beyond the rift } { application
About You - The Player
Name: Emily
Age: 23
Contact: iluvroadrunner6@gmail.com / iluvroadrunner6 on AIM
Past Role Playing Experience: Stuff. And things.
The Character
Name: Stefan Salvatore
Age/Birthdate: 163 / 17 in appearance
Species: Vampire
*Type: Wanderer
Canon: The Vampire Diaries / 309: Homecoming
*Pre-existing powers: Stefan is a vampire which means they come with a very unique set of skills. They are very strong, and very fast. They also have the ability to compel you -- a form of mind control -- they augment memories, use it to get their way, it's kind of like the Force except there's no handwaving involved -- not unless the vamp's a giant nerd. They can survive off animal blood as well as human blood, but they are stronger if they feed on the human stuff -- which is why the vampires that what the fun party tricks but don't want to hurt people will steal blood bags from a hospital/blood bank in order to feed. Their strength is also based on age -- the older a vampire is, the stronger they are. Vampire blood injested by humans heals them from all injuries, but it doesn't revive them. This is ... usually how people wind up with vampire blood in their systems.
On the other hand, they still have their weaknesses. These vampires are weakened by the sun. Some of them have daylight rings which allow them to walk in the sunlight, but a vast majority of them will be set on fire if they spend too long in the sunlight. Vervain, an herb, also will knock them out cold and prevents compulsion. They also are weakened by any kind of wood being shoved into their body, and can be killed by a stake to the heart.
*Rift Change, if applicable: Shapeshifter. A fawn and grizzly bear.
Livejournal: veryemerson
Played By: Paul Wesley
Icon: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/114104070/42393190
Appearance: Stefan is tall, about 5’ 11”, and looks much younger than he actually is. He’s been seventeen for about a hundred and fifty years, so there you go. He has fair skin, with light brown hair that he usually wears spiked. He sticks to solid colors and jeans, and is a fan of leather jackets.
Personality: Stefan Salvatore is a vampire.
It’s not a part of his life that he likes to emphasize, nor does he like to spread around. In fact, when he’s not binging on blood, he tries his best to be a normal guy. Despite the fact that he’s one hundred sixty-three, he goes to high school, or college to be among people, to make friends, start a life. When you die at seventeen, a life isn’t really something you get to have, and Stefan’s been chasing it ever since. When Stefan is on the wagon, so to speak, he only drinks animal blood, which leaves him substantially weaker than other vampires, but it also keeps him from killing people. When he’s on the wagon, the Stefan Salvatore that people meet is sweet, affectionate, and friendly-in fact, he’s probably about as close to human as a vampire can get. He is well read, eloquent, and polite, and has very few enemies based on who he is as a person.
Unfortunately for Stefan, however, he’s not very good at staying on the wagon, and technically, he shouldn’t be. Drinking human blood is in a vampire’s nature, and the fact that Stefan spends so much time fighting that part of his nature instead of learning how to balance it, he falls into these binge cycles, starting with when he was first turned into a vampire and repeating several times over the course of his life. It hasn’t really been shown what events in his life have triggered these binges, but it seems clear that it’s most likely due to some kind of overwhelming negative emotion. According to TVD lore, when a person becomes a vampire, their emotions are heightened-happiness becomes ecstasy, sadness becomes despair. Younger vampires have the ability to turn these emotions off, and often times it’s because they can’t handle the onslaught of emotions on such an intense level. In theory, his first experience with the darker side of his personality came shortly after he was turned. It wasn’t until he met a vampire named Lexi, who taught him control and how not to overindulge himself on blood that he learned how to manage his emotions and gain some sense of normalcy. It’s possible that when this normalcy is threatened, and he tips towards the side of despair, that’s when he turns his feelings off and succumbs to his desire for blood, but it’s also possible that it could be something as simple as needing to drink human blood to heal himself after a fight, and never stopped, slowly succumbing to the darker side of his personality.
Stefan at his worst is the kind of vampire who drowns himself in blood to the point where he blacks out and doesn’t remember what he’s done. He is amoral, without any kind of regard for humanity as a whole-in fact, you could even say that he despises it. He’s the kind of killer who likes the hunt. He plays games with his victims, compelling them into doing things they wouldn’t normally do. He feeds on them with reckless abandon, sometimes so violently that he tears their bodies apart, and he keeps a list of the victims that he feeds on in order to relive the kills at a later date-and that list can get to be a long one, depending on how long he goes on these binges. These situations usually ended with Lexi, Stefan’s best friend and also a vampire, locking him down and detoxing him from human blood until she forces him to feel again. It’s something that Stefan is forever grateful for-even if he curses her for it during the process.
