[OOC] Application to deercountry (Re-app)

[inkedspell]

Character Base

• Character Name: Sarona Gayle
• Age: 18
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: Original Character / After luring the Soulcarver back to the Mystlands and watching her best friend being absorbed by it. | Deer Country CRAU up to March 2022
• Items Coming Along:
-- Outfit: Short sleeve shirt, under tank top, dark-wash overalls, steel-toe boots, undergarments, hairband to hold hair back from face, and her glasses.
-- Satchel: Flashlight, Swiss army knife, and Med Pack (inhaler and 1 month prescription of ACE inhibitors and Immunity Boosters), 3 hairbands, 1 magnifying glass, 1 pair of scissors, bottle of water, 5 nutrient powder packs, and replacement pair of glasses.
-- 1 Rune pack (5 small ink bottles, mini-folder with 5 sheets of Rune paper, 1 small notebook, 1 regular pen, 2 inkwell pens, a Runic Needle Pen (for tattoos))
-- 1 mini tool kit (mini hammer, 3 screwdrivers, wrench, pliers, wire cutters, mini ratchet and 4 interchangeable heads, mini tape measure (20ft)).
-- Prosthetic limb

• Content Warnings for Character: Pediatric medical complications, parent abuse/neglect, sibling abuse, unhealthy coping behaviors, survivalist self-harm/amputation, death of parental/family figures, and other forms of personal trauma.

Character Background

• History: Character History
• Core Relationships:
-Sarona has struggled to build strong bonds her entire life because she grew up in a family where her bonds didn’t mean anything. She was raised to believe her only value is in what she can do for others or the status and prestige her skills could provide her parents. Her mother was resentful and endorsed her brother’s bullying of her, her father was more absent than anything and dismissive when he was around enough to care. So long as she was exceling, he felt she was fine and moved on with his day. Her sister and the housekeeper were the only people who showed any regular interest in her. So she had a lot of trouble building bonds that didn’t involve her having to give something, or prove herself and that is what she believes her purpose in life is. It just came to the point that she decided she would choose on her own who she would giving and proving herself to. This is why JD and the Inkmetal Forge helped turn her life around. Sure, the therapy didn’t help as much as they thought it had, for she often talked around the therapist in ways to let them assume she was doing better than she was, but they taught her the value of service for better causes and that even if others don’t say “thank you” you don’t need that. You just need to know you did what you could when you could.

Her mentor Roan is someone she greatly admires and looks up to and he uses that to his advantage to get her to do things, like go back to school. But at the same time, she doesn’t feel she can be vulnerable with him, even though she logically believes he wouldn’t hold it against her, because something tells her that it’s a flaw to let other people see her in that way. She’s been called weak, pathetic, and useless most of her life, so she can’t allow others to see her in that way. She must be capable of handling anything that comes at her. Therapy has taught her that she shouldn’t act like feelings don’t exist, but often she takes those messages and turns them around on other people, insisting that they should acknowledge their feelings and take whatever time they need.

Recently, her friend Romero, who she would call her best friend even before now, has broken through a lot of her boundaries purely through stubborn support. He’s been there for her, seeing how she’s spiraled and been influenced by the obsidian shard into obsessing over it and pulls her back as much as he can. When she wouldn’t back down from her plans to try and stop the Soulcarver, her forced her to let him help. Where many people back off because they don’t want to trample over her boundaries and respect her autonomy (or are adults telling her what she can and can’t do about the situation), he’s shoved himself right in there and won’t let her dismiss him. His unwavering, even if at times critical, support of her has really helped keep her from descending into a total breakdown since the awakening of the Soulcarver. She doesn’t feel alone because he’s been there for her every step of the way even when she ignored him, talked down to him, or tried to shut him out. She needed someone like that in her life and she didn’t realize just how much until now. It doesn’t change how she still struggles to relate to other most people, but it does show that she can have deep emotional bonds and that her ability to let people in isn’t as broken as she thought.

