The Last Voyage: Application
Aug. 31st, 2015 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quitsmilingUser Name/Nick: Gail
User DW: cacopheny
AIM/IM: cacopheny @ gchat
E-mail: cacopheny @ gmail
Other Characters: None at TLV
Character Name: Subject 89P13, alias “Rocket”. Don’t call him subject anything. Seriously.
Series: Guardians of the Galaxy / MCU
Age: Unknown, though probably not more than a few years of age
From When?: When the Kree ship crashed on Xandar
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Rocket is an unrepentant thief, bounty hunter, and prison escapee. You’re probably never actually going to cure most of that, but he’s also a misanthropist who doesn’t trust people and generally hides behind his intellect to avoid actually feeling things for people (then fails spectacularly, and gets mad over it). It’d go a long way to improving his character to actually have him accept that emotions are okay and caring for people is important, so that’s my goal here for him.
Abilities/Powers:
* Tech genius: Rocket builds things out of spare parts that could blow up moons. Seriously. He made the Haydron Enforcer out of bits of machinery lying around Peter 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, Rocket is great at climbing on things he shouldn’t be climbing on, whether they be trees, buildings, people, or machinery. He makes it up Groot in record time on many occasions.
* Piloting: Rocket taught himself how to fly spaceships, and has had a lot of practice at it since he started, in 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, 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.
* Senses: Rocket is still largely an animal, despite his 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.
Personality:
For all he might look cute and cuddly, courtesy of the soft fur, fluffy tail, and diminutive stature, Rocket isn’t really a nice guy, not by a long shot. He isn’t interested in cuddling at all, not unless he’s really drunk or really emotional or both. He has an explosive temper and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, 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 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 either tied, or a very close second. 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.
Rocket is, on the whole, ruled by two things-- and never at the same time. Either his impressively enhanced brain is in control, and he’s logical and clever and ingenious, coming up with brilliant if sometimes overly complex plans to get out of sticky situations... or his equally powerful emotions are in control, in which case he’s impulsive and irrational and even a little stupid, and prone to leaping into something when he knows he’s got no chance in hell of succeeding. When emotions get involved, he winds up caring for things and people way more than he knows he should, which he hates, and then he makes even stupider decisions, which he hates even more-- like flying a spacecraft directly into the bridge of the Dark Astor.
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. Friendship and love are things he’s only just starting to understand, let alone appreciate, after a lifetime of only worrying about himself and not trusting anyone else. 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.
Additionally, 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, he doesn’t consider those things "animalistic" at all. They’re just himself.
Given he thinks he died in the Dark Astor's crash, and that Groot sacrificed himself for nothing, Rocket will be coming into the Barge a little angrier than usual-- not that this is always necessarily noticeable. But he just lost his best friend and backup, about the only being in the galaxy he actually really trusts, through his own stupid fault and his friend's stupid love for him, and even worse, he did it just when Rocket even realized just how much he cared for the walking tree, right back. That's going to affect his reactions to just about everything, from making connections and trusting (less likely at first), to taking risks (also less likely, until you actually get the anger out), to following rules (not like he did this much, anyway). He's likely to try to compare everyone on the ship to Groot, and at least for a while, come up lacking. Nobody can be that patient, understanding, silly, and caring, especially not to a grouchy little monster like Rocket knows he is.
Barge Reactions:
Rocket is used to aliens, if not exactly multiple universes, but those will be easy enough to lump into the “aliens and other planets” category. Nothing at all in the universe is like him, after all, so why not have some other weirdness out there? He’s also used to prisons, and used to being able to escape them without too much effort, so the isolated nature of the Barge is going to be a rather rude shock to his system when he finds he can’t get away no matter how hard he tries and how clever his schemes are.
