Application
About You
Name: Seldon
Personal LJ: raven_seldon
E-mail: seldon7549@gmail.com
AIM/MSN/YIM: AIM: sora of scathan | MSN: rseldon@live.com
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About Your Character
Name: Detritus
Age: Unknown. Probably somewhere around middle-age-ish.
Gender: Male
Fandom They Come From: Discworld
What part of the storyline are you taking your character from?: After the end of Thud!
Personality:
Sergeant Detritus of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is, above all, a Good Copper. He's unshakeably loyal to his friends and fellow watchmen, dedicated to the thankless task of trying to make Ankh-Morpork a better place, and a good deal wiser, in a slow, straightforward, hard-headed way, than he's often given credit for. And he's very big and very strong and has a natural talent for shouting at people -- all useful in his line of work.
Admittedly, he is -- most of the time -- not one of the city's most intelligent inhabitants. Trolls are not, in general, renowned for their speed of thought, and Detritus has often been considered pretty slow even by troll standards. He was well into adulthood before ever learning to count past two, for example. His vocabulary and reading skills are... spotty at best. And when he first joined the Watch it took him a long time to learn to salute properly -- he couldn't quite get the knack of stopping his hand, or at least slowing it down, before it actually hit his forehead, and as a result he knocked himself unconscious on several occasions.
With that said, those who know him well have (gradually) come to realise that "slow" and "stupid" are not, in fact, quite the same thing. Terry Pratchett, in The Art of Discworld, describes him as in fact being "quite clever in an oblique troll way". He doesn't have much imagination, but he's persistent and hard-working; it may take a long time to get an idea into his brain, but once it's there he doesn't lose it quickly, either. He's almost always slow to anger, and has more than once been a voice of reason in situations that could otherwise have gotten very unpleasant. (With which said, he's not averse to violence, either, in its place -- but he's learned a fair bit of tact in the Watch.) And he's a firm believer in the notion that if he -- who originally joined the Watch only because his girlfriend insisted he find proper work, and he'd been fired from everywhere else for being too thick -- has been able to make something of himself, then there's potential in just about anyone.
As a final note -- Discworld trolls' brains work more efficiently in cold temperatures than in warm, and anyone who's been around Detritus when it's below freezing has found out that there's a hell of a lot of intellectual potential there that usually goes untapped. In cold temperatures, he is a much quicker and sharper creature than usual. His first partner in the Watch, realising this, invented a "thinking cap" for him that has clockwork-powered fans built in to help keep his head cool. While it definitely doesn't get his brain down to genius-level temperatures, it does seem to help him think more clearly.
Link To Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detritus_(Discworld)
How did your character die?: Killed by one of Ankh-Morpork's numerous drug dealers -- Detritus has been crusading against the illegal drug trade in the city's trollish community for years.
What non-magical items did your character have with them before dying?: His armor, his thinking cap, and his modified 2,000-lb draw siege crossbow, the Piecemaker.
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Log and Journal Samples
First Person Sample:
[[OOC: Please note that yes, the grammatical errors are deliberate.]]
Oh-kay. I do not know what t'is is, but it are not Ankh-Morpork.
Dat is a problem.
[long pause]
So. Dere's... lots an'... more than lots'f trees everywhere. An' I got my armor an' my bow, but I don't remember pickin' dem up or puttin' dem on or anyfing. Last t'ing I can recall I was at home goin' to sleep, and now I'm here, an' dat... does not make sense.
[laboriously] So... er... somebody put me here, an' dat doesn't make sense neither, 'cause why'd they go to all dat trouble an' then leave me wit' a weapon an' everyt'ing, right? Stealin' someone away but giving 'em somet'ing to kill you with, dat's not too smart.
...Yeah, unless it are some kinda political fing again. [long, rumbling sigh] Oh, boy. One way or anot'er, though, better get back to der city first t'ing.
Right. Now I jus' gotta find out which way it is.
