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Mar. 23rd, 2019 03:29 pmUser Name/Nick: Steph
User DW: Nope
E-mail: underwater dot owl at gmail dot com
Other Characters: Quentin Coldwater, Peter Nureyev, Darlene Alderson
Character Name: Jasnah Kholin
Series: the Stormlight Archives
Age: 40ish- although from a different time rate.
From When?: End of Oathbringer
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Jasnah’s on the side of the good guys.
Item: A sphere (canonical item- small glass bead with a chip of gemstone inside it.)
Abilities/Powers: Jasnah is an Elsecaller, which is an order of the Knights Radiant. Each order of the Knights has two specific ‘surges,’ or kinds of abilities. As an Elsecaller, Jasnah’s are teleportation and transformation (alchemy- blood into wood, stone into bread, etc.) On board she will not be able to transport inside locked areas of the ship.
Jasnah has a couple of other base abilities as a knight- she can use stormlight to heal herself very quickly and to improve her speed and strength. She can summon a shardblade- an extra long magic-sword that goes through metal like butter. She can summon shardplate, a translucent armour that shrouds her and can take a tremendous beating, without seriously slowing her down or limiting her range of movement.
Jasnah is a very sensible, practical lawful good type so I won’t propose any power caps for her beyond the usual ‘don’t break the setting.’ A bit more on this in 'special notes.'
Personality:
Jasnah Kholin ends Oathbringer being crowned the Queen in Exile of Alethkar, but through most of the Stormlight Archive so far we’ve known her as the brilliant sister to King Elhokar. Gender roles in Alethi society include rigid division of intellectual labour, where it’s generally considered gauche and even heretical for men to be able to read or write, but even within the feminine arts of arts, philosophy and science Jasnah was a towering force. A lot of her inappropriate behavior and unorthodoxies were tolerated because of her royal background and her phenomenal intelligence.
While she is the model of intellectual femininity, and impeccably graceful and always immaculately made up, Jasnah’s biggest social ‘failing’ is her heresy. At an early age she broke from the Vorin church and decided she didn’t believe in the existence of the Almighty or the teachings of the Ardentia. As a member of the royal family among a deeply religious people, this was a source of great strain to her family. It also made her the target of numerous assassination attempts from an early age- although those would have been inevitable for someone of her rank. Despite the inconvenience of her beliefs Jasnah declared them loudly, and dealt with the unpleasant results without flinching.
She’s the kind of woman people follow. Her ward observes in book three something to the effect of if you come near Jasnah, she’ll immediately tell you what to do, you’ll immediately find yourself doing it, and then cursing her doubly because she’ll have been right all along. Her instructions aren’t always popular, because they tend to be extremely utilitarian, but they’re always focused on the greater good and she does have just enough of a pinch of ‘but not to the point where I become monstrous’ to keep her from veering back over the edge into inmate territory. For instance, when it turns out the Heralds (vaguely analogues to the apostles) are alive and possibly causing the apocalypse, Jasnah’s first reaction is to declare in an open council that they have to find and kill them. It’s not her faith, but it is the faith she was raised in, and the cavalier and unhesitating approach to the question makes several jaws in the room drop.
To be fair, she really is usually right. The plot of the Stormlight Archives has been about the beginning of the end of the world, and Jasnah Kholin is one of the characters who first believed it was coming. One of the protagonists uncovered her work and her anxiety that this was right around the corner. She’s a character with a macro-level view of history and the world and the systems of magic in her reality. She’s engaged, and committed to being a player on this global scale; that’s partially why everyone’s been trying to kill her for so long, because she’s the queen on the chess board, and has been since she was young.
One of the nicest things about Jasnah that makes her such a well rounded character is that she’s also extremely human. She develops deep and protective attachments in her life, to her family (in particular her younger brother,) to her spren and her ward. Sanderson often contrasts the pure ice that people see her as with the way she cries when she’s reunited with her mother after traumatic events. There are lots of portrayals of the steely surface with the secret tender heart, but Jasnah stands out among the many as particularly well rewarding when she opens up.
Barge Reactions: Jasnah is going to have a bit of a time adjusting to the barge because the base rules of her world are SO MUCH DIFFERENT. The tech on Roshar is non-existent, or based on the use of stormlight instead of electricity. The flora and fauna are different; most plants move extremely actively, think whomping willow or magically retracting grass. Animals don’t have fur; all natural life is chitinous. There are birds but because of millions of years and the loss of language they’re all referred to now as chickens (I’m not even kidding.) Emotions, attitudes, and reactions manifest themselves on Roshar as spren- so when someone is ashamed, shamespren fall around them like cherry blossom petals, or when they’re victorious glowing golden glory spren burst around them like halos, and when the wind goes by spren dance on it. The barge will look weird, cold and dead to her eyes.
She’s as adaptable and determined as they come, but it will be a wider cultural gap to bridge than most. She’ll get there eventually, but the initial stages will be a lot of culture shock and comparisons.
Deal: Jasnah will need some time to ponder the perfect question, but she’ll ask for information about how to contain and control Odium.
History: Link!
Sample Journal Entry:
What language are you speaking? What language do you hear?
Do you speak other languages, and when you switch to them, do the people around you understand each other?
What script, glyphs, or alphabet do you write with? Do you see them on your communicator? Do other people see them as the icons you touch? [She means keys to type with, but doesn't quite have the turn of phrase.] If you write them by hand can the people around you read them?
I'm experimenting with written word. I'm in the bar drawing glyphs, if anyone volunteers to come try to read.
[Even, she’s been told, the men- which pleases and amuses her. She’s never been conservative about gender roles, she’s far too interested in surviving to pay attention to what women aren’t supposed to know about fighting or military strategy, but still… you never quite escape the systems you were socialized with.]
Sample RP:
Jasnah arrives on the barge the very last day of the world being inside out above Portland. After the orientation meeting she can’t quite recall all the details of, she hits the deck hard. Something about Escher-space makes the transition from the office into the boat environment a little less smooth than it might normally be. For a heartbeat, she imagines that this is a trap and this has all gone terribly wrong, and so begins the start of a very bad first day.
By the time anyone is around and conscious enough to notice a newcomer, Janah is tired, and still a little bruised, but up and about. Newcomers always stands out, but in her formal havah Jasnah does a little more than. The dress is a deep mauve, clings tight over the bust and hip, and falls in loose waves down to her ankles. One sleeve, peculiarly enough, is cut longer than the other, trailing down to cover her hand, which she holds close to her side. She’s clearly accustomed to moving and working without it. The cloth is richly embroidered, and her hair is curled into an elegant and ornate twist, held back with jeweled pins that seem to cast a faint red glow over the glossy black of it.
So. Sore thumb.
