Torchwood [Freeform]

Spoiler: The Comic Creators

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You work... Well, worked, for The Comic Creators. An indy comic and graphic novel group, owned by Mr. Duffin. He was an odd fellow, but a personable one. Your job was about what you'd expect, for a startup group like that. Long hours, maybe not enough pay, but enough for bills and always the promise of more. And the crew were friendly, so it made it tolerable.

Of course, that changed on a day where nothing went right. Your charger broke without you realizing it-so your phone was dead when you woke up. Because your phone was your alarm, you also woke up late, and had to rush out to get to work. You went in, not noticing the unusual situation in the parking lot. None of your coworkers' cars, just black vans.

When you went inside, you made it halfway to your spot, when someone stopped you. Tall, bald security person-no one you knew. It was only then you realized something was up-but of course, it was too late by that point.

There was a flash of color, a brief moment of pain, and then the darkness of unconsciousness.

You woke up in an unfamiliar room. There was a note on the bedside table.

Spoiler: Overworked At The Hospital

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Hospitals are always busy. People are always getting hurt and needing help. But you do your job-your duty, if you want to wax poetic. You took this job to help people, and help people you do. But stress is a hell of a thing, and you could feel yourself fraying.

It didn't help that the patients just weren't getting better. Post-surgical patients seemed to be doing alright, but no one got well enough to leave, and people kept coming in. The hospital was running out of rooms fast.

Then, during an overnight shift, everything went to hell. There were crashing, screaming, alarms and power outage. You started doing your job-from a sleepy shift to rushing people out. You got a lot of patients out before something hit you in the back of the head-something that went squelch, but hit hard enough to knock you out.

You woke up in an unfamiliar room. There was a note on the bedside table.

Spoiler: Abnormal Astronomy

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At a prestigious college, you work with the talented Doctor Quill. Doctor Quill, a middle-aged woman with thick glasses, is an expert of all things astronomy, and you were eager to learn from her. Sure, a lot of the work was tedious-collating data, managing spreadsheets, making sure instruments stayed level... But you were learning a lot, and gathering important scientific data.

But things started adding up wrong. As one of the doctor's best students, you both spent hours, poring over the results, trying to figure out what could possibly be causing these kind of results. You worked away at it for weeks, and then one night, you got a call from her. She told you that she thought she had it-and wanted you to come in to confirm it.

You got there too late, though. The building was on fire, everything destroyed. And before you could even start to grieve, some thugs grabbed you, shoving a sack over your head and manhandling you into the back of a van. The van sped off, and then tipped over. Your head met the side of the vehicle, and everything went dark.

You woke up in an unfamiliar room. There was a note on the bedside table.

Spoiler: The Note

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You have been in an accident. You encountered something you should not have. And so, you are faced with a choice.

Forget about it. Wake up tomorrow and go back to your life, ordinary as the day you were born.

Or help make sure that everyone else can keep living their ordinary lives, safe and happy.

You do not have to choose immediately. You will be able to learn more before you decide.

But be prepared.

-R.L.

Spoiler: Recruitment Info

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System: Freeform!
Player Count: Up to four.
Style of Play: Action! Adventure! Working through the supernatural and paranormal world that you never knew was real!
Allowed Content: Feel free to draw inspiration from just about any media and your imagination.
Character Creation: A simple forum post works for your PC sheet. A google doc or something if you want to be fancy, but make sure I can access it!

• Backstory: Skirt Length, See Other Notes.
• Experience: Competent at your job, but new to all this.
• Wealth: Per Backstory.
• Alignment: Heroic.
  

Other Notes: You do not HAVE to pick from the existing prompts. If you choose to make something different, I'd like a short vignette that ends with you being knocked out and waking up in the room, but really, have fun with this.

Follow-up note: Make sure your character will say yes to joining. The game's not fun if you decide to go back to regular life!

Perhaps we can get a summary of what our characters learn before joining. From what we know right now, this could be anything from urban fantasy to diving into metaphysical relame (like in Black Rock Shooter). Would be nice to have more of a clue of what the story is to come up with a character.

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Originally Posted by Greenflame133

Perhaps we can get a summary of what our characters learn before joining. From what we know right now, this could be anything from urban fantasy to diving into metaphysical relame (like in Black Rock Shooter). Would be nice to have more of a clue of what the story is to come up with a character.

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Fair point!

Torchwood is an international organization, founded in the late 1800s Britain, who's purpose is to combat the supernatural, extraterrestrial, and paranormal. Among their ranks, they count technological geniuses, potent mages, and even the occasional non-human. They do attempt to leak the technological innovations they have to the wider world, but have to do so carefully.

What you should expect is modern supernatural style gameplay. You're going to be on Earth, not diving into a metaphysical realm or anything like that, combatting aliens, demons, mages, and all manner of other not so ordinary foes.

Oh! And, via your accidents that lead you to Torchwood, you should probably develop or awaken some kind of power more than ordinary folk have. Don't think I made that clear in the first post.

Then think I shall lean on European folklore and make a changeling. More specifically human child who spends time amongst fey/spirts. Something that happened before she could remember and brief enough (at last from outside perfective) to not seem like anything too unnatural.

As I think about it more. Perhaps I clean into the Slavic side. It might be quite fun to combine modern ideas of gender and the association of intersex people with magic in Slavic culture. Unfortunately that's a bit of a tricky topic when it comes to such changeling as historically "changeling" was able given to kids nowadays we would likely consider autistic. Of course, it's not a one-to-one translation, but it might inform some aspects of said character. Should I do that, I would rather avoid exact recreation of my experiences, but at the same time I don't want to fall into stereotypes.

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Originally Posted by JNAProductions

Fair point!

Torchwood is an international organization, founded in the late 1800s Britain, who's purpose is to combat the supernatural, extraterrestrial, and paranormal. Among their ranks, they count technological geniuses, potent mages, and even the occasional non-human. They do attempt to leak the technological innovations they have to the wider world, but have to do so carefully.

What you should expect is modern supernatural style gameplay. You're going to be on Earth, not diving into a metaphysical realm or anything like that, combatting aliens, demons, mages, and all manner of other not so ordinary foes.

Oh! And, via your accidents that lead you to Torchwood, you should probably develop or awaken some kind of power more than ordinary folk have. Don't think I made that clear in the first post.

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I remember making a character for this game idea a while back, but IRL got in the way of the game's start.
It turns out that I still have that character's google doc, and it's grown rather large by now as I have actually kind of fallen in love with this character idea.
Yeah...I'd probably have to strip off some of the things that got added on over the past year or so to make it work here, but maybe?
If it helps jog memory, I had intended for him to have "fallen into" this game's world from his own, in some sort of space-time anomaly. In a way, that could be the "accident" -- though the thing that turned him into what he is now in the first place was the original intended accident in question.

Aleph, if you could do me a favor and do a brief write-up of what you'd like to have your character be, that'd be greatly appreciated.
Seventeen pages is awesome, but as you said, not all of it will be used.

Also, glad I inspired something cool! :)

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Originally Posted by JNAProductions

Aleph, if you could do me a favor and do a brief write-up of what you'd like to have your character be, that'd be greatly appreciated.
Seventeen pages is awesome, but as you said, not all of it will be used.

Also, glad I inspired something cool! :)

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Omg I had paging disabled so I didn't actually realize how many pages it had gotten to XD
(some of that is pictures and quotes but yea it's long)
I'll drop a summary of it here soon

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Originally Posted by Aleph Null

Omg I had paging disabled so I didn't actually realize how many pages it had gotten to XD
(some of that is pictures and quotes but yea it's long)
I'll drop a summary of it here soon

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Thank you.

