Application | awashrpg

[whichcraft]

Applicant Info

Name: Alex
Contact: Journal PM is preferred!
Current Character(s): Ignis Scientia | FFXV | unfatalist
Reserve: For current players I believe there's no reserve required?

Character Info

Character's Name: The Witch (true name: Summer Moran)
Character's Canon: Original
Character's Age: 21
Canon Point: A few months into her captivity under Maerlyn the Gray

Background/History:

Summer Moran is one of six once-average kids abruptly launched into a very not-average set of circumstances. While walking home from university classes on what was otherwise an entirely normal day, Summer and five of her friends witnessed a rift being torn open in reality on their school's campus, and were summarily unceremoniously sucked through. Swept off to another dimension, they were greeted by a wizard named Maerlyn the Gray, granted magnificent magical powers, and told that their efforts were needed to rid the world of the machinations of evil and return peace and prosperity to this, the land of Nevermorrow.

Scattered throughout the world were six magical objects of power that, when combined, would grant the holder the ability to wish open a portal between the worlds; Maerlyn charged the group with finding and retrieving them, ostensibly to prevent them from falling into the hands of an entity he identified as Skul, the Dread King. If the objects of power were to fall into Skul's hands, Maerlyn explained, he would surely use them to cross over into Summer's universe and seek to conquer it.

However, where her friends were largely content to accept this explanation on its face and quickly embraced the prospect of taking on new lives of adventure and heroism, Summer was less convinced. Eventually, she came to realize that Maerlyn had his own motives for seeking the six items of power — namely, to prevent anyone else from utilizing them. Maerlyn, after all, had already demonstrated the power to bring the six to Nevermorrow to begin with; his interest in gathering the artifacts was to maintain the monopoly on interplanar travel altogether.

Thus, Summer privately arrived at her own ulterior motives: first, to retrieve the six objects of power by any means necessary, and second, to develop her own magical powers enough that she would someday be able to confront Maerlyn directly, sensing that he was hiding far more than he was letting on to the group. In doing so, she crafted herself a new persona to hide and protect her real identity while adventuring: The Redheaded Witch.

Ultimately, Summer and her friends did manage to retrieve the six objects, leading them to a final confrontation with Skul. During the ensuing battle, one of Summer's friends was tricked into attacking her by mistake, mortally wounding her. Horrified, her friend bargained with Maerlyn to save her life, but salvation came at a price: in exchange for her life, Summer would have to repay her debt through service as Maerlyn's pupil (read: captive) once the battle had concluded, even after all of her friends had been returned home. Allegedly this was to continue fostering her magical skills; in reality, it was because Maerlyn knew the one thing Summer wanted most was to go home, and wanted to take it away from her.

Now, alone in Nevermorrow, Summer continues to languish on Maerlyn's Sorceror's Isle, allegedly as his student, but truthfully as his hostage and captive.

Strengths:

Intelligent — As her group's strategist and de facto leader, Summer is absolutely the scholar of the group, and tends to be a reliable source of generally random and largely useless knowledge. She's also perceptive and good at synthesizing facts and observations into bigger picture conceptions, reasoning through problems, and drawing conclusions about things she doesn't know from the things that she does. She has a good memory and tends to learn things quickly, and rarely forgets what she's learned; this assists her in maintaining her various personas and facades, by allowing her to remember the lies she tells and keep them cohesive without contradicting herself.

Resourceful — Lacking the power and position to effectuate long-term, wide-scale plans, Summer instead tends to be good at making up strategies on the fly and staying one step ahead of her enemies, adapting as she goes in order to achieve her aims. Though she and Maerlyn are both schemers, Maerlyn is the type to have Plans A through M already planned out before he ever makes a move, while Summer is more the type to plan out a basic framework of a goal and start making up Plan B as soon as it looks like Plan A is starting to go south. Her magic also reflects this, as rather than specializing in any one thing, she chose instead to be a jack of all trades, possessing a potpourri of largely unrelated spells and mostly relying on her own creativity to come up with innovative ways of using them to achieve her goals.

