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TLV - Character Applications
CHARACTER APPLICATIONS
Application periods are open all month, every month.
The Final Fantasy VII Compilation cast is at cap, and FFVII Compilation apps are currently closed.
Please read all rules and guidelines before submitting an application. Be sure to check the Taken Characters list and the Retired Characters list before posting an application here.
NOTES:
WARDEN APPLICATION FORM - CANON CHARACTERS
WARDEN APPLICATION FORM - ORIGINAL CHARACTERS (sample app #1, sample app #2)
INMATE APPLICATION FORM - CANON CHARACTERS
INMATE APPLICATION FORM - ORIGINAL CHARACTERS (sample app #1, sample app #2)
Last Updated: 07/09/2023
Application periods are open all month, every month.
The Final Fantasy VII Compilation cast is at cap, and FFVII Compilation apps are currently closed.
Please read all rules and guidelines before submitting an application. Be sure to check the Taken Characters list and the Retired Characters list before posting an application here.
NOTES:
- After applying for a character, we ask that players allow 30 days before bringing their next character into the game. In some cases (warden or cast caps, upcoming major game events) players may approach the mod team and clear submitting an application a few days early, though it will not be approved before the 30 day mark.
- If you are applying into an existing cast, please be aware that we may speak to players of characters close to (any version of) the character, and will speak to the players of canonmates of the character for which you are applying. We reserve the right to reject an application if it would render a current character or characters unplayable in the opinion of their player(s). If your app is rejected for this reason, we ask that you respect the decision.
- Both samples may be taken from threads on the Test Drive Meme, as long as they are recent and match your application with respect to canonpoint and warden/inmate status. The TDM goes up once per month and is always marked on the Event Calendar. If you would prefer to write yours out and would like some inspiration, check out the Flood Event tag on the OOC community; you're welcome to write a sample based on your character's reaction after one of these events! Here are a few popular choices.
- Canons (or canonpoints, in the case of ongoing series) must have been out for at least 30 days before they can be applied for.
- If you're reapping a character that you previously dropped and you plan to have them retain their memories of their previous stint onboard, please include at least a few sentences discussing how their previous stay affected them, and noting any relevant changes to their personality, worldview, and motivations. The more significant the changes, the more detail we'd like.
WARDEN APPLICATION FORM - CANON CHARACTERS
WARDEN APPLICATION FORM - ORIGINAL CHARACTERS (sample app #1, sample app #2)
INMATE APPLICATION FORM - CANON CHARACTERS
INMATE APPLICATION FORM - ORIGINAL CHARACTERS (sample app #1, sample app #2)
Last Updated: 07/09/2023
Sara Pezzini | Witchblade (Top Cow Comics) 1/2
User Name/Nick: Naomi
User LJ:
AIM/IM: metonumia
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Merlin, Iroh, Shego, Poison Ivy
Character Name: (Detective) Sara Pezzini
Series: Witchblade
Age: Early 30s
From When?: Shortly after the events of issue #69, as described in the History section.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Although her methods are sometimes a teensy bit unorthodox and there's a voice in her head that tells her to kill things, everything Sara does is ultimately driven by her desire to be a good cop and protect her city. She has intimate lived experience of managing and controlling darker urges, and has spent enough time dealing with criminality and evil of all kinds to understand what would drive an Inmate's decisions and how that behaviour might be changed.
Item: Her police badge.
Abilities/Powers: This is going to take a while.
Alone, Sara has all the training and competences you would expect from an intelligent and experienced detective. However, she is also the current host of the Witchblade, an ancient symbiotic weapon created to act as a balance between the warring universal forces of light and dark (the Angelus and the Darkness respectively). In its dormant state, it appears to be a jewelled bracelet or watch worn on her right wrist. Even in this state, it still speaks to her, and acts as a sort of early warning system for supernatural beings or times of mortal peril (not reliably, and not often providing enough information to be useful).
