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exsilium
» PLAYER INFORMATION
Player NAME: Betsy
Current AGE: 21
Player TIME ZONE: EST
Personal JOURNAL:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
be_themoon
IM & SERVICE: oakashandwillow @ aim
Player PLURK:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
be_themoon
Current CHARACTERS: Max Kearney (OC @motherofnemesis) & Roslyn Small ( OC @ boughtabookstore)
» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Larissa Dunbar
Character PULL-POINT: Shortly after completing the Wilson case!
Character AGE: 26
Character ABILITIES:
Magical.
Mundane.
Character WORLD:
Larissa comes from a world in which magic is commonplace and everyday. About 5% of the population has some form of magical gift and it's not undercover or unknown. While spontaneous development isn't uncommon at all, the most powerful gifts tend to run in the blood. Each person with a gift has different, specific talents - healing magic, weather magic, foresight - the list of ways it can manifest are long and potentially never ending. Nobody really knows where this comes from or how it operates, but given that people have been being born with talents that tie into the modern world it seems that whatever it is it's adjusting with the growth of the world. Magic has been advancing alongside technology and in some places becoming intertwined. While most magic is instinctual, some of it does require props - Larissa's cards for her foresight, herbs and potions for healing magic, runes for warding magic.
Aside from that distinction, the world has advanced along the same lines as ours has. World history and structure has not been strongly altered other than that magic is integrated into every day life - healers work in hospitals along side normal doctors, people go to people with foresight for advice. Public sentiment towards magical users tends to be primarily neutral, though there are religious and other groups who think that it's too dangerous to not be much more closely regulated than the simple registration currently in place. Their lobby's have never been more powerful than the ones the magic user's have, though.
Character HISTORY:
Larissa was born in 1988 to a family with a history of powerful magic. Her mother is one of the most talented healing witches known in recent times, her father was the first person to be born with a gift of technopathy, her older sister Mary is a highly in demand weather witch, her younger sister Blanche has a silver tongue (not literally, but she's quite good at convincing people they want to do things for her), and her younger brother Robert looks to be following her mother's footsteps. Larissa, on the other hand, didn't even realize she had a gift until she was 13 and she first realized she could tell when people were lying, and it took her until sometime in the middle of college to realize that she could also tell the future through tarot cards.
Most of her life has gone pretty normally. She attended school, was an average student, was on the Mathletes and after graduation went to her state college for a degree in Accounting. Her college experience was also fairly typical - she had a couple relationships, one she dumped and one that dumped her, she was in a few clubs, and after graduation she managed to get a good job with the help of her father and how many people he knows in the business world. She kept her abilities on the downlow as much as possible, but word got out here and there and one day about age 24 a policeman named Alec Robinson knocked on her door and asked for her help in solving a case. From then on she did side work occasionally for the police, just coming in to give reads on crime scenes or occasionally suspects to provide a secondary means of knowledge. It's a good second source of income and it helps her feel useful. The cases have all been mundane, including the one she just completed, which was an arson case that led to the arrest of some very dumb teenage boys. In short, nothing particularly exciting has ever really happened to Larissa.
Character PERSONALITY:
Larissa is, first and foremost, unconvinced of her own importance to the world. She is, in fact, pretty sure that she's not very important at all. Her family members are important, but in comparison to them she doesn't have a very useful gift and she knows precisely how useless she looks next to them (she knows, quite thoroughly, because people have a bad habit of trying to lie to her). This doesn't generally present much of a problem to her - she's quite content to go through life obscure, unnoticed, and uninteresting. This has been her general approach to life, because when from a very young age your older sister is exceptionally charismatic and already powerful and you don't even seem to have powers and are almost painfully shy, well. You tend to get slightly overlooked. Even after she outgrew most of her shyness she remained a very quiet, introverted person, easy to lose in a crowd or a family of charismatic people. While she's confident in her ability as an accountant and her value to her job, personally she feels like she's terribly unimportant as a whole.
This has only changed slightly within the past two years as she started working with the police. Her partnership with Detective Robinson has been one of respect and trust mutually given as they've worked together, and Larissa has been gathering more self confidence from it with each case closed. At the same time she's not very fond of either of her gifts and prefers not to use them. She's never even talked about her ability to tell lies, leaving that one completely unknown, because for someone who likes to be exceptionally fair to everyone and is a rather gentle soul Larissa carries something of a grudge for magic - and especially for her own. She's never going to be able to forget the disappointment in relatives' faces and voices when they were informed that Larissa didn't have any gifts, or the way 'yet' was always added in a falsely bright voice. It's importance to her family and lack of it in herself has left her feeling perpetually somewhat slighted by magic, even if her family did their best to never let it influence how they treated her. The problem tended to be outside of the immediate family, though her siblings had some things to say on it while they were all growing up, as children do - they weren't meant maliciously, but nevertheless the memory stuck.
