Still here in the event the GM decides to come back to it, but also very understanding if that does not happen.
Search Posts
My deepest condolences. Many of my social circles were recently hit with losses from the Oakland warehouse fire, so you have my sincerest sympathy.
Beatrix's face sours again, scrunching into an irritated frown. "I didn't say I was your 'friend'," she snaps at Sad. The green wisps swirling through her lash give way to red.
Beatrix makes a nominal effort to wipe some of the gore from her face, but other than that she seems to have little initial response to the encounter. Staring at her strange weapon, she feels a bizarre movement beneath her right arm: muscles and tendons flexing and straining and... something else. The sensation passes quickly. She'd hewn that creature near in half, an impressive -and curious- feat for a woman whose physique could be charitably described as "skin and bones". Quinn's remarks snap her out of her navel-gazing, and Beatrix looks up to meet the other woman's eyes. "Superior numbers did us well here. Perhaps... perhaps sticking together is a good idea." She sounded as if she had to reach into her stomach to pull the statement, squirming and defiant, from herself. But it was sincere. Faint streaks of green swirled through her weapon.
Beatrix weighed her options. She had little desire to risk her life, but the creature was already wreathed in the flames Regina had covered the room with (that was certainly a useful skill), and her companions had "bravely" charged into battle with the creature. Beatrix concluded she could likely assist in engaging the creature with minimal risk to herself. Moving into the room, she positions herself to strike the creature, bringing her strange weapon down on it with an overhead cleave:
Hi everyone. My girlfriend's grandfather passed away suddenly yesterday. I'll likely have some down time tomorrow to post, but if it is necessary to bot me in any capacity until I am able to do so, please don't hesitate. Apologies for the disruption.
Going through the scattered belongings, Beatrix comes upon a well-stocked backpack, some ratty old clothes, and some hide armor. Her gut tells Beatrix these things belong to her, but what little she could recall from her fractured memories indicated she'd never owned much more than the dirt under her nails. Perhaps more recently things had gotten better? If that was the case she wished she could remember those times. The wave of stench rolling in from the corpse-strewn room beyond the door was enough to give even Beatrix pause. She had the distinct impression that it was not often something managed to turn her stomach. "If he can't keep up he can't keep up," Beatrix states stonily of Campre. "But I don't like the sound of going up the chimney. I'd prefer to be in a space where I can defend myself."
Beatrix rolls her eyes at Saturday's self-assured retort to her criticism, but it fades to concern when the man cries out in pain. While the expression is genuine, whether it's out of sympathy or worry at a reduction of their tactical options is unclear to any observers. When he recovers, she returns to her usual neutral expression. Recalling the native abilities she discovered in the dream world, she concentrates and a long, semi-translucent weapon forms in her hands. Faint wisps of maroon shoot through the otherwise grey object. "As ready as I'll ever be," she states flatly.
Hey everyone! Got bogged down way more than expected with Food Day preparations. I'll try to fire off a proper post later tonight.
Beatrix is intended to be a difficult person, but I don't have any desire to cause serious party disharmony. Please, any of you, tell me if you feel I'm leaning a bit too hard into it. And it is something I plan on having her "grow out of" as the campaign goes on.
"Fancy yourself the sort that makes those kinds of decisions for people, are you?" Beatrix retorts with a sneer. However, the expression fades and she quickly relents any desire to butt heads. "Fine, bring him along, then. But it's gonna be hard enough with a half-dozen different ideas about what we should do to get out of here without adding another head besides."
"Sounds like he's made up his mind," Beatrix responds flatly to Era and Saturday's conversation about the man's condition. "And if he's right about that thing coming back with help, we should get out of here."
Beatrix pauses dressing herself briefly to make a sweeping gesture around the room with her hand. "Does this place look like it cares what we want?"
