App For Voidtreckers

[thepriceforalife]

Player Information

Name: Stareyes
Age: 38
Contact details: [Bad username or site: beccastareyes @ :plurk.com"]
Other characters: Zelgadis Greywords (Slayers)

Character Information

Name: Thomas Price
Canon: InCryptid
Canon Point: Slightly-post "That Ain't Witchcraft"
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU
Age: 87 He looks to be in his 30s.

World Information: https://incryptid.fandom.com/wiki/InCryptid_Wiki

Personal History: https://incryptid.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Price


The wiki leaves off with Thomas having made a dubious bargain with the Crossroads and noting that he eventually did marry Alice and have two kids before the Crossroads collected the final part of its payment. The Crossroads called in its mark while Alice was pregnant with Child Number 2 because it knew Mary wouldn't let Alice try to follow Thomas.

Thomas found himself in a hostile world that the Crossroads and beings like it had been using as a ‘killing jar’ — it was easy to enter but hard to leave. The oversoul of that universe and the anima mundus of the world had died, making survival barely feasible, leading to a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Thomas decided that not only was he going to survive long enough to get home, but that he was not going to sacrifice others for his own survival. Hence his rise to power from the outside was as a sorcerer-king suited to the sort of patriarchal bullshit that comes from recruiting the starting population from ‘people who make bargains with creepy cosmic forces’, while inside Thomas continued his studies into magic, drawing off the pneuma from new arrivals (sort of a residue from inter-universal travel) for both defense and to build a community with adequate food, water, and air, and to at least block accidentally dimensional travel into the killing jar, even if he couldn’t do anything against the Crossroads. He also used some of the power to slow his own aging, hoping that the rate of time between universes favored him and much less time passed on Earth.

While people of many species and universes entered the world, Thomas was the last person from Earth for some time. Only about four years ago, a human teenager named Sally Henderson fell through after a bargain with the crossroads for her friend James’s freedom from a deal his ancestors made. From Sally, Thomas was able to confirm that time had been passing normally on Earth, and most likely Alice was an old woman and his children were well into middle age. Also that the Crossroads probably had deliberately kept out people from Earth to let Thomas get his hopes up, then dash them. Recently, the new arrivals have entirely stopped, and Thomas is well aware that he has a new countdown to worry about — not his personal life, but the resources of the world they are on.

Personality:
Thomas Price’s defining trait is loyalty. As far as he’s concerned, he has two obligations at the moment: get home to his family (even if he suspects his wife is elderly, if not dead, his kids might be alive) and get everyone else trapped in this bottle universe back somewhere that isn’t a dying planet. This especially includes the hundreds of people who have accepted him as a leader. Even before Thomas made a dubious bargain, loyalty was a defining trait. When the Healys gave him a cause to be worthy of his loyalty, it took him a bit more than a year to jump in. While Thomas may have accepted his position as wizard-king on a dying world simply to carve out enough safety to start figuring out magic to get home, he accepted that the power came with the responsibility of actually leading these people.

Needless to say, Thomas also is very group-oriented. He was raised in a hidden paramilitary organization where members generally didn’t grow old. He noted that even living in a four-person dorm room seemed lonely after living in dormitories that were dozens of kids, and he adopted a family of wild animals when he was left alone in a murder house on spy duty partially just to have company. Thomas is one of the few people who will be entirely fine with the train accommodations. The group orientation also means Thomas has a few issues with guilt. He describes saving Alice’s life as the most selfish thing he did (despite it being him willing to trade his life for hers, and only getting it bargained down to his freedom because of his friend Mary and the fact that even the Crossroads couldn’t fully heal Alice), because it was entirely about what he, Thomas, wanted. Like, while people did go to the Crossroads for good reasons, we know of cases such as ‘guy asks for immortality, he gets a car that keeps him young as long as he drives and feeds it souls’, and that is the sort of person Thomas Price compares himself to, because his wife only got a decade with him rather than dying before she was even old enough for Thomas to acknowledge his feelings for her. Hence vowing to save everyone on the world, even the ones who want to kill and eat his entire settlement, because this will in some way prove that he’s not selfish when no one is saying that.

Needless to say, Thomas is also pretty family-oriented. Even if his wife is probably dead (spoiler: she’s not, and she’s still looking for him after fifty years), his kids might not be and that’s enough motivation to keep him still wanting to get back to Earth. He’s also sort of adopted Sally as a surrogate daughter, even if he doesn’t look old enough to have one.

Thomas is also blunt, and straightforward. His reaction to ‘I am ordered to go to Nowhere, America and spy on a family of traitors’ was to immediately go introduce himself as the friendly neighborhood Covenant spy. Part of that was the pragmatic ‘this area is rural enough that people are already asking me if I’m related to the Healys because we are literally the only British people anyone here has met, so better to establish myself to them first before the neighbors talk to them’, but the other part was basically lacking the inclination to lie. When his arranged fiancee shows up, he is honestly at a loss for how to make her go away until Mary takes the initiative and goes with ‘you can’t marry him, because I already did’ and Thomas just kind of is like ‘okay, I guess that works’. He’s a lot more comfortable with ‘you don’t want to bear my kids because I’m a sorcerer’, even if that is a lot more dangerous for him. Thomas is capable of lying, as he hid his magical talent (though his teachers did worry he was an arsonist), and his persona as Autarch was as a scary and ruthless undying wizard. (Which was mostly to have the other asshole warlords not see him as weak.)

