[App] a_facility

[listenupbitchcakes]

OOC Information:
Name: Aubrey
Age: 24
AIM: meant to care
E-MAIL: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
Are you new? If not, list your current characters: Rikki Barnes

IC Information:
Name: Jessica Drew
Fandom: Marvel 616
Timeline: Spider-Woman: Agent of SWORD
Age: Early 30s? Prooobably? IDK, man, comics.
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 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.

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.

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.

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; 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 somehow 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. She joined the Avengers - or rather, stayed on the Avengers, despite never having joined them herself to begin with - but she's still having a rough time, feeling isolated and hurt and confused. This probably isn't helped by the fact that the Avengers are now in hiding, operating illegally since Norman Osborn took control of SHIELD and the Avengers Tower in the wake of the invasion. Recently, she was approached by Abigail Brand, the leader of a group called SWORD, and offered the chance to go hunting some of the Skrulls still remaining on the planet. Given the chance for some sort of vengeance, Jess leapt at the opportunity.

When she arrives in Fac, she's been in Madripoor for a few days. She's killed two Skrulls, been arrested, been abducted by HYDRA, been attacked by the Thunderbolts who are trying to drag her back to Norman Osborn, and is in the process of getting the shit kicked out of her by the Skrull she was sent to find. Because that is just the kind of luck life she's been having.

Roleplay Sample - Log:

Jess sees Anya coming from down the hall - rusty brown hair emerging from Carol's apartment, her voice carrying ahead of her as she talks to her girlfriend - and almost without thinking ducks through the door into the stairwell, out of sight before the girl can notice her. A part of her (a very large part, at that) feels stupid and cowardly, avoiding a perfectly nice girl who looks up to her, who may as well be Carol's daughter, who only seems to want Jessica to like her. But...

She sighs, leaning back against the closed door to the hall and letting her head drop back against it, just softly enough not to make a thump Anya might notice as she passes. It's the way she looks at her, every time they're in a room together. It's not that suspicious sideways glance people throw her way when they think she's not looking, or the worried frown like they're trying to decide just how much the Skrull thing's screwed her up, if she's even stable enough to be trusted to do her job anymore. Anya looks at her like she's someone to admire. A good person. A person who doesn't screw up everything she touches. A hero.

It should feel good. It should be a relief after being surrounded by so many people who can't look at her without seeing Veranke. It just makes her feel sick. She holds her breath and waits for the sound of Anya's footsteps and voice to recede down the hall, and gives it another minute or so before she actually opens the door and steps out into the hall again, heading to Carol's apartment. Maybe she should ask her to have a word with her protege about appropriate role models or something, because - fellow spider-person or not - Jessica is certain she's not it.

Sometimes it feels like that's the only thing she's certain of these days.

Roleplay Sample - Journal:

So this is great. Hilarious. Barely off one spaceship after being kidnapped by aliens, and now here I am again. This is...

There has to be a point where things can't possibly get any worse, right? Someone please tell me I've hit it, because if there's some lower level of hell waiting for me, I'm going to scream. Or maybe just start punching things. That sounds better, actually.

I've been told you're not Skrulls here, and so far - for lack of a better option, assuming my alien detector hasn't been screwed with - I'm believing it. But I'm still getting a lot of red lights here, and frankly, it's making me nervous. Any chance asking everyone who's not human to introduce themselves and announce their planet of origin would do any good, or is that asking too much?

Probably is, with my luck.

This game includes horrible mental and physical torture of your character. After reading the rules/faq for clarification, how do you expect your character to handle this and continue to function?

Jess has been tortured. She's been brainwashed. She meets terrible things happening to her with bared teeth and snarling defiance, and she cannot be broken. However, she is sensitive to having her head screwed with, having people make her do things against her will, and if that happens, or if she feels she's been made to do something she can't justify, she'll probably brood a lot and get angry at people who don't deserve it and not tell anyone about her problems ever - though her canonmates (and hopefully any other friends she makes in the Facility) will mitigate that somewhat. In short... yes, she will be a little dysfunctional, but no more than she is already. In her words: "I can take anything you got. I was born broken."