application @ scorched

[thalmorborn]

Out of Character Information

Player Name: tegu
Player Journal: magitek
Playing Here: not any currently though I have played here in the past.
Where did you find us? by now, I honestly cannot remember.
Are you 16 years of age or older? Oh yeah.

In Character Information

Character Name: Athanas (aka The Dragonborn)
Canon: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Timeline: …because of the nonlinear way the Elder Scrolls series of games work, it’s kind of hard to give a direct draw point that would corroborate with any other player’s experience (e.g. lategame, postgame) As such, I’ll just give where he is in his questlines at the time of drawing.
Dark Brotherhood: Completed
Dragonborn: Completed
Dawnguard: Unstarted
Main Quest: end of Elder Knowledge
Thieves Guild: pre-Darkness Returns
Mage College: pre-Under Saarthal
Civil War: Unstarted
Companions: Unstarted.
Character's Age: 28.



Powers, Skills, Pets and Equipment:

I am going to play a bit fast and loose with the skills he will possess for Scorched, simply because the Dragonborn--any Dragonborn--in TESV:Skyrim will almost certainly wind up absurdly overpowered, and that needs to be toned down heavily for online RP purposes. Thus he is going to lack certain powers that he would have acquired by his progress in the normal game, just to keep things balanced.

“WARRIOR” SKILLS:

Smithing: He can fletch arrows, maintain his bow, and make gold and silver jewelry, but that’s all. (Fudging how the game actually handles the skill in-game: Technically, in-game!Athanas has the potential capability to make any forged item, but he never has done more than fletch and jewel, because he has no interest in labor over a forge. For Scorched’s intents and purposes, fletching and jeweling is all he can do).

Heavy Armor: He has never worn it a day in his life and probably could barely lift it. No skill here.

Block: He has never used a shield in his life; as a High Elf he would have been trained to use magic in his off-hand instead. No skill here.

Two-Handed Weapons: He simply does not have the strength to effectively use a huge ol’ greatsword, battleaxe, or warhammer. No skill here.

One-Handed Weapons: He can use these better than two-handed weapons since they weigh less, but he still has little talent with swords, small axes, and maces. However, what he is proficient with are daggers and knives; his preferred melee combat style is to find his way behind an enemy and either stab them in the back or cut their throat.

Archery: His shining combat skill. Athanas is very skilled with bow and arrows, capable of delivering powerful shots that drop the opponent in their tracks with great speed and precision, seeming to have almost preternatural vision. He has in-game every perk in the tree, though for RP purposes all that would translate to is a dangerous archer as I’ve described above.

“MAGE” SKILLS:

High Elves like Athanas are, in the world of Tamriel, the most magical of all races and the best mages. However, Athanas is not like typical High Elves, because he happens to be quite bad at magic. There’s only two magical things he can do well, and the rest he has barely any skill in at all.

Illusion: The only school of magic he has talent in. Illusion is used to disguise the caster or manipulate others. Athanas can use Muffle and Invisibility to conceal himself, and Fury, Fear, or Calm to manipulate the minds of others, though people with a strong will can resist the effects. The most notable perk he has is “Quiet Casting”, which means that any spell he uses is silent and cannot give away his position. (Of course in the game, whether or not the mind-altering spells work on PCs in Scorched will be dependent on a permissions form and discussed beforehand and only with permission and all that good stuff).

Conjuration: Horrid at it. He knows only Soul Trap, to trap the souls he needs for enchanting. In Scorched, Soul Trap will not work on PCs, because as it’s canonically a Fate Worse Than Death it would ruin the game. (He used to know Summon Arvak and the Bound Weapons spells in-game, but they’re being removed for abiding with rules/balance reasons).

Destruction: Also horrid at it. He only knows the basic Flames spell, which, despite looking fearsome, is essentially only a threat to minor wildlife and haystacks. (Again, he used to know a couple other spells, but balance.)

Restoration: Again, horrid at it! He only knows Healing, and is only as good as he needs to be to reduce chances of dying.

Alteration: His worst school of magic, Athanas will retain no Alteration spells at all in Scorched.

Enchanting: Athanas is actually a talented enchanter, knowing most of the standard enchantments and capable of using the trapped souls of beings to add magical effects to things, namely bows, daggers, and jewelry. (As with the Smithing skill, I am fudging this a little from the game--technically, Athanas would be able to enchant ANYthing, but he only really cares about bows, daggers, and jewelry).

