application! (the last voyages)
Feb. 20th, 2026 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adamanteaUser Name/Nick: Daekie
User DW:daekie (mostly unused)
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
daekie preferred, daekie @ Discord also viable
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Ashton Carveranashthetic
Character Name: Adamantea | Poppy Keo | our lady of gardens
Age: 10,000+ chronologically?; 'early adulthood' mentally/emotionally, 'mid-teens to very early adulthood' physically
From When?: Post-campaign (Poppy is from a homebrew campaign - called Fallen Tower - of the tabletop game Mage: the Ascension), the year ~2000ish
Warden Justification:The last words Poppy Keo spoke before her Ascension were: "...I want to be a good person. I don't want to be afraid anymore. But I also want to be able to decide what that means."
Yes, Adamantea is a god of minds and feelings with an earnest and well-meaning nature: she remembers being human, or at least thinking she was human, and that gives her perspective. More than that, though, she was trapped in an impossible scenario - predestined to lose, knowing she had already lost hundreds, thousands of times before - and she escaped. With the bonds she made with others, she escaped, and she became more. She has done terrible things as a "mortal" Mage - and since then, she has seen others rise above themselves. She knows change is not a serial process, but an ebb and flow, and that no night lasts forever.
She knows the hearts and minds of people: after all, she's part of the aspect of reality that is these things. No heart is as black and cold as its owner thinks it is, given enough time, and she's been around for a good long time. Yes, people can fall! They can also rise.
If an inmate is on the Barge, the Admiral believes they can graduate, and as such Adamantea believes in their capacity to graduate. Even if they don't. Her faith in someone else won't fix them, and because it'd be deeply and horrifyingly unethical she won't manually 'fix' them (she's trying pretty hard to have "a code of ethics", non-divine entities are squishy 0n0), but that faith sure can't hurt!
Not a quote from her, but this is effectively her take on divinity and on wardenhood both: "We get to change you, and then you choose what to do with it."
Item: A mood ring with an elaborate metal setting; the stone changes colors to reflect her inmate's emotional state, and the setting indicates direction (solid 50% chance I'm going to change this, but right now it's the final blank section of the app and I am not letting that hold me back)
Abilities/Powers: This is the TL;DR version; a version with more info is here. Adamantea is Ascendant - she was an Archmage, and now she's a god. (And also an Archmage. One sort of builds on top of the other.) To some degree she is part of the fundamental underpinnings of reality, the ones that Mages normally manipulate to work magic.
Her powers can wax and wane -- she is a being of facets and refractions, after all; she's much unchanging diamond as she is the first blooms of spring. Her workings usually have a crystalline appearance in some way, though flowers are also common.
• ASCENDANT ARCHMAGE OF MIND: 'Mind' is one of the Spheres a Mage can manipulate to affect reality: it encompasses consciousness, thought, feeling, minds, emotions, dreams, memories, etc. This is Adamantea's primary Archsphere and divine domain, meaning she is one with this Sphere: she does not 'manipulate' it to create effects. She just does, and reality reflects what she does.
* She is not a god of madness. That's a different cabal member.
• MASTER OF LIFE: Secondary domain. Biology, growth, living things, recovery. For Adamantea this primarily manifests as healing, effective immortality, and plant growth, though not always.
• MASTER OF PRIME: Secondary domain. Raw magic and the shaping thereof. Adamantea excels at shaping the magic in the air around her; she can create temporary objects or effects, create magical items, bless someone to grant them powers that draw from her own, drain magic from an object… she likes conjuring items from raw magic a lot.
• MAGE OF... THE REST: Can manipulate the aspects of reality known as Spirit, Matter, Forces, Time, and Correspondence to varying degrees, but they're not her primary domain, so they take a decent chunk more effort.
• PARADIGM: If she wants to do meaningful magic, she - or someone involved in the situation - needs to Have Feelings about it.
• MARAUDER: If she experiences extremely intense distress, she emits a marauder field - an area around her where reality stops working right, shattered and warped like a prism of light. Corridors don't connect where they should, entities don't behave quite right, and people don't think rationally. The more distressed she is, the more intense the effect is, until reality becomes completely unrecognizable.
• DIVINITY: Worshippers can commune with her and receive her favor, and she's easily evoked with strong, discordant emotions.
She's a skilled hand-to-hand combatant. By default she'd rather use martial arts if she's doing physical combat, but if weapons are needed she prefers gauntlets. Way, way stronger than you’d think a 5’2” fat girl would be, and while some of it is muscle, some of it is ‘this isn't a human body and it doesn't need to work on human rules if she doesn't feel like it’.
