Ammond Raidie/Psymagus Waspfire (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
psycheslantern) wrote2013-07-10 07:35 pm
psycheslantern) wrote2013-07-10 07:35 pm
Entry tags:
Application: We the Lost
Player Name: Bramble
Player Contact:bramblepatch, ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
bramblepatch, raspberrywhisper@gmail.com (email & AIM), ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
bramblepatch
Character Name: Ammond Raidie
Canon: Homestuck OC (non-sgrub AU)
Game Transplant:![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
jarjammed
Original App: Here!
Game Summary: Jarjammed is a Homestuck-based jamjar, built on the Homestuck concept of Sburb - a "game" played out in a pocket universe known as the Incipisphere, providing personalized quests and challenges for its chosen heroes, and serving as the mechanism by which new universes are created. In this case, the original "players" failed miserably, and the sole surviving player managed to gain access to the source code of her local reality and alter it to bring in more heroes. This led to nearly a year and a half of constant recruitment from all over the multiverse, during which the ever growing and changing player base concerned themselves largely with infighting and throwing (frequently disastrous) parties, to the mounting dismay and frustration of both the Incipisphere's native Prospitian people and the inscrutable, betentacled Noble Circle of Horrorterrors which observe the game from beyond the outer boundaries of the Incipisphere.
With a few notable exceptions, the Jarjammed cosmology tracks very closely to the canon Homestuck cosmology. The main exceptions are the constant entry of players from different universes, and a complete lack of predetermination, doomed timelines, or stable time loops - although the players were not aware of this until the endgame.
How long was your character in Game: Approximately nine months.
History of Character in their Game:
Ammond entered Sburb during a period of relative calm in the Incipisphere: most major feuds between players were at a low ebb, the Prospitian revolutionaries known as the Sisterhood were only beginning to seriously take action, and the Horrorterrors were making people nervous but had not actually shown their hand - or tentacle, as the case might be - as the hostile force they would prove themselves to be. To Ammond, recruited from mere months before the point that she would have been forcibly conscripted in to the interstellar Alternian Imperial Fleet and stripped of rights and personhood to serve as the psionic "helmsman" - read, engine - of an imperial spacecraft, the Incipisphere seemed like an almost unimaginable paradise. She proceeded to throw herself into the quests assigned to her as the Gear of Choice, take every opportunity to socialize with other players, and generally just be a snarky little shit on the public memo system - getting in an argument, for instance, with resident flamboyant necromancer Jay Zimin over who had the more unreadable chosen text color.
A few weeks after Ammond first entered the Incipisphere, the game malfunctioned under the stress of the unintended large playerbase, temporarily mutating everyone physically and psychologically into strange and disturbing forms. Ammond took to these mutations with relative equanimity, at least compared to her client player, Ienzo, who reacted very poorly to being transformed into a "sexy halloween costume" version of himself, or her client player, Kyouichi Saionji, whose newly developed blindness and general state of being perpetually on fire was only exacerbated by one of his closest friends, Gentaro Kisaragi, being psychologically transformed into a violently unstable high-caste troll. With Gentaro in this state, Saionji had bowed to the general conception among other trolls in the game that he and Gentaro were moirails, or romantically involved under the nonsexual, pacifying and protective relationship model known to trolls as pale romance or moirallegiance. Speaking with Saionji at this point may have given Ammond a somewhat optimistic impression of humans' capacity for pale romance.
There was some fallout around the time that the mutations were reversed, including the death of a long-term player, but none of it involved people who Ammond knew directly, and she rather intentionally ignored it. She continued to engage with the larger community whenever possible, making friends, getting a feel for the local politics, and frequently getting herself much deeper into discussions of helmsmanship than she was really comfortable with. This was also about the time that she started developing a major and ill-advised hatecrush on fellow yellowblooded troll Sollux Captor, who was spending a lot of time making a nuisance of himself and acting in a decidedly stalkerish manner toward an ex-kismesis. She was also beginning to palecrush on Ienzo.
Then Karkat Vantas, the Page of Peace, unlocked a game power that allowed him to induce artificial peace in himself or others and, doped up on this effect, decided that with mounting tensions in the community, the logical next step was to forcibly bring peace to as many people as possible and recruited the help of a powerful adult psionic troll, Dasraa Nasati, to accomplish this. Ammond was lucky enough to be away from her home base when they went from planet to planet in search of players to offer the choice of peace, or a savage beating and then peace; Saionji and Ienzo were not so lucky. She wouldn't find out that Saionji had been hit for some time, but when Ienzo sent out an eerily calm and unworried call for major medical attention, Ammond responded, along with Jay Zimin and Jay's friend Bertie Wooster. In the ensuing chaos - well, chaos on the part of everyone but Ienzo, anyway - it was discovered that Bertie had developed the ability to heal people by absorbing their injuries onto his own body, Jay had developed the ability to heal people through skin-to-skin contact with the injured area, and Ammond had the admittedly fully natural rather than game-given ability to make Bertie faint by taking off her top "for moral support" (he, a proper English gentleman, had objected to the idea of undressing in front of her after absorbing a serious case of broken ribs from Ienzo, and Ammond, a self-proclaimed "yell()wbl()()d fr()m the wr()ng side ()f the m()dular l()c()motive c()nveyance rails," was being at least partially purposefully obtuse about it).
If Ammond wasn't pale for Ienzo before, she most certainly was now, and made a point of checking in with him during the Halloween Party later that week. Other highlights of the party included enthusiastic but inefficient murder attempts by the ghost-type pokemon hostess, lots of people getting set on fire, Ammond showing up in a realistic rubber penguin mask which would later become iconic for reasons no one involved could comprehend, and Jay's boyfriend Klaus having his soulgem stolen, rendering him temporarily dead.
