selfish war machine
“It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.” |
P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Your Name: ariel
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
witchbabybat
Current characters in TLC: NA
TICKY BOXES
Are you over the age of eighteen? ✔
Are you aware that the mods will use dicerolls to determine the outcome of certain actions and comfortable with the fact that while your character cannot die without your express permission, they may get into some serious trouble? ✔
Are you ready to rumble? ✔
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Character Name: Uri Shalit; Lee Rosenberg; "Wolfgang Einhorn"
Username:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kashaph
Fandom, Fandom AU, or OC: World of Darkness (Mage: the Ascension) original character
Played By: Andreja Pejic
Physical Description: Wolfgang is a tall young human bean who is objectively attractive (her PB is a supermodel, come on) but also kind of sickly and weird-looking. The first thing people tend to notice about her is how tall she is, actually — she clocks in at 6' 4", meaning she tends to tower over everyone else in a room. She is obviously visibly uncomfortable with this: she tends to slouch, hunches her shoulders, lowers her head, and stares at the floor, as if trying to make herself smaller. She will often attempt to hide behind other people. Accustomed as she is to being stared at — she's been stared at her whole life no matter what she does with herself — at some point in her adolescence Wolfgang decided that if people were going to stare at her she was going to do as much as she could to control what they saw. Her appearance is important to her, particularly the parts of it that she can control, namely hair and clothes. Her hair is an integral part of her gender identity, and she becomes uncomfortable and panicked if it's threatened. Her clothes are important to her in that they directly affect her level of confidence. She likes to be well-dressed and her style skews strongly towards weird because the more people are looking at her clothes, the less they're looking at her face. She'd rather be known as "that one person who keeps wearing the weirdest-looking shoes I've ever seen" than something insulting and offensive about her gender. Also, when Wolfgang looks put together, she feels put together. It's a visible sign that she's Totally Not Sick, Guys, Totally Fine, but her illness often impedes her ability to physically care for herself and if she realises her standards are slipping she will actually refuse to be seen by other people, petrified of being judged for it.
She has blonde hair, blue-green eyes, and is fair-skinned though she tends to tan before she burns. She is white and ethnically Jewish by way of Germany and Poland. She has two distinctive moles on the left side of her mouth. Sartorially what is notable about her is her comfort with mens- and womenswear, and that she seldom wears anything black if she has the choice. She typically wears perfume, even if it's only a few drops of orange blossom or sandalwood oil. She has various scars over her body that are small, old, and not particularly distinctive, the marks of an active childhood and adolescence.
Wolfgang is DMAB transgender, nonbinary femme-identified, she/her or they/them pronouns.
History: CW: violence directed at children, suicide
Uri Shalit was born June 16th, 1992, in Tel Aviv, Israel, the oldest son of middle-class parents Yaniv and Elizavet Shalit, who would later go on to have three daughters. What separated Uri from every other child born is that Uri was born Awakened, aware of the existence of magic and in touch with her Avatar, the magical force attached to her soul that guided and taught her. In the cradle, she was playing with supernatural forces, often using them for selfish reasons instinctively; her parents thought she was a strangely well-behaved baby and they were just awesome parents who happened to always be around when she needed something. She never got sick. She was walking, talking, and reading before all her peers. She never cried or got bored, and she had an active, vivid imagination, making up all kinds of strange stories. As she got older, she used magic to get into adventures and mischief, not all of which were entirely light-hearted; child mages tend to die gruesome deaths very early, and the fact that Uri survived her childhood with her mind and body mostly intact is testimony to her quick wits and magical muscle.
The downside to this is that everyone was aware that there was something unsettlingly off about Uri. Her own parents sometimes found it hard to look at her for very long and were apt to ignore her as she got older, unaware that they were even doing so. When Uri started school, her peers resoundingly rejected her, sensing that she was different and strange. Uri grew up very lonely as a result, and by the time she had learned to use her magic to travel to different places, she thought she'd found the solution to that loneliness. She'd use her magic to drop into the Umbra, making friends with fantastical creatures and spirits, and later used it to travel to other places on Earth, answering the calls of other lonely children, some of whom she befriended.
Uri was twelve when she noticed that things were changing. Uri's few friends, scattered across the globe, were growing up and moving on, leaving her behind. Uri was starting to notice things about the world around her that she hadn't before, awful things: unfairness, discrimination, war, racism, the abuse of power by authority figures, and the daily violence of the mundane world, which was increasingly coming to appear to Uri as a dark and terrible place. She realised she was alone in the world, in danger from forces older and more powerful than herself, and that she was too different from everyone else. She had held on for as long as she could, but her childhood was finally starting to end. At twelve, her Avatar, tired of having the joy and imagination beaten out of it by a cold and unfeeling world, chose to go back to Sleep. Uri forgot magic; she forgot everything. She became a normal child.
She went on to go to high school, where she finally made some real friends, getting into the usual amounts of trouble as she hung out with a mostly alternative, largely LGBTQ-affiliated group of kids. Her parents were so thrilled she was finally making friends and going out that they didn't even care when she'd get in trouble at school or get caught shoplifting downtown as long as she was socialising and happy. If she was still quiet and seemed withdrawn and sad, as if she were desperately missing something she couldn't remember, everyone attributed that to normal teenage moodiness. She did well in school, was reasonably well-liked, and graduated high school with honours. When she turned eighteen and realised she had to enlist in the armed forces, Uri panicked. She didn't want to serve, she strongly objected to the occupation and was petrified at the thought of having to hurt or kill another living person. She was unable to get a deferment although she tried very hard, including making herself sick, and there was enormous pressure from every area of her life to just go into service; it's very difficult to get a good job in Israel without IDF service, her family were pressuring her to not "throw her life away," and draft-dodging can lead to arrest and possible jail time. With great reluctance, against her own judgement, Uri went.
She lasted about a year, and then panicked and fled in the middle of the night.
A deserter from the army, Uri fled north, through Lebanon and then central Asia and southeast Europe, spending a lot of time in Turkey. To this day she is not able to articulate exactly why she had to leave just then, nothing especially terrible or traumatic had happened to her, she just woke up one night and realised she couldn't do it anymore, that she was a hypocrite and a tool of a system that she hated. By the time she'd realised what she had done it was too late to go back without drastic consequences. She adopted a series of pseudonyms — the most frequent and recent being Wolfgang Einhorn, passing herself off as German in places where nobody spoke German or knew what a German accent sounded like — scraped by hand-to-mouth, doing whatever work she could get, though it was hard for her to support herself in foreign countries where she often did not speak the language, and she spent a lot of time homeless, sleeping on park benches, digging out of trash. On the few occasions she found herself getting back on her feet, she would suddenly be blindsided by strange and frightening hallucinations and delusions — the stress of her situation had triggered the manifestation of her latent schizophrenia at the same time as her Avatar was trying to reAwaken, causing a confusing mess of symptoms that made her occasionally unable to function. Panicked, terrified that she was losing her mind, she self-medicated with whatever she could get her hands on. Plagued by recurring hyperrealistic nightmares about her own past lives and their violent, gruesome ends, she grew more and more sick as she tried to avoid sleeping, avoid socialising, avoid anything that would draw attention to herself.
