Nancy Downs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theweirdos) wrote2025-04-11 12:16 am
theweirdos) wrote2025-04-11 12:16 am
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quantumvelvet
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Yelena Belova (musicdied)
Character Name: Nancy Downs
Series: The Craft
Age: 16.
Even before the movie began, Nancy harboured a whole lot of anger, and was quick to lash out socially. Once she gained access to actual magic, that lashing out took on a supernatural bent, resulting in her killing two people, possibly being an accomplice to a third death, and trying to kill one of her friends after psychologically tormenting her for several days. She's very much not an adult, but she's seen and done things that have left her hardened, and has the mental framework to handle a lot of the weirder and more unnerving aspects of the Barge.
From When?: At the end of the movie, when Sarah blasts her into the mirror during their fight. In canon, she's injured and knocked unconscious, but survives; here, that head trauma's going to be worse than a Hollywood sleep tap.
Inmate Justification: Nancy is confirmed to have killed two people with magic, and may have contributed to the death of a third - canon isn't entirely clear on whether one of the deaths was actually something the coven caused, or just something they predicted. While her reasons were somewhat sympathetic, it was part of an escalating hunger for and abuse of power that culminated in her terrorizing and trying to murder one of her friends for opposing her.
Ideally, working with a warden will help her develop better outlets for her anger, and teach her that power for its own sake isn't actually all that great, and jealously hoarding it and lashing out at anyone who angers her is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Arrival: Unwilling
Abilities/Powers: Nancy is a powerful witch who's been infused with the power of her deity, which comes along with a whole heap of magical abilities.
Partly Retained
Telekinesis - In canon, Nancy's shown to be a powerful telekinetic, able to move large pieces of furniture with ease, blow out windows, and levitate herself or another person with no apparent time limit. Until and unless her powers are restored, this will be reduced to being able to move or manipulate items no larger than a hardback novel, at only the speed a relatively fit human could throw or swing it - essentially, she'll be able to hit someone with a smallish object to give herself a chance to escape a threat, but won't be able to do serious damage.
Biokinesis - In canon, the girls are able to heal injuries, even old injuries, with their magic, and Nancy in particular causes her abusive stepfather to have a heart attack. Until and unless her powers are restored, she'll only be able to heal, not harm, and healing serious injuries will be seriously draining.
Sense Magic - Nancy is shown to be able to sense when magic is being cast on her, even remotely, and to identify who's doing it. Since this has no offensive application, she'll still be able to sense magic being used on her (outside of magic-like flood or environmental port effects), but she'll only be able to identify the source if she's both familiar with them and they're not actively masking their magical signature somehow.
Resist Magic - Nancy is shown to be able to resist magic cast on her, if she's aware of it (she no-sells Sarah's first attempt at binding her; the second comes while she's unconscious after her pull point and takes, though it being fueled by their deity may also have an impact there). She'll still be able to resist magic cast by someone equal to or weaker than her (unless it would be more fun for her defenses to fail for plot reasons), but someone who's stronger or more experienced than she is could get around her defenses with varying levels of effectiveness. Like the above senses, this won't help her with floods, port effects, or other game mechanics at all.
Glamour - In canon, the girls are able to create incredibly convincing full-sensory illusions (convincing explosions, swarms of vermin, very detailed tv broadcasts), shapeshift, and render themselves invisible or difficult to detect. Until and unless her powers are restored, Nancy will only keep the last past, and will only be able to stay invisible or hold an SEP field for very brief periods of time - long enough to escape a serial killer or bail out of a room, not long enough to cause too much trouble.
Fully Suppressed
Telepathy - Nancy is able to read minds, and pull information from someone's thoughts, memories, and subconscious. She would presumably be blocked by psychic shields, this just isn't addressed in canon.
Dream manipulation - Nancy is able to enter and control someone's dreams. While she only uses this in canon to cause nightmares, that's a conscious choice, and in theory she would be able to also create a positive dreamscape if she had access to this power and was so inclined.
