A Gentle Night: Application
Jan. 16th, 2019 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quitsmilingCHARACTER
Name Subject 89P13, alias “Rocket”. Don’t call him subject anything. Seriously.
Canon MCU: Guardians of the Galaxy
Age Unknown, anywhere from 8 to 12 years. Fully mentally adult. Is entirely uncertain of what his lifespan might be.
Birthright Jewel Summer-sky
Dreams made flesh Rocket wants the infinity stones in his possession, so he can find someone to wield them and get his team back. And maybe to kill Thanos with them.
Canon point The end of Infinity War, a little while after the Snap
Canon Powers
* Tech genius: Rocket builds things out of spare parts that could blow up moons. Seriously. He made a weapon capable of doing just that, in his own words, out of bits of machinery lying around Quill’s ship, basically just for the fun of it, because he was bored. Crafting complex machinery, usually weapons, is how he relaxes. He even hums while he does it.
* Extremely dexterous: Like the raccoons of his heritage (or whatever he is, reports seem to vary between intelligent species), Rocket is great at climbing on things he shouldn’t be climbing on, whether they be trees, buildings, people, or machinery. Given his hands are very tiny, they’re also good for working with tiny machine parts.
* Piloting: Rocket taught himself how to fly spaceships-- technically, he was cybernetically enhanced to be a fighter pilot, among other things, but he didn’t get through most of the official training before he escaped-- and has had a lot of practice at it since he started, having stolen or bought or tinkered on various types of crafts. He can handle pretty much anything, especially if you give him a couple minutes to prod at it before he actually has to take off.
* Plans: Rocket is really very smart, especially when it comes to tactical and survival skills, like escaping places or breaking into places. He’s good at spotting useful things and finding just the right use for them.
* Implants: While they don’t really make him stronger or faster than your average raccoon (or whatever he is), Rocket’s cybernetic implants do make it easier to wield fairly large guns (compared to him) and have some small benefit in keeping him alive when otherwise wounds or lack of resources (like, for example, air) might kill him. It’s only really enough to last him an extra minute or two, though. Most of the cybernetics are aimed at enhancing his brain function and capacity, and making it easier for him to walk upright (though he does scamper often, too).
* Senses: Rocket is still largely an animal, despite his very capable brain, and he’s got the ears and nose that come with the species. He has, thus, above average senses of smell and hearing, and is a little better at seeing in the dark than a human would be.
As none of his abilities are magic, the jewel will not really affect them as such. He may wind up trying to use it as a power source for tech, though, rather than working out much in the way of spells.
Personality
Rocket is not really the hero type. He has an explosive temper and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, he is literally triggered by condescension with the immediate need to make himself look tougher and smarter than whoever insulted him, and he’s got a pretty loose definition of “property”: he tends to just borrow, take, and use things that aren’t his without thinking anything of it. He isn’t human, so human (or humanoid) morals mostly don’t even occur to him. He’s judgmental and mocking, a smart-ass and a genius who doesn’t care who he tells about it, and often cocky-- though with good reason, since his plans do usually work. He’s proud of his intelligence and his cleverness with gadgets, and again isn’t shy about saying it.
The most important thing to him is himself and his own survival, with Groot being tied for that-- or maybe slightly more important, since Groot’s diminishing into his smaller and younger self, but he’d never admit it. The other Guardians come in next, and for the most part, he tries to avoid caring about anyone else. Four people is more than enough to worry about. He’s definitely not out to actually “do good”, because that’s just dumb, and while he might do the right thing in the end, he’ll grumble and growl and be rude while he does it, and he usually requires a lot of encouragement to get there in the first place, when his first impulse is to run the other way when there's trouble, or possibly shoot it in the face.
