.000 // ooc
abilities
The Archive is a repository of knowledge. The living memory of humankind. It knows and understands every single thing that has ever been written down, all human wisdom in its world and everything that happened to all hosts before the current, including feelings and thoughts. It knows about culture, science, philosophy, lore and tradition. It accumulates what is written and spoken. It studies and learns. Its purpose is to procure and preserve knowledge.
The Archive is as strong as the strongest wizard, having vast amounts of magical power at its disposal and the knowledge to wield it with finesse. However, it only makes use of this power when there is no other choice, such as when its host is attacked by eight Denarians at the same time.
All the same, one has to keep in mind that currently, the Archive is an eleven-year old girl and the physical limitations of that apply.
personality
The Archive is a neutral entity of knowledge and as such, doesn't take sides. In history, the huge amount of knowledge combined with the memory of all personal emotion of the former hosts has been known to drive the hosts mad. In order to avoid this, the Archive keeps its hosts emotionally remote.
Thus, the Archive in its current form appears to be distant, aloof, earnest and quite formal.
At the same time, the current host (from now on called Ivy), is a little girl who came to inherit the power of the Archive at an unusually young age. Ivy shows childlike character traits such as liking and being drawn to cute animals and drawing up formal documents in crayon.
She's a child. She is eleven years old and she's mostly alone. She might be very mature for her age, but she's nevertheless a child.
Harry Dresden is the only one who has treated her like a child as opposed to a "human databank", giving her the nickname Ivy (Archive, Archive-y, Ivy) and letting her pet his cat, Mister. She's rather attached to him.
The other person she shows an emotional attachement to is Kincaid, her bodyguard/babysitter/driver. She puts herself in harm's way rather than seeing him hurt. He seems to be some sort of a paternal figure for her, though she doesn't forget that he is a mercenary and hired to work for her.
Ivy's case is different from that of the other hosts before her. Since she hasn't learnt how to deal with the emotional aspects of day-to-day life before inheriting the Archive, people are worried that she might lose the Archive's neutrality and let her human feelings take over. This hasn't happened (yet?).
Due to the unusual circumstances of her inheriting the Archive, her young age and the recent trauma of being kidnapped by Nicodemus, Ivy is somewhat emotionally fragile. In addition to that, she remembers everything her mother ever felt about her - and her mother hated her, hated the very idea of her.
Ivy's been through a lot of pain in her young life. She's learnt to compartmentalise and to differentiate between her official position as the Archive and her actual human life. Yet, she never had a real childhood and never will.
Her duties as the Archive include being the referee at supernatural duels and as such, she's seen death and ordered Kincaid to kill as well. She can be cold-blooded when her duties demand it, but underneath it all, she's just a little child. She gets scared and she's afraid. She knows she'll never live a normal life.
info-modding
The Archive's one of those characters that have the possibility to info-mod to the point of no return. Fourth wall, whut? I'm going to keep the info-modding as close to non-existent as I possibly can.
In canon, she knows everything that is ever written down. For poly's sake, I'll pretend that private, unhackable entries are excluded from this. If you do want Ivy to know about your character's private entries, drop me a note.
I'll consider filtered posts fair game. Since Ivy is a neutral entity, she's not going to actually do anything with the knowledge she collects. If you don't want her to have access to certain filters, I'm sure we'll be able to work something out.
The Archive knows everything - I don't. If I as a player make a mistake, please point it out to me. Likewise, feel free to hit me with critique, plotting possibilities, praise or complaints, either as a comment in this post, over AIM (sn: chatonai) or per e-mail (chatonai @ gmail.com) ♥