Lydain Pelkys (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sombercomedienne) wrote2016-08-12 01:42 pm
sombercomedienne) wrote2016-08-12 01:42 pm
We the Lost: Application
Player Name: Bramble
Preferred Pronouns?: they/them/their
Player Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
bramblepatch
Other characters in play? Ammond "Psymagus Waspfire" Raidie
Character Name: Lydain Pelkys
Canon: Homestuck OC
Game Transplant: Synodiporia
Original App: Here.
Game Summary: Synodiporia characters - referred to in character and out of character as Travelers - are whisked away from their native realities, not to a new world, but to a never-ending cycle of further universe-hopping Jaunts with periodic stopovers in an unstable Liminal Space between trips. Their travels through the multiverse, and the ever-changing nature of Liminal, are understood to be under the control and direction of the mysterious Trumps, godlike entities identified with the major arcana of the tarot, who occasionally deign to directly interact with the Travelers but mostly pull strings from behind the scenes. In each Jaunt, the Travelers are deposited in a new world which will face some crisis over the next six weeks; Travelers are split between Investigators, who are placed in the world with all their memories and abilities intact but very little in the way of other resources, and Infiltrators, who seamlessly take on identities among the locals, complete with an entirely new set of memories. In order to successfully complete the Jaunt, the Travelers must work together to resolve the crisis facing the world they visit.
How long was your character in Game: Five months
History of Character in their Game: Lydain first arrived in Liminal Space between the Lightning Age and Children of the Night Jaunts. At the time, Liminal took the form of a labyrinth of stained glass, lit from behind by firelight; Lydain was initially under the impression that this was an aspect of the Dark Carnival of circus mythology, and, hence, that she was dead. She was soon (mostly) dissuaded from this belief by the fact that her fellow Travelers were not trolls, let alone members of her religion, and also by the fact that several people she encountered actually had clear memories of their deaths, and she herself did not. She spent the next week attempting to adjust to Liminal Space. Liminal Space itself was not the most hospitable environment, most notably in the fact that while for the most part the more experienced Travelers were able to see to the physical needs of the group, no one else was familiar enough with sopor slime to supply her with any. As a result, she slept poorly that first week, when she was able to sleep at all. Additionally, all Travelers gained a set of telepathic powers on entering Liminal, and Lydain was perturbed to discover that these actually overwrote her native psychic abilities, leaving her unable to directly perceive or influence the emotions of others (fortunately, this also eliminated her tendency to accidentally interact with other people's dreams while she herself was asleep, which otherwise would have been a problem in the absence of sopor).
Many of the other Travelers were friendly and at least distantly helpful, and although Lydain's habitual caution around new people prevented her from quickly making close friends, she did strike up several friendly interactions. In particular: Thorne, a vampire from 21st century New York, was enthusiastic and approachable and also gained Lydain's great approval by throwing a Day of the Dead party within a few days of Lydain's arrival. Tim Drake (the second Robin of "Batman &" fame, played at Synodiporia as a CRAU) was the first person she met who recognized her species, having briefly met trolls at some point in the past, and was genuinely a helpful and anchoring presence, if a little overzealous in warning her off of trying to apply Alternian norms to a largely human population. Additionally, several Travelers responded to her request on the telepathic network for help in procuring sopor; although none were able to actually produce it (due largely to the fact that Lydain could provide neither a sample nor a chemical formula), she did receive multiple offers of other chemical or magical sleep aids, and while none of these could fully replace topical sopor, they did help a little.
Lydain's first Jaunt was the Children of the Night Jaunt, in which the Travelers were inserted into the supernatural political scene of Sarmatia, a small post-soviet nation circa 1998. The previous ruling Prince, an evenhanded and generally well-liked vampire, had recently committed suicide, and the Jaunt covered the process of choosing his successor - for the first time, both vampires and werewolves would have a chance to democratically elect the leader of their combined populations. Lydain Infiltrated - that is, was substituted for a local, with no memory of her true nature - as Lyuba Popov, a member of small, rural werewolf pack made up of other Infiltrating Travelers. Specifically, Ombrandanti or wraithwolves, a subspecies of werewolves (...or mostly wolves; jackels and hyenas also occur among the wraithwolves, and Lyuba's "wolf" form was a hyena) marked by great stealth, a fear aura, and a tendency to astrally project during the full moon. Although within the context of the Jaunt, she remembered them only as her long-time pack members and surrogate family, both of the other werewolves in the little pack were Travelers she'd spoken with in Liminal; pack leader Toshi had been friendly, if a little too distantly sardonic to really be considered helpful, and Tim was the aforementioned "only Traveler who knew what trolls were."
