Post by Vinyl Scratch on Jul 19, 2014 23:34:47 GMT -6
||| VINYL SCRATCH |||
[Image credit to Yellowfur on Tumblr]
#Name; Vinyl Scratch
#Age ; 16
#Orientation ; Demisexual
#Gender ; Female, cisgender
#Occupation ; Student by day, A/V techie by evening, fighting evil by moonlight
#Alignment ; Bearers of Harmony (Element of Loyalty)
#Physique ; “Lithe” in good terms and “scrawny” in bad, she’s right at average height but built lean and a little boyish, making her seem more frail than she is. Her shoulders and hips are about the same width, though, and she has a good, sprightly kind of balance to her. She’s no athlete or gymnast, but she can clearly plant her feet down and throw a punch if the need be.
#Hair color and style ; Cut moderately short and naturally a black-brown color, she’s since dyed it a bright two-tone cyan and fixes it up into a messy “scenester” style. When she doesn’t feel like styling, she sometimes ties it back, more often lets it just fall wherever (which doesn’t look that different, but you won’t hear her admit it).
#Eye color ; Red. Or “magenta,” or “maroon,” or “evil,” whatever you read into it. This is part of why she picked the shades.
#Clothing ;TackyCasual-chic, she calls it. Likes to dress comfortably—no heels for this gal—but with an eye toward style. What she thinks of as “style,” though, is pretty off-the-wall; she’s known to sport everything from band shirts, bangled skirts, hoodies, ratty jeans, lime-green shoes with orange laces, unnecessary belts, and so many bracelets you’d think she made friends with every kid from Summer Camp. One constant article is a pair of neon-purple shades—there wasn't anything particularly special about them at first, but she’s grown sort of attached.
#Other appearance details (optional) ;One of Vinyl’s nervous habits is drawing on herself with a pen. She’s no artist, but she’s made enough of a habit out of it that sometimes, after spending a long time bored out of her mind, there are great big crawling designs all the way up her arms. Sometimes these are mistaken for tattoos, and give her parents a proper heart attack.
It’s also worth noting that she wears prescription contacts, and glasses at home. Turns out having red eyes makes you pretty darn sensitive to light, and as a result she’s nearsighted. C’est la vie.
#Personality ;With Vinyl, what you see is what you get. She’s a laid-back wisecracker, a chick with moxie and good humor. You know the type—brash and sassy and somehow deeply genuine about herself. That’s who she is, and if it rubs someone the wrong way she’s perfectly content to live and let live. She has a longstanding streak of independence and a solid foundation of self-confidence to hold it up.
As much she might act like it, though, it isn’t a bottomless foundation. She covers it up with bravado, but she’s actually a little shy of being vulnerable with people. There are some things about herself she’s still shaky and uncertain on, and in quiet moments she’s even downright afraid—but she knows she’s still just a teenager, even if she feels older, and she’s not supposed to have it all figured out yet.
In her more quiet moments, she’s also prone to a fairly surprising amount of wisdom. She’s obviously no world-weary sage, of course, Vinyl’s still just a sixteen-year-old girl, but there’s a kind of relaxed insightfulness to her that you wouldn’t normally expect out of someone so gregarious. Doesn’t show it often, though; she’s more comfortable with the persona of being frivolously fun and impish, even if it makes people assume she’s airheaded.
And as much as Vinyl acts that laissez-faire persona, she still values her close friendships and family before all else. She works on behalf of the Element of Loyalty, after all. She’s known to go to ridiculous lengths for someone if it’s important enough. You can joke about friends who’d help you bury a body, but Vinyl would actually do it—and she’d only complain about the shovel giving her blisters. If you want to really upset her, a sure-fire way is to go after her loved ones.
There are a few other things that really rub her the wrong way. She tries not to get flustered, but wasting money or food both irritate her, and she can’t stand it when someone tears at someone below them on the pecking order. It’s the closest thing she has to a rage button; she’s a big fat sucker for the underdog. She’s also prone to snark at people she perceives as “high-class” or pretentious, though it’s ironic since she’s a bit pretentious herself.
If Vinyl has one big vice, though, it’s in the matter of her stubbornness. Sure, having that kind of tenacity can come in handy, but more often than not it’s exhausting at best, and gets her in trouble at worst. Once she gets fixated on something she can end up letting it run away with her brain, and not getting a resolution will eat at her for ages. She’ll hold on to grudges too long and obsess on details. Whether it’s a piece of music, a tech project, a personal problem, or even just a person, she’s prone to run herself into the ground.
She’s still scrappy at heart, though; no matter what comes, she’ll do her best not to ignore the things that matter. There’s songs to sing, friendships to forge, love to make, and somewhere out there… a great big Discorded to beat up. Right?
#History ;Vinyl spent most of her childhood moving around the foster care system, being shuffled from one family to another as parents or the state passed her along. Since she didn’t have a consistent home life, she grew into independence from a fairly early age, and although initially that made her a real “wild child,” it didn’t take long for her to learn you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. That said, she was still a stubborn, tenacious little kid even back then, and even if she often had to leave them, she made fast friendships and tried to keep a hold of them as long as possible.
