Suzy Schwan

Glass Spider's Knight

A player character in On The Horizon

Old character sheet available here: Old OTH Suzy

Who Are You?

Once upon a time a mortal woman and a Rider of the Bleak Academy had a baby who was fated to be the end of the world. Fortunately for the world, the baby was baptised before her father could claim her soul. She drowned and died in the wickedness-devouring waters of Big Lake, and the Void was forever denied its champion.

There it would have ended were it not for the wishes of a demented young playwright. Today Suzy Schwan is the daughter of Mortimer and Melancholy Swan, best friend of Chuubo, pitches in as a stagehand, extra or occasional understudy for the drama club, and is the feared right hand of the Student Council Treasurer Glass Spider.

Left to her own devices though, she broods with the delinquents on the periphery of the playground, holds communion with the dead, does battle with vampires and scours the School’s labs and libraries for the secret of immortality.

Profile

Academics Skill: Straight-A student
Sports Skill: Talented
Favorite Foods: Strawberries, Teriyaki, Espresso, Cajun Chicken Pizza
Blood Type: A
Animal: Ox
Age: 15

Skills Description
[2] Delinquent You’re new to the role, but you are comfortable with brawling, sneaking, skateboarding and rule-breaking.
[3] Student You’re an honour student, when it suits you.
[-1] Swimming It’s not that you can’t swim, but the waters of Big Lake really didn't want to let you go.
[-1] Actually looking like a vampire You've started experimenting with your mother’s make-up. Thus far the results leave something to be desired.
[2] Cool Adolescent immortality is one thing, but Death really has no hold on you!
[1] Superior Drama You’re preternaturally comfortable with acting, squabbles, turbulent social scenes and stage management. Furthermore you just seem to have this presence that makes the world around you ever so slightly more like an over the top play or movie. You insist on beta-reading all of Chuubo’s scripts.
[2] Perk: Superior Vitality 2 Suzy’s pretty tough! She's not completely breaking the laws of physics over her knee, but she's easily as strong as a professional weightlifter and punchy as an Olympic boxer. Not bad for the shortest girl in class who isn't actually some kind of fairy.

[0] [Tied to Trust] Affliction: Oblivious to the wickedness of delinquents.

Will: 8/8
Miraculous Will (From accessory: Restricted to skateboarding): 3/3
Miracle Points: 2/5

Intentions

  • -
  • -

Health Levels and Wounds

Normal Levels:    [    ] [    ]
Tough Levels:     [    ]
Divine Levels:    [    ] [    ]

Perks

Accessory: Suzy's skateboard, Hilderith. This is a magically perfect skateboard forged from the fingernails of dead giants; through which Suzy can channel miraculous will. (For transport and showing off mostly. Suzy has a tendency to use it as a weapon too, but that doesn’t actually grant her miraculous will.)

[2] [Indomitable] Affliction: I am Glass Spider's Knight.

Connections
[1] Glass Spider/Chuubo - Boss or best friend? Either way you're bound to the guy.
[1] Miramie Mesmer - Second-best friend. A kindred spirit who rails against this base and impure world.
[1] The Delinquents - They're pretty metal.

Experience and Issues

Genre

Techno
Genre XP actions: Sympathetic Action, Shock, Foreshadowing, Discovery.

General XP Actions
Sympathetic Action Try to comfort or reassure someone frozen up from emotion, the spotlight or shock!
Shock A special variant on Sympathetic Action, where the person who’s “all frozen up” takes the XP Action instead.
Foreshadowing You notice that you’re paying a lot of attention to something.
Discovery You’re doing something you’ve never done, or exploring somewhere new and it impacts you!
Reaction Shot Something happens…react to it!
Ritual Participate or react to one.
Transition React to one.

Emotion XP: Fist-Pump. Hell yeah!

