app for pradeda
Your Name: Sarah
Contact: valentinite@plurk, AIM:valentinitesarah, email: valentinite @lj, or PM any of my journals, including this one.
LiveJournal: valentinite
Timezone: Eastern USA
Do you have other characters in this game? No.
Character
Name: Rose Lalonde
Fandom: Homestuck
Age: 13
Physical description: Rose is an average-height 13 year old girl, in the sort of gawky stage at the beginning of puberty, where she's started getting taller but hasn't filled out at all. She has short blonde hair cut in a pixie haircut, purple eyes, and a very feminine face -- full lips, long eyelashes, perfectly shaped thin eyebrows.
Background: Rose's page on the MSPA Wiki
Point in Story: Just after this conversation with Kanaya, when she is preparing to blow up the Green Sun.
Personality:
All of her life, Rose's role model for adulthood is her mother, who is aloof, passive-aggressive, but does deeply love her daughter. In fact, all of the adults she meets (so far) are nigh-faceless authority figures. (Or quite literally faceless, in the case of Doc Scratch). Adults lie, distort the truth, and are generally sarcastic. She takes this model and emulates it. Homestuck is, apocalypses and sloppy troll makeouts aside, a coming-of-age story, and Rose's journey towards adulthood is part of it.
She often feels the need to deny things she loves to avoid seeming sentimental or juvenile -- she really loves wizard stories, but she pretends to hate them; she loves her cat Jaspers and is sad when he dies, and she's also implied to care more about the pony Maplehoof that her mom got her than she outwardly shows. The same is true of her love for her mother; their relationship is outwardly founded on trying to ignore each other except for sarcastic, over-the-top statements of affection. For example, Rose drew a picture of her cat Jaspers when she was a small child. Her mom bought a $15,000 frame for it and hung it on the fridge, enshrining her terrible kid-artwork and love for her cat forever. (Or at least until the end of the universe, which will likely be very soon.)
She isn't in the slightest bit above playing dirty when necessary -- she harasses John and Dave into playing Sburb with her. Once set up as John's server player, she pretty much completely ignores his suggestions and does what she wants, although she does help keep him from getting killed by imps and other enemies when necessary.
She can be extremely secretive -- the first time we see her in person, we get a brief description and then watch her hide both a purple package (which turns out to contain John's half-finished birthday present) and then hide her writing journals. She can also seem callous at times, though she tries not to do so visibly. Just after hiding both package and journal, she pulls out her violin and plays a tune while John is in mortal peril. Later, she admits to Jade that she was ignoring Pesterchum messages from the other kids at times, because Jade calls her on it after gaining the ability to see whatever people are doing, and sees that Rose is sitting at her computer ignoring Jade's message.
At the same time, she enjoys being a know-it-all -- she gloats over different things in her first two conversations with John. First, that she knows him well enough to know he's wearing a ridiculous disguise, and second, that she knows what his birthday present from Dave is, despite never explaining directly why she knows. This also explains why she enjoys writing FAQs -- while she sometimes gets annoyed at the other kids when they don't know things that seem obvious to her, she also enjoys teaching people things.
She has an unusual attitude towards money; after all the ironic battles with her mother, she tends to think of expensive things as relatively worthless, and free items as being without value. When talking about items in Sburb early on, she says "According to the Atheneum, it is a free item. This speaks to its importance, in my view." She is right, but other important items are expensive in-game, and she tends to dismiss price as a concern while playing unless she can't actually build what she wants at that moment. Her birthday gift to John is hand-knitted, and she claims it is entirely a facetious sentimental gesture, but even as it is ironic it is a sentimental gesture; she just doesn't show sentiment in any other way.
She has a multi-fold approach to challenges -- the first step is straightforward. She does whatever is simplest, like running up to the top of her house to get a better wireless signal, or pulling up GameFAQs and looking for a Sburb walkthrough. The second is still straightforward; in the absence of a decent walkthrough, she'll write one herself, in fairly clear detail. She doesn't let sentiment stop her -- she kicks Jaspers coffin off its plinth to set up her laptop by the emergency generator, without the embalmed dead cat bothering her at all.
The third prong is the leap of faith, into the darkness. She does this repeatedly, and this is what her symbolic object is for entry into Sburb -- a bottle, which ends up falling off the house. She jumps, grabs it, and is in turn rescued by Jaspers' ghost. Earlier, she's rescued from fire by her mom, and it is implied that John will rescue her from her turn to grimdarkness, although this has not yet occurred. She goes from methodically dissecting the game as a normal player to planning to blow up major game constructs, hacking planets apart.
