Deer Country Application

[themuseabandonsyou]

Character Base

• Character Name: Orpheus
• Age: 22
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: Hadestown (2019) | Post-Canon
• Items Coming Along:

• An acoustic guitar
• A set of enchanted guitar strings that summon a magical shield when played
• A set of enchanted guitar strings that help with sanity when played
• A tortoiseshell lyre that powers up other Sleepers when played
• A fireproof, water-resistant, stab-proof denim jacket with pockets of holding
• A bright red carnation that never wilts
• His mother's journal

• Content Warnings for Character: Hadestown deals with themes of food scarcity, implied alcoholism, suicide-adjacent themes, death of a loved one, memory loss, and parental abandonment.

Original Deerington Application

• Link to Accepted Deerington Application: Here.
• Additional Adjustments to include:

• Core Relationships:

• Eurydice: While it's easy to characterize Orpheus and Eurydice's relationship as simple love at first or second sight, there's a little more to it if one digs in a little deeper. What draws Orpheus to Eurydice first isn't just shallow attraction, but his empathy and ability to pick up on more than others maybe intend to let on cluing him in to her feelings of loneliness as she sings about later in All I've Ever Known, and wanting to be - or knowing he could be - the person to step in and make things better. Beyond that initial spark, though, Orpheus's relationship with Eurydice is primarily one of balance. The traits he admires most about her - wit, practicality, sensibility - are all things he either lacks or feels that he lacks, and he's sort of in awe of her for it, looking to her for guidance and support in circumstances that call for those traits. At the same time, though, he worries for her and her difficulty in trusting others and tries to nudge her towards leading a less lonely lifestyle, to the degree that she's comfortable with at least. Theirs is a relationship with a great deal of mutual respect, and at their best the two of them push and pull each other towards being more balanced individuals.
  
  All that said, the greatest flaw in their relationship is a lack of communication - much of this on Orpheus's end, as he fixates on his projects and ignores Eurydice's attempts to get his attention in favor of working. It should be noted, however, that this too was an act of love on his part, as he was convinced that finishing his song would solve all of their problems faster and better than him attempting to help in any other way would have. It was misguided, however, and it doesn't take away the fact that he did ignore her distress, but it wasn't totally heartless. When they do actually talk to each other later in Promises, though, their priorities are ultimately very similar, albeit there are hints that Orpheus feels he doesn't deserve Eurydice if he can't keep to the promises he made during Wedding Song and provide for her. This comes back to bite him in Doubt Comes In, where he laments that it feels absurd to think she'd follow him back into the cold and dark of the surface, and this among other anxieties is ultimately what drives him to take that fateful look back.
• Hermes: Orpheus's relationship with his uncle and primary guardian throughout his life can be partially summed up in the way Orpheus addresses him. While he refers to the other gods as 'Lord' and 'Lady,' Hermes's honorific is simply 'Mister'. In context, this indicates a sense of both respect as well as familiarity. Hermes is a reassuring presence for him, and throughout the musical - especially during the Epics - he pauses what he's doing periodically to look to him for approval, which Hermes readily provides. He encourages Orpheus to talk to Eurydice when Orpheus seems unsure about approaching, and gently nudges him in the right direction as he stumbles through that awkward first meeting. It's clear that the two of them have a great deal of affection for each other, Orpheus's trust in Hermes being unspoken but implied in how he always checks with him when he's nervous and Hermes outright saying that he appreciates Orpheus's point of view, citing his optimism as one of the reasons he took him in after his mother left.
  
  That said, Hermes is also willing to be stern with Orpheus, trying repeatedly to get his attention and bemoaning his obliviousness during Chant and later being very clear in his disapproval over Orpheus ignoring Eurydice. Even so, he's the one who bends the rules for Orpheus and Eurydice's sake to give him the directions to Hadestown, caring more for their happiness than the laws governing life and death, and is quick to advise and attempt to reassure Orpheus before his walk out of the underworld, and expresses a resigned sort of dismay as he fails.
• Persephone: While Persephone and Orpheus don't interact much on stage directly, a great deal can be gleaned about their relationship by what they say about each other. He has a respect for her bordering on reverence - which makes sense, given her status as a goddess - and demonstrates this during his toast in Living It Up On Top, expressing his faith that she'll always return bearing the spring and the harvest, despite her returning later and leaving earlier every year. At the same time, though, he shows some awareness that she's deeply unhappy with the state of things, acknowledging her use of alcohol as a way to drown out her problems. He seems more concerned about this than anything else, rather than resentful, as a less forgiving or empathetic person might be given Persephone's problems sort of become everyone's problems in the way that the gods' issues tend to. In turn, Persephone expresses a protectiveness over him when he arrives in Hadestown, trying to intervene when Hades sics his workers on him and bearing witness to his song and sorrow in If It's True, taking it as her cue to go to Hades and persuade him to give Orpheus a chance.
• Hades: A recurring theme of Orpheus's relationships with the other characters in his canon is his intense faith and trust in others. Hades serves as the exception to that. This largely stems from their opposing points of view - Orpheus as a poor member of the working class who's seen all types pass through the bar where he works and talked to them about their struggles, and Hades as the god of the Underworld and all the riches under the Earth, factory foreman and king of the underground, whose contact with his workers seems to be mostly limited to recruiting them when they're at their lowest. While Orpheus is able to relate to his love for his wife and his fear of losing her to a world where he can't follow, the workings of Hades's mind are mostly a mystery to him. Orpheus sees the cruelty of the working conditions in Hadestown as he passes through in search of Eurydice, the exploitation of the workers and the things they lose along the way, and fails to understand how or why someone would do that to another person. This inability to follow Hades's lines of thought makes Orpheus incredibly nervous around him to the point of outright fear and suspicion, worrying that the condition he's given to not look back on his way out of the Underworld is a trick or trap. In the end, this serves to contribute to his decision to turn around at the last moment, as part of his anxiety stems from the idea that Hades lied to him and that Eurydice wouldn't be there after all.

