the_measurers | Application

Entry tags:

!mod,
applications

Application

Entanglement has switched over to a dressing room format for now, so applications aren't needed for the time being.

FANDOM CHARACTER APPLICATION:

Mun: Your Name: Your Journal: (optional) Your Email: Your AIM: (optional) Character: Character's Name: Character's Fandom: Character's Home Universe:(Please either describe a bit of your character's universe or link to a wiki that does so) Canon Point you're taking him/her/it from: (If your character's spent a signifigant amount of time in the game universe, please include it here, including whether they've been on Senburu-Trati'salan a while) Method of Arrival on Station: (see the FAQ for a list of options) Physical Appearance: (You may link to a picture if you like. If they'll be gaining new clothes upon arrival, describe them here) Personality: (at least two paragraphs) Abilities and Skills: (Both human and superhuman. Optional section.) Sample: (At least three good sized paragraphs. Please set this within the game's multiverse. You may use NPCs or characters already in the game as foils for your character in this sample if you wish. Format is prose, either third or first person. You may also use a musebox post or one in <lj site="livejournal.com" user="testrunbox"> as your sample. This post may be slightly shorter than a sample written here, as long as your total length of writing (initial post+your tags) fits the length guidelines.)

ORIGINAL CHARACTER APPLICATION:

Mun: Your Name: Your Journal: (optional) Your Email: Your AIM: (optional) Character: Character's Name: Character's Fandom: (if an original universe based OC, put 'OC' here) Character's Home Universe:(Please describe it. What's it like? Magic? Technology? What is their home culture like?) Method of Arrival on Station: (see the FAQ for a list of options) Physical Appearance: (You may link to a picture if you like. If they'll be gaining new clothes upon arrival, describe them here) Character History: (Their life up to arrival on Senburu-Trati'salan. You don't need to tell us every detail but enough that we get an idea of what shaped them into who they are today.) Personality: (at least two paragraphs) Abilities and Skills: (Both human and superhuman. Optional section.) Sample: (At least three good sized paragraphs. Please set this within the game's multiverse. You may use NPCs or characters already in the game as foils for your character in this sample if you wish. Format is prose, either third or first person. You may also use a musebox post or one in <lj site="livejournal.com" user="testrunbox"> as your sample. This post may be slightly shorter than a sample written here, as long as your total length of writing (initial post+your tags) fits the length guidelines.)

Whichever application you're posting, please put the character's name, if they're an OC, and their fandom (if any) in the subject line.

Note again that you are allowed to use musebox posts and posts on testrun_box for your sample. In that case, your total amount of tags written will be added up, so the initial post can be shorter than normal for a sample. You're still required to use a prose format and set the sample in the game universe though.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Mun:

Your Name: Call me Bliss.
Your Email: Blissauthority@gmail.com, which I also use for instant messaging.
Your AIM: tsunderlightning@aol.com, which I will only use if there are prescheduled chats or similar.

Character:

Character's Name: Anna Lin
Character's Fandom: Bliss Stage (Tabletop RPG).

She actually began life as an example character, but the information on her is so sparse (by design: she's meant to be precon PC) that I'm applying her as an OC and using massive amounts of headcanon.

Character's Home Universe: In a word, post-apocalyptic of the 'cozy little end of the world' variety. Most of the adults are gone, in a strange induced sleep called the Bliss, and those few that remain have been insomniac for around 7 years and are a few trumps short of a Tarot deck. While it's relatively modern in terms of the technology level, a lot of knowledge was lost when the adults went out to lunch: they have some working computers and electricity, but not an Internet (which depends on an infrastructure they can't maintain).

Not to mention that there's a lot of extradimensional aliens mucking about who like to kill large gatherings of survivors for no adequately explained reason. They have a unique xeno-tech weapon platform that they stole from these aliens called the ANIMa, which I'll describe later under 'powers.'

Method of Arrival on Station: At moderator option: Either the alien presence was caused by the Feywhatever and Anna was recruited by the Resistance, or she stumbled through an unstable dimensional portal in the Dream and was shifted, cradle, body and all, to the station.

