000 - Info/App
User Name/Nick: Naomi
User LJ: asyndeta
AIM/IM: metonumia
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Shego, Iroh, Count D, Merlin, Toshiko Sato
Character Name: Eris
Series: Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
Age: Ageless, really. Appears mid-20s-ish.
From When?: Tricky, this. She has nothing even approaching a near-death scene in canon. For the sake of the game, let's say that Zeus kicks her ass for having ideas above her station and sends her to the Barge to get her head straightened out. This would be shortly after the events of the movie.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate.
Abilities/Powers: As a goddess, Eris enjoys near-omnipotence - commanding Tartarus, the realm of chaos, and having dominion over a variety of giant beasts and mythical creatures. Also due to her status as a deity, she has no need to eat/sleep/bathe etc., although she might do these things anyway for pleasure. For Barge purposes her powers will be cut to the following, most of it aesthetic:
Shapeshifting: Enough to give herself a normal human appearance for ports and the like, and enough to briefly reshape her body - not enough to imitate another person and not in a way that would make her more dangerous. The physical size of her body will be limited to normal human stature.
Teleportation: She does a lot of swooshing from place to place in canon. On the Barge I'd like her able to teleport short distances - no more than twenty metres at a time, not through any locked doors, and only into areas she'd be allowed to go anyway. She'll be vulnerable to magical entrapment, and stun guns or other physical attacks will still work in the event that she needs to be caught.
Floating/hovering: Just enough to have her normal 'swimming in mid-air' sort of movement. No higher than six feet. You could reach up and grab her by the hair if you felt like it.
Immortality: Gone. She might take a little longer to go down than the average mortal but it will definitely be possible.
Personality:
Eris - Discordia in Latin, or simply Strife - is the goddess of chaos, a role that she has embraced far beyond the duties of a personified concept. While causing chaos seems to be rewarding for its own sake, what she seems to want ultimately is power: power over a world that has collapsed into total, irredeemable disorder. Her own realm, Tartarus, is an unknowable place filled with shifting sands and the relics of dead civilisations, seemingly populated only by herself and her menagerie of monsters: she tells Sinbad that she wants to see the entire world become just like it.
In person, Eris is every inch the femme fatale: she moves sinuously, flirts with her antagonists and gets very much up close and personal. Deeply intuitive, she's able to perceive people's desires and darker sides and use them to bend those people to her will; when it suits her, she's quick to prod at people's sore spots and reveal truths about them that they perhaps weren't ready to accept. Her affect suggests that nothing bothers her in the slightest and even when that's proven to be untrue she's quick to bounce back, casually dismissing one scheme in pursuit of the next.
To achieve her goals, Eris isn't above getting her hands dirty - she steals the Book of Peace in person when she didn't really have to, apparently just for giggles - although she normally deputises to giant monsters and the like. She also undertakes manipulation on a smaller scale and, like all good manipulators, she perceives the long game. Sinbad seems to think she wants to see him dead all along, but of course she doesn't. She believes Sinbad will run from trouble and knows perfectly well that the honourable Proteus will submit to being executed in his stead; without an heir to its throne, the orderly and peaceful Syracuse will descend into civil war, which is her actual goal. Similarly, it's likely that when she triggered the chain of events starting the Trojan War, she went into it knowing exactly what would happen, anticipating the reactions of both Paris and the three deities who tried to bribe him.
Speaking of the Trojan War, Eris is extremely petty with both good and bad results. She started that war because she wasn't invited to a wedding (ironically due to her reputation for causing trouble); conversely, she takes it easy on Sinbad because she thinks he's cute. Alongside that, she saw him as a kindred spirit, a heartless unreliable thief with no regard for other people, and based on that assessment of him she made a vow that would only be to her benefit if Sinbad proved himself to be as selfish as she thought he was. He wasn't, and Eris kept her promise. She claims that when a goddess makes a solemn vow she is 'bound for all eternity'; it's uncertain if this is literally the case or if she faces punishment from a higher power for breaking her word. Probably the latter, since she seems to make a conscious decision to surrender the Book of Peace and not to smash Sinbad into a greasy smear when he embarrasses her in public. It's likely that whatever vows she's made in the past were just food for her ego: she makes promises because she's so convinced of her understanding of any given situation, she knows she'll never have to pay up. She is absolutely enraged when Sinbad defies expectations, but not so much that she fails to keep her word. Ironically, the goddess of chaos seems to have a fair amount of personal discipline.
