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faeriegoldPLAYER INFORMATION
Name: Joysweeper
Age: 33
Contact: joysweeper @ plurk
Timezone: EST
Other characters: n/a
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Vögelein
Canon: Vögelein: Clockwork Faerie
Canon point: The start of the first volume, after she discovers Jakob has died and flees their apartment, before she meets Jason.
Age: ~300. Mentally she seems equivalent to late teens early twenties.
History: In the mid 17th century, before the doors between the human world and Faerie fully closed, Vögelein was created by a master watchmaker as a dancing automaton. Unbenownst to either of them, when he created her it was with such skill and love and loneliness that some Fae spirit crossed to inhabit her, making her come truly alive, though she needed to be wound like any clockwork. Her creator called her a miracle and knew she had to be kept secret.
Vögelein outlived her creator and had to have other human “Guardians” who wound her and kept her safe and close to them, either introducing her to her next Guardian when they got old, or dying, throwing her world into chaos and forcing her to approach and bargain with someone new. During WWII she lived with a Frenchwoman who was killed in the American advance and was rescued by an American soldier, Jakob, who became her Guardian. As Jakob aged and became paranoid he and Vögelein quarreled, and in the middle of one of their worst fights he stumbled into traffic and was hit by a car. Guilt-wracked, Vögelein did her best to serve as his nurse and stayed quietly with him, ceasing the limited independence that had so bothered Jakob, until his death.
He hadn’t been in any condition to introduce her to a new Guardian, so Vögelein was forced to turn to the first person she could find to wind her, only to find he was even more controlling. She also met her first ‘real’ faerie, an inutterably bitter creature stranded in and poisoned by the human world, and eventually was able to find a half-peace with him. A friendly street sweeper arranged to find chill people she could visit to wind her without her living with them exclusively.
Suitability: Not gonna lie, she'll have a rough start but it's at least half because of the humanization. Vögelein has absolutely known danger and hardship. She's lived centuries with her limitation of needing others to wind her, or within thirty-six hours she'll collapse, lose her memories starting with the most recent ones, and then die. She has attacked people to protect her loved ones or out of anger. Usually she hides or runs with limited physical risk to herself, though, as until now she's been both highly mobile and very small.
Pretty sure she's gonna die in the first month but she can learn!
Is this a re-app? n/a
Inventory: Around her neck, a tiny key on a fine chain. A cigar box containing clothes - other than what she arrives in they're all clockwork-scale because I think that's funny - tiny quill pens, tiny parchments, a locket with a photograph, and a tiny pendant her Guardians have worn. She's never owned much.
Powers, abilities and/or inhuman traits: The powers are real simple but I'll list them as levels because of the possibility of expanding them with noncanon additions. Traits are a bit more complex and involved.
Level 1 Memoryshare: In canon this is only shown working on another faerie, since they're both creatures partly of another world. In a game it might work on other PCs as they are also of other worlds. Vögelein can touch someone and until contact is broken they are both surrounded by a full-scene vision from either character's treasured memories. Physically they're in the same place, oblivious and vulnerable to attack.
Level 1 Glamour: Vögelein can't make herself invisible but as a faerie creature she can be hard to notice when she's not doing something to stand out, though some characters are immune and see her anyway. Let’s say... player characters unless they opt otherwise, major NPCs, and her own Manifestations see her just fine, but if she's thirty feet or more away from other Manifestations and monsters then they don't notice her unless she does something to catch their attention.
Level 1? Eidetic memory: Vögelein doesn’t forget anything, though if she’s not paying attention to something then it doesn’t get stored away.
Traits:
Level 1 Inhuman Appearance: Purely aesthetic. Gold-colored skin, sapphirelike irises, pointed ears, markings like tattoos on her joints, markings like tattoos of her wings on her back.
Level 2 Inhuman Appearance: Small size and working wings. Vögelein is maybe nine inches tall with four gold-and-mica wings that build up a lot of static electricity, enough to shock but not enough to cause injury. Her flight is limited in speed - about equivalent to a fast bicycle - in height, and in duration as she tires soon and can't fight strong winds. For her size she is very strong, able to tear cloth and skin with her bare hands, but all in all she's still weaker than at human scale.
