Hazel Lockwood (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deadtective) wrote2014-06-24 06:05 pm
deadtective) wrote2014-06-24 06:05 pm
Entry tags:
mom app;
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Len
RETURNING: n/a
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Hazel Lockwood
CHARACTER AGE: 19 physically and mentally, plus roughly ten years of being dead.
CANON ORIGIN: Completely original.
CHRONOLOGY: A month or so after being resurrected.
CLASS: Incredibly reluctant hero.
HOUSING: Random is fine.
BACKGROUND:
Hazel's world is identical to present day Earth, with the addition of magic. Magical beings, from witches to vampires and everything in between, exist under the veneer of regular society. Their influence on history has been relatively low because they prefer to keep to themselves, most believing that regular people simply aren't worth their time. While disagreements occasionally spill over and cause repercussions for the unknowing masses, for the most part the magical community is aggressively insular and perfectly happy with its underground status.
This complacency most likely stems from the fact that the only thing 'underground' about them is their supernatural abilities - most of the unnatural beings on earth are old money at this point (thanks to their extended lifespan) and have created an array of snobbish organizations which they use to mingle in public; basically the DAR or debutante groups, just with vampires instead of young Southern girls. While there are magical people living in more working class situations, it's rare to find such a scenario where the person hasn't chosen this lifestyle voluntarily. Much more likely is that they were the victims of someone's whims and are now trying to hold down their job at the packing plant while also howling through the swamps once a month.
For the first nineteen years of her life, Hazel had no knowledge that all over the world werewolves were sinking their claws into the cattle industry or that witches held massive divination sessions to determine the optimal stock purchases for the year. She was born a regular human to regular human parents in the northeastern United States, and lived a blissfully normal life filled with the usual sorrows and triumphs of childhood and teenagerdom.
Then she went to college.
During spring break, Hazel decided to be a little adventurous and join a group of her friends and friends' friends in going down to New Orleans. Piling into overstuffed hotel rooms and exploring a new city seemed like the sort of thing you were supposed to get out of the college experience, after all. Unfortunately, in what was the beginning of Hazel's chronic poor luck, the fun didn't last very long - several days into the trip, she was ambushed and killed while walking back to her hotel alone. The culprit was a serial killer who had already racked up an impressive body count by the time he knocked off Hazel; it would be several months until he was caught, and several more until he confirmed that she had indeed been one of his victims.
In the meantime, Hazel's body had already set sail on a new journey. A week or so after being dumped unceremoniously into the Mississippi, the corpse resurfaced during a heavy rainstorm and began to float down the river like some kind of macabre pool toy. It was spotted and pulled ashore by a woman named Edith, who had been out for a walk in the wee hours of the morning and had no interest in turning the body over to the police.
As it turned out, Edith was a witch. This would have been nothing more than an interesting piece of trivia if not for the fact that she was also a witch with a vendetta. Edith had once been part of the supernatural high society in New Orleans - however, her choice in romantic partners would be her downfall. An old lover who was as vindictive as she was and with far greater ambitions returned to showcase his newfound powers - by binding Edith to her home and sealing the majority of her powers.
This would have been the end of things if not for Edith's elemental affinity with water; when it rained she was able to draw a small amount of power from the water and either store it or use it to push the boundaries of her binding just a little. It was during one such rainstorm that she saw Hazel's corpse, and the opportunity that accompanied it - while she herself could not leave the city to pursue her revenge, she could craft a servant that could.
Hazel's body was summarily spirited back to Edith's home and embalmed, using the tools which the witch had collected and used during her days of freedom. The preserved body was then stored for the next ten years as Edith slowly built up enough power to attempt the resurrection.
She finally grew tired of waiting any longer and, on the night of a particularly vicious thunderstorm, began the spell. However, Edith had made a huge error - her years of being unable to cast spells had prompted her to miscalculate the amount of power required to create a zombie. Hazel was raised, but her personality and consciousness had returned as well.
Although Edith was less than pleased with her relative failure of an undead slave (and Hazel even less so) she managed to find a way to make things work. Hazel may have been able to mouth off and protest, but the witch still held the ability to rend her soul from her body and send her back to her untimely grave. With this threat looming over her head, Hazel had no choice but to acquiesce to Edith's demands and set off across America in search of the mage who had bound Edith and a revenge she had no interest in.
