max | nyx (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
motherofnemesis) wrote2019-02-02 07:39 pm
motherofnemesis) wrote2019-02-02 07:39 pm
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hadriel
PLAYER
Player name: Betsy
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be_themoon
Characters currently in-game: 0
CHARACTER
Character Name: Maxine Kearney
Character Age: 35
Canon: Original
Canon Point:
World Description:
Max’s story is set in the near future, the point which she’s taken from at age 35 being 2039. By the time she was born in 2004, metahumans had begun to crop up, slowly. By the time she was 15 they were a big deal and superheroes and vigilantes were all the rage. By the time she was 21, the government cracked down on all superheroes, vigilantes and metahumans in the United States who weren’t registered and quite a few who were. Ten years later, the fight to try and stop that is still ongoing.
While in most ways stepping into her world wouldn’t seem to be much of a departure from ours, it would become apparent on closer observation that there are significant differences, mostly in terms of technology and the response to metahuman abilities. No, flying cars aren’t an every day thing, but that’s mostly due to government regulation making them a huge hassle to own. They are still obtainable and can be seen here and there. Facial recognition is common and every day in most areas considered middle class and above, security systems have advanced, and the police and soldiers carry weapons that are clearly not purely ballistically based. Technology has not advanced as far as one might have assumed it would by 2039 however, mostly because of the emergence of metahumans. A great deal of the scientific effort expended has gone into both understanding and containing them, or harnessing their abilities in other ways. Another significant amount of effort has gone into simply keeping the environment stable. While for the most part it is, plane travel is significantly more risky than it used to be and therefore less common.
In many ways, the dystopian nature of the government’s control over metahumans is easy to miss and unobtrusive.
History:
Max was born to a family that was at once neither the greatest nor the worst, with one big sister. Her parents split up when she was about six due to major incompatibilities. There wasn’t anything particularly traumatic about it, no big yelling or screaming matches, but her dad moved to Chicago and Max rarely saw him after that. He came to visit twice – once when she broke her leg in elementary school, once when she graduated high school – but other than that their only real contact was the calls he made on her birthdays and Christmas.
Her mom subsequently had to take on two jobs to make sure her two daughters were provided for and could remain in her custody, so Max didn’t really see her all that much either. Once she hit middle school she started offering to take on a job of her own, but just like her older sister before her her mother forbade it. Her older sister Helen was seven years older and Max’s role model, but she moved out with her boyfriend as soon as she graduated high school so as to not be a burden on her mom. Max realized she had empathy at a very young age and concealed it from everyone, even her sister, not wanting to cause more trouble. She also exhibited a natural aptitude for technology, and was registered as a mechanopath at a young age before testing was able to determine whether or not a given talent was truly a metahuman ability or not. It would later turn out that while she is very gifted in the field of mechanics it has no basis in any metahuman gene.
Which all meant that when Max was 16 and found out that her best friend Alex had recently joined up with the City’s group of vigilantes, a tight knit clan who swore by a strict code that included never killing anyone and always putting justice first, there was no one to notice or stop her from getting more and more drawn into his new world. At first as just extra technical and emotional support, and then as she became more and more fascinated by the actual job she branched into doing detective work for him, and then by the age of 18 she created her own costume and joined the clan. The newspapers called her Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night. Max never actually gave herself a name, but in later years she would adopt that as her codename, mostly in irony. It took her a while to become accepted and integrated into the group, but she proved herself several times. While she never became a central part of the group and maintained a certain independence, her acceptance into the group was extremely important to her. Max turned out to be pretty good at being a vigilante, though she did have a few very close calls.
But no good thing lasts forever. Max kept working as a vigilante and sped through college, as opposed to highschool where she’d mostly avoided skipping grades. By 20 she’d graduated and was working as a mechanic while figuring out what the next step was, and had formed a tight empathy bond to one of the other superheroes in her clan, a technopath and paranoiac named John. They’d moved in together quickly, essentially a whirlwind romance, about six months from first real conversation to living together and declarations of love and a full fledged empathic bond. She never got to figure that out. The government concluded that leaving metahumans running around was just too dangerous, and with the help of a group dedicated to keeping metahumans under control cracked down on them. Which might not have been that bad, and in fact Max at first thought it might be reasonable – but the first time someone fought back, it became obvious that the government had no plans of going about this nicely. A little investigation revealed that at least some of the prisoners were being sent to facilities to experiment on them and find out how to turn off and replicate their powers. John learned about this and the next day he vanished. Initially Max thought he’d been captured and killed, since the emotional bond between them was severed and she couldn’t think of any reason he would do that if alive. She would think this for almost two years, immediately going on the run to try to keep herself safe and find a way to rescue anyone imprisoned by the government. While her empathy was a secret, her suspected mechanopathy was known and linked to her civilian identity, and both her mother and sister thought the government initiative was a good idea. She was chased. She killed her first person when almost successfully ambushed in her hotel room a few months into this, not good enough at staying off the grid yet to escape them. She turned 21 the next day, alone in the middle of nowhere, trying to figure out how to scrub blood out of her clothes.
Most of the next decade can be kind of skipped over, really. The highlights! About a year after her first ditch and run, she returned to her hometown and began trying to find who the resistance against the government was, subsequently joining up with them. She became a courier between splintered resistance groups across the country, carrying supplies and messages that were too sensitive to be trusted to a computer when the government now had access to more and more technopaths. About a year after she started working with them, she met John again. His paranoia had led to him ditching her and the bond for her own safety, she discovered, and his mental health was deteriorating. Over the years to come, they would settle with an uneasy unrelationship – they both were no longer willing to have the commitment they’d had before (for completely different reasons) but they tried to remain friends and be there for each other. Kind of hard, given that in many ways they were still in love, so the whole friendship relationships whatever it was thing was extremely uneasy. It was around then that Max began to shut down her empathy, using it only when necessary for missions and trying to ignore it.
About three years into the fight, at age 24, Max was captured for the first time. She spent ten months in a government facility, at first being tortured for the information she carried and then, after she broke, they attempted to force her to use her mechanopathy for them on on various inventions that they hoped would give them a bigger edge in the fight but weren’t working yet. She deliberately sabotaged multiple projects, which didn’t work out too well for her health or wellbeing. She was eventually broken out by John and some other members of the revolution. At age 26 she would spend another 8 months in prison, on a similar pattern, this time escaping herself by working on a guard with her empathy. Her stints in prison did serious damage to her ability to shield herself from outside emotional input, as her empathy was specifically used against her. She’s repaired a lot of that damage, but it still cracks easily under persistent large amounts of emotional turmoil from outside.
The entire revolution so far has been fairly consistent. Sabotage and rescue attempts of the people who have been captured, establishing safe places and getting people out of the country who want out, and acts of domestic terrorism against the government facilities holding them. Over the years quite a few people have become discouraged and left the country or been killed or captured and not yet recovered, and the movement is in some ways dwindling. It’s beginning to look like they may never win. From age 21 to 33 Max has spent almost all of her time dedicated to working with the resistance. She cut all contact with her family years ago both as a means of protecting them and because the one time she showed up asking for help they were horrified that she was associating herself with people who were basically domestic terrorists and told her to turn herself in. She hasn't tried to contact them since because she doesn't want to have to handle further rejection.
Eventually, around a decade in, things are actively starting to fall apart. Their losses are no longer sustainable and there have been arguments over whether it's morally justifiable to recruit any new people into a fight where more people have died or been tortured into submission than have stayed alive and unharmed. The resistance is shrinking and the government is progressively managing to put a better public face on their relations with powered people while vilifying the resistance more and more.
Personality:
Max is like the little determinator that could. She’s been knocked down a hundred times and she just always gets back up and keeps going. When she was younger this was fueled by an eternal optimism and idealism for the world. As she grew up, it lost that and became simply a habit, a matter of sheer willpower. Max gets back up. It’s what she does. She adapts to new situations and new problems with ease, deals with things as they come. Part of this is rooted in her childhood – she never wanted to create any new problems for her mom, so she learned to just go with whatever happened, find a way to take care of herself, and quickly became very self-sufficient. Take everything in stride. Some of it’s just her personality and the fact that she was born adaptable. This has lent itself really well to her life. A lot of other people would have given up by now, but Max doesn’t have the word ‘quit’ in her vocabulary. She just carries on carrying on – sometimes because she doesn’t know what else to do.
Which isn’t to say that she isn’t affected by the things she’s gone through. She is, to a huge extent. As a teenager, Max was slightly starved for affection and attention and had a huge need for approval. She was also cheerful and optimistic and idealistic, and very open, or at least very good at faking being open. What she wasn’t was at all good at trusting people. Her trust has always been something she gave selectively. What she wanted most in the world was to belong to a place or a group or to have people she could call family. So the clan of vigilantes she wound up joining became her substitute for that, became the people that she looked to for approval, and John became the person she placed a huge amount of trust in. And then in the space of a few short months she lost John, she lost her surrogate family, and then not long after that she lost even the possibility of returning to her surrogate family when she killed someone, which went against every rule her clan of vigilantes had. They remained willing to visit her and help keep her hidden when she was in their city, but she knew that they never really approved of her after they found out she’d started killing now. She knew. Empathy’s a bitch sometimes. And then not too long after that she found that John had willingly left her, which was basically her nightmare from the get go of their relationship, for any relationship really, because people leaving is her greatest fear. That was a series of blows that she never truly recovered from. She kept going, she kept doing her work and being the best she could be, but she closed down a lot of her emotional responses to things after that and drawing her out of that shell is hard.
