@shylarah Creepy? Sounds like more fun! It also lets me know to get damage control and a priest on hand!
I'd be glad to have a pair of people that know each other already; sounds like you two can get some good dynamics going to make things richer and lively.
@Dulcet Oh, I should clarify. I know Rumple, but if Alys met...whatever this thing is, she probably thought it was a spider council and either wisely left it alone or tried to kill it. ^.^;; In other words, the characters don't know each other.
Oh gosh yes. Damage control would be a good idea. Ahahaha. x.x
I can understand why you'd either give them a wide berth or want to kill them! It's a bunch of politicians that don't even need to worry about looking good!
@Dulcet ahahaha, no. I am not entirely sure -- Fallen London isn't very clear on the matter -- but it sounds like it's a bunch of sorrow spiders that somehow become a single creature? So something with a nasty bite and far /far/ too many legs.
@shylarah I took a peek at the wiki quickly and saw their likeness. I don't know how you'd wind up anywhere near them, but I'm afraid that bugspray just won't cut it.
I'm quite interested in seeing what this proposal is!
Name: Saito Mamushi Online Handle: Habushu Gender: Male Age: 25
Appearance: The classic ectomorph, Mamushi looks for all the world like someone put him on a rack and stretched. Standing at 207 cms and weighing in at give-or-take 80 kgs, there is nothing about him that isn't long and lanky. Having moved past actually identifying with any reasonable form of fashion, Mamushi keeps his ink-black hair buzzed to avoid the work of a high-maintenance hair cut and spends most of his time swimming in varying degrees of heavy, black clothing. He's usually rocking a beanie of some sort with a pithy internet-culture slogan scrawled across it, the only dominating aspect of his personal style as far as his clothing is concerned. In spite of his otherwise uninteresting aesthetic his face is surprisingly expressive, with large, dark eyes and sharp cheekbones over thin, alarmingly animated lips almost always pointed some degree of down. Mamushi has cultivated a wide variety of expressions to indicate his distaste, disgust, irritation, and long-suffering weariness, all of which are swiftly and comically rendered before disappearing entirely when focused on something that truly captures his attention.
An avid fan of both body-art and rebellion, Mamushi has a number of tattoos not the least of which being the ones on his surprisingly large hands. They are intricate and intense, Japanese kanji blending into snake-like patterns that curl up and disappear beneath the long sleeves he's almost always wearing. He sports a number of piercings as well, from his thickly-ringed ears to his snake-bit lips and perforated eyebrows. He notably lacks gauges, which he thinks look stupid.
Bio: As far as Mamushi is concerned, his bizarre and sordid life began/was over when his younger sister discovered the internet.
Until then he'd been a relatively normal, reasonably awkward young man. The son of twice-married salaryman, Mamushi lived most of his young life being alternatively scolded or ignored depending on his academic performance. With his father working more hours than most people are aware it's possible to work and his mother maintaining the easy illusion that she didn't actually have a husband, Mamushi was left to his own devices and found woefully unprepared. Though at first his grades and the accompanying social status were quite good, as soon as puberty and hormonal rebellion hit it was all over. Motivation gave way to cynicism, innocence gave way to bitterness, and he became at fourteen the curmudgeon he now assumes he was always meant to be. He also began to grow considerably, taller than even the girl's in his classroom, and between that and his dropping grades he was rapidly declared 'the weird kid' and abandoned yet again by the twin devils of social mobility and adolescent awkwardness.
Not that it mattered. Who cared. Like many disaffected youth, Mamushi went through phases. He was a punk for a while, a goth for maybe a year, but in the end even that started to give way when he began to realize how fake it all was. Rebellion for rebellion's sake was as stupid as conformity for conformity's sake, and so he chose to do neither. Embracing his loner status and moving his social interaction to the internet, Mamushi began to embrace hacker culture and the anonymity it provided. Though he was skilled enough to pull of a few basic tricks and otherwise learned to manipulate the growing technology at his fingertips, in truth that too was just a matter of boredom. The only place he was anything near active was an obscure forum for hyper-realistic origami, the kind of place that the nerdiest of the paper nerds hung out. The origami community might be bigger than most people realized but it was still a niche within a niche, an elitist forum for the most esoteric of hobbies, and it was here that Mamushi became legend (or as legendary as one can be for their origami).
