Jason Rand (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beyond_the_sea) wrote2013-09-07 10:02 pm
beyond_the_sea) wrote2013-09-07 10:02 pm
here he comes to save the earth
Trigger warning for frank fontaine discussion of drugs and murder stuff.
ALSO spoiler warning for Bioshock (but if you haven't played Bioshock then what are you doing with your life)
OOC Information:
Name: Caz
Are you over 15? I'm afraid I am yes
Contact: I'm on AIM as rianofski, and Plurk as hypnoplasmids
IC Information:
Name: Preincarnation: Jack Wynand, or Jack Ryan. Reincarnation: Jason Rand.
Canon and medium: Bioshock; video game
Age: Preincarnation: Either 24 or straight up four, depending on who you ask and whether their memories are hilariously inaccurate. Reincarnation: Just plain old 24.
Preincarnation Species: Human.
Preincarnation Appearance: Tall, broad, muscular; short dark hair; generally built like a brick shithouse. Lots of scars and whatnot from pretty much nonstop battle. Twin chainlink tattoos on both his wrists.
Any differences: Jason is a little shorter, with floppier hair, and built like a normal big guy rather than a walking tank. Also, he is sans the scars and tattoos.
Preincarnated History: SO MUCH BULLSHIT OKAY.
(You know what, just in case I'm throwing too many names at you at once, I've added a brief glossary at the end of the app.)
Jack began life in a lab as a harvested embryo. So far, so good! Essentially, there was a huge power struggle going on in an underwater not-utopia called Rapture. The city was descending into vicious civil war, and the pretender, Frank Fontaine, wanted to oust the man in charge, Andrew Ryan.
Never one to go for the simple option, Fontaine put together a huge implausible scheme involving faking his death and growing an assassin out of Ryan's own DNA. That assassin was Jack.
Li'l Baby Jack was pumped full ofmagic scientifically plausible drugs and general mental conditioning in order to:
A roaring success, Fontaine's kawaii li'l sleeper agent was shipped off to the surface world to wander around until he was needed. Jack lived on land for a year, never suspecting that he wasn't a normal guy, until he received the orders he didn't know he'd been waiting for. Would he kindly get on a plane flying over the Atlantic, and then when it reached certain coordinates, take a gun and bring it the fuck down?
And so at the beginning of the game Jack finds himself in the sea with a crashed plane and a whole lot of problems, and no idea that it was him who made it crash. He takes refuge in a mysterious lighthouse, which leads him in a bathysphere down to the city of Rapture. As far as he knows, besides a nagging sense of nostalgia, it's his first visit.
By now Fontaine has already """died""" and retooled himself as Atlas, hero of the people. It's as Atlas that he introduces himself to Jack, and from then on, he subtly drops that would-you-kindly into conversation to steer Jack towards his ultimate goal: Andrew Ryan. To keep Jack from getting suspicious, he pretends that Ryan has killed his (Atlas's) family, and emphasises the whole 'oh Ryan fucked everyone in Rapture over' angle, giving Jack his own reasons to be mad at the guy.
Jack stomps his way through the magical wonderland of Rapture, enjoying such quaint scenery as massive leaks, rampant Art Deco, and corpses. The city hasn't survived the ongoing civil war very well, and most everyone is either dead or a Splicer -- a crazy superpowered junkie killing for their next hit of ADAM. ADAM is the magic slug drug that helped create Jack in the first place. ADAM, it turns out, is a discovery that Rapture probably shouldn't have made.
Jack starts using it pretty might right away, because hey, when in Rome, right?
Newly armed with various powers such as telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and bees, Jack battles his way through the city in whatever direction Atlas points him. Along the way he's attacked by about a zillion splicers, whom he dispatches. He also encounters Big Daddies -- huge smelly golems made from diving suits and what used to be human beings. And he encounters their proteges, the Little Sisters -- little zombielike girls who've been turned from children into free-range ADAM factories.
Your average splicer dreams of bagging a Little Sister, but the Big Daddies and their drill arms have other ideas. Jack, on the other hand -- Jack, who is built from the ground up to be an OP motherfucker -- is perfectly capable of bringing down a Big Daddy.
At this point, the player is always given a choice. They can:
Fontaine had a lot of money, but he didn't have ALL THE MONEY, and he definitely didn't have ALL THE TIME, and besides, Jack was a big trial-and-error experiment from start to finish. The scientists involved managed to get the important parts working -- the triggers, the false memories, the accelerated growth. But their deadline was harsh and some things just didn't get prioritised. Things like certain memories, maybe he doesn't recall his birthdays, maybe he isn't as good at spelling as he could be. But especially things that take experience to gain. Real empathy, emotional maturity, that sort of thing is all a little lacking in the toddler who looks like he's 24.
