a temporary journal title

PLAYER INFO
Name: Kit, she/her or they/them
Age: 32. I think. Shit.
Contact: alexipharmaca / PM
Current Characters: None

CHARACTER INFO
Name: Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Journal: necrosaint
Age: 18 (also stopped physically aging at 18)
Appearance:
This character sheet is linked with permission, demonstrating all the aspects of Harrow's appearance and some of the face paint, detail also in color on the face paint.

She wears all black whenever she can get away with it, and her bone corset and other exoskeletal pieces, too. Epic amounts of bone jewelry.

Canon: The Locked Tomb Trilogy
Canon Point: Post-Harrow the Ninth by like a minute

History: Wiki is very comprehensive! Content warnings for suicide, emotional and physical abuse.

Abilities: Harrow is a necromancer, which allows her to not just speak to the dead (she's in fact very poor at this aspect, as well as experiencing a psychosis that creates some actual hallucinations at times so she doesn't even know if a ghost is real) but control aspects of thanergy (death energy) and theoretically thalergy (life energy). Being away from the dead or sources of death takes a lot out of her - or it did before her Lyctorhood. Specifically Harrow is a bone adept, and can do just about anything with bones that one could imagine: skeletal constructs of any size from her small chips of bone that she wears and carries with her, creating regenerating bone ash, and healing any sort of injury to bone in herself or others. As a Lyctor but an incomplete and damaged one, she is capable of healing any injury to herself but needs to be able to concentrate on and think it through; nothing is automatic, and so if mentally incapacitated (or just really thoroughly beat up) Harrow can be killed. I am completely game to do a lot or a little with this, as for the most part other than making skeletal constructs to help her do physical things, while Harrow is a highly intellectual necromancer who is very into studying the theory and analyzing it, she isn't hugely showy and doesn't often want to use her bones for anything besides helping herself and protecting herself. Since they're bones, they're breakable; they're just human bone, and anything that can break bone can get to her (and if you take her away from any source of bone, and take all of hers away, she can't generate it from nothing, either).

Questionnaire:

1. What do they care deeply about? What kind of loyalties, commitments, moral codes, life philosophies, passions, callings or spirituality and faith do they have? How do these tend to be expressed?
For the most part, she cares about bones. But beyond that: The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House cares primarily for ... the Ninth House. She cares more than anything for the body in the Locked Tomb, which her home was created to guard and prevent it from getting out and anyone else from getting in. She knows its traps like the patterns of her own blood vessels, which she knows perfectly indeed. Being a religious leader since her earliest youth, running services on her own by age ten, her loyalty is first to the Locked Tomb and the Ninth, and then to the Emperor Undying, God who became Man and Man who became God, The Necrolord Prime. Her morals follow this precisely—she is an ascetic nun of the Ninth, who believes firmly in austerity and simplicity. She is not prone to indulgence or enjoyment for enjoyment's sake. Her rituals are also protective to her due to her own neuroses, and sticking to the path she was raised in precisely is how she keeps herself put together. But she also has a loyalty to the most important person in her life, her cavalier who died for her, and Harrow will give everything for Gideon, to protect Gideon, to make Gideon safe - so she has learned to try to experience a little bit more, because it is what Gideon would want. She's been forced to let people in, to give a little trust, because her life and having one is why her cavalier died (that's the tl;dr version, anyway). Her passion is for necromancy and for understanding the mysteries of the universe through a lens of scientific theory,a nd that is her passion - she will lecture, she will speak enthusiastically, and go on and on, eyes bright and heart wide open, on that subject alone. To become one of the Saints, the Emperor's Hands, was a lifelong dream for two reasons: one, because she is fervently worshipful, and two, because she decided at age ten she'd have to become immortal in case the girl inside the Locked Tomb, who she had fallen desperately in love with, came to life.

2. What kind of person could they become in the future? What are some developmental paths that they could take: best, worst, most likely?
The future Harrow will be a fully-realized being who is content, if not genuinely happy, if she enters into a mental space and the right connections to others where she is living for herself. Not because she cost too much, or because she has to protect the Tomb, or because she has to live so Gideon can, but just because she, Harrow, the person, wants to be. For the most part no one ever uses her name (just a series of titles) let alone lets her do things or exist just because she wants to; she doesn't do things for herself. She could be a brilliant and happy person who lives to the fullest extent, loves and can be loved in return, if she were able to understand that its' okay to do things for yourself just because you're you.

In a best case, she does that.

In a worst case, she never finds anyone who will be the right amount of mean back, never finds anyone who will parry ideas with her, never finds any more foils or frenemies-she-secretly-loves or found-family or even another cavalier. Her ego and self-sufficient ideals win and she dies in a bone cocoon, alone.

Most likely? She's always going to be a workaholic, somewhat misanthropic, somewhat austerity-focused, smart but socially awkward except in ritualistic contexts where she's perfection personified bone adept who doesn't care about anything but bones really ... but she'll have that little family-of-heart, because her time through other worlds and being put in situations where she and others must trust to survive, and she'll keep her fondness for them wrapped up inside, an intimate secret between Harrow and the people Harrow loves. She will be free and have fun, but only sometimes, only when pushed just a little--but there will be at least one person who puts up with her attitude, with her constant need to be pushed in order to do anything that isn't work, and it'll be enough.

