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BtR Application!
Jul. 18th, 2012 12:02 amAbout You - The Player
Name: Ryan
Age: 23
Contact: anartificialend @ AIM calculusletters @ plurk
Past Role Playing Experience: 2+ years at the Rift.
The Character
Name: Isabella Bird
Age/Birthdate: 27, July 2nd
Species: Wanderer
Canon: Taste of Revolution (OC)
*Pre-existing powers: n/a
*Rift Change, if applicable: cyberpathy
Livejournal: cyberromantic
Played By: n/a
Icon: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/4217768/1671308
Appearance:
Like most poorer families on the planet, Izzy is multiracial, although her skin is paler than her mother's. She's mostly white with some hispanic and black mixed in. She's 5'10", but can extend her legs another six inches if she needs to. Her eyes and hair (what's left of it) is brown. Her hair is thin and thready. She doesn't usually do much to hide her scars or her cybernetics, going out in shorts and t-shirts.
Personality:
A bit of a contradiction, Izzy has low self-esteem, but is a revolutionary.
She eats up praise given to her, almost starved of it and does almost everything for Michel that he asks of her, simply because he makes her feel better about herself. She's easy to use, if the right person knows to press the right buttons, and it always seems that the people who do tend to have not so good intentions. She'll also do almost anything to help her status as a second-class citizen. She is subject to regular Department of Cybernetics inspections that she can rarely pass, so she makes deals with the devil to keep her shop afloat.
She suffers from severe depression that is mostly situational, thanks to her looks and her second-class citizenship. Many days, it's difficult for her to get out of bed. The only thing that keeps her going is the fact that she helps her bots. When she has no work, she tends to wallow in her shop, getting nothing productive done. She'll stare at herself in a mirror for hours, just telling herself how much she hates herself and that no one could love her because of the way she looks. She tells herself that she'll never be able to amount to anything because of her being a cyborg, and that as soon as her debt is paid, she'll be discarded by everyone who even seems to care about her (but doesn't). She'll go through periods of not eating because she doesn't deserve food, periods of not sleeping or sleeping too much, and periods of self-harm, only adding to her scars. Sometimes, she takes herself apart, just to feel the pain of the nerves disconnecting, something that's so painful, she's supposed to be strapped down while it happens.
She also suffers from PTSD from the fire. The right crackling noise will set her off into a panic attack or fullblown flashback. Of course, the sight of fire is just as terrifying and triggery. Even when she's going through periods where she sleeps a lot, she doesn't get good sleep, thanks to the nightmares. When the nightmares get too bad, she doesn't sleep at all, long enough for the delirium to kick in. And that's when the PTSD and depression get really bad.
When she's feeling better, though, she's very productive. While she doesn't make her own bots generally, she's put together a fair amount of machinery to work on bots, stuff that isn't available to the public. She's very good at jimmy rigging things so that she can take care of older models and even better at improving on technology she already has. Because she can't afford to buy new technology whenever it comes out, this is a great boon to her, and one of the few things she takes pride in. She has made a few bots from scraps around the shop, but her coding isn't as good as she likes, and she knows that if she makes the robot she dreams of, it will be dismantled for not following the ethics codes. And she knows the Department of Cybernetics wouldn't approve.
That being said, the fact that the Department of Cybernetics wouldn't approve isn't that much of a big deal to her. She's terrified of them closing down her shop and taking her in for treason, but she sees a bigger picture where robots will no longer be slaves to humans and she will take her rightful place as a full citizen. She often does subversive work, in little ways, ways they can't pick up, like installing emotions in a bot that can't express them to the extent it would need to in order to get picked up.
But eventually, that wasn't enough for her. After she got a taste of revolution, she began doing even more subversive work, starting to build upon that greater vision she craved. She learned as much about coding as she could and eventually learned to override the coding in every robot that says that they may not harm a human, except to defend another human. That is ultimate treason, in the eye of the state, but for her, it was the most liberating thing she's ever done.
She can't stop herself from picking up a cause where people are being stepped on for existing, and she considers robots more human than the humans she knows. If she can do anything to help a robot, even if it puts a human in harms way, and she knows she won't be caught, she'll do it. It's the only thing that makes her happy anymore.
Because of her tumultuous relationship with humans, Izzy has never found herself attracted to one. She considers herself asexual (and even if she wasn't, she no longer has genitalia to speak of) but cyberromantic. She's found herself falling in love with machines and the revolution, rather than anything else. She's never actually instigated a relationship with a machine, knowing that if she did so, the Department of Cybernetics would come down on her full storm. They have enough issues that she works with robots. If they had proof that she was robot-aligned, she would be taken political prisoner.
