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dr. stephen strange ([personal profile] rehandle) wrote2023-09-25 08:16 pm
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STEPHEN STRANGE
Dr. Stephen Strange NAME
Cis male SEX/GENDER
MCU CANON
Post-MoM. CANONPOINT


HISTORY
FORMATIVE_EVENT
The death of his sister. Sometime in their childhood, Stephen's younger sister Donna fell through the ice of a lake and died. Having been there and unable to save her is both what led him to become a doctor and ignited in him a fear of failure that later calcified into perfectionism and arrogance.
FORMATIVE_EVENT
At the height of his neurosurgical career Stephen took a glance at some promising brain scans while driving at speed up a winding road and ended up hurtling over the cliffside. The resulting injuries to his hands ensured he'd never perform another surgery, and refusing to accept what he then considered to be the loss of his life's one purpose eventually landed him at the doors of Kamar-Taj where he would go on to discover magic and enter his life’s next phase.
FORMATIVE_EVENT
In their final conversation, Stephen’s teacher the Ancient One issued some last words of wisdom: It’s not about you. She explained that if he wanted he could use magic to go back to his old life, and the world would be ‘all the lesser for it’. The conversation shifts his perspective. Up until then he’d been working at improving his magical ability in order to return to the life he lost, but after this he lets it go and commits himself to the millions more lives magic could help him save.
FORMATIVE_EVENT
A war leads him to bet innumerable lives on a 1 in 14million+ chance that a specific group of people might fight, live and die in precisely the correct order to bring everyone back. It’s the first time he’s had to play god and it leaves him deeply unsettled to have acted so far outside the bounds of his old morality. Having never learned to acknowledge and process his own pain, he brushes this event under the carpet where it continues to interfere with his judgment and undermine his previously solid self-confidence.
FORMATIVE_EVENT
Over the course of a brief encounter with the multiverse, Stephen is confronted with three different versions of himself that each amplify one of his worse traits. One decides to kill a child in order to save the universe from her power. Another is so convinced of his own ability to independently solve all world-threatening problems that he dooms two worlds to destruction. The third is so miserable that he ventures across the multiverse possessing other versions of himself and killing them. This literal self-reflection bestows him with a self-awareness he hadn't had before, forcing him to address his own behaviour and adapt it going forward.


ABILITIES
ABILITY As a sorcerer with a natural aptitude for (and wildly in love with) his craft, Stephen Strange has a not insubstantial range of magical ability.

His power for the most part comes from Eldritch magic, a form of light-based magic utilized by the Masters of the Mystic Arts that draws on energy to various effects, including:

Energy constructs: used most commonly to conjure weapons and shields that can vary in size and shape.
Elemental & matter control: manipulating energy to interact with the elements (air, earth, water, fire) and general physical matter (moving objects around etc)
Binding spells: red bands of power used to bind.
Energy blasts: he goes pew pew with big ol’ energy beams/zip zap with power that spills like lightning.
Energy conversion: he can convert energy into different forms.
Item enchantment: the ability to imbue items with magic.
Warding spells: protection spells breakable only by his own magical signature.
Portal creation: using a channeling device he can create portals from one place to another.
Locator spell: the spell will locate whatever it’s provided with a sample of - generally used for people, but could also be used for places or things.

Other spells, general purpose sorcery and magic-adjacent abilities that may or may not rely on Eldritch magic specifically include:

Illusions: from grand spacescapes thrown up like projections to tiny stones hidden in an illusory star, he can create illusions to trick the senses.
Transmutation: changes the properties of something to make it into something else.
Conjuration: summons items to him, having them magically appear and disappear.
Teleportation: he can travel and transport others short distances without portals.
Astral projection:
separates his spirit from his body.
Memory magic: used to alter memory.
Power absorption: can lift innate powers from others and harness them himself.
Physiology manipulation: Stephen channels magical energy through his own body in order to lessen the impact of his nerve damage. In theory he can also use this to manipulate his own body in other ways and potentially extend that out into the bodies of others.
Magic sense: the ability to sense magic in the area and identify others by their magic where he’s particularly familiar with it.
Third Eye: used to seed things (ghosts, magic, auras) the human eye can’t.

Due to his power set devouring DW's character limit, I’ve made an external REFERENCE SHEET including more detail, nerfs and a note on the way I hope to mix and match the above abilities organically to reflect Stephen’s style.

PERMISSIONS
Yes TOUCHING Yes KISSING Yes SEX Yes with discussion, he's better guarded against telepaths than some but not invulnerable POWERS USE Yes with plotting INJURY Yes if it's tightly plotted/CR or plot-relevant death
Yes, can fight with and without magic FIGHT SCENES Open to ships SHIPPING Ok for other marvel characters, otherwise not for this game FOURTH-WALLING I can go for maybe two weeks to a month BACKTAGGING Usually fine for anything on the network, pls contact if you're in doubt THREADJACKING Bathroom/emeto as kinks, death/injury/dub/non-con without prior plotting OOC HARD LIMITS


PREFERENCES
SMUT KINK_1
KINK_2
KINK_3
HORROR TROPE_1
TROPE_2
TROPE_3


MONSTER
appearance
Transformed, Stephen is nothing but arms and hands. Composed of a viscous black substance, hands - hundreds of them - crawl over and amongst each other to move the thing about. The monster only has one eye and opening it casts a bright orange glare that gives away its position so it often travels blind, using its thousands of fingers to navigate by touch. The slime it’s made of is non-Newtonian: thick fluid until it isn’t, solidifying like wet sand under pressure when it needs to grasp or beat. The hands can come together to form structures which ooze over with a fine layer of the stuff they’re made of to leave behind detail (ref), though it relies on replicating what it sees: the only thing it comes ‘pre-programmed’ with is Stephen’s image. These detailed structures can’t maintain form - they can only move by the hands themselves shifting beneath the surface layer of slime which disrupts any realism - so generally faces will be worn as still, close-eyed death masks and more complex structures won’t bother to disguise themselves at all (ref).


POWER_LIST
mind's eye | on making eye contact, the creature can ‘see’ into the mind. It can recall the faces and fears known to a victim and use that to recreate them. It can also communicate telepathically once this connection is opened, snatching snippets of remembered conversations and replaying them or reforming them into patchworks to lure victims or inflict pain.
infection | as a physical, slime-based creature, there’s a chance that slime secretions may end up in wounds or left behind in other orifices. At player discretion, these secretions can interfere with nerve function in the affected area, resulting in sensation shifts (pain, temperature, numbness). These can be reversed by introducing any of Stephen’s non-transformed bodily fluids to the affected body.


behavior
The creature isn’t usually very nuanced. Its fundamental drive is to Do All Harm: it seeks prey simply to have its hands full, and on finding them uses blunt force to grasp, beat, tear and choke. The only time it will behave in a more calculated manner is when it gets its hands on someone Stephen has a more meaningful connection with - this is when his fear of those connections causes the monster to zero in on them, taking its time and employing the mind’s eye to administer more personal torment.

Although cutting and slashing will be able to dislodge individual hands, due to the nature of the monster it’s weaker to elemental attack: anything that’ll interrupt its composition. Watering it down, contaminating it with earth or other substances, burning it etc. Damage to its eye will also slow it down.