[App] alteredstates

[listenupbitchcakes]

Player Information
Name/Alias: Aubrey
Personal Journal: mortalcity
Email: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
I am 18+ years old.

May we post and/or link your application for others to see as an example in the future? Yes


Character Information
Character Name: Jessica Drew
Canon: Marvel 616
Canon Point: Avengers Assemble: The Enemy Within
Character Journal: listenupbitchcakes

Appearance:

Jess is 5'10", with a lithe athletic build and curves sufficient to disguise the fighter's musculature if you don't look too hard. She has long, thick black hair (dyed, naturally dark blonde or light brown), green eyes and fair skin. Her costume is red and yellow and skintight, with a mask that hides the top half of her face while leaving her hair free; it has "web-pits" under the arms and attached to the sides that allow her to glide for long distances.

Jess Drew is the cutest Avenger everyone else can go home
More modern and maskless
And more realistic

Age: Early 30s? Prooooobably? IDK man, comics.
History:

So Jess was pretty much doomed to a weird life from before she was born. Her parents, Jonathan and Miriam Drew, were researching the genomes of several species of spider, funded by the terrorist organization HYDRA; while Miriam was pregnant with Jess, she was hit with a laser beam containing the genetic information of spiders. Her parents were surprised when the child was born apparently completely normal... at least, until she was about seven, and started displaying some powers - sticking to things accidentally, at first. Her father saw it as an opportunity to further his research, and began experimenting on her, until her mother discovered it and confronted him. He lost his temper and attacked her; Jess, panicked, hit him with a venom blast and fell into a coma.

She woke up ten years later. She was told her parents were dead and HYDRA had rescued her, kept her alive for the decade her body spent repairing itself. A scared seven-year-old in a near-grown woman's body, she believed them when they told her HYDRA were freedom fighters, doing good for the world - after all, she had no reason not to. She was trained as a covert agent for a year while HYDRA both helped her mind catch up to her physical age and brainwashed her, twisting what she knew of her life, trying to make certain she stayed loyal to HYDRA. Finally, they sent Jess to kill Nick Fury - she failed, but Fury saw a confused, frightened seventeen-year-old girl, and rather than killing her or sending her to be interrogated or whatever else it is SHIELD does with captured terrorists, he showed her the truth about HYDRA, what they were really like, some of the terrible things they'd done. Jess ran and went into hiding - from HYDRA, from SHIELD - for several years. When HYDRA tracked her down, she killed everyone who came after her and exploded the HYDRA base; when SHIELD tracked her down, she let Fury convince her to work with them.

Eventually, Jess left SHIELD and moved to California, where she worked as a bounty hunter acting as Spider-Woman, and a private investigator under her real name. She made friends and contacts, though mostly staying under the radar as a hero, and for perhaps the first time ever started to have a life that she was comfortable and happy in - so of course, things had to go wrong. In a battle with Morgan Le Fey, Jessica was apparently killed; the Avengers and Doctor Strange helped her spirit return to her body, but after she returned, she no longer had her powers. She abandoned her Spider-Woman identity, continuing to work as a private investigator.

Over time, Jessica's abilities began to come back, but slowly and erratically, not enough to be really relied upon - not enough to allow her to work as a hero again. When HYDRA contacted her, offering to give her her powers back if she would work for them, Jess immediately went to Nick Fury to ask what she should do; he told her to accept the offer, to work as a double agent within HYDRA, and since the alternative was letting HYDRA kill her for refusing, she did. Unfortunately, it was a set-up: she went in for the procedure to restore her powers... and the person who came out wasn't Jessica.

She had been targeted for replacement by the Skrulls, shapeshifting aliens attempting a covert invasion of Earth, and Jess was replaced by the Skrull queen, Veranke. The Skrull lived her life, joined the Avengers, and eventually made an outright attempt to take over the world. Jess seems to have been unconscious or otherwise unaware of her situation: when a ship containing many Skrull hostages crashed at the very end of the invasion, Jess was confused and had actually never seen a Skrull at that point.

She came back to a life that didn't feel like hers anymore, and a world that knew her face and hated it because it was the face of the Skrull queen, and she's been struggling to pull her life back together ever since. She stayed on the Avengers, joined an organization called SWORD when they gave her a chance to go alien-hunting, started dating Hawkeye, and... things started to come together for her. Of course, Jess being Jess and this being comics, they couldn't stay that way for long: she's recently broken up with Clint after finding out he cheated on her, her best friend has a brain tumor that's killing her... and she's been abducted by a magic river. Just when she thought nothing could surprise her...

Personality:

Looking at Jessica at first, it's easy to see her as the private detective she once was, and harder to see her as the secret agent she was born and raised to be. She's tough and competent, if a little socially awkward. She has a tendency to be a little stand-offish, blunt and not at all shy with her opinions, but she has a wry sense of humor, sardonic and often teasing, with a tendency to veer toward the self-deprecating. If you know her casually, she's often friendly and willing to help with any problem you have - but she still tends to keep her feelings and her own problems to herself.

On a deeper level, Jess is not exactly an easy person to get to know or understand, and maybe it's because she barely understands people herself. It's not surprising: as a child, she had no one around her own age, the only adults she ever saw regularly were her parents and her nursemaid, and she missed a whole decade of her formative years. Relating to other people just isn't natural to her - when she was younger, people would sense something off about her and instinctively avoid her or view her with suspicion, and though she's gotten much better at faking normality over the years, she's still intensely conscious of a gap between herself and most people. A huge part of her self-image centers around being an outsider; she has a strong tendency to be lonely and isolated and not really know how to connect with other people enough to bridge the gap.

