P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O NYour Name: rui
OOC Journal: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ruiUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: no
Email + IM: alioth @ gmail, life in flame @ aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Peter Rumancek (dropped)
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O NName: Sophie Groeneveldt
Canon: Unclean LegacyOriginal or Alternate Universe: original
Canon Point: after Montechristien’s death
Number: 006. otherwise, rng me, baby.
Setting: There really aren’t any wikis about UL, but hopefully explanation will suffice. Sophie’s canon is set in the late 1400s-early 1500s, on the Isle of Ys. Her father serves the court of Prester John, whose legend was popular during that time. Being as that this is a land of Romance and Fairy Tales, there are wizards, angels, knights and unicorns, but there are also footie pajamas, ninjas, and Santa Claus, amongst other things. Speech can vary from very formal to ‘this sucks’. Magic is commonplace, or at least it is so for the Groeneveldt children. It takes many forms, and many of those forms have colors. For Sophie’s story, the most important colors are White, Red, Onyx, Blue, and Gold.
Christianity also exists in this world, with God being the ultimate avatars of White and the Devil being the ultimate avatars of Red. For most humans, their lives are a balancing act between Good and Evil, attempting to save their souls from Hell. This balancing act is even more difficult for the Groeneveldt children, who have an unfortunate tendency toward evil. It isn’t their fault, though, that their mother was a Saraman and their father committed a genocide beyond imagining, and then had the misfortune of having his soul sucked into Hell. In any case, White is never exactly pinned down and defined. Although it is certainly the color of Heaven and God's Plan for the world, it is not a particularly active sort of magic. Red magic is living, active and undiscriminating hate, and collects the souls of the damned.
The next important color of magic is Onyx. Onyx is a realm of void, almost like purgatory in that it collects the souls of suicides. Onyx is also the realm of the elder races, including creatures like fairies, dragons, ogres, hippogriffs, a unicorn, and humanoids. The first among them is Cedric Saraman, who doesn’t much like being stuck in the void with all those creatures, and causes them to be released upon the Earth. Saraman bears 76 children with an angel, 73 of which God drowns. The three remaining become the house of Saraman, eventually interbreeding with humans when there start being humans.
Blue is possibly the most difficult to explain. Blue is the color of intention, and its avatars desire to create a better, more harmonious world than the one that currently exists. Blue seeks an end to tragedy, even when that goes against the structures of God’s plan for humanity. There are several avatars of the Blue created before one of them, Dirija Alai, feels pity and seeks to resurrect Saraman’s 73 dead children. Her plan is nearly foiled by an archangel named Lishivecht, but a single strand of Dirija Alai’s hair remains hanging down into Hell, and the Saraman children climb it. These 73 children become the Qaddesim, or Blue essentials. As for Lishivecht, he is cast out of Heaven by God to become the Devil, avatar of the Red realm. Some time after that, the Violet realm of Life takes an avatar and all the Garden of Eden business happens, and humans populate the earth.
Sometime after
that, Montechristien Groeneveldt and his twin Baltasar are born, and then things start to go really wrong. In this particular world, there is only one soul allotted per birth, no matter how many children there are in the womb. Baltasar is the one who gets the soul, and he becomes an extremely powerful sorcerer. Meanwhile, Montechristien, being soulless and therefore unable to properly perform magic, becomes obsessed with the idea of another route to unimaginable power—hunting the blue essentials, killing them, and turning them to alchemical gold.
Gold is purity, perfection, and expression of purpose—the stuff of miracles, but also dead. Blue essentials become Gold because they alone are creatures that chose to be living. Eventually, after several decades, a multitude of failures and the help of a cat possessed by a Violet angel, he finally succeeds in his task. Once he he has accomplished that, he marries Yseult Saraman. Yseult bears them six children before Montechristien's twin Baltasar oversteps his power, attempting to bind God to his will, and is dragged into Hell for it. Despite his damned soul, Montechristien and Yseult conceive another child, and she dies giving birth. She goes to Heaven, a fact she finds very upsetting, considering the circumstances, and Montechristien is left to attempt to raise his seven strange children on his own, despite the fact that he constantly sees the world as a hateful, pointless place because his soul is already damned.
History: Sophie is one of the seven children of Montechristien Groeneveldt, the man who murdered 100 blue essentials and turned them to gold to gain unimaginable power. After creating his hundred little gold men, Groeneveldt went on to marry a rather incredible woman and then produce even more incredible children. Sophie's siblings include a brother who wrestled bears as a toddler, a brother who cut off his finger to become deathless, a brother who has looked upon the face of God, and a sister made of protoplasmic shadow. As for Sophie herself, she is a skinchanger, a shapeshifter able to become anything that she can imagine.
