OC App Sample

[cityship]

Character's Name: Roxana Schreiber
Character's LJ: toariversodeep
Character's canon: n/a - OC

Brief personality outline of your character:

Roxie is a very smart and educated girl, almost disturbingly so for her age; she could easily pass basic and some intermediate college classes despite her irregular schooling. Her social education, though, hasn't exactly kept pace—she easily gets frustrated with poorly-educated or "dumb" people, and her behavior in general often tends to be annoyingly abrasive when it isn't wallflower-subtle.

A lot of this is overcompensation for the fact that she's basically very insecure: when she does decide that something is the right course of action, or that someone is worth trusting, she usually latches on to an unhealthy extent. She might change her opinion later, especially in the face of evidence contrary to her favored mindset, but this doesn’t keep her from fixating on something else instead. She’s rare to call out these judgements, though, so it wouldn’t be hard to see her as unpleasantly wishy-washy. Before flipping her judgement, she tends to act totally self-secure about it, even if she’s having internal doubts.

Despite all this, she does occasionally make friends, usually when the stress gets enough that her attempted facade of “smart, sophisticated adult-lite” breaks down and she reveals some of the pain and vulnerability that near-constantly haunts her—well, when she does so in an endearing or pitiable manner, anyway, rather than merely throwing a fit or doing something else unlikeably childish. This doesn’t really happen intentionally, though, and she tends to shy away from associating with other kids anywhere near her age unless they display the same sort of advanced education that she does (and then she usually ends up butting heads with them over something stupid anyway).

Brief history and background of your character:

Roxie, age fourteen-and-a-half, has rotated through an assortment of foster homes since the age of seven, when her single-parent mother was institutionalized for severe mental illness. The girl was, from a young age, quiet, intelligent, and very perceptive, even if she seemed to be lost in her own little world sometimes. This wasn't always a good thing, though; she didn't do well in school, either being ahead enough of things that she was given make-work or almost hopelessly behind because she thought a subject wasn't worth studying. This only added to the issues in the homes she was placed into—often she'd be almost painfully independent and judgmental, and at the same time seem almost preternaturally intelligent for her age. Most of the homes she was rotated out of within six months to a year because the foster parents found her too precocious or annoying or simply disturbing.

Once, at age ten, she was sharply beaten by latest foster father after critiquing his poor command of his finances. To her caseworker, she sharply denied that anything untoward had happened. Shortly afterward, a severe fire burned down the foster family's home; if Roxie's caseworker had any suspicions about the way Roxie had managed to be on the other end of town and get herself into the custody of social services shortly thereafter, they were never aired, but then again he was only a short span from retiring, and her case was quickly transferred to a different agent.

A little while after her thirteenth birthday, though, Roxie was placed into the home she's been in since. These foster parents were a married pair of university professors. While there was a somewhat uneasy acclimation period, they kenned to her far more quickly than any of the others she'd lived with—and viewed her strangeness not as something to be bludgeoned back into line, but as a challenge to be adapted to. While they never really grew close, they did slowly become comfortable around each other, and the two adults frequently found excuses to pull Roxie from school for museum visits or whatever else they thought would be more genuinely educating.

It was three nights after her fourteenth birthday that something very strange happened: waking up from a muddled, befuddling dream of giant snakes and star-filled skies to find a doorway forged of brass and lead standing in the middle of her room. After scavenging a few things from the house for supplies (her foster parents seemed very solidly asleep, strangely) and putting on sturdy clothes, she stepped through. A step past, she found herself in a dark serenade of stars and galaxies; a few more, though just trying to comprehend it lost all sense of distance, and she found herself in a grand court. She had been chosen, the night god there told her, to defend her world and beyond it, if she would accept the position. His grip was loose, for dreams and epiphanies were a thing of subtle guidance and there were many, many worlds to watch over, with the enemies of all that would have free thought always creeping in at the edges.

Roxie accepted the offer, and thereafter drifted a grand reception that had her introduced to the other champions of her world—older, she noted, but none quite staid or mature. The party-cum-introduction flowed through the night... and after drifting to sleep, exhausted from the night, Roxie awoke in a field near her home, clutching a small silver bell. The incident was written off as just a particularly odd case of sleepwalking, but the girl soon found that she could do amazing things with the bell by striking just the right notes to twist the mind or by building the noise into a bone-shattering crescendo.

And then the missions started coming to her in dreams. With the blinders torn away from her, Roxie could see the bone-white spinner-things hiding in stolen, disguised flesh. Eliminating the first was the hardest. The action took only a moment, a swing of a resonating silver club that knocked it off balance, and then again and again and again, splattering it into the ground and she realized she was screaming and the stolen blood and shredded white silk-strands and fragments of tendons had spattered across her and she spent hours sobbing in a dark corner of an abandoned building...

It slowly got easier, a little at a time, to scrub the horrible feelings out of each assignment, as Roxie scavenged artifacts from the defeated outsiders and found the time to step out of the world into the neighboring ones to find strange new experiences and train with those fellow champions she came across. She never managed to meet a fellow of her own world, which didn't disturb her—after all, with such a wide geographic area, they could well be on the other side of the globe.

And it's here, about six months into her tenure, that the meatship abduction happens.

