NationStates

Do not remove this search tag: #PLAPP

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PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Character Name: Sanford “Sandy” Bela (married to Amanda Bela)

Character Gender: Male

Species (nation personification, human, alien, etc): human

Age: 38

Appearance: dark brown hair, ruddy complexion, hazel eyes, 5' 10”, 185#

URL to Character Picture, if any:

Primary Objective: (What is your character's main goal? This should be the thing that drives their part of the plot.) gain more magical ability, materials, and knowledge, including knowing local spell-casters and supernatural beings

Secondary Objectives: (What other goals does your character intend to achieve? These should drive subplots.) discover his connection to the Olympian pantheon and their purpose (if any) for him having the spell that turns him into Pegasus.

MUNDANE SKILLS
These do NOT require points. These are the average, daily things your character can do. Examples are "drive a car", "speak a normal Foreign Language", "play a guitar", "write poetry". Some mundane skills come from your bio and are freebie. A soldier knows very basic training (shoot a gun, basic drill). Medic, martial arts or sniper would be a Specialized Skill or Talent.
List Mundane skills here:
Typical modern American adult skills at typical adult competency (drive a car, etc)
History (Classical Greek Cosmos, expert)
History (Other times and places, ok)
Speak Greek (Classical, Church, and Modern; all fluently)
Speak Arabic (Halting)
Play basketball (formerly on high school team)
Bake bread (not bad)


SPECIALIZED SKILLS AND TALENTS
These are specialized skills that set you apart from the average person. You have 7 points to spend here. Examples are swordsmanship, sniper, coercion, piloting etc.
Ability 1: Stick fighting, 3
Ability 2: Alchemy, 2
Ability 3: Magical knowledge, 3
Ability 4: Diagnosis, 1
Ability 5: Triage, 3
Ability 6: First Aid, 3

OPTIONAL SUPERNATURAL CHARACTERISTICS
You have 7 points to spend here on supernatural skills or abilities. Sonic Scream, Levitation, Spell Casting, Shape Shifting etc. Superman MUST have his kryptonite, so Restrictions are what can't they do with their power or what balances it. They can only use it when they genuinely need it? They can't use it for more then five minutes without serious side-effects? Some things are allowed without points. A pegasus has wings thus it can fly. A raptor is fast thus no points are spent in speed. These "natural" abilities should be listed in the character's description, however.

Ability 1: Sorcery (AKA “the Art”)
Power Level: 4
Strengths: Sorcerers cast spells they've learned from written texts and they always succeed in casting them, barring hostile action.
Weaknesses: Sandy knows relatively few spells, and most are relatively weak, as reflected by his low Magical Knowledge skill (See Spell List below)
Restrictions: Sorcerers need time to cast their spells, and working sorcery requires speaking the spells, making magical gestures to direct the spells, or both.

Ability 2: Sense Magic (AKA “the Sight”)
Power Level: 2
Strengths: Sandy can see and hear that an object or spell is magic, and get an idea of how powerful the magic is. Sometimes, especially for powerful magic (Power 5 or more), he has an idea of the kind of magic it is (or most powerful kind of magic in a complex spell or object).
Weaknesses: Sandy's Sight is a bit nearsighted, so beyond 5m it starts to blur – he can't always tell what specifically is magic – and it's useless beyond 20m. His Hearing is worse: he can't locate the source of magical sounds at all, so he just knows they're nearby.
Restrictions:

Spell List

• Spell: Apollonius' Fifth Metamorphosis
  Power Level: 6
  Strengths: This spell turns Sandy into Pegasus. Not a pegasus, but the Pegasus, the child of Poseidon and Medusa, birthed when Medusa's blood mixed with seafoam after Medusa was killed by Perseus, and raised by the Muses on Mount Helicon. That Pegasus.
  
  Pegasus is, of course, a large, strikingly handsome, flying white horse. He's capable of sustained flight at 40m/sec (90 MPH), and by the Grace of the Muses, only very powerful beings can affect his flight. (He can be wounded as normal, but not grounded by being trapped in a mere mundane net.) As another gift of the Muses, Pegasus hears magic as music, and has a keen ear for it, allowing him to hear magic from a great distance and learn a lot about the magic being worked from its sound. Pegasus' magical hearing is Power 7. Pegasus can carry a rider (or two, in a pinch).
  
  Pegasus can fight like, well, a big flying horse. Being kicked by Pegasus is gonna hurt, and you don't want him to land on you. However, he's not a skilled fighter; kicking, bucking, biting, and running people over are just things horses do.
  
