IN CHARACTER
Intro:
A courtier entered the courtroom of Romadon with great haste. The large marble halls echoed with each hurried foot step. The slender courtier did not have time to relish in the splendor of the crimson and gold hangings, nor the slick, polished armor of the Kings Own Guard. The solders nodded to the courtier, allowing him to approach the throne. He stopped in front of the aging King, Astron the Third, and knelt at his feet. "My Lord, it is as we feared. There is indeed a Shifter in our kingdom, as is the..." He stammered, "The Death Walker, as he is called. Your person is no longer safe."
The King stood abruptly, and scratched his gray beard. "Guards. Apprehend the courtier."
The solders obey without question, placing their halberds at the courtiers neck, though the courtier shot the King a look of surprise. "My Lord?"
"If there is indeed a Shifter in our kingdom, I can not trust anyone, not even you, courtier. Take him away until we can be sure of his identity." The King ordered.
One of the guards placed a hand on the courtiers shoulder, "I'm sorry sir, the King is right. That is, if he knew where the Shifter was... Unfortunately, he is already here."
The guard drug the blade across the courtiers throat, the thick blood spilling down his chest and onto the throne room floor. Several guards swarmed into the throne room to kill the intruder. However, two other people instantly appeared in the center of the room. One wore a gray cloak, and the other wore one deathly black. Before the second guard could react, the black figure placed his hand on the mans face. Instantly the guard screamed in pain, and fell backwards. He writhed on the floor, clutching at his helm. At last he pulled it off, and the other guard recoiled in terror. The mans head was slowly caving in on itself, black cracks of corruption littering his face and skull. At last, the man stopped screaming, though his body continued to collapse, until is was nothing more than empty armor, and charred ash.
"The Death Walker...." One of the men whispered.
The two cloaked figures fell among the remaining retainers like sheep among wolves. The man in gray seemed to blink in and out of existence, and close the gaps between his enemies in an instant. Then his wicked curved blade would end their lives. One of the guards extended his hand to shoot a column of light at the gray figure. It hit the man in the arm, and began to burn away his cloak. He shrieked and began to beat the the magical fire with his free hand, before disappearing. The Death Walker approached from behind, and traced his finger along the guards exposed neck. His life was ended shortly afterward.
Meanwhile, the one called the Shifter advanced on the King, who recoiled and fell back into the throne. Terror was plain on his face.
The Shifter smiled, "My dear King. While you have the Midas Touch, it appears you have nothing to defend yourself with.You can, only transmute plain rock into gold, correct? Well, we shall see."
The Shifter grabbed the Kings shoulders. Nothing happened. After a few seconds, the guard took several paces back and began to sob. The King smiled wickedly, and rose from the Throne. "I like this body. The one I currently had was beginning to get stale. Really now, could you not find better help? Oh well, I shall try to rule better in your place."
The guard, or more accurately King Astron looked up pleadingly "You can not do this! Give me back by body, my life!"
The King motioned to his two minions. The Blinker approached the Death Walker. Very carefully, they touched with gloved hands, and then disappeared. Once they were gone, the Shifter called out, "GUARDS!"
Several more armed men entered the throne room. "Guards, take away this assassin, throw him into the lowest dungeon, but keep him alive for sentencing."
King Aston watched in horror, as another man sat in his body, and stole his crown, his body, and his live.
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The concept:
This world is very very loosely based on the Land of Zanth novels, by some guy I don't know. I never read the books, never looked at them, and never heard about them until about a year ago. The only thing I know, is that in Zanth, everyone is born with a Talent. The talent is instinctual, meaning as you grow, you know what you power is, how to use it, and it's limitations. You are only ever born with one talent, and once a talent is possessed by someone, no other person can have the same talent, ever.
The example used is this. There once was a man who could change the color of his urine. He is the only one with that talent, and no other person will ever have that talent again. It's a crappy talent to be sure, but it is unique.
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Talents:
In this world, talents are often used to denote your status in the world. Commoners can change the color of their pee, have eyes in the backs of their heads, and a useless array of other talents.
Great Kings and Rulers control fire, can turn people into animals by just a thought, and King Astron can turn any rock into pure gold.