She likes to mimic people, in a way that varies between mockery and affection depending on who she's talking to. She raps at Dave, she joins in fish puns with Eridan, and she has a not-so-disguised love of melodrama.
Finally, she's thirteen, and can sometimes be a bit silly. Whether it's a refrigerator magnet as a fake mustache, or alchemizing the same magnet along with some of her mother's vodka to make magnetic vodka for absolutely no reason except that it is funny, she does have an age-appropriate sense of humor. She just tends to only let it out when she thinks no one is watching.
Powers/Abilities:
Sylladex: All Homestuck characters carry their equipment in a sylladex, which is an RPG-like storage system with various limits on what they can carry but also much more capacity than a normal person. The sylladexes are acknowledged by the characters and discussed, however -- it's not like a cargo system in a game that is just for player convenience. Each sylladex has a particular modus as to how stuff is added and removed from what is effectively hammerspace. At the start of the comic, they can't carry any individual object larger than one they could carry themselves, and they have a limit on the maximum number of items. Rose never hits her item limit, so we don't see what it is; the most we see her carry is eight items, although she's not worried about space at that point, so it likely carries at least a few more. The first few moduses we see are all basic programming data structures (although more ridiculous ones turn up later). Rose's modus is a tree structure, where all of the items are arranged hanging from a root object. If she grabs the root object out of the tree, everything in her sylladex spills out on the ground. As the characters get stronger, their sylladexes expand or are upgraded. However, Rose often prefers to have her salamander familiar, Vicery Bubbles von Salamancer, carry things for her rather than fussing with her sylladex, and hasn't visibly upgraded it aside from making it a little less annoying.
Strife Specibus: The strife specibus is how each character's weapon is specified, and is created the first time they try to wield something. Hers is needlekind, from wielding her knitting needles. Later, she creates needlewands and the Thorns of Ogoloth. These are basically magic wands, but they still fit the original specibus. Specibuses can be taken from defeated enemies (or friends), and characters can have more than one; there is not yet concrete evidence whether or not they can be voluntarily exchanged. Rose only has needlekind.
Her needlewands shoot fire, electricity, and dark energy. She assumes the magic comes from the needlewands themselves, but Doc Scratch later claims it comes from her. Looking closely, tiny sparks and flames can be seen even when she is attacking with her knitting needles; she just didn't notice it at the time.
The specibuses come with a downside; a character cannot use a weapon that does not fit their specibus. Rose quite literally cannot shoot a gun if one is placed in front of her.
Both the sylladex and strife specibus are seen as normal traits for people in the Homestuck universes.
Sight - crystal ball: As for character-specific abilities, Rose is a Seer, and can use magic. She has two magic balls -- the first is a crystal ball, which allows her to look in on any person and any location. She must have the crystal ball to do this, and she doesn't tend to snoop. On the Pradeda, she will only do it with explicit permission from the other player.
Sight - cue ball: The other is a magic cue ball, which is like a Magic 8-Ball without the window. If she asks the right questions, it is always correct, though it can still be quite cryptic. So far in the comic, she has only used the cue ball twice, after Doc Scratch tipped her off as to how it works. This hasn't occurred at the point where she was taken, though she has the cue ball and the power. She will be able to figure it out without Doc Scratch's advice, especially if she discusses it with her canonmates. The cue ball cannot give her information she doesn't at least suspect -- it can only reinforce her instincts. As an example, with the ship-anagram name puzzle, it could solve the anagram slightly faster than she could with paper and pencil, but only if she had already realized that she should try anagramming the name.
Dreamself: Rose is a Derse dreamer, which means that, for her entire life, her dreams have been filled with the whispers of the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors, eldrich creatures à la H.P. Lovecraft that have been crying for help into the dreams of half of the Sburb players. Until well after the game begins, Rose is not consciously aware of this. Given that they are entirely cut off from their home universes, her dreams will no longer be filled with whispers. The only lingering effect is that she and her canonmates (human and troll) can converse in dreams which both remember upon waking. The other effect having a dreamself gives is one "extra life", but this will not work on the Pradeda.
Flight: Rose can fly and hover midair.
Non-magical: She's good at video games for a 13-year-old, terrible (but enthusiastic) at creative writing (matching her IM text, her prose is purple), and she's a very good knitter for someone who'd only learned to knit a few months ago. She is fairly athletic -- she rolls and dodges easily, and as soon as she enters the Medium she kills an Ogre (the second tier of enemies) with just knitting needles and some yarn. And finally, she has a massive vocabulary, but often talks more like she swallowed a thesaurus than incorporating it smoothly into her speech.
