- A real fancy dude who's basically a dnd dragonborn and somehow "one of the good ones." Got scales and horns where his skin should be, hard to hurt and can breathe fire and shit.
- Scruffy ass sailor dude who was happier on the ocean, but can't go back for some reason. When he touches the bones of something dead, they spring to life and he can graft them into the shape of other things like a necromancer.
- Girl who lived in poverty and spend most days working for crumbs, only to find one day she could turn into fog and move really fast. Started stealing stuff this way, got caught doing it.
The ones who were smart, and the ones who learned. Marlen was the latter.
They’d slept in cold weather before. Had to, even. There were ways to make snow feel warm without melting, or to turn a metal coffin that people used to drive into something passable as overnight shelter. But that was typically in an American environment. In American winters, which weren’t so bad as the ones in this remote forest a hemisphere away. And so, the time-honored process of fucking around and finding out reminded Marlen how exactly they got by all those years. By not being a stubborn fuck.
They didn’t spend much time fussing over decorations in the cabin they picked. A bag was dropped to the floor, a blanket was tossed over Marlen’s shoulders, and they spent the next couple of hours just chilling. The party would be a good opportunity to figure things out and learn who people were. They just rested and waited patiently for a while. Without any real reason to move around or take a walk, they just didn’t. It was a long trip, and Marlen was used to long trips enough to take rest when it was available.
Maybe they’d all be as okay as Iliana.
It was probably an hour or so, maybe longer when Marlen decided to head back out. They weren’t really sure. They rummaged through their belongings and changed out of the lightly damp clothing they wore here. Replacing it, they put on not a fancy outfit suited for a party, but a parka that was a little big on them. It was old, and definitely worn a lot.
They searched around for a mirror, and shot a finger gun at it.
”Okay. Party time, party time… Proud of me yet, dad?”
There wasn’t a response.
Back out into the cold they went.
Marlen couldn’t easily imagine being around a lot of people. What were they meant to say? Hi, how’s the weather? That wouldn’t work, the weather was cold. Wonderful day we’re having? Nope, it was midnight. The thought plagued them while they wakes the distance from their cabin out into the broader areas of the camp. They used to go weeks without even laying eyes on a human being, let alone interacting with one. But this was supposed to be a new start, in a way. Marlen didn’t have to do it perfect. They just had to do it.
A bonfire was burning in the distance. There was one singular person sitting by it, from what they could see.
So Marlen approached, reaching behind their back and conjuring up a guitar. Holding it by the neck, with the body resting on a shoulder, they came within view and fixed a look on the demigod of water.
”This seat taken?”
interactions ....|.... River ............... mentions ....| @Mjolnir....
I have a couple of ideas. Is there a general “vibe” that powers tend to have or can it be theoretically anything? Like I read there was a shapeshifter and a metalbender but are there people who seem like they’re basically wizards to people who don’t know them?
Suppose, for example, someone was Enlightened in a way that let them draw shapes on something and cause weird things to happen. Or someone who could take a sword and a flintlock and touch them against each other, causing some weird gunblade thing to appear where they were
Jack craned his head to look at Nochalla, as if she were an actual human being and not a three-eyed housecat. She blinked slowly, like she was answering a question. Her ears twitched in response to something Jack could not hear. Nochalla was a strange creature, who Jack could, strangely enough, trust the well-being of his daughter to and count on them both to stay out of trouble.
Relatively speaking.
”By all means. I am needed on Earth, today. An old friend found something strange and has asked me to inspect it, which may take minutes or hours, depending on what we find,” He said.
That meant Annika would probably be alone all day.
”You’re more than capable of taking care of yourself. Stay within the Everdark today, but feel free to explore as you want.”
Fixing Shit ⫻ You can’t always afford to have someone else fix your car or your leaky roof. Emil learned how to do shit like that the hard way, making him good at figuring out what’s broken and how to make it right.
Scrapper ⫻ Watching a 40 year old man get drunk and smack his wife didn’t sit right with Emil when he was a kid. So he started standing up and doing something about it, and he quickly learned how to fight dirty. Going for the eyes, kicking the shins out from under someone, and the classic throat punch are how Emil beats someone up.
