@Lewascan2 OK, I like the sheet. I just feel that she's a little too strong for the very start. Being a small universe is something I may have expected further down the road. I won't ask that you change anything for now. Would you accept a temporary nerf slapped on her for the start of the RP?
Sure. I wasn't certain where the line exactly was, but you seemed to want "anime character in the final fight of the last episode with the OP playing behind them" (with Simon from Gurren Lagann as the example in the post with said quote), so I aimed a bit high. What sort of nerf? The "being a universe" bit?
I will say that her being effectively a very very small universe was the idea (literally human-sized at the start), one that is slowly growing in power (and bigger on the inside), as her new state of being grows into its own, sort of like how Superman had to grow into his powers after absorbing years of sunlight. But that's slightly digressing.
Assuming we leave everything mostly as-is, an initial nerf would work. Perhaps gradually loosening power-constraints? Basically, most of her mana generation is tied up with maintaining and stabilizing her new exotic body while expanding its energy production, so she's a bit limited in when and where she should be expending her mana. Going anywhere near lightspeed for any significant period right now is something that's too energy intensive, and time travel is both mana-expensive and also extremely dangerous (or so she believes), since her body is rather experimental and its limits unknown should she put it up against more time shenanigans.
If we go this way, I could use a sort of escalating progression system to keep track of how her limits raise IC, perhaps something like her maximum "safe speed" (the speed she can maintain continuously without surpassing her mana regen rate much -if any-) starting at speed of sound and then increasing daily (or at some other time period) at an escalating rate. This is not to say that she can't go faster in emergencies, but her mana regen won't be able to keep up, and she'd be severely limited.
Doubling rate system(?): 767 mph + 2 mph, 4 mph, 8 mph, 16 mph, 32 mph, 64 mph, 128 mph, 256 mph, 512 mph, 1,024 mph, 2,048 mph, (Day 11 total: 4,861 mph/Mach 6-ish -slightly faster than supersonic), 4,096 mph, 8,192 mph, 16,384 mph, 32,768 mph, 65,536 mph, 131,072 mph, (Day 17 total: 262,909 mph -just barely 8k short of lightning strike speed), 262,144 mph, 524,288 mph, 1,048,576 mph, 2,097,152 mph, 4,194,304 mph, 8,388,608 mph, 16,777,216 mph, 33,554,432 mph, 67,108,864 mph, 134,217,728 mph, (Day 27 total: 268,436,221 mph -slightly faster than return stroke of lightning, the speed most people think of, being 1/3rd of lightspeed), 268,435,456 mph, 536,870,912 mph, (Day 29 total: 1,073,742,589 mph -1.6 times lightspeed), 1,073,741,824 mph, (Day 30 total: 2,147,484,413 mph -3.2 times the speed of light and casual time travel capable)
With this system, she once more reaches her prime and then surpasses in about a month. It's a bit of a slow start (heh), but the ramp-up later down the line is as appropriately powerful as one would expect from the characters in this story. Of course, this assumes this isn't too quick an improvement rate. I don't know what the IC timeline length will look like.
As a major point of note and sort of self-imposed nerf: I do want to say that despite time travel being the keystone of her ascension, it was always the plan to make all the IC justifications I can to ensure she doesn't use it except as the most absolute of last resorts. After all, only reason she ever tried it to begin with was when the alternative was her planet's genocide, and her method to stave off a paradox still cost her literally everything but her mind and soul. It's an extremely powerful tool... and an often double-edged sword, and I intend to treat it as such. And also, from an OOC story-telling perspective, I know very well how careful one must be with its utilization in order to not kill all sense of tension, so I've been planning on how to nerf it myself (a large part being Jen's inexperience with it), especially given that I'm sure its regular use would be quite annoying to both the GM and my fellow players.
Fun fact: in the lore for a board game (Kingdom Death: Monster), the closest thing to their world's ultimate evil is an "Entity" called the Goblin. There's content forthcoming for battling the Goblin Dragon (as dragons are the physical manifestations of Entities), but for now its entire relationship with the game is a random event where the Goblin looks at you, and you instantly die.
I don't know whether to be in awe of the detail or disappointed that the ultimate evil in a world more Lovecrafian than Lovecraft isn't just a regular ass fantasy goblin.
