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Apr. 22nd, 2012 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andtimesCharacter Info
Fandom: Discworld - Thief of Time (WARNING: Lol, such spoilers :X )
Version: Original
Name: Lobsang Ludd
Age: ... um. 17? By now? Maybe?
City of Residence: Blüdhaven
Background: First off, Lobsang comes from Discworld which is, as the name suggests, shaped like a disc. This flat planet rests on the back of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of Great A'Tuin the star turtle. The little sun and moon follow complicated paths around this whole ensemble. In this universe that's somewhere towards the edge of the normal curve so far as universes go, lot of things you might not think of as real are a lot more real than you'd think they'd be. It is very much a world created.
Once upon a time, Time (the dark-haired lady who is Discworld's anthropomorphic personification of time, lowercase) and Wen the Eternally Surprised (founder of the History Monks) fell in love. And had a son. Well, two sons. The same son born twice, just a minute apart. On the advice of their midwife, the two infants were given to others to raise so that they might live out human lives while waiting to come into their own. They were sent off to Ankh-Morpork to learn a trade.
Newgate Ludd was a foundling of the Ankh-Morpork Thieves' Guild until he was discovered by a traveling History Monk while performing a complicated manipulation of time, apparently on reflex and out of self-preservation. He was renamed Lobsang and taken to the monastery up the Ramtop Mountains for training in this manipulation; for the History Monks, time is a flowing entity that can be changed or moved. People's minds are designed to play with time. Lobsang was uncannily talented, and so, to keep him out of everyone's hair (so to speak), he was apprenticed to The Sweeper, Lu-Tze, who was pretty unconventional in his own right. Lobsang is something like the hero of this little story.
Jeremy Clockson was a foundling of the Ankh-Morpork Clockmakers' Guild where he specialized in making accurate clocks. Very very accurate clocks. For Jeremy, time was rigid and uncompromising - every second was exactly a second, and he always knew exactly when it was. The chronos counterpart, maybe, to Lobsang's kairos. Jeremy's devotion to precision occasionally caused him "moments" and everyone else "incidents", but he took medication for that, thank you, and the Guild was very understanding of those who might not tick with the rest of humanity. He's something like the villain of this story, albeit an unintentional one.
More likely, the villains would be the Auditors of Reality - a group of not-quite-beings who avoid Death and dying by never having life to begin with. They make sure the laws of physics are followed as much as they can be in a universe such as the Disc's. They observe and they take notes and they quantify. They are the Rules. The Auditors would hate life, which is disorderly, and would hate people more because they are even more disorderly, except for the fact that hate is an emotion, and thus a sign of personality. The Auditors avoid acquiring personalities and individuality and all things associated with being alive - or at least they try. Life has a tendency of getting to you.
In an effort to end the world (by freezing time), they hire Jeremy to create a glass clock. Or really: The Glass Clock. This is the theoretical perfect clock that would tick with the universe and always, always be accurate. A dream come true for Jeremy. However, unbeknown to all of humanity but the History Monks, it would also stop – and then break – history and the universe and generally cause apocalypse. It sort of fell to Lobsang to save the day.
In every instant, that impossibly quick transformation of what was 'now' into 'then', Time destroys the universe of the present and recreates it – almost identical but never exactly the same - in what was the future and is now the new present. By creating The Glass Clock, Jeremy Clockson brought about the end of the world.
With the help of Lu-Tze, Death's granddaughter, an insane rogue ex-Auditor, and the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, Lobsang Ludd saved the world and put everything back the way it belonged, almost as good as new. In the middle of all of this stuff (actually, a bit more toward the end, really), Jeremy and Lobsang found each other and became whole. That is, they fused. Ta-da, one body, one soul, two histories of lifetimes in one. One whole person - the son of Time.
With the resolution to the whole apocalypse thing, and having at last inherited his mother's powers along with stronger influences of his immortal nature, Lobsang sort of took up the family business and the mantle of Time. For the most part, he sacrifices his human life (and relationships) to carry out his mother's duties as the Disc's second Time.
.
.
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Er, note: For the sake of
Personality: When the two "brothers" merged, they/he chose to keep the name Lobsang as Lobsang was the one who had the happier memories. However, the, uh, new Lobsang is still a combination of both. While Lobsang-now-Time seemed to predominantly composed of Lobsang traits, probably out of necessity, there will likely be Jeremy traits hanging around too. (Like you don't have enough split boys already). I find it easier to describe them separately:
As an apprentice of the History Monks, Lobsang often seemed to pick up on new lessons even before they were taught, then quickly became bored and frustrated. He was impatient and mischievous, and frankly a bit of a brat, and it didn't help at all that he had been first raised by the Thieves' Guild of Ankh-Morpork before being sent to the mountains to live with monks. His reluctant mentor could empathize.
