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Character info

Character name: Need, also Sister Lashan
Canon: Heralds of Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey
Canon point & release date: The end of Storm Breaking, 1996
History: History (as Lashan), (as Need) (content warning for suicide)
Powers (no more than 150 words):
Psychic! Powerfully telepathic and empathic. Can share memories (hers, others') with groups, tap others' senses, locate and control animals, accelerate skill teaching, control peoples' bodies if they don't resist.

Magic! Personal reservoir refills with time and rest. Overexertion harms, can kill her. Can also ask people to 'donate' energy (becoming painfully exhausted), or neutralize other magic and use that power herself. Spells - enchanting weapons, luck manipulation, buffing/debuffing senses and physical stats, lightning, life and magic based darksight, protective shields, concealing shields, demon/spirit harming...

Healing! With donated help, can cure dramatic mortal wounds. Otherwise more limited wound curing, painkilling, death slowing. Can alter bodies with consent. Can also 'counter heal', poisoning flesh.

On material plane, she's intangible/insensate, bound to a sword. On spirit plane, she's many luminous particles that can take different solid shapes, including an unusually lifelike human one. Doesn't require food, water, or sleep; may partake. Multitasks.

Personality

What is your character most afraid of? How are they defined by this fear? (100-300 words)
Need fears becoming passive.

Need is among the oldest of the angelic-type spirits in her setting and highly values consent/allowing people to decide for themselves. She's standoffish, inclined to serious caution, and has an extremely long, remote view of events that lets her shrug and move on from things she can't change. After so long dead her emotional range has shortened. She still feels care for people and anger on their behalf but everything else is more shallow. It was once nightmarish to be insensate while on the material plane, but now it's just an annoyance.

Also, when she's gone too long (as in weeks and months) without people, or she's spent way too much magic, Need falls 'asleep' for sometimes centuries. While asleep she still tries to meet her goals, but is a very different sort of entity then, acting through her sword on the material plane and choosing bearers to soul-bond with, then forcing them without heed for proportion or preparation to answer the desperation (the 'need') of mostly women.

All in all that means it's quite easy for her to just coast. She hates that! When she was alive it was not in her nature to sit with folded hands! So she tries to know as much as she can and interfere mostly in small ways, often involving herself quietly and behind the scenes, acting as guide and support. She is a more active meddler than most other angels, more involved. When the world was threatened by apocalyptic magical waves, she threw in with several like her to help and sacrificed her tie to the physical world, the sword, in the process.

What is your character's greatest desire? How are they defined by this desire? (100-300 words)
Basically? She wants to help. She defines herself as someone who comes to the aid of those in desperate need.

The end of her life (which has an effect on her thousands of years of afterlife) is marked with absolute devastation. When her home was razed and most of her family killed or kidnapped by someone who felt he could order this with impunity, she felt she had no other option to make things right besides making a really terrible choice. After she imprisoned her soul in her sword she was able to guide and assist her young apprentice in rescuing their Sisters and killing the person responsible, but there was no returning to how things were. So she became a sort of spirit of justice, trying to help those in positions as desperate as her own.

Despite a cynical attitude Need has inherent sympathy for the victims of patriarchy and abuse of power, and is quite kind and empathic. She especially likes people who are trying to maintain a morality in difficult circumstances, and has dedicated herself many times to teaching people skills and independence, to truly consider what they want from life, excellence, and critical thinking. Mentoring and even basically adopting "children" (everyone, seven hundred year old angelic spirits included, is a child) is important to her, which also helps keep her from feeling passive.

How will not having memories change your character? What core personality traits, if any, will change? How? (200-300 words)
Need's truly ancient, has ties to the divine, and comes from a setting with rather simplistic morality. Normally she's unshakeable, arrogant, and extremely certain of herself, putting on a show of confidence even when she doesn't feel it herself and keeping a lot of secrets. Children will lose hope if she's not! She's also rather paranoid and cynical about people in a way that would go worse if she wasn't always reading their minds and thus actually knows if they're angling for betrayal or not.

Without most of her memories, she doesn't have a ludicrous depth of experience and contacts to draw on and will be more open. While she's still on the careful, cynical side and still seems certain of herself it's much less pronounced and she's a bit more inclined to trust. She can more easily relate on a personal level to others, if she finds them thoughtful enough, and has less reason to keep secrets. And without being so used to being basically an angel that exists to observe and assist the living, maybe she can actually form goals and desires for her own sake? We'll see!

(Additionally she's here in her spirit particle approximation of her human body in the last few years of her life - a healthy, active, strong seventysomething - and can't simply change it, so she's physically present but limited, rather than being attached to an unbreakable sword and endowing living people with powers. This adds on to make her more inclined and required to work more openly with others.)

Thread samples:
One
Two

Memories

You have 10 memory points. How will you use them?
Type of regain: 1 point.
Memory: awareness that she's been dead for a long time and in that time she's forgotten many things, regained them, and forgotten them again. This is normal and inevitable. She does remember that she's regained the name she had as a human, Sister Lashan.

Type of regain: 1 point.
Skill: Weapons making. She knows something about the properties of materials and how to modify them and make them work together. Need can wrap the end of an iron bar and give it a little bit of edge, she can improvise a spear, she can make a functioning sling out of braided cords. Making arrows and bows, and actually making and mending swords, is beyond her.

Type of regain: 3 points.
Skill: Using a sling to launch stones accurately and at killing speed. However, because Need has a great approximation of an elderly body, she can only sling a few stones at a time before her shoulder forces her to stop and rest, and her range is less than a hearty young slinger's.

Type of regain: 1 point.
Skill: Healing. Need can lay on hands and stop bleeding, purge infection, ease swelling, and just in general accelerate the body's natural processes so a fresh wound seems like it's been healing for a few days. It is however uncomfortable, even painful, while she's doing it, and doing it tires her and makes both her and her patient hungry even though she doesn't normally have to eat.

Type of regain: 2 points.
Relationship: The core of her relationship with Vena, her foster daughter/apprentice when she was alive. She protected, taught and nurtured this girl, but in a moment of horrifying loss also betrayed her in some sense, and then guided her again, but their relationship was different and darker afterwards.

Type of regain: 1 point.
Skill: Just a bit of ability to use swords and things that approximate them. She is very hampered by, again, being an old lady; she's not as fast and has less flexibility and energy compared to younger people, but she knows basic forms and footwork.

Type of regain: 1 points.
Skill: keeping the majority of her powers shielded, locked down and all but inert. She can sense magic and people's emotions when up close, which is also functionally a form of darksight that makes living and magical things stand out. If she takes down her psychic shielding without regaining more skill, she will be intrusively bombarded with the thoughts and feelings of everyone around her, a loud and chaotic welter of information. At best she can glean a thing or two from the noise before getting overwhelmed and having to lock down again, probably with a headache.

Player info

Name: Joys or Joysweeper
Pronouns: she/her
Age: 34
Contact: joysweeper
Permissions: Permissions

Link to invite: Invite
Character in game: n/a but we'll see if I can finish an app for Vic in time