You wouldn’t necessarily know by looking at her just how out of her element she is. In Alethi nobility, it’d be unheard of for men and women to share a buffet like this. Men’s food is cooked black and hot with spice, and women’s food is cooked sweet and fragrant; households as rich as hers will keep separate kitchens, and all banquets will involve separate sittings. If she were to wish to take lunch with a man, there would at least be two separately coloured cloths laid down, to symbolically demarcate the table. Waiting in line with men and women- and women wearing bare hands, is a culture shock as profound as any she’s ever known.
She hides it well, fills her tray and finds a seat alone. She takes a bite of a curry, and lifts her safehand to her mouth to stifle an immediate cough. A life on sweet women’s foods has done nothing to inculcate a spice tolerance.
Special Notes: Jasnah is bonded with a spren (erm- closest thing would be a familiar?) which is what makes her one of the Knights Radiant and gives her all her powers. Ivory, her spren, would be a PC though, so won’t be joining her onboard. I’ll say the abilities are still there and the bond is unbroken, but dormant.
Jasnah uses her powers by consuming stormlight! Sanderson plays a lot with the stuff as a resource that’s renewable on a medium convenient basis. On Roshar, when a storm passes overhead, it infuses light into gemstones (aka spheres, like her warden item) which can then be used to power technology, or to let Radiants like Jasnah do their thing. It’s customary to hang spheres outside in locked baskets in the storm for them to be refreshed. I’d like Jasnah to put up a basket on deck, and for her spheres to recharge in there periodically (and frustratingly erratically.) I like this variable access to power as a solution to her being massively overpowered (here’s a picture of her transforming air back into a knocked down wall made of gold! She will not be able to do this with the little stormlight she can get on board. Stormlight fades once it’s gathered so it has to be used or it’ll be lost, so she can’t really store it up to do a huge amount of stuff with it. Instead she’ll have to focus on the boat on narrow and strategic application of her powers.
User DW: Nope
E-mail: underwater dot owl at gmail dot com
Other Characters: Quentin Coldwater, Peter Nureyev, Darlene Alderson
Character Name: Jasnah Kholin
Series: the Stormlight Archives
Age: 40ish- although from a different time rate.
From When?: End of Oathbringer
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Jasnah’s on the side of the good guys.
Item: A sphere (canonical item- small glass bead with a chip of gemstone inside it.)
Abilities/Powers: Jasnah is an Elsecaller, which is an order of the Knights Radiant. Each order of the Knights has two specific ‘surges,’ or kinds of abilities. As an Elsecaller, Jasnah’s are teleportation and transformation (alchemy- blood into wood, stone into bread, etc.) On board she will not be able to transport inside locked areas of the ship.
Jasnah has a couple of other base abilities as a knight- she can use stormlight to heal herself very quickly and to improve her speed and strength. She can summon a shardblade- an extra long magic-sword that goes through metal like butter. She can summon shardplate, a translucent armour that shrouds her and can take a tremendous beating, without seriously slowing her down or limiting her range of movement.
Jasnah is a very sensible, practical lawful good type so I won’t propose any power caps for her beyond the usual ‘don’t break the setting.’ A bit more on this in 'special notes.'
Personality:
Jasnah Kholin ends Oathbringer being crowned the Queen in Exile of Alethkar, but through most of the Stormlight Archive so far we’ve known her as the brilliant sister to King Elhokar. Gender roles in Alethi society include rigid division of intellectual labour, where it’s generally considered gauche and even heretical for men to be able to read or write, but even within the feminine arts of arts, philosophy and science Jasnah was a towering force. A lot of her inappropriate behavior and unorthodoxies were tolerated because of her royal background and her phenomenal intelligence.
While she is the model of intellectual femininity, and impeccably graceful and always immaculately made up, Jasnah’s biggest social ‘failing’ is her heresy. At an early age she broke from the Vorin church and decided she didn’t believe in the existence of the Almighty or the teachings of the Ardentia. As a member of the royal family among a deeply religious people, this was a source of great strain to her family. It also made her the target of numerous assassination attempts from an early age- although those would have been inevitable for someone of her rank. Despite the inconvenience of her beliefs Jasnah declared them loudly, and dealt with the unpleasant results without flinching.
She’s the kind of woman people follow. Her ward observes in book three something to the effect of if you come near Jasnah, she’ll immediately tell you what to do, you’ll immediately find yourself doing it, and then cursing her doubly because she’ll have been right all along. Her instructions aren’t always popular, because they tend to be extremely utilitarian, but they’re always focused on the greater good and she does have just enough of a pinch of ‘but not to the point where I become monstrous’ to keep her from veering back over the edge into inmate territory. For instance, when it turns out the Heralds (vaguely analogues to the apostles) are alive and possibly causing the apocalypse, Jasnah’s first reaction is to declare in an open council that they have to find and kill them. It’s not her faith, but it is the faith she was raised in, and the cavalier and unhesitating approach to the question makes several jaws in the room drop.
To be fair, she really is usually right. The plot of the Stormlight Archives has been about the beginning of the end of the world, and Jasnah Kholin is one of the characters who first believed it was coming. One of the protagonists uncovered her work and her anxiety that this was right around the corner. She’s a character with a macro-level view of history and the world and the systems of magic in her reality. She’s engaged, and committed to being a player on this global scale; that’s partially why everyone’s been trying to kill her for so long, because she’s the queen on the chess board, and has been since she was young.
One of the nicest things about Jasnah that makes her such a well rounded character is that she’s also extremely human. She develops deep and protective attachments in her life, to her family (in particular her younger brother,) to her spren and her ward. Sanderson often contrasts the pure ice that people see her as with the way she cries when she’s reunited with her mother after traumatic events. There are lots of portrayals of the steely surface with the secret tender heart, but Jasnah stands out among the many as particularly well rewarding when she opens up.
Barge Reactions: Jasnah is going to have a bit of a time adjusting to the barge because the base rules of her world are SO MUCH DIFFERENT. The tech on Roshar is non-existent, or based on the use of stormlight instead of electricity. The flora and fauna are different; most plants move extremely actively, think whomping willow or magically retracting grass. Animals don’t have fur; all natural life is chitinous. There are birds but because of millions of years and the loss of language they’re all referred to now as chickens (I’m not even kidding.) Emotions, attitudes, and reactions manifest themselves on Roshar as spren- so when someone is ashamed, shamespren fall around them like cherry blossom petals, or when they’re victorious glowing golden glory spren burst around them like halos, and when the wind goes by spren dance on it. The barge will look weird, cold and dead to her eyes.
She’s as adaptable and determined as they come, but it will be a wider cultural gap to bridge than most. She’ll get there eventually, but the initial stages will be a lot of culture shock and comparisons.
Deal: Jasnah will need some time to ponder the perfect question, but she’ll ask for information about how to contain and control Odium.
History: Link!
Sample Journal Entry:
What language are you speaking? What language do you hear?
Do you speak other languages, and when you switch to them, do the people around you understand each other?
What script, glyphs, or alphabet do you write with? Do you see them on your communicator? Do other people see them as the icons you touch? [She means keys to type with, but doesn't quite have the turn of phrase.] If you write them by hand can the people around you read them?