Wardening Strategies and Philosophies: Adamantea is nice, polite, and has a backbone of pure diamond (probably not literally, but who can say with her). She's seen and done far too much to be phased by anything the Barge throws at her - and even if something does phase her, she can always use her control of Mind to ensure she doesn’t freak out. It has been a very long time since she was a person like this, so it’s a nice experience to have!
As a warden, she’ll take her first few months of temps as a chance to observe how other wardens do it before she really commits to any style options besides ‘being politely interested but ethically refraining from reading their mind’ (likely asking to backseat in warden minds if she’s actively interested - not to interfere, just to see how they think). She knows she has incredibly immense power just by being herself, so she does her best to have something resembling a code of ethics: yes she could just mindhack or actively force you into having the revelations you need to have. It'd be very easy, actually.
...but that would be unethical! So she won't.
Inmates who’d pair well with her are likely ones who want to improve but are stymied by themselves somehow, or ones who fundamentally believe they can’t improve. She can breed lilacs out of the dead land, as T.S. Eliot once put it: she can find the fragile seed of growth in them and coax it towards the sun. Well, it’s like growing plants on a trellis, isn’t it? You need to give them the ladder and the structure to do well.
Ultimately: love is real, and even if it won't save you, it won't hurt! To some degree she has the mindset of a classic magical girl protagonist: she's a nice sweet girl who cares deeply for her friends and she Will Not Give Up, even if that means she has to do weird things. The cognitive dissonance is for other passengers, who'll need to reconcile the teenage girl who says um five times a minute with the idea of 'god of mind who could permanently and irrepairably shatter your mind just by thinking about it a little too hard.'
(...I don’t know how effective it would be to get an inmate who is absolutely not cool with her interacting with their mind, but it would be kind of funny.)
Deal: Drive back the red star Anthelios and postpone the end of the world for several decades, minimum.
World Information: The World of Darkness - even the one in the world of the Sixth Age - is like our world, except it's just generally kind of worse. Also, supernatural creatures are real and exist in secret. This includes wizards. (...they call themselves Mages.)
Mages are willworkers: a reincarnating aspect of their soul, their Avatar, has awoken and can interact with the universe in a way that regular humans - sleepers - cannot. They can directly interact with the aspects that underpin reality; they believe the universe works a certain way, and so - for them in that moment - it does.
But not always. Most Mages contend with Paradox: the universe works a certain way because of mass consensus, and we all know magic isn't real, don't we? The more egregiously supernatural an act, the more likely it is that reality notices and bites back. An impossibly good run of luck might mean your car breaks down at the worst possible moment. A particularly magically vulgar working? Catch on fire. Speak in tongues. Seize. Cast a spell vulgar enough, and you risk being erased from reality entirely, potentially even a retroactive erasure: not only are you no longer now, you never were in the first place.
The two primary sects of Mages are:Avatar Genius awakens. Technocrats are the guys making the Terminator. They're the gene-splicing scientists creating the plants of the future... or the guard dogs of your nightmares. They're the guys running the stock market. The Traditions? Those reality deviants? Pfeh. The Technocracy's goal is to advance humanity.
For generations upon generations, the Traditions and the Technocracy have been engaged in a war for the fate of reality: the Ascension War. You see, within the World of Darkness, reality is decided by mass consensus: what the sleeper masses believe en masse is true? Is. Introducing things into mass consensus makes them from magic into something that's just true. LSD was created by Mages, before it was introduced to consensus. Wifi? You better believe Technocrats invented that. Whoever controls consensus controls reality, and the Traditions and the Technocracy have long since been at each others' throats.
Mages also have two other existential threats to contend with:
A Nephandi is a far more serious threat. Remember the Avatar? That reincarnating part of the soul that grants magic? Nephandi are Mages who have inverted their Avatars into something entropic and terrible; they seek only to hasten the world's end. If you kill a Nephandi, their Avatar's reincarnation is still inverted, and it will warp that child from the day they're born into the worst person they could possibly be. Once a Nephandi is made, that soul cannot be saved. It must be destroyed.
In the world of the Sixth Age, the apocalypse - Gehenna - happens in 2004. It begins in 1999 with the events of the Week of Nightmares, and is heralded by Anthelios, the red star. As the end of the world grows closer, Anthelios approaches, growing brighter and brighter. In 2004 - though no one knows it quite yet - Helios, the spirit of the sun / the sun itself, will die.
