giftedtwin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
giftedtwin) wrote2011-08-06 12:00 am
giftedtwin) wrote2011-08-06 12:00 am
Entry tags:
TLV APPLICATION; complete
User Name/Nick: Jessi
User LJ:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jessihoney
AIM/IM: jessihoney18
E-mail: jess[dot]piggin[at]gmail[dot]com
Other Characters: Perry
Character Name: Master Lord Thom of Trebond
Series: The Song of the Lioness Quartet
Age: 19
From When?: After his death.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate ― while Alanna made friends and tempered her skill with socialisation, Thom sought only power. He has deep trust issues and a bit of a god complex.
Item: n/a
Abilities/Powers: Thom is a very powerful sorceror. He has the power to do... well, pretty much anything, as long as he knows the spell for it. He's the youngest person to ever pass the Mastery exams; he focused on arcane and esoteric magic. He can heal, though that was never something he was particularly focused on so it's not that strong and he doesn't know that much theory on it. He raises someone from the dead (though it's revealed in later books that Roger was actually in the Sorceror's Sleep, which is a sort of state between death and life, as no one but the gods can ACTUALLY bring people back from the Black God's realm) and with enough literature, he can do just about anything.
Limitation-wise, there's a couple of things to note. After he raised Roger, his Gift was corrupted by Roger's, slowly killing him; he wasn't able to perform small spells anymore because he couldn't control the amount of power he used, his body became super-heated and he glowed in the dark and he describes it—jokingly—as “a cold in my Gift”. Before he died, he put some of his power into his twin, but the rest of it was drained completely by Roger at the moment of death. Gifts regenerate, but that kind of draining isn't something that's going to come back too quickly, and he's going to be sick and stuff for a while on waking on the Barge. When it does start to come back (probably after a few weeks?) it'll be limited by the Barge, so it's going to be much smaller and probably still corrupted, so he won't be able to use it too much. Setting limits, I'm going to say that he won't be able to perform anything big; the showy magic of the court or the powerful arcane magic he spent his time learning in the City of the Gods. He'll be able to create light, create small fires and use healing magic; he'll be able to transform small objects into other things (though this creates an imbalance in the world and if, say, he changed a chair into a book, somewhere on the Barge a book would change into a chair to rebalance it and he probably won't do it much because it's more trouble than it's worth); he'll be able to do a tiny bit of fairly useless scrying (so, for example, he'll be able to look into a mirror and get tiny glimpses of future events) but I'm going to limit that with it being only REALLY near future, like less than an a half hour or something; he'll be able to sense magic in objects and people but not accurately and without being able to use Words of Power etc he won't be able to learn what type of power/how strong it is/etc.
There's a lot of power in Thom and magic in the Tortall universe isn't really that well defined, so it's an iffy sort of thing. I would have said his magic was going to just be completely gone, but learning to offset his powerlust with socialisation and learning to use it responsibly is going to be a big part of his redemption, so... yeah. It's kind of necessary. If you other mods need me to try and define a bigger list of what he can do or limit him further or take out particular powers, I can do that. If there's anything I'm iffy on when playing him, I'll come to one of you guys and discuss it.
Personality: Thom's main defining trait is his desire for power. From when he was a small child, he wanted the power he could get by learning his magic. His dreams were big then. When talking to Alanna about not wanting to be a knight, he states, “I don't want to be a knight! I want to be a sorceror. I want to slay demons and walk with the gods.” That desire and ambition only grew as he became more and more powerful through his training. Thom believes that power is all important. He was willing to sacrifice almost anything for it—everything except his twin sister—up to and including normal human interaction. He seeks power to the detriment of his personal relationships, becoming hard and cold. He completely rejected the other students and the masters in the City of the Gods, believing they would be afraid and jealous of his power if they knew what he possessed. For Thom, his power is kind of like a safety blanket. He can have his power and has convinced himself that if he has his power, he needs nothing else. He uses it as a shield to keep himself from people who might disappoint him, and he uses it to raise himself up in his own mind. He believed it would be easy to become a god, if only he could learn enough magic, and therefore only ever have to rely on himself.
A huge part of his identity is tied up in the strong Gift he has; he started learning basic magic when he was somewhere around four or five and then formally training to become a sorceror at age ten, and for those years of his life, he tracked down the hardest, most obscure spells he could find, partly because he wanted to test himself to make sure he was as powerful as he believed and partly because almost no one else could do those things. He studied completely arcane and esoteric spells for a lot of his training, just for kicks because no one else was learning them and they were usually big and showy. He, like his sister Alanna, possibly had a natural talent for healing seeing as they're twins, but he never focused on learning much of that magic because it was too mundane, too ordinary. Thom longs to be extraordinary.
A lot of Thom's actions do come from a need to feel special and unique, though he doesn't acknowledge that desire in himself. They also stem from fear—he fears being rejected or repressed or hurt in some other way by the people around him, so he retreats into himself. Or at least, it started as fear and then kind of became habit and arrogance as he started to view himself as on a much higher level than other people. Nothing anyone else does is important and he misconstrues their intentions—for example, he tells Alanna that Master Si-cham and the other Masters are simply jealous of him and fear his power but in truth Si-cham fears what his power may do to him and others but would happily have become a mentor and friend if Thom had let him.
There's somewhat of a disconnect between Thom and his own emotions; he's sought knowledge and magic for so long that concerns that aren't knowledge and magic elude him. Alanna comments that he seems incredibly lonely and he doesn't even know it when she visits him in the City. He doesn't really understand what makes himself (and everyone else around him) tick. It's not exactly that Thom doesn't understand human emotions, it's more that he doesn't view them as particularly important. Although he can put on a courtly manner and can be perfectly polite if and when he wants to be—he is a noble Lord in a chivalric society, after all—but he usually doesn't bother unless he's addressing someone of a higher noble rank than himself. Unless there's some kind of need or reason for it, other than just polite social convention, Thom won't use formalities. He's used to being the most powerful person in the room and therefore the concerns of mere mortals don't concern him.