Items you're bringing with you:
* The Thorns of Ogoloth, which are a pair of black and white magic wands, and shoot dark energy.
* A headband computer/visor
* A green laptop, with self-contained power supply and knitted cozy
* A black dress and pink belt/scarf
* A Grimoire
* One magic crystal ball
* One magic cue ball
* One entirely unmagical set of knitting needles and bag of yarn
The laptop and headband computer may or may not be compatible with ship's systems.
Samples
First Person POV (Network Post):
[Anyone in the entertainment room can see Rose, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor, with a bright green laptop on her lap. She types furiously for a bit, and then pokes at the touchpad several times in increasing frustration. Finally, she switches on her communicator.]
Has anyone had any luck making a call? As in to somewhere outside this tin can. Anywhere would be a start.
You see, I'd love to stay and chat. Maybe over a nice cup of rehydrated tea and cookies, but I have some pressing matters to attend to.
You must know the sort. End of the world, the culmination of the battle between light and dark that has raged since the universe was merely a babe in swaddling tachyon particles. My universe, that is. I'm not so sure about this one.
[She pauses, and then adds, in a very serious business voice:]
I need to see a man about a dog.
Third Person POV (Log Post):
The lights in the crew section had been flickering for several hours. They made one valiant leap towards illumination, and then the room was plunged into darkness.
A number of people were shouting and crashing around in the dark, like they were unfamiliar with the concept of a power outage. As if, in fact, this was not an event which had been occurring with alarming frequency, and showed all evidence of continuing to occur with greater or equal frequency.
Rose was not alarmed. There were several hours before even total life support systems collapse would degrade the air too badly to breathe, and she had a plan for that, if it came to it. More likely it was just another short circuit. She'd prefer not to be the one climbing through endless tunnels in this rat warren they called a ship. There were people here shorter than her. Really. Not very many, but it was someone else's turn to plug the lights back in.
Oh, who was she kidding. If she wanted it done properly, she was going to end up doing it herself. If it came to that.
Hmm. It wouldn't hurt to put the first of her contingency plans into action. She opened a chat window and clicked on a familiar name. Depending on other people was always the weakest link. "Egbert. I hope this message finds you in an expedient fashion. There's something I need you to do."
Contact: valentinite@plurk, AIM:valentinitesarah, email: valentinite @lj, or PM any of my journals, including this one.
LiveJournal: valentinite
Timezone: Eastern USA
Do you have other characters in this game? No.
Character
Name: Rose Lalonde
Fandom: Homestuck
Age: 13
Physical description: Rose is an average-height 13 year old girl, in the sort of gawky stage at the beginning of puberty, where she's started getting taller but hasn't filled out at all. She has short blonde hair cut in a pixie haircut, purple eyes, and a very feminine face -- full lips, long eyelashes, perfectly shaped thin eyebrows.
Background: Rose's page on the MSPA Wiki
Point in Story: Just after this conversation with Kanaya, when she is preparing to blow up the Green Sun.
Personality:
All of her life, Rose's role model for adulthood is her mother, who is aloof, passive-aggressive, but does deeply love her daughter. In fact, all of the adults she meets (so far) are nigh-faceless authority figures. (Or quite literally faceless, in the case of Doc Scratch). Adults lie, distort the truth, and are generally sarcastic. She takes this model and emulates it. Homestuck is, apocalypses and sloppy troll makeouts aside, a coming-of-age story, and Rose's journey towards adulthood is part of it.
She often feels the need to deny things she loves to avoid seeming sentimental or juvenile -- she really loves wizard stories, but she pretends to hate them; she loves her cat Jaspers and is sad when he dies, and she's also implied to care more about the pony Maplehoof that her mom got her than she outwardly shows. The same is true of her love for her mother; their relationship is outwardly founded on trying to ignore each other except for sarcastic, over-the-top statements of affection. For example, Rose drew a picture of her cat Jaspers when she was a small child. Her mom bought a $15,000 frame for it and hung it on the fridge, enshrining her terrible kid-artwork and love for her cat forever. (Or at least until the end of the universe, which will likely be very soon.)
She isn't in the slightest bit above playing dirty when necessary -- she harasses John and Dave into playing Sburb with her. Once set up as John's server player, she pretty much completely ignores his suggestions and does what she wants, although she does help keep him from getting killed by imps and other enemies when necessary.
