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

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!

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OOC Information

Player name: Bramble

Player age and gender: 28 / Nonbinary / they/them

Player Contact:

bramblepatch, discord bramble#6628

Any other characters in game? Sawbones Jetshard

IC Information

Character name: Sonja Klee

Character canon: Fallen London (blank slate player character)

Canon point: The in-game date is April 1896; it's four and a half decades after London was stolen, and the current Lord Mayor of London is the supposed Tomb Colonist Feducci. As a character, Sonja is approximately mid-late game; she's progressed through as much of the Heart's Desire ambition storyline as has been released, and has acheived several other high-level plot milestones.

Physical Description: [An illustration + face claim is Camren Bicondova]. Sonja has recently turned 27 and at 5'2" is of average height for a woman of her time period. She has spent the past eight years living underground and studying things man was not meant to know, and she looks it; her already naturally fair complexion is very, very pale, and her curly, light-brown hair is both going prematurely silver and worn cropped very short for a late-19th-centry woman owing to the risk posed by frequent Correspondence-related hair fires. She does not typically wear cosmetics, and tends toward dark circles under her eyes. Occasional, but not as occasional as would be wise, contact with the godlike entity known as Storm has turned her eyes the mottled grey of stormclouds.

She prefers dark-colored, plain clothing, usually in brown or shades of blue and purple, and while she has no personal objection to donning trousers for the sake of practicality when undertaking strenuous work, she prefers period-appropriate women's clothing for everyday wear and when trying to make a good impression. She favors amber jewelry. Her hands and forearms are often stained with ink and speckled with minor cuts and burns, and she has two tattoos, although neither is typically visible when she's dressed - the likeness of a Rattus faber bandit on her upper right arm, and her own name, in script embellished with twining ivy, on her left hip. Most of her major scarring is likewise hidden beneath her clothes; while liberal application of the Neath's various questionably-safe curatives has prevented many of her serious injuries from scarring, she does bear the lasting marks of a number of wounds to the torso which should have been, and temporarily were, fatal, and the scar of a large dog-bite on her left forearm.

About the Character: A note on the world of Fallen London: while in our world, Prince Albert died of typhoid fever in December of 1861, in Sonja’s world things went a little differently, to the tune of “capitalist space-bats, in cooperation with a lovesick and frightened minor cosmic horror living under the earth, offered Queen Victoria the opportunity to save her consort’s life in exchange for the City of London.” Victoria accepted, becoming the Traitor Empress of the city of Fallen London. Albert survived, after a manner of speaking. London was relocated to the vast subterranean cavern known as the Neath, as the Echo Bazaar’s Fifth City - part of its research into the nature of love in a millennia-long attempt to draft a conciliatory message to its social superior and former lover, the Sun. Much of the oddness of the Neath can be traced, directly or indirectly, to the fact that the Sun and the other Celestial Judgments cannot see what’s going on down there and put a stop to it.

And the rest of the British Empire... persisted, without its capitol, although somewhat diminished in power and influence on the world stage. Sonja was born March 11, 1870, to an upper middle-class family in Salisbury, England. Her father was a Prussian expatriate and former Lutheran clergyman; after the publication of several writings that were fringe by the standards of pretty much any contemporary Christian sect, the Reverend Klee had been “encouraged” to leave his position. After emigrating to Britain, he restricted himself to secular philosophical scholarship and married Sonja’s mother, a schoolteacher. Sonja, born nearly a decade after London’s Fall, was a bright, inquisitive girl, and excelled academically throughout her childhood. She took an early interest in theology, the occult, and the nature of the soul, an interest which her mother tolerated with some concern and her father actively encouraged until his death in 1885. If anything, this loss only spurred her deeper into her darker interests, and at some point in the next couple of years, she began to chase rumors of a card game called the Marvelous, played for the stake of the player’s soul and potentially paying out their heart’s desire – and honestly, Sonja was as interested in the “betting one’s soul” angle as in so abstract a reward. According to the rumors, the game was played in the Neath. Although contact between the Surface and the Neath was limited, there were still a few known points of entry, and in 1888, at the age of 18 and without her mother’s knowledge, Sonja made her way to Italy and from there down the intricate locks of the Cumaean Canal and across the dark Unterzee by steamer to London.

