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OOC INFORMATION

Name: Laura
Are you over 18?: ye
Contact:

jojoveller
Other characters: Pal

megatheorem and the Lorenz

hotproblems app is also mine
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IC INFORMATION

Name: Octavian Howe
Canon: original
Age: 61
Gender: male
Species: human (ghost)
Appearance: he died when he was 31, but even prior to that he's pale with dark hair and the air of a consumptive Victorian waif. Skinny, not especially tall, holds very still all the time because he was a ghost for thirty years and it's weird to be able to move around freely again. He wears glasses.
Canon point: A little bit after his nephew and friends liberate him from his murder prison.

History: from his info post, his oc wiki--

Octavian was born and raised in the city of Rose Vale to a moderately well-known family of scholars and magicians, the Howes. He showed an aptitude for tinkering at a young age, encouraged by his academically-oriented parents to pursue that interest. Young Octavian interpreted this as pushing it as far as he could take it, and began inventing small machines for simple tasks (for example, automatic tea-pouring machine) as a hobby. He dabbled as well in the magic spells and rituals his parents specialized in, although he always preferred the machinery.

In school he was introduced to alchemy and became interested in combining that new knowledge set with his experience in inventing. His younger twin brother followed more directly in their parents' footsteps studying magic, and the two often collaborated on making magical items in their teen years. Many of these items, and the volumes of notes the boys created, were sold to help the two build up a nest egg in their early university days; these days, the old magical items are considered immensely valuable collectors items, referred to as the "Howe Relics," now a prestigious set of items to possess after the family's many mysterious tragedies.

But that's later.

In university, Octavian meets and befriends classmate Hiram Bellerose. The two quickly bond over mutual interests in pushing the limits of technology and alchemy, partnering on side projects and university projects alike. The university years, and the few years following, are the golden years for the two of them: nothing but ideas and projects and infinite hope for their future. Octavian's family name has pull, Hiram has money of his own to add to what Octavian's custom inventions made; it's going great. They plan to go into business properly, inventors and alchemists pushing the envelope of modernity and changing lives! Octavian's personal project on the side, how to use modern marvels to extend the human lifespan, toddles along without Hiram's input.

As the years pass, the two begin to have disagreements about the future of their joint venture. Octavian wants to invent, not to mass produce, whereas Hiram wants to do precisely that: mass produce their work to make a marketable business. He's tired of living on commission and word of mouth, while Octavian is content with what they have. Enter the yet-unnamed Howe Engine, Octavian's compromise: a machine that alchemizes Rose Vale's aptly named "rose ore," a rare but powerful mineral in the energy business, in a way that produces more energy on less ore. This is the one, the moneymaker. Hiram is excited to finally get somewhere, and then Octavian says he needs more time to refine it. They argue, and Hiram's temper and frustration get the better of him; he kills Octavian as his partner is at work in Hiram's own home workshop laboratory. He seals the lab, waits a few days, and reports Octavian missing. A month later he unveils the Howe Engine, named for his missing partner, to great success.

In the lab, Octavian continues to work. He wakes up with a sore head and sore everything else, but he has things to do and so he gets right back to it. His awareness of anything besides tinkering with his projects and his notes comes and goes; he can see his own body there prone on the floor in a puddle of congealed blood, but that seems like someone else's problem. Between life and death, the specter of Octavian Howe gets back to work.

He stays that way for he doesn't know how long, until Hiram returns to the lab. Older and richer, he returns one day simply to gloat, and maybe to weep, over Octavian's body, while Octavian's ghost flickers at the edge of perception.

The personal project changes after that, conjuring up old knowledge of his parents' studies and what he knows of spirit magic, so that Octavian can create himself a medium to exist through. With the full knowledge that he is dead and spectral, the urgency of keeping himself anchored amplifies a thousandfold; luckily he is very skilled, and he's nearly finished perfecting a sigil and ritual that can bind his essence to a token when a gang of oddballs break into Hiram's estate to steal a valuable artifact. A Howe Relic, as luck would have it, something Hiram paid to collect for reasons Octavian thinks are partly sentiment but mostly spite. He agrees to help the group only because they arrive with the item in hand when they find him - and his body; he'll help them escape Hiram's magical security if they will take him with them.

They do take him with them. It's been thirty years since he "disappeared," and an apparent twenty since the remains of the Howe family were mysteriously killed in "an accident." Octavian has bones to pick with his old friend, but he has to bring himself back to life, first.

