VT: App

[learnedfool]

Player Information

Name: Stareyes
Age: 37
Contact details: beccastareyes @ gmail.com/[Bad username or site: “beccastareyes” @ “plurk.com”]
Other characters: Zelgadis GReywords

Character Information

Name: Penric kin Jurald
Canon: World of the Five Gods
Canon Point: Post-Knot of Shadows
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU
Age: 35

World Information: https://chalion.fandom.com/wiki/Chalion_Wiki

Personal History: https://chalion.fandom.com/wiki/Penric_kin_Jurald
https://chalion.fandom.com/wiki/Desdemona

The wiki mostly links to the stories, so I’ll summarize.

Penric was born the seventh child in a rather poor noble family. Sincere had no interest in being a mercenary, the plan was to marry him off to a merchant’s daughter, trading social influence for money. This got derailed when he stopped to help an elderly divine (read: clergy) on the road. Learned Ruchia was a Temple sorceress — sharing her body with a demon considered tame enough to be useful — and dying. As her demon could not survive without a human host, she jumped to Penric, since ehe had volunteered to help. Penric was bundled off to Ruchia’s original destination, to let her order deal with him. Their original plan was to call a saint to exorcise Penric, which would kill the demon (who Pen had named Desdemona when he discovered she lacked a name of her own). By the time the saint got there, Penric had come to terms with having a passenger along and, knowing the exorcism would be death for Desdemona, pleaded with the saint to let him keep her. Given an exorcism involved opening a channel to the Bastard, the god whose oversight was demons (among other things), the god listened to Penric’s plea and decided to see what happened.

Penric was trained as both a divine and a sorcerer, and became the court sorcerer to the Princess Llewyn kin Stagthorne. In between various temple missions involving the supernatural, he worked on translating and refining a text on sorcery that Desdemona’s riders had been working on, and picking up pet projects — like learning how to duplicate the magic of shamans using sorcery. However, when the elderly Princess Llewyn died, the successor to her position had her own sorcerer, so Penric had to seek an alternate post. He worked for a time as a physician-sorcerer. Nominally he was a student. but Desdemona’s skill meant he was constantly given the toughest of cases. He burned out, was starting to have suicidal impulses, and Desdemona gave him an ultimatum: get a new position, or else.

Penric became the court sorcerer to the Duke of Adria, which only lasted for a short time before he was asked to be a courier for a sensitive mission to reply to a letter from a Cedonian general, Adelia Arisydia, seeking a position. The original letter was a fake to set up the general for charges of treason: Penric was immediately captured and thrown into prison as a spy for carrying a response, and the general was blinded. Penric escaped (as the locals had not known he was a sorcerer), posed as a physician to heal the general out of guilt, fell head over heals for the general’s widowed half-sister, Nikys Khatai, and then had to help the pair of them escape when the conspirators learned Adelis still had his vision. Adelis had gotten a genuine offer from the Duke of Orbas, so a smitten Penric was torn between seeking his own position in Orbas or persuading Adelis to accept the Duke of Adria’s offer so he could keep seeing Nikys. Well, if Nikys was interested in seeing him back, which was something she was uncertain about, given any relationship with Penric was effectively a threesome with Desdemona. The two did work through their issues when rescuing Nikys’s mother, who was taken as a hostage against Adelis, and Penric accepted both the Duke of Orbas’s job offer and Nikys’s proposal.

Penric currently has a position in the Bastard’s Order in VIlnoc, Orbas’s capital, two young children, and two semi-students: sorcerers with demons on their first human host. Recently, the conspirators from Cedonia had tried to kill Adelis; given they had been using untrained hedge-sorcerers, Penric got involved and witnessed the second time an exorcism was refused by divine mandate. Coming out of it, Penric got his second student, Adelis got married and a position in his home country (with the understanding that his sister and brother-in-law meant he still had ties to Orbas), and Cedonia’s regency council got a good housecleaning.

Personality:
You can get a good picture of Penric from his history. He's a compassionate person who is used to being the youngest sibling and being a sort of afterthought, enough that he just steps up and does things. He's friendly and chatty and tends to take responsibility for things that he shouldn't. Consider the situation with Adelis: he was nearly killed because of internal Cedonian politics that considered a foreign messenger traveling in disguise collateral damage, and he not only doesn’t immediately get out, but stays long enough to make sure the man actually harmed by the conspiracy was healed, even though Penric was both only unwittingly involved and incidental. This was also why he made a terrible physician; he takes things far too personally, and has no ability to detach himself. He’s also developed an affinity for making sure demons are treated right: when Cedonia realized he was a sorcerer and assumed he was unaffiliated with the temple, they sent a Temple sorcerer after him. Penric not only defeated him, but stayed long enough to lecture the man as the desperation move he tried — to use chaos magic to cause a heart attack in Penric — would have caused the demon to be stripped from him. Penric considered this both unkind (as the human had made that decision, not the demon) and a waste of what was, after all, a divine gift. When Adelis’s would-be assassin turned out to be a young mother who was receiving demons and then taught to kill with them under threat of harm to her son, Penric immediately took her as a student as soon as it was clear she was keeping her demon AND made it a priority to get her son rescued.

While he was not terribly religious when he met Desdemona, his experiences have made him devout, albeit with the sort of logic that trickster figures use (like while on the run, taking from the offering box of the Bastard, since the temple normally supports him anyway; however, he didn't feel right taking from the Mother, as he refused to take the physician's oath and be seconded to Her service). The Bastard’s area of concern are both acting as the balance when needed, and generally the parts of society that do not neatly fit by the rules. This can be overt — Desdemona warned Penric that while his mother would probably be proud that her son had become a divine, that being a divine of the Bastard was more typical for illegitimate children of nobles, rather than legitimate children — but it also includes people like Nikys who just felt like she was adrift for most of her life, as the daughter, sister and wife (and later widow) of military men. Penric’s journal name was actually from something Adelis said of him: that he often seems like a fool, or mentally ill, because he does not act in a straightforward way. He’s not entirely lacking in common sense — when facing a plague he was not the one who decided to test if it was carried by fleas by encouraging fleas to bite him (and he was horrified that his fellow physician did so). Of course, when he discovered it was the horseflies that were carrying the plague, he did get bitten by them, but that was a divine message.

Penric is also a scholar, and happiest among his books, or among his family. He grew up with a large family, and is comfortable with having a house with a library and children playing. As mentioned above, he is the sort of compassionate person who adopts strays. While he is not a good physician, he is far more temperamentally suited to medical research, and has alarmed the household with his experiments on nervous systems using rats (as rats are sacred to the Bastard, Penric considers them less theologically risky than other animals) under the idea of new ways to use medical sorcery to assist in, say, surgery. Often this also ends up having self-defense applications, and Penric is very careful to not tell his brother in law about exactly what he is capable of. Penric is generally a peaceful man who would rather talk than fight, and who has theological prohibitions against killing with sorcery (mundane means are not as theologically dicy, just the normal legal troubles), but he will defend himself.

Desdemona has built her own identity from those of her riders, as she has no memory of being unformed chaos. Even now, her most recent human riders exist as distinct facets of her personality. Desdemona likes pretty things and people, and will fuss over Pen's appearance even when he won’t. She tends to be the more pragmatic one when it comes to danger, even if she shares Pen's affinity for bending the rules and she can ask Pen to indulge in things she wants to do. They do tend to balance each other out: Desdemona's confidence is from her experiences, while Penric's is more anchored in faith and compassion and the element of surprise. Desdemona adores Penric and feels proud that she picked him out: even if she can survive his death, she'd rather he not die and gets seriously concerned when he's seriously injured. She can be vengeful: when someone seriously injured Pen, she told Pen that she'd jump into his killer and make sure his life was painful until he died, despite knowing that if the Bastard's Temple caught up with her after that, she'd be dead.

Des generally has a lot more people skills, and especially women (thanks to having lived with them for her entire pre-Penric existence). She’s usually the one who points things out regarding people’s emotional states for Penric to notice, and he trusts her judgement in such things. Penric’s insistence on treating Des as a person who is always present with him means that people used to Penric have started to ask to talk to her directly and that makes her happy. We get the impression that a lot of her prior riders were people she liked, but that she had most of her interactions under the assumption that the other person couldn’t tell if it was Desdemona or (for example) Ruchia talking. Nikys had a full conversation with her regarding what it would be like if Nikys married Penric, and that pretty much cemented Nikys’s status as ‘yes, this one Pen, and not just because I’ll have to listen to you moping for a while if you mess this up’.

Key themes: “The gods have no hands but ours”, exploring the areas of interest of a chaotic trickster god, negotiating life as two people in one body.

