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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
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.