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4 mos ago
Current I've been on this stupid site for an entire decade now and it's been fantastic, thank you all so much
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2 yrs ago
Nine years seems a lot longer than it feels.
2 yrs ago
Ninety-nine bottles of bottles of bottles of bottles of bottles of bottles of bottles of bottles of bottles on the wall
4 likes
4 yrs ago
Biting Spider Writing
7 yrs ago
They will look for him from the white tower...but he will not return, from mountains or from sea...
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In Lem's Stash 2 yrs ago Forum: Test Forum


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Physical Description
Kirika is quite a tall girl, standing at nearly 170cm (or roughly 5'7"), with a stick-thin physique that looks more like a slender boy's body than a girl's. She feels somewhat like it should make her self-conscious, but she's thankful for it; anything to stick out more. Also somewhat helpful in that endeavor is her hair. Smooth and pin-straight, it falls in a violent silver-white curtain to more or less the small of her back. It matches her eyes, the pale gray of morning fog. The way she walks helps her grab attention as well: a smooth, crisp, snapping stride, moving perhaps a little bit more quickly than is necessary. It makes her look like she's perpetually hurrying, and it comforts her the way people look at her a little bit strangely when she's going about her business.

When not wearing the dour school uniform that she's entrapped within, she wears things that, while well within acceptable range, tend to stick out a little bit. Her most common example is a tan trench coat that her father gave her when she went off to school ("In case it's raining, sweetie!). It's a little longer on her than it is on her father, dropping just about to the middle of her shins. The summer is a little warm to wear it unless it's a particularly cool day, but she's beginning to grow attached just the same.

Personal History
Maki Kirika’s first couple years were completely normal. Her mother and father, an editor and photographer respectively, doted on her. And while of course she doesn’t remember anything of that time, it was almost idyllic until she was about halfway through her second year, when her Quirk manifested and she vanished. Not just from her parents' sight. Not just from their hearing. Not just from their photos and family videos. No, her face even vanished from their memories.

And so, her first memories are of smothering attention. Smothering attention and very seldom being left alone. And she didn't understand why, until one day she realized that her parents didn't notice her.

The next years of her life would be characterized by a feeling of suffocation. When she was at home, it was that feeling of suffocation that worried parents give. She had very little privacy; even being alone in her room was a rarity, even up through middle school. Personal space was a thing that belonged to other people, and her mom was never too far away to reach out and touch her hand. When she was at school, that suffocation was the feeling of choking fear that comes with being forgotten. Her Quirk was unstable for a long time, and there were times when she would simply vanish, and times when she couldn't reappear. Though she always told people that touch would break it, every time it happened, she would tense up when peoples' eyes skated over her. Even worse were those rare moments when touching people wouldn't break it, at least not for a few seconds. She thought. She never could tell on her own, after all.

About this time was when her attention-hogging personality began to come to the fore. She couldn't tell when her Quirk was active, it was true. At least not on her own. But if she was up in everyone's faces, when the whole room was looking at her, then she would always know. She would know. And, she convinced herself—in defiance of the facts—that the closer she was to everyone, the less likely it was to not break on touch. And with that personality came the start of a seething resentment. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that she always needed to make sure people could see and hear her before she did anything. It wasn't fair that she was terrified of fading away, being un-personed so thoroughly nobody would ever remember her. It wasn't fair.

But as she aged and gained some control over her Quirk, she began to experience another side of it. Yes, it was unpredictable, and when it went off without her knowing, it was genuinely terrifying. But, as she discovered when she was cornered on a city street at night before fading both her and her friend away, it could also be exceptionally useful. And that got her to thinking. Using her Quirk in public would certainly be frowned upon—if anybody could really tell, that was. But it would be difficult to learn how to keep it from activating on its own without any kind of instruction.

Somewhere to learn how to properly use her Quirk, to peel back the anger that she had towards it, and to harness its burgeoning power as a force for good? Well, she'd lived in Sapporo her whole life. Ishin academy was just down the road, right?

Character Arc
Kirika's character arc is founded deeply in her fear. How her fear is created, how her fear is handled, and how her fear is eventually resolved. She has a remarkably powerful utility Quirk, something that could be genuinely terrifying if she were to embrace it all immediately. But she can't properly use it, because she fears it desperately. She grew up being terrified of being un-personed and forgotten since she can remember, and it's going to take her a long, long time to move past that.

That moving on is going to form the crux of her character development. As she gains better control over her Quirk, her fear will slowly begin to abate. And though of course there will be moments of relapse where her Quirk activates all on its own and she returns to that instinctual fear, she will move past them, and eventually past that bone-deep fear to truly take advantage of the Quirk that she's been cursed or—she will eventually realize—blessed with.

