(no subject)
Mun
Name KJ
Livejournal Username: whiteadelphi
E-mail: saidhanrahan@gmail.com
AIM/MSN: Damn Fangirls
Current Characters at Luceti: Nami from One Piece
Character
Name: Katie McCoy
Gender: Female
Age: Nine. More or less. In fact, she is nine, but she has vague memories of past lives stretching for ohhh about 300 years or so, so while she’s a brat most of the time she occasionally has flashes of eerie maturity. (She’ll also often introduce herself as being over 300 years of age, because dude. You need to be at least 21 to get into a bar, right?)
Wing Color: Baby blue. Occasionally they might glitter a little provided you don’t look at them directly. >>
Physical Appearance I’ma gonna get some icons drawn for her (by someone), but she’s quite short (being a child, oddly) - just under four feet tall. Dark brown curly hair that’s kind of down to her chin and doesn’t like to behave and is often hat hair because she shoves a blue beanie on it every chance she can get (do not mess with the hat :|), and eyes that are slightly yellowy-green in nature and the pupils don’t look quite right. They’re very slightly elongated like a cat’s. Not enough to think she’s not human, but weird enough that people will remember them. They also reflect light. Canines are ever so slightly elongated too. It’s like she’s got a couple of cat genes in there, heaven forbid. Oh, but rosy English complexion 8Db She’ll always wear skirts and dresses no matter the time of year. She’ll have a burn mark that’s fresh around one wrist when she arrives in Luceti, but it will fade into a scar with time.
Oh, and occasionally she turns into a small, black and white cat. Well …kitten, at her age. But only when nobody’s looking. And very occasionally she’ll look like a mixture of the two, but I’ll go into that a little later.
History: Oh lord, this is probably going to sound ridiculous, but bear with me. >_>
Katie was born in 1981 in Bath, England, and was a normal child in every way for the first eight years of her life. Precocious and kind of spoiled and selfish, but most kids are; she also loved her parents and stood up to school bullies to protect other kids (annnd then lost to school bullies, but pfft, it’s the thought that counts) and occasionally was really nice and tried not to give either of her parents a headache for the evening. All in all, stereotypically assertive and spoiled only child of an average family until one fine day, she was hit by a car. Wonderful experience in any small child’s life, right?
But she doesn’t remember it very clearly, because things got confusing at that point. Katie is not actually human. She’s a changeling. Technically, she has two souls; a human one and a fae one, dormant, but when her life was threatened it flared awake, engaging magic to protect her from death and changing her forever.
The Pooka is a trickster changeling, a fae creature trapped within the body of a human being. Katie is still Katie, but she is also now someone other, a creature far older than the age of nine that comes with its own blessings and dangerous flaws. The gift of magic and the ability to shapeshift is always a plus. The fact that certain faerie superstitions and cold iron can hurt her now? Not so much. Then there is the fact that all pooka are geased to never be able to tell the complete truth, not without causing themselves a lot of pain; her parents will never understand why Katie lies about everything, always, and she can never tell them she loves them. Not directly. Eventually, a pooka finds a way.
It could be very emotional and traumatising, especially when your parents start dragging you to psychologists because you appear to have developed compulsive lying in the wake of a car accident, and weird things start happening around you all the time. But Katie is not the only changeling in all of England - place is rife with old traditions and tales of the fair folk, and most of them are eerily true in a way - and a fae society does exist, which she was quickly dragged into by her own kind. She made friends (…mostly adoptive protective older types) to understand her and keep her safe, and maybe with that added friendship and protection in her life things would eventually adjust back to …well, reasonably normal.
But fae society has enemies, everything from court feuds to the dauntain, and even small children don’t escape from that unscathed. (The dauntain are the sort of people who use the phrase “I don’t believe in fairies” as a murder weapon. More in a sec.) So …juggling a mystified and slowly more distant family with the occasional freakish occurrence and random bastard trying to kill her just because of what she is? You could forgive the poor kid for having a nervous breakdown and hiding under her bed forever. She’s only nine. But really, she’s done this before; about twelve times, to be precise. There are faded, distant flashes of memory and the knowledge that she’s weathered this in the past, and it’s oddly the faint mark of adulthood several times over and the more flexible mind of a child combined that let her overcome any problems and practically shrug them off. They hurt her at the time, sure. But in a sense, Katie is unbreakable. She’ll always bounce back.
