![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Abraxas App
OOC INFORMATION
Player Name: Marie
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
seemarierun
Other Characters in Game: N/A
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Nico di Angelo
Canon: Riordanverse
Canon Point: The end of The Sun and the Star
Age: 15 and 3/4 (the 3/4 is very important)
Background: Here on this wiki
Arrival Scenario: Free Cities
Suitability: Well, he won’t be happy about being in another war-adjacent situation, but Nico is used to being a pawn in the hands of the gods. Greek demigods are compelled to act on behalf of the gods via quests, and they can’t avoid them, despite the ceremony of formally accepting the quest. Nico would know: he tried to dodge his own quest for months.
A number of Nico's abilities are asterisked above. This is to denote abilities that cannot be heavily used or repeatedly used without a good long rest or use of magical restoratives. Calling up a skeleton, or even a few skeletons, can be done easily and repeatedly. Calling up an entire 20 skeleton SWAT team will leave him exhausted. He has recently summoned hundreds to thousands of skeletons to build a halfpipe of the damned, but he passed out in short order for several hours. Similar effects were seen when he transformed living creatures into undead.
The shadow travel is heavily asterisked because it has been shown to have potentially life-threatening consequences if he overextends himself. The first time he tried it, Nico passed out for a week. He still occasionally passes out in he's taking others with him, although luckily he's stopped landing in China. While Nico has gotten better at it, repeated teleportation of himself, two others and a forty foot statue nearly permanently turned him into a shadow himself and left him briefly comatose. He's been advised to do it as little as possible; he has problems with listening. I always inflict a nap-penalty on more than a few jumps in a one hour period. He might get away with 2-4 in a fight, but he will go ni-ni within 15 minutes of the fight ending.
Most monsters can smell demigods and quite a number of them preferentially eat demigods. It's implied that most young or solo demigods are killed. I'd love to keep this in the game and have anything that would qualify as a "monster" or would potentially eat humans or demigods be able to track him from a mile away.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Nico has a strong moral code, but it may not perfectly align with what most people consider a moral code. It's overly attuned to fairness and getting what one deserves, especially when it comes to punishment, and he will go to any length to protect the people he considers friends. He doesn't relish fighting other demigods, but he's one of the few demigods in the entire series who is both counted among the heroes and shown killing other demigods/humans.
And he does it with cold brutality. While he did feel guilty about what he did to Bryce, there's no debating that reducing a living demigod to a faceless, chattering spirit and preventing him from having a noble death sentenced the other teen to the Fields of Asphodel or worse. What he does to Nero's Germani soldier is no less awful, but more of a grey area as the Germani actually died over a thousand years ago but was alive again and physically human. Nico withered him down to a skeleton to save Apollo, and he didn't even seem shaken afterwards.
Mercy means the fairest outcome with the least amount of suffering. It doesn't mean an absence of pain, it doesn't mean everyone lives. And sometimes, like with his half-sister Hazel, it means upending the natural order of life, death and afterlife to give someone a second chance when the first was stolen from them, even if it runs the risk of being smote himself.
He does what he says he's going to, and he expects other people to do the same. This often leaves him disappointed and causes him to self-isolate harder when it happens, as he's had it happen too many times now. His sister's leaving him at Camp Halfblood was taken as a betrayal, and Nico believed Percy's promise that he'd protect Bianca on their quest (but she didn't survive it). When Nico says he's going to do something, he does it. He doesn't expect accolades for following through and is shocked when people notice. Most of the time, he's only trying to do the right thing, or keep idiot campers from being killed by the entire Roman Legion.
His ethics don't stop at humans and demigods either. Nico cultivated with the troglodytes, learning their customs and language when they were a little offputting to human sensibilities, and when he and his friends caused the trogs to lose their home to rampaging bulls, Nico helped them find a new place and continued to visit them afterwards. He took a quest to Tartarus to save a Titan, one of the Greek gods' enemies. He doesn't judge anyone unfairly due to preconceptions absorbed from others - but he does judge them on personal experience.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
An overlapping trio of kindness, warmth, and empathy, with a side of daring.