A psychotic break landed her in hospital in Turkey — she doesn't remember much of what happened, but was later told that she freaked out in her hotel room and attempted to jump from the roof, where she was talked down by a police officer, then admitted to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital when it was determined she was a) a danger to herself, and b) not lucid. She was twenty years old, and it was the worst three weeks of her life. When they let her out, she at least had a better understanding of what was wrong with her and how she could help it. Unfortunately it meant she kept dismissing the signs of her reAwakening Avatar as schizophrenic hallucinations, and the prescription medication she was overusing blunted her Avatar even further. She's currently caught in between these two states, unaware of her burgeoning power, thinking she's just sick.
Powers: Wolfgang is a mage, a human with the ability to utilise magic. She is not, at this time, aware that she has any special ability, and I would like to keep it that way for a while. I'd like for her to slowly reconnect with her power over the course of the game, ideally by completing quests but I can also do them as a sort of vision quest type scenario as narratives.
All mages from Wolfgang's canon have the ability to use their will to fundamentally alter reality around them. In the precepts of her canon, the world is governed by a set of rules created out of consensual reality, or the generally-agreed upon way that the world reacts as imagined by all the people who live in it and perceive it. Mages are able to violate this consensual reality, which they see not as hard-and-fast rules but as a set of guidelines or suggestions, casting feats using their willpower as channeled through spheres with the aid of a focus. That's a lot of random technical jargon, so let's define all of those things.
SPHERES. Magical effects in the World of Darkness are separated into nine spheres of influence, which are correspondence, entropy, forces, life, matter, mind, prime, spirit, and time. Using these spheres alone or in combination with each other, mages can create any kind of effect imaginable. The ones that are relevant to Wolfgang because she can use them are:
If that sounds like a lot of power, it's because it is; mages Wolfgang's age generally don't have that much backing them, as the Avatar tends to Awaken in young adulthood. Wolfgang, on the other hand, was actively using and learning magic for twelve years. Wolfgang's reAwakening gave them access to some of, but not all of, the spheres she'd learned when she was a child — resulting in her suddenly having a lot of power very fast with very little memory of what to do with it or how to keep it from getting out of hand. Although Wolfgang has a large reservoir of raw power, this is tempered by her weaknesses: poor control, unpredictability, and warped perception. (More on this below.)
FOCUS. A mage's focus is the thing they use to actually physically cast whatever feat they are attempting. A focus can be anything that gets the job done and is often improvised in situations that demand immediate responses. However, they usually have a paradigm they turn to — it could be traditional witchcraft tools, or computer programming, or prayer, whatever, it's usually rather consistent. Wolfgang's are dreams and imagination — she does her best work when she's asleep, and when she's awake, she casts feats with the aid of admittedly childish games and tools such as string-games, jacks, pogs, coins, Legos, tinker-toys, etc. Wolfgang has recently learned how to use traditional Jewish magic as the foci for spells, but without an instructional guide she's kind of improvising a lot of it now. The symbolism attached to a gesture is what gives a focus its power, but lower-levels spells can often be done without the aid of a focus. You need a focus to set a table on fire, but not to light a cigarette. A focus does not have to be physical or flashy, but physical symbolic action is the easiest way to do it, as it's something people have an easier time wrapping their heads around: "I do this thing, and that makes this other thing happen."
AVATAR. The Avatar is the personification of Wolfgang's power, a separate entity that is permanently attached to her. The Avatar has their own consciousness and personality, but can only be seen and heard by Wolfgang. (Maybe other mages, and there has been at least one instance where another mage has gone into her head and been able to speak to the Avatar, but they're not gonna just pop out of nowhere and go interacting with other PCs. On the other hand, Wolfgang is always aware of their presence, and will often converse with them in public, not aware or forgetting that other people can't see or hear them.) The Avatar's visual/physical manifestation is influenced by the mage; in Wolfgang's case, they take the form of a genderless child somewhere between six to twelve years old who is nearly transparent, like a ghost, or as a lion/ess with a blind eye. The Avatar is ornery, mistrustful of adults, hostile towards strangers, aggressive, and short-tempered. They could easily be described as bratty. The Avatar's purpose is to guide and teach, and while they cannot control their mage, they can certainly influence them. The Avatar's primary motivation is keeping Wolfgang safe. They will encourage her to flee from dangerous situations and if backed into a corner will influence her to kill to survive. The only time the Avatar encourages her to be proactive is when the safety of children is at stake: in that case, the Avatar will advocate doing anything to ensure the children survive, even if they have to kill every adult in the room, even if it puts Wolfgang in direct danger. The Avatar cannot be separated from Wolfgang without her going completely mad and dying.
Wolfgang's mental illness has warped her Avatar. Usually she is fine, but when she's in quiet — a state where the Avatar has warped beyond any rationality — she ceases to see the world the same way other people do, and her perception will begin to influence reality around her. Wolfgang goes into quiet when she has a break from reality, which is usually prompted by extreme mental and emotional stress, but can also be caused by drugs or suddenly going off her meds. Most mages go into quiet once or twice in their lives, but a mage who does so very frequently or who is permanently in quiet is called a Marauder, and they're hated and feared by other mages due to the stereotype of them as being especially violent or dangerous. Due to the severity of her illness, Wolfgang is technically a Marauder.
PARADOX. Paradox is the supernatural force that occurs when the effects of a particular feat are at odds with the force of the disbelief of any witnessing party — which is to say, if you hurl a giant fireball into the street and someone sees it who doesn't know about magic, paradox is the magical backlash that comes from their rejection of that fireball being possible. Paradox happens when any kind of magical feat cannot be explained within the rules of consensual reality, making two types of magic: coincidental (things that can be explained in a mundane way) and vulgar (things that cannot). Vulgar magic causes paradox, coincidental magic does not, thus mages strive to make as many of their feats coincidental as possible. The concept of paradox kind of flies out the window in panfandom game settings, where the existence of supernatural powers and magic is common knowledge, however in the interests of helping limit this character's abilities (because without paradox, she is massively overpowered), I'm gonna go ahead and say paradox is still a thing: in the event she casts magic that would be considered vulgar, regardless of whether any witnessing non-mage parties are aware of the existence of magic, she will accrue paradox. Paradox does not typically affect Wolfgang personally since she's a Marauder, but it does affect people and things around her, and there's a distinct risk of her accruing too much paradox and being temporarily ejected into a pocket paradox dimension. Paradox effects range from spells not working or backfiring to mild to severe pain or even death, it depends on the severity of the spell and how much paradox the mage has already acquired.
