Quentin Coldwater

 OOC PREFERENCES:
•CONTACT METHOD: Plurk, UndrwO, or pm to the journal box.
•THREAD-JACKING: Fine, but please if you're threadjacking within one of my posts also RP with me in it.  I don't mind a tag in and thread jack, I prefer no threadjacking plus no engagement with my character.
•FOURTH WALLING / CANON PUNCTURE: No fourth walling, yes to future canon punctures from canonmates.
•BACKTAGGING: Yes, but in some instances I reserve the right to drop.
•AVOIDED TOPICS: Nope.
•PREFERRED GENDER PRONOUN: She/her/hers

IC CHARACTERISTICS: 
•CURRENT CANON POINT: Post-canon
•PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Prematurely white hair, tall, thinly built but with muscle from swordwork.  Under the clothes there are body parts made of wood and magical tattoos.
•DEMEANOR: Quentin is a little nerdy, awkward, distracted- not welcoming exactly but not hostile, either.
•ABILITIES: Highly capable human fighter, great shot, advanced understanding of mechanics.
•MEDICAL INFORMATION: One amputated arm. Signs of chronic dehydration- kidney damage.
•CABIN INFORMATION: A slightly renovated but very old fashioned set of rooms- think Harry Potter-esque, brocade, four posters. Door is red painted wood, and the door handle a stylized whale's tail
•OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS: None

IC PERMISSIONS:
•MENTAL: Please ask first.
•MIMICRY: Yes.
•VIOLENCE: Yes.
•MAGIC: Please ask first.
•DEBATE: Yes.
•OTHER / NOTES: None

