PIXIE LED — application.

[sakhr]

🦋 OOC Information

Name: Bobby
Contact: crowders / boppins on discord
Age: 21+
Other Characters: n/a
Invitation: Here
Permissions: Here

🦋 IC Information

Character Name: Bartimaeus of Uruk (a.k.a. Rekhyt of Alexandria, Necho of Jerusalem, Sakhr al-Jinni of Al-Arish, N'gorso the Mighty, Wakonda of the Algonquin, etc. etc.)
Age: Technically speaking, he's ageless, but he was first summoned in 3010 BC, which puts him at just over 5,000 in human years.
Canon: The Bartimaeus Sequence
Canon Point: Post-Ptolemy's Gate
Character History: A quick summary to add some context to the books as a whole and Bartimaeus's place in them:

Bartimaeus' world is an alternate Earth history where magic is real, but only in the hands of spirits from the Other Place, a formless, timeless realm where he and his fellow spirits comingle without borders. Magicians – humans who have been trained in the art of summoning and constraining 'demons' – bring spirits to our world and constrain them with powerful words of bondage, forcing the spirits to bend to their will. Spirits of all kinds have been enslaved by magicians in service of various empires over the years, from the old empires of Egypt to the modern British Empire, which is still a functioning entity in Bartimaeus' 21st century. In this world, names are highly important, and knowing someone's true name gives people immense power, so most magicians are given birthnames and then told to forget them, until they're granted a new magician name once they're old enough. Most societies are split between magicians (who hold positions of leadership and power, and are essentially upper classes) and 'commoners' (working classes who make up the majority of the population and are subjugated by the magicians, who use spirits' magic to keep them under control), whose only real difference is education.

Bartimaeus was first summoned from the Other Place in 3010 BC, in Ur, Sumer, and ever since then he's been summoned regularly to assist in things like building walls, stealing artefacts, defending cities and fighting wars, with the occasional 'non-threatening consultation followed by an immediate dismissal' thrown in every now and then. He has a long-term animosity with another djinni who is quite a bit more powerful than him, by the name of Faquarl; they're approximately the same age, and are often summoned at the same time by opposing magicians, pitting them against each other – at the same time, though, many spirits are ones he's friends with, and there's nothing they can do but fight each other if their masters are enemies.

Bartimaeus is irascible, sarcastic and cynical. Over his many thousands of years of enslavement, he's seen the worst of humanity come to the fore over and over again as he's fought their battles and defended their magicians. He uses humour as a front to cover for his bitterness and anger, but his relationship with humans is a little less antagonistic in comparison to many other djinn, as he's been defined by his erstwhile fondness for a very tiny number of his masters over the years.

Aaaand a wiki link for the plot summaries here!
Canon Abilities:

• Species: Bartimaeus has a number of abilities thanks to the fact that he's a powerful djinni of the fourth level. His true form is not a body at all but rather something called 'essence', which is sort of like multicoloured liquid smoke floating around in the air. He constrains himself to various shaped forms while on Earth, though, and his true essence is very rarely seen. As a result of all this, he possesses superhuman strength, agility and endurance, as well as a lot of magical ability.
• The Seven Planes: The Seven Planes are seven separate but overlapping planes, and each one shows a different level of magical activity. The more powerful a spirit is, the more planes they can typically view. Magic can be seen as an 'aura' on secondary planes, even when it's invisible on the first plane. (I have an opt-in for players to decide if they want Bartimaeus to be able to use this ability to sense/discern things about teir characters, otherwise by default I assume he can't see anything.)
• Magic: Bartimaeus is a djinni, a subclass of 'spirits' who inhabit The Other Place. His magic is fire and air based, usually things like funnels of air or blasts of fire. The spells themselves have various names, but essentially their destructive ability can be boiled down to fire or air. He can also produce olfactory spells, releasing sweet smells or unpleasant stenches into the air around him as he will. I have a list of all his majorly referenced spells here.
  
• Shapeshifting: Technically speaking he can visually become anything he wants, including inanimate objects, but his favoured forms are birds or other flying animals as well as animals commonly seen in ancient Egypt, and he's also not above appearing as mythological creatures such as a minotaur. His 'standard' form when existing around other humans is a young Egyptian boy, painstakingly modelled on Ptolemy, but he also occasionally appears in the guise of Kitty, rarely as Nathaniel, or otherwise generally very attractive people, sometimes with unusual aspects like wings or small horns. He also regularly becomes inanimate objects such as a wisp of smoke or a whirling sandstorm, and has discussed the capability of turning into a simple wooden footstool. If he wants to shapeshift into another real person, he needs to know their true name to 'get a handle on them', as it were – but he tends not to do this for most people, as for him appearing as another real person is an act of love and devotion on his part. Technically speaking, if he was forced to be reduced to his base form, it would be his essence, so if for any reason that happens in game, that is what he would become, and not his standard form of Ptolemy. His essence is only fully protected in the Other Place, so he would be very weak in this state.
• Endurance: He technically doesn't need to eat or sleep, and is instead rejuvenated while not in the Other Place by consuming essence (e.g. people, spirits, etc.).
• Weaknesses: As a djinni, he's weak to iron and silver and he doesn't particularly like earth (dirt, mud, etc.) either. Any of these substances would sap his energy if he was overexposed, while long or serious exposure to silver (see: being stabbed with a silver blade or surrounded by any kind of silver container) would kill him.

Inventory: Nothing.

🦋 Personality

1. Has your character always believed in magic? Do they have something influencing their perspective on the supernatural/metaphysical/spiritual from their past? How do they feel about magic?

