Lavi Bookman (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
inksplashes) wrote2016-11-29 02:35 pm
inksplashes) wrote2016-11-29 02:35 pm
application
Player
Name: Ari
Age: 27.
Contact: Plurk; see player or mod contact page.
Preferred Pronouns: She/her.
Character
Name: Lavi "Bookman Jr." (Alias; real name unknown.)
Age: 21
Memory Option: 1
Established Status: 3 Years
Canon: D. Gray-man (Manga)
Canon Point: Ch 207
Citizenship: None; reclamation agent or authorized non-citizen.
Job: Killjoy
* Level: 3
Abilities:
Skills
Memory: Bookman training and work requires a sharp eye for detail and an even sharper mind. Lavi has a photographic memory and needs no more than a glance to commit an image to mind.
Strategy: A keen observer of history and culture, Lavi has a considerable repertoire of battle strategies and tactics at his disposal when necessary. He cultivates the image of a person with a careless attitude and lacking wit, but when he chooses to turn his intellect on an enemy, the results can be devastating.
Deception: Disciplined and well-practiced at slipping into different personas, Lavi is described as a mirror pane--reflecting nothing back but the image of others. An expert liar, he can often deduce the best route for endearing himself to someone--friend, enemy, or otherwise--in order to meet his goals with none the wiser to his true intent.
Combat Specialist: Canonically, he's spent a lifetime learning martial arts and honing close quarters combat skills. Since his weapon of choice is staff-like and he's evidently not bad with a flag pole, he's appears better with long-range weapons rather than melee.
Field Medic: A lifetime spent in one war zone after the next has garnered Lavi some crude but effective medic skills--nothing that would qualify him to work in a clinic, certainly, but basic understanding of how to treat wounds, poisons, and keep himself or someone else alive long enough to find a more qualified set of hands.
Passives
Lavi has no out of the ordinary passives, though his physical capacity is hinted at being slightly above average in terms of strength and endurance. For simplicity's sake and because canon doesn't like being clear, we'll just say he's exceptionally well trained and in peak condition.
Powers
Innocence: Canonically, Lavi is an exorcist of the Black Order, an individual capable of synchronizing with "innocence". Innocence is a substance which can purify and destroy the akuma virus when it takes on a weapon form and is paired with an appropriate accommodator. Lavi is one such user and his innocence takes the form of a size-shifting war hammer. In Overjoyed, its size-changing abilities are owed to its use of claytronics or programmable matter. Although he'll have access to the hammer, he won't remember how to use it until he begins his first major regain. It currently rests dormant in his room.
Outside of its obvious offensive abilities, Lavi uses the hammer to strike magical seals and release powerful spells. While retaining their overall visual impact, their interface is now a holographic display, and the seals themselves are made of the same programmable matter that the hammer is--by selecting the different commands (i.e., hellfire and ash, violent thunder, so on), he instructs the catoms to rearrange and change their charge to produce the desired effect.
Major | Fire Stamp: Hellfire and Ash: Similar to canon, this produces a column of flame, but unlike canon, he no longer has the ability to ride said flame like he's hanging ten, because that's not a thing. Because of its nature as programmable matter, he is only capable of directing the column within a limited range around him.
Major | Heaven Stamp: Violent Thunder, Whirling Skies: Selecting this command from the interface menu creates a directional column of lightning or electrical charge.
Major | Wood Stamp: Wind: This seal creates a localized vortex with limited directional abilities.
Major | Wood Stamp: Spinning Dist of Heaven and Earth: A more advanced technique than the previous, this technique can canonically control the atmosphere and objects in nature (such as the clouds, atmospheric pressure, wind, rain, etc), but in Overjoyed will be limited to more localized effects--controlling one or the other, but not both, and within a short radius of his position.
Major | Combo Stamp: Terrible Lightning of Heaven: Using a combination of fire and heaven commands, the claytronics matter can be shaped into a wall of fire and iron as either a defensive or offensive measure.
Personality: Bookmen take no sides, harbor no loyalty. They are the impartial chroniclers, the untouched wanders, drifting through history like whispers of wind.
Lavi is a successor of this esoteric clan, and though his smile is always warm and his laughter rings bright, his heart is separated by a distance that none may cross.
He cares for others, he can't stop himself--but it doesn't matter.
