✨ somnia app

[longwillows]

PLAYER INFO

Name: Cee
Preferred Contact: ceesawaseesaw or PM; Discord by request
Age: 31
Invite Link: here!

CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Kalmiya Longwillow
Canon: Original Character (Homebrew Dungeons & Dragons 5e setting)
Age: 23
If Under 16, why is this character a good thematic fit for Somnia?: N/A
Canon Point: Shortly before the arrival of the winter holidays in an extended period of downtime for her adventuring party
Wiki Link(s): Campaign synopsis, campaign history, full info (incomplete but the personality section and most relevant history-related context is filled out!)

SOMNIA-SPECIFIC QUESTIONS

1. Dreams are how Sleep chooses you. What might draw your character into Somnia— a wound, a wish, a weakness? Would they follow the dream, or run from it?

As someone very well-versed in the art of the supernatural deal and someone who fought tooth and nail for her own identity, Kalmiya is not one to easily fall into a situation that may rob her of herself. Her two highest priorities in life are freedom and love; with both always at the forefront of her mind, she has the will to turn down nearly anything that she believes could jeopardize those things. As long as she has any reason to suspect that someone or something is intentionally trying to trick her or override her will, Kalmiya will argue, bargain, deceive, fight, flee—but she won't simply acquiesce.

However, Kalmiya is also deeply curious and borderline hedonistic in her tendency to chase indulgence. While she is very cautious, she is not easily scared, and the threat of danger is not inherently enough to discourage her from something that could be a fun adventure. She is confident enough in her strengths to take risks if she thinks she might find something fun or new in the experience, and she follows her instincts, which tend to run in extremes of either paranoia or pleasure-chasing. She let rules and fear control her life for so long, and she refuses to allow those things to stop her from enjoying her freedom now that she has it.

She is most likely to follow a dream that offers itself in a value neutral way—simply existing, without an insistence upon being beheld or partaken of. A dream that offers vibrancy and many curiosities, but no obvious hostilities, especially if the dream provides her opportunities to do things she might otherwise never get to do. And most importantly, if she has good reason to believe that following the dream could lead her back to her loved ones—and back to herself—she will chase it regardless of the risk.

2. Somnia is a slow unraveling—of worlds, and of selves. How does your character respond to fear, transformation, and losing control? Do they fight, adapt, collapse?

Kalmiya lacked any real control over her self and life for her first twenty years of existence. The coping methods and self-preserving behaviors of those years are still within her, even though she has made extensive conscious effort to break the most harmful of habits. For better or worse, she is good at adapting to situations where her control is limited; Kalmiya is good at parley, playing parts, and biding her time for opportunities. She extends her own patience and survival through safe methods of expression and reflection, primarily daily meditations and, more recently, painting. When all that fails, she's also very good at compartmentalizing and repression, per her incredibly religious upbringing.

Of course, her patience only goes so far. Kalmiya is someone who feels things very intensely, and she is not eager to be reattached to a leash after escaping her collar. There is only so far she can go within the bindings of fear and loss of control before lashing out. This can take the form of pettiness, callous selfishness, recklessness, and even violence. Which she makes polite efforts to aim away from things and people that don't deserve it, but the longer she goes without relief for troubling feelings and some semblance of control over her own fate, the less discriminatory she is about her behavior.

Transformation would actually the least troubling aspect of the dream for Kalmiya. Change is the essence of life, and she has already undergone so much change. Her relationship with her physical form is a complicated one; though she has grown more accepting of her own body and has learned to love the pleasures it can bring her, there is still part of her that resents it for its appearance, as that is what initially prompted her hometown to believe she was the solution to all of their problems. While having agency of her own body is important to her, its physical presentation is less important than the self it contains. As she resents the form she was born in, she is likely to resent any new form forced upon her, but as long as she can find ways to make it her own, she will take transformations in stride. Particularly given the Vessel type I have chosen; shapeshifting is something Kalmiya has always wanted to be capable of, and having that degree of control over her presentation would be very pleasing to her even if she has mixed feelings about the origin of the ability.

3. Connection is the only constant. What kind of bonds does your character form— fast and burning, slow and wary, deep and desperate? How might that shape their time in this world?

As someone who grew up without any real love or connection, Kalmiya is someone who deeply craves connection of every kind, even though she is often at the same time fearful of the possibility. She is intentional, but not forceful, in the way that she forms bonds; when she wants to make a connection with someone, she will act to pursue it, but she never seeks to control the shape of the bond. She lets relationships develop naturally into whatever personality and circumstance dictate. Some people are meant to be close friends, or rivals, or lovers, or only acquaintances; Kalmiya is not someone who tries to force a square peg into a round hole when it comes to relationships. She likes to make her best effort at connection and see how it plays out.

Kalmiya usually forms bonds in steps, though the speed at which she takes the steps varies wildly. The first step is like; she's very social and easygoing, so she tends to feel fondness for people very quickly, often based on superficial things such as vibes or the entertainment someone has provided her. The second step is understanding. She likes to know who someone really is and why they are the way they are, particularly people she perceives as having similar struggles to her own. She gives a very patient approach to this step, as understanding often necessitates vulnerability, and she prefers to respect a refusal to divulge sensitive information (as that is what she would want in return.) When it comes to forging bonds, Kalmiya is the kind of person who sits quietly in the room with the skittish cat for as long as it takes for the cat to warm up to her.

