p90 application

[tr1xx]

APPLICATION

Player Name/Handle: Blue
Plurk Handle: autisticblueteam
Preferred pronouns (optional): They/Them
Player Status: Current Player
Other characters: South
Invited by: N/A

Character Name: Cameron "Cammie" MacCloud
Fandom: gen:LOCK
Character Journal: tr1xx
OU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OU
Canon point: After the events of gen:LOCK Storm Warning
Age: 17
PB: N/A

SETTING BACKGROUND

gen:LOCK is set in the not-so-distant, but significantly technologically advanced future of the 2060-70s, a future in which the world has been overrun by a war between two factions: the Polity and the Union. The war has been going on for four years as of 2072, and started after the Battle of New York. The Union are a militant, fascist regime that suppresses individuality and rules through fear and the Polity is the only organised force standing in their way, but they're dangerously close to losing. Their last hope is gen:LOCK, a brand new technology which enables certain, compatible human minds to be uploaded to a cybnernetic brain that can run a large mecha, called a Holon.

Only 6 people are currently known to be compatible with the technology, including Cammie MacCloud. However, gen:LOCK tech has fallen into the Union's hands once before with disastrous results, and alongside her team Cammie must do everything possible to prevent that from happening again whilst also defending the Polity's territory and assisting them in turning the tide against the Union.

HISTORY

• Cammie was born in Scotland in 2055 to a Motorcycle Racer and a Oil Rig Decommissioning Officer. Cammie's father was seriously injured in a crash when she was young, paralysing him and putting him in a wheelchair.


• Cammie and her father spend time together in the Ether, where they built a private space she's kept to this day. He teaches Cammie the basics of coding and engineering. He and her Gran help her to build the first iteration of Nugget and her ears.


• Cammie's mother dies in a Union attack on the North Sea Oil Rigs. Her father dies as a result of complications from his original accident. Cammie is orphaned, but continues to be raised by her Gran.


• Cammie starts hacking in black-hat spaces after her father dies and drops out of school around 14/15 to pursue it, where she makes money to buy new gear etc. Eventually, she takes a job that turns out to be a Polity Cybersecurity trap and she's arrested, spending 4 days in a cell before her Gran bails her out.


• Pol Cy offer Cammie the opportunity to go white-hat and work for them instead of facing prison time. Cammie agrees and begins to serve out her sentence with them, until the Experimental Science Unit asks for her transfer to them due to her gen:LOCK compatibility. Reluctantly, they allow it.


• Cammie is run through various tests before finally being brought to the Vanguard base, the Anvil, alongside others. One turns out to be a Union spy masquerading as someone else and he attempts to steal one of the cyberbrains and Holons by uploading himself. He's incompatible and so he dies.


• Despite the dramatic affair, Dr. Weller convinces the remaining three new gen:LOCK compatible candidates (Valentina, Kazu and Cammie) to give it a try. Cammie goes first.


• The GL team spend time training and learning to work as a team, with varying success. Cammie struggles with combat and adjusting to the proportions of her Holon body, a problem that continues to plague her when they're sent on their first field assignment.


• Cammie is cut off from the rest of her team by the Union's single stolen Holon, Nemesis. Nemesis rips her Holon's head off in an attempt to reach the cyberbrain, which is extremely traumatic despite it's lack of actual harm, before she's rescued.


• Cammie starts having nightmares and during one of their training sessions, she figures out that you can use the Holon's controls to edit your brain. She makes herself more confident and aggressive, which Weller chooses to use as a teaching moment before reverting the settings remotely.


• The GL team complete another assignment during which Cammie shares her visual sensors with Val, so that he can shoot Nemesis despite having no line of sight.


• As a result of this fight, they find out that Nemesis is actually a copy of Chase's mind, a back-up that Weller took when Chase was the only member of the program. After the original Chase's Holon was taken by the Union, they returned the back-up to his body and stopped copying brains.


• The Anvil is attacked. GL escape but believe everyone else has died. They figure out Nemesis can track them through the GL network. They eventually find RTASA, where Cammie is able to build all of the personalised upgrades for each of their Holons she designed; everyone loves them.


• They find out the Anvil survived, though Weller is actually dead. With the help of the Anvil and RTASA, they set up to lure Nemesis in to fight him. It's a hard battle, involving multiple instances of Mindshare, culminating in a 5-way Mindshare between the whole team which enables them to beat Nemesis. Chase detaches from his human body permanently.