I'm experimenting with written word. I'm in the bar drawing glyphs, if anyone volunteers to come try to read.
[Even, she’s been told, the men- which pleases and amuses her. She’s never been conservative about gender roles, she’s far too interested in surviving to pay attention to what women aren’t supposed to know about fighting or military strategy, but still… you never quite escape the systems you were socialized with.]
Sample RP:
Jasnah arrives on the barge the very last day of the world being inside out above Portland. After the orientation meeting she can’t quite recall all the details of, she hits the deck hard. Something about Escher-space makes the transition from the office into the boat environment a little less smooth than it might normally be. For a heartbeat, she imagines that this is a trap and this has all gone terribly wrong, and so begins the start of a very bad first day.
By the time anyone is around and conscious enough to notice a newcomer, Janah is tired, and still a little bruised, but up and about. Newcomers always stands out, but in her formal havah Jasnah does a little more than. The dress is a deep mauve, clings tight over the bust and hip, and falls in loose waves down to her ankles. One sleeve, peculiarly enough, is cut longer than the other, trailing down to cover her hand, which she holds close to her side. She’s clearly accustomed to moving and working without it. The cloth is richly embroidered, and her hair is curled into an elegant and ornate twist, held back with jeweled pins that seem to cast a faint red glow over the glossy black of it.
So. Sore thumb.
You wouldn’t necessarily know by looking at her just how out of her element she is. In Alethi nobility, it’d be unheard of for men and women to share a buffet like this. Men’s food is cooked black and hot with spice, and women’s food is cooked sweet and fragrant; households as rich as hers will keep separate kitchens, and all banquets will involve separate sittings. If she were to wish to take lunch with a man, there would at least be two separately coloured cloths laid down, to symbolically demarcate the table. Waiting in line with men and women- and women wearing bare hands, is a culture shock as profound as any she’s ever known.
She hides it well, fills her tray and finds a seat alone. She takes a bite of a curry, and lifts her safehand to her mouth to stifle an immediate cough. A life on sweet women’s foods has done nothing to inculcate a spice tolerance.
Special Notes: Jasnah is bonded with a spren (erm- closest thing would be a familiar?) which is what makes her one of the Knights Radiant and gives her all her powers. Ivory, her spren, would be a PC though, so won’t be joining her onboard. I’ll say the abilities are still there and the bond is unbroken, but dormant.
Jasnah uses her powers by consuming stormlight! Sanderson plays a lot with the stuff as a resource that’s renewable on a medium convenient basis. On Roshar, when a storm passes overhead, it infuses light into gemstones (aka spheres, like her warden item) which can then be used to power technology, or to let Radiants like Jasnah do their thing. It’s customary to hang spheres outside in locked baskets in the storm for them to be refreshed. I’d like Jasnah to put up a basket on deck, and for her spheres to recharge in there periodically (and frustratingly erratically.) I like this variable access to power as a solution to her being massively overpowered (here’s a picture of her transforming air back into a knocked down wall made of gold! She will not be able to do this with the little stormlight she can get on board. Stormlight fades once it’s gathered so it has to be used or it’ll be lost, so she can’t really store it up to do a huge amount of stuff with it. Instead she’ll have to focus on the boat on narrow and strategic application of her powers.
Bits and Pieces
May. 23rd, 2018 08:08 pmThere was another who came before you
He was a hero and your brother and my son.
He fought the darkness, the darkness won.
Unrest in the House of Light- the Protomen
Gasping for air I'm chokin'
Running with no sign of slowin'
Till my legs are broken
Easy Tiger.
Easy Tiger- Portugal. The Man
Can you imagine living one more day
With a beast right up in your face?
Can see me dying in this house, in any house
For a man in vain
Blinded by the Hurricane?
Mr Hurricane- Beast
I can't find enough love in my heart
Let alone in my bones
To keep you standing.
Pots and Pans- The Kills
Hey, shut the fuck up boy
You are starting to piss me off
Take your hands off that girl
You have already had enough.
Lay it Down- Peter Bjorn and John
He was a hero and your brother and my son.
He fought the darkness, the darkness won.
Unrest in the House of Light- the Protomen
Gasping for air I'm chokin'
Running with no sign of slowin'
Till my legs are broken
Easy Tiger.
Easy Tiger- Portugal. The Man
Can you imagine living one more day
With a beast right up in your face?
Can see me dying in this house, in any house
For a man in vain
Blinded by the Hurricane?
Mr Hurricane- Beast
I can't find enough love in my heart
Let alone in my bones
To keep you standing.
Pots and Pans- The Kills
Hey, shut the fuck up boy
You are starting to piss me off
Take your hands off that girl
You have already had enough.
Lay it Down- Peter Bjorn and John
research notes
May. 19th, 2018 09:13 pmPOPULATION
1) How many people are on board?
2) How were we brought here?
3) Why were we brought here?
4) What are the shared characteristics of the population that has arrived?
a) Is there any kind of pattern that can be established in who is here?
b) Clusters of people from some worlds seem to exist; who, from what world, and again- why?
STATION HISTORY
1) Who was here before us?
a) Where did they go?
b) Who cleaned up their personal effects?
2) Why were they here?
3) What is the meaning of the message we arrived to?
a) Whether or not they caused it, what was the disaster they described?
b) Is it likely to occur again?/Is it ongoing?
STATION FUNCTION
1) To what degree was the station prepared for our arrival?
2) Why does the network exist?
a) Are the messages we receive on there periodically (vis- our arrival, Muller speaking to makomori, the new station roster information) being sent to us concurrently, or as an echo of the past?
b) If they're current, where are they coming from?
3) Does the fact that we've been given access to it and now sent this roster mean we're intended to staff the station?
4) Individual points of data from the roster, and questions that have been asked already;
a) Hudie's discussion about neuroscience being prioritized
b) Whether 'governor' implies that this is a constituent state of a country or planet that exists elsewhere
c) If this is a military outpost with a scientific arm, or a scientific outpost with a military presence to protect the research.
i) What are the distinctions between the kinds of scientists listed on that roster?
ii) Can we read anything into the research priorities based on the number of vacancies under each?
5) What are the phenomena we're experiencing here?
a) The fainting that we experience when we destroy things
b) The fact that we understand one another's languages when spoken or typed, but not when read
c) The visions, whether they're into the past, or completely manufactured
i) Screams in the walls
ii) Explosions in the halls
d) Hermione's ladder. I'll let her explain the discovery.
6) How do we leave?
a) To the planet below; people who've been to space before, how would you normally be transported?
b) To our home worlds; requires understanding how we arrived, but can't be an objective we lose sight of.
SAFETY AND SECURITY
1) What do we need to understand about the station systems for the sake of our survival?
a) Explosive decompression: what it is, how to avoid it?
i) Specifically, is the damage passengers have been doing to the walls increasing our risk of same
ii) Should we be doing repairs? Does anyone know how?
iii) What emergency procedures should we know?
b) Food and water security. What is in these machines? How much of there is it? How can we support the existing garden plans?
c) Air
2) Medical. Ren, the clinic, what further work is needed there?
