Saash | The Oregon Trail Application
PLAYER
NAME/NICKNAME: LA
AGE: 26
PERSONAL LJ: possiblyevil
TIMEZONE: CST
EMAIL ADDRESS: lacarlson85@gmail.com
IM SCREENNAME AND SERVICE: hunterofpenguins [aim]
CHARACTER
NAME: Saash
AGE: 7 or 8 years; this makes her middle-aged for a cat.
FANDOM/MEDIUM: The Book of Night with Moon | Book
CANON PULL-POINT: Post-canon.
ABILITIES:
It is difficult to define wizardry. It is supposed to allow wizards to do, basically, anything they can imagine, though powers are less pliable for adults than they are for young wizards. Saash is in the adult camp, as a grown cat, and is less likely to do absolutely ridiculous things with her magic. In the Feline Wizardry sequence, the mainstay of feline wizards appears to be altering physics to suit their needs. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: making air solid for the purposes of creating air walls or paths and stairs of air to travel across, having metal heat up to destructive degrees, moving objects by manipulating gravity from afar, displace matter to allow them to walk through walls, cancel out light around them to go invisible, disrupt matter to make it explode.
Other things common amongst Wizardry (and seen used by Saash or other cats) are speeding up healing processes, shielding spells, dampening sound heard from outside a certain area, translocation spells (Saash is paticularly good at these, as they are very similar to gates; she can transport multiple people and objects), convincing insects to go elsewhere, time slides, and mindspeech to other wizards. These spells and concepts can be mixed and matched to work together to achieve various effects (for example, a shield over x about of area that will keep a timed amount of breathable, warm air in with the wizards and whoever else is with them). Wizards can hold spells in reserve to trigger at a moment's notice, but only if they prepare them prior to going into the field. Wizardry in general relies on a lot of specifics and is not simple spell-slinging; they need to know exactly what is going to happen, to what it will happen to, why, how, or the spell will fail. In this vein, Wizards cannot lie (or, at least, a smart Wizard will not), since that may be the end of them.
Wizards like Saash also have access to The Speech. It is the language all wizards use to communicate with all beings without actually needing to know any particular language. It allows Saash, a cat, to be understood by humans and for her to understand them in return. It also translates written language. This covers any and all languages, including between other animals, ones from off-world, and other dimensions. There is also the Whispering, a constant stream of knowledge used by the cats as their “wizard manual”, but as that comes directly from an outside source (one of the Powers), Saash is losing contact with that. Saash is a Tenth Lifer, but the only perk I am including in-game from that is her immortality (no aging) and a general resilience to illness.
To stay in line with the 50% rule, things Saash will not have are: a full-on immunity to mundane problems mortals have (like hunger, cold, etc), contact with the Powers That Be (they would be an outside source of all-knowing knowledge and that won’t work in a jamjar game), time slides (as fun as these would be, they require permission and help from the Powers to happen at all), and her power levels are back to that of when she was a normal wizard, rather than the inexhaustible power of a Tenth Lifer. She will also have her old mortal body back so people can actually see and interact with her normally.
CHARACTER BACKGROUND:
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
Saash is a wizard in the service of the Powers That Be. She is a cat. She is pledged to preserve life and ease suffering amongst that life, as are all wizards who combat the heat death of the Universe began by the enemy of the wizards and the Powers, the Lone Power. Her ninth life had her living in the vast city of New York, working as the gate specialist (basically an engineer) in the wizardly transit system that hid itself away within the Grand Central Station. She was the third in a three cat team, all of them skilled wizards in their own right, and was one of the most knowledgeable on the gates, though happily not the leader of the crew. Life in the big city was going as smoothly as it could for her up until one of their gates began acting up.
A routine check-up on the gates led to the discovery of a kitten, a wizard-to-be on Ordeal, which meant nothing but trouble for them. The arrival of the kitten was only the start to a series of malfunctions with the gates and eventually even Saash could not keep them in check. It turned out that the gate issues and the kitten, Arhu, were all connected and as the problems with the gate system came to a head, they found themselves battling the Wise Ones, sentient dinosaurs long forgotten and left hidden in the depths of an older, uncivilized dimension that existed next to the mundane one (the one New York and humans were part of). This dimension was Downside and the cats were able to access it.