Thom is arrogant. Very, very arrogant. He is proud and has an ego. He longs for power and once he has it, he needs to feel secure in it. If he believes he's the most powerful or the smartest person in the room, he's perfectly happy to act like a fool and pretend to be stupid. When someone actually legitimately knows something that he doesn't, he feels like an idiot and he feels angry and humiliated. He takes personal offence at things that aren't meant to be offensive. He gets defensive about his knowledge, insisting that he knows what's best and that he can do it. He's self-centred and he also doesn't respect other people's knowledge, somehow viewing it either as unimportant, useless or some kind of threat to his own position of power. Interestingly, he doesn't try to use his power to manipulate other people. It's enough for him to have the power and the knowledge that he is the only person who can do what he does; he hardly ever feels the need to play with the people around him.
He is, however, impulsive. For a long, long time, he firmly believed that everything he chose to do was right and important—only after raising Duke Roger from the dead and having his Gift corrupted did he realise (privately) that maybe he wasn't so right all the time. But Thom doesn't think a lot about consequences before he does something. He doesn't consider other people's feelings before doing what he thinks is right. And what he thinks is right is certainly usually not his society's general idea of right. Right isn't normally raising your twin sister's archenemy—the most powerful sorceror in the Eastern Lands bar yourself, the man who tried to kill the King, Queen and Prince a number of times—from the dead less than a year after she killed him in a duel.
He feels a lot of guilt and shame at himself for raising Roger, but Thom is, inside, a bit of a little boy in terms of emotion. He can't express his feelings very well and lashes out at people instead of trying to solve the problems. He has a temper that flares up sometimes; he's goaded into doing stupid things to prove he's the best; he can't admit to his mistakes and anyone questioning him will get themselves snapped at. He's blunt and direct and pert, particularly by the end of his life—as by the time you're glowing bright enough to light a room and you're hot enough that touching your skin almost burns another person, you don't have a lot of fucks to give about offending people.
It's stated that the only person he ever loved was Alanna, and certainly he cared about her a huge amount. The bond between the twins was unbreakable, and even after years of distance and seperation, that love remained strong. All other personal relationships completely eluded him because he's antisocial.
He's curious, interested in forms of magic he hasn't seen or studied. He'll learn spells he'll never, ever have reason to use just to say that he can do that spell. He has a sense of humour, though its nice side usually only shows through around Alanna, and even then, he's a fan of the loving-mocking school of joking.
On the Barge, Thom will basically... ignore his warden, if he can help it. He won't like the idea of having to listen to someone else harp on about what he did wrong, even if he knows exactly what he did. Knowing it and admitting it to a stranger are completely different things. The fact that he won't have most of his Gift will be a problem as well, as he will find it extremely distressing. He'll distract himself for a while by discovering technology and trying to understand how it works and what it is; he'll think it's a weird form of magic. He'll also be fascinated by the idea of parallel universes, different time periods and the ports and floods. His investigations into this stuff will be initially entirely for distraction purposes, so he can remain in denial for a while and pretend everything's cool.
Path to Redemption: Thom needs to learn how to deal with people—he needs a big old bunch of socialisation. A warden can help him a lot just by talking to him and dealing with his issues as they arise; making friends is going to be the first thing a warden will need to do. Then, in terms of what needs to be addressed, the warden will have to help him get control over his power (particularly as it's going to come back partially-corrupted and he's going to eventually have to deal with that by completing the spells he and Master Si-cham began before the coronation) and stop being so proud and arrogant about it. He'll have to learn to use it responsibly and not as a way to gain a higher status than other people. He'll need to learn to trust other people and to stop taking personal offense at people being smarter than him or more skilled than him at certain things. His guilt and shame need to be worked through, once he can admit how stupid he was.
Something that isn't going to work is flat out telling him where he went wrong, calling him out on things he did that were idiotic or stupid, as Thom will most likely get defensive and shut down the conversations, not taking it on board.
Talking about Alanna will almost certainly be a good way in, though it'll probably take him a while to open up. Another good thing to get him to do would be to learn to use his power for healing--an unselfish way of using his Gift, and a constructive use of power.
History: In 419 HE (Human Era of his world), Thom and his twin sister Alanna were born to Lady Marinie and Lord Alan of Trebond. Sadly, Marinie died in childbirth despite her magical Gift. The twins were Gifted as well; Lord Alan believed their Gifts should have saved their mother and blamed the magic for his wife's death. Because of this, he didn't allow the twins to learn magic. He retreated from their lives and was a mostly absent figure in their childhoods. The two people who mainly raised the twins were Coram and Maude—Coram, an ex-soldier, taught them to ride, to hunt and some basic fighting; Maude, the village wise woman, taught the twins some basic herb-lore and all the magic she knew behind their father's back. Alanna was always much more into the physical training, excelling in the basics Coram taught them. Thom, however, hated the physical stuff because he wasn't naturally good at it and Coram made him feel stupid. He was much more interested in the power he could gain through learning magic. He listened to Maude and paid attention to her because he believed she had something more to teach the twins. (She had taught them pretty much everything she knew, except for some magic that was almost too powerful for her to attempt.)
