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aefenglom Application
Player Information
Name: Erry
Age: 29
Contact: Discord: Erry#5671
Other Characters: Momiji Sohma (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selfishwish)
Character Information
Name: Jane Canary
Canon: Deadwood
Canon Point: Post-Season 1, pre-season 2, during her extended drunken bender after leaving the Deadwood camp.
Age: Early 30s. (Never given in canon; compromising between the age the historical Jane would have been when she arrived in Deadwood (~25) and the age of the actor portraying her in S1 (~35).)
History:
Deadwood provides little hard information about Jane's life prior to the series' opening and is loose enough with history that assuming that her adventures before that point tracked the historical Calamity Jane's is probably inappropriate.
Here, though, is what we know about Jane's backstory and what can be reasonably inferred: She was likely born on the American frontier sometime in the late 1840's or early 1850's. Her early life was deeply traumatic; her only reference to her childhood or family in canon is a confession of having been horribly and repeatedly sexually abused as a young girl. Most likely, she traveled extensively throughout the American West during her life, gathering the skills and experience that supported her later career as a scout. Likely she was forced to take whatever work she could from an early age to support her family. At some point, she began wearing men's clothing. Almost certainly, she became accustomed to those around her regarding her as half a freak and half a joke because of her unfeminine appearance and mannerisms. And, likely well prior to the beginning of canon, she became an alcoholic.
Eventually, Jane embarked on a career as a scout for the U.S. military, likely working in a number of Great Plains territories during the repeated clashes between U.S. forces and Native American tribes during this period. Most notably, in the years immediately prior to the opening of Deadwood's first season, she provided her services to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in the Dakota and Montana territories in the run-up to the Battle of Little Bighorn and Custer's Last Stand. That battle saw Custer's forces crushingly defeated by the Sioux and Cheyenne and the Colonel himself killed in battle. By this point, Jane appears to have been a veteran scout; she recognized and had no hesitation about concluding that Custer was a preening fool incapable of listening to others' good advice, who strutted his way into a massacre. (It's a bit of a sore point for her.)
Prior to Deadwood's open, Jane also developed a deep friendship with "Wild Bill" Hickok, a famous/infamous gunfighter, sometimes-lawman, and sometimes-outlaw. It's unclear how they first met, but by the first season's open she is unreservedly devoted to him, possibly to the point of unrequited love. At the beginning of Season 1, she arrives in the Deadwood camp along with Bill and his companion Charlie Utter during the early height of the gold rush in the surrounding Black Hills. Bill has (ostensibly) come intending to prospect, but by all appearances Jane has no plans other than 1) accompanying Bill and 2) drinking.
On the night of the trio's arrival, a rider appears in the camp reporting that a family of settlers has been massacred on the road to another settlement, Spearfish. Overhearing reports of the attack in a local saloon, Jane is outraged to learn that--though there are rumors of a child survivor--the saloonkeeper, Al Swearengen, has convinced his patrons to wait until sun-up to mount a party to investigate. Jane insists on riding out on her own and joins up with Hickok and others who find and retrieve the surviving child, Sophia.
Jane immediately becomes protective of Sophia and assists the camp's doctor, Doc Cochran, in tending to her injuries and looking after her. She soon learns that Swearengen employed the "road agents" who attacked Sophia's family and intends to get rid of the girl lest she recover far enough to report that the attack was by white bandits. Jane attempts to keep Swearengen from discovering that Sophia is conscious when he investigates, but his impassive aggression sparks memories of past trauma and she panics. Afterwards, Charlie Utter keeps her from drunkenly marching into Swearengen's saloon to murder him--and, by chance, the two intercept the saloon operator's hired killer and Doc Cochran, who have each balked at carrying out Swearengen's orders. Together, the foursome conspire to smuggle Sophia out of camp until Swearengen deems it more convenient to murder his road agents rather than their victim.