Aerokinesis - Nancy's element is air, and she has some control over it. She can shape and manipulate gusts of wind and air currents, up to the force of a strong gale in a limited area.
Pyrokinesis - Nancy is able to start small fires, roughly the size of a bedroom wastebasket. Or a microwave.
Weather manipulation - Nancy can summon localized storms or rainfall, roughly the size of a city block.
Technopathy - Nancy is able to manipulate technology, and has used this to remotely turn on televisions, turn lights on and off, cut power, change traffic lights, and short out machines. The more sophisticated a device, the more she'd presumably need to know about it to effectively control it - no hacking into highly secured systems or re-tasking satellites with her brain here, maybe making an older ATM spew bills.
Divination - Nancy is able to scry on a person or location, and is shown to remotely track Sarah when she breaks with the coven.
Spellcasting - The girls are able to use magic spells and rituals to create sustained effects and manipulate probability. This manifests as both curses - for example, love spells, making a bully's hair fall out over a prolonged period of time - and more beneficial effects - Nancy's impoverished and abusive stepfather suddenly having a very large life insurance policy that no one knew about. They also have the ability to bind someone else's magic, and protective rituals that shield against harm or malign influence do exist in canon, though the only attempt to use one on screen is interrupted before it can be completed. One major drawback to using a spell to alter or control the course of events is that while magic can set something in motion, it can't just be undone if the witch who cast the spell has buyer's remorse - it has to run its course. Given the different kinds of magic in play in game, and the sheer power level of some of the characters, this won't necessarily prevent someone else from undoing Nancy's spells if she gets her magic back in full, but if she curses someone, she won't be able to just go "oh, shit, my bad" and take it back.
Spiritual communion - The girls are able to get in touch with the spirit world, and summon, channel, and absorb the power of spiritual entities. The main being they contact is their deity, but it's also shown that a witch can contact or be contacted by the spirits of the dead, and this would likely extend to other spirits or magical beings present in a given setting.
Inmate Information: Nancy grew up poor, with an alcoholic mother, and a father she never met. When her mother eventually got married, it was to a man with abusive tendencies that got worse as time went on, and took on overtones of sexual harassment as Nancy entered her teenaged years. The adults around her by and large turned a blind eye, writing her off as destined to turn out like her mother, and therefore not worth the effort. Her peers weren't much better, and things didn't improve when she entered high school, at a private Catholic school that catered to the wealthy. It's implied that she was a scholarship student, which was just one more thing for her classmates to look down on her for.
All of this taught Nancy that the structures and institutions that shaped her world were hostile. Adults weren't there to help her, authority figures weren't there to help her, and her peers would treat her like a victim if they could. And so she started rejecting societal expectations in fashion and behaviour. She learned to take what she wanted, and make the first strike, lashing out at people to keep them at arm's length. She was loud, and crude, and volatile, and revelled in the fact that people found her unnerving.
She did have a couple of friends, Bonnie and Rochelle, other social outcasts. If she wasn't always kind to them, she did genuinely care about them, exhibiting a protective streak, and offering sympathy - if sometimes awkwardly - for their woes. The three girls formed the initial coven, and while their dabbling in witchcraft may have originally started as another way to give the finger to systems that failed them, all three of them developed a genuine faith, both in the deity they chose to worship, Manon, and in the existence of magic itself.
Belief in magic didn't translate to actual magic until the arrival of a new student, Sarah, in their junior year. While Nancy was initially hostile toward her - seeing her as just another spoiled rich girl, no different than any of the other students who rejected them - she came around at Bonnie's urging, and began to regard Sarah as another close friend. She and the other girls brought Sarah into their coven, and suddenly, their magic started working. Their first major spell was cast to grant each of them a wish, and Nancy's wish was to gain "all the power of Manon". She saw it as a way to break out of the mold the world seemed to have created for her, to have enough power that she wouldn't have to be the victim, wouldn't have to care about people looking down on her.