How Rocket reacts to various disasters and emergency situations will largely depend on whether he has anyone he cares about involved in them, and if any of those people he cares about are generally good examples. If not, he’ll likely just be worried about saving his own neck, or whatever tech he’s fiddling with, rather than helping anyone else. If so, he might actually panic and try to help, and like as not make a mess of things by not thinking them through. He’s not likely to be surprised by random disasters, considering how rocky his recent year has been, though any alternate-universe type shenanigans will definitely be rattling. The only thing Rocket feels really comfortable with is his sense of self, and taking that away will be a Big Deal.
Path to Redemption:
This depends entirely on the definition of “redeemed”. Rocket will never not be a casual thief and he’ll probably never stop reacting to situations he’s unhappy in with anger and snark. It is possible, however, to make him learn how to care, and accept that he cares, in a more healthy manner than he currently does, and learn to act on that occasional impulse to help more people than just those he really cares about. That would be my goal for this game, not curing him of core aspects of his character-- he needs to be good, but that doesn’t mean he has to be nice.
The best way of doing that? Respect. No making fun of his height or his animal aspects, no putting him down, and no humiliating him. Patience is also key; the two characters in his canon he cares for the most are the two most patient and stoic, and in some ways the most forgiving of his particular set of vices, whether because he shares them (in Drax's case) or he's just a forgiving kind of guy (in Groot's case). Appealing to his peculiar set of morals (which is, sadly, fairly self-centered) is a good way to start: he’ll get along better in this new setting if he plays along, at least for a little while. That will give him time to get attached to a couple people, whose safety he’ll actually want to safeguard, which will be the next most important part of his redemption arc: making friends.
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 rabid, 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 22 (23, now) 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 his 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 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 five 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, possibly based in intuition, scent signals, and sub-human-hearing sounds, but as Groot seems to think he interprets him just fine, Rocket doesn’t think too hard about it. Given Groot puts up with him and is generally the most innocent creature in the universe, Rocket actually did grow to trust and like the tree-man-- not that he ever really admitted it, and usually showed his affection through insults.
By now, Rocket has 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. Unfortunately, the infamous assassin Gamora also found Peter Quill that same day, and the two managed to thwart each other handily, with the result being all four-- including Groot-- being thrown in a large local space-prison called the Kyln. Prisons didn’t bother Rocket, not after his various daring escapes from them in the past, and after the somewhat humiliating admittance process, he immediately started putting together his plan for escape, and recruiting Quill and Gamora to help. Plans changed slightly when he learned about how much he could earn by helping Quill and Gamora get to a buyer for some object of Quill’s, compared to simply turning the guy in for the bounty.
They escaped the prison largely on Rocket’s brilliance, if he did say so himself (and he did), with an angry free rider named Drax and made haste for Knowhere, a mining colony on the severed head of some giant dead alien, and met with the Collector who told them just what it was Quill had been carrying around: an Infinity Stone powerful enough to level planets. It did level the Collector’s building, and wound up in the hands of the mad Kree vigilante Ronan, while Quill and Gamora wound up in the hands of the people who’d wanted Quill’s bounty, to begin with: the Ravagers Quill had worked with. Rocket’s first impulse was to run, because he wanted to stay alive, dammit. It took some arguing by Groot and Drax to convince him to help their friends, and even then his new plan wasn’t terribly good, thrown together on emotion rather than logic. Thankfully, Quill had managed to save himself, so it didn’t matter how likely they’d been to succeed.
Reunited on the Ravager’s ship, Quill talked them all into trying to steal the Infinity Stone back from Ronan-- and it took a lot of talking, when it came to Rocket. Finally it took Groot’s expectant look to change his mind, and even then he was sour about it, but when he decides to do something, he does it, so he helped out to the best of his ability, adding his general brilliance to the planning process and committing himself emotionally to the cause. They intercepted Ronan’s spaceship, on its way to destroy Xandar with the Infinity Stone, as it was descending to the planet. When the battle was joined, once his part in the main plan was complete-- he got to blow a hole in the side of Ronan’s ship, the Dark Astor, for Quill and the rest to use to board it-- he even took the initiative to help protect the people of the planet by blowing up fighter ships before they could crash-land on the surface, reducing the loss of life, and attempted to encourage the local authorities of the Nova Core during the fight.
