app for souljammed

Player name: Kari
Contact info: karijou, legione dentro @ aim
Other characters currently played: n/a

Character name: Madoka Kaname
Age: 16 and a few months.
Canon: Puella Magi Madoka Magica, as a CRAU from ryslig
Canonpoint: End of Homura's third timeline, canon-updated from two years in Ryslig.

Background: Hoo, boy. First off, let's start with this link, which gives a series of events that happen before all timelines, followed immediately by the events of the first three timelines (timeline 3 being the most important for this Madoka). This link also gives a fair bit of background about Madoka, but doesn't directly address much of the main series events.

Now, on to her CRAU (Ryslig):

• Immediately after asking Homura to kill her, Madoka becomes one of the first new arrivals on Ryslig. With a shattered soul gem and a firm belief that this is some sort of afterlife, Madoka sets about trying to do as much good with it as she can.
  
  
• The first fog rolls in, and with it the first really Creepy Stuff starts to happen. Madoka helps people when she finds them and makes sure nobody is panicking too badly, and for a little bit it's almost like she's a magical girl again (or at least has that sort of sense of purpose). A week later, she goes into the forest as part of a search crew for a missing group of workers, and even more creepy stuff happens. She realizes two things: this is not an afterlife after all, and none of this bodes well.
  
  
• Some time of almost-normalcy goes by, and then Madoka dies. Literally - her heart stops in her body during a heart attack, but when the pain is over she's not sure what to make of it. (She's still moving around, after all!) The only other changes she gets here are hunger and a hunting instinct, and she finds herself starting to track and kill small woodland creatures. Others are not so lucky, as many of the newcomers begin to physically mutate into monsters at this point. She tries to help where she can.
  
  
• Almost a full month passes. A few monsters find out at this point that they need to devour humans to survive. Madoka is one of the unlucky ones - after she cannibalizes a body on instinct in the Vandare graveyard, the full set of physical changes kicks in all at once. Ashamed at giving in to the hunger and her new appearance, Madoka flees into the nearby forest and hides in the woods.
  
  
• After nearly week of hiding, Madoka hears news of new arrivals in Vandare. A bit reluctantly, she leaves her cave to find them and try to explain as much as she can about Ryslig - and in the process, she runs into Mami and Homura. She is astounded to find that neither of them runs away from her on sight, and further that neither wants to push her away for the way she looks or what she's done.
  
  
• After a bit of discussion, the three decide to find some way to cohabitate - that way, if another set of changes hits the new group, they have both a support network and a possible caretaker in Madoka. Another one of the first group, Tonika - someone who has helped and been helped by Madoka since her arrival - offers the group a place to stay in Bavan, and they gratefully take her up on it.
  
  
• Other monsters begin to report that after about a month, the hunger becomes unstoppable - a few monsters berserk, killing whatever they can lay their hands on in a crazed attempt to feed. Madoka realizes it has been nearly a month since she fed, and in her desperation is dragged into a different realm by the Fog God that brought them all to Ryslig. Without a chance to stop it, Madoka feasts on one of the willing followers - and in doing so, becomes pledged to the Fog God. Mami sees all of this, and when Madoka is next able to talk about it, promises to help look for a way to stop the Fog God.
  
  
• Months pass in relative simplicity. Madoka begins to grow used to eating humans, but works at all times to find ones that are already dead to prevent further loss of life. She helps other monsters through their transformations, and despite her newfound greed does her best to share what kills have to be made with others. However, during a harvest festival, Madoka discovers that a few monsters have been cursed together: Madoka, Mami, and Dipper and Mabel Pines. If one of them does not kill and offer a human body as sacrifice, the whole group will burn to death. Panicked, Madoka tries to find a way out, and in the last hours of the night abducts and kills a townsperson so that none of the others will have to do so themselves.
  
  
• Tonika and Homura both vanish over the months. Mami asks Madoka to move in with her in the downtown and to run a small cafe together, and Madoka accepts. The Tomoe-Kaname Cafe does not immediately take off well, but they manage to break even by a combination of monster fascination in the surrounding town and Mami's cooking. The cafe continues to be a staple of their life until Madoka's departure, except for...
  
