palamedes THEE sextus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
megatheorem) wrote2022-09-19 09:32 pm
megatheorem) wrote2022-09-19 09:32 pm
rhodos.
PLAYER INFORMATION
Name: Laura
Age: 31
Contact: pm
Timezone: EST
Other characters: none
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Palamedes Sextus
Canon: The Locked Tomb series
Canon point: ch. 6 of Nona the Ninth (fully released on Sept. 13 and ch. 1-6 have been out since July, so there are mild spoilers in here for Nona's early canon)
Age: ~21
History: here
Suitability: The premise of the Empire that Palamedes is from in his canon is that a cohort of child soldiers and necromancers with cannon fodder bodyguards fight an endless war against An Enemy for reasons that only their Emperor really knows and isn't sharing with them. Palamedes himself is accustomed therefore to great, looming dangers and various kinds of violence; being a necromancer himself, he's also intimately familiar with death and all its friends, and he's an extremely good necromancer on top of that. He's smart and skilled enough to keep his head in a crisis and take care of the people around him (he has technically been the political leader of his Imperial House since he was thirteen). Throughout the events of canon, he's put through a deadly haunted house and blasts his own soul out of his body to avenge some murders, keeps himself sane in extreme isolation for several months, and aids in the attempted escape of his entire people from the warring Empire to a place of safety - winding up living for six months on a planet that is fundamentally a refugee haven on its best days and an active war zone in others. While he isn't emotionally unaffected by all of these things, these conditions and the presence of death and violence are all part and parcel for him in his daily life. He can hack it, given enough time.
Is this a re-app? nope
Inventory: A pencil stub, a romance novel (The Necromancer's Marriage Season), a notebook, a tape recorder with a tape in it.
Powers, abilities and/or inhuman traits: Palamedes is a necromancer, which does not mean he makes zombies, in this canon, mostly. A necromancer is fundamentally a wizard that makes use of life energy (thalergy) and death energy (thanergy) to do various flesh/bone/spirit magics. Palamedes is an incredibly powerful necromancer but not unlimited in scope/raw power, per canon; I've adjusted basically all of these to include significant nerfs even past canon for the sake of not loosing a death wizard on a town that regularly turns into a death zone. With that in mind, Palamedes' abilities are:
MANIFESTATION
Character flaws/traumas: cw: cancer, violence, burning people alive
Character trait(s) the Manifestation reflects: Palamedes' Manifestation reflects primarily his guilt over his choices hurting the people he cares about, as well as his personal fear of what his own mind is capable of if he keeps putting it through Extremes. It more or less looks like a version of himself with his worst mistakes symbolically stuck on, reflecting how he heaps too many responsibilities onto himself and obsesses over them excessively.
Description: While roughly Palamedes-sized (about 6') and shaped ("starvation-thinness," lanky), the Oversight Body is difficult to look at most times, almost as if the space it occupies simply isn't there. The best term for what it's like to look at it directly would be "migraine aura," where it can induce the effect of either a too-bright flashing space, or a "blind spot" where the eye can recognize it's there, but it can't be clearly processed. Better spotted in the periphery, the Oversight Body when not viewed head-on is completely ashen grey in appearance, robed and faceless save for its eyes, which burn pure white. Besides the eyes-only face, the only other part of its body that isn't covered by grey robe are its hands, which - while also grey, still - are skeletal, with sharpened fingertips.
Attacks and behavior: The Oversight Body is twitchy, with erratic movements and an apparent inability to hold still. It looks physically quite weak but possesses an unerring dedication to following, which it will do without attacking unless provoked or looked at directly for too long. When it attacks, its movements become focused and precise, and it uses its skeletal hands like dual blades; its primary desire is to stop and hold whoever it might attack, and will become less aggressive if met with minimal resistance. While it will swipe to incapacitate, if attacked in turn it will switch tactics to enveloping its target in a white fire, the same as what burns in its eyes. If it manages to grab or incapacitate an individual, it will endeavor to take them away and ignore all other people present even if subsequently attacked again. It can very easily be hit, particularly when dragging someone away, and despite its own ability to dispense fire, it is the most vulnerable to fire and/or explosions from another source. However, it's extremely persistent, so literally taking it apart to stop it from moving is usually necessary to escape from it if it isn't outrun.
