Coraline Finch

OOC INFORMATION

Player Name: Maniette
Are you over 18?: 28!
Contact: Maniette
Other Characters in Game: NA

IC INFORMATION

Character Name: Coraline Finch (born Danielle Renee Finch)
Canon: Changeling: The Lost
Canon Point: Four months after escaping from Arcadia
Background: Changeling: The Lost is set in a world very much like reality - all the pop cultural trappings and general references thereof included, functionally it's just like real life, except for the existence of semi-eldritch monsters known as Fae that live in an off-shoot reality called Arcadia, and traverse the bridge between Arcadia and the real world called the Hedge to emerge and kidnap innocent people. Or not-innocent ones; whoever catches their fancy, for some reason or another.

Coraline - or Danielle, was one of the former; a completely normal and innocent person, who had no idea magic was actually real, just like the rest of the mortal population. She was just a regular kid who grew up in Melbourne, Australia, with her mum and dad. Admittedly that was still tense, with lots of arguments between them that they thought Danielle didn't overhear; but when she was eight and a half, her parents finally got properly divorced, and she switched houses every two weeks, between her mum's lavish house and fancy car that she won in the divorce, and her dad's small one-bedroom apartment and third-hand work car. Danielle eventually started spending more time at her mum's house, reluctant to leave between being horribly guilted by her mum over loving her dad more and needing to prove it, and her mum organising all of her activities to be in her affluent area so it became a chore for her dad to have her over. When he tried fighting for more honest custody, Danielle's mum pulled the rug out from under him and got his custody revoked completely with only limited visitation around Danielle's eleventh birthday. Kicked in the teeth by the defeat, and with Danielle firmly under her mother's thumb, her dad moved away to Canberra; the last thing he did before he left was give Danielle her birthday present - an expensive Pandora bracelet filled with charms of her interests.

And at that point the abuse from Danielle's mum turned extreme - no physical assault, but intense emotional neglect and abuse, and severe gaslighting to make the poor girl believe that it was her own fault. Danielle tried bearing with it, and did her best to convince herself she still loved her mum and things were okay.

Until she was fourteen, and her mum slapped her.

That was Danielle's last straw - she'd internalised at least one thing from her dad, and that was that parents don't hit their kids. She didn't wait to try and pack her shit - she just ran out the door, with no other plan besides away from her mum. Which is how she ran directly into the arms of a handsome stranger; one who literally wiped away the bruise on her face, told her she was too beautiful to ever be struck again, and how would she like to come with him to a place where she would always be adored and treated like a princess. And fourteen-year-old, scared and upset and enchanted Danielle said yes.

The man, who she never learned the true name of (though He had several titles: The Serpent's Fangs, Dignitary of the Huntsman, Crucis Venator), kept her safe from harm, close by His side and true to His word, warm, safe and loved. But Danielle started to become wary, when she slowly realised that she never felt hungry or thirsty by His side; realised how the small army of huntsmen and hunting beasts and other retainers her Keeper always had around seemed to always be a little too ready to please Him (and looked a little bit too human, in all the wrong ways); how whenever their Keeper laughed everyone followed suit; and how when one retainer was too slow to respond, her Keeper went silent and simply raised His hand - and the man turned into a stag and fled, too slow to escape being torn to utter shreds by the hunting dogs for sport, and his pieces left scattered in the path.

Then one day, her Keeper found a new favourite, and Danielle was shunted aside. Oh, he never hurt her, and still kept the still-a-child in His immediate, intimate attention, like He promised, but now she realised it was safer to be unseen, to fly under His radar and make sure she never drew attention. She learned to blend in with the plants surrounding them in their traipses through the Hedge and to turn as insubstantial as a sunbeam when she recognised His blank-faced fury for what it was; and so she survived, always prepared for the moment when He got bored or angry at her next.

There was no warning when it actually happened: one of the Huntsman, their Keeper's most powerful and His personal confidante, rebelled and struck out at his fellows, and started a wild battle for survival. Danielle acted in almost the same moment he did, stealing a tray from another retainer and slamming it into their Keeper's face. It was just enough distraction to keep him from killing the Rebellious Huntsman, and in return the Huntsman grabbed her as he fled, dragging the child in tow in their wild escape back into the real world, arriving by sheer luck in a nature reserve in Canberra.