This isn't to say she's not a bit of a sadist. Well, a lot of a sadist. As well as 'chaos' in a general sense, Eris is also set over the chaos of war; she delights in the idea of the countless deaths that would be caused by the collapse of Syracuse and probably didn't lose any sleep over the years-long conflict in Troy. She throws a kraken-like creature, sirens and a monstrous bird in the way of Sinbad's closely-monitored voyage less as an attempt to kill him and more to make him and his crew suffer for her entertainment. Unlike her mythological portrayals, which have her personally walking through warzones and sowing destruction with her more warlike siblings, Eris would be unlikely to bring her own wrath onto the battlefield - but she would be comfortably hovering somewhere close by, enjoying the show and making life more difficult for everyone involved.
She'll be none too cheerful about losing her powers or her 'pets', but she'll see the Barge as a playground. A place already suffering from a lack of order - no hierarchy, no tangible leadership, prime to be nudged over the edge into total chaos.
Path to Redemption:
There is some stuff about Eris that is flat-out unfixable. As the goddess of chaos, she's never going to stop getting off on it just a bit. Having said that, she isn't evil per se - her relationship with humanity is more like a kid kicking over ants' nests to see what'll happen, more than anything inspired by genuine malice. Really, Eris' problem is that she's a bit too eager: presiding over chaos is all very well, but she needs to appreciate that there have to be limits, just as the rest of her family recognises that their spheres of control must also be finite. More than that, humans cause plenty of chaos by themselves without trying to help them along; things like her humiliation by Sinbad could be avoided if she stopped getting over-involved.
History:
[Note: The following encompasses the events of the film but is fleshed out by some other material, mostly Homer. Any shameless mythological cherrypicking is....well, in the spirit of the movie, to be honest :c]
Eris is the daughter of Zeus and Hera, and the twin sister of Ares, although she seems not to see her family much any more. Given her behaviour, it's likely she was banished to Tartarus - realised in the movie as her personal realm, its gateway just beyond the edge of the Earth - for stirring shit up within her family (some myths mention her as being confined in or below Hades, Tartarus' traditional location).
She seems to be making the best of it though, having - as she tells Sinbad - 'places to go, things to destroy, stuff to steal'. Wanting as she does to see the whole world plunged into chaos, Eris has presumably spent her existence contributing in large and small ways to the sum disorder and misery of humankind. Most famously, she engineers the Trojan War after not being invited to the wedding of Achilles' parents, Peleus and Thetis; she shows up anyway with a golden apple bearing the inscription 'for the fairest' and throws it into the party, where it's claimed by Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. The Trojan Paris is called upon to judge between the three, Aphrodite wins by bribing him with the love of the world's most beautiful woman, and in taking her off to Troy he makes an enemy of all of Greece (not to mention Athena and Hera). What Eris gets out of it is a war lasting ten years, and she probably would have shown up with the apple even if she had been invited. It's possible that this was the stunt that got her banished to Tartarus.
An unknown length of time later, her attention falls on Syracuse, which is protected by the magical MacGuffin Book of Peace. She offers the pirate Sinbad infinite wealth if he steals it for her; when he doesn't, she uses shapeshifting and one of his knives to take it herself and frame him for the crime. Sinbad immediately realises that Eris has taken the book and gone back to Tartarus; only Proteus, his childhood friend and sole heir to the throne of Syracuse, believes him. He uses the 'right of substitution' to take Sinbad's place, giving Sinbad ten days to recover the book before Proteus will be executed instead of him. Marina, Proteus' fiancee, tags along for the ride to Tartarus.