At the same time, though, Rocket is probably the most observant and, in his own way, caring of the Guardians. It’s not surprising that he’d notice something like the tone of voice someone used when talking about a former employer or where the pieces of a broken arrow fell, given his brainpower and ability to put small details together into a workable plan. What might surprise people is that he actually uses those details for the benefit of other people, without being asked, and with luck, without being noticed (in case it doesn’t work or he has to explain himself). He collected those arrow pieces and put them back together, in order to give an important keepsake to his friend. He made the shortest route to his missing partner, as soon as he could, when an ally so much as suggested the person Quill was currently with might not be good news. He contacted the Ravager captains when their exiled companion died heroically, in the hopes that the news would redeem him in their eyes. No one else thought to do that… just Rocket.
Love scares Rocket, because while he’s never felt like anyone had it for him (except maaaaybe Groot), he’s come to realize over the course of his acquaintance with the other Guardians that he could pretty easily feel it for someone else, if they just make a little effort to understand him and help him out. Altruism is worse: it annoys and confuses him, having a hard time understanding that people might do something just to benefit someone else, even (and maybe especially) if that someone else is himself. He’s much more used to people assuming he’s easy to take advantage of, given his size and furry appearance, or mocking him for the same. Even the other Guardians started off largely insulting towards him until the drunken meltdown it took to express how much it bothered him.
Thus, Rocket actually makes every attempt to distance himself from others and from his own feelings, whether through his outward layer of mockery, his constant focus on material things and money, or by indulging in various vices like alcohol or, you know, shooting people with electric nets and laughing at their pain. (It’s funny when they wriggle and twitch, okay?) When he fails to distance himself from others, that’s when the stupidity starts. It’s become a powerful defense mechanism, so much so that he’s managed to weaponize it and not only use it to keep his emotions off the radar but also to save his skin physically by pissing off an enemy so much they made mistakes. It isn’t a healthy defense, but it’s probably the best one he has to keep from getting disappointed in life.
Finally, Rocket’s animal heritage hasn’t been entirely erased with the combination of cybernetics and drugs that turned him into his unique self, and he still has some more animalistic responses to some things: he might growl at a threat, or scamper up a tree if frightened, or sleep all damn day after being up all night. He doesn’t question these things, or really think about his reactions to things at all until after the fact, and since he doesn’t actually know what kind of animal he is (don’t say raccoon; he is not a freakin’ raccoon), he doesn’t consider those things "animalistic" at all. They’re just himself.
History
The creature that would eventually call himself Rocket was originally born in a lab, along with half a dozen other baby raccoons-- or whatever he is; reports of various species’ familiarity with his “kind” vary. Of the litter, only he managed to take to the drug and cybernetics combo being tested without dying, going viciously mad, losing body parts, or otherwise failing out of the program. He gained limited sentience early on, but his full capacities didn’t start to manifest until adulthood, and after several revisions to his tech/drug cocktail, being “remade” over and over, as he says. Most of what he remembers from that time is pain, fear, anger, and occasionally boredom, without much in the way of specifics.
Revisions continued after his emergence into full sentience, too, but not for terribly long, because with his full capacities, he could work out his very first plan. He boasts he’s broken out of 23 prisons, but that’s not counting the lab he escaped from first. He pretended to be stupider than he really was and used the scientist’s lab equipment against them, starting the pattern of the rest of his escapes. He almost didn’t even make it, having to teach himself on the fly how to handle the small cargo spacecraft he hijacked, but going back simply wasn’t an option. Even if he did, he was sure they'd just kill him.
After that, having pretty much been taught nothing in the way of morals and still being an animal at the core, he wound up descending quickly into thievery and occasional thuggery to survive, though only for himself rather than for a gang or group of any kind. He didn’t trust the giant, furless aliens who inhabited most of the galaxy, as they were too much like the scientists he escaped from, so he preferred to work alone. He taught himself how to fly a proper starship fighter and picked up munitions almost without any effort at all. Finding most conventional weapons boring and simple, he started tinkering with them to design some of his own.