• GL become semi-independent of the Vanguard and begin to assist the Polity wherever they can, whilst also working on GL specific things. One such assignment involves rescuing a group of Refugees from Union territory, where one refugee claimed to have information about 'stolen brains'. Said refugee dies before reaching De Soto base.


• GL is trapped at the base due to the Hurricane that forced them to rush to help the refugees in the first place. Whilst there, they begin to realise something is fishy about everything that's happened. Cammie, in particular, notices something is off and investigates by returning to her black-hat roots. As a result, she faces a cyber attack that almost breaches GL.


• Someone semi-successfully hacks her Holon, but she was able to fend it off and trace it back to not just a spy amongst the refugees, but amongst the higher ranking members of the Polity at the base. He's arrested. The storm clears and GL move on.



PERSONALITY

Cammie looks like a sweet kid, with her freckles and mechanical rabbit ears and generally bouncy demeanor, but don't be fooled: she's stubborn, swears like a sailor, is sarcastic enough for her whole squad, and has absolutely no patience for being treated like just some kid. In fact, doing so is the quickest way to get on her bad side; whilst she's forgiving enough of her teammates for their occasional slip ups (though she still grumbles, even then), any stranger who makes this mistake receives no such leniency. For example, when investigating the spy situation at De Soto, she was unsure if her judgement of one suspect was being clouded by the fact they treated her like a dumb kid.

She's been reprimanded for her language in the past, most notably by the late Dr. Weller, and has been warned that some people won't take her as seriously when she swears as much as she does. Sometime prior to GL squad's involvement at De Soto, she agreed to institute a virtual swear jar in which she would have to pay Ether credits whenever she cursed, something that was semi-successful in controlling her language, because she does want to be taken more seriously by those around her.

She's an extremely curious and creative person, always eager to learn more about the world around her but especially when it comes to technology and mechanics. She likes to be hands on with the code and gear she's working with and isn't afraid to ask questions about it, even if she doesn't always expect an affirmative answer. Upon receiving her GL suit, she immediately began examining its components and asking questions and later, she shared with Migas her concerns about her Holon's proportions, reacting with delight when he proposed modifications to the frame and sent her the programs she'd need to design such changes. With these tools, she was able to create five highly personalised Holon frames, sets of armour and weapons for her squad that were specifically designed to suit both their personal styles and skillsets.

She's observant, not only remembering things about her squad that enabled her to make such personalised designs but often noticing things that her teammates don't; whilst at De Soto base, she was the only one with the expertise to realise that the use of high pressure valves in one of the suspect's motorcycles indicated that they weren't who they said they were, as the use of such valves was limited to someone much richer than the suspect in question pretended to be. She was also the first one to realise that activity in the GL network was the reason why Nemesis could track them. Coming from a non-military background, she looks at things in a different way to the rest of her squad, which has proven to be vital on multiple occasions.

However, outside of her primary areas of expertise, Cammie often lacks confidence. At 17 and lacking any military experience, she often feels that she isn't keeping up with the other members of GL and is, in fact, holding them back in the field. She struggles with physical skills and aim, requiring a set of aim-assist drones that can be rendered unusable by adverse conditions. After their first encounter with Nemesis, in which she was cut off from the team and her Holon beheaded, she even attempted to artificially boost her confidence and aggression by adjusting the settings of her cyberbrain, in hopes of combatting this. Whilst she learned that this isn't the best way to go about dealing with the problem, she still struggles with it.

This is further exacerbated by her continued, relatively fresh trauma from that first encounter with Nemesis. Whilst she was physically unharmed, the experience was still extremely traumatic as, Holon body or not, she still experienced having her head torn off. In the aftermath she has been plagued by nightmares in which Nemesis comes for her, and she's struggled to talk about them with anyone as she feels as if she shouldn't feel this way when she's physically fine and should be over it by now, because all the texts say that the nightmares will go away eventually. She's only recently opened up to Chase about it, after particularly feeling that she couldn't talk to him as he'd been through much worse, and is still reluctant to tell the others.

