player information ● name: Jae ● age:OLD 25+ ● contact: ninjae @ plurk ● other characters: Poe Dameron, Chyler Silva, Carson Beckett
character information ● name: Athena Parker ● canon: Original Character - Shared World ● canon point: Half-way through her senior year of high school ● age: 19 (barely)
● (original) world:
Athena comes from a world where magic is and has always been real, even if it wasn't freely recognized or practiced until comparatively recently. Magic users--known in modern parlance as the "Gifted"--have been operating in the open since the Second World War. The path to the present, comparative acceptance of the Gifted was punctuated by legal and civil battles, and a lot of hashing out what constitutes legal and illegal use of a Gift. Broadly explained, the Gift can be tapped through Rituals, which vary from person to person. One person might be able to use magic via coding or programming while another needs to sing, dance, or write poetry. Rituals can be more or less common, with some being common enough to earn them nicknames--bards, for example, who use their magic through music.
Athena was born 1999, into the end of a decade where Gifts became much more broadly accepted and spawned youth cultures based around Gifts and Ritual expression. Which isn't to say that the Gift is accepted or valued everywhere; there continue to be tensions with conservative circles and anti-Gifted groups.
See also: Athena's parents. She comes from a family of Staten Island cops who married into other cop families, cops who aren't fond of the crimes perpetrated by the Gifted. None of Athena's immediate family is Gifted; the only other Gifted person is her aunt, Lenore Carrigan, who left at seventeen and ended up joining first the army, then the MIA (think the FBI/CIA for magical crimes and terrorist acts). Athena grew up surrounded by racial hatred, bigotry, and every imaginable slur being leveled at her aunt and people like her.
Her mother was essentially white trash with delusions of grandeur, sending Athena to piano and singing lessons, which the girl took to with a passion that her mother naturally took credit for. When Athena got tested for magic and it was revealed she was not only Gifted, but that her magic was tied to musical expression, her parents... did not react well. The singing lessons stopped, the piano was sold. They tried to keep Athena from learning even the magical basics, but her teacher and principal intervened, threatening to call CPS. Even if it wouldn't have done anything to get Athena out of her parents' house, the possibility of a black mark on the family name after Lenore was an unacceptable risk.
When she realized in eighth grade that she liked girls, she swore to keep it a secret from them forever. She even managed, until the end of her sophomore year of high school, when a teacher caught her and her girlfriend spraypainting "BE GAY, DO CRIMES" on the back of the school on the last day.
Her parents kicked her out. Barely sixteen and on the street, she first tried to find her way in NYC, where she met first Amy and Trish, a pair of gay bag ladies who adopted her for the first couple of months, and then Robbie, the first girl she was ever able to date openly. Robbie was a street kid about a year older than Athena, on her own for that much longer. They were together about a year, until Robbie got arrested while hanging on to one of their friend's drugs. It was the last time Athena saw her, and it was right after that she left NYC--after she found the friend the drugs belonged to and beat the shit out of him. It seemed like a good time to get gone. By this time she was almost seventeen.
She ended up in Philadelphia and fell in with a group of street kids ranging in age from fifteen to almost twenty-one. Almost all of them were like her, bards, their magic expressed through music. They made their way by busking, singing and playing together in parks for as long as they could before getting run off by the cops, and when all else failed, pickpocketing and panhandling. Athena was happy, which was a first. She got a crush on the group's de facto leader, a twenty-year-old woman named Taylor.
Unfortunately, bards have a rep. Flaky, thieving, manipulative. It was the rep that drew her group into the crosshairs of police who wanted to crack down on the homeless in Philadelphia. They weren't hard to find, weren't hard to follow, and had to start moving around after a raid on their squat resulted in one of their guitarists getting arrested and carted off.
It was during a performance in a less-patrolled park that Athena got caught singing a spell to loosen the pockets of her listeners, making it easier for the pickpockets of her commune to make their way through the crowd and earn them all dinner. The others, for the most part, got away.
She was looking at serious consequences, but her Aunt Lenore had been looking for her. As soon as Athena's name popped up on an arrest record, Lenore was there, cashing in favors and getting Athena out of jail and into Lenore's custody.