Third Person Sample:
There wasn't much use, Detritus knew, in worrying about things he didn't understand. There were, after all, a lot of things he didn't understand. If he were to worry about all of them, he wouldn't have time for much else.
This one, however, was worrisome however he looked at it. Detritus was a large troll. Occasionally he had been described as a small mountain. He was a creature made of living rock, weighing several hundred pounds and given to carrying a modified siege crossbow as a hand weapon. He was not, in short, someone that a lot of people were inclined to mess with. And yet he had apparently been spirited out of his home in the night, dropped in a dark, unfamiliar forest, and... left with his armor and a very, very powerful weapon.
He stood and thought about that last for a while, his already craggy forehead creasing further.
Eventually he reached a conclusion. Detritus was not the world's quickest thinker. He had, however, been in the Watch for a long time now, and had seen a lot, and one of the things he'd seen a few times now was that if someone gave you a weapon in a situation like this, they were probably hoping you'd use it. And their reasons for hoping you'd use it probably weren't good ones -- particularly given that the weapon in question, the Piecemaker, was the kind of thing that could probably very easily start a war if fired at the wrong moment. It was more a weapon to have than actually to use.
In other words, this looked an awful lot like the start to some sort of setup. The Ankh-Morpork City Watch had annoyed a lot of people over the years. There was probably someone, somewhere, who would be very happy if a senior sergeant of the Watch turned up someplace he really shouldn't be, shooting at people or things he really shouldn't be shooting at. Particularly when a lot of people still weren't so happy about how the recent Koom Valley situation had turned out.
Just sitting around here didn't look like a very good idea either, though. In such a strange situation it was probably best to get back to Ankh-Morpork and get backup from the Watch as quickly as possible. He'd just have to be careful. Tactful, that was the thing.
He shouldered his bow, set off into the forest, and grinned, diamond teeth gleaming in the stray bits of light that filtered down to the forest floor. He was good at tact.
Name: Seldon
Personal LJ: raven_seldon
E-mail: seldon7549@gmail.com
AIM/MSN/YIM: AIM: sora of scathan | MSN: rseldon@live.com
----------------------
About Your Character
Name: Detritus
Age: Unknown. Probably somewhere around middle-age-ish.
Gender: Male
Fandom They Come From: Discworld
What part of the storyline are you taking your character from?: After the end of Thud!
Personality:
Sergeant Detritus of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is, above all, a Good Copper. He's unshakeably loyal to his friends and fellow watchmen, dedicated to the thankless task of trying to make Ankh-Morpork a better place, and a good deal wiser, in a slow, straightforward, hard-headed way, than he's often given credit for. And he's very big and very strong and has a natural talent for shouting at people -- all useful in his line of work.
Admittedly, he is -- most of the time -- not one of the city's most intelligent inhabitants. Trolls are not, in general, renowned for their speed of thought, and Detritus has often been considered pretty slow even by troll standards. He was well into adulthood before ever learning to count past two, for example. His vocabulary and reading skills are... spotty at best. And when he first joined the Watch it took him a long time to learn to salute properly -- he couldn't quite get the knack of stopping his hand, or at least slowing it down, before it actually hit his forehead, and as a result he knocked himself unconscious on several occasions.
With that said, those who know him well have (gradually) come to realise that "slow" and "stupid" are not, in fact, quite the same thing. Terry Pratchett, in The Art of Discworld, describes him as in fact being "quite clever in an oblique troll way". He doesn't have much imagination, but he's persistent and hard-working; it may take a long time to get an idea into his brain, but once it's there he doesn't lose it quickly, either. He's almost always slow to anger, and has more than once been a voice of reason in situations that could otherwise have gotten very unpleasant. (With which said, he's not averse to violence, either, in its place -- but he's learned a fair bit of tact in the Watch.) And he's a firm believer in the notion that if he -- who originally joined the Watch only because his girlfriend insisted he find proper work, and he'd been fired from everywhere else for being too thick -- has been able to make something of himself, then there's potential in just about anyone.