All talents have limitations, and certain limitations can give room for similar talents, but not the same. For example. Astron can turn rocks into gold, but not people. A talent may exist where a man can turn people into gold, but nothing else. All talents have certain limitations like this.
Talents featured here are:
King Astron: (Explained)
Shifter: Is able to trade bodies with anyone else by touch.
-Limitation: He must keep the man he has switched places with alive, or die with him. Can not jump to a third body, without going back to his first one.
Death Walker: Kills with just a touch.
-Limitation: The contact must be made with bare skin to bare skin. (This is a very strong talent, used for story purposes.)
Blinker: Teleports himself and anything attached to him to another space instantly.
-Limitation: He must have line of sight to the area in question. (He used windows to get in and out of the throne room, he can still pass through objects). Naturally he can not teleport well in darkness, or in a closed room.
Guard: Creates a beam of light able to light flammable materials on fire.
-Limitation: It is difficult to sustain for long periods of time.
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Profile:
User name:
Character name:
Age:
Gender:
Description: (including weapons and clothes, no pics please, unless you did it yourself)
Personality:
History:
Talent:
Strength: (needs at least one)
Limitation: (needs at least one)
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Rules:
1: Follow all RPG Gateway rules
2: Follow all my rules
3: No godmodding, ect. ect.
4: Be nice to others, no killing unless asked, ect. ect.
5. Be creative
6. Have fun
7. try to have a word count of around 100 per post. Sometimes you just can't do it if you're in combat or a conversation, but give it your best shot.
X. In case I have more, they'll go here.
Oh, and try to all start in or near the same town. I shall name it... Grayhaven. (Damn, names are hard sometimes.)
Once I get accept you, post a short - medium intro in the above town, and I shall progress the plot. If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve this RP, or some plot ideas, please shout me a PM.
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Accepted profiles:
User name: (My username??? Uh... ok) eregthejester
Character name: Jael
Age: 26
Gender: Female
Description: Fiery red hair, rich brown eyes, fair skin, short but strong and fairly built. Fleece tunic, side-laced vest, (that sash thing that goes around the waist/hips), pants, thigh-high soft leather boots. She carries a sword, it's blade covered in a red sheen which she sets afire. She usually carries a powerful recurve bow with a couple dozen arrows.
Personality: When friends are involved, she's a playful puppy. But alone and abroad, secretiveness and unwelcoming glares are what she sheds. Few people know who she really is, and it's likely those who do are dead. Tragedy of war built her a thick shell that allows few in. But inside is another world altogether. Forced to fight her way through life, she desires peace and solace.
History: She once had a family and she was to be given in marriage to a handsome lad. But war fell upon her homeland on her wedding day. Her husband-to-be was killed, as well as her family. Only her brother escaped, to where she knew not. She took her fiancé's strange sword for her own and ran.
Talent: Flame (?)
Strength: Can create and manipulate fire, as well as spread without harm onto herself, her belongings, or other objects.
Limitation: She cannot put out fire without aid unless it is just on herself. She needs water or the likes to undo her work, or else she will just make it worse. Also, if startled, sneezing, coughing, or her dreaming sets her on edge, uncontrolled flames can result.
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User name: --> please see above
- BankruptCharacter name: Sean Adams
Age: 19
Gender: Male
Description: (including weapons and clothes, no pics please, unless you did it yourself)
Sean, unlike some, changes his clothes everyday. It is difficult to generalize what he wears on a day-to-day basis, as his style changes. If he is in a good mood, he will usually pick out something dull, if he is in a bad mood, something brighter will be worn. On his person, he walks around with a hidden dagger, not a sword. He does not weigh much for his size, although he is not skinny, nor fat. He is well built, and has broad shoulders.
Personality: This again, is another difficult thing to explain. He is quite the odd lad. When you get to know him extremely well, you see the insight he has. You see his a philosopher, not a mere bystander. However, at first sight, one sees a loud, obnoxious kid. He laughs loudly, and smiles all the time. It is hard to see that he is often very sad, and just puts on a front.
