Vanya Hargreeves (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
onlyordinary) wrote2020-05-26 11:34 pm
onlyordinary) wrote2020-05-26 11:34 pm
Entry tags:
Application: Piper 90
APPLICATION
Player Name/Handle: Smurf
Plurk Handle:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
smurfsmuggler
Player Status: New Player
Other characters: N/A
Invited by: Korel
Character Name: Vanya Hargreeves
Fandom: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
Character Journal:onlyordinary
OU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OU
Canon point: End of season 1
PB: N/A
SETTING BACKGROUND
Vanya is from Earth, 2019, but it’s a little off from ours. Their technology seems to be stuck in the 80s, and in 1989, 43 women gave birth to babies despite not actually being pregnant. Vanya was one of those babies. She and six other babies were bought by a mysterious billionaire who trained all of Vanya’s ‘siblings’ to be The Umbrella Academy, teen superheroes, and deliberately excluded Vanya. Predictably, Vanya and all her brothers and sister were really messed up by this experience, to the point where none of them were able to avert the apocalypse. (They actually caused it. Oops.)
HISTORY
• Vanya was born in 1989 and bought by Reginald Hargreeves. He discovered her powers quickly and trained her in them. It took her killing at least three nannies and accidentally cutting Reginald’s face open before he decided this was a bad idea. He put four-year-old Vanya in a traumatizing soundproofed room for a while before giving her emotional-suppressant medication and having his super brainwashing daughter tell Vanya she is ordinary and always was.
• Vanya was continually told ‘there’s nothing special about you’ and ‘you’re only ordinary’ and excluded from participating in activities with her siblings to reinforce the brainwashing. Vanya’s siblings pick up on their father’s habits and start excluding her even when they don’t have to.
• One of Vanya’s brothers, Five, runs away when they’re thirteen to prove he can time-travel. He gets trapped in a post-apocalyptic future. It’s implied Vanya was closest with him and she grieves his loss.
• When they’re 16 or 17, another of Vanya’s brothers, Ben, dies violently, presumably during a mission. This prompts all the siblings to go their own way and drop contact with each other entirely, to the point where it’s implied Vanya did not attend (and possibly wasn’t even invited to) her sister’s wedding and has not met her niece.
• When Vanya’s 25, she writes a memoir about being the ordinary child in The Umbrella Academy and reveals that they were all abused children. The publicity this brings is very unwelcomed by most of her siblings, her brother Diego especially.
• Cut to 2019, Reginald Hargreeves dies, and everyone comes back together for the funeral. Everyone’s lives are in shambles because they are messes (with Vanya possibly being the most functional of all of them), and they all treat each other like shit. Five returns from the future, still looking 13, and declares that the apocalypse is coming in eight days.
• Vanya meets Leonard Peabody, a man with a grudge against the academy who manipulates her into a relationship with the express purpose of stealing her medication and using her power to hurt her siblings. Vanya discovers she has powers, and when Allison, her sister, tries to reveal Leonard, Vanya lashes out and cuts Allison’s vocal chords. She is immediately horrified and regretful, but Leonard drags her away before she can call emergency services.
• Vanya realizes Leonard’s deception and murders him with her powers after declaring that she loves her family and they love her, no matter what Leonard said. She goes home to check on Allison and cry to her family. Luther, her super strong brother, lures her in with the offer of a hug and then chokes her until she is unconscious. He put her in the soundproofed room her father trapped her in, and her family left her there until she has a psychotic break and busts herself out. She destroys their childhood home, kills their only remaining father figure who enabled the abuse, and then goes to her concert where she ends the world with a violin.
• She arrives in the game immediately after Allison shoots a gun next to her ear to stop her powers. As far as Vanya is aware, her entire family tried to kill her, possibly succeeding, and she is not aware of the reason why, assuming it’s in retaliation for hurting Allison and killing their remaining father figure.