Her early years in London were less than glamorous. Sonja took work and housing where she could find it, dabbling in poetry, pest control, and petty crime to keep a roof over her head, more or less identifiable – if heavily mushroom-based – food on the table, and books on the shelf. She was frequently in trouble with the authorities during this time, and did several short stints in New Newgate Prison. She also was less than cautious of her physical and mental health; death does not work quite right in the Neath and Sonja quickly learned not to fear the occasional stabbing, poisoning, or fall; the Neath’s proximity to the dream-realm of Parabola, along with the influence of certain entities found in the Neath, makes dreams potent and dangerous, and Sonja was sometimes hospitalized in the Royal Bethlehem Hotel with the dissociative condition known delicately as “a state of some confusion” among Londoners. And occasionally sheer social disgrace drove her to temporary exile in the Tomb Colonies, where those too frequently dead and as a result too physically deteriorated for polite society dwell. Sonja wrote to her mother a few months after reaching London, although only after she’d returned from the dead for the first time, a transgression against natural Law which would render sunlight instantly and irreversibly fatal to her. She was now a permanent resident of the Neath, for better or for worse.

The connections she made in those early years with London’s least and strangest would remain strong even when her fortunes improved, for Sonja has a soft spot for oddballs and a loyal streak a mile wide – she befriended the gangs of wild, half-mad urchin children who live in London’s twisting streets and the intricate ropewalks of the rooftops known as the Flit, the bizarre, squidlike Rubbery Men who trade in Deep Amber and are frequent targets of xenophobic violence from Londoners, and the intelligent, mechanically skilled rats of the neath, known politely as Rattus faber but more commonly as L.B.s. And she began her association with Hell’s Brass Embassy and with the Devils that work within.

Sonja was, and remains, less comfortable around most of the human factions of Fallen London; bohemians and society types are entertaining and spies and criminals are useful, but she feels no real allegiance or fondness for most of them. She’s perfectly willing to play the constables and the church for her own benefit, and does a pretty good job of charming them, but privately she’s both cautious and contemptuous of them.

She took easily to the more relaxed mores of a city existing at the whims of an entity that wants desperately to understand love, and after nearly a decade in the Neath, Sonja is notably promiscuous and hedonistic, pursuing partners of all genders and multiple species. Her longest-standing sexual relationship is her open “marriage” to a Rubbery – a physically and emotionally intimate relationship, but not perhaps a romantic one by usual human standards.

Eventually, she began serious study of the Correspondence, the language of the Judgments, and the history of the Neath before London’s Fall. At about the same time, she started working more closely with the urchin gangs, using them as a support network as she established herself as a minor trickster and con-artist. When her exploration of the ruins of the Forgotten Quarter lead her to the Cave of the Nadir, a wellspring of the color of purple darkness called irrigo which causes forgetfulness, she shared that knowledge with the urchins. As her scholarship became more esoteric, she began attracting more attention from the Brass Embassy, and her work shifted from the petty mischief to the darker and more dramatic showmanship of a street conjurer with the support and backing of Hell’s agents.

1891 saw several turning points for Sonja – she finally discovered reliable information on the Marvelous, and began the laborious process of convincing former players to meet for another round. It would take her a further four years to track down all of the players. Some she finds sympathetic and now considers friends and allies, such as the mad playwright-turned-beggar-king Tristam Bagley (also called the Topsy King), the Manager of the Royal Beth (who, thousands of years before, had been the king who naively sold the First City to the Masters), and the Bishop of St. Fiacre’s (secretly one of the monstrous shapeshifters known as Snuffers, but a good fellow for it). Others she has less patience for – Mr. Pages (a Master of the Bazaar), the Deviless Virginia (an archeological rival), and the Cardsharp Monkey (a monkey that plays cards). She now waits, impatiently, on word of the venue in which the game is to be played.

The other major turning point of this year was that Sonja, in an unwisely unguarded moment, allowed a Quiet Deviless of her very close acquaintance to take her soul.

Sonja believed, and still believes, that a person is fully within her rights to sell her soul. In her case, though, she was seduced into it, and quickly found that soullessness did not suit her. When confronted, the Quiet Deviless admitted to having already traded it away – it was at least probably still in circulation in the city rather than having been delivered to Hell. After a couple of months of feeling dully sorry for herself, she set out to investigate London’s illicit soul trade, eventually tracking down her own soul in the possession of an illegal soul-poacher, or spirifer. In the process, she discovered and began working with the church’s Committee for Vital Restitution, an organization devoted to reuniting the soulless with their souls. This association did not end with her own recompletion, and while Sonja remains generally apathetic or mistrustful toward much of the church’s activities, she is to this day an active and productive member of the C.V.R.

