Alec Troven (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
element_wizard) wrote2015-04-07 05:25 pm
element_wizard) wrote2015-04-07 05:25 pm
Ten Forward App
Your name or online alias: Kippur
Your email: kippur@mad.scientist.com
Another preferred means of contact: AIM: kippurbirdy
Character's Full Name: Alexander “Alec” Raven Troven
Character's Journal Name:element_wizard
What would you like your character's tag to be?: Alec Troven
Answer the following questions in 800+ words put together...
Is this character an OC or AU set in a canon world? If so, which canon?: OC
Which canon point?: Current Canon Point.
If not, describe their world. This includes things like whether the world has magic or technology, what sort of culture your character comes from, the relative era in which it is set, etc.:
The world that Alec came from is called Tynara. It’s a planet with low technology, the wizards having the highest level of technology and that is around Edwardian Era. Their technological progress has been severely hampered by the Fey who have no desire to have iron spread out through their world. There are four known mortal races on Tynara: humans, witches, wizards and angels. Humans are ordinary individuals with no magical abilities whatsoever. Witches and wizards were created by the fey to use as cannon fodder in a war with outside invaders. Witches can manipulate life energy and wizards can manipulate elemental energy: fire, water, earth and air. A percentage can control all four of the elements. Alec is currently the only one alive who can do so, but in the past there were more of them. Angels live across the sea on a different continent, they have feathered wings but that’s all they have in common with angels. The only two known angels on Lancoon continent where Alec lives are in the city of Lancoon.
Wizards don’t tend to take being called human very well, even if there’s no visible cues to tell one from the other. They mostly live in a city known as Pentarch up in the Dragon Ridge Mountains.
The fauna on Tynara tends to be a bit on the spikey side to protect them from griffins and dragons. Horses have horns and boney plates. Cattle are as large as bisons with horns the body equivalent length of a Texas Longhorn. They are also not domesticated and generally not eaten by the people at large. There are tiny dragon like creatures, the size of hummingbirds, that fulfill a similar role and hawk-like phoenixes
The fey and dragons, both intelligent beings, don’t tend to bother with mortals very often beyond preventing them from advancing too far technologically wise. The reasons for this is that about five thousand odd years before Alec was born a group of humans from another world opened up a portal to Tynara looking to see if the world was worth colonizing. They were technologically advanced, far more than earth in the 21st century. They brought with them a great deal of iron and other weapons that prevented the dragons and fey from properly fighting them. In a truce between the two, the fey and dragons collected native humans and performed, what were essentially genetic experiments on them to create both the wizards and witches. Thus they had individuals with firepower that were capable of dealing with the invaders as well as getting up close to them with less harm than what would happen if a fey or dragon were to get near them. Also, they were quick to grow and expendable. The invaders were beaten but at the cost of random portals opening and closing on Tynara.
Those portals persist to this day and it is through one of them that Alec’s interesting turn of his life started.
Character's background (their past and present, including applicable events in other games you may have played them in):
Alec’s pre-Game/alternate reality history.
Sometime after learning that Kratz was Lorac, Alec stumbled through a rift between realities and ended up between reality itself - not in a different reality - but outside of reality entirely. There he encountered an ... entity that decided they liked him very much, chewed him up and spat him out into something completely different than what he’d had been before. It gave him access to the memories - to the minds - of every single alternate version of himself out there. It told him that he existed somewhere in ever reality. Oh, yes, and he wouldn’t be able to die until every single universe ever stopped existing. Ever. Of course Alec didn’t come out with his sanity intact.
He’s managed to put on a good face of being sane, but the cracks are there and sometimes they show.
From that moment on he found himself being tossed between reality to reality, sometimes by his own volition, sometimes not. After some time traveling and actual time traveling where he’d bounced around in other realities he found himself to be perhaps a bit too powerful to fit in properly and with rather odd histories and connections with the people that live there, he discovered the Nexus (Sages of Chaos/Dear Multiverse). It was here that he first started making relationships with people - he met Rhys here as well as others who he would discover repeated themselves in other realities he visited. He met people, fallen in love with some people. Learned to not be so obnoxious with the use of his reality warping powers. It was also during this time that he discovered his memory of events would remain, even if the events themselves ceased to exist.
He’d gotten into a relationship with an individual and one day discovered that his history with that person had ceased to exist and that something had tried to do the same to him. He could remember it existing and at the same time not existing. Both histories happened and he remembered. Over the long years this has happened more than once, his own history being - as he calls it - rewritten, but him being unable to forget it. This didn’t help his sanity any. He started trying to come up with his own true self and leaving everything else to be not real. It allowed him to keep a bit of himself centered and actually functional.
From there he continued to branch out into other nexuses, like Miliways and at one point even built himself his own multi-dimensional Inn in a nexus point called Passages Inn.
Returning home - or at least to the reality he considered home - started to be an interesting experience. He discovered that even if he had been gone for hundreds of years his own personal time, only a few seconds to an hour at most would have passed for everyone else. He didn’t age and everything had gone back to “normal”. Though his family and Jono noticed. He wants to explain it to them, but he can’t really.
