(no subject)
OOC Information:
Name: Smurf
Age: 20
AIM: Smurfheartstrong@aim.com
MSN: N/A
Y!M: N/A
E-MAIL: Aquamarine.from.ocean@gmail.com
IC Information:
Name: Vaarsuvius
Fandom: Order of the Stick
Timeline: Strip #762, after the Darth V arc and during the Tarquin arc during the festival being held in Elan’s honor.
Age: 130
Appearance: An elf, which means V is slightly shorter than the average human, has a more delicate, slender, and agile body/bone structure, and has pointy ears. Vaarsuvius has long dark purple hair (which is worn in a ponytail) and dark purple eyes, and has very pale skin. (The ponytail thing may not necessarily be in the userpic, since that's a new development and there isn't enough art for me to include the ponytail in each one.) Vaarsuvius also happens to be androgynous and no one knows hir sex, which is a question Vaarsuvius is content to leave unanswered.
Abilities: In the D&D system, Vaarsuvius is a mid-level wizard, meaning that, after eight hours of rest, the elf (provided V has a spell book) can prepare a set number of spells for the whole day. Vaarsuvius specializes in evocation (a school of magic that makes you able to summon lightning and fireballs and stuff) and has banned necromancy (magic to raise zombies) and conjuration (magic to teleport). Vaarsuvius also has strong divination skills and has a penchant for blowing stuff up.
Personality: Vaarsuvius is True Neutral, meaning that s/he doesn’t really care much about Good and Evil outside of what affects hir and hir loved ones personally, and while s/he’s willing to play by the rules if they’re not inconvenient, s/he’s not bound by them. (Although recently, s/he’s been flirting with the dark side a little more than is safe.) S/he’s defined by a lust for power, specifically arcane (magic) power, and has done some very questionable things in hir quest to get it, which helps illustrate hir detachment from morality. S/he understands ethics in an intellectual way, but s/he emotionally disengages from things, probably to avoid pain. (My personal theory is that something traumatic happened in hir childhood, but that’s speculation.) When s/he doesn’t disengage, it’s very easy for her to be blindsided and hurt if things go wrong, as one can see when s/he has a PTSD spiral after hir magic failed her. That being said, consciously or unconsciously, s/he makes it very difficult for anyone to get close enough to hir to do that kind of damage; the reason s/he was so severely affected by the failure of magic was because it didn’t occur to hir that a concept could turn and bite the way a person could.
S/he’s extremely arrogant (with reason, to be fair: s/he’s a very smart person and the most powerful member of hir adventuring group), and dismisses anyone s/he deems less intelligent or less powerful, though s/he’s recently realized that power isn’t everything and is working on the issue with Blackwing, hir raven familiar. Blackwing acts as hir conscience since he is wise (compared to Vaarsuvius, at least) and understands Vaarsuvius’s situation the way a reader of the comic would, since for the majority of the comic, Vaarsuvius ignored him completely and he was only observing, invisible to everyone (reader included) until Vaarsuvius remembered him, which was only when he was useful. With the late character development, Vaarsuvius apologized to Blackwing and thanked him for being so faithful despite hir subpar treatment of him-a very rare show of humility-and Blackwing appreciated the gesture enough to agree to guide her through hir growth. The fact that Vaarsuvius was humbled enough by hir divorce and the curb-stomp battle s/he had with Xykon (the series’ Big Bad) to admit that s/he was wrong (not only to Blackwing, but to another party member named Durkon, too) is an indicator that s/he is actually ready to grow, though the process is awkward at times and s/he’s still haughty and difficult to get along with.
S/he is socially maladjusted and has the charisma of a dead fish. I speculate that s/he had a childhood that was marked by heavy isolation, probably because of homeschooling, and s/he never saw a reason to learn common social graces. S/he demonstrates an interesting combination of politeness and rudeness-s/he is blunt, dismissive, and impatient, but at the same time, s/he insists on referring to people by their last name, or at least with an article (s/he called hir closest friend in hir adventuring party ‘Ms. Starshine’, which I think indicates s/he still holds her at arm’s length), s/he has disdain for crass or boorish behavior, rarely if ever swears, has “impeccable table manners”, and is able to hold a polite conversation if s/he feels the other person is intelligent enough to be respected. Most of all, hir biggest pet peeve is someone mocking or otherwise insulting hir intelligence or magic, and when that happens, s/he generally makes her displeasure known, either by immediately blasting the other person with magic or by putting down a spell that they would trip and be blasted by later. This is a very hard habit to break, even with Blackwing’s help.
