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ataraxion Application, January 2016
Application Explanation
P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Dray
OOC Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dray
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: No
Email + IM: dracothrope at gmail. Plurk is![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
drayma
Characters Played at Ataraxion: n/a
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: AJ (Amanda Jolene) Harris
Canon: CRAU-OC; AJ is a clone of an original character (hairsay) and was created by the technicians of boxmods. She existed from May 2014 to July 2014. She also arrived on the strange planet in ataraxion from September to October 2015.
Original or Alternate Universe: CRAU
Canon Point: AJ's coming from just after her drop-point in Ataraxion, shortly after having put on a mask and wandering into a mask-imposed nightmare about her time in Box.
Setting:
[Note that this is from her initial application]
Before AJ was cloned and released into the Box (her original, Jolene, was brought in during March 2014, and AJ possesses her original's memories from the time that Jo was born until their split in May) her memories tell her that she came from an earth very similar to our own, save perhaps shifted towards cynicism. She grew up and lived in southern Alberta, Canada, in a semi-rural mountain community. She eventually wound up in Calgary, the province's business capitol. In late 2010, the city was bombed or gassed or otherwise suffered a major apocalyptic disaster of chthonic proportions; because AJ was not able to gather more than first-hand evidence, she does not know how the city fell, only that for a few months she was hard-pressed to survive in the aftermath. The disaster ruptured to the surface and spread awful transformations across the landscape and over all life in its path, and much of the city's population died instantly. Others were mentally or physically disfigured, or both. For three or four months AJ and her friend survived by the skin of their teeth in ever-changing and and ever-worsening conditions, trying to find a way to escape the changes and outrun the expanding bubble of the disaster's influence.
For those unfamiliar with the Box, the prison was given this colloquial name because of its deadly electric barriers that extended not only around the perimeter (a couple dozen kilometers wide on a side) but also as a roof about a couple of kilometers up and a basement deep beneath the earth. Inside was what came to be known as the killing floor by some, where various characters were dragged in and left to fend for themselves (with the occasional nudge from the Technicians), and where all kinds of highly imaginative and highly deadly tests were rolled out to maximize pain, suffering, and ultimately death for the sake of vengeful, restless gods that rested deep below the Box itself. Every character that died was brought back to life via cloning and very careful augmentations (usually to mock prisoners, as with scars and memory augmentations) and left to fend for themselves again. This cycle happened over and over for each character despite the Technicians' waning resources and the waning patience of the gods demanding ever more sacrifices. For those who were able to survive and move on with life, the Box was otherwise a pleasant enough place in between tests: it supported massive forests, a river, marshes, a long strip of ocean-front (and even some ocean itself), two small towns, and various buildings in which characters could find useful items and deadly traps.
AJ's understanding of the Box extends beyond her original's experiences, as when AJ was first awoken, she was forced to endure the basement suite of the facility located far under the Box's lower barrier. She and all of the other clones (one for each character in the Box that month) were given the opportunity to explore the testing suite, the first layer between the Box and the world of the Technicians. She was traumatized: down here were kept bodies of those who had died and been reclaimed by runners; half-grown clones; and a whole bevvy of monsters kept in prison cages on-call for the next event, waiting for their time to be let out and to kill. AJ made a break for it at the first possible opportunity, but what looked like an escape route actually led her up into the killing floor... as for every other clone who tried to escape. This provided a bond between those who'd experienced the basement; many began to work together to try to take their originals down.
The reason for this highly-targeted malice was partially instilled by the Technicians: when AJ first spotted Jolene she was struck by a pang of unfairness and hatred so strong that it nearly consumed her. She struggled with this urge for the entirety of her short existence. Though the Technicians did nothing to specifically help the wave of clones destroy their originals, AJ was wily enough to manipulate her surroundings (and scared enough by the knowledge that if she failed she would be sent back down to the basement to be experimented on or worse) that she managed to get the upper leg on her original. At the time, Jolene was infested with an intelligent 'tetravirus' composed of thousands of sentient voices with great potential to knit and change flesh or even the fabric of biological existence, and AJ made a deal with it after knocking her double unconscious. In the end she wrested a part of its prickly, sticky red biomass for herself. The tetravirus claimed that it could grant invulnerability to just about anything that AJ could imagine, so not only was the clone able to greatly endanger Jolene's life (she had her double ripped open to pull parts of the tetravirus out) but had greatly extended her own chances of survival... or so she thought.
Like most things in the Box, the sentient virus wasn't to be trusted. AJ managed to survive eating drugged and poisoned food, as well as an outbreak of an unrelated virus that killed many other prisoners, but in the end her parasite turned on her and dissolved her body for its own biomass. Unlike the original prisoners, the Technicians had no interest in bringing a faulty clone back for another round. AJ passed alone in the dark of the forest where she had made her camp, a forgotten monster like all the rest.
Much later, possibly in a galaxy far away, AJ woke with the first wave of new arrivals to the alien planet that the Tranquility, experiencing all of the chaos inherent with being revived from what she was sure was death to new and unfamiliar surroundings. For two months, she gained her bearings along with her confidence with the help of other survivors of the crash, as well as the tentative alliance of some... including the only other clone to be brought over from the Box, Algidus.
