doubtfulknight | upcycle app

Name: Lark/Cee
Age: Over 18
Contact info: Plagueheart#0051 on Discord or PM this journal

Character: Larkspur Plagueheart
Canon: World of Warcraft (Player character)
Canon Point: Mid-Legion; after the Ebon Blade assault on Light's Hope
Character age: 260-ish

Canon Abilities/Powers: oh no this is so much

Undead: Not subject to the frailties of the living (e.g. needing to breathe). Uncommonly durable and uncommonly strong because pain means nothing to him. Can be temporarily slain, but will gradually reconstitute and eventually resurrect unless entirely destroyed and his soul unbound from the mortal plane.
Scourge necromancer: Trained in raising the dead for service, whether it's the temporary sort like ghouls and skeletons, or longer-lasting greater undead like death knights (though those take a hell of a lot more work and he can't do it alone). Also tolerably okay at necromancer chores like stitching limbs onto abominations.
Rune magic: Can use runes, either imbued on his runeblade (more powerful) or sketched onto surfaces (much less powerful), to cast darque majikks and enhance himself and his allies. He draws primarily from two death knight disciplines: Unholy and blood.
- Disciple of the Unholy: Magic to manipulate disease and raw unholy energy. Disciples of the unholy focus on raising and binding undead to their will and inflicting deadly plagues on, well, everything that gets in their way. Delightful. Also the school of nullifying or silencing enemy magic. This is Larkspur's strongest specialization.
- Disciple of Blood: Magic to manipulate blood and life force. Allows the disciple to steal the life from his enemies and use it to renew his own, or that of allies. Blood runes can be used to heal the living but it feels disgusting and foreign to them, so is Not Recommended. Also allows the disciple to strengthen himself to better endure blows and compel weak-willed enemies to attack him instead of his allies, i.e., blood death knights are tanks. Larkspur is moderately proficient at Blood but it's not his go-to unless he has to be punched in the face a bunch to protect someone else.
- Disciple of Frost: Lark is very, very bad at Frost. About all he can do is temporarily summon chains of ice to bind an opponent and freeze water so he can walk across it.
Necromantic miscellany: Larkspur can bind weaker-willed undead into his service and shift partially into the realm of death for a few instants to move faster or escape from being snared. He can construct death gates that allow near-instant transit through the realm of Death (the Shadowlands) between any location and Acherus, the stronghold of the Knights of the Ebon Blade. Also, can talk to spirits.
Heightened senses: Totally blind to the physical world but able to see things that are purely in the realm of death. Preternaturally keen hearing and sense of smell; has trained himself to echolocate on the move in lieu of seeing. Can sense air currents with his goofy eyebrow whiskers. Attuned to magic; perceives different types as different tastes.
Contains multitudes: Is, technically, a gross blob of disease and insects that happens to be wearing an elf suit. No, really: The biofilm that inhabits his body is doing his thinking for him. This can go exactly as wrong as one might imagine.
Moth-souled: Has a constellation of big, colorful moths that are externalized chunks of his soul. Can borrow their senses (as much as moths have) to perceive what they perceive, allowing him to use them as a kind of distributed spy network. Additionally, as long as his moths survive, he can (theoretically) resurrect himself even if his body's destroyed, by taking over another corpse. (He is unaware this is possible, meaning he effectively couldn't do it.)
Combat-trained: Proficient in combat with a two-handed axe, a two-handed sword, or a sword and shield. Also has a host of support abilities that go with a life in the military: Armor and clothing repair, weapon maintenance, making and breaking camp, etcetera.
High elven nobility: Has had an appropriate classical education for a man of his station, as well as several decades of military training and service. He doesn't remember all of it anymore, but can sometimes recall it at need.
Herbalist: He's good at recognizing plants and knowing what they're used for. Mostly applies to plants from Azeroth and her sister realms.
Animal handling: Knows how to ride and care for several different types of animals routinely used as mounts and hunting companions on Azeroth, though he's most familiar with raptors and proto-drakes. He's hilariously bad with horses.

Because the island doesn't have any resident dead or corpses, he will be restricted in his ability to raise undead allies without the presence of a recently killed and not-yet-reclaimed corpse to resurrect. His death gates simply will not ever work because the island has no Shadowlands to travel through.