Fillory and Further

"My street in Paris is named for a surgeon who taught at the nearby medical school and discovered an abnormal skin condition, a contracture that causes the fingers to bend inward, eventually turning the hand into a full-time fist. It's short, this street, no more or less attractive than anything else in the area, yet vacationing Americans are drawn here, compelled for some reason to stand beneath my office window and scream at one another.
For some, the arguments are about language. a wife had made certain claims regarding her abilities. "I've been listening to tapes," she said, or, perhaps, "All those romance languages are pretty much alike, so what with my Spanish we should be fine." But then people use slang, or ask unexpcted question, and things begin to fall apart.
"You're the one who claimed to speak French." I hear this all the time, and look out my window to see a couple standing toe to toe on the sidewalk.
"Yeah," the woman will say. "At least I try."
"Well try harder, damn it. Nobody knows what the hell you're saying."
Geographical arguments are the second most common. People notice that they've been on my street before, maybe half an hour ago, when they only thought they were tired and hungry and needed to find a bathroom.
"For God's sake, Phillip, would it kill you to just ask somebody?"
I lie on my couch, thinking Why don't you ask? How come Phillip has to do it? But these things are often more complicated than they seem. Maybe Phillip was here twenty years ago and has been claiming to know his way around. Maybe he's one of those who refuse to hand over the map, or refuse to pull it out, lest he look like a tourist.
The desire to pass is loaded territory and can lead to the the ugliest sort of argument there is. "You want to be French, Mary Frances, that's your problem, but instead you're just another American." I went to the window for that one and saw a marriage disintegrate before my eyes. Poor Mary Frances in her beige beret. Back at the hotel it had probably seemed like a good idea, but now it was ruined and ridiculous, a cheap felt pancake sliding off the back of her head. She'd done the little scarf thing, too, not caring that it was summer. It could have been worse, I thought. She could have been wearing one of those striped boater's shirts, but, as it was, it was pretty bad, a costume, really.
Some vacationers raise the roof- they don't care who hears them- but Mary Frances spoke in a whisper. This, too, was seen as a pretension and made her husband even angrier. "Americans," he repeated. "We don't live in France, we live in Virginia. Vienna, Virginia. Got it?"
I looked at this guy and knew for certain that if we'd met at a party he'd claim to live in Washington, DC. Ask for a street address, and he'd look away, mumbling, "Well, just outside DC."
When fighting at home, an injured party can retreat to a seperate part of the house, or step into the backyard to shoot at cans, but outside my window the options are limited to crying, sulking, or storming back to the hotel. "Oh, for Christ's sake," I hear. "Can we please just try to have a good time?" This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it.
Most of Hugh's and my travel arguments have to do with pace. I'm a fast walker, but he has longer legs and likes to maintain a good twenty-foot lead. To the casual observer, he would appear to be running from me, darting around corners, intentionally trying to lose himself. When asked about my latest vacation, the answer is always the same. In Bangkok, in Ljubljana, in Budapest and Bonn: What did I see? Hugh's back, just briefly, as he disappeared into a crowd. I'm convinced that before we go anywhere he calls the board of tourism and asks what style and color of coat is the most popular among the locals. If they say, for example, a navy windbreaker, he'll go with that.
It's uncanny the way he blends in. When we're in an Asian city, I swear he actually makes himself shorter. I don't know how, but he does. There's a store in London that sells travel guides alongside novels that take place in this or that given country. The idea is you'll read the guide for the fact sand read the novel for atmosphere- a nice thought, but the only book I'll ever need is Where's Waldo? All my energy goes into keeping track of Hugh, and as a result I don't get to enjoy anything.
The last time this happened we were in Australia, where I'd gone to attend a conference. hugh had all the free time in the world, but mine was limited to four hours on a Saturday morning. There's a lot to do in Sydney, but first on my list was a visit to the Taronga Zoo, where I hoped to see a dingo. I never saw that Meryl Streep movie, and as a result the creature was a complete mystery to me. Were someone to say, "I left my window open and a dingo flew in,"I would have believed it, and if he said, "Dingoes! Our pond is completely overrun with them," I would have believed that as well. Two-legged, four-legged, finned or feathered: I simply had no idea, which was exciting, actually, a rarity in the age of twenty-four-hour nature channels.
Hugh offered to draw me a picture, but having come this far, I wanted to extend my ignorance a little bit longer, to stand before the cage or tank and see this thing for myself. It would be a glorious occasion, and I didn't want to spoil it at the eleventh hour. I also didn't want to go alone, and this was where our problem started.
Hugh had spent most of his week swimming and had dark circles beneath his eyes, twin impressions left by his goggles. When in the ocean, he goes out for hours, passing the lifeguard buoys and moving into international waters. It looks as though he's trying to swim home, which is embarrassing when you're the one left on the shore with your hosts. "He honestly does like it here," I say. "Really."
Had it been raining, he might have willingly joined me, but, as it was, Hugh had no interest in dingoes. It took a solid hour of whining to change his mind, but even then his heart wasn't in it. Anyone could see that. We took a ferry to the zoo, and while on board he stared longingly at the water and made little paddling motions with his hands. Every second wound him tighter, and when we landed I had to literally run to keep up with him. The koala bears were just a blur, as were the visitors who stood before them, posing for photos.
"Can't we just...," I wheezed, but Hugh was rounding the emus and couldn't hear me.
He has the most extraordinary sense of direction I've ever seen in a mammal. Even in Venice, where the streets were seemingly designed by ants, he left the train station, looked at a map, and led us straight to our hotel. An hour after checking in he was giving directions to strangers, and by the time we left he was suggesting shortcuts to the gondoliers. Maybe he smelled the dingoes. Maybe he'd seen their pen from the window of the plane, but, whatever his secret, he ran right to them. I caught up a minute later and bent from the waist to catch my breath. Then I covered my face, stood upright, and slowly parted my fingers, seeing first a fence and then, behind it, a shallow moat filled with water. I saw some trees- and a tail- and then I couldn't stand it anymore and dropped my hands.
"Why, they look just like dogs," I said, "Are you sure we're in the right place?"
Nobody answered, and I turned to find myself standing beside an embarrassed Japanese woman. "I'm sorry," I said, "I thought you were the person I brought halfway around the world. First-class."
A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people have creepier, more photogenic things to look at. A gorilla pleasures himself while eating a head of iceberg lettuce, and it's much more entertaining than a forty-something-year-old man who dashes around talking to himself. For me, the talk is always the same, a rehearsal of my farewll speech: "...because this time, buddy, it's over. I mean it." I imagine myself packing a suitcase, throwing stuff in without bothering to fold it. "If you find yourself missing me, you might want to get a dog, an old fat one that can run to catch up to you and make that distant panting sound you've grown so accustomed to. Me, though, I'm finished."
I will walk out the door and never look back, never return his calls, never even open his letters. The pots and pans, all the things that we have acquired together, he can have them, that's how unfeeling I will be.
"Clean start," that's my motto, so what do I need with a shoebox full of photographs, or the tan coloured belt he gave me for my thirty third birthday, back when we first met and he did not yet understand that a belt is something you get for your aunt, not your boyfriend, I don't care who made it. After that, though, he got pretty good in the gift giving department: a lifelike mechanical hog covered in real pigskin, a professional microscope offered at the height of my arachnology phase, and, best of all, a seventeenth century painting of a Dutch peasant changing a dirty diaper. Those things I would keep- and why not? I'd also take the desk he gave me, and the fireplace mantel, and, just on principle, the drafting table, which he clearly bought for himself and tried to pass off as a Christmas present.
Now it seemed I would be leaving in a van rather than on foot, but, still, I was going to do it, so help me. I pictured myself pulling away from the front of our building, and then I remembered that I don't drive. Hugh would have to do it for me, as he should after everything he'd put me through. Another problem was where this van might go. An apartment, obviously, but how would I get it? It's all I can do to open my mouth at the post office, so how am I going to talk to a real estate agent? The language aspect has nothing to do with it, as I'm no more likely to house hunt in New York than I am in Paris. Wen discussing sums over sixty dollars, I tend to sweat. Not just on my forehead, but all over. Five minutes at the bank, and my shirt is transparent. Ten minutes, and I'm stuck to my seat. I lost twelve pounds geting the last apartment, and all I had to do was sign my name. Hugh handled the rest of it.
On the bright side, I have money, though I'm not exactly sure how to get my hands on it. Bank statements arrive regularly, but I don't open anything that's not personally addressed or doesn't look like a free sample. Hugh takes care of all that, opening the icky mail and actually reading it. He knows when our insurance payments are due, when it's time to renew our visas, and when the warranty on the dishwasher is about to expire. "I don't think we need to extend this," he'll say, knowing that if the machine stops he'll fix it himself, the way he fixes everything. But not me. If I lived alone and something broke, I'd just work around it: use a paint bucket instead of a toilet, buy an ice chest tand turn the dead refrigerator into an armoire. Call a repairman? Never. Do it myself? That'll be the day.
I've been around nearly half a century, yet I'm still afraid of everything and everyone. A child sits beside me on a plane and I make conversation, thinking how stupid I must sound. The downstairs neighbours invite me to a party and, after claiming that I have a previous engagement, I spend the entire evening confined to my bed, afraid to walk around because they might hear my footsteps. I do not know how to turn up the heat, send an e-mail, call the answering machine for my messages, or do anything even remotely creative with a chicken. Hugh takes care of all that, and when he's out of town I eat like a wild animal, the meat still pink, with hair or feathers clinging to it. So is it any wonder that he runs from me? No matter how angry I get, it always comes down to this: I'm going to leave and then what? Move in with my dad? Thirty minutes of pure rage, and when I finally spot him I realize that I've never been so happy to see anyone in my life.
"There you are," I say. And when he asks where I've been, I answer honestly and tell him I was lost.