PERSONALITY
Vanya is defined by her family and their history. She lived her life inside a big house with no one but a robot who’d give her love and affection, and her attempts at reaching out for affection and validation from others were consistently spurned for reasons outside of her control. Worse, the drugs her father put her on crippled her ability to change her situation. The drugs made her passive, tired, and weak-willed, which set her up to be an emotional punching bag for the other abused children in the house and robbed her of the ability to stand up for herself. But make no mistake—her passivity and weak will were the drugs, not Vanya herself, and that difference makes for a deep crisis of identity.
Vanya is used to drifting through life unable to connect with others due to her awkwardness and self-worth issues. She internalizes the insults people sling at her, from telling her that she’s a liability to that she doesn’t have the passion to continue with the vocation she’s dedicated her life to, and she demonstrates zero confidence in talking with other people or taking risks. Up until recently, she has been the quintessential doormat, holding herself with tired dignity as she goes through the motions of a deeply lonely life.
When Leonard steals her medication, it’s like a switch flips. Within a day of sobriety, she is auditioning for a role she’s always wanted and nails it. Within two days, she faces four of her siblings at once and calls them out furiously and articulately for excluding her even when their father wasn’t alive to tell them to. Within three days, she is coolly and calmly standing up to Leonard’s manipulation when he pushes her to forgo musical practice in favor of her powers, despite the fact that he is the only person to ever make her feel special and their relationship is still new enough to fear for. Within four days, she snaps and screams at Allison for brainwashing her, probably the first time she’s screamed at anyone in her life.
When Vanya is not under the influence of her medication, she demonstrates not only a previously hidden strong backbone and a willful disposition, but she also demonstrates her rage. Stopping her medication pops the cork on decades of resentment that had built up. Despite Leonard goading her, she does keep her rage in check up until she feels physically threatened. Her most violent outbursts happen when Leonard is being beaten up, Allison is about to brainwash her, Luther locks her in her trauma cell, and her brothers try to attack her on stage during her concert. But once she feels threatened, the gloves come off, and she has no self-control. She murders Leonard with every sharp object in the building, she takes down her whole childhood home with her family still in it, and she blows up the moon (by accident).
But just because she doesn’t usually lash out violently doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a nasty vindictive streak. It’s smothered by her medication for the most part, but when she’s off of it and she’s destroying the Academy, she takes the time to go to each of her siblings’ rooms, reminisce about how small they made her feel, and blow it up. When Pogo, her only positive father figure, confesses to enabling her life-long abuse and manipulation even after her father died, she brutally murders him and takes the time to watch him die. She does not yet know how to manage all of her anger in a healthy way—understandable, since she could not actually feel its weight since she was four—and thus lashes out, either physically or verbally, and does not see things from other people’s perspectives.
Which leads to another flaw of Vanya’s—she’s self-centered. To be fair to her, she shares this flaw with all her siblings, but it’s particularly glaring in her because she does not appreciate how hard it was for her siblings in the Academy. She understands that their father abused them all and they all craved his love—she demonstrated her understanding of their collective pain when writing in her book—but she does not understand the unique pain each of her siblings endured. She does not consider Klaus’ difficulties with his powers, Allison’s collapsing worldview caused by her powers, or Diego and Luther’s inability to connect with others. She is wrapped up in her own pain, and she publishes a book laying their childhood abuse bare. She either doesn’t consider how it would hurt them to have that information out there, or she doesn’t care. She is also self-centered in that she does not take the time to consider how Pogo must have also felt trapped, as a risen ape and legally chattel for the master who mutated him; and were Pogo to try to share that with her, she'd likely dismiss him because he still helped her father destroy her mind.
