application
Mun Information
Name/nickname: Christina
Journal: Lollobrigida
Current Characters in El Dorado:
Faith Lehane - BtVS/Angel
Captain Jack Harkness - Doctor Who/Torchwood
Character Information
Name: Parker
Fandom: Leverage
Canon point: Post - The Underground Job (I'm writing this before that episode airs, but I want her to be as current as humanly possible)
Age: 24 (Canon states she's in her 20's - I'm guessing until I have a concrete answer)
Brief history: There aren't very many detailed Wiki pages about Parker. Even the Leverage Wikia that's "Official" is kind of sucky. However Livejournal has this amazing fact page! http://community.livejournal.com/leverage_hq/1501.html It isn't up to current canon, but it is the most complete thing I could find.
Just for your own information I also read John Roger's blog, Kung Fu Monkey to get more insight into the character, I went to ConCon back in March, I read all the articles on IfMagazine.com like this one -- http://www.ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3861 and I'm a member of the press so I often get screeners and interview chances from TNT. Here's an article I wrote for the advance review of The Boost Job - http://www.b103fm.com/Blogs/ChristinasCatchUp/blogentry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10128961 -- which was a huge Parker episode. I do try to make myself extremely aware of what is going on with these characters.
Personality: Parker can be described in about a million different ways, but the only thing that won't be falling into her 'three words that describe me' is normal. In fact that's one of her few fears, is that she isn't fitting in with everyone else. Being a thief, she needs to be able to hide herself in the crowd, but due to everything else about Parker, she doesn't always pull that off.
She's a thief. Deep down, she doesn't even steal things for the actual item, but for either the value or the challenge. However, hardly anything is considered a challenge for Parker. She's been training to be a thief since she was a child, rewarded with ice cream sundaes