Dan Sagittarius (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hallelujahjunction) wrote2021-08-20 04:47 pm
hallelujahjunction) wrote2021-08-20 04:47 pm
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wildestlands App
APPLICATION
Player Name/Handle: Lisa
Plurk Handle:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
hotpinkcoffee
Preferred pronouns (optional): she/he/they
Player Status: New Player
Other characters: None (apping Caroline Forbes, Spencer Hastings and Rowena MacLeod)
Invited by: Korel
Character Name: Daniel Ruston “Dan Sagittarius” Sartoris
Fandom: Tabletop OC
Character Journal:hallelujahjunction
OU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OC withpiper90 CRAU
Canon point: After the end ofpiper90
PB: Ian Somerhalder
SETTING BACKGROUND
Dan comes from an urban fantasy setting: a world much like our own, but resplendent with cryptids, monsters, secret societies, wizards and ghosts tucked just out of view of most of the human populace. The supernatural underbelly of the world is colloquially known as The Weird. Dan’s a monster hunter, which means he is plugged into a network of people and beings aware of The Weird and is frequently summoned to help take care of them. While most monster hunters in his world are affiliated with a unionized secret society of magic users known as The Shield, Dan, while aware of the society’s existence, avoids the backbiting politics of The Shield and is essentiallya scab an independent contractor, which is something of a rarity.
OC/AU/CRAU REQUIREMENTS
OC HISTORY
• Dan was born sometime in the 80’s to two survivalist libertarian conspiracy theory preppers who lived in a bunker in Hallelujah Junction, California, off-the-grid. He was the second eldest of seven children.
• As a child, Dan and his siblings were homeschooled in their bunker and on their family’s land, where they learned plenty of practical skills – field medicine, sharpshooting, cooking, music – and neglected some very critical skills such as reading and writing. Dan never learned to read. His youth was secluded, unusual and objectively unsafe, but happy.
• Dan's parents were frequent customers of a witch named Hepzibah, who was, unbeknownst to them, grooming them with small favors and charms with the goal of reaping the souls of their children. The Sartorises signed a contract with her to protect their property from being repossessed by the government for delinquent taxes and were horrified to realize that they had bartered away their youngest daughter's soul.
• Dan’s parents broke on the contract with Hepzibah, who placed a curse on the entire family to perish one by one over the course of a decade.
• Within two years, Dan’s parents died horribly by the curse. Led by Dan's older sister Kitty, the siblings embarked on a road trip to try and find a way to unbind the curse. Their efforts were not nearly as successful as they hoped, despite their becoming very familiar with The Weird, and each fruitless year one of Dan’s siblings died.
• After seven years under the curse, Dan and Kitty, the last two survivors of their family, finally found and confronted Hepzibah. They were able to break the curse, but Kitty was mortally wounded in the fight while shielding Dan from an attack. She died in Dan’s arms.
• Dan, alone, uneducated and aimless, took off on a road trip across North America with no destination in mind, picking up odd jobs washing dishes, fixing cars or stripping and sleeping in stranger’s beds. While working at a gay bar called The Zodiac in Dallas, he adopted the name “Dan Sagittarius” as his stripper name and eventually his official identity, abandoning “Sartoris” entirely.
• Dan began to associate with The Shield because monster-hunting was a gig that played into his survivalist, gun nut skillset. Despite prejudices against him for being a Mundane - someone who genetically cannot perform magic - he developed a reputation for being useful at navigating social settings and reliable in a fight. He was particularly good at de-escalating dangerous situations with monsters and ghosts and solving cases with minimal bloodshed.
• In Mexico, Dan purchased a classic car for a criminally low amount of money. He soon realized that the car was cheap because it was haunted as shit; upon setting the vehicle on fire, he inadvertently released the ghost of an eleven year-old girl, Eliora, who had been killed in a hit-and-run with that car.
• Dan promised to take Eliora to some magician friends of his to untether her spirit from the car and befriended her on the journey; she chose to stay on this plane with him. Dan considered Eliora like a little sister or partner in crime, and they traveled together for several more years, grifting and slumming their way back and forth across the continent. Eliora’s powers gave her intense bloodlust, and Dan’s role often boiled down to convincing her to not use sadistic magical powers just because she could.
