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amberdrakeI'm home again, I won the war, and now I am behind your door
I tried so hard to obey the law, and see the meaning of this all
Remember me? Before the war? I'm the man who lived next door
Long ago...
Name: Aro
Contact: aroihkin on plurk and discord
Age: I'm fawdy
Other Characters: Astronema, Murderbot
Invitation: extant
Permissions: boop
Character Name: Amberdrake k'Leshya
Age: 40-42ish. Shit's vague, but he's probably about 18-20 when he joined Urtho at very the start of the War, the War was a decade long and ends at the end of the first book (28-30), then there's a decade between books (38-40), the second book takes about a year, and I'm taking him about a year after that, so 40-42? Ish? He's got those good good Kaled'a'in genes and skin-tone, and takes damn good care of himself, though, so he looks younger, the absolute fucker.
Canon: Heralds of Valdemar
Canon Point: about a year after the White Gryphon, the second book in his trilogy
Character History: http://valdemar.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page (Velgarth wiki.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Gryphon (The first book.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Gryphon (The second book.)
Early history directly from the first book: link, start with the paragraph What if I had told him a story—"Once on a time, there was a Kaled'a'in family, living far from the camps of their kin—"
I've also put up small samples of the books in this tag and on his profile. Because you can't youtube a book, and the wiki pages are... ehhh, lacking. As they usually are for books.
Canon Abilities:
-------- ARCANE:
Strong Healing Gift and stronger Empathic Gift -- not a rare combination on his world, but it's rare (and detrimental) to have both be so strong. More about that in Weaknesses.
---- Strengths:
The Empathic Gift can theoretically be used as a defense, projecting confusing and conflicting emotions at an attacker in order to escape. The Healing Gift can also be theoretically used as such, because it isn't some blanket "healing" spell that he spams on his target -- Amberdrake is actually able to see into a person's body and manipulate the fluids and energies inside. "Healer's Aftershock" (see below) prevents those with the Healing Gift from abusing this ability, even if they were so inclined. But if you tried to strangle him, for example, he could force the muscles of your arms to suddenly relax. It would take him a moment, however, so it's not as useful against someone leaping out of hiding and trying to stab him in the eye.
On the other hand, he has very fast reflexes and stands a good chance of at least getting out of the way. This is a war medic who had to deal with thrashing gryphons and kyree and kicking dyheli, as well as the occasional too-angry client. He knows how to get out of dodge.
I also go with the idea that he usually needs to touch someone to do things like paralyze a limb. The exception is when he's worked on someone and 'knows' their body well enough to do it at speaking range, but it costs a whole hell of a lot of energy.
He can also project images; sounds; memories, although usually only with skin contact, and usually only when the person involved is another Empath or at least similarly open (by arcane means) to such a connection. I say "usually" because he is able to delve that deep into the non-Gifted, but only by lowering his shields to a dangerous (for his own sanity) level. It's not something he'll generally do unless it's a do-or-die severity situation.
---- Weaknesses:
His Gifts are as much bane as blessing, and often more-so. The Empathic Gift prevents him from being a full-time Healer, because on top of feeling the "Healer's Aftershock" from the Healing Gift -- where he takes on some of the pain of the wounds he heals -- he also feels pain and despair and suffering on an emotional level, and when he's Healing he can't afford to shield harder against his patient. This is why he was an emergency Healer instead of a full-time Healer in the War, and most of his days were spent attending to his duties as a kestra'chern instead.
The combination of Gifts also makes it nigh-impossible for him to ever become a fighter in the conventional sense; he feels everything he inflicts on another. In canon it's not until the third book -- when he's in his fifties -- that he's ever shown actually taking something down, and it was a direct threat against his daughter and his gryphon brother and his son, so Drake was the height of desperation. It still ended with him on his knees on the ground clutching his head and vulnerable, and he'd have been screwed if something else had attacked.
Furthermore, places like hospitals and battlefields have a profound effect on him, the amount of pain and suffering in the air -- physical and emotional -- chews through his shields faster and harder than it chews through those of other Empaths on his world, and he spent many years of his Chirurgeon training bed-bound with imitations of his patients' ailments.
