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> PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Emmy
PRONOUNS: She/Her
AGE: 28
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
rifting
> CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Ian Fowler
CANON: OC
AGE: 34
CANON POINT: after an alien apocalypse and an oops with the leader's son
HISTORY:
PERSONALITY:
The first impression someone gets from Ian is that "chill vibe" feeling. It's in his body language, it's in his posture, and it's the version of himself that he likes to portray to the world. He isn't easily baited into arguments, he's not quick to anger, and when presented with an issue he comes at it with a grounded and unbiased approach. He weighs both sides of a problem, or sees both perspectives of feuding parties, and because of this he can present compromises in a way that feels rational but not condescending. He can keep a cool head under pressure, but that's not necessarily a product of healthy coping - his upbringing lead him to be incredibly detached, it's just that he uses it to his advantage. He tends to store up all of his anger or sadness (or horror and fear) and set them aside until later, when he can process it all in private by himself.
This is entirely a product of his upbringing. Growing up without a father was difficult at first, and he always had the sense of something missing. He'd ask his mother about it when he could, but being the type of woman she was (independent, feminist, stoic, sort of a hippy) she'd dismiss the topic without any real detail. As soon as he was old enough to not burn the house down and fix his own dinner she took on a second job, and he spent nearly his entire life that way - coming home to an empty house, having nobody but his own company. To him, it feels like all of his relationships go this way; they're surface level, friendly and enjoyable, but incredibly impermanent. It's likely the result of him self-sabotaging or refusing to allow himself to create intimate connections - the last straw was probably his mother's death. The only other person he was tethered to, and once she was gone it's like his willingness to be vulnerable closed up shop. He allows people to drift out of his life without doing anything to stop it, convinced that's the way it was always going to go. As a result, he's never had a serious relationship that lasted longer than a year, and all of his friends are just literally friends, no best friends, no found family. He gets invited to their weddings and their parties, but they've never been to his house and they don't know his mother's name. He truly began to realize this about himself after the world went to shit, when he realized he didn't have anyone to feel extremely concerned about and nobody to notice if he, himself, got killed.
Spending so much of his time alone (and heavily encouraged by his mother when she was around), Ian tended to turn to books and interests that fascinated him to fill up his time. When he was very young he'd take things apart and put them back together again; alarm clocks, vacuum cleaners. Anything that he could disassemble and learn the inner workings of, and then put back together whole. This definitely isn't a metaphor for his father issues, that would be totally nuts right? Later, this became finding the problem with something and resolving it - spilling over from machines and appliances to people. He studies people like he studies his work, and he has enough social intelligence to Get them. This has been one of the key things that kept him alive after things got dire - picking up on the invading species' patterns, making keen judgement calls on strategic supply runs, making good judgement calls when someone didn't seem like a good fit for the Crater Lake survivalist group.
When not filling his time with solo hobbies, Ian tends to be a little desperate for human contact at least at some level. He works best in group situations rather than one on one, and he can facilitate group discussions or add to group dynamics in a way that seems effortless and outgoing. It started in middle school with his group of delinquents, and admittedly began as a need to be liked by his peers. As he's gotten older, this outgoing social navigation turned him into a social butterfly; his calm and ease make it seem like he's not trying to be the center of attention, and his aloof nature keep him from coming on too strong. He's comfortable being around people almost all the time, comfortable drinking or doing group activities with zero anxiety - because he doesn't let them in really.
Because of his solitary nature and his intelligence, Ian tends to become a little full of himself. He tries to stay self-aware and check it with some humility, but he has a natural instinct to assume his opinion is the Right opinion. When it comes to a matter of morality or decision making, he strongly relates to one side of an issue and anyone on the other side is wrong & should feel bad about themselves. While he isn't even remotely a mansplainer (his mother was way too strong an influence for that shit), he gets so keen on teaching people and sharing knowledge that he might assume they know less than they do - or less than him, unless proven otherwise. He also believes that his life experience has made him a kind of "emotionally evolved", that his unusual and difficult upbringing + all the experience he's gained both in college and in his career make him wise. He dishes out that wisdom like it's candy, and may shake his head at people who don't take it. He won't harp, but he may quietly judge. In terms of his place in the survivalist counsel post-apocalypse, this earns him an equal amount of respect and derision - the more morally aligned of the group tend to agree with his assessments whereas the purely tactical survival-first members dismiss him as idealistic and naive to the grisly, hard choices that ought to be made.
