[Daybreak] Application
Feb. 18th, 2018 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nor_iron_barsPLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Echo
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
EchoDoctor
OTHER CHARACTER(S) IN GAME: None.
CANON INFORMATION
CHARACTER NAME: Jailbreak
CANON: Original character from a shared universe called Invisible Hand.
HISTORY:
The Earth that Jailbreak was born on is remarkably similar to our own, save for the publicly known existence of magic. Officially, the story is that mages are given their powers by the familiars that seek them out, thus choosing these young heroes for the noble fight against monsters which attack our world in blind hunger to devour us all, and that in order to continue the fight they must return their power to the source that granted it to them once they turn eighteen, so that it can be given to another in their place.
Unofficially, about three hundred years ago, a bunch of mages figured out that you could take magical power from others if you could trick them into giving it up, and decided to set up a long con that would put them all in a position to gather all the power they could hold. It's been working for them for a long time, all those magical girls and boys and everyone else who fought and died for their little scheme entirely unaware that they were fueling the lavishly indulgent and magically extended lives of the rich and powerful with the magic that was their birthright.
Sure, the fact that monsters are becoming more and more attracted to Earth because they can sense the increasingly huge amount of magic that's been stockpiled on it and want to feed on it is a little worrying, but hey. It's not like that's their problem to deal with, right?
Jail was a foster kid, ditched on a doorstep somewhere as a baby and brought up in the polite but unloving care of the foster system in general.
She spent the first six years of her life in a small-town orphanage somewhere along the boarder between Texas and New Mexico, and after that a series of depressingly short-term foster homes. Neither the Whitesmith Children's Home nor the majority of her various foster families were particularly cruel to her, merely distant and dispassionate, treating her with the cold professionalism of people who considered it a duty to keep her alive and physically healthy.
The end result was a bright, shy, socially-awkward child who was desperately starved for affection, and did her absolute best to at all times be what other people wanted her to be in the hopes that she would eventually be good enough to be wanted.
It didn't quite work out.
Receiving her powers sometime around age eleven didn't improve the situation- when she told her current foster family about her powers, they turned out not to be able to handle it and immediately sent her off to the next one.
Having "learned her lesson", she didn't tell the next one about her powers and they assumed she was some kind of delinquent, because why else would she be sneaking off to go do things at odd hours? And they sent her off, too.
It eventually culminated in her getting flat-out kicked out of a particularly bad foster home- not just awkwardly shuffled along to the next one, but actively 'tossed all her stuff out the front door, told her to never come back, slammed it shut in her face and locked it'.
She attempted to continue doing her duties as a magical girl while homeless, but getting moved from one area to another all the time meant that she never had a chance to really build up any kind of team or allies among her fellow magical girls, and with no one to help them out she and her familiar, Althea, were fading fast.
Among all the people Jail had known in her life, Althea was quite possibly the only one to ever treat her with genuine, unconditional affection and care... which is why his death upon being lured into a battle they couldn't win hit her so very hard.
They had tracked a monster into an industrial district and followed it into a factory. It had been hiding out in an area that contained some severely caustic chemicals, taking advantage of the fact that the fumes were too dangerous for ordinary humans to enter without protective gear.
While the enhanced durability of a magical girl in their transformed state protected Jail from the danger, Althea's death briefly knocked her powers out of commission, exposing her fragile human lungs and throat to something far too harsh for them to handle. The end result was permanent damage, requiring her to wear her magitech gasmask constantly in order to ensure that she could safely breathe.
Being left once more utterly alone in the world, Jail came to the conclusion that people were simply never going to care about her no matter how much she tried, and that instead she had to look after herself exclusively. Accordingly, she stopped acting as a hero and instead put her powers to use as a black market magical goods dealer and occasional petty thief, and has not bothered to transform fully since.
She was seventeen.
Now, at age twenty-six, she's beginning to start the slow process of caring for others again. It might be a little bit easier for her to admit that if they weren't all so determined to risk their lives all the time, of course...
The magical girl system of her world is a corrupt and arbitrary one, set up by the ancient and malevolent mages of the Hand of Providence conspiracy in order to provide them with power and pleasure for as long as they can keep it running, at the expense of everybody else. Jail is aware of this, but would have counted herself content to have escaped the system into a life of crime and not bothered fighting against them further, if it weren't for the fact that the resistance finds her useful enough to hire her. And keep hiring her. And... keep hiring her, and working with her, and bringing her on missions to the point where she's somehow become a major and valuable part of the rebellion against the conspiracy despite ostensibly only being in this to make a quick buck. Oops?