After returning to camp with Sophia, Jane continues to care for her--until Wild Bill is abruptly murdered, shot in the back of the head while playing poker. After seeing Bill's body, a grief-stricken Jane promptly sets off on a bender and wanders into the surrounding wilderness. By chance, she stumbles upon Andy Cramed, a conman afflicted with smallpox, whose employer abandoned him in the woods to avoid rumors of plague spreading in the camp. Jane tends to him, saving his life, and upon her return to the camp Doc Cochran shakes her out of her stupor by recruiting her to assist him in the camp plague tents. After his recovery, Cramed tells her that "Hereinafter in times of calamity, I'll be sure to call for Jane." (Though this is likely the canonical germ of "Calamity Jane," she doesn't appear to go by that nickname at all prior to the timejump between Season 3 and Deadwood: The Movie.)
As the plague within the camp begins to subside, however, Jane's alcoholism worsens. She refuses multiple job offers from Charlie Utter, each plainly intended to keep her occupied once her work at the plague tents is no longer available to keep her from constant dissolution. In her final appearance in Season 1, she informs Charlie that she has resolved to leave Deadwood, driven by a mixture of despair at the human suffering around her, an inability to cope with Bill's death, and fatalism about her own weakness: "The direction of this entire camp makes me sick, and it bores the living shit out of me. . . . I will not be a drunk where he's buried, and I cannot stay fuckin' sober."
She sets out from Deadwood the same night, promising to pay Charlie back for the horse he offers to provide for her. If admitted, Jane would arrive in-game several days afterwards, pulled into Aefenglom through the reflection in a stream at which she has stopped to water her mount.
Personality:
Jane is a foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, tempestuous, dissolute, hyper-defensive, untrusting, and perpetually drunken wrecking ball. The first impressions she makes--at least when called to deal with the public at large--typically come in two forms: stumbling through a situation halfway shitfaced or snapping at those in her way to go and fuck themselves. (These approaches are not, it should be said, mutually exclusive. Indeed, they frequently go hand-in-hand.) She is boisterous and not above bluster, quick to turn to aggression when put on-guard.
This is Jane's default approach to the outside world, because the outside world has more or less done nothing but hurt and deride her since her birth. By the beginning of Deadwood, she has long since accepted that she will never have a place in "normal" society, even on the frontier. Whatever her skill as a scout or wagon-driver, to the bulk of those she encounters she's still just a woman skulking around dressed as a man, drinking like a man, cursing like a man, doing man's work. Even in the Deadwood camp--a lawless pit filled with every kind of squalor and antisocial behavior--she's regarded as, at best, a harmless and somewhat risible freak, and at worst as a degenerate. Jane is plainly used to this being the default reaction to her person anywhere she goes: Constantly, she responds to harmless questions or even earnest compliments with suspicion, skepticism, and outright hostility, certain that the speaker is implying something harmful or having a sly joke at her expense. (Told by Doc Cochran that she has a gift for caring for the sick and injured, Jane replies, wounded: "Don't be mean.") When threatened, she lashes out--and she sees most people as a potential threat by default.
To those who manage to get on her good side, however, Jane is capable of immense kindness and consideration. Children receive this care from her automatically, and with Sophia she's gentle, careful to make her feel safe, and even (somewhat) capable of reining in her cursing. But the same applies to adult friendships, loathe as she is to make those: Being around Bill immediately softens her, and she would rather suffer anything than so much as inconvenience him. (Admittedly, Bill is an extreme case: Charlie Utter probably qualifies as her next closest friend, and she typically reacts to him with a healthy layer of insults and irritability covering any concern.)
Despite her brashness, Jane is a natural caregiver. Her encounter with Andy Cramed pretty much sums it up: Grief-stricken, drinking herself into a stupor, her natural reaction to encountering a man with a fatal, infectious disease is still to interrupt everything to sit and keep the man company, making sure he has water. Anyone weak and vulnerable is likely to evoke the same root concern from her. (She ultimately tends Andy all the way back to health despite suspecting--correctly--that he'd likely led a pretty reprehensible life beforehand.) Along with that concern comes a natural perceptiveness: She spots hurt and vulnerability in those around her that others might readily miss, either out of willful blindness or insensitivity to the afflicted's efforts to hide it away.