OTHER LIMITATIONS. I do a dice roll whenever I have Wolfgang do a magic feat. I roll a d20, and if it's a 10 or below, the spell has some kind of weird effect applied to it; if I roll a three or below, it doesn't work at all. (Of course, making a spell have a weird side effect or not work without a roll is also up to my and the mods' discretion, but a die roll to succeed is always required.)
The nature of Wolfgang's magic requires some set-up for most big effects. This makes it not particularly suited for combat unless she specifically comes prepared.
ECHOES & WEIRDNESS. Although Wolfgang is not an amateur or a baby mage, she is entirely self-taught and self-trained, which combined with her illness means that her degree of control over her magic is... not good. The warped nature of her Avatar exacerbates this. In fact one of the flaws on her character sheet is Weirdness, which causes her spells to have weird or unsettling effects — spells will often go off without her conscious control (for instance, she might suddenly hear people's thoughts without meaning to, or she may accidentally break locks) or have odd side-effects attached to them, or just not work the way she planned them to.
Echoes is another flaw on her character sheet. Echoes are effects on the world around them that are outside the mage's control. They take many forms, but in Wolfgang, these are primarily 1. her presence is repulsive to animals, with the exception of cats, goats, and crows, who adore her to an unsettling and life-hampering degree; 2. she can't pass raw milk without it curdling; and 3. she sees ghosts all the time, not just when a spell is in effect.
EXPIRATION DATE. The Avatar reincarnates. It's a conglomeration of all the past lives, influenced by and made up by them, yet separate at the same time. Wolfgang has been many people before and will go on to be many more people, and in her case, all of those people have something in common: they all die young. Very young, in fact, the average age at death has been twelve. The oldest any of her past lives has ever been is twenty-four; Wolfgang is twenty-one. She knows her time is running out and is aware that it's likely she's going to die at any moment between now and then. This is just destiny, it's not something she can control, and she also has no way to predict when or how it will happen, though she suspects that, like all her past lives before her, her death will be violent murder.
Talents/Abilities: Wolfgang has professional military training, in a potentially dangerous situation she keeps a cool head and knows how to behave to minimise risk mostly by having had it drilled in her head. She's a good shot and has some basic EOD training. She can skateboard and play the guitar. Useful!
Personality: Wolfgang is a shy, quiet person with a dreamy, head-in-the-clouds nature that makes her appear to be not quite all there. She's very intelligent, but a little vague, and she is cripplingly shy. She has trouble making eye contact with anyone and talking to strangers is like torture for her. She will if she has to, but strangers tend to notice how she stumbles over her words, mumbles, and fidgets anxiously. Wolfgang is highly impulsive; she's learned that if she thinks things through too much she just talks herself into inaction, so she ought to just do things. This seldom goes as well as she'd like, yet she persists.
Politically she is anti-authority to the point of leaning towards anarchism; she hates cops, soldiers, and politicians, and will frequently align herself with the kind of political radicals who throw molotov cocktails through Starbucks windows. This is at odds with her shy, conflict-averse personal life, but Wolfgang finds it easy to act and very difficult to feel. She has trouble processing and acknowledging her emotions, which she mostly views as inconvenient and embarrassing.
Her fear of social conflict makes her passive-aggressive. She wants everyone to like her all the time and is also very sensitive and has her feelings hurt very easily, so she will act one way with someone and another way with someone else in the hopes of making them both happy, but this is emotionally taxing. One annoying quirk of hers is her propensity to constantly apologise, even for things that are not her fault and that she has no control over.
She also has absolutely zero common sense and tends to miss the obvious solution in favour of the elaborate or unlikely, which has frequently landed her in trouble, if not just embarrassed her. She's oblivious to a lot of common social cues and usually needs things spelled out for her. She can be quite charming if you've got any patience for socially maladjusted weirdo hermits, and there's an endearing quality to her vagueness that often compels people to want to protect her. This is frustrating to her; people see her as a delicate flower who needs protecting, but in reality she's a survivor through and through. Survival for her means lying, concealing, hiding — that makes it difficult for her to open up with people.
Wolfgang has schizophrenia, a mental illness characterised by hallucinations and delusions, amongst other symptoms. This affects every single aspect of what she does, as most of her life is taken up by managing her illness. What complicates Wolfgang's relationship with her illness is that in addition to occasionally hallucinating things that don't line up with conventional reality, she is also actually able to alter reality via magic, and frequently does so in order to match her warped perception. Separating her illness from her magic is difficult to impossible and she can't always or often trust her own perception. Considering she's about to be thrown into an environment where it will be even harder to tell her delusions from reality — in the real world, if you say "I quit my job because my boss is a reptilian," people go "wow, so that's kind of crazy," but in a panfandom game, people are likely to take that at face value — it is especially crucial that she surround herself with people she can trust completely.
Summary:
+ Clever, compassionate, intelligent, inventive, adaptable, resilient, helpful, proactive, people pleaser, resourceful
- Sensitive, anxious, shy, lacks common sense, poor impulse control, passive-aggressive, conflict-avoidant, gullible, profoundly mentally ill
SETTING SPECIFIC INFORMATION
Estate and descriptors: Tenderness (compassion, empathy, vulnerability)
Reason for this Estate: Wolfgang is preoccupied with social justice through a lens of compassionate empathy, meaning said preoccupation comes from a place of soft-hearted sensitivity. She's less concerned about Justice for Justice's sake than she is about caring for other people; it's not about fairness or what's objectively right, it's about seeing people free from pain and suffering, the freedom to pursue happiness and their best selves. Tenderness has a slight degree of protectiveness to it that's slightly detached, the feeling of a parent with a newborn child, or holding a baby rabbit in your palm, or the joyous freedom that comes from loving where you are but knowing you have to leave.
Her compassion for others is easily her best trait; it fuels her most selfless actions and motivates her to do the best work she can do. But it's that compassion and empathy for others that makes her vulnerable; she's easy to hurt, emotionally, psychically, and physically, and that hurting is a fundamental aspect of what drives her, is in fact a necessary component of empathy. Tenderness is fragile; it's easier to squash a pound of meat than a pound of stone. A soft and gentle love for people and things isn't weakness, it takes an incredible amount of courage to have thin skin, to rip open your chest and offer it to the world openly.
Imperator and Code: Cipactli, Dark. She will be bewildered by this news because it is at a glance completely at odds with her Estate. Her avatar, on the other hand, can definitely get behind the idea that all humans should destroy themselves individually — all adult humans, that is. THAT SAID, Cipactli's personal code is something Wolfgang can get behind, all of that seize the day, be greedy for experience and such. Wolfgang has a zest for life that is unmatched by most, an inherent wanderlust sparked by her first journey away from home with nothing on her back but her clothes. Her sense of adventure and curiosity about the world around her are both powerful motivating factors for her. Appetite? Desire? Hunger? All shades of the same idea, and one that Wolfgang feels very strongly, the one that motivates their restless wanderlust, their thirst for knowledge, and their strong commitment to justice.
