In the Night: Application

[scarsolderthanyou]

PLAYER INFO

Player Name: Gail
Player Contact: cacopheny @ plurk

Character(s) In-Game: Bucky Barnes

CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Stone of Indigo Cloud
Age: Somewhere between 500 and 600; looks in his 60 or 70s
Canon: Books of the Raksura



World Description:
Stone comes from a planet known by its inhabitants as the Three Worlds, not because there are three planets or three continents, but because there are species that live on the ground, in the sea, and in the sky. There are no humans in the Three Worlds, only groundlings, sealings, and skylings, and many variations of each. The technological level varies depending on the species, with some approaching magical steampunk empires and others at bare hunter-gatherer subsistence levels.

The shape-shifting Raksura are hunter-gatherers themselves, technically groundlings but with wings in their scaled forms. They live in the sprawling forest of giant “mountain-trees” known to his people as the Reaches, inside a tree as large as a small town, towering thousands of feet into the sky and supporting whole ecosystems in their branches and along their trunks. The inside was shaped and hollowed into a space big enough for Raksura to fly, climb, and make whole villages of rooms for sleeping, working, eating, and raising children.

Raksura are aerial predators, obligate carnivores, with two forms: one mostly human-looking, if a bit too tall and oddly colored with teeth too sharp and tongues too long; the other scaled, spined, and clawed, humanoid dragons in a wide variety of colors. Sometime in the distant past, the Aeriat race-- the ones with wings-- joined up with the Arbora race-- the ones without wings, adapted for climbing instead-- to form one interbreeding culture. They live in groups called colonies, organized in biological and social castes. Arbora are soldiers, hunters, teachers, and mentors (the magic-users of the Raksura, mostly augers and healers), which are mostly social castes. Aeriat are warriors, consorts, and queens, which are entirely biological castes: warriors are infertile, while consorts and queens interbreed with each other and with the Arbora.

The main threat in the Three Worlds, beyond the expected predators (there are sentient sealings the size of whales, multi-limbed horrors dwelling at the bottom of swamps, and tentacle creatures living in the dense jungles) and the typical interspecies prejudices and spates of warfare, is the Fell. The Fell are a sister species to the Raksura, deviated from the same original race thousands of years ago, only their ferocity isn’t tempered by the creative and socially-minded influence of the Arbora, and they look at all the other species of the world as food. The Raksura and the Fell hate each other, and most of the grounding races on the main continent of the Three Worlds fear them both the same, not knowing the difference.



History:
The Reaches at the time of Stone’s fledgling years were getting too populous, and smaller colonies were having trouble keeping their territory. When the current reigning queen died and passed leadership on to her daughter, the court decided to take off for new grounds. Stone was still young, and considered the trek an adventure, learning to hunt while they traveled, and developing stronger and more wild than sheltered consorts in the Reaches ever got to be. The court eventually found an old ruined pyramid structure in the east beyond the forests of the rest of their kind. Stone never really felt comfortable there, tired of the “adventure” and missing home, but that was where his queen Azure chose him, and he stayed where she did to raise their clutches.

The court lived away from their ancestral grounds for about eight generations, or a little over three hundred turns. Raksuran consorts live to perhaps a hundred and twenty turns or a little less, with the exception of “line-grandfathers”, or consorts who live many times a Raksura’s standard lifespan and grow well past their standard size, as Raksura don’t ever stop growing over their lives. As the turns passed, it became clear that Stone was to become one of those, as first Stone’s queen Azure and then his children began to fade and die while he remained strong and healthy, and only grew larger and stronger as time went by.

After he outlived the last of his earlier clutches, and with no queen to keep him settled in the court, Stone began to range further and further from the colony, exploring the lands and people around them. He fought stray Fell, learned the customs of various peoples across the Three Worlds, visited their allies, and checked on their old mountain-tree in the Reaches. He enjoyed his freedom, but it was lonely, so he did always return to visit whichever generation of his family lived in the court’s new grounds, bringing stories of his travels.

