[XI_RPG application draft]
- PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Elle
AGE: 20
PRONOUN OF CHOICE: her/she
EMAIL ADDRESS: ellie[dot]savell[at]googlemail[dot]com
AIM SCREENNAME & MAIN PERSONAL LJ ACCOUNT: Got Materia & otilu
OTHER CHARACTERS: too many Tony Stark, Cassie Lang, Sasuke Uchiha, Temeraire, Yuffie Kisaragi.
- CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Harry James Potter
CODENAME: Lightning Lad None
SERIES/SOURCE: the Harry Potter series
AGE: 13/14
GENDER: male
ROLE: student
BACKGROUND: Fourteen years ago, the Sorcerer Supreme happened to be taking tea with the daughter of a renowned clairvoyant and precognitive when she saw a vision of the future. Now, this sort of thing happens surprisingly often, but since it pertained to the defeat of a supervillain he had been trying to deal with for quite some time with no real success, he paid slightly more attention. She saw the birth of a boy to hero parents, who would somehow be able to succeed where the collected might of the British hero teams had failed. That is to say, the reason they were all failing to bring him to justice was that his arch-enemy - his heroic equal and opposite - had yet to be born. Unfortunately, said supervillain also caught wind of this prediction, and renewed his attacks with deadly vigour.
Harry was a year old when his parents' civilian identities were betrayed to Lord Voldemort, and the events unfolded with depressing predictability. His parents were gone - vanished without a trace. But there was one snag. When Voldemort finished gloating at baby Harry and finally pulled the trigger of his feared Death Ray, the power was reflected back, and the villain was inexplicably defeated and forced to flee. At this point the police arrived, and were baffled to find a child bearing a strange lightning bolt-shaped cut on his forehead, sitting amidst the rubble of his house with no sign of anyone else. They managed to track down an aunt in Surrey, and the legalities went through without a hitch - to the collective dismay of the heroes who had known the Potters and their relatives. Asleep in the arms of a social worker, Harry Potter vanished from the super hero world for the next eleven years.
The Dursleys weren't exactly model adoptive parents. Aware of Harry's superpowered legacy, they sought to stamp out any kind of interest in the world beyond the house and school. Comic books were banned; he was steered away from the television or computer games. Anything that could ignite the imagination of a young boy into attempting to pretend he was a hero was forbidden - because they knew he'd be able to do more than just pretend. They figured that keeping him as downtrodden as possible was the best possible way of making him ordinary; he grew up doing the majority of household chores, neglected apart from the odd moments where he did something not entirely normal; at which point he would wish they'd forget he was there again.
That changed when he received an acceptance letter to a prestigious boarding school in Scotland from a strange man at a pub - apparently, he was told, he had been put down for a place at birth. His parents had set aside money for his fees and expenses - money that he suddenly had access to, unbeknown to his aunt and uncle. With no arguments that could satisfy Harry's mysterious stranger, they capitulated and he headed for Hogwarts School the moment term began.
The school was... weird, to put it bluntly. Rumours and legends were plenty: there was a huge squid in the lake, the staircases moved every other Tuesday, the paintings could answer back if you talked to them. Older students knew these were untrue, but continued to feed each myth to the newcomers with typical childish glee. Due to their remote location, the sports teams rarely got the chance to play against other schools, which means the rules had... developed, somewhat. A mainly student-run sport called Quidditch is entirely unique to the school, since it involves several different sizes and colours of ball, a number of hula hoops on sticks for goals, and far too many injuries to be as fun and popular as it is. No one is entirely sure what the rules of Quidditch are; it changes every year, and sometimes from game to game. Several games in which rules were voted in mid-play are looked back on fondly by their participants.
In any case, life at the school was vastly different from Number 4, Privet Drive. For one thing, his name was recognised by those students whose parents had ties to the assorted super heroes of the United Kingdom - and there was a suspicious amount of students in that category. He found out quickly that his parents had not, in fact, died in a car crash, but had presumably been killed by the infamous super villain Lord Voldemort, on the same night that he had repelled him and brought an end to that particular reign of terror. Rather intimidated by the sudden reputation and expectations dropped on his eleven-year-old shoulders, Harry nevertheless rallied, making a number of friends and doing passably well enough in his lessons. He discovered a talent for sports, and joined the Quidditch team immediately.