PERSONALITY:
Hazel attempts to portray herself as rational and level-headed, but the reality is that it's incredibly easy to wind her up. A great deal of this stems from the fact that she's been thrust into a world which she previously had no idea existed and is consistently expected to navigate it without any sort of help. She reacts to the strange and unnatural in a manner that any normal person would - to a degree. As much as she tries to come across as otherwise, Hazel is incredibly immature in many ways and her responses often reflect that.
Her tendency towards theatrics aren't completely the fault of young adulthood, however. As much as she appears to be more or less well-adjusted, beneath the surface is a cauldron of insecurities. Hazel is constantly questioning her humanity and looking for every possible reason to justify her claim that she's still a human where it counts, regardless of her lack of a pulse.
To this end, she believes that so long as she keeps her reactions to the bizarre well within what a 'normal' person would do, she can continue to consider herself human. This is the reason that some of her outbursts seem so overblown from an outside perspective - the longer she spend mired in the supernatural and strange, the less she actually finds it strange, and this is absolutely terrifying to her.
While Hazel may consider it a huge detriment and attempt to stifle it at any possible turn, her adaptability is actually one of her greatest assets. When she allows herself, she can roll with the most unexpected twists and turns and use her limited pool of skills to achieve the outcome she wants from a situation, even when such a feat seems impossible. Unfortunately, because of the negative connotations she's attached to it, Hazel only ever taps into her full potential when caught in situations that move too quickly for her to do anything but react on instinct.
Said instincts are much nobler than she really realizes or admits. With everything that's been thrust upon her, Hazel steadfastly maintains that she doesn't want to deal with anyone else's problems or become involved with anything more than she actually has to. However, she is at her core a good person, and the experiences she's suffered through have made her acutely sensitive to plights with similar themes.
She can't in good conscience walk away from situation where someone may be seriously injured or killed - or worse, situations where someone's free will has been compromised in some way. From her perspective, there's nothing she can do about her own issues, but that doesn't mean that anyone else should ever have to suffer through the same thing.
These forays into altruism bring to light the fact that Hazel possesses much more determination than she realizes; although she has no experience with combat or the intimate details of magic, she's willing to put everything on the line in order to forge ahead and achieve her goals.
For all of her unintentional meddling in other people's lives, Hazel is incredibly lonely. Because of her death she cannot contact her former friends and family, nor can she reach out and forge new bonds with normal people. Similarly, her condition prevents her from befriending anyone from the supernatural community - zombies are considered antiquated and less than human, prompting nothing but disdain for one that hasn't even been raised properly.
Hazel feels her isolation very keenly, although she tries her best to repress any thoughts about it. This loneliness makes her desperate for some way to connect with people or unburden herself, even in the smallest and vaguest way, of the weight she is constantly carrying around.
POWER:
- zombie physiology (canon)
As a zombie, Hazel no longer requires any of the things necessary to keep the human body alive - she doesn't need to breath, eat, sleep, or other similar things. Additionally, she no longer tires or feels extreme heat and cold in a way that could cause her discomfort. Her body cannot age, as it has literally been preserved; no matter how long she exists, she will always be physically nineteen.
Most obviously, her undead condition means that it is now impossible for her to die by most normal means. She no longer has any blood in her body, which means she cannot bleed, and any open wounds sustained can be easily sewn up with medical thread; similarly, broken bones and other effects of blunt force trauma magically repair themselves at a rapid speed.
Unlike some styles of zombies, however, she does not retain the ability to manipulate body parts that are removed. For example, if she had a hand ripped off, it would just sit on the ground like a regular severed hand rather than leap at her attacker's face or the like. If she were completely torn apart, only the largest chunk of her body would retain consciousness and (limited) mobility.
However, this does not mean that Hazel is invulnerable. While she has increased resistance to most magical spells (as well as more mundane things such as being set on fire) she is incredibly susceptible to holy and healing magic - because she no longer has any organs or other systems to heal, the spells instead do incredible damage as they attempt to fix objects which no longer exist. If afflicted with this sort of magic for long enough, it can easily incapacitate or 'kill' her for good.
It is incredibly easy for those with supernatural sensitivities to detect that Hazel is no longer human; additionally, with enough finesse they can also notice that the spell used to resurrect her was botched and she is (from a magical standpoint) rather poorly put together.
This also works in reverse - now that she's an otherworldly being, Hazel possesses the 'sight' which allows supernatural creatures to perceive each other as they truly are. This means that she is able to see through glamours cast both to disguise their conjurers and confound others as well as perceive beings that would generally be invisible to those with no psychic ability. She can also feel magic in the air and tell it apart from spells cast by different people, as well as trace them to their source if she focuses hard enough on it. None of this would be done without explicit permission by the other player, of course.
- power nullification (non-canon)
Hazel will be able to create a sort of dead zone (pun intended) in a twenty meter radius around her. Within this field all superhuman powers will be disabled, including projectiles that cross through it. It will not, of course, disable anything else, so if a bodybuilder wanted to run up to Hazel and rip her head off he would be able to do so with ease.
The field can only be triggered consciously, and it requires focus to maintain. If Hazel becomes distracted it will disappear, and if she moves it will move with her rather than become a remote projection.
It will, of course, only work on those people whose players have given permission prior, and would be disabled if it interfered with the plot progression in any way.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ah, thank god this thing has a text option. Hazel is leery of even putting her voice out onto this network - she really doesn't want any way to be more identifiable than she absolutely has to be. perhaps it's a little paranoid in the company of other...less than normal people, but she can't help it. somehow she doesn't think even imPorts would look kindly on a zombie.]
So, this is...fantastic.
There's probably been a lot more creative complaining on here than I can dish out, so I guess I'll skip that for now. Maybe I'll come back to that when the next catastrophe hits.
I do actually want to ask about something productive, though. Anyone who decided to go unregistered - how's that working out for you? I get that you lose all the shiny toys, but I'm not really sure how...well, I mean, does it actually matter?
Those nanomachine whatevers don't get pumped out of your blood automatically when you decide not to register, do they? So what's stopping anyone from deciding you're going to help anyway?
Is there something about all this that just didn't get mentioned while I was talking with people? No one really seems worried at all when it looks like a huge issue to me! Am I just nuts? Does this universe jumping render you temporarily insane or something??
[perfect. a completely smooth and put together first post that absolutely did not devolve into the intense anxiety and worry that's been roiling in her head since she first staggered out of the government facility. yes, this will surely get her the rational answers she desires.]
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: An open log from her last time in the game.
FINAL NOTES: She's being wiped clean for this go round, but if for some masochistic reason you'd like to see more thread examples, I have a post of every thread Hazel ever did during her previous stay in MoM.
NAME: Len
RETURNING: n/a
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Hazel Lockwood
CHARACTER AGE: 19 physically and mentally, plus roughly ten years of being dead.
CANON ORIGIN: Completely original.
CHRONOLOGY: A month or so after being resurrected.
CLASS: Incredibly reluctant hero.
HOUSING: Random is fine.
BACKGROUND:
Hazel's world is identical to present day Earth, with the addition of magic. Magical beings, from witches to vampires and everything in between, exist under the veneer of regular society. Their influence on history has been relatively low because they prefer to keep to themselves, most believing that regular people simply aren't worth their time. While disagreements occasionally spill over and cause repercussions for the unknowing masses, for the most part the magical community is aggressively insular and perfectly happy with its underground status.
This complacency most likely stems from the fact that the only thing 'underground' about them is their supernatural abilities - most of the unnatural beings on earth are old money at this point (thanks to their extended lifespan) and have created an array of snobbish organizations which they use to mingle in public; basically the DAR or debutante groups, just with vampires instead of young Southern girls. While there are magical people living in more working class situations, it's rare to find such a scenario where the person hasn't chosen this lifestyle voluntarily. Much more likely is that they were the victims of someone's whims and are now trying to hold down their job at the packing plant while also howling through the swamps once a month.
For the first nineteen years of her life, Hazel had no knowledge that all over the world werewolves were sinking their claws into the cattle industry or that witches held massive divination sessions to determine the optimal stock purchases for the year. She was born a regular human to regular human parents in the northeastern United States, and lived a blissfully normal life filled with the usual sorrows and triumphs of childhood and teenagerdom.
Then she went to college.
During spring break, Hazel decided to be a little adventurous and join a group of her friends and friends' friends in going down to New Orleans. Piling into overstuffed hotel rooms and exploring a new city seemed like the sort of thing you were supposed to get out of the college experience, after all. Unfortunately, in what was the beginning of Hazel's chronic poor luck, the fun didn't last very long - several days into the trip, she was ambushed and killed while walking back to her hotel alone. The culprit was a serial killer who had already racked up an impressive body count by the time he knocked off Hazel; it would be several months until he was caught, and several more until he confirmed that she had indeed been one of his victims.
