Mask or Menace App

[tenebrarius]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Marlowe
AGE: 31
JOURNAL: marlowe_tops
IM / EMAIL: naradragonfly@gmail.com
PLURK: marlowe_tops
RETURNING: New Applicant

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Adam Parrish
CHARACTER AGE: 18
SERIES: The Raven Cycle
CHRONOLOGY: End of The Dream Thieves
CLASS: Hero
HOUSING: De Chima, please. Random roommates is fine.

BACKGROUND: Adam Parrish, at the Raven Boys Wiki

PERSONALITY: CW for mention of child abuse (physical & emotional)
Adam is a tangle of contradictions. It’s said once in canon that “If you combined these two things – the unfathomable and the practical – you were most of the way to understanding Adam Parrish.” As a rising magician for powers he doesn’t understand, he considers himself to be “unknowable”, while his daily life in Henrietta is driven by his practical concerns like paying the rent. But in addition to the unfathomable and the practical, Adam is proud. His pride colors everything that he does and sets him constantly to quarreling with his best friends. He will not accept help or pity from any of them, which makes him sharp-tempered because he is aware of just how pitiable his circumstances are. The only things that are his are the things that he’s fought and struggled to achieve: his place and partial scholarship at Aglionby Academy, the crappy apartment where he lives, the respect that he has earned at his part-time jobs. He is only beginning to learn how to let his friends help him, and he still fights it every time.

Growing up in poverty—and in an abusive household—has given Adam ambitions to get out of Henrietta, to make something of himself, and to never look back. He tries to minimize his Henrietta accent, and he fears that he will never be able to escape his past. He wants to remake himself into someone as financially comfortable and effortlessly successful as Gansey. Beyond that, Adam’s ambitions are not yet clearly defined. He wants to succeed, to be financially prosperous, to be out of Henrietta, and go to college. He hasn’t settled on any particular career, though his aim is generally toward law, business, or politics.

One of Adam’s most hidden ambitions is his desperate desire to be loved, not limited to a romantic sense. As Gansey once remarks about Adam’s parents “I hate them. The bruises he’d come to school with. Who has he ever had to love him? Ever?” Adam’s aware that he’s love-starved, and he’s easily spooked by touch because of growing up in an abusive household. He does not believe that he can be loved, which has recently been reinforced by his girlfriend Blue breaking up with him and telling him that her true love is “not gonna be you.” He’s always coped with the lack of love in his life by alienating himself and thickening the emotional walls around his heart. He sees himself as different from his peers, and finds it hard to identify with anyone, especially after he begins developing magical powers as the hands and eyes of a magical semi-sentient forest. He both embraces and struggles against his conviction that he is different and unlovable. He wants to reciprocate the friendship that Gansey, Ronan, Blue, and Noah offer him, and hates that he finds himself constantly quarreling with them. He does love his friends and, increasingly over the course of the books, begins to accept that they love him.

A naturally guarded person, he’s very careful with his words and his actions. If he’s not certain what to say, he’ll keep quiet. If he’s not certain what to do, he won’t interfere. He prefers to watch and consider before deciding on a course of action, and he doesn’t offer opinions or ideas unless he’s specifically asked. In the same way, he keeps his secrets very close to his chest and reveals as little as possible about himself, even to his friends. He does this partly out of a fear of rejection (because of how he’s been starved of love and affection for his entire life) and partly because he knows that if he imposes himself on others or draws too much attention, he’ll end up hurt and vulnerable (because of growing up in an abusive household). As a child, he quickly learned to take care of as many of his own needs as possible, feeding himself, bathing himself, and keeping out of the way. He kept his grades impeccable and did his chores before his parents got home, so that they would—as much as possible—forget his existence and have nothing to criticize. This survival tactic has become a fixation for him, and he becomes defensive and angry if other people try to help him or take care of him.


POWER: The Magician.

