At the gates and the walls of Montségur

Quick warning up-front: This character's ethnic and national origins mean that he has relatives who are Holocaust survivors AND that he grew up in the country responsible for it. He is extremely wary of Nazi Germany parallels and may make uncomfortable observations about them. If this also makes YOU uncomfortable, please let me know and I will be sure to avoid it when tagging with you!

[OOC]
Backtagging: Okay up to a point, but if the thread's been going for several weeks I'm probably going to want to put it down.
Threadhopping: The most emphatic YES I can muster
Fourthwalling: He's an OC so, not a thing?
But on that note: Siegmund is a huge nerd but I am zero percent interested in fourth-walling people. He's not going to assume people he recognizes are from fictional worlds; he's way more likely to assume they're from real worlds and the fiction he knows is not completely accurate because it's fictional accounts of actual alternate universes.
Uncomfortable Topics: Honestly I'm not bothered by most sensitive topics and I'm super difficult to offend, but 1) I'm emetophobic, and 2) discussion of bodily functions (even for humour purposes) makes me super uncomfortable, so I'd appreciate avoiding such topics around me.

[IC]
Physical contact: OOCly I don't care and you don't need to ask, but ICly Siegmund does not appreciate physical contact and tends to react like a cat getting shoved into a bath.
Flirting: Again, OOCly I don't care and you don't need to ask. ICly, Siegmund is so fucking clueless about flirting he can't even recognize it.
Telepathy/mind-reading: Generally okay with it, but if you ask first I can make sure to put more in my tags for you.
Injuries: In context of a fight log or heated argument, minor injuries (cuts, scrapes, bruises, etc) are A-OK and don't require permission. In other contexts, ask first. For major injuries, always ask first. Never Okay: deforming injuries or major facial injuries; major squick for me, sorry.
Killing: For now, hard no.

Misc: If something is going to be a major game-changer CR-wise, please let me know first. I can roll with things like that if I have a chance to plan for it first, but I kind of flounder if it's sprung on me without explicit warning.

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: The Guindo
AGE: 28
JOURNAL: theguindo
IM / EMAIL: PianistOfRaielin
PLURK: ninjarobotclone
RETURNING: N/A

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Siegmund Sylvester Heissenrech (Shimon ben Chanan)
CHARACTER AGE: 19
CANON ORIGIN: Strictly Original
CHRONOLOGY: To the end of what's in background.
CLASS: He thinks villain sounds cool but realistically he's going to end up doing the dark anti-hero shtick until it fails him.
HOUSING: I am down with him being housed with random roommates! Also open to the possibility of one of the other cities.

BACKGROUND:
Siegmund comes from Earth. Not "our world but magic" or "our world but vampires"--just our world. It's boring, and Siegmund has always been bored with it. From a young age, he latched onto fantasy and sci-fi stories as a means to escape, however temporarily, from the dreariness of his real life. He immersed himself in books, anime, video games, even his own art, and shut out anything that wasn't interesting enough to grab his attention. So far, his life has been privileged enough that he could afford to shut out reality like that, but as he approaches an age where adult responsibilities are being expected of him, he's quickly beginning to learn that it doesn't work that way anymore.

The Heissenrechs are an old-money family in Munich that runs a handful of Jewish funeral homes. (How do you get old-money German and Jewish in the same family? Short version - "Jewish" and "old money" are on different branches of the family tree.) All that really means to Siegmund is that money is no object, and working for his dad is The Worst. His Jewish heritage, however, is a significant part of his life, and Siegmund is surprisingly pious. He took to rules-lawyering on Talmud at an early age, much to his parents' consternation, and he's strict about following kashrut and observing shabbat.

He coasted through his education, spending more time on building up a reputation as one of the cool loner kids than on his schoolwork. His parents' money secured him a position at a prestigious Gymnasium that he hated, earning grades that were passable but not particularly noteworthy. He passed his Abitur with similar mediocrity, and when it came time to pick a university, he...well...didn't. His father kept pushing him to get a business degree so he could take over the family business, but Siegmund had less than no interest in such a thing, and his younger sister Katja was far more business minded anyway. He'd rather leave his father's mantle to her.

But beyond just not wanting to take over the family business, he just plain doesn't know what to do with his life. He coasted through most of his childhood without any significant worries or obligations, and now he's being asked to make a decision that will decide the course of the rest of his life. It's so huge and overwhelming that he's found himself petrified with indecision. He's nowhere near mature enough to handle such a heavy choice and he's coped by drawing even further into his own interests to shut it out, as if he can make it go away by ignoring it long enough.

Business is what his father wants for him, but his passions are art and Talmud. The last time he mentioned maybe going to a fine arts school instead of a business school, his father's stony response scared him away from ever mentioning the seminary option. And his mother's no help either - she just keeps saying that she'll support any decision he makes but it gosh it would really make his father happy if he took over the family business.

