Hadriel App
Apr. 5th, 2018 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magician_kingPLAYER
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.
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.