Unfortunately for her, she is also a twin, and the coin toss of birth left her sister Christine carrying their shared soul. Being without a soul causes Sophie more than a few problems, many of them brought on by other people's feelings on the subject. In a world where Heaven and Hell are very real and their father has personally fought the Devil, being 'good' is a legitimate concern for the Groeneveldts, and Sophie's siblings decide early on that she needs extra guidance to avoid the Devil's corruption. This is understandable since the Devil was occasionally actually on their doorstep, but more than a little misguided, as she is literally the only one of them unable to be saved or damned through her own actions. Nonetheless, she does her best to please them and meet their expectations, even when her understanding of things like 'justice' and 'goodness' come off as more than a little rote.
On their tenth birthday, their father granted each of the Groeneveldt children one wish. Fueled by her twin’s taunting and her desire to fit in with her siblings, Sophie makes a wish that grants both her extraordinary ability to become anything she can imagine and puts her at the top of the Devil’s interest list. In short, she wishes to be ‘worth tempting’; that the Devil would desire her as he desired her siblings. The results, predictably enough, are horrific. Sophie's wish changes her abilities from simple shapeshifting into the most extreme of versions, allowing her to become anything anyone wants her to be, from lightning to lava to a swarm of gnats, or possibly all of those at once and more. Being that sort of creature, she immediately attracts the attention of the Devil, who could use such a being for his own ends.
Every night after that, Sophie spends from dark until sunrise being chased by the Devil, in the rotting body of her father's twin. She keeps this a secret from her family, as her siblings would very likely kill her if there was even a suggestion she was Devil-tainted. Until the age of 15, her relationships with two of her three brothers are positive, and she even helps her knightly brother to hunt criminals, probably to try and prove that she is, indeed, good.
Slightly before her 16th birthday, said knightly brother rescues her on a night when she is caught by the Devil (there are very strong rape overtones here), wrestling him away and holding him all night. In the morning, when Sophie wakes, all her brother cares about is whether she has been ‘tainted’ or not. She lies, telling him everything is fine, and then decides she’s had enough and is going to face down the Devil. However, when she goes to ask her more powerful siblings for help, they refuse.
Ultimately, Sophie faces down the Devil alone. They make a deal—if the Devil wins, Sophie gives herself over to him and stops being Sophie, and if Sophie wins then the Devil will let her remain herself, give her a bit of his power and leave her family alone until her father’s death.
During the fight, she takes some of the pure essence of the Devil’s Red magic into her body, partially becoming this Red essence before realizing what a bad idea this might have been. Still, this power puts her on near-equal footing with the Devil, even as it corrupts her mind. She then replaces some of the Red with Gold, which is miraculous and powerful but also by nature dead. She ‘wins’ the fight in that the Devil runs from her, but what she did to herself also means that she’s dying. Upon the terms of their pre-battle agreement, the Devil saves Sophie’s life by revealing the smallest bit of Blue left in her.
Fast-forward almost 10 years, and Sophie has been living on her own, wandering and still tainted by the Red and Gold essences she drew on years before, when she gets a summons that her father is dying. All of the Groeneveldt siblings return home to either try and claim their father’s Gold legacy of unimaginable power, or just try to keep one of the others from getting it. For Sophie, this involves a murder attempt resulting in a day-long trip home in the furnace of her twin’s house on legs, followed by an epic battle with the two brothers who loved her but now want her and each other dead, and culminates in Sophie and her sorcerer brother being shish-kabobed on her knight brother’s anti-magic spear as she slits his throat. Then their big sister comes in and yells at all of them, spears are withdrawn and throats healed, there’s one last run-in with the Devil. Eventually they all come to realize that it’s a terrible, terrible idea to let any of them have unimaginable power, so they put the Gold into a thresher, releasing miracle powder all over the land.
Personality: Sophie Groeneveldt is a soulless, Hell-tainted shapeshifter who fought the Devil and made him turn and run. She is also a lost, lonely, deeply traumatized person who has been burdened with enormous secrets that she keeps to try and hold on to whatever meager love her family will give.
Being soulless and a Groeneveldt, Sophie's moral compass can be more than a little wonky, but she usually tries to be kind, at least to people who aren't her twin sister, Christine. She has been isolated all of her life, to the point where the only connections we see in her world are all family members, and the Groeneveldts are a more than eccentric bunch. In the story, we see her older brother Manfred scold Sophie about not killing bandits much as one would scold a child to not steal cookies from the cookie jar, to which she replies rather lightly that she didn't, trying to please him and not seeming particularly concerned with the seriousness of the accusation. It seems a perfectly rational suggestion to her that her father should simply use his enormous power to pluck his own damned soul from Hell. When asked why she should be good, she has no real answer beyond having been told that she should be so, and she seems to have difficulty defining goodness without using other difficult to pin down concepts like 'justice' and 'fairness'.