He's spent a long time with relatively no supervision and few people in his life, although his sister Bianca did try to look after him. When your mother dies before you're ten, it can be traumatizing. When your dad Hades decides the solution is to that is to wipe your memories and dump you in a series of increasingly dangerous "babysitting" solutions, you end up hitting your tween years a little awkward, lonely and naïve.
Running away and essentially raising himself from 11-14 didn't really improve the situation until he returned to camp permanently after the Battle of Gaia. It's very much still a work in progress - he's learning that people actually want to be in his life, and he's actively drawn to people that are bolder, more outgoing, friendly and considerate. There's a reason he sits at the Apollo table at mealtimes, and it's not just because he has a doctor's note granting permission.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Between being a child of Hades (which carries a certain stigma), being time-displaced, and being gay, Nico has struggled with insecurity and fears that he won't be accepted - a fear that he then self-fulfills by pushing everyone away and not giving them an opportunity to do so. He feels like he's as the odd duck in the middle of a flock of geese - when really he's in the middle of the duck pond. While he's increasingly unashamed about who he is, he still wants to be more "normal".
To that end, he's been binging on modern culture, and in the Trials of Apollo and The Sun and the Star, we see him referencing punk bands, going to the mall, and binging all 9 Star Wars movies in a weekend. Some of it - certainly the Star Wars and possibly Beyonce - is likely out of a desire to acclimate into his new (well, first) group of friends with shared interests.
And yes, I think he dislikes his own self-doubts about acceptance more than his fatal flaw of grudges. Some people deserve the vendetta..
What is their sign, and why? Death. Predictable for the son of Hades, I know, and Justice would have also been a good match, but sticking by his friends through the absolute worst is what he does best. Even when he doesn't realize they're his friends yet, and he even goes as far as to encourage it in others. Despite spending the first 8-10 books of the Riordanverse feeling like an outcast, Nico acts for the greater good even when there is a poor chance of a personal positive outcome. He gets Hades to raise an army for the Battle of New York, at the risk of further angering and disappointing his father. He sticks with the Seven when he wasn't on their quest, despite his recent traumatic trip to Tartarus and subsequent kidnapping. He follows that up with nearly dying in the process of getting the Athena Parthenos to Camp Halfblood because it was necessary and still participates in the subsequent Battle of Gaia. Nico even devises a plan to let the trogs live in the Underworld without telling his father, after their original home is destroyed by Nero's bulls (it's a long story). He plans and follows through even if something takes months.
Also there is a skull involved. They're very important to his aesthetic.
SAMPLES
Samples: Top level with comments
Player Name: Marie
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: N/A
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Nico di Angelo
Canon: Riordanverse
Canon Point: The end of The Sun and the Star
Age: 15 and 3/4 (the 3/4 is very important)
Background: Here on this wiki
Arrival Scenario: Free Cities
Suitability: Well, he won’t be happy about being in another war-adjacent situation, but Nico is used to being a pawn in the hands of the gods. Greek demigods are compelled to act on behalf of the gods via quests, and they can’t avoid them, despite the ceremony of formally accepting the quest. Nico would know: he tried to dodge his own quest for months.
He’s going to interpret his arrival as a sort of quest, So, he’ll help how he can, and that includes whatever quirky side quests are demanded. Nothing is free, especially when gods are involved. He’s sort of numb to the whole “you want X? Well, first you must go through eleventy trials” deal. As long as nobody turns him into a plant - again - it’s acceptable. even at camp, he and the other campers have to pitch in to work the strawberry fields that fund it.
Whether he enlists will depend on the situation. He doesn’t like fighting humans and won’t easily be forced into a true soldier role.
That said, it’s probably inevitable; he’s terrible at staying out of a fight, and he will absolutely jump in if he sees that people on the fringes of society are being hurt.
He will be a grumpy little shit about it though. He’s a hundred years old in the body of a 15 year old. He’s allowed to be a curmudgeon. He doesn’t take stupid orders well at all, and he’s the one who decides if they’re stupid. The amount of freedom he has is breathtaking for a fifteen year, as a camp that hosts hundreds of demigods in the summer is mainly staffed by two people as far as mentoring and discipline is concerned.