Jane is also an addict. She has long-since ceased to regard her alcoholism as something she can control. She knows she's a drunk; she knows others see her as a drunk. She regards herself with no small measure of disgust as a result. But she has little real motivation to try to change. She knows no other way to cope with the hurt in her life. Worse, she fundamentally does not believe herself capable of overcoming her own weakness. And so her solution is just to--make do. Scrape by, find a new bottle each day, find somewhere hopefully indoors to lay her head each night, and resist thinking about what comes tomorrow. Depending on her level of inebriation, she swings wildly between furtively attempting to make her weakness as unobtrusive as possible to brazenly daring anyone to say an off word about it.
More than anything, Jane is terribly, cripplingly lonely. Bill may be the one true friend, devoid of any asterisk, that she has ever had in life. (And he's gone.) It's doubtful she's ever felt safe or brave enough to dare to love anyone romantically. (When she begins to develop feelings for a local madam in later canon, she appears tenderly, fearfully baffled throughout.) She wants people so badly but knows that this longing will inevitably be in vain. It is a shitty way to live.
Abilities & Skills:
Inventory/Companions:
Choice: Witch.
Reason: For one reason, turning Jane into a monster would just be too cruel for me. She already sees herself as, if not monstrous, at least disgusting and reviled in the eyes of society, and beginning to sprout horns or whatever would feed into that far too readily. She can handle being uncomfortable in her own skin all on her own. For another, despite her boisterous, foulmouthed demeanor, Jane excels at skills that require care and delicacy when she's willing to give herself chance, as evidenced by her skill at nursing both Sophia and Deadwood's plague victims. Learning magic (especially healing magic) will mesh well with that.
For a third, the mental image of Jane shitfaced drunk in wizard class, trying to learn how to conjure a toad, is just really, really funny.
Sample: TDM
Name: Erry
Age: 29
Contact: Discord: Erry#5671
Other Characters: Momiji Sohma (
selfishwish)Character Information
Name: Jane Canary
Canon: Deadwood
Canon Point: Post-Season 1, pre-season 2, during her extended drunken bender after leaving the Deadwood camp.
Age: Early 30s. (Never given in canon; compromising between the age the historical Jane would have been when she arrived in Deadwood (~25) and the age of the actor portraying her in S1 (~35).)
History:
Deadwood provides little hard information about Jane's life prior to the series' opening and is loose enough with history that assuming that her adventures before that point tracked the historical Calamity Jane's is probably inappropriate.
Here, though, is what we know about Jane's backstory and what can be reasonably inferred: She was likely born on the American frontier sometime in the late 1840's or early 1850's. Her early life was deeply traumatic; her only reference to her childhood or family in canon is a confession of having been horribly and repeatedly sexually abused as a young girl. Most likely, she traveled extensively throughout the American West during her life, gathering the skills and experience that supported her later career as a scout. Likely she was forced to take whatever work she could from an early age to support her family. At some point, she began wearing men's clothing. Almost certainly, she became accustomed to those around her regarding her as half a freak and half a joke because of her unfeminine appearance and mannerisms. And, likely well prior to the beginning of canon, she became an alcoholic.
Eventually, Jane embarked on a career as a scout for the U.S. military, likely working in a number of Great Plains territories during the repeated clashes between U.S. forces and Native American tribes during this period. Most notably, in the years immediately prior to the opening of Deadwood's first season, she provided her services to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in the Dakota and Montana territories in the run-up to the Battle of Little Bighorn and Custer's Last Stand. That battle saw Custer's forces crushingly defeated by the Sioux and Cheyenne and the Colonel himself killed in battle. By this point, Jane appears to have been a veteran scout; she recognized and had no hesitation about concluding that Custer was a preening fool incapable of listening to others' good advice, who strutted his way into a massacre. (It's a bit of a sore point for her.)
Prior to Deadwood's open, Jane also developed a deep friendship with "Wild Bill" Hickok, a famous/infamous gunfighter, sometimes-lawman, and sometimes-outlaw. It's unclear how they first met, but by the first season's open she is unreservedly devoted to him, possibly to the point of unrequited love. At the beginning of Season 1, she arrives in the Deadwood camp along with Bill and his companion Charlie Utter during the early height of the gold rush in the surrounding Black Hills. Bill has (ostensibly) come intending to prospect, but by all appearances Jane has no plans other than 1) accompanying Bill and 2) drinking.
