Application for cape_kore

[andifeelfine]

Player Name: Carly

Age: 23

E-mail: yaysunshine@gmail.com

Other characters played at Cape Kore: Jones (wandandsickle)

 

[Character information]

Name: Linnaea Ito

Canon: World of Darkness (Geist: the Sin-Eaters) Original Character

Canon Point: 2019

Age: 24

 

Appearance: Linnaea is 5'7" and has a lean, athletic figure; even before she had to fend for herself in the wake of the apocalypse, she was in sports year-round and a forward on the varsity soccer team. She likes to wear bright colors (they make her happy!) although her clothing choices have a pragmatic bent to them since, you know, post-apocalyptic wanderer, so largely stuff she can move around in. She wears her hair slightly longer than shoulder-length, and up in a loose bun or a ponytail.

 

When she uses her supernatural powers, for a brief moment her true nature is apparent to mort—her skin is pale and mottled, and her hair appears to have fallen out; she looks like she's deathly ill (which is to say she appears as she did when she died).
 

Inventory: Shotgun, case of ammunition (5), 4 x canned soup (vegetable), 6 x ramen noodle packs (chicken flavor), notebook x 6 (3 full, one half-full), ballpoint pen x 5, extra set of clothes, sleeping bag, hunting knife, rope (8 yards), first-aid kit, hand sanitizer

 

Abilities: Lin basically hit up every hunting store she could find before she hit the road for real and also raided the library for books on how to survive in the wilderness, and has been doing just that for the last seven years or so. She's good at finding edible plants, knows how to use a gun, can now skin and cook animals like a pro, and can do a decent job with first aid. She's also in very good physical shape--she used to do sports year-round, and now spends most of her time hiking and living off the land, which tends to keep you pretty trim. She's also very good at most academic subjects, particularly math, science, and history.

 

As far as supernatural powers go: Lin can influence machinery and mechanical devices in a supernatural way with the Industrial Key, although it's easier for her to work with slightly older tech, rather than the cutting-edge stuff. Using her abilities, she can figure out how to work devices she's never seen before, can unlock nearly any mundane lock, is a bane to man-made weapons, and can even store devices and objects in her body.

 

Under the purview of the Passion Key, she gains supernatural ability related to emotions, which she finds particularly useful as a girl on a mission to help people finish their unfinished business. She can make herself supernaturally insightful—or intimidating, for that matter, when she needs to be—and resists supernatural mental compulsion.

 

She is also able to draw upon the powers of her Geist to ferret out falsehoods told to her, as well as hide her own lies and even her own presence from others. Oh, and using the Phantasmal Key, she can become a horrifying eldritch monstrosity at will. That's a thing. It is highly distressing for everyone but her. (She thinks it's kind of neat.)

 

She has a handful of minor always-on abilities, as well: she can sense, see and speak to ghosts; she can tell how old anyone is down to the day and hour and sense people who are not long for this mortal coil; she can pick up some vague sensations pertaining to how a dead person died; she is not subject to disease or poison (...hence why she has not yet died of radiation poisoning again), can undo physical damage to her person using ghostly plasm, and is far harder to incapacitate than most mortals; lastly, she can also be brought back from the dead (again) a limited number of times by her Geist, though doing so will leave her less and less in control of her own body each time as her Geist begins to take over. She can also theoretically open gateways to the underworld, but that's obviously jamjar-breaking, so I'll happily forego that.

 

History: Linnaea Ito probably would have grown up to have a perfectly normal, if above-average life, under normal circumstances. She was clever and hard-working, and played varsity sports year-round; she got good grades and was on track to have her pick of a number of very good colleges where she would get a degree in something very useful. Under normal circumstances.

 

That is, if she and all of Merced, CA hadn't died of radiation poisoning from the fallout of LA getting bombed out of existence when she was seventeen. She was the last one left in Merced, and died alone, lying in a pool of her own vomit.

 

And that would have been it, except for the thing that happened next.

 

Suddenly a great brightness filled her vision, and she found herself standing amidst a field of bright, pure white—and in front of her, the pure black silhouette of a girl about half her size stood and traced words in black on the air: DO YOU WANT TO LIVE?

