buffleheaded | Duplicity reapp

« « « BLOODLUST » » »

« « « OOC INFORMATION

Name: Jay
Age: 36
Contact: fakealchemist on plurk, pm this journal
Timezone: EST
Other Character(s): Reapp – previous acceptance link

« « « IC INFORMATION

Name: Imoen
Door: Previous designation – dominant.

Canon: Baldur’s Gate
Canon Point: Since her last stay in Duplicity I’d like to advance her from the end of “Shadow of Amn” to her “Throne of Bhaal” epilogue, at which point she is coming to terms with who her adventure has made her, but stepping out of her sibling’s shadow so that she isn’t concerned with comings and goings of castmates.

Age: 22
Appearance: Image.
The young woman is small, with a slender build for a character design meant to emphasize a thief's agility. Imoen has brown hair, but keeps it dyed pink and cropped between chin and shoulder-length, with several locks in simple decorative ties. She has pronounced cheekbones, a high forehead and generally smooth skin save for scars from fighting and torture -- the most obvious of which is a scar over her right eye.

History: Wiki covers through the end of “Shadow of Amn.” Since this is a reapp, it’s worth noting that any mention of Abdel Adrian would be substituted with Syeira,

child_of_bhaal, who originally came to Duplicity as her sibling with her. The wiki fails to incorporate “Throne of Bhaal,” so that follows.

After the sisters defeat Irenicus and Bodhi, and recover their souls, they find themselves thrust into a chaotic new conflict. War breaks out in Tethyr, with many Bhaalspawn fighting for power – here more than ever, we find that the Bhaalspawn work a bit like Highlander, gathering their father’s divine power as their siblings die. A woman named Melissan seems to be trying to protect the Bhaalspawn who aren’t part of the conflict, but particular set known as The Five manage to kill them all anyway as they sack the city of Saradush.

As the protagonist and their party takes the individual members of the Five down, they and their party members grapple with what it means to have grown so powerful to be dealing with matters of this scale. The protagonist is growing into the power of a god, and though far less powerful, Imoen is struggling with the awakening of the divine essence in herself; her abilities grow, and she has to work more to adjust to the urges that come with being a Bhaalspawn.

In the end, it is revealed that Melissan’s true identity is Amelyssan, manipulating both the protagonist’s party and the Five into killing each other. She plans to kill whatever Bhaalspawn’s left standing (ie, the protagonist, and incidentally Imoen) to finish gathering up Bhaal’s essence and resurrect the old murder god. Once she’s defeated, the protagonist gets to decide whether they’re going to ascend to godhood themselves, or live out their life as a mortal adventurer. Imoen’s choice is to return to her childhood home, the library fortress of Candlekeep, taking a little mental health break before stepping back out into the world to associate as a peer with famous archmages – and to found her own thieves guild.
CR AU: Using this to discuss relevant Duplicity history! In Duplicity, Imoen fell in love with the warlock/bard tiefling Juniper, with Juniper as her contracted submissive – and she came to be rather intimate friends with the OC Phillip, and Wicked’s Glinda. The structure of her life in Duplicity led to a lifestyle increasingly independent of her sister; she was experiencing a life without adventure, in which she began to play games with the individuals she met in the city for her own comfort and entertainment. She and Juniper would take the edges off each other’s traumas, and then sweetly amuse one another. Glinda provided her with someone to prank, and Phillip provided someone who would play along with certain types of mischief. The arrival and departure of castmates like her brother Sarevok and the cleric Anomen troubled her, sparked a need for action. But otherwise, the relationships she built in the city taught her to engage in the odd things that would come up in the city as a way to explore and enjoy things that might not have otherwise occurred.

Personality:
Positive Trait: Mischievous
Imoen is, first and foremost, defined by a desire to be cheerful. When we first meet her, Imoen knows something’s wrong before the protagonist does, and she knows it because she’s making her own fun within the boring confines of Candlekeep. She pickpockets monks she knows won’t have anything valuable; pickpockets her own allies, and teases them before giving things back, just to try stirring up some fun. As the story progresses and threatens to become too edgy, she tries to keep things light – as examples, she makes up embarrassing stories to tease her sibling, pranks the evil wizard that can join the party, or trades absurd tall tales with another rogue, for example. It is a plot point that her general upbeat energy suppressed the divine essence of her father, and in order to awaken it, an evil wizard had to subject her to extensive torture and magical experimentation. Even with the Bhaalspawn side of her awakened, and Imoen coming to understand that she’s not the same person she used to be, the rogue starts more actively choosing to present herself as someone playful, even goofy. Imoen is an intelligent woman – she likes to be seen as an annoying little sister type, and works to present herself accordingly. For example, party members question how cavalier she seems to be about the revelations of her nature, and she cracks jokes about the possibility she'll turn into a murderous monster.
In Duplicity: This part of her became easier. CR supported and comforted her when things triggered the problematic aspects of being a Bhaalspawn. Not being in life-or-death plots meant she could focus on enjoying things. Imoen got to go to parties, make a friend by stealing their phone and sending texts through it, and adapt some spells for inappropriate use in pranks or a bit of creative sex.

