app for babylonwood
The Player
User Name/Nick: Tiki
User LJ: kranna_tiki
AIM/IM: theroarmaster (AIM)
Won't you try to be kind to that wandering mind,
For it only hopes it can be free.
With our peace-bonded knives and our hyperspace drives,
We're living more richly in fantasy...
The Character
Character Name: Lute
Character Journal: no_onebetter
Canon: Fire Emblem: Seima no Kouseki (otherwise known as Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones)
Age: 15
From When?: pre-recruitment: Lute gains most of her knowledge of the outside world once she’s recruited in-game, so I suppose this would be the best point for her: maximal curiosity, minimal survival skills.
Abilities/Powers:
Lute has the ability to use magic, meaning specifically that she can properly read the incantations needed to conjure spells. Her ability to use magic therefore also requires a spell book of some form. She also possesses a genius-level intellect that allows her to retain and process huge sums of information. (Basically, she’s like one of those kids who skip high school and go straight to college.)
Power Limitations:
Because Lute requires spell books to cast magic, her power is effectively limited to whatever spells she has on hand. Additionally, spell books in the Fire Emblem universe can be ruined by continuous reading; in order to retain the use of her magic, Lute would have to be able to write her own spell books. With her level of intelligence, it’s probably likely that she can (or will have the foresight to copy the spells before her current book disintegrates), but since these will be written out on poor quality paper and mimicry can never fully replace the original, the spells generated will be weaker. On a numerical scale, if, say, an original Fire spell did 10 points of damage, a copied Fire spell would do around 5. So the effectiveness has been halved.
Inventory:
- one dress (purple)
- one cloak (white)
- pair of leather vambraces
- pair of hair ties
- one pair of leather boots (purple)
- one metal necklace/choker
- one Fire tome (40 uses)
- 3 vulneraries (healing potion things)
Personality:
Typically, men represent the “logic” of humanity while women represent the “emotions”. Lute, however, is completely the reverse of this: everything she does is done by an exacting logical process in which she completely ignores her feelings in favor of satisfying her genius and curiosity, the latter of which is insatiable. Having grown up in a sheltered environment surrounded by books, Lute has a great desire to gain first-hand experience and see the world for herself, come good or bad. Everything will be observed and noted objectively, and Lute is quite single-minded in pursuit of knowledge, often ignoring people around her in favor of observing her chosen specimen. Her enthusiasm for exploration is likewise endless, not only because of how relatively new most things in the outside world are for her, but also because she desires to be a powerful and famed sage in her own right, which, logically, requires field work.
Ironically enough, her energetic enthusiasm comes at the expense of her street smarts - of which she has none. Daring and strong-willed enough to doggedly pursue whatever goal she’s established for herself, Lute will often plunge into dangerous situations or unknowingly cross boundaries without any forethought of the consequences; for such a logical person, she takes remarkably little time to actually think through her actions. She also has little regard for said consequences (see: running out to battle/observe monsters on a dime after being explicitly told to stay within the bounds of her village), especially when they mostly affect others. This general insensitivity toward others is, like most of her faults, probably due to the sheltered nature of her life.
Lute also exudes incredible self-confidence, due in part to her intellect. She considers herself a prodigy, and thus does her best to act the part: her manners are all guided by archaic guidelines set down in books; her speech is typically high-brow; and she is a mage only because she believed that to be the one profession worthy of her talents - which says a lot about how she feels about non-mages. Obviously, Lute comes off as condescending and elitist; perhaps unsurprisingly, this to her is perfectly acceptable, since in her mind, she has good reason to act in such a way.
However, there is also strong evidence that deep inside, Lute is quite insecure, particularly in regards to her own, supposedly unparalleled genius. She is suspicious of all those with high intelligence, especially other mages, and sees them as potential threats to her status as an exercise in perfection. Such suspects often become subject to stalking, magical ambushes, and other tests designed by Lute to prove her superiority (mostly to herself) over them.