Posting immediately after I wake up results in world-class writing like using the word "statement" four times in two paragraphs. :P
Beatrix quickly exits the cell at the first available opportunity. "Thank you." She says to Fifteen. The statement is clipped and severe, but not insincere. One gets the impression that it is a statement she is not accustomed to making. At Regina's statement, Beatrix's eyes fall upon her with a withering stare. "If it was that important to you, you wouldn't care whether they were clean or not," she says in a derisive tone. Without further statement, she begins rifling through the befouled garments, selecting any that are still functional before putting them on.
Beatrix observes quietly from her crouched position. She recoils towards the back of the cell slightly when the others attack the... thing... torturing the man on the table. She stands, carefully, when the thin figure runs from the room. She seems unconcerned with being naked, though this does not come across as confidence. Anxiety begins to build in the back of her mind as she begins to consider how they could escape, but is flooded away with relief when she sees the other cell swing open. A relieved sigh escapes her lips, followed quickly by an earnest plea: "Don't forget us in here!"
You guys are always posting in huge flurries when I am otherwise indisposed. ( ._.) Not actually a big deal, lol. I could probably keep up if I didn't loathe posting from my phone so much. :P My girlfriend is sick at the moment, too. Fingers crossed I do not suffer the same fate, as my job is not particularly conducive to taking sick days.
Beatrix's eyes open slowly. She does not startle as she awakes, but her heavy breath and the sheen of sweat across her forehead indicate a nightmare as potent as any of the others. She lifts herself to a crouch, and slowly takes in that her compatriots from the dream world also accompany her here in the world of -she assumes- flesh and blood. She opens her mouth to indicate her displeasure, but before any sound can escape Jacqueline goes on the offensive. "Oh, so we're doing that again," Beatrix states dryly.
Alright we're going to play it that way A+ 100% with the flavor text on that one.
Also, the Era and Jacqueline cards work really well together.
It's hidden because, were it published, all of creation would quake before her might. :P
It's not a perfect fit in-game, but in the "too anime to drive" AU we're building here, Beatrix is definitely the Yandere.
Well, since I don't need to post until this is resolved (probably), I got bored and did a thing. These. Are. FANTASTIC.
Sorry I missed posting yesterday! I've been fighting a cold and took a NyQuil that laid me out a bit quicker than I expected. I got one post off before sleep hit me like a truck. Woke up with my face on my laptop keyboard. >_>
Beatrix turns aggressively towards whatever made the rustling sound. Seeing the large, yellow eyes, she brandishes her lash in front of herself with both hands. "Stay away from me! I'll kill you, don't think I won't!" To any listeners she sounds deadly serious, but her voice still cracks as she makes her threat. A yellowish coloration seeps back into the slowly swirling patterns in her weapon.
Beatrix falters, the unnaturally warping landscape taking it's tool on even her uniquely sharp senses. Her stomach turns, and she is forced to take a knee to recover herself. Something worms it's way down her arm, and with a shriek her opposite hand moves to strike it away. But there's nothing there. She feels it again, something wiggling along her limb. Under the skin, she realizes with a sickening horror. When the movement reaches her hand, she involuntarily makes a fierce grip as strange, semi-solid matter emanates from her grasped hand outward. The growing mass extends itself out to just over five feet. She steadies her grip on it with her other hand. The curious weapon is mostly whitish and translucent in coloration, but looking closer Beatrix sees streaks of yellow pulse through it. Weapon. That word stuck in her mind. She grimaced as a fresh batch of shattered memories skipped across her mind like falling bits of glass. She had killed before, when she was forced to. This was how she'd done it. Beatrix looked back the way she had been running from, unable to avoid thinking of the others that remained any longer. She mutters a string of curses under her breath and though it goes unnoticed by her, the slight coloration in her manifested weapon shifts from yellow to green as she turns to run back towards the others.
Okay, I swapped Cause Fear for CLW. +1 to Party Survival! ...Except it's in the hands of someone who, as far as she can remember, has never had a reason to trust another person her entire life, hahaha. So maybe more like +1/2 to Party Survival. Incidentally, since we're discussing Beatrix's personality, I do intend to roleplay an alignment shift within the first couple modules of the AP. Not huge, just to either LN, CN, or NG depending on how her experiences shake out.
