rae_of_sun

How to reach player?
PM: This one, or wildmage_daine or jennifer_strange
AIM: Platy121

[Out Of Character]
Backtagging with this character: Absolutely!
Threadhopping with this character: Give me a heads up, first.
Fourthwalling: Eh, keep it light.
Canon puncture: Psshh as if anyone's actually heard of her Go ahead.
Offensive subjects: Vampires

[In Character]
Sexual/romantic orientation: heterosexual/heteroromantic
Hugging this character: sure
Flirting with this character: go for it
Giving this character a kiss: also fine
Something more intimate: she'd be up for it, but I'm more fade-to-black
Relationships: not super likely in the short term, but not impossible in the long term
Dub-con/non-con/sexual assault: nope
Fighting with this character: she'd be lousy at it unless you're a vampire, in which case, you'll probably die. Also, she does have a couple of wards on her person that might freak out if she's attacked, so burning sensations and/or a killer light show are possible.
Injuring this character: discuss it with me, first
Killing this character: nooooo!
Using telepathy/mind reading abilities on this character: she'll probably be able to tell you're doing it, and she will definitely not appreciate it, but she doesn't have any real defenses to speak of.

The Player
Name/nickname: Carrie
Age: 29
Pronouns: female
Contact: PM here (or wildmage_daine or jennifer_strange); platy121 on AIM
Currently played characters: Pretty much all of the obscure fantasy female characters are mine (except for Aly). :P

The Character
DW account: rae_of_sun
Name: Rae Seddon
Alias: Sunshine
Age/Birthdate: 25 years old
Species: human, though she has lingering anxiety over the possibility that there's some demon blood on her mother's side of the family (probably not).
Canon: "Sunshine" by Robin McKinley (GO FORTH AND READ IT IMMEDIATELY)
Canon point: After the end of the book.
Played By: Lizzy Caplan

Icon:

Abilities:

Sunshine is a reluctant magic handler whose actual abilities are probably a good deal greater than she's willing to explore. What she really loves to do is reign over her bakery in her step-father's coffeehouse, churning out cinnamon rolls and muffins and inventing all sorts of delicious desserts. And ignoring her magical heritage as much as life allows (which, in recent months, has been Not Much).

She knows how to transmute small objects into other small objects, but has only ever changed things that are small enough to fit inside her cupped hands. It's the only skill she's been taught, thanks to her paternal grandmother. During these informal lessons, she also learned that sunlight acts as a sort of magical power source for her. She can do more impressive work in direct sunlight than in the shade. She can soak up sunlight for as long as she likes without ever getting a sunburn, and sunlight deprivation is the only thing that has ever made her ill.

The most impressive things she can do are all a result of a strange counteraffinity she has for vampires. If she likes a vampire, she can act as a sun shade, allowing them to walk in daylight, unharmed, for as long as they remain in physical contact with her. On the flip side, she can also stake a vampire with pretty much any vaguely pointy object she has on hand... or just her bare hands, if she's desperate enough. She can also get a vague reading on where a vampire is in reality just by interacting with them over the internet, presuming there is already some kind of bond between her and them.

Thanks to Constantine, she can also see in the dark - including the dark of the day. As gifts go, it's often a pain in the ass. Her vision is best and clearest in total darkness; if there's any light, she has to deal with seeing through shadows, which can be disorienting. Another side effect is that if she looks closely enough at the shadows that fall across people's faces, she can 'read' them to some degree. She can tell if someone isn't entirely human (though she can't guess specifics without some kind of frame of reference), and if she looks very closely, it amounts to a vague sort of telepathy regarding things like honesty and motive.

Appearance:

She's middling tall and skinny, with her hair often looking a bit weird thanks to being pulled back under a scarf while she works. She favors bright colors, and any jewelry probably involves plastic and rhinestones. In the heat of the bakery, she wears as little as decency allows; overall, she dresses for comfort.

She has a few interesting scars thanks to recent escapades: a crescent-shaped scar in the middle of her chest below her collarbones, and a thin loop encircling her neck where a necklace used to be.

If it's dark enough, those with very sharp eyes might detect a faint, golden glimmer under her skin.

Also, she definitely has a case of bitchy resting face.

Personality:

Sunshine's mother and step-father both have a dominant Feed People gene that's been passed along to her; she loves the work she does in her bakery. It's far more than just a job to her, and she's only rarely bothered by the fact that Charlie's has pretty much become her life, with its employees and regulars all coming together in a big, extended family. Despite her magic handling potential, she's happy just being a baker.

