Jan. 18th, 2007

tanarill: (Default)
Yes. I am. I'm currently working on constructing the character of my Walker. The problem with Walkers (all of them, not just mine) is that they are uber-gods of magic. To balance this, most of them have some fairly deep psychological issues that, theoretically, being a Walker helps to get rid of.

A list of her problems:
She's got a huge crush on her adopted brother's husband.
She (accidentally) got her best friend killed at age seven, and made this the basis of her personality.
She's a member of a nobility whose sole purpose for the last thousand years or so has been to hunt down and kill innocents (although, to be fair, they are innocents who go crazy and scoop ten-mile-wide craters out of the earth), and she doesn't really want to kill people.
She is being raped. Walkers don't live in their bodies, and time kind of breaks around them. Despite the fact that she has been outside of her body for nealy a hundred thousand years, she's going to arrive back two heartbeats after she left.
She has a demon living in her heart; this is not a metaphor. There is also an angel living in her mind, put there to counteract the demon. If she's not careful, it takes over her body and does stupid things like try to feed the hungry by giving them a good meal.
Emotionally, she is dependent on her sword-that-used-to-be-a-human. The sword is working on this.

. . . and I just realized that I've loaded this girl down with enough problems to top even RP!Dan. I was gonna ask for suggestions to help screw her up even more, but I should really give her some breaks.

Alright! Tomorrow: her uber-god-of-magic powers.
tanarill: (Default)
Okay, so continuing from yesterday. I listed all the things that plague my lovely little Walker-muse. Now I shall list what she's got going for her.

Lists:

Pre-Walker skills, which she had in her home universe:
Unless she's making an effort, most psi powers bounce off of her. It's caused by a really rare recessive gene that her entire family has. (This is why they are the ones who have to hunt down and kill psi-Talents; they're the only ones the Talents can't effect.)
If someone does direct a psi-Talent at her, she can pinpoint the person who's doing it and bounce it where she wants it to go. She can bounce multiple sources at one target, and while she can only bounce additively (as opposed to Talents, who get exponentially stronger in groups), she can affect her family, and other otherwise-immune people.
If someone bounces something like empathy at her, she can use that Talent. In essence, she becomes an empath for a short time.

Walker skills, which she got from being a Walker or learned while Walking:
Once she enters a universe, she can set up a mind-link with the Walker database. Pretty much everything that all Walkers have ever learned is stored there, so if she doesn't know something immediately, a few hours of searching can usually turn up the answer.
She can make simulacra, physical bodies to use while she's in a universe. Simulacra, which aren't alive, can't die. They also don't age. They do need to eat and sleep in the early years, but a different Walker eventually figures out a way around that problem, and she learns to modify her simulacra to not need either. The same trick allows her to change the simulacra's physical attributes.
She doesn't need simulacra to survive, although obviously it's easier to do what the does if she's go a body to do it in.
She can break people's souls. She doesn't like doing this, since a big part of becoming a Walker is having one's soul broken, and making an enemy into an uber-powerful magic god is generally a Bad Idea.
She knows a lot of magic. This is a side effect both of passing through a lot of universes and of having the Walker mind-link. What it means is that she can generally find a type of magic not effected by any bindings she's placed under, and remove the bindings.
Any magic that bounces off of her is subject to the same rules as Talents. About three-quarter of all magic does. This means that, even though she's a good mage on her own, she can also channel a lot of other people's spells at one goal.
She can call down a goddess; that is, instead of allowing a goddess to ride her body while she becomes an avatar, she puts herself in the goddess' body and use the goddess as the avatar instead. There is a complicated Arrangement that details under what conditions she's allowed to do this.

Eska-powers, which belong to the sword:
It talks. In your head.
It thinks.
It chooses its own bearer.
It can use any senses that its bearer possesses, as well as some of its own.
If invited to, it can take over the bearer's body, making them into one kickass swordsman with no training whatsoever.
It knows magic, and can hide this fact. This is important when an enemy mage is expecting the magic attack to come from the Walker, and finds that it's come from the sword instead.
It has some level of prophetic power, but nobody knows how much, not even the sword itself.

See why she needed to have so many disads? Without them, she's be way overpowered. I still think she's way overpowered, but I don't want her to lose any of her ads. I might have sacrifice them anyway. Please tell me which skill, in your opinion, gives her the most power. That's the one that's going to either go away entirely or be much, much harder to do. None of the pre-Walker skills are going away, though.

Next up: Some form of backstory. Quite possibly the Talent/Hunter dichotomy of her home universe.

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