Noah Miller

APPLICATION
▸PLAYER
Name: Carley
Other Characters Played: Raylan Givens

▸CHARACTER
Name: Noah Miller
Journal: heatedup
Canon: original
Age: 26
Canon Point: n/a

World Description:
Noah's world is very much like Earth, but the supernatural has been commonly known of since about the turn of the century. Magic was known in ancient times and there's a lot of documentation that was destroyed or hidden, but it went underground somewhere around 1200 CE. This was the middle of the Dark Ages and anti-magical sentiment had grown so powerful that those with abilities decided it was necessary to go underground or die. Magitech is minimal and unreliable so far; apart from the fact that magic and science simply operate under different rules, magic was so distrusted for so long that no one even really started trying to create magitech until the nineties. You had a Magical History Month in school alongside Black History Month and Women's History Month, and you spent a week in third grade learning the basic categories of magical creature.

There's been some interbreeding between humans and other creatures. Because of this, magic for humans can pretty much be divided into "meant for humans" and "not meant for humans." Basic sorcery and incantations, elemental magics, and physical magics like drawing runes or making potions (where what matters isn't so much the mental energy as getting the physical actions right) can be classified as "meant for humans," because they're all things humans will tolerate well. Psychic abilities, glamour magic, and magics to manipulate the physical world (like Transfiguration from Harry Potter), among other things, are not meant for humans, because they tend to screw up the human brain. People who see the future, for example, tend to display symptoms of brain injuries and end up dying young if they can't find a way to control their visions. There are other conditions, like vampirism and lycanthropy, that are considered magic, but don't fall into these categories because the people afflicted become no longer human.

Noah is a fire elemental. Elemental magics appear in a few other races (elves, for example), but are much more rare and appear to have evolved first in humans. The current theory in Noah's world is that being an elemental is genetic, since elements run along family lines, but this theory is incorrect. Being an elemental involves a spirit of your element entering your body before or shortly after birth, within a few days. A spirit can enter the body of a baby with two human parents. Shards of spirits may be carried in semen or split off from a mother's spirit, allowing the spirits to breed and children to be born as elementals. Due to the mechanism, babies are slightly more likely to take the mother's element; the mother's spirit is fighting on home turf, after all. In five to ten percent of births, neither spirit has entered the baby's body and the child is not considered an elemental, often because there's another power already existing in the baby (like a psychic ability, which is genetic and would exist from conception). Elementals with other powers they were born with are not unheard of, but they're extremely rare -- the spirits like to have their host all to themselves.

The spirits have consciousness which allows elementals of a certain skill level to hear the spirit's voice, although it's less complex than say, a human personality. They're forces of nature, each focused on one of the mechanisms required to keep nature running smoothly; water is associated with magic, fire with destruction, earth with fertility and creation, and air with logic. Air and Fire always have a male voice, and Earth and Water are always female, though what it sounds like to each specific elemental is based heavily on their perceptions and experiences. Noah hears fire as a slightly older man, loud and rowdy and tending to tell dirty jokes and encourage Noah's worst impulses. You'll only hear your element speak when near a source of it; airs can hear it pretty much anytime, waters won't hear it much if they're more than a few hundred yards from a pool of water (many of them keep a bathtub filled in the house for this purpose), and earths might feel cut off if they're in high buildings or in the middle of cities. Fires are kind of shit out of luck most of the time, although the sun provides a low-level source of fire (it's a massive source, capable of burning people on Earth, but it's also 93 million miles away).

Your element affects your personality and physical appearance, not to the point of altering genetic structure, but it will pull forward what's there that it likes. A full write-up of how elements like to affect elementals is here http://heatedup.dreamwidth.org/294.html#cutid12 . Almost no elementals perfectly fit the personality and physical appearance of their element; most will lack or be less pronounced in at least one or two of the personality traits (for example, Noah doesn't have serious problems with authority, and he's less of a wanderer than most). The last important aspect of an elemental's life is the Academy.

Established in the middle ages when magic went underground, the Academy has been falling steadily out of favor since the supernatural was revealed. They have a lot of very important documents and artifacts in their possessions that would have revealed the existence of elementals if they'd been discovered by historians at an inopportune time, only a small fraction of which have been released to the public since 1900. The Academy's primary function is to track elementals and care for the needs that the general public can't or won't, including those that elementals don't want publicly known. Their main motivation for everything is essentially public image. If the general public knew just how much control an older air elemental gains over weather, there would be riots in the streets, and that's one of the least unsavory secrets. If you ever lose control of your element, which is most common in the late teens and early twenties when your power is really growing its fastest, you go to the Academy. The official story is that nothing bad will happen if you don't, but there are rumors. The Professors want to protect the greater good, and it's unclear what price they are willing to pay. If nothing else, they're really the only people who can instruct on such things competently.