Until one year he returned to find the number of his home colony much reduced. There had been sickness, he’d been told. And a hunting accident. And there had been more stillbirths and fewer of the flighted, sterile warriors to protect the court born in recent years. All of the other consorts had died or been sent away. Alarmed, Stone left again to speak with their allies in a nearby court, to bargain for consorts and warriors to help protect their court-- and help them move, as he was urging that they return to their original home in the Reaches. None of the mentors could auger the cause of their decline, but all of them agreed that something had to be wrong, and sent him in the direction that they thought had the most chance of Stone returning with help.

Stone returned empty-handed… until he stopped to rest on one of the floating island ruins dotting the skies and all but ran into a solitary, courtless consort living among a local groundling tribe. Moon had no idea what he was, or what Stone was, but Stone managed to talk him into coming with him after the groundling tribe left Moon out to die because they mistook his scaled form for a Fell. Stone found himself rather attached to the little brat even before he got him all the way home. Moon’s grouchiness and independence reminded him of his own, and the plight of a lost and confused Raksura who didn’t even know what he was pulled at his old, parental heart.

With Moon’s help, Stone and his queens discovered the source of their court’s decline: the direct magical attentions of a Fell flight, including a Fell/Raksura crossbreed mentor with magical powers. Together they destroyed the flight, and finally made their way back west towards the Reaches with the help of some groundlings and their flying boats. It took various adventures, including meeting up and allying with Moon’s original court Opal Night and dealing with yet more Fell/Raksura hybrids, before everything started to settle down and the court could start breeding again-- Jade and Moon producing a clutch of five great-great-great grandchildren for Stone-- at least until the next adventure sent them investigating cities supposedly made by the forerunner race a few years later.

The result of that fateful trip was a half-Fell flight taking up residence in the Reaches in Moon’s birthcourt’s territory, Stone taking up with a misplaced sealing named Rorra for a while (at least as long as she deigned to stay near Indigo Cloud’s home tree), and the destruction of half or more of the population of the Fell by a forerunner weapon that nearly destroyed the Raksura and a large swath of groundling races, in the process. It was only through Moon and Jade’s efforts that the combined courts of Indigo Cloud and Opal Night stopped the weapon before it could complete its horrible task. Stone helped, of course.


CRAU: NA


Death: About 40 turns after the events of the book series, Stone finally dies of old age. This means that about a year before his actual death, he loses all the remaining color in his skin and hair (he’d been gray for almost a century, brown-skinned and black-haired before that), and starts losing muscle mass and needing more sleep until he finally just doesn’t wake up again.


What are your plans for this character in-game? Stone’s demeanor is basically the polar opposite of Bucky’s: he’s chatty, strong-willed, confident in himself, and never going to get more human than he currently is (which is not a lot)-- while at the same time not as strong, fast, and durable as he used to be, and likely to get himself into trouble thinking he is. I’m hoping he will make a very different-feeling pool of CR. Plus, I’m really interested in putting another non-human into the game, as well as someone actually OLD. I’m extra looking forward to playing with him as truly elderly. In my other games with him, he’s old but still strong, used to being literally the strongest of his whole court. This will be hard for him, and that makes it fun!


What aspects of this game and/or its setting are you most interested in having this character engage with? Stone can fly. I fully anticipate him getting into trouble going places he’s not supposed to. He’s also a literal predator who’s going to have to get by with nothing to hunt (he doesn’t eat people, that’s just gross) and not a lot of fresh meat, which is not going to make him a happy camper. Also, being a literal great-great-great-great granddad, I absolutely expect him to start dadding at people. Half the game needs a good-natured but gruff grandpa. He also has extremely powerful senses of smell and hearing, which will be useful in the dark.


How does your character generally get along with other people? He swats the backs of their heads, affectionately calls them idiots, and offers hugs and advice liberally. Really, Stone is a very friendly old man, he’s just kind of gruff about it, and he loves hearing other people talk about their cultures and families. He also loves food, and will use food to make other people comfortable with him, whether by begging from their meals or offering to share his. If someone threatens him or someone he cares about, though, he’s pretty quick to growl and bite off heads. He’s used to being the biggest and the baddest, the protector of his court, and that gives him a lot of confidence in dealing with others. The fact that he is no longer the biggest and baddest hasn’t entirely registered with him. He’s been alive for several centuries, and actually elderly for like... a year.


What is your character's mental state upon entering the game? Bemused, kind of annoyed and a little tired of it all, but interested. He’d been ready to die, and his people don’t have any concept of an afterlife, but hey, if there’s more to do, there’s more to do.


Skills/Abilities:
; Shapeshifting: Stone has a human-like “groundling” form, and a dragon-like winged form. The shapeshift itself looks like disappearing in a cloud of dark mist. The big one is Stone, before he lost the last of his color.
; Shapeshift stowing: Due to the nature of shapeshifting in his species-- though they don’t understand it, the series creator has stated they exist in both forms at once, only swapping the dimension each form is in-- when shifting from groundling to winged form, Stone takes his clothes with him, into some nether space, as well as anything he was carrying with him. They return exactly the way he left them when he shifts back to groundling. He can in fact hold onto an object and shift with it, hiding it wherever his clothes go until he shifts back into groundling form. The object can’t really be very big, but it can be anything not alive.
; Magical mass: Again due to the odd nature of Raksuran shifting, in groundling form, Stone can be as immovable as if he were still dragon-sized, though if weighed he wouldn’t have the same weight as his winged form; it’s a magical effect rather than a physical one. Also, when he growls in groundling form, it can reverberate as if it were coming from a much larger body. And yes, he still growls (and hisses) in groundling form.
; Sharp senses: Raksura are predators, and rather more animalistic than humans whose development hinged less on ambush hunting and more on tools and persistence, and as such their senses are more powerful than your average human’s senses. As Raksura get older, they get more powerful, and that applies to their senses as well, so Stone’s hearing, sense of smell (more through his tongue, like a lizard, than through his nose), and distance vision are very powerful. His different forms also have different sensory abilities-- touch and taste are stronger as a groundling, while vision, hearing, and smell are stronger in his winged form.
; Healing: Stone heals more quickly than a human would, recovering from a nearly slit throat in the span of a week and a half… but only when in his winged form. So if he wants to take advantage of this, he has to stay the size of a small house and be unable to talk for the duration.
; Digestion: Stone can eat just about anything, provided it's actually edible. He has swallowed a six-foot-long fish before, spines and scales and bones and all, not even bothering to chew.
; Fighting: After several lifetimes of wandering and killing the Fell, he’s learned more than a few things about defending himself and others. He’s still stronger than he looks, despite the increased delicacy of being literally dead of old age, so he can still be useful in a fight. Just… not as useful as he expects to be.
; Politics: Politics are everywhere, including in Raksuran courts. Politics is what keeps a race of haughty predators from killing each other over every little insult. Consorts, in particular, are raised to be closely aware of the political situation in a court, and to manipulate it as needed for the good of the court. He used this skill to help blend in with groundling cultures when away from his court.


Flaws/Weaknesses:
; Culture Clash: Stone isn’t human. He knows how to get along with groundlings, most of the time, but humans aren’t groundlings, either. There’s going to definitely be some culture clash going on here, especially given Stone isn’t remotely interested in changing.
; Diet: Stone may be able to eat just about anything, but he is still a carnivore. He needs fresh meat to stay truly healthy. That’s something that could easily be in short supply right now in Beacon.
; Vision: Stone’s right eye is about 70% blind due to some kind of pre-birth damage to the eye, which results in him turning his head more often than he otherwise might to get a clearer view, and his up-close vision is rubbish as a trade-off for having such good distance vision. (Someone should get him reading glasses.) Also, given the darkness, his distance vision will not be particularly useful unless he’s flying over somewhere with a light source.
; Technology: Coming from a literal hunter-gatherer society, where they live in magical trees and eat their food raw, means Stone isn't going to understand the tablets at all. He's not going to understand a lot of what people talk about, either. There's going to be a lot of "what the shit does that mean" coming from his corner.
; Age: Stone is very, very old for his people, and in general Raksura get stronger and sharper as they age. He's spent the past couple hundred years being larger, stronger, faster, and more enduring than everyone he knows. In the past year and a half, at most, that strength, speed, and endurance has whittled away to a fraction of what he's used to-- less, even, than what most adults of his species are capable of. A year and a half isn't long enough for him to get used to that change, inside, and he's still going to naturally react to things as if he could squash them without even trying. This is going to Be A Problem, and likely result in him getting hurt a lot when he tries to do things his body is no longer capable of.
; Shifted Speech: Or lack there-of. When in his winged form, Stone can’t talk. There’s something about how the vocal chords and mouth changed when expanding along with his size that makes it impossible to properly enunciate words, even in the growling Raksuran speech.
; Personality flaws: The other side of confidence is stubbornness, and Stone has that in spades. He doesn't admit to being wrong easily, which is probably pretty common among the various heroes and anti-heroes and even villains of Beacon. Raksura in general tend to be temperamental, both in the sense of being touchy about insult and quick to get angry, and Stone isn't really any different, though he's more mellow than some of his kind after so many centuries of life. Consorts in particular tend towards being dramatic, and while he'd never admit it, Stone has that problem, too: in particular, he's a big, fat show-off when he wants to impress someone.