“ASSASSIN” SKILLS

Light Armor: While this is his preferred armor type, he actually isn’t as good at making effective use of it as he “ought” to be, considering that his preferred combat style (archery and backstabbing) rely on his opponents not knowing where he is and thus not being able to hit him.

Sneak: VERY good at this, at being essentially a swift and hidden shadow. Athanas’ greatest weapon in any confrontation is his ability to go unnoticed by his enemies until there is something pointy lodged in one of their vital organs.

Speech: Look he once convinced the court of Solitude that King Olaf the dragonslayer was himself a dragon. He is very good with his mouth, very persuasive, and a smooth-talker in general.

Pickpocket: Very good at relieving people of their valuables, to the point that in-game he can strip a person of their weapons and even the clothes off their back without them knowing. In Scorched, this is just “talented pickpocket” because not even I can think of a way to make that level of theft work logically.

Lockpicking: He is good at picking locks, unfortunately, he happens to hate it. As a result he avoids it wherever possible.

Alchemy: Athanas is a talented potion and poison-maker, however, since this is contingent on having a supply of ingredients he knows and knows how to work with, it’d probably be of limited utility in Anatole. I’d like to propose that he can gain some skill in the art of it over the course of the game, but it’d be contingent on what’s available and would be run through mod-checks for balance (e.g. no finding limitless supplies of things to make invisibility potions or paralysis poisons with).

SHOUTS:

Being GREATLY trimmed from what he used to know, again because of balance. All shouts have a recharge time, so he cannot spam them.

Aura Whisper:
When Athanas uses this, he can see the “auras” of any being within a few hundred feet, whether they are alive, undead, demonic, robotic, etc. He can see these auras even through walls, and the auras are in the general shape of the being in question. What the shout will not reveal to him is disposition towards him (unlike the Detect spells in the same game, which show enemies and friends differently) and the seeing-through-walls can be very disorienting, thus making exact location hard to pin down, more so the farther away an entity is.

Fire Breath:
...Breathes fire. Just like the dragon he is.

Throw Voice:
A whisper of a shout that produces an insult from a hard-to-discern location, the idea being to make those who hear the insult get up and investigate it or be distracted by it.

Unrelenting Force:
FUS RO DAH Unleashes the physics engine That famous memetic shout that blasts everything around, because you can’t have a Dragonborn without FUS RO DAH.

MISCELLANEOUS:

He has fantastic mobility and high magicka reserves because of his race (In Skyrim, High Elves are the fastest and most mobile race, and naturally have huge magicka bonuses). He is very intelligent and prefers to outsmart his enemy rather than outfight them, per se. He is also skilled at Creative Mountaineering--getting around the very rocky terrain of Skyrim without using roads. Because roads are not very stealthy.

EQUIPMENT:

ONE Dragonbone Bow
ONE Dragonbone Dagger
ONE motley assortment of arrows
ONE Shrouded Hood
ONE suit of Vampire Royal Armor
ONE pair of Vampire Boots
ONE pair of Vampire Gauntlets
ONE Nightweaver’s Band
ONE Amulet of Mara
ONE set of generic clothes and shoes
ONE (generic and limited supply of potions of healing and generic damage poisons)

PETS:

None.

Canon History:

(The Elder Scrolls games present a problem for anyone trying to turn a playthrough into a coherent narrative, simply because of how they are constructed. While most RPGs have one primary storyline and a few other “side quests”, Elder Scrolls games have a “main” questline, several other questlines of similar length and writing quality, and absolutely nothing compelling a player to start any of them. The player has total freedom to roam about a very content-rich world in whatever order they wish, and as a result the adventure is not easily turned into a narrative).

“You’re not with the Thalmor Embassy, are you, High Elf? No, that can’t be right...”