While s/he has a tendency to be brusque and insensitive, s/he genuinely cares about hir friends, though s/he has difficulty showing it. Usually, hir idea of showing affection is by letting someone come closer to hir, either by sharing personal information (a big deal to hir, since s/he’s an intensely private person) or by making an effort to be helpful in an emotional setting (like giving advice or lending an ear, but she never confides her own problems to someone without significant effort on the other person’s part). Even then, it’s hard to remember s/he likes you sometimes, because s/he still has a tendency to be brusque, especially when s/he’s in a bad mood, but s/he can be depended on for help when it’s needed most.
S/he was married, so s/he knows about love, but s/he has difficulty maintaining it, since s/he habitually withdraws from closeness, both physical and emotional, and s/he rarely paid attention to hir spouse or their adopted children, which ended in an abrupt divorce during the comic’s run.
Another thing to know is that s/he likes to think that s/he’s led by logic and cool calculation. If something can be predicted, then it can be fought. Hir need for control is the root of every flaw s/he has-other people are not predictable and cannot be controlled, so they have to be kept at a safe distance to avoid them hurting hir; if s/he gets enough power and magic, s/he will be able to control hir surroundings and nothing will be able to hurt hir-as long as s/he can anticipate what will happen, then s/he’s safe. S/he can function fine with this attitude in the ivory tower s/he was schooled within, but s/he can’t handle the sheer Unknown that is other people, the outside world. And that was is hir downfall.
Being faced with the unknown and uncontrollable has revealed that, no matter what s/he likes to think, she’s not led by logic. S/he’s led by emotions, and extremely explosive, uncontrolled ones at that. That is possibly the most scary thing that s/he’s ever faced. So, of course, s/he does hir best to ignore it. Too bad life doesn’t work that way.
History: The description of Vaarsuvius’s history is not particularly thorough in canon, so a lot is left to the reader’s imagination, but s/he was born in a small town in the Elven Lands to two rangers and was introduced to magic early on by a family friend named Aarindarius, who later on took hir as an apprentice for sixty years. After that, Aarindarius began to worry s/he was getting too isolated in their tower, so s/he was kicked out into the world. At some point around here, s/he got married to an elf named Inkyrius and adopted two children (who we don’t know the names or genders of). Eventually, s/he decided to go adventuring to get more powerful and left hir family for six years, and during the webcomic’s run, she killed a black dragon who turned out to be the young son of a very, very powerful mother dragon.
Vaarsuvius was going through an intense breakdown halfway through the comic because hir magic had failed hir during a war depicted in the comic, leading to hir being forced to watch as a group of soldiers were slaughtered, begging for hir help and eventually cursing hir until each was dead, and that was added on to the fact that hir adventuring party get separated (half escaped by water and half was left in the ravaged city-V was on the boat with two other members) and no matter how hard s/he tried, she couldn’t find the other half of the party (one of the people being one of hir few close friends), which started to prove that hir magic couldn’t solve everything. This culminated in hir storming away from what was left of the party, when the mother dragon attacked and graphically described how she was going to attack V’s family (I believe she said she would kill Inkyrius, then eat V’s kindergarten-aged children feet-first before trapping their souls in a stone forever, then going to another plane, so V wouldn’t have a hope of ever rescuing hir children), then the dragon teleported to V’s home. Vaarsuvius really broke down at this, and three fiends (basically demons) appeared and offered hir a deal: to splice three super-powerful but super-evil souls to hir own for however long s/he could hang onto them, and for every second s/he had them, each fiend would be able to possess hir own body at some point for the same amount of time. The fiends proved by trickery that the only reason Vaarsuvius was really accepting the deal was because s/he had to prove to hirself that arcane magic could solve everything, that s/he could solve everything, without any kind of help. It was for pride.
Vaarsuvius accepted the splice and went on to graphically torture and murder the mother dragon in front of hir cowering spouse and children, culminating in hir forcing the dragon to watch as s/he cast a spell that murdered each and every creature that could claim any kind of blood relation to the mother dragon. (The fiends were quite shocked as, while they had told V that hir alignment would be affected by the splices, they had lied. V was only convinced that it would affect hir. In reality, everything s/he did, s/he did of her own free will.) (It should be noted that, in the humanoid culture, killing goblins/orcs/dragons/etc. without provocation is considered perfectly okay because they’re ‘Evil’ by birth, though even fellow humanoids would be shocked to hear about this single-handed wholesale genocide.)