Still, relating to people her own age can be hard, and she struggles to make deep, lasting bonds. She can have friends like she made in Deerington, such as Ruby or Mirai or Luz, who she worries about, cares for, and wants to help succeed in their own rights, but despite caring about them, she can’t break through the barrier of self-sabotage. Even the fact she likes to flirt with older girls or hit on ladies that are more likely to be unavailable for her is part of the way that she keeps a distance between herself and others. She doesn’t want this distance, but her fear leads her to projecting into situations where she ultimately knows things will remain superficial. Because if she does let them close, and she loses them, then she’s the failure for being hurt or letting them be hurt, for not being able to prevent it. The beginning of the Shattered End, the apocalypse she maybe started back home, only reinforced to her that being vulnerable and making mistakes is bad for her because something horrible always comes out of it. And for all that Romero is trying to convince her that’s not true, she may never let go of that fear completely.


• Summary of CRAU Impact:
Being in Deerington and Deer Country has influenced Sarona’s outlook on life, but perhaps not for the better. She’s met people she cares for and is protective over (Ruby, Luz, Glitch, even Resident Dad Man Shiro), but she’s also kept herself strategically at a distance to avoid the potential of being too hurt when someone leaves, like when they made the transition from Deerington to Trench and Sarona realized Mirai hadn’t made it with them. She hadn’t known Mirai for too long but worried about her and wanted to know she was okay. Saeri already struggled with having bonds withheld from her, of them not being permanent. Being in a place where people come and go and you never know if they’ll come back has really taught her how to not mourn those losses by maintaining the barrier emotionally.

Of course, she’s also seen how people who hurt others and don’t feel any remorse for those actions suffer no consequences because the state of things makes those consequences completely irrelevant. Glitch was maimed by Maul and nothing happened. Nothing that mattered. And even in her argument with Maul about his “guilt” it cemented the state of things in her mind. In Deerington and Trench, consequences are relative and ineffective and all they had was social pressure to afford any kind of structure and protection. It has made her views on “death” a lot more laissez faire, despite never having died herself, along with her views on revenge. Because maybe nothing is permanent, but the temporary hurt might still bring some measure or closure. Not that she’s gotten to have any of that herself.

Sarona’s blood magic in Deer Country will be greatly influenced by the consequences of her choices at the end of Deerington. When given the option to sacrifice or awaken her own egg, Sarona chose to sacrifice it, believing that if she did so, she would be protecting others. This was not a selfless or Noble choice, but one made of selfish need to prove she had value and that others would find her worthy, even if only in sacrificing herself so others could survive. And thus, her obsessive need to do for others and seek out meaning in herself through that instead of seeking internal validation is going to lead to emotional influences on her blood magic.

Character Personality Through Key Moments

(2+) Positive Experiences:
Sarona’s intelligence and thirst for knowledge has always been her greatest strength as it pushes her to want to understand the world and to think critically about why things are the way they are. She can learn and assimilate new information very quickly and is adaptable at how she mixes different forms of rune magic together to get the result she wants. She was smart enough to build her own golems at five years old, and used that intelligence to help her friend Romero in creating a seal to prevent his curse from causing further decay in his bones and soul.

Sarona is also very motivated in that she doesn’t ever give up and will keep pushing and striving to find new ways to achieve her goals. When she was trapped in the Mystlands for a year, she could have succumb to her injuries multiple times, but she didn’t. She patched herself up, she pushed on and eventually she found a location where she could escape through a Gate back to Earth.

Sarona is also giving, although she would never consider it that way. She spent her childhood being reminded over and over that her only value is what she could do for others. She was trained to give of herself even to her own detriment. But after seeing the Inkmetal Forge’s humanitarian work she realized that she didn’t have to give and give to selfish, greedy people who didn’t care. She could actually do good and give to people who needed and didn’t have. So yes, she can be very giving, offering her skills, services, and knowledge but she doesn’t realize that it’s not her ingrained trauma pushing it but the fact she really does want to help people.