Her moral compass is kind of a little bit whacked. She’s told herself over the years that the people she’s killed a) deserved to die and b) she had no choice but to kill them to complete a mission / save someone else / fix this problem. She’s justified to herself acts of what amounts to domestic terrorism, quite a lot of murders, blackmail, psychologically terrorizing people – she’s capable of self-rationalizing that she needs to do these things enough to actually do them. The problem comes afterwards, when she has to live with what she’s done. She might proclaim that she has no regrets but she has massive regrets. As much as she does genuinely believe in her mission and her goal, she also firmly believes every person who’s died at her hands is a mark against her on some invisible ledger. She doesn’t really believe in any higher power, but some part of her is still absolutely certain that judgment will be coming her way one day, and that she will deserve it. That doesn’t mean she won’t do what she feels has to be done next time too.
She’s developed a strong sense of paranoia and her refusal to rely on anyone else to do things for her has only grown. Years of what’s essentially been constant combat as well as her imprisonments has led to her developing PTSD. While she keeps tight control of herself and attempts to of the symptoms, she doesn’t sleep easily, struggles with reminders of particularly traumatic past events, and reacts with hypersensitivity to sudden change. She already had some control issues, and her stints in prison only added on to those. When presented with a situation where she doesn’t have control and sees no way to gain it Max freaks out internally and will start to stonewall everything. She will never willingly go into a situation where she can't at least rationalize some measure of control over it.
None of this is stuff that is really obvious to the outside world. She learned early on as an empath how to present a false front to the world, how to pretend to be someone they want her to be. Max lives in possibilities. This is a person she could be, this is a person she can pretend to be. Predominantly she presents herself to the outside world as someone who's relatively serious but also fairly open and easy to get along with, if not the most cheerful of people and tending more towards heavy sarcasm than humor. It's a method she's found tends to be fairly good at getting information, and also at warding off actual questions about herself. It's only once people start trying to get close that she starts closing herself off more obviously. She stays just out of reach of understanding as much as possible.
The people she cares about she cares about intensely and deeply and will do almost anything for. She’s always developed affection and caring for people quickly, as much as she tries not to, though these days she prefers to pretend she doesn’t actually. (This solution does not work as well as she would like it to.) The passion that she had as a young adult has been pushed down and buried under seriousness, but it’s still there, just as unacknowledged as she can make it. She doesn’t talk about things. She doesn’t tell people her past. Max buries everything. But despite all of this, despite these things, she cares. She considers it her greatest flaw, even though in reality it’s her greatest asset. It’s the reason she’s still fighting, the reason she hasn’t given up. Max cares about people, and their lives, and whether they’re okay. She cares particularly about the people who matter to her. She has a self sacrificial streak that runs all the way back to her childhood and her lack of self worth then, and also just to her deeply protective instincts towards people who matter to her.
She actually has a really active sense of humor, in that she finds a lot of really random stuff funny. She loves terrible old movies, and bad puns, and how did the chicken cross the road jokes. She likes innocuous, completely innocent things that are there solely for amusement. She tends to enjoy stuff like that in private or with people she trusts a lot. It's a personal thing, being amused, because she wants to keep it from ever being ruined. She loves fixing things, most of all. She hasn’t been able to for years without looking over her shoulder for the government, but her favorite thing has always been fixing things. Making them better instead of worse, and that is perhaps her most constant heartache these days. It’s so hard to fix things when you spend a lot of time blowing them up. She hasn't had all that much time for hobbies but once given free time without responsibilities she'll gravitate back towards the things that make her happy quickly - building and fixing things, playing video games, learning, dumb jokes.
At the core of her, Max is a person who still wants to believe that things can be better, that people can be good, and that fixing things is as simple as turning a screw a little tighter. She’s just buried it down under layers and layers of cynical jaded anger at a world that’s refusing to let that dream be true.
But she's also someone who isn't really sure she deserves to be alive, given everything she's done. The reconciliation between those two sides of her is one that is perpetually difficult for her.
Inventory:
1. What looks like fairly standard dark colored street winter wear, but has been carefully and unobtrusively modified with body armor inserts around the chest and several hidden pockets, as well as a conceal carry shoulder holster. Combat boots.