Emotion took over, though, when the Nova Core fighters failed and it looked like his friends, on board the Dark Astor, were going to be killed. Rather than something rational and considered, he just crashed his ship into the Dark Astor’s bridge. Thankfully, it did do a little good, causing the Dark Astor to lose power and plummet to the planet’s surface, though it didn’t destroy Ronan, infused with the power of the Infinity Stone as he was. Groot sacrificed himself in the crash by turning himself into a protective ball of wood and leaves, wrapped around the other four, to Rocket’s horror and grief. It took seeing certain death for his partner to not only admit that he did care about Groot-- a lot, in fact-- but to realize Groot really did care about him, back, and saw through his grumpiness as clearly as Rocket saw through his limited vocabulary. That is a Big Deal, because Rocket never did believe anybody else really cared about him before Groot, and now he's lost it through what he sees as his own actions. The crash is the last thing he remembers, and everyone can assume he died in it despite Groot's attempt to save them. Rocket certainly will.
Sample Journal Entry:
He’s not here! You can’t tell me you kidnapped a guy for the death-prison reform ship and left his partner behind!
[Rocket’s apparently been digging through every scrap of potential personal belongings in the cabin he's been assigned, even tearing some of them. He’s standing in the middle of the mess, ranting.]
If anybody deserves this stupid second chance of yours, this redemption or whatever it is you're trying to do, it's him, not me! So you picked me up, but just left him there? Probably smashed to kindling? And dragged me here? That's just messed up! I don't believe it. You wouldn't be that dumb.
[He pauses to focus a glare and a sharp-toothed snarl on the nearest warden.]
So you tell me right now, or swear I'll blow a hole in this goddamned ship. Where’s. Groot!
Sample RP:
Test-drive meme
Special Notes: None
User DW: cacopheny
AIM/IM: cacopheny @ gchat
E-mail: cacopheny @ gmail
Other Characters: None at TLV
Character Name: Subject 89P13, alias “Rocket”. Don’t call him subject anything. Seriously.
Series: Guardians of the Galaxy / MCU
Age: Unknown, though probably not more than a few years of age
From When?: When the Kree ship crashed on Xandar
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Rocket is an unrepentant thief, bounty hunter, and prison escapee. You’re probably never actually going to cure most of that, but he’s also a misanthropist who doesn’t trust people and generally hides behind his intellect to avoid actually feeling things for people (then fails spectacularly, and gets mad over it). It’d go a long way to improving his character to actually have him accept that emotions are okay and caring for people is important, so that’s my goal here for him.
Abilities/Powers:
* Tech genius: Rocket builds things out of spare parts that could blow up moons. Seriously. He made the Haydron Enforcer out of bits of machinery lying around Peter 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, Rocket is great at climbing on things he shouldn’t be climbing on, whether they be trees, buildings, people, or machinery. He makes it up Groot in record time on many occasions.
* Piloting: Rocket taught himself how to fly spaceships, and has had a lot of practice at it since he started, in 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, 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.
* Senses: Rocket is still largely an animal, despite his 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.
Personality:
For all he might look cute and cuddly, courtesy of the soft fur, fluffy tail, and diminutive stature, Rocket isn’t really a nice guy, not by a long shot. He isn’t interested in cuddling at all, not unless he’s really drunk or really emotional or both. He has an explosive temper and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, 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 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 either tied, or a very close second. 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.
