. Anger, soft but present. “Some, the others have decided not... to go ahead with the match without Sella.”
For a few moments, Some sat perfectly still, not feeling his parent's hand or her gentle squeeze. Protests bubbled up and he made them, and she kept her anger under wraps for him as she comforted him, but there was nothing to argue against. The match was dissolved. Some would not have his own family, not this one.
Grues don't have a word for depression, but his family understood the bleak exhaustion that overtook him after the news. He took care of the children, made sure his elders had everything they needed, performed his duties to his family, but he did so with a sense of distance he couldn't cross. He felt like he was tallying everything he knew in life. And finding that it was a very, very short list.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Some's life has been that of a caretaker of young children, and the lessons he teaches them are sacred to him. Share, and be firm about your boundaries. Don't say mean things and don't lie. Know why you are doing something before you do it. Do the things you promise you will do. And above all else, be kind.
This last is so important to him that the instant he discovered that the creatures his kind called only Meat were just like him, that their noises were language and their lives as important to them as his was to him, it broke something in him.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Kindness is the quality Some idolizes, and wishes to recognize in himself again. He grew up believe that he and his tribe were kind, that the generous way they treated each other and their neighbors meant they were intrinsically good and worthy of good things happening to them.
Learning that all along, they were hunting, imprisoning, killing other beings worthy of kindness has harmed him. In recovering, he's going to go far in the other direction, towards utter pacifism and self-sacrifice. He'll eventually find a middle ground.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
He dislikes the biases he's already consciously working to overcome, that humans are simply the creatures known as Meat, wicked little minions of Light. He hates that he still wants to and possibly has to eat them.
What is their sign, and why?
Some embodies every aspect of The Empress to a T. He was crafted by his entire life circumstances to fill that role.
SAMPLES & ARRIVAL
Samples:
Some discusses many new concepts with Ibram Gaunt, and discusses racial differences with Louis
Arrival Scenario: Honored Guest
Player Name: Hats
Are you over 18?: Twice that
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: Jon Sims
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Some ovMennet
Canon: Original Character
Canon Point:
Background:
Children, gather close, link hands, and listen to the stories the stones tell us.
Before the families were the gods. Water, Earth, Light, Air, and Void were one, and they were happy together. But they wanted children, and had none. They tried to make children, each putting their essences into this vessel or that and creating life in that manner, but the new creatures were animals, thoughtless and wordless, and not children. They tried and tried. They created the crawlers and creepers and fliers, the swimmers and the tunnelers. But none of them were children. One by one, the gods ceased to be willing to try, until only Earth and Light still strove together.
Together, they created the great shifters, the enormous worms that roll beneath her surface, and make it tremble and move. And she cried out at the pain of their birth, because they too were mindless, and flung Light away so he ran to seek comfort from Air. And Earth retreated into herself, deep into the chasms and folds of her body, into the great black of her heart.
Everywhere she went inside herself, she found grief. It riddled her with cracks, filled her with holes, tied the cords of her heart into knots. And she followed those cracks and those knots with her fingers, and read them, and read aloud the word there, a word she had never known before, the name of the first Grue. And so Crux was born into her arms, from the place where six cracks meet in the heart of Earth, and she finally had the child she needed so very much.
When she came back to the surface of herself, holding her daughter, the other gods all crowded around, each wanting to hold her, to dote on her as parents. But Earth remembered all those failures, remembered the way they had, one by one, stopped sharing her nest and left her to the pain of childlessness alone, and she shielded her daughter from them, sending them away with excuses and errands again and again, keeping Crux in her own arms and hers alone.
Only Light noticed how angrily she watched them all, how jealously she guarded the infant. And so he went to her, late in the night, to remind her of how he had tried to help her until she had driven him away. Still, she spurned him, and he left in a rage that towered high, and as she had, he fled deep into his own body. It was anger, not grief, that made him search for names in his own bones until he found them. Fire, he read from the convergence of six winds, and his temper flared to life as its own soul, greedy and forever furious, and Spite, he read when six chasms yawned, and Meat were born from the places where his body invaded hers, seeking and grasping and many.
And that is how Grues and Meat came into the world, my children, before the families. But do not be afraid. Because Earth gave us teeth like obsidian, and gemstones for eyes, and hunger of our own. And Void gave us the Somes, so that the great shifters shouldn't kill us, because they are part of Light as well. Be wary the Meat, for they ally with Fire and live in Light's protection, but they are soft and blind, and they cannot speak or reason. And they are ours to eat, for when they are all gone, Earth will forgive Light for their creation, and all the gods will be happy again.
If Grues wrote history books, that would be the first chapter of every one.
Actually, they are the product of alien tinkering with human genetics, a semi-failed culling project that was abandoned on Earth centuries ago by a race that calls themselves The Shepherds. But to a grue, a stone knife is the height of technology, and stories told around the cavern are the only history they know.
Grues are a man-eating species living in the caves and deep, dark places of Earth, in a parasitic relationships with the humans on the surface. They were created to be dependent on human flesh, though can live on other intelligent or near-intelligent species if absolutely necessary, at a health deficit. So long as the species isn't herbivorous.
They have a scent which is appealing to humans, to the point of luring unwary humans away into the dark. They do not need to eat often, and they do not sleep at all. They are short-lived, with 20 being the average and 25 being an extreme outlier.
Though his Earth is current with IRL history, the humans do not know about the grues except as the roots of a series of myths and fairy tales. (To the humans of his world, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood is not eaten by a wolf, but by a Darkling, a Scandinavian boogie monster based on Grues. “Oh grandmother, how good you smell,” is a line from their version of the tale. Some doesn't know this.)
Grues are photophobic, supernaturally sensitive to light. They have eight eyes, all of them very sensitive to one spectrum or another, allowing them to see in the lightless depths of the caves. The eyes have a defensive enzyme reaction, a catalyst that is released into the vitreous humor to make it opaque under the assault of bright or sudden light, protecting the optic nerve behind. This slowly fades, over a period that can last hours or days, restoring the sight. Their fur is extremely flammable, and their skin burns to a dangerous degree almost instantly in direct sunlight or bright firelight. Light that does not come from specifically flame does not affect them as much.
Grues have five biological sexes in approximately equal proportions. Societies vary across the world, but in Some's locale, society is a tribal meritocracy, with the most productive members of any tribe in control regardless of of sex. Inters like Some, being the smallest on average and not having fangs, are very rarely the leaders, typically falling into the fifth-position in any family unit. They are, however, the traditional magic users, the Somes. Not all inters become Somes, but all Somes are inters. (Mennet is my character's birth-name, but he does not now consider it his name at all except to distinguish himself from other Somes. Some ovMennet = Some who-was-Mennet)
A Some is the emergency exit for a cave-dwelling tribe, the 'shortest path.' In the event of an emergency (and most emergencies below ground involve falling rocks or flash flooding), they can rapidly remove their tribe-mates to a safe location via a limited form of teleportation. For this reason, they are bound to remain close to the family core, in reach. An apprenticeship system ensures that they know the way to safe locales without having to go far in search of them.
Forty-odd years ago (three generations, by grue standards), the volcano known by humans as Mount Saint Helens and by grues as Missing-Light erupted, caving in many of the local caverns and killing many whole tribes. Before that eruption, there was inter-tribe raiding and occasional killing. Paranoia hasn't yet faded, though the cease-fire has lasted. The only regular interaction between tribes is occasional group-hunts, seasonal swapping of storytellers, and arranged marriages. Intermarriage is the norm, but always results in the new five-set settling in the tribe with the lowest numbers, for good.
Magic aside, their technology level is relatively stone-age. Once in a while, human technology (spun and woven rope and cloth, for instance, and wood- and stone-working) filters in, but on their own, grue technology progresses quite slowly. Their 'written' language is currently in the process of moving from being an intricate tally-work of knots in twine to rudimentary carved hieroglyphs. They have not, yet, found a reason to invent or borrow the wheel. They see no value in paper or things written on it.
They have a strong sense of art, almost entirely tactile. Music is uncommon and entirely ritual, dedicated to one of their five gods (Earth, Water, Air, Light, Void), combining singing with simple bone pipes and drums. No use for visual arts in the lightless caves. Storytelling is a daily ritual, and storywalks, a complicated sort of art installation, are revered. Scarification is common, but never casual. Magic is most often tied into the marks, occasionally into storywalks.
Some ovMennet himself was born 31 years after the eruption, the fourth of nine children, in the River-Eaten tribe of the Shaking Walls caverns. He was chosen to be a Some when he was two by his parent Some ovKepim, and has been raised so ever since. He was marked with his Name at four, a detailed scarification on his back that allows him to teleport. At seven, he became an adult and was made responsible for the home-bound, the very young and very old of his tribe. His parent Some ovKepim remains responsible for the out-bound, the able-bodied adults and older children. There is one more Some in his tribe, ovBorit, but he's only three. Some tries not to play favorites among his siblings, cousins, and niblings, but it's definitely Some ovBorit.
Some knew the exact shape the rest of his life would take. He was promised into a relationship with four other young grues from three other tribes, but he was the lowest-status of the set, and knew he was kind of a pity-choice, included because his tribe was severely underpopulated and needed the new hunters. When the highest-ranked member of the betrothal was killed hunting, it fell apart. He only ever even got to meet one of the others, a female named Shan from the next-nearest tribe.
It took two years to arrange that betrothal, and with its collapse, Some, already 9 and approaching midlife, realized how little he knew about the world. He'd never been farther away from his cavern than someone could walk on a single full belly. He met fewer people in his life than he had fingers. He'd never been on a hunt, or seen the surface, even though it is no so high above River-Eaten that he couldn't reach it.
Some prayed to Void, the trickster and the god of Somes for guidance before asking his parents if he could, just once, go with a hunt and see the surface. He never expected them to say yes, but they did, and he went with the hunters on their very next expedition.
But when he met the creatures they hunted, and one screamed, he understood its cries for help. And he saved it, and took it back to the surface, and never returned.
Suitability: Some is burning (lol) to learn as much as he can. About anything. He'll do great in any setting he can throw himself into learning things, and he'll align himself with whoever seems willing to teach him and isn't openly cruel.
Powers:
Teleportation - Some can teleport under three conditions: 1) The scars on his back are undamaged and uncovered. 2) He has been from point A to point B before, via the real world. His magic has to know the route, so to speak. 3) He's carrying less than ~5x his own weight. Being attached to something however tenuously counts as carrying it. Tie a string between his wrist and a doorknob; he may as well be carrying the whole house, and he's not going anywhere. This power is subject to fatigue.
Dark Vision - Each pair of his eight eyes sees a different part of the spectrum, resulting in vision that extends far, far outside the range of visible light. As long as darkness is the lack of light and not the presence of obstruction, Some can see. He is, however, mostly colorblind except in cases of vivid red.
The Draw - Grues have a faint nonspecifically-appealing scent, the purpose of which is specifically to soothe and lure humans on his world. If it works on humans of other worlds, I will leave up to individual players.