She doesn't handle danger or threat well at all - she tends to panic under it and have almost no idea of what to do. The one time a case seemed like it might be a threat to her and Detective Robinson advised her to start carrying a gun she backed out of the case immediately and it took a great deal of convincing to get her back on it, but she never touched a gun. She's a pacifist by nature, dislikes violence and fighting of any kind and extremely conflict avoidant to the point of being conciliatory in a way that disadvantages her just to get away from a fight of any kind. She doesn't like raised voices, she doesn't like anger, she just wants everyone to get along and be nice. Her nerves, never particularly good, get very bad at the prospect of violence or physical danger in particular, or when she's confronted with something. She is also a truly terrible public speaker. Never ask her to speak publicly. While 'fearful' isn't always an accurate descriptor for her - when she's certain of herself and what she's saying she can speak up for herself and be very certain - but as soon as she's uncertain about anything she loses all of that certainty and becomes very self questioning and easy to push around and over. It's one of the reasons she's in accounting - math is one of the only things she's ever been absolutely constantly certain of. She knows for a fact she can do math in her sleep, so she chose as her profession the one thing she knew she would never feel self-conscious about.
She has a highly creative side, doing a fair amount of gourmet baking and painting in her spare time. This tends to come as a surprise to people who know her in her day to day life and it's something she keeps very private, as she does almost every aspect of her personal life. Larissa compartmentalizes highly, preferring to keep everything in its precise place. People from work don't cross over into her private life, she dislikes people in her private life coming into her work, and she's not a sharer of personal information. She keeps everything highly organized both physically and mentally, because it helps her orient herself in regards to the world and keep her confidence. If she knows where everything is, knows what's going on, it helps keep her confidence. But her creativity is important to her, as a means of expressing herself in a way that she finds very difficult to ever use words for, to release tension and calm herself down. It's also something that makes her feel uniquely herself, rather than just another cog in the machine - an unfortunate side effect of how terribly ordinary she feels most of the time in comparison to the people she's closest to and spends most of her time with.
Her family is, regardless of how she feels about their magic, extremely important to her. She still lives in the same city as her parents and frequently goes over for weekend dinners or to watch after their dog if they're travelling or just to visit their dog since she doesn't have any pets of her own. Her relationship with her father is closer than with her mother because they share the same intellectual bent, but she loves and respects both of her parents a great deal and is very fond of her siblings, though in practice she finds it hard to be around her entire family gathered for long periods of time because they're all very overwhelming and impressive people. If there is one thing she is absolutely loyal to and would stand for in the face of anything, it's her family. For anything else she would be highly likely to bend rather quickly, but when it comes to her family it's a different matter entirely. She manages to get courage for them that she's unable to get at any point for herself.
Larissa is a quiet, reserved person with a preference for control that she finds exceptionally difficult to maintain due to her general lack of self confidence and difficulty seeing herself as anything more than a small and terribly unimportant piece in a rather big machine.
» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: When asked to choose a weapon, she will choose one of her pens as the object she's most familiar with and as someone very opposed to violence. It's evolution will go in several stages. In the first stage, if she addresses a letter or note to a specific person, when written with the pen nobody will be able to read the note but her and the person it is specifically addressed to. In the second stage, in addition to that, if she transcribes what someone is saying or has said then the ink will change colors from black to red while she's transcribing any lie that they've said. In the third stage, the pen will evolve a second cartridge triggered by a separate button that sprays pepper spray into the eyes of an attacker. In stage four, very simple objects drawn with the pen become reality for a space of about 15 minutes before returning to paper (very, very simple - no bigger than 12 inches in any direction, needs to all be one material and one part - a small entirely metal knife, a key, a saw blade without a handle, etc). Each stage will take 1-3 months of training and several missions to achieve.
Character INVENTORY: 1 set of clothing - office clothes, suit skirt, shirt, jacket, shoes, hose, underthings, winter coat, hat & scarf. 1 briefcase, containing a fair amount of now useless papers for various accounting things she was working on, two black pilot G2 pens, a basic laptop with charger and earphones, small basic makeup kit, a Rider-Waite tarot card set, a wallet (cash, ID cards, etc), a pocket knife.