Athanas was born sometime in the 160s-170s of the Fourth Era, under the Thalmor regime on Summerset Isle. The Thalmor are a radical High Elf faction, who believe that their race is the greatest form of life on Tamriel, and operate a totalitarian, fascistic government on the island with an imperialist, militaristic view towards the rest of the mainland. At the time of the game, they also have three large (though not uncontested) provinces on the mainland--Valenwood, Elsweyr, and Hammerfell. He spent the vast majority of his life surrounded by Thalmor propaganda and narratives about the outside world, and as an adult joined the machine by which they operated, working as a Thalmor spy. However, an assignment involving Ulfric Stormcloak, a leader of a rebellion and instigator of civil war within the province of Skyrim, went badly wrong, and he woke up to find himself on a cart to Helgen, to be executed along with the rebels he was mistaken as being one of. Even though Elenwen, the Thalmor Ambassador to Skyrim, was there, she did nothing to help him--and if Alduin the World Eater had chosen to attack Helgen three seconds later than he did, Athanas would be dead.

In the chaos of the dragon attack, Athanas was able to escape the burning city of Helgen with some help from Ralof, a Stormcloak rebel he had shared the cart with--Ralof mistook him for being sympathetic to their cause, and Athanas did not see fit to correct him. Ralof guided him out of Helgen, and from there to the settlement of Riverwood, the rebel’s childhood home and home of his relatives. There, they conferred about the dragon attack--a remarkable and terrifying occurrence, because dragons had not been seen for thousands and thousands of years, and when they did exist on Tamriel, they had ruled and enslaved the mortal races. As well, the very first appearance of a dragon was at the attempted execution of a man who championed himself as a true liberator of Skyrim, and there’s no way that that is coincidence. ...It’s also extremely alarming, because Riverwood is poorly defended and wouldn’t stand a chance against a dragon. So Athanas was sent on an errand to the capital of Whiterun hold (the province of Skyrim is divided into nine ‘holds’, each ruled by a Jarl) to tell the Jarl of what had happened and to entreat his assistance. Upon doing this, he was given an errand to retrieve the Dragonstone from Bleak Falls Barrow for the assistance it might provide in dealing with the dragon crisis, and then Athanas dealt with his second dragon attack. This time, instead of running from the dragon, he was able to kill it.

And then he absorbed its soul. That was new.

And also then, this is the point where a coherent narrative really breaks down, because Athanas’ priorities are unfortunately not of the “do what you are supposed to do like a good little elf” variety. He wanted money and power more than he wanted to fulfill some old Nord legend/prophecy he knew very little about. So in the interest of trying to turn this history into something more defined than a jumble of quests, I’m going to list the questlines individually, in the rough order they were begun, and relate the choices he made and the effects the questlines had on him in as brief a manner as possible (otherwise this would be well over 10000 words) while linking to the quest details in the wiki.

MAIN QUEST

• Unbound: Completed. Chose to follow Ralof out of Helgen.
• Before The Storm: Completed without incident.
• Bleak Falls Barrow: Completed without incident.
• Dragon Rising: Completed without incident.
• The Way Of The Voice: Completed without incident.
• The Horn Of Jurgen Windcaller: Completed without incident.
• A Blade In The Dark: Completed without incident.
• Diplomatic Immunity: Completed without incident. Chose to infiltrate the embassy using Thalmor robes, chose to let Malborn die.
• A Cornered Rat: Completed without incident.
• Alduin's Wall: Completed without incident.
• The Throat Of The World: Completed without incident.
• Elder Knowledge: Still in process, he has delved Alftand and seen Blackreach, but he hasn't returned the Elder Scroll to the Time Wound yet.

As for changes to Athanas' character that happened due to these--perhaps the biggest one was his disillusionment with the Thalmor. By necessity, he went against them during Diplomatic Immunity and A Cornered Rat, and afterwards Thalmor hit squads were sent after him with a 'kill on sight' order. His old life became officially irretrievable at that point, and even a mind that had been steeped in the state propaganda of the Aldmeri Dominion since birth began to doubt and resent. At the same time, however, he was discovering kinds of power completely unimaginable to mortals--the dragon shouts, the dragon power--which in a weird way only reinforced the key teaching of the Thalmor, that of elven supremacy. He starts the game as a vanilla Elven Supremacist. He ends it as an Athanas Supremacist.

He also grows even less fond of the Blades--his Dominion heritage would have predisposed him to dislike them already, but their treatment of him as more of a servant than their master irritates him greatly, and is exacerbated further by his racism.