At one recent point Laruna ended up getting sent to the City (in Polychromatic) much to her joy and his despair. Mostly because he couldn’t stay in the City and protect her. He could only visit occasionally during certain curses and he abused the hell out of any little incident that could allow him to visit. When the City sent everyone home, she browbeat him into creating a doorway between their world and a friend with benefits she’d made while in the city, so that she could continue visiting him. Unfortunately something happened and the doorway to his world - the world itself - completely collapsed and vanished. He had to comfort Laruna and was at a complete loss as to how to explain it because he didn’t know why it happened either.
Since then he’s spent a bit of time in Boomtown, which was okay and he met a lot of nice people but eventually it left a sour taste in his mouth and he had to leave.
One other interesting thing that he discovered was that his older self - one from years in the future from when his world has long died and been destroyed as the sun ate it - and he could communicate and occasionally his older self would borrow his body, much like he could borrow alternate versions of himself’s bodies. It makes life rather awkward. Especially since his older self has given up most concepts of pretending to actually care about shit.
Character's personality:
On the surface Alec comes off as a bit of a cosmic slacker. He’s got all this power and what does he use it for? Just to meander about the multiverse and watch things going on. He doesn’t try and help people. He doesn’t try to make the world a better or worse place. He just sits there, on the metaphorical couch, eating the metaphorical popcorn and watching the metaphorical TV. Oh, sure sometimes he’ll intervene, it’s not like he doesn’t have a policy of non-interference and his intervening is a big decision for him. He just does it when he feels like it. Over the years he’s developed a bit of apathy towards life and people because what does it matter? They’re all going to die eventually. Because of this, in his really sour moods he can come off as exceptionally cold and perhaps even a bit cruel since he will flat out say that’s why he’s not doing anything to help people.
Another reason that he doesn’t use his abilities to their full extent (like healing someone, bringing someone back from the dead and shapeshifting to name a few) is because of a personal line in the sand that he’s drawn for himself. As long as he stays behind that line and doesn’t cross it he feels like he’s still “human” and not a god. He doesn’t want the responsibility that comes with such abilities. He doesn’t want to be asked “why didn’t you heal/bring back from the dead person x but not person y?” “Because I didn’t feel like it” never felt like a good answer to him.
In some ways Alec has gone beyond the realms of insanity and found himself somewhere else, a place of calm certainty that well, yes, all this sort of fucked up stuff is going to happen to him. No there’s nothing he can do about it. So why not? Why not go running after that dragon? It’s not like it’s going to kill him... permanently. Why not ruin some alternate version of his life? It’s not like it matters. It’s given him a bit of a confidence and a bit of mad certainty in his life. Yes. He is going to push that big red button to see what happens. It’s kind of what happens when you get told by reality itself that yes you are a great big pawn and no, there’s nothing you can do about it and yes, they are fucking with you. Have fun!
But that’s only in some ways.
In other ways Alec is very tired and very lonely. He knows that he can’t go home again. Or at least when he does go home he won’t be able to stay there for long. Not only that but he knows that he’s going to outlive everyone he knows and grew up with, even his insane godfather. Everyone he loves, everyone he hates, possibly his entire world is going to go to dust and he’ll still be alive. And there is not a damn thing he can do about it. Not only that be he’ll be finding himself in alternate realities where things had gone different. People he knew were different. Mirror universes, all the cliches are there. And there’s no place to call home. He has no rest. No time off. No end to his journey of being a pinball in the pinball machine of reality, bouncing and colliding and spinning out of control.
When he finds himself in realities where people don’t know him, he makes friends but it’s always in the back of his mind that this too will turn to dust and this too will be gone before he knows it. Perhaps he will never see them again. Perhaps he will. Perhaps he will see people again but they’ll be different. Or they never met him.
Alec also has that air about him of someone who is constantly being trolled. He knows the universe is fucking with him as a straight fact and has his little mantra of soon this will be over and I’ll be somewhere else. Of course this also causes him to try and troll the universe by not playing with the rules and roles he’s been given.
While that takes care of the general insanity, on his normal end of things Alec is fiercely loyal to people he like or considers friends. It’s a bit of “I’m not going to be here for long so I might as well do as much for them as I can” and just a general thing he’s always been. Alec never had many friends and so he wants to make sure he never does anything to alienate the ones he has.
To him nothing he does really matters unless he’s back in his home reality. That being said he doesn’t go around killing people willy nilly because they’re not “real”. It’s just that this particular belief allows him to go around and do things that he feels that he normally couldn’t do but has to do because of the reality he’s in. It’s one of the only way he can act mildly sane. It’s a disassociation. A splitting of his personality. Who he is when he’s not home is a different person than who he is out in the multiverse. It has to be or he couldn’t live - couldn’t function - otherwise. Especially with some of the things he’s done or has had done to him.
Being two people at once has left him broken which he’s very good at hiding under his cosmic slacker, doesn’t care about anything really, persona.
