cyborged | [ooc] capitalh application

PLAYER STUFF
Name: Frank
Pronoun: They/Them/Their
Email address: simmichan @ gmail.com
Preferred contact:

FiremanSam, or AvoidedDrowning on AIM
Other characters: N/A

CHARACTER STUFF
Name: Jack Sears
Aliases: Raiden
Canon: Metal Gear Solid
Role: Hero
Species: Human (Cyborg)
Gender: Male
Age: 29
Appearance: Yup. Literally the only difference between this and his "civilian" look is that he wears a trenchcoat. That's it.

Origin story:

Once upon a time, there was a happy family. This happy family lived in Liberia in the 80s, and, you know. Being the late 80s in Liberia it wasn't great, but they managed.

Didn't last long, though.

After the Civil War broke out, this happy family was murdered. The claim was that they were just casualties of war, but the truth of it was that they were killed by a family friend who took their son and named him Jack. And when he was old enough, ("old enough" being six years old,) this family friend put a gun in Jack's hands and taught him to kill.

This family friend, a man by the name of George, was part of a TRIDENT cell looking into the best ways to create supersoldiers. Children were particularly great candidates because of the way the serum interacted with their genetics while their bodies were still developing, and their youth made their personalities easier to shape and mold and control. And the civil war gave them a great opportunity to test these kids out.

Jack fought in the war from the moment he was given that gun until it ended, when he was 11, having risen through the ill-defined ranks to become Captain of his unit. When the war was over, George left him with a foster family while he settled some affairs, but Jack was eventually taken to the US by an NGO and placed in a relief centre and, eventually, moved into foster care.

Over time, he "forgot" about his time in Liberia, suppressing the memories until eventually they only ever surfaced as nightmares. He grew up, relatively well-adjusted all things considered, and eventually joined the military after he left college. There's a lot of "coincidences" surrounding this particular year of his life. Like his powers being pointed out to him during a medical examination, meeting his girlfriend, Rose, and eventually applying to and getting into CONDOR, only to discover said girlfriend was also a CONDOR agent. Though, in the interest of separating their business lives from their home ones, they rarely worked together. She suggested the codename Raiden, and he went with it since it's not like he had any better ideas. I mean it's hardly as though it was a thematic name based on a fighter plane that would later cause Jack to define himself solely as a weapon, right?

Almost certainly not.

As a rookie, Raiden wasn't really trusted to go do stuff beyond local crimestopping on his own, but after a while he was sent off on a mission on his own. Just a small one, dealing with some terrorists out on an oil rig. It seemed like a bit more than meets the eye, but Raiden's experience and skills so far suggested he could handle it.

They were only half right about it.

Rose acted as his liason during the mission, guiding him and relaying orders and information as things got more and more hairy. He met an oddly suspicious Lieutenant who was apparently the only survivor of a Navy SEAL team who'd been sent in and everyone seemed to be constantly surprised by Raiden's statements and kept talking about all sorts of stuff that didn't jive with the mission briefing at all.

Turns out, the oil rig was owned by TRIDENT because of reasons that are unclear but had something to do with Freedom and the rig making a good weapons testing facility. Oh, and wouldn't you know it? The leader of the TRIDENT cell was good ol' George. Not that either of them recognise eachother to begin with. And the suspicious Navy SEAL was actually an ex-special agent who was a small time legend in the right circles. It's a veritable clusterfuck! This legend - or Snake, as is his codename - went in knowing the truth of the situation. He kinda agreed to work with Raiden by way of their goals lining up, and their collaboration helps Raiden to question the orders he's been getting. Not before he's actually captured by the head of the operation and is forced to confront his past. He comes clean with Rose about it after he escapes his temporary imprisonment and they have a very touching conversation over the comms about how much they love eachother and how ashamed of his past he is. Very sweet.

Ohh no, what's that? More plot twists? Heck yeah. Seems Rose was a TRIDENT double agent the WHOLE TIME. Ohh snap. It seems she recommended Raiden for the mission not based on his skills, but because of his past with TRIDENT. His ability to compartmentalise and ignore his past apparently makes him valuable to them as a prototype for longer term soldier stuff, and so they wanted to keep and study him to really understand how he's been doing for these last 20 years. It's all a mess. He has to team up with Snake and take down the rig and have a swordfight with George while he monologues about destiny and memes and repeating the mistakes of your past and then kill him. Which Raiden would probably feel bad about if he wasn't so great at never analysing what he's feeling at any given time.