Despite being a little too full of himself about it, Ian is actually pretty wise. He tends to see the bigger picture as well as the smaller details that make it up, and he can find a middle ground between both. His social exploration and exposure have given him a really good understanding of the human condition, and a lot of the perspectives that make up people individually. He offers up advice from a place of levelheadedness, and he navigates things with real care. He uses his perceptiveness and empathy to understand people, take a really good educated guess at their needs, and imagine the consequences of his actions before he takes them. Because he likes to fluff up his "I'm a wise and good person" ego, he goes out of his way to be considerate at all times and judges people who aren't.
All of his outgoing nature is surface level. He doesn't really believe in intimacy for himself - mostly because he doesn't let himself have it, not after his mother, not with the hole his father left. He's absolutely convinced that all relationships are temporary, all things end, and to open himself up to vulnerability will only result in that terrible feeling of loss again. He hasn't dealt with this and only mildly acknowledges it, which makes him a total hypocrite about the advice he gives to others and his desire to be considered emotionally evolved. Beyond just that, he may take up a moral stance on something one minute and then later down the line choose the exact opposite of it if it feels like it aligns with his then-feelings. He lets people out of his life so easily and either feels sorry for himself about it or lowkey considers them shallow.
Although it takes a LOT of work to upset Ian, some things will absolutely do it. Getting into heated discussions about an issue he's decided he's the moral authority on will eventually devolve into a flaring of his normally repressed temper, and he has a tendency to yell. From a personal relationships standpoint, on the off-chance he does start to let somebody in and he finds himself slighted or betrayed by them, he takes it incredibly personally. He may surprise them by breaking his normally reserved disposition and getting incredibly petty or spiteful, using his perceptiveness and his intelligence to unleash ruthless commentary. In the heat of the moment he's very difficult to communicate with, he'll take everything in the worst possible way, and he won't concede until after he's stepped away to ground himself again. After that he may re-evaluate and feel guilty for the things he said or did, or - if the issue was severe enough - he may carry resentment and a grudge for long duration of time. This is largely because of the next bullet point.
Ian has a tendency not to deal with his core issues. He'll compromise and work out surface-level misunderstandings or disagreements, but anything deeper than that gets shoved down. He hasn't dealt with his fear of abandonment, he hasn't really processed his mother's death, and when he gets incredibly angry at someone he channels all of his emotion into his work until he doesn't feel it anymore. He'll spend hours or days at a time on a project or preparing things for a class, he'll take on too many classes at once, he'll essentially drown himself in work to avoid dealing with something that greatly upsets him. Because it never comes out into the open, because he never addresses the parts of him that hurt, he never reaches a resolution. He will carry a bad-enough rift for the rest of his life unless the other party makes a serious move to force him to acknowledge things. Once the world went to shit, he lost a lot of this outlet. There's plenty to build and fix and do, but there are no classes to teach now. He goes out on supply runs when he can, but when he can't he's taken up turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Alcohol is becoming a little bit of a crutch, and to satiate the part of himself that knows he's unattached and empty he tends to sleep around with people and then feel incredibly unfulfilled the next day.
SPECIES: Human
APPEARANCE: one
SKILLS:
NEW POWER: inorganic manipulation
> SAMPLES
SAMPLE ONE: Here
SAMPLE TWO: Here
NAME: Emmy
PRONOUNS: She/Her
AGE: 28
CONTACT:
> CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Ian Fowler
CANON: OC
AGE: 34
CANON POINT: after an alien apocalypse and an oops with the leader's son
HISTORY:
- Born September 1, 1986 in Weaverville, California.
- Single mother and an absent father without even a name to him, he believes his mother may have an idea or two of who it could be but not any real certainty.