3. How do they behave within a group? What role(s) do they take? Does this differ if they know and trust the group, versus finding themselves in a group of strangers? Why?
She is either a silent observer or a leader. Big differences, because Harrow doesn't trust anyone at all at first blush, and has a big chip on her shoulder re: doing everything by herself, largely because for most of her life she only could do things by herself. She's also afraid that any and all of the rest of the group could hurt her or side against and destroy her, when she is desperate to live. Once she's gotten to know the group, though, if she's in the same group long enough they no longer are strangers? She starts to consider these people hers, whether or not she actually likes them. When she has to do something big with a group, for her safety, for theirs, just because it's a thing that has to be done, she'll realize that she has ideas and needs to express them. She's actually good at teamwork, but has been raised to be a leader, and developed a talent for coordination as well as a natural bossy streak that means Harrow falls into a leadership role pretty naturally if no one stops her. She just has to have started talking at all first.

4. What do they need and want out of relationships, and how do they go about getting it?
She needs to be loved. She needs an equal relationship, or two, or five. She needs a connection that does not fall apart and shatter her; Harrow has never been loved properly by anyone (her parents loved her at a distance, afraid of what they had done to get her, afraid of what she was and just how good a necromancer she had become and how fragile a soul she was), and the only person she loved who may have been able to give her any kind of true regard died so that Harrow could live. Harrow did not appreciate it. The difference is that this is what Harrowhark actually needs from relationships and not what she thinks she needs; she thinks she is entirely self-sufficient and can be alone, with the exception of, perhaps, one person. She is deeply lonely but doesn't process a lot of her inner pain as such. She will need a challenge -- like the game's environment(s)! -- to force her to engage with others, much like the only other time she had a friend. This manifests initially in her narrowing in on someone who is highly intelligent and wants to talk out (bonus points if in the form of a debate!) the possible ramifications of choices and actions in how to get out of a challenging or unsafe situation. From there, she starts to let that person in, and they'll connect further. But the way through Harrow's walls, and the only way Harrow lets people in (despite the fact that deep down all she wants to do is let people in, that is entirely subconscious) is by beginning with Brainy-Intellectual-Academic People Problem Solving Verbally.

And oh, does she want people to be proud of her. Even when she claimed to hate Gideon, even when she called her by a mean name, when she did something successful? Did you behold me, Griddle? Please praise her. Please be proud of her. Please tell her she did something right. She needs that more than anything--she needs it enough to even ask.

5. How do they understand the world–what kind of worldview and thought processes do they have? Why?
Throughout her early childhood, Harrow was practically worshiped by the small population of the hole-in-an-asteroid monastery she grew up in ... but treated more like a praised object than loved like a child. She sees herself thus as how she was treated in her early years: like a thing that exists for others, like something too valuable to die or be destroyed despite her own flickering suicidal desires. The world is not for her, exactly. She has a reason and a purpose and a singular drive. She must be the best necromancer of her generation, of existence, all time -- enjoying things, being properly loved and wanted and appreciated, belonging, all of that is for other people. Harrow seems arrogant (and she is, as regards her own ability) but she is also very self-loathing, and so she thinks of everything as somewhat separate from herself. She's cautious and wary, because anyone and everyone could divert her from her path, distract her from the reason her parents even made her (and so many died for her to be born!) ... she knows she has other curiosities. She knows she has baser desires. She hates them and wishes to deny them, and desperately strives to continue to be a stoic nun apart from everything. At the same time, she knows the world is full of things she doesn't understand, and almost finds that offensive. Harrowhark Nonagesimus should, wants to, must understand everything, and that is part of her drive: it is all a mystery to be solved. People are a thing that will only hurt her, but the world itself she wants to pick away at with science and necromancy and questions and writings and theories and ideas until there is nothing she cannot comprehend.

6. How much do they rely on their minds and intellect, versus other approaches like relying on instinct, intuition, faith and spirituality, or emotions?
Harrow is an interesting blend, here: she is very religious, but has now met her God and has a somewhat unsettled view of him. Still, she is a religious leader by upbringing (raised in a monastery) and considers faith very highly ... but other than that, is 100% intellectual all the time. She's Super Smart and an Incredibly Talented Necromancer (which is more science than magic where she's from) and doesn't have room for making decisions based on anything except planning, research and logistics. Her feelings are an annoying side effect of being human that she tries not to pay any credence to; she believes experiencing them to be a flaw. Spirituality is important to her only when it is hers; religion that is her religion. She doesn't trust her own instinct, but she trusted her cavalier's. Emotions are useless. Intellect is everything.

7. What is something others might find intolerable about them?
This question delights me because often the answer is what is something others WOULDN'T find intolerable about her. Harrow is stubborn. Harrow is snarky. Harrow is fierce in a quiet way. She is mildly polite in a religious setting but otherwise silent and looking at people in a way that seems as if she's judging them (because she is). The fact that she speaks her mind boldly and quite rudely at times, and that she seems to have absolutely no sense of humor most of the time and is irritable and unpleasant when not wearing the airs of the Reverend Daughter (which in the TDM she mostly was except with her canonmate, hence there being a lot of bluntness to her but not much rudeness). She nitpicks. She's bossy. She's offensive just by the way she speaks half the time ... and the fact her vocabulary is super-precise with a lot of lengthy terminology? That's pretty intolerable to a lot of people too.