caldera app

[endscape]

Player
Name: Laura
Contact: jojoveller or pm
Over 18?: yup
Current Characters: none
Link to permissions/opt out: here

Character
Name: Adrian Boughbend
Canon: original
Canon point: after he regains magic use by severely hurting himself in a monster fight
CRAU?: no
Age: 29
History: my info post is his wiki-- but here is just the history, specifically:

Adrian is born in 1512 to the Boughbend family in the city of Redchurch, a modestly-sized city in the Empire of Kesh. He is the only child of his parents, who own and operate an in called The Sweet Pea, and he has a comfortable childhood spent meeting many travelers and strange characters who come through the inn. It's through listening to these travelers that he develops a drive to learn sorcery, which luckily for him he has an innate inclination towards, and he focuses his education on magic as soon as he hits the properly educable age (twelve).

He excels at it; he is a very good sorcerer. Top marks in school, the pride of his parents and the neighborhood, and even, as a teenager, scouted to participate in the Proxy Program, to train to be a Proxy of the Emperor. This is essentially sorcerer accelerated grad school, and once he becomes a Proxy he will be able to buy his parents a hundred inns with the renown and gold that will come with the position.

In his advanced studies he continues to excel, challenged for once by peers who are on his own level, which is fresh and new and sometimes frustrating. A year in he receives the Proxy gem, an enchanted piece of magitech inserted behind his right ear, that will enable the mind-linking magic that Proxies use to act in the Emperor's name. In another few years, during a practical exam, disaster strikes: a classmate's overuse of magic splits the veil and touches something, something eldritch and hungry, and they are torn apart by both magic and creature. Adrian is witness to it and the creature is witness to him, leaving him deathtouched. For this reason and his lingering trauma leaving him volatile and prone to lashing out, he is removed from the program.

The problem with failing out as a Proxy is no one has ever done it before; people who can't cut it tend to die rather than drop out, and Adrian has the Proxy gem stuck in the side of his head, permanently. It gives him too much magical access, and so as a precautionary measure, the program leaders fasten an enchanted silver cuff around his wrist that will silence his magical ability as long as it's there, or else it will hurt him gravely to try. Adrian, angry and defeated, becomes a teacher of swordsmanship. He does this in the university for about a year before the looks and the muttering and the rumors—about the cuff, the deathtouch, the incident—get to him, and he quits to become a private tutor for local nobles' children.

It's a living. He's not very happy about it, but his dreams were ground under heel years ago now, and he's able to live comfortably, at least. He has some renown as a good teacher and swordsman, although people still ask him off the cuff questions about his past, and it stings every time. He tries to move on, but random people he meets don't want to let him. He tries.

Another few years on and one of his students, a young girl nicknamed Bee, goes missing—suspiciously quickly after she tells Adrian someone from the Proxy Program has reached out to her family about her potential. Her parents quickly lose interest in investigating her disappearance; if she isn't around to get them that Proxy money, they will focus on her younger sister instead, and Adrian takes this a little personally. Other Proxies-in-training have also started to go missing, and a conspiracy seems to be afoot, and despite his reputation and all his misgivings, Adrian is well-equipped to investigate the disappearances. At the urging of Bee's younger sister, he agrees to... try. To do... something.

The cuff is still a problem. So is the way he's not a Proxy, and so old contacts and former friends in the program have very little interest in helping him out in any way. It takes him months to make any progress at all, and his progress takes him deep into a monster-infested cave. In the cave, disarmed and desperate, he makes the near-suicidal choice to use his magic despite the punishment of the cuff; the Proxy gem activates, and the wellspring of magic he reaches in the Proxy connection allows him to quite literally burn through the cuff's enchantments and shatter it. He passes out, but the monster still dies.

Now he's a bit further into his quest, and the Proxy gem connection is unstable—but he can reach out to Bee, wherever she is, and she can do her best to help him get there. All on his own. Maybe he should gather a party? He's trying.