Saturday and Jacqueline's inexplicable nobility elicits a brief, stunned series of blinks from Beatrix. "Brief" being the key word, however. Shaking the sensation off, she throws up her hands with indifference. "Excellent, get yourselves killed. Since you're being such good friends, I'll be sure to use those extra few minutes to keep running." Looking towards the others, she makes a motioning gesture: "Let's not waste their time!" With that, Beatrix is down the wide path as fast as her feet will carry her.
@Everyone: Yay or nay on whether I should pick up cure spells? @DM Czernobog: Do you have an objection to me swapping Beatrix's Cause Fear for Cure Light Wounds? If you'd rather I didn't since we've already started, I don't mind. I can always pick it up at level 2.
Beatrix reluctantly takes the woman's hand with hers, but once she is on her feet quickly snatches it away. "I know how to run, thank you very much." She says angrily, but at a volume not much above a whisper. With the way this hellscape seemed to be dampening their very voices in it's endless malaise, she wasn't sure even the sharp-eared among them could hear it. At the junction of two lit paths Beatrix has seemingly rediscovered a sense of determination, or at least self-preservation. She moves past the rest towards the large alley. "This one it is then! You don't use words to run! If whatever is making that noise catches up with us, you can debate it to death. I'll be busy trying not to die."
Beatrix knew streets, she'd spent her whole life living on them -she thinks, memories are hazy, fractured- but these streets were strange. Wrong. She could hear voices. They conjured warring instincts: Trust no one. No, trust them. She curled in on herself, trying to hide from everything around her. "Where are we?" Almost a whisper. "Who are you!?!?" Much louder than a whisper.
I also see the gameplay thread is going. Wow, you all were going ham this morning! O_O I'm meeting someone for breakfast, but I'll have something in Gameplay in about two hours or so!
Ah! So much activity! Tuesday is my Saturday (weird work schedule, yeah?), so it's a good thing I didn't sleep in for once! Let's try to cover a few things being discussed: Healing: Spiritualists get the cure spell line. It's stepping a bit outside of Beatrix's flavor, but considering the situation I would be fine with swapping my Cause Fear for Cure Light Wounds. I won't ever be a particularly robust healer, but it's enough to potentially avert disaster here and there. What an Ectoplasmatist does: I'm basically a Bad Touch Magus (i.e. my "bonus damage" comes from y'all coup de grace-ing the daylights out of enemies I paralyze). I also make a decent skirmisher, as Beatrix is quite buff and my ectoplasmic lash eventually has a natural 15' reach. Oh, and the lash is one of the better "progressively upgraded weapons as a class feature", meaning I can sink a good chunk of my WBL into other, more esoteric magical gear to increase our problem-solving versatility. On gore: I'm pretty much fine as long as it isn't, like, grand guignol 24/7. Voice Actor: My in-brain IMDB is not nearly as good with voice actors as it is with live-action performers, so I don't really have a good answer for this. Sorry! :-/ Did I miss anything?
Beatrix checking in! At work, so this will be quick. Absolutely ecstatic to get in, really I have no words. And I am in such good company! Really excellent spread of characters here. Edit: Also vote "no" on sanity rules. If I were the only psychisch caster, I honestly wouldn't mind shouldering that burden for some extra flavor, but as we are the sanity rules could easily nerf a third of the party. I think rolling with no healer is tempting fate enough.
The anticipation... It is killing me! So many wonderful applicants, good luck everyone!
Ah! So it does. I had just assumed "ancient language you came across while researching various things", looks like I missed that tidbit in the Player's Guide.
@Belltrap: For your second feat, Splash Weapon Mastery is insanely useful right from the get-go. As for justification of knowing Aklo as a language, I don't think it's a stretch at all for any Int-based class with research as an inherent theme of the class flavor to have simply "picked it up".
Hmmmm. Never considered "theme music" for a character before. Beatrix would need something angry and spooky. I think The Nocturnal House by Pretty Girls Make Graves would work well.
With regards to the "casting your character" query, I could very much see Beatrix played by a young Tamsin Greig.
This is Orannis' character, Beatrix the Lost. Qlippoth-Spawn (with the Pass For Human race trait, more on that little tidbit below) Spiritualist with the Ectoplasmatist archetype. Crunch is on the alias. Fluff is here in the post for ease of access, but I'll be copy-pasting it into the alias later. What She Can Remember:
Fear, mostly. What she can put together, with snippets of recall: As a little girl, a beggar in some "rustic" Ustalavian backwater. Everyone hated her, though none of them could say why. They chased her out eventually, they said she knew things she shouldn't. A few years older now, a city. Caliphas? Karcau? Can't be sure. Still a beggar. People treat her even worse here, but also notice her less. A good memory: she does well one night, has nearly a gold piece worth of coins. A bad memory: another beggar -can't remember what they looked like but they were much, much bigger than her- tries to take the coins. Beatrix is stronger, somehow. Pushes them away, knocks them over. They draw a knife, she screams. Then the other beggar is dead before their knife could even be swung, a hole in them as if they'd been run through with a sword. Someone saw. Things got worse. She was going to have to run again. But there was an... Out... This time... But she... Can't... Remember... She knows during this time she learned to do things, amazing things. To seize a great and terrible power within her, but how and why?
Appearance:
Beatrix is a scrawny young woman whose dark, straight hair, pale complexion, and sharp features mark her as a native Ustalavic. She wears an old and worn, though still functional, shirt of thick hide over tattered peasant's clothes and never seems to be able to completely rid herself of incidental grime, giving her the general countenance of a beggar. Certain things about Beatrix don't quite add up to those who observe her. She's perplexingly strong for a street waif, and close scrutiny reveals she is prone to muscle spasms that Beatrix herself does not seem to notice.
Personality:
Beatrix mostly tries to go unnoticed, a survival tactic she's possessed her whole life. She is prone to telling people what they want to hear regardless of whether or not it's the truth, another survival tactic, though she is honest about never having known any family. She has a great deal of sympathy for those existing below the bottom rung of society, with experiences similar to what she can recall of her life. She tends to be cold, otherwise, assuming that if others were not experiencing misfortune they would be burning her at the stake instead of asking her for help. Curiously, she feels some level of instinctual trust in the other PCs, and she finds this mostly frustrating. Beatrix is frighteningly perceptive. She has sharp situational awareness and reads people very well. This, combined with her occasional ability to seemingly glean knowledge she should not have from her environment, tends to make people uncomfortable.
Lastly, my concept for the whole "Qlippoth-Spawn with Pass For Human" thing: For DM Czernobog: I really wanted the Lovecraftian flavor the Qlippoth have, but was also keenly aware that the in-world RP hurdles for Qlippoth-spawn are several orders of magnitude higher than other Tieflings. My solution was this: all of Beatrix's deeply horrendous earmarks of her heritage are internal. By this I mean the obvious: she has numerous redundant and vestigial organs (which, incidentally, explain her preternatural durability) and bizarre, complex networks of hyper-tense tendons (and thus, her abnormal strength for her frame). But it also goes beyond that, to the degree that it's almost as if her Qlippoth heritage is another, discrete creature inside of her. These vestigial organs and muscles wriggle and writhe beneath her skin. They largely pass off as muscle spasms, but someone in physical contact with her when it happened would distinctly feel something moving beneath her skin. Were she to suffer a severe enough wound to significantly "open up" part of her, one might actually see creepy little tentacles or whatever wriggling out of the wound. This "second presence" also possesses some degree of it's own sentience. It is the source of her psychic abilities (spells, command over ectoplasm, psychometry) as well as "whispering to her": it is not quite "voices in the head", but the second presence within her is the source of her unnaturally keen observations about her surroundings and other people, as well as the source knowledge she simply could not have with her lack of any kind of education (i.e. background sill ranks in History). Please let me know how you feel about this. If you think I'm reaching a bit, or anything about it doesn't work or is a potential gameplay concern for you, I'd be happy to re-tool the concept.
|