After that, V’s family was horrified and Inkyrius demanded that Vaarsuvius stay with them and let go of the splices if s/he wanted to keep hir family, but V refused, citing that s/he had to fix everything. After a series of thwarted attempts to fix everything (everything was getting fixed on its own), s/he tried to attack the series’s Big Bad himself, and ended up getting thrashed, losing all the splices. Then, at a big monologue from the villain, s/he realized that power doesn’t necessarily have to be arcane-any kind of power is still power. At that epiphany, s/he used what little resources s/he had to take/hide the Big Bad’s immortality relic and save one of the plot-important prisoners the Big Bad had been torturing for three months instead of running to save hir own hide, and through outside forces, s/he was saved and brought back to hir party with the prisoner. S/he learned from the experience and is now trying to become a better person with the help of hir raven familiar, Blackwing, but Inkyrius sent a request for divorce, which V signed without a struggle, citing that s/he felt it was best for hir family to live a peaceful life instead of being targeted by hir many enemies.
Extra Notes and Speculation: We haven't seen much of V after the Darth Vaarsuvius arc, so hir development is largely up to me at this point. I play hir as I think s/he would react in the long term: more eager than usual to interact somehow with others--not necessarily in a friendly or romantic manner, but just interaction. S/he has suffered a huge emotional upheaval and refuses to allow anyone in and tell them, so s/he responds by clinging to people for some kind of intellectual comfort by talking. I also tend to play hir a little more polite than s/he has been in the past, since I feel that that is also a part of hir attempts at reform. Far from a social butterfly, friendly, or pleasant to anyone s/he deems beneath hir, but less apt to write people off based on an impression and willing to put more effort in being on good terms with the people s/he is forced to work with.
Overall Info:
Rating: G - NC17
Death: Please talk to me beforehand, but I'm open to the possibility.
Smut: If it's in-character.
Yaoi - Het - Yuri: Given V's nature, it could be any of the three with any given character until I say something definitive. As it stands, I'm open to any possibility, but I lean more towards Het for one reason and one reason alone: I love playing with pregnancy scares. :P
Name: Smurf
Age: 20
AIM: Smurfheartstrong@aim.com
MSN: N/A
Y!M: N/A
E-MAIL: Aquamarine.from.ocean@gmail.com
IC Information:
Name: Vaarsuvius
Fandom: Order of the Stick
Timeline: Strip #762, after the Darth V arc and during the Tarquin arc during the festival being held in Elan’s honor.
Age: 130
Appearance: An elf, which means V is slightly shorter than the average human, has a more delicate, slender, and agile body/bone structure, and has pointy ears. Vaarsuvius has long dark purple hair (which is worn in a ponytail) and dark purple eyes, and has very pale skin. (The ponytail thing may not necessarily be in the userpic, since that's a new development and there isn't enough art for me to include the ponytail in each one.) Vaarsuvius also happens to be androgynous and no one knows hir sex, which is a question Vaarsuvius is content to leave unanswered.
Abilities: In the D&D system, Vaarsuvius is a mid-level wizard, meaning that, after eight hours of rest, the elf (provided V has a spell book) can prepare a set number of spells for the whole day. Vaarsuvius specializes in evocation (a school of magic that makes you able to summon lightning and fireballs and stuff) and has banned necromancy (magic to raise zombies) and conjuration (magic to teleport). Vaarsuvius also has strong divination skills and has a penchant for blowing stuff up.
Personality: Vaarsuvius is True Neutral, meaning that s/he doesn’t really care much about Good and Evil outside of what affects hir and hir loved ones personally, and while s/he’s willing to play by the rules if they’re not inconvenient, s/he’s not bound by them. (Although recently, s/he’s been flirting with the dark side a little more than is safe.) S/he’s defined by a lust for power, specifically arcane (magic) power, and has done some very questionable things in hir quest to get it, which helps illustrate hir detachment from morality. S/he understands ethics in an intellectual way, but s/he emotionally disengages from things, probably to avoid pain. (My personal theory is that something traumatic happened in hir childhood, but that’s speculation.) When s/he doesn’t disengage, it’s very easy for her to be blindsided and hurt if things go wrong, as one can see when s/he has a PTSD spiral after hir magic failed her. That being said, consciously or unconsciously, s/he makes it very difficult for anyone to get close enough to hir to do that kind of damage; the reason s/he was so severely affected by the failure of magic was because it didn’t occur to hir that a concept could turn and bite the way a person could.