Over the next week, Ienzo regained full use of his emotions, Jay made multiple maudlin drunken memos (the first out of sheer unhappiness with the game, the second after Klaus was dropped from Jarjammed and disappeared), and Ammond reached out to both of them - with concern and support to Ienzo, and with amusement and rather more brusque encouragement to Jay.
At this point the Horrorterrors were also actively recruiting players, and by recruiting I mean attempting to mind control them. Out of Ammond's social circle, Jay was mildly compromised, via the influence of a more thoroughly controlled player, Neophyte Redglare. For the time being, it mostly manifested by doing odd things to his voice when he was upset. Sollux Captor claimed to be voluntarily working for the Horrorterrors in a rather disjointed memo on the public boards; Ammond took some pleasure in pointing out exactly how confused and contradictory he sounded.
In the wake of Klaus's disappearance, Bertie attempted to help out by setting Jay up on dates with a number of other players. Ammond was perhaps mildy disappointed and more than a little taken aback when Jay arrived for their date and flatly informed her that he was not remotely interested in girls, but she responded with relative grace and they agreed to hang out as friends for the day anyway. As they hiked out to visit some sights on Ammond's planet, Ammond learned that Ienzo had become romantically involved with Bertie (a fact which she later confirmed with Ienzo, and then proceeded to give Bertie a friendly "if you break his heart I'll hurt you" talk) and also more than she ever really wanted to know about the politics of human gender and sexuality, especially in Jay and Bertie's conservative home realities.
The Horrorterrors made their move in early December, causing their pawns among the players to perform a blood ritual en masse which created ghostly, sinister doubles of all the planets in the game. Players free from Horrorterror control tried, unsuccessfully, to stop this ritual from being completed; Ammond's Land of Decay and Growth was not directly targeted, but Saionji asked her for backup when a mind-controlled Riku showed up to perform the ritual on his planet. This encounter was the first time that Ammond and Saionji met in person, and also the first time that Saionji realized that Ammond was, in fact, a girl.
Sollux followed up the ritual with an even more disjointed memo. Ammond heckled him again. He responded by demanding that she put her money where her mouth was, she agreed to meet him, and he showed up at her planet and beat her in a severely unmatched psionic dual, breaking her leg. Ammond called Ienzo for help; luckily, his home reality was one with fairly advanced healing magic (although he himself was not skilled in cure spells) and he had access to a number of healing potions. Ammond was left physically healed and feeling a little guilty about constantly paleflirting with the human boy, who was clearly not recognizing her flirtation as anything other than friendliness.
(Other popular but ill-advised memos over the next few days introduced a number of human players to the fact that troll fine cuisine makes heavy use of larval trolls, and introduced a number of troll players (including Ammond) to the fact that humans bear live young. Both factions would have been happier without this knowledge. Ammond and Saionji made a pact to prevent each other from ever finding out any more salient details of each other's species' reproductive habits. Also as a result of these memos, Ammond received her first introduction to the writings of the Disciple.)
A large number of players, including Ammond and her friends (minus Bertie who, as a noncombatant, got locked in his bathroom and left behind) gathered on the planet of one of the dead original players to defeat the Denizen, the "final boss" of the late player's personal quests. Although several of their number were badly injured, Ammond escaped none the worse for wear aside from a profound fatigue and heavy migraine from overstressing her psionic ability. Ienzo was in even worse shape, having cast high-powered spells until he passed out; after the battle, Jay appointed himself as Ienzo's nursemaid and attempted to curb his activity on the public message boards, by telling him off on said message boards. Ammond objected to what she saw as Jay's overzealous and incautious protectiveness of Ienzo, and, after getting Ienzo's permission to speak for him, yelled at Jay a lot over it.
Then Saionji came over to Ammond's hive and the two of them proceeded to get drunk and maudlin together.
The Horrorterrors' interference wasn't over, though - nor was Sollux's downward spiral. Gaining access to the source code of the Incipisphere, Sollux destabilized the physical world, increased the spawn rate of the monsters that infested everyone's worlds, and then exchanged everyone's powers with each other. Disoriented and overwhelmed, many of the players teamed up for security; Ammond spent a week staying in Bertie's flat on the Land of Pianos and Parties, along with Jay, Ienzo, and several other friends of Bertie's. Sollux, having temporarily received a preternatural mad science ability, continued to sabotage the Incipisphere, ultimately deleting a number of planets from existence. One of these planets was Brass and Frogs, a planet of one of the original players, which they were just beginning to realize was necessary to finish Sburb. Another of the planets deleated was Decay and Growth, Ammond's planet. Without a planet of her own, Ammond moved to Ienzo's Land of Disorientation and Decay.
Finally, Sollux revealed himself as a double agent and attempted to break free from the Horrorterrors' influence. He managed to restore Brass and Frogs and implement a code that would protect the other players from the mental control of the Horrorterrors, before the Horrorterrors attacked him, killing his primary body and taking his dreamself hostage.
Meanwhile, and against the advice of pretty much everyone who had ever had a party go disastrously wrong, Bertie decided to host a Valentine's Day party. Ammond worked up the nerve to confess her feelings to Ienzo and asked him to be her moirail; although he was not sure he fully understood the implications of the relationship, he agreed, and they attended the party together. It was a rather nice party, up until the final boss of Bertie's personal quest invaded, kidnapped a number of guests (including Ienzo) and, when the others went to rescue them, killed Bertie. Ienzo kissed Bertie's dead body to revive him, and then threw himself at the giant wasp monster out of pure vengeful grief. Ammond, recognizing that they were badly outclassed, took Ienzo down with a drugged dart, and with Jay's help hauled him back to Bertie's flat.
