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justanexpressionROUTE 29
Player
Name: Plague
Personal Journal:corellianrogue
E-mail: candykatt@gmail.com
AIM/MSN: AIM - CorsecGreenXWing
Timezone: CST (-6 GMT)
Current Characters in Route: none
Character
Name: Jack Frost
Series: Rise of the Guardians
Timeline: post-movie
Canon Resource Links: Jack at RotG Wiki
RotG at regular Wiki
One note: Jack’s age is never officially given in the canon (yet, at least), but is listed variously as either 14 or 17. Since the creator of the series says he’s 14, that’s what I go with.
Personality:
While Jack has seen a great many things and been a great many places in the 300 years since he died, he’s still very much stuck in the body and mind of a teenage boy. He’s just as rash and impulsive and moody and prone to bouts of foolishness as any average 14-year-old, not to mention the easy sarcasm of a teenager who assumes he must be smarter than all the adults around him. His life is a permanent snowday and he’s just fine with no more responsibility than he chooses to give himself. As Jack himself puts it when he first meets the other Guardians, they’re “hard work and deadlines, and I’m snowballs and fun times.” He’s also a 14-year-old who’s spent 300 years effectively alone, unable to be seen by the children that he enjoys spending time around and making happy. Most of the time, he keeps himself entertained and distracted, but the isolation does occasionally leave him open to darker moods and loneliness. Even the moon, which gave him his powers and his name, never spoke to him again. To some extent, before he joins them, he views the other Guardians with resentment, believing that they receive all the praise and love of children despite never spending any real time around children like he does. He even amuses himself by causing them trouble, such as by starting “the Blizzard of ‘68” on Easter Sunday, much to the annoyance of Bunnymund the Easter Bunny.
Through the events of the movie, Jack discovers his Center and the purpose the Man in the Moon had for creating him, as well as gaining his memories of his life before he died and became Jack Frost the winter spirit. When he was still alive, he saved his sister by pushing his own fear aside and making a game out of getting her to safety. His actions ended up getting him killed, but that same courage and quick thinking have since served him well. As the Guardian of Fun, and with children who finally believe in him and can see him, Jack also has more of a purpose and drive than he ever had before. Jack isn’t afraid of being stubborn when he wants to get his way, which combines with a competitive streak a mile long and that innate teenage belief that he’s always right to make a dangerous combination.
Although Jack is fully capable of being responsible if there’s a good reason in it for him, such as helping one of his fellow Guardians, he much prefers goofing off and having fun. His very favorite activity is giving kids a snow day, so that they can spend the day goofing off and having fun with him, whether they can see him or not. He’s less fond of adults as they can’t see him and tend to have lost the sense of fun that kids have, so while he’ll start a snowball fight or make the perfect conditions for sledding for a child, when his attentions stray to adults, they tend to result in things that are more fun for him than the adult. A suddenly slippery patch of ice where it was clear sidewalk before, or a gust of wind that destroys a carefully-raked pile of leaves are both in his arsenal of tricks. He’s not malicious, and he wouldn’t go so far as to actually hurt someone deliberately, but his ideas tend to stop at ‘I’ll have fun doing that!’ without always considering the person on the other side. That lack of forethought can get him in trouble, especially when paired with his impulsiveness, and even more especially when they keep him from following or recognizing good advice from people who really do know better. Fortunately for him, the same creativity and sense of fun that lets a child look at a stick and see a horse or a sword or a thousand other things, gives Jack the ability to think on his feet in ways that an adult maybe wouldn’t, which helps balance out his more regrettable decisions.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
+Resourceful
Anything can be a game or a toy to a child, and Jack has adapted that resourcefulness to serve him well in good times and bad.
+Fun
The Guardian of Fun is nothing if not a mood-maker. He can brighten the worst of days with a well-played joke or just being a cheerful presence.
+Adaptable
He takes most things pretty well in stride. Suddenly waking up with ice powers? Awesome! Getting his memories back and realizing he’d once had a family? Cool, but still gotta save the world! Accidentally helping the bad guy ruin Easter? Okay, that one slows him down a bit, but then it’s right back on the horse.
+Protective
When he was still human, Jack died saving his little sister, and that much hasn’t changed about him since. He’ll do whatever it takes to protect anyone he cares about.
+/- Stubborn
Jack is stubborn as the day is long, to borrow an old phrase. This can help him remain steady in the face of overwhelming odds, but it also tends to send him headfirst into terrible ideas.
+/- He’s a 300-year-old teenager
This is both the biggest positive and the hugest negative, for numerous reasons. Is it possible to be both up on current events and completely behind the times? Somehow, Jack manages. He may know all the current trends and cool bits of tech... but he’s never used any of them. Being invisible makes it kind of hard to pose for pictures, and who would he call with a cell phone? He’s filled with eternal teenage snark, and he’s been around enough years to figure out the best possible prank ideas, plus he’s forever young enough to think they’re hilarious. And even centuries of faith in his abilities can’t shake the innate teenage fear that everyone is secretly judging him.
+/- Trusting
He tends to have the mindset of ‘if they aren’t actively trying to kill me, how bad could they be?’ It’s not that he’s stupid, far from it, or even really naive per se. He knows bad people exist, and he does have a usually reliable sense of self-preservation (as much as he needs one, being dead and all), it’s just that his own years of never being believed in makes him hesitant to do the same to others. He tends to trust people right up to (and sometimes after) he’s been shown otherwise. That’s great for meeting new people, since he’ll make friends with just about anyone given half a chance, but it also means he’s the sort that believes the villain’s sob-story monologue and doesn’t realize till after that he’s missing his wallet and a kidney.
-Childish
Jack is ultimately still very young. It shows in his childish pranks and aversion to responsibility. In fact, really, his childish everything.
-Afraid of being forgotten
After so long being visible only to other spirits and inhuman beings, Jack’s greatest fear is being alone and invisible with no one believing in him.
-Caution? What’s that?
Look before you leap? Jack might as well have never even heard such an expression. Where would be the fun in that?
-Impulsive
Jack isn’t stupid, far from it, but sometimes his actions really are. Chasing off after the bad guy all by himself only seems like a good idea if you don’t think about it at all first.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Seel
Password: Strawberry Marmalade
Samples
First Person Sample:
[The angle when the gear turns on is... strange. Like it’s being held by someone too distracted to pay attention to where it might be pointing. There’s part of a chin, a shoulder, and plenty of scenery. The top of a whitish blob flops past the bottom of the screen. From the sound it makes, it must be a Seel.]
This is really weird. You know that?
[The Seel gives a cheerful affirmative from somewhere. Suddenly, the picture shifts, moving erratically until it stops with a soft thud as the gear is dropped and lands in the grass. At least it has a good view, now, framing most of a boy in his teens, crouching on his toes next to a backpack as he rummages through it, occasionally pulling things out for a closer look. His blue hooded sweatshirt has seen better days, and his pants don’t seem to be from quite the right century. Together with the ice-white hair, it makes something of an odd picture.]
If this is... Naw, it’s way too cutesy to be one of Pitch’s tricks.
[He looks up, past the gear at where the sounds of the Seel are coming from. His smile grows, just a bit.]
You sure you’re not a Selkie?
[A negative. The gear is nudged closer, and he laughs as he reaches for it.]
Okay, okay. Remind me to introduce you to Sandy sometime.
Third Person Sample:
Jack stared up at the sky, doing his best to mentally drown out the quiet music that seemed to follow him everywhere. He got the impression it did that to everyone, though, so it got to be the least of his concerns right now.
He was perched in the crook of a tree, hands behind his head as he braced his back against the trunk and his legs on one of the larger branches, about ten feet closer to the ground than he’d like. Even getting that far had been a challenge, though, without the wind and his powers helping him. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d relied on them until now.
Down below, somewhere in the shadow of the tree, he could hear Phil snoring. He grinned to himself, pleased. The real Phil wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment, of course, but hey, what he didn’t know probably wouldn’t kill him. Not that he’d find out unless Jack found a way out of here. Now there was a sobering thought.
“There’s got to be some big plan in play here, right? Some really important plan that makes absolutely no sense at all?” Of course, Manny wasn’t in the sky here, and even if he was, Jack knew there likely wouldn’t have been an answer, anyway. Luckily, he was no stranger to talking to himself. Except he didn’t have to, now, did he?
He swung himself forward to straddle the branch, looking around until he spotted Phil. “Not that you can talk.”
Phil looked up, barking reproachfully. Jack laughed. “Okay, how about I can’t listen? How’s that?”
The Seel made a happier sound, flopping in a circle before looking up at Jack again, expectantly this time. “What? Someone stuck in a well?”
“Seel!”
“Cat got your tongue?”
“SEEL!”
He grinned, swinging down to hang from the branch and drop to his feet in a crouch. He could remember doing that plenty of times when he’d still been alive, but a memory didn’t make it feel any less strange when the wind wasn’t there to catch him. Once he’d caught his balance, he stood and stretched, before flicking Phil’s horn lightly with his fingers. “And yet, somehow you still make more sense than Bunny.” He grabbed his backpack and slung it on. “Come on. There’s got to something fun around here somewhere, right?”
“Seel!”
MAISON DE PORTES
Player's Name: Plague
Contact info: email: candykatt@gmail.com AIM: CorsecGreenXWing Plurk: Jaetopus
DW: personal: corellianrogue; if it’s okay for me to reuse a journal, Jack’s will be justanexpression (currently in use at Route 29)
Character: Jack Frost
Canon: Rise of the Guardians
Version: movie
Canon Point: Toward the end of the movie, after getting his memories back and fixing his staff, but before getting back to save Jamie and the other Guardians, for maximum frustration at being trapped.
Age: Appears 14, technically closer to 314 (give or take)
Gender: male
History: http://riseoftheguardians.wikia.com/wiki/Rise_of_the_Guardians For a brief summary of the movie itself
Jack was born Jackson Overland Frost sometime in the late 1600s or early 1700s in the Pennsylvania colony, near what would become Burgess, Pennsylvania. While life as a colonist wouldn’t have been easy, he and his younger sister still found time for fun outings such as going ice skating in the winter. Unfortunately, while skating with his sister one late spring day, neither of them had expected the ice to be as thin as it was. When his sister skated onto a patch that threatened to give out under her weight, Jack turned the dangerous situation into a game, ultimately saving his sister’s life at the expense of his own.