(2+) Negative Experiences:
But along with Sarona’s intelligence comes arrogance, she sees herself as more informed and thus more suited to make decisions than other people she thinks don’t know what they are doing. It that can also leave her blind to the opinions of others that may be just as important or valuable. She thinks she’s the smartest and thus she must have the answers to the problems. Like when she didn’t listen to her professors about the potential dangerous of her coming into physical contact with the Obsidian Shard again, because she thought that she knew more considering she’d already spent a year with it and felt what it could do. She thought she knew the risks, and it backfired on her.

Sarona is also a perfectionist to the point that she can become distracted and hyperfixate on that perfection. She doesn’t know how to accept being wrong. She has to get everything right and if not then, not only is she a failure, but people could die, the world could end, and she will be the reason. Or worse of all, it will prove how worthless and undeserving she is of all the good things in her life. She will spend hours, days, weeks, too focused to eat or sleep properly until someone else steps in and draws her out of it. The Obsidian Shard fed on this and that’s how she became so entrenched in trying to fix what she sees as her failure, in waking the Soulcarver.

Ironically, both of these very self-focused traits come down to what Sarona can do and what she has done. Proof of knowledge, proof of skill, proof of how useful and valuable she is as a tool. Because Sarona in the end lacks self-worth. She knows that she should be important as a human being, but she doesn’t actually believe that she is. She sees herself as someone who exists to do for others, to give to others, and to make the lives of other people easier. She just gets to choose how she does that and who she chooses to help.

Something else that has been steady building in Sarona is her temper. She’s angry at the world, angry at herself, and angry that she keeps fighting and things still keep going wrong. Every step she takes forward leads to two more steps back, like how her plan to trick the Soulcarver led to her and Romero being fused with the shard. Or how her attempts to fix that led to Romero being taken by the Soulcarver. She can still portray herself as being more at ease and unaffected than she really feels, but the anger at the injustices of the world isn’t going anywhere and is becoming more apparent. The fact it’s fueled by her own self-loathing means it will probably burst out eventually but she’d held it back so far.

Deer Country Attributes

• Canon Powers:
Sarona is a prodigy in Runic Inscriptions and Golem-making, and has a hobby of making small golems that do basic tasks, such as picking up laundry, or watering plants, but recently has been making more complex Golems. She also is good at making temporary Inscriptions. Temporary tattoos that have an even more finite time span for their usage, but can create a greater burst of power and energy. These tattoos are made with a special ink and put on a specially treated paper that can then be transferred to a person’s body. These tattoos are generalized and can be more mass-produced than the unique specialized tattoos that the Inkmetal Forge members put on their own bodies.

She has seven (7) runic tattoos on her body:
-- 1: Metal-warping Inscription down her right arm that she designed herself that allows her to manipulate and bend metals with her bare hands. The shifting is near instantaneous. Typically uses it to shift metal staffs/poles/beams into weaponry. This inscription has a scar running through it that disrupted the magic, but has since been repaired with reinforcement runes.
-- 2: Rune on left breast that improves her health, not exponentially, but it boosts her immune system to prevent her from falling ill as often as she did as a child and it means if she does get sick her body works through the illness much faster. A cold may last only a few hours versus a few days.
-- 3: Tattoo is on her left leg, which boosts her speed in temporary bursts. She can move so quickly it’s almost as if she’s teleporting from one location to another, but this is not something she can maintain so it only works in thirty second increments and she can only use it five times before she has to rest.
-- 4: Base Tattoo is on the back of her right shoulder links to the basic AIM suits used by the Inkmetal Forge. It allows her to activate the suits while not being inside of them and direct their actions remotely. These mobile suits are very simple and only can perform certain tasks and skills each, as they are primarily for construction and emergency services. This rune was also created with specialized ink that caused her hair to turn blue.
-- 5: Invulnerability tattoo on her left upper arm. This provides her an inability to be harmed through most means or to feel pain for up to an hour depending on the severity of the damage the rune is absorbing. After that hour though it begins to shut down the other runes on her body and redirect all the power in them to itself to continue working if she doesn’t turn it off. Letting it fully recharge on its own takes 12 hours.
-- 6: Anti-Greying purification rune above right breast. Protected from the effects of the Myst in most circumstances, but due to the incompleteness of the rune higher severe exposure or attacks from Greyed creatures might still have an effect on her.
-- 7: Alchemic mutations rune on left hand that works on Mystland flora/Myst-affected organic materials. While the primary purpose was to use it to make edible plants she could eat, it can also be combined with her anti-Grey rune to heal organic matter from Greying effects. This takes a lot out of her though, so it would be used rarely. This rune was recreated by her and carved into the palm of her prosthetic hand after she got it because she felt the need to look as much like her former self as possible.

