(no subject)
Player Information
Name/Alias: Odette
Email: seerowskindness [at] yahoo [dot] com
AIM Screenname: n/a
Personal Livejournal: odette_river
I am 18+ years old.
May Boudicca unscreen your application for others to see? Yes
Character Information
Character Name: Dairine Callahan
Fandom: Young Wizards
Canon Point: After Wizards at War, with additional history from wastedlands, and crowdedhour
Character Livejournal: redfive_wizard
Picture: Here
Appearance: Here
Age: 14
History: At about age four, Dairine taught herself to read by borrowing her older sister Nita’s books. She kept the reading a secret from her parents for a while, but eventually they figured it out, which turned out to be a good thing because it meant she had access to the library. Over the next few years, she read through the children’s section and then, a bit more slowly, through the adult section. Knowledge, she figured, as she watched her sister get bullied at school, was the way to protect herself. Of course, at that age she really couldn’t understand the novels on an emotional level, but she was learning a lot about anatomy and psychoanalysis and dinosaurs.
Despite her obvious precocious tendencies, her parents decided to keep her with her peers and not allow her to skip grades. Dairine found this silly, because it meant all the work was so easy, but she didn’t really mind. Nita was happy to teach her things, and she always had her books.
But then Dairine noticed that her sister knew something she didn’t, and Nita wasn’t sharing. Dairine made it her business to notice things, so when Nita started acting strangely, sitting in the yard whispering to herself and disappearing for long periods of time, of course Dairine knew about it. She began watching Nita carefully, and finally, on a trip to the beach, found Nita and her friend Kit as they shape-shifted back from whales. Dairine demanded to know everything. In this way, she found out about magic, and this changed her life.
Shortly thereafter, she took the Wizard's Oath herself, pledging to defend life and to combat entropy, one of the Lone Power's tools, as well as the Lone Power Itself. Then, Dairine, as with all wizards, had her Ordeal. Hers was harder than most, but at the same time, she was young, and so had vast stores of power at her disposal. After gallivanting through the universe for a while, running away from some aliens, and finding some help from a random stranger, she went head-to-head against the Lone Power and won. In fact, her Ordeal (at least from our vantage point within time) was the tipping point in the Lone Power’s path to redemption. And, as a result of her Ordeal, Dairine ended up with a sentient computer and a mental connection to a race of silicon-based creatures whom she’d created.
In the beginning of her wizardly career, Dairine became used to this great firepower. She could do almost anything she wanted--bouncing between planets and barely feeling the power loss, burning through problems instead of having to deal with them using finesse. This was normal: the youngest wizards are always the strongest.
And then her mother was diagnosed with cancer, just as Dairine was coming off her peak power levels, and she found there was nothing she could do. She didn’t have enough control to do the delicate wizardries necessary to help and was left frustrated and sidelined while Nita tried to save their mother. It didn’t work, and their mother died, plunging Dairine into a very dark time. Her therapist was stupid, school was stupid, and she didn’t understand why anything mattered except escaping to somewhere else in the universe and looking at the stars and trying to remember that there was still life and life was still important.
Eventually, though, things got better. She got a new therapist, one who knew about wizardry and wasn’t as much of an idiot, and she got better at working with her new power levels. Feeling better about things, she signed up for a wizard exchange program and hosted three alien wizards. One of them, Roshaun, turned out to be a prince and Dairine had trouble with his attitude right from the start. Despite this the two managed to form a friendship. Not a moment too soon, because Dairine, her sister, and wizards across the universe found themselves plunged into their most desperate fight yet, as wizardry itself started to fail.
Dairine managed to survive this as well, but not without a cost. Roshaun, enacting a difficult wizardry, disappeared. While the others presumed him to be dead, Dairine thought differently, and began (however aimlessly) looking for him.
At which point she somehow found herself in Wonderland. Wonderland as in Alice in Wonderland. This was not a very pleasant experience, but it looked like she might finally have made it back home. Not so. Instead, she found herself trapped in a time-traveling castle with killer unicorns stalking the grounds, an apocalyptic future, and more problems than she could count. She spent quite a long time here, forming some close friendships with people from other worlds and trying--unsuccessfully--to find her way back home.
Here, too, her mental connection with her computer, Spot, was severed due to a period that she spent possessed by a demon. They were working at restoring their link, but one thing happened after another and they never had time to properly sit down and work things out. And it wasn’t that much of an inconvenience, wizardry still worked, and if they had to say things to each other instead of just thinking them, that was of little concern as far as the big picture was concerned.