Mechanic ⫻ Emil works in a car shop, so the thing he’s best at fixing is usually a car. If it’s not working right, he can probably find some way to get it back into shape or hold things over for a while.
Fucking Deal With It ⫻ Emil has learned, time and time again, that shit is rough. He has the near supernatural ability to think, “It is what it is” about so many things. Whether it’s an unbelievable amount of patience or just being too tired to give a shit, Emil gets through it.
Emil is younger than he looks. His unkept facial hair and the tired look in his eyes make him seem like he’s in his late thirties, but he’s still in his late twenties. The man tends to have a battered, thrown-together “Homeless Chic” aesthetic consisting of multiple hooded shirts and old jeans worn long enough to be confused for sweatpants. He tends to dress im layers because he’s used to bring outside in the cold a lot. His hands are calloused to hell and back, and though Emil doesn’t have any kind of tattoos or body mods, you can tell he’s got some road miles on him.
Psychology ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Боже, черт возьми, все это, черт возьми! …What? Nothing."
MAIN GOAL ⫻ Having goals implies there's some kind of future. Emil hasn't really been in a good enough mindset of late to feel like he can make those kinds of plans. His first priority has been to get a better opportunity and find more stability in life. Emil wants to find a way to know where he's going to be in the next month before he starts planning for the next year.
PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Life isn't fair. Same shit, different day. You can expect a fair hand, but you won't always get one. When bad things happen, the best way to get over them is to get through them. Just keep fucking moving.
SECRETS ⫻ When Emil was 13, he watched a kid drown. He could’ve done something about it, but he didn’t because he was afraid he’d drown too.
SEXUALITY ⫻ Eh.
FEARS ⫻ Emil really doesn’t like being high up off the ground, it makes his head spin. Oh, and he’s also afraid he’s going to die before his life actually gets better.
REPUTATION IN SHADOW ⫻ Emil was the guy you knew in high school, and wondered about after he dropped off the radar for the rest of your life. The guy who just went completely incommunicado and left no trace of where he went with his future. People don't know Emil, they knew him at some point or another in the past, before he fell to their wayside, and then another wayside again and again.
FLAWS ⫻ Emil habitually assumes the worst about a lot of things. This new job is probably going to fall through, that girl his friend from work introduced him to probably isn’t interested, the rain is probably about to leak through the roof, and so on and so forth. He isn’t used to looking at things positively, and he expects people to turn their backs on him when he isn’t looking.
Backstory ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "It is what it is."
Once upon a time, there was a sleepy town assailed by an army of the dead for reasons unknown. Day after day, night after night, the Emil Kolya of this town would wade through the slain undead to take power for himself and turn it into weapons with which he would protect his hometown. He became a kind of gritty, respected hero that took the opportunity for magic by the horns and put himself on the level of Adepts. People were fascinated by the sealing techniques he cobbled together that shouldn’t have worked, but did. And after that chapter of his life came to a close, he went on to become a well-renown monster hunter with an arsenal of magical tools at his disposal.
His counterpart from Shadow wasn’t so fortunate.
His sleepy town didn’t have much going for it. It was about half an hour from a big city known as Hayweather, just far enough not to benefit from things like tourism or any kind of local business. This Emil’s parents came from Shadow’s Russia to its America in the wake of his father’s newest job opportunity. They lived in Hayweather for roughly ten years before they had a kid and decided not to raise him in such a noisy environment.
It wasn’t a bad decision. Less people, less crime, less chaos from being in such a populated area… But it wasn’t the right decision, either. Emil grew up with just a single father, because his mother had died in childbirth, the town didn’t have its own hospital and they weren’t in a position to make it to Hayweather before it was too late. And then his dad started working overtime in a remote job he held for years, both to distract himself and to deal with raising a kid alone.
And if that wasn’t enough, lots of people in the town weren’t particularly nice to him. Things sucked, he’d go to school and get into scuffles with other kids, and then go home to a place where the kitchen tablet’s chairs were stuck to the floor because they hadn’t been moved in so long. Someone in town sold drugs, and Emil had reported it for obvious reasons. That made him a few more enemies before he was even 17.