Lyuba's pack wasn't particularly politically active, although they - and the vampiric household with whom they were associated - had come down from the mountains to take part in the election and to scout for potential corvigers, or human servants and potential candidates for transformation. They kept to themselves for the most part, staying out of the way of the worst of the political wrangling, and were satisfied by but not entirely invested in the ultimate election of a populist werewolf and the vampiric protege of the old prince as co-rulers.
Immediately after the election, the jaunt ended, and Lydain awoke in Liminal Space, herself again. Although she hadn't been aware of her altered state while she actually was Lyuba, once she was back to herself it was something of a relief - although the loss of the Ombrandanti ability to instill fear stung almost as much as her original loss of her natural Chucklevoodoos. Liminal also took on a different form this time, that of a snow-covered network of mountain trails, weaving between caves of mysterious high-tech equipment. The cold was less than comfortable for Lydain, as a cool-blooded high-caste troll; she spent most of her time until the next change of Liminal space trying to stay inside the caves and wearing pretty much every item of clothing she had access to. She also gratefully accepted the aid of another traveler name Lupa, who offered her the loan of an emergency space blanket.
Luckily, it wasn't too long before Liminal changed form again, this time taking the form of an enormous middle-school gymnasium (some of the other travelers having semi-successfully petitioned the Trumps for a ballroom for a New Year's fete). This prompted several conversations between Lydain and other Travelers about the nature of human educational institutions, and specifically with Thorne about their respective apocalyptic cultist backgrounds. Because honestly, if you can't bond over your respective worlds being probably just about to end any day now, what can you bond over? This is also the point where Tim mentioned having met Gamzee Makara at some point, a revelation that honestly kind of shocked Lydain, largely because of her very low opinion of Gamzee's survival chances outside of the Grand Highblood's patronage. The boy just isn't good at things in her experience, ok?
Anyway, having been granted what can be loosely defined as a dance floor, the Travelers threw their New Year's ball, the preparations of which were slightly interrupted when Eren Jaeger used his titan form to help hang decorations without making sure everyone knew it was him first. There was some localized panic, which Lydain observed from the periphery with a mixture of concern and amusement.
After the dance, Liminal Space changed again, this time to a bizarre amalgam of a fitness center and a psychiatrist's office, with all the windows showing the inside of a swimming pool. No one was quite certain what this signified, but the general consensus was that it wasn't very flattering. (The concept of "mental health professional" was a new one to Lydain, as well.) A number of new Travelers also appeared with this new shift of their surroundings; Lydain was no longer one of the new kids on the block, so to speak, and she rather enjoyed the experience of trying to help the newcomers adjust. Not that she was terribly good at it; she mostly managed to extensively question the sanity of a changeling named Jules, after finding him dangling by one foot from the exercise equipment.
The next Jaunt was Escape from Junkworld, a space opera jaunt which saw the Travelers scrambling to leave the surface of a planet-wide junkyard-slash-penal colony and outrun a deadly storm of Tachyon particles in a pair of ancient, poorly understood salvaged space ships. Lydain Infiltrated again, this time as the Baroness of the Dead Reach, the one-time owner of a profitable diamond mining colony, who had been deposed and cryogenically imprisoned for heresy nine hundred years before after she and two of her higher ranking underlings had fallen foul of their species inherently shaky grasp on reality and convinced themselves that they were the physical embodiments of the past, present, and future and also that the end times were imminent. What had followed was a lot of cultist activity and also a lot of sacrifice of sapient beings, and by the time the authorities descended on the colony, the other two had turned on each other and decimated the colony, and only Lydain (still convinced she was the personification of the present time) and her personal elven slave were still alive. As the cult leader who had dealt with the day-to-day operation of the community, encouraged by her fellows to give herself over to only the present moment, the Baroness was actually kind of unclear on what their actual goals were; to wit, whether they were trying to usher in the apocalypse or prevent it.
And then she emerged from cryo almost a millennium later to find that said personal slave had already been revived a few weeks earlier and was now surrounded by allies, and also that apparently the world was about to end. For real this time. She herself was without much in the way of allies, and the Baroness's species - diabolin - was one that did not do well in isolation: one of the major hallmarks of diabolin psychology and cognition was the total absence of a sleep state; instead, they spent most of the time in a state of mild hallucination or waking dreams. In groups, diabolin would frequently compare their current perceptions to determine reality and also use their psionic ability to copy or overwrite others' emotions to smooth over the worst of their natural volatility. On her own, and without the aid of the enslaved non-diabolin assistant she'd grown used to using as a reality check, the Baroness quickly resumed the downward spiral that had gotten her convicted of blasphemy nine hundred years before.