There are aspects of him that stay the same from his home version and multiverse version such as ideas on killing people, a general sort of inborn snobbery at the fact that he’s a wizard and everyone else is below him, and he’s a noble too so that doesn’t quite help either. Still the snobbery isn’t intentional, it was just the way he was raised. He does want to be a nice person. He does try hard at it but also realizes that he does weird people out. His natural curiosity at wanting to figure out how everything works existed since he was a small child as was the desire to poke things with sticks to see what happens. He’s now lucky enough that he can poke things with sticks and not worry too much about the consequences. He has also always come off as being about as threatening as a damp budgie and with the brains of one too, easily scattered brained and distractible. He can be threatening, but he has to really try and he usually has to pull “rank” with his powers, letting people feel/sense exactly what he is and what he could do to them. But he doesn’t like doing that. Instead he just lets people believe in the damp budgie persona, the natural tendencies to be incapable of doing something sensible when a bad idea presents itself and bouncing around until something interesting comes about.
Character's skills/abilities/powers: Alec essentially has two sets of powers: those he were born with and those he acquired later in life. The first set are those of an Element Wizard, that being he can control and manipulate all four elements - fire, water, air, and earth. He’s also a minor empath, not enough that it impacts his life beyond giving him the ability to make shields that keep telepaths or other nosey mental people out. From his fey heritage he has an absolute sense of direction in that he always knows where he is and can’t get lost. (Unless outside forces mess with it the landscape.) and a mild iron allergy. Handling iron for long periods of time, not passing a pot but say having iron handcuffs on, will create a rash and then other unpleasant skin allergy fun things.
The second set of powers are the ones that he acquired when he fell into chaos. They are the ability to manipulate probability and reality giving him the ability to warp reality much like the Q can. However since the nature of his powers are chaos based they don’t work exactly as he always expects them to do or will completely backfire, so he tries not to rely completely on them. Several “stable” things exist. He has a field around him that protects him from projectiles or things being shot at him, like from a ray gun. However it doesn’t work against melee attacks. It’s also what allows Alec to travel to different realities. When it’s an involuntary jump he’s possessing his alternate self. If it’s not, then he’s projecting himself through the cracks into that world since he exists in between between where dimensions bump into each other. It’s in the latter cases that he has access to his chaos abilities as opposed to whatever his alternate might have, if any. It lets him teleport, which is basically pulling back into the between and re-entering elsewhere, and keeps him in constant contact with every single other alternate of his in existence. Going into his head isn’t a fun place. It also lets him muck about the time stream.
Also. He cannot stay dead. He can die, but he will come back to life a few days later.
Over his travels he’s become a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, picking things up as he lives the lives of his alternates and constant traveling. You don’t get to be his age without picking stuff up. He’s not good at any of this, but he’s got a fair knowledge of stuff; nothing like physics or chemistry, but things picking locks and cooking. More particularly, he’s good with numbers and math, but seriously dyslexic. He’s not a master swordsman but he can hold his own. Despite his age, he’s never really kept up on his swordsmanship. Finally, he’s a decent musician, having been trained as a bard for five years, but never made it out of apprentice.
In regards to his “chaos” abilities. They will be willingly capped. The Q have the top dog spot in the powers ranking in the Star Trek universe and while, in theory and in another reality Alec’s powers would be on level with them, he understands the necessity of not upsetting the power balance. Exactly what the capping will be is up to the mods.
Any special equipment your character is bringing along? This includes weaponry, magic items, etc.: Alec has a long sword called “the Sword of Dragons” or “the Dragon Sword” made out of a special metal that contains no iron and that he can call and banish at will and is capable of cutting and closing holes in reality. This second aspect will be nulled for game.
Why do you want to play this character in Ten Forward, and what do you plan to do with them? Alec is a Star Trek fan. I am a Star Trek fan. I love playing Alec and being able to play with him in a place he loves is something I haven’t been able to do before. As for what I plan to do with him? Just let him interact with people and see what happens.
What is your character's greatest flaw? Alec greatest flaw is that he’s rather selfish to the point of lack of empathy at times. He’s rather willing to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants as long as it amuses him, damn be everyone else. This is an outgrowth of spending so much time in other realities where in a way the consequences don’t matter because he won’t have to live with them when he leaves as well as the realization that everyone else is going to die at some point so why does it matter? They’re not really real. If they were real, they wouldn’t die and go away. So, damn be the consequences! Let’s go push that button! The only place he considers real is the world he grew up in, everything else is just like a dream and dreams don’t count as real.
Describe your character's family (whether family by blood or by choice). How does your character feel about them? What did your character learn from them?
Alec’s blood family consists of his parents, his twin sister Laruna, his older brother Wolf and his grandparents and uncles that travel. His mother, having died when he was thirteen, holds that odd space in his life of nostalgic memories. He’s not sure if he’s remembering her as she was or as wishful thinking. On the other hand, his father up and left within a few weeks of his mother’s passing and hasn’t been seen since. Alec has no idea if he’s alive or not and one of the things he wonders in the wee hours of the morning is if he did something to drive his father away. The worst things that happen to Alec is seeing his parents in other realities with his mother still alive and his father still with them. It causes a horrible ache and drives home what he lost more than he cares to remember. Especially when they seem nicer than the ones he remembers.
With Laruna and Wolf, he has a fairly normal sibling relationship. They tend to look after him because he’s the baby (by ten minutes or so) and because of the situation his powers put him in. He feels guilty that he can’t really talk to them about what goes on in his life, but knows there’s nothing they can do about it, so why bother. His grandparents and uncles were a brief presence in his life for five years. They were caring and kind and he enjoyed his time with him. His uncle Cricket was very patient with teaching him music, even if they both sort of knew he wouldn’t ever be that good of a musician.