STRENGTHS:
-Creative: Jail is a highly intelligent woman with a very sharp and flexible mind, capable of coming up with inventive solutions as easily as she does literal inventions. Need someone to code a magical computer program? Jail can do that. Need someone to con a vampire out of ancient secrets? Fuck it, she's in. She's good at thinking on the fly and outside the box. And then stealing the box. And selling the contents of the box to a guy on ebay.
-Resilient: She's been through a great deal of pain over the years, and emerged battered but not broken. While her coping mechanisms may leave much to be desired, the fact remains that Jail responded to her struggles by attempting to move on and find happiness in her life, not allowing them to drag her down. If she goes through painful events, whether physical or emotional, she'll be hurt but still know how to function and move on.
-Understanding: For all her self-centered manners, Jail is oddly compassionate at times. She genuinely bears no ill-will towards most people, and is willing to live peacefully with anyone willing to live with her in turn. You have some weird, disturbing personal shit going on? That's fine. She'll accept you as who you are.
FLAWS:
-Lazy: Jail is capable of much, but can rarely be bothered. Unless someone gives her a strong motivation to actually accomplish something, she's much more likely to ignore serious matters in favor of whatever seems fun. She'll create powerful magical artifacts on commission, but left to her own devices she's just as likely to turn the toaster into an instant pizza maker instead of making something actually useful.
-Selfish: Her primary goal in all things is her own pleasure and happiness. While this tends not to lead to active cruelty, as she genuinely doesn't enjoy hurting people and therefore doesn't pursue it as part of her constant search for joy, it means that she tends to focus on her own needs instead of the big picture. Like basically everyone in the magical community, she was worried about Nightfall, but even the end of the world wasn't enough to get her to throw in with the people working on preventing it until that cause became personally relevant to her.
-Avoidant: Both her professional and personal methods tend to involve running away from problems rather than face them. She'll dig in her heels on petty things, but endlessly dodge the issue if you try to confront her on something big. Attempts to connect with her emotionally will be often brushed off with a joke, and anger tends to result in her simply dropping the relationship and moving on. If you want her to actually discuss her feelings like an adult, you'll either have to guilt her into it by accident or pin her down yourself.
CANON ABILITIES:
-Transformation sequence: like all magical girls, Jail has the ability to transform into her magical girl self, which gives her a snazzy new outfit and notably enhanced physical abilities, being much stronger and more durable. I am not planning to carry over this particular power to her AU self, and will instead focus on the other two.
-Scanning: Jail has the ability to Look at things, seeing reality on a deeper level instead of ordinary sight. This allows her to see the fundamental nature of things, thus learning more about them, though she does not always understand them clearly. It's like being handed the blueprints for a machine when everyone else is only looking at the casing- you have more information about it than they do, but whether you can interpret it successfully is up to you.
-Altering: If she has Looked at something, Jail can reach out and very carefully alter the fundamental nature of that object. If done in just the right way, this turns ordinary objects into magical artifacts. This is how she creates her trademark magitech. Objects will always become something thematically connected to the original item, though what that is varies. For example, she could turn a refrigerator into a weather control machine or a stasis chamber, but not into a teleportation device. Though this ability is very versatile, it is also time consuming and effort intensive, and therefore leaves her largely defenseless if her magitech is destroyed or damaged.
AU INFORMATION
AU CHARACTER NAME: Jailbreak
AGE: 26
POSITION: Professor of alchemy and artifice- that is to say, how to make magical artifacts, items, and weapons without blowing yourself up. At least, not by accident.
(In other words, it's basically Magical Shop Class.)
Also handling a large chunk of the IT department, by virtue of being very familiar with the... occasionally interesting ways magic and technology may intersect.
AU BACKSTORY:
-The Hand is largely the same as in canon, a group of old and powerful mage families secretly scamming young mages out of their powers by sending them false familiars to tell them about their heroic destiny and trick them into fighting "monsters". Here, those familiars are bound minor daemons, making the young mages unwittingly contracted.