A few types of creatures considered fantasy to us did not go underground in the middle ages, most notably elves and orcs. Elves can interbreed with humans, but orcs usually can't. Both of these races prefer to live away from humans, although city elves became a lot more common after magic re-emerged. This tendency along with them both being vastly outnumbered by humans means they've been largely able to survive in seclusion for most of history. They were and usually are still treated like outsiders, worthy of suspicion and fear, but not openly hunted, pursued, or hated. Orcs are very near to dying out, populations dwindling due to their inability to breed with other species, rejection of most medicine (they're resistant to infections, but not immune, so death from things like childbirth is more common than in humans), and a shrinking number of places where they can seclude themselves from humans. Human scientists doubt orcs will exist in another three hundred years, despite working from admittedly shaky data.

Background Information:
(For canon characters only. You can link to a wiki page, or another informative site, that gives a general overview of the setting and character. If nothing exists, you can write your own brief summary instead. For OCs this would be covered under World Description.)

Personality:
The thing with Noah is, he has good intentions, but he is careless and super dumb. He's an utter failure at thinking more than one or two events into the future, he does not think before he speaks or acts, and he's often blind to subtle cues and needs to be given a very clear sign or instruction to understand that he's causing someone distress. He likes to be a brat about getting his way and doesn't consider that he may be stepping on someone else to do it -- part of him assumes that other people will push back just as hard if things are important to them, and he's okay with getting into fights about such things, but for the most part it just doesn't enter his head.

Noah has a lot of love to give and feels very intensely. He can be somewhat melodramatic as a result. When he's happy, he has the ability to waft it onto everyone around him, but when he's down, you have never seen anyone wallow this hard in your life. He just loves a lot of things, freely and easily, but the upshot is that all the things that hurt will hurt him more. It doesn't help that Noah has a one-track mind and little to no ability to self-soothe. Once he gets fixated on a thing, he pursues it to the end and he's not good at multitasking. He can do maybe two things at once -- talk while he cooks dinner, for example -- but that's about as far as his attention will split and he'll easily be distracted if he's trying to do two things at once. He tends to get very intensely into one person or thing for a brief period of time and then drop them all at once, largely forgetting about the old thing. It's not really that he doesn't love that thing anymore, just that he has this new thing now. It's not something he would know how to explain if confronted, although with anything that would still be there awhile later, like a friend or lover, he will eventually come back and focus all his attention for awhile as if the old thing were shiny and new again.

This, combined with fire's personality in him, causes him to sometimes randomly become very angry. Not the cute, quick burst kind either, an angry Noah will go into scorched-earth destroy-everything mode until he's satisfied or gets tired -- fire does represent destruction, being the force of nature that purges old clutter for new growth. He usually has the sense to get away from the people he loves rather than taking it out on them, but on the rare occasion he doesn't or can't, Noah can certainly be cruel. If he's not in scorched-earth anger mode, he's probably mad about something incredibly silly, like what you did in his dream last night or your character turning his down for sex when he made you in the Sims. This type of anger just makes him quiet and huffy for a few hours until he forgets about it. In addition to random rage is frequent random lust, and Noah makes it his business whenever he arrives in a new place to figure out where men congregate who might swing his way, and to learn what those men are looking for so he can do his best to become it on short notice, whenever he gets that sudden itch.

Noah will often deliberately ignore important information because it displeases him, which we can see in his romantic inclinations: Noah's judgment in men is so bad that he could probably be talked into marrying Satan, if Satan had a nice cock. No one does intentional self-deception like Noah Miller. The fact is that, despite being pretty good at hiding it, Noah has a lot of insecurity. Absent of fire's influence, he wouldn't have particularly more or less than anyone else (because everyone certainly has insecurities), but fire tends to be more insecure than average. Add that to Noah's loving heart and the fact that he's been ridiculed for things like how loving he is just enough times to be waiting for it, and he will guard himself with deception and bravado. The biggest tell Noah has is that when he's feeling insecure, he tries to take up less physical space. It's not something he's even aware of doing, so it often looks like something else, but he'll slouch down in a seat, press himself against a wall, or pull his knees up to his chest.

Appearance:
(Description and/or a link to an image is fine!)

Abilities:
(If a character has magical or otherwise better-than-human abilities, they should be described here. Just listing them out without explanation may not be enough, so please detail what they are, their strengths and limitations, etc. If a wiki exists with good, detailed information, it may be used to supplement your summary.)

▸SAMPLES:
(One sample may be a link to a post/log thread of decent length that's occurred in the last six months from another game, or from a meme/musebox if the setting is the same as what the character will be apped from and the thread provides a good example of characterization — i.e. no AU settings or overly cracky memes. The other sample must be written to take place in Carvaka's setting.