Path towards resolution: Because Palamedes' Manifestation reflects his guilt over all the people he believes he's directly hurt with his actions, part of his path towards resolving this will be to like, calm down - to stop trying to be the problem-solver for everyone, all the time. He doesn't have a problem with teamwork necessarily, but he needs to learn that not every problem is his to solve; sometimes, the better choice and the "right choice" are not the same! And that's okay! He needs to learn this, whether that winds up showing in a stern talking-to from other people or a more brutal trial and error process. Once he can do this, dealing with its other aspects - namely, his fear of what he's doing to his own mind - will fall into place more or less naturally; if he can stop obsessing over problem-solving for everyone he meets, and acknowledge that things going wrong in the lives of his people are not all his explicit fault, he can relax the extreme hold he has on his own brain and just... relax. In terms of literally dealing with the Manifestation, face-to-face, the fact that it physically looks like a weird version of himself covered in Symbolic Reminders means that he'll have to face all of the other things first, before he can effectively take on the Manifestation in any kind of permanent manner. Until then: you can bet he will, as is traditional, put that shit in a box and compartmentalize it away until Later. This will, of course, make it that much harder to get the ball rolling towards resolution; he'll need support from outside his own head to really do it.
SAMPLES
One TDM toplevel and two, from a past game
Name: Laura
Age: 31
Contact: pm
Timezone: EST
Other characters: none
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Palamedes Sextus
Canon: The Locked Tomb series
Canon point: ch. 6 of Nona the Ninth (fully released on Sept. 13 and ch. 1-6 have been out since July, so there are mild spoilers in here for Nona's early canon)
Age: ~21
History: here
Suitability: The premise of the Empire that Palamedes is from in his canon is that a cohort of child soldiers and necromancers with cannon fodder bodyguards fight an endless war against An Enemy for reasons that only their Emperor really knows and isn't sharing with them. Palamedes himself is accustomed therefore to great, looming dangers and various kinds of violence; being a necromancer himself, he's also intimately familiar with death and all its friends, and he's an extremely good necromancer on top of that. He's smart and skilled enough to keep his head in a crisis and take care of the people around him (he has technically been the political leader of his Imperial House since he was thirteen). Throughout the events of canon, he's put through a deadly haunted house and blasts his own soul out of his body to avenge some murders, keeps himself sane in extreme isolation for several months, and aids in the attempted escape of his entire people from the warring Empire to a place of safety - winding up living for six months on a planet that is fundamentally a refugee haven on its best days and an active war zone in others. While he isn't emotionally unaffected by all of these things, these conditions and the presence of death and violence are all part and parcel for him in his daily life. He can hack it, given enough time.
Is this a re-app? nope
Inventory: A pencil stub, a romance novel (The Necromancer's Marriage Season), a notebook, a tape recorder with a tape in it.