» SAMPLES
First PERSON:
[ Text, because it's so much easier to sound confident in text than in person over video. She really can't do public speaking. ]
Hi everyone. My name's Larissa. I know it's a lot to ask, but I was wondering if anyone could give me more information on what exactly they mean when they ask you to choose a weapon? They told me it was okay to choose something that wasn't actually dangerous but I was wondering if it would become dangerous? It's important for me to know. I know everyone seems really busy, there's no rush at all, but I'd really like to know if I can at all. Thank you.
Oh also how do you sign up to do supply runs? There are a few things I'm probably going to start needing soon I think.
Third PERSON:
The kitchen is something of a disaster, which she probably should have expected. The number seemed to change daily, but it the mean average was apparently hovering around 430 residents of this station. It was a lot to expect to keep anywhere clean with that many people, much less a kitchen. They always managed to get the brunt of everyone's messiness anyways, and here there seemed to be no accountability. For anything, really, if what everyone was saying sounded true. It wasn't really something she could weigh in on, the whole conversation. She was new and she didn't know anything and it's not like she was the politician. That was Blanche - Blanche and her silver tongue and her bright convincing smile now apparently over a thousand years away, before you even went into the part where she was on the moon. Astronauts on the moon was one thing, that wasn't a big deal, but people living on the moon -
She really didn't want to think about any of that. She really, really didn't want to think about any of that. So instead she was going to clean the kitchen because she needed something to do to take her mind off of everything and this place was a disaster, who could even stand to cook in this mess? Why did everyone feel like leaving their dishes behind them was reasonable?
Not that she could really say anything, because she'd watched at least three people put dishes in the washer and not do anything else and hadn't had the courage yet to speak up. It's not like it's her place, after all. She's still really new and she's just another person. But she can clean the kitchen, and then it will be nice for at least a little while and that will be good. Maybe by the time she finishes she'll even wake up. That would be good. She'd really like that. If she doesn't wake up she's going to have to admit that it might be real and she doesn't want to do that.
» ADDITIONAL NOTES
n/a
Player NAME: Betsy
Current AGE: 21
Player TIME ZONE: EST
Personal JOURNAL:
be_themoonIM & SERVICE: oakashandwillow @ aim
Player PLURK:
Current CHARACTERS: Max Kearney (OC @
motherofnemesis) & Roslyn Small ( OC @ boughtabookstore)» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Larissa Dunbar
Character PULL-POINT: Shortly after completing the Wilson case!
Character AGE: 26
Character ABILITIES:
Magical.
foresight. Larissa can see someone's (or someplace's) personal future or immediate past through tarot spreads. This is fairly limited - she can see only things immediately effecting one person or (fairly small - think one or two rooms) space, the person or place involved has to be present and while her interpretation is generally accurate it is also generally vague and she has a tendency to see things in a way that makes it difficult to know exactly what they mean, which means her advice might work but also it will frequently not make sense until the thing actually happens. Also time travel is probably going to mess that up fairly significantly aw yeah.
human lie detector. If someone lies to her in spoken words within about a five foot radius of her, Larissa gets a sense that it's not the truth. The lie must be directed at her - she can't tell if it's in someone else's conversation and it is completely useless over text, through sign or body language, or outside of that radius. If it's part of several statements she can't tell which was the lie, just that something said wasn't true.
Mundane.
Accountant / Mathematician. She is very good at accounting and math!
Cooking. Also she is an excellent cook.
Painting. Lastly she is a decent artist! And that's about it.
Character WORLD:
Larissa comes from a world in which magic is commonplace and everyday. About 5% of the population has some form of magical gift and it's not undercover or unknown. While spontaneous development isn't uncommon at all, the most powerful gifts tend to run in the blood. Each person with a gift has different, specific talents - healing magic, weather magic, foresight - the list of ways it can manifest are long and potentially never ending. Nobody really knows where this comes from or how it operates, but given that people have been being born with talents that tie into the modern world it seems that whatever it is it's adjusting with the growth of the world. Magic has been advancing alongside technology and in some places becoming intertwined. While most magic is instinctual, some of it does require props - Larissa's cards for her foresight, herbs and potions for healing magic, runes for warding magic.
Aside from that distinction, the world has advanced along the same lines as ours has. World history and structure has not been strongly altered other than that magic is integrated into every day life - healers work in hospitals along side normal doctors, people go to people with foresight for advice. Public sentiment towards magical users tends to be primarily neutral, though there are religious and other groups who think that it's too dangerous to not be much more closely regulated than the simple registration currently in place. Their lobby's have never been more powerful than the ones the magic user's have, though.
