Justice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
whatisright) wrote2017-11-18 07:22 pm
whatisright) wrote2017-11-18 07:22 pm
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Handle: Smurf
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Over 18? Yep
Characters Played: None at the moment.
Character Name: Justice
Series: Dragon Age
Canon Point: Post-Awakening, but pre-DA2. The Warden Commander has left Vigil’s Keep and the Orlesian Wardens are now in charge. Fereldan Templars have recently volunteered to join the Gray Wardens as part of a way to keep an eye on Anders, which is driving Anders and Justice closer.
At this point in canon, Justice is an incorporeal spirit trapped inside of a rotting corpse. In the interest of not finding a new corpse for him every month, I would like to say that the Orbiters have been kind enough to help him create his own corporeal form while he was in stasis (something spirits have been shown to do), and they suggested a more palatable appearance than that of a corpse. Justice will be PB’d by Richard Armitage.
Character Age: Justice is a spirit from a land without linear time, so he doesn’t exactly have an age, but he acts like a middle-aged adult for the most part.
Background: (For the record, I refer to Justice pre-canon as ‘it’ because spirits are genderless, and during and post-canon is ‘he’ because that’s what the mortals call him and he just goes with it for the sake of ease.) Justice was ‘born’ in the Fade, otherwise known as the world of dreams. And by ‘born’, I mean that it was just there at some point. As I said above, it was created through the dreams and values of mortals, but it’s unaware of that. There is not really such a thing as linear time in the Fade, so it has theoretically been alive for an eternity or for maybe five minutes prior to canon. It’s difficult to even draw a comparison to time passing in the mortal world, because events in the mortal world appear in the Fade compounded by everyone’s separate perspectives, dreams, and embellishments, so it’s unclear when the events depicted actually happened.
The last time the Fade and the mortal world were in sync was before the Veil was created. Justice could have possibly been alive then, but even if it had been, the events that occurred at that point were retold and embellished and changed and dreamed about so many times that it could have re-experienced a thousand different versions of the Veil’s creation without ever knowing what was close to truth and what wasn’t.
There are references within the series to Fade spirits ‘purifying’ themselves of experiences and knowledge that threaten to corrupt them by making themselves forget them entirely, sacrificing growth and change so that they can keep themselves from becoming demons, and it is likely that Justice has done this itself and thus doesn’t remember chunks of its own history.
So all this means that we don’t know much about Justice’s history prior to canon. It traveled the Fade, fighting demons and saving mortals and generally aspiring to justice, when the Warden Commander and her merry band of misfits fell into the Fade in the middle of one of its ‘soul-saving’ excursions.
The rest of this is covered by Awakening canon, so here is a handy dandy wiki link.
Personality: Justice is a spirit of justice. This may sound redundant, but it’s very important that anyone who tries to understand him understands that fact. It informs everything about him, because he is fundamentally defined by his virtue, and while he was indirectly created by mortals, he’s very different from them.
The concept of justice defines him, as do its popular connotations. He is righteous, sometimes crossing the line into self-righteous; he is stern, but never to the point of being unkind; he is fair, or at least constantly strives to be; and he is tireless. He has a strong moral compass that decides everything he does, and he’s not afraid to turn around and scold others for not adhering to what he believes is right and wrong. At the same time, he is not entirely inflexible. It’s possible to talk him in and out of certain views, as long as one’s argument is well supported and morally sound.
Like the ideal form of justice, he strives to understand why people do wrong things even as he condemns them as wrong. He asks questions, listens to the answers, and considers what he is told. He does have perspective on levels of moral wrongdoing—he will not respond the same way to thievery as he would to cold-blooded murder—and he won’t necessarily insist on taking punishment into his own hands. For most crimes, he seems to prefer scolding and trying to cajole people into seeking atonement rather than punishing them, as he does when he travels with a woman who murdered many men she mistakenly believed murdered her sister. That said, he’s not above killing people himself if he believes that their crimes warrant it, as he insists on doing when darkspawn ambush and kill Kristoff.
