[OOC] Shadow Smiles (Page 2) — Roleplayer Guild

[OOC] Shadow Smiles Page 2

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Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by Redward

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Redward Merry

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@The Narrator Changes are accepted!

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by SilverPaw

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@Redward Thank you, I hope I will be able to portray her in the IC as well as I have in the CS.

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by hagroden

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Hey, so, are there any plans to start this? Because it's starting to seem like it's dead before it's even begun.

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by Redward

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@hagroden Yep! Just got some time on my hands to do the Introductory Post for Maya and Luca.

I'll be handling Eddie, sometime soon.

Sorry about the delay!

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Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by hagroden

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@Redward
Are we good to post IC, or do we need to wait until Eddie's post is up?

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by hagroden

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sorry for double post
Wanted to give everyone a heads up that IC has been posted, in case they unsubscribed.

@The Narrator@ScreenAcne@SilverPaw@jdh97
	Ey, you guys still in this?

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by jdh97

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YES, WHAT DO YOU WANT?!

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by SilverPaw

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Still in, but I'm going to need time to make a post for this. It might take until sometime next week. By the way, can/should we do the Smile-visit/transformation for our first post?

Hidden 7 yrs ago → 7 yrs ago Post by Redward

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@hagroden Yeah, everyone's free to go ahead.

@SilverPaw You can.

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Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by hagroden

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Awesome!! I'll post after dinner!!

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by hagroden

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And there's my first post, figured I'd let him marinate in death for a few hours while the others suffer from their transformation lucidly.  

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by The Narrator

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@hagroden Still here! Kind of lost what to do with my first post though.

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by hagroden

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@The Narrator
	From what I recall, we're starting about three hours before we become infected, which is the amount of time it takes for the miasma gifts from smile to infect us. So, for the most part, I believe our intro posts are supposed to be our interactions w/ smile while he delivers our "gifts."
	Could be wrong though, I'm sure Red can confirm.

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by ScreenAcne

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I'll place down some, motherfucking, mythical mathmatics either tonight or tomorrow. It's a bit on the twilight of sentient sight and my sleep has been more up and down than a arthitic camera man shot.

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by ScreenAcne

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Just mtoherfucking, put my parcel paragraphs into the postal service, kindred. It might be a little bit of a limper, I'm trying to improve my literacy language and my mastery over shit like semi-colon and colons is still a bit fickle.

Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by Redward

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I'm getting started on Eddies Introduction, right now. Should be up in a short while!

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Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by Redward

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Put up a (in my opinion) short Eddie intro. Hope it's adequate!

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Hidden 7 yrs ago → 7 yrs ago Post by Viatos

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Name: Sunday Kavanaugh

Age: 28

Human Appearance: 

Personality: Sunday is an anxious, analytical person. He suffers from a variety of nervous jitters and a compulsive need for information, and despite his extraordinarily conscientious and effective work in the noble field of cybersecurity, he has a more serious flaw as well: a tendency towards mystic obsession, a switch in his mind that sometimes trips and throws everything into sharp relief as symbols and icons and omens of some unknowable nightmare-truth slithering behind reality. It's a kind of dangerous panic he's prone to. He's happiest gathering up and working through volumes of sterile, bloodless data, and he fits most definitions of stable or functional, but every now and again, he...goes off for a while.

An infusion of Miasma-infested brain tissue'll probably sort him right out.

Occupation: Lab technician

History (Optional): Sunday had an easy childhood; his family loved him, they had wealth and opportunity, things were golden - the last of three well-bred brothers, he always seemed nervous about some unidentified concern, but other than that...not a lot to complain about. Okay, sometimes he had a little fit, he was hard to keep calm some days, but he was smart and soft-spoken and it's not like the empire hadn't already been divided up for his brothers in lions' shares. His parents picked out a quiet corner for him and expected he'd be happy there, and they were almost right, too. He started out in accounting, which went well, until one night they found him making arbitrary transactions to try and describe a numerology he'd invented and it became clear he was going to be a long-term project after all.