Vanya is self-centered, but she can also be kind. She demonstrates a gentle, supportive disposition when dealing with Leonard as a student, soothing his stated anxieties about starting the violin too late. When she lost Five, she kept him in her heart most visibly. She made his favorite snack and kept the lights on every night for an indeterminate amount of time in hopes that he’d come back home. Similarly, she does try to reach out to Allison when she sees her agonizing over her daughter and custody disputes, and even when Allison snaps at her for her effort, Vanya calls specifically to check on Allison afterwards. When Five comes to her for help, despite the fact she’s skeptical of his sanity and claims of the apocalypse, she does try to offer comfort and a place to sleep (plus the number of a therapist, offered as kindly as she could). Vanya loves her siblings, and loudly says so when Leonard questions it, though she now has doubts that any of them love her.
Vanya Hargreeves is a fundamentally lonely, damaged woman who struggles to rise above her past, but she has yet to appropriately deal with it and now has to learn who she is without her father’s chemical intervention.
CANON POWERS
Atmokinesis – Weather control, usually influenced by her feelings.
Super Hearing – She can hear at far distances and can hear other people’s heartbeats.
Sound Manipulation – Her powers are vaguely based on sound, meaning she needs to have a sound to focus on in order to use the following powers. She’s most powerful when she’s making the sound herself, like with her violin or her heartbeat.
Telekinesis – She’s able to lift people and objects and manipulate them with force and precision.
Sound Wave Projection – After taking in a sound, she’s able to externalize the sound with a shockwave or laser. This includes blunt force throwing people off their feet, explosions, and precise slashing damage (like, 'cut your sister's vocal chords from five feet away but not kill her' precise), and likely more.
Geokinesis – Vanya can cause earthquakes that damage the ground or take down whole buildings.
Life Absorption? – There is a scene where Vanya is connected to all of her living brothers through a beam of white light and the life is visibly drained out of them, implying that maybe she’s absorbing it. This isn’t explicitly confirmed.
Emotion manipulation? – There is a scene where Vanya, fresh off her medication, plays her music for a disinterested director and we the audience see soundwaves wafting from her violin, and as soon as they hit her audience, they immediately sit at attention and dopily smile while listening, eventually giving her the part she was auditioning for. It’s not clear whether she was just better at the violin without her medication or if her powers had something to do with it, but I think the visible sound waves were implying that her power was involved.
LASER BEAMS – At some point she charged up her power so much that when she was knocked unconscious, she released a laser beam from her chest that blew up the moon.
As a side effect of her power, when she’s exerting herself, she bleaches things she touches white. Her black suit and dress shoes became glowing white, and her standard violin became white in canon when she charged herself up with her violin. They remain white even when she’s unconscious and no longer using her power, implying that the color change is permanent.
POWER SELECTION
Canon Powers:
Super Hearing
Sound Manipulation
Telekinesis
Sound Wave Projection
Geokinesis (Nerfed as mods would like)
Emotional manipulation (Nerfed so only when she’s making music and only with player permission)
Dramatically bleaching everything white when using her power, including her eyes
ABILITIES
Vanya’s greatest skill is her skill with the violin. I also headcanon that she can play piano, guitar, and cello in a pinch, though not as well as the violin, which is pretty common for musical educators and musicians in orchestras. This primes her to learn more instruments in the violin family fast if she must. She also has teaching experience, especially with children, and has enough clients to live off of, so she’s good with kids and musical education. She writes well enough to have written a bestselling book.
On top of that, despite not actually being allowed to participate in the combat training of her siblings, Vanya did sit through nonstop survival guides growing up. She has not been in a survivalist situation, but she has enough survivalist education to be better prepared than the average person. She’s also very familiar with being under the thumb of an authoritarian figure and keeping her head down in an explosive family with a whole bunch of superpowers, so I’d say she has experience that would suit her for living with Jorgmund breathing down her neck.
SETTING/SUITABILITY
Please answer all of the following. Keep in mind that if a character is not suited to a stressful intrigue and action setting, or if a character is aged 11-15, you will have to work extra hard to justify how they can function in the game as an equal (or learn how to quickly).
➤ How do you expect your character to respond to the setting? Even if they plan to rebel in the long term, will they be able to at least obey enough to not get shocked to death?
