plumptiousone (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
plumptiousone) wrote2016-04-16 01:36 pm
plumptiousone) wrote2016-04-16 01:36 pm
THISAVROU APP
OUT OF CHARACTER
Player Name: MonkeysInPants
Are you 16 or older: Newly minted 28 years
Contact: Plurk @monkeysinpants
Current Characters: Allison Ruth, Cyclonus
Tag: rhiow
IN CHARACTER
Name: Rhiow
Canon: Diane Duane's Feline Wizards series
Canon Point: Following the events of To Visit the Queen
Age: 5-6 (cat middle age)
History:
As a kitten, Rhiow came to live with a human couple, Hhuha (Susan) and Iaehh (Mike). She was spayed while she was young.
Not long after leaving kittenhood, she was ‘approached’ by the Whisperer, a feline deity and incarnation of the Powers That Be, who offered her Wizardry in exchange for taking an Oath to fight against entropy and slow down the heat-death of the universe. Managing to survive her Ordeal - during which she came into possession of an incomplete spell which would come into play later in her life - Rhiow became a full wizard. She apprenticed under feline worldgate technician Ffairh, taking over his position after he passed away. She ended up working repeatedly with fellow gating expert Saash, and then Urruah, until the group of them ended up as a team of three, in charge of the Grand Central Station worldgating complex in New York.
The first two Feline Wizards books depict two particular incidents in Rhiow’s wizardly life.
The Book of Night With Moon:
On a typical day at work, the Grand Central team finds a cat, barely out of kittenhood on the tracks. The kitten’s name is Arhu, and it turns out that he’s not only a fresh wizard on his Ordeal, but also a visionary or seer. The team gets dragged along as part of his Ordeal when the Grand Central gates begin to malfunction. The trouble grows, with dinosaurs spilling out into New York, and the very nature of worldgates beginning to break down, and Rhiow’s favorite human being killed in a traffic ‘accident’, arranged by the Lone Power, creator of death and entropy. In order to fix things, Rhiow trades one of her lives to better equip her team and leads them to Old Downside - a more ‘central’ universe that takes the form of prehistoric New York, where cats are still massive hunters, and the saurian refugees of the asteroid that wiped them out have survived deep underground. There they meet the first saurian wizard chosen by the Powers That Be, face down the Lone Power and liberate the saurians from its cruel influence, leading them up into the sun.
To Visit the Queen:
Though still mourning her lost human, Hhuha, and dealing with her other human, Iaehh’s decision whether or not to keep her, Rhiow finds her team once again on errantry, this time helping one of the London gating teams with their own malfunctioning gates. They discover that a certain Lone Power has been messing with time, creating an alternate timeline where a detail physics textbook from our present ended up in Victorian times, and Queen Victoria was assassinated. In order to fix the timelines and stop the new timeline from overtaking their own and dooming them all to nuclear winter, the two gating teams must go back (and sideways) in time to save the Queen and locate the misplaced book. In the end, one of the London team betrays them, but they still manage to be successful in part thanks to a spell that was put in place back in the days of Ancient Egypt. With crisis once again averted despite more friends lost, Rhiow’s team returned home.
Personality:
Rhiow is a cat. She is a very sweet and friendly one, adoring the company of her humans and quick to give out a reassuring rub and purr to comfort upset humans. She’s a little more reserved with other cats, but still friendly enough, though she can have a sharp tongue if you goad her too much.
As a cat, she doesn’t always get the way humans think or understand why they do what they do, but she does her best. She has little interest or respect for property, though she understands that it’s important to humans (and thus refrains from scratching her humans’ furniture), concerned more with territory than objects, as a good cat is. She also has little respect for her human, Hhuha’s reasons for keeping with a job that makes her miserable, and isn’t afraid to let her know so by tossing around her paperwork.
She has a cat’s sense of pride, which doesn’t work quite the same as a human’s - she sees nothing wrong with using a litter box that must be cleaned out by other people, or begging food off humans - but she once talks about almost missing a foothold on a potentially deadly drop, and how she’d been “horrified at what might have happened, or worse, who might have seen her.” (The Book of Night with Moon) No cat enjoys looking foolish!
She also has the instinctive urge to kill small creatures - particularly rats - and isn’t especially fond of dogs, though she does her best to be polite.