It has granted her a wide array of abilities: she can form various weapons, generate full body armor in order to protect herself (she can also form wings allowing flight), shoot energy blasts from the hand or sword, fire projectile darts, and whip-like grapples to attack or climb. The Witchblade is also an excellent lockpick, and can heal wounds, even mortal ones. It can show the host scenes of great trauma, and allow the host to relive experiences from past hosts as dreams. The Witchblade is also known to be able to damage incorporeal beings and is capable of slaying other-dimensional entities and deities; it can also communicate with spirits of the dead and share gleaned knowledge with its host. On one occasion it connected directly with the mind of a severely disabled boy, allowing Sara to communicate with him although he couldn't speak.
It also had a tendency of ripping all Sara's clothes off when used to generate armour. Canon reasoning? The Witchblade is a pervert. Eventually she trained it to stop doing that.
However, she will spend her time on the Barge trying not to use any of these abilities, particularly the offensive/destructive ones. Part of her reason for coming to the Barge in the first place is to stop having to use the Witchblade as frequently as she does and allowing it so much control over her life. The Witchblade is also notoriously unreliable, sometimes acting without her command as a response to perceived threat, sometimes refusing to respond even when her life is in danger.
Sara Pezzini | Witchblade (Top Cow Comics) 2/2
In many ways Sara adheres to the female detective archetype seen in cop shows everywhere: worldweary, cynical and a little sarcastic, not to mention married to the job, but staunchly dedicated and possessed of strong moral fibre. This includes a deeply abiding respect for human life: although she's killed people in her own defence and when she's had no other choice, she would do anything to prevent the death of an innocent bystander. She is a great believer in the criminal justice system and would much prefer to see people tried and imprisoned for their actions than die in the process of being caught. She has a strong caring instinct, seeing herself as at least partly responsible for her younger sister Julia (who is something of a wild child) and Lisa, the daughter of a murdered friend. She can be quick-tempered under stress but never really blindingly so; out of necessity she's learnt how to better control her anger and fear in recent years. Often she can go for days with a background buzz of frustration or misery and it can make her difficult to be around but it doesn't seriously cloud her judgement.
Not unnaturally, Sara's more decent impulses place her at odds with the Witchblade. Although she's had the opportunity to give it up on a few occasions, or has had it forcibly taken, she's always taken it back - because she knows that someone who would want to treat it as a weapon to be used rather than a burden to be suppressed could cause untold pain and misery. The Witchblade is sadistic, in love with death and destruction, and preys on Sara's weaknesses in its attempts to be given free reign - occasionally going so far as to completely withhold its powers or outright attack Sara's body until she submits to its whim, allowing it to kill their enemies or let them be killed when she had hoped to take them alive. Because the weapon is empathic, this violence forces her to feel the pleasure and arousal the Witchblade does during acts of violence, making it yet more difficult to keep it under her command. Overall her relationship with the Witchblade waxes and wanes from the cooperative to the antagonistic, largely depending on her own level of conviction in her desire to possess and control the weapon.
This is not to say that Sara herself has no darker side. While she is as incorruptible as cops get and tries to keep her moral code unshakeable, clearly differentiating between right and wrong, she has always operated in a greyer area than some. Since coming into possession of the Witchblade she has been all but forced to take this to the point of vigilantism, toeing the line between good and evil; the threats she has encountered have become ever more brutal and dangerous and she has had to become more brutal herself in order to combat them. But even since Sara was a child, she had severe anger issues, spending time in and out of therapy for her nihilistic thoughts and violent tendencies - which practically imploded at the point of her father's death. These never really got 'better' but were sublimated into her chosen career, where she took massive risks - not least an apparent phobia of the very idea of calling for backup. She used to be a bit of a thrillseeker, and still is, at least much more than she'd like to admit - although these days she avoids calling for backup more because the backup would inevitably get killed.