Vanya did not live eighteen years with Reginald Hargreeves just to not know how to keep her head down long enough to get out of a bad situation. She will feign passive compliance at first and wait until she can think of a way to shut down the collars (and then violently murder all the willing Jorgmund staff onboard).
➤ What do you hope to do with your character long-term?
I hope to have Vanya make peace with her past and get to know who she actually is without Reginald’s drugs holding her back. Ideally, she’d be able to come to terms with her own role in her fucked up family life and forgive herself and her siblings for everything. And also she should grow to be the badass she was always meant to be.
➤ Does your character currently have skills that would allow them to adapt, survive, and do the heroic things being asked of them? If your character doesn't, do you think they'd have the capacity to learn quickly?
There’d be a learning curve, but Vanya has the power and the gumption to figure things out.
➤ If they're not used to cooperating with others, what makes you think they'll be able to adapt to cooperating with the group?
Vanya isn’t used to cooperating with others beyond her orchestra, but it’s less because she’s hard to work with and more because she’s kind of awkward and doesn’t know how to reach out to others. When put in an environment where she’s told to work with people and others are able to recognize and manage her awkwardness, she should be a good team-player.
➤ Will your character have long-term plans to rebel against Jorgmund? If so, how? Will they betray the other PCs and cooperate with Jorgmund? If so, how do you plan to handle the negative CR that might arise?
Vanya is totally going to plan on rebelling against Jorgmund. The way she dealt with Reginald was to just keep her head down until she was legally able to leave, but she won’t have the promise of an end with Jorgmund. Vanya isn’t an analytically-minded person so she’ll wait until she sees an opportunity, but without the guidance from someone a little more cunning than her, she’ll probably end up trying to brute force her way out if she feels trapped for too long.
SAMPLES
Network Sample
[The camera turns on to view a woman that has seen better days. She’s hooked up to a polygraph, dressed in a blinding white suit, and her irises are white. She slumps in her chair, looking away from the camera at someone who’s interviewing her. To the layman, she may look detached and disinterested, but she holds herself with the careful calmness of a person who’s used to dealing with people who can and will hurt her.
The interviewer says, “If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?”
The woman’s brow creases in mild confusion, but she rolls with the question.]
A cat, I guess.
[The polygraph starts rattling around. The interviewer tsks, saying, “That’s a lie.”
The woman’s brow creases more, her confusion plain.]
A… songbird, then?
[The polygraph rattles again, and the interviewer says, “You have to stop lying.”]
Scorpion? Butterfly?
[Rattle rattle. “Stop lying.”]
I… A dingo?
[The polygraph calms down again. The woman is now openly skeptical of the machine next to her, but she keeps playing along because the interviewer can shock her if she doesn’t.
“You’re a new addition to the crayon box, what color would you be?”
The woman looks down at her entire color scheme.]
White.
[The polygraph is satisfied.
“You’re on your way to your best friend’s wedding and your boss calls and says a client needs something, what do you do?”
The woman’s eyes lose focus. She purses her lips, staring at something that’s not there.]
I don’t have any friends.
[The polygraph is satisfied.]
Prose Sample
A Test Drive at another game.
ADDITIONAL INFO
Vanya is bringing along her white violin and her white bow.
FINAL QUESTIONS
The players won't know what the mods are doing with these questions until sometime later.
➤ Will your character suspect some kind of guiding intelligence has brought them to the game? Or will they think it was random or done by Jorgmund?
A part of Vanya will be convinced that Allison really did shoot her in the head, and this is the land after death or a hallucination on her part. She’s not going to think of it as a guiding intelligence per se, but as a natural process.
If she’s convinced that she’s not actually dead, she’s going to wonder if it was the Stuff itself that brought her or if it was Jorgmund.
➤ If they think it was something other than Jorgmund, like God or some other force of fate, what character traits do they think of that intelligence as having? Is it cruel or kind? Capriciously punishing them or doing it for good reason?