Sleeplessness - There is no such thing as an unconscious state for grues. They can't sleep, pass out, or be knocked unconscious, though things that would do so to a human are probably still incapacitating to a grue in some manner.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Some wasn't even there for the most impactful moment of his life. He heard about it later, weeks later when his parent, Kins the Storyteller, asked him to follow her to the chamber where she kept her bones – it was a private space, one of the only ones in the tribe, and his hackles rose slightly as he stepped inside.
She sat him down, sat with him flank to flank, and put two arms around him as she told him that Sella, the hunter from the Sky-Bone tribe, had been killed on the surface.
He sat still, letting his parent stroke the fur between his shoulders, but he didn't think he needed comforting. Those were his first thoughts – why do I feel so little? Sella was supposed to have become his partner, before this year's icing, along with three others from two more tribes. “What- does Kerk now?” he asked, thinking of the only one of the arrangement that he'd actually met. Kerk was from Rattle-Slope, the next-nearest tribe to River-Eaten. Close enough that they'd visited each other a few times.
“Yes...” There was a hesitance in her voice, and something Some wasn't sure he'd ever heard from his gentle parent before, outside of her stories. Anger, soft but present. “Some, the others have decided not... to go ahead with the match without Sella.”
For a few moments, Some sat perfectly still, not feeling his parent's hand or her gentle squeeze. Protests bubbled up and he made them, and she kept her anger under wraps for him as she comforted him, but there was nothing to argue against. The match was dissolved. Some would not have his own family, not this one.
Grues don't have a word for depression, but his family understood the bleak exhaustion that overtook him after the news. He took care of the children, made sure his elders had everything they needed, performed his duties to his family, but he did so with a sense of distance he couldn't cross. He felt like he was tallying everything he knew in life. And finding that it was a very, very short list.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Some's life has been that of a caretaker of young children, and the lessons he teaches them are sacred to him. Share, and be firm about your boundaries. Don't say mean things and don't lie. Know why you are doing something before you do it. Do the things you promise you will do. And above all else, be kind.
This last is so important to him that the instant he discovered that the creatures his kind called only Meat were just like him, that their noises were language and their lives as important to them as his was to him, it broke something in him.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Kindness is the quality Some idolizes, and wishes to recognize in himself again. He grew up believe that he and his tribe were kind, that the generous way they treated each other and their neighbors meant they were intrinsically good and worthy of good things happening to them.
Learning that all along, they were hunting, imprisoning, killing other beings worthy of kindness has harmed him. In recovering, he's going to go far in the other direction, towards utter pacifism and self-sacrifice. He'll eventually find a middle ground.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
He dislikes the biases he's already consciously working to overcome, that humans are simply the creatures known as Meat, wicked little minions of Light. He hates that he still wants to and possibly has to eat them.
What is their sign, and why?
Some embodies every aspect of The Empress to a T. He was crafted by his entire life circumstances to fill that role.
SAMPLES & ARRIVAL
Samples:
Some discusses many new concepts with Ibram Gaunt, and discusses racial differences with Louis
Arrival Scenario: Honored Guest
(no subject)
Jul. 27th, 2021 08:03 pmOOC INFORMATION
Player Name: Hats
Are you over 18?: Twice that
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: Jon Sims
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Some ovMennet
Canon: Original Character
Canon Point:
Background:
Children, gather close, link hands, and listen to the stories the stones tell us.
Before the families were the gods. Water, Earth, Light, Air, and Void were one, and they were happy together. But they wanted children, and had none. They tried to make children, each putting their essences into this vessel or that and creating life in that manner, but the new creatures were animals, thoughtless and wordless, and not children. They tried and tried. They created the crawlers and creepers and fliers, the swimmers and the tunnelers. But none of them were children. One by one, the gods ceased to be willing to try, until only Earth and Light still strove together.
Together, they created the great shifters, the enormous worms that roll beneath her surface, and make it tremble and move. And she cried out at the pain of their birth, because they too were mindless, and flung Light away so he ran to seek comfort from Air. And Earth retreated into herself, deep into the chasms and folds of her body, into the great black of her heart.
Everywhere she went inside herself, she found grief. It riddled her with cracks, filled her with holes, tied the cords of her heart into knots. And she followed those cracks and those knots with her fingers, and read them, and read aloud the word there, a word she had never known before, the name of the first Grue. And so Crux was born into her arms, from the place where six cracks meet in the heart of Earth, and she finally had the child she needed so very much.
When she came back to the surface of herself, holding her daughter, the other gods all crowded around, each wanting to hold her, to dote on her as parents. But Earth remembered all those failures, remembered the way they had, one by one, stopped sharing her nest and left her to the pain of childlessness alone, and she shielded her daughter from them, sending them away with excuses and errands again and again, keeping Crux in her own arms and hers alone.
Only Light noticed how angrily she watched them all, how jealously she guarded the infant. And so he went to her, late in the night, to remind her of how he had tried to help her until she had driven him away. Still, she spurned him, and he left in a rage that towered high, and as she had, he fled deep into his own body. It was anger, not grief, that made him search for names in his own bones until he found them. Fire, he read from the convergence of six winds, and his temper flared to life as its own soul, greedy and forever furious, and Spite, he read when six chasms yawned, and humans were born from the places where his body invaded hers, seeking and grasping and many.
And that is how Grues and humans came into the world, my children, before the families. But do not be afraid. Because Earth gave us teeth like obsidian, and gemstones for eyes, and hunger of our own. And Void gave us the Somes, so that the great shifters shouldn't kill us, because they are part of Light as well. Be wary the humans, for they ally with Fire and live in Light's protection, but they are soft and blind. And they are ours to eat, for when they are all gone, Earth will forgive Light for their creation, and all the gods will be happy again.
If Grues wrote history books, that would be the first chapter of every one.
Actually, they are the product of alien tinkering with human genetics, a semi-failed culling project that was abandoned on Earth centuries ago by a race that calls themselves The Shepherds. But to a grue, a stone knife is the height of technology, and stories told around the cavern are the only history they know.
Grues are a man-eating species living in the caves and deep, dark places of Earth, in a parasitic relationships with the humans on the surface. They were created to be dependent on human flesh, though can live on other intelligent or near-intelligent species if absolutely necessary, at a health deficit. They do not need to eat often. They are short-lived, with 20 being the average and 25 being an extreme outlier.
Though his Earth is current with IRL history, the humans do not know about the grues except as the roots of a series of myths and fairy tales. (To the humans of his world, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood is not eaten by a wolf, but by a Darkling, a Scandinavian boogie monster based on Grues. He doesn't know this.)
Grues are photophobic, extremely sensitive to light. They have eight eyes, all of them very sensitive to one spectrum or another, allowing them to see in the lightless depths of the caves. The eyes have a defensive enzyme reaction, a catalyst that is released into the vitreous humor to make it opaque under the assault of bright or sudden light, protecting the optic nerve behind. This slowly fades, over a period that can last hours or days, restoring the sight. Their fur is extremely flammable, and their skin burns to a dangerous degree almost instantly in direct sunlight or bright firelight.
Grues have five biological sexes in approximately equal proportions. Societies vary across the world, but in Some's locale, society is a meritocracy, with the most productive members of any tribe in control regardless of of sex. Inters like Some, being the smallest on average, are very rarely the leaders, typically falling into the fifth-position in any family unit. They are, however, the traditional magic users, the Somes. Not all un-males become Somes, but all Somes are un-males. (Mennet is my character's birth-name, but he does not now consider it his name at all except to distinguish himself from other Somes. Some ovMennet = Some who-was-Mennet)
A Some is the emergency exit for a cave-dwelling tribe. In the event of an emergency (and most emergencies below ground involve falling rocks or flash flooding), they can rapidly remove their tribe-mates to a safe location via a limited form of teleportation. For this reason, they are bound to remain close to the family core, in reach. An apprenticeship system ensures that they know the way to safe locales without having to go far in search of them. Forty-odd years ago (three generations, by grue standards), the volcano known by humans as Mount Saint Helens erupted, caving in many of the local caverns and killing many whole tribes. Before that eruption, there was inter-tribe raiding and occasional killing. Paranoia hasn't yet faded, though the cease-fire has lasted. The only regular interaction between tribes is occasional group-hunts and seasonal swapping of storytellers. Intermarriage is the norm, but always results in the new five-set settling in the tribe with the lowest numbers, for good.
Magic aside, their technology level is relatively stone-age. Once in a while, human technology (woven rope and cloth, for instance, and wood- and stone-working) filters in, but on their own, grue technology progresses quite slowly. Their 'written' language is currently in the process of moving from being an intricate tally-work of knots in twine to rudimentary carved hieroglyphs. They have not, yet, found a reason to invent or borrow the wheel. They see no value in paper or things written on it.
They have a strong sense of art, almost entirely tactile. Music is sporadic and entirely ritual, dedicated to one of their five gods (Earth, Water, Air, Light, Void). No use for visual arts in the lightless caves. Scarification is common, but never casual.
Some ovMennet himself was born 31 years after the eruption, the fourth of nine children, in the River-Eaten tribe of the Shaking Walls caverns. He was chosen to be a Some when he was two, by his parent Some ovKepim, and has been raised so every since. He was marked with his Name at four, a detailed scarification on his back that allows him to teleport. At seven, he became an adult and was made responsible for the home-bound, the very young and very old of his tribe. His parent Some ovKepim remains responsible for the out-bound, the able-bodied adults and older children. There is one more Some in his tribe, ovBorit, but he's only three.
Some knew the exact shape the rest of his left would take. He was promised into a relationship with four other young grues from three other tribes, but he was the lowest-status of the set, and knew he was kind of a pity-choice, included because his tribe was severely underpopulated and needed the new hunters. When the highest-ranked member of the betrothal was killed hunting, it fell apart. He only ever even got to meet one of the others, a female named Shan from the next-nearest tribe.
It took two years to arrange that betrothal, and with its collapse, Some, already 9 and approaching midlife, decided that nothing in his very sheltered little life would ever change unless he changed it.
Suitability:
Powers:
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
What is their sign, and why?
SAMPLES & ARRIVAL
Samples:
Arrival Scenario:
Player Name: Hats
Are you over 18?: Twice that
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: Jon Sims
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Some ovMennet
Canon: Original Character
Canon Point:
Background:
Children, gather close, link hands, and listen to the stories the stones tell us.
Before the families were the gods. Water, Earth, Light, Air, and Void were one, and they were happy together. But they wanted children, and had none. They tried to make children, each putting their essences into this vessel or that and creating life in that manner, but the new creatures were animals, thoughtless and wordless, and not children. They tried and tried. They created the crawlers and creepers and fliers, the swimmers and the tunnelers. But none of them were children. One by one, the gods ceased to be willing to try, until only Earth and Light still strove together.
