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modmachine) wrote2015-07-29 12:42 am
modmachine) wrote2015-07-29 12:42 am
APPLICATIONS
In order to keep the number of players from getting overwhelming for the mods, all applications are processed in a queue in the order submitted and characters are accepted as space becomes available (either as space in the game is increased or other characters are removed from the game). Acceptance into the queue does not guarantee entrance to the game; unless there are glaring errors in the application (such as a missing section) or moderator concerns, all applications go into the queue based on the time of reserve (if applicable) or submission. There are two queues, one for newly arrived characters and one for those who are already residents of Hex. At the time of game opening, there will be twelve slots for new arrivals and twelve for current residents, discounting moderator characters. (Moderator characters apped in after game start will be a part of the queue.) The remaining four slots in the game will go to whichever fills up first. Post your applications to this entry in the following format: First comment should contain the OOC information section only. Successive comments should be posted in reply to that comment, as many as you need. Moderator responses will be appended to the last comment of the application. Last updated: Dec 5 11:pm EST
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Kitty | Shadowrun
Player name: Kira
Player age and gender: 28/she
Any other characters in game? N/A
1/2
Character name: Kitty
Character canon: Shadowrun V
Canon point: 2078
Character history:
Kitty was born as the biggest kitten in the litter of a stray cat somewhere in the Rhine-Ruhr Megaplex, a huge, polluted, multicultural sprawl in the very west of the Alliance of German Countries, short ADL. The mommy cat didn't return one day, and this might have been the early end of the baby shapeshifter, had a little old lady by the name of Chantalle Schulz not found the hidden corner that Kitty had been born in and rescued the only surviving baby cat. The strangely large size of the kitten didn't tip Chantalle off about something being off with this cat, nor did the fact that she aged very slowly - and really, considering the neighbourhood, it could always just have been that the mommy cat had eaten some science lab's incorrectly disposed of waste, hindering proper growth in her litter. It wasn't that strange, and the woman was just glad that her new companion didn't require much food - or medical attention, really, never getting sick. And what a bright and understanding little kitten it was. No, Chantalle was way too happy and uninterested in questioning her luck to make enquiries. She was also not particularly inventive when naming her kitten.
Kitty on the other hand was quite happy the way it was as a young kitten. She did sometimes turn into a human, but always quickly turned back, so that Chantalle never noticed. And then, when she was old enough to comprehend the trideo news flickering on after the shows that Chantalle had fallen asleep to, she started learning about the world outside the apartment. One night, there was a documentary on magical critter extinction measures in Quebec, and shapeshifters were mentioned, too. For a long time after she thought that being hunted down and killed was what happened to animals like her, bigger than they should be and able to turn into metahumans, everywhere. And when she learned that most countries and companies just didn't consider them metahuman but also didn't hunt them, and that there were even a few countries where they were valued more, it felt way too late to tell Chantalle about who she really was. So she just pretended that it wasn't there when the old woman was around, and started experimenting with her human form elsewhere. For this, she started to sneak out of the apartment more and more regularly and through trial and error learned how to appear metahuman and interact with people like she was one.
Chantalle's apartment was located next to a waste facility run by the Shiawase corporation. One day, a curious new scent came from over there, so one young shapeshifter cat decided that sneaking in there was an excellent idea to figure it out. All went well until she suddenly found herself without a place to hide and two security trolls came towards where she was - and she did the next best thing and jumped into the back of an open transporter (not a waste one. It was very clean inside). The security trolls closed the doors and walked away. She was stuck in a dark, mostly empty space with no food and slowly decreasing amounts of oxygen.
Nothing happened for well over a day - she can't tell how long it was, exactly, but it felt like eternity - and she was too afraid of what they might do with her to start meowing for help. But then something did happen: Someone opened the door, and she only in time managed to jump into a hiding spot before yelling and fighting erupted outside, and just as the transporter started moving two street samurai, a human woman with a balance tail and a male troll, jumped into the back of the vehicle. As it sped out of the facility, gunshots erupted.
They made some head before people started following them, and while there was a moment of peace, the troll noticed Kitty. And recognized her as the cat that a little old lady had asked him to look out for earlier that day when he had been in disguise to find an observation point of the waste facility a few stories above Chantalle's flat. There was no more time than for a few nice words and an attempt to calm her down from a distance, but when the shadowrunners (because that was what they were, Kitty would later learn) got into trouble, and the trouble threatened to take out the whole transporter, including Kitty, the shock and fear made her magic abilities surface - she switched into her human form and sent an acidic wave towards the helicopter that was about to shoot big grenades at them.