• During a monster-hunting case, Dan received a lethal blow while fighting a vampire. Eliora gave up her life force to keep Dan alive, which resulted in her vanishing from the dimension and essentially dying.
• Dan was kidnapped by the Jorgmund and taken to the Rig in the Gone Away World, where he spent about a year doing missions for the Jorg. While there, he grew close with several other “Hires”, including the Easter Bunny. While on a mission, Dan and Bunny stole a time travel device and changed Dan's timeline so that his family never died, but as a price, Dan can never go home without blipping himself and his family out of existence entirely through time shenanigans.
• While on a mission to a marriage reality show, he ended up wedding Bunny for show, and they never ended up divorced.
• Dan and the other Hires escaped the Rig, and here he is.
PERSONALITY
Dan Sagittarius is, in many ways, the best guy you’ll ever meet. He’s brave, compassionate, and generous. He’ll take a bullet for a stranger or drop everything to help an old lady cross the street safely. He’s charismatic and nurturing and can make any person in the room feel like the center of the world. He gives excellent advice. He’s the first person in a group to circle around and make sure the stragglers are cared for, and possibly the first to even realize people are straggling. He’ll remember someone’s face, name, occupation and coffee order a decade after meeting them once. He cares deeply for others and is empathetic and perceptive enough to meet most people where they are. Having lost so many, he values the uniqueness of each person’s life to an extreme degree, and doesn’t compromise his notions of protecting the vulnerable and keeping an open mind to others. He’s kind, he’s community-minded, he’s attentive and he’s self-sacrificing.
He’s also a lying con artist who’s grifted, thieved and ghosted his way across the continent several times, cutting legal and sometimes ethical corners willy-nilly, weaponizing his charm and empathy to get what he wants. Dan’s extremely manipulative and dishonest, with a tendency to self-servingly believe that what someone doesn’t notice won’t hurt them, and that as long as he isn’t causing actual injury or ruin to anyone else anything he does is fair play.
Nor does Dan’s deep, sincere reverence for the life and safety of others translate to intimacy, as Dan closes himself off emotionally from others. He holds himself at a distance, always taking in more information from others than he’s willing to give and cutting and running as soon as things get close. His distaste for commitment is reflected in his relationships with places and lifestyles, too, and he’s constantly restless and looking for the next thing to take his mind off things. He has a tendency to leave people hanging, avoid difficult conversations, and put problems out of sight, out of mind, whether they're solved or not. It's only at the Rig that Dan's had to be accountable to people, since he couldn't just ditch them, and only with Bunny that Dan's been able to forge a longterm, mutually-supportive partnership.
Dan closes himself off from his own emotions as well. He’s intensely uncomfortable sitting with his feelings, particularly grief. He distracts himself with risky, self-destructive behavior, ranging from drugs and alcohol to rushing into wildly unsafe situations. He’s impulsive and reckless, and while he’s always got an eye out for the safety of those around him, he has a complete blindspot when it comes to his own, and resents anyone attempting to look out for him. He mostly isn’t suicidal, but he’s dodged his sense of self for so long that his own existence is a zero in his decision-making calculus, and he dislikes having to go back to the chalkboard.
Wonky survival math aside, Dan’s quite intelligent and resourceful. Dan’s attention to detail doesn’t extend solely to the minutiae of people’s lives; he’s got an incredible knack for auditory memory and direction, as he’s never been able to write things down and has just had to remember them. On account of having consuming literally hundreds of hours of audiobooks and documentaries and thousands of hours of NPR, he’s got a broad knowledge of trivia. Dan’s accustomed to showing up in strange situations with no money and limited resources against supernatural foes, and as such is quick to analyze his surroundings and suss out any beneficial angle. He’s skilled at a variety of disciplines that others might not expect from him, such as trapping and carpentry. He’s never ostentatious about his smarts, and his impulsivity and especially his illiteracy often lead people to assume he’s stupid; he rarely tries to disprove them, aware that “dumb but pretty” or “stupid but sweet” are stereotypes that play in his favor, but he is somewhat sensitive to being dismissed for his poverty or inability to read.
Dan may wish to just disconnect from the world and all the burdens it comes with, but he’s fundamentally incapable of separating himself from it; with so little knowledge of his own heart, all he can do is follow his instincts to gather and tend to those around him. He’s more than just a social creature; he’s a social symbiote, sustained only by the importance of each soul he surrounds himself with.