AJ became brash as she grew more familiar with the forest, to the point that she tried to take advantage of what was available. Believing that the place they'd landed was far more benign than the literal box of horrors she'd come over from, she guessed that the signs of native life cropping up around the site of the crash were tokens meant to reach out, not to torture. Before others could warn her of the dangers of relying too heavily on conjecture, she put one of them on and wandered off while trapped in the illusion of returning to the Box's basement, presumably to another cruel end.
Summary of Previous Visit toataraxion:
AJ arrived to the the game in September, 2015, when characters were first pulled in to the crashed ship due to a malfunctioning Jump Drive. At this time she was incredibly wary of other people and incredibly traumatized by her near death. She tried to play this off when she recognized that others were being approached by survivors of the crash, once Rey managed to calm her down. At first, AJ meandered aimlessly in the rickety base-camp that had just been set up outside of the radius of the jump zone, but not long after, she met an ice alien named Algidus, another clone from the Box who had been pulled into this strange world with the same wave of new arrivals.
Realizing that they had some bond of commonality, AJ and Algidus struck a bargain to work together to try to find a way to explore further across the planet and ultimately get off of it, despite their great differences and natures to distrust. AJ, having a goal to work towards, began harassing survivors for more details about her new world. When she realized that this place was not officially a killing ground or a test zone for horrific experiments, she loosened up still further, revealing an acerbic overtone that put her off from many other survivors. Those willing to put up with her (including, for example, Sirius of the wizarding survivors) received promises of luxuries like alcohol, which she quested to create with the supplies at hand.
Hunting and experimenting occupied much of her time from that point forward, between September and October, and AJ spent much of her time travelling between three small sites in the jungle surrounding the basecamp, where she hoarded supplies she found and fermented sugary and fibrous plants in small batches. Later in October she came back to camp with a single bottle of more or less effective alcohol, though she did not have time to call in her payments. She and Algidus had been evolving a great friendship as well, and though at that point the two of them had not made any concrete plans on how to explore a wider vicinity, they were hopeful of retrieving a shuttlecraft from the crash to dig into and begin repairing using the wizard survivors' help. At the end of October, AJ fell prey to the mask event, putting on a mask and falling into a hallucination that involved her return to the underground beneath the Box. She stumbled off into the jungle and has not been seen from November 2015 to present.
History:
Most of AJ's recent history is covered above, but she is a fleshed out OC from a fairly mundane background. She grew up in a mid-sized mountain town on a cattle ranch, in a large family composed of her parents and four older brothers. AJ was constantly hounded by her nigh-upon militantly religious and conservative mother to uphold the norms of her gender, but AJ, always stubborn, refused to comply at first because she didn't want to fall in line, and later because dressing and acting more like a girl irked her and made her feel weak and stupid.
Instead she wound up spending a lot of time playing with hand-me-down toys and wearing hand-me-down clothing from her brothers, trying to impress the younger of the four of them by hanging around their friends and getting into hyperbolic amounts of trouble to make up for what they saw in her as a handicap of being younger and physically weaker. She also spent a lot of time around her much more equitable father, who though taciturn and mostly done with fathering, still found her obsessive attention to detail easy to accommodate in his garage. Before he inherited their ranch he had joined the military as an air corps aviation engineer, and automotive mechanics was still his passion, so when he wasn't maintaining their ranch, AJ could inevitably track him down to watch him tinker.
By the time that she was fourteen, her father had passed on his truck to her to 'solve'. It was broken down and needed new parts, and her eldest brother made a habit of taking her down to the junk yard to help her source and buy parts to put it back together. By the time she was sixteen, and with the help of her dad, she had a working (if noisy) beast and AJ used it to escape her home and unhappy school-life by driving for hours over the provincial border to find walking trails and climbing spots.
Speaking of school-life, her stubbornness, her desire to fit in with the wrong crowd, and her inability to play well with other children marked her as an exile from a very young grade. Her unwillingness to fit in did not do her any favours, especially as she grew into teenagerhood. Ostracized by those of her gender and usually picked on by the opposite, she spent a lot of time that should have been going into getting good grades on getting into fights and sitting in detention. AJ missed a year that could have gone towards college in recovering from nearly dropping out. Her eldest brother again saved her bacon; as an electrical engineer working with a large company that spanned the entirety of the province, he convinced her that it was a lucrative career path to follow and poured a lot of encouragement into her to get a further education.
AJ enrolled a year later than she probably ought to have at the the major trades college in Calgary, packing everything into her truck and moving out to the big city. She met her first staunch friend as she tried to navigate college: a scrawny, short young man named Ryan Planter who inevitably was bullied within an inch of his life when thrust into the mix of classmates more interested in hockey and beer than mathematical brain-scratchers and universal anomalies. AJ teamed up with him as his defender while he helped her through the more complex mathematical problems inherent to the theory side of her curriculum. She also wound up talking him out of a very dark place, realizing that she'd grown close enough to him that she was deeply invested in his well-being.