3) Personal.
a) Again, per Muller's message; is there a traitor on board?
b) Is there any credible reason to believe the population brought here poses any risk to each other that would necessitate a security force or an emphasis on personal safety?
c) Same question, external forces that might attack us as a population. What is making us as a group decide to prepare for this eventuality; instinct, or some likelihood I don't understand?
VIDEO QUESTIONS
1) Are the videos visions of the past?
2) Are the videos happening in another version of reality just beyond our own?
3) Who is sending them to us?
4) What motive might they have?
5) What is the overall message they intend to convey/why would someone want us to receive that message? To what extent do we accept it?
VIDEO 1:
a) Where were they trying to go?
b) Is where they arrived instead what triggered the calamity?
c) How did they make the transfer?
d) Why?
VIDEO 2:
a) Who were the body that was betrayed?
b) Who was the traitor?
c) What were they trying to accomplish, and how were they thwarted?
VIDEO 3:
a) What is happening in this video?
i) To the man fallen through the floor
ii) To the man killed by the flying tools
b) Is the station trying to kill them?
c) Why? Is it related to the fainting defence mechanism? If so is it possible that the walls have one objective and the inhabitants another?
---Someone who understands AI, is it possible that this place is sentient?
VISIONS
1) What are the visions people have experienced so far?
2) Are there signs of the destruction we have seen manifesting anywhere on the station?
3) Is this the past, present, or potentially a warning of the future?
4) Who is sending them to us?/How are they arriving?
Please feel free to contribute questions. I'd like to work on as comprehensive a list as possible.
1) How many people are on board?
2) How were we brought here?
3) Why were we brought here?
4) What are the shared characteristics of the population that has arrived?
a) Is there any kind of pattern that can be established in who is here?
b) Clusters of people from some worlds seem to exist; who, from what world, and again- why?
STATION HISTORY
1) Who was here before us?
a) Where did they go?
b) Who cleaned up their personal effects?
2) Why were they here?
3) What is the meaning of the message we arrived to?
a) Whether or not they caused it, what was the disaster they described?
b) Is it likely to occur again?/Is it ongoing?
STATION FUNCTION
1) To what degree was the station prepared for our arrival?
2) Why does the network exist?
a) Are the messages we receive on there periodically (vis- our arrival, Muller speaking to makomori, the new station roster information) being sent to us concurrently, or as an echo of the past?
b) If they're current, where are they coming from?
3) Does the fact that we've been given access to it and now sent this roster mean we're intended to staff the station?
4) Individual points of data from the roster, and questions that have been asked already;
a) Hudie's discussion about neuroscience being prioritized
b) Whether 'governor' implies that this is a constituent state of a country or planet that exists elsewhere
c) If this is a military outpost with a scientific arm, or a scientific outpost with a military presence to protect the research.
i) What are the distinctions between the kinds of scientists listed on that roster?
ii) Can we read anything into the research priorities based on the number of vacancies under each?
5) What are the phenomena we're experiencing here?
a) The fainting that we experience when we destroy things
b) The fact that we understand one another's languages when spoken or typed, but not when read
c) The visions, whether they're into the past, or completely manufactured
i) Screams in the walls
ii) Explosions in the halls
d) Hermione's ladder. I'll let her explain the discovery.
6) How do we leave?
a) To the planet below; people who've been to space before, how would you normally be transported?
b) To our home worlds; requires understanding how we arrived, but can't be an objective we lose sight of.
SAFETY AND SECURITY
1) What do we need to understand about the station systems for the sake of our survival?
a) Explosive decompression: what it is, how to avoid it?
i) Specifically, is the damage passengers have been doing to the walls increasing our risk of same
ii) Should we be doing repairs? Does anyone know how?
iii) What emergency procedures should we know?
b) Food and water security. What is in these machines? How much of there is it? How can we support the existing garden plans?
c) Air
2) Medical. Ren, the clinic, what further work is needed there?
3) Personal.
a) Again, per Muller's message; is there a traitor on board?
b) Is there any credible reason to believe the population brought here poses any risk to each other that would necessitate a security force or an emphasis on personal safety?
c) Same question, external forces that might attack us as a population. What is making us as a group decide to prepare for this eventuality; instinct, or some likelihood I don't understand?
VIDEO QUESTIONS
1) Are the videos visions of the past?
2) Are the videos happening in another version of reality just beyond our own?
3) Who is sending them to us?
4) What motive might they have?
5) What is the overall message they intend to convey/why would someone want us to receive that message? To what extent do we accept it?
VIDEO 1:
a) Where were they trying to go?
b) Is where they arrived instead what triggered the calamity?
c) How did they make the transfer?
d) Why?
VIDEO 2:
a) Who were the body that was betrayed?
b) Who was the traitor?
c) What were they trying to accomplish, and how were they thwarted?
VIDEO 3:
a) What is happening in this video?
i) To the man fallen through the floor
ii) To the man killed by the flying tools
b) Is the station trying to kill them?
c) Why? Is it related to the fainting defence mechanism? If so is it possible that the walls have one objective and the inhabitants another?
---Someone who understands AI, is it possible that this place is sentient?
VISIONS
1) What are the visions people have experienced so far?
2) Are there signs of the destruction we have seen manifesting anywhere on the station?
3) Is this the past, present, or potentially a warning of the future?
4) Who is sending them to us?/How are they arriving?
Please feel free to contribute questions. I'd like to work on as comprehensive a list as possible.
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Soulcasting at a Glance
Apr. 26th, 2018 10:06 amA soulcaster like Jasnah has the ability to use stormlight infused gems to transform substances.
One of the big themes of the books is the amount of stormlight the knights have, whether their spheres are done, how far they can make their stormlight stretch and this sense of 'it's depleting, should I use it now so I've used as much of it as I've been given, or save it while it dwindles in case of an emergency tomorrow.' I want to be meticulous about tracking and playing Jasnah problem solving with the scarce stormlight she gets.
Gemstones in the Stormlight Archives are set into small beads of glass called 'spheres,' which come in different denominations, chips, marks, and broams, from smallest to largest. The larger the denomination, the larger the gem, the more stormlight it holds, the more mass it can transform.
Sapphire: Translucent gas, air
Smokestone: Opaque gas, smoke, fog
Ruby: Fire
Diamond Quartz: glass, crystal
Emerald:Wood, plants, moss
Garnet: Blood, all non-oil liquid
Zircon: All kinds of oil
Amethyst: Metal
Topaz: Rock and stone
Heliodor: Meat, flesh
In the books, Shallan uses one garnet to transform a heavy metal goblet into an equal weight amont of blood. Jasnah uses much larger specialized soulcaster specific gemstones to turn human enemies into various substances, such as fire and quartz.