( Here is a link to her logs at crowdedhour.)
Personality: From a young age, Dairine equated knowledge with power, and she figured if she knew things she’d be able to protect herself. So she started learning. Thus, Dairine is smart. She has a smattering of knowledge about history, literature, science... You name it, Dairine has read something about it. All of this knowledge means that Dairine quickly got too smart for her own good. She isn’t usually actively rude, but if you’re in a position of power and she doesn’t think you’re smart enough, she won’t have a lot of respect for you.
And, just in general, Dairine has a sharp personality. She’s not afraid to engage in some verbal sparring or to get a little carried away with the sarcastic remarks. If someone annoys her, she’s pretty quick to make some sort of pert remark. She recognizes that this isn’t a good thing, but if she’s aggravated, she really doesn’t stop to think about what she’s saying.
Dairine is also used to not being taken very seriously. For the past year or more, she’s been a kid living in an adult world. She learned quickly that adults are going to be concerned and worried no matter what she tells them, so she’s stopped caring so much about what they say to her and learned that the only way for them to perceive her as competent is to act competent. Thus, she usually goes into a situation regardless of what the adults might say. She also isn’t afraid to speak up for herself and show that her opinion matters.
Does this make her foolhardy? Maybe a little bit. Dairine takes risks and throws herself into situations even if the odds don’t look good. She figures that at this point it’s her job. She’s a wizard; she’s protecting the universe; she’s got to take risks. So she does. It’s not that she doesn’t get scared, but she’s learned to deal with it. And there is a certain rush that you get from going up against death and--at least for now--winning.
Dairine has a strong sense of good and evil. The way wizardry is presented to young wizards, this only makes sense. You have the Powers that Be and you have the Lone One. The Lone One is evil; the Powers are good. Even before she became a wizard, Dairine was obsessed with finding Darth Vader and defeating him. She recognized Star Wars was just a story, and all of that, but in her head it was some sort of big metaphor for life. When she was presented with wizardry, of course the first thing she did was go out and look for Darth Vader, and when you go looking for the Lone Power, you’re bound to find It.
But, with maturity, Dairine’s clear-cut sense of good and evil has become a little muddled. She’ll still stick to it, still say that It is evil and the Powers are good, but when you’re not actually dealing with one of the Powers directly, sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s good and what’s evil. This is definitely a problem, but she hasn’t spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do about it. She’s started learning to only consider the immediate future: will working with this person help me survive another day? Okay, then let’s do it.
Nevertheless, Dairine loves her wizardry. She loves working with the universe and protecting the universe and all the craziness that accompanies that task. She loves knowing how things work on a very intimate scale, loves being at the frontline when there are problems. Her wizardry is, in no small part, what’s kept her sane over the past few years.
Powers/Special Abilities: Dairine is a wizard, meaning that she has the ability to talk to the universe and tell it to do what she wants. Of course, this takes energy, often a lot of energy if she wants anything big to get done. Her magic is based on the Speech, a language universally understood by all of creation. However, it's more than just saying the words. It takes concentration to perform a spell, as well as some payment of energy, whether from Dairine's own personal energy reserves or through some other means (though an agreement like that is of course not without its own consequences). Another aspect of wizardry is that the youngest wizards are always the strongest, and at this point Dairine is well off her peak power levels and thus has to find other ways to do things rather than just powering through spells by brute force alone.
Since the start of her wizardly career, Dairine has been working with a computer who's turned very sentient named Spot. She doesn't need him to complete spells, but he's a very useful counterpart so that she doesn't have to keep everything in her head all the time. As noted above, they're currently having some troubles communicating.
Reason for Character Choice: I've been throwing Dairine into different games for a while now and I've really liked watching her grow and try to mature a little bit. Also, since fighting entropy is such a big part of her canon, I think it'll be very interesting to write for her in this game.
Additional Information: Dairine is just a kid, but don't let that fool you. At this point, she's used to dealing with adults and holding her own. She's a bit sarcastic, a bit quick-tempered, but in general she's a good kid. Oh, and she's a wizard.
Writing Samples
First-Person Transmission Sample: (A sample written for a different game. Let me know if you want something else.)
[The video shows a stringy, red-haired fourteen-year-old with a very displeased expression on her face.]
So let me get this straight. I’m back on Earth. Basically everyone is dead. My computer’s broken. And there’s no explanation for me being back. Again.