History: There'll be a really extensive writeup of her history at some point (mostly for my own reference). For the sake of not making everyone read a Wikipedia page worth of text (complete with footnotes), here's an abbreviated (STILL LONG. SORRY. I AM WHAT I AM.) version (....under a dropdown. I am what I am.):
When Poppy was sixteen, the Stone was complete - but the resurrection was worthless, a broken mind in a rotted corpse - and that Stone required stealing an artifact from a local chapter of Mages, who wanted both Keos apprehended. Allesandro called in a favor from an old Mage friend: ferry Poppy to safety with the Solificati of Las Vegas and be paid handsomely.
They never made it there. That chapter of Mages hunted the two of them down, and Poppy Keo died on a sandy road outside of Boulder City. Her father gave her a failsafe if everything went wrong, a liquid draught of the Philosopher's Stone to drink -- but still she turned to glass in her would-be protector's hands and shattered.)
(As it turns out, everything up to this point wasn't her. She's just a side effect of saving that girl: a side effect who was nearly a perfect replica, down to the soul. But she remembers it, so... does it really matter that she's not actually the girl who died right outside Boulder?
She doesn't think so.)
In 1995, three outcast high schoolers in Las Vegas - Xavier Maurice Ante (neurotic, passive underdog), Danny Garcia (crutches-bound bitter loner, comics superfan), and Alycia Levine (a wildhearted artist living in her own world) - awakened to true magic when a classmate pulled a gun at their junkyard hangout; their souls linked to each other... and to a fourth. A blinding flash of light - and then it was morning. That afternoon they found Poppy unconscious in a room there, a crystal embedded over her heart; all she remembered of her life was her given name, and her magic.
The four were the subjects of recruitment campaigns from every Mage in the city: multiple mages with no prior affiliation awakening at once? And the Anomaly - a metal skeleton dripping with flesh made of raw magic and energy that moved nonlinearly through time - had appeared during their awakening, its intentions unknown.
(Xavier remembered that there'd been a fourth person in their friendgroup, back in fifth grade. He couldn't remember her name. It was more comforting to say it hadn't been Poppy, but none of them could ever say for sure.)
That recruitment campaign rapidly went downhill when shots were fired: a dozen people died in the crossfire. The teens escaped to nearby Boulder City, home of the unaffiliated Mage tradition called the Hollow Ones, who were willing to give the kids a place to stay and food to eat as long as they helped out and kept their heads low. After a field trip, the Solificati of Vegas identified Poppy's crystal as a soulstone: a way to permanently preserve a soul. Her body was superficial casing for that.
(A Hollow One tracked strange things happening in that desert. She'd been hearing Poppy’s name in the wind for over a century. In 1918, inventor D. Levine found strange radio waves holding two words: "Poppy, don't--")
Two busy months later, it came to a head when a Mage who'd taken them under his wing tried robbing the largest casino in Las Vegas: the place nobody in the city would hit. Everyone needed money to finance a war, even the Ascension War. Everything went wrong, so they ran -- they were told they couldn't be protected as a group, but if they individually tried to claim sanctuary they'd probably get it.
So Poppy went to the Fae of Las Vegas, stayed with nearby experience-seekers the Cult of Ecstacy, and became the official Fae Liason for the northwestern United States. She spent two years getting paid on commission to capture magical beasts. It was alright.
Two years later in January 1997, all four were drawn back to Vegas, now collectively calling themselves the Outsiders. The Anomaly was active again, and the only people that both Traditions and Technocracy alike could agree on trusting were the fools who'd tried to rob the casino back in 1995: if they’d been stupid enough to do that, there was no way they were responsible for this.(They were, in fact, unwittingly responsible for the Anomaly. Or they would be. Predestination and nonlinearity are a bitch.)
1997 and 1998? Those were busy years!
For the sake of not writing a full Wikipedia page, let's sum up Fallen Tower: Part 2 as: Oh, God, Everything Happens So Much. Things that happened include:
• Dealt with the Sphinx, a transuniversal Mage policing force (led by alternate future versions of the Outsiders); all guards working for the Sphinx were also alternates of the Outsiders. In every timeline where the Outsiders existed, these future selves said, so too did the Anomaly -- and if the Outsiders were removed from the timeline, the Anomaly ceased to exist. Just to be sure these particular kids would die, the Sphinx prepared a magical nuke and threw it into the future to target a single specific moment...which is when the Anomaly broke into the dimension and killed the Sphinx's leadership. This meant the magical power of the realm fell under the Outsiders' control, who used it to obliterate the Vampire stronghold of Ceoris and escape safely.
• Traveled to Atlantis to find the demon Mammon's true angelic name, ultimately causing the city to fall onto the surface of Hell itself.
• Predestination led to the Outsiders breaking into the lowest levels of Area 51. There they met Alan, an advanced Technocratic construct interested in the concept of God, and the Sphinx's final attack came: a terrible light from the sky killing everyone in the reactor room.