Bartimaeus is a magical spirit, so belief in magic has never been the issue. What is the issue is how it is used, and how it can be turned against him. The life of a djinni is strange: he has friends among his fellow spirits, but they frequently find themselves at odds with each other, and in order to preserve his own life he must often turn his magic on these friends. A hundred years later, they may be on the same side again. Magic is intrinsic to his being: he has no solid form, because underneath he's a roiling mass of essence, but magic allows him to replicate that in some small way by being able to change, flitting from one shape to the next even if he returns to his favourites. He enjoys being good, being a djinni of a certain renown; he is proud of what he has achieved, and frequently brags about his incredible feats on Earth as well as the impressive humans he's spoken to or served in the past. He frequently brags (and possibly lies) about his history, his capacity, and his talents. Some of it is justified bragging, but other stuff is just lying, and he's also an enormous hypocrite, repeatedly disparaging other spirits for bragging in the same way. Magic is his biggest strength and he'd really be nothing without it.

The cruelty inherent in the summoning and binding process, the fact that he has no choice – that's the issue at the root of it all. At home in the Other Place, no matter how comforting and rejuvenating it may be, he has no renown or individuality, because he is simply part of the whole; really, magic is only something he has and something he's good at when he's on Earth. Magic gives him his personality, his strengths and weaknesses, his ability to brag endlessly about himself and his feats. It's complicated.


2. If there's one person your character would follow to another realm, who would it be and why? If there's no one, state that and explain why.

There are, in fact, three. The first is Ptolemy, who is going to take up a lot of this section so I'll leave him for another question. The other two are Kitty and Nathaniel. Kitty's presence in the answer to this is self-explanatory: she did the same for him, and put her youth, health, and life on the line in the process. Bartimaeus now knows, without reservation, that she would do anything for him, and so he'd do anything for her. The second is Nathaniel, but that's a bit more complicated. Nathaniel's sacrifice at the end mirrors Ptolemy's decision to dismiss Bartimaeus and thus save him rather than allow them to die side by side; it was also no small feat for Nathaniel to willingly share his body with Bartimaeus, knowing that Bartimaeus could easily subsume him and take over his body permanently. But that was more about Nathaniel knowing how important it was for Bartimaeus to be able to return home, which he wouldn't be able to do if he took Nathaniel's body.

With Nathaniel, nothing is ever straightforward. He did something only one other magician has ever done for Bartimaeus – save him by dismissing him at the expense of his own life – but there's so much bad blood between them that the boy's good is made murky by the bad. But if Nathaniel came to him now, after everything, and asked Bartimaeus to follow him somewhere, he'd do it. It would be complicated, and messy, but Nathaniel is important to Bartimaeus and that's always going to be the case. Just the fact that he thinks of him as his true name and not as John Mandrake, his chosen magician moniker which has always symbolised his capacity for cruelty, malice, and selfishness, proves that there's a red thread between them that hasn't been broken.


3. If your character could ask for one wish, and it's going to be magically granted without any consequence, what will it be and why?

He'd like to speak to Ptolemy again. Even after two thousand years, Bartimaeus still misses him. He loves him deeply, after all this time – the proof of that is his faithful recreation of Ptolemy's appearance, which is still his favoured form even now. Ptolemy was the first human to try to bridge the gap, to make a gesture of pure goodwill that is still, even after Kitty and Nathaniel's respective sacrifices, the greatest and most potent thing anyone (human or spirit) has ever done for him. But more than that, Bartimaeus liked Ptolemy. He liked talking to him, answering his questions, watching him learn and grow and sate his thirst for knowledge. He doesn't have anything particular to say to Ptolemy, except perhaps a thank you for dismissing him rather than letting him die alongside him, but really there are no unsaid words between them, because both knew what they meant to each other. But so much has happened in his life that he'd like to share with Ptolemy. It would mean a lot just to see him again, as a real person in front of him and not his own reflection.


4. What is your character's most outstanding personality trait, and why?

5,000 years of enslavement at the hands of magicians have made Bartimaeus irascible, sarcastic, and dry-humoured, as well as deeply cynical of change – when you have access to all that history, it's hard not to spot patterns. He's seen empires rise and fall in the blink of an eye, and though this experience has made him alert to the signs of weakness in any given ruling power, he also knows that empires only fall because they're pushed, and the empire that did the pushing simply steps over a corpse to start a new cycle of oppression and war. Bartimaeus has seen millennia pass, and the deaths of both humans and fellow spirits, and he's been responsible for a lot of those deaths himself – but no matter who he's fighting for, he is still summoned again and again, bound to do the bidding of his master, and forced to put his life on the line. Forgive him if he doesn't endanger himself any more than usual trying to alter the status quo. Things happen, times change. His solution is just to do what he's bidden until he can return to the Other Place.

That being said, though, Bartimaeus is in many ways capable of more hope than most other spirits when it comes to humans. Even before his life-altering relationship with Ptolemy, he had something of a soft spot for a human who could hold their own with a strong personality, even defending one from Faquarl who insisted on trying to eat her. At the same time, Ptolemy is partially why he doesn't trust humans so much: Ptolemy's unfathomable sacrifice and his untimely death were never once recreated until Kitty tried it thousands of years later, which just shows you how much spine the average human has. Still, he has hope, and he's capable of trusting those who demonstrate they trust him too. So he's cynical, but buried deep underneath is a nut of sentimentality for humans who break the chain.

🦋 Fae Court

• The Autumn Court


• The Day Court


• The Summer Court

(Bart was in the Day Court last time he was in game and I would like to retain that if possible!)
Ability: 1) Retaining his canon abilities, please!

🦋 RP Samples

TDM with Faquarl and Claudia