Xavier Institute Application

[molded]

PLAYER INFORMATION
PLAYER: Loki
ARE YOU AT LEAST 14 YEARS OLD?: Yes.
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: Over 18.
CONTACT: AIM: TrcksterLoki, plurk: helbindi, Email: electronicsiliviy@gmail.com
PERSONAL JOURNAL: quetzalcoatl
CHARACTERS PLAYED: None.

CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: “Enemy” Caster. Aliases: Caster, Alice. “True” and AU legal name: Nursery Rhyme.
CANON: Fate/Extra
CANON REFERENCE: Here and here.
AGE: 12.
GENDER: Her physical sex can appear to change at will, but her actual physical sex is female, which she defaults to. Her mental gender is also female.
YEAR IN SCHOOL/FACULTY POSITION: Middle school first year.

APPEARANCE: Here, though she does not have prosthetic limbs in this AU.

PERSONALITY: Nursery Rhyme is a cheerful, playful girl. She’s nearly always smiling or laughing, finding something amusing in nearly anything she encounters, save for angry adults. Even when she gets into trouble, it isn’t long before that grin returns and she’s off to hide in the kitchen and tease the staff. Her favorite things in the world are games of pretend. Her abilities make her especially good at them, and her childhood connection to storybooks makes them especially precious to her. She is intelligent enough to make up a convincing twist to any problem others might find in her game, and charismatic enough that children her own age and younger will follow along, despite their misgivings.

Like any child, Nursery Rhyme is not always exactly well-behaved. She enjoys doing some things that adults grow tired of quickly, and she’s too stubborn to stop when asked, unless someone she cares for is doing the asking. The problem is that she is too playful. She treats life like it’s a game. Her inability to emotionally connect with anyone as deeply as Alice combined with her lack of care for life often causes her to walk the line of sociopathy and the simple carefree attitude that allows many children to hurt small animals without really meaning to. If anything bad happens, everyone can just play doctor, right...?

She is attached to Alice more than anyone else in the world. Though she gets along well with most people, everything and everyone is secondary to Alice. She is so bonded to the other girl that Nursery Rhyme is even willing to carry Alice’s name and face constantly, as though they were really born as twins. Her protectiveness of her friend is the most common way to see her show a more angry, negative side to her personality, but it’s rare. Anything that comes between them is grounds for putting you on her personal black list, which means that she might just destroy something you love in revenge.

More childish than most others her age, she often refers to herself in the third person, with “Alice” as her most common chosen moniker. This verbal tic is something she refuses to give up, even when it is mocked. Her stubbornness about it is matched only by her stubbornness about anything concerning Alice. If you call her by another name, she will still respond to it, but she will not use it to refer to herself.

Aside from Alice, though, Nursery Rhyme is friendly and out-going enough to make friends with many kinds people, even those who are significantly older than herself. She especially likes anyone who is willing to play along with her games and pranks. These are the sort of people she finds herself drawn to the most, and she will follow them around in the hopes that they will join her game or make one up of their own.

POWERS/ABILITIES: Nursery Rhyme’s ability is really based on perception and illusion. It comes in two forms: her ability to make herself look different (such as changing her face and height), and the ability to change the appearance of other, existing beings and objects.

Her ability to cast illusions on other objects is limited. She must be within a range of twenty feet, and can only change their appearance to something of a similar build. For example, she may be able to make a small dog look like a cat, but she could not make a Chihuahua look like a Pit Bull. While she has the potential to change another person’s appearance like she can her own, it is unstable and doesn’t last for more than a few minutes. By the time she reaches adulthood, this will most likely change, but for now, it’s not something she does often.

She’s rather powerful for her age, but with that power comes some lack of control. She isn’t always able to maintain a consistent look, which can lead to one eye changing color or the shape of her face changing in the middle of speaking. Her power over her appearance is the most stable when she is mimicking the face of someone she knows well.

Her powers are also linked to her emotional state. When she is calm and/or confident, her illusions are steady and more realistic, making them more difficult to differentiate from something physical. The more upset she becomes, the more likely her illusions are to change into something more childish or cartoony, or disperse altogether. As she is quite a young mutant, this isn’t an uncommon occurrence.