Personality:

More than anything else, Adrian is exhausted. He used to be someone— he had potential, he had a future, he had everything he had wanted since childhood and he was going to use his skill and talent to really make a difference! And then events outside his control made him a shameful failure, condemned based solely on proximity to tragedy; he's never quite recovered from this.

At his core Adrian is a pretty bold and confident person, opinionated, passionate about his interests and proud of his skills. Unfortunately he's lived under the watchful eye of the Emperor's authorities for years, forbidden to pursue his first love of magic, and it's worn down on his willingness to be passionate, to be driven. Deathtouched people like himself are treated poorly, like they're contagious, or like curious oddities that don't get personal boundaries, so he's developed a habit of keeping to himself until he can be sure people aren't going to... get strange about him.

It's also hard to maintain passion and drive and joie de vivre in the Empire that crushed his dreams under its heel and told him to deal with it or else; while he's not a total pariah by any means, being cut off from his magic for so many years struck a serious blow to his overall quality of life. Living with a beacon on his arm that would bring the authorities down on him if he so much as lit a candle with a flick of fire spell has made him deeply distrustful of authority and resentful of power, despite his own deep yearning to get his past back and be the sorcerer in power he was supposed to be.

He throws himself into the things he does have, because he can't live with doing nothing. So his new career at swordsmanship tutoring isn't what he wanted, but he has too much pride to do it poorly. He cares deeply for his craft and his students, and he's a good teacher with a lot of patience and skill for educating, on top of just being skilled with a sword.

He cares very deeply for the people he's close to, which is very few; the thing that drags him kicking and screaming out of his comfort zone and into being the hero is harm coming to one of his students, after all. He'll do it, even if he wishes he didn't have to. The guilt would eat him up otherwise, lingering from being unable to save his classmate in the incident that left him deathtouched; if he can, no matter how much he hates it, he ought to help.

When he's comfortable and the circumstances are right (about swords, usually) he's quite confident, and other times when he's comfortable he's still a little bumbling and awkward. That's just how he is. He's always wanted to be someone else, so sometimes he comes across as uncomfortable in his own skin.

Powers and abilities: Adrian is a sorcerer, but his magic is busted because he's a) deathtouched and b) was magically restrained for several years. He can use his magic now, but the deathtouched element means that all of his magic is kind of "burnt" i.e. doesn't work completely as intended. A basic list of his magic skills:

Elemental magic: Your bog standard water/earth/fire/air/elec; he doesn't have light/holy or dark/curse type abilities. His elemental skills never come out the way he wants them to: they'll be too strong or too weak, never just right.
Detect magic: Also the standard; his version also leaves a mark, like an angry smear, so it can't be used in secret.
Thaumaturgy: His uses come out wrong, for example, using thaumaturgy to create the sound of thunder might sound like it's coming through a bad speaker, or from multiple places at once in fractures.
Offensive/defensive magic: Like your standard witch bolt etc., but not exactly a 5e witch bolt etc. Like the elemental magic, these come out wrong: bolts that go wherever they want, magic shields that come out too thin, etc.

In short, his magic is busted. It also physically hurts him to use, due to the enchanted nerf cuff he was forced to wear for years. He had to overclock his magic to explode it off and get unfettered magic access back, and this has left his "magic nerves" permanently damaged; spellcasting just hurts.

The gem in his head allows him to tap into the magic of others, but because it's attuned to the Emperor and other Proxies with similar implants, it's not very useful here.

Besides magic, he is an adept swordsman and a somewhat decent amateur investigator. He can cook simple dishes and has nice handwriting, too.
Chosen faction: Dryad
Suitability: He's from a setting with a similar level of technology/magic, so he has no issues with adjusting to any of that. He's also just been kind of called upon on a personal level to be the chosen one who can save a bunch of people, and he's really chafing against it because of how his life has gone so far, so! Becoming one of many chosen ones who are asked to help save a whole world is obviously the next logical step in his ~journey~. He'll do his best.

Sample
My TDM top level with a couple threads

Questions, comments, and concerns: none ✌️