For the Carvaka-specific sample, we're looking for a good example of character voice and how the character will adapt to the setting. We suggest avoiding "where am I?" or "where are my friends?" type samples, as these tend to be generic and often not fully representative of a character's normal behavior. You can still send in these kinds of samples if you wish to, but we advise applicants to consider whether or not they fulfill the requirements that we're looking for.)

First Person:
(A 'network style' post.)

Third Person:
(A 'log style' post. Bracket or prose text are both acceptable.)

june 1987 - noah born in las vegas
july 1993 - moves to el paso
june 1995 - moves to lubbock
dec 1995 - moves to atlanta
july 1996 - moves to houston
june 1998 - moves to el paso
june 2000 - moves to reno
august 2002 - moves to lubbock
june 2003 - moves to phoenix
july 2004 - moves to austin
june 2005 - graduates high school
september 2005 - moves out

PLAYER INFORMATION
➤ NAME: Carley
➤ AGE: 5/10/89
➤ JOURNAL: calmyourshit

CHARACTER INFORMATION
➤ CHARACTER NAME: Noah Sean Miller
➤ CHARACTER AGE: 26
➤ BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Noah is fairly tall, around 6'1, with an athletic build. He's not exactly jacked and he doesn't work out, but he's more muscular than fat from a generally active life. He's tan and blonde with blue eyes and an expressive face, generally with his hair sticking out in all directions and a day or two's worth of stubble because he doesn't like shaving (and he tends to develop a Beard of Sadness if he doesn't have any reason to look good for awhile). He dresses in very simple clothes, jeans and t-shirts and work pants and boots, generally in mostly black and red.
➤ HISTORY: Noah's world is a modern urban fantasy world where magic is known. It has always existed and went underground in the middle ages, with the leaders of the magical community working to collect and hide every clear record of supernatural activity. The supernatural re-emerged just after the turn of the century -- World War 1 is blamed partly on everyone still being really shaken and paranoid about vampires and werewolves. Having had a hundred years to adjust now, people are more used to the idea, but discrimination and unnecessary segregation are still rampant. People only started trying to actually use magic in the mainstream, as an influence on technology, in the nineties, so for the most part the world still looks the same.

About two thirds of the world's population is human, a tenth elves, and the rest is comprised of many different nonhuman but humanoid races. (Elves were still known in the time period where magic was underground, but most of the rest being various types of nymphs and fae, and thus always magical, were not.) In general, they're all still referred to as humanoid because a) for the most part they can interbreed and b) only humans were widely known when taxonomy was being developed. A few scientists of the time did make classifications for magical species, but when these were brought forth in the fifties they were rejected out of hand, largely because prejudice was still rampant and the current wisdom was that anything pertaining to magic was junk science.

The basic rule for whether something exists in this world is that if more than one culture ever had a myth or believed in it, it exists. There are also different categories of several things, according to different myths. For example, elementals (which Noah is) once had two types, eastern and western. Western elementals are earth, air, fire, and water (whether there has ever been a spirit, akasha, or aether elemental is unclear -- current theory is that telepaths may actually be this), while the eastern ones used the five elements: steel, wood, fire, water, and earth. Unfortunately, the eastern elementals have died out, so all surviving elementals are born under the western system, regardless of ancestry or birthplace. A detailed writeup of this system (and the governing of the species in general) can be found here.

Noah was born to a 23-year-old showgirl in Las Vegas. Brenna had become pregnant without even knowing who the father was, but she'd wanted a baby for a long time, and decided to get her act together for her son. Noah was raised by a single mother all on her own, living in Vegas for the first six years of his life before fire's wanderlust took hold. The pair rarely spent more than a couple of years in one place after that, moving every summer so Noah didn't have his school years interrupted. Noah didn't mind, having the same nomadic wanderlust as his mother, although there was one place they were always going back to: Uncle Eli's.

Eli was Brenna's best friend, and he owned a hostel for elementals that Brenna and Noah visited on most holidays. Uncle Eli was the closest thing Noah had to a father figure, and represented a bit of stability in his life -- no matter where Brenna moved them to next, Eli would be in the same place.

Which he needed, because Noah went to three different high schools. He got in a lot of fights and had a lot of sex, and had an extremely bitchy phase for most of his teen years while his individual personality struggled to balance with that of fire. This resulted in sporadic training at MMA and wrestling gyms (because he was skinny as hell and his mother figured he might as well not get his ass kicked too badly). He moved out when he was eighteen, personality starting to settle as he grew into his emotions and his body. He contemplated college, but mostly decided that sounded like a drag and started hanging out around illegal fights and seedy bars and started trading on the abilities he had, in fighting and with fire. Bouncing, cage fighting, and security don't pay all that well, but they're good enough to support him most of the time.