As a member of this little gang, he does actually take on a role in their operations, helping their current weapons/demolition guy with his craft. It helps that the demolitions guy (Penny, he'd like to be called), is a bit of an oddball with an interest in Octavian's personal studies of alchemy and magic, too; Penny provides a lot of valuable insight and enables Octavian to make more progress than he has in literal decades, as his help is key in getting Octavian's literal soul to a more stable form. Once Octavian is able to focus on other things besides literally holding the reins of his runaway soul constantly, he helps with the gang's operations from a strictly behind-the-scenes standpoint. He tries to bond with his nephew, which is awkward, because he doesn't remember how to be a person very well. In the background, he daydreams about his terrible vengeance. It's a "living."

Personality answers:

Your character must live with only one sense for a year. They are allowed to choose. What do they pick? Why? How do they cope?
Practically speaking he would pick sight, because he considers it the most useful for being able to keep working; he needs to be able to see what his hands are doing, etc. But actually he would pick touch; he existed as a disembodied soul for a very long time and he misses being able to touch and feel and physically reaffirm that he exists. Touch has, as a result, become synonymous with "being alive" to him, and he craves being able to touch and feel again. If only to feel like he's still there, still real. Ironically he was never much one for being touched when he was still alive; his family and his one (1) friend were basically the only people he'd tolerate touching him for longer than a handshake, so it's with a healthy dollop of irony that he would choose touch, now.

As for lacking the other senses, he'd manage. Even in death he was able to see and to hear, he doesn't really care about smell, he might miss taste but not as much as touch— only a single year isn't long enough to acclimate himself to a sense of feeling again, anyway. He'd give up the other senses for even longer for the guarantee of having that sense of touch to reaffirm that he's here and he's real.

What does your character think about physical appearances? Are they the sort to meticulously primp themselves, or could they not care less?
Honestly, he doesn't care at all, and this plays directly into his usual take on most things: he isn't interested in other people's opinions. He was like this in life, too; his brother Sterling and his friend Hiram were the people whose opinions he valued the most, and everyone else is an incidental loss. Lately he's become invested in his nephew and his nephew's friends (a gang of criminals), but for the most part, Octavian is not at all interested in what other people think of him. He's also been dead for a long time and having a physical body is for him and not anyone else; why should he care what other people think of his hair or his glasses? That he has hair and glasses at all is the thing that matters.

Not to say that he's a slob, but he will wear the same sweater vests every day like a one-outfit-only cartoon character if given the option. His lack of caring is sometimes a contradiction; he wants other people to affirm that he's really there, but he doesn't really want to invest in them enough to return the favor in any way. On the other hand, it makes him pretty unshakeable in his convictions when he doesn't assign any value to the opinions of strangers, on his appearance or otherwise.

What is your character most afraid of?
Octavian's greatest fear is Dying For Real. In life his pet project was trying to extend life through magic and alchemy, including the traditional ultimate alchemist's goal of immortality, but it wasn't serious until he died and his experimental magics just barely managed to keep a hold on his soul and prevent him from being completely gone. Having to exist as a hacked-together pseudo-existence for the next several decades ramped up his dread towards dying "completely"; resurrection is not real, after all. As a ghost-spirit-magical being, he became keenly aware of the fragility of life and even more fragile state of a human soul, and since he was only made magically strong enough to leave the scene of his murder after thirty years, he was immediately struck by the knowledge that his entire family had also died in the interim, excepting a nephew born after his own death, and they did not have the convenience of lingering as ghost-things.

To "emerge" after so long and find that time has taken everything from him, and being a lingering soul has taken most of his visceral humanity (sense of touch, taste, etc), leaves him horrified that he could be wiped out of existence for real before he cracks resurrection magic and reclaims the life stolen from him. That all said, while he isn't shy about this and would speak of it if asked, he sees no reason to bring it up himself, and his behavior regarding his new mortality (in "canon" as an alchemical golem, in Karteria as a revived dead person) comes off as careless and unconcerned because of the relief of it; he's already been murdered once, ergo, the worst thing that could happen to him has already passed, and if he says it enough times he'll definitely start to believe it.

What would be your character's lowest, darkest moment they've lived through? How did they respond to their troubles and face their demons?
Well, "lived through"... It would be, as a ghost, learning that his family have all died while he was stuck floating in a room after his own death. The death would have taken it if not for this, but Octavian's family have always been the center of his world, and losing them hurts badly enough without realizing it's been something like twenty years since he technically lost them, and he was just unawares. That he was a ghost stuck in a room and therefore it isn't technically his fault for not knowing doesn't occur to him; he should have done better with his magic formulae and gotten himself out of the situation faster, no excuses. It's the most shocking thing he could possibly learn after lingering past his own murder, and if he wasn't so detached from the emotional human experience after all this time, he would be way more incoherent about it. It's a ticking time bomb, if he ever manages to overcome the disconnect he feels, like he's not a participant in anything but an observer hovering on the edge of the human experience now.

