phantasmods | APPLICATIONS

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:

OOC Information

Player name

Player age and gender

Player Contact

Any other characters in game?

IC Information

Character name

Character canon

Canon point

Physical Description

About the Character

Character abilities

Inventory

Samples

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IC Information

Character name: Kokoro Belmont
Character canon: Otomedius
Canon point: After the true end of Excellent
Physical Description: Here normally; here transformed, and sadly, that's one of the less unfortunate battle outfits in this series.
About the Character: Imagine a world in which Gradius took place in the ancient past and various other Konami franchises were shoved into the backstory, including Castlevania, Getsu Fuuma Den, Twinbee, Busou Shinki, and a bunch of others that don't really go together. So you have a version of Earth that, long ago, was a bystander when the threat of the alien Bacterians was staved off by heroic alien Gradians, specifically the pilots of space fighter jets. Welp, that exists, and it was into that world that Kokoro Belmont was born.

As per her family tradition, she was put through rigorous training at a young age to fight vampires, demons, and anything else that might happen to show up and threaten the local people. She was always told by her older brother that the most important things were their duty and their destiny, and she grew up believing it, always doing her best to make her ancestors proud. Kokoro wasn't the greatest at everything, which only made her miserable, but she tried her best even if there wasn't any immediate threat.

(The game's gallery mode implies that Kokoro's brother is in fact a young Julius Belmont. That would require a bit of hoop-jumping to make any sense, but so does anything in this. The fanbase has run with it and matched it up with the games' main canon timeline, meaning that Julius has been MIA since Kokoro was a kid, and since that doesn't outright contradict anything Otomedius-wise, I'm keeping it.)

Then in the modern era (the 2010s on Earth, but the 8000s for Gradians), aliens called Bacterians invaded, with their weird spaceships, weirder pilots, and honestly idiotic penguin minions. Kokoro wasn't involved fighting off the first invasion wave, but there were other girls around her age who were: the "Angels" of the G-Organization, who were magical girls of a sort (and one normal kid who built her own riding machine) who channeled the mysterious "Platonic Power" and rode mechanical ship-things called Ride Vipers into battle. The Angels were in fact a group of seemingly normal high school girls (and one guy) at a school called St. Gradius Academy, and when said guy left the team to go training on his home planet, an emissary recruited Kokoro as well as Gesshi Hanafuuma, another girl from a long line of warriors, as his replacements. And thus she started high school at St. Gradius and got her own Ride Viper, called Stavros.
From there, she slowly made friends with her squadmates and started to have a lot of fun in her life. However, when the Bacterians invaded again, Kokoro went all business. She relied a lot upon the stories of her ancestors as she and the others followed the trail of Bacterians to fight them off wherever they appeared, culminating into going into space protected only by the shields around their Ride Vipers. However, just when they got somewhere, a mysterious alien woman appeared with the Bacterians, calling herself their leader, "Dark Force". Dark Force instantly wiped out the entire Earth fleet aside from the Angels. Their commander decided that the only option was to open up a hole in time and send the Angels through it.

From there, Kokoro and company warped to a Bacterian base in a time when Dark Force was just a child. Using Bacterian defector Tita Nium's access codes, they were able to get inside, and from there they progressed into the depths of the base. Kokoro discovered that in the centre of the otherwise futuristic space base was actually a stone castle that, she commented, bore similarity to Dracula's. This is never explained and I'm not even going to try. Dark Force reveals that, even as a child, she's the leader of the Bacterians and very powerful, and she takes them on in her own Ride Viper, called Black Viper, and escapes; when they give chase, she reappears in a giant mech called Death Bringer. The Angels still beat Dark Force, and they go through the time portal again to get back to a version of the present where everybody isn't dead.

Except that neither is Dark Force. The kid survived and followed them through the portal, and she attacks them one last time, flying through the air with no plane or mech to speak of. The Angels are not impressed, and they defeat her for the last time... presumably. After all, Dark Force reveals, she will continue to exist in some form for as long as humans do. Anyway, the Angels go triumphantly back to Earth and decide to live their lives happily. Kokoro is shown smiling and having fun in the end, but her story isn't over; in the epilogue, she is seen approaching Dracula's castle on her own quest.

Kokoro is a person who's gone through a lot of work to get to where she is. She trains hard every day to live up to her family's legacy because that's what she's always been told is the only way for her to live. She does believe in the reasons that they've always fought -- protecting the people, preventing anyone else from going through the torture that her ancestors went through -- but for her, front and centre is simply that this is what she is supposed to do. Kokoro always tells the other Angels (and more often, tells herself) that fighting is both her duty and her destiny.

This pushes Kokoro to be very stoic and serious on the job. There are missions and threats, there are allies, enemies, and civilians, and that's it. Though they don't interact a lot, she doesn't seem to be as suspicious of Tita as others were in the beginning, and on the flip side, when T. B. Rika reveals herself to have been a Bacterian spy and everybody else is shocked and reluctant to fight her, Kokoro simply says that Rika attacked the city and has to be dealt with. That's that. She barely even reacts when Dark Force wipes out the entire human fleet. Everyone around her is stunned, most of them are crying, but Kokoro muses that this must be the destiny she's been dealt.

