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enodiamod
BASICS
nameParson Starling
alias
Reverend
(as in, "going to see the Reverend to get hitched before the mission")
division
operations / contingent explorer
occupation
age & dob
31, AUG 4 (leo)
pronouns
he/him
family
mother; Bonnie Che Starling
father; Jeff Starling
siblings; 5 older sisters, ranging from 33 to 41 and including a set of twins
CONCEPT
Mixed-up mixologist might settle down once the world stops spinning.POWERS
emulsification;In short, Parson is able to create a temporary link between any two living entities. For its duration, the link grants a sort of telepathic and empathic bond. If the two linked entities are also Liminal, they are additionally able to share their own abilities with each other.
more details...
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Parson's "emulsification" ability is colloquially known around Enodia as "getting hitched" or "hitching." Parson himself also occasionally refers to it as "mixing drinks" when he's being coy or "making mayonnaise" when he's being crude.
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The Psychic Link: the link between two hitched entities grants a limited psychic and empathic bond. Physical sensations, surface thoughts, and surface emotions are shared. You can't plumb the mind of the person you're hitched to, but you can communicate wordlessly and across a couple of football fields' worth of distance.
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Power Sharing: hitched Liminals can tap into each others' powers. Hitching does not confer skill, and some subjects may have difficulty utilizing or controlling their new temporary abilities. Additionally, a borrowed power always manifests as a weaker version of the original.
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Power Blending: in some rare instances, two Liminals may be able to blend their abilities into wholly new powers. This is more likely to happen if the joined Liminals share similar powers or have a strong personal connection or bond of some sort. THIS ASPECT OF PARSON'S POWERS IS AT MOD DISCRETION; please seek mod approval before moving forward with a blended ability.
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Hitches are established through touch. The link must be "opened" by touching one subject and then "closed" by touching another. Holding a hitch "open" takes a great deal of concentration. Parson typically only holds hitches open for seconds, but in the right conditions can hold a hitch open for upwards of 2 minutes before it slips loose and closes.
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Parson can control how long a hitch lasts to a fine degree, but longer hitches do drain him more, leaving him physically and mentally fatigued (and hungry). For safety reasons, he will not establish a link that lasts longer than 5 hours; he is unsure of what his upper limits are.
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Parson does not need to concentrate to maintain a hitch. The "strength" of the hitch, and by extension its duration, is established with the link itself.
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It isn't too hard for Parson to establish a link, but a number of factors affect how draining it is to create one. The shorter the duration and quicker the link is established, the more he can do in one go before he needs a break.
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Being hitched is not a painful experience, but it can sometimes feel a little like being on psychedelics. The more time you spend hitching, the less weird the experience is.
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Hitches usually fade out slowly over a period of minutes. Abruptly broken hitches can occur if one party is knocked unconscious; this experience is typically painful for one or both subjects.
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There is evidence indicating that long hitches or catastrophically broken hitches can potentially change one or both subjects, causing a "burn" effect where personality traits, emotions, or powers linger after the hitch has ended. Hence Parson's time limit.
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- Parson most frequently uses this ability to hitch himself to someone to gain more useful abilities when in the field. On a case-by-case basis, he'll also hitch others, but there's a bit of a process.
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Please check the Binding Service Post before saying that Parson has linked your character with another. While I'm generally 100% game for hijinks and drama, I want to be informed of any potentially hairy plots that Parson could get himself tangled up in by binding characters.
inertia control;
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In theory, Parson is able to manipulate the inertia of himself or any small object through touch.
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Ideally, he uses this to make a cannonball of himself, stand up to otherwise overwhelming force, or reinforce blows in a fight. It...does not always work that way in practice.
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At the moment, Parson is only able to consciously control his own body's inertia. Though he does possess the capacity to alter the inertia of other things through touch, he is unable to willfully control this.
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These powers often malfunction in inconvenient ways, rendering him or his limbs inert or transferring inertia to objects Parson is touching at random. Oddly, stress does not seem to affect the malfunction rate of these abilities.
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These unruly powers were permanently imparted to him after the death of Gavin Waldinger.
PERSONALITY
There's no doubt you've seen Parson before, the leading man in a 90s rom-com, sweet and smiling and interested. He's a presence as colorful as the drinks he mixes at The Space Between, and that's by design. He's putting in full time hours making sure you don't think he's any more complicated than your favorite chick flick hero.It's not that he's serving up an entirely false bill of goods. There's a great deal of truth to his mask. Parson is genuinely, almost indefatigably upbeat and gregarious. He likes people, likes their stories (hearing them and sharing them with others), commits the important details to memory, and always seems to have room for more information. He tries to see the best in everything -- people and situations, both -- and tends to be baffled when things don't go his way. If folks mistakenly also assume that he's shallow or an airhead? Well, that's fine.
