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Avalon Application
Feb. 15th, 2014 08:35 pmOOC Information
Name: Magic
Contact: PM this journal or email @ laudanumlace[@]gmail[dot]com
Current Characters: N/A
IC Information
Name: Captain Twig Verginix
Canon: The Edge Chronicles
Canon Point: Just after setting out from Sanctraphrax to track down his crew.
History:
Twig was born to a sky pirate and his wife, Quintinius (known as Cloud Wolf) and Maris Verginix while the two were on a voyage in the treacherous Deepwoods with a superstitious and petty captain. As it was considered bad luck to have a child born on a sky ship, Twig’s parents were forced to abandon him in a woodtroll village, as woodtrolls were known for being simple and kind folk. There, he was adopted by a woodtroll couple and raised alongside their own children for thirteen years, although he was never truly accepted by anyone other than his “Mother-Mine”. Twig’s only link to his parents is his “comfort cloth”; a shawl Maris sewed for him with an image of a lullabee tree for luck, which Twig always wears tied around his neck as a scarf.
At thirteen, it was becoming unavoidably clear that Twig would not have a real place in a woodtroll village, not least because he was not at all cut out for the lumber trade that most woodtrolls worked at. When a sky pirate crew came to purchase timber and offered Twig a place on their ship as a cabin boy, his adoptive parents’ natural distrust of sky pirates led them to pack him off to relatives for a while.
This would have been fine, as all woodtroll villages are connected by beaten-down paths, except Twig wandered off the path… and began an adventure through the Deepwoods. Over the course of several months, he traversed the Deepwoods – which, as far as he knew, was all there was to the world – making a number of friends along the way. Most notable are Gristle Tatum, a slaughterer boy whose life Twig saved and in return was embraced by his family and given a gift of friendship in the form of a hammelhorn fur waistcoat, which he has always retained, and a banderbear who Twig helped to be rid of a rotten tooth, and in return has gained the friendship of all banderbears – and, finally, the caterbird. Twig witnessed the caterbird hatching, an event that meant the bird was bound for all of Twig’s life to watch over him and save his life.
Eventually, Twig came across a crew of sky pirates captained by none other than his father. Cloud Wolf immediately recognised his son from the scarf around his neck and told the story of Twig’s birth and abandonment without revealing that Twig and his son were one and the same; he and Twig both knew, but the rest of the crew did not. The next morning, Twig awoke to find his father’s ship gone – abandoned a second time.
After an attempt by the Gloamglozer – a demonic figure that cursed the Verginix line beginning with Twig’s father – on his life, however, Twig was saved by the caterbird and taken to his father’s ship. There, Twig became a member of his father’s crew, although his true link to Cloud Wolf was kept secret due to the captain’s fears that his mutinous quartermaster would take advantage of his connection with Twig if it were revealed.
Two years later, his fears were proved accurate. Cloud Wolf was coerced into heading a stormchasing mission to recover a substance called stormphrax from the Great Storm, which was vital for saving the scholarly city of Sanctaphrax. The city was built upon one of the same buoyant rocks that sky ships used to fly and relied on stormphrax, which became unbelievably heavy in darkness, to keep it from breaking free of its moorings. There was usually a substantial amount of stormphrax in the treasure chamber within the rock, but the current Most High Academe was stealing from the stores to continue creating phraxdust, a substance that could, amongst other things, purify water – vital when the water supply from the Edgewater River was befouled by the industrial hub of Undertown.
Due to the danger of the mission, Twig was barred from accompanying the crew – enter Slyvo Spleethe, quartermaster, to lend a sympathetic ear and suggest Twig be smuggled aboard and revealed when it was too late to turn back to Undertown and so prove his worth to his father. When the moment came, Spleethe did indeed reveal Twig – as a means to force Cloud Wolf to give up his ship. The ensuing fight in the Great Storm tore apart the ship, and Cloud Wolf was lost to open sky. The remaining loyal crewmembers banded together in the Twilight Woods under Twig’s lead, but the mind-altering properties of the forest led to each one leaving the group in turn until only Twig and Maugin, the ship’s stone pilot, remained. They hired a guide to cross the Mire that lay between the Twilight Woods and Undertown, who unbeknown to them was once a Knight Academic, a man on the same mission as Cloud Wolf, who went mad when he failed and collected the stormphrax that got caught in the toes of creatures traversing the Twilight Woods to the Mire.