During the year, he uncovered a villainous plot by Voldemort - inhabiting an LMD of their I.T. teacher, who he had murdered during the summer in Albania - to obtain an item of significant value stored in the school's vaults. With their headmaster - who had revealed to Harry his identity as Earth's Sorcerer Supreme - away in another dimension, Harry and his friends took it upon themselves to stop Voldemort's plot, which they actually succeeded at. It was here Harry actually realised there was something preventing the Dark Lord from harming him - or even touching him - but he didn't know what.
That summer, the Dursleys reacted to his exploits by ignoring him as much as humanly possible. That is, until a Skrull (nicknamed Dobby) dropped by to warn Harry that he must on no accounts go back to his school. When he refused, Dobby shifted into Harry, went downstairs, and used his skrull forcefield powers to levitate and ruin a cake his Aunt was about to serve to her guests. Furious, Uncle Vernon locked him in his room for over a week. This was cut short when his friend from school and two of his brothers drove up in the dead of night, having stolen their father's car. Harry managed to get out of the window with his suitcase and budgie, but the car stalled when they tried to drive away and the Dursleys woke up. Desperate, Harry telekinetically caused the car and all its passengers to levitate, and they flew to the next county in fine style. He stayed at his friend's house - which was suspiciously full of heroic equipment - for the rest of the summer. Things went even more pear-shaped when Dobby reappeared to place an invisible barrier over the station entrance to King's Cross, causing them to miss their train back to school. Of course, his friend had a fantastic idea. The car was right there - why didn't they just fly there again? This went well right until the moment Harry passed out from mental fatigue and they crashed into one of the larger trees on the school grounds.
With such an auspicious start to his second year, Harry was understandably wary when, true to Dobby's warnings, bad things started to happen at Hogwarts. Anti-mutant propaganda was rife, and students started to be attacked. Through a mixture of bad luck and being too curious for his own good, Harry was constantly spotted near the sites of the attacks immediately after. Everyone started avoiding him, and when he accidentally threw another student through a window after they confronted him violently about their suspicions, he was only saved from suspension or expulsion by the interference of Dumbledore and his Head of House, a very sensible woman.
Naturally, he discovered the true culprit - a follower of Voldemort had planted a mind-control device on another student at the start of the year. With the help of Dumbledore's Cape of Levitation, which he had summoned accidentally because he is just that loyal to the Sorcerer Supreme, he triumphed over the ultimate form of this device - a huge robotic snake hidden beneath the school fifty years ago.
[THIRD YEAR IS ON HOLD UNTIL I CAN TALK TO A SIRIUS]
Suspended from the school for constant breach of rules and regulations, Harry returned to the Dursleys for the summer dispirited and generally rather bitter at the whole system. There he stayed until Dumbledore appeared late one night in his room, in his customary flash of magical light and swirl of Cape, with news of another school for superpowered children who would gladly accept him. Of course, the fact that shit was going down in America might also have entered into it. Having just woken up, and not running on all cylinders, Harry bewilderedly asked what was going on and why Dumbledore was in his room at three in the morning, at which point the Sorcerer Supreme dropped some forms onto his bedside table and disappeared again.
The Dursleys signed them the moment he brought them downstairs, somewhat gleefully, and even paid for his one-way plane ticket.
PERSONALITY: Harry has Chronic Hero Syndrome, and that will tell you all you need to know on many levels. He has a deep-seated need to save people, stemming from his repressed heroism and own neglectful upbringing. Not to mention the evil super villain out to get him, who seems to be his problem now. This doesn't just cover his friends; anyone in danger or in need will trigger his 'saving people thing', to the point that it can be exploited flawlessly by those with ill intent. It exasperates his friends for obvious reasons - he'll even do a heel-face turn and rescue an enemy he was previously fighting if the opportunity presents itself. If he fails to help someone, he will be inflicted with a deep guilt and self-accusation, no matter whether it was actually possible for him to affect the event whatsoever.