Annnd the fact that she’s possibly a little nuts also helps.
Thus far, only six months have passed since she became a changeling proper, and most of that period has been to try and adjust her rather uh …skewed viewpoints and lifestyle with the more mundane one of her entirely human family. Luckily being a pooka tends to turn lying into an art form. (Abstract, headache-forming art at that. Trying to discern what the hell a pooka is trying to tell you can be like looking at one of those annoying pictures that’s supposed to be hiding a boat somewhere.) One of the knights in court has taken her on as a squire and is slowly teaching her how to fight with a sword - largely because being a knight herself sounded just fantastic. (So yes, she’s actually a squire. Whether she’d ever have made it to knighthood is another matter, though the knight seemed fond enough of her.) But it’s not as if she needs the sword to defend herself, even at the age of nine.
Six months after she joined the fae court, she was attacked by the dauntain; specifically picked as the smallest and weakest of her friends, being a child, and therefore they singled her out while she was alone and tried to force as much information out of her as they could about the rest of fae society. Two dauntain came for her, armed with cold iron and a hatred of all things fae. …they’re both still alive. One fled being chased (and mauled) by the city’s feral cat population and the other is now crippled. Katie smashed him through a wall with a filing cabinet. Magic has perks. But use of it is tiring, and Katie never made it back home after the encounter. She slipped into cat form and found an alleyway to curl up in and sleep it off …and then woke up in Luceti as a child again.
Minor Explanation on Changeling Society, dauntain, and where everyone else fits between:
It’s hard to boil this down, because changeling society and the dynamic with the dauntain is complex, and uh …in Luceti, neither of them have a function. But if I put it in Peter Pan terms, the changelings are the Lost Boys; holding onto their imagination and creativity and fighting against the dying of the light in the world as more and more people move away from the older, darker routes of mythology and lore and believe that yes, all those legends about the fae are just that, nothing more. The power of belief is potent. In order to survive they must borrow glamour from humans everywhere they can find it …and the best way to do that is to encourage creativity and escapism and belief in the human race, because the aura of glamour that such people give off is enough to keep them sustained for some time. If Peter Pan had been a changeling, he’d have been soaking the stuff in the very moment he got Wendy and her brothers to step out the window and fly. (Finding glamour in the wacky world of Luceti? Really is not going to be a problem. /stares at population.)
And if the changelings are the Lost Boys, the dauntain are the pirates. Their very presence causes glamour to wither and fade away, and changelings will normally turn and run. The dauntain used to be changelings themselves; they’re what happens when a changeling loses all touch with glamour and just fades away, giving into hatred and twisting over time until all they want to do is destroy the creatures they once were. They look human and take roles in human society, often as police or tax officials or something else equally mundane. And they’ll kill changelings wherever they find them.
Neither will ever appear in Luceti, I imagine, although some individuals would definitely make Katie just run rather than deal with them, just as she’s more likely to follow some people around with big starry eyes. She’d cling to someone like Luffy, who is Peter Pan simple minded and will believe anything, and believes he can do anything. Someone like Luffy just bleeds glamour all over the place. (There is nothing harmful about leeching glamour, by the way. It’s like …basking in sunlight or something. Changeling’s gotta have their magical Vitamin D.) The insane often come under this category, too. Funny, that. >_>
By the same token, someone like Sokka might make her cringe because he’s always trying to find a rational explanation for everything. You know. He’s the type to say, “I don’t believe in fairies.” But he has such a mind for inventiveness, she’d probably have a love hate relationship with him. Someone like Donatello would make her uncomfortable, but he’s been exposed to so many wacky things, he wouldn’t be too hard to take. She’d probably avoid him. …Spock she’d probably run from the second she saw him. (Sorry, Spock.)