On the night of the trio's arrival, a rider appears in the camp reporting that a family of settlers has been massacred on the road to another settlement, Spearfish. Overhearing reports of the attack in a local saloon, Jane is outraged to learn that--though there are rumors of a child survivor--the saloonkeeper, Al Swearengen, has convinced his patrons to wait until sun-up to mount a party to investigate. Jane insists on riding out on her own and joins up with Hickok and others who find and retrieve the surviving child, Sophia.
Jane immediately becomes protective of Sophia and assists the camp's doctor, Doc Cochran, in tending to her injuries and looking after her. She soon learns that Swearengen employed the "road agents" who attacked Sophia's family and intends to get rid of the girl lest she recover far enough to report that the attack was by white bandits. Jane attempts to keep Swearengen from discovering that Sophia is conscious when he investigates, but his impassive aggression sparks memories of past trauma and she panics. Afterwards, Charlie Utter keeps her from drunkenly marching into Swearengen's saloon to murder him--and, by chance, the two intercept the saloon operator's hired killer and Doc Cochran, who have each balked at carrying out Swearengen's orders. Together, the foursome conspire to smuggle Sophia out of camp until Swearengen deems it more convenient to murder his road agents rather than their victim.
After returning to camp with Sophia, Jane continues to care for her--until Wild Bill is abruptly murdered, shot in the back of the head while playing poker. After seeing Bill's body, a grief-stricken Jane promptly sets off on a bender and wanders into the surrounding wilderness. By chance, she stumbles upon Andy Cramed, a conman afflicted with smallpox, whose employer abandoned him in the woods to avoid rumors of plague spreading in the camp. Jane tends to him, saving his life, and upon her return to the camp Doc Cochran shakes her out of her stupor by recruiting her to assist him in the camp plague tents. After his recovery, Cramed tells her that "Hereinafter in times of calamity, I'll be sure to call for Jane." (Though this is likely the canonical germ of "Calamity Jane," she doesn't appear to go by that nickname at all prior to the timejump between Season 3 and Deadwood: The Movie.)
As the plague within the camp begins to subside, however, Jane's alcoholism worsens. She refuses multiple job offers from Charlie Utter, each plainly intended to keep her occupied once her work at the plague tents is no longer available to keep her from constant dissolution. In her final appearance in Season 1, she informs Charlie that she has resolved to leave Deadwood, driven by a mixture of despair at the human suffering around her, an inability to cope with Bill's death, and fatalism about her own weakness: "The direction of this entire camp makes me sick, and it bores the living shit out of me. . . . I will not be a drunk where he's buried, and I cannot stay fuckin' sober."
She sets out from Deadwood the same night, promising to pay Charlie back for the horse he offers to provide for her. If admitted, Jane would arrive in-game several days afterwards, pulled into Aefenglom through the reflection in a stream at which she has stopped to water her mount.
Personality:
Jane is a foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, tempestuous, dissolute, hyper-defensive, untrusting, and perpetually drunken wrecking ball. The first impressions she makes--at least when called to deal with the public at large--typically come in two forms: stumbling through a situation halfway shitfaced or snapping at those in her way to go and fuck themselves. (These approaches are not, it should be said, mutually exclusive. Indeed, they frequently go hand-in-hand.) She is boisterous and not above bluster, quick to turn to aggression when put on-guard.
This is Jane's default approach to the outside world, because the outside world has more or less done nothing but hurt and deride her since her birth. By the beginning of Deadwood, she has long since accepted that she will never have a place in "normal" society, even on the frontier. Whatever her skill as a scout or wagon-driver, to the bulk of those she encounters she's still just a woman skulking around dressed as a man, drinking like a man, cursing like a man, doing man's work. Even in the Deadwood camp--a lawless pit filled with every kind of squalor and antisocial behavior--she's regarded as, at best, a harmless and somewhat risible freak, and at worst as a degenerate. Jane is plainly used to this being the default reaction to her person anywhere she goes: Constantly, she responds to harmless questions or even earnest compliments with suspicion, skepticism, and outright hostility, certain that the speaker is implying something harmful or having a sly joke at her expense. (Told by Doc Cochran that she has a gift for caring for the sick and injured, Jane replies, wounded: "Don't be mean.") When threatened, she lashes out--and she sees most people as a potential threat by default.