Lute’s other major weakness, if it wasn't apparent already, lies in her understanding (or lack thereof) of human emotions. In fact, in-game, it is shown that she is rather stunted emotionally: in a conversation with her close friend Artur, Lute confesses that all she knows about love comes from the books she has read. As feelings are not things easily explained by books, she becomes flustered when confronted with new emotional experiences, and therefore tries to keep those to a minimum, mostly by constantly maintaining the aforementioned greater-than-thou attitude.
Her lack of emotional experience also means that Lute does not know about tact; she says what she thinks, making her opinion very honest, but at the same time incredibly blunt and sometimes mean-hearted. Her harshness is somewhat muted by her youth, which tends to prevent people from truly taking her words to heart and instead creates the typical “You’re a strange little child, but alright…” sort of effect, but for Lute, this means that not only does she lack emotional perception, but she also lacks the influence of respected peers and discipline. This isn’t to say that Lute is disorderly, as, like the logic she so faithfully employs, she is just as structured and methodical in her habits. However, it means that she does not take kindly to criticism and will do everything in her power to refute or discredit it, typically in childish fashion.
History:
*In Fire Emblem, characters can be recruited during battle for the protagonist’s army. These recruitable characters, aside from a select few, do not play a major role at all in the course of the storyline. Lute is one such of these, meaning that although she does receive a little character development, most of her role in the events of the game can only be supposed.
Lute was raised by her grandmother in a small village on the outskirts of the Za’ha Woods in the country of Renais within the world of Magvel. In said village, she lived out a fairly sheltered life mostly surrounded by books, as Lute possessed an unusually large intellect. She also began studying magic, considering it the only discipline truly worthy of her intellectual skills. By her teenage years, she was already pointing out flaws in otherwise canon texts concerning the sciences and scheming to perform her own experiments and research in the outside world, of which she had little knowledge or experience. In keeping with her nature as an odd, reclusive scholar, Lute also saw very little human interaction outside of one other close friend: a monk-in-training named Artur. Baffling enough, Lute got along well with Artur (He was a good buffer to her eccentricities), going so far as attempting to cure his arachnophobia by “immersing him in what he feared most” - in other words, filling his room with spiders - and actively spying on him in what she called “Monk Watching”. Both, which proved predictably traumatizing for Artur, were considered by Lute to be signs of affection.
When Lute was around the age of fifteen, Renais’ longtime ally and neighbor Grado suddenly declared war for reasons that no one could fathom, but that actually had to do with ominous forces stirring in the continent: (prepare for non-Lute-related details)
Before the war had begun, Lyon, the prince of Grado (and the close friend of the royal twins of Renais, Eirika and Ephraim), had, with the aid of several other scholars in the Grado court, discovered and used a powerful dark spell that allowed one to see into the future. What he saw was grim: a powerful earthquake destroying most of Grado. Desperate to protect his kingdom, Lyon in turn began research on the Sacred Stone of Grado, one of five such Stones that had been used to seal the evil Demon King Fomortiis eight hundred years prior. The Sacred Stone of Grado was particularly important because it also housed the sealed soul of Fomortiis, which led to its nickname of the (titular) Fire Emblem.
Lyon also had personal reasons for finding a way to harness the power of the Sacred Stone: his father Vigarde, the Emperor of Grado, had recently died, and Lyon, who had long been plagued by ill health, felt that he alone could not guide the country through the impending catastrophe. Thus, he sought to find a way to resurrect Vigarde in order to provide Grado with the leader he felt it needed.
In any case, Lyon’s efforts eventually led to the separation of Grado’s Sacred Stone into two stones: the Sacred Stone and the Dark Stone, the latter of which housed the soul of the Demon King. Finding that the Dark Stone in particular proved responsive to his dark magic, Lyon managed to use the Stone to resurrect his father, only to fall under the Demon King’s influence. He then became convinced that the only way to save his beloved country was to fully revive the Demon King and use his power. Unfortunately, the only way to revive the Demon King was to destroy all of the Sacred Stones (since they acted as a seal for the Demon King), and the Sacred Stones were located in each of the five countries of the continent. Thus, Grado in actuality was preparing to go to war with the entire world; Renais had only been the first of four other targets.
