Unfinished Library App
Oct. 30th, 2025 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wontforbidtherainPlayer Name: Stareyes
Player Contact(s): beccastareyes@gmail.com
Are you over 18? Yes
Do you have any other characters in game?: No
Who invited you?: NA
Character Name: Aphra Marsh
Canon: The Innsmouth Legacy
Canon Point: After Winter Tide (book 1)
Age: 34
History:
There isn’t a series wiki, but if you want a book plot summary, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Tide
Aphra was born in Innsmouth, Massachusetts, which seemed to be an isolated fishing town with a bad reputation. It actually was the home of a subspecies of humans, Deep Ones, who underwent a metamorphosis into immortal fish-people around middle age thanks to an ancient bargain with the water, and who never really gave up their ancestral polytheism (Aeonism). Rumors of demons and magic eventually caused the US government to round up the residents of Innsmouth and ship them to an internment camp far in the Nevada desert. This happened when Aphra was ten; she saw US soldiers shoot her father when he tried to defend her. Metamorphosing adults were taken deeper in the desert for experimentation.
The people of Innsmouth, unable to cope with the conditions, slowly died from illness. By 1942, Aphra and her brother, Caleb were the only two left, when the US government decided the camp could be repurposed for a new set of undesirable enemies: Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. Aphra and Caleb, though adults, were taken in by Rei Koto, a Japanese widow with three children. The US government seemed to forgot that there were two Deep Ones among the camp’s population, and the Marshes were freed with the rest of the camp residents at the end of the war.
Aphra settled in San Francisco with the Kotos, while Caleb returned to survey Innsmouth. A chance offering of a job at a bookstore introduced her to Charlie Day, who was a would-be mystic, and Aphra offered to trade what she remembered from her childhood introductions to magic for access to Charlie’s books. An encounter with FBI agent Ron Spector showed that the US government hadn’t entirely lost interest — Spector was sympathetic to the Marshes, and wanted Aphra’s consultation, so Uncle Sam could separate harmless minority religions from dangerous cultists.
Spector eventually offered Aphra a consulting position. The US government was worried that body-switching magic might be used for espionage, and he suggested that while he could get Aphra access to the famed library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, near Innsmouth, she could also use the chance to access Innsmouth’s books, which had been taken by Misktatonic scholars for ‘safekeeping’ after the raid.
Spector’s little adventure leads to a number of things:
— Aphra and Caleb are able to reconnect with the Deep One elders, including their grandfather. They are given a choice: accept that they will be the last and youngest Deep Ones, or rebuild Innsmouth and have children with other humans, accepting that the children may not inherit the metamorphosis. Aphra is still undecided.
— Aphra meets of Ron Spector’s rival, Barlow, who thinks America should develop its own magic without ‘ancient superstition’. This ends up getting a girl killed, and renders Barlow’s main magic specialist unable to read or write. Aphra concludes that she still doesn’t trust the US government, but she is willing to trust that Agent Spector is a good man but limited by his duty to such. (But that also he will tell her about said limits.)
— Aphra ends up forming a ‘confluence’ of student-mages trying to learn what they can. This includes herself, Charlie, Caleb, Audrey Winslow (a local university student), and Deedee Dawson (the FBI’s informant on Misktaonic’s campus) and sometimes Professor Catherine Trumbull (who got dragged in as her body had been used by a non-human archivist for historical research… but who left after it was clear things were getting dangerous, leaving Aphra to explain to a woman how six months had passed without her realizing it and who these weirdos were in her house).
Is this character an AU? What type?: No.
Personality:
Aphra never set out to do so, but she ended up a leader and teacher. She parlayed her grade-school education in magic and dead languages to a partnership with her boss who had collected some occult tomes, and then into a whole ‘working group’ (or confluence) of students. By her people’s customs, she is ‘eldest on land’ (Gavn) and thus a leader, even if their community is herself, her brother, a few humans with Deep One ancestors, and a scant few allies. People look to her even without a title. Aphra is also quite willing to over-extend herself and do some dangerous things for her people.
Her experiences also made her fiercely protective of her younger brother, Caleb, as well as the Kotos as her only family on land, and anyone else that becomes her people. She also is drawn to people who also negotiate a lack of power and agency -- when a rival team of FBI agents summoned something that, at best, would probably kill the summoner and at worst would leave a crater where the county was, she asked the Elders to intervene on behalf of one of the team (Sally, a college student who had hoped to learn what had been denied her because she was female), and refused to let them take action that would save Aphra’s life while damning the student. On a more personal level, it was also what propelled her to give her adoptive sister, Nancy Koto, a ‘job’ helping her track down the descendants of relatives who had children with people of the air.
In contrast, Aphra has a deep-seated distrust of authority outside of her own people’s elders — and even with them, she will argue, but she trusts their good intentions. Her interactions with Agent Spector lead her to the conclusion that he is a good man and sincerely believes that if he can show that Aphra and Caleb are assets and not threats, he can buy them some safety. Aphra would mostly prefer the US government stop noticing her at all, and thinks Agent Spector is overly optimistic, but that there are times when having his connections is helpful. Her encounter with a Yith historian also makes her a lot more cynical than her people usually are about the Yith — sure, they are preserving Earth’s history, and that of humans, but they also are self-righteous and pompous assholes who justify horrible things in the name of historical preservation.
Aphra is also sincerely religious, and not just because it was part of her culture denied her by her captors. Aeonism isn’t exactly a hopeful religion (it basically states that ‘everything will die eventually, even the gods’ and doesn't promise an afterlife), but she takes comfort in the fact that that applies to all of the frustrations and anger and pettiness. It does also provide some level of fatalism — if the general sense of Earth’s history is all laid out, then the Yith knew of the Deep One genocide and never said anything, and that doesn’t get driven home until Aphra meets a Yith and asks. Some of Aphra’s conviction is that especially when you know the universe is indifferent to you, you need to care about the people around you to make up for it.
Aphra is brisk and organized and trying to bring her community back, while trying to reconcile the fact in her heart that it will never be her childhood home. As no remaining Deep Ones are on land besides Aphra and Caleb, any children will be ‘mistblooded’ and not guaranteed to have a metamorphosis. Aphra is lukewarm on the idea of marriage and children in general, but the idea that she’d have to bury some of her children and Caleb’s children makes her heart-sick. (She is not thinking about how many friends she has that are not going to join her in the sea.)
Powers and Abilities:
Aphra’s people tend to be stronger, tougher and have faster reflexes than humans; not superhuman, but enough that a woman who is not particularly active and who went through some poor health in her adolescence, can sometimes get the drop on a human man. She can also see in near-darkness, and is largely immune to the cold of a Massachusetts winter, or even a dip in the Atlantic during that winter — hot and dry conditions are not good for her, in contrast.
Aphra is a student of magic. Magic largely is not used to affect matter, as such magics can be sanity-destroying. We have seen Aphra use magic as a diagnostic and for some light healing — mostly speeding natural recovery. She has performed a summoning — for other humans, this can range from 'someone wants to talk to me here' to utter conviction that something wonderful is waiting in the summoning circle. She has created links to her companions to get a sense of who they are as people, but also what they feel — this also allowed a eldritch horror lodged in both Aphra and Audrey to be removed by a ritual performed on Aphra. She has done a few weather-workings, but mostly to go from 'fog and clouds' to 'clear skies above me', and always in groups. While it is only briefly touched on in Winter Tide, Aphra has started to learn dream magic to quiet her own nightmares, but can develop this power further into dream-waking with practice.
As for mundane skills, Aphra is fluent in several languages — both real ones like Latin, and the fictional Enochian and R’yleh. Her education beyond grade school is scattered, but she can cook and clean, and remembers some of the family recipes.
Inventory: Mostly the clothing on her back. Aphra does carry a small knife intended for ritual use.
Sample: https://unfinishedooc.dreamwidth.org/681.html?thread=111785#cmt111785
https://unfinishedooc.dreamwidth.org/681.html?thread=131753#cmt131753
When presented with a choice, is the character more likely to stick with tried and true methods? Or make something new up on the fly?
Aphra will first try the traditional methods, because she’s seen how innovation can go wrong. She wants to understand a situation before she innovates. That being said, much of her life has run into new territory, so she adapts. She is slowly realizing that as comforting as the past was — because so much of her culture and heritage was lost at the same time she lost her parents and home — that her people will need to rebuild and that it means that the old ways will not work. And that she might need to argue with the elders who don’t have as much awareness of how the world has changed.
What is more important to your character, preserving the past or forging a future?
Aphra would say that these are the same thing. A lot of her religious beliefs treat the timeline as a fixed and unchangeable progression and that entropy will eventually win. Both are parts of living in the now. But it is worth nothing that Aphra sees herself as having a future. While Caleb went back to the ruins to argue with those who had stolen Innsmouth’s things, Aphra stayed to help the Kotos rebuild their shattered life, and only returned East when she had an actual ‘in’ and a worry for the future — in a world with nuclear weapons, she did not want any government messing around with magic.
How does your character influence their own story? What about the stories of others?
Aphra’s story is one of realizing that while her world was torn down — she is a victim of a genocide, though no one in the books calls it that — she is alive and wants to rebuild, and mostly she is figuring out what that means. She is self directed — when Spector tells her about a possible Aeonist cult in San Francisco, she investigates if only for a sense of community, and when she finds that the mix of religious fervor and poor understanding was leading adherents to drown themselves in the Pacific, and Aphra herself couldn’t get through to them, she informs Spector to save lives.
In the second book, the Mi-Go call Aphra a word that marks a person who draws other people to them. It can be seen in the first book, where Aphra is the one who gives Audrey both a hint of the magical, but also comforts Audrey when Audrey finds out that she’s part K’nyan (the people of the rock, who are also called the Mad Ones Under the Earth) and helps remind Audrey that who she was yesterday is the same person she is now, just with a bit more upsetting family history. She also makes sure Trumbull gets help from the elders on ‘so you just got back to your body after a stint in the Yithian archives’. Aphra is the sort of person who believes firmly that if everything will crumble to dust and the stars will fade, and no one will remember either the good or the bad of Earth… here and now, it still matters to be kind, to seek understanding and to remember that even if you just have to endure, at least your tormentors are also irrelevant in the face of an indifferent universe.
Are you alright with your character’s canon being used as a Recommended Reading?: Very. Or anything Lovecraft, though Aphra may Weill have Opinions on its accuracy.
Player Contact(s): beccastareyes@gmail.com
Are you over 18? Yes
Do you have any other characters in game?: No
Who invited you?: NA
Character Name: Aphra Marsh
Canon: The Innsmouth Legacy
Canon Point: After Winter Tide (book 1)
Age: 34
History:
There isn’t a series wiki, but if you want a book plot summary, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Tide
Aphra was born in Innsmouth, Massachusetts, which seemed to be an isolated fishing town with a bad reputation. It actually was the home of a subspecies of humans, Deep Ones, who underwent a metamorphosis into immortal fish-people around middle age thanks to an ancient bargain with the water, and who never really gave up their ancestral polytheism (Aeonism). Rumors of demons and magic eventually caused the US government to round up the residents of Innsmouth and ship them to an internment camp far in the Nevada desert. This happened when Aphra was ten; she saw US soldiers shoot her father when he tried to defend her. Metamorphosing adults were taken deeper in the desert for experimentation.
The people of Innsmouth, unable to cope with the conditions, slowly died from illness. By 1942, Aphra and her brother, Caleb were the only two left, when the US government decided the camp could be repurposed for a new set of undesirable enemies: Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. Aphra and Caleb, though adults, were taken in by Rei Koto, a Japanese widow with three children. The US government seemed to forgot that there were two Deep Ones among the camp’s population, and the Marshes were freed with the rest of the camp residents at the end of the war.
Aphra settled in San Francisco with the Kotos, while Caleb returned to survey Innsmouth. A chance offering of a job at a bookstore introduced her to Charlie Day, who was a would-be mystic, and Aphra offered to trade what she remembered from her childhood introductions to magic for access to Charlie’s books. An encounter with FBI agent Ron Spector showed that the US government hadn’t entirely lost interest — Spector was sympathetic to the Marshes, and wanted Aphra’s consultation, so Uncle Sam could separate harmless minority religions from dangerous cultists.