Being apprenticed to Lu-Tze did wonders for maturing the kid and reducing some of that cocky attitude. Lu-Tze taught him to really think ("Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.") and gave him the space he needed to discover himself, even before he discovered himself. Saving the world and reach a sort of understandign with a very no-nonsense schoolteacher (the aforementioned granddaughter of Death) probably helped too.
Jeremy was brilliant at his craft, but also obsessive and socially maladjusted. Very obsessive and socially maladjusted. Carrying out a conversation for several minutes was a feat. He had a history of violence when others were deliberately inaccurate with their timekeeping, but he was given medication and also kept under careful observation by his guild (which was sympathetic to the ways of erratic geniuses, being entirely composed of clockmakers).
For the most part, he was quiet and isolated, completely absorbed by whatever his current project was, and failing completely at interacting with other people. He only ever seemed to become passionate when it came to talking about clocks and time-related theories. Jeremy wasn't completely unaware of his environment – there were hints at the beginning of an almost-romance (with the aforementioned ex-Auditor), but he and Lobsang fused before anything came of it. He didn't break his universe on purpose.
Powers: Lobsang's training with the Thieves' Guild was incomplete, but adequate. Sizing up buildings and similar locations – entrances, exits, where valuables are probably kept – comes pretty naturally to him, but he does need that early familiarization. Not being in his own city will be jarring. Picking pockets, climbing walls, and related skills are also a part of that arsenal.
He was raised in the largest, dirtiest, definitely smelliest city in his world (which is, by the way, probably something like London) and probably knows his way around a scrape. he was then taught to fight without weapons in the training dojos of the History Monks. While he wasn't taught deja-fu – where strikes move through time as well as space – he may have picked it up from his master who is the only person in their world who could do it. The rest of his training with Lu-Tze was mostly in what passes for common sense on the Disc.
At the dojos, Lobsang learned a number of martial arts (sna-fu, okidoki), and generally did rather well thanks to his instinctive ability to slice. and learned. Slicing is a technique where time is sliced into smaller and smaller parts – meaning to everyone else, he is moving very fast. Other useful skills include, for example, being able to rust metal doors in minutes. He also sometimes has negative reaction time - he can dodge before you start striking.
While he can fight dirty, on some level, Lobsang believes in fighting fair. He hesitates to strike a woman(-shaped being) and is surprised by tricks and cheating. Lu-Tze never completely cured him of these nobler sentiments, to the frustration of his more sensible teammates. His big fight to save the world involved people who exploded from feeling some pain or even from eating chocolate (sensory overload); against an opponent who really knows his/her business, he's going to have some problems.
Weaknesses: Since he's accustomed to being able to play with time and most of his fighting techniques involve some form of slicing, he's a lot less effective in a timeless environment where he only has ordinary hand-to-hand to rely on.
Journal Sample: Ha, I'm not sure how I feel about this city. Are people always this helpful? I can't help but think it's some sort of trick, the way no one's tried to knock me over yet.
Who do I see about getting a Guild license? Although I don't know if I really want to take up thieving again, I'm pretty sure I can qualify. Unless someone has other ideas?
RP Sample: Well. That had been rather... disorienting. Which wasn't a sensation Lobsang had encountered in quite a long span of relative time. Or, rather, it was one he had well been able to set aside and ignore in favor of carrying out his duties – something of a background buzzing and forgettable reminder of presence, like blinking. The very fact that he was now unable to do so was as much an indication of the bizarreness of his current situation as of his new (old, familiar, impossible) state of being.
Human. Or almost human, as grounded to his mortal form as he had ever been. He was thinking in four dimensions. Lobsang took a moment to really absorb this incredible realization before returning to taking stock of his current situation.
Right. So, universe placement. He judged it to be perhaps a few steps forward from his origin's.
A city. Lobsang sniffed the air tentatively – and stopped. Abruptly. Completely different from Ankh-Morpork, except for how it wasn't. It was safe to conclude that this while it wasn't likely AM's counterpart, this city definitely shared a few traits.
A... Roundworld? This should be interesting. Mentally, he ran through the various concepts that had been associated with the majority of Roundworlds he knew, and was only minutely reassured. Intellectually, he knew that of course people don't fall off the bottom. As Time, he had once even understood exactly why it was so, but the sudden return to his half-mortal self meant his perspective had also sized back, becoming so so small.
When your perspective is small, the range of thoughts you can have is proportionally larger. Limitations like new freedom. Bewilderment was like coming home. A pang of regret that he would not be finding Susan in this world, soothed, then smothered beneath eagerness to be living.
While he might not know why he was here (surely not something on his end of things?), he wasn't overly concerned. His mother was fully capable of looking after things while he was away, and he wasn't really about to say no to an unexpected vacation. It wasn't as though he was abandoning his duties if he wasn't really in a position to carry them out, right?
Lobsang set down a likely looking street with a tiny half-smile. Time to meet the city.
