penance } { application

[polydeukes]

OOC Info
Name: Emily
Age: 31
Contact: iluvroadrunner6/iluvroadrunner6#1178
Current Characters: n/a


IC Info

Name: Josie Saltzman
Canon: Legacies (TVDverse)
Age: 16
Appearance: Played by Kaylee Bryant
Canon Point: 210: This Is Why We Don't Entrust Plans to Muppet Babies
Background: A wiki link
CRAU: n/a

Personality:

Jose Saltzman is a twin. And not just any kind of twin – she’s a magical twin.

While this isn’t a personality trait, it has shaped much of the way that the world sees her – like one part of the whole, that is, the Saltzman twins. Initially, the two girls are set up as opposites, both visually (Lizzie is blond while Josie is a brunette) and in terms of personality. Where Lizzie is erratic, confident, and occasionally callous, Josie is kind, compassionate, and steady, providing a grounding force for her twin as she rides the highs and lows of her manic and depressive flows.

In some ways, this can make Josie seem like a pushover, always setting aside her happiness to soothe Lizzie’s ego, but in others, it allows them to play to each other’s strengths. As Lizzie astutely points out, Josie spends a lot of her time comfortably in this space and letting Lizzie have most of the limelight. However, as Josie grows, she starts to want a little more of her spotlight and her recognition and asserting that with her sister starts to create wrinkles in their relationship. Lizzie is a bit of a bulldozer, however, and Josie doesn’t always know how to put her best foot forward smoothly – that is to say, as strong as they are in their sisterhood, this doesn’t mean that their relationship isn’t without wrinkles.

Asserting herself with other people isn’t as much of a problem. Josie has never been afraid to stand up for herself, her family, or what she thinks is right, and this is shown multiple times throughout the first season. Things come to a head when she and her sister nearly die at the hands of a giant spider and are only saved because a fellow witch knows more offensive magic than they do. Josie puts her foot down with her father and makes her case for offensive magic being added to their curriculum. When she’s elected to the Honor Council as a representative for the witches and forces her to choose whether or not a student should stay when he believed to be the source drawing trouble to their school, she votes against it, wanting to protect her family first. As the season progresses, she starts to assert herself more with her sister, and that causes some of the more significant wrinkles mentioned above, but eventually, she and Lizzie work themselves out to rebalance their sisterly bond to something still hopelessly codependent, but a little more evenly spread.

Coming back around to the “magical” part of “magical twin,” Josie is a witch, and a member of a now-dead bloodline of witches called the Gemini Coven. Her family life – and the identity that comes in that – is a little complicated. The Gemini Twins, intended to be the leader of the said coven, have a long and complicated history involving a curse that Josie and Lizzie are just beginning to understand the full weight of, which was part of the reason for their extended rift. At 22, the Gemini twins go through what’s called a merging ceremony, where one twin will absorb the other. While their parents are both working to find ways to prevent this from happening, it’s a lot to place on the two girls who have a minimal connection to the coven itself, as the rest of the coven is dead. Their mother, who was also a Gemini twin, was never really a part of their lives, as she died before they were born.

Josie often longed for a connection with her birth mother, because as much as she loves Caroline, the woman who raised her, Lizzie was much more a child of Caroline Forbes, whereas Josie took after the woman she never got a chance to meet. When she finally got the opportunity to meet her, it was ruined, naturally, because that’s what this universe does to good things. Still, she also got the chance to finally connect with the parent who had been absent in her life and get the validation she’d been seeking. That was one of the first steps forward in asserting her own identity separate from her twin—wanting to be heard for herself rather than as part of the pair.

Another aspect of her magic, however, is that she’s a siphon. This means that she doesn’t generate her magic, but instead, she always needs to channel it from other things. While she’s in school, the wards often provide enough magic for her to do simple spells, but she can also draw power from magical creatures as all magical creatures in TVD land were created by witches. This need when it comes to her magic has made her resourceful, often needing to think outside the box.

As Josie’s come into her own, both as a witch and as a person in Season 2, she finds herself being seduced to the dark side a bit. The new headmaster of the school started introducing her to more and more black magic, to the point where she had to channel the side effects into a separate vessel. The reasons for using the black magic vary, from selfish reasons to well-intentioned ones, but that doesn’t change the physical detriments she suffers as a result.

Josie’s real struggle with darkness, and more specifically the seduction of dark magic, is rooted in the dichotomy of being “good” vs. being “bad.” She doesn’t know how to balance her more assertive qualities and the power that comes with being a witch of her caliber and being “good” person. She’s like a pendulum, where too far to one side and she’s passive and codependent, while too far to the other she’s murderous and aggressive. She’s trying hard to find the middle, but at the point where she’s coming in to Penance, she’s at the tipping point to send her towards her darker impulses. Which is why she can hopefully arrive with the Mora Miserium, because where better to deal with this tipping point than Hell?

Weaknesses/Temptations:

Doing bad things for supposedly good reasons

Wanting to be powerful and in control

Putting other people’s needs before her own and letting that bubble into resentment

Trusting people she probably shouldn’t trust

Leaning in too hard to what she thinks she should do, to the point of self-sabotage

Prone to petty jealousy

Codependent to a fault

Always needs to be taking care of other people

Will do absolutely anything to protect her family, good or bad

Sins:

Broke Landon out of werewolf holding

Casually set ex’s hair on fire

Did forbidden dark magic spell with Hope to track Landon

Forcing her team to lose the game

Doing more secret magic behind her father’s back

Killing endangered supernatural creatures (x4)

Magic-whammied Jed to save Raf

Stole a kiss from the boy Lizzie liked

Bribing voters

Released zombie mom and got herself buried alive

Burying years of resentment from playing second fiddle to Lizzie

Being a terrible sister

Arson (x a bunch)

Lied about setting Hope’s room on fire, blaming it on Hope

Neglecting her sister when she’s having a breakdown

Stealing the ascendant from her father’s office

Accidentally stealing Hope’s boyfriend

Gives another witch a nosebleed out of jealousy

Giving herself an allergic reaction to accommodate Landon on their first date

Broke Ethan’s arm with dark magic

Lying to her father (x a bunch, she’s a teenager)

Invading people’s privacy with Josie’s journal

Trying to deceive a very powerful witch

Assaulting Freya with a memory spell and causing bodily harm

Then assaulted all of Mystic Falls with it

Having a big manipulative streak

Got manipulated into doing major black magic and creating a dark object

Enabling her sister’s bullying

Running away from her problems

Powers/Abilities:

Josie is a witch which means that she can cast spells! Josie is mostly trained in Traditional Magic or Earth Magic, though she has done black magic on occasion. Witches cannot be compelled, but they are the most fragile of the TVD supernatural trifecta (witches, werewolves, and vampires).

Unlike most witches, however, Josie is what’s called a siphon. This means she can’t generate her magic the way most witches can. Instead, she needs to draw it from other things or people around her. Usually, this takes the form of other spells, other witches, or the occasional werewolf or vampire. Since werewolves and vampires were created with a curse, they generate magical energy per TVD rules.

Josie is also a Gemini twin. A long time ago, her family line was cursed so that to pick the next leader of the coven, the two Gemini twins would have to merge on their twenty-second birthday, and one twin would absorb the other. This isn’t necessarily a power per se but it does mean that Josie and Lizzie do feel each other’s pain, can suffer ill effects when the other does black magic and are generally more in-tune with each other than your average twin.

They also can sense when things are wrong with the other and they’re in trouble.

Items:

A Mora Miserium, containing her misused black magic for … later date shenanigans. (If permissible, if not that’s totally cool too!)

Hope’s spelled pendant that makes quiet things heard

Penelope’s burn book

SAMPLES

Network: From Asgard
Log: TDM