Fade Rift Application

[sohighandwild]

PLAYER

Name: Ammmy
Age: adult swim
Contact: prettiestwhistles/prettiestwhistles #5125 @ Discord
Other Characters: Julius, Romain de Coucy (side character)
Interests: I’m interested in collecting CR that wouldn’t be open to my current pair, and I’ve been playing with the idea of a non-Rifter with an anchor shard for quite a while.

CHARACTER

Name: Caterina (“Ket”) Perrino
Canon/OC: Dragon Age OC
Journal: sohighandwild
Race: Elf-blooded human
Nationality: Antivan
Occupation: Con artist/card sharp
Division: Scouting
Mage or Not: No
Age: 25

History

The girl who would become Caterina Perrino wasn’t born under that name. Her mother called her Gianna; her father was never in the picture to her knowledge. Mother and daughter lived in Rialto’s alienage until Gianna was about seven, when her mother caught a fever and died. Appearing human and with no extended family to look for her, Gianna promptly ditched her name and her history, and stowed away on a caravan to Antiva City.

She made her way at first with a combination of begging and pickpocketing, but quickly caught the eye of a con artist named Livio, who thought adding a charming little girl to his cons could be useful. Livio’s other protege, Paolo, was a few years older than the girl now calling herself Caterina; they developed a sibling dynamic. (Paolo was the one who nicknamed her Ket, teasing that Caterina was too long a name for a short little girl.) Livio, who Ket eventually deduced had once had some sort of ties to the merchant princes, trained the two of them to credibly pass as all kinds of people to run cons. Ket became especially skilled at faking nobility. (Picture “Learn To Do It” except if Anya was in on the con. ...and both Anya and Dmitri were preteens.)

When Ket was in her late teens, she wanted to see a wider world than Antiva City. She left abruptly, but not on bad terms. Exactly. She maybe should have said goodbye? Even so, she’d do a lot to defend either Livio or Paolo if it turned out they needed her.

Ket’s main wheelhouse is high-stakes card-based grifts -- think "posing as an heiress at the Thedosian equivalent of a high-stakes Baccarat table" rather than "really good at three-card monte," though she did the later capably as a child. She’s more inclined to long cons than crimes of opportunity. As such, she’s a capable actress as well as a card sharp. She has sometimes worked with a crew, sometimes alone. She has mainly operated in Antiva and Rivain for the past eight years or so, though with intentions of journeying farther in time.

In Dairsmuid, Ket caught the attention of a member of the watch named Triana. In Triana’s mind, she’s Javert to Ket’s Valjean. Ket routinely forgets who Triana is. At first, this was actually true. Later, she performed forgetting because she gathered it pissed Triana off.

Unfortunately, Triana eventually caught her -- in part because Ket was betrayed by a guy she was doing a job with (Johann, a Marcher who had been vouched for by a friend but was less trustworthy than anticipated).

Ket was being transported from Llomerryn (where she was caught) back to Dairsmuid when a rift opened near the caravan. She’s now a proud owner of an anchor shard and finds herself rerouted to Kirkwall. Triana is furious and convinced Ket somehow a) is faking or b) did it on purpose.



Personality

Ket’s a bit of a thrill-seeker. She’s not really in crime for the money -- though the money is nice -- so much as for the high of executing a high-stakes job successfully. She’d probably have kept running cons if she hadn’t got caught, even if she eventually had enough money not to need to, because she’s good at it and she finds it really enjoyable. (Especially the part where rich and powerful people look foolish.) A little bit of a younger Debbie Ocean/Henry Gondorff vibe. Pride is definitely her downfall; it’s hard for her to pass up an opportunity to use her skills, even if she’s the only one who knows what she’s gotten away with.

While she doesn’t trust easily, once she does, that trust is very hard to lose. On the surface she’s fairly self-centered, but once she has your back, she has it forever (even if she has it in an aggravating way). The flip side of this is that she’s deeply afraid of letting someone she cares about see her real self and having them reject her. Given how important bonds with others are to her, Ket has a history of not infrequently aborting before getting close to someone when she can’t get a read on how they feel about her. She doesn’t really care about what strangers think of her, but putting herself out there and getting shot down is another matter.