In Downside, Saash and the rest of her team picked up yet another wizard on Ordeal. This one was a Wise One. Along with both young wizards, they reached the heart of the problem. The Lone Power (the big bad bent on destroying everything) had created with an army of Wise Ones serving under it. At the beginning of the fight, Saash died. She had tried to blow up one of the minions of the Lone Power, the one that stood between them and winning, but only managed to have all the spell backfire on her. The rest of the first half of the battle went badly. With the team falling apart, their leader, Rhiow, pulled out a spell that brought them back, but not as themselves. The spell summoned the Powers That Be into the bodies of the failing wizards. The tides turned against the Lone Power and the saurian beings who served it. The team won, ended the Ordeals of both young wizards, and left Downside to return to the mundane dimension.
There they discovered the price Saash had paid for the trip to Downside. Despite having been brought back from death by the Power that she had become during the battle, her ninth life had been taken from her when she had gotten herself fried. Yet there she stood, seemingly alive and well in the mundane dimension. The Powers That Be had granted her the fabled Tenth Life, which gave the People who ascended to it great power. This meant she was no longer able to live on as a normal wizard, since that power came with a giant heap of extra work to do, so she bid her team goodbye and left immediately on Their business.
CHARACTER PERSONALITY:
Saash is a cat.
Saash is also a wizard.
Not only does that make her a small, sarcastic thing with claws, it makes her a small, sarcastic thing with claws and magical powers. It doesn’t make her the cuddliest of felines, which suits her just fine, thank you. Saash was the technical prowess behind her team, not the public relations, and that left her room to become brisk, fast-talking, and over-analytical. Surviving on the job relied heavily on these mannerisms, considering her average day had her tooth-deep in dangerous hyper-strings, complete with countdowns to when the gate she’d be fixing may or may not snap shut on her. Of course, this also left room for her to be sarcastic, neurotic, and anxious in situations that deviated from her usual tech work.
She is noted as neurotic primarily for her skin problems, which is itchy but can be attributed to no physical problem, and her constant grooming has come off as rude before. Her first impression to Rhiow, her team’s leader, was that she was vain and full of herself because she kept stopping and interrupting conversations to fuss with her fur. It nearly brought them to blows before Saash managed to explain. No disease, no fleas, it just was. It was revealed later on that her itching problem was because her soul, on its last life, had become too big for her body, and even after gaining her Tenth, the problem was noted to remain. It is neurosis through and through. It makes her twitchy and somewhat irritable to boot. As for her anxious streak, her Ordeal to become a Wizard is alluded to as a traumatic one, though never expanded upon in detail (as she refused to ever discuss it and her team knew better than to pry). Saash is reluctant to jump into obvious danger, preferring to lurk on the sidelines unless her interference is absolutely necessary. That isn’t the say she refuses to face those dangers, as she does, time and time again, for the sake of her team and her work, but she will never enjoy those moments and is sure to let everyone know just how much she doesn’t enjoy them.
Neurosis and sarcasm aside, she is sworn to protect life for the sake of life (which is a part of the Oath all wizards take) and will help people, any kind of people. Wizardy never seems to be offered to anyone incapable of caring for others and Saash cares quite a bit for her team, even when an interloping kitten is foisted upon them. She ends up letting Arhu, the kitten on Ordeal, stay at her place. Mostly due to it being the only feasible place to stash him, but she does show enough worry over his well-being that it casts her in a begrudging motherly light from time to time. As for the rest of her team, she comes off as best friend to Rhiow (at least, second best next to Rhiow’s human), unwilling to abandon her even when the endgame plans would put Saash in the worst of harm’s way, and to Urruah, something akin to an argumentative sibling with how they pepper each other with sarcastic quips and stabs, though she is quick to set aside those differences to get to work.
To sum it up, she is an expert in her field, about finesse over power, and is motivated to get her job done quickly and cleanly. While she may have a sarcastic bark to her (or maybe meow, in this case), her bite isn’t as bad. Due to her Oath, she is bound to seek out those who are troubled and lend them aid, regardless of personal opinion (and, wow, does she have those). She is capable of great loyalty and being a caring friend, and, while anxious towards danger, can push through it if there is work to be done.
WORLD: The world of Diane Duane’s Feline Wizardy sequence (and Young Wizard series, which takes place in the same ‘verse) involves a secret society of wizards, granted magic by the Powers That Be to aid in the fight to save all universes from destruction. Humans are not the only ones who are wizards, but also cats, dogs, whales, birds of prey, even aliens across the vast span of space. They all combat the efforts of the Lone Power, which left the other Powers when it created death and seeks to bring everything to an end. In this universe, it is normal for wizards to encounter pocket dimensions, alternate dimensions, travel to other worlds/galaxies, shapeshift, channel gods, rewind time, speak with inanimate objects, and so on. Life as a wizard is basically non-stop weird from the moment they take the Oath to become one.