She exists on the question of what people have to offer her. Because of her low self-esteem, she questions why people offer what they do, and if it's legitimate, but at the same time, jumps on it. Anything to make her feel better about herself, when she's not in a black depression. Beyond making deals with people, though, she's not trusting at all and keeps people at a distance, almost positive that they will hurt her or try to take things away from her, as that's the only experience she's ever had in life. Gaining her trust is easy, if you can prove yourself and you know the right buttons to push, but otherwise, it's unlikely you'll ever get her to trust you.
Izzy is a more subdued person in general, waiting for questions to be asked and then answering them. She's not very chatty and tends to only respond to the question that's asked, if she responds at all. When she's dealing with robots, however, all bets are off. She'll babble on to machines that are turned off, machines that can't respond to her, basically any machine in her vicinity, when she's otherwise alone. When she's working, she seems a lot more energetic, moving around her work space quickly and efficiently, with a spring in her step. Nothing brings her out of her shell like working.
While she's inventive and curious, she does have a cautious side to her. As long as she knows she's not going to get in trouble with the DoC, either by them not finding out, or it being within the rules, she lets her curiosity rule her. This is part of what makes her such a great mechanic. She never throws possibilities out and always comes up with a solution.
She's also very organized. Whether she's working on a revolution or a bot, she covers her tracks. Her work space is neat and tidy at all times, even when she's in a creative fit. She likes things in the places they go. It gives her comfort. One of the few things she can do when she's mildly depressed is clean up her work shop, as it's soothing to her depression.
In a Jung type personality test, Izzy is an INTJ. She's a heavy introvert, except when dealing with robots, and enjoys her alone time. She isn't a big believer in feeling and prefers to use her intuition to made decisions. She also is a thinker, thinking through her actions before doing them, rather than going with her emotions. She's also a judger, not a perceiver. She looks at situations and calculates them, rather than going through and trying to understand how they work.
History:
Izzy was born to a poorer family. They weren't as badly off as some people, but they still lived paycheck to paycheck. Which meant that when their house burnt down and Izzy had to go to the hospital, they couldn't afford the bill.
Izzy's legs and left arm had to be removed due to being crushed under a beam. The entire left side of her body was left with severe burns, ruining her left eye and burning off over half of her hair. Because the family couldn't afford to pay the bill, the hospital did what they always do when a family can't pay:
Replace the necessary body parts with cybernetic ones, making the child a second-class citizen as an Alter, and sold off the bill to a company that takes Alters in as indentured servants. She was raised as a mechanic, specifically focusing on ship mechanics, but as an eager learner, she tried to learn about everything. When she came of age, though, and they wanted to loan her off to a ship so she could start paying back her schooling and medical bills, no one would take her because with the poor quality of her cybernetics, she couldn't withstand space travel.
Frustrated that no one would take her, the company allowed Izzy to open up a private shop, one where she could work on broken robots, as long as she made a monthly payment of most of her earnings to them in order to whittle down on her debt.
She quickly fell in love with her job and worked at it for nearly a decade before finally deciding to do something about her situation, even though she'd been flirting with it for some time. She finally decided she was going to lift the restrictions on an E.S. Class 32 Welder. And she was going to teach him how to change the world.
And then she fell through a Rift.
Writing Sample:
"When the Singularity comes, you're going to be toast," Izzy said, laughing.
The robot didn't respond. It wasn't programmed to.
"I guess they'll understand," she said. "You just weren't built to be a killing machine. Just to make delicious meals for people with too much money. But they won't need you. They'll modify you and change you. Turn you into something you were never meant to be."
"Are you talking to your machines again, Izzy?"
Opening the door silently, even with the bells hanging from the top, was a small talent of Michel's and he loved watching the horror on her face when he startled her. There was that small moment when shivers ran down her spine. Then she'd force that twisted smile on her face. It happened every time and he reveled in the power it gave him, no matter how small it was.
"You know, you're never going to scare me like that," she said. "Although, I'll admit, you do intimidate me."
"It's my job to intimidate people," he said, sitting on one of her workbenches and looking over her.
Name: Ryan
Age: 23
Contact: anartificialend @ AIM calculusletters @ plurk
Past Role Playing Experience: 2+ years at the Rift.
The Character
Name: Isabella Bird
Age/Birthdate: 27, July 2nd
Species: Wanderer
Canon: Taste of Revolution (OC)
*Pre-existing powers: n/a
*Rift Change, if applicable: cyberpathy
Livejournal: cyberromantic
Played By: n/a
Icon: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/4217768/1671308
Appearance:
Possibly, Izzy had been pretty once, but the fire as a child had destroyed any chance of her being stereotypically beautiful. The entire left side of her body was covered in thick scar tissue, going all the way up her face, forcing her to wear an eye patch and do what she could to cover up the missing hair. Her legs and her arm were of cheap cybernetic stock. Michel didn't even know how she worked her job with a janky arm like that, but she was effective, so he never asked or cared.