Growing up as he has in a state of general neglect and negativity, he is unconceited and socially awkward. The fact that the first Christmas present he ever got was from a schoolfriend at Hogwarts - and he didn't expect any - says a great deal about his drastically lowered expectations from friends and family - he honestly doesn't expect people to reciprocate, but he'll probably help them anyway. Intelligent enough, his main strengths lie elsewhere, in his unwavering courage and his perceptiveness - his gut feelings are often right, and, having been proven right multiple times, he will stubbornly insist so until his friends capitulate and go along with his suspicions. He can occasionally be witty, and he has flashes of brilliance more closely linked to his perceptions than his book smarts, but it's safe to say that his friend Hermione was the brains of the operation at Hogwarts. Occasionally he catches the Idiot Ball and thinks he needs to Do This Thing Alone, but it never lasts long. He is also fairly prone to feelings of bitterness, arrogance or rage, but they generally correspond to people insulting his parents or friends, or moments of extreme drama.
APPEARANCE: Harry is fairly short and scrawny for his age, with hair that just won't lie flat no matter what he or anyone else does to it. He has ~bright green eyes~, glasses that will just not stay fixed, and a vivid scar on his foreheard, shaped like a lightning bolt, but he generally flattens his hair over it because it draws unwanted attention. He tends to wear cast-off clothing or his school uniform, and now that he's at a school without an actual uniform, this is going to become a problem. I'm ignoring the films' tendency to make everyone suitably fashionable and modern - I refuse to believe Harry owns a casual jacket. He'll probably wear his Hogwarts uniform sometimes anyway.
POWERS: Telekinesis - he can unlock doors, make things fly or 'summon' objects from long distances. He cannot affect himself, but he can use it on other living beings. His trademarks are being able to disarm someone without harming them and fly using a sturdy object as a medium - yes, he has used a broom a few times, but he's a little embarrassed about it. He's been able to lift a car containing himself and three other children and fly it to the next town, but that's the general limit to his abilities.
He can also inexplicably create various amounts of light from nowhere, ranging from 'my hand is a torch' to 'begone, darkness!', although the latter is a little out of his reach at present. He has superb reflexes, but nothing in the superhuman range, and he can converse with snakes. The latter he only discovered recently, and received such a negative reaction from those around him that he tends to avoid demonstrating the ability around other people unless it's a matter of life and death.
Finally, he has a psychic shield around him that protects him from Voldemort - and only Voldemort. Everything else is just as effective. He is also especially vulnerable to mental intrusion and illusion, though he has a higher than average resistance to mind control.
ANYTHING ELSE?: He has a white budgerigar called Hedwig, who is well-trained enough to be allowed to fly around his room and perch on his arm, but still likes to bite. He is moderately famous in super hero circles around Britain and Western Europe, and his deeds over the past few years managed to make the news, if briefly. His worst subjects are History and Math.
- RP SAMPLES
First-person sample: Okay, right. I've been talking to some people, and we reckon a Quidditch team could work. Er, before we start, though, we're going to need players, and equipment. I think the equipment is sorted, but the more players the better, really. So, who's interested?
Third-person sample: Harry stared at his case for perhaps the tenth time, mentally running through his possessions to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything under the floorboards or crammed down the side of his bed. The list didn't take that long, and the only thing he could think of was the small box of presents that had arrived a few weeks ago from various corners of England. Peeking out from underneath the stack of cards were the book on American slang from Hermione - "Make sure you read it before you arrive, Harry. It's really important!" - the bulk packet of marshmallows from Ron - "'cause they're different over there, mate. Honest." - and a pair of socks covered in cartoon goats that Harry suspected were from Dumbledore.
That would be the last to go into the suitcase. He stowed the last of Hedwig's feed next to his uniform, and wrestled his pride and joy - a collapsible racing bike - back into its case. Then the box slotted into its place, and the case snapped shut with surprising ease. Just in time, too. His uncle appeared at the door of his bedroom, an impatient scowl firmly in place. Apparently not even the prospect of being legally allowed to deport Harry to another continent could make him hide his dislike.
"You ready, boy?"
With a final, brief look around the room, Harry nodded tersely and dragged his suitcase off the bed. Next stop, Salem Center.
