Post by forte on Jan 2, 2010 14:17:36 GMT -5
The Player
[/size]OOC Name:
Forte ;D
Age:
16.
Gender:
Female.
Other Characters:
Nope.
The Character
[/size]Name:
Samuel Harris Viner
Aliases:
Sam.
Age:
25
Species:
Human
Planet of Origin:
Earth
Gender:
Male
Current Standing:
Lower middle class, Police Officer.
Detailed Appearance:
Sam is fairly old fashioned in appearance, as humans go. He's no giant at 5' 10", but he's in good health and has fantastic reflexes. His light brown hair is kept short, in what could almost be called a military buzz but is not quite, and frames startlingly hazel eyes - more green than blue and quite distinctive. he's not pallid, but not tan, either, often with a flush to his skin that suggests exhaustion. His eyes are heavy-lidded, his nose long but aquiline, rather like a beak, and his cheeks gaunt. His feet are too long for his body, but don't for a second mistake it for a sign of clumsiness - he's learned how to survive the tough streets. He rarely struts or shows off, even though he's in the law enforcement, and in fact prefers to go plain-clothes any day. The outfit just makes on stand out too much for his liking.
He's well-muscled, but no powerhouse. The thing he's best at is probably running - he can go for a long time (and has often needed to) at top speed. His dress is usually crisp and clean, but unpredictable. Due to a certain fondness for the bottle (after all, in his line of work, who doesn't need a drink?) he can often show up to work more than a little rumpled. In the rougher parts of town he dons a disguise, more as a safety precaution than anything. Not that anyone would recognize him. He tries really, really hard not to be recognized. Unfortunately for him, however, he's a rather memorable character. After all, when's the last time you saw a perfectly average human being walking along the street? The only staple part of his gear are his (rather unusual) boots, although they do seem to change a little bit... and a weapon of some sort. Preferably one that can hit someone from a long range.
His gait is unhurried at rest, frantic at speed, his legs longer than his stature would suggest. He wears contacts (technologically enhanced, of course - can show transparent images that may be useful and aid in aiming a ranged weapon.) and has a standard police implant (a small device inserted directly in the aural centers of the brain - undetectable by most scanners, and used for communication purposes. It melts at any sign of beams that would reveal it, and therefore allows the officer to remain undetected - although breaking his line of communication). Other than this and a few false bones where his own have been broken in the line of duty, Sam is remarkably unaltered. Usually he is to be found wearing the form-fitting and skin-blending Kevlar bullet-and-ray-proof-suit of the police officer - but as this is detectable, not always.
Strengths:
- Speed. He can outrun most human beings and some alien species.
- He has a knack for survival, and is a fairly decent officer as officers go.
- Modest? But it's for his own protection - who knows what he'd do if he had leeway to brag.
- Innovative. Extremely. Some would call him clever. None would call him exactly smart, but he sure is adaptable.
- Hardy. He's not known for fading fast, and is staunch and steady as a rock even in the face of extreme peril.
- Has an innate sense of direction, can find his way from point a to point b largely from memory. Although it is standard for officers to receive remote directions, this comes in handy during covert operations.
- Good with ranged weapons and fine in a fight. Which is not to say that he could win against an alien behemoth.
Weaknesses:
- As aforementioned, he has a certain fondness for the bottle. Oftentimes at least a little drunk. But it keeps him sane.
- A coward? Maybe not, but he would certainly rather run or shoot from afar than get into a fight in which he could die. This is his survival instinct pushed to the max, although sometimes he comes off as rather more lamb than lion.
- Technology impaired. Honestly, he can't even work a toaster without help (usually from other technology, actually.) The only things he feels comfortable with are his weapons and his boots.
- He cares too much. Which usually leads him to other vices. Such as drinking. And smoking.
- Old-fashioned. Probably just a little. Sometimes he just really needs to get with the times. Although it works fine for him if he's absolutely clueless.
- Short. Well, not terribly. But it's not as if he's going to be a basketball player in the near future.
- Something of a "species-ist". A human supremacist. Or whatever they call it these days. This comes through sometimes, but NOT WITH FELLOW POLICEMEN. Actually, in his mind, cops probably constitute a species of their own. No doubt one of the world's stranger creatures.
