City of Keys - Application
Player Details
Name: Callie
Birthday and Age 3/24/84, 27
Personal LJ Username:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
callie_chan
E-mail: callistodementia @ gmail.com
AIM/Instant Messenger(s): FyreflyzBlaze
Time Zone: EST
Other characters in game: None yet
Character Application
Character Name: Lyndis Nivali
Fandom: Homestuck (OC)
Gender: Male
Canon Point: He was pulled into the Vox systems while he'd been sleeping on his quest bed, just minutes away from being murdered by a crazed yellowblood and fellow Sgrub player and accidentally ascending to god tier. Shortly after the holiday season in the systems, he slipped through a window that turned out to be a portal, arriving in Cypher.
Power: With Lyn being a self-sufficient thief, accustomed to living by his wits thanks to not having the strength to make do otherwise, and relying on bluffs and illusions to trick and mislead those he can't confront directly...he's basically everything the Traveler exemplifies, and was a natural choice.
Orientation: Bisexual, as all trolls are, though he tends to lean more toward other males due to unfamiliarity and awkwardness when dealing with females.
Suitability: At almost nine sweeps, Lyn is over eighteen in human years - in fact is probably about nineteen.
Personality: The very first thing you need to know about Lyndis is to call him Lyn. He hates his full name; to him it sounds weak and girly(not that being associated with something 'girly' necessarily has as many negative connotations for a male troll on Alternia as it might on Earth, but he's overly sensitive to anything that might reflect poorly on him). How he wound up with a name he dislikes so much is something of a mystery.(We'll blame the text entry boxes.) But the fact is that, if Lyn has to instruct you to call him by his nickname, then a critical failure has already occurred along the line somewhere because you shouldn't know his full name to begin with.
Lyn has two major defining personality traits that, more often than not, are directly in conflict with each other. The first is that he is a perpetual coward. Having been orphaned early in life and forced to look out for himself - in terms of general survival as well as hiding from the culling most orphaned trolls have to look forward to - he's spent most of his sweeps hyper-aware of his own weakness and vulnerability, knowing he could be culled by almost any troll or imperial drone on a whim. As a lowblood with purely defensive psionic powers, and no possessions beyond what he can scavenge and steal - without even a proper hive, or a recuperacoon(and the blood-soaked racial dreams he has undoubtedly don't help his nerves) - he's all too conscious of his weak standing in troll society, and he even manages to undersell what abilities he does have as often as not in fits of fatalistic pessimism. As a result, he's developed a deep and unshakable paranoia, convinced (and not entirely incorrectly) that the world is, if not out to get him specifically - because that would imply he's important enough to give special notice - at the very least engineered to kill him. He's twitchy and neurotic, always looking over his shoulders, keeping his back to any convenient wall, and half-crouched in preparation to bolt at all times.
The other aspect of his personality - and constantly in conflict with his cowardice - is his pride. One of the things that sweeps of socializing on the internet taught Lyn is that talking big is sometimes all that matters. He quickly learned to be loud, egotistical, and talk himself up as a purely defensive measure, and to fiercely protect his inflated credibility. He rarely believes anything he brags about in regards to himself; he's merely invested in making other people believe he's stronger and better and more deserving of respect than he necessarily is, if only to keep them off his back. It's really the only self-defense he has aside from hiding, since, while not being a bad fighter - especially after going through so much of his session - he's still unwilling to kill other trolls. The conflicts come in when he has to defend his credibility in the face of risks that he'd never run for any other reason; sometimes it's a tug-of-war between taking a risk for the sake of his 'cred', or determining that the cure is actually worse than the disease. Credibility doesn't mean much if you get yourself killed defending it, after all.
Whether you consider Lyn an insufferable prick or a pretty decent guy entirely depends on how well he knows you, and how much he likes you. To people he doesn't give a damn about - which is almost everyone - Lyn is cynical, pessimistic, sarcastic, paranoid, and preemptively defensive, looking out for himself first and the rest of the world coming in a distant second. He has a surprising capacity for loyalty - even altruism - if he actually becomes attached to someone else, but it's not easy to become close enough to him for him to ever be attached to you, or you to him. And he's not going to even begin to stick his neck out for a stranger unless he feels it serves his own purposes in some way.
This isn't to say Lyn doesn't have a pleasant side. If people don't give him trouble, he can actually be quite agreeable, even friendly. He's surprisingly easygoing once you get past the prickly exterior, and very protective of the few people that matter to him - protective enough to actually tap into some reserves of bravery for their sake, if necessary. The only thing that makes him hard to get along with is the fact that he treats no one with any respect or consideration until they've actually done something to earn it from him.