And to further complicate matters, Siegmund spent his teenage years crafting this image of himself as a cool badass loner that other kids look up to and respect. Fine arts and Talmud don't jive with that image, but neither does business. In fact, no adult career jives with that image, because it is the kind of thing that only works in high school and has no place in the real world outside of action movies. But if that can't be who he is, then who is he?

He's been out of school for a year now, and he was forced into a job at the funeral home as a compromise between university and nothing. While he does find the religious/ritual aspect of funeral service fascinating, his job largely involves paperwork and trying to upsell grieving families on coffins, and he hates it. He goes through the motions and then comes home and escapes into fiction, and occasionally stops to wonder what he's doing with his life. Wouldn't it be great, he thinks, if he could get whisked away on some magical adventure in a completely different world where he never has to think about this decision ever again?

No. It wouldn't be great. Because realistically, the call to adventure doesn't solve problems, it just creates new ones. Welcome to Heropa, Siegmund.

PERSONALITY:
Siegmund has layers. Like an ogre! And like an ogre, many of them are unpleasant. On the surface, you have this cool anti-hero type loner who doesn't give a fuck about anything and rolls through life like he owns the damn place. Underneath that you have the snarky friend who will run raids with you in WoW and joke about anime and draw fanart of your RO characters. And underneath that, you have the surly, moody teenager who thinks he knows everything and refuses to listen to anybody who tells him otherwise, and further still under that you have the boy stuck between childhood and adulthood, crammed into a box that no longer fits but terrified to step out of it because the poor fit of comfortable familiarity is preferable to that great, vast unknown.

Siegmund has a very strict idea of the type of person he wants to be, but it's pieced together from all the coolest parts of the fiction he's consumed and doesn't correlate to anything in the real world. You can't just grow up into a loner anti-hero in modern-day Germany, it doesn't work that way because life isn't a video game or an action movie. While he does have things he'd like to do with his life - he's leaning very heavily toward pursuing seminary school and becoming a rabbi - there's so much uncertainty tied up in becoming an adult that he can't force himself to take that first step past his self-doubts.

And boy, does he ever have a truckload of crippling self-doubt about the transition to adulthood. Just how much of this image of himself as an apathetic loner is a facade? If his passions have always been art and faith, how does that fit in with that image? Has it always been so fake? What job options are even open to him in art and religion that his father wouldn't dismiss out of hand as pointless? Does he really want to be a rabbi? It's not like he wants a congregation or anything, he just wants a deeper understanding of his heritage and beliefs; is that enough to justify seminary instead of a real school with a real degree? Do you even have job options as a rabbi besides getting hired by a congregation? Where is he going with his life?

But his preferred method for dealing with this discomfort is to pretend it's not there and ignore the source. He distracts himself, throws himself into other things, puts on blinders so he can't see it. Siegmund is not the type of person who likes to tackle deeply-rooted personal problems head-on, and thus far he's had a privileged enough life that he hasn't had to. This is the first serious personal crisis he's ever had to address, and he really doesn't know what to do with it.

But enough about his major crisis of character. Let's talk about the smaller things. Like I said, he's secretly your typical surly teenager under the aloof loner facade. He gets frustrated easily and gets pissy about it, he's stubborn and self-centered, he does impulsive shit that doesn't work out and blames everything but himself, he snaps at people who are trying to help him... And on top of that, the facade he's trying to keep up often causes him to say things he doesn't actually mean and unintentionally hurt people. That's fine, though. A badass doesn't care, right? Except he does care, and he feels really bad about it, but he also feels like he can't apologize without losing face, so he just keeps up his apathetic wall and pretends upsetting others doesn't bother him. I'm sure you can guess that this causes problems for him sometimes.

His apathy is half facade and half defense mechanism. He's afraid of opening himself up to ridicule about the things he genuinely cares about, so he keeps his passions closely guarded and puts up a shield of pretending not to care what people say about anything to put some emotional distance between himself and his actions and the words of others. Because of this, he can be pretty good at distancing himself emotionally from situations that aren't wrapped up in that closely-guarded chest in his heart, which means...well it means he gets into a lot of stupid arguments and got himself a reputation in some spaces as a troll. He does kind of like to mess with people, but it's harmless.

He has trouble motivating himself for anything he's not passionate about. This is why he was a straight-C student - not because he isn't intelligent, but because he just couldn't force himself to care. This has occasionally gotten him a reputation as lazy or a flake, because if he agreed to something and then later decided he didn't want to do it, he just wouldn't.

