William "Penny" Adiyodi (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shakeitoff) wrote2019-08-06 01:20 am
shakeitoff) wrote2019-08-06 01:20 am
Entry tags:
Deerington Application
IN CHARACTER
Character Name: William "Penny" Adiyodi
Canon: The Magicians
Canon Point: Season 1, Episode 13, right after getting the spell tattooed to his fingers.
In-Game Tattoo Placement: left shoulder
Current Health/Status: Alive, healthy
Age: 23
Species: Human/Traveler
History: wiki
Personality:
"Asshole" is probably the word most people would use to describe Penny after they first meet him. On the outside, he's aggressive and surly, always doing his best to shove anyone who strays too close out of his orbit. He uses verbal insults as well as his imposing 6'+ height to intimidate others to stay out of his way, but only if they're certain kinds of men. With women and some other kinds of men, he's usually just stand-offish, keeping his distance and warding them away with apathy and curt rudeness rather than aggression and insults. Who he decides to be aggressive with and who he chooses a softer approach with ultimately comes down to three things: their gender, their personality, and how open or closed their mind is.
One of the most important keys to understanding Penny is knowing that he is a Psychic. He can hear the thoughts and feelings of other people automatically and constantly, and it's a gift that has brought a lot of pain to his life growing up. He's always been a lone wolf, mostly out of circumstance since according to Arjun Gupta, the actor who portrays him, he grew up a drifter, in and out of homes in the foster care system, and on top of that he grew up believing he was crazy because of the voices he heard. His psychic talent that he didn't understand just enhanced that feeling that so many foster children have going from home to home that there was something wrong with him, something broken that nobody could want or love. So Penny embraced the role of the lone wolf, and when he was a teenager and started realizing the voices were actually thoughts with the help of a voice from another world, that just made him double down on keeping people, and all their thoughts and feelings out where they can't hurt or let him down.
However, despite all the pain of his life without a family or a home and hearing voices, Penny still yearns for connection, to feel like he's important to someone, valuable and needed. Inside that prickled armor that he surrounds himself with is really just a soft gooey center that cares deeply for others and wants to matter. For a long time, he ran from that part of himself, and when he was enrolled in Brakebills, the one school that can teach him how to harness his gifts, he was forced into one of the first stable and reliable living situations he's been in, and with people who can understand him. That was a culture shock that he struggled with quite a bit. But given time, he found himself getting tangled up in other people despite his best efforts not to care about them and their problems, especially one girl just as damaged and closed off as he is.
Kady Orloff-Diaz is in all likelihood Penny's first love. They met as a casual hook-up and just kept sleeping together because it was just sex. Until it wasn't. Both of them used sex to cope with being unable to truly connect on an emotional level with anyone, and Kady is far from the only person he was seducing and attempting to seduce for the hell of it, she was just the only one who stumbled her way into his heart. When Penny realized that she meant something more to him, it had an interesting affect. One would think that a person like Penny who has spent his life so alone and keeping it that way would become frightened and push love away. But instead he embraced it like a starving man in so much pain and so desperate for a loaf of bread that he'd be crazy to deny it when it's finally in front of him. He opened himself up to her, and at first she pushed him away, but then they came together when circumstances pushed them into the right position a week or two later and they took a leap together, an unbelievably brave one given their respective backgrounds.
But then, Kady had to leave school, and she left Penny behind to protect him with hardly any explanation. It tore him up, but he stayed at Brakebills and continued to help Quentin and Alice try to find a way to defeat the monster that was going to come for them all. The door to his soft center that cares about others was opened by Kady, and bravely, he chose not to close it again and dedicated himself to saving a girl and helping a cause bigger than himself. It's said later on in the series by a character who's observed all of them from afar that Penny acts like he doesn't care about anyone, but the truth is he cares more than anyone. Penny is always throwing his life at a problem, risking his neck for everyone, Kady especially, and it's because of that part of him that needs to prove he's worthy. The little boy who hopped from home to home just wanting to feel like he's apart of a family and wanted. But also to feel like his life has meaning in general, not just to those he cares about.
Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping:
Magic System Overview: In The Magicians, magic can do a hell of a lot of things, but it does have rules and is divided into 6 major disciplines: Physical Magic, Natural Magic, Illusion Magic, Knowledge, Healing Magic, and Psychic Magic. Every magician can cast spells from any discipline of magic, but the discipline that a magician specializes in is the one that comes as naturally as breathing to them, and is determined in their first year at school through a series of testing by the faculty.