Rocket is, on the whole, ruled by two things-- and never at the same time. Either his impressively enhanced brain is in control, and he’s logical and clever and ingenious, coming up with brilliant if sometimes overly complex plans to get out of sticky situations... or his equally powerful emotions are in control, in which case he’s impulsive and irrational and even a little stupid, and prone to leaping into something when he knows he’s got no chance in hell of succeeding. When emotions get involved, he winds up caring for things and people way more than he knows he should, which he hates, and then he makes even stupider decisions, which he hates even more-- like flying a spacecraft directly into the bridge of the Dark Astor.
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. Friendship and love are things he’s only just starting to understand, let alone appreciate, after a lifetime of only worrying about himself and not trusting anyone else. 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.
Additionally, 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, he doesn’t consider those things "animalistic" at all. They’re just himself.
Given he thinks he died in the Dark Astor's crash, and that Groot sacrificed himself for nothing, Rocket will be coming into the Barge a little angrier than usual-- not that this is always necessarily noticeable. But he just lost his best friend and backup, about the only being in the galaxy he actually really trusts, through his own stupid fault and his friend's stupid love for him, and even worse, he did it just when Rocket even realized just how much he cared for the walking tree, right back. That's going to affect his reactions to just about everything, from making connections and trusting (less likely at first), to taking risks (also less likely, until you actually get the anger out), to following rules (not like he did this much, anyway). He's likely to try to compare everyone on the ship to Groot, and at least for a while, come up lacking. Nobody can be that patient, understanding, silly, and caring, especially not to a grouchy little monster like Rocket knows he is.
Barge Reactions:
Rocket is used to aliens, if not exactly multiple universes, but those will be easy enough to lump into the “aliens and other planets” category. Nothing at all in the universe is like him, after all, so why not have some other weirdness out there? He’s also used to prisons, and used to being able to escape them without too much effort, so the isolated nature of the Barge is going to be a rather rude shock to his system when he finds he can’t get away no matter how hard he tries and how clever his schemes are.
How Rocket reacts to various disasters and emergency situations will largely depend on whether he has anyone he cares about involved in them, and if any of those people he cares about are generally good examples. If not, he’ll likely just be worried about saving his own neck, or whatever tech he’s fiddling with, rather than helping anyone else. If so, he might actually panic and try to help, and like as not make a mess of things by not thinking them through. He’s not likely to be surprised by random disasters, considering how rocky his recent year has been, though any alternate-universe type shenanigans will definitely be rattling. The only thing Rocket feels really comfortable with is his sense of self, and taking that away will be a Big Deal.
Path to Redemption:
This depends entirely on the definition of “redeemed”. Rocket will never not be a casual thief and he’ll probably never stop reacting to situations he’s unhappy in with anger and snark. It is possible, however, to make him learn how to care, and accept that he cares, in a more healthy manner than he currently does, and learn to act on that occasional impulse to help more people than just those he really cares about. That would be my goal for this game, not curing him of core aspects of his character-- he needs to be good, but that doesn’t mean he has to be nice.
The best way of doing that? Respect. No making fun of his height or his animal aspects, no putting him down, and no humiliating him. Patience is also key; the two characters in his canon he cares for the most are the two most patient and stoic, and in some ways the most forgiving of his particular set of vices, whether because he shares them (in Drax's case) or he's just a forgiving kind of guy (in Groot's case). Appealing to his peculiar set of morals (which is, sadly, fairly self-centered) is a good way to start: he’ll get along better in this new setting if he plays along, at least for a little while. That will give him time to get attached to a couple people, whose safety he’ll actually want to safeguard, which will be the next most important part of his redemption arc: making friends.
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 rabid, 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 22 (23, now) 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 his 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 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 five 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, possibly based in intuition, scent signals, and sub-human-hearing sounds, but as Groot seems to think he interprets him just fine, Rocket doesn’t think too hard about it. Given Groot puts up with him and is generally the most innocent creature in the universe, Rocket actually did grow to trust and like the tree-man-- not that he ever really admitted it, and usually showed his affection through insults.