The fact that he is a spirit also defines him. The Fade is much more complicated than the mortal world in many ways, but one of the ways in which it’s much simpler is its morality. Dreams and perspective simplify and distill real world conflicts until they’re a matter of good versus evil, and this has given spirits room to operate without much nuance. Justice is no exception.
His concept of morality is simplistic black and white, and his understanding of the nuances of mortal experience is lacking. That said, Justice is also a fundamentally curious spirit, which isn’t a trait he necessarily shares with all his brethren. When he goes to the mortal world, he finds all the things he sees, even the memories of imperfect human existence, to be beautiful, even if he doesn’t understand it all. He asks questions, and as he asks more questions and grows closer with mortals, more nuance is introduced into his worldview and he grows with it. His moral system is not immune to growth and change.
With spirithood comes a unique dedication to virtue that mortals can’t possibly match. He is wholly dedicated to righting wrongs and helping those who can’t help themselves, whether that requires cajoling or fighting. It gives him purpose and resilience, and it also allows him to be selfless and kind in ways that most mortals aren’t capable of.
That said, being a spirit also makes him hella awkward. He is the kind of guy who will read your mind and see that you’re cheating on your wife, and he will announce that your cheating is wrong right in the middle of dinner. He’s the kind of guy who will stare at you for ten minutes and wonder why you’re uncomfortable. He’s the kind of guy who will drop his arm in the middle of a fight and ask you to please stop screaming and hand him his rotting appendage.
Justice has all the social sense of a blind gopher. He can read objects, but he can’t read a room. On one hand, this makes him very easy to read once a person gets to know him: his expressions are subtle but impossible for him to hide, and he rarely says anything other than what he means. On the other hand, it handicaps him among mortals because he’s curious about them and enjoys their company, but most find him unsettling to be around and he’s not sure how to fix that.
Overall, this forms the picture of an awkward but dedicated and curious person striving to do good in the world, and who’s open to growth. Great, right?
Well, not necessarily. Being a creature created by the thoughts of mortals, Justice is especially vulnerable to being corrupted by mortals. After this canon point, he is shown becoming corrupted because he’s forced to feel the rage and pain of a suffering mortal, and he’s unable to end the injustice nor make himself forget. He’s corrupted to the point where he’s a frothing homicidal maniac every time he takes control of the body. This isn’t a reflection of Justice’s personality so much as it is an unfortunate truth about spirits: by engaging with mortals, they change in ways that make them less pure, and that opens the door to becoming a demon. The denizens of the Fade are shaped by mortals, and they can be re-shaped by the expectations and feelings of the mortals surrounding him. This means that not only can Justice be corrupted by being trapped into a situation where he feels injustice he’s unable to fix, but he can be corrupted just by being around mortals who expect him to be a demon too long.
Justice, at this point, is mostly unaware of the risk that he’s taking by spending time with mortals. He doesn’t know how he’s created and he doesn’t know the power they have to corrupt him personally. If he’s allowed to live among them long enough and slowly grow into the role of a mortal himself, he’s more likely to transition into becoming something close to human rather than becoming a demon. This transition would remove his vulnerability to binding or becoming a demon entirely, but also weaken his spirit powers. But getting into the wrong situation before that transition has a chance to take effect will risk him becoming a demon, which is his greatest fear of all.
To be a demon would be a betrayal of everything he holds dear to him. He is most vulnerable to becoming a demon of vengeance, which isn’t a creature directly shown in canon but is presumably a demon that excessively punishes wrongdoers (likely with a loose definition of ‘wrongdoer’) and feeds on their suffering. Demons feed on mortal vice and suffering while spirits avoid mortals or try to uplift them. To become a demon would mean no longer being Justice, not just in virtue but even personality. He doesn’t really know why spirits become demons, being able to guess at best, and that scares him.
Powers/Abilities: Okay, so spirit/demon powers are pretty poorly defined and inconsistent throughout the games and comics. We know that spirits and demons are capable of doing what each other do because they’re basically different sides of the same ‘species’, and we know that demons can teach blood magic and some spirits have been known to use magic that’s easily mistaken for blood magic, so I’m just going to break things down into what Justice is likely to do down to what he’d never do barring corruption.