Jono, his boyfriend… lover… friend… is a sort of mixed bag complicated thing for Alec. He knows that he “cheats” on Jono all the time when he’s out of the reality but tells himself it doesn’t matter. The two of them care about each other, even if they’re not sure exactly what they are to each other. They started out as friends and when Alec returned to the city after five years the realized that there could be something more. Alec feels like Jono is a bit of a twit, but a twit that cares about him and who he cares about. Being a twit isn’t a bad thing, since he is what might be called a jerk with a heart of gold. Or at least silver.
On the non-blood side but from his world and definitely impactful in his life is Lorac Seriph also known as Kratz. Even before Alec was born Lorac - who lived a thousand years ago - had a huge impact on his life. He was the cause that Alec never could learn to use his elemental abilities openly and then later properly. And then it got creepier. Lorac became Alec’s godfather under the name Kratz who helped raise Alec until he was sent back in time to meet Lorac when he was younger. (Time loops, yay). There Alec fell in love with Lorac and when he got back to his own time period Kratz revealed himself to be Lorac and Alec realized that the reason why Lorac went crazy and killed people was because he wanted to be with Alec. This has left Alec more than creeped out and conflicted. His feelings for Kratz and Lorac haven’t exactly changed but he never saw Kratz as a romantic interest and Lorac … well… yeah… He avoids that part of his time period as much as possible and really doesn’t like talking about it, seeing it as one of life’s great big fuck yous that’s been thrown his way.
Then, finally, there’s Rhys. Alec’s relationship with Rhys is exceptionally complicated. They’re friends in that they’re both muliversal travelers who run into each other all the time. Rhys says he tolerates Alec’s company, but is also willing to buy him a beer and lend an ear after Alec’s had a particularly nasty time in an another reality. They both know things that others don’t and are both very old. They’re platonic life friends, knowing that they can count on each other, even if Alec exasperates Rhys to no end at times. What makes things even worse for Alec, when it comes to Rhys, is that he is possibly Jono’s father. Jono’s father left before he was born and Alec has seen versions of Rhys with a son that looks and acts remarkably like Jono. If Rhys knows, he doesn’t say one way or another and Alec has no desire to open that particular can of worms so he keeps his thoughts to himself.
What hobbies does your character have? Traveling to alternate realities, painting miniatures, collecting things, talking to people, watching stuff, messing around in time and space, getting interested in “fan boy” stuff, stealing or recreating important items from various realities for his collections (ie. the One Ring, a piece of the M’Kraan crystal, a shardblade etc)
Your character wakes up in the middle of the night in panic from a nightmare. What was the nightmare? Apparently the one thing that would really give Alec a nightmare is being alone, trapped in a room by himself, without his powers and unable to hear all his other alternates so he’s just alone with his thoughts. Alone with nothing to distract him from himself. Just all his crazy things going on in his head spinning around until he falls into a complete and utter paranoid mess. The other thing that gives him nightmares was a reality he found himself in, where his alternate was a young teenager and was horribly abused into Stockholm Syndrome and driven insane to the point that he would do anything including gleefully killing for his master. It is perhaps the one reality that he’s not talked about to anyone except to Rhys, and that only happened after waking up from a nightmare when he was piss drunk. He still has some physical scars on him from that world which he won’t talk about and one of the few things he will actually get defensive and not… damp budgie scatterbrained about.
Writing Sample #1:
Test drive Sample
Writing Sample #2 (optional):
Alec slinked along the familiar hallways of the Enterprise, his hands in his pockets as he watched people - the crew trying to do their work and the visitors in various stages of disbelief to resignation to anger and all the fun things in between. He knew the starship well enough to know where not to go and to keep his head down so he wouldn’t attract too much attention from the Continuum or certain individuals to be more exact. His past with them in some realities wasn’t the best and he didn’t want to repeat mistakes here. Ten-Forward was always the easiest of places as people were always around there and it was harder to keep track of people coming and going. But for right now he didn’t feel like dealing with the crowds and wanted to find a quiet place to sit.
He remembered one version he visited where the captain and Q ended up on top of the saucer section to talk in private about Trelane … or 0 … he couldn’t remember which. Maybe it was both? It was pretty private after all. A good place to talk where no one could overhear them.
Hah.
Buuuut that would be very noticeable and currently he didn’t want to get stuck here. Sure it’d be temporary(everything was always temporary for him) but he currently had other things he wanted to deal with and sort out. Some of it involved actually being home for once and spending time with Jono and family, other parts involved bothering Rhys because it was always entertaining to bother Rhys. He even wondered if he could get Rhys to come and visit, but decided against it. Being trapped in a spaceship was not high on Rhys list of Things He Enjoyed Doing, in fact with the man’s wanderlust it was probably right there on the bottom which also included dealing with idiotic gods, stepping in shit and at times, Alec. Rhys would murder Alec. A lot.
Which would be awkward.
Turning a corner he felt a familiar shift in reality behind him and froze, one foot in the air. Putting it down carefully he stifled a sigh and instead put on a smile. He’d been caught… finally. Well, nothing to do but hope he got kicked out. Though knowing the multiverse’s general ‘fuck you’ attitude towards him, he seriously doubted he’d get that lucky.
