Five Stolen Cities: Application
Aug. 1st, 2014 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oildripPLAYER
player name: Bramble
pronouns: they/them/their
age: 24
contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
bramblepatch, AIM: raspberrywhisper@gmail.com
CHARACTER
character name: Amity Ratty
character title: the Murine Nuisance
age: approximately eight months (young adult)
gender: female; she/her/hers
species: Rattus faber
strengths: Amity is watchful, and can sometimes manage persuasive.
canon history:
Amity is an AU of Ammond Raidie, a homestuck OC of mine.
Growing up in a large, primarily lowblood suburban hivecluster in an arid highland region of Alternia, Ammond's childhood was fairly uneventful by troll standards. She cultivated friends and the less murderous sort of enemy, and tried to avoid serious fights with her neighbors but did not hesitate to use whatever force necessary to defend herself and her home, a habit she learned primarily from the giant hornet that served as her parent and guardian. Low-caste, clever, moderately psionically gifted, and with an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, Ammond developed an interest in the invasive biotechnology used to harness living psionic trolls as power sources for the empire's space ships, and by the time she reached adolescence she'd begun to make practical, if illicit, use of the technology for her own less ambitious purposes - primarily small land-transportation vehicles such as motorbikes.
As adulthood and with it, conscription into the imperial fleet, loomed, Ammond's interest grew into an obsession and she began to isolate herself - besides wanting to focus on her work, Ammond was also struggling with mounting depression and anger over the fate that awaited adults with her brand of psychic abilities, in the fleet. She cut ties with most of her friends, and broke off her kismesisship, the only one of the four romantic models observed by trolls in which she'd formed any lasting relationship at that point.
Having successfully isolated herself from her former social circle, Ammond formed - and carried out - a plan to defect and flee into the wilderness before she could be conscripted. Avoiding conscription was relatively easy; surviving as a lone disenfranchised adult on a planet full of well-supplied, hostile, and armed children and adolescents should have been a more difficult proposition; by rights, Ammond should have lasted weeks at most. Instead, she had the good fortune to encounter a small group of other renegade young adults, led by a no-caste mutant with a chip on his shoulder, connections to a number of highblooded trolls with revolutionary (or at least dramatically piratical and anti-imperial) leanings, and the force of a centuries-old reformist cult behind him. Ammond's skill as a bioengineer and mechanic, and her willingness to strap herself into her own prototypes, earned her a place in the rapidly growing rebellion, first in maintaining the few ships they had managed to capture from the empire and rehabilitating the liberated helmsmen, and later, as she became more comfortable manipulating the helm arrays in the field, travelling with the boarding parties that hijacked additional imperial ships.
If the rebellion can actually pull through and put the radical reformist of an imperial heiress on the throne, Ammond's probably going to go down in history as a minor hero of the revolution and the inventor of the first humane helmsman rig. Or they could all die horribly as their supposedly-second-coming-of-a-prophet leader gets distracted from the mission by caring too fucking much about literally everyone. That's a definite possibility, too.
AU history:
Amity was born in an attic somewhere in the seedier parts of Spite - and finding parts of Spite that are seedier than other parts of Spite is, after all, something of a feat. During her short childhood and adolescence (for L.B.s may be smart enough to grant them a somewhat better survival rate than surface rats, but they still mature much faster than humans) she exhibited a strong aptitude for mechanical engineering, which was in the best Rattus faber tradition, and an equally strong dislike for authority figures which was... honestly mostly an "Amity" thing, unfortunately. As a pup, she mostly managed to stay under the radar of the rat gang that controlled her street, but eventually word gets around when a young rat has a knack for building things that not only tick or shoot, but also go really fast or explode.
(Or, occasionally, go really fast and explode, although that's not generally the intended function. Or so Amity claims.)
Familiar and none too impressed with the rodentine cost of constant turf wars between the local gang and those in nearby streets, she didn't take well to the offers of fraternity, security, and a small share of the loot offered by the burly, ragged rats who showed up at her cluttered nest. Possibly there might have been a tactful way to express this, but although Amity can be charming when it suits her, true diplomacy tends to fail her when she's angry. She escaped the confrontation less one earring - and less the respectable chunk of ear associated with said earring - and hasn't been back to that street since.
In the past four months or so, she's been living in various areas of the city, selling her mechanical skills to the highest - and frequently humanoid - bidder, drinking things that rats are probably not actually supposed to drink, and generally making more significant enemies than lasting friendships. This is, partly, because she still has little fondness for the political players of the L.B. world and less for the human authorities.
