Name: Tristan Traeger
Age: Twenty one
Appearance I:
Personality:
Tristan is friendly but jaded, an amiable nihilist, a dreamer both sad and thankful to have been so rudely awakened. He's always just a little bit submissive, never showing force when he can stand to go with the flow, always happy to play the game, play along, to humor and to validate. He takes the shape of the world around him and remembers his own only occasionally, in moments of terrible clarity, shining and sharp as broken glass. He used to be different, but then again, didn't everyone? He used to believe he was destined to save the world.
But then again, didn't everyone?
Occupation: Student of sin, New Age charlatan
History:
Tristan came to Lightbridge just a few years back, bright-eyed missionary child of the Way of Light's charismatic messiah and his favorite chorister. The Way of Light had long since slipped past the boundary that separates church from cult, and his sending was more a rival's power play than a show of trust, but he didn't really understand all that at the time. All he knew was he had been chosen! Such a big mission. So serendipitous, this city with its synonym for a name, this new adventure for mankind, for him...!
He didn't come alone, of course. Lance (short for Lancelot; all the kids had knight names, or lady names, to help armor and isolate them in the irreverent world) was his best friend, almost a brother. Sir Wolfgang, he was a little less sure of; older, iron-eyed, too quick to smile and too knowing a smiler. Someone who Tristan couldn't help but think of as, well, worldly.
And he was worldly, was Wolfgang. He liked to drink and start nasty fights, usually after he said something about someone, about their family, usually a woman or a kid. He always met eyes when he said these things, and that was when his smile was widest. Wolfgang had huge, heavy hands, and so these fights often went his way, and never mind the one he'd been steadily losing for the soul of the boys in his charge. But one day a fight didn't go his way. Someone broke a bottle, not a first time, and then they broke Sir Wolfgang, which was. Tristan wasn't there, but during the trial it turned out someone caught it all on cellphone. Several someones, actually.
They were supposed to be invincible. That was the secret truth that had kept them all together, the heart of the Way of Light, that bad things couldn't really happen to them - not really. God would test them - [i][color=82ca9d]was Sir Wolfgang my test?[/i][/color], but in the end they would prevail, it was their destiny. They all had destinies. They were going to save the world. But watching the trial, listening to the defendant, to their tearful lover, Tristan realized that was probably what just about everyone believed. He realized that Sir Wolfgang hadn't been special, and neither was he. They were none of them invincible.
He wrote a letter back home, left it with Lance, who seemed more betrayed by Tristan than by the death of their guardian. Lightbridge had opportunities, and Tristan took advantage of them. Made his way. At least at first. Then he got tired, and so he drifted a little, disconnected, settled. At least for a while. Then he got tired...and so on. Today he's a vagrant. That's not quite the same as being broke, mind you - he makes it okay, mostly out of the pockets of a certain kind of starstruck bubble-tea-and-power-balance mystic, and he even has an office of sorts, with two chairs and everything. He's eating, anyway. When he wants to. He's pretty thin now.
And then the dying started - and with the dying, the rumors about the Subway Ghost Girl, the whispers - and then someone he knew was gone, and for some reason he just had to know the truth. A nightmare, maybe, or a memory from the bad old days. Some sermon stuck in his brain that caught ahold of his imagination and wouldn't shake loose again. the He went looking, and something looked back, something that looked like a ghost but wasn't, because there's no such thing as ghosts. Was it an accident, just dumb luck that Tristan heard the call? Had to be. Like ghosts and gods and promises kept, there's no such thing as destiny.
Semblance Type: Enlightened...?
Semblance Appearance: A full, curving mask of emerald and carbon-black crystal, split in five places along a star-shaped fracture to reveal bright gold and dark iron in the form of moving clockworks suggestive of living eyes. Four exquisite silver horns extend delicately around the Semblance, colorful ribbons hanging from each.
Semblance Abilities: Names shamelessly stolen from Exalted. Concepts shamelessly stolen from the Book of Genesis.
Once, the Fallen known as Kiarrine was a truly Enlightened artisan-architect among her kind - but that was long before her Fall. Those powers, today, are lost. This Semblance remembers only her ending, the huntress with bared teeth and rolling eyes, treacherous quartermaster to an army she hated and feared almost as much as its enemies.
Constructive Convergence of Principles: With rite and blood sacrifice - usually his own - Tristan can plant the seed of one of Kiarrine's mobile command posts, which will promptly begin extending a creep of holographic blueprints and the suggestions of Enlightened geometry. Over time these diagrams warp surrounding patches of landscape or containing structures into a strange, but beautiful, pseudomechanical "garden" of responsive clockwork tendrils and equipment-groves. Such gardens offer shelter, sustenance, surveillance, and armory within their confines, all that a madling angel would need to fight a one-way war against the shadows she saw from the corners of her eyes. This is not an effective power for crisis situations - it can offer up a single tool, fruit, or camera-vine in a few moments, but its full offering requires at least a day of guided construction, and considerably longer when overtaking large structures. If the seed at the heart of the garden is uprooted and destroyed, everything else goes with it. Explosively. If not maintained regularly by blood and prayer after reaching full bloom, they'll initiate a controlled collapse at the same rate they were built.