One of her methods of coping with this trauma (and the traumas of life in general) is to throw herself into either games on the Ether network, a virtual reality network that spans the globe in which she sees as a safe haven of sorts, or into her work. She spends hours late at night either designing things or going into the Ether, which leads people to think that she's simply staying up late gaming for the sake of it, when it's more of a case of her being unable to sleep and needing to ease her mind. Admitting this is something she also struggles with.

She isn't, however, at all ashamed of her interests; her bunny-rabbit aesthetic is consistent across her every-day clothes, her Holon armour and her Ether avatar. She makes pop-culture references and talks about manga, enjoys gaming with her squad and wishes they'd use it as a method of team-building more, and objects to any implication that her interests are childish.

Cammie is, in the end, a teenager who is still learning and developing, who has lost multiple years of her childhood to the loss of her parents, the war, and working off a prison sentence earned doing black-hat hacking. She wants to have fun, but she also wants to be respected for the person she is and the experiences she's had.

CANON POWERS

Cammie has no powers in her human body, except for the fact she is one of currently only six known individuals with a brain capable of being safely uploaded to a cyberbrain so that she can run a Holon. Whilst in the Holon, she is capable of sharing her mind, her senses and her abilities with her teammates (and vice versa) and this effect lingers somewhat after the fact.

POWER SELECTION

Noospheric Powers

Mindshare - A large part of being part of gen:LOCK is all about being one part of a larger puzzle, a member of a team that is capable of sharing parts of yourself with another person in a very literal way, whether that be skills, experiences or emotions. Whilst this ability is isolated to their time in the Holons, where their brains are transformed into code, it is an integral part of their teamwork and the ideas Weller had behind gen:LOCK.

Drawing from this Cammie can, therefore, enable temporary transfers of certain skills between herself and others. For example, she could give someone temporary access to her skills as a hacker if she either needed assistance, or were unable to do it herself for some reason or another. Or, she could herself gain access to someone's combat experience for long enough to get herself out of a tight situation, etc.

This would not apply to actual powers, rather to practical skillsets. The effect would only last long enough for the target of the skill in question to succeed at (or fail at) their task, or for [a maximum of 30 minutes], whichever comes first. So, for example, in combat it'd wear off after the most immediate fight ended, but with mental skills that require more time it'd last a little longer.

ABILITIES

Hacking/Programming - Cammie's big thing is hacking and coding; prior to her time in GL, she was working as a white-hat hacker for the Polity and after arriving at GL, she was eager to get her fingers into the tech's highly complex code, though she wasn't enabled to until after Dr Weller's death. Whilst any systems she can get her hands on here would be extremely different to those she is used to, as her standard toolkits and knowledge are centered around the Ether and Mixed Reality networks, she's also a quick learner and will attempt to find ways to put these skills to use anyway.

Engineering - Cammie is also known to be a highly skilled engineer for her age. She designed and built her own robotic rabbit ears/hearing aids, her own robotic companion Nugget, and was responsible for elaborate, personalised armour and frame designs for the Holons (Mecha) she and her team use.

Combat - Her combat skills are not highly developed, but she's learning and most importantly she's willing to learn. Whilst she's used to any combat she takes part in being through her Holon body, anything she learns in her human body will benefit her and she knows that.

SETTING/SUITABILITY

➤ How do you expect your character to respond to the setting? Even if they plan to rebel in the long term, will they be able to at least obey enough to not get shocked to death?

Like anyone else Cammie's obviously not going to be pleased and she is going to want to rebel, but she's capable of behaving herself in front of authority unless she has actual reason to think she has leeway and nothing says 'no leeway' like a shock collar.

➤ What do you hope to do with your character long-term?

Cammie's going to have to learn how to stand on her own, without her team, and how to handle her problems without hiding in the Ether or her work, which I think will be interesting. Otherwise, besides her offering help with the rebellion efforts where she can, it will be mostly seeing how she develops in/responds to the setting long-term and I also think she has some fun CR opportunities in game.

➤ Does your character currently have skills that would allow them to adapt, survive, and do the heroic things being asked of them? If your character doesn't, do you think they'd have the capacity to learn quickly?

Whilst not naturally inclined towards combat, Cammie's already begun the process of learning to fight and whilst it's very much an ongoing process, she's willing to put in the work. It's also implied she's naturally a highly resilient and adaptable person, as that is a large part of what makes gen:LOCK candidates compatible with the technology in the first place.