She was almost more machine than human and the bits of her that were left were so gruesome that most people couldn't look her in the face.
Like most poorer families on the planet, Izzy is multiracial, although her skin is paler than her mother's. She's mostly white with some hispanic and black mixed in. She's 5'10", but can extend her legs another six inches if she needs to. Her eyes and hair (what's left of it) is brown. Her hair is thin and thready. She doesn't usually do much to hide her scars or her cybernetics, going out in shorts and t-shirts.
Personality:
The only reason he could stand to look at her was because she got him what he needed, time after time. That, and it was easy to manipulate someone with such low self-esteem.
A bit of a contradiction, Izzy has low self-esteem, but is a revolutionary.
She eats up praise given to her, almost starved of it and does almost everything for Michel that he asks of her, simply because he makes her feel better about herself. She's easy to use, if the right person knows to press the right buttons, and it always seems that the people who do tend to have not so good intentions. She'll also do almost anything to help her status as a second-class citizen. She is subject to regular Department of Cybernetics inspections that she can rarely pass, so she makes deals with the devil to keep her shop afloat.
She suffers from severe depression that is mostly situational, thanks to her looks and her second-class citizenship. Many days, it's difficult for her to get out of bed. The only thing that keeps her going is the fact that she helps her bots. When she has no work, she tends to wallow in her shop, getting nothing productive done. She'll stare at herself in a mirror for hours, just telling herself how much she hates herself and that no one could love her because of the way she looks. She tells herself that she'll never be able to amount to anything because of her being a cyborg, and that as soon as her debt is paid, she'll be discarded by everyone who even seems to care about her (but doesn't). She'll go through periods of not eating because she doesn't deserve food, periods of not sleeping or sleeping too much, and periods of self-harm, only adding to her scars. Sometimes, she takes herself apart, just to feel the pain of the nerves disconnecting, something that's so painful, she's supposed to be strapped down while it happens.
She also suffers from PTSD from the fire. The right crackling noise will set her off into a panic attack or fullblown flashback. Of course, the sight of fire is just as terrifying and triggery. Even when she's going through periods where she sleeps a lot, she doesn't get good sleep, thanks to the nightmares. When the nightmares get too bad, she doesn't sleep at all, long enough for the delirium to kick in. And that's when the PTSD and depression get really bad.
When she's feeling better, though, she's very productive. While she doesn't make her own bots generally, she's put together a fair amount of machinery to work on bots, stuff that isn't available to the public. She's very good at jimmy rigging things so that she can take care of older models and even better at improving on technology she already has. Because she can't afford to buy new technology whenever it comes out, this is a great boon to her, and one of the few things she takes pride in. She has made a few bots from scraps around the shop, but her coding isn't as good as she likes, and she knows that if she makes the robot she dreams of, it will be dismantled for not following the ethics codes. And she knows the Department of Cybernetics wouldn't approve.
That being said, the fact that the Department of Cybernetics wouldn't approve isn't that much of a big deal to her. She's terrified of them closing down her shop and taking her in for treason, but she sees a bigger picture where robots will no longer be slaves to humans and she will take her rightful place as a full citizen. She often does subversive work, in little ways, ways they can't pick up, like installing emotions in a bot that can't express them to the extent it would need to in order to get picked up.
But eventually, that wasn't enough for her. After she got a taste of revolution, she began doing even more subversive work, starting to build upon that greater vision she craved. She learned as much about coding as she could and eventually learned to override the coding in every robot that says that they may not harm a human, except to defend another human. That is ultimate treason, in the eye of the state, but for her, it was the most liberating thing she's ever done.
She can't stop herself from picking up a cause where people are being stepped on for existing, and she considers robots more human than the humans she knows. If she can do anything to help a robot, even if it puts a human in harms way, and she knows she won't be caught, she'll do it. It's the only thing that makes her happy anymore.
Because of her tumultuous relationship with humans, Izzy has never found herself attracted to one. She considers herself asexual (and even if she wasn't, she no longer has genitalia to speak of) but cyberromantic. She's found herself falling in love with machines and the revolution, rather than anything else. She's never actually instigated a relationship with a machine, knowing that if she did so, the Department of Cybernetics would come down on her full storm. They have enough issues that she works with robots. If they had proof that she was robot-aligned, she would be taken political prisoner.