In the meantime, Hazel's body had already set sail on a new journey. A week or so after being dumped unceremoniously into the Mississippi, the corpse resurfaced during a heavy rainstorm and began to float down the river like some kind of macabre pool toy. It was spotted and pulled ashore by a woman named Edith, who had been out for a walk in the wee hours of the morning and had no interest in turning the body over to the police.
As it turned out, Edith was a witch. This would have been nothing more than an interesting piece of trivia if not for the fact that she was also a witch with a vendetta. Edith had once been part of the supernatural high society in New Orleans - however, her choice in romantic partners would be her downfall. An old lover who was as vindictive as she was and with far greater ambitions returned to showcase his newfound powers - by binding Edith to her home and sealing the majority of her powers.
This would have been the end of things if not for Edith's elemental affinity with water; when it rained she was able to draw a small amount of power from the water and either store it or use it to push the boundaries of her binding just a little. It was during one such rainstorm that she saw Hazel's corpse, and the opportunity that accompanied it - while she herself could not leave the city to pursue her revenge, she could craft a servant that could.
Hazel's body was summarily spirited back to Edith's home and embalmed, using the tools which the witch had collected and used during her days of freedom. The preserved body was then stored for the next ten years as Edith slowly built up enough power to attempt the resurrection.
She finally grew tired of waiting any longer and, on the night of a particularly vicious thunderstorm, began the spell. However, Edith had made a huge error - her years of being unable to cast spells had prompted her to miscalculate the amount of power required to create a zombie. Hazel was raised, but her personality and consciousness had returned as well.
Although Edith was less than pleased with her relative failure of an undead slave (and Hazel even less so) she managed to find a way to make things work. Hazel may have been able to mouth off and protest, but the witch still held the ability to rend her soul from her body and send her back to her untimely grave. With this threat looming over her head, Hazel had no choice but to acquiesce to Edith's demands and set off across America in search of the mage who had bound Edith and a revenge she had no interest in.
PERSONALITY:
Hazel attempts to portray herself as rational and level-headed, but the reality is that it's incredibly easy to wind her up. A great deal of this stems from the fact that she's been thrust into a world which she previously had no idea existed and is consistently expected to navigate it without any sort of help. She reacts to the strange and unnatural in a manner that any normal person would - to a degree. As much as she tries to come across as otherwise, Hazel is incredibly immature in many ways and her responses often reflect that.
Her tendency towards theatrics aren't completely the fault of young adulthood, however. As much as she appears to be more or less well-adjusted, beneath the surface is a cauldron of insecurities. Hazel is constantly questioning her humanity and looking for every possible reason to justify her claim that she's still a human where it counts, regardless of her lack of a pulse.
To this end, she believes that so long as she keeps her reactions to the bizarre well within what a 'normal' person would do, she can continue to consider herself human. This is the reason that some of her outbursts seem so overblown from an outside perspective - the longer she spend mired in the supernatural and strange, the less she actually finds it strange, and this is absolutely terrifying to her.
While Hazel may consider it a huge detriment and attempt to stifle it at any possible turn, her adaptability is actually one of her greatest assets. When she allows herself, she can roll with the most unexpected twists and turns and use her limited pool of skills to achieve the outcome she wants from a situation, even when such a feat seems impossible. Unfortunately, because of the negative connotations she's attached to it, Hazel only ever taps into her full potential when caught in situations that move too quickly for her to do anything but react on instinct.
Said instincts are much nobler than she really realizes or admits. With everything that's been thrust upon her, Hazel steadfastly maintains that she doesn't want to deal with anyone else's problems or become involved with anything more than she actually has to. However, she is at her core a good person, and the experiences she's suffered through have made her acutely sensitive to plights with similar themes.
She can't in good conscience walk away from situation where someone may be seriously injured or killed - or worse, situations where someone's free will has been compromised in some way. From her perspective, there's nothing she can do about her own issues, but that doesn't mean that anyone else should ever have to suffer through the same thing.
These forays into altruism bring to light the fact that Hazel possesses much more determination than she realizes; although she has no experience with combat or the intimate details of magic, she's willing to put everything on the line in order to forge ahead and achieve her goals.
