application / tlv

[indispensible]

User Name/Nick: Anne
User DW: trustme_imthe
AIM/IM: Neither; plurk @ trustmeimthe
E-mail: tavrosno[at]gmail[dot]com
Other Characters: Marquis de Carabas, Alex, Cassel, Mal, Abigail

Character Name: Vin Venture
Series: Mistborn
Age: 21
From When?: After her death alongside Ati, at the end of Hero of Ages

Inmate/Warden:

Warden. Vin has a lot to offer as a warden - while she's not a very straightforward or even very kind person, she is highly empathetic and very effective at Getting Shit Done. She also has personal experience in making the best of an extraordinarily shitty situation and doing the right thing even when you would really rather do the wrong thing. And finally, she is highly realistic: she sees people both as they are and as they could be, and so would be a good person to have in your corner, wardenly speaking.

Item: Her earring.

Abilities/Powers:

Vin is an Allomancer, which basically just means she ingests metal and "burns"/metabolizes it in order to use its power. More specifically, Vin is Mistborn rather than a Misting, which means she doesn't get just one power, she gets ALL THE POWERS. Various metals and their uses listed in the table below; the first eight and duralumin are the most frequently used, whereas some, like aluminum, are frankly kind of dumb. Vin might use them, but only in a really specific and rare circumstance. Atium and malatium are world-specific metals, so it's up to mods and precedent set by castmembers if she'd have access to them on the Barge.

METAL	ALLOMANTIC POWER
Iron	Pulls on surrounding metals
Steel	Pushes on surrounding metals
Tin	Enhances all senses
Pewter	Enhances physical strength, agility, balance, healing
Brass	Dampens others' emotions; colloquially, Soothing
Zinc	Enhances others' emotions; colloquially, Rioting
Copper	Hides Allomantic pulses, of the user or a group of Allomancers
Bronze	Detects Allomantic pulses (see note on Hemalurgy, below)
Aluminum	Burns all stored metals instantly, leaving the user's reserve empty
Duralumin	Enhances next metal(s) burned
Atium	Allows user to see briefly into another person's future
Malatium	Allows user to see briefly into another person's past
Gold	Allows user to see into their own past
Electrum	Allows user to see into their own future

An important tenet of Allomancy, particularly for Mistborn, is the necessity of using metals to best effect. Examples: steel/iron are very often used in conjunction with each other, along with accessories (such as coins/horseshoes/other metal crap) to travel very quickly, to travel long distances, to jump from high places without crashing to the ground and breaking all of your bones, etc. Tin/pewter are often used in conjunction to enhance fighting skills; a Mistborn can use the supersensory perception provided by tin to better guide their pewter-given strength and balance. Brass/zinc are often used together, as one might expect, to target different aspects of another's emotions.

Additionally, Vin has been affected by Hemalurgy, which is like Allomancy's nasty cousin, the one that's never invited to the fun reunions. Hemalurgy is the art of stealing power from one person via stabbing them to death with a big fuckoff piece of metal, then stabbing somebody else with it to redistribute the power. The earring Vin possesses is essentially a Hemalurgic spike (see History), which enhances her natural bronze-burning ability and gives her the ability to pierce Copperclouds. This ability is only functional when she's wearing the earring, however; how often she does that depends entirely on which way her paranoia swings while on board, so it's hard to say how much this power will actually be used during game play.

Here is some excruciatingly detailed information regarding Allomancy, specifically the myriad uses for the eight basic metals, and Hemalurgy.

For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that Vin took on the powers of Preservation, one of the Shards of Adonalsium, shortly before her death. This will, barring some really weird unforeseen event, have absolutely zero effect on her during her time on the Barge; this Shard has since been absorbed into Harmony as mentioned here. This was a fairly complicated event, but essentially, Vin was nearly omnipotent, -present, and -scient for a day or so, most notably with the ability to make drastic physiological changes to the world of Scadrial and its place within its solar system; she was also able to imbue others with the powers of the ubiquitous mists, the body of Preservation. ALL THAT SAID, she then killed herself and the holder of Ruin, so almost certainly moot.

On a less powers-based note, Vin has a number of vital skills that she relies on more or less constantly. She is a thief trained from birth and is familiar with the intricacies of a con, having lived with various thieving crews since the death of her mother and sister. As such, she's adept at stealthy, silent movement and decent (although by no means flawless) at misdirection and guiding others where she wants them to go. Most significantly, she has at times been a fairly ruthless bodyguard and at other times an extremely ruthless assassin, so she knows, in short, how to fight and kill people, metals or no metals, and how to do it well and efficiently.

Personality:

While a certain level of duality is by no means unique among the characters of Mistborn, Vin exemplifies the quality of balance perhaps most explicitly. During her personal journey, she veers from one extreme to another on various spectrums, including but not limited to trust versus mistrust, bluntness versus subtlety, instinct versus reason, and preservation versus destruction. As a preface to the main body of this personality section, it's vital to point out that Vin's ultimate strength is her ability to utilize both opposites on such spectrums, rather than to define herself as strictly one thing or another.