When the disaster that struck the city fell out around them, both she and Ryan were spared the immediate doom that took so many people, but Ryan was afflicted with a physical deformity, and AJ (or at least her original) was afflicted with a niggling growth of insanity, one that she would not recognize for what it was until it was too late. Her mental parasites were small and dumb and served mostly to tease negative thoughts from her, but if she had not been yanked into the prison of the Box she would probably have been overwhelmed the longer she stayed within the torn apart city, the same way that Ryan's small affliction was slowly growing and taking over his body, turning him into something unspeakably other.
Personality:
AJ has more of her mother in her than she would like to admit to, without the searing social graces to put all of that sheer brute force to work in a useful way. She is a massive mix of deep-rooted insecurities, false bravado, social conditioning, rebellious impulses, and high focus and practical thinking that make it impossible for her to stay reserved or aloof for long. On top of that, her trauma traversing her destroyed city tends to crop up at times to expound on her negative traits, and on top of that her understanding that she's a worthless clone of an original that she hates, a disposable monster... AJ has a few issues that work against her.
This isn't to say that she is completely feral and unable to interact with others. In fact, AJ is capable of forming extremely strong bonds with others at a one-on-one level, as her experiences with her friend Ryan (both before and after the fall of her city) can attest to. She feels immediate and deep-rooted empathy towards other exiles and monsters, though common sense wins out if they are not the kind to be socialized with. AJ is very wary of groups, and has better common sense in some ways than does her original, Jolene; where at one time AJ might have been very pushy and relatively uninhibited (in light of that false bravado) she has been tempered by the horrors of malicious Technicians towards stoicism and avoidance of organized society. This is not infallible, however, and she tends to treat any not inherently dangerous situation as one she can handle simply by dint of her past, which is not always true. She is extremely observant, but she is also quick to solidify guesses into what she thinks are facts, which can work for or against her. All of that forceful personality tends to come out on a one-on-one level. AJ believes that trust can only be gained by fear and strength and though she is not a very good manipulator, she has the makings of one if she can only survive through the mistakes she has yet to make.
AJ possesses a background in practical problem solving, specifically with mechanical problems, but also with electronics. She will study for hours on a topic if given the option and the resources, but this usually includes practical aspects in addition to book learning (in fact, if she's not able to put half-formed ideas to the test, she can lose steam and burn out easily.) She applies this to her study of humans and humanoids, using it to keep herself alive by approaching those whose arm she can twist and avoiding those she thinks might cause her trouble.
Unfortunately, AJ is not a great liar. Both her body language (often exaggerated, especially when her hands come near her face) and her facial expressions are easy to read. Usually, at least at first, this trends towards hostility, defensiveness, crudeness and suspicion, but if she grows more trusting, the defensiveness and suspicion drop somewhat in exchange for forceful humour and somewhat derogatory friendship. She is crude (she swears a lot and makes a lot of gestures, some of which are contextual to her upbringing, and some of which ought to be universally understood on some level by all humans as being crass as hell) and she can be pretty hostile even to friends, but this comes across in horseplay and pranking, which in itself is a kind of testing. She likes to know that those she's allied herself with are strong and worthy of her trust, though this isn't a conscious want. Just as AJ can sometimes go out on a limb to prove herself to others, she has a craving for the same in return. This might not have been as intrinsic were she not a certified clone; now she tends towards needing little gestures on a regular basis to validate her existence and her own worthiness.
While some might quail about their artificial existence, AJ can a stubborn ass about hers. She treats her mistrust in herself as a mistrust in life and the powers that be in general. Her hyper-focus could very easily turn inward without an outlet, which means that she usually leaps for anything to avoid introspection on too deep a level. This usually manifests in observation and study followed by a lot of experimentation, which allows her to vent any frustration (and deeper issues) on a temporary setback. Really, if she's to be stuck in a survival setting, she's one of those who will watch others until she picks up what they did wrong, then try to improve upon it... and if that doesn't work, she more importantly will keep trying. When she has a goal that she can put solid work towards, she becomes an entirely different person, healthier and more sociable, or at least less skittish.
It's probably important to note that while AJ will try her best to remain on the outskirts, when she gets embroiled (and she probably will, and quickly) she sticks to her guns more than she would have without the clone conditioning. She makes decisions that she does not go back on, and while she will beat a retreat if she's made a terrible mistake, she can be very hard to convince that she's wrong. She only apologizes at truly apocalyptic mistakes, going out of her way to come up with some other way to mitigate either disagreements or opportunities for consolation.
It's probably completely unimportant to mention that AJ's such a prickly possum from childhood that she's always been a half-ways never-nude and a virgin besides, given that it doesn't originate from any particular trauma nor does it have bearing on most of her interactions, but she wears layers like they're a legitimate physical defense and she takes raunchy jokes aimed at her expense very poorly, never mind that she will launch a volley of the same at another.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
AJ is an average human being, despite her fantastic circumstances. She has mechanical and automotive expertise within the realms of human ability, and a good understanding of the basic workings of electrical routing and its uses. Her knack for survival has been enhanced by her time narrowly avoiding death and disfiguration in a monster-infested hell hole, and her time at the Box has helped some, too. AJ's weaknesses are partly based around her physical strength (she is a 5'9" ectomorph who has survived on a malnourished diet for months) and her social reticence. Competing against others who are stronger or more socially and emotionally adept, she will always lose. Pitted against other manipulative people, she has not learned enough to defend herself against their wiles. AJ sees the world as a competition, which is a weakness in and of itself in light of surviving in an unknown world where social bonds will certainly be the key.