Level 3 Inhuman Appearance: Faerie Clockwork body. Her skin becomes warm, flexible gold plating over complex multi-geared inner workings. Minor injuries to her plating heal much as skin does, greater ones may require finding gold to patch it, similarly minor injuries to her internal mechanisms will right themselves but greater ones cause difficulty. She's not as delicate as she appears and can be swatted to a stone floor with only minor injury but getting stamped on or bitten would be bad.
Instead of any need to sleep, drink, or eat she has to be wound with her key at least every thirty-six hours, more often if she goes to great exertion. If not her wings stop working, then her legs, then her arms and she collapses and her memories degrade, then she dies. Lost memories don’t return and for a period after she’s rewound she has to relearn how to move and speak and is helpless for some weeks.
probably given enough regains I'd make it so that at the start of the month she reverts to human size and an organic body but could choose to transform into a small, flightworthy clockwork that must be wound, but can't choose to change back.
MANIFESTATION
Character flaws/traumas:
Loved ones dying
Vögelein is immortal so long as she’s wound and has outlived everyone she’s cared about, often having to see and be helpless to stop a violent death. Her creator died while she was away and the city was sacked and burned, Alexi was attacked by thugs and died of his wounds. During WWII she was able to hide in a chimney and survive a house collapse but Madeline wasn’t so lucky. And of course Jakob declined, becoming angry and paranoid, then losing his faculties.
She is bothered by all of these but most actively haunted by Alexi’s death. Hunted for being Roma, he’d tried to leave her with other people. She followed and having to deal with essentially an anguished child may have distracted him enough that he couldn’t escape an ambush. Although she was able to struggle free of the bag he shoved her in and attack the men beating him, all Vögelein could really do was comfort him as he died, and then she was too upset and confused to follow his last wishes.
Dependence/independence
Vögelein needs close regular contact to survive and has been brought up to rely on one person at a time, and hates to leave that person. But since Alexi, her Guardians tend to see her as a burden and something to protect. They often impose limits on her. The man she finds after Jakob dies even tries locking her in his apartment and plans to let her wind down enough to lose her memories and become utterly dependent on him. By nature Vögelein is a free spirit who resents being told what to do and doesn’t like to put herself first, and has an inclination to defiance if she doesn’t agree with what she’s told, which can go well or poorly.
When she fought with Jakob it was over his impending eviction, which he’d kept from her. He refused to let his family help him, refused any of her suggestions, and basically said that since she snuck out at night (to go to a library) she must have someone else anyway so she should leave. When she wouldn’t, he apparently threw her Guardian pendant, her last memento of Alexi, into the river, and she attacked him in a rage, which led to him being hit by a car. Her guilt for this was enough that she stayed with him and didn’t even visit the library or go flying for pleasure until his death, nor did she press to be introduced to his nurse, and only left his body when she had a bare couple hours before winding down.
Isolation
Vögelein’s known since soon after she was made that she has to keep herself a secret. People would want to kill or study her, she is not the normal sort of person. The interactions she was able to have with people other than her Guardians are very, very limited and she feels quite set apart from humanity as a whole. The bitter, iron-deformed faerie she meets sees humans as something to toy with maliciously and will kill them - while this horrifies Vögelein, some of that comes from a place of understanding.
She’s actually inclined to being friendly and cheerful and was literally made to love and be loved, to consider herself as basically human. But it’s hard to do that when she feels like she can't talk to most of them! Her glamour even lets her pass by unnoticed by most people and she tends to play dead and appear to be a toy if that’s not an option. On page every time she meets someone for the first time, she’s either turning to them out of desperation or is utterly shocked that they notice her.
Manifestation name: Not Jakob
Character trait(s) the Manifestation reflects: Primarily dependence/independence but there’s angles on the other two.
Description: Not Jakob has an enormous head and a huge, long reaching arm with a really big hand, so that from certain angles and in fog it appears to be a gigantic figure crawling along the ground, but get some clear distance and it’s just regular big with some grotesquely outsized body parts. It resembles a very old man wrapped in worn filthy clothes, with skin that’s sticky, sort of gelatinous and gray with tiny dark red veins.