Lyn doesn't bear any particular angst or resentment over the unpleasant circumstances in which he grew up; the way he sees it, that's just how life goes on Alternia. (And, as far as he's concerned, basically everywhere - sometimes life just sucks, and you either deal with it or die.) In fact, he takes some measure of pride in being able to live through circumstances that rightfully should have gotten him culled, and his ability to dodge even the drones. But that doesn't change the fact that he lost his lusus at an early age, or that he's had to watch his back all his life, knowing he could be killed at any time by anything. As such, he's developed a fear of death - not just his own death, but death as a very concept - practically to the point of phobia. Not only does he fear dying himself, he doesn't like it when anyone dies, from his closest friends to some of his worst enemies. This makes him a bit of a freak among trolls, who are understandably expected to be quite comfortable with the idea of culling. It might almost suggest compassion, if it wasn't almost entirely fueled by cowardice - but it does mean that, despite his short temper and constant tough talk, and regardless of how much he hates you, Lyn is very unlikely to kill you or anyone else. This might be considered a positive trait in other races, but for a troll it's a critical handicap - one he's acutely aware of and goes to great lengths not to advertise.
Socially, Lyn's a bit strange. Having barely interacted with other trolls in person - only over chat clients like Trollian - he's not particularly experienced in how to handle any kind of genuine social situation. He never developed the habit of deferring to highbloods, or being polite to anyone in general, because it wasn't like anyone could get at him through his husktop...so he speaks his mind at all times, and objects to the very idea of changing his behavior as being an entitled demand. These habits persisted even after his session began, when he started talking to trolls within arm's reach, which was alternately (and incorrectly) interpreted as his either being brave or having a death wish. However, he has zero interest in any sort of strife that isn't purely verbal; though he didn't actually come to blows with any other trolls in his session(at least not by the time he was pulled from it into this one), he would have simply bolted if someone tried to aggress him physically. Whoever said 'discretion is the better part of valor' was wasting valuable running time flapping their jaw.
Lyn's opinion of the hemospectrum is that no one has the inherent right to tell him who he should respect or how much he's worth. This is relatively unsurprising, as he's lived a very independent life far from other trolls who could bring the hemospectrum home to him in any way; as a result, he has no ingrained respect for the hemospectrum or for highbloods, and had enough distance and anonymity to be able to flaunt his disrespect without repercussions. He tends to think of all highbloods as prissy, self-righteous, entitled, bugfuck-crazy tightasses...though, since he's very rarely had anything whatsoever to do with highbloods, this is an opinion based largely on both posturing and word of mouth. There was only one highblood in his own session, and Lyn loathed her...in fact, there were some hints that the two of them were beginning to wax black for each other, very much as their ancestors had before them.
Up until very recently, Lyn wanted absolutely nothing to do with quadrants; as far as he was concerned, they were nothing more than wastes of time and energy, with nothing about them seeming appealing enough to make them worth bothering with. Part of this was rather blatant emotional and social immaturity on his part, of course, but there was also a degree of sour grapes to it - he'd had no prospects before his own session, and had never anticipated actually coming by any. There wouldn't have been any point in thinking something he was likely never going to have would be great, after all, at least not unless he wanted to feel sorry for himself. However, he actually did find a matesprit for himself in Vox, in the form of a cajun Gamzee from an unusual world. And, while he still thinks quadrants are complicated pains in the nook, Gamzee showed him why they were worth the hassle. Along with Dahved Stridr, who's almost inarguably become Lyn's best friend, Lyn's actually begun developing something resembling a normal troll social life, and enjoying it...not to mention becoming more comfortable with both the thought and discussion of sex, having filled pails for the first time (and subsequent times) with Gamzee and engaging in tons of ironic flirtation with Dahved.
However, as his Gamzee isn't going to be transferred over from the Vox systems with him...he'll be forcibly losing the only quadrant he's ever had. Odds are he won't take it well when he realizes that he's likely to never see Gamzee again.
Abilities: As a lowblood, Lyn has the ability to psionically reflect light to camouflage himself (along with, occasionally, things that are nearby or that he's touching) for a brief period of time; the less he's concealing and the more he's concentrating, the longer he can make the camouflage last. This effectively allows him to render himself temporarily invisible.
Further, as the Rogue of Dusk in his session, Lyn has the ability to create, control, and manipulate shadows and darkness. As darkness is incorporeal, its greatest uses are for concealment or blinding his enemies, or creating illusions(which are, of course, illusions made of pure darkness. He can't make a convincing illusion of another person, for instance, since that would require color and fine detail, but he could easily make an illusion of an angry black dragon or an sGrub ogre to intimidate opponents). These illusions are also incorporeal, of course, so they're meant for psychological effect alone...not to mention that the bigger and more complex an illusion is, the more focus and effort are demanded of him. He can, with even greater effort, give substance to the shadows he controls, but this is on an extremely limited scale; at his extreme, he wouldn't be able to manage more than enough to grant substance to a shadow his own size or smaller for more than a minute or so, and he would be exhausted even from that. If he uses this aspect of his abilities at all, it's likely as a last-ditch defense.
Had he achieved god tier in his session, he would have been granted the strength and stamina to give substance to nearly any shadow under his control, of any size, allowing him to actually use his abilities offensively, as well as giving him the ability to travel between any area in shadow - suddenly making his unassuming title a significant and sufficiently godly power within his session. Perhaps one day...