Twig and his last companion discovered this haul of stormphrax, along with the ship the knight had set out on. He and Maugin restored the ship enough to fly it and returned to Sanctraphrax. Twig worked out the Most High Academe’s secret to creating phraxdust and sold the information to Mother Horsefeather, an innkeeper and loan shark in Undertown, in exchange for the funds to purchase a brand new ship, the Edgedancer and recruit a crew. Once his crew was assembled – from people he helped in one way or another, with the exception of his quartermaster, Wingnut Sleet – Twig spread the secret across the whole of Undertown, giving everyone access to clean water.
As for his next mission – Twig was told by the caterbird that his father was still alive, lost in open sky beyond the Edge, and so set out with his crew to the perilous skies to find him. While Twig was successful, he and his crew encountered a storm that sent them back to the Edge, scattered across the land. Twig landed close to Sanctaphrax in a semi-catatonic and was taken in by the Professor of Darkness, who tried to keep him in the floating city for his own safety. When he was snapped out of his confused state by Cowlquape, a young Sanctaphrax scholar, Twig was determined to track down his crew and fulfil his duty to them as captain.
Personality:
Generous, confident, and adventurous, Twig is a genuinely good person. He looks to the needs of others before his own and always stands up for an underdog; hence why most of his crew was picked from people he helped and saw potential in, rather than directly recruiting experienced sky-sailors. This is also likely due to the mutiny of the Stormchaser he witnessed first-hand as a result of his father keeping crewmembers who could not be trusted.
Although he was very insecure and nervous when he was younger, Twig has become confident in his own abilities due to being pitted against seemingly impossible odds and coming through them, such as rebuilding a decrepit, practically destroyed sky ship and flying it almost single-handedly, the second time ever he was in charge of flying a sky ship. He inspires those around him to loyalty and rewards that loyalty both to ensure it continues and just because that’s the right thing to do.
This can be seen most clearly in his mission to reunite the crew of the Edgedancer. Despite being told multiple times that the task he has set himself is madness, Twig doesn’t consider for a moment not finding each crewmember and ensuring their safety. He repays loyalty in kind and considers it part of his duty as captain to look after his crew.
Twig is also considerably daring, as shown by his double-crossing of Mother Horsefeather and spreading the means of acquiring clean water through the whole of Undertown. Note that this is a woman his own father was afraid of angering, and who was the equivalent of a crime boss/loan shark in the city. Although he is by no means fearless, he has grown to know what is more important than fear and how to conquer it in a crisis.
While not academic in the slightest, Twig is an intelligent boy, and is quick to pick up on things with some instruction. He is no genius – his introduction to flying a sky ship ended in disaster because the instructions were brief and sparse – but by the canon point he would be brought from he has gotten the knack for picking up things that aren’t explicitly spelled out. A good way to describe him by this point is street-smart; he cannot stand being cooped up in Sanctraphrax after the Professor of Darkness tends to him in the aftermath of his flight into open sky, and cannot understand why anyone would dedicate their life to study, but can barter well and is familiar with the customs of most species on the Edge and knows how to respect them.
Finally, Twig is usually a good judge of character, having learned from the disastrous consequences of trusting Slyvo Spleethe, and has nothing but disdain for the cowardly, mean-spirited, and those who prey on the weak.
Samples
First-Person:
[The video feed comes to life to reveal a wet young man, his black braids plastered to his head. A smile is on his lips but there’s an edge of worry to his voice and in his eyes.]