Issues

On-Going Issues
[0] None

Arcs

[2] Indomitable
Don't Piss Me Off Once per chapter, or a second or later time for +1 MP, Suzy may enhance an action to paralyse a single target or a group of people. Targets lose the ability to move, feel a shadow pass over the graves, and confront the feeling of imminent mortality. The target cannot voluntarily escape, but their player may choose for them to experience an involuntary escape by collapse, drained, which ends to effect on them or that they experience a heightened emotional outburst, which ends the effect for everyone.
Sense Life and Death Suzy can sense the essence of life and death. This allows her to see ghosts, to sense the presence of living and undead things in an area (giving her a limited sort of echolocation in areas filled with life or the presence of death, like Old Molder) and to track people by the “scent” of their life-force. (Or to sense the presence of the undead by whatever they have instead of life.) Suzy can do this for free.
No Seriously, Don't Piss Me Off Suzy has Superior Vitality 2 as a Perk, and her feats of strength are Miraculous actions with 2 free Strike. In short, Suzy’s strength cannot be opposed by mundane actions, and tends to win out against normal, unaugmented miraculous actions too.
Bleakest Curse Once or twice per book (or 4MP a third or later time per book) Suzy may begin a tribulation for someone or something by draining the life-force from it and replacing it with necromantic anti-life; turning people (or corpses) into the undead or twisting mundane objects into weapons of death. Ironically this also makes people so afflicted very hard to kill. Afflicted characters may play up the effect of their tribulation as a 1/Chapter XP option for any ongoing storyline quest. If Suzy has used “Tribulation” on a target during the story, she may spend 1 MP and take an XP action to tug the strings of fate and repeat the process. Lingering effects last until either the end of the story or the resolution of an Issue linked to the tribulation. Suzy may have used this power to turn Holly Stark into a zombie.
Slip of a Girl Despite her appearance, Suzy is still a student of School and has an uncanny knack for becoming just another girl in a uniform and vanishing into the crowd when convenient (and when she spends 1 MP). She’s also disturbingly adept at passing as a delinquent and hanging around at delinquent meetings unremarked, even when every delinquent in School knows her face. (A fact which annoys the Kame brothers to no end.) The HG may also invoke this power to declare that she’s an unobserved onlooker in a scene where an interesting event is going down that the HG thinks she would like to be present at.
[1] Gatekeeper
Delinquents? Doooooooorks! An Affliction equal to your Trust Issue. Suzy has a tendency to be… well, not blind to the wickedness of others exactly, but she doesn't usually care about it. Given she’s hatchetwoman to one of the Six Sins of Lord Entropy she’s not really in a position to complain! Despite her ostensible loyalties, she still hangs out with delinquents from time to time. It’s gonna bite her in the ass one of these days.
Delinquent Lore Once per book (or 1 MP a second or later time per book, 2 MP a second or later time per Chapter) learn the story of a new delinquent.
You Work For Me Now After hunting a delinquent for most of a Chapter, spend 1 MP to trap and bind them (usually via detention, press-ganging into the Drama Club or Student Council Finance Committee or similar). Spend 2 MP to trap them after hunting them for a few minutes or hours, 4 MP to do so instantaneously or retroactively. This power functions as a wish.
Gaze Into the Abyss After dedicated work for a Chapter, spend 1 MP to enhance your perception to gaze into the underworld, see the ebb and flow of spirits or gain insight into the student underbelly of the School from the perspective of the entire delinquent-network. It costs 4 MP to do this in the course of a few minutes or hours, 8 MP and a Deadly Wound to do this instantly. This power is much more elaborate and all-encompassing than “keen nose” which is basically just a spiritual radar and tracking device. It acts as a wish “I wish I had a power of communication/interaction/perception that worked like this…”
One of Those Dorks Has Gotta Know Something About This… 1/Chapter (or a second or later time for 1 MP) Consult with a delinquent. This power functions as a wish. “I wish I could learn something about this from the delinquents.”

Immortality
Suzy strives to conquer death! She hasn't succeeded to her satisfaction, but by any sane standard she's nigh-on immortal, and can basically only be harmed by those things whose nature is to kill what cannot be killed. Anything less than that, she simply conquers through sheer grit and determination.

Accessory: Hilderith, a skateboard made from the fingernails of dead giants. (Gross, but surprisingly effective.)

The Curse of Deathlessness:
Suzy is an Excrucian revenant bound to the will of Glass Spider. This doesn't have any specific mechanical effects on its own, but it informs a lot of her Arc powers, perks and Silver Quest Miracles.