The mix of surprise and the actual damage that her (rather weak because unlearned) attack caused got the group the time that they needed to turn the tides of the battle, and they managed to escape without casualties.
Once escaped, introductions were made, and the runner team after some hasty discussions offered her a deal: She would help them in future runs, and in return they would get her ready to participate in metahuman society - get her the skills and the more materialistic means like a commlink and a fake ID - and also teach her how to make better use of her magic and her agility. It was a good deal for both sides. Kitty got what she needed at that time, and the runners got a team member that only wanted a small part of the monetary rewards for runs but due to her skills in infiltration and magic was quite valuable. Two members of the team became especially valuable to her: Ivokat, the mage, taught her how to use her magic and helped her find resources where what he had and could do stopped working for her. And Malicia, the street samurai with the balance tail, took her under her wing a bit and took her along for runs away from the other team members. This introduced Kitty to wetwork, aka assassination runs. Not that the other team members were unimportant: Leo, the rigger, who taught her some Japanese and got her a miniscooter to drive around on; Eärendil, the decker, who introduced her to the world of those of the upper and even higher classes; and Simon, the troll, who showed her how to blend in in parts of the town worse than the one she had been raised in. With the team having three Elves, two of which had ties with Tír na nÓg, an Elvish country, it happened almost naturally that she also learned some Sperethiel, the Elven language.
She still lives with Chantalle; the woman was overjoyed to see her return. But she has now become a free roaming cat, and after some panic the woman understood that her cat would always return to her,even if sometimes she stayed away for a few days.
Character world:
While not exactly the future of our world - the timelines parted a bit before the dissolution of the Soviet Union - the world of Shadowrun still in many ways is ours, just with a reawakened magic and the technology of 60 years into the future. And the pollution of 60 more years of only barely regulated environmental irresponsibility, can't forget that. I'll try to just name some highlights in each area.
The internet is wireless, you can enter it on a way more physical seeming level than today. Advanced technology makes it hard to avoid it; augmented reality (AR) is widespread and makes you be bombarded with AR ads instead of billboards or neon signs when walking around a shopping district. But you can also step into the internet itself, leaving your body behind and stepping into the virtual reality. People rarely drive their cars themselves anymore, vast advancements in medicine and technology have enabled a widespread use of implants and other technical enhancements to human bodies and advanced technology, guns typically come with network abilities... and so on. Oh, and most recently there are artificial intelligences that are fighting for their civil rights. Or stealing bodies and committing terrorist acts, that depends on your viewpoint.
And there's magic! Dragons and other magical animals, metahuman magic users, magic storms, astral planes, and yes, ...metahumans. While classic humans still exist, a number of them have been born or changed into dwarves, elves, trolls and orcs (and their subspecies) as the levels of magic in the world rose. Magic is everywhere, and it is not always nice - indeed, it can be pretty nasty. Magic critters can be quite dangerous, and in especially polluted areas they sometimes are more toxic than their surroundings. Viruses have created ghouls and vampires. All in all, most magical creatures in lore exist in the world of Shadowrun in one way or the other.
A highlight of pollution is certainly the SOX, an area in central Europe so radioactively polluted that it can only be entered in protective suits, filled with storms that negate all magic and thus kill spirits and dual beings. But other natural disasters are around too - water smuggling is a major issue in the countries of California and Australia because of the water shortage there. And magical calamities have joined the natural ones.
