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: Awe
Player age and gender: 18 / he
Any other characters in game? Not yet
no subject
Character name: Aya Shameimaru
Character canon: Touhou Project
Canon point: After Hidden Star in Four Seasons' extra scenario
Physical Description: Here's a picture. While Aya appears to be in her early-to-mid-20s, she is at least 1000 years old. She is about 180 cm tall (slightly shorter than 6 ft 0 in).
About the Character: The history of Gensokyo is, at once, only tangentially relevant to Aya's character and essential to it - Gensokyo is an isolated pocket dimension hidden in rural Japan for the continued existence of youkai, Japan's native monsters, in the face of science and other inquiries making it more difficult for them to live. By doing so, the youkai detached themselves from the collective human imagination and became able to grow and develop on their own.
As of late, Gensokyo has been beset by a number of "incidents" typically resolved by a local shrine maiden (Reimu) or a black-and-white magician (Marisa), of which Aya generally knows the details or was otherwise directly involved. She takes extensive notes of anyone she interviews whether in connection to these incidents or not, but because she does her memory is somewhat inconsistent. Recent incidents include:
- The time the whole region was covered in extremely thick red fog, and then Reimu and Marisa beat up some vampires
- The time winter hadn't subsided at all until like May, and then Reimu and Marisa and Sakuya (a maid in the employ of the aforementioned vampires) went to the Netherworld to get spring back
- The time when everyone was throwing too many parties because a hidden oni was increasing the party density
- The time the moon was replaced with a fake, so one of four pairs of characters (details unclear) artificially extended the night to get the real moon back before permanent damage could be done
- The time all the flowers everywhere started blooming without regard for what season it was, which as it turns out just kinda happens once every sixty years or so but also there were too many ghosts around because a local shinigami wasn't doing her job
- The time a couple of gods from the outside moved an entire shrine and lake into Gensokyo, on top of the mountain where Aya lives, and then struck some kind of deal with at least the Great Tengu that he apparently didn't tell anyone about
- The time the weather went haywire around everyone, and Reimu's shrine was destroyed in an earthquake twice, because a celestial got bored
- The time a geyser full of evil spirits suddenly erupted in Reimu's backyard because one of the aforementioned outside gods wanted to make a nuclear fusion reactor
- The time UFOs showed up, and then a Buddhist temple ship parked outside the village
- The time Prince Shotoku, who was secretly a Taoist and also female-identifying, got angry because her mausoleum was landed on top of by the aforementioned Buddhist temple ship
- The time when all the humans started losing hope, so all three religious leaders simultaneously go for a "please try this religion" tactic
- The time everyone's magical items went haywire and there was a big storm and an upside-down castle
- The time urban legends and other rumors spread like wildfire, and everyone is really concerned about balls
- The time the moon people launched a full-scale invasion of Gensokyo
- The time where people started taking over each other for no apparent reason
- The time different regions of Gensokyo were in completely different seasons, and it was because a couple of servants of a secret god were dancing behind people to draw out their hidden powers so that said secret god could hire their replacements
And, on a level much more specific than this, Aya knows about all this stuff, because she is, first and foremost, a reporter. Gathering material is generally close to the top her of mind in just about all situations; during an incident in which Reimu's shrine was destroyed, her response to hearing about it (from Reimu herself) is that it sounds like it would make a good news story and that she's going to investigate immediately just as soon as she's done chasing Reimu off the mountain, which is generally off-limits to humans. Her fixation on the next story is at times so severe that she can do things such as break into houses without even thinking about it. On at least one occasion when big news was happening underground, she volunteered to be a remote support for Reimu while she resolved the incident mostly just to hear everything as it was happening so she could write about it later.
The actual composition of an issue of her Bunbunmaru Newspaper is relatively straightforward. When writing it, Aya is concerned with whether or not she knows the facts of what is going on first and foremost but, consciously or not, can’t help from injecting her own view of the situation into her writing. Interviews are generally reproduced verbatim, however, and the one time she tried writing a more tabloid-style publication she accepted advertisements and outside columns, including several that were extremely morbid and didn’t seem to have a point. The tabloid was cancelled after an interview that would have appeared in it caused Aya to suspect that a Lunarian goddess with the power to invert a situation just by talking about it might abuse her writing as some sort of offensive maneuver against Gensokyo. It also includes a number of sections towards the end in which she de-embellishes and re-checks the facts of some of the articles that had been written therein, including one that looks like a scathing teardown of Prince Shotoku lifted from the coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In short, she can and does let her own biases show in her writing, even though her reporting is for the most part accurate.
As for more direct offensive maneuvers, she prefers to avoid using them. However, her general attitude about information gathering occasionally leads to confrontations. The only known time she deliberately started a fight was with someone that had used a trap to kick her out of a duel that was already in progress between them. Said rematch is also one of the few cases Aya is genuinely outmatched by her opponent even despite said opponent holding back, who surrenders in the face of Aya's tenacity anyway. It takes a few moments for Aya to accept that she wins the duel, after which she immediately starts launching into the interview she'd asked for just before it began.
Aya's personal life is largely unknown; she is on the job pretty much every time she shows up in canon, but culturally as a whole the tengu are pretty well-off and have food sources and lots of alcohol and everything. She enjoys drinking a lot, like most tengu, but she knows there's no way she could win in a drinking contest against either of Gensokyo's two resident oni, Suika (never not drunk, has a literally infinite supply of super-alcohol) and Yuugi (constantly balancing a plate of the stuff, could punch you straight to the moon if she were so inclined).
Character abilities: Aya, as a crow tengu, is an inherently magical being. She is longer-lived, stronger, and faster than a human, and in fact faster than other tengu. Supposedly, even her signature spell that involves her moving really fast, Illusionary Dominance, is still just a fraction of her top speed, not to mention her ability to maneuver effectively at that kind of speed. Her specialty in terms of magic is wind manipulation, which she uses to assist her already superhuman speed, create small tornadoes and other projectiles made of air, and, in a more esoteric use of the wind, "listen" to it to pick up rumors. Many of her attack spells have names, due to the nature of magical duels in Gensokyo; a list of these is on her Touhou Wiki page. (The "Skills" section above it is instead a list of her shot types and special moves from the fighting games she appeared in (Spell Cards themselves are supermoves)).
Spell Card dueling is always non-lethal, and she is able to hold back as much raw power as necessary to ensure this is the case. She can also supplement her wind attacks with generic magic energy bullets.
All this physical and magical strength does come with a fairly significant drawback, which is that she is especially vulnerable to mind-altering effects and possession not in terms of susceptibility but in terms of results; if something like that gets used on her it's extremely hard to recover from and might even be permanent.
More niche magical skills she has include the ability to hide and show her wings at will and the ability to make regular non-magic crows do what she wants generally (one at a time);
In terms of more mundane skills, her primary skillsets are journalism and photography. Also she holds liquor really well.
Inventory: Writing instruments, feather fan, camera, the Bunkachou (her notebook, full of ridiculous amounts of photos and notes. Her handwriting is apparently actually pretty cute.)
Samples: here are two threads
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;
-> A canvas bag from Camp St Alpine, filled with multicolored Sharpie markers. In total, there are 48, with no duplicate colors.
-> A magical sparkler that throws off gold sparks when lit. It can be reused infinitely many times.