1. One Sig Sauer 9mm.
1. One backpack, similarly modified with armor inserts and hidden pockets. Contains one very powerful laptop requiring iris scan to access, that weird jumble of cables and wires that tech people always seem to have on them, a secondary clip for her gun, lockpick set, a pack of gummy bears, two Snickers (one half eaten), a fairly comprehensive first aid kit, flashlight, several protein bars, notebook and pens, swiss army pocket knife, small portable tool kit.
Abilities:
1. Empathy. She can read and affect the basic emotions of people within around a half miles’ range of her, though she’s only able to affect them with any real accuracy within a much shorter range, about eyesight. She can induce fear, anger, relaxation, etc., most of the time without the person even being aware that something outside of their head is influencing them. Her abilities can be shielded against by anyone with some training, no psychic talent required, so long as they’re aware of the possibility. She hasn’t used these as much as she could have in the past decade or so, and as such she’s currently cautious about using them because she doesn’t have the subtlety necessary to keep people from realizing something’s messing with their heads and is also very, very out of practice in anything but brute force. She is capable of developing an empathic link to one person (and only one person at a time – one must be broken before another can be formed) that allows her to read not only their emotions but almost their thoughts and certainly go back into their memories and also lets her work with their emotions much more thoroughly and delicately than otherwise, with their complete awareness of what she’s doing. It also increases the range from which she can affect them. In her world, empaths are not uncommon and this bond is used primarily between an empath and someone with a power that can be overwhelming - technopathy, superhearing or senses, etc. - as a way to keep that person grounded.
2. Combat proficiency. Max has been operating as either a vigilante or in an underground resistance for well over a decade, and has solid combat skills as a result. Good aim with a gun, knows how to use and maintain multiple models, reasonable experience and proficiency in explosives, and and a solid grounding in several types of hand to hand combat, with proficiency in krav maga and capoeira. She keeps herself in good shape and practices on a regular basis whenever possible.
3. Mechanics. While she's knowledgeable in computers and has a solid understanding of coding, her real technological talent lies in assembling, disassembling, and fixing machines. She went to college for mechanical engineering and was well on her way to a second degree in electrical engineering as well when everything went south, and typically goes for mechanic jobs when staying in one place for too long.
Flaws:
Max does not forgive and she definitely doesn't forget wrongs done to her or those she loves, and will seek vengeance for them. "Holding grudges" is a light word for the extent to which she feels about injustices against those she would like to protect. She is capable of justifying to herself genuinely terrible acts balanced against a wrong she considers great enough, and will commit them despite considering them to be terrible. She has lied, murdered, stolen, and destroyed property with a fair amount of regularity for over a decade now, and given what she considers an important enough cause will do so again.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample:
It's not that Max doesn't know "weird". Weird is a word that could be pretty accurately used to sum up her life for the past -- long while now. At least, that's what she would prefer to go with. Weird sounds better than disaster does, or tragedy, or anything else that might be come up with, and it also encompasses the genuinely off the wall things that tend to happen when a lot of people with more-than-human abilities work together despite having very different philosophies of life.
It's just that this is -- well, this is really weird. Teleportation? She's done that before, sure. But always to somewhere that actually existed, with someone else who had that ability, in a manner that was explained and understood. Definitely not at random into a gladiator arena with a creature that seemed like it was pulled straight out of some movie.
At first she'd assumed nightmare, or maybe some very strange and abnormal psychic backlash, or worse but possible a very strange interrogation, but it's been a full day now of wandering around this place, the weird architecture staying entirely solid to her touch, the extremely convincing population who are utterly convinced of this being reality, and the initial wary confusion she had felt is giving way to an all too familiar sense of entrapment. This can’t be real. It can’t be. But every sense she has is telling her that it is, that there is no waking up from this, and if it is a softer sort of prison than she is used to that does not change the fact that it is, without a doubt, a prison of a kind. (If it’s real.)
Max has never had the luxury of time to come to a decision slowly, and she doesn’t think this place will be any kind of exception to that rule. As much as she’s on the guard against any evidence she’s been captured again and this is just some extremely strange new way to interrogate her, if the people she’s spoken to here are to be believed there’s a whole lot more she needs to be on the lookout for now.
Gods. Actual gods? She’s never believed in that, and she’s not feeling quite ready to start just yet, but at the very least there are certainly some very, very powerful beings here it sounds like. And even with as much time as she’s spent fighting against the imprisonment of metahumans, Max is keenly aware of the damage that the stronger ones can do. (That she is capable of, even.) Here doesn’t seem like it’s truly any safer than home, and the alarm bells in her head don’t seem like they plan on stopping ringing any time soon.