But time passes differently in Arcadia and the real world: Danielle had been Taken for some ten years, but only three has passed in reality. And her first instinct, when she realised where they were, was to find her dad's house and see him again. But when she rocked up to his new house with its nice new car, torn up and bloodied and scared and accompanied by a hulking behemoth of a man missing one arm, her dad didn't even wait for her to explain before he pulled her in for a hug and broke down crying. It turned out he'd known, even with the near-flawless simulacrum her Keeper had left behind, and tried to find her once, but had been saved from his own recklessness by Danielle's own doppelganger. He took Danielle, and the Huntsman in, and they've all been living together since. And Danielle picked a new name: Coraline, like the other little girl who found herself in a horrifying new world.

After some time spent recuperating and adjusting, Coraline and the Huntsman - Hunter, now - went to present Coraline to the Seasonal Courts, for formal induction into Changeling society. Hunter had long since been accepted by the Spring Court, despite the Summer King trying to convince him otherwise; but Hunter used the goodwill earned from the King's favour towards him to get Coraline a meeting with him. This ended... poorly. Not only because the King, Captain Slipstream, immediately dismissed Coraline as too scrawny and weak to be a proper member of the Court of Wrath: but because after their failed meeting, Coraline slipped away from Hunter's careful eye and attacked Slipstream in his private quarters to prove her strength - and the only reason she didn't get killed for it was one of Slipstream's generals coming at the sound of the commotion and literally pulled Coraline out of danger. She was still horrifically beaten up, but even in defeat she was still struggling to escape the general's grip and go back for more. Though as she was being carried away from the scene by Hunter to go get healed, Summer had already noticed, and granted her its Mantle to mark her as a formal member of the Court. Even if no-one knew it.

Shortly after that, since she then had a warrant on her head for attacking a prominent Changeling political figure, her father signed her up for secondary school to keep her safe and busy, and that is where she is coming from: detention, after beating up another girl.

Suitability: Changeling: The Lost is an inherently dark and traumatic setting, with plentiful references and acting-out of all kinds of abuse, trauma and explicit suffering and harm. Coraline herself has suffered not only domestic abuse, but the ongoing emotional and magical abuse from the time spent under her Keeper's control.

More though, Coraline is a very driven person with a wild moral compass and no clue where she's going with it. She's passionate and nosy and a hundred percent willing to throw in with whatever’s going on, so long as she gets a thrill from it. Furthermore, she actively seeks out power, either to gain it for herself or to work out how to get whoever has it to work with her so she can make use of it herself; and she's young and inexperienced enough still that consequences are, by and large, things that happen to other people, so she's consistently unprepared for the fallout of her massive actions, which I'm excited to play with and see how it affects her.

Powers: As a Changeling Coraline has a number of magical spells known as Contracts that are powered by emotional energy she harvests, known as Glamour. A full list of game mechanics for her powers can be found here, but in summary--
The contracts Coraline currently has access to are:

- Elemental Weapon: Collect an element and turn it into an archaic weapon, such as fiery gauntlets, watery daggers, lightning lances - all of which deliver bonus damage compared to a mundane version thereof. Coraline can also make weapons out of shadows, that can fully blind her target for a brief period.
- Fae Cunning: Coraline's skin becomes as hard as petrified wood. She can dodge attacks with magical, effortless ease - and if something does land, the weapon takes damage as well as her.
- High Summer's Zeal: When an opponent attacks her, she can magically compel them to stay and fight despite their own wishes. It takes a massive amount of willpower (as in, this is a game mechanic that would exhaust the opponent mentally) for the opponent to back down and stop fighting her.
- Elemental Fury: Scream at the heavens and summon an environmental effect in a 20m diameter: this can include blizzards, earthquakes, extreme heat or cold, floods, heavy rain or winds, or an inferno. Coraline is unharmed by the effects of this contract, but can't extend that immunity.
- Unravel the Tapestry: Rewind the last few actions taken (for fairness sake, maybe up to 4 tags); everyone reacts the same except for Coraline, who can move upon reset and act differently. Activates automatically if she takes a fatal blow, but only once a season; otherwise she can choose to activate it whenever she wants, and as long as any other damage she takes isn't lethal it will be soft reset. (She can only use it a maximum of five times before she's mentally exhausted due to the heavy toll of time travel on a mortal mind, and that's if she doesn't use other Contracts or have any pre-existing mental strain.)
- Uncanny: A goblin contract, which grants her the ability to be uncannily good at something she's not otherwise skilled in, or make her more skilled at something she is. This racks up a magical debt against her, which manifests as magically reduced chances of success in any other skill at a random point, or a random status condition that directly impedes whatever task she was trying to perform. If too much debt is incurred, this can become a permanent side effect, but unless you guys want to track her debt I'll be monitoring this myself.

