Sara Smith || Innocent Sweetheart || Bliss Stage (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
otomechapilot) wrote2017-03-23 11:13 pm
otomechapilot) wrote2017-03-23 11:13 pm
Entry tags:
Synodiporia App || Sara Smith, Innocent Sweetheart || Bliss Stage (tabletop)
P L A Y E R;
NAME: Bliss
AGE: 32
PLAYER JOURNAL: None; PM any of my journals or contact me via Discord/Plurk
TIMEZONE: Pacific
CONTACT: blissauthority at gmail dot com Email; BlissAuthority#4698 on Discord; @blissauthority on Plurk
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: None, but apping Frederika Bernkastel.
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Sara Smith (the Innocent Sweetheart)
CANON: Bliss Stage tabletop game
POINT IN CANON: Start of the campaign
AGE: 14
APPEARANCE:
Pictured with crush wingman Keenan Caine, right.
CANON HISTORY:
Right now, right this moment, right as you read these words, humanity is struck down by an alien force from beyond the limits of our understanding.
It is the first blow of a terrible war.
Seven years later, armed with a technology you cannot understand and can barely operate, you will strike back.
This is how.
- Bliss Stage: Ignition Stage, back cover
Sara Smith is practically an OC, inspired by (admittedly provocative) statlines and a running example in a rulebook. Much of this is from my own dueterocanonical video game project.
With that in mind:
Sara survived the end of the world - when her parents and other adults around her fell asleep and in Bliss forever, when civilization became a Wake, and when the Dream became a place full of hostile invading aliens. In short, when her life, in the words ofher crush her best friend, became “Postapoc YA fiction bullshit.”
Her brother Derek tried, bless his heart, to shelter her from the worst of it, taking her to a bastion of civilization on Treasure Island just off the San Francisco Bay - the Resistance, led by the last adult left awake on the planet, Jim Preston. It was there that her brother started developing a reverse engineered weapon. This Alien Numina Inversion Machine allowed Resistance "Pilots" to dive into the Dream and fight back with mecha made of weaponized love.
And she vowed to be one of the Pilots fighting on the front lines. Her brother had protected her: now it was her turn to pay the favor forward.
She's been training for a year, since she turned 13 over her brother's protests - but with the advice and encouragement of her wing commander and mentor Anna Lin. Her best friend, Luiz, acted as her Anchor, a position that is to Tank as Sara is to Neo when they hack into the alien matrix of dreams.
Her first mission - to defend the old 108 Bus as it took a new pilot candidate to the base - was a complete success, routing the aliens. Later, she discovered that she had rescued the son of the commander, Joshua Preston, and he was to be trained with them too.
This is the point at which the video game project's story began, and where I’m taking Sara from.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Sara Smith is an immature, hot-headed and hot-blooded pilot with her heart firmly in the right place and a very black-and-white view of morality.
She thinks the aliens attacking are "people," and she thinks that makes them "worse than monsters, cause monsters can't help it." At least in my take, she's eventually going to be proven right when "alien heroes" make their presence known; her hatred of the alien invaders is because they're invaders, not because they're aliens. She applies the same logic to humans, and is probably going to be hurt very badly when some of her friends and crushes prove to not be very nice people - at least, not all the time.
She's generally cheerful and upbeat, and that's mostly genuine; This manifests as being a bit of a chatterbox, and an aversion to profanity ("Oh my God" is a frequent substitute). When she is hurting, she'd rather count her blessings and put on a brave face than "mope," and only confides in a few key members of her support network - in the vidya gaem, this was mostly going to be her friends among the Anchors, sometimes her XO Anna, increasingly her crush (whoever it turned out to be that run), and decreasingly her brother Derek. She'll probably peg some trustworthy souls as "practically Anchors" and confide her fears to them in game.
Sara does not have clear memories of the world before it ended, and the picture painted by Derek and the others... frankly doesn't impress her that much. Sure, they had airplanes and hospitals, but they also had crooked cops, schools designed to produce Extruded Productivity, racism and homophobia. She's an avid reader, of fictions and fantasies and of history both, and she's seeking to learn from the past so that the Resistance doesn't ever repeat it's mistakes.