When it came time for the twins to leave their home fief, their father planned to send Thom to the palace to earn his knighthood and Alanna to the convents in the City of the Gods to learn to be a lady. The twins had other ideas. At Alanna's urging, Thom forged letters to Duke Gareth at the palace and the First Daughter of the convent, saying that Thom was to learn sorcery and “Alan” was to become a knight. Alanna convinced Thom that they would be able to frighten Coram into silence and that they would be able to talk Maude around to going along with them. Maude attempted to scry in the fire—a magic she wasn't really powerful enough to attempt, but managed it anyway, much to Thom's interest. Maude agreed to their plan, and the next morning, Coram and Alanna headed for the palace while Maude and Thom went to the City of the Gods.
For the next three years, Thom lived in the convent, relearning basics and learning new forms of magic. (Because the books follow Alanna, we only learn of his life there second-hand, and not much about it even then.) After three years at the convent, he moved to the Mithran Cloisters and became a student there. A number of things happened outside the City of the Gods during the years of his training which Thom heard and wrote to Alanna about--such as the Ysandir in the Black City being defeated, the Sweating Sickness that raged through Corus, and the war with Tusaine. For the most part, these events were completely removed from his life. Their interest for him was solely in the magic involved and their effect on his sister. He wrote to Alanna a number of times to tell her to watch out for her “smiling friend” Duke Roger of Conte, the mastermind behind most of the shit going down in Tortall. Roger, feeling threatened by Alanna at the palace, sent spies to check up on Thom and gauge whether he was as much of a threat as his twin 'brother'.By that point, however, Thom had been playing the idiot for a number of years, practising his magic late at night and keeping a low profile by pretending to be stupid and slow during actual lessons. He had much more power than he let on, and he managed to keep Roger's spies fooled as well. In fact, until he decides to take his Mastery examinations at age eighteen, no one ever suspects he's as powerful as he turns out to be.
He passed the written Mastery exams (something which most sorcerors only even ATTEMPT in their late twenties and early thirties), and was preparing for his spoken exams and his Ordeal of Sorcery when Alanna and George Cooper came to visit him in the City. They discussed Duke Roger and a number of other things; the main thing that came of this visit was Thom's Ordeal of Sorcery, as—in trying to force Alanna's goddess-given emberstone pendant to give up its secrets to him with a very powerful word of Command—he disrupted a number of very delicate and intricate spells that the other Masters were working on; one of the masters, Si-cham, told him that his Ordeal would be to put all those spells to rights. He managed to complete this a little while before Alanna's Ordeal of Knighthood. He then prepared to travel to Corus to support her and see her knighted, delaying the trip only so as to create a special shield for her that displayed the Trebond coat of arms initially but when she revealed her true identity as a woman could be changed to show a lioness rampant to represent her as the first lady knight in centuries. After finishing this shield, he left for Corus, getting there in time to present Alanna with her shield.
At the festivities accompanying the various squires completing their Ordeals, Thom met Duke Roger for the first time. He sat and talked with him about spells and sorcery, while Alanna took the opportunity to break into Roger's rooms and discover magic wax figurines of a number of people in the palace that Roger had been using as part of his plot to take the throne. She brought them forth as evidence against him and he demanded trial by combat. Even though her hands had been injured in the Chamber of the Ordeal and even though Roger cheated with magic during the duel, Alanna managed to win, killing him. In the process, her secret was revealed before the court as her special boob-binding corset was cut through and her breasts showed through her clothes. Thom stepped in and explained their swap to the King and the rest of the court. Shortly after this, Alanna left the court for wandering as a knight of the realm (mainly just to get away for a while). Thom took his place in the court.
He enjoyed the courtly lifestyle, liking fine clothes, feasting and all the attention he was given as the youngest ever Master of the Mithran Light. Some of Roger's followers and hangers-on attatched themselves to him, feeding his ego. One in particular, Delia of Eldorne, goaded him constantly, trying to get him to prove how strong his power was, saying that if he was truly Gifted enough to be a Master at such a young age he must have the power to do what any of the great sorcerors could do; she wanted him to try raising the dead.
Thom finally gave in around ten months after Alanna left the court—during which time she got adopted into a Bazhir desert tribe, got proposed to (kind of) by the Prince, taught two girls to be shamans in a male-dominated culture, rejected the Prince's proposal, then went and started sleeping with George and hanging out in Port Caynn—and prepared to raise Roger from his tomb. For a while, he set wards and guard spells up, then prepared what he would need, then finally, on All Hallow, he drained almost all of Alanna's power without permission and used it and his own to raise her archenemy from the dead. Nice move, Thom.
He kept it secret for a while, then revealed Roger to the court. (Alanna had travelled into far distant lands by then and had no idea of any of this until over half a year later.) The shock—and an ill-timed illness—basically killed the Queen, then the King followed quickly after—committing suicide by jumping off a cliff on his horse. Thom was shunned a little bit, as people feared him and hated what he'd done. Roger showed no sign of having his once-powerful Gift, however, and the court started to readjust. Roger seemed to feel that he owed Thom a debt, so helped him with research and other mundane stuff; Thom was charged with spying on Roger and watching for any sign that his magic was returning. (In the original version of this story, which was an adult fantasy novel rather than four YA fantasy books, Thom actually started a romantic/sexual relationship with Roger during this time. I'm not entirely sure how it would've played out because they're both royally screwed up characters, and a lot of things would have been terrible about it.)
From some time (probably around five or six months) after Roger was raised, Thom started getting sick. His body temperature slowly rose, his flesh started to glow in the dark and his Gift—which had been a bright amethyst purple fire before—turned an old-blood rusty red colour. This was down to his Gift being corrupted by Roger's—his had been a bright orange, and both his and Thom's Gifts after his return had changed to the rusty red. Thom was the only one of the two to get sick at all, though. He was also so full of power that he had absolutely no control over the amount of magic that went into even the simplest of his spells. He refused help, rejected the idea that he had made a mistake and was in trouble he couldn't handle. George Cooper visited him once or twice for Alanna's sake, worrying about his health. Thom refused help, but George sent for Master Si-cham anyway.