Can't really do much but be patient. The GM is still setting things up. Keep in mind, he only finished the CS relatively recently. Also, they probably have IRL stuff to attend to. They're obviously much more occupied than you or I. I will admit (constantly rechecking the page every couple hours or so as I am) that I'm a bit frustrated with the speed of conversation myself, but I have plenty of other things to occupy me in the meantime.
After all, my character is basically done and approved. She just needs a bit of a nerf for the start to eventually grow out of, so all that's left is to figure out just what shape exactly that nerf will take, which requires some conversation.
On that note of CS creation, maybe finish your own character sheet fully and get it out there for submission? That way the GM has something to actually respond to. I can see they've already approved of your broad strokes concept; just need to get the expanded version given the go-ahead.
@Lewascan2 Oh, I hadn't realized that you wanted to negotiate the nerf.
What I was planning was basically putting your character on the same footing as everyone else at the start, divorced from their "universe" and therefore most of her power. She can still move very fast, but the Void is not a place where concepts like time, speed, distance, etc, hold a lot of value.
@Dead Cruiser Not negotiate the nerf necessarily. I just had no context for what you wanted to do specifically. I was just throwing something out there, and I do want to do something that hopefully makes everyone happy. I'm perfectly fine with a nerf; after all, I'd already planned on self-nerfing her time travel (and still do).
divorced from their "universe" and therefore most of her power. She can still move very fast, but the Void is not a place where concepts like time, speed, distance, etc, hold a lot of value.
The only real issue with this is that Jen uses White magic primarily and is actually a bit of a novice with advanced Red magic, so she compensates with her mastery of Speed specifically. Honestly, she'd be utterly hopeless at any Red magic (and most magic in general) that has nothing to do with Speed, but digression aside, what that boils down to is that the majority of her power is actually entirely internal (even before her ascension). I went that way since you seemed to want characters to have power sources completely separate from outside/dimensional sources. That's part of the reason I had her ascension change her body so that she generated her own energy and basically embodies her own perception of Speed, not the local one.
I'm guessing the way this'll work is she's mostly limited to internal manipulations and just has a really hard time manipulating the world around her (aka Red magic)? Which means she won't be able to easily effect the world or other people (ie Time Travel or moving people quickly without killing them from whiplash) until she gets a better handle on how the local reality/universal rules (if any) work. So this would cut her off from performing the majority of her objectively most impressive feats, and she'll have to re-learn them according to the new rules of reality.
I was thinking of making some more specific notes regarding her body, like the fact that (despite being a tiny universe) it's not actually much more durable than a regular human's and won't be until she grows in power and gets "denser". Unless by "divorced from her universe" you were referring to said body? In that case, I'm perfectly up for nerfing the power generation component and reducing her to more of an elemental, where the state of "being a small universe" is what she is currently in the process of evolving into.
@Dead Cruiser Any more general specifics on the nerf? For now, I'm thinking what I'll do specifically is have Jen have the most trouble with Red magic applications, since the world around her operates on different rules of reality that she'll have to adapt to. And her state of "being a tiny universe" is not her current state, but instead what she is evolving into. For now, she's merely more an "elemental" of speed. As a result of her current state of "evolving", her mana is somewhat limited, since she's afraid to mess with the portion of it that's devoted to her body's maintenance until her body finishes stabilizing its transition.
@Dead Cruiser Whoops, internet glitched and made me double-post. You know what? I'll make use of this accident to post an edited (and hopefully final) version of the CS. The main changes will be additions of initial nerf details to her Mastery and Ephemera sections. Everything else should be the same aside from her first title.
Name: Jen Shiragami
Titles: Overclock, Fastest Woman Alive, Bane of the Heaven Seeker, The Deathlight, Vanquisher of the Unspoken, The Hero Who Never Was
Age: 21 physically... and a fair bit older mentally if one considers her living extended periods with an accelerated mind.
World: Earth Q is an Earth variant world once reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland by decades-long war with a Wuxia-style Invader, were it not for Jen's final heroic act during her ascension restoring it to a golden age of relative peace. Magic and supernatural abilities are a fairly new phenomenon on this world, barely 30 years old, and are thus poorly understood and with shaky foundations for training.
