S.H.R.E.D. Application

[onlyonerose]

Player Name: Cherry (CherryFlight)
18+: Y
Opt-Outs: Eye gore entirely, discuss before externally-encouraged suicide or self-harm, warn before major dismemberment
Favored Horror/Torture Flavor: Preference for psychological, but fine with any aside from the one hard opt-out above.
Traitor Opt-In?: N
Password: Pineapple

Name: Persephone
Age: 800+, frozen physically at ~23
Canon: V Rising
Canon Point: Eh, somewhere in act 2. She's just killed Beatrice, and gotten curbstomped by Christina and Simon. V Rising is a sandbox and "act 2" basically means "no longer primarily hunting in the starter area, main activity now in the center of the map".

Personality Traits: (6 - 10 core traits.)
- Prideful/Haughty, or the illusion of it should it fail
- Insecure
- Reserved
- Nurturing (in her own weird way)
- Stubborn
- Protective (again, in her own weird way)
- Honor-bound (as in, mostly honest, will generally leave non-hostile entities alone, etc.)

Fears: (4 - 6 fears.)
- Isolation
- Electrocution (or anything that comparably causes intense pain and loss of motor control)
- Silver (specifically sharp and/or pointy silver things)
- Captivity
- Torture
- Loss of loved ones

Values:
-Resilience
-Coolness under pressure
-Open-mindedness
-Loyalty
-Honor/honesty/fairness

Hope: A simple life, by vampire standards: a castle with a flower garden, forge, kiln, and library; her girlfriend; wildlife and would-be hunters and bandits to feed on... and NO VAMPIRIC TYRANTS TRYING TO COME BACK FROM TRUE DEATH, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Regret: Having to kill Beatrice the Tailor, who never lifted a finger to fight back. She needed that blood, but...

Best Memory:
-Current: Millie (human GF) calling the castle "home". Kind of bittersweet since that involved Millie's hometown rejecting her.
-Forgotten: Dancing with Silvana, her late wife. (she can only recall brief snatches of sensation and emotion)

Worst Memory: Being tortured with a silvered sword by a paladin, long ago, before the Long Sleep. It stuck with her so badly it returns to mind vividly when triggered, when she's forgotten nearly all else from before.
--Bonus: The symbol of the Church of Luminance is a stylized sunrise (here's an example on a gravestone), and Persephone was staring at this on the paladin's breastplate the entire time. It is a POTENT trigger, usually expressed as aggression. Drop one of these into a scene to shut down any rational contributions from her! Random entirely innocent images may clip this, such as a child's drawing or the Forgotten Realms' deity Lathander's holy symbol (though admittedly anyone carrying that is likely to have the same attitude towards vampires). There's only so many ways to stylize a sunrise!

Powers:
--General--
-Vampiric Senses: She can smell blood and get a sense of its type in general: human/mortal (and what they've imprinted into their blood, see Blood Memory below), or other vampire, but unless they're particularly potent she has to be relatively close to get that kind of detail. Also, naturally, she can see well with very little light. Vampires are nocturnal, after all. If possible I'd like the scent to remain during experiments? It can lead to fun things like, what's the room's general heart rate? Or inform her attitude immediately based on whether the other subject(s) is/are human. Totally understand if not though!

-Minor Vampire Powers: There are several small things that can't be solved by linking a wiki page that vampires simply do. Things like having the strength and sturdiness to chop down a tree or break apart a rock with their bare hands if they've got the patience (though this is incredibly inefficient and will leave a vampire very thirsty! Best to use the proper tools instead!), being able to leap from any height and land on their feet unharmed, passive slow wound regeneration, or simple vanity like keeping hair and clothes tidy after a messy fight.

-Blood Memory: Blood has two components: physical and spiritual. A vampire needs whole blood (containing both) to sustain themself, but it goes beyond sustenance. When a vampire feeds on a victim, they gain certain capabilities depending on the potency of their victim's blood, apparently inherent. Something's odd about that, though - humans aren't born rogues, warriors, or scholars. How is that possible? The same reason V-Blood Carriers - the game's bosses impart their skills through their blood. Albeit in a lesser form for these ordinary creatures: simple enhancements to stealth or magic, rather than distinct skillsets or a thorough understanding required to build something new. Now, Persephone will be stuck in a body that can no longer stomach several liters of blood. So I propose this remains in a weakened form. She may learn impressions about someone's skillset from a drop of blood on her tongue, but cannot ingest the amount she would need to fully benefit as she would back home.