An unknown time later, the new winter spirit Jack Frost was awakened from the frozen pond he’d died in and given powers by the Man in the Moon who told him only his name and nothing else. At first, his new ability to fly and control ice and snow was miraculous and wonderful for Jack, until he stumbled upon the nearby village, having no memories of his own, and realized that no one could see or touch him. In fact, they walked directly through him. Through the next three hundred years, this would remain the same. Normal humans had no idea he was there because they didn’t believe in him, and the supernatural beings he ran across either ignored him or saw his boyish attitude toward fun and games as something to be shunned. It hardly helped matters that he tended to deliberately antagonize some of them, especially the “big four” such as Bunnymund the Easter Bunny and the yeti workers at Nicholas St. North’s toy workshop.
Forward to three hundred years later and the reappearance of the Guardians’ old enemy Pitch Black in the events of the movie. When the Man in the Moon decided that the Guardians would need more help this time around, he picked Jack Frost to step in. Of course, no one asked Jack for his opinion before dragging him into the middle of everything. At first, he was reluctant to team up, seeing the Guardians as fundamentally different and unlike him, but through helping them defeat Pitch and protecting the children he’d grown to know and care about over the course of the movie, he learned about himself, and not just from the memories revealed by his baby teeth. He discovered his Center, his purpose, as the Guardian of Fun, and discovered a new faith in himself in the process.
Personality: (Oh lord, this is so long, I’m sorry. -_-)
While Jack has seen a great many things and been a great many places in the 300 years since he died, he’s still very much stuck in the body and mind of a teenage boy. He’s just as rash and impulsive and moody and prone to bouts of foolishness as any average 14-year-old, not to mention the easy sarcasm of a teenager who assumes he must be smarter than all the adults around him. As Jack himself puts it when he first meets the other Guardians, they’re “hard work and deadlines, and I’m snowballs and fun times.” He’s fully capable of being responsible if there’s a good reason for it, but he much prefers goofing off. He’s also a 14-year-old who’s spent 300 years effectively alone, unable to be seen by the children that he enjoys spending time around and making happy. Most of the time, he keeps himself entertained and distracted, but the isolation does occasionally leave him open to darker moods and loneliness. Even the moon, which gave him his powers and his name, never spoke to him again.
Through the events of the movie, Jack discovers his Center and the purpose the Man in the Moon had for creating him, as well as gaining his memories of his life before he died and became Jack Frost the winter spirit. When he was still alive, he saved his sister by pushing his own fear aside and making a game out of getting her to safety. His actions ended up getting him killed, but that same courage and quick thinking have since served him well. Jack isn’t afraid of being stubborn when he wants to get his way, which combines with a competitive streak a mile long and that innate teenage belief that he’s always right to make a dangerous combination.
He much prefers the company of other kids instead of adults as they usually lose the sense of fun that kids have. While he’ll start a snowball fight or make the perfect conditions for sledding for a child, when his attentions stray to adults, they tend to result in things that are more fun for him than the adult. A suddenly slippery patch of ice where it was clear sidewalk before, or a gust of wind that destroys a carefully-raked pile of leaves are both in his arsenal of tricks. He’s not malicious, and he wouldn’t go so far as to actually hurt someone deliberately, but his ideas tend to stop at ‘I’ll have fun doing that!’ without always considering the person on the other side. That lack of forethought can get him in trouble, especially when paired with his impulsiveness, and even more especially when together they keep him from following or recognizing good advice from people who really do know better. Fortunately for him, the same creativity and sense of fun that lets a child look at a stick and see a horse or a sword or a thousand other things - or that lets a boy look at his terrified sister and make a game of hopscotch out of saving her life - gives Jack the ability to think on his feet in ways that an adult maybe wouldn’t, which helps balance out his more regrettable decisions.
Fears: Jack’s greatest fear is being forgotten or being ignored and invisible. He’s grown used to living with it, mostly by interacting with as many people as possible, even if they don’t notice him. He can still affect the real world, making them see what he does, if not him. People walking through him, as if he’s a ghost or not even there, that’s the worst.
He’s also not the hugest fan of water. Oh, FROZEN water, sure, that’s fine, but considering he died by drowning under the ice of a pond, he’s understandably not so fond of being submerged. Even if he doesn’t technically need to breath anymore.
Since I’m taking him from after he’s got his memories back, I’d also like to play with his fear of losing people he cares about (and, importantly, who depend on him). Obviously, no matter how well he hid it, he was terrified while trying to save his sister, and he’d have done just about anything Pitch told him to to save Baby Tooth in Antarctica, so while not exactly a fear he’d recognize on its own, it could be fun to explore.
Weaknesses: “These things might be used against you important later. Please be detailed.” Wow, you sound so professional about it. I love it. XD (*ahem* Back to SRS APP WRITING)
Jack is a winter spirit. Minus a brief trip to Tooth’s palace, we don’t get to see Jack in many HOT places in the movie (I imagine Bunny’s warren to be something like a greenhouse - warm but not uncomfortably so, and mostly just humid). His powers, and really his existence, are all based in ice and snow and cold. It’s never stated anywhere in the movie itself, but my personal assumption is that Jack, and especially Jack’s powers are either reduced or just don’t work as well when it’s hot.
He’s also ridiculously impulsive and depressingly prone to that hero thing where they think someone’s in danger so they run off to do something stupid to save them, but no one is really in danger, it’s just the bad guy luring them down a hole in the ground under a not-bed.
Mundane Strengths/Abilities: Jack doesn’t have any educated abilities, as such. Most of what he does relies on his powers, flying and fighting and making ice to trip people and all that. But Jack’s greatest non-magical strength is his creativity. He may be 300 years old, but he’s a 300-year-old 14-year-old. It’s the same skill that let him save his sister with a game of hopscotch when he was actually 14-years-old. It lets him use his skills in new ways to fit a need, and also lets him make things up on the fly when he doesn’t have a skill that would cut it.
Sensitivity/Magical Ability: Technically speaking, Jack is, sort of, a ghost. Or, at least, he was dead, and now he’s not exactly. He is certainly a supernatural being. It’s shown in the movie that supernatural or mythical beings don’t need to “believe” in each other before they can see and interact with each other.
Supply List: There goes my hopes for a nuke (although now I want to know people actually do... naw)
Jack travels pretty light, so he won’t have much at all with him except his clothes and his staff. He will have his memories, in the form of a small gold cylinder filled with his full set of baby teeth. The staff is probably technically a magical weapon, as Jack uses it to channel his powers even though they technically come from him and not the staff itself.
Sample RP post: (Written for Route 29, so Jack doesn’t have his powers here. I can do up something else if necessary)
Jack stared up at the sky, doing his best to mentally drown out the quiet music that seemed to follow him everywhere. He got the impression it did that to everyone, though, so it got to be the least of his concerns right now.
He was perched in the crook of a tree, hands behind his head as he braced his back against the trunk and his legs on one of the larger branches, about ten feet closer to the ground than he’d like. Even getting that far had been a challenge, though, without the wind and his powers helping him. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d relied on them until now.
Down below, somewhere in the shadow of the tree, he could hear Phil snoring. He grinned to himself, pleased. The real Phil wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment, of course, but hey, what he didn’t know probably wouldn’t kill him. Not that he’d find out unless Jack found a way out of here. Now there was a sobering thought.
“There’s got to be some big plan in play here, right? Some really important plan that makes absolutely no sense at all?” Of course, Manny wasn’t in the sky here, and even if he was, Jack knew there likely wouldn’t have been an answer, anyway. Luckily, he was no stranger to talking to himself. Except he didn’t have to, now, did he?
He swung himself forward to straddle the branch, looking around until he spotted Phil. “Not that you can talk.”
Phil looked up, barking reproachfully. Jack laughed. “Okay, how about I can’t listen? How’s that?”
The Seel made a happier sound, flopping in a circle before looking up at Jack again, expectantly this time. “What? Someone stuck in a well?”
“Seel!”
“Cat got your tongue?”
“SEEL!”
He grinned, swinging down to hang from the branch and drop to his feet in a crouch. He could remember doing that plenty of times when he’d still been alive, but a memory didn’t make it feel any less strange when the wind wasn’t there to catch him. Once he’d caught his balance, he stood and stretched, before flicking Phil’s horn lightly with his fingers. “And yet, somehow you still make more sense than Bunny.” He grabbed his backpack and slung it on. “Come on. There’s got to something fun around here somewhere, right?”
“Seel!”
SAUDADE
PLAYER
NAME: Plague
EMAIL: candykatt@gmail.com
PREFERRED PRONOUNS: she/her/hers
BEST CONTACT: AIM: CorsecGreenXwing, Plurk:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Jaetopus (plurk is more reliable on weekdays due to work)
TIMEZONE: Central US (-6 GMT)
AGE: 29
PLAYED CHARACTERS: none
LINK TO RESERVE: link~
CHARACTER
NAME(S): Jack Frost
AGE: actually 300+, appears about 14
CANON: Rise of the Guardians (movie only)
BACKGROUND HISTORY:
Links: Brief summary of the movie and Jack himself
Jack was born Jackson Overland Frost sometime in the late 1600s or early 1700s in the Pennsylvania colony, near what would become Burgess, Pennsylvania. While life as a colonist wouldn’t have been easy, he and his younger sister still found time for fun outings such as going ice skating in the winter. Unfortunately, while skating with his sister one late spring day, neither of them had expected the ice to be as thin as it was. When his sister skated onto a patch that threatened to give out under her weight, Jack turned the dangerous situation into a game, ultimately saving his sister’s life at the expense of his own.
An unknown time later, the new winter spirit Jack Frost was awakened from the frozen pond he’d died in and given powers by the Man in the Moon who told him only his name and nothing else. At first, his new ability to fly and control ice and snow was miraculous and wonderful for Jack, until he stumbled upon the nearby village, having no memories of his own, and realized that no one could see or touch him. In fact, they walked directly through him. Through the next three hundred years, this would remain the same. Normal humans had no idea he was there because they didn’t believe in him, and the supernatural beings he ran across either ignored him or saw his boyish attitude toward fun and games as something to be shunned. It hardly helped matters that he tended to deliberately antagonize some of them, such as Bunnymund the Easter Bunny and the yeti workers at Nicholas St. North’s toy workshop.