 

A few minutes later, Linnaea woke up, alive, and healthy. And no longer alone. The Silhouette now walks everywhere with her through abandoned towns and across barren lands that were once fertile ground, her form taking the place of Linnaea's shadow—she's not a very demanding mistress, but occasionally she'll give Lin something to do for her. A lot of it's getting the dead to their proper rest, whether it's those who've stayed past their time or the dying who need a little push; she also seems to have an interest in helping children in whatever way they can. Linnaea, herself, prefers to help people she meets settle their business in life so they can die without regrets.

 

She had never really had a plan for what she wanted to do with her life; she never felt like she had a calling. This, she finds so much more freeing, in a strange sort of way. It's not the fact that she has a purpose now that's the real reason for her excessive cheerfulness; it's that when death has been so close, it's a lot easier to see the wonder in just existing! Right, right?

 

Personality: Linnaea is aggressively cheerful, to the point that it's slightly terrifying. She takes nearly everything in stride, because measured against the yardstick of her experiences, most things just aren't that bad, and so things are pretty okay then! She is always trying to look on the bright side of life and trying to get others to do the same, which is nice sometimes and annoying other times when something is legitimately upsetting.

 

She is pretty much genuinely just happy to be alive and to experience anything and everything that she can; she is also extra-cheerful because a part of her somewhere in the back of her head is pretty sure that if she stops being cheerful she will just descend into a pit of sad from which she won't be able to escape. Her life is actually pretty shitty and terribly lonely, if she stops and thinks about it, so she tries not to. There are a lot of things that she can do now that she couldn't do before, yes, but if her death hadn't been inevitable, she probably would have been perfectly happy with normalcy and friends and family.

 

She also hasn't left behind her old self entirely; she's a hard worker, and has it in her head that she should be able to get done anything she puts her mind to, and still very dutiful—if only that she has a different set of parameters, now. She's polite (usually), thoughtful, and kind to those in need, and willing to speak her mind when she thinks something ought to be said (sometimes a little too much).

 

While the circumstances of her life have meant she's had to do a lot of things she wouldn't have thought right before to survive, she thinks that people ought to be nice and helpful to one another. There's the pragmatic concern that people with peaceful lives don't tend to leave ghosts behind, but it's also because she's pretty sure being a dick to other people never made anyone very happy in the end, and even if nothing really matters, she thinks that if everyone tried to do right by other people, everything would be a lot better. Hey, maybe the apocalypse wouldn't have happened. Think about that, man.

 

[Samples]

First Person:

one!
two!

 

Third Person:
After Linnaea woke up, the first thing she did was was wander around the empty streets, taking everything in. It was so strange; everything looked perfectly fine, aside from the absence of people and noise. It was almost as if they'd all stood up and walked off, if she didn't know differently. There was her school, its doors closed for the last time two weeks ago; there was Ana's house where she'd spent a lot of time during her middle school years before they grew apart. The Starbucks where she and her friends had often stopped after school, feeling sophisticated with their fancy coffee drinks.

 

Maybe some of them had survived. She knew Rachel's family had gotten out of town almost immediately after the bombings started--though she had no idea where they'd gone. Maybe their time-share in the mountains? That would probably be a good place to go; there'd be animals to hunt for food and it would be an unlikely target considering that the population there was sparse, though she couldn't really see them roughing it. (Stranger things had happened, though.) She probably ought to think about hitting the road, herself, sometime soon... but there was still one thing.

 

Most of them had not lived lives than anyone would call very important, in the grand scheme of things. She wouldn't even call her own short life very significant. But now that they were gone, she realized how much they'd really meant to her--or, if she hadn't known them, how much they had probably meant to someone else. But the universe was a big place, and all of them were so small. Who would remember them?

 

She would, she decided.

 

For the next couple of weeks, she wrote and wrote, every memory she had of this town and its people; she wandered the streets and buildings, taking in all that it was and had been. She greeted those that re-emerged as ghosts and asked them for their stories while she helped resolve their last regrets. They'd been good people, bad people, and in the grey area in-between, but there was something uniquely beautiful about each and every one of their lives, their circumstances, their hopes and dreams. There was nothing insignificant about any one life, not to Linnaea.

 

And so the town slowly emptied again as she bade them each farewell, although this time the difference was not as obvious. They'd gone on to whatever was next, for them, and now only she remained--but she'd carry their memories with her as long as she could.

 

The sky was clear and the day was sunny, and the road ahead. It was a little sad, in the way that leaving behind something you've outgrown often is, but at the same time, she felt happy that she'd had it to leave behind at all.

 

And as she walked, and hefted her pack on her shoulders, a smile grew on her face.

 

Anything Else?
Nope~!