-Creation Magic and Castle Hearts: Vampires can use their powers to manipulate materials. Crafting simple cloaks from cloth and thread with minimal time and no needles, waterskins from leather and spun plant fiber, distilling a medicine from rat marrow and plant matter, or...building the first foundation of a home. There is more to blood than keeping a vampire healthy. The spiritual essence of blood can be refined into an energy source. Not for the vampire, it's useless to drink. But they can create a Castle Heart out of raw stone, claiming a surrounding area as their territory. Doors within their territory only open to those given permission (that's right, humans have it backwards!) and the Heart can power workstations to refine their raw materials into the building blocks - literally and figuratively - of grand castles.

The catch? Well, there are two.

First, Persephone won't have her magic bag that can just carry thousands of pounds of timber and stone weightlessly. She would have to drag every bit of stone needed for her Heart to its location the hard way. Second, this is not Vardoran. Vardoran bounced back from Dracula's blood rain magnificently, and teems with life. The town...does not. She would have to kill constantly (a medium-sized wild animal or poorly fed human averages 65 essence total if she also harvests their heart and makes a blood press; a day's fuel is 180) to keep her "castle" (let's be honest, it would be a Heart and a few scraggly attempts at a stone floor) active, and that would earn her more enmity than whatever palisades she could slap together could hold back. Not to mention, she holds fast to her notion of honor and won't attack people who haven't attacked her first - Beatrice was an outlier. Even if she retains the full extent of this power, it's highly unlikely she could do anything with it, unless someone agrees to a rapid-fire death loop to feed a Heart. She'd still have to lug materials around to build around it.

But because people could cooperate and volunteer their lives repeatedly to have impregnable walls and doors, I wouldn't blame you for nixing this.

--Codified--
-Vampiric Powers:
Shapeshifting: Wolf Form, Bear Form, Rat Form
Other: Blood Mend (will not work; no blood pool to draw from); Dominate (I doubt she'd use this? I'll make a permissions post for it anyway)
-Spells: Just for fun, I'll say she only has the spells she had readied instead of her entire spellbook. Maybe she can earn more through regains?
Veil of Frost - all Veil spells create a decoy that allows a vampire to elude attackers until the illusion expires (in a second or two) or they announce their presence somehow otherwise.
Aftershock
Corrupted Skull - up to you how you want to deal with the skeleton summons!
Chaos Barrage


Arrival Choice: Accept. Assuming an implement to remove teeth was available, she pulled her lower right fang. If that wasn't enough, she'd also remove the left one, significantly weakening her bite grip. If these are not acceptable (either in-universe or by mod override) she'd cut off a finger. I'd like failed sacrifice(s), if any, to remain gone until death, too!

Soul Weirdness?: The diegetic respawn system - it's already attached to an undying body! When she is struck down, even by silver or sunlight, she comes back at any ancient vampire waygate she knows of or in her coffin. (It is VERY HARD to kill a vampire for good in Vardoran. Even the one thought dead dead is working to revive himself from the shadow realm - yes, they really called it that.) Free vampiric essence resembles a swarm of bats carried on a red mist, which I'm interpreting as body and soul respectively.

How Do You Wanna Do This?: well, there are no waygates. And unless she somehow manages to create and feed a castle heart, no coffin she can bind to. It would be so funny if her remains teleported themselves to the next closest thing, the floor right in front of the body printer. A respawn point is a respawn point, right? They'll just have to keep cleaning her up. Whether her soul capsule goes with the remains, I'll leave that to mod discretion. Also I'd love for the bat swarm thing to happen but because the soul's contained in the capsule, they just swarm around the capsule full of pulsing red mist until someone prints a body. Have fun collecting that! (Don't worry. They don't bite. They're noncorporeal.)
Writing Samples: (At least 2, within the last year.)
Link 1: This part of her backstory post is written in her POV and is what would have happened relatively soon if she hadn't been taken.
Link 2: TDM thread


And, because the interest gauge plurk said sandbox characters count as OC's...