The most easily noticeable dichotomy in Vin is her extremes of trust versus mistrust - which might also be described as faith versus paranoia. For the vast majority of her life, Vin's first instinct was paranoia, and she's had to work very hard to get to a point where it's not her only instinct. The (relatively) good influence of Kelsier first allowed her to trust others at all, and then taught her a specific lesson: that it's better to trust and have trust broken than never to trust at all. This is a lesson that Vin carries with her and lives by, along with what she's learned in her relationship with and struggles alongside Elend. Namely: true love, romantic or platonic, requires faith, sometimes blind faith, that loved ones with do the right thing, even if it doesn't seem like the right thing at the time. Conversely, she has learned and regularly reminds herself that she has the right to demand faith from others, that others can and should trust her to choose the right path. Because of the things she's learned, Vin doesn't like to be alone; she's most comfortable when she has a small group of people she trusts deeply. It's with these people that she's most able to express her not insignificant reserves of self-confidence, poise, and sly humor, things that those outside that group might never get to see more than a glimpse of.

That said, Vin's harsh upbringing will never completely leave her. She was nearly killed by her mothers, physically and emotionally abused by her brother Reen and a long series of crewleaders, and lived under constant threat of violence and death until Kelsier found her. While a number of later positive experience have tempered her paranoia, negative experiences (in particular her manipulation by Zane and Ruin, which proved that even her thoughts might not be her own) have reinforced her opinion that paranoia might not be the worst instinct to have. Even if those negative experiences hadn't come up, the truth is that Vin's childhood wouldn't have left, and will never leave, her. Her first instinct will always be suspicion, and she'll always be watching her back. Also, while she has for the most part overcome the nagging self-doubt that she experienced for a large part of canon, her self-confidence isn't invulnerable, and those with the right approach can definitely, although not necessarily easily, make her doubt herself.

Next up: bluntness versus subtlety. Vin is described nigh-constantly as blunt, and she absolutely is. She's highly likely to attack first and ask questions later; she has on numerous occasions advocated taking out a political opponent rather than trying to negotiate with them. Further, she has very little time for social niceties, political maneuvering, or backhanded comments. If Vin thinks you're a damn idiot, she will tell you to your face that you're a damn idiot. She often refers to herself as the empire's knife, a concept she becomes increasingly comfortable with: she understands that part of her role is to use her skills and power as an unusually powerful Mistborn to eliminate instability and create as safe a world for her friends and her people as she can.

However, she also accepts her role as the emperor's wife. For a very long time she was uncertain as to how she could function as a weapon and an empress at the same time. By the end of canon, however, she has realized - as she's realized about many things - that she can be both at once. Just as she's perfectly comfortable leaping around in the dark mists eliminating threats in men's clothes, so she's comfortable in a ballgown applying slightly more subtle but equally dangerous pressure to courtly personalities. She can use her powers of persuasion, her knowledge of the way people work, to maintain a deft touch on those whose help she needs to secure the safety of her people, just as she can hold a knife to someone's throat, and she recognizes that both are legitimate methods, depending on context.

Related to both of the above spectrums, Vin is both a creature of instinct and (in some ways) a woman of reason. Admittedly her more prominent feature is a heavy dependence on instinct. This is directly related to her upbringing on the streets and her reliance on reading people for survival. She has an uncanny ability to tell whether somebody's completely full of it; she also relies on gut feeling and will often veer away from a situation just because something totally indefinable about it feels wrong. She's content for the most part to let her instinct dictate her actions. However, under pressure Vin is more than capable of reasoning out seemingly impossible problems. This ability is less innate than learned (from Kelsier, Elend, and Sazed in particular), but is nevertheless remarkable, if only for the dogged refusal Vin has for accepting anything other than a complete and logical solution to her problems.

Vin's relationship to violence is a confusing and touchy one. On the one hand, she abhors violence against the weak - in part because of her own life experiences, in part because of the moral(ish) code she learned from Kelsier. Many of her actions come from a desire to defend the people as a whole, who can't defend themselves from the supernatural forces that come upon the world. On the other hand, when it comes to threats to herself, Elend, and the empire, she has no problem with, and in fact often takes pleasure in, destroying the opposition. (See: slicing Straff Venture right in half with a koloss sword.) While her confused understanding of her own relationship to violence has been manipulated in the past, she dies with a fairly clear understanding of how and why she uses violence. In general, she uses it as a means by which to preserve the safety of her people - and she also uses violence herself so that other people won't have to. She's content being the knife, for the most part, because she knows that's not all she is, because she won't be swallowed up by it.