Energy/Magic Channeling: Adam is not himself a source of power, he is a channel for it. Most of his canon magic functions by tapping into the power of Cabeswater (magic forest) and/or the ley line and modifying or repairing it. At his current canon point, that’s all he has ever done and all he knows he can do. In Mask or Menace, he’ll have the ability to deflect or channel magic or energy in his vicinity. He won’t be able to change the inherent nature of any magic, but he can minimize or amplify existing magic and change the direction of it, including reflecting attacks back at opponents. He’ll have no defense against physical attacks unless he can use surrounding energies to create a protective force field, and he has no creative or combative powers for his magic. The energies he can move are: most magics, especially if they “flow” in some capacity, most energies (fire, lightning, electricity), and anything that “flows” in a capacity that can be nudged and guided (water, wind, ley lines, even crowds). He cannot compel anything to move in a manner that would be inherently unnatural to it (eg, redirecting the course of a stream is easy, causing a stream to flow uphill is hard, and causing a stream to retract toward its origin is nigh impossible), and the more flow or energy that a thing has, the more natural it is to Adam’s powers (getting moving traffic to move around an obstacle is easy, getting a standing crowd to part would be difficult). Emotional energy is outside of his range of power—he would not be able to shift the mood in a room or defuse a riot—and he can only use his ability to move living creatures when they are moving in some sort of migration or flock pattern and he can nudge the path of the flow.

Under the same umbrella, he has related low-level psychic powers, mostly along the lines of large magical forests trying to get him to perform complicated feng shui on ley lines. He’s trained in the use of tarot cards to communicate with magical or spiritual forces that can’t or won’t communicate in words. He can’t read minds or tell the future, he’s really just a psychic beacon for inanimate magical entities that want him to do his thing and redirect some energies. If he eventually learns how, he’ll be able to use this to read broader energy networks, such as locating the source of a power outage or identifying a strange magical surge in the vicinity, but for the time being he isn’t aware of this nuance of his magic-channeling abilities.

Tangentially related to his other magics of energy and flow, he has the ability to influence the weather of his surroundings. Much of this is directly tied to his ability to control the flow of energies (wind, water) around him, simply doing that on a wider and more atmospheric level. Even though he’ll know from the intro pamphlet that this was listed as an ability, he won’t initially be aware that he’s doing this—he likes cloudy weather, which often suits his mood, so he’ll be pleased to find that the weather in his area often reflects what he’s feeling, but after causing a thunderstorm or two when he loses his temper, he’ll start to realize that he really can consciously impact the weather around him. This also gives him the one significant combat ability he has (once he figures out how to use it): Adam can call down lightning and direct it to his will.

These powers are new to him, so I plan to play out his learning how to use them.


〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[Adam has spent four days avoiding his phone. It has buzzed. It has beeped. It has lit up with the names of his friends.

The first two days were easy to ignore his phone. He spent fourteen hours sleeping and the rest staggering around in a groggy haze. He has drunk too much coffee, ignored his roommate, and only emerged from his residence to find the nearest grocery, where he bought a quart of ice cream, a stack of frozen pizzas, and a tub of instant coffee.

His phone has called to him in that time. He figured out how to set it on vibrate, but he can still feel it in his pocket. It’s connected to the network, sending him updates from other imPorts. He figured out, also, how to turn off the vibrate function, but didn’t. He figured out how to disconnect from the network, but didn’t. He likes the insistent, occasional buzz in his pocket, or against the nightstand. Each buzz comes with a tiny stab of guilt.

The phone makes him feel connected to the world that he’s hiding from. It reminds him that his friends are waiting for him. That they’re probably worried about him.

He picks up his phone. Sees a blur of updates. Sets it back on the table face down. His heart pounds.

On the morning of the fourth day, before any civilized person has begun their morning, when Adam has just woken up at three A.M. from another twelve-hour stretch of sleep, Adam opens his phone and reads through his messages. And then he sends one, a single line of text, his tentative signal that he might be willing to emerge into the world and behave like a functional human being.]

I’m not dead.


LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: Test Drive Meme

FINAL NOTES: Poc!Adam: While Adam isn’t described very much in canon, there’s enough description to be clear that he is white and blond. I’ve chosen to use a PoC PB for him, and I subsequently headcanon Adam with long-ish black hair, like his PB.