If she can be swayed to join a cause, she will work her damnedest to make it succeed. She goes to uncomfortable lengths for what she believes in.
AJ will have a slightly heightened understanding of telepathic communication and empathetic manipulation. The first comes from the tetravirus known as the Biomatrix that integrated with her brain and spoke to her mind-to-mind. AJ will be able to discern most voices that are projected into her head as just that. She has a slight resistance to emotional and memory manipulation because she no longer has any psychic parasites in her brain from Calgary's fall. Originally, these twisted her thoughts to evoke rage, fear, and despondence, modifying her memories to suit her negative emotions. Without that, AJ has had time to come to understand when a niggling feeling is not her own. This also comes from her clone conditioning by the Technicians. She suspects that she could have gotten over her raw hatred for Jolene, but that emotional punch was hard to resist. She will need to take time to learn to resist manipulation but she will at least be aware that it's happening.
In fact, since she arrived on the alien planet, she's had some time to put this to the test. She's begun to integrate strange psychic happenings into her every day. Coming back to that, she will be aware of a spread of odd abilities that others possess, and attempt to mimic them on her own. Her ability to manipulate matter has advanced the most on this front, but telepathy and empathy (of the psychic sort) are both things she's well aware of.
Inventory:
-A mask and a spear, two items that she had just previous to her disappearance
-A secondary jumpsuit; the first intact and the second with its sleeves ripped off
Species/Race: Human, Caucasian.
Appearance: Five foot nine, bony, strong jaw and generally bitter look. Very long black hair, blue eyes, surprisingly few scars as yet. She usually likes to layer clothing, though given how muggy the jungle is she'll go with only as much as she can handle without sweating. She has hangups about showing off her body.
Age: 20; her body is only a few months old but is vat-grown to resemble her predecessor exactly.
AU Clarification:
AJ versus Jolene, or even AJ versus Jolene pre-Box canon, is not as wide a gap as it probably is for some CRAU characters. AJ was only self possessed as a living clone for about two months, and her time in the Box overall (including her memories of Jolene's time) a couple of months longer than that. They were all traumatic months, granted, but then AJ's time in Calgary after it had gone to anarchic chaos was also so traumatic that her center for judging danger and acceptable risk has significantly shifted. The reason for her name change stems from Jolene's full name, 'Jolene Amanda Harris'. Because AJ was not entirely successful in snuffing out her original and slipping into her shoes, she chose to go by something else, however 'Amanda' felt too feminine.
The largest differences are mentioned in her personality, but generally AJ is more malicious and more willing to rely on gut instinct. She's slightly less prone to bullying into the center of a dilemma at hand to prove her worth, and she is more likely to try to manipulate a person to do what she wants, rather than simply trying to impress upon them that what she thinks is right is right for everyone. She is more observant but also more prone to making assumptions for herself. AJ is equally as crass and equally unapologetic. She's not a great or even--usually--a good person.
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
It's been a single day since the recent arrivals have been herded out of a crumbling ship and into the basecamp, but this time AJ has managed to give everyone the slip. She's been haunted by her experiences with the mask she put on before her disappearance; like a bad nightmare, she'd been lost, wandering in the halls of a sub-basement under the killing floor of a prison she'd been made for, chased by monsters, plagued by ghosts (and sometimes husks) of people she used to know.
The monsters in the jungle aren't helping her distinguish between hallucination and reality. She's run to one of her old sites in hopes of finding remnants of familiarity, but the place has been completely uprooted, and now she's found herself in a deadly game of chase as a small pack of particularly determined infected creatures howls and tramples after her.
AJ is not a strong person; she's not one who could run a marathon. She's not feeling well enough to think straight, but she knows there is a river south of her and for now she makes that her destination with a spear in her hand and breath burning in her recently tube-clogged throat. With these howlers hot on her heels she only just realizes that she's coming up on another living human--or something like one, anyways--a few seconds before she can give a warning holler that will make a difference.
Breathless, voice a wheezing rasp, she can only yell "run!" because even if she has been haunted, and even if she's half-ways a monster herself, this is the first time she's seen anyone who hasn't been a twisted remnant of their former self and she feels a powerful pang of hope and terror all at once that she will fuck up, here. Scraping the beasts off on someone else only occurs to her moments later, and by then she's already made her choice. Sometimes loneliness and fear of going it alone wins out.
Comms Sample:
[It's been a trying day or two. AJ is alive, at least, and she's huddled up under a blanket in basecamp, miserable and aloof. She's been trying to observe all of the changes that she now knows have gone on without her.
Given a small mirror shard--one smashed off of a larger piece--she finally feels ready to try to reach out.]
I leave you babies alone for a few days and everything just goes straight to shit, doesn't it?
[This is her best nonchalant face, but the bags under her eyes are dark and she looks unwell. This is the first time that she has used either network, so her face will not likely be familiar to those who hadn't seen her around camp previously, more than two months ago.]
P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Dray
OOC Journal:
drayUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: No
Email + IM: dracothrope at gmail. Plurk is
Characters Played at Ataraxion: n/a
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: AJ (Amanda Jolene) Harris
Canon: CRAU-OC; AJ is a clone of an original character (
hairsay) and was created by the technicians of boxmods. She existed from May 2014 to July 2014. She also arrived on the strange planet in ataraxion from September to October 2015.Original or Alternate Universe: CRAU
Canon Point: AJ's coming from just after her drop-point in Ataraxion, shortly after having put on a mask and wandering into a mask-imposed nightmare about her time in Box.
Setting:
[Note that this is from her initial application]
Before AJ was cloned and released into the Box (her original, Jolene, was brought in during March 2014, and AJ possesses her original's memories from the time that Jo was born until their split in May) her memories tell her that she came from an earth very similar to our own, save perhaps shifted towards cynicism. She grew up and lived in southern Alberta, Canada, in a semi-rural mountain community. She eventually wound up in Calgary, the province's business capitol. In late 2010, the city was bombed or gassed or otherwise suffered a major apocalyptic disaster of chthonic proportions; because AJ was not able to gather more than first-hand evidence, she does not know how the city fell, only that for a few months she was hard-pressed to survive in the aftermath. The disaster ruptured to the surface and spread awful transformations across the landscape and over all life in its path, and much of the city's population died instantly. Others were mentally or physically disfigured, or both. For three or four months AJ and her friend survived by the skin of their teeth in ever-changing and and ever-worsening conditions, trying to find a way to escape the changes and outrun the expanding bubble of the disaster's influence.
For those unfamiliar with the Box, the prison was given this colloquial name because of its deadly electric barriers that extended not only around the perimeter (a couple dozen kilometers wide on a side) but also as a roof about a couple of kilometers up and a basement deep beneath the earth. Inside was what came to be known as the killing floor by some, where various characters were dragged in and left to fend for themselves (with the occasional nudge from the Technicians), and where all kinds of highly imaginative and highly deadly tests were rolled out to maximize pain, suffering, and ultimately death for the sake of vengeful, restless gods that rested deep below the Box itself. Every character that died was brought back to life via cloning and very careful augmentations (usually to mock prisoners, as with scars and memory augmentations) and left to fend for themselves again. This cycle happened over and over for each character despite the Technicians' waning resources and the waning patience of the gods demanding ever more sacrifices. For those who were able to survive and move on with life, the Box was otherwise a pleasant enough place in between tests: it supported massive forests, a river, marshes, a long strip of ocean-front (and even some ocean itself), two small towns, and various buildings in which characters could find useful items and deadly traps.
AJ's understanding of the Box extends beyond her original's experiences, as when AJ was first awoken, she was forced to endure the basement suite of the facility located far under the Box's lower barrier. She and all of the other clones (one for each character in the Box that month) were given the opportunity to explore the testing suite, the first layer between the Box and the world of the Technicians. She was traumatized: down here were kept bodies of those who had died and been reclaimed by runners; half-grown clones; and a whole bevvy of monsters kept in prison cages on-call for the next event, waiting for their time to be let out and to kill. AJ made a break for it at the first possible opportunity, but what looked like an escape route actually led her up into the killing floor... as for every other clone who tried to escape. This provided a bond between those who'd experienced the basement; many began to work together to try to take their originals down.
The reason for this highly-targeted malice was partially instilled by the Technicians: when AJ first spotted Jolene she was struck by a pang of unfairness and hatred so strong that it nearly consumed her. She struggled with this urge for the entirety of her short existence. Though the Technicians did nothing to specifically help the wave of clones destroy their originals, AJ was wily enough to manipulate her surroundings (and scared enough by the knowledge that if she failed she would be sent back down to the basement to be experimented on or worse) that she managed to get the upper leg on her original. At the time, Jolene was infested with an intelligent 'tetravirus' composed of thousands of sentient voices with great potential to knit and change flesh or even the fabric of biological existence, and AJ made a deal with it after knocking her double unconscious. In the end she wrested a part of its prickly, sticky red biomass for herself. The tetravirus claimed that it could grant invulnerability to just about anything that AJ could imagine, so not only was the clone able to greatly endanger Jolene's life (she had her double ripped open to pull parts of the tetravirus out) but had greatly extended her own chances of survival... or so she thought.
Like most things in the Box, the sentient virus wasn't to be trusted. AJ managed to survive eating drugged and poisoned food, as well as an outbreak of an unrelated virus that killed many other prisoners, but in the end her parasite turned on her and dissolved her body for its own biomass. Unlike the original prisoners, the Technicians had no interest in bringing a faulty clone back for another round. AJ passed alone in the dark of the forest where she had made her camp, a forgotten monster like all the rest.
Much later, possibly in a galaxy far away, AJ woke with the first wave of new arrivals to the alien planet that the Tranquility, experiencing all of the chaos inherent with being revived from what she was sure was death to new and unfamiliar surroundings. For two months, she gained her bearings along with her confidence with the help of other survivors of the crash, as well as the tentative alliance of some... including the only other clone to be brought over from the Box, Algidus.
