App for Fade Rift

[rathercommon]

PLAYER

Name: Hope
Age: Old 9
Contact: asyndeton @ plurk
Other Characters: None
Interests: What sort of RP are you hoping for in Fade Rift? Are there particular aspects of the world you're hoping to dig into? Types of plots or threads you're excited about? Do you love action scenes? Political intrigue? Rescuing lost animals? This doesn't have to be long or complex and there is no right answer-it's to help us make sure our plots stay in line with people's interests.

CHARACTER

Name: Kathleen "Kitty" Jones
Canon/OC: Canon
Canon Point: From the end of the second book, The Golem's Eye, after all her friends are dead.
Journal:
Age: 16

Canon World

The world of the Bartimaeus series is one in which magic has shaped human history. Essentially, there is a parallel dimension of living, sentient magic that's referred to as the Other Place. Some seven thousand years ago, the first humans found a way to draw out the magic of the Other Place and force it into a shape that resembles life as we know it: these early magicians summoned a portion of this boundless magic and forced a name upon it, and through this process individualized it and made this magic into a spirit.

Spirits, also known by super-judgey people as "demons," are the means by which humans do magic. The first summoners only summoned spirits to converse with them and learn about them, but, well, people are people, and so it wasn't long before people developed ways to enslave the spirits. Soon after, they started waging war using these slaves: all the great empires (Mesopotamia, Persia, Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire) were built by enslaving and sacrificing spirits, forcing them to fight one another and die for a cause they had no connection to.

The book series is set in the early 2000s, in London, at the height of the British Empire. The London of the books quite resembles our own, though with certain crucial differences: their technology works by magic, rather than science; that technology runs approximately fifty years behind our own; and the country is run by a repressive, totalitarian oligarchy.

The population is essentially split into two classes of people: magicians and commoners. Magicians are fewer in number, but control everything. They hold all positions in government, from Prime Minister down to the junior-sub-under-secretary-for-whatever; they own most businesses, run all trade, occupy all university positions. They are not, generally, encouraged to marry or have children, with those who choose to do so significantly hurting their career prospects. Instead, they're expected to take on apprentices - commoner children whose parents sold them into indenture, who are taken into the magicians' homes and taught to be paranoid and hateful and fearful from day one. It's a vicious cycle: none of these kids have any chance, and then when they come of age they end up running the country and taking apprentices of their own and perpetuate the cycle of paranoia and ambition and abuse.

Commoners, meanwhile, are kept deliberately ignorant. Only a few of them are taught to read, the ones who are intended for the secretarial pools and bookkeeping jobs. They're cut off from education at age 15, fed propaganda, and watched constantly through magical surveillance. They hate the magicians and fear them, and some few of them agitate for revolution but don't have the means to make it happen… yet.

History

" Kitty was born to a commoner - i.e., non-magical - family. Her parents were obedient to the established order, and tried to raise her to be similarly obedient. They, uh, failed.
" When she was thirteen, she was out playing cricket with a friend of hers in a park that commoners weren't supposed to enter. She hit the ball far enough that it went outside the bounds of the park and smashed the windshield of the car of a prominent magician. The magician, in revenge, cast a vicious spell upon her friend Jakob and herself.
" Jakob was permanently disfigured because of the spell. Kitty, on the other hand, survived unscathed - because it turned out she was someone who had resilience, an ability to withstand the effects of magic. Resilience naturally occurred in populations that were exposed to magical energy; however, because magic hadn't been around so very long in Britain, it was only starting to pop up in the very youngest generations.
" She brought a lawsuit against the magician for having hurt her and her friend. Unsurprisingly, they found in the magician's favor, and slapped her with all his court fees. The amount of these fees were enough that her parents would at the very least lose their house - if not go to debtors' prison.
" The fees, however, were paid by a man named Mr Pennyfeather, a leader of the anti-magician Resistance. Kitty, out of gratitude, joined the Resistance and became a key member.
" The Resistance was a ragtag band of misfits - like, really ragtag. And overall, really bad at Resisting. Basically, their strategy was to rob houses and collect magical artifacts, occasionally using those artifacts to bomb buildings. Mostly, it was just about collecting material things.
" When Kitty was sixteen, the Resistance got word of the biggest potential score yet: they would rob the tomb of the former Prime Minister William Gladstone, who had founded the current magical empire. If they pulled off this daring heist, it would propel the Resistance to new wealth and power.
" Surprise! DOUBLE-CROSS.
" Kitty and her friends had been sent in to get the artifacts out of Gladstone's tomb because they had Resilience and could possibly survive the demon guarding the tomb. The key word being possibly. In the end, everyone died except for Kitty; she escaped with the Staff of Gladstone, an absurdly powerful magical weapon.
" Aaand because she had it, the government came after her, with all the prominent magicians jostling to get at her and claim the staff. In the end, she was captured by the magician John Mandrake. However, one of the other magicians ambushed them and sent a golem after them, a terrible creature of magic; Kitty had the chance to get away clean, but instead she risked her life to save Mandrake's. Fortunately, Bartimaeus, a demon, was impressed enough by her courage that he faked her death and helped her flee.