What he's guarding so carefully is a perfectionist streak a mile wide, one that sometimes extends to his expectations for others more than is appropriate. He needs everything to be just so, and has a hard time letting go when it isn't. Steadfast, yes, but exacting and terminally stubborn, as well. Thankfully, he's sort of single-minded about it -- he's not much concerned with how things are going outside of his lane, and manages to rein in his judgmental, competitive nature enough to not be wholly intolerable.
It still makes him sort of tough to deal with -- eccentric, self-involved, and often irritating. That's why the mask is there. So you don't bother getting to know him well enough to see all the gremlin stuff beneath.
There's a wrench in the works, though. A still somewhat recent accident that's left him grappling with unfamiliar feelings about everything from near strangers to favorite flavor of ice cream. He's still trying to pick out the parts of him that are actually Gavin Waldinger -- a sudden combativeness at odds with his natural people-pleaser tendencies is Symptom Zero, but there's also the strange turn for his sense of humor. Louder, darker, more sarcastic.
He hates it all on principle, even if this new weird part of him is doing its best to embrace giving up the mask.
😊: upbeat, steadfast, gregarious, organized, friendly, good listener, curious, resourceful
🤷: performatively courageous, outgoing, idealistic, eccentric, calculating, gallows humor
🔥: gossip, self-involved, perfectionist, superficially judgmental, terrified of failure, stressed 100% of the time, cosplaying as a normal person and not sure how to stop, vascillates between people-pleaser & combative/ornery, what could one banana cost five dollars
APPEARANCE
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6ft, athletic/strength-building build
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very clean cut, meticulous about hair/skin
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likes leather jackets in bright colors, but otherwise a t-shirts and jeans kinda fella
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has contacts, avoids wearing glasses
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no tattoos. lots of scars from teenage athletics, general stupidity, & fieldwork
HISTORY
Parson is not alone in being obnoxious. The whole family has been running like they're from that one 2000s Nutri-Grain commercial for the last half century. It started with mom and dad, their romance plucked from the pages of at least five different Hallmark movie scripts. She, a wealthy real estate investment banker from New York on one last girls' weekend before getting hitched; he, a ski instructor in Bend, Oregon. Five days and a whole lot of drama later, one engagement was broken and another had begun.Six babies total eventually followed what was an opulent but still extremely country-themed wedding. Over the next 12 years, the Starlings added five girls -- a set of twins among them -- and one boy, Parson, to their party. Unsurprisingly given how this story started, all six of them hit the ground running, and haven't really stopped since.
As the youngest and the only boy, Parson endured an unbelievable amount of torment, pressure, and indulgence. It's honestly a wonder he didn't turn out a much, much bigger asshole.
While always at least a little desperate for the attention and approval of his five older sisters, he also valued his privacy and identity as a singular person and not part of a larger, overly caffienated family unit. As soon as he was old enough, he started working. Most of his childhood was a long string of practices, games, performances, and gigs. Piano, lacrosse, delivering papers. Basketball, boy scouts, walking dogs. Working at that Blockbuster, as a lifeguard, then eventually, for his senior year, as a hiking guide and ski instructor, just like dear old dad.
The rifts happened in there, somewhere, and while one did open not too far from home, Parson was far too busy, and his life too well insulated by the family's wealth and his affluent community, for it to affect him all that much. His family hadn't been touched with "gifts" from the portals, and those neighbors who had generally moved away. It was something distant and strange. Incomprehensible, and so he didn't bother trying to comprehend it.
He may've been valedictorian of his high school graduating class, but college, with its comparative lack of structure and oversight, proved a bit more challenging than he was prepared for. Parson burnt the candle at both ends trying to stay on top of things, and the cracks started to show. He hopped majors several times and took multiple study abroad opportunities, including a Semester At Sea as a sophomore when his major was, briefly, Marine Biology.
He was twenty, taking a gap year to teach English abroad and working nights as a "himbo" in a themed "muscle man" bar for fun money, when his powers manifested. Empathetic links have their advantages when you're young and hot. Telepathic ones, not so much. Compelled to do what society had deemed "the right thing", he registered with IRIS and fell into work with the agency. That gap year became two, and then three, as he gradually fell from bartending to working with IRIS to explore and document Riftlands across the country. Eventually, his skills came into demand, and he distinguished himself as a field agent.
For the next handful of years, Parson split his time between field work, bartending, and finishing his degree -- in Zoology, of all things. Enodia was supposed to be temporary. As a young but experienced field agent, he was meant to help the fledgling Exploration division there establish itself in the region. They kept him there, though. For the most part, he didn't mind, though he did request transfer at least once.
Parson's non-stop full-throttle cannonballing through life finally went off the rails shortly before the blip. What should have been a routine foray into the Riftlands ended in tragedy, when a fellow explorer -- one Parson was bound to -- was killed by what Parson is 99% sure was his own negligence. The result was catastrophic. Gavin Waldinger was killed, and Parson was gravely injured as a result. When he came to days later, he was different, and Gavin's powers hadn't left him.
Parson was on leave, busying himself mainly with work at The Space Between, when the blip happened. His still haywire abilities endangered him, again, but he was saved by a coworker who, up until then, he believed wouldn't have pissed on him if he were on fire.
He spent the ensuing three months visiting family, trying to decide whether he'd even return to Enodia or retire from that work. What brought him back was, ultimately, the bar. The previous owner was getting old. Tired of living in relative isolation, and ready to move closer to her grandkids. She bequeathed the Space to her three senior bartenders -- Parson among them -- and committed to moving south. It seemed Parson's decision had been made for him.
NOTES
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Parson's natural accent is decidedly West Coast, but since The Accident, he sometimes (to his complete mortification) slips into a faintly British accent.
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Owing to his major jumping in college, Parson has a cursory knowledge of a lot of different topics, mostly in the sciences. He takes advantage of all those Chemistry classes to get fancy with his mixed drinks.
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He does know how to do all the ridiculous flippy Tom Cruise in Cocktail shit. He doesn't break it out unless he thinks it'll net him a good tip.
PERMISSIONS
WRITING: Whatever works for you, bub. I default to 3rd person, present tense and enjoy gdocs or threading, but can switch it up.
BACKTAGGING: Yes please. I am catastrophically slow at comment RP and get overwhelmed quick. Feel free to tap me about dropped stuff.
THREADHOPPING: Go for it, but I do not do it, myself. If you want me to show up to something I'm not already in, please link me directly OOC. I am a vampire and will not interrupt a conversation that my character is not already a part of unless specifically invited ooc or the vibe is very obviously a large group chat, even if my character is name dropped. I am not exaggerating lmao it's a wonder I ever make activity.
PRIVATE FILTERS: If a post is bumping, I totally don't mind at all (I love when a post I make becomes a massive shitpost). Once the post has died down though, please move extremely long private messages (like 40+ replies) to IC spam/another post. Just for my mailbox, mostly. I appreciate it!
SENSITIVE TOPICS: I will curate my own experience and will not engage with or will dip from things that make me uncomfortable. Appreciate standard TWs, though. If it comes up, please put pictures of spiders under a cut/as a hyperlink and not an embed, and add a warning in a post if there are pictures in comments. I appreciate it so much thank you. ;A;
IC SENSITIVE TOPICS: Loss of a loved one. Gavin Waldinger and his various romantic trysts. Liminals as a danger. "Normal" Human Behavior. This all said, Parson's powers effectively give him a mini ego death every time he hitches to someone, and as a consequence he tends to ... not react in the ways one might expect.
SMUT: I max out at PG-13 in prose. Fade 2 Black for hornie scenes. Totally fine with discussing what happened/the nature of a relationship OOC, though.
CONFLICT: Parson is historically a people-pleaser, but since The Accident, has become markedly more combative, unwilling to be a doormat. He tends to vacillate between conflict avoidance and setting very firm boundaries, but he's not out here picking fights. Either way, this is likely a jarring change for those who know him.
OOC note: I will allow my characters to ride to complete and irreversible emotional ruin in an It's A Small World boat if that's where their arc is going, but I never, ever want to disrupt someone else's plot or make someone else uncomfortable. I will do my best to reach out to you OOC before doing anything brash. Please just hit me up if a plot is not going in a direction you're comfortable with!!
VIOLENCE: Accustomed to roughhousing but generally pretty gentle. Will typically not throw the first punch in conflict, but will not back down from a fight, and is not afraid to hop into a brawl to back up a pal.
BADMOUTHING: I don't mind, and Parson probably doesn't mind, either. Ego death, grief, etc. I usually keep my own badmouthing RP to public, unfiltered posts; it's an open invitation to call my character out!!
SHIPPING, CRUSHES, ROMANCE: Parson is bi, out, and proud (of his terrible taste in men). Gay awakening was 100% Tim Curry's smog monster in FernGully sorry not sorry. He is generally dtf, and is active on a few dating apps. Parson lost the man who he was pretty sure was going to be The One back in December 2022, and subsequently had that man's personality fuse with his own. Suffice it to say, genuine romantic overtures may cause him to evaporate. You've got to trick him with a box, a stick, some string, and a piece of cheese.
OOC note: I like to play flirtatious characters and characters who sleep around. Sometimes my characters will get crushes that are meant to evaporate, but I tend to go pt pt pt pt pt MEEP MEEP pew when I sense actual romo lmfao I'm sorry. I'm unable to be normal. That said, I'm open to shipping, but the vibes have to be just right, and I am not ready to ship until I'm comfortable with my character and feel that they've got an established social circle first.