Eventually, Emil got out of high school and things at home at gotten better. His dad had eventually moved on from the past, and was in a good enough financial position that he considered heading back to Russia with his son. They both had family over there that Emil had never been introduced to, and it would’ve made things easier on both of them for a whole slew of reasons Emil didn’t fully get. But it sounded better than the shitty town he grew up in.
So they left America. A month later, they were on the other side of the planet, and with a lot of help at home, Emil learned his native language enough to speak as if he’d been born there. He met his uncle and the entire family on that side of the tree, moved into a house just down the street from them, and things were generally fine. Shadow’s Moscow was vibrant and full of things to do. Emil spent two years settling in with his dad, getting to know things and enjoying a new page in the book of his life.
It only lasted that long, though. In time, Emil learned that his uncle, Pavel, had a habit of putting hands on his wife and arguing about politics in a way that wasn’t very safe for drywall. And his kids who were several years younger than Emil himself occasionally had bruises on their elbows when they walked past his house. Emil’s old man wasn’t too happy about it, but he always told his son that family was the only thing they had at the end of the day.
What his father hadn’t said was that he was sick for a long time. Emil found out when he came home from a day out with a girl, to find that Pavel and his wife were both there sobbing over a corpse with a gun between its fingers. He left a note saying he didn’t know how long he had to live, and that he wanted to leave America because he feared it wasn’t very long once. Emil’s father didn’t leave any indication of what he had, it could’ve been cancer or it could’ve been early dementia. But no one ever found out.
Emil had no choice but to move in with his uncle’s family. Pavel didn’t mind, neither did his wife Irina. But Emil eventually got to a point where he’d break Pavel’s face in half when he caught the man abusing his own family. So by the time he was 20 and unable to get into college, he had to move out and find a job.
The next few years were a blurry, stagnant haze until the day Emil stepped down a hallway and saw himself staring back.
Abstraction ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "A shovel? What am I supposed to do with-"
TYPE ⫻ Agent
ABSTRACTION ⫻ The Gravedigger
ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ When Emil fell into Kindle, he found an oversized shovel embedded in concrete like a sword meant for a king. It absorbs the essence of anything it is used to kill, alive or undead, and uses that as fuel to conjure up dead things. Recently killed creatures can be resurrected, ghosts can be summoned. The shovel acts like a battery for death, which Emil can pull out and used as a way to sustain the minions.
LIMITS ⫻ No matter the conditions of the undead summoned, they’re products of the Gravedigger. Unless they originate from elsewhere, they’re on a timer. These undead lack an internal source of power, unlike other zombies or ghouls that can exist indefinitely. These undead have to be nourished by Emil, using the internal well of death that the Gravedigger builds up. If it depletes fully, its only use is as a hefty tool for cleaving and bludgeoning.
WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)
Other ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Yeah. This is rough."
Anyyyything else?
THE.GRAVEDIGGER
| Death’s Authority |
"For when the unquiet dead get too loud."ORIGINS & CREATIONS: | The Gravedigger was created by Emil Kolya of Kindle during his childhood, as a way to get through a horrific crisis. An undead invasion occurred and no one came to help, so he figured it out himself. |
TYPE: | Necromantic Weapon |
LOCATION: | Kindle |
NOTABLE OWNERS: | Emil Kolya of Kindle: Creator of the Gravedigger |
ABSTRACTION-GRANTING: | No | .............................................................................
As a kid, Emil Kolya of Kindle once spent three long weeks in a town beset on all sides by the undead. Having no magical experience beforehand, he had to learn quickly or die try. So he grabbed the closest thing to a weapon that he could find, a hefty shovel, and started slashing. Zombies were dismembered, ghouls were tossed into holes filled with flammable material, and the occasional ghost had its face smacked in. It worked for a whole, but then the undead intensified.
As more and more them appeared, Emil eventually worked out a method to use their power for himself. He learned a method of dealing, but his novice skills meant that he bit off more than he could chew.
The Gravedigger is a long shovel, big enough to be used as a spear, with a handle made of death driftwood. The head was originally polished steel, but has since ossified and now resembles cracked bone. It is a vessel for necromantic energy, eating death at every opportunity- Anything living or undead killed by the Gravedigger is drained of whatever kept it going, and this power can be used to reanimate or summon the dead.
