Village Application

[abyssum_invocat]

PLAYER INFO

Name:Sage

Age:32

Contact:both plurk and DW are at repositorian | repositorian, discord is @ sage#2486

CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Sinthia Schmidt
Canon: Captain America Comics
Canon Point: Captain America, Vol 5 Issue 15
Appearance: 5'5", 113 pounds, blue/brown eyes, brown hair, above average muscle tone for a mid-twenties young woman
Age: born before ww2, date unknown, appears in her mid-late twenties


Character snapshot: Daughter of Johann Schmidt (yeah, that one), also known as the Red Skull. Sinthia is a capable assassin; being trained by her father, she is an expert hand to hand combatant and martial artist. She is also highly proficient in firearms and explosives. As the Red Skull's child, she is also quite intellectual and very intelligent. She is, however, also somewhat odd as a result of a very isolated upbringing and isn't always entirely confident in human interactions. She has four unstable and very powerful extrahuman abilities, those being telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, and voluntary intangibility.

World description: Very briefly: completely crazy. Less briefly: in a world where superheroes and supervillains are very real, Sinthia is one of the latter, by way of inheritance and somewhat unethical processes. SHIELD, Captain America, the Avengers, all of those entities are very real and very well-known in Sinthia's world, though she's not entirely sure of where she fits into all of them. She's from the Marvel 616 world (ish), and it has all the features of our reality. Same countries, same personalities (politicians, movie stars, presidents, etc.), same historical events (Trojan War, World Wars, 9/11, etc.), and so on. However, it also features distinct ones, such as countries like Wakanda and Genosha, and organizations like the US governmental agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and its main enemy, Hydra. Earth-616 is the mainstream continuity of the Marvel multiverse and where most of Marvel's comics take place. Most origins for superhuman powers include magic, genetic manipulation or bionic implants. Some heroes and villains have no powers at all, but depend instead on hand-to-hand combat training or advanced technological equipment, which is slightly more advanced than in our world as a rule.

History: Sinthia was born sometime before World War 2--I tend to headcanon around 1937--and entirely human. She was put in an unidentified machine that accelerated her aging to adulthood and granted her superhuman powers, specifically telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation, and voluntary intangibility. (Any or all of these can be nerfed to a large extent, though Sinthia is not in perfect control of them as an adult and can very easily have mishaps.) Here, however, is where I go a little AU of the strict comics in favor of making it easier to blend worlds between 616 and the MCU: Sinthia survived the world war and intervening years by something like the same process as was used on Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier. She had been trained at an early age to be a proficient assassin and to follow orders from Hydra without question, and as Hydra grew in SHIELD's shadow so too did Sinthia survive, simply frozen until she was needed. When she was awoken and deemed too uncontrollable for the kind of work they needed done, she was implanted with false memories of being an entirely normal woman named Erica Holstein. These memories included erasing all knowledge of her history and control over her abilities, but she was found by a SHIELD/Hydra operative named Brock Rumlow, who systematically tortured her to break the conditioning, revealing who she truly was. She is as of her entrance to the game still reconciling the two lives she remembers, and this will very likely affect her mental state.

What are your character’s mental/emotional strengths? 1) Resilience to emotional or mental trauma: Sinthia has survived growing up in an active warzone where the concept of mercy did not exist, being indoctrinated into a supervillain-heavy organization as a child, participating in and perpetrating violent acts including murder, and being tortured and fed misinformation both positive and negative. She tends to accept strange information and/or frightening happenings with a calm facade. Sometimes this does make her seem not-entirely-aware of her surroundings, though she far from stupid.

2) Ability to reconcile violence: As mentioned in her history, Sinthia is a trained assassin, and has no qualms over killing or injuring others, should the need arise. She isn't murder-happy (something that honestly would have probably made her life smoother), but she does consider it an acceptable outcome, depending on the situation.

3) Acceptance of extrahuman abilities/the supernatural: Sinthia has four extrahuman abilities herself, and is familiar with personas in her world both superhero and supervillain. To say the world is slightly unusual for her is an understatement: she's no more likely to remark on sudden disappearances and seeing shifting figures out of the edges of her sight than she would be pigeons on a New York sidewalk. Not to say she's overly hard to spook: she can feel fear and has as healthy a self-preservation instinct as anyone else, if not a higher-than-average response to it being threatened. But just because she might see something approximating a ghost through a windowpane doesn't mean she'll run screaming away.

What are your character’s mental/emotional weaknesses? 1) Susceptibility to misinformation: Sinthia has seen, done, and been around all manner of very strange, nigh-impossible things, and unfortunately this means that some explanations that might otherwise be obviously far-fetched, or outright fabrication, she will accept as entirely plausible, even to her detriment. She has been altered into believing her entire life was an elaborate lie, and she knows how easily the mind can be manipulated as hers has been.

2) Lack of coping mechanisms: Sinthia has never had, nor been taught, any coping mechanism for dealing with the emotional fallout of what she's done. She has killed many people, injured many more, and while she was strongly encouraged and taught to have no regret and feel no remorse, simply put, the human mind cannot fulfill that requirement. She does remember many of the things she's done, and without knowing the entire extent of why, these actions do haunt her. It's not a constancy of remembrance, but in similar situations she can devolve into panic and reflex reactions. Without any way to snap herself out a panic spiral, this can be very dangerous indeed, to herself and others.