  
• A few months in, the farming town of Rota riots. Huge numbers of monsters are captured in an outright invasion, tortured, and kept in a pen to be starved to death/dissolved with acid. Madoka is one of these monsters, and despite getting out relatively lucky she is still covered with lacerations and acid/fire burns by the end of it. When the town burns down in a retaliatory attack from the monsters, she is finally hit by her complete and utter powerlessness in this whole situation.
  
  
• Homura and Kyouko arrive (again, in Homura's case). Both are completely unfamiliar with everything, though Madoka has picked up in her more-than-a-year-long stay how worlds and timelines work differently in this place. Madoka and Mami work with them, offer them shelter, and try to help them through their transformations. In return, Homura takes Madoka to the doctor to finally get glasses for her terrible deer vision.
  
  
• After several months of waffling on the issue and a downright comedy of errors involving a date auction, Mami asks Madoka to be her girlfriend, and a very confused but grateful Madoka accepts.
  
  
• The Fog God begins to repeatedly whisper a request to Madoka, and when Madoka finally complies - killing a zombified Mahiru Koizumi to put her out of her misery - she finds she can grow a set of pink-tipped, long white wings.
  
  
• Another god makes its presence known, shifting many of the monsters into something different, and Madoka becomes a vampire for two months. This gives her many of the things she'd want - nonlethal feeding, humanoid appearance, and less debilitating weaknesses - at the cost of her guilt, humanity and impulse control. Madoka does several terrible things during this period, ranging from "stupid" to "horrifying," and towards the end figures out a way to make her wings permanent.
  
  
• She finally turns back into a wendigo, finds that Mami is missing from the peninsula, and falls into a depression over everything that's happened. Over the next few weeks, she does her best to spring back - after all, Mami might still be somewhere in the forests, and she can work to make amends to the people she hurt - but running a cafe is difficult on her own, and people are more than willing to talk about the mistakes she made. When Kyuubey shows up offering a solution at the cost of her soul, Madoka thinks long and hard before agreeing.

Personality: Madoka Kaname, when she's first introduced, appears to be a fairly average young girl. She cries as easily as she laughs, and she's the kind of person to grab her friend's hands or just hug them tight on a whim. It's only when Kyubey finally calls to her that she is drawn into conflict, and it's in conflict that her true character shines through. Despite having no powers of her own (for a show literally named "magical girl Madoka Magica," she sure takes her sweet time getting there), Madoka does everything she can to watch out for her friends. Some of this is obvious, like the moral support she offers; however, she even sticks around during battles just in case she needs to make a contract to save a friend. When it comes down to it, Madoka is willing to sell her soul into a painful life of battle (and later, to even become a witch) if it means saving the life of another.

And this selflessness isn't just restricted to her friends. When she finally does make her wish in the main timeline - a tremendous one, one that effectively allows her to shoulder the burden of every magical girl that has existed and ever will - she does so without dwelling on the pain it will cause her or the power it will bring. To her, all that matters is that all the girls who have fought before her shouldn't be punished for their dreams. She is supremely idealistic - willing to trade her material existence for a chance at hope for all others, and to do it all with a smile. After all, if she can make a miracle like that come to fruition, it's worth any pain it might bring, right?

Still, this willingness to take action comes with its own problems. When Madoka doesn't have something to fight for, or some way to fight for it, she doesn't have much confidence or even sense of self. She talks throughout the series how nice it would be to be worth something, or to have something she could actually do; she even (briefly) considers making a wish just to be a magical girl early on.

Now, Madoka's canon point - the third timeline of the show - makes a bit of a difference in a few important ways. For one, Madoka makes a contract very early into the loop, and as such doesn't have to deal with as much of her "no purpose" issues for very long. The biggest change, however, is a direct result of the events of the timeline. Sayaka becomes a witch, Mami snaps and tries to kill the other three girls (intending to kill herself afterwards), and Madoka is the one to shoot and kill her first.

This forces Madoka into a different direction of development; even though she's always been capable of doing what needs to be done, personally killing a close friend (one who is still human and conscious, at that) is too much for her. She only barely manages to keep going thanks to the incoming Walpurgis Night; after all, if she gives up hope there, she'll be taking Homura with her. Once she and Homura defeat the great witch, she lies to Homura for the first time (tricking her into taking the last grief seed) and even gives her first "selfish" request of the series: she wants Homura to go back and time and stop her from being tricked by the Incubators. None of this is done out of cruelty or true selfishness, of course; Madoka wants to create a world where her friends can be happy, even if she knows she won't be around to see it.