Nation states have lost most of their power where they still exist, with very few exceptions. Corporations have taken their place as the main power players; the biggest of them having their own extraterritorial areas all over the world and their own citizens. Organized crime is huge as well, and corruption and general shadiness is so widespread in all all three, countries, corporations and crime syndicates, that they often are less different than they try to pretend. Society can be roughly split in two groups: Upper and middle class people living in more or less highly controlled and pleasant environments with citizenship status and lower class people who are poor, often without a real ID and without any structural protection, who in turn at least don't have their every move tracked and controlled. To make it plastic: A poor person will only eat food made of soy and enriched with artificial flavours while a middle class person will sometimes have real foods and a rich person will have only that and real meat, too. ID-less people, especially when they are orcs, will often be killed in droves in "police raids" (there are almost no real police systems anymore, they're all private for-profit security firms now) without anyone caring or a good reason, while a higher up person might just discreetly vanish, but it would actually in some way be about them. There is minor movement between the groups - talents that are snatched off the streets or people who work their way into the corrupt systems, and people who for one reason or the other leave the perfect world to work in the shady underbelly of society. Chantalle is one of the poor people who have a state ID - a kind of ID that doesn't award real privileges as corporation IDs do, but at least she officially exists, which brings its own set of advantages, and has enough money to afford her own flat in a fairly safe section of the worse parts of the sprawl. Shadowrunners like the ones that Kitty met are in-betweens; they come from both sides of society and end up as highly skilled independent criminals for hire for various reasons. To use examples from her team: For the troll street samurai, it was a steep climb up the social ladder from a poor slum kid, for the elven mage it was a heavy fall from a high society member in his homeland to a fugitive in a different country selling his abilities. tl;dr: It's dystopian, but at least dead people aren't turned into soylent green. If they lie wounded on the street, they might however be disassembled for all their parts that can be sold with profit.
2/2
Most things are a game to Kitty. She wasn't raised with duties and responsibilities, having been perceived as nothing but a cat for the longest time, and her nature didn't exactly support a sense for either forming. That doesn't necessary make her unreliable, but it takes a conscious effort of will for her to take things seriously enough to do them the fast and practical instead of the fun way. She can technically stab a person to death quickly and effectively before being noticed, but it is a lot more fun to not kill them immediately and make them jump around instead, isn't it? The matter can be as simple of complicated, as important or unimportant, as dangerous or safe as they may be, Kitty will only treat them seriously if she's either upset, disturbed, hurt or angry herself or if she is trying hard to not make it a game.
The one major exception to this rule are interpersonal relationships that mean something to her. She might still tease such people and play with things that belong to these people, but she will take the relationships themselves very seriously. That is why she can be dependable: Wanting a person she cares about to be safe and well is her main motivation for going through with something efficiently and for persevering in the face of frustration or boredom with a task. It even surpasses her own survival as a motivator, mostly because she does not worry for her own safety very much, subconsciously considering herself invincible in the way that children do sometimes. Consciously, she can make rather accurate estimates of the dangers in a situation and act on them, but when she doesn't have to or take the time to consider things thoroughly, all that goes out of the window. The other thing that can throw those accurate estimates off is when her phobia of rooms that are too dark for her to see and which have no available exit is triggered, which was acquired when she thought she would die in that transporter. Her functionality is severely limited under such circumstances, and it takes her much willpower to think about anything that is not flight.
It won't be very apparent most of the time that she cares about someone or is loyal to them, though, as she only really shows it clearly in a pinch. As a pinch constitute situations in which the other is in danger or seriously injured or sick as well as very sad, and comparable situations. She will try to do what she can to help, and if there is nothing, she will just try to stay close and provide comfort that way.
Another reason why she might get all close and cuddly is when she is feeling upset herself, is injured or otherwise isn't well. Or if she's just needy and wants attention. This kind of proximity is a lot easier to get than the other kind - while she won't go to a stranger with it, it only requires a very basic level of trust in the other person.
Let's return to the fact that she needs strong motivators to overcome frustration or boredom and still do something despite them. Normally, when the well-being of someone that she cares about isn't at risk, she will only do things that seem interesting to her and usually abandon a task when it stops being interesting to her - runs fall under the well-being of people that she cares about being endangered. Generally, she is full of energy, but she can also be supremely lazy and just lie or sit around for hours if she's content. Likewise, when something goes wrong or something awkward happened, she will abandon it and just pretend that it never happened. If confronted about it, she won't deny it, but outside of that it will be nothing to her.
Something else that is, while not nothing, a lot less troublesome to her than for most people is killing someone or inflicting harm on them. This is not due to trauma, as she grew up in a household where she was not treated as a human, yet still beloved and treasured. But most of her knowledge about the metahuman world comes from watching movies and from interacting with people who are more or less deeply stuck in the ugly, corrupt underbelly of metahuman society and life. She can feel compassion, she just tends not to. To a big part, this approach ties back into considering things a game, and it changes with people whom she doesn't consider a game. For them, she can feel very strong compassion. One could perhaps say that she isn't so much a psychopath as someone who hasn't quite learned to apply her theory of mind to people whom she isn't close enough to to have witnessed their personhood first hand. This incomplete ToM coincidences with surroundings where violence and other ugly things are fairly normalized and in which she is capable of being a (minor) predator, so that no external forces really keep her in check, either.