Also, it can be hard to make a lot of friends when she keeps annoying someone to the point that the wisest action seems to be to pack up everything she can drag onto the back of a cart and take off for some new and interesting part of the fifth city. She's lost significant progress on several projects like this over the months, forced to leave behind half-finished rat-sized clockwork vehicles too unwieldy to haul out of her ad-hoc workshop, and in one case five weeks of careful notes, for some bemused home- or shop-owner to discover at a later date.
At the moment, Amity is living behind the wall of a honey den in Veilgarden, although she's starting to think it's about time to move on again. Is it possible to get a contact high from the wallpaper in a place devoted to the consumption of Prisoner's Honey? Probably not but she'll swear it is.
personality:
The Murine Nuisance is, well, a nuisance. It's something of a feat to be called after one's ability to get on people's nerves rather than one's occupation, skills, or social standing, but Amity seems to not only have managed it, but also embraces and many even revels in the label. She talks a lot, very quickly, and with liberal use of slang picked up all over the city, which can maker her a little hard to follow. If she has to sit in one place for any significant amount of time, she's probably fidgeting with something that's either mechanical or edible, and if you're really lucky, it's something that already belongs to her. More likely - oh, she's so sorry, sir, was that your watch that she just absentmindedly dismantled? That's completely her fault, give her a moment and she'll see if she can't have it ticking again. Really, very sorry.
While she does not by habit cultivate many close friendships, Amity's default attitude is gregarious, optimistic, and friendly - within reason, of course, it doesn't do for someone of her size to go hanging around within easy grabbing distance or anything. But generally she relies on her small size and agility to get her out of sticky situations rather than putting too much care into avoiding those situations in the first place. She requires very little prompting to talk - and talk a lot - to another person, and generally will listen attentively in turn. She's generally easy-going and is more apt to be self-deprecating than to make jokes at other people's expense.
The Nuisance is not particularly cautious with sharing information, either - secrets and rumors are valuable, of course, but her usual stock in trade is metallic with lots of little moving parts, and while Amity will drive a hard bargain when dealing with most forms of commerce, she's got a bit of a blind spot in regards to commodities that she can't hold in her paws. She likes knowing things for the sake of knowing them, and will pay for information if necessary, but once she's learned something she's generally pretty liberal with passing it on to people she likes or is trying to impress.
And, similarly, Amity will talk to almost anyone once, the main exception being that she has absolutely no trust whatsoever for cats of any size or coloration and avoids them as much as possible. Otherwise - rat, human, infernal, clay, rubbery, or whatever else the Neath chooses to throw at her, the Murine Nuisance will generally natter happily at them until given a good reason not to (luckily, she's got enough of a self-preservation instinct that things like "a clearly expressed desire to hurt me" or "working for the Department of Menace Eradication" count as good reasons not to natter at people). She generally gives an impression of being mostly at ease with people on a humanoid scale; this is, until she gets to know a person better, something of an affect, as she is of the belief that acting like a small vulnerable prey animal is a good way to be seen as a small vulnerable prey animal and makes an almost belligerent point of treating humans and human-scale people as equals. This can, and often does, extend to a complete refusal to acknowledge that she actually does need some sort of accommodation on account of her size; it's not uncommon to find her running to keep up with a human's stride, or struggling with containers or bottles far too large for her to use comfortably.
The easygoing attitude, however, is almost entirely abandoned at the door (or window, or hole in the baseboard, or gap in the roof...) of her current workshop; while at any point she's liable to start absentmindedly tinkering with some bit of mechanical minutia, actually working on something is another matter entirely. When working on a complicated project, especially one of her own design, Amity is obsessive and single-minded. While it wouldn't be accurate to call her terse - the rat has no problems talking while she works, and often talks to herself - she's certainly less personable, and is even less inclined than usual to slow down or repeat herself for someone else's benefit. She also doesn't collaborate well, preferring to keep full control of a project until it's finished and ready to hand off to a buyer - or, just as likely, to sit in the corner of her workshop gathering dust until she either disassembles it for parts or decides it's too much work to take it with her when she moves. Her specialty, like many L.B.s, is clockwork; if given the chance she's always game to acquire new knowledge, especially of a mechanical or medical sort, but her understanding in most fields that don't involve a lot of very small interlocking gears is rudimentary at best.
