ABOUT YOU

Name: Curry
Are you 18 or over?: Yes.
Other characters played: n/a

CHARACTER

Name: Chivason (Chivy) Darrell
Canon: Original (same universe as Sefton Lowell, different year)
Age: 17. He's short for his age -- about five foot three.
History: A short time after Chivy's second birthday, his mother disappeared, leaving his father to raise him alone. Galvin, Chivy's father, made a living in carpentry, and spent a lot of time traveling to other nearby towns for jobs, which meant Chivy was often taken care of by his father's friends and an elderly neighbor, Lynley, when his father had to go away. The stress of being a single father and trying to keep himself and his son fed, clothed, and sheltered was hard on Galvin. It wasn't so bad at first — work was good and his friends were glad to help — but after about three years, the company he had been working for dissolved and many of the jobs and most of the support moved to other areas and workers. Galvin started spending more and more time away from home — usually gambling or finding some reason to avoid the situation. At the same time, Chivy started spending more and more time with Lynley (or Lynna, as Chivy calls her). Eventually, his father just... never came back.

It was a gradual enough change that Chivy didn't much mind it, especially since Lynna had already been almost as close as family for most of his life, and no one seemed to care that his parents were both gone and he was living with someone of no actual relation.

Chivy has never had many friends. Most of his childhood friends were the sons of the people his father worked with, and they moved away when the business fell apart. Because Chivy rarely spent time away from his home or school when he was younger, he didn't have many chances to get himself into trouble with his odd proclivity for finding lost things. His classmates didn't mind having someone who often returned things to them, and Lynna certainly had no problem with the fact that anything lost around the house didn't stay lost for long.

When trouble did show up, however, it showed up in force. A little over a month before his fifteenth birthday, Lynna fell ill. The doctor couldn't say what was wrong, but she spent more and more time asleep as time went by. Between taking care of her, school, and the odd jobs he started taking on to help pay for medical costs, Chivy was more busy than ever. On the way home from school about a week later, he happened to pick up a wallet that was lying on the side of the road. Finding identification inside, he went to return it, but the man it belonged to called the police as soon as Chivy left. It wouldn't have been too big of a deal — people return lost items all the time — but all of the money was missing from the wallet before Chivy picked it up, and it wasn't the first time his name had been associated with that kind of thing. The police arrived during one of Lynna's infrequent periods of relative wellness, and Chivy heard them explain the situation to her from the other room before grabbing what little he could on short notice and leaving town.

Chivy has been on the road for more than three years now, funding his journey mostly through the sale of things he finds along the way (with a few boosts from odd jobs and kindly old ladies). He doesn't avoid interaction with others, but moving around as often as he does means it's difficult to make any strong friendships. The only exception comes in the form of Sefton Lowell, a kind of human magnet who also made a habit of frequent relocation. Chivy first ran into Sefton (nearly literally) more than a year ago... and kept on running into him. Luckily (or maybe not) for Sefton, Chivy decided pretty much immediately that he would be Sefton's friend — the jury's out on whether he's convinced Sefton of that yet. In either case, the two of them have fallen into a comfortable pattern of running into each other in almost every new city they visit.

A little under a year after meeting Sefton, and almost two months before present day, Chivy met with an odd peddler from whom Chivy got a pair of gloves infused with cold. Something of a niche item, they're not useful for many things, at least on a normal scale (who wants a pair of gloves that constantly give you ice fingers?). On an abnormal scale, though, the fact that they're cold-infused means that they negate Sefton's knack and make it possible for Chivy to wake his friend by means of shaking, as well as touching Sefton in general without provoking a panic attack or putting himself at risk of emotional-manipulation.

Point in canon: 2042, current month/day
Window Location: Near Dayton, Ohio.
Universe: Same world as Sefton (1024), but about 12 years earlier.
2042: Earth, but not quite. Technology is actually further back from present day (for the most part) — think '80s/'90s — and there's a greater emphasis on "green" technology. Automobiles are more environmentally friendly and less widespread since most people prefer to use public transportation.

There's also a bit of what we would term magic mixed in — it's possible to infuse objects with elemental properties. Refrigerators, for example, are electronically powered, but can also be infused with cold so that they use less power and work more efficiently. Blankets can be infused with heat, driers infused with wind, et cetera. This kind of technology is rare, though, and so are the objects, so they're usually treasured possessions and rather expensive.

The biggest thing about the universe is that some people are born with abnormal abilities — knacks, if you will. It can range anywhere from being more likely to flip heads than tails to knowing how to speak several languages with relative ease. The more powerful the knack, the more likely it gets noticed, but a lot of them just slide by.

Things are changing, though, and people with odd abilities are becoming more common — not that many people have noticed. From Chivy's perspective, his knack is just a thing he's lived with all his life, but nothing he'd expect anyone else to immediately understand.

Abilities: Put simply, Chivy finds things. More specifically, he has a knack for sensing the location of lost objects and people. This manifests itself as a mental urge to move closer to whatever nearby lost object that grows stronger the more he tries to resist it (in essence, a headache that decreases as he goes in the right direction). It's not too difficult to ignore as long as he's well-rested and paying attention, although ignoring it does give him a headache.

For the most part, it's useful -- he's a bit of a magpie in the collecting-shinies department -- but it does mean he gets himself lost if he's not careful, especially since he's not usually careful. It's also gotten him into trouble on more than one occasion. Randomly being really, really good at finding things, with no particular explanation why or how, is not actually all that helpful. At best, people are puzzled, but pleased. At worst, they start to wonder if he’s taking things to somehow get credit for finding them or just planning on making off with them in the first place.

On the less abnormal side, he's very skilled at falling asleep in the most random of places, making a meal out of whatever's on hand (it's not gourmet, but he can at least manage edible), and travelling long distances on foot. He also has a lot of experience with making do with limited cash flow and making nice with strangers.

He's not had any experience with any sort of fighting and is just a normal squishy human. He also has a pretty appalling sense of what colors go with what -- he just tends to enjoy very bright.
Possessions:
* Brown knapsack
* A good assortment of miscellanea in the bag, including: a small clay frog, a quarter with a whole through the center, and a small locket. (rubber bands, shoe laces, a few pencil nubs, some candy wrappers, this could go on a while? Nothing really worth writing home about.)
* Black fingerless gloves -- they're cold-infused, which means they emit cold and draw energy from whoever's wearing them to do so. They also have a dampening effect on Sefton's knack, which is the only reason Chivy wears them.

Personality: Chivy is extremely loyal, and places a lot of value in how others perceive him. This can get somewhat tangled in the way he lives his life — he's had to learn to be okay with taking things without asking, and sneaking about — but he tries his best to justify it to himself by returning as many of the things he finds as he can and helping out whenever possible. In theory, if he can do enough random good, he'll balance out his karma. He's never wanted praise for bringing back the things he finds (not that he doesn't bask in it when given), but is just happy imagining that he's brightened someone's day by returning something they thought was gone forever.

He tries to stay focused on the positive — often stubbornly, considering the paths his life has travelled — and when he can't mask the bad with good, he just ignores it. He's spent the last two years or so on the road convincing himself that he left home to find his father, rather than because he needed to stop being a drain on Lynna. The only reason that lie can stand is that nothing has forced him to examine it very closely. He's on the road because, like his father, he has a hard time feeling comfortable staying in one place, and searching for his dad is just a convenient excuse. Overall, though, this attitude has worked pretty well for him so far; he doesn't like dwelling on the fact that his parents left him when he was very small, that his stand-in mother figure may or may not have died while he was away, that there is no one (okay, mostly no one, Sefton counts) who knows where he is or who he is well enough to worry about him.

He hates it when people accuse him of stealing the things he finds, but he can hardly blame them for coming to the easy conclusion, so he just ends up frustrated with himself. There must be something he's doing wrong to bring people to that conclusion, even if it's just being too obvious about returning things. At the same time, he can't just walk away from the things he finds — it's worse to knowingly leave something valuable where it can be damaged than to be associated with its initial disappearance.

He's possessive, but not to the level of obsession. He just feels responsibility for the things he finds and wants to believe that he can get them to where they should be. This carries over to his friendships, when he has them. He has a hard time walking away from a problem without trying to fix it, even if it's not necessarily something the person wants to deal with. He does know when to back down, he just has a knack for toeing the line. This isn't an entirely selfless priority — he considers his friends' happiness a personal task. It's just one of the things offered in the package he calls friendship.

He's very stubborn about trying to be helpful. If he feels like there's something going on in a person's life that he, personally, would be able to help with, he will take responsibility and try to push his way in — until and unless he's given an acceptable reason to back off. "It might get them angry with me" is not actually an acceptable reason, especially if it's something that he feels is really causing unhappiness in the person's life. This is, essentially, what happened with Sefton. Chivy didn't think it was right that Sefton was alone, so he declared himself the one to fix the problem.
Thread Sample: [...]
Prose Sample: [We are not linking canon, be a good kid.]
Plans: Chivy doesn't have a lot of friends -- or, well, any friends who aren't Sefton -- or a lot of people-he-knows in general. His life is very transient, so it'll be nice to give him a stationary set of people, while not pulling him completely away from his life at home. He'll definitely be interested in exploring other worlds if he can find people willing to take him there. He's also a walking itemfinder, which is something I dream of actually managing to use in a game. Finding lost things is something he's good at and something he very much enjoys doing. Other than that... we'll both be feeling out the game at the same time, I've been off the RP scene for a little while now.
Notes: Nothing that I know of?

DÆMON

Name: Marie
Sex: Female
Form: Cairn Terrier
Additional notes: [color? um?]
Why this form: Because puppy. Loyalty, intelligent, love to explore, independent, tenacious, sensitive (females tend to be more independent)