App for Duplicity
Sep. 7th, 2023 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Name: Naomi Age: ANCIENT (I'm in my 30s ok) Contact: Timezone: UST/GMT Other Character(s): N/A |
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Name: Astarion Ancunín Door: Door Pass Canon: Baldur's Gate 3 Canon Point: Updated April 2024 - immediately after the fall of the Nether Brain, just as he loses the protections offered by the illithid tadpole. Age: 240-ish Appearance: Astarion is 5' 9" with slightly curly silver hair, red eyes and long pointed ears; his canines have grown out to fangs, and there are two puncture scars on the right side of his throat. He's extremely pale and has very good skin (the narrator uses the phrase 'lustred pearls'). He takes care over his appearance, even though he can't actually see what he looks like - which is to say that he keeps his clothes neat and in good repair, and fusses when he can't bathe as often as he'd like. His limited wardrobe falls into 'fantasy 16th century' - lots of leather, high collars (not high enough to hide his scars) and some frills and embroidery. History: We don't know much about Astarion's early life, and can't trust him to be a reliable narrator; he may not remember some of it. He seems to have honestly forgotten what colour his eyes were before he was turned. He grew up in a noble household in Baldur's Gate and worked as a magistrate. Per Early Access material, he was actively selling criminals to vampires; whether or not the situation was quite this extreme, he was definitely corrupt in some sense. Owing to some of the judgements he made, he was beaten mostly to death by a group of humans and '''saved''' by Cazador Szarr, a high-ranking nobleman and vampire. He drained Astarion's blood and later stood there waiting for him to claw his way out of his own grave. Classy. Astarion had become a vampire spawn, one of seven 'siblings' who served Cazador as slaves. The role of the spawn was to go out into the city after dark and seduce likely victims for Cazador, bringing them back to his palace for him to feed on. Astarion and the others were forbidden from feeding on 'thinking creatures'; he describes being fed rats and insects, enough to subsist on but not to really live. The spawn were kept in either a shabby dormitory or the 'kennels', a bare cell with a few filthy blankets strewn around. Disobedience, mistakes, or failures - real, minor or perceived - were punished with torture, sometimes for days at a time. Astarion seemed a particular 'favourite' of Cazador's in this regard. For disobeying orders, he was once buried alive for an entire year, after which he never dared step out of line. This all went on for two centuries. Unbeknownst to Astarion and his siblings, the prey they brought home weren't merely being drained and discarded, but converted into spawn and kept in a network of underground cells in their thousands. Their souls were intended to power the Rite of Profane Ascension, a mass sacrifice which would transform Cazador into the Vampire Ascendant - with incredible power and none of a vampire's vulnerabilities. Astarion was a keystone of this rite, he and has siblings having had ritual markings carved into his back as a channel for its power. ANYWAY. Just before the start of the game timeline, Astarion was out hunting for human prey when he was seized by a Mind Flayer, imprisoned on its ship and infected with an Illithid tadpole (see Powers). When the ship was assaulted and crashed, he was thrown free and eventually met the rest of his fellow survivors. Then the game happens. It's a whole lot but the tl;dr is that the player character and their party are trying to find a way to defeat the beforementioned giant pulsating brain, with the aim of destroying it or (Astarion's immediate preference) harnessing its power. Along the way, the party learns of the Rite of Profane Ascension; Astarion is determined to subvert it and himself become Vampire Ascendant, gaining freedom from both Cazador and the Illithid. That this will mean the deaths of his siblings and (as he later learns) seven thousand imprisoned spawn doesn't even faze him. After much adventure and awkward bonding moments, they arrive in the city of Baldur's Gate; following some encounters with his siblings, the party travels to Cazador's palace and descends into the ancient complex beneath it. It is, obviously, a trap. Astarion tries to resist the hold Cazador has on him, fails, and is dragged into participating in the ritual as one of its sacrifices. And then he gets kidnapped. Again. Personality: Positive Trait: Loyalty This is a weird one to ascribe to someone who's also pathologically dishonest and power-hungry, so it might be more accurate to say that it's loyalty predicated on respect. You could consider him amoral at best - his ethical gradient isn't 'good to evil', more 'master to slave' - but what that means in practice is that he's much more difficult to drive away than some of the others. If there are people around him who respect his autonomy and don't try to force or coerce him into acting against his will, he is ride-or-die for those people. Even if he becomes Vampire Ascendant - which solves a fair chunk of his problems, at least from his own perspective - he sticks with the party and sees things through to the bitter end, although he's a dick about it. If he doesn't, then he sticks with his new buds until the sun comes out and he physically has to make a run for it before catching fire. Negative Trait: Self-loathing Astarion spent two hundred years living in a basement and eating rats when he wasn't out hunting innocent people for his master's consumption. He was forced to submit to torture, mutilate himself, and have sex on thousands of occasions. His coping mechanism was to just...decide he didn't deserve any better. Given that his affect is 'sassy bitch who thinks he's better than you' 98% of the time, it takes some digging to see how this is articulated. One element of this is his lack of compassion for people you'd expect him to empathise with: slaves, other vampire spawn, and the otherwise oppressed. He refers to them with dismissal and distaste not because he holds himself above them, but because he doesn't: they're wretched, and so is he. The only thing that differentiates him is luck. The other area where this trait comes out clearly is around sexual and emotional intimacy. He slept with a lot of strangers while hunting for Cazador's prey, and knows how to do a very good job of it, but was so completely under his master's control that he saw it more as his body being used for someone else's benefit. He alludes to instances of having no command over his body at all during sex. If he seduces another member of the party, it's entirely practical: a means of granting himself the safety of their protection and support. If things develop to the point where he develops feelings for them, he'll stop sleeping with them - he's sparing them the denigrating experience of sex with something like him. Negative Trait: Thirst for power For Astarion, power - specifically, the power to control and dominate others - has become inextricable from freedom and security. When he realises the tadpole in his brain 1) is giving him freedom from Cazador 2) lets him influence other tadpoled minds and 3) seems not to be about to turn him into a Mind Flayer, he is immediately on board with consuming more tadpoles and accessing more of that power. When he learns that there's a chance of assuming control over the giant brain which itself controls all the Mind Flayers and tadpoled people, he's very enthusiastic about that too. The only hard limit he has with all this is actually becoming half-illithid, given his memory of how painful it was to physically transform into a vampire. He takes a similar approach to his master's Rite of Profane Ascension. He has no interest in preventing it, but in claiming its power for himself. Seven thousand people are going to die to make that happen? Fuck 'em, they're vampire spawn, they're basically dead anyway. He is, for most of the game (if not all of it), unaware or unconcerned that he's just walking the same cycle of violence and abuse that Cazador himself trod out for him. Negative Trait: Duplicity (I'M SORRY I CAN'T DESCRIBE IT BETTER) Astarion just...lies, all the time, to serve a sense of ruthless pragmatism. In the player character's very first interaction with him, he tries to trick them into turning their back so he can pull a knife on them, fearing that they're enthralled to the illithid. He later claims he 'needs' humanoid blood, but he doesn't - what he wants is to test whether he's capable of feeding from a non-animal and breaking Cazador's commandment against it. He, at the very least, exaggerates his interest in the PC while seducing them - what he can get out of their relationship is infinitely more important to him than any actual attraction. Later on, when dealing with the Rite of Profane Ascension, he's approached by his 'siblings' - Cazador's other spawn. Needing their help to carry out his plans, he claims that they'll be free if they swear loyalty to him - but he knows there's no end to the ritual that won't kill them. He asks them to go willingly to their deaths because that's the only way for him to get what he needs. Powers and Abilities: Astarion is:
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