Player Information
Name: Ann
Age: 21
AIM SN: chatonai
email: chatonai @ gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? yes
Currrently Played Characters: n/a
Conditional: Activity Check Link: n/a
Character Information
General
Canon Source: The Dresden Files
Canon Format: Books
Character's Name: The Archive / Ivy
Character's Age: The Archive is a magical entity of unknown age, but very old, the current host, however, is an eleven-year old child.
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played. The Archive is an incredibly strong entity with almost unlimited knowledge. Despite the age of the host, she could certainly survive in the most hostile setting, though in her canon, she hires a bodyguard, because her feet don’t reach the pedals of a car. If she has the means, she might hire one again in Siren’s Port, but she certainly doesn’t need one to survive in the setting.
What form will your character's NV take? A little magical paper-journal. Words will appear in it, voices will sound from it and video images or holographs might appear on its pages.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities:
The Archive is a repository of knowledge. The living memory of humankind. It knows and understands every single thing that has ever been written down, all human wisdom in its world and everything that happened to all hosts before the current, including feelings and thoughts. It knows about culture, science, philosophy, lore and tradition. It accumulates what is written and spoken. It studies and learns. Its purpose is to procure and preserve knowledge. The Archive is as strong as the strongest wizard, having vast amounts of magical power at its disposal and the knowledge to wield it with finesse. However, it only makes use of this power when there is no other choice, such as when its host is attacked by eight Denarians at the same time.
All the same, one has to keep in mind that currently, the Archive is an eleven-year old girl and the physical limitations of that apply.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? n/a
Weapons: none except for her magic and her knowledge
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History:
The Archive as an entity has been around for about five thousand years.
When Harry Dresden (and thus the reader of the books) first meet the Archive, she is a seven years old (Death Masks) and serves as the arbiter in the duel between Harry Dresden and Don Paolo Ortega, a vampire. Before this time, she went solely by the name of the Archive, but Harry gives her the nickname Ivy. She reveals to Harry that she’s been the Archive since her birth. The Archive is normally passed down from mother to daughter each generation when the daughter is about thirty, has her own children and is emotionally somewhat better equipped to have five thousand years worth of knowledge as well as the perfect memory of each previous host’s lifetime suddenly dumped in their brain. However, the grandmother of the current Archive died in an accident - something very rare, since it is the Archive’s nature to protect its hosts and given its enormous knowledge and power, it is very good at protecting its hosts - and Ivy’s mother wasn’t in any emotional state to deal with the burden of the Archive - she was young and in love, pregnant with Ivy. She hated her mother for dying, condemning her to a lifetime of being the Archive, and she hated her daughter for having freedom ahead of her. So instead of dealing, Ivy’s mother killed herself, leaving Ivy to inherit the Archive. With the perfect memory of the Archive that Ivy has thus also comes the knowledge of what her mother felt for her.
It’s unknown who “raised” Ivy. There is little known about Ivy’s life before she met Harry Dresden, and little about how she usually spends her time, barring the unusual circumstances Harry always ends up in. Fact is that Kincaid has been working for her for a long time. He worked for her grandmother as well, and Ivy’s mother confided him into her troubles. Ivy has remained emotionally distant her whole life, possibly because it is the only way in which she won’t be overwhelmed by the situation, by being the Archive - a burden that has been known to drive people better equipped for it than a young child insane, which is why the Archive began becoming so distant in the first place - to keep its hosts sane.
In Small Favour, Ivy is kidnapped by Nicodemus and the Denarians. They plan on torturing her into accepting one of the coins, making her one of them and effectively bringing all her power and knowledge under their control. In how far she actually is tortured is not revealed (all she says is “They did things to me”), but when Harry and others coming to her rescue find her, she is hung in a magical circle designed to keep her powers contained, naked. Her body is bruised and scratched and she is half unconscious from the cold. After these events, Ivy is kept asleep by the wardens until either Harry or Kincaid arrives - the wardens are worried what will happen if she wakes, scared and confused, without a familiar figure there. All the same, the wardens are also worried about the fact that there is someone who could be defined as familiar to Ivy, someone who’d be able to calm her, someone she trusts, since she’s supposed to be distant and emotionally remote so as not to endanger her sanity. They’re worried that if Ivy snaps, due to her unique circumstances she would be able to overcome the fact that the Archive was designed to be neutral. “Imagine the results of the anger and bitterness and desire for revenge of all those lifetimes, combined with the power of the Archive and the restraint of a twelve-year-old child,” Luccio tells Harry, drawing a fairly accurate image of what could happen.
In the aftermath of Small Favour, Ivy cries herself to sleep in Harry’s arms and settles down a little more when Kincaid arrives.