History: Lyn has always been something of a runt troll - remarkably small and weak for his size, inferior even when compared to others in his lowblood caste(which, for the record, is brownblood at best - more specifically, he's a creamblood, which is really a washed-out orange and places him somewhere in standing between Tavros and Sollux). That he made it through his trials alive was something of a miracle and, he privately believes, probably a fluke. But the fact is that he did make it through, and was thus picked up by a lusus. However, he suspects that natural selection was at work here as well, because he ended up with a lusus that matched him perfectly - small, weak, and entirely unimpressive, dwarfed by other lusii and Alternian fauna alike. Not that Lyn cared; his weasel lusus was quite loyal and protective, and highly playful, and they formed a strong bond almost immediately.
Lyn's lusus recognized quickly that his charge was vulnerable and would need quite a bit of time before he would come into any strength or skills with which to defend himself. Therefore, he made certain to take his charge out into the wilderness, miles away from any other trolls, intending to have their hive built in safe isolation. Lyn and his lusus holed up in a well-concealed cliffside cave (one with its own generator, even) as the carpenter drones began work on a hive nearby - a hive nestled into the cliffside itself and commanding an excellent view of the wilderness around them. An easily defensible bastion of solitude. While they waited on its construction, Lyn's lusus helped him learn to read - among other basic things - played with him, and gave him as good a start in life as any troll could have asked for. Lyn even began to develop the (somewhat ambitious) desire to become a survicerator - a member of the fleet's mysterious group of scouts, tasked with reconnaissance and sabotage ahead of the main force of the troll armies...along with the all-consuming task of keeping themselves alive long enough to report back, because a dead scout is good to no one. Despite being a runt in a species all too ready to cull the weak, Lyn's future looked relatively bright.
Then everything went down the load gaper.
Alternia is a dangerous world by any standards, and Lyn's lusus always made sure to leave their cave first in the evenings to ensure the coast was clear. So it was that one night - before work on Lyn's hive was even half-finished - Lyn's lusus exited their cave, perhaps a bit less cautiously than usual, and was pounced on by a passing scalebeast before Lyn could lift a finger. A horrified Lyn retreated deep into his cave, not daring to leave it for days - and when hunger and thirst finally forced him out again, he was greeted by his own lusus' corpse and a hive abandoned half-built, the carpenter droids having processed that Lyn was now no longer viable to survive to adulthood and thus not worth wasting further work on.
There wasn't much else for Lyn to do at this point but either accept his inevitable culling, or to try and scrape along as best he could. He opted for the latter - as much to honor his lusus' efforts to keep him alive as anything else. He carefully buried what remained of his lusus (purely for utility's sake - he couldn't very well leave the bones out in the open, it was disturbing) and began the extremely difficult task of getting by on his own. Necessity drove him to thievery - which was inadvertently made far more difficult by the fact that it was at least ten miles to the nearest troll city, and the commute required every time he needed anything. He quickly learned to grab anything and everything he could, because there was so little he could get and so much he might need. As there was nothing keeping him from living closer to the city for his own convenience, it might have been easier to move there...but his own fear of anything and everything, compounded by his desire to hold onto what memories of his lusus he could, kept him living alone in the cave they had started off in together, talking to his weaseldad's grave in lieu of having anyone else to converse with.
Without his psionic camouflage, it's doubtful that Lyn would have had any degree of success - either in hiding from culling or stealing from other trolls. But he managed to limp along at first, and he learned the basics quickly - never steal too much from one place, never take anything too obviously valuable, don't take more than you can carry, never do anything high-profile, always have an escape route. As he aged and learned, he became more successful, more able to strategize and plan, better able to pick good targets, more easily able to make the trek and more fit to get around. He began to build up stores, piles of things - all the more so once he acquired his modus. So long as he stole more in a day than he could consume, he was coming out ahead, and gradually he wound up having (packaged, of course) food supplies set by. He started being able to steal things he wanted, not just what he needed. He managed to get his hands on a husktop. As he became a more proficient thief, Lyn achieved a sort of affluence - at least as far as being an orphan street squeakbeast was concerned. He wasn't really living day to day anymore, which was enough of a life improvement to make him relatively content.
Lyn was forced to teach himself quite a few skills beyond basic stealth and thievery, of course; for one thing, he wound up becoming something of a self-taught mechanic, nursing along the increasingly outdated generator in his cave. He taught himself how to pick locks, how to climb and navigate the cliffs around his cave, how to use a sylladex and strife specibus, how to use the weapon his strife specibus allows him(which, in fact, he uses more often as a climbing aid than a weapon), and eventually how to use a husktop. This last was a critical skill, because it allowed him - for the first time in his life - to have direct contact with other trolls, not to mention putting information he'd never otherwise have had access to at his fingertips. Almost all of his exposure to troll culture came to him through that husktop, and it quickly became one of his most important possessions. He was able to read new books(he'd been something of a bookworm while his lusus was still alive, confined to their cave with little else to do), learn basic skills like simple math, watch movies, play games(a personal favorite), and visit online forums full of other trolls to talk to regarding his favorite games.
Imagine, if you will, a troll gaming forum.
