Duplicity App Redux

[chrisisofaith]

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Name: Lysoke Age: 28 Contact: lysoke Timezone: CST Other Character(s): Essek Thelyss | resonantcomplications

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Name: Chris Sonom Door: Previous Application and Acceptance as a Submissive Canon: D&D OC Canon Point: Level 16/In Zenethil, just after an assassination attempt Age: 26 Appearance: PB Image 1|PB Image 2 | Illistration he’s based on Chris is 6ft, average build, with blond hair and pale green eyes, he has a small scar on his upper lip, one on the palm of his left hand, and a semi-circle bite scar along his front and back History: (World setting info) Chris was born Chrystal Sonom, one of a set of twins born to the noble Sonom family in the Moonsea Region city of Melvaunt. Melvaunt is a port town and one of ill-repute as correuption, worship of dark gods like Bane, and slave trade were all common and accepted practices. The Sonom family held a high seat in the noble-ruled city and, along with the very closely related Lister family, made a lot of decisions regarding city practices. However, the Sonom’s recent religious awakening to a more kind-hearted and loving goddess started bleeding into their political practices and the changes they were making were slowly changing the tone of the city in a way the Listers did not see as profitable. Seeking to end the changes and seize the Sonom seats and power for their own, the Listers ordered the entire Sonom family killed through a local assassin carta. Chrystal and Rhyt were only four years old, but their nanny was very loyal, so she fled with the girls at the risk of her own life, to hide them away in safety; no one else of the Sonom household made it out of the slaughter. Fearing they would be more likely to be found and killed if they stayed together, their nanny split up the twins. She sent Rhyt away with a thieves guild who were loyal to the Sonoms and travelled around the Moonsea, while Chrystal she gave to a local brothel whose matron, Lady Ivaline, owed the Sonoms a life-debt. The twins would go on to write to each other over the next several years and shared everything with one another as best they could, but they wouldn’t see each other again for eighteen more years. Lady Ivaline and her right-hand-woman, Kayt, raised Chrystal with a decent education and taught her things she thought a lady ought to know like diplomacy and manners and how to smile even when you didn’t feel like smiling as well as practical things like history and math and economics. Despite being raised in a brothel, Chrystal was never intended to work there since they both thought of her as a noble girl and not just another ward. Still, Chrystal never liked to be idle, so she helped about the brothel with cleaning, dressing, and keeping up with the books, once she was old enough. However, due to her circumstances, Chrystal was never allowed to leave the brothel’s property and, knowing her restless nature, Ivaline decided it might be better to have her more involved in the business. At seventeen, she had Chrystal dress up and play the role of a ‘Companion,’ someone whose time was bought strictly for company, the lowest cost option at the brothel. Seventeen was also when Chrystal finally started coming to terms with the fact that she didn’t feel right being who everyone thought she was or being ‘Chrystal’ at all. However, she didn’t know what to do with the feeling until she met a man named Malik Kallian, a bard and merchant for the local temple of Bane who purchased her time from dusk until dawn every day for a week. He could see her unrest and gave her what she wanted: stories of the outside world, of adventures on the sea and fantastic travels. Their conversations ranged all over the spectrum during their hours together, including a dip into religion where Kallian told Chrystal about Bane and how he was both the god of tyrants and against tyrants, how Bane’s goal was strife and pain, a thought that would attract Chris later when exploring his options to strike at the Listers. Despite the gap in their ages, Chrystal found herself attracted to and enchanted by Kallian to the point that, when Kallian asked Lady Ivaline if he could spend the night with Chrystal, she spoke up for it, even though that wasn’t supposed to be her type of work. Ivaline allowed it, despite her reservations, and the two spent an intimate night together. Afterwards, while Kallian still slept, Chrystal tried on some of his clothes to see how he felt in them. The pieces started falling together when he realized he felt more like himself in Kallian’s clothing than he ever did in his own, but Kallian himself put things together for him when he woke up during Chrystal’s exploration. He started calling Chrystal ‘Chrys’ for short and told him about his brother who had been through similar feelings of uncertainty until coming to terms with himself. Through Kallian’s wisdom and support (and some