For this reason she also fancies herself an artist and keeps a journal. It helps her organize her own thoughts, and perhaps those that come after her (and she has no doubt others will) can learn from it. She's a very good cartoonist - even if she has some atrocious power fantasy OCs like Kalikoneko the Tigerbunny and a Diana, Warrior Princess grasp on the history of Before.
She's also a hopeless romantic, and is looking for someone to sweep her off her feet. Or to sweep someone off their feet, either way; one of the Anchors might like to be treated like a princess. Derek has done a very good job teaching her what a healthy relationship looks like, both by professing it and by the example of the last pilot he ever Anchored (before poor Christopher got Blissed Out mid-battle). Sara will settle for nothing less than a romance between equals.
POINT OF DEPARTURE:
Bliss Stage has several areas of canon doubt and uncertainty meant to be addressed through play, mostly through the endgame goals called "hopes." This take on her Resistance has four Hopes: to defeat the aliens; to create a better world than the one before the war; to prevent further Blissouts; and to communicate with the aliens. All of these were victory conditions, with a Golden Ending where she achieved all of the above.
She's also slightly older and more mature than the original game implied because I was making an girl-meets-boy/girl-meets-girl otome romance game, which frankly wasn't much of a stretch in the original tabletop game.
ABILITIES: Sara is a fairly lucid dreamer, and has experience using relationship symbols as weapons in a dream-space and in navigating through dream-logic and symbolic space. How effective any of this is without the ANIMa or an Anchor is up for debate, but it may be interesting for her Mark to, effectively, Anchor her in her variety of dream combat.
Her variety of dream combat... well, if Nanoha is magical girls with mecha show tropes, then the ANIMa is a mecha as gloriously magical girl show. She summons a pilotable robot ranging in size from D.Va's battlesuit to "uses a skyscraper as a club" as dictated by the logic of whatever Nightmare she's fighting past; it is always, intrinsically, a match for the alien she's facing, as it's made from the same technology that made them hellishly huge.
Each of its major subsystems is a symbol of her relationship with someone she, to use a loaded word, loves. The more emotionally intense and intimate the relationship is, the more useful and powerful the system is; the more trusting and safe the relationship is, the more sturdy and reliable the system. The game rated this on a scale of 0-5 for both stats; Int 4 requires a punch, or a kiss, on the mouth, and she will get nothing higher in this game.
Her increasingly distant but completely incorruptible and trustworthy brother (2 Intimacy, 5 Trust) can be drawn on for a tower shield; the dangerously flirtatious but potentially caddish Keenan Caine, hercrush wingman, gets her a plasma shotgun that tends to overheat when fired constantly (3 Intimacy, 1 Trust), for example.
Half of the fun of playing her canon at other games has been figuring out what CR-powered weapons she'll get from growing relationships with her castmates.
She has no other powers, but I like to imply that Pilots and their Anchors are slightly psychic and give them interesting dreams outside of the cockpit.
INVENTORY:
No pockets and nothing notable on her but her clothes, but she's wearing a rather curious set of armor: a divesuit, with the lowermost layer a standard wetsuit, followed by a layer of biker's or soccer players plastic shinguards, armguards, shoulderpads, breastplate and backplate.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?
M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
THE FOOL - She's taking her first step into Piloting, off a cliff, trusting that her ANIMa can fly. It's in the name of her playbook: she's an Innocent Sweetheart. She's an otome heroine, finding her way and coming of age in the world. She's at the very start of her story.
THE MAGICIAN - Sara is coming into power, learning the arcane ways of Piloting, the limits of her machine, seeing if she can exceed them. She's becoming a magical girl/mecha jock hybrid, striking forth with great power and furious anger to conquer the demons they all share.
CHARIOT - Sara is riding a force of concordant opposition into battle, the ANIMa a melding of Science and Visions (my personal theme song for Bliss Stage, no less). She is all forward momentum, striding into battle on wings of light, powered by a miniature sun - draw your own conclusions on who such systems symbolize.
LOVERS - Sara is looking for love in all the right places, experimenting with flirtation and dreaming of either finding a prince or being someone's knight in shining armor. It's in the name of her playbook: she's an Innocent Sweetheart. Love is her weapon, and trust is her armor! Or she would be, if Lovers was taking anyone at the moment.
VETO:
Sara is not nearly together enough to be at the end of the path: she's not on top of her WORLD any time soon. Right now, her life is great and she's an eternal optimist and idealist; her TOWER has yet to fall.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Monkeying around with Winston at Cosmographia; Well done, medium Raya.
PROSE SAMPLE: Needlessly meta.
NAME: Bliss
AGE: 32
PLAYER JOURNAL: None; PM any of my journals or contact me via Discord/Plurk
TIMEZONE: Pacific
CONTACT: blissauthority at gmail dot com Email; BlissAuthority#4698 on Discord; @blissauthority on Plurk
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: None, but apping Frederika Bernkastel.
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Sara Smith (the Innocent Sweetheart)
CANON: Bliss Stage tabletop game
POINT IN CANON: Start of the campaign
AGE: 14
APPEARANCE:
Pictured with CANON HISTORY:
Right now, right this moment, right as you read these words, humanity is struck down by an alien force from beyond the limits of our understanding.
It is the first blow of a terrible war.
Seven years later, armed with a technology you cannot understand and can barely operate, you will strike back.
This is how.
- Bliss Stage: Ignition Stage, back cover
Sara Smith is practically an OC, inspired by (admittedly provocative) statlines and a running example in a rulebook. Much of this is from my own dueterocanonical video game project.
With that in mind:
Sara survived the end of the world - when her parents and other adults around her fell asleep and in Bliss forever, when civilization became a Wake, and when the Dream became a place full of hostile invading aliens. In short, when her life, in the words of
Her brother Derek tried, bless his heart, to shelter her from the worst of it, taking her to a bastion of civilization on Treasure Island just off the San Francisco Bay - the Resistance, led by the last adult left awake on the planet, Jim Preston. It was there that her brother started developing a reverse engineered weapon. This Alien Numina Inversion Machine allowed Resistance "Pilots" to dive into the Dream and fight back with mecha made of weaponized love.
And she vowed to be one of the Pilots fighting on the front lines. Her brother had protected her: now it was her turn to pay the favor forward.
She's been training for a year, since she turned 13 over her brother's protests - but with the advice and encouragement of her wing commander and mentor Anna Lin. Her best friend, Luiz, acted as her Anchor, a position that is to Tank as Sara is to Neo when they hack into the alien matrix of dreams.
Her first mission - to defend the old 108 Bus as it took a new pilot candidate to the base - was a complete success, routing the aliens. Later, she discovered that she had rescued the son of the commander, Joshua Preston, and he was to be trained with them too.
This is the point at which the video game project's story began, and where I’m taking Sara from.
CANON PERSONALITY:
Sara Smith is an immature, hot-headed and hot-blooded pilot with her heart firmly in the right place and a very black-and-white view of morality.
She thinks the aliens attacking are "people," and she thinks that makes them "worse than monsters, cause monsters can't help it." At least in my take, she's eventually going to be proven right when "alien heroes" make their presence known; her hatred of the alien invaders is because they're invaders, not because they're aliens. She applies the same logic to humans, and is probably going to be hurt very badly when some of her friends and crushes prove to not be very nice people - at least, not all the time.
She's generally cheerful and upbeat, and that's mostly genuine; This manifests as being a bit of a chatterbox, and an aversion to profanity ("Oh my God" is a frequent substitute). When she is hurting, she'd rather count her blessings and put on a brave face than "mope," and only confides in a few key members of her support network - in the vidya gaem, this was mostly going to be her friends among the Anchors, sometimes her XO Anna, increasingly her crush (whoever it turned out to be that run), and decreasingly her brother Derek. She'll probably peg some trustworthy souls as "practically Anchors" and confide her fears to them in game.
Sara does not have clear memories of the world before it ended, and the picture painted by Derek and the others... frankly doesn't impress her that much. Sure, they had airplanes and hospitals, but they also had crooked cops, schools designed to produce Extruded Productivity, racism and homophobia. She's an avid reader, of fictions and fantasies and of history both, and she's seeking to learn from the past so that the Resistance doesn't ever repeat it's mistakes.
For this reason she also fancies herself an artist and keeps a journal. It helps her organize her own thoughts, and perhaps those that come after her (and she has no doubt others will) can learn from it. She's a very good cartoonist - even if she has some atrocious power fantasy OCs like Kalikoneko the Tigerbunny and a Diana, Warrior Princess grasp on the history of Before.
She's also a hopeless romantic, and is looking for someone to sweep her off her feet. Or to sweep someone off their feet, either way; one of the Anchors might like to be treated like a princess. Derek has done a very good job teaching her what a healthy relationship looks like, both by professing it and by the example of the last pilot he ever Anchored (before poor Christopher got Blissed Out mid-battle). Sara will settle for nothing less than a romance between equals.
POINT OF DEPARTURE:
Bliss Stage has several areas of canon doubt and uncertainty meant to be addressed through play, mostly through the endgame goals called "hopes." This take on her Resistance has four Hopes: to defeat the aliens; to create a better world than the one before the war; to prevent further Blissouts; and to communicate with the aliens. All of these were victory conditions, with a Golden Ending where she achieved all of the above.
She's also slightly older and more mature than the original game implied because I was making an girl-meets-boy/girl-meets-girl otome romance game, which frankly wasn't much of a stretch in the original tabletop game.
ABILITIES: Sara is a fairly lucid dreamer, and has experience using relationship symbols as weapons in a dream-space and in navigating through dream-logic and symbolic space. How effective any of this is without the ANIMa or an Anchor is up for debate, but it may be interesting for her Mark to, effectively, Anchor her in her variety of dream combat.
Her variety of dream combat... well, if Nanoha is magical girls with mecha show tropes, then the ANIMa is a mecha as gloriously magical girl show. She summons a pilotable robot ranging in size from D.Va's battlesuit to "uses a skyscraper as a club" as dictated by the logic of whatever Nightmare she's fighting past; it is always, intrinsically, a match for the alien she's facing, as it's made from the same technology that made them hellishly huge.
Each of its major subsystems is a symbol of her relationship with someone she, to use a loaded word, loves. The more emotionally intense and intimate the relationship is, the more useful and powerful the system is; the more trusting and safe the relationship is, the more sturdy and reliable the system. The game rated this on a scale of 0-5 for both stats; Int 4 requires a punch, or a kiss, on the mouth, and she will get nothing higher in this game.
Her increasingly distant but completely incorruptible and trustworthy brother (2 Intimacy, 5 Trust) can be drawn on for a tower shield; the dangerously flirtatious but potentially caddish Keenan Caine, her
Half of the fun of playing her canon at other games has been figuring out what CR-powered weapons she'll get from growing relationships with her castmates.
She has no other powers, but I like to imply that Pilots and their Anchors are slightly psychic and give them interesting dreams outside of the cockpit.
INVENTORY:
No pockets and nothing notable on her but her clothes, but she's wearing a rather curious set of armor: a divesuit, with the lowermost layer a standard wetsuit, followed by a layer of biker's or soccer players plastic shinguards, armguards, shoulderpads, breastplate and backplate.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW?
M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION:
THE FOOL - She's taking her first step into Piloting, off a cliff, trusting that her ANIMa can fly. It's in the name of her playbook: she's an Innocent Sweetheart. She's an otome heroine, finding her way and coming of age in the world. She's at the very start of her story.
THE MAGICIAN - Sara is coming into power, learning the arcane ways of Piloting, the limits of her machine, seeing if she can exceed them. She's becoming a magical girl/mecha jock hybrid, striking forth with great power and furious anger to conquer the demons they all share.
CHARIOT - Sara is riding a force of concordant opposition into battle, the ANIMa a melding of Science and Visions (my personal theme song for Bliss Stage, no less). She is all forward momentum, striding into battle on wings of light, powered by a miniature sun - draw your own conclusions on who such systems symbolize.
VETO:
Sara is not nearly together enough to be at the end of the path: she's not on top of her WORLD any time soon. Right now, her life is great and she's an eternal optimist and idealist; her TOWER has yet to fall.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Monkeying around with Winston at Cosmographia; Well done, medium Raya.
PROSE SAMPLE: Needlessly meta.