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PLAYER
Player name: Manda
Contact: sidereal
Characters currently in-game: butts mcgee

CHARACTER
Character Name: Adam Parrish
Character Age: 18
Canon: The Raven Cycle
Canon Point: Post-Blue Lily, Lily Blue.
History: wiki link, but it's not particularly good, so here is a summary.

Adam Parrish was born in a trailer park in Henrietta, Virginia, and he's been working to get out of it ever since. His family is poor in both money and affection, his father physically abusing him for years and his mother standing by. In pursuit of his ultimate goal, getting out and leaving Henrietta and his life behind him, Adam won a partial scholarship to Aglionby, the elite private boy's school in town. He worked hard to attend it, making top grades in nearly all his classes and working three jobs to pay the remaining portion of his tuition. Attending Aglionby threw him into the path of Richard Gansey III, who Adam got to know initially because of his car (Adam being something of a mechanic), and who quickly drew Adam into his orbit and his consuming quest for the dead Welsh king Glendower. Adam didn't necessarily believe in the magic that Gansey seemed certain existed, but he was drawn to Gansey's charisma and decided to help him. He quickly became one of a set, Gansey, Ronan, and Adam, all devoted to their quest.

This quest is thrown into high gear when the boys meet Blue and the magical forest atop the ley line, Cabeswater, begins to awaken. Very attracted to Blue, Adam asks her out, and they begin dating. Soon Adam can't deny that magic is real, but at the same time they're really starting to get somewhere, Adam's life is beginning to fall apart. After being dropped off at home one night, Adam is beaten by his father on the steps of his home. Ronan steps in and attacks Adam's father. The police are called, and Adam chooses to press charges against his father, because if he doesn't, Ronan will be arrested and kicked out of Aglionby. Adam ends up deaf in one ear from the abuse, without a home to return to, and forced to possibly rely on Gansey - the one thing he never wanted to do.

Not long after, Barrington Whelk, the man who killed their friend Noah as a sacrifice in an attempt to wake the ley line, attempts to do so again. Consumed by his own turmoil, Adam also goes to Cabeswater on his own to wake the ley line. A confrontation ensues, friends arrive, weird shit happens, and Adam ends up sacrificing himself to wake the ley line, giving up what he values most, his freedom.

Adam moves into an apartment above the offices of St. Agnes, the Catholic church Ronan attends. The bargain weighs on him as Cabeswater attempts to communicate, but magical forests aren't great at that sort of thing. Adam thinks he's going crazy or that he might have suffered brain damage. He hallucinates, seeing spirits and trees, and finally he goes into a fugue state and wanders for miles, unaware of what he's doing.

Meanwhile, his personal life is going to shit, because leaving an abusive home, dealing with the effects of that abuse, and having a magical forest in your head does not leave you on an even emotional keel. Blue breaks it off with him, his friendship with Gansey frays at the seams, and Ronan is off doing crazy shit. Persephone, a psychic who lives with Blue, takes Adam under her wing and helps him balance himself, doing a ritual to strengthen the bond between him and Cabeswater while leaving his mind his own, and teaching him to scry. Adam and Persephone restore Cabeswater's power.

In the third book, Adam continues his work with Cabeswater, repairing ley lines and giving the forest more strength. He patches up his relationships a bit, no longer fighting with Gansey and spending a lot of time with Ronan, who asks for his help getting revenge on Colin Greenmantle, the man who murdered Ronan's father. Together, they create evidence that will frame him for child murder, and Adam and Ronan grow closer. Adam testifies at the hearing about his father's abuse, and Gansey and Ronan show up to support him, helping Adam realize that he can accept their help without losing himself.

Finally, they all go down in some crazy caves to try to find Glendower and Blue's mom. Adam does some magic - his powers and connection to Cabewater having grown slowly throughout the book - and they do successfully find Blue's mother, if not Glendower. They also accidentally help wake an evil sleeping entity. Whoops.

Personality: Adam Parrish is a creature of carefully maintained pride, deep ambition, and a strong undercurrent of self-loathing. He presents himself to the world around him in a certain way: quiet, polite, studious. It's not that these things aren't true, it's that they're nowhere near the whole story. Adam is quiet not out of shyness, but because he's observing. He's polite, but struggles with his anger and his fragile pride. He's studious, getting the top marks in all his classes (except Latin), but he still thinks of himself as a fraud. The intelligence and hard work is real, but he's not doing it for its own sake, but rather as a foothold on his way to his ultimate goal: leaving Henrietta behind.

As an extremely poor scholarship student at a school full of incredibly rich boys, Adam always feels like he has something to prove. He hides his real 'hick' accent, takes meticulous care of his uniform, and excels in his classes. Even with all that, he knows he doesn't fit in. He wants to make something of himself, and he needs to do it on his own, without the help of his rich friends. They don't understand this, and it causes conflict, particularly with Gansey, who doesn't understand why Adam won't accept his help.

