Thistlegreen Manor: Application
May. 3rd, 2018 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thelastoftheasPLAYER INFO:
Name: Gail
Age: 36
Current Characters: None
Reserved: NA
CHARACTER INFO:
NAME: Amelia Heartstriker
CANON: The Heartstriker Series
CANON POINT: The end of book 3, when she has her brother kill her
AGE: Four thousand something. It doesn’t show except in her dragon form, which is about the size of a 747.
HISTORY:
The feathered serpent Bethesda Heartstriker, Amelia’s mother, was among the first generation of dragons to be hatched on the plane of Earth, after dragons fled their own collapsing plane sometime in the distant past. Amelia was from the second, hatched in Bethesda’s first clutch when her mother was only one hundred years old-- still very young (for a dragon). All of them were given names that began with the A sound... as subsequent clutches were named with the B sound, C, D, etc. The current clutch, hatched in the year 2068 and now 27 years old, is up to the Js. Bethesda is a very, very prolific dragon.
Things were relatively calm, at first. Amelia learned magic from her grandfather, the great Quetzalcoatl, a dragon settled in Central America. He had no human form, being originally from the dragons’ doomed plane; only those born on Earth had the ability to shapeshift without prodigious amounts of magic. In the end, Amelia learned just about everything she needed to know as a young dragon from him, as her mother Bethesda was not particularly parental and was, in fact, a bit suspicious of her children. She even rescued the runt of her mother’s second clutch and helped their grandfather raise him, as well (at least until his Seer gift kicked in, and he became suddenly valuable to Bethesda). Magic was her first love, though, beyond flying or fighting or even collecting gold and power-- the only things she hoarded were knowledge, in the form of books (at the time), and human mages who, though she treated them well, were still her possessions. She had a small village of them, in fact, and made sure to breed them so that as much as possible of the gift that made them able to direct the world’s natural magic bred true. Her best friend (and best rival) was the other most powerful mage in the plane, Svena, one of the ice dragons of Europe. They never actually called each other friends, even tried to kill each other multiple times, and yet always got together for drinks and magic debate whenever they had the chance.
Amelia’s magical specialization, even from a young age, was creating portals-- that is, opening a magical gateway between one place and another. She could do it on her new home plane, say from wherever she’s standing to her own private island in the South Pacific, and she could also do it between planes, visiting other universes, earning her the additional title of Planeswalker. That ability would come in very handy as, right around the same time, in the early 1000s AD, all the magic in the world suddenly dried up, stoppered up by human mages afraid of the growing power of spirits. The spirits all went dormant, and dragons had to spend most of not all of their time in their human forms to conserve energy-- and those without human forms had to find a source of power elsewhere, or go as dormant as the spirits.
For Quetzalcoatl, this meant blood magic, and the historical human sacrifices of the Aztecs-- in this timeline, they were all made to keep him alive. That didn’t last more than a century or two, though, before Bethesda, Amelia’s mother, took advantage of his growing weakness and his misplaced trust in his daughter to betray and kill him, taking over the clan with the new title Heartstriker. She claimed a mountain for her own in what would eventually become New Mexico and hung her own father’s preserved head in her throne room, handing out his magical teeth a weapons for her most loyal or powerful offspring.
Because she did it to her father, Bethesda fully expected betrayal from her own children. Whenever someone got too powerful, too ambitious, or too secretive, she promptly killed them, or had them killed. Amelia is the last child from the A clutch, and the seer Brohomir (called Bob more often than not) the last of the B clutch and only alive because of his ability to see the future being useful to Bethesda, and Conrad (first knight and protector of the clan) and Chelsie (enforcer and executioner of the clan) are all that’s left of the C clutch. Amelia herself probably wouldn’t have lasted, depending on magic as she did rather than physical strength, except for that other title she picked up: Planeswalker. Dragons have magic at their core, what they call their “fire”, rather than having to exist entirely on magic drawn from the outside world. It’s not enough to sustain their larger forms for very long or to do much defensive or offensive magic, not without doing damage to their own souls and potentially killing themselves, but it’s more than enough to find a connection point to another plane and cut a portal to it.
This is what Amelia did for centuries of Earth time. On Earth, the withered magic cut short not only the power but also the lifespan of a dragon, keeping their numbers small and making it more and more uncomfortable the older a dragon became, requiring more magic outside themselves to sustain them. Amelia avoided that by spending the majority of her time in other planes, learning and growing and keeping herself at full strength-- and also avoiding her suspicious, murderous mother. On the rare times she did come to Earth’s plane, she bore the limited magic and dangerous family ties by staying more or less drunk the whole time. The habit grew through the years, making her (if one is being generous) a functional alcoholic. She may have been alive and well and learning, all of which were very good things, but she was not remotely happy. She missed her own clutch’s siblings, and the little brother she all but raised herself, and having an actual home, and not having to be afraid of her own stupid mother.