Forward to three hundred years after waking up in that pond and the reappearance of the Guardians’ old enemy Pitch Black in the events of the movie. When the Man in the Moon decided that the Guardians would need more help this time around, he picked Jack Frost to step in. Of course, no one asked Jack for his opinion before dragging him into the middle of everything. Minding his own business one spring evening after bringing a late snowday full of fun and snowball fights to the children of Burgess, he found himself surrounded by Bunny and two of North’s yetis who stuffed him in a sack to take to the North Pole. Once there, he was told he’d been chosen as a Guardian, but he disrupted North’s grand ceremony to rudely tell everyone involved that, no, he didn’t want to be a Guardian, and he wouldn’t be one.
To Jack, being a Guardian meant being tied down, filled up with responsibility until there wasn’t any room for himself left. He wasn’t about ‘hard work and deadlines’ as he told the Guardians, thanks but no thanks. North took him aside to question Jack’s reluctance, telling him that, just like all the other Guardians, if Jack had been chosen by the Moon, then he had a Center filled with something to protect. North’s Center was wonder, but when questioned, Jack had no idea what his own might be.
Their talk was interrupted by news that the Tooth Fairy’s home, where all the teeth (and memories) of children were stored, had been attacked by Pitch Black. Jack agreed to come along, although warily. The Guardians arrived to find Pitch there with his minions, the ominous-looking Nightmares in the shape of horses formed from Pitch’s corruption of the Sandman’s own dream sand. They’d stolen the teeth and Tooth’s worker fairies, Jack managing to save only one, that he nicknamed Baby Tooth. After taunting the Guardians, Pitch withdrew with his stolen goods, leaving them to pick up what pieces they could. It was then that Jack discovered a pair of important secrets. The Guardians not only protected the children of the world, but their very existence depended on the children believing in them. If the children stopped believing, as Pitch had threatened, the Guardians would no longer exist.
More importantly, to Jack at least, Tooth told him the real reason they collected the teeth. While North protected childlike wonder with Christmas, the fairies collected children’s teeth because they held childhood memories. Even Jack’s, she was sure. The answer to the very thing that had haunted Jack all those years, the not knowing who or what he’d been before he was Jack Frost, had been right there the entire time. He made up his mind quickly, then, offering to help the Guardians get the teeth and the fairies back if that meant Tooth would find his memories for him once they had.
But first, the Guardians had to make sure the children of the world kept believing long enough for them to try. As children started waking up to find their tooth hadn’t been exchanged for a coin overnight, more and more stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy. So the four Guardians plus Jack and Baby Tooth set out to collect all the teeth themselves. It worked surprisingly well until they ended up in the bedroom of Jamie Bennett, a child Jack had gotten to know by name as he grew up in Burgess. When the Guardians’ antics woke Jamie, he could see them all… except for Jack. He pretended to take it all in stride, ending with Bunny being chased by Jamie’s dog as the result of a ‘prank’ from Jack, with Jamie, his dog, and all of the Guardians but Sandy being put to sleep by Sandy’s dream sand.
Of course, at that moment, Pitch and his nightmares attacked. As the only two awake, Jack and Sandy took off after him, hoping to defeat him and rescue the teeth. Unfortunately for them, as children stopped believing in the Guardians and were plagued more and more by the Nightmares, Pitch had grown even stronger than when they’d seen him at Tooth’s home. The other Guardians arrived, still half asleep but determined, just as Jack and Sandy were surrounded by Nightmares. In a last effort, Sandy made sure to toss Jack to relative safety before being confronted by Pitch and ultimately consumed by the corrupted dream sand.
Realizing what was about to happen, Jack did his best to get to Sandy before Pitch attacked, but he wasn’t able to get there in time. For the first time, too late, he realized that the Guardians, for all he didn’t agree with them, had become the closest things to friends he’d had in three hundred years, as long as he could remember. In a sudden surge, his magic reacted, creating for the first time ‘ice lightning,’ great lightning-shaped spears of ice that destroyed the Nightmares that had defeated Sandy and knocked Pitch himself out of the fight, protecting the rest of the Guardians even though it was too late to save Sandy.
The magic taking its toll, Jack lost control of the wind as he lost consciousness, falling out of the sky, only to be saved by Tooth. Or, perhaps, ending up in a different sort of Darkness...
PERSONALITY:
To be fair, he is kind of teeeeeechnically a special snowflake.
At his core, Jack Frost is the Guardian of Fun. That’s his Center, which is with him whether he knows to look for it or not. Although I’m taking Jack from a point in canon before he remembers who he was (and therefore before he discovers who is is), the things that made the moon choose him as a Guardian are still there even if he doesn’t recognize them. When he was still alive, he saved his sister by pushing his own fear aside and making a game out of getting her to safety. His actions ended up getting him killed, but that same courage and quick thinking have since served him well. Jack isn’t afraid of being stubborn when he wants to get his way, which combines with a competitive streak a mile long and that innate teenage belief that he’s always right to make a dangerous combination, sometimes for him, sometimes for everyone else.
Jack has seen a great many things and been a great many places in the 300 years since he died, but he’s still very much stuck in the body and mind of a teenage boy. He’s just as rash and impulsive and moody and prone to bouts of foolishness as any average 14-year-old, not to mention the easy sarcasm of a teenager who assumes he must be smarter than all the adults around him. As Jack himself puts it when he first meets the other Guardians, they’re “hard work and deadlines, and [he’s] snowballs and fun times.” He’s fully capable of being responsible if there’s a good reason for it, but he much prefers goofing off. If something manages to be work and fun at the same time, though, such as the competition to collect the most teeth, he’ll put everything into it to come out on top just for bragging rights.
He’s also a 14-year-old who’s spent 300 years effectively alone, unable to be seen by the children that he enjoys spending time around and making happy. Most of the time, he keeps himself entertained and distracted, but the isolation does occasionally leave him open to darker moods and loneliness. Even the moon, which gave him his powers and his name, never spoke to him again. Combined with his insecurity over his missing memories, this sometimes leads to self-doubt when the stakes are highest. It helps explain his constant pranks a bit, as only Bunny and Phil the yeti actually know Jack well enough to have an opinion of him at the start of the movie. Both see him in a rather unforgiving light thanks to his pranks: burying Easter under a blizzard in Bunny’s case, and apparently regular attempts to break into North’s workshop in Phil’s.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite that relative isolation, he’s also very trusting if you can get past that snarky first impression. Although he outwardly doesn’t care much for the other Guardians when he first meets them, he’s obviously willing to take them at their word very quickly, even coming around to joke more easily with Bunny. In Antarctica with Pitch, although the boogieman has killed one of his friends and is threatening the rest, he trades his own powers for the chance to free Baby Tooth. It backfires horribly on him (see also: dangerously impulsive) but he’s still surprised when Pitch goes back on his word. Jack himself keeps his word when it’s most important, never willingly going back on a promise and being hurt when the Guardians lose faith in him.
Overall, he’d rather keep the company of kids instead of adults as they usually lose the sense of fun that kids have. A snowday, for instance, is heaven for a child while an adult only sees the extra effort to get to work. While he’ll start a snowball fight or make the perfect conditions for sledding for a child, when his attention strays to adults, they tend to result in things that are more fun for him than the adult. A suddenly slippery patch of ice where it was clear sidewalk before, or a gust of wind that destroys a carefully-raked pile of leaves are both in his arsenal of tricks. He’s not malicious, and he wouldn’t go so far as to actually hurt someone deliberately, but his ideas tend to stop at ‘I’ll have fun doing that!’ without always considering the person on the other side.
That lack of forethought can get him in trouble, especially when paired with his impulsiveness, and even more especially when together they keep him from following or recognizing good advice from people who really do know better. He runs off on his own despite the other Guardians’ warnings because he truly believes his ideas are best, which leads to Easter being ruined and Jack having a pair of truly awful encounters with Pitch. That same impulsiveness also leaves him open to being goaded into stupid fights and anger, such as the arguments he and Bunny tend to get into. He’s truly terrible at letting someone else have the last word.
Fortunately for him, the same creativity and sense of fun that lets a child look at a stick and see a horse or a sword or a thousand other things - or that lets a boy look at his terrified sister and make a game of hopscotch out of saving her life - gives Jack the ability to think on his feet in ways that an adult maybe wouldn’t, which helps balance out his more regrettable decisions. The sharp mind that keeps him restless between pranks can adapt well to even the most unexpected situations, such as suddenly becoming a Guardian and saving the children of the world in less than a week. When he lets himself really think something through, more often than not he comes to the right conclusion, such as realizing the only way to defeat Pitch and protect his friends in an instant once he thought instead of reacting. He’s also able to improvise and quickly improve his powers, such as the attack that surprised even him when he tried to save Sandy. Although unsure how he did it at the time, he’s able to recreate the attack multiple times (although with somewhat less power) in subsequent encounters with Pitch and little to no practice.
CHARACTER RELATIONSHIPS:
Sandy: The first among the Guardians that Jack would really consider a friend instead of some strange combination of coworker and kidnapper. Even he’s not quite sure why, but Sandy never smothered him with expectations like Tooth and North or just plain expected him to fail like Bunny. He was also the fondest of Sandy’s work with the kids, often sampling a dream or two when he and Sandy happened to cross paths, although they’d never actually met before being introduced by North. Sandy’s death hit him very hard, because it was losing the first friend he could remember having.
Bunny: Unlike the rest of the Guardians, Bunny is the only one with whom Jack has a history. It’s not exactly a shining example of friendship, unfortunately. Jack has the bad tendency to annoy Bunny on purpose because he reacts so loudly, with his crowning achievement the Blizzard of ‘68 drowning Easter Sunday in snow. Despite that being decades ago, Bunny really holds a grudge. Jack’s been dodging him ever since. They’ve settled into something of an uneasy truce now that they’re both on the same team, and it might be heading toward a grudging respect.