She's also got a soft spot for an underdog and an anti-authoritarian streak; her political stance can best be summarized as "Who has the most power here? Ok, I'm with the other guy." Her distrust of anyone who would claim authority goes, in fact, all the way to the top, and she's no fonder of the Masters than of constables or bandit-chiefs, more or less on principle. Insofar as she can be said to have sympathies toward any major human faction, she's got some revolutionary leanings.
At eight months of age, Amity is an adult rat but still a fairly young one; assuming that the average L.B. is able with her intelligence to secure a better quality of life and better medical care than her wild surface kin, she's probably got a life span of something like three to four years, barring illness, accident, cats, run-ins with Department hunters, sea monsters, industrial sabotage, hungry raggedy men, or overenthusiastic urchins. Which means there's a chance the Nuisance will still be around a fortnight from now, at least.
samples:
[one]
[two:
Three days. Three bloody days since the Murine Nuisance had been able to make it back to her own bed to sleep. Well. Nest. She wasn't one of those rats who set up with dollhouse furniture and silk sheets or anything; that kind of thing always struck her as laughable, and not in a good way. Pretentious, rather. Hah, and she was sure there were plenty of human folk in the city who'd be glad of a nice snug hole out of the fog, lined with bits of flannel and loose goosedown and twists of wool. Not much to look at, just a corner out the back of the cramped space where she built things out of clockwork and roller-skate wheels when she had half a minute of her own time, but it was hers for the moment and it seemed dreadfully inviting when she came slinking cautiously back through the back parlors of the mostly-quiet honey den at blue o'clock in the morning.
Yes, a few hours sleep, she thought as she slipped through the hole in the baseboard and into her den. A few hours, if "two dozen" counted as "a few." She absently unbuckled the narrow leather straps of the little pouch at her hip, leaving it draped across her makeshift workbench, and sat back on her haunches, running front paws over her tired whiskers and yawning. She had grime clear down under her fur, she knew, it'd take ages to get herself properly clean. That'd teach her not to get better explanations of a job before she took it, instead of assuming she was just being paid uncommonly well to church a jack - "can you take one machine outta a case and put a new one in its place without leaving marks" had turned into the better part of two days under a dock working as quietly as possible.
Aw, well, at least it'd paid decently for the work; she could afford to focus on her own projects for a bit. Once she'd gotten some sleep.]
player name: Bramble
pronouns: they/them/their
age: 24
contact:
CHARACTER
character name: Amity Ratty
character title: the Murine Nuisance
age: approximately eight months (young adult)
gender: female; she/her/hers
species: Rattus faber
strengths: Amity is watchful, and can sometimes manage persuasive.
canon history:
Amity is an AU of Ammond Raidie, a homestuck OC of mine.
Growing up in a large, primarily lowblood suburban hivecluster in an arid highland region of Alternia, Ammond's childhood was fairly uneventful by troll standards. She cultivated friends and the less murderous sort of enemy, and tried to avoid serious fights with her neighbors but did not hesitate to use whatever force necessary to defend herself and her home, a habit she learned primarily from the giant hornet that served as her parent and guardian. Low-caste, clever, moderately psionically gifted, and with an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, Ammond developed an interest in the invasive biotechnology used to harness living psionic trolls as power sources for the empire's space ships, and by the time she reached adolescence she'd begun to make practical, if illicit, use of the technology for her own less ambitious purposes - primarily small land-transportation vehicles such as motorbikes.
As adulthood and with it, conscription into the imperial fleet, loomed, Ammond's interest grew into an obsession and she began to isolate herself - besides wanting to focus on her work, Ammond was also struggling with mounting depression and anger over the fate that awaited adults with her brand of psychic abilities, in the fleet. She cut ties with most of her friends, and broke off her kismesisship, the only one of the four romantic models observed by trolls in which she'd formed any lasting relationship at that point.
Having successfully isolated herself from her former social circle, Ammond formed - and carried out - a plan to defect and flee into the wilderness before she could be conscripted. Avoiding conscription was relatively easy; surviving as a lone disenfranchised adult on a planet full of well-supplied, hostile, and armed children and adolescents should have been a more difficult proposition; by rights, Ammond should have lasted weeks at most. Instead, she had the good fortune to encounter a small group of other renegade young adults, led by a no-caste mutant with a chip on his shoulder, connections to a number of highblooded trolls with revolutionary (or at least dramatically piratical and anti-imperial) leanings, and the force of a centuries-old reformist cult behind him. Ammond's skill as a bioengineer and mechanic, and her willingness to strap herself into her own prototypes, earned her a place in the rapidly growing rebellion, first in maintaining the few ships they had managed to capture from the empire and rehabilitating the liberated helmsmen, and later, as she became more comfortable manipulating the helm arrays in the field, travelling with the boarding parties that hijacked additional imperial ships.