Finally, Thomas is curious and also has a scholar’s desire to make sense. His take on the Covenant of Saint George is that they started as people responding to the ‘hi, humans would like to not be killed by beasts or hostile neighbors’ with a reasonable level of force, but morphed into a dogmatic organization out to wipe out anything (or anyone) they viewed as unnatural. He mentions one of his problems as a boy was asking questions to try to get the logic why some things were unnatural and some weren’t. Even without the sorcery (which was a secret that branded him as unnatural), the outrage when he was asked to censor his work and discovering that important safety warnings were classified was offensive to him. Not only was it against the truth, and risked actual lives in the name of ideological purity, but it underlined that the Covenant came down to an emotional reaction against the monsters under the bed. He kept his own notes in a booby-trapped chest because loss of knowledge was considered a sin. It might not have been enough to make Thomas leave, but it was enough that his superiors didn’t need to look for other reasons when he did start expressing some questionable ideas.

Key themes: In the context of the story, Thomas is Penelope to Alice Price-Healy’s Odysseus, as he’s introduced as ‘the reason Grandma Alice only stops by for visits’. Thomas’s other themes are chosen loyalty (Enid Healy comments that the Price family were always known to stand by their word, and Thomas’s own commitment to the community he built) and living with a doom over your head (the crossroads not only restricted his movements as the cost of saving Alice’s life, but told him that if he ever was content despite that, they’d take him to a place where Alice couldn’t follow; after the crossroads strand him in a dying world, Thomas is aware that there’s nothing he can do to stop the world continuing to decay, but he can prolong survival and a degree of comfort for the people around him).

Main Motivation: After Sally arrived, Thomas assumes that he’d go back to Earth with his wife either elderly or dead, and his children middle-aged. As a result, while his priority is to break out of the bottle world, his concern is more to save all the people trapped here. Even the assholes trying to kill him, if he can.

Skills: Thomas Price grew up in a hidden order of genocidal assholes monster-hunters. While he was put into the research path (the ‘pen and the page’ as opposed to the ‘sword and the secret’), he did have some field training, especially as standard Covenant policy was that researchers questioning the party line got field duty to show them why the Covenant existed.

Thomas is a scholar, with emphasis on what we’d call field biology and ecology, though trained for the opposite aim that most ecologists are — the Covenant wanted him to document creatures so the ‘unnatural’ ones could be purged. He’s also quite knowledgeable about the arcane arts, but largely self taught though he was able to get some of the fundamentals on the sky from the Covenant’s libraries.

Because of his fieldwork, Thomas is combat-trained and knows first aid and other survival skills. Alice notes that he pulls his shots slightly, though he is comfortable with guns. He also is good with knives, and has the metallurgy skills to maintain and repair weapons. He was the one who kept Alice’s guns (inherited from her mother) in working order.

Thomas is also a sorcerer. His native element is fire and it is one thing he can call without much effort or thought. This includes things like a detector-flame spell to spot poisonous gases or airborne pathogens, the ability to generate at least small sparks (enough to restart a heart), and the occasional ability to rapidly increase the temperature of a person to lethal effects. While he can summon fire, he doesn't usually toss around fireballs.

Other magic either involves some degree of ritual and effort, or the tattoos that let him invoke a spell without the ritual. For instance, his anti-aging spell ran off of magic but could run in the background. He also was able to recognize other magical spells stored in tattoos, so may be able to use them himself.

Things he’s been shown to do in canon include:

1. Move substances around based on principles of sympathetic magic. For instance, shoveling his driveway by using the fact that the snow on the driveway and to the side of the driveway came from the same cloud, so could be called to one place. Alice also noted he could magic away blood before it landed on books, presumably by the same principle — the blood knows whose body it belongs in.

2. Alter substances to appear as other substances, possibly with illusion effects. Thomas was able to temporarily make it appear that Enid Healy's body was mauled in a hunting accident when her remains were skeletonized by snake venom via a LOT of deer meat and magic. He also mentions reshaping the stone ruins he set up as his household by blunt force and a lot of magic.

3. Create long-standing effects. Thomas maintained an air shield and better access to water and fertile soil, as well as a translation effect. He also created wards to both keep strangers out of certain areas and around the world itself to discourage visitors.

4. Draw power from other sources. All of the environmental effects ran on the pneuma he harvested from visitors, which he noted was a lot because the Crossroads was a blunt instrument when it came to dimensional travel. He could also take down his own protections to get some of the power back.

It is explicitly mentioned that Thomas can't heal with magic. It's possible he could learn, but it would require either a teacher or experimenting that he's not willing to do. It's also possible he could duplicate spells from other traditions of magic, though they would be basics -- even in his own world, people like route witches and umbramancers are better at things than a sorcerer.

Magic is very calorie-intensive. Moving snow around was relatively easy, but at one point Thomas had to move human remains and that required him to eat several sticks of butter because there wasn’t a bit of the remains to serve as a focus to call things back together. Making a deer carcass appear like a human body for long enough to fool a coroner meant he had to basically down sugar during the process, eat a large meal after, and he still felt like he was dead tired. Tattoos are easier because he can store the energy for the spell later. Being on the dying world was both helpful and harmful — Thomas’s internal batteries charged slowly from the lack of life energy and general ‘we do what we can’ for food, but regular new arrivals could agree to surrender the residue of energy caught by travel through dimensions. At this point, Thomas on a healthy world is scary.

Item: A wallet photo of himself, Alice and his son, Kevin. It was taken shortly before Thomas was yoinked from Earth.

Sample: TDM: https://voidtreckerooc.dreamwidth.org/84490.html?thread=11386122#cmt11386122
Dear Player: https://dear-player.dreamwidth.org/5110825.html

Notes: (For Voidtrecker purposes, I’m going to say being on the train limits what Thomas can do to roughly what he could manage pre-Crossroads. On a world, he is more subject to whatever rules mess with magic, but is more powerful when in a healthy environment. Any ability to draw power from crossing dimensions or the void itself would require mod permission and research or experimentation.)