Name: Dove
Age: 21+
Contact: PM this journal
Other Characters: N/A
Interests: Laura's particular brand of fuckeduppedness ensures that she stays interesting for both action-oriented and socially oriented threads (for me, at least!). So, to be honest, I'm hoping to play a little of both of those and see if we can get her someplace a little more functional than she starts out.


Name: Laura Kint (Kinney--but that doesn't sound all that Nevarran, based on what we know about the region)
Canon: X-Men
Journal: justashotaway
Race: Human
Nationality: Nevarran
Occupation: Point her in a direction, and she'll stab for you
Division: Forces
Mage or Not: Not
Age: ~16-17

History

Original history - relevant through the end of NYX

• Conceived by a Nevarran woman, Sarra Kint, with a man Laura knows nothing about. Sarra saw the child as an opportunity for study and experimentation. Her colleague, Alexander Reis, saw the potential to create an assassin he'd never have to pay, to defend his social position.

• Raised primarily in a locked wing of a country estate in Nevarra with the unlikely moniker of X-23 (number your experiments, kids) and given only minimal affection and attention.

• Raised with the intent that she'd learn tactical thought, major languages from the continent, and various fighting techniques. Sarra was in charge of the more academic learning, and on occasion, she'd slip in a fairy tale.

• Reis experimented with variations on the contents of a confusion grenade as a kind of backup plan, in case X-23 refused to obey--the goal was to confound and enrage her enough that she'd fight indiscriminately. He tested it at one of X-23's fencing lessons, where she murdered her fencing master as a resut.

• Reis also experimented on her with lyrium, most notably by grafting it to bones in her hands and feet. She became able to manifest magical claws, with the side effect of a minor healing factor and improved sense of smell.

• Taken out to assassinate starting around age eleven. Small targets first, eventually moving up to people Reis actually wanted dead.

• At fourteen, found out through her mother that Reis was planning to attempt this again and had simply not yet acquired a new infant to begin with. In the estate's ballroom, X-23 stabbed Reis to death, but not before he threw a grenade. When she calmed, X-23 discovered she'd murdered her mother as well--and in looking, panicked, through the estate for coin for an escape, she found a letter to her in Sarra's things. It verified that the girl she'd called X-23 was her daughter and that she'd wanted to name her Laura.

• Found her way to the streets of Cumberland, where she was taken in by a man called Deepstalker and forced into prostitution for men who wanted pain.

• Befriended another human girl, Kiden, on the streets--homeless, though not a prostitute. Deepstalker, who saw her as a threat to his hold on his most profitable girl, attacked her, and Laura killed him.

• Left Cumberland quickly out of fear of the authorities. Made her way to Kirkwall and the Inquisition.

Personality

Laura has spent a lifetime under the thumb of others, and it shows in everything she does. She's a good soldier, in many ways: she thinks of the world in terms of missions and objectives, listens to the orders her superiors give her, and almost never argues their validity. If she's been told to kill somebody or destroy property or do reconnaissance on a group of people, she'll go for it without question. She's an observant girl, clever, with knowledge of a variety of languages and some ability to take care of herself if she's thrown into unusual circumstances.

There are a couple of problems with that Ideal Minion, however. She struggles with making her own choices--even her approach to getting dressed in the morning is borrowed from somebody else. While that's good when you want to point her in a direction and tell her to stab, it's bad if you need her to do a lot of improvisation. She'll think literally and only in service of the mission, in that case, which can be detrimental; if there's an opportunity to blow up a building and destroy everyone she's supposed to destroy, she'll be inclined to do it, even if it risks allies' lives.

The most serious issue, however, is that she doesn't want to be someone's good soldier--or their dangerous lay, for that matter. She wants to be a person, and she doesn't know how. To borrow from her OOC creators, Laura's a greatsword trying to become a real girl.

Here's where we say that she is a person simply by nature of existing and all that feel-good stuff, but she's not the person she wants to be. Put simply, Laura's awkward. Frequently silent, terse and formal when she does speak, she doesn't know how smalltalk works or what's appropriate to say when attempting it. When she makes the attempt, it's based on observing others.

She struggles to identify and understand emotions besides anger and pain. She can take a stab wound and keep slicing--that's her job--but she has minimal resiliency when it comes to interpersonal relations. Jealousy, embarrassment, self-consciousness, guilt...where other people learned to handle minor expressions of these emotions as children, Laura is completely unequipped. She turns to self-injury to process every unhappy thing she's unfamiliar with--pain and punishment, she understands, and using her claws on herself transforms something like I like a boy and he kissed a different girl into something manageable.

Someday, she wants to be the kind of person other people are: moving effortlessly through conversations over supper and lounging elegantly on chaises. It's going to take effort, though, and a great deal of growth.

Opinions & Affiliations

The Chantry: Doesn't believe in the Maker or have any meaningful experience with the Chantry outside of references in philosophical texts on war. Finds stained glass pretty.

The Qun: Knows very little about it.

Mages: Distrustful as a rule, but willing to overlook that if someone otherwise seems worthwhile.

Nevarran mages: Significantly more distrustful.

The Mage/Templar War: Knows very little about it, to be honest. Not at all opposed to mage oversight, not clear on the value of templarhood.

Other Races: Familiar with elves and dwarves, less so with qunari. Much more likely to commit microaggressions than anything notably hateful.

Adaptation Notes

For Laura, I needed a setting where people with access to science and/or magic would have the capital, social and otherwise, to be able to do lowkey experimentation in their basements--but I wanted this to be a situation of "similar ideas re:lyrium popping up in multiple places" rather than "the same jerk who experimented on Fenris experimented on Laura." So I chose to make her Nevarran. Making her human was the easiest way to ensure that if someone, someday, was like oh, yeah, I could play Logan here, he could be whatever race they preferred. (Then it just turns out she's elf- or dwarfblooded instead of 100% human.) Her abilities are no longer inborn, but they're still singular and still deeply wound up in her childhood trauma. I also massaged some dates around to give her a little more time to learn stuff at Reis' manor.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths:
• Lyrium-laced bones, specifically along her hands, feet, and lower arms and legs
• Some healing factor
• Excellent sense of smell
• Can self-direct a bit
• Obedient
• Skilled fighter using swords or fists (or sword-fists)
• Fluent in Nevarran, Trade, and Orlesian. Reasonably good with Antivan and Tevene, though her accent is much more noticeably Nevarran.

Weaknesses:
• Poorly socialized
• In urgent need of therapy
• Can't self-direct a lot
• The emotional understanding of a potted plant
• Ruthless, blunt
• Incredibly lonely, though she doesn't realize it
• Might not be able to go back to Nevarra

Inventory

The clothes on her back, the lyrium in her hands and feet. That's about it.

Motivation

Rumors regarding the Inquisition abounded when Laura was in Cumberland. Her image of it was of a powerful organization, one that could protect its members--and when she needed to leave Nevarra in a hurry, it seemed like the only option available.



sample 1, sample 2