Due to its location, and the lack of any other towns or cities in the area with their own adventurers' guilds, the once small town of Nekoyama has transformed into a thriving city. Whether the beaches to the east are being assaulted by the monsters that make their home on and around the island of Akugashima, believed to be home to one of the world's largest natural Aetherium crystals, the farmers to the north needing protection for their crops or herds or someone is needed to investigate claims of ancient artefacts in the mountains or forests to the west, guild members from Nekoyama are likely to be called upon. The city itself is a fairly modern design with a large shopping centre, apartment complexes and, at the centre of the town, the guild hall. The Nekoyama guild hall is a towering structure, on the top floors, a number of employees monitor social networking sites and phones, keeping an eye out for people in danger. Several floors are put aside to house people who have been temporarily displaced and need somewhere to stay. The ground floor serves as as a meeting area, featuring notice boards covered in posters advertising jobs that need doing, a bar and other facilities that the guild members can use to relax. Finally, the building's basement level contains a number of training facilities for most combat styles people could need them for. Aside from the guild hall, the city's other main draw is its shopping mall. Within it are an assortment of stores selling everything from weapons and enchanted items to more mundane things such as video games, as well as a gaming arcade and cinema and a food court featuring cuisines from around the world. Towards the outskirts of the city are a number of residential areas, with a mixture of traditional and modern house designs. At the top of a hill in the wealthiest of these districts sits the Wakahisa Manor, a huge western-style mansion owned by a famous mage family. Rumour has it that the mansion's staff is composed entirely of familiars kept by a woman whose age has remained unchanged for centuries. Of course, no one has been able to conclusively prove this and the current owner seems more than happy to let people wonder about who or what she is. --- Some information about how some things work in the setting: [hider=Familiars:]•Most familiars start out as little more than mass-produced dolls. •These dolls come in an assortment of forms and are sold in most major cities. •Many of these are based on assorted mythological creatures, though more mundane animals such as cats, owls and ravens are common too. •Familiars can be healed or revived from recent death by being fed some of their mage's mana. •After their first infusion, a familiar develops a personality and is widely considered to be a sapient living being, with all the rights that entails. •The more infusions a familiar undergoes, the less reliant they are on their mage's mana to function, to the point where some more powerful familiars are able to continue functioning after their mage's death. •Most mages can only maintain up to 3 familiars. Though the exact number is dependant on the individual mage's capabilities, as well as how developed their familiar(s) are.[/hider][hider=Magic:]•Everyone can use magic to some degree. •A person's power depends on the individual, with some mages being naturally talented and others being effectively powerless. •People have affinities for assorted elements and concepts. •Learning and creating spells related to these affinities is easier than learning something unrelated while many find it impossible to learn spells based on something directly opposed to their affinity. •A person's affinity also impacts their familiar's abilities. For example, someone whose affinity is ice will have a hard time trying to infuse their familiar with fire-based abilities.[/hider][hider=Infusion:]•Infusion requires Aetherium crystals, which come in two varieties •Artificial crystals: Mass-produced, available at high prices in major cities. Given as rewards by adventurers' guilds for helping with monster slaying or other such tasks. •Natural crystals: Rarer and more powerful, these have a tendency to turn the flora and fauna around them into dangerous monsters over time, making getting them difficult. Some scholars believe that over the course of 100 or more years, even non-living items in the vicinity of these crystals could be transformed, though there's no conclusive proof to back this up. •Infusion is a fairly simple process, based around a spell that almost everyone entering the adventuring profession (or any other career where it would be helpful) learns fairly early on. •Though it's not difficult, it IS somewhat time consuming. A magical circle must be prepared, the crystal and the item/being being infused must be placed inside the circle and the process requires 5-10 minutes of focus, depending on the crystal's power. •Infusion can result in a variety of possible effects, depending on what is being infused: •Familiars: Due to their nature, infusions tend to have a wider variety of effects on familiars than other items: •Enhances the abilities of a familiar, as well as the mage (though not as much as if the mage had directly infused the power into themselves) •Can result in changes to the familiar's appearance. Most stop looking like dolls after the first couple of infusions and despite being mass-produced, it is