+ application (the games)
Jul. 29th, 2014 08:19 pmOUT of CHARACTER
Name: Trace
Other characters: None.
IN CHARACTER
Name: Jack (or Subject Zero)
Fandom: Mass Effect
Canon point/AU: Just before the end of Mass Effect 3
Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fuckcerberus
PB: Using icons of her from her canon source.
History: WIKI.
Presentation:
Where do I even start? Jack is literally just a whole big bundle of problems strung together by threads of sanity. Mass Effect 3 shows her with quite a few more of those threads, thank god for that. She's gone from unstable and filled with rage to finding her purpose and achieving some sort of stability through it. And sure, she's still a wreck inside of her head, but it's a work in progress instead of a fact of life like it used to be.
(Note: Each of the following are detailed further in the 'motivations' section.)
outlaw.
Jack has long since learned to have a really skewed view of authority in which the people with power are always the bad guys. Shepard was an exception, which opened her up to the possibility of further exceptions (like Alliance, who gave her the job at Grissom after she helped Shepard), but this is still a hard viewpoint to shake. Because of this, her natural reflex when being pushed in one direction is to push even more forcefully in the other direction. She can see reason, especially with the help of someone like Shepard, but that doesn't change the fact that belligerence is still her default reaction to dealings with people in power.
rage.
Rage is the closest things he has to a coping mechanism, to a way to handle when something hurts her, wrongs her, angers her, saddens her, or even makes her uncomfortable. It's pretty much the catch-all reaction, occasionally supplemented by smearing the walls with her transgressors. As such, a lot of her interactions with people are going to begin with some kind of anger or bitching. And as a general rule, nothing's her fault. Everything can be twisted and blamed on someone else somehow, generally angrily. She may have gotten better about her rage since ME2, but without her kids to give her a reason to stay straight, all bets are pretty much off.
twisted.
Because let's be real here, even when she's not smearing the walls with the blood of people who've fucked up her life, she's often tempted to kill people anyway. Sometimes, she openly looks for excuses, pushes buttons, goads them into one wrong step so she can kill them and say that one learned their lesson too. It's not even just that she's savage, which in a sense she kind of is. It's because killing is the only time in her life that she's ever felt truly happy. Her captors in the Teltin facility made it so, giving her narcotics to cause euphoria when she killed and zapping her when she hesitated. To this day, she still "gets warm feelings inside" when she kills someone, and has been seen getting twitchy as if experiencing physical discomfort when she almost kills someone but Shepard calls her off. On top of that, she has a long long list of crimes she's so proud of, and when she rattles them off, it sounds like she had entirely too much fun committing them. Being fucked-up is the element in which she thrives, and she doesn't try for a second to hide it.
unstable.
Jack is a borderline psychopath with an unpredictably violent nature. Even when you're playing the game as Shepard where there's usually a well- and poorly-received answer for everything (paragon and renegade answers, the latter generally being an insufferable dick), you can never tell when you're talking to Jack which options will have her telling you to fuck right off or even threatening your life. In her interactions with others, she'll be equally unpredictable - maybe she's amused one second, but then the other person says a wrong word or phrase without realizing and it's back to 'fuck you'. Boredom is also incredibly dangerous for her--in the 'idle hands are the devil's workshop' sense, among others. Boredom (and the time it gives her to think) is the cause for a ridiculous percentage of the crimes she's committed.
trust.
It takes a hell of a lot to even begin to earn Jack's trust. Unless you're Shepard, it'll take a trip to hell and back fighting side-by-side for her to even consider it. She won't trust someone until she understands them, not why they deserve to be trusted, but rather, what exactly they're looking for from her. Everyone has an angle - nobody just ~wants to be buddies~. She's willing to share a whole bunch about her past, about her time on Pragia, about the shit she's been through, because that isn't shit she's exposing herself too badly to tell people. It was on the sheets every time the authorities took her in, back in Citadel Space, so it stopped being sensitive fast. But in general, she doesn't let people into the personal shit in her head.
abrasive.