At first, Nancy was pleased for her friends as their desires began to be granted. Their spells were working. Other magic they experimented with was working. But the longer she went without any sign of her own desire being granted, the more resentful and angry she grew. This came to a head one night, at home. Her stepfather was drunk, and tried to paw open her robe. Nancy's mother defended her. Her stepfather started hitting her mother. And Nancy's temper exploded.
She blew several fuses in the kitchen, set a couple of small fires...and gave her stepfather a fatal heart attack. It wasn't a conscious decision - in the moment, she wanted him to pay and she wanted him gone, and that's the form it took - but it wasn't something she felt any real remorse or grief over, either. And then, a few days later, a lawyer for her stepfather's employer informed Nancy and her mother that there had been an unusually sizable life insurance policy, and that they were the beneficiaries. And just like that, their lives had changed.
Nancy began delving deeper into the magical arts, and came across a ritual to invoke the spirit of Manon and pull his power into her. Despite warnings that it would be dangerous for an inexperienced witch, she was able to convince the rest of the coven to perform the ritual. Unfortunately for everyone, it worked, and Nancy's power increased exponentially. With the increase in her power, she began to go off the rails. She'd never really had any sort of framework for how to use power responsibly - in the world as she saw it, having power meant being able to do whatever you wanted, to prevent yourself from being hurt, or to punish those who did hurt you. This led to the first fractures forming in the coven. Sarah worried about Nancy's increasingly reckless behaviour, and the changes in Bonnie and Rochelle's attitudes, and when she expressed that worry, they cut her off.
At least, until Sarah's boyfriend, Chris, tried to rape her, and she ran to Rochelle's house for help. Despite their argument, Sarah was still one of them - and Nancy, more than the rest of them, was furious. She stormed off to confront him, terrified him with magic, and then after he followed up his insults and self-justifications with what she saw as a profoundly insincere apology, she threw him out a window with telekinesis. Much like with her stepfather's death, it came as a combination of her deep rage at something she saw as unjust - Chris attacking Sarah, and then only hours later partying with his friends, Chris's general misogynistic behaviour toward women whose reputations he ruined - and a desire to protect someone she cared about.
Chris's death drove the final wedge between Nancy and Sarah. A few days later, Sarah tried to bind Nancy's power, but Nancy was the stronger witch, and was able to fight it off. She viewed this as an attack - an attempt to control her, to make her helpless again, to make her the victim again - and a betrayal of a friendship that she had, from her perspective, fully upheld her end of. Bonnie and Rochelle took her side, and the three of them struck back at Sarah, first tormenting her with nightmares and illusions, and then finally trying to kill her, making it look like she'd committed suicide out of guilt over her boyfriend's death.
Though they initially went along with it, this last act was enough to shake Nancy's friends, and they fled - unbeknownst to Nancy, because of an illusion worked to make them believe their misdeeds were backlashing on them - leaving her to fight Sarah alone. Both of the girls were strong witches, and Sarah had also been able to invoke Manon and magnify her powers, so at first, they fought to a stalemate. Sarah turning Nancy's illusions back on her shocked her enough that she was briefly regretful for what she'd done and how far she'd taken it, but that lesson was short-lived. The second Sarah tried to bind her again, Nancy snapped, unable to accept losing any of the power she considered so hard-won, and attacked her physically. The end of this physical fight, when Nancy was thrown into a mirror, is when she'll be entering the Barge.
Path to Redemption: The two main goals Nancy will need to clear in order to graduate are 1) finding a more positive outlet for her anger than lashing out at the world, and 2) understanding how to use power responsibly, and that there's a lot of space between not being the strongest person in the room, and being a victim. Ideally, she'll also learn that limitations aren't just there to control her and keep her weak, though this is likely to come as a part of having a good warden, and won't necessarily have to be actively worked on like the other two points.
