TLV App (CW: Implied/referenced suicide)

[chaos_drifter]

User Name: Camryn 

User DW: chaos_drifter

Method of Contact: This journal

Other Characters Currently In-Game: N/A

Character Name: Avalon (original character)

Age: That’s a bit complicated. Mentally, they’ve been around for several millennia. Physically, they can shapeshift to be any age. In this case, they’ll come into the game with the body of a skinny, genderless, Japanese adult (see icon).

From When?: As they died after being shot by a would-be victim, the Admiral took one look at their very, very long list of murder victims and dropped them on the Barge. They learned the hard way that they may be immortal, but they are definitely not invulnerable.

Inmate Justification: Avalon sees murder as their entire purpose in life. They have no identity, no emotions, and no sense of self outside of what they can do once they get into someone’s head. Working with a Warden on the Barge, and therefore having supervised human interaction, will enable them to find themself and form connections with others. Finding an identity as a human to go along with their identity as a mage will help them to go back into the world with a desire to grow as a person rather than simply popping in and out of the Rift and murdering people for the rest of their existence.

Arrival: Avalon was very much brought onto the Barge against their will. They were planning to regenerate in the Rift and then go back to murdering people, not get snatched up by the Admiral and end up on the Barge.

Abilities/Powers:

• The Rift–Avalon has access to a spirit realm in their world, which they call the Rift. Within it, their physical body disappears and they take the form of an opaque, intangible human silhouette. They can’t shapeshift, but their telepathy still works. They can also sense strong emotions from others, which they use to find and select their targets. The Rift acts as a portal to transport Avalon to their targets, and they can enter it for protection. For example, if someone attacks them, they can disappear into the Rift, and their physical body will cease to exist until they come back out.

  • Barge Limits—This is completely nerfed.

• Shapeshifting–(See “Special Notes” for more information.) Outside the Rift, Avalon can replicate the physical form of anyone they’ve seen or any physical body that they can visualize. Their default form tends to be the body of a young enby, because it looks harmless and gives them time to get their bearings with unknown people. If they’re currently hunting a victim, they’ll appear as a clone of their victim until they find it useful to look like something or someone else (such as a loved one of their victim).

  • Barge Limits—This ability is going to be mostly unchanged. Avalon will enter the Barge in their default form and will be able to shapeshift. However, other characters, especially mages, will be able to quickly notice that something is not quite right about whoever’s form Avalon has decided to use at the time. Their shapeshifting will essentially be more transparent.

• Telepathy–Both inside and outside the Rift, Avalon can communicate telepathically with others, though their telepathy is altered inside the Rift. This sounds like a regular conversation that no one can hear except for Avalon and the person at whom their telepathy is directed. It doesn’t matter if the victim is a mage or a human; Avalon will be perfectly capable of poking around in said victim’s head. (Note: telepathy will be indicated by ::italics with double colons instead of quotation marks:: in my posts.)

  • Barge Limits—Avalon will still be able to use telepathy with everyone on the Barge, but other mages (either Wardens or Inmates), once they become aware that Avalon is telepathic, will be able to choose not to hear them.

• Body Sharing–Avalon can travel from the Rift directly into another person’s body and be the human’s headmate. However, the one time they actually tried this, it resulted in their first failed kill. They are capable of sharing the bodies of humans, but not mages, and they likely will not try it again.

  • Barge Limits—They are not particularly interested in using this ability again, so not that they will care, but this will be completely nerfed. 

Inmate Information: Avalon lacks a stable identity. They change their physical appearance and the way they conduct themself around others based entirely on what they think will harm their current victim the most. However, they are often unsure of who they are. Their personality is centered around their murders, constantly shifting to match their current target. They build different selves around an emotionless core.

Avalon basically sees all other conscious beings as potential targets instead of lives. Their honesty is the only “moral” value they have, and they use that for murder. They don’t value life at all. They also tend to see the negative aspects of people and be somewhat blind to people’s positive aspects, because the negative aspects are what are useful to them.

Having existed for as long as they have, Avalon is a fairly intelligent being. They have quickly discovered the limits of their magic, and they can read people fairly well, though their human interaction is very limited. They are also able to quickly pick up languages, which they have learned from traveling all over the world, and they can adapt well to cultural norms, enabling them to blend in with the people around them. However, they don’t spend much time in the real world. They essentially stalk potential victims for a month or so from inside the Rift before manifesting near the victim as a clone of either the victim or someone in his/her/their life. They stay in the real world for as long as it takes to kill the victim. This method has worked for several millennia, and Avalon has only failed twice. The first failed victim had a friend who intervened before Avalon could finish the job. The second failed victim shot Avalon, landing them on the Barge. 

