Welcome to Gaia! ::

Name: Kyndall Rosen

Nickname: Kyn, “Doll”

Age: 34

Birthday: December 17th

Sign: Sagittarius

Gemstone: Turquoise

Blood Type: O+

Fav. Food: Pasta!

Hated Food: Mayonnaise

School: Crystal Academy teacher of dramatics

Hobbies:

Dramatic Maven: Kyndall has a collection of books, plays, and manuscripts that shame most film libraries. She collects them where she finds them and has in her time written a few works of her own. If she's not in class or busy with some other life necessity she is generally reading. In fact, she owns no TV and doesn't often spend time on computers except to write. Most of her collection she's read so many times she's memorized them.

To Be or Not To Be...: She enjoys reading monologues and practices quite often in her own home when she's alone. This is a source of great embarrassment to her daughter, Harmony. Still, she's actually quite good. She studied in her younger days hoping to appear on Broadway or some major theatre bracket. Now she settles for running the school drama club.

Sing a little Song: Singing is how Kyndall communicates. She sings when she's happy or when she's thinking. She listens to music reflective of her mood and has taken lessons since she was young. She plays guitar and piano and sings along with the melody. When she plays old show tunes it means she's so angry she's about to explode. She will, on occasion, make the rounds on a particular karaoke night and usually knocks em' dead (as much as anyone can singing karaoke)

Ki-yah!: Kyndall has to stay in shape. Most of the time this comes in the form of martial arts lessons. There were so many reasons for her to begin to take the classes: they'd improve her balance and poise, they'd keep her in shape, and she'd learn a useful skill in the big bad city. It also allows her to meet new people which makes Kyndall a happy panda and gets her out of the house at least three nights a week.

Virtues:

Logic as Life...: Kyndall is much more logically minded than she is emotional but it's not quite the curse it sounds to be. Because of this logic she tends to stay calm in a crisis and is prepared to wait it out with you. She's good at playing at emotions, pretending to have the full range of them, but she's far better at ditching them in lieu of the less complicated logic. Logic doesn't lie.

Curious: Kyndall is actually quite curious. Ever since she was young she had to know what was around the next corner or why people behave the way that they do even to the point of outright asking them. Did I mention she's terminally curious? Oh, good. This part of her personality has served her well over the years since she's willing to put in the work to find whatever it is she's searching for and has also helped her meet people and make friends because she shares some interest in common with them. This is often counterpointed by her impulsiveness when she seeks to imitate or wants a little adventure.(see below).

Observant: If the mind is a muscle then Kyndall's is an Olympian. Especially her memory. She goes out of her way to take in what's going on around her and apply it to her life. She's likes puzzles and always goes out of her way to try and fit the pieces together to make a complete picture, even if she's just a small part of it.

Flaws:

Impatient: Ever since the age of three Kyndall has not had any patience. This did not make her very popular in the sandbox. Now she's better about controlling the bigger signs of her impatience but it still manifests routinely in small ways like drumming her fingers on a convenient surface (such as her hip) or sighing when she thinks something is taking too long. When coupled with her issues of impulse control the problem becomes more severe and may lead to sarcastic comments or even outbursts when she's in a particularly impatient mood. This, as you might imagine, gets her in quite a bit of trouble.

Impulsive: Coupled with the impatience is a distinct lack of impulse control. Often, if she gets something into her head she'll do it before thinking of the consequences. She believes that the first choice is often the truest and though her instincts don't always show her the right thing to do occasionally this impulse control problem puts her down the right path. Certainly her life is never dull. When wrong it mostly just causes her a lot of embarrassment but sometimes the consequences are more severe.

Shallow: The entire entertainment industry is based on looks. As an aspiring actress Kyndall is fully aware of that and holds herself and everyone she meets to that standard of aesthetics. She is of the mind set that if someone is ugly that they don't take pride in themselves and isn't worth her time. The problem is that she doesn't often look below the surface and has to have something beaten over her head before she can start to see past the physical. When manifested this quality can come out in the form of mean/sarcastic comments based on appearance or sly backhanded compliments. This does not work well with her impulsiveness at all. She'll say things at the WORST times occasionally.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION

Eyes: Large Violet eyes shaped pretty much like the eyes on my Gaia avatar.