Even worse, Bethesda had her all wrong. Amelia had never wanted to lead the clan. It was too much work, too much danger, not enough time for study (and for drinking, and for dancing, and for bantering with friends). But her mother would never believe her no matter what she said, so she kept having to run, and she kept drinking.
Things changed in the year 2035, when magic suddenly returned to Earth. An asteroid hit somewhere in Canada, and that shook some of the magic of the world loose again. Amelia visited at that point, briefly, but the flow was still a trickle, and it still wasn’t comfortable for a dragon of her age-- spending time on other planes meant that time often flowed differently where she was, so she is physically much older than the simple millennia plus that had passed on Earth since she hatched-- so she left again after checking in with her brother Bob, the Seer.
Bob called her back a mere sixty years later because of her newest, youngest brother: Julius. Bethesda had enough clutches in a thousand years to get all the way through the Js, going alphabetically. Julius was, to put it frankly, a bad dragon because he was, oddly enough, a nice dragon. He refused to accept life debts, he refused to attack and hurt people, he refused to climb the ladder of dragonic success by exploiting businesses or people or even circumstances. He was, to any other dragon raised in a power-hoarding culture like theirs, an absolute failure, and really weird, to boot. Amelia met him, and her first estimation was “cute, but naive and kind of stupid”, especially when she discovered he had a very promising human mage with a bound spirit for a “friend”. Dragons don’t normally make friends with humans, they collect them as pets and servants and playthings. So Amelia did what any sensible dragon would do: she tried to woo the girl away from Julius with promise of magical knowledge lost from before the meteor strike, status as the highest mage in her new cadre of them she planned to start, and the promise of aid against a little dragonhunter problem they’d managed to attract.
The mage, Marci, turned her down flat because she didn’t want to be a possession, and because she didn’t want to leave Julius and not be able to help him if he needed it-- and Marci was smart enough to turn her desire back around on Amelia, and earn aid against the dragonhunter anyway. Their discussion was cut short about then by the arrival of a pair of European ice dragons, Estella and her own friend-slash-rival Svena, who picked a fight until Svena could trap Amelia under a cage of ice just long enough for a plane to crash on her and knock her out. Estella was another Seer, and knew the exact timing she needed to fulfill her plan: she had purchased specific and unlikely futures for members of the Heartstriker clan in order to destroy it, enacted through chains applied when those dragons were weak and distracted. Those futures were ones in which each person chained did exactly what Estella told them to, leaving them literal slaves to her magic. Amelia was one of those dragons, and the chain disappeared once applied, leaving her weak but unaware of what had happened long enough for Marci and Chelsie to rescue her and return her to Julius’s house to recover.
Julius refused to give the weakened Amelia up to their mother Bethesda, who had fully intended to make use of this weakness to kill her daughter once and for all, which won Amelia over to his side, and even earned an apology from her for trying (and failing) to steal his human. “We’re BFFFFs now,” she said, messing up the local slang (BFF, obviously). Of course, given Amelia’s definition of “friendship” is basically “people who use each other and share drinks”, that doesn’t mean a whole lot. Either way, though, the friendship didn’t get long to cement itself, because later that day, just as Amelia was opening a portal to the plane the chains had come from, Estella appeared at Julius’s house and activated the chains on her and on Chelsie. Julius and Marci escaped through the portal, leaving the others to Estella to enact her plan to destroy Bethesda once and for all.
As one would expect from an unlikely protagonist, Julius wound up saving the day in an unorthodox manner, freeing the rest from their locked-in futures simply by letting them expire while he bought a few more minutes after Estella’s purchased futures, creating a paradox, and the chance for change. Estella’s youngest sister killed her and freed the European ice dragon clan from the Seer’s wishes, and Julius used his new strength to force the clan’s political structure to change, becoming more egalitarian and democratic. Not a lot more… but it takes small steps, with dragons who are used to working out their problems by killing each other.
Amelia stuck around for a little while after that, to do some magical research herself while the vote shenanigans went on around her. She met with Svena for drinks, and worked out a plan to split her personal soul-magic, her “fire”, for safekeeping-- or, in reality, to enact a crazy scheme to try and usurp an unborn spirit’s place and make dragonkind finally natives of the plane of Earth, protecting them and gaining power at the same time. Svena pulled half of Amelia's fire out of her own body, and put it into Marci’s, Julius’s mage friend.
And then two days later, Marci was killed, as Amelia and Bob the Seer had known she would be, taking Amelia’s extra fire, magic or in this case (hopefully) spirit, with her. Bob then, at Amelia’s insistence, killed her, intending that her awareness would then go join Marci in the human afterlife, giving her access to the spiritual plane.
Instead, she woke up in Thistlegreen Manor, with no memory of who she was or what she was, and a powerful craving for mimosas. Unfortunately, nobody (including herself) knows what a mimosa is….