Rhiow is a wizard, and a team leader. This makes her a person who has pledged to help slow down the heat death of the universe, often at risk to her own life. She does her best to be respectful of other species, having worked with many, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, and tries to be polite and understanding of species differences. Unlike some wizards, she really tries to focus on helping everyone rather than just her own species.
She’s extremely dedicated to her role of protecting the universe, as well as her team, willing to sacrifice greatly to keep them as safe as possible - including giving up one of her nine lives in order to ensure they could be well-equipped in a dangerous situation. Not even the death of Hhuha, the human she described as ‘the great love of her life’ could keep Rhiow from completing her duty, despite how much it pained her.
She’s also very patient, keeping her team balanced despite their contrasting personalities, usually managing to do so without violence, though she’s not afraid to lay down a heavy paw if they get too out of line (cats are cats after all, and sometimes somebody needs their ears shredded a little to really drive a point home).
She’s terribly responsible, sometimes to a fault, having difficulty just letting go and doing things she can’t be certain of. In the words of her own thoughts, “She was a team leader. She had to be responsible, methodical, make sure she was right: others’ lives depended upon it.” (The Book of Night with Moon). There’s a good reason why when Rhiow used a spell that temporarily made her team avatars of the Powers That Be, that she embodied Iau, the One, mother of the universe and the rest of the feline pantheon. They both have a lot to look after!
Abilities/Skills:
Rhiow has Wizardry. The way this manifests for feline wizards is a bit different from how it works for human ones. Rather than a physical Manual, they experience the Whispering, where a voice in their minds - thought to be one of their deities, Hrau’f the Silent - tells them what they need to know when they need to know it… so long as it’s preserved in the sum of Wizardly knowledge and She’s allowed to tell them.
In Savrou, Rhiow will find her connection to the Whisperer seems to be oddly delayed and softened, as if there’s a great distance between them. This is worrisome.
Spells can be performed in two primary fashions: in one, structures of the Speech are physically laid out in the world (generally in circles). This method allows other wizards to look over your work. The other is to hold and recite spells in a mental workspace, kept complete except for the last word. Keeping a spell ‘loaded’ in such a fashion is a mental burden on the wizard, a pressure to be completed that grows until the spell is released. Normally, only a few spells can be kept ready to use at a time, but special dispensation can be traded for at a high price (like one of Rhiow’s nine lives). Repeated use of the same spell in a short period of time also comes with a price, resulting in ‘burn-in’: “the wizardly problem that came of doing the same spell too often. The spell’s range decreased, and its effectiveness dwindled, until you could get some rest and recharge yourself” (The Book of Night with Moon).
Wizardry is basically bound by the laws of thermodynamics. You have to put energy into something to get something out of it, and generally the bigger the effect the more energy it takes. Since each wizard only has a limited amount of energy at a time, they always try to use the most energy efficient way possible to accomplish their goals.
Additionally, cats have a natural ability to see the ‘strings’ that hold together the universe: “light-strings of matter substrates, weft lines, and the other indicators of forces and structures that held the normally unseen world together.” (The Book of Night with Moon) This makes cat wizards uniquely suited to being gate technicians, where gates are an ancient, permanent system of portals - presumably put in place by the Powers That Be - that allow wizards to rapidly transit across the globe and throughout the universe without having to waste their own energy on personal transit spells. Rhiow herself is a gating expert.
Other abilities that cats have a particular affinity for (to the point that even some non-wizardly cats can manage them), are Sidling - the ability to walk where visible light doesn’t hit them, making them invisible but not intangible - and the ability to walk through objects. The presence of the Ingress and its power source will make it more difficult for Rhiow to exercise these abilities than usual, especially since it seems to activate without warning.
Apart from her Wizardry, Rhiow has the general abilities of a cat. She walks silently, she sees well in the dark, she has a great sense of balance and can leap long distances, her hearing and sense of smell are much better than a human’s, she’s got sharp pointy claws and teeth… and she’s also quite a skilled hunter! As far as house-cat sized prey are concerned.
She’s also cute as a button.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Strengths:
Leadership experience
Used to working with a variety of species, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial
Gating expert
Good hunter
Cute and fluffy
Weaknesses:
No opposable thumbs
Very short
Likes to sleep 16-20 hours a day, considers 4 hour shifts long
Sheds, may induce allergic response
Doesn't respect paperwork
Items:
None.
SAMPLES
Network Sample:
[The camera flicks on to a view very close to the ground, from what appears to be under a bed. A fuzzy black cheek takes up one edge of the view as the camera is mounted on Rhiow’s collar-MID.