It was rough, though. She didn’t always get along so well at school, and being an outsider made her a natural target. Around the time she was 9, she was living with an older couple and had gotten in a some bad fights (by kid standards, anyway) with the other kids—a couple of which she’d even started. After a bit of thought, the old lady decided to sit Vinyl down in front of their old upright piano and start giving her lessons, so she’d have an outlet and something to do with herself.
She took to it like a fish to water. She went from bopping randomly at the keys to hen-pecking to playing simple melodies within a few months, and she ran with it. A simple set of 88 keys unlocked a whole world to her, and though it made her more solitary and introverted than she was before, she’d never been happier.
Unfortunately, her time with that couple didn’t last forever, and she was moved on to the next household after a year or so. The damage was done, though; the music bug had bitten. Even if she no longer had a piano, or at least easy access to one, that didn’t stop her from listening. She had Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, and everyone who ever learned from them to catch up on. When her fingers got too itchy, she took to doodling and scratching down her thoughts, whatever little outlets she had.
* * *
Skip forward a few years. At 13, Vinyl was placed into a suburban Ponyville household, the one that would eventually adopt her for good. She had saved up for a few years, bits of pocket money at a time, and she bought herself a keyboard. It was used, and a little battered, and the A4 key stuck, but it had weighted keys and a solid wood finish—more importantly it was hers, and she picked right up where she left off.
The Scratch family, consisting of two fathers and an older brother, wound up being a good fit for her. They all bonded well together, and even if she was a tad off-beat to the rest of them at first, they signed the papers and took her in permanently just before she entered high school. She was, and is, determined not to let them down; in Freshmen year she stuck her nose to the grindstone and turned from a C into a straight-A student, and she’s loyal to the end for them.
Following Freshmen year, she had two obvious choices; the Music club, or the A/V club. The former lasted only a few months before the stuffy atmosphere made her almost choke to death, and she flipped right into the A/V crew. Vinyl had always had a decent head for math and science, and finding a way to combine that with music without all the pretension of classical composing and orchestration was heaven on earth for her.
And for the next couple of years, everything’s been going hunky-dory. Vinyl adjusted to living the easygoing suburban life, developed her musical skills, and continued to work hard at school, even taking some odd jobs here and there to finance her passions. It all led up to her taking the DJ booth for the Canterlot High Fall Formal…
* * *
…Yeah. That Fall Formal. With the zombies and demon and big-ass rainbow cannon. At the time she had assumed someone dropped some serious acid into the punch, but in the following weeks, the crater continued to exist in spite of the odds. Magic was real and it was right there in front of her. And it could explode.
She wasn’t so stoked about that part. So on top of everything else, she started to hit the internet and make preparations—in case this weird, evil magic came back in a bad way. After moving around so much and finally finding a place to call home, she wasn’t about to give it up so easily and let it get assaulted by freakin’ demon monsters from Hell.
So after some planning and tinkering, she started lingering, sometimes. She’d stay late to work on something for the A/V club, or take the long way around, or have her lunch alone on the rooftop. For lack of a better term, she started watching the school for danger and actively sought it out, in case one of the Elements wasn’t there. And one evening, it paid off.
* * *
It was one of the times she’d stayed after school, working on reinforcing the auditorium’s lighting grid. There was a sudden burst of noise from outside, by the sports field; an enormous, winged mockery of the school mascot had cropped up and began wrecking things left and right. During a late practice, one of the Discorded had popped up thanks to a player infuriated at being left out by his injury, and there wasn’t an Element close at hand to help the rest of the team…
Which is why ahead of time, Vinyl had taken apart a taser and attached the electrodes to the business end of a shop hammer. Maybe not elegant, definitely not allowed by the school (or the state), but her little device held an Element none of the others had; the Element of Surprise.
‘Course, it didn’t solve the problem. When she took off, charged at the Discorded and slammed it with a million volts and 2 miliamps of electric hammer, all it did was buy time. She had sort of stunned the thing while everyone else ran off, and then it knocked her flat on her back.
…But that’s where things started to properly change, because she got back up and came at it again. And again. It kept knocking her away, but she forced herself off the ground each time and distracted it, buying time for one of the magical chicks to show up. Even when the battery on her hammer died and the grip was smoking, she kept coming, whacking, getting knocked back just to keep it from getting away and hurting someone else.
Sure enough, an Element showed up to wipe out the Discorded and save the day—and Vinyl, for all her trouble, got knocked down again by a beam of light. Her loyalty and dedication, to keep fighting for even when the getting got bad, had granted her the power to tap into the Element of Loyalty.