OCCUPATION: Pastor
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON:
The hyperstring construct blazed with golden fire around her, humming with the power that ran it, the sound filling her ears and blocking out the general rumble of the trains somewhere off in the distance. That never bothered her these days. It was an everyday event in the life of Saash and she was sure her team was keeping an eye on the subway tunnel. They would drag her out if one happened to come barreling down the tracks towards them.
She sank a claw into the heart of the gate and queried it. It thrummed back a response, the Speech translating it into something Saash could comprehend. This gate was running in tip top shape. That was a relief, though not what she had been looking for. She let that string go and sank her claws into a different clump, bringing up a query for the array that connected this gate to the other two that dwelt within the unseen world of the station. Nothing. Normally that would be the end of it, case closed, shut down shop and get home in time for nice spot in the afternoon sun, but Saash knew someone had been accessing them without the gates logging them. The nothing she was finding was too much of a nothing.
The cat grumbled into the gate, to no one in particular, “You thought I wouldn’t notice...”
But of course she did. What an insult! The gates saw a huge usage of on-world transit. There were logs. There were always logs. No logs at all stank of some amateur trying to mask themselves as they passed through. An amateur, messing with her gates? Saash wouldn’t stand for it. She dug her claws in deeper, dropped one string here and there for a few different ones. She would backwards-engineer what this interloper had done if she had to, because there was no way she was going to let them get away with this!
FIRST PERSON:
Oh fwau... it won’t even... ugh. Fine.
[There’s only a voice here, no video, no text; Saash wouldn’t be too capable of those in any case. So, one oddly accented, mildly nervous-sounding voice.]
Is this on? Hello? I see a light, so it must be. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be asking, believe me, but I need some help. Preferably from someone with opposable thumbs. Yes, I know, that’s a strange request, but you’ll get it once you see the dilemma...
[Everyone else may have their watches around their wrists, but a cat’s wrist isn’t so large. Whoever thought to wrap hers around her neck instead had an irritating sense of humor!]
NOTES: Since she is a cat and a small cat, at that, Saash will be arriving with her watch around her neck like a collar, if that is okay.
NAME/NICKNAME: LA
AGE: 26
PERSONAL LJ: possiblyevil
TIMEZONE: CST
EMAIL ADDRESS: lacarlson85@gmail.com
IM SCREENNAME AND SERVICE: hunterofpenguins [aim]
CHARACTER
NAME: Saash
AGE: 7 or 8 years; this makes her middle-aged for a cat.
FANDOM/MEDIUM: The Book of Night with Moon | Book
CANON PULL-POINT: Post-canon.
ABILITIES:
It is difficult to define wizardry. It is supposed to allow wizards to do, basically, anything they can imagine, though powers are less pliable for adults than they are for young wizards. Saash is in the adult camp, as a grown cat, and is less likely to do absolutely ridiculous things with her magic. In the Feline Wizardry sequence, the mainstay of feline wizards appears to be altering physics to suit their needs. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: making air solid for the purposes of creating air walls or paths and stairs of air to travel across, having metal heat up to destructive degrees, moving objects by manipulating gravity from afar, displace matter to allow them to walk through walls, cancel out light around them to go invisible, disrupt matter to make it explode.
Other things common amongst Wizardry (and seen used by Saash or other cats) are speeding up healing processes, shielding spells, dampening sound heard from outside a certain area, translocation spells (Saash is paticularly good at these, as they are very similar to gates; she can transport multiple people and objects), convincing insects to go elsewhere, time slides, and mindspeech to other wizards. These spells and concepts can be mixed and matched to work together to achieve various effects (for example, a shield over x about of area that will keep a timed amount of breathable, warm air in with the wizards and whoever else is with them). Wizards can hold spells in reserve to trigger at a moment's notice, but only if they prepare them prior to going into the field. Wizardry in general relies on a lot of specifics and is not simple spell-slinging; they need to know exactly what is going to happen, to what it will happen to, why, how, or the spell will fail. In this vein, Wizards cannot lie (or, at least, a smart Wizard will not), since that may be the end of them.