North: The first time Jack meets North, he asks if he’s been brought to the North Pole because he’s on the naughty list. North replies, “On naughty list? You hold record!” While that obviously doesn’t make Jack any sort of horrible person, it does give North a particular frame of reference which makes it twice as interesting when he’s the one who so often reaches out to Jack, especially at the beginning. He almost manages to be a sort of parental figure, that fun dad that everyone else in your class is equally envious of and kind of scared by. He’s also the person who explains what it means to be a Guardian. Jack likes North, but he worries that he’s not at all what North thinks he should be.
Tooth and her fairies: According to Tooth and her fairies Jack’s teeth (and only his teeth, the rest of him is just normal) are just about the best things on the planet. They “sparkle like freshly fallen snow.” She does her best to mother him, but he’s firmly of the mind that he could not possibly ever need mothering, no thank you. Jack is understandably a little intimidated by Tooth (considering how much time she spends trying to look in his mouth), but he knows she means well. Most of the time.
Jamie Bennett and his friends: Jamie and his friends are Jack’s current favorite pack of kids. They live in Burgess, which Jack has adopted as something of a home base over the years. Though he travels far and wide, he always comes back. Though they can’t see him, he’s fond of them and knows all their names and favorite hobbies. He’s strangely devoted considering none of them know he exists, but seeing them happy because of something they did makes him feel a little less lonely, like maybe he could be part of the gang.
Pitch Black: Although he won’t admit it, Jack understands this bad guy a little too well. He knows what it’s like to be alone and forgotten, knows the lengths he’s occasionally gone to, hoping the kids would realize who was responsible for their winter fun. While he doesn’t agree with Pitch’s methods, and certainly not with hurting the kids by making them lose their belief, he still understands the motive behind it. He might have even managed something close to sympathy until Pitch attacked them in Burgess, killing Sandy. After that, understanding or not, Pitch had crossed a line Jack couldn’t forgive.
STRENGTH OF HEART MOMENT SUMMARY:
I’m taking Jack from the moment he collapses after using his magic to attack Pitch following Sandy’s death. It’s the first truly unselfish act we see from Jack up to that point in the movie. Prior to that, he’d been acting in his own interest, to rescue the teeth so he could regain his memories, but when Sandy is surrounded, he realizes he’s about to lose someone he could have called a true friend, and he finally acts like a Guardian for the first time that we see.
POWERS
SAMPLE - THE AWAKENING:
It wasn’t cold, but it was dark, and he was definitely afraid.
“Sandy!” His eyes flew open and for a second, he thought he was still there, still fighting, but then he realized he wasn’t. He wasn’t anything. He wasn’t anywhere, either. There wasn’t even any moon to save him this time.
No sooner had he noticed it than he was falling again, but it felt different this time, more like flying and less like the uncontrolled freefall exhausting his magic had left him in. There was no wind to call here; he didn’t have his staff even if there was. Somehow, he didn’t need it. He felt his feet touch a floor he couldn’t see, and he spun around, looking for anything or anyone there.
Jack…
“Who’s there?! Tooth?” Except it hadn’t sounded anything like Tooth, had it? It was a girl’s voice, one that felt almost familiar. He looked around again, still seeing nothing but darkness. He’d never thought he was scared of the dark before. “Anybody?”
Jack, hurry!
“Hurry where?! I can’t-” He’d taken a step forward, toward where he thought the voice might be coming from. Apparently that was the signal whoever was waiting for as the floor seemed to almost explode upward. He covered his eyes, and when he opened them again, the scene had changed. The floor was… glowing? He stared, not quite sure what to make of it but not wanting to take his eyes off it, either. It looked like something that belonged in North’s workshop. In fact, right in the center, he recognized the ‘G’ from the floor of North’s observation deck, the G for Guardians. Around it were murals, matching the one he’d seen at Tooth’s palace, showing the four Guardians in action.
You have to choose.
“Choose what?” His tone was sharper than it could have been, but if mysterious voices were going to give him confusing directions, he didn’t want any of it. He wanted to go home. He needed to go home.
The voice must have heard his frustration, because the floor changed again. Where the murals to his left had been now stretched an iced-over pond, the ice just starting to crack in places from an early spring thaw. He recognized it like he’d recognize his own hand. It was the pond he’d woken up in as Jack Frost, the one he’d watched countless Burgess kids skate on every winter. An old pair of well-worn skates sat just at the edge, like they were waiting for someone to use them. He took a step closer, then another, and before he’d really decided to, he was kneeling next to the skates. “What is this?”
You have to choose who you are. You can hide from everyone, but would you protect them, too? Are you a Guardian?
He’d be ashamed of his reaction later, probably, but he dropped the skates faster than if they’d burned him, stumbling back to this feet. “I’m not a Guardian. I’m not like them.” The denial was weaker than it had been at the North Pole, but he knew it was still true. How could he ever be a Guardian? “How am I supposed to choose when I don’t know the answer?”
A flare of light followed his words, a new shape melting up out of the mosaic at the top of the circle, ignoring his objection. He was backing away from it before it had even fully gained its shape, before it sunk in that it was as unmoving as a statue. A Nightmare, although something about it was different. It only took Jack moments to see why; a line of gold had wrapped around its neck and body - one of Sandy’s whips. In places, the black sand that made up the Nightmare flickered and shifted, alternately black and gold as one side or the other won new ground in the battle. Sandy had managed to change a few of the Nightmares back to dreams before… before, but his whip alone wouldn’t be strong enough for that. Not without help.
Are you brave? Will you fight even if you might lose? Are you a Warrior?
This time he hesitated, but he still shook his head. Sandy had been a warrior, sure, even North and Bunny. He could fight but not on his own. He wasn’t like them.
He was almost expecting the third flash to his right following his decision. The shape this time was as familiar as the other two but twice as welcome. His staff rested against a pile of snowballs that glowed softly with magic. The staff itself was dead and brown, just like he’d first seen it. Waiting. Finally, something normal around here. With a happy laugh, he reached for it, only to be stopped again by the voice.
You’re always playing tricks, Jack. They can hurt people. Are you strong enough to tell the difference? Are you a Mystic?
Even with that warning, even knowing he was supposed to make some sort of serious choice, it wasn’t hard to take his staff as soon as the girl stopped talking. It glowed to life in his hand. There wasn’t any choice to be made. “I don’t know anything about a mystic. I just know I can’t be anything but me.” And the staff, the snowballs, the tricks, that was him. Not a Guardian, not a warrior, just Jack Frost. It was the one thing he did know.
Then choose what you aren’t.
“What?” That made even less sense than before. “Why do I have to choose that?”
You can’t be everything, Jack. No one can be. To be something, you have to not be something else. What aren’t you?
He turned warily, looking at the frozen, patchwork Nightmare, and the quiet, still pond. When it came right down to it, maybe that choice was easy, too. He could fight, if he had to, but... “I’m not a Guardian.”
With a final flash, everything but his staff disappeared, leaving him alone with the glowing floor again, the G seeming twice as accusing now that he’d said it out loud. “What- Hey! Where’d you go-” He was given no time to finish, as with a crack, the floor separated under him, dropping him back into darkness.
SPECIAL ABILITIES:
So Artificer. Not gonna lie, that was actually not the choice I expected him to end up with, but considering his canon point and the events of the movie immediately following his pull point, it ended up making the most sense to reject the shield. It won’t affect his powers at all, but it’ll be interesting to see how the rejection affects his mental state should he ever get his memories back ingame. Considering how quickly Pitch is able to get one over on him, being extra vulnerable to the darkness also seems appropriate.
So powers. Physical, first. Jack isn’t especially strong or powerful physically, but he is very quick and has superb balance. I attribute a lot of this to being a spirit, so sometimes the laws of physics let him skate by on things, like sitting on top of his staff like a very strange ascetic. He’s also extra sturdy. We see him fall from pretty high up to land on a large tree branch, then get up and laugh it off. He can be hurt, and magically it’s not hard to do so, but breaking or damaging his staff is going to be a better way to get to him physically than doing anything to him directly.
Magic is a little more complicated. Per modly okay, he’s going to be keeping a few of the more intrinsic bits of being a winter spirit: able to stand being out in the cold with no shoes, for example, or covering things in frost and making little, animated frost bunnies. The sort of harmless tricks that are just part and parcel of being Jack Frost. Also, being a winter spirit, he’ll be far more at ease with the sort of elemental spells he’s used to dealing with (i.e. the aero and blizzard lines) and he’s never going to quite trust the fire spells, if he ever learns to do them at all.
It’s going to take a little while (or someone telling/teaching him to do it) before he even begins to think about using other sorts of spells, but once he does, he’s a very quick study, and I expect he’ll start experimenting with making things happen like flight and the frost lightning he’d managed to create right before his pull point. He will also probably keep channeling all magic through his staff until/unless someone tells him you don’t have to do that in this universe. Boy is great at improvising but terrible at breaking habits.
INVENTORY:
Jack travels pretty light even at the best of times, so it’ll be just him, his clothes, and his staff.
NOTES/ASPIRATIONS
Madb (and Beth, because she’d be sad if I left her out) have said a lot about this game, so I’m excited to try it out. I’ve never pulled Jack from such an early point in his canon before, so I’m looking forward to seeing how not having his memories and the motivations that come with them will affect him and how he relates to others.
I’ll put a note here, too, about the couple strange situations I checked with the mods, so I have notes of them and anyone else wanting to check out my app can see, too. First, Jack’s staff is sort of a source for him. When Pitch breaks it in Antarctica, he physically suffers for it. So it’s coming along less as a weapon and more because it’s kind of a package deal with him.
Second, as mentioned in the special abilities, Jack’s magic is not entirely switching over to the KH system, since he’s a winter spirit and so much of it is bound up in what he is. In addition to the tiny bits of magic that are staying, Jack himself will still have a few spirit attributes. He’ll be visible to everyone (at least, everyone on Penrose) but he’s very hard to damage physically seeing as he’s not alive in the technical human sense, and he’s always slightly chilly to touch. You won’t get frostbite from touching him (harhar) but you’ll notice it. He’ll be most comfortable in the cold and more uncomfortable than your average person in extreme heat. He can function in it but he avoids it if he can. So just don’t expect to see him on Aestival too often. Of course, the way visiting other worlds works, who knows what would happen anywhere else?