Since then, she’s mostly been learning how to best use her ability—and trying her damnedest to juggle her friends, her schoolwork, her family, and now fighting evil, while still trying to find the time to make some music in-between the rest.The Roleplayer's Corner
#Nickname ; Dizzy
#Age ; Twentysomething
#Gender/Preferred Pronouns ; Neutral or feminine
#How did you find us? ; The Doubled Has Been Fun
#Sample RP ;Tak. Taka-tak. … Taka-tak.
… Tak taka-tak. Tak taka-tak. Tak taka-tak taka-tak taka-tak
tak tak taka-tak taka-tak taka-tak tak whack slip clatter. ”Shoot.”
Vinyl bent down to pick up her pen. After giving it another couple halfhearted taks on edge of the table, she resigned herself to having already lost the rhythm. Oh well. If it didn’t get stuck in her head, it wasn’t a very good one anyway. And the librarian was giving her the stink-eye again. She gave her a sheepish grin and turned her attention back to the book.
She was only on the third chapter of her biology textbook, and already it made her brain feel how those amoeba looked. Gelatinous and flat. With little annotations. She was good at science, she could understand physics and chemistry pretty well—those were things with numbers and formulas. It was just applying math to stuff. But this biology business was on a totally different league, a league filled with latin names and flowcharts and ugh.
And she had a report due on the first three chapters. By Wednesday. Ugh.
She flopped her face down in between the pages, her shades clattering off the top of her head. This was so painful. So. Painful. She wanted to be at home with her drum machine and her headphones and a melody or something… but that’s exactly why she had to be at the library. There were all those distractions, and dangit, she had to study this. Even if it meant certain death, and oh yes. It meant death.
Besides—she had heard there was some kind of attack at the park not that long ago. Discord made a giant fire-breathing pigeon or something and flattened some music club girl. That park wasn’t too far from here, and the school tended to attract that weirdo’s weirdness and his evilly weird weirdery. Staying late meant she could stay vigilant in case something happened.
…But nothing happened. No evil monster was going to save her from this terrible fate.
With a deep sigh and one last hopeful look at the window, almost wishing for that fire pigeon to barrel in and smash the statue outside… she picked up the pen again, flipped open her workbook, and started taking notes. It was Vinyl versus education. Round one. No prisoners. Ding.
||| Element of Harmony Form |||
#Hair color and style ; Her hair stays the same color and style in her transformed state, though it may look a little more sharp and neat, and it parts for the presence of a white horn on her forehead. Such is the way of Harmony.
#Eye color ; Red, still, but a bit brighter and more “neon” colored. Hard to tell with those shades though.
#Clothing ; She’s an Element, not a Bearer; no fancy magical girl outfit for Vinyl. Luckily, she looks like she just leapt out of an excessively-saturated anime pretty much every day anyhow.
#A more thorough description (optional) ; Aside from the horn, Vinyl’s transformation, for some reason, includes making her purple shades transform into a pair of sturdy machine-grade goggles. The goggles (unlike her shades) don’t prevent her from seeing in dark situations, and in fact have a faint violet glow.
#Element of; Loyalty
#Pony Spirit ; Unicorn
#Harmonizer/Disharmonizer Appearance ;Vinyl’s Harmonizer is in the form of a charm bracelet, usually on her left wrist, which has a bunch of double eighth-note charms hanging off of it. To activate, she simply presses one of the charms into her palm and shakes out the bracelet; from then until it deactivates, all of the charms light up blue.
#Magical Abilities;
Ability Name; Battle Record
Ability Type; Defensive
Ability Effect; Allows her to create, wield, spin and manipulate shield-like discs of magic.
Ability Description; Vinyl’s power isn’t big on offense, but it’s very versatile; when her Harmonizer is active, she can form blue discs of pure, humming harmonic magic at her fingertips, though only one at a time on either hand or a large one with both. They can range in size from barely wider than her fingertip to a shield wide enough to cover her head to knee. Spinning them maintains and increases their energy, making them stronger and more durable; consequently, bigger ones take longer and are harder to spin.
She can then do several things with one: she can either keep it at her palm like a traditional shield, which lets her maintain it for longer periods and under more duress; she can throw it like a frisbee, and after a few bounces or a direct hit it dissipates; or she can “position” it in the air for a couple seconds, which is really only good for creating a small standing shield or as something to step on for a boost up.
It’s worth noting, however, that these aren’t badass blades of death. Though one of them thrown might cut a rope, she can’t keep spinning them once they leave her hands, so unless it’s very short-range they lose power quickly. They’re also not very accurate, just by dint of the fact Vinyl has awful aim; if she’s going to throw them, it’s more effective as a quick “spray and pray” to hold an enemy back.
(As a flavor note, the discs also make an oscillating musical tone as she spins them; higher and thinner for smaller discs, bigger and lower for larger ones.)
Ability Name; Telekinesis
Ability Type; Support
Ability Effect; Grants the user the ability to manipulate objects through magic.
Ability Description; When used, an object is surrounded by colored magical auras. Vinyl is then able to move the object around. The larger, heavier the object, the more magic that has to be used to lift it.