Backstory: This part contains a summary of her experience within the game world, with some minor liberties taken. She still doesn't remember much from before the Long Sleep, and remembers nothing of being human. Here's a rundown of major things she doesn't remember (yet), in case you want the game to play with them:
(warnings ahead for mentions of suicide)

HUMAN
-As a human, Persephone Laurel Underhill (her middle and last names are lost to the Long Sleep) lived with parents who were aggravating perfectionists. She spent her childhood pretending her upper limit was lower than it was, keeping their expectations low. But if she couldn't make herself useful by merit...
-They were wealthy but not quite noble, and were hoping to marry Persephone into a more prestigious family. So when they caught her kissing the tanner's daughter, Silvana, they lost their shit. Three days later, they told her Silvana had taken her own life. If only she hadn't tried to seduce someone above her station...
-This was only technically true, as Persephone found out when she fled into the woods in despair. She was hoping for suicide by monster, and while her life did indeed end...well. Yeah.
-It turns out, the tanner had heard rumors the vampires weren't merely monsters, but secret shepherds, conspiring with the ruling class to maintain a status quo. He'd carried his daughter's near-lifeless body into the woods and begged them to save her, in exchange for his servitude.
-And Persephone, also looking to die, found the same fate. The vampire who answered the tanner's plea headed a relatively young clan, and gladly took in fresh blood.

VAMPIRE
-Their blood-sire's name was Fabian, and, like them, he was not a vampire from the human nobility, fleeing the grasp of time; nor was he the rougher type, those vampires born when an exiled criminal displayed uncommon talent, power, or charisma and found a vampiric patron's favor instead of filling their cups. No, like them, he had been rejected by the humans around him. Even though the superstitions that banished him were better founded than most: Even as a human, he'd been fascinated by blood magic. But he still considered it unjust, and surrounded himself with vampires also abandoned by humanity, be it for prejudice, superstition, or dark conspiracy against an innocent.
-Fabian made something one day that made the noble vampires like him very much: a working mirror. A creation of blood magic that tapped into possibility itself and beyond, not only could this mirror show a vampire themself for the very first time, but it could change them, if they wished. Body type, hair color and texture, complexion, eye color...anything. A vampire who wished to reimagine themself could, and a noble clan hosted a grand ball to celebrate and showcase it, launching Fabian's formerly laughable clan of misfits into respectability.
-During this ball, for whatever reason, Fabian's clan, including Persephone, latched onto the fact they could make their hair into colors it never could have been as a human. (this is why hers is teal, of course) This drew Dracula's derision. He remarked that a vampire clan "bright and colorful as a rainbow" could never inspire the proper fear and respect in humans.
-In response, Fabian renamed his clan "Children of the Moonlight Prism" then and there. Fabian's children rejoiced, and openly mocked the ancient lord's scowling face. They'd nearly all been turned in their teens or early twenties, after all. They were basically a vampiric frat house.
-And this is why you don't build a vampiric frat house: they decided to tear down every last one of Drac's complaints and went out and slaughtered the nearest town: Persephone and Silvana's hometown. Persephone was especially gleeful to take revenge on her parents. She even came up with a one-liner she thought sounded intimidating. "Be wary of snuffing out lights without cause, lest you create your own shadows." Some artistic fledglings took some entrails to write "YOU THREW US AWAY. THIS IS WHAT YOU GET." in the street.
-It certainly brought fear. Respect, though? Perhaps not the right kind. Both the vampiric and human nobility had to scramble to do some damage control, and the Children of the Moonlight Prism weren't allowed out of their castle grounds for a while. Persephone realized, listening to the others' complaints to her blood-sire, how dangerous unchecked power could be, how important it was to maintain that frail balance they kept. Fabian's lectures over this incident also helped bring about her current sense of honor. Never again would she take part in the massacre of those who had, with few exceptions, done nothing to them but exist. (at least...until Beatrice.) They all mellowed after that, and settled into normal vampire life in those days. Persephone married Silvana, and life, such as it was, was good.
-And then that thing about unchecked power came back at them. From Dracula. It started a war, and Persephone knew which side she was on. The rest (aside from an incident with a paladin during the war she remembers too well), that's canon lore.

Setting (origin world/realm): Lore page. This consolidates most of the lore and all of the setting info from the dev blogs.