NAME: Elle
AGE: 20
PRONOUN OF CHOICE: her/she
EMAIL ADDRESS: ellie[dot]savell[at]googlemail[dot]com
AIM SCREENNAME & MAIN PERSONAL LJ ACCOUNT: Got Materia & otilu
OTHER CHARACTERS: too many Tony Stark, Cassie Lang, Sasuke Uchiha, Temeraire, Yuffie Kisaragi.
- CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Harry James Potter
CODENAME: Lightning Lad None
SERIES/SOURCE: the Harry Potter series
AGE: 13/14
GENDER: male
ROLE: student
BACKGROUND: Fourteen years ago, the Sorcerer Supreme happened to be taking tea with the daughter of a renowned clairvoyant and precognitive when she saw a vision of the future. Now, this sort of thing happens surprisingly often, but since it pertained to the defeat of a supervillain he had been trying to deal with for quite some time with no real success, he paid slightly more attention. She saw the birth of a boy to hero parents, who would somehow be able to succeed where the collected might of the British hero teams had failed. That is to say, the reason they were all failing to bring him to justice was that his arch-enemy - his heroic equal and opposite - had yet to be born. Unfortunately, said supervillain also caught wind of this prediction, and renewed his attacks with deadly vigour.
Harry was a year old when his parents' civilian identities were betrayed to Lord Voldemort, and the events unfolded with depressing predictability. His parents were gone - vanished without a trace. But there was one snag. When Voldemort finished gloating at baby Harry and finally pulled the trigger of his feared Death Ray, the power was reflected back, and the villain was inexplicably defeated and forced to flee. At this point the police arrived, and were baffled to find a child bearing a strange lightning bolt-shaped cut on his forehead, sitting amidst the rubble of his house with no sign of anyone else. They managed to track down an aunt in Surrey, and the legalities went through without a hitch - to the collective dismay of the heroes who had known the Potters and their relatives. Asleep in the arms of a social worker, Harry Potter vanished from the super hero world for the next eleven years.
The Dursleys weren't exactly model adoptive parents. Aware of Harry's superpowered legacy, they sought to stamp out any kind of interest in the world beyond the house and school. Comic books were banned; he was steered away from the television or computer games. Anything that could ignite the imagination of a young boy into attempting to pretend he was a hero was forbidden - because they knew he'd be able to do more than just pretend. They figured that keeping him as downtrodden as possible was the best possible way of making him ordinary; he grew up doing the majority of household chores, neglected apart from the odd moments where he did something not entirely normal; at which point he would wish they'd forget he was there again.
That changed when he received an acceptance letter to a prestigious boarding school in Scotland from a strange man at a pub - apparently, he was told, he had been put down for a place at birth. His parents had set aside money for his fees and expenses - money that he suddenly had access to, unbeknown to his aunt and uncle. With no arguments that could satisfy Harry's mysterious stranger, they capitulated and he headed for Hogwarts School the moment term began.
The school was... weird, to put it bluntly. Rumours and legends were plenty: there was a huge squid in the lake, the staircases moved every other Tuesday, the paintings could answer back if you talked to them. Older students knew these were untrue, but continued to feed each myth to the newcomers with typical childish glee. Due to their remote location, the sports teams rarely got the chance to play against other schools, which means the rules had... developed, somewhat. A mainly student-run sport called Quidditch is entirely unique to the school, since it involves several different sizes and colours of ball, a number of hula hoops on sticks for goals, and far too many injuries to be as fun and popular as it is. No one is entirely sure what the rules of Quidditch are; it changes every year, and sometimes from game to game. Several games in which rules were voted in mid-play are looked back on fondly by their participants.
In any case, life at the school was vastly different from Number 4, Privet Drive. For one thing, his name was recognised by those students whose parents had ties to the assorted super heroes of the United Kingdom - and there was a suspicious amount of students in that category. He found out quickly that his parents had not, in fact, died in a car crash, but had presumably been killed by the infamous super villain Lord Voldemort, on the same night that he had repelled him and brought an end to that particular reign of terror. Rather intimidated by the sudden reputation and expectations dropped on his eleven-year-old shoulders, Harry nevertheless rallied, making a number of friends and doing passably well enough in his lessons. He discovered a talent for sports, and joined the Quidditch team immediately.