More generally, Sara has a habit of distancing people. Even around Julie and Lisa she's economical with the truth, and although she fosters friendly acquaintances without trouble, she'd be able to count who she considers friends on one hand. Possessing the Witchblade has made her more secretive (although that fact that she possesses it feels like a bit of an open secret in certain circles), more paranoid and more likely to go it alone in perilous situations. This isn't entirely unjustified. Her partner was killed at the same time she acquired the Witchblade, and his replacement has been pulled into near-death situations more than once. People who get close to her for any reason tend to wind up dead. It's partly for this reason that she was drawn to the assassin Ian Nottingham - who was seemingly impervious to these dangers, who already knew all her secrets, and who she could get close to both physically and emotionally without it being a death sentence. Eventually, though, her moral compass kicked back in; he was never going to be more than a completely amoral contract killer and she couldn't overlook that forever. She's not really afraid of love or intimacy but she's definitely afraid of the consequences for the people she's intimate with.
As mentioned, much of her reason for coming to the Barge would be to give herself a sort of break from her life being lived according to the whims of the Witchblade (and everyone who wants it) without actually surrendering it to someone else. It's an attempt to rediscover herself as a human being with good intentions, rather than merely a host or - worse still - a channel through which the Witchblade acts. She believes strongly in rehabilitation, and knows that people can change and redeem themselves, but when so many of her recent suspects have been supernatural or outright demonic in nature it's been difficult for her to connect with those concepts. On the Barge she would try her level best to be 'normal' - to make friends, form meaningful relationships with people and try to keep things calm and organised wherever possible.
History:
[The following is dragged together from a really, really inconsistent canon dictated by writers who don't seem to talk to each other very much. Witchblade meandered through being a plotless T&A comic for dozens of issues before acquiring something similar to a narrative, and keeps getting used as a jumping-off point for other Top Cow properties. It shows. Constantly.]
It seems that Sara had been intended to bear the Witchblade from birth. As a young girl, growing up in a suburban area with her parents and little sister Julie, Sara had trouble sleeping; medical investigation found that her entire night's sleep would be spent in the REM phase, meaning that on sleeping she would enter a vivid 'dream life' that felt almost as real (and was as easily remembered) as her waking hours. As an adult, the Witchblade would use this to let her relive other hosts' lives, help her make connections she had failed to see and even psychically connect her dreams with those of others who possessed part of the weapon or its power. Her father Vincent, a cop, and his partner Joe Siry both seemed to know that she was destined for greater things but the young Sara caught only the barest hints of this.
Then, at the age of 11, Vincent was killed - shot, Sara would later learn, by Siry at the behest of a powerful cult who had owned him for some time. Sara's already temperamental behaviour began to spin out of control; at the age of 13, her therapist discovered an innate supernatural power in Sara, going on to kidnap her. She was held in an unknown location for three months. At the time of writing, Sara doesn't remember what happened to her; it seems likely that she underwent some sort of ritual or transformative process to ready her to take on the Witchblade later in life.
Sara was highly intelligent, breezing through high school, but the only life she could imagine herself having was one in the police force. Although not yet mentioned in canon, she presumably attended college for at least 2 years (due to applicant requirements in New York), then immediately enrolled in the Police Academy. After graduation, she started work at the 18th Precinct under then Lieutenant Joe Siry, becoming a detective two years later - an unusually quick progression. She was the only female detective there.
Some years later, her investigation of a known drug dealer - Gallo, the man responsible for the death of a good friend - led her to the Rialto theatre. Unbeknownst to her, billionaire Kenneth Irons had arranged a 'tournament' of sorts to find the person able to bear the Witchblade - which he had long had in his possession, but had been unable to wield, losing his hand in the attempt. Sara and her partner Michael Yee sneaked into the theatre; Yee was caught and in the process of trying to save him, Sara was mortally wounded and Yee was killed. The Witchblade responded to Sara's desperation to live and claimed her as its new host; it healed her wounds and, through her, killed the tournament's numerous attendees - all but Irons and his bodyguard, Ian Nottingham, who had escaped.
Both Irons and, later, Nottingham attempted to take the Witchblade from her but ultimately failed. In the years that followed, Sara was under the scrutiny of a number of people and organisations - most regularly Irons, Nottingham and Level 42, part of a cult seeking to hunt out and utilise men and women with special abilities known as Noble Ones. Alongside this, her work for the NYPD continued. In the years following her acquisition of the Witchblade, Sara garnered a reputation for picking up the 'psychic hotline' jobs - homicides that were seemingly ritualistic, physically impossible or otherwise bizarre - to the extent that she was being called into other precincts to work on such cases.