If she’s convinced that the Stuff itself brought her here, she won’t necessarily see it as cruel or kind, but she will be hopeful that there was a reason and that this is somehow the universe giving her a chance to do something worthwhile.
Player Name/Handle: Smurf
Plurk Handle:
Player Status: New Player
Other characters: N/A
Invited by: Korel
Character Name: Vanya Hargreeves
Fandom: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
Character Journal:
onlyordinaryOU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OU
Canon point: End of season 1
PB: N/A
SETTING BACKGROUND
Vanya is from Earth, 2019, but it’s a little off from ours. Their technology seems to be stuck in the 80s, and in 1989, 43 women gave birth to babies despite not actually being pregnant. Vanya was one of those babies. She and six other babies were bought by a mysterious billionaire who trained all of Vanya’s ‘siblings’ to be The Umbrella Academy, teen superheroes, and deliberately excluded Vanya. Predictably, Vanya and all her brothers and sister were really messed up by this experience, to the point where none of them were able to avert the apocalypse. (They actually caused it. Oops.)
HISTORY
• Vanya was born in 1989 and bought by Reginald Hargreeves. He discovered her powers quickly and trained her in them. It took her killing at least three nannies and accidentally cutting Reginald’s face open before he decided this was a bad idea. He put four-year-old Vanya in a traumatizing soundproofed room for a while before giving her emotional-suppressant medication and having his super brainwashing daughter tell Vanya she is ordinary and always was.
• Vanya was continually told ‘there’s nothing special about you’ and ‘you’re only ordinary’ and excluded from participating in activities with her siblings to reinforce the brainwashing. Vanya’s siblings pick up on their father’s habits and start excluding her even when they don’t have to.
• One of Vanya’s brothers, Five, runs away when they’re thirteen to prove he can time-travel. He gets trapped in a post-apocalyptic future. It’s implied Vanya was closest with him and she grieves his loss.
• When they’re 16 or 17, another of Vanya’s brothers, Ben, dies violently, presumably during a mission. This prompts all the siblings to go their own way and drop contact with each other entirely, to the point where it’s implied Vanya did not attend (and possibly wasn’t even invited to) her sister’s wedding and has not met her niece.
• When Vanya’s 25, she writes a memoir about being the ordinary child in The Umbrella Academy and reveals that they were all abused children. The publicity this brings is very unwelcomed by most of her siblings, her brother Diego especially.
• Cut to 2019, Reginald Hargreeves dies, and everyone comes back together for the funeral. Everyone’s lives are in shambles because they are messes (with Vanya possibly being the most functional of all of them), and they all treat each other like shit. Five returns from the future, still looking 13, and declares that the apocalypse is coming in eight days.
• Vanya meets Leonard Peabody, a man with a grudge against the academy who manipulates her into a relationship with the express purpose of stealing her medication and using her power to hurt her siblings. Vanya discovers she has powers, and when Allison, her sister, tries to reveal Leonard, Vanya lashes out and cuts Allison’s vocal chords. She is immediately horrified and regretful, but Leonard drags her away before she can call emergency services.
• Vanya realizes Leonard’s deception and murders him with her powers after declaring that she loves her family and they love her, no matter what Leonard said. She goes home to check on Allison and cry to her family. Luther, her super strong brother, lures her in with the offer of a hug and then chokes her until she is unconscious. He put her in the soundproofed room her father trapped her in, and her family left her there until she has a psychotic break and busts herself out. She destroys their childhood home, kills their only remaining father figure who enabled the abuse, and then goes to her concert where she ends the world with a violin.
• She arrives in the game immediately after Allison shoots a gun next to her ear to stop her powers. As far as Vanya is aware, her entire family tried to kill her, possibly succeeding, and she is not aware of the reason why, assuming it’s in retaliation for hurting Allison and killing their remaining father figure.