They moved him to data analysis, which Sunday excelled at, until his parents had to replace a second and then a third boss after he unnerved them badly enough to force the issue of continued employment. They tried discreet medications, but there was some pressure from economic rivals at the time and the risk of exposure meant curtailing any in-depth treatment. His oldest brother offered him a spot at the top of their IT department. It was an awkward first few years, Sunday had to pick up the expertise as he went along and most of his subordinates saw the signs, but he was settling. Then another incident. This was a bad one. There were arguments, fights. The word institutionalization was spoken out loud. But they weren't that kind of family, the Kavanaughs. That kind of thing didn't happen, so:

So Sunday bounced around a lot. There were relationships, which ended as badly as the work. There were - does it matter? It wasn't a great life. It was really a neurosis with "life" painted over it. Anyway, one day things changed.

He'd landed a lab tech job at a bleeding-edge medical firm under the name Blackthorne. He wasn't doing anything too terribly important himself, but he got to look at the numbers of people who were, and to him the numbers were as good as a documentary, so in a way - a quiet little way not very many people but Sunday could understand - it was all pretty exciting. Until the usual began, only...this time it wasn't the usual. This time he'd found something real - because someone, or something, was changing the numbers. Someone, or something, knew his head and where it was soft and vulnerable. They knew how to draw him out, and where everyone else in his life had seen spasms or frenzies, whatever watched Sunday gave order to his flailing limbs and made a marionette out of a madman. It's still not clear how he got through the security protocols. He had information that wasn't possible to have obtained, and he used it with surgical precision to breach containment.

Sunday ended up in a black lab himself after that.

And then Smile came, and told him if it was his brain holding him back all this time, maybe he should try another...

Infection Status: Infected

Miasma Abilities (Infected Only): 

FASHIONED CREATURES HALF MADE UP: Miasma is adaptive, revolutionary as well as evolutionary, and where its movement through a world of meat has been curtailed by iron and electricity, it seeks to overcome. Sunday is the harbinger of a strain of Infected capable of biomechanical integration: by Infecting a creature or corpse with his Miasmic strain (usually through blood transfusion) he triggers a process of rapid mutation that makes the resultant meat remarkably receptive to mechanical introductions. In layman's terms, he can hybridize Infected and machines, creating semiconscious horrors - gremlins - that bring mobility and agency to devices or resilience and weaponization to organic hosts. This power is mostly limited by time and resources: the further from default functionality and the grander in scale or complexity a gremlin, the more subsidiary materials he'll need and the longer it'll take to fashion a working result. The easiest thing to work on is himself, although unlike his Infected transformation, grafted tech and biomass aren't supernaturally concealed in human form.

Gremlins that spend at least an hour a day within a hundred feet of Sunday's Infected form don't get "hungry," but barring this opportunity to recharge they need to seek out power sources or go dormant. Any sort of electricity will do - including bio-electricity, the harvest of which is incapacitating to humans and fatal to small animals and children. Gremlins that last more than a day start developing quirks and minor evolutions beyond their original form and function. How, why, and to what extent or end are all open questions.

BY SLIGHT LIGAMENTS: With understanding comes mastery. Sunday's Infected flesh is studded with pods of boiling light, within which sacred storms howl and rage. The copper-lined nerve clusters that extend into these pods manipulate electromagnetism to send electronic signals, allow him to levitate half a dozen feet off the ground or, often more significantly, unleash precisely-targeted lightning blasts. This last ability is by default no more dangerous than the modern rifle, because Sunday's body can only hold so much power at once - though it seems limitlessly able to replenish itself, "reloading" at a bolt-action's pace - but nearby gremlins that have been appropriately modified with pods of their own provide additional containment he can fill and then draw upon. It's not the fastest weapon in the world, but it's certainly impressive.