Or boiled down: creativity is a wonderful drug, and too much logic is poison.
Personality:
Katie wants to be a hero. Not in the burning this-is-my-dream sense, but in the totally immature child’s sense of the word. She wants to be a Jedi. No wait, a knight. Or ooh, a samurai! Maybe a ninja. Vampire hunter! Archaelogist! Sith lord! … okay, so maybe ‘hero’ is totally the wrong word in some respects. Katie just wants to be something awesome. (…she’d be the nicest Sith Lord ever. She just thinks Darth Vader looked cool.) She’s the ultimate in precocious, incorrigible, spoiled children who think the world revolves around them and, in many ways, her reactions to everything will be just that: those of a child. But combined with the flashes of past lives and the difficulties she faces as a changeling? In some ways, she can be downright sociopathic.
She’s not a killer, per se, but her treatment of the dauntain that tried to hurt her touched off a brutal reaction. She had no intent to kill by smashing him through the wall with the filing cabinet, but she certainly wouldn’t have cared if he died, either; he tried to hurt her, she lashed back as viciously as she could. Because Katie doesn’t stop to think about repercussions to her actions at all. When something angers or hurts her, she can be downright malicious in retaliation. And her desire to be something cool and awesome and heroic and her realisation that the world is darker than most people give it credit for and often reaches out for the weak means she is fiercely protective of anyone she deems as weaker than herself (i.e. usually other children) and she will protect them by any means necessary. It’s…complicated. But generally can be boiled down to her being, in effect, a child with more extreme circumstances to cope with than most children.
Heavy stuff aside, she bears all the hallmarks of her chosen Pooka form; the cat. She’s very playful, she’s curious to a fault and she’s easily distracted. She has a mind like quicksilver, often jumping from one subject to the next, not that many people will understand what the hell she’s telling them at first - she’s a liar, through and through. Katie has a habit of telling the truth, but surrounding it by so much babbling about random associated topics that it’s damn hard to work out what that truth is.
Despite her selfishness and occasionally sociopathic nature, she does have a high degree of empathy. She’ll always look out for the people she likes and she’ll have a fair understanding of how people are feeling, and just like adults yelling in a room will make a child cry, she’ll do what she can to make things better if someone is obviously in pain. (…unless she really doesn’t like them. Then she may just be kind of mean.) She’s got a very indomitable nature; she can hurt, and she might go hide for a few days, but once she recovers enough she’ll be back to normal. It’d have to be something on the scale of murdering her family for her to be scarred by it …although she does remember. And never forgets. …though sometimes she might forgive.
She loves drawing, mainly with chalk, and she loves playing kid’s games, especially hopscotch. Chalk + hopscotch = OTP where Katie is concerned. But mainly, she loves pretending. That list of things she wants to be? She’s often one of them. Honest. She might zoom through town with a stake and a silver cross looking for vampires (…hope she doesn’t find any), or find herself a cape and jump off a building (though unlike other children who try this, she will land safely. And might just do that to freak out the natives.), or go exploring or pretend to force-crush people’s throats (…okay, she can’t do that. This is a good thing.) She loves listening to other people’s stories, and if they sound cool she’ll want to be what they are.
And lastly, despite being a bouncy sort of child - always and ever, driving everyone nuts - she is highly cognisant of the fact that nobody will ever fully understand her, ever. Most of the time this is just funny. In some cases, it hurts. It’s the one thing that will constantly get under her skin. Not being able to tell your mother you love her? That’s a bitch. And Katie may attempt to avoid getting into close friendships with anyone for precisely that reason, because she will miss her parents, even if they didn’t know what to do with her most days … and she doesn’t think she really wants to be in a situation where she feels she needs to explain the sort of person she is.
Therefore, she’ll probably make the best friends with people who just accept her as she is.
The Pooka Birthright
The pooka is the secret keeper. They cannot tell the truth without causing themselves pain - and by the time they feel the need to try this, people will assume they’re lying anyway. The flip side of that is that after a few minutes of talking with somebody, that person will often happily confide in the pooka just about anything, even things they normally wouldn’t. (Exceptions: if that person has sworn an oath to keep it a secret. Changelings are all about oaths. Or of course if the player really doesn’t want to. >> Permissions post ahoy.)
