FADE RIFT APPLICATION

PLAYER

Name: Lily
Age: 26
Contact: aeneia @ plurk
Other Characters: N/A
Interests: Lakshmi is a fighter, and a devoted rebel. She'll be torn largely by wanting to help everyone she meets, especially with the rifts - and wanting desperately to get back home to her own wars. I prefer to get involved in action plots, and in particular her skills lie in combat, and she'll seek out places where she can do that so that's where a lot of where my attention will go.

CHARACTER

Name: Lakshmi Bai ( Rani/Queen of Jhansi, "Jhansi ki Rani", Manikarnika, "Manu", "Chhabili" )
Canon/OC: The Order: 1886
Canon Point: While Galahad is unconscious.
Journal: shri
Age: 58, with the appearance of about mid 20s

Canon World

❝LITTLE BOBBY PAIGE WAS BORED, EVEN WHEN JUST 9 YEARS OLD
STAYING OUT ONE NIGHT, HE CAME HOME WITH A BLOODY BITE
DAY TIME WANED, AND DARKNESS FALLED, ALL NOISES WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD STOPPED
BOBBY WOKE NO LONGER HIM, AND TORE HIS PARENTS LIMB FROM LIMB❞

The Order: 1886 is set in an alternative 19th-century world, where centuries ago, a creature known as the Half-Breed emerged as an evolution of mankind. These were werewolves and vampires, that were either born into their state or are those who are bitten and turn. Humanity has been battling for survival against them, ever since. All of the human development has had a singular goal, since then, defeating the Half-Breeds, and it has vastly accelerated the need for this. Many things that won't exist for another 20 or 30 years are found in the Order universe with slight variances as the need for survival as a species has pushed production and demand into high gear for thousands of years. None of the supernatural is a secret, and all matters of it are out in the open to the world at large.

Which, desperate to protect his home and land - King Arthur ( get ready it gets more nuts from here ) - rose the Knights of the Roundtable to be a force to fight against them. But it was hopeless for a long time, as mankind couldn't beat an apex predator with the tools available to them. This only changed when the Knights came back with the Blackwater. These men and women have gone on to become the foremost fighters in the British Empire. The last stand against the Half-Breed that has slowly been turning the war against the tide. Which is where the Half-Breeds got smart instead of violent. As the British Empire expanded and was as similarily terrible as it's real-world counterpart, they instead took up position of power in these countries via groups like the United India Company ( the East India Company in the real world ), they sort to expand and take up their influence in the countries Britain was in the middle of suppressing and were not paying much attention too.

At least, amongst the nobility. There isn't a single common person from the UK to India that doesn't know what's really going on and it's just furthered the divide between ruler and ruled. England is a powder keg waiting to explode. In this world the brutalities of Racism, Colonialisation, Classicism are intermingled between the European Nobility and the Half Breeds. Like for instance, the lead villain of the game, Lord Hastings, is the head of the United India Company, a Peer of the Realm, Member of the House of Lords ....... and also Jack the Ripper and a Vampire. Eeesh. This is a Gothic Horror with an emphasis on the horror. Life is miserable, desperate, and crumbling through the end of the British Empire. The Knights have a thankless, immortal task of having to do things like - kill children who have been turned - and desperately fighting to be remotely human beings anymore, the common people and Britain's colonies are chewed up like cattle to a hungry empire of Vampires and Lycans.

History

Rani Lakshmi Bai was the Queen of Jhansi and one of the key leaders of the First Indian Independence War against the British Occupation. As a child, she was trained in as a warrior.

When she was 13, she had an arranged marriage to the Maharaj Gangadhar Rao Newalkar, taking the name Lakshmi Bai. They had a happy marriage and eventually had a son together once she was old enough, named Damodar Rao. It didn't last, her son was to die in just four months, which lead to the adoption of a family member, Anand Rao as her husband's health slowly depleted and he died.

Lakshmi would become the figurehead of the rebellion against British Rule in central India. After Jhansi fell in a siege, the war raged for months during 1857, until the last battle at the Fortress of Gwalior. Two long days of battle, she fell beside her men, sword in hand, but ultimately defeated. So feared by the British for the devotion she inspired, that her name would be banned in the British Empire until the end of the 19th century.

Or so the British would tell the world and so she let them believe. In truth, the occupation of India by the United India Company was being used as a front by Lycan and Vampires to export their kind through the British Empire and infect whole cities. At one point or another - canon is vague - she met the Knight, Sir Bors De Ganis, who died, and she took up is blackwater and fake her own death to take up the fight again.

In England with Devi, her second in command/body double/symbolic daughter in tow, she takes up the mantle of the Rebellion there. She fights on the streets through acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare feeding into political unrest. Getting help from people like Nikola Tesla, who in this universe... makes weapons for the Order. She targets the ships of the United India Company to huge amounts of public destruction and loss of life but is effective in disrupting shipping.

The losses are heavy, and a particular bombing that ends up destroying a city block via a blimp crashing into it ( oops ), she causes the knight Sir Percival to die. Sending his closest friend and the series protagonist, Sir Galahad, into a crash course with her.

She shows him the truth of what the British Empire has become and gives him a pet name in the process. Eventually, they do ally when Galahad tries to secure evidence he can use in a court of law. It ends as well as you'd expect with immediate betrayal by one of the other knights who - surprise, surprise, has been a lycan all along.

More details can be found here, though, Lakshmi only turns up about halfway through, and this is more on the game itself. Yay, secondary characters that actually have huge amounts of backstory!

❝ONE DAY ALL OUR BURDENS WILL END, BROTHER.❞

Personality

❝ My death is a worthy sacrafice.❞

- chapter 9, an uneasy alliance

BRAVERY & RESILIENCE: Her greatest strength is her determination and willingness to keep on fighting. Even when odds are miserable, she stays strong and doesn't fear for her own life. She's a woman that's lost her son, her husband, her kingdom, was humiliated by the way she was treated and watched her people suffer horrific deaths, all before she was 20 years old, but still found the strength to go on and fight. It is a long, unpleasant battle, but she doesn't skirt from it, believing wholeheartedly in what she's fighting for and the rightness of her cause.

SELF ASSURANCE & ARROGANCE: Lakshmi presents herself with authority and the presence of one who expects to be listened to and treated with respect. She tends to be restrained in a lot of her more emotional responses or more sentimental topics. But, sometimes, a playfulness can still be seen. However, this turns into an arrogance that is frankly tactless when she decides she doesn't care about someone else's feelings in a situation, to the point that Galahad pulls a gun on her. If she's decided something needs to be said, or she's made up her mind about it, she's blunt and to the point. She doesn't look to anyone else for validation.

REMORSELESSNESS & RUTHLESSNESS: Lakshmi might be the worst thing that happened to England's public monuments and suburbs this side of the Viking invasion. She is committing acts of terrorism that cost the lives of many innocents and huge destruction of public property. But when she's confronted with it, instead of showing much remorse, she just takes it in her stride as the cost of her fight. Ends have to justify means when there is so much at stake and no one seems more aware of it than she is. Going so far as to openly mockingly laugh at Galahad when he protests.

FLEXIBILITY: Not that she's constantly totally unfeeling and always serious or unable to compromise. With Galahad when they are in an uneasy alliance, she compromises on his request, even when she clearly think it's the stupidest most naive thing she's ever heard, especially because she knows better. But she agrees to his stipulation for the purposes of a great goal. Similarly, when Galahad asks her to lower her weapon - a pretty big thing for someone who's lived her life - she rolls her eyes but does it.

LOYALTY & DEVOTION: When she cares about someone, there is nothing she won't do for them on a personal level, and loyalty is always repaid with it. They always come second to the cause, but then, she doesn't tend to form close relationships with people who don't understand that. This also makes her very hard on her them and has a bad habit of pushing people away out of worry about what might happen to them. She can't bear to see any of the people closest to her hurt, and it leads to those people often feeling shoved aside.

❝ galahad: "the rani of jhansi?"
lakshmi: "i surprise you again, knight?"
galahad: "the famous warrior queen who took up arms against our armies in india? our generals reported you dead in gwalior."
lakshmi: "I often benefit from the underestimation of fools."
❞

Strengths & Weaknesses

General:

• Trained Warrior & Commander, in both close quarter combat in city situations and open battlefield combat. Swords, Knives/Daggers, Pistols, Rifles, but overall
• Limited to WWI-era technology.
• Skilled horseback rider and in mounted combat.
• High level of endurance and pain tolerance, with and without the Blackwater.
• Experience with Guerrilla Warfare, but also sieges, having to move troops etc.
• Experience in stealth, surveillance, subterfuge and assassinations.
• She's not a big book learner outside of religious context.
• Successfully ran a court and country, which was a feudal based system so there was no parliament to help her out.
• Speaks three languages, Hindi, Marathi & English.

❝ Blackwater is a blessing and a curse:
To the Knights of The Order it provides longer life, but they live to see everyone that they love die.❞

Lakshmi, like the Knights, drinks the Blackwater. A purported Holy Grail, though whether it is truly the blood of christ is up for debate, but its effects are not. It grants everyone who drinks from it long life, if not outright immortality. Lakshmi, too, has long outlived her more natural years without aging even slightly from it. The blackwater, after first drinking from it, is mixed with a person's blood, and their blood alone can restore them. It can be shared with another, but it isn't done lightly by anyone, and Lakshmi doesn't share her own even with her family.

Not having the blackwater over a long enough time frame, however, will kill the person who drinks it.

The Blackwater has several enhancing abilities:

• Long Life: All who drink the blackwater do not outwardly age in any real manner. In Lakshmi's case, she's at minimum 57 years old, but doesn't look much older than her late twenties. Some of the knights are six and seven centuries old and don't look much more than mid-fifties. However as soon as they stop drinking the Blackwater, they begin to age rapidly. This seems to be where lack of Blackwater really kills them.


• Healing: Drinking the Blackwater means that outside of an immediately fatal wound like being shot in the heart or head, or being knocked out and unable to consume it, they can heal almost any wound in seconds. More serious wounds will take some minutes and fatigue them for longer, but it does not kill or even cripple them long term. Lady Igraine, for instance, gets her spine broken and one sip of it later, she's up and walking after awhile. Galahad survives being in an airship crash into the crystal palace.


• Increased abilities: All who drink the blackwater are faster, stronger, enhanced sight, smell and hearing. It's not truly superhuman, but it's well and beyond what a peak human can do. In the case of Lakshmi, she's able to comfortably dead weight lift Sir Galahad who is over 6', wearing weapons and heavy clothes, single handed up a wall with very little exertion. They can't say, throw cars around, but they're well and truly able to do things the average person can't.


• The Blacksight: The exception to the above is when they enter what is called the Blacksight. It's a heightened, almost peak state where they react faster, see, hear and smell clearer and process in a way that makes the rest of the world almost slow down to how quickly they move. I interpret this as a hyperawareness that makes them feel and move faster than the world around them.

Suggested Nerfs

She's fairly comparable to a Warden in theory. Enhanced, specifically to fight one kind of enemy. I was thinking I could limit the Blacksight to being used against only darkspawn enemies & mages rather than just in general, because the blackwater drinkers come up on par with the superhuman, but they squish normal people rather horribly, especially when there aren't guns or any kind of projectile weaponry.

With healing - I was thinking that really serious wounds, like broken bones and above, no longer heal instantly, instead take her at least a week of recovery and thus run a higher risk of death for her in the immediate if she's not careful, and will stop that messed up thing Knights do of like, getting stabbed a lot and then just walking it off. So it helps, but not in some battle changing way, she just probably won't die of an infection if she's sensible. Minor wounds scraps, cuts, fractures, still heal perfectly in moments.

Arrival Inventory

• her phial of blackwater
• her long knife / khontar
• a complete set of her royal clothes: sari + all it's associated pieces, but no shoes.
• a whole lotta bling ( this has 10 pieces, all gold & mixed jewels, head jewellery, necklaces, rings, toe rings, anklets etc, bling as fuq ).
• a bundle of baby clothes and blankets

'Human'ization

Aside from her extended lifespan, Lakshmi is just a plain old woman. The lack of humanisation is far more mental than physical.

Fit

Lakshmi is an interesting mix of a point further along in the type of events of dragon age, but from a completely different angle. She's the heart and soul of two rebellions and has fought as much for freedom as to just plain old survive. She also is a very flawed person prone to feeling and acting too much and finds it hard to turn a blind eye even when she wants too. Aspects of Thedas will hit far too close to home and no matter how she wants to keep her distance, it'll be impossible to stop her from being embroiled in the world and its politics.

I'm also very interested in exploring one of the lesser aspects that are present but not touched on in the Order which is the struggle for humanity and not fitting in with the people around them anymore due to their unnatural and duty-driven lives.

SAMPLES

W/ Kitty
W/ Ioverth