The escaped slave in question was another Infiltrating Traveler, Armin Arlet - someone who, although neither of them could remember it now, had been friendly and offered help when she'd been trying to find sopor in her first week in Liminal.
Lydain managed to half sweet-talk, half sneak onto one of the escape ships - a strange, half-organic vessel of unknown origin known as the Empress of Moths. She was pleased to find that Armin had also boarded the Empress, but after she'd corned him shortly after takeoff, he'd retreated to within his circle of protectors and she was unable to reassert any control over him, much to her annoyance.
As the two ships - the Empress and the Corona, a ship of human make with an experimental engine - approached light speed, things got... weird, on board. The Empress's Navigator began to see what he believed to be organized data patterns in the static of the Tachyon Storm, although he was unsure how to interpret it. Anyone with technologically-based senses - both artificial intelligences, and others with cybernetic implants - was frequently hallucinating massive disasters and strange, burning figures attacking the ships. Eventually, Lydain decided that there might be something significant to the remarkably consistent reports of these hallucinations, and that the logical course of action would be to track down the ship's doctor and insist on having a bit of cybernetic circuitry installed, herself. This was probably not a great plan, but she came out of it no less functional than she'd been before, albeit with full access to a fascinating new set of waking dreams.
Once the ships reached light speed, the hallucinations of disasters stopped, replaced by a strange, echoing song throughout the ships... and small portals began opening between the two ships and also onto what the Investigating Travelers recognized as Liminal Space, allowing passage between the ships (although Lydain shied away from such exploration; the Baroness's deal had always been about time, not space). It was thanks to the now free passage between the ships that Lydain encountered a younger diabolin and distant relative who was the current owner of her former barony; she responded with petty bullying, but didn't pursue further interaction, in part because the reminder of how much time she'd lost was unwelcome. These portals proved to be a double-edged sword when the Corona's engine began to malfunction, as they allowed everyone on board to evacuate to the Empress, but served to tether the ships together and slow the Empress with the Tachyon Storm still gaining.
By the time something otherworldly and beautiful hatched from the Empress of Moth's mysterious reactor and left the ship with enough power to make it to safety and none of the surreal issues that had plagued it for weeks upon weeks, Lydain was so far out of sync with reality that she hardly noticed.
When the Jaunt ended and Lydain returned to her proper physical form and identity, the memories of the past six weeks came as a distinct, unpleasant shock. Liminal Space was pleasant enough, a kind of network of narrow, subterranean farms, but Lydain was badly disoriented for a few days. Equally disorienting was the discovery that, as Travelers sometimes did, she had actually gained the ability to transform physically into the species she had Infiltrated as - although she retained her own memories now, it was still entirely less than pleasant to startle herself out of a nightmare by reflexively transforming into a form that was incapable of sleep.
And having reflexively transformed into her diabolin form, she certainly wouldn't have chosen to encounter Armin while still trying to figure out how to turn back. That was a very awkward conversation, although he was far more understanding and willing to forgive things that had happened when neither of them were really themselves than she had expected, or would honestly have thought appropriate. Still, even if he was able to intellectually excuse what had happened on the Jaunt, he clearly was still emotionally affected by the decades of memories of his jaunt persona being enslaved and maltreated by hers, and whatever trust they'd had before the jaunt was badly damaged.
Another change of Liminal Space's form - this time to a mansion and surrounding grounds constructed entirely from paper - posed a welcome distraction, as did the arrival of more new Travelers. Lydain made a concentrated effort to regain her usual cheerfulness as she explored Liminal and helped to introduce the newcomers to how the whole Liminal-Space-and-Jaunt cycle worked.
And the beginning of the next Jaunt marks the point where Zephyr found this Lost troll and brought her to the Meadous. The rest, we can only hope, will be history.
How did they change from their canon personality wise (Please explain what caused it to happen?) Lydain is a good deal less self-assured than she was before her time in Synodiporia, although she still tries to put up a confident front. Having her entire identity overwritten twice in five months was supremely disconcerting, even if it was temporary each time. She does remember her time as Lyuba with some fondness, especially with regards to her close relationship with her pack. However, her stint as the Baroness was unpleasant, bordering on traumatic; while the diabolin had her own history and identity, her personality was more than a little reflective of Lydain's own. Lydain is introspective enough to recognize that she potentially shares the same tendency toward petty cruelty and thoughtlessness toward people she professes to care about - and in her way, the Baroness was very fond of her elven slave - and perhaps also toward delusions of grandeur. She finds this upsetting, and while she's nowhere near the point of a true crisis of faith, she is somewhat troubled by the parallel between her own devotion to the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs and the Baroness's to her own home-grown triune heresy.