Sarona has permanently bonded herself to the power of the Soulcarver through merging with one of the obsidian shards of its heart back home. This causes her runes to shimmer with an iridescent glow when she uses her magic and this means in canon that she can mimic the power of the Soulcarver, although she has not yet learned this. It also creates a direct connection between her and the Soulcarver, allowing it to track her and her to track it in return. The powers she is aware that the Soulcarver has are shapeshifting, magical power boost and corruption, defensive anti-magical capabilities by attacking and poisoning magic around it, and the ability to create near impenetrable obsidian armor. These are the only ones she will have any potential to learn. The drawback of this mystland magic is that the more she were to use it, the more her own magic would be corrupted to mirror that of the Soulcarver and her own heart could be turned to stone.

For purposes of the game, her rune-magic is going to be tied more into the setting with her metal-warping being stronger when she uses blood magic and the alchemic organic rune working in limited ways on making plants edible, but only when she is using blood magic.

Also has five years of martial arts training (krav maga and taekwondo) and fighting Mystland creatures under her belt.

• Blood Type: Darkblood
• Omen: Simidele, a rainboweye mountain lion of the Mystlands. Basically, a mountain lion mostly covered in peacock feathers with wings and a long tail that can fly. Simidele is a cuddly friendly boy who just wants people to love him, let him do things for them, and is just a good boy who doesn’t know how oblivious he is and he’s okay with that. He’s trusting, loving, and gives of himself in hopes of people giving of themselves in return. A bit clingy. Honestly, Simidele reminds her a great deal of Romero.
• Blessed Day: April 9th is Sarona’s blessed day as it’s the day that she was abandoned in the Mystlands by her brother, Wynston.
• Patron Pthumerian: Argonaut and yes she’s going to have Opinions. She’ll think that she should have gotten Never Mind considering her birthday is in September and she’s basically a rune scholar. She won’t understand how she ended up with a Patron representing hope, naïve wonder, and trust of all things.

• Blood Power Manifestation:
As a darkblood, Sarona’s going to have her blood magic make her runes even stronger and more powerful when she can contain it and use it in an ink-like form, which is possible with her minor reality-shaping abilities. She could possibly train herself to do this with other darkblood’s blood but not without player permission and it would take time. Because of the Soulcarver’s influence, her rune tattoos will glow and shimmer when she uses them, and her darkblood will provide a power boost to those who imbibe it or apply it directly to their person. This will also connect with the Consequence she has from the events at the end of Deerington.

Her Consequence for sacrificing her egg also comes into play here, as anyone she had a transfusion with will thus gain a psychic link with her. She will become the bearer of all pain they have for days, up to a week, depending on how much blood is transfused. Every scrape, cut, mortal wound, or even emotional pain, she will feel it instead of them. Where once she wanted to suppress and ignore her own negative feelings, now she’ll be forced to taking on the negative feelings and physical pain of anyone she helps in a more direct way. They will also feel stronger for a limited period of time as they feed on Sarona’s own energy, causing her potential fatigue from the drain.

Writing Samples

One: In Game Sample
Two: TDM Sample

The Player

• Player Name: Kathrine
• Player Age: 30+
• Player Contact: chocolateisbrainfood
• Permissions: Here.