Wherever it goes it’s heralded by a smell of the sickbed and gunsmoke. It’s feverishly hot to the touch.
Attacks and behavior:
When Vögelein isn’t in sight, Not Jakob wanders aimlessly and leans heavily against walls. It will start for other people and use its giant arm to grab at them to pull close as if examining them, then throw them to the side. It will ignore people who lie down on the ground, or collapse after being thrown, unless they’re in its path. If it’s attacked it mostly flails but also may pick up and throw things in big, telegraphed arcs.
When Not Jakob can see Vögelein it becomes more animated and will “protect” her by batting indiscriminately at lesser monsters, other Manifestations, and other player characters. If she’s in range it will grab her and either press her to the ground or into itself, smothering her.
Path towards resolution: Vögelein has to reckon with her relationship to Jakob. It was seemingly better once, but age didn’t do his mental state any favors and loving him couldn’t fix that. She has to be able to hold that yes he did love her back and was doing what he thought was best for her, that much of his poor treatment was due to a failing mind. She may bear some responsibility for him being injured and declining faster, sure. But she doesn’t have to refrain from thinking ill of the dead. It’s not fair to expect her to be confined and to have no opinions or input on how someone she lives with and depends on gets by, and she shouldn’t have to resign herself to misery out of love and guilt.
SAMPLES
One and two
Name: Joysweeper
Age: 33
Contact: joysweeper @ plurk
Timezone: EST
Other characters: n/a
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Vögelein
Canon: Vögelein: Clockwork Faerie
Canon point: The start of the first volume, after she discovers Jakob has died and flees their apartment, before she meets Jason.
Age: ~300. Mentally she seems equivalent to late teens early twenties.
History: In the mid 17th century, before the doors between the human world and Faerie fully closed, Vögelein was created by a master watchmaker as a dancing automaton. Unbenownst to either of them, when he created her it was with such skill and love and loneliness that some Fae spirit crossed to inhabit her, making her come truly alive, though she needed to be wound like any clockwork. Her creator called her a miracle and knew she had to be kept secret.
Vögelein outlived her creator and had to have other human “Guardians” who wound her and kept her safe and close to them, either introducing her to her next Guardian when they got old, or dying, throwing her world into chaos and forcing her to approach and bargain with someone new. During WWII she lived with a Frenchwoman who was killed in the American advance and was rescued by an American soldier, Jakob, who became her Guardian. As Jakob aged and became paranoid he and Vögelein quarreled, and in the middle of one of their worst fights he stumbled into traffic and was hit by a car. Guilt-wracked, Vögelein did her best to serve as his nurse and stayed quietly with him, ceasing the limited independence that had so bothered Jakob, until his death.
He hadn’t been in any condition to introduce her to a new Guardian, so Vögelein was forced to turn to the first person she could find to wind her, only to find he was even more controlling. She also met her first ‘real’ faerie, an inutterably bitter creature stranded in and poisoned by the human world, and eventually was able to find a half-peace with him. A friendly street sweeper arranged to find chill people she could visit to wind her without her living with them exclusively.
Suitability: Not gonna lie, she'll have a rough start but it's at least half because of the humanization. Vögelein has absolutely known danger and hardship. She's lived centuries with her limitation of needing others to wind her, or within thirty-six hours she'll collapse, lose her memories starting with the most recent ones, and then die. She has attacked people to protect her loved ones or out of anger. Usually she hides or runs with limited physical risk to herself, though, as until now she's been both highly mobile and very small.
Pretty sure she's gonna die in the first month but she can learn!
Is this a re-app? n/a
Inventory: Around her neck, a tiny key on a fine chain. A cigar box containing clothes - other than what she arrives in they're all clockwork-scale because I think that's funny - tiny quill pens, tiny parchments, a locket with a photograph, and a tiny pendant her Guardians have worn. She's never owned much.
Powers, abilities and/or inhuman traits: The powers are real simple but I'll list them as levels because of the possibility of expanding them with noncanon additions. Traits are a bit more complex and involved.
