@Dark Cloud Not necessarily. After all, we only really have like three people with either accepted or mostly accepted sheets. That's a pretty small group. I'd expect 4-5 honestly for something like this.
@Dark Cloud Well, sometimes a character concept can seem real fun at first, but when you start really thinking about how you want their future/endgame (or perhaps, merely the path to get there) to look, inspiration can flounder. And, to be fair, it's been like a month since the initial interest post by the GM. What may have seemed great back then, might not seem so appealing now. At least a benefit of the slow-ish start-up is that you have the option to reconsider your options before you lock yourself into something you won't enjoy long-term.
@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)?
@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.
@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.
@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.
OOF, just gonna go ahead and quickly retract my own submission for now. Got myself some good RPs between then and now, so I probably won't have time for this one.
As quickly as things had gone right, they went wrong all the more abruptly. Even as he lined up a shot on the fleeing coffin goblin, a shout of pain and then scream of rage from Victoria drew Hugh’s attention to an apparently occupied treetop.
Cursing under his breath his own carelessness and for allowing himself to be swept overmuch into the rest of the group’s reckless momentum, Hugh readjusted his priorities to the new archers, only for the Bard’s scream to take up a new and enchanted pitch, the tree quaking under the force of her magic before depositing its far less alive occupants to the ground with a twinned set of meaty crunches.
Also on lines of thought he had overlooked, it occurred to him that taking a hostage to interrogate would be most expedient… only for the pale Tieling to core them through the back with another eye-searing golden beam. To say the least, they were quite dead.
Gritting his teeth, Hugh’s eyes darted around in search of any more hidden hostiles, but as the team began to squabble somewhat and panic over Victoria’s injury, he could see no others ready to take advantage of their distraction. Letting out a long-suffering sigh, Hugh returned his arrow to his quiver and left his cover to approach the camp. To be sure, however, he felt no need to release Pass Without Trace. After all, it would last an hour with the Ki he typically was forced to devote to it, and if anything significant occurred shortly, it would be all the better to have it still up, just in case.
As the current blame-game washed over him, Hugh couldn’t help rolling his eyes, as he strode over to his first target. “Wrong,” he addressed both Kathryn and Marita, taking hold of the arrow in the goblin’s chest. “Kathryn has no fault here. If anything, the only ones to blame are Victoria, herself… and perhaps me. As a magically inclined Bard, and one of her particular magical proclivities…” He shot a look at Morty, before giving a grunt and tugging the arrow free with a small squelch, grimacing at the bent tip and tossing it away. Useless. “I assumed she would be a more long-range combatant, especially considering her far less impressive armor. I had assumed -as she seemed originally amicable to going with me- that she would have ranged magic to apply, and…” He looked at the damaged tree, as he strode past it and inspected his other victim. “She did. What I want to know is what exactly possessed her to lunge forward past her armored comrades into melee when magic would have suited her just fine.”
Hugh sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I will admit; as far as culpability goes, when I suggested the change in battle formation, I made assumptions about her combat proclivities, and assumptions can be dangerous things. But make no mistake, our frontline was near flawless in their execution. The blame -if such must indeed be assigned- does not lie there.”
His piece said, Hugh finally reached for his other arrow and far more gingerly tugged it free from the prone corpse, nodding in satisfaction and the wholeness of it. A little cleaning and he could reuse this one just fine. On that note… he was never one to turn down new gear he didn’t have to pay for, and he turned his attention back to the first goblin he’d shot.
Rifling through the goblin’s effects, he frowned, unstrapping the quiver and holding it up to the light that streamed through the forest canopy.
This was…
“Good quality…” he muttered to himself, drawing an arrow from the quiver and inspecting it, as his brows furrowed further. “Good craftsmanship… Actual craftsmanship.” It looked professionally made, a stark contrast to the far more… barbaric make of the goblin’s leather armor. Both the arrows and the quiver were of a make that he’d not see shunned in the military or well-made mercenary companies.
