Anafiel Delaunay de Montreve (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
youandyoualone) wrote2017-07-15 03:54 pm
youandyoualone) wrote2017-07-15 03:54 pm
Entry tags:
syn app wip help i have lost control of my life
P L A Y E R;
NAME: bii
AGE: SO OLD like 35 now
PLAYER JOURNAL:biichan
TIMEZONE: PST
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
obiisama
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Thorne, Maria (smol), Chie; formerly, Byerly and Luke
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Anafiel Delaunay de Montreve
CANON: Kushiel's Dart et sequelae
POINT IN CANON: his death
AGE: about 40
APPEARANCE: Look, he's d'Angeline, so even at pushing forty he's hot stuff. Long russet auburn hair threaded with silver, grey eyes flecked with topaz, that d'Angeline uncanny symmetry, and his features have been described as austere and noble. Mostly wears a resting bitchface expression when dealing with people.
CANON HISTORY: Wiki article, even though it doesn't cover anything past pre-canon, mostly summarizing his short story. Once we reach canon, he's around for chapters 3 through 36 of Kushiel's Dart, the summaries of which are linked in the book’s page.
CANON PERSONALITY: Before we start off, I want to mention that so much of my characterization of Anafiel Delaunay comes from You, And You Alone aka The Story of How I Fucked Up A Lot, A Dying Meditation by Anafiel Delaunay. It’s is pretty much the only part of canon where we get to see Anafiel from his own point of view instead of Phedre’s (directly in her books or indirectly in the case of the Imriel books) or history’s. And while Phedre has always represented him as being noble and wise and nigh-infallible, Delaunay through his own eyes is a living study of a lifetime of making rash decisions--and that, I think, makes him a lot more interesting.
Okay. So. I think the first thing we have to talk about in regards to Anafiel Delaunay de Montreve is the man’s mind, because he’s pretty damn intelligent and creative. He has a gift for poetry and during his youth he was reckoned a prodigy. He ended up going off to the University in Tiberium when he reached his eighteenth year, which means that he’s actually super well educated as well. His knowledge base pretty damn vast too, which is borne out when he takes one look at Phedre’s eyes and immediately recognizes she’s an anguisette, which nobody else been able to do.
He’s observant too and he can think on his feet. He always could, even before he got his leet spy training from Maestro Gonzago--although said spy training helped him learn how to be very sneaky and also honed his powers of observation to a ridiculous level. It also taught him to lie better and to manipulate people--and what he didn’t learn from the Unseen Guild on that subject, he learned from Melisande. Thanks to her and the Unseen Guild, he’s adept at using people, sometimes ruthlessly so, and capable of hardening his heart to the necessity of it.
And he does consider it necessary in order to honor the oath he made to his beloved Rolande: to protect Rolande’s daughter, Ysandre, and do what he can to secure her happiness. Anafiel holds that promise sacred, working to do so until quite literally his death. His protege, Phedre, upholds that oath in his place after his murder.
Anafiel swore that oath because he loved Rolande de la Courcel and when Anafiel Delaunay loves, he loves deeply, thoroughly, and with great devotion. This was, in fact, not the first oath he swore in earnest to Rolande: earlier, he also swore himself to Rolande and Rolande alone so long as they both lived, knowing that Rolande could not reciprocate and not regretting it, even though it lead to his disinheritance. He kept that oath, too, until Rolande’s death and even when Rolande’s death freed him from that oath and he threw himself into a period of debauchery to deal with his grief, he still only dallied with women. He died with Rolande’s name on his lips. In the near twenty years after Rolande’s death, there was only other man he took as a lover.
That man--still in many ways a boy, really--was Alcuin no Delaunay, the first of his two pupils, the second of which was Phedre no Delaunay. His beautiful boy and his god-touched girl, he thought of them, his students, wards and heirs. He loved them too in his way. Although he never married and sired no children, Phedre was in many ways a near-daughter to him. Alcuin was a more complicated matter, but to Anafiel their late-blooming romantic affection was quite literally one of the few good, sweet things at the end of his bitter life. When they became lovers, something relaxed in him for the first time in years.
Not that Anafiel wasn’t at least partially responsible for the bitterness of his life. If Anafiel Delaunay has a fatal flaw, it is his propensity for making rash as fuck decisions in moments of high emotion, especially in anger or deep melancholy. Nearly all the significant events of his adult life have come about because of his rash decisions. His last minute decision to frame himself as a ‘soldier-poet’ wins him Rolande’s attention and affection. Composing the song where he labels Isabel L’Envers as a murderer gets his works rendered anathema. Telling Melisande about the Unseen Guild during one of his moods of black despair leads to her actually joining them, which probably really fucking helped her with all her scheming in the years to come. Good job, Anafiel.