When Noah was 22, he got his ass thoroughly kicked, was drugged with a sedative in a drink, received a head injury when he fell down, and started hearing fire's voice all in one night. Within a week he had set twelve accidental fires, mostly in his sleep, so he went to the Academy to re-learn his control. He spent about five months there and tried to move back to where he'd been living before, but he had fallen in love with the city of Phoenix. So he found a little apartment in Smokytown (the nickname for the elemental area of that city, it being mostly comprised of fire and air elementals) and used what connections he could find to get work and find the fights, and soon enough he'd established himself well, put down a root or two for the first time in his life. He doesn't know if he'll stay in this city forever (probably not) but he's been content for the last three years and he's actually made some lasting friendships for once.
➤ PERSONALITY: The thing with Noah is, he has good intentions, but he is careless as all hell. He's an utter failure at thinking more than one or two events into the future, he does not think before he speaks or acts, and he's often blind to subtle cues and needs to be given a very clear sign or instruction to understand that he's causing someone distress. He likes to be a brat about getting his way and doesn't consider that he may be stepping on someone else to do it -- part of him assumes that other people will push back just as hard if things are important to them, and he's okay with getting into fights about such things, but for the most part it just doesn't enter his head.

Noah has a lot of love to give and feels very intensely. He can be somewhat melodramatic as a result. When he's happy, he has the ability to waft it onto everyone around him, but when he's down, you have never seen anyone wallow this hard in your life. He just loves a lot of things, freely and easily, but the upshot is that all the things that hurt will hurt him more. It doesn't help that Noah has a one-track mind and little to no ability to self-soothe. Once he gets fixated on a thing, he pursues it to the end and he's not good at multitasking. He has to pause the movie to return a text message, and trying to talk to him while he's cooking will just anger and confuse him. He tends to get very intensely into one person or thing for a brief period of time and then drop them all at once, largely forgetting about the old thing. It's not really that he doesn't love that thing anymore, just that he has this new thing now.

This, combined with fire's personality in him, causes him to sometimes randomly become very angry. When this happens he'll go find a fight or work out or something, anything to vent his anger on. He usually has the sense to get away from the people he loves rather than taking it out on them, but on the rare occasion he doesn't or can't, Noah can certainly be cruel. In addition to random rage is frequent random lust, and Noah makes it his business whenever he arrives in a new place to figure out where men congregate who might swing his way, and to learn what those men are looking for so he can do his best to become it on short notice, whenever he gets that sudden itch.

Noah will often deliberately ignore important information because it displeases him, which we can see in his romantic inclinations: Noah claims to have no weirdness around not having a father, but he's very much into older, frequently married, men (fortunately not exclusively). No one does intentional self-deception like Noah Miller. This also resulted in him, for a long time, trying to convince people he was bisexual and a switch in bed, but no, this is one hundred percent not the case. He's trying to stop doing that now, because it never ended well for him or for anyone but his friends, who got to watch and laugh. It's all rooted in insecurity. Absent of fire's influence, he wouldn't have particularly more or less than anyone else (because everyone certainly has insecurities), but fire tends to be more insecure than average. Add that to Noah's loving heart and the fact that he's been ridiculed for things like how loving he is just enough times to be waiting for it, and he will guard himself with deception and bravado.
➤ POWERS: Noah is immune to heat and fire, and can never be burned except with specific types of magic. He has near-total control over heat and fire as well, with the level of his ability at any given moment being restricted by his concentration, the amount of water in the air and around him, the temperature of the room, his emotional state, and other similar factors. He can shapeshift into a being of pure fire, but it's incredibly difficult -- he's only done it three times in his life, all in controlled settings, and he's basically insensate in this state. His senses do work, but he doesn't have enough practice to be able to interpret them correctly. He can also hear the voice of fire, although usually all it's doing is cracking dirty jokes and egging Noah on to do things he knows he shouldn't.

Noah's very sensitive to cold and water. Touching ice will be for him like sticking their hand in flame is for a human. Any ambient temperature below fifty degrees makes him sluggish and miserable, often with cold/flu-like symptoms. Water is poison to Noah -- he drinks things like coffee and orange juice that are acidic enough to mask it. A few hours of being out in the rain would kill him, and he'd only have to be submerged for a couple of minutes to be at risk of death. The best way to cure water poisoning is to put Noah in fire and leave him there for a few hours. Water makes it harder to use his abilities, and tossing a cup of it on him would be enough to suppress his abilities completely for at least a few minutes.
➤ SUITABILITY: Noah will be slightly weirded out at first, but he's very open about sex and fairly good at going with the flow, so he'll be able to at least wait it out and see if the situation changes for awhile, and once he builds some CR he'll be able to settle in reasonably.
➤ FIRST PERSON EXAMPLE: [So here's a slightly unusual place to be making a network post from: Noah is huddled under the blankets in his bed, only the light from the screen lighting him. You can only see the upper half of his face because he's curled up in a ball, and it's pretty plain that he's shivering a bit. But what you can see of his face is grumpy. as. fuck.]

