Chatterbox: Inkwell

Character 911/Character rentals!

Got a character who won't do what you want? Think you have a Mary Sue, but can't bring yourself to kill it dead? Need help with writing an accent? Want general critique? Come here, maybe someone'll have some advice.

Alternatively... Want to rent a character to use in your story? Want a chance to play around with someone else's creation? Want to see how someone else uses your character? Drop your creations here, and borrow someone else's for a while. Swap babysitting tales.

I'll start, shall I?

Thursday Silvertongue II is a small, pale, grey-eyed black-haired member of a race which, at present, has no name. Her left arm is heavily tattooed in black ink; her shoulder sports a solid black maple leaf and spiderwebs and intricate patterns spiral down her arm from its stem, ending at her ring and fourth finger, which are also solid black. 

This race is extremely long-lived (Thursday is considered young, and she's nearly 200 years old). They are somewhat elflike and tend towards small stature, and their home is a world known as Excelsior, where they live on the northern continent, M'ntred (I went into Tolkein-esque detail with this world/idea, it's been simmering for a long time, bear with me for a while). 

This race is a very magical race, and everyone has a practical, everyday magic within them; above that are seven "ranks" of magic, and these seven ranks determine one's status. The class order is very dynamic due to this, as amounts of magical ability are not hereditary.

I won't go into detail about the ranks; suffice to say that the lowest is peasant-level and is basically a simple "task-magic", which can be used for simple everyday tasks, and the highest is royalty-level and involves elemental distortion.

There are also "melders". Thursday is one of these. Melding, essentially, is the ability to fuse, or "meld" with a solid, liquid, and a handful of visible gases. Once melded one can manipulate the shape and behaviour of the material, for example making stone mobile by quickening the movement of the atoms. Basically, melders can walk through solid objects or water, change the landscape as they see fit, even "possess" other people through physical, rather than mental, means.

Of course there are limitations; melders risk spreading themselves so thinly through a material ("mediums" they're called) that they break the link between their physical selves and their minds and souls; when this happens they become golems of whatever they happened to be melded with, and end up beasts of burden or wild animals, depending on whether they are caught and herded to captivity or not. Also, while melded they are highly vulnerable to attack; fr'instance you could kill a melder by waiting for them to meld with a tree, and then killing the tree by setting fire to it, because, by melding to a living thing, the melder literally becomes that thing, if only for an instant, and if it dies suddenly, the melder doesn't have the time to get away. Nonliving things do not carry that risk, simply because the melder's psyche has nothing to "stick" to as it would with a living thing. Does that make sense? 

This level of power has a dreadful tendency to corrupt, naturally, so the majority of melders are evildoers.

Thursday II also has a rare genetic disorder of her species, a disease known as Garnet Syndrome. It's a kind of blood disorder which causes groups of blood cells to spontaneously crystalize into hard, colourful lumps called "garnets" due to their texture and similarity to both garnet stones and pomegranate seeds (which gave garnet stones their name). They are very painful and can temporarily cripple the victims if they become lodged in or near the joints; garnets usually last about a week ((not one of our weeks - the Excelsioran year is 5 42-day months, each month comprised of 3 14-day weeks; and each day is approximately 6 hours of daylight followed by 3 hours of dusk and 3 of night, for a total of 12 hours.)). If they last longer they are usually surgically removed.

Occasionally garnets burst through the skin and solidify; in which case they are usually left alone, as removal would be potentially very damaging.

The disorder also causes severe muscle atrophy, mostly in the legs, if not caught and treated at an early age; Thursday's wasn't caught until she was well into her 30's (the equivalent of about 10 years old) and she's forced to wear leg braces ever since, because the damage was, by that time, irreversible.

She's kind of an outcast because of the volatile, corrupting nature of her power; but the rulers of her race rely heavily on her strategic help in times of war. She's slightly... off... in her thought patterns, and in our world she'd be considered insane, but her different views have saved the army more than once.

She's a mite bitter and cynical due to her treatment, and her condition (the near-cripple condition, that is, not the melder one).

Anyway, I'm offering her up for rental because I am TOO BUSY with my vampire story and Broken Dreams to write a story with her in it/about her. Any takers?