Alanna returned to court eight months after Thom raised Roger. To her horror, she found the state of affairs completely different: Roger alive, the King and Queen dead and Jonathan to be crowned. And her twin basically dying slowly. Thom begged her forgiveness and she forgave him. The coronation was slated to happen not too long after her return. Everyone prepared. Master Si-cham arrived, Thom initially rejected his help but finally relented. Si-cham and Thom, the week before the coronation, asked Alanna to help; they needed her to carry a part of Thom's corrupted, overgrown Gift for a week, so that he would be free to start the necessary spells to fix himself. She agreed a little reluctantly and took a part of his magic.
Roger was, of course, scheming behind everyone's backs, and on the coronation day, his military forces stormed the palace from the streets while he created a Gate of Idramm in the palace catacombs to drain power away from anyone who got near it. He drained what remained of Thom's Gift entirely to draw the Gate. Thom's body, already weak and sick, gave out, and Alanna found him dying. He had just enough strength to tell her not to use her Gift because it was tied to the bit of his she still held and that was tied to Roger. As long as she didn't use her own Gift, that part would be locked away and Roger would not be able to drain it.
Then Thom died while Alanna was holding his hand. And it was sad as fuck.
Sample Journal Entry: [Today, Barge, you're going to get to see an old timey person figure out the journals. The first part of this is scribbled fast in thin, scratchy handwriting. Thom's using the paper journal he found sitting next to the communicator device, which he doesn't recognise at all, to write notes about said communicator.]
origin?Carthakian divine? ?
magic stored inside -- not the one using
sorcerors
scrying, far-speech
language- "communicator", "fuck", "robot"
floods?
perhaps linked warning messages--harnessed magic--long distances
NO WA
[The scribbling stops abruptly in the middle of a word and there's a few minutes of nothing. Then the video feed on the communicator clicks on, showing Thom's fingers half-covering the camera and a tiny glimpse of coppery-red hair. His voice is extremely raspy and he's halfway through a muttered sentence.]
--rse, you press these into the-- [The video feed flicks off entirely, then switches quickly to audio, then back to video. Now his thumb's covering half the camera and he moves it experimentally, shifting it off the camera. He peers into the lens and you get a lovely shot of purple eyes in a sallow face complete with deep, dark bags. His face looks a little sweaty.] I see, it's... a little like a scrying mirror but-- [He trails off. He can see himself on the screen now; he puts his thumb back over the lens twice, blotting out the image, then stops. He tries to position the camera and manages to... kind of get it to an angle that isn't THAT bad. He's too close, though, and his hand is shaking enough that the image jitters.]
I'm afraid I'm at a loss. I don't even know who I'm asking, but if you... others can see this I'd very much like to know where I am. [A wry, slightly bitter smile stretches his too-thin face and the camera angle dips abruptly as he glances over his shoulder at the door. He forgets to fix it when he looks distractedly back.] I did think it was my rooms in the palace, but I just opened my door and it...suddenly became very obvious that that is not the case. Either I'm somewhere different, or this is a very, very odd dream. And as I'm not inclined to ha-- [But his calm speech is interrupted by a sudden, dry coughing fit and the camera jerks wildly around. When it's over, he doesn't finish his sentence or adjust the camera and instead just rasps:] I would appreciate the information, if anyone has it to give.
[Then there's some shaky fumbling and button pressing that changes the feed to audio again--which catches the tail-end of a second painful coughing fit--and then off.]
Sample RP: Thom woke himself with a rasping cough, feeling cold all over. He sat up in the pitch-dark room, blinking wide eyes in the blackness. He couldn't see anything. His lungs were burning; it felt like his ribs were tightening around them. He dug his fingers into the skin on his chest, wheezing, his mind entirely focused on the deceptively simple act of just breathing. Take another breath. When had this gotten so hard? He used to be able to breathe easily. Another. Before—
Then everything that had happened came rushing back to him. The coronation, Roger, Alanna. He had died. Roger had drained him and he had died with Alanna's hand in his. He was alive, though. Wasn't he breathing? Had it been some kind of dream? A vision maybe? Or was this the Black God's realm? He reached for his Gift, knowing there were candles by his bedside or a set fire in the hearth, intending to light them even if the power he drew would be enough to melt the candles to stubs or char the logs to embers in an instant.
There was nothing there.
The young Master reached again, frantically, hands simultaneously groping in front of him. Nothing! There was nothing. His Gift was drained, completely and utterly. He felt empty inside, all of his senses deadened and dull. His teeth chattered as he tried one more time, trying to draw some magic—any tiny little scraps—from the deepest parts of his power. Again, nothing. This was different than the few times he had drained his Gift trying some powerful spell before. This time it had been ripped from him, all the carefully-collected power that he held draining to Roger.
Slowly, Thom's ragged breathing calmed. He realised then why the blackness seemed so unusual; he no longer glowed. He lowered his hands slowly to the blankets, then slid his skeletal frame out of bed. Reaching to the table by the bed, he scrabbled for flint and steel, striking a spark after a few tries and managing to light a candle. He was in his room, the room from the palace just the same as it ever was.. If this was the Black God's domain, it wasn't what he would have expected.
He shuffled toward the door. Another round of coughing stopped him in his tracks for a long moment, but he reached it, slumped against it for a moment as he caught his breath. He was shaking so intensely he could barely stand. Finally he opened the door, expecting to see the palace halls. What he saw—once his eyes adjusted to the blinding lights—was something completely different.