Shortly thereafter, Ammond had a deeply awkward "I'm paledating your boyfriend, please don't get territorial, I swear I'm not competition and actually I approve of you" conversation with Bertie. This important bit of interspecies diplomacy out of the way, Ammond moved to Pianos and Parties permanently, joining the household that already included both Ienzo and Jay.
The Horrorterrors revealed that they still held Sollux prisoner and were actively torturing him, and were willing to return him in exchange for the Sburb players' cooperation. Ammond, still nursing a huge hatecrush on Sollux and distraught to find herself suddenly homeless, publicly expressed doubt as to the desirability of getting him back, which offended a number of influential members of the community. After this misstep, she avoided the discussion of the situation, while several of the others agreed to exchange their dormant dreamselves for Sollux's safe return and to work toward completing Sburb and vacating the Incipisphere within the next two months. A few weeks after his rescue, Sollux, still badly traumatized, feeling very guilty about his actions, and physically infirm, messaged Ammond. She admitted that while she didn't actually want to condemn him to eternal torture at the tentacles of the Horrorterrors, she still hated him, and he invited her to come get even with him. She agreed to meet up with him, at which point she yelled at him a lot, hit him in the face a lot, and then suggested that maybe once he was able to do something other than sit around feeling sorry for himself, he should look her up.
Sollux's matesprit, Karkat, then messaged Ammond to yell at her a little but mostly impress upon her the importance of not actually breaking Sollux. Ammond and Sollux had a long conversation about how neither thought the other was funny and about growing up as helmsbait, and also about how she needed to respect the boundary of not talking about the to him Horrorterrors. Ammond sent Sollux a very bad movie about bees to watch while he convalesced. Thus awful teenage yellowblood kismessitude blossomed.
Sburb kicked into high gear. Ammond felt more than a little lost, as her friends completed their quests and she, without her planet, had none to complete. They didn't manage to keep the deadline set by the Horrorterrors, but a deft use of the god tier powerup allowed the hostages to escape. Eventually, the players managed to genetically engineer and breed the frog that was the physical representation of the new universe they were to create. Sollux reached god tier, healing the bulk of the damage done to him while in the Horrorterrors' power. Ienzo also reached god tier, with Ammond and Bertie having to rush him to his quest bed after yet another party went badly awry.
Meanwhile, a couple of the newer additions to Sburb made their presence felt: Xigbar was an old friend from Ienzo's morally questionable past who was, according to warnings from several others from their home reality, not nearly as reformed as Ienzo thought he was. Ammond chose to take a "keep your friends close and your friends' possibly evil friends closer" strategy in regards to Xigbar, and though she would never precisely trust him, she did enjoy his laid-back, snarky manner.
Jay became romantically involved with Lestat de Lioncourt, and proceeded to spiral deeper into the abusive relationship for the next couple of months until finally a botched miniboss battle left Jay abandoned on Lestat's planet with injuries that would require amputation of both legs below the knee. Ammond stood vigil during the amputation, assisting as much as she could and generally keeping a slightly suspicious eye on the ad hoc surgeon they had asked to come help. Afterward, she sent a threatening private message to Lestat promising painful death if he so much as attempted to make eye contact with Jay again, and blocked him. He disappeared from the game soon after.
As Sburb, and therefore Jarjammed, entered its endgame, the Propitian Sisterhood assassinated their Queen while many of the players watched, including Ammond. In response, the White King surrendered to Derse, allowing the cataclysmic Reckoning to be initiated and rain meteors on Skaia. In order to stop the Reckoning and enter the new universe, the players would have to defeat the Black King and Queen. Feeling overwhemed and underpowered, Ammond decided to build a battlemech for herself, adapted from Alternian helmsman technology. The mech worked fairly well for the first part of the battle, until a direct hit from the Black Queen caused the biopsionic conduits to overload, killing her. Sollux was first on the scene and kissed her corpse to revive her on Derse; by the time she made it back from the outermost planet of the Incipisphere, the battle had ended with the leader of the Prospitian Sisterhood showing up, killing the Black King, and driving off the players.
The next four days were little more or less than open war, as the players fled first to Cassandra Mortmain's castle home (where Ammond and Sollux hooked up in the bathroom because they're terrible like that) and then to the hidden labs in the asteroid belt just inside the orbit of Derse, fending off the Prospitian forces while figuring out how to enter the new universe and claim their reward. During this final period, the Horrorterrors contacted the players one last time, to reveal that for more than a year, the Incipisphere had been completely immune to destiny, and entering the new universe would spread this effect to the entire multiverse.
This troubled the players a good deal less than the Horrorterrors thought it should.
How did they change from their canon personality wise (Please explain what caused it to happen?) Ammond's personality hasn't changed significantly during her time in Jarjammed; she's still a foul-mouthed, irreverent little twerp with very little sense of when to shut her mouth (unless interacting with someone in the upper third or so of the hemospectrum or someone she perceives as being the equivalent of that status, in which case she is probably terrified out of her wits). One of the larger developments is that her general outlook is a lot less Alternian-centric than it used to be. Honestly, it took a couple of months for her to genuinely relate to non-trolls as people - befriending humans in Sburb, particularly Jay and Bertie and especially Ienzo, was probably the deciding factor in this development. She's still firmly of the belief that Alternia is great (even when it is objectively not, say what you like about the applications of biopsionic technology, in her view the theory is totally logical and any species that uses something other than telekinesis to power space ships is hopelessly backward) and that humans are weird and get hung up on weird things, but after spending nine months interacting with humans (and a spattering of other species) she's a lot less inclined to, for instance, view people who don't use quadrants as amusing and emotionally stunted.