Once he knew his way around the quadrant, had already escaped from three prisons, and had picked out a name for himself, Rocket settled on bounty hunting as a slightly more respectable way to earn cash than simply stealing-- though he still did that, sometimes, too. Finally feeling more secure in himself and his ability to look after himself, he started to take on with partners, just to spread out the work a little. He was always the brains of the operation, as far as he was concerned, but an extra pair of arms and an extra gun did help out sometimes, especially when the owner of that gun was bigger and stronger than he was. He met Groot after his last “muscle” died on him, picking up the lone tree-man after said tree-man managed to unknowingly lift him out of the line of fire and provide a handy and surprisingly sturdy meatshield (or would that be “woodshield”?) against a bounty-gone-wrong. Impressed by how resilient Groot was, he practically bullied Groot into joining him, but they’ve been paired up together for a couple years now, and Groot shows no sign of wanting to leave. His ability to understand the leafy extraterrestrial is something of a mystery to both of them, though some have theorized it might have a psychic component as the rest of the crew eventually picked it up as well.
By now, Rocket had over fifty counts against him across the galaxy, between theft, escapes from prison, mercenary activity, and arson. Especially arson. Blowing things up is fun, okay? He was looking for a new mark on the populous planet of Xandar when he found Peter Quill, aka Starlord, with a respectable bounty on him for retrieval alive. From there, he and Groot wound up launched into his first ever attempt to save the galaxy, along with Quill, an assassin named Gamora, and a literal-minded fighter named Drax, going up against Ronan the Accuser, a Kree fanatic who got his hands on an Infinity Stone and aimed to destroy the planet Xandar… to start with, anyway. Thanks to the five of them, Ronan failed, though in the process a lot of people died, including (sort of) Groot.
They spent a couple weeks on Xandar after that, recuperating. Rocket managed to find a tiny piece of Groot that still had life in it and planted it in a pot to nurture, Quill’s ship was rebuilt, and they finally took their leave with their records expunged and the warning not to break the law again. They didn’t always do so great at that part (particularly Rocket with the “not stealing”), taking up minor protection work and bounty hunting to pay for fuel, but they did wind up saving the galaxy again when Quill’s father, a megalomaniacal celestial who was literally a planet, showed up and tried to cover the known universe with basically himself. Rocket lost someone he actually considered a friend in that escapade, and he learned a little bit about himself in the process.
Several years later they wound up involved in their first ever failure to save the galaxy, when they stumbled upon the wreckage of the last Asgardian vessel after Thanos attacked it. Rocket travelled with the rescued Thor to the dwarven star forge for a new Thanos-killing weapon, then to Earth to help fight Thanos’s goons to protect the Infinity Stones, but in the end all their hard work wound up for nothing. The Snap, as people are calling it, still took away half of all life… including Rocket’s entire crew, and his oldest and dearest companion, the adolescent Groot. He’s still somewhere between shock and grief… and anger. There’s a lot of anger, too.
SAMPLES
Network Sample
Listen up, you a-holes. Time for a little lesson on "not petting the furry people".
[Fittingly, the person on the far-caster is a furry person. Some people might recognize him as a raccoon-- albeit one with clothes, a gun slung over one shoulder, and an annoyed expression. His tone is pretty sarcastic as he continues:]
Just cuz somebody is little and cute and furry doesn't mean he wants people gettin' their dirty, sticky, hairless paws all over him. In fact, it might mean he wants them gettin' their dirty, sticky, hairless paws as far away from him as possible, because not everybody likes bein' treated like your favorite little pet from home.
[He leans in close to the far-caster, looming bigger over the viewers.]
And sometimes those little furry people might actually bite your freakin' hand off if you touch them again.
We on the same page here? Because that page says don't touch!
[And with that, ending on a shot of his teeth bared at the camera in a grimace, he shuts the far-caster off.]