Together, they created the great shifters, the enormous worms that roll beneath her surface, and make it tremble and move. And she cried out at the pain of their birth, because they too were mindless, and flung Light away so he ran to seek comfort from Air. And Earth retreated into herself, deep into the chasms and folds of her body, into the great black of her heart.
Everywhere she went inside herself, she found grief. It riddled her with cracks, filled her with holes, tied the cords of her heart into knots. And she followed those cracks and those knots with her fingers, and read them, and read aloud the word there, a word she had never known before, the name of the first Grue. And so Crux was born into her arms, from the place where six cracks meet in the heart of Earth, and she finally had the child she needed so very much.
When she came back to the surface of herself, holding her daughter, the other gods all crowded around, each wanting to hold her, to dote on her as parents. But Earth remembered all those failures, remembered the way they had, one by one, stopped sharing her nest and left her to the pain of childlessness alone, and she shielded her daughter from them, sending them away with excuses and errands again and again, keeping Crux in her own arms and hers alone.
Only Light noticed how angrily she watched them all, how jealously she guarded the infant. And so he went to her, late in the night, to remind her of how he had tried to help her until she had driven him away. Still, she spurned him, and he left in a rage that towered high, and as she had, he fled deep into his own body. It was anger, not grief, that made him search for names in his own bones until he found them. Fire, he read from the convergence of six winds, and his temper flared to life as its own soul, greedy and forever furious, and Spite, he read when six chasms yawned, and humans were born from the places where his body invaded hers, seeking and grasping and many.
And that is how Grues and humans came into the world, my children, before the families. But do not be afraid. Because Earth gave us teeth like obsidian, and gemstones for eyes, and hunger of our own. And Void gave us the Somes, so that the great shifters shouldn't kill us, because they are part of Light as well. Be wary the humans, for they ally with Fire and live in Light's protection, but they are soft and blind. And they are ours to eat, for when they are all gone, Earth will forgive Light for their creation, and all the gods will be happy again.
If Grues wrote history books, that would be the first chapter of every one.
Actually, they are the product of alien tinkering with human genetics, a semi-failed culling project that was abandoned on Earth centuries ago by a race that calls themselves The Shepherds. But to a grue, a stone knife is the height of technology, and stories told around the cavern are the only history they know.
Grues are a man-eating species living in the caves and deep, dark places of Earth, in a parasitic relationships with the humans on the surface. They were created to be dependent on human flesh, though can live on other intelligent or near-intelligent species if absolutely necessary, at a health deficit. They do not need to eat often. They are short-lived, with 20 being the average and 25 being an extreme outlier.
Though his Earth is current with IRL history, the humans do not know about the grues except as the roots of a series of myths and fairy tales. (To the humans of his world, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood is not eaten by a wolf, but by a Darkling, a Scandinavian boogie monster based on Grues. He doesn't know this.)
Grues are photophobic, extremely sensitive to light. They have eight eyes, all of them very sensitive to one spectrum or another, allowing them to see in the lightless depths of the caves. The eyes have a defensive enzyme reaction, a catalyst that is released into the vitreous humor to make it opaque under the assault of bright or sudden light, protecting the optic nerve behind. This slowly fades, over a period that can last hours or days, restoring the sight. Their fur is extremely flammable, and their skin burns to a dangerous degree almost instantly in direct sunlight or bright firelight.
Grues have five biological sexes in approximately equal proportions. Societies vary across the world, but in Some's locale, society is a meritocracy, with the most productive members of any tribe in control regardless of of sex. Inters like Some, being the smallest on average, are very rarely the leaders, typically falling into the fifth-position in any family unit. They are, however, the traditional magic users, the Somes. Not all un-males become Somes, but all Somes are un-males. (Mennet is my character's birth-name, but he does not now consider it his name at all except to distinguish himself from other Somes. Some ovMennet = Some who-was-Mennet)
A Some is the emergency exit for a cave-dwelling tribe. In the event of an emergency (and most emergencies below ground involve falling rocks or flash flooding), they can rapidly remove their tribe-mates to a safe location via a limited form of teleportation. For this reason, they are bound to remain close to the family core, in reach. An apprenticeship system ensures that they know the way to safe locales without having to go far in search of them. Forty-odd years ago (three generations, by grue standards), the volcano known by humans as Mount Saint Helens erupted, caving in many of the local caverns and killing many whole tribes. Before that eruption, there was inter-tribe raiding and occasional killing. Paranoia hasn't yet faded, though the cease-fire has lasted. The only regular interaction between tribes is occasional group-hunts and seasonal swapping of storytellers. Intermarriage is the norm, but always results in the new five-set settling in the tribe with the lowest numbers, for good.
Magic aside, their technology level is relatively stone-age. Once in a while, human technology (woven rope and cloth, for instance, and wood- and stone-working) filters in, but on their own, grue technology progresses quite slowly. Their 'written' language is currently in the process of moving from being an intricate tally-work of knots in twine to rudimentary carved hieroglyphs. They have not, yet, found a reason to invent or borrow the wheel. They see no value in paper or things written on it.
They have a strong sense of art, almost entirely tactile. Music is sporadic and entirely ritual, dedicated to one of their five gods (Earth, Water, Air, Light, Void). No use for visual arts in the lightless caves. Scarification is common, but never casual.
Some ovMennet himself was born 31 years after the eruption, the fourth of nine children, in the River-Eaten tribe of the Shaking Walls caverns. He was chosen to be a Some when he was two, by his parent Some ovKepim, and has been raised so every since. He was marked with his Name at four, a detailed scarification on his back that allows him to teleport. At seven, he became an adult and was made responsible for the home-bound, the very young and very old of his tribe. His parent Some ovKepim remains responsible for the out-bound, the able-bodied adults and older children. There is one more Some in his tribe, ovBorit, but he's only three.
Some knew the exact shape the rest of his left would take. He was promised into a relationship with four other young grues from three other tribes, but he was the lowest-status of the set, and knew he was kind of a pity-choice, included because his tribe was severely underpopulated and needed the new hunters. When the highest-ranked member of the betrothal was killed hunting, it fell apart. He only ever even got to meet one of the others, a female named Shan from the next-nearest tribe.
It took two years to arrange that betrothal, and with its collapse, Some, already 9 and approaching midlife, decided that nothing in his very sheltered little life would ever change unless he changed it.
Suitability:
Powers:
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
What is their sign, and why?
SAMPLES & ARRIVAL
Samples:
Arrival Scenario:
Bete Noire memories: Trauma
Mar. 18th, 2014 08:26 amRelevant thread #1
#2
"We're just cattle to you," Jim had said, with that flat, hardening look on his face. "How could you? How can you talk to us, to me, knowing I'm food?"
Some remembered how tired and thin Jim looked, that day. And how human. Human in a way he had thought he'd stopped seeing. The famine had pared Jim down, harshened the lines of his face and wasted the muscle of his arms and shoulders. And Some knew, on a level that had nothing to do with his mind, what that half-starved flesh would taste like if he bit into him. What flavors would be lacking in that malnourished blood. And that knowing gave a weight to Jim's words like the force behind a stab.
"I never called you food!" he protested, throat thick. It turned his lower voice into an alarmed hiss, one that cracked like an adolescent's. "Or cattle! Jim, you're my friend!"
Jim wasn't afraid of him, but that couldn't balm the terror in Some's gut. He was looking into Jim's face and seeing a wall, a wall that hadn't been there when he'd met the man. Everything, the kindness, the body-friendship, the trust was gone. And that wall was Some's fault. He tried to explain himself, caught himself trying to make excuses, and the knife twisted in his gut.
"You can turn yourself in, or you can wait for someone to come," Jim said, unequivocal. The voice of the law Some had been hiding from so long.
And Some had been craven. He had fought that wall in Jim's eyes with pathetic desperation. He had told Jim, not in so many words, that only Some's friendship, his love for him would be the force to stop Some-the-Hunter. He didn't know if it was true. Skin crawling with terror, he had begged for reassurance, for any flicker of the once-lover he'd known first. "How am I supposed to stay there if I am afraid for my life?" he'd begged, speaking of prison. "If I am starving? Hurt? I have to choose to stay there!" he'd flung at him.
When Some had gone with him, Jim had stood by his side, seeing him through the barely-understood process of incarceration. But that wall had stayed in place, so much worse than the prison walls that closed around and around and around Some until he was in a cell so small that he couldn't stretch out his full length.
And then, before he'd even had a chance to catch his breath or calm his heart, he had had to go through it all again with Lance. And it was so much worse, because where Jim had thrown up a wall, Lance's pain had been like the ground collapsing under him. And then they have left him, his friends, had left him alone in a cage where they were the bars.
#2
"We're just cattle to you," Jim had said, with that flat, hardening look on his face. "How could you? How can you talk to us, to me, knowing I'm food?"
Some remembered how tired and thin Jim looked, that day. And how human. Human in a way he had thought he'd stopped seeing. The famine had pared Jim down, harshened the lines of his face and wasted the muscle of his arms and shoulders. And Some knew, on a level that had nothing to do with his mind, what that half-starved flesh would taste like if he bit into him. What flavors would be lacking in that malnourished blood. And that knowing gave a weight to Jim's words like the force behind a stab.
"I never called you food!" he protested, throat thick. It turned his lower voice into an alarmed hiss, one that cracked like an adolescent's. "Or cattle! Jim, you're my friend!"
Jim wasn't afraid of him, but that couldn't balm the terror in Some's gut. He was looking into Jim's face and seeing a wall, a wall that hadn't been there when he'd met the man. Everything, the kindness, the body-friendship, the trust was gone. And that wall was Some's fault. He tried to explain himself, caught himself trying to make excuses, and the knife twisted in his gut.
"You can turn yourself in, or you can wait for someone to come," Jim said, unequivocal. The voice of the law Some had been hiding from so long.
And Some had been craven. He had fought that wall in Jim's eyes with pathetic desperation. He had told Jim, not in so many words, that only Some's friendship, his love for him would be the force to stop Some-the-Hunter. He didn't know if it was true. Skin crawling with terror, he had begged for reassurance, for any flicker of the once-lover he'd known first. "How am I supposed to stay there if I am afraid for my life?" he'd begged, speaking of prison. "If I am starving? Hurt? I have to choose to stay there!" he'd flung at him.
When Some had gone with him, Jim had stood by his side, seeing him through the barely-understood process of incarceration. But that wall had stayed in place, so much worse than the prison walls that closed around and around and around Some until he was in a cell so small that he couldn't stretch out his full length.
And then, before he'd even had a chance to catch his breath or calm his heart, he had had to go through it all again with Lance. And it was so much worse, because where Jim had thrown up a wall, Lance's pain had been like the ground collapsing under him. And then they have left him, his friends, had left him alone in a cage where they were the bars.
PSL: For Batman
Apr. 1st, 2013 01:54 amThe menagerie on the grounds of a secluded estate just outside Gotham was not the sort of zoo where you'd find lions or wolves. No one sold popcorn, no ticket stand stood at the entrance. In fact, from the outside or the air, there was no sign that it was there. There was just a warehouse, painted to fade into the wooded background at the end of its long drive. But inside.