In every way, Jack is a scarred and war-painted product of her past. Because of how many people have fucked with her, she's become somebody nobody dares to fuck with. In every aspect of her life, this shows through, from her appearance to her attitude. She's absolutely obsessed with being the strongest, the most badass, the most fearsome, the one without any weakness. The one people see and run screaming. She's gotten a new tattoo for every time major shit went down in her life, so the amount of ink she had was directly proportional to how much she fucking hated the entire galaxy. She kept the shaved head after her stint with the cult because she realized how much it did for her image, just one more thing to make people hesitate before they start any shit. And then there's her language, cruder than anyone else on the ship by far. Not to mention the fact that she's not afraid to tell you how much she'd enjoy tearing you apart. Or tell you all about the people who've fucked with her, what they did to her, how bad she made them suffer for it. In a weird way, she's incredibly proud of what she's become, of how she looks and of everything wrong in her head because it's why she's alive and why she's considered the most dangerous biotic in the galaxy.
progress!
While all of the above was true (and still is, on the inside), Jack has made a whole bunch of progress between ME2 and when we first find her at Grissom Academy in ME3. It's obvious from just a picture of her, with a pony-tail instead of a fully-shaved head and with an actual set of clothing rather than just a strap to cover her nipples. And it only really goes uphill from there. Over the course of her introduction scene, you see her showing caring and compassion openly (she teaches a group of young biotics, and they're hers), displaying distinct leadership ability (she leads those kids through an impromptu combat situation), and even watching her mouth a little. She found a purpose to give a shit about, so she cleaned herself up. More on this in 'motivations'.
Motivations:
(not sure how to divvy presentation and motivations, so I hope this will do!)
outlaw.
From the first she can remember, the people in charge have always wronged her. Hurt her. Fucked with her. In the Teltin facility for the first fifteen-or-so years of her life, she was in isolation and misery because of them. The only time she wasn't miserable was when she was fighting the other students, and that was because the euphoria was drug-induced anyway. Then she escaped, and as it turned out, the real world was ready to fuck her just as hard as the scientists did. The captain of the ship who picked her up abused her and tried to sell her as a slave. Gang leader after gang leader fucked her over. Not to mention the actual authorities, C-Sec and the planetary equivalents. They never got off her case. In the same way that most people grow up learning to avoid the thugs and criminals who'll hurt you and take what's yours, Jack grew into the realization that the so-called 'good guys' would do just that. Her adverse reaction to figures in authority directly stems from this.
rage.
"How long can hate hold a thing together?" I tripped over that question not long ago and it struck me quite how thoroughly that describes Jack. More than any other character I've ever seen, Jack is absolutely fueled by hate. Hate, rage, violence. Blame. Nothing's her fault, see. Everything that's happened in her life so far has either been a choice she doesn't regret or has been something someone else has done to her. Sometimes both. She blames Cerberus for who she is, how she was raised. She blames all of the ship crews and gangs and even just couples or small groups she's encountered for her refusal to trust anyone and even for their own deaths, because they tried to use her. She finds something to blame everyone for, every single person, so she can find a reason to be pissed off at them too. In her eyes, violent fury is the polar opposite of 'weak', which she loathes being and feels the need to overcompensate for every time it seems like that's a thing that might even remotely be happening.
twisted.
Why is she so twisted? Besides the fact that it's a defense mechanism to protect her from the vast majority of genuine emotion... It's a rush. Getting shot at's a rush, getting chased by the cops is a rush, causing damage and destruction is a rush. Danger itself is a rush, though the feelings she get from killing are significantly more intense, being the lingering affects of what amounts to a lifelong narcotic addiction. But still. it makes her feel powerful and free and she loves it. Once they get to the Arena, she'll have no qualms about killing literally as many people as possible. Like someone's finally letting her off her leash after all that time as a respectable teacher.
unstable.
Put simply, she's unstable because the inside of her head is pretty fucked up. Part of it's learned behavior and part of it's the lingering effect of years of chemical experimentation. And like I said, boredom is incredibly dangerous for her--the more time she spends bored, the more time she has to think, and spending quality time with the inside of her head is one of the last things she wants to do. But despite that, her trauma is an integral part of her. She wouldn't have a clue how to function without it. In a sense, she may hunt down trouble or situations she knows will be trauma-inducing all on her own, because despite being terrible, it's familiar. Not comforting, nothing really comforts Jack, but it's something she knows how to handle.
trust.