When the fuck is this rain goin' away? It is day fuckin' four.

I feel like a fuckin' dog scared a' the thunder and hidin' under the stairs.

[His accent is a little stronger than usual with annoyance.]

Any houses got a fireplace? Preferably ones I can get to without goin' outside for long?
➤ THIRD PERSON EXAMPLE: http://throwitinabox.dreamwidth.org/tag/~noah+miller

Name: Noah Miller
Canon: original
Sexuality: homosexual, but he sometimes tries to tell himself he's bi. he's trying to stop, because it never ends in anything but hilarity or tears.
Age: 25ish
History and world info: Noah was born in Las Vegas to Brenna Miller, a twenty-three-year-old showgirl and fire elemental who had been born to humans. Noah was raised with his mother's firm and occasionally too-fierce assertions that being a fire elemental was a totally awesome and okay thing to be, as Brenna was trying to convince herself of it just as much as her son. Of course, this had the side effect of giving him some insecurity about it. He didn't like spending time with non-elemental children, and they generally didn't live in places with a lot of their kind -- Brenna has negative associations with the Academy, a general organizing and educational body for elementals, and didn't want to live near it. Fortunately, there was Uncle Eli: not actually Noah's uncle, but Brenna's best friend, an earth elemental who runs something like a hostel, and usually had some kids around for Noah to play with when he and Brenna visited.

When Noah was six, Brenna absolutely could not stay in one place anymore (she'd been convinced to settle long enough to give Noah some stability and roots) and they moved away, rarely spending more than a couple of years in one place after that. Noah didn't mind this so much -- he was, after all, a fire like his mother with the same nomad's heart. He asked questions about his father, of course, and Brenna answered them honestly and never freaked out about it, so Noah would say he doesn't have any serious daddy issues. Whether this is true is open to interpretation, to say the least.

Noah went to three different high schools. He got in a lot of fights and had a lot of sex, and had an extremely bitchy phase for most of his teen years while his individual personality struggled to balance with that of fire. This resulted in sporadic training at MMA and wrestling gyms (because he was skinny as hell and his mother figured he might as well not get his ass kicked too badly). He moved out when he was eighteen, personality starting to settle as he grew into his emotions and his body. He contemplated college, but mostly decided that sounded like a drag and started hanging out around illegal fights and seedy bars and started trading on the abilities he had, in fighting and with fire. Bouncing, cage fighting, and security didn't pay all that well, but they were good enough to support him most of the time. Noah has never needed a lot of material crap or money to spend.

He mostly continued to wander the same way his mother had until he started hearing fire's voice at age 22, a fairly normal time to start hearing it. This almost seemed to break him somehow. He'd always had to work hard to keep his impulses under control (with enough risky behavior when he was younger to prove it), but now he kept lighting fires accidentally. He moved to Phoenix, the closest city from which the Academy could be accessed (incidentally a great place for fire elementals) and went to the Professors (the people who run the Academy) for help. They tapped an older earth elemental to help him. Earth is good for fire and for making the normally flighty and restless element grow roots, and the two just get along well in general. Over the course of a few months, Noah learned from his teacher to fix these "leaks." The teacher had the amulet that Noah still uses made, for purposes of lessons, and Noah has obviously never quite shaken this problem because he still starts to generate heat like an oven when he gets excited (this really only applies to sex now, but he'd still give it to someone he was genuinely angry at and someone he was scared of might need it, although if he's scared of them he won't give it).

Noah tried to go back to wandering, but he'd fallen in love with the city a little, so he moved back into the apartment he'd gotten, basically a fireproof concrete bunker with thick walls, few windows, and a month-to-month lease. He doesn't think he'll stay there forever, but he's not yet feeling the itch to move again. He has a life and connections and he knows where to go to fight or to fuck or to burn, and for now, that's all he needs.

Setting: Noah's world is what would happen if you took all your classic fantasy elements and put them in one world, then grew them up into 2013. (Leaving the in-universe fantasy genre somewhat lackluster, one would assume.) There are elves, witches, werewolves, vampires, trolls, and they've all been part of history in their own ways, but most relevant to Noah's life in particular are the elementals.

The elementals are like witches, in that they're basically human, but with some magic added. Before world travel and globalization, the elementals of a particular area were aligned with what we know now as the elemental folklore of that area: an Ancient Chinese elemental, for example, would be water, fire, metal, wood, or earth. However, different areas of the world have had different species die out, and all the elementals who survive today trace their magic to the European system: earth, air, fire, water. The organizing body for the elementals is known, among the community, only as the Academy. The Academy is, for the Harry Potter fans, a combination of the Ministry of Magic and Hogwarts. They keep records on elementals and deal with crimes specific to the species, as well as educating elementals who can't or don't want to be educated at home. The Academy exists in a pocket dimension and can be accessed from multiple places around the world, and communities of elementals tend to cluster around these entrances, not unlike communities of immigrants in today's world (think Chinatown). The Academy has a representative in most governments around the world, like most magical organizations, and like most magical organizations, they get relegated to "low-power special interest group" and are largely ignored.

