inkulcation | eudio app;

PLAYER INFORMATION

NAME: Makari
AGE: 23
CONTACT: makari.crow@gmail.com or pm to journal
CHARACTERS PLAYED: n/a

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: China Sorrows
CANON: Skulduggery Pleasant
AGE: Somewhat past four hundred, probably about 430.
CANON POINT: End of book six: she’s just lost nearly everything.

BACKGROUND: Wiki is [here]; character specific page is [here]. Fan-run and subject to inconsistencies, of course, and I’ll note that I disagree with some of it. More on that under Anything Else.

INCENTIVE/FIT:

Incentive; So China's initial thought, of course, because a secret that she was trying very hard to keep has just gotten out, is to see if that can be fixed. As erasing other peoples' memories is not on, she'll have to settle for the restoration of something she's lost.

Which will be, after some finagling, her dead brother. While it would be nice to have her contacts and resources and library back, and it would be amazing if those one-of-a-kind irreplaceable books that got blown up were no longer so much ash and dust, her political position is precarious; those could just as easily be taken again. And, while she's proud, she's at a particularly low point right now. Enough to actually act on the unspoken regret she carries for never resolving things with her brother.

In most precise terms, China's incentive is the restoration of Mr Bliss, living and whole in mind and body.

(She will, however, lie through her teeth to everyone else about what she asked for.)

Fit; While not exactly a cuddly person, China's not a stranger to using her appearance and/or body to achieve a goal. Direct quote: "I do what I must to get what I want." If it's worth it -- and it absolutely is -- she'll go quite a ways, and fortunately, murder isn't even necessary in this case.

She might even eventually admit to actual emotions, if I’m lucky.

SAMPLES:

Recent threads taken from China at Tu Shanshu; she has not changed significantly in her time there and characterization should not be notably different. [here] and [here]. The first is prose and emotions everywhere; the latter is long, network-style, and so much snark.

ANYTHING ELSE?

While it isn’t outright specified in canon, it seems most likely that China’s specific magical discipline is the language of magic. Her wiki page implies in the first line that her magic is to make people fall in love with her, and that she studies symbolic magic on the side; I disagree with this analysis and do not play her that way. Rather, my interpretation is that the language of magic is her discipline. She has a wide variety of tattoos which have all manner of uses, and I believe that her ability to create love in other people is derived from an array of sigil-tattoos that generates that passive effect. She’s described multiple times as having a great love of books and reading and language, before anything else in her life, and I believe this interpretation makes more sense for her.

The way I play her magic does have a fair chunk of headcanon woven in, necessarily, as canon does not go into great detail; I’m specifying that now so I don’t do so repeatedly over the next paragraphs.

Passively, her magic grants her unnaturally steady hands and sharp eyesight and focus, both of which make the precision required for symbolic magic easy for her. It also makes her grasp of the language more instinctive, from the most efficient arrangement for a given group of sigils to which one is more appropriate in a given situation to which joining symbol is more useful. In other words, it makes many of the simpler things second nature, and while China has studied extensively and can pass her knowledge down, it occasionally takes her a few moments to explain the most basic principles, which seem dumbfoundingly obvious to her.

She often uses all this knowledge to create wards or tattoos. Her entire body is covered in tattoos, all invisible until she calls on them, every single one with a magical use. A variety of them have combat uses, such as physical augments or blasts of energy; some of them are tied to her living space and library in Ireland, to allow her to manipulate her surroundings, and as such those will be useless unless and until she re-creates the other parts of the appropriate arrays here; some are environmental, designed to make sure she’s comfortable no matter the climate. None of these exceed car-level destruction, and the combat ones are generally oriented toward damaging people, not places. The one I might point out specifically is the pair on her palms that cause agonizing pain and eventual death with physical contact; if you would prefer she not have that capability, I’m amenable to limiting her.

The emotional manipulation array is the tricky one. It’s a set of tattoos that goes across her collarbones, and as a passive effect it causes people to fall in love with her, whether romantic love or friend-crush love or celebrity adoration. In canon, it’s specified that she herself can’t actually turn it off; I reason that it’s one of the earliest tattoo sets she gave herself, and is therefore woven into the others in such a way that retooling everything would take months if not years.

Naturally, for Eudio, this effect will be deactivated, as it’s amazingly coercive in nature and creates all kinds of consent issues, but I include it to explain exactly what China’s used to, and why she’ll be more than a bit off-balance upon arrival. Ideally, the tattoos themselves will remain, but those which cause that specific effect will simply remain dormant and unresponsive, if that's acceptable.