For Wolfgang, the idea of humanity destroying itself is less literally "everyone should die" than it is about deconstruction and revolution, a constant state of change, the same way their avatar is in constant flux and their essence is dynamic. At heart, Wolfgang is a revolutionary, so far towards the left of the spectrum that she tends to scare people with her politics, and for her the Dark can be interpreted as seeing every person achieve their best potential. Destruction is the flip side to creation, the thing that makes creation necessary and possible to begin with, and one of Wolfgang's most developed spheres is all about the destruction and decay of all things in reality, Entropy. At the same time there will be massive resistance from her over the idea that people should go to war or destroy the environment, for example. It's just that she doesn't view entropy as an inherently evil force.
There are aspects of Dark that she strongly agrees with and aspects she strongly disagrees with with very little room in between which is what I find interesting, those polar opposites, just like I find it interesting that someone whose Estate is defined by their empathy towards others being bound to a Code that encourages self-destruction in individuals. Wolfgang will likely try to sidle around the less savoury aspects of Dark and turn what looks to most people to be an incredibly negative, even evil thing into a powerful vehicle for change, good or bad.
The Wild is more fitting for Wolfgang's personal outlook on life, but the Dark is more interesting, imo.
Reason for playing: Wolfgang is a favourite OC of mine because she falls under one of my favourite tropes, which is the reluctant/cowardly hero(ine). There's also a lot there that I enjoy writing; themes of mental illness as depicted by a character who is generally positive and good-natured, for instance, as well as gender identity and faith. You don't get to see a lot of trans warriors, or Jewish magicians, or psychotic heroes. She's easy to write and easy to come up with CR for. Also, she is a cutie patoot.
S A M P L E S
Please pick two or three of the following:
- In character, please write out a scene where a magical genie appears and offers your character whatever they want most in the world. What are they searching for? Can they clearly articulate what they want?
* "You have one wish."
Wolfgang blinks several times in rapid succession, her face slowly pulling into a look of confused uncertainty. Her hand automatically goes to her hair, which she begins to tug anxiously. "Erm," she says. "A Coke, please."
The genie, floating stately in the air with his arms folded across his chest, every inch the imposing supernatural wonder that he is, frowns deeply. "I beg your pardon?" he asks.
"Uh. Wait. No, not that. I mean, would it be a poison Coke?"
"I'm sure I've no idea what you mean."
"You know, like the monkey's paw thing." Wolfgang is starting to sweat. It feels really hot here suddenly. "You wish for a thing and you get it but it is all wrong. I could wish for world peace and you'd make it all Brave New World, yeah? I could wish for a house and you'd kill my uncle or something."
"That's... that's not quite how it works —"
"Or I wish for the end of child abuse and you disappear all the children! Or I wish for unlimited money and I turn into some kind of tyrannical despot, or —"
The genie brings his hand to his face, gently massaging his temples. "Well, you've got to wish for something. I don't get to go back in the lamp until you do, and I'm really not thrilled to be stuck on the clock, here."
"Oh, jeez. Uh... gosh. Uh, well, uh, hm." Wolfgang starts to pace violently, wringing her hands. There are a lot of things she'd wish for, notably to undo what she just did, but she can think of a million ways each of them could go wrong, and once she thinks of it she can't let go of the thought. They come too quickly. There's a voice in her head telling her to wish for a weather balloon. What the hell is that all about? "What if I wish to have no wishes?"
"Then you'd be wasting a wish, but if that's really what you want, then fine, whatever." The genie holds up a hand, cutting her off from responding. "It is done!" In a flash of smoke and shadow, he disappears once again into the lamp.
Wolfgang puts her hands on her hips and squints across the empty desert, wiping the sweat off her cheek with one hunched shoulder. It's at least another thirty miles to Beirut. "I probably should have wished for a car."
- Reviewing apps can be a miserable task. Please tell us a joke that your character has made while trapped in a gloomy or hopeless situation.
* "Dogs can't look up."
It's been stuck in her head for days. In fact, it's the only thing she can say, the only thing she can think. Her thoughts keep returning to it over and over like some demented carousel. She hears it echo in her head in her own voice, over and over, dogs can't look up, dogs can't look up, dogs can't look up.
She's pretty sure that's not true. It's one of those random facts someone tells you to look smart. Or that you find on the internet somewhere. Dogs can't look up.
"Dogs can't look up," she tells the resident, voice pained. He doesn't speak any English, so she hopes he thinks she's speaking nonsense. Being psychotic is preferable to how embarrassing it is that she can't let go of this phrase. It's Ankara, it's June, they keep changing the residents, there's some kind of drama going on with HR but Wolfgang doesn't speak Turkish well enough to understand. Doesn't matter. Crazy is crazy in any language.
"Dogs can't look up," she repeats, and every time that phrase comes out it saps a little more of her energy. She wants to say something else, but every word feels wrong, like rubbing your shin against carpet. She finds herself curling up on the couch in the doctor's office, the one who speaks enough English for them to muddle through a conversation well enough, pulling an itchy throw around herself. She moans and tosses and turns, the phrase circling her mind, not letting go. "I know that isn't true. Don't judge me."
At some point indulging it is only enabling. She's got to try to turn her face away instead. I'm not crazy. I'm not stupid. I'm not crazy.
"Three physicists are in a boat," Wolfgang says, grinding her teeth. "They've got no matches and four cigarettes. So one of them throws one overboard and suddenly the whole boat becomes a cigarette lighter."
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Your Name: ariel
Contact:
Current characters in TLC: NA
TICKY BOXES
Are you over the age of eighteen? ✔
Are you aware that the mods will use dicerolls to determine the outcome of certain actions and comfortable with the fact that while your character cannot die without your express permission, they may get into some serious trouble? ✔
Are you ready to rumble? ✔
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Character Name: Uri Shalit; Lee Rosenberg; "Wolfgang Einhorn"
Username:
kashaphFandom, Fandom AU, or OC: World of Darkness (Mage: the Ascension) original character
Played By: Andreja Pejic
Physical Description: Wolfgang is a tall young human bean who is objectively attractive (her PB is a supermodel, come on) but also kind of sickly and weird-looking. The first thing people tend to notice about her is how tall she is, actually — she clocks in at 6' 4", meaning she tends to tower over everyone else in a room. She is obviously visibly uncomfortable with this: she tends to slouch, hunches her shoulders, lowers her head, and stares at the floor, as if trying to make herself smaller. She will often attempt to hide behind other people. Accustomed as she is to being stared at — she's been stared at her whole life no matter what she does with herself — at some point in her adolescence Wolfgang decided that if people were going to stare at her she was going to do as much as she could to control what they saw. Her appearance is important to her, particularly the parts of it that she can control, namely hair and clothes. Her hair is an integral part of her gender identity, and she becomes uncomfortable and panicked if it's threatened. Her clothes are important to her in that they directly affect her level of confidence. She likes to be well-dressed and her style skews strongly towards weird because the more people are looking at her clothes, the less they're looking at her face. She'd rather be known as "that one person who keeps wearing the weirdest-looking shoes I've ever seen" than something insulting and offensive about her gender. Also, when Wolfgang looks put together, she feels put together. It's a visible sign that she's Totally Not Sick, Guys, Totally Fine, but her illness often impedes her ability to physically care for herself and if she realises her standards are slipping she will actually refuse to be seen by other people, petrified of being judged for it.