But he does try to cope with it by going all in on bonding with his nephew Emory, whom he didn't know existed until they met when Octavian was already dead. Emory has his own walls up because of his own troubled life, and suddenly having a ghost uncle who got murdered is a lot for him to bear; combine with Octavian's lack of social skills, and their familial bonding is awkward at best. He's trying very hard, he would love for his nephew to love him and not politely shy away from him, but he doesn't know what he's doing.

Inventory: A coin, a photo album, a chunk of ceramic.
Powers/Abilities:

previously a ghost
Thanks to Patho-Gen, he'll be solid and alive again, but just for completionism's sake: as a ghost he had a few powers that will be irrelevant now. Those include the ability to use magic and alchemy to manifest himself as a ghost at all, as "regular"/naturally-occurring ghosts aren't canonical to his world; making himself intangible, which he didn't like doing; and summoning a temporary golem body with alchemy that he could possess for a time. He doesn't need to do any of this anymore, but he Could, so, it's included.

invention & alchemy
In life, Octavian was lauded as a prodigy of both machines and alchemical pursuits. He's always been driven to create and discover, and made a laboratory of his life to study newer and better applications of alchemy and mechanical engineering. His ultimate goal with both these fields was the extension of life, literally immortality in the case of his alchemical studies.

and a dash of magic
He's studied the arcane. Elemental magic interests him very little, as does the magic that ironically kept him around: the magic of spirits. Most of his magical knowledge is scholarly rather than in practice.

cooking
He's a pretty good cook! Because his brother insisted they learn. He's lazy, though.

Samples: Here & Here
Player Goals: Little ghost man delights in his second go at Life... he's a tinkerer so he may be willing to tinker with tech improvements in exchange for Patho-Gen re-juicing his body. But mostly he's going to have fun and eat foods.
Soul Choice: Golem

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<div style="font-size:18px">OOC INFORMATION</div>
Name: Laura
Are you over 18?: ye
Contact: @jojoveller.plurk
Other characters: Pal @megatheorem and the Lorenz @hotproblems app is also mine
Permissions & opt-out: <a href=https://manifestering.dreamwidth.org/560.html>Permissions & Opt-out</a>

<div style="font-size:18px">IC INFORMATION</div>
Name: Octavian Howe
Canon: original
Age: 61
Gender: male
Species: human (ghost)
Appearance: <a href="https://images.plurk.com/2qGaBaX9HO6FKpeWvhn3s5.png">he died when he was 31</a>, but even prior to that he's pale with dark hair and the air of a consumptive Victorian waif. Skinny, not especially tall, holds very still all the time because he was a ghost for thirty years and it's weird to be able to move around freely again. He wears glasses.
Canon point: A little bit after his nephew and friends liberate him from his murder prison.

History: from his info post, his oc wiki--<blockquote>Octavian was born and raised in the city of Rose Vale to a moderately well-known family of scholars and magicians, the Howes. He showed an aptitude for tinkering at a young age, encouraged by his academically-oriented parents to pursue that interest. Young Octavian interpreted this as pushing it as far as he could take it, and began inventing small machines for simple tasks (for example, automatic tea-pouring machine) as a hobby. He dabbled as well in the magic spells and rituals his parents specialized in, although he always preferred the machinery.

In school he was introduced to alchemy and became interested in combining that new knowledge set with his experience in inventing. His younger twin brother followed more directly in their parents' footsteps studying magic, and the two often collaborated on making magical items in their teen years. Many of these items, and the volumes of notes the boys created, were sold to help the two build up a nest egg in their early university days; these days, the old magical items are considered immensely valuable collectors items, referred to as the "Howe Relics," now a prestigious set of items to possess after the family's many mysterious tragedies.

But that's later.

In university, Octavian meets and befriends classmate Hiram Bellerose. The two quickly bond over mutual interests in pushing the limits of technology and alchemy, partnering on side projects and university projects alike. The university years, and the few years following, are the golden years for the two of them: nothing but ideas and projects and infinite hope for their future. Octavian's family name has pull, Hiram has money of his own to add to what Octavian's custom inventions made; it's going great. They plan to go into business properly, inventors and alchemists pushing the envelope of modernity and changing lives! Octavian's personal project on the side, how to use modern marvels to extend the human lifespan, toddles along without Hiram's input.