The biggest difficulty any warden will have with her is that keeping her powers tightly bound is a direct road to failure. She needs to learn to reframe power so she doesn't always feel the need for more, doesn't feel the need to constantly assert her dominance in order to feel secure. She won't learn this from a position of powerlessness. That's where she's lived her entire life, and that's what's taught her to need to be on top of the heap. More of that won't help her. At the same time, giving her power back too quickly will just lead to her acting out and digging herself deeper, and give her warden a lot of messes to clean up. An ideal warden will loosen her leash over time, and will find a way to deal with her inevitable lashing out without just yanking her power back again. Someone who has had, and will admit to, their own colossal fuck-ups with misuse of power may be able to start her on a path to coming back from that.
Playing on Nancy's sense of loyalty and protective instincts may be a way to bring her around, if done carefully. The first two times she lashed out with her magic, she did so to protect the people she cared about. Likewise, helping her find a way to channel her anger and sense of injustice into improving the world around her might help her feel more secure. She's unlikely to ever trust in systems and authority, but practical action with practical results are convincing.
That distrust for authority will also be a hurdle her warden will have to clear. She will not respond well to rigid restrictions, and the more a warden tries to corrale and control her, the more she'll push back. She shouldn't be given all the rope she needs to hang herself, but a laxer touch will be more likely to convince her to start giving some tentative trust, and give her warden a foundation to work from.
Given she's coming in directly following a fight with another witch, and illusions were a big part of that fight, she'll initially have difficulty believing the Barge is real. She'll look for the cracks, and try to catch people out on what she's sure must be lies. Once she's accepted her fate, however, she'll be fascinated by the wealth of magic on display, and will be torn between her ingrained anti-authoritarian streak and her desire to return to life.
She will probably deliberately play with some flood effects, to see if she can figure out how they work.
History: Here
Sample Network Entry: Here
Sample RP: A couple prose starters here.
Special Notes: Anything else not covered here that you'd like us to know!
User DW: If applicable.
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Yelena Belova (
musicdied)Character Name: Nancy Downs
Series: The Craft
Age: 16.
Even before the movie began, Nancy harboured a whole lot of anger, and was quick to lash out socially. Once she gained access to actual magic, that lashing out took on a supernatural bent, resulting in her killing two people, possibly being an accomplice to a third death, and trying to kill one of her friends after psychologically tormenting her for several days. She's very much not an adult, but she's seen and done things that have left her hardened, and has the mental framework to handle a lot of the weirder and more unnerving aspects of the Barge.
From When?: At the end of the movie, when Sarah blasts her into the mirror during their fight. In canon, she's injured and knocked unconscious, but survives; here, that head trauma's going to be worse than a Hollywood sleep tap.
Inmate Justification: Nancy is confirmed to have killed two people with magic, and may have contributed to the death of a third - canon isn't entirely clear on whether one of the deaths was actually something the coven caused, or just something they predicted. While her reasons were somewhat sympathetic, it was part of an escalating hunger for and abuse of power that culminated in her terrorizing and trying to murder one of her friends for opposing her.
Ideally, working with a warden will help her develop better outlets for her anger, and teach her that power for its own sake isn't actually all that great, and jealously hoarding it and lashing out at anyone who angers her is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Arrival: Unwilling
Abilities/Powers: Nancy is a powerful witch who's been infused with the power of her deity, which comes along with a whole heap of magical abilities.
Partly Retained
Telekinesis - In canon, Nancy's shown to be a powerful telekinetic, able to move large pieces of furniture with ease, blow out windows, and levitate herself or another person with no apparent time limit. Until and unless her powers are restored, this will be reduced to being able to move or manipulate items no larger than a hardback novel, at only the speed a relatively fit human could throw or swing it - essentially, she'll be able to hit someone with a smallish object to give herself a chance to escape a threat, but won't be able to do serious damage.