As a final note -- Discworld trolls' brains work more efficiently in cold temperatures than in warm, and anyone who's been around Detritus when it's below freezing has found out that there's a hell of a lot of intellectual potential there that usually goes untapped. In cold temperatures, he is a much quicker and sharper creature than usual. His first partner in the Watch, realising this, invented a "thinking cap" for him that has clockwork-powered fans built in to help keep his head cool. While it definitely doesn't get his brain down to genius-level temperatures, it does seem to help him think more clearly.
Link To Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detritus_(Discworld)
How did your character die?: Killed by one of Ankh-Morpork's numerous drug dealers -- Detritus has been crusading against the illegal drug trade in the city's trollish community for years.
What non-magical items did your character have with them before dying?: His armor, his thinking cap, and his modified 2,000-lb draw siege crossbow, the Piecemaker.
----------------------
Log and Journal Samples
First Person Sample:
[[OOC: Please note that yes, the grammatical errors are deliberate.]]
Oh-kay. I do not know what t'is is, but it are not Ankh-Morpork.
Dat is a problem.
[long pause]
So. Dere's... lots an'... more than lots'f trees everywhere. An' I got my armor an' my bow, but I don't remember pickin' dem up or puttin' dem on or anyfing. Last t'ing I can recall I was at home goin' to sleep, and now I'm here, an' dat... does not make sense.
[laboriously] So... er... somebody put me here, an' dat doesn't make sense neither, 'cause why'd they go to all dat trouble an' then leave me wit' a weapon an' everyt'ing, right? Stealin' someone away but giving 'em somet'ing to kill you with, dat's not too smart.
...Yeah, unless it are some kinda political fing again. [long, rumbling sigh] Oh, boy. One way or anot'er, though, better get back to der city first t'ing.
Right. Now I jus' gotta find out which way it is.
Third Person Sample:
There wasn't much use, Detritus knew, in worrying about things he didn't understand. There were, after all, a lot of things he didn't understand. If he were to worry about all of them, he wouldn't have time for much else.
This one, however, was worrisome however he looked at it. Detritus was a large troll. Occasionally he had been described as a small mountain. He was a creature made of living rock, weighing several hundred pounds and given to carrying a modified siege crossbow as a hand weapon. He was not, in short, someone that a lot of people were inclined to mess with. And yet he had apparently been spirited out of his home in the night, dropped in a dark, unfamiliar forest, and... left with his armor and a very, very powerful weapon.
He stood and thought about that last for a while, his already craggy forehead creasing further.
Eventually he reached a conclusion. Detritus was not the world's quickest thinker. He had, however, been in the Watch for a long time now, and had seen a lot, and one of the things he'd seen a few times now was that if someone gave you a weapon in a situation like this, they were probably hoping you'd use it. And their reasons for hoping you'd use it probably weren't good ones -- particularly given that the weapon in question, the Piecemaker, was the kind of thing that could probably very easily start a war if fired at the wrong moment. It was more a weapon to have than actually to use.
In other words, this looked an awful lot like the start to some sort of setup. The Ankh-Morpork City Watch had annoyed a lot of people over the years. There was probably someone, somewhere, who would be very happy if a senior sergeant of the Watch turned up someplace he really shouldn't be, shooting at people or things he really shouldn't be shooting at. Particularly when a lot of people still weren't so happy about how the recent Koom Valley situation had turned out.
Just sitting around here didn't look like a very good idea either, though. In such a strange situation it was probably best to get back to Ankh-Morpork and get backup from the Watch as quickly as possible. He'd just have to be careful. Tactful, that was the thing.
He shouldered his bow, set off into the forest, and grinned, diamond teeth gleaming in the stray bits of light that filtered down to the forest floor. He was good at tact.