Race: A black-souled/Perceiver human(?), Jen developed from her youth a natural and intuitive connection to the forces of Speed. By all accounts she is otherwise a bog-standard human woman of Japanese descent... at least on the surface.
Form: Jen appears as a young human woman of what could be described as be Japanese heritage. As a result of her ascension, this appearance is more a thin veneer than anything. Having been forced to cast aside her mortal form in truth, the illusion falters when she uses her powers to any real degree, revealing a semi-ethereal blue humanoid being that appears to be more a living, moving galaxy than anything else.
Legend: Jen's world was woefully unprepared for an invader with the bullshit of a Wuxia protagonist behind them. A war of decimation with the goal of godhood was waged against her world, and Jen from the age of 11 found herself participating. The war went on for a full decade from her joining, and Jen's power over Speed was cultivated and mastered in that time, her personally confronting the Invader many a time and often being the only thing between her world and annihilation. She in many ways became the face of the resistance, and her very presence tended to at least guarantee that the enemy could not win outright.
Widely hailed as humanity's savior, she was a one-woman army, known to slay and save thousands in the blink of an eye, entire armies liberated or laid to waste at her leisure. Rumor said that should one have a way by which she may hear them and so much as call her name, she could cross the ocean to aid the besieged before the words ceased to flow. Her final battle with the Invader would see her finally initiating a last desperate stage of her personal cultivation, resulting in her victory, along with her ascension and removal from the entirety of her world's memory and history.
Will: Jen dedicated herself to heroism and war from a young age. Time and again she has fought for the sole purpose of saving lives and opposing an unparalleled tyrant of a madman. Despite having finally defeated said tyrant once and for all, she cannot lay such instincts completely to rest. That said, facing a new world with new people and evils, Jen can only feel a looming sense of... exhaustion. Having sacrificed everything for her world and spent half her life at war, Jen now desires to try living for herself for a change, to seek personal peace instead of peace for the sake of others. To that end, she intends to explore the new limits of her existence/body and shatter them all over again, to cast down any threat to her peace, and to finally have what she always reserved for others... hopefully without compromising her moral compass... much. It's time for the selfless hero to be a bit selfish for once.
Mastery: Jen has long cultivated a natural intuition for manipulating the primal forces of Speed, to a degree that steps even into the realm of space-time. Her mastery has seen her surpass even the speed of light and the flow of time itself, and her ascension has seen the obtainment of near-immortality through the stark transformation of her body to one more akin to an elemental of Speed than anything else. Broadly speaking, if one can so much as conceptualize a usage of speed, it's fair to assume she can make it happen -or figure it out if not; she is basically a living embodiment of Speed. However, her mastery is very much White Arts focused. Red Arts are comparatively unexplored territory for her. And as a result of the Void's rather unstable and unfamiliar rules of reality, she has found herself in the position of being nearly a complete novice at Red arts once more, unable to properly perform time travel or techniques akin to safely moving other people at her higher speeds.
Ascent: When faced with the genocidal ascension to godhood of the Invader that had long terrorized her world, Jen was forced to finally attempt time travel. In order to prevent a worldwide paradox and ensure success, she exploited her time-space manipulation through her mastery of Speed to sacrifice her own past/history. As a result, her body began to unravel from the self-contained paradox, and she was forced to craft a new shell of a body from the fundament of Speed around her while she reversed time.
In short, she successfully reversed time by more than a decade and assassinated the Invader in the moment they entered her world. However, her not yet completely stable form interacted with the forces laid bare by the Invader's dimensional technique, causing Jen to lose her grip on her world's timeline. Fumbling to stabilize her form, she began to Ascend, as she managed to work a solution together using her accelerated reaction time. Her form solidified, and a force like a sun being birthed within her propelled her uncontrollably forth into the next adventure.
During the Wuxia Invader's ascension ritual, a genocidal sacrifice was initiated, wiping out a large portion of the planet's population and ensuring the Invader's ultimate victory. Instead of allowing such an atrocity to pass, Jen was forced to use time travel. She was wary of causing a paradox, but it was the only thing she had left, and she had a theory about how she could make it work.
Speed of light remains constant irrespective of the observer. It is observed that as the speed of an object increases, time slows down. At the speed of light, time stops. And on further increment of speed greater than light, time reverses. Thus, to travel back in time we have to move faster than Light. And Jen's personal step: sacrifice her own timeline to ensure that her appearance in the past would not cause a paradox.