Powers, abilities and/or inhuman traits: Palamedes is a necromancer, which does not mean he makes zombies, in this canon, mostly. A necromancer is fundamentally a wizard that makes use of life energy (thalergy) and death energy (thanergy) to do various flesh/bone/spirit magics. Palamedes is an incredibly powerful necromancer but not unlimited in scope/raw power, per canon; I've adjusted basically all of these to include significant nerfs even past canon for the sake of not loosing a death wizard on a town that regularly turns into a death zone. With that in mind, Palamedes' abilities are:
• Psychometry: using energy signatures, he can get flashes of the history of where an object has been and who has interacted with it; limitations: sometimes it just straight doesn't work, but for the sake of game flow, let's say he can't read back further than a few days
• Wards: drawn with his blood and imbued with energy to ward off spirits/creatures; limitations: stops working if the drawing is smudged/ruined, loses effectiveness over time (let's say 30 min), can only ward an area about the size of a living room
• Other kind of wards: this one is like an invisible wall that spends energy to produce and maintain; limitation: lasts about 2 minutes before it makes him sweat blood out of every pore and get woozy
• Flesh magic: fundamentally healing, but also works the other way, e.g. his personal knowledge of how bodies work lets him effectively put them back together or take them apart; limitations: can't revive the dead, healing is restricted to a max level of like a stab wound, taking a body apart with his brain uses A Lot of energy and will knock him out if he inflicts more than like a stab wound on something
• Bone magic: not his specialty and so a low priority, but bone magic as he has been taught allows the user to "program" a skeleton to perform basic tasks; limitation: time limit of an hour
• Spirit magic: ability to talk to summon and speak with spirits; limitation: time limit 5 min, also is a pain to do because sometimes spirits just don't want to play
• Sticky soul: honestly I don't intend this to ever be regained as relevant because it's nutty, but since it's relevant to his canon point and half his traumas: he knows how to attach his soul to an object so that if his body dies, he can kick it as a revenant; genuinely just putting this one here to give it a nod
MANIFESTATION
Character flaws/traumas: cw: cancer, violence, burning people alive
Palamedes is an extremely obsessive person with a habit of severely compartmentalizing. Sometimes, this is a good thing! He is an important figure among his people and his life has not been completely easy - a close friend from childhood he harbored romantic feelings for was dying of cancer since before they met, and his ability to keep his feelings in check did help him to create medical equipment that extended her life much longer than anyone predicted. However, the kind of mind that can turn off its stressors is a mind that has potential to be incredibly dangerous, something Palamedes himself knows; when he puts himself into extreme isolation (locked in a "room" of his own mental design, after his body explodes) he stays there for eight months without losing all traces of his sanity, which he himself says is kind of a concern. There's something very walking-a-knife's-edge about his ability to put everything wrong with his life in a different box and not have to look at it, and whether he's headed for an abrupt snap or a complete excising of his capacity for empathy is something he himself isn't sure of. He worries about it! He doesn't talk about it. The face he presents to everyone in his life including Camilla, his best friend and cavalier (necromancer's bodyguard), is one of being put together flawlessly, unaffected by things that should have broken him by now. The obsessive devotion to his Tasks and keeping his people safe, combined with the compartmentalizing, are a trauma response that get more dangerous the longer he keeps leaning into them.Manifestation name: Oversight Body
As for a straight trauma, significant personal loss is something Palamedes has experienced in kind. His aforementioned friend and crush, Dulcinea Septimus, was always probably going to die of her illness— and then she was murdered, actually. Palamedes learns of this not long after four other people he was friendly with are murdered, and he blames himself in some capacity for all of them; he believes that if he had been cleverer, or quicker on the uptake, none of those people would have been killed. The loss of Dulcinea in particular sticks with him, as they'd been friends for most of his life and he'd dedicated so much time to trying to save her from her cancer; it sticks with him so strongly in fact that, after losing two more friends and having a third tell him that it's okay if she dies, he snaps and declares that he's refusing to lose anyone else from now on. These losses have all led to him internalizing a sense of personal responsibility for his loved ones, and each time he fails to save someone, it digs the knife in that much deeper. It also extends out to strangers, as he applies equal weight to the suffering of his friends to that of strangers being burned alive by military radicals; to Palamedes, the loss of nine million people he doesn't know is the same as the loss of his dearest friends. While, as before, he doesn't often bring this up, his behavior becomes reckless in stages the more loss he encounters, as all he really wants to do is get his friends back and live a safe and boring life. The guilt he feels over losing Dulcinea, his other friends, and even just trying to keep himself alive weighs heavy on him at all times, and he would do absolutely anything to protect the people he has left.