She's also no longer remotely surprised to encounter humans or other non-troll beings, although her general outlook on life is still extremely Alternian. She's fully willing to work with aliens and even to befriend them on a case-by-case basis, but in general she tends to see them more as any-port-in-a-storm allies than as equals.
How did they change from their canon physically (Please explain what caused it to happen?): She has no major physical changes to her base form, although she does now have the ability to transform physically into a diabolin: superficially similar to a troll, but with a higher degree of resistance to poisons and radiation, slightly greater physical stamina and sturdiness, and a different set of psionic abilities. Plus the whole "not needing to sleep" thing.
Powers: Lydain's native powers are the Chucklevoodoo complex of psychic abilities common to most if not all indigos; she doesn't have the range or force of the Makara line, but she's reasonably adept at interpreting, manipulating, or imposing fear states in others, especially for a troll of her age. She also technically has the ability to use the dream-manipulating aspect of Chucklevoodoos, but she doesn't have the control to do it on purpose, or to acheive much beyond getting passively swept up into others' dreams.
Both aspects of her Chucklevoodoos were nullified upon entering Liminal Space for the first time, and she does not currently have access to these powers.
Powers granted or learned within Synodiporia are classed into Psychic skills, which deal with the use of the telepathic network, Liminal skills, which deal with directly manipulating Liminal Space, and Other skills, which include both mundane skills and unusual powers.
Lydain's Psychic skills include Filter Intrusion, which allows her to access otherwise private psychic communication, Sensory Livestreaming, which allows her to broadcast sensory information as well as language-based messages on an existing psychic connection, and Sensory Eavesdropping, the ability to use the psychic network to directly piggyback on someone else's sensory impressions.
Synodiporia's telepathic network was a connection that existed between all travelers by Trump fiat; these skills are merely techniques for dealing with an existing psychic connection and do not allow her to establish a new one. In terms of game mechanics, she was allowed to take two psychic skills at the time she was apped to replace the Chucklevoodoo powers that had been nullified; I chose Filter Intrusion and Sensory Livestreaming with the idea that those represented similar techniques to those she used with the powers she was losing. Following this line of thought: if she regains her Chucklevoodoos, I presume that she will be able to use them with more finesse as a result of having additionally learned Sensory Eavesdropping.
Lydain's Liminal skills include Hammerspace I, which allowed her to securely store up to 25 pounds of items in Liminal Space and access them at any time, and Liminal Bubble, which allowed her to form a small, temporary area in Liminal Space (up to ten feet in diameter and lasting up to twelve hours) that would exclude any dangerous or intrusive features.
Liminal skills work directly with the uniquely malleable nature of reality within Liminal Space; they do not effect worlds with their own locally defined laws of physics, except in cases where they allow access to Liminal Space. Therefore, these skills will be nonfunctional unless Zephyr specifically permits them to work, or unless Lydain finds herself in a similarly inherently formless area.
Lydain's only Other skill of note is her ability to take her Diabolin Form at will. This gives her increased physical stamina and resistence to poison and radiation and eliminates her need to sleep, while rendering her more psychologically volatile and prone to mild hallucinations. While in Diabolin form and only while in Diabolin form does she have Diabolin psionics, which include unreliable short-term precognition (often difficult or impossible to distinguish from the more mundane waking dreams experienced by diabolin) and the ability to "sync up" emotions with another person, either by imposing their emotional state on the other person, or by intentionally changing their emotional state to match. Attempts to change either party's emotions to something the other is not feeling generally result in totally randomizing both parties' emotional states for a few minutes.
Possessions: Clothing: her subjugglator trainee uniform (pants, shirt, socks, neck ruff, armored gauntlets) and a change of civilian clothes (skirt, bodice, blouse, camisole, bloomers, stockings), boots, and underthings
Weaponry: nightstick, baseball bat, and a pair of throwing axes
Misc: white and black greasepaint pots, a deck of cards, a permanent marker, and a smartphone.
Please provide three samples from your previous game, at least one will have to be third person with context:
Sample One: Psychic post: Thanks for trying, Tim, but she doesn't know what the chemical formula for sopor is...
Sample Two: Gymnasiums are weird, and also Lydain and Thorne are big ol' apocalypse nerds
Sample Three: The Baroness of the Dead Reach consults with the Empress's Navigator
Notes: I would like to ask, both for my convenience in not having to write around sockpuppeting and for the sake of Waspfire's peace of mind, that Lydain not be placed at an address on Poundcake Lane.