• Summary of CRAU Impact:

Rather than go through all of Orpheus's CR person by person, it's a little easier to just link his CR Chart and summarize the impact his relationships and time in game had on him overall. Multiple people but perhaps most notably Vyng were present towards the beginning of his stay in Deerington to help try to talk Orpheus through his guilt over having failed Hades's test, trying to get him to see it not as having messed up a simple task at the last minute, but having buckled under the compounding pressure of an incredibly difficult journey. Others talked him through his blaming himself for her going to Hadestown in the first place after he got so lost in his songwriting that he failed to notice her struggling, either by arguing that he was trying in his own way or simply providing a sympathetic ear, agreeing that he could and maybe should have acted differently but being understanding of his situation. His guilt wasn't totally assuaged - despite repeated conversations on the subject, the loss of a loved one twice over isn't something a person easily gets over in a year - but it did make him less prone to open self-flagellation over it, as he didn't want to worry his friends. Some of this resulted in a bit of a tendency to try to smile through the pain instead (usually unsuccessfully, as Orpheus is very bad at lying), but some of it did sink in, and he feels less overwhelmingly guilty about it than he did when he arrived.

It's worth noting that accepting help in the first place with his emotions was a big step for him - back at the end of his canon, Orpheus leaves the railway town rather than face his friends and family in the wake of losing Eurydice a second time, intending to wander the Earth alone in search of her in a self-imposed exile that stemmed partially from guilt and feelings of not deserving sympathy from others, but also fear of drawing close to others and losing them as well. Being stuck in Deerington, however, put an end to all of that, as there's only so isolated a person can be when they're in a confined space with so many other people who are all but barging into your business all the time to make sure you're okay. Being too polite to turn away help and not quite woodsy enough to run off and try to live by himself in the middle of the national park or something, Orpheus was forced to form bonds with the other Sleepers and made fast friends with many of them, perhaps most notably Ariadne and Fern. Again, he still feels immense guilt over what happened to Eurydice, but that notion that he can't or doesn't deserve to have friends anymore is long gone.

Unfortunately, the impact Deerington had on him isn't all positive. For all the camaraderie and bonding over shared trauma, there sure was a lot of shared trauma, and Orpheus was not the most well equipped to handle much of it. This culminated in some feelings of intense helplessness, of being a burden to others and generally feeling useless. He didn't express this to others very often, but it came up explicitly in a conversation with Alex after the attempt to break out of the dream with Varian and the Pines family's portal. While he resolved to try to learn to be more 'useful' by learning more than the basics of first aid and other non-combat oriented skills, events conspired such that he never really got the chance. It's still a deep concern of his, and many of his new neuroses since coming to Deerington revolve around feeling unable to help the people around him due to his own incompetence.

Deer Country Attributes

• Canon Powers: Orpheus's abilities in canon as the son of a Muse are a little ambiguous, but the stuff we know he can do for sure is summon flowers in the dead of winter and cause stones to weep and move aside with his voice. He's also able pluck the song Hades wrote for Persephone out of the ether some thousands of years later, saying it "came to him, as if [he'd] known it all along", implying a degree of supernatural insight. In the myths, Orpheus's singing also attracts and soothes wild animals.
• Blood Type: Paleblood
• Omen: Killdeer (Aoede, she/her/hers)
• Blessed Day: April 29th
• Patron Pthumerian: Argonaut
• Blood Power Manifestation: Generally speaking Orpheus's Paleblood abilities will be manifesting most often as producing visual effects/minor hallucinations with his music - radiating sunlight, producing floating flower petals and other bits of visual flair. The rest will mostly rely on permission from other players, but with effort he may be able to exert some of his own emotional state on others through his music - not outright mental control or manipulation, but a burst of sort of 'forced empathy,' showing them how he feels. Also with player permission he'll be capable of dreamwalking and may receive brief, very abstract visions of the future - more symbolic in nature than literal and generally keyed towards showing him how a person's feelings or mental state may change. These will occur OOCly with significant plotting in advance and ICly seemingly at random, with him having little control over when and where they occur or who he receives his insight about.

The Player

• Player Name: QV
• Player Age: 26
• Player Contact: questionableveracity
• Permissions: Here.

Link to your reserve for this character: Here.