Since Rose gave herself up to CONDOR freely and agreed to share everything she knows from working with TRIDENT, there was some hope for her relationship with Jack. But, uh. That didn't last. He kind of went down a dark path with a lot of alcohol and bar fights and blaming her for everything that was currently awful in his life, and eventually left when he realised he had a problem and that the relationship as it was was just way too toxic for either of them. He went to stay off the grid with Snake for some time, since dude had dealt with some similar issues, and came back to work once he felt stable enough to give it his all.

And that was great, for a time. Until a mission lead to him being captured, again, by TRIDENT. This time it was purely coincidence rather than any calculated effort on their part. This time he was in there for the better part of a year while they used him as one of their subjects for experimenting with cybernetics. They replaced almost his entire body with, you know. One that is significantly less organic than the one he had beforehand. Looking into using biotechnology to augment powers already present in a person and all that.

He was rescued eventually, and has since been taking the time to get used to his new body and figure out what the full extent of his new capabilities currently are.

Personality:

Raiden - at this point in his life - is probably someone who's easier to describe in terms of who he was and who he is.

Up until a few years ago, he was a fairly excitable guy. Having suppressed his memories of his life as a child soldier, he affected the personality of a rookie. Initially inexperienced and prone to outbursts. Occasionally cynical and sarcastic, he was pushy when he felt he was being messed around or given ridiculous orders, but ultimately obedient to the chain of command. After meeting Snake, he began to trust his instincts more and learned to consider the ideals of freedom on a personal and universal scale, and he began to question what exactly it was that he was fighting for.

These things only started to grow as it became more and more evident that the mission wasn't exactly on the up and up. After the truth of his life came flooding out, (his childhood, his relationship with TRIDENT and George, the true nature of his mission,) he started to unravel a bit at the seams. Finally being able to pin down the source of his nightmares he was filled with a new sense of self-loathing and began to question the worth of his life. He also also began questioning his sense of reality; finding out about how much of his life was a lie having been just about too much to handle.

He seemingly came together a bit after that oil rig mission, deciding that despite all his evil nonsense, George made some good points about living honestly and free of influence. He decided give his relationship with Rose a real try, free of pretence and subterfuge. Unfortunately, everything he'd learned and experienced on that mission was too much and he never sought treatment - instead he begun drinking heavily and started to get into fights. His relationship with Rose understandably began to suffer and he chose to leave her. Subsequently, due to a need to do something worthwhile with his life, he went back to work. AND THEN EVERYTHING WENT TITS UP.

Raiden's torture at the hands of TRIDENT left him a fairly different person. He became morose, withdrawn and stoic. He threw away his name - Jack - deciding to only go by Raiden now as he was officially little more than a weapon. Though he had always had this thought in mind after learning about his past from Rose and George and the truth behind his name (his real name, Jack, having been the name the Allies used for the Mitsubishi JM2 Raiden in WWII, he has since chosen to live up almost entirely to this name after receiving what he likely considers the physical manifestation of what he always was; his exoskeleton.

In a way, he considers his personal quest for freedom to be over. To have been a a farce. He doesn't believe he'll ever really get away from the things he's done and the things that were done to him, but he'll keep working for that better world. If there is anything in this world that Raiden is willing to die for, it is the rights of people - or, more significantly, him and the people he loves - to live their lives free of fear and control, with genuine free will. It's the only way he knows to separate himself from the plans that have been forced upon him since he was a child; by fighting against them. He even believes that if they can get rid of TRIDENT and other villains like them, he'll be free too.

He's closed off, more than anything. Raiden is painfully terrified of being alone because he hasn't got or ever had, in his opinion, a family. Has always been alone. So he shut down the part of himself that had to worry about that. He has - in his own mind - always been alone. The kind of person who can be picked up and tossed aside as the situation demands. It's easier to keep people at arm's length, rather than deal with the eventual heartbreak when they're done. But he doesn't want to be alone either; just being a bit lonely of your own volition is better than being left to the wayside.

Raiden considers himself to be somewhat inconsequential as a person. He's well aware of his worth as a soldier and a tool, but as a person he has an incredibly low opinion of himself. It's a common thread that keeps coming up in his life - the idea of himself as a weapon rather than as a person. Even though it's pushed to an extreme over recent events, it's obviously a feeling that's always been there. That he's not much more than just some soldier and a dirty mark on history. He's never really shaken that view of himself despite his best attempts to leave his past behind. He wants desperately to be something more, something better - which is a large part of why he takes so much to Snake when they first meet and why he's so fiercely loyal to CONDOR. Because Snake's a hero, these other operatives are heroes - but he never quite figures it out.

He doesn't relate well to people on a personal level - he has really trouble connecting beyond talking shop, given his fragmented sense of self and his new "no nonsense, all business" approach to life. He has a soft spot for children, and reacts with incredible violence to people intentionally putting children in danger, but beyond that. Nah. Personal relationships are bullshit as far as he is concerned. It's weakness, it's setting yourself up to get hurt, and also he doesn't feel like he deserves it. He'll even hastily correct anyone calling him Jack. It's all Raiden, all the time.