Preferred Pronouns?: they/them/their
Player Contact:
Other characters in play? Ammond "Psymagus Waspfire" Raidie
Character Name: Lydain Pelkys
Canon: Homestuck OC
Game Transplant: Synodiporia
Original App: Here.
Game Summary: Synodiporia characters - referred to in character and out of character as Travelers - are whisked away from their native realities, not to a new world, but to a never-ending cycle of further universe-hopping Jaunts with periodic stopovers in an unstable Liminal Space between trips. Their travels through the multiverse, and the ever-changing nature of Liminal, are understood to be under the control and direction of the mysterious Trumps, godlike entities identified with the major arcana of the tarot, who occasionally deign to directly interact with the Travelers but mostly pull strings from behind the scenes. In each Jaunt, the Travelers are deposited in a new world which will face some crisis over the next six weeks; Travelers are split between Investigators, who are placed in the world with all their memories and abilities intact but very little in the way of other resources, and Infiltrators, who seamlessly take on identities among the locals, complete with an entirely new set of memories. In order to successfully complete the Jaunt, the Travelers must work together to resolve the crisis facing the world they visit.
How long was your character in Game: Five months
History of Character in their Game: Lydain first arrived in Liminal Space between the Lightning Age and Children of the Night Jaunts. At the time, Liminal took the form of a labyrinth of stained glass, lit from behind by firelight; Lydain was initially under the impression that this was an aspect of the Dark Carnival of circus mythology, and, hence, that she was dead. She was soon (mostly) dissuaded from this belief by the fact that her fellow Travelers were not trolls, let alone members of her religion, and also by the fact that several people she encountered actually had clear memories of their deaths, and she herself did not. She spent the next week attempting to adjust to Liminal Space. Liminal Space itself was not the most hospitable environment, most notably in the fact that while for the most part the more experienced Travelers were able to see to the physical needs of the group, no one else was familiar enough with sopor slime to supply her with any. As a result, she slept poorly that first week, when she was able to sleep at all. Additionally, all Travelers gained a set of telepathic powers on entering Liminal, and Lydain was perturbed to discover that these actually overwrote her native psychic abilities, leaving her unable to directly perceive or influence the emotions of others (fortunately, this also eliminated her tendency to accidentally interact with other people's dreams while she herself was asleep, which otherwise would have been a problem in the absence of sopor).
Many of the other Travelers were friendly and at least distantly helpful, and although Lydain's habitual caution around new people prevented her from quickly making close friends, she did strike up several friendly interactions. In particular: Thorne, a vampire from 21st century New York, was enthusiastic and approachable and also gained Lydain's great approval by throwing a Day of the Dead party within a few days of Lydain's arrival. Tim Drake (the second Robin of "Batman &" fame, played at Synodiporia as a CRAU) was the first person she met who recognized her species, having briefly met trolls at some point in the past, and was genuinely a helpful and anchoring presence, if a little overzealous in warning her off of trying to apply Alternian norms to a largely human population. Additionally, several Travelers responded to her request on the telepathic network for help in procuring sopor; although none were able to actually produce it (due largely to the fact that Lydain could provide neither a sample nor a chemical formula), she did receive multiple offers of other chemical or magical sleep aids, and while none of these could fully replace topical sopor, they did help a little.
Lydain's first Jaunt was the Children of the Night Jaunt, in which the Travelers were inserted into the supernatural political scene of Sarmatia, a small post-soviet nation circa 1998. The previous ruling Prince, an evenhanded and generally well-liked vampire, had recently committed suicide, and the Jaunt covered the process of choosing his successor - for the first time, both vampires and werewolves would have a chance to democratically elect the leader of their combined populations. Lydain Infiltrated - that is, was substituted for a local, with no memory of her true nature - as Lyuba Popov, a member of small, rural werewolf pack made up of other Infiltrating Travelers. Specifically, Ombrandanti or wraithwolves, a subspecies of werewolves (...or mostly wolves; jackels and hyenas also occur among the wraithwolves, and Lyuba's "wolf" form was a hyena) marked by great stealth, a fear aura, and a tendency to astrally project during the full moon. Although within the context of the Jaunt, she remembered them only as her long-time pack members and surrogate family, both of the other werewolves in the little pack were Travelers she'd spoken with in Liminal; pack leader Toshi had been friendly, if a little too distantly sardonic to really be considered helpful, and Tim was the aforementioned "only Traveler who knew what trolls were."
