application (mask or menace)

[prayercycles]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Macey
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: thaumiel
IM / EMAIL: clydewater@gmail.com
PLURK: keterclass
RETURNING: Yes, I also play Cassandra Igarashi (queenofseers)!

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Fortunato Medeiros
CHARACTER AGE: 16
SERIES: Morning Glories
CHRONOLOGY: After Issue #42 As of 2/21/2019: After #50
CLASS: Good-natured but morally ambiguous.
HOUSING: Currently Maurtia Falls #001

BACKGROUND: Here's a wiki entry if you want reference, but it's out of date and doesn't have everything in it so here we go:

(Content warnings for violence, abuse, and eye-related gore in this history.)

Fully explaining the plot of Morning Glories is a somewhat impossible endeavor (it has very complicated and unclear lore on top of being unfinished) but the premise can be explained thusly: Morning Glory Academy is an evil boarding school, full of standard horror tropes like murder and torture and underground dungeons and creepy ghosts, plus a mysterious Headmaster who is never seen and runs everything. The Academy recruits only children who were born on the same day (May 4th, sixteen years ago), and has a particular interest in figuring out which of these children have special, ambiguous powers and brainwashing and manipulating them to their will. Meanwhile, a lot of other things are happening, including time travel and parental drama, but most relevantly to this application a man named Abraham has been collecting many of these special children and raising them to take down the Academy in a camp in the middle of the Egyptian desert. Considering he is also teaching them how to be literal child soldiers, his true motives here are a little ambiguous.

Fortunato is one of those kids, but spent the first seven years of his life growing up somewhere in Brazil and mostly unaware of these machinations, other than a vague awareness that he had something special going on. This was apparently particularly related to an ability shared by some superpowered people that basically amounts to using your words as mind control. His father's justification to him on this front was that he was given a gift by God. This general cluelessness was quickly shattered when MGA hired some kidnappers to take him for placement in the school, and his father was shot in the process. Luckily, he was saved by mysterious secret agent/perpetual child-saver Danielle Clarkson (who is actually a time traveling MGA student, it's complicated), but not before they had to narrowly avoid MGA higher-up Georgina Daramount and her own band of guards using the mind-control power and, at Danielle's request, prayer. On their way out, before Fortunato got picked up to go to Abraham's camp, Danielle gave him a basic rundown of the overly large conflict he was now a part of and told him that their words had power and it was important to use them carefully.

Needless to say, the combination of being saved by prayer and knowing his words could be important enough to get people killed was pretty hefty for a seven-year-old.

Fortunato spent the next five years at Abraham's camp in Egypt, where the children were primarily taught about the evils of the Academy that some of them would unfortunately have to infiltrate someday via lots of bible stories and learning how to shoot guns. They were child soldiers, in other words, though there was a slightly loving veneer over the entire thing. Fortunato was apparently the opposite of a socialite, quiet enough that even after spending five years in a primarily English-speaking camp he still didn't consider his grasp on the language very good, and he also got even more overtly Christian than he was before. Case in point: at twelve, when Abraham said he and five other children were being sent to infiltrate the Academy, Fortunato promptly packed up his things, got on the bus and prayed for hours. A normal reaction, for sure.

All the children sent to the Academy spent the next two years undercover with foster families in their countries of origin to provide a cover story, and then got to the Academy on their fourteenth birthdays (for sake of simplicity, I'll refer to the whole group as the Truants, their somewhat-official group name). Being that this is a murder-school, things rapidly dissolved into disaster for Fortunato, because all six were soon put through a trial to test them, in which they all got put in detention and the room got set on fire. Fortunato himself passed out during it, and was sent to the Nurses' office. If you thought this would be a safe haven in this hell-place, it was the opposite, as Nurse Nine enjoys testing whether children have special powers or not by injecting them with a special green goo that gives them plot-important visions, which Fortunato was promptly the victim of. But the plot-important vision was not the twist here! The actual development was that that night, one of the other Truants, Irina, came into the office and, after hearing about what Fortunato had experienced, gave him a pitch: Abraham is a coward who doesn't know what he's doing, and his plans would doom them. They'd switch to her plan, which was to instruct the other Truants to rescue Fortunato...while she snuck out and attempted to kill the Headmaster. Fortunato, reluctant but convinced, agreed. Irina failed pretty miserably. However, when Fortunato went out into the woods where she was hiding to check on her, she revealed her encounter with the Headmaster did give her one important piece of information: she believed that killing Abraham's biological son Ike, who did not grow up with them, could end the conflict they've become embroiled in for good.

Two years pass! Most of the Truants (except Irina, who becomes a literal forest woman, going around blowing things up) settle into MGA. Two specific things happen to Fortunato during this period: first, he stays loyal to Irina's plans; and second and more importantly, he gains the attention of Georgina Daramount, the MGA higher-up who tried to kidnap him as a child- and who also happens to be the older of the Headmaster's two daughters. As Fortunato had become fairly quiet and seemingly innocuous by this point, Daramount apparently attempted to sway him from from Abraham's side (which she assumed he was still on) to hers, making him her "teacher's pet" (her words). Of course, this actually did not work at all.