Each main discipline has sub-disciplines, for example Physical Magic is centered around the ability to manipulate the nature and properties of matter and energy, and includes Telekinesis and Cryomancy as two of its many sub-disciplines. A Magician whose discipline is Telekinesis can move objects with their mind as easily as with a thought or a flick of the hand, and other disciplines within the Physical Magic umbrella come rather easily to them as well, but they would require more conscious focus and effort. But if a Magician in the Physical magic discipline seeks to perform a spell in another discipline such as Natural Magic, which is the manipulation and development of the environment (i.e. growing plants etc.), they can do it, they would just require a lot of study, practice and focus, as well as much more effort.
Magic is performed primarily using tuts, which are a series of hand motions (video compilation example), and some usually more complex and powerful spells also use chants in all languages known to man depending on the spell's origin, as well as potions, incense and sigils. Spells are also affected by a complex combination of circumstances like the season and phase of the moon etc. that a Magician must remain always aware of to cast properly. There is also a complex mathematical and advanced physics system behind spells, and magic isn't in a fixed form or limited to the categories they are divided into. Skilled magicians are often able to create spells from scratch if they understand the theory behind them, as well as combine aspects from different spells from varying disciplines to create a custom spell that way. Therefore, all Magicians must be extremely intelligent (like 98th percentile I.Q.), capable of being always and easily aware of the many circumstances that affect spells at any given moment and using highly advanced mathematics, physics and dozens upon dozens of languages on the fly.
Magic can basically do almost anything you need it to do, or more specifically: magic does whatever the plot needs it to do, but it does have limits. The biggest limit is how much magic a magician can channel on their own, and if they surpass that limit, the magic burns them up in a blue, fiery and painful transformation from human to a malicious monster made of pure magic with no conscience called a niffin. This limit can be stretched if magicians do powerful spells together in what's called cooperative magic, to share the load. Though Magic can do quite a lot and is usually only limited to the amount of power a magician can channel safely and their imagination and skill, it can't do everything, such as cure cancer or solve major complex problems that plague the world. But with enough effort on the part of many many magicians working together, it can apparently make the United States 38% more tolerant towards minorities for the last hundred years.
Penny's Abilities: Penny's discipline is in Psychic Magic, which is magic relating to, affecting, and influenced by the mind. He's been able to hear the thoughts and pick up on the emotions of other people all of his life, and it's something he can't turn on and off, only hone and dampen with substances. He's said that most people's thoughts and feelings are like white noise and he can't glean much unless he focuses in on purpose, but there are some people who project their thoughts and feelings outward like a beacon, and then there are some who can close their minds from him entirely, and those people are usually magicians using wards. The types of spells in the Psychic Magic discipline that Penny is naturally proficient in aside from his constant telepathy are as follows:
Outside of Psychic Magic, Penny has studied spells in most of the other disciplines as well, though he's only shown using a handful such as Battle Magic, which is primarily physical and has many different forms: energy missiles and blasts, fire balls, and arcs of razor sharp energy blades to name a few. And like most other magicians at his level, he can use location spells to find people and objects, warding and protection spells to keep out threats from a physical location or the mind/body, brew various potions for a myriad of purposes, so on and so forth. Again, magic is broad and malleable to the caster's needs, so getting specific about every spell he can and can't do is pretty much impossible, but he's not a master magician yet, even if he's rather skilled, and he has limitations.
Warping: All of Penny's spell-work will generally be unpredictable. An attempt to send a fireball at an enemy might result in a comical whoopie cushion puff of air, or a simple locator spell might blow up in his face about 50% of the time, and the other 50% they work as normal.
His constant telepathy will still work mostly normally, but people's thoughts will be more white noise and harder to focus in on depending on the other player's permissions. Mind control of sentient beings will result in him being forced to do what he's trying to make another person do, though he wouldn't do it in the first place, you never know. Mind Control of animals will get more difficult the larger the animal is, for example: he could control a swarm of insects for a good several minutes, but a bear for only a minute or two at best. And he has never had a reason or desire to use memory magic, but if he ever tried in game for whatever reason, it would be as unpredictable as other magic, he might try to erase a day of memories and accidentally take away a month or none at all, and this would only ever be by individual player permission for specific plots.
His ability to enter dreams and communicate with people there should be fine as is, and any attempt to do anything to the dream of a sleeper could be minimized a bit if necessary. Perhaps another interesting warp could be that threats in the dreams of sleepers can physically hurt him now, though not fatally, an injury in a dream would be reflected on his body at about half the severity. And any attempts to reach the dreams of people outside of Deerington to call for help will be like hitting a psychic wall that leaves him with a migraine. Also, given that Deerington is a dream itself, if he tries to manipulate the setting, he'll find it immensely difficult to change anything outside of a small radius around himself for too long. Like, he might be able to change the grass in that radius red for a few minutes before it gives him a nosebleed and exhausts him. But please let me know if I can do more with this, or nothing at all.