Back to Renais itself. The country quickly capitulated to the Grado army, partly because of the completely unforeseeable attack and partly because Grado also possessed the largest army on the continent, but also because Grado was employing unconventional methods of battle - specifically, a general of Grado, Riev, was summoning massive armies of undead to support the Grado regulars, no thanks to the revived Demon King.
Eventually, these armies arrived at Lute’s village. While the young mage wished to study the dark creatures now prowling the country (as they hadn’t been seen for thousands of years), she was convinced by Artur, whose light magic was far more effective against such monsters, to remain at the village for her safety while he attempted to assist the armies of Eirika, Princess of Renais, who were trying to protect the village. However, Lute’s thirst for research got the better of her, and she decided that she would use whatever opportunity she got to leave her hometown.
Before she can leave, though, she’ll find herself ~*~magically~*~ transported through the Arch.
First Person Sample:
[The video feed comes on, but it’s slowly spinning clockwise - apparently, someone is trying to figure out what exactly is going on and has accidentally turned on the video in the process.]
Well, obviously it has the ability to act as a compass, but that surely cannot be all it is good for. Comparatively, the weight of a compass would be far less...
[At the first response, she nearly drops the device, but soon regains her grip - this time using two hands. Lute’s face fills the feed; she’s completely disregarded the words being spoken to her, only that there is now a voice.] It’s sentient-ah, I mean, you’re sentient! Oh my, I don’t think any of the texts I’ve read have ever mentioned a sentient, inorganic being, if you don’t mind me saying. Hello? Please tell me your name. How do you subsist? Do you even require sustenance, being inorganic? Or am I wrong? I can't possibly be wrong. Hello? Hello? Are you there? Speak again, mysterious creature!
[She recoils as the person responding shouts something.] …what? A video? Pray tell, what is that?
Prose Sample:
It’s marvelous. Unheard of. Simply astonishing. No one, not even the great sages of dynasties past, has ever discussed or mentioned the phenomenon of suddenly finding oneself in a mysterious forest after merely getting up with the intention of making tea. No one…save her. If anyone ever needed proof of her genius (which would be silly, because her genius is undeniable), it would be this feat; she has abilities not even she can consciously comprehend. Just the prospect is giving her chills - or perhaps that’s from the moisture of the forest floor seeping into her clothes?
Regardless, Lute is delighted. The mage springs to her feet, dusts herself off, and carefully examines her spell book for damage before peering around with uncontained glee. Artur had expressly forbidden her from leaving the village, yet had said nothing about the very slim chance that she might accidentally - wait, nothing with her was accidental. This had to be…an act of her subconscious! Yes. Clearly. Artur had forbidden her from leaving, and yet he had said nothing about the possibility of her subconsciously willing herself into another world, dimension, part of the continent, what have you. So technically, this was not disobedience. After all, who was he (or any one for that matter) to order her subconscious around?
Simply put, it is the chance of a lifetime. She can already see her name, lovingly inscribed in the annals of history - the first known person capable of teleportation. Now, all she needs to do is find some way to will herself back…but perhaps that can wait. This is her first time outside the village in years, and personally, Lute cannot help but wonder what awaits in the depths of the shadowy trees. A lost civilization? Or perhaps a mythical beast…either way, she will be the one to discover it.
As she steps forward eagerly, her foot bumps against something hard; it must have fallen off of her person as she stood up. Frowning, Lute bends down and picks the strange contraption up. It is jet black, circular, metal, and cool to the touch. There is a catch on the side; she flips the lid open and stares down uncomprehendingly at the display.
“Curious…” A small, devilish grin forms on her face. “I suppose this is the first order of business.”