And if she's gotten used to relating to non-trolls as people, she's also a heck of a lot less prone to depersonalizing herself. Her self-esteem issues have improved, mostly by virtue of having spent the last nine months with a very real expectation of having a future - something she was very aware was out of the question back on Alternia - and by virtue of having had a chance to experiment more fully with the theory and practice of using biopsionic technology for her own ends without drawing untoward attention from the authorities or being totally judged for it by absolutely everyone. Just most of everyone. She's more open to collaboration than she was back home, more confident in the value of her skills, and a lot more willing to form new relationships with the expectation that they're going to last, because she doesn't feel like she's going to totally and involuntarily abandon them at the worst possible time. (Which, granted, is still a possibility, with how often people disappeared in Jarjammed, but on Alternia she had recently broken off her on-again-off-again kismessitude because she thought that it wasn't fair to ask some other newly-conscripted kid to be quadranted to a space ship engine, and just generally was actively distancing herself from her friends to protect them.)
How did they change from their canon physically (Please explain what caused it to happen?):
Ammond is in better shape, physically, than she was when she started Sburb. She's still naturally inclined toward extreme thinness, but she's put on a little weight thanks to easier access to higher quality food. She's also gained about an inch in height, and maybe half an inch in horn length - nothing dramatic, but she's a little closer to her full adult stature.
Thanks to her recent death and revival via her dreamself, most of her old injuries are healed; the chip in her horn is gone, along with any mark of the invasive psionic leads that powered the fighter craft she built for the Reckoning battle in Jarjammed. She is, however, still likely at any given time to sport a mottling of sucker-shaped bruises on the insides of her wrists and along her lower back from the non-invasive diodes she uses to power smaller devices that run on the same kind of technology.
Powers:
Ammond is very casual with the use of her psionic powers; she is capable of lifting about the same amount of weight telekinetically as she can physically, albeit with somewhat greater range and flexibility, and has enough precision to type or handle delicate objects with her telekinesis. Socially, she doesn't differentiate much between psionic and physical contact; characters she likes may occasionally get a gentle tap or nudge from across the room, and if a disagreement comes to blows, she's as likely to fight with her mind as with her fists. She can fly under her own power, although not at any great speed and extended flight tires her and can give her migraines. Ammond is not capable of energy-beam type attacks, and only rarely shows any sort of visual effect - when under a great deal of stress, or using an unusual amount of power, she may emit white sparks.
She also has the skill and knowledge to efficiently harness her own psionic force to power mechanical devices, usually by way of a system of biotech cables that work on similar principles as the invasive, oppressive helmsman technology used to power Alternian spacecraft. The major use Ammond has for this technology is to power a dirt bike with a modified engine - a bipsycle, if you will. For most applications, Ammond uses a form of noninvasive diode that adheres to her skin; in rare cases, she may make use of cables which are inserted under her skin. While she is connected to a biopsionic array of any significant power, Ammond's psionics are automatically siphoned off and she cannot use them for anything other than powering the device.
The powers granted to Ammond by her time in Sburb were never fully realized and, in this form, are almost entirely passive; as the Gear of Choice, Ammond's presence and participation in a situation can help make options clear, making it less likely that people will overlook possible courses of action. This doesn't effect possibilities governed by pure chance, does not provide any information the characters do not already have, and does not offer any insight into what is the best or most productive choice.
Possessions:
Tech:
- Bipsycle (dirtbike, runs on hybrid internal combustion/biopsionic engine)
- Stingpsycle (flying, hornet-themed mod of the bipsycle)
- Assorted small-scale psychobiotechnological components and materials for the cultivation thereof
- Husktop (portable computer)
- Plague Doctop (hands-free mask-based computer, looks like an ornate plague doctor's mask)
- DVD Collection (Troll Lost; Townhive, Mediliquidator; Standard Secular Rest Day Morning Live compilations; Bee Movie; A young midblood's rural hive is translocated by anomolous weather conditions and she must navigate a strange and hostile landscape with her small canine lusus, contains gimmicky use of color, twelve musical numbers, two caliginous scenes not suitable for small wigglers, five pale scenes, one purpoted suicide of an extra (which may be a large bird flapping its wings), etc. etc. ..., a number of action movies of varying quality)
Literature (1 box):
- Collected works of Troll John Green
- Collected works of Troll Sharon Creech
- Handy references on Biopsionic technology
- 2 binders of notes on the same
- The Book of the Signless, as recorded by the Disciple
- Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery
Clothing (2 boxes):
- wardrobe mostly consisting of black tank tops and grey skinny jeans
- an unfortunate variety of novelty chuck taylors
- tuxedo
- black leather coat and fabric surgical mask
- assorted body jewelry, bandannas, and handkerchiefs
- the Troubling Penguin Mask (rubber full-head mask depicting an emperor penguin.)
Weapons:
- blowgun
- darts (knockout; hornet sting; paralytic; poisoned)
Other:
- first aid kit
Please provide three samples from your previous game, at least one will have to be third person with context:
Sample One: >Ammond: f rien dship?: Ammond attempts to console a grieving and slightly possessed Jay.