Oh my god, Jack has so many trust issues. Before Shepard, her ability to trust had been physically and emotionally beaten out of her by every single person she's ever spent more than an hour with. Jack never hid what she was capable of, but maybe she should've, because even after Teltin there wasn't a single person who wanted to do anything but use her. Use her body, use her powers, use her reputation. No, I lied--there was one person. But he up and died for her, so she obviously couldn't trust that asshole to stick around either. Even with Shepard, who was straightforward from the start and came through on her word right off the bat, Jack spent a good five or six major missions and the conversations in between a mix of pissed off and confusion because she just plain couldn't figure out what Shepard wanted from her. (In a male!Shepard playthrough, she assumes he wants sex so she isn't so confused about it--the confusion starts if he says he doesn't, that he wants to get to know her as a person. She's from a female!Shepard verse, but that still says a lot about her outlook on people.)
conflicted.
As certain as I've sounded about all of these points, almost every single thing I've said so far is the dominant half of another of Jack's internal conflict. Because really, she has so many things going wrong inside her at any given time and she has zero healthy methods to express this fact. She feels unbalanced--everything feels unbalanced. She has so many scars she didn't earn and so few that she should've earned but didn't. Her tattoos aren't just a symbol of what she's accomplished... Nobody can touch her long enough to scar her anymore, so the tattoos are the only real substitute. Like, the faces on her arms? Those are fallen comrades, murdered gang 'sisters'. That hurt her worse than any wound, but she walked away without any scars to show for it. Like it had never happened. That drove her nuts. And then there are times when what her life's becoming doesn't mesh with the instincts she has. Like at one point (right here, for reference, because her tone says a lot), Shepard says something that would normally piss her off but it's Shepard and she trusts Shepard. So she says, "I've turned people inside-out for a hell of a lot less. What are you doing?" Almost like 'don't make me do this :C' Not even a threat, really, more like she's obligated to turn Shepard inside-out if she keeps it up, no matter what she wants. She also has a shocking amount of survivor's guilt buried way the fuck down. Guilt over all of the kids who were basically lab rats in the Teltin facility, used only to test the fatality of biotic enhancements before they got to her, and guilt over the one person pre-Shepard who didn't screw her over, but proceeded to sacrifice himself to save her life. On top of that, despite how lost she'd be without trauma of some sort, there's a part of her that desperately wants to get rid of it. It may have been the latent vulnerability sparked by returning to the place where she was scared and isolated as a child, but when she was about to shoot Aresh (who wanted to restart the Teltin facility), she said, "I-... shit. Is this right? Will killing him fix my head?" Almost hopeful-sounding. And then, most conflicted of all, there are times when it really seems like she wants to be the good guy in a situation. But then as soon as she realizes that's what it seems like, when she realizes she's actually being a decent human being, she shuts you out. As if she's scared to even try to be good because she already knows she's unstoppable at being bad.
progress!
Jack's made a shocking amount of progress, since the second game when all of the above was 100% true. It's still who she is on the inside, that's not something a person can change (especially in the span of six or seven months). And really, though protecting Shepard with her biotic shield on the Collector ship was the breakthrough that inspired it (it was the first time she'd ever used her biotics to their fullest to protect someone else's life), being handed a dozen bumbling teenaged biotics was what made a world of difference. All of a sudden, here were a group of kids who looked up to her instead of feared her. Jack had never been looked up to before. Over the next few months, she threw herself into teaching these kids. Into preparing them for the war ahead. Into protecting them, when she needs to. Jack didn't think she could ever care about anyone the way she cares about these kids, and that makes her a very fierce sort of protective. They're her kids, and anyone who fucks with them will regret it. And through these kids, she's found her place. Her purpose. She's matured, because that's what the kids needed. She's lost a lot of her recklessness because it's not just her life on the line anymore. And sure, she's still abrasive as fuck with the mouth of a sailor, but she is the best she could possibly be for these kids. (Think about this: In order to have this position under Alliance observation, she can't have killed anyone recently. Which means she more or less kicked what amounts to the after-effects of a lifelong narcotics addiction cold-turkey just for these kids. She forced herself to stabilize for them. That says so much.) All of the above sections are still true, in essence--if she lost her job and her kids, it's almost guaranteed that she'd revert almost completely. But it's progress. And that's more than anyone but Shepard really expected from her.