And, to bring us back round into the original topic, that includes really understanding death and its implications. Let's look at his surroundings. He's killing like eight people every twenty minutes, and they're all trying their damnedest to kill him -- that sort of thing dulls the horror of killing, after a while. And Jack is, in fact, dying every so often -- his respawning is built right into the plot of the game. Death is, what? An inconvenience? And that's not even going into what they did to his head in the lab. Fontaine wasn't trying to build no peacenik bleeding heart.
Jack just tries to kill the girls quickly, so that they don't make sad sorts of noises.
As Jack progresses, Ryan keeps trying to kill him, and to figure out whether he's a Soviet spy or what the fuck. But then he started to figure it out. And by the time Jack actually reaches him, Ryan is ready with an info dump: Jack is his son, Jack is mind-controlled, here are the exact words, Atlas is playing him for a fool. All his memories are false. Oh, and Jack is a disappointment. A shitty, moronic, sleepwalking excuse for a son.
And then he makes Jack kill him with a golf club, since, why not.
Atlas reveals himself to be Fontaine, oh no, everyone is shocked and amazed and had totally not worked that out by now. Jack is actually kind of stunned and horrified by this whole set of events -- and they all happen right on top of each other, Ryan's revelations, Ryan's death, Fontaine's mocking confession. If his memories of the farm are false, if he's killed Andrew Ryan, and if Atlas was never real to begin with, then, well, he's kind of lost three dads in the space of ten minutes. And at least one of them is still yukking it up at having betrayed him. That shit is hard to swallow.
He doesn't understand all of it, not right away. But he does understand that Atlas -- Fontaine -- is his enemy now.
And this whole time in Rapture, he's only had one way of dealing with his enemies.
Jack teams up with Dr Tenenbaum, one of his old scientist-creator-types (and thankfully reformed), to take Fontaine the hell down. Jack has kind of sort of been killing her girls for ADAM this whole game, but it seems she's willing to overlook that for the moment in order to rid herself of a greater evil. She manages to remove Jack's mental conditioning (uh, gradually), and then she turns Fontaine's ultimate weapon back at him.
In order to reach him, Jack has to use the Little Sisters -- which means dressing up as one of their lumbering protectors. Sadly, impersonating a Big Daddy involves more than a halloween store costume. The real Big Daddies are mutated and mutilated, grafted into their suits beyond retrieval. Jack doesn't have to go quite that far, but he does end up smelling pretty bad and performing amateur surgery on his own throat.
It's not pleasant, but at least it puts him back on track.
Fontaine, watching his own death jog towards him in an ugly sweater, goes through the five stages of 'oh jesus fuck i'm in trouble':
Jack falls slightly short of the Good Ending, by which I mean he celebrates his victory by literally hijacking a nuclear sub and taking a bunch of splicers to continue murdering people on the surface world. But that's all an afterthought, really.
Reincarnated History: Jason's reincarnated life is significantly less bullshit than his previous incarnation's, although as a trade-off, it's also slightly more boring. He has a similar tendency to go with the flow, a similar ability to accept something as the new status quo without a huge struggle. While this allowed his predecessor to get straight to fighting splicers without a whole lot of questions, in Jason it's just… sort of resulted in a middling, meandering life.
The son of adoptive parents, he did well in school so that they would be proud. But then they stopped talking and his father moved away, and he did less well. College didn't seem like a great idea, with money tight and his ambition distinctly lacking. So he's taken jobs here and there since then, passing some of his paychecks to his mom and smoking away the rest (he's trying to quit. Kind of. Sometimes).
He spends a lot of his free time messing around online, or jogging. In an ideal world he'd be jogging with a dog, but he's not mean enough to inflict his financial situation or schedule-less schedule on an innocent animal. Walking a dog seems like a great idea on the, what, three days a week he actually feels like exercise? The rest of the days, he's resigned to coveting people's pooches from afar.
Now and then he runs races for charity, which would have pissed off his preincarnation's father to hilarious extents. Tends to be on behalf of children's charities like Make-A-Wish and groups for homeless kids.
Online, he once flirted with being an internet troll, as do all kids of a certain age. He felt kind of bad about annoying random people, though, so he stopped. Nowadays he'll sometimes be found beginning to teach himself a language, or beginning to write a novel, or beginning to think about a get-rich-quick scheme. Or he'll just be on one of those newfangled FaceCupids or OKSpaces or whatever the kids are using these days.
Currently he works as a garbage collector, and it gets him up and out in the mornings, so he really doesn't mind it. It's kind of nice, even, he supposes.
But it is getting to the point where he's looking back on his life and going 'dang, what could I have done to make this more exciting?' It's a bit of a depressing position, but his parents aren't pushing him any more, and he can't seem to gather the motivation to put that fire up his own ass.
Gee I wonder if finding the network will help with that??
First Echo: Jason's friend has a daughter, and her daughter had an eighth birthday, and for her birthday they rented a pool and had a party. Jason volunteered to help out. The girls thought it would be an hilarious jape to surprise him by pushing him into the pool.
