the village application

[revvedup]

PLAYER INFO

Name: Carlee
Age: Over 21
Contact: vdova on plurk or PMs.

CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Max Guevara
Canon: Dark Angel
Canon Point: Mid-2x01 (Designate This)
Appearance: Max is of slightly above average height (5'7) and slender build with long, dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a light olive complexion. She was engineered to be exceptionally pretty with a unique musculature, so she's much stronger than she looks. Visual!
Age: 21

Character snapshot: Max is, above anything else, a fighter, both in the sense that she was built to be a soldier and has spent her life since escaping the place she was created fighting to remain free. She is also contradictively altruistic - early on she is portrayed as tough and fairly selfish, looking out for her own safety above all else, but as early as the pilot she is shown as being willing to help her friends and determines, without much deliberation, to save Logan Cale's life and help the woman he was protecting get her daughter back from being kidnapped. Max is also extremely careful, not wanting to form attachments too easily for fear that she'll have to desert them eventually or that she'll get them hurt or killed due to the people who are searching for her. By the end of season one, she's allowed herself to open up to people a bit more, revealing her origins to her best friend and allowing herself to admit that she's fallen in love.

Unfortunately, right after this she gets recaptured and shortly after that, she'll end up in the Village. So.

World description: At the time of its release, the world of Dark Angel was considered a dystopian future, where the USA had become vulnerable to corruption, poverty, and bankruptcy. (Honestly, not all that different from how reality turned out to be.) The key difference is that genetic engineering was advanced enough in the year 2000 to be capable of creating near perfect soldiers; incredibly attractive humans with enhanced senses and stamina, animal DNA to improve their agility, and genius level intelligence as well as eidetic memories. These experiments were created in a government funded facility called Manticore, which created their soldiers by crafting embryos and delivering them via surrogate birth. In 2009 there was an escape from the facility and a few months after that, terrorists set off an electromagnetic pulse that fried the electronics on the East Coast, leaving the USA in a state of poverty. The show takes place ten years later in Seattle, Washington, where the US is still in economic turmoil and someone has taken it upon themselves to expose criminals and corrupt people in positions of power who calls himself Eyes Only.

History: Max was genetically engineered and spent half her life being trained to be the perfect soldier, which is a factor that plays into her life much more than she'd prefer it to. She's had to rely on her training and abilities to survive in a world she was mostly unfamiliar with, learning how to stay safe and act like a normal girl in addition to trying to find ways to combat a neurological defect she'd been born with and try to stay off of Manticore's radar. By the time we first see her, she has carved out a life for herself that is relatively comfortable, but you can still see that she has problems in it due to not being entirely willing to open herself up to people - her ex has cheated on her because she's too distant, she moonlights as a cat burglar in order to pay for a private detective to look into finding her missing siblings and a woman who helped assist her in her escape. By chance, she attempts to rob a man who turns out to be Eyes Only, and he offers her help in searching for these people for her help with protecting his clients. She refuses but comes to regret this when a friend ends up dying due to not receiving medicine he should have been getting and Logan gets shot. She ends up helping reunite the client with her daughter and reuniting with Logan three months later, where he makes the same proposal to her, offering information on her brother, Zack.

Throughout the next year, she works closely with Logan, eventually growing closer with him and even opening up to him and even her best friend about who she is. She reunites with several of her siblings, but it is unfortunately not the reunion she had been hoping for, especially where Zack is concerned - as it turns out, he has been in touch with the other X5s and refuses to let her get in contact with them for their own safety (so he says). The season culminates with three things: Max letting herself realize she's in love with Logan, the X5s working with their former enemy against a bigger, more dangerous threat, and Max getting shot during the siege on Manticore, her and Zack being taken back, and Zack killing himself to give her his heart when hers fails.