I’ve been informed of the reason I’m here and, while I will do whatever I can to help, there are some things I have to ensure first.
Is there any way for me to contact anyone from my – um – my world?
[That’s definitely going to take some getting used to.]
I left behind a crew and it is imperative that I ensure their safety without me. I was attempting to locate them when I was brought here. Please, if anyone can help me, I would be in your debt.
Third-Person:
Cloud Spires was the closest he had found to home, which made it both welcome and bittersweet to visit. Whenever the wind ruffled his hair or he dipped his hand into a cloud, Twig was forcibly reminded of his crew; left behind, abandoned.
He meant what he had said when he first arrived; he would do whatever he could to help the people who needed him here. It was the right thing to do, and he clearly was needed. How could he dedicate himself to this task, though, without first doing right by his crew? Guilt pulled at his heart, and more than once he had woken in a cold sweat, a cry on his lips as the nightmares of watching his father’s crew falling apart before his eyes dissipated into the night air.
One crew had already met its untimely end due to his actions; a second would not follow. That meant he had two choices ahead of him. Try to find a way home, or stay and try to solve the problems of this world as quickly as possible to hasten his return in the right way.
The little insect - dragonfly, that was the word – that hovered by him landed on his shoulder, getting a smile out of Twig. He ran a finger down its back.
“Holding up all right?” he asked softly and then, noticing its colour, added: “Hungry?”
The dragonfly hummed its assent and Twig shook himself out of his melancholy thoughts. The issue of getting home was a complex problem that he could not solve immediately, but he could get that little fellow some food.
“Come on, then,” he continued, getting to his feet. “Let’s see what Cloud Spires has to offer us.”
Even as the words left his mouth, Twig realised that Cloud Spires – or, rather, his attachment to it – probably wasn’t helping things. Clutching to the closest thing to home would not help anything. Wandering around, helpless, would not fix things. He should know better than that by now; he was no longer a young’un who needed to have his hand held through troubled times.
Back to the Forgotten Worlds, then, after his dragonfly had eaten, and on to… to whatever was required of him.
Name: Magic
Contact: PM this journal or email @ laudanumlace[@]gmail[dot]com
Current Characters: N/A
IC Information
Name: Captain Twig Verginix
Canon: The Edge Chronicles
Canon Point: Just after setting out from Sanctraphrax to track down his crew.
History:
Twig was born to a sky pirate and his wife, Quintinius (known as Cloud Wolf) and Maris Verginix while the two were on a voyage in the treacherous Deepwoods with a superstitious and petty captain. As it was considered bad luck to have a child born on a sky ship, Twig’s parents were forced to abandon him in a woodtroll village, as woodtrolls were known for being simple and kind folk. There, he was adopted by a woodtroll couple and raised alongside their own children for thirteen years, although he was never truly accepted by anyone other than his “Mother-Mine”. Twig’s only link to his parents is his “comfort cloth”; a shawl Maris sewed for him with an image of a lullabee tree for luck, which Twig always wears tied around his neck as a scarf.
At thirteen, it was becoming unavoidably clear that Twig would not have a real place in a woodtroll village, not least because he was not at all cut out for the lumber trade that most woodtrolls worked at. When a sky pirate crew came to purchase timber and offered Twig a place on their ship as a cabin boy, his adoptive parents’ natural distrust of sky pirates led them to pack him off to relatives for a while.
This would have been fine, as all woodtroll villages are connected by beaten-down paths, except Twig wandered off the path… and began an adventure through the Deepwoods. Over the course of several months, he traversed the Deepwoods – which, as far as he knew, was all there was to the world – making a number of friends along the way. Most notable are Gristle Tatum, a slaughterer boy whose life Twig saved and in return was embraced by his family and given a gift of friendship in the form of a hammelhorn fur waistcoat, which he has always retained, and a banderbear who Twig helped to be rid of a rotten tooth, and in return has gained the friendship of all banderbears – and, finally, the caterbird. Twig witnessed the caterbird hatching, an event that meant the bird was bound for all of Twig’s life to watch over him and save his life.