Character abilities:
- Cannot read and write and generally will have a hard time grasping academic knowledge or fine arts related things. She has a lot of street smarts, though, and possesses a good deal of knowledge gathered through listening to gossip, observation of places and people and consuming popular media. (Her housekeeping abilities are zero, too. Nobody asks their cat to do the dishes.)
- Stealth. She can use magic to make herself invisible, but even in her human form she's very quiet and moves fluidly and without more movements than necessary, and wears clothes that help her with not being seen. She also has solid experience with sneaking into well guarded places. In addition, she knows how to navigate most social situations in a way that will allow her to not draw attention to herself, and can always fall back on her cat form.
- Fighting. She can use pistols, handle daggers and has basic Krav Maga training. Generally her fighting abilities are tailored to allow her to either stealthily take out one single person or get out of situations of violence quickly. She's a scout and infiltrator, foremost, and when her abilities are needed in an actual fight it will be her magical abilities, not the physical ones.
- Speaking of magic, she's a quite adept shaman for her age. Being a dual being (existing on and perceiving the physical and the astral plane at the same time, always) helps, but it goes beyond that. Being what she is she doesn't see any merit in dabbling with spirits - her guardian spirit is more than enough of those guys, thank you - but she has poked at the other fields of magic (witchcraft and wizardry). That means that she can both handle free magic and magic bound to items. The spells that she can currently cast are invisibility, mask (an illusion that changes the appearance of her body to all senses and technical applications; primarily used to hide her cat eyes), acid wave, mana flash, immaterial punch, levitation, creation of darkness fields and physical barriers. She's currently training to learn mind manipulation and lie detection. Some of the spells that she can use, she can also trap in items so that they can then be used independently of her/that she doesn't have to go through doing them to use them on the spot. It is easier to trap them in natural items than in highly processed technology. She can also create foci, items that support a magic user's magical abilities, homunculi, and watchers.
- Regeneration. All shapeshifters, likely due to their strong affinity with the astral plane (where spirits reside) and magic, have an enhanced regeneration- it is so good that she would grow back lost limbs if necessary and that any implant below deltaware (the highest, most expensive, least accessible quality of implants) wouldn't stay in her body. Her healing rate is also vastly above average. It's still possible for her to die, though.
- This is not so much an ability as that it needs to go somewhere - ageing in shapeshifters is a /leshrug thing. While there was once the assumption that they simply aged doubly as fast as regular humans, research has shown a vast variety of ageing speeds and processes among shapeshifters that isn't even clearly based in the origin species. Kitty is seven and her human form looks 8-9.
- She speaks Standard German, Ruhrspeak (an amalgam language, made up of German, Polish, Turkish, Russian and a few other languages), a little English, Sperethiel and Japanese.
- Better senses: Sees better in twilight, hears ultrasound, perfect balance. In cat form, she has all the advantages (and disadvantages) of a cat.
Samples:
One
Two
Another one, in case the other two don't contain enough introspection.
Intended decay path:
She'll turn into a changeling (more specifically into a beast, having been nicked and turned into a pet kitten as an exceptionally cute toddler - old enough to have some memories and upon her escape still young enough for a sufficient amount of those memories to still be around).
Her memories will realign so that Chantalle becomes her human grandmother that raised her and her accident in the waste facility and subsequent work with the runner team becomes her escaping and making a new life for herself (I'm still unclear on how this would best align as I'm only starting to poke at CtL). Her shadowrunner teammates will become fellow changeling NPCs, annnd I'm thinking that with a bit of help (from not!Malicia? Whom she's working with now?) she'd have offed her fetch and live with her human grandmother again.
Stigmatic glitch:
There is a faint scent of industrial and, when she's stressed, toxic waste in the air around her. It's faint enough that she, who has grown up in the middle of a huge, polluted urban sprawl (and whose home base is located right next to a waste facility and a polluted river), won't notice it and might even comment on how fresh the air in Hex is, but it will be noticeable for people that have very good noses or who are very close, in a cramped space with her, etc.
ACCEPTED
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