AJ became brash as she grew more familiar with the forest, to the point that she tried to take advantage of what was available. Believing that the place they'd landed was far more benign than the literal box of horrors she'd come over from, she guessed that the signs of native life cropping up around the site of the crash were tokens meant to reach out, not to torture. Before others could warn her of the dangers of relying too heavily on conjecture, she put one of them on and wandered off while trapped in the illusion of returning to the Box's basement, presumably to another cruel end.
Summary of Previous Visit to
ataraxion: AJ arrived to the the game in September, 2015, when characters were first pulled in to the crashed ship due to a malfunctioning Jump Drive. At this time she was incredibly wary of other people and incredibly traumatized by her near death. She tried to play this off when she recognized that others were being approached by survivors of the crash, once Rey managed to calm her down. At first, AJ meandered aimlessly in the rickety base-camp that had just been set up outside of the radius of the jump zone, but not long after, she met an ice alien named Algidus, another clone from the Box who had been pulled into this strange world with the same wave of new arrivals.
Realizing that they had some bond of commonality, AJ and Algidus struck a bargain to work together to try to find a way to explore further across the planet and ultimately get off of it, despite their great differences and natures to distrust. AJ, having a goal to work towards, began harassing survivors for more details about her new world. When she realized that this place was not officially a killing ground or a test zone for horrific experiments, she loosened up still further, revealing an acerbic overtone that put her off from many other survivors. Those willing to put up with her (including, for example, Sirius of the wizarding survivors) received promises of luxuries like alcohol, which she quested to create with the supplies at hand.
Hunting and experimenting occupied much of her time from that point forward, between September and October, and AJ spent much of her time travelling between three small sites in the jungle surrounding the basecamp, where she hoarded supplies she found and fermented sugary and fibrous plants in small batches. Later in October she came back to camp with a single bottle of more or less effective alcohol, though she did not have time to call in her payments. She and Algidus had been evolving a great friendship as well, and though at that point the two of them had not made any concrete plans on how to explore a wider vicinity, they were hopeful of retrieving a shuttlecraft from the crash to dig into and begin repairing using the wizard survivors' help. At the end of October, AJ fell prey to the mask event, putting on a mask and falling into a hallucination that involved her return to the underground beneath the Box. She stumbled off into the jungle and has not been seen from November 2015 to present.
History:
Most of AJ's recent history is covered above, but she is a fleshed out OC from a fairly mundane background. She grew up in a mid-sized mountain town on a cattle ranch, in a large family composed of her parents and four older brothers. AJ was constantly hounded by her nigh-upon militantly religious and conservative mother to uphold the norms of her gender, but AJ, always stubborn, refused to comply at first because she didn't want to fall in line, and later because dressing and acting more like a girl irked her and made her feel weak and stupid.
Instead she wound up spending a lot of time playing with hand-me-down toys and wearing hand-me-down clothing from her brothers, trying to impress the younger of the four of them by hanging around their friends and getting into hyperbolic amounts of trouble to make up for what they saw in her as a handicap of being younger and physically weaker. She also spent a lot of time around her much more equitable father, who though taciturn and mostly done with fathering, still found her obsessive attention to detail easy to accommodate in his garage. Before he inherited their ranch he had joined the military as an air corps aviation engineer, and automotive mechanics was still his passion, so when he wasn't maintaining their ranch, AJ could inevitably track him down to watch him tinker.
By the time that she was fourteen, her father had passed on his truck to her to 'solve'. It was broken down and needed new parts, and her eldest brother made a habit of taking her down to the junk yard to help her source and buy parts to put it back together. By the time she was sixteen, and with the help of her dad, she had a working (if noisy) beast and AJ used it to escape her home and unhappy school-life by driving for hours over the provincial border to find walking trails and climbing spots.
Speaking of school-life, her stubbornness, her desire to fit in with the wrong crowd, and her inability to play well with other children marked her as an exile from a very young grade. Her unwillingness to fit in did not do her any favours, especially as she grew into teenagerhood. Ostracized by those of her gender and usually picked on by the opposite, she spent a lot of time that should have been going into getting good grades on getting into fights and sitting in detention. AJ missed a year that could have gone towards college in recovering from nearly dropping out. Her eldest brother again saved her bacon; as an electrical engineer working with a large company that spanned the entirety of the province, he convinced her that it was a lucrative career path to follow and poured a lot of encouragement into her to get a further education.
AJ enrolled a year later than she probably ought to have at the the major trades college in Calgary, packing everything into her truck and moving out to the big city. She met her first staunch friend as she tried to navigate college: a scrawny, short young man named Ryan Planter who inevitably was bullied within an inch of his life when thrust into the mix of classmates more interested in hockey and beer than mathematical brain-scratchers and universal anomalies. AJ teamed up with him as his defender while he helped her through the more complex mathematical problems inherent to the theory side of her curriculum. She also wound up talking him out of a very dark place, realizing that she'd grown close enough to him that she was deeply invested in his well-being.