- His mother worked 2 jobs to keep them financially afloat, meaning as soon as he was old enough Ian became a latchkey kid and spent the vast majority of his time alone.
- In his teen years he fell into a group of semi-hoodlum kids with whom he'd smoke pot or break into abandoned buildings with, but in the mining town that is Weaverville there isn't really a lot of trouble you can get into.
- Pushed by his mother to make a better life for himself than she could give him, he attended college and ultimately followed his tendency to take things apart & put them back together to decide on an engineering major.
- Did your rather stereotypical experimenting in his under-grad years, sleeping around and playing with recreational drugs off and on
- Found out his mother had cancer not long after he started post-grad, she was a pack a day smoker who didn't quit even after her diagnosis. She passed away 6 months later.
- He spent a few years after her passing withdrawn and channeling all of his feelings into school or work or projects.
- Private consulting / contracting after getting his masters, took on a few apprentices and found he really liked sharing his knowledge or guiding them to their fullest potential.
- Experimented with teaching off and on until his resume was good enough to get an adjunct position at Berkeley, where he devoted most of his focus rather than contracted work.
- All this boring shit aside, things get real in 2018 when humanity experiences First Contact via a technologically advanced species that touched down on all major humanity hubs across the globe.
- Humanity is subjugated entirely in a matter of months. The species have a name for themselves that translates into English as "The Judge", they're a scavenging race who - much like their title suggests - visit planets with intelligent life and determine whether or not they're deserving of the gift they've been given.
- Haha of course Earth sucks, do you even live here? Humanity is found unworthy of its resources, and the Judge sets up shop to strip it and harvest all of it that it can for their colonizing fleet.
- Humans are given the opportunity to join work camps in order to survive, doing manual labor for the race and living off bare-minimum scraps. The alternative is considered an act of aggression, and any human that refuses will be slaughtered.
- In addition to the decimation of anyone who rebels, they also deem humans with "defects" to be a waste of resources; anyone with any kind of physical problem that can be detected is "mercy killed", which can range anywhere from wheelchairs to even glasses. Less obvious disabilities may slip through the screening process - contact lenses, asthma, anything that doesn't manifest plainly on the surface. If a disability is discovered later, the human is put down. This includes flu symptoms and the common cold.
- To further demonstrate their mercy, humans in the work camp can volunteer to die rather than toil - there are daily offerings of something colloquially termed a "suicide bus", where broken and hopeless people can board to be carted to their death. Although it's rumored to be a painless alternative, nobody knows how these people are killed and nobody has ever returned from a suicide bus.
- The Judge's primary interest is in metal. They have ships not terribly unlike magnets that can detect any metal larger than a sedan. All major cities are a threat, and while outlying small towns haven't yet been fully ripped out of the ground, venturing into one is a risk - it could be visited at any time and anyone unfortunate enough to be inside of a building at this time is crushed in the devastation like an enormous metal-only trash compactor.
- Ian was fortunate enough to make it out of the city without being rounded up or slaughtered - not because he's super great at being a bad-ass survivor, but through dumb luck and charity in the form of his TA Luke rolling up with his sisters and throwing out the apocalyptic version of "get in loser we're going shopping."
- They head north through the national forests, keeping off major highways and then eventually abandoning the car as too much of a risk after a close call.
- They wind up merging with a few additional survivors, and find their way up to Crater Lake National Park. The metal-free cabins, the remoteness of the location, and the access to fresh water make it a habitable and mostly-safe place to establish a tentative homestead.
- Ian is still not a super apocalypse bad ass, so he does not become the leader of this group. It's lead by a strong independent boss bitch named Nia, who uses him for both his level-headed council and for what he can bring to the table - namely, figuring out solutions to increase their quality of life that don't involve metal. His crowning achievement is a shower made entirely of PVC pipe.
- Months pass and they wind up taking in a few more stragglers; everyone is expected to participate in the maintenance of the camp, and all able bodied people are made to go on supply run expeditions in a sort of rotation.