Log Sample
Test drive thread
PLAYER
Name Gail
Are you 18 or older? Yes
Contact PM this journal, or cacopheny @ plurk
Current character None
Name Subject 89P13, alias “Rocket”. Don’t call him subject anything. Seriously.
Canon MCU: Guardians of the Galaxy
Age Unknown, anywhere from 8 to 12 years. Fully mentally adult. Is entirely uncertain of what his lifespan might be.
Birthright Jewel Summer-sky
Dreams made flesh Rocket wants the infinity stones in his possession, so he can find someone to wield them and get his team back. And maybe to kill Thanos with them.
Canon point The end of Infinity War, a little while after the Snap
Canon Powers
* Tech genius: Rocket builds things out of spare parts that could blow up moons. Seriously. He made a weapon capable of doing just that, in his own words, out of bits of machinery lying around Quill’s ship, basically just for the fun of it, because he was bored. Crafting complex machinery, usually weapons, is how he relaxes. He even hums while he does it.
* Extremely dexterous: Like the raccoons of his heritage (or whatever he is, reports seem to vary between intelligent species), Rocket is great at climbing on things he shouldn’t be climbing on, whether they be trees, buildings, people, or machinery. Given his hands are very tiny, they’re also good for working with tiny machine parts.
* Piloting: Rocket taught himself how to fly spaceships-- technically, he was cybernetically enhanced to be a fighter pilot, among other things, but he didn’t get through most of the official training before he escaped-- and has had a lot of practice at it since he started, having stolen or bought or tinkered on various types of crafts. He can handle pretty much anything, especially if you give him a couple minutes to prod at it before he actually has to take off.
* Plans: Rocket is really very smart, especially when it comes to tactical and survival skills, like escaping places or breaking into places. He’s good at spotting useful things and finding just the right use for them.
* Implants: While they don’t really make him stronger or faster than your average raccoon (or whatever he is), Rocket’s cybernetic implants do make it easier to wield fairly large guns (compared to him) and have some small benefit in keeping him alive when otherwise wounds or lack of resources (like, for example, air) might kill him. It’s only really enough to last him an extra minute or two, though. Most of the cybernetics are aimed at enhancing his brain function and capacity, and making it easier for him to walk upright (though he does scamper often, too).
* Senses: Rocket is still largely an animal, despite his very capable brain, and he’s got the ears and nose that come with the species. He has, thus, above average senses of smell and hearing, and is a little better at seeing in the dark than a human would be.
As none of his abilities are magic, the jewel will not really affect them as such. He may wind up trying to use it as a power source for tech, though, rather than working out much in the way of spells.
Personality
Rocket is not really the hero type. He has an explosive temper and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, he is literally triggered by condescension with the immediate need to make himself look tougher and smarter than whoever insulted him, and he’s got a pretty loose definition of “property”: he tends to just borrow, take, and use things that aren’t his without thinking anything of it. He isn’t human, so human (or humanoid) morals mostly don’t even occur to him. He’s judgmental and mocking, a smart-ass and a genius who doesn’t care who he tells about it, and often cocky-- though with good reason, since his plans do usually work. He’s proud of his intelligence and his cleverness with gadgets, and again isn’t shy about saying it.
The most important thing to him is himself and his own survival, with Groot being tied for that-- or maybe slightly more important, since Groot’s diminishing into his smaller and younger self, but he’d never admit it. The other Guardians come in next, and for the most part, he tries to avoid caring about anyone else. Four people is more than enough to worry about. He’s definitely not out to actually “do good”, because that’s just dumb, and while he might do the right thing in the end, he’ll grumble and growl and be rude while he does it, and he usually requires a lot of encouragement to get there in the first place, when his first impulse is to run the other way when there's trouble, or possibly shoot it in the face.