What is their greatest negative emotion towards an object, situation, or person in their past?: The crippling, heartbroken way he misses being part of the Scourge hivemind. This is decidedly unhealthy given the Lich King raised Larkspur into undeath against his will and shaped him into a merciless weapon--only to later discard him as part of a high-stakes gamble that didn't even work. Yet he still misses the sense of utter belonging to something larger than himself, of having a place in that horribly efficient machine of death. He aches for it so fiercely that between that and the psychic scarring of having once been bound in thrall, he's terribly vulnerable to being mind-controlled again--especially if it's by someone or something that seems even a little bit like it can make him feel like he belongs, again.

How strongly do they feel about the negative subject matter, on the scale of one to ten?: 10; it has shaped everything he's done since becoming a death knight, in ways large or little. His own current focus on building a better world for the dead to inhabit is an outgrowth of his lost belonging with the Scourge and his deep disappointment that Bolvar Fordragon is not a Lich King he can return to. Through no fault of Fordragon's own: The man was one of the best possible choices to take the Helm of Domination, but the Lich King's drive to eliminate all life is nearly uncontrollable, and that is something Larkspur cannot be a part of. Fordragon is doing his utmost to keep the Scourge asleep and Azeroth safe from them, but even he must yield to its impulses.

It's worth noting also that Larkspur has changed, too, into someone that no iteration of the Scourge would be suitable for.

He gives himself no credit for that because the longing to return is so sharp he cannot read it as anything but the truest desire of his own heart. He just can't obey it because the consequences of returning to the Scourge and the Scourge using him as nothing more than a weapon again are unimaginable.

What is their greatest virtue?: His compassion, realized in his ability to open up emotionally to others and draw them into the circle of those he cares about. It lends him a strong understanding of other people and makes him downright dangerous when it comes to making friends. It is something he is very careful about expressing around particular individuals because, he is well aware, it can make him vulnerable and weak.

How aware are they of their virtue, on a scale from one to ten?: A weird 4. He views it from a somewhat twisted standpoint: He knows he can win friends and influence people by being kind and opening up to them, but has a sneaking suspicion that he's doing it to manipulate them into staying with him. (He isn't, not really; he is largely genuine in his emotions, though not above gently manipulating people for their own good. Or, sometimes, greatly manipulating them if needs must; the dead do what the living cannot.) Furthermore, he would not credit himself as being particularly better than anyone in any emotional or moral realm; he is more accustomed to seeing his lacks than his strengths there, because his nature means he lacks a great deal of what he considers morality. He can't really avoid his impulse to kill; he has to raise the dead to aid him in combat against increasingly powerful foes; he eats people if he's desperate.

Additionally, he's internalized an entirely different morality--the ruthless pragmatism of the Ebon Blade--that tells him he is weak and shameful for being as merciful and loving as he is. They're wholly undesirable traits in a death knight, who must be prepared to give no quarter and do anything to win against his enemies. So by those lights, he's a particularly terrible specimen of a death knight and his "virtue" is one of the worst vices one could indulge.

So in the end, he knows objectively his soft heart is useful, but doesn't think of it as good; it's a sad metaphor for his entire existence.

Items:

Terminus Est, a runed great-axe
A suit of bone-pale saronite plate armor and the clothes beneath it
Three big colorful moths

Samples: Pumpkin education special with Lahabrea
This is probably a record for shortest completed TDM thread with Kate.

Special notes: Larkspur has no eyes and is completely physically blind, though he can see spirits. He will not be taking the initial deal to restore his eyes and sight.

His soul is bound into his runeblade and the big fluffy moths he always carries around with him. Ordinarily he has A Lot of the moths, but I'm reducing that to three (3) to keep them from getting out of control, because he can sense things through them. I'd like to keep 'em as a set but if they can't count as one item due to being part of his weird...goo...nature... I can reduce that to one.

Additionally, he needs to kill something sapient every few days or suffer from increasingly crippling pain and mental distortion. Hopefully... the monsters count...

Wholly open to having his powers further nerfed beyond what I've suggested above, if mods think it appropriate! I know he has a weirdly huge kit... curse u, MMO PCs.