By this point, Abraham had been taken by MGA as retribution for Irina's attack on the Headmaster and imprisoned. While Fortunato stayed with Irina's plans, fellow Truants Vanessa and Akiko (the latter of whom has had an obvious crush on Fortunato for many years) tried to free him- only to fail and get themselves locked up in different parts of the Academy. That sets up probably the most unfortunate series of events in Fortunato's life: see, time travel is also a thing in this universe, and by now Abraham's previously mentioned biological son Ike has arrived as a new student, so Irina has a new plan. At the Academy's field day, Woodrun, the remaining Truants shift all the students to another time period, opening them up to eventually kill Ike without staff interference. Fortunato's part of the plan is to get Akiko, who by then had spent a month drugged in a cell, and take her to sacrifice a life (the non-powered twin brother of one of the kids they grew up with at Abraham's camp) to David, the previously mentioned ghost creature. Said sacrifice will prevent the time travel from resetting. (Yeah. It's a lot of lore.)

This went fine until David actually started murdering the guy, at which point Akiko revealed she had something many of the other Truants had begun to lack: morals. She gave Fortunato a big smack on the lips and then gave herself up to David as a replacement before Fortunato could stop her, putting her in a comatose state. This did not go over well with everyone else, especially with one of the other Truants, Ian, who is Akiko's best friend, clearly in love with her, and had always been jealous of Fortunato.

After that, the Truant's plan quickly fell apart, even with Irina briefly taking control of the school guards using her own mind control abilities. Afterward, all the Truants were taken back into the Academy to be imprisoned in one way or another, Fortunato included.

Fortunately, half of them were released earlier than expected thanks to some maneuvering by the Headmaster's younger daughter, ambiguously aligned guidance counselor Lara Hodge; unfortunately, the Headmaster's older daughter is Daramount, and she was very, very upset with Fortunato. The Headmaster didn't take the children being displaced in time well and beat Daramount badly for it, and now she believed she needed to prove to the student body that she was still a figure to be feared. So she overruled Hodge, kept Fortunato locked up, and decided to project on him a bit- by having him beat bloody by both her and some guards, and then going a bit overboard.

In this situation, "overboard" means "she poked both his eyes out with her thumbs." Fortunato prayed throughout the entire ordeal. It did not help.

...Thankfully, after that there's a bright spot: though still trapped in the cell, Fortunato discovered that Akiko had been able to separate her spirit from her still-comatose body, but only he could perceive her. At his canon point, she's since been keeping him company, doing fun things like reading him comic books and explaining the plot of Beetlejuice to him.

Even that, though, has a dark side. Fellow Truant Ian had become part of a revolutionary student newspaper on-campus and was prodded by fellow contributors into visiting Fortunato in his cell, but Ian was still bitter at Fortunato failing to stop Akiko from being hurt, and grew even more enraged when Fortunato told him of Akiko's spirit visiting him. Ian then attacked Fortunato and told him that he both planned to kill Fortunato and to "set things right"- "make it so [Fortunato] never existed in the first place." Despite this serious threat, Fortunato is reluctant to explain things to Akiko, knowing her friendship with Ian means a lot to her and hoping that Ian won't actually go through with his plan.

(He will.)

EDIT 2/21/2019:

Not much initially changes for Fortunato after his previous canon point; he’s still blinded, locked in a cell, communicating with a coma-ghost of Akiko and ruminating on Ian’s threat to his life. Fortunato continues to not tell Akiko about Ian’s threat, not wanting to hurt her, but over the next week or so he does begin to get anxious, telling her it would be better for her to wake from the coma she’s in sooner than later, as he assumes Ian will calm down if he sees she’s alright.

Of course, that doesn’t do much of anything, and Ian is able to continue with his plan, getting access to a strange machine called the Cylinder that he believes will allow him to execute his plan to undo Fortunato’s presence and give Akiko “a better life.” The first part of Ian’s plan, however, involves killing Fortunato. During a particularly chaotic day when the campus guards are distracted, Ian goes into Fortunato’s basement cell and accosts him; Fortunato begs him not to, but Ian isn’t swayed, and he begins hitting Fortunato over the head with a rock. Ironically, Akiko wakes up just in time to go to the cell and witness this happening- but her protests only convince Ian to continue and kill Fortunato out of jealousy. Ian kills Akiko after, and then dies using the Cylinder; while it’s unknown if his plan to erase Fortunato’s existence actually worked, Fortunato is definitely at least deceased.