Stefan as he’s landing in Chicago is somewhere in between these two extremes, however, unlike the earlier binges where he chose to succumb to his nature, this one Klaus forced him into. He drank the blood in the first place to save Damon’s life in order to get the cure for a werewolf bite (werewolf bites are fatal to vampires), and then Klaus compelled him to turn off his emotions, forcing him into his sociopathic “ripper” persona, destroying his relationships with everyone he cares about in the process. However, in return for saving Klaus’s life, he released Stefan from his compulsion and allowed him to have his freedom again. It’s not long after that that Stefan will be waking up in Chicago, so he will have to learn to find the balance of those emotions again, but this time on his own, without his best friend. At the same time, however, he isn’t going to want to return to the animal blood diet. He’s stronger on human blood, and given that he is in a strange place, he’s going to be on the defensive. He will want to have every advantage possible. Therefore, he’ll have to learn the thing he never learned, how to balance what he is with his lifestyle, and not let it overtake him. It’s going to be a rough road, but it has a lot of potential for growth.
Events: The first major event in making Stefan who he is, was his being turned into a vampire. As I stated earlier, Stefan as a vampire isn’t exactly the prettiest thing in the world. He has trouble with controlling his blood urges, with controlling his emotions. Stefan as a vampire enjoys the hunt and the kill, and he went from a gentle, kind hearted human, to a blood thirsty vampire who not only conned his brother into turning with him, but went on to murderer who remained of the founding families and many other people along with them. It took him a long time to learn to control those blood urges, as well as get a handle on himself as a person, and this is a cycle that repeats a lot throughout his life. He had a friend named Lexi who would pull him back from the edge and try to get him back onto the right path again, and when he is off the blood, he carries the guilt of the people that he killed with him, but it’s these cycles and binges that have come to define his life.
The second major event that has effected Stefan at this current canon point is Klaus. Klaus has had a lot of influence over Stefan’s life over the centuries, from creating the situation that allowed his sire to turn him, creating the situation that meant the woman he currently loves existed, and they were even friends during one of Stefan’s blood binges in the twenties. Klaus is the reason that Stefan winds up back on the blood again, and also is the reason why he needs to learn how to deal with his emotions again. Klaus is the one who compels him to turn off his emotions, and essentially takes everything that he cared about in his life from him, including Elena, his brother Damon, and the life that he had been building for himself. It’s Klaus’s presence in his life that motivates Stefan to throw the rest of it away and fight back against him. It’s a dramatic change from the more passive Stefan we’ve seen in the past. Not that Stefan isn’t willing to fight for what he needs, but he’s not usually one to take the fight to the enemy-that’s usually Damon’s role. Stefan decides to take the fight into his own hands, and it’s just shortly after that that he is going to land in Chicago.
Writing Sample: When a vampire turns off his emotions, they never go away completely.
They sit on the edges of his mind, just waiting for the moment when he’ll let them in again. They bubble up when you first wake up, thinking that maybe this will be the time when he’ll acknowledge the fact that his humanity is there and that he has it. That it’s part of him. Normally, it will just get shoved back down again, blocked out, but as the day wears on and starts to weigh on him a little more, they bubble up again, reminding him how tired he is. Emotions are the only reason why he sleeps a lot of the time, because he gets tired of holding things back doesn’t want to feel, and sleep is the only way to keep them out again.
When an Original compels a vampire to turn off his emotions, however, it’s another story.
There’s no bubbling. No reminder of the person he used to be or the things he used to do. All that’s left is the cold expanse of nothing-ness that comes with feeling nothing, and caring about nothing. He looks at the people around him and feels nothing that he used to feel. He looks at Elena, and all he could see is the pulse of her juglar, pressing up against her skin with the steady thump-thump, thump-thump of her heart. To a vampire who can’t feel anything, all that’s left is blood.
And when Klaus lets him go, it all comes rushing back.
All the guilt, the pain, the anger, it floods back like an tsunami and it takes everything he has not to let it cripple him. But he holds himself together long enough to let Katherine to get him in the car, and for her to stop driving. He’s already started pushing it down again, wanting to just keep not feeling for a little while longer, because the fact of the matter is this-there’s no Lexi to bring him back this time around. There’s no one to lock him down and wait for him to burn himself out. He would have to do this on his own, and he didn’t know if he’s strong enough for that. He never has been before.
Then Katherine tells him that he needs to get mad. That she has something she needs him to do, and he can’t if he’s not angry enough. He slowly lets that bit of himself in, just a taste of the anger he has bubbling under the surface, and by the time Katherine drops him off on the side of the road to do what he needs to do, he knows this won’t be a problem.
Anger is easy. Anger he can do.