The third step is usually love. What kind depends on the nature of the relationship (though she often struggles to delineate different kinds and is prone to muddling them with one another.) While she can fall into love with people quickly, this is often a more introspective stage for Kalmiya. With some experience of deep love under her belt now, she realizes that it is something that comes with responsibility to maintain, and that requires considering what place she wants it to have in her life and where she is willing to compromise to keep it. After so aggressively making herself her first priority after her escape from Sanctuary, it can be hard for Kalmiya to reckon with giving up total freedom to keep someone she loves in her life. None of this stops her from feeling that love, and usually falling deeply into it before she realizes what's happening, but how to express and act upon it is something she has to think about.

The final step in Kalmiya's bonds, which should come before love but doesn't, is trust. Until she met and grew close with her current adventuring party, there were many parts of herself that Kalmiya struggled to accept, much less show to someone else. She is very insistent on who she is, but she is less open about who she was, because there is still a large part of her that considers those two to be different people. Who she was represents the worst parts of her life and of her self, and Kalmiya fears that acknowledging those parts to people will impede their ability to see her for who she is now. Though she may care very deeply for someone, and trust often comes in smaller steps on specific matters, it takes a lot of concerted and reciprocated effort for Kalmiya to trust people with her whole self. She has grown closer to reconciling her present and future with her past through her bonds with her cohort, but she has not yet reached a place of true self-acceptance in that regard.

While she is likely to make friends easily in Sleep's world, Kalmiya is going to struggle with being alone again, both in a general sense and as she specifically misses her bonds from home. She is good at being alone at this point, but it isn't her preferred state of affairs—frankly, as someone with ever-present ties to the Feywild and the Celestial Plane, she is rarely ever truly alone in the spiritual sense. Being without even her patrons in the waking world is going to be very difficult for her; not only is it isolating, but they are the sources of the powers she knows how best to use, and being without those could put her on the back foot as far as trust goes. She may need to be more willing to ally herself with those she doesn't trust or even like, or could be more susceptible to chasing Tethers to fill the voids of power and loneliness within her.

4. What are two major forces in your character's personality that are often in conflict? (Ex: logic vs emotion, power vs guilt, obedience vs rage, etc.)

Acceptance vs paranoia. Kalmiya's upbringing encouraged hypervigilance in all aspects of her life to maintain her facade of divine perfection and protect herself from the dangers of being discovered as a fraud. She had to think about everything; how to talk, how to carry herself, how to counsel troubled townspeople, how to get through a drought, how to appease the politics of the clergy. How to read people to figure out what they want to hear, what they need to hear, and what they might be thinking of her at any given moment. Even after escaping this life, Kalmiya lived her first years of freedom in constant fear of being identified as an aasimar, and specifically the one that left the town of Sanctuary. She had to consciously think about who she wanted to be and how to express it after a life of being nothing and nobody beyond the Savior of Sanctuary.

Needless to say, her history has given Kalmiya a propensity for anxiety and overthinking, particularly in times of danger or stress. As she was growing up, she managed the worst of it through meditation and mindfulness, a practice that she continues diligently to this day. By organizing, acknowledging, and processing her anxious thoughts, she has learned to let them go without losing control of herself to them. Most of the time, anyway. It's meditation, not magic. A combination of this diligent emotional management and her ability to compartmentalize has allowed Kalmiya the perspective to face things as they are. Feelings, situations, people... While she has the sharpened intuition to know when something goes deeper, Kalmiya makes concerted efforts to accept things at face value until they are ready to reveal themselves to her.

This is what allows her to get along with so many different kinds of people and adapt to even the stickiest of situations. Part of feeling in control is knowing the things you can't control, and while Kalmiya's paranoia has certainly saved her life on many occasions, she's much happier when she can let go of her own racing thoughts and live fully in every present moment. She's well aware of her own inclinations towards overthinking and how it leads her back into the kind of misery that characterized her upbringing, so she does everything she can not to live in that anxiety, despite being in a profession that often encourages it. Sometimes staving it off means healthy practices like mindfulness, meditation, and creative expression. And sometimes it means chasing indulgence and distraction like her very life depends on it. Even with years of practice, it is a constant battle between Kalmiya's overactive instincts and her desire to experience things simply and straightforwardly—to do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, without worrying about the consequences.

VESSEL SELECTION
Which Vessel Type are you choosing: Token or Offering? Offering - Trickster
Why does this Vessel type feel appropriate for your character? After an upbringing dictated by rigid religion, rules, and expectations, Kalmiya thirsts for and thrives in spontaneity and chaos, particularly under the wing of her Fey patron, of a species well-known for their capriciousness and chaotic potential. To her, chaos and impulse are symbols of freedom, and there's also a very base part of her that delights in simply being contrary to the strict values of her hometown. Chaos is fun, mischief is fun, and Kalmiya Longwillow will not ever allow herself to be starved of fun again. Her warlock abilities are already focused very heavily on mischief and trickery, so incorporating the abilities of a Trickster (in the dream) and transitioning to them (in the waking world) will honestly be uncomfortably easy for her in some ways.

Additionally, her struggles with presentation and identity make a shapeshifter an excellent choice of form for her. It's an ability she's always dreamt of having, so finally getting it under such tenuous conditions would be both rewarding and frustrating for her in a struggle that will be fun to explore. She has spent a lot of time moderating her image in different contexts throughout her life—forced to as the Savior, careful to as an anonymous wanderer, and determined to as Kalmiya Longwillow. Presenting what she wants to present is a double-edged skill of hers that suits the Trickster Offering well.
Choose one OR list three subclass options within your chosen Vessel type that you think would suit them: N/A

Samples: 1, 2, 3