Despite all of this, his faith is unshakable. When he steps into synagogue he's like a completely different person. Still quiet and moody, but invested in discussing God, Torah, Talmud, faith, and everything in between. His rabbi is his closest confidant, and he would never cheat on the rules of kashrut or observing shabbat. He believes in upholding the spirit of the law over the letter of the law, because trying to find loopholes in the letter of the law is still disrespecting its intent. (Secular laws, though, that's a different story. He's too afraid of consequences to outright break any, but they're handed down by government, not God; he'll exploit that shit for loopholes if he wants to.)

Two rules are most important above everything else: always do everything in your power to save a life, and any rule is breakable in the course of saving a life. Of course, he's never had to make any hard decisions in his life thus far, so who's to say how he'll actually act in the moment? He's a perfectly normal teenager who gets scared and makes bad decisions. He tells himself he'll be able to do the right thing if push comes to shove, but you never really know what you'll do until you're in the fire.

So to sum it up, you've got this kid who's trying really hard to force himself into this box of "cool" but who's discovering that he actually has the strongest interests in decidedly "uncool" stuff. The bottom line is that he doesn't know who he is or what he wants to do with himself. The person he's tried to be his whole life is not who he finds himself turning out to be as an adult. That guy wouldn't want to be a rabbi, and if he did, he certainly wouldn't let fear of his family's reactions stop him from pursuing it.

Siegmund isn't living up to his own expectations and it's left him uncertain, insecure, and trying desperately to fit himself back into a mold he outgrew years ago because this amorphous self that he now has to define on his own is frightening and uncomfortable. He's so desperate to shove himself back into a comfortable box that no longer fits that he's essentially sabotaging his own personal growth. If he'd just accept that he isn't a stupid teenager anymore and embrace all those things he worries are stupid or uncool, he'd be much better for it. But he won't. Because he doesn't want to be a dorky rabbi-in-training who spends all his time on the internet or painting landscapes. He wants to be the kind of person he'd be intimidated and impressed to meet. This leads to him making decisions based on what he thinks he should want, and not what he does want, which is a bad habit to get into.

POWER:
He'll be getting some powers as an imPort, since, of course, he didn't have any back home.

Basically, he'll be getting shadow magic. It's got three umbrellas, two which are passive/automatic and one that is active/controlled.

Shadow Affinity: a passive ability that gives him a natural affinity for darkness and an aversion toward light.
► He can see just fine in perfect darkness, but his eyes are very light sensitive.
► Bright light muddles his focus and concentration; conversely, darkness makes it easier to focus and concentrate.
► His eyes glow in the dark, but just enough to be spooky and not enough to illuminate anything.

Shadow Grace: basically your standard MMO-assassin-class agility, but linked to the light level. Also a passive ability.
► In well-lit surroundings, it's non-existent and he's back to his normal self. The lower the light, the better the skill.
► It affects his sense of balance, his reflexes, his ability to move silently, and his overall grace/agility. It does not affect his strength.
► It's best in total darkness. At this level he can move in perfect silence at full speed, and his reflexes/agility/etc are about three times better than his baseline.

Shadow Manipulation: the bulk of his powers, the ability to manipulate and control shadows.
► The core of this power is the ability to change the shapes of shadows and force them off their surfaces into solid, physical form. This allows him to summon shadow weapons/armour and corporeal shadow beasts and so on.
► The amount of shadow mass remains constant. He can change the shapes of shadows but can't add more shadow to them. He can, however, stretch out shadows to connect them and share shadow mass between them. The thinner the connection, however, the harder it is to maintain as a coherent whole.
► He can melt into shadows and travel through them, as long as they're connected somehow. He can stretch shadows to connect them and create a path, but again, thinner connection = harder to travel through.
► He can also turn himself into a living shadow and project himself onto surfaces. Like Flatland!
► He can possess the shadows of people or objects by slipping into them while melted into the shadows. He can control their movements by controlling their shadows. This can be resisted/broken through brute force or willpower.
► He can pin a shadow the same way you might pin a cape. Stick a knife in it, throw a rock on it, just set a foot on it - the individual casting the shadow will be unable to move such that their shadow no longer touches the pinning object. Can be broken by physically removing whatever is pinning the shadow.
► Bright flashes of light will disrupt most of his skills and make it more difficult to maintain any of his changes. And, of course, the less stark the shadow, the more difficult it is to get a grasp on.

FINAL NOTES:
► English is his third language, behind German and Hebrew. He took classes in school, of course, but he mostly learned it from the internet through English-language MMOs. He's not fluent, but he's passable, and his written English is much better than his spoken.
► He's nearsighted. He's not blind without his glasses, but it's definitely bad enough that he can't read the whiteboard from the front row without them. He's going to need some prescription sunglasses, like, immediately.
► He's got terrible pollen allergies, it's awful you guys.