[She pauses, takes a breath, and rubs at her eyes, before looking back at the camera.]
Great. Well, guys, I’m Dairine and I’m on Errantry and I greet you, though I’m beginning to think that means zilch here. Which is also great. If anyone has some good news, I would love to hear it, because right now this world is looking even worse than the one I came from. Not that I want to get all depressing right away, but...
[Her mouth twists and the video cuts out.]
Third-Person Log Sample: If Dairine had still been able to hear Spot in her mind, he would have provided an explanation for the sudden rush of silence, the sudden prickly feeling of a vacuum against her skin. But she wasn't able to hear him and so she did what anyone who's spent enough time messing around in space would do--she closed her eyes, stopped breathing, and started to think a spell that would provide her with enough protection from the vacuum of space to get her bearings and figure out what was going on.
Except that as she finished thinking the last words of the spell, she didn't feel the comforting push of a nice nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere against her skin. Everything felt exactly the same as before.
Cautiously, she opened one eye, figuring that if she was going to die a frozen retina wouldn't be too bad in the grand scheme of things. One eye was followed rapidly by a second, because what she was being treated with was a view of a planet as seen from orbit. An altogether unfamiliar planet, because she'd never been able to do a wizardry that would get her off the planet. But now here she was, apparently floating above the planet and--inexplicably--not dead.
It was at this point that she forgot about the not breathing thing, but when her diaphragm pushed down to fill her lungs with air, or the lack thereof, nothing happened. Her lungs didn't collapse, nor did they fill with any sort of ambient gas. They just were.
Something was definitely fishy about this.
She didn't have much time to consider exactly what was fishy, though, because that was when the planet began to rapidly bloom with fire, fire that was just as quickly extinguished by darkness. She shuddered. She shuddered and wanted to look away, but gritted her teeth and kept watching, hoping for answers.
Because she recognized that darkness. It was the same darkness that had almost taken Earth, what now seemed like lifetimes ago. It was the same darkness that had taken Roshaun, the same darkness that was a tool of the Lone Power.
And so she watched, because there was nothing else she could do. She watched as darkness folded into the planet, as darkness folded into itself. She watched until her own eyes went dark.
And then she jerked awake, lungs suddenly filling with air, and looked around in confusion at the white, white walls.
Name/Alias: Odette
Email: seerowskindness [at] yahoo [dot] com
AIM Screenname: n/a
Personal Livejournal: odette_river
I am 18+ years old.
May Boudicca unscreen your application for others to see? Yes
Character Information
Character Name: Dairine Callahan
Fandom: Young Wizards
Canon Point: After Wizards at War, with additional history from wastedlands, and crowdedhour
Character Livejournal: redfive_wizard
Picture: Here
Appearance: Here
Age: 14
History: At about age four, Dairine taught herself to read by borrowing her older sister Nita’s books. She kept the reading a secret from her parents for a while, but eventually they figured it out, which turned out to be a good thing because it meant she had access to the library. Over the next few years, she read through the children’s section and then, a bit more slowly, through the adult section. Knowledge, she figured, as she watched her sister get bullied at school, was the way to protect herself. Of course, at that age she really couldn’t understand the novels on an emotional level, but she was learning a lot about anatomy and psychoanalysis and dinosaurs.
Despite her obvious precocious tendencies, her parents decided to keep her with her peers and not allow her to skip grades. Dairine found this silly, because it meant all the work was so easy, but she didn’t really mind. Nita was happy to teach her things, and she always had her books.
But then Dairine noticed that her sister knew something she didn’t, and Nita wasn’t sharing. Dairine made it her business to notice things, so when Nita started acting strangely, sitting in the yard whispering to herself and disappearing for long periods of time, of course Dairine knew about it. She began watching Nita carefully, and finally, on a trip to the beach, found Nita and her friend Kit as they shape-shifted back from whales. Dairine demanded to know everything. In this way, she found out about magic, and this changed her life.
Shortly thereafter, she took the Wizard's Oath herself, pledging to defend life and to combat entropy, one of the Lone Power's tools, as well as the Lone Power Itself. Then, Dairine, as with all wizards, had her Ordeal. Hers was harder than most, but at the same time, she was young, and so had vast stores of power at her disposal. After gallivanting through the universe for a while, running away from some aliens, and finding some help from a random stranger, she went head-to-head against the Lone Power and won. In fact, her Ordeal (at least from our vantage point within time) was the tipping point in the Lone Power’s path to redemption. And, as a result of her Ordeal, Dairine ended up with a sentient computer and a mental connection to a race of silicon-based creatures whom she’d created.