During the year, he uncovered a villainous plot by Voldemort - inhabiting an LMD of their I.T. teacher, who he had murdered during the summer in Albania - to obtain an item of significant value stored in the school's vaults. With their headmaster - who had revealed to Harry his identity as Earth's Sorcerer Supreme - away in another dimension, Harry and his friends took it upon themselves to stop Voldemort's plot, which they actually succeeded at. It was here Harry actually realised there was something preventing the Dark Lord from harming him - or even touching him - but he didn't know what.
That summer, the Dursleys reacted to his exploits by ignoring him as much as humanly possible. That is, until a Skrull (nicknamed Dobby) dropped by to warn Harry that he must on no accounts go back to his school. When he refused, Dobby shifted into Harry, went downstairs, and used his skrull forcefield powers to levitate and ruin a cake his Aunt was about to serve to her guests. Furious, Uncle Vernon locked him in his room for over a week. This was cut short when his friend from school and two of his brothers drove up in the dead of night, having stolen their father's car. Harry managed to get out of the window with his suitcase and budgie, but the car stalled when they tried to drive away and the Dursleys woke up. Desperate, Harry telekinetically caused the car and all its passengers to levitate, and they flew to the next county in fine style. He stayed at his friend's house - which was suspiciously full of heroic equipment - for the rest of the summer. Things went even more pear-shaped when Dobby reappeared to place an invisible barrier over the station entrance to King's Cross, causing them to miss their train back to school. Of course, his friend had a fantastic idea. The car was right there - why didn't they just fly there again? This went well right until the moment Harry passed out from mental fatigue and they crashed into one of the larger trees on the school grounds.
With such an auspicious start to his second year, Harry was understandably wary when, true to Dobby's warnings, bad things started to happen at Hogwarts. Anti-mutant propaganda was rife, and students started to be attacked. Through a mixture of bad luck and being too curious for his own good, Harry was constantly spotted near the sites of the attacks immediately after. Everyone started avoiding him, and when he accidentally threw another student through a window after they confronted him violently about their suspicions, he was only saved from suspension or expulsion by the interference of Dumbledore and his Head of House, a very sensible woman.
Naturally, he discovered the true culprit - a follower of Voldemort had planted a mind-control device on another student at the start of the year. With the help of Dumbledore's Cape of Levitation, which he had summoned accidentally because he is just that loyal to the Sorcerer Supreme, he triumphed over the ultimate form of this device - a huge robotic snake hidden beneath the school fifty years ago.
[THIRD YEAR IS ON HOLD UNTIL I CAN TALK TO A SIRIUS]
Suspended from the school for constant breach of rules and regulations, Harry returned to the Dursleys for the summer dispirited and generally rather bitter at the whole system. There he stayed until Dumbledore appeared late one night in his room, in his customary flash of magical light and swirl of Cape, with news of another school for superpowered children who would gladly accept him. Of course, the fact that shit was going down in America might also have entered into it. Having just woken up, and not running on all cylinders, Harry bewilderedly asked what was going on and why Dumbledore was in his room at three in the morning, at which point the Sorcerer Supreme dropped some forms onto his bedside table and disappeared again.
The Dursleys signed them the moment he brought them downstairs, somewhat gleefully, and even paid for his one-way plane ticket.
PERSONALITY: Harry has Chronic Hero Syndrome, and that will tell you all you need to know on many levels. He has a deep-seated need to save people, stemming from his repressed heroism and own neglectful upbringing. Not to mention the evil super villain out to get him, who seems to be his problem now. This doesn't just cover his friends; anyone in danger or in need will trigger his 'saving people thing', to the point that it can be exploited flawlessly by those with ill intent. It exasperates his friends for obvious reasons - he'll even do a heel-face turn and rescue an enemy he was previously fighting if the opportunity presents itself. If he fails to help someone, he will be inflicted with a deep guilt and self-accusation, no matter whether it was actually possible for him to affect the event whatsoever.