Instead of right and wrong, most of Sophie's decisions are based on love and a sense of self. She constantly hurts herself in order to keep her family blissfully ignorant and non-murderous, but also to retain their love. The idea of family is a very complex one for Sophie, as they are simultaneously the people she loves most in the world, the people who she must hide from, and the the people who hurt her the most, physically and mentally. Given her nature, Sophie is extremely difficult to kill, so the thought of being hated by her siblings probably has equal or greater weight than their likeliness to try and kill her.
For Sophie, there is a vast difference between a kind person and a good one. She ‘knows’ she’s incapable of the latter, but for the most part she tries to be the former, even if her idea of kindness can translate a bit oddly. For example, if she knew about an in-game auto-respawn rule, she would likely kill someone she cared about if they had been badly injured instead of trying to find them a healer, because in her mind that lessens their suffering.
She’s also desperate for love and acceptance, and will go out of her way to do kind things for people she sympathizes or empathizes with. That said, she’s often suspicious of genuinely nice people being genuinely friendly, because people reaching out to her in acts of kindness has always backfired in her life. For example, her brother Manfred saving her from the Devil wasn’t an attempt to save his sister from suffering, it was to save her virtue. Toward the end of the story when her twin invites her into her house and feeds her, it’s actually an attempt to murder her by throwing her into the house’s furnace. Unfortunately for Christine’s plan, it turns out that Sophie can survive furnaces. If someone earns her trust, however, she would go to the end of the world for them, regardless of danger to herself. Every act of kindness in the world has a cost, in Sophie’s mind, and she’s always aware that price will come along.
Sophie mentally defines herself in a few ways: as a Groeneveldt, as a skinchanger, as soulless, and as Christine's twin. Her family is undeniably central in her life, and up until her fight with the Devil she tries to maintain positive relationships while also keeping her secret, doing what she can to fit in and prove herself as being good enough. The things she has heard from her family, most especially her siblings, about being soulless, are things she has internalized to a great degree. In reality, Sophie is pretty much a blank slate, incapable of sin or grace and able to very literally become anything at all. However, she doesn't see herself in this way at all before her fight with the Devil, and interprets her soullessness as an unfair lack that makes her worth less than her brothers and sisters. At the same time, she is constantly fighting Christine's influence over her, struggling in whatever ways she can to prove her sister wrong. Her ability to change her shape is also incredibly important to Sophie. It is the ability that both makes her able to flee from the Devil and causes her to need to in the first place, and it is also the thing that allows her to successfully hide this from her family.
Her tumultuous relationship with her sister shows Sophie's core strength and her struggle to retain her sense of self. Christine, burdened from childhood with the terror of the Devil and the responsibility of saving them both from Hell, often accuses Sophie of being evil and corrupted. Their relationship is one filled with fights as children that lead to fairly regular attempts by Christine to kill Sophie, convinced that somehow this would purge the evil from their soul. This accusation fuels much of Sophie’s behavior, and she goes to pretty incredible lengths to prove her sister wrong.
Sophie’s outward demeanor often only reflects a shadow of her internal feelings. She works to restrain her facial expression and body language, and it takes a lot of emotion for her to speak her true feelings. Having a front of strength and poise is important to her. It is her habit to disguise her injuries and true state using her shapeshifting, and she also has a whole host of tricks to keep from showing her feelings on her face, like shifting away her tear ducts so she doesn’t cry or manifesting a second mouth inside her stomach so she can chew her lip or grind her teeth out of sight. She is an adept and casual liar, as illustrated by her years of deceiving her entire family. Circumstances forced her to be mature beyond her years, but between the wisdom and poise she still has her moments of teenage immaturity. She can’t resist the urge to rile Christine when her twin pushes her buttons, goes off to face the Devil shounen-style, alone and unarmed with anything more than her abilities and her convictions and without even considering asking her incredibly powerful father for help when her siblings refuse. After nearly dying to save her family, she also seems to cut off contact with them, as certain grudges and misunderstandings end up being carried through the next ten years.
As an adult, Sophie hasn’t changed much from her teenaged self. She won’t start a verbal spar but still can’t resist riling her sister, and has stopped giving speeches instead of taking action. She isn’t senseless about her violence, but she is adept at it, and while she is not unkind, she is not a good person either. The conversation she had with the Devil and the fact that she has seen the world devoid of anything but hate, shouldered the burden of that and fought to remain herself has taken a lasting toll. Also, while her shapeshifting abilities and years of keeping secrets have given her a very good read on body language, a lifetime of isolation has left her with little opportunity to use those skills with anyone outside her family. She has the manners of nobility learned in childhood, but it’s mostly a thin veneer over a somewhat feral child without an inborn moral compass.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: As a skinchanger, in the context of canon Sophie can literally become anything. However, we also see her injured, starving, and otherwise physically vulnerable. When Sophie is injured, she can cover the injury to make it appear to go away. However, that doesn’t mean she’s healed. Her properties make her extremely difficult to kill, but Sophie constantly maintains a ‘normal’ shape that is actually a lie—her true appearance is scarred and starving. Her shape slips in one scene in canon, when she is emotionally overwhelmed, and so I believe that she has to on some level constantly maintain her shape.