That's where she's been since, first being tutored to bring her up to speed and then re-enrolling in high school as an eighteen-year-old junior. Halfway through her senior year, she's nineteen and happier than she's ever been in her life. She has a caretaker who loves her, a mentor she adores, and a life she never thought she'd have.
And then Riverview happened.
● abilities:
Magic as a force exists to be tapped by the Gifted, but it isn't all-powerful, and can have dangerous consequences when used irresponsibly. Magic is channeled through intent and Rituals to create spells. Rituals can be just about anything, from sewing to woodworking to song and dance. Magic essentially attaches itself to the things that interest a person when they're young, allowing itself to be worked through those things. For example, a Gifted woodworker would perhaps need to whittle to create a simple spell, while more complex work would take more complex creations. Spells themselves are unique to their casters; if Athena were to craft a spell using her Ritual, someone else couldn't just duplicate the spell to achieve the same effect, because even if the Ritual is the same, the intent wouldn't necessarily be the same.
Athena is a bard, which essentially means she sings magic. More thoroughly described, the Ritual through which she's able to cast spells is built on music and musical expression. From humming or whistling to playing piano accompaniment while she sings, she can't do shit if it's not channeled through song. She's also just a baby bard, which means her more complex spells aren't that powerful, and the harder she pushes herself the more likely it is to go badly.
● strengths:
Compassionate - For all that she projects a take-no-shit give-no-fucks attitude, it's really not hard to get past that facade. She just... loves the world a lot. For all that she's had shitty examples of love in her family, she's always fallen hard and fast for people in general. People are amazing. After she got kicked out, she got taken in by a pair of gay old bag ladies who helped her get on her feet, and that wasn't the last time she found compassion in the people who fell through the world's cracks. That's not to say her life on the street was easy by any means. But it showed her that even the people the world forgets are worth something.
Kind - In the same vein, she's very willing to express her compassion. She'll willingly share just about everything but food, and even that if it's with someone who doesn't have the same easy access that she does now. She's very into showing she cares about people--giving gifts, random acts of kindness, giving money to every panhandler she sees, etc. A favorite when she doesn't have much else to offer is writing people poetry and songs. Her gentleness and compassion come together to create someone who just wants people to be happy.
Loyal - As hard and fast as she falls for people, she's also very willing to fight for them and stand by them even if she doesn't know them all that well. One of the ways she survived on the street was to close ranks with the people around her when things started going bad. A group of angry homeless is far more affective at scaring off shitty abusive college guys than one person alone. She takes her relationships with people very, very seriously, and she takes it very badly when her trust is betrayed.
● weaknesses:
Proud - She hates looking weak. She hates owing people. Even and sometimes particularly adults. It's a combination of hating everything her parents ever gave her, and living on her own for almost two years. She likes being able to take care of herself, to deal with her own problems, and she doesn't tend to share when shit's going bad until it's gone so bad she doesn't have a choice but to ask for help.
Scared - Growing up in an ultra-conservative home meant she lived in fear for much of her young life, terrified of what would happen if they found out she was gay. Even after they kicked her out, the fear followed her onto the street: fear of strangers, fear of hunger, fear of assault, fear of cold, etc etc. Her life has never been stable, and that reflects in her relationship with... well, everything. At this point it's so ingrained that half her defensiveness is bravado to keep fear at bay. Some nights are nothing but anxiety-fueled insomnia while she goes over all the reasons that what she has today could be gone tomorrow.
Impulsive - There are two sides to her impulsivity. The first is simply the Bad Life Choices that come with being a teenager. Not thinking things through, not considering consequences, not even paying attention to the risks something poses to herself or others. The other is her temper. She gets angry fast, making snap decisions in the heat of the moment that sometimes go bad, fast. She ended up beating a guy half to death once because he punched the girl she had a crush on, and only stopped when the girl in question pried Athena off of him. Her instinct is to protect "her territory" from anyone and everyone, which means taking insults and answering them with, for example, magic to the face.
● job skills (optional): She's a nineteen-year-old super senior with a singing talent and a magical gift for TROUBLEMAKIN'. But really she's probably best suited for a part-time job and a moon GED before tackling university and magical study.
Athena Parker | OC | Reserved
● name: Jae
● age:
OLD25+● contact: ninjae @ plurk
● other characters: Poe Dameron, Chyler Silva, Carson Beckett
character information
● name: Athena Parker
● canon: Original Character - Shared World
● canon point: Half-way through her senior year of high school
● age: 19 (barely)
● (original) world:
Athena comes from a world where magic is and has always been real, even if it wasn't freely recognized or practiced until comparatively recently. Magic users--known in modern parlance as the "Gifted"--have been operating in the open since the Second World War. The path to the present, comparative acceptance of the Gifted was punctuated by legal and civil battles, and a lot of hashing out what constitutes legal and illegal use of a Gift. Broadly explained, the Gift can be tapped through Rituals, which vary from person to person. One person might be able to use magic via coding or programming while another needs to sing, dance, or write poetry. Rituals can be more or less common, with some being common enough to earn them nicknames--bards, for example, who use their magic through music.
Athena was born 1999, into the end of a decade where Gifts became much more broadly accepted and spawned youth cultures based around Gifts and Ritual expression. Which isn't to say that the Gift is accepted or valued everywhere; there continue to be tensions with conservative circles and anti-Gifted groups.
See also: Athena's parents. She comes from a family of Staten Island cops who married into other cop families, cops who aren't fond of the crimes perpetrated by the Gifted. None of Athena's immediate family is Gifted; the only other Gifted person is her aunt, Lenore Carrigan, who left at seventeen and ended up joining first the army, then the MIA (think the FBI/CIA for magical crimes and terrorist acts). Athena grew up surrounded by racial hatred, bigotry, and every imaginable slur being leveled at her aunt and people like her.
Her mother was essentially white trash with delusions of grandeur, sending Athena to piano and singing lessons, which the girl took to with a passion that her mother naturally took credit for. When Athena got tested for magic and it was revealed she was not only Gifted, but that her magic was tied to musical expression, her parents... did not react well. The singing lessons stopped, the piano was sold. They tried to keep Athena from learning even the magical basics, but her teacher and principal intervened, threatening to call CPS. Even if it wouldn't have done anything to get Athena out of her parents' house, the possibility of a black mark on the family name after Lenore was an unacceptable risk.
When she realized in eighth grade that she liked girls, she swore to keep it a secret from them forever. She even managed, until the end of her sophomore year of high school, when a teacher caught her and her girlfriend spraypainting "BE GAY, DO CRIMES" on the back of the school on the last day.
Her parents kicked her out. Barely sixteen and on the street, she first tried to find her way in NYC, where she met first Amy and Trish, a pair of gay bag ladies who adopted her for the first couple of months, and then Robbie, the first girl she was ever able to date openly. Robbie was a street kid about a year older than Athena, on her own for that much longer. They were together about a year, until Robbie got arrested while hanging on to one of their friend's drugs. It was the last time Athena saw her, and it was right after that she left NYC--after she found the friend the drugs belonged to and beat the shit out of him. It seemed like a good time to get gone. By this time she was almost seventeen.
She ended up in Philadelphia and fell in with a group of street kids ranging in age from fifteen to almost twenty-one. Almost all of them were like her, bards, their magic expressed through music. They made their way by busking, singing and playing together in parks for as long as they could before getting run off by the cops, and when all else failed, pickpocketing and panhandling. Athena was happy, which was a first. She got a crush on the group's de facto leader, a twenty-year-old woman named Taylor.
Unfortunately, bards have a rep. Flaky, thieving, manipulative. It was the rep that drew her group into the crosshairs of police who wanted to crack down on the homeless in Philadelphia. They weren't hard to find, weren't hard to follow, and had to start moving around after a raid on their squat resulted in one of their guitarists getting arrested and carted off.
It was during a performance in a less-patrolled park that Athena got caught singing a spell to loosen the pockets of her listeners, making it easier for the pickpockets of her commune to make their way through the crowd and earn them all dinner. The others, for the most part, got away.
She was looking at serious consequences, but her Aunt Lenore had been looking for her. As soon as Athena's name popped up on an arrest record, Lenore was there, cashing in favors and getting Athena out of jail and into Lenore's custody.
That's where she's been since, first being tutored to bring her up to speed and then re-enrolling in high school as an eighteen-year-old junior. Halfway through her senior year, she's nineteen and happier than she's ever been in her life. She has a caretaker who loves her, a mentor she adores, and a life she never thought she'd have.
And then Riverview happened.
● abilities:
Magic as a force exists to be tapped by the Gifted, but it isn't all-powerful, and can have dangerous consequences when used irresponsibly. Magic is channeled through intent and Rituals to create spells. Rituals can be just about anything, from sewing to woodworking to song and dance. Magic essentially attaches itself to the things that interest a person when they're young, allowing itself to be worked through those things. For example, a Gifted woodworker would perhaps need to whittle to create a simple spell, while more complex work would take more complex creations. Spells themselves are unique to their casters; if Athena were to craft a spell using her Ritual, someone else couldn't just duplicate the spell to achieve the same effect, because even if the Ritual is the same, the intent wouldn't necessarily be the same.
Athena is a bard, which essentially means she sings magic. More thoroughly described, the Ritual through which she's able to cast spells is built on music and musical expression. From humming or whistling to playing piano accompaniment while she sings, she can't do shit if it's not channeled through song. She's also just a baby bard, which means her more complex spells aren't that powerful, and the harder she pushes herself the more likely it is to go badly.
● strengths:
Compassionate - For all that she projects a take-no-shit give-no-fucks attitude, it's really not hard to get past that facade. She just... loves the world a lot. For all that she's had shitty examples of love in her family, she's always fallen hard and fast for people in general. People are amazing. After she got kicked out, she got taken in by a pair of gay old bag ladies who helped her get on her feet, and that wasn't the last time she found compassion in the people who fell through the world's cracks. That's not to say her life on the street was easy by any means. But it showed her that even the people the world forgets are worth something.
Kind - In the same vein, she's very willing to express her compassion. She'll willingly share just about everything but food, and even that if it's with someone who doesn't have the same easy access that she does now. She's very into showing she cares about people--giving gifts, random acts of kindness, giving money to every panhandler she sees, etc. A favorite when she doesn't have much else to offer is writing people poetry and songs. Her gentleness and compassion come together to create someone who just wants people to be happy.
Loyal - As hard and fast as she falls for people, she's also very willing to fight for them and stand by them even if she doesn't know them all that well. One of the ways she survived on the street was to close ranks with the people around her when things started going bad. A group of angry homeless is far more affective at scaring off shitty abusive college guys than one person alone. She takes her relationships with people very, very seriously, and she takes it very badly when her trust is betrayed.
● weaknesses:
Proud - She hates looking weak. She hates owing people. Even and sometimes particularly adults. It's a combination of hating everything her parents ever gave her, and living on her own for almost two years. She likes being able to take care of herself, to deal with her own problems, and she doesn't tend to share when shit's going bad until it's gone so bad she doesn't have a choice but to ask for help.
Scared - Growing up in an ultra-conservative home meant she lived in fear for much of her young life, terrified of what would happen if they found out she was gay. Even after they kicked her out, the fear followed her onto the street: fear of strangers, fear of hunger, fear of assault, fear of cold, etc etc. Her life has never been stable, and that reflects in her relationship with... well, everything. At this point it's so ingrained that half her defensiveness is bravado to keep fear at bay. Some nights are nothing but anxiety-fueled insomnia while she goes over all the reasons that what she has today could be gone tomorrow.
Impulsive - There are two sides to her impulsivity. The first is simply the Bad Life Choices that come with being a teenager. Not thinking things through, not considering consequences, not even paying attention to the risks something poses to herself or others. The other is her temper. She gets angry fast, making snap decisions in the heat of the moment that sometimes go bad, fast. She ended up beating a guy half to death once because he punched the girl she had a crush on, and only stopped when the girl in question pried Athena off of him. Her instinct is to protect "her territory" from anyone and everyone, which means taking insults and answering them with, for example, magic to the face.
● job skills (optional): She's a nineteen-year-old super senior with a singing talent and a magical gift for TROUBLEMAKIN'. But really she's probably best suited for a part-time job and a moon GED before tackling university and magical study.
● housing (optional): Floor 1, communal
● network username: citharede
● network sample: here!
● prose/action sample: here!