Several months later, Max has recovered from the heart transplant and is working on her escape plan to get back to Logan, who has made himself a target of Manticore in the time since she was recaptured. She is assisted with this by Alec, a genetic twin of her X5 brother, Ben, and by a first generation transgenic named Joshua. (This turns out to be a set up so Max can infect Logan with a virus that's been genetically targeted to kill Logan if she touches him; she will arrive without any knowledge of this.)

What are your character’s mental/emotional strengths?

- Max is incredibly determined, from birth and throughout her adulthood. As a child this was shown through her training, which involved intense physical endurance challenges, learning different fighting techniques, psychological training, and education; we don't know much about the X5s relationships to each other, but Max mentions some of her training being seen as games. Post escape, this is shown by her desire to survive without being recaptured, and then to keep those she loves safe.

- She is also extremely loyal and develops attachments quicker than she'd probably prefer to, since no attachments have made it easier to cut and run when she's needed to. However quickly these relationships end, once you have earned her loyalty you have it for life, unless you do something to lose it.

- She is able to think and act quickly, relying on her training and memory to formulate a plan in a pinch.

What are your character’s mental/emotional weaknesses?

- As a negative counter to her determination, Max is also incredibly stubborn. Once she has formed an opinion on somebody, it's difficult for her to reconcile that, even when confronted with evidence that there is more to the person and their story than what was initially presented.

- She is also fairly judgmental, which is another thing that can be chalked up to her training - she'd been taught to make quick assessments to determine the best course of action, and she's been proven correct often enough to be unwilling to change this, at least at the point in canon I'll be taking her from.

- She has often been emotionally closed off, to protect herself and others who become important to her. This has resulted in her being hurt by a number of people. Bad circumstances have unfortunately not proven her wrong about this, but she'd gotten better at letting people in prior to getting recaptured.

What events or circumstances in your character’s past have impacted them the most?

- Jack and Eva's death and the resulting escape - the X5s endured a great amount of physical and psychological torture in addition to genetic defects the doctors didn't know how to treat at the time, but Jack dying due to complications of that genetic defect and the guards trying to come for Max when she exhibited the same symptoms prompted them into action to protect her. Zack fought off a guard and Eva obtained his weapon, leading Max, Zack, and the other X5s until she was shot to death by Lydecker. Seeing exactly what they were worth to their creators if they failed in their purpose spurred the X5s into further action, enacting an escape plan in a matter of minutes, and prevented Max from ever wanting to use a gun again.

- Discovering Eyes Only - Max's discovery of who Eyes Only really was and his subsequent request for her to help him in exchange for finding information on the siblings she'd been searching for lead to her being aware of why he'd been attack and caring about the consequences of turning him down. Her guilt and the fact that he'd actually turned up information on who she'd been looking for lead to her working with him, and helping him lead to her altruism developing significantly - she was now more interested in doing the right thing because it's the right thing, and not because she has a working arrangement with Logan. Working with someone who already knew the truth about her history helped her open up and let herself fall for someone for real for the first time, though it took her a while to realize this.

- Tinga's death, her own death, and her recapture - Seeing Tinga's death and Lydecker's reveal that he wasn't the one responsible spurred her into doing the unthinkable - working with him to take Manticore down for good. They succeeded in destroying the genetics lab, but failed in destroying the facility, and Max was shot to death by her X7 clone and left behind at Lydecker's insistence that Manticore could save her life where they couldn't. She woke in a hospital bed to Renfro welcoming her home, turning the volume up on her heart monitor so she could hear Zack's heart beating in her chest, her first attempt at breaking her. These attempts to break her so they could remold her only succeeded in making her more determined to escape, something she (thinks) was on her way to successfully accomplishing when she ends up in the village.

What impressions do others tend to have of your character and how do those impressions differ from who your character truly is? People tend to think of her as hard or cold, and in the past this has been due to it being how she wanted people to see her - fewer attachments meant fewer people to leave behind or get hurt. Even now that she's allowed herself to open up a bit, it is still incredibly hard for her to let her walls down, especially around those she's unfamiliar with, but she is actually incredibly emotional and sensitive, it's just difficult for her to show that or anything that makes her vulnerable.