Setting: She's going to be pretty torn. On the one hand, the authorities are telling her to kill people again and they haven't earned the right to give her orders, so fuck 'em. On the other hand, killing people is still kind of a drug fix for her, so she might grudgingly cooperate a little more than initially intended.
SAMPLES
First Person Thread:
[ the second she's awake, jack's bolt upright in bed, and by the time the voice patches in, she's already at the door making decently forceful attempts to open it. but when the voice mentions the device, her eyes dart to the object in question.
jack's jaw sets, and she storms toward the device. ] Record my fucking feelings, [ she grumbles, making no attempt to keep quiet about her displeasure, then seizes the device and winds back for an impressive pitch at the nearby wall.
....but she doesn't let it fly. she's gripping it tight, white-knuckled tight, but how far is breaking this fucking thing going to get her? swallowing hard, she reels in her arm and turns the device to face her.
the feed turns on. ]
That was bullshit, [ she says, jaw tight. ] But kid, I know your fucking face, and next time? You're mine. [ and she hangs up. ]
Prose:
It's in cuffs that she's hauled in to see the Gamemakers, cuffs and a mutinous glare. It didn't have to be this way, they said. This won't win her any sponsors, they said. So she punched their stupid fucking faces, and now she's sizing the Gamemakers up like she'd almost like to do it again.
But she doesn't.
Instead, she approaches the Gamemakers, gaze leveled and hands in fists. "Put me back," she says. It isn't quite hostile, though. Almost like the least-negotiable request you've ever heard. "Put me back, or those damn kids and everyone else is going to get crushed like a fucking ant." That's an exaggeration. She's just one player in the war, and not even a big one. But if she just mentioned the kids and these Gamemakers still chose to be assholes about it, about the lives of her kids... She would've killed them all where they stand, and she would've liked it.
They don't answer. They just stare, almost like they're waiting.
She lets out a bark of laughter, holding her hands out to each side in a wide shrug. "I'm not gonna kiss your ass." That's all there is to it. "Shit, I don't have to. You want me to kill people? I'll do it with or without your help. With my bare fucking hands." Her upper lip curls a little with the last words. Where the fuck's Shepard when you need her?
What is your character scored: 9, based onmica's advice the fact that she's a strong combatant and tenacious and even her mental 'weaknesses' make her more interesting to watch in combat. never a dull moment.
Name: Trace
Other characters: None.
IN CHARACTER
Name: Jack (or Subject Zero)
Fandom: Mass Effect
Canon point/AU: Just before the end of Mass Effect 3
Journal:
fuckcerberusPB: Using icons of her from her canon source.
History: WIKI.
Presentation:
Where do I even start? Jack is literally just a whole big bundle of problems strung together by threads of sanity. Mass Effect 3 shows her with quite a few more of those threads, thank god for that. She's gone from unstable and filled with rage to finding her purpose and achieving some sort of stability through it. And sure, she's still a wreck inside of her head, but it's a work in progress instead of a fact of life like it used to be.
(Note: Each of the following are detailed further in the 'motivations' section.)
outlaw.
Jack has long since learned to have a really skewed view of authority in which the people with power are always the bad guys. Shepard was an exception, which opened her up to the possibility of further exceptions (like Alliance, who gave her the job at Grissom after she helped Shepard), but this is still a hard viewpoint to shake. Because of this, her natural reflex when being pushed in one direction is to push even more forcefully in the other direction. She can see reason, especially with the help of someone like Shepard, but that doesn't change the fact that belligerence is still her default reaction to dealings with people in power.
rage.
Rage is the closest things he has to a coping mechanism, to a way to handle when something hurts her, wrongs her, angers her, saddens her, or even makes her uncomfortable. It's pretty much the catch-all reaction, occasionally supplemented by smearing the walls with her transgressors. As such, a lot of her interactions with people are going to begin with some kind of anger or bitching. And as a general rule, nothing's her fault. Everything can be twisted and blamed on someone else somehow, generally angrily. She may have gotten better about her rage since ME2, but without her kids to give her a reason to stay straight, all bets are pretty much off.
twisted.