Traveling will of course be limited to Deerington itself, and any attempt to leave via Traveling will result in the same symptoms as leaving via walking, but all at once. His teleporting in town will tire him out when used too often where it never did before and he'll have trouble aiming for a bit at first, especially if he tries to bring people with him. An attempt to teleport to the lakefront might land him knee-deep in water when on his own, and if he has people with him, they'll all get dunked into the center of it and have to swim to shore. His astral projection will be unchanged, but he'll find that trying to project to worlds outside of Deerington and into locked areas of Deerington to see inside will not only just result in a flash of white that flings him back to where he started, but trap him on the astral plane for a couple days or so. Trying to Travel to locked areas of Deerington will have the same affect as trying to leave Deerington.
It's implied that Travelers are hyper aware of the fabric of reality around them and can sense vibrations of magic and energy coming off of objects etc. As a powerful psychic, Penny will likely be able to sense that Deerington is a dream world right away, and possibly feel the power that holds it together as well as the fact that there's more layers to it. He's able to psychically hear and locate people in whole other universes with his telepathy, so the voice that psychics can pick up on (presumably Sodder's) as described on the Warping page will probably be pretty clear to him. And since he's also got dimension and multiverse hopping powers he'd likely be able to feel his home world where he's sleeping and maybe even other worlds since Travelers aren't tethered to any one world all the time. While in Deerington, I imagine that he'll especially be able to feel the worlds of other sleepers and the paths that tether them to Deerington.
Basically, Penny's powerful psychic ability makes him hyper sensitive to everything about Deerington and the people and monsters in it. It's difficult to imagine how that would feel to him, and also how much of his own power and will he can assert on the setting and the npc residents, so I hope my guess work in the warping has been to mod satisfaction, and any more details that I could get for how to handle his power in the setting would be really cool!
Each main discipline has sub-disciplines, for example Physical Magic is centered around the ability to manipulate the nature and properties of matter and energy, and includes Telekinesis and Cryomancy as two of its many sub-disciplines. A Magician whose discipline is Telekinesis can move objects with their mind as easily as with a thought or a flick of the hand, and other disciplines within the Physical Magic umbrella come rather easily to them as well, but they would require more conscious focus and effort. But if a Magician in the Physical magic discipline seeks to perform a spell in another discipline such as Natural Magic, which is the manipulation and development of the environment (i.e. growing plants etc.), they can do it, they would just require a lot of study, practice and focus, as well as much more effort.
Magic is performed primarily using tuts, which are a series of hand motions (video compilation example), and some usually more complex and powerful spells also use chants in all languages known to man depending on the spell's origin, as well as potions, incense and sigils. Spells are also affected by a complex combination of circumstances like the season and phase of the moon etc. that a Magician must remain always aware of to cast properly. There is also a complex mathematical and advanced physics system behind spells, and magic isn't in a fixed form or limited to the categories they are divided into. Skilled magicians are often able to create spells from scratch if they understand the theory behind them, as well as combine aspects from different spells from varying disciplines to create a custom spell that way. Therefore, all Magicians must be extremely intelligent (like 98th percentile I.Q.), capable of being always and easily aware of the many circumstances that affect spells at any given moment and using highly advanced mathematics, physics and dozens upon dozens of languages on the fly.
Magic can basically do almost anything you need it to do, or more specifically: magic does whatever the plot needs it to do, but it does have limits. The biggest limit is how much magic a magician can channel on their own, and if they surpass that limit, the magic burns them up in a blue, fiery and painful transformation from human to a malicious monster made of pure magic with no conscience called a niffin. This limit can be stretched if magicians do powerful spells together in what's called cooperative magic, to share the load. Though Magic can do quite a lot and is usually only limited to the amount of power a magician can channel safely and their imagination and skill, it can't do everything, such as cure cancer or solve major complex problems that plague the world. But with enough effort on the part of many many magicians working together, it can apparently make the United States 38% more tolerant towards minorities for the last hundred years.