Your email: kippur@mad.scientist.com
Another preferred means of contact: AIM: kippurbirdy
Character's Full Name: Alexander “Alec” Raven Troven
Character's Journal Name:
element_wizard What would you like your character's tag to be?: Alec Troven
Answer the following questions in 800+ words put together...
Is this character an OC or AU set in a canon world? If so, which canon?: OC
Which canon point?: Current Canon Point.
If not, describe their world. This includes things like whether the world has magic or technology, what sort of culture your character comes from, the relative era in which it is set, etc.:
The world that Alec came from is called Tynara. It’s a planet with low technology, the wizards having the highest level of technology and that is around Edwardian Era. Their technological progress has been severely hampered by the Fey who have no desire to have iron spread out through their world. There are four known mortal races on Tynara: humans, witches, wizards and angels. Humans are ordinary individuals with no magical abilities whatsoever. Witches and wizards were created by the fey to use as cannon fodder in a war with outside invaders. Witches can manipulate life energy and wizards can manipulate elemental energy: fire, water, earth and air. A percentage can control all four of the elements. Alec is currently the only one alive who can do so, but in the past there were more of them. Angels live across the sea on a different continent, they have feathered wings but that’s all they have in common with angels. The only two known angels on Lancoon continent where Alec lives are in the city of Lancoon.
Wizards don’t tend to take being called human very well, even if there’s no visible cues to tell one from the other. They mostly live in a city known as Pentarch up in the Dragon Ridge Mountains.
The fauna on Tynara tends to be a bit on the spikey side to protect them from griffins and dragons. Horses have horns and boney plates. Cattle are as large as bisons with horns the body equivalent length of a Texas Longhorn. They are also not domesticated and generally not eaten by the people at large. There are tiny dragon like creatures, the size of hummingbirds, that fulfill a similar role and hawk-like phoenixes
The fey and dragons, both intelligent beings, don’t tend to bother with mortals very often beyond preventing them from advancing too far technologically wise. The reasons for this is that about five thousand odd years before Alec was born a group of humans from another world opened up a portal to Tynara looking to see if the world was worth colonizing. They were technologically advanced, far more than earth in the 21st century. They brought with them a great deal of iron and other weapons that prevented the dragons and fey from properly fighting them. In a truce between the two, the fey and dragons collected native humans and performed, what were essentially genetic experiments on them to create both the wizards and witches. Thus they had individuals with firepower that were capable of dealing with the invaders as well as getting up close to them with less harm than what would happen if a fey or dragon were to get near them. Also, they were quick to grow and expendable. The invaders were beaten but at the cost of random portals opening and closing on Tynara.
Those portals persist to this day and it is through one of them that Alec’s interesting turn of his life started.
Character's background (their past and present, including applicable events in other games you may have played them in):
Alec’s pre-Game/alternate reality history.
Sometime after learning that Kratz was Lorac, Alec stumbled through a rift between realities and ended up between reality itself - not in a different reality - but outside of reality entirely. There he encountered an ... entity that decided they liked him very much, chewed him up and spat him out into something completely different than what he’d had been before. It gave him access to the memories - to the minds - of every single alternate version of himself out there. It told him that he existed somewhere in ever reality. Oh, yes, and he wouldn’t be able to die until every single universe ever stopped existing. Ever. Of course Alec didn’t come out with his sanity intact.
He’s managed to put on a good face of being sane, but the cracks are there and sometimes they show.
From that moment on he found himself being tossed between reality to reality, sometimes by his own volition, sometimes not. After some time traveling and actual time traveling where he’d bounced around in other realities he found himself to be perhaps a bit too powerful to fit in properly and with rather odd histories and connections with the people that live there, he discovered the Nexus (Sages of Chaos/Dear Multiverse). It was here that he first started making relationships with people - he met Rhys here as well as others who he would discover repeated themselves in other realities he visited. He met people, fallen in love with some people. Learned to not be so obnoxious with the use of his reality warping powers. It was also during this time that he discovered his memory of events would remain, even if the events themselves ceased to exist.
He’d gotten into a relationship with an individual and one day discovered that his history with that person had ceased to exist and that something had tried to do the same to him. He could remember it existing and at the same time not existing. Both histories happened and he remembered. Over the long years this has happened more than once, his own history being - as he calls it - rewritten, but him being unable to forget it. This didn’t help his sanity any. He started trying to come up with his own true self and leaving everything else to be not real. It allowed him to keep a bit of himself centered and actually functional.
From there he continued to branch out into other nexuses, like Miliways and at one point even built himself his own multi-dimensional Inn in a nexus point called Passages Inn.
Returning home - or at least to the reality he considered home - started to be an interesting experience. He discovered that even if he had been gone for hundreds of years his own personal time, only a few seconds to an hour at most would have passed for everyone else. He didn’t age and everything had gone back to “normal”. Though his family and Jono noticed. He wants to explain it to them, but he can’t really.