By now, Rocket has 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. Unfortunately, the infamous assassin Gamora also found Peter Quill that same day, and the two managed to thwart each other handily, with the result being all four-- including Groot-- being thrown in a large local space-prison called the Kyln. Prisons didn’t bother Rocket, not after his various daring escapes from them in the past, and after the somewhat humiliating admittance process, he immediately started putting together his plan for escape, and recruiting Quill and Gamora to help. Plans changed slightly when he learned about how much he could earn by helping Quill and Gamora get to a buyer for some object of Quill’s, compared to simply turning the guy in for the bounty.
They escaped the prison largely on Rocket’s brilliance, if he did say so himself (and he did), with an angry free rider named Drax and made haste for Knowhere, a mining colony on the severed head of some giant dead alien, and met with the Collector who told them just what it was Quill had been carrying around: an Infinity Stone powerful enough to level planets. It did level the Collector’s building, and wound up in the hands of the mad Kree vigilante Ronan, while Quill and Gamora wound up in the hands of the people who’d wanted Quill’s bounty, to begin with: the Ravagers Quill had worked with. Rocket’s first impulse was to run, because he wanted to stay alive, dammit. It took some arguing by Groot and Drax to convince him to help their friends, and even then his new plan wasn’t terribly good, thrown together on emotion rather than logic. Thankfully, Quill had managed to save himself, so it didn’t matter how likely they’d been to succeed.
Reunited on the Ravager’s ship, Quill talked them all into trying to steal the Infinity Stone back from Ronan-- and it took a lot of talking, when it came to Rocket. Finally it took Groot’s expectant look to change his mind, and even then he was sour about it, but when he decides to do something, he does it, so he helped out to the best of his ability, adding his general brilliance to the planning process and committing himself emotionally to the cause. They intercepted Ronan’s spaceship, on its way to destroy Xandar with the Infinity Stone, as it was descending to the planet. When the battle was joined, once his part in the main plan was complete-- he got to blow a hole in the side of Ronan’s ship, the Dark Astor, for Quill and the rest to use to board it-- he even took the initiative to help protect the people of the planet by blowing up fighter ships before they could crash-land on the surface, reducing the loss of life, and attempted to encourage the local authorities of the Nova Core during the fight.
Emotion took over, though, when the Nova Core fighters failed and it looked like his friends, on board the Dark Astor, were going to be killed. Rather than something rational and considered, he just crashed his ship into the Dark Astor’s bridge. Thankfully, it did do a little good, causing the Dark Astor to lose power and plummet to the planet’s surface, though it didn’t destroy Ronan, infused with the power of the Infinity Stone as he was. Groot sacrificed himself in the crash by turning himself into a protective ball of wood and leaves, wrapped around the other four, to Rocket’s horror and grief. It took seeing certain death for his partner to not only admit that he did care about Groot-- a lot, in fact-- but to realize Groot really did care about him, back, and saw through his grumpiness as clearly as Rocket saw through his limited vocabulary. That is a Big Deal, because Rocket never did believe anybody else really cared about him before Groot, and now he's lost it through what he sees as his own actions. The crash is the last thing he remembers, and everyone can assume he died in it despite Groot's attempt to save them. Rocket certainly will.
Sample Journal Entry:
He’s not here! You can’t tell me you kidnapped a guy for the death-prison reform ship and left his partner behind!
[Rocket’s apparently been digging through every scrap of potential personal belongings in the cabin he's been assigned, even tearing some of them. He’s standing in the middle of the mess, ranting.]
If anybody deserves this stupid second chance of yours, this redemption or whatever it is you're trying to do, it's him, not me! So you picked me up, but just left him there? Probably smashed to kindling? And dragged me here? That's just messed up! I don't believe it. You wouldn't be that dumb.
[He pauses to focus a glare and a sharp-toothed snarl on the nearest warden.]
So you tell me right now, or swear I'll blow a hole in this goddamned ship. Where’s. Groot!
Sample RP:
Test-drive meme
Special Notes: None