Submerged and confused, with a small child attached to each limb, Jason had a wonderful opportunity to remember another time when he fell in the water. Except on that other occasion, the water was cold and black, and instead of bright indoor lights, what he was struggling to swim up towards was flames. His echo is the moments after the plane crashed into the Atlantic, when he was trapped underwater, surrounded by sinking luggage and debris.
Preincarnation Personality: Jack's personality was designed in a lab to careful specifications. He is basically what happens when you give a small child endless strength and power and then tell him it's okay if the other kids stop breathing.
He's good on the whole endurance front, mentally as well as physically. If you want someone who can brute force his way through a brick wall and come out the other side still running, Jack is your man. The sheer number of splicers he fights his way through without a breather is really quite impressive. That's on top of the giant diving suit robot monsters, and all the crushing despair inherent to being trapped in a crappy crumbling city under heavy miles of water. I'm sure Jack's not unaffected, but he still goes out and does his thing.
He's blessed and cursed with the ability to accept things quite easily -- and sometimes this doubles as not questioning what he's told, even if he probably should. It definitely doubles as tending to follow orders. He spent a long time following the instructions of a man on a radio, just because the man on the radio said he should. He took it on trust that Atlas was telling the truth and would help him. Later he offered the same complete trust to Dr Tenenbaum, even though he knew she'd spent most of his life treating him as a science experiment, and even when she gave him instructions like 'okay now go pull your own voicebox out through your throat and replace it with a whale noise thing'. As Fontaine put it, "kid, you won't even walk till somebody says 'go'."
While he's naturally all for following orders, once he knows that he's been built and mind controlled, Jack starts to rebel against what comes naturally. It's not exactly an easy fight, especially since he's not the most self-aware of guys to begin with. But he doesn't want to be anybody's faceless tool.
And then of course he goes and becomes Tenenbaum's, so you can see it's going to take him some time and effort to rebel against his programming.
On the other hand, he has good reasons for following Tenenbaum's orders. For one thing, they both have the same goal: Fontaine's death. But as well as that, something Jack desperately wants is somebody to look up to. An authority figure, because he definitely struggles with making decisions on his own. He needs somebody to tell him whether he's doing the right thing.
Sadly, his parental/authority figures so far have included: a false memory created to manipulate him, the scientists who created it, some jerk who's been trying to kill him for the past few hours, and Fontaine's terrible accent. Jack isn't doing so well there; it's no wonder he latches onto Tenenbaum, the closest thing he has left to a mother.
And he could probably use someone to show him how to do life properly, because Jack is not well socialised. He did spend a year on land, so he's not a caveman with no idea how to function. But there are a lot of things people take for granted that he doesn't really get, either because he wasn't taught it by the scientists, or because he hasn't lived long enough to have the requisite experience. He can clean, load and fire like twelve types of ranged weapon, but indirect humour disarms him. He can subsist for days off stale coffee, bad vodka, and cake bars, but he can't digest betrayal or compromise. He can keep running and fighting for hours without a rest, but having to tell a convincing lie stops him in his tracks.
In the long term, apart from the dad thing and simple concepts like 'to be happy', Jack doesn't know what he wants out of his life. And let's be fair, he shouldn't have had to decide that yet. He shouldn't have even had to decide what to take in school yet.
As mentioned above, Jack... doesn't really get death. What little kid does? I mean, he understands that dead people stop moving and shouting and shooting at him, but the full implications and finality of death is another matter. Especially since about the eighth time he personally kicked the bucket. Death starts to lose its horror when you see it everywhere around you, and keep coming back from it yourself.
He struggles with his temper, especially after ADAM enters the picture, which is part of why ~REVENGE~ is his go-to problem-solving solution.
And can I just re-iterate that determination? And bravery to the point of craziness? Even if I was a brick shithouse with superpowers, I don't think I could have made it through Rapture without at least one cutscene where I just sat down and cried for a while. Jack might need a little help picking a direction, but once he's on it he is an unstoppable machine. Whether that's admirable or not depends on whether he's cutting his way to his goal through disposable enemies or cute little girls.
Speaking of craziness, Jack is... well, you probably noticed this already, but Jack is very violent. I dunno, maybe it's something about being in a city full of murderous thugs, but all his most effective problem-solving comes in the form of a) killing someone or b) killing more someones. Dude opposes you in some way? Zap him and whack him, one-two punch. Little kids have the slug drugs you want in their stomachs? Pff, pass the carving knife. Hell, it even becomes a game after a while, when there's been so much suffering and death that none of it is real any more. Maybe all the ADAM is finally getting to him, even with the genetic safeguards they grew into his brain.
But hey, looking at Fontaine and Ryan, maybe beating your problems to death with a lamp is just a habit that runs in the family!