3) Inexperience with society and/or 'normal' people: Sinthia has largely existed entirely alone. She was never created to be a person, rather a conveniently person-shaped weapon capable of dealing a great amount of damage to a large number of enemies--and she is good at being that. But she does not exist in a vacuum, and her lack of expertise in dealing with people very much means that in a setting dependent on interaction with others, she will be disadvantaged.

What events or circumstances in your character’s past have impacted them the most? The single most impactful event in Sinthia's history has been, undoubtedly, being systematically brutalized and tortured for the express purpose of breaking and re-molding her mind and psyche. She will react very negatively to anything that reminds her of that, be it restraint without her consent, or intense interrogation, and those negative reactions can sometimes be violent. She can also retreat into silence and non-communication, depending on how afraid she feels. Another important event is the transformation she underwent as a child: the machine her father built to accelerate her aging and grant her superhuman powers was not meant, nor designed, to be painless, and as a result she holds a deep-seated distrust and fear of most medical machinery and equipment. She also feels a frankly troublign amount of guilt over the number of people she has killed: some of the innocence of childhood, not to mention the societal mores that came with being a 'normal young woman', have stuck around. Sinthia does not understand how to reconcile the two separate albeit incomplete lives she has led.

What impressions do others tend to have of your character and how do those impressions differ from who your character truly is? Upon first meeting Sinthia, many people would assume she is either exceedingly distracted, or not entirely aware of her surroundings. Both of these are incorrect. She is in fact very observant, though she is not an expert in reading people's faces or body language: she tends to rely somewhat heavily on her extrahuman abilities for that to grasp the thoughts and moods of those around her. Obviously in this game setting that will not be possible, but her ordinary five senses are still sharp, and she does know how to use them to take stock of her surroundings. She is, however, eerie in her lack of outward emoting: she simply never learned to do it well.

What motivates your character?Sinthia is, by and large, motivated by curiosity. In much the same way as Hannibal Lecter sets plans into motion to see what will happen, so too will Sinthia act without overmuch concern for the safety of others (or, sometimes, herself) simply because she wants to understand something. She's still working out what motivates her as an individual without an agenda to fulfill or someone to give her orders.

How does your character handle crisis or adversity? Sinthia is a capable, rational adult, and so adversity tends to be handled by a set of rubrics: what is the easiest, fastest solution to a problem, what will cost the least expenditure of effort, et cetera. Crises on the other hand are unusual for her to be handling alone without an expectation of backup or a goal set by someone else that she has been instructed to strive for. Sinthia will be somewhat prone to inaction until the point of crisis is too much to bear, at which point she reacts explosively.

Skills, abilities, and physical weaknesses: As far as Sinthia's superhuman powers go, I am open to nerfing them pretty extremely. Teleportation and intangibility seem a little too easy to manipulate in this setting to be fun, so I propose simply disabling them entirely: she could try to use them, but nothing would happen save a little flickering. And ideally much the same, to a lesser extent, would happen with telepathy and telekinesis: I propose that her telekinetic abilities would be limited to her physical strength, with a decrease in the amount of weight she can lift as her distance from said object increases. At a distance of a foot, perhaps she could lift something weighing eighty pounds with little trouble: from a distance of twenty feet away, she would struggle with the same amount and her control over the object in question would be much less stable. Telepathy is the trickiest of the powers to nerf, and as such I'd like to request that her telepthy is still available to her, but that the people around her simply come across as radio static ninety-five percent of the time. She may be able to glean a stray thought or two, or the 'feeling' of a mood from someone else, but she won't be able to pull a Charles Xavier on anyone. If these nerfs aren't enough for the game setting I'm entirely open to communication from the mods!

Inventory: One relatively warm winter outfit (shirt, trousers, boots, coat), solid black. Sinthia has no other non-weapon paraphernalia.

HORROR INFO

What aspects of your character are you most interested in exploring in a horror setting? I'd be interested in exploring how Sinthia copes with having, essentially, two lives in her head. She's not given a lot of space or time in the canon to come to grips with that, and a horror game where the environment is actively working against the players seems like it would tap into that.

What is your character’s mental state upon entering the game? Exceedingly confused. She is newly awoken as her true self (referenced above), aware of her heritage and abilities (for as long as they last her) and her past as having been programmed and altered by SHIELD to live a false, powerless, 'normal' life. She will be distrustful of most people and prone to isolation upon entering the game.

What unsettles and frightens your character? What sort of encounters would chip away at your character’s psychological stability? Sinthia is very prone to being frightened and overwhelmed emotionally and psychologically by the idea that her consciousness, her self-knowledge and memories, are merely another layer as if on a nesting doll. She is very unsettled by things and people that only barely pass as normal, things in which the details are all wrong despite the larger picture being, at first, recognizable and/or palatable.

What horrifying events or genre elements would you like to see utilized in the game? I would like to see Eldritch Abominations or forms beyond comphrehension, and possibly some Matrix- or Freddy-Krueger-esque dreamscapes that carry physical or mental harm within them. Think Old Hag Syndrome, but way way worse.

SAMPLES

Test Drive: TDM
Log Sample: Alternate Log #1 from Milliways
Log Sample: Alternate Log #2 from Milliways