  Weaknesses: Being an Immortal, Pegasus' presence is easily noticed over long distances (hundreds of meters) by those sensitive to the supernatural. His wingbeats make a loud, distinctive sound, so he's not at all sneaky in flight, though he's eerily silent if he's just gliding. (Figure a 4:1 glide ratio if it matters: he drops a meter for every four meters flown. Pegasus glides better than a brick, but not as well as a bird.)
  
  Being a large horse, Pegasus can't really communicate. The best he can do is play trick horse, nodding or shaking his head, neighing, or stamping his hooves. Likewise, he can't do much more than clumsily handle objects with his hooves or teeth. Pegasus has trouble moving around in buildings because he's so big, and may be unable to fit through doors.
  
  Restrictions: Sandy can cast this spell only on himself.
  
  
  
• Spell: Apollonius's Sixth Metamorphosis
  Power Level: 5
  Strengths: This shapeshifting spell allows Sandy to take on any humanoid form. This spell can be cast silently, a minor bonus.
  
  Weaknesses: It's not a disguise spell, so Sandy can't copy somebody else's appearance. Nor does it affect his clothing, so he needs to arrange something suitable for his new form, especially if it's a different size than he is. The spell is a bit tiring to keep up, so if Sandy is doing anything other than (slowly) walking and talking, he's limited in how long he can maintain it.
  
  Restrictions: Sandy can cast this spell only on himself.
  
  
• Spell: Eyes, Ears, and Nose of the Wolf
  Power Level: 3
  Strengths: These three spells boost the recipient's senses to a wolf's level: they can see in near-darkness, hear keenly (including hearing ultrasound), or gain excellent senses of smell and taste, even letting them track by smell.
  Weaknesses: these spells last only 20 minutes per casting, so Sandy finds himself frequently recasting them during routine uses, like walking around at night.
  Restrictions:
  
  
  
• Spell: Pack Friend
  Power Level: 4
  Strengths: Pack Friend makes canids friendly towards the spell's recipient. They can get them to follow their wishes, but the effect is that the canids act like well-trained dogs; the recipient doesn't gain any supernatural ability to command them per se
  Weaknesses: lasts only 20 minutes.
  Restrictions: only works on animals, not anthros
  
  
  
• Spell: The Ever-full Cup
  Power Level: 3
  Strengths: Creates beverages, up to a few gallons
  Weaknesses: only things Sandy has drunk, though that's a long list
  Restrictions: only mundane beverages (no potions or the like)
  
  
  
• Spell: Critiques of the Heat/Chill
  Power Level: 3
  Strengths: allows the recipient to remain comfortable in extremes of heat/cold
  Weaknesses: won't protect against excessively high/low temperatures, such as those generated by magic or technologically-advanced weapons.
  Restrictions:
  
  
  
• Spell: Fireworks
  Power Level: 0
  Strengths: makes pretty -- if very small -- fireworks displays
  Weaknesses: requires constant gestures with both hands to sustain
  Restrictions: SF/X only, no meaningful IC effect possible
  
  
  
• Spell: Hypatia's Gate to the Worlds
  Power Level: 8
  Strengths: a dimensional travel spell, providing Gates to alternate Earths. Capable of moving significant volumes and masses, up to tens of cubic meters and several tons.
  Weaknesses: beyond Sandy's ability to cast reliably
  Restrictions: intended as a plot device to bring the Belas to Bielefield, not expected to use in play (although Sandy will talk about it as a spell he knows and how it works, etc)

MAGICAL OR SPECIAL ITEMS
List:

• The Extensible Staff: The one enchanted object Sandy's found is a mere stick... but it can change size. At its smallest, it's barely bigger than a pencil, and at its longest, it makes an excellent vaulting pole. It can change shape slightly, so Sandy sometimes uses it as a flat-headed cane. Sandy's gotten pretty good at using it as a vaulting pole, as it's proved handy for escaping people trying to kill him. He can even use it for leaping attacks, though he's not the best at it. With a running start, Sandy can use the vaulting pole to leap up to 10m high and 20m across. (Yeah, it's longer than an Olympic vaulting pole, and more like what ancient soldiers used to assault fortifications before the scaling ladder was invented.)
  
• A magical/alchemical workroom, containing typical arcane equipment and a little modern chemical equipment
  
• Texts of spells and alchemical recipes (about two dozen recipes), some written in magical words only visible with the Sight
  
• A supply of alchemical starting materials and reagents
  
• A magical safe, disguised as a refrigerator, hidden by illusions, warded, and a bunch of other unnecessary IC precautions, with an enchantment that protects the contents from natural decay.
  