Biokinesis - In canon, the girls are able to heal injuries, even old injuries, with their magic, and Nancy in particular causes her abusive stepfather to have a heart attack. Until and unless her powers are restored, she'll only be able to heal, not harm, and healing serious injuries will be seriously draining.
Sense Magic - Nancy is shown to be able to sense when magic is being cast on her, even remotely, and to identify who's doing it. Since this has no offensive application, she'll still be able to sense magic being used on her (outside of magic-like flood or environmental port effects), but she'll only be able to identify the source if she's both familiar with them and they're not actively masking their magical signature somehow.
Resist Magic - Nancy is shown to be able to resist magic cast on her, if she's aware of it (she no-sells Sarah's first attempt at binding her; the second comes while she's unconscious after her pull point and takes, though it being fueled by their deity may also have an impact there). She'll still be able to resist magic cast by someone equal to or weaker than her (unless it would be more fun for her defenses to fail for plot reasons), but someone who's stronger or more experienced than she is could get around her defenses with varying levels of effectiveness. Like the above senses, this won't help her with floods, port effects, or other game mechanics at all.
Glamour - In canon, the girls are able to create incredibly convincing full-sensory illusions (convincing explosions, swarms of vermin, very detailed tv broadcasts), shapeshift, and render themselves invisible or difficult to detect. Until and unless her powers are restored, Nancy will only keep the last past, and will only be able to stay invisible or hold an SEP field for very brief periods of time - long enough to escape a serial killer or bail out of a room, not long enough to cause too much trouble.
Fully Suppressed
Telepathy - Nancy is able to read minds, and pull information from someone's thoughts, memories, and subconscious. She would presumably be blocked by psychic shields, this just isn't addressed in canon.
Dream manipulation - Nancy is able to enter and control someone's dreams. While she only uses this in canon to cause nightmares, that's a conscious choice, and in theory she would be able to also create a positive dreamscape if she had access to this power and was so inclined.
Aerokinesis - Nancy's element is air, and she has some control over it. She can shape and manipulate gusts of wind and air currents, up to the force of a strong gale in a limited area.
Pyrokinesis - Nancy is able to start small fires, roughly the size of a bedroom wastebasket. Or a microwave.
Weather manipulation - Nancy can summon localized storms or rainfall, roughly the size of a city block.
Technopathy - Nancy is able to manipulate technology, and has used this to remotely turn on televisions, turn lights on and off, cut power, change traffic lights, and short out machines. The more sophisticated a device, the more she'd presumably need to know about it to effectively control it - no hacking into highly secured systems or re-tasking satellites with her brain here, maybe making an older ATM spew bills.
Divination - Nancy is able to scry on a person or location, and is shown to remotely track Sarah when she breaks with the coven.
Spellcasting - The girls are able to use magic spells and rituals to create sustained effects and manipulate probability. This manifests as both curses - for example, love spells, making a bully's hair fall out over a prolonged period of time - and more beneficial effects - Nancy's impoverished and abusive stepfather suddenly having a very large life insurance policy that no one knew about. They also have the ability to bind someone else's magic, and protective rituals that shield against harm or malign influence do exist in canon, though the only attempt to use one on screen is interrupted before it can be completed. One major drawback to using a spell to alter or control the course of events is that while magic can set something in motion, it can't just be undone if the witch who cast the spell has buyer's remorse - it has to run its course. Given the different kinds of magic in play in game, and the sheer power level of some of the characters, this won't necessarily prevent someone else from undoing Nancy's spells if she gets her magic back in full, but if she curses someone, she won't be able to just go "oh, shit, my bad" and take it back.
Spiritual communion - The girls are able to get in touch with the spirit world, and summon, channel, and absorb the power of spiritual entities. The main being they contact is their deity, but it's also shown that a witch can contact or be contacted by the spirits of the dead, and this would likely extend to other spirits or magical beings present in a given setting.