Negative Trait: Bloodlust
The problem with being a child of a murder god. This part of her is contrary to all the sweetness she usually spreads around; since her father’s taint has been brought to the surface there are certain instincts that have woken in her. This expressed itself in the worst ways when she was missing her soul, but it means she has to mind what this could turn her into, if she isn’t careful. She has become fascinated by blood, violence, and glimpses of pain or death, at once loving and disgusted by it. When she's in her right mind, Imoen avoids fighting where possible, complaining she's seen too much death and there has to be another way - but it’s so tempting, and violence can be triggering for her, on occasion getting the better of her and causing her to do things like crow as she sees an enemy incinerated, or making her disappointed when a fight ends to the point she confides that she was so frustrated she wanted to jump on her sibling, clawing and biting. The more she sees, the harder it is to stop.
In Duplicity: This proved to be a problem on multiple occasions for her. During the first Tumenalia, she and her sister lost control of themselves and escalated some frustrated nerves to a brief physical fight, ending with Imoen crying about the things that can’t be fixed about herself. On another occasion, Juniper had to distract and occupy Imoen, keeping her Dominant from getting herself in trouble for attacking people. The most egregious incident came when she lost control and attempted to carve a word into Poison Ivy’s body, making an enemy of a woman who had previously been curious about Imoen.

Negative Trait: Careless
Imoen’s interest in making herself the goofy companion is a bit of a problem, sometimes. Imoen will attempt to undercut seriousness and make light of things at times that are quite inappropriate, especially pranking and teasing allies that strike her as too self-righteous. She is no stranger to the word ‘oops,’ an unfortunate quality in the person you might want to find and disarm – or set – deadly traps, much less direct magical energies. Imoen’s the sort of wizard who’s muttering to herself “Clearing my mind. Clear mind. Cleeeeear miiiiiiind.” She’s the sort of rogue who sneaks out of Candlekeep fortress without taking the time to plan for the fact that she’ll want to be let back in someday (good luck, you need a sufficiently rare book to donate to Candlekeep’s library as price for admission). For a rogue who spent much of the adventure trying to stay out of the spotlight, she makes herself stick out like a sore thumb with bright hair dyes and clothing. She does plan, she does understand consequences, or else she wouldn’t succeed in her personal ambitions. But she’s also too happy to laugh off the consequences of acting on impulse or watching her plans go awry.
In Duplicity: She’s learned to respect the boundaries of the city’s systems. Imoen participated once in an attempt to break into a building and steal information, and saw her submissive punished in a separate event. Imoen found that it wasn’t really worth the trouble. But outside of that, on the personal level with other LIERs – oh, Imoen will ruin her own attempt to stealthily prank a vampire by taking too many chances, and get in trouble for it.

Negative Trait: kleptomania
Imoen cheerfully tells a companion that she became a thief because one day, she saw one of her two adoptive father figures walking around with a trinket hanging out, daring her to grab it. For years, she was cooped up with monks with nothing of value to steal (and she certainly wasn’t going to be able to profit from selling her father figure’s things back to himself), but she was exploring their pockets anyway. At the start of the adventure, she only knows something’s going on and invites herself along for the adventure because she makes it a habit of breaking into people’s private quarters to root through their belongings. She’s actually quite bad at pickpocketing. Mechanically, Imoen’s thief skills are distributed such that she can handle any lock presented to her in canon, but she has very little invested in pickpocketing or trap-setting – and dialogue supports that she’s bad at it, rather than pretending otherwise. Imoen makes a great break-and-enter thief, but she knows she’s likely to get caught when she puts her hand in someone’s pocket and she wants to do it anyway. She will attempt to steal from her own party members, and simply give the item back to her victim because the feelings that come with the act was the goal, not the keeping of the item itself.
In Duplicity: On one hand, Imoen learned not to go around saying she’s a thief. She wants to stay under the radar and not collect citations. That said, though, among LIERs she has only felt rewarded for her behavior. For example, early on Imoen tried to lift jewelry off of Wicked’s Glinda at a dance, and Glinda noticing the attempt led to flustered behavior that deeply amused Imoen, leading to CR in which the rogue incorrigibly misbehaved around Glinda for her own amusement.