Personality:
The first impression most people get of him is temperate. For the most part, although he seems a little bit off keel. He can be quite mercurial and explosive at times, but in the face of danger is remarkably focused, calm, and in control of himself. This makes him invaluable as an officer. He's not exactly courage itself - he won't go running off on a mission impossible with some million to one chance that he'll return, but he will do whatever it takes to survive. Those who work under him learn to respect him, even if he seems a little off. A little unbalanced. Troubled. And maybe he is, but he refuses to acknowledge it in any way. Which is one of the reasons he's rather afflicted with drinking, cursed, one might say. But he tries to pull himself together enough to get through every painful day.
Whilst warm to the force (not exactly amiable, however. he doesn't have many cop friends), he is suspicious and even cold towards the rest of the world - especially other species. Although there are aliens on the force and he accepts them easily (the only things he won't stand for are vampires), he does not like aliens at all. Maybe this is eccentric, but it is a fairly natural suspicion, one which Sam does little or nothing to curb. He detests air travel and usually gets another officer to fly the cruiser if he needs one, since he hates driving in the air even more than he hates being int it. He loses almost all sense of direction (and his is prodigious on land) when he's taken off land, loses the innumerable impressions that one could get from something as simple as the street.
He's not rich - mostly because he's a beat man and therefore so low down on the police spectrum and so far away from its corrupt core that he really and truly believes that his job is to stop crime. In fact, he's fairly deluded about the fact that there is corruption, and if someone came up to him and told him that his organization was evil he'd probably punch them in the nose. If he was in a bad mood, which he often is. He can often have a temper when tired, angry, or drunk, and can fly off the handle, although he does try to keep himself calm and keep his pulse slow. Sometimes he succeeds. More often he does not. Enemies beware! He'll be after you forever, even if he has to dog you for his whole damned existence. Vengeance means rather over much to him, one of the reasons he can be a little rash.
At heart, though, he's an extremely dedicated and loyal cop. Even though the pay is low and some of the jobs have been filled now by robots, he desires no other job in the world. In fact, when offered a promotion he would probably reject it. He likes being in charge of his little squad, his rag-tag forces patrolling the street, and he wouldn't have it any other way. Despite being an authority figure, he does have a huge anti-authoritarian streak, and hates being under a brash or misunderstanding higher-up. One could say he doesn't like to be dominated in any way, and refuses to lose. He's stubborn and willful, but in all just a simple old wholehearted beat cob, weary of the world and of everyone in it, and seeing the propensity for evil in all of man (and alien) kind.
Prized Possessions:
First, there are the boots.
Well, sometimes they're boots. Other times they are slippers. Or socks. Or running shoes. And then occasionally they are full-bodied armor. It all depends on what Sam needs at the moment. Rare, expensive, and totally unique, the boots adapt to what Sam needs at the moment. It's advanced technology, and one that very few people can figure out. Not that Sam would let you analyze his boots in a million years. He loves the things. He never takes them off. Of course, the armor they produce is fairly inefficient - a bullet or simple ray gun would probably break it, but, really, the boots can be quite useful when one has to run fast and/or have split-second protection in a surprise attack.
And the weapon of choice.
Which is a small, standard-issue police ray gun. Settings: stun, maim, and kill. Particularly powerful? No, but it's deadly accurate and can cause mild harm to most beings. The kill setting is pretty deadly, also, but Sam is not too fond of killing people.
He's also been known to use a Tazer, tranquilizer gun, and myriad other weapons - whatever seems appropriate at the time. As long as it's small enough to be hidden on one's person he'll take it.
History:
Sam was not born on Earth. He has never been to Earth. He will never go to Earth, probably. No, twenty-six years ago he was born on a barely established satellite colony amongst humans. The planet had been uninhabited. But years off geographical efforts had paid off, and it could now support life. He was among the first of the planet's second generation, a child of an age of frontier-building in the further reaches of Earth, at the then barely accessible borders of the colonial range. It was hardly the technologically advanced world that was the middle colonies and Earth itself, and it would remain almost twenty-first century until subsequent improvements in space travel, including the carving of hyperspace routes, would allow for his home planet and even those beyond to be quickly and violently turned into thriving technological casinos, bits of haze to shield the eyes from the mass genocide.