At the same time, though, Rocket is probably the most observant and, in his own way, caring of the Guardians. It’s not surprising that he’d notice something like the tone of voice someone used when talking about a former employer or where the pieces of a broken arrow fell, given his brainpower and ability to put small details together into a workable plan. What might surprise people is that he actually uses those details for the benefit of other people, without being asked, and with luck, without being noticed (in case it doesn’t work or he has to explain himself). He collected those arrow pieces and put them back together, in order to give an important keepsake to his friend. He made the shortest route to his missing partner, as soon as he could, when an ally so much as suggested the person Quill was currently with might not be good news. He contacted the Ravager captains when their exiled companion died heroically, in the hopes that the news would redeem him in their eyes. No one else thought to do that… just Rocket.
Love scares Rocket, because while he’s never felt like anyone had it for him (except maaaaybe Groot), he’s come to realize over the course of his acquaintance with the other Guardians that he could pretty easily feel it for someone else, if they just make a little effort to understand him and help him out. Altruism is worse: it annoys and confuses him, having a hard time understanding that people might do something just to benefit someone else, even (and maybe especially) if that someone else is himself. He’s much more used to people assuming he’s easy to take advantage of, given his size and furry appearance, or mocking him for the same. Even the other Guardians started off largely insulting towards him until the drunken meltdown it took to express how much it bothered him.
Thus, Rocket actually makes every attempt to distance himself from others and from his own feelings, whether through his outward layer of mockery, his constant focus on material things and money, or by indulging in various vices like alcohol or, you know, shooting people with electric nets and laughing at their pain. (It’s funny when they wriggle and twitch, okay?) When he fails to distance himself from others, that’s when the stupidity starts. It’s become a powerful defense mechanism, so much so that he’s managed to weaponize it and not only use it to keep his emotions off the radar but also to save his skin physically by pissing off an enemy so much they made mistakes. It isn’t a healthy defense, but it’s probably the best one he has to keep from getting disappointed in life.
Finally, Rocket’s animal heritage hasn’t been entirely erased with the combination of cybernetics and drugs that turned him into his unique self, and he still has some more animalistic responses to some things: he might growl at a threat, or scamper up a tree if frightened, or sleep all damn day after being up all night. He doesn’t question these things, or really think about his reactions to things at all until after the fact, and since he doesn’t actually know what kind of animal he is (don’t say raccoon; he is not a freakin’ raccoon), he doesn’t consider those things "animalistic" at all. They’re just himself.
History
The creature that would eventually call himself Rocket was originally born in a lab, along with half a dozen other baby raccoons-- or whatever he is; reports of various species’ familiarity with his “kind” vary. Of the litter, only he managed to take to the drug and cybernetics combo being tested without dying, going viciously mad, losing body parts, or otherwise failing out of the program. He gained limited sentience early on, but his full capacities didn’t start to manifest until adulthood, and after several revisions to his tech/drug cocktail, being “remade” over and over, as he says. Most of what he remembers from that time is pain, fear, anger, and occasionally boredom, without much in the way of specifics.
Revisions continued after his emergence into full sentience, too, but not for terribly long, because with his full capacities, he could work out his very first plan. He boasts he’s broken out of 23 prisons, but that’s not counting the lab he escaped from first. He pretended to be stupider than he really was and used the scientist’s lab equipment against them, starting the pattern of the rest of his escapes. He almost didn’t even make it, having to teach himself on the fly how to handle the small cargo spacecraft he hijacked, but going back simply wasn’t an option. Even if he did, he was sure they'd just kill him.
After that, having pretty much been taught nothing in the way of morals and still being an animal at the core, he wound up descending quickly into thievery and occasional thuggery to survive, though only for himself rather than for a gang or group of any kind. He didn’t trust the giant, furless aliens who inhabited most of the galaxy, as they were too much like the scientists he escaped from, so he preferred to work alone. He taught himself how to fly a proper starship fighter and picked up munitions almost without any effort at all. Finding most conventional weapons boring and simple, he started tinkering with them to design some of his own.