Quirk Description
Kirika's Quirk, and the great object of her fear, is Null Field At a thought, she can project an invisible bubble around her, more or less five feet across. She, and anybody within that bubble, becomes imperceptible. They'll still trigger motion detectors, infrared lasers; they're still there. But living things struggle with the same. They're not made invisible. More like...they're rendered so unbelievably unremarkable that wherever they are, it just seem like the most natural thing in the world.

Other than the somewhat restrictive size limit that requires people to stay close to Kirika, there aren't a lot of inherent factors that limit its use. Though it does constantly drain her energy when it's active, it's more of a passive drain than anything else. She may become tired and hungry a little bit more quickly and easily, but it's nothing she really notices. So duration isn't an issue. The main restriction placed upon its use is when anybody within the bubble does anything that would get them noticed for sure. Touching someone, throwing an object with an easily traceable flight path, having their footprints followed back to them; when one member of the bubble is noticed, then it immediately pops and reveals everybody. And while there's no set duration on the Null Field, once it's brought down it can't be thrown up again for at least a couple minutes. No do-overs.

In addition, the field will break whenever Kirika falls asleep or is knocked unconscious—for the most part. Though unlikely, it can stay up through sleep. And this is when Kirika is the most afraid. Because if it won't break, even when she's not conscious...will it ever break at all?
In Lem's Stash 2 yrs ago Forum: Test Forum


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Physical Description
Standing at 5'1", Kayo stands at a height just slightly shorter than usual (which only helps her, really). Her most noticeable physical trait at first glance is her long curtain of pale green hair, which she takes very, very good care of (it takes her nearly an hour to brush it out in the morning, it's a nightmare). Her skin is smooth and fine due to an equal amount of care. She has a narrow face and a sharply pointed chin. Finally we reach her brilliant green eyes, which are slightly off-putting to some people: they glow dimly in low light, and her pupils are narrow and slitted, like a snakes. She's almost always wearing a smile; it's just unclear which kind of smile it is.

Personal History
Nigata Kayo did not have an exceptionally good childhood.

It was alright for the first couple years. Her mother—Nigata Kagami, an excellent doctor loved by all—had always been a touch strange, but she was too young to really understand anything about it. Until very early in elementary school, everything was fine. Everything was fine. And then her Quirk manifested itself just slightly later than normal. And it manifested itself while she was playing with her mother.

She doesn't remember a whole lot of this time, but she does remember her mother grunting in surprise and pain and then looking at her with sudden malice. And from then on, her childhood grew harder.

Her mother dropped the act, revealing herself as the raging narcissist that she was. Someone who only became a doctor for the accolades and praise. Someone who only acted nice because it made people love her. And somebody who had a minor and pedestrian Quirk to adjust her own pain tolerance. Because of her Quirk, Kayo's did very little to her. But now she knew that her daughter's Quirk was more powerful than her own. And she took offense. She became a monster to her daughter, alternately ignoring her, psychologically tormenting her, and forcing her to look in a mirror and use her own Quirk on herself until she was a screaming, crying wreck (mirrors still terrify her to this day). So it's not a stretch to imagine that Kayo began to pull inwards, and give herself the ego that her mother no longer did.

This was only aggravated in school, where she would occasionally accidentally use her Quirk on other kids. And though she apologized profusely, they began to avoid her, all but one. And so, the only way for her to rationalize it and preserve the ego that she was beginning to build up for herself was to assert: they're all dumb. Everybody but Kaoru, they're all dumb idiots. And to make it worse, as her Quirk began to build in power more and more, pain stopped repulsing her. Instead, causing pain began to...intrigue her.

All of these factors conspired to forge her into an obsessive narcissist who, additionally, was very fascinated by pain. And when she was a little way into middle school, these all combined to give her a horrible fixation on a classmate who she grew absolutely obsessed with. And when she fixed him with her eyes, when she caused that terrible pain, she felt a thrill like nothing else. Though she—with Kaoru's help—managed to escape her obsession, it still bubbled just under the surface, waiting for a new target. Crushing it down as best she could, she decided something then and there.

If her mom was that jealous of her Quirk, then what would insult her more than becoming a hero?

Character Arc
As a character, Kayo is an exploration on inversions.

She initially goes to IA out of spite for her mother, but eventually really, truly wants to become a hero. She starts her character arc with manipulation and obsession, and ends it with contrition and redemption. Rather than the character course of someone who wants to become a hero, aims straight for that goal and then perhaps dips down onto a dark place and becomes a villain, she is a character who starts on that dark path towards villainy, but manages to pull herself out of that doom spiral and become somebody that she can legitimately be proud of.