THIEVES GUILD

• A Chance Arrangement: Completed without incident.
• Taking Care Of Business: Completed without incident. Chose to brawl Keerava, break Bersi's urn, and Haelga gave up without a fight.
• Loud And Clear: Completed without incident. Successfully burned three beehives, spared Aringoth.
• Dampened Spirits: Completed without incident. Mallus survived and became a fence, Athanas learned he strongly disliked Maven Black-briar.
• Scoundrel's Folly: Completed without incident. Gulum-Ei was persuaded to give up the goods, survived, and became a fence.
• Speaking With Silence: Completed without incident.
• Hard Answers: Completed without incident and without killing people.
• The Pursuit: Completed without incident. Did not bother to try to bargain or reason with Vald, just killed him outright.
• Trinity Restored: Completed without incident aside from his own misgivings.
• Blindsighted: Completed without incident. Fus Ro Dah'd Mercer off the statue to his death. This is the final quest he has completed, as he just doesn't want to give up that skeleton key...
• Side Jobs: Has completed enough of them to restore Influence in Markarth, Windhelm, and Whiterun.

He likes the Thieves Guild. He likes them very much, being people greatly fond of coin and jewels, just like him, and of having control, just like him. He grew little as a result of the Guild questline, being that they basically coddled and encouraged many of his worse characterstics without providing any challenges--in fact, in many ways they just made him worse.

The very interesting thing about Athanas' relationship to the Thieves Guild is that he bears a much greater resemblance to the villain of the questline than any possible hero: In his selfish, mercenary, and ruthless nature he is quite like Mercer Frey, and indeed, at the end of the questline, when Frey calls out the Dragonborn and asks them if they really believe in "honor among thieves", Athanas answers honestly and says that he doesn't, he simply wants the Skeleton Key and all the power it can potentially give him. He even shares Mercer's dislike of Karliah, though in his case it is more to do with how Karliah making him a Nightingale read to him like her 'sacrificing' Brynjolf and himself to Nocturnal in order to deflect her wrath--and he strongly dislikes people making decisions for him like that.


DARK BROTHERHOOD

• Innocence Lost: Completed without incident.
• With Friends Like These...: Completed without incident. Chose to kill all three.
• Sanctuary: Completed without incident.
• Mourning Never Comes: Completed without incident. Chose not to kill Nilsine, as he personally disliked Muiri.
• Whispers In The Dark: Completed without incident.
• The Silence Has Been Broken: Completed without incident.
• Bound Until Death: Completed without incident. Slaughtered Vittoria with archery and evaded capture with invisibility.
• Breaching Security: Completed without incident. Maro was slaughtered in Whiterun, in the Jarl's own palace.
• The Cure For Madness: Completed without incident. Chose to spare Cicero and lie to Astrid.
• Recipe For Disaster: Completed without incident. Killed both chef and Gourmet, chose to lie to the chef about sparing him, and hid the Gourmet's body in a vat.
• To Kill An Empire: Completed with as much incident as required by the story. Chose the bombastic "acting" options and the weird ingredients.
• Death Incarnate: Completed without incident.
• Hail Sithis!: Completed without incident. Both Maro the elder and Amaund Motierre were killed as well as the Emperor.
• Side Contracts: All side contracts were successfully completed. The Dark Brotherhood questline is complete.

The most important things imparted to Athanas by the Dark Brotherhood questline were resolution to a sort of crisis of faith and the stinging pain of great, great failure. At the time the Night Mother declared him Listener, he was having a sort of crisis of faith in the Eight Divines--or rather, whether or not he needed to suck it up and admit that Talos was in fact a Divine just as much as they were. And thus, given Dominion propaganda, whether or not everything he knew about religion was a lie. Then the Night Mother spoke and with her voice came the reassurance that whatever he knew of the Divine, at least there was Sithis, the Dread Father, and the certainty of Sithis Is Not. And when you're a murderous sociopath, that can help lead to a religious reconciliation.

As for tempering failure, that came with the failure to see through Astrid's plot, and the failure to stop his Sanctuary from being put to the torch and the sword. He didn't love any of his "Family"--he's probably not capable of loving anyone other than himself. But he had much invested emotionally in the Brotherhood by that point, and so it being torn apart hurt deeply. So this failure made him more cautious, yes, more willing to wait and move carefully--but it also made him crueler and more vengeful. He sees this as a good thing.

DRAGONBORN

• Dragonborn: Completed without incident. Chose to impersonate a priest of Mara while in Raven Rock as a guise to make life easier...
  