Ultimately, Dan’s just a mess of contradictions: a man who can recite a hundred poems from memory but can’t read a dinner menu, whom you can rely on but never trust, who has lost but never grieved, who loves everyone and yet is close to nobody, a loner who thrives in a community.
Great guy. Mostly.
CANON POWERS
None.
POWER SELECTION
POWER TYPE
Magic Weapon: Cursed
Longbow: Dan will have a longbow that never seems to run out of arrows, with arrows that have the ability to punch through magical shields when activated. As a curse effect, anyone within fifteen feet of Dan when he’s using the bow will have their magic go on the fritz and become unreliable. It'll be up to individual players and what's most fun for the thread whether it's that magic doesn't work at all, or that it has unexpected and erratic effects.
ABILITIES
Dan’s great with people and animals. He’s got very “friend to all living things” vibes, and is a particularly calming presence for children or people who feel scared or vulnerable. He’s got a keen enough eye for body language and tone that he can communicate well even when he doesn’t share a language or species with others.
Dan’s a great liar, actor, dancer and impersonator.
Dan can play piano incredibly well (though he can’t read music). He’s particularly good at ragtime.
Dan’s got a good deal of “badass normal” skills on account of being a monster hunter raised by preppers on a farm. He has great wilderness survival and field medicine/first aid skills. He’s in good shape and can hold his own in hand-to-hand combat, but has no formal martial arts or boxing training. He can ride horses very well and knows animal husbandry.
On account of his odd jobs and past adventures/hobbies, he’s skilled with knots, swimming, carpentry, electrical and plumbing work, and construction.
SAMPLES
Prose Sample
ADDITIONAL INFO
As discussed over plurk, I’d like Dan to have a flask with magical alcohol in it. It doesn’t provide sustenance, but it is enough to keep him out of withdrawal and get him drunk. No one else can use it. I mostly, for personal reasons, just want to avoid playing out a detox/relapse storyline like would happen if access to liquor were only intermittent.
Additionally, Dan is a Mundane on his world, which means he can't use any magic (including things that most normal humans can do, like seances or exorcisms). With his cursed longbow and magic flask aside, I'd like to continue that Dan can't use magic, including any that's benevolently gifted to him. He can still be subject to magic, though.
Player Name/Handle: Lisa
Plurk Handle:
Preferred pronouns (optional): she/he/they
Player Status: New Player
Other characters: None (apping Caroline Forbes, Spencer Hastings and Rowena MacLeod)
Invited by: Korel
Character Name: Daniel Ruston “Dan Sagittarius” Sartoris
Fandom: Tabletop OC
Character Journal:
hallelujahjunctionOU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OC with
piper90 CRAUCanon point: After the end of
piper90PB: Ian Somerhalder
SETTING BACKGROUND
Dan comes from an urban fantasy setting: a world much like our own, but resplendent with cryptids, monsters, secret societies, wizards and ghosts tucked just out of view of most of the human populace. The supernatural underbelly of the world is colloquially known as The Weird. Dan’s a monster hunter, which means he is plugged into a network of people and beings aware of The Weird and is frequently summoned to help take care of them. While most monster hunters in his world are affiliated with a unionized secret society of magic users known as The Shield, Dan, while aware of the society’s existence, avoids the backbiting politics of The Shield and is essentially
OC/AU/CRAU REQUIREMENTS
OC HISTORY
• Dan was born sometime in the 80’s to two survivalist libertarian conspiracy theory preppers who lived in a bunker in Hallelujah Junction, California, off-the-grid. He was the second eldest of seven children.
• As a child, Dan and his siblings were homeschooled in their bunker and on their family’s land, where they learned plenty of practical skills – field medicine, sharpshooting, cooking, music – and neglected some very critical skills such as reading and writing. Dan never learned to read. His youth was secluded, unusual and objectively unsafe, but happy.
• Dan's parents were frequent customers of a witch named Hepzibah, who was, unbeknownst to them, grooming them with small favors and charms with the goal of reaping the souls of their children. The Sartorises signed a contract with her to protect their property from being repossessed by the government for delinquent taxes and were horrified to realize that they had bartered away their youngest daughter's soul.
• Dan’s parents broke on the contract with Hepzibah, who placed a curse on the entire family to perish one by one over the course of a decade.
• Within two years, Dan’s parents died horribly by the curse. Led by Dan's older sister Kitty, the siblings embarked on a road trip to try and find a way to unbind the curse. Their efforts were not nearly as successful as they hoped, despite their becoming very familiar with The Weird, and each fruitless year one of Dan’s siblings died.
• After seven years under the curse, Dan and Kitty, the last two survivors of their family, finally found and confronted Hepzibah. They were able to break the curse, but Kitty was mortally wounded in the fight while shielding Dan from an attack. She died in Dan’s arms.
• Dan, alone, uneducated and aimless, took off on a road trip across North America with no destination in mind, picking up odd jobs washing dishes, fixing cars or stripping and sleeping in stranger’s beds. While working at a gay bar called The Zodiac in Dallas, he adopted the name “Dan Sagittarius” as his stripper name and eventually his official identity, abandoning “Sartoris” entirely.
• Dan began to associate with The Shield because monster-hunting was a gig that played into his survivalist, gun nut skillset. Despite prejudices against him for being a Mundane - someone who genetically cannot perform magic - he developed a reputation for being useful at navigating social settings and reliable in a fight. He was particularly good at de-escalating dangerous situations with monsters and ghosts and solving cases with minimal bloodshed.
• In Mexico, Dan purchased a classic car for a criminally low amount of money. He soon realized that the car was cheap because it was haunted as shit; upon setting the vehicle on fire, he inadvertently released the ghost of an eleven year-old girl, Eliora, who had been killed in a hit-and-run with that car.
• Dan promised to take Eliora to some magician friends of his to untether her spirit from the car and befriended her on the journey; she chose to stay on this plane with him. Dan considered Eliora like a little sister or partner in crime, and they traveled together for several more years, grifting and slumming their way back and forth across the continent. Eliora’s powers gave her intense bloodlust, and Dan’s role often boiled down to convincing her to not use sadistic magical powers just because she could.
• During a monster-hunting case, Dan received a lethal blow while fighting a vampire. Eliora gave up her life force to keep Dan alive, which resulted in her vanishing from the dimension and essentially dying.
• Dan was kidnapped by the Jorgmund and taken to the Rig in the Gone Away World, where he spent about a year doing missions for the Jorg. While there, he grew close with several other “Hires”, including the Easter Bunny. While on a mission, Dan and Bunny stole a time travel device and changed Dan's timeline so that his family never died, but as a price, Dan can never go home without blipping himself and his family out of existence entirely through time shenanigans.
• While on a mission to a marriage reality show, he ended up wedding Bunny for show, and they never ended up divorced.
• Dan and the other Hires escaped the Rig, and here he is.
PERSONALITY
Dan Sagittarius is, in many ways, the best guy you’ll ever meet. He’s brave, compassionate, and generous. He’ll take a bullet for a stranger or drop everything to help an old lady cross the street safely. He’s charismatic and nurturing and can make any person in the room feel like the center of the world. He gives excellent advice. He’s the first person in a group to circle around and make sure the stragglers are cared for, and possibly the first to even realize people are straggling. He’ll remember someone’s face, name, occupation and coffee order a decade after meeting them once. He cares deeply for others and is empathetic and perceptive enough to meet most people where they are. Having lost so many, he values the uniqueness of each person’s life to an extreme degree, and doesn’t compromise his notions of protecting the vulnerable and keeping an open mind to others. He’s kind, he’s community-minded, he’s attentive and he’s self-sacrificing.
He’s also a lying con artist who’s grifted, thieved and ghosted his way across the continent several times, cutting legal and sometimes ethical corners willy-nilly, weaponizing his charm and empathy to get what he wants. Dan’s extremely manipulative and dishonest, with a tendency to self-servingly believe that what someone doesn’t notice won’t hurt them, and that as long as he isn’t causing actual injury or ruin to anyone else anything he does is fair play.
Nor does Dan’s deep, sincere reverence for the life and safety of others translate to intimacy, as Dan closes himself off emotionally from others. He holds himself at a distance, always taking in more information from others than he’s willing to give and cutting and running as soon as things get close. His distaste for commitment is reflected in his relationships with places and lifestyles, too, and he’s constantly restless and looking for the next thing to take his mind off things. He has a tendency to leave people hanging, avoid difficult conversations, and put problems out of sight, out of mind, whether they're solved or not. It's only at the Rig that Dan's had to be accountable to people, since he couldn't just ditch them, and only with Bunny that Dan's been able to forge a longterm, mutually-supportive partnership.