Charismatic — Summer is a very good talker. Between a knack for reading people, a wide vocabulary, and a general way with words, she's fairly persuasive when it comes to making people like her, perceive her in a certain way, or occasionally to even do what she wants. She's also a skilled liar, and tends to be good at telling people what they want to hear, and then turning that into a means of getting what she's after. She prefers to talk herself out of situations rather than resorting to a fight, and her charisma combined with her natural competence quickly had her acknowledged as the de facto leader of her group, in large part because she just made an excellent case for being the one who ought to be trusted with the responsibility.

Weaknesses:

Fragile — For all that she may be smart and capable, Summer is about as strong as a poodle and her limbs are probably best categorized as "limp noodle" status of musculature. She's not a very fast runner and tires easily; she can't lift much of anything heavy without the assistance of magic, and she's prone to tiring herself out, getting dehydrated, and occasionally even fainting if she's been out in the sun too long or has pushed herself too hard. One good solid hit could easily knock her down and severely injure her, and in a physical fight, there's no contest — she's going to lose. She much prefers convincing other people to do her heavy lifting for her (literally), because there's just no way she can do it herself.

Cynical — When Maerlyn first brought the group to Nevermorrow and pitched them his tale about how they were needed to become heroes and protect the world from ruin, Summer was the only one who remained skeptical of his motives. While this in itself isn't inherently a flaw, the lengths to which Summer sometimes takes her cynicism certainly can be. Thanks to Maerlyn's negative influence, Summer tends to be constantly mistrustful of others, always looking for ulterior motives and often refusing to ever take what people say at face value. This also leads her to be extremely secretive about herself, choosing to safeguard her own motives and often preferring to lie rather than let someone else find out information that, in her mind, could potentially be used against her.

Machiavellian — At her worst, Summer will prioritize staying alive above all else. She believes that when it comes to remaining alive, the ends justify the means, regardless of what those means might be. This tendency to act without regard for anything other than her own survival comes with plenty of negative ramifications: it makes her selfish in the clutch, often unwilling to assist someone else unless she's reasonably confident it won't put herself at risk to do it, and it means she's willing to do pretty much whatever it takes, including murder, if it means that she escapes a bad situation with her life. As she once noted herself, she will always seek to achieve her goals first, and worry about what her actions say about her once she's safe on the other side with the freedom to contemplate them in security.

Powers/Abilities:

Summer's primary ability is her magic, which awakened in her as a consequence of being pulled out of her own world and into the world of Nevermorrow. While she's capable of learning new spells with practice, she essentially operates as a "magical battery" and can only use her magic a limited number of times per day before exhausting it, after which she needs to sleep and eat in order to recharge herself. At the time of her arrival in Awash, she is capable of casting spells that allow her to do the following:

• Generate and control fire

• Throw lightning from her fingertips

• Fly and/or hover in midair

• See in the dark

• Create lights and mimic sounds

• Temporarily summon a magical steed for riding purposes (approx. 1 hour)

• Temporarily transform into a living creature of her choosing (approx. 1 hour)

• Utilize minor illusions to change her appearance (specifically one that she uses to change her hair color from a subdued brownish to a bold, vibrant red, and one that she uses on her face to hide the leftover scarring from the mortal wound she took when her friend attacked her in battle)

• Open a door to a pocket dimension (effectively hammerspace; however, while time does not pass within the hammerspace, an object placed into it will rapidly accelerate through and "catch up" to the present moment once it leaves it. For example, a fresh apple placed in the hammerspace will not rot so long as it's inside the pocket dimension, but if it's left in there for a year, the instant it's removed it will age a full year in the span of a few seconds and immediately rot).

• Evaporate water from things that contain water. Like bodies. Bodies have a lot of water in them.

• ...Essentially, cast a spell that lets her get high on inflicting pain on things. This one is kind of a niche spell for character reasons but she uses it as a way of numbing herself to some of the shittier or more horrible things she's done in her life, because the spell is essentially a drug that makes her feel good about doing things that would normally really upset her.