At one recent point Laruna ended up getting sent to the City (in Polychromatic) much to her joy and his despair. Mostly because he couldn’t stay in the City and protect her. He could only visit occasionally during certain curses and he abused the hell out of any little incident that could allow him to visit. When the City sent everyone home, she browbeat him into creating a doorway between their world and a friend with benefits she’d made while in the city, so that she could continue visiting him. Unfortunately something happened and the doorway to his world - the world itself - completely collapsed and vanished. He had to comfort Laruna and was at a complete loss as to how to explain it because he didn’t know why it happened either.
Since then he’s spent a bit of time in Boomtown, which was okay and he met a lot of nice people but eventually it left a sour taste in his mouth and he had to leave.
One other interesting thing that he discovered was that his older self - one from years in the future from when his world has long died and been destroyed as the sun ate it - and he could communicate and occasionally his older self would borrow his body, much like he could borrow alternate versions of himself’s bodies. It makes life rather awkward. Especially since his older self has given up most concepts of pretending to actually care about shit.
Character's personality:
On the surface Alec comes off as a bit of a cosmic slacker. He’s got all this power and what does he use it for? Just to meander about the multiverse and watch things going on. He doesn’t try and help people. He doesn’t try to make the world a better or worse place. He just sits there, on the metaphorical couch, eating the metaphorical popcorn and watching the metaphorical TV. Oh, sure sometimes he’ll intervene, it’s not like he doesn’t have a policy of non-interference and his intervening is a big decision for him. He just does it when he feels like it. Over the years he’s developed a bit of apathy towards life and people because what does it matter? They’re all going to die eventually. Because of this, in his really sour moods he can come off as exceptionally cold and perhaps even a bit cruel since he will flat out say that’s why he’s not doing anything to help people.
Another reason that he doesn’t use his abilities to their full extent (like healing someone, bringing someone back from the dead and shapeshifting to name a few) is because of a personal line in the sand that he’s drawn for himself. As long as he stays behind that line and doesn’t cross it he feels like he’s still “human” and not a god. He doesn’t want the responsibility that comes with such abilities. He doesn’t want to be asked “why didn’t you heal/bring back from the dead person x but not person y?” “Because I didn’t feel like it” never felt like a good answer to him.
In some ways Alec has gone beyond the realms of insanity and found himself somewhere else, a place of calm certainty that well, yes, all this sort of fucked up stuff is going to happen to him. No there’s nothing he can do about it. So why not? Why not go running after that dragon? It’s not like it’s going to kill him... permanently. Why not ruin some alternate version of his life? It’s not like it matters. It’s given him a bit of a confidence and a bit of mad certainty in his life. Yes. He is going to push that big red button to see what happens. It’s kind of what happens when you get told by reality itself that yes you are a great big pawn and no, there’s nothing you can do about it and yes, they are fucking with you. Have fun!
But that’s only in some ways.
In other ways Alec is very tired and very lonely. He knows that he can’t go home again. Or at least when he does go home he won’t be able to stay there for long. Not only that but he knows that he’s going to outlive everyone he knows and grew up with, even his insane godfather. Everyone he loves, everyone he hates, possibly his entire world is going to go to dust and he’ll still be alive. And there is not a damn thing he can do about it. Not only that be he’ll be finding himself in alternate realities where things had gone different. People he knew were different. Mirror universes, all the cliches are there. And there’s no place to call home. He has no rest. No time off. No end to his journey of being a pinball in the pinball machine of reality, bouncing and colliding and spinning out of control.
When he finds himself in realities where people don’t know him, he makes friends but it’s always in the back of his mind that this too will turn to dust and this too will be gone before he knows it. Perhaps he will never see them again. Perhaps he will. Perhaps he will see people again but they’ll be different. Or they never met him.
Alec also has that air about him of someone who is constantly being trolled. He knows the universe is fucking with him as a straight fact and has his little mantra of soon this will be over and I’ll be somewhere else. Of course this also causes him to try and troll the universe by not playing with the rules and roles he’s been given.
While that takes care of the general insanity, on his normal end of things Alec is fiercely loyal to people he like or considers friends. It’s a bit of “I’m not going to be here for long so I might as well do as much for them as I can” and just a general thing he’s always been. Alec never had many friends and so he wants to make sure he never does anything to alienate the ones he has.
To him nothing he does really matters unless he’s back in his home reality. That being said he doesn’t go around killing people willy nilly because they’re not “real”. It’s just that this particular belief allows him to go around and do things that he feels that he normally couldn’t do but has to do because of the reality he’s in. It’s one of the only way he can act mildly sane. It’s a disassociation. A splitting of his personality. Who he is when he’s not home is a different person than who he is out in the multiverse. It has to be or he couldn’t live - couldn’t function - otherwise. Especially with some of the things he’s done or has had done to him.
Being two people at once has left him broken which he’s very good at hiding under his cosmic slacker, doesn’t care about anything really, persona.
There are aspects of him that stay the same from his home version and multiverse version such as ideas on killing people, a general sort of inborn snobbery at the fact that he’s a wizard and everyone else is below him, and he’s a noble too so that doesn’t quite help either. Still the snobbery isn’t intentional, it was just the way he was raised. He does want to be a nice person. He does try hard at it but also realizes that he does weird people out. His natural curiosity at wanting to figure out how everything works existed since he was a small child as was the desire to poke things with sticks to see what happens. He’s now lucky enough that he can poke things with sticks and not worry too much about the consequences. He has also always come off as being about as threatening as a damp budgie and with the brains of one too, easily scattered brained and distractible. He can be threatening, but he has to really try and he usually has to pull “rank” with his powers, letting people feel/sense exactly what he is and what he could do to them. But he doesn’t like doing that. Instead he just lets people believe in the damp budgie persona, the natural tendencies to be incapable of doing something sensible when a bad idea presents itself and bouncing around until something interesting comes about.