Following both of these, Palamedes possesses a rather fatal flaw of gentle hypocrisy, piled high with a helping of trying to do everything for everyone. The latter is obvious - he really doesn't need to put the effort into saving nine million strangers he's never met and isn't his fault if something happens to them because he didn't act, but he will put himself in the center and try to take responsibility, if he cannot take control. In an effort to get his people out of the Empire, he's tricked into getting sixteen of his friends and family kidnapped and held captive for months on end, and placed in a situation where they could be burned alive at any time - and even though they aren't, many of them blind themselves to contend with a supernatural danger that they wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Palamedes is destroyed by this; the safety of his family is everything to him, and he never once stops blaming himself for what happens to them, even when they're alright in the end - even when he couldn't have known that an agreement would be broken in such a betrayal that they'd all be captured. It was his call, and so it's his fault; he did this, because he always has to stick his opinions in and convince people that he's right, and he's quite good at that. His hypocrisy shows in similar ways, primarily in how he has much less regard for his own physical safety than his family's. He blows himself up to avenge his murdered friends, without considering that his contingency plan (hooking his soul onto his own skull) might fail or that, regardless, he leaves his remaining loved ones with a piece of his skull for company in the meantime. This isn't to say that he doesn't feel immeasurable guilt and grief over doing this to them - he does - but in the moments where looking after himself would be... helpful, he leaps straight into not doing that - because he's always right, of course. It might kill him daily that, devested of his own body, he's hurting Camilla by living literally in the back of her mind, but he did still take the first leap without consulting anyone else— the same sort of behavior he berates so many people for, the rest of the time.
Character trait(s) the Manifestation reflects: Palamedes' Manifestation reflects primarily his guilt over his choices hurting the people he cares about, as well as his personal fear of what his own mind is capable of if he keeps putting it through Extremes. It more or less looks like a version of himself with his worst mistakes symbolically stuck on, reflecting how he heaps too many responsibilities onto himself and obsesses over them excessively.
Description: While roughly Palamedes-sized (about 6') and shaped ("starvation-thinness," lanky), the Oversight Body is difficult to look at most times, almost as if the space it occupies simply isn't there. The best term for what it's like to look at it directly would be "migraine aura," where it can induce the effect of either a too-bright flashing space, or a "blind spot" where the eye can recognize it's there, but it can't be clearly processed. Better spotted in the periphery, the Oversight Body when not viewed head-on is completely ashen grey in appearance, robed and faceless save for its eyes, which burn pure white. Besides the eyes-only face, the only other part of its body that isn't covered by grey robe are its hands, which - while also grey, still - are skeletal, with sharpened fingertips.
Attacks and behavior: The Oversight Body is twitchy, with erratic movements and an apparent inability to hold still. It looks physically quite weak but possesses an unerring dedication to following, which it will do without attacking unless provoked or looked at directly for too long. When it attacks, its movements become focused and precise, and it uses its skeletal hands like dual blades; its primary desire is to stop and hold whoever it might attack, and will become less aggressive if met with minimal resistance. While it will swipe to incapacitate, if attacked in turn it will switch tactics to enveloping its target in a white fire, the same as what burns in its eyes. If it manages to grab or incapacitate an individual, it will endeavor to take them away and ignore all other people present even if subsequently attacked again. It can very easily be hit, particularly when dragging someone away, and despite its own ability to dispense fire, it is the most vulnerable to fire and/or explosions from another source. However, it's extremely persistent, so literally taking it apart to stop it from moving is usually necessary to escape from it if it isn't outrun.
Path towards resolution: Because Palamedes' Manifestation reflects his guilt over all the people he believes he's directly hurt with his actions, part of his path towards resolving this will be to like, calm down - to stop trying to be the problem-solver for everyone, all the time. He doesn't have a problem with teamwork necessarily, but he needs to learn that not every problem is his to solve; sometimes, the better choice and the "right choice" are not the same! And that's okay! He needs to learn this, whether that winds up showing in a stern talking-to from other people or a more brutal trial and error process. Once he can do this, dealing with its other aspects - namely, his fear of what he's doing to his own mind - will fall into place more or less naturally; if he can stop obsessing over problem-solving for everyone he meets, and acknowledge that things going wrong in the lives of his people are not all his explicit fault, he can relax the extreme hold he has on his own brain and just... relax. In terms of literally dealing with the Manifestation, face-to-face, the fact that it physically looks like a weird version of himself covered in Symbolic Reminders means that he'll have to face all of the other things first, before he can effectively take on the Manifestation in any kind of permanent manner. Until then: you can bet he will, as is traditional, put that shit in a box and compartmentalize it away until Later. This will, of course, make it that much harder to get the ball rolling towards resolution; he'll need support from outside his own head to really do it.
SAMPLES
One TDM toplevel and two, from a past game