Point in Canon: A few weeks after Small Favor
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: n/a
Character Personality:
The Archive is a neutral entity of knowledge and as such, doesn't take sides. In history, the huge amount of knowledge combined with the memory of all personal emotion of the former hosts has been known to drive the hosts mad. In order to avoid this, the Archive keeps its hosts emotionally remote.
Thus, the Archive in its current form appears to be distant, aloof, earnest and quite formal.
At the same time, the current host (from now on called Ivy), is a little girl who came to inherit the power of the Archive at an unusually young age. Ivy shows childlike character traits such as liking and being drawn to cute animals and drawing up formal documents in crayon.
She's a child. She is eleven years old and she's mostly alone. She might be very mature for her age, but she's nevertheless a child.
Harry Dresden is the only one who has treated her like a child as opposed to a "human databank", giving her the nickname Ivy (Archive, Archive-y, Ivy) and letting her pet his cat, Mister. She's rather attached to him.
The other person she shows an emotional attachement to is Kincaid, her bodyguard/babysitter/driver. She puts herself in harm's way rather than seeing him hurt. He seems to be some sort of a paternal figure for her, though she doesn't forget that he is a mercenary and hired to work for her.
Ivy's case is different from that of the other hosts before her. Since she hasn't learnt how to deal with the emotional aspects of day-to-day life before inheriting the Archive, people are worried that she might lose the Archive's neutrality and let her human feelings take over. This hasn't happened (yet?).
Due to the unusual circumstances of her inheriting the Archive, her young age and the recent trauma of being kidnapped by Nicodemus, Ivy is somewhat emotionally fragile. In addition to that, she remembers everything her mother ever felt about her - and her mother hated her, hated the very idea of her.
Ivy's been through a lot of pain in her young life. She's learnt to compartmentalise and to differentiate between her official position as the Archive and her actual human life. Yet, she never had a real childhood and never will.
Her duties as the Archive include being the referee at supernatural duels and as such, she's seen death and ordered Kincaid to kill as well. She can be cold-blooded when her duties demand it, but underneath it all, she's just a little child. She gets scared and she's afraid. She knows she'll never live a normal life.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game: n/a
Character Plans:
I decided to app Ivy at Siren’s Pull because she is a neutral entity and there’s even been some suggestion in canon that she can’t not be neutral, something that could be fun to play off in a game with such strong opposing sides. I could easily see either side trying to abuse her knowledge, though I’m not 100% sure I’d like for that to happen.
Job-wise, she would make a very good Greeter.
As for the issue of info-modding: while the potential is certainly there and I would love for her to have access to all of the network, including the secret plotting communities, the Archive would never and might not even be able to use the knowledge gained. The Archive’s just there to preserve knowledge, not use or distribute it in any way, so there won’t be any info-modding.
Appearance/PB: Elle Fanning.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
This is not the Nevernever. I am not familiar with this place. Kincaid-- no, Kincaid is not here. It is troublesome that I was not aware of the existence of this place previously.
Siren’s Port, correct?
I’m scared.
Third Person Sample
The Archive looked around, trying to match what she saw with her knowledge, but she came up blank. No building plans, no maps, nothing that she could draw from. This place didn't exist in her memory.
That was unsettling. She was used to remembering everything, she was used to knowledge and this sudden lack of it confused and worried her.
She still remembered everything else, though. Even the feelings of hatred her mother had harboured against her. Her expression darkened before she caught herself. It was ironic, though. Her mother had begrudged her the freedom of growing up without the Archive and then promptly taken that freedom from her. So why did she still have to feel her mother's hatred now?
Ivy took a deep breath to clear her head of those thoughts. It wasn't wise to get hung up on emotions, she knew that. It was hard sometimes, but she never forgot. She literally couldn't, after all.
She didn't know what to do and that was even more unsettling. She was scared. Kincaid wasn't around and she didn't know where he was, either. While technically, she knew she didn't need him to protect her, she'd grown used to his presence and missed him.
It was scary here. The fact that she was sore and dizzy didn’t help, either, and that she found herself in the centre of a baseball oval with no actual knowledge of how she had arrived here made it worse. There was a number of signs pointing into various directions, telling newcomers to go this or that way. Many of them included curse words and Ivy reflexively looked away. Such language was not appropriate for a child her age.
Ivy gasped softly when suddenly, new sets of memories were added to the already existing ones. She remembered other people arriving in this place and that communication took place via the NetVice. She remembered the information people had recorded. That calmed her down somewhat. At least now she knew where she was, even though some of the records she found were indicators of things she did not find the least bit comforting.
Ivy bit down on her lip, considering her options. She would make a post on the network, she decided, and ask for help. She'd find a place to stay before darkness would fall and the monsters came out, even though she knew she would be able to defend herself. Safety and shelter had to have priority. She would sort out everything else in the morning.