Spoiler: Summary: Altair Zephyrian "Astral" Aerilas

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The gestalt being known by the callsign "Astral" is not originally from this universe. In fact, it is precisely this origin that drives his investment in an organization like Torchwood, dedicated to shielding everyday mundane people from the not-so-mundane things that lurk in their midst.
Altair Centauri Lewis was born in late September 2023 in rural Colorado to Quentin and Diana Lewis. The pair were both prolific astrophysicists, with Diana having put lots of research into a project that eventually became the first nuclear-powered rocket to transit the asteroid belt and Quentin having led the push to discover many far-off stars. They had retired to raise their son, on whom they did not want to impose. But even though they did not tell him of their careers as astronomers, Altair was himself always a stargazer, and he even began to train as a pilot in college in hopes that he could become an astronaut.
While plane crashes tend to deter most people from flying, Altair did not flinch when his parents were killed when Oceanic Airlines flight 564 crashed into the Sydney Opera house on April 2, 2042. His friends gave him sideways glances as he completed his type ratings, first on piston-powered planes and then on small jets. And he faced reporters with a smile as he went to board the Ouranos II rocket that was to carry him and the rest of the crew of Juno III to Callisto, the third of Jupiter's Galilean Moons, in late 2044. By the time he came out of stasis to conduct the landing nearly two years later, Earth was a changed place...though he did not yet know it.
What happened on the Juno III mission was kept from the public, and such secrets were easy to keep in the wake of the events of the year 2045 when the public had far bigger concerns. Altair does not talk much of the event himself, other than the vague memory of his human body feeling an odd lurching sensation and then engaging in conversation with a disembodied voice in an oddly warm and bright place. The star, Aerilas Anax Zephyrian, remembers even less, having only just detected the presence of an incoming body milliseconds before he would have been incinerated.
As it turns out, the supernatural was as real in Altair's world as it is in this one. Stars have souls just as humans do, and this was a kind and compassionate one who would do everything to avoid harming an innocent fleshling -- up to and including the ultimate sacrifice. Of course, it did not end up being necessary -- stars are powerful in their own right, and Aerilas was able to conduct a merger of himself with Altair in order to save the latter and gain himself a new, mobile body in the process. But when he returned to Earth, the newly-formed celestial body found himself in a world that had vastly changed.
The world Altair comes from experienced a cosmic event known as the Tipping in the year AD 2045. That universe had in place for most of its history something known as the Worldly Veil, which hides supernatural beings from the eye of mundanes. A werewolf may appear as a very gruff man; a fairy sprite might seem like a dragonfly or butterfly; leviathans appear as large rocks or sea turtles, and even magic that might normally be impossible to conceal remains hidden to the eyes of mundane mortals so long as the Veil holds. But it can only take so much strain, and it was shattered by the actions of a cabal of supernatural beings who felt restrained by its presence, and the result was the destabilization of the fabric of reality in the wake of so much rapid change. This Tipping is not an apocalypse by itself, but if left unchecked it can lead to an event known as the Sundering, which is far worse for the multiverse.
When the effects of a Tipping world spread too rapidly in its universe, the entire universe's dimensional fabric can unravel, sending its denizens scattered throughout the vast other planes of the multiverse.
This was the eventual fate of Altair's world, and how he ended up in this one. And his determination is now very straightforward -- see that this world does not suffer a similar fate.

Spoiler: Some Notes

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I know I linked this google doc earlier but I'm linking it again to have it in one place. It's a lot more detailed than this summary, for anyone who wants to read more about this character (I have had the concept for a while, as I mentioned previously).
For clarity's sake, the "accident" as it would be for the purpose of Torchwood is the Sundering and Altair's arrival in this world as part of the immediate aftermath of that.
I tried to demarcate the sections well enough that the information on the various important things (the Tipping, the Sundering, and other parts of the backstory like the Flight 564 crash and how it relates to the Worldly Veil and the Tipping) but some of them are not relevant here necessarily other than to provide context for experience Altair already has with working with a supers organization, though it's out in the open and thus a different sort of job.