Powers: I've tried to organize this into overall sections, as Riordan demigods tend to deus ex machina grow their powers all the time. I've done NOTES on the bullets where I am providing clarification on how I personally play it or will play it in Abraxas, and included a canon limitations section. - Standard Demigod Abilities
- Battle senses - Demigods in this universe have heightened awareness and alertness, which is often mistaken as ADHD, that is meant to keep them ever ready for battle.
- Prophetic dreams - Demigods often have prophetic dreams and message-carrying dreams. Nico is shown to have better-than-average control over his dreams, including the ability to astral project his consciousness into the dreams of other demigods or to send others into deep dreams.
- Brain "hard-wired" for Ancient Greek
- Enhanced physique - Demigods, by nature of being half god, are just a bit better than peak human for their size and age in regards to strength, speed, agility, stamina, durability, senses, and reflexes. It's not on par with a true metahuman ability in any of these areas. For example, Nico can't lift 500 lbs, but he can and does lift and carry healthier campers. Another example is that the camp rock wall features lava, and that sort of proximity to a lava flow would likely kill a human, or being hurled into a concrete pillar and surviving.
- Demigod Abilities specific to being a child of Hades
- Limited Geokinesis:
- Can call up rocks from the ground (usually black and extremely sharp) and levitate them if he chooses*
- Can split fissures in the ground (usually done to drag monsters to the Underworld or call up skeletons). Sometimes these fissures have green light/flames
- Necromancy:
- Can physically call up the undead (largely those buried nearby but not limited to) and control them. This generally takes the form of skeletons, but can be zombies.* NOTE: Nico cannot restore anyone/thing to life, but only animate them in death. This will be limited to a range of several feet around him only, he can't call up a graveyard from across the street. He will start with three undead maximum but can be increased through event gains/rewards. They'll also collapse after a few hours.
- Can dismiss/destroy/banish/release the souls of the risen undead as well as those that have cheated death.* NOTE: For clarity, I'm interpreting this to those that have been called up as Nico can call them up in the bullet above, and not on anyone that has resurrected through other means (like Starbuck or Jason Todd). This will be limited to only those under his control or any that are under no one's control. He can't interfere with another person's necromancy, PC or NPC.
- Can physically interact with ghosts and control them.* NOTE: In game, the latter will solely apply to other ghosts, not mod NPCs or PC's like a Nearly Headless Nick, for example. The ghosts he can control will not be sentient and will be more like wraiths. He will start with three ghosts maximum but can be increased through event gains/rewards.
- Can summon souls of the deceased by ritual and communicate with them. NOTE: He doesn't do this as frequently as he used to. It can be distressing, it's physically weary, and after the whole thing where Minos was essentially feeding off his energy, Nico sees the potential danger in it. It will likely never be used in game and, if I was considering it, I'd ask the mods first.
- Can summon bones out of the ground and animate them without reforming the body. NOTE: This will be limited to a range of several feet around him only, he can't call up a graveyard from across the street. He will start with three skeletons maximum but can be increased through event gains/rewards. They'll also collapse after a few hours.
- Can send out some non-verbal message that warns the undead and spirits to keep away (which they will adhere to). NOTE: Only applies to dead-dead, not your Starbucks and Jason Todds.
- Can sense death and life, including knowing if someone is nearing their death (even if they are not injured), when someone he is close to has died, w
hen a god is fading, where living individuals are in Tartarus, if a death is not "normal", and if any changes occur in someone's mortality). NOTE: This will need to be opt-in only with PCs and not applicable to the setting's gods, NPCs, or character drops. Can kill mortals and demigods by transforming them into ghosts or skeletons and banishing them to the Underworld.*- Can use use the seeds of Persephone to put himself in a Death Trance for 24 hours.
- Umbrakinesis: Can shadow travel, essentially teleporting via shadows. shadows as a way of transportation; however, great distances tend to wear him out.*** NOTE: I understand that this will be limited to within borders and no passengers will be allowed.
- Can absorb other magical shadow effects into his sword.
- Can generate darkness as bolts and shields.
- Can twist shadows around him to hide.
- That Boy Ain't Right: Nico has shown extremely limited additional powers/status effects which largely serve as literal mood-setting, as he seems to use them when he's angry, and as a way of signalling to others that he's a child of the Underworld.
- Limited Cryokinesis: Generates an area intense cold, dropping the temperature in the immediate area and causing a frost to form.
- Projects/inspires an aura of fear and death, similar to Hades on a reduced scale. It has caused people and monsters to shrink away from him. Some have claimed that he smells like death, but this is also described as like rain on a stone. As this can cause grass and other plant life in his immediate vicinity (say less than 5 feet) to wither, it is likely related to the necromancy.
- Limited Geokinesis:
A number of Nico's abilities are asterisked above. This is to denote abilities that cannot be heavily used or repeatedly used without a good long rest or use of magical restoratives. Calling up a skeleton, or even a few skeletons, can be done easily and repeatedly. Calling up an entire 20 skeleton SWAT team will leave him exhausted. He has recently summoned hundreds to thousands of skeletons to build a halfpipe of the damned, but he passed out in short order for several hours. Similar effects were seen when he transformed living creatures into undead.
The shadow travel is heavily asterisked because it has been shown to have potentially life-threatening consequences if he overextends himself. The first time he tried it, Nico passed out for a week. He still occasionally passes out in he's taking others with him, although luckily he's stopped landing in China. While Nico has gotten better at it, repeated teleportation of himself, two others and a forty foot statue nearly permanently turned him into a shadow himself and left him briefly comatose. He's been advised to do it as little as possible; he has problems with listening. I always inflict a nap-penalty on more than a few jumps in a one hour period. He might get away with 2-4 in a fight, but he will go ni-ni within 15 minutes of the fight ending.
Most monsters can smell demigods and quite a number of them preferentially eat demigods. It's implied that most young or solo demigods are killed. I'd love to keep this in the game and have anything that would qualify as a "monster" or would potentially eat humans or demigods be able to track him from a mile away.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Completing the quest to rescue Bob the Titan from Tartarus with his stupid unarmed boyfriend Will Solace. Bob helped Nico and his friends on previous trips to the Underworld and, unlike the other Titans, had been redeemed after a bath in the River Lethe. Bob sacrificed to help Nico's friends escaping Tartarus, and it's been haunting Nico. But it's even more than just saving Bob - his father gave him the quest - Hades, who once thought Nico was insufficient, gave him the quest because he knew he could handle it and rewarded Nico with something that's been elusive for years, closure for his mother and sister's deaths.
His sister Bianca's death is perhaps the more obvious answer, but that was the beginning of Nico's story. Who doesn't love a good happy ending? I love this as the capstone to Nico's story in the PJO universe - finally the one on the quest, the hero, and he comes away with everything. Closure, pride/approval, his father's blessing to just fuck off and be happy for the rest of his life, Will's safe, Bob's safe. The metaphorical choice let go of his inner demons, now given physical form as cacodemons by the goddess Nyx, and when they want to stay with him, what does he do? Takes them home to camp and feeds them pancakes under the table.
His sister Bianca's death is perhaps the more obvious answer, but that was the beginning of Nico's story. Who doesn't love a good happy ending? I love this as the capstone to Nico's story in the PJO universe - finally the one on the quest, the hero, and he comes away with everything. Closure, pride/approval, his father's blessing to just fuck off and be happy for the rest of his life, Will's safe, Bob's safe. The metaphorical choice let go of his inner demons, now given physical form as cacodemons by the goddess Nyx, and when they want to stay with him, what does he do? Takes them home to camp and feeds them pancakes under the table.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Nico has a strong moral code, but it may not perfectly align with what most people consider a moral code. It's overly attuned to fairness and getting what one deserves, especially when it comes to punishment, and he will go to any length to protect the people he considers friends. He doesn't relish fighting other demigods, but he's one of the few demigods in the entire series who is both counted among the heroes and shown killing other demigods/humans.