Special Notes: I have a feeling my tenses are slipping everywhere throughout this app. Ugh.
User LJ:
jessihoneyAIM/IM: jessihoney18
E-mail: jess[dot]piggin[at]gmail[dot]com
Other Characters: Perry
Character Name: Master Lord Thom of Trebond
Series: The Song of the Lioness Quartet
Age: 19
From When?: After his death.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate ― while Alanna made friends and tempered her skill with socialisation, Thom sought only power. He has deep trust issues and a bit of a god complex.
Item: n/a
Abilities/Powers: Thom is a very powerful sorceror. He has the power to do... well, pretty much anything, as long as he knows the spell for it. He's the youngest person to ever pass the Mastery exams; he focused on arcane and esoteric magic. He can heal, though that was never something he was particularly focused on so it's not that strong and he doesn't know that much theory on it. He raises someone from the dead (though it's revealed in later books that Roger was actually in the Sorceror's Sleep, which is a sort of state between death and life, as no one but the gods can ACTUALLY bring people back from the Black God's realm) and with enough literature, he can do just about anything.
Limitation-wise, there's a couple of things to note. After he raised Roger, his Gift was corrupted by Roger's, slowly killing him; he wasn't able to perform small spells anymore because he couldn't control the amount of power he used, his body became super-heated and he glowed in the dark and he describes it—jokingly—as “a cold in my Gift”. Before he died, he put some of his power into his twin, but the rest of it was drained completely by Roger at the moment of death. Gifts regenerate, but that kind of draining isn't something that's going to come back too quickly, and he's going to be sick and stuff for a while on waking on the Barge. When it does start to come back (probably after a few weeks?) it'll be limited by the Barge, so it's going to be much smaller and probably still corrupted, so he won't be able to use it too much. Setting limits, I'm going to say that he won't be able to perform anything big; the showy magic of the court or the powerful arcane magic he spent his time learning in the City of the Gods. He'll be able to create light, create small fires and use healing magic; he'll be able to transform small objects into other things (though this creates an imbalance in the world and if, say, he changed a chair into a book, somewhere on the Barge a book would change into a chair to rebalance it and he probably won't do it much because it's more trouble than it's worth); he'll be able to do a tiny bit of fairly useless scrying (so, for example, he'll be able to look into a mirror and get tiny glimpses of future events) but I'm going to limit that with it being only REALLY near future, like less than an a half hour or something; he'll be able to sense magic in objects and people but not accurately and without being able to use Words of Power etc he won't be able to learn what type of power/how strong it is/etc.
There's a lot of power in Thom and magic in the Tortall universe isn't really that well defined, so it's an iffy sort of thing. I would have said his magic was going to just be completely gone, but learning to offset his powerlust with socialisation and learning to use it responsibly is going to be a big part of his redemption, so... yeah. It's kind of necessary. If you other mods need me to try and define a bigger list of what he can do or limit him further or take out particular powers, I can do that. If there's anything I'm iffy on when playing him, I'll come to one of you guys and discuss it.
Personality: Thom's main defining trait is his desire for power. From when he was a small child, he wanted the power he could get by learning his magic. His dreams were big then. When talking to Alanna about not wanting to be a knight, he states, “I don't want to be a knight! I want to be a sorceror. I want to slay demons and walk with the gods.” That desire and ambition only grew as he became more and more powerful through his training. Thom believes that power is all important. He was willing to sacrifice almost anything for it—everything except his twin sister—up to and including normal human interaction. He seeks power to the detriment of his personal relationships, becoming hard and cold. He completely rejected the other students and the masters in the City of the Gods, believing they would be afraid and jealous of his power if they knew what he possessed. For Thom, his power is kind of like a safety blanket. He can have his power and has convinced himself that if he has his power, he needs nothing else. He uses it as a shield to keep himself from people who might disappoint him, and he uses it to raise himself up in his own mind. He believed it would be easy to become a god, if only he could learn enough magic, and therefore only ever have to rely on himself.
A huge part of his identity is tied up in the strong Gift he has; he started learning basic magic when he was somewhere around four or five and then formally training to become a sorceror at age ten, and for those years of his life, he tracked down the hardest, most obscure spells he could find, partly because he wanted to test himself to make sure he was as powerful as he believed and partly because almost no one else could do those things. He studied completely arcane and esoteric spells for a lot of his training, just for kicks because no one else was learning them and they were usually big and showy. He, like his sister Alanna, possibly had a natural talent for healing seeing as they're twins, but he never focused on learning much of that magic because it was too mundane, too ordinary. Thom longs to be extraordinary.
A lot of Thom's actions do come from a need to feel special and unique, though he doesn't acknowledge that desire in himself. They also stem from fear—he fears being rejected or repressed or hurt in some other way by the people around him, so he retreats into himself. Or at least, it started as fear and then kind of became habit and arrogance as he started to view himself as on a much higher level than other people. Nothing anyone else does is important and he misconstrues their intentions—for example, he tells Alanna that Master Si-cham and the other Masters are simply jealous of him and fear his power but in truth Si-cham fears what his power may do to him and others but would happily have become a mentor and friend if Thom had let him.
There's somewhat of a disconnect between Thom and his own emotions; he's sought knowledge and magic for so long that concerns that aren't knowledge and magic elude him. Alanna comments that he seems incredibly lonely and he doesn't even know it when she visits him in the City. He doesn't really understand what makes himself (and everyone else around him) tick. It's not exactly that Thom doesn't understand human emotions, it's more that he doesn't view them as particularly important. Although he can put on a courtly manner and can be perfectly polite if and when he wants to be—he is a noble Lord in a chivalric society, after all—but he usually doesn't bother unless he's addressing someone of a higher noble rank than himself. Unless there's some kind of need or reason for it, other than just polite social convention, Thom won't use formalities. He's used to being the most powerful person in the room and therefore the concerns of mere mortals don't concern him.