She didn't just erase the battle, the defeat. She reversed time all the way back to the exact moment the Wuxia Invader had arrived in her world years ago. As she did so, the disappearance of her very past caused her body to begin to come apart at the seams. In order to retain cohesion, she infused herself with the very concept of speed that flowed more freely around her now than ever before, crafting a new body from the fundament of the universe, a part of her mortality inextricably cast away to achieve a stable existence outside her own timeline.
She found the moment of the Invader's entry and attacked him with every bit of her fully cultivated power against his less experienced past self, a merciless barrage of high-speed vibrating attacks that reduced him forever to mere atoms. However, the Invader had still been resolving the effects of his dimensional technique when she struck. The combination of such a technique imploding and Jen's own state of still-resolving ascension and weakened grasp on her world's timeline caused her to be nicked by the collapsing technique and thrust from her world entirely, as her ascension solidified and completed in truth.
Arriving in a place unknown, she found that her very being had been fundamentally changed by the experience. In order to maintain her existence, she had not merely joined herself to the concept of Speed. No, for to join herself with her own universe's rules of reality would have resulted in her unraveling the moment she left. Instead, she had managed to transform herself into a sort of moving "universe of Speed" in the shape of a human. Her very being was a self-sustaining battery of an existence that molded and adapted itself to instead be fueled merely by Jen's own belief and perception of Speed.
Ephemera: The Speed Nexus (Beta Stage): During her ascension, Jen's body was ripped apart by her own paradox, and she was forced to craft a new one from the fundament of Speed to act as a shell/shield for her memories and soul, becoming something akin to an "elemental" of speed. Her body appears to be relatively self-sustaining and capable of generating its own mana, but the majority of the mana seems to be devoted to its current stabilization/evolution process. As a result, Jen is currently decidedly weaker than her prime and must be far more careful about when and how she expends her limited -but slowly growing- undevoted mana reserves.
As a result of its inorganic nature, this body is no longer is capable of aging normally. Nor does it require food, drink or air. The body is barely any more durable than a standard human's. This will likely change in time, as it grows in power and "density".
The Speed Nexus: The eventual evolution of Jen's body. A self-sustaining existence within Jen's body of her own semi-unintentional creation. More accurately, her body is the nexus itself, a relatively tiny but growing and hyper-compressed "Universe of Speed" that acts as a protective shell/shield for her memories and soul to guard against the paradox that destroyed her original body. Through this and her own perception of her power, her body has become essentially a walking physical expression of the fundamental force of Speed. This body is a magical nuclear power plant, constantly utilizing the forces of its own existence to generate and store further power, which is partially put towards generation, escalating the speed at which it generates more ad infinitum.
This body doesn't possess an organic growth cycle and as a result is no longer is capable of aging. Nor does it require food, drink or air. However, the body is barely any more durable than a standard human's. This will likely change in time, as it grows in power and "density".
Loyal Fol-... Frien-... Honestly, it's a cult: As a result of erasing her own history/past, very few from her home-world recall her existence, and she has been relegated more to myth than anything. That said, she is not the only being that can step beyond the reach of time, and several that remember cultivate her (presently false) image as a Goddess and search for ways to contact her or bring her home.
@Dark Cloud Well, from what I've seen, all you really need is the bare bones of their origin, a general description of their journey (like a book synopsis almost) and then maybe several examples of epic feats they've accomplished or rumors about them.
How they actually triumphed in the most ultimate of ways, the end of their journey and reaching the peak of their power, should be saved for the Ascent section.
@Lewascan2 I keep thinking that I've replied to you when I haven't. I blame mind goblins.
Uhh basically what you can expect is that in the genesis of her new self-universe, she has made her personal conception of speed tied to that universe. Therefore when she and the universe are apart, so is she and the concept of speed. Not to mention that the laws of physics and causality in the Void are... up to interpretation.
@Dead Cruiser Okay, sure? The thing I'm having trouble grasping is how she'd be "apart" from her self-universe if said universe is literally her body. And how would she still use Speed Magic while unable to even touch upon the concept of speed (unless you mean just the concept of speed in the Void around her, in which case, she basically has to internalize all her magical efforts)?