Dan closes himself off from his own emotions as well. He’s intensely uncomfortable sitting with his feelings, particularly grief. He distracts himself with risky, self-destructive behavior, ranging from drugs and alcohol to rushing into wildly unsafe situations. He’s impulsive and reckless, and while he’s always got an eye out for the safety of those around him, he has a complete blindspot when it comes to his own, and resents anyone attempting to look out for him. He mostly isn’t suicidal, but he’s dodged his sense of self for so long that his own existence is a zero in his decision-making calculus, and he dislikes having to go back to the chalkboard.
Wonky survival math aside, Dan’s quite intelligent and resourceful. Dan’s attention to detail doesn’t extend solely to the minutiae of people’s lives; he’s got an incredible knack for auditory memory and direction, as he’s never been able to write things down and has just had to remember them. On account of having consuming literally hundreds of hours of audiobooks and documentaries and thousands of hours of NPR, he’s got a broad knowledge of trivia. Dan’s accustomed to showing up in strange situations with no money and limited resources against supernatural foes, and as such is quick to analyze his surroundings and suss out any beneficial angle. He’s skilled at a variety of disciplines that others might not expect from him, such as trapping and carpentry. He’s never ostentatious about his smarts, and his impulsivity and especially his illiteracy often lead people to assume he’s stupid; he rarely tries to disprove them, aware that “dumb but pretty” or “stupid but sweet” are stereotypes that play in his favor, but he is somewhat sensitive to being dismissed for his poverty or inability to read.
Dan may wish to just disconnect from the world and all the burdens it comes with, but he’s fundamentally incapable of separating himself from it; with so little knowledge of his own heart, all he can do is follow his instincts to gather and tend to those around him. He’s more than just a social creature; he’s a social symbiote, sustained only by the importance of each soul he surrounds himself with.
Ultimately, Dan’s just a mess of contradictions: a man who can recite a hundred poems from memory but can’t read a dinner menu, whom you can rely on but never trust, who has lost but never grieved, who loves everyone and yet is close to nobody, a loner who thrives in a community.
Great guy. Mostly.
CANON POWERS
None.
POWER SELECTION
POWER TYPE
Magic Weapon: Cursed
Longbow: Dan will have a longbow that never seems to run out of arrows, with arrows that have the ability to punch through magical shields when activated. As a curse effect, anyone within fifteen feet of Dan when he’s using the bow will have their magic go on the fritz and become unreliable. It'll be up to individual players and what's most fun for the thread whether it's that magic doesn't work at all, or that it has unexpected and erratic effects.
ABILITIES
Dan’s great with people and animals. He’s got very “friend to all living things” vibes, and is a particularly calming presence for children or people who feel scared or vulnerable. He’s got a keen enough eye for body language and tone that he can communicate well even when he doesn’t share a language or species with others.
Dan’s a great liar, actor, dancer and impersonator.
Dan can play piano incredibly well (though he can’t read music). He’s particularly good at ragtime.
Dan’s got a good deal of “badass normal” skills on account of being a monster hunter raised by preppers on a farm. He has great wilderness survival and field medicine/first aid skills. He’s in good shape and can hold his own in hand-to-hand combat, but has no formal martial arts or boxing training. He can ride horses very well and knows animal husbandry.
On account of his odd jobs and past adventures/hobbies, he’s skilled with knots, swimming, carpentry, electrical and plumbing work, and construction.
SAMPLES
Prose Sample
ADDITIONAL INFO
As discussed over plurk, I’d like Dan to have a flask with magical alcohol in it. It doesn’t provide sustenance, but it is enough to keep him out of withdrawal and get him drunk. No one else can use it. I mostly, for personal reasons, just want to avoid playing out a detox/relapse storyline like would happen if access to liquor were only intermittent.
Additionally, Dan is a Mundane on his world, which means he can't use any magic (including things that most normal humans can do, like seances or exorcisms). With his cursed longbow and magic flask aside, I'd like to continue that Dan can't use magic, including any that's benevolently gifted to him. He can still be subject to magic, though.