Application for Ryslig

[ronstadt]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Hazel
Contact: hopepunk
Age: 39
Other Characters: Number Five (Horatio) youngtimer, Norman Osborn certaininequities

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Ronstadt
Age: Canon doesn't explicitly say, but suggests mid-to-late 20s. I'm going with 26.
Canon: Ronstadt (podcast)
Canon Point: S1E9: The Killing Moon Pt. 2, as he steps into his office.
Character Information: This Tumblr tag has brief summaries of each episode. I'm working on transcribing them for fans who have issues with podcasts for one reason or another, but that's slow going.

So here are some Cliff Notes...(click to expand)

Ronstadt starts out living somewhere in the rural Midwest, working at an ice cream parlor, when he suddenly develops a strange, overwhelming tingling sensation he describes as "Listerine blood", and starts hearing a voice in his head. The tingling occurs erratically, and sometimes causes him pain. Not wanting to scare his elderly boss and friend, Ronstadt runs away and goes in search of a diagnosis. His six-month search from clinics to self-help gurus leads him to Los Angeles, where the pain seems to stop. But then Ronstadt realizes he can see things others can't: ghosts, people with supernatural abilities, strange creatures. He dubs the ability his "craydar" and gets an apartment over a washed-up 90s TV actor's garage and a job at an occult bookstore. It works well for a few months, since he can tell which books are true at a glance ... and then he's telling people most of the books are fakes. He spends a few aimless months unemployed, and by the time he's been in the City of Angels a year, Ronstadt's favorite tiki bartender, Monty, convinces him to try to find a job that uses his weird ability (not that she believes him at all, of course). He gets a job at Koreatown 9-1-1, taking all the "crazy" calls.

At first the job is uneventful, and the voice in his head only provides color commentary. On the same night he's introduced to a new hire, Estevez, Ronstadt gets his first real supernatural call: a little girl who's being stalked by a shadow monster. When she describes it to him, Ronstadt's craydar kicks in at full swing in a way it hadn't since he arrived in L.A, and suddenly he just knows what it is: a Vile Lurk. The voice in his head provides a little encouragement, and Ronstadt is able to talk the little girl to safety.

Over the next few days, Ronstadt makes friends with Estevez, is introduced to a punk-rock drummer named Faye, and is hunted down by a sassy witch named Hattie. Hattie was drawn to Ronstadt because she could sense the strength of his power ... and starts to teach Ronstadt the ropes of a magic ability he had barely realized he had. She's spooked about the strength of his power, and starts pushing him to tell her about his life. When he tries, he finds it amazingly hard to come up with details. Ronstadt goes on dates with Faye, and when she asks him about memories of his childhood, he gives her stories that sound ... extremely familiar to any listeners older than in their 20s. Faye is disturbed, and pulls up YouTube to prove to Ronstadt that all the memories he thinks are his were scenes from movies, TV, and even commercials. Stunned, Ronstadt leaves the date and goes to Hattie looking for answers. She doesn't have any, but the more Ronstadt learns about his magic (making several bad decisions along the way), the more he realizes he's in danger. A group of dark magicians called the Shadowmancers are planning to hunt down magic-users in L.A. and steal their power ... and the little girl he protected was one of their targets, which put Ronstadt in their sights, too. After several close calls and a few more 9-1-1 call hijinks, Ronstadt and Hattie hatch a plan to take down the Shadowmancers.

Estevez and Monty help Ronstadt prepare for the upcoming battle, but Faye breaks up with him and leaves to go on tour with her band. He figures it's all for the better because it means she's as far away from trouble as she could get. The climactic fight is the season finale, and Ronstadt and Hattie take out the entire circle of Shadowmancers together. Ronstadt is able to control his power, and the two of them find out that there's another, even more powerful entity behind the power-stealing racket. Hattie makes Ronstadt promise to continue his magic lessons at a bonafide magic school, and goes on the road looking for more information. Ronstadt's headed back to his tiny office at 9-1-1 when he will arrive in Ryslig: right before the series drops a finale cliffhanger bomb.

Personality:
The first impression Ronstadt gives most people is that of a walking ode to subculture. He's a hipster in the most boiled-down sense possible: he curates his own personal style without putting any sort of label on it, and his tastes are as eclectic as his "electrified linguini" blonde mullet. He wears black boots, skinny jeans and ties, shirts that lean toward 80s nostalgia, and drinks Mai Tais like water. The focal point of his living space isn't his TV, it's his record player, and he clearly marches to the beat of his own drum. Whether those drums are playing punk, luau music, surf rock, or synth depends on the day. Ronstadt is so used to being considered The Weird Guy due to reacting to things no one else can see that he's owned it as a label, using wisecracks or sarcasm to hide how awkward he truly is. He can only get a few lines of small talk into a conversation before he starts feeling an urge to bolt. (It's worth noting that the first thing he said to his future girlfriend was quite literally "Duuuuuuuuuuhhhh...") But if the other person is patient enough to lead him over that hurdle to something more personal, he can find his stride and start engaging about the subjects the person really cares about. Otherwise, depending on his mood, he might try to actively avoid situations where strangers or acquaintances will try to pull him in for a talk. His closest friend, Estevez, only got to know him because he cornered him in the men's room while they were both there and got him talking... and now they're bros for life.

He's a surprisingly trusting person, not even beginning to question Hattie's motives for tracking him down until a local ghost warns him that witches and magic-users usually mean nothing but trouble.
Only once a seed of doubt is planted will he start looking for reasons to suspect or mistrust anyone.
Even once he was suspicious of Hattie, Ronstadt goes out of his way to protect her from the Shadowmancers, driving her around LA in the middle of the night to find a brightly lit place where the Vile Lurks can't attack her. Then he stays with her, parked in her beat-up station wagon, on the roof of a parking garage until he knows it's safe. Even when he learns at a few points that Hattie was withholding information to protect him or keep him from freaking out, he doesn't lose his temper: in fact, he's only ever seen legitimately angry once, when his boss refuses to send out emergency vehicles to one of his calls because he doesn't believe in the supernatural. Ronstadt's a great, even-keeled friend, provided you're perseverant enough to make him into one.