S/he’s extremely arrogant (with reason, to be fair: s/he’s a very smart person and the most powerful member of hir adventuring group), and dismisses anyone s/he deems less intelligent or less powerful, though s/he’s recently realized that power isn’t everything and is working on the issue with Blackwing, hir raven familiar. Blackwing acts as hir conscience since he is wise (compared to Vaarsuvius, at least) and understands Vaarsuvius’s situation the way a reader of the comic would, since for the majority of the comic, Vaarsuvius ignored him completely and he was only observing, invisible to everyone (reader included) until Vaarsuvius remembered him, which was only when he was useful. With the late character development, Vaarsuvius apologized to Blackwing and thanked him for being so faithful despite hir subpar treatment of him-a very rare show of humility-and Blackwing appreciated the gesture enough to agree to guide her through hir growth. The fact that Vaarsuvius was humbled enough by hir divorce and the curb-stomp battle s/he had with Xykon (the series’ Big Bad) to admit that s/he was wrong (not only to Blackwing, but to another party member named Durkon, too) is an indicator that s/he is actually ready to grow, though the process is awkward at times and s/he’s still haughty and difficult to get along with.
S/he is socially maladjusted and has the charisma of a dead fish. I speculate that s/he had a childhood that was marked by heavy isolation, probably because of homeschooling, and s/he never saw a reason to learn common social graces. S/he demonstrates an interesting combination of politeness and rudeness-s/he is blunt, dismissive, and impatient, but at the same time, s/he insists on referring to people by their last name, or at least with an article (s/he called hir closest friend in hir adventuring party ‘Ms. Starshine’, which I think indicates s/he still holds her at arm’s length), s/he has disdain for crass or boorish behavior, rarely if ever swears, has “impeccable table manners”, and is able to hold a polite conversation if s/he feels the other person is intelligent enough to be respected. Most of all, hir biggest pet peeve is someone mocking or otherwise insulting hir intelligence or magic, and when that happens, s/he generally makes her displeasure known, either by immediately blasting the other person with magic or by putting down a spell that they would trip and be blasted by later. This is a very hard habit to break, even with Blackwing’s help.
While s/he has a tendency to be brusque and insensitive, s/he genuinely cares about hir friends, though s/he has difficulty showing it. Usually, hir idea of showing affection is by letting someone come closer to hir, either by sharing personal information (a big deal to hir, since s/he’s an intensely private person) or by making an effort to be helpful in an emotional setting (like giving advice or lending an ear, but she never confides her own problems to someone without significant effort on the other person’s part). Even then, it’s hard to remember s/he likes you sometimes, because s/he still has a tendency to be brusque, especially when s/he’s in a bad mood, but s/he can be depended on for help when it’s needed most.
S/he was married, so s/he knows about love, but s/he has difficulty maintaining it, since s/he habitually withdraws from closeness, both physical and emotional, and s/he rarely paid attention to hir spouse or their adopted children, which ended in an abrupt divorce during the comic’s run.
Another thing to know is that s/he likes to think that s/he’s led by logic and cool calculation. If something can be predicted, then it can be fought. Hir need for control is the root of every flaw s/he has-other people are not predictable and cannot be controlled, so they have to be kept at a safe distance to avoid them hurting hir; if s/he gets enough power and magic, s/he will be able to control hir surroundings and nothing will be able to hurt hir-as long as s/he can anticipate what will happen, then s/he’s safe. S/he can function fine with this attitude in the ivory tower s/he was schooled within, but s/he can’t handle the sheer Unknown that is other people, the outside world. And that was is hir downfall.
Being faced with the unknown and uncontrollable has revealed that, no matter what s/he likes to think, she’s not led by logic. S/he’s led by emotions, and extremely explosive, uncontrolled ones at that. That is possibly the most scary thing that s/he’s ever faced. So, of course, s/he does hir best to ignore it. Too bad life doesn’t work that way.
History: The description of Vaarsuvius’s history is not particularly thorough in canon, so a lot is left to the reader’s imagination, but s/he was born in a small town in the Elven Lands to two rangers and was introduced to magic early on by a family friend named Aarindarius, who later on took hir as an apprentice for sixty years. After that, Aarindarius began to worry s/he was getting too isolated in their tower, so s/he was kicked out into the world. At some point around here, s/he got married to an elf named Inkyrius and adopted two children (who we don’t know the names or genders of). Eventually, s/he decided to go adventuring to get more powerful and left hir family for six years, and during the webcomic’s run, she killed a black dragon who turned out to be the young son of a very, very powerful mother dragon.