For the purposes of the AC reward system at Reverie Terminal, I'll say each broam is able to transform roughly 500g of the original substance into the corresponding amount of the counterpart. In terms of stormlight fading, the gems would be at half strength within two weeks, and done within a month. 250g of same for a mark, 50g of same for a chip, depleting at the same rate.
As a knight radiant, Jasnah can use the stormlight not just for soulcasting. She can heal herself and borrow a little strength by drawing in the light like a breath. A sphere would be enough to heal a cut, or ease extensive bruising, or speed along the healing process for larger injuries.
Jasnah can draw stormlight in from one gemstone, and infuse it into another if her spheres go done- eg, since she arrived with a garnet, she can draw stormlight from a new sphere and put it into the garnet should she ever need to soulcast liquid of any kind.
In the books, spheres are recharged by being left out in the storm, but the strong implication is that it's a property of a spren that lives in the passing storm that recharges them. I'll say there's no opportunity for done spheres on the terminal to recharge at all, and Jasnah will just end up overtime with a hilarious backlog of pretty paperweights.
One of the big themes of the books is the amount of stormlight the knights have, whether their spheres are done, how far they can make their stormlight stretch and this sense of 'it's depleting, should I use it now so I've used as much of it as I've been given, or save it while it dwindles in case of an emergency tomorrow.' I want to be meticulous about tracking and playing Jasnah problem solving with the scarce stormlight she gets.
Gemstones in the Stormlight Archives are set into small beads of glass called 'spheres,' which come in different denominations, chips, marks, and broams, from smallest to largest. The larger the denomination, the larger the gem, the more stormlight it holds, the more mass it can transform.
Sapphire: Translucent gas, air
Smokestone: Opaque gas, smoke, fog
Ruby: Fire
Diamond Quartz: glass, crystal
Emerald:Wood, plants, moss
Garnet: Blood, all non-oil liquid
Zircon: All kinds of oil
Amethyst: Metal
Topaz: Rock and stone
Heliodor: Meat, flesh
In the books, Shallan uses one garnet to transform a heavy metal goblet into an equal weight amont of blood. Jasnah uses much larger specialized soulcaster specific gemstones to turn human enemies into various substances, such as fire and quartz.
For the purposes of the AC reward system at Reverie Terminal, I'll say each broam is able to transform roughly 500g of the original substance into the corresponding amount of the counterpart. In terms of stormlight fading, the gems would be at half strength within two weeks, and done within a month. 250g of same for a mark, 50g of same for a chip, depleting at the same rate.
As a knight radiant, Jasnah can use the stormlight not just for soulcasting. She can heal herself and borrow a little strength by drawing in the light like a breath. A sphere would be enough to heal a cut, or ease extensive bruising, or speed along the healing process for larger injuries.
Jasnah can draw stormlight in from one gemstone, and infuse it into another if her spheres go done- eg, since she arrived with a garnet, she can draw stormlight from a new sphere and put it into the garnet should she ever need to soulcast liquid of any kind.
In the books, spheres are recharged by being left out in the storm, but the strong implication is that it's a property of a spren that lives in the passing storm that recharges them. I'll say there's no opportunity for done spheres on the terminal to recharge at all, and Jasnah will just end up overtime with a hilarious backlog of pretty paperweights.
Please bring me any feedback here, I'm extremely open to it!
In fact, I'm going to proactively write about one struggle I have with playing from the Stormlight Archives. I love these books, but my first exposure to them was the audiobook series. I've been listening to them on and off for years. In so doing, I developed a lot of mental spellings of the fictional words in the stories, based on the pronunciation of the narrators.
I am working extremely hard to correct myself. It's little things, mostly, like fear spren instead of fearspren, krem instead of crem, fabrile instead of fabrial. Brandon Sanderson makes up a lot of words. Right now I'm in the stage of googling every noun from every tag before I post it but it's bound to happen eventually. If you know the books and catch me doing it I appreciate the correction. I apologise in advance.
In fact, I'm going to proactively write about one struggle I have with playing from the Stormlight Archives. I love these books, but my first exposure to them was the audiobook series. I've been listening to them on and off for years. In so doing, I developed a lot of mental spellings of the fictional words in the stories, based on the pronunciation of the narrators.
I am working extremely hard to correct myself. It's little things, mostly, like fear spren instead of fearspren, krem instead of crem, fabrile instead of fabrial. Brandon Sanderson makes up a lot of words. Right now I'm in the stage of googling every noun from every tag before I post it but it's bound to happen eventually. If you know the books and catch me doing it I appreciate the correction. I apologise in advance.
(no subject)
Apr. 25th, 2018 09:22 am“What is a woman's place in this modern world?" Jasnah Kholin's words read. "I rebel against this question, though so many of my peers ask it. The inherent bias in the inquiry seems invisible to so many of them. They consider themselves progressive because they are willing to challenge many of the assumptions of the past.
They ignore the greater assumption--that a 'place' for women must be defined and set forth to begin with. Half of the population must somehow be reduced to the role arrived at by a single conversation. No matter how broad that role is, it will be--by-nature--a reduction from the infinite variety that is womanhood.
I say that there is no role for women--there is, instead, a role for each woman, and she must make it for herself. For some, it will be the role of scholar; for others, it will be the role of wife. For others, it will be both. For yet others, it will be neither.
Do not mistake me in assuming I value one woman's role above another. My point is not to stratify our society--we have done that far to well already--my point is to diversify our discourse.
A woman's strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses it to be, but in the power to choose that role. It is amazing to me that I even have to make this point, as I see it as the very foundation of our conversation.”
They ignore the greater assumption--that a 'place' for women must be defined and set forth to begin with. Half of the population must somehow be reduced to the role arrived at by a single conversation. No matter how broad that role is, it will be--by-nature--a reduction from the infinite variety that is womanhood.
I say that there is no role for women--there is, instead, a role for each woman, and she must make it for herself. For some, it will be the role of scholar; for others, it will be the role of wife. For others, it will be both. For yet others, it will be neither.
Do not mistake me in assuming I value one woman's role above another. My point is not to stratify our society--we have done that far to well already--my point is to diversify our discourse.
A woman's strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses it to be, but in the power to choose that role. It is amazing to me that I even have to make this point, as I see it as the very foundation of our conversation.”
application
Apr. 24th, 2018 09:26 pmPLAYER
» HANDLE: Steph
» CONTACT: UndrwO on Plurk
» AGE: 28
» CHARACTER(S) IN-GAME: None
CHARACTER
» NAME: Jasnah Kholin
» CANON: The Stormlight Archives
» CANON POINT: Post Oathbringer.
» AGE: Early thirties- but in a world where years are longer than the human calendar. Fortyish.
» SETTING: Jasnah comes from the planet Roshar, an intensely magical world with a very complex setting. Roshar is a large planet, with heavier than human gravity and a longer than Earth orbit. Things on Roshar take physical form as what the people there call 'spren.' The wind is followed by windspren, translucent young women flying along with it. When someone gets mad, anger spren bubble around their heads. When you're healing someone you clean a wound to 'drive off rot spren,' etc.