An emergency recall spell meant the Outsiders woke outside the shielded reactor chamber, watching the parts left inside be burned away by the light and fuse into one being: a metal skeleton dripping with molten flesh, whose goal was to travel back in time to the Fall of Heaven and kill God himself for creating such a cruel world.
• At the heart of Area 51 was an enormous metal spider; inside it was an entity with names including Lucifer, Prometheus, the Weaver, and the Devil, who called the Outsiders old friends he hadn’t seen for a long time.
And then Fallen Tower: Part 3, where everything happens so much, moreso:
• Lucifer said that in a year, the Anomaly would ask them to come with it to the fall of Heaven, and they had to agree. There were thousands of timelines where they'd become part of the Anomaly, but only one timeline - this one - where they'd escaped: and that meant that his memories of meeting them thousands of years ago had to take place, or the timeline would be doomed.
• Accidentally dragged Las Vegas into the first level of the spirit world. It stayed that way for a year. Regular humans unawakened couldn't sense it at all, thankfully.
• Poppy (re?)met Allesandro Keo, her father, who’d detached his lab from subjective time and was living with a version of her from before she'd met the Outsiders. Allesandro explained the truth of the matter: she wasn't Poppy Keo. In saving his daughter, he'd created a time paradox as reality backlashed against his defiance.
Poppy - the Outsider - was the living manifestation of the paradox, and she was unconsciously trapping the Outsiders in a time loop. Every time it ended, the other three left, and she reset to the beginning. From Allesandro's perspective, she came in every week, always with the same questions.
He begged her to close the loop and fix the paradox. Closing the loop meant that at the end, she would need to die. And because everything
• Encountered Damion, a boy with a mech suit obsessed with dragons. He was actually from another world where there had been five Outsiders, him being the fifth, but had been taken here and had his memories rewritten by Technocrats desperate to kill the Outsiders before they blew anything else up. (It didn't work, he ended up being incorporated into them.)
• Went back in time and instilled beliefs in the Technocratic construct Alan to create a timeline where only he became the Anomaly. Its plan to kill God had been created by a fusion of their final thoughts when they'd become it: if he already had those thoughts, then the Outsiders didn't need to have ever been involved with its creation.
• In the end, met with the Anomaly. It acknowledged it was supposed to try to kill God, for only three of them to travel back in time with it, but also it wanted something else: to precede God. Why should any of them do as they were meant to? Why listen to predestination? It pulled an echo of Poppy off - setting it at the beginning of the loop to become the amnesiac her, again, powering the loop that kept her alive and real - and they all traveled back in time to the Fall of Heaven.
They walked the world for ten thousand years. They became something other than human, all five of them, along the way: a God who Watches. A lady of gardens. A god of death who destroys evil. A god of color and madness and creation. And the very first dragon in all the world.
Sample Network Entry: [The girl on the video has on a flower crown of lilies and roses, all pale pinks and golds. She looks apologetic, in the sort of way someone can look apologetic for existing.]
So, um, this is not the way I kinda was hoping I could talk about this if it ever came up?
The Admiral called me Adamantea in the pairings list, which is fine...? It's my name. It's just, um, I know I've told people mostly that I'm called Poppy, which is. [A sheepish little smile.] Also? My name?
It's not a title, or anything, it's just... another name. Which-ever one anyone wants to call me is okay? Adamantea [and there's something weighty to it, not in her tone but in some subtone of her voice you don't hear so much as feel in the back of your mind] isn't any more formal or any more official.
[She thinks about it for a second and wrinkles her nose.]
This still doesn't mean anyone gets to call me Popcorn. Okay? I don't like it. If you think I'm talking to you, I am, and I [with all the huffiness of an offended teenage girl] will know if you call me that even in your head. Don't. It's kinda rude.
Sample RP: January 2026 Voice Test Meme, and February 2026 Voice Test Meme
Special Notes: 'Poppy Keo', 'Adamantea', and 'our lady of gardens' are all equally Her Name on a 'true name' level. If Barge documentation has to pick a single name for her only, Adamantea is preferred, but otherwise only use one at a time.
Technically it's Adamantea, not Adamantea (and the same goes for our lady of gardens) but that's... that's basically like a name showing up in a fancy font in a comic book speech bubble. There's no need to copy the formatting anywhere unless it'd be fun.
User DW:
daekie (mostly unused)E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Ashton Carver
anashtheticCharacter Name: Adamantea | Poppy Keo | our lady of gardens
Age: 10,000+ chronologically?; 'early adulthood' mentally/emotionally, 'mid-teens to very early adulthood' physically
From When?: Post-campaign (Poppy is from a homebrew campaign - called Fallen Tower - of the tabletop game Mage: the Ascension), the year ~2000ish
Warden Justification:The last words Poppy Keo spoke before her Ascension were: "...I want to be a good person. I don't want to be afraid anymore. But I also want to be able to decide what that means."