Player name: Betsy
Contact:
Characters currently in-game: 0
CHARACTER
Character Name: Maxine Kearney
Character Age: 35
Canon: Original
Canon Point:
World Description:
Max’s story is set in the near future, the point which she’s taken from at age 35 being 2039. By the time she was born in 2004, metahumans had begun to crop up, slowly. By the time she was 15 they were a big deal and superheroes and vigilantes were all the rage. By the time she was 21, the government cracked down on all superheroes, vigilantes and metahumans in the United States who weren’t registered and quite a few who were. Ten years later, the fight to try and stop that is still ongoing.
While in most ways stepping into her world wouldn’t seem to be much of a departure from ours, it would become apparent on closer observation that there are significant differences, mostly in terms of technology and the response to metahuman abilities. No, flying cars aren’t an every day thing, but that’s mostly due to government regulation making them a huge hassle to own. They are still obtainable and can be seen here and there. Facial recognition is common and every day in most areas considered middle class and above, security systems have advanced, and the police and soldiers carry weapons that are clearly not purely ballistically based. Technology has not advanced as far as one might have assumed it would by 2039 however, mostly because of the emergence of metahumans. A great deal of the scientific effort expended has gone into both understanding and containing them, or harnessing their abilities in other ways. Another significant amount of effort has gone into simply keeping the environment stable. While for the most part it is, plane travel is significantly more risky than it used to be and therefore less common.
In many ways, the dystopian nature of the government’s control over metahumans is easy to miss and unobtrusive.
History:
Max was born to a family that was at once neither the greatest nor the worst, with one big sister. Her parents split up when she was about six due to major incompatibilities. There wasn’t anything particularly traumatic about it, no big yelling or screaming matches, but her dad moved to Chicago and Max rarely saw him after that. He came to visit twice – once when she broke her leg in elementary school, once when she graduated high school – but other than that their only real contact was the calls he made on her birthdays and Christmas.
Her mom subsequently had to take on two jobs to make sure her two daughters were provided for and could remain in her custody, so Max didn’t really see her all that much either. Once she hit middle school she started offering to take on a job of her own, but just like her older sister before her her mother forbade it. Her older sister Helen was seven years older and Max’s role model, but she moved out with her boyfriend as soon as she graduated high school so as to not be a burden on her mom. Max realized she had empathy at a very young age and concealed it from everyone, even her sister, not wanting to cause more trouble. She also exhibited a natural aptitude for technology, and was registered as a mechanopath at a young age before testing was able to determine whether or not a given talent was truly a metahuman ability or not. It would later turn out that while she is very gifted in the field of mechanics it has no basis in any metahuman gene.
Which all meant that when Max was 16 and found out that her best friend Alex had recently joined up with the City’s group of vigilantes, a tight knit clan who swore by a strict code that included never killing anyone and always putting justice first, there was no one to notice or stop her from getting more and more drawn into his new world. At first as just extra technical and emotional support, and then as she became more and more fascinated by the actual job she branched into doing detective work for him, and then by the age of 18 she created her own costume and joined the clan. The newspapers called her Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night. Max never actually gave herself a name, but in later years she would adopt that as her codename, mostly in irony. It took her a while to become accepted and integrated into the group, but she proved herself several times. While she never became a central part of the group and maintained a certain independence, her acceptance into the group was extremely important to her. Max turned out to be pretty good at being a vigilante, though she did have a few very close calls.
But no good thing lasts forever. Max kept working as a vigilante and sped through college, as opposed to highschool where she’d mostly avoided skipping grades. By 20 she’d graduated and was working as a mechanic while figuring out what the next step was, and had formed a tight empathy bond to one of the other superheroes in her clan, a technopath and paranoiac named John. They’d moved in together quickly, essentially a whirlwind romance, about six months from first real conversation to living together and declarations of love and a full fledged empathic bond. She never got to figure that out. The government concluded that leaving metahumans running around was just too dangerous, and with the help of a group dedicated to keeping metahumans under control cracked down on them. Which might not have been that bad, and in fact Max at first thought it might be reasonable – but the first time someone fought back, it became obvious that the government had no plans of going about this nicely. A little investigation revealed that at least some of the prisoners were being sent to facilities to experiment on them and find out how to turn off and replicate their powers. John learned about this and the next day he vanished. Initially Max thought he’d been captured and killed, since the emotional bond between them was severed and she couldn’t think of any reason he would do that if alive. She would think this for almost two years, immediately going on the run to try to keep herself safe and find a way to rescue anyone imprisoned by the government. While her empathy was a secret, her suspected mechanopathy was known and linked to her civilian identity, and both her mother and sister thought the government initiative was a good idea. She was chased. She killed her first person when almost successfully ambushed in her hotel room a few months into this, not good enough at staying off the grid yet to escape them. She turned 21 the next day, alone in the middle of nowhere, trying to figure out how to scrub blood out of her clothes.