Every time a zombie is laid to rest, or a ghost is smacked out of existence, its captured essence allows it to be brought back out. Undead summoned this way are stripped of all their innate power, and so they have to be sustained by the Gravedigger’s internal well of death. Without this power, a corpse will begin to slow down until nothing keeps it moving, and incorporeal undead will simply fade until there’s nothing left.
The funny thing about being made of sheer capital-N Nothingness for so long was that Umbra hadn’t accounted for pain. The sensation of flesh being flayed from bone, the hot and debilitating throb of burning meat, the numbness of lightning- Everybody had a tolerance for pain that sat somewhere, he wasn’t used to it. It overwhelmed it, his senses on the verge of rushing to a foreign brain to throw a foreign, metaphorical breaker to shut everything down.
It left him open to damn near anything Xavier could do on the mental front, no less.
Hearing the commotion ahead, Ryder booked it and whirred her laser gun to life. She hit the bottom of the elevator shaft with a grinding noise as her telekinesis cushioned the fall against twisted metal, and saw the chaos. Lasers flickering off walls, Wolverine going mad in Umbra faces, Beast doing beastly things… That was what she hoped for. Becker was gone, but Umbra’s consciousness occupied the body the exact same way. And Umbra was barely clinging to reality as it was now that several highly trained mutants were unloading hell and fury into him. Storm’s lightning barely gave him the chance to move.
Becker was an ordinary human. Umbra was being flogged so much his loose footholds over reality meant damn near nothing.
NO.
NO. NO. NO.
The hallway shuttered.
Ryder pointed the gun at his face, and another beam filled the hall. Neon blue, unlike the bright red from Cyclops’ powers. It left a nice hole where his jaw was five seconds ago.
But he still existed.
SHE IS MINE.
No, I’m fucking not.
In the lightness abyss that Xavier had dropped himself into, Ryder appeared. Not unlike the first time they properly interacted, her presence weighed down on this space like an anvil. The walls that were and weren’t there became nails on a chalkboard. She was what he wanted, but he could no longer reach for her.
Your fucking master plan came apart. And it’s your own damn fault, you piece of shit.
Things in the kitchen floated around Jack, going this way and that while he overlooked some notes scrawled onto paper. By the time Annika got downstairs, a piece of fresh, seasoned garlic bread and a glass of orange juice waited for her. He would’ve put something more together for her, but he knew Annika was old enough to make her own food if she ever wanted. The kitchen smelled good, and it always did. When Jack was Annika's age, he never would have dreamed he'd be cooking food this nice for anyone at all.
Nochalla scampered in after Annika, and hopped up into a chair that had a cushion on it. That chair was for her, and her alone. No one was ever allowed to sit in, or even move that chair. The last time anyone did, Nochalla spent the next week not as a housecat, but as a panther.
Annika wasn't here when that happened, but Jack warned her about it.
"I suggest you avoid any intense use of your magic today, Annika," Jack told her. "You should rest, but you did well yesterday."
"Mrp," Nochalla commented. Her ears twitched. Something weird was going on.
Fixing Shit ⫻ You can’t always afford to have someone else fix your car or your leaky roof. Emil learned how to do shit like that the hard way, making him good at figuring out what’s broken and how to make it right.
Scrapper ⫻ Watching a 40 year old man get drunk and smack his wife didn’t sit right with Emil when he was a kid. So he started standing up and doing something about it, and he quickly learned how to fight dirty. Going for the eyes, kicking the shins out from under someone, and the classic throat punch are how Emil beats someone up.
Mechanic ⫻ Emil works in a car shop, so the thing he’s best at fixing is usually a car. If it’s not working right, he can probably find some way to get it back into shape or hold things over for a while.
Fucking Deal With It ⫻ Emil has learned, time and time again, that shit is rough. He has the near supernatural ability to think, “It is what it is” about so many things. Whether it’s an unbelievable amount of patience or just being too tired to give a shit, Emil gets through it.
Emil is younger than he looks. His unkept facial hair and the tired look in his eyes make him seem like he’s in his late thirties, but he’s still in his late twenties. The man tends to have a battered, thrown-together “Homeless Chic” aesthetic consisting of multiple hooded shirts and old jeans worn long enough to be confused for sweatpants. He tends to dress im layers because he’s used to bring outside in the cold a lot. His hands are calloused to hell and back, and though Emil doesn’t have any kind of tattoos or body mods, you can tell he’s got some road miles on him.