To those who manage to get on her good side, however, Jane is capable of immense kindness and consideration. Children receive this care from her automatically, and with Sophia she's gentle, careful to make her feel safe, and even (somewhat) capable of reining in her cursing. But the same applies to adult friendships, loathe as she is to make those: Being around Bill immediately softens her, and she would rather suffer anything than so much as inconvenience him. (Admittedly, Bill is an extreme case: Charlie Utter probably qualifies as her next closest friend, and she typically reacts to him with a healthy layer of insults and irritability covering any concern.)
Despite her brashness, Jane is a natural caregiver. Her encounter with Andy Cramed pretty much sums it up: Grief-stricken, drinking herself into a stupor, her natural reaction to encountering a man with a fatal, infectious disease is still to interrupt everything to sit and keep the man company, making sure he has water. Anyone weak and vulnerable is likely to evoke the same root concern from her. (She ultimately tends Andy all the way back to health despite suspecting--correctly--that he'd likely led a pretty reprehensible life beforehand.) Along with that concern comes a natural perceptiveness: She spots hurt and vulnerability in those around her that others might readily miss, either out of willful blindness or insensitivity to the afflicted's efforts to hide it away.
Jane is also an addict. She has long-since ceased to regard her alcoholism as something she can control. She knows she's a drunk; she knows others see her as a drunk. She regards herself with no small measure of disgust as a result. But she has little real motivation to try to change. She knows no other way to cope with the hurt in her life. Worse, she fundamentally does not believe herself capable of overcoming her own weakness. And so her solution is just to--make do. Scrape by, find a new bottle each day, find somewhere hopefully indoors to lay her head each night, and resist thinking about what comes tomorrow. Depending on her level of inebriation, she swings wildly between furtively attempting to make her weakness as unobtrusive as possible to brazenly daring anyone to say an off word about it.
More than anything, Jane is terribly, cripplingly lonely. Bill may be the one true friend, devoid of any asterisk, that she has ever had in life. (And he's gone.) It's doubtful she's ever felt safe or brave enough to dare to love anyone romantically. (When she begins to develop feelings for a local madam in later canon, she appears tenderly, fearfully baffled throughout.) She wants people so badly but knows that this longing will inevitably be in vain. It is a shitty way to live.
Abilities & Skills:
- Firearms (Late 19th Century) - Jane isn't the expert gunfighter that Wild Bill is, but she constantly carries a pistol and is reasonably quick on the draw when given cause. She knows how to use the weaponry of her period effectively, at least when she's sober enough to aim and steady of nerve.
- Horsemanship - Jane is an able rider and wagonhand, experienced in the care and handling of horses and other livestock.
- Scouting / Wilderness Survival - Jane's an experienced scout and frontiersman. She knows how to get by in the wilderness, how to forage and keep camp, how to track, and presumably how to avoid detection when in enemy territory--at least when she's sober enough not to yell at the top of her lungs, instead.
- Nursing (Late 19th Century) - Jane doesn't have any advanced medical knowledge, but she is gifted and reasonably experienced at providing first aid and tending to the sick and injured, at least relative to 19th Century medical standards.
Inventory/Companions:
- One (1) set of trailblazing attire - Pictured here: A somewhat ragged set of men's slacks, shirt, and jacket, a set of boots, a bandolier, and a belt and holster for her pistol.
- One (1) 19th century pistol, with 18 rounds in her bandolier.
- One (1) canteen, half-full of bourbon.
Choice: Witch.
Reason: For one reason, turning Jane into a monster would just be too cruel for me. She already sees herself as, if not monstrous, at least disgusting and reviled in the eyes of society, and beginning to sprout horns or whatever would feed into that far too readily. She can handle being uncomfortable in her own skin all on her own. For another, despite her boisterous, foulmouthed demeanor, Jane excels at skills that require care and delicacy when she's willing to give herself chance, as evidenced by her skill at nursing both Sophia and Deadwood's plague victims. Learning magic (especially healing magic) will mesh well with that.
For a third, the mental image of Jane shitfaced drunk in wizard class, trying to learn how to conjure a toad, is just really, really funny.
Sample: TDM