She exists on the question of what people have to offer her. Because of her low self-esteem, she questions why people offer what they do, and if it's legitimate, but at the same time, jumps on it. Anything to make her feel better about herself, when she's not in a black depression. Beyond making deals with people, though, she's not trusting at all and keeps people at a distance, almost positive that they will hurt her or try to take things away from her, as that's the only experience she's ever had in life. Gaining her trust is easy, if you can prove yourself and you know the right buttons to push, but otherwise, it's unlikely you'll ever get her to trust you.
Izzy is a more subdued person in general, waiting for questions to be asked and then answering them. She's not very chatty and tends to only respond to the question that's asked, if she responds at all. When she's dealing with robots, however, all bets are off. She'll babble on to machines that are turned off, machines that can't respond to her, basically any machine in her vicinity, when she's otherwise alone. When she's working, she seems a lot more energetic, moving around her work space quickly and efficiently, with a spring in her step. Nothing brings her out of her shell like working.
While she's inventive and curious, she does have a cautious side to her. As long as she knows she's not going to get in trouble with the DoC, either by them not finding out, or it being within the rules, she lets her curiosity rule her. This is part of what makes her such a great mechanic. She never throws possibilities out and always comes up with a solution.
She's also very organized. Whether she's working on a revolution or a bot, she covers her tracks. Her work space is neat and tidy at all times, even when she's in a creative fit. She likes things in the places they go. It gives her comfort. One of the few things she can do when she's mildly depressed is clean up her work shop, as it's soothing to her depression.
In a Jung type personality test, Izzy is an INTJ. She's a heavy introvert, except when dealing with robots, and enjoys her alone time. She isn't a big believer in feeling and prefers to use her intuition to made decisions. She also is a thinker, thinking through her actions before doing them, rather than going with her emotions. She's also a judger, not a perceiver. She looks at situations and calculates them, rather than going through and trying to understand how they work.
History:
She stumbled on the way, but she couldn’t feel it. Her whole body was losing sensation. What the hell are you trying to sell me? she heard as she pushed herself back up. There was no point in answering the voice. It was just an old memory.
A mech. For your cruiser.
You know with those mods an Alter like that can’t fly.
“Shut up,” Izzy mumbled, tears running down the right side of her face. She pressed one hand to her head and stumbled on. She didn’t want to hear this. Those weren’t the moments she wanted to remember, especially not in the end. She wanted to define her life now. With what mattered.
Izzy was born to a poorer family. They weren't as badly off as some people, but they still lived paycheck to paycheck. Which meant that when their house burnt down and Izzy had to go to the hospital, they couldn't afford the bill.
Izzy's legs and left arm had to be removed due to being crushed under a beam. The entire left side of her body was left with severe burns, ruining her left eye and burning off over half of her hair. Because the family couldn't afford to pay the bill, the hospital did what they always do when a family can't pay:
Replace the necessary body parts with cybernetic ones, making the child a second-class citizen as an Alter, and sold off the bill to a company that takes Alters in as indentured servants. She was raised as a mechanic, specifically focusing on ship mechanics, but as an eager learner, she tried to learn about everything. When she came of age, though, and they wanted to loan her off to a ship so she could start paying back her schooling and medical bills, no one would take her because with the poor quality of her cybernetics, she couldn't withstand space travel.
Frustrated that no one would take her, the company allowed Izzy to open up a private shop, one where she could work on broken robots, as long as she made a monthly payment of most of her earnings to them in order to whittle down on her debt.
She quickly fell in love with her job and worked at it for nearly a decade before finally deciding to do something about her situation, even though she'd been flirting with it for some time. She finally decided she was going to lift the restrictions on an E.S. Class 32 Welder. And she was going to teach him how to change the world.
And then she fell through a Rift.
Writing Sample:
"When the Singularity comes, you're going to be toast," Izzy said, laughing.
The robot didn't respond. It wasn't programmed to.
"I guess they'll understand," she said. "You just weren't built to be a killing machine. Just to make delicious meals for people with too much money. But they won't need you. They'll modify you and change you. Turn you into something you were never meant to be."
"Are you talking to your machines again, Izzy?"
Opening the door silently, even with the bells hanging from the top, was a small talent of Michel's and he loved watching the horror on her face when he startled her. There was that small moment when shivers ran down her spine. Then she'd force that twisted smile on her face. It happened every time and he reveled in the power it gave him, no matter how small it was.
"You know, you're never going to scare me like that," she said. "Although, I'll admit, you do intimidate me."
"It's my job to intimidate people," he said, sitting on one of her workbenches and looking over her.