And so, by the end of the third timeline - when she asks Homura to kill her before she becomes a witch, and Homura tearfully obliges - Madoka has lost a great deal of the innocence she brought with her. She's killed a close friend in self defense, she's seen two other friends die horrible deaths, and she's even put a horrible burden on the one friend she has left. Her words are quiet and hesitant, almost back to how she sounded before she became a magical girl and gained some confidence, and she is able to understand for the first time just how harshly she and her friends have been lied to. But even with all of that, she still holds her ideals to her dying breath. She doesn't ask to die out of sadness or penance, but out of love for the world around her - because even if that world has such unspeakably awful things in it, there's still too much worth protecting to allow herself to hurt any of it.

Her time in the Ryslig peninsula has changed her further, of course. Part of this is biological - wendigos have a propensity to greed and jealousy, and even if Madoka's done everything in her power to avoid acting on those emotions she can't deny that she feels them more strongly now. More than that, though, she's lost a bit of her old spark of hope in favor of trying to make things as good as she can right now. It's hard to keep your head held high when you know, once the month is up, you're going to have to kill someone or take the fruits of someone else doing that, you know? How are you supposed to make "the right decision" when the only option you have is killing a human being? But even with all of that, Madoka does everything in her power to help others where she can - to make sure she brings as much good as she does bad, and to make sure nobody has to suffer any more than is absolutely necessary.

Because even if this Madoka is filled with regrets, and even if she's seen more than any sixteen year old should ever have to, she is still the same young woman who cries as easily as she laughs.

Wish: "I want to stop the hunger for all monsters - in this world, and back home, and anywhere else we might go. After all of this, I don't think any of us can really call ourselves human, but... even so, I don't want a single one of us to ever have to hurt someone to get by. That's my wish."

Just how the Incubators found Ryslig wasn't relevant to Madoka. The price they asked? Even knowing the truth of what it entailed, Madoka couldn't bring herself to regret it. She'd thought for two years about what she could do with another chance, about finding some way to pay off the terrible price this place asked for good - when Kyuubey offered, Madoka didn't have to think twice.

After all, even if she became a witch, she could give Mami, Homura, and everyone else back on the peninsula a chance at a happy life.

She wakes in Nyoi-Cho, a few key things missing in her mind. She remembers Kyuubey, but not the Incubators; she remembers the pain of leaving Mami and Homura behind, but not witches or the thought she might become one; she remembers killing Mami with her own hands, the sobbing and choking that came straight after, but she cannot be quite sure whether the girl's wings had fully grown in yet or not. But the biggest thing missing, something she is able to recognize immediately, is the need to eat humans. (The wendigo's natural hunger remains, constant and powerful - but any food she eats serves to dull it.)

Note: I realize that this may be a difficult wish to work with if other players from Ryslig wish to keep their character's hunger! I am more than happy to work out some sort of compromise or workaround in these scenarios.

Power: Madoka's wish is of an active nature, and as such is geared more towards combat than defense. Similarly, her wish comes from an odd state of mind: she wants monsters to be able to live without hurting humans, but she's come to terms with remaining a monster herself. Thus, her active power will also serve as her weapon - sharp claws of pink energy extending off her already-stretched fingers. In this way, she can turn her monstrous aspects towards protecting people from witches and familiars rather than killing and feeding.

Her passive power functions in a similar sort of way. Throughout her time at Ryslig, Madoka has been forced to make the best decision she can in overwhelmingly terrible circumstances. Her wish is made along this vein of clear thought - she wants to try and reduce people's suffering as much as possible, while still acknowledging that some things may be unfixable. Thus, in contrast to canon Madoka's aura of hope, monster Madoka would emanate an aura of clarity: around her, people would find that they could think more clearly and calmly.

(These powers are meant to directly mirror canon Madoka's, and are chosen with the player's permission.)

Weapon: Five pink claws of energy on each hand, long and terribly sharp.

Sample: Third person action and network text! (Fifteen comments each.)