➤ If they're not used to cooperating with others, what makes you think they'll be able to adapt to cooperating with the group?

Cammie's already used to working as a part of a team, and a team that didn't naturally adjust to cooperating with each other at that. She'll be alright with the group.

➤ Will your character have long-term plans to rebel against Jorgmund? If so, how? Will they betray the other PCs and cooperate with Jorgmund? If so, how do you plan to handle the negative CR that might arise?

She's going to want to rebel and she's going to want to use her skills to do that as much as possible; if that proves to not be as possible as she'd hope for one reason or another, she'll try and adapt to do whatever she can. She won't just sit by, both for the sake of the other New Hires and because she has a world to return to that still actively needs her help.

SAMPLES

Network Sample

[ "If you were a plant/animal, what kind of plant/animal would you be and why?"

Cammie scoffs. ]

Oh well that's easy. [ She doesn't elaborate, until the interviewer coughs. She rolls her eyes and the green, mechanical rabbit ears wrapped around her ponytail twitch. ] Uh, hullo? I'm wearing rabbit ears? Ye cannae tell me you can't figure it out from that.

Seriously. I'd be a rabbit. I actually kinda am, usually; or, well, some of the time anyway. When I'm all big an' mechanical. Or in the Ether. ...does the Ether exist here? Guessin' not. Piss. That's gonna suck.

[ There's a beat of silence before the Interviewer goes on: "What was a time when you had to work as part of a team?" ]

Well, I literally shared my brain-space with a buncha people to defeat a mega-evil, disembodied brain in a big metal suit, and we won, so I'd say that counts. I'm one of literally six people that coulda done it so you don't get to be picky with who ye work with and it worked out fine. Mostly. Some things coulda gone better.

[ Like the fact that one of them ended up having become permanently an Ether ghost and unable to return to his actual human body, whilst another guy basically ended up in a coma, but she doesn't want to think about that right now. ]

Point is, we came together as a team, and we won. Eventually.

[ "If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?"

Cammie's brow furrows as she thinks, swinging her legs. Her mechanical ears flatten against her head. After a few seconds, her expression morphs into a smile and her eyes are closed. ]

Gran's kitchen. Sittin' at that old table with a nice cuppa in front of me, maybe even some fried haddock from the shop down the way. Home. That'd be nice.

[ The expression morphs again into a scowl. ]

Not like that's likely though, is it? Home's a long, long way away. Kinda cruel, asking a girl that.

Prose Sample

TDM Thread

ADDITIONAL INFO

Cammie is almost always seen wearing a pair of mechanical rabbits ears that not only emote, but also have the function of processing audio. Whilst it's confirmed that the ears do pick up and respond to audio as if they were actual ears, it's never explicitly confirmed why; however Cammie is seen to not react as strongly to audio-only cues when not wearing the ears, and is pretty much only seen not wearing them when she is or has been sleeping, which gives the strong implication that she's hard of hearing and the ears are her hearing aids. I'd like to go with this idea and so she'd need to retain her ears outside of missions.

She would also have been found with Mixed Reality contact-lens like implants in her eyes/head, which would usually enable real-time translation, music playing, internet access and augmented reality functions, but these functions would be rendered useless as they'd be unable to connect to the Ether. However they are implants, not something that can just be plucked from her person on arrival, and may also be responsible for the wireless control and connection to her ears via something akin to bluetooth that would still function.

Cammie would have been found wearing her GL Suit, which is a near-bullet proof body suit that enhances the user's physical capabilities whilst wearing it by reading their nervous system, that Jorgmund may wish to allow her access to on physically demanding missions as she's otherwise pretty physically unremarkable. It can easily be worn under other clothing without causing issues with its functions.

Cammie has a tiny robot, called Nugget, that she carries with her everywhere and that seems to be able to store and transfer data for her. However, I don't think he's strictly sentient and he might therefore be too close to a pet to actually come in with her?

FINAL QUESTIONS

➤ Will your character suspect some kind of guiding intelligence has brought them to the game? Or will they think it was random or done by Jorgmund?

She'll definitely think it was Jorgmund.

➤ If they think it was something other than Jorgmund, like God or some other force of fate, what character traits do they think of that intelligence as having? Is it cruel or kind? Capriciously punishing them or doing it for good reason?

N/A