Phantasmal Rift Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
phantasmods) wrote2018-01-17 08:32 am
phantasmods) wrote2018-01-17 08:32 am
APPLICATIONS
Applications are currently closed and will open at 12:01 AM PST on February 22nd.
Post your applications to this entry in the following format: First comment should contain the OOC information section only. Successive comments should be posted in reply to that comment, as many as you need. Moderator responses will be appended to the last comment of the application.
A reserve is not required to app! Please note that while the total cap for characters per player is four, you can apply a maximum of two characters per application cycle.
APPLICATION TEMPLATE:
Please note that apps are processed in batches at the end of the application period!
IMPORTANT: Be sure to post your app with the journal you intend to use for the game!
Post your applications to this entry in the following format: First comment should contain the OOC information section only. Successive comments should be posted in reply to that comment, as many as you need. Moderator responses will be appended to the last comment of the application.
A reserve is not required to app! Please note that while the total cap for characters per player is four, you can apply a maximum of two characters per application cycle.
APPLICATION TEMPLATE:
- OOC Information
Player name: [Your preferred name or handle here]
Player age and gender: [18+ folks only. Preferred pronouns go here, though please include one least one of he/she/they for the sanity of your mods and fellow players]
Player Contact: [Plurk, Discord, what have you]
Any other characters in game?
[THIS IS THE END OF YOUR FIRST COMMENT. EVERYTHING AFTER THIS GOES IN REPLIES TO THE FIRST COMMENT.]
IC Information
Character name: [Western order, please. Also if your character is a AU with a different name than the one they had in canon, please let us know!]
Character canon: [If your canon has multiple adaptations and you pull from one in specific, please note that. If your character is a CRAU, please note game they came from here!]
Canon point: [If your character is an AU, please include both their ORIGINAL CANONPOINT and their AU canonpoint. In the case of a CRAU, please note their canonpoint at their PREVIOUS GAME.]
Physical Description: [Image links are fine! Please also include your character's relative height and age!]
About the Character: [Tell us about your character! This is a freeform section for both history and personality, and we're looking for 500-2000 words. Please don't go too far under or overboard!]
Character abilities: [Include both supernatural abilities and more mundane ones, please! Details are good.]
Inventory: [What's on your character's person when they arrive, magically or otherwise?]
Samples: [Threads from the test drive are strongly preferred, but any thread of at least eight comments from your character will do.]
Please note that apps are processed in batches at the end of the application period!
IMPORTANT: Be sure to post your app with the journal you intend to use for the game!
no subject
Player name: Bliss
Player age and gender: 32, They/Them
Player Contact: BlissAuthority#4698 @ discord, therealbliss @ plurk
Any other characters in game? Not presently! Apping Alex Faris!
no subject
Character name: Meredith Odetta Baker (replacing an unnamed Anchor in this published one-shot)
Character canon: Bliss Stage tabletop OC
Canon point: Midgame; Keenan Caine route
Physical Description:
16 years old, relatively dark-skinned African-American black girl; short, chubby, pear shaped, busty; dense curly redbrown hair in 'princess curls' to her shoulders; hazel eyes, broad button nose, warm smile, expressive face; tends to wear multilayered swirling skirts, sashes, jackets and scarves over a blouse over a really good sports-bra and shorts.
About the Character: cw child endangerment and abuse, teenage sex, lovecraftian bullshit, drug abuse, violence
"Right now, right this moment, right as you read these words, humanity is struck down by an alien force from beyond the limits of our understanding.
It is the first blow of a terrible war.
Seven years later, armed with a technology you cannot understand and can barely operate, you will strike back.
This is how."
Copy from the back cover of Bliss Stage. Link is to the game's website.
This weapon was the Bliss, which causes everyone with approximately 18 years worth of healthy and regular sleep patterns to fall asleep and dreaming with a smile on their faces, locked into blissful dreams for eternity. The cause? A canonically specified area of player inquiry, but for the sake of the old campaign and personal VN project I'm drawing Merry from, let's say it's a form of spiritual radiation - a little exposure to the radiant Bliss in dreams is fine, but at 108 REMs and the Blissful Birthday, you're good as dead.
All of humanity's adults falling asleep at the wheel in 2018 had the effects you'd think it would on industrialized civilization overnight. Infrastructure collapsed in months; gangs led by Lord of the Flies-ass teenage boys were the law of the land and the uneasy status quo two years in, and things lurked in dreams that some never woke up from, struck dead from terror and stigmata.
Then the first Nightmare strode out of the water, where the Dream met the Wake, and even that fragile society was shattered. Giants of flesh and bone and biotechnological terror, armed with hideous strength, searing rays, and noxious smokes, the Nightmares sought dense human habitation to terrorize it. In their wake, the Dream solidified, shifted, turned to - if not a place, then a stage for the Nightmares to set.
This reign of alien terror was unopposed for five years. Then there were whispers of a Resistance.
In Treasure Island off the coast of San Francisco, in the Job Corps built in the ruins of a Navy base, a man named James Paul Preston ('Jim' to his friends) dodged the Bliss by denying himself restful, dreaming sleep. Hopped up on coffee and amphetamines, burning with the desire to avenge his wife Esperanza Castellano and his son Josh Preston-Castellano (presumed lost to the Bliss), he gathered a personal army of teenage laborers and soldiers, placed them under his protection, and declared himself the Colonel of the Treasure Island Resistance, a force that would fight back against the alien invaders that had occupied his planet.
Enter Meredith Baker, who had been surviving as best she could on Treasure Island and adjoining Yerba Buena, by staying out of trouble and being indispensable to Jimmy's little junta by virtue of being an excellent cook with a good head for numbers. Experience as a poor, than middle class, then back to poor again Black kid from Oakland helped her out here - and access to the vast resources of the Job Corps culinary arts department meant she could ensure no one went hungry until the farms started producing food, giving them time to hold out until a weapon to fight back could be found.
They had some luck with car bombs and leftover ordinance, but that was limited, and the corpses of the Nightmares collapsed under their own weight and burned to ashes after being slain... until a girl going by Mulan Porter, quite by accident, knocked the corpse into the sea - and it didn't go up in flames, instead sinking and staying there.
They found out a lot from that one lucky break, five years in. They found out that water was a liminal space, where the Dream and Wake were one, and that things of the Dream could be packed in water and brought into the Wake. They found out that the brain and spinal cord of one of these giants, when properly prepared and analyzed with magnetic resonance, could be hacked into a route to a dream. Most importantly, they found out that what they took for the Nightmares were mere weapons, meatsuits - projections of form to protect the meaning of the aliens themselves. And that this process could be reversed.
They dubbed their weapon the Alien Numina Inversion Machine. The ANIMa.
A 15-year old ex gangleader named Anna Lin - a particular favorite of the Colonel - was selected as the first test pilot. The first foray into the dream was nearly disastrous, Anna's sleeping mind conjuring up terrors and instability - until Meredith leapt in, took the comm, and started to whisper to her and soothe her, using a combination of hypnotic patter, Jungian interpretation, and cognitive-behavioral tricks to calm her down and help her visualize a suit of shining armor - a titanic mecha made of weaponized love. It worked, and Anna's strode out of the bay triumphant, in the cradle of a giant robot made of her bond with Meredith.
After seven long years, they could finally strike back. This was how.
Anna had become the first ANIMa Pilot, of Unit 00, Phoenix Dragon. Meredith became her Anchor. The first Anchor. Their relationship became the psychic substance that formed the chassis of the Phoenix Dragon, as strong as their trust, as powerful as their intimacy - and every other weapon on it was formed of Anna's love for her other friends and family.
If this sounds like they were falling for each other, you're not wrong - but for a host of reasons they've avoided admitting it. Among others, it is clear to Merry from the readouts of one system - Anna's with Jim Preston's, that the ANIMa symbolizes as a black hole generator where the heart should be - that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong, and that her Pilot has been terribly, terribly abused...
She ought to fix that one day.
no subject
And it's much easier to cultivate friends than pawns, something she doesn't think that her old boss James Paul Preston realized. The one great advantage of being placed in a Sansa Stark situation is that she's bright enough to know and count on being the Sansa at base. Further with a kind word and a gun than with the gun alone, after all. She prefers to be honest, but working for an authority figure she can't trust has taught her subterfuge.
Merry is an Anchor - while the other romantic leads are Sara's fellow Pilots, she's rear echelon support staff. She serves as mission control, in general and for Wing Commander Lin and prodigal son Joshua Preston-Castellano in particular (she's effectively, in the campaign/VN project I'm drawing her from, the unnamed Anchor in the published one-shot here.) The other Anchors defer to her for her superior expertise.
She hopes to win the peace - to make a better world than Before. As a black girl from Oakland she has no illusions about the nastier aspects of Earth That Was. While the others fight a war, she conspires with the other Anchors and with Anna to build a society, one more equitable then that of 20teen America, and pull Colonel Preston's junta out from under him before he notices he's been democratically overthrown.
She also acts as a quartermaster, rationing and distributing supplies. In practice, this also means she's usually on kitchen patrol - she doesn't trust anyone but Anna and the main character's boyfriend Keenan in her kitchen unsupervised, for both sanitary and supply reasons. She does enjoy cooking; she does NOT enjoy herding dishwashing cats till 11 PM and sleeping at 2 AM, and is outright irate when people try to foist other scutwork on her.
She's traditionally feminine with traditionally feminine hobbies; needlework, gardening, romance (and sci fi, and mystery) novels, a weakness for (making and eating) sweets when ingredients are available. She's not particularly fussed about her weight and would have been a foodie or a chef or a nominative determinism victim... if there was no war. The one 'masculine' outlier in her hobbies is boxing with - and spotting for - Anna, and this may be an excuse of hers to stay close to her favorite Pilot without it being gay.
Meredith is one of the five path characters and romantic leads of the VN project, who protagonist Sara Smith can entangle her life and Hopes with - although, to fix the chronic shortage of teenage lesbians at Phan-Rift (and because my Sara's at another game where she's on Keenan route), I'm taking her from a timeline where she's not involved with Sara and has not confessed to Anna.
On Meredith route (or more properly, "A Better Society" route where Sara flirts with her), she becomes Sara's princess - and it turns out that being a princess is hard work. Merry is always, always lowkey exhausted. Her back and neck is sore from a combination of standing all day, sleeping poorly, and being generously endowed... but she manages to look regal doing her work, if weary. Working in her kitchen turns to volunteering in her kitchen to spend time with her, turns to giving her tokens of esteem and backrubs and tea and sympathy and shit when did I fall in love with her. Merry is always very, and sincerely, grateful for it. Eventually they adopt "my princess/ milady" and "my knight/ Ser Smith" as pet names.
Just to shitpost, when Sara asks "Lesbians, share your wisdom" Merry offers "World is hard and cold... tiddy, soft and warm."
Character abilities:
As an Anchor, Meredith is a chaplain, navigator, and dream interpreter. Anchors are the closest things to base counselors and psychologists that the Resistance has got, and her style is a blend of hypnotherapy, cognitive-behavioral tech, and Jungian dream interpretation. She's empathic, patient, understanding - and totally willing to call bullshit when it'll help.
Her Anchor training also means she's skilled with the particular psionic sensor and monitoring equipment used by the Resistance (as a Jungian the name "ANIMa" makes her giggle, and she calls her rig's software the ANIMUS, for Alien Numina Inversion Machine Utility System), which transfers well to mundane radar and mapping technology.
As a cook and quartermaster, she knows how to properly organize, manage and ration scant resources for maximum benefit, and how to cook healthy, delicious and energizing meals - which she considers another important facet of her psychological work. She's damned proud that no one will go hungry on her watch.
She's a voracious but necessarily eclectic reader (the Resistance library is small, but growing), with a good base of contemporary culture popular with teenagers at her time and some reading in more complex works of literature. Whenever possible, naturally, I'll invent canons that don't actually exist to avoid canon puncture, but her costume does reference her beloved House Ravenclaw explicitly.
She is not a good shot, but she knows enough about firearms to not shoot anything accidentally, and she's not harmless. Just mostly harmless.
She has no overtly supernatural powers. If she does pick them up from PhanRift, her affinities will be for healing, dream-based magic, and extrasensory perception.
Inventory:
A traveller's backpack with camping supplies and suitable backpacking rations for one week.
A water bottle.
A first aid kit.
A 9mm Parabellum police issue pistol looted from the Blissed, two magazines, and 36 bullets.
A layered outfit suitable for the cold, rainy seasons of California: black raincoat over everything else/packed into her bag, flowing purple dress, Ravenclaw scarf for a sash, green and yellow jacket, orange blouse, red scarf, over black boyshorts and a strong sportsbra. Her backpack has two changes of clothes - one sensible orange tank top and jean overalls, and one black skirt and pastel-on-black All The Pretty Little Horses t-shirt featuring the Pegasus Champion of Valor, Skybiscuit.
A set of posters depicting a Ymir-class terror drone and reading:
"GIANTS NO MORE! WE CAN BEAT BACK THE ALIEN MENACE ONCE AND FOR ALL! JOIN UP AT THE TREASURE ISLAND RESISTANCE - WORK FOR ALL - FOOD FOR ALL! Meet at the Embarcadero Bart Station. DO NOT ATTACK THE MEETING SITE. We do not carry food or medical supplies and will respond to attack with OVERWHELMING FORCE."
Samples:
https://phantasmemes.dreamwidth.org/6621.html?thread=2263773#cmt2263773 - Main thread
https://phantasmemes.dreamwidth.org/6621.html?thread=2264029#cmt2264029 - Pleasantries with Asch
ACCEPTED
Additionally, if you use a secondary journal for icon space or other purposes, please respond to this comment with it so that we can get it included!
For your participation in the Test Drive, your character also receives the following items of loot;
Blanket: A blue blanket, in a material you don't recognize. It's soft and warm, though.
"WHAT THE FUCK IS FOR DINNER?!?" Cookbook: A very, uh, colourful cookbook that walks you through 50 easy recipes. It's perfect for a beginner, if the language doesn't put you off.