Ket really doesn’t give a shit about rules or ethics in the sense of whether something is the right thing or the wrong thing to do in any societal or cosmic sense. Her moral compass is 100% based on her relationships with people. Are you someone she thinks as one of “her” people? She’s here to defend and support you to the end (although possibly in her idea of what that looks like, rather than what you actively say you want from her). Are you someone she’s doing business with? She will do her best to keep her word, because that’s good business sense. Are you a random stranger? Good luck with your life, random stranger, Ket is not here for you. Trolley problem summary: Ket would 100%, without hesitation run over 5 people she doesn’t know to save one person she does. (But she’d also sacrifice herself to save that one person if it’s someone who truly matters to her.)

Opinions & Affiliations

Ket is fairly apolitical in practice. She thinks nobles have done nothing in particular making them worthy of having more than everyone else and feels zero guilt about conning them. Her feelings about elves are complicated and mostly repressed, though she has no problem working with elves professionally. She doesn’t know any dwarves or Qunari well, but has no particular problem with them; more or less ditto mages. She has a few contacts among the Antivan Crows, and while she never had any interest in joining them, she respects their organization’s commitment to honoring business deals. She thinks the Chantry as an institution is a racket, but she’s uninterested in arguing with or dissuading sincere believers. (She has better things to do.) Ket’s been vaguely aware of the Corypheus situation but figured it would sort itself out one way or another.



Strengths & Weaknesses

While Ket has no background in espionage, her skills will slot neatly into information gathering. She’s good at playing a part, being unobtrusive, listening to other people (and gauging when they’re lying), and getting around a city without being followed. If Riftwatch ever needs anyone to cheat at cards, she can also help with that; ditto pickpocketing, and she’s a decent forger in a pinch. She’s bilingual (Antivan and Trade), and has picked up conversational Rivani. While not A Fighter (tm), she is proficient in basic self defense unarmed and with daggers.

Since she is arriving at Riftwatch as a captured criminal, it’s likely a lot of people within the organization will distrust her. Ket doesn’t intend to alienate people, though she’s not here to charm them either since it’s going to be hard to pretend to be someone she’s not. Ket is a city girl, so wilderness survival is not her long suit. It’s also very hard for her not to win at something, even if proving she can is not the point and is actually detrimental to what she’s doing.

Inventory

Ket arrives at Riftwatch with the clothes on her back and a handful of coins she’s lifted off her guards a little at a time on the journey to Kirkwall. She’s probably going to buy a knife soon.

Motivation

She was going to be executed, but luckily (“luckily”) was being transported from point A to point B when she got an anchor shard embedded in her hand. She wasn’t really given a choice in joining up, in that she was promptly turned over to Riftwatch by her guards, but Riftwatch is better than being dead. If she does a good job for them, maybe she'll get a pardon! (?)

She’d take revenge on Johann if it came up, but it’s not a priority right now since he’s out of reach for the time being.

SAMPLES

1. A test drive.

2. When Ket had decided to see the world, she hadn’t meant Kirkwall.

Granted, it could be worse. She’d heard discussions about Skyhold, and an isolated fortress in the mountains sounded very dull no matter how surprisingly nice the weather within its walls turned out to be. Kirkwall has the distinct advantage of being a city, where actual people live. She also suspects that if she's able to work out how to get farther away from other anchor shard bearers without the ache in her hand getting worse, it will be easier to bolt from Kirkwall. (Or, perhaps, she can convince a few other shard-bearers to bolt too. She’s fairly sure that not all of them can be upstanding citizens who only want to help.)

In the meantime, she’s planted herself on one of the city’s many interior walls, with a view of one of its even more excessive stairways. To anyone watching, she appears to be idly slicing and eating an apple. She’s doing that, of course, but only incidentally to making a mental list of people going into and out of the Broken Shield, which she’s gathered is one of the places serious card players tend to go.

Triana had said, before reluctantly giving Ket up to Riftwatch, that at least everyone would know she was up to something here. But that was only partially true. The Division heads know, certainly, and probably the project leaders. Anyone in Riftwatch inclined to pay attention could easily find out. But that leaves everyone who isn’t paying attention, plus the entire non-Riftwatch population of Kirkwall. Could she set herself up under an alias? Unlikely, at least not at length. Could she relieve people of some coin as long as she did it carefully and didn't get greedy? Not a problem.

She’ll have work to keep her busy as soon as someone figures out what to do with her. But for now, it can’t hurt to get a sense of who in Kirkwall is good at cards, who thinks they're better than they are, and who has sharp enough eyes that Ket should avoid them. Even if she doesn’t do anything with the information right away, it never hurts to think ahead.