That isn't to say that he doesn't have shields at all, but they have well-documented severe limits that have actually had a profound and permanent effect on him as a character. It seems that the less sources are involved, the better he does, but he also has some psychological weaknesses within them that aren't part of the standard Empath package, due to his background.
It should also be noted that use of the Healing Gift drains both himself and his patient's energy, although he has enough skill and experience and a strong enough Gift that it normally takes either catastrophic injuries or many injured people to actually exhaust him, especially now that he isn't run ragged from a decade of war.
Also, he can't Heal himself, though I've ruled in the past that he's probably harder to scar up. His over-all health levels are higher on this sort of irrelevant level; for example his blood stays untainted in these polluted 'modern' settings, as though he still lived in his own chemical-free world. But it's nothing that would make a lick of difference if he himself wasn't always taking pains to stay in top physical condition the mundane way.
The canon range on his Gifts are roughly as follows:
* Empathic Gift -- Voice range. If, in a quiet setting, he could hear a character's voice, he's also "hearing" more than that (even if they're too far for him to make out words). In a noisy setting, obviously, he'd sense further away than he'd hear. But that seems to be about the rule of thumb. Closer lets him pick up more details, just like picking out more visual details in a person's clothing. If he's deliberately widening his range, with concentration, he can probably pick up a basic feel within shouting-like-you-mean-it range. On Haven, he was able to sense a distressed stranger a block or two away, but Haven was 99% Empathically silent, so his shields were lower.
* Healing Gift -- Requires touch. Almost always requires skin contact with the relevant area, but not always. Sometimes he can work without touch, but he has to be very familiar with the anatomy of who he's dealing with and probably within touching range, and I've ruled in the past that it burns his energy twice as fast as it strains to make the connection. Merely seeing what's wrong with someone doesn't seem to require touch, but definitely requires touching range, and won't be nearly as detailed without touch.
The only way his powers could be widely-catastrophic would be if he dropped his shields and let his considerable Empathic Gift run completely wild... but he would definitely lose his mind if he did that. It's dangerous to his sense of self to even lower them below normal to one person while keeping them normal to everyone else. Even that much could potentially destroy him from the inside out, if the other person was malicious enough or reeled him in too far.
-------- MUNDANE:
Fully-trained Chirurgeon (non-magic surgeon), fully-trained Healer (further general medical knowledge on multiple species), fully-trained Kestra'chern.
Kestra'chern: a holistic therapist dealing with the following (and many other closely-related skills):
* Costume & acting -- he couldn't even let an entire gossipy war-camp know when he was distressed... for a decade. He was considered easily the best kestra'chern and often tended to Urtho himself, as well as his top people; seeing him in any kind of distress would have sent the whole army into a panic. Learning to act is part of training to be a kestra'chern for many reasons from safeguarding your clients' secrets to ensuring the mental well-being of everyone else. This is something he continued for three books -- spanning over 30 years of story. There's also that time he framed himself as a murderer and a lunatic in the eyes of a potential war-enemy nation's Court, in order to then disguise himself as 'Hawkwind', a stern-faced scout put in charge of guarding himself, which allowed him much more freedom to move around to attempt to catch the real killer. He can be a smooth bastard, both in maintaining the "kestra'chern mask" and in more dramatic performances.
* Massage therapy (assisted further by his extensive training in medicine) -- give him time and a massage table and he can turn just about anyone into putty. Even Gods are not immune, or at least they weren't on Multiverse Haven.
* Bodypainting, feather dying, feather repair, general related stuff applying to the various races of his world, which ranges from feathers and fur to scales and skin. He finished his kestra'chern apprenticeship as a feather-painter in particular.
* Psychology -- from the "tell me about your mother" clipboard variety to the sex therapist intimacy issues variety, all depending on the client.
* Escapology and rope/knotwork -- he's kidnapped at one point in White Gryphon and hog-tied by a mad-man, and he remarks while squirming out of the ropes that he's forgotten more about knots than that psycho has ever learned.
Between being a trained Chirurgeon, trained Healer, and trained Kestra'chern, he's actually got quite a bit of herbalistic know-how as well. He mixes many of his medicines and teas and dyes himself.