Lyuba's pack wasn't particularly politically active, although they - and the vampiric household with whom they were associated - had come down from the mountains to take part in the election and to scout for potential corvigers, or human servants and potential candidates for transformation. They kept to themselves for the most part, staying out of the way of the worst of the political wrangling, and were satisfied by but not entirely invested in the ultimate election of a populist werewolf and the vampiric protege of the old prince as co-rulers.
Immediately after the election, the jaunt ended, and Lydain awoke in Liminal Space, herself again. Although she hadn't been aware of her altered state while she actually was Lyuba, once she was back to herself it was something of a relief - although the loss of the Ombrandanti ability to instill fear stung almost as much as her original loss of her natural Chucklevoodoos. Liminal also took on a different form this time, that of a snow-covered network of mountain trails, weaving between caves of mysterious high-tech equipment. The cold was less than comfortable for Lydain, as a cool-blooded high-caste troll; she spent most of her time until the next change of Liminal space trying to stay inside the caves and wearing pretty much every item of clothing she had access to. She also gratefully accepted the aid of another traveler name Lupa, who offered her the loan of an emergency space blanket.
Luckily, it wasn't too long before Liminal changed form again, this time taking the form of an enormous middle-school gymnasium (some of the other travelers having semi-successfully petitioned the Trumps for a ballroom for a New Year's fete). This prompted several conversations between Lydain and other Travelers about the nature of human educational institutions, and specifically with Thorne about their respective apocalyptic cultist backgrounds. Because honestly, if you can't bond over your respective worlds being probably just about to end any day now, what can you bond over? This is also the point where Tim mentioned having met Gamzee Makara at some point, a revelation that honestly kind of shocked Lydain, largely because of her very low opinion of Gamzee's survival chances outside of the Grand Highblood's patronage. The boy just isn't good at things in her experience, ok?
Anyway, having been granted what can be loosely defined as a dance floor, the Travelers threw their New Year's ball, the preparations of which were slightly interrupted when Eren Jaeger used his titan form to help hang decorations without making sure everyone knew it was him first. There was some localized panic, which Lydain observed from the periphery with a mixture of concern and amusement.
After the dance, Liminal Space changed again, this time to a bizarre amalgam of a fitness center and a psychiatrist's office, with all the windows showing the inside of a swimming pool. No one was quite certain what this signified, but the general consensus was that it wasn't very flattering. (The concept of "mental health professional" was a new one to Lydain, as well.) A number of new Travelers also appeared with this new shift of their surroundings; Lydain was no longer one of the new kids on the block, so to speak, and she rather enjoyed the experience of trying to help the newcomers adjust. Not that she was terribly good at it; she mostly managed to extensively question the sanity of a changeling named Jules, after finding him dangling by one foot from the exercise equipment.
The next Jaunt was Escape from Junkworld, a space opera jaunt which saw the Travelers scrambling to leave the surface of a planet-wide junkyard-slash-penal colony and outrun a deadly storm of Tachyon particles in a pair of ancient, poorly understood salvaged space ships. Lydain Infiltrated again, this time as the Baroness of the Dead Reach, the one-time owner of a profitable diamond mining colony, who had been deposed and cryogenically imprisoned for heresy nine hundred years before after she and two of her higher ranking underlings had fallen foul of their species inherently shaky grasp on reality and convinced themselves that they were the physical embodiments of the past, present, and future and also that the end times were imminent. What had followed was a lot of cultist activity and also a lot of sacrifice of sapient beings, and by the time the authorities descended on the colony, the other two had turned on each other and decimated the colony, and only Lydain (still convinced she was the personification of the present time) and her personal elven slave were still alive. As the cult leader who had dealt with the day-to-day operation of the community, encouraged by her fellows to give herself over to only the present moment, the Baroness was actually kind of unclear on what their actual goals were; to wit, whether they were trying to usher in the apocalypse or prevent it.
And then she emerged from cryo almost a millennium later to find that said personal slave had already been revived a few weeks earlier and was now surrounded by allies, and also that apparently the world was about to end. For real this time. She herself was without much in the way of allies, and the Baroness's species - diabolin - was one that did not do well in isolation: one of the major hallmarks of diabolin psychology and cognition was the total absence of a sleep state; instead, they spent most of the time in a state of mild hallucination or waking dreams. In groups, diabolin would frequently compare their current perceptions to determine reality and also use their psionic ability to copy or overwrite others' emotions to smooth over the worst of their natural volatility. On her own, and without the aid of the enslaved non-diabolin assistant she'd grown used to using as a reality check, the Baroness quickly resumed the downward spiral that had gotten her convicted of blasphemy nine hundred years before.