Steve McGarrett 1 234 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 2223 Former inmate, whom Quentin can no longer look in the eyes from the shame. Dillon Cole 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Former warden, who listened to Quentin until he graduated. Rohan Kishibe 1 Not easy to get along with. Omar Little 1 2 Quentin was scared of him. Omar once thought Quentin was the 'face of gentrification.' Petr 12. Told the best stories. Annie 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Dear sweet friend. Flame? But so ditzy. But so hot. Doctor Orpheus 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Fellow magic practitioner. Friend, but also exasperating? Tiffany Doggett 1 2 3 4 5 The sweetest lady he knows. Chloe 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 He thinks of her often, and sometimes has a hard time forgetting the things she said. They cared a lot, and never could quite understand each other. Arthas 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Weird demon friend, who Quentin could shoot the shit with for hours. Lark Tennant 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Weird manipulatey friend. Honest liar. Luke Skywalker 1 Another Star Wars character he can't really talk to. The Iron Bull 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Quentin was so awkward with being flirted with. Rosethorn 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Something he wants to argue, but about what? Eliot Spencer 1 2 Steve McGarrett's best friend, Quentin never could look him in the eye after everything that went wrong. Jean Grey 1 2 3 4 For how long they've known each other, Quentin doesn't know how to talk to her. Tommy Shelby 1 One thread only, one big secret. Letty Ortiz 1 2 3 4 5 He listened to her, even when she didn't always think highly of him. Barbara Gordon 1 2 3 4 5 Lol nerds. Boyd Crowder 1 2 3 4 5 Quentin always thought Boyd was a lot cooler than him. Good bartender, though. Kevin Prentiss 1 2 Weird kid. They didn't know each other well. Victor Creed 1 Quentin was not into it. Iris Wildthyme 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 It's too intense. He isn't sure why exactly, but he just can't quite. Mary McGarrett 1 2 3 Steve's baby sister. Quentin thinks they didn't take her drug issues seriously enough. Mewtwo 1 Hard to take a purple cat seriously. Clementine Chausseur 1 Just one of those one time chats. Eggsy Unwin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 What a good friend. Quentin doesn't know anyone else who listens as well as Eggsy or pays such kind attention. Stephanie Brown 1 2 3 They're friendly when they chat, they don't chat often. Steve Rogers 1 2 3 4 5 6 They were demotion buddies. Snafu Shelton 1 Sixty seconds in passing. Touko 1 2 3 She had a crush. He was oblivious. Luna Lovegood 1 2 3 4 5 6 No spoilers. Shan 1 They didn't know each other well. Aya 1 2 She was sweet! Good Christmas present giver. Simon Tam 1 He really liked him, alas. Max Rockatansky 1 2 They got along super well, really. Good relationship advice. Vergil Sparda 1 2 They were weirdly chill for how hardcore he was. Chime 1 Quentin didn't know what to make of him. Nico 1 2 Quentin is on the verge of getting invested. Chie Satonaka 1 She was polite enough. Victor Frankenstein 1 2 Quentin wishes they could have talked more. Erskine 1 2 He is just not chatty, alas. Beyond Birthday 1 2 3 4 5 What a weird relationship. Elizabeth 1 2 3 Quentin killed her. She never forgave him. Credence Barebone 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31. BEST. FRIEND. Shiro 1 2 Credence's gf. He keeps a distance so he can advise from the outside. Alec McDowell 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Credence's ex warden. The Doctor 1 2 3 4 HATRED. Dark Mousey 1 Didn't know each other well. Hugh Cambridge 1 2 3 The guy Q accidentally canonpunctured. Hans Gruber 1 Too hardcore. Allan 1 2 3 Definitely a superhero. Shuos Mikodez 1 2 Jedao's evil boss. Shuos Jedao 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 What a heartbreaker. Fives 1 2 3 4 5 Sparring and magic partner. Sinjir 12 Tricksy hobbit. Han Solo 1 2 But Quentin can't even look him in the face. Darth Vader 1 Same problem as Han. Chris d'Amico 1 2 Haha what a WEIRDO Porthos 1 2 3 4 5 They fight like cats and dogs. Joleyne Cujoh 1 He got along with her better than Rohan. Mickey Gallagher 1 2 They ought'n't to get along as well as they managed to. Anya 1 Huge crush. Zinzi December 1 2 She was too lively. Horseriver 1 2 3 4 5 Love in a breach. The Joker 1 NOPE. Bill Cipher 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 2324 Weird space triangle friend who Quentin has murdered twice. But he loves him. Leonard Snart 1 They should talk more, seriously. Mick Rory 1 2 3 4 5 He burnt down the library? Ford Pines 1 Haha oh god. Helen Magnus 1 He doesn't know her well. Nikola Tesla 1 2 3 4 Okay he loves this with all his nerd heart. Stan Pines 1 2 3 4 Jesus Christ what is this show? Kol Mikkaelson 1 Passing connection. Odd 1 2 What birds of a feather. Trisana Chandler 1 2 3 4 5 It's amazing they don't fight more honestly. Andred 1 2 3 Interesting time shenanigans. Newt Scamander 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Probably they'd be a lot closer if Q didn't feel so loyal to Credence. Hope 1 Victim of Quentin's antiauthoritarian rage. Elaine Rainier 1 2 He wanted to talk more ghost-shop with her than he got to. Horatio Hornblower 1 Dorks of a feather. Toad 1 Not a lot. Dean Winchester 1 2 3 4 5 6 Quentin cared about him so much. Nina 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Beloved weird friend. He misses her so much. Ardyn Izuna 1 2 3 4 5 Worst. Introductory. Thing. Ever. T'Pol 1 She intimidated him tbh. Harry Starks 1 2 Weirdly tense. Not a crush? Kind of a crush. Rhys 1 More to come! Francesco 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 What a beautiful friendship. Scott Summers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 These two got along super well. Pitch Black 1 Nope the fuck out. Selina Kyle 1 A victim of Quentin's reasonableness. Bucky Barnes 1 2 3 4 They're so different. But Quentin likes him, but remains slightly intimidated. Toad II 1 Didn't know each other well. Miles 1 One time. Killer Frost 1 2 3 He really likes her? They actually talked. Quentin never asked his name... 1 2 3 Another example of Quentin's ability to get along with maniacs? Natasha Romanoff 1 He was terrified of her. Mercedes 1 Cats and dogs. Tristan 1 Judgement. Only judgement. Chelsey Jensen 1 2 Scary dude, afa Q was concerned. Yara 1 2 3 4 5 6 All bar fights and screaming. Rey 1 2 3 She didn't get him. But it was cool anyways. Clancy 1 Weird breach friends. Sara 1 She was cool! He couldn't make eyecontact. Rip 1 Only judgement. The Master 1 One of those nice people he reminded himself to talk to more then failed to. Teddy Flood 1 That thousand yard stare tho. Matt Murdoch 1 Recipient of all his warden rage. Overkill 1 2 Weirdly frank and friendly. Amos 1 One of those people who doesn't get scifi. Admiral 1 2 The moment of graduation! Emma Frost 1 2 Discussing their new status as fugitives. Clark Kent 1 2 Discussing starting a book club. Dr Harry Goodsir 1 2 About the Arctic. Phasma 1. Differential ethics. Phasma 1. More ethics. code by photosynthesis

