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Jun. 2nd, 2024 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
learnedfoolPlayer Name: Stareyes
Player Pronouns: She/her
Player Contact: beccastareyes@plurk
Player Age: 40
Character Name: Penric kin Jurald
Canon: World of Five Gods/Penric and Desdemona
Canon Point: After Demon Daughter
Age: Pen is 37/38; Desdemona is over 200 years old.
Species: Pen is human, Des is a demon.
Journal:learnedfool
Permissions: https://learnedfool.dreamwidth.org/1679.html
Goals: Most of the series is what I consider casefic, with the largest arc being ‘how Penric meets and proposes to his wife and gets embroiled in Cedonian politics’. Penric’s motivations are usually ‘scholarly pursuits’ and ‘fulfilling his vocation as a sorcerer and cleric of the Bastard’, with ‘family’ sliding in after his marriage. That means, a lot of times the plot starts when someone drops an interesting case that requires someone spiritually sensitive into Pen’s lap, and he goes off and solves it. His off-panel goals beyond the domestic include translating an extensive work on sorcery that Des’s riders have been working on writing for at least one lifetime. Pen, polyglot that he is, has not only done several translations, but also figured out how to speed up printing using sorcery to create the plates — this is pre-movable type, so printing exists but requires each page be carved into a plate. He is also the setting equivalent of a medical researcher, in that at one point he was doing wide scale experiments on rats to figure out the safest way to knock out a living creature using sorcery, which would allow for more extensive medical procedures.
Penric is also on a one-man mission to better educate people about sorcerers and sorcerers about their powers. He’s had several students work with him, and the people around him know when he’s about to give a lecture on how sorcery and demons work. It may be that has been because of attitudes that don’t really see demons as ‘people’ but as tools, or just general stigma against sorcerers. (Which, to be fair, someone with a demon who is untrained tends to do things like ‘set fires to everything’ when distressed, and a demon who has just enough experience with humans to overwhelm one, but not enough to logic out ‘the Temple will catch us, and then I get exorcised and die’ can ascend, leading to a possessed person.)
Speaking of, Desdemona’s goals are usually short-term and somewhat selfish. She can be very attached to individual people (which started with Penric himself, and includes their family, Pen’s apprentice, and so on), and generally likes it when she gets to experience Pen’s senses of something nice. Before Penric married, it was noted that they had a bit of trouble because Pen was pretty solidly heterosexual and Des is pansexual; Pen was willing to let her use his eyes, but this occasionally got them punched or propositioned by men who noticed the pretty blond man was eyeing them.
Morals: Pen firmly sits in the chaotic good section of the D&D alignment grid, which is what happens when you let a very smart man become the cleric of a trickster god. Pen tends to run on vibes. For instance, after he inadvertently helped an innocent man get framed for treason and blinded as punishment, he funds his ‘heal him, then get him and his sister across the nearest border’ by looting the temple offering box for prayers to the Bastard as he gets paid by the temple, but refused to touch the one for the Mother, as Pen refused to be sworn into her service as a physician. He also took it as a sign when he found the Father’s offering box full as ‘I am supposed to be correcting this miscarriage of justice, the gods say so’. (This seems to be a general problem for people brought into close contact with the gods, especially the Bastard. They remember that human law exists, but their morality tends to be shaped by encounters with the divine, and also makes things awkward within the normal Temple hierarchy. Thankfully, Penric is usually better behaved than most of the saints in the church, who get Deep Weird by virtue of being a channel through which the gods work.)
Pen has an over-inflated sense of personal responsibility, as that ‘get framed for treason’ thing ended with Pen tossed into a bottle dungeon (basically a cell with an opening at the top and a drain at the bottom) and then nearly drowned to avoid a witness, and Pen’s reaction was ‘I better make sure the man who was victimized is okay; oh, shit, he’s not but I think I could fix this if I stay in the area and heal him, while being a known wanted foreigner’. The reason Penric never became an actual physician was because he takes everything too damn personally, and it was destroying his mental health because his talents meant he was given the hardest cases.
The hard line Penric has is killing: he can do so with a bow, or a blade, but even the accidental death of a person due to sorcery is enough to doom Desdemona, so he won’t risk it. One gets the impression that both Penric and Desdemona would die for one another — if Pen dies due to violence, Des may well jump to his killer and give them a Very Bad Time until killing them also kills her, and that Des would use sorcery to keep Pen alive, even if Pen is trying to stop her because there’s no reason she should die.
Des’s morals are primarily self-interested or centered around the people she cares about. Her reasons for not doing something she might want to do is usually ‘Pen wouldn’t like it’ or ‘if I kill anyone, or if Pen kills anyone using sorcery, I get sucked back into the Bastard’s Hell and dissolve, so let’s not do that’. She likes destruction, being an embodiment of chaos, especially complicated things. She also sees no reason to be polite to people she dislikes.