She has blonde hair, blue-green eyes, and is fair-skinned though she tends to tan before she burns. She is white and ethnically Jewish by way of Germany and Poland. She has two distinctive moles on the left side of her mouth. Sartorially what is notable about her is her comfort with mens- and womenswear, and that she seldom wears anything black if she has the choice. She typically wears perfume, even if it's only a few drops of orange blossom or sandalwood oil. She has various scars over her body that are small, old, and not particularly distinctive, the marks of an active childhood and adolescence.
Wolfgang is DMAB transgender, nonbinary femme-identified, she/her or they/them pronouns.
History: CW: violence directed at children, suicide
Uri Shalit was born June 16th, 1992, in Tel Aviv, Israel, the oldest son of middle-class parents Yaniv and Elizavet Shalit, who would later go on to have three daughters. What separated Uri from every other child born is that Uri was born Awakened, aware of the existence of magic and in touch with her Avatar, the magical force attached to her soul that guided and taught her. In the cradle, she was playing with supernatural forces, often using them for selfish reasons instinctively; her parents thought she was a strangely well-behaved baby and they were just awesome parents who happened to always be around when she needed something. She never got sick. She was walking, talking, and reading before all her peers. She never cried or got bored, and she had an active, vivid imagination, making up all kinds of strange stories. As she got older, she used magic to get into adventures and mischief, not all of which were entirely light-hearted; child mages tend to die gruesome deaths very early, and the fact that Uri survived her childhood with her mind and body mostly intact is testimony to her quick wits and magical muscle.
The downside to this is that everyone was aware that there was something unsettlingly off about Uri. Her own parents sometimes found it hard to look at her for very long and were apt to ignore her as she got older, unaware that they were even doing so. When Uri started school, her peers resoundingly rejected her, sensing that she was different and strange. Uri grew up very lonely as a result, and by the time she had learned to use her magic to travel to different places, she thought she'd found the solution to that loneliness. She'd use her magic to drop into the Umbra, making friends with fantastical creatures and spirits, and later used it to travel to other places on Earth, answering the calls of other lonely children, some of whom she befriended.
Uri was twelve when she noticed that things were changing. Uri's few friends, scattered across the globe, were growing up and moving on, leaving her behind. Uri was starting to notice things about the world around her that she hadn't before, awful things: unfairness, discrimination, war, racism, the abuse of power by authority figures, and the daily violence of the mundane world, which was increasingly coming to appear to Uri as a dark and terrible place. She realised she was alone in the world, in danger from forces older and more powerful than herself, and that she was too different from everyone else. She had held on for as long as she could, but her childhood was finally starting to end. At twelve, her Avatar, tired of having the joy and imagination beaten out of it by a cold and unfeeling world, chose to go back to Sleep. Uri forgot magic; she forgot everything. She became a normal child.
She went on to go to high school, where she finally made some real friends, getting into the usual amounts of trouble as she hung out with a mostly alternative, largely LGBTQ-affiliated group of kids. Her parents were so thrilled she was finally making friends and going out that they didn't even care when she'd get in trouble at school or get caught shoplifting downtown as long as she was socialising and happy. If she was still quiet and seemed withdrawn and sad, as if she were desperately missing something she couldn't remember, everyone attributed that to normal teenage moodiness. She did well in school, was reasonably well-liked, and graduated high school with honours. When she turned eighteen and realised she had to enlist in the armed forces, Uri panicked. She didn't want to serve, she strongly objected to the occupation and was petrified at the thought of having to hurt or kill another living person. She was unable to get a deferment although she tried very hard, including making herself sick, and there was enormous pressure from every area of her life to just go into service; it's very difficult to get a good job in Israel without IDF service, her family were pressuring her to not "throw her life away," and draft-dodging can lead to arrest and possible jail time. With great reluctance, against her own judgement, Uri went.
She lasted about a year, and then panicked and fled in the middle of the night.
A deserter from the army, Uri fled north, through Lebanon and then central Asia and southeast Europe, spending a lot of time in Turkey. To this day she is not able to articulate exactly why she had to leave just then, nothing especially terrible or traumatic had happened to her, she just woke up one night and realised she couldn't do it anymore, that she was a hypocrite and a tool of a system that she hated. By the time she'd realised what she had done it was too late to go back without drastic consequences. She adopted a series of pseudonyms — the most frequent and recent being Wolfgang Einhorn, passing herself off as German in places where nobody spoke German or knew what a German accent sounded like — scraped by hand-to-mouth, doing whatever work she could get, though it was hard for her to support herself in foreign countries where she often did not speak the language, and she spent a lot of time homeless, sleeping on park benches, digging out of trash. On the few occasions she found herself getting back on her feet, she would suddenly be blindsided by strange and frightening hallucinations and delusions — the stress of her situation had triggered the manifestation of her latent schizophrenia at the same time as her Avatar was trying to reAwaken, causing a confusing mess of symptoms that made her occasionally unable to function. Panicked, terrified that she was losing her mind, she self-medicated with whatever she could get her hands on. Plagued by recurring hyperrealistic nightmares about her own past lives and their violent, gruesome ends, she grew more and more sick as she tried to avoid sleeping, avoid socialising, avoid anything that would draw attention to herself.
A psychotic break landed her in hospital in Turkey — she doesn't remember much of what happened, but was later told that she freaked out in her hotel room and attempted to jump from the roof, where she was talked down by a police officer, then admitted to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital when it was determined she was a) a danger to herself, and b) not lucid. She was twenty years old, and it was the worst three weeks of her life. When they let her out, she at least had a better understanding of what was wrong with her and how she could help it. Unfortunately it meant she kept dismissing the signs of her reAwakening Avatar as schizophrenic hallucinations, and the prescription medication she was overusing blunted her Avatar even further. She's currently caught in between these two states, unaware of her burgeoning power, thinking she's just sick.
Powers: Wolfgang is a mage, a human with the ability to utilise magic. She is not, at this time, aware that she has any special ability, and I would like to keep it that way for a while. I'd like for her to slowly reconnect with her power over the course of the game, ideally by completing quests but I can also do them as a sort of vision quest type scenario as narratives.
All mages from Wolfgang's canon have the ability to use their will to fundamentally alter reality around them. In the precepts of her canon, the world is governed by a set of rules created out of consensual reality, or the generally-agreed upon way that the world reacts as imagined by all the people who live in it and perceive it. Mages are able to violate this consensual reality, which they see not as hard-and-fast rules but as a set of guidelines or suggestions, casting feats using their willpower as channeled through spheres with the aid of a focus. That's a lot of random technical jargon, so let's define all of those things.