Jess doesn't trust easy, and again, it's not hard to see why. Her father saw her more as a valuable experiment than a child; the people who "rescued" her and became, in a way, a second family to her turned out to be murderous fanatics. This has only gotten worse since returning from her Skrull kidnapping - it's hard to stop wondering, after that, why no one noticed she was gone, why no one saw the difference between herself and Veranke, whether people are really seeing her when they look at her, or the murderous alien that stole her face and life. It's also hard not to feel inferior - in a way, the Skrull was a better Jessica than Jessica was: she became an Avenger, she made friends, she was generally less broken and screwed-up... A lot of the time, Jess doesn't really like herself, and looking at how Veranke replaced her and what she did during that time drives home all the reasons why.

For all her issues connecting with other people, she is deeply compelled to look out for those around her, whether she knows them or not. Her primary goal is usually keeping innocent people safe... though inflicting pain on the bad guys is always a good secondary goal, and she is not exactly restrained or merciful when it comes to that. She also has a bad habit of not entirely thinking plans through, not asking for help when she could really use it, or charging into a bad plan knowing it's bad and just not caring - Jess just plain doesn't always make good choices in the pursuit of doing the right thing, but she keeps trying, time after time, and she has the best intentions at heart.

Powers/Special Abilities:

- General superhumanness. She's much stronger, faster, and more durable than a human ever could be; she has better reflexes and is generally more flexible and agile than ordinary humans as well.
- Immune to toxins, poisons, drugs and radiation. It does take one exposure to all toxins, poisons and drugs for her to be immune - they will affect her in that first exposure, though not to the extent that they would an ordinary human, and after that her body is primed to counter that particular chemical and will not respond to it. Radiation does not affect her at all.
- Wall-crawling. Jess' hands and feet can adhere to surfaces through bioelectrostatic energy (which allows it to work through gloves and shoes, so that's kind of important).
- Venom blasts. Don't ask me why they're called venom blasts, they're not actually venom at all. They're bursts of bioelectric energy that can stun or kill... or just hurt a hell of a lot, at their gentlest.
- Pheremones! She can secrete pheremones that elicit strong attraction, fear, or other emotions. This is consciously controlled, though if she's very emotional she sometimes does it without meaning to.

River Power:

Jess now has the ability to talk to spiders. She can't order them around unless they feel like listening to her: she can just understand them. Also, proximity to Jess grants spiders considerably more intelligence than they would ordinarily have; this effect wears off gradually once they're no longer exposed to her.

Reason for Character Choice:

Jess is a fun mix of dark and broody and totally screwed up, and a complete goofball dork who genuinely cares for people and wants to do good in the world. She is deeply damaged and knows it, she's constantly fighting her own feelings of inadequacy and feeling out of place in the world for one reason or another, but she does keep fighting... and despite all of that, she maintains a sense of humor, the ability to tease her friends and crack jokes in the darkest hours. Basically, as an RP character, she's full of potential for emotional drama without getting too dark and depressing (like some of the other options I considered for this game).
She'll do best in a city setting where she doesn't feel too trapped, and one where there's no particular group trying to control her actions - after her childhood, that wouldn't go over well, but in the freedom of a city, she'd be able to relax and settle in. Additionally, she's pretty used to parallel universes and weird shit, so she won't spend too long adjusting and I'll get to jump right into the fun stuff. Her experience as a private detective gives her a lot of potential openings for plots and CR (the superhero thing doesn't hurt either, since her first instinct when it comes to big direct threats is "GO ZAP IT, SEE WHAT HAPPENS"). Basically, she's everything I look for in a first character to a game, and this game is the perfect place for her.

Writing Samples
First-Person Transmission Sample:

Okay, so I know we're all blaming this on the river, and... I guess the Hudson's always been pretty shady, so it doesn't surprise me, but. I swear to God if I see one green, shapeshifting, bumpy-chinned alien, there's a ninety-five percent chance I'm going to start smashing things Hulk-style.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound racist or speciesist or whatever, just... I'm not doing this again. The whole alien abduction thing has really lost its charm for me.

Assuming it really is the river and there's no nefarious purpose here... Hi. I'm your friendly neighborhood Spiderwoman, I apologize to my male counterpart for stealing his line, and I guess I'll be stuck here until the Avengers sort out their shit long enough to have one of the science-types track me down. Nice to meet you.

Third-Person Log Sample:

Jess slammed her suite door behind her and heroically restrained the urge to put a hole in Tony's wall. Shrugging her coat off her shoulders, she let it fall to the floor, stalked to the couch, and fell face-down onto it, outer arm and leg dangling to the floor.

"Stupid," she mumbled into the couch cushions. "Why am I always so stupid? Dumb boy and his dumb face and his dumb--"

The sentence strangled in her throat, tangled up in a sob. Jess clenched her jaw and tried to will away the tears pricking her eyes. Carol warned her. She knew it was a bad idea right from the start, but she always figured if it was going to blow up it would be because of his ex-wife, or because he was a jerk or secretly evil or something, not...

Not that she wasn't even worth getting serious about. Not that she hadn't even mattered enough to worry about hurting.

"Asshole," she whispered into the couch, and groped on the side table for the phone. She couldn't tell Carol. Not now. Couldn't face the sympathetic face and the 'I told you so' and the offers to punch him into next week. But if she had to get up tomorrow and worry about whether she was going to bump into Hawkeye in the kitchen...

"Hey," she said as the phone stopped ringing and Carol picked up, pitching her voice higher and hoping it sounded more cheerful than she felt. "Are you doing anything tonight?"