What motivates your character? The desire to be free and live her own life separate from how she was created.

How does your character handle crisis or adversity? Somehow her reaction is both fight and flight - given the opportunity to run without confrontation, she will, because it's the safer option that leads to less exposure and less mess, but if given no other option she won't hesitate to fight back. She'll also talk big game when it comes to threatening people (like her friends), but often won't follow through aside from the occasional smack upside the head.

Skills, abilities, and physical weaknesses: Max's canon abilities are best described as enhanced, much like Steve Rogers's - she is capable of doing and withstanding more than the average human, her reflexes and general speed are faster, and she can endure more fighting or running for longer. Her senses are also enhanced - in this case, think of Matt Murdock to a slightly less intense degree - she cannot hear someone's heartbeat, for example, but she can hear conversations clearly from a far distance if she tunes into them and she can see things clearly from that same distance if she focuses. She was also engineered with a great deal of pluripotents (stem cells) in her bloodstream so she can heal from injury much quicker than a normal human could, although fatal wounds will still kill her (this is demonstrated at the end of season one when she is shot to death by her X7 clone and given a heart transplant by her brother; she is capable of Manticore's intense training regimen only months after receiving the transplant and shows the scar to her boss, which is healed enough by the middle of the season to not be visible). She can also go for long periods without sleep, which is theorized to be due to shark DNA, and her other capabilities are due in part to feline DNA. She also has an eidetic memory and is extremely intelligent. Her skills include proficiency in multiple languages and forms of martial arts and other forms of combat, both armed and hand to hand (though she refuses to use firearms).

When it comes to nerfing, I figured her senses could be a bit duller and that she'd be unable to move or heal as quickly. I also thought that attempts to use her senses (such as trying to focus her vision on something too far away) could result in a negative physical effect, such as migraines or vertigo.

Inventory: Her Manticore uniform.

HORROR INFO

What aspects of your character are you most interested in exploring in a horror setting? One of the things I enjoy most about horror is seeing how people respond to the situation and what people end up finding themselves capable of. With Max specifically I'd like to see how she'd react to something like hauntings or magic - she has a fairly fantastic origin story that's outside of the realm of possibility for most, but it's rooted in science and realization that hauntings and magic would throw her off her game a bit.

What is your character’s mental state upon entering the game? Max had been on her way to escape Manticore to prevent them from assassinating her would-be boyfriend (unaware that she was the person meant to assassinate him, having been infected with a virus genetically targeted to kill him if they touch). She's determined to get to him first, scared that she won't, and a little exhilarated that it seems as if she's actually managed to escape, unaware that it was a set up. Upon realizing that she's somewhere else she can't leave, she's going to be very unhappy about it, but will remain determined to leave and find a way to get herself and the people she meets there home.

What unsettles and frightens your character? What sort of encounters would chip away at your character’s psychological stability? Specific knowledge of events she's never talked about and tries not to think about - there is an episode where her brother, Ben comes into Seattle and she realizes that he's become a serial killer in the time since the escape, driven mad because he was unable to process the world outside of Manticore. His presence clearly rattles her, since his MO includes things like taking his victim's teeth and offering them as penance to a statue of the Virgin Mary and she recalls them looking up to her as the Blue Lady, who a janitor had said would protect them. He brings up a time that the X5s tracked down a convict and murdered him, referring to it as the most exhilarating day of their life because for one moment, they were exactly what they were meant to be, and this rattles Max enough to strike him.

Other things that would get to her would include abuse and exploitation, especially involving children.

What horrifying events or genre elements would you like to see utilized in the game? I really enjoy survival horror and people realizing they need to work together, people using their skills in new ways, and finding new ways to fight a common enemy.

If you mean what kind of horror I'd like to see, my favorite horror movies are Alien, Jennifer's Body, and Scream. Do with that what you will.

SAMPLES

Test Drive: Here
Log Sample: Here
Log Sample: Here