PLAYER
Player name: Steph
Contact: UndrwO on Plurk
Characters currently in-game: None

CHARACTER
Character Name: Quentin Coldwater
Character Age: 30ish.
Canon: The Magicians Trilogy
Canon Point: Post-canon

History: Spoilers for the full trilogy.
Quentin was one of those kids who always waited for his Hogwarts letter, who tried every wardrobe to see if it led to Narnia- though in the Magicians, Narnia is ‘Fillory’ and the wardrobe is a grandfather clock. He made it all the way to his university entrance interview for Princeton before the magic came. Instead of staying in the real world for a distinguished career as a mathematician, Quentin left Brooklyn for Brakebills, a highly exclusive magical university somewhere in upstate New York.

He had a pretty mixed school experience- he excelled over all, was skipped forward an academic year, ultra competitive even among the most brilliant magical minds of his generation. He played a bad practical joke and got a classmate killed. He fell in love- twice! Once in puppy love with his best friend Eliot, once in earnest with a girl named Alice, who was so brilliant she left him in the proverbial intellectual dust. He failed to help his most important childhood friend, Julia. He broke the class bro’s nose in a fistfight, which Penny had rightly deserved. When everyone else manifested their disciplines, his natural magical talent failed to emerge- they’re a mark of maturity, apparently, and he still had a little too much growing up to do. He failed to win the approval of a teacher he admired. He succeeded in becoming a truly excellent magician.

After school, Quentin floundered a little. He picked up a minor drug habit, and a major drinking problem. He cheated on Alice, and generally just sort of thoroughly squandered his potential. Only then, he found out that Fillory was real- books written about the imaginary play land of children that had been telling the truth after all. Quentin hurtled headlong into Fillory, hoping against hope that this magical adventure was the one that’d finally make him happy.

Instead, Alice died saving his life. Quentin was left comatose, and abandoned alone in Fillory by his friends (through no fault of their own- they’d had no idea whether he was going to wake up, so of course they returned to Earth.) Left with prosthetics made out of living wood and Marie-Antoinette stress-white hair, Quentin spent a year on a quest back to earth, then indulged himself in a small nervous breakdown and a year spent working in an investment firm that specialized in mergers and acquisitions and three martini lunches. Eliot, Janet, and Julia showed up and dragged him back to Fillory in a fit of broken window class and new hope.

After several years as the lower king (to Eliot’s high) Quentin decided that he was languishing in Fillory. He set off on a quest- not sure what it was for, at first, but discovering quickly that they were saving magic. A book’s worth of antics ensued, mostly to do with Quentin learning that Julia had had a terrible fucking time of it, learning magic outside of a school, and that nothing in life is easy. The hero isn’t the one who gets the reward, the hero is the one that pays the price.

Quentin ends the second book faced with another magical door to walk through- and maybe this one will make him happy, finally? But he turns the chance down, giving it to Julia instead, in her time of great need. As a result of his selflessness, Quentin is banished from Fillory.

Stunned, standing curbside on Earth in full medieval garb, in total shock, badly missing Julia and Janet and Eliot, Quentin does the only thing he can think of and returns to Brakebills. He discovers a magical talent for repair of small objects and becomes a teacher, picking up first year minor mending. He gets a reputation as a wine lush and a total basket case- barely smiling, only periodically touching down to earth, magically brilliant but a little spooky. He finds a pet project, working on research on high level matter and energy exchange research. Then Alice turns up- and Quentin gets fired.

Alice had died by turning herself into a niffin- letting her magic consume her in order to kill the beast that bit Quentin’s shoulder off and gave him all those magical prosthetics. She turns up at Brakebills, glowing blue white as a spirit of pure magical energy and totally murderous. Upon seeing her, Quentin fails to activate the wards that ought to have banished her permanently- thus endangering all the students under his care.

Newly unemployed, Quentin veers into working on the magical grey market- he accepts a contract to join a team stealing a suitcase, and follows a series of hunches and clues through some very dangerous situations to a confrontation with niffin-Alice. His matter-energy exchange research, undertaken before he’d even known the chance would come (magic is funny that way) pays off, and she’s returned to life.

Together, they return to Fillory, which has entered into an apocalypse scenario. More disparate threads come together. The first spell he’d ever done, the gift from the magician who’d taught him the most important magic he’d ever learned- he kills the twin gods of Fillory, and all their magic rushes into him- he becomes the temporary god of Fillory, and all mending is minor when you’re vast enough. He repairs the shattered world, heals the injured, hangs the fallen sun and stars back in the sky, shoos the turtle the world rides on top of back into line. He’s loved Fillory since he was a very little boy, and he pours all that obsessive rereading, adoration, escapism into the task of reassembling the ruined mess. Then, he lets the power go.

Quentin leaves Fillory behind, and goes with Alice to us magic to make a land of his own. Things aren’t back to a love relationship between them- too much has happened by far, she’s still barely fully human- but they set out into the new reality together, and there’s a sense of hope. Quentin has learned for once and for all that his bleakest fears about the world are true- it’s violent, nasty, brutish, terrible- but he has the power to make it better, and that’s enough to live with.