Name: Gail
Age: 36
Current Characters: None
Reserved: NA
CHARACTER INFO:
NAME: Amelia Heartstriker
CANON: The Heartstriker Series
CANON POINT: The end of book 3, when she has her brother kill her
AGE: Four thousand something. It doesn’t show except in her dragon form, which is about the size of a 747.
HISTORY:
The feathered serpent Bethesda Heartstriker, Amelia’s mother, was among the first generation of dragons to be hatched on the plane of Earth, after dragons fled their own collapsing plane sometime in the distant past. Amelia was from the second, hatched in Bethesda’s first clutch when her mother was only one hundred years old-- still very young (for a dragon). All of them were given names that began with the A sound... as subsequent clutches were named with the B sound, C, D, etc. The current clutch, hatched in the year 2068 and now 27 years old, is up to the Js. Bethesda is a very, very prolific dragon.
Things were relatively calm, at first. Amelia learned magic from her grandfather, the great Quetzalcoatl, a dragon settled in Central America. He had no human form, being originally from the dragons’ doomed plane; only those born on Earth had the ability to shapeshift without prodigious amounts of magic. In the end, Amelia learned just about everything she needed to know as a young dragon from him, as her mother Bethesda was not particularly parental and was, in fact, a bit suspicious of her children. She even rescued the runt of her mother’s second clutch and helped their grandfather raise him, as well (at least until his Seer gift kicked in, and he became suddenly valuable to Bethesda). Magic was her first love, though, beyond flying or fighting or even collecting gold and power-- the only things she hoarded were knowledge, in the form of books (at the time), and human mages who, though she treated them well, were still her possessions. She had a small village of them, in fact, and made sure to breed them so that as much as possible of the gift that made them able to direct the world’s natural magic bred true. Her best friend (and best rival) was the other most powerful mage in the plane, Svena, one of the ice dragons of Europe. They never actually called each other friends, even tried to kill each other multiple times, and yet always got together for drinks and magic debate whenever they had the chance.
Amelia’s magical specialization, even from a young age, was creating portals-- that is, opening a magical gateway between one place and another. She could do it on her new home plane, say from wherever she’s standing to her own private island in the South Pacific, and she could also do it between planes, visiting other universes, earning her the additional title of Planeswalker. That ability would come in very handy as, right around the same time, in the early 1000s AD, all the magic in the world suddenly dried up, stoppered up by human mages afraid of the growing power of spirits. The spirits all went dormant, and dragons had to spend most of not all of their time in their human forms to conserve energy-- and those without human forms had to find a source of power elsewhere, or go as dormant as the spirits.
For Quetzalcoatl, this meant blood magic, and the historical human sacrifices of the Aztecs-- in this timeline, they were all made to keep him alive. That didn’t last more than a century or two, though, before Bethesda, Amelia’s mother, took advantage of his growing weakness and his misplaced trust in his daughter to betray and kill him, taking over the clan with the new title Heartstriker. She claimed a mountain for her own in what would eventually become New Mexico and hung her own father’s preserved head in her throne room, handing out his magical teeth a weapons for her most loyal or powerful offspring.
Because she did it to her father, Bethesda fully expected betrayal from her own children. Whenever someone got too powerful, too ambitious, or too secretive, she promptly killed them, or had them killed. Amelia is the last child from the A clutch, and the seer Brohomir (called Bob more often than not) the last of the B clutch and only alive because of his ability to see the future being useful to Bethesda, and Conrad (first knight and protector of the clan) and Chelsie (enforcer and executioner of the clan) are all that’s left of the C clutch. Amelia herself probably wouldn’t have lasted, depending on magic as she did rather than physical strength, except for that other title she picked up: Planeswalker. Dragons have magic at their core, what they call their “fire”, rather than having to exist entirely on magic drawn from the outside world. It’s not enough to sustain their larger forms for very long or to do much defensive or offensive magic, not without doing damage to their own souls and potentially killing themselves, but it’s more than enough to find a connection point to another plane and cut a portal to it.
This is what Amelia did for centuries of Earth time. On Earth, the withered magic cut short not only the power but also the lifespan of a dragon, keeping their numbers small and making it more and more uncomfortable the older a dragon became, requiring more magic outside themselves to sustain them. Amelia avoided that by spending the majority of her time in other planes, learning and growing and keeping herself at full strength-- and also avoiding her suspicious, murderous mother. On the rare times she did come to Earth’s plane, she bore the limited magic and dangerous family ties by staying more or less drunk the whole time. The habit grew through the years, making her (if one is being generous) a functional alcoholic. She may have been alive and well and learning, all of which were very good things, but she was not remotely happy. She missed her own clutch’s siblings, and the little brother she all but raised herself, and having an actual home, and not having to be afraid of her own stupid mother.