Because let's be real here, even when she's not smearing the walls with the blood of people who've fucked up her life, she's often tempted to kill people anyway. Sometimes, she openly looks for excuses, pushes buttons, goads them into one wrong step so she can kill them and say that one learned their lesson too. It's not even just that she's savage, which in a sense she kind of is. It's because killing is the only time in her life that she's ever felt truly happy. Her captors in the Teltin facility made it so, giving her narcotics to cause euphoria when she killed and zapping her when she hesitated. To this day, she still "gets warm feelings inside" when she kills someone, and has been seen getting twitchy as if experiencing physical discomfort when she almost kills someone but Shepard calls her off. On top of that, she has a long long list of crimes she's so proud of, and when she rattles them off, it sounds like she had entirely too much fun committing them. Being fucked-up is the element in which she thrives, and she doesn't try for a second to hide it.
unstable.
Jack is a borderline psychopath with an unpredictably violent nature. Even when you're playing the game as Shepard where there's usually a well- and poorly-received answer for everything (paragon and renegade answers, the latter generally being an insufferable dick), you can never tell when you're talking to Jack which options will have her telling you to fuck right off or even threatening your life. In her interactions with others, she'll be equally unpredictable - maybe she's amused one second, but then the other person says a wrong word or phrase without realizing and it's back to 'fuck you'. Boredom is also incredibly dangerous for her--in the 'idle hands are the devil's workshop' sense, among others. Boredom (and the time it gives her to think) is the cause for a ridiculous percentage of the crimes she's committed.
trust.
It takes a hell of a lot to even begin to earn Jack's trust. Unless you're Shepard, it'll take a trip to hell and back fighting side-by-side for her to even consider it. She won't trust someone until she understands them, not why they deserve to be trusted, but rather, what exactly they're looking for from her. Everyone has an angle - nobody just ~wants to be buddies~. She's willing to share a whole bunch about her past, about her time on Pragia, about the shit she's been through, because that isn't shit she's exposing herself too badly to tell people. It was on the sheets every time the authorities took her in, back in Citadel Space, so it stopped being sensitive fast. But in general, she doesn't let people into the personal shit in her head.
abrasive.
In every way, Jack is a scarred and war-painted product of her past. Because of how many people have fucked with her, she's become somebody nobody dares to fuck with. In every aspect of her life, this shows through, from her appearance to her attitude. She's absolutely obsessed with being the strongest, the most badass, the most fearsome, the one without any weakness. The one people see and run screaming. She's gotten a new tattoo for every time major shit went down in her life, so the amount of ink she had was directly proportional to how much she fucking hated the entire galaxy. She kept the shaved head after her stint with the cult because she realized how much it did for her image, just one more thing to make people hesitate before they start any shit. And then there's her language, cruder than anyone else on the ship by far. Not to mention the fact that she's not afraid to tell you how much she'd enjoy tearing you apart. Or tell you all about the people who've fucked with her, what they did to her, how bad she made them suffer for it. In a weird way, she's incredibly proud of what she's become, of how she looks and of everything wrong in her head because it's why she's alive and why she's considered the most dangerous biotic in the galaxy.
progress!
While all of the above was true (and still is, on the inside), Jack has made a whole bunch of progress between ME2 and when we first find her at Grissom Academy in ME3. It's obvious from just a picture of her, with a pony-tail instead of a fully-shaved head and with an actual set of clothing rather than just a strap to cover her nipples. And it only really goes uphill from there. Over the course of her introduction scene, you see her showing caring and compassion openly (she teaches a group of young biotics, and they're hers), displaying distinct leadership ability (she leads those kids through an impromptu combat situation), and even watching her mouth a little. She found a purpose to give a shit about, so she cleaned herself up. More on this in 'motivations'.
Motivations:
(not sure how to divvy presentation and motivations, so I hope this will do!)
outlaw.
From the first she can remember, the people in charge have always wronged her. Hurt her. Fucked with her. In the Teltin facility for the first fifteen-or-so years of her life, she was in isolation and misery because of them. The only time she wasn't miserable was when she was fighting the other students, and that was because the euphoria was drug-induced anyway. Then she escaped, and as it turned out, the real world was ready to fuck her just as hard as the scientists did. The captain of the ship who picked her up abused her and tried to sell her as a slave. Gang leader after gang leader fucked her over. Not to mention the actual authorities, C-Sec and the planetary equivalents. They never got off her case. In the same way that most people grow up learning to avoid the thugs and criminals who'll hurt you and take what's yours, Jack grew into the realization that the so-called 'good guys' would do just that. Her adverse reaction to figures in authority directly stems from this.
rage.
