application

[incaenstrix]

PLAYER

Name: Hope
Age: Old
Contact: asyndeton on Plurk
Other Characters: Byerly
Interests: I wanna get more into action-y plots! Byerly is such a boob who can never go out and do fun swashbuckling stuff. I also want to open up some space for people to interact more with what’s going on on the ground in Tevinter.

CHARACTER

Name: Tertia (technically, Sergia, but everyone calls her Tertia)
Canon/OC: OC
Journal: incaenstrix
Race: Elf
Nationality: Tevinter
Occupation: Rebel
Division: Forces
Mage or Not: Yes
Age: Probably 20ish

History

• Tertia doesn’t know whether her parents were slaves or whether they were free and sold her into slavery. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter that much - her earliest memories were of her work as a servus publicus, a slave owned by the Imperium. The Imperium named her Sergia, and gave her documents, and put her to work on a cleaning brigade, where she was the third slave who'd been named Sergia, so: Tertia.
• Cleaning was essentially all she did for the first fifteen years of her life, scrubbing the public streets and making Minrathous sparkle. It was a backbreaking, exhausting job, but also one that could have been far worse: the cleaners were pretty invisible, so she was never subjected to any special abuse or mistreatment.
• When she hit puberty, her magic started to emerge. There was no moment of drama where it manifested. Things just started to happen around her: the air around her was cooler in the heat of summer, or warmer in winter; her scrub-bucket took longer to run dry; insects never seemed to bother the people on her brigade as much as they did others. All very subtle, and so it took a good few years before it was recognized as magic.
• Doesn’t that sound like good news?? Magic in Tevinter???? NO! IT’S TERRIBLE!! Magical power could be a path to success for people in certain positions. But also, mage blood is seen to power more potent blood magic rituals. And so, when Tertia’s power was recognized, she was re-sold at a premium to an Altus mage who trained her in the basics just enough to give her the tools to avoid going full Abomination and then started using her blood for magic.
• This time was simultaneously awful and also, like, kind of nice? Just because if you’re being used for your blood, you’re generally kept pretty healthy and well-fed. Like, the bleeding wasn’t great, nor was the growing awareness that the Altus might kill her with no warning for a large-scale ritual. But for the very first time in her life, she had a bit of leisure to start learning things. Like, during these years, she started learning how to read and write, and even though she was only supposed to use those skills on tightening up her magical control, she also managed to get her hands on a few books describing the outside world.
• Then: Corypheus’ coup. When Corypheus came in and took over, she was freed, as were many other slaves with magical potential. And, like the famed Calpernia, and like the others freed at that time, she joined up with the Venatori.
• And you know what? The Venatori fucking sucked. She’d had high hopes at first of finding respect and being treated like a person. But they treated her as — well, most commonly, like she was still a slave. Honestly, in a lot of ways, it was worse than the way she’d been treated when she was an actual slave.
• The breaking point came when she saw one of the Venatori experiments, in which prisoners — predominantly elves — were being used to grow red lyrium. After that, she took the terrifying step of, for the first time in her life, making her own choice: she defected.
• But she wasn’t on her own for too long. She found her way quickly to a faction of rebelling slaves who weren’t Venatori-affiliated. And here, at least, she found more belonging: these were people like her, who treated her like a person.
• This group is curious about the possibility of allying with Riftwatch to build a future where the Tevinter slaves are liberated without being beholden to the Venatori. And so they’ve sent her south as an emissary, to investigate Riftwatch and to decide whether they’re deserving of faith.