Physical Appearance: This, basically. (http://i472.photobucket.com/albums/rr82/BlissAuthority/Bliss%20Stage%20fancruft/Scan10004-2.jpg) She probably has a flightsuit, as well, which looks roughly like Sara Smith's in this image. (http://s472.photobucket.com/albums/rr82/BlissAuthority/Bliss%20Stage%20fancruft/?action=view&current=Scan10001-5.jpg#!oZZ8QQcurrentZZhttp%3A%2F%2Fs472.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr82%2FBlissAuthority%2FBliss%2520Stage%2520fancruft%2F%3Faction%3Dview%26current%3DScan10002-3.jpg)

Character History:
Sometime in 2012 ("right now," according to the rulebook, but the Mayan Calendar joke was too funny to pass up), a plague of sorts named the Bliss struck the earth. For seven years, this affliction caused everyone on earth over the age of 18 to fall asleep and never wake up from their blissful dreams. Anna's canon point is 2019, for reference.

The loss of the adult population of the world had about the effect on industrialized society that you'd think it would. Rural areas did a little better, as did the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and similar, but most of the poor shmucks left behind couldn't farm or forage, and Snickers bars don't grow on trees. Teenage gangs started up for mutual protection, including Anna's homies from Oakland's Chinatown. At best they were pirates. At worst... ever read Lord of the Flies?

And in 2014, the aliens responsible for the Bliss landed, and picked up where it left off. They piloted bizarre Terror Drones, techno-organic giants and monsters, and smoked out survivors wherever they could with searing rays and noxious smoke and other weapons too hideous to describe. Even worse, they were impervious to small arms - and while the kids had easy access to firearms from the local police station, good luck getting one in a fighter jet or a tank.

It turned out that it was possible to survive the Bliss, but at a dire cost: never being able to sleep and dream again. According to the Final Act scenario in the book, a security guard named James Preston managed this feat by taking amphetamenes to stay awake. With the help of his son Joshua Preston and a small group of teenage soldiers, they started up a group called the Resistance to deal with the alien threat. Anna joined them soon after the birth of her son Archer, taking her lieutenant and best friend Laura Porter with her.

By a combination of brilliant planning and sheer dumb luck, they managed to capture a Terror Drone, and realized it was some kind of psychic projection - then reverse engineered the tech they needed to create their own weapons based on the Alien Numina Inversion Machine. (Incidentally, it's a popular bit of fanon that ANIMa is a backronym - and that it was originally just "the Anima Weapon..."

Anna slept with the commander in a moment of mutual weakness, got hurt, recovered. Then, she fell for fellow pilot Keenan, was cheated on, slapped him, got hurt, and never quite recovered. Anna's not sure if she loved the girl assigned as her Anchor or just needed contact comfort, but she really hopes it was the former; she respected the other pilots and Resistance members, except for that one smug bastard who never Piloted or Anchored, but thought he knew better then people who did because he made the damn machine. She's hurt, she's bitter, she needs a smoke and a beer - but then she's going to take point, blow up the aliens, and make a future for Archer.

It's bigger than that, of course. The existence of the dimensional portels and the station is proof of that. But all that means is that her campaign needs to take that into account.

Personality:

Anna Lin is, in order: A soldier, a survivor, a mother, and a teenager.

First - soldier. When the end of the world happened, Anna joined a gang for protection, and quickly adopted military virtues. She's used to command of her ANIMa squadron and does not suffer fools gladly because of it. She prefers the concrete and the practical over the abstract and theoretical, and thinks of her life in terms of battles, operational theatres and wars. Not to say she doesn't value to contributions of noncombatants, if they're doing something practical. Farmers and cooks and weavers have her respect. So do storytellers and artists and general 'morale' people. Middle management? Pretentious would-be aristocrats? Can rot in hell.

Lin left her gang when it became apparent that they were making things worse, not better; and she's been planning to improve the lot of all other survivors since. When it comes down to it, if it's you or her, she picks herself - but that's very seldom the right choice in the long run, and you're going to need to run her ragged to get her to abandon her allies, let alone her true friends. Being an ANIMa pilot does that to you.