Since Proteus' execution is the ultimate aim of Eris' scheme, she throws sirens and the monstrous birdlike Roc in the way of Sinbad's crew, but they get around them and eventually Marina and Sinbad reach Tartarus. Honestly, Eris doesn't try that had to prevent them showing up, believing that Sinbad is an untrustworthy, black-hearted thief and his own nature will undo him in the end. When she meets him in Tartarus, she vows to him she'll return the book if he answers a question honestly: if he doesn't get the book, would he run, or submit to his execution in Syracuse? Sinbad picks the latter and she tells him he's a liar, sending him on his way empty-handed, but the truth is that Sinbad only perceives himself as the sort of person who would cut and run if his oldest friend's life was on the line. In reality, he does actually go back to Syracuse: Eris prevents his execution, furious, because what he said has borne itself out to be true and by the terms of her vow she has to return the Book of Peace. Even though Sinbad is not at all classy about his victory, Eris is graceful in defeat and leaves Syracuse in peace. It would be at this point that her father Zeus would show up up in Tartarus and smack her down for trying to start another massively destructive war for the lulz.
Sample Journal Entry:
[Video function yay! The shot frames a battered stone throne, enveloped in purple mist. Slowly it coalesces into Eris' shape; she's lounging across the throne, legs dangling over one armrest. Her hair floats, moving when she moves as if she's underwater. She's been doing some backreading and looks...delighted.]
So, let me see if I've got this right.
A lone ship without a course, sailing through the endless heavens: a vessel of two sides. On one...thieves, murderers, traitors and liars. The darkest hearts that all the worlds in existence can offer. On the other? A combination of noble, selfless heroes and desperate mercenaries, here for nothing more than to earn their keep. All of them, men and women summoned here to bring those black sheep back to the flock.
No order, no hierarchy, no rules. A single figurehead of control, who refuses to lead, never seen and doing little more than murmuring from the shadows. And if that wasn't enough...an occasional tendency for the waters we sail to bring on all sorts of strange magic, altering the mind and body beyond all reason.
[She chuckles and leans back.]
Oh. I'm going to love it here.
[Her body melts away and reforms itself, upright, walking towards the camera.]
By the way. I'm Eris. The goddess of chaos. Maybe some of you have heard of me. Introduce yourselves, won't you?
[She blows a kiss to the communicator, then reaches over to switch it off.]
Sample RP:
It wasn't a prison. The Barge - ripe with opportunity, constantly teetering on the brink, drip-feeding her thirst for disorder - it would never be a prison to her. It was a gift, an opportunity; heck, on the Inmates' good days, it was practically a temple. The sphere of stars all around the ship, even though the constellations were alien and ever changing, reminded her of Tartarus. Between the floods, the ports, the coming and going of her crewmates, truly it was a world built on shifting sands.
As for leadership, well...it was tangible, after a while. Certain people who rose above the crowd: a delicate web of authoritative Wardens, a smaller handful of influential Inmates. Their voices tended to be heard louder than others', but without those voices? There would be nothing but clamour.
Nothing but chaos.
And where any voice spoke, there would be an eagerness - somewhere - to silence it. All she had to do was find it. A word in the right ears, a weapon in the right hands...and the Barge's delicate threads would snap. But maybe it would take even less than that. Less work on her part, at least. There were people, surely, who wanted command over the Barge, to use its many and varied powers for their own designs. A megalomaniac or two had to be a sure thing on a vessel filled with criminals, even the Admiral was clearly unconquerable to anyone with even the slightest bit of sense. And if it was their idea to kick away the struts that held up the Barge's delicate sense of order, well... a ship in chaos, a would-be king humiliated, and a goddess innocent of any wrongdoing.
What threads of power she still had, she wanted to keep, after all, and her Warden was turning out to be so boorish. She smiled to herself and drifted across the deck. Places to go...things to destroy.
User LJ: asyndeta
AIM/IM: metonumia
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Shego, Iroh, Count D, Merlin, Toshiko Sato
Character Name: Eris
Series: Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
Age: Ageless, really. Appears mid-20s-ish.
From When?: Tricky, this. She has nothing even approaching a near-death scene in canon. For the sake of the game, let's say that Zeus kicks her ass for having ideas above her station and sends her to the Barge to get her head straightened out. This would be shortly after the events of the movie.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate.
Abilities/Powers: As a goddess, Eris enjoys near-omnipotence - commanding Tartarus, the realm of chaos, and having dominion over a variety of giant beasts and mythical creatures. Also due to her status as a deity, she has no need to eat/sleep/bathe etc., although she might do these things anyway for pleasure. For Barge purposes her powers will be cut to the following, most of it aesthetic:
Shapeshifting: Enough to give herself a normal human appearance for ports and the like, and enough to briefly reshape her body - not enough to imitate another person and not in a way that would make her more dangerous. The physical size of her body will be limited to normal human stature.
Teleportation: She does a lot of swooshing from place to place in canon. On the Barge I'd like her able to teleport short distances - no more than twenty metres at a time, not through any locked doors, and only into areas she'd be allowed to go anyway. She'll be vulnerable to magical entrapment, and stun guns or other physical attacks will still work in the event that she needs to be caught.
Floating/hovering: Just enough to have her normal 'swimming in mid-air' sort of movement. No higher than six feet. You could reach up and grab her by the hair if you felt like it.
Immortality: Gone. She might take a little longer to go down than the average mortal but it will definitely be possible.
Personality:
Eris - Discordia in Latin, or simply Strife - is the goddess of chaos, a role that she has embraced far beyond the duties of a personified concept. While causing chaos seems to be rewarding for its own sake, what she seems to want ultimately is power: power over a world that has collapsed into total, irredeemable disorder. Her own realm, Tartarus, is an unknowable place filled with shifting sands and the relics of dead civilisations, seemingly populated only by herself and her menagerie of monsters: she tells Sinbad that she wants to see the entire world become just like it.
In person, Eris is every inch the femme fatale: she moves sinuously, flirts with her antagonists and gets very much up close and personal. Deeply intuitive, she's able to perceive people's desires and darker sides and use them to bend those people to her will; when it suits her, she's quick to prod at people's sore spots and reveal truths about them that they perhaps weren't ready to accept. Her affect suggests that nothing bothers her in the slightest and even when that's proven to be untrue she's quick to bounce back, casually dismissing one scheme in pursuit of the next.
To achieve her goals, Eris isn't above getting her hands dirty - she steals the Book of Peace in person when she didn't really have to, apparently just for giggles - although she normally deputises to giant monsters and the like. She also undertakes manipulation on a smaller scale and, like all good manipulators, she perceives the long game. Sinbad seems to think she wants to see him dead all along, but of course she doesn't. She believes Sinbad will run from trouble and knows perfectly well that the honourable Proteus will submit to being executed in his stead; without an heir to its throne, the orderly and peaceful Syracuse will descend into civil war, which is her actual goal. Similarly, it's likely that when she triggered the chain of events starting the Trojan War, she went into it knowing exactly what would happen, anticipating the reactions of both Paris and the three deities who tried to bribe him.
Speaking of the Trojan War, Eris is extremely petty with both good and bad results. She started that war because she wasn't invited to a wedding (ironically due to her reputation for causing trouble); conversely, she takes it easy on Sinbad because she thinks he's cute. Alongside that, she saw him as a kindred spirit, a heartless unreliable thief with no regard for other people, and based on that assessment of him she made a vow that would only be to her benefit if Sinbad proved himself to be as selfish as she thought he was. He wasn't, and Eris kept her promise. She claims that when a goddess makes a solemn vow she is 'bound for all eternity'; it's uncertain if this is literally the case or if she faces punishment from a higher power for breaking her word. Probably the latter, since she seems to make a conscious decision to surrender the Book of Peace and not to smash Sinbad into a greasy smear when he embarrasses her in public. It's likely that whatever vows she's made in the past were just food for her ego: she makes promises because she's so convinced of her understanding of any given situation, she knows she'll never have to pay up. She is absolutely enraged when Sinbad defies expectations, but not so much that she fails to keep her word. Ironically, the goddess of chaos seems to have a fair amount of personal discipline.