If the rebellion can actually pull through and put the radical reformist of an imperial heiress on the throne, Ammond's probably going to go down in history as a minor hero of the revolution and the inventor of the first humane helmsman rig. Or they could all die horribly as their supposedly-second-coming-of-a-prophet leader gets distracted from the mission by caring too fucking much about literally everyone. That's a definite possibility, too.
AU history:
Amity was born in an attic somewhere in the seedier parts of Spite - and finding parts of Spite that are seedier than other parts of Spite is, after all, something of a feat. During her short childhood and adolescence (for L.B.s may be smart enough to grant them a somewhat better survival rate than surface rats, but they still mature much faster than humans) she exhibited a strong aptitude for mechanical engineering, which was in the best Rattus faber tradition, and an equally strong dislike for authority figures which was... honestly mostly an "Amity" thing, unfortunately. As a pup, she mostly managed to stay under the radar of the rat gang that controlled her street, but eventually word gets around when a young rat has a knack for building things that not only tick or shoot, but also go really fast or explode.
(Or, occasionally, go really fast and explode, although that's not generally the intended function. Or so Amity claims.)
Familiar and none too impressed with the rodentine cost of constant turf wars between the local gang and those in nearby streets, she didn't take well to the offers of fraternity, security, and a small share of the loot offered by the burly, ragged rats who showed up at her cluttered nest. Possibly there might have been a tactful way to express this, but although Amity can be charming when it suits her, true diplomacy tends to fail her when she's angry. She escaped the confrontation less one earring - and less the respectable chunk of ear associated with said earring - and hasn't been back to that street since.
In the past four months or so, she's been living in various areas of the city, selling her mechanical skills to the highest - and frequently humanoid - bidder, drinking things that rats are probably not actually supposed to drink, and generally making more significant enemies than lasting friendships. This is, partly, because she still has little fondness for the political players of the L.B. world and less for the human authorities.
Also, it can be hard to make a lot of friends when she keeps annoying someone to the point that the wisest action seems to be to pack up everything she can drag onto the back of a cart and take off for some new and interesting part of the fifth city. She's lost significant progress on several projects like this over the months, forced to leave behind half-finished rat-sized clockwork vehicles too unwieldy to haul out of her ad-hoc workshop, and in one case five weeks of careful notes, for some bemused home- or shop-owner to discover at a later date.
At the moment, Amity is living behind the wall of a honey den in Veilgarden, although she's starting to think it's about time to move on again. Is it possible to get a contact high from the wallpaper in a place devoted to the consumption of Prisoner's Honey? Probably not but she'll swear it is.
personality:
The Murine Nuisance is, well, a nuisance. It's something of a feat to be called after one's ability to get on people's nerves rather than one's occupation, skills, or social standing, but Amity seems to not only have managed it, but also embraces and many even revels in the label. She talks a lot, very quickly, and with liberal use of slang picked up all over the city, which can maker her a little hard to follow. If she has to sit in one place for any significant amount of time, she's probably fidgeting with something that's either mechanical or edible, and if you're really lucky, it's something that already belongs to her. More likely - oh, she's so sorry, sir, was that your watch that she just absentmindedly dismantled? That's completely her fault, give her a moment and she'll see if she can't have it ticking again. Really, very sorry.
While she does not by habit cultivate many close friendships, Amity's default attitude is gregarious, optimistic, and friendly - within reason, of course, it doesn't do for someone of her size to go hanging around within easy grabbing distance or anything. But generally she relies on her small size and agility to get her out of sticky situations rather than putting too much care into avoiding those situations in the first place. She requires very little prompting to talk - and talk a lot - to another person, and generally will listen attentively in turn. She's generally easy-going and is more apt to be self-deprecating than to make jokes at other people's expense.
The Nuisance is not particularly cautious with sharing information, either - secrets and rumors are valuable, of course, but her usual stock in trade is metallic with lots of little moving parts, and while Amity will drive a hard bargain when dealing with most forms of commerce, she's got a bit of a blind spot in regards to commodities that she can't hold in her paws. She likes knowing things for the sake of knowing them, and will pay for information if necessary, but once she's learned something she's generally pretty liberal with passing it on to people she likes or is trying to impress.