Anna had a child, 2 at her canon point, named Archer. This was one of the signs that she needed to leave her gang: it was no place to raise a child. Hell, she was no person to raise a child, but she muddled through with the help of the proverbial village. It mellowed her out from her younger "fuck da police" days, gave her a softer side. She loved her boy, and corrects anyone who calls him an accident: "Try 'he was a surprise,' asshole." Not to say that she didn't sometimes want to throttle the little bastard, but she never tried and that's what counts, right?

And for all of that, and all her tough persona, she's a 17 year old that's in over her head and she knows it. She's scared and lonely, and though she handles it admirably, she should not have been fighting in the war at all; she should be growing up, going to prom, exploring her emotions. She resents going through puberty while wielding a weapon that explodes when you have an acrimonious breakup, to put it mildly...

Abilities and Skills: Anna Lin is the pilot of a piece of hardware called an Alien Numina Inversion Machine, or ANIMa for short. It's a bizzare psionic device reverse-engineered from xenotech. As described in the Bliss Stage rules, it allows her to literally wield love as a weapon - in the form of a mecha, a suit of powered armor, also called an ANIMa, or if Anna is in a snarky enough mood "the ANIMe device."

Simply put, each major subsystem or weapon of her ANIMa battlesuit is a symbol of her relationship to someone she knows, and they are literally powered by intimacy and armored in trust. Hence Anna also quipping that ANIMa is "an acronym for 'Someone Likes Carl Jung.'"

The ANIMa, while powerful, has several critical weaknesses:
First and foremost, it's a psionic projection. The ANIMa is capable of affecting the physical world, but Anna Lin must be asleep, dreaming, and in the ANIMa Cradle to use it.
Second, without the guidance of a sensor operator named an Anchor, she cannot wake up. Barring someone apping her Anchor, it's going to take some time and CR for her to find someone she'd trust with the job.
Which brings us to the third major weakness - it runs on intimacy and trust. The suit itself is literally formed from Anna's relationship to her current, acting Anchor - specifically, the trust that she and her Anchor have for each other. Each other weapon is also a specific relationship to someone, likewise fueled by shared intimacy and trust.

According to the Bliss Stage corebook, trust is arbitrary, but intimacy requires certain levels of transgressive behavior. As it states:
Intimacy 1 needs only that Anna recognize someone's name or face, and forms a sub-par weapon - a crappy HUD, a bucker shield, a pickax.
Int 2 requires working together, living in close quarters, or taking meals together and creates decent gear - a pistol or shotgun, a sword, a hookshot.
Int 3 involves lasting emotional harm, or chaste physical affection, or sharing personal food or booze. It creates excellent military gear - assault rifles, GPS sensors, fire-and-forget missiles.
Int 4 requires blood or spit one way or the other. Breaking someone's nose, seeing someone naked, kissing, or copping a feel is enough. It creates improbable weapons - plasma torches that act like lightsabers, transformers, small efficient jetpacks.
Int 5 is sex or murder, and murder breaks the relationship through death. Think Gurren Lagaan's Giga Drill Breaker, GaoGaiGar's Goldiron Hammer, the Yggdrasil Generator (on the Lancelot from Code Geass), the Evangelion Lance of Longinius, and the Yamato's Wave Motion Cannon.

Now, Anna is not willing to grind for God Tier weapons with anyone she just met. It's pretty much impossible that she'll be willing to sleep with anyone without a LOT of CR, not after all she's been through. For one thing, her squad learned the hard way that treating the ANIMa as an upgrade treadmill is an excellent way to make ANIMa battlesuits explode in a puff of trauma. Combine that with being on the receiving end of such bastardry, and Lin ain't going to try that shit. She's going to treat everyone she meets the way she would if she wasn't a Pilot. At least, that's the ideal.

Note also that it's possible to, say, have kissed a stranger and only have Int 2 (very shallow relationship, not at all intimate.)

Anna Lin has no superhuman abilities other than access to an ANIMa. She is, however, very fit and in excellent physical health, and fluent in spoken and written Cantonese and English. Her mental health is not a impressive: she is a veteran of a thousand psychic wars, to quote the Blue Oyster Cult, and she's more than a bit bitter and prickly. Take her in a straight fistfight and you're probably going to get beaten bloody: attack her sense of self, or her relationships, and you have the advantage.