This isn't to say she's not a bit of a sadist. Well, a lot of a sadist. As well as 'chaos' in a general sense, Eris is also set over the chaos of war; she delights in the idea of the countless deaths that would be caused by the collapse of Syracuse and probably didn't lose any sleep over the years-long conflict in Troy. She throws a kraken-like creature, sirens and a monstrous bird in the way of Sinbad's closely-monitored voyage less as an attempt to kill him and more to make him and his crew suffer for her entertainment. Unlike her mythological portrayals, which have her personally walking through warzones and sowing destruction with her more warlike siblings, Eris would be unlikely to bring her own wrath onto the battlefield - but she would be comfortably hovering somewhere close by, enjoying the show and making life more difficult for everyone involved.
She'll be none too cheerful about losing her powers or her 'pets', but she'll see the Barge as a playground. A place already suffering from a lack of order - no hierarchy, no tangible leadership, prime to be nudged over the edge into total chaos.
Path to Redemption:
There is some stuff about Eris that is flat-out unfixable. As the goddess of chaos, she's never going to stop getting off on it just a bit. Having said that, she isn't evil per se - her relationship with humanity is more like a kid kicking over ants' nests to see what'll happen, more than anything inspired by genuine malice. Really, Eris' problem is that she's a bit too eager: presiding over chaos is all very well, but she needs to appreciate that there have to be limits, just as the rest of her family recognises that their spheres of control must also be finite. More than that, humans cause plenty of chaos by themselves without trying to help them along; things like her humiliation by Sinbad could be avoided if she stopped getting over-involved.
History:
[Note: The following encompasses the events of the film but is fleshed out by some other material, mostly Homer. Any shameless mythological cherrypicking is....well, in the spirit of the movie, to be honest :c]
Eris is the daughter of Zeus and Hera, and the twin sister of Ares, although she seems not to see her family much any more. Given her behaviour, it's likely she was banished to Tartarus - realised in the movie as her personal realm, its gateway just beyond the edge of the Earth - for stirring shit up within her family (some myths mention her as being confined in or below Hades, Tartarus' traditional location).
She seems to be making the best of it though, having - as she tells Sinbad - 'places to go, things to destroy, stuff to steal'. Wanting as she does to see the whole world plunged into chaos, Eris has presumably spent her existence contributing in large and small ways to the sum disorder and misery of humankind. Most famously, she engineers the Trojan War after not being invited to the wedding of Achilles' parents, Peleus and Thetis; she shows up anyway with a golden apple bearing the inscription 'for the fairest' and throws it into the party, where it's claimed by Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. The Trojan Paris is called upon to judge between the three, Aphrodite wins by bribing him with the love of the world's most beautiful woman, and in taking her off to Troy he makes an enemy of all of Greece (not to mention Athena and Hera). What Eris gets out of it is a war lasting ten years, and she probably would have shown up with the apple even if she had been invited. It's possible that this was the stunt that got her banished to Tartarus.
An unknown length of time later, her attention falls on Syracuse, which is protected by the magical MacGuffin Book of Peace. She offers the pirate Sinbad infinite wealth if he steals it for her; when he doesn't, she uses shapeshifting and one of his knives to take it herself and frame him for the crime. Sinbad immediately realises that Eris has taken the book and gone back to Tartarus; only Proteus, his childhood friend and sole heir to the throne of Syracuse, believes him. He uses the 'right of substitution' to take Sinbad's place, giving Sinbad ten days to recover the book before Proteus will be executed instead of him. Marina, Proteus' fiancee, tags along for the ride to Tartarus.