- Nia's son Jamill, a teenager, began pushing for his involvement in these supply runs. There's a back and forth among Nia, Ian, and a few other members of her unofficial counsel, with Ian ultimately making the final call that he's old enough to begin participating and he has to start eventually anyway. Might as well be on a small, routine run to a tiny town in a group of the most experienced of them.
- They get cornered by Judge soldiers doing a sweep before their ship rips out a store. They manage to get out before being crushed, but Judge soldiers end up snatching Nia's son and taking him away presumably to a work camp. Ian will be joining the game before going back to camp to tell Nia the news.
PERSONALITY:
- Calm & Even Tempered
The first impression someone gets from Ian is that "chill vibe" feeling. It's in his body language, it's in his posture, and it's the version of himself that he likes to portray to the world. He isn't easily baited into arguments, he's not quick to anger, and when presented with an issue he comes at it with a grounded and unbiased approach. He weighs both sides of a problem, or sees both perspectives of feuding parties, and because of this he can present compromises in a way that feels rational but not condescending. He can keep a cool head under pressure, but that's not necessarily a product of healthy coping - his upbringing lead him to be incredibly detached, it's just that he uses it to his advantage. He tends to store up all of his anger or sadness (or horror and fear) and set them aside until later, when he can process it all in private by himself.
- Aloof & Detached
This is entirely a product of his upbringing. Growing up without a father was difficult at first, and he always had the sense of something missing. He'd ask his mother about it when he could, but being the type of woman she was (independent, feminist, stoic, sort of a hippy) she'd dismiss the topic without any real detail. As soon as he was old enough to not burn the house down and fix his own dinner she took on a second job, and he spent nearly his entire life that way - coming home to an empty house, having nobody but his own company. To him, it feels like all of his relationships go this way; they're surface level, friendly and enjoyable, but incredibly impermanent. It's likely the result of him self-sabotaging or refusing to allow himself to create intimate connections - the last straw was probably his mother's death. The only other person he was tethered to, and once she was gone it's like his willingness to be vulnerable closed up shop. He allows people to drift out of his life without doing anything to stop it, convinced that's the way it was always going to go. As a result, he's never had a serious relationship that lasted longer than a year, and all of his friends are just literally friends, no best friends, no found family. He gets invited to their weddings and their parties, but they've never been to his house and they don't know his mother's name. He truly began to realize this about himself after the world went to shit, when he realized he didn't have anyone to feel extremely concerned about and nobody to notice if he, himself, got killed.
- Perceptive & Intelligent
Spending so much of his time alone (and heavily encouraged by his mother when she was around), Ian tended to turn to books and interests that fascinated him to fill up his time. When he was very young he'd take things apart and put them back together again; alarm clocks, vacuum cleaners. Anything that he could disassemble and learn the inner workings of, and then put back together whole. This definitely isn't a metaphor for his father issues, that would be totally nuts right? Later, this became finding the problem with something and resolving it - spilling over from machines and appliances to people. He studies people like he studies his work, and he has enough social intelligence to Get them. This has been one of the key things that kept him alive after things got dire - picking up on the invading species' patterns, making keen judgement calls on strategic supply runs, making good judgement calls when someone didn't seem like a good fit for the Crater Lake survivalist group.
- Social & Laid Back
When not filling his time with solo hobbies, Ian tends to be a little desperate for human contact at least at some level. He works best in group situations rather than one on one, and he can facilitate group discussions or add to group dynamics in a way that seems effortless and outgoing. It started in middle school with his group of delinquents, and admittedly began as a need to be liked by his peers. As he's gotten older, this outgoing social navigation turned him into a social butterfly; his calm and ease make it seem like he's not trying to be the center of attention, and his aloof nature keep him from coming on too strong. He's comfortable being around people almost all the time, comfortable drinking or doing group activities with zero anxiety - because he doesn't let them in really.
- Egotistical & Self-Righteous
Because of his solitary nature and his intelligence, Ian tends to become a little full of himself. He tries to stay self-aware and check it with some humility, but he has a natural instinct to assume his opinion is the Right opinion. When it comes to a matter of morality or decision making, he strongly relates to one side of an issue and anyone on the other side is wrong & should feel bad about themselves. While he isn't even remotely a mansplainer (his mother was way too strong an influence for that shit), he gets so keen on teaching people and sharing knowledge that he might assume they know less than they do - or less than him, unless proven otherwise. He also believes that his life experience has made him a kind of "emotionally evolved", that his unusual and difficult upbringing + all the experience he's gained both in college and in his career make him wise. He dishes out that wisdom like it's candy, and may shake his head at people who don't take it. He won't harp, but he may quietly judge. In terms of his place in the survivalist counsel post-apocalypse, this earns him an equal amount of respect and derision - the more morally aligned of the group tend to agree with his assessments whereas the purely tactical survival-first members dismiss him as idealistic and naive to the grisly, hard choices that ought to be made.
- Wise & Considerate
Despite being a little too full of himself about it, Ian is actually pretty wise. He tends to see the bigger picture as well as the smaller details that make it up, and he can find a middle ground between both. His social exploration and exposure have given him a really good understanding of the human condition, and a lot of the perspectives that make up people individually. He offers up advice from a place of levelheadedness, and he navigates things with real care. He uses his perceptiveness and empathy to understand people, take a really good educated guess at their needs, and imagine the consequences of his actions before he takes them. Because he likes to fluff up his "I'm a wise and good person" ego, he goes out of his way to be considerate at all times and judges people who aren't.
- Lonely & Hypocritical
All of his outgoing nature is surface level. He doesn't really believe in intimacy for himself - mostly because he doesn't let himself have it, not after his mother, not with the hole his father left. He's absolutely convinced that all relationships are temporary, all things end, and to open himself up to vulnerability will only result in that terrible feeling of loss again. He hasn't dealt with this and only mildly acknowledges it, which makes him a total hypocrite about the advice he gives to others and his desire to be considered emotionally evolved. Beyond just that, he may take up a moral stance on something one minute and then later down the line choose the exact opposite of it if it feels like it aligns with his then-feelings. He lets people out of his life so easily and either feels sorry for himself about it or lowkey considers them shallow.
- Inflexible When Angry
Although it takes a LOT of work to upset Ian, some things will absolutely do it. Getting into heated discussions about an issue he's decided he's the moral authority on will eventually devolve into a flaring of his normally repressed temper, and he has a tendency to yell. From a personal relationships standpoint, on the off-chance he does start to let somebody in and he finds himself slighted or betrayed by them, he takes it incredibly personally. He may surprise them by breaking his normally reserved disposition and getting incredibly petty or spiteful, using his perceptiveness and his intelligence to unleash ruthless commentary. In the heat of the moment he's very difficult to communicate with, he'll take everything in the worst possible way, and he won't concede until after he's stepped away to ground himself again. After that he may re-evaluate and feel guilty for the things he said or did, or - if the issue was severe enough - he may carry resentment and a grudge for long duration of time. This is largely because of the next bullet point.
- Workaholic & Repressive
Ian has a tendency not to deal with his core issues. He'll compromise and work out surface-level misunderstandings or disagreements, but anything deeper than that gets shoved down. He hasn't dealt with his fear of abandonment, he hasn't really processed his mother's death, and when he gets incredibly angry at someone he channels all of his emotion into his work until he doesn't feel it anymore. He'll spend hours or days at a time on a project or preparing things for a class, he'll take on too many classes at once, he'll essentially drown himself in work to avoid dealing with something that greatly upsets him. Because it never comes out into the open, because he never addresses the parts of him that hurt, he never reaches a resolution. He will carry a bad-enough rift for the rest of his life unless the other party makes a serious move to force him to acknowledge things. Once the world went to shit, he lost a lot of this outlet. There's plenty to build and fix and do, but there are no classes to teach now. He goes out on supply runs when he can, but when he can't he's taken up turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Alcohol is becoming a little bit of a crutch, and to satiate the part of himself that knows he's unattached and empty he tends to sleep around with people and then feel incredibly unfulfilled the next day.
SPECIES: Human
APPEARANCE: one
SKILLS:
NEW POWER: inorganic manipulation
> SAMPLES
SAMPLE ONE: Here
SAMPLE TWO: Here