Wizards like Saash also have access to The Speech. It is the language all wizards use to communicate with all beings without actually needing to know any particular language. It allows Saash, a cat, to be understood by humans and for her to understand them in return. It also translates written language. This covers any and all languages, including between other animals, ones from off-world, and other dimensions. There is also the Whispering, a constant stream of knowledge used by the cats as their “wizard manual”, but as that comes directly from an outside source (one of the Powers), Saash is losing contact with that. Saash is a Tenth Lifer, but the only perk I am including in-game from that is her immortality (no aging) and a general resilience to illness.
To stay in line with the 50% rule, things Saash will not have are: a full-on immunity to mundane problems mortals have (like hunger, cold, etc), contact with the Powers That Be (they would be an outside source of all-knowing knowledge and that won’t work in a jamjar game), time slides (as fun as these would be, they require permission and help from the Powers to happen at all), and her power levels are back to that of when she was a normal wizard, rather than the inexhaustible power of a Tenth Lifer. She will also have her old mortal body back so people can actually see and interact with her normally.
CHARACTER BACKGROUND:
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
Saash is a wizard in the service of the Powers That Be. She is a cat. She is pledged to preserve life and ease suffering amongst that life, as are all wizards who combat the heat death of the Universe began by the enemy of the wizards and the Powers, the Lone Power. Her ninth life had her living in the vast city of New York, working as the gate specialist (basically an engineer) in the wizardly transit system that hid itself away within the Grand Central Station. She was the third in a three cat team, all of them skilled wizards in their own right, and was one of the most knowledgeable on the gates, though happily not the leader of the crew. Life in the big city was going as smoothly as it could for her up until one of their gates began acting up.
A routine check-up on the gates led to the discovery of a kitten, a wizard-to-be on Ordeal, which meant nothing but trouble for them. The arrival of the kitten was only the start to a series of malfunctions with the gates and eventually even Saash could not keep them in check. It turned out that the gate issues and the kitten, Arhu, were all connected and as the problems with the gate system came to a head, they found themselves battling the Wise Ones, sentient dinosaurs long forgotten and left hidden in the depths of an older, uncivilized dimension that existed next to the mundane one (the one New York and humans were part of). This dimension was Downside and the cats were able to access it.
In Downside, Saash and the rest of her team picked up yet another wizard on Ordeal. This one was a Wise One. Along with both young wizards, they reached the heart of the problem. The Lone Power (the big bad bent on destroying everything) had created with an army of Wise Ones serving under it. At the beginning of the fight, Saash died. She had tried to blow up one of the minions of the Lone Power, the one that stood between them and winning, but only managed to have all the spell backfire on her. The rest of the first half of the battle went badly. With the team falling apart, their leader, Rhiow, pulled out a spell that brought them back, but not as themselves. The spell summoned the Powers That Be into the bodies of the failing wizards. The tides turned against the Lone Power and the saurian beings who served it. The team won, ended the Ordeals of both young wizards, and left Downside to return to the mundane dimension.
There they discovered the price Saash had paid for the trip to Downside. Despite having been brought back from death by the Power that she had become during the battle, her ninth life had been taken from her when she had gotten herself fried. Yet there she stood, seemingly alive and well in the mundane dimension. The Powers That Be had granted her the fabled Tenth Life, which gave the People who ascended to it great power. This meant she was no longer able to live on as a normal wizard, since that power came with a giant heap of extra work to do, so she bid her team goodbye and left immediately on Their business.
CHARACTER PERSONALITY:
Saash is a cat.
Saash is also a wizard.
Not only does that make her a small, sarcastic thing with claws, it makes her a small, sarcastic thing with claws and magical powers. It doesn’t make her the cuddliest of felines, which suits her just fine, thank you. Saash was the technical prowess behind her team, not the public relations, and that left her room to become brisk, fast-talking, and over-analytical. Surviving on the job relied heavily on these mannerisms, considering her average day had her tooth-deep in dangerous hyper-strings, complete with countdowns to when the gate she’d be fixing may or may not snap shut on her. Of course, this also left room for her to be sarcastic, neurotic, and anxious in situations that deviated from her usual tech work.
She is noted as neurotic primarily for her skin problems, which is itchy but can be attributed to no physical problem, and her constant grooming has come off as rude before. Her first impression to Rhiow, her team’s leader, was that she was vain and full of herself because she kept stopping and interrupting conversations to fuss with her fur. It nearly brought them to blows before Saash managed to explain. No disease, no fleas, it just was. It was revealed later on that her itching problem was because her soul, on its last life, had become too big for her body, and even after gaining her Tenth, the problem was noted to remain. It is neurosis through and through. It makes her twitchy and somewhat irritable to boot. As for her anxious streak, her Ordeal to become a Wizard is alluded to as a traumatic one, though never expanded upon in detail (as she refused to ever discuss it and her team knew better than to pry). Saash is reluctant to jump into obvious danger, preferring to lurk on the sidelines unless her interference is absolutely necessary. That isn’t the say she refuses to face those dangers, as she does, time and time again, for the sake of her team and her work, but she will never enjoy those moments and is sure to let everyone know just how much she doesn’t enjoy them.