-While the Hand is still powerful, unlike in canon they're far from the only game around, or even one of the biggest players. Therefore, they operate on a much smaller scale. Because of this, there's no specific organized resistance against them, unlike canon.
-Jail's backstory is largely the same, being a young seer who manifested her powers at age eleven and happened to be targeted by the Hand. She faked her own death in order to run from them when her familiar was killed, and her career as a magical petty thief and smuggler ensued as it did in canon.
-As opposed to lung damage from the fight that killed her familiar, here her breathing troubles are the result of her seer powers and the drain on her health they cause. She still wears her magitech gas mask in order to mitigate them.
-After taking Maddie as an apprentice, the two of them repeatedly pulled off a two-man con that involved tricking old and powerful mage families out of valuable secrets.
-This eventually backfired on them and resulted in them needing to hide from a very large and powerful mage family out to identify and eliminate the criminals that had attempted to defraud them. Daybreak Academy was one of the few places willing and able to give them amnesty in exchange for Jail providing her skills and knowledge as an instructor.
AU PERSONALITY DEVIATION: Jail's personality is largely the same as her canon self, still the same shameless rogue with a heart of, if not gold, then at least silver.
The main difference is that she's more focused on pursuing her criminal career instead of fighting against the Hand, largely due to the fact that they're one power out of many instead of the world-controlling threat they were in canon.
RACE: Human.
SECRET SOCIETY: While Jail has a scattering of contacts among many factions, generally all people vaguely disreputable and willing to pay her to do their dirty work, she isn't part of any particular organized group. This gives her the freedom to work as she chooses, though it has also prevented her from ever really becoming more than a minor player in the criminal underworld, due to lack of resources that the backing of a larger power would provide.
POWERS: Jail is a seer, who supplements her power's lack of offensive capability by having learned rune magic, which she uses to create various magical artifacts. Her Second Sight gives her a natural knack for analyzing things on a deeper level, so she finds runes and magical item crafting reasonable intuitive.
She's a relatively weak seer, having fairly poor skill at viewing the future, but a very skilled craftswoman. Through dint of great effort, she has become highly experienced with both magical and nonmagical engineering, and can generally manage to create wonders if given enough time, resources, and information to work with. Her successes with combining modern technology with magic have been largely responsible for both her ability to pursue her criminal career and her need to do so, in order to pay for all the materials her craft requires.
Her most impressive project is her car, which has been described as "the Batmobile with more magic and far less taste". She's been working on it for years, and it's crammed full of magical gadgetry.
HOUSING: Jail is living in her car.
More specifically, in the trunk of her car, which contains an entire room the size of a college dorm room, in total defiance of physics. It even has a small bathroom, though God only knows how the plumbing works. She parked it in one of the spaces reserved for Academy staff when she showed up, and hasn't moved it since.
Just leave her mail under one of the windshield wipers, it's fine.
RP SAMPLE
Her Test Drive top level is here.
INTERVIEW SAMPLE PROMPT
(The following scenario is available to all characters who are apping in and is considered canon - all prospective teachers for the academy are interviewed by staff members to ensure they're a good fit. The definition of "good fit" seems to vary wildly from staffer to staffer.)
1. TELL US ABOUT YOUR EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND.
Define "education". 'Cause I didn't graduate high school, but lemme tell you: I have learned some shit. ...Guess you can just put down "practical experience"?
2. TELL US ABOUT YOUR TEACHING EXPERIENCE.
I got an apprentice, that count? She's a good kid.
3. WHAT UNIQUE PERSPECTIVES DO YOU THINK YOU BRING TO THE ACADEMY?
You're gonna be sending them out to hunt some bad shit down, right? Those kids you're teaching here. Well, I got hunted.
And nobody's caught me yet.
4. WHAT, IN YOUR OPINION, IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR A SCHOOL TO PROVIDE TO ITS STUDENTS
Campus safety. As in "I better be fucking safe on this campus, 'cause that was our deal, and I'm fucking off with your wallet and a couple printers from the computer lab if you don't hold up your half".
5. DESCRIBE YOUR COMMUNICATION STYLE AND HOW YOU INTERACT WITH COWORKERS.
I'm gonna go with "loudly"? Yeah, loud pretty much covers it.
6. HOW DO YOU ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO PUSH THEMSELVES AND TAKE THEIR SCHOOLWORK SERIOUSLY?