Character's skills/abilities/powers: Alec essentially has two sets of powers: those he were born with and those he acquired later in life. The first set are those of an Element Wizard, that being he can control and manipulate all four elements - fire, water, air, and earth. He’s also a minor empath, not enough that it impacts his life beyond giving him the ability to make shields that keep telepaths or other nosey mental people out. From his fey heritage he has an absolute sense of direction in that he always knows where he is and can’t get lost. (Unless outside forces mess with it the landscape.) and a mild iron allergy. Handling iron for long periods of time, not passing a pot but say having iron handcuffs on, will create a rash and then other unpleasant skin allergy fun things.
The second set of powers are the ones that he acquired when he fell into chaos. They are the ability to manipulate probability and reality giving him the ability to warp reality much like the Q can. However since the nature of his powers are chaos based they don’t work exactly as he always expects them to do or will completely backfire, so he tries not to rely completely on them. Several “stable” things exist. He has a field around him that protects him from projectiles or things being shot at him, like from a ray gun. However it doesn’t work against melee attacks. It’s also what allows Alec to travel to different realities. When it’s an involuntary jump he’s possessing his alternate self. If it’s not, then he’s projecting himself through the cracks into that world since he exists in between between where dimensions bump into each other. It’s in the latter cases that he has access to his chaos abilities as opposed to whatever his alternate might have, if any. It lets him teleport, which is basically pulling back into the between and re-entering elsewhere, and keeps him in constant contact with every single other alternate of his in existence. Going into his head isn’t a fun place. It also lets him muck about the time stream.
Also. He cannot stay dead. He can die, but he will come back to life a few days later.
Over his travels he’s become a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, picking things up as he lives the lives of his alternates and constant traveling. You don’t get to be his age without picking stuff up. He’s not good at any of this, but he’s got a fair knowledge of stuff; nothing like physics or chemistry, but things picking locks and cooking. More particularly, he’s good with numbers and math, but seriously dyslexic. He’s not a master swordsman but he can hold his own. Despite his age, he’s never really kept up on his swordsmanship. Finally, he’s a decent musician, having been trained as a bard for five years, but never made it out of apprentice.
In regards to his “chaos” abilities. They will be willingly capped. The Q have the top dog spot in the powers ranking in the Star Trek universe and while, in theory and in another reality Alec’s powers would be on level with them, he understands the necessity of not upsetting the power balance. Exactly what the capping will be is up to the mods.
Any special equipment your character is bringing along? This includes weaponry, magic items, etc.: Alec has a long sword called “the Sword of Dragons” or “the Dragon Sword” made out of a special metal that contains no iron and that he can call and banish at will and is capable of cutting and closing holes in reality. This second aspect will be nulled for game.
Why do you want to play this character in Ten Forward, and what do you plan to do with them? Alec is a Star Trek fan. I am a Star Trek fan. I love playing Alec and being able to play with him in a place he loves is something I haven’t been able to do before. As for what I plan to do with him? Just let him interact with people and see what happens.
What is your character's greatest flaw? Alec greatest flaw is that he’s rather selfish to the point of lack of empathy at times. He’s rather willing to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants as long as it amuses him, damn be everyone else. This is an outgrowth of spending so much time in other realities where in a way the consequences don’t matter because he won’t have to live with them when he leaves as well as the realization that everyone else is going to die at some point so why does it matter? They’re not really real. If they were real, they wouldn’t die and go away. So, damn be the consequences! Let’s go push that button! The only place he considers real is the world he grew up in, everything else is just like a dream and dreams don’t count as real.
Describe your character's family (whether family by blood or by choice). How does your character feel about them? What did your character learn from them?
Alec’s blood family consists of his parents, his twin sister Laruna, his older brother Wolf and his grandparents and uncles that travel. His mother, having died when he was thirteen, holds that odd space in his life of nostalgic memories. He’s not sure if he’s remembering her as she was or as wishful thinking. On the other hand, his father up and left within a few weeks of his mother’s passing and hasn’t been seen since. Alec has no idea if he’s alive or not and one of the things he wonders in the wee hours of the morning is if he did something to drive his father away. The worst things that happen to Alec is seeing his parents in other realities with his mother still alive and his father still with them. It causes a horrible ache and drives home what he lost more than he cares to remember. Especially when they seem nicer than the ones he remembers.
With Laruna and Wolf, he has a fairly normal sibling relationship. They tend to look after him because he’s the baby (by ten minutes or so) and because of the situation his powers put him in. He feels guilty that he can’t really talk to them about what goes on in his life, but knows there’s nothing they can do about it, so why bother. His grandparents and uncles were a brief presence in his life for five years. They were caring and kind and he enjoyed his time with him. His uncle Cricket was very patient with teaching him music, even if they both sort of knew he wouldn’t ever be that good of a musician.
Jono, his boyfriend… lover… friend… is a sort of mixed bag complicated thing for Alec. He knows that he “cheats” on Jono all the time when he’s out of the reality but tells himself it doesn’t matter. The two of them care about each other, even if they’re not sure exactly what they are to each other. They started out as friends and when Alec returned to the city after five years the realized that there could be something more. Alec feels like Jono is a bit of a twit, but a twit that cares about him and who he cares about. Being a twit isn’t a bad thing, since he is what might be called a jerk with a heart of gold. Or at least silver.
On the non-blood side but from his world and definitely impactful in his life is Lorac Seriph also known as Kratz. Even before Alec was born Lorac - who lived a thousand years ago - had a huge impact on his life. He was the cause that Alec never could learn to use his elemental abilities openly and then later properly. And then it got creepier. Lorac became Alec’s godfather under the name Kratz who helped raise Alec until he was sent back in time to meet Lorac when he was younger. (Time loops, yay). There Alec fell in love with Lorac and when he got back to his own time period Kratz revealed himself to be Lorac and Alec realized that the reason why Lorac went crazy and killed people was because he wanted to be with Alec. This has left Alec more than creeped out and conflicted. His feelings for Kratz and Lorac haven’t exactly changed but he never saw Kratz as a romantic interest and Lorac … well… yeah… He avoids that part of his time period as much as possible and really doesn’t like talking about it, seeing it as one of life’s great big fuck yous that’s been thrown his way.
Then, finally, there’s Rhys. Alec’s relationship with Rhys is exceptionally complicated. They’re friends in that they’re both muliversal travelers who run into each other all the time. Rhys says he tolerates Alec’s company, but is also willing to buy him a beer and lend an ear after Alec’s had a particularly nasty time in an another reality. They both know things that others don’t and are both very old. They’re platonic life friends, knowing that they can count on each other, even if Alec exasperates Rhys to no end at times. What makes things even worse for Alec, when it comes to Rhys, is that he is possibly Jono’s father. Jono’s father left before he was born and Alec has seen versions of Rhys with a son that looks and acts remarkably like Jono. If Rhys knows, he doesn’t say one way or another and Alec has no desire to open that particular can of worms so he keeps his thoughts to himself.
What hobbies does your character have? Traveling to alternate realities, painting miniatures, collecting things, talking to people, watching stuff, messing around in time and space, getting interested in “fan boy” stuff, stealing or recreating important items from various realities for his collections (ie. the One Ring, a piece of the M’Kraan crystal, a shardblade etc)
Your character wakes up in the middle of the night in panic from a nightmare. What was the nightmare? Apparently the one thing that would really give Alec a nightmare is being alone, trapped in a room by himself, without his powers and unable to hear all his other alternates so he’s just alone with his thoughts. Alone with nothing to distract him from himself. Just all his crazy things going on in his head spinning around until he falls into a complete and utter paranoid mess. The other thing that gives him nightmares was a reality he found himself in, where his alternate was a young teenager and was horribly abused into Stockholm Syndrome and driven insane to the point that he would do anything including gleefully killing for his master. It is perhaps the one reality that he’s not talked about to anyone except to Rhys, and that only happened after waking up from a nightmare when he was piss drunk. He still has some physical scars on him from that world which he won’t talk about and one of the few things he will actually get defensive and not… damp budgie scatterbrained about.
Writing Sample #1:
Test drive Sample
Writing Sample #2 (optional):
Alec slinked along the familiar hallways of the Enterprise, his hands in his pockets as he watched people - the crew trying to do their work and the visitors in various stages of disbelief to resignation to anger and all the fun things in between. He knew the starship well enough to know where not to go and to keep his head down so he wouldn’t attract too much attention from the Continuum or certain individuals to be more exact. His past with them in some realities wasn’t the best and he didn’t want to repeat mistakes here. Ten-Forward was always the easiest of places as people were always around there and it was harder to keep track of people coming and going. But for right now he didn’t feel like dealing with the crowds and wanted to find a quiet place to sit.
He remembered one version he visited where the captain and Q ended up on top of the saucer section to talk in private about Trelane … or 0 … he couldn’t remember which. Maybe it was both? It was pretty private after all. A good place to talk where no one could overhear them.
Hah.
Buuuut that would be very noticeable and currently he didn’t want to get stuck here. Sure it’d be temporary(everything was always temporary for him) but he currently had other things he wanted to deal with and sort out. Some of it involved actually being home for once and spending time with Jono and family, other parts involved bothering Rhys because it was always entertaining to bother Rhys. He even wondered if he could get Rhys to come and visit, but decided against it. Being trapped in a spaceship was not high on Rhys list of Things He Enjoyed Doing, in fact with the man’s wanderlust it was probably right there on the bottom which also included dealing with idiotic gods, stepping in shit and at times, Alec. Rhys would murder Alec. A lot.
Which would be awkward.
Turning a corner he felt a familiar shift in reality behind him and froze, one foot in the air. Putting it down carefully he stifled a sigh and instead put on a smile. He’d been caught… finally. Well, nothing to do but hope he got kicked out. Though knowing the multiverse’s general ‘fuck you’ attitude towards him, he seriously doubted he’d get that lucky.