app for scorched!
Out of Character Information
player name: Bree
player livejournal: angelcallie
playing here: Riza Hawkeye, Deneve, Yachiru Kusajishi
where did you find us? the yellow pages
are you 16 years of age or older?: yupper, that’s a roger.
In Character Information
character name: Verity Kindle
Fandom: Connie Willis’ novel To Say Nothing of the Dog
Timeline: The end of the novel
character's age: Early/mid 20s, 23 at a guess.
powers, skills, pets and equipment: Welp. She’s really just a normal girl. She has some detectivey skills, she’s extremely intelligent, and she is an accomplished historian. She’s good at taking charge and organizing, as well as misdirecting people’s attention and thinking on her feet. She’s clever and adaptable and has read entirely too many old detective novels. She is not going to be doing much fighting, but she won’t really be panicking either. I mean, she’s been in a burning cathedral while the Luftwaffe were dropping bombs on the roof, so she’s made of pretty tough stuff for a ‘normal.’ She has some very basic fencing and shooting skills and self-defense skills and she is willing to learn just about anything.
As for pets, she will also be bringing her cat, Penwiper, to Anatole, much to the inevitable dismay of Mr Dunworthy, Finch, and the cloning department at Oxford University.
canon history:
Verity is an English girl, well-educated and intelligent. Born probably somewhere around the year 2034 and into a family of some privilege, she went through primary and secondary school always at or near the top of her class. As an undergraduate at Oxford’s Balliol College, she majored in history and aquitted herself as well there as in any earlier stage of her academic life, putting her in the running for the graduate program for historians. Balliol’s history department, by 2057 when Verity is there as an established graduate student and historian, contains a well-developed time travel sub-department. The time machine, which consists of a network of super computers and a veil and is called “the net” by its users, is only available to graduate students on assignment or resident history professors due to the possible dangers of destroying the time-space continuum. Verity’s original assignment was 1930s Britain where there was apparently nothing better to do than read Dorothy Sayers detective novels. But Verity didn’t last long in that assignment.
The department was inexplicably hijacked by a pushy American millionaire named Lady Shrapnell who took the liberty of pulling out and reassigning every active historian the history department had (and then some). So Verity was sent instead to 1888 with instructions to find and read the diary of one Tocelyn “Tossie” Merring, a vapid ancestor to Lady Shrapnell whose life-changing experience with the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Coventry cathedral lead to the Lady’s crusade to reconstruct the church exactly as it had been, no matter how many historians had to get dropped in mallows fields and chased by dogs and horribly time lagged to do it.
While attempting to fulfill her mission, Verity at one point witnessed the Merring’s butler, Baine, throwing Tossie’s cat Princess Arjumand into the Thames, presumably to drown her. Verity could not allow such a crime to go uncorrected and promptly jumped into the river to rescue the cat, sparing nary a thought for the propriety of a Victorian lady. In an effort to hide her impulsiveness from the judgmental contemporaries, she slipped into the gazebo which housed the net’s opening and, still in possession of the cat, accidentally passed through back to Oxford 2057. At that moment, the cat became an incongruity which, from the perspective of the history department and the net technicians, had the potential to destroy the entirety of the space-time continuum.
She was reprimanded by the department chair, James Dunworthy, and sent back to 1888 without her supper (or the cat, who had been handed off into the unknowing care of a very time-lagged historian named Ned Henry, whose ridiculous crooked mustache and jaunty boater had Verity found immediately irresistible. Which, frankly, annoyed her at first.)
Several misadventures with drowning Oxford professors, excessive “keep off the everything” signs, swans on the warpath, and strange utensils (to say nothing of the dog) later, Ned was able to finally return Princess Arjumand to her home at Muchings End (were Verity was waiting, afraid that future Oxford had sent Ned not to return the cat but to drown her), though not without appearing at just the right moment during a séance to cause Mrs Merring to fall into a dead faint and then proclaim the very much alive Princess Arjumand quite deceased. But of course, correcting the one incongruity of the cat caused a handful of others, not the least of which being the sudden engagement of Ned’s travelling companion, Terrence St Trewes, to Tossie, both of whom were supposed to be historically destined for someone else. The effort to correct this second, larger incongruity involved even more effort, as well as jumble sales, tittering posies, séances and sugared violet tins, and endlessly asking every eligible (and not so eligible) male they encountered if his last name began with a C.
But of course the continuum is infinitely more complex and simple than anyone who is merely one of its components can understand. It had plans set in motion long before 1880 or 2057 to correct for an earlier incongruity that the time travel department was not even aware of. Revolving, of course, around the Bishop’s Bird Stump, that elusive and hideous footed figureal urn in Coventry Cathedral the night it was destroyed. So the continuum removed Verity from 1888 while it self-corrected, dropping her into the bombing of the same cathedral she and the whole history department were working to reconstruct, though she had thought that she was returning to 2057. Needless to say, she was a little confused (not to mention surrounded by fire and exploding incendiaries) but Ned came after her (through a drop point not surrounded by fire) and they were able to get back to Oxford (2057) to solve the mystery of the Bishop’s bird stump, get the vase where it belonged, be given a kitten and get engaged to one another just in time for the consecration of Lady Shrapnell’s new Coventry Cathedral (in Oxford).
personality:
Verity is smart, even without the information implants and subliminals to aid her, she picks things up very quickly. That’s part of the reason why she was so well suited to taking the long-term undercover mission at the Merring’s house. She is good at assimilating herself. Added to that, she’s adaptable and can think on her feet very well. Even time-lagged (which is a state, like extreme exhaustion or sleep deprivation, historians get in when they make too many jumps from one time to another) she’s a good actress, able to pick up hints and cues and run with them quite easily.
She can be fiery, too, like any good redhead. She has a strong sense of right and wrong and when she sees something that goes against what she considers to be right she will often leap to correct it, sometimes without really thinking of the more long-term consequences of her actions. This can make her a bit impulsive from time to time. She isn’t really afraid to chew people out for doing things she thinks are wrong, but in those situations she luckily usually has enough common sense to consider first who she is talking to and in what social context so as to save herself from giving lectures on subjects that would be better served by simply taking action on her own.
She is kind and compassionate as well as a professed lover of animals, cats and bulldogs in particular, and can be rather soft-hearted at times. When dealing with emotional situations it is not unusual for her to cry. She is also prone to blaming herself and becoming slightly depressive if she is stuck in a situation she can’t get out of, particularly if it affects others and really is her own fault. But she can be light and funny, too. She has a mischievous side that enjoys teasing and she has a good, if occasionally perverse sense of humor. She also reacts to things like sleep deprivation or alcohol or caffeine in a slightly manic fashion, prone to babbling and taking liberties with other people’s food and drink.
As far as dealing with people, she isn’t exactly a people person but she knows how to work around people’s issues and work herself into the tableau inconspicuously. Occasionally she makes snap judgments of people which are not always right and often fueled by a bad first impression. But she makes up for it by being open-minded and reasonable and having an enormous well of patience when it comes to dealing with people who are extremely annoying or trying, even for long periods of time.
why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting?
Although she has no powers or special strengths that would really help her with fighting, she is smart and adaptable and would be able to fit herself well into Anatolian daily life, especially given her training as a historian. She probably has some knowledge of fencing and defending herself from normal people, but she is always willing to learn so she won’t end up being the damsel in distress. She will also very likely come to find the place and it’s mish-mash of people extremely fascinating and have a lot of well-educated ideas on how to help the scorched and the natives live in harmony.