Speaking of which, that ‘black mood’ was by no means an isolated incident. Anafiel is prone to such things, fits of deep melancholy that render him irritable, especially sharped tongued and generally unfit for polite company. (Not that he doesn’t have a sharp tongue even out of the black mood.) These days he generally tries to withdraw if possible and try to ride them out without self-sabotaging himself even further. Probably one of the greater contributors to these black moods is his knowledge of how much he’s fucked up over the years. One of the more delightful discoveries (for me) from Y&YA is learning that Anafiel Delaunay was very much self-aware of all the ways that he fucked everything up. How he fucked up his own life. How he fucked up Alcuin’s life without meaning to. How he’s probably fucked things up for Phedre and how he doesn’t know if she’s alive or dead. More than even Barquiel L’Envers, the one who hates Anafiel Delaunay the very most of all is himself.
Also, he hates it when people cry in front of him. It makes him super uncomfortable, very few exceptions.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: n/a
VETERAN?: Not exactly, but he was around for the fourth wall event when Jules broke Liminal Space. I’ll be handwaving a dungeon rescue for him with Megan.Also, it might be nice if he got to take a 0-level skill to represent his time in the fourth wall, however. I know for a fact I did at least 45 comments with him in that time period. If it’s allowed, I’d probably want to take Sensory Livestream.
ABILITIES: Anafiel does not have any fantastical abilities. His mundane abilities include riding horses, fighting with swords, managing his household and finances, being a courtier, speaking multiple foreign languages (Cruithne, Caerdicci, also Skaldi I believe), having a university education, writing excellent poetry that he's not allowed to publish, and spying/teaching people to spy. He got his spy training from the Unseen Guild. Oh and while his sexytimes skills are nothing compared to Alcuin or Phedre, he did get d’Angeline sex ed and he did spend a lot of time in the Night Court the year after Rolande died, so he’s got a pretty good grasp on How To Be Good At Sex.
INVENTORY: He had nothing but his much-stabbed clothes when he died/ended up at the fourth wall; during that fourth wall he got something to wear without holes. He quite possibly has a modern pen upon his person. Modern pens are amazing ok ok. Post-it notes are also amazing. He might have had some of those too upon his person. BUT THAT IS PRETTY MUCH ALL.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? I am not a genius spymaster and I'm going to deal with not being one by Infiltrating Anafiel every time I can. As far as CR overlapping goes, I figure that handwaving has so far stood me in good stead with Thorne and Maria (and the fourth wall in general.)
M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION: Sadly, my number-one best Arcana for Anafiel Delaunay, the one that most encompasses the dumpster fire of his life, TOWER, lost its match and cannot claim him. So we’ll just put down some other options that might work.
MAGICIAN - Focus, determination, initiative… Anafiel Delaunay has the Magician’s qualities in spades. He’s also creative, having been a very good poet once, before he publicly slandered (is it slander if it’s probably true?) the Dauphin’s betrothed and got himself forbidden from publishing anything again in his lifetime. Also, as far as manipulation goes, he’s probably got that down to an artform.
HERMIT - Perhaps not his strongest match, but it could work in a pinch. He did spend his dying moments looking inward and gaining a deeper understanding of his life. And to be a spymaster you have maintain a certain amount of distance yourself from things like emotion in order to clearly deploy your spies. Plus he could probably use some of Hermit’s influence.
JUSTICE - Analysis, curiosity, logic and reason, objective mind… all qualities needed by a spymaster. Not to mention the man’s strong personal sense of Justice, which got him in trouble with Isabel L’Envers. I mean, I’d have to get another mod to play her in conversation space, but Justice would definitely work if no others did.
DEATH -- Loss, conclusion, sadness, being caught in the unescapable, good-byes, finishing-up… Death could work for him. He’s had more than enough loss and sadness in his life and he’s a recently dead man as well. As someone whose narrated-by-him part of canon was basically about his life flashing before his eyes while dying, I think it also works in that way. And the whole new beginnings/change in the cycle would also work, since Syn would be one hell of a new beginning and he’s gone through a lot of changes in his life.
DEVIL -- A fairly decent match for him, actually. For one thing, Delaunay possesses a good deal of insight on how people tick. For another, he’s very passionate. He also has a fine understanding of the workings of lust, hedonism, temptation, sexuality and, yes, vice. (Given that he trained up a pair of spy courtesans, it’s only natural he would.) And yeah, I’d say he’s at least somewhat racist against Tsingani because he dismissed Hyacinth pretty much until he died.