He's also able to do his own mending with those amazing stitches, and can make his own clothing with sufficient time. (It's not like he knows how to use a sewing machine.) Kestra'chern often design their own clothing.
As a kestra'chern and someone with a multicultural background involving multiple countries, Drake knows most of the languages he was exposed to on his world... at least enough to get by with some creative gesturing.
As a Kaled'a'in, he can stick to a fighting war-horse's saddle like glue, and as the son of scouts and mercenaries, he can move very quietly on foot. And he's a pretty good shot with a bow, but the way it instantly fucks him up to do harm like that makes it very much not viable (as seen in the third book).
Inventory: His clothes, hair ornaments, etc. He always has various herbs and things in his pockets, and he'll probably recover some seeds from some of it to grow here. Stuff like Zhaneel's feather, some of Skan's smaller feathers, a little sewing/suturing kit. He has a lot of pockets. Also, a little flock of messenger birds who happened to be perched on him at the time he was taken, because as little Empaths themselves they tend to like him a lot. They're about the size of zebra finches, ridiculously colorful, about as smart as human toddlers, and capable of imitating any voices or sounds. They're trouble, basically. And adorable.
Option 1: Answer the following questions. Elaborate on the answer, especially your characters thoughts and feelings surrounding the answer. For Canon Characters, you can choose four questions. For Original Characters, you will need to choose six questions. Keep the word count to 150-400 per question.
List your top three choices for your characters adoptive court. The mods will choose the one out of those three options that seems the most fitting based on your app.
Ability: Do you want your character to gain the ability of their court? (Delete the other two options.)
3) Yes, but they either have no ability of their own, or they refuse to trade theirs away; they will buy their court's ability on credit.
None of my others took court abilities. It's time.
In the maze:
My TL:
Gabriel edition - the noncombatant
Harry edition
Kiriya edition
Castiel's TL
Hazel Levesque's TL - the calm presence
Lucien's TL - the war-Healer
After the maze:
NPC roulette: Ahri - the kestra'chern
I tried so hard to obey the law, and see the meaning of this all
Remember me? Before the war? I'm the man who lived next door
Long ago...
🦋 OOC Information
Name: Aro
Contact: aroihkin on plurk and discord
Age: I'm fawdy
Other Characters: Astronema, Murderbot
Invitation: extant
Permissions: boop
🦋 IC Information
Character Name: Amberdrake k'Leshya
Age: 40-42ish. Shit's vague, but he's probably about 18-20 when he joined Urtho at very the start of the War, the War was a decade long and ends at the end of the first book (28-30), then there's a decade between books (38-40), the second book takes about a year, and I'm taking him about a year after that, so 40-42? Ish? He's got those good good Kaled'a'in genes and skin-tone, and takes damn good care of himself, though, so he looks younger, the absolute fucker.
Canon: Heralds of Valdemar
Canon Point: about a year after the White Gryphon, the second book in his trilogy
Character History: http://valdemar.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page (Velgarth wiki.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Gryphon (The first book.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Gryphon (The second book.)
Early history directly from the first book: link, start with the paragraph What if I had told him a story—"Once on a time, there was a Kaled'a'in family, living far from the camps of their kin—"
I've also put up small samples of the books in this tag and on his profile. Because you can't youtube a book, and the wiki pages are... ehhh, lacking. As they usually are for books.
Canon Abilities:
-------- ARCANE:
Strong Healing Gift and stronger Empathic Gift -- not a rare combination on his world, but it's rare (and detrimental) to have both be so strong. More about that in Weaknesses.
---- Strengths:
The Empathic Gift can theoretically be used as a defense, projecting confusing and conflicting emotions at an attacker in order to escape. The Healing Gift can also be theoretically used as such, because it isn't some blanket "healing" spell that he spams on his target -- Amberdrake is actually able to see into a person's body and manipulate the fluids and energies inside. "Healer's Aftershock" (see below) prevents those with the Healing Gift from abusing this ability, even if they were so inclined. But if you tried to strangle him, for example, he could force the muscles of your arms to suddenly relax. It would take him a moment, however, so it's not as useful against someone leaping out of hiding and trying to stab him in the eye.