Hair: Kyndall's hair is long (down to her mid back or waist), wavy to slightly curled, and a deep emerald green color with lighter green highlights. She usually wears it down or half up pinned in back with a silver clip. When it's like that it shows the hairline that makes up the top of her heart shaped face. Otherwise the grown out bangs to either side have the same effect. ((Think of Michiru's hair style in Setsuna's color with highlights.))
Reference 1 for length
Reference 2 for possible style
Reference for color of hair but a pretty good reference for outfit, too.

Of course I'm totally fine with artistic liberty. I'm sure she'll turn out beautiful!

Face: She has a very pretty, delicate face. It's heart shaped and is generally highlighted by her large eyes and full mouth. Reference to shape and hairline emphasis if pulled back.

Clothes: Kyndall wears skirts, blouses, and cardigans to work. Generally the cardigan is buttoned about 3 buttons up from the bottom to emphasize her waist with the blouse showing at the top. The skirts tend to be full and to her knees – no pencil skirts for her. She's actually rather in shape for being 34. She wears heels to work all the time, as well.
Reference Something like this except the color scheme is off (usually blues or tans...possibly even green or brown) and the bottom three buttons of the cardigan are buttoned.

Kyndall's Life Story:

Kyndall was born in a small town and grew up with her twin sister Syndall. The two of them were close. They had a normal childhood in a small house with a small back yard and two loving parents. Like most children in small towns they idolized the big city and wanted to be like the movie stars they saw on TV. Everything about them seemed glamorous and dramatic and both sisters decided early on in their lives that they would become famous actresses one day.

They'd study together, taking turns acting and singing in their attic on cool days. The parents indulged their daughters where they could offering them piano and music lessons from a kindly woman down the street. Being conservative they worried about their daughter's choices but didn't intervene.

As teenagers do both of the girls grew more rebellious as they got older sure that they knew more about life and their futures than their uptight conservative parents. One night after a long fight about their choices both girls decided they'd had enough of the small town life and packed their bags. They left in the middle of the night hitching a ride into the city and using the money they'd been saving to find somewhere to live.

That's when reality came crashing in. They went on audition after audition and no one wanted them for the million reasons directors don't want actresses. Crushed, the sisters felt defeated. Kyndall found solace in schooling which she took up again at a local high school. Syn continued to sink into a depression. One night Syn was working at a party and was taken advantage of by man who claimed to be in the business. When he laughed at her later, denouncing her naivety she went home and killed herself.

Kyndall found her, was completely torn and ended up making some bad choices. She wound up pregnant a few short months later. By then her father had died of a heart attack while working and Kyndall only had her heart broken mother for company. When her mother followed the girl was singularly alone for the first time in her life. This is when Kyndall learned to sink or swim. If it hadn't been for the child being the one tie she had to anything else in the world she probably would have sunk.

Life was hell for the girl for the next five years of her life. She finished high school by correspondence and worked two jobs in between to support herself. One of her jobs alone paid for the baby's things and the other paid for their life/living arrangements. She found a woman in her building willing to babysit for a reasonable price and if it weren't for this woman's pity she wouldn't have made it through. Instead of the normal break down of a person's life (8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, and 8 hours personal time) Kyndall had 16 hours of work and 4 hours of sleep and 4 hours baby/homework time. To say she was beyond exhausted by the time Harmony was old enough to go to kindergarten is an understatement.

Being this sleep deprived and busy during this time was a blessing and a curse. While she had no time for a social life or for anything else, really, she also didn't have any time to wallow in self pity for her lack of family. It also means she didn't have time to let go of them, either. She simply buried the hurt down into herself and now has gotten used to ignoring it. If that floodgate ever breaks open, though, there will be very big consequences.

Things got better as Harmony grew and started school. Since she didn't move through things quite as quickly Kyndall could now devote 8 hours to college while the girl was at school and spend a little more time sleeping. Only a little, of course, because she still had to study and do homework. Eventually Kyndall learned how to live without sleep and catch up only on days off (she specifically requested week days off from work for this purpose). When she graduated from college she applied as a drama teacher at the Academy. From this she could finally support herself fully and would have gone back to acting if she didn't feel like it was too late for her to do so. She stopped acting for herself for the most part but always drove Harmony to excel for herself.

Harmony feels equal parts of resentment against her mother and abandonment by her as well. Ms. Lowell, her babysitter, was more of a mother to her than her own ever was. Kyndall understands this but knows the choices she made were the best options she had at the time. She wishes her daughter would forgive her. The two often fight now over Harmony's rebellion against being an actress or not showing interests in things her mother has an interest in. Harmony feels like Kyndall is trying to push her to be a carbon copy. Kyndall feels that Harmony will end up in a life the same as hers was if she keeps rebelling and is hurt that he daughter doesn't want to be anything like her. She also has a secret desire to live vicariously through her daughter for all the things she never got to do.