Yes, Adamantea is a god of minds and feelings with an earnest and well-meaning nature: she remembers being human, or at least thinking she was human, and that gives her perspective. More than that, though, she was trapped in an impossible scenario - predestined to lose, knowing she had already lost hundreds, thousands of times before - and she escaped. With the bonds she made with others, she escaped, and she became more. She has done terrible things as a "mortal" Mage - and since then, she has seen others rise above themselves. She knows change is not a serial process, but an ebb and flow, and that no night lasts forever.
She knows the hearts and minds of people: after all, she's part of the aspect of reality that is these things. No heart is as black and cold as its owner thinks it is, given enough time, and she's been around for a good long time. Yes, people can fall! They can also rise.
If an inmate is on the Barge, the Admiral believes they can graduate, and as such Adamantea believes in their capacity to graduate. Even if they don't. Her faith in someone else won't fix them, and because it'd be deeply and horrifyingly unethical she won't manually 'fix' them (she's trying pretty hard to have "a code of ethics", non-divine entities are squishy 0n0), but that faith sure can't hurt!
Not a quote from her, but this is effectively her take on divinity and on wardenhood both: "We get to change you, and then you choose what to do with it."
Item: A mood ring with an elaborate metal setting; the stone changes colors to reflect her inmate's emotional state, and the setting indicates direction (solid 50% chance I'm going to change this, but right now it's the final blank section of the app and I am not letting that hold me back)
Abilities/Powers: This is the TL;DR version; a version with more info is here. Adamantea is Ascendant - she was an Archmage, and now she's a god. (And also an Archmage. One sort of builds on top of the other.) To some degree she is part of the fundamental underpinnings of reality, the ones that Mages normally manipulate to work magic.
Her powers can wax and wane -- she is a being of facets and refractions, after all; she's much unchanging diamond as she is the first blooms of spring. Her workings usually have a crystalline appearance in some way, though flowers are also common.
• ASCENDANT ARCHMAGE OF MIND: 'Mind' is one of the Spheres a Mage can manipulate to affect reality: it encompasses consciousness, thought, feeling, minds, emotions, dreams, memories, etc. This is Adamantea's primary Archsphere and divine domain, meaning she is one with this Sphere: she does not 'manipulate' it to create effects. She just does, and reality reflects what she does.
* She is not a god of madness. That's a different cabal member.
• MASTER OF LIFE: Secondary domain. Biology, growth, living things, recovery. For Adamantea this primarily manifests as healing, effective immortality, and plant growth, though not always.
• MASTER OF PRIME: Secondary domain. Raw magic and the shaping thereof. Adamantea excels at shaping the magic in the air around her; she can create temporary objects or effects, create magical items, bless someone to grant them powers that draw from her own, drain magic from an object… she likes conjuring items from raw magic a lot.
• MAGE OF... THE REST: Can manipulate the aspects of reality known as Spirit, Matter, Forces, Time, and Correspondence to varying degrees, but they're not her primary domain, so they take a decent chunk more effort.
• PARADIGM: If she wants to do meaningful magic, she - or someone involved in the situation - needs to Have Feelings about it.
• MARAUDER: If she experiences extremely intense distress, she emits a marauder field - an area around her where reality stops working right, shattered and warped like a prism of light. Corridors don't connect where they should, entities don't behave quite right, and people don't think rationally. The more distressed she is, the more intense the effect is, until reality becomes completely unrecognizable.
• DIVINITY: Worshippers can commune with her and receive her favor, and she's easily evoked with strong, discordant emotions.
She's a skilled hand-to-hand combatant. By default she'd rather use martial arts if she's doing physical combat, but if weapons are needed she prefers gauntlets. Way, way stronger than you’d think a 5’2” fat girl would be, and while some of it is muscle, some of it is ‘this isn't a human body and it doesn't need to work on human rules if she doesn't feel like it’.
Wardening Strategies and Philosophies: Adamantea is nice, polite, and has a backbone of pure diamond (probably not literally, but who can say with her). She's seen and done far too much to be phased by anything the Barge throws at her - and even if something does phase her, she can always use her control of Mind to ensure she doesn’t freak out. It has been a very long time since she was a person like this, so it’s a nice experience to have!