Roshar is also unique in that there are storms that circle the planet that kill everything. There is no local wildlife that isn't crustacean based- the people hunt and eat 'greatshells' the size of houses, and crack through their carapace and dodge their chitenous feet. All grass and trees have evolved to retract to flee the stormfront. People are left out to be killed by the storm. But, the storm brings stormlight with it- a kind of energy that can be captured by gemstones left out to be recharged by the weather. 'Radiants' like Jasnah can draw power from this stormlight by drawing it in like breath and using it to accomplish tremendous feats. There's no technology to speak of, partially because of historical events known as Desolations, where fabled voidbringers rose and attacked the human kingdoms and nearly razed them to the ground. Every time one of these catastrophes would occur, tremendous progress would be lost, so there are stories of old abilities that were never recovered.
Jasnah grew up a princess in the Alethi kingdom. The Alethi are a warlike people who have been fighting battles amongst themselves for centuries, and were only very recently united by her father, the first High King in generations. After his assassination, the control of the kingdom passed to Jasnah’s younger brother, and the Alethi went to war to seek vengeance on the people who had Gavilar killed.
Jasnah stayed mostly out of this conflict. She had become convinced that another Desolation was coming, and so threw herself into researching how to prevent or survive it. Sure enough, the Everstorm arrives and the Desolation begins. The kingdom of Alethkar falls to the Parshendi, the strange creatures who are imbued with tremendous powers by the new Everstorm. Jasnah and the remaining Alethi nobility live in exile in a mountain city, a tall tower sheltered from the storm.
As the last book ends, the war between the Parshendi and the humans is escalating. The island nation of Thaylenah, an old Alethi ally, is attacked by Parshendi, evil spren, and thunderclasts- massive giant golems that tower higher than most buildings, monsters that no one would ever have believed in until they came to life and began destroying houses and temples. The humans turn the enemy back, against practically all odds, but this marks the beginning of what is going to be a long term siege with apocalyptic consequences.
» SHORT DESCRIPTION: Brilliant, proud, authoritative, independent, determined, groundbreaking.
» INFLUENTIAL EVENTS:
1. Heresy.
Jasnah is the daughter of King Gavilar of Alethkar, and there are expectations when it comes to being a princess among the Alethi. It's an intensely reserved society, and very modest, with strict codes of behaviour for men and women. Women are supposed to confine themselves to womenly pursuits, such as scholarship, mathematics, and writing. Men aren't permitted to be able to read or write, and are instead relegated to labour, leadership, and warfare. The Alethi are extremely warlike, and the high princes fight among one another often. Women are expected to be chaste, to dress modestly, and to never reveal their 'safe hand,' the left hand, which is customarily covered by a sleeve worn long and dangling past the fingertips, or a glove, if you're not nobility. The Alethi have a strict caste system defined by the colour of a person's eyes- with light violet eyes, the honorific for Jasnah would be 'Brightness Kholin.' After a long life as an absolute paragon of the virtues of Alethi womanhood (albeit perhaps slightly more prudish and unmarried than is strictly appropriate) Jasnah absolutely scandalized the entire kingdom by disavowing the Vorin church. Despite her extremely pious people, Jasnah became an admitted atheist. People would try to convert (and occasionally assassinate) her for the rest of her life as a result of this decision, but the resistance only stiffened her resolve. Jasnah is not scared of people thinking badly of her. She commands respect through means other than popularity and false piety.
2. Loss.
When Jasnah was a young woman, her father Gavilar was assassinated. Jasnah was close with her father, and shaken by the loss. The death saw her (incompetent, immature) younger brother crowned king of Alethkar, and also ignited a tremendous war between the Alethi and the assassins. It shifted her family dynamics in other peculiar ways- shocking an alcoholic uncle into sobriety, starting off a long and close relationship between him and Jasnah. Though she bore through it with poise and dignity, Gavilar's death was one of the defining moments of her life.
3. Radiance.
Right as her father died, Jasnah was deeply occupied in her own story. She'd bonded a spren, which means formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with one of the sentient species of spren. The bond with Ivory gives her powers of a Knight Radiant- varied from person to person, between orders in the knights. Jasnah is an Elsecaller, meaning she has the surges of Transportation and Transformation- she can travel instantaneously from place to place, and she can soulcast- turn one kind of matter into another, like a stone into bread, or an enemy into smoke. The trouble was, the Radiants were only supposed to emerge when a Desolation was close. This becomes the impetus for Jasnah to devote her scholarship to learning what had happened, what the voidbringers even were, how the Radiants worked. It began a scholarly quest that lasted for years. She became convinced that the voidbringers had never left Roshar. Part of the world economy was based on the free labour of the obedient Parshmen, a group of people bought and sold by the Alethi, famous for their docility and stupidity. Parshmen left alone are likely to sit and stare at a wall, and the Alethi have taken extreme (unethical) advantage of the situation and folded them into their slave economy. Jasnah becomes convinced that the Parshmen were descended from Parshendi prisoners taken at the end of the last Desolation, and that when the Everstorm came, the Parshmen would rise up and kill their owners.
4. Void.
The Desolation began with the Everstorm, a second sweeping stormfront travelling in the opposite direction of the natural storms of Roshar. Jasnah's predictions about the Parshmen and Parshendi were basically incorrect, but there still manages to be a massive and ugly conflict between the Alethi and the Parshmen, who have risen up against their masters and made a break for freedom. An ugly war begins, and Jasnah is a key figure in steering it. This is a major life event for her not just because the world is changing, but because she reveals that she's a Radiant, and moves from scholar to soldier, defending cities with her tremendous powers.
5. Coronation.
During the early days of the Desolation, Alethkar is lost. The surviving Alethi scatter. Jasnah's brother, the king, is killed. Succession should then pass he throne to her uncle, but he turns it down for reasons that are far too complicated to go into. After that it should be her cousin, but he doesn't want it either, and his younger brother is an absolute mouse and a scholar... the end result is a tremendous break with tradition among the rigid and gender-restrictive Alethi. In an already completely unrecognizable new world, Jasnah Kholin becomes the new queen, cementing her role in history as an absolute iconoclast and force to be reckoned with.
» FIT: Jasnah is a natural leader and an absolute pragmatist. She's determined, she can fight, she's proud and interrogative and won't let anyone get away with an inch. She's a great fit for a game because she'll always drive the action forward. However, she's a weird fit for this setting because a) it's a huge technological jump, absolutely astonishing, and b) she comes from such an absolutely alien fantasy setting that the adjustment will be shocking. Not having any spren around, when you can't go a minute without seeing one in Roshar? Also what the heck is a dog?
There will also be a lot of culture shock and even potential conflict based on the normalized hierarchies in Alethkar. Jasnah currently takes it for granted that slavery is a perfectly natural consequence of lawbreaking, that the social caste system is completely normal. In her scholarship, Jasnah writes eloquent critiques of the system, but she grew up as a princess in this kingdom so a lot of the attitudes are internalised, though she'll deplore her own irrationality.