Any differences: Well, for starters, Jason isn't a giant murderer. He'll get physical and fight, sure, hey, and sometimes that's a lot easier than talking. But killing someone? Jesus christ, what's wrong with you? It's safe to say that Jason values individual life a whooole lot higher than Jack does. In the same vein, he loves kids, gets on pretty well with them. And while Jack doesn't actively dislike them or anything, it takes a certain disregard to straight up kill them. If you suggested bumping off kids for their slug drugs to Jason, he'd be flabbergasted.
Thanks to growing up in real life and not in a lab, Jason is a lot more sociable and better socialised than Jack was. This includes being better at lying, though he's still not great at it and doesn't particularly like to do it. It also means he's not comically credulous (just regular kind). He's got better self-control. His sense of humour, and in fact his vocal cords in general, see a hell of a lot more use now that he's not a silent FPS protagonist.
Another difference is that, while he doesn't really know what he wants to do with his life, he does know what he wants to be. He just wants to be a good guy, make people's days better rather than worse, help people out like his parents did with him. He wants to be able to look at himself and see a good guy. Oddly enough, this means child murder is not on his schedule. And importantly, he knows what 'good' means to him, he's not waiting around for somebody to teach him about right vs wrong.
A lot of the Jack-like aspects of his personality kinda clash with his 'peaceful good guy' self-image, but hope springs eternal.
Also he doesn't walk around buzzed out of his mind on slug drugs, so that's something to consider.
Abilities: OH BOY. Jack's plasmid (active superpower) and gene tonic (passive superpower) loadout is customisable to an extent, but let's say that by the end of the game, he was packing these plasmids:
Jack also collected a good number of weapons, mostly guns of various kinds. This included everything from a pistol, to a grenade launcher, to his beloved pipe wrench. I'm still going for that concise thing, believe it or not, so here is a list of these weapons.
On top of all this (CAN YOU BELIEVE I'M NOT DONE YET?) Jack has a pretty insane metabolism, thanks to the whole 'speed-grown in a few years' thing. This is why throughout the game he eatscreme cakes everything in the world mostly creme cakes, and drinks like three bottles of whiskey to spend ten seconds slightly drunk. Eating and drinking heals his wounds a bit. And cannibalising people's internal organs heals him even more, but only if they're a certain kind of splicer.
This all probably sounds massively OP, because it is, but the whole echo concept (plus the fact that he doesn't have access to EVE except in tiny amounts from tobacco) seems like a fantastic way to limit it down.
Roleplay Sample - Third Person: Holla holla get sample! This is hilariously long and goes through a good number of emotions and whatnot. It features preincarnation Jack.
Roleplay Sample - Network: Wham bam sample ma'am! They skip off into an in-person interaction fairly soon, but the op and first few tags are on the network. We assumed they'd interacted before and gotten a couple echoes back.
Any Questions? can his next echo be 'he gets every superpower back and wins the rp' :V
NO WAIT COME BACK I HAVE REAL QUESTIONS TOO
1. Swimming pool! Since this is a location should I make up some stuff and add it to the post where all the stuff in the city is? Or does that only really matter for places where characters work and whatnot?
2. An echo that brings back the would-you-kindly! This is a very bad idea! But mods, is it a bad idea in the 'ha ha ha here's a recipe for shenanigans' way, or the 'no seriously don't do that because your character will fuck everything up and die' way? Discuss.
Helpful Glossary For Mods Not Acquainted With Bioshock:
ALSO spoiler warning for Bioshock (but if you haven't played Bioshock then what are you doing with your life)
OOC Information:
Name: Caz
Are you over 15? I'm afraid I am yes
Contact: I'm on AIM as rianofski, and Plurk as hypnoplasmids
IC Information:
Name: Preincarnation: Jack Wynand, or Jack Ryan. Reincarnation: Jason Rand.
Canon and medium: Bioshock; video game
Age: Preincarnation: Either 24 or straight up four, depending on who you ask and whether their memories are hilariously inaccurate. Reincarnation: Just plain old 24.
Preincarnation Species: Human.
Preincarnation Appearance: Tall, broad, muscular; short dark hair; generally built like a brick shithouse. Lots of scars and whatnot from pretty much nonstop battle. Twin chainlink tattoos on both his wrists.
Any differences: Jason is a little shorter, with floppier hair, and built like a normal big guy rather than a walking tank. Also, he is sans the scars and tattoos.
Preincarnated History: SO MUCH BULLSHIT OKAY.
(You know what, just in case I'm throwing too many names at you at once, I've added a brief glossary at the end of the app.)
Jack began life in a lab as a harvested embryo. So far, so good! Essentially, there was a huge power struggle going on in an underwater not-utopia called Rapture. The city was descending into vicious civil war, and the pretender, Frank Fontaine, wanted to oust the man in charge, Andrew Ryan.
Never one to go for the simple option, Fontaine put together a huge implausible scheme involving faking his death and growing an assassin out of Ryan's own DNA. That assassin was Jack.