highly unlikely to find two identical familiars. However, in some cases, due to conscious effort on the part of the familiar and/or mage, they retain their doll-like appearance. •Familiars can develop new abilities, these are dependant on a number of factors: the type of familiar they are (a draconic familiar is more likely to develop fire breath than a fairy, for example), the quality of a crystal, what the familiar and/or mage want from the infusion (this is generally not as influential as other factors and has limits, for example: a mage can't simply really, really want their familiar to be able to warp the fabric of space and time and expect it to work out, it's more...determining whether the new ability will be offensive, defensive or support-based) and some other factors. •While most familiars start out doll-sized, they can gain the ability to grow larger (though something growing to human size requires fewer, less powerful crystals than making a dragon become the size of a building) •Generally, this is not a permanent change and requires some degree of focus and energy to maintain •Items: Infusing an item with a crystal's power imbues it with special abilities. While items can be infused with multiple crystals' power, certain...[i]irregularities[/i] can occur with too many. Depending on the quality of the item and crystals, there's a chance that it will gain sentience and/or change form. While some powerful mages have attempted to exploit this to staff their homes with items transformed into humanoid forms, such a thing is widely considered too risky to attempt, with most instances of this happening resulting in the items in question turning into dangerous monsters imbued with a multitude of magical powers. •Humans: Finally, a person can infuse themselves with a crystal's power. As mentioned above, this can be used to boost their magical power, however it can also be used to enhance their physical abilities beyond human limits. •Certain limitations or flaws can be added to an infusion to increase the power granted. For example, a normal infusion might allow a sword to cut through steel, but adding a big enough flaw or limitation (making it pass harmlessly through living beings or needing to draw blood every week or it'll lose its power) could enable it to cut through almost any non-living matter.[/hider][hider=Setting notes:]•Generally similar to modern Earth. •Due to the presence of magic, guns never advanced to the levels they're at today. Think flintlock pistols and such. •Major cities are generally safe, though some rural towns and farms are occasionally attacked by monsters coming from areas with natural crystals. •Some towns maintain their own "adventurers' guild" which serves as a hub for people looking for an assortment of jobs, ranging from searching for items lost in areas known to contain monsters to slaying dragons that are terrorising farmers to any number of other possible tasks.[/hider] --- So, yeah...anyone interested? Oh, and if there's anything I didn't mention or was unclear about, feel free to ask for a better explanation. --- A few things to keep in mind: •The RP's tone will be fairly light most of the time, though there will be serious moments. •Start your character off at a reasonable power level. Not everyone needs to be perfectly even, but if everyone else needs to work together to take on a pack of mutated wolves and you can take on a dragon on your own, we have a problem. •Try to avoid making your character's powers overlap with other players', while it's fine for multiple characters to have melee weapons or use offensive ranged magic, I'd prefer if there was some variety in the specifics. --- Banned Powers: I apologise if this causes problems with anyone's ideas, but I don't feel comfortable allowing any of the following powers into the RP. Keep in mind that some things may have slipped my mind, so I apologise if someone signs up with something not on this list and gets rejected: •One hit kills, for the obvious reason of removing the threat of any combat encounter for the character. This refers to things like "I touch you and you die", not something as simple as having a weapon. •By the same token, freezing, petrifying or otherwise turning people into inanimate objects, while not strictly a one hit kill tends to have the same general impact on combat. •Mind control, possessing other people's characters, manipulating people's emotions or just anything that amounts to you getting to decide what someone else's character does or how they react to things, in part due to the potential to basically be another one-hit win ability and in part because it can get in the way of the affected player's enjoyment. •De-powering other characters is unacceptable, given the importance of those abilities in any combat scenes. •Reality warping, due to the fact that it kind of ruins any dramatic impact of any plot line people might try if someone can simply wave their hand and fix everything. •Powers used to no sell attacks; this doesn't mean that you can't have a character with enhanced toughness, the power to go incorporeal, regenerate injuries or even resurrect themselves if they die, however they should not be completely untouchable and regeneration or resurrection will be expected to take time and/or have some other drawback. --- Character Sheet: Name: Age: Appearance: Personality: Backstory: Abilities/Equipment: