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snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:43 pm
snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:43 pm
Application
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Doctor Stephen Strange | MCU | reserved
Name: Kathryn
Age: 29
Contact Info:
Other Characters: Ecks (
Character Information
Name: Dr. Stephen Vincent Strange
Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Age: 40
Gender: Male
Canon Point: After the end of Doctor Strange (2016 film)
Background Link: MCU Wiki links - SPOILER ALERT: film summary; biography of Doctor Strange. These pages include extensive spoilers for the film.
Player's rewritten reference version (still contains spoilers):
Doctor Stephen Strange was a brilliant but arrogant and self-centered neurosurgeon whose life revolved around his award-winning work. Strange suffered a car accident (his own fault) that dealt severe nerve damage to his hands, leaving him unable to continue his career. He became destitute through his obsessive efforts to find a cure; when he heard of a former paraplegic named Jonathan Pangborn who had learned to walk again, Strange sought him out and learned that the man had apparently been healed at a place named Kamar-Taj in Nepal. Strange spent his last dollar on a one way trip to Kathmandu, where he did indeed find Kamar-Taj and the Masters of the Mystic Arts, led by a woman known as the Ancient One. After Strange's skepticism (and just being a butt in general) nearly cost him the opportunity to study with the Ancient one, he did get accepted into Kamar-Taj, where he resided and worked at learning the aforementioned Mystic Arts. While the timeline of the film and the length of his studies at Kamar-Taj are unclear, this application assumes that he spent at least a year at Kamar-Taj in order to reach his current level of ability. He struggled initially, but after being forced into a breakthrough by the Ancient One he progressed rapidly and began pushing the limits of what he was expected (or even allowed) to learn, going so far as to tamper with temporal magic he found in a book from the Ancient One's private collection. Strange was also expected to learn to fight at this time; he sort of did, but not particularly well.
When he learned that the purpose of the Masters was to protect the world from mystical/dimensional threats, Strange initially refused to become involved…for about half a minute before he found himself defending the Sanctum Sanctorum of New York (one of three Sanctums designed to protect the Earth from malicious alternate dimensions) from an attack by one of the Ancient One's former students, Kaecilius, who intended to give the Earth over to the ruler of the Dark Dimension in exchange for eternal life. It was during this fight that an animate artifact known as the Cloak of Levitation selected Stephen as its new owner and came to his aid, which was fortunate for Stephen because he was getting his ass kicked. After Strange fended off the first attack on the New York Sanctum, he and fellow master Karl Mordo faced a repeat attack and Strange nearly got the both of them killed due to a major tactical error. The Ancient One came to their rescue but was mortally wounded in the process, later dying at the hospital where Strange had formerly worked.
With Mordo, Strange went forth to defend the final Sanctum in Hong Kong, only to find it already destroyed and a rift to the Dark Dimension opened in the sky above it. Using an artifact known as the Eye of Agamotto (actually the Infinity Stone of Time, not that Stephen knows anything about it), Strange reversed time to undo the attack on the Sanctum, including undoing a number of deaths of both fellow Masters and civilians. Kaecilius interrupted his spell before Stephen could completely restore the Sanctum. Hearing Kaecilius reference the fact that the Dark Dimension was beyond time, Strange abandoned the fight to enter said Dark Dimension and confront its eldritch ruler, Dormammu. Knowing that he could not hope to fight Dormammu, Stephen instead annoyed the entity into giving up his attack on Earth by trapping himself and Dormammu in an endless time loop until Dormammu would agree to bargain with him. Dormammu responded by killing Stephen repeatedly; it is likely that Strange experienced a violent death dozens or even hundreds of times while wearing down Dormammu's patience. Eventually Dormammu conceded in order to be set free and agreed to Strange's demands that he leave the Earth and take Kaecilius and his zealots with him.
With the Master of the New York Sanctum dead, Stephen agreed to take on the mantle in his place after returning the Eye of Agamotto to its proper place in Kamar-Taj. His canon point is immediately post-movie, so the further developments revealed in post-credits scenes are irrelevant to this application.
Inventory:
Non-magical equipment / Clothing that totally doesn't make him look like a cultist or anything:
Magical items:
Personality:
Until relatively recently, Stephen was a self-centered neurosurgeon whose work was his life. A combination of arrogance and fear of failure drove him to the top of his field, which offered him both the accolades he desired and a sense of control over his own life as well as the fates of his patients. As a surgeon, Stephen selected his patients based largely upon how much they might benefit his career, declining to operate on patients whose problems he deemed uninteresting and older patients who might "ruin his record" by dying on the table, and declining even to communicate with potential patients whose cases he considered "hopeless." That being said, Stephen took his Hippocratic oath seriously even if he did not invest himself emotionally in his patients as individuals. Stephen had also made for a poor boyfriend to his former significant other, Dr. Christine Palmer, due to his general narcissism. The two did, however, remain on friendly terms after the relationship officially ended (Stephen has a tendency to stick by the individuals he's chosen to trust), though Christine eventually cut off contact when Stephen became emotionally abusive in the downward spiral of financial and emotional self-destruction that followed his accident.
Stephen's time at Kamar-Taj taught him humility almost above all else, which is somewhat ironic considering the cosmic powers that came with the training. His sorcery education began with the Ancient One quite calmly and deliberately stripping away all of Stephen's assurance in his basic understanding of the universe. The greatest lesson the Ancient One imparted to Stephen, though, is that it's not about him. While that's a lesson with which Stephen continues to grapple, he has become more willing to put others first, to share credit when credit is due, and frankly to acknowledge that other people are also capable of competence, though he still tends to only allow himself to rely upon a few select people he has deemed trustworthy. He became willing, also, to admit his own wrongdoings and to offer a sincere apology to Christine without any accompanying expectation that they would resume their romantic relationship.
Stephen still strives for greatness; while his time at Kamar-Taj has given him a clearer picture of his place in the world, he has never stopped pushing himself to new heights. While he is innately gifted, Stephen is no stranger to the hard work that goes into reaching the top of one's field, and is singularly, stubbornly driven when it comes to increasing his own knowledge. He is a lifelong learner with an impressive memory that he puts to both impressive and not-so-impressive uses. His increased powers of retention allowed him to progress rapidly in his education first as a surgeon and then as a sorcerer, but they also allow him to pack his brain with esoteric musical trivia that he enjoys reciting whenever given the slightest excuse. In his former career he went so far as to play musical trivia games with his assistant while performing brain surgery, to no apparent detriment; he is, apparently, quite adept at multitasking.
Stephen has a dry but active sense of humor that he employs mainly for his own amusement. He favors sarcasm as well as deadpan deliveries of the more absurd truths he encounters. While he is capable of speaking seriously about important matters (and is definitely capable of man-tantrums at his lowest points), he generally prefers to downplay his fears. He can be sassy when the mood strikes, but he mostly says things he himself finds funny rather than making many keen observations about the people around him.
While Stephen does hold certain convictions to heart (namely his reluctance to use deadly force), he is flexible in his problem-solving and shows a marked readiness to break the rules (up to and including the laws of nature) if he perceives that good will come of it. Stephen is not a rule-breaker for its own sake, but will readily circumvent or simply ignore any rules that would prevent him from solving a problem or progressing in his own education. Because Stephen sees rules (even his own) only as guidelines to be constantly questioned, he is relatively forgiving of hypocrisy in others so long as the intent was good.
For all the humility he's managed to learn, Stephen remains largely unable to accept that there are problems he cannot solve. His distaste for killing, rather than making him a pacifist, drives him to find alternate solutions to problems that often fly in the face of the more direct strategies used by other sorcerers, martial artists, superheroes, and so on. Stephen prefers to contain or remove threats rather than fight them directly. This stems partly from a moral objection to killing, partly from a refusal to allow others on the sidelines to become casualties, and partly out of an ongoing need to prove to himself and others that he has a better way of doing things. Also, well, partly because Stephen is not particularly good at fighting (when forced into combat, he mainly shows off his mad skills at running away). Even when his creative problem-solving backfires spectacularly, as it did the second time he faced Kaecilius, Stephen is not deterred from trying to do things his own way again later.
Finally, Stephen is willing to put himself in harm's way to protect others. Despite his initial reluctance to become involved in the Masters' mystical war, Stephen was drawn into the fight the moment he saw a fellow member of his order fighting for his life and interjected himself into the situation despite being outnumbered and vastly outmatched. Stephen is not a man to stand by and allow another person to get hurt or killed when it is within his power to prevent it, even if that means that he must suffer immensely for his interference. Stephen has shown willingness to endure torture (even to invite it upon himself) for the sake of protecting the people of Earth; while his experiences in the Dark Dimension will certainly have scarred him, Stephen's taste of self sacrifice has also left him stronger than ever in his conviction to protect others.
2 of 2: Doctor Stephen Strange | MCU | reserved
Sorcery:
As noted in the inventory section, I propose that he should keep the Cloak of Levitation and that it should remain animate/actively magical on the grounds that it behaves like a living creature and therefore qualifies as a canon pet. At full power, the Cloak would be strong enough to lift Strange, giving him limited flight capabilities (also, enabling it to drag him about against his will), and sturdy enough to block attacks made with bladed weapons without being damaged itself. In Norfinbury, the Cloak will retain its ability to move and act, including the ability to fly through the air independently of Stephen, to hang in midair when not being worn, and to wrap around and roughly manipulate objects. It will not be capable of lifting Strange (or any other heavy object) and will be rendered about as sturdy as any quality garment made of heavy fabric, nullifying its usefulness as magical armor. It will also be unable to fly any higher than an average human can jump.
In canon, Stephen is able to tap into a variety of magic powers (some only with the use of magically imbued artifacts), including teleportation, travel to neighboring dimensions, astral projection, summoning shields and weapons made of energy from other dimensions, and altering the flow of time. Given that all of these abilities represent distinct survival advantages, he will not be able to use them in Norfinbury. If possible, I would like him to be able to come tantalizingly close to calling upon his sorcery, namely by generating sad, useless little sparks in the air when he tries to create a portal or pull energy from another dimension (the sparks would not be useful for generating heat or lighting fires, and he would have to work quite hard to do even that much).
Mundane abilities:
Strange is a quick learner with an eidetic memory (that is, while his memory is not perfect, he has significantly improved sensory recall compared to an average person). He is quick to grasp and to be able to implement complex concepts and instructions. He is also shown to have significant (but not inhuman) linguistic ability; during his time at Kamar-Taj he learned to read ancient Sanskrit well enough to understand an advanced magical text and perform a ritual described in its pages within minutes of first reading it.
Beyond that, Doctor Strange is also a passable martial artist. He's capable of physically defending himself, but without his magic he likely wouldn't hold up very well against more experienced fighters, and he cannot strike with his hands without causing himself a good deal of pain due to extensive previous damage.
Disability:
While this is obviously not an extra ability, it's important to note that Stephen Strange has limited use of his hands due to extensive nerve damage sustained in a car crash. He is capable of performing tasks necessary for day to day survival (he will be perfectly capable of operating doors, for instance, and of dressing himself), and he is able to type slowly but clearly when he makes the effort. However, he has poor individual control over his fingers and he experiences nearly constant tremors in both hands that worsen under duress; he will struggle with any tasks that require fine motor skills. He also experiences chronic pain that comes and goes at irregular intervals, which he will treat with meditation and/or any over-the-counter pain killers he manages to find.
Suitability:
While Stephen has grown as a person and become more willing and able to set his ego (...and personal safety) aside for the common good, he will have a hard time coping with the loss of his powers. When he lost the use of his hands he obsessed over finding a cure to the point of financially ruining himself and destroying what few positive relationships he had because his life lacked meaning without his work. This time around he'll handle the loss of his abilities better due to his increased emotional maturity, but he'll have to convince himself that he'll eventually be able to get his powers back in order to be able keep moving forward.
Stephen is a problem-solver, and I expect him to actively work with others to find answers and help move the ongoing explorations forward. Being transported to an alternate universe and encountering people he considers fictional (not to mention a face twin in Sherlock) is something Stephen will actually take more or less in stride at this point in his life. While he will be curious about the town and its inhabitants and won't exactly be happy about the cold and the
monstersanomalies, the core issue of finding himself in another world will not phase him as badly as it does many characters.RP Samples:
I may have gone a little overboard. Please note that typos in Stephen's text-based communications are intentional.
ACCEPTED
A standard single-story house with a kitchen, living room, dining room, bathroom, and bedroom. All of the doors inside the house have had their handles broken off. They can still be pushed open, but none of them close properly, not even the bathroom.
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