AU HISTORY: Nursery Rhyme was born in London, England, and at first glance appeared to be an ordinary child. Abandoned on the steps of a local church as a toddler for unknown reasons, Nursery Rhyme had no identity of her own. She had no memories of her name or family, and so she took on the alias of “Nursery Rhyme”, a person who could be a hero to lost children like everywhere, just like in the stories she loved dearly. She had no proper name left with her, and so the state officials in charge of her case allowed her to keep this as her legal name until her real one was uncovered. They had given up any attempts to call her something else when they always ended in horrible, screaming fits. As her birth parents were never found, she continued to use this name for years.

Her mutation appeared rather early. By age 7, she was able to change minor parts of her appearance to mimic others, and combined with her natural acting ability, she could pass for other children easily in front of adults. As she was an orphan to begin with and was often wandering around the city without the supervision of the orphanage’s staff, the people who did see her with different colored hair and eyes didn’t realize that she was a mutant who could change how she looked. As she first discovered her powers, she thought of herself as a magician, and sometimes called herself "Caster". It was around age 10, when she started to mimic others’ more seriously and convincingly, that she met Alice.

Alice, another mutant of the same age, had very few friends and her family was often away. The two of them were desperate for a playmate that would understand them, and carried by the coincidence that Nursery Rhyme looked very similar to Alice even without her powers, they got along wonderfully. They had the same taste in most everything, and their ways of speaking were similar. This led to Nursery Rhyme copying Alice’s appearance more often than not, as it felt natural to them that they were so alike. They were almost like twins, and when they were together, Nursery Rhyme began to call herself “Alice”, as well. She considered herself made for Alice, and that they were two sides of the same coin.

The pair of them met another group of mutants soon after, and they instantly felt a kinship to the leaders of the group, a pair of fraternal twins. It was here that Nursery Rhyme truly showed how she was different from Alice. Her idea of playing a game with them involved battling with their powers, and Alice went along with it, as usual, because Nursery Rhyme convinced her it was just pretend. Nursery Rhyme had not intended for anyone to get hurt, and mistakenly thought the others had the same control over their abilities as she did.

Unfortunately, Alice’s mutant powers, combined with another mutant’s, got out of control. She accidentally hurt herself quite badly, damaging her arms and legs to the point she could no longer leave her bed. Nursery Rhyme refused to leave Alice in order to learn to better control her own powers, but Alice convinced her to go on ahead so that Nursery Rhyme would never end up in the same situation.

With the promise that the Xavier Institute would take care of Alice while in recovery and that she would most likely be coming to the school as soon as she was physically able to, Nursery Rhyme agreed to attend.

SAMPLE
1ST PERSON SAMPLE:

[The video turns on, showing Nursery Rhyme laughing to herself. Apparently, whatever it is she’s giggling at, it’s hysterical, as it takes almost thirty seconds for her to calm down enough to speak.]

Oh... Alice just wanted to let everyone see something funny she found.

[It switches over to a video taken from a school computer webcam. One of the faculty, apparently doing paperwork, jumps out of their chair and lets out a little shriek as their pen suddenly turns into a gardner snake. The teacher throws it across the room, where it turns back into a pen and lays harmlessly on the floor.

The video changes back to Nursery Rhyme, still laughing.]

Heehee. Alice wants to play that game again! Or maybe we can play hide and seek. Does anyone want to play a game with Alice?

THIRD PERSON SAMPLE:

The school hallways seem so empty and dull to Nursery Rhyme. Though she has been at the school for a few days, she can’t shake the eerie feeling her quiet bedroom gives her. Her roommate doesn’t like to talk much at night, and without Alice, it’s so very, very lonely. Even all the games and schoolwork aren’t enough to make her forget when it gets really bad. It’s when she tries to turn to Alice and say something she would laugh at, only to remember she isn’t there, that Nursery Rhyme feels the worst. Why did she have left Alice behind, when she couldn’t even walk? She could still go back, if she wanted. They couldn’t keep her here if she planned it right. She was smart enough to break out, just like the good guys who go to jail when they didn’t do anything wrong.

The weekly video chats with Alice at the end of every week that the teachers promised her are the only reason she stays. As long as her friend is there, wanting her to try her best, how could Nursery Rhyme ever back down or give up?

That’s doesn’t even cover the new playmates she can make while she’s here. Yes, she’ll be sure to make Alice feel welcome as soon as she arrives, with lots of friends! After all, who wouldn’t like Alice? If there was such a person, Nursery Rhyme didn’t want to know them. After all, a person who doesn’t like children is just a bad guy, aren’t they?