Struggles: Pen and Des’s relationship is one where they don’t have a choice about being in each other’s heads, and that can be difficult to navigate when they disagree. When they encountered Otta, a six year old girl who had received a very young demon, and whose father belonged to the branch of the religion that saw demons as inherently evil rather than ‘they belong to the trickster god, so, like all of His gifts, they are double-edged’. Penric assumed the best outcome for her would be ‘we get her exorcised, and send her back to her family if they are alive’, but also didn’t seem to realize that his own tendency to promote better understanding of demons and sorcery were counter to that goal. Des, meanwhile, sees exorcisms as comparable to executions: they might be necessary, but she doesn’t like them, and in this case, the demon doesn’t deserve it (and Pen is normally on her side for this one). Eventually the two of them agree that, while it is a lot to ask a six year old to make this decision, she is the one who most has to live with the consequences.
Penric also has to deal with prejudices about sorcerers, and the fact that as someone the Bastard sees as ‘oh, I like those two, they are very helpful when I point them at problems’, most people see him as (charitably speaking) eccentric. Penric is full of lateral thinking, and has had more mystical experiences than any five other people, so he comes off as Really Really Weird and has never really hidden that.
Pen's sense of responsibility also means that he struggles a lot with guilt, to the point where he caused a mental health crisis by trying to become a physician (and his superiors deciding that Des's experience meant 'throw Pen at the hard cases' was their plan) because he could not handle losing patients. Rather than recognize this was a skill he didn't have, he blamed himself for not being able to cut it.
Position: Professor of anatomy; student of whatever you got.
Explanation: Penric is effectively a medical researcher in canon; he trained as a physician, but wasn’t psychologically suited to clinical work. He is qualified to be a professor of human anatomy, though he’d need to get up to date, as magic only covers for so much. If he is too far behind, he also works as a foreign language teacher, as he speaks a half-dozen languages that seem to be at or near European/MENA ones.
That being said, Penric is going to be distracting himself from ‘being away from his family’ and ‘in a horror jamjar’ by being a student of whatever is on offer and holing up in the library. He might favor 'magic', ‘medicine’ and ‘engineering’ for things he might be able to take home with him, but if you want a man who will sit through your 12th century Chinese art history lecture, you have one. The main balance point is Desdemona’s attention span, as she is empathically not a scholar. (She likes novelty and sensations, so more inclined to pay attention in a lab/studio/PE class)
Introspective Writing Sample: https://newcombers.dreamwidth.org/280.html?thread=121880#cmt121880
Interactive Writing Sample: https://newcombers.dreamwidth.org/280.html?thread=161560#cmt161560
Player Pronouns: She/her
Player Contact: beccastareyes@plurk
Player Age: 40
Character Name: Penric kin Jurald
Canon: World of Five Gods/Penric and Desdemona
Canon Point: After Demon Daughter
Age: Pen is 37/38; Desdemona is over 200 years old.
Species: Pen is human, Des is a demon.
Journal:
learnedfoolPermissions: https://learnedfool.dreamwidth.org/1679.html
Goals: Most of the series is what I consider casefic, with the largest arc being ‘how Penric meets and proposes to his wife and gets embroiled in Cedonian politics’. Penric’s motivations are usually ‘scholarly pursuits’ and ‘fulfilling his vocation as a sorcerer and cleric of the Bastard’, with ‘family’ sliding in after his marriage. That means, a lot of times the plot starts when someone drops an interesting case that requires someone spiritually sensitive into Pen’s lap, and he goes off and solves it. His off-panel goals beyond the domestic include translating an extensive work on sorcery that Des’s riders have been working on writing for at least one lifetime. Pen, polyglot that he is, has not only done several translations, but also figured out how to speed up printing using sorcery to create the plates — this is pre-movable type, so printing exists but requires each page be carved into a plate. He is also the setting equivalent of a medical researcher, in that at one point he was doing wide scale experiments on rats to figure out the safest way to knock out a living creature using sorcery, which would allow for more extensive medical procedures.
Penric is also on a one-man mission to better educate people about sorcerers and sorcerers about their powers. He’s had several students work with him, and the people around him know when he’s about to give a lecture on how sorcery and demons work. It may be that has been because of attitudes that don’t really see demons as ‘people’ but as tools, or just general stigma against sorcerers. (Which, to be fair, someone with a demon who is untrained tends to do things like ‘set fires to everything’ when distressed, and a demon who has just enough experience with humans to overwhelm one, but not enough to logic out ‘the Temple will catch us, and then I get exorcised and die’ can ascend, leading to a possessed person.)
Speaking of, Desdemona’s goals are usually short-term and somewhat selfish. She can be very attached to individual people (which started with Penric himself, and includes their family, Pen’s apprentice, and so on), and generally likes it when she gets to experience Pen’s senses of something nice. Before Penric married, it was noted that they had a bit of trouble because Pen was pretty solidly heterosexual and Des is pansexual; Pen was willing to let her use his eyes, but this occasionally got them punched or propositioned by men who noticed the pretty blond man was eyeing them.