Personality:
Consorts are typically delicate, sheltered, and gentle, maybe even a little flighty. They’re fond of children and good at sussing out the motivations and feelings of others, and are considered some of the more graceful and polite of the Raksura. Stone, however, is so old and well-traveled that the only two of those that still apply are his parental nature and his ability to see to the heart of things, though “delicate” and “flighty” never even applied to him as a fledgling. Instead, he is grumpy and snide, showing affection more through light cuffs and casual insults (“idiot” is his favorite) than the smiles and kind words of a younger consort-- though he’s also usually ready with a hug and a comforting lap to sit in if someone seems to need it.

Most consorts only leave their homes if they are being traded to another court to share out their bloodline or for a tame diplomatic mission to forge an alliance, but even then young Stone’s experiences were different, given the court’s travel while they looked for a new home. After the loss of his queen and his first clutches due to their old age and his unexpectedly long lifetime, Stone has spent more time away from his court than within it. He’s talked to a lot of non-Raksura, killed a number of non-Raksura, and even had sexual relations with a handful non-Raksura-- the latter of which scandalizes his court a little bit when they think about it, even though the Raksura are generally very open-minded and straight-forward about sex. Stone knows enough to be suspicious of strangers, particularly those who smell off or who seem shifty to him, but it doesn’t stop him from engaging with them.

It helps that he is also very confident in himself. He’s used to being deferred to, respected, and obeyed the way a stern but affectionate father would be, and it shows in nearly all of his interactions with others, familiar or otherwise. Even in unfamiliar or difficult situations, it helps him keep steady that he knows his own worth and the exact extent of his own abilities. He might growl about it, but he keeps his head, accepting that any trouble that comes up will be dealt with. The only time he’s ever really shown as losing his self-control in panic is when his whole species is at risk of being wiped out.

Some of Stone’s confidence also comes from quite literally being a parent many times over, of several clutches of five bitty Raksura each, watching them grow and assume responsibility and make him grandbabies. This also means that, over his long life, Stone has lost a lot of people he’s cared about. While many things annoy him, the only thing that really makes him lose his temper is a threat to people he cares for. He’ll lose them soon enough, by his standards, but he doesn’t want to lose them sooner than he has to. Loss doesn’t keep him from loving; it has made him, instead, love more fiercely and with more wisdom.


Items:
; Stone comes to Beacon with nothing but the clothes on his back, and a single bracelet tucked up under his sleeve, gold and designed like Aeriat flying entwined. He doesn’t even have any shoes. (Not that Raksura wear shoes.)

SAMPLES

Log Sample: Test drive thread.

Network Sample: Test drive thread that’s very short, also from his other game, also very short. For a non-thread attempt if those aren’t good enough:

[Like most of Stone’s commentary to the network, this is done via audio, because Stone can’t see the tablet comfortably enough for typing anything long. So the message comes through to everyone’s tablets in a grouchy old man’s reedy voice.]

Okay, kids. I’m tired of people screaming when they see me. The big, colorless, winged monster with all the spines and scales and shit? That’s sometimes at the bonfire or in the water by the dock or flying around over the village? That’s me. Stone. I’m a shapeshifter.

I promise I’m not going to eat anybody, or squash anybody, or whatever you people might be worried about. I just need to stretch my wings sometimes. Both forms are me, and I can’t just spend all my time in one, or I get itchy.

So now we’re all on the same air current, right? No one is going to shoot at me or run away or think I’m going to step on them? Because The only thing you people need to worry about with me is eating all your fried food, and trying to explain this over and over to frightened groundlings is getting really old.