Most of the next decade can be kind of skipped over, really. The highlights! About a year after her first ditch and run, she returned to her hometown and began trying to find who the resistance against the government was, subsequently joining up with them. She became a courier between splintered resistance groups across the country, carrying supplies and messages that were too sensitive to be trusted to a computer when the government now had access to more and more technopaths. About a year after she started working with them, she met John again. His paranoia had led to him ditching her and the bond for her own safety, she discovered, and his mental health was deteriorating. Over the years to come, they would settle with an uneasy unrelationship – they both were no longer willing to have the commitment they’d had before (for completely different reasons) but they tried to remain friends and be there for each other. Kind of hard, given that in many ways they were still in love, so the whole friendship relationships whatever it was thing was extremely uneasy. It was around then that Max began to shut down her empathy, using it only when necessary for missions and trying to ignore it.
About three years into the fight, at age 24, Max was captured for the first time. She spent ten months in a government facility, at first being tortured for the information she carried and then, after she broke, they attempted to force her to use her mechanopathy for them on on various inventions that they hoped would give them a bigger edge in the fight but weren’t working yet. She deliberately sabotaged multiple projects, which didn’t work out too well for her health or wellbeing. She was eventually broken out by John and some other members of the revolution. At age 26 she would spend another 8 months in prison, on a similar pattern, this time escaping herself by working on a guard with her empathy. Her stints in prison did serious damage to her ability to shield herself from outside emotional input, as her empathy was specifically used against her. She’s repaired a lot of that damage, but it still cracks easily under persistent large amounts of emotional turmoil from outside.
The entire revolution so far has been fairly consistent. Sabotage and rescue attempts of the people who have been captured, establishing safe places and getting people out of the country who want out, and acts of domestic terrorism against the government facilities holding them. Over the years quite a few people have become discouraged and left the country or been killed or captured and not yet recovered, and the movement is in some ways dwindling. It’s beginning to look like they may never win. From age 21 to 33 Max has spent almost all of her time dedicated to working with the resistance. She cut all contact with her family years ago both as a means of protecting them and because the one time she showed up asking for help they were horrified that she was associating herself with people who were basically domestic terrorists and told her to turn herself in. She hasn't tried to contact them since because she doesn't want to have to handle further rejection.
Eventually, around a decade in, things are actively starting to fall apart. Their losses are no longer sustainable and there have been arguments over whether it's morally justifiable to recruit any new people into a fight where more people have died or been tortured into submission than have stayed alive and unharmed. The resistance is shrinking and the government is progressively managing to put a better public face on their relations with powered people while vilifying the resistance more and more.
Personality:
Max is like the little determinator that could. She’s been knocked down a hundred times and she just always gets back up and keeps going. When she was younger this was fueled by an eternal optimism and idealism for the world. As she grew up, it lost that and became simply a habit, a matter of sheer willpower. Max gets back up. It’s what she does. She adapts to new situations and new problems with ease, deals with things as they come. Part of this is rooted in her childhood – she never wanted to create any new problems for her mom, so she learned to just go with whatever happened, find a way to take care of herself, and quickly became very self-sufficient. Take everything in stride. Some of it’s just her personality and the fact that she was born adaptable. This has lent itself really well to her life. A lot of other people would have given up by now, but Max doesn’t have the word ‘quit’ in her vocabulary. She just carries on carrying on – sometimes because she doesn’t know what else to do.
Which isn’t to say that she isn’t affected by the things she’s gone through. She is, to a huge extent. As a teenager, Max was slightly starved for affection and attention and had a huge need for approval. She was also cheerful and optimistic and idealistic, and very open, or at least very good at faking being open. What she wasn’t was at all good at trusting people. Her trust has always been something she gave selectively. What she wanted most in the world was to belong to a place or a group or to have people she could call family. So the clan of vigilantes she wound up joining became her substitute for that, became the people that she looked to for approval, and John became the person she placed a huge amount of trust in. And then in the space of a few short months she lost John, she lost her surrogate family, and then not long after that she lost even the possibility of returning to her surrogate family when she killed someone, which went against every rule her clan of vigilantes had. They remained willing to visit her and help keep her hidden when she was in their city, but she knew that they never really approved of her after they found out she’d started killing now. She knew. Empathy’s a bitch sometimes. And then not too long after that she found that John had willingly left her, which was basically her nightmare from the get go of their relationship, for any relationship really, because people leaving is her greatest fear. That was a series of blows that she never truly recovered from. She kept going, she kept doing her work and being the best she could be, but she closed down a lot of her emotional responses to things after that and drawing her out of that shell is hard.