(Sometimes, he even believes that's still true.)
49 names, 49 logs. Each record a bookman creates entails a new name, a new persona. Lavi has existed longer than all others before, and perhaps therein lies the critical flaw. This 49th persona has stayed entrenched so long now that it's begun to seep past the skin and into his bones, that it's become him.
The smiling fool, laughing and charming his way through people, aching for the burdens of others but keeping his own hidden .. that person is steadily becoming indistinguishable from the bookman who fabricated him. That person's smiling face has controlled his for so long that he no longer knows when it's lying or telling the truth.
He no longer knows if the distinction is important, either.
In this way, being a killjoy is an easy double-life for Lavi. The creeds of his clan and ultimate goal of his mission often run in concert with one another: remain neutral, remain true to the word of the warrant.
But he is first and foremost a bookman--the Reclamation Apprehension Coalition is a stepping stone in his pilgrimage, a convenient means to an end. Given the choice between his duties as one or the other, he wouldn't hesitate to betray everything the RAC stands for and everyone in it.
Save, perhaps, Yu.
Yu is a liability, a perpetual threat to his impartial distance. He won't admit it to himself, but every time he has to consider leaving his partner's side and beginning a new log, taking a new name--it comes with a measure of heartbreak. Three years spent together, three years spent behind a mask of friendly lies and steady banter...
The edges of his smile are beginning to fray now, the veneer beginning to chip.
Each time a secret passes through the curve of his lips, he knows he's breaking a vow, complicating the inevitable day when they become enemies.
(Every human is just an enemy waiting to happen; all societies are just wars in delay -- )
All the same, he hopes that their semblance of friendship, of trust, might make that complication worth it.
But that is not to say that Lavi is not without his joyous moments. He genuinely enjoys his work and his studies, his shallow relationships. His warm persona often endears him to others and his intelligence, albeit carefully hidden unless he has call to do otherwise, provides him insights that most people miss.
And above all else, Lavi is young.
Too young to ever fully adhere to his creed as either a killjoy or bookman. Too young not to get wrapped up in the moment and emotions of others, even if he can disconnect and shift between them with greater ease than others. His temper can still run hot beneath that placid mask, especially in the face of cruelty or ignorance. Although he may be trained to think in terms of black and white, his heart still very much deals in shades of gray.
He is imperfect in each of his positions in life, but his priorities--at least for now--are clear.
「 I am the Bookman’s successor. My current name—
AU History: Suffering from a serious case of Side Character Fever, little is known about Lavi's pre-canon history. When canon does address his history, it does so largely in relation to his clan, Bookmen.
Bookmen are a highly respected but secretive clan of history keepers, individuals tasked with observing and recording the hidden sides of history. They record the wars that no one else hears about, observe the regimes that no one else sees pulling the strings. In Overjoyed, they serve much the same function, but because of the vastness of the stars and density of contested borders, they no longer hold the same universal authority to observe at will. Rather, they're now a relatively obscure secular organization dispersed through the galaxy. Some bookmen operate in public offices and security agencies, conducting themselves in the middle of the events they seek to record, while others retain the more traditional approach, traveling from planet to planet, war to war, changing sides to get the best vantage point for their records.
Each time a bookman ends a log, they change their name and adopt a new persona. Sometimes these changes are minute, at others, not--while in canon this was viable due to 19th century England having relatively poor security encryption, this will be handled on a governmental level in Overjoyed. The bookmen who operate within public offices and bureaus across the galaxy will be responsible for changing the identities of their clan brethren, though it's safe to assume that these identities will be shallow and imperfect when first created--deep enough covers to fool most officials, but scarcely enough to convince the suspicious and determined.
Lavi's current identity has existed for roughly three years, offering some measure of protection from prying eyes. On record, his birth planet is Telen, but due to his relationship with the RAC, little else is available for viewing outside of his birth date and completed warrants.
Born on a backwater planet on the far side of the J, Lavi's life prior to becoming an apprentice of the Bookman Clan is a wash of patchy memories and wordless images. An orphan, he was chosen to become the successor of a wandering bookman at age six, wherein he renounced his birth name and took on his first alias. From that day forward, whoever he was originally--whoever he might've become--was discarded, and Lavi traded his childhood in for a life of training and traveling.