In the beginning of her wizardly career, Dairine became used to this great firepower. She could do almost anything she wanted--bouncing between planets and barely feeling the power loss, burning through problems instead of having to deal with them using finesse. This was normal: the youngest wizards are always the strongest.
And then her mother was diagnosed with cancer, just as Dairine was coming off her peak power levels, and she found there was nothing she could do. She didn’t have enough control to do the delicate wizardries necessary to help and was left frustrated and sidelined while Nita tried to save their mother. It didn’t work, and their mother died, plunging Dairine into a very dark time. Her therapist was stupid, school was stupid, and she didn’t understand why anything mattered except escaping to somewhere else in the universe and looking at the stars and trying to remember that there was still life and life was still important.
Eventually, though, things got better. She got a new therapist, one who knew about wizardry and wasn’t as much of an idiot, and she got better at working with her new power levels. Feeling better about things, she signed up for a wizard exchange program and hosted three alien wizards. One of them, Roshaun, turned out to be a prince and Dairine had trouble with his attitude right from the start. Despite this the two managed to form a friendship. Not a moment too soon, because Dairine, her sister, and wizards across the universe found themselves plunged into their most desperate fight yet, as wizardry itself started to fail.
Dairine managed to survive this as well, but not without a cost. Roshaun, enacting a difficult wizardry, disappeared. While the others presumed him to be dead, Dairine thought differently, and began (however aimlessly) looking for him.
At which point she somehow found herself in Wonderland. Wonderland as in Alice in Wonderland. This was not a very pleasant experience, but it looked like she might finally have made it back home. Not so. Instead, she found herself trapped in a time-traveling castle with killer unicorns stalking the grounds, an apocalyptic future, and more problems than she could count. She spent quite a long time here, forming some close friendships with people from other worlds and trying--unsuccessfully--to find her way back home.
Here, too, her mental connection with her computer, Spot, was severed due to a period that she spent possessed by a demon. They were working at restoring their link, but one thing happened after another and they never had time to properly sit down and work things out. And it wasn’t that much of an inconvenience, wizardry still worked, and if they had to say things to each other instead of just thinking them, that was of little concern as far as the big picture was concerned.
( Here is a link to her logs at crowdedhour.)
Personality: From a young age, Dairine equated knowledge with power, and she figured if she knew things she’d be able to protect herself. So she started learning. Thus, Dairine is smart. She has a smattering of knowledge about history, literature, science... You name it, Dairine has read something about it. All of this knowledge means that Dairine quickly got too smart for her own good. She isn’t usually actively rude, but if you’re in a position of power and she doesn’t think you’re smart enough, she won’t have a lot of respect for you.
And, just in general, Dairine has a sharp personality. She’s not afraid to engage in some verbal sparring or to get a little carried away with the sarcastic remarks. If someone annoys her, she’s pretty quick to make some sort of pert remark. She recognizes that this isn’t a good thing, but if she’s aggravated, she really doesn’t stop to think about what she’s saying.
Dairine is also used to not being taken very seriously. For the past year or more, she’s been a kid living in an adult world. She learned quickly that adults are going to be concerned and worried no matter what she tells them, so she’s stopped caring so much about what they say to her and learned that the only way for them to perceive her as competent is to act competent. Thus, she usually goes into a situation regardless of what the adults might say. She also isn’t afraid to speak up for herself and show that her opinion matters.
Does this make her foolhardy? Maybe a little bit. Dairine takes risks and throws herself into situations even if the odds don’t look good. She figures that at this point it’s her job. She’s a wizard; she’s protecting the universe; she’s got to take risks. So she does. It’s not that she doesn’t get scared, but she’s learned to deal with it. And there is a certain rush that you get from going up against death and--at least for now--winning.
Dairine has a strong sense of good and evil. The way wizardry is presented to young wizards, this only makes sense. You have the Powers that Be and you have the Lone One. The Lone One is evil; the Powers are good. Even before she became a wizard, Dairine was obsessed with finding Darth Vader and defeating him. She recognized Star Wars was just a story, and all of that, but in her head it was some sort of big metaphor for life. When she was presented with wizardry, of course the first thing she did was go out and look for Darth Vader, and when you go looking for the Lone Power, you’re bound to find It.