• The Temple of Miraak: Completed without incident. Started this accidentally, by discovering that sleeping would put him under Miraak's spell.
  
• The Fate of the Skaal: Completed without incident, saved the Skaal.
  
• Cleansing the Stones: Completed without incident. No lives were lost in the process of freeing the enthralled citizens from their "work."
  
• The Path of Knowledge: Completed without incident. Forged a... "friendship" is a strong word. "Understanding" with Neloth.
  
• The Gardener of Men: Completed without incident. Did not hesitate for a moment in deciding to send Storn to Herma-Mora.
  
• At The Summit of Apocrypha: Completed without incident. Remains defiant of Hermaeus Mora, but...
  
• Black Books: All other Black Books were found and traversed successfully.

The best way to describe the effects of the Dragonborn questline on Athanas would be as "massive reality check." Not only did it show him how limited his powers were in comparison to Miraak's, but it also brutally drove home just how powerful a Daedric Prince is, and the ramifications of dealing with them. The fact the Hermaeus Mora wants Athanas as his servant sickens and terrifies him, especially because now that he has seen Mora's power he is not sure how he could successfully defy his will. The events of Dragonborn have left Athanas shaken up, and unsure of how to approach his life from here on out--to the point that arrival in Anatole may come as something of a relief, if it comes with assurance that Mora cannot find him here.

OTHER

• The Mind of Madness: Completed without incident--well, with as little incident as possible when dealing with the Madgod.
  
• A Night to Remember: Completed with as little incident as possible when dealing with what happens when the Prince of debauched hedonism decides to go trolling.
  
• The Black Star: Chose to corrupt Azura's Star into the Black Star.
  
• Promises to Keep: Chose to double-cross Louis Letrush and keep the horse.
  
• Tending the Flames: Completed without incident. Successfully convinced the court of Solitude that Olaf was a dragon.
  
• In My Time of Need: Completed successfully. Performed the Epic Triple-Cross ending so that he was the only one standing, with all possible rewards.

These quests are chosen to be spelled out in history, out of all the hundreds of things he has done in his 400-hour playthrough, because they are excellent illustrators of his slyness, persuasive skills, and cruel, back-stabbing nature: In "The Black Star", he chose to snub Azura by corrupting her artifact into a device that only held Black Souls, those of sentient beings, because of a combination of siding with Nelacar over Aranea for racist reasons and the ruthless expediency of it--Black Souls are the very best for enchanting, but regular Black Souls Gems are hard to find. Nevermind that he's condemning a thinking being to a hideous fate, he just wants to have an easier time enchanting. (Plus he did take some glee in the corruption itself). In "Promises to Keep" he expresses his backstabbing nature by stealing from Maven (technically his "employer" as a member of the Thieves Guild) and then stealing from Louis at the end--sucks to be you, next time run a background check on the person you partner with. In "Tending the Flames" he shows off just how persuasive and how good of a smooth talker he is--convincing all of Solitude that a famed dragonslayer was actually a dragon himself is no mean feat. And "In My Time of Need" demonstrates how spectacularly untrustworthy he is, choosing to betray the Alik'r, then Saadia, then both of them at once, again, getting the reward and payment from both of them before killing them to cover his tracks and "punish" whoever was the real enemy of the Aldmeri Dominion. ...And the "Mind of Madness" and "Night to Remember" quests are there for comic relief after so much Elder Scrolls!disaster doom and despair.

Personality:

The short version is "Athanas is a monstrous asshole, but sometimes he pretends not to be."

The longer version is that Athanas is rather like a high-functioning sociopath, capable of playing at normalcy enough to fly under the radar, being very convincing of his good intentions and harmlessness, right up until the point where he kills you. So in a way, there are two sides of Athanas, the side he shows the world intentionally, and the side he intentionally hides in order to live amongst them. It still comes out from time to time, but he tries to keep these instances to when any witnesses will be dead soon. But make no mistake, this hidden side is actually dominant, making all the decisions.

This is how Athanas presents himself to the world:

In short, he's your friend! He is cheerful and personable, and eager to help you out (so that you'll like him and be more easily manipulable and usable). He makes jokes, he flirts relentlessly. There's almost always a smile on his face, and it's hard not to smile along, as he's quite a charmer. He's endearing also in his cleverness and his inquisitiveness. Now, this Athanas is not without flaws--he's a showoff, to be sure, and can be immature, and frequently comes across as being selfish or self-centered--but overall, he tries to come off as an affable, likable elf.