Her moral compass is kind of a little bit whacked. She’s told herself over the years that the people she’s killed a) deserved to die and b) she had no choice but to kill them to complete a mission / save someone else / fix this problem. She’s justified to herself acts of what amounts to domestic terrorism, quite a lot of murders, blackmail, psychologically terrorizing people – she’s capable of self-rationalizing that she needs to do these things enough to actually do them. The problem comes afterwards, when she has to live with what she’s done. She might proclaim that she has no regrets but she has massive regrets. As much as she does genuinely believe in her mission and her goal, she also firmly believes every person who’s died at her hands is a mark against her on some invisible ledger. She doesn’t really believe in any higher power, but some part of her is still absolutely certain that judgment will be coming her way one day, and that she will deserve it. That doesn’t mean she won’t do what she feels has to be done next time too.
She’s developed a strong sense of paranoia and her refusal to rely on anyone else to do things for her has only grown. Years of what’s essentially been constant combat as well as her imprisonments has led to her developing PTSD. While she keeps tight control of herself and attempts to of the symptoms, she doesn’t sleep easily, struggles with reminders of particularly traumatic past events, and reacts with hypersensitivity to sudden change. She already had some control issues, and her stints in prison only added on to those. When presented with a situation where she doesn’t have control and sees no way to gain it Max freaks out internally and will start to stonewall everything. She will never willingly go into a situation where she can't at least rationalize some measure of control over it.
None of this is stuff that is really obvious to the outside world. She learned early on as an empath how to present a false front to the world, how to pretend to be someone they want her to be. Max lives in possibilities. This is a person she could be, this is a person she can pretend to be. Predominantly she presents herself to the outside world as someone who's relatively serious but also fairly open and easy to get along with, if not the most cheerful of people and tending more towards heavy sarcasm than humor. It's a method she's found tends to be fairly good at getting information, and also at warding off actual questions about herself. It's only once people start trying to get close that she starts closing herself off more obviously. She stays just out of reach of understanding as much as possible.
The people she cares about she cares about intensely and deeply and will do almost anything for. She’s always developed affection and caring for people quickly, as much as she tries not to, though these days she prefers to pretend she doesn’t actually. (This solution does not work as well as she would like it to.) The passion that she had as a young adult has been pushed down and buried under seriousness, but it’s still there, just as unacknowledged as she can make it. She doesn’t talk about things. She doesn’t tell people her past. Max buries everything. But despite all of this, despite these things, she cares. She considers it her greatest flaw, even though in reality it’s her greatest asset. It’s the reason she’s still fighting, the reason she hasn’t given up. Max cares about people, and their lives, and whether they’re okay. She cares particularly about the people who matter to her. She has a self sacrificial streak that runs all the way back to her childhood and her lack of self worth then, and also just to her deeply protective instincts towards people who matter to her.
She actually has a really active sense of humor, in that she finds a lot of really random stuff funny. She loves terrible old movies, and bad puns, and how did the chicken cross the road jokes. She likes innocuous, completely innocent things that are there solely for amusement. She tends to enjoy stuff like that in private or with people she trusts a lot. It's a personal thing, being amused, because she wants to keep it from ever being ruined. She loves fixing things, most of all. She hasn’t been able to for years without looking over her shoulder for the government, but her favorite thing has always been fixing things. Making them better instead of worse, and that is perhaps her most constant heartache these days. It’s so hard to fix things when you spend a lot of time blowing them up. She hasn't had all that much time for hobbies but once given free time without responsibilities she'll gravitate back towards the things that make her happy quickly - building and fixing things, playing video games, learning, dumb jokes.
At the core of her, Max is a person who still wants to believe that things can be better, that people can be good, and that fixing things is as simple as turning a screw a little tighter. She’s just buried it down under layers and layers of cynical jaded anger at a world that’s refusing to let that dream be true.
But she's also someone who isn't really sure she deserves to be alive, given everything she's done. The reconciliation between those two sides of her is one that is perpetually difficult for her.
Inventory:
1. What looks like fairly standard dark colored street winter wear, but has been carefully and unobtrusively modified with body armor inserts around the chest and several hidden pockets, as well as a conceal carry shoulder holster. Combat boots.