Ego-Infused Pattern Primacy: The fruits born of the Semblance offer sustenance and strength, but come at disturbing cost. Each provides a full meal's nourishment, the accelerated clarity of an amphetamine high, and an unchecked access to adrenaline or equivalent biomechanical systems of a body. They have only two side effects, but each is significant: first, users will dream in externally-visible holographics, which can be interfaced by a garden to affect their content. Second and more importantly the fruits usurp addictions - physical and psychological, harmless as sugar or deadly as suicidal obsession - taking over their effects and turning them towards the fruits themselves.
Precision Thought-Force Exercise: It is the way of Chaos to play monster, to confront every problem with overwhelming power and tear to shreds or devour whole all that can be, losing much of value in the process. It is the way of Order to approach even obstacle with exactly appropriate measures. Tristan's powers and their benefits scale with the degree to which he's outnumbered or outmatched. It was by cultivating this ability that Kiarrine nourished her delusions of one day standing as gaoler over all the hateful hordes of the Unfettered and her traitor compatriots...but like any power it has its limits. It feeds on hostile intent and living will, and cannot activate against mechanical or lifeless opposition, against enemies unaware of or not primarily focused on the user, or against those without definite desire to harm or kill - self-defense or efforts to subdue trigger nothing. Even efforts to subdue with future malice are exempt.
Appearance II:
The Fallen: Kiarrine, the Silver Gift, was once as kind and trusting as she was brilliant, and she WAS brilliant. She built such grandiose wonders as the Sundust Sanctuary and the Path of Laughter, but she was best-known - once - for the peerless pleasure garden orrerry known as Kiarrine's Starcatch.
One day, it was burned to the ground.
Kiarrine could not fathom the evil of this, and in trying some small and sacred thing at the heart of her strained, and creaked, and snapped. She became other than she was, and it is terrible indeed to see a servant of Order lose their purpose and their way. She decided that if her greatest design could be sundered by Chaos - for surely it was the work of some Unfettered that undid her - then nothing, no one, could be above suspicion, or corruption, or ruin. She devoted her delicate hands to constructing war-hutches and boltholes, filling these places with paranoid data-dumps and terrifying schemes to purge and restore the Enlightened to what she believed was true Order, unaware of how far from grace she was falling.
Her end was a mercy brought about by three who had once loved her: a soldier she had brought peace, a cruel soul she had been kind to, and a small-minded one she had shown wonders. They only meant to keep and heal her, but they underestimated her insane resolve, and where the last garden of Kiarrine once grew there is only gray ash and scorched earth today.
Age: Twenty one
Appearance I:
Personality:
Tristan is friendly but jaded, an amiable nihilist, a dreamer both sad and thankful to have been so rudely awakened. He's always just a little bit submissive, never showing force when he can stand to go with the flow, always happy to play the game, play along, to humor and to validate. He takes the shape of the world around him and remembers his own only occasionally, in moments of terrible clarity, shining and sharp as broken glass. He used to be different, but then again, didn't everyone? He used to believe he was destined to save the world.
But then again, didn't everyone?
Occupation: Student of sin, New Age charlatan
History:
Tristan came to Lightbridge just a few years back, bright-eyed missionary child of the Way of Light's charismatic messiah and his favorite chorister. The Way of Light had long since slipped past the boundary that separates church from cult, and his sending was more a rival's power play than a show of trust, but he didn't really understand all that at the time. All he knew was he had been chosen! Such a big mission. So serendipitous, this city with its synonym for a name, this new adventure for mankind, for him...!
He didn't come alone, of course. Lance (short for Lancelot; all the kids had knight names, or lady names, to help armor and isolate them in the irreverent world) was his best friend, almost a brother. Sir Wolfgang, he was a little less sure of; older, iron-eyed, too quick to smile and too knowing a smiler. Someone who Tristan couldn't help but think of as, well, worldly.
And he was worldly, was Wolfgang. He liked to drink and start nasty fights, usually after he said something about someone, about their family, usually a woman or a kid. He always met eyes when he said these things, and that was when his smile was widest. Wolfgang had huge, heavy hands, and so these fights often went his way, and never mind the one he'd been steadily losing for the soul of the boys in his charge. But one day a fight didn't go his way. Someone broke a bottle, not a first time, and then they broke Sir Wolfgang, which was. Tristan wasn't there, but during the trial it turned out someone caught it all on cellphone. Several someones, actually.
They were supposed to be invincible. That was the secret truth that had kept them all together, the heart of the Way of Light, that bad things couldn't really happen to them - not really. God would test them - [i][color=82ca9d]was Sir Wolfgang my test?[/i][/color], but in the end they would prevail, it was their destiny. They all had destinies. They were going to save the world. But watching the trial, listening to the defendant, to their tearful lover, Tristan realized that was probably what just about everyone believed. He realized that Sir Wolfgang hadn't been special, and neither was he. They were none of them invincible.