So his early world was a simple one, but changed withing ten years of his life with the invention of computer-driven carving ships to create routes along which transport ships and pedestrians could travel quickly in hyperspace. (Actually, if you want to get technical, these had been invented long before their arrival was felt on Sam's home planet - due to the nature of travel in light years, to those traveling it seems as if it is quick, but to those who are stationary and not moving faster than light itself it takes much, much longer for the transport ship to arrive. Sam's planet, as a later colony and therefore more distant from supply lines at the time, took as many as five years real time (about three months for a cargo ship, a blink of an eye for a military cruiser) to reach).
With the sudden influx of ships, the original colonists either dispersed or stayed, but Sam's parents were tired of this simple life. Unlike himself, they had been born on the immensely advanced planet Earth, and yearned to be back in that environment. Their colonization had given them the means to move and to start a new life, both of them having been fairly poor to begin with. And so they boarded a ship and for barely three months were in space, before arriving on the colony of Touchdown eight years ago. Eighteen-year-old Sam chose to attend police academy then, practically his only choice. The brilliant, raised among this technology and adapted, might go on to something more. But, as for him, he was behind. (It took two and a half years real time to travel to Touchdown aboard a slow ship from his home planet for the curious.)
The rest is, well, history. He passed police academy and spend years working on the beat before rising to the point that he has met now. Still, he's a little bit of an outsider in the lands of Touchdown - for example, he hardly knew how to gamble before he came except in the most cursory of ways, and most definitely did not drink. No, that vice came later, along with stress and pressure and the things that he has seen. Horrific things take place in this "perfect" city. It is, yes, dangerous. And sometimes, sometimes, in the tail of his eye maybe he can see through the fog to what is really going on in this high-tempo, fast-paced but extremely lugubrious world. Can he grasp the enormity of it? No. It is questionably whether he will ever be anything different than he is now.
Roleplay Sample:
((Pretty much randomly taken from a former site. It's not too old, either.))
Twilight embraced the world. The day birds had gone to bed, and those who sang in the night were not quite awake. An eerie sort of quiet had descended upon the land, and the sky was a twist of purple-blue and the fading orange that tinted the bottoms of the few scattered clouds that broke the horizon. Gradually the light crept away, and the darkness of night broke through the top of the top of the great curving skyline. A single human silhouette broke the lifeless magic of the fast-fading dusk, standing alone on the sand with his breaths timed to the rhythm of the waves as they fell across the beach. Dmitri raised his dark eyes across the great black body of water, the crests of each wave rimmed with the ruddy orange color, overcome by the beauty and the power and the endless dark expanse of water that stretched out on and on across the land.
He had never before seen the ocean, and the sheer... infinity... of the whole thing blew him away. He had forgotten that he had come here out of some inner sorrow that gnawed silently at him, that he couldn't bear to stay at home. Home. He had never thought that about anywhere, really. Everything had always seemed... temporary, unstable. Like it could break in the softest of winds. He couldn't bear to face himself in the mirror and think that he was happy. Against all odds. Against everything that he knew and had known and had forgotten. And at the same time, he was bitterly sad and missing home and wanting to go back. He didn't understand his own thoughts anymore. But now the waves drowned out the endless buzz of thought and confusion, and allowed him to just breathe for a moment. To stop thinking and abandon himself to the beauty and power and the abyss that swallowed his own petty little problems.
He had left his shoes and socks back by the rocks, lying lonely among a scattering of shells and sand. The tugging tide danced across his toes, cold and drowning out everything except the hypnotic motion of water. A little sigh escaped his lips as he looked back across the wet sand, at his own small, crooked footsteps across the great canopy of white. He felt insignificant, swallowed by some great perhaps and pushed along by a current that he could not fight against. It was a sad feeling. He'd lost control of his life long ago, probably before he was even born, but at the same time he didn't like to be so aware of that fact. Especially not when he was beginning to think that he actually had a choice. With another sigh, he sank to the ground, not caring that his pants were going to be covered with sand and completely unaware of the amount of itching the stuff did once it had dried out. Not that he cared much at this point.