Special Notes: N/A
User Name/Nick: Tiki
User LJ: kranna_tiki
AIM/IM: theroarmaster (AIM)
Won't you try to be kind to that wandering mind,
For it only hopes it can be free.
With our peace-bonded knives and our hyperspace drives,
We're living more richly in fantasy...
The Character
Character Name: Lute
Character Journal: no_onebetter
Canon: Fire Emblem: Seima no Kouseki (otherwise known as Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones)
Age: 15
From When?: pre-recruitment: Lute gains most of her knowledge of the outside world once she’s recruited in-game, so I suppose this would be the best point for her: maximal curiosity, minimal survival skills.
Abilities/Powers:
Lute has the ability to use magic, meaning specifically that she can properly read the incantations needed to conjure spells. Her ability to use magic therefore also requires a spell book of some form. She also possesses a genius-level intellect that allows her to retain and process huge sums of information. (Basically, she’s like one of those kids who skip high school and go straight to college.)
Power Limitations:
Because Lute requires spell books to cast magic, her power is effectively limited to whatever spells she has on hand. Additionally, spell books in the Fire Emblem universe can be ruined by continuous reading; in order to retain the use of her magic, Lute would have to be able to write her own spell books. With her level of intelligence, it’s probably likely that she can (or will have the foresight to copy the spells before her current book disintegrates), but since these will be written out on poor quality paper and mimicry can never fully replace the original, the spells generated will be weaker. On a numerical scale, if, say, an original Fire spell did 10 points of damage, a copied Fire spell would do around 5. So the effectiveness has been halved.
Inventory:
- one dress (purple)
- one cloak (white)
- pair of leather vambraces
- pair of hair ties
- one pair of leather boots (purple)
- one metal necklace/choker
- one Fire tome (40 uses)
- 3 vulneraries (healing potion things)
Personality:
Typically, men represent the “logic” of humanity while women represent the “emotions”. Lute, however, is completely the reverse of this: everything she does is done by an exacting logical process in which she completely ignores her feelings in favor of satisfying her genius and curiosity, the latter of which is insatiable. Having grown up in a sheltered environment surrounded by books, Lute has a great desire to gain first-hand experience and see the world for herself, come good or bad. Everything will be observed and noted objectively, and Lute is quite single-minded in pursuit of knowledge, often ignoring people around her in favor of observing her chosen specimen. Her enthusiasm for exploration is likewise endless, not only because of how relatively new most things in the outside world are for her, but also because she desires to be a powerful and famed sage in her own right, which, logically, requires field work.
Ironically enough, her energetic enthusiasm comes at the expense of her street smarts - of which she has none. Daring and strong-willed enough to doggedly pursue whatever goal she’s established for herself, Lute will often plunge into dangerous situations or unknowingly cross boundaries without any forethought of the consequences; for such a logical person, she takes remarkably little time to actually think through her actions. She also has little regard for said consequences (see: running out to battle/observe monsters on a dime after being explicitly told to stay within the bounds of her village), especially when they mostly affect others. This general insensitivity toward others is, like most of her faults, probably due to the sheltered nature of her life.
Lute also exudes incredible self-confidence, due in part to her intellect. She considers herself a prodigy, and thus does her best to act the part: her manners are all guided by archaic guidelines set down in books; her speech is typically high-brow; and she is a mage only because she believed that to be the one profession worthy of her talents - which says a lot about how she feels about non-mages. Obviously, Lute comes off as condescending and elitist; perhaps unsurprisingly, this to her is perfectly acceptable, since in her mind, she has good reason to act in such a way.
However, there is also strong evidence that deep inside, Lute is quite insecure, particularly in regards to her own, supposedly unparalleled genius. She is suspicious of all those with high intelligence, especially other mages, and sees them as potential threats to her status as an exercise in perfection. Such suspects often become subject to stalking, magical ambushes, and other tests designed by Lute to prove her superiority (mostly to herself) over them.