• An assortment of mundane historical documents and artifacts from Classical Greece, the American Civil War, and the Second World War. The last two sets are the Belas' family heirlooms.
  

BACKGROUND
Education or Training: post-graduate studies in history, concentrating on Classical Greece.
Character Background/Biography:

Three years ago, Sandy Bela was a happily married historian specializing in classical Greek history at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. On a research trip to New York, Sandy found a scroll in the Met Museum's collections with text only he could see superimposed on a copy of Apollonius' Inclinations. He eventually figured out that the text was a pair of spells, one of which let him turn into Pegasus, and the other allowed him to change his appearance. The spells proved surprisingly easy to learn despite their power. As Sandy later found out, that was one of their author's specialities.

Sandy spent most of a month exulting in turning into Pegasus before his flights over the rooftops of Philadelphia caught the notice of other … things with magical and supernatural abilities. Sandy was sucked into a many-sided war between forces he didn't understand and wasn't able to handle. If not for chancing onto some allies, Sandy surely would have been killed.

With his allies' help and protection, Sandy was able to learn more sorcery, little alchemy, and – with their cover – even a bit of mundane self-defense. Sandy's allies were scattered after a crushing defeat, and Sandy and his wife Amanda fled to Europe, both for safety and to search for more magical knowledge.

Europe's security proved fleeting, and Sandy was again discovered, despite elaborate precautions. However, by then he'd come across a spell that could take him to other worlds. It was a difficult spell, but after a few test jaunts to places that were easy to reach, Sandy tried for an idyllic forested world where he and his wife could rest for a while. The return trip to Earth didn't go as planned, however, and the Belas arrived in Bielefeld.


OTHER GAME MECHANICS
URL to Apartment Picture: (What's the inside of their apartment look like) http://www.felmiatika.com/wp-content/up ... modern.jpg
Link to RP examples: (this MUST be a DIRECT LINK to your IC post in an RP, NOT a link to the RP thread itself. If you don't have examples, make your biography good.)

http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic ... 5&t=307045 (Due to the way the guy running that universe ran things, he posted all OPs, but the first post is my text, as seen from my posts in the rest of the thread.)

http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic ... #p19389190

IMPORTANT:
One paragraph that sums up your character. This paragraph is what we'll use on your player tab on the first page of the thread. This MUST be brief. Your tab will contain a link to your application so people will have full details:

Sandy is a quiet, professional historian turned jumpy, outmatched amateur sorcerer. Sandy's playful curiosity proved a bad match for supernatural guerrilla war, and Sandy ended up on a losing side, pursued by foes he only partially understood. A refugee in his own world, Sandy sought sanctuary in another. Botched wizardry brought him and his wife to Bielefeld.

Do not remove this search tag: #PLAPP

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PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Character Name: Amanda Bela (married to Sandy Bela)

Character Gender: female

Species (nation personification, human, alien, etc): human

Age: 33

Appearance: curly, platinum blonde hair; fair skin; big, brown eyes; 5' 3”, 115#. Amanda has a plain, slightly girlish face, and many people think she has simply amazing hair, and both men and women have been known to ask her how she keeps it that way. Amanda has no idea; it's just always been that way. Amanda looks a few years older than she is.

URL to Character Picture, if any:

Primary Objective: (What is your character's main goal? This should be the thing that drives their part of the plot.) gain influence within the Building and the wider world

Secondary Objectives: (What other goals does your character intend to achieve? These should drive subplots.) live a normal life with supernatural benefits (now: living a 21st century American lifestyle in a magical world with limited resources)

MUNDANE SKILLS
These do NOT require points. These are the average, daily things your character can do. Examples are "drive a car", "speak a normal Foreign Language", "play a guitar", "write poetry". Some mundane skills come from your bio and are freebie. A soldier knows very basic training (shoot a gun, basic drill). Medic, martial arts or sniper would be a Specialized Skill or Talent.
List Mundane skills here:
Typical modern American adult skills at typical adult competency (drive a car, etc)
Law (well-trained lawyer)
Speak French (fluently)
Sing (better than average, with a pleasant voice)
Underworld Contacts (only contacts made IC)

SPECIALIZED SKILLS AND TALENTS
These are specialized skills that set you apart from the average person. You have 7 points to spend here. Examples are swordsmanship, sniper, coercion, piloting etc.
Ability 1 and Points Spent: Pistol shooting, 4 (Amanda has small hands, so she can use only .32 and smaller caliber guns)
Ability 2 and Points Spent: Alchemy, 1
Ability 3 and Points Spent: Being an Adult Skills, 2 (Amanda can cook pretty well, balance a checkbook without trouble, fix typical household objects quickly, write a thank-you note with feeling, and other do other important but dull-sounding things quickly, easily, and efficiently. She'll never be mistaken for a master chef, accountant, repairman, or any other specialist, but she never fails to be surprised at how many people can't properly manage their own lives.)


OPTIONAL SUPERNATURAL CHARACTERISTICS
You have 7 points to spend here on supernatural skills or abilities. Sonic Scream, Levitation, Spell Casting, Shape Shifting etc. Superman MUST have his kryptonite, so Restrictions are what can't they do with their power or what balances it. They can only use it when they genuinely need it? They can't use it for more then five minutes without serious side-effects? Some things are allowed without points. A pegasus has wings thus it can fly. A raptor is fast thus no points are spent in speed. These "natural" abilities should be listed in the character's description, however.
Ability 1: God's Advocate
Power Level: 7
Strengths: Amanda is an excellent trial lawyer. No, scratch that: she's an incredible trial lawyer. She can get juries to lock up guilty people and throw away the key on only the sketchiest of circumstantial evidence, and can convince juries to bring down the Wrath of Tort on all sorts of slippery characters. Criminals have accepted all sorts of plea bargains and settlements on hearing that Amanda's going to represent the DA or the plaintiff.

Amanda's the same way when defending the innocent. She has gotten somebody acquitted of murder despite them being caught with a smoking gun in their hand. The “victim” was eventually shown to be an enforcer for a loan shark, and Amanda's client was rightly defending himself.

Weaknesses: Amanda doesn't have any special sense for who's innocent or guilty, God's Advocate just manifests when she's prosecuting somebody guilty or defending somebody innocent. She's not even aware that something unusual is happening until she sees or hears people's reactions to what she's saying, and then she knows when she's got somebody dead to rights/pure as the driven snow.

Restrictions: God's Advocate only works when she's accusing the guilty or protecting the innocent (Amanda doesn't think this is a disadvantage, but it does limit her lawyerly powers). It also only works in court or other formal settings (Amanda often forgets this, and is surprised when people don't believe her in “civilian” life). Significantly, it doesn't work on her husband Sandy, who blithely ignores her warnings about the sorts of supernatural beings to associate with. Also significantly, Amanda isn't the best judge of supernatural beings, and she has falsely accused one who turned out to be legitimately angelic, much to her intense regret.

MAGICAL OR SPECIAL ITEMS
List:
* A small amount of exotic ammunition (silver, Cold Iron, etc) for her .32 Walther PPK that affects certain supernatural beings. Sandy can make her more with alchemy.
* An artillerist's Long Luger Model 08 (heirloom, no ammunition for it)


BACKGROUND
Education or Training: lawyer
Character Background/Biography:
Amanda's been a “smart kid” all her life, but her gift didn't really bloom until she started working for the Philadelphia Public Defender's Office. Her career took off at that point, and she switched to the City Attorney's office to help break up an organized crime ring. Eventually, she was hired by a fancy law firm to argue complicated civil suits. That made Amanda a pretty penny, but she continued to take pro bono work defending poor people, and a special clause in her employment contract let her take on special criminal prosecutions at city request.

Amanda had already met Sandy by then; they met when she was an incoming law student and he was a junior tenure-track professor. They bumped into each other sometimes at parties near campus, but they didn't really hit it off until Sandy invited her to his apartment for a dinner date. Amanda was charmed to discover that Sandy had trained his parrot to say romantic things to her; Amanda thought that was sweet, and decided to keep them both. They married about five years ago.

Amanda was initially disturbed by Sandy's claims to be able to work magic, then fascinated when they turned out to be true. She'd never ridden a horse before, much less a stunningly-handsome flying one. Amanda's fascination turned to fear when Sandy blundered into enemies more powerful than he was, then to relief as they both were sheltered by some “friends” Sandy had made.

Amanda's fell apart in sync with Sandy's when they were on the run from Sandy's friends' enemies; that was when Amanda discovered that she could kill a man in cold blood (also a woman, two werewolves, and a scaly man-thing with yellow blood). But now that Sandy seems to have accidentally brought the both of them to a new world, she's hoping she can forget all that for good.


OTHER GAME MECHANICS
URL to Apartment Picture: (What's the inside of their apartment look like) http://www.felmiatika.com/wp-content/up ... modern.jpg
Link to RP examples: (this MUST be a DIRECT LINK to your IC post in an RP, NOT a link to the RP thread itself. If you don't have examples, make your biography good.) http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic ... 5&t=307045 (Due to the way the guy running that universe ran things, he posted all OPs, but the first post is my text, as seen from my posts in the rest of the thread.)

http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic ... #p19389190

IMPORTANT:
One paragraph that sums up your character. This paragraph is what we'll use on your player tab on the first page of the thread. This MUST be brief. Your tab will contain a link to your application so people will have full details:
Amanda is a sorcerer's apprentice's wife. She'd rather be known as a gifted, personable attorney, but that hasn't been so important almost. Amanda's tired of running for her life, but is looking for something more fulfilling than going out in a blaze of glory. A few weeks of arguing a complex case before a jury would be great, and even a few days in a quiet city would be acceptable.

Do not remove this search tag: #PLAPP

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PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Character Name: Amaryllis Kalina Nikanorova (Formerly Volkova)

Character Gender: Female

Species (nation personification, human, alien, etc): Human

Age: 26

Appearance: Her body is slim, as with many Branriechians who grew up through hard-times, though her military training has kept her fit enough, and her womanly form exudes an air of confidence about her.

URL to Character Picture, if any: In the foreground

Primary Objective: At some point, realizing her family will likely be safe enough to grow up happily, Rylli wants nothing more than to get back in the seat of her Su-37 Terminator, to fly a nimble fighter-jet once more before she gets too old to fly anymore.

Secondary Objectives: To learn a new hobby in case she can't realize her first objective of flying, she yearns to find something to occupy her time with considering she'll have more free-time on her hands as her children grow a little older.

MUNDANE SKILLS
These do NOT require points. These are the average, daily things your character can do. Examples are "drive a car", "speak a normal Foreign Language", "play a guitar", "write poetry". Some mundane skills come from your bio and are freebie. A soldier knows very basic training (shoot a gun, basic drill). Medic, martial arts or sniper would be a Talent. You can list these here: Basic military training, speaks Russian and English, very precise, is able to drive a vehicle, has amazing reaction-times.


SPECIALIZED SKILLS AND TALENTS
These are specialized skills that set you apart from the average person. You have 7 points to spend here. Examples are swordsmanship, sniper, coercion, piloting etc.
Ability 1 and Points Spent: Fighter-pilot training, 5 points
Ability 2 and Points Spent: Survivalism, 2
Ability 3 and Points Spent: N/A
Ability 4 and Points Spent: N/A


MAGICAL OR SPECIAL ITEMS
List: Amaryllis also possesses a small charm-necklace that allows her to control her Mer-form.


BACKGROUND
Education or Training: Communist-oriented youth-group, Branriech public-schools, and BPAF Academy
Character Background/Biography: Amaryllis Kalina Volkova was born in the Southern regions of the Branriech-Soviet-Republic. Her father, a veteran of the Red-Army, was one of the last soldiers killed in the Soviet-Afghanistan conflict. She was destined to never meet the man who'd fathered her. A few years later, her mother was killed in an auto accident coming to pick the young Rylli up from school. Much like Bran, the young girl became property of the state, raised in youth-camps and foster homes until she was called into service at 15 years of age. She completed basic-training in 2 weeks, and was sent to join her brother in the BPAF. With her brother holding a high-rank in a prestigious squadron, she was put in a pool of names to attend the Orlovets Flight Academy run by the BPAF. As she neared graduation, a year later, the unthinkable occurred. The last-living member of her family, her brother, was killed on a foggy morning thanks to mechanical-error in his plane.

Returning to the news of her brother's death, Rylli was promoted up into the same squadron, where she met a young mechanic named Branson Nikanor. The two quickly became fast-friends, and were inseparable for several years until Bran's mysterious disappearance. Nearly a year later, disgruntled with her meaningless service, Rylli rocketed off from the base one morning, zooming towards the border, with several MiG-21s trailing her, she disappeared from Branriech-radar soon after leaving the border. She flew for several hours until crash-landing across the street from an apartment building in Vafflehelm. Since then, she'd taken part in many various adventures with her fellow apartment-dwellers, married the love of her life, and started a wonderful family.


OTHER GAME MECHANICS
URL to Apartment Picture: (What's the inside of their apartment look like) Same as Bran's, of course.
Link to RP examples: You didn't see anything . . .

IMPORTANT:
One paragraph that sums up your character. This paragraph is what we'll use on your player tab on the first page of the thread. This MUST be brief. Your tab will contain a link to your application so people will have full details: An Ex-Fighter pilot in the Branriech Air Force, Amaryllis Nikanorova is Bran's loving wife, and mother to both Rachelle and Tolya. Her quick-wits are well-suited to flying various aircraft, but also serve her well elsewhere.