History: Sean was born into a poor family. He worked hard, though, and did not lose his dignity by begging. As he worked hard, and was never put down, he got hired to work in the king's castle. At first, he did not know what he was getting into, but he soon found out. They were strict. He was not allowed to goof off, or be loud. It was all about respecting the king. He and the king ran into each other once, and forgetting his manners that were taught there, he said, to him, "So you're the one we're supposed to bow to..." The king laughed, and they became friends. He wasn't that old, either.
Talent: Reality Manipulation
Strength: (needs at least one) Sean can change the way people see things. It does not really change the reality of things, but changes the way the effected person sees what is happening. They could believe that someone is behind them, when that person is actually in front of them.
Limitation: (needs at least one) His limitations vary from time-to-time. He must have touched them once before (to sense them), and then be within a 10 meter radius of that person. He never has measured , but has estimated. These limitations aggravate him a lot.
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User name: FuseInsideMyHead
Character name: Michael
Age: 23
Gender: Male
Description: Michael has short, black hair that extends over his ears and to his eyelashes. His eyes are of gold, a distinct trait among his family; But he has something different, only his left eye is gold, his right eye is white...he is blind in his right eye. His body is a very small build: Michael is a short 5'7" and he isn't very muscular at all. Michael's hands and feet are also small compared to most men his age. Michael is usually seen in a grey silk tunic; The reason for the silk is its thickness, the thicker the fabric, the harder time his Soul Strings will have to pass through them and into open air. He is usually seen wearing a pair of fleece jeans, for flexibility and movement. On top of all of his clothing, he loves to wear his favorite black cloak unbuttoned and with no hood. With his apparel, he carries a dirk to assassinate. He keeps his cargo belt full of vials filled with a deadly poison used to wet the tip of his dirk and designed to deliver not a fatal blow, but a blow that will eventually kill the one struck due to the poison.
Personality: Michael is a distant person with a big heart. He doesn't like to be decieved and lied to, which is why he is distant. Michael is a very kind man who has never fell in love or has had anyone fall in love with him, for this reason too, is why he is distant aswell. Since Michaels accident that resulted in his blind eye, he is very very very careful with his Talent and chooses not to use it in repeated sequences.
History: Michael was raised outside of Erodeon in a small hut with only his Mother. His Mother actually adopted him to help her with her tasks at their small hut, such as hunting and helping her tend to the garden and other mundane tasks a sixty-year-old woman has trouble doing. He always enjoyed being around his Mother in the forest where he was raised, he would go out into the forest and explore every day and bring back something for his Mother to cook up in their fire that seemed to never go out(His Mom would always gather firewood). He enjoyed the normal things a teenager enjoyed doing, he liked exploring, climbing trees and rocks, swimming, and hunting.
When Michael turned twenty, his Mother asked him to go and catch and kill a boar, because they would be having company over. He lurked fearlessly into the forest as he did every day since he was just fourteen with only his bow and his dirk to defend himself with.
Later that evening, he returned with the seemingly dead boar. He thought he had shot it through the heart with one of his hand-crafted arrows, but he was wrong, it was merely incapacitated. His mother prepared a concoction made from salt and a mystery poison from a plant his mother grew in their garden. He went to joust the pig through his mouth to roast it on the open flame, but as he began shoving the tree branch down the boar's throat, it suddenly started thrashing and kicking. It instinctively kicked Michael repeatedly in the legs and chest before it went after his mother. His Mother screamed and screeched as the boar tackled her to the floor, the spice she had prepared went spiraling into the air. Michael's pain subsided enough to where he could open his eyes, only to find the poison and salt land straight into his right eye. The sensation was like ripping your eye out and throwing it into the very flame the boar was about to be cooked in.
Michael heard his mother repeatedly scream for him, repeatedly gasp for breath over her blood-filled mouth as the boar ripped and tore at her body with his sharp tusks. He scrambled to the floor, the poison still burning his eys...but suddenly...the burning stopped and he could no longer see out of his eye and this event was simultaneously in conjunction with the discovery of his Talent. Slowly, long white strands of his soul was thrust through his chest and into the boar. The boar screeched in pain as it's energy and strength was drained from its own body by this force. It broke free of the strings and trampled over Michael one more time and ran out of the hut.