This is how Athanas actually is:

He has no sense of morality, only practicality, and a sense of his likes and dislikes, these being more whims than a studied moral code. Indeed, he is very capable of finding much pleasure in the suffering of others, and in inflicting suffering. He prioritizes pleasure, and in this can be extremely promiscuous, because he has a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea of it being virtuous not to have what he desires. His jokes turn to cruel mockery, and his friendly touching to violence. He is greedy, craving power and money and influence. His intelligence and inquisitiveness turns to calculation and cunning, and overall he is a despicable creature.

These bleed through into his "fake" personality, and his fake personality in turn shares facets with his "real" personality. In many ways, they're the same traits, simply taken to extremes of "good" or "bad"--the nasty mockery becomes gentler jokes, the affectionate flirtations escalate to a promiscuous and occasionally predatory sexuality. It’s not a split personality, it’s not even much of a mask, it is only an awareness of what he can and cannot get away with, and an according modulation of behavior.

One important facet of how Athanas is a horrible person would be his racism and how he came to acquire it. He grew up on the Summerset Isle while it was the seat of the Aldmeri Dominion, under the rule of the radical Thalmor faction. To not put a fine point on it, the Thalmor are fascistic, totalitarian, elven supremacist, militaristic, genocidal racists. (Comparison between them and the Nazis runs rampant in the fandom). They run a police state, and are well-established as being extremely effective at propaganda, information control/dissemination, and espionage. As a result, having never known anything other than this government, Athanas was inculcated since childhood with their values and their ideals. He firmly believes that the high elves are the greatest form of life in the world, followed by other elves, and then the races of men, and tends to act accordingly, with contempt for humans and their accomplishments, and scorn for lesser elves’ cultures and societies. Now, as with his other sociopathic behaviors, he has learned to modulate it in public--he doesn’t run around in human cities telling everyone he meets that they’re filthy, weak, and stupid--but he still believes it, it still affects his actions even when on his ‘best behavior’ (he is simply never going to treat a human as well as he treats another elf), and it will still come out so long as he thinks he can get away with it.

Speaking of High Elves--Athanas is, as previously established, bad at magic. Unfortunately, high elves are not only the best race when it comes to magic, but also a whole lot of their ethnic identity, such as it were, is based around magical talent. Athanas thus has a gigantic chip on his shoulder with regards to his lack of magical skill in most schools, and the quickest way to make him angry to the point of irrationality is to point out this failing, establish oneself as better at magic (especially if one is of a "lesser" race), and...just the topic of magical talent at all is very, very fraught. Even a compliment can set him off if he perceives it as being backhanded or insufficiently praiseful or more born of pity than actual admiration. So--yes, this is a tremendous trigger for him, if you will.

Despite his confidence in his ability to kill things long before they even know he is there, Athanas does have things he fears (and subsequently hates due to fearing them). High among these are the undead. Athanas feels that the dead should stay dead, and thinks of undead things as profoundly unnatural and wrong on a fundamental level; they deeply unnerve him. This goes double for the Skyrim undead, due to distressing hints in the game that Skyrim undead (draugr) can somehow corrupt and drive crazy those who invade their tomb until they become one of them--this notion he finds quite frankly terrifying. This fear mostly manifests as a deep reluctance to enter places where the undead might be, near-paranoia while inside said places, and a very pronounced tendency to "shoot first, confirm if hostile afterwards" and go a bit. Overboard. When making very sure the dead will not walk again.

The Falmer and Dwemer ruins of Skyrim also scare him, not only due to fear for his life (Falmer and functional Dwemer automatons are very, very dangerous), and not only due to them being profoundly creepy (Dwemer ruins are abandoned of living things (except Falmer), but their machines are STILL WORKING and still active, and Falmer are basically the most horrific versions of Morlocks fiction has yet dreamed up; I could write pages and pages on how ungodly they are), but also because they induce in him a sort of existential horror. Dwemer (Deep Elves aka Dwarves) and Falmer (Snow Elves) had perhaps the most magnificent civilizations in all of Tamriel in the ancient days. But the Dwemer vanished--didn't die, vanished--as a result of their arrogance in trying to become divine. The Falmer were conquered and abused into degeneration, and now they are sub-sentient blind devils. For someone who fervently believes in Elven supremacy and superiority, the Dwemer and the Falmer present a very scary rebuttal that he cannot rationalize away. On one level, he realizes that there is nothing stopping high elves from going the same way, and that's a terrifying thought.