And so, her character development over time is just that. The obsessive pit that she digs herself down into is not only a low point for everyone else around her, but a low point for her own health, safety, and sanity. The way that she crawls out of that pit—the challenges she faces in order to get there, the people that she's hurt that she needs to hopefully make amends to—is where the great majority of her character will be, and I'm very excited to see it.

Quirk Description
Kayo is so toxic that even looking at her can be dangerous.

Her Quirk Venom Eyes can be activated any time she makes direct eye contact with somebody, directly tapping into the target's nervous system—specifically the pain receptors. With a pulse of a sickly yellow glow from her snakelike eyes, she can dial them up or down, causing either a searing, full-body pain or a deadening numbness, though she's significantly better at using the pain than she is the numbness.

There are a few limits on this power. Since it requires direct eye contact, it has a limited range, and is almost completely useless, at least at the start, on people who either hide their eyes, don't have eyes to hide, can't use their eyes, or have no nerves to aggravate. Each pulse from her Venom Eyes additionally accrues a brief cooldown period where her optic nerves need to rest from the sudden stimulation.
In Lem's Stash 2 yrs ago Forum: Test Forum
Character sheets, post drafts, etc. etc. etc.



"We shouldn't need to have a job from Pris to talk with them," Alja huffed out. "You've heard everything that's going on. Wayfarers aren't the most well-liked group right now, so the more of us there are, the better chance we have to make it right. Keeping a line of communication open is a lot easier than reopening a broken one." She walked up to the door, hesitating in front of it.

If she was honest, she was scared of going into Mystic Prophecy herself. Every time she'd been in this guild hall before, it had been like a home. Now, as the silence yawned, it felt more like a tomb. But there was no point in running away. Kazuki was only half the reason she'd been so insistent on coming here. There were people here that she liked, like Pris. People she borderline needed, like Leaves. And somewhere back there was Luci, surviving on anger and spite. Maybe, just like after Arnaakus, she couldn't do anything to help her. But, just like after Arnaakus, damn sure she was going to try. Rael and Benkei could could come if they wanted; she rather hoped they would. But Kazuki wasn't getting out of here without going in. He might have visited Prophecy post-glitch before. He might not have; she wasn't sure. But if he had, then it hadn't. Been. Enough.

So she couldn't give him an out. She couldn't give him any way to avoid this, or else it would never happen. He might hate her after this. That was fine. He could hate her all he liked. But she knew very well what desperate guilt gone unaddressed turned into, and she wasn't keen on turning him over to it.

She turned to the three behind her, judging the distance from her to Kazuki. "Come if you're comin', we don't have all day!"

Then, with one swift motion, she yanked the door open, snatched Kazuki's wrist, and pulled him inside with her.
Lol


I still haven't forgiven you for this
And I never will
Kana whirled around at the sounds of a scuffle, awareness ratcheted up as high as it could go. A man with an accent yelling. The sound of harpoons striking the walls. And a very, very faint noise that she couldn't quite parse, but reminded her of violence all the same. She closed her eyes tightly.

There are so many better things to worry about right now. There could be something very bad happening down with the engine. You could go up like you planned and deal with the leader. Can you really afford the time to go help whatever's going on?

Before the thought had even finished, she knew the answer. Not a chance she was going to stand there as more people got hurt. Not when she could do something about it. Damn everything else, she'd been 'gifted' with these goddamn legs; might as well use them for good for once. She took a long, calming breath. I didn't want to hurt anyone tonight. I really didn't. But just because they started the fight doesn't mean I can't end it. It's different this time. You're helping people. The breath heaved out. Eyes still closed, "Keep going towards the engine room. I'll catch up with you soon." For just a moment, she was very grateful that she was wearing her mask.

Her eyes snapped open, and she blasted towards the fight, Edgedancer surging out of her at its full strength. In the space between heartbeats, the calm and slightly wobbling tink of her footsteps was replaced with the shrieking sound of metal crashing into metal at high speed as she blazed down the narrow corridor. The world moved in slow motion around her, and the sound of fighting came into clear focus. A distant corner of her brain hissed in dissatisfaction at the British man. You're making too much noise. Just asking to get hurt. Shut up. She wanted to hate him for being in such a place that she needed to do this. She wanted to find a vessel for her pent-up anger and frustration. Someone that she could blame, and blame harmlessly. But she couldn't bring herself to hate him. He was stuck here like everyone else. Nobody was making her do this but her.

