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Applications Two
APPLICATIONS ARE CLOSED!
The next application opening date is Friday 16th January, 7pm EST.
The next application processing date is Friday 23rd January, 7pm EST.
IMPORTANT: PLEASE POST YOUR APPLICATIONS HERE ON THE NEW APPLICATION PAGE
We're so glad you're thinking of joining us in Haven, where we are all safe.
In order to apply for a canon character, please fill out the information below and post it in a comment in this entry. For an OC, please apply using the OC information. Please do not link to applications, all applications must be posted here. Please do not delete your applications; if you do not want it to be seen, you can request for it to be screened after a decision is made.
You may apply for two characters every application round, to a total of six characters. Only two of these may be from the same canon, and they cannot be too familiar with one another. Please make sure to mark the header of your comment(s) with RESERVED or NOT RESERVED, as well as the character name and canon. App challenges are not allowed currently.
Try to remember spelling and grammar are important, and in app length quality and not quantity is what matters. All parts of the application must be your own work, plagiarism will not be tolerated, though you are welcome to reuse your own old applications.
If you are asked for revisions, please don't panic! It doesn't mean the mods don't like you, only that we probably need more information before making a decision. If you are asked for revisions, you will have one week to supply them.
Applications are open on a monthly cycle, where they will be opened on the second Friday of every month for a week, and then processed on the third Friday of the month, before being closed again.
We now have a test drive community athaventest which is continuously open. Posts there may be used in lieu of a sample in the application. You may also link posts, logs, or threads from other games and memes in lieu of samples, though we ask that they be no more than one year old. As of November 22nd 2014, samples cannot be "where am I" intro posts. The reason for this is that we often find it hard to gauge characterization from those, as most people when immediately in a new surrounding are confused or frightened.
While we encourage players who have dropped to re-join us, we do not encourage the continual rapid dropping and re-apping of the same character in a short time period. You are welcome to request specific housing, and all attempts will be made to accommodate that request, but it may not always be possible.
To see what we are looking for:
Canon Characters:
Sample Application (Faith Lehane)
Sample Application (Iroh)
Original Characters:
Sample Application (Mors)
Sample Application (Vera de Barr)
Sample Application (Malkus Iverwelling)
Previous Game History:
Sample Application (Abel Nightroad/Mayfield RPG)
Sample Application (Bolin/Discedo)
The old application post can be found here if you would like to look through past accepted applications.
Applications will be open on the following dates (from 7pm EST):
12th-19th December
16th-23rd January
Applications will be processed on the following dates (at 7pm EST):
19th December
23rd January
To apply for a canon character, please fill out this form:
To apply for an original character, please fill out this form:
håkon wium lie ❧ original character // not reserved
Contact Info: soft drowning @ aim
Other Characters Played:
Lily Baskerville // reddour // pandora hearts
Rui Ninomiya // idealists // gatchaman crowds
Rita Mordio // reputation // tales of vesperia
Preferred Apartment: None
håkon wium lie ❧ original character // not reserved
Background/History:
So it’s a story like any other. You have a planet with sentience, and you have a human race that needs to be controlled. What else would a planet do but churn out supernatural beings to observe and regulate the beings that it gave birth to?
Håkon is one of those beings. The universe he hails from has a mechanic called ‘world-cores’. These world cores are sentient beings, collectively called ‘birds’, who power worlds by generating a theoretically unlimited amount of life force. Each world has a single ‘bird’ powering it. This life force is what goes into the world, giving birth to plants, animals and human beings. When beings die, their life force goes back into the pool of life force to be recycled and churned out again. The recycled life energy loses past memories and personalities, and are reborn as new living creatures. A rabbit in one life will become a millipede in another. A person in one life can become a tree in another. Pretty simple, right?
However, the world has four self-regulating bodies of power that it uses as back-up energy sources that defy the mechanics of their world. Essentially, they are blobs of life force that do not get recycled back into the life-stream, as it were. Instead, they keep their memories and personalities intact. With every natural life-span they live out, they are pulled back into the core of the world, and then spat back out again into yet another life-span. These are the ones who are to watch over the world, to regulate the world, to do what the world cannot, and to keep all the inhabitants of the world safe from themselves.