Thom is arrogant. Very, very arrogant. He is proud and has an ego. He longs for power and once he has it, he needs to feel secure in it. If he believes he's the most powerful or the smartest person in the room, he's perfectly happy to act like a fool and pretend to be stupid. When someone actually legitimately knows something that he doesn't, he feels like an idiot and he feels angry and humiliated. He takes personal offence at things that aren't meant to be offensive. He gets defensive about his knowledge, insisting that he knows what's best and that he can do it. He's self-centred and he also doesn't respect other people's knowledge, somehow viewing it either as unimportant, useless or some kind of threat to his own position of power. Interestingly, he doesn't try to use his power to manipulate other people. It's enough for him to have the power and the knowledge that he is the only person who can do what he does; he hardly ever feels the need to play with the people around him.
He is, however, impulsive. For a long, long time, he firmly believed that everything he chose to do was right and important—only after raising Duke Roger from the dead and having his Gift corrupted did he realise (privately) that maybe he wasn't so right all the time. But Thom doesn't think a lot about consequences before he does something. He doesn't consider other people's feelings before doing what he thinks is right. And what he thinks is right is certainly usually not his society's general idea of right. Right isn't normally raising your twin sister's archenemy—the most powerful sorceror in the Eastern Lands bar yourself, the man who tried to kill the King, Queen and Prince a number of times—from the dead less than a year after she killed him in a duel.
He feels a lot of guilt and shame at himself for raising Roger, but Thom is, inside, a bit of a little boy in terms of emotion. He can't express his feelings very well and lashes out at people instead of trying to solve the problems. He has a temper that flares up sometimes; he's goaded into doing stupid things to prove he's the best; he can't admit to his mistakes and anyone questioning him will get themselves snapped at. He's blunt and direct and pert, particularly by the end of his life—as by the time you're glowing bright enough to light a room and you're hot enough that touching your skin almost burns another person, you don't have a lot of fucks to give about offending people.
It's stated that the only person he ever loved was Alanna, and certainly he cared about her a huge amount. The bond between the twins was unbreakable, and even after years of distance and seperation, that love remained strong. All other personal relationships completely eluded him because he's antisocial.
He's curious, interested in forms of magic he hasn't seen or studied. He'll learn spells he'll never, ever have reason to use just to say that he can do that spell. He has a sense of humour, though its nice side usually only shows through around Alanna, and even then, he's a fan of the loving-mocking school of joking.
On the Barge, Thom will basically... ignore his warden, if he can help it. He won't like the idea of having to listen to someone else harp on about what he did wrong, even if he knows exactly what he did. Knowing it and admitting it to a stranger are completely different things. The fact that he won't have most of his Gift will be a problem as well, as he will find it extremely distressing. He'll distract himself for a while by discovering technology and trying to understand how it works and what it is; he'll think it's a weird form of magic. He'll also be fascinated by the idea of parallel universes, different time periods and the ports and floods. His investigations into this stuff will be initially entirely for distraction purposes, so he can remain in denial for a while and pretend everything's cool.
Path to Redemption: Thom needs to learn how to deal with people—he needs a big old bunch of socialisation. A warden can help him a lot just by talking to him and dealing with his issues as they arise; making friends is going to be the first thing a warden will need to do. Then, in terms of what needs to be addressed, the warden will have to help him get control over his power (particularly as it's going to come back partially-corrupted and he's going to eventually have to deal with that by completing the spells he and Master Si-cham began before the coronation) and stop being so proud and arrogant about it. He'll have to learn to use it responsibly and not as a way to gain a higher status than other people. He'll need to learn to trust other people and to stop taking personal offense at people being smarter than him or more skilled than him at certain things. His guilt and shame need to be worked through, once he can admit how stupid he was.
Something that isn't going to work is flat out telling him where he went wrong, calling him out on things he did that were idiotic or stupid, as Thom will most likely get defensive and shut down the conversations, not taking it on board.
Talking about Alanna will almost certainly be a good way in, though it'll probably take him a while to open up. Another good thing to get him to do would be to learn to use his power for healing--an unselfish way of using his Gift, and a constructive use of power.
History: In 419 HE (Human Era of his world), Thom and his twin sister Alanna were born to Lady Marinie and Lord Alan of Trebond. Sadly, Marinie died in childbirth despite her magical Gift. The twins were Gifted as well; Lord Alan believed their Gifts should have saved their mother and blamed the magic for his wife's death. Because of this, he didn't allow the twins to learn magic. He retreated from their lives and was a mostly absent figure in their childhoods. The two people who mainly raised the twins were Coram and Maude—Coram, an ex-soldier, taught them to ride, to hunt and some basic fighting; Maude, the village wise woman, taught the twins some basic herb-lore and all the magic she knew behind their father's back. Alanna was always much more into the physical training, excelling in the basics Coram taught them. Thom, however, hated the physical stuff because he wasn't naturally good at it and Coram made him feel stupid. He was much more interested in the power he could gain through learning magic. He listened to Maude and paid attention to her because he believed she had something more to teach the twins. (She had taught them pretty much everything she knew, except for some magic that was almost too powerful for her to attempt.)