Elementals tend to be very insular as a people. The Academy does not encourage marriage or fraternization with normal humanoids (given the presence of species like elves and dwarves, it's considered impolite to refer to all people as humans) or other magical species. Partly this is to minimize threats to the Academy's power, but there's also a practical reason: apart from their powers, his or her element has a deep effect on an elemental's personality and physical appearance, to the degree that an outsider with basic knowledge could easily tell when they've crossed from Watertown into Earthtown or Airtown (this is not as clearly defined as the separation between an elemental area and a nonmagical area, but elementals do gravitate to others of their same type). Elementals also cannot learn any of the learnable magics, so going to a school for witches or psychics would be pointless. Nonmagical purebred humans are also the dominant race in the world, constituting around 80% of the world's population; being nonhuman or magical is roughly on the order of being black or gay in modern America, with the implied social disadvantages, so it's easier to simply live apart from that where possible.

Fire elementals are immune to heat and fire from the day they're born. Around puberty, they start being able to manipulate fire. Somewhere in their 20s, they start hearing the voice of fire, which is always male. At this point they can also shapeshift into fire, but this is incredibly difficult until about 40. They tend to run hotter than most people, and they don't sweat much, largely eliminating the need for bathing. The "classical" fire elemental appearance is average height with an athletic build, brown eyes, red hair, ruddy skin, and freckles.

Elementals have distinct personalities, although most elementals don't follow the general personalities or appearances to the letter -- they are still human under their element, with human variation. Basically, your element takes what's there in your genetics and fits it to the guidelines as closely as it can.

Fire elementals are very distinctive, unforgettable people. Never sketched in pastel, fire is drawn in bold lines and bright colors. They're the passionate and the partiers. Fire is a nomad, having no true home on the earth, but fire elementals crave connection. They need people to love and to hate, and they get lonely and insecure very easily. At the same time, they are out of control and follow no one else's rules, so it can be hard for them to find the connections they need so deeply, even as the energetic and outgoing individuals they are. Very much given to both lust and rage, which fire is associated with, if they're not careful, fires can be incredibly destructive, of themselves and of everyone around them. Fires are very persistent, burning through until there's nothing left and hard to stop. They tend to be irrational and have problems with authority.

Fire is the destructive force, the unmaker of nature, so his voice will often be urging fire elementals to burn and destroy, egging them on when they give in to their emotions. For this reason and the emotional neediness that makes them vulnerable to being hurt, fires are the most likely elementals to become villains.

Water is literally poison to a fire elemental. This gets more severe as they get older and closer to their element, but a fire will never be able to swim and they won't like to drink water -- alcohol or things that are very acidic like orange juice or coffee go easier on them. By their 20s, being trapped in a pool or rainstorm is enough to make them very ill, and by their 40s, being pushed into a lake could be enough to kill them.

The last important thing to know is that elementals can be born to nonmagical people. It's not common, happening maybe once in a few thousand births, but common enough not to be unheard of, and elemental children of human parents are usually (not always) identified and singled out by the Academy in their teens if not earlier. There isn't really a term for these people in modern English (lots of tribal languages and languages that haven't changed much in awhile still have words for them), but they're sometimes coloquially called natural-born. This is affected somewhat by geographic features of a person's birth place. Natural-born fires, for example, tend to be born in deserts, while waters tend to be born near large bodies of water. Earths tend to be born in forests or farmlands, while airs tend to be born on top of mountains or in large cities. (One would think this would protect elementals from dying out, but the more elementals there are in the world, the more elementals are naturally-born. The energy or spirit that makes elementals needs a strong hold in the world already to be able to get into new ones.)

Notable elementals in the history of this world (for purposes of giving examples, Noah won't make any specific references) include Albert Einstein, who was an air elemental. Mozart came from a long line of waters. There's strong evidence that Elizabeth I was a fire and it's generally agreed upon by historians now, but being in the position she was in, she kept it concealed at the time (this is also why she never married or had children -- they would have inherited her element). Elizabeth may have inherited this from her mother, Anne Boleyn, but the only evidence there is Anne's reported personality. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin are earths, evidenced by Tolkien's near-pornographic descriptions of nature and hobbit-holes, and Martin's lurid and loving descriptions of food.

Witches can create protective wards for elementals, with an elemental's participation. The witch has to create the object that's warding (most common are woven or beaded jewelry and tattoos, so the witch needs whatever that skill is) and the elemental puts their energy into it with a simple spell the witch performs. The result of the spell will protect the person bearing the object from that elemental's powers, and only their powers. Noah has a wooden amulet with his energy on it, so someone wearing it will be immune to any fire or heat coming from him. Another elemental could still hurt that person, as well as flame that's being fueled by something other than his energy. So Noah throwing a fireball at someone would be fine. Noah lighting a rag on fire and throwing that would burn them.