Vaarsuvius was going through an intense breakdown halfway through the comic because hir magic had failed hir during a war depicted in the comic, leading to hir being forced to watch as a group of soldiers were slaughtered, begging for hir help and eventually cursing hir until each was dead, and that was added on to the fact that hir adventuring party get separated (half escaped by water and half was left in the ravaged city-V was on the boat with two other members) and no matter how hard s/he tried, she couldn’t find the other half of the party (one of the people being one of hir few close friends), which started to prove that hir magic couldn’t solve everything. This culminated in hir storming away from what was left of the party, when the mother dragon attacked and graphically described how she was going to attack V’s family (I believe she said she would kill Inkyrius, then eat V’s kindergarten-aged children feet-first before trapping their souls in a stone forever, then going to another plane, so V wouldn’t have a hope of ever rescuing hir children), then the dragon teleported to V’s home. Vaarsuvius really broke down at this, and three fiends (basically demons) appeared and offered hir a deal: to splice three super-powerful but super-evil souls to hir own for however long s/he could hang onto them, and for every second s/he had them, each fiend would be able to possess hir own body at some point for the same amount of time. The fiends proved by trickery that the only reason Vaarsuvius was really accepting the deal was because s/he had to prove to hirself that arcane magic could solve everything, that s/he could solve everything, without any kind of help. It was for pride.
Vaarsuvius accepted the splice and went on to graphically torture and murder the mother dragon in front of hir cowering spouse and children, culminating in hir forcing the dragon to watch as s/he cast a spell that murdered each and every creature that could claim any kind of blood relation to the mother dragon. (The fiends were quite shocked as, while they had told V that hir alignment would be affected by the splices, they had lied. V was only convinced that it would affect hir. In reality, everything s/he did, s/he did of her own free will.) (It should be noted that, in the humanoid culture, killing goblins/orcs/dragons/etc. without provocation is considered perfectly okay because they’re ‘Evil’ by birth, though even fellow humanoids would be shocked to hear about this single-handed wholesale genocide.)
After that, V’s family was horrified and Inkyrius demanded that Vaarsuvius stay with them and let go of the splices if s/he wanted to keep hir family, but V refused, citing that s/he had to fix everything. After a series of thwarted attempts to fix everything (everything was getting fixed on its own), s/he tried to attack the series’s Big Bad himself, and ended up getting thrashed, losing all the splices. Then, at a big monologue from the villain, s/he realized that power doesn’t necessarily have to be arcane-any kind of power is still power. At that epiphany, s/he used what little resources s/he had to take/hide the Big Bad’s immortality relic and save one of the plot-important prisoners the Big Bad had been torturing for three months instead of running to save hir own hide, and through outside forces, s/he was saved and brought back to hir party with the prisoner. S/he learned from the experience and is now trying to become a better person with the help of hir raven familiar, Blackwing, but Inkyrius sent a request for divorce, which V signed without a struggle, citing that s/he felt it was best for hir family to live a peaceful life instead of being targeted by hir many enemies.
Extra Notes and Speculation: We haven't seen much of V after the Darth Vaarsuvius arc, so hir development is largely up to me at this point. I play hir as I think s/he would react in the long term: more eager than usual to interact somehow with others--not necessarily in a friendly or romantic manner, but just interaction. S/he has suffered a huge emotional upheaval and refuses to allow anyone in and tell them, so s/he responds by clinging to people for some kind of intellectual comfort by talking. I also tend to play hir a little more polite than s/he has been in the past, since I feel that that is also a part of hir attempts at reform. Far from a social butterfly, friendly, or pleasant to anyone s/he deems beneath hir, but less apt to write people off based on an impression and willing to put more effort in being on good terms with the people s/he is forced to work with.
Overall Info:
Rating: G - NC17
Death: Please talk to me beforehand, but I'm open to the possibility.
Smut: If it's in-character.
Yaoi - Het - Yuri: Given V's nature, it could be any of the three with any given character until I say something definitive. As it stands, I'm open to any possibility, but I lean more towards Het for one reason and one reason alone: I love playing with pregnancy scares. :P