VETO: Any of the ones who’ve claimed my current girls, please. (Priestess, Empress, Sun.) I know that’s technically three but oh well.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Various TDM threads will have to suffice
PROSE SAMPLE: Here is quite a lot of prose from the fourth wall last year for mysyns sins.
NAME: bii
AGE: SO OLD like 35 now
PLAYER JOURNAL:
biichanTIMEZONE: PST
CONTACT:
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Thorne, Maria (smol), Chie; formerly, Byerly and Luke
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Anafiel Delaunay de Montreve
CANON: Kushiel's Dart et sequelae
POINT IN CANON: his death
AGE: about 40
APPEARANCE: Look, he's d'Angeline, so even at pushing forty he's hot stuff. Long russet auburn hair threaded with silver, grey eyes flecked with topaz, that d'Angeline uncanny symmetry, and his features have been described as austere and noble. Mostly wears a resting bitchface expression when dealing with people.
CANON HISTORY: Wiki article, even though it doesn't cover anything past pre-canon, mostly summarizing his short story. Once we reach canon, he's around for chapters 3 through 36 of Kushiel's Dart, the summaries of which are linked in the book’s page.
CANON PERSONALITY: Before we start off, I want to mention that so much of my characterization of Anafiel Delaunay comes from You, And You Alone aka The Story of How I Fucked Up A Lot, A Dying Meditation by Anafiel Delaunay. It’s is pretty much the only part of canon where we get to see Anafiel from his own point of view instead of Phedre’s (directly in her books or indirectly in the case of the Imriel books) or history’s. And while Phedre has always represented him as being noble and wise and nigh-infallible, Delaunay through his own eyes is a living study of a lifetime of making rash decisions--and that, I think, makes him a lot more interesting.
Okay. So. I think the first thing we have to talk about in regards to Anafiel Delaunay de Montreve is the man’s mind, because he’s pretty damn intelligent and creative. He has a gift for poetry and during his youth he was reckoned a prodigy. He ended up going off to the University in Tiberium when he reached his eighteenth year, which means that he’s actually super well educated as well. His knowledge base pretty damn vast too, which is borne out when he takes one look at Phedre’s eyes and immediately recognizes she’s an anguisette, which nobody else been able to do.
He’s observant too and he can think on his feet. He always could, even before he got his leet spy training from Maestro Gonzago--although said spy training helped him learn how to be very sneaky and also honed his powers of observation to a ridiculous level. It also taught him to lie better and to manipulate people--and what he didn’t learn from the Unseen Guild on that subject, he learned from Melisande. Thanks to her and the Unseen Guild, he’s adept at using people, sometimes ruthlessly so, and capable of hardening his heart to the necessity of it.
And he does consider it necessary in order to honor the oath he made to his beloved Rolande: to protect Rolande’s daughter, Ysandre, and do what he can to secure her happiness. Anafiel holds that promise sacred, working to do so until quite literally his death. His protege, Phedre, upholds that oath in his place after his murder.
Anafiel swore that oath because he loved Rolande de la Courcel and when Anafiel Delaunay loves, he loves deeply, thoroughly, and with great devotion. This was, in fact, not the first oath he swore in earnest to Rolande: earlier, he also swore himself to Rolande and Rolande alone so long as they both lived, knowing that Rolande could not reciprocate and not regretting it, even though it lead to his disinheritance. He kept that oath, too, until Rolande’s death and even when Rolande’s death freed him from that oath and he threw himself into a period of debauchery to deal with his grief, he still only dallied with women. He died with Rolande’s name on his lips. In the near twenty years after Rolande’s death, there was only other man he took as a lover.
That man--still in many ways a boy, really--was Alcuin no Delaunay, the first of his two pupils, the second of which was Phedre no Delaunay. His beautiful boy and his god-touched girl, he thought of them, his students, wards and heirs. He loved them too in his way. Although he never married and sired no children, Phedre was in many ways a near-daughter to him. Alcuin was a more complicated matter, but to Anafiel their late-blooming romantic affection was quite literally one of the few good, sweet things at the end of his bitter life. When they became lovers, something relaxed in him for the first time in years.
Not that Anafiel wasn’t at least partially responsible for the bitterness of his life. If Anafiel Delaunay has a fatal flaw, it is his propensity for making rash as fuck decisions in moments of high emotion, especially in anger or deep melancholy. Nearly all the significant events of his adult life have come about because of his rash decisions. His last minute decision to frame himself as a ‘soldier-poet’ wins him Rolande’s attention and affection. Composing the song where he labels Isabel L’Envers as a murderer gets his works rendered anathema. Telling Melisande about the Unseen Guild during one of his moods of black despair leads to her actually joining them, which probably really fucking helped her with all her scheming in the years to come. Good job, Anafiel.
Speaking of which, that ‘black mood’ was by no means an isolated incident. Anafiel is prone to such things, fits of deep melancholy that render him irritable, especially sharped tongued and generally unfit for polite company. (Not that he doesn’t have a sharp tongue even out of the black mood.) These days he generally tries to withdraw if possible and try to ride them out without self-sabotaging himself even further. Probably one of the greater contributors to these black moods is his knowledge of how much he’s fucked up over the years. One of the more delightful discoveries (for me) from Y&YA is learning that Anafiel Delaunay was very much self-aware of all the ways that he fucked everything up. How he fucked up his own life. How he fucked up Alcuin’s life without meaning to. How he’s probably fucked things up for Phedre and how he doesn’t know if she’s alive or dead. More than even Barquiel L’Envers, the one who hates Anafiel Delaunay the very most of all is himself.
Also, he hates it when people cry in front of him. It makes him super uncomfortable, very few exceptions.
POINT OF DEPARTURE: n/a
VETERAN?: Not exactly, but he was around for the fourth wall event when Jules broke Liminal Space. I’ll be handwaving a dungeon rescue for him with Megan.
ABILITIES: Anafiel does not have any fantastical abilities. His mundane abilities include riding horses, fighting with swords, managing his household and finances, being a courtier, speaking multiple foreign languages (Cruithne, Caerdicci, also Skaldi I believe), having a university education, writing excellent poetry that he's not allowed to publish, and spying/teaching people to spy. He got his spy training from the Unseen Guild. Oh and while his sexytimes skills are nothing compared to Alcuin or Phedre, he did get d’Angeline sex ed and he did spend a lot of time in the Night Court the year after Rolande died, so he’s got a pretty good grasp on How To Be Good At Sex.
INVENTORY: He had nothing but his much-stabbed clothes when he died/ended up at the fourth wall; during that fourth wall he got something to wear without holes. He quite possibly has a modern pen upon his person. Modern pens are amazing ok ok. Post-it notes are also amazing. He might have had some of those too upon his person. BUT THAT IS PRETTY MUCH ALL.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? I am not a genius spymaster and I'm going to deal with not being one by Infiltrating Anafiel every time I can. As far as CR overlapping goes, I figure that handwaving has so far stood me in good stead with Thorne and Maria (and the fourth wall in general.)
M A R K S;
JUSTIFICATION: Sadly, my number-one best Arcana for Anafiel Delaunay, the one that most encompasses the dumpster fire of his life, TOWER, lost its match and cannot claim him. So we’ll just put down some other options that might work.
MAGICIAN - Focus, determination, initiative… Anafiel Delaunay has the Magician’s qualities in spades. He’s also creative, having been a very good poet once, before he publicly slandered (is it slander if it’s probably true?) the Dauphin’s betrothed and got himself forbidden from publishing anything again in his lifetime. Also, as far as manipulation goes, he’s probably got that down to an artform.
HERMIT - Perhaps not his strongest match, but it could work in a pinch. He did spend his dying moments looking inward and gaining a deeper understanding of his life. And to be a spymaster you have maintain a certain amount of distance yourself from things like emotion in order to clearly deploy your spies. Plus he could probably use some of Hermit’s influence.
JUSTICE - Analysis, curiosity, logic and reason, objective mind… all qualities needed by a spymaster. Not to mention the man’s strong personal sense of Justice, which got him in trouble with Isabel L’Envers. I mean, I’d have to get another mod to play her in conversation space, but Justice would definitely work if no others did.
DEATH -- Loss, conclusion, sadness, being caught in the unescapable, good-byes, finishing-up… Death could work for him. He’s had more than enough loss and sadness in his life and he’s a recently dead man as well. As someone whose narrated-by-him part of canon was basically about his life flashing before his eyes while dying, I think it also works in that way. And the whole new beginnings/change in the cycle would also work, since Syn would be one hell of a new beginning and he’s gone through a lot of changes in his life.
DEVIL -- A fairly decent match for him, actually. For one thing, Delaunay possesses a good deal of insight on how people tick. For another, he’s very passionate. He also has a fine understanding of the workings of lust, hedonism, temptation, sexuality and, yes, vice. (Given that he trained up a pair of spy courtesans, it’s only natural he would.) And yeah, I’d say he’s at least somewhat racist against Tsingani because he dismissed Hyacinth pretty much until he died.
VETO: Any of the ones who’ve claimed my current girls, please. (Priestess, Empress, Sun.) I know that’s technically three but oh well.
S A M P L E S;
ACTIONSPAM SAMPLE: Various TDM threads will have to suffice
PROSE SAMPLE: Here is quite a lot of prose from the fourth wall last year for my