fade rift.

[tender]

PLAYER

Name: eppy
Age: old.
Contact: pogonophile @ plurk
Other Characters: john silver, ellis
Interests: someone to balance out john and ellis; a little bit younger, a lot less cautious with her words, a lot less prone to lying and a bit more able to fully commit herself to the cause without a lot of caveats or smoke screens.

CHARACTER

Name: Derrica
Canon/OC: oc
Journal: promiscuity
Race: Human
Nationality: Rivaini
Occupation: on paper: traveling healer. in practice: a pirate
Division: Forces
Mage or Not: Mage
Age: early to mid twenties.

History

side character app, for reference, some minor changes have occurred.

Derrica's the daughter of two sailors (read: pirates) She's been told a handful of different things, but mostly what she knows is that her mother left Llomerryn to give birth and her father boarded the next ship out. Her mother dies during childbirth. Her father never returns.

Derrica's magic manifested at a young age, and she was taken to the Circle of Dairsmuid. The majority of her earliest memories are of life in the Circle; she has never known anything else. The nearest she's had to family was the Rivaini Seers and the other apprentices and instructors within the Circle.

Promising apprentice to the Seers, successfully (and miserably) harrowed and elevated within the Circle. Everything is coming up Millhouse.

The Right of Annulment is carried out, destroying the Circle of Dairsmuid. Fleeing the templars, she beelines to Llomerryn and talks herself onto the first departing ship of questionable repute she comes across.

Her initial goal is to get as far from Rivain as possible, terrified that she will be put to sword as well. She travels with that first crew for a year, assisting them as a healer and then as part of their vanguard.

The next two years of her life were largely uneventful. She joined another hard-luck crew when it was clear her first crew's luck had turned for the better and would stay that way.

Too afraid to return to Rivain or stay on dry land for too long, she committed herself to bettering the lives of the crews that took her in.

Like the Circle, the crews she sailed with became her home. Despite the rumors of war, Derrica believed as long as she was on a ship, there was very little that could touch her.

Guilt and duty re: the state of Thedas finally catch up to her. After the Divine Election, she hitches a ride to Kirkwall to see what's going on, reasoning that she can always disappear again if Inquisition/Riftwatch doesn't work out and/or the mage cops come knocking.

Personality

By rights, Derrica should probably not be so soft, and yet. There is an innate softness in her. She knows exactly how unforgiving the world can be, but she can't manage to completely close herself off from it. Derrica lets people in. She cares very deeply. She steels herself against the worst outcomes but she never taught herself how to stop feeling in the first place.

Derrica saw the only home she ever knew and the people who cared for her destroyed; the Annulment is a deep wound that never exactly healed right. The memory of it is extremely painful, and she can't articulate a lot of the things she feels in relation to it. She carries around a lot of vicious anger and deep, crippling fear leftover from that night; she's never processed any of it. The Annulment fundamentally changed her; she'd never thought the world could hurt her in such a way, or that people could genuinely believe that her people would do them harm.

But in spite of all that, Derrica has a very soft heart. She likes helping people. She likes taking care of folks. It's easy for Derrica to make close connections with people she views as friends. She genuinely likes people; she's a social person and generally easy to get along with. But relationships are complicated for her. There's a lot of messiness beneath the surface: Derrica's always internally prepared to cut and run at the first sign of danger, or to be forcibly ousted when her presence becomes inconvenient.

Derrica's fairly slow to anger, but when she hits her breaking point, phew. She can be brutal. She defends herself and her allies very intensely because she's lived through the absolute worst case scenario and never wants to be on the receiving end of that kind of loss again. She desperately craves the closeness of family, and strives to make herself useful because she worries that her acceptance (especially after what she saw at Dairsmuid) is conditional on her being the type of mage that's handy to have around and protected.

Opinions & Affiliations

The Chantry: Fuck. them.
The Qun: Understood, appreciated, but isn't for her.
Mage/Templar War: A source of extreme guilt. There was a long period where she was able to successfully ignore that it was happening/had happened, but it's harder to do that in Riftwatch when she's in close quarters with people who did actually fight in it. The sense that she should have been there and shame that she was too frightened is a big motivator for her to Do Better, somehow.
Templars and Seekers: Derrica recognizes that they're doing their job, and tries to consider that when she contemplates these people, but as far as she's concerned, they're fucking butchers.
Circles + Circle Mages: Her feelings are so complicated. Derrica's upbringing in the Circle was very happy. She didn't suffer and she wasn't mistreated, but since the Annulment she's been confronted with the fact that her experience wasn't universal. So it's a muddle of "this should be a good life" coexisting with "this likely wasn't a good life for everyone" and trying to discern what this means in the bigger picture. It's a work in progress.

Adaptation Notes

Strengths & Weaknesses

+ / - MAGE: natural talent for creation magic, specifically healing spells. has some fascination for more offensive branches, though didn't manage much study before the annulment. derrica's time was split between formal instruction in the circle, and more traditional, rogue instruction bequeathed to her by the matriarchs.
+ / - SEER: having shown promise from a very young age, Derrica was given instruction by the elder seers in communing with spirits and theoretically would have been taught how to allow a spirit to possess her if necessary. her instruction in was cut short by the Annulment of her Circle, so she has a general sense of how to commune with spirits and how a possession would be initiated, but she never learned enough to attempt the latter safely.
+ HEALER: along with her natural affinity for healing spells, derrica's improved and expanded upon her knowledge of how to patch people up with bandages and salves during her voyages on the open sea.
+ / - BATTLEMAGE: she just loves to fucking hit things; derrica's preferred position is right in the middle of melee fights where she can crack some heads with her staff. downside to this? she's a shrimp who's liable to be knocked flat if her opponent gets a chance to hit her back hard enough.
- EXPERIENCE: she's sheltered as hell; raised in the Circle with her main contact to outside life being elderly Rivaini seers, then hardluck crews of sailors, Derrica's understanding of life across Thedas is pretty lopsided. She's still grasping exactly how different life from Circle to Circle could vary, and processing the crushing betrayal that was the Annulment. Essentially she had her world very forcibly cracked open and acclimating to new experiences and worldviews is an ongoing process.
+ / - EMOTIONAL: a double-edged sword, really. derrica's stronger because of how in touch and rooted she is in her emotions, but she's easier to manipulate because of how soft she is. she's good at connecting with people, but not great at second-guessing anyone.

Inventory
- clothes on her back
- stave; heavily weighted at the top, blade lashed to the bottom.
- her mother's necklace
- fuckin nothing else

Motivation

The need to be helpful finally caught up with her. She meant to join the Inquisition but Riftwatch is the next best thing, so here she is!! Ready to fight Corypheus!!!

SAMPLES

hijinks pt 1 | hijinks pt 2