Whilst he can appear - by all intents - to be incredibly brave and selfless, it's not difficult to argue that a lot of this comes from the fact that he doesn't feel he has any worth as a person. He's lost his worry of dying or of never leaving a mark on the world since he internalised the view that he's a weapon to be used and discarded. He is, however, fairly honourable in his approach. Whilst he may not hold his life as something to be valued, he is not entirely willing to throw it away uselessly. He holds tight to his ideals and his bonds - if he's little more than a weapon, then he is a weapon that will be used to fight the good fight, as it were.

Differences from canon:

SNAAAAAAAKE.

That's probably the most substantial difference. To make him work in the setting in the absence of one in the game, Snake has to be more of a peripheral influence in his life rather than the constant he is in the game. Alongside this is the fact that he hasn't been manipulated his entire life by a shadow government using him as part of a plan to develop a new world order so much as a few agents working for a supervillain organisation, so he's less paranoid and anti-government than he otherwise would be. Nor is he working for a clandestine organisation who were actually a fake version of a real clandestine organisation that he idolised - the things about his life that are actually real and tangible far outweigh the things that aren't, rather than the reverse.

The presence of organisations like CONDOR and Alpha Force also allow him to place more faith and trust in his fellow man. Though he still believes himself to be alone as a person, he's not part of a fringe group fighting a clandestine war against a global superpower here. In fact the status quo is significantly more positive, so there's not such a sense of "if I can't do this, it's over," all the time. I mean, those situations happen sometimes probably, but it's not a constant and it's not always on the shoulders of him and like two other people.

Also, dude. Significantly less cyborg ninjas turning up and dropping cryptic hints while people are on important missions.

Power level: C
Powers:

Raiden's actual powers are relatively low key; he has heightened endurance, improved healing - though not a healing factor per se, quicker reflexes, and he's slightly stronger than a dude his size should really be. The kind of stuff that's incredibly easy to pass off as just being "gifted." This is all augmented and amped up by his new body, which has made him noticeably superhuman in terms of pure, physical ability.

He's also fitted up with an internal comm system - which has been fully disconnected from TRIDENT's network since his return - and eyepieces that can function as night vision, thermal imaging, and binoculars. Though only one at a time. What is this, the future?

More of note, potentially, is his skill as a soldier and an agent. Given his childhood, it's no surprise he has a natural aptitude for fighting and navigating battles. He has a heightened aptitude for this kind of thing. Which is a real sore spot for him, but also means he's been incredibly proficient with a variety of weapons and in hand-to-hand combat for a long time. His training with CONDOR and some on-the-job work with Snake have also made him pretty skilled in stealth and espionage. You wouldn't think a heavy-ass robot could move silently through the jungle, but you'd be wrong.

Team affiliation: CONDOR

First person sample:

Have a bunch of links.

Prose sample:

There's a lot that's changed about him recently, he realises.

The first may be that he didn't snicker at the phrase "penal code" like he used to. Every time anyone said it. (God, he must've been kind of annoying.) But there's other stuff too. Like how the prospect of a stakeout doesn't fill him with 700 years of "no thank you, sir," anymore. Not to go so far as to say he enjoys or looks forward to them - let's not be ridiculous - but he approaches it as something that needs to be done and that's that.

"You've been standing there for thirteen hours." A voice crackles over the comm, sounding equal parts perplexed and impressed, and Raiden hesitates.

"Thirteen hours?" He echoes, rolling his shoulders out of habit since they certainly don't need it, "I haven't seen any activity."

There's silence on both ends of the line; Raiden spends most of it contemplating going into the building, taking a closer look. They're not going to find out much just staring at it from the outside, evidently. There must be a secret entrance or a--

"I want you to come back in. Swap out with someone."

That stuns Raiden into silence. Not that he's especially talkative these days, so maybe his silence doesn't register as one of surprise straight away, but it is. "What?" He starts as if to argue, and he certainly wants to. He's fine. Thirteen hours is nothing. It's a waste of resources to swap him out. But he knows well enough when he's looking to start a fight he won't win - which wouldn't endear him to his supervisors at all, and he really needs to be on their good side for this next little while - so he'll swallow it. Sighing, he nods first and then answers, "Fine." A little more tightly than maybe is appropriate, but still. He's agreeing, it's something.

And he doesn't try to pull a fast one or anything. Raiden waits patiently for the changeover, informs the person come to relieve him that he's fairly certain there's an entrance underground or somewhere they can't see from top level, and then he goes. Following orders like a good soldier should.

What a bunch of bullshit.