This power has two notable side-effects. The first is that energy is energy, and Sunday doesn't really run down: he doesn't get tired and he hasn't felt hungry since meeting Smile. He isn't sure where the power comes from, but he has nightmares about it - a dark place, a laughing thing that looks like a star at first, but isn't.

The other notable side-effect is that there are certain kinds of signal Sunday can't help but send: within a few hundred feet minor malfunctions and bursting light bulbs are the order of the day, non-sentient Infected that don't share his strain suffer occasional bursts of mental static, and certain people begin to experience slightly-intrusive daydreams about Sunday's Infected form in vague, symbolic, and sometimes decidedly uncomfortable sequences. Such idle thoughts are, uniquely, as apparent to Sunday as radio chatter. He doesn't understand this side-effect either, why the marked are chosen, what it means that they're marked, what it means that he's shown.

Miasma Appearance (Infected Only): Sunday thinks of his other self as a "serpent of light," which as titles go isn't terribly accurate - the twisting, sinuous thing he becomes is loosely serpentine, and does shine with an uncomfortable radiance, but it's more of a furred cephaloinsectoid nightmare spotted everywhere with translucent boils full of alien light. Tucked up close against his underbelly, he has a bevy of delicate unfolding mantis-claws a few feet in length, of little use in combat but with impressive potential dexterity. He can slither effectively with his assorted appendages, as nimble and unpleasant to watch as a centipede.

Name: Martin Margrave, formerly Martin Warrick, sometimes the Magnificient Marovio

Age: 33

Human Appearance: Tall, dark, and handsome, Martin plays hard to the stereotypical image that screams either magician or evil vizier, depending on what sort of movies you watch. 

Personality (Optional): The showman. The charmer. The daredevil. The maniac?

Occupation: Stage magician (former?)

History (Optional): Martin majored in theatre, to the despair of his math and engineering professors - whip-smart and clever with his hands, he would have made an outstanding architect. He wanted to be a magician instead, but it turns out all the fantastical props in the world don't make up for a certain lack of stage presence and an insurmountable aversion to the slow ramp of complexity necessary to hook an audience instead of just overwhelming them from the start. He knows the backstage arts, but his work has to be front and center. He's skilled, but his career is failing.

So is his marriage; Martin may have locked in the dream of marrying his high school sweetheart, but somewhere after the early years the dream began to fade. Adrianna Lisbon-Margrave hasn't been home the last couple years, and their awkward bitterness-edged friendship has been deteriorating of late - some kind of trouble she won't disclose, something to do with her work up at Blackthorne. He'd be more concerned if he wasn't also trying to be a positive influence in the lives of Jacob and Alison Warrick, younger siblings by seven years and ten respectively, who their parents say are in trouble with a drug craze quietly sweeping NSC. Some newfangled thing called Thana or Thane, short for Thanatopsic Arcana, said to produce the same full-throttle trip as a dying brain dumping its remaining chemical load all atonce.

Maybe he'd at least have a handle on THAT, along with his stumbling career and the oncoming subway train of middle-aged loneliness and mediocrity he can feel starting to circle around him, if it wasn't for the latest complication - two unexpected visitors to his last, greatest, and most fateful performance. One was a friend of his wife, an off-duty S.C.A.R.E. operative (Martin knew her as "internal security") determined to make the most of a bad date by taking in a good show.

The other was Smile, not off-duty at all, who changed what actually wasn't a very good show into something...extraordinary. He pointed out, over the course of a movie-monster fast advance, that all these suffering people weren't really looking for Martin's help. No one suffering is. They just want to be understood. For Martin to...have a heart.

The clip's gone viral, but nobody outside the kooky conspiracy boards has bitten on the idea that a magic show might have involved an actual supernatural event - yet. Sure, it was a weird finale, but timely pyrotechnics and a little primal instinct from Martin covered up the worst of what happened for the majority of his audience.