PERSONALITY
Vanya is defined by her family and their history. She lived her life inside a big house with no one but a robot who’d give her love and affection, and her attempts at reaching out for affection and validation from others were consistently spurned for reasons outside of her control. Worse, the drugs her father put her on crippled her ability to change her situation. The drugs made her passive, tired, and weak-willed, which set her up to be an emotional punching bag for the other abused children in the house and robbed her of the ability to stand up for herself. But make no mistake—her passivity and weak will were the drugs, not Vanya herself, and that difference makes for a deep crisis of identity.
Vanya is used to drifting through life unable to connect with others due to her awkwardness and self-worth issues. She internalizes the insults people sling at her, from telling her that she’s a liability to that she doesn’t have the passion to continue with the vocation she’s dedicated her life to, and she demonstrates zero confidence in talking with other people or taking risks. Up until recently, she has been the quintessential doormat, holding herself with tired dignity as she goes through the motions of a deeply lonely life.
When Leonard steals her medication, it’s like a switch flips. Within a day of sobriety, she is auditioning for a role she’s always wanted and nails it. Within two days, she faces four of her siblings at once and calls them out furiously and articulately for excluding her even when their father wasn’t alive to tell them to. Within three days, she is coolly and calmly standing up to Leonard’s manipulation when he pushes her to forgo musical practice in favor of her powers, despite the fact that he is the only person to ever make her feel special and their relationship is still new enough to fear for. Within four days, she snaps and screams at Allison for brainwashing her, probably the first time she’s screamed at anyone in her life.
When Vanya is not under the influence of her medication, she demonstrates not only a previously hidden strong backbone and a willful disposition, but she also demonstrates her rage. Stopping her medication pops the cork on decades of resentment that had built up. Despite Leonard goading her, she does keep her rage in check up until she feels physically threatened. Her most violent outbursts happen when Leonard is being beaten up, Allison is about to brainwash her, Luther locks her in her trauma cell, and her brothers try to attack her on stage during her concert. But once she feels threatened, the gloves come off, and she has no self-control. She murders Leonard with every sharp object in the building, she takes down her whole childhood home with her family still in it, and she blows up the moon (by accident).
But just because she doesn’t usually lash out violently doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a nasty vindictive streak. It’s smothered by her medication for the most part, but when she’s off of it and she’s destroying the Academy, she takes the time to go to each of her siblings’ rooms, reminisce about how small they made her feel, and blow it up. When Pogo, her only positive father figure, confesses to enabling her life-long abuse and manipulation even after her father died, she brutally murders him and takes the time to watch him die. She does not yet know how to manage all of her anger in a healthy way—understandable, since she could not actually feel its weight since she was four—and thus lashes out, either physically or verbally, and does not see things from other people’s perspectives.
Which leads to another flaw of Vanya’s—she’s self-centered. To be fair to her, she shares this flaw with all her siblings, but it’s particularly glaring in her because she does not appreciate how hard it was for her siblings in the Academy. She understands that their father abused them all and they all craved his love—she demonstrated her understanding of their collective pain when writing in her book—but she does not understand the unique pain each of her siblings endured. She does not consider Klaus’ difficulties with his powers, Allison’s collapsing worldview caused by her powers, or Diego and Luther’s inability to connect with others. She is wrapped up in her own pain, and she publishes a book laying their childhood abuse bare. She either doesn’t consider how it would hurt them to have that information out there, or she doesn’t care. She is also self-centered in that she does not take the time to consider how Pogo must have also felt trapped, as a risen ape and legally chattel for the master who mutated him; and were Pogo to try to share that with her, she'd likely dismiss him because he still helped her father destroy her mind.
Vanya is self-centered, but she can also be kind. She demonstrates a gentle, supportive disposition when dealing with Leonard as a student, soothing his stated anxieties about starting the violin too late. When she lost Five, she kept him in her heart most visibly. She made his favorite snack and kept the lights on every night for an indeterminate amount of time in hopes that he’d come back home. Similarly, she does try to reach out to Allison when she sees her agonizing over her daughter and custody disputes, and even when Allison snaps at her for her effort, Vanya calls specifically to check on Allison afterwards. When Five comes to her for help, despite the fact she’s skeptical of his sanity and claims of the apocalypse, she does try to offer comfort and a place to sleep (plus the number of a therapist, offered as kindly as she could). Vanya loves her siblings, and loudly says so when Leonard questions it, though she now has doubts that any of them love her.