Personality:
Quentin is a HUGE NERD. He’s a classic fanboy- and even at thirty after some magic life lived, the aura clings to him. He’s never tried to give it up. He has glasses, leans towards cuords and cardigans and you just have to look at him to absolutely know that he has been jammed into at least one locker in his lifetime.

That said, you might be surprised if you tried it. Quentin grew up in Brooklyn as a math geek and chess champion. When he gets into physical fights in the book he doesn’t pull his punches- in fact, I’ll mention again, he breaks Penny’s nose for him when he kicks off. He’s also a viciously talented magician with a shockingly short fuse for showboating. As much as he seems like a soft target, it’s definitely a huge trap.
Quentin is canonically prone to black periods- the author deliberately uses language and internal dialogue associated with depression. Other characters identify him as clinically depressed and probably also suffering PTSD, though Quentin isn’t self-aware enough to apply those descriptors to himself and he hasn’t been clinically assessed as such.

Despite his own extremely icy relationship with his own emotionally neglectful parents, Quentin is actually fantastic with children. He’s a good teacher for university age students, and patient and attentive with the little people he meets in the story. There’s one important plot point where he charms a little girl so much that she draws him a ‘passport’ in crayon- he folds it up and keeps it and uses it to travel into the afterlife later on and speak to the ghost of a young man he’d been coaching who’d died along the journey.

However, at heart he’s extremely loyal, and tremendously selfless where his friends are concerned. Once he reasons through a problem he will do anything he can to do the right thing- even if it’s hard. He would die for, can barely bring himself to see the flaws in his friends. He isn’t demonstrative about it- but once you’re in with him you’re in.

Quentin is earnest. He’s friends with glib, sarcastic, snide, jaded, wonderful and brilliant people, and he’s learned their mannerisms, but Eliot observes correctly that he’s the one of them who still wholeheartedly believes in magic. Growing up he was a serious little person, and he hasn’t quite outgrown it, either. Behind those layers of quidditch jokes and rolling eyes, is an entirely credulous, tender hearted person.

The books cover a huge span of time, beginning when he’s seventeen/eighteen and ending with him entering his thirties. The Quentin I’ll be playing is one who has outgrown the most terrible aspects of his own personality- he’s been sober a little bit, has worked hard to atone for a lot of the mistakes he’s made. He’s no longer the kind of man who’d cheat on a partner, or someone who prioritizes fantasy over real life. But he’s also only recently finished this journey. He’s tired, and the road has been long.

Inventory: Glasses.

Abilities: Magic; the system of magic in the Magicians novel is an extremely interesting one. All spells need to be done with knowledge of the background ‘circumstances.’ To cast a spell to knock a nail in, you may need to know what altitude you’re at and what phase the moon is in- and if one or the other is different that impacts the way you cast. There are up to dozens of circumstances for each spell, hundreds of exceptions that need to be brute memorized- the reason that Brakebills is a university program is that it’s just too hard for kids.

Exceptions exist- once a magician becomes fluent they begin to get a feel for the grammar and can gradually interpret circumstances, feeling the way spells react under their hands (most magic is cast by a series of bone cracking hand movements.) Also magicians have a ‘discipline,’ something they’ve got a special affinity for and can usually manage under most circumstances. Quentin’s is minor mending.

Given time in the city, Quentin will begin to get a sense for the local circumstances- he’s travelled across different worlds before so is pretty good at extra-terrestrial casting. But that’ll be a natural initial hard power cap that he’ll have to work to overcome every time Hadriel has a major setting change.

Flaws: Quentin makes nasty choices when he's back into an emotional corner. He's good in an actual crisis but he snaps when he's angry and self-destructs when he's unhappy. He cheats on his girlfriend, does drugs, drinks, etc. When he's good he's good, but when he's tailspinning he brings other people down with him.

His biggest flaw is that he can be narcissistic. Quentin can get extremely caught up in introspection and is only barely holding it together by the skin of his teeth. He also has difficulty reading people’s expressions, and a pretty hard time inferring how normal people would react- in the mild way common to many an extremely intellectually oriented soul. It can lead to him being occasionally pretty hurtful.

SAMPLES
Action Log Sample:

He hits the books. He trims his fingernails, flexes his muscular hands, and tears into the air itself. His hands sing, slip, and catch purchase. He misunderstands the tides, then finds it and growls low in the back of his throat. Moon- moons? No, altitude. Figuring out which of the two is pulling on his spellwork is like balancing a knife on the tip of his finger, trying to figure out which direction it's trying to fall.

It's been a very long time since he had to start this in a new world from scratch. It's half by feel, half brutal calculus. He scrawls pages and pages of math, fills up a notebook, misses the sunset, lights and then burns down his candles. The turning of the world and shape of power resolves itself into a coherent story somewhere around dawn.

That's when he puts his wards up, goes to find his little cot, and collapses and curls up. He's earned a throbbing headache, sore joints, and a sense of deep satisfaction. He doesn't always understand Hadriel, doesn't necessarily want to be here, but he feels better now that he can at least hold his own.

User Name/Nick: Steph
User DW: knights_say_nih
AIM/IM: UndrwO on Plurk
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Ricki Tarr and Furiosa

Character Name: Quentin Coldwater
Series: The Magicians Trilogy, by Lev Grossman
Age: 30
From When?: Postcanon

Inmate/Warden: Wardens-- Quentin is a character who went through an agonizingly slow (in some respects) maturing process. He faced serious business before he was really ready for it, made mistakes, hurt people very, very badly, and then learned over many years the complexities around making something right, and the fact that you sometimes just can't. Quentin is a life lesson in how sometimes it just isn't enough to want to be the hero. He's a great candidate for a warden because he comes from a canon with a really unique blend of high magic and really deep emotional introspection. His story is about perfectionism and failure and self-image, and it'll enable him a lot to help those inmates who have a lot of self-deception.

Item: Quentin's warden item will be his glorious Fillorean pocket watch;

"He took the silver watch out of his pocket, the one Eliot had given him before he left Fillory. He'd hardly glanced at it before- he'd been too shocked and angry when they told him he had to leave- but now that he did he saw that its face was studded with a really glorious profusion of detail: two extra dials, a moving star chart, the phases of the moon. It was a beautiful watch."