SPHERES. Magical effects in the World of Darkness are separated into nine spheres of influence, which are correspondence, entropy, forces, life, matter, mind, prime, spirit, and time. Using these spheres alone or in combination with each other, mages can create any kind of effect imaginable. The ones that are relevant to Wolfgang because she can use them are:
- CORRESPONDENCE • Two points. Basic correspondence involves the ability to perceive relative spatial location, sense and touch space, extend one's physical senses across distances, and "call" small objects to them, as if pulling them out of thin air. Mages with correspondence magic are supposed to always know where they are in space. A quirk of Wolfgang's Weirdness flaw is that this does not apply to her. In fact, she's more likely than ever to get lost, and the more she uses correspondence, the more confused she gets about where she is in relation to everything around her. In the interests of fairness I'm OK with nerfing this sphere to apply only to what is within Wolfgang's field of vision.
- ENTROPY • Three points. Entropy deals with, more than simple decay, all kinds of probability. Three points of entropy allows a mage to sense an object's destiny, puzzling out its strengths and weaknesses and what it's actually meant for or what it can do, and control minor probability, causing things to happen that may be unlikely but are not impossible. They can reverse an object's fortune, causing it to suddenly break down or abruptly start working again. This is especially effective on mechanical objects like machines and locks, and less effective on complex systems like living things. Breaking things is easier than fixing them for obvious reasons: it's easy to tinker with some random gears and make a machine come to a grinding halt, harder to figure out which gears are stuck and get them working again.
- FORCES • Three points. Forces deals with the elements. Forces magic is almost always vulgar by definition, it's flashy and destructive and clearly breaks the laws of physics, but very small feats (lighting a cigarette in one's cupped hand, for instance, or making a cold room slowly warm up) can be coincidental. Three points of forces would allow a mage to sense different kinds of energy waves around them, including being able to perceive wavelengths outside of normal human perception; create and control small or minor elements, such as small fires, sound, coldness, darkness, etc; and transmute minor forces into one another, turning shadow into light or heat into cold, for instance.
- MATTER • Two points. At a basic level, matter deals with all non-living forms of creation. Two points of matter enables a mage to sense and recognise different forms of matter, including its shape and form and what it is composed of. They can sense hidden objects this way. Basic transmutation is also possible at this level. They cannot change its state, temperature (except in combination with forces), or shape — they could spin thread into gold but could not, say, turn a bullet into a rose. (Could probably turn it into a marshmallow, though.)
- MIND • Two points. Mind magic is essentially psychic power. Two points of mind enables a mage to sense and read thoughts and emotions, shape their dreams, and shield their thoughts and emotions from others. At this stage, they are also capable of psychometry. They can send subtle mental impulses or compulsions or leave psychic impressions on objects. (e.g., making an important document have the impression of "don't pick me up! don't read me!") Range is not well-defined here, but for the sake of fairness let's say she must be able to see what she's trying to affect. Also, Wolfgang's ability to shield her thoughts is not always on; she has to consciously cast a spell to activate it.
- SPIRIT • One point. One point of Spirit enables the mage to see and communicate with ghosts and other spirit beings. They can sense the presence of nearby spirits, both sentient and nonsentient. They can also sense the gauntlet (the barrier separating ordinary reality from otherworlds) around them, read its strength, and find places where it can be breached or torn.
If that sounds like a lot of power, it's because it is; mages Wolfgang's age generally don't have that much backing them, as the Avatar tends to Awaken in young adulthood. Wolfgang, on the other hand, was actively using and learning magic for twelve years. Wolfgang's reAwakening gave them access to some of, but not all of, the spheres she'd learned when she was a child — resulting in her suddenly having a lot of power very fast with very little memory of what to do with it or how to keep it from getting out of hand. Although Wolfgang has a large reservoir of raw power, this is tempered by her weaknesses: poor control, unpredictability, and warped perception. (More on this below.)
FOCUS. A mage's focus is the thing they use to actually physically cast whatever feat they are attempting. A focus can be anything that gets the job done and is often improvised in situations that demand immediate responses. However, they usually have a paradigm they turn to — it could be traditional witchcraft tools, or computer programming, or prayer, whatever, it's usually rather consistent. Wolfgang's are dreams and imagination — she does her best work when she's asleep, and when she's awake, she casts feats with the aid of admittedly childish games and tools such as string-games, jacks, pogs, coins, Legos, tinker-toys, etc. Wolfgang has recently learned how to use traditional Jewish magic as the foci for spells, but without an instructional guide she's kind of improvising a lot of it now. The symbolism attached to a gesture is what gives a focus its power, but lower-levels spells can often be done without the aid of a focus. You need a focus to set a table on fire, but not to light a cigarette. A focus does not have to be physical or flashy, but physical symbolic action is the easiest way to do it, as it's something people have an easier time wrapping their heads around: "I do this thing, and that makes this other thing happen."
AVATAR. The Avatar is the personification of Wolfgang's power, a separate entity that is permanently attached to her. The Avatar has their own consciousness and personality, but can only be seen and heard by Wolfgang. (Maybe other mages, and there has been at least one instance where another mage has gone into her head and been able to speak to the Avatar, but they're not gonna just pop out of nowhere and go interacting with other PCs. On the other hand, Wolfgang is always aware of their presence, and will often converse with them in public, not aware or forgetting that other people can't see or hear them.) The Avatar's visual/physical manifestation is influenced by the mage; in Wolfgang's case, they take the form of a genderless child somewhere between six to twelve years old who is nearly transparent, like a ghost, or as a lion/ess with a blind eye. The Avatar is ornery, mistrustful of adults, hostile towards strangers, aggressive, and short-tempered. They could easily be described as bratty. The Avatar's purpose is to guide and teach, and while they cannot control their mage, they can certainly influence them. The Avatar's primary motivation is keeping Wolfgang safe. They will encourage her to flee from dangerous situations and if backed into a corner will influence her to kill to survive. The only time the Avatar encourages her to be proactive is when the safety of children is at stake: in that case, the Avatar will advocate doing anything to ensure the children survive, even if they have to kill every adult in the room, even if it puts Wolfgang in direct danger. The Avatar cannot be separated from Wolfgang without her going completely mad and dying.
Wolfgang's mental illness has warped her Avatar. Usually she is fine, but when she's in quiet — a state where the Avatar has warped beyond any rationality — she ceases to see the world the same way other people do, and her perception will begin to influence reality around her. Wolfgang goes into quiet when she has a break from reality, which is usually prompted by extreme mental and emotional stress, but can also be caused by drugs or suddenly going off her meds. Most mages go into quiet once or twice in their lives, but a mage who does so very frequently or who is permanently in quiet is called a Marauder, and they're hated and feared by other mages due to the stereotype of them as being especially violent or dangerous. Due to the severity of her illness, Wolfgang is technically a Marauder.