Other non-spell skills include:
- Trained Observer: Coraline is used to staring at people and very quick to pick up on important information in a scene, and is excellent at reading the mood in a room (and then choosing to ignore it).
- Seizing the Edge: Always ready for a situation to turn against her, Coraline is skilled at taking the initiative in a combat scene and is always one of the first to move in a chase scene.
- Fast Talking: She can put on airs of a chatty and intense teenager when needed, and can talk circles around people when she wants to.
- Sympathetic: And in the other direction, she can play a fantastic wounded gazelle gambit to get other people to protect her.
- Improvised Weapon: Coraline has plentiful experience taking mundane or random items and using them as weapons, and can also use them as shields against harm no matter how improbable. She can always make the most out of any random item she grabs to attack with.

And her other magical abilities include:

- Glamour. Emotional energy that she can recover by harmlessly harvesting (or, harmfully, by reaping) the emotional energy of other 'intelligent beings with emotions'. Supernatural creatures will give her strange Glamour, on a case-by-case basis. As she is technically a Summer courtier, she gets double the amount for harvesting someone else's Anger. Functionally this serves as mana for her Contracts and the below abilities. If she was ever to run out
- Summer Mantle: While she's not strictly aware that she has this, Coraline always smells like rainbow Paddle Pops, and can use this to intimidate or cow other people when she makes an intimidation check.
- Pledge Sealing. Fate and Wyrd wrap strangely around Changelings - Coraline can use this to hold other people to promises they make, even non-serious or incidental ones (for example, "I'll kick his ass" is as valid as "I swear I'll always protect you" or "Next one's on me"), with repercussions based on the scale of the promise made: these can be as mild as a bruise, a minor penalty to perform a skill, or a minor supernatural effect such as bad luck or a reversed reflection; but if Coraline puts willpower and Glamour into the pledge, the effects can be more severe - an actual injury, a severe penalty to skills, or the activation of a Contract against the victim. Furthermore, regardless of the seal level, Coraline and the victim will both know when the promise is broken or unable to be fulfilled.
- Oneiromancy: Changelings are all skilled lucid dreamers, and are able to investigate the dreams of other people as well. Using Glamour, she's able to drag other sleeping people she's in contact with in the waking world into lucid dreaming, and while in the dreams of other people she can implant subliminal messages or access repressed or secret memories, with some effort.
- Bedlam: Anyone within sensory range of Coraline (including witnessing her on camera or through other filters) when she incites Bedlam is susceptible to being completely overtaken by whatever emotion she's channeling and act according to it - Wanton for desire, Competitive for wrath, Frightened for fear and Lethargic for sorrow. Magical characters have a higher chance to resist or realise this is a magical compulsion, but mundane people who get affected would justify it as their own emotions in the moment, and only realise after it wears off that it may have been strange or out of character for them to act like such. This can also be incited involuntarily by Coraline, but means she has no control over which emotion people feel.
- Escape Artist: Changelings are very difficult to be kept locked up when they don't want to be. Coraline can reflexively use Glamour to escape any bonds or cages, so long as they're not made of iron. If it's another person or magical bonds holding her, it becomes a contest to see who wins. This functions independently to her Blessings below, as a default Changeling trait.
- Seeming Blessing: As a Darkling, Coraline can touch something insubstantial - a shadow, or a sunbeam, or motes of dust in the air - and disappear, turning into the same substance for a brief period. If someone is watching her while she does this, it takes Glamour; otherwise, merely willpower.
- Kith Blessing: And as a Dryad, she is able to hide in plain sight against trees and large bushes, and move around if she's careful. She also is extremely adept at finding paths and tracking people, thanks to an instinctive understanding of forests and plant life. This applies even in supernatural woodlands, since she is also supernatural.
- The Mask: Not strictly a power but worth noting also is her Mask and Mien. Her Mask is a powerful illusion that makes her look human to all senses, including smell and touch - while there are some small pieces of her true self that manifest in the Mask - her hair feels waxy like damp leaves, for example - there's no major outward indication to anyone that meets her that she's anything more than a mundane human person, and it can't be seen through by mundane eyes or modern technology. The exception to this rule is other Changeling or Fae creatures, or anything else that has specifically supernatural means of looking through illusions, or other seemingly arbitrary criteria (I'll be setting up a permissions page for this). Likewise, she can also see through other creatures magical illusions in the same way they can see through hers. She can choose to spend a point of Glamour to drop her Mask for a scene, revealing her true self; but this also causes any magical gateways within 10 yards of her to open automatically when she does.