Main Motivation: Most of Penric’s books are stand-alone ‘casefic’ adventures. Penric normally comes into contact with the case via some element of either assignment by his Temple’ or his god putting things into his way. A reoccurring theme is Penric’s interaction both in promoting the welfare of demons under the Temple’s care and preserving knowledge of sorcery.

Des’s main motivation is Penric’s welfare and well-being.

Skills: Pen speaks multiple languages, which I tend to assume are close enough to their European counterparts since his world is clearly modeled on Europe/the Mediterranean basin. His training as a divine gives him somer history and a lot of theology, and he notes that he is trained as a physician. While this is pre-modern training, sorcery means Pen has excellent anatomical knowledge, and, while probably not familiar with drugs more sophisticated than things like willow bark or opiates, decent at surgery. He can use a bow and fish and ride.

Desdemona shares some of her skills with Pen. She's got a lot of general knowledge from previous lives: one spent as a courtesan, one as a spy, several working for the Temple. She'd advise Pen on being sneaky, but he is a quick study.

So, let's talk what mystical stuff Desdemona grants. Des can see through Pen's eyes, but also has her own vision, which is a lot more sensitive to souls. Pen can't use it for long without feeling overwhelmed. She can also enable Pen to see in the dark and has some ability to sense inside a body — for instance, she could tell that Adelis’s retinas and the backs of his eyeballs were intact, so his vision could be magically healed, and sense a tumor in an ally. Des can detect other demons, gods, ghosts (souls lingering after their body dies) and shamans/spirit warriors (who have animal souls attached to theirs). She can also detect saints (humans with powers granted by the gods), though this can be limited by how ‘open’ the connection is with their god. The common element seems to be any sort of alteration or addition to a soul. Desdemona can trigger Pen to be much faster or more coordinated than he is naturally, but only in short bursts. She can also direct magic on her own as long as Pen is conscious — for instance, she can deal with Penric having head trauma when he’s only semi-conscious but has to keep him awake for her to work.

As a chaos demon, Des can manipulate chaos, and grant Pen the ability to do so. The series describes things as 'downhill' and 'uphill', which a modern reader would phrase as the flow of entropy. Downhill magic includes accelerating a natural reaction (like rusting metal, dissolving hair dye or unravelling rope), creating heat, and disrupting normal biological processes (not always in bad ways: killing parasites is part of this). Uphill magic allows Des or Pen to create ice, do delicate manipulations like pick a lock, or heal. While downhill magic is mostly free (and a normal part of Desdemona's nature -- she is a font of chaos), uphill magic needs to be balanced by dumping stored chaos or Pen will suffer. (Long term effects include a skyrocketed risk of cancer: all of Desdemona's prior hosts prior to her entering service as a Temple demon had cancer; short term effects are hyperthermia.) Also, killing a human with sorcery is a risk on Desdemona: when the soul returns to the gods, the Bastard swoops in to retrieve His demon. Animals are considered acceptable if they are insects or other pests where they are not wanted (the Bastard considers these His animals), or going to die anyway.

Study with the shamans of the Weald allows Penric to duplicate their abilities with sorcery, though he still pays the cost in blood (often more blood than a shaman would). He can move souls around, though he’s only tried that with earthworms. In canon, such magic can not only be used to anchor another animal soul to an animal, with the goal of creating a Great Beast, but an animal soul to a human (to create a spirit warrior or shaman), or temporarily store a human soul in an object. (The latter because spirit warriors and shamans need the animal soul removed to go to the afterlife, rather than hang around as a ghost.) Penric would be extremely reluctant to experiment with actual human souls, but I mention it for completeness. The other shamanic ability Penric has shown is the weirding voice — he can give a command to an animal or person and have it obeyed. This requires at least some blood, dependent on the nature of the command and the target — telling an animal to do something it would want to do anyway is a bit of a nosebleed, while telling a human to do something (on the level of ‘You don’t need to see his identification. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. He can go about his business.’) can cause Penric to cough up enough blood to alarm everyone around him.

Item:. I’m assuming that Desdemona counts as the item, as being a separate character, who is not app-able (as she cannot exist without a body, so cannot be apped independently). If not, Penric’s sorcerer braids — a set of braided cords marking Penric as both a divine (priest) and sorcerer.

Sample: https://voidtreckerooc.dreamwidth.org/77027.html?thread=10657763#cmt10657763

Notes: See my note in items mostly. Also, I assume that Pen and Des would need to share a tether since under normal circumstances, Pen dying would mean Des would jump to another character.