Avalon is obsessed with their first failure. They are often thinking about him, trying to figure out why they couldn’t kill him. They are haunted both by their failure and the fact that someone else can enter their realm. Avalon is not particularly good at giving up, and will see things through for as long as they can. While they are constantly molding their identity to fit their victims, they do have a strong will and are able to make decisions quickly. The flip side of this determination is their obsessiveness. Once they have decided that they want to kill someone, they absolutely have to make sure that person dies. They will chase that person all over the world, for as long as they have to, and they will make sure she/he/they are killed, even if they have to do it by stabbing him/her/them in the gut. 

Avalon has only really had the opportunity to obsess over people, given how often they move around for the sake of their “hobby”. However, once they begin living on the Barge, they will be forced to give up murder to some extent, and they will quickly learn that they obsess over anything that they have real interest in. They will decide that they want to do something, and then fixate on that task or activity until they have done what they want to do or until they find a new obsession and their interest wanes. Avalon essentially feels a constant need to be poking around in someone’s head, and this can cause them to be impulsive at times. In the normal course of their existence, this means that they attack every potential victim whose emotional torture seems like a good idea. Since they don’t feel much of anything, their fixations and their victims give them the limited “emotions” that they have.

Avalon uses it for emotional manipulation, but they are honest. Everything that they use to push their victims over the edge is true, or at least a true reflection of the victim’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. They push their victim’s negative emotions as far as they can, but they always make sure that they are only using things that their victim believes to be true. 

They react well to challenges, but not failures. If they think that someone will be difficult to kill, they’ll try to find a way to make it work. Similarly, they will spend their time on the Barge attempting to either escape or commit murder anyway. Failing at something just makes Avalon more obsessed with succeeding in any way they can.

As far as criminal activity goes, Avalon does their best to follow the laws of whichever society they are currently occupying because it helps them to blend in. When they are outside the Rift, they are entirely focused on killing one person, and they will do whatever they can to avoid getting caught. They also focus on causing emotional harm rather than physical harm. They try to kill people as quietly as possible. 

Path to Redemption: The two main things that Avalon needs to change about themself are, one, the fact that they murder people, and two, their inability to form stable relationships with others. They need to learn to connect with others in genuine ways rather than just trying to get close to someone so that they can find a way to kill him/her/them. In other words, Avalon needs to figure out who they are outside of their hobby and build a true personality for themself.

The reason that they kill people is that this is the purpose they have found for themself. They are empty, and they have learned to use murder to fill the void. Their first kill was an accident, but Avalon discovered that finding people’s darkest moments and using them to manipulate people makes them feel whole. Since Avalon was born from the Rift, they essentially don’t exist except for the identities that they have made for themself. They see themself and all other living beings as meaningless, so they have no qualms about ending lives. 

Their time on the Barge should be spent learning to value the lives of others and see people as people rather than targets. Outside of their hobby, Avalon struggles to form strong bonds with others and understand human emotions, and they have the people skills of a rock. They literally do not know how to have a conversation without actively searching for and exploiting their partner’s emotional weaknesses. They only form “relationships” when they are looking for weapons, and they only learn enough about people to destroy their lives. They will need to learn to actually connect with others. The first step towards this will likely be trying to form one meaningful relationship. Understanding empathy and learning to care for another being will help them to value human life and see others as more than just targets.

They generally do not take kindly to authority, so being placed on the Barge and being wardened will both be met with resistance. Avalon is used to doing things on their own terms, without considering what anyone else thinks. They will likely spend a lot of time in the Rift, where they can be alone, and it will take some work from their Warden to get them to stop isolating themself. 

They do not want to change, but they are far from an illogical being. Their murder methods hinge on logic and figuring out what will work best to hurt their victim, so they would not respond to any sort of emotion-based therapy, but they will respond to logic. If Avalon’s Warden can get them to see why murder is wrong, he/she/they might make some headway with them. The Warden will also have to keep a close eye on them for…a while. As for teaching them to connect with others, their Warden will practically have to manhandle them. Forcing Avalon to interact with others would help them start to develop some empathy. Their main problem comes from the fact that they have no existence outside of murder, and since they change their identity so often, they have no idea who they actually are. They see their “hobby” as an identity. They will need to find an identity outside of it and develop a true sense of morals.