However, the ordeal did not actually do much to sour her opinion toward and relationship to the Brass Embassy; she still feels warmly toward many individual devils (though perhaps a bit chilly toward the one who Abstracted her) and is generally supportive of Hell’s recent overthrow of its nobility. Even as she committed herself to her work with the C.V.R., she also deepened her professional connections to Hell; a year later, she would persuade a priest to renounce his vocation as part of her initiation into the Counter Church. (The parallel to her own family history does not escape her.) Serving as a Crooked Cross, she doesn’t consider herself to be working for Hell as much as with Hell, quietly undermining the authority and influence of the church in London. As a Crooked Cross, she uses the title of Advocate - as in, Devil's Advocate, although she leaves the first bit implicit.

Her great passion, though, is her academic work; with the backing of the radical academics of the Dilmun Club, she’s embarked on a number of scientific voyages in the southern reaches of the Unterzee, as well as numerous visits to Polythreme, where everything is alive. Her major focus is theosophy, the study of the nature of the divine, souls, and sapience; her discoveries about the nature of the creatures she shares the Neath with have by now pretty much demolished her belief in traditional Christian theology. She is deeply fond of the oddities that can only exist in the Neath – creatures that could only arise out of sight of the Judgements, such as Snuffers and Clay Men, and beings who have undergone almost unthinkable transformations in their time in the neath, such as the Manager of the Royal Bethlehem (once the king of the First City) and the Third City tomb colonists of Tanah-Chook.

Her studies often become far more personal than is really safe. She over the course of several years cultivated her dreams of the sky and pagan rituals until she successfully invited Storm, the Unterzee’s god of retribution and foul weather and the Bazaar’s warden, into her dreams. She has worked closely with the Professor Emeritus of Infernal Rarefactions at Benthic College, feeding terrible secrets into the Truthbreaker Engine until even more terrible revelations are produced. She’s visited Flute Street, the haven of Rubbery-kind far below London, and occasionally she has allowed them to perform minor alterations on her with their flesh-crafting devices – although nothing that has persisted more than a few weeks after the treatment. She also has stumbled on the beginnings of lore about Mr. Eaten, the lost Master, often enough to know that she does not wish to look deeper into the matter – she does have a shred of self-preservation left.

Sonja currently lives as a voluntary guest – rather than an involuntary patient, having learned to better manage her mental health, albeit occasionally by indulging in alcohol, laudanum, or stranger neathy intoxicants – in a palatial suite at the Royal Beth. She continues a close alliance with the Urchins, supporting several of the gangs directly and also running an orphanage for those kids who are homeless in the city by circumstance rather than choice or close association with Storm. Most of the adult company she keeps is varying degrees of eldritch or mad; the sane and mundane tend to get hurt in her company.

Sonja still has no idea what boon she would claim, should she play and win the Marvelous.

Character abilities:
An Extraordinary Mind: Sonja is a highly educated and deeply perceptive and observant woman, and is well-known for these qualities in those areas of Fallen London where these skills and abilities are most highly valued. She has published several volumes of scholarly work, particularly in the fields of theosophy and cryptopaleotology, as well as a number of collections of poetry and epic poems, and has made occasional forays into other forms of both fiction and nonfiction writing.

A Scholar of the Correspondence: Mortals are not meant to read the complex, idiosyncratic ideographs of the language spoken by the celestial Judgements. Even safely hidden away beneath the earth, the symbols will burn or melt most surfaces they're inscribed on (lead tablets can bear them, for a while) and often cause physical and metaphysical damage to the reader (severe nightmares and burnt hair are ubiquitous among correspondence scholars). Many symbols may have profound psychological effects even on uninitiated viewers. Sonja has made a systematic study of the correspondence and can read and write many of the common symbols as easily as she reads and writes english, with only occasional fires. She's also reached the point in her studies where she is fast running out of easily accessible, reasonably safe primary sources in the city, and had started researching alternate sources of correspondence sigils - the wind and waves of the Unterzee, the anatomy of certain neathy creatures, and her own dreams.