Inmate Information: Nancy grew up poor, with an alcoholic mother, and a father she never met. When her mother eventually got married, it was to a man with abusive tendencies that got worse as time went on, and took on overtones of sexual harassment as Nancy entered her teenaged years. The adults around her by and large turned a blind eye, writing her off as destined to turn out like her mother, and therefore not worth the effort. Her peers weren't much better, and things didn't improve when she entered high school, at a private Catholic school that catered to the wealthy. It's implied that she was a scholarship student, which was just one more thing for her classmates to look down on her for.
All of this taught Nancy that the structures and institutions that shaped her world were hostile. Adults weren't there to help her, authority figures weren't there to help her, and her peers would treat her like a victim if they could. And so she started rejecting societal expectations in fashion and behaviour. She learned to take what she wanted, and make the first strike, lashing out at people to keep them at arm's length. She was loud, and crude, and volatile, and revelled in the fact that people found her unnerving.
She did have a couple of friends, Bonnie and Rochelle, other social outcasts. If she wasn't always kind to them, she did genuinely care about them, exhibiting a protective streak, and offering sympathy - if sometimes awkwardly - for their woes. The three girls formed the initial coven, and while their dabbling in witchcraft may have originally started as another way to give the finger to systems that failed them, all three of them developed a genuine faith, both in the deity they chose to worship, Manon, and in the existence of magic itself.
Belief in magic didn't translate to actual magic until the arrival of a new student, Sarah, in their junior year. While Nancy was initially hostile toward her - seeing her as just another spoiled rich girl, no different than any of the other students who rejected them - she came around at Bonnie's urging, and began to regard Sarah as another close friend. She and the other girls brought Sarah into their coven, and suddenly, their magic started working. Their first major spell was cast to grant each of them a wish, and Nancy's wish was to gain "all the power of Manon". She saw it as a way to break out of the mold the world seemed to have created for her, to have enough power that she wouldn't have to be the victim, wouldn't have to care about people looking down on her.
At first, Nancy was pleased for her friends as their desires began to be granted. Their spells were working. Other magic they experimented with was working. But the longer she went without any sign of her own desire being granted, the more resentful and angry she grew. This came to a head one night, at home. Her stepfather was drunk, and tried to paw open her robe. Nancy's mother defended her. Her stepfather started hitting her mother. And Nancy's temper exploded.
She blew several fuses in the kitchen, set a couple of small fires...and gave her stepfather a fatal heart attack. It wasn't a conscious decision - in the moment, she wanted him to pay and she wanted him gone, and that's the form it took - but it wasn't something she felt any real remorse or grief over, either. And then, a few days later, a lawyer for her stepfather's employer informed Nancy and her mother that there had been an unusually sizable life insurance policy, and that they were the beneficiaries. And just like that, their lives had changed.
Nancy began delving deeper into the magical arts, and came across a ritual to invoke the spirit of Manon and pull his power into her. Despite warnings that it would be dangerous for an inexperienced witch, she was able to convince the rest of the coven to perform the ritual. Unfortunately for everyone, it worked, and Nancy's power increased exponentially. With the increase in her power, she began to go off the rails. She'd never really had any sort of framework for how to use power responsibly - in the world as she saw it, having power meant being able to do whatever you wanted, to prevent yourself from being hurt, or to punish those who did hurt you. This led to the first fractures forming in the coven. Sarah worried about Nancy's increasingly reckless behaviour, and the changes in Bonnie and Rochelle's attitudes, and when she expressed that worry, they cut her off.
At least, until Sarah's boyfriend, Chris, tried to rape her, and she ran to Rochelle's house for help. Despite their argument, Sarah was still one of them - and Nancy, more than the rest of them, was furious. She stormed off to confront him, terrified him with magic, and then after he followed up his insults and self-justifications with what she saw as a profoundly insincere apology, she threw him out a window with telekinesis. Much like with her stepfather's death, it came as a combination of her deep rage at something she saw as unjust - Chris attacking Sarah, and then only hours later partying with his friends, Chris's general misogynistic behaviour toward women whose reputations he ruined - and a desire to protect someone she cared about.
