hadriel

[velvetini]

PLAYER Player name: Ash Contact: deadite @ plurk/PM! Characters currently in-game: N/A CHARACTER Character Name: Roslyn Proctor ("Rose") Character Age: 27 Canon: Original Canon Point: After her first run-in with the Void. World Description: Rose's world is, for the most part (and for most people), your standard Earth circa the 1920s. The only real difference is the existence of creatures that aren't quite demons in the biblical sense, but are close enough to it for most of them to refer to themselves as such when dealing with humans. They have reality-bending abilities which are more or less magical in nature, come from a realm separate from the tangible human world, and survive by feeding off of the life-force of living creatures. They can take small amounts from just any living creature - that's why sometimes otherwise perfectly healthy people either fall inexplicably ill or, in the case of particularly powerful demons, drop dead without warning - but it's much easier and much quicker for them to cut deals with humans willing to trade away their lives in exchange for favors or otherworldly gifts courtesy of the demon's magic. After stealing her powers from the demon Knightly, Rose gained the ability to slip into the demon's own pocket dimension - every demon has one - and through her own experiences and subconscious, inadvertently established a small universe she and its eventual inhabitants called the Dim. Equal parts nightmarish and dreamlike, built from her own thoughts, fears, influences, and the bits and pieces of fairytales she'd grown up on as a child, the Dim is a realm stuck in eternal twilight and populated by intelligent animal-headed people. And monsters. Lots of monsters. History: Roslyn Proctor was a poor farmgirl born to blue-collar parents in Nowheresville, Montana who grew up dreaming of something better. Then she got it, and it worked out terribly for everyone. Then things got weird. Before all of that, though, Roslyn was born to simple people who lived a simple life, working hard and earning their keep. She never really liked it, either. Even as a little girl, she liked to dress up and pretend to be famous - the older she got, growing up alongside a younger brother who took to the family farm with zeal, the more and more dissatisfied she was with her lot in life. Although she lived in the countryside, she was eager for any chance to go into town and boggle at the energy and bustle city life offered; she idolized Hollywood starlets and wealth, and due to her lifelong interest in music, even dreamed of a glamorous career as a singer. However, despite her restlessness, her parents kept her on an even path and her distance from the city and all its vices kept her out of trouble, for the most part. However, after her brother came down with scarlet fever and later died, the subsequent strain on her parents' marriage caused a split, and she moved to Chicago with her mother and lived with family. It was just the spark a teenage Roslyn needed to go wild; she was convinced that she had a future in music and wouldn't consider any other lifestyle, spending her time sneaking out and skipping school to have fun instead. When she was in her late teens, her mother put her foot down: Roslyn, now exclusively going by her stage name "Rose", was being sent to live with relatives back in Montana to break her wild streak and get her away from the lifestyle she'd chosen. Rather than accept it, Rose left home for good, making the move to New York for the singing career she'd always fantasized about. At the age of 24, a dead-broke crooner who was good, but just not good enough, who couldn't land a major gig for the life of her, Rose was desperate. Desperate enough, in fact, to be approached by the self-proclaimed demon Knightly, a slim figure in a sharp coal black suit who promised he could make her wildest dreams come true, but only if she were willing to shave decades off her life for it. With no other options, and starving for fame, Rose agreed. And she got everything she ever wanted. More or less. For two years, Rose enjoyed the life of a true-blue sensation; rather than casual interest at best, her singing attracted crowds, and then people looking to cash in on her. She signed deals, she made money, she found a place as a media darling, and most importantly, she made money. Lots. The more she sang, the more people loved her for it; when she sang happily, they were happy, and when she crooned sorrowful tunes, they cried. She sang love songs and they loved her. However, Knightly hadn't played fair, and when he twisted her voice, he added a little touch of his own. The more she sang, the more people heard her voice, the more violently the listeners reacted - and after she'd made it to the radio, her first major live show ended up filled with plenty of brainwashed listeners. Her first set involved a sad song, a love song, and a revenge song, in that order. By the time the third song rolled around, the hypnotic and emotion-shifting magical effect of her voice whipped the crowd into a murderous frenzy. The show went very badly. Rose was forced into hiding soon after, career ruined, and the family of her unintended victims wanted blood. It was a month or two after this that Rose was once again approached by the demon Knightly, but for a different reason; he had been lured into trying to make a deal with a human who had an irresistibly, deliciously long lifespan ahead of him, and had found himself tricked by a religious sect dedicated to wiping Knightly's kind out of existence. Severely weakened, Knightly had been forced to jump between all the humans whose lives he had stolen. He needed a host, someone whose spirit was strong enough to hold him and who he could hide in until he found a way to recover his stolen