Vanya Hargreeves is a fundamentally lonely, damaged woman who struggles to rise above her past, but she has yet to appropriately deal with it and now has to learn who she is without her father’s chemical intervention.
CANON POWERS
Atmokinesis – Weather control, usually influenced by her feelings.
Super Hearing – She can hear at far distances and can hear other people’s heartbeats.
Sound Manipulation – Her powers are vaguely based on sound, meaning she needs to have a sound to focus on in order to use the following powers. She’s most powerful when she’s making the sound herself, like with her violin or her heartbeat.
Telekinesis – She’s able to lift people and objects and manipulate them with force and precision.
Sound Wave Projection – After taking in a sound, she’s able to externalize the sound with a shockwave or laser. This includes blunt force throwing people off their feet, explosions, and precise slashing damage (like, 'cut your sister's vocal chords from five feet away but not kill her' precise), and likely more.
Geokinesis – Vanya can cause earthquakes that damage the ground or take down whole buildings.
Life Absorption? – There is a scene where Vanya is connected to all of her living brothers through a beam of white light and the life is visibly drained out of them, implying that maybe she’s absorbing it. This isn’t explicitly confirmed.
Emotion manipulation? – There is a scene where Vanya, fresh off her medication, plays her music for a disinterested director and we the audience see soundwaves wafting from her violin, and as soon as they hit her audience, they immediately sit at attention and dopily smile while listening, eventually giving her the part she was auditioning for. It’s not clear whether she was just better at the violin without her medication or if her powers had something to do with it, but I think the visible sound waves were implying that her power was involved.
LASER BEAMS – At some point she charged up her power so much that when she was knocked unconscious, she released a laser beam from her chest that blew up the moon.
As a side effect of her power, when she’s exerting herself, she bleaches things she touches white. Her black suit and dress shoes became glowing white, and her standard violin became white in canon when she charged herself up with her violin. They remain white even when she’s unconscious and no longer using her power, implying that the color change is permanent.
POWER SELECTION
Canon Powers:
Super Hearing
Sound Manipulation
Telekinesis
Sound Wave Projection
Geokinesis (Nerfed as mods would like)
Emotional manipulation (Nerfed so only when she’s making music and only with player permission)
Dramatically bleaching everything white when using her power, including her eyes
ABILITIES
Vanya’s greatest skill is her skill with the violin. I also headcanon that she can play piano, guitar, and cello in a pinch, though not as well as the violin, which is pretty common for musical educators and musicians in orchestras. This primes her to learn more instruments in the violin family fast if she must. She also has teaching experience, especially with children, and has enough clients to live off of, so she’s good with kids and musical education. She writes well enough to have written a bestselling book.
On top of that, despite not actually being allowed to participate in the combat training of her siblings, Vanya did sit through nonstop survival guides growing up. She has not been in a survivalist situation, but she has enough survivalist education to be better prepared than the average person. She’s also very familiar with being under the thumb of an authoritarian figure and keeping her head down in an explosive family with a whole bunch of superpowers, so I’d say she has experience that would suit her for living with Jorgmund breathing down her neck.
SETTING/SUITABILITY
Please answer all of the following. Keep in mind that if a character is not suited to a stressful intrigue and action setting, or if a character is aged 11-15, you will have to work extra hard to justify how they can function in the game as an equal (or learn how to quickly).
➤ How do you expect your character to respond to the setting? Even if they plan to rebel in the long term, will they be able to at least obey enough to not get shocked to death?
Vanya did not live eighteen years with Reginald Hargreeves just to not know how to keep her head down long enough to get out of a bad situation. She will feign passive compliance at first and wait until she can think of a way to shut down the collars (and then violently murder all the willing Jorgmund staff onboard).