On the other hand, he has very fast reflexes and stands a good chance of at least getting out of the way. This is a war medic who had to deal with thrashing gryphons and kyree and kicking dyheli, as well as the occasional too-angry client. He knows how to get out of dodge.
I also go with the idea that he usually needs to touch someone to do things like paralyze a limb. The exception is when he's worked on someone and 'knows' their body well enough to do it at speaking range, but it costs a whole hell of a lot of energy.
He can also project images; sounds; memories, although usually only with skin contact, and usually only when the person involved is another Empath or at least similarly open (by arcane means) to such a connection. I say "usually" because he is able to delve that deep into the non-Gifted, but only by lowering his shields to a dangerous (for his own sanity) level. It's not something he'll generally do unless it's a do-or-die severity situation.
---- Weaknesses:
His Gifts are as much bane as blessing, and often more-so. The Empathic Gift prevents him from being a full-time Healer, because on top of feeling the "Healer's Aftershock" from the Healing Gift -- where he takes on some of the pain of the wounds he heals -- he also feels pain and despair and suffering on an emotional level, and when he's Healing he can't afford to shield harder against his patient. This is why he was an emergency Healer instead of a full-time Healer in the War, and most of his days were spent attending to his duties as a kestra'chern instead.
The combination of Gifts also makes it nigh-impossible for him to ever become a fighter in the conventional sense; he feels everything he inflicts on another. In canon it's not until the third book -- when he's in his fifties -- that he's ever shown actually taking something down, and it was a direct threat against his daughter and his gryphon brother and his son, so Drake was the height of desperation. It still ended with him on his knees on the ground clutching his head and vulnerable, and he'd have been screwed if something else had attacked.
Furthermore, places like hospitals and battlefields have a profound effect on him, the amount of pain and suffering in the air -- physical and emotional -- chews through his shields faster and harder than it chews through those of other Empaths on his world, and he spent many years of his Chirurgeon training bed-bound with imitations of his patients' ailments.
That isn't to say that he doesn't have shields at all, but they have well-documented severe limits that have actually had a profound and permanent effect on him as a character. It seems that the less sources are involved, the better he does, but he also has some psychological weaknesses within them that aren't part of the standard Empath package, due to his background.
It should also be noted that use of the Healing Gift drains both himself and his patient's energy, although he has enough skill and experience and a strong enough Gift that it normally takes either catastrophic injuries or many injured people to actually exhaust him, especially now that he isn't run ragged from a decade of war.
Also, he can't Heal himself, though I've ruled in the past that he's probably harder to scar up. His over-all health levels are higher on this sort of irrelevant level; for example his blood stays untainted in these polluted 'modern' settings, as though he still lived in his own chemical-free world. But it's nothing that would make a lick of difference if he himself wasn't always taking pains to stay in top physical condition the mundane way.
The canon range on his Gifts are roughly as follows:
* Empathic Gift -- Voice range. If, in a quiet setting, he could hear a character's voice, he's also "hearing" more than that (even if they're too far for him to make out words). In a noisy setting, obviously, he'd sense further away than he'd hear. But that seems to be about the rule of thumb. Closer lets him pick up more details, just like picking out more visual details in a person's clothing. If he's deliberately widening his range, with concentration, he can probably pick up a basic feel within shouting-like-you-mean-it range. On Haven, he was able to sense a distressed stranger a block or two away, but Haven was 99% Empathically silent, so his shields were lower.
* Healing Gift -- Requires touch. Almost always requires skin contact with the relevant area, but not always. Sometimes he can work without touch, but he has to be very familiar with the anatomy of who he's dealing with and probably within touching range, and I've ruled in the past that it burns his energy twice as fast as it strains to make the connection. Merely seeing what's wrong with someone doesn't seem to require touch, but definitely requires touching range, and won't be nearly as detailed without touch.
The only way his powers could be widely-catastrophic would be if he dropped his shields and let his considerable Empathic Gift run completely wild... but he would definitely lose his mind if he did that. It's dangerous to his sense of self to even lower them below normal to one person while keeping them normal to everyone else. Even that much could potentially destroy him from the inside out, if the other person was malicious enough or reeled him in too far.