Li'l Baby Jack was pumped full of
- make him grow at a hugely accelerated rate (at one year old he already looked like a teenager);
- make him respond to various trigger phrases with, e.g., unfailing obedience and/or a kind of drawn-out self-destruct;
- give him false memories of a nice life growing up on a farm, and definitely not in an underwater mad science laboratory at all;
- make him not go instantly crazy when using Rapture's selection of superpower-granting heroin.
A roaring success, Fontaine's kawaii li'l sleeper agent was shipped off to the surface world to wander around until he was needed. Jack lived on land for a year, never suspecting that he wasn't a normal guy, until he received the orders he didn't know he'd been waiting for. Would he kindly get on a plane flying over the Atlantic, and then when it reached certain coordinates, take a gun and bring it the fuck down?
And so at the beginning of the game Jack finds himself in the sea with a crashed plane and a whole lot of problems, and no idea that it was him who made it crash. He takes refuge in a mysterious lighthouse, which leads him in a bathysphere down to the city of Rapture. As far as he knows, besides a nagging sense of nostalgia, it's his first visit.
By now Fontaine has already """died""" and retooled himself as Atlas, hero of the people. It's as Atlas that he introduces himself to Jack, and from then on, he subtly drops that would-you-kindly into conversation to steer Jack towards his ultimate goal: Andrew Ryan. To keep Jack from getting suspicious, he pretends that Ryan has killed his (Atlas's) family, and emphasises the whole 'oh Ryan fucked everyone in Rapture over' angle, giving Jack his own reasons to be mad at the guy.
Jack stomps his way through the magical wonderland of Rapture, enjoying such quaint scenery as massive leaks, rampant Art Deco, and corpses. The city hasn't survived the ongoing civil war very well, and most everyone is either dead or a Splicer -- a crazy superpowered junkie killing for their next hit of ADAM. ADAM is the magic slug drug that helped create Jack in the first place. ADAM, it turns out, is a discovery that Rapture probably shouldn't have made.
Jack starts using it pretty might right away, because hey, when in Rome, right?
Newly armed with various powers such as telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and bees, Jack battles his way through the city in whatever direction Atlas points him. Along the way he's attacked by about a zillion splicers, whom he dispatches. He also encounters Big Daddies -- huge smelly golems made from diving suits and what used to be human beings. And he encounters their proteges, the Little Sisters -- little zombielike girls who've been turned from children into free-range ADAM factories.
Your average splicer dreams of bagging a Little Sister, but the Big Daddies and their drill arms have other ideas. Jack, on the other hand -- Jack, who is built from the ground up to be an OP motherfucker -- is perfectly capable of bringing down a Big Daddy.
At this point, the player is always given a choice. They can:
- rescue the Little Sister, restoring her humanity and free agency, and gain a little ADAM in return; or
- harvest her, embracing gruesome infanticide and gaining a king's ransom in ADAM (meaning more and better superpowers, at least in the short term).
Fontaine had a lot of money, but he didn't have ALL THE MONEY, and he definitely didn't have ALL THE TIME, and besides, Jack was a big trial-and-error experiment from start to finish. The scientists involved managed to get the important parts working -- the triggers, the false memories, the accelerated growth. But their deadline was harsh and some things just didn't get prioritised. Things like certain memories, maybe he doesn't recall his birthdays, maybe he isn't as good at spelling as he could be. But especially things that take experience to gain. Real empathy, emotional maturity, that sort of thing is all a little lacking in the toddler who looks like he's 24.
And, to bring us back round into the original topic, that includes really understanding death and its implications. Let's look at his surroundings. He's killing like eight people every twenty minutes, and they're all trying their damnedest to kill him -- that sort of thing dulls the horror of killing, after a while. And Jack is, in fact, dying every so often -- his respawning is built right into the plot of the game. Death is, what? An inconvenience? And that's not even going into what they did to his head in the lab. Fontaine wasn't trying to build no peacenik bleeding heart.
Jack just tries to kill the girls quickly, so that they don't make sad sorts of noises.
As Jack progresses, Ryan keeps trying to kill him, and to figure out whether he's a Soviet spy or what the fuck. But then he started to figure it out. And by the time Jack actually reaches him, Ryan is ready with an info dump: Jack is his son, Jack is mind-controlled, here are the exact words, Atlas is playing him for a fool. All his memories are false. Oh, and Jack is a disappointment. A shitty, moronic, sleepwalking excuse for a son.
And then he makes Jack kill him with a golf club, since, why not.
Atlas reveals himself to be Fontaine, oh no, everyone is shocked and amazed and had totally not worked that out by now. Jack is actually kind of stunned and horrified by this whole set of events -- and they all happen right on top of each other, Ryan's revelations, Ryan's death, Fontaine's mocking confession. If his memories of the farm are false, if he's killed Andrew Ryan, and if Atlas was never real to begin with, then, well, he's kind of lost three dads in the space of ten minutes. And at least one of them is still yukking it up at having betrayed him. That shit is hard to swallow.