Personality: Noah often seems scary at first glance. He's a tall, muscular guy who cuts an intimidating figure and has a devilish face, whether it's wearing a smile or a scowl. It's likely that the first time you see Noah will be while he's bouncing at a club or fighting, too, instances where the rage of fire is most dominant in him. However, watch him for awhile when he's not around the fights or work or someone he dislikes, and he starts to seem a little more harmless. Better yet, wait for him to open his mouth, because from the first word, it will be obvious he's actually a gigantic teddy bear.

Noah's definitely an intense person, just that he's generally intensely happy. It's very hard to really shake Noah because he just doesn't give a fuck. He doesn't see the point in letting anything get him down unless it's actively fucking with him at that moment, although he still has those days where it's just not working for him. When he's up, he radiates it and can just waft it onto everyone around him, but when he's down, you have never seen anyone wallow this hard. Melodrama is often par for the course here. He definitely has some charisma, but it's a shallow sort and he has trouble keeping someone's attention for a long time. He's great at parties, but once they're over, he tends to be forgotten pretty quickly. This can make him insecure at times, especially given his need for connection and hatred of isolation. It's worth noting that Noah lives most of his life with a feeling halfway between starvation and abandonment, being deprived of his element more than an earth, air, or water, so it's very easy for him to feel abandoned. His charm is of the clumsy kind, as well, and his actual attempts to be suave or debonair mostly just turn out hilarious.

Noah tends to have a one-track mind. He's not very good at multitasking, tending to focus all his attention on one thing at a time...though usually not for very long. People don't bother trying to diagnose fire elementals with ADHD anymore, but if they did, Noah would probably have that diagnosis. The result of this is that when he's into a person, or a hobby or activity or anything else, he's very very intensely into them for a day or a week or a month or a few months, and then he drops them all at once and all but forgets it happened. It's not that he doesn't still love that person or thing, he's just got this new thing now. This is a big part of what keeps fires so lonely; they need someone to either hold their attention past that expiration date, or who's willing to stick around once the initial burst of omg-new-shiny interest wears off. (Incidentally, this is half of why earths and fires make some of the best friends -- the other half being that fire is good at giving earth the alone time they need, while the fire goes off and has adventures.) The most consistent thing Noah's had in his life is fighting, and even then, that's more fire's influence than his natural personality, and he rarely fights the same way in the same place more than four or five times.

This trait can go a little bit wrong for Noah. His attention is intense, almost obsessive, but he can be very impulsive, which means he ends up spending more time than he should have on something that he probably would have dropped had he even thought it all the way through before he started. He usually at least has pretty good hindsight and doesn't tend to make the same mistakes twice...except romantically. He's kindof a sucker for punishment with guys, and if he's wallowing in melodrama over something there's a fifty percent chance it's related to boy troubles. It's not that Noah is especially unlucky in love, he's just young still and his type is not a type that's primed for success with him, given his personality. Noah will often deliberately ignore important information because it displeases him, which we can see in his romantic inclinations: Noah claims to have no weirdness around not having a father, but he's almost exclusively into older, frequently married, men.

Noah has a good heart, though he's not overly concerned with morality. He doesn't like being told what to do most of the time, whether by God or a boss or whoever, and will pretty often do something just to be contrary, but he tries not to actively hurt anyone or anything -- he was once playing with fire in a forest and when an earth elemental came to tell him he was scaring the trees, he was crestfallen and immediately contrite. He's a lot more willing to take risks with his own safety than someone else's, and will behave much more recklessly if he's alone. He just doesn't have time to worry all the time, so he doesn't do it when he's the only one at risk; hurting himself is just a consequence of his own dumbass actions, hurting someone else is unacceptable. Generally, his nature is a loving one, even if complicated by his general destructiveness and partly motivated by wanting people to like him.

Noah sortof gets a free pass on certain qualities in his world because everyone just knows that fires are like that. He's somewhat aware that he gets away with certain things, and therefore in a subconscious way expects to get his way most of the time -- this is also part of his single-focus attention, making it hard for him to adjust to not getting his way. He can be a dick about it if he doesn't, and Noah can be extremely obnoxious in general. He's loud and rambunctious and happy and not very good at considering other people's feelings or needs (he tries, and is sad when he fails, but that doesn't mean he's good at it). By human standards, he would probably be considered an asshole for his destructiveness and failure to think things through (and whether they're right is entirely up to interpretation, whether you think generally good intentions make up for anything), even if he later tries to say he didn't mean it. And his destructiveness, as a vessel of fire, can be massive -- Noah can reach levels of careless cruelty or brutality that seem like they must be deliberate, but they're usually not. He also gets clingier and needier the more insecure he feels in a friendship or relationship, and his inability to focus on anything other than what he's going to be focusing on is too frustrating for a lot of people to deal with.