skill with a pair of scissors), Chrystal gave way to Chris during the hours of that last day together. Kallian made Chris promise to keep working on finding himself and, when he came back from his next shipping venture, he’d introduce Chris to his brother. Unfortunately, Kallian never returned from sea and Chris never knew what happened, but he was on the path to making himself into someone he was comfortable being. Although hesitant, Ivaline helped him and his role changed from a lady of the brothel to a protector of it and allowed him to start his studies as a Cleric when he found his prayers answered one day by Bane himself. The real test came when the head of the Lister household arrived at the brothel one day, looked Chris in the face, and didn’t recognize him. From that day on, Ivaline allowed Chris more freedom around the city. Chris spent the next five years training, scoping out the city, and building a web of contacts and informants for the eventual ruination of the Listers. His anger and desire for action in the face of patience resulted in a habit of starting bar brawls in the slums of Melvaunt, something he became quite good at and even better at slipping away from after the chaos was in full swing to avoid being caught. When he was twenty-two years old, he received a letter from Rhyt that said she’d found an adventuring party that seemed like promising help in their plot for revenge. He agreed to meet with them at the docks that the Listers used for slave trade and see what they could do. His arrival at the docks was well timed as the group (a human sorcerer, tiefling barbarian, and human rogue) wasn’t fairing well against uneven odds in their attempt to free the slaves. Chris turned the tide with his magic and the group was able to dispatch the slavers and free the slaves. Chris wasn’t very impressed with the group but, during the confusion, Rhyt was taken by the same assassin group hired by the Listers years ago, now with a bounty on ‘the twin girls.’ Without other options to save his sister, Chris teamed up with the group and they followed the trail to save Rhyt. The trail eventually led to the Listers themselves and the group was able to save Rhyt and kill the entire Lister family, finally offering the closure both twins had been looking for. However, killing the Listers left a power vacuum in the city, so the group convinced the twins to step into their noble roles and take over the Lister-Sonom power with a promise that they would help to make the city better as well. The next three years saw the twins and the group newly dubbed ‘The Guardians of Melvaunt’ slowly improving the city’s practices and reputation through abolishing slave trade and hunting down the fetid parts of the city’s underbelly that Rhyt’s thief guild connections couldn’t control. However, where Rhyt flourished in her new role, Chris chaffed. He longed to leave the city, as he’d always wanted to, and see what the world had to offer. On top of that, the city’s position on the worship of Bane was changing to something negative and Chris began to question his faith in the deity he’d given everything to. When a chance arose to leave the city to check on an issue out of town, Chris leapt at it and joined the Guardians on their journey to a neighboring city, despite the fact that his magic had started to fail due to his crises of faith. The venture saw the group magically teleported apart from each other, so Chris headed back to Melvaunt, figuring he’d meet them there. What he found, however, was the city burned and the dead body of his sister near a massive clockwork dragon that appeared to be the culprit. In his grief, he tried to fight the dragon, but his magic continued to fail him. Fortunately, the Guardians arrived and were able to retreat with Rhyt’s body and a struggling Chris to regroup. They were able to find some other members of their household who’d escaped the city and were informed that an army led by another cleric of Bane had come and killed those who didn’t make it out in time and Rhyt who’d been evacuating the city when the army was spotted on the horizon. The dragon only came afterwards to raize the city and, apparently sit upon the rubble. With nowhere else to go, the group burned Rhyt’s body and retreated to the mountains and the hometown of one of the guardians that was located there. On the way to the mountains, the group kept seeing ravens, particularly one that had unique markings that always sat just outside their campsite at night. With Chris’ fractured faith apparent and his magic unreliable, one of the Guardians suggested Chris switch to worship of the Raven Queen, a neutral force who collected the souls of the dead and who fit much more closely with Chris’ beliefs. Still reeling from his own doubts and feelings of betrayal, Chris turned down the suggestion, but said he’d think about it. When the group arrived at the mountain city, there were new problems to help with, including rifts between the material plane and