While Sophie was born more or less human, she is an extremely magical creature, and therefore vulnerable to any sort of anti-magic effects or objects. She can be killed, although the spell her brother was using to do it was a spell that was intended to kill creatures like phoenixes. Being stabbed with the anti-magic spear may have killed her eventually, but in context it was difficult to tell wether she would have died or just been stuck there indefinitely in agony.
Alignment-wise, Sophie is Complicated. She has no soul, which means she is incapable of either grace or sin, neutral in the truest meaning of the thing. She is also tainted by the Red power of the Devil, which is held in check by the miraculous power of alchemical Gold. Between her life experiences and also as a relation of the Saramans, Sophie is also tainted by Onyx. What it may mean in game context is up to players whose characters can see things like that. It does mean that she is vulnerable to the influences of evil things, especially if they’re persuasive speakers. Sophie’s taints are not visible on her skin, but if cut, she would onyx ichor threaded with gold and red and a teensy bit of blue. Trying not to bleed in public is one of her many hobbies.
While Sophie’s power is technically limitless, I’m personally not interested in breaking the game, stealing every show, ruining people’s fun, etc. She’s limited by the capability of her imagination and the fact that she’s a reactive person instead of a planner. She is used to being and working alone, concerned only for her own survival, and isn’t much of a hero in the comic-book sense of the word. In a crowd of strangers, she’s likely to try and hide her abilities, because her family is well known and feared in her homeland. If the mods feel that additional nerfing is necessary I’d be happy to discuss it!
Inventory: one fingerbone belonging to a child, one set of throwing knives (6) with leather arm and leg holsters (well-worn), one ivory comb and brush set, one hooded wool cloak, one set of period-appropriate clothing, one pair soft-soled leather boots.
Appearance: I use Lonneke Engel as Sophie’s PB. Her icons are
here and
here although neither account is paid up right now. There’s no physical descriptor of her in canon at all, except that her twin sister has dark hair and light blue-grey eyes, and that all the Groeneveldt children are quite attractive. She’s short, about 5’2”, very skinny and all wiry muscle, somewhere between a ballerina and a long-distance runner. That isn’t reflected in her icons because not only is it difficult to find someone who matches that description, I feel it might make people uncomfortable to have a PB that thin. Her hair is long enough to sit on and she wears it down. There are no visible scars on her body in her standard shape, but taking away her magic would reveal a lot of scarring and possibly recent injury all over her body, and veins that look very dark beneath her skin.
Age: 26
AU Clarification: n/a
S A M P L E SLog Sample: Sophie likes the gardens. They feel nothing like home and smell entirely wrong, but they’re also the only place that feels entirely
real to her. Being surrounded by metal and grease and the ever-pressing presence of humanity makes her heart race and her palms sweat to the point where she has to close her pores and make her heart that of a unicorn instead, implacable and unmoved.
She can fly in here, too, climb up a tree and take wing as a sparrow, a raven, a hawk. There are no real currents but still she can soar. It makes her feel farther away from the…
thing in the ship that calls out to the taint in her blood. It does not call sweetly, though, and thus far that makes it easier to resist, easier to keep the wash of red from tinting her landscape.
This is not what she’d imagined would happen. But who could imagine being whisked away from the straw pallet she’d been given for the night into a choking container of blue slime, a terrible tube down her throat. She had staggered but not fallen, retched but not vomited, as one cannot vomit when their stomach momentarily ceases to exist.
Francescu’s finger bone had been in the locker that matched the strange number she couldn’t shift off of her arm, and while she was dressing along with the others she had slipped it back where it belonged, safe behind her ribcage. At least she had that much. Idly, her fingers tap against her breastbone.
Then the sprinkler system goes on. Startled, Sophie takes wing with a squawk of protest, seeking shelter.
Comms Sample: [
the woman on the comm screen is all big pale eyes and long dark hair. she’s holding it just a bit too close, so it’s hard to see much of what’s behind her. there isn’t much to see anyway, it’s just a room, although one dim enough that the comm is lighting her features.]
I don’t suppose anyone knows very much about the…thing. The evil thing. Do they? I should like to know a bit more. What is it’s purpose in bringing us all here? Is it a creature of the Devil?
[
she pauses, face blank, and then takes a breath and pushes stray hair out of her eyes.]
Violet, Francescu, Manfred, Tomas, Elisabet…Christine…if any of you are here, so am I.