World Information: Avalon does not technically “live” anywhere, unless the Rift counts. They frequently jump in and out of it as they seek out victims, and they use it to travel to wherever their victim happens to be in the world. They have watched the world evolve from its beginning, and have been everywhere, though they spend most of their time in the Rift and only come out when they want their current target to see them. They have seen every political and cultural system in history, even if they haven’t been directly involved. Their memories of historical events are limited to how it affected the person they were trying to murder at the time. Suffice to say they weren’t paying too much attention to what was actually going on in the world.

The only difference between the world that they come from and the real world is that about half of humanity was born with elemental magic in Avalon’s world. These elementals can have any combination of water, air, ice, fire, and earth magic. Someone born as an elemental would be able to produce and manipulate whichever elements they were born with. Each element is also associated with an emotion (fear, lust, apathy, anger, arrogance), and the user will have difficulty regulating that emotion while using the element. Avalon uses this lack of emotional control to their advantage when given the opportunity.

Avalon does not know this, but the Rift could potentially be accessible to anyone with magical abilities, if that person is prepared to deal with the fact that it alters magic. They have had someone else enter their realm once, and they were completely unprepared for it. Having people invading it on the Barge would be…fun, to say the least.

History: Avalon is immortal. They existed as a disembodied presence for about four millennia before humans came into the world. They were able to watch humans from inside the Rift, and began to see how humans were interacting with each other. Their first kill was a girl who was already suicidal, and they used their magic to push her over the edge without entirely knowing why they were doing it. After that, Avalon started experimenting to figure out how far they could push people. They learned to use the Rift to locate emotional signatures, search for new victims, and eventually, appear in the physical world, where they discovered their ability to shapeshift. They also developed a kind of ritual for their kills. After locating a potential victim, Avalon would use their telepathy to manipulate the victim’s thoughts and emotions until they drove the victim to commit either suicide or homicide. They continued to use this method for a few centuries, adding beads to their bracelet to keep track of their kills.

Avalon has traveled all over the world for the sake of their hobby, and has picked up bits and pieces of almost every language. They have seen every era of human history, though they haven’t been directly involved in much of it. They’ve tried to avoid killing anyone with too much status, limiting their targets to people who are already struggling in some way. They don’t try to make something out of nothing.

Avalon has deviated from their usual method once. They met a victim whom they thought would be difficult, so they decided to inhabit his body instead of simply appearing as a clone of someone in his life. However, a friend of his recognized that the victim’s thoughts were not entirely his own and interfered. This resulted in the friend being able to follow Avalon into the Rift and converse with them inside it. Avalon decided to abandon the victim until they could prevent others from entering their realm.

They killed a few hundred people after their first failure, but could not stop thinking about the friend. Eventually, they stopped killing for a little while and just waited in the Rift, watching people from inside. They found someone who seemed like a good target, and began looking for her weaknesses. They eventually entered the real world as a clone of her best friend, but the woman was able to recognize that Avalon was not her friend. They tried to kill her physically, but she shot them before they could kill her, and they ended up on the Barge.

Sample RP: Here!

Sample Network:

[Avalon spends several minutes ignoring the communicator in their room. When they finally turn to face it, their expression is blank.] 

The journal in my room does not belong to me. I would like to have it removed.

[They reach behind the communicator and pull out an old-looking notebook, flipping through the pages in front of the camera.] 

Does this belong to anyone here?

[A pause.] 

Also, I will not be here if you come to pick it up.

[Their flat expression flickers, just barely.] 

I am not going to say where I will be. You will be able to find me easily enough.

[They reach forward and click the video off.] 

Special Notes: Something that is part of Avalon’s shapeshifting is their bracelet. They have five hundred and thirteen blood-red beads wrapped around their wrist, each bead representing a person that they have killed. The bracelet is essentially a part of their body, and can’t be taken off. It disappears when they enter the Rift and reappears on their person when they leave. They use their shapeshifting to add a bead when they finish a kill. They will retain enough of their shapeshifting abilities to add beads while on the Barge, though their Warden will obviously do everything in his/her/their power to keep Avalon from actually killing anyone. Also, I will make a permissions post for players to opt out of Avalon trying to attack their characters.
Canon Update: Avalon was gone for six hundred years in their world (a week and a half Barge-time), during which they 1) met their “brother”, Adam, 2) were introduced to the existence of others like them, and 3) killed about a hundred people. The humans and elementals in Avalon’s world discovered that the “Passengers” they thought were a myth are very real. As for their Barge journey, Avalon finally had to come to terms with the fact that the Erik-and-Adam-shaped hole in their murder spree has nothing to do with why they’re here. They also took a few days to remember the people they’ve met on the Barge and readjust to not having their powers.