Inside was three stories of ornate cages, like a prison painted over to look like the biggest circus sideshow ever put on, with golden bars and bright-painted murals. Step right up and see the two-headed calf. Except it was a two-headed child, here. And a mermaid who looked half-eel. A man with a hole through his chest where a heart should be. And a maneating monster, in a place of pride at the end of the ground-floor's corridor.
Some, like the other residents of the esoteric zoo, had been bought, through channels he didn't even understand. All he knew was that he'd been passed from captor to captor half his life, and this was the best so far. The man who owned the place was loud and brash, and liked to bring guests to show them his collection, but he at least didn't make any of them fight, or want to touch them. He just liked to have them, and to keep them at any cost.
Inside was three stories of ornate cages, like a prison painted over to look like the biggest circus sideshow ever put on, with golden bars and bright-painted murals. Step right up and see the two-headed calf. Except it was a two-headed child, here. And a mermaid who looked half-eel. A man with a hole through his chest where a heart should be. And a maneating monster, in a place of pride at the end of the ground-floor's corridor.
Some, like the other residents of the esoteric zoo, had been bought, through channels he didn't even understand. All he knew was that he'd been passed from captor to captor half his life, and this was the best so far. The man who owned the place was loud and brash, and liked to bring guests to show them his collection, but he at least didn't make any of them fight, or want to touch them. He just liked to have them, and to keep them at any cost.
Exposition and a start?
Feb. 23rd, 2013 10:47 amThey found him in New York, in the subways, but the string of deaths stretched out of the city, well into the mountains on the other side of the state. They'd all had the same markers; a body partially devoured, the marks of small, even teeth and short, thick claws. Nothing matched any species on record, though. The first dozen had been put down to some unidentified animal, which had already attracted the attention of the organization. But then one had been killed with a knife, a knife stolen from one of the previous kills. And they got more sophisticated as they moved east. And then they began in New York.
It was a chance report, a woman riding the subway claimed she had looked out her window at a junction in the tunnels and seen a young man, looking up at the train from a gap by the tracks, his face illuminated by the train's lights and smeared with blood. The Habakkuk Foundation made sure to get there before the police.
-------
It was the first time in his life that Some had been restrained. They'd caught him with a loop on the end of a stick, and then there had been a sting, and he'd collapsed into blackness. When he woke, he was bound, tied down to a table with the sharp reek and cold touch of metal, and the lights above were too bright for him to open his eyes. He pulled against them, making a worried noise deep in his throat.
"H-hello?"
It was a chance report, a woman riding the subway claimed she had looked out her window at a junction in the tunnels and seen a young man, looking up at the train from a gap by the tracks, his face illuminated by the train's lights and smeared with blood. The Habakkuk Foundation made sure to get there before the police.
-------
It was the first time in his life that Some had been restrained. They'd caught him with a loop on the end of a stick, and then there had been a sting, and he'd collapsed into blackness. When he woke, he was bound, tied down to a table with the sharp reek and cold touch of metal, and the lights above were too bright for him to open his eyes. He pulled against them, making a worried noise deep in his throat.
"H-hello?"
Open - voice. One distraught grue.
Feb. 18th, 2013 03:41 amConrad! Conrad, you answer me! Conrad, where are you! I'm at your apartment, I checked the crypt, where are you!?
[In the meantime, hostel residents, a grue has just broken down the door of one of the apartments here and, not having found anyone, shouted in all but physical pain before scrambling around to check anywhere in the building where a bat- no, where three bats could hide.]
[In the meantime, hostel residents, a grue has just broken down the door of one of the apartments here and, not having found anyone, shouted in all but physical pain before scrambling around to check anywhere in the building where a bat- no, where three bats could hide.]
Activity check for The Games
Nov. 2nd, 2012 12:55 amActivity, divided by Arenas, in the comments below.
Jōkiryu Onsen
May. 2nd, 2012 03:53 pm
Current Dragons in Residence;
Twic -- Some's dragon (cat-sized)
Freddy -- Rapunzel's dragon (horse sized)
The Bath Houses;
Please note that this facility is operated entirely by volunteers, and free to use. However, donations for the continued upkeep of the facilities are both appreciated, and encouraged. Please make use of the Donations Box next to the door.
Monday - 11 a.m. - 4 a.m.
Tuesday - 8 a.m. - 1 a.m.
Wednesday - 8 a.m. - 1 a.m.
Thursday - 11 a.m. - 4 a.m.
Friday - 8 a.m. - 1 a.m.
Saturday - 8 a.m. - 1 a.m.
Sunday - Closed
**Please note that all days have extended hours for those citizens with aversions to sunlight.
While located within the forest, there is a clearly marked woodland path leading from the city proper up the hill. Please be assured that the wildlife has largely departed the area thanks to the significant traffic to, and from the site. The gardens have been fenced in, as well, simply as a precaution.
Currently, there are three outdoor baths. Please be aware of posted signs concerning swimsuits, and modesty for the sake of other bathers.
Each pool feeds into the next, and while none are chemically treated, the natural minerals already in the water effectively keep each bath cleaned. For this reason we ask that no soap be used in the outdoor facilities to preserve the natural mineral benefits of the water. The shaded bath is occasionally up to two degrees warmer during daylight hours. Please be aware of the amount of time you are spending in each pool.
There is also a tumbling little stream, falling from basin to basin across one edge of the grounds, but any guest dipping into it will find it cold, and the basins are stocked with koi and small, nibbling trout.
The largest bath near the bottom of the hill is quite deep along the eastern edge. Children must be supervised in this area as there is no permanent life guard on duty.
There are also, currently, both male, and female indoor facilities and comforts, complete with showers. It is advised that you bring your own toiletries, but for a small fee towels, soaps, and single use packets of shampoo are made available.
(( See this image for a rough idea of how an onsen should look. ))
Private Residence;
Not far from the onsen proper one of the garden's paths has a sign posted warning bathers that they are approaching a private residence. Those that get too curious will be disappointed, though, because while Professor Snape has lain a magical barrier around the entire grounds, there are specific barriers to protect the house itself. Only a very select few can cross those barriers after hours.
If you do become invited in, you'll note that the house is cozy, and suited to its inhabitants. The windows on the sunward side of the house are all shuttered, though Rapunzel occasionally opens them when Some is not about. Sabine, the resident cat, is usually in one windowsill or another.
Those who can enter the residential area after hours are given a small charm made from a stone taken from the onsen's grounds, tied to the magic wards on the entire place.
Also, there is a small attic room over the storage closets in the onsen proper. It's cozy, but both Some OvMennet, and Lance Blackthorn have used this attic space as a home away from home, and it's currently available in case of need.
Some inherited the Onsen, rather against his inclinations, and has been learning to run it. So it isn't as polished or beautiful a place as it was under Ichigo, Zangetsu, and Rukia, but with the arrival of spring, it's coming back into its own.
player information.
name: Hats
are you over 18?: Yep.
personal dw: i_id
email/msn/aim/plurk/etc: AIM: LadyRHolmes, Plurk: TheHats
characters in abax: Nobody yet.
in character information.
name: Some ovMennet
age: 11
sex: Other
race: Grue
weight: 178lbs
height: 5'4" (Sized down from 7'5". Quadriped. Overall length sized down to 7'9" from 11'3" so he fits in the locker.)
[OPTIONAL] cause of death: Rockslide. River-Eaten Caverns. February 18, 2012, 11:43pm.
canon point: After he ran away from his family.
previous cr: n/a
physical appearance:
Grues are hunters, designed for climbing and running and living in the lightless depths of the earth. Some is small for a grue, even before being shrunk down to be brought into Abax. He's a delicate little monster, four long, gangly legs and four spindly arms, and a body like a centaur patterned after a large hound, rather than a horse. The chest of his lower body is deep-sprung and narrow, and his upper body is willowy, proportionally narrower than a human's torso. The two pairs of arms are just one above the other, with the lower pair just slightly smaller. His hands and feet are all long and thin, with six digits including opposable thumbs.
He's furred, smooth, fine black hair over dark gray skin.
Like all grues, he has two mouths, seperated by a narrow, levered jaw, and eight eyes, on a roughly level line back from where a human's would be. There's not much of a nose, and his ears are small. He has a fur crest running over the peak of his skull and down to peter out at the nape of his neck.
His back is scarificated with a simple line design that goes from neck to waist.
Reference one.
Reference two.
world information:
If Grues wrote history books, that would be the first chapter of every one.
Actually, they are the product of alien tinkering with human genetics, a semi-failed culling project that was abandoned on Earth five hundred years ago. But to a grue, a stone knife is the height of technology, and stories told around the cavern are the only history they know.
Grues are a man-eating species living in the caves and deep, dark places of Earth, in a parasitic relation with the humans on the surface. They were created to be dependent on human flesh, though can live on other intelligent or near-intelligent species if absolutely necessary.
Though his Earth is current with IRL history, the humans do not know about the grues except as the roots of a series of myths and fairy tales. (In his world, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood is not eaten by a wolf, but by a Darkling, a Scandinavian boogie monster based on Grues.)
Grues are photophobic, extremely sensitive to light. They have eight eyes, all of them very sensitive to one spectrum or another, allowing them to see in the lightless depths of the caves. The eyes have a defensive enzyme reaction, a catalyst that is released into the vitreous humor to make it opaque under the assault of bright or sudden light, protecting the optic nerve behind. This slowly fades, over a period that can last hours or days, restoring the sight.
Grues have five biological sexes: male, female, ur-male, ur-female, and un-male. Societies vary across the world, but in Some's locale, society is a meritocracy, with the fiercest fighters in control regardless of of sex. Un-males, being the smallest sex on average, are very rarely the leaders, typically falling into the fifth-position in any family unit. They are, however, the traditional magic users, the Somes. Not all un-males become Somes, but all Somes are un-males.
A Some is the emergency exit for a cave-dwelling tribe. In the event of an emergency (and most emergencies below ground involve falling rocks), they can rapidly remove their tribe-mates to a safe location. For this reason, they are bound to remain close, in reach. An apprenticeship system ensures that they know the way to safe locales without having to go far in search of them. Thirty-odd years ago (two generations, by grue standards), Mount Saint Helens erupted, caving in many of the local caverns and killing many whole tribes. Before that eruption, there was inter-tribe raiding and occasional wars. Paranoia hasn't yet faded, though the cease-fire has lasted.
Magic aside, their technology level is relatively stone-age. Once in a while, human technology (woven rope, for instance, and wood- and stone-working) filters in, but on their own, grue technology progresses quite slowly. Their 'written' language is currently in the process of moving from being an intricate tally-work of knots in twine to rudimentary carved hieroglyphs. They have not, yet, found a reason to invent or borrow the wheel. They see no value in paper or things written on it. (Some will not, obviously, be able to read his toe tag.)