One of those extra dials will be devoted to the tracking of his inmates.

Abilities/Powers: Quentin is an extraordinarily powerful character, but with a lovely failsafe built in to keep him from being plot/setting breaky. Although he's a deeply, terrifyingly talented magician, the system of magic in his world is ruled by what are called 'circumstances.' Every spell Quentin casts needs to be cast differently depending on, well, the circumstances. To so much as knock a nail into a piece of wood, Quentin needs to know any number of things in order for the spell to fully succeed;

"He cast Legrand's Hammer Charm at noon and at midnight, in summer and winter, on mountaintops and a thousand yards beneath the earth's surface. He cast the spell underwater and on the surface of the moon. He cast it in early evening during a blizzard on a beach on the island of Mangareva, which would almost certainly never happen since Mangareva is a part of French Polynesia, in the South Pacific. He cast the spell as a man, as a woman, and once- was this really relevant?- as a hermaphrodite. He cast it in anger, with ambivalence, and with bitter regret."

Luckily, his honours thesis involved magic and space travel, (he went to go visit the moon, in just his skin- failed at it, but did the prep work nonetheless, to know how to transfer a lot of his skills to space) so he will be less lost on board than the average magician. However, anything he shouldn't be able to do at any given moment can easily be explained as failing due to the wacky circumstances.

For a brief summary of some of the things Quentin can do in canon;
Levitate/fly
Make himself impervious to blows
Improve his reflexes and reaction time
Cast a spell to create an invisible umbrella over someone's head in heavy rain
Draw a sword from a place beyond space and time, so long as he has a few coins to hand
Mess with probabilities; card flips, coin tosses, etc
Manage a few basic transformations; he's familiar with geese, foxes, bears, and whales, and could accomplish more with a little prep work
All manner of minor mending- all magicians have a discipline, and this is Quentin's- small broken objects long to spring together and resolve themselves in his hands.
Create barriers to keep people out of things
Break down most magical enchantments, given time and study
Mini, showy things; lights flashing, baby bits of levitation, glass smashing; special effects.

Plus one very handy 'Peruvian fainting hex,' harmless unless they hit themselves on the way down and highly useful in many situations.

I would give him access to these slowly, at a measure of one or so a month over his time on the barge (and nixing any the mods need nixed!) to make his adaptation to space travel realistic. I'd also like to periodically make him lose one or two of them, either for a month or for good, as the barge passes through unknown and untold locations.
Given time and research (upwards of MONTHS) in the book, Quentin accomplishes;

Creating one pocket dimension in the attic of his own house (a fucked up mirror verse where everything is backwards and deeply uncanny)
Eventually, creating a whole new Narnia, fundamentally.
Restoring a demon (niffin, rather- the magical core/monster that a magician burns down to if they lose control of their own magic) to human form- sort of related to restoring the soul to a body.

Many of these need ingredients that would be impossible or very difficult to procure on the barge- leaves from plants from a garden that grows on the underside of the world, where every emotion every human is experiencing flourishes as something living, or ununoctium, plus learning new languages, developing high theory. Each could rightly take years of study, and each could easily fail, entirely.


Personality: In many respects, because the books are so much about his growth, a lot of Quentin's personality is really a product of what has happened to him; the magician I'm apping here has very little in common with the boy in the first book. Quentin goes through a difficult adolescence, with a lot of horrible self-consciousness and self-sabotage.
He’s unflatteringly immature, fixated on children’s literature, unable to cope with the idea of being happy. He’s used, as he puts it, to having a monopoly on suffering, mostly on account of being a brilliant teenager with emotionally neglectful parents and all the pains of a normal highschool life as a socially awkward nerd. He made a decision, at some point in his childhood, that he was going to be incredibly unhappy. He describes this as a sensation of preparing for something, putting hours of dedication and effort and brilliance into it, and then at the very last second feeling a familiar anticlimactic sense that he doesn’t care anymore whether all the effort pays off or not, and consequentially never enjoying his triumph.

He is frequently triumphant, at least on a material level, because he is incredibly smart. He was shipped out to university level calculus classes during highschool, and was one of a few hundred students nation-wide to be selected into the entrance test for his school for magic. Of those students, he was one of twenty to be accepted, and of those twenty he was one of two to be moved up to second year after his first semester. Unfortunately these incredible gifts only seem to make him more easily dissatisfied, quickly bored with even the completely miraculous.

As a child he is miserable and sulky around his friends and family because a major part of him believes that he should not be living this life, that he must have been switched at birth from what he was really meant to be doing. He becomes hopelessly obsessed with the children’s books ‘Fillory and Further,’ a Narnia stand-in series about British children going to the countryside during the war and discovering a passage into another world through the back of a grandfather clock, where they meet talking animals and have wild adventures fighting a witch who wants to freeze time itself. Many children who don’t fit in withdraw into fiction. A fair number get obsessed with ‘waiting for a Harry Potter letter’ or what have you, but few let it isolate them, and paralyze them with resentment the way Quentin does. When Fillory never opens up to him, he begins to hate the real world for failing him.

It turns out he simply wasn’t waiting long enough. At what he thinks is going to be an interview for Princeton Quentin does end up receiving a summons to a magician’s college called Brakebills. He is initially completely enraptured, and does well in his new environment. One of the more redeemable things about Quentin is that he’s very seldom overtly cruel. While he has a slight penchant for sarcasm he mostly turns it on targets who understand and can fight back, and he goes out of his way to include and be friends with shy students (even though they might be smarter than him, which rankles him notably but doesn’t change how he treats them) or ones who are falling a bit behind in the competitive academic environment at Brakebills. He’s prone to taking risks, taking extra credit assignments to prove himself, and he isn’t afraid of work or of physical suffering. In one chapter, he’s on a small team playing a competitive sport, and the weak link of the team isn’t showing up for starting time. Quentin leaves to go find him, because he’d rather lose with him than win without him, and after some touching encouragement brings him back to play. It’s little glimmers of personality like this that save him from being a complete and utter pill, which is a risk when you’ve got as much self-pity going on as Quentin does.

He also has a few devastating experiences while he is in school. In one, he is trying to screw around with a teacher who has been picking on him, and whispers something to fuck up a spell he’s working on. The spell goes wrong. Instead of changing the weather, it summons a man into the classroom, with too many fingers and too many teeth. The students sit frozen, by magic, as it circles them. With all of them sitting there, trapped, unable to look, it eats one of the girls alive, before vanishing back into the world it came from. Quentin is appropriately devastated, and it takes him a long time to begin to be able to study again, with a profoundly renewed respect for spellwork.

After that, he demonstrates intelligence and dedication, learning magic deftly and voraciously, and even makes a solid circle of friends, but soon his disaffectedness begins to follow him, and dissatisfaction sets in in even the most magical of settings. He spends his last semester at school irate and bored once more.

Post-graduation, as though being basically let into Hogwarts wasn’t enough, the curtain peels back further. An old schoolmate shows up with the news that there are worlds beyond their own, and when they go through Quentin finds himself in Fillory. Yes, the Fillory from the books he was obsessed with as a child was mostly real. The author was rendering the wild storytellings of children who had actually travelled there and come back to share their adventures. What he’d penned as fiction had actually all been true, if simplified for narrative purposes. And yet, Quentin is miserable in Fillory. This finally forces him into a little self-examination, and he begins to confront the fact that all his life he has set himself up to be miserable by pretending that it’s just his goals that aren’t being realized. After all, here, against all odds, the most fantastical, impossible desires he’s ever had have come true, and still he walks around in a sulk.

Though he’s working hard to do away with this habit, but at the canon point I’m bringing him in from he still has vestiges of it, the occasional fallback into angry cynicism. However, after a few brutal object lessons in ‘why self-sabotage is stupid’ and the death of a loved one, he is at least on the mend from this particular all-encompassing personality trait. On the mend, but only very slowly.

Then, at Brakebills, Quentin does manage to get into something approaching a healthy relationship with his classmate, Alice. They are together for a few years and are initially very much in love with one another. Quentin is brilliant, but Alice is even more so, and he wishes he could resent her for it but simply adores her instead. However, after they graduate, things go sour for the pair. Alice’s parents’ are magicians, so she knows the trap very well; when you leave an all-encompassing, terribly rigorous school for magic behind, and are thrown out into the real world with tremendous power and no real need to work to make a living, you can go kind of off the rails if you don’t find something meaningful to do with yourself. She throws herself into her studies and goes from ‘great’ to ‘fucking phenomenal,’ and Quentin throws himself into the New York party scene and goes from a minor alcoholic to a pretty solid one. He dabbles with a number of harder drugs, too, and generally lets his brilliant mind stagnate in resentment. Then in a fit of alcohol induced self-sabotage he fucks one of their roommates (actually he possibly fucks around a little two of them, he knows he was with Janet but also has vague memories of Eliot being there as well.) He isn’t remotely discreet about it. He wakes up with Alice sitting at the foot of the bed, and whether or not the pair would have properly reconciled the reader never finds out, as a few minutes later Quentin is plunged into Fillory for the very first time.

The Fillory adventure is action packed, blood curdling, and terrifying. Many of them die. One young magician has his hands bitten off at the wrists. Most tragically, Quentin and Alice never have time to reconcile. They have a few more fights on their travels. She gives him the gift of some extraordinary insight, explaining that she thinks he hates himself so much that he punishes people who love him. Quentin decides he still loves her and will win her back. Apparently, she still loves him too, because she sacrifices herself there fighting the monster of the piece, knowingly giving her life to save Quentin, despite the fact that he has broken her heart. He is badly, badly injured in the same fight and spends a number of months unconscious or barely aware. This results in some interesting physical characteristics he'll be bringing to the barge- his shoulder and knee are made of living wood, where the crushed and chewed away parts of him were grown back like a tree by centaur magic. He has no feeling in the areas, and has one nasty chip in the shoulder where he was hacked at by a sword.

One of the best things about Lev Grossman’s writing his that he handles the trauma of battle and loss and metaphysical crisis really really well. Quentin immediately tailspins, cycles rapidly between frantic energy and total soul-crushing self-loathing and depression. He learns every single thing about magic he can, following in Alice’s footsteps and going from ‘great’ to ‘the best there is.’ Afterwards, returning to Earth, he gives up magic entirely (and picks up drinking with renewed vigor) using magician connections to land himself a cushy job as a VP in some huge firm where he fucks around on the internet all day and has three-martini lunches. He languishes in this blackness for months. Periodic bouts of depression and drinking are an aspect of Quentin's character- the narrative frequently acknowledges that he probably needs to be on some kind of serious medication, but isn't. The characters reference and expressly handle the PTSD they all have as a result of that first book.

The only good news for Quentin is that eventually he does seem to learn from some of his behavior. His grief for Alice plays out in the books naturally and touchingly, and he seems to take to heart what she’d said about his deliberately hurting people for caring about him. He becomes one of the four kings and queens of Fillory (again, check the Narnia reference) and becomes a much nicer person. He frequently reflects on how much better he is now than he was when he was a teenager. As he transitions into actual adulthood his sarcasm becomes less self-loathing and more externally focused (he’s not a much nicer person to BE around, admittedly, just slightly more healthy.) And to be fair to him, he really does have his nice moments. He sneaks down to the kitchens and brings up a piece of cake to a little girl who has been unfairly sent to bed without dessert by her tyrannical mother, and talks gently and seriously with the child on a number of occasions. He becomes less vindictive with Julia, who has re-entered his life, and makes genuine steps to make amends for what a son of a bitch he was when they were kids (their original relationship had a horrible, whiny 'she's friend zoned me' vibe to it- and he gets the hell over himself). He still drinks and he still resents, but he also takes personal responsibility, about a tablespoonful at a time. He goes on a quest. He begins to make choices not because they seem logical or seem comfortable, but because they are the right thing to do. He becomes a hero. He learns, most of all, that a hero isn’t someone who comes home victorious, a hero is someone who pays the price.

Sent back to earth, Quentin finally begins to learn the lesson that 'wishing doesn't make it so' (which can be a real stunting point for the emotional growth of a magician- since for them it frequently does.) He gets work as a teacher, and develops a lovely sensitivity for talking to people younger than him; he trains other magicians tenderly and kindly, much unlike his teachers, coming up through school.

He learns what real failure feels like. He's fired from his job, and launches on a quest to put right the horrible wrong in his life, the death of Alice. The adventure is a lesson for him in making amends without expectation of what he's owed- when he does return her to the land of the living, she is furious with him, and says horrible things to him, and has no intention of beginning dating him again- and Quentin is actually just totally fine with that, absorbs the criticism and allows her to lash out and respects her boundaries, and generally just leaves behind that huge and nasty personality trait that many nerd boys have of expecting his princess to be in this castle. A bunch of other huge, important, climactic stuff happens, but the really big thing is that he just takes off the proverbial fedora already and grows up.

Grown-up Quentin is a balm, a soft and level-headed result of all of the mortifyingly childish and awkward life lessons involved in the earlier novels. He shares his wisdom carefully and judiciously. He cries openly whenever he feels great sorrow or great joy. He loses the petty need to win every argument, to have the last word. He gives himself permission to be proud, and to be content. He becomes... more of a Prospero, really, a powerful, wise wizard who would often rather die than give up, who harnesses great power and uses it not always entirely wisely, but mostly for good, wrapped in the skin of a modern young man who was raised on Harry Potter and ipods and comes from Brooklyn.


Barge Reactions: Quentin will react to the Barge with a certain amount of acerbic equanimity. A lifetime of finding doors into alternate magic worlds has prepared him for this setting brilliantly; he is used to there being something behind the walls, and is very well prepared for it to be bloody and horrifying. The moral questions around the inmate/warden power structure will be a little more difficult for him to wrestle with; magicians tend to be a pretty decrepit lot in that respect- there's an awful lot of 'can we?' and not a lot of 'should we?' and a certain amount of nose-looking-down with regards to real people- but then again, as a boy raised on fantasy and adventure stories he'll be sort of a sponge for some of the main concepts once he does start thinking about it, and has a few deepset beliefs in the areas of silver, gold and wooden cups, righteous woodcutters rescuing princesses and swords that lift from stones. He'll catch on quickly.

Deal: Quentin is a character who steps through doorways into other worlds almost professionally. Additionally, the books end pretty well for him, in terms of resolving everything, giving him what he needs (if not necessarily all of what he wants) and teaching him the difference between those two things. As such, his deal is a kindness, rather than something he badly needs. In the final fight to keep magic in the world, the dragons from earth fought the gods, and sustained heavy casualties. (Whenever a god worked out it was being attacked, it would erase the dragon from existence.) In the aftermath, their numbers were few and they had all forgotten how to reproduce. Quentin's deal will be to offer them what they say they need, be it their vanished comrades restored or the knowledge of how to mate.


History: Three novels:
The Magicians
The Magician King
The Magicians Land

Sample Journal Entry: The theory is called 'inverse profundity.' It's actually a documented phenomena, if you're talking to the right people. The premise is, the bigger you go in terms of scope, the more abstract and metaphorical or awesomely powerful the concept, the more mundane the presentation turns out to be. God, in my world, looks like a big, silvery janitor. Oh, and there are a fleet of Him. Same awe inspiring and miraculous behaviour, wrapping itself up in- well. Meat loaf Mondays. Salvation of souls in manila envelopes and legal scale file-folders. I mean, fuck, the Admiral probably uses a label maker. Inverse profundity.

Sample RP: Quentin is good with 'I'm a magician' for the first few months. It gets the usual responses; a raised eyebrow, a smile, a shake of the head, a look of disbelief and some questions about Davids Copperfield & Blaine. He laughs it off, shakes his head politely, insists, no, not a wizard, not a wiccan, not a hobbyist- He gets a deck of cards thrust into his hands one day in the cafeteria, smiles, and starts to shuffle.

No one knows cards like Quentin Coldwater. The con artists on board know it by the way his clever fingers rifle the deck, pulling off neat tricks, flipping the four of clubs four times after thorough shuffles. He cuts to it, cuts to it again, pulls it from an onlooker's breast pocket, produces it from thin air. He throws it, like it's a razor, embedding it in the mess hall apples from three, then five, then ten feet back. He laughs it off, tucks it back into the deck, demurs.

"Bullshit," says someone, under his breath, and Quentin should let it go, he should- but then again, why should he?

He flips the four of clubs. Hands the deck over to the detractor, and has him flip the four of clubs. Shuffle, flip the four of clubs- when examined, the deck is full of every card in every suit- the top card is the queen of hearts, but when he turns the deck over, and Quentin nods, it flips up again, four of clubs, and so, too, does the one below that. Despite another check- the next five cards when fanned are two diamonds, a jack, a queen, and then another club, but this one is a nine- when flipped from a closed deck the pull four of clubs, again, again, again.

The room crackles a little, as the improbability takes its' toll. The next card is a four, yes, but it's the four of hearts, diamonds- and then another four, but rather than a spade, it's the four of swans, four of cups, four of keys, four of bees, four of glass, four of swords, four of cyanide, four of despair, four of clubs, four of clubs, four of clubs-

The last one, instead of the little configuration of clover, is a pictured creature, a caveman-like beast, holding a large stone club in its' paw- and it would be cartoonish, except for the malevolence in the beady little eyes, except for the twisted jaw, the splayed out carcass in the backdrop.

"Once more?" Offers Quentin, into the soft silence, and pulls, yes, a four of clubs, the real card this time, and only because the room is perfectly, frighteningly silent, is it audible when the little figure standing over the corpse opens its' blackened maw and screams for meat.

He will not, any time soon, be invited by anyone to play a hand of poker.

Special Notes: None I can think of.