As the years pass, the two begin to have disagreements about the future of their joint venture. Octavian wants to invent, not to mass produce, whereas Hiram wants to do precisely that: mass produce their work to make a marketable business. He's tired of living on commission and word of mouth, while Octavian is content with what they have. Enter the yet-unnamed Howe Engine, Octavian's compromise: a machine that alchemizes Rose Vale's aptly named "rose ore," a rare but powerful mineral in the energy business, in a way that produces more energy on less ore. This is the one, the moneymaker. Hiram is excited to finally get somewhere, and then Octavian says he needs more time to refine it. They argue, and Hiram's temper and frustration get the better of him; he kills Octavian as his partner is at work in Hiram's own home workshop laboratory. He seals the lab, waits a few days, and reports Octavian missing. A month later he unveils the Howe Engine, named for his missing partner, to great success.

In the lab, Octavian continues to work. He wakes up with a sore head and sore everything else, but he has things to do and so he gets right back to it. His awareness of anything besides tinkering with his projects and his notes comes and goes; he can see his own body there prone on the floor in a puddle of congealed blood, but that seems like someone else's problem. Between life and death, the specter of Octavian Howe gets back to work.

He stays that way for he doesn't know how long, until Hiram returns to the lab. Older and richer, he returns one day simply to gloat, and maybe to weep, over Octavian's body, while Octavian's ghost flickers at the edge of perception.

The personal project changes after that, conjuring up old knowledge of his parents' studies and what he knows of spirit magic, so that Octavian can create himself a medium to exist through. With the full knowledge that he is dead and spectral, the urgency of keeping himself anchored amplifies a thousandfold; luckily he is very skilled, and he's nearly finished perfecting a sigil and ritual that can bind his essence to a token when a gang of oddballs break into Hiram's estate to steal a valuable artifact. A Howe Relic, as luck would have it, something Hiram paid to collect for reasons Octavian thinks are partly sentiment but mostly spite. He agrees to help the group only because they arrive with the item in hand when they find him - and his body; he'll help them escape Hiram's magical security if they will take him with them.

They do take him with them. It's been thirty years since he "disappeared," and an apparent twenty since the remains of the Howe family were mysteriously killed in "an accident." Octavian has bones to pick with his old friend, but he has to bring himself back to life, first.

As a member of this little gang, he does actually take on a role in their operations, helping their current weapons/demolition guy with his craft. It helps that the demolitions guy (Penny, he'd like to be called), is a bit of an oddball with an interest in Octavian's personal studies of alchemy and magic, too; Penny provides a lot of valuable insight and enables Octavian to make more progress than he has in literal decades, as his help is key in getting Octavian's literal soul to a more stable form. Once Octavian is able to focus on other things besides literally holding the reins of his runaway soul constantly, he helps with the gang's operations from a strictly behind-the-scenes standpoint. He tries to bond with his nephew, which is awkward, because he doesn't remember how to be a person very well. In the background, he daydreams about his terrible vengeance. It's a "living."</blockquote>Personality answers:<blockquote>Your character must live with only one sense for a year. They are allowed to choose. What do they pick? Why? How do they cope?
Practically speaking he would pick sight, because he considers it the most useful for being able to keep working; he needs to be able to see what his hands are doing, etc. But actually he would pick touch; he existed as a disembodied soul for a very long time and he misses being able to touch and feel and physically reaffirm that he exists. Touch has, as a result, become synonymous with "being alive" to him, and he craves being able to touch and feel again. If only to feel like he's still there, still real. Ironically he was never much one for being touched when he was still alive; his family and his one (1) friend were basically the only people he'd tolerate touching him for longer than a handshake, so it's with a healthy dollop of irony that he would choose touch, now.

As for lacking the other senses, he'd manage. Even in death he was able to see and to hear, he doesn't really care about smell, he might miss taste but not as much as touch— only a single year isn't long enough to acclimate himself to a sense of feeling again, anyway. He'd give up the other senses for even longer for the guarantee of having that sense of touch to reaffirm that he's here and he's real.

What does your character think about physical appearances? Are they the sort to meticulously primp themselves, or could they not care less?
Honestly, he doesn't care at all, and this plays directly into his usual take on most things: he isn't interested in other people's opinions. He was like this in life, too; his brother Sterling and his friend Hiram were the people whose opinions he valued the most, and everyone else is an incidental loss. Lately he's become invested in his nephew and his nephew's friends (a gang of criminals), but for the most part, Octavian is not at all interested in what other people think of him. He's also been dead for a long time and having a physical body is for him and not anyone else; why should he care what other people think of his hair or his glasses? That he has hair and glasses at all is the thing that matters.