Chris's death drove the final wedge between Nancy and Sarah. A few days later, Sarah tried to bind Nancy's power, but Nancy was the stronger witch, and was able to fight it off. She viewed this as an attack - an attempt to control her, to make her helpless again, to make her the victim again - and a betrayal of a friendship that she had, from her perspective, fully upheld her end of. Bonnie and Rochelle took her side, and the three of them struck back at Sarah, first tormenting her with nightmares and illusions, and then finally trying to kill her, making it look like she'd committed suicide out of guilt over her boyfriend's death.
Though they initially went along with it, this last act was enough to shake Nancy's friends, and they fled - unbeknownst to Nancy, because of an illusion worked to make them believe their misdeeds were backlashing on them - leaving her to fight Sarah alone. Both of the girls were strong witches, and Sarah had also been able to invoke Manon and magnify her powers, so at first, they fought to a stalemate. Sarah turning Nancy's illusions back on her shocked her enough that she was briefly regretful for what she'd done and how far she'd taken it, but that lesson was short-lived. The second Sarah tried to bind her again, Nancy snapped, unable to accept losing any of the power she considered so hard-won, and attacked her physically. The end of this physical fight, when Nancy was thrown into a mirror, is when she'll be entering the Barge.
Path to Redemption: The two main goals Nancy will need to clear in order to graduate are 1) finding a more positive outlet for her anger than lashing out at the world, and 2) understanding how to use power responsibly, and that there's a lot of space between not being the strongest person in the room, and being a victim. Ideally, she'll also learn that limitations aren't just there to control her and keep her weak, though this is likely to come as a part of having a good warden, and won't necessarily have to be actively worked on like the other two points.
The biggest difficulty any warden will have with her is that keeping her powers tightly bound is a direct road to failure. She needs to learn to reframe power so she doesn't always feel the need for more, doesn't feel the need to constantly assert her dominance in order to feel secure. She won't learn this from a position of powerlessness. That's where she's lived her entire life, and that's what's taught her to need to be on top of the heap. More of that won't help her. At the same time, giving her power back too quickly will just lead to her acting out and digging herself deeper, and give her warden a lot of messes to clean up. An ideal warden will loosen her leash over time, and will find a way to deal with her inevitable lashing out without just yanking her power back again. Someone who has had, and will admit to, their own colossal fuck-ups with misuse of power may be able to start her on a path to coming back from that.
Playing on Nancy's sense of loyalty and protective instincts may be a way to bring her around, if done carefully. The first two times she lashed out with her magic, she did so to protect the people she cared about. Likewise, helping her find a way to channel her anger and sense of injustice into improving the world around her might help her feel more secure. She's unlikely to ever trust in systems and authority, but practical action with practical results are convincing.
That distrust for authority will also be a hurdle her warden will have to clear. She will not respond well to rigid restrictions, and the more a warden tries to corrale and control her, the more she'll push back. She shouldn't be given all the rope she needs to hang herself, but a laxer touch will be more likely to convince her to start giving some tentative trust, and give her warden a foundation to work from.
Given she's coming in directly following a fight with another witch, and illusions were a big part of that fight, she'll initially have difficulty believing the Barge is real. She'll look for the cracks, and try to catch people out on what she's sure must be lies. Once she's accepted her fate, however, she'll be fascinated by the wealth of magic on display, and will be torn between her ingrained anti-authoritarian streak and her desire to return to life.
She will probably deliberately play with some flood effects, to see if she can figure out how they work.
History: Here
Sample Network Entry: Here
Sample RP: A couple prose starters here.
Special Notes: Anything else not covered here that you'd like us to know!