A corner in the hallway loomed ahead of her; sounded like whatever was going on was just around it. Even if she wanted to, she didn't have the time or space to slow down. So instead she sped up as much as she could. And jumped.

She struck the wall, and with all the speed and power that her Septima brought her, she kicked it. With one more jagged, metallic screech, she launched herself forward and twisted in midair, whizzing past the Englishman and a...man? Woman?...person in a haori, of all things—and aiming a flying scissor kick at the closest frogman.

And, as all her pent-up frustration boiled over—her quiet time ruined, her guards off, her legs being used against a human being again—she axed downwards at him with a furious scream.

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Physical Description
A woman of perhaps 5'5" with an extremely average build, Quinnlash can melt into a crowd of people with relative ease as long as she pulls a hood over her head. Not only imbued with a pyromancer's ember but a pyromancer herself, her single eye gleams with a brilliant yellow light. Her hair is very long, kept in a tight braid that trails down her back. Though most if it is the dark gray it always was, bits and pieces of the fringes around her face have begun to bleed the same vivid hue as her eye.

While her body certainly isn't unfit by any stretch, it's not to the same standards that many other Hunters have trained to. Her tendency to keep her distance means that much of her evasive skills in combat rely on creating space between her and enemies as fast as she can. She's nimble enough, of course, needs to be in order to avoid being struck by any return fire, but not very strong. The most obvious place to see this is in her musculature. It is very apparent that she's not a frontline fighter by any means. What she lacks in strength, though, she makes up for in consistency. Though her muscles aren't overly strong, they are filled with a seemingly unnatural endurance and surefootedness even for a hunter. Bought and paid for with each backwards step taken while lining up a shot, that manifests in confident and easy movement, even in the most perilous situation.

She wears long, baggy, thick clothes with many layers, worn and tattered by now, as she travels. She no longer feels the cold now, heated as she is with an ember from deep inside. But deep within her, in a part that she despises, there is a fear that one day, she will lose what makes her human. That perhaps she already has. That her soul, already so fragile, will shatter like a pane of glass, and she'll lose something very, very important.

Character Conceptualization
Quinnlash was a scholar once. A books-in-a-library-in-Midnos, dyed-in-the-wool scholar. She'd been raised to be one her entire life. Ever since she could read, her parents—both reputable scholars themselves—had inundated her, drowned her, with diagrams, carvings, and so many books. Some as heavy as she was and varying widely in topic, the only way for her to keep her head above water was to swim. And swim she did, meekly accepting her parents' demands and doing her work, kept totally isolated in her room within the small but lavish house in the capital of Midnos. She grew very knowledgeable for her age as she simply read. Not that she could understand most of what was in the books. But what else was she to do? With nothing else around her, all the time she could ever want, and the only two people in her world constantly telling her to study at such a young age, what could she do but eat, sleep, and read? She didn't want to go outside. Her parents told her that it was dark. It was dark, and scary, and filled with things that wanted to hurt you. Best to just stay inside studying, right? She could go outside when she was older.

But when she was seven, she was allowed to leave the house. Just once, with her father close beside her. She clung tightly to him, looking fearfully at the dark world, as he took her to see a strange woman. The two of them spoke seriously in low voices for some time. What little she could hear, she didn't understand. Words like "magical affinity," "innate talent," "potential for phenomenal things." She had no idea what was going on, and flinched away, clutching to her father's clothing, when the woman reached her glowing hand out to her. She averted her pale violet eyes from her and closed them tightly, terrified. But no touch came, only a faint warmth that soon faded entirely. She opened her eyes in time to see the woman nod gravely at her father and then turn to walk towards her. And no matter how Quinnlash struggled, no matter how she screamed or cried—the pyromancer took her. The last things she ever heard from her family were two words from her father, as she tearfully begged him to take her back home with mama, please, whatever she did she was sorry, she'd be a good girl from now on, she'd never ask to go outside again:

"Goodbye, Quinn."

From then on, she studied different topics, in different ways. How to conjure flame. How to use it to defend yourself. How to exercise fine control over it. How to channel it for sustained periods. The work was grueling—mentally and physically exhausting. Months bled into years and years bled together, as she studied and trained as a pyromancer, first from a small group of skilled pyromancers and then—as her prodigal once-in-a-generation skill became apparent—by Ezlineia Aldos, the Pyromancer-Queen of Midnos, whom she became very close to. She even started calling her Mom.