But to Adam, freedom is the most important thing, and his pride tells him that taking Gansey's help would make him belong to Gansey, even when what Gansey's trying to do is get him out of his abusive home. Even there, he thinks he needs to do it on his own, although at the same time he thinks of himself as a coward for not leaving sooner.

Adam recognizes the effects that abuse has had on him, and even at one point thinks to himself that he has Stockholm syndrome because he misses his home so much after he's left. He recognizes the effects, but he can't change them, which only frustrates him more. He thinks of himself as unworthy, ugly, monstrous, and alone, even though none of the people who love him would agree. Sometimes he seems to understand that this is because he was abused, and sometimes he seems to simply accept it as truth. Adam is a victim, but not always a sympathetic one - he refuses to take offered help, lashes out when his pride is injured, and is nearly incapable of depending on anyone but himself.

Observant of others, Adam is confused by himself. He doesn't always know what he wants. Persephone observes that he's most interested in the one thing that remains unknowable to him, his own mind. He's intelligent enough to recognize his abuse, but unable to change the way he reacts because of it. This is all exacerbated by his bargain with Cabeswater, giving up his autonomy to become the avatar and tool of the forest. Before he is in balance with it, he thinks he's going crazy, and between that and the other problems in his personal life, he lashes out at those around him.

Adam does struggle with his anger, as he does with his loneliness. He thinks of himself as an army of one, unknowable, alone, despite the friends who try to support and help him. He finds it extremely difficult to reach out for help, or even just to accept help when it's offered. He's self-reliant to a fault, even when he shouldn't be, but over the course of the books has become, very slowly, more able to accept help from his friends.

Despite his distance from them, Adam does love his friends deeply and truly, and he is loyal to them. Upon being told that Ronan was potentially in trouble, he tried to sneak out of his house on two separate occasions, leading to beatings from his father. The idea that he might end up being responsible for Gansey's death affects him deeply, and by the end of the third book, Gansey's safety is the one thing he has left to ask for. Adam's prickly pride leads him to fight with his friends, but that doesn't erase his deep love for them - though he always fears that they may see him as the unworthy creature he thinks he is.

Adam is intelligent and observant, loyal and often kind, and deeply driven. He's also angry and secretive, ambitious and cunning, and intensely critical of himself. Unsurprisingly, it's the second set of qualities that Adam himself focuses on, while it's only outside observers who ever seem to appreciate the first set. He takes care to not let his internal conflict show in front of anyone outside his circle, but Gansey, Ronan, and Blue are all adept at accidentally (or not) getting under his skin and sparking his easily offended spikiness.

Adam's character arc in the books, though not yet finished, appears to be that of a boy slowly overcoming the marks his abuse has left on his mind and finding his own worthiness. His bargain with Cabeswater, though it makes things harder at first, in the long run helps with this. It protects him and offers a refuge in times of emotional distress, and it offers him power when he's never had anything like that before. Adam slowly learns how to use it and becomes the magician that Persephone and Ronan name him, and as he does so he begins to learn that accepting help doesn't mean selling yourself, and that perhaps he doesn't so desperately need to be fixed.

He's not quite there yet. He still bubbles with self-hatred, considering himself an ugly boy compared to someone like Ronan, who creates beautiful things. But he's learning that he doesn't have to do everything on his own, that he can have power, and that people can care for him even if he believes he's not worthy of it.

Canon updated to Chapter 66 of The Raven King in June 2016:

Over the course of The Raven King, Adam didn't change so much as accept who he is, what he wants, and what he can do. While he spent a good portion of the last three books dealing with the trauma of his abuse and learning how to cope with his magical powers, the last book is where a lot of these things are finally resolved. Not completely - Adam still has a lot of growing to do, and the effects of abuse can't be healed in a matter of months. He'll be dealing with that for the rest of his life. But he's gotten more measured, more able to deal with his own anger, and - most importantly - able to more effectively identify the moments when his trauma is affecting him.

The moment at the Barns when he remembers overhearing his father is an excellent example of this. He allows himself to think of the memory and then let it go, rather than flinching away and then focusing too hard on it like he would once have. It still hurts, and it still haunts him, but it doesn't consume him and it doesn't spark a downward spiral of condemnation and self-hatred like it once would have. He's learning how to cope with his trauma, how to live with it, since it'll never be completely gone. He's coming to terms with it, in a much more healthy way than he did in previous books. It will be an ongoing process, but in TRK it's clearly begun and will continue.

Some things, however, he's fully accepted. One big area of growth for Adam was realizing that he can love things - that love may be a privilege, but it's a privilege he's capable of feeling and even giving. Rather than focusing on what needs to be done and pushing his own wants and needs aside, Adam accepts that he can love things like doing magic and being happy and being with his friends. This leads more or less directly to him reciprocating Ronan's feelings, though he does it in a typically Adam way - talking to Gansey first, trying to understand what love feels like and whether that's what he feels for Ronan. He knows that he can't take Ronan lightly, that he can't play a game, and that if he chooses to return Ronan's interest it will be something serious for both of them. In the end, he settles all these questions for himself, and chooses to begin a relationship with Ronan, knowing all of those things.