Internet trolling was one of the first forms of socialization that Lyn was ever introduced to, and - like every other skill Lyn realized he needed to acquire in his life - he picked it up fast. He rapidly became one of the premiere fuckasses of any board he visited, having plenty of time between city runs to be as vocal and insulting as anyone. He didn't even have a lusus to feed; he could argue people hoarse all damn night if he felt like it. He made virtually no friends this way, and it taught him all the wrong things about getting along with other trolls(except, perhaps, if he's looking to inspire kismessitude), but it was still more than he'd ever had before.
Cue a few more sweeps passing, and Lyn first heard mention of a game called sGrub. It was going to be big, it was going to be popular, everyone was going to be playing it - Lyn decided he wanted in. He promptly went out and stole copies of the game - both server and client - and found someone on an sGrub forum who needed a partner to connect with. And that's how, entirely inadvertently, Lyn wound up in the Medium, dropped into the Land of Cliffs and Concrete confused as hell and left to the whims of some troll he barely knew.
Lyn's land was hardly welcoming, being a barren desert broken up only by ruined buildings and jagged cliffs leading to equally barren plateaus - all of which were being constantly and thoroughly bleached by a vicious, unsetting sun. Lyn's consorts weren't any more pleasant, being troll-sized and (perhaps understandably) surly cockroaches who hid in the dark cliff crevices and ruined structures of LOCAC - anywhere there was darkness, of which there really isn't much. The quest of his land is to Bring The Night - to extinguish the brutal daylight his land is cursed with and usher in an endless night of cockroach partying. Lyn won't have accomplished this by the time he gets pulled to Vox, as he needs god tier abilities to create enough darkness to cover the sky, and as such his land did little more than confuse and frustrate him.
His session didn't get much easier or more understandable from there. In the players' rush to coordinate with each other and to complete their chain, Lyn lost track of his kernelsprite until after he'd entered the Medium. When he was reunited with it, he made a highly startling and not entirely pleasant discovery - it had already been prototyped once, without any input on his part. Unbeknownst to everyone - especially Lyn - Lyndis' own ancestor had still been alive while their session had been starting up. Through a series of events both scandalous and improbable, the Saboteur had, centuries ago, been kismeses with the very royalblood he served in the fleet, one who had extended his lifespan to match her own shortly before a minor lowblood uprising led to her death. (Whether she lengthened his life out of affection or malice, not even the Saboteur could say.) Fleeing the lowbloods who would happily have killed her survicerator servant, the Saboteur had taken to hiding in the one place he expected no adult troll to ever look - back on their home planet. Though he hid in solitude, he continued his scouting and information-gathering on Alternia purely as a force of habit, something to occupy the long sweeps with...and so, eventually, discovered the existence of his own descendant, with their similarities being too obvious for him to ignore. In observing him, as well as keeping an ear to the ground in regards to current events in general, the Saboteur had learned of sGrub, as well as the occasional rumor that it would destroy the world. With a born survicerator's determination to stay alive at any cost, he resolved to involve himself in his descendant's session by any means necessary to ensure his own survival, and intentionally prototyped himself with Lyn's sprite to that end.
Being unexpectedly saddled with his own ancestor in the form of a sprite, who readily harassed and critiqued him at every opportunity, did very little for Lyn's temper. (Though the double prototyping of the bones of Lyn's lusus did instill the Saboteur with both more of a paternal instinct for Lyn and a general sense of playfulness that improved their relations somewhat.) Despite their rocky relationship, however, the Saboteur's centuries of practical experience and keen tactical mind served Lyn far better than almost any other prototyping option could have. This was quite fortunate, too, since his ancestor's prototyping - and remarkably similar psionic abilities to Lyn's own - led to Lyn having to face scores of frequently invisible imps.
Lyn's session was an exceedingly unusual one far beyond the unique circumstances of his own ancestor being prototyped; in fact, every troll in his session wound up, either by accident or design, prototyping their ancestor into their sprite...though, of course, most of these involved prototyping remains and not their living flesh and blood. (Which led, among other things, to an embarrasingly pitch reunion between Saboteursprite and the sprite of his royalblood kismesis, as her own descendant was part of Lyn's session.) A session that had prototyped trolls - especially given that Lyn's session was heavily lowblooded - made for imps with quite a few powerful psionic abilities, to say nothing of weapons; their Black King was already shaping up to be incredibly formidable, easily balancing out their high-functioning sprites.
At the time ELIOS pulled Lyn from his session, quite a few things were happening at once. Their Space player had just finished breeding their frogs; the Black King was poised to begin the Reckoning at any moment; oh, and one of their players - a lowblood, oddly enough - had gone completely insane and was seeking to murder the other players...starting with Lyn, if only because he was judged the slipperiest. (Fortunately, her killing spree is destined to only be partially successful; many of the trolls in their session are destined to ascend to god tier, with most of the ascensions being the direct consequence of the very murders she commits.) The soon-to-be murderess had been on the verge of killing Lyn as he slept on his quest bed - a standard paranoid precaution of his, suggested to him by his ancestorsprite - while his dream self innocently explored Derse.
At this point, he was pulled into the Vox systems, where he's been living for the past several months. In that time he camped out in the woods, nearly starved, lost his virginity, became matesprits with a highblood(much to his own surprise), made a best friend, and very reluctantly began living in a crowded building with other trolls at his matesprit's request. Of course, if he was afraid to live in a crowded building, Cypher is going to overwhelm his nerves to the point where he simply explodes.