When the world gave birth to these blobs of self-regulating powers, each blob took on a different aspect of the world. What were the aspects?
Pollution, Famine, War and Death.
This is the story of four horsemen.
When Håkon first became sentient, he didn’t call himself ‘Håkon’. He didn’t have any reason to, because names didn’t even exist back then. He first breached life by being an amoeba that has evolved the ability to photosynthesis. This is how long ago the beginning of his story stretches. As a being outside of the natural cycle of life, he’d die again, and again, and again, natural life-spans for the species that he was being reincarnated into, but unlike most organisms, he’d keep his memories and basic personality traits between reincarnations. A little while later, he was reborn as a trilobite, and a little whole later, he was a fish. Once upon a time, quite a while later, he became a dinosaur. A little bit more recently, he’s been a wolf, a platypus, and a cormorant. He even spent one miserable wintery stint as a snowshoe hare. The world tends to reincarnate him as an apex herbivore or carnivore for the time period. Tends to, being the keyword. In practice, he’s probably hit most of the major animal species, and a few of the weird ones.
It’s not until he’s become a creature like, say, a fox or a whooping crane that he realizes there are three other beings out there who share the same fate he does. He first meets Death as a turtle. He first meets Famine as an owl. He first meets Pollution as a baby harp seal, white against the bloody snows of the north. But because of the natural way of things, none of the four had much of a way of interaction with one another, until after the 1200’s, where all four of them were, for the very first time, reincarnated as the same species. Specifically, they became human. And from then on, all four of them have been human since. The very first of the four that Håkon met as a person was Death, and Death, to this date, has been his first and most cherished friend. He would eventually meet Pollution and Famine as well, but Death was the very first. And it was from meeting Death that Håkon realized how lonely he had always been.
The rest of the story is about a long, long wait. Håkon was born basically with an intrinsic love for the world, and a strong sense of responsibility that he didn’t try to fight in regards to protecting the world that he loved. The love wasn’t born from experience or any natural inclinations of affection. Instead, it’s something that’s been written into what he is. He was born to love and protect the world. He recognizes and understands that his love for the world isn’t his, but rather like a commandant from the world that he serves. Ultimately, he’s okay with this, because he solidly believes that there needs to be something that everyone loves more than they love life. It’s just that because he viscerally knows his role in the world, he is waiting for the chance to act on the role. He acts in the world’s benefit, and he watches over the world in case anything untoward happens. As the aspect of War, he is drawn to warzones. Time and again, no matter which corner of the world he is born in, he would ultimately travel to whichever great conflict of the decade was taking place, and to horrifically look on as humans slaughtered one another. But this isn’t what he’s here to prevent. No—as ‘war’, conflict is a part of him. A part of him feels excited because of the face of conflict. He remembers his first conflict vividly—it was a mere land dispute between two tribes. In the night, a group of men from one tribe ambushed another, killing everyone they could. Flames were lit, blood was spilt. Survivors fled into the night. He was a part of the tribe that fled. He had been snatched up by his human mother, who had dragged him out of their tarp made of animal skins and soft leathers, and had taken him into the wilderness. But he remembers returning to the site of the battle in the morning, remembers seeing the blood on the ground, the slaughtered animals, the bodies of people that he had once known. He remembers crying, there, an incredible ache of his heart that could not have been anything but the world grieving for the loss of life, but also remembers the horrified elation he feels at the brimming energy of the conflict and tension.
He remembers the holler behind him, the axe coming for his head.
He dies. He had only lived for twelve years with that tribe. When he is reborn again into another tribe, he travels back to the general area where that land dispute was fought. A flood had changed the landscape, making the area uninhabitable. The tribe that had destroyed his no longer existed. This was seventeen years later.