Combining these two traits make pooka the best storers of secrets in changeling society. People tell them everything, and they …can’t pass it on. Not without a great deal of effort.
The second pooka birthright is shapeshifting. They cannot do it constantly (it uses up that precious, precious glamour, so think maybe once or twice a day) and they cannot do it when anyone else can see them. But Katie can indeed change from a girl to a kitten and back again. Being a kitten can have some awesome advantages. By the same token, she can talk to cats (moot in Luceti) and her clothes shift with her. In normal society she could summon cats for every block around and get them to follow her or protect or her or whatever, but that won’t apply in Luceti. (Unless …someone apps a cat which they just did. HRM. Permissions again.)
If anyone ever sees Katie in her pure form - which they can’t unless they’re enchanted, and she specifically has to enchant them - they’ll see that her catlike features are far more pronounced. The eyes are definitely a cat’s, the canines are longer, and she’ll be sporting a tail and a pair of ears probably jammed down by the blue beanie on her head.
Most people will only see her as an ordinary little girl with slightly feral eyes, or a small kitten if she’s so inclined.
Changeling Birthrights
Changelings are the modern version of the fair folk from old legend, and as such are still bound by certain things. Most important is the vow. A changeling who makes any promise must keep it. Likewise, a person who promises a changeling something must always follow through. Do not enter into a deal with the fae lightly. A pooka can ascribe certain conditions to a broken promise which can be scary. Remember “Cross my heart and hope to die, 40 needles in my eye?” Yyyeah. Not that Katie would ever be that horrible, because that crosses the line from retaliation into outright calculated cruelty. But she’d find it hilarious to, say, tell a vampire that if he breaks his promise to bring her a lollipop by a certain time, he’ll find himself watching the sun rise the next day. Because that? Funny. Clearly not horrible at all. Besides, vampires are evil creatures of the night so who cares.
Changelings can also see the echo of dreams, being so highly connected with all things imagination-based. If a person has recurring nightmares, a changeling will often be able to see echoes of those nightmares just …following that person around. Sometimes this is useful to tell what’s eating at a person. (Katie might hear screams every time she sees Sanji, for instance.) Other times it’s downright dangerous. The changeling can see the nightmares and the nightmares can see the changeling right back. Bad things may therefore ensue. (This is also a permission-based thing only.) On the flipside, this may also work with long term obsessions as well.
And then there’s everything that just messes with a changeling big time. Church bells are bad. Lucky there aren’t any in Luceti. Can’t cross running water. (Bridges are okay - just. So are people being absolute bastards and tossing her to the other side in a screaming heap.) People putting up horseshoes or throwing salt over their shoulders. This all works to a lesser degree. (She’s just more likely to avoid them, really.) But the big one is cold iron, or unwrought iron. It burns on touch. And not only will it kill her painfully, but it’ll destroy her faerie soul so that she has no way of ever reincarnating again.
We like to avoid cold iron around here.
Luckily, the chances of anyone picking her as one of the fair folk are kind of small. We hope. (Though she will come across as startlingly magical to anyone with the ability to detect magic or see auras.)
And lastly on this section (sob, this is so long I’m sorry):
Magic
…actually she doesn’t have much, but what she does have is annoying. Er, to others, mostly. Mostly, she knows the art of Wayfare. Travelling fast. She can’t teleport, (though she may learn at some point in the future, as Wayfare is an art that develops over time) but she can jump incredibly far and fast, always guaranteed a safe landing. She can also jump an object or a person somewhere in the same way. (The filing cabinet was guaranteed a safe landing. The poor idiot it smashed through the wall was not.) Katie can also open her own doors in any barrier she so desires to see what’s on the other side. Obviously not The Barrier, but she might disconcert a few people when she just …opens a small door in their wall and waves hi on her way through.
Katie can also heal herself and others. But how effective she is on others depends entirely on how much glamour she can leech from them to do it. If you’re a scientist, sorry. She won’t have any choice but to leave you dying in a ditch.