</td></tr>
Player
Name: Plague
Personal Journal:
corellianrogueE-mail: candykatt@gmail.com
AIM/MSN: AIM - CorsecGreenXWing
Timezone: CST (-6 GMT)
Current Characters in Route: none
Character
Name: Jack Frost
Series: Rise of the Guardians
Timeline: post-movie
Canon Resource Links: Jack at RotG Wiki
RotG at regular Wiki
One note: Jack’s age is never officially given in the canon (yet, at least), but is listed variously as either 14 or 17. Since the creator of the series says he’s 14, that’s what I go with.
Personality:
While Jack has seen a great many things and been a great many places in the 300 years since he died, he’s still very much stuck in the body and mind of a teenage boy. He’s just as rash and impulsive and moody and prone to bouts of foolishness as any average 14-year-old, not to mention the easy sarcasm of a teenager who assumes he must be smarter than all the adults around him. His life is a permanent snowday and he’s just fine with no more responsibility than he chooses to give himself. As Jack himself puts it when he first meets the other Guardians, they’re “hard work and deadlines, and I’m snowballs and fun times.” He’s also a 14-year-old who’s spent 300 years effectively alone, unable to be seen by the children that he enjoys spending time around and making happy. Most of the time, he keeps himself entertained and distracted, but the isolation does occasionally leave him open to darker moods and loneliness. Even the moon, which gave him his powers and his name, never spoke to him again. To some extent, before he joins them, he views the other Guardians with resentment, believing that they receive all the praise and love of children despite never spending any real time around children like he does. He even amuses himself by causing them trouble, such as by starting “the Blizzard of ‘68” on Easter Sunday, much to the annoyance of Bunnymund the Easter Bunny.
Through the events of the movie, Jack discovers his Center and the purpose the Man in the Moon had for creating him, as well as gaining his memories of his life before he died and became Jack Frost the winter spirit. When he was still alive, he saved his sister by pushing his own fear aside and making a game out of getting her to safety. His actions ended up getting him killed, but that same courage and quick thinking have since served him well. As the Guardian of Fun, and with children who finally believe in him and can see him, Jack also has more of a purpose and drive than he ever had before. Jack isn’t afraid of being stubborn when he wants to get his way, which combines with a competitive streak a mile long and that innate teenage belief that he’s always right to make a dangerous combination.
Although Jack is fully capable of being responsible if there’s a good reason in it for him, such as helping one of his fellow Guardians, he much prefers goofing off and having fun. His very favorite activity is giving kids a snow day, so that they can spend the day goofing off and having fun with him, whether they can see him or not. He’s less fond of adults as they can’t see him and tend to have lost the sense of fun that kids have, so while he’ll start a snowball fight or make the perfect conditions for sledding for a child, when his attentions stray to adults, they tend to result in things that are more fun for him than the adult. A suddenly slippery patch of ice where it was clear sidewalk before, or a gust of wind that destroys a carefully-raked pile of leaves are both in his arsenal of tricks. He’s not malicious, and he wouldn’t go so far as to actually hurt someone deliberately, but his ideas tend to stop at ‘I’ll have fun doing that!’ without always considering the person on the other side. That lack of forethought can get him in trouble, especially when paired with his impulsiveness, and even more especially when they keep him from following or recognizing good advice from people who really do know better. Fortunately for him, the same creativity and sense of fun that lets a child look at a stick and see a horse or a sword or a thousand other things, gives Jack the ability to think on his feet in ways that an adult maybe wouldn’t, which helps balance out his more regrettable decisions.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
+Resourceful
Anything can be a game or a toy to a child, and Jack has adapted that resourcefulness to serve him well in good times and bad.
+Fun
The Guardian of Fun is nothing if not a mood-maker. He can brighten the worst of days with a well-played joke or just being a cheerful presence.
+Adaptable
He takes most things pretty well in stride. Suddenly waking up with ice powers? Awesome! Getting his memories back and realizing he’d once had a family? Cool, but still gotta save the world! Accidentally helping the bad guy ruin Easter? Okay, that one slows him down a bit, but then it’s right back on the horse.
+Protective
When he was still human, Jack died saving his little sister, and that much hasn’t changed about him since. He’ll do whatever it takes to protect anyone he cares about.
+/- Stubborn
Jack is stubborn as the day is long, to borrow an old phrase. This can help him remain steady in the face of overwhelming odds, but it also tends to send him headfirst into terrible ideas.
+/- He’s a 300-year-old teenager
This is both the biggest positive and the hugest negative, for numerous reasons. Is it possible to be both up on current events and completely behind the times? Somehow, Jack manages. He may know all the current trends and cool bits of tech... but he’s never used any of them. Being invisible makes it kind of hard to pose for pictures, and who would he call with a cell phone? He’s filled with eternal teenage snark, and he’s been around enough years to figure out the best possible prank ideas, plus he’s forever young enough to think they’re hilarious. And even centuries of faith in his abilities can’t shake the innate teenage fear that everyone is secretly judging him.
+/- Trusting
He tends to have the mindset of ‘if they aren’t actively trying to kill me, how bad could they be?’ It’s not that he’s stupid, far from it, or even really naive per se. He knows bad people exist, and he does have a usually reliable sense of self-preservation (as much as he needs one, being dead and all), it’s just that his own years of never being believed in makes him hesitant to do the same to others. He tends to trust people right up to (and sometimes after) he’s been shown otherwise. That’s great for meeting new people, since he’ll make friends with just about anyone given half a chance, but it also means he’s the sort that believes the villain’s sob-story monologue and doesn’t realize till after that he’s missing his wallet and a kidney.
-Childish
Jack is ultimately still very young. It shows in his childish pranks and aversion to responsibility. In fact, really, his childish everything.
-Afraid of being forgotten
After so long being visible only to other spirits and inhuman beings, Jack’s greatest fear is being alone and invisible with no one believing in him.
-Caution? What’s that?
Look before you leap? Jack might as well have never even heard such an expression. Where would be the fun in that?
-Impulsive
Jack isn’t stupid, far from it, but sometimes his actions really are. Chasing off after the bad guy all by himself only seems like a good idea if you don’t think about it at all first.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Seel
Password: Strawberry Marmalade
Samples
First Person Sample:
[The angle when the gear turns on is... strange. Like it’s being held by someone too distracted to pay attention to where it might be pointing. There’s part of a chin, a shoulder, and plenty of scenery. The top of a whitish blob flops past the bottom of the screen. From the sound it makes, it must be a Seel.]
This is really weird. You know that?
[The Seel gives a cheerful affirmative from somewhere. Suddenly, the picture shifts, moving erratically until it stops with a soft thud as the gear is dropped and lands in the grass. At least it has a good view, now, framing most of a boy in his teens, crouching on his toes next to a backpack as he rummages through it, occasionally pulling things out for a closer look. His blue hooded sweatshirt has seen better days, and his pants don’t seem to be from quite the right century. Together with the ice-white hair, it makes something of an odd picture.]
If this is... Naw, it’s way too cutesy to be one of Pitch’s tricks.
[He looks up, past the gear at where the sounds of the Seel are coming from. His smile grows, just a bit.]
You sure you’re not a Selkie?
[A negative. The gear is nudged closer, and he laughs as he reaches for it.]
Okay, okay. Remind me to introduce you to Sandy sometime.
Third Person Sample:
Jack stared up at the sky, doing his best to mentally drown out the quiet music that seemed to follow him everywhere. He got the impression it did that to everyone, though, so it got to be the least of his concerns right now.
He was perched in the crook of a tree, hands behind his head as he braced his back against the trunk and his legs on one of the larger branches, about ten feet closer to the ground than he’d like. Even getting that far had been a challenge, though, without the wind and his powers helping him. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d relied on them until now.
Down below, somewhere in the shadow of the tree, he could hear Phil snoring. He grinned to himself, pleased. The real Phil wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment, of course, but hey, what he didn’t know probably wouldn’t kill him. Not that he’d find out unless Jack found a way out of here. Now there was a sobering thought.
“There’s got to be some big plan in play here, right? Some really important plan that makes absolutely no sense at all?” Of course, Manny wasn’t in the sky here, and even if he was, Jack knew there likely wouldn’t have been an answer, anyway. Luckily, he was no stranger to talking to himself. Except he didn’t have to, now, did he?
He swung himself forward to straddle the branch, looking around until he spotted Phil. “Not that you can talk.”
Phil looked up, barking reproachfully. Jack laughed. “Okay, how about I can’t listen? How’s that?”
The Seel made a happier sound, flopping in a circle before looking up at Jack again, expectantly this time. “What? Someone stuck in a well?”
“Seel!”
“Cat got your tongue?”
“SEEL!”
He grinned, swinging down to hang from the branch and drop to his feet in a crouch. He could remember doing that plenty of times when he’d still been alive, but a memory didn’t make it feel any less strange when the wind wasn’t there to catch him. Once he’d caught his balance, he stood and stretched, before flicking Phil’s horn lightly with his fingers. “And yet, somehow you still make more sense than Bunny.” He grabbed his backpack and slung it on. “Come on. There’s got to something fun around here somewhere, right?”
“Seel!”
MAISON DE PORTES
Player's Name: Plague
Contact info: email: candykatt@gmail.com AIM: CorsecGreenXWing Plurk: Jaetopus
DW: personal: corellianrogue; if it’s okay for me to reuse a journal, Jack’s will be justanexpression (currently in use at Route 29)
Character: Jack Frost
Canon: Rise of the Guardians
Version: movie
Canon Point: Toward the end of the movie, after getting his memories back and fixing his staff, but before getting back to save Jamie and the other Guardians, for maximum frustration at being trapped.
Age: Appears 14, technically closer to 314 (give or take)
Gender: male
History: http://riseoftheguardians.wikia.com/wiki/Rise_of_the_Guardians For a brief summary of the movie itself
Jack was born Jackson Overland Frost sometime in the late 1600s or early 1700s in the Pennsylvania colony, near what would become Burgess, Pennsylvania. While life as a colonist wouldn’t have been easy, he and his younger sister still found time for fun outings such as going ice skating in the winter. Unfortunately, while skating with his sister one late spring day, neither of them had expected the ice to be as thin as it was. When his sister skated onto a patch that threatened to give out under her weight, Jack turned the dangerous situation into a game, ultimately saving his sister’s life at the expense of his own.