I am extremely interested to explore the theme of leadership with Jasnah. Many characters in DWRP have complex relationships with authority. Jasnah is an interesting mix of gifted, brilliant, and a natural leader, and completely lacking in any kind of emotionaly nurturing traits. She is magnetic, but she is not personable. She's also a newly minted leader, when she never expected to be. It will be interesting to see what kind of role she takes on in the community, whether she manages to alienate everyone as a haughty relic of an outdated political system, or whether she draws people to her. I'm sure it'll be some of both.
» POWERS: Although Jasnah is a reasonably powerful character in canon, there's a natural power cap in the setting for her, which is her access to stormlight. Without storms passing by to recharge done spheres, she'll never be able to draw in stormlight from gemstones, and stormlight is what feeds her powers. I'm generally an active player and will trade in every AC point I can get for recharged spheres, but this will still make it a real struggle for her to use her abilities. She will never have enough stormlight to transport from place to place, and she will only be able to soulcast small things. To make matters worse, spheres 'go done' on their own, so she can never save piles and piles of them and kill a guy, she'll always have to manage the tension of choosing between using all the fresh stormlight right now, and defending herself with a big push of soulcasting.
There are also complex world mechanics to do with special blades that Knights Radiant can summon from thin air. Jasnah will not have access to hers here (because the blade is actually the body of her spren and he isn't with her on board.) If it ever feels appropriate I'll ask mods about it on the AC post, but for the indeterminate future the weapon is absolutely nixed.
» NOTES: I'd also like to bring Jasnah in with a single lit sphere in her pocket, a token from home and a small bit of power to ease the adjustment. Maybe enough to transform about 100 grams of something solid into 100 ml of something liquid, decreasing by about 5 g/ml per day every day she doesn't use it until the sphere is done.
Also this is extremely esoteric but Alethi women don't reveal their left hand in public, it's a deeply sexualized bodypart. I was hoping to put one left handed glove in with her undergarments- though if that doesn't work I can swap it out with the sphere as her 'token from home.'
» SAMPLES:
Network
I've been up on the highest level of the structure, and from the windows that there are, I can't see land below us. I don't know what that means. As abrupt as this is, it's important that we proceed here slowly and methodically. When you learn something, share it with these- they're not spanreeds, I don't think we have anything exactly like them on my world. But they're useful nonetheless.
I am what my world calls a veristitalian, part of a movement of scholarship that emphasize women recording the world around us in order to create a comprehensive record. This combined log can then be analyzed, to generate an understanding of the world in general, based only off of proven and observable realities. Not superstition, not tradition, not supposition and not faith. I propose we each of us begin to contribute to this record now, in whatever way we can.
I haven't seen any spren, or any stormlight, and I haven't yet met a person who knows what such thing are. I'd be grateful if you'd read this message out to the men near you, and scribe for them if they find anything we should be aware of.
[A few minutes later, ever so slightly non-plussed.]
All of them read. In every world? That strikes me as a tremendous improvement.
[She's further from home than she thought.]
Log
1. 2. 3.
» HANDLE: Steph
» CONTACT: UndrwO on Plurk
» AGE: 28
» CHARACTER(S) IN-GAME: None
CHARACTER
» NAME: Jasnah Kholin
» CANON: The Stormlight Archives
» CANON POINT: Post Oathbringer.
» AGE: Early thirties- but in a world where years are longer than the human calendar. Fortyish.
» SETTING: Jasnah comes from the planet Roshar, an intensely magical world with a very complex setting. Roshar is a large planet, with heavier than human gravity and a longer than Earth orbit. Things on Roshar take physical form as what the people there call 'spren.' The wind is followed by windspren, translucent young women flying along with it. When someone gets mad, anger spren bubble around their heads. When you're healing someone you clean a wound to 'drive off rot spren,' etc.
Roshar is also unique in that there are storms that circle the planet that kill everything. There is no local wildlife that isn't crustacean based- the people hunt and eat 'greatshells' the size of houses, and crack through their carapace and dodge their chitenous feet. All grass and trees have evolved to retract to flee the stormfront. People are left out to be killed by the storm. But, the storm brings stormlight with it- a kind of energy that can be captured by gemstones left out to be recharged by the weather. 'Radiants' like Jasnah can draw power from this stormlight by drawing it in like breath and using it to accomplish tremendous feats. There's no technology to speak of, partially because of historical events known as Desolations, where fabled voidbringers rose and attacked the human kingdoms and nearly razed them to the ground. Every time one of these catastrophes would occur, tremendous progress would be lost, so there are stories of old abilities that were never recovered.
Jasnah grew up a princess in the Alethi kingdom. The Alethi are a warlike people who have been fighting battles amongst themselves for centuries, and were only very recently united by her father, the first High King in generations. After his assassination, the control of the kingdom passed to Jasnah’s younger brother, and the Alethi went to war to seek vengeance on the people who had Gavilar killed.
Jasnah stayed mostly out of this conflict. She had become convinced that another Desolation was coming, and so threw herself into researching how to prevent or survive it. Sure enough, the Everstorm arrives and the Desolation begins. The kingdom of Alethkar falls to the Parshendi, the strange creatures who are imbued with tremendous powers by the new Everstorm. Jasnah and the remaining Alethi nobility live in exile in a mountain city, a tall tower sheltered from the storm.
As the last book ends, the war between the Parshendi and the humans is escalating. The island nation of Thaylenah, an old Alethi ally, is attacked by Parshendi, evil spren, and thunderclasts- massive giant golems that tower higher than most buildings, monsters that no one would ever have believed in until they came to life and began destroying houses and temples. The humans turn the enemy back, against practically all odds, but this marks the beginning of what is going to be a long term siege with apocalyptic consequences.
» SHORT DESCRIPTION: Brilliant, proud, authoritative, independent, determined, groundbreaking.
» INFLUENTIAL EVENTS:
1. Heresy.
Jasnah is the daughter of King Gavilar of Alethkar, and there are expectations when it comes to being a princess among the Alethi. It's an intensely reserved society, and very modest, with strict codes of behaviour for men and women. Women are supposed to confine themselves to womenly pursuits, such as scholarship, mathematics, and writing. Men aren't permitted to be able to read or write, and are instead relegated to labour, leadership, and warfare. The Alethi are extremely warlike, and the high princes fight among one another often. Women are expected to be chaste, to dress modestly, and to never reveal their 'safe hand,' the left hand, which is customarily covered by a sleeve worn long and dangling past the fingertips, or a glove, if you're not nobility. The Alethi have a strict caste system defined by the colour of a person's eyes- with light violet eyes, the honorific for Jasnah would be 'Brightness Kholin.' After a long life as an absolute paragon of the virtues of Alethi womanhood (albeit perhaps slightly more prudish and unmarried than is strictly appropriate) Jasnah absolutely scandalized the entire kingdom by disavowing the Vorin church. Despite her extremely pious people, Jasnah became an admitted atheist. People would try to convert (and occasionally assassinate) her for the rest of her life as a result of this decision, but the resistance only stiffened her resolve. Jasnah is not scared of people thinking badly of her. She commands respect through means other than popularity and false piety.