Lucid Dreaming: Sonja is frequently able to recognize when she is dreaming, to take purposeful action within the dream, and to remember her dreams clearly upon waking. She prefers not to take actions that will derail or disrupt a dream unless she believes herself to be in serious psychological or physical danger. Being Stormy-Eyed, she has a particular sense for the internal logic of dreams having to do with weather and the sky, although taking actions that follow said logic actually interferes with the lucidity of her dreaming - when she embraces What the Thunder Said, she tends to get carried away.

Polyglot: In addition to her knowledge of the Correspondence, Sonja is fluent in English and German, conversational in French and Loamsprach, the language spoken by the Clay Men, and is adept at interpreting the speach and sign-language of the Rubbery Men but has difficulty reproducing either aspect of their language due to her human vocal limitations and lack of tentacles. She understands Khaganian, the language of the Fourth City and its descendents, with limited accuracy.

Poison tolerance: During her time in the Neath, Sonja has built up a tolerance to various mushroom-based toxins, including but not limited to those found in the fly agaric mushroom - mushrooms are a dietary staple in many parts of the Neath, including London, and also have largely supplanted fruit as the basis for winemaking. There are many, for lack of a better word, vintages of mushroom wine that are broadly safe for human consumption, but Sonja also enjoys the occasional tipple of distilled spirits that would kill most humans.

Sleight of Hand: Although she's moved on to more rarified professional work, Sonja retains the skills in legerdemain and pick-pocketing that she developed while working as a trickster and a conjurer.

Parkour!: Sonja's spent enough time navigating the rooftops and ropewalks of the Flit and the ruins of the Forgotten Quarter that she's confident of her footing, at speed, on most terrain that is not actively attempting to eat her.

Combat: Although she generally prefers to go around a conflict rather than through it, Sonja knows her way around both knife-fighting and light gunplay. In a pinch, she'll fight barehanded, but she really prefers not to.

Inventory:
Sonja arrives wearing: a relatively unremarkable 1890s-era women's walking suit, sturdy boots, and a pair of goggles with irrigo-stained lenses (worn on top of her head). She carries a ratwork derringer in a concealed holster up her sleeve.

She carries a slightly scuffed gladstone bag containing: several notebooks and document folders contaning information that would be potentially valuable in London, ranging in value from cryptic clues and map scraps to a few extraordinary implications and something that probably counts as legitimate blackmail material against a public figure (naturally, all of these are probably of negligible value here). A brass case of calling cards. A file containing half a dozen infernal contracts, none of them hers. An "illicit volume of unexpectedly racy fungal-themed poetry". A roll of carnival tickets. Approximately 10 echoes in mixed bank-notes, rostygold, and nevercold brass. A purse of golden deep amber, a somewhat smaller purse of reddish warm amber, and a single nodule of deep red pulsating amber. A black half-mask of the variety known as a sneak-theif's mask among London's underground. A keyring holding a wide variety of keys of different sizes and materials. A patent scrutinizer magnifying lens. A bottle of muscaria brandy - a mushroom-based alcohol toxic to the incautious human, although she's long since built up a resistance. A bottle and a half of F. F. Gebrant's Tincture of Vigor. Her Dilmun Club badge, the lapel pin which marks her as a member of that society of radical academics. Her shepherd's timepiece, the signature pocketwatch which marks her as an agent of the C.V.R. Her crooked cross, the vandalized holy symbol which marks her as a clergywoman of the Counter-Church.

Accompanying her - sometimes on a lead, but intelligent and well-behaved enough that Sonja often lets her walk freely - is Electra, her rubbery hound - a creature something like a largish scent-hound made out of a squid. Or perhaps a dog made squidlike; based on the hound's observable behavior and reactions to her attempts to communicate (like many creatures of the Neath, the dog is intelligent enough to comprehend human speach, although like most rubberies, she's not physiologically equipped to respond in kind), Electra seems to be somewhat more canine than rubbery in psychology. She's a sweet, loyal dog if, like most creatures of rubbery-kind, rather melancholy.

Samples: [In Which the Inconvenient Advocate Arrives in the Fissure And Brings Her Dreams With Her, In Which the Advocate Meets an Unusual Zee-Monster

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!

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;

-> A blue and orange sleeping bag, sized for an adult (though perhaps not a large adult). Packed in a travel bag with "CARVER" written on it in black sharpie.
-> A pair of white boots, coming up nearly to the knee, with blue lights running around the top that glow constantly. There's more than a bit of a heel to them when you actually put your feet in.

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