Enchanting - this is just the process of enabling another person to see the world the way Katie sees it. Which means they’ll see her true form, they’ll see the sky and the buildings look kind of twisted and warped, and they get to see dream echoes too…and be affected by them, but largely only if they choose to interact with the echoes. In short, she gives someone one hell of a high. Katie enchants another by offering them a gift handmade, whether that be cookies or a daisy chain or whatever. (I can’t …actually see her doing this unless it’s exceptional circumstances, because the less people that know what Katie is, the better for her. But she might do it for people she gets close to, because people who can interact with the nightmares surrounding a person can also fight those nightmares. In a literal sense. Be nice to drive the nightmares away for a while, ne? But still, that’s just …a plot example and probably not likely to happen any time soon, if ever.)
Enchanting an individual leaves them in that state for anywhere from a few hours to a few days (probably at the player’s discretion) and when it wears off, their memory of it will probably be kind of hazy. So yeah. Kind of like a drug trip.
Strengths:
Physical
Uh … she’s a nine year old girl >_>;; In her cat form she’s every bit as agile as you’d expect a small kitten to be, and she’s pretty nimble in her human form, buuut no strength or stamina to speak of, really. She does actually know how to use a sword. (She in fact has a sword.) It’s child-sized, and she’d been learning to use it for about three months. Nothing that will do her much good against others, but she’ll dedicate a lot of time to getting better at it in Luceti. She also has the keen senses of a cat no matter which form she’s in.
Mental
She has a quick mind and is very intelligent and is …capable of fabricating some impressive lies there. Or at least …impressive lengths of babble in which the truth may be contained if you look hard enough. Also, because of the nature of her fae soul, she does occasionally have flashes of insight that are far too mature for her. But these are few and far between, and often serve to enable her to recognise an unfamiliar concept more than anything else. And then there’s her imagination, which is ridiculously vast, and her artistic talent which is pretty damn good. Though usually she still prefers to draw all over the sidewalk with chalk.
Emotional
Katie’s highly empathic and therefore can be either highly understanding or highly cruel. She’s extraordinarily resilient and will bounce back very fast after most traumas, which is a godsend in this town. She’s also …rather brave for a nine year old. Recklessly so. Trying to scare her is kind of hard. Only the dauntain or threats to her family have thus far managed it
Magical
Every changeling can tap into the fabric of reality itself to draw on immense power when it’s desperately needed: that is, in times of extreme adrenalin/trauma/stress. Katie can literally, automatically, draw magic out of the dreaming to become far more powerful than a girl of nine should ever be. Superhumanly strong and fast and boosting her arcane arts to their most powerful (In this case, she will manifest the ability to teleport - herself and others - and her ability to heal will not only become phenomenally good, but she can reverse the effect to hurt people as well; to rip old wounds open, more specifically.) This is a very short burst of power - maybe fifteen seconds at the most, which is often all a fight needs - and cannot be tapped by choice. There needs to be extremes involved - I daresay either someone has to die in front of her, or someone has to be about to die if she can’t stop it.
This gift is called Dragon’s Ire. And it will flood the area with magic and most likely enchant every person in the nearby vicinity (say a 15 foot radius or so) for the duration, and bring her memories of past lives to the foreground, so for those few seconds Katie will be …more or less someone else a lot more mature. Once it runs out, she’ll fall in a heap and be a semi-delirious mess for a day or two, because drawing on the weave of magic is a one way ticket into bedlam for a changeling (see weaknesses). Dragon’s Ire is a dangerous desperation reaction.
Kind of like a limit break, really. One hopes this will never come up in game. (But hey, I never thought Nami’d get into fights either, so…)
Weaknesses:
Physical:
Back to that nine year old child part again. And she’s also excessively allergic to cold iron.