The story of his life basically goes on like this. Countless lives pass. He grows up as a man, as a woman, a starving child, the daughter of a despicable dictator. During the Roman era, he grows up as a lady in a virtuous roman household, the wife to a great war general. He bears children and cares for them the way society expects him to. When his husband dies, he attempts to reform the politics of his household, but his shut away by his children. He dies after he is poisoned by an assassin. The stories usually go like this. But you know, this is life. A part of his task is to watch life pass, and record it with every passing day, inscribed into his memory. He knows, starkly, that the world is watching life go on through his eyes—he is the arms and eyes of the earth, and someday, the earth will call him back and assimilate him, and he will no longer exist. He bears children, makes countless dear friends that eventually die and leave him behind, and navigates each and every society that he is born into the way only humans can. The only constant are his counterparts—Death, whom he seeks out the best he can every lifetime. Famine and Pollution, who become his friends, and with whom he shares cherished memories. However, there’s no guarantee that all four of them will be born together in the same era. The reincarnation cycle is rather random. It’s not until the current day, where technology has become wide-spread and finding someone you really wish to find has become but a click of a button and a quick three-second flip through facebook, that he’s been easily able to find all four of them.
But what’s the purpose of keeping around beings like these, reincarnated through each and every cycle, fated to watch the world pass by? To protect the interests of the world they serve, of course. To repel threats to the natural order of things.
The threat comes from the sky one winter morning. Håkon remembers it clearly. Back then, he had reincarnated into a small girl. When the first beings from the other world force their way through their world’s membrane, he felt the entire world shake. It was a feeling like none other—like being violated from the inside out, the anger, the rage, the humiliation, the pain, oh god, the pain. That day, he ended up hospitalized. While the rest of the world turned on, the Wishmakers came to their world. And the Wishmakers, they began harvesting people’s life energies via contracts, with the promise of granting people wishes. They took, they stole, and they killed. They killed so, so much.
Håkon took up arms. At this point, he was the only one of the four Aspects that still maintained the full range of his powers. Famine’s powers had been steadily waning, as he was slowly getting recycled back into the world. Pollution had grown unstable, both mentally and emotionally. Death was nowhere to be found. This was brought about by two millennia of complacency. The world hadn’t expected to be violated. Only Håkon was ready. Ultimately, he fought this battle alone. For decades afterwards, he gathered intelligence on the beings that came from the sky, watching, documenting, and coolly calculating. The end goal was to drive them all back, enough to leave this world alone and thereon after. But he knows that he can’t do this alone. He makes preparations for decades, while waiting for the other three Aspects to slowly be reborn into the world again. Generation after generation, he’d find Famine and Pollution again, and waited for Death to be reborn again so that someday, the four of them can gather together their strength, and put into action a plan that will protect their responsibility and duty.
It all sounds easier than it really is. There are numerous factors that make this difficult, and anyway, it’s not like the Wishmakers wanted to be here in the first place, and it’s just a very grand, convoluted plot that spans two stories and a side-series. But where I’m taking Håkon from is just after he’s begun to put his plan into action—his plan to drive these outsiders from the world that he is bound to protect.
In this lifetime, Håkon is the son of a billionaire. He was born in a small chateau in the Swiss alps on a snowy November evening, and was promptly declared Swedish citizenship. His mother is the CEO of a large tech company that is widespread across Europe, but which holds their base in Stockholm, Sweden. Despite this, Håkon,as a child, grew up in France. As the Aspect of war, and technically the furthest thing from a regular human, he has all of his past memories intact of the lives he had lived previously, but because the world has recognized that shoving into the head of a three-year-old child two millenia’s worth of memories won’t do anybody any good, Håkon recovers his memories slowly over the course of his childhood. The first thing he remembers is his love for the world, and the three other aspects in the world—Famine, Pollution and Death. The next thing he remembers his how his previous lives dealt with his returning memories: calmly, carefully, analytically, without revealing said memories to the people surrounding him. From there onwards, the going was easy. As he recovers his memories, he grows up like a spoiled rich kid. He is fiddling around with computers at the age of four, gets pushed through a private schooling by the age of ten, and by the age of thirteen, he has recovered all of his memories, his powers, and most importantly, his purpose. At the age of fifteen, he graduates highschool, and spends the next two years traveling the world under the guise of an ‘international learning experience’, which is, in actuality, a quick overview of the state of the conflict between Wishmakers. During this time, he becomes a chess grandmaster. He enters university at the age of seventeen. Three years later, he puts his plan into action.
håkon wium lie ❧ original character // not reserved
The majority of Hakon’s personality is based on societal views on war, which is just as well, because he is essentially the personification of war. The strangeness is that he is not so inhuman as he may seem.