He doesn't understand all of it, not right away. But he does understand that Atlas -- Fontaine -- is his enemy now.
And this whole time in Rapture, he's only had one way of dealing with his enemies.
Jack teams up with Dr Tenenbaum, one of his old scientist-creator-types (and thankfully reformed), to take Fontaine the hell down. Jack has kind of sort of been killing her girls for ADAM this whole game, but it seems she's willing to overlook that for the moment in order to rid herself of a greater evil. She manages to remove Jack's mental conditioning (uh, gradually), and then she turns Fontaine's ultimate weapon back at him.
In order to reach him, Jack has to use the Little Sisters -- which means dressing up as one of their lumbering protectors. Sadly, impersonating a Big Daddy involves more than a halloween store costume. The real Big Daddies are mutated and mutilated, grafted into their suits beyond retrieval. Jack doesn't have to go quite that far, but he does end up smelling pretty bad and performing amateur surgery on his own throat.
It's not pleasant, but at least it puts him back on track.
Fontaine, watching his own death jog towards him in an ugly sweater, goes through the five stages of 'oh jesus fuck i'm in trouble':
- Denial;
- Anger;
- Bargaining;
- Depression; and
- Splicing up into an Academy Award to fight back.
Jack falls slightly short of the Good Ending, by which I mean he celebrates his victory by literally hijacking a nuclear sub and taking a bunch of splicers to continue murdering people on the surface world. But that's all an afterthought, really.
Reincarnated History: Jason's reincarnated life is significantly less bullshit than his previous incarnation's, although as a trade-off, it's also slightly more boring. He has a similar tendency to go with the flow, a similar ability to accept something as the new status quo without a huge struggle. While this allowed his predecessor to get straight to fighting splicers without a whole lot of questions, in Jason it's just… sort of resulted in a middling, meandering life.
The son of adoptive parents, he did well in school so that they would be proud. But then they stopped talking and his father moved away, and he did less well. College didn't seem like a great idea, with money tight and his ambition distinctly lacking. So he's taken jobs here and there since then, passing some of his paychecks to his mom and smoking away the rest (he's trying to quit. Kind of. Sometimes).
He spends a lot of his free time messing around online, or jogging. In an ideal world he'd be jogging with a dog, but he's not mean enough to inflict his financial situation or schedule-less schedule on an innocent animal. Walking a dog seems like a great idea on the, what, three days a week he actually feels like exercise? The rest of the days, he's resigned to coveting people's pooches from afar.
Now and then he runs races for charity, which would have pissed off his preincarnation's father to hilarious extents. Tends to be on behalf of children's charities like Make-A-Wish and groups for homeless kids.
Online, he once flirted with being an internet troll, as do all kids of a certain age. He felt kind of bad about annoying random people, though, so he stopped. Nowadays he'll sometimes be found beginning to teach himself a language, or beginning to write a novel, or beginning to think about a get-rich-quick scheme. Or he'll just be on one of those newfangled FaceCupids or OKSpaces or whatever the kids are using these days.
Currently he works as a garbage collector, and it gets him up and out in the mornings, so he really doesn't mind it. It's kind of nice, even, he supposes.
But it is getting to the point where he's looking back on his life and going 'dang, what could I have done to make this more exciting?' It's a bit of a depressing position, but his parents aren't pushing him any more, and he can't seem to gather the motivation to put that fire up his own ass.
Gee I wonder if finding the network will help with that??
First Echo: Jason's friend has a daughter, and her daughter had an eighth birthday, and for her birthday they rented a pool and had a party. Jason volunteered to help out. The girls thought it would be an hilarious jape to surprise him by pushing him into the pool.
Submerged and confused, with a small child attached to each limb, Jason had a wonderful opportunity to remember another time when he fell in the water. Except on that other occasion, the water was cold and black, and instead of bright indoor lights, what he was struggling to swim up towards was flames. His echo is the moments after the plane crashed into the Atlantic, when he was trapped underwater, surrounded by sinking luggage and debris.
Preincarnation Personality: Jack's personality was designed in a lab to careful specifications. He is basically what happens when you give a small child endless strength and power and then tell him it's okay if the other kids stop breathing.
He's good on the whole endurance front, mentally as well as physically. If you want someone who can brute force his way through a brick wall and come out the other side still running, Jack is your man. The sheer number of splicers he fights his way through without a breather is really quite impressive. That's on top of the giant diving suit robot monsters, and all the crushing despair inherent to being trapped in a crappy crumbling city under heavy miles of water. I'm sure Jack's not unaffected, but he still goes out and does his thing.