Eventually, Twig came across a crew of sky pirates captained by none other than his father. Cloud Wolf immediately recognised his son from the scarf around his neck and told the story of Twig’s birth and abandonment without revealing that Twig and his son were one and the same; he and Twig both knew, but the rest of the crew did not. The next morning, Twig awoke to find his father’s ship gone – abandoned a second time.
After an attempt by the Gloamglozer – a demonic figure that cursed the Verginix line beginning with Twig’s father – on his life, however, Twig was saved by the caterbird and taken to his father’s ship. There, Twig became a member of his father’s crew, although his true link to Cloud Wolf was kept secret due to the captain’s fears that his mutinous quartermaster would take advantage of his connection with Twig if it were revealed.
Two years later, his fears were proved accurate. Cloud Wolf was coerced into heading a stormchasing mission to recover a substance called stormphrax from the Great Storm, which was vital for saving the scholarly city of Sanctaphrax. The city was built upon one of the same buoyant rocks that sky ships used to fly and relied on stormphrax, which became unbelievably heavy in darkness, to keep it from breaking free of its moorings. There was usually a substantial amount of stormphrax in the treasure chamber within the rock, but the current Most High Academe was stealing from the stores to continue creating phraxdust, a substance that could, amongst other things, purify water – vital when the water supply from the Edgewater River was befouled by the industrial hub of Undertown.
Due to the danger of the mission, Twig was barred from accompanying the crew – enter Slyvo Spleethe, quartermaster, to lend a sympathetic ear and suggest Twig be smuggled aboard and revealed when it was too late to turn back to Undertown and so prove his worth to his father. When the moment came, Spleethe did indeed reveal Twig – as a means to force Cloud Wolf to give up his ship. The ensuing fight in the Great Storm tore apart the ship, and Cloud Wolf was lost to open sky. The remaining loyal crewmembers banded together in the Twilight Woods under Twig’s lead, but the mind-altering properties of the forest led to each one leaving the group in turn until only Twig and Maugin, the ship’s stone pilot, remained. They hired a guide to cross the Mire that lay between the Twilight Woods and Undertown, who unbeknown to them was once a Knight Academic, a man on the same mission as Cloud Wolf, who went mad when he failed and collected the stormphrax that got caught in the toes of creatures traversing the Twilight Woods to the Mire.
Twig and his last companion discovered this haul of stormphrax, along with the ship the knight had set out on. He and Maugin restored the ship enough to fly it and returned to Sanctraphrax. Twig worked out the Most High Academe’s secret to creating phraxdust and sold the information to Mother Horsefeather, an innkeeper and loan shark in Undertown, in exchange for the funds to purchase a brand new ship, the Edgedancer and recruit a crew. Once his crew was assembled – from people he helped in one way or another, with the exception of his quartermaster, Wingnut Sleet – Twig spread the secret across the whole of Undertown, giving everyone access to clean water.
As for his next mission – Twig was told by the caterbird that his father was still alive, lost in open sky beyond the Edge, and so set out with his crew to the perilous skies to find him. While Twig was successful, he and his crew encountered a storm that sent them back to the Edge, scattered across the land. Twig landed close to Sanctaphrax in a semi-catatonic and was taken in by the Professor of Darkness, who tried to keep him in the floating city for his own safety. When he was snapped out of his confused state by Cowlquape, a young Sanctaphrax scholar, Twig was determined to track down his crew and fulfil his duty to them as captain.
Personality:
Generous, confident, and adventurous, Twig is a genuinely good person. He looks to the needs of others before his own and always stands up for an underdog; hence why most of his crew was picked from people he helped and saw potential in, rather than directly recruiting experienced sky-sailors. This is also likely due to the mutiny of the Stormchaser he witnessed first-hand as a result of his father keeping crewmembers who could not be trusted.