For all of her unintentional meddling in other people's lives, Hazel is incredibly lonely. Because of her death she cannot contact her former friends and family, nor can she reach out and forge new bonds with normal people. Similarly, her condition prevents her from befriending anyone from the supernatural community - zombies are considered antiquated and less than human, prompting nothing but disdain for one that hasn't even been raised properly.
Hazel feels her isolation very keenly, although she tries her best to repress any thoughts about it. This loneliness makes her desperate for some way to connect with people or unburden herself, even in the smallest and vaguest way, of the weight she is constantly carrying around.
POWER:
- zombie physiology (canon)
As a zombie, Hazel no longer requires any of the things necessary to keep the human body alive - she doesn't need to breath, eat, sleep, or other similar things. Additionally, she no longer tires or feels extreme heat and cold in a way that could cause her discomfort. Her body cannot age, as it has literally been preserved; no matter how long she exists, she will always be physically nineteen.
Most obviously, her undead condition means that it is now impossible for her to die by most normal means. She no longer has any blood in her body, which means she cannot bleed, and any open wounds sustained can be easily sewn up with medical thread; similarly, broken bones and other effects of blunt force trauma magically repair themselves at a rapid speed.
Unlike some styles of zombies, however, she does not retain the ability to manipulate body parts that are removed. For example, if she had a hand ripped off, it would just sit on the ground like a regular severed hand rather than leap at her attacker's face or the like. If she were completely torn apart, only the largest chunk of her body would retain consciousness and (limited) mobility.
However, this does not mean that Hazel is invulnerable. While she has increased resistance to most magical spells (as well as more mundane things such as being set on fire) she is incredibly susceptible to holy and healing magic - because she no longer has any organs or other systems to heal, the spells instead do incredible damage as they attempt to fix objects which no longer exist. If afflicted with this sort of magic for long enough, it can easily incapacitate or 'kill' her for good.
It is incredibly easy for those with supernatural sensitivities to detect that Hazel is no longer human; additionally, with enough finesse they can also notice that the spell used to resurrect her was botched and she is (from a magical standpoint) rather poorly put together.
This also works in reverse - now that she's an otherworldly being, Hazel possesses the 'sight' which allows supernatural creatures to perceive each other as they truly are. This means that she is able to see through glamours cast both to disguise their conjurers and confound others as well as perceive beings that would generally be invisible to those with no psychic ability. She can also feel magic in the air and tell it apart from spells cast by different people, as well as trace them to their source if she focuses hard enough on it. None of this would be done without explicit permission by the other player, of course.
- power nullification (non-canon)
Hazel will be able to create a sort of dead zone (pun intended) in a twenty meter radius around her. Within this field all superhuman powers will be disabled, including projectiles that cross through it. It will not, of course, disable anything else, so if a bodybuilder wanted to run up to Hazel and rip her head off he would be able to do so with ease.
The field can only be triggered consciously, and it requires focus to maintain. If Hazel becomes distracted it will disappear, and if she moves it will move with her rather than become a remote projection.
It will, of course, only work on those people whose players have given permission prior, and would be disabled if it interfered with the plot progression in any way.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[ah, thank god this thing has a text option. Hazel is leery of even putting her voice out onto this network - she really doesn't want any way to be more identifiable than she absolutely has to be. perhaps it's a little paranoid in the company of other...less than normal people, but she can't help it. somehow she doesn't think even imPorts would look kindly on a zombie.]
So, this is...fantastic.
There's probably been a lot more creative complaining on here than I can dish out, so I guess I'll skip that for now. Maybe I'll come back to that when the next catastrophe hits.
I do actually want to ask about something productive, though. Anyone who decided to go unregistered - how's that working out for you? I get that you lose all the shiny toys, but I'm not really sure how...well, I mean, does it actually matter?
Those nanomachine whatevers don't get pumped out of your blood automatically when you decide not to register, do they? So what's stopping anyone from deciding you're going to help anyway?
Is there something about all this that just didn't get mentioned while I was talking with people? No one really seems worried at all when it looks like a huge issue to me! Am I just nuts? Does this universe jumping render you temporarily insane or something??
[perfect. a completely smooth and put together first post that absolutely did not devolve into the intense anxiety and worry that's been roiling in her head since she first staggered out of the government facility. yes, this will surely get her the rational answers she desires.]
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: An open log from her last time in the game.
FINAL NOTES: She's being wiped clean for this go round, but if for some masochistic reason you'd like to see more thread examples, I have a post of every thread Hazel ever did during her previous stay in MoM.