Psychology ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Боже, черт возьми, все это, черт возьми! …What? Nothing."
MAIN GOAL ⫻ Having goals implies there's some kind of future. Emil hasn't really been in a good enough mindset of late to feel like he can make those kinds of plans. His first priority has been to get a better opportunity and find more stability in life. Emil wants to find a way to know where he's going to be in the next month before he starts planning for the next year.
PHILOSOPHY ⫻ Life isn't fair. Same shit, different day. You can expect a fair hand, but you won't always get one. When bad things happen, the best way to get over them is to get through them. Just keep fucking moving.
SECRETS ⫻ When Emil was 13, he watched a kid drown. He could’ve done something about it, but he didn’t because he was afraid he’d drown too.
SEXUALITY ⫻ Eh.
FEARS ⫻ Emil really doesn’t like being high up off the ground, it makes his head spin. Oh, and he’s also afraid he’s going to die before his life actually gets better.
REPUTATION IN SHADOW ⫻ Emil was the guy you knew in high school, and wondered about after he dropped off the radar for the rest of your life. The guy who just went completely incommunicado and left no trace of where he went with his future. People don't know Emil, they knew him at some point or another in the past, before he fell to their wayside, and then another wayside again and again.
FLAWS ⫻ Emil habitually assumes the worst about a lot of things. This new job is probably going to fall through, that girl his friend from work introduced him to probably isn’t interested, the rain is probably about to leak through the roof, and so on and so forth. He isn’t used to looking at things positively, and he expects people to turn their backs on him when he isn’t looking.
Backstory ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "It is what it is."
Once upon a time, there was a sleepy town assailed by an army of the dead for reasons unknown. Day after day, night after night, the Emil Kolya of this town would wade through the slain undead to take power for himself and turn it into weapons with which he would protect his hometown. He became a kind of gritty, respected hero that took the opportunity for magic by the horns and put himself on the level of Adepts. People were fascinated by the sealing techniques he cobbled together that shouldn’t have worked, but did. And after that chapter of his life came to a close, he went on to become a well-renown monster hunter with an arsenal of magical tools at his disposal.
His counterpart from Shadow wasn’t so fortunate.
His sleepy town didn’t have much going for it. It was about half an hour from a big city known as Hayweather, just far enough not to benefit from things like tourism or any kind of local business. This Emil’s parents came from Shadow’s Russia to its America in the wake of his father’s newest job opportunity. They lived in Hayweather for roughly ten years before they had a kid and decided not to raise him in such a noisy environment.
It wasn’t a bad decision. Less people, less crime, less chaos from being in such a populated area… But it wasn’t the right decision, either. Emil grew up with just a single father, because his mother had died in childbirth, the town didn’t have its own hospital and they weren’t in a position to make it to Hayweather before it was too late. And then his dad started working overtime in a remote job he held for years, both to distract himself and to deal with raising a kid alone.
And if that wasn’t enough, lots of people in the town weren’t particularly nice to him. Things sucked, he’d go to school and get into scuffles with other kids, and then go home to a place where the kitchen tablet’s chairs were stuck to the floor because they hadn’t been moved in so long. Someone in town sold drugs, and Emil had reported it for obvious reasons. That made him a few more enemies before he was even 17.
Eventually, Emil got out of high school and things at home at gotten better. His dad had eventually moved on from the past, and was in a good enough financial position that he considered heading back to Russia with his son. They both had family over there that Emil had never been introduced to, and it would’ve made things easier on both of them for a whole slew of reasons Emil didn’t fully get. But it sounded better than the shitty town he grew up in.
So they left America. A month later, they were on the other side of the planet, and with a lot of help at home, Emil learned his native language enough to speak as if he’d been born there. He met his uncle and the entire family on that side of the tree, moved into a house just down the street from them, and things were generally fine. Shadow’s Moscow was vibrant and full of things to do. Emil spent two years settling in with his dad, getting to know things and enjoying a new page in the book of his life.