Once he knew his way around the quadrant, had already escaped from three prisons, and had picked out a name for himself, Rocket settled on bounty hunting as a slightly more respectable way to earn cash than simply stealing-- though he still did that, sometimes, too. Finally feeling more secure in himself and his ability to look after himself, he started to take on with partners, just to spread out the work a little. He was always the brains of the operation, as far as he was concerned, but an extra pair of arms and an extra gun did help out sometimes, especially when the owner of that gun was bigger and stronger than he was. He met Groot after his last “muscle” died on him, picking up the lone tree-man after said tree-man managed to unknowingly lift him out of the line of fire and provide a handy and surprisingly sturdy meatshield (or would that be “woodshield”?) against a bounty-gone-wrong. Impressed by how resilient Groot was, he practically bullied Groot into joining him, but they’ve been paired up together for a couple years now, and Groot shows no sign of wanting to leave. His ability to understand the leafy extraterrestrial is something of a mystery to both of them, though some have theorized it might have a psychic component as the rest of the crew eventually picked it up as well.
By now, Rocket had over fifty counts against him across the galaxy, between theft, escapes from prison, mercenary activity, and arson. Especially arson. Blowing things up is fun, okay? He was looking for a new mark on the populous planet of Xandar when he found Peter Quill, aka Starlord, with a respectable bounty on him for retrieval alive. From there, he and Groot wound up launched into his first ever attempt to save the galaxy, along with Quill, an assassin named Gamora, and a literal-minded fighter named Drax, going up against Ronan the Accuser, a Kree fanatic who got his hands on an Infinity Stone and aimed to destroy the planet Xandar… to start with, anyway. Thanks to the five of them, Ronan failed, though in the process a lot of people died, including (sort of) Groot.
They spent a couple weeks on Xandar after that, recuperating. Rocket managed to find a tiny piece of Groot that still had life in it and planted it in a pot to nurture, Quill’s ship was rebuilt, and they finally took their leave with their records expunged and the warning not to break the law again. They didn’t always do so great at that part (particularly Rocket with the “not stealing”), taking up minor protection work and bounty hunting to pay for fuel, but they did wind up saving the galaxy again when Quill’s father, a megalomaniacal celestial who was literally a planet, showed up and tried to cover the known universe with basically himself. Rocket lost someone he actually considered a friend in that escapade, and he learned a little bit about himself in the process.
Several years later they wound up involved in their first ever failure to save the galaxy, when they stumbled upon the wreckage of the last Asgardian vessel after Thanos attacked it. Rocket travelled with the rescued Thor to the dwarven star forge for a new Thanos-killing weapon, then to Earth to help fight Thanos’s goons to protect the Infinity Stones, but in the end all their hard work wound up for nothing. The Snap, as people are calling it, still took away half of all life… including Rocket’s entire crew, and his oldest and dearest companion, the adolescent Groot. He’s still somewhere between shock and grief… and anger. There’s a lot of anger, too.
SAMPLES
Network Sample
Listen up, you a-holes. Time for a little lesson on "not petting the furry people".
[Fittingly, the person on the far-caster is a furry person. Some people might recognize him as a raccoon-- albeit one with clothes, a gun slung over one shoulder, and an annoyed expression. His tone is pretty sarcastic as he continues:]
Just cuz somebody is little and cute and furry doesn't mean he wants people gettin' their dirty, sticky, hairless paws all over him. In fact, it might mean he wants them gettin' their dirty, sticky, hairless paws as far away from him as possible, because not everybody likes bein' treated like your favorite little pet from home.
[He leans in close to the far-caster, looming bigger over the viewers.]
And sometimes those little furry people might actually bite your freakin' hand off if you touch them again.
We on the same page here? Because that page says don't touch!
[And with that, ending on a shot of his teeth bared at the camera in a grimace, he shuts the far-caster off.]
Log Sample
Test drive thread
PLAYER
Name Gail
Are you 18 or older? Yes
Contact PM this journal, or cacopheny @ plurk
Current character None