Powers and Abilities: Imoen is a thief and wizard. For mundane abilities, she is trained in fighting with daggers, staves, bows and darts; she is also very skilled in lockpicking and finding and disarming traps. She has mediocre skill in stealth, and negligible skill in setting traps. She enjoys picking pockets but is statistically bad at it; basically as a thief she's best at breaking into and rooting through people's homes. Imoen is not among the strongest of Bhaalspawn, but now that her portion of the god's essence is no longer being suppressed people with relevant senses may be able to detect it. Abilities from Bhaal’s essence are based on her alignment, so she mostly gains the ability to channel energy to heal or inflict harm at a touch once in a while.

As a mage, however, Imoen has a great deal of spellcasting utility. She has to get a full night’s rest (by default considered eight hours) and spend time studying her spellbook to memorize any spells she wants to use for that day. She must have her spellbook, and she cannot memorize and cast every spell in her book; she has to try and anticipate which ones she'll need on a given day, or she won't have the ones she needs prepared. In general, all spells have methods to mitigate or negate damage or negative effects they inflict. In the interest of simplicity, I'm going to assume that instant death effects or spells that summon/banish entities across planes of existence are not available to her. A full list with details and commentary on usefulness/weaknesses is here but because that’s long, a generalized description:

Level one is the most minor spells, such as small blasts of energy, close-range flaming or ice attacks, creates a greasy area that hinders movement, causes status effects such as sleep, illusions to temporarily blind or confuse enemies, improve her own sight, or identify magic items.

Level two includes manipulating fire or shooting an acid attack at one target, inflict status effects like creating a sticky web to stop movement, or a number of enchantments or illusions to hide herself or counter the special abilities of others (for instance, Vocalize lets her cast a spell silently if she expects someone to make it so she can't talk, or Mirror Image generates several illusions of herself to hide among and take hits for her). There’s a spell for unlocking things when her own lockpicking skills fails.

Level three has a number of useful spells, such as throwing one large or several small fireballs and lightning bolts, with a variety of defensive spells that either directly counter magical effects or reduce damage from specific damage types, such as acid, fire, mundane ranged attacks, or electricity. Utility spells include hasting/slowing targets, or even immobilizing them.

Level four has a sweet spot of power and variety. It largely improves on earlier spells, with several new ones inflicting status effects like confusion or illness that weakens and slows the target until it can be cured. Enchantments allow her to temporarily create a mace, axe or sword out of magical energy (rarely used because she's not good with those weapons and those who are good with them usually carry better versions of those weapons), or scry an area for several minutes to watch or study something from afar. There are improved spells protecting her from hot or cold damage types while surrounding her in defensive flame, a spell to remove a curse or turn a target into an animal. Stoneskin covers her in magic stone that absorbs a number of physical hits for her. This is also the first level to offer a spell that lets her cast and store a spell for later, letting her trigger it in an instant without taking the time to cast in the heat of combat.

Level five offers improved protection spells, an improved confusion spell, the ability to set off a burst of flames around herself, and a few more spells countering magical abilities.

Level six offers better magical counters, a spell storage ability that triggers regardless of what she's doing based on a set circumstance (such as "enemy sighted" or "wizard loses 50% of health). There are also spells for things like chain lightning or the ability to magically increase her strength for melee fighting for a couple minutes.

Level seven offers a delayed-blast fireball that waits for an enemy to wander too close before going off, more magic counters, creating a floating sword that wields itself (but can be destroyed), a third spell storage ability (this one stores better spells than the first, but she can only have one active at a time), and the ability to project an illusion of herself that she can move around and cast spells through (basically letting herself fight without directly exposing herself). The most amusing spell on this level is a Sphere of Chaos -- people in an small area of effect get hit with random status effects including bursting into flames, being healed or hasted.

Level eight gets nasty with an area of effect spell that damages by sucking moisture out of all living beings in the area of effect, creating a cloud of flames or manifesting a large magical hand that attempts to catch and squeeze an enemy. There's an improved option to project her image and fight through it, as well as more flavors of spell counters. This level offers for the first time the ability to inscribe a magical symbol on a surface that serves as a trap that inflicts a status effect, such as fear.

Inventory:
-Spellbook
-Cloak of Non-Detection aka "Whispers of Silence" (Enchanted: protects from magical attempts to reveal the wearer when he or she is invisible/in stealth. Despite advertisement, not actually effective against all means of detection.)
-"Firetooth" dagger (Enchanted: Minor fire damage on hit. Returns to the user after it's been thrown.)

Samples:
- Drinks with Kirk with musings on what cookies deserve and rather different family dynamics.
- Flower arrangements with Astarion. Imoen knows when the city offers an activity, it’s a chance to spin up some games of her own.