(None of the above is to say that Vin is above violence for its own sake, or for revenge. When manipulated by Zane, she slaughters three hundred enemy soldiers out of a misguided attempt to protect Elend - but really just to send a message. She's also capable of intensely vengeful and ruthless thoughts, as when she tells the usurper of Fadrex City that while she would ransack the city and leave it gutted, Elend wouldn't, because he's a better person than she is. The distinction is that her violent impulses are directed in service of quote-unquote the greater good by Hero of Ages, and are for the most part under control.)

The final dichotomy to consider with Vin is defeat versus determination. There are numerous points in canon where it looks like Vin's going to just lie down and give up. And honestly, there are a couple of times when she does. She's dramatically floating in the mists/lying in a pool of blood/staring at the ceiling listening to Evanescence/etc. The distinction here is that even though she does give up on an emotional level, she doesn't ever completely dismiss the possibility on a rational level that some solution to her current insurmountable problem might come along. The further in canon she gets, too, the less likely she is to mope and the more likely she is to harness her own intrinsic bullheadedness to get what she wants.

To put this in perspective: yes, Vin is stubborn, but she is stubborn up against things that would legitimately make you want to lie down and cry for the next forever. Show her a near-omnipotent god, and she will show you how she can beat it. It's a stubbornness that's born in part of a fierce desire to live, but also of a desire to protect, a drive to make things better for others than it has been for her, and a need to prove to herself that she can - that no matter how bad things get, faith in herself and in those she loves will see her through.

So it's probably no great surprise that Vin's greatest drive, beyond the physical safety of herself and her loved ones, is belonging. The feeling of belonging and of being if not understood then at least trusted provides Vin with security, or as close to it as she can ever truly come. She will continue to seek to fulfill this drive on the Barge, in new and different ways, but it will never, ever stop being vital to her survival.

Barge Reactions:

First order of business is standard Mistborn "oh cool FLOWERS!!" She's going to be kind of enamored of being in a place that's not heinous volcanic eruptions/ash/dead shit everywhere. It's nice!

Second order of business is going to be getting her bearings from a distance as much as possible. Vin is not a touchy-feely person and needs time to get to know people, so her instinct is going to be gathering information without giving very much in return. While she will eventually start warming up to people, the instinctively curious part of her will require that she investigate worlds other than her own and figure out how fucked up all the other ones are, on a scale of 1-Scadriel.

Because she has a pretty strong disinclination toward mental manipulation, she'll overall be very angry about breaches and floods. Given that she can't actually do anything about them, she'll eventually learn to focus her frustration on other things - obviously depending on what's happening Barge-wise at the time. Regardless, she'll be an extremely active warden - possibly more in actions than in words, but She Will Be Watching. And taking notes. Pretty much all the time.

Sidenote: behind all of this Vin is going to be figuring out how she feels about being alive again, or at least alive-ish. She felt a certain serenity in death, so even though she's working toward a deal, she will have mixed feelings about being out and about among the living again. She'll probably show little to none of this to other people, but it's going to be background noise for sure.

History: Thisaway

Sample Journal Entry:

1, 2, & 3

Sample RP:

It's impossible, Vin is finding, not to see this place through the eyes of others.

The first inescapable pang of longing, of loss, comes when she enters the library. It's enormous - she's never seen this many books close together, she thinks, not even in the throes of one of the crew's most intense and boring research sessions - and she thinks of Sazed, and it hurts. She can see him here, long thin fingers trailing intently down a page, can see his notes as if she's reading over his shoulders, including the way it occasionally trails off the page when he gets overexcited and forgets where the borders are. Ink splatters the page, and she smiles fondly at his excitement.

Or what she imagines of it, because of course he's not here.

The CES is what makes her think of TenSoon, strangely enough. It's the vastness of it, the cleanness, too. It's that she knows he could run free here, with no master and no particular place to be. That appeals to her. That, and the idea of racing him, and she spends several minutes trying to decide which one of them would win.

But of course TenSoon isn't here either. She knows that.

She thinks of everyone, more or less, circles around to people she's met briefly but who've touched her heart in their own way - thinks of everyone before she thinks of Elend. Because she knows, once she thinks of him, she won't be able to stop seeing everything through his eyes.

And she's right. The second she allows it, she feels his unabashed glee at the stories of books, his marvelling at the stars and their movements over the deck, his open-mouthed astonishment at not just knowing of a warm yellow sun and flowers underfoot, but feeling them.

What surprises her, although maybe it shouldn't really, is that thinking of this helps. It allows her to hold herself higher, face the daily strangeness of this place with a level of dignity that it's sometimes easy to forget she has. That this is a place that Elend would enjoy - would be happy she's found, in the bizarre and roundabout way that she has - lets her be, at the very least, content.

And most importantly, it allows her to smile, small but bright. That's enough to start with, she thinks; to keep her surviving.

Special Notes: n/a