They have a strong sense of art, almost entirely tactile. Music is sporadic and entirely ritual, dedicated to one of their five gods (Earth, Water, Air, Light, Void). No use for visual arts in the lightless caves. Scarification is common, but never casual.
history: Some is the third child of five intermarried parents. He is an un-male, the fifth of the grues' five biological sexes, and the only un-male among his eight siblings. He grew up in the River-Eaten Pits, deep inside the cave-nation of All-Falls-In under what the humans call the Northern Cascades. His extended family, some thirty members in all, forms the Climbs-Shaking-Walls Tribe. They are not the most powerful tribe in All-Falls-In, but they pay tribute to no one.
Some himself was apprentice to his fifth-parent, Some ovKeppim. Some (which is an approximate transliteration for human tongues and languages), is as much title as name, a holy word that allows the bearer, consecrated at a young age and marked with it, to use the twists of language to twist his place in reality. To teleport.
Being a Some is a powerful responsibility. Somes are expected to be loyal all their lives to their own tribe, and never to stray from their caves. Unable to leave even to hunt, they have to depend on their families for everything, every bite they eat. And that never sat well with Some. A dutiful child and then a dutiful young adult, he chafed but remained as his siblings left home one by one, wedding into other tribes or bringing their new spouses home, waiting for his own (arranged) marriage. It was unthinkable for him to leave.
But then his approaching marriage fell apart. The would-be fourth-spouse, a female from the next-higher tribe and a famous hunter, was killed in a sky-bearing-rockfall, and the first-spouse, an ur-male from the Cave-Mouth tribe, the highest tribe in All-Falls-In, refused to enter the marriage with three nobodies and no prize. Some watched the future he'd waited for for all his life fall to chaste dust, while his siblings already had children of their own.
When ovKeppim took a second apprentice, Some's oldest brother's fourth child, a bright little un-male named, newly, Some ovBorrit, Some found himself at a loss. Purposeless - His role still stood around him like a cloak, but no emergencies had struck the cave in so long. The mountain roots had ceased to shake a generation ago, and the deepquakes came but rarely. He was never to be a spouse, never a parent.
It was time to leave. Unthinkable. Undeniable. And so one moment he was home, sitting on his ledge, ovBorrit crawling across his lap and off towards half-blind ovKeppim, the new markings proud ridges across his spiky-furred narrow shoulders. And the next, Some was somewhere else. He would be hurt to know it took his family a full day to notice that he was no longer anywhere in River-Eaten.
But he never would. Three weeks out (as we measure time, for Grues measure it in nothing smaller than seasons), he was passing through a cave perilously close to the surface, well away from the places he knew. It was a noisy cave, as some surface caves were, for it passed close to one of the human roads at the surface. The constant rumbling kept him nervous, but it also kept him from hearing the beginnings of the rock collapse until it was too late. The ceiling shattered, and he meant to teleport away, but half of the equation of a teleport is knowing where you are to start with, and he had been distracted for days. The hesitation was his undoing: Sunlight streamed in, along with a roaring machine with two white-hot eyes that were the last things Some saw before he died.
personality: Some has just abandoned a lifetime of conditioning, loyalty, and family. He's sullen and angry for the moment, mostly at himself, but his base-line personality is easy-going, friendly, eager-to-please. Since he can't go home, he's unconsciously looking for a replacement family. His natural urge is to acquire people. Unfortunately for him, in this lonely state, he's a natural minion.
There are three driving factors in Some's current working personality. At the base is the way he was raised - A middle child in a boisterous, affectionate family. He's met fewer people outside his own family than he has fingers, which leaves him prone to overestimate a person's esteem for him. He's physically affectionate, likes to touch and hug at the slightest provocation. Simultaneously, his name/role set him apart inside that family, made him different, made him at once both more (in that he has a specific Purpose) and less (in that he can't prove himself alongside any of them, particularly the hunters). In game, he's suddenly outside his role, his family, his caves - in essence, everything he has known as important and secure. He'll look for roles he can fill, ways he can feel important to someone or some group. He'll try to integrate, but not mind if he doesn't so long as they treat him well.
Second is his species. He's going to have more empathy for nonhumans than for humans. He knows academically that humans are intelligent, technologically more advanced than his people, but he regards them as inferior on a moral scale because he was raised that way. They deserve to be hunted and eaten because Grues deserve to eat them. He's not a philosopher. The extent of his self-examination in this area, prior to the city, was limited; Humans were created to feed Grues, and therefore Grues eat humans. It's fair, because any adult human has already lived a long life, as long or longer as any Grue's. Human children are a gray area - Some chooses to abstain.
Third is his loss - Some believes in loyalty above all else at heart, but right now, he's in rebellion against it, seeing it as a trap because of the failure of his betrothal. He wasn't in love with any of the other members of his would-be-marriage, had only met two of them, but he was dedicated to the match, emotionally invested in it so deeply that its dissolution was a huge personal betrayal. That's his recent past, within the last month, and his ability to trust is still wounded. This is transitory - he wants trust, and will come around eventually. He'll even learn to trust humans, so long as they retain the majority.
A first impression would depend on how one meets Some. On a casual meeting, he's cautiously friendly, smiling and shaking hands but keeping escape an option. If no threat is offered, he's quick to assume acquaintance for friendship, with visits and favors offered and asked. This will be true among humans and nonhumans alike; living apart from his own kind and desperate for company, there will have to be a shift from seeing humans as prey to humans as companions and the prey as exceptions. In other games, he's created justifications for himself based on how many obvious connections any potential prey has.
If introductions are made by a friend, the caution is much less, almost recklessly trusting. He likes to ask about families; any two Grues meeting each other would have some link of relations, however convoluted.
There's a less common way to meet him, though, when he needs to fill that hunger; a dark night, a narrow alley or an abandoned building, and he creeps up on a victim, lurking in wait luring with all-too-human cries for help. He will learn to strangle victims, those long hands ideal. But if no one can die, a knife will work to steal his pound of flesh.
abilities/powers: Some can teleport himself, so long as he can see. The ability is tied to his name and comes from the marks on his back. He can take up to four times his own weight (approximately 500lbs) with him easily, up to six times (approximately 750lbs) with strain, to the point of passing out. If he's blind or passes out mid-transport, he can't control the destination. He can't teleport through gold, or if he is wearing it himself.
His senses of scent/taste and hearing are on a par with most large cats, sharper than a human's, particularly for distinguishing location, suitability, and health of potential prey. His jaws are significantly stronger than a human's, and his teeth are sharp and grow back quickly.
In normal indoor light, his visual acuity is on effectively on par with a human's. He can see a short way into the IR and UV spectrums, giving him heat vision, and his eyes are attuned to follow movement more than shape. He is effectively colorblind, except for very strong reds. The brighter the light, the less detail he can see.
He is vulnerable to bright or sudden lights, and especially to fire and sunlight. He himself is quite flammable.
first person sample: Some asking about souls.
third person sample: Some making up with someone he's wronged.
case no: 08-08-48
name: Hats
are you over 18?: Yep.
personal dw: i_id
email/msn/aim/plurk/etc: AIM: LadyRHolmes, Plurk: TheHats
characters in abax: Nobody yet.
in character information.
name: Some ovMennet
age: 11
sex: Other
race: Grue
weight: 178lbs
height: 5'4" (Sized down from 7'5". Quadriped. Overall length sized down to 7'9" from 11'3" so he fits in the locker.)
[OPTIONAL] cause of death: Rockslide. River-Eaten Caverns. February 18, 2012, 11:43pm.
canon point: After he ran away from his family.
previous cr: n/a
physical appearance:
Grues are hunters, designed for climbing and running and living in the lightless depths of the earth. Some is small for a grue, even before being shrunk down to be brought into Abax. He's a delicate little monster, four long, gangly legs and four spindly arms, and a body like a centaur patterned after a large hound, rather than a horse. The chest of his lower body is deep-sprung and narrow, and his upper body is willowy, proportionally narrower than a human's torso. The two pairs of arms are just one above the other, with the lower pair just slightly smaller. His hands and feet are all long and thin, with six digits including opposable thumbs.
He's furred, smooth, fine black hair over dark gray skin.
Like all grues, he has two mouths, seperated by a narrow, levered jaw, and eight eyes, on a roughly level line back from where a human's would be. There's not much of a nose, and his ears are small. He has a fur crest running over the peak of his skull and down to peter out at the nape of his neck.
His back is scarificated with a simple line design that goes from neck to waist.
Reference one.
Reference two.
world information:
Children, gather close, link hands, and listen to the stories the stones tell us.
Before the families were the gods. Water, Earth, Light, Air, and Void were married, and they were happy together. But they wanted children, and had none. They tried to make children, each putting their essences into this vessel or that and creating life in that manner, but the new creatures were animals, thoughtless and wordless, and not children. They tried and tried. They created the crawlers and creepers and fliers, the swimmers and the tunnelers. But none of them were children. One by one, the gods ceased to be willing to try, until only Earth and Light still strove together.
Together, they created the great shifters, the enormous worms that roll beneath her surface, and make it tremble and move. And she cried out at the pain of their birth, because they too were mindless, and flung Light away so he ran to seek comfort from Air. And Earth retreated into herself, deep into the chasms and folds of her body, into the great black of her heart.
Everywhere she went inside herself, she found grief. It riddled her with cracks, filled her with holes, tied the cords of her heart into knots. And she followed those cracks and those knots with her fingers, and read them, and read aloud the word there, a word she had never known before, the name of the first Grue. And so Crux was born into her arms, from the place where six cracks met in the heart of Earth, and she finally had the child she needed so very much.
When she came back to the surface of herself, holding her daughter, the other gods all crowded around, each wanting to hold her, to dote on her as parents. But Earth remembered all those failures, remembered the way they had, one by one, stopped sharing her bed and left her to the pain of childlessness alone, and she shielded her daughter from them, sending them away with excuses and errands again and again, keeping Crux in her own arms and hers alone.
Only Light noticed how angrily she watched them all, how jealously she guarded the infant. And so he went to her, late in the night, to remind her of how he had tried to help her until she had driven him away. Still, she spurned him, and he left in a rage that towered high, and as she had, he fled deep into his own body. It was anger, not grief, that made him search for names in his own bones until he found them. Fire, he read, and his temper flared to life as its own soul, greedy and forever furious, and Spite, he read, and humans were born from the places where his body invaded hers, seeking and grasping and many.
And that is how Grues and humans came into the world, my children, before the families. But do not be afraid. Because Earth gave us teeth like obsidian, and gemstones for eyes, and hunger of our own. And Void gave us the Somes, so that the great shifters shouldn't kill us, because they are part of Light as well. Be wary the humans, for they ally with Fire and live in Light's protection, but they are soft and blind. And they are ours to eat, for when they are all gone, Earth will forgive Light for their creation, and all the gods will be happy again.
If Grues wrote history books, that would be the first chapter of every one.