powers. After taking advantage of his situation to beat the shit out of him for crossing her, Rose agreed to a new deal with new terms - her terms. He would fix everything he had ruined, give her back the star-studded life she felt she deserved, and would give her her life back to boot. Reluctantly, Knightly agreed, and the two set off to find the human who had stolen Knightly's powers and take them back. She gained use of his scant remaining powers as well, learning to use the shadows to her advantage. Through a tense game of cat and mouse, Rose and Knightly, with the assistance of an up-and-coming Wall Street accountant by the name of Foster, were able to foil the cult's plans and take back Knightly's powers - however, Knightly had no intention of following through on his promises to both Rose and Foster, namely because he couldn't. Instead, he attempted to devour Rose's spirit entirely, but it was one double-cross too many - Rose had grown used to his powers and was able to turn them against him, absorbing him instead. She took his life and his powers and his otherworldliness and made them her own, and though she couldn't grant her own wishes, she made sure to grant Foster's (which had been so similar to her own) free of charge. Exhausted, her powers unstable, she managed to stick around long enough for a kiss - Foster was very sweet, after all, and she'd sort of fallen for him, even if she no longer felt they could have a life together - before fading away. Demons don't necessarily die, though, and Rose returned to a sort of stasis in the pocket dimension Knightly had briefly shown her before; in his time it had been pure blackness (he wasn't very creative), but by the time Rose woke up again after her powers stabilized, she had changed it to a world she later came to call the Dim. It was a strange fairytale-like world in endless twilight, woody and dark and dotted with cities inhabited by intelligent, human-like creatures who just so happened to have the heads of animals. It was dangerous, full of horrible monsters, but dreamlike and so much less complicated than the human world. Although wildly disoriented for a while, Rose eventually found the place comfortable, choosing to remove herself from the human world - where she'd done so much damage - and live among the denizens of the Dim instead, eventually realizing that their immunity to her voice meant she could make her living there singing. Like she'd always wanted to. Rose is coming to Hadriel after five years of this (which translated to one year in the human world), having just been approached by one of the Dim's gods (who know who she is and that she created the place, but warned her not to try and get involved in running it) - specifically, the personification of the Void, who politely asked her to destroy the Dim so he could have all his nothingness back, thank you very much - and been forced back into the human world to prepare for any attacks he might make, seeking to feed off of humans and bolster her powers. Personality: Rose hasn't had it bad, but she's never had it quite as good as she thinks she deserves. At first brush though, Rose seems like she could be any young woman from her time - a little disgruntled, maybe, but nothing out of the usual. Knightly may have been a cackling villain with a chronic backstabbing disorder, but Rose genuinely prefers being straightforward with people, even to the point of bluntness. She may be much less likely to flatter or pretend to be nice than she did when she was human, but she won't screw you unless you give her a good reason to, and she's not interested in messing around with people for her own entertainment. She won't lie to you to make you feel better, and she may seem a little distant, but she's not cruel. However, she's also dealt with a lot of bullshit. A lot. Most of it is courtesy of Knightly, which has overall left her much less willing to trust or take someone just at their word, but part of it is just plain being tired of getting screwed over, either by individuals like Knightly or, in her opinion, by the world in general - she may have matured from her experiences, but there's still a part of her that feels cheated, like she wasn't given the life she deserved. She wasn't a bad person, never hurt anyone or stole from people and always paid her taxes, so although she's come to accept the way things have turned out for her, she still doesn't really think they're fair. She's more than a little bitter about it, and as a result of that and the things she was exposed to while clawing for fame (the corruption, the racism, the sexism of her time, and how many people have tried to exploit her when she was vulnerable), her worldview is colored with more than a little bit of cynicism. She acknowledges that there are good people in the world, but if you ask her, there aren't all that many, and most people will fudge their own morals when given enough incentive. But people aren't bad, not all of them, and as much as she'd probably like to be a pessimistic logic machine at this point - it would certainly save her a few headaches - Rose is still Roslyn underneath it all. She's still a dreamer, still has a soft spot for the genuine and the kind (like Daniel Foster, who she may or may not carry a small torch for), and there's no greater evidence than the Dim itself - it's nightmarish sure, populated with monsters and with a distinctly surreal, slightly grotesque aspect to it and its inhabitants, but it's also dreamlike, simple, easy; the inhabitants are weird but genuinely good at heart, friendly and helpful, and life there is simple the way a child's idealized version of the life might be. No war, no taxes, no hate. It simply is. More than anything, someone who doesn't know her well might just assume Rose is tired, because