2. Loss.
When Jasnah was a young woman, her father Gavilar was assassinated. Jasnah was close with her father, and shaken by the loss. The death saw her (incompetent, immature) younger brother crowned king of Alethkar, and also ignited a tremendous war between the Alethi and the assassins. It shifted her family dynamics in other peculiar ways- shocking an alcoholic uncle into sobriety, starting off a long and close relationship between him and Jasnah. Though she bore through it with poise and dignity, Gavilar's death was one of the defining moments of her life.
3. Radiance.
Right as her father died, Jasnah was deeply occupied in her own story. She'd bonded a spren, which means formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with one of the sentient species of spren. The bond with Ivory gives her powers of a Knight Radiant- varied from person to person, between orders in the knights. Jasnah is an Elsecaller, meaning she has the surges of Transportation and Transformation- she can travel instantaneously from place to place, and she can soulcast- turn one kind of matter into another, like a stone into bread, or an enemy into smoke. The trouble was, the Radiants were only supposed to emerge when a Desolation was close. This becomes the impetus for Jasnah to devote her scholarship to learning what had happened, what the voidbringers even were, how the Radiants worked. It began a scholarly quest that lasted for years. She became convinced that the voidbringers had never left Roshar. Part of the world economy was based on the free labour of the obedient Parshmen, a group of people bought and sold by the Alethi, famous for their docility and stupidity. Parshmen left alone are likely to sit and stare at a wall, and the Alethi have taken extreme (unethical) advantage of the situation and folded them into their slave economy. Jasnah becomes convinced that the Parshmen were descended from Parshendi prisoners taken at the end of the last Desolation, and that when the Everstorm came, the Parshmen would rise up and kill their owners.
4. Void.
The Desolation began with the Everstorm, a second sweeping stormfront travelling in the opposite direction of the natural storms of Roshar. Jasnah's predictions about the Parshmen and Parshendi were basically incorrect, but there still manages to be a massive and ugly conflict between the Alethi and the Parshmen, who have risen up against their masters and made a break for freedom. An ugly war begins, and Jasnah is a key figure in steering it. This is a major life event for her not just because the world is changing, but because she reveals that she's a Radiant, and moves from scholar to soldier, defending cities with her tremendous powers.
5. Coronation.
During the early days of the Desolation, Alethkar is lost. The surviving Alethi scatter. Jasnah's brother, the king, is killed. Succession should then pass he throne to her uncle, but he turns it down for reasons that are far too complicated to go into. After that it should be her cousin, but he doesn't want it either, and his younger brother is an absolute mouse and a scholar... the end result is a tremendous break with tradition among the rigid and gender-restrictive Alethi. In an already completely unrecognizable new world, Jasnah Kholin becomes the new queen, cementing her role in history as an absolute iconoclast and force to be reckoned with.
» FIT: Jasnah is a natural leader and an absolute pragmatist. She's determined, she can fight, she's proud and interrogative and won't let anyone get away with an inch. She's a great fit for a game because she'll always drive the action forward. However, she's a weird fit for this setting because a) it's a huge technological jump, absolutely astonishing, and b) she comes from such an absolutely alien fantasy setting that the adjustment will be shocking. Not having any spren around, when you can't go a minute without seeing one in Roshar? Also what the heck is a dog?
There will also be a lot of culture shock and even potential conflict based on the normalized hierarchies in Alethkar. Jasnah currently takes it for granted that slavery is a perfectly natural consequence of lawbreaking, that the social caste system is completely normal. In her scholarship, Jasnah writes eloquent critiques of the system, but she grew up as a princess in this kingdom so a lot of the attitudes are internalised, though she'll deplore her own irrationality.
I am extremely interested to explore the theme of leadership with Jasnah. Many characters in DWRP have complex relationships with authority. Jasnah is an interesting mix of gifted, brilliant, and a natural leader, and completely lacking in any kind of emotionaly nurturing traits. She is magnetic, but she is not personable. She's also a newly minted leader, when she never expected to be. It will be interesting to see what kind of role she takes on in the community, whether she manages to alienate everyone as a haughty relic of an outdated political system, or whether she draws people to her. I'm sure it'll be some of both.
» POWERS: Although Jasnah is a reasonably powerful character in canon, there's a natural power cap in the setting for her, which is her access to stormlight. Without storms passing by to recharge done spheres, she'll never be able to draw in stormlight from gemstones, and stormlight is what feeds her powers. I'm generally an active player and will trade in every AC point I can get for recharged spheres, but this will still make it a real struggle for her to use her abilities. She will never have enough stormlight to transport from place to place, and she will only be able to soulcast small things. To make matters worse, spheres 'go done' on their own, so she can never save piles and piles of them and kill a guy, she'll always have to manage the tension of choosing between using all the fresh stormlight right now, and defending herself with a big push of soulcasting.
There are also complex world mechanics to do with special blades that Knights Radiant can summon from thin air. Jasnah will not have access to hers here (because the blade is actually the body of her spren and he isn't with her on board.) If it ever feels appropriate I'll ask mods about it on the AC post, but for the indeterminate future the weapon is absolutely nixed.
» NOTES: I'd also like to bring Jasnah in with a single lit sphere in her pocket, a token from home and a small bit of power to ease the adjustment. Maybe enough to transform about 100 grams of something solid into 100 ml of something liquid, decreasing by about 5 g/ml per day every day she doesn't use it until the sphere is done.
Also this is extremely esoteric but Alethi women don't reveal their left hand in public, it's a deeply sexualized bodypart. I was hoping to put one left handed glove in with her undergarments- though if that doesn't work I can swap it out with the sphere as her 'token from home.'
» SAMPLES:
Network
I've been up on the highest level of the structure, and from the windows that there are, I can't see land below us. I don't know what that means. As abrupt as this is, it's important that we proceed here slowly and methodically. When you learn something, share it with these- they're not spanreeds, I don't think we have anything exactly like them on my world. But they're useful nonetheless.
I am what my world calls a veristitalian, part of a movement of scholarship that emphasize women recording the world around us in order to create a comprehensive record. This combined log can then be analyzed, to generate an understanding of the world in general, based only off of proven and observable realities. Not superstition, not tradition, not supposition and not faith. I propose we each of us begin to contribute to this record now, in whatever way we can.
I haven't seen any spren, or any stormlight, and I haven't yet met a person who knows what such thing are. I'd be grateful if you'd read this message out to the men near you, and scribe for them if they find anything we should be aware of.
[A few minutes later, ever so slightly non-plussed.]
All of them read. In every world? That strikes me as a tremendous improvement.
[She's further from home than she thought.]
Log
1. 2. 3.