Sample Two: Post Valentine's party fallout log: Bertie returns home after dying and being revived. A little later, Ammond is pale as a very pale thing for Ienzo.
Sample Three: >Sollux: Research: What is blackrom how does it work
Player Contact:
bramblepatch, Character Name: Ammond Raidie
Canon: Homestuck OC (non-sgrub AU)
Game Transplant:
jarjammedOriginal App: Here!
Game Summary: Jarjammed is a Homestuck-based jamjar, built on the Homestuck concept of Sburb - a "game" played out in a pocket universe known as the Incipisphere, providing personalized quests and challenges for its chosen heroes, and serving as the mechanism by which new universes are created. In this case, the original "players" failed miserably, and the sole surviving player managed to gain access to the source code of her local reality and alter it to bring in more heroes. This led to nearly a year and a half of constant recruitment from all over the multiverse, during which the ever growing and changing player base concerned themselves largely with infighting and throwing (frequently disastrous) parties, to the mounting dismay and frustration of both the Incipisphere's native Prospitian people and the inscrutable, betentacled Noble Circle of Horrorterrors which observe the game from beyond the outer boundaries of the Incipisphere.
With a few notable exceptions, the Jarjammed cosmology tracks very closely to the canon Homestuck cosmology. The main exceptions are the constant entry of players from different universes, and a complete lack of predetermination, doomed timelines, or stable time loops - although the players were not aware of this until the endgame.
How long was your character in Game: Approximately nine months.
History of Character in their Game:
Ammond entered Sburb during a period of relative calm in the Incipisphere: most major feuds between players were at a low ebb, the Prospitian revolutionaries known as the Sisterhood were only beginning to seriously take action, and the Horrorterrors were making people nervous but had not actually shown their hand - or tentacle, as the case might be - as the hostile force they would prove themselves to be. To Ammond, recruited from mere months before the point that she would have been forcibly conscripted in to the interstellar Alternian Imperial Fleet and stripped of rights and personhood to serve as the psionic "helmsman" - read, engine - of an imperial spacecraft, the Incipisphere seemed like an almost unimaginable paradise. She proceeded to throw herself into the quests assigned to her as the Gear of Choice, take every opportunity to socialize with other players, and generally just be a snarky little shit on the public memo system - getting in an argument, for instance, with resident flamboyant necromancer Jay Zimin over who had the more unreadable chosen text color.
A few weeks after Ammond first entered the Incipisphere, the game malfunctioned under the stress of the unintended large playerbase, temporarily mutating everyone physically and psychologically into strange and disturbing forms. Ammond took to these mutations with relative equanimity, at least compared to her client player, Ienzo, who reacted very poorly to being transformed into a "sexy halloween costume" version of himself, or her client player, Kyouichi Saionji, whose newly developed blindness and general state of being perpetually on fire was only exacerbated by one of his closest friends, Gentaro Kisaragi, being psychologically transformed into a violently unstable high-caste troll. With Gentaro in this state, Saionji had bowed to the general conception among other trolls in the game that he and Gentaro were moirails, or romantically involved under the nonsexual, pacifying and protective relationship model known to trolls as pale romance or moirallegiance. Speaking with Saionji at this point may have given Ammond a somewhat optimistic impression of humans' capacity for pale romance.
There was some fallout around the time that the mutations were reversed, including the death of a long-term player, but none of it involved people who Ammond knew directly, and she rather intentionally ignored it. She continued to engage with the larger community whenever possible, making friends, getting a feel for the local politics, and frequently getting herself much deeper into discussions of helmsmanship than she was really comfortable with. This was also about the time that she started developing a major and ill-advised hatecrush on fellow yellowblooded troll Sollux Captor, who was spending a lot of time making a nuisance of himself and acting in a decidedly stalkerish manner toward an ex-kismesis. She was also beginning to palecrush on Ienzo.
Then Karkat Vantas, the Page of Peace, unlocked a game power that allowed him to induce artificial peace in himself or others and, doped up on this effect, decided that with mounting tensions in the community, the logical next step was to forcibly bring peace to as many people as possible and recruited the help of a powerful adult psionic troll, Dasraa Nasati, to accomplish this. Ammond was lucky enough to be away from her home base when they went from planet to planet in search of players to offer the choice of peace, or a savage beating and then peace; Saionji and Ienzo were not so lucky. She wouldn't find out that Saionji had been hit for some time, but when Ienzo sent out an eerily calm and unworried call for major medical attention, Ammond responded, along with Jay Zimin and Jay's friend Bertie Wooster. In the ensuing chaos - well, chaos on the part of everyone but Ienzo, anyway - it was discovered that Bertie had developed the ability to heal people by absorbing their injuries onto his own body, Jay had developed the ability to heal people through skin-to-skin contact with the injured area, and Ammond had the admittedly fully natural rather than game-given ability to make Bertie faint by taking off her top "for moral support" (he, a proper English gentleman, had objected to the idea of undressing in front of her after absorbing a serious case of broken ribs from Ienzo, and Ammond, a self-proclaimed "yell()wbl()()d fr()m the wr()ng side ()f the m()dular l()c()motive c()nveyance rails," was being at least partially purposefully obtuse about it).
If Ammond wasn't pale for Ienzo before, she most certainly was now, and made a point of checking in with him during the Halloween Party later that week. Other highlights of the party included enthusiastic but inefficient murder attempts by the ghost-type pokemon hostess, lots of people getting set on fire, Ammond showing up in a realistic rubber penguin mask which would later become iconic for reasons no one involved could comprehend, and Jay's boyfriend Klaus having his soulgem stolen, rendering him temporarily dead.