Name: Callie
Birthday and Age 3/24/84, 27
Personal LJ Username:
callie_chanE-mail: callistodementia @ gmail.com
AIM/Instant Messenger(s): FyreflyzBlaze
Time Zone: EST
Other characters in game: None yet
Character Application
Character Name: Lyndis Nivali
Fandom: Homestuck (OC)
Gender: Male
Canon Point: He was pulled into the Vox systems while he'd been sleeping on his quest bed, just minutes away from being murdered by a crazed yellowblood and fellow Sgrub player and accidentally ascending to god tier. Shortly after the holiday season in the systems, he slipped through a window that turned out to be a portal, arriving in Cypher.
Power: With Lyn being a self-sufficient thief, accustomed to living by his wits thanks to not having the strength to make do otherwise, and relying on bluffs and illusions to trick and mislead those he can't confront directly...he's basically everything the Traveler exemplifies, and was a natural choice.
Orientation: Bisexual, as all trolls are, though he tends to lean more toward other males due to unfamiliarity and awkwardness when dealing with females.
Suitability: At almost nine sweeps, Lyn is over eighteen in human years - in fact is probably about nineteen.
Personality: The very first thing you need to know about Lyndis is to call him Lyn. He hates his full name; to him it sounds weak and girly(not that being associated with something 'girly' necessarily has as many negative connotations for a male troll on Alternia as it might on Earth, but he's overly sensitive to anything that might reflect poorly on him). How he wound up with a name he dislikes so much is something of a mystery.
Lyn has two major defining personality traits that, more often than not, are directly in conflict with each other. The first is that he is a perpetual coward. Having been orphaned early in life and forced to look out for himself - in terms of general survival as well as hiding from the culling most orphaned trolls have to look forward to - he's spent most of his sweeps hyper-aware of his own weakness and vulnerability, knowing he could be culled by almost any troll or imperial drone on a whim. As a lowblood with purely defensive psionic powers, and no possessions beyond what he can scavenge and steal - without even a proper hive, or a recuperacoon(and the blood-soaked racial dreams he has undoubtedly don't help his nerves) - he's all too conscious of his weak standing in troll society, and he even manages to undersell what abilities he does have as often as not in fits of fatalistic pessimism. As a result, he's developed a deep and unshakable paranoia, convinced (and not entirely incorrectly) that the world is, if not out to get him specifically - because that would imply he's important enough to give special notice - at the very least engineered to kill him. He's twitchy and neurotic, always looking over his shoulders, keeping his back to any convenient wall, and half-crouched in preparation to bolt at all times.
The other aspect of his personality - and constantly in conflict with his cowardice - is his pride. One of the things that sweeps of socializing on the internet taught Lyn is that talking big is sometimes all that matters. He quickly learned to be loud, egotistical, and talk himself up as a purely defensive measure, and to fiercely protect his inflated credibility. He rarely believes anything he brags about in regards to himself; he's merely invested in making other people believe he's stronger and better and more deserving of respect than he necessarily is, if only to keep them off his back. It's really the only self-defense he has aside from hiding, since, while not being a bad fighter - especially after going through so much of his session - he's still unwilling to kill other trolls. The conflicts come in when he has to defend his credibility in the face of risks that he'd never run for any other reason; sometimes it's a tug-of-war between taking a risk for the sake of his 'cred', or determining that the cure is actually worse than the disease. Credibility doesn't mean much if you get yourself killed defending it, after all.
Whether you consider Lyn an insufferable prick or a pretty decent guy entirely depends on how well he knows you, and how much he likes you. To people he doesn't give a damn about - which is almost everyone - Lyn is cynical, pessimistic, sarcastic, paranoid, and preemptively defensive, looking out for himself first and the rest of the world coming in a distant second. He has a surprising capacity for loyalty - even altruism - if he actually becomes attached to someone else, but it's not easy to become close enough to him for him to ever be attached to you, or you to him. And he's not going to even begin to stick his neck out for a stranger unless he feels it serves his own purposes in some way.
This isn't to say Lyn doesn't have a pleasant side. If people don't give him trouble, he can actually be quite agreeable, even friendly. He's surprisingly easygoing once you get past the prickly exterior, and very protective of the few people that matter to him - protective enough to actually tap into some reserves of bravery for their sake, if necessary. The only thing that makes him hard to get along with is the fact that he treats no one with any respect or consideration until they've actually done something to earn it from him.
Lyn doesn't bear any particular angst or resentment over the unpleasant circumstances in which he grew up; the way he sees it, that's just how life goes on Alternia. (And, as far as he's concerned, basically everywhere - sometimes life just sucks, and you either deal with it or die.) In fact, he takes some measure of pride in being able to live through circumstances that rightfully should have gotten him culled, and his ability to dodge even the drones. But that doesn't change the fact that he lost his lusus at an early age, or that he's had to watch his back all his life, knowing he could be killed at any time by anything. As such, he's developed a fear of death - not just his own death, but death as a very concept - practically to the point of phobia. Not only does he fear dying himself, he doesn't like it when anyone dies, from his closest friends to some of his worst enemies. This makes him a bit of a freak among trolls, who are understandably expected to be quite comfortable with the idea of culling. It might almost suggest compassion, if it wasn't almost entirely fueled by cowardice - but it does mean that, despite his short temper and constant tough talk, and regardless of how much he hates you, Lyn is very unlikely to kill you or anyone else. This might be considered a positive trait in other races, but for a troll it's a critical handicap - one he's acutely aware of and goes to great lengths not to advertise.