When it came time for the twins to leave their home fief, their father planned to send Thom to the palace to earn his knighthood and Alanna to the convents in the City of the Gods to learn to be a lady. The twins had other ideas. At Alanna's urging, Thom forged letters to Duke Gareth at the palace and the First Daughter of the convent, saying that Thom was to learn sorcery and “Alan” was to become a knight. Alanna convinced Thom that they would be able to frighten Coram into silence and that they would be able to talk Maude around to going along with them. Maude attempted to scry in the fire—a magic she wasn't really powerful enough to attempt, but managed it anyway, much to Thom's interest. Maude agreed to their plan, and the next morning, Coram and Alanna headed for the palace while Maude and Thom went to the City of the Gods.
For the next three years, Thom lived in the convent, relearning basics and learning new forms of magic. (Because the books follow Alanna, we only learn of his life there second-hand, and not much about it even then.) After three years at the convent, he moved to the Mithran Cloisters and became a student there. A number of things happened outside the City of the Gods during the years of his training which Thom heard and wrote to Alanna about--such as the Ysandir in the Black City being defeated, the Sweating Sickness that raged through Corus, and the war with Tusaine. For the most part, these events were completely removed from his life. Their interest for him was solely in the magic involved and their effect on his sister. He wrote to Alanna a number of times to tell her to watch out for her “smiling friend” Duke Roger of Conte, the mastermind behind most of the shit going down in Tortall. Roger, feeling threatened by Alanna at the palace, sent spies to check up on Thom and gauge whether he was as much of a threat as his twin 'brother'.By that point, however, Thom had been playing the idiot for a number of years, practising his magic late at night and keeping a low profile by pretending to be stupid and slow during actual lessons. He had much more power than he let on, and he managed to keep Roger's spies fooled as well. In fact, until he decides to take his Mastery examinations at age eighteen, no one ever suspects he's as powerful as he turns out to be.
He passed the written Mastery exams (something which most sorcerors only even ATTEMPT in their late twenties and early thirties), and was preparing for his spoken exams and his Ordeal of Sorcery when Alanna and George Cooper came to visit him in the City. They discussed Duke Roger and a number of other things; the main thing that came of this visit was Thom's Ordeal of Sorcery, as—in trying to force Alanna's goddess-given emberstone pendant to give up its secrets to him with a very powerful word of Command—he disrupted a number of very delicate and intricate spells that the other Masters were working on; one of the masters, Si-cham, told him that his Ordeal would be to put all those spells to rights. He managed to complete this a little while before Alanna's Ordeal of Knighthood. He then prepared to travel to Corus to support her and see her knighted, delaying the trip only so as to create a special shield for her that displayed the Trebond coat of arms initially but when she revealed her true identity as a woman could be changed to show a lioness rampant to represent her as the first lady knight in centuries. After finishing this shield, he left for Corus, getting there in time to present Alanna with her shield.
At the festivities accompanying the various squires completing their Ordeals, Thom met Duke Roger for the first time. He sat and talked with him about spells and sorcery, while Alanna took the opportunity to break into Roger's rooms and discover magic wax figurines of a number of people in the palace that Roger had been using as part of his plot to take the throne. She brought them forth as evidence against him and he demanded trial by combat. Even though her hands had been injured in the Chamber of the Ordeal and even though Roger cheated with magic during the duel, Alanna managed to win, killing him. In the process, her secret was revealed before the court as her special boob-binding corset was cut through and her breasts showed through her clothes. Thom stepped in and explained their swap to the King and the rest of the court. Shortly after this, Alanna left the court for wandering as a knight of the realm (mainly just to get away for a while). Thom took his place in the court.
He enjoyed the courtly lifestyle, liking fine clothes, feasting and all the attention he was given as the youngest ever Master of the Mithran Light. Some of Roger's followers and hangers-on attatched themselves to him, feeding his ego. One in particular, Delia of Eldorne, goaded him constantly, trying to get him to prove how strong his power was, saying that if he was truly Gifted enough to be a Master at such a young age he must have the power to do what any of the great sorcerors could do; she wanted him to try raising the dead.
Thom finally gave in around ten months after Alanna left the court—during which time she got adopted into a Bazhir desert tribe, got proposed to (kind of) by the Prince, taught two girls to be shamans in a male-dominated culture, rejected the Prince's proposal, then went and started sleeping with George and hanging out in Port Caynn—and prepared to raise Roger from his tomb. For a while, he set wards and guard spells up, then prepared what he would need, then finally, on All Hallow, he drained almost all of Alanna's power without permission and used it and his own to raise her archenemy from the dead. Nice move, Thom.
He kept it secret for a while, then revealed Roger to the court. (Alanna had travelled into far distant lands by then and had no idea of any of this until over half a year later.) The shock—and an ill-timed illness—basically killed the Queen, then the King followed quickly after—committing suicide by jumping off a cliff on his horse. Thom was shunned a little bit, as people feared him and hated what he'd done. Roger showed no sign of having his once-powerful Gift, however, and the court started to readjust. Roger seemed to feel that he owed Thom a debt, so helped him with research and other mundane stuff; Thom was charged with spying on Roger and watching for any sign that his magic was returning. (In the original version of this story, which was an adult fantasy novel rather than four YA fantasy books, Thom actually started a romantic/sexual relationship with Roger during this time. I'm not entirely sure how it would've played out because they're both royally screwed up characters, and a lot of things would have been terrible about it.)
From some time (probably around five or six months) after Roger was raised, Thom started getting sick. His body temperature slowly rose, his flesh started to glow in the dark and his Gift—which had been a bright amethyst purple fire before—turned an old-blood rusty red colour. This was down to his Gift being corrupted by Roger's—his had been a bright orange, and both his and Thom's Gifts after his return had changed to the rusty red. Thom was the only one of the two to get sick at all, though. He was also so full of power that he had absolutely no control over the amount of magic that went into even the simplest of his spells. He refused help, rejected the idea that he had made a mistake and was in trouble he couldn't handle. George Cooper visited him once or twice for Alanna's sake, worrying about his health. Thom refused help, but George sent for Master Si-cham anyway.