That said, she's introverted enough to really value her independence. She moved out of her parents' house as soon as she could afford it, and she tends to play her emotional cards pretty close to her vest (she is not going to want to talk about her feelings, or listen to you talk about yours). If she's anxious about something, she's more likely to overcompensate by acting like a miserable bitch than actually own up to what's bothering her. And she's almost always anxious about something. Even if nothing awful is happening, there's the ever-present concern that her known magic-handling heritage will clash with her potential demon-cross heritage, resulting in a homicidal meltdown. This almost certainly won't happen, but she worries that it could.

She can, on occasion, be a bit needy. She might despise that neediness, as she's self-aware enough to call it what it is, but that doesn't necessarily stop her.

In short, she's a spaz.

When she's not being defensively sarcastic, she can be pretty nice - especially if you're letting her feed you. Sincere appreciation for her baking pleases her more than she'd ever let on. If you like her food, you're automatically her friend. If you don't, you automatically aren't. If she likes you enough, you can expect to be given special treats and/or first dibs at whatever toxic sugar concoction she's come up with this week.

In her spare time, she enjoys drinking pots of tea and reading trashy fantasy novels.


History:

Sunshine was born Raven Blaise. Her father was a magic handler from a powerful and relatively famous magic-handling family; her mother was a magic-free probably-entirely-human whose relationship with Onyx Blaise was frowned upon by both her family and his. Some of that disapproval might have been due to her mother only being probably-entirely-human, as magic-handling genes and demon genes don't mix well, and it's pretty common to have some demon blood that never manifests in any noticeable way.

When Sunshine was six, her mother left her father, partly due to a dislike of some of his 'business associates.' She fought hard to keep Sunshine, whose name was shortened to Rae. For the next few years, she was raised to be fully and stubbornly normal. She was, for the most part, successful, if you don't count a passion for cooking and a love for sunlight.

Her paternal grandmother contacted Sunshine's mother when she was nine, requesting to be allowed to visit the girl. Sunshine's mother was fair to a fault, and allowed Sunshine to visit her grandmother at her lakeside cabin. This is when Sunshine first learned to transmute small objects. Her grandmother continued to teach her the basics during the next few months. The most impressive act Sunshine managed was transmuting a ring - impressive because things like metal and stone are harder than less dense objects. She also learned that sunlight was her 'element;' she could do more in sunlight than in the shade.

When she was ten, the Voodoo Wars started, and the visits stopped. It was humans versus vampires, for the most part, and it left a good portion of the country ravaged. Anyone from her father's side of the family disappeared, which made it that much easier for her to ignore the magic in her blood and focus on baking.

Her mother had remarried a coffeehouse owner named Charlie Seddon. It was Charlie who gave Sunshine her nickname, which stuck so firmly that before long, everyone was using it. She worked in the coffeehouse through high school. Despite her love of reading, she was not a very good student and only barely graduated; afterwards, it was an easy shift to full time in the bakery.

She started dating Mel, the head cook and an ex-biker with an abundance of magic-bearing tattoos, and moved to a rental a few miles out of town. She quickly befriended her landlady, an old woman named Yolande.

One spring evening when she's 25, Sunshine gets a bit overwhelmed by the constant exposure to her coffeehouse family and decides to visit the old cabin by the lake. She is kidnapped by a gang of vampires and brought to one of the grander abandoned estates by the lake, where another vampire, Constantine, is being held captive. They are chained to opposite walls in a ballroom and left alone together, Sunshine his intended meal.

The good news is that Constantine doesn't actually want to eat her, because him breaking down and doing so would be a victory for his captors. He encourages Sunshine to talk to him, both to remind him that she's a 'rational creature' and to distract him from the sunlight the following day. There is enough shadow in the ballroom for him to stay out of direct sunlight and avoid bursting into flames, but indirect exposure to daylight isn't very good for his state of mind.

The second evening, the captors return. In order to encourage Con to eat his supper, they slash Sunshine's chest open just below her collar bone and toss her into Con's lap. He is still able to resist eating her - barely.

The following morning, Sunshine uses her remembered transmutation abilities to turn her jackknife into a key. She frees herself, then makes the objectively insane decision to free Constantine, as well, excusing herself by saying she doesn't like bullies. Besides, Con has been about as decent to a human as any given vampire can be, so there's a point in his favor. He tries to refuse, pointing out that he can't leave the house during the day, but she soon discovers, to Con's considerable astonishment, that she can protect him from the sun's devastating effects just by maintaining (uncomfortable) contact with him.

They escape the house and return to the cabin, where Sunshine is momentarily flummoxed to find that her car has disappeared. It's a long way back to town on foot, and it takes them the entire day to get back to New Arcadia. By the end of the journey to her apartment, she is so physically and magically exhausted that she's barely alive. Constantine has to carry her into her apartment and hand-feed her scraps of three-day-old muffin. Once he's satisfied that she isn't going to croak, he leaves her.

Sunshine makes a concentrated effort to Not Remember what happened while she was kidnapped and to return to life as normal. This is made difficult by the attentions of SOF (Special Other Forces), who suspect Others were involved with her disappearance and are very curious to know what happened - not least of all because people don't make a habit of escaping from vampires, and some of the sharper tools in the SOF shed think vampires may have been involved - and by the fact that the wound on her chest refuses to heal. After some months of trying to heal the wound conventionally and then just ignoring it as best she can (to Mel's chagrin), she ends up unintentionally calling Constantine back to her in an effort to figure out what is going on.

Con informs her that the wound is poisoned (it was meant to kill him if he ended up drinking it), which is why it isn't healing properly. He manages to work out a way to heal her using 'clean' blood, which had belonged to a doe. The process is messy and unpleasant, but it works. The side effects are twofold: Sunshine can now see in the dark, and she has the memories of the doe's last few days in her head.

Con also tells Sunshine that Bo (short of Beauregard), leader of the gang of vampires that are trying to attack him, is not happy they both escaped and is trying to find them. One of his gang members actually comes quite close to finding Sunshine; one night, he appears a few blocks away from the coffeehouse. She realizes he's there, though she couldn't tell you how she knew, and without thinking, she grabs a stainless steel table knife, bolts out the door, and kills him.

This is also messy and unpleasant, and it really gets SOF's attention. No one should be able to kill a vampire with a table knife; wood is the only substance that really gets through. She's taken to SOF to get cleaned up and questioned, and while she doesn't mention Con, she does admit that vampires were the ones who kidnapped her. Pat, Jesse, and Theo, the three agents she knows best (coffeehouse regulars) are pretty desperate for her to cooperate, since they could sure use someone in the field who can kill vampires with such improbable ease. They rope in Aimil, one of Sunshine's good friends who also does some work for SOF on the side, and convince Sunshine to try and locate a vampire via the globenet. Since her kidnapping, she's developed a bond with Con and Bo; consequently, she is able to locate an online message that came from Bo, and use it to get a vague directional bead on where he is.

As time goes on, it becomes clear that Sunshine isn't going to get any peace unless Bo is destroyed, so she and Con combine forces to hunt him down. She also enlists the help of Yolande, who turns out to be a wardskeeper. Her landlady makes her a ward that looks like a net of sunshine, meant to help her draw power more efficiently. Armed with that, her counteraffinity, and her directional lead on Bo, Sunshine and Constantine head into battle.

She really doesn't expect to survive, and it's a miserable battle involving a lot of exploding vampire bodies before they finally reach Bo in an old warehouse. He's a very old vampire and not in good physical shape (think oozy), but he radiates evil and his voice alone is almost powerful enough to kill her. She manages to tear his heart out, and the warehouse explodes. Con gets her out alive - barely - and they run straight into an armed division of SOF.

Con miraculously manages to pass as human, which gets them through their debriefing by the Goddess of Pain, SOF second-in-command and terrifying hardass. The interrogation lasts long enough that the sun rises before it's finished, but Sunshine keeps Con from being found out by using her sunshade trick once more (this time by giving him her jackknife, which has been inadvertently loaded with her magic like a little battery and, coincidentally, glows in the dark).

With Bo destroyed, there is no longer any real reason for Sunshine and Con to continue their association - a fact which Sunshine finds surprisingly upsetting. Con, just as improbably, isn't keen on breaking all ties with her, either - in fact, he's quite certain he couldn't even if he wanted to, as they've been bound together by their various adventures. So, Sunshine continues to work in the bakery by day, and occasionally hangs with her vampire buddy at night.

Writing Sample:

Here is a thing.

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