Spector eventually offered Aphra a consulting position. The US government was worried that body-switching magic might be used for espionage, and he suggested that while he could get Aphra access to the famed library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, near Innsmouth, she could also use the chance to access Innsmouth’s books, which had been taken by Misktatonic scholars for ‘safekeeping’ after the raid.
Spector’s little adventure leads to a number of things:
— Aphra and Caleb are able to reconnect with the Deep One elders, including their grandfather. They are given a choice: accept that they will be the last and youngest Deep Ones, or rebuild Innsmouth and have children with other humans, accepting that the children may not inherit the metamorphosis. Aphra is still undecided.
— Aphra meets of Ron Spector’s rival, Barlow, who thinks America should develop its own magic without ‘ancient superstition’. This ends up getting a girl killed, and renders Barlow’s main magic specialist unable to read or write. Aphra concludes that she still doesn’t trust the US government, but she is willing to trust that Agent Spector is a good man but limited by his duty to such. (But that also he will tell her about said limits.)
— Aphra ends up forming a ‘confluence’ of student-mages trying to learn what they can. This includes herself, Charlie, Caleb, Audrey Winslow (a local university student), and Deedee Dawson (the FBI’s informant on Misktaonic’s campus) and sometimes Professor Catherine Trumbull (who got dragged in as her body had been used by a non-human archivist for historical research… but who left after it was clear things were getting dangerous, leaving Aphra to explain to a woman how six months had passed without her realizing it and who these weirdos were in her house).
Is this character an AU? What type?: No.
Personality:
Aphra never set out to do so, but she ended up a leader and teacher. She parlayed her grade-school education in magic and dead languages to a partnership with her boss who had collected some occult tomes, and then into a whole ‘working group’ (or confluence) of students. By her people’s customs, she is ‘eldest on land’ (Gavn) and thus a leader, even if their community is herself, her brother, a few humans with Deep One ancestors, and a scant few allies. People look to her even without a title. Aphra is also quite willing to over-extend herself and do some dangerous things for her people.
Her experiences also made her fiercely protective of her younger brother, Caleb, as well as the Kotos as her only family on land, and anyone else that becomes her people. She also is drawn to people who also negotiate a lack of power and agency -- when a rival team of FBI agents summoned something that, at best, would probably kill the summoner and at worst would leave a crater where the county was, she asked the Elders to intervene on behalf of one of the team (Sally, a college student who had hoped to learn what had been denied her because she was female), and refused to let them take action that would save Aphra’s life while damning the student. On a more personal level, it was also what propelled her to give her adoptive sister, Nancy Koto, a ‘job’ helping her track down the descendants of relatives who had children with people of the air.
In contrast, Aphra has a deep-seated distrust of authority outside of her own people’s elders — and even with them, she will argue, but she trusts their good intentions. Her interactions with Agent Spector lead her to the conclusion that he is a good man and sincerely believes that if he can show that Aphra and Caleb are assets and not threats, he can buy them some safety. Aphra would mostly prefer the US government stop noticing her at all, and thinks Agent Spector is overly optimistic, but that there are times when having his connections is helpful. Her encounter with a Yith historian also makes her a lot more cynical than her people usually are about the Yith — sure, they are preserving Earth’s history, and that of humans, but they also are self-righteous and pompous assholes who justify horrible things in the name of historical preservation.
Aphra is also sincerely religious, and not just because it was part of her culture denied her by her captors. Aeonism isn’t exactly a hopeful religion (it basically states that ‘everything will die eventually, even the gods’ and doesn't promise an afterlife), but she takes comfort in the fact that that applies to all of the frustrations and anger and pettiness. It does also provide some level of fatalism — if the general sense of Earth’s history is all laid out, then the Yith knew of the Deep One genocide and never said anything, and that doesn’t get driven home until Aphra meets a Yith and asks. Some of Aphra’s conviction is that especially when you know the universe is indifferent to you, you need to care about the people around you to make up for it.
Aphra is brisk and organized and trying to bring her community back, while trying to reconcile the fact in her heart that it will never be her childhood home. As no remaining Deep Ones are on land besides Aphra and Caleb, any children will be ‘mistblooded’ and not guaranteed to have a metamorphosis. Aphra is lukewarm on the idea of marriage and children in general, but the idea that she’d have to bury some of her children and Caleb’s children makes her heart-sick. (She is not thinking about how many friends she has that are not going to join her in the sea.)