Further out in the room, several paklers can be seen making a mess, presumably in search of food. One of them suddenly looms close in the view, peering under the bed. The distinctive deep yowl of a seriously pissed-off cat rings out from right next to the camera, and a black paw lashes into view, claws out, to smack the pakler right across the face.
It backs off for the moment.
The yowling dies away, and Rhiow’s small voice speaks up instead.]
Sorry about that. That was a little close for comfort.
I wouldn’t mind some assistance. The little furry ones were easy to handle, but these are a bit- oh, for Queen Iau’s sake!
[The scratched pakler is back, reaching for Rhiow now, and she hisses. The ugly creature suddenly drops to the floor, stiff as a board.]
Please?
Prose/Action Sample:
NOTE: This doesn’t have to be canon for how Rhiow would experience the Ingress, but I felt like playing around!
The feeling is nothing like gate transit. It’s not even the deep pressure of a timeslide. It’s something unfamiliar, but the result is the same: Rhiow finds herself somewhere other than where she was moments before. Disturbed by the unexpected transit, she tucks herself down defensively, tail lashing with her agitation.
Where is this? A large room of metal and machinery, that makes her think more of something she’d find off-planet than on Earth.
Where am I? she says, querying the Whisperer. There’s an odd delay in the response, and when it arrives it feels strangely far away, and is nothing more than a sense of her own confusion echoed back to her. Oh dear. Nothing good can come of not even the Powers That Be knowing where you are. Or perhaps the Silent One simply isn’t able to say. Rhiow’s little pink tongue flicks out to lick her nose.
Looking around, the fur on her back proceeds to stand on end. Behind her is a thing. It’s not a worldgate. It has none of the neat weave of hyperstring and chains of wizardry that make up the complex web of a gate. In fact, it’s an utter mess, a chaotic tangle of strings of forces hung this way and that, wrapped haphazardly around each other, strung from the surrounding machinery through to a central knot of tightly coiled hyperstring structures. But despite the mess of it, she can still see the way that space folds, the metaextension of strings, puckering, stretching away, drilling through space, and she recognizes what that means.
Her ears lay flat against her skull, and she lets out a yowl of distress. Oh, sweet Iau, it’s a gate without wizardry.
Are you 16 or older: Newly minted 28 years
Contact: Plurk @monkeysinpants
Current Characters: Allison Ruth, Cyclonus
Tag: rhiow
IN CHARACTER
Name: Rhiow
Canon: Diane Duane's Feline Wizards series
Canon Point: Following the events of To Visit the Queen
Age: 5-6 (cat middle age)
History:
As a kitten, Rhiow came to live with a human couple, Hhuha (Susan) and Iaehh (Mike). She was spayed while she was young.
Not long after leaving kittenhood, she was ‘approached’ by the Whisperer, a feline deity and incarnation of the Powers That Be, who offered her Wizardry in exchange for taking an Oath to fight against entropy and slow down the heat-death of the universe. Managing to survive her Ordeal - during which she came into possession of an incomplete spell which would come into play later in her life - Rhiow became a full wizard. She apprenticed under feline worldgate technician Ffairh, taking over his position after he passed away. She ended up working repeatedly with fellow gating expert Saash, and then Urruah, until the group of them ended up as a team of three, in charge of the Grand Central Station worldgating complex in New York.
The first two Feline Wizards books depict two particular incidents in Rhiow’s wizardly life.
The Book of Night With Moon:
On a typical day at work, the Grand Central team finds a cat, barely out of kittenhood on the tracks. The kitten’s name is Arhu, and it turns out that he’s not only a fresh wizard on his Ordeal, but also a visionary or seer. The team gets dragged along as part of his Ordeal when the Grand Central gates begin to malfunction. The trouble grows, with dinosaurs spilling out into New York, and the very nature of worldgates beginning to break down, and Rhiow’s favorite human being killed in a traffic ‘accident’, arranged by the Lone Power, creator of death and entropy. In order to fix things, Rhiow trades one of her lives to better equip her team and leads them to Old Downside - a more ‘central’ universe that takes the form of prehistoric New York, where cats are still massive hunters, and the saurian refugees of the asteroid that wiped them out have survived deep underground. There they meet the first saurian wizard chosen by the Powers That Be, face down the Lone Power and liberate the saurians from its cruel influence, leading them up into the sun.
To Visit the Queen:
Though still mourning her lost human, Hhuha, and dealing with her other human, Iaehh’s decision whether or not to keep her, Rhiow finds her team once again on errantry, this time helping one of the London gating teams with their own malfunctioning gates. They discover that a certain Lone Power has been messing with time, creating an alternate timeline where a detail physics textbook from our present ended up in Victorian times, and Queen Victoria was assassinated. In order to fix the timelines and stop the new timeline from overtaking their own and dooming them all to nuclear winter, the two gating teams must go back (and sideways) in time to save the Queen and locate the misplaced book. In the end, one of the London team betrays them, but they still manage to be successful in part thanks to a spell that was put in place back in the days of Ancient Egypt. With crisis once again averted despite more friends lost, Rhiow’s team returned home.
Personality:
Rhiow is a cat. She is a very sweet and friendly one, adoring the company of her humans and quick to give out a reassuring rub and purr to comfort upset humans. She’s a little more reserved with other cats, but still friendly enough, though she can have a sharp tongue if you goad her too much.
As a cat, she doesn’t always get the way humans think or understand why they do what they do, but she does her best. She has little interest or respect for property, though she understands that it’s important to humans (and thus refrains from scratching her humans’ furniture), concerned more with territory than objects, as a good cat is. She also has little respect for her human, Hhuha’s reasons for keeping with a job that makes her miserable, and isn’t afraid to let her know so by tossing around her paperwork.
She has a cat’s sense of pride, which doesn’t work quite the same as a human’s - she sees nothing wrong with using a litter box that must be cleaned out by other people, or begging food off humans - but she once talks about almost missing a foothold on a potentially deadly drop, and how she’d been “horrified at what might have happened, or worse, who might have seen her.” (The Book of Night with Moon) No cat enjoys looking foolish!
She also has the instinctive urge to kill small creatures - particularly rats - and isn’t especially fond of dogs, though she does her best to be polite.
Rhiow is a wizard, and a team leader. This makes her a person who has pledged to help slow down the heat death of the universe, often at risk to her own life. She does her best to be respectful of other species, having worked with many, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, and tries to be polite and understanding of species differences. Unlike some wizards, she really tries to focus on helping everyone rather than just her own species.
She’s extremely dedicated to her role of protecting the universe, as well as her team, willing to sacrifice greatly to keep them as safe as possible - including giving up one of her nine lives in order to ensure they could be well-equipped in a dangerous situation. Not even the death of Hhuha, the human she described as ‘the great love of her life’ could keep Rhiow from completing her duty, despite how much it pained her.
She’s also very patient, keeping her team balanced despite their contrasting personalities, usually managing to do so without violence, though she’s not afraid to lay down a heavy paw if they get too out of line (cats are cats after all, and sometimes somebody needs their ears shredded a little to really drive a point home).
She’s terribly responsible, sometimes to a fault, having difficulty just letting go and doing things she can’t be certain of. In the words of her own thoughts, “She was a team leader. She had to be responsible, methodical, make sure she was right: others’ lives depended upon it.” (The Book of Night with Moon). There’s a good reason why when Rhiow used a spell that temporarily made her team avatars of the Powers That Be, that she embodied Iau, the One, mother of the universe and the rest of the feline pantheon. They both have a lot to look after!
Abilities/Skills:
Rhiow has Wizardry. The way this manifests for feline wizards is a bit different from how it works for human ones. Rather than a physical Manual, they experience the Whispering, where a voice in their minds - thought to be one of their deities, Hrau’f the Silent - tells them what they need to know when they need to know it… so long as it’s preserved in the sum of Wizardly knowledge and She’s allowed to tell them.
In Savrou, Rhiow will find her connection to the Whisperer seems to be oddly delayed and softened, as if there’s a great distance between them. This is worrisome.
Spells can be performed in two primary fashions: in one, structures of the Speech are physically laid out in the world (generally in circles). This method allows other wizards to look over your work. The other is to hold and recite spells in a mental workspace, kept complete except for the last word. Keeping a spell ‘loaded’ in such a fashion is a mental burden on the wizard, a pressure to be completed that grows until the spell is released. Normally, only a few spells can be kept ready to use at a time, but special dispensation can be traded for at a high price (like one of Rhiow’s nine lives). Repeated use of the same spell in a short period of time also comes with a price, resulting in ‘burn-in’: “the wizardly problem that came of doing the same spell too often. The spell’s range decreased, and its effectiveness dwindled, until you could get some rest and recharge yourself” (The Book of Night with Moon).