-------- MUNDANE:
Fully-trained Chirurgeon (non-magic surgeon), fully-trained Healer (further general medical knowledge on multiple species), fully-trained Kestra'chern.
Kestra'chern: a holistic therapist dealing with the following (and many other closely-related skills):
* Costume & acting -- he couldn't even let an entire gossipy war-camp know when he was distressed... for a decade. He was considered easily the best kestra'chern and often tended to Urtho himself, as well as his top people; seeing him in any kind of distress would have sent the whole army into a panic. Learning to act is part of training to be a kestra'chern for many reasons from safeguarding your clients' secrets to ensuring the mental well-being of everyone else. This is something he continued for three books -- spanning over 30 years of story. There's also that time he framed himself as a murderer and a lunatic in the eyes of a potential war-enemy nation's Court, in order to then disguise himself as 'Hawkwind', a stern-faced scout put in charge of guarding himself, which allowed him much more freedom to move around to attempt to catch the real killer. He can be a smooth bastard, both in maintaining the "kestra'chern mask" and in more dramatic performances.
* Massage therapy (assisted further by his extensive training in medicine) -- give him time and a massage table and he can turn just about anyone into putty. Even Gods are not immune, or at least they weren't on Multiverse Haven.
* Bodypainting, feather dying, feather repair, general related stuff applying to the various races of his world, which ranges from feathers and fur to scales and skin. He finished his kestra'chern apprenticeship as a feather-painter in particular.
* Psychology -- from the "tell me about your mother" clipboard variety to the sex therapist intimacy issues variety, all depending on the client.
* Escapology and rope/knotwork -- he's kidnapped at one point in White Gryphon and hog-tied by a mad-man, and he remarks while squirming out of the ropes that he's forgotten more about knots than that psycho has ever learned.
Between being a trained Chirurgeon, trained Healer, and trained Kestra'chern, he's actually got quite a bit of herbalistic know-how as well. He mixes many of his medicines and teas and dyes himself.
He's also able to do his own mending with those amazing stitches, and can make his own clothing with sufficient time. (It's not like he knows how to use a sewing machine.) Kestra'chern often design their own clothing.
As a kestra'chern and someone with a multicultural background involving multiple countries, Drake knows most of the languages he was exposed to on his world... at least enough to get by with some creative gesturing.
As a Kaled'a'in, he can stick to a fighting war-horse's saddle like glue, and as the son of scouts and mercenaries, he can move very quietly on foot. And he's a pretty good shot with a bow, but the way it instantly fucks him up to do harm like that makes it very much not viable (as seen in the third book).
Inventory: His clothes, hair ornaments, etc. He always has various herbs and things in his pockets, and he'll probably recover some seeds from some of it to grow here. Stuff like Zhaneel's feather, some of Skan's smaller feathers, a little sewing/suturing kit. He has a lot of pockets. Also, a little flock of messenger birds who happened to be perched on him at the time he was taken, because as little Empaths themselves they tend to like him a lot. They're about the size of zebra finches, ridiculously colorful, about as smart as human toddlers, and capable of imitating any voices or sounds. They're trouble, basically. And adorable.
🦋 Personality
Option 1: Answer the following questions. Elaborate on the answer, especially your characters thoughts and feelings surrounding the answer. For Canon Characters, you can choose four questions. For Original Characters, you will need to choose six questions. Keep the word count to 150-400 per question.
- Has your character always believed in magic? Do they have something influencing their perspective on the supernatural/metaphysical/spiritual from their past? How do they feel about magic?
- If your character could ask for one wish, and it's going to be magically granted without any consequence, what will it be and why?
- If there's one person your character would follow to another realm, who would it be and why? If there's no one, state that and explain why.
- What is your character's most outstanding personality trait, and why?
This is an interesting one! I'm cribbing a lot from the book directly, but Amberdrake was raised initially in the city of Therium, far from the homeland and customs of his people. When his magical Healing and Empathic Gifts began to show themselves at age thirteen, his family chose to send him to the capital of the neighboring country of Predain, to learn "modern medicine" instead of back to the Clans to learn the "old-fashioned" ways of the Kaled'a'in Healers.