Okay, that’s 110% dope.
Awesomesauce!

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Originally Posted by JNAProductions

Okay, that’s 110% dope.
Awesomesauce!

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TY!
I...yea the idea of a literal celestial body for a character has been one of my bucket list items for a while now :P
Games that support an idea of that sort are few and far between, though LOL

I might have some ideas.

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Originally Posted by Illven

I might have some ideas.

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Keep us updated.

Also, Greenflame! Any word on your progress for a PC? :)

I'm afraid nothing it can show off quite yet, but I do have things layed but I do think I have a soild idea where I will take her

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Originally Posted by Greenflame133

I'm afraid nothing it can show off quite yet, but I do have things layed but I do think I have a soild idea where I will take her

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Entirely fair. Looking forward to when you’ve got something to show. :)

I'm thinking plant mage?

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Originally Posted by Illven

I'm thinking plant mage?

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If you want to come up with an ordinary botanist/gardener/other plant expert backstory and have me come up with an accident, that'd work for me.
If you want to do it all yourself, also good.

Alright, here is some backstory

Spoiler: Lilliana Ashemore {she/they}

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When Lilliana was a child, before she could speak, she found themself in the strangest tea party. Kidnapped from a garden of her parents' summer home out in the countryside. She spends a few hours confused is a place of strange color and people. Yet her return was just a few minutes after she left, enough to scare thier parents, but not long enough to suspect anything unnatural. Just a cruise child wondering a bit too far.

From there, they lived a mostly ordinary life. There were a few singes she was different but everybody has thier quicks right? As they grew up, they ended falling into alt-culture, with its loud music, disregard for social forms and general affinity, intrusting people. She would often fight with parents over taste or grades. Yet she was scraping buy. Even somehow manage to get into a pretty good university, even if she had to do the weekend course. During weak-days she would work at the front for a lending company, not a bank, a lending company. The job was mostly just sitting there on board. Time they used to study and draw. When the men in suites came, she was worried. The company seemed shady and those things only really affect people high up. This made taking her all to easy.

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Originally Posted by Greenflame133

Alright, here is some backstory

Spoiler: Lilliana Ashemore {she/they}

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When Lilliana was a child, before she could speak, she found themself in the strangest tea party. Kidnapped from a garden of her parents' summer home out in the countryside. She spends a few hours confused is a place of strange color and people. Yet her return was just a few minutes after she left, enough to scare thier parents, but not long enough to suspect anything unnatural. Just a cruise child wondering a bit too far.

From there, they lived a mostly ordinary life. There were a few singes she was different but everybody has thier quicks right? As they grew up, they ended falling into alt-culture, with its loud music, disregard for social forms and general affinity, intrusting people. She would often fight with parents over taste or grades. Yet she was scraping buy. Even somehow manage to get into a pretty good university, even if she had to do the weekend course. During weak-days she would work at the front for a lending company, not a bank, a lending company. The job was mostly just sitting there on board. Time they used to study and draw. When the men in suites came, she was worried. The company seemed shady and those things only really affect people high up. This made taking her all to easy.

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Looks pretty good to me.

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Originally Posted by Illven

I'm thinking plant mage?

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So you're seeing my literal celestial body and raising me a literal green thumb?

...I guess that only applies if your botanist actually becomes photosynthetic tho

Ehe.

Spoiler: Chelsea (she/her)

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Chelsea formerly known as Trevor had lived a relatively upper middle class life. They went to school, had friends, and eventually went to college for the study of botonny as a massive natural green thumb.

They are currently getting used to their new body and new powers of literal botomancy? Trying to not the grass from growing where they stand as proven quite a handful so far.

Right-I'm about to go to bed, but I feel confident moving on with the three characters presented.

Illven's PC, for sure, will need some more fleshing out, but any objections to making an OOC thread for you three and me?

Not at all.

OOC Thread, then. :)