PARADOX. Paradox is the supernatural force that occurs when the effects of a particular feat are at odds with the force of the disbelief of any witnessing party — which is to say, if you hurl a giant fireball into the street and someone sees it who doesn't know about magic, paradox is the magical backlash that comes from their rejection of that fireball being possible. Paradox happens when any kind of magical feat cannot be explained within the rules of consensual reality, making two types of magic: coincidental (things that can be explained in a mundane way) and vulgar (things that cannot). Vulgar magic causes paradox, coincidental magic does not, thus mages strive to make as many of their feats coincidental as possible. The concept of paradox kind of flies out the window in panfandom game settings, where the existence of supernatural powers and magic is common knowledge, however in the interests of helping limit this character's abilities (because without paradox, she is massively overpowered), I'm gonna go ahead and say paradox is still a thing: in the event she casts magic that would be considered vulgar, regardless of whether any witnessing non-mage parties are aware of the existence of magic, she will accrue paradox. Paradox does not typically affect Wolfgang personally since she's a Marauder, but it does affect people and things around her, and there's a distinct risk of her accruing too much paradox and being temporarily ejected into a pocket paradox dimension. Paradox effects range from spells not working or backfiring to mild to severe pain or even death, it depends on the severity of the spell and how much paradox the mage has already acquired.
OTHER LIMITATIONS. I do a dice roll whenever I have Wolfgang do a magic feat. I roll a d20, and if it's a 10 or below, the spell has some kind of weird effect applied to it; if I roll a three or below, it doesn't work at all. (Of course, making a spell have a weird side effect or not work without a roll is also up to my and the mods' discretion, but a die roll to succeed is always required.)
The nature of Wolfgang's magic requires some set-up for most big effects. This makes it not particularly suited for combat unless she specifically comes prepared.
ECHOES & WEIRDNESS. Although Wolfgang is not an amateur or a baby mage, she is entirely self-taught and self-trained, which combined with her illness means that her degree of control over her magic is... not good. The warped nature of her Avatar exacerbates this. In fact one of the flaws on her character sheet is Weirdness, which causes her spells to have weird or unsettling effects — spells will often go off without her conscious control (for instance, she might suddenly hear people's thoughts without meaning to, or she may accidentally break locks) or have odd side-effects attached to them, or just not work the way she planned them to.
Echoes is another flaw on her character sheet. Echoes are effects on the world around them that are outside the mage's control. They take many forms, but in Wolfgang, these are primarily 1. her presence is repulsive to animals, with the exception of cats, goats, and crows, who adore her to an unsettling and life-hampering degree; 2. she can't pass raw milk without it curdling; and 3. she sees ghosts all the time, not just when a spell is in effect.
EXPIRATION DATE. The Avatar reincarnates. It's a conglomeration of all the past lives, influenced by and made up by them, yet separate at the same time. Wolfgang has been many people before and will go on to be many more people, and in her case, all of those people have something in common: they all die young. Very young, in fact, the average age at death has been twelve. The oldest any of her past lives has ever been is twenty-four; Wolfgang is twenty-one. She knows her time is running out and is aware that it's likely she's going to die at any moment between now and then. This is just destiny, it's not something she can control, and she also has no way to predict when or how it will happen, though she suspects that, like all her past lives before her, her death will be violent murder.
Talents/Abilities: Wolfgang has professional military training, in a potentially dangerous situation she keeps a cool head and knows how to behave to minimise risk mostly by having had it drilled in her head. She's a good shot and has some basic EOD training. She can skateboard and play the guitar. Useful!
Personality: Wolfgang is a shy, quiet person with a dreamy, head-in-the-clouds nature that makes her appear to be not quite all there. She's very intelligent, but a little vague, and she is cripplingly shy. She has trouble making eye contact with anyone and talking to strangers is like torture for her. She will if she has to, but strangers tend to notice how she stumbles over her words, mumbles, and fidgets anxiously. Wolfgang is highly impulsive; she's learned that if she thinks things through too much she just talks herself into inaction, so she ought to just do things. This seldom goes as well as she'd like, yet she persists.
Politically she is anti-authority to the point of leaning towards anarchism; she hates cops, soldiers, and politicians, and will frequently align herself with the kind of political radicals who throw molotov cocktails through Starbucks windows. This is at odds with her shy, conflict-averse personal life, but Wolfgang finds it easy to act and very difficult to feel. She has trouble processing and acknowledging her emotions, which she mostly views as inconvenient and embarrassing.
Her fear of social conflict makes her passive-aggressive. She wants everyone to like her all the time and is also very sensitive and has her feelings hurt very easily, so she will act one way with someone and another way with someone else in the hopes of making them both happy, but this is emotionally taxing. One annoying quirk of hers is her propensity to constantly apologise, even for things that are not her fault and that she has no control over.
She also has absolutely zero common sense and tends to miss the obvious solution in favour of the elaborate or unlikely, which has frequently landed her in trouble, if not just embarrassed her. She's oblivious to a lot of common social cues and usually needs things spelled out for her. She can be quite charming if you've got any patience for socially maladjusted weirdo hermits, and there's an endearing quality to her vagueness that often compels people to want to protect her. This is frustrating to her; people see her as a delicate flower who needs protecting, but in reality she's a survivor through and through. Survival for her means lying, concealing, hiding — that makes it difficult for her to open up with people.
Wolfgang has schizophrenia, a mental illness characterised by hallucinations and delusions, amongst other symptoms. This affects every single aspect of what she does, as most of her life is taken up by managing her illness. What complicates Wolfgang's relationship with her illness is that in addition to occasionally hallucinating things that don't line up with conventional reality, she is also actually able to alter reality via magic, and frequently does so in order to match her warped perception. Separating her illness from her magic is difficult to impossible and she can't always or often trust her own perception. Considering she's about to be thrown into an environment where it will be even harder to tell her delusions from reality — in the real world, if you say "I quit my job because my boss is a reptilian," people go "wow, so that's kind of crazy," but in a panfandom game, people are likely to take that at face value — it is especially crucial that she surround herself with people she can trust completely.
Summary:
+ Clever, compassionate, intelligent, inventive, adaptable, resilient, helpful, proactive, people pleaser, resourceful
- Sensitive, anxious, shy, lacks common sense, poor impulse control, passive-aggressive, conflict-avoidant, gullible, profoundly mentally ill
SETTING SPECIFIC INFORMATION
Estate and descriptors: Tenderness (compassion, empathy, vulnerability)
Reason for this Estate: Wolfgang is preoccupied with social justice through a lens of compassionate empathy, meaning said preoccupation comes from a place of soft-hearted sensitivity. She's less concerned about Justice for Justice's sake than she is about caring for other people; it's not about fairness or what's objectively right, it's about seeing people free from pain and suffering, the freedom to pursue happiness and their best selves. Tenderness has a slight degree of protectiveness to it that's slightly detached, the feeling of a parent with a newborn child, or holding a baby rabbit in your palm, or the joyous freedom that comes from loving where you are but knowing you have to leave.