Mental
…oh my god, she has ADD. Well, not really. But there’s too much cat in her. Katie’s attention can be diverted from the subject at hand by waving a piece of string at her or a butterfly going past her face (…she’ll commence staring and licking her lips, it’ll be creepy) or the like. She won’t get distracted when important stuff is going on that concerns her - waving string in her face while trying to stab her at the same time, and you know what she’ll pay more attention to there - but in any other circumstance? If you don’t want Katie paying attention to you, toss a jingling ball out the door. She’ll follow it. Aside from this, she has insatiable curiosity and will always follow up on things that get her attention, no matter how bad an idea it is. (She is never, ever bored. There is always something to look at.)
Emotional
She is nine and she just …doesn’t…think. No concept of repercussions. (She’s much like Luffy in that regard.) Well, to a point; Katie will know that yelling insults at a bad guy will get her attacked, so instant repercussions, sure. But she’s not capable of planning more than that one step at a time, and given she never plans at all, well …yeah. This is mostly because she’s a child, which means she may grow out of it as she matures. She’s also selfish, and minded to be spiteful to people if they rub her the wrong way, and …yeah, she does tend to be very feral and a little brutal where enemies are concerned. And she has very little respect for authority. A person ordering her to do something may find she’ll do just the opposite unless that person is someone she knows well.
Magical
Her entire changeling persona is pure magic. Any ability to detect magic will see it. Dispel Magic won’t remove it because it’s inherently a part of her, but … if Katie went into the tunnels, she’d quite probably forget she was a changeling and just be a confused girl with a lot of confused memories and have no idea why she was down there in the first place.
She also runs the risk of either bedlam (too much glamour) or fading away (too much banality. Or too many scientists, if you’d prefer.) One drives her into hallucination land and unable to tell up from down, and the other will suppress her changeling side completely. Both can be balanced with effort, but that might take people actually knowing how to help her (so if I mess with this at all, it’ll take a lot of forethought.) A mallynapping will mess her up big time.
Samples
First Person:
[Wide yawn.] Ooh, a forest. Well, that’s different. I wonder if this one has bears? I wonder how I got here.
[Shuffling sounds.] Oh, I see how it is. This is a magic book, right? But they got my name wrong. [Flip flip flip. Then a small giggle.] And there are people in it! …wait, did someone turn my town into a book? That’s not allowed.
Hellooooo-oooo! Anyone in there? [Shake shake shake.] I can hear you, you know. Who hit me? My back hurts and -
…I have wings! [There’s the sound of running, a jump, a thud and an ‘oof’. And then uncontrollable giggling.] I can fly!.
Third Person:
Waking up in the forest with a magical book and a pair of wings wasn’t exactly the weirdest thing that had ever happened to her. Well, some of her best friends had wings, and these ones were at least cute. Even if they didn’t let her fly, which was kind of cheating, but she would make do. What was more annoying was that all her stuff was gone. The dress was cute and all (if boring), but her sword was gone. And her string! And her screwdriver. And her chalk. It didn’t help that her wrist still burned and itched like bugs working their way into her skin, but there was nothing she could do about that. Katie scowled and kicked at a twig on the ground, ears twitching in annoyance as she stomped through the trees.
She had no idea where she was, but she knew there was a town nearby. She could smell it, if nothing else - an odd mix of food smells wafting on the breeze and smoke and a hint of perfume from somewhere and just plain people-live-here smells that she usually only caught from the alleyways in town when moonlighting as a cat. No car smells, though. Maybe it was one of those tiny farm communities or something. And a disconcerting odour of blood and wolves in the forest, which meant she wasn’t going to stay out here any longer than necessary. Wolves could be nice enough, she supposed, and friendlier than sharks, but she didn’t really feel up to avoiding being eaten right now. She was too tired to play tag with the wildlife today. Though it was pretty out here, so maybe when she managed to get some more sleep she could come out again and explore to her heart’s content. (Maybe. If she could find the right hat. And it would fit over her other hat. Oh, and a whip would be a good idea, too.)
Special note:
Changelings are sourced from a series of RPG books under the White Wolf label, which provides a setting only; it’s designed for people to make original characters from that setting, and I am drawing the changeling society/structure from there. (In fact, this character is distinctly a stand-alone style of character, but I wouldn’t feel right without mentioning that her inspiration comes from here.)