1. One Sig Sauer 9mm.
1. One backpack, similarly modified with armor inserts and hidden pockets. Contains one very powerful laptop requiring iris scan to access, that weird jumble of cables and wires that tech people always seem to have on them, a secondary clip for her gun, lockpick set, a pack of gummy bears, two Snickers (one half eaten), a fairly comprehensive first aid kit, flashlight, several protein bars, notebook and pens, swiss army pocket knife, small portable tool kit.
Abilities:
1. Empathy. She can read and affect the basic emotions of people within around a half miles’ range of her, though she’s only able to affect them with any real accuracy within a much shorter range, about eyesight. She can induce fear, anger, relaxation, etc., most of the time without the person even being aware that something outside of their head is influencing them. Her abilities can be shielded against by anyone with some training, no psychic talent required, so long as they’re aware of the possibility. She hasn’t used these as much as she could have in the past decade or so, and as such she’s currently cautious about using them because she doesn’t have the subtlety necessary to keep people from realizing something’s messing with their heads and is also very, very out of practice in anything but brute force. She is capable of developing an empathic link to one person (and only one person at a time – one must be broken before another can be formed) that allows her to read not only their emotions but almost their thoughts and certainly go back into their memories and also lets her work with their emotions much more thoroughly and delicately than otherwise, with their complete awareness of what she’s doing. It also increases the range from which she can affect them. In her world, empaths are not uncommon and this bond is used primarily between an empath and someone with a power that can be overwhelming - technopathy, superhearing or senses, etc. - as a way to keep that person grounded.
2. Combat proficiency. Max has been operating as either a vigilante or in an underground resistance for well over a decade, and has solid combat skills as a result. Good aim with a gun, knows how to use and maintain multiple models, reasonable experience and proficiency in explosives, and and a solid grounding in several types of hand to hand combat, with proficiency in krav maga and capoeira. She keeps herself in good shape and practices on a regular basis whenever possible.
3. Mechanics. While she's knowledgeable in computers and has a solid understanding of coding, her real technological talent lies in assembling, disassembling, and fixing machines. She went to college for mechanical engineering and was well on her way to a second degree in electrical engineering as well when everything went south, and typically goes for mechanic jobs when staying in one place for too long.
Flaws:
Max does not forgive and she definitely doesn't forget wrongs done to her or those she loves, and will seek vengeance for them. "Holding grudges" is a light word for the extent to which she feels about injustices against those she would like to protect. She is capable of justifying to herself genuinely terrible acts balanced against a wrong she considers great enough, and will commit them despite considering them to be terrible. She has lied, murdered, stolen, and destroyed property with a fair amount of regularity for over a decade now, and given what she considers an important enough cause will do so again.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample:
It's not that Max doesn't know "weird". Weird is a word that could be pretty accurately used to sum up her life for the past -- long while now. At least, that's what she would prefer to go with. Weird sounds better than disaster does, or tragedy, or anything else that might be come up with, and it also encompasses the genuinely off the wall things that tend to happen when a lot of people with more-than-human abilities work together despite having very different philosophies of life.
It's just that this is -- well, this is really weird. Teleportation? She's done that before, sure. But always to somewhere that actually existed, with someone else who had that ability, in a manner that was explained and understood. Definitely not at random into a gladiator arena with a creature that seemed like it was pulled straight out of some movie.
At first she'd assumed nightmare, or maybe some very strange and abnormal psychic backlash, or worse but possible a very strange interrogation, but it's been a full day now of wandering around this place, the weird architecture staying entirely solid to her touch, the extremely convincing population who are utterly convinced of this being reality, and the initial wary confusion she had felt is giving way to an all too familiar sense of entrapment. This can’t be real. It can’t be. But every sense she has is telling her that it is, that there is no waking up from this, and if it is a softer sort of prison than she is used to that does not change the fact that it is, without a doubt, a prison of a kind. (If it’s real.)
Max has never had the luxury of time to come to a decision slowly, and she doesn’t think this place will be any kind of exception to that rule. As much as she’s on the guard against any evidence she’s been captured again and this is just some extremely strange new way to interrogate her, if the people she’s spoken to here are to be believed there’s a whole lot more she needs to be on the lookout for now.
Gods. Actual gods? She’s never believed in that, and she’s not feeling quite ready to start just yet, but at the very least there are certainly some very, very powerful beings here it sounds like. And even with as much time as she’s spent fighting against the imprisonment of metahumans, Max is keenly aware of the damage that the stronger ones can do. (That she is capable of, even.) Here doesn’t seem like it’s truly any safer than home, and the alarm bells in her head don’t seem like they plan on stopping ringing any time soon.