Powers and Abilities:
Aphra’s people tend to be stronger, tougher and have faster reflexes than humans; not superhuman, but enough that a woman who is not particularly active and who went through some poor health in her adolescence, can sometimes get the drop on a human man. She can also see in near-darkness, and is largely immune to the cold of a Massachusetts winter, or even a dip in the Atlantic during that winter — hot and dry conditions are not good for her, in contrast.
Aphra is a student of magic. Magic largely is not used to affect matter, as such magics can be sanity-destroying. We have seen Aphra use magic as a diagnostic and for some light healing — mostly speeding natural recovery. She has performed a summoning — for other humans, this can range from 'someone wants to talk to me here' to utter conviction that something wonderful is waiting in the summoning circle. She has created links to her companions to get a sense of who they are as people, but also what they feel — this also allowed a eldritch horror lodged in both Aphra and Audrey to be removed by a ritual performed on Aphra. She has done a few weather-workings, but mostly to go from 'fog and clouds' to 'clear skies above me', and always in groups. While it is only briefly touched on in Winter Tide, Aphra has started to learn dream magic to quiet her own nightmares, but can develop this power further into dream-waking with practice.
As for mundane skills, Aphra is fluent in several languages — both real ones like Latin, and the fictional Enochian and R’yleh. Her education beyond grade school is scattered, but she can cook and clean, and remembers some of the family recipes.
Inventory: Mostly the clothing on her back. Aphra does carry a small knife intended for ritual use.
Sample: https://unfinishedooc.dreamwidth.org/681.html?thread=111785#cmt111785
https://unfinishedooc.dreamwidth.org/681.html?thread=131753#cmt131753
When presented with a choice, is the character more likely to stick with tried and true methods? Or make something new up on the fly?
Aphra will first try the traditional methods, because she’s seen how innovation can go wrong. She wants to understand a situation before she innovates. That being said, much of her life has run into new territory, so she adapts. She is slowly realizing that as comforting as the past was — because so much of her culture and heritage was lost at the same time she lost her parents and home — that her people will need to rebuild and that it means that the old ways will not work. And that she might need to argue with the elders who don’t have as much awareness of how the world has changed.
What is more important to your character, preserving the past or forging a future?
Aphra would say that these are the same thing. A lot of her religious beliefs treat the timeline as a fixed and unchangeable progression and that entropy will eventually win. Both are parts of living in the now. But it is worth nothing that Aphra sees herself as having a future. While Caleb went back to the ruins to argue with those who had stolen Innsmouth’s things, Aphra stayed to help the Kotos rebuild their shattered life, and only returned East when she had an actual ‘in’ and a worry for the future — in a world with nuclear weapons, she did not want any government messing around with magic.
How does your character influence their own story? What about the stories of others?
Aphra’s story is one of realizing that while her world was torn down — she is a victim of a genocide, though no one in the books calls it that — she is alive and wants to rebuild, and mostly she is figuring out what that means. She is self directed — when Spector tells her about a possible Aeonist cult in San Francisco, she investigates if only for a sense of community, and when she finds that the mix of religious fervor and poor understanding was leading adherents to drown themselves in the Pacific, and Aphra herself couldn’t get through to them, she informs Spector to save lives.
In the second book, the Mi-Go call Aphra a word that marks a person who draws other people to them. It can be seen in the first book, where Aphra is the one who gives Audrey both a hint of the magical, but also comforts Audrey when Audrey finds out that she’s part K’nyan (the people of the rock, who are also called the Mad Ones Under the Earth) and helps remind Audrey that who she was yesterday is the same person she is now, just with a bit more upsetting family history. She also makes sure Trumbull gets help from the elders on ‘so you just got back to your body after a stint in the Yithian archives’. Aphra is the sort of person who believes firmly that if everything will crumble to dust and the stars will fade, and no one will remember either the good or the bad of Earth… here and now, it still matters to be kind, to seek understanding and to remember that even if you just have to endure, at least your tormentors are also irrelevant in the face of an indifferent universe.
Are you alright with your character’s canon being used as a Recommended Reading?: Very. Or anything Lovecraft, though Aphra may Weill have Opinions on its accuracy.