Penny's Abilities: Penny's discipline is in Psychic Magic, which is magic relating to, affecting, and influenced by the mind. He's been able to hear the thoughts and pick up on the emotions of other people all of his life, and it's something he can't turn on and off, only hone and dampen with substances. He's said that most people's thoughts and feelings are like white noise and he can't glean much unless he focuses in on purpose, but there are some people who project their thoughts and feelings outward like a beacon, and then there are some who can close their minds from him entirely, and those people are usually magicians using wards. The types of spells in the Psychic Magic discipline that Penny is naturally proficient in aside from his constant telepathy are as follows:
- Mind Control: Controlling the behavior of others through mental command. Penny is theoretically a powerful enough psychic to manage to control a sentient mind, but he has not actually done it, nor is he inclined to since it's amoral and frowned upon. However, any other non-sentient animal such as an insect are very easy for him to control and he has no problem with it.
- Memory Magic: Spells that access memories as well as alter them, or erase them. Penny has never been shown to use this sort of magic, but as a psychic, he would find it easy to do if he ever had a reason to try it. It's been used to remove 3 years of magic knowledge from an expelled student or patch a good memory over a traumatic one by other characters.
- Dream Manipulation: Multiple times in the series, Penny has entered the dreams of other characters to communicate with them, and if he were so inclined he could alter the nature of the dream's content; it's said to be a common prank among psychics at Brakebills. And waking a sleeping person from in their dream is also possible, but it seems like he has to find them in the dream to do it.
- Traveling: This is Penny's discipline and it's the rarest of all disciplines. It's the ability to instantly teleport anywhere in the multiverse, which is an incredible and useful talent, but also extremely dangerous. If Penny is even a millimeter off or not in full control at all times to prevent Traveling in his sleep, he could end up in a volcano or a universe with no oxygen and die. Penny has mostly mastered his Traveling ability and using a spell tattooed on his fingers, he can bring passengers with him. Travelers are also technically not completely human, they are classified as a hybrid of human and an unknown magical creature, which means Traveling is in their DNA, unlike other magicians' disciplines. All magicians draw on magic that is in the air to power their spells, so if magic is "turned off" by the Gods, like in season 3, all Magicians lose the ability to cast spells, including Travelers, but Travelers can still Travel since the ability is apart of them. Their blood itself also has magical properties and can be used in rituals to create mirror bridges across vast distances that Travelers can't reach normally for one reason or another, such as powerful wards that keep them out.
- Astral Projection: This is a sub-ability of Traveling, and it is essentially just Traveling with your mind instead of your whole body, through the astral plane. In season 3, when Penny gets trapped on the astral plane, he learns how to possess objects and move them around to get people's attention, since communicating with people from the astral plane is otherwise mostly impossible from what we've seen so far.
- Memory Magic: Spells that access memories as well as alter them, or erase them. Penny has never been shown to use this sort of magic, but as a psychic, he would find it easy to do if he ever had a reason to try it. It's been used to remove 3 years of magic knowledge from an expelled student or patch a good memory over a traumatic one by other characters.
- Dream Manipulation: Multiple times in the series, Penny has entered the dreams of other characters to communicate with them, and if he were so inclined he could alter the nature of the dream's content; it's said to be a common prank among psychics at Brakebills. And waking a sleeping person from in their dream is also possible, but it seems like he has to find them in the dream to do it.
- Traveling: This is Penny's discipline and it's the rarest of all disciplines. It's the ability to instantly teleport anywhere in the multiverse, which is an incredible and useful talent, but also extremely dangerous. If Penny is even a millimeter off or not in full control at all times to prevent Traveling in his sleep, he could end up in a volcano or a universe with no oxygen and die. Penny has mostly mastered his Traveling ability and using a spell tattooed on his fingers, he can bring passengers with him. Travelers are also technically not completely human, they are classified as a hybrid of human and an unknown magical creature, which means Traveling is in their DNA, unlike other magicians' disciplines. All magicians draw on magic that is in the air to power their spells, so if magic is "turned off" by the Gods, like in season 3, all Magicians lose the ability to cast spells, including Travelers, but Travelers can still Travel since the ability is apart of them. Their blood itself also has magical properties and can be used in rituals to create mirror bridges across vast distances that Travelers can't reach normally for one reason or another, such as powerful wards that keep them out.
- Astral Projection: This is a sub-ability of Traveling, and it is essentially just Traveling with your mind instead of your whole body, through the astral plane. In season 3, when Penny gets trapped on the astral plane, he learns how to possess objects and move them around to get people's attention, since communicating with people from the astral plane is otherwise mostly impossible from what we've seen so far.