Actually, they are the product of alien tinkering with human genetics, a semi-failed culling project that was abandoned on Earth five hundred years ago. But to a grue, a stone knife is the height of technology, and stories told around the cavern are the only history they know.
Grues are a man-eating species living in the caves and deep, dark places of Earth, in a parasitic relation with the humans on the surface. They were created to be dependent on human flesh, though can live on other intelligent or near-intelligent species if absolutely necessary.
Though his Earth is current with IRL history, the humans do not know about the grues except as the roots of a series of myths and fairy tales. (In his world, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood is not eaten by a wolf, but by a Darkling, a Scandinavian boogie monster based on Grues.)
Grues are photophobic, extremely sensitive to light. They have eight eyes, all of them very sensitive to one spectrum or another, allowing them to see in the lightless depths of the caves. The eyes have a defensive enzyme reaction, a catalyst that is released into the vitreous humor to make it opaque under the assault of bright or sudden light, protecting the optic nerve behind. This slowly fades, over a period that can last hours or days, restoring the sight.
Grues have five biological sexes: male, female, ur-male, ur-female, and un-male. Societies vary across the world, but in Some's locale, society is a meritocracy, with the fiercest fighters in control regardless of of sex. Un-males, being the smallest sex on average, are very rarely the leaders, typically falling into the fifth-position in any family unit. They are, however, the traditional magic users, the Somes. Not all un-males become Somes, but all Somes are un-males.
A Some is the emergency exit for a cave-dwelling tribe. In the event of an emergency (and most emergencies below ground involve falling rocks), they can rapidly remove their tribe-mates to a safe location. For this reason, they are bound to remain close, in reach. An apprenticeship system ensures that they know the way to safe locales without having to go far in search of them. Thirty-odd years ago (two generations, by grue standards), Mount Saint Helens erupted, caving in many of the local caverns and killing many whole tribes. Before that eruption, there was inter-tribe raiding and occasional wars. Paranoia hasn't yet faded, though the cease-fire has lasted.
Magic aside, their technology level is relatively stone-age. Once in a while, human technology (woven rope, for instance, and wood- and stone-working) filters in, but on their own, grue technology progresses quite slowly. Their 'written' language is currently in the process of moving from being an intricate tally-work of knots in twine to rudimentary carved hieroglyphs. They have not, yet, found a reason to invent or borrow the wheel. They see no value in paper or things written on it. (Some will not, obviously, be able to read his toe tag.)
They have a strong sense of art, almost entirely tactile. Music is sporadic and entirely ritual, dedicated to one of their five gods (Earth, Water, Air, Light, Void). No use for visual arts in the lightless caves. Scarification is common, but never casual.
history: Some is the third child of five intermarried parents. He is an un-male, the fifth of the grues' five biological sexes, and the only un-male among his eight siblings. He grew up in the River-Eaten Pits, deep inside the cave-nation of All-Falls-In under what the humans call the Northern Cascades. His extended family, some thirty members in all, forms the Climbs-Shaking-Walls Tribe. They are not the most powerful tribe in All-Falls-In, but they pay tribute to no one.
Some himself was apprentice to his fifth-parent, Some ovKeppim. Some (which is an approximate transliteration for human tongues and languages), is as much title as name, a holy word that allows the bearer, consecrated at a young age and marked with it, to use the twists of language to twist his place in reality. To teleport.
Being a Some is a powerful responsibility. Somes are expected to be loyal all their lives to their own tribe, and never to stray from their caves. Unable to leave even to hunt, they have to depend on their families for everything, every bite they eat. And that never sat well with Some. A dutiful child and then a dutiful young adult, he chafed but remained as his siblings left home one by one, wedding into other tribes or bringing their new spouses home, waiting for his own (arranged) marriage. It was unthinkable for him to leave.
But then his approaching marriage fell apart. The would-be fourth-spouse, a female from the next-higher tribe and a famous hunter, was killed in a sky-bearing-rockfall, and the first-spouse, an ur-male from the Cave-Mouth tribe, the highest tribe in All-Falls-In, refused to enter the marriage with three nobodies and no prize. Some watched the future he'd waited for for all his life fall to chaste dust, while his siblings already had children of their own.
When ovKeppim took a second apprentice, Some's oldest brother's fourth child, a bright little un-male named, newly, Some ovBorrit, Some found himself at a loss. Purposeless - His role still stood around him like a cloak, but no emergencies had struck the cave in so long. The mountain roots had ceased to shake a generation ago, and the deepquakes came but rarely. He was never to be a spouse, never a parent.
It was time to leave. Unthinkable. Undeniable. And so one moment he was home, sitting on his ledge, ovBorrit crawling across his lap and off towards half-blind ovKeppim, the new markings proud ridges across his spiky-furred narrow shoulders. And the next, Some was somewhere else. He would be hurt to know it took his family a full day to notice that he was no longer anywhere in River-Eaten.
But he never would. Three weeks out (as we measure time, for Grues measure it in nothing smaller than seasons), he was passing through a cave perilously close to the surface, well away from the places he knew. It was a noisy cave, as some surface caves were, for it passed close to one of the human roads at the surface. The constant rumbling kept him nervous, but it also kept him from hearing the beginnings of the rock collapse until it was too late. The ceiling shattered, and he meant to teleport away, but half of the equation of a teleport is knowing where you are to start with, and he had been distracted for days. The hesitation was his undoing: Sunlight streamed in, along with a roaring machine with two white-hot eyes that were the last things Some saw before he died.
personality: Some has just abandoned a lifetime of conditioning, loyalty, and family. He's sullen and angry for the moment, mostly at himself, but his base-line personality is easy-going, friendly, eager-to-please. Since he can't go home, he's unconsciously looking for a replacement family. His natural urge is to acquire people. Unfortunately for him, in this lonely state, he's a natural minion.
There are three driving factors in Some's current working personality. At the base is the way he was raised - A middle child in a boisterous, affectionate family. He's met fewer people outside his own family than he has fingers, which leaves him prone to overestimate a person's esteem for him. He's physically affectionate, likes to touch and hug at the slightest provocation. Simultaneously, his name/role set him apart inside that family, made him different, made him at once both more (in that he has a specific Purpose) and less (in that he can't prove himself alongside any of them, particularly the hunters). In game, he's suddenly outside his role, his family, his caves - in essence, everything he has known as important and secure. He'll look for roles he can fill, ways he can feel important to someone or some group. He'll try to integrate, but not mind if he doesn't so long as they treat him well.
Second is his species. He's going to have more empathy for nonhumans than for humans. He knows academically that humans are intelligent, technologically more advanced than his people, but he regards them as inferior on a moral scale because he was raised that way. They deserve to be hunted and eaten because Grues deserve to eat them. He's not a philosopher. The extent of his self-examination in this area, prior to the city, was limited; Humans were created to feed Grues, and therefore Grues eat humans. It's fair, because any adult human has already lived a long life, as long or longer as any Grue's. Human children are a gray area - Some chooses to abstain.
Third is his loss - Some believes in loyalty above all else at heart, but right now, he's in rebellion against it, seeing it as a trap because of the failure of his betrothal. He wasn't in love with any of the other members of his would-be-marriage, had only met two of them, but he was dedicated to the match, emotionally invested in it so deeply that its dissolution was a huge personal betrayal. That's his recent past, within the last month, and his ability to trust is still wounded. This is transitory - he wants trust, and will come around eventually. He'll even learn to trust humans, so long as they retain the majority.
A first impression would depend on how one meets Some. On a casual meeting, he's cautiously friendly, smiling and shaking hands but keeping escape an option. If no threat is offered, he's quick to assume acquaintance for friendship, with visits and favors offered and asked. This will be true among humans and nonhumans alike; living apart from his own kind and desperate for company, there will have to be a shift from seeing humans as prey to humans as companions and the prey as exceptions. In other games, he's created justifications for himself based on how many obvious connections any potential prey has.
If introductions are made by a friend, the caution is much less, almost recklessly trusting. He likes to ask about families; any two Grues meeting each other would have some link of relations, however convoluted.
There's a less common way to meet him, though, when he needs to fill that hunger; a dark night, a narrow alley or an abandoned building, and he creeps up on a victim, lurking in wait luring with all-too-human cries for help. He will learn to strangle victims, those long hands ideal. But if no one can die, a knife will work to steal his pound of flesh.
abilities/powers: Some can teleport himself, so long as he can see. The ability is tied to his name and comes from the marks on his back. He can take up to four times his own weight (approximately 500lbs) with him easily, up to six times (approximately 750lbs) with strain, to the point of passing out. If he's blind or passes out mid-transport, he can't control the destination. He can't teleport through gold, or if he is wearing it himself.
His senses of scent/taste and hearing are on a par with most large cats, sharper than a human's, particularly for distinguishing location, suitability, and health of potential prey. His jaws are significantly stronger than a human's, and his teeth are sharp and grow back quickly.
In normal indoor light, his visual acuity is on effectively on par with a human's. He can see a short way into the IR and UV spectrums, giving him heat vision, and his eyes are attuned to follow movement more than shape. He is effectively colorblind, except for very strong reds. The brighter the light, the less detail he can see.
He is vulnerable to bright or sudden lights, and especially to fire and sunlight. He himself is quite flammable.
first person sample: Some asking about souls.
third person sample: Some making up with someone he's wronged.
case no: 08-08-48
Art Reference Page.
Feb. 9th, 2012 09:16 amReference One: Link (Sketch)
Most accurate, doesn't show how centaurish the shape is, though, and the tail is wrong.
Reference Two: Link (Completed drawing)
Too bulky, and the arms should be one pair directly below the other, not widely spaced. Hands and feet aren't quite right. Tail is right.
Reference Three: Link (Character sheet for grue! and human!form Some.
Eye placement is off and not enough eyes. Nose is right. Also, the scars on human!Some's back are also visible on his grue form, in the same placement.
Important details:
Eight eyes, largest at the center to smallest above the ears. F
our fingers and two thumbs on each hand/foot, thumbs opposing each other.
All digits are long and slender, with an extra knuckle.
Teeth are small and pointed, even as a saw blade. No fangs.
Fur is very short on face and back, shaggier around ribs and the upper parts of his limbs. Very black and glossy.
Most accurate, doesn't show how centaurish the shape is, though, and the tail is wrong.
Reference Two: Link (Completed drawing)
Too bulky, and the arms should be one pair directly below the other, not widely spaced. Hands and feet aren't quite right. Tail is right.
Reference Three: Link (Character sheet for grue! and human!form Some.
Eye placement is off and not enough eyes. Nose is right. Also, the scars on human!Some's back are also visible on his grue form, in the same placement.
Important details:
Eight eyes, largest at the center to smallest above the ears. F
our fingers and two thumbs on each hand/foot, thumbs opposing each other.
All digits are long and slender, with an extra knuckle.
Teeth are small and pointed, even as a saw blade. No fangs.
Fur is very short on face and back, shaggier around ribs and the upper parts of his limbs. Very black and glossy.
A job interview!