"How long can hate hold a thing together?" I tripped over that question not long ago and it struck me quite how thoroughly that describes Jack. More than any other character I've ever seen, Jack is absolutely fueled by hate. Hate, rage, violence. Blame. Nothing's her fault, see. Everything that's happened in her life so far has either been a choice she doesn't regret or has been something someone else has done to her. Sometimes both. She blames Cerberus for who she is, how she was raised. She blames all of the ship crews and gangs and even just couples or small groups she's encountered for her refusal to trust anyone and even for their own deaths, because they tried to use her. She finds something to blame everyone for, every single person, so she can find a reason to be pissed off at them too. In her eyes, violent fury is the polar opposite of 'weak', which she loathes being and feels the need to overcompensate for every time it seems like that's a thing that might even remotely be happening.
twisted.
Why is she so twisted? Besides the fact that it's a defense mechanism to protect her from the vast majority of genuine emotion... It's a rush. Getting shot at's a rush, getting chased by the cops is a rush, causing damage and destruction is a rush. Danger itself is a rush, though the feelings she get from killing are significantly more intense, being the lingering affects of what amounts to a lifelong narcotic addiction. But still. it makes her feel powerful and free and she loves it. Once they get to the Arena, she'll have no qualms about killing literally as many people as possible. Like someone's finally letting her off her leash after all that time as a respectable teacher.
unstable.
Put simply, she's unstable because the inside of her head is pretty fucked up. Part of it's learned behavior and part of it's the lingering effect of years of chemical experimentation. And like I said, boredom is incredibly dangerous for her--the more time she spends bored, the more time she has to think, and spending quality time with the inside of her head is one of the last things she wants to do. But despite that, her trauma is an integral part of her. She wouldn't have a clue how to function without it. In a sense, she may hunt down trouble or situations she knows will be trauma-inducing all on her own, because despite being terrible, it's familiar. Not comforting, nothing really comforts Jack, but it's something she knows how to handle.
trust.
Oh my god, Jack has so many trust issues. Before Shepard, her ability to trust had been physically and emotionally beaten out of her by every single person she's ever spent more than an hour with. Jack never hid what she was capable of, but maybe she should've, because even after Teltin there wasn't a single person who wanted to do anything but use her. Use her body, use her powers, use her reputation. No, I lied--there was one person. But he up and died for her, so she obviously couldn't trust that asshole to stick around either. Even with Shepard, who was straightforward from the start and came through on her word right off the bat, Jack spent a good five or six major missions and the conversations in between a mix of pissed off and confusion because she just plain couldn't figure out what Shepard wanted from her. (In a male!Shepard playthrough, she assumes he wants sex so she isn't so confused about it--the confusion starts if he says he doesn't, that he wants to get to know her as a person. She's from a female!Shepard verse, but that still says a lot about her outlook on people.)
conflicted.
As certain as I've sounded about all of these points, almost every single thing I've said so far is the dominant half of another of Jack's internal conflict. Because really, she has so many things going wrong inside her at any given time and she has zero healthy methods to express this fact. She feels unbalanced--everything feels unbalanced. She has so many scars she didn't earn and so few that she should've earned but didn't. Her tattoos aren't just a symbol of what she's accomplished... Nobody can touch her long enough to scar her anymore, so the tattoos are the only real substitute. Like, the faces on her arms? Those are fallen comrades, murdered gang 'sisters'. That hurt her worse than any wound, but she walked away without any scars to show for it. Like it had never happened. That drove her nuts. And then there are times when what her life's becoming doesn't mesh with the instincts she has. Like at one point (right here, for reference, because her tone says a lot), Shepard says something that would normally piss her off but it's Shepard and she trusts Shepard. So she says, "I've turned people inside-out for a hell of a lot less. What are you doing?" Almost like 'don't make me do this :C' Not even a threat, really, more like she's obligated to turn Shepard inside-out if she keeps it up, no matter what she wants. She also has a shocking amount of survivor's guilt buried way the fuck down. Guilt over all of the kids who were basically lab rats in the Teltin facility, used only to test the fatality of biotic enhancements before they got to her, and guilt over the one person pre-Shepard who didn't screw her over, but proceeded to sacrifice himself to save her life. On top of that, despite how lost she'd be without trauma of some sort, there's a part of her that desperately wants to get rid of it. It may have been the latent vulnerability sparked by returning to the place where she was scared and isolated as a child, but when she was about to shoot Aresh (who wanted to restart the Teltin facility), she said, "I-... shit. Is this right? Will killing him fix my head?" Almost hopeful-sounding. And then, most conflicted of all, there are times when it really seems like she wants to be the good guy in a situation. But then as soon as she realizes that's what it seems like, when she realizes she's actually being a decent human being, she shuts you out. As if she's scared to even try to be good because she already knows she's unstoppable at being bad.
progress!