Socially, Lyn's a bit strange. Having barely interacted with other trolls in person - only over chat clients like Trollian - he's not particularly experienced in how to handle any kind of genuine social situation. He never developed the habit of deferring to highbloods, or being polite to anyone in general, because it wasn't like anyone could get at him through his husktop...so he speaks his mind at all times, and objects to the very idea of changing his behavior as being an entitled demand. These habits persisted even after his session began, when he started talking to trolls within arm's reach, which was alternately (and incorrectly) interpreted as his either being brave or having a death wish. However, he has zero interest in any sort of strife that isn't purely verbal; though he didn't actually come to blows with any other trolls in his session(at least not by the time he was pulled from it into this one), he would have simply bolted if someone tried to aggress him physically. Whoever said 'discretion is the better part of valor' was wasting valuable running time flapping their jaw.
Lyn's opinion of the hemospectrum is that no one has the inherent right to tell him who he should respect or how much he's worth. This is relatively unsurprising, as he's lived a very independent life far from other trolls who could bring the hemospectrum home to him in any way; as a result, he has no ingrained respect for the hemospectrum or for highbloods, and had enough distance and anonymity to be able to flaunt his disrespect without repercussions. He tends to think of all highbloods as prissy, self-righteous, entitled, bugfuck-crazy tightasses...though, since he's very rarely had anything whatsoever to do with highbloods, this is an opinion based largely on both posturing and word of mouth. There was only one highblood in his own session, and Lyn loathed her...in fact, there were some hints that the two of them were beginning to wax black for each other, very much as their ancestors had before them.
Up until very recently, Lyn wanted absolutely nothing to do with quadrants; as far as he was concerned, they were nothing more than wastes of time and energy, with nothing about them seeming appealing enough to make them worth bothering with. Part of this was rather blatant emotional and social immaturity on his part, of course, but there was also a degree of sour grapes to it - he'd had no prospects before his own session, and had never anticipated actually coming by any. There wouldn't have been any point in thinking something he was likely never going to have would be great, after all, at least not unless he wanted to feel sorry for himself. However, he actually did find a matesprit for himself in Vox, in the form of a cajun Gamzee from an unusual world. And, while he still thinks quadrants are complicated pains in the nook, Gamzee showed him why they were worth the hassle. Along with Dahved Stridr, who's almost inarguably become Lyn's best friend, Lyn's actually begun developing something resembling a normal troll social life, and enjoying it...not to mention becoming more comfortable with both the thought and discussion of sex, having filled pails for the first time (and subsequent times) with Gamzee and engaging in tons of ironic flirtation with Dahved.
However, as his Gamzee isn't going to be transferred over from the Vox systems with him...he'll be forcibly losing the only quadrant he's ever had. Odds are he won't take it well when he realizes that he's likely to never see Gamzee again.
Abilities: As a lowblood, Lyn has the ability to psionically reflect light to camouflage himself (along with, occasionally, things that are nearby or that he's touching) for a brief period of time; the less he's concealing and the more he's concentrating, the longer he can make the camouflage last. This effectively allows him to render himself temporarily invisible.
Further, as the Rogue of Dusk in his session, Lyn has the ability to create, control, and manipulate shadows and darkness. As darkness is incorporeal, its greatest uses are for concealment or blinding his enemies, or creating illusions(which are, of course, illusions made of pure darkness. He can't make a convincing illusion of another person, for instance, since that would require color and fine detail, but he could easily make an illusion of an angry black dragon or an sGrub ogre to intimidate opponents). These illusions are also incorporeal, of course, so they're meant for psychological effect alone...not to mention that the bigger and more complex an illusion is, the more focus and effort are demanded of him. He can, with even greater effort, give substance to the shadows he controls, but this is on an extremely limited scale; at his extreme, he wouldn't be able to manage more than enough to grant substance to a shadow his own size or smaller for more than a minute or so, and he would be exhausted even from that. If he uses this aspect of his abilities at all, it's likely as a last-ditch defense.
Had he achieved god tier in his session, he would have been granted the strength and stamina to give substance to nearly any shadow under his control, of any size, allowing him to actually use his abilities offensively, as well as giving him the ability to travel between any area in shadow - suddenly making his unassuming title a significant and sufficiently godly power within his session. Perhaps one day...
History: Lyn has always been something of a runt troll - remarkably small and weak for his size, inferior even when compared to others in his lowblood caste(which, for the record, is brownblood at best - more specifically, he's a creamblood, which is really a washed-out orange and places him somewhere in standing between Tavros and Sollux). That he made it through his trials alive was something of a miracle and, he privately believes, probably a fluke. But the fact is that he did make it through, and was thus picked up by a lusus. However, he suspects that natural selection was at work here as well, because he ended up with a lusus that matched him perfectly - small, weak, and entirely unimpressive, dwarfed by other lusii and Alternian fauna alike. Not that Lyn cared; his weasel lusus was quite loyal and protective, and highly playful, and they formed a strong bond almost immediately.
Lyn's lusus recognized quickly that his charge was vulnerable and would need quite a bit of time before he would come into any strength or skills with which to defend himself. Therefore, he made certain to take his charge out into the wilderness, miles away from any other trolls, intending to have their hive built in safe isolation. Lyn and his lusus holed up in a well-concealed cliffside cave (one with its own generator, even) as the carpenter drones began work on a hive nearby - a hive nestled into the cliffside itself and commanding an excellent view of the wilderness around them. An easily defensible bastion of solitude. While they waited on its construction, Lyn's lusus helped him learn to read - among other basic things - played with him, and gave him as good a start in life as any troll could have asked for. Lyn even began to develop the (somewhat ambitious) desire to become a survicerator - a member of the fleet's mysterious group of scouts, tasked with reconnaissance and sabotage ahead of the main force of the troll armies...along with the all-consuming task of keeping themselves alive long enough to report back, because a dead scout is good to no one. Despite being a runt in a species all too ready to cull the weak, Lyn's future looked relatively bright.
Then everything went down the load gaper.
Alternia is a dangerous world by any standards, and Lyn's lusus always made sure to leave their cave first in the evenings to ensure the coast was clear. So it was that one night - before work on Lyn's hive was even half-finished - Lyn's lusus exited their cave, perhaps a bit less cautiously than usual, and was pounced on by a passing scalebeast before Lyn could lift a finger. A horrified Lyn retreated deep into his cave, not daring to leave it for days - and when hunger and thirst finally forced him out again, he was greeted by his own lusus' corpse and a hive abandoned half-built, the carpenter droids having processed that Lyn was now no longer viable to survive to adulthood and thus not worth wasting further work on.
There wasn't much else for Lyn to do at this point but either accept his inevitable culling, or to try and scrape along as best he could. He opted for the latter - as much to honor his lusus' efforts to keep him alive as anything else. He carefully buried what remained of his lusus (purely for utility's sake - he couldn't very well leave the bones out in the open, it was disturbing) and began the extremely difficult task of getting by on his own. Necessity drove him to thievery - which was inadvertently made far more difficult by the fact that it was at least ten miles to the nearest troll city, and the commute required every time he needed anything. He quickly learned to grab anything and everything he could, because there was so little he could get and so much he might need. As there was nothing keeping him from living closer to the city for his own convenience, it might have been easier to move there...but his own fear of anything and everything, compounded by his desire to hold onto what memories of his lusus he could, kept him living alone in the cave they had started off in together, talking to his weaseldad's grave in lieu of having anyone else to converse with.
Without his psionic camouflage, it's doubtful that Lyn would have had any degree of success - either in hiding from culling or stealing from other trolls. But he managed to limp along at first, and he learned the basics quickly - never steal too much from one place, never take anything too obviously valuable, don't take more than you can carry, never do anything high-profile, always have an escape route. As he aged and learned, he became more successful, more able to strategize and plan, better able to pick good targets, more easily able to make the trek and more fit to get around. He began to build up stores, piles of things - all the more so once he acquired his modus. So long as he stole more in a day than he could consume, he was coming out ahead, and gradually he wound up having (packaged, of course) food supplies set by. He started being able to steal things he wanted, not just what he needed. He managed to get his hands on a husktop. As he became a more proficient thief, Lyn achieved a sort of affluence - at least as far as being an orphan street squeakbeast was concerned. He wasn't really living day to day anymore, which was enough of a life improvement to make him relatively content.
Lyn was forced to teach himself quite a few skills beyond basic stealth and thievery, of course; for one thing, he wound up becoming something of a self-taught mechanic, nursing along the increasingly outdated generator in his cave. He taught himself how to pick locks, how to climb and navigate the cliffs around his cave, how to use a sylladex and strife specibus, how to use the weapon his strife specibus allows him(which, in fact, he uses more often as a climbing aid than a weapon), and eventually how to use a husktop. This last was a critical skill, because it allowed him - for the first time in his life - to have direct contact with other trolls, not to mention putting information he'd never otherwise have had access to at his fingertips. Almost all of his exposure to troll culture came to him through that husktop, and it quickly became one of his most important possessions. He was able to read new books(he'd been something of a bookworm while his lusus was still alive, confined to their cave with little else to do), learn basic skills like simple math, watch movies, play games(a personal favorite), and visit online forums full of other trolls to talk to regarding his favorite games.
Imagine, if you will, a troll gaming forum.
Internet trolling was one of the first forms of socialization that Lyn was ever introduced to, and - like every other skill Lyn realized he needed to acquire in his life - he picked it up fast. He rapidly became one of the premiere fuckasses of any board he visited, having plenty of time between city runs to be as vocal and insulting as anyone. He didn't even have a lusus to feed; he could argue people hoarse all damn night if he felt like it. He made virtually no friends this way, and it taught him all the wrong things about getting along with other trolls(except, perhaps, if he's looking to inspire kismessitude), but it was still more than he'd ever had before.
Cue a few more sweeps passing, and Lyn first heard mention of a game called sGrub. It was going to be big, it was going to be popular, everyone was going to be playing it - Lyn decided he wanted in. He promptly went out and stole copies of the game - both server and client - and found someone on an sGrub forum who needed a partner to connect with. And that's how, entirely inadvertently, Lyn wound up in the Medium, dropped into the Land of Cliffs and Concrete confused as hell and left to the whims of some troll he barely knew.
Lyn's land was hardly welcoming, being a barren desert broken up only by ruined buildings and jagged cliffs leading to equally barren plateaus - all of which were being constantly and thoroughly bleached by a vicious, unsetting sun. Lyn's consorts weren't any more pleasant, being troll-sized and (perhaps understandably) surly cockroaches who hid in the dark cliff crevices and ruined structures of LOCAC - anywhere there was darkness, of which there really isn't much. The quest of his land is to Bring The Night - to extinguish the brutal daylight his land is cursed with and usher in an endless night of cockroach partying. Lyn won't have accomplished this by the time he gets pulled to Vox, as he needs god tier abilities to create enough darkness to cover the sky, and as such his land did little more than confuse and frustrate him.
His session didn't get much easier or more understandable from there. In the players' rush to coordinate with each other and to complete their chain, Lyn lost track of his kernelsprite until after he'd entered the Medium. When he was reunited with it, he made a highly startling and not entirely pleasant discovery - it had already been prototyped once, without any input on his part. Unbeknownst to everyone - especially Lyn - Lyndis' own ancestor had still been alive while their session had been starting up. Through a series of events both scandalous and improbable, the Saboteur had, centuries ago, been kismeses with the very royalblood he served in the fleet, one who had extended his lifespan to match her own shortly before a minor lowblood uprising led to her death. (Whether she lengthened his life out of affection or malice, not even the Saboteur could say.) Fleeing the lowbloods who would happily have killed her survicerator servant, the Saboteur had taken to hiding in the one place he expected no adult troll to ever look - back on their home planet. Though he hid in solitude, he continued his scouting and information-gathering on Alternia purely as a force of habit, something to occupy the long sweeps with...and so, eventually, discovered the existence of his own descendant, with their similarities being too obvious for him to ignore. In observing him, as well as keeping an ear to the ground in regards to current events in general, the Saboteur had learned of sGrub, as well as the occasional rumor that it would destroy the world. With a born survicerator's determination to stay alive at any cost, he resolved to involve himself in his descendant's session by any means necessary to ensure his own survival, and intentionally prototyped himself with Lyn's sprite to that end.
Being unexpectedly saddled with his own ancestor in the form of a sprite, who readily harassed and critiqued him at every opportunity, did very little for Lyn's temper. (Though the double prototyping of the bones of Lyn's lusus did instill the Saboteur with both more of a paternal instinct for Lyn and a general sense of playfulness that improved their relations somewhat.) Despite their rocky relationship, however, the Saboteur's centuries of practical experience and keen tactical mind served Lyn far better than almost any other prototyping option could have. This was quite fortunate, too, since his ancestor's prototyping - and remarkably similar psionic abilities to Lyn's own - led to Lyn having to face scores of frequently invisible imps.
Lyn's session was an exceedingly unusual one far beyond the unique circumstances of his own ancestor being prototyped; in fact, every troll in his session wound up, either by accident or design, prototyping their ancestor into their sprite...though, of course, most of these involved prototyping remains and not their living flesh and blood. (Which led, among other things, to an embarrasingly pitch reunion between Saboteursprite and the sprite of his royalblood kismesis, as her own descendant was part of Lyn's session.) A session that had prototyped trolls - especially given that Lyn's session was heavily lowblooded - made for imps with quite a few powerful psionic abilities, to say nothing of weapons; their Black King was already shaping up to be incredibly formidable, easily balancing out their high-functioning sprites.
At the time ELIOS pulled Lyn from his session, quite a few things were happening at once. Their Space player had just finished breeding their frogs; the Black King was poised to begin the Reckoning at any moment; oh, and one of their players - a lowblood, oddly enough - had gone completely insane and was seeking to murder the other players...starting with Lyn, if only because he was judged the slipperiest. (Fortunately, her killing spree is destined to only be partially successful; many of the trolls in their session are destined to ascend to god tier, with most of the ascensions being the direct consequence of the very murders she commits.) The soon-to-be murderess had been on the verge of killing Lyn as he slept on his quest bed - a standard paranoid precaution of his, suggested to him by his ancestorsprite - while his dream self innocently explored Derse.
At this point, he was pulled into the Vox systems, where he's been living for the past several months. In that time he camped out in the woods, nearly starved, lost his virginity, became matesprits with a highblood(much to his own surprise), made a best friend, and very reluctantly began living in a crowded building with other trolls at his matesprit's request. Of course, if he was afraid to live in a crowded building, Cypher is going to overwhelm his nerves to the point where he simply explodes.