Her compassion for others is easily her best trait; it fuels her most selfless actions and motivates her to do the best work she can do. But it's that compassion and empathy for others that makes her vulnerable; she's easy to hurt, emotionally, psychically, and physically, and that hurting is a fundamental aspect of what drives her, is in fact a necessary component of empathy. Tenderness is fragile; it's easier to squash a pound of meat than a pound of stone. A soft and gentle love for people and things isn't weakness, it takes an incredible amount of courage to have thin skin, to rip open your chest and offer it to the world openly.
Imperator and Code: Cipactli, Dark. She will be bewildered by this news because it is at a glance completely at odds with her Estate. Her avatar, on the other hand, can definitely get behind the idea that all humans should destroy themselves individually — all adult humans, that is. THAT SAID, Cipactli's personal code is something Wolfgang can get behind, all of that seize the day, be greedy for experience and such. Wolfgang has a zest for life that is unmatched by most, an inherent wanderlust sparked by her first journey away from home with nothing on her back but her clothes. Her sense of adventure and curiosity about the world around her are both powerful motivating factors for her. Appetite? Desire? Hunger? All shades of the same idea, and one that Wolfgang feels very strongly, the one that motivates their restless wanderlust, their thirst for knowledge, and their strong commitment to justice.
For Wolfgang, the idea of humanity destroying itself is less literally "everyone should die" than it is about deconstruction and revolution, a constant state of change, the same way their avatar is in constant flux and their essence is dynamic. At heart, Wolfgang is a revolutionary, so far towards the left of the spectrum that she tends to scare people with her politics, and for her the Dark can be interpreted as seeing every person achieve their best potential. Destruction is the flip side to creation, the thing that makes creation necessary and possible to begin with, and one of Wolfgang's most developed spheres is all about the destruction and decay of all things in reality, Entropy. At the same time there will be massive resistance from her over the idea that people should go to war or destroy the environment, for example. It's just that she doesn't view entropy as an inherently evil force.
There are aspects of Dark that she strongly agrees with and aspects she strongly disagrees with with very little room in between which is what I find interesting, those polar opposites, just like I find it interesting that someone whose Estate is defined by their empathy towards others being bound to a Code that encourages self-destruction in individuals. Wolfgang will likely try to sidle around the less savoury aspects of Dark and turn what looks to most people to be an incredibly negative, even evil thing into a powerful vehicle for change, good or bad.
The Wild is more fitting for Wolfgang's personal outlook on life, but the Dark is more interesting, imo.
Reason for playing: Wolfgang is a favourite OC of mine because she falls under one of my favourite tropes, which is the reluctant/cowardly hero(ine). There's also a lot there that I enjoy writing; themes of mental illness as depicted by a character who is generally positive and good-natured, for instance, as well as gender identity and faith. You don't get to see a lot of trans warriors, or Jewish magicians, or psychotic heroes. She's easy to write and easy to come up with CR for. Also, she is a cutie patoot.
S A M P L E S
Please pick two or three of the following:
- In character, please write out a scene where a magical genie appears and offers your character whatever they want most in the world. What are they searching for? Can they clearly articulate what they want?
* "You have one wish."
Wolfgang blinks several times in rapid succession, her face slowly pulling into a look of confused uncertainty. Her hand automatically goes to her hair, which she begins to tug anxiously. "Erm," she says. "A Coke, please."
The genie, floating stately in the air with his arms folded across his chest, every inch the imposing supernatural wonder that he is, frowns deeply. "I beg your pardon?" he asks.
"Uh. Wait. No, not that. I mean, would it be a poison Coke?"
"I'm sure I've no idea what you mean."
"You know, like the monkey's paw thing." Wolfgang is starting to sweat. It feels really hot here suddenly. "You wish for a thing and you get it but it is all wrong. I could wish for world peace and you'd make it all Brave New World, yeah? I could wish for a house and you'd kill my uncle or something."
"That's... that's not quite how it works —"
"Or I wish for the end of child abuse and you disappear all the children! Or I wish for unlimited money and I turn into some kind of tyrannical despot, or —"
The genie brings his hand to his face, gently massaging his temples. "Well, you've got to wish for something. I don't get to go back in the lamp until you do, and I'm really not thrilled to be stuck on the clock, here."
"Oh, jeez. Uh... gosh. Uh, well, uh, hm." Wolfgang starts to pace violently, wringing her hands. There are a lot of things she'd wish for, notably to undo what she just did, but she can think of a million ways each of them could go wrong, and once she thinks of it she can't let go of the thought. They come too quickly. There's a voice in her head telling her to wish for a weather balloon. What the hell is that all about? "What if I wish to have no wishes?"
"Then you'd be wasting a wish, but if that's really what you want, then fine, whatever." The genie holds up a hand, cutting her off from responding. "It is done!" In a flash of smoke and shadow, he disappears once again into the lamp.
Wolfgang puts her hands on her hips and squints across the empty desert, wiping the sweat off her cheek with one hunched shoulder. It's at least another thirty miles to Beirut. "I probably should have wished for a car."
- Reviewing apps can be a miserable task. Please tell us a joke that your character has made while trapped in a gloomy or hopeless situation.
* "Dogs can't look up."
It's been stuck in her head for days. In fact, it's the only thing she can say, the only thing she can think. Her thoughts keep returning to it over and over like some demented carousel. She hears it echo in her head in her own voice, over and over, dogs can't look up, dogs can't look up, dogs can't look up.
She's pretty sure that's not true. It's one of those random facts someone tells you to look smart. Or that you find on the internet somewhere. Dogs can't look up.
"Dogs can't look up," she tells the resident, voice pained. He doesn't speak any English, so she hopes he thinks she's speaking nonsense. Being psychotic is preferable to how embarrassing it is that she can't let go of this phrase. It's Ankara, it's June, they keep changing the residents, there's some kind of drama going on with HR but Wolfgang doesn't speak Turkish well enough to understand. Doesn't matter. Crazy is crazy in any language.
"Dogs can't look up," she repeats, and every time that phrase comes out it saps a little more of her energy. She wants to say something else, but every word feels wrong, like rubbing your shin against carpet. She finds herself curling up on the couch in the doctor's office, the one who speaks enough English for them to muddle through a conversation well enough, pulling an itchy throw around herself. She moans and tosses and turns, the phrase circling her mind, not letting go. "I know that isn't true. Don't judge me."
At some point indulging it is only enabling. She's got to try to turn her face away instead. I'm not crazy. I'm not stupid. I'm not crazy.
"Three physicists are in a boat," Wolfgang says, grinding her teeth. "They've got no matches and four cigarettes. So one of them throws one overboard and suddenly the whole boat becomes a cigarette lighter."