Over the next week, Ienzo regained full use of his emotions, Jay made multiple maudlin drunken memos (the first out of sheer unhappiness with the game, the second after Klaus was dropped from Jarjammed and disappeared), and Ammond reached out to both of them - with concern and support to Ienzo, and with amusement and rather more brusque encouragement to Jay.
At this point the Horrorterrors were also actively recruiting players, and by recruiting I mean attempting to mind control them. Out of Ammond's social circle, Jay was mildly compromised, via the influence of a more thoroughly controlled player, Neophyte Redglare. For the time being, it mostly manifested by doing odd things to his voice when he was upset. Sollux Captor claimed to be voluntarily working for the Horrorterrors in a rather disjointed memo on the public boards; Ammond took some pleasure in pointing out exactly how confused and contradictory he sounded.
In the wake of Klaus's disappearance, Bertie attempted to help out by setting Jay up on dates with a number of other players. Ammond was perhaps mildy disappointed and more than a little taken aback when Jay arrived for their date and flatly informed her that he was not remotely interested in girls, but she responded with relative grace and they agreed to hang out as friends for the day anyway. As they hiked out to visit some sights on Ammond's planet, Ammond learned that Ienzo had become romantically involved with Bertie (a fact which she later confirmed with Ienzo, and then proceeded to give Bertie a friendly "if you break his heart I'll hurt you" talk) and also more than she ever really wanted to know about the politics of human gender and sexuality, especially in Jay and Bertie's conservative home realities.
The Horrorterrors made their move in early December, causing their pawns among the players to perform a blood ritual en masse which created ghostly, sinister doubles of all the planets in the game. Players free from Horrorterror control tried, unsuccessfully, to stop this ritual from being completed; Ammond's Land of Decay and Growth was not directly targeted, but Saionji asked her for backup when a mind-controlled Riku showed up to perform the ritual on his planet. This encounter was the first time that Ammond and Saionji met in person, and also the first time that Saionji realized that Ammond was, in fact, a girl.
Sollux followed up the ritual with an even more disjointed memo. Ammond heckled him again. He responded by demanding that she put her money where her mouth was, she agreed to meet him, and he showed up at her planet and beat her in a severely unmatched psionic dual, breaking her leg. Ammond called Ienzo for help; luckily, his home reality was one with fairly advanced healing magic (although he himself was not skilled in cure spells) and he had access to a number of healing potions. Ammond was left physically healed and feeling a little guilty about constantly paleflirting with the human boy, who was clearly not recognizing her flirtation as anything other than friendliness.
(Other popular but ill-advised memos over the next few days introduced a number of human players to the fact that troll fine cuisine makes heavy use of larval trolls, and introduced a number of troll players (including Ammond) to the fact that humans bear live young. Both factions would have been happier without this knowledge. Ammond and Saionji made a pact to prevent each other from ever finding out any more salient details of each other's species' reproductive habits. Also as a result of these memos, Ammond received her first introduction to the writings of the Disciple.)
A large number of players, including Ammond and her friends (minus Bertie who, as a noncombatant, got locked in his bathroom and left behind) gathered on the planet of one of the dead original players to defeat the Denizen, the "final boss" of the late player's personal quests. Although several of their number were badly injured, Ammond escaped none the worse for wear aside from a profound fatigue and heavy migraine from overstressing her psionic ability. Ienzo was in even worse shape, having cast high-powered spells until he passed out; after the battle, Jay appointed himself as Ienzo's nursemaid and attempted to curb his activity on the public message boards, by telling him off on said message boards. Ammond objected to what she saw as Jay's overzealous and incautious protectiveness of Ienzo, and, after getting Ienzo's permission to speak for him, yelled at Jay a lot over it.
Then Saionji came over to Ammond's hive and the two of them proceeded to get drunk and maudlin together.
The Horrorterrors' interference wasn't over, though - nor was Sollux's downward spiral. Gaining access to the source code of the Incipisphere, Sollux destabilized the physical world, increased the spawn rate of the monsters that infested everyone's worlds, and then exchanged everyone's powers with each other. Disoriented and overwhelmed, many of the players teamed up for security; Ammond spent a week staying in Bertie's flat on the Land of Pianos and Parties, along with Jay, Ienzo, and several other friends of Bertie's. Sollux, having temporarily received a preternatural mad science ability, continued to sabotage the Incipisphere, ultimately deleting a number of planets from existence. One of these planets was Brass and Frogs, a planet of one of the original players, which they were just beginning to realize was necessary to finish Sburb. Another of the planets deleated was Decay and Growth, Ammond's planet. Without a planet of her own, Ammond moved to Ienzo's Land of Disorientation and Decay.
Finally, Sollux revealed himself as a double agent and attempted to break free from the Horrorterrors' influence. He managed to restore Brass and Frogs and implement a code that would protect the other players from the mental control of the Horrorterrors, before the Horrorterrors attacked him, killing his primary body and taking his dreamself hostage.
Meanwhile, and against the advice of pretty much everyone who had ever had a party go disastrously wrong, Bertie decided to host a Valentine's Day party. Ammond worked up the nerve to confess her feelings to Ienzo and asked him to be her moirail; although he was not sure he fully understood the implications of the relationship, he agreed, and they attended the party together. It was a rather nice party, up until the final boss of Bertie's personal quest invaded, kidnapped a number of guests (including Ienzo) and, when the others went to rescue them, killed Bertie. Ienzo kissed Bertie's dead body to revive him, and then threw himself at the giant wasp monster out of pure vengeful grief. Ammond, recognizing that they were badly outclassed, took Ienzo down with a drugged dart, and with Jay's help hauled him back to Bertie's flat.