Since Proteus' execution is the ultimate aim of Eris' scheme, she throws sirens and the monstrous birdlike Roc in the way of Sinbad's crew, but they get around them and eventually Marina and Sinbad reach Tartarus. Honestly, Eris doesn't try that had to prevent them showing up, believing that Sinbad is an untrustworthy, black-hearted thief and his own nature will undo him in the end. When she meets him in Tartarus, she vows to him she'll return the book if he answers a question honestly: if he doesn't get the book, would he run, or submit to his execution in Syracuse? Sinbad picks the latter and she tells him he's a liar, sending him on his way empty-handed, but the truth is that Sinbad only perceives himself as the sort of person who would cut and run if his oldest friend's life was on the line. In reality, he does actually go back to Syracuse: Eris prevents his execution, furious, because what he said has borne itself out to be true and by the terms of her vow she has to return the Book of Peace. Even though Sinbad is not at all classy about his victory, Eris is graceful in defeat and leaves Syracuse in peace. It would be at this point that her father Zeus would show up up in Tartarus and smack her down for trying to start another massively destructive war for the lulz.
Sample Journal Entry:
[Video function yay! The shot frames a battered stone throne, enveloped in purple mist. Slowly it coalesces into Eris' shape; she's lounging across the throne, legs dangling over one armrest. Her hair floats, moving when she moves as if she's underwater. She's been doing some backreading and looks...delighted.]
So, let me see if I've got this right.
A lone ship without a course, sailing through the endless heavens: a vessel of two sides. On one...thieves, murderers, traitors and liars. The darkest hearts that all the worlds in existence can offer. On the other? A combination of noble, selfless heroes and desperate mercenaries, here for nothing more than to earn their keep. All of them, men and women summoned here to bring those black sheep back to the flock.
No order, no hierarchy, no rules. A single figurehead of control, who refuses to lead, never seen and doing little more than murmuring from the shadows. And if that wasn't enough...an occasional tendency for the waters we sail to bring on all sorts of strange magic, altering the mind and body beyond all reason.
[She chuckles and leans back.]
Oh. I'm going to love it here.
[Her body melts away and reforms itself, upright, walking towards the camera.]
By the way. I'm Eris. The goddess of chaos. Maybe some of you have heard of me. Introduce yourselves, won't you?
[She blows a kiss to the communicator, then reaches over to switch it off.]
Sample RP:
It wasn't a prison. The Barge - ripe with opportunity, constantly teetering on the brink, drip-feeding her thirst for disorder - it would never be a prison to her. It was a gift, an opportunity; heck, on the Inmates' good days, it was practically a temple. The sphere of stars all around the ship, even though the constellations were alien and ever changing, reminded her of Tartarus. Between the floods, the ports, the coming and going of her crewmates, truly it was a world built on shifting sands.
As for leadership, well...it was tangible, after a while. Certain people who rose above the crowd: a delicate web of authoritative Wardens, a smaller handful of influential Inmates. Their voices tended to be heard louder than others', but without those voices? There would be nothing but clamour.
Nothing but chaos.
And where any voice spoke, there would be an eagerness - somewhere - to silence it. All she had to do was find it. A word in the right ears, a weapon in the right hands...and the Barge's delicate threads would snap. But maybe it would take even less than that. Less work on her part, at least. There were people, surely, who wanted command over the Barge, to use its many and varied powers for their own designs. A megalomaniac or two had to be a sure thing on a vessel filled with criminals, even the Admiral was clearly unconquerable to anyone with even the slightest bit of sense. And if it was their idea to kick away the struts that held up the Barge's delicate sense of order, well... a ship in chaos, a would-be king humiliated, and a goddess innocent of any wrongdoing.
What threads of power she still had, she wanted to keep, after all, and her Warden was turning out to be so boorish. She smiled to herself and drifted across the deck. Places to go...things to destroy.