A decade of war followed, a decade of watching humans repeat the same mistakes over and over again. No matter what planet they were on, no matter which side they temporarily allied themselves with, Lavi watched the emergence of the same pattern. Of greed and power hunger, of foolishness exacting a cost too high for either side to pay but neither being willing to relent.
Ten years of travels and for all his esoteric knowledge, the thing he came to understand most strongly was that humans are a feeble species. That people are just enemies waiting to be turned against one another, and peace? Peace is merely the pause between wars, the ash left as one society crumbles and another rises to repeat the cycle all over again.
Traveling so much had its downsides--the bullet wounds, the sicknesses, the often near death experiences--but it also had its perks. In his 48 names and personas prior to "Lavi", he experienced cultures that others seldom hear about, let alone immerse themselves in. He met with respected elders and ingratiated himself with criminal overlords, studied cultural rites and saw the overturn of governments while most children were still learning to master their hormones.
(That one, as it happens, he still hasn't quite pulled off, but that's another story.)
When he was sixteen, he took on the persona "Deak", following his mentor to a small mining planet on the outskirts of the J. A militia force there was beginning to grow into a full scale rebellion, and though his clan had previously been on the side of their oppressors, they now offered their services as strategists in exchange for the ability to compile a new record. They arrived during a particularly trying time for the militia, their halls filled with the dead, and though Lavi--then Deak--smiled and laughed, few responded in kind.
A girl, her face young but her regard somber and bitter like a soldier, met his gaze in rebuke.
What a depressing place, he thought that first night.
Eventually they fitted him with a uniform, began to think of him as one of their own, sharing meals and heartaches together. As the years ticked on, he began to find it difficult to remember his place as an outsider--to not think of himself as one of them in turn.
Like all home-grown revolutions, however, the tides of war began to turn against the militia force. Sensing that his pupil was beginning to grow too attached to his place in the vagabond order, Lavi's mentor decided to end his participation in the log prematurely, instructing his student to begin his rite of passage at the age of nineteen.
The rite of passage, a pilgrimage, would be his first assignment without the oversight of a senior bookman.
The Quad had long since been on the history keepers' radars, and Lavi, having traveled it briefly in the earliest days of his tutelage, was sent to observe the growing changes therein. How and who he became to do so was up to him--the success of his mission would determine his ability to graduate from apprentice to full-fledged bookman.
And so "Lavi" was born.
After some brief skirmishes with border authorities and visas, Lavi realized he needed a better cover for moving through the area without impediment, and that eventually brought him to the Reclamation Apprehension Coalition. A seasoned combatant, Lavi passed through their evaluations and became a level 3 killjoy, notably receiving particularly high marks on his psychological examination.
Not sanctioned to form his own team, Lavi was pointed in the direction of a particularly surly young man of the same age, and with enough taunting, teasing, and well placed comments, the two became partners.
He's pretty sure Kanda still wishes he'd missed his flight that day, but it hardly matters now. As long as "Lavi" exists, he'll do so in tandem with that man.
CRAU: No.
Original History: Link.
Inventory:
War Hammer (in his room; dormant), a leather bound journal written in an undecipherable language mixed into his overabundant collection of books, a collection of acupuncture needles wrapped carefully and forgotten in cargo storage.
Samples:
TDM Sample #1
TDM Sample #2
Miscellaneous Notes: Their ship, Noah, will be purchased with half of his intro HP points and half of Kanda’s as agreed upon by both players OOC.
Major | Fire Stamp: Hellfire and Ash: Similar to canon, this produces a column of flame, but unlike canon, he no longer has the ability to ride said flame like he's hanging ten, because that's not a thing. Because of its nature as programmable matter, he is only capable of directing the column within a limited range around him.
Major | Heaven Stamp: Violent Thunder, Whirling Skies: Selecting this command from the interface menu creates a directional column of lightning or electrical charge.
Major | Wood Stamp: Wind: This seal creates a localized vortex with limited directional abilities.
Major | Wood Stamp: Spinning Dist of Heaven and Earth: A more advanced technique than the previous, this technique can canonically control the atmosphere and objects in nature (such as the clouds, atmospheric pressure, wind, rain, etc), but in Overjoyed will be limited to more localized effects--controlling one or the other, but not both, and within a short radius of his position.
Major | Combo Stamp: Terrible Lightning of Heaven: Using a combination of fire and heaven commands, the claytronics matter can be shaped into a wall of fire and iron as either a defensive or offensive measure.
Personality: Bookmen take no sides, harbor no loyalty. They are the impartial chroniclers, the untouched wanders, drifting through history like whispers of wind.
Lavi is a successor of this esoteric clan, and though his smile is always warm and his laughter rings bright, his heart is separated by a distance that none may cross.
He cares for others, he can't stop himself--but it doesn't matter.
(Sometimes, he even believes that's still true.)
「 The Bookman’s successor. I take on a new name each time I go somewhere new, and discard it each time I leave. 」
49 names, 49 logs. Each record a bookman creates entails a new name, a new persona. Lavi has existed longer than all others before, and perhaps therein lies the critical flaw. This 49th persona has stayed entrenched so long now that it's begun to seep past the skin and into his bones, that it's become him.
The smiling fool, laughing and charming his way through people, aching for the burdens of others but keeping his own hidden .. that person is steadily becoming indistinguishable from the bookman who fabricated him. That person's smiling face has controlled his for so long that he no longer knows when it's lying or telling the truth.
He no longer knows if the distinction is important, either.
「 He must not become attached or be controlled by emotion. He speaks with all kinds of people, then leaves as if nothing has happened. 」
In this way, being a killjoy is an easy double-life for Lavi. The creeds of his clan and ultimate goal of his mission often run in concert with one another: remain neutral, remain true to the word of the warrant.
But he is first and foremost a bookman--the Reclamation Apprehension Coalition is a stepping stone in his pilgrimage, a convenient means to an end. Given the choice between his duties as one or the other, he wouldn't hesitate to betray everything the RAC stands for and everyone in it.
Save, perhaps, Yu.
Yu is a liability, a perpetual threat to his impartial distance. He won't admit it to himself, but every time he has to consider leaving his partner's side and beginning a new log, taking a new name--it comes with a measure of heartbreak. Three years spent together, three years spent behind a mask of friendly lies and steady banter...
The edges of his smile are beginning to fray now, the veneer beginning to chip.
Each time a secret passes through the curve of his lips, he knows he's breaking a vow, complicating the inevitable day when they become enemies.
(Every human is just an enemy waiting to happen; all societies are just wars in delay -- )
All the same, he hopes that their semblance of friendship, of trust, might make that complication worth it.
「 Like a gust of wind. The wind doesn’t stay in one place. It feels nothing for the places it’s passed through. It just keeps wandering. 」
But that is not to say that Lavi is not without his joyous moments. He genuinely enjoys his work and his studies, his shallow relationships. His warm persona often endears him to others and his intelligence, albeit carefully hidden unless he has call to do otherwise, provides him insights that most people miss.
And above all else, Lavi is young.
Too young to ever fully adhere to his creed as either a killjoy or bookman. Too young not to get wrapped up in the moment and emotions of others, even if he can disconnect and shift between them with greater ease than others. His temper can still run hot beneath that placid mask, especially in the face of cruelty or ignorance. Although he may be trained to think in terms of black and white, his heart still very much deals in shades of gray.
He is imperfect in each of his positions in life, but his priorities--at least for now--are clear.
「 I am the Bookman’s successor. My current name—
—Lavi. 」
AU History: Suffering from a serious case of Side Character Fever, little is known about Lavi's pre-canon history. When canon does address his history, it does so largely in relation to his clan, Bookmen.
Bookmen are a highly respected but secretive clan of history keepers, individuals tasked with observing and recording the hidden sides of history. They record the wars that no one else hears about, observe the regimes that no one else sees pulling the strings. In Overjoyed, they serve much the same function, but because of the vastness of the stars and density of contested borders, they no longer hold the same universal authority to observe at will. Rather, they're now a relatively obscure secular organization dispersed through the galaxy. Some bookmen operate in public offices and security agencies, conducting themselves in the middle of the events they seek to record, while others retain the more traditional approach, traveling from planet to planet, war to war, changing sides to get the best vantage point for their records.