Shortly thereafter, Ammond had a deeply awkward "I'm paledating your boyfriend, please don't get territorial, I swear I'm not competition and actually I approve of you" conversation with Bertie. This important bit of interspecies diplomacy out of the way, Ammond moved to Pianos and Parties permanently, joining the household that already included both Ienzo and Jay.
The Horrorterrors revealed that they still held Sollux prisoner and were actively torturing him, and were willing to return him in exchange for the Sburb players' cooperation. Ammond, still nursing a huge hatecrush on Sollux and distraught to find herself suddenly homeless, publicly expressed doubt as to the desirability of getting him back, which offended a number of influential members of the community. After this misstep, she avoided the discussion of the situation, while several of the others agreed to exchange their dormant dreamselves for Sollux's safe return and to work toward completing Sburb and vacating the Incipisphere within the next two months. A few weeks after his rescue, Sollux, still badly traumatized, feeling very guilty about his actions, and physically infirm, messaged Ammond. She admitted that while she didn't actually want to condemn him to eternal torture at the tentacles of the Horrorterrors, she still hated him, and he invited her to come get even with him. She agreed to meet up with him, at which point she yelled at him a lot, hit him in the face a lot, and then suggested that maybe once he was able to do something other than sit around feeling sorry for himself, he should look her up.
Sollux's matesprit, Karkat, then messaged Ammond to yell at her a little but mostly impress upon her the importance of not actually breaking Sollux. Ammond and Sollux had a long conversation about how neither thought the other was funny and about growing up as helmsbait, and also about how she needed to respect the boundary of not talking about the to him Horrorterrors. Ammond sent Sollux a very bad movie about bees to watch while he convalesced. Thus awful teenage yellowblood kismessitude blossomed.
Sburb kicked into high gear. Ammond felt more than a little lost, as her friends completed their quests and she, without her planet, had none to complete. They didn't manage to keep the deadline set by the Horrorterrors, but a deft use of the god tier powerup allowed the hostages to escape. Eventually, the players managed to genetically engineer and breed the frog that was the physical representation of the new universe they were to create. Sollux reached god tier, healing the bulk of the damage done to him while in the Horrorterrors' power. Ienzo also reached god tier, with Ammond and Bertie having to rush him to his quest bed after yet another party went badly awry.
Meanwhile, a couple of the newer additions to Sburb made their presence felt: Xigbar was an old friend from Ienzo's morally questionable past who was, according to warnings from several others from their home reality, not nearly as reformed as Ienzo thought he was. Ammond chose to take a "keep your friends close and your friends' possibly evil friends closer" strategy in regards to Xigbar, and though she would never precisely trust him, she did enjoy his laid-back, snarky manner.
Jay became romantically involved with Lestat de Lioncourt, and proceeded to spiral deeper into the abusive relationship for the next couple of months until finally a botched miniboss battle left Jay abandoned on Lestat's planet with injuries that would require amputation of both legs below the knee. Ammond stood vigil during the amputation, assisting as much as she could and generally keeping a slightly suspicious eye on the ad hoc surgeon they had asked to come help. Afterward, she sent a threatening private message to Lestat promising painful death if he so much as attempted to make eye contact with Jay again, and blocked him. He disappeared from the game soon after.
As Sburb, and therefore Jarjammed, entered its endgame, the Propitian Sisterhood assassinated their Queen while many of the players watched, including Ammond. In response, the White King surrendered to Derse, allowing the cataclysmic Reckoning to be initiated and rain meteors on Skaia. In order to stop the Reckoning and enter the new universe, the players would have to defeat the Black King and Queen. Feeling overwhemed and underpowered, Ammond decided to build a battlemech for herself, adapted from Alternian helmsman technology. The mech worked fairly well for the first part of the battle, until a direct hit from the Black Queen caused the biopsionic conduits to overload, killing her. Sollux was first on the scene and kissed her corpse to revive her on Derse; by the time she made it back from the outermost planet of the Incipisphere, the battle had ended with the leader of the Prospitian Sisterhood showing up, killing the Black King, and driving off the players.
The next four days were little more or less than open war, as the players fled first to Cassandra Mortmain's castle home (where Ammond and Sollux hooked up in the bathroom because they're terrible like that) and then to the hidden labs in the asteroid belt just inside the orbit of Derse, fending off the Prospitian forces while figuring out how to enter the new universe and claim their reward. During this final period, the Horrorterrors contacted the players one last time, to reveal that for more than a year, the Incipisphere had been completely immune to destiny, and entering the new universe would spread this effect to the entire multiverse.
This troubled the players a good deal less than the Horrorterrors thought it should.
How did they change from their canon personality wise (Please explain what caused it to happen?) Ammond's personality hasn't changed significantly during her time in Jarjammed; she's still a foul-mouthed, irreverent little twerp with very little sense of when to shut her mouth (unless interacting with someone in the upper third or so of the hemospectrum or someone she perceives as being the equivalent of that status, in which case she is probably terrified out of her wits). One of the larger developments is that her general outlook is a lot less Alternian-centric than it used to be. Honestly, it took a couple of months for her to genuinely relate to non-trolls as people - befriending humans in Sburb, particularly Jay and Bertie and especially Ienzo, was probably the deciding factor in this development. She's still firmly of the belief that Alternia is great (even when it is objectively not, say what you like about the applications of biopsionic technology, in her view the theory is totally logical and any species that uses something other than telekinesis to power space ships is hopelessly backward) and that humans are weird and get hung up on weird things, but after spending nine months interacting with humans (and a spattering of other species) she's a lot less inclined to, for instance, view people who don't use quadrants as amusing and emotionally stunted.