Something worth mentioning: I didn't state this above, but ANIMa battlesuits work both ways. Physical damage to the machine actually erodes and frays the trust of the underlying relationship. Lin does not summon a weapon lightly, for this reason...

Sample (First person) (Locked to Sa'Hot)

Sa'hot. Dearest Sa'hot. My delphinian friend.

Knock that shit the fuck out yesterday or I swear to god I'm going to lightsaber your ventral blowhole, do I make myself clear?

I've dealt with much randier than you in much worse situations, and the lame 'let's upgrade your mecha' joke was old since before someone started trying to crammed 10 liters of brain in a 5 liter dolphin skull.

Every time you do that, you fray my patience and the armor on my suit literally gets that much thinner.

You're a good friend, you're competent, you're an excellent linguist and you're essential to the survival of the greater Resistance. I would like you a lot more if you didn't keep on trying to flirt with me, so please don't make me hurt you.

I'm not into dolphins. Hell, I'm not sure if I'm into humans anymore. So please, just knock it the fuck off.

With completely platonic love,

Anna Lin

While overall we enjoyed your application, we'd like to ask for the following modifications:

1: We'd feel much better if you decided your character's method of arrival. Flip a coin if you want, but the decision should come from you.

2: We'd like a couple more details in the appearance section: Hair color? Eye color? Build? Typical expression?

3: The sample is of the wrong type. Please resubmit a prose sample (IE with a narrator, either in first or third person, describing something happening). We don't require a sample for the network or other forms of IC communication.

You can edit your comments or reply directly here.

Thank you.

No problem: happy to make these revisions.

1: I would honestly prefer for her to have been recruited (possibly because of the ANIMa), and for the Bliss Stage aliens to be a bigger problem. The canon implies they're extradimensional eldrich horrors, anyway. Whether or not they're part of the Feywhatever or a separate thing I leave in your hands.

2: Anna Lin has dark eyes and black hair and is very fit - not ripped, but tall, muscular, and athletic. Having had a child added on some weight and hip, as well.

Lin's default expression is a slight scowl, like in the icon above.

3:

Lin's physical eyes closed, and her eyes in the dream opened. She was staring at a heads up display showing the feed from sensors that did not literally exist. She tightened her grip on a flightstick and her ANIMa responded in kind, gripping a lance that Tavros - it's source - would have recognized from his days in SGRUB.

"This is Sunshine," Anna said, wincing at her callsign - an artifact of her earlier doom-and-gloom in the lesser Resistance back home. "Beginning a sweep of the surrounding systems."

Her astral armor kicked off the hull of the station, and she drifted. True stealth was impossible in space, of course: even the coldest ship was hotter than a bit of rock. But going in cold increased the time it took for the enemy to find a firing solution, which was all right with her. Lin rolled her neck, the helm of her ANIMa mirroring the motion.

Lin applied the slightest amount of thrust from a jetpack that looked suspiciously like Sa'hot's drysuit and hurtled forward, stopping to better maneuver through the rings of a gas giant.

An alarm went off before her Anchor could whisper "Pattern orange at four-o-clock." Lin said something about the likely profession of her enemies in Cantonese, then kicked off a small rock and blasted away.

"Definitely something here," she snarled, slashing a missile away with her lance. "Gonna need some backup."

Please join

entanglement_rp,

entangle_chan and

entanglementooc. You may also join the OOC comm with your personal journal if you wish. The AIM chat is SchroedingersChat.

One final question: Is she named in the source material? It helps us figure out what to put down when we add her to the character list.

Welcome to the game!

Anna Lin's canonical name is... Anna Lin. Here's her character sheet. (http://www.flick.com/~cdr/rpg/bliss/final2/anna.html)

Thank you. One last request and I swear we'll stop pestering you: please introduce yourself on the OOC comm. Welcome to the game!

HEY RON, LET'S GO BOTHER LIN

I'm on it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Application

Anna Lin || Bliss Stage (Canon OC) || 1/?

Re: Anna Lin || Bliss Stage (Canon OC) || 2/4?

Re: Anna Lin || Bliss Stage (Canon OC) || 3/5?

Re: Anna Lin || Bliss Stage (Canon OC) || 4/5

Re: Anna Lin || Bliss Stage (Canon OC) || 5/5

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