But, with maturity, Dairine’s clear-cut sense of good and evil has become a little muddled. She’ll still stick to it, still say that It is evil and the Powers are good, but when you’re not actually dealing with one of the Powers directly, sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s good and what’s evil. This is definitely a problem, but she hasn’t spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do about it. She’s started learning to only consider the immediate future: will working with this person help me survive another day? Okay, then let’s do it.
Nevertheless, Dairine loves her wizardry. She loves working with the universe and protecting the universe and all the craziness that accompanies that task. She loves knowing how things work on a very intimate scale, loves being at the frontline when there are problems. Her wizardry is, in no small part, what’s kept her sane over the past few years.
Powers/Special Abilities: Dairine is a wizard, meaning that she has the ability to talk to the universe and tell it to do what she wants. Of course, this takes energy, often a lot of energy if she wants anything big to get done. Her magic is based on the Speech, a language universally understood by all of creation. However, it's more than just saying the words. It takes concentration to perform a spell, as well as some payment of energy, whether from Dairine's own personal energy reserves or through some other means (though an agreement like that is of course not without its own consequences). Another aspect of wizardry is that the youngest wizards are always the strongest, and at this point Dairine is well off her peak power levels and thus has to find other ways to do things rather than just powering through spells by brute force alone.
Since the start of her wizardly career, Dairine has been working with a computer who's turned very sentient named Spot. She doesn't need him to complete spells, but he's a very useful counterpart so that she doesn't have to keep everything in her head all the time. As noted above, they're currently having some troubles communicating.
Reason for Character Choice: I've been throwing Dairine into different games for a while now and I've really liked watching her grow and try to mature a little bit. Also, since fighting entropy is such a big part of her canon, I think it'll be very interesting to write for her in this game.
Additional Information: Dairine is just a kid, but don't let that fool you. At this point, she's used to dealing with adults and holding her own. She's a bit sarcastic, a bit quick-tempered, but in general she's a good kid. Oh, and she's a wizard.
Writing Samples
First-Person Transmission Sample: (A sample written for a different game. Let me know if you want something else.)
[The video shows a stringy, red-haired fourteen-year-old with a very displeased expression on her face.]
So let me get this straight. I’m back on Earth. Basically everyone is dead. My computer’s broken. And there’s no explanation for me being back. Again.
[She pauses, takes a breath, and rubs at her eyes, before looking back at the camera.]
Great. Well, guys, I’m Dairine and I’m on Errantry and I greet you, though I’m beginning to think that means zilch here. Which is also great. If anyone has some good news, I would love to hear it, because right now this world is looking even worse than the one I came from. Not that I want to get all depressing right away, but...
[Her mouth twists and the video cuts out.]
Third-Person Log Sample: If Dairine had still been able to hear Spot in her mind, he would have provided an explanation for the sudden rush of silence, the sudden prickly feeling of a vacuum against her skin. But she wasn't able to hear him and so she did what anyone who's spent enough time messing around in space would do--she closed her eyes, stopped breathing, and started to think a spell that would provide her with enough protection from the vacuum of space to get her bearings and figure out what was going on.
Except that as she finished thinking the last words of the spell, she didn't feel the comforting push of a nice nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere against her skin. Everything felt exactly the same as before.
Cautiously, she opened one eye, figuring that if she was going to die a frozen retina wouldn't be too bad in the grand scheme of things. One eye was followed rapidly by a second, because what she was being treated with was a view of a planet as seen from orbit. An altogether unfamiliar planet, because she'd never been able to do a wizardry that would get her off the planet. But now here she was, apparently floating above the planet and--inexplicably--not dead.
It was at this point that she forgot about the not breathing thing, but when her diaphragm pushed down to fill her lungs with air, or the lack thereof, nothing happened. Her lungs didn't collapse, nor did they fill with any sort of ambient gas. They just were.
Something was definitely fishy about this.
She didn't have much time to consider exactly what was fishy, though, because that was when the planet began to rapidly bloom with fire, fire that was just as quickly extinguished by darkness. She shuddered. She shuddered and wanted to look away, but gritted her teeth and kept watching, hoping for answers.
Because she recognized that darkness. It was the same darkness that had almost taken Earth, what now seemed like lifetimes ago. It was the same darkness that had taken Roshaun, the same darkness that was a tool of the Lone Power.
And so she watched, because there was nothing else she could do. She watched as darkness folded into the planet, as darkness folded into itself. She watched until her own eyes went dark.
And then she jerked awake, lungs suddenly filling with air, and looked around in confusion at the white, white walls.