Principle: The Search for Immortality
Suzy is a Grail Seeker. She knows on some level that her life and very existence are fake; she's got no existence seperate of being Glass Spiders best friend/bound demon. To fill the void she perceives in herself, she searches for something that will tie her to the world eternally.

Other: The Delinquents of Horizon School
Suzy holds communion with the dead; while you'd think that this would give her powers over ghosts, in her day-to-day life this most often manifests as a kind of rapport with the delinquents. She just seems to constantly tangle with them, whether fighting them or just hanging out.

Quests

Floating XP: 9

To Make an End To Death
Type of Quest: Chibi, Work and Study
XP: 1/9

Gain 1 XP every scene/10 posts when you explain how what you are doing is relevant to your search for immortality. Your catchphrase is some variation of: "…I wanted to take a stand and conquer death."

Rebel Without a Cause
Type of Quest: Sidequest, Setting
XP: 0/9

You know in your heart that it is your nature to fight the world. Once upon a time, you had a reason, something that justified cracking the world open like an egg and bringing death and ruin to all its inhabitants. But in the end, even now that you have forgotten what that prize was, even knowing that it has quite possibly slipped your grasp forever, you still *want* to fight. You might have had a justification once, but in the end you *enjoy* it. This emptiness, and the thought that you're really just a murderous thug looking for an excuse to hurt people, scares you. So you have resolved to find a cause. Something good and decent and worth fighting for.

The problem is you don’t really know how to even start looking for one, and most of your attempts to drive forward either go nowhere, or are just you posturing about conquering death while doing something crazy dangerous.

Sometimes thrill-seeking or posturing just don’t cut it, and you feel lost. Like you’re reaching out for something and you don’t know what it is. When this happens, when you lose your grip on a situation and can’t move forward or take action, you’ll turn to Glass Spider, or Chuubo, or some other old friend and say something like: “Do you remember why it is we’re doing all this? I mean like, everything, in general?”

When this happens, you can take 1 XP every scene/10 posts.


Behind the Mask
Type of Quest: Storyline
XP: 0/21

This is the story of how Suzy is targeted by a Cruel Prince. (Someone set above others by natural talent or divine right; and so thinks they can do whatever they like.) This will be a masked enemy, probably another member of the Student Council who will try to turn Suzy to their service and away from Glass Spider, most likely by corrupting or subverting the bond that ties Suzy and Glass Spider together. They will probably at least partially succeed. Alternatively it may be the story of how Suzy gets twisted further into the web of Glass Spider. Either way works.

Gain 3 XP when:

  • You trust the Guardian Bird or some other Bird-Like figure with something precious;
  • there’s a dramatic case of mistaken identity related to the Arc events or antagonists — e.g., a Cruel Prince kidnaps a hapless bystander instead of Suzy (or vice versa), or Suzy mistakenly puts her trust in an enemy;
  • A plan for dealing with a Cruel Prince blows up in Suzy's face.

You can claim each of the above rewards once per quest, to a maximum of 9 XP.

Gain 1 XP 1/Chapter when:

  • Testing an idea on:
    • How to defeat a Cruel Prince.
    • Why a Cruel Prince chose a particular target or strategy.
    • How to overcome Suzy's feelings of entrapment/lack-of-existence.
    • How to conquer death.
  • Admiring the guardianship abilities of the Guardian Bird.
  • Investigating the Student Council.
  • Talking with someone about the first Principal Entropy and his death.
  • Talking with someone about fate and free will.
  • A "death flag" scene for a Walker in Darkness. (A sinner who shares you vice, but embraces it or scoffs at the sacred thing you are trying to uphold/protect. They are on a course to disaster and will most likely meet an unfortunate and instructive fate. As of last game this was Nameless but who knows?) They talk sympathetically about their plans for life, do something needlessly dangerous, or get to interested in something you are having the Guardian Bird guard.

Completed Quests

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[URL=http://chuubo.wikidot.com/oth:suzy-schwan]Suzy Schwan[/URL], [B]the Glass Spider's Knight[/B]
[SIZE=1]Fist Pump XP (Hell yeah!)[/SIZE]
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