the shadow plane. Their venture in the shadow plane led them to the throne of the Raven Queen herself who asked for the Guardian’s help. While in the Raven Queen’s castle, they discovered Rhyt in her service, were briefly reunited with her, and she admitted to being the uniquely marked raven that had been following them. In return for the Guardian’s heroics, the Raven Queen gave them each a gift. To Chris, she gave not only a gift, but a new holy symbol, appointing him her cleric; a role he accepted gratefully, if hesitantly. She pointed them to the northern city of Ilinivur for their journey and promised that, should they seek to resurrect Rhyt someday, she would not stop her soul from returning. With renewed faith, hopeful he could one day revive his sister, and a direction to head in, Chris and the Guardians headed north towards Ilinivur. Weeks of travel, adventures to help cities they stopped at along the way (including an encounter where Chris was turned to stone for about a day before being restored by the group), and new connections made in their mounting war effort against the Clockwork Dragon, saw the adventurers to Ilinivur’s doorstep. There were new connections made, reveals to be had, and political favors to try and gain while in Ilinivur. The city leadership offered further insight into a group of adventurers that had passed through Ilinivur five years earlier who seemed tied to the army that had attacked Melvaunt months earlier. They offered to help the Guardians contact the city they now resided in, Zenethil to the East, and promised war support only if the Guardians helped alleviate some of the strife Illinivur was handling first. The Guardians agreed and headed out on this new branch of their adventure, but not before one of the party (amnos, the Tiefling Barbarian) commissioned a very powerful magical item to ‘help Chris with his dysphoria’ (in broad terms) though Amnos didn’t give this item to Chris immediately nor informed him of it’s commission. On the night before they were to head out, conversation drifted towards their efforts to restore Melvaunt beyond just avenging it, this tension finally snapped in Chris and led to a spilling of all his reservations and vitriol of the city: the fact he didn’t want to lead it, didn’t want to stay there, and didn’t even care for the city as a home the way the others did, it had always been and still was his prison. The group offered him an out: a chance to put all this down and leave if he wanted, to disperse the efforts against the offending army and Zenethil and only focus on resurrecting Rhyt to eventually leave the whole thing behind. Chris took a few hours to himself to think, really think, and finally came to the conclusion: it wasn’t a prison if he was choosing it and it was worth choosing if his friends -his family- called it home. With Renewed purpose, Chris and the rest of the group headed out the next morning. All of the group’s efforts for Illinivur were in aid of the city’s satellite settlements nearby, the first of which involved culling a powerful vampiress that prayed on the town. In the process, the group found the means to revive Rhyt and finally were reunited with her permanently when they returned to Illinivur, three months to the day of her death. The rest of the adventures went well enough, though they began to find signs of Zenethil’s involvement in the area in the form of clockwork iron giants. In the third and final city, after a fight with a fire elemental that almost saw Chris die in combat, Amnos finally gave Chris the item and told him to think about it. Chris spent two days with the item before finally working up the courage to use it with some help and support from his boyfriend and fellow party member, Ra’ah. The item did far more than Amnos anticipated and acted like a Wish spell, completely changing Chris’ physical gender to match how he’d always seen himself. Now sporting a slightly more obviously masculine look and heaps more confidence, Chris continued the group’s ventures down South and back to the Moonsea to follow a lead on a location for powerful artifacts that might help the Guardians in their goals. The Bell in the Deep, Northkeep, was a long-sunken city that the group explored and looted for what items were left of use to them. While there, they found a collection of a powerful leviathan wizard who lived in the ruins that included humanoid specimens kept in a museum. The human member of which was none other than Malik Kallian. At Chris’ urging, the group freed Kallian and escaped with him. Kallian didn’t immediately recognize Chris between time and the recent change, but when he did, the reunion was a mostly joyous one. With time, many conversations, and a bit of quality time spent between Kallian and Ra’ah, Chris renewed his relationship with Kallian while maintaining the one he had with Ra’ah. When they made port again, Kallian decided to stay in the Moonsea region to help with efforts in the area organizing the refugee