cornered the market on wearing black and sneering

Harrow Nonagesimus

OOC
Name: Kit
Contact: skeletone
Other characters: None right now
Invited by: Mod plurkfriend!

IC
Name: Harrowhark Nonagesimus (but you can call her Harrow)
Canon: The Locked Tomb
Canonpoint: post-Gideon the Ninth, prior to the events in book two
CRAU? No
Age: 17, but she'll turn 18 in a couple of months per the next book, so I'll have to note when that happens in game.

Character History: This wiki is a lot like reading two Locked Tomb books and is even almost as long!

Personality: Please accept this cool formatting that I already had done, because I cannot do better than I've already completed.

Strengths.

Strengths:

• Intelligence, learning drive: Harrow is noted by anyone who meets her to be prodigiously smart. She was teaching herself out of advanced books at age four; both in terms of intelligence and in necromancy, no one ever told her that she could not do these things or should not be able to, and so she did. She has been doing that her whole life, and she is both very book-smart and very situation-aware ... so long as it's a situation she is familiar with, and here she is a fish out of water.


• Necromantic/magical aptitude: Her necromancy skills are +200 Absolutely Through the Roof. The circumstances of her existence have basically given her the power of 200 souls rather than just one, and she is very, very driven to use that raw ability to a highly precise level of skill. Being this good with necromancy means that she will be able to potentially heal others (she's not great at it but she's working on it) and be able to create tools of various uses if she can get her hands on adequate bone supply. She will also be very capable of learning and working on the skills of the magic of her new surroundings, though not being immediately at expert level will frustrate her. She'll get there.


• Ability to comfort: Harrowhark is a religious leader in her home, and she has a talent for soothing and comforting others that is not ... what's expected when seeing her in her normal 18 year old necromancer visage. She can be very soothing, come off as older and wiser (she is not that wise) and offer complex advice and ritual to other humans who are in hard places. Her compassion flows deep, even if she often struggles to show it as herself.


• Cartography: She's really good at making maps when exploring places, and keeping them accurate and specific.

Weaknesses.

Weaknesses:

• Physical frailty: She is small, weak and sickly. While she could win in a fight from afar using necromancy and throwing bones around, she is very easy to knock out. Using too much necromancy results in nosebleeds (or sweat bleeds, or eye bleeds, or ...) and can wear her out for a time, though less than pre-canon. She tires out after not walking very far at all, and often makes a skeleton to carry her. Basically, she is a wimpy wet cat of a human being who only can't be broken by a strong wind due to her magical status. Absolutely everyone can beat Harrow in arm wrestling if she has to use her own arms.


• Mental illness: Harrow canonically has schizophrenia, though she largely has it controlled such that most people are unable to tell. (I the player have vast familial and professional experience with this disease and will be playing it with the utmost respect and accuracy.) This means her mental state in and of itself is a great weakness: she cannot trust her own reality testing, is highly self-judgmental at all times, sometimes suffers from auditory and occasionally even visual hallucinations. She is intermittently somewhat paranoid and distrusting (okay, so that part might also be seen as a strength) but the big key to how it is a weakness is that as a result Harrowhark almost never believes her own initial perception despite her intelligence and observational skills.


• Arrogance: And yet, somehow, despite the fact she doesn't trust herself initially? She thinks she is the most competent person in the room 24/7, because growing up, she was. She was also in charge of everything starting at the age of ten and even as a deeply traumatized child was shadow-running her House (a small population but still an entire planet). This means Harrow is beyond confident about her own abilities and is not prone to listening to others' ideas at first; she has started to come around due to the events of GTN, but you've got to impress her before she listens. Her thinking that her own idea is the best idea by default has gotten her in trouble before and it will again.


• Dependency on necromancy: In case you hadn't yet noticed, there's a theme here -- Harrow is extremely A Necromancer. Nothing else about her matters, she is nothing else, there is nothing else. Having her powers nerfed is going to shake her confidence, her conviction, the core of her being. Even if they are still there, she is somehow less; in the beginning, Harrow will be a resoundingly easy target for Shadow that only the presence of others who will care enough about connection to draw her out will be able to save.


• Social discomfort/awkwardness: Outside of trained diplomacy and religious rituals, Harrow is very poor in the social skills department and very uneasy around others. She is not used to having equals. This "making connections to survive" thing isn't going to go well at first.

Fears, desires and regrets.

Fears: Everything can be wrapped into failure; being anything less than the best necromancer of her generation. Wasting the 200 lives that were cost for her own. Having anyone else die for her to live. The loss of Crux, the only human alive who she knows loved her unconditionally. The opening of the Tomb, the destruction of the Ninth House. People getting too close to her. Prolonged physical touch. Hormones acting ways that people notice. Letting anyone down for even ten seconds. Harrowhark is a tiny bone gremlin ball of silly fears and deep, profound fears, and she wraps them around herself in a shroud and carries them with her. Fear brings her strength and disgusts her simultaneously. Her fear of failure - in her next move, in her next lifetime, in anything and everything - is the only reason she goes on.
Desires: To become a proper Lyctor Saint. To save the Ninth House. To protect what is in the Locked Tomb (... and maybe see it wake up and give her a hug). To embody the best and most competent version of herself. To solve a great mystery. To matter.
Regrets: The death of Gideon Nav, her cavalier, in her defense. There is nothing Harrow could have done to stop this that would not have killed herself as well as innocent third parties, but she still benefitted from it (by surviving it) and regrets it. She regrets the lack of attention to what others were doing that allowed for the death of her first cavalier, Ortus Nigenad, as well. Every other mistake, even the one that resulted in the loss of her parents and her running the House in secret from age ten, no matter how hard on her, Harrow believes to have been the right way forward.

Suit Preferences: Spade! Dealing is something I can see Harrow getting good at, and competitive at in her own way, and it will really benefit from her necromancy -- she can have extra fingers on her hands, and grow whole skeletal limbs or entire skeletons that she can use as constructs to automate simple tasks like spinning a roulette wheel or throwing dice. It's so useful! And so cool looking! And so gimmicky she might get neat tips! She's also a huge nerd who probably will learn to count cards very quickly so she can figure out if other people are doing it (her player knows how to count cards and yes it's easy to notice) and she already wears black with black on top all the time. Grey is an acceptable addition.

Powers/Abilities: Harrow is a Locked Tomb flavor necromancer, subseries bone adept. If it is bone, she can manipulate it and make it follow her commands. Any bone she can get her hand on she can make into a full, mobile (meaning it has ligaments) skeleton of whatever it was—to Harrow's knowledge this is only humans because she's never really seen animals (her planetoid does not have them) but it's actually any mortal species. She is able to make them at varying sizes, too, which means opportunities to create GIANT SKELETON ARMY or also a tiny, hand-sized little elephant if you give her a piece of ivory.

She's able to do many of the other things necromancers can do at high levels because she is overpowered even in canon (their literal God is surprised by her capacity) but she is relatively unskilled at all other types of necromancy. As someone in the midst of becoming a Lyctor necrosaint, she is no longer aging and also able to heal herself fully from any injury, but because of her lack of stable Lyctorhood she has to do so consciously, making her difficult to kill but not impossible.

Sample: Here is a scene from Abraxas and there's also a scene from Deer Country as well as a top level on Elysium's TDM. (The first two are with my other Harrow journal but are definitely me!)