Alanna returned to court eight months after Thom raised Roger. To her horror, she found the state of affairs completely different: Roger alive, the King and Queen dead and Jonathan to be crowned. And her twin basically dying slowly. Thom begged her forgiveness and she forgave him. The coronation was slated to happen not too long after her return. Everyone prepared. Master Si-cham arrived, Thom initially rejected his help but finally relented. Si-cham and Thom, the week before the coronation, asked Alanna to help; they needed her to carry a part of Thom's corrupted, overgrown Gift for a week, so that he would be free to start the necessary spells to fix himself. She agreed a little reluctantly and took a part of his magic.
Roger was, of course, scheming behind everyone's backs, and on the coronation day, his military forces stormed the palace from the streets while he created a Gate of Idramm in the palace catacombs to drain power away from anyone who got near it. He drained what remained of Thom's Gift entirely to draw the Gate. Thom's body, already weak and sick, gave out, and Alanna found him dying. He had just enough strength to tell her not to use her Gift because it was tied to the bit of his she still held and that was tied to Roger. As long as she didn't use her own Gift, that part would be locked away and Roger would not be able to drain it.
Then Thom died while Alanna was holding his hand. And it was sad as fuck.
Sample Journal Entry: [Today, Barge, you're going to get to see an old timey person figure out the journals. The first part of this is scribbled fast in thin, scratchy handwriting. Thom's using the paper journal he found sitting next to the communicator device, which he doesn't recognise at all, to write notes about said communicator.]
origin?
magic stored inside -- not the one using
sorcerors
scrying, far-speech
language- "communicator", "fuck", "robot"
floods?
perhaps linked warning messages--harnessed magic--long distances
NO WA
[The scribbling stops abruptly in the middle of a word and there's a few minutes of nothing. Then the video feed on the communicator clicks on, showing Thom's fingers half-covering the camera and a tiny glimpse of coppery-red hair. His voice is extremely raspy and he's halfway through a muttered sentence.]
--rse, you press these into the-- [The video feed flicks off entirely, then switches quickly to audio, then back to video. Now his thumb's covering half the camera and he moves it experimentally, shifting it off the camera. He peers into the lens and you get a lovely shot of purple eyes in a sallow face complete with deep, dark bags. His face looks a little sweaty.] I see, it's... a little like a scrying mirror but-- [He trails off. He can see himself on the screen now; he puts his thumb back over the lens twice, blotting out the image, then stops. He tries to position the camera and manages to... kind of get it to an angle that isn't THAT bad. He's too close, though, and his hand is shaking enough that the image jitters.]
I'm afraid I'm at a loss. I don't even know who I'm asking, but if you... others can see this I'd very much like to know where I am. [A wry, slightly bitter smile stretches his too-thin face and the camera angle dips abruptly as he glances over his shoulder at the door. He forgets to fix it when he looks distractedly back.] I did think it was my rooms in the palace, but I just opened my door and it...suddenly became very obvious that that is not the case. Either I'm somewhere different, or this is a very, very odd dream. And as I'm not inclined to ha-- [But his calm speech is interrupted by a sudden, dry coughing fit and the camera jerks wildly around. When it's over, he doesn't finish his sentence or adjust the camera and instead just rasps:] I would appreciate the information, if anyone has it to give.
[Then there's some shaky fumbling and button pressing that changes the feed to audio again--which catches the tail-end of a second painful coughing fit--and then off.]
Sample RP: Thom woke himself with a rasping cough, feeling cold all over. He sat up in the pitch-dark room, blinking wide eyes in the blackness. He couldn't see anything. His lungs were burning; it felt like his ribs were tightening around them. He dug his fingers into the skin on his chest, wheezing, his mind entirely focused on the deceptively simple act of just breathing. Take another breath. When had this gotten so hard? He used to be able to breathe easily. Another. Before—
Then everything that had happened came rushing back to him. The coronation, Roger, Alanna. He had died. Roger had drained him and he had died with Alanna's hand in his. He was alive, though. Wasn't he breathing? Had it been some kind of dream? A vision maybe? Or was this the Black God's realm? He reached for his Gift, knowing there were candles by his bedside or a set fire in the hearth, intending to light them even if the power he drew would be enough to melt the candles to stubs or char the logs to embers in an instant.
There was nothing there.
The young Master reached again, frantically, hands simultaneously groping in front of him. Nothing! There was nothing. His Gift was drained, completely and utterly. He felt empty inside, all of his senses deadened and dull. His teeth chattered as he tried one more time, trying to draw some magic—any tiny little scraps—from the deepest parts of his power. Again, nothing. This was different than the few times he had drained his Gift trying some powerful spell before. This time it had been ripped from him, all the carefully-collected power that he held draining to Roger.
Slowly, Thom's ragged breathing calmed. He realised then why the blackness seemed so unusual; he no longer glowed. He lowered his hands slowly to the blankets, then slid his skeletal frame out of bed. Reaching to the table by the bed, he scrabbled for flint and steel, striking a spark after a few tries and managing to light a candle. He was in his room, the room from the palace just the same as it ever was.. If this was the Black God's domain, it wasn't what he would have expected.
He shuffled toward the door. Another round of coughing stopped him in his tracks for a long moment, but he reached it, slumped against it for a moment as he caught his breath. He was shaking so intensely he could barely stand. Finally he opened the door, expecting to see the palace halls. What he saw—once his eyes adjusted to the blinding lights—was something completely different.
Special Notes: I have a feeling my tenses are slipping everywhere throughout this app. Ugh.