And if she's gotten used to relating to non-trolls as people, she's also a heck of a lot less prone to depersonalizing herself. Her self-esteem issues have improved, mostly by virtue of having spent the last nine months with a very real expectation of having a future - something she was very aware was out of the question back on Alternia - and by virtue of having had a chance to experiment more fully with the theory and practice of using biopsionic technology for her own ends without drawing untoward attention from the authorities or being totally judged for it by absolutely everyone. Just most of everyone. She's more open to collaboration than she was back home, more confident in the value of her skills, and a lot more willing to form new relationships with the expectation that they're going to last, because she doesn't feel like she's going to totally and involuntarily abandon them at the worst possible time. (Which, granted, is still a possibility, with how often people disappeared in Jarjammed, but on Alternia she had recently broken off her on-again-off-again kismessitude because she thought that it wasn't fair to ask some other newly-conscripted kid to be quadranted to a space ship engine, and just generally was actively distancing herself from her friends to protect them.)
How did they change from their canon physically (Please explain what caused it to happen?):
Ammond is in better shape, physically, than she was when she started Sburb. She's still naturally inclined toward extreme thinness, but she's put on a little weight thanks to easier access to higher quality food. She's also gained about an inch in height, and maybe half an inch in horn length - nothing dramatic, but she's a little closer to her full adult stature.
Thanks to her recent death and revival via her dreamself, most of her old injuries are healed; the chip in her horn is gone, along with any mark of the invasive psionic leads that powered the fighter craft she built for the Reckoning battle in Jarjammed. She is, however, still likely at any given time to sport a mottling of sucker-shaped bruises on the insides of her wrists and along her lower back from the non-invasive diodes she uses to power smaller devices that run on the same kind of technology.
Powers:
Ammond is very casual with the use of her psionic powers; she is capable of lifting about the same amount of weight telekinetically as she can physically, albeit with somewhat greater range and flexibility, and has enough precision to type or handle delicate objects with her telekinesis. Socially, she doesn't differentiate much between psionic and physical contact; characters she likes may occasionally get a gentle tap or nudge from across the room, and if a disagreement comes to blows, she's as likely to fight with her mind as with her fists. She can fly under her own power, although not at any great speed and extended flight tires her and can give her migraines. Ammond is not capable of energy-beam type attacks, and only rarely shows any sort of visual effect - when under a great deal of stress, or using an unusual amount of power, she may emit white sparks.
She also has the skill and knowledge to efficiently harness her own psionic force to power mechanical devices, usually by way of a system of biotech cables that work on similar principles as the invasive, oppressive helmsman technology used to power Alternian spacecraft. The major use Ammond has for this technology is to power a dirt bike with a modified engine - a bipsycle, if you will. For most applications, Ammond uses a form of noninvasive diode that adheres to her skin; in rare cases, she may make use of cables which are inserted under her skin. While she is connected to a biopsionic array of any significant power, Ammond's psionics are automatically siphoned off and she cannot use them for anything other than powering the device.
The powers granted to Ammond by her time in Sburb were never fully realized and, in this form, are almost entirely passive; as the Gear of Choice, Ammond's presence and participation in a situation can help make options clear, making it less likely that people will overlook possible courses of action. This doesn't effect possibilities governed by pure chance, does not provide any information the characters do not already have, and does not offer any insight into what is the best or most productive choice.
Possessions:
Tech:
- Bipsycle (dirtbike, runs on hybrid internal combustion/biopsionic engine)
- Stingpsycle (flying, hornet-themed mod of the bipsycle)
- Assorted small-scale psychobiotechnological components and materials for the cultivation thereof
- Husktop (portable computer)
- Plague Doctop (hands-free mask-based computer, looks like an ornate plague doctor's mask)
- DVD Collection (Troll Lost; Townhive, Mediliquidator; Standard Secular Rest Day Morning Live compilations; Bee Movie; A young midblood's rural hive is translocated by anomolous weather conditions and she must navigate a strange and hostile landscape with her small canine lusus, contains gimmicky use of color, twelve musical numbers, two caliginous scenes not suitable for small wigglers, five pale scenes, one purpoted suicide of an extra (which may be a large bird flapping its wings), etc. etc. ..., a number of action movies of varying quality)
Literature (1 box):
- Collected works of Troll John Green
- Collected works of Troll Sharon Creech
- Handy references on Biopsionic technology
- 2 binders of notes on the same
- The Book of the Signless, as recorded by the Disciple
- Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery
Clothing (2 boxes):
- wardrobe mostly consisting of black tank tops and grey skinny jeans
- an unfortunate variety of novelty chuck taylors
- tuxedo
- black leather coat and fabric surgical mask
- assorted body jewelry, bandannas, and handkerchiefs
- the Troubling Penguin Mask (rubber full-head mask depicting an emperor penguin.)
Weapons:
- blowgun
- darts (knockout; hornet sting; paralytic; poisoned)
Other:
- first aid kit
Please provide three samples from your previous game, at least one will have to be third person with context:
Sample One: >Ammond: f rien dship?: Ammond attempts to console a grieving and slightly possessed Jay.
Sample Two: Post Valentine's party fallout log: Bertie returns home after dying and being revived. A little later, Ammond is pale as a very pale thing for Ienzo.
Sample Three: >Sollux: Research: What is blackrom how does it work