honestly? She kind of is. Just like she always has, she wants life to be easy and comfortable, even if the details have shifted; instead of being so filthy rich that she never had to worry about anything, now she just wants to stay in her simple little world and live her simple little life doing what she enjoys, and it takes something serious to motivate her otherwise (like the walking personification of oblivion walking up to you after a show and going hey, so it'd be cool if you helped me destroy everything and not seeming too put off when you tell him hell no). Otherwise, she's content to just exist. You know. As you do when you're a weird dimension-hopping creature who feeds on life itself. Inventory: Nothing! Not even the clothes on her back. (She makes those out of shadows.) Abilities: siren song - What Rose originally traded decades of her life for, and something that she still hasn't found a way to reverse or nullify. Rose's singing used to be good, but not great; thanks to Knightly's intervention, her voice now has a hypnotic effect on normal humans, and can even alter emotions depending on the tone and content of her singing. There are varying levels of immunity to this, and particularly focused or strong-willed individuals may or may not be as affected as the next guy. It also has an addictive effect on some, and people who are repeatedly exposed to it - say, fans who appear at multiple shows - may be more easily manipulated by it than others. 2spooky shadows - Rose inherited her demonic abilities from Knightly, a being who took his power primarily from shadows. As a result, Rose also draws her power from the absence of light and can handle available shadows within a ten foot radius several different ways: - she can mold them into different forms of her choosing, usually manifesting as your friendly neighborhood shadow hands, although she can temporarily shift them into other things, like furniture or simple weaponry. Direct light weakens her, and because she's taken to wearing her own shadow as clothing, she doesn't cast one herself. - she can essentially teleport between shadow sources, stepping "into" one source and out of another, but having no access to the Dim means she'll only be able to move to shadows within sight range, or possibly to locations she's studied very closely/is familiar with to the point of knowing where shadows will be. - she can also become completely intangible as a shadowy outline of herself with two circular white spots where her eyes should be, at the cost of being able to speak or physically interact with the world. the Dim - Rose's pocket dimension (every demon has one), currently unavailable because loljamjar. It's just here for completion's sake. wishmaster bs - Rose's ability to grant wishes in exchange for taking years off of human lives as sustenance, also nerfed for now, also here for completion's sake. Flaws: Besides being a card-carrying member of a race that's comfortable calling themselves demons, Rose has her fair share. She measures success by what a person has and how much other people want to be them; when she was younger, she saw her family and most of the people around her as failures who had learned to settle for what they'd managed to scraped together, but considered herself better, destined for greater things. She's more than a little bit vain, materialistic, and now that she has power, is all too willing to use it to get her way, even if these days "her way" usually amounts to keeping the Dim safe and living comfortably. She's blunt, sometimes bordering on rude, and considers most "human issues" below her these days. She's also more or less responsible for the deaths of a hundred or so people from her catastrophe of a last show, so there's that. SAMPLES Action Log Sample: When Rose steps out of the Dim, she's expects to step into the coat room of a failing theater in downtown Brooklyn. Instead, she's suddenly a coal black spot in the middle of what she thinks might be some sort of stone structure, but with the way she immediately recoils from a blast of unexpected sunlight, it's hard to tell. Her first instinct is to step back into the dim, tipping back with the full expectation of the ground taking her readily, bringing her back into the dark, safe twilight world she calls home now. Instead, she hits the ground, and she swears like a man. The heels she'd crafted to fit in with the picture of the affluent theater enthusiast become form-fitting flats instead as Rose forces herself onto her feet unsteadily, keenly aware that not only are there people here, there are things. Not demons, not the denizens of the Dim, she'd be able to feel those; instead, the ground is moving unsteadily and something erupting out of it to her left has her scrambling for the cover of shade, finding the nearest source of it and flitting to it for safety. It's the first time in a long time that she's been genuinely uncertain, feels like; after so much time spent in a world teeming with shadows, and then as a powerful creature slipping among unknowing humans, she's gotten comfortable. Certain. The giant bloody red worm that pops out of the ground a good fifty feet away and spews a noxious chartreuse liquid sure as hell isn't certain, and it's very fucking uncomfortable. But, as another worm rises from the dirt close enough to her for concern, draws back like it's getting to spit, and finds itself batted clean out of its hole by a great shadowy hand that disintegrates when it grazes a ray of sunlight, Rose handles it. She's handled monsters before. She doesn't know why she's handling monsters right now, and the realization that she's been cut off from the safety of the Dim hasn't quite sunk in yet, but she's handling it. Because of course she is. Rose handles everything. Whether or not she feels like it.