And he does it with cold brutality. While he did feel guilty about what he did to Bryce, there's no debating that reducing a living demigod to a faceless, chattering spirit and preventing him from having a noble death sentenced the other teen to the Fields of Asphodel or worse. What he does to Nero's Germani soldier is no less awful, but more of a grey area as the Germani actually died over a thousand years ago but was alive again and physically human. Nico withered him down to a skeleton to save Apollo, and he didn't even seem shaken afterwards.
Mercy means the fairest outcome with the least amount of suffering. It doesn't mean an absence of pain, it doesn't mean everyone lives. And sometimes, like with his half-sister Hazel, it means upending the natural order of life, death and afterlife to give someone a second chance when the first was stolen from them, even if it runs the risk of being smote himself.
He does what he says he's going to, and he expects other people to do the same. This often leaves him disappointed and causes him to self-isolate harder when it happens, as he's had it happen too many times now. His sister's leaving him at Camp Halfblood was taken as a betrayal, and Nico believed Percy's promise that he'd protect Bianca on their quest (but she didn't survive it). When Nico says he's going to do something, he does it. He doesn't expect accolades for following through and is shocked when people notice. Most of the time, he's only trying to do the right thing, or keep idiot campers from being killed by the entire Roman Legion.
His ethics don't stop at humans and demigods either. Nico cultivated with the troglodytes, learning their customs and language when they were a little offputting to human sensibilities, and when he and his friends caused the trogs to lose their home to rampaging bulls, Nico helped them find a new place and continued to visit them afterwards. He took a quest to Tartarus to save a Titan, one of the Greek gods' enemies. He doesn't judge anyone unfairly due to preconceptions absorbed from others - but he does judge them on personal experience.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
An overlapping trio of kindness, warmth, and empathy, with a side of daring.
He's spent a long time with relatively no supervision and few people in his life, although his sister Bianca did try to look after him. When your mother dies before you're ten, it can be traumatizing. When your dad Hades decides the solution is to that is to wipe your memories and dump you in a series of increasingly dangerous "babysitting" solutions, you end up hitting your tween years a little awkward, lonely and naïve.
Running away and essentially raising himself from 11-14 didn't really improve the situation until he returned to camp permanently after the Battle of Gaia. It's very much still a work in progress - he's learning that people actually want to be in his life, and he's actively drawn to people that are bolder, more outgoing, friendly and considerate. There's a reason he sits at the Apollo table at mealtimes, and it's not just because he has a doctor's note granting permission.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Between being a child of Hades (which carries a certain stigma), being time-displaced, and being gay, Nico has struggled with insecurity and fears that he won't be accepted - a fear that he then self-fulfills by pushing everyone away and not giving them an opportunity to do so. He feels like he's as the odd duck in the middle of a flock of geese - when really he's in the middle of the duck pond. While he's increasingly unashamed about who he is, he still wants to be more "normal".
To that end, he's been binging on modern culture, and in the Trials of Apollo and The Sun and the Star, we see him referencing punk bands, going to the mall, and binging all 9 Star Wars movies in a weekend. Some of it - certainly the Star Wars and possibly Beyonce - is likely out of a desire to acclimate into his new (well, first) group of friends with shared interests.
And yes, I think he dislikes his own self-doubts about acceptance more than his fatal flaw of grudges. Some people deserve the vendetta..
What is their sign, and why? Death. Predictable for the son of Hades, I know, and Justice would have also been a good match, but sticking by his friends through the absolute worst is what he does best. Even when he doesn't realize they're his friends yet, and he even goes as far as to encourage it in others. Despite spending the first 8-10 books of the Riordanverse feeling like an outcast, Nico acts for the greater good even when there is a poor chance of a personal positive outcome. He gets Hades to raise an army for the Battle of New York, at the risk of further angering and disappointing his father. He sticks with the Seven when he wasn't on their quest, despite his recent traumatic trip to Tartarus and subsequent kidnapping. He follows that up with nearly dying in the process of getting the Athena Parthenos to Camp Halfblood because it was necessary and still participates in the subsequent Battle of Gaia. Nico even devises a plan to let the trogs live in the Underworld without telling his father, after their original home is destroyed by Nero's bulls (it's a long story). He plans and follows through even if something takes months.
Also there is a skull involved. They're very important to his aesthetic.
SAMPLES
Samples: Top level with comments