When the disaster that struck the city fell out around them, both she and Ryan were spared the immediate doom that took so many people, but Ryan was afflicted with a physical deformity, and AJ (or at least her original) was afflicted with a niggling growth of insanity, one that she would not recognize for what it was until it was too late. Her mental parasites were small and dumb and served mostly to tease negative thoughts from her, but if she had not been yanked into the prison of the Box she would probably have been overwhelmed the longer she stayed within the torn apart city, the same way that Ryan's small affliction was slowly growing and taking over his body, turning him into something unspeakably other.
Personality:
AJ has more of her mother in her than she would like to admit to, without the searing social graces to put all of that sheer brute force to work in a useful way. She is a massive mix of deep-rooted insecurities, false bravado, social conditioning, rebellious impulses, and high focus and practical thinking that make it impossible for her to stay reserved or aloof for long. On top of that, her trauma traversing her destroyed city tends to crop up at times to expound on her negative traits, and on top of that her understanding that she's a worthless clone of an original that she hates, a disposable monster... AJ has a few issues that work against her.
This isn't to say that she is completely feral and unable to interact with others. In fact, AJ is capable of forming extremely strong bonds with others at a one-on-one level, as her experiences with her friend Ryan (both before and after the fall of her city) can attest to. She feels immediate and deep-rooted empathy towards other exiles and monsters, though common sense wins out if they are not the kind to be socialized with. AJ is very wary of groups, and has better common sense in some ways than does her original, Jolene; where at one time AJ might have been very pushy and relatively uninhibited (in light of that false bravado) she has been tempered by the horrors of malicious Technicians towards stoicism and avoidance of organized society. This is not infallible, however, and she tends to treat any not inherently dangerous situation as one she can handle simply by dint of her past, which is not always true. She is extremely observant, but she is also quick to solidify guesses into what she thinks are facts, which can work for or against her. All of that forceful personality tends to come out on a one-on-one level. AJ believes that trust can only be gained by fear and strength and though she is not a very good manipulator, she has the makings of one if she can only survive through the mistakes she has yet to make.
AJ possesses a background in practical problem solving, specifically with mechanical problems, but also with electronics. She will study for hours on a topic if given the option and the resources, but this usually includes practical aspects in addition to book learning (in fact, if she's not able to put half-formed ideas to the test, she can lose steam and burn out easily.) She applies this to her study of humans and humanoids, using it to keep herself alive by approaching those whose arm she can twist and avoiding those she thinks might cause her trouble.
Unfortunately, AJ is not a great liar. Both her body language (often exaggerated, especially when her hands come near her face) and her facial expressions are easy to read. Usually, at least at first, this trends towards hostility, defensiveness, crudeness and suspicion, but if she grows more trusting, the defensiveness and suspicion drop somewhat in exchange for forceful humour and somewhat derogatory friendship. She is crude (she swears a lot and makes a lot of gestures, some of which are contextual to her upbringing, and some of which ought to be universally understood on some level by all humans as being crass as hell) and she can be pretty hostile even to friends, but this comes across in horseplay and pranking, which in itself is a kind of testing. She likes to know that those she's allied herself with are strong and worthy of her trust, though this isn't a conscious want. Just as AJ can sometimes go out on a limb to prove herself to others, she has a craving for the same in return. This might not have been as intrinsic were she not a certified clone; now she tends towards needing little gestures on a regular basis to validate her existence and her own worthiness.
While some might quail about their artificial existence, AJ can a stubborn ass about hers. She treats her mistrust in herself as a mistrust in life and the powers that be in general. Her hyper-focus could very easily turn inward without an outlet, which means that she usually leaps for anything to avoid introspection on too deep a level. This usually manifests in observation and study followed by a lot of experimentation, which allows her to vent any frustration (and deeper issues) on a temporary setback. Really, if she's to be stuck in a survival setting, she's one of those who will watch others until she picks up what they did wrong, then try to improve upon it... and if that doesn't work, she more importantly will keep trying. When she has a goal that she can put solid work towards, she becomes an entirely different person, healthier and more sociable, or at least less skittish.
It's probably important to note that while AJ will try her best to remain on the outskirts, when she gets embroiled (and she probably will, and quickly) she sticks to her guns more than she would have without the clone conditioning. She makes decisions that she does not go back on, and while she will beat a retreat if she's made a terrible mistake, she can be very hard to convince that she's wrong. She only apologizes at truly apocalyptic mistakes, going out of her way to come up with some other way to mitigate either disagreements or opportunities for consolation.
It's probably completely unimportant to mention that AJ's such a prickly possum from childhood that she's always been a half-ways never-nude and a virgin besides, given that it doesn't originate from any particular trauma nor does it have bearing on most of her interactions, but she wears layers like they're a legitimate physical defense and she takes raunchy jokes aimed at her expense very poorly, never mind that she will launch a volley of the same at another.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
AJ is an average human being, despite her fantastic circumstances. She has mechanical and automotive expertise within the realms of human ability, and a good understanding of the basic workings of electrical routing and its uses. Her knack for survival has been enhanced by her time narrowly avoiding death and disfiguration in a monster-infested hell hole, and her time at the Box has helped some, too. AJ's weaknesses are partly based around her physical strength (she is a 5'9" ectomorph who has survived on a malnourished diet for months) and her social reticence. Competing against others who are stronger or more socially and emotionally adept, she will always lose. Pitted against other manipulative people, she has not learned enough to defend herself against their wiles. AJ sees the world as a competition, which is a weakness in and of itself in light of surviving in an unknown world where social bonds will certainly be the key.