As a warden, she’ll take her first few months of temps as a chance to observe how other wardens do it before she really commits to any style options besides ‘being politely interested but ethically refraining from reading their mind’ (likely asking to backseat in warden minds if she’s actively interested - not to interfere, just to see how they think). She knows she has incredibly immense power just by being herself, so she does her best to have something resembling a code of ethics: yes she could just mindhack or actively force you into having the revelations you need to have. It'd be very easy, actually.
...but that would be unethical! So she won't.
Inmates who’d pair well with her are likely ones who want to improve but are stymied by themselves somehow, or ones who fundamentally believe they can’t improve. She can breed lilacs out of the dead land, as T.S. Eliot once put it: she can find the fragile seed of growth in them and coax it towards the sun. Well, it’s like growing plants on a trellis, isn’t it? You need to give them the ladder and the structure to do well.
Ultimately: love is real, and even if it won't save you, it won't hurt! To some degree she has the mindset of a classic magical girl protagonist: she's a nice sweet girl who cares deeply for her friends and she Will Not Give Up, even if that means she has to do weird things. The cognitive dissonance is for other passengers, who'll need to reconcile the teenage girl who says um five times a minute with the idea of 'god of mind who could permanently and irrepairably shatter your mind just by thinking about it a little too hard.'
(...I don’t know how effective it would be to get an inmate who is absolutely not cool with her interacting with their mind, but it would be kind of funny.)
Deal: Drive back the red star Anthelios and postpone the end of the world for several decades, minimum.
World Information: The World of Darkness - even the one in the world of the Sixth Age - is like our world, except it's just generally kind of worse. Also, supernatural creatures are real and exist in secret. This includes wizards. (...they call themselves Mages.)
Mages are willworkers: a reincarnating aspect of their soul, their Avatar, has awoken and can interact with the universe in a way that regular humans - sleepers - cannot. They can directly interact with the aspects that underpin reality; they believe the universe works a certain way, and so - for them in that moment - it does.
But not always. Most Mages contend with Paradox: the universe works a certain way because of mass consensus, and we all know magic isn't real, don't we? The more egregiously supernatural an act, the more likely it is that reality notices and bites back. An impossibly good run of luck might mean your car breaks down at the worst possible moment. A particularly magically vulgar working? Catch on fire. Speak in tongues. Seize. Cast a spell vulgar enough, and you risk being erased from reality entirely, potentially even a retroactive erasure: not only are you no longer now, you never were in the first place.
The two primary sects of Mages are:
the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions and the Technocracy.
The Traditions who include magical traditions everywhere from the Order of Hermes (more traditional wizards) to the Virtual Adepts (reality hackers) and the Verbena (druids) According to the Technocracy themselves, they're not Mages: they utilize Enlightened Science, a way to interact with the universe that one gains when theirFor generations upon generations, the Traditions and the Technocracy have been engaged in a war for the fate of reality: the Ascension War. You see, within the World of Darkness, reality is decided by mass consensus: what the sleeper masses believe en masse is true? Is. Introducing things into mass consensus makes them from magic into something that's just true. LSD was created by Mages, before it was introduced to consensus. Wifi? You better believe Technocrats invented that. Whoever controls consensus controls reality, and the Traditions and the Technocracy have long since been at each others' throats.
Mages also have two other existential threats to contend with:
Marauders and Nephandi.
A Marauder is a Mage whose magic twists everything around them to reflect their vision of reality. A Marauder who believes himself a grim superhero may find the city produces deranged supervillains for him to pit himself against, twisting normal people into what he subconsciously thinks there should be. A Marauder who believes in astrology may find that your rising sign does influence every aspect of your life. Marauders never know what they are - which is what makes them so dangerous, because their fields of influence affect other Mages, too.A Nephandi is a far more serious threat. Remember the Avatar? That reincarnating part of the soul that grants magic? Nephandi are Mages who have inverted their Avatars into something entropic and terrible; they seek only to hasten the world's end. If you kill a Nephandi, their Avatar's reincarnation is still inverted, and it will warp that child from the day they're born into the worst person they could possibly be. Once a Nephandi is made, that soul cannot be saved. It must be destroyed.
In the world of the Sixth Age, the apocalypse - Gehenna - happens in 2004. It begins in 1999 with the events of the Week of Nightmares, and is heralded by Anthelios, the red star. As the end of the world grows closer, Anthelios approaches, growing brighter and brighter. In 2004 - though no one knows it quite yet - Helios, the spirit of the sun / the sun itself, will die.
History: There'll be a really extensive writeup of her history at some point (mostly for my own reference). For the sake of not making everyone read a Wikipedia page worth of text (complete with footnotes), here's an abbreviated (STILL LONG. SORRY. I AM WHAT I AM.) version (....under a dropdown. I am what I am.):
Sometimes a lot of things happen in very little time, in the grand scheme of things.