Growing up as he has in a state of general neglect and negativity, he is unconceited and socially awkward. The fact that the first Christmas present he ever got was from a schoolfriend at Hogwarts - and he didn't expect any - says a great deal about his drastically lowered expectations from friends and family - he honestly doesn't expect people to reciprocate, but he'll probably help them anyway. Intelligent enough, his main strengths lie elsewhere, in his unwavering courage and his perceptiveness - his gut feelings are often right, and, having been proven right multiple times, he will stubbornly insist so until his friends capitulate and go along with his suspicions. He can occasionally be witty, and he has flashes of brilliance more closely linked to his perceptions than his book smarts, but it's safe to say that his friend Hermione was the brains of the operation at Hogwarts. Occasionally he catches the Idiot Ball and thinks he needs to Do This Thing Alone, but it never lasts long. He is also fairly prone to feelings of bitterness, arrogance or rage, but they generally correspond to people insulting his parents or friends, or moments of extreme drama.
APPEARANCE: Harry is fairly short and scrawny for his age, with hair that just won't lie flat no matter what he or anyone else does to it. He has ~bright green eyes~, glasses that will just not stay fixed, and a vivid scar on his foreheard, shaped like a lightning bolt, but he generally flattens his hair over it because it draws unwanted attention. He tends to wear cast-off clothing or his school uniform, and now that he's at a school without an actual uniform, this is going to become a problem. I'm ignoring the films' tendency to make everyone suitably fashionable and modern - I refuse to believe Harry owns a casual jacket. He'll probably wear his Hogwarts uniform sometimes anyway.
POWERS: Telekinesis - he can unlock doors, make things fly or 'summon' objects from long distances. He cannot affect himself, but he can use it on other living beings. His trademarks are being able to disarm someone without harming them and fly using a sturdy object as a medium - yes, he has used a broom a few times, but he's a little embarrassed about it. He's been able to lift a car containing himself and three other children and fly it to the next town, but that's the general limit to his abilities.
He can also inexplicably create various amounts of light from nowhere, ranging from 'my hand is a torch' to 'begone, darkness!', although the latter is a little out of his reach at present. He has superb reflexes, but nothing in the superhuman range, and he can converse with snakes. The latter he only discovered recently, and received such a negative reaction from those around him that he tends to avoid demonstrating the ability around other people unless it's a matter of life and death.
Finally, he has a psychic shield around him that protects him from Voldemort - and only Voldemort. Everything else is just as effective. He is also especially vulnerable to mental intrusion and illusion, though he has a higher than average resistance to mind control.
ANYTHING ELSE?: He has a white budgerigar called Hedwig, who is well-trained enough to be allowed to fly around his room and perch on his arm, but still likes to bite. He is moderately famous in super hero circles around Britain and Western Europe, and his deeds over the past few years managed to make the news, if briefly. His worst subjects are History and Math.
- RP SAMPLES
First-person sample: Okay, right. I've been talking to some people, and we reckon a Quidditch team could work. Er, before we start, though, we're going to need players, and equipment. I think the equipment is sorted, but the more players the better, really. So, who's interested?
Third-person sample: Harry stared at his case for perhaps the tenth time, mentally running through his possessions to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything under the floorboards or crammed down the side of his bed. The list didn't take that long, and the only thing he could think of was the small box of presents that had arrived a few weeks ago from various corners of England. Peeking out from underneath the stack of cards were the book on American slang from Hermione - "Make sure you read it before you arrive, Harry. It's really important!" - the bulk packet of marshmallows from Ron - "'cause they're different over there, mate. Honest." - and a pair of socks covered in cartoon goats that Harry suspected were from Dumbledore.
That would be the last to go into the suitcase. He stowed the last of Hedwig's feed next to his uniform, and wrestled his pride and joy - a collapsible racing bike - back into its case. Then the box slotted into its place, and the case snapped shut with surprising ease. Just in time, too. His uncle appeared at the door of his bedroom, an impatient scowl firmly in place. Apparently not even the prospect of being legally allowed to deport Harry to another continent could make him hide his dislike.
"You ready, boy?"
With a final, brief look around the room, Harry nodded tersely and dragged his suitcase off the bed. Next stop, Salem Center.