And, similarly, Amity will talk to almost anyone once, the main exception being that she has absolutely no trust whatsoever for cats of any size or coloration and avoids them as much as possible. Otherwise - rat, human, infernal, clay, rubbery, or whatever else the Neath chooses to throw at her, the Murine Nuisance will generally natter happily at them until given a good reason not to (luckily, she's got enough of a self-preservation instinct that things like "a clearly expressed desire to hurt me" or "working for the Department of Menace Eradication" count as good reasons not to natter at people). She generally gives an impression of being mostly at ease with people on a humanoid scale; this is, until she gets to know a person better, something of an affect, as she is of the belief that acting like a small vulnerable prey animal is a good way to be seen as a small vulnerable prey animal and makes an almost belligerent point of treating humans and human-scale people as equals. This can, and often does, extend to a complete refusal to acknowledge that she actually does need some sort of accommodation on account of her size; it's not uncommon to find her running to keep up with a human's stride, or struggling with containers or bottles far too large for her to use comfortably.
The easygoing attitude, however, is almost entirely abandoned at the door (or window, or hole in the baseboard, or gap in the roof...) of her current workshop; while at any point she's liable to start absentmindedly tinkering with some bit of mechanical minutia, actually working on something is another matter entirely. When working on a complicated project, especially one of her own design, Amity is obsessive and single-minded. While it wouldn't be accurate to call her terse - the rat has no problems talking while she works, and often talks to herself - she's certainly less personable, and is even less inclined than usual to slow down or repeat herself for someone else's benefit. She also doesn't collaborate well, preferring to keep full control of a project until it's finished and ready to hand off to a buyer - or, just as likely, to sit in the corner of her workshop gathering dust until she either disassembles it for parts or decides it's too much work to take it with her when she moves. Her specialty, like many L.B.s, is clockwork; if given the chance she's always game to acquire new knowledge, especially of a mechanical or medical sort, but her understanding in most fields that don't involve a lot of very small interlocking gears is rudimentary at best.
She's also got a soft spot for an underdog and an anti-authoritarian streak; her political stance can best be summarized as "Who has the most power here? Ok, I'm with the other guy." Her distrust of anyone who would claim authority goes, in fact, all the way to the top, and she's no fonder of the Masters than of constables or bandit-chiefs, more or less on principle. Insofar as she can be said to have sympathies toward any major human faction, she's got some revolutionary leanings.
At eight months of age, Amity is an adult rat but still a fairly young one; assuming that the average L.B. is able with her intelligence to secure a better quality of life and better medical care than her wild surface kin, she's probably got a life span of something like three to four years, barring illness, accident, cats, run-ins with Department hunters, sea monsters, industrial sabotage, hungry raggedy men, or overenthusiastic urchins. Which means there's a chance the Nuisance will still be around a fortnight from now, at least.
samples:
[one]
[two:
Three days. Three bloody days since the Murine Nuisance had been able to make it back to her own bed to sleep. Well. Nest. She wasn't one of those rats who set up with dollhouse furniture and silk sheets or anything; that kind of thing always struck her as laughable, and not in a good way. Pretentious, rather. Hah, and she was sure there were plenty of human folk in the city who'd be glad of a nice snug hole out of the fog, lined with bits of flannel and loose goosedown and twists of wool. Not much to look at, just a corner out the back of the cramped space where she built things out of clockwork and roller-skate wheels when she had half a minute of her own time, but it was hers for the moment and it seemed dreadfully inviting when she came slinking cautiously back through the back parlors of the mostly-quiet honey den at blue o'clock in the morning.
Yes, a few hours sleep, she thought as she slipped through the hole in the baseboard and into her den. A few hours, if "two dozen" counted as "a few." She absently unbuckled the narrow leather straps of the little pouch at her hip, leaving it draped across her makeshift workbench, and sat back on her haunches, running front paws over her tired whiskers and yawning. She had grime clear down under her fur, she knew, it'd take ages to get herself properly clean. That'd teach her not to get better explanations of a job before she took it, instead of assuming she was just being paid uncommonly well to church a jack - "can you take one machine outta a case and put a new one in its place without leaving marks" had turned into the better part of two days under a dock working as quietly as possible.
Aw, well, at least it'd paid decently for the work; she could afford to focus on her own projects for a bit. Once she'd gotten some sleep.]