Not to say that he's a slob, but he will wear the same sweater vests every day like a one-outfit-only cartoon character if given the option. His lack of caring is sometimes a contradiction; he wants other people to affirm that he's really there, but he doesn't really want to invest in them enough to return the favor in any way. On the other hand, it makes him pretty unshakeable in his convictions when he doesn't assign any value to the opinions of strangers, on his appearance or otherwise.

What is your character most afraid of?
Octavian's greatest fear is Dying For Real. In life his pet project was trying to extend life through magic and alchemy, including the traditional ultimate alchemist's goal of immortality, but it wasn't serious until he died and his experimental magics just barely managed to keep a hold on his soul and prevent him from being completely gone. Having to exist as a hacked-together pseudo-existence for the next several decades ramped up his dread towards dying "completely"; resurrection is not real, after all. As a ghost-spirit-magical being, he became keenly aware of the fragility of life and even more fragile state of a human soul, and since he was only made magically strong enough to leave the scene of his murder after thirty years, he was immediately struck by the knowledge that his entire family had also died in the interim, excepting a nephew born after his own death, and they did not have the convenience of lingering as ghost-things.

To "emerge" after so long and find that time has taken everything from him, and being a lingering soul has taken most of his visceral humanity (sense of touch, taste, etc), leaves him horrified that he could be wiped out of existence for real before he cracks resurrection magic and reclaims the life stolen from him. That all said, while he isn't shy about this and would speak of it if asked, he sees no reason to bring it up himself, and his behavior regarding his new mortality (in "canon" as an alchemical golem, in Karteria as a revived dead person) comes off as careless and unconcerned because of the relief of it; he's already been murdered once, ergo, the worst thing that could happen to him has already passed, and if he says it enough times he'll definitely start to believe it.

What would be your character's lowest, darkest moment they've lived through? How did they respond to their troubles and face their demons?
Well, "lived through"... It would be, as a ghost, learning that his family have all died while he was stuck floating in a room after his own death. The death would have taken it if not for this, but Octavian's family have always been the center of his world, and losing them hurts badly enough without realizing it's been something like twenty years since he technically lost them, and he was just unawares. That he was a ghost stuck in a room and therefore it isn't technically his fault for not knowing doesn't occur to him; he should have done better with his magic formulae and gotten himself out of the situation faster, no excuses. It's the most shocking thing he could possibly learn after lingering past his own murder, and if he wasn't so detached from the emotional human experience after all this time, he would be way more incoherent about it. It's a ticking time bomb, if he ever manages to overcome the disconnect he feels, like he's not a participant in anything but an observer hovering on the edge of the human experience now.

But he does try to cope with it by going all in on bonding with his nephew Emory, whom he didn't know existed until they met when Octavian was already dead. Emory has his own walls up because of his own troubled life, and suddenly having a ghost uncle who got murdered is a lot for him to bear; combine with Octavian's lack of social skills, and their familial bonding is awkward at best. He's trying very hard, he would love for his nephew to love him and not politely shy away from him, but he doesn't know what he's doing.</blockquote>Inventory: A coin, a photo album, a chunk of ceramic.
Powers/Abilities:<blockquote>previously a ghost
Thanks to Patho-Gen, he'll be solid and alive again, but just for completionism's sake: as a ghost he had a few powers that will be irrelevant now. Those include the ability to use magic and alchemy to manifest himself as a ghost at all, as "regular"/naturally-occurring ghosts aren't canonical to his world; making himself intangible, which he didn't like doing; and summoning a temporary golem body with alchemy that he could possess for a time. He doesn't need to do any of this anymore, but he Could, so, it's included.

invention & alchemy
In life, Octavian was lauded as a prodigy of both machines and alchemical pursuits. He's always been driven to create and discover, and made a laboratory of his life to study newer and better applications of alchemy and mechanical engineering. His ultimate goal with both these fields was the extension of life, literally immortality in the case of his alchemical studies.

and a dash of magic
He's studied the arcane. Elemental magic interests him very little, as does the magic that ironically kept him around: the magic of spirits. Most of his magical knowledge is scholarly rather than in practice.

cooking
He's a pretty good cook! Because his brother insisted they learn. He's lazy, though.</blockquote>Samples: <a href=https://kelesis.dreamwidth.org/4499.html?thread=5753235#cmt5753235>Here</a> & <a href=https://kelesis.dreamwidth.org/4499.html?thread=5833619#cmt5833619>Here</a>
Player Goals: Little ghost man delights in his second go at Life... he's a tinkerer so he may be willing to tinker with tech improvements in exchange for Patho-Gen re-juicing his body. But mostly he's going to have fun and eat foods.
Soul Choice: Golem

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