Jesus shit, have you met these kids? They already got the apocalypse coming straight up everyone's ass before they graduate, the way it's looking. Last thing they need is anyone telling 'em to take this even more seriously.
Let's face it: if the end of the world doesn't get 'em to do their homework, piling on more stress ain't gonna change that.
7. HOW DO YOU MANAGE STUDENTS WHO ARE DEFIANT OR ACTING OUT?
A high-five, usually.
8. HOW DO YOU ENCOURAGE AND MENTOR STUDENTS WHO ARE STRUGGLING OR DEPRESSED?
Weirdly enough, I'm pretty sure a high-five is a decent idea for this one, too? But mostly I'd find someone who was, y'know. Actually qualified to handle a mental health crisis.
Not exactly the world's best expert on mental health here, sure, but I bet you five bucks I can track down a decent shrink in under fifteen minutes.
Ten, if they ain't hiding too well.
9. WHAT, IN YOUR OPINION, IS THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON TO TEACH EVERY STUDENT WHO WALKS THROUGH OUR DOORS?
"Anybody who tells you they got all the answers is high or selling something". ...or both, I guess. Could definitely be both.
10. DESCRIBE A POSITIVE TEACHING EXPERIENCE YOU HAD AND WHAT YOU DID.
Most of teaching my apprentice, I guess? She's pretty sharp, picks stuff up real quick. Just gotta give her a chance to learn.
11. DESCRIBE A NEGATIVE TEACHING EXPERIENCE YOU HAD AND WHAT YOU DID TO TURN IT AROUND.
Once a dude tried to mansplain classic rock to me in a bar, so I sang the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song at him until he gave up and left.
12. DESCRIBE A NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE WITH A COWORKER AND HOW YOU HANDLED IT.
I was pulling off a heist with a couple other guys and the dude who was supposed to take out the guards stabbed me in the kidney and tried to run off with the cash, so I played dead and turned the silent alarms back on while he was wrestling with the third guy for the knife, then snuck out the back when the cops showed up.
...what? C'mon, I went back and broke guy number three outta jail once I could stand up without blacking out again, I'm not a total dick.
13. HOW DO YOU THINK YOUR CURRENT BOSS OR SUPERVISOR WOULD DESCRIBE YOUR JOB PERFORMANCE?
I'm self-employed, so... [Shifts in seat, faces to the right as though addressing someone sitting next to her.] I dunno, boss, what do you think?
[Shifts in the other direction and faces left, pitches her voice down as though doing a bad impression of a stern authority figure.] You're a flaming disaster bitch, but you got style. A+ employee. You win at performance reviews forever.
[Shifts to the right again.] Aww, sweet. Best workplace ever, am I right? [Claps hands.] Self-five.
14. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE YOUR GREATEST TEACHING STRENGTHS?
If they can put up with me for a year, a lot of shit is gonna seem pretty tame in comparison.
15. WHAT ARE YOUR BIGGEST TEACHING WEAKNESSES?
...the part where I blatantly shouldn't be allowed around impressionable kids?
Look, this whole "trade you a spot here for teaching" thing was your idea, I offered to just pay you rent- look, I said I'd be able to get the money, you don't gotta know where I'd be getting the money from. Fuck's sake, what are you, the IRS?
Doesn't matter now, anyway. That offer's off the table now, you turned that down and we're just all gonna have to live with this.
16. ONE OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF ACADEMY FACULTY IS PROTECTING STUDENTS FROM THAT WHICH MIGHT DO THEM HARM. TELL US HOW EQUIPPED YOU ARE TO DO THIS.
Equipped sure is the word for it, yeah. You want artifacts? I can do artifacts. You want explosives? I can do explosives. Gimme time and resources and I'll make you something to do anything. Last time I went anywhere without a couple dozen tricks up my sleeve was back in '04- yeah, I know I'm wearing a tank top.
It's a metaphor. They're my metaphorical sleeves. Work with me here, okay? I mean, seeing if you can is the whole point of this thing, so you probably oughtta step up your game.
But hey, it's okay- I won't tell anyone you're bad at playing nice with the other kids if you don't.
17. WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE FOR YOUR STUDENTS?
Time.
If you know jackshit about seers, then you oughtta know how much that matters.