Character HISTORY:
Larissa was born in 1988 to a family with a history of powerful magic. Her mother is one of the most talented healing witches known in recent times, her father was the first person to be born with a gift of technopathy, her older sister Mary is a highly in demand weather witch, her younger sister Blanche has a silver tongue (not literally, but she's quite good at convincing people they want to do things for her), and her younger brother Robert looks to be following her mother's footsteps. Larissa, on the other hand, didn't even realize she had a gift until she was 13 and she first realized she could tell when people were lying, and it took her until sometime in the middle of college to realize that she could also tell the future through tarot cards.
Most of her life has gone pretty normally. She attended school, was an average student, was on the Mathletes and after graduation went to her state college for a degree in Accounting. Her college experience was also fairly typical - she had a couple relationships, one she dumped and one that dumped her, she was in a few clubs, and after graduation she managed to get a good job with the help of her father and how many people he knows in the business world. She kept her abilities on the downlow as much as possible, but word got out here and there and one day about age 24 a policeman named Alec Robinson knocked on her door and asked for her help in solving a case. From then on she did side work occasionally for the police, just coming in to give reads on crime scenes or occasionally suspects to provide a secondary means of knowledge. It's a good second source of income and it helps her feel useful. The cases have all been mundane, including the one she just completed, which was an arson case that led to the arrest of some very dumb teenage boys. In short, nothing particularly exciting has ever really happened to Larissa.
Character PERSONALITY:
Larissa is, first and foremost, unconvinced of her own importance to the world. She is, in fact, pretty sure that she's not very important at all. Her family members are important, but in comparison to them she doesn't have a very useful gift and she knows precisely how useless she looks next to them (she knows, quite thoroughly, because people have a bad habit of trying to lie to her). This doesn't generally present much of a problem to her - she's quite content to go through life obscure, unnoticed, and uninteresting. This has been her general approach to life, because when from a very young age your older sister is exceptionally charismatic and already powerful and you don't even seem to have powers and are almost painfully shy, well. You tend to get slightly overlooked. Even after she outgrew most of her shyness she remained a very quiet, introverted person, easy to lose in a crowd or a family of charismatic people. While she's confident in her ability as an accountant and her value to her job, personally she feels like she's terribly unimportant as a whole.
This has only changed slightly within the past two years as she started working with the police. Her partnership with Detective Robinson has been one of respect and trust mutually given as they've worked together, and Larissa has been gathering more self confidence from it with each case closed. At the same time she's not very fond of either of her gifts and prefers not to use them. She's never even talked about her ability to tell lies, leaving that one completely unknown, because for someone who likes to be exceptionally fair to everyone and is a rather gentle soul Larissa carries something of a grudge for magic - and especially for her own. She's never going to be able to forget the disappointment in relatives' faces and voices when they were informed that Larissa didn't have any gifts, or the way 'yet' was always added in a falsely bright voice. It's importance to her family and lack of it in herself has left her feeling perpetually somewhat slighted by magic, even if her family did their best to never let it influence how they treated her. The problem tended to be outside of the immediate family, though her siblings had some things to say on it while they were all growing up, as children do - they weren't meant maliciously, but nevertheless the memory stuck.
She doesn't handle danger or threat well at all - she tends to panic under it and have almost no idea of what to do. The one time a case seemed like it might be a threat to her and Detective Robinson advised her to start carrying a gun she backed out of the case immediately and it took a great deal of convincing to get her back on it, but she never touched a gun. She's a pacifist by nature, dislikes violence and fighting of any kind and extremely conflict avoidant to the point of being conciliatory in a way that disadvantages her just to get away from a fight of any kind. She doesn't like raised voices, she doesn't like anger, she just wants everyone to get along and be nice. Her nerves, never particularly good, get very bad at the prospect of violence or physical danger in particular, or when she's confronted with something. She is also a truly terrible public speaker. Never ask her to speak publicly. While 'fearful' isn't always an accurate descriptor for her - when she's certain of herself and what she's saying she can speak up for herself and be very certain - but as soon as she's uncertain about anything she loses all of that certainty and becomes very self questioning and easy to push around and over. It's one of the reasons she's in accounting - math is one of the only things she's ever been absolutely constantly certain of. She knows for a fact she can do math in her sleep, so she chose as her profession the one thing she knew she would never feel self-conscious about.
She has a highly creative side, doing a fair amount of gourmet baking and painting in her spare time. This tends to come as a surprise to people who know her in her day to day life and it's something she keeps very private, as she does almost every aspect of her personal life. Larissa compartmentalizes highly, preferring to keep everything in its precise place. People from work don't cross over into her private life, she dislikes people in her private life coming into her work, and she's not a sharer of personal information. She keeps everything highly organized both physically and mentally, because it helps her orient herself in regards to the world and keep her confidence. If she knows where everything is, knows what's going on, it helps keep her confidence. But her creativity is important to her, as a means of expressing herself in a way that she finds very difficult to ever use words for, to release tension and calm herself down. It's also something that makes her feel uniquely herself, rather than just another cog in the machine - an unfortunate side effect of how terribly ordinary she feels most of the time in comparison to the people she's closest to and spends most of her time with.