Neurosis and sarcasm aside, she is sworn to protect life for the sake of life (which is a part of the Oath all wizards take) and will help people, any kind of people. Wizardy never seems to be offered to anyone incapable of caring for others and Saash cares quite a bit for her team, even when an interloping kitten is foisted upon them. She ends up letting Arhu, the kitten on Ordeal, stay at her place. Mostly due to it being the only feasible place to stash him, but she does show enough worry over his well-being that it casts her in a begrudging motherly light from time to time. As for the rest of her team, she comes off as best friend to Rhiow (at least, second best next to Rhiow’s human), unwilling to abandon her even when the endgame plans would put Saash in the worst of harm’s way, and to Urruah, something akin to an argumentative sibling with how they pepper each other with sarcastic quips and stabs, though she is quick to set aside those differences to get to work.
To sum it up, she is an expert in her field, about finesse over power, and is motivated to get her job done quickly and cleanly. While she may have a sarcastic bark to her (or maybe meow, in this case), her bite isn’t as bad. Due to her Oath, she is bound to seek out those who are troubled and lend them aid, regardless of personal opinion (and, wow, does she have those). She is capable of great loyalty and being a caring friend, and, while anxious towards danger, can push through it if there is work to be done.
WORLD: The world of Diane Duane’s Feline Wizardy sequence (and Young Wizard series, which takes place in the same ‘verse) involves a secret society of wizards, granted magic by the Powers That Be to aid in the fight to save all universes from destruction. Humans are not the only ones who are wizards, but also cats, dogs, whales, birds of prey, even aliens across the vast span of space. They all combat the efforts of the Lone Power, which left the other Powers when it created death and seeks to bring everything to an end. In this universe, it is normal for wizards to encounter pocket dimensions, alternate dimensions, travel to other worlds/galaxies, shapeshift, channel gods, rewind time, speak with inanimate objects, and so on. Life as a wizard is basically non-stop weird from the moment they take the Oath to become one.
OCCUPATION: Pastor
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON:
The hyperstring construct blazed with golden fire around her, humming with the power that ran it, the sound filling her ears and blocking out the general rumble of the trains somewhere off in the distance. That never bothered her these days. It was an everyday event in the life of Saash and she was sure her team was keeping an eye on the subway tunnel. They would drag her out if one happened to come barreling down the tracks towards them.
She sank a claw into the heart of the gate and queried it. It thrummed back a response, the Speech translating it into something Saash could comprehend. This gate was running in tip top shape. That was a relief, though not what she had been looking for. She let that string go and sank her claws into a different clump, bringing up a query for the array that connected this gate to the other two that dwelt within the unseen world of the station. Nothing. Normally that would be the end of it, case closed, shut down shop and get home in time for nice spot in the afternoon sun, but Saash knew someone had been accessing them without the gates logging them. The nothing she was finding was too much of a nothing.
The cat grumbled into the gate, to no one in particular, “You thought I wouldn’t notice...”
But of course she did. What an insult! The gates saw a huge usage of on-world transit. There were logs. There were always logs. No logs at all stank of some amateur trying to mask themselves as they passed through. An amateur, messing with her gates? Saash wouldn’t stand for it. She dug her claws in deeper, dropped one string here and there for a few different ones. She would backwards-engineer what this interloper had done if she had to, because there was no way she was going to let them get away with this!
FIRST PERSON:
Oh fwau... it won’t even... ugh. Fine.
[There’s only a voice here, no video, no text; Saash wouldn’t be too capable of those in any case. So, one oddly accented, mildly nervous-sounding voice.]
Is this on? Hello? I see a light, so it must be. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be asking, believe me, but I need some help. Preferably from someone with opposable thumbs. Yes, I know, that’s a strange request, but you’ll get it once you see the dilemma...
[Everyone else may have their watches around their wrists, but a cat’s wrist isn’t so large. Whoever thought to wrap hers around her neck instead had an irritating sense of humor!]
NOTES: Since she is a cat and a small cat, at that, Saash will be arriving with her watch around her neck like a collar, if that is okay.