Mar. 7th, 2011 10:32 pmSome's interview covered:
Why he wants to work for the hospital:
To earn money, and to be helpful. He came from a culture where everyone had a role and purpose, and has been missing his for a while.
What positions has he held before:
Childcare, and he's trained in emergency teleportation.
Expand on the teleporting?
He can carry up to three average-sized adults safely (Four risks him passing out mid-teleport and then they could wind up anywhere, and if they outweigh him by approx x6, he can't manage the teleportation at all), between eight and eleven times a day with breaks between them. Teleportation is safe, does not put the patient in danger of being moved (so long as they can be 'ported from flat surface to flat surface), and is instant. At worst, it is disorienting to some. (A demonstration was given, the interviewer teleported to the hostel lobby and back with no ill effects.)
How can he do this?
He was trained in it for more than half of his life. It's a power common in his tribe. He mentioned that his name was behind the power, but could not explain any science behind it.
Does he have any other skills useful to the hospital?
No, but he would be very happy to learn basic first aid.
He was hired on a very probationary basis by Doctor So-and-so, pending observation of his skills. He is to take care of transportation only, no attempt at medicine.
Included is a notation that he is obviously not human, but he managed to gloss over that when asked what he actually is.
Why he wants to work for the hospital:
To earn money, and to be helpful. He came from a culture where everyone had a role and purpose, and has been missing his for a while.
What positions has he held before:
Childcare, and he's trained in emergency teleportation.
Expand on the teleporting?
He can carry up to three average-sized adults safely (Four risks him passing out mid-teleport and then they could wind up anywhere, and if they outweigh him by approx x6, he can't manage the teleportation at all), between eight and eleven times a day with breaks between them. Teleportation is safe, does not put the patient in danger of being moved (so long as they can be 'ported from flat surface to flat surface), and is instant. At worst, it is disorienting to some. (A demonstration was given, the interviewer teleported to the hostel lobby and back with no ill effects.)
How can he do this?
He was trained in it for more than half of his life. It's a power common in his tribe. He mentioned that his name was behind the power, but could not explain any science behind it.
Does he have any other skills useful to the hospital?
No, but he would be very happy to learn basic first aid.
He was hired on a very probationary basis by Doctor So-and-so, pending observation of his skills. He is to take care of transportation only, no attempt at medicine.
Included is a notation that he is obviously not human, but he managed to gloss over that when asked what he actually is.
Permissions meme!
Aug. 29th, 2010 02:18 pmCHARACTER NAME: Some ovMennet
[OOC]
Backtagging: Yes, though I try not to get more than 2-3 threads behind.
Threadhopping: By all means.
Fourthwalling: Please don't.
Offensive subjects:
[IC]
Hugging this character: Go for it. He's easy to startle, but he's contact-hungry.
Kissing this character: See above.
Flirting with this character: By all means! He's not interested in relationships with humans (yet), but he'd be flattered.
Fighting with this character: Yes! He's a lousy fighter, though he's on the steep part of the learning curve.
Injuring this character (include limits and severity): Go for it. No limits at this time, though some foreplanning never hurts.
Killing this character: Totally fine while death is off the table. No permadeath please.
Using telepathy/mind reading abilities on this character: You can try, but he's hard to read. His mind reads very much like a word cloud, all themed verbal impressions with no specific images or readable thoughts.
Warnings: He's into human-eating. At this stage in the game, he's afraid to hunt, but that doesn't mean if your character walks into his cave he's not going to try for a bite. And with death on holiday, he's likely to try eating people alive. So... yeah, potential for lots of blood and guts.
Get your own copy of the IC/OOC Permissions meme!
[OOC]
Backtagging: Yes, though I try not to get more than 2-3 threads behind.
Threadhopping: By all means.
Fourthwalling: Please don't.
Offensive subjects:
[IC]
Hugging this character: Go for it. He's easy to startle, but he's contact-hungry.
Kissing this character: See above.
Flirting with this character: By all means! He's not interested in relationships with humans (yet), but he'd be flattered.
Fighting with this character: Yes! He's a lousy fighter, though he's on the steep part of the learning curve.
Injuring this character (include limits and severity): Go for it. No limits at this time, though some foreplanning never hurts.
Killing this character: Totally fine while death is off the table. No permadeath please.
Using telepathy/mind reading abilities on this character: You can try, but he's hard to read. His mind reads very much like a word cloud, all themed verbal impressions with no specific images or readable thoughts.
Warnings: He's into human-eating. At this stage in the game, he's afraid to hunt, but that doesn't mean if your character walks into his cave he's not going to try for a bite. And with death on holiday, he's likely to try eating people alive. So... yeah, potential for lots of blood and guts.
Get your own copy of the IC/OOC Permissions meme!
App for Throne of Shadows
Jun. 28th, 2000 04:49 pm1. Player Information
Name: Hats, y'all know me.
Username: TheHats @plurk, LadyRHolmes @AIM
Current characters in ToS: Darius is on his way out. They'll high-five at the door.
Reserve: Here
2. Canon Character Information
If your character is an original character, skip this and move onto the third section.
3. Original Character Information
If your character is a canon character, skip this and move on to the fourth section.
Name: Character's name (and nickname, if they go by one) Some ovMennet, Some
PB: Art icons, as he is nonhuman.
Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gruesome
Age: 13, which is approx middle-age for a grue. He has a few gray hairs but is not losing mobility yet.
Appearance: Grues look like nightmare centaurs. Their shape speaks of cheetahs, deer, and skinny, four-armed men all at once. Oh, and there's a bit of border collie about the tail. Some is small for a grue, standing 7'8" at ease, 11'8" if he stretches out his full length. He's thin under his sleek black fur, with elongated proportions. Four arms and four legs can be used interchangeably, he has hands for feet, four fingers and two thumbs to a hand, and short black claws. Eight eyes and two mouths, just a suggestion of ears and nose, and a crest of stiff fur along his skull that rises when he's upset or afraid.
Home World: Some comes from Earth! Technically speaking, he comes from a fictional cave system under the Cascade Mountain range in Washington and Oregon state. His tribe's particular cave, River-Eaten, is just south of the Columbia river, near an unnamed fictional city of about 85,000 humans.
History: Some is the third child of five intermarried parents. He is an un-male, the fifth of the grues' five biological sexes, and the only un-male among his eight siblings. He grew up in the River-Eaten Pits, deep inside the cave-nation of All-Falls-In under what the humans call the Northern Cascades. His extended family, some thirty members in all, forms the Climbs-Shaking-Walls Tribe. They are not the most powerful tribe in All-Falls-In, but they pay tribute to no one.
Some himself was apprentice to his fifth-parent, Some ovKeppim. Some (which is an approximate transliteration for human tongues and languages), is as much title as name, a holy word/prayer/spell that allows the bearer, consecrated at a young age and marked with it, to use the twists of language to twist his place in reality. To teleport.
Being a Some is a powerful responsibility. Somes are expected to be loyal all their lives to their own tribe, and never to stray from their caves. Unable to leave even to hunt, they have to depend on their families for everything, every bite they eat. And that never sat well with Some. A dutiful child and then a dutiful young adult, he chafed but remained as his siblings left home one by one, wedding into other tribes or bringing their new spouses home, waiting for his own (arranged) marriage. It was unthinkable for him to leave.
But then his approaching marriage fell apart. The would-be second-spouse, a female from the next-higher tribe and a famous hunter, was killed in a sky-bearing-rockfall, and the first-spouse, an ur-male from the Cave-Mouth tribe, the highest tribe in All-Falls-In, refused to enter the marriage with three nobodies and no prize. Some watched the future he'd waited for for all his life fall to chaste dust, while his siblings already had children of their own.
When Some ovKeppim took a second apprentice, Some's oldest brother's fourth child, a bright little un-male named, newly, Some ovBorrit, Some found himself at a loss. Purposeless - His role still stood around him like a cloak, but no emergencies had struck the cave in so long. The mountain roots had ceased to shake a generation ago, and the deepquakes came but rarely. He was never to be a spouse, never a parent.
It was time to leave. Unthinkable. Undeniable. And so one moment he was home, sitting on his ledge, ovBorrit crawling across his legs and off towards half-blind ovKeppim, the new markings proud ridges across his spiky-furred narrow shoulders. And the next, Some was somewhere else. He would be hurt to know it took his family a full day to notice that he was no longer anywhere in River-Eaten.
But he never would. Three days out (as we measure time, for Grues measure it in nothing smaller than seasons), he was passing through a cave perilously close to the surface, well away from the places he knew. It was a noisy cave, as some surface caves were, for it passed close to one of the human roads at the surface. The constant rumbling kept him nervous, but it also kept him from hearing the beginnings of the rock collapse until it was too late. The ceiling shattered, and he meant to teleport away, but half of the equation of a teleport is knowing where you are to start with, and he had been distracted for days. The hesitation was his undoing: Sunlight streamed in, along with a roaring machine with two white-hot eyes that were the last things Some saw before he-
He woke up in Bete Noire, the first city he'd ever seen. Populated mostly by humans, it was a difficult place for Some to adjust to. He made friends there, and enemies, and learned what it was like to die and come back. He spent time in a humanoid body, even some time as a human, and was arrested for the murders he needed to feed himself, imprisoned, and paroled. Eventually, he wound up running a bath-house, knowing love and more than his fair share of loss, and trying hard to be content anyway. He no longer wants to go home.
Powers/Talents: As a Some, Some is a teleporter. He can teleport up to four times his weight easily, and to about six with physical cost. He can be prevented from doing so by gold, being shackled to something that weighs much more than his limit, magic, or the scars on his back being damaged. He cannot teleport between worlds.
Otherwise, he's a predator. His senses of scent and hearing are very, very good, and darkness is his native element, though his sight suffers a lot at night.
Personality: Some likes to be liked. He's friendly by default, even when he's wary about meeting someone new. Easily frightened or intimidated, the mere thought of having an enemy, someone personally gunning for him, keeps him up at night. He's very keenly aware of the obstacle his appearance, and his diet, make towards this, and as a result, tends to bend over backwards to appear nonthreatening. This is, admittedly, difficult for a seven-foot tall nightmare centaur with four arms, two shark-toothed mouths, forty-eight claws and eight eyes. The waggy tail helps.
A little.
He isn't dumb, but does come from a world of extremely limited educational opportunities. He's about as literate as a third grader and is still working on that, and is good at arithmetic but bad at abstract calculations. He's self-conscious about all of this, and about his stilted accent that comes from trying to speak English through that many teeth. When he first arrived in Bete Noire, he had a strong syntax, but has deliberately eradicated it. Now, it only shows up when he is stressed, angry, or in despair.
He doesn't anger easily, at least, though he's prone to defensiveness and guilt. From Bete Noire, he's used to a fairly high level of discrimination for how he looks, even when he was mostly human. He expects that, these days, on first meetings. It makes him fond of anonymous ways to contact people.
So in sum-up, he is a very nice man-eater who would much rather be friends.