The teachers at the College of Chirurgeons in Predain were so "modern" they didn't believe in Empathy, Healing, or any other magic. They only believed in what they could see, weigh, and measure; in what anyone with training could do, and "not just those with some so-called mystical Gifts."
So while Drake himself has always known magic is real, some of his formative years were around those who did not. Plus, an unshielded and untrained Empath in a teaching hospital?
The Gift of Empathy was no Gift at all when there were too many sick and dying people to shut out. And the chirurgeons that were his teachers only made him sicker, misdiagnosing him and dosing him for illnesses he didn't even have.He's lucky they didn't accidentally poison him to death, honestly.
First instinct? He would wish that Ma'ar had never been born.
But given a second to think, he'd realize that Ma'ar was a symptom of a much bigger problem. So then he would wish that the kind of political climate that gave Ma'ar so much power in Predain was impossible. (Hi, his canon has fascists too, isn't that something. I never guessed when I started playing him decades ago that I'd see this shit happening in real-time where I live, too.)
Anyway, if he could take that sort of thing right out of human nature, with no unintended consequences? Just... snip-snip, we're not prone to handing all the power to the worst among us, anymore? He'd take that in a heartbeat. Amberdrake k'Leshya is based as fuck like that.
And he saw Ma'ar's rise to power up close, he was living in the city the guy started in. He was visibly part of the 'decadent foreigners' / barbarians Ma'ar started off by rallying the people against. He fled ahead of his troops when they started taking and disappearing prisoners. And he was one of the first to pledge himself to Urtho when the Mage of Silence declared he would stop him.
Urtho, the Mage of Silence. He was the creator of the gryphons, the Adept who gave the other races their intelligence (and freedom), and despite preferring to keep to himself most of the time and do his own thing in his tower, he was the first to stand in firm opposition to Ma'ar. And as a fellow Adept Mage, the Mage of Silence was one of the only people who could maybe stand against the Mage of Black Flame in that arena, too. (In their time, Adept means... so magically powerful you can create sapient species out of thin air. Ma'ar made the makaar in response to Urtho's gryphons, but they're pure weapons who live short miserable lives to keep the generations cycling quickly and breed out any flaws. Vs Urtho wanting to make a true species that could live long after he was gone.)
Anyway, Drake was Urtho's personal kestra'chern and did everything he could to try to support his mental health throughout the decade of war. He misses Urtho dearly. And he will take all his secrets and insecurities and flaws with him to the grave, just like with all his clients.
Amberdrake's Empathic Gift is so strong that it could unravel his mind like a ball of yarn if he were to drop all his shields, but it really stands no chance next to his non-magical, normal, human empathy. He even has a hard time staying angry with people, because he usually figures out why they are the way they are, and then either can relate on some level, or just can't summon the energy for anger over trivial shit anymore.
“It’s not that I’m polite, it’s that I know too much about human nature—and I know how it can be twisted and deformed until people turn into monsters. That makes it difficult to stay angry with anyone for very long, since I generally know what their feelings and motivations are. Now that I’ve talked with Urtho about our enemy, I even know why Ma’ar is the way he is. I can manage to stay angry with Ma’ar; I just wish that knowing the reasons for his behavior would make some difference in stopping him.”He has a long, long fuse. It can be burned, but it takes a lot of work, because he'll just figure you out and keep blowing out the match you're tying to light it with. That empathy isn't just about stuff that could make him angry, of course, but it's indicative of how easily he's able to relate to others.
Also, this gifset from MASH feels very relevant:
It probably helps that he has a hard time thinking of himself as a person, but hey. Silver lining?
🦋 Fae Court
List your top three choices for your characters adoptive court. The mods will choose the one out of those three options that seems the most fitting based on your app.
- Autumn
- Summer
- Day
Ability: Do you want your character to gain the ability of their court? (Delete the other two options.)
3) Yes, but they either have no ability of their own, or they refuse to trade theirs away; they will buy their court's ability on credit.
None of my others took court abilities. It's time.
🦋 RP Samples
In the maze:
My TL:
Gabriel edition - the noncombatant
Harry edition
Kiriya edition
Castiel's TL
Hazel Levesque's TL - the calm presence
Lucien's TL - the war-Healer
After the maze:
NPC roulette: Ahri - the kestra'chern