rp tools | hurts, pains and traumas

[pacificates]

As a Spirit of Compassion, Cole has a form of telepathy in which he can reads the minds of others — more specifically their hurts, worries, and traumas. He is drawn to those hurts, in a wish to help them. He can deal with this in handfuls of ways: often offering words of encouragement, or gentle nudging to people to act, or perhaps revealing information the person does not know. Other times he can simply take the hurt away and make a person forget it. Sometimes it may a case be reminding a person of something comforting, like reminding a dying soldier of a soup his mother made to comfort him in his last moments.

Often, Cole comments on those hurts — speaks them out loud as he comes to him, often in cryptic ways. Here are a few examples of such within canon.

"She is bare-faced, embarrassed, and she doesn't know. She thinks it's because of her. He hurts, an old pain from before, when everything sang the same. You're real, and it means everyone could be real. It changes everything, but it can't."
— Cole's comments on a Inquisitor Lavellan romance with Solas, had he removed her vallaslin and then broke off the relationship with her.

"An old name burns inside armor that shouldn't fit, lit by faces of the children he couldn't save."
— Cole's comments on Blackwall and his past actions.

"He sounds right again with the chains in place, but the music makes him sad."
— Cole's comments on Cullen, if he is told to resume taking Lyrium.

"A breath-caught smile from the Enchanter as the candle lights. The walls are safe; she will never be hungry again."
— Cole's comments on Vivienne's relationship with Duke Bastien.

For the sake of sanity/rp purposes, I've included a little fill out form for Cole's abilities to help me write out these pains, due to Cole's nature of speaking them aloud often — or him offering solutions/comfort to others, considering a character's pain doesn't need be something they're actively thinking about for Cole to sense it. Basically, give me food to work with! Please fill out for threads!

For Deer Country players: please feel free to add in game-specific hurts/memories /things in game that would comfort them, as well as canon ones.

<b>Character Name / Journal:</b> character name / journal here <b>Canon:</b> canon here <b>Character Memory/Fear/Pain:</b> name one, name several. feel free to add in details of memories, perhaps things like specific images, or snippets of conversation. symbols, colours, things like that. <b>How can Cole help:</b> is there perhaps insight Cole can give, maybe an explanation relating to the memory (ie. maybe character b lied to protect your character and your character didn't know this) or perhaps something comforting Cole can recall to remind your character of? or perhaps he can simply have your character forget

Comments

Jason Kolchek | House of Ashes

[hearuthinking]

Character Name / Journal: Jason Kolchek/ hearuthinking
Canon: The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes

Character Memory/Fear/Pain: 1. Jason in an unhappy/poor home. Canon is a little vague on this so I've dumped in a lot of headcanon. Basically he grew up pretty poor, he has an older sister that he loves, his Russian grandmother lived with them (where he learned how to speak Russian, was told old Russian folktales, learned to cook), and in school he was bullied/looked down on because of said poor home. "Trailer trash" was probably thrown around a lot. He has a Southern accent so headcanon is he was also looked down on for that, people assuming he was uneducated/not intelligent.
*Fandom also more or less agrees that Jason's grandfather is Joe Roberts, a World War 2 soldier who dies in Man of Medan (basically there's a bioweapon on his ship that makes him hallucinate and he and another soldier kill each other/die of fear). Jason wears a wristwatch fandom has decided belonged to Joe, so do what you want with that information.

2. Jason as a stoner. He states that he was stoned on 9/11 which was less than two years before canon starts (May 2003) and didn't even hear about the attack until a week later. He also says "my life was going nowhere fast" and "I jumped at the chance to sign up" which implies he did it to escape his life rather than a sense of duty. Headcanon says he super overcompensated with his "Remember" hat and the two patriotic tattoos.

3. Jason and Nick kill a civilian. Long story short, they see a woman at a checkpoint, think she might have a bomb, and Nick shoots her on Jason's orders. They find out she was just carrying groceries and couldn't hear them because she was wearing headphones.

4. Canon has all kinds of trauma Cole can pick up on. One of Jason's team, Merwin, is accidentally smothered by Nick. Jason also has to stake another team member Joey with a tent peg after Joey turns into a vampire. At one point Jason is dragged off by a vampire. We don't get to see how Jason got out of that alive but it's established the vampires just shrug off bullets.

5. Salim just in general. This scene is a good one to showcase them. Again not 100% canon but Jason basically did an enemies-to-lovers speedrun. He told Salim about his unhappy life back home, the checkpoint, being stoned on 9/11, and then chose Salim over his team by going back and saving him. Which is a pretty huge deal considering Salim is an enemy soldier.

6. Sorry I forgot to mention: his last canon moment was being interrogated by people wearing hazmat suits. IDK if they're from CENTCOM (central command) or some agency called in because of the alien vampires. They seemed focused on the "irregularity" of him "allying with an enemy combatant". Jason lost his shit and told them Salim was "worth five of you people". So do with that what you will.

How can Cole help: Jason wouldn't want to forget any of this, even the bad stuff. But Cole can remark on Jason's better qualities (being a good leader, keeping a level head in the midst of all they went through, getting the five of them out safely, saving Salim, etc). Cole is also welcome to say something about a sword and shield, as that's the motif with Salim (sword) and Jason (shield) or whatever you think he might say to all of this.