Most recently, Sara had been on leave - travelling through Pennsylvania on the way to Gettysburg - when she came across a teenage hitchhiker named Claire. She had run away from home and was making her way to Indianapolis to find her brother; Sara called the local police department, only to learn that Claire's brother was dead - and over a hundred years old. When she returned Claire to her family, the Witchblade showed her an image of a possible future: the family being violently torn apart by its power.
Moments later, Claire pulled a gun. It transpired that the family had been frozen in time, granted immortality in exchange for sacrifices made to an entity living in their home, and Sara was intended as their next victim. In the ensuing struggle, Sara was shot by mistake, the Witchblade making no attempt to heal her or retaliate; despite Claire's attempts to get her away from the house, they were overpowered and dragged back onto the family's property. Sara tried to run and all but collapsed against a seemingly dead tree. Possessed by the entity in question, it began to swallow her up. The Witchblade demanded that she stand and fight, that she accept the weapon and the destiny attached to it instead of denying it and running away, before it would intercede on her behalf. Finally she surrendered. The weapon came to life and the family, Claire included, were slaughtered, leaving Sara broken and horrified. Shortly after this she would receive her invitation to the Barge.
Sample Journal Entry:
[Hello, Barge. The video affords a view of Sara's apartment - compact, untidy, cheap furniture - and a small, fluffy white dog curled up against her leg. She looks hesitant, and if it seems like she's trying to project a sense of normality it's because she is.]
....okay, well, let me start by saying I don't really get the video blogging. Don't really understand what happened to just talking to people, but this seems to be the done thing around here and....if it ain't broke, right? Right. I never even got on Facebook.
Anyway. The name's Sara Pezzini. I'm a cop - NYPD, 18th Precinct, for those of you who know what that means. Gonna be here as a Warden for the foreseeable future. Don't suppose anybody can offer an estimate on when I'm likely to be assigned an Inmate? The Admiral wasn't clear on bureaucratic process, or - well, I'm preaching to the choir here, you don't need me to tell you he's a little on the enigmatic side. I've only been here six hours and I already know around five times more than he told me about this place.
[Also, an ancient Dear Mun entry for a less on-best-behaviour post from Sara.]
Sample RP:
If there was a single advantage to being on a ship apparently entirely crewed by Pop Culture's Greatest Hits 1990-2011, it was the fact that she could tell the Infirmary staff she was fine two hours after being bodily hurled down a set of stairs and they actually believed her. She'd gotten what seemed to be a form lecture about not throwing herself into any more disasters any time soon, but no-one was trying to make her stay. And she was fine. The Witchblade had been as quiet as a mouse when she'd resisted letting it tear the guy limb from limb, but (after she'd spent a few painful minutes being thrown around before backup arrived) it seemingly wasn't petty enough to let her spend weeks contending with multiple fractures.
It'd made its point, after all.
And that was something else nice (?) about the Barge, she supposed. Backup that was actually halfway effective against the sort of problems she usually served as backup for herself. Not that she was without that kind of support back home, but fair-weather friends and short-term visitors with their own agendas were a little different from having literal superheroes as neighbors. People around explicitly for the same reason as she was, even if their means and motivations were different - and she couldn't exactly get on anyone's case for unorthodox methodology.
Maybe the aforementioned superhero neighbors meant she could afford to start reaching out a little bit. Drop the lone wolf act - though it had been going on so long she wasn't sure it was an act any more. It wasn't the case here that she couldn't afford to bring people into her social circle because it brought them into the blast radius - but could she afford to get used to that? The Witchblade certainly seemed so indifferent to her friends' suffering that sometimes she wondered if it was jealous of anyone else spending time with her.
She was still limping a little when she reached the gym. Running off a mostly-healed broken ankle was a terrible idea but she could still go a few rounds with a punchbag before she got the week's sleep she'd need before being 'over' this latest episode.
PENDING
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