Jack's made a shocking amount of progress, since the second game when all of the above was 100% true. It's still who she is on the inside, that's not something a person can change (especially in the span of six or seven months). And really, though protecting Shepard with her biotic shield on the Collector ship was the breakthrough that inspired it (it was the first time she'd ever used her biotics to their fullest to protect someone else's life), being handed a dozen bumbling teenaged biotics was what made a world of difference. All of a sudden, here were a group of kids who looked up to her instead of feared her. Jack had never been looked up to before. Over the next few months, she threw herself into teaching these kids. Into preparing them for the war ahead. Into protecting them, when she needs to. Jack didn't think she could ever care about anyone the way she cares about these kids, and that makes her a very fierce sort of protective. They're her kids, and anyone who fucks with them will regret it. And through these kids, she's found her place. Her purpose. She's matured, because that's what the kids needed. She's lost a lot of her recklessness because it's not just her life on the line anymore. And sure, she's still abrasive as fuck with the mouth of a sailor, but she is the best she could possibly be for these kids. (Think about this: In order to have this position under Alliance observation, she can't have killed anyone recently. Which means she more or less kicked what amounts to the after-effects of a lifelong narcotics addiction cold-turkey just for these kids. She forced herself to stabilize for them. That says so much.) All of the above sections are still true, in essence--if she lost her job and her kids, it's almost guaranteed that she'd revert almost completely. But it's progress. And that's more than anyone but Shepard really expected from her.
Setting: She's going to be pretty torn. On the one hand, the authorities are telling her to kill people again and they haven't earned the right to give her orders, so fuck 'em. On the other hand, killing people is still kind of a drug fix for her, so she might grudgingly cooperate a little more than initially intended.
SAMPLES
First Person Thread:
[ the second she's awake, jack's bolt upright in bed, and by the time the voice patches in, she's already at the door making decently forceful attempts to open it. but when the voice mentions the device, her eyes dart to the object in question.
jack's jaw sets, and she storms toward the device. ] Record my fucking feelings, [ she grumbles, making no attempt to keep quiet about her displeasure, then seizes the device and winds back for an impressive pitch at the nearby wall.
....but she doesn't let it fly. she's gripping it tight, white-knuckled tight, but how far is breaking this fucking thing going to get her? swallowing hard, she reels in her arm and turns the device to face her.
the feed turns on. ]
That was bullshit, [ she says, jaw tight. ] But kid, I know your fucking face, and next time? You're mine. [ and she hangs up. ]
Prose:
It's in cuffs that she's hauled in to see the Gamemakers, cuffs and a mutinous glare. It didn't have to be this way, they said. This won't win her any sponsors, they said. So she punched their stupid fucking faces, and now she's sizing the Gamemakers up like she'd almost like to do it again.
But she doesn't.
Instead, she approaches the Gamemakers, gaze leveled and hands in fists. "Put me back," she says. It isn't quite hostile, though. Almost like the least-negotiable request you've ever heard. "Put me back, or those damn kids and everyone else is going to get crushed like a fucking ant." That's an exaggeration. She's just one player in the war, and not even a big one. But if she just mentioned the kids and these Gamemakers still chose to be assholes about it, about the lives of her kids... She would've killed them all where they stand, and she would've liked it.
They don't answer. They just stare, almost like they're waiting.
She lets out a bark of laughter, holding her hands out to each side in a wide shrug. "I'm not gonna kiss your ass." That's all there is to it. "Shit, I don't have to. You want me to kill people? I'll do it with or without your help. With my bare fucking hands." Her upper lip curls a little with the last words. Where the fuck's Shepard when you need her?
What is your character scored: 9, based on
