application: tlv
Mar. 23rd, 2019 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
veristitalianUser 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.