Sample post:

One-two, one-two, one-two, one-two-three, one-two, one-tw—She stops. She turns. Her tongue has been making a pointless little popping noise, but it pauses now as she traces the ridges of the wall with a palm. She shuffles a foot as she moves forward and back. A murmur: "It's longer here." She pulls the bell on its silver chain from around her neck and strikes the side. A tone rings out as pure as a summer day, and the meatflesh of the wall shudders; the girl shudders too, head twisting to the side.

"There's a passage," she says, and then, "Why am I talking to myself?"

A moment's pause, and then she darts down the hallway, looking for someone, anyone to tell about it.

Superhuman abilities and such:

Roxie is physically augmented in a way that suggests she may not be entirely human anymore. She has a literally inhuman capacity for raw damage; in most cases, she isn't really 'hurt' as much as 'disabled', unable to fight effectively while her bones and muscles knit themselves back together in a disturbing, gory display. She's much stronger than she looks, verging from a well-trained adult human to a low-superhuman depending on how far she strains herself—though doing so tends to damage her, the extra effort shredding back through muscles not designed to support that kind of thing. (The most she's done, so far, is lift a small car—though that left her overstrained and unreadily weak for a good week afterwards.) She has sharp reflexes, like those of a well-trained soldier—though it's entirely an inherent response, as she's had only the barest amount of formalized training. Her senses are sharper, too, and she's been able to perform primitive echolocation or track people or things by scent if the environment isn't too overwhelming.

As a chosen of Shyama the night god, Roxie's senses pierce the disguises of his sworn enemies, the Cho—as well as anything else that would hide in and control the flesh of men. She can't lend this ability to anybody else, though. Being one of the night god's chosen also lends her a metaphysical status something like a high priestess. This normally doesn't affect temporal matters much, since he doesn't intervene in the world directly, but she is a perfectly lucid dreamer, and can even project her consciousness in sleep (or meditation) into the world or, sometimes, the dreams of others. She regularly communes with her deity, or tries to, though he sometimes doesn't answer the call.

Roxie's main abilities—the ones that reach past just "squish things" or "get orders from head honcho"—come from her panoply of magical doodads and whatsits, many of which she's stolen from those Cho she's killed or defeated, and the few remaining besides her silver bell she's cooked and hewn together out of primitive alchemies.

Quite a few of these act as basically magical (and strange) versions of military or utility equipment: marbles that produce explosive light and then painfully deep darkness; salves that bind over wounds or reknit damage in inanimate things; crystals that produce light or distracting noise; parcels of waybread that can sustain a full-grown man for a day with one bite; candies that temporarily transform the eater into a small animal; and so on. Most of this not-particularly-special sort of stuff she has a small but reproducible supply of, since given enough time she can cook up new cycles, though it's something of an obtuse and frustrating process.

The greatest of her 'main' artifacts is her silver bell. It can sublty warp the minds of those who hear it ring, though this isn't infallible; it can produce shriekingly resonant tones that tear through things in its path, though this isn't as physically powerful as Roxie herself; and it can transform into a long, gleaming silver morningstar that hits more solid than iron and rings with each impact in a way that tears at the concentration and consciousness of whoever it hits. More mundanely, too, the bell can produce an incredible symphony of notes at will, enough for a full set of instruments and much louder than its small size would suggest.

On her left index finger Roxie wears a simple brass ring that can produce invisible geometric planes of force that can deflect blows or other things. They aren't unbreakable, but they're strong (tougher than her, though she hasn't tested the full extent), which is why she uses it—and though they normally last for only a moment, Roxie can make them last longer by channeling her energy into the ring. (The result of the extra strain on her can be kind of nasty, though.)

Around her head, when she goes on a mission—for it's rather noticeable—she has an ivory-and-silver circlet to wear. With it, her eyes cloud over with blackness; she can see in the dark as well as she can in the light, and she can manipulate local light and darkness, making shadows cloud over light sources or draining the dark enough to make an area lit with painful bone-white brightness. She often uses this to pull darkness speckled with night-sky stars around herself, disguising herself to any mundanes. (None of these abilities help much against the Cho, who have other ways to sense than eyes.)

These aren't the only things she has—they're just the ones that stand out most. She has other magical odds and ends, but their uses tend to be much more situational and with more negative aspects. Some examples:
- A skeleton key that opens any purely mechanical lock (whether or not it has a keyhole), but only when fed with a drop of innocent blood.
- A nine-volt battery that when touched to someone's temple gives a sharp shock, giving a temporary bewildering double vision that can see ghosts and other immaterial things, but inducing a lasting and unpleasant set of migranes.
- A parchment map leafed in brass and gold that displays a metaphysical map of the local region. With a few lucky guesses and enough time to cross-index, it can be used to step through the weak points of reality into bordering continuums—but it can't force anything open, and these verges are often in inconvenient places. Plus, hopefully there aren't any unpleasant bordering planes that one could accidentally step into...
- An acoustic guitar that's mundane in every way except for being completely unbreakable. Also, the strings occasionally weep blood.

Non-superhuman special abilities of note:

Besides being just plain smart for her age (but not impossibly so), Roxie is pretty good with occult subjects in general. She can name off descriptions of cryptozoological creatures, or come up with the supernatural significances of assorted plants and animals and such off the top of her head. She's a pretty good ritualist—she hasn't been able to give any of it any real power past what magical items she can brew up, but she could probably impress a mundane practicioner of the supernatural with her knowledge, and she'd be able to defend against magic or supernatural creatures that "follow the rules" if she had the right ingredients at hand. Also, she's a pretty good musician, though having magical musical instruments is what pushes her out of amateur-grade.