It only lasted that long, though. In time, Emil learned that his uncle, Pavel, had a habit of putting hands on his wife and arguing about politics in a way that wasn’t very safe for drywall. And his kids who were several years younger than Emil himself occasionally had bruises on their elbows when they walked past his house. Emil’s old man wasn’t too happy about it, but he always told his son that family was the only thing they had at the end of the day.
What his father hadn’t said was that he was sick for a long time. Emil found out when he came home from a day out with a girl, to find that Pavel and his wife were both there sobbing over a corpse with a gun between its fingers. He left a note saying he didn’t know how long he had to live, and that he wanted to leave America because he feared it wasn’t very long once. Emil’s father didn’t leave any indication of what he had, it could’ve been cancer or it could’ve been early dementia. But no one ever found out.
Emil had no choice but to move in with his uncle’s family. Pavel didn’t mind, neither did his wife Irina. But Emil eventually got to a point where he’d break Pavel’s face in half when he caught the man abusing his own family. So by the time he was 20 and unable to get into college, he had to move out and find a job.
The next few years were a blurry, stagnant haze until the day Emil stepped down a hallway and saw himself staring back.
Abstraction ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "A shovel? What am I supposed to do with-"
TYPE ⫻ Agent
ABSTRACTION ⫻ The Gravedigger
ABSTRACTION DESCRIPTION ⫻ When Emil fell into Kindle, he found an oversized shovel embedded in concrete like a sword meant for a king. It absorbs the essence of anything it is used to kill, alive or undead, and uses that as fuel to conjure up dead things. Recently killed creatures can be resurrected, ghosts can be summoned. The shovel acts like a battery for death, which Emil can pull out and used as a way to sustain the minions.
LIMITS ⫻ No matter the conditions of the undead summoned, they’re products of the Gravedigger. Unless they originate from elsewhere, they’re on a timer. These undead lack an internal source of power, unlike other zombies or ghouls that can exist indefinitely. These undead have to be nourished by Emil, using the internal well of death that the Gravedigger builds up. If it depletes fully, its only use is as a hefty tool for cleaving and bludgeoning.
WEAKNESSES ⫻ (DO NOT FILL THIS OUT, I WILL PROVIDE IT FOR YOU)
Other ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ "Yeah. This is rough."
Anyyyything else?
THE.GRAVEDIGGER
| Death’s Authority |
"For when the unquiet dead get too loud."ORIGINS & CREATIONS: | The Gravedigger was created by Emil Kolya of Kindle during his childhood, as a way to get through a horrific crisis. An undead invasion occurred and no one came to help, so he figured it out himself. |
TYPE: | Necromantic Weapon |
LOCATION: | Kindle |
NOTABLE OWNERS: | Emil Kolya of Kindle: Creator of the Gravedigger |
ABSTRACTION-GRANTING: | No | .............................................................................
As a kid, Emil Kolya of Kindle once spent three long weeks in a town beset on all sides by the undead. Having no magical experience beforehand, he had to learn quickly or die try. So he grabbed the closest thing to a weapon that he could find, a hefty shovel, and started slashing. Zombies were dismembered, ghouls were tossed into holes filled with flammable material, and the occasional ghost had its face smacked in. It worked for a whole, but then the undead intensified.
As more and more them appeared, Emil eventually worked out a method to use their power for himself. He learned a method of dealing, but his novice skills meant that he bit off more than he could chew.
The Gravedigger is a long shovel, big enough to be used as a spear, with a handle made of death driftwood. The head was originally polished steel, but has since ossified and now resembles cracked bone. It is a vessel for necromantic energy, eating death at every opportunity- Anything living or undead killed by the Gravedigger is drained of whatever kept it going, and this power can be used to reanimate or summon the dead.
Every time a zombie is laid to rest, or a ghost is smacked out of existence, its captured essence allows it to be brought back out. Undead summoned this way are stripped of all their innate power, and so they have to be sustained by the Gravedigger’s internal well of death. Without this power, a corpse will begin to slow down until nothing keeps it moving, and incorporeal undead will simply fade until there’s nothing left.
Member
Forsythe
Cerera
tadcfnaf
Achronum
Zeus23
xVampire3go
Antlers
Morose