The escaped slave in question was another Infiltrating Traveler, Armin Arlet - someone who, although neither of them could remember it now, had been friendly and offered help when she'd been trying to find sopor in her first week in Liminal.
Lydain managed to half sweet-talk, half sneak onto one of the escape ships - a strange, half-organic vessel of unknown origin known as the Empress of Moths. She was pleased to find that Armin had also boarded the Empress, but after she'd corned him shortly after takeoff, he'd retreated to within his circle of protectors and she was unable to reassert any control over him, much to her annoyance.
As the two ships - the Empress and the Corona, a ship of human make with an experimental engine - approached light speed, things got... weird, on board. The Empress's Navigator began to see what he believed to be organized data patterns in the static of the Tachyon Storm, although he was unsure how to interpret it. Anyone with technologically-based senses - both artificial intelligences, and others with cybernetic implants - was frequently hallucinating massive disasters and strange, burning figures attacking the ships. Eventually, Lydain decided that there might be something significant to the remarkably consistent reports of these hallucinations, and that the logical course of action would be to track down the ship's doctor and insist on having a bit of cybernetic circuitry installed, herself. This was probably not a great plan, but she came out of it no less functional than she'd been before, albeit with full access to a fascinating new set of waking dreams.
Once the ships reached light speed, the hallucinations of disasters stopped, replaced by a strange, echoing song throughout the ships... and small portals began opening between the two ships and also onto what the Investigating Travelers recognized as Liminal Space, allowing passage between the ships (although Lydain shied away from such exploration; the Baroness's deal had always been about time, not space). It was thanks to the now free passage between the ships that Lydain encountered a younger diabolin and distant relative who was the current owner of her former barony; she responded with petty bullying, but didn't pursue further interaction, in part because the reminder of how much time she'd lost was unwelcome. These portals proved to be a double-edged sword when the Corona's engine began to malfunction, as they allowed everyone on board to evacuate to the Empress, but served to tether the ships together and slow the Empress with the Tachyon Storm still gaining.
By the time something otherworldly and beautiful hatched from the Empress of Moth's mysterious reactor and left the ship with enough power to make it to safety and none of the surreal issues that had plagued it for weeks upon weeks, Lydain was so far out of sync with reality that she hardly noticed.
When the Jaunt ended and Lydain returned to her proper physical form and identity, the memories of the past six weeks came as a distinct, unpleasant shock. Liminal Space was pleasant enough, a kind of network of narrow, subterranean farms, but Lydain was badly disoriented for a few days. Equally disorienting was the discovery that, as Travelers sometimes did, she had actually gained the ability to transform physically into the species she had Infiltrated as - although she retained her own memories now, it was still entirely less than pleasant to startle herself out of a nightmare by reflexively transforming into a form that was incapable of sleep.
And having reflexively transformed into her diabolin form, she certainly wouldn't have chosen to encounter Armin while still trying to figure out how to turn back. That was a very awkward conversation, although he was far more understanding and willing to forgive things that had happened when neither of them were really themselves than she had expected, or would honestly have thought appropriate. Still, even if he was able to intellectually excuse what had happened on the Jaunt, he clearly was still emotionally affected by the decades of memories of his jaunt persona being enslaved and maltreated by hers, and whatever trust they'd had before the jaunt was badly damaged.
Another change of Liminal Space's form - this time to a mansion and surrounding grounds constructed entirely from paper - posed a welcome distraction, as did the arrival of more new Travelers. Lydain made a concentrated effort to regain her usual cheerfulness as she explored Liminal and helped to introduce the newcomers to how the whole Liminal-Space-and-Jaunt cycle worked.
And the beginning of the next Jaunt marks the point where Zephyr found this Lost troll and brought her to the Meadous. The rest, we can only hope, will be history.
How did they change from their canon personality wise (Please explain what caused it to happen?) Lydain is a good deal less self-assured than she was before her time in Synodiporia, although she still tries to put up a confident front. Having her entire identity overwritten twice in five months was supremely disconcerting, even if it was temporary each time. She does remember her time as Lyuba with some fondness, especially with regards to her close relationship with her pack. However, her stint as the Baroness was unpleasant, bordering on traumatic; while the diabolin had her own history and identity, her personality was more than a little reflective of Lydain's own. Lydain is introspective enough to recognize that she potentially shares the same tendency toward petty cruelty and thoughtlessness toward people she professes to care about - and in her way, the Baroness was very fond of her elven slave - and perhaps also toward delusions of grandeur. She finds this upsetting, and while she's nowhere near the point of a true crisis of faith, she is somewhat troubled by the parallel between her own devotion to the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs and the Baroness's to her own home-grown triune heresy.
She's also no longer remotely surprised to encounter humans or other non-troll beings, although her general outlook on life is still extremely Alternian. She's fully willing to work with aliens and even to befriend them on a case-by-case basis, but in general she tends to see them more as any-port-in-a-storm allies than as equals.
How did they change from their canon physically (Please explain what caused it to happen?): She has no major physical changes to her base form, although she does now have the ability to transform physically into a diabolin: superficially similar to a troll, but with a higher degree of resistance to poisons and radiation, slightly greater physical stamina and sturdiness, and a different set of psionic abilities. Plus the whole "not needing to sleep" thing.
Powers: Lydain's native powers are the Chucklevoodoo complex of psychic abilities common to most if not all indigos; she doesn't have the range or force of the Makara line, but she's reasonably adept at interpreting, manipulating, or imposing fear states in others, especially for a troll of her age. She also technically has the ability to use the dream-manipulating aspect of Chucklevoodoos, but she doesn't have the control to do it on purpose, or to acheive much beyond getting passively swept up into others' dreams.
Both aspects of her Chucklevoodoos were nullified upon entering Liminal Space for the first time, and she does not currently have access to these powers.
Powers granted or learned within Synodiporia are classed into Psychic skills, which deal with the use of the telepathic network, Liminal skills, which deal with directly manipulating Liminal Space, and Other skills, which include both mundane skills and unusual powers.
Lydain's Psychic skills include Filter Intrusion, which allows her to access otherwise private psychic communication, Sensory Livestreaming, which allows her to broadcast sensory information as well as language-based messages on an existing psychic connection, and Sensory Eavesdropping, the ability to use the psychic network to directly piggyback on someone else's sensory impressions.
Synodiporia's telepathic network was a connection that existed between all travelers by Trump fiat; these skills are merely techniques for dealing with an existing psychic connection and do not allow her to establish a new one. In terms of game mechanics, she was allowed to take two psychic skills at the time she was apped to replace the Chucklevoodoo powers that had been nullified; I chose Filter Intrusion and Sensory Livestreaming with the idea that those represented similar techniques to those she used with the powers she was losing. Following this line of thought: if she regains her Chucklevoodoos, I presume that she will be able to use them with more finesse as a result of having additionally learned Sensory Eavesdropping.
Lydain's Liminal skills include Hammerspace I, which allowed her to securely store up to 25 pounds of items in Liminal Space and access them at any time, and Liminal Bubble, which allowed her to form a small, temporary area in Liminal Space (up to ten feet in diameter and lasting up to twelve hours) that would exclude any dangerous or intrusive features.
Liminal skills work directly with the uniquely malleable nature of reality within Liminal Space; they do not effect worlds with their own locally defined laws of physics, except in cases where they allow access to Liminal Space. Therefore, these skills will be nonfunctional unless Zephyr specifically permits them to work, or unless Lydain finds herself in a similarly inherently formless area.
Lydain's only Other skill of note is her ability to take her Diabolin Form at will. This gives her increased physical stamina and resistence to poison and radiation and eliminates her need to sleep, while rendering her more psychologically volatile and prone to mild hallucinations. While in Diabolin form and only while in Diabolin form does she have Diabolin psionics, which include unreliable short-term precognition (often difficult or impossible to distinguish from the more mundane waking dreams experienced by diabolin) and the ability to "sync up" emotions with another person, either by imposing their emotional state on the other person, or by intentionally changing their emotional state to match. Attempts to change either party's emotions to something the other is not feeling generally result in totally randomizing both parties' emotional states for a few minutes.
Possessions: Clothing: her subjugglator trainee uniform (pants, shirt, socks, neck ruff, armored gauntlets) and a change of civilian clothes (skirt, bodice, blouse, camisole, bloomers, stockings), boots, and underthings
Weaponry: nightstick, baseball bat, and a pair of throwing axes
Misc: white and black greasepaint pots, a deck of cards, a permanent marker, and a smartphone.
Please provide three samples from your previous game, at least one will have to be third person with context:
Sample One: Psychic post: Thanks for trying, Tim, but she doesn't know what the chemical formula for sopor is...
Sample Two: Gymnasiums are weird, and also Lydain and Thorne are big ol' apocalypse nerds
Sample Three: The Baroness of the Dead Reach consults with the Empress's Navigator
Notes: I would like to ask, both for my convenience in not having to write around sockpuppeting and for the sake of Waspfire's peace of mind, that Lydain not be placed at an address on Poundcake Lane.