He's blessed and cursed with the ability to accept things quite easily -- and sometimes this doubles as not questioning what he's told, even if he probably should. It definitely doubles as tending to follow orders. He spent a long time following the instructions of a man on a radio, just because the man on the radio said he should. He took it on trust that Atlas was telling the truth and would help him. Later he offered the same complete trust to Dr Tenenbaum, even though he knew she'd spent most of his life treating him as a science experiment, and even when she gave him instructions like 'okay now go pull your own voicebox out through your throat and replace it with a whale noise thing'. As Fontaine put it, "kid, you won't even walk till somebody says 'go'."
While he's naturally all for following orders, once he knows that he's been built and mind controlled, Jack starts to rebel against what comes naturally. It's not exactly an easy fight, especially since he's not the most self-aware of guys to begin with. But he doesn't want to be anybody's faceless tool.
And then of course he goes and becomes Tenenbaum's, so you can see it's going to take him some time and effort to rebel against his programming.
On the other hand, he has good reasons for following Tenenbaum's orders. For one thing, they both have the same goal: Fontaine's death. But as well as that, something Jack desperately wants is somebody to look up to. An authority figure, because he definitely struggles with making decisions on his own. He needs somebody to tell him whether he's doing the right thing.
Sadly, his parental/authority figures so far have included: a false memory created to manipulate him, the scientists who created it, some jerk who's been trying to kill him for the past few hours, and Fontaine's terrible accent. Jack isn't doing so well there; it's no wonder he latches onto Tenenbaum, the closest thing he has left to a mother.
And he could probably use someone to show him how to do life properly, because Jack is not well socialised. He did spend a year on land, so he's not a caveman with no idea how to function. But there are a lot of things people take for granted that he doesn't really get, either because he wasn't taught it by the scientists, or because he hasn't lived long enough to have the requisite experience. He can clean, load and fire like twelve types of ranged weapon, but indirect humour disarms him. He can subsist for days off stale coffee, bad vodka, and cake bars, but he can't digest betrayal or compromise. He can keep running and fighting for hours without a rest, but having to tell a convincing lie stops him in his tracks.
In the long term, apart from the dad thing and simple concepts like 'to be happy', Jack doesn't know what he wants out of his life. And let's be fair, he shouldn't have had to decide that yet. He shouldn't have even had to decide what to take in school yet.
As mentioned above, Jack... doesn't really get death. What little kid does? I mean, he understands that dead people stop moving and shouting and shooting at him, but the full implications and finality of death is another matter. Especially since about the eighth time he personally kicked the bucket. Death starts to lose its horror when you see it everywhere around you, and keep coming back from it yourself.
He struggles with his temper, especially after ADAM enters the picture, which is part of why ~REVENGE~ is his go-to problem-solving solution.
And can I just re-iterate that determination? And bravery to the point of craziness? Even if I was a brick shithouse with superpowers, I don't think I could have made it through Rapture without at least one cutscene where I just sat down and cried for a while. Jack might need a little help picking a direction, but once he's on it he is an unstoppable machine. Whether that's admirable or not depends on whether he's cutting his way to his goal through disposable enemies or cute little girls.
Speaking of craziness, Jack is... well, you probably noticed this already, but Jack is very violent. I dunno, maybe it's something about being in a city full of murderous thugs, but all his most effective problem-solving comes in the form of a) killing someone or b) killing more someones. Dude opposes you in some way? Zap him and whack him, one-two punch. Little kids have the slug drugs you want in their stomachs? Pff, pass the carving knife. Hell, it even becomes a game after a while, when there's been so much suffering and death that none of it is real any more. Maybe all the ADAM is finally getting to him, even with the genetic safeguards they grew into his brain.
But hey, looking at Fontaine and Ryan, maybe beating your problems to death with a lamp is just a habit that runs in the family!
Any differences: Well, for starters, Jason isn't a giant murderer. He'll get physical and fight, sure, hey, and sometimes that's a lot easier than talking. But killing someone? Jesus christ, what's wrong with you? It's safe to say that Jason values individual life a whooole lot higher than Jack does. In the same vein, he loves kids, gets on pretty well with them. And while Jack doesn't actively dislike them or anything, it takes a certain disregard to straight up kill them. If you suggested bumping off kids for their slug drugs to Jason, he'd be flabbergasted.
Thanks to growing up in real life and not in a lab, Jason is a lot more sociable and better socialised than Jack was. This includes being better at lying, though he's still not great at it and doesn't particularly like to do it. It also means he's not comically credulous (just regular kind). He's got better self-control. His sense of humour, and in fact his vocal cords in general, see a hell of a lot more use now that he's not a silent FPS protagonist.
Another difference is that, while he doesn't really know what he wants to do with his life, he does know what he wants to be. He just wants to be a good guy, make people's days better rather than worse, help people out like his parents did with him. He wants to be able to look at himself and see a good guy. Oddly enough, this means child murder is not on his schedule. And importantly, he knows what 'good' means to him, he's not waiting around for somebody to teach him about right vs wrong.