Furthermore, Coraline is particularly vulnerable to fire damage, and is thus somewhat pyrophobic. As well, iron is a massive inherent weakness due to her being a Fae creature: her Contracts and other Changeling skills explicitly don't work on iron, and she will suffer immediate low-grade damage upon touching any.

PERSONALITY QUESTIONS

Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them. Her mother and father getting divorced. While her father was mostly able to mitigate the damage Coraline's toxic mother was inadvertently doing when they were together, upon divorcing and moving out there was no-one to stop her mother's increasingly unhealthy behaviour and the ways it affected Coraline. Her mother was openly, constantly dismissing, berating and yelling at her, making the household so hostile that Coraline's friends started refusing to come over, if their parents didn't outright ban them; her mother also refused to spend money on Coraline where she could, or destroyed her clothes as punishments, resulting in Coraline becoming socially ostracized by her peers due to always looking tattered, neglected and tired; her own behaviour began changing, resulting in her becoming demure, constantly panicky and clamming up when people raised their voices around her, resulting in her being a constant target of bullying. It wasn't until her mother actually slapped her that Coraline realised what she was going through was abuse, but by that point she'd already fled her mother's house and gotten captured by her Keeper, making the realisation come far too late.

Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by? Coraline follows a pretty simple motto: Power is strength is power. The only way to get what you want and to protect yourself in life is with a willingness to commit to whatever part you need to play in order order make someone give it to you; or, failing that, massive acts of violence. Her philosophy is defined heavily by the strict emotional abuse her mother put her through, by all of her mother's problems being her fault, and she did her best to play her part as the perfect daughter to make her mother happy and receive the affection she desired, and to a limited extent this worked, a little. She mastered this mentality thanks to her Durance and learning to behave perfectly under her Keeper to stay alive, but it was violence at the last second that guaranteed her freedom.

What quality or qualities do they admire most? Strength, above all else. She was rescued by a Huntsman who tore his own arm off to save them both from fae hunting beasts, she was nearly killed by the Summer King because she wasn't strong enough to defeat him but he overpowered her easily. She's convinced that violence and brute force are a valid path to further her goals, and while her own attempts thereof have consistently failed so far she's seen other people pull it off just fine, so clearly it works. She's just not good enough. However, that's not the end of the world: Power thrives, but pathetic survives, in her words. If she can't out-muscle someone, she's prepared to be an absolute little suck-up in order to get their support and under their guard, so she can take what she wants at a later point in time. This is not a plan without its flaws, however, especially with her limited tolerance for boredom and short patience, but she acknowledges it as her second-best plan.

Do they have a part of themselves they dislike? As much as she's also willing to exploit the fact in how other people react to her, Coraline loathes her own weakness. She'll swear that she just means being a physically weak, small and skinny fourteen year old, but it actually runs a lot deeper: she suffered through many years of parental abuse that she is convinced now she should have been able able to fight back against, her Keeper "only" took her because she had a massive "moment of weakness" after her mother slapped her, and she's spent almost a decade stuck in the mindset of a child while trapped in a nightmarish Durance where any mistakes would get her literally torn to shreds. All of this has twisted into a deep, ugly thorn of self-loathing in her heart that she doesn't know how to remove, so she makes it everyone else's problem instead.

What is their sign, and why? Tower! Coraline is coming into herself as an angry little punk, and is quick to retaliate against slights against her - for example, the Summer King denying her an audience because he thought she was scrawny and useless resulted almost immediately in her launching a sneak attack against him. She actually gets fortified by throwing herself into combat and scrapes, regardless of whether she succeeds in them, and while she's not necessarily skilled at applying it yet, she's very observant and quick to notice things that can be exploited in order to cause more chaos.

SAMPLES & ARRIVAL

Samples: A toplevel with 9+ Coraline comments and a thread with 6 more.

Arrival Scenario: Imprisoned! As discussed on the FAQ, she will still have her Mask and Mantle, as these are passive skills. As well, any extended contact with iron will visibly begin to damage her, and whenever manacles are removed she will have obvious first-degree burns.

Name: Hunter Duke (prev. Atticus Barrymore)
Age: 46. Spent close to 14 years in Arcadia while 30 passed outside.

Attributes:

Social:



Abilities:


Lost Template:


Contracts:
Shield

Crown

Summer


Merits: