ooc: application

[foxsays]

PLAYER

Name: Mhairi
Age: 26
Contact: deathwailart
Other Characters: n/a
Interests: Exploration! Araceli's naturally curious and prone to sneaking around thanks to years as a thief and her time as a guard, playing around with the politics and the grey-on-grey conflicts of the Dragon Age setting with someone entirely removed from it attempting to find common ground sounds like fun, especially all the cultural confusion and playing politics. I've always liked doing background information gathering and sneaking around to find out things that help the plot in games before and I think given everything about Inquisition and the setting that it'd be great to get to play it with so many other characters in the game.

CHARACTER

Name: Araceli Bonaventura (full name:  Araceli Bonaventura y Castell)
Canon/OC: Original
Journal: foxsays
Age: 20

History

world info; it explains things that are too wordy given the history limit.

• Daughter of a pirate (Felix) and a courtesan (Neria), Araceli lived her early life running around the main island of Castileos, taught lessons by a tutor in the brothel and also around her father's ship whenever he was in port. When not at those places, she spent her time hanging around with a group of young thieves.
• Whilst often away, her father usually had his friends keeping an eye on Araceli when it was known that she roamed, including the woman who taught her the finer points of duels and shooting. She picked up gambling very young from the brothel and docks and taught herself how to scramble around rooftops. Her father was the one to gift her Lux, her pet fox and constant companion.
• At fifteen she left home to move into the artisan distract, setting up shop as a thief and fence, earning a reputation as impossible to catch. She stole mainly from nobles if she wasn't sneaking into the beds of their wives or daughters.
• Most of her thieving was for the thrill of it, not the coin and she took bigger and more risky jobs because she loved the planning and the rush of pulling a heist off. Most of her coin ended up going to feeding her hungry artist neighbours.
• At nineteen, running low on excitement, she planned to sneak into the royal palace to steal the queen's jewels, spending a whole month casing it; she was watched as any stranger would be thanks to the queen's spies and they made it their business to learn of her.
• Upon sneaking into the palace, she made it to the royal apartments where she found the queen attacked by assassins that she quickly dispatch before the queensguard arrived. Instead of punishment, she was rewarded: a spot on the queensguard was hers, the first Castilean (all others were from neighbouring countries as an alliance system) and the first commoner.
• Time in the queensguard was rough at first as the noble daughters resented her and looked down on her but she won their friendship in time, helping to ease their homesickness but she was closest of all to the queen, an advisor on how it truly was for common folk. Araceli was her eyes and ears, even disguising Leandra so she could see all she wished to. Rumours swirled of the closeness of the queen and her guards at this time.
• It was when Araceli and Leandra were close to becoming lovers that the queen confessed all to her: that she had known of Araceli, that she'd had her followed and had spoken to her father as he bore letters of marque from her hand. The other queensguard had been hidden and allowing her into the palace had been a test, an existing assassin plot tweaked so Leandra could exploit a loophole to appoint a commoner to her guard. Araceli was even more proud to have been trusted and swore to serve loyally for the rest of her days.

Personality

Friendly, loyal, witty, charming and not one to back down from a challenge, Araceli is very much the 'typical' Castilean citizen.

With parents who supported and nurtured her, allowing her the freedom to make mistakes whilst letting her know she always had them as a safety net, she grew up with confidence and more independence than most. She was encouraged to make her own path in life, her parents offering the right sort of lessons she might need and, upon realising how much she loved a challenge, setting her lessons in a way that appealed to that competitive streak in her.

Araceli has the strong religious beliefs of Castilean citizens: she believes that the sea is a holy place, that their royalty have the blood of the merfolk in their veins; the sea is in her blood, the way it's in everyone's blood because the sea offers life. The thought of drowning isn't one that scares her – the sea will reclaim her and when that moment comes, she won't be the one to argue. This is why she didn't even hesitate when she saw the queen being attacked by an assassin.

The last year of her life, amongst the nobility and the queensguard has exposed Araceli much more to the attitudes of those in other lands, the ones who have less guarded tongues than sailors at docks who need to stay friendly if they want to get good prices for their wares. It was the first time she was ever made to feel small for being 'the get of a pirate and his whore' according to her fellow queensguard, letting her realise that Castileans can often be seen as very odd people compared to the rest of Terradeos.

With the kind of parents she had, she learned how to read people; sometimes you defuse a situation with humour or flattery, sometimes drinks and a few hands of cards or dice, sometimes with a duel or sometimes you back down and regroup. They're valuable lessons for both a thief and a guard, the lessons that have kept her alive.

Underneath all her smiles, she can have a temper, one that can seemingly explode out of nowhere like a sudden storm, usually if someone tries to make her feel small or speaks casually of hurting others or not caring of them. It happens most when nobles or the wealthy dismiss the claim of commonfolk, washing their hands of them which is something she can't abide at all. It can take her a few days to calm down, usually off on her own by the sea or the ship graveyards to think.

When it comes to strangers, she can lie and cheat, but to those she loves, she feels horrendously guilty about it, even if it's a lie to protect them. In her view, she's not being loyal to them if she lies and it's the one tell she actually has because she can't look at them while she does it.


Strengths & Weaknesses

+ strong swimmer, knows her way about a ship, reads a compass, map and stars comfortably (well, if she actually knows the stars)
+ knows her way about flintlock pistols, rapiers, throwing knives
+ incredible balance - she's great at parkour on land and on ships
+ sneaky; she knows how to stick to the shadows, how to listen and watch well, how to read a person
+ not many locks are safe for her if she has the time to work away at them
+ knows her way about a deck of cards and a cup of dice, a handy thing to know when sometimes winning a few hands gets you coin or information
+ reads and writes well, she knows a bit about history, politics, philosophy and naturalistics (the term for the life sciences in her verse)
+/- loyal to a fault, to the point she can't lie well to people she cares for even if it's to protect them or herself
+/- relies on her agility and speed in a fight, if someone were to come at her with heavy blows while she was alone for long she'd have to run
+/- loves a challenge, this can make her really helpful where others might pass an opportunity up but it can also have her doing something a bit too reckless
- small and light, she can't take heavy blows and wielding heavy weapons is pretty impossible
- soft-hearted; her love of her home and culture can see her being hugely hurt whenever it's mocked
- her love of the sea can lead to her feeling homesick if she's kept far from it for too long
- lover of shiny things; she still likes to steal, usually a few coins, a piece of jewellery etc just to keep her skills sharp
- blunt; she might know how politics works and there are times she bites her tongue but she talks the same way to people, tending not to hide behind metaphors or flowery phrases

Arrival Inventory

2 x flintlock pistols
2 x rapiers
1 x knife
Guard uniform and boots
1 x deck of cards
1 x set of dice
1 x hip flask
1 x lockpicking kit worn as earrings and necklace

Quick question! Companion animals, yes or no? If yes, her fox Lux should be added to the inventory.

'Human'ization

n/a

Fit

With a broad set of skills, Araceli would likely fall back on them to keep from being out of her depth. She’s been away to sea in terrible storms and deadly calms and kept her head, she’s learned to be around the highest society and the lowest and to get about without being seen so she’d use all of that to help her find her feet. Her job involves watching and listening, as did her prior years as a thief so she often makes sure she can learn enough about a situation before getting involved in anything. The hardest part for her would be being away from the sea but having magic in her hand and understanding what it can do along with the death of the original Inquisitor would convince her that she could make a difference to the common folk; if the Inquisition is for all, she’d believe it should start with them before any nobles or the Chantry.

Coming from a world where the closest thing to magic is consulting old wise women and looking for signs in waves and other forms of scrying along with more folklore styled beliefs about the sea, Araceli would have a different opinion of the mages and templars, finding both the good and bad in each of them. Having to cope with actually having a form of magic will probably take getting used to at first, once she actually understands what it is, more for it distracting her when she’s climbing or shooting at first. Getting to broaden her horizons about the different racial issues in the setting would also really help her character growth as she’s usually the one explaining customs to the foreign queensguard girls.

SAMPLES

Action spam in which she meets her first Qunari and starts hitting on her. As you do.

log;
Two boys had watched her climb the crumbling tower at the top of the village not long after she’d arrived, loose stone and mortar always threatening to give way under her fingers until she’d finally hauled herself up and over the rotting wood that had once been a floor of the tower, when most of the tower was still around. It was the highest point she’d found in the village that wasn’t amidst the press of worried people, well, apart from a more grand building that had a robed woman standing by it; she knew enough to know it was religious, that appeared to translate well across lands, something about the tone of her voice as she spoke about things Araceli didn’t understand. So she’d looked around for somewhere else tall that wasn’t one of the cliffs because she could climb up buildings, masts and rigging fine but the hills were another sort of challenge and had settled on the crumbling old tower. The chest, lock eaten by rust, wood warped from wind and rain, had been opened at some point and sat sad and empty as she stretched up on her tiptoes before closing it and using it for some extra height as she climbed as high as she dared.

The boys stared, mouths gaping wide and despite herself she smiled and saluted until they scurried off.

“Little boys don’t want to see a woman breaking her neck,” she muttered to herself, cursing when she almost lost her footing.

She’d confirmed once and for all that no, this really wasn’t home at all and she’d somehow found herself here, being woken by an old man shaking her with an oar digging into her back, the names Redcliffe and Hinterlands meaning little. But the people had been worried, eyeing her with more than the unease they gave a strange face and she’d seen no pistols so she’d hidden her own. Even the swords seemed different - not even the flashiest duellists wore theirs on their backs at home and these swords looked big, some as big as her even.

Carefully, she climbed down, sliding the last few feet following the curve and upon spying two little faces peeking from behind the bushes she dropped into a low flourishing bow, winking as they turned red and ran. Once they were gone the smile slipped from her face as she sighed, rising up on her toes to catch sight of the calm waters; they could call the taven The Gull and Lantern all they liked but it wasn’t a sailor’s tavern, not really, and the only boats were sad little rowing boots like the one she’d woken from, nets piled about and smelling of fish. There was no roar of waves and wheeling gulls, no stalls selling the catch of the day and even the buildings were all wrong, sad drab brown wood. True, not everywhere at home was made of stone but they were always brightly painted, not with whatever they’d added to the walls here, the strange bears and stags and other things that made her look away with how strange they were.

Like her hand.

Her glowing hand.

She pressed her fingers down against it again, hissing at something that felt like a bruise mixed with a sting from a jellyfish, drawing her fingers back with another curse. Waking up in a boat with a green hand was almost a joke amongst sailors and pirates but the hand never glowed in the story although it certainly bothered her just as much as it did the other afflicted.

“Leandra would want you to go to the tavern and listen,” she told herself, ignoring the looks people gave her because she’d learned that more of them were concerned for their purses in the face of a strange girl they couldn’t decide a name for (Antiva sounded closest, based on what she’d heard, but parts of Rivain sounded so much like her father that it made her heartsick). “She’d tell you to sit there and have a few drinks and buy a round, make them laugh and play cards. If it was for her, no matter where you were you wouldn’t miss it.”

At least if she had a drink she might forget for a moment how she felt lost for the first time in her life.