➤ What do you hope to do with your character long-term?
I hope to have Vanya make peace with her past and get to know who she actually is without Reginald’s drugs holding her back. Ideally, she’d be able to come to terms with her own role in her fucked up family life and forgive herself and her siblings for everything. And also she should grow to be the badass she was always meant to be.
➤ Does your character currently have skills that would allow them to adapt, survive, and do the heroic things being asked of them? If your character doesn't, do you think they'd have the capacity to learn quickly?
There’d be a learning curve, but Vanya has the power and the gumption to figure things out.
➤ If they're not used to cooperating with others, what makes you think they'll be able to adapt to cooperating with the group?
Vanya isn’t used to cooperating with others beyond her orchestra, but it’s less because she’s hard to work with and more because she’s kind of awkward and doesn’t know how to reach out to others. When put in an environment where she’s told to work with people and others are able to recognize and manage her awkwardness, she should be a good team-player.
➤ Will your character have long-term plans to rebel against Jorgmund? If so, how? Will they betray the other PCs and cooperate with Jorgmund? If so, how do you plan to handle the negative CR that might arise?
Vanya is totally going to plan on rebelling against Jorgmund. The way she dealt with Reginald was to just keep her head down until she was legally able to leave, but she won’t have the promise of an end with Jorgmund. Vanya isn’t an analytically-minded person so she’ll wait until she sees an opportunity, but without the guidance from someone a little more cunning than her, she’ll probably end up trying to brute force her way out if she feels trapped for too long.
SAMPLES
Network Sample
[The camera turns on to view a woman that has seen better days. She’s hooked up to a polygraph, dressed in a blinding white suit, and her irises are white. She slumps in her chair, looking away from the camera at someone who’s interviewing her. To the layman, she may look detached and disinterested, but she holds herself with the careful calmness of a person who’s used to dealing with people who can and will hurt her.
The interviewer says, “If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?”
The woman’s brow creases in mild confusion, but she rolls with the question.]
A cat, I guess.
[The polygraph starts rattling around. The interviewer tsks, saying, “That’s a lie.”
The woman’s brow creases more, her confusion plain.]
A… songbird, then?
[The polygraph rattles again, and the interviewer says, “You have to stop lying.”]
Scorpion? Butterfly?
[Rattle rattle. “Stop lying.”]
I… A dingo?
[The polygraph calms down again. The woman is now openly skeptical of the machine next to her, but she keeps playing along because the interviewer can shock her if she doesn’t.
“You’re a new addition to the crayon box, what color would you be?”
The woman looks down at her entire color scheme.]
White.
[The polygraph is satisfied.
“You’re on your way to your best friend’s wedding and your boss calls and says a client needs something, what do you do?”
The woman’s eyes lose focus. She purses her lips, staring at something that’s not there.]
I don’t have any friends.
[The polygraph is satisfied.]
Prose Sample
A Test Drive at another game.
ADDITIONAL INFO
Vanya is bringing along her white violin and her white bow.
FINAL QUESTIONS
The players won't know what the mods are doing with these questions until sometime later.
➤ Will your character suspect some kind of guiding intelligence has brought them to the game? Or will they think it was random or done by Jorgmund?
A part of Vanya will be convinced that Allison really did shoot her in the head, and this is the land after death or a hallucination on her part. She’s not going to think of it as a guiding intelligence per se, but as a natural process.
If she’s convinced that she’s not actually dead, she’s going to wonder if it was the Stuff itself that brought her or if it was Jorgmund.
➤ If they think it was something other than Jorgmund, like God or some other force of fate, what character traits do they think of that intelligence as having? Is it cruel or kind? Capriciously punishing them or doing it for good reason?
If she’s convinced that the Stuff itself brought her here, she won’t necessarily see it as cruel or kind, but she will be hopeful that there was a reason and that this is somehow the universe giving her a chance to do something worthwhile.