Even worse, Bethesda had her all wrong. Amelia had never wanted to lead the clan. It was too much work, too much danger, not enough time for study (and for drinking, and for dancing, and for bantering with friends). But her mother would never believe her no matter what she said, so she kept having to run, and she kept drinking.
Things changed in the year 2035, when magic suddenly returned to Earth. An asteroid hit somewhere in Canada, and that shook some of the magic of the world loose again. Amelia visited at that point, briefly, but the flow was still a trickle, and it still wasn’t comfortable for a dragon of her age-- spending time on other planes meant that time often flowed differently where she was, so she is physically much older than the simple millennia plus that had passed on Earth since she hatched-- so she left again after checking in with her brother Bob, the Seer.
Bob called her back a mere sixty years later because of her newest, youngest brother: Julius. Bethesda had enough clutches in a thousand years to get all the way through the Js, going alphabetically. Julius was, to put it frankly, a bad dragon because he was, oddly enough, a nice dragon. He refused to accept life debts, he refused to attack and hurt people, he refused to climb the ladder of dragonic success by exploiting businesses or people or even circumstances. He was, to any other dragon raised in a power-hoarding culture like theirs, an absolute failure, and really weird, to boot. Amelia met him, and her first estimation was “cute, but naive and kind of stupid”, especially when she discovered he had a very promising human mage with a bound spirit for a “friend”. Dragons don’t normally make friends with humans, they collect them as pets and servants and playthings. So Amelia did what any sensible dragon would do: she tried to woo the girl away from Julius with promise of magical knowledge lost from before the meteor strike, status as the highest mage in her new cadre of them she planned to start, and the promise of aid against a little dragonhunter problem they’d managed to attract.
The mage, Marci, turned her down flat because she didn’t want to be a possession, and because she didn’t want to leave Julius and not be able to help him if he needed it-- and Marci was smart enough to turn her desire back around on Amelia, and earn aid against the dragonhunter anyway. Their discussion was cut short about then by the arrival of a pair of European ice dragons, Estella and her own friend-slash-rival Svena, who picked a fight until Svena could trap Amelia under a cage of ice just long enough for a plane to crash on her and knock her out. Estella was another Seer, and knew the exact timing she needed to fulfill her plan: she had purchased specific and unlikely futures for members of the Heartstriker clan in order to destroy it, enacted through chains applied when those dragons were weak and distracted. Those futures were ones in which each person chained did exactly what Estella told them to, leaving them literal slaves to her magic. Amelia was one of those dragons, and the chain disappeared once applied, leaving her weak but unaware of what had happened long enough for Marci and Chelsie to rescue her and return her to Julius’s house to recover.
Julius refused to give the weakened Amelia up to their mother Bethesda, who had fully intended to make use of this weakness to kill her daughter once and for all, which won Amelia over to his side, and even earned an apology from her for trying (and failing) to steal his human. “We’re BFFFFs now,” she said, messing up the local slang (BFF, obviously). Of course, given Amelia’s definition of “friendship” is basically “people who use each other and share drinks”, that doesn’t mean a whole lot. Either way, though, the friendship didn’t get long to cement itself, because later that day, just as Amelia was opening a portal to the plane the chains had come from, Estella appeared at Julius’s house and activated the chains on her and on Chelsie. Julius and Marci escaped through the portal, leaving the others to Estella to enact her plan to destroy Bethesda once and for all.
As one would expect from an unlikely protagonist, Julius wound up saving the day in an unorthodox manner, freeing the rest from their locked-in futures simply by letting them expire while he bought a few more minutes after Estella’s purchased futures, creating a paradox, and the chance for change. Estella’s youngest sister killed her and freed the European ice dragon clan from the Seer’s wishes, and Julius used his new strength to force the clan’s political structure to change, becoming more egalitarian and democratic. Not a lot more… but it takes small steps, with dragons who are used to working out their problems by killing each other.
Amelia stuck around for a little while after that, to do some magical research herself while the vote shenanigans went on around her. She met with Svena for drinks, and worked out a plan to split her personal soul-magic, her “fire”, for safekeeping-- or, in reality, to enact a crazy scheme to try and usurp an unborn spirit’s place and make dragonkind finally natives of the plane of Earth, protecting them and gaining power at the same time. Svena pulled half of Amelia's fire out of her own body, and put it into Marci’s, Julius’s mage friend.
And then two days later, Marci was killed, as Amelia and Bob the Seer had known she would be, taking Amelia’s extra fire, magic or in this case (hopefully) spirit, with her. Bob then, at Amelia’s insistence, killed her, intending that her awareness would then go join Marci in the human afterlife, giving her access to the spiritual plane.
Instead, she woke up in Thistlegreen Manor, with no memory of who she was or what she was, and a powerful craving for mimosas. Unfortunately, nobody (including herself) knows what a mimosa is….