(There are things she didn't remember for years.)
(Poppy Keo was born 1969 in an well-to-do area of San Francisco. She grew up well enough, but stopped going to school at 11 after her mother Khemera's death in a car accident. Her father Allesandro, an alchemist and a Mage from the magical tradition the Solificati, began attempting to create a Philosopher's Stone for a resurrection; while helping him, Poppy herself awakened to true magic.When Poppy was sixteen, the Stone was complete - but the resurrection was worthless, a broken mind in a rotted corpse - and that Stone required stealing an artifact from a local chapter of Mages, who wanted both Keos apprehended. Allesandro called in a favor from an old Mage friend: ferry Poppy to safety with the Solificati of Las Vegas and be paid handsomely.
They never made it there. That chapter of Mages hunted the two of them down, and Poppy Keo died on a sandy road outside of Boulder City. Her father gave her a failsafe if everything went wrong, a liquid draught of the Philosopher's Stone to drink -- but still she turned to glass in her would-be protector's hands and shattered.)
(As it turns out, everything up to this point wasn't her. She's just a side effect of saving that girl: a side effect who was nearly a perfect replica, down to the soul. But she remembers it, so... does it really matter that she's not actually the girl who died right outside Boulder?
She doesn't think so.)
In 1995, three outcast high schoolers in Las Vegas - Xavier Maurice Ante (neurotic, passive underdog), Danny Garcia (crutches-bound bitter loner, comics superfan), and Alycia Levine (a wildhearted artist living in her own world) - awakened to true magic when a classmate pulled a gun at their junkyard hangout; their souls linked to each other... and to a fourth. A blinding flash of light - and then it was morning. That afternoon they found Poppy unconscious in a room there, a crystal embedded over her heart; all she remembered of her life was her given name, and her magic.
The four were the subjects of recruitment campaigns from every Mage in the city: multiple mages with no prior affiliation awakening at once? And the Anomaly - a metal skeleton dripping with flesh made of raw magic and energy that moved nonlinearly through time - had appeared during their awakening, its intentions unknown.
(Xavier remembered that there'd been a fourth person in their friendgroup, back in fifth grade. He couldn't remember her name. It was more comforting to say it hadn't been Poppy, but none of them could ever say for sure.)
That recruitment campaign rapidly went downhill when shots were fired: a dozen people died in the crossfire. The teens escaped to nearby Boulder City, home of the unaffiliated Mage tradition called the Hollow Ones, who were willing to give the kids a place to stay and food to eat as long as they helped out and kept their heads low. After a field trip, the Solificati of Vegas identified Poppy's crystal as a soulstone: a way to permanently preserve a soul. Her body was superficial casing for that.
(A Hollow One tracked strange things happening in that desert. She'd been hearing Poppy’s name in the wind for over a century. In 1918, inventor D. Levine found strange radio waves holding two words: "Poppy, don't--")
Two busy months later, it came to a head when a Mage who'd taken them under his wing tried robbing the largest casino in Las Vegas: the place nobody in the city would hit. Everyone needed money to finance a war, even the Ascension War. Everything went wrong, so they ran -- they were told they couldn't be protected as a group, but if they individually tried to claim sanctuary they'd probably get it.
So Poppy went to the Fae of Las Vegas, stayed with nearby experience-seekers the Cult of Ecstacy, and became the official Fae Liason for the northwestern United States. She spent two years getting paid on commission to capture magical beasts. It was alright.
Two years later in January 1997, all four were drawn back to Vegas, now collectively calling themselves the Outsiders. The Anomaly was active again, and the only people that both Traditions and Technocracy alike could agree on trusting were the fools who'd tried to rob the casino back in 1995: if they’d been stupid enough to do that, there was no way they were responsible for this.
1997 and 1998? Those were busy years!
For the sake of not writing a full Wikipedia page, let's sum up Fallen Tower: Part 2 as: Oh, God, Everything Happens So Much. Things that happened include:
• Dealt with the Sphinx, a transuniversal Mage policing force (led by alternate future versions of the Outsiders); all guards working for the Sphinx were also alternates of the Outsiders. In every timeline where the Outsiders existed, these future selves said, so too did the Anomaly -- and if the Outsiders were removed from the timeline, the Anomaly ceased to exist. Just to be sure these particular kids would die, the Sphinx prepared a magical nuke and threw it into the future to target a single specific moment...which is when the Anomaly broke into the dimension and killed the Sphinx's leadership. This meant the magical power of the realm fell under the Outsiders' control, who used it to obliterate the Vampire stronghold of Ceoris and escape safely.