Basically, at first glance, Håkon is what you see: the rich son of a billionaire. Eccentric and brilliant, he is in the habit of driving people up the wall, undermining authority at every possible given step, and basically playing up a cultured yet utterly insufferable personality. He is loud and boastful, he makes deadpan cracks, he is a total nut about Lego and history and other really nerdy things, and he spends money like water. As a person, he has an incredibly off-beat sense of humour that manifests itself as the most inappropriate of times, he loves to prank others, and he is horribly untactful at times because he prefers bluntly speaking his mind—as is proper, for he is the son of a billionaire, and he’s always been surrounded by people who listened to him. He has expensive hobbies, expensive ways of driving people nuts, and hates sitting still— crazy active enough to run across furniture, jump on tables and generally cause a scene wherever he goes. And people have to get used to this, because, well, he’s rich, and he’s eccentric, and he’s allowed to be eccentric because he’s rich. Funnily enough, just two lifetimes ago, he was a worker at an assembly plant, and a lifetime before that, he worked in the coal mines. What Håkon’s strength is his ability to adapt to the lifetimes that he is reincarnated into. There are several things that help him along the way: the fact that he doesn’t completely regain his memories until he’s around ten to thirteen, which allows him to absorb and be shaped by the environment his present self is growing up in, and his need to blend in with society. This illustrates his first true personality point: Håkon is viciously adaptable, and is an amazing actor. Underneath his insufferability, or not-so-underneath, as he doesn’t bother to hide it, just that different situations bring out different aspects of him—is an insatiable appetite for wealth, and an extremely calculating personality. He is the sort of person who will laugh you to your grave, all hands on deck, because blackmail is sweet.
In truth, the name ‘Håkon Wium Lie’ is a name that he inherited from his present lifetime. Over the course of the years, he’s been called many names—each family names their child something special, after all, and he’s been recorded in the annals of history in many, many different ways. Håkon makes it a policy to be referred to by whatever name his current lifetime has bestowed upon him. In this lifetime, he is ‘Håkon’. Basically, it’s the easiest and simplest way to go about doing things. This illustrates Håkon’s second personality point: that he doesn’t put the same stock into certain societal traditions that regular people would. Names hold no power over him. Similarly, society’s views on gender and norms also don’t hold any real power over him. He calls himself ‘male’, but to be honest, he doesn’t identify as any of the available genders on the spectrum of gender identity. He doesn’t particularly identify with the society that he has grown up in, and the cultures that the people around him ascribe to.
Essentially, then, his character is made up of a synthesis of all the environments that he grew up in, and a distillation of what it means to him.
Håkon, as a character, is a character embroiled in bitter conflict. Håkon is the aspect of War. This is as much as what he calls himself as it is what he is. At the core of his being, he is an individual who is contradictory in subtle ways. For example, he is a highly pragmatic individual who puts stock into logical decision-making, but of the four horsemen he is the most emotional, and he is extremely prone to adrenaline-junkie behaviour. Surprisingly, these traits co-exist within him naturally. He is logical and strategic, but believes that you must your emotions into account when making decisions, or else the decisions that you make will never be the morally acceptable one. As a character, he doesn’t believe that logic will necessarily lead you to the best decision. The way he puts it ‘Why are you making a decision? Because you’re trying to satisfy a need. Why do you want that need satisfied? Because there’s emotional attachment to the need. So in the end, the end result from decision-making will bring about an emotional reaction. So then, why, during the decision-making process, do you not use your emotions? You have the world’s strongest decision-making tool in your chest right this very minute. So why aren’t you using it?’ This gives you a good idea of his character—blunt, pragmatic and logical, but who is someone who places great stock in human emotion, and who believes morality is impossible without emotions. In Håkon’s mind, just because two concepts are opposites in the dictionary does not mean these two aspects cannot coexist.