Wizardry is basically bound by the laws of thermodynamics. You have to put energy into something to get something out of it, and generally the bigger the effect the more energy it takes. Since each wizard only has a limited amount of energy at a time, they always try to use the most energy efficient way possible to accomplish their goals.
Additionally, cats have a natural ability to see the ‘strings’ that hold together the universe: “light-strings of matter substrates, weft lines, and the other indicators of forces and structures that held the normally unseen world together.” (The Book of Night with Moon) This makes cat wizards uniquely suited to being gate technicians, where gates are an ancient, permanent system of portals - presumably put in place by the Powers That Be - that allow wizards to rapidly transit across the globe and throughout the universe without having to waste their own energy on personal transit spells. Rhiow herself is a gating expert.
Other abilities that cats have a particular affinity for (to the point that even some non-wizardly cats can manage them), are Sidling - the ability to walk where visible light doesn’t hit them, making them invisible but not intangible - and the ability to walk through objects. The presence of the Ingress and its power source will make it more difficult for Rhiow to exercise these abilities than usual, especially since it seems to activate without warning.
Apart from her Wizardry, Rhiow has the general abilities of a cat. She walks silently, she sees well in the dark, she has a great sense of balance and can leap long distances, her hearing and sense of smell are much better than a human’s, she’s got sharp pointy claws and teeth… and she’s also quite a skilled hunter! As far as house-cat sized prey are concerned.
She’s also cute as a button.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Strengths:
Leadership experience
Used to working with a variety of species, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial
Gating expert
Good hunter
Cute and fluffy
Weaknesses:
No opposable thumbs
Very short
Likes to sleep 16-20 hours a day, considers 4 hour shifts long
Sheds, may induce allergic response
Doesn't respect paperwork
Items:
None.
SAMPLES
Network Sample:
[The camera flicks on to a view very close to the ground, from what appears to be under a bed. A fuzzy black cheek takes up one edge of the view as the camera is mounted on Rhiow’s collar-MID.
Further out in the room, several paklers can be seen making a mess, presumably in search of food. One of them suddenly looms close in the view, peering under the bed. The distinctive deep yowl of a seriously pissed-off cat rings out from right next to the camera, and a black paw lashes into view, claws out, to smack the pakler right across the face.
It backs off for the moment.
The yowling dies away, and Rhiow’s small voice speaks up instead.]
Sorry about that. That was a little close for comfort.
I wouldn’t mind some assistance. The little furry ones were easy to handle, but these are a bit- oh, for Queen Iau’s sake!
[The scratched pakler is back, reaching for Rhiow now, and she hisses. The ugly creature suddenly drops to the floor, stiff as a board.]
Please?
Prose/Action Sample:
NOTE: This doesn’t have to be canon for how Rhiow would experience the Ingress, but I felt like playing around!
The feeling is nothing like gate transit. It’s not even the deep pressure of a timeslide. It’s something unfamiliar, but the result is the same: Rhiow finds herself somewhere other than where she was moments before. Disturbed by the unexpected transit, she tucks herself down defensively, tail lashing with her agitation.
Where is this? A large room of metal and machinery, that makes her think more of something she’d find off-planet than on Earth.
Where am I? she says, querying the Whisperer. There’s an odd delay in the response, and when it arrives it feels strangely far away, and is nothing more than a sense of her own confusion echoed back to her. Oh dear. Nothing good can come of not even the Powers That Be knowing where you are. Or perhaps the Silent One simply isn’t able to say. Rhiow’s little pink tongue flicks out to lick her nose.
Looking around, the fur on her back proceeds to stand on end. Behind her is a thing. It’s not a worldgate. It has none of the neat weave of hyperstring and chains of wizardry that make up the complex web of a gate. In fact, it’s an utter mess, a chaotic tangle of strings of forces hung this way and that, wrapped haphazardly around each other, strung from the surrounding machinery through to a central knot of tightly coiled hyperstring structures. But despite the mess of it, she can still see the way that space folds, the metaextension of strings, puckering, stretching away, drilling through space, and she recognizes what that means.
Her ears lay flat against her skull, and she lets out a yowl of distress. Oh, sweet Iau, it’s a gate without wizardry.