An unknown time later, the new winter spirit Jack Frost was awakened from the frozen pond he’d died in and given powers by the Man in the Moon who told him only his name and nothing else. At first, his new ability to fly and control ice and snow was miraculous and wonderful for Jack, until he stumbled upon the nearby village, having no memories of his own, and realized that no one could see or touch him. In fact, they walked directly through him. Through the next three hundred years, this would remain the same. Normal humans had no idea he was there because they didn’t believe in him, and the supernatural beings he ran across either ignored him or saw his boyish attitude toward fun and games as something to be shunned. It hardly helped matters that he tended to deliberately antagonize some of them, especially the “big four” such as Bunnymund the Easter Bunny and the yeti workers at Nicholas St. North’s toy workshop.
Forward to three hundred years later and the reappearance of the Guardians’ old enemy Pitch Black in the events of the movie. When the Man in the Moon decided that the Guardians would need more help this time around, he picked Jack Frost to step in. Of course, no one asked Jack for his opinion before dragging him into the middle of everything. At first, he was reluctant to team up, seeing the Guardians as fundamentally different and unlike him, but through helping them defeat Pitch and protecting the children he’d grown to know and care about over the course of the movie, he learned about himself, and not just from the memories revealed by his baby teeth. He discovered his Center, his purpose, as the Guardian of Fun, and discovered a new faith in himself in the process.
Personality: (Oh lord, this is so long, I’m sorry. -_-)
While Jack has seen a great many things and been a great many places in the 300 years since he died, he’s still very much stuck in the body and mind of a teenage boy. He’s just as rash and impulsive and moody and prone to bouts of foolishness as any average 14-year-old, not to mention the easy sarcasm of a teenager who assumes he must be smarter than all the adults around him. As Jack himself puts it when he first meets the other Guardians, they’re “hard work and deadlines, and I’m snowballs and fun times.” He’s fully capable of being responsible if there’s a good reason for it, but he much prefers goofing off. He’s also a 14-year-old who’s spent 300 years effectively alone, unable to be seen by the children that he enjoys spending time around and making happy. Most of the time, he keeps himself entertained and distracted, but the isolation does occasionally leave him open to darker moods and loneliness. Even the moon, which gave him his powers and his name, never spoke to him again.
Through the events of the movie, Jack discovers his Center and the purpose the Man in the Moon had for creating him, as well as gaining his memories of his life before he died and became Jack Frost the winter spirit. When he was still alive, he saved his sister by pushing his own fear aside and making a game out of getting her to safety. His actions ended up getting him killed, but that same courage and quick thinking have since served him well. Jack isn’t afraid of being stubborn when he wants to get his way, which combines with a competitive streak a mile long and that innate teenage belief that he’s always right to make a dangerous combination.
He much prefers the company of other kids instead of adults as they usually lose the sense of fun that kids have. While he’ll start a snowball fight or make the perfect conditions for sledding for a child, when his attentions stray to adults, they tend to result in things that are more fun for him than the adult. A suddenly slippery patch of ice where it was clear sidewalk before, or a gust of wind that destroys a carefully-raked pile of leaves are both in his arsenal of tricks. He’s not malicious, and he wouldn’t go so far as to actually hurt someone deliberately, but his ideas tend to stop at ‘I’ll have fun doing that!’ without always considering the person on the other side. That lack of forethought can get him in trouble, especially when paired with his impulsiveness, and even more especially when together they keep him from following or recognizing good advice from people who really do know better. Fortunately for him, the same creativity and sense of fun that lets a child look at a stick and see a horse or a sword or a thousand other things - or that lets a boy look at his terrified sister and make a game of hopscotch out of saving her life - gives Jack the ability to think on his feet in ways that an adult maybe wouldn’t, which helps balance out his more regrettable decisions.
Fears: Jack’s greatest fear is being forgotten or being ignored and invisible. He’s grown used to living with it, mostly by interacting with as many people as possible, even if they don’t notice him. He can still affect the real world, making them see what he does, if not him. People walking through him, as if he’s a ghost or not even there, that’s the worst.
He’s also not the hugest fan of water. Oh, FROZEN water, sure, that’s fine, but considering he died by drowning under the ice of a pond, he’s understandably not so fond of being submerged. Even if he doesn’t technically need to breath anymore.
Since I’m taking him from after he’s got his memories back, I’d also like to play with his fear of losing people he cares about (and, importantly, who depend on him). Obviously, no matter how well he hid it, he was terrified while trying to save his sister, and he’d have done just about anything Pitch told him to to save Baby Tooth in Antarctica, so while not exactly a fear he’d recognize on its own, it could be fun to explore.
Weaknesses: “These things might be used against you important later. Please be detailed.” Wow, you sound so professional about it. I love it. XD (*ahem* Back to SRS APP WRITING)
Jack is a winter spirit. Minus a brief trip to Tooth’s palace, we don’t get to see Jack in many HOT places in the movie (I imagine Bunny’s warren to be something like a greenhouse - warm but not uncomfortably so, and mostly just humid). His powers, and really his existence, are all based in ice and snow and cold. It’s never stated anywhere in the movie itself, but my personal assumption is that Jack, and especially Jack’s powers are either reduced or just don’t work as well when it’s hot.
He’s also ridiculously impulsive and depressingly prone to that hero thing where they think someone’s in danger so they run off to do something stupid to save them, but no one is really in danger, it’s just the bad guy luring them down a hole in the ground under a not-bed.
Mundane Strengths/Abilities: Jack doesn’t have any educated abilities, as such. Most of what he does relies on his powers, flying and fighting and making ice to trip people and all that. But Jack’s greatest non-magical strength is his creativity. He may be 300 years old, but he’s a 300-year-old 14-year-old. It’s the same skill that let him save his sister with a game of hopscotch when he was actually 14-years-old. It lets him use his skills in new ways to fit a need, and also lets him make things up on the fly when he doesn’t have a skill that would cut it.
Sensitivity/Magical Ability: Technically speaking, Jack is, sort of, a ghost. Or, at least, he was dead, and now he’s not exactly. He is certainly a supernatural being. It’s shown in the movie that supernatural or mythical beings don’t need to “believe” in each other before they can see and interact with each other.
Supply List: There goes my hopes for a nuke (although now I want to know people actually do... naw)
Jack travels pretty light, so he won’t have much at all with him except his clothes and his staff. He will have his memories, in the form of a small gold cylinder filled with his full set of baby teeth. The staff is probably technically a magical weapon, as Jack uses it to channel his powers even though they technically come from him and not the staff itself.
Sample RP post: (Written for Route 29, so Jack doesn’t have his powers here. I can do up something else if necessary)
Jack stared up at the sky, doing his best to mentally drown out the quiet music that seemed to follow him everywhere. He got the impression it did that to everyone, though, so it got to be the least of his concerns right now.
He was perched in the crook of a tree, hands behind his head as he braced his back against the trunk and his legs on one of the larger branches, about ten feet closer to the ground than he’d like. Even getting that far had been a challenge, though, without the wind and his powers helping him. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d relied on them until now.
Down below, somewhere in the shadow of the tree, he could hear Phil snoring. He grinned to himself, pleased. The real Phil wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment, of course, but hey, what he didn’t know probably wouldn’t kill him. Not that he’d find out unless Jack found a way out of here. Now there was a sobering thought.
“There’s got to be some big plan in play here, right? Some really important plan that makes absolutely no sense at all?” Of course, Manny wasn’t in the sky here, and even if he was, Jack knew there likely wouldn’t have been an answer, anyway. Luckily, he was no stranger to talking to himself. Except he didn’t have to, now, did he?
He swung himself forward to straddle the branch, looking around until he spotted Phil. “Not that you can talk.”
Phil looked up, barking reproachfully. Jack laughed. “Okay, how about I can’t listen? How’s that?”
The Seel made a happier sound, flopping in a circle before looking up at Jack again, expectantly this time. “What? Someone stuck in a well?”
“Seel!”
“Cat got your tongue?”
“SEEL!”
He grinned, swinging down to hang from the branch and drop to his feet in a crouch. He could remember doing that plenty of times when he’d still been alive, but a memory didn’t make it feel any less strange when the wind wasn’t there to catch him. Once he’d caught his balance, he stood and stretched, before flicking Phil’s horn lightly with his fingers. “And yet, somehow you still make more sense than Bunny.” He grabbed his backpack and slung it on. “Come on. There’s got to something fun around here somewhere, right?”
“Seel!”
SAUDADE
PLAYER
NAME: Plague
EMAIL: candykatt@gmail.com
PREFERRED PRONOUNS: she/her/hers
BEST CONTACT: AIM: CorsecGreenXwing, Plurk:
TIMEZONE: Central US (-6 GMT)
AGE: 29
PLAYED CHARACTERS: none
LINK TO RESERVE: link~
CHARACTER
NAME(S): Jack Frost
AGE: actually 300+, appears about 14
CANON: Rise of the Guardians (movie only)
BACKGROUND HISTORY:
Links: Brief summary of the movie and Jack himself
Jack was born Jackson Overland Frost sometime in the late 1600s or early 1700s in the Pennsylvania colony, near what would become Burgess, Pennsylvania. While life as a colonist wouldn’t have been easy, he and his younger sister still found time for fun outings such as going ice skating in the winter. Unfortunately, while skating with his sister one late spring day, neither of them had expected the ice to be as thin as it was. When his sister skated onto a patch that threatened to give out under her weight, Jack turned the dangerous situation into a game, ultimately saving his sister’s life at the expense of his own.
An unknown time later, the new winter spirit Jack Frost was awakened from the frozen pond he’d died in and given powers by the Man in the Moon who told him only his name and nothing else. At first, his new ability to fly and control ice and snow was miraculous and wonderful for Jack, until he stumbled upon the nearby village, having no memories of his own, and realized that no one could see or touch him. In fact, they walked directly through him. Through the next three hundred years, this would remain the same. Normal humans had no idea he was there because they didn’t believe in him, and the supernatural beings he ran across either ignored him or saw his boyish attitude toward fun and games as something to be shunned. It hardly helped matters that he tended to deliberately antagonize some of them, such as Bunnymund the Easter Bunny and the yeti workers at Nicholas St. North’s toy workshop.