Standing up with a pensive frown, he made his way around the camp and found a similar story.
Good quality weapons. Homemade armor.
If it were just one or two of them, it would be one thing, but the entire group of goblins was professionally equipped in weaponry. More tellingly, the only weapons they had were bows, shortswords and daggers, and all of them were in good enough condition that they could honestly be resold with just a little cleanup. The weapons had no identifying marking or branding that he could determine. One and all down to the hilts, they were perfectly identical and made to last, with none of the flourishes a public blacksmith might employ for the sake of appealing to casual buyers.
On the one hand, one could assume that the goblins had raided their weaponry from a mercenary band. On the other, any mercenary band that was professional and strict enough to have completely matching weaponry was quite unlikely to be the type to fall victim to goblins that weren’t so well equipped before ambushing them. However, if the goblins had stolen their weapons from guards, they would likely be wielding a greater variety of things.
Crossbows, nets, spears and full on longswords. A properly equipped guard group had far more to offer than mere shortswords and daggers, and though small, goblins were perfectly capable of handling weaponry that wasn’t obnoxiously heavy, like a greatsword. It beggared belief that the goblins would take any larger weaponry and have dick-measuring contests over their weapon sizes.
No, unfortunately, Hugh was more inclined to believe that some greedy piece of shit had willingly sold weaponry to these little assholes. That or in the worse scenario, someone was actively collaborating with the region’s goblin raiders to obtain greater profits and perhaps receive tribute through the goblins’ “spoils of war”. Or maybe they were even trying to destabilize the region.
It was too soon to tell, but this was too strange to ignore.
“We can sell these,” Hugh voiced aloud, as he finished gathering the weaponry into a pile near the cart that Kathryn was busy getting back on its metaphorical feet. “They’re uniform, unmarked, and of the same style, the sort you’d expect from the military and the like. Give them a good shine-up, and I’m sure we could get someone to take them off our hands. Well, whatever it is that you don’t decide to keep. On that note…” Hugh tucked away a dagger, quiver, shortbow and an additional thirty arrows. “And whatever you don’t plan on using, we might be best keeping around for the sake of the investigation. Something’s not right here. These goblins were far too well equipped for simple raiders… yet not so well as one would expect if they had killed their weapons’ previous owners.”
And they were voraciously hungry to have eaten nearly a full humanoid.
Despite burning corpses being nothing unfamiliar, Hugh grimaced lightly at the sight and smell of the remains of the goblins’ meal, as he looked over the scorched bones and lightly kicked some dirt over to snuff the still burning fire.
Taking a bit of a closer look, he found himself frowning for different reasons. There weren’t enough bones here to make more than a single body, which implied… that the coffin was being transported empty? Perhaps. Between that and the wine in transport, it was clear that this delivery was intended for someone of relative means.
Perhaps the driver got away from the pack of likely far faster creatures, which was… not unfeasible, considering the lack of a beast of burden corpse. Perhaps the driver had managed to mount it and take off. Then again, given that any corpse in a coffin would have likely already started to undergo rigor mortis or otherwise be exposed to the tender mercies of preservatory techniques, Hugh couldn’t imagine it being palatable even to goblins… unless it had been preserved for burial by a Cleric or the like, which was fully possible considering the wealth hinted at by this cart.
Then again, he could hear the sounds of a herd animal echoing in the distance. And if he could hear it, certainly the goblins would have had no trouble. They just hadn’t had any need to care. A cursory glance around gave him a general heading for the raided cart’s missing animal, but he had somewhat more important things to look at.
Namely, if these goblins were so well equipped, perhaps they were cocky enough to still be carrying some manner of written conveyance regarding how such had come to be… And if turning out their pockets also made him back some of the exorbitant amount of coin he’d been put in a position to need to spend, well, that was just a bonus.
@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.
TheWendil,
Noctis,
Danyel,
thedarkness,
Reisling,
Guardian Angel Haruki,
Izurich,
4wheathRmany,
Aisede,
Aku the Samurai
