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.

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OOC Information

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IC Information

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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.

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APPLICATIONS

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