Likely To Do:
• Read objects (he says that mortals leave ‘fingerprints’ bearing feelings, memories, etc. on the objects they handle, and he can sense them. These fingerprints can last long after a mortal is dead.)
o This also means he can ‘sense’ a person if he’s familiar with them or what their ‘fingerprints’ feel like.
• Track mortals he’s familiar with using his ability to ‘sense’ them. (At least one spirit was able to track one man across half a country that way.)
• Read surface-level thoughts and deeper memories related to injustices people suffered or committed, including the thoughts of people far away or dead who are closely affected by the injustice suffered or committed by a person nearby. This also means that he’s a supernatural lie detector.
• Use spirit magic to boost his combative abilities and the defense of his allies. He can also boost a mage’s magical abilities and use certain types of magic himself, including but not limited to temporarily enchanting objects.
• Sense darkspawn, Gray Wardens, demons, people who use lyrium, and other spirits. He can ‘hear’ magic.
Less Likely to Do, but Might Consider
• Mess with mortal perception to assist them or effectively become invisible.
o Theoretically he can make other people invisible as well, but even a spirit that is invisible regularly has severe limitations on sharing that power and using it causes pain and nosebleeds.
• Make himself forget something. This is the aforementioned method of a spirit ‘purifying’ itself of memories that are difficult to reconcile with their virtue, denying themselves growth in exchange for avoiding corruption. This is not foolproof, as memories can return and some memories can be left to fester too long to forget.
o Theoretically he can also make others forget him or things relating to him, but he’s even less likely to do that than to make himself forget.
• Change his appearance (since he is no longer in Kristoff’s body, he effectively has control over how he appears. He is most comfortable appearing as his friends recognize him.)
o He has mentioned in canon that he believes being in a female body would be an interesting change in perspective, so it is possible he may switch his appearance for the sake of learning more about mortals later on.
• Teleport (other spirits have been shown effectively teleporting across very limited distances, probably using their spirit power. Since they don’t do that in combat, I assume that it takes effort and isn’t really worth it unless they need it for something.)
• Possess an inanimate object or a willing living host. This is shown to bring a host that has just died back to life and act as supernatural life support until the spirit exits the body again.
Will Never in a Million Years Do (Unless he’s Corrupted)
• Fuck around directly with a mortal’s head to alter thoughts and perception without permission, especially with the intention to trap them in a state where he can feed off of them uninterrupted.
o He is slightly more willing to do this with permission from the host if he is doing something for their sake, such as easing pain, but that can still be a hard sell for them.
• Feed on the suffering of a mortal, or generally feed on an unwilling mortal.
• Force an unwilling mortal to accept possession and take direct control of their body.
Power Nerfs (if applicable): For the sake of gameplay, I’d like to nerf his ability to hear thoughts and memories. I’d like the power available if there is OOC consent, but otherwise, let’s say that there’s some block that is disrupting his ability to hear distinct thoughts and sense past injustices.
And, of course, I will also have an IC permissions post where people can give their comfort level with additional powers like invisibility, possession, forgetting, and consensual mind tampering. None of these things will ever be done without explicit OOC permission, and it’s not likely to come up often because Justice doesn’t like to do these things with or without permission.
Inventory: One full set of standard Gray Warden armor – Basically just what your average knightly heavy armor with the Gray Warden’s sigil on it
One ring made of lyrium - This is a magical object made with raw lyrium, a highly toxic material considered pure magic which can drive people to madness with prolonged exposure and can kill mages on contact. Lyrium can be powdered into a highly addictive drug or made into a potion meant to boost mana. It also sings, but only spirits and certain mortals can hear it. Justice likes it because it sings to him and it’s a gift from a friend.
Incentives: Justice is well incentivized by justice for justice’s sake, and thus will be eager to do anything that he considers just, but if the Orbiters feel like rewarding him on top of that…
- Guaranteed safety of loved ones
- Items that are pregnant with intense memories that he’s not familiar with, like a soda bottle a man held just before he proposed to his girlfriend.
- Items that allow him to have more of Kristoff’s memories, like mementos belonging to Kristoff.
- Items made of lyrium. Lyrium song basically turns him into a cat in a sunbeam.
- Assistance righting a wrong that he cannot right by himself.