Personality

• Tertia has been defined, all her life, by powerlessness. Her well-being has always depended upon the good will of the people around her. And so she has fostered the two primary qualities that have led to good will from those people: charm and reliability.
• Her charm takes the form of sweetness and biddability. She smiles often, speaks kindly to the people around her, laughs at others’ jokes, and doesn’t make trouble. She’s curious and engaged, a bubbly and warm presence. And her reliability takes the form of hard work, determination, and gumption.
• This may cause her to give an impression of being naive or sheltered. Far from it, though: Tertia’s worldview is absolutely fucking grim. She believes that the people around her will, inevitably, if given a reason to do so, hurt her or use her. Every action that she takes, every decision she makes, is predicated on the assumption that harm will come if it starts being in someone’s interest to do harm. This is so ingrained in her that it doesn’t even occur to her that this is cynicism; trust is so outside of her worldview that she simply cannot conceive of what it means to trust.
• Still — she’s figured out ways to find joy in the world. There’s a lot she takes real pleasure in. She enjoys nature, enjoys stories, enjoys fine food and sweets; hedonistic pleasures are dear to her. She enjoys jokes, enjoys the company of others. Her mistrust doesn’t quite rise to the level of anxiety or fear that ruins that joy.
• And there’s one last thing she finds she enjoys: killing the people who deserve it. Whoops! That doesn’t really fit in well with her cute and wholesome image that she really tries to foster. But sometimes there’s nothing more satisfying than taking a deserving life. So.


Opinions & Affiliations

The Imperium: The Tevinter Imperium — in particular, the old hierarchies of the Imperium and its systems of slave-holding — is the enemy that Tertia is fighting against. She thinks that slave-holders deserve to die, the Magisters foremost among them.

The Venatori: Tertia is not unsympathetic to the Venatori. They’re at least open to the liberation of the slaves. She’d likely still be fighting for them, if it weren’t for the cruelty of their methods and how slow they’ve been to make good on their promises of slave liberation.

The South: Interesting! Weird. She doesn’t really understand what makes, say, Orlesians different from Antivans or Free Marchers or whatever. She’s interested to find out, though.

Elves: The only people to be trusted.

Dalish: Really cool and exciting and fascinating. They’re so liberated and wild!

Humans: Best to smile and stay out of their way.

Qunari: Frightening, not really people from her point of view.

Mages and Templars: She doesn’t really get it. The Southern mage/Templar conflict is so far outside her lived experience that she genuinely doesn’t know what they’re fighting about.

Adaptation Notes

n/a

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths
• Ties to the slave rebellion. The slave rebellion is a loosely-organized group, distinct from the slaves who have joined the Venatori, who are focused on freeing other slaves and killing slaveowners. They’ve been fairly successful to date. They’re a group that has a lot of promise for helping out with the war effort — but also one that isn’t quite sold on whether Riftwatch or the Venatori are more likely to further their aims.
• Mage. She’s moderately talented — neither remarkably good nor remarkably bad. She has an affinity in particular for primal magic, and typically casts elemental spells. Her training to date has been pretty minimal.
• Charm. She’s a very pretty young woman who knows how to use her sweet face and deft social skills to defuse conflicts and redirect anger.
• Cleverness. She’s not educated, but she’s quite clever and capable of learning quickly.

Weaknesses
• Questionable loyalty. She’s not here to fight the Venatori; she’s here to fight the Imperium. She’s like 70% sure that Riftwatch is the better group to fight alongside, since the Venatori have done some evil shit. But if Riftwatch proves they’re not especially interested in freeing the slaves, her loyalty might go elsewhere.
• Half-trained. She only got enough training to basically make sure she wasn’t going to turn into an abomination. So all the dangers of a hedge mage are still there — and, given that she was a front-row observer of quite a few blood magic rituals, it’s not impossible that she’d dip into that, as well.
• Ignorance. She knows nearly nothing about the world beyond what she read in a few books. This extends to things like how money works and how you keep yourself alive when not either enslaved or conscripted into an army.
• Gullibility. No one’s ever bothered to lie to her before — what would be the point? — so she’s extremely credulous and bad at separating truth from lies.
• Simmering rage. Under all the smiles, there’s a very real and ferocious anger that could boil up at inopportune moments. Not impossible that at some point there’ll be some murdered unarmed prisoners.


Inventory

• Mage staff
• Traveling outfit
• Traveling pack with 1 spare outfit and a waterskin and a few crusts of bread
• 20 coppers


Motivation

Finding out what Riftwatch’s deal is and whether they deserve an alliance with the slave rebellion in Tevinter.

(Note that Tertia is coming from just one branch of the slave rebellion; if others want to play out any plots related to this group independent of her stuff, this is quite possible! They could just be getting in touch with a different branch.)

SAMPLES

Sample one
Sample two