Not to repeat myself, but Some needs to be liked. It's at the core of a lot of what he does. It makes him clingy at times, generous at others, and anxious a good deal of the time. The more time he spends alone, the lower his drive to do anything becomes; time spent with friends, even with friendly acquaintances, refreshes him and inspires him to new things.
He's also a family man. Since arriving in Bete Noire, he's learned how to craft families of his own, and need will drive him to do so again, if any opportunity presents himself. He conflates trust, affection, and love, believing them to be more or less all the same thing.
Why would your character be chosen? Some is all about family, a true socialist by nature, if not always in practice. He'd have a lot to learn about running any sort of nation, but he is always eager to learn, and quick to absorb people into what he considers his family, with so far no limit as to how many.
How much does your character know about nonhumans? Some knows next to nothing about nonhumans, especially beyond any races he's already met. He has a lot of trouble wrapping his mind around the concept of galaxies and extraterrestrial bodies, no matter how many times it's been explained.
The Nysgod might know something of him, though. Unbeknownst to any grue, they were created only about five hundred years ago, out of human stock, by an alien race who called themselves The Shepherds. The Shepherds's original plan was for grues to keep the human population down to a minimum, but the project was abandoned before it could be fine-tuned, and the grues left to fend for themselves. Their numbers are dwindling. Some's tribe is one of only 40 left, with a a total population somewhere around 700 worldwide.
Why this character: Some is my mainstay. I've been playing him for eight years, and the first reason any setting appeals to me is usually 'Some would think [things] about this.' He would have been my first choice here except that I was setting him up in The Games when I decided to join ToS, and didn't want to start two things with one character at once.
4. Samples
Please either include a first-person entry that could be your character's first post on The Network, or a third-person prose or action spam sample that could be your character's reaction to arriving in Dagaz. For the other two samples, links to previous character examples are fine.
First-Person: (5+ sentences)
Now I'm wondering what I have to offer this place. Bete Noire took us for a reason, Lance used to say. We never knew what it was, of course... There was no one to ask. But here... there's a machine. A machine chose us because of... What? If it can choose, why can't it explain? Why can't the man who made it?
I am new, but I am sure that that would mean much to every single person here.
Third-Person: Some talking a his vampire best friend into letting him adopt his horrible half-bat babies. Don't judge me!
Third Sample: Some coming up against Trolls and their idea of romance. cw: references to Some being killed in the Hunger Games.
Name: Hats, y'all know me.
Username: TheHats @plurk, LadyRHolmes @AIM
Current characters in ToS: Darius is on his way out. They'll high-five at the door.
Reserve: Here
If your character is an original character, skip this and move onto the third section.
3. Original Character Information
If your character is a canon character, skip this and move on to the fourth section.
Name: Character's name (and nickname, if they go by one) Some ovMennet, Some
PB: Art icons, as he is nonhuman.
Journal:
gruesomeAge: 13, which is approx middle-age for a grue. He has a few gray hairs but is not losing mobility yet.
Appearance: Grues look like nightmare centaurs. Their shape speaks of cheetahs, deer, and skinny, four-armed men all at once. Oh, and there's a bit of border collie about the tail. Some is small for a grue, standing 7'8" at ease, 11'8" if he stretches out his full length. He's thin under his sleek black fur, with elongated proportions. Four arms and four legs can be used interchangeably, he has hands for feet, four fingers and two thumbs to a hand, and short black claws. Eight eyes and two mouths, just a suggestion of ears and nose, and a crest of stiff fur along his skull that rises when he's upset or afraid.
Home World: Some comes from Earth! Technically speaking, he comes from a fictional cave system under the Cascade Mountain range in Washington and Oregon state. His tribe's particular cave, River-Eaten, is just south of the Columbia river, near an unnamed fictional city of about 85,000 humans.
History: Some is the third child of five intermarried parents. He is an un-male, the fifth of the grues' five biological sexes, and the only un-male among his eight siblings. He grew up in the River-Eaten Pits, deep inside the cave-nation of All-Falls-In under what the humans call the Northern Cascades. His extended family, some thirty members in all, forms the Climbs-Shaking-Walls Tribe. They are not the most powerful tribe in All-Falls-In, but they pay tribute to no one.
Some himself was apprentice to his fifth-parent, Some ovKeppim. Some (which is an approximate transliteration for human tongues and languages), is as much title as name, a holy word/prayer/spell that allows the bearer, consecrated at a young age and marked with it, to use the twists of language to twist his place in reality. To teleport.
Being a Some is a powerful responsibility. Somes are expected to be loyal all their lives to their own tribe, and never to stray from their caves. Unable to leave even to hunt, they have to depend on their families for everything, every bite they eat. And that never sat well with Some. A dutiful child and then a dutiful young adult, he chafed but remained as his siblings left home one by one, wedding into other tribes or bringing their new spouses home, waiting for his own (arranged) marriage. It was unthinkable for him to leave.
But then his approaching marriage fell apart. The would-be second-spouse, a female from the next-higher tribe and a famous hunter, was killed in a sky-bearing-rockfall, and the first-spouse, an ur-male from the Cave-Mouth tribe, the highest tribe in All-Falls-In, refused to enter the marriage with three nobodies and no prize. Some watched the future he'd waited for for all his life fall to chaste dust, while his siblings already had children of their own.
When Some ovKeppim took a second apprentice, Some's oldest brother's fourth child, a bright little un-male named, newly, Some ovBorrit, Some found himself at a loss. Purposeless - His role still stood around him like a cloak, but no emergencies had struck the cave in so long. The mountain roots had ceased to shake a generation ago, and the deepquakes came but rarely. He was never to be a spouse, never a parent.
It was time to leave. Unthinkable. Undeniable. And so one moment he was home, sitting on his ledge, ovBorrit crawling across his legs and off towards half-blind ovKeppim, the new markings proud ridges across his spiky-furred narrow shoulders. And the next, Some was somewhere else. He would be hurt to know it took his family a full day to notice that he was no longer anywhere in River-Eaten.
But he never would. Three days out (as we measure time, for Grues measure it in nothing smaller than seasons), he was passing through a cave perilously close to the surface, well away from the places he knew. It was a noisy cave, as some surface caves were, for it passed close to one of the human roads at the surface. The constant rumbling kept him nervous, but it also kept him from hearing the beginnings of the rock collapse until it was too late. The ceiling shattered, and he meant to teleport away, but half of the equation of a teleport is knowing where you are to start with, and he had been distracted for days. The hesitation was his undoing: Sunlight streamed in, along with a roaring machine with two white-hot eyes that were the last things Some saw before he-
He woke up in Bete Noire, the first city he'd ever seen. Populated mostly by humans, it was a difficult place for Some to adjust to. He made friends there, and enemies, and learned what it was like to die and come back. He spent time in a humanoid body, even some time as a human, and was arrested for the murders he needed to feed himself, imprisoned, and paroled. Eventually, he wound up running a bath-house, knowing love and more than his fair share of loss, and trying hard to be content anyway. He no longer wants to go home.
Powers/Talents: As a Some, Some is a teleporter. He can teleport up to four times his weight easily, and to about six with physical cost. He can be prevented from doing so by gold, being shackled to something that weighs much more than his limit, magic, or the scars on his back being damaged. He cannot teleport between worlds.
Otherwise, he's a predator. His senses of scent and hearing are very, very good, and darkness is his native element, though his sight suffers a lot at night.
Personality: Some likes to be liked. He's friendly by default, even when he's wary about meeting someone new. Easily frightened or intimidated, the mere thought of having an enemy, someone personally gunning for him, keeps him up at night. He's very keenly aware of the obstacle his appearance, and his diet, make towards this, and as a result, tends to bend over backwards to appear nonthreatening. This is, admittedly, difficult for a seven-foot tall nightmare centaur with four arms, two shark-toothed mouths, forty-eight claws and eight eyes. The waggy tail helps.
A little.
He isn't dumb, but does come from a world of extremely limited educational opportunities. He's about as literate as a third grader and is still working on that, and is good at arithmetic but bad at abstract calculations. He's self-conscious about all of this, and about his stilted accent that comes from trying to speak English through that many teeth. When he first arrived in Bete Noire, he had a strong syntax, but has deliberately eradicated it. Now, it only shows up when he is stressed, angry, or in despair.
He doesn't anger easily, at least, though he's prone to defensiveness and guilt. From Bete Noire, he's used to a fairly high level of discrimination for how he looks, even when he was mostly human. He expects that, these days, on first meetings. It makes him fond of anonymous ways to contact people.
So in sum-up, he is a very nice man-eater who would much rather be friends.
Not to repeat myself, but Some needs to be liked. It's at the core of a lot of what he does. It makes him clingy at times, generous at others, and anxious a good deal of the time. The more time he spends alone, the lower his drive to do anything becomes; time spent with friends, even with friendly acquaintances, refreshes him and inspires him to new things.
He's also a family man. Since arriving in Bete Noire, he's learned how to craft families of his own, and need will drive him to do so again, if any opportunity presents himself. He conflates trust, affection, and love, believing them to be more or less all the same thing.
Why would your character be chosen? Some is all about family, a true socialist by nature, if not always in practice. He'd have a lot to learn about running any sort of nation, but he is always eager to learn, and quick to absorb people into what he considers his family, with so far no limit as to how many.
How much does your character know about nonhumans? Some knows next to nothing about nonhumans, especially beyond any races he's already met. He has a lot of trouble wrapping his mind around the concept of galaxies and extraterrestrial bodies, no matter how many times it's been explained.
The Nysgod might know something of him, though. Unbeknownst to any grue, they were created only about five hundred years ago, out of human stock, by an alien race who called themselves The Shepherds. The Shepherds's original plan was for grues to keep the human population down to a minimum, but the project was abandoned before it could be fine-tuned, and the grues left to fend for themselves. Their numbers are dwindling. Some's tribe is one of only 40 left, with a a total population somewhere around 700 worldwide.
Why this character: Some is my mainstay. I've been playing him for eight years, and the first reason any setting appeals to me is usually 'Some would think [things] about this.' He would have been my first choice here except that I was setting him up in The Games when I decided to join ToS, and didn't want to start two things with one character at once.
4. Samples
Please either include a first-person entry that could be your character's first post on The Network, or a third-person prose or action spam sample that could be your character's reaction to arriving in Dagaz. For the other two samples, links to previous character examples are fine.
First-Person: (5+ sentences)
Now I'm wondering what I have to offer this place. Bete Noire took us for a reason, Lance used to say. We never knew what it was, of course... There was no one to ask. But here... there's a machine. A machine chose us because of... What? If it can choose, why can't it explain? Why can't the man who made it?
I am new, but I am sure that that would mean much to every single person here.
Third-Person: Some talking a his vampire best friend into letting him adopt his horrible half-bat babies. Don't judge me!
Third Sample: Some coming up against Trolls and their idea of romance. cw: references to Some being killed in the Hunger Games.