citizens of Melvaunt. The Guardians returned to the mountain city they’d started in for a bit of rest and calibration, though their vacation was interrupted by the realization that a prominent member of Zenethil had come to the city as well. Once they’d cornered him, they finally received more information about their mysterious foes and the fact that their power had come from BAne himself who had demanded they raze a city in return for raising their own: Melvaunt for Zenethil. A choice made infinitely easier for the fact they’d been in Melvaunt five years ago seeking aid from the rumored Sonom twins. Efforts that led to their discovery by the Listers. The Listers killed one of their members in retaliation and banished the rest, leaving grief and bad blood behind. The other adventuring group turned to Bane who reached out to their Warlock and through his power, now sought their own peace to heal. With new context, the Guardians largely abandoned their intentions of war and set out to Illinivur and then on to Zenethil to try and make peace instead.Along the way, Chris started having dreams of the God Bhaal who wanted to meet the group to talk. Hesitant to make nice with another evil god, Chris told the others and they agreed to at least meet him since they likely wouldn’t have much choice. Before the group set out, however, they gathered together those surviving refugees from Melvaunt responsible for the decision to kill the Zenethil group’s party member as an effort to offer the prisoners as an olive branch. Now faced with keeping the prisoners in line, Chris often found himself needing to step into his role as the leader of Melvaunt as well as whatever city may yet be built on it’s ashes, a mantle that fit a lot better than he would have anticipated. When the group finally made it to the place Bhaal said he’d meet them, they met with him in a demiplane within their minds and outside of time to discuss their next steps and Bane’s motivations. Bhaal told the group they had three options: fight Bane directly and ensure his defeat meant his power waned for a few centuries, find his sources of influence and power in the Material Plane and destroy them to lessen his power in the Moonsea Region, or to make peace with him to offer him worship as a god of Order instead of Tyranny, effectively changing how he was worshiped and the damage he could do in the area. None of the group felt comfortable offering the latter due to Chris’ suffering from being aligned with Bane, but Chris himself decided to make the offer in the reasoning that changing Bane’s nature meant no one else would have to suffer the abuse and manipulation he did. With this tentative decision made, the group made the rest of their journey to Zenethil in relative peace. They were met at the city with very little fanfare and a somewhat cold reception from those in power, though nothing openly hostile until a couple days later when Chris and one of his party were handed envelopes that held a spell trap that very nearly killed them both and no overt signs as to the perpetrator. Personality: The very core of Chris’ personality is his anger. What happened to his family was never hidden from him and the fact he could never see his twin sister, the person he would always be closest to, because of the Lister’s power and threat constantly weighed on him. That was what started the first turnings of the storm that is Chris Sonom. Add in the fact he wasn’t allowed to leave the brothel for thirteen years, felt trapped in the city that had taken everything from him, then was forced to rule that same city, lost his sister to a force that had power from the god he put everything into worshiping, and now is on a journey to save the city he never wanted, Chris is a roiling tempest ready to lash out with wind and lightning at any grievance. His anger is more like a storm than a flame, however, he doesn’t flare up in his anger, it seethes and waits and piles up. Some of it was released in that outburst he had with his friends in Illinivur and he’s settled other parts of it now that he has Rhyt back and has accepted his position as future head of the city the group intends to build. However, anger is still something he contends with and has to overcome before offering the more political or patient responses he’s more prone to as time has gone on. It is likely to be a constant the rest of his life. For now, he manages it with a carefully level head and cool, tactical, precision. The downside of his tactical games is that he can very easily (and sometimes does intentionally) end up manipulating the people around him, whether he means to or not. He manipulated the Guardians of Melavaunt to his goals by playing on their good nature to help save the city, even though all he really wanted was his sister safe and the Listers dead. He played the same angle as the group was adventuring again, using his noble name and heritage to play up the ‘poor destroyed town’ angle to get help when all he wanted was to break his old god’s new playthings. Even now, when the situation has changed measurably and he knows he’s heading toward the possibility of needing to make nice with Bane in the future, Chris is already considering what he might need to do as the political leader of the group to ensure they are endeared to Zenethil and it’s leaders if they can’t sway the city’s god. Just as with his anger, Chris is nearly always in a state of analysis and forward thinking with what consequences -good or bad- he may be able to maneuver into place. One of Chris’ best traits is his confidence. He’s had wonderful support throughout the stages of his transition, so he has full confidence and pride in who he is even before the physical aspect came into play. He knows what he’s about and isn’t ashamed of it. He knows he’s attractive, he knows he can flirt and fight and hold his own in a drinking contest, and he knows he’s got more wisdom than some people do in a lifetime. He also knows the difference between his wisdom and another’s intelligence, Chris’ intelligence isn’t especially high, he’s not well-traveled or well-read, he knows facts about his city, the gods, and medicine, and that’s about it, but he’s usually happy to learn new things and expand his horizons. He knows he’s learned things that no book can give him and he holds that close and values it. His experiences are his own and he’s learned enough through them to be fairly self-aware of his actions and motivations and even of the anger he outwardly denies. What gets in the way of his wisdom is his inability to communicate. Despite his reservations, Chris is a good leader, he’s adept at making decisions and plans and enacting them, but he’s not great with expressing what he’s feeling at any given moment, no matter if the emotion is positive or negative. He has just as much difficulty expressing his frustration with the situation with Zenethil as he does telling Ra’ah or Kallian he loves them. He’s more likely to rely on physical actions to indicate affection or even frustration than he is to come out and say anything. On top of that, he’s very much the type to hold onto unsolvable problems until they become too much for him rather than asking for help, as was the case with his crisis of faith. No one else in his immediate group is religious and none of them liked the fact he followed Bane, so instead of seeking help or advice, he bottled up the issue until it nearly got him killed. More recently, with his concerns about what sort of city the group intends to rebuild in Melvaunt’s place, he’s only had one conversation with Ra’ah and to no ultimate solution, so the problem continues to cycle in his head unending. That all said, he is working on it. When one of his party recently asked if he was okay when he was clearly upset, at first he said he was fine, then amended it to say he wasn’t fine, but would be soon enough. Powers and Abilities: Chris is a Death Cleric, so he has access to all of the cleric spells of 8th level or lower (about 36 of them a day out of a potential of 105 known.) Mainly, his magic focuses on necrotic (dark) magic like Inflict Wounds and some healing magic like Cure Wounds and Restoration spells since he’s the main caregiver to his friends. More powerful spells like Revivify (a resurrection spell), Create Undead, and anything to do with other planes won’t be available to him due to nerfing. Some of the list of potential Cleric spells he may know can be found here and this is his Character Sheet. Chris’ more martial abilities, like his Tavern Brawler feat which basically allows him to effectively pick up anything around him to use as a weapon and to be able to hold and grapple someone despite his lower strength score will be available to him as well as his ability to concentrate while under attack, the Warcaster feat. Additionally, and somewhat uselessly, he can speak Celestial, Dwarvish, and Elvish, as well as Common, DnD’s equivalent to English. He’s also very perceptive and insightful, so he’s usually pretty good at noticing things and picking up on the little tells people give away in their body language as well as being well versed in general field medicine. Inventory: > Chris’ spectral scythe > Holy Symbol of the Raven Queen > Clasp of the Raven Queen Samples: Sample 1 Sample 2 Re-app note (In regards to personality and history): Chris’ previous activity is documented here, but, for the most part, what character development he had in-game was dwarfed or re-experienced in his canon, other than becoming a bit more tech-savvy thanks to some of his CR like Nate. As for history, major points that stick out were his negative run-in with Kyle Valenti as a vampire snack, his antagonizing relationship with Tim Stoker that lead to Chris’ realignment punishment, his relationship with Lux that lead to him being more comfortable and open to all kinds of sexual encounters, and his relationship with his Dominant, Festival, who Chris trusted more than anyone else in the city.