She can be extremely secretive -- the first time we see her in person, we get a brief description and then watch her hide both a purple package (which turns out to contain John's half-finished birthday present) and then hide her writing journals. She can also seem callous at times, though she tries not to do so visibly. Just after hiding both package and journal, she pulls out her violin and plays a tune while John is in mortal peril. Later, she admits to Jade that she was ignoring Pesterchum messages from the other kids at times, because Jade calls her on it after gaining the ability to see whatever people are doing, and sees that Rose is sitting at her computer ignoring Jade's message.
At the same time, she enjoys being a know-it-all -- she gloats over different things in her first two conversations with John. First, that she knows him well enough to know he's wearing a ridiculous disguise, and second, that she knows what his birthday present from Dave is, despite never explaining directly why she knows. This also explains why she enjoys writing FAQs -- while she sometimes gets annoyed at the other kids when they don't know things that seem obvious to her, she also enjoys teaching people things.
She has an unusual attitude towards money; after all the ironic battles with her mother, she tends to think of expensive things as relatively worthless, and free items as being without value. When talking about items in Sburb early on, she says "According to the Atheneum, it is a free item. This speaks to its importance, in my view." She is right, but other important items are expensive in-game, and she tends to dismiss price as a concern while playing unless she can't actually build what she wants at that moment. Her birthday gift to John is hand-knitted, and she claims it is entirely a facetious sentimental gesture, but even as it is ironic it is a sentimental gesture; she just doesn't show sentiment in any other way.
She has a multi-fold approach to challenges -- the first step is straightforward. She does whatever is simplest, like running up to the top of her house to get a better wireless signal, or pulling up GameFAQs and looking for a Sburb walkthrough. The second is still straightforward; in the absence of a decent walkthrough, she'll write one herself, in fairly clear detail. She doesn't let sentiment stop her -- she kicks Jaspers coffin off its plinth to set up her laptop by the emergency generator, without the embalmed dead cat bothering her at all.
The third prong is the leap of faith, into the darkness. She does this repeatedly, and this is what her symbolic object is for entry into Sburb -- a bottle, which ends up falling off the house. She jumps, grabs it, and is in turn rescued by Jaspers' ghost. Earlier, she's rescued from fire by her mom, and it is implied that John will rescue her from her turn to grimdarkness, although this has not yet occurred. She goes from methodically dissecting the game as a normal player to planning to blow up major game constructs, hacking planets apart.
She likes to mimic people, in a way that varies between mockery and affection depending on who she's talking to. She raps at Dave, she joins in fish puns with Eridan, and she has a not-so-disguised love of melodrama.
Finally, she's thirteen, and can sometimes be a bit silly. Whether it's a refrigerator magnet as a fake mustache, or alchemizing the same magnet along with some of her mother's vodka to make magnetic vodka for absolutely no reason except that it is funny, she does have an age-appropriate sense of humor. She just tends to only let it out when she thinks no one is watching.
Powers/Abilities:
Sylladex: All Homestuck characters carry their equipment in a sylladex, which is an RPG-like storage system with various limits on what they can carry but also much more capacity than a normal person. The sylladexes are acknowledged by the characters and discussed, however -- it's not like a cargo system in a game that is just for player convenience. Each sylladex has a particular modus as to how stuff is added and removed from what is effectively hammerspace. At the start of the comic, they can't carry any individual object larger than one they could carry themselves, and they have a limit on the maximum number of items. Rose never hits her item limit, so we don't see what it is; the most we see her carry is eight items, although she's not worried about space at that point, so it likely carries at least a few more. The first few moduses we see are all basic programming data structures (although more ridiculous ones turn up later). Rose's modus is a tree structure, where all of the items are arranged hanging from a root object. If she grabs the root object out of the tree, everything in her sylladex spills out on the ground. As the characters get stronger, their sylladexes expand or are upgraded. However, Rose often prefers to have her salamander familiar, Vicery Bubbles von Salamancer, carry things for her rather than fussing with her sylladex, and hasn't visibly upgraded it aside from making it a little less annoying.
Strife Specibus: The strife specibus is how each character's weapon is specified, and is created the first time they try to wield something. Hers is needlekind, from wielding her knitting needles. Later, she creates needlewands and the Thorns of Ogoloth. These are basically magic wands, but they still fit the original specibus. Specibuses can be taken from defeated enemies (or friends), and characters can have more than one; there is not yet concrete evidence whether or not they can be voluntarily exchanged. Rose only has needlekind.
Her needlewands shoot fire, electricity, and dark energy. She assumes the magic comes from the needlewands themselves, but Doc Scratch later claims it comes from her. Looking closely, tiny sparks and flames can be seen even when she is attacking with her knitting needles; she just didn't notice it at the time.