Still, the habits ingrained into her by her parents held. Whenever she had time to spare, little enough of it thought there was, she would plod her way into Ezlineia’s library and find the book that Ezlineia told her to sink her brain into to distract her from the crippling fear she felt of the outside world. In reference tomes and manuals of pyromancy, the world was categorized. Understandable. Dissected. But whenever she stepped outside, it all bled together into a mess of darkness and confusion that she fled from time and again. She'd heard the stories of the Void. She'd heard tales about what lurked out there in the darkness. And she was, as ever, afraid. So she buried herself with scholarship and training, distracting herself from the terrifying world around her. She was a perfect piece of moldable clay: quiet, meek, obedient, desperate to be loved, and hopelessly eager to please.

Time ticked by, revealing Quinnlash, now a very powerful—if very inexperienced—pyromancer of 24 years, still lurking in Ezlineia’s libraries, reading about the world that she was ever and always too scared to explore, even past her doorway. There was a hidden, growing part of her that wanted, that desperately yearned, to see what was out there. But it was crushed beneath something far more meaningful that had bubbled up beneath her of late. Studies had been done in Midnos on how to fight the Void. How to resist their corruptive influence. She should know, she’'d read them all. But nothing she'd ever found in her mentor’s library knew what they were. And with that realization, the deep-rooted anger reared its head. She had been shut up her entire life, first of her parents' will, then Ezlineia’s, then her own. And now, 24 years into her life, what did she have to show for it? An exhausting fear. A horrible feeling of being trapped. And not a fragment of new knowledge to contribute to anything. She knew how to wield fire, but what did that matter if she didn’t even know what she was fighting?

Angry. Angry. Angry. Angry at the entire world. But she didn't let it out. She couldn't let it out. She closed in again. And she let it fester. It simmered beneath her for a year and a half, during which time she grew increasingly desperate to find out more about the Void. To find out something, anything, about the Void. A way to justify to herself the decades spent in isolation.

But she never did.

And nearing the tail end of her twenty-fifth year, the caldera of rage had swollen within her, growing more and more misplaced tremors of anger. Anger at her parents, who locked her in one room for years, and instilled deep within her the fear of the unknown that still dogged her feet. Anger at that damned pyromancer Elan for taking her away from her family when she was scarcely old enough to understand what was happening. Anger at Ezlineia, for her obsessed devotion to training her to become the next Queen. But most of all? Most of all, she was so furious it made her sick to her stomach at herself. If all the Midnosian studies on the Void were useless, what was she? Hiding in the library walls, never daring to take more than a few steps outside? Her whole life...what did any of it mean?

No more. No more calculating decisions for weeks before taking a single action. No more staring silently at the ceiling, unable to sleep, eyes fearfully darting about the room for hours. No more suppressing her emotions, crushing them down until they boiled her alive. No more books. No more. No more useless scholarship. No more being groomed to take the throne by Ezlineia. After all, a queenship was just another, shinier cage. Never again. No more. She needed to leave this place. To escape. To throw herself into something else, something so singular and savage that she could only ever think of it. Her brain screamed for it.

The caldera burst. The volcano erupted.

With barely a conscious thought, she found herself strapped to a table as a willing volunteer, with Mom standing above her.

"Are you really sure you want to do this, Quinnlash?"
"Fucking yes! Hurry up already!

The Queen sighed almost mournfully. And then came the pain. Her pyromancy warred with the ember growing within her, violently rejecting this foreign flame. Her skin peeled off and regrew. Her blood seethed and boiled. Her muscles were shredded, rebuilt, and shredded again. She vaguely remembers her bones snapping like brittle burnt twigs under their own weight. And her eyes incandesced, searing themselves white hot and bubbling within her skull. One of them ran out of her face, dripping like magma to the floor and collecting in a smoking, ruined pool. Only the other made it through the transformation from scholar to something far more dangerous, and it was forever dyed with a baleful yellow light.

In the years since, she's changed so much from the her that hid from the world that she doesn't even recognize what she was anymore. She's a different person now. The life of a Huntress was one that she'd only come upon through reckless abandon and overpowering emotion—sheer blinding anger—and so that is who she became. She barely even remembers the old Quinnlash. The Quinnlash that she left behind. And for that she is thankful, as she embraces a new Quinnlash. The Quinnlash who fights the darkness. Who embraces the constant pain. Who does all she can to not feel fear. Because if she does, then the rest of her—the one she's tried so hard to forget—may come creeping back.

Never again. Fight for the sake of fighting. Never again. Move on. Never again. Don't ever look back.

Other Information
TBD

It's going to be a bit before I can properly dig into a character, I've got some nerve damage to deal with. If it goes on too long, don't hesitate to move without me.
I, on the other hand, love the shit out of the classic zamboni no matter where. I'm into this tbh.
Good lord, I love Mox so much
She senses the psychopathy
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