Again, just because Summer knows how to do all of these things doesn't mean she can use them indiscriminately; because she only has so much available magic at any given time, she has to be sort of judicious about how much magic she uses and in what ways. For particularly big, extravagant uses of her powers, she'd maybe be able to use them once or twice before exhausting herself; for little things like creating sounds, she'd expend very little energy and be able to use them quite a bit without overexerting herself.

(As a side note, because Summer is capable of learning new spells with tutelage and practice, please let me know if it would be acceptable for her to add new spells to her repertoire over the course of gameplay, if she happens to be taught them by her CR! Understandably she would have to work for it to figure them out, but I'd like to know whether she would have the option to grow and develop in that respect through her interactions with other characters!)

Summer also has a familiar in the form of a blue jay, which she is magically connected to. She's capable of commanding her familiar and seeing through its eyes, which is one of the perks; however, that connection is a double-edged sword, as trapping her familiar can also lead to her being trapped by proxy, and wounding or killing her familiar will severely injure (though not kill) Summer herself.

I'm also happy to nerf or tweak any of the above-listed abilities if you think it's needed! Please just let me know.

Other Noteworthy Traits:

• Silver Tongue — Summer is a pretty smooth talker with a political science degree, so she's got a definite knack for schmoozing, making up believable lies, spinning convenient half-truths, and convincing people to do what she wants them to.

• Stupid Trivia — Summer is a wealth of Trivial Pursuit-grade Really Random Knowledge™. In keeping with her jack-of-all-trades nature, she "kind of sorta" knows how to do a wide variety of things, or possesses at least enough of a foundational basis of knowledge to make educated guesses about how things work, probably.

• Genre Savvy — A synthesis of being well-read and highly suspicious, Summer tends to be unusually genre-savvy and often draws comparisons between her present circumstances and situations she's seen in various media, as a means of trying to anticipate what's going to happen and plan for it before it actually does.

• Music — She has a good sense of rhythm, can sing passably well, and can also play the piano.

• Archery — Though it's more of a "yes she kind of knows how to do this" and less of properly a "skill", Summer has attempted to mitigate a dependency on her magic to defend herself by learning at least the basics of how to shoot a bow and arrow. She's no Diana the Huntress, but she can mostly hit what she aims at, if it's not too far away and isn't moving around too much.

• Magically Sensitive — Being magically-inclined herself, she can generally tell when magic is at work or sense when an object has magical potential. That doesn't mean she can tell what it specifically does or is capable of, but she can usually look at something and reliably go, "Yep, that's magic."

• Resilience — Summer has seen some shit, but she's bound and determined not to let it break her. She's good at keeping a level head in a crisis, working under pressure, and compartmentalizing emotions and morality for the sake of reasoning through a problem and getting the job done.


Weapons & Other Special Inventory:

• Cloak of Shadows — a floor-length black hooded cloak that is as much her persona's trademark as her red hair is. The cloak is magically enchanted in such a way that the eye doesn't tend to want to linger on it; it doesn't render her invisible outright, but it's sort of like mild universal camouflage. (on her person)

• Leather Warrior's Armor — magically enchanted to be fire-resistant, which helps a lot in situations where she might want to start throwing fire around. (on her person)

• A Backpack — contains a few textbooks, some paper, pens, wallet, keys, notebooks; your garden-variety school supplies. Also holds two changes of clothes and some assorted small-scale loot, mostly jewelry. (on her person)

• An enchanted knife, which is magically enhanced to be able to cut through most things (the limits of which I'm more than happy to nerf or work with you on). (on her person)

• A non-magical bow and a quiver of arrows. (on her person / in her hammerspace)

• Her familiar (pet/animal companion)

• A no-longer-magical "engagement ring" on her right hand (on her person)

• Her favorite stuffed animal from her own world (one additional reasonable item!)


Color: Red, please, and #AA3333 if it's available! She identifies strongly with the color red, and uses it as a motif color for her alias as the Redheaded Witch, because red hair stands out and is an immediately identifiable physical characteristic, which goes well when you're trying to get a legend started.

Sample: TDM!

[ OPTIONAL ] World Aspect: N/A!