Morals: Pen firmly sits in the chaotic good section of the D&D alignment grid, which is what happens when you let a very smart man become the cleric of a trickster god. Pen tends to run on vibes. For instance, after he inadvertently helped an innocent man get framed for treason and blinded as punishment, he funds his ‘heal him, then get him and his sister across the nearest border’ by looting the temple offering box for prayers to the Bastard as he gets paid by the temple, but refused to touch the one for the Mother, as Pen refused to be sworn into her service as a physician. He also took it as a sign when he found the Father’s offering box full as ‘I am supposed to be correcting this miscarriage of justice, the gods say so’. (This seems to be a general problem for people brought into close contact with the gods, especially the Bastard. They remember that human law exists, but their morality tends to be shaped by encounters with the divine, and also makes things awkward within the normal Temple hierarchy. Thankfully, Penric is usually better behaved than most of the saints in the church, who get Deep Weird by virtue of being a channel through which the gods work.)
Pen has an over-inflated sense of personal responsibility, as that ‘get framed for treason’ thing ended with Pen tossed into a bottle dungeon (basically a cell with an opening at the top and a drain at the bottom) and then nearly drowned to avoid a witness, and Pen’s reaction was ‘I better make sure the man who was victimized is okay; oh, shit, he’s not but I think I could fix this if I stay in the area and heal him, while being a known wanted foreigner’. The reason Penric never became an actual physician was because he takes everything too damn personally, and it was destroying his mental health because his talents meant he was given the hardest cases.
The hard line Penric has is killing: he can do so with a bow, or a blade, but even the accidental death of a person due to sorcery is enough to doom Desdemona, so he won’t risk it. One gets the impression that both Penric and Desdemona would die for one another — if Pen dies due to violence, Des may well jump to his killer and give them a Very Bad Time until killing them also kills her, and that Des would use sorcery to keep Pen alive, even if Pen is trying to stop her because there’s no reason she should die.
Des’s morals are primarily self-interested or centered around the people she cares about. Her reasons for not doing something she might want to do is usually ‘Pen wouldn’t like it’ or ‘if I kill anyone, or if Pen kills anyone using sorcery, I get sucked back into the Bastard’s Hell and dissolve, so let’s not do that’. She likes destruction, being an embodiment of chaos, especially complicated things. She also sees no reason to be polite to people she dislikes.
Struggles: Pen and Des’s relationship is one where they don’t have a choice about being in each other’s heads, and that can be difficult to navigate when they disagree. When they encountered Otta, a six year old girl who had received a very young demon, and whose father belonged to the branch of the religion that saw demons as inherently evil rather than ‘they belong to the trickster god, so, like all of His gifts, they are double-edged’. Penric assumed the best outcome for her would be ‘we get her exorcised, and send her back to her family if they are alive’, but also didn’t seem to realize that his own tendency to promote better understanding of demons and sorcery were counter to that goal. Des, meanwhile, sees exorcisms as comparable to executions: they might be necessary, but she doesn’t like them, and in this case, the demon doesn’t deserve it (and Pen is normally on her side for this one). Eventually the two of them agree that, while it is a lot to ask a six year old to make this decision, she is the one who most has to live with the consequences.
Penric also has to deal with prejudices about sorcerers, and the fact that as someone the Bastard sees as ‘oh, I like those two, they are very helpful when I point them at problems’, most people see him as (charitably speaking) eccentric. Penric is full of lateral thinking, and has had more mystical experiences than any five other people, so he comes off as Really Really Weird and has never really hidden that.
Pen's sense of responsibility also means that he struggles a lot with guilt, to the point where he caused a mental health crisis by trying to become a physician (and his superiors deciding that Des's experience meant 'throw Pen at the hard cases' was their plan) because he could not handle losing patients. Rather than recognize this was a skill he didn't have, he blamed himself for not being able to cut it.
Position: Professor of anatomy; student of whatever you got.
Explanation: Penric is effectively a medical researcher in canon; he trained as a physician, but wasn’t psychologically suited to clinical work. He is qualified to be a professor of human anatomy, though he’d need to get up to date, as magic only covers for so much. If he is too far behind, he also works as a foreign language teacher, as he speaks a half-dozen languages that seem to be at or near European/MENA ones.
That being said, Penric is going to be distracting himself from ‘being away from his family’ and ‘in a horror jamjar’ by being a student of whatever is on offer and holing up in the library. He might favor 'magic', ‘medicine’ and ‘engineering’ for things he might be able to take home with him, but if you want a man who will sit through your 12th century Chinese art history lecture, you have one. The main balance point is Desdemona’s attention span, as she is empathically not a scholar. (She likes novelty and sensations, so more inclined to pay attention in a lab/studio/PE class)
Introspective Writing Sample: https://newcombers.dreamwidth.org/280.html?thread=121880#cmt121880
Interactive Writing Sample: https://newcombers.dreamwidth.org/280.html?thread=161560#cmt161560