Saito Mamushi loves origami. He loves everything about it. He has from the moment he folded a perfectly crisp, clean paper crane to leave for his father to come home to and as far as he's concerned will until he dies. There's something magical about the neatness of it, the knowledge that from one flat plane of paper anything can emerge. Though he'd always been good enough at it to get some attention, it was only as he retreated from anything resembling a normal or reasonable life that he became truly masterful. Intensely private, he used dummy account after dummy account to ask individual questions or make singular comments before finally owning a profile and beginning to post. One after another, a slow but steady trickle, he began to make masterpieces of paper, the kinds of things that just can't reasonably be done. Christmas trees with folded needles, bowls of ramen with curling strands of steam above it. His snakes in particular were impeccable, scales and fangs and slit pupils impossibly detailed out of simple paper. A purist, all his folds are done without tools and without cutting--though he occasionally integrates more than one sheet into his work, it is his sole concession and one made rarely and always demonstratively. He has meticulously destroyed any and all attempts made to discredit his work, of which there have been a surprising amount.
While Mamushi's online life became the focus of his young existence, at seventeen his home life began to rear its ugly head once more. When his mother finally left for real after several years of affairs and indiscretions on both sides his father married again, this time a woman at the office who was every bit as obsessed with her job as he was with his. It was the social coup of the century around the water-cooler, and it meant that for the first time Mamushi was not an only child. His new step-sister Tokimi would be moving in, and that meant all sorts of trouble.
As a young Gravure idol, Tokimi was doing everything she could to get fame, fortune, and publicity at the behest of the manager Mamushi was convinced she was sleeping with even then. In an industry of young girls bound and determined to show just how sexy innocence could be Tokimi was particularly precocious, her numbers and sales small but climbing. Her life was very nearly constantly on broadcast, which meant that her new 'big brother' was for the first and most awkward time in his life thrust into a spotlight he never dreamed or wanted. Worse, it was increasingly clear that he was to be a foil to her bright and tempting-but-oh-so-innocent antics. The consummate loser with no grades, no ambition, and no prospects, he was framed quite excellently as some perverted ogre who took any and all opportunities to catch her at her most scandalous and indecent. Baited into rearing his sharp tongue and fast temper on more than one occasion, she played him expertly in her little casting game and her ratings sky-rocketed for it. She would journal about how much she loved him like the brother he basically was only to have him 'stumble in' and find her in her underwear, or 'just' getting out of the shower. It was contrived and scripted, a real-life soft-core, and her fans ate it up. They responded to the social media presence that Tokimi set up for him with everything from threats to jealousy to (most alarmingly) occasional devotion, and though he never engaged with any of them Tokimi's antics ensured that her ratings stayed high and he remained a bit performer in her play.
Mamushi steadfastly refused to embrace or accept any form of such celebrity. Disgusted by the whole affair, he retreated even further into his art and his internet life (which he kept extremely carefully off-camera). Unable to find a good job thanks to poor grades and poor ambition, unwilling to cash in on either form of his awkward internet fame, and with his parents unwilling to support him in moving out, Mamushi endures his life with Tokimi and her ever-evolving stardom as bitterly as one might imagine.
He currently works as the night clerk at a sex shop run by a pair of older lesbians. He ran across their add in an appropriately skeezy website and was pleased to discover them to be significantly less skeezy in person. They give him oranges from their tree and he makes them paper handcuffs for the holidays.
Abilities / Type of Abilities: Mamushi's abilities are at once known and unknown to him; something of an idiot-savant, Mamushi can do things with paper that really shouldn't be possible. He can fold paper knives that can cut through steel, paper shields that can stop bullets. He can twist and fold paper until it can swallow up an object like it was never there and balance tension so well that a rattlesnake's tail will shake when people walk by. In truth there's almost nothing Mamushi couldn't fold out of paper given enough time and materials, from living paper creatures to paper armaments to works of impossible, Escher-esque art. In the end, the only real limits are his imagination and his intention.
Mamushi, of course, maintains that it's simply a matter of craftsmanship. It's all just math, when you get right down to it. You just have to know your angles.
Equipment / Clothing: Mamushi arrives to the party in his trademark black, sporting a lovely black hoodie with a Harambe meme on the back and a Tool t-shirt. His jeans are suitably baggy and black, his shoes a pair of dark sneakers. He has on him his smart phone, his wallet, a good deal of assorted paper and a pocket knife.