Her family is, regardless of how she feels about their magic, extremely important to her. She still lives in the same city as her parents and frequently goes over for weekend dinners or to watch after their dog if they're travelling or just to visit their dog since she doesn't have any pets of her own. Her relationship with her father is closer than with her mother because they share the same intellectual bent, but she loves and respects both of her parents a great deal and is very fond of her siblings, though in practice she finds it hard to be around her entire family gathered for long periods of time because they're all very overwhelming and impressive people. If there is one thing she is absolutely loyal to and would stand for in the face of anything, it's her family. For anything else she would be highly likely to bend rather quickly, but when it comes to her family it's a different matter entirely. She manages to get courage for them that she's unable to get at any point for herself.
Larissa is a quiet, reserved person with a preference for control that she finds exceptionally difficult to maintain due to her general lack of self confidence and difficulty seeing herself as anything more than a small and terribly unimportant piece in a rather big machine.
» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: When asked to choose a weapon, she will choose one of her pens as the object she's most familiar with and as someone very opposed to violence. It's evolution will go in several stages. In the first stage, if she addresses a letter or note to a specific person, when written with the pen nobody will be able to read the note but her and the person it is specifically addressed to. In the second stage, in addition to that, if she transcribes what someone is saying or has said then the ink will change colors from black to red while she's transcribing any lie that they've said. In the third stage, the pen will evolve a second cartridge triggered by a separate button that sprays pepper spray into the eyes of an attacker. In stage four, very simple objects drawn with the pen become reality for a space of about 15 minutes before returning to paper (very, very simple - no bigger than 12 inches in any direction, needs to all be one material and one part - a small entirely metal knife, a key, a saw blade without a handle, etc). Each stage will take 1-3 months of training and several missions to achieve.
Character INVENTORY: 1 set of clothing - office clothes, suit skirt, shirt, jacket, shoes, hose, underthings, winter coat, hat & scarf. 1 briefcase, containing a fair amount of now useless papers for various accounting things she was working on, two black pilot G2 pens, a basic laptop with charger and earphones, small basic makeup kit, a Rider-Waite tarot card set, a wallet (cash, ID cards, etc), a pocket knife.
» SAMPLES
First PERSON:
[ Text, because it's so much easier to sound confident in text than in person over video. She really can't do public speaking. ]
Hi everyone. My name's Larissa. I know it's a lot to ask, but I was wondering if anyone could give me more information on what exactly they mean when they ask you to choose a weapon? They told me it was okay to choose something that wasn't actually dangerous but I was wondering if it would become dangerous? It's important for me to know. I know everyone seems really busy, there's no rush at all, but I'd really like to know if I can at all. Thank you.
Oh also how do you sign up to do supply runs? There are a few things I'm probably going to start needing soon I think.
Third PERSON:
The kitchen is something of a disaster, which she probably should have expected. The number seemed to change daily, but it the mean average was apparently hovering around 430 residents of this station. It was a lot to expect to keep anywhere clean with that many people, much less a kitchen. They always managed to get the brunt of everyone's messiness anyways, and here there seemed to be no accountability. For anything, really, if what everyone was saying sounded true. It wasn't really something she could weigh in on, the whole conversation. She was new and she didn't know anything and it's not like she was the politician. That was Blanche - Blanche and her silver tongue and her bright convincing smile now apparently over a thousand years away, before you even went into the part where she was on the moon. Astronauts on the moon was one thing, that wasn't a big deal, but people living on the moon -
She really didn't want to think about any of that. She really, really didn't want to think about any of that. So instead she was going to clean the kitchen because she needed something to do to take her mind off of everything and this place was a disaster, who could even stand to cook in this mess? Why did everyone feel like leaving their dishes behind them was reasonable?
Not that she could really say anything, because she'd watched at least three people put dishes in the washer and not do anything else and hadn't had the courage yet to speak up. It's not like it's her place, after all. She's still really new and she's just another person. But she can clean the kitchen, and then it will be nice for at least a little while and that will be good. Maybe by the time she finishes she'll even wake up. That would be good. She'd really like that. If she doesn't wake up she's going to have to admit that it might be real and she doesn't want to do that.
» ADDITIONAL NOTES
n/a