Appearance: Noah's tallish, around 6'2, with an athletic kind of body. He gains muscle easily and loses it slowly and is active enough that he rarely has a lot of fat on him. He has blonde hair, usually sortof spiky and sticking out although he doesn't generally do anything to it, blue eyes, and he sports a tan. Generally, he looks very California-surfer-y, with a very expressive, mobile face and usually wearing a smile.

Abilities: Noah essentially shares his body with the spirit of fire, like a demon possession only not evil. It changes his personality and biology in some fundamental ways, and if it were to be forcibly ripped from his body he would probably die, and at the very least become a vegetable. This is known because elements can only inhabit living bodies, and turning an elemental into a vampire or werewolf, past a certain age, will always kill or break them (younger elementals, in whom the element isn't very strong yet, can sometimes survive).

Noah is immune to any heat or fire, unless it's magical energy expressed as heat. Whether a fire spell from a magic user will work on him or just feel really good depends on exactly the magic system; in Noah's world, it will always work, because the only people who can manipulate actual fire are elementals. Generally, if a canon makes any distinction between magical fire and real fire, the magical fire will probably burn him. If a torch can be lit with magic and behave like a regular torch, it might not. He also has the ability to summon and manipulate flame. This is limited mostly by his willpower, but also certain environmental factors that boil down to how much the elements of fire and water are around him, but are measured with things like humidity level, temperature, whether there are other elementals nearby, etc. The presence of other fire elementals -- even children who don't have any use of their powers yet -- has a multiplying effect on Noah's powers. He can also take the physical form of fire, but only just. This is incredibly difficult, really only possible with prolonged meditation or a seriously life-threatening situation, and he's basically insensate in this form. His senses still function, but he doesn't have enough experience in this form to interpret them correctly. He's also very vulnerable to injury -- throwing a cup of water on him is like cutting out a random part of his body and could conceivably kill him. Noah also has the ability to feed fire his energy instead of letting it consume physical fuel. This is how he can prevent his clothes burning off if he lights himself on fire, for example, and he can keep a natural fire going for longer this way.

Noah's very vulnerable to cold, even apart from the potential for water poisoning. He's very susceptible to hypothermia, frostbite, and other cold-related maladies, although at his age he still falls within the range of human normal. Exposure to water will give him water poisoning, but the problem is pretty mild in an elemental's mid-twenties, and he's not in danger of serious illness or death until there's a lot of water involved, or water for a prolonged period of time. Some drizzling for the last bit of his walk home is enough to make him feel sortof gross and maybe get a little nauseous, but it would take being stuck in a heavy rainstorm for upwards of twenty minutes for him to be at risk of serious illness. However, all it would take to "de-claw" him for a few minutes, in terms of powers, would be to throw a cup of water on him. Water poisoning has the effect of "clogging the pipes" on Noah's ability to use fire, and he'd need to burn out the water exposure before he could use his powers normally again. He has trouble breathing air that's too humid, and he will not (and in fact cannot) take showers. He doesn't sweat much, and he can burn or scrape off most impurities. For the things he can't, he'll use alcohol.

Inventory:-a carved wood, vaguely tribal-looking amulet on a leather thong, slightly scorched, about the size of a baby's fist, that will protect someone from his powers
-house keys
-wallet, including a couple of cards, ID, some cash, a picture of himself and his mother when he was five, and a picture with a bunch of friends at the Academy
-his dark red leather jacket
-jeans, t-shirt, socks, boots
-his lucky cigarette lighter, a zippo magicked to never need a refill
-mostly full pack of cigarettes

Types of sex I am OK with: really almost anything! As long as it's consensual and can happen in reality, I'm down.
Kinks or practices I enjoy: Noah's kink list is here and a more general kink list for me as a player is here!
His favorites list is:
* Dirty Talking
* Fingers in Mouth
* Flogging / Whipping / Paddling
* Hair Pulling
* Older Partners
* Receiving Anal Sex
* Sexual Exhaustion
* Sexual Pain
* Spanking
* Verbal Abuse (like being called a slut)
Types of sex I'm not OK with: Anything that can't happen in reality. Inflation, vore, etc.
Kinks or practices I don't enjoy: I'm not into anything that involves actual injury. Welts/bruises/small cuts are okay, but serious blood loss, broken bones, sexual injury, etc are not.
Willing to write rape or dubcon?: dubcon, maybe. It depends on the circumstances. Rape, no.
Is fade to black OK?: sure, especially for a pairing we've done the sex on before or sex where nothing particularly interesting is expected to happen. I do enjoy buildup and afterglow, too! If we can have at least a bit of these I'll be as happy as if we played through :)