She maintains no sort of personal life. If anyone makes it past her very detail oriented list of dating standards most balk at the idea of her being a mother. Being a mother also kept her from really being able to pursue acting. She settled for a job teaching drama to students.

I'll try and give a more complete crit later, but I gave this quest a quick read through and had a couple thoughts and questions:

1: Her name and appearance made me immediately think of 'Rozen Maiden', just curious. Was that a coincidence?

2: Over the five years after her mother died, I'd love to see some information on how she was supporting herself in order to pay for college and support her newborn. Daycare and sitting services are expensive, as are baby accouterments. (A Box of a hundred or so diapers costs about 25$ and you'd be surprised how fast you blow through them.) Baby clothing only costs around 5 dollars an item, but since, especially at newborn size, they blitz through that so fast you'd barely believe they'd ever fit them in the first-place, that adds up, and it doesn't help that formula is six dollars a bottle... and the alternative adds extra complications. That's not even counting stuff like a crib and a few toys, bottles, pacifiers. ((six bucks for two pacifiers at my local store. I kid you not.))

Was she still trying to act? What did she do about the kid? How did she pay for said help, since apparently at this point she'd lost all her relatives. Also in the first three months or so she could be looking at a lot of lost sleep, especially being a single mom, which would have also made things really challenging.

She seems to have done quite a impressive juggling act in those blurry five years, especially for an seventeen year old with no family. That's a major, major adjustment and with no one to help her, so it seems a bit of a shame to glaze over this major time of 'Sink or swim'.

Bump

Bump

This character's virtue set needs a bit of work: they're all talking about talents she has, when virtues need to be about admirable aspects of her personality! The idea is not to showcase skills she has, but describe ways she thinks and acts that make her a likable person.

I'd highly recommend you replace Hey! I recognize this... with something else. Not only is it not much of a personality trait, it's a super gamebreaking ability to have -- you have her as able to "read" people's thoughts and feelings with unrealistic accuracy, and this goes into powerplay / metagaming territory. This is bad because playing against a character who can always tell what's going on with others in this way is not only a form of spotlight-hogging, but also really unfun to for other players to write around. People are going to have characters with emotional problems they WANT to keep secret from others, and having the ability to remove that without consent isn't exactly classy. ^^;

If you want her to be concerned with others' emotions, then say she's Caring instead of giving her an unrealistic ability like that. However, that might not make much sense since you've said that she's a Shallow person who's more concerned with someone's looks than anything else.

Talented pretty much has the same problem. It's a random ability that doesn't tell us much about her motivations or behavior, and on top of that it's kind of overpowered. Having a knack for lying or acting is fine, but you seem to be implying that she's so good at it she can use it to trick anyone or get into anything. That's going a bit too far. D: Again, this needs to be replaced with a personality trait. If she likes to act, it would be more appropriate for the Hobbies section.

Photographic Memory would work better as Observant or Attentive. As it is it’s just a random talent that takes no effort and doesn't add anything to her personality. Giving her Observant / Attentive as a trait instead and saying that she's 1. interested in remembering things and 2. puts effort into remembering them would be a lot more constructive.


Her flaw set is fine except for Impatient. If she's good at controlling her impatience it isn't exactly a negative trait! This needs more on how it can negatively affect others in order to work.

One of the problems I had with giving your character an ability to cold-read like that is that a promise from the player to not use this ability does not erase the fact that she has this capacity IC -- it would be the same as approving a senshi attack or Negaverse weapon that's overpowered if a player promised to never use it to its full potential. It just doesn't work. The character still has an unfairly imbalanced ability IC, and so would yours if I approved them with that virtue. D: That said, I'm glad you changed it!

As for her Impatient trait, let me clarify what I meant by referring to the flaw rundown in the quester's guide:




You can think of Kyndall's profile as being full of things that other characters might say about her if they met her or got to know her. A largely internalized flaw doesn't work because other characters can't observe it -- therefore it's not going to negatively affect them, so they have no reason to dislike her for it. In order for it to really count -- and for this game, a trait 'counts' when it can apply to and change an RP situation for other characters involved -- she HAS to externally express the trait somehow.


In the same way, her Curious virtue needs a bit on how it's a positive trait -- e.g. is she willing to ask questions and do the research to feed her curiosity? Just adding something like that in would make it work just fine.