application?

[kethedammit]

I was tired of it. I'd been tired of it for indictions, since I'd left Keeper and didn't have her to keep me safe. I was tired and lonely, not to mention wet and cold. I said, "My name's Mildmay. That's for real."
She was from Wrath. She didn't know the baggage that name had.
-Mélusine, Sarah Monette

This app is going to be long as shit and I apologize. It's in general very hard for me to stop talking about Mildmay once I've began, and this is complicated by the fact that Mildmay's canon and character are both extensive and complex.

I'M SORRY.

PERSONAL
NAME: Pel
PERSONAL JOURNAL: pitseleh
EMAIL: CapeQuod@Gmail.com
AIM: CapeHoc
CURRENT CHARACTERS: N/a


CHARACTER
CHARACTER NAME: Mildmay the Fox
SERIES: The Doctrine of Labyrinths
CANON POINT: Mildmay comes from between the third (The Mirador) and fourth (Corambis) books in the series, respectively. He's just set off toward Craloxa with Felix, but has not yet reached it.

LOSS: Mildmay's sense of direction. Through the books, Mildmay is constantly contrasted with his brother, and one of the ways this is accomplished is through Mildmay's sense of direction. Despite not having any magical ability, Mildmay has an almost supernatural sense of direction, and can almost never get lost, especially in mazes and labyrinths (which, given the name of the series, the brothers encounter more than once). To contrast, Felix could, as Mildmay says, get lost in a teacup. Mildmay has always depended on this skill, and always taken it a little for granted; the loss of it will shake him a bit, and certainly inconvenience him in the byzantine expanse of Paradisa.

ABOUT THE CHARACTER:

If you counted self-esteem in numbers, Mildmay has a negative nine thousand. He actively hates himself, and thinks he's a monster for killing all the people that he has, and doesn't expect people to like him. Because of this, he doesn't try to be pleasing or nice to other people, expecting that no matter what he does, no one will like him. He's not outwardly cruel or callous, but he doesn't try very hard to fit to anyone's superficial needs; he sees it at setting himself up for failure.

As a child, Mildmay was verbally and emotionally abused by his Keeper (a Keeper is a kidsman-- think Fagin in Oliver Twist-- an adult who houses children for the express purpose of teaching them to steal and commit illegal acts) in an attempt to keep him cowed; Mildmay was and is very skilled, and his Keeper wanted him all for herself. She trained him to be an assassin, a thief and a murderer, all while telling him he was stupid and ugly and that he was lucky she tolerated him. All of this did a number on his self-esteem (obviously), his view of the world and his way of interacting with others. Mildmay almost never shows outward emotion, almost never makes the first social gambit, and almost always lets others have their way in social situations.

To an outsider, he's extremely quiet and impassive, ashamed of a giant scar on his face that he received (in a knife-fight) in early youth; he thinks he's hideous. Combined with his hair, bright red and very uncommon in the city of his birth, he sticks out even more. These two traits, along with his Keeper's abuses, have all bled into each other and resulted in a deep suspicion of being paid attention, and a deeper hatred of being in the center of it; he's very skilled at blending in, in spite of his physical appearance. He'd prefer to be ignored, for good or for ill. He isn't meek, but he's very passive. His strength, and his reputation as an assassin, generally keep him from being manipulated, so he doesn't really feel the need to exert undue pressure elsewhere, physical or social. He's used to being manipulated by his Keeper, so he knows the signs of a manipulator.

Mildmay isn't talkative; he's taciturn to the point of being occasionally monosyllabic. He isn't very skilled with introspection, not questioning why he does something or what his motivations are. He has an intrinsic understanding of his own mind, to the point where it becomes a weakness; with few exceptions, he doesn't question himself, his actions or his motivations, until it's too late.

Mildmay knows very well who he is and what his place is in the world, but he hates that person and he hates that place. Thanks to his Keeper, and his looks, self-hatred is almost his default setting; he consistently underestimates himself, his actions, his needs. He only ever acknowledges his skills in illegal trades: he can steal, he can fight, he can kill. He isn't proud of himself for these things.

He doesn't strive to change because he sees no way around it, nor does he even acknowledge that he dislikes himself. He'll just automatically assume that most people really dislike being around him or hate him from the start. He has a great deal of difficulty believing when people tell him differently, or compliment him.

People do compliment him occasionally, though, because he is fairly intelligent, if just uneducated. However, he cannot view these complements as 'real', always dismissing them as misguided or, worse, malicious. All of Mildmay's skills were learned for the art of swift murder, and, as a result, Mildmay does not view them as good skills, regardless of whether he is using them benignly.

On that note, though, he dearly hates being insulted, because it just backs up that he's the kind of person who he thinks he is: the type who deserves to be insulted. Depending on the person insulting, he'll either react in short-lived anger (his sense of self control is too much to ever let him loose his temper for too long) or just walk away ...okay, not walk. Limp. Mildmay was injured very badly in the second book, and has developed a substantial limp in one of his legs. He is now barred from a few of his skills: he cannot run as fast, becomes winded by the pains in his leg, has difficulty with stairs, climbing, fighting, and most unduly physical tasks. He can still manage, but the price is higher and the act is more difficult. It only adds to his sense of displacement and self-hatred. He could do awful things, he thinks, but now he cannot even manage those.

Since Mildmay blends into the background and doesn't talk, he's become a passive observer of the world. Given enough time, he can very readily understand others, often because he talks so little, he just lets other people talk and talk and talk, and learns a lot about them from the exchange.

He's very empathic and kind, but won't express this in any outward way unless he has to. It's part of his moral center, unchained even from years with Keeper, when it would have been so much easier to become amoral and not have any objections to killing. Mildmay's morality isn't religious; only, he has a deep hatred of doing others harm, and always treats everyone with a minimal of respect. He's not a doormat, not completely, but he won't ever act in a way that takes away a person's autonomy, their choices, their sense of self: he won't discount others as people. In short, he hates treating others the way he thinks he should be treated, and often is. This is in part because he has learned from his Keeper's example, and is now committed to never continuing the cycle she started.

As a consequence of this, Mildmay loves children. If the kids aren't scared of his looks, he is often naturally good with them. He doesn't play with them or anything, but tells them stories and treats them intelligently and generally, kids love him. He's a firm believer in preserving innocence, due to the number his Keeper did on his. He doesn't want to fix the world, but he's committed to not making it any worse. He doesn't always succeed, and has sometimes been forced to make very tough decisions. But he tries.

He also loves his brother. He really really does. Even when Felix makes it difficult, which he does; Felix and Mildmay have very opposing personalities, and this isn't helped along by the binding-by-forms, a magical spell that Felix has over Mildmay that forces Mildmay into subservience to Felix. But Mildmay still loves his brother. When Felix was insane, before the binding-by-forms was set in place, Mildmay had to take care of him. He describes any time when Felix was happy and felt safe with him as the best time of his life. He only wants to be by Felix, good or bad, even when Felix returned to sanity and his admittedly rotten personality along with it. Mildmay will do anything anything anything for Felix ...except murder. Mildmay has murdered for Felix in the past, and has called a moratorium on that. But for Felix's welfare, Mildmay would do anything.

So Mildmay understands other people, but not himself, loves the brother who treats him like shit, and thinks he should be treated like shit, but hates being treated like shit and hates people who perpetuate that treatment.

Mildmay... he's complicated.

ABILITIES:

Physically, Mildmay is a very excellent knife fighter. He will kill without emotion, quickly (if he can help it) and methodically. He is very good at killing, stealing, lock-picking, blending into a crowd, playing cards, swimming, navigation, maps, and mental math. The things you can expect an assassin/cat burglar to be good at, he is fairly good at, with lying being the big exception. Mildmay, like his brother, cannot lie at all, in action, word or intent.

Mildmay's also got the largely unexplained ability to Never Get Lost, not even in a maze or a labyrinth. Due to his brother's amazing ability to Get Lost Constantly, Mildmay has in all likelihood been afforded this ability by the great and cosmic powers that control Thematic Irony. (This ability will be lost to Mildmay in-game, but is preserved here for posterity.) He can count out money with great proficiency (he's good at applied math, so subtraction and division, but not theoretical stuff like physics), and is a wonderful storyteller.

Emotionally, Mildmay is incredibly empathic, able to read people easily. He's no Sherlock Holmes, he can't tell where you were born by shaking your hand, but he can judge the things important to him in other people: their social class, intelligence, relative innocence, kindness, patience, and their potential threat level. (This ability will probably be weakened in-game, as Mildmay is accustomed to reading people via the social currents of his world, and now, out of that world, he'll need some time to adjust.)

So Mildmay is a skilled killer, with a huge amount of physical prowess all honed towards the art of robbing people of their property and occasionally their lives.

...Mind you, with his morals, personality and leg being the way that they now are, Mildmay will rarely utilize these skills, either because he can’t or because he won’t.

This came to a head at the end of The Mirador, where he refused to kill a man even though he'd been magically compelled to do so; he was only able to resist due to sheer force of will. Afterwards, because he failed to kill this man, he is more-less exiled from the only home he's ever known. However, Mildmay shows no remorse for his mercy, even though it cost him much. His refusal to kill, and his hesitance to use violence unless strictly necessary, renders a huge chunk of his skills null. Add in his bum leg, and he's much less formidable than he seems; the only skills he has are based in the abilities of his mind, which are things he has no confidence in.

These days, the skill he relies on most is reading people-- something he’s very good at, seeing as he is most often a passive observer, even in his own life. He doesn’t spend much thinking time on himself, so he’s free to pick up, watch and understand others. He doesn't see this skill as a mental skill, though; Mildmay, being vastly undereducated, doesn't see any of his innate mental skills as assets, just as the bare minimum. He only sees learned, trained skills as being really worthwhile.

Physical handicap aside, Mildmay also has a mental block about his own mental prowess. He's been told he's stupid-- by his Keeper, by the bourgeois, by his brother and friends-- so often that he believes it. He may have uncanny skill in mathematics, but he is unable to fully utilize this innate skill to its full extent, due to the unshakable belief that he cannot really be that smart. He will always stop himself from seeing his clear intelligence through to its full potential.

From the point in canon I am taking him, Mildmay is struggling with illiteracy, and has no practice navigating more scholarly subjects like psychology or philosophy. This isn't because (despite what he thinks) he's stupid, it's because he's never had a formal education and is thus unpracticed at thinking in such a fashion. Higher concepts escape him not because he's stupid, but because he's untrained at how to properly hold the subjects in his mind, having no prior experience doing so.

Lastly, Mildmay is also inclined towards sickness. He is by no means innately sickly, but when he gets a cold, he gets a serious flu that leaves him completely bedridden for upwards of a month. No in betweens: Mildmay's either in the full blush of health, or he's bedridden and delirious.

THIRD-PERSON WRITING SAMPLE: [Mildmay has a fairly idiosyncratic way of speaking, as evidenced from his 1st person sample, and I've tried to convey that in the writing sample. As such, he uses double negatives and course language. This is on purpose, to show Mildmay's unique perspective and the way he views the world.]

It's raining, because of course it is. The land around them ain't pretty, but nothing's really honey and roses when you're soaked to the bone. The horses are pissed, Mildmay can tell that much, even though he ain't never been someone too familiar with horses. But Mildmay ain't too happy neither, and he can recognize the signs.

And Felix is just sitting there, on his horse. If his legs weren't moving along in the saddle, Mildmay'd think he'd turned to stone. Since everything happened, since Isaac fucking Garamond and the Curia and... since Gideon, things hadn't been right. Mildmay knew that; Felix needed his space, and it weren't Mildmay's place to pester him about, anyway. Not much that Mildmay could do. Some fucking brother he was.

So they rode through the rain. It was coming down in sheets, Mildmay could see that every time he looked up through the wet, red curtain of his hair. Real bad stuff, fucking ice cold, and Mildmay wouldn't be surprised if one of 'em'd caught something by the end of it. He'd ask for them to stop, to try and take shelter, except there weren't no shelter to take, and this wasn't rightly the kind of place Mildmay'd like to stop even in the normal way of things. Only thing worse'n fighting off thugs with a bum leg was fighting 'em off with a bum leg in the mud and the rain.

Through the cold, through the mud, through the wet, Mildmay thought about his brother, and the neat little packet of rings in the inside of his coat. Shannon Teverius (Shannon fucking Teverius!) had given them to him. Felix's old rings, the ones Felix's said he hadn't wanted because the only thing better than a kick in the teeth was kicking your own teeth yourself. Felix was probably thinking, oh, this rain is perfect, it's just what I deserve.

Mildmay had seen the state of Isaac Garamond, when they'd carried him out.

Maybe Felix did deserve it. But it wasn't-- what was that word Zephyr used?-- it wasn't Mildmay's purview to worry over none of that. It was Mildmay's fucking purview to keep an eye on the poor bastard, no matter what he did. That's just the way it was.

Oh, and would you look at that, it'd stopped raining. Mildmay looked up from his hands, twisted in the reigns, only to notice his hands weren't holding reigns no more. The horse was gone. The rain was gone, too, because Mildmay was inside, sure as eggs were eggs. He was in some room, a big one, with those types of paintings and furniture and digs folks in the Mirador would've just about died over. The Mirador again, then, some room he'd never seen before.

Mildmay looked around and saw a painting-- beautiful, alright-- of a fat lady playing a harp. He glared at her for a bit, trying to getting himself together. What the hell just happens? Where was Felix? What the fuck had Felix done? Some stupid spell to get them back in the Mirador? Could you even do that? Was Felix even dumb enough to pull that kind of shit?

Only one way to find out.

"Well, fuck," Mildmay said to the fat lady and her harp, because that's all he could do. He walked off, trying to find a door, a window, something... He could feel the pull of the binding-by-forms tugging at his chest like twine caught on his ribs; Felix was around here, somewhere.

Now all Mildmay had to do was find him.

FIRST-PERSON JOURNAL SAMPLE: http://ohmykethe.livejournal.com/7983.html?style=mine

INTENT: I've played Mildmay twice before, but never with castmates ready for him. As such, I'm looking forward to doing new things with Mildmay, seeing how he reacts to his castmates and how he gets used to Paradisa (an environment very like the Mirador-- another beautiful and magical castle-- to which he's accustomed, but different enough to make him change and move in interesting ways). I'm eager to see how he'll acclimate to this new environment. At the same time, I'd like to move the introverted Mildmay into a setting where he can be slightly more extroverted. Not by much-- Mildmay is never going to start throwing wild parties-- but enough that he feels comfortable around people again. I'd like him to make friends, something that isn't usually easy for him.