Toplevel at the TDM!
OOC
Handle: Smurf
Contact:
Over 18? Yep
Characters Played: None at the moment.
THE CHARACTER
Character Name: Justice
Series: Dragon Age
Canon Point: Post-Awakening, but pre-DA2. The Warden Commander has left Vigil’s Keep and the Orlesian Wardens are now in charge. Fereldan Templars have recently volunteered to join the Gray Wardens as part of a way to keep an eye on Anders, which is driving Anders and Justice closer.
At this point in canon, Justice is an incorporeal spirit trapped inside of a rotting corpse. In the interest of not finding a new corpse for him every month, I would like to say that the Orbiters have been kind enough to help him create his own corporeal form while he was in stasis (something spirits have been shown to do), and they suggested a more palatable appearance than that of a corpse. Justice will be PB’d by Richard Armitage.
Character Age: Justice is a spirit from a land without linear time, so he doesn’t exactly have an age, but he acts like a middle-aged adult for the most part.
Background: (For the record, I refer to Justice pre-canon as ‘it’ because spirits are genderless, and during and post-canon is ‘he’ because that’s what the mortals call him and he just goes with it for the sake of ease.) Justice was ‘born’ in the Fade, otherwise known as the world of dreams. And by ‘born’, I mean that it was just there at some point. As I said above, it was created through the dreams and values of mortals, but it’s unaware of that. There is not really such a thing as linear time in the Fade, so it has theoretically been alive for an eternity or for maybe five minutes prior to canon. It’s difficult to even draw a comparison to time passing in the mortal world, because events in the mortal world appear in the Fade compounded by everyone’s separate perspectives, dreams, and embellishments, so it’s unclear when the events depicted actually happened.
The last time the Fade and the mortal world were in sync was before the Veil was created. Justice could have possibly been alive then, but even if it had been, the events that occurred at that point were retold and embellished and changed and dreamed about so many times that it could have re-experienced a thousand different versions of the Veil’s creation without ever knowing what was close to truth and what wasn’t.
There are references within the series to Fade spirits ‘purifying’ themselves of experiences and knowledge that threaten to corrupt them by making themselves forget them entirely, sacrificing growth and change so that they can keep themselves from becoming demons, and it is likely that Justice has done this itself and thus doesn’t remember chunks of its own history.
So all this means that we don’t know much about Justice’s history prior to canon. It traveled the Fade, fighting demons and saving mortals and generally aspiring to justice, when the Warden Commander and her merry band of misfits fell into the Fade in the middle of one of its ‘soul-saving’ excursions.
The rest of this is covered by Awakening canon, so here is a handy dandy wiki link.
Personality: Justice is a spirit of justice. This may sound redundant, but it’s very important that anyone who tries to understand him understands that fact. It informs everything about him, because he is fundamentally defined by his virtue, and while he was indirectly created by mortals, he’s very different from them.
The concept of justice defines him, as do its popular connotations. He is righteous, sometimes crossing the line into self-righteous; he is stern, but never to the point of being unkind; he is fair, or at least constantly strives to be; and he is tireless. He has a strong moral compass that decides everything he does, and he’s not afraid to turn around and scold others for not adhering to what he believes is right and wrong. At the same time, he is not entirely inflexible. It’s possible to talk him in and out of certain views, as long as one’s argument is well supported and morally sound.
Like the ideal form of justice, he strives to understand why people do wrong things even as he condemns them as wrong. He asks questions, listens to the answers, and considers what he is told. He does have perspective on levels of moral wrongdoing—he will not respond the same way to thievery as he would to cold-blooded murder—and he won’t necessarily insist on taking punishment into his own hands. For most crimes, he seems to prefer scolding and trying to cajole people into seeking atonement rather than punishing them, as he does when he travels with a woman who murdered many men she mistakenly believed murdered her sister. That said, he’s not above killing people himself if he believes that their crimes warrant it, as he insists on doing when darkspawn ambush and kill Kristoff.
The fact that he is a spirit also defines him. The Fade is much more complicated than the mortal world in many ways, but one of the ways in which it’s much simpler is its morality. Dreams and perspective simplify and distill real world conflicts until they’re a matter of good versus evil, and this has given spirits room to operate without much nuance. Justice is no exception.
His concept of morality is simplistic black and white, and his understanding of the nuances of mortal experience is lacking. That said, Justice is also a fundamentally curious spirit, which isn’t a trait he necessarily shares with all his brethren. When he goes to the mortal world, he finds all the things he sees, even the memories of imperfect human existence, to be beautiful, even if he doesn’t understand it all. He asks questions, and as he asks more questions and grows closer with mortals, more nuance is introduced into his worldview and he grows with it. His moral system is not immune to growth and change.
With spirithood comes a unique dedication to virtue that mortals can’t possibly match. He is wholly dedicated to righting wrongs and helping those who can’t help themselves, whether that requires cajoling or fighting. It gives him purpose and resilience, and it also allows him to be selfless and kind in ways that most mortals aren’t capable of.
That said, being a spirit also makes him hella awkward. He is the kind of guy who will read your mind and see that you’re cheating on your wife, and he will announce that your cheating is wrong right in the middle of dinner. He’s the kind of guy who will stare at you for ten minutes and wonder why you’re uncomfortable. He’s the kind of guy who will drop his arm in the middle of a fight and ask you to please stop screaming and hand him his rotting appendage.
Justice has all the social sense of a blind gopher. He can read objects, but he can’t read a room. On one hand, this makes him very easy to read once a person gets to know him: his expressions are subtle but impossible for him to hide, and he rarely says anything other than what he means. On the other hand, it handicaps him among mortals because he’s curious about them and enjoys their company, but most find him unsettling to be around and he’s not sure how to fix that.
Overall, this forms the picture of an awkward but dedicated and curious person striving to do good in the world, and who’s open to growth. Great, right?
Well, not necessarily. Being a creature created by the thoughts of mortals, Justice is especially vulnerable to being corrupted by mortals. After this canon point, he is shown becoming corrupted because he’s forced to feel the rage and pain of a suffering mortal, and he’s unable to end the injustice nor make himself forget. He’s corrupted to the point where he’s a frothing homicidal maniac every time he takes control of the body. This isn’t a reflection of Justice’s personality so much as it is an unfortunate truth about spirits: by engaging with mortals, they change in ways that make them less pure, and that opens the door to becoming a demon. The denizens of the Fade are shaped by mortals, and they can be re-shaped by the expectations and feelings of the mortals surrounding him. This means that not only can Justice be corrupted by being trapped into a situation where he feels injustice he’s unable to fix, but he can be corrupted just by being around mortals who expect him to be a demon too long.
Justice, at this point, is mostly unaware of the risk that he’s taking by spending time with mortals. He doesn’t know how he’s created and he doesn’t know the power they have to corrupt him personally. If he’s allowed to live among them long enough and slowly grow into the role of a mortal himself, he’s more likely to transition into becoming something close to human rather than becoming a demon. This transition would remove his vulnerability to binding or becoming a demon entirely, but also weaken his spirit powers. But getting into the wrong situation before that transition has a chance to take effect will risk him becoming a demon, which is his greatest fear of all.
To be a demon would be a betrayal of everything he holds dear to him. He is most vulnerable to becoming a demon of vengeance, which isn’t a creature directly shown in canon but is presumably a demon that excessively punishes wrongdoers (likely with a loose definition of ‘wrongdoer’) and feeds on their suffering. Demons feed on mortal vice and suffering while spirits avoid mortals or try to uplift them. To become a demon would mean no longer being Justice, not just in virtue but even personality. He doesn’t really know why spirits become demons, being able to guess at best, and that scares him.
Powers/Abilities: Okay, so spirit/demon powers are pretty poorly defined and inconsistent throughout the games and comics. We know that spirits and demons are capable of doing what each other do because they’re basically different sides of the same ‘species’, and we know that demons can teach blood magic and some spirits have been known to use magic that’s easily mistaken for blood magic, so I’m just going to break things down into what Justice is likely to do down to what he’d never do barring corruption.
Likely To Do:
• Read objects (he says that mortals leave ‘fingerprints’ bearing feelings, memories, etc. on the objects they handle, and he can sense them. These fingerprints can last long after a mortal is dead.)
o This also means he can ‘sense’ a person if he’s familiar with them or what their ‘fingerprints’ feel like.
• Track mortals he’s familiar with using his ability to ‘sense’ them. (At least one spirit was able to track one man across half a country that way.)
• Read surface-level thoughts and deeper memories related to injustices people suffered or committed, including the thoughts of people far away or dead who are closely affected by the injustice suffered or committed by a person nearby. This also means that he’s a supernatural lie detector.
• Use spirit magic to boost his combative abilities and the defense of his allies. He can also boost a mage’s magical abilities and use certain types of magic himself, including but not limited to temporarily enchanting objects.
• Sense darkspawn, Gray Wardens, demons, people who use lyrium, and other spirits. He can ‘hear’ magic.
Less Likely to Do, but Might Consider
• Mess with mortal perception to assist them or effectively become invisible.
o Theoretically he can make other people invisible as well, but even a spirit that is invisible regularly has severe limitations on sharing that power and using it causes pain and nosebleeds.
• Make himself forget something. This is the aforementioned method of a spirit ‘purifying’ itself of memories that are difficult to reconcile with their virtue, denying themselves growth in exchange for avoiding corruption. This is not foolproof, as memories can return and some memories can be left to fester too long to forget.
o Theoretically he can also make others forget him or things relating to him, but he’s even less likely to do that than to make himself forget.
• Change his appearance (since he is no longer in Kristoff’s body, he effectively has control over how he appears. He is most comfortable appearing as his friends recognize him.)
o He has mentioned in canon that he believes being in a female body would be an interesting change in perspective, so it is possible he may switch his appearance for the sake of learning more about mortals later on.
• Teleport (other spirits have been shown effectively teleporting across very limited distances, probably using their spirit power. Since they don’t do that in combat, I assume that it takes effort and isn’t really worth it unless they need it for something.)
• Possess an inanimate object or a willing living host. This is shown to bring a host that has just died back to life and act as supernatural life support until the spirit exits the body again.
Will Never in a Million Years Do (Unless he’s Corrupted)
• Fuck around directly with a mortal’s head to alter thoughts and perception without permission, especially with the intention to trap them in a state where he can feed off of them uninterrupted.
o He is slightly more willing to do this with permission from the host if he is doing something for their sake, such as easing pain, but that can still be a hard sell for them.
• Feed on the suffering of a mortal, or generally feed on an unwilling mortal.
• Force an unwilling mortal to accept possession and take direct control of their body.
Power Nerfs (if applicable): For the sake of gameplay, I’d like to nerf his ability to hear thoughts and memories. I’d like the power available if there is OOC consent, but otherwise, let’s say that there’s some block that is disrupting his ability to hear distinct thoughts and sense past injustices.
And, of course, I will also have an IC permissions post where people can give their comfort level with additional powers like invisibility, possession, forgetting, and consensual mind tampering. None of these things will ever be done without explicit OOC permission, and it’s not likely to come up often because Justice doesn’t like to do these things with or without permission.
Inventory: One full set of standard Gray Warden armor – Basically just what your average knightly heavy armor with the Gray Warden’s sigil on it
One ring made of lyrium - This is a magical object made with raw lyrium, a highly toxic material considered pure magic which can drive people to madness with prolonged exposure and can kill mages on contact. Lyrium can be powdered into a highly addictive drug or made into a potion meant to boost mana. It also sings, but only spirits and certain mortals can hear it. Justice likes it because it sings to him and it’s a gift from a friend.
Incentives: Justice is well incentivized by justice for justice’s sake, and thus will be eager to do anything that he considers just, but if the Orbiters feel like rewarding him on top of that…
- Guaranteed safety of loved ones
- Items that are pregnant with intense memories that he’s not familiar with, like a soda bottle a man held just before he proposed to his girlfriend.
- Items that allow him to have more of Kristoff’s memories, like mementos belonging to Kristoff.
- Items made of lyrium. Lyrium song basically turns him into a cat in a sunbeam.
- Assistance righting a wrong that he cannot right by himself.
SAMPLES
Toplevel at the TDM!