Not so much for the operative, though. Martin was black-bagged backstage and woke up buried in the laboratory-dungeons of the Evadne Complex, full of strange urges and rippling with a power he doesn't understand. As if his life wasn't complicated enough.

Infection Status: Infected

Miasma Abilities (Infected Only): 

LUNAR OMENS: His Infected appearance is contrarian - a bulky body and wide, wedge-shaped predator's head, but its slender limbs move delicately, balancing on bone spurs like a dancer. He has help, though, in the form of a loose relationship with mass and gravity. He moves too fast - especially through the air, breaking physical laws regarding velocity and air resistance as if he'd received a state exemption - and across surfaces that not only lack obvious grip but shouldn't be able to support his weight, which is actually several times what his appearance would suggest. The selectivity of these omens make him exceedingly dangerous on the hunt for prey unaware of them, especially if that prey is not itself imbued with supernatural physicality.

CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT: Martin can consume biomass to create batlike "familiars" that are mostly bundles of teeth, wings, and tail-tacles from his body: a corpse offers enough material to refine into a single familiar. They're loosely independent and not particularly dangerous (to humans) when not directed by his will; they hunt nonhuman fauna and for bodies, whose biomass they repurpose into infected disturbing "hives" that can produce more of their number (with the advantage that hives accept piecemeal offerings; the character needs at least a hundred pounds worth of corpse all at once). While familiars are intelligent enough to avoid harm when possible, they don't threaten living humans even in self-defense - they're unwilling to endanger potential Infected hosts. They hide from Infected not of their strain, but sometimes follow them in hopes of new biomass sources, and sometimes mob non-sentient Infected who cross into a hive's "territory". Their hives begin to leak Miasma as they grow, and non-sentient Infected created by exposure or forced into extended contact (at least a day) with its Miasma adopt familiar instincts - driving Infected of different strains to destroy both familiars and hives if they can get at them.

Within about a hundred yards of the character, Martin can hear and echolocate through his familiars. Within about thirty yards, they become effectively extensions of his will. Within biting range, Martin can actually eat familiars that have been directed to consume and catalyze blood or neural tissue for him - a mouthful of blood allowing him to recover about a day's worth of memory over a few minutes' time, while a familiar that's snacked down on a whole brain offers up to a week, digested over hours. Infected with the familiar strain aren't quite so attuned: he can listen through one at a time, direct its actions, or consume it to recover memory, but all of these activities require his full concentration to perform.

RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL:  Once a hive reaches about a busload's worth of biomass, it stops producing batlike familiars and "calls" its existing brood home. If most of them make the journey, the hive devours them to spawn a single new being - a packmate - a lupine Infected whose form and relationship to the physical laws of our universe are similar to Martin's own. More alarmingly, a packmate displays sentient levels of autonomy...and the first time it consumes an entire human corpse, becomes imprinted, thereafter capable of taking that form and a week's worth of its memories. Like familiars, they can catalyze blood and neural tissue. Unlike familiars, they don't need to die to update each other or Martin - a single heavy bite will do. These creatures aren't capable of creating familiars or evolving, but the phenomenon is one whose threat is immediately obvious.

Familiars and packmates both seem compelled to sing or hum softly in the presence of a hive or their ultimate master, and this sole instinct resists all attempts at override.

Miasma Appearance (Infected Only): His transmogrified form is a monstrous sort of chiropterolupine mash-up, big, toothy, with no eyes in the usual place and too many elsewhere, winglike limbs clawed by bone spurs, and big fluffy ears. He is a fever-dream variation of a vampire werewolf.

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Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by Redward

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@Viatos I like them. Nicely done.

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Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by hagroden

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Hey, I apologize, but I'm going to go ahead and drop out from this RP. It's not really going anywhere, given that it's been up for nearly a month and only has a handful of IC posts. If you do a revamp of this, I'll definitely be interested, so please send me a message if you do.

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