What you were doing before you came: Before he arrived, Mamushi was folding. Having made a good deal of origami for himself, he'd never really tried to make origami for someone else even if he intended to give it to them. It's proving much harder than he expected, especially for her. What, exactly, would he make her that wouldn't be gimmicky or stupid? That she might actually treasure instead of just 'appreciate' and sit on her shelf with whatever other knick-knacks she (probably?) collected? Especially having sent her something intellectual before; would she want more of the same? Would she still like it if it wasn't so high-brow? It was a stupid idea to begin with and that hadn't changed by the time he threw his hands up and decided to leave it for now.
The invitation was a welcome distraction.
Other: Mamushi is, as one might imagine, depressed and lonely. He has no real friends aside from his employers, no real family except an absentee father and a mother who only calls when she's feeling bad about running off, and no real love life aside from some perverted internet fantasy dreamed up to get Tokimi better ratings. As much as he wants company he has no idea how to get it, much less what to do with it if he had it, and so he's taken to occasionally sending his odd little origami creations to random people who catch his attention. The latest was an English professor whose theoretical geometry lectures greatly improved his awareness of how to properly pocket extra materials within the angles of a paper--he sent her a particularly complicated folding puzzle that unwound itself from its envelope as thanks and she posted a video for the 'anonymous student who donated her new favorite piece of art' in response. It was the first reaction he'd ever gotten to one of his little cries for help, and he's currently working on sending another one--his first follow-up.
But what.
So. This is a super-bizarre character I've had in my head for a while that I (for obvious reasons) couldn't actually figure out how to fit and engage with previously. Let's see if he works for this game of yours.
@Howler OH MY GOSH. Firstly, love your writing. Secondly, love the character. <3 ...And Alys will be suitably confused because why would anyone put /writing/ on their clothing? ...might one put the words from a novel? Yes? Ooh, that would be /lovely/ if it caught on....
@shylarah Thanks on both accounts! I'm excited to see more people who know about Fallen London/Sunless Sea, I'm always surprised I haven't seen an rp of it crop up here.
@Howler Mamushi seems like he'd make an excellent foil to the others that are here so far! I also have the feeling that, given what I see of his personality, he's going to get increasingly annoyed with the company until we can hopefully find some way to send him off the deep end. Hopefully we can give him inspiration for another piece of work too.
Mamushi is APPROVED; get him in the character's tab.
@Dulcet@Howler I LIKE SENDING PEOPLE OFF THE DEEP END! Actually, Alys has been there a few times already. <3 Also literal insanity, because...well, Fallen London mechanics? ^.^;
While I've sent out a reminder to other people that have expressed interest, I'd like to know what all of you have planned for this holiday season. I understand that it can get quite busy for some people (I myself am actually going to be out of town [with access to the internet and a laptop] for the entirety of the Christmas weekend and I'll be entertaining family coming to visit over New Years) so please let me know if you're going to be doing anything so I don't start things up and then we all have to wait afterwards.
At the very latest I'm thinking of starting a few days into January (though I'll be heading back to University the first week, so it'll be busy then too.) Symbolically I think it'd be great to start at midnight, New Years, but I have no idea where everyone is so the magic of that would probably fall short.
IC post is almost done; I've redone it a couple of times while changing the Host's baseline personality up. I have a lot of free time while travelling, so it'll be here on the weekend at the latest.
@Dulcet I am... very likely going to be out a-reveling at midnight on New Years, so while I appreciate the orderliness of the symbolism I'd say you're right, that's probably not going to work quite well.
I personally suggest sooner rather than later, as I'll be careful not to keep people held up and I'd like to get a post (or two, even, gasp!) out before the holidays start properly, but that's just me. I'm happy to go whichever way the wind blows on this one.
I'll just be working the holidays. No real interrupt to my schedule otherwise, so I'll be free to write. Still working on my PC, I should have something posted soon.
@Dulcet I have some life but not that much. I have something Christmas day, but probably will be on either morning or late evening. New Year...don't think I have anything. Even when I have stuff I pop on in the morning before heading out. Like today with work. ^.^ And I can cook ideas while I'm doing other things. <3
I'll second the sooner rather than later start. I don't have much going on this holiday season. I'm typically never without phone or laptop, so my traveling isn't a limiting factor for me this year.