Outside of Psychic Magic, Penny has studied spells in most of the other disciplines as well, though he's only shown using a handful such as Battle Magic, which is primarily physical and has many different forms: energy missiles and blasts, fire balls, and arcs of razor sharp energy blades to name a few. And like most other magicians at his level, he can use location spells to find people and objects, warding and protection spells to keep out threats from a physical location or the mind/body, brew various potions for a myriad of purposes, so on and so forth. Again, magic is broad and malleable to the caster's needs, so getting specific about every spell he can and can't do is pretty much impossible, but he's not a master magician yet, even if he's rather skilled, and he has limitations.
Warping: All of Penny's spell-work will generally be unpredictable. An attempt to send a fireball at an enemy might result in a comical whoopie cushion puff of air, or a simple locator spell might blow up in his face about 50% of the time, and the other 50% they work as normal.
His constant telepathy will still work mostly normally, but people's thoughts will be more white noise and harder to focus in on depending on the other player's permissions. Mind control of sentient beings will result in him being forced to do what he's trying to make another person do, though he wouldn't do it in the first place, you never know. Mind Control of animals will get more difficult the larger the animal is, for example: he could control a swarm of insects for a good several minutes, but a bear for only a minute or two at best. And he has never had a reason or desire to use memory magic, but if he ever tried in game for whatever reason, it would be as unpredictable as other magic, he might try to erase a day of memories and accidentally take away a month or none at all, and this would only ever be by individual player permission for specific plots.
His ability to enter dreams and communicate with people there should be fine as is, and any attempt to do anything to the dream of a sleeper could be minimized a bit if necessary. Perhaps another interesting warp could be that threats in the dreams of sleepers can physically hurt him now, though not fatally, an injury in a dream would be reflected on his body at about half the severity. And any attempts to reach the dreams of people outside of Deerington to call for help will be like hitting a psychic wall that leaves him with a migraine. Also, given that Deerington is a dream itself, if he tries to manipulate the setting, he'll find it immensely difficult to change anything outside of a small radius around himself for too long. Like, he might be able to change the grass in that radius red for a few minutes before it gives him a nosebleed and exhausts him. But please let me know if I can do more with this, or nothing at all.
Traveling will of course be limited to Deerington itself, and any attempt to leave via Traveling will result in the same symptoms as leaving via walking, but all at once. His teleporting in town will tire him out when used too often where it never did before and he'll have trouble aiming for a bit at first, especially if he tries to bring people with him. An attempt to teleport to the lakefront might land him knee-deep in water when on his own, and if he has people with him, they'll all get dunked into the center of it and have to swim to shore. His astral projection will be unchanged, but he'll find that trying to project to worlds outside of Deerington and into locked areas of Deerington to see inside will not only just result in a flash of white that flings him back to where he started, but trap him on the astral plane for a couple days or so. Trying to Travel to locked areas of Deerington will have the same affect as trying to leave Deerington.
It's implied that Travelers are hyper aware of the fabric of reality around them and can sense vibrations of magic and energy coming off of objects etc. As a powerful psychic, Penny will likely be able to sense that Deerington is a dream world right away, and possibly feel the power that holds it together as well as the fact that there's more layers to it. He's able to psychically hear and locate people in whole other universes with his telepathy, so the voice that psychics can pick up on (presumably Sodder's) as described on the Warping page will probably be pretty clear to him. And since he's also got dimension and multiverse hopping powers he'd likely be able to feel his home world where he's sleeping and maybe even other worlds since Travelers aren't tethered to any one world all the time. While in Deerington, I imagine that he'll especially be able to feel the worlds of other sleepers and the paths that tether them to Deerington.
Basically, Penny's powerful psychic ability makes him hyper sensitive to everything about Deerington and the people and monsters in it. It's difficult to imagine how that would feel to him, and also how much of his own power and will he can assert on the setting and the npc residents, so I hope my guess work in the warping has been to mod satisfaction, and any more details that I could get for how to handle his power in the setting would be really cool!
Inventory:
Writing Samples: TDM Top Level
OUT OF CHARACTER
Player Name: Charley
Player Age: 31
Player Contact:
Other Characters In Game: Lance (Voltron)
In-Game Tag If Accepted: penny adiyodi: charley
Permissions for Character: here
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Yes
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: I enjoy anything that pushes characters' psychological limits and forces them to have to question their ideals and themselves to survive and protect those they care about. Zombies, monsters, ghosts, demons, I'm all in for all of it.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: Certain kinds of body horror are hard for me. Alien chest bursters are ok, for example, but 'Cannibal Holocaust', 'Human Centipede' and 'Tusk' type horror is too much for me, particularly if there are visuals. If it is written out semi-graphically I can usually handle it. Otherwise, I'm okay with most other things.
Additional Information:
