application – aefenglom.

[voktys]

Player Information
Name: Mina
Age: 25
Contact: PM & dracula#1035 & nehelenia
Other Characters: -/-

Character Information
Name: Melisandre
Canon: A Song of Ice and Fire
Canon Point: A Dance With Dragons, Chapter 31
Age: Physically, she appears to be in her early thirties or thereabouts, but she is definitely considerably older than that. The only book canon reference on the matter says that she's practiced magic for "years beyond count", so we're absolutely talking triple-digits, possibly in the 300-400 years range.
History: Here!

Personality:

Faith is what defines Melisandre the most. It began when she was sold to the Red Temple as a child slave –– a fate she considers a blessing, implying in her point of view chapter that anything that came before was worse –– and continues on as she spends the majority of her life within R'hllor's temples. It is unlikely she heard many, if any, dissenting opinions from what she was taught there until she was well into her adulthood, by which time she would have been a priestess in her own right. She considers herself 'chosen' and 'blessed' by the Lord of Light, and sees proof for his existence in her magical abilities.

She is dutiful and loyal until the end, but not to any mortal person – her own feelings don't matter to her, she is predominately a vessel for her god, and will do anything to see her purpose through to the end. It might hurt her, she is human at the end of the day, but if hurting is necessary, she won't shirk from it. This becomes apparent even on a physical level – when Rattleshirt, magically disguised as Mance Ryder, is burned at the stake, keeping up the glamour physically pains her as if she herself is burning, and she shows none of that on the outside, nor does she even for a moment consider dropping her deception.

In general, she views the world both through the eyes of someone who had, at one point, had nothing, but also through the lens of her religion. In the Faith of R'hllor, there is good, there is evil, and there is absolutely no moral grey area. Someone is either all good or all bad – and of course, as a priestess, she thinks of herself as an instrument to her god, and, as a result, she thinks of herself as someone who is thoroughly good. Because if all she does is done in order to enact the will of her god, who stands for all that is light and positive and life-affirming, her actions can't possibly be anything but good.

So she is a classic case of someone thinking that good intentions justify the means. And boy, could she stand to be a little pickier about the means. If she believes it to be justified and for the greater good, there is nothing she wouldn't do to herself or another person, and she proves that sufficiently in canon – from birthing shadow demons to kill 'false' kings, over leeching children, all the way to numerous human sacrifices, she will stop at nothing to see her mission through to the end. She believes herself entirely in the right when she withholds information or outright manipulates others into doing her bidding, to the point where it borders on something of a superiority complex, based on what she believes to be her relationship to R'hllor.

More often than not, she presents herself as being both incredibly powerful and downright serene. Her own motivation is that the more people fear her, the less they will stand in her way – this is something she uses from her very first appearances in the second book all the way to book five. Likewise, she can be quite persuasive, telling people what they want to hear, and more importantly, she doesn't hesitate to put on a show if it will sway people over to her side.

The other side of the coin is that, having been born a slave, she started life pretty much defenceless. Even so many years later, she approaches others with distrust and a certain degree of paranoia (in fact, the first thing she looks for every time she searches her fires for a vision, is threats to her own safety). A good part of her relying on fear isn't just a manipulation tactic and a way to seem untouchable, it's also plain old self-defence.

As a result of that particular blend of self-preservation and manipulative behaviour, her approach to the truth is more than a little haphazard. She will eagerly cite scripture, for instance when it comes to Azor Ahai (Fire Jesus), but she is just as willing to stage an entirely fake ceremony in which her Chosen One pulls a fake, flaming sword from a pyre, all to convince people of the legitimacy of her visions. Likewise, she'll use colourful alchemist powders to enhance her fires, making it seems as if she is performing some feat of magic, while all she really did comes down to tossing the equivalent of an Essosi fire-cracker into the flames. Her thoughts behind it are that, as long as people Believe, all lies are justified, and in order to get people to believe, it's her job to make them 'see' something.

That said, she has a lot more humanity left in her than she openly shows. A lot of what she does, and a lot of the choices she makes, she pretends are entirely simple and come easy to her. In fact, even the reader doesn't know how much these things cost her until they reach her point of view chapter, where her narration goes on about her distress at no longer being able to see Stannis in the flames, her double and triple checking her own visions, and her fears. When she says 'the night is dark and full of terrors', it's not just part of a prayer, but something she genuinely believes in – she truly, well and truly, fears the dark (to the point where she canonically always has lit candles in her room), and more than that, she fears her dreams of the past, and would give anything if it meant that she would never have to sleep or dream again.

In a similar vain, as much as she is willing to make difficult calls, to send people to their certain deaths or, in the case of Hardhome later in the book, letting them starve in spite of how well she recalls her own fear of starvation, because she knows all efforts to help would be in vain, and thus a waste of precious resources that are more needed elsewhere–– as much as all of that is true, she does very much value life and makes attempts to minimise suffering.

She makes efforts to salvage what and who she can. Sometimes, like in the case of Mance Rayder, because she has an ulterior motive and a use for that person at a later point, but sometimes, it's just because she doesn't consider their deaths in any way necessary. When Maester Pylos tries to poison her, she outright tells him, quietly, that dropping the cup is still an option, then drinks most of the poisoned wine herself leaving only a sip for him, and while she shows no open regret over his death, she did give him as much of an out as she could. In a similar vein, she keeps Devan Seaworth away from the war. This is perhaps her most significant show of humanity – Davos Seaworth, his father, had lost his four oldest sons in the war already, and in her narration she states that he has "suffered enough grief". Davos loathes her, Davos had planned to assassinate her, and she even notes that he "would not thank her for it", and she still seeks to spare him more pain. It even implies that she feels some sense of guilt for the Battle of the Blackwater, and while she is unlikely to express that openly, it does show that, when confronted with mistakes she has made, she does not merely brush them off.

Abilities & Skills:

Non-Magical:
- Languages: Melisandre is fluent in the Common Tongue, High Valyrian, and Asshai'i.

- Everyday Life: She has some background in all kinds of ordinary tasks like sewing, preparing food, tending to animals, taking care of minor injuries and health issues. While she has servants at her disposal throughout book canon, she did start life as a slave, and had to take care of herself for a considerable amount of her time.

- Tactics and Strategy: While she vastly prefers to fall back on her visions, she has spent the better part of the last few years as part of Stannis' war council, so battle strategies and war tactics are nothing new anymore.

- Alchemy: She can make poisons and powders from plants, bones, and whatever else GRRM could think of. In canon, she notes that it is incredibly time consuming and requires highly specific ingredients that tend to be hard to come by – in a game context, it's mostly just going to give her an edge if she looks into Aef's take on alchemy.

Magical:

- Fire: Using her powers, she is able to set fire to something, usually in combination with a prayer, but she's also shown to do it without. The less flammable something is, the more difficult it will be for her!

- Shadowbinding: Melisandre is a shadowbinder who can weave things from shadows and control them. This is very difficult for her to do, it's painful, it falls under the broader category of blood magic (so she needs blood, semen, or a sacrifice to make anything of significance happen). She can conjure up a shadow knife without assistance, she can likely control some small-time shadow without too much struggle, but anything bigger is going to Cost, and cost A Lot. The biggest variant she 'produces' in canon are shadow demons she literally physically gives birth to.

- Clairvoyance: She can see visions in the flames, and even show them to others. It's not an easy (or even painless) skill, and it's taken her years and years to be as good as she is. Likewise, what she sees is an Option for the future, not an inevitability.

Obviously, all of this is history in Aef, but it will colour the way she approaches and thinks of the magic in-game: magic is something she trusts and has relied on for many years, but it's also something that can go horribly wrong and rarely comes cheap.

Pseudo-Magical:

- Poison immunity: Might get nerfed, especially if the plot calls for it, but in canon, she can drink the better part of a cup of poisoned wine and be completely okay afterwards.

- Body... temperature...: This is less a skill and more a fun fact, but she's usually perceived to be almost uncomfortably warm to the touch, and is generally not affected at all by the cold. It's at a point where ice melts in her general presence, which she notes as something hard to miss.

- Sleep & Food: She needs very little sleep, canonically stating that she opts to sleep for an hour every few nights. As for food, she considers it... optional for herself, forgets about it for days at a time, and the only explanation she offers in the book is that "R'hllor provided her with all the nourishment her body needed" but that she makes an effort to eat occasionally because it's a fact "best concealed from mortal men". There's no real canon explanation beyond those two lines, but:

All of the pseudo-magical abilities seem to tie in with the fact that she isn't exactly standard-issue human anymore. Her supernaturally long life-span aside, these other changes to her mark-up (the lack of a need for food or the near-immunity to cold) seem to either be changes brought on through prolonged use of magic or some actual temple-based divine Whatever. In terms of nerfing, I was thinking of having her show up with a regular human need for sleep and food, and no longer immune to poisons – but I'd like to keep her high body temperature (minus cold immunity) until the vampirism takes it away, just to make the whole ordeal a little more harrowing for her. :)

Inventory/Companions:

No companions!

Regular Items:
- one set of red priest robes
- one scarf, also red
- riding boots (you guessed it: red)
- a small knife
- many hairpins

Special Items
- one gold-and-ruby choker, worn around her neck: while it doesn't seem to have any powers of its own, she appears to be using the ruby in it to channel her magic. It burns her when she does something particularly strenuous (for instance, when she burns a man at the stake while keeping him under a glamour), meaning that it can serve as a warning if she is about to overstrain herself. Lovingly nerfed upon arrival, it's now just a very, very expensive collar-style necklace.

Various powders, all hidden in assorted pockets of her robes:
- one to instantly choke and kill a man: canon does not show this one in use, but states that it creates a smoke that will have that effect on a victim.
- one to light fire with: to be tossed onto a flammable object.
- one to snuff out fire with: must be thrown into fire.
- one that causes intense amounts of fear in whoever breathes it in: likely works the same way the choking one does.

The powders are alchemy-based and not strictly speaking 'magical-magical', but I'm happy to just have them be nerfed upon arrival.

Choice: Vampire!
Reason:

It's both fitting and challenging. It fits because she's canonically not quite mortal, red-eyed, and a little bit too interested in blood (for the sake of her magic, but still). And on the other hand, a vampire's greatest weakness is the very sunlight her faith worships, and she canonically fears the night and tries to stop the terrors (read: undead ice wraiths) that lurk in it. It would be incredibly interesting to play out how she would cope with having to face those fears as a part of herself, especially as she would need to come to terms with the fact that the change might be quite permanent.

Sample: 4th Wall!