Each time a bookman ends a log, they change their name and adopt a new persona. Sometimes these changes are minute, at others, not--while in canon this was viable due to 19th century England having relatively poor security encryption, this will be handled on a governmental level in Overjoyed. The bookmen who operate within public offices and bureaus across the galaxy will be responsible for changing the identities of their clan brethren, though it's safe to assume that these identities will be shallow and imperfect when first created--deep enough covers to fool most officials, but scarcely enough to convince the suspicious and determined.
Lavi's current identity has existed for roughly three years, offering some measure of protection from prying eyes. On record, his birth planet is Telen, but due to his relationship with the RAC, little else is available for viewing outside of his birth date and completed warrants.
Born on a backwater planet on the far side of the J, Lavi's life prior to becoming an apprentice of the Bookman Clan is a wash of patchy memories and wordless images. An orphan, he was chosen to become the successor of a wandering bookman at age six, wherein he renounced his birth name and took on his first alias. From that day forward, whoever he was originally--whoever he might've become--was discarded, and Lavi traded his childhood in for a life of training and traveling.
A decade of war followed, a decade of watching humans repeat the same mistakes over and over again. No matter what planet they were on, no matter which side they temporarily allied themselves with, Lavi watched the emergence of the same pattern. Of greed and power hunger, of foolishness exacting a cost too high for either side to pay but neither being willing to relent.
Ten years of travels and for all his esoteric knowledge, the thing he came to understand most strongly was that humans are a feeble species. That people are just enemies waiting to be turned against one another, and peace? Peace is merely the pause between wars, the ash left as one society crumbles and another rises to repeat the cycle all over again.
Traveling so much had its downsides--the bullet wounds, the sicknesses, the often near death experiences--but it also had its perks. In his 48 names and personas prior to "Lavi", he experienced cultures that others seldom hear about, let alone immerse themselves in. He met with respected elders and ingratiated himself with criminal overlords, studied cultural rites and saw the overturn of governments while most children were still learning to master their hormones.
(That one, as it happens, he still hasn't quite pulled off, but that's another story.)
When he was sixteen, he took on the persona "Deak", following his mentor to a small mining planet on the outskirts of the J. A militia force there was beginning to grow into a full scale rebellion, and though his clan had previously been on the side of their oppressors, they now offered their services as strategists in exchange for the ability to compile a new record. They arrived during a particularly trying time for the militia, their halls filled with the dead, and though Lavi--then Deak--smiled and laughed, few responded in kind.
A girl, her face young but her regard somber and bitter like a soldier, met his gaze in rebuke.
What a depressing place, he thought that first night.
Eventually they fitted him with a uniform, began to think of him as one of their own, sharing meals and heartaches together. As the years ticked on, he began to find it difficult to remember his place as an outsider--to not think of himself as one of them in turn.
Like all home-grown revolutions, however, the tides of war began to turn against the militia force. Sensing that his pupil was beginning to grow too attached to his place in the vagabond order, Lavi's mentor decided to end his participation in the log prematurely, instructing his student to begin his rite of passage at the age of nineteen.
The rite of passage, a pilgrimage, would be his first assignment without the oversight of a senior bookman.
The Quad had long since been on the history keepers' radars, and Lavi, having traveled it briefly in the earliest days of his tutelage, was sent to observe the growing changes therein. How and who he became to do so was up to him--the success of his mission would determine his ability to graduate from apprentice to full-fledged bookman.
And so "Lavi" was born.
After some brief skirmishes with border authorities and visas, Lavi realized he needed a better cover for moving through the area without impediment, and that eventually brought him to the Reclamation Apprehension Coalition. A seasoned combatant, Lavi passed through their evaluations and became a level 3 killjoy, notably receiving particularly high marks on his psychological examination.
Not sanctioned to form his own team, Lavi was pointed in the direction of a particularly surly young man of the same age, and with enough taunting, teasing, and well placed comments, the two became partners.
He's pretty sure Kanda still wishes he'd missed his flight that day, but it hardly matters now. As long as "Lavi" exists, he'll do so in tandem with that man.
CRAU: No.
Original History: Link.
Inventory:
War Hammer (in his room; dormant), a leather bound journal written in an undecipherable language mixed into his overabundant collection of books, a collection of acupuncture needles wrapped carefully and forgotten in cargo storage.
Samples:
TDM Sample #1
TDM Sample #2
Miscellaneous Notes: Their ship, Noah, will be purchased with half of his intro HP points and half of Kanda’s as agreed upon by both players OOC.