PERSONALITY:

To call Fortunato the quiet type is a little bit of an understatement. It's not that he doesn't talk at all- he'll certainly speak when spoken to. But knowing from a young age that you could mind-control others with your words certainly makes an impression, as did the advice to be careful with what he says. Because of that, pretty much anything Fortunato says has some thought put into it, often a bit too much; he either tends to put things succinctly and bluntly or, particularly if it's something he wouldn't say eagerly, to get long-winded and choppy. Even in dire situations, he also seems to want to be polite- he has trouble getting a full objection to Vanessa's plans out of his mouth, and even when on a tight schedule while rescuing Akiko he tries to politely ask her to stay on target. He doesn't seem to have any particular desire to hurt others or cause trouble, despite the fact that he frequently gets pulled into doing so for the "greater good." And when he thinks his actions have hurt others, he clearly blames himself for the failing- he states that he believed he lost his eyes as punishment for not saving Akiko from being hurt, for example, even when getting hurt had been her choice.

This desire not to trouble things further extends to actions, too; Fortunato's poised and formal nature seems to come from thinking as hard about the things he does have control over as much as his words, to the point that a desire not to hurt Akiko by telling her that Ian plans to kill him is literally putting his life in danger. His generally stoic and mysterious demeanor is as much the result of him carefully positioning his actions as much as it is that he's simply not the happiest person (for obvious reasons).

Another thing that comes with his stoicism is that Fortunato rarely starts things himself- to put it bluntly, he's more of a follower than a leader. In fact, his desire to not cause further harm has put him in the position of joining a violent revolt- with little direction of his own besides a devotion to God and a natural desire to survive the conflict he grew up in, he was somewhat easily swayed. He's far from naive, but he does feel as if he has little control over his own situation, hence a part of his religious devotion; he does have a desire for direction, even if it's primarily from an outside force.

All of that is to say nothing of the inclusion of prayer in his life; Fortunato is deeply religious, to the point of reciting a Psalm while he's being beaten up. To put it bluntly, when you're worried about how your words will effect other people, God is much easier to talk to. Considering the point to which he relies on this to little avail, it could be considered somewhat obsessive, but mostly comes from the fact that he's spent most of his life knowing he'll likely die fighting in a conflict that's far too large to comprehend properly. Faith is a comfort, but also something he has reason to believe could get him out of the mess he's in...even if there's little sign of that actually happening.

EDIT 2/21/2019:

In terms of a personality shift from his canon update, Fortunato will be even more closed-off that he was previously; this series of events has confirmed his worst fears about the consequences of developing close relationships and trusting others, and he’ll be even less willing to get involved in the lives of others, despite having become more comfortable on MoM’s environment. He’s always been somewhat fatalistic, and now he’ll be even more so. On the other hand, it’ll also make him more willing to tell others things that might be necessary for his or their protection, knowing the result if he doesn’t. Thus, while more severe emotionally, he may be willing to get a bit bolder if the situation calls for it- the worst has already occurred for him, so there’s little point in holding back when things are going wrong.

POWER: So here's the dang thing with powers in Morning Glories: they're often both very, very overpowered and very, very vaguely defined. To simplify things, I'm going to just give Fortunato new powers, one of which is sort of related to canon but I'm just recreating whole-cloth. In other words, both of these are Porter powers.

1. Hyperactive Healing Factor: Fortunato is in a pretty horrible state physically when he gets Ported in, but that'll quickly change: he's going to have a healing factor (only for himself) that will work to fix any wounds or damage to him within minutes. In other words, he's going to have eyes again...

...The problem is, they'll only work about 60% of the time. The downside of having a healing factor that works that fast is that it won't quite work perfectly. Sometimes things will just heal wrong. For example, if he were to lose his index finger, a middle finger might grow in its place instead. In the case of his eyes, they'd thankfully grow back, but sometimes they just won't work. This also won't make him invulnerable- if he's very badly hurt to the point that his body wouldn't be able to heal before dying, he's dead.

2. Prayer Power: Well, obviously. If allowed to pray for it uninterrupted for at least five minutes, Fortunato can grant himself or someone else a power boost for ten minutes. This would include a minor strength/endurance boost and make their own powers more...well, powerful, depending on exactly what the power is. The key is him being able to keep this up during a chaotic situation.

EDIT 2/21/2019:

2. Power in Words: In canon, this manifests with some characters being able to mind control others via command, seemingly with little to no limitation. In MoM, it won’t be that easy. Fortunato will be able to use the power to command someone to do something, but characters will have the ability to resist (whether related to a power or just general resilience- this is up to the other player involved), and long-term commands can last no more than a week. There will be a new section on his permissions page for this. (It is also unlikely Fortunato will use this often, and it’ll presumably be hashed out with myself and any relevant players if it is done.)

3. Liminal Existence: For up to a half hour, he’ll quite literally be able to blip out of existence- everything else will be left the same, but he will inexplicably be gone. Once the time period ends, he’ll reappear where he was previously, having not experienced anything while he was “gone.” No other characters or parts of the world will be affected. Much like his Healing Factor, this may glitch out and work without Fortunato’s control on occasion, but if he attempts to he will be able to intentionally activate it and choose the amount of time it takes place over.

FINAL NOTES: Fortunato's childhood at Murder Cult Camp means he knows his way around a lot of basic weaponry, particularly guns, and has fairly good fighting skills. That said, I don't think he's especially proficient or good with most of it; he's not usually the one in his group of teen rebels who would be doing that sort of thing.