NAME: Echo
CONTACT:
OTHER CHARACTER(S) IN GAME: None.
CANON INFORMATION
CHARACTER NAME: Jailbreak
CANON: Original character from a shared universe called Invisible Hand.
HISTORY:
The Earth that Jailbreak was born on is remarkably similar to our own, save for the publicly known existence of magic. Officially, the story is that mages are given their powers by the familiars that seek them out, thus choosing these young heroes for the noble fight against monsters which attack our world in blind hunger to devour us all, and that in order to continue the fight they must return their power to the source that granted it to them once they turn eighteen, so that it can be given to another in their place.
Unofficially, about three hundred years ago, a bunch of mages figured out that you could take magical power from others if you could trick them into giving it up, and decided to set up a long con that would put them all in a position to gather all the power they could hold. It's been working for them for a long time, all those magical girls and boys and everyone else who fought and died for their little scheme entirely unaware that they were fueling the lavishly indulgent and magically extended lives of the rich and powerful with the magic that was their birthright.
Sure, the fact that monsters are becoming more and more attracted to Earth because they can sense the increasingly huge amount of magic that's been stockpiled on it and want to feed on it is a little worrying, but hey. It's not like that's their problem to deal with, right?
Jail was a foster kid, ditched on a doorstep somewhere as a baby and brought up in the polite but unloving care of the foster system in general.
She spent the first six years of her life in a small-town orphanage somewhere along the boarder between Texas and New Mexico, and after that a series of depressingly short-term foster homes. Neither the Whitesmith Children's Home nor the majority of her various foster families were particularly cruel to her, merely distant and dispassionate, treating her with the cold professionalism of people who considered it a duty to keep her alive and physically healthy.
The end result was a bright, shy, socially-awkward child who was desperately starved for affection, and did her absolute best to at all times be what other people wanted her to be in the hopes that she would eventually be good enough to be wanted.
It didn't quite work out.
Receiving her powers sometime around age eleven didn't improve the situation- when she told her current foster family about her powers, they turned out not to be able to handle it and immediately sent her off to the next one.
Having "learned her lesson", she didn't tell the next one about her powers and they assumed she was some kind of delinquent, because why else would she be sneaking off to go do things at odd hours? And they sent her off, too.
It eventually culminated in her getting flat-out kicked out of a particularly bad foster home- not just awkwardly shuffled along to the next one, but actively 'tossed all her stuff out the front door, told her to never come back, slammed it shut in her face and locked it'.
She attempted to continue doing her duties as a magical girl while homeless, but getting moved from one area to another all the time meant that she never had a chance to really build up any kind of team or allies among her fellow magical girls, and with no one to help them out she and her familiar, Althea, were fading fast.
Among all the people Jail had known in her life, Althea was quite possibly the only one to ever treat her with genuine, unconditional affection and care... which is why his death upon being lured into a battle they couldn't win hit her so very hard.
They had tracked a monster into an industrial district and followed it into a factory. It had been hiding out in an area that contained some severely caustic chemicals, taking advantage of the fact that the fumes were too dangerous for ordinary humans to enter without protective gear.
While the enhanced durability of a magical girl in their transformed state protected Jail from the danger, Althea's death briefly knocked her powers out of commission, exposing her fragile human lungs and throat to something far too harsh for them to handle. The end result was permanent damage, requiring her to wear her magitech gasmask constantly in order to ensure that she could safely breathe.
Being left once more utterly alone in the world, Jail came to the conclusion that people were simply never going to care about her no matter how much she tried, and that instead she had to look after herself exclusively. Accordingly, she stopped acting as a hero and instead put her powers to use as a black market magical goods dealer and occasional petty thief, and has not bothered to transform fully since.
She was seventeen.
Now, at age twenty-six, she's beginning to start the slow process of caring for others again. It might be a little bit easier for her to admit that if they weren't all so determined to risk their lives all the time, of course...
The magical girl system of her world is a corrupt and arbitrary one, set up by the ancient and malevolent mages of the Hand of Providence conspiracy in order to provide them with power and pleasure for as long as they can keep it running, at the expense of everybody else. Jail is aware of this, but would have counted herself content to have escaped the system into a life of crime and not bothered fighting against them further, if it weren't for the fact that the resistance finds her useful enough to hire her. And keep hiring her. And... keep hiring her, and working with her, and bringing her on missions to the point where she's somehow become a major and valuable part of the rebellion against the conspiracy despite ostensibly only being in this to make a quick buck. Oops?
STRENGTHS:
-Creative: Jail is a highly intelligent woman with a very sharp and flexible mind, capable of coming up with inventive solutions as easily as she does literal inventions. Need someone to code a magical computer program? Jail can do that. Need someone to con a vampire out of ancient secrets? Fuck it, she's in. She's good at thinking on the fly and outside the box. And then stealing the box. And selling the contents of the box to a guy on ebay.
-Resilient: She's been through a great deal of pain over the years, and emerged battered but not broken. While her coping mechanisms may leave much to be desired, the fact remains that Jail responded to her struggles by attempting to move on and find happiness in her life, not allowing them to drag her down. If she goes through painful events, whether physical or emotional, she'll be hurt but still know how to function and move on.
-Understanding: For all her self-centered manners, Jail is oddly compassionate at times. She genuinely bears no ill-will towards most people, and is willing to live peacefully with anyone willing to live with her in turn. You have some weird, disturbing personal shit going on? That's fine. She'll accept you as who you are.
FLAWS:
-Lazy: Jail is capable of much, but can rarely be bothered. Unless someone gives her a strong motivation to actually accomplish something, she's much more likely to ignore serious matters in favor of whatever seems fun. She'll create powerful magical artifacts on commission, but left to her own devices she's just as likely to turn the toaster into an instant pizza maker instead of making something actually useful.
-Selfish: Her primary goal in all things is her own pleasure and happiness. While this tends not to lead to active cruelty, as she genuinely doesn't enjoy hurting people and therefore doesn't pursue it as part of her constant search for joy, it means that she tends to focus on her own needs instead of the big picture. Like basically everyone in the magical community, she was worried about Nightfall, but even the end of the world wasn't enough to get her to throw in with the people working on preventing it until that cause became personally relevant to her.
-Avoidant: Both her professional and personal methods tend to involve running away from problems rather than face them. She'll dig in her heels on petty things, but endlessly dodge the issue if you try to confront her on something big. Attempts to connect with her emotionally will be often brushed off with a joke, and anger tends to result in her simply dropping the relationship and moving on. If you want her to actually discuss her feelings like an adult, you'll either have to guilt her into it by accident or pin her down yourself.
CANON ABILITIES:
-Transformation sequence: like all magical girls, Jail has the ability to transform into her magical girl self, which gives her a snazzy new outfit and notably enhanced physical abilities, being much stronger and more durable. I am not planning to carry over this particular power to her AU self, and will instead focus on the other two.
-Scanning: Jail has the ability to Look at things, seeing reality on a deeper level instead of ordinary sight. This allows her to see the fundamental nature of things, thus learning more about them, though she does not always understand them clearly. It's like being handed the blueprints for a machine when everyone else is only looking at the casing- you have more information about it than they do, but whether you can interpret it successfully is up to you.
-Altering: If she has Looked at something, Jail can reach out and very carefully alter the fundamental nature of that object. If done in just the right way, this turns ordinary objects into magical artifacts. This is how she creates her trademark magitech. Objects will always become something thematically connected to the original item, though what that is varies. For example, she could turn a refrigerator into a weather control machine or a stasis chamber, but not into a teleportation device. Though this ability is very versatile, it is also time consuming and effort intensive, and therefore leaves her largely defenseless if her magitech is destroyed or damaged.
AU INFORMATION
AU CHARACTER NAME: Jailbreak
AGE: 26
POSITION: Professor of alchemy and artifice- that is to say, how to make magical artifacts, items, and weapons without blowing yourself up. At least, not by accident.
(In other words, it's basically Magical Shop Class.)
Also handling a large chunk of the IT department, by virtue of being very familiar with the... occasionally interesting ways magic and technology may intersect.
AU BACKSTORY:
-The Hand is largely the same as in canon, a group of old and powerful mage families secretly scamming young mages out of their powers by sending them false familiars to tell them about their heroic destiny and trick them into fighting "monsters". Here, those familiars are bound minor daemons, making the young mages unwittingly contracted.
-While the Hand is still powerful, unlike in canon they're far from the only game around, or even one of the biggest players. Therefore, they operate on a much smaller scale. Because of this, there's no specific organized resistance against them, unlike canon.
-Jail's backstory is largely the same, being a young seer who manifested her powers at age eleven and happened to be targeted by the Hand. She faked her own death in order to run from them when her familiar was killed, and her career as a magical petty thief and smuggler ensued as it did in canon.
-As opposed to lung damage from the fight that killed her familiar, here her breathing troubles are the result of her seer powers and the drain on her health they cause. She still wears her magitech gas mask in order to mitigate them.
-After taking Maddie as an apprentice, the two of them repeatedly pulled off a two-man con that involved tricking old and powerful mage families out of valuable secrets.
-This eventually backfired on them and resulted in them needing to hide from a very large and powerful mage family out to identify and eliminate the criminals that had attempted to defraud them. Daybreak Academy was one of the few places willing and able to give them amnesty in exchange for Jail providing her skills and knowledge as an instructor.
AU PERSONALITY DEVIATION: Jail's personality is largely the same as her canon self, still the same shameless rogue with a heart of, if not gold, then at least silver.
The main difference is that she's more focused on pursuing her criminal career instead of fighting against the Hand, largely due to the fact that they're one power out of many instead of the world-controlling threat they were in canon.
RACE: Human.
SECRET SOCIETY: While Jail has a scattering of contacts among many factions, generally all people vaguely disreputable and willing to pay her to do their dirty work, she isn't part of any particular organized group. This gives her the freedom to work as she chooses, though it has also prevented her from ever really becoming more than a minor player in the criminal underworld, due to lack of resources that the backing of a larger power would provide.
POWERS: Jail is a seer, who supplements her power's lack of offensive capability by having learned rune magic, which she uses to create various magical artifacts. Her Second Sight gives her a natural knack for analyzing things on a deeper level, so she finds runes and magical item crafting reasonable intuitive.
She's a relatively weak seer, having fairly poor skill at viewing the future, but a very skilled craftswoman. Through dint of great effort, she has become highly experienced with both magical and nonmagical engineering, and can generally manage to create wonders if given enough time, resources, and information to work with. Her successes with combining modern technology with magic have been largely responsible for both her ability to pursue her criminal career and her need to do so, in order to pay for all the materials her craft requires.
Her most impressive project is her car, which has been described as "the Batmobile with more magic and far less taste". She's been working on it for years, and it's crammed full of magical gadgetry.
HOUSING: Jail is living in her car.
More specifically, in the trunk of her car, which contains an entire room the size of a college dorm room, in total defiance of physics. It even has a small bathroom, though God only knows how the plumbing works. She parked it in one of the spaces reserved for Academy staff when she showed up, and hasn't moved it since.
Just leave her mail under one of the windshield wipers, it's fine.
RP SAMPLE
Her Test Drive top level is here.
INTERVIEW SAMPLE PROMPT
(The following scenario is available to all characters who are apping in and is considered canon - all prospective teachers for the academy are interviewed by staff members to ensure they're a good fit. The definition of "good fit" seems to vary wildly from staffer to staffer.)
1. TELL US ABOUT YOUR EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND.
Define "education". 'Cause I didn't graduate high school, but lemme tell you: I have learned some shit. ...Guess you can just put down "practical experience"?
2. TELL US ABOUT YOUR TEACHING EXPERIENCE.
I got an apprentice, that count? She's a good kid.
3. WHAT UNIQUE PERSPECTIVES DO YOU THINK YOU BRING TO THE ACADEMY?
You're gonna be sending them out to hunt some bad shit down, right? Those kids you're teaching here. Well, I got hunted.
And nobody's caught me yet.
4. WHAT, IN YOUR OPINION, IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR A SCHOOL TO PROVIDE TO ITS STUDENTS
Campus safety. As in "I better be fucking safe on this campus, 'cause that was our deal, and I'm fucking off with your wallet and a couple printers from the computer lab if you don't hold up your half".
5. DESCRIBE YOUR COMMUNICATION STYLE AND HOW YOU INTERACT WITH COWORKERS.
I'm gonna go with "loudly"? Yeah, loud pretty much covers it.
6. HOW DO YOU ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO PUSH THEMSELVES AND TAKE THEIR SCHOOLWORK SERIOUSLY?
Jesus shit, have you met these kids? They already got the apocalypse coming straight up everyone's ass before they graduate, the way it's looking. Last thing they need is anyone telling 'em to take this even more seriously.
Let's face it: if the end of the world doesn't get 'em to do their homework, piling on more stress ain't gonna change that.
7. HOW DO YOU MANAGE STUDENTS WHO ARE DEFIANT OR ACTING OUT?
A high-five, usually.
8. HOW DO YOU ENCOURAGE AND MENTOR STUDENTS WHO ARE STRUGGLING OR DEPRESSED?
Weirdly enough, I'm pretty sure a high-five is a decent idea for this one, too? But mostly I'd find someone who was, y'know. Actually qualified to handle a mental health crisis.
Not exactly the world's best expert on mental health here, sure, but I bet you five bucks I can track down a decent shrink in under fifteen minutes.
Ten, if they ain't hiding too well.
9. WHAT, IN YOUR OPINION, IS THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON TO TEACH EVERY STUDENT WHO WALKS THROUGH OUR DOORS?
"Anybody who tells you they got all the answers is high or selling something". ...or both, I guess. Could definitely be both.
10. DESCRIBE A POSITIVE TEACHING EXPERIENCE YOU HAD AND WHAT YOU DID.
Most of teaching my apprentice, I guess? She's pretty sharp, picks stuff up real quick. Just gotta give her a chance to learn.
11. DESCRIBE A NEGATIVE TEACHING EXPERIENCE YOU HAD AND WHAT YOU DID TO TURN IT AROUND.
Once a dude tried to mansplain classic rock to me in a bar, so I sang the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song at him until he gave up and left.
12. DESCRIBE A NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE WITH A COWORKER AND HOW YOU HANDLED IT.
I was pulling off a heist with a couple other guys and the dude who was supposed to take out the guards stabbed me in the kidney and tried to run off with the cash, so I played dead and turned the silent alarms back on while he was wrestling with the third guy for the knife, then snuck out the back when the cops showed up.
...what? C'mon, I went back and broke guy number three outta jail once I could stand up without blacking out again, I'm not a total dick.
13. HOW DO YOU THINK YOUR CURRENT BOSS OR SUPERVISOR WOULD DESCRIBE YOUR JOB PERFORMANCE?
I'm self-employed, so... [Shifts in seat, faces to the right as though addressing someone sitting next to her.] I dunno, boss, what do you think?
[Shifts in the other direction and faces left, pitches her voice down as though doing a bad impression of a stern authority figure.] You're a flaming disaster bitch, but you got style. A+ employee. You win at performance reviews forever.
[Shifts to the right again.] Aww, sweet. Best workplace ever, am I right? [Claps hands.] Self-five.
14. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE YOUR GREATEST TEACHING STRENGTHS?
If they can put up with me for a year, a lot of shit is gonna seem pretty tame in comparison.
15. WHAT ARE YOUR BIGGEST TEACHING WEAKNESSES?
...the part where I blatantly shouldn't be allowed around impressionable kids?
Look, this whole "trade you a spot here for teaching" thing was your idea, I offered to just pay you rent- look, I said I'd be able to get the money, you don't gotta know where I'd be getting the money from. Fuck's sake, what are you, the IRS?
Doesn't matter now, anyway. That offer's off the table now, you turned that down and we're just all gonna have to live with this.
16. ONE OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF ACADEMY FACULTY IS PROTECTING STUDENTS FROM THAT WHICH MIGHT DO THEM HARM. TELL US HOW EQUIPPED YOU ARE TO DO THIS.
Equipped sure is the word for it, yeah. You want artifacts? I can do artifacts. You want explosives? I can do explosives. Gimme time and resources and I'll make you something to do anything. Last time I went anywhere without a couple dozen tricks up my sleeve was back in '04- yeah, I know I'm wearing a tank top.
It's a metaphor. They're my metaphorical sleeves. Work with me here, okay? I mean, seeing if you can is the whole point of this thing, so you probably oughtta step up your game.
But hey, it's okay- I won't tell anyone you're bad at playing nice with the other kids if you don't.
17. WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE FOR YOUR STUDENTS?
Time.
If you know jackshit about seers, then you oughtta know how much that matters.
Power Upgrades
Date: 2020-09-04 04:27 pm (UTC)