Forward to three hundred years after waking up in that pond and the reappearance of the Guardians’ old enemy Pitch Black in the events of the movie. When the Man in the Moon decided that the Guardians would need more help this time around, he picked Jack Frost to step in. Of course, no one asked Jack for his opinion before dragging him into the middle of everything. Minding his own business one spring evening after bringing a late snowday full of fun and snowball fights to the children of Burgess, he found himself surrounded by Bunny and two of North’s yetis who stuffed him in a sack to take to the North Pole. Once there, he was told he’d been chosen as a Guardian, but he disrupted North’s grand ceremony to rudely tell everyone involved that, no, he didn’t want to be a Guardian, and he wouldn’t be one.
To Jack, being a Guardian meant being tied down, filled up with responsibility until there wasn’t any room for himself left. He wasn’t about ‘hard work and deadlines’ as he told the Guardians, thanks but no thanks. North took him aside to question Jack’s reluctance, telling him that, just like all the other Guardians, if Jack had been chosen by the Moon, then he had a Center filled with something to protect. North’s Center was wonder, but when questioned, Jack had no idea what his own might be.
Their talk was interrupted by news that the Tooth Fairy’s home, where all the teeth (and memories) of children were stored, had been attacked by Pitch Black. Jack agreed to come along, although warily. The Guardians arrived to find Pitch there with his minions, the ominous-looking Nightmares in the shape of horses formed from Pitch’s corruption of the Sandman’s own dream sand. They’d stolen the teeth and Tooth’s worker fairies, Jack managing to save only one, that he nicknamed Baby Tooth. After taunting the Guardians, Pitch withdrew with his stolen goods, leaving them to pick up what pieces they could. It was then that Jack discovered a pair of important secrets. The Guardians not only protected the children of the world, but their very existence depended on the children believing in them. If the children stopped believing, as Pitch had threatened, the Guardians would no longer exist.
More importantly, to Jack at least, Tooth told him the real reason they collected the teeth. While North protected childlike wonder with Christmas, the fairies collected children’s teeth because they held childhood memories. Even Jack’s, she was sure. The answer to the very thing that had haunted Jack all those years, the not knowing who or what he’d been before he was Jack Frost, had been right there the entire time. He made up his mind quickly, then, offering to help the Guardians get the teeth and the fairies back if that meant Tooth would find his memories for him once they had.
But first, the Guardians had to make sure the children of the world kept believing long enough for them to try. As children started waking up to find their tooth hadn’t been exchanged for a coin overnight, more and more stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy. So the four Guardians plus Jack and Baby Tooth set out to collect all the teeth themselves. It worked surprisingly well until they ended up in the bedroom of Jamie Bennett, a child Jack had gotten to know by name as he grew up in Burgess. When the Guardians’ antics woke Jamie, he could see them all… except for Jack. He pretended to take it all in stride, ending with Bunny being chased by Jamie’s dog as the result of a ‘prank’ from Jack, with Jamie, his dog, and all of the Guardians but Sandy being put to sleep by Sandy’s dream sand.
Of course, at that moment, Pitch and his nightmares attacked. As the only two awake, Jack and Sandy took off after him, hoping to defeat him and rescue the teeth. Unfortunately for them, as children stopped believing in the Guardians and were plagued more and more by the Nightmares, Pitch had grown even stronger than when they’d seen him at Tooth’s home. The other Guardians arrived, still half asleep but determined, just as Jack and Sandy were surrounded by Nightmares. In a last effort, Sandy made sure to toss Jack to relative safety before being confronted by Pitch and ultimately consumed by the corrupted dream sand.
Realizing what was about to happen, Jack did his best to get to Sandy before Pitch attacked, but he wasn’t able to get there in time. For the first time, too late, he realized that the Guardians, for all he didn’t agree with them, had become the closest things to friends he’d had in three hundred years, as long as he could remember. In a sudden surge, his magic reacted, creating for the first time ‘ice lightning,’ great lightning-shaped spears of ice that destroyed the Nightmares that had defeated Sandy and knocked Pitch himself out of the fight, protecting the rest of the Guardians even though it was too late to save Sandy.
The magic taking its toll, Jack lost control of the wind as he lost consciousness, falling out of the sky, only to be saved by Tooth. Or, perhaps, ending up in a different sort of Darkness...
PERSONALITY:
At his core, Jack Frost is the Guardian of Fun. That’s his Center, which is with him whether he knows to look for it or not. Although I’m taking Jack from a point in canon before he remembers who he was (and therefore before he discovers who is is), the things that made the moon choose him as a Guardian are still there even if he doesn’t recognize them. When he was still alive, he saved his sister by pushing his own fear aside and making a game out of getting her to safety. His actions ended up getting him killed, but that same courage and quick thinking have since served him well. Jack isn’t afraid of being stubborn when he wants to get his way, which combines with a competitive streak a mile long and that innate teenage belief that he’s always right to make a dangerous combination, sometimes for him, sometimes for everyone else.
Jack has seen a great many things and been a great many places in the 300 years since he died, but he’s still very much stuck in the body and mind of a teenage boy. He’s just as rash and impulsive and moody and prone to bouts of foolishness as any average 14-year-old, not to mention the easy sarcasm of a teenager who assumes he must be smarter than all the adults around him. As Jack himself puts it when he first meets the other Guardians, they’re “hard work and deadlines, and [he’s] snowballs and fun times.” He’s fully capable of being responsible if there’s a good reason for it, but he much prefers goofing off. If something manages to be work and fun at the same time, though, such as the competition to collect the most teeth, he’ll put everything into it to come out on top just for bragging rights.
He’s also a 14-year-old who’s spent 300 years effectively alone, unable to be seen by the children that he enjoys spending time around and making happy. Most of the time, he keeps himself entertained and distracted, but the isolation does occasionally leave him open to darker moods and loneliness. Even the moon, which gave him his powers and his name, never spoke to him again. Combined with his insecurity over his missing memories, this sometimes leads to self-doubt when the stakes are highest. It helps explain his constant pranks a bit, as only Bunny and Phil the yeti actually know Jack well enough to have an opinion of him at the start of the movie. Both see him in a rather unforgiving light thanks to his pranks: burying Easter under a blizzard in Bunny’s case, and apparently regular attempts to break into North’s workshop in Phil’s.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite that relative isolation, he’s also very trusting if you can get past that snarky first impression. Although he outwardly doesn’t care much for the other Guardians when he first meets them, he’s obviously willing to take them at their word very quickly, even coming around to joke more easily with Bunny. In Antarctica with Pitch, although the boogieman has killed one of his friends and is threatening the rest, he trades his own powers for the chance to free Baby Tooth. It backfires horribly on him (see also: dangerously impulsive) but he’s still surprised when Pitch goes back on his word. Jack himself keeps his word when it’s most important, never willingly going back on a promise and being hurt when the Guardians lose faith in him.
Overall, he’d rather keep the company of kids instead of adults as they usually lose the sense of fun that kids have. A snowday, for instance, is heaven for a child while an adult only sees the extra effort to get to work. While he’ll start a snowball fight or make the perfect conditions for sledding for a child, when his attention strays to adults, they tend to result in things that are more fun for him than the adult. A suddenly slippery patch of ice where it was clear sidewalk before, or a gust of wind that destroys a carefully-raked pile of leaves are both in his arsenal of tricks. He’s not malicious, and he wouldn’t go so far as to actually hurt someone deliberately, but his ideas tend to stop at ‘I’ll have fun doing that!’ without always considering the person on the other side.
That lack of forethought can get him in trouble, especially when paired with his impulsiveness, and even more especially when together they keep him from following or recognizing good advice from people who really do know better. He runs off on his own despite the other Guardians’ warnings because he truly believes his ideas are best, which leads to Easter being ruined and Jack having a pair of truly awful encounters with Pitch. That same impulsiveness also leaves him open to being goaded into stupid fights and anger, such as the arguments he and Bunny tend to get into. He’s truly terrible at letting someone else have the last word.
Fortunately for him, the same creativity and sense of fun that lets a child look at a stick and see a horse or a sword or a thousand other things - or that lets a boy look at his terrified sister and make a game of hopscotch out of saving her life - gives Jack the ability to think on his feet in ways that an adult maybe wouldn’t, which helps balance out his more regrettable decisions. The sharp mind that keeps him restless between pranks can adapt well to even the most unexpected situations, such as suddenly becoming a Guardian and saving the children of the world in less than a week. When he lets himself really think something through, more often than not he comes to the right conclusion, such as realizing the only way to defeat Pitch and protect his friends in an instant once he thought instead of reacting. He’s also able to improvise and quickly improve his powers, such as the attack that surprised even him when he tried to save Sandy. Although unsure how he did it at the time, he’s able to recreate the attack multiple times (although with somewhat less power) in subsequent encounters with Pitch and little to no practice.
CHARACTER RELATIONSHIPS:
Sandy: The first among the Guardians that Jack would really consider a friend instead of some strange combination of coworker and kidnapper. Even he’s not quite sure why, but Sandy never smothered him with expectations like Tooth and North or just plain expected him to fail like Bunny. He was also the fondest of Sandy’s work with the kids, often sampling a dream or two when he and Sandy happened to cross paths, although they’d never actually met before being introduced by North. Sandy’s death hit him very hard, because it was losing the first friend he could remember having.
Bunny: Unlike the rest of the Guardians, Bunny is the only one with whom Jack has a history. It’s not exactly a shining example of friendship, unfortunately. Jack has the bad tendency to annoy Bunny on purpose because he reacts so loudly, with his crowning achievement the Blizzard of ‘68 drowning Easter Sunday in snow. Despite that being decades ago, Bunny really holds a grudge. Jack’s been dodging him ever since. They’ve settled into something of an uneasy truce now that they’re both on the same team, and it might be heading toward a grudging respect.