He wrote a letter back home, left it with Lance, who seemed more betrayed by Tristan than by the death of their guardian. Lightbridge had opportunities, and Tristan took advantage of them. Made his way. At least at first. Then he got tired, and so he drifted a little, disconnected, settled. At least for a while. Then he got tired...and so on. Today he's a vagrant. That's not quite the same as being broke, mind you - he makes it okay, mostly out of the pockets of a certain kind of starstruck bubble-tea-and-power-balance mystic, and he even has an office of sorts, with two chairs and everything. He's eating, anyway. When he wants to. He's pretty thin now.
And then the dying started - and with the dying, the rumors about the Subway Ghost Girl, the whispers - and then someone he knew was gone, and for some reason he just had to know the truth. A nightmare, maybe, or a memory from the bad old days. Some sermon stuck in his brain that caught ahold of his imagination and wouldn't shake loose again. the He went looking, and something looked back, something that looked like a ghost but wasn't, because there's no such thing as ghosts. Was it an accident, just dumb luck that Tristan heard the call? Had to be. Like ghosts and gods and promises kept, there's no such thing as destiny.
Semblance Type: Enlightened...?
Semblance Appearance: A full, curving mask of emerald and carbon-black crystal, split in five places along a star-shaped fracture to reveal bright gold and dark iron in the form of moving clockworks suggestive of living eyes. Four exquisite silver horns extend delicately around the Semblance, colorful ribbons hanging from each.
Semblance Abilities: Names shamelessly stolen from Exalted. Concepts shamelessly stolen from the Book of Genesis.
Once, the Fallen known as Kiarrine was a truly Enlightened artisan-architect among her kind - but that was long before her Fall. Those powers, today, are lost. This Semblance remembers only her ending, the huntress with bared teeth and rolling eyes, treacherous quartermaster to an army she hated and feared almost as much as its enemies.
Constructive Convergence of Principles: With rite and blood sacrifice - usually his own - Tristan can plant the seed of one of Kiarrine's mobile command posts, which will promptly begin extending a creep of holographic blueprints and the suggestions of Enlightened geometry. Over time these diagrams warp surrounding patches of landscape or containing structures into a strange, but beautiful, pseudomechanical "garden" of responsive clockwork tendrils and equipment-groves. Such gardens offer shelter, sustenance, surveillance, and armory within their confines, all that a madling angel would need to fight a one-way war against the shadows she saw from the corners of her eyes. This is not an effective power for crisis situations - it can offer up a single tool, fruit, or camera-vine in a few moments, but its full offering requires at least a day of guided construction, and considerably longer when overtaking large structures. If the seed at the heart of the garden is uprooted and destroyed, everything else goes with it. Explosively. If not maintained regularly by blood and prayer after reaching full bloom, they'll initiate a controlled collapse at the same rate they were built.
Ego-Infused Pattern Primacy: The fruits born of the Semblance offer sustenance and strength, but come at disturbing cost. Each provides a full meal's nourishment, the accelerated clarity of an amphetamine high, and an unchecked access to adrenaline or equivalent biomechanical systems of a body. They have only two side effects, but each is significant: first, users will dream in externally-visible holographics, which can be interfaced by a garden to affect their content. Second and more importantly the fruits usurp addictions - physical and psychological, harmless as sugar or deadly as suicidal obsession - taking over their effects and turning them towards the fruits themselves.
Precision Thought-Force Exercise: It is the way of Chaos to play monster, to confront every problem with overwhelming power and tear to shreds or devour whole all that can be, losing much of value in the process. It is the way of Order to approach even obstacle with exactly appropriate measures. Tristan's powers and their benefits scale with the degree to which he's outnumbered or outmatched. It was by cultivating this ability that Kiarrine nourished her delusions of one day standing as gaoler over all the hateful hordes of the Unfettered and her traitor compatriots...but like any power it has its limits. It feeds on hostile intent and living will, and cannot activate against mechanical or lifeless opposition, against enemies unaware of or not primarily focused on the user, or against those without definite desire to harm or kill - self-defense or efforts to subdue trigger nothing. Even efforts to subdue with future malice are exempt.
Appearance II:
The Fallen: Kiarrine, the Silver Gift, was once as kind and trusting as she was brilliant, and she WAS brilliant. She built such grandiose wonders as the Sundust Sanctuary and the Path of Laughter, but she was best-known - once - for the peerless pleasure garden orrerry known as Kiarrine's Starcatch.
One day, it was burned to the ground.
Kiarrine could not fathom the evil of this, and in trying some small and sacred thing at the heart of her strained, and creaked, and snapped. She became other than she was, and it is terrible indeed to see a servant of Order lose their purpose and their way. She decided that if her greatest design could be sundered by Chaos - for surely it was the work of some Unfettered that undid her - then nothing, no one, could be above suspicion, or corruption, or ruin. She devoted her delicate hands to constructing war-hutches and boltholes, filling these places with paranoid data-dumps and terrifying schemes to purge and restore the Enlightened to what she believed was true Order, unaware of how far from grace she was falling.
Her end was a mercy brought about by three who had once loved her: a soldier she had brought peace, a cruel soul she had been kind to, and a small-minded one she had shown wonders. They only meant to keep and heal her, but they underestimated her insane resolve, and where the last garden of Kiarrine once grew there is only gray ash and scorched earth today.