What was left inside the hut was a pool of blood, a cold, lifeless, dead body of what used to be Michael's Mother and a confused and battered twenty-year-old. Completely ignoring his Talent, Michael stood and staggered to his mother's side with tears filled his eyes as he dropped into the pool of blood beside her. He cried out, "I'm sorry Mother, I should have made sure it was dead, I should have made sure it was dead...I should have killed it before it took your life. I should have killed it..." Michaels tears fell into the blood of his lifeless mother, his heart deepening into a pit of shame and sorrow.
Later that day, when the relatives arrived, they came upon Michael digging into the middle of the garden his Mother worked so hard on; He was digging her a grave. He told them what had happened and directed their eyesight to the side of the hut, where his Mother lay in her favorite dress, the dress she was going to wear when she decided to marry if she ever found love. Her hair was as white as snow, her skin soft and pale, and her body stiff. Michael continued digging with his fingernails while his relatives grabbed shovels to help him dig the grave.
A few days later, Michael turned over the hut to one of his aunts and decided to leave forever. She declined the gift at first, but then she realized that he could no longer be here, with the guilt of letting his mother die right in front of his eyes. She left him be and hugged him goodbye. Michael wondered off into the unknown, avoiding the large bustling town of Erodeon, because people was the last thing he needed. Instead, he set his sights on the small town of Grayhaven.
Within the few years of his life in Grayhaven, he perfected his Talent and gave it a name of it's own : Soul Stringer. He could extend the strings of his soul longer than ever, he could control an animal or human longer than ever, and he finally mastered the extraordinary ability to drain the life force and strength of the ones he held in the grasp of his dark, lonely, and guilty soul...
Talent: Soul Stringer
Strength: A Soul Stringer has the abilities to extend strings from his chest made from the soul of the Soul Stringer to control anything it touches. The Soul Stringer need not have to move any part of his body to move the one who has been ensnared, but all he needs is complete concentration to keep hold of the effected and he can make them do whatever he pleases. He can also drain strength and energy from the one who is caught in his strings enough to weaken them.
Limitation: A Soul Stringer can only control a person for about 15 seconds and cannot make the one effected by the strings comit suicide or do harm to themselves, as that will kill the Soul Stringer aswell. The Soul Stringer is frozen in place and is unable to move while he has someone ensnared in his strings. If the strings are severed, then the Soul Stringer looses control of the target and will not be able to use his Talent without rest. In addition, a Soul Stringer may have the perk of 'controlling' two people at once, but he is unable to make either of the possessed do anything, he and the two effected by his Soul Strings are unable to move.
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Places and People of Note:
Places:
Romadon:
- Romadon is the country in the eastern lands ruled by King Astron. He was a kind ruler, but has lately turned his mind to war. (I wonder why). The country consists of mostly farm land, and is some distance from the mountains of Teratriff, so they have little in the way or ore, or stone. Many river cut across the landscape, making this country rich and fertile. The rivers lead to the sea, which marks the end of Romadon's boarders.
-Romadon city: Resides in the country of the same name, and is the ruling seat of King Aston. It is the largest city for miles, and it's wall remain uncontested.
Erodeon:
-Also called the valley kingdom. Erodeon rests in a valley created by the Teratriff Mountains. They ring the land, eventually flattening out on the western side, opening up into a vast desert. The country is fertile enough, receiving plenty of irrigation from the mountain runoff. However since there are few natural lake, or river, irrigation is carefully managed, or else the soil will dry and turn to dust, much like the desert.
-Grayhaven: Resides in the kingdom of Erodeon, although just barely. They see themselves as mostly independent, and dignitaries rarely visit, so long as their taxes are paid. The city lays between two of the highest peaks, called The Snowy Brothers. The two mountains create a natural crevice, where the city was built. The formation provides shelter both to the harsh winds, as well as invading armies. Both to the east and west of the city are two narrow roads, which slope downwards, so any army will have a height disadvantage.
People:
King Aston: The rightful ruler of Romadon, though his body is currently being occupied by an unknown person. He is currently in prison in the City of Romadon.