North: The first time Jack meets North, he asks if he’s been brought to the North Pole because he’s on the naughty list. North replies, “On naughty list? You hold record!” While that obviously doesn’t make Jack any sort of horrible person, it does give North a particular frame of reference which makes it twice as interesting when he’s the one who so often reaches out to Jack, especially at the beginning. He almost manages to be a sort of parental figure, that fun dad that everyone else in your class is equally envious of and kind of scared by. He’s also the person who explains what it means to be a Guardian. Jack likes North, but he worries that he’s not at all what North thinks he should be.
Tooth and her fairies: According to Tooth and her fairies Jack’s teeth (and only his teeth, the rest of him is just normal) are just about the best things on the planet. They “sparkle like freshly fallen snow.” She does her best to mother him, but he’s firmly of the mind that he could not possibly ever need mothering, no thank you. Jack is understandably a little intimidated by Tooth (considering how much time she spends trying to look in his mouth), but he knows she means well. Most of the time.
Jamie Bennett and his friends: Jamie and his friends are Jack’s current favorite pack of kids. They live in Burgess, which Jack has adopted as something of a home base over the years. Though he travels far and wide, he always comes back. Though they can’t see him, he’s fond of them and knows all their names and favorite hobbies. He’s strangely devoted considering none of them know he exists, but seeing them happy because of something they did makes him feel a little less lonely, like maybe he could be part of the gang.
Pitch Black: Although he won’t admit it, Jack understands this bad guy a little too well. He knows what it’s like to be alone and forgotten, knows the lengths he’s occasionally gone to, hoping the kids would realize who was responsible for their winter fun. While he doesn’t agree with Pitch’s methods, and certainly not with hurting the kids by making them lose their belief, he still understands the motive behind it. He might have even managed something close to sympathy until Pitch attacked them in Burgess, killing Sandy. After that, understanding or not, Pitch had crossed a line Jack couldn’t forgive.
STRENGTH OF HEART MOMENT SUMMARY:
I’m taking Jack from the moment he collapses after using his magic to attack Pitch following Sandy’s death. It’s the first truly unselfish act we see from Jack up to that point in the movie. Prior to that, he’d been acting in his own interest, to rescue the teeth so he could regain his memories, but when Sandy is surrounded, he realizes he’s about to lose someone he could have called a true friend, and he finally acts like a Guardian for the first time that we see.
POWERS
SAMPLE - THE AWAKENING:
It wasn’t cold, but it was dark, and he was definitely afraid.
“Sandy!” His eyes flew open and for a second, he thought he was still there, still fighting, but then he realized he wasn’t. He wasn’t anything. He wasn’t anywhere, either. There wasn’t even any moon to save him this time.
No sooner had he noticed it than he was falling again, but it felt different this time, more like flying and less like the uncontrolled freefall exhausting his magic had left him in. There was no wind to call here; he didn’t have his staff even if there was. Somehow, he didn’t need it. He felt his feet touch a floor he couldn’t see, and he spun around, looking for anything or anyone there.
Jack…
“Who’s there?! Tooth?” Except it hadn’t sounded anything like Tooth, had it? It was a girl’s voice, one that felt almost familiar. He looked around again, still seeing nothing but darkness. He’d never thought he was scared of the dark before. “Anybody?”
Jack, hurry!
“Hurry where?! I can’t-” He’d taken a step forward, toward where he thought the voice might be coming from. Apparently that was the signal whoever was waiting for as the floor seemed to almost explode upward. He covered his eyes, and when he opened them again, the scene had changed. The floor was… glowing? He stared, not quite sure what to make of it but not wanting to take his eyes off it, either. It looked like something that belonged in North’s workshop. In fact, right in the center, he recognized the ‘G’ from the floor of North’s observation deck, the G for Guardians. Around it were murals, matching the one he’d seen at Tooth’s palace, showing the four Guardians in action.
You have to choose.
“Choose what?” His tone was sharper than it could have been, but if mysterious voices were going to give him confusing directions, he didn’t want any of it. He wanted to go home. He needed to go home.
The voice must have heard his frustration, because the floor changed again. Where the murals to his left had been now stretched an iced-over pond, the ice just starting to crack in places from an early spring thaw. He recognized it like he’d recognize his own hand. It was the pond he’d woken up in as Jack Frost, the one he’d watched countless Burgess kids skate on every winter. An old pair of well-worn skates sat just at the edge, like they were waiting for someone to use them. He took a step closer, then another, and before he’d really decided to, he was kneeling next to the skates. “What is this?”
You have to choose who you are. You can hide from everyone, but would you protect them, too? Are you a Guardian?
He’d be ashamed of his reaction later, probably, but he dropped the skates faster than if they’d burned him, stumbling back to this feet. “I’m not a Guardian. I’m not like them.” The denial was weaker than it had been at the North Pole, but he knew it was still true. How could he ever be a Guardian? “How am I supposed to choose when I don’t know the answer?”
A flare of light followed his words, a new shape melting up out of the mosaic at the top of the circle, ignoring his objection. He was backing away from it before it had even fully gained its shape, before it sunk in that it was as unmoving as a statue. A Nightmare, although something about it was different. It only took Jack moments to see why; a line of gold had wrapped around its neck and body - one of Sandy’s whips. In places, the black sand that made up the Nightmare flickered and shifted, alternately black and gold as one side or the other won new ground in the battle. Sandy had managed to change a few of the Nightmares back to dreams before… before, but his whip alone wouldn’t be strong enough for that. Not without help.
Are you brave? Will you fight even if you might lose? Are you a Warrior?
This time he hesitated, but he still shook his head. Sandy had been a warrior, sure, even North and Bunny. He could fight but not on his own. He wasn’t like them.
He was almost expecting the third flash to his right following his decision. The shape this time was as familiar as the other two but twice as welcome. His staff rested against a pile of snowballs that glowed softly with magic. The staff itself was dead and brown, just like he’d first seen it. Waiting. Finally, something normal around here. With a happy laugh, he reached for it, only to be stopped again by the voice.
You’re always playing tricks, Jack. They can hurt people. Are you strong enough to tell the difference? Are you a Mystic?
Even with that warning, even knowing he was supposed to make some sort of serious choice, it wasn’t hard to take his staff as soon as the girl stopped talking. It glowed to life in his hand. There wasn’t any choice to be made. “I don’t know anything about a mystic. I just know I can’t be anything but me.” And the staff, the snowballs, the tricks, that was him. Not a Guardian, not a warrior, just Jack Frost. It was the one thing he did know.
Then choose what you aren’t.
“What?” That made even less sense than before. “Why do I have to choose that?”
You can’t be everything, Jack. No one can be. To be something, you have to not be something else. What aren’t you?
He turned warily, looking at the frozen, patchwork Nightmare, and the quiet, still pond. When it came right down to it, maybe that choice was easy, too. He could fight, if he had to, but... “I’m not a Guardian.”
With a final flash, everything but his staff disappeared, leaving him alone with the glowing floor again, the G seeming twice as accusing now that he’d said it out loud. “What- Hey! Where’d you go-” He was given no time to finish, as with a crack, the floor separated under him, dropping him back into darkness.
SPECIAL ABILITIES:
So Artificer. Not gonna lie, that was actually not the choice I expected him to end up with, but considering his canon point and the events of the movie immediately following his pull point, it ended up making the most sense to reject the shield. It won’t affect his powers at all, but it’ll be interesting to see how the rejection affects his mental state should he ever get his memories back ingame. Considering how quickly Pitch is able to get one over on him, being extra vulnerable to the darkness also seems appropriate.
So powers. Physical, first. Jack isn’t especially strong or powerful physically, but he is very quick and has superb balance. I attribute a lot of this to being a spirit, so sometimes the laws of physics let him skate by on things, like sitting on top of his staff like a very strange ascetic. He’s also extra sturdy. We see him fall from pretty high up to land on a large tree branch, then get up and laugh it off. He can be hurt, and magically it’s not hard to do so, but breaking or damaging his staff is going to be a better way to get to him physically than doing anything to him directly.
Magic is a little more complicated. Per modly okay, he’s going to be keeping a few of the more intrinsic bits of being a winter spirit: able to stand being out in the cold with no shoes, for example, or covering things in frost and making little, animated frost bunnies. The sort of harmless tricks that are just part and parcel of being Jack Frost. Also, being a winter spirit, he’ll be far more at ease with the sort of elemental spells he’s used to dealing with (i.e. the aero and blizzard lines) and he’s never going to quite trust the fire spells, if he ever learns to do them at all.
It’s going to take a little while (or someone telling/teaching him to do it) before he even begins to think about using other sorts of spells, but once he does, he’s a very quick study, and I expect he’ll start experimenting with making things happen like flight and the frost lightning he’d managed to create right before his pull point. He will also probably keep channeling all magic through his staff until/unless someone tells him you don’t have to do that in this universe. Boy is great at improvising but terrible at breaking habits.
INVENTORY:
Jack travels pretty light even at the best of times, so it’ll be just him, his clothes, and his staff.
NOTES/ASPIRATIONS
Madb (and Beth, because she’d be sad if I left her out) have said a lot about this game, so I’m excited to try it out. I’ve never pulled Jack from such an early point in his canon before, so I’m looking forward to seeing how not having his memories and the motivations that come with them will affect him and how he relates to others.
I’ll put a note here, too, about the couple strange situations I checked with the mods, so I have notes of them and anyone else wanting to check out my app can see, too. First, Jack’s staff is sort of a source for him. When Pitch breaks it in Antarctica, he physically suffers for it. So it’s coming along less as a weapon and more because it’s kind of a package deal with him.
Second, as mentioned in the special abilities, Jack’s magic is not entirely switching over to the KH system, since he’s a winter spirit and so much of it is bound up in what he is. In addition to the tiny bits of magic that are staying, Jack himself will still have a few spirit attributes. He’ll be visible to everyone (at least, everyone on Penrose) but he’s very hard to damage physically seeing as he’s not alive in the technical human sense, and he’s always slightly chilly to touch. You won’t get frostbite from touching him (harhar) but you’ll notice it. He’ll be most comfortable in the cold and more uncomfortable than your average person in extreme heat. He can function in it but he avoids it if he can. So just don’t expect to see him on Aestival too often. Of course, the way visiting other worlds works, who knows what would happen anywhere else?
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