Although he was very insecure and nervous when he was younger, Twig has become confident in his own abilities due to being pitted against seemingly impossible odds and coming through them, such as rebuilding a decrepit, practically destroyed sky ship and flying it almost single-handedly, the second time ever he was in charge of flying a sky ship. He inspires those around him to loyalty and rewards that loyalty both to ensure it continues and just because that’s the right thing to do.
This can be seen most clearly in his mission to reunite the crew of the Edgedancer. Despite being told multiple times that the task he has set himself is madness, Twig doesn’t consider for a moment not finding each crewmember and ensuring their safety. He repays loyalty in kind and considers it part of his duty as captain to look after his crew.
Twig is also considerably daring, as shown by his double-crossing of Mother Horsefeather and spreading the means of acquiring clean water through the whole of Undertown. Note that this is a woman his own father was afraid of angering, and who was the equivalent of a crime boss/loan shark in the city. Although he is by no means fearless, he has grown to know what is more important than fear and how to conquer it in a crisis.
While not academic in the slightest, Twig is an intelligent boy, and is quick to pick up on things with some instruction. He is no genius – his introduction to flying a sky ship ended in disaster because the instructions were brief and sparse – but by the canon point he would be brought from he has gotten the knack for picking up things that aren’t explicitly spelled out. A good way to describe him by this point is street-smart; he cannot stand being cooped up in Sanctraphrax after the Professor of Darkness tends to him in the aftermath of his flight into open sky, and cannot understand why anyone would dedicate their life to study, but can barter well and is familiar with the customs of most species on the Edge and knows how to respect them.
Finally, Twig is usually a good judge of character, having learned from the disastrous consequences of trusting Slyvo Spleethe, and has nothing but disdain for the cowardly, mean-spirited, and those who prey on the weak.
Samples
First-Person:
[The video feed comes to life to reveal a wet young man, his black braids plastered to his head. A smile is on his lips but there’s an edge of worry to his voice and in his eyes.]
I’ve been informed of the reason I’m here and, while I will do whatever I can to help, there are some things I have to ensure first.
Is there any way for me to contact anyone from my – um – my world?
[That’s definitely going to take some getting used to.]
I left behind a crew and it is imperative that I ensure their safety without me. I was attempting to locate them when I was brought here. Please, if anyone can help me, I would be in your debt.
Third-Person:
Cloud Spires was the closest he had found to home, which made it both welcome and bittersweet to visit. Whenever the wind ruffled his hair or he dipped his hand into a cloud, Twig was forcibly reminded of his crew; left behind, abandoned.
He meant what he had said when he first arrived; he would do whatever he could to help the people who needed him here. It was the right thing to do, and he clearly was needed. How could he dedicate himself to this task, though, without first doing right by his crew? Guilt pulled at his heart, and more than once he had woken in a cold sweat, a cry on his lips as the nightmares of watching his father’s crew falling apart before his eyes dissipated into the night air.
One crew had already met its untimely end due to his actions; a second would not follow. That meant he had two choices ahead of him. Try to find a way home, or stay and try to solve the problems of this world as quickly as possible to hasten his return in the right way.
The little insect - dragonfly, that was the word – that hovered by him landed on his shoulder, getting a smile out of Twig. He ran a finger down its back.
“Holding up all right?” he asked softly and then, noticing its colour, added: “Hungry?”
The dragonfly hummed its assent and Twig shook himself out of his melancholy thoughts. The issue of getting home was a complex problem that he could not solve immediately, but he could get that little fellow some food.
“Come on, then,” he continued, getting to his feet. “Let’s see what Cloud Spires has to offer us.”
Even as the words left his mouth, Twig realised that Cloud Spires – or, rather, his attachment to it – probably wasn’t helping things. Clutching to the closest thing to home would not help anything. Wandering around, helpless, would not fix things. He should know better than that by now; he was no longer a young’un who needed to have his hand held through troubled times.
Back to the Forgotten Worlds, then, after his dragonfly had eaten, and on to… to whatever was required of him.