She isn't always like that, though. Kokoro may turn off her emotions for work, but when there's no threat to the world around her, she's a perfectly ordinary girl. She befriends the other Angels and has fun with them, doing everything from going to the school festival to karaoke night to going to the hot springs late at night so the group can have the whole place to themselves. She only looks allergic to fun when fun is not what they're supposed to be having.

Kokoro is also pretty hard on herself, going back to the huge expectations her family has for her and that she has for herself. She gets really embarrassed and judges herself over small things like screwing up in gym class, even if nobody else really cares. She does. Who ever heard of a vampire hunter tripping over a jump rope? She takes comfort in things going the way they're supposed to, because then she knows how to deal with them.

Secretly, Kokoro does just wish she could be normal. However, she doesn't fixate on that. She knows very well that it's impossible, and whenever she can, she puts it out of her mind. This is why, instead, she fixates on being Just Like Her Ancestors. She does wonder, though, if she can live normally after her own story is done.

Character abilities: Kokoro is one of the few human Angels, so she doesn't have tentacle hair or shoot lasers from her fingers, but here's what she does have.

-On foot, Kokoro is able to use a variety of weapons. Her weapon of choice is her whip, but she also has holy water, which she throws in bottles like grenades, and throwing axes. She has no shortage of storage, either -- thanks, video game hammerspace!

-Kokoro uses "Platonic Power", which no one really understands in canon but allows her to transform into her Angel outfit (which includes a communicator headset to call Operetta and her teammates! But there's no signal here.) and use a Ride Viper. Her Ride Viper is called Stavros, and her Platonic Power allows it to run and provides a shield around her (albeit far from a perfect one; she can and will still get hit when shot at enough) to protect her from enemy attacks and environmental hazards. She can even breathe in space with this.

-I should elaborate on a Ride Viper's actual basic capabilities. It can fly, withstand extreme heat and cold (they go into an active volcano and into Antarctica and everything's fine, though a lot of that can be attributed to the shield when Platonic Power is used), and go into and out of space. They're heavily based on the old Gradian fighter ships, though much smaller and just barely surround the pilot.

-Stavros' basic weapon loadout is unique to Kokoro and no one else can use these weapons (not even Esmeralda, Ms. Walking Armoury). Aside from the basic rapid bullets, they all mirror the weapons she uses on foot; she has a beam whip, which travels in front of her to strike at enemies, she can toss holy water and throwing axes, and she fires cross-shaped lasers. If gameplay is any indication (she's recommended for advanced players), most of her weapons also have a terrible learning curve, so she's had a lot of practice to use them well. ...Usually. She's still prone to fits of clumsiness.

-She also has only one Option (a small drone floating around her Ride Viper that can fire at enemies); it is called Trigon. It fires in the opposite direction of Kokoro's movement, so it's good for firing above, below, or behind her, and when upgraded enough (in the game, this is done by levelling up), it can fire in two directions. At level 1 and 2 it fires bullets, and at level 3 it fires twin lasers.

-Stavros can also be fitted with a number of other weapons, like pulse lasers, guns, and boxing gloves (not even kidding), instead. Kokoro cannot upgrade her Ride Viper herself, so if she did regain any upgrades, she'd just have parts sitting around and nothing to do with them, and her basic weapon loadout works well enough for her anyway.

-Platonic Power also enables Kokoro to use her Grand Cross -- an attack that manifests as a giant glowing cross that hits anything in its path. She calls it "Lightning Sword" and it acts as her Platonic Break (special attack). It appears horizontally instead of vertically like her ancestors' versions of the ability did, because she's from a shmup and not a metroidvania, so it's best suited for enemies directly in front of her and at short distances above or below.

There's no shortage of gameplay videos to see these for yourself. In this one, in the first stage alone she begins with basic bullets and then proceeds to pull out Beam Whip, Holy Water, Lightning Sword, and Trigon all before the boss. I'm bringing her in without her Ride Viper, so she'd only be able to use the on-foot weapons and the basic Platonic Power stuff (transformation, Lightning Sword) until she gets it back.
Inventory:
-Bracelet that sends alerts (or would if there were a signal to other worlds) and allows her to transform.
-Her basic physical whip. (The beam whip is not included as it's part of Stavros's weapon loadout.)
-A hammerspace full of throwing axes and holy water, she's not storing anything else.

Samples: Testdrive toplevel and some assorted threads.

Thank you and welcome to Phantasmal Rift! The mods will handle all the behind the scenes stuff for you - all you need to do is join

phantasmalrift,

phonetasmal and

phantasmemes, and then head over to the OOC Intro post! You may also wish to join the Discord server if you haven't already! Everything you need to know immediately upon game entry is here at the Welcome Post!

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;

Ruff and Tuff Plate Set: A set of five plates, each featuring a different picture of the same cute, cartoony dog. He's got a goofy look on his face.
Summer Dress: A plain, sleeveless summer dress in white. Perfect for beating the summer heat.

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APPLICATIONS

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