He's also incredibly untrustworthy. As his history indicates, he basically has never met a person he wouldn't backstab at the very moment they became useless to him, or more useful dead. Athanas is a murderous liar and if he tells you the sky is red don't you dare look up (taking your eyes off him and exposing your throat) for evidence to prove him wrong.

This, then, is Athanas: A racist, sociopathic elf who nonetheless holds great power; a distressing example of what happens when the only person who can save the world is incapable of loving anything other than himself.

Why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting?

It is absolutely unpossible for Anatole to be more of a crapsack world than 4th Era Tamriel. He’ll be fine.

Writing Samples

Network Post Sample: From when I played him at ExitVoid.

Third Person Sample:
For a moment, he almost felt bad, not taking Aela the Huntress up on her offer. For a moment, he cast a longing look up the hill, to a meadhall that promised much more, and much richer, food and drink than he could expect at a single, humble inn, and a bed, and all for "free", as well.

...Then he remembered that joining up with the Companions necessarily would entail putting up with a dozen large, loud, hairy, drunken, stinking Nords, which was why he refused the offer in the first blighted place, and he turned back to the inn.

He didn't have much money, just barely enough to cover the price of food and a bed--not surprising, he'd been sentenced to die barely a day ago, and stripped of his earthly possessions, and it still made him angry (and, deep down, ashamed) to think on it. So he sat at the bar, nursing a bottle of cheap mead and feeling very sorry for himself. Or at least, he tried to. There was some caterwauling in the area that...distracted him.

"Ohhhh there once was a hero named Ragnar the Red..."

By the Eight, could Nords do nothing right? Not even sing? Athanas, already in a foul mood, tried to block it out, but there was a quality about that wretched man's voice that pierced him through, and only a minute later he was standing up from the bar to approach the man and tell him to please, for the love of Dibella, stop already.

Except, however, that when he tapped the man on the shoulder, the first words out of his mouth were "Interested in Carlotta? Sorry, but once Mikael gets them, they're got," and all Athanas could do was stare. Sure, he'd talked to the attractive Imperial selling groceries, she'd mentioned a problem with a bard--this was that bard? This...scrawny, unimpressive, harsh-voiced...

"You need to leave Carlotta alone." Athanas summoned his most intimidating voice, remembering what Carlotta had promised to anyone who could get him off her back--shiny, spendy gold.

"Carlotta put you up to this, didn't she?" The idiot had the nerve to sound betrayed. "I'm sorry, but that fiery widow is mine. She just doesn't know it yet."

What. An idiot. Not so much that Athanas disagreed with the precise phrasing or the sentiment, more that saying these kinds of things openly in a small city--word gets around, and then you have awkward explanations to make, and when all is said and done you sleep alone in a cold bed.

And that was the thing with idiots--the only way to get some sense into them was through violence.

"Leave her alone, or else," Athanas said in a warning tone, already able to guess what his reaction was going to be--

--and thus able to dodge the right hook that followed his snarl of "I don't have to take that from you!"

The list of things Mikael was not was already long, and Athanas smugly thought that he could add "a competent fighter" to that. He stepped back, dodged his over-heavy swings--and when Mikael swung too hard, and too far, he stunned him with a knee to the solar plexus, then took his face in hand and smashed him to the floor.

When the other man could pick himself back up from the floor, he groggily said he'd give up, and Athanas smiled magnanimously, forgivingly, and leaned down to pull him back up to his feet. There was no reason they couldn't be friends in the end, right? Right. And there was no point in continuing hostilities, after all. A drink would help him feel much better.

And within fifteen minutes, Mikael was pleasantly buzzed, and Athanas had relieved his pockets of his coin purse, and all was as it should be.

Anything else? Due to the difficulties of converting a canon like The Elder Scrolls into app-able form, I would like to emphasize that if moderation has any questions at all, please contact me and I will do my best to explain/rectify problems.