As an individual who has lived a long, long time, through many lifetimes and many, many different circumstances, Håkon has a very particular view of the world. He no longer sees the world in black and white—no matter where he looks, he sees things in shades of gray. Because he’s experienced so much, he is confidently—almost assuredly so. He is confident in his decisions, he is confident in his approach to the world, and by god, he is stubborn. Because he’s seen so much and experienced so much, he doesn’t believe that he is likely to be in the wrong. In fact, statistics would show that, of all the decisions that he’s made over the course of those two millennia, he has had more practice at making a wider variety of decisions and opinions than most people alive. Therefore, he has the right and confidence to speak his mind, and he has the right to believe that he is right. This is his way of thinking, and in a way, it’s tantamount to arrogance. His in-canon nickname is ego-mountain. This isn’t an exaggeration. Whether it’s his role or not, Håkon is vastly confident in his own abilities, and while he’s always tried to take into account the opinions of other people, he sometimes loses sight of what is important.
Håkon is reactive, not active. As much as he’d rather act than react—if you think about what war is like, it’s almost a truly reactive behaviour towards bigger problems. If war is breaking out, it’s because all other avenues have already been explored and discarded, and the problem couldn’t have been resolved without needing violence and bloodshed. Håkon is highly reactive. While he’s a busybody who likes getting up in people’s business, almost loudly social and annoying attentive to others, he almost never acts unless someone else has already placed the first chesspiece on the board. As a chess grandmaster in canon, he understands the value of waiting until your opponent has shown their hand. This also extends into how he interacts with people on a daily basis. His reactive state of mind allows him to gauge other people’s reactions, and then strike back as needed. Pragmatic, thoughtful, he is dangerous. He can be mean. And he has an incredible sense of jealousy and preservation—both for himself, and for those around him, almost borderline extremely clingy, ruthless and annoying.
håkon wium lie ❧ original character // not reserved
His deepest wish is to eradicate war.
And he isn’t particularly quiet about this.
Because at the core of his being, he is an incredibly lonely individual. He is terrified of being lonely. Imagine his relief when he realized that there are three other beings who shared his fate, and who will support him throughout the millennia. He makes deeply cherished friends every lifetime, not because society needs him to, but because a lifetime without friendship, in his opinion, is not worth living. He knows that lives are short. While he will be reincarnated, time and again, the people that he has fallen in love with will likely be dead by the time he is reborn again. He only has one lifetime to meet them, to get to know them, to make a connection. Therefore, he will fight to the death in order to spend one more day with the people that he cherishes.
This is the true nature of war.
They do say love and war are two sides of the same coin...
håkon wium lie ❧ original character // not reserved
As the aspect of War, Håkon has a set of passive and active abilities. Passive abilities include the ability to generate his own life force. This means his human body is stronger and sturdier than the average person’s, and that he is capable of surviving injuries people normally would not be able to survive. His healing ability is also quite strong. While a broken leg will remain a broken leg, his leg will likely recover in four weeks, when the usual takes six. Little things like that. To be honest, in the grand scheme of things, his sturdiness is of no use. Because he will be reincarnated anyway, the need to stay alive decreases. He is also able to sense conflict within others. At the peak of his power, Håkon is capable of cataloging and sensing the conflict of every individual who lives in his world. He can look at anyone, and be able to tell you what sort of conflict they’ve experienced, whether or not they’ve fought, physically or verbally, with anyone, whether or not they have ever experienced war. He is instinctively drawn to people who are embroiled in conflict. At Haven, this passive ability will be toned down: he will only be able to sense that people are related to conflict, but will not know any details unless the other mun agrees to it. Other passive abilities include: rudimentary magic resistance, and the ability to grab any mundane object and allow it to be used as a weapon. A ruler gains a sharper edge. A lightbulb glows hot. Wood strengthens. Cords become sturdier. He is also able to pick up any weapon and have instinctive knowledge on how to use it to maximum efficiency. His ability will be toned down to only weapons that he has seen before, and only if other muns in the thread agrees.