Lute’s other major weakness, if it wasn't apparent already, lies in her understanding (or lack thereof) of human emotions. In fact, in-game, it is shown that she is rather stunted emotionally: in a conversation with her close friend Artur, Lute confesses that all she knows about love comes from the books she has read. As feelings are not things easily explained by books, she becomes flustered when confronted with new emotional experiences, and therefore tries to keep those to a minimum, mostly by constantly maintaining the aforementioned greater-than-thou attitude.
Her lack of emotional experience also means that Lute does not know about tact; she says what she thinks, making her opinion very honest, but at the same time incredibly blunt and sometimes mean-hearted. Her harshness is somewhat muted by her youth, which tends to prevent people from truly taking her words to heart and instead creates the typical “You’re a strange little child, but alright…” sort of effect, but for Lute, this means that not only does she lack emotional perception, but she also lacks the influence of respected peers and discipline. This isn’t to say that Lute is disorderly, as, like the logic she so faithfully employs, she is just as structured and methodical in her habits. However, it means that she does not take kindly to criticism and will do everything in her power to refute or discredit it, typically in childish fashion.
History:
*In Fire Emblem, characters can be recruited during battle for the protagonist’s army. These recruitable characters, aside from a select few, do not play a major role at all in the course of the storyline. Lute is one such of these, meaning that although she does receive a little character development, most of her role in the events of the game can only be supposed.
Lute was raised by her grandmother in a small village on the outskirts of the Za’ha Woods in the country of Renais within the world of Magvel. In said village, she lived out a fairly sheltered life mostly surrounded by books, as Lute possessed an unusually large intellect. She also began studying magic, considering it the only discipline truly worthy of her intellectual skills. By her teenage years, she was already pointing out flaws in otherwise canon texts concerning the sciences and scheming to perform her own experiments and research in the outside world, of which she had little knowledge or experience. In keeping with her nature as an odd, reclusive scholar, Lute also saw very little human interaction outside of one other close friend: a monk-in-training named Artur. Baffling enough, Lute got along well with Artur (He was a good buffer to her eccentricities), going so far as attempting to cure his arachnophobia by “immersing him in what he feared most” - in other words, filling his room with spiders - and actively spying on him in what she called “Monk Watching”. Both, which proved predictably traumatizing for Artur, were considered by Lute to be signs of affection.
When Lute was around the age of fifteen, Renais’ longtime ally and neighbor Grado suddenly declared war for reasons that no one could fathom, but that actually had to do with ominous forces stirring in the continent: (prepare for non-Lute-related details)
Before the war had begun, Lyon, the prince of Grado (and the close friend of the royal twins of Renais, Eirika and Ephraim), had, with the aid of several other scholars in the Grado court, discovered and used a powerful dark spell that allowed one to see into the future. What he saw was grim: a powerful earthquake destroying most of Grado. Desperate to protect his kingdom, Lyon in turn began research on the Sacred Stone of Grado, one of five such Stones that had been used to seal the evil Demon King Fomortiis eight hundred years prior. The Sacred Stone of Grado was particularly important because it also housed the sealed soul of Fomortiis, which led to its nickname of the (titular) Fire Emblem.
Lyon also had personal reasons for finding a way to harness the power of the Sacred Stone: his father Vigarde, the Emperor of Grado, had recently died, and Lyon, who had long been plagued by ill health, felt that he alone could not guide the country through the impending catastrophe. Thus, he sought to find a way to resurrect Vigarde in order to provide Grado with the leader he felt it needed.
In any case, Lyon’s efforts eventually led to the separation of Grado’s Sacred Stone into two stones: the Sacred Stone and the Dark Stone, the latter of which housed the soul of the Demon King. Finding that the Dark Stone in particular proved responsive to his dark magic, Lyon managed to use the Stone to resurrect his father, only to fall under the Demon King’s influence. He then became convinced that the only way to save his beloved country was to fully revive the Demon King and use his power. Unfortunately, the only way to revive the Demon King was to destroy all of the Sacred Stones (since they acted as a seal for the Demon King), and the Sacred Stones were located in each of the five countries of the continent. Thus, Grado in actuality was preparing to go to war with the entire world; Renais had only been the first of four other targets.