As far as his life philosophy goes, Ronstadt is very much a man who prefers to live in the moment. Part of it is out of necessity because he has no real memories of his past, but he is also very content just living life as it comes. When he was on the road trying to find answers to his sudden new condition, he makes no mention of being afraid or having any sort of qualms about leaving the familiarity of the quiet Midwest behind. He simply knows that he needs answers in order to get his life going again, so he goes after them. In this way he's extremely need-driven, but not in an anxious way. If he needs a job, he finds one, but he makes note of having no problem sleeping on the ground, living (and eating) rough when he can't. He's lived out of cheap hotel rooms, likely a shelter or church or two, and seems to be happy enough with his tiny apartment above Gus' garage, even though he describes it as "a postage stamp". He takes an astounding amount in stride, up to and including the revelation that his memories are all false. He's rocked by the news, but it only takes him a day or so of moping around his apartment to get back on his feet and try to start looking for answers yet again. There are only two times he's seen to truly be brought down by failure. The first is right before he gets the 9-1-1 job, when he's depressed about being unemployed and without any answers to why he's seeing things no one else can. The second is when Faye rejects him after trying to stay the night at his apartment: he blacks out, thinking that they've hooked up ... but when he wakes in the morning, Faye's nowhere to be found and won't answer his calls or texts. When Ronstadt does catch up to her, she explodes at him, saying he has some gall to not remember that he yelled at her to get away from him, and that he 'seemed like a different person'. Ronstadt knows enough about the Shadowmancers and his power at that point to realize that his latent power/true self is trying to protect him and keep him out of the public eye ... and only once Faye shares that disturbing fact with him does he remember shoving away numerous old friends and possible lovers in the same fashion. Distraught, he dissociates a bit and almost wanders into traffic ... but that's as close as he comes to giving up or wallowing in misery. He would much rather act on his problems and find solutions, no matter what it takes. Whether or not they're wise ways to act on the problems, well ... that's another story entirely.

That same zen, moment-to-moment attitude that makes it easy for Ronstadt to adapt to his new-found powers is the one that also gets him into the most trouble: because he's extremely impulsive. When he gets angry at his boss, he decides to find a way to prove to him that Side B is real ... and does so by making a deal with a creature called a Grave Trader, not knowing or caring what it might want from him in return. Only after the deal is made and his boss fails to be frightened at all by what ensues does Ronstadt realize that he rashly promised an open favor/boon/possibly even life or soul to a creature he knew almost nothing about. When the very first spell he casts has a stronger effect than Hattie expected, she tells him not to do any more magic until they can figure out where his power came from. But he's so high on the thrill of it that he doesn't make it 24 hours before casting another spell ... on someone he doesn't realize is a Shadowmancer. The spell backfires and kills the Shadowmancer, putting Ronstadt squarely in the sights of Shadowmaster Kenner Lash: precisely what Hattie was trying to prevent. However, that impulsive side can also lead to good things: he leaves the 9-1-1 call center to save a little girl from a Vile Lurk (by exploding the propane tank in her backyard ... effective, but really pretty damn DUMB), and at the end of the season, he unites four orphans' ghosts with a lonely woman who can also see the supernatural. Half the reason Ronstadt makes such spur-of-the-moment and often disastrous decisions, putting himself in harm's way, is that he's thinking more about what he needs to do and how much conviction is behind it. If he were on an airplane and the oxygen masks dropped down, he'd be the idiot putting them on other people who had two perfectly capable hands just because they told them at the beginning of the flight that he had cool boots.

The biggest flaw to Ronstadt's name, however, isn't his amazing lack of self-preservation or forethought: it's his addictive tendencies. They dovetail almost seamlessly with the rest of his problems, to the point that he wouldn't even think of himself as a potential addict to anything. After a year of living in Los Angeles, his bartender remarks that he's driven up a tab for "thousands" of Mai Tais, and on one notable occasion, he walks into the Hula Shaker and orders four for himself just before noon, only to wake up and realize that he passed out in a booth until nighttime. Ronstadt drinks when he doesn't want to think, so having to learn and adapt to magic begins to keep him out of the bar. However, that first spell leaves him with a rush: when he decides to cast the aforementioned spell that kills the Shadowmancer, his narration lays it out bare:

I can't stop thinkin' about it. I wanna do it so bad, just one more time. Casting that spell? Such a rush. Felt like this space inside me I didn't even know was empty was suddenly ... full. ... All that's left is the killer urge to cast that spell again. Wait. Technically, I only promised Hattie I wouldn't cast (that spell)... One little spell isn't gonna hurt anyone. And who knows? Rockin' some abracadabra might knock loose a memory or two.

He falls extremely quickly into a textbook addict's thought patterns and behavior, right down to making excuses to indulge. Given all the vices available in Ryslig, it'll be interesting to see what he might latch on to without his powers to play with ... since while he learned and grew from the lesson he learned killing the Shadowmancer, those tendencies are still very likely to rear their head over something else.

5-10 Key Character Traits:
Even-tempered
Adaptable
Wisecracking
Awkward
Trusting
Loyal
Addictive (tendencies)
Reckless
Impulsive
Determined

Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Fits, please!

Opt-Outs: Spider, Fairy, Lich, Slime

Roleplay Sample: TDM: Beetlejuice and Top Level - with Rev