Level 1 Memoryshare: In canon this is only shown working on another faerie, since they're both creatures partly of another world. In a game it might work on other PCs as they are also of other worlds. Vögelein can touch someone and until contact is broken they are both surrounded by a full-scene vision from either character's treasured memories. Physically they're in the same place, oblivious and vulnerable to attack.
Level 1 Glamour: Vögelein can't make herself invisible but as a faerie creature she can be hard to notice when she's not doing something to stand out, though some characters are immune and see her anyway. Let’s say... player characters unless they opt otherwise, major NPCs, and her own Manifestations see her just fine, but if she's thirty feet or more away from other Manifestations and monsters then they don't notice her unless she does something to catch their attention.
Level 1? Eidetic memory: Vögelein doesn’t forget anything, though if she’s not paying attention to something then it doesn’t get stored away.
Traits:
Level 1 Inhuman Appearance: Purely aesthetic. Gold-colored skin, sapphirelike irises, pointed ears, markings like tattoos on her joints, markings like tattoos of her wings on her back.
Level 2 Inhuman Appearance: Small size and working wings. Vögelein is maybe nine inches tall with four gold-and-mica wings that build up a lot of static electricity, enough to shock but not enough to cause injury. Her flight is limited in speed - about equivalent to a fast bicycle - in height, and in duration as she tires soon and can't fight strong winds. For her size she is very strong, able to tear cloth and skin with her bare hands, but all in all she's still weaker than at human scale.
Level 3 Inhuman Appearance: Faerie Clockwork body. Her skin becomes warm, flexible gold plating over complex multi-geared inner workings. Minor injuries to her plating heal much as skin does, greater ones may require finding gold to patch it, similarly minor injuries to her internal mechanisms will right themselves but greater ones cause difficulty. She's not as delicate as she appears and can be swatted to a stone floor with only minor injury but getting stamped on or bitten would be bad.
Instead of any need to sleep, drink, or eat she has to be wound with her key at least every thirty-six hours, more often if she goes to great exertion. If not her wings stop working, then her legs, then her arms and she collapses and her memories degrade, then she dies. Lost memories don’t return and for a period after she’s rewound she has to relearn how to move and speak and is helpless for some weeks.
probably given enough regains I'd make it so that at the start of the month she reverts to human size and an organic body but could choose to transform into a small, flightworthy clockwork that must be wound, but can't choose to change back.
MANIFESTATION
Character flaws/traumas:
Loved ones dying
Vögelein is immortal so long as she’s wound and has outlived everyone she’s cared about, often having to see and be helpless to stop a violent death. Her creator died while she was away and the city was sacked and burned, Alexi was attacked by thugs and died of his wounds. During WWII she was able to hide in a chimney and survive a house collapse but Madeline wasn’t so lucky. And of course Jakob declined, becoming angry and paranoid, then losing his faculties.
She is bothered by all of these but most actively haunted by Alexi’s death. Hunted for being Roma, he’d tried to leave her with other people. She followed and having to deal with essentially an anguished child may have distracted him enough that he couldn’t escape an ambush. Although she was able to struggle free of the bag he shoved her in and attack the men beating him, all Vögelein could really do was comfort him as he died, and then she was too upset and confused to follow his last wishes.
Dependence/independence
Vögelein needs close regular contact to survive and has been brought up to rely on one person at a time, and hates to leave that person. But since Alexi, her Guardians tend to see her as a burden and something to protect. They often impose limits on her. The man she finds after Jakob dies even tries locking her in his apartment and plans to let her wind down enough to lose her memories and become utterly dependent on him. By nature Vögelein is a free spirit who resents being told what to do and doesn’t like to put herself first, and has an inclination to defiance if she doesn’t agree with what she’s told, which can go well or poorly.
When she fought with Jakob it was over his impending eviction, which he’d kept from her. He refused to let his family help him, refused any of her suggestions, and basically said that since she snuck out at night (to go to a library) she must have someone else anyway so she should leave. When she wouldn’t, he apparently threw her Guardian pendant, her last memento of Alexi, into the river, and she attacked him in a rage, which led to him being hit by a car. Her guilt for this was enough that she stayed with him and didn’t even visit the library or go flying for pleasure until his death, nor did she press to be introduced to his nurse, and only left his body when she had a bare couple hours before winding down.