A lot of the Jack-like aspects of his personality kinda clash with his 'peaceful good guy' self-image, but hope springs eternal.
Also he doesn't walk around buzzed out of his mind on slug drugs, so that's something to consider.
Abilities: OH BOY. Jack's plasmid (active superpower) and gene tonic (passive superpower) loadout is customisable to an extent, but let's say that by the end of the game, he was packing these plasmids:
- Insect Swarm: Grossly make bees crawl out of your hand and attack your enemies!
- Incinerate!: Grossly set your hand on fire and shoot flames!
- Electro Bolt: Shoot lightning from your hand like a miniature Thor!
- Security Bullseye: Makes the Rapture security system attack whoever you throw a gross blob at. Super amazingly useful outside of Rapture.
- Telekinesis: You know what this does. Only affects objects in line of sight.
- Cyclone Trap: Spawns a cute li'l tornado that can throw one person around.
- Rescue Little Sister: Does what it says on the tin. Didn't see much use.
- Armored Shell: Makes things hurt & injure him 15% less!
- Damage Research 2: Helps with a game mechanic stat boost thing
- Electric Flesh 2: Unharmed by electricity, does more damage with Electrobolt
- Photographer's Eye 2: Makes him take photos better. I'm not kidding.
- Wrench Jockey 2: He is a god of bludgeoning damage.
- You know what, there are a lot of these and you mentioned keeping things precise, so here is a list of potential tonics (he doesn't have all of them equipped but you can get an idea of what they involve).
Jack also collected a good number of weapons, mostly guns of various kinds. This included everything from a pistol, to a grenade launcher, to his beloved pipe wrench. I'm still going for that concise thing, believe it or not, so here is a list of these weapons.
On top of all this (CAN YOU BELIEVE I'M NOT DONE YET?) Jack has a pretty insane metabolism, thanks to the whole 'speed-grown in a few years' thing. This is why throughout the game he eats
This all probably sounds massively OP, because it is, but the whole echo concept (plus the fact that he doesn't have access to EVE except in tiny amounts from tobacco) seems like a fantastic way to limit it down.
Roleplay Sample - Third Person: Holla holla get sample! This is hilariously long and goes through a good number of emotions and whatnot. It features preincarnation Jack.
Roleplay Sample - Network: Wham bam sample ma'am! They skip off into an in-person interaction fairly soon, but the op and first few tags are on the network. We assumed they'd interacted before and gotten a couple echoes back.
Any Questions? can his next echo be 'he gets every superpower back and wins the rp' :V
NO WAIT COME BACK I HAVE REAL QUESTIONS TOO
1. Swimming pool! Since this is a location should I make up some stuff and add it to the post where all the stuff in the city is? Or does that only really matter for places where characters work and whatnot?
2. An echo that brings back the would-you-kindly! This is a very bad idea! But mods, is it a bad idea in the 'ha ha ha here's a recipe for shenanigans' way, or the 'no seriously don't do that because your character will fuck everything up and die' way? Discuss.
Helpful Glossary For Mods Not Acquainted With Bioshock:
- Rapture: A city under the Atlantic ocean. Built as a haven for people who followed a roughly Objectivist philosophy, "where the great would not be constrained by the small". Collapsed into unrest and then civil war within a decade or two.
- Andrew Ryan: Born in the USSR, he stayed there long enough to get a real hateboner for communism before fleeing to the USA. When the US government started to expand its influence after WWII (with new regulations and so on), he saw it as a sign of encroaching communism, gave the whole planet the middle finger and founded Rapture as a super duper free market paradise. Nominally objectivist; actually a dictator.
- Frank Fontaine: A conman who used his profits from smuggling to gain power and fund several businesses. His was the first business to produce ADAM and Plasmids en masse. He also established poorhouses in order to attract an army of loyal citizens, with which he could challenge Ryan’s position of power.
- Brigid Tenenbaum: A child prodigy, she found her love of science and lost her soul in a Nazi prison camp. Later went on to discover ADAM and create both Jack and the Little Sisters. Experienced a moral turnaround after all this, since, you know, better late than never.
- Little Sisters: Ordinary little girls who have been mentally and physically conditioned to a) produce ADAM in their stomachs, and b) get unused ADAM from corpses and recycle it. This is exactly as gross as it sounds.
- ADAM: ADAM is a substance derived from sea slugs, which repairs damaged cells by replacing them. Unfortunately, the new cells are unstable and require larger and larger doses of ADAM to keep them from crumbling disastrously. ADAM was originally conceived as a medical drug which could regrow and repair damaged body parts. Honestly you’d be better off taking Krokodil.
- Krokodil: Do not google image search Krokodil. If you do, run. This is not a drill
- Plasmids/Tonics: Drugs which utilise ADAM’s unstable cells to imbue the user with great powers and characteristics. Demand is varied, so this could mean anything from making you on fire to just making you really hot.