As a person, Håkon eats and sleeps like a regular human being, but he technically doesn’t need anything but sleep. Food and water are things that he consumes to keep up appearances—technically, his organs only function at a minimal level. However, he needs at least three hours of sleep per day to be at full functioning capacity. He tends to forgo even that amount of sleep—causing him to crash in energy levels approximately once every week and a half.
Håkon’s only active ability is the ability to form ‘Contracts’ with other people. As the Aspect of war, he is unable to perform magic unless he holds a contract. Usually, he holds a contract with his world, negating the need to form contracts with other beings. Upon arriving in Haven, he will need to hold a contract with another character in order to tap into the full range of his magical powers. Ultimately, his power, like the Wishmakers of his world, is the ability to grant miracles by manipulating life-force. With a contract, he will be able to tap into both his own life-force and the life-force of his contractor. His element is fire, and his nature is war, which allows him to perform strong magic to do with war—summoning swords and storms of flames, for example. He is also able to grant minor miracles that have nothing to do with his nature, such as levitation, limited flight, making an apple pop into existence, drawing a large-scale graffiti on the wall etc. But these are limited. The larger the scale of the magic, the the life-force it’d take. He cannot bring the dead back to life, and as healing is not his nature or element, he can only grant minor healing magic. Any large-scale healing will likely cost both him and his contractor’s full life-force, causing them both to die.
Also, not really abilities, but I wasn't sure where to put this-- Hakon cannot recognize human faces. As in, every face more or less looks the same to him. It's like trying to get a three-year-old child to recognize the differences between the faces of identical breeds of horses. Impossible. He judges people's identities via their actions, voices and mannerisms, but he's pretty easy to fool if you know what you're doing. Also, Hakon hits states of mania and depression. He'll get worked up on adrenaline, and then crash a few days later. ~~*The more you know~*~
håkon wium lie ❧ original character // not reserved
1. A small switchblade
2. A broken watch
3. A small first-aid kit tucked into his jacket
Sample Entry:
Two threads! Let me know if more is needed ;u;
http://tearsofademon.dreamwidth.org/23684.html?thread=1275012#cmt1275012
http://fictionalized.dreamwidth.org/19234.html?thread=228386#cmt228386
Sample Entry Two:
A quiet day at the residence. Birds are chirping, the sun is shining—okay, who are we kidding here. No birds, no sun. But we do have two, rather bored individuals sitting in a room. One is sitting on a chair and pretending to be The Thinker. The other is painting him.
Okay, fine. Clarification. Only one is bored. And it’s not the one painting.
"Okay, I take it back. At least give me my phone or something. I’m about to turn the painting of ‘The Thinker’ into ‘The Fidgeter’, and you’re not gonna like that a whole lot," says the 'model'. Currently, Håkon is bored out of his mind. Watching the other guy paint him was interesting for the first five minutes, but for every minute that passed afterwards, he’d felt his interest waning. Watching repetitive movements of wrist, brush, brush against water, brush against paint, brush against canvas, rinse and fucking repeat three hundred million times is not exciting, not matter how bored the way they before, and anyway, Håkon feels a little cheated here. He had been promised that this would be something interesting. Turns out it was only interesting for the other guy. At some point or another, he got tired of watching paint dry out of the corner of his eyes, and now is wondering how long it’d take before the paint on the side of the canvas dried. This was the worst.
Carefully trying not to squirm, he surreptitiously peeks over the lens of his glasses. The painter is studiously ignoring him.
Wow.
Slowly, he begins to draw up a plan that involves three cans of eggplant, a brick, and nine socks with holes in them.
If he has to sit here and pretend to be ‘The Thinker’, he muses, he might as well put his time to good use and start thinking.
Re: håkon wium lie ❧ original character // not reserved
feel free to not judge this app until the next app round ;u;7
-> ACCEPTED