If she can be swayed to join a cause, she will work her damnedest to make it succeed. She goes to uncomfortable lengths for what she believes in.
AJ will have a slightly heightened understanding of telepathic communication and empathetic manipulation. The first comes from the tetravirus known as the Biomatrix that integrated with her brain and spoke to her mind-to-mind. AJ will be able to discern most voices that are projected into her head as just that. She has a slight resistance to emotional and memory manipulation because she no longer has any psychic parasites in her brain from Calgary's fall. Originally, these twisted her thoughts to evoke rage, fear, and despondence, modifying her memories to suit her negative emotions. Without that, AJ has had time to come to understand when a niggling feeling is not her own. This also comes from her clone conditioning by the Technicians. She suspects that she could have gotten over her raw hatred for Jolene, but that emotional punch was hard to resist. She will need to take time to learn to resist manipulation but she will at least be aware that it's happening.
In fact, since she arrived on the alien planet, she's had some time to put this to the test. She's begun to integrate strange psychic happenings into her every day. Coming back to that, she will be aware of a spread of odd abilities that others possess, and attempt to mimic them on her own. Her ability to manipulate matter has advanced the most on this front, but telepathy and empathy (of the psychic sort) are both things she's well aware of.
Inventory:
-A mask and a spear, two items that she had just previous to her disappearance
-A secondary jumpsuit; the first intact and the second with its sleeves ripped off
Species/Race: Human, Caucasian.
Appearance: Five foot nine, bony, strong jaw and generally bitter look. Very long black hair, blue eyes, surprisingly few scars as yet. She usually likes to layer clothing, though given how muggy the jungle is she'll go with only as much as she can handle without sweating. She has hangups about showing off her body.
Age: 20; her body is only a few months old but is vat-grown to resemble her predecessor exactly.
AU Clarification:
AJ versus Jolene, or even AJ versus Jolene pre-Box canon, is not as wide a gap as it probably is for some CRAU characters. AJ was only self possessed as a living clone for about two months, and her time in the Box overall (including her memories of Jolene's time) a couple of months longer than that. They were all traumatic months, granted, but then AJ's time in Calgary after it had gone to anarchic chaos was also so traumatic that her center for judging danger and acceptable risk has significantly shifted. The reason for her name change stems from Jolene's full name, 'Jolene Amanda Harris'. Because AJ was not entirely successful in snuffing out her original and slipping into her shoes, she chose to go by something else, however 'Amanda' felt too feminine.
The largest differences are mentioned in her personality, but generally AJ is more malicious and more willing to rely on gut instinct. She's slightly less prone to bullying into the center of a dilemma at hand to prove her worth, and she is more likely to try to manipulate a person to do what she wants, rather than simply trying to impress upon them that what she thinks is right is right for everyone. She is more observant but also more prone to making assumptions for herself. AJ is equally as crass and equally unapologetic. She's not a great or even--usually--a good person.
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
It's been a single day since the recent arrivals have been herded out of a crumbling ship and into the basecamp, but this time AJ has managed to give everyone the slip. She's been haunted by her experiences with the mask she put on before her disappearance; like a bad nightmare, she'd been lost, wandering in the halls of a sub-basement under the killing floor of a prison she'd been made for, chased by monsters, plagued by ghosts (and sometimes husks) of people she used to know.
The monsters in the jungle aren't helping her distinguish between hallucination and reality. She's run to one of her old sites in hopes of finding remnants of familiarity, but the place has been completely uprooted, and now she's found herself in a deadly game of chase as a small pack of particularly determined infected creatures howls and tramples after her.
AJ is not a strong person; she's not one who could run a marathon. She's not feeling well enough to think straight, but she knows there is a river south of her and for now she makes that her destination with a spear in her hand and breath burning in her recently tube-clogged throat. With these howlers hot on her heels she only just realizes that she's coming up on another living human--or something like one, anyways--a few seconds before she can give a warning holler that will make a difference.
Breathless, voice a wheezing rasp, she can only yell "run!" because even if she has been haunted, and even if she's half-ways a monster herself, this is the first time she's seen anyone who hasn't been a twisted remnant of their former self and she feels a powerful pang of hope and terror all at once that she will fuck up, here. Scraping the beasts off on someone else only occurs to her moments later, and by then she's already made her choice. Sometimes loneliness and fear of going it alone wins out.
Comms Sample:
[It's been a trying day or two. AJ is alive, at least, and she's huddled up under a blanket in basecamp, miserable and aloof. She's been trying to observe all of the changes that she now knows have gone on without her.
Given a small mirror shard--one smashed off of a larger piece--she finally feels ready to try to reach out.]
I leave you babies alone for a few days and everything just goes straight to shit, doesn't it?
[This is her best nonchalant face, but the bags under her eyes are dark and she looks unwell. This is the first time that she has used either network, so her face will not likely be familiar to those who hadn't seen her around camp previously, more than two months ago.]