• Traveled to Atlantis to find the demon Mammon's true angelic name, ultimately causing the city to fall onto the surface of Hell itself.
• Predestination led to the Outsiders breaking into the lowest levels of Area 51. There they met Alan, an advanced Technocratic construct interested in the concept of God, and the Sphinx's final attack came: a terrible light from the sky killing everyone in the reactor room.
An emergency recall spell meant the Outsiders woke outside the shielded reactor chamber, watching the parts left inside be burned away by the light and fuse into one being: a metal skeleton dripping with molten flesh, whose goal was to travel back in time to the Fall of Heaven and kill God himself for creating such a cruel world.
• At the heart of Area 51 was an enormous metal spider; inside it was an entity with names including Lucifer, Prometheus, the Weaver, and the Devil, who called the Outsiders old friends he hadn’t seen for a long time.
And then Fallen Tower: Part 3, where everything happens so much, moreso:
• Lucifer said that in a year, the Anomaly would ask them to come with it to the fall of Heaven, and they had to agree. There were thousands of timelines where they'd become part of the Anomaly, but only one timeline - this one - where they'd escaped: and that meant that his memories of meeting them thousands of years ago had to take place, or the timeline would be doomed.
• Accidentally dragged Las Vegas into the first level of the spirit world. It stayed that way for a year. Regular humans unawakened couldn't sense it at all, thankfully.
• Poppy (re?)met Allesandro Keo, her father, who’d detached his lab from subjective time and was living with a version of her from before she'd met the Outsiders. Allesandro explained the truth of the matter: she wasn't Poppy Keo. In saving his daughter, he'd created a time paradox as reality backlashed against his defiance.
Poppy - the Outsider - was the living manifestation of the paradox, and she was unconsciously trapping the Outsiders in a time loop. Every time it ended, the other three left, and she reset to the beginning. From Allesandro's perspective, she came in every week, always with the same questions.
He begged her to close the loop and fix the paradox. Closing the loop meant that at the end, she would need to die. And because everything
• Encountered Damion, a boy with a mech suit obsessed with dragons. He was actually from another world where there had been five Outsiders, him being the fifth, but had been taken here and had his memories rewritten by Technocrats desperate to kill the Outsiders before they blew anything else up. (It didn't work, he ended up being incorporated into them.)
• Went back in time and instilled beliefs in the Technocratic construct Alan to create a timeline where only he became the Anomaly. Its plan to kill God had been created by a fusion of their final thoughts when they'd become it: if he already had those thoughts, then the Outsiders didn't need to have ever been involved with its creation.
• In the end, met with the Anomaly. It acknowledged it was supposed to try to kill God, for only three of them to travel back in time with it, but also it wanted something else: to precede God. Why should any of them do as they were meant to? Why listen to predestination? It pulled an echo of Poppy off - setting it at the beginning of the loop to become the amnesiac her, again, powering the loop that kept her alive and real - and they all traveled back in time to the Fall of Heaven.
They walked the world for ten thousand years. They became something other than human, all five of them, along the way: a God who Watches. A lady of gardens. A god of death who destroys evil. A god of color and madness and creation. And the very first dragon in all the world.
Sample Network Entry: [The girl on the video has on a flower crown of lilies and roses, all pale pinks and golds. She looks apologetic, in the sort of way someone can look apologetic for existing.]
So, um, this is not the way I kinda was hoping I could talk about this if it ever came up?
The Admiral called me Adamantea in the pairings list, which is fine...? It's my name. It's just, um, I know I've told people mostly that I'm called Poppy, which is. [A sheepish little smile.] Also? My name?
It's not a title, or anything, it's just... another name. Which-ever one anyone wants to call me is okay? Adamantea [and there's something weighty to it, not in her tone but in some subtone of her voice you don't hear so much as feel in the back of your mind] isn't any more formal or any more official.
[She thinks about it for a second and wrinkles her nose.]
This still doesn't mean anyone gets to call me Popcorn. Okay? I don't like it. If you think I'm talking to you, I am, and I [with all the huffiness of an offended teenage girl] will know if you call me that even in your head. Don't. It's kinda rude.
Sample RP: January 2026 Voice Test Meme, and February 2026 Voice Test Meme
Special Notes: 'Poppy Keo', 'Adamantea', and 'our lady of gardens' are all equally Her Name on a 'true name' level. If Barge documentation has to pick a single name for her only, Adamantea is preferred, but otherwise only use one at a time.
Technically it's Adamantea, not Adamantea (and the same goes for our lady of gardens) but that's... that's basically like a name showing up in a fancy font in a comic book speech bubble. There's no need to copy the formatting anywhere unless it'd be fun.