Back to Renais itself. The country quickly capitulated to the Grado army, partly because of the completely unforeseeable attack and partly because Grado also possessed the largest army on the continent, but also because Grado was employing unconventional methods of battle - specifically, a general of Grado, Riev, was summoning massive armies of undead to support the Grado regulars, no thanks to the revived Demon King.
Eventually, these armies arrived at Lute’s village. While the young mage wished to study the dark creatures now prowling the country (as they hadn’t been seen for thousands of years), she was convinced by Artur, whose light magic was far more effective against such monsters, to remain at the village for her safety while he attempted to assist the armies of Eirika, Princess of Renais, who were trying to protect the village. However, Lute’s thirst for research got the better of her, and she decided that she would use whatever opportunity she got to leave her hometown.
Before she can leave, though, she’ll find herself ~*~magically~*~ transported through the Arch.
First Person Sample:
[The video feed comes on, but it’s slowly spinning clockwise - apparently, someone is trying to figure out what exactly is going on and has accidentally turned on the video in the process.]
Well, obviously it has the ability to act as a compass, but that surely cannot be all it is good for. Comparatively, the weight of a compass would be far less...
[At the first response, she nearly drops the device, but soon regains her grip - this time using two hands. Lute’s face fills the feed; she’s completely disregarded the words being spoken to her, only that there is now a voice.] It’s sentient-ah, I mean, you’re sentient! Oh my, I don’t think any of the texts I’ve read have ever mentioned a sentient, inorganic being, if you don’t mind me saying. Hello? Please tell me your name. How do you subsist? Do you even require sustenance, being inorganic? Or am I wrong? I can't possibly be wrong. Hello? Hello? Are you there? Speak again, mysterious creature!
[She recoils as the person responding shouts something.] …what? A video? Pray tell, what is that?
Prose Sample:
It’s marvelous. Unheard of. Simply astonishing. No one, not even the great sages of dynasties past, has ever discussed or mentioned the phenomenon of suddenly finding oneself in a mysterious forest after merely getting up with the intention of making tea. No one…save her. If anyone ever needed proof of her genius (which would be silly, because her genius is undeniable), it would be this feat; she has abilities not even she can consciously comprehend. Just the prospect is giving her chills - or perhaps that’s from the moisture of the forest floor seeping into her clothes?
Regardless, Lute is delighted. The mage springs to her feet, dusts herself off, and carefully examines her spell book for damage before peering around with uncontained glee. Artur had expressly forbidden her from leaving the village, yet had said nothing about the very slim chance that she might accidentally - wait, nothing with her was accidental. This had to be…an act of her subconscious! Yes. Clearly. Artur had forbidden her from leaving, and yet he had said nothing about the possibility of her subconsciously willing herself into another world, dimension, part of the continent, what have you. So technically, this was not disobedience. After all, who was he (or any one for that matter) to order her subconscious around?
Simply put, it is the chance of a lifetime. She can already see her name, lovingly inscribed in the annals of history - the first known person capable of teleportation. Now, all she needs to do is find some way to will herself back…but perhaps that can wait. This is her first time outside the village in years, and personally, Lute cannot help but wonder what awaits in the depths of the shadowy trees. A lost civilization? Or perhaps a mythical beast…either way, she will be the one to discover it.
As she steps forward eagerly, her foot bumps against something hard; it must have fallen off of her person as she stood up. Frowning, Lute bends down and picks the strange contraption up. It is jet black, circular, metal, and cool to the touch. There is a catch on the side; she flips the lid open and stares down uncomprehendingly at the display.
“Curious…” A small, devilish grin forms on her face. “I suppose this is the first order of business.”
Special Notes: N/A