The specibuses come with a downside; a character cannot use a weapon that does not fit their specibus. Rose quite literally cannot shoot a gun if one is placed in front of her.
Both the sylladex and strife specibus are seen as normal traits for people in the Homestuck universes.
Sight - crystal ball: As for character-specific abilities, Rose is a Seer, and can use magic. She has two magic balls -- the first is a crystal ball, which allows her to look in on any person and any location. She must have the crystal ball to do this, and she doesn't tend to snoop. On the Pradeda, she will only do it with explicit permission from the other player.
Sight - cue ball: The other is a magic cue ball, which is like a Magic 8-Ball without the window. If she asks the right questions, it is always correct, though it can still be quite cryptic. So far in the comic, she has only used the cue ball twice, after Doc Scratch tipped her off as to how it works. This hasn't occurred at the point where she was taken, though she has the cue ball and the power. She will be able to figure it out without Doc Scratch's advice, especially if she discusses it with her canonmates. The cue ball cannot give her information she doesn't at least suspect -- it can only reinforce her instincts. As an example, with the ship-anagram name puzzle, it could solve the anagram slightly faster than she could with paper and pencil, but only if she had already realized that she should try anagramming the name.
Dreamself: Rose is a Derse dreamer, which means that, for her entire life, her dreams have been filled with the whispers of the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors, eldrich creatures à la H.P. Lovecraft that have been crying for help into the dreams of half of the Sburb players. Until well after the game begins, Rose is not consciously aware of this. Given that they are entirely cut off from their home universes, her dreams will no longer be filled with whispers. The only lingering effect is that she and her canonmates (human and troll) can converse in dreams which both remember upon waking. The other effect having a dreamself gives is one "extra life", but this will not work on the Pradeda.
Flight: Rose can fly and hover midair.
Non-magical: She's good at video games for a 13-year-old, terrible (but enthusiastic) at creative writing (matching her IM text, her prose is purple), and she's a very good knitter for someone who'd only learned to knit a few months ago. She is fairly athletic -- she rolls and dodges easily, and as soon as she enters the Medium she kills an Ogre (the second tier of enemies) with just knitting needles and some yarn. And finally, she has a massive vocabulary, but often talks more like she swallowed a thesaurus than incorporating it smoothly into her speech.
Items you're bringing with you:
* The Thorns of Ogoloth, which are a pair of black and white magic wands, and shoot dark energy.
* A headband computer/visor
* A green laptop, with self-contained power supply and knitted cozy
* A black dress and pink belt/scarf
* A Grimoire
* One magic crystal ball
* One magic cue ball
* One entirely unmagical set of knitting needles and bag of yarn
The laptop and headband computer may or may not be compatible with ship's systems.
Samples
First Person POV (Network Post):
[Anyone in the entertainment room can see Rose, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor, with a bright green laptop on her lap. She types furiously for a bit, and then pokes at the touchpad several times in increasing frustration. Finally, she switches on her communicator.]
Has anyone had any luck making a call? As in to somewhere outside this tin can. Anywhere would be a start.
You see, I'd love to stay and chat. Maybe over a nice cup of rehydrated tea and cookies, but I have some pressing matters to attend to.
You must know the sort. End of the world, the culmination of the battle between light and dark that has raged since the universe was merely a babe in swaddling tachyon particles. My universe, that is. I'm not so sure about this one.
[She pauses, and then adds, in a very serious business voice:]
I need to see a man about a dog.
Third Person POV (Log Post):
The lights in the crew section had been flickering for several hours. They made one valiant leap towards illumination, and then the room was plunged into darkness.
A number of people were shouting and crashing around in the dark, like they were unfamiliar with the concept of a power outage. As if, in fact, this was not an event which had been occurring with alarming frequency, and showed all evidence of continuing to occur with greater or equal frequency.
Rose was not alarmed. There were several hours before even total life support systems collapse would degrade the air too badly to breathe, and she had a plan for that, if it came to it. More likely it was just another short circuit. She'd prefer not to be the one climbing through endless tunnels in this rat warren they called a ship. There were people here shorter than her. Really. Not very many, but it was someone else's turn to plug the lights back in.
Oh, who was she kidding. If she wanted it done properly, she was going to end up doing it herself. If it came to that.
Hmm. It wouldn't hurt to put the first of her contingency plans into action. She opened a chat window and clicked on a familiar name. Depending on other people was always the weakest link. "Egbert. I hope this message finds you in an expedient fashion. There's something I need you to do."