Personality

Kitty is a lot of things, and most of them very good things. She's incredibly intelligent, emotionally perceptive, brave and compassionate; she's curious and skeptical; she's fierce and determined. Unfortunately, these are qualities you're not really supposed to have when you're the oppressed underclass in a fantasy dystopia. Consequently, all her life, the people around her have tried to drive these qualities out of her: teachers, her parents, the courts - even the Resistance that was supposed to be her emotional and spiritual liberation - have tried to silence her and subdue her, have tried to turn her into someone who conformed and obeyed. So as a result, Kitty at this age is a young woman who's angry, who's uncertain of herself and her place in the world, who knows what's wrong but doesn't yet understand what's right.

She's starting to take steps towards remedying this. Recent events have made her more able to define herself. Her courage and compassion have been tested enough that she knows that she's capable of standing up to power, that she'll risk her life for her friends, and most importantly that she'll risk her life for her enemies, too. So she's starting to take steps to be proactive and really define herself in relation to her world, instead of just reacting to her circumstances with blind anger. However, she's still pretty shaky on her feet.

She has her fair share of bad qualities, too, of course. Kitty is very arrogant: when she decides something is right, she'll try to trample anyone who disagrees with her. She's kind of an asshole, too: she'll lay down her life to save her friends, sure, but she's also the sort of person to just ghost somebody because the fact that they were depressed made her uncomfortable. She's pretty ignorant about a lot of things, although that one is more the fault of her society than her own fault, since she was just straight-up undereducated. And she's incredibly judgmental. And she's pretty short-tempered and quick to violence.

Still, all that is counterbalanced by her single best quality: she always tries to get better. She's constantly evolving, and generally for the better. When she becomes aware of her faults, she works to address them. She's always on the path to becoming a better person.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths
" Remarkably high magical resistance. In her canon, she's able to withstand very powerful magical attacks. She's not completely immune - a particularly powerful attack knocks her out for a few hours. And she can be hurt by any natural effects from a magical attack: for example, she can't be killed by a magical fireball, but if that fireball starts a real fire, then she can be burned.
" Craftiness. She's led a double life as a decent citizen by day, rebel by night for about three years now. She knows how to pick locks and climb walls and disarm magical traps. She's also an accomplished liar - helped along by the fact that she is a kid, and no one suspects a kid.
" Moderate fighting ability, especially in urban terrain. She can't hold her own against the average soldier or warrior, but she has proficiency with knives and silver throwing discs, and she can strategically use the city landscape to help her. Not good enough to take people down, but good enough to hold them off long enough to escape.
" Intellect and creative thinking. Research skills. Girl literally changes the world with little more than a library card.
" Charisma. She's not really a born leader, but she's stubborn and charming and good at convincing people of things.
" Boundless optimism.

Weaknesses
" Definitely a kid. She has a lot of room to grow.
" Fairly ignorant about anything beyond her personal experience.
" Super reckless. She'll charge in without a plan even when she knows it's a trap.
" Unremarkable physical endurance. She can be killed as easily as the next person with a knife or a gun.
" Short-sightedness. She fixates on the problems she's familiar with and neglects the ones that other people are suffering.

Suggested Nerfs

I'd definitely like Kitty to hold onto her resilience to magic! Since it's just a defensive weapon, not anything offensive, and since resistance to magic is part of the fabric of the Dragon Age universe, it seems like it could integrate without too many problems.

Arrival Inventory

Kitty will be arriving from a dream of being a secretary in a secretarial hell-scape. That means that she'll be arriving dressed (uncharacteristically) in a skirt-suit with painful high heels. She'll also be arriving with a mountain of office supplies, including typewriters, fancy fountain pens, about two dozen cups of coffee, and perhaps a thousand post-it notes. She'll also be pursued by about three chattering demonic ghouls in business suits which will need to be defeated.

'Human'ization

N/A!

Fit

First off, on a personal level, I'm really interested to see how Kitty will develop as a result of being exposed to the mages' struggle for independence. Where she's from, the dynamics of power are completely reversed, with magicians dominating over those without magic. So being present in this world will force her to do a lot of growing up: her instinct will be to applaud the way that mages are restrained, but eventually seeing the abuses in the system will lead her to question what's right and what's wrong.

Additionally, I'm interested in playing Kitty as a rifter because it means that she'll see everything as an outsider…which means that all the ingrained power structures will strike her as strange, and she'll challenge and question everything she sees. It'll be a fun way to engage with the game world.

Finally, Kitty is also active and outgoing and curious; she'll be interesting here because of how thoroughly she'll dig into the plot and explore the world.

SAMPLES

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