He also accepts and understands that he no longer feels the drive to leave and never come back that he once did. Instead, the option of coming back to Henrietta, and to Ronan and the Barns specifically, seems to hold a definite allure for him. Adam still wants to pursue his education and his future, he's still ambitious and hardworking, but now Ronan and the Barns are positioned as something he sees as a home, or as something that could be a home one day. He'll leave, but he'll come back, and none of it will involve resentment or compromise on his part. It's what he wants, a bright future and a home where he is wanted. He also bonds quite quickly with the Orphan Girl Ronan pulled out of his dreams, being the one to understand her trauma and offer his own form of comfort, and the one to think of her and want to take care of her.

More practically, over the course of the final book Adam grows more comfortable and skilled with his own magic. He scries many times and barely needs to concentrate to do it, seeming comfortable and easy with it when once he was uncertain. He is able to use Cabeswater's power to protect both him and Ronan, and he thinks of magic as something he genuinely enjoys doing. Cabeswater is more like another friend to him than a mere source of power, even once he knows where the forest really comes from.

The exact moment Adam is coming from is a fraught and emotional one, but over the course of the book (and the series) he's grown comfortable with who he is and what he wants. He no longer allows his abuse or his anger to define him, and he lets himself love things. He's come a long way.

Inventory:

- his Box-issued cell phone
- medical supplies: bandages, antibiotic cream, ibuprofen and aspirin, gauze, surgical tape, antiseptic wipes, ace bandage, tweezers
- food: a couple cans of soup, 6 energy bars, a package of beef jerky, a bottle of water
- a change of clothes: jeans and a t-shirt, socks, underwear
- a pack of tarot cards, wrapped in a silk bag
- wallet with a driver's license, student ID, some various punchcards and discount cards, and $7.38, mostly in coins
- a backpack that the above are kept in
- a knife

Abilities:

Adam's non-magical abilities are pretty straightforward - he's an intelligent person, recognized by his friends as a planner, and his cunning mind makes it easy for him to come up with ideas that might not be instantly obvious. He's also a mechanic, good at working on cars and knowledgeable about their inner bits. He is an excellent and dedicated student, acing all his classes. He speaks decent Latin.

His magical abilities are a little more vague. Adam's bargain with Cabeswater gave him the ability to sense ley lines and magical energy. He can communicate with the forest, both subconsciously and through the use of scrying - via tarot, a bowl of water, a candle flame, etc. He can use this communication to learn what Cabeswater wants, or to try to learn other things (more clairvoyance than seeing the future, though he does know how to read tarot as well - needless to say, I would only use this for game-related things with mod permission and planning). He's also slowly discovering that he can use Cabeswater's power to manipulate things around him - shielding himself from tiles that would have fallen on him, protecting himself from his father with thorns, channeling the power of the ley lines for Ronan to use.

Adam is still in the early stages of learning how to use his new connection to Cabeswater, but it's clear that he is able to use the magic that's now part of him, if mostly on an unconscious level. His connection doesn't seem to be affected based on distance. As Gansey observes, he is now a creature of Cabeswater.

Flaws:

Adam is prideful and stubborn, refusing help because he thinks it's pity. He's also resentful of the wealth and privilege that he aspires to. He has buried rage that scares him and that he tries hard to control, and he's almost incapable of being easy on himself. Self-hatred over 9000. Also this one time he framed a guy for child murder, and this other time he let a guy die. He doesn't really feel bad about either one. Kid's got a ruthless streak.

CR AU
Previous Game and Time: The Box, June-September 2015
Previous Development:

Adam is still essentially the same person he was before he was sent to Box. A little more traumatized, but it hasn't yet altered his personality too much. He saw his best friend die, and that's made him more protective, but he was already motivated to do whatever he needs to to keep Gansey safe. There are really only two big changes of note.

The first is that he's beginning to reach out for help more often. Not significantly more often, but being put in survival situations alongside people who are more equipped for them than Adam is made him realize that it might be all right, and even necessary, to accept help from people without offering something in return. This extends to his friends as well, though in that case he's moving even more slowly. Still, he's trying to depend on them more bit by bit, instead of doing everything himself.

The second is that he's realized and accepted his attraction to Ronan, as well as his own sexuality. For the moment, that's only an internal change, as he needs time to figure the more emotional side of things out, but it was a big step for him. He knows that he can be attracted to men as well as women, now, and that he returns Ronan's interest, even if that's as far as he can say for now. Also, Ronan knows. And Gansey. And Noah. And basically everybody. But hey, at least his sexuality crisis is over.

SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: TDM link