Isolation
Vögelein’s known since soon after she was made that she has to keep herself a secret. People would want to kill or study her, she is not the normal sort of person. The interactions she was able to have with people other than her Guardians are very, very limited and she feels quite set apart from humanity as a whole. The bitter, iron-deformed faerie she meets sees humans as something to toy with maliciously and will kill them - while this horrifies Vögelein, some of that comes from a place of understanding.
She’s actually inclined to being friendly and cheerful and was literally made to love and be loved, to consider herself as basically human. But it’s hard to do that when she feels like she can't talk to most of them! Her glamour even lets her pass by unnoticed by most people and she tends to play dead and appear to be a toy if that’s not an option. On page every time she meets someone for the first time, she’s either turning to them out of desperation or is utterly shocked that they notice her.
Manifestation name: Not Jakob
Character trait(s) the Manifestation reflects: Primarily dependence/independence but there’s angles on the other two.
Description: Not Jakob has an enormous head and a huge, long reaching arm with a really big hand, so that from certain angles and in fog it appears to be a gigantic figure crawling along the ground, but get some clear distance and it’s just regular big with some grotesquely outsized body parts. It resembles a very old man wrapped in worn filthy clothes, with skin that’s sticky, sort of gelatinous and gray with tiny dark red veins.
Wherever it goes it’s heralded by a smell of the sickbed and gunsmoke. It’s feverishly hot to the touch.
Attacks and behavior:
When Vögelein isn’t in sight, Not Jakob wanders aimlessly and leans heavily against walls. It will start for other people and use its giant arm to grab at them to pull close as if examining them, then throw them to the side. It will ignore people who lie down on the ground, or collapse after being thrown, unless they’re in its path. If it’s attacked it mostly flails but also may pick up and throw things in big, telegraphed arcs.
When Not Jakob can see Vögelein it becomes more animated and will “protect” her by batting indiscriminately at lesser monsters, other Manifestations, and other player characters. If she’s in range it will grab her and either press her to the ground or into itself, smothering her.
Path towards resolution: Vögelein has to reckon with her relationship to Jakob. It was seemingly better once, but age didn’t do his mental state any favors and loving him couldn’t fix that. She has to be able to hold that yes he did love her back and was doing what he thought was best for her, that much of his poor treatment was due to a failing mind. She may bear some responsibility for him being injured and declining faster, sure. But she doesn’t have to refrain from thinking ill of the dead. It’s not fair to expect her to be confined and to have no opinions or input on how someone she lives with and depends on gets by, and she shouldn’t have to resign herself to misery out of love and guilt.
SAMPLES
One and two
revisions
Date: 2022-08-29 07:50 pm (UTC)Level 2 Inhuman Appearance: Vögelein's key pendant appears in her rooms. On touching it, she's brought to her canon size and her wings are restored, and she is stuck that way until the monthly reset. Faerie-size Vögelein is maybe nine inches tall with four gold-and-mica wings that build up a lot of static electricity, enough to shock but not enough to cause injury. Her flight is limited in speed - about equivalent to a fast bicycle - in height, and in duration as she tires soon and can't fight strong winds. For her size she is very strong, able to tear cloth and skin with her bare hands, but all in all she's still weaker than at human scale.
Level 3 Inhuman Appearance: Faerie Clockwork body, tied again to contact with her key. Her skin becomes warm, flexible gold plating over complex multi-geared inner workings. Minor injuries to her plating heal much as skin does, greater ones may require finding gold to patch it, similarly minor injuries to her internal mechanisms will right themselves but greater ones cause difficulty. She's not as delicate as she appears and can be swatted to a stone floor with only minor injury but getting stamped on or bitten would be bad.
Instead of any need to sleep, drink, or eat she has to rely on other characters to wind her with her key at least every thirty-six hours, more often if she goes to great exertion. Being wound requires at least a few minutes of another character standing still and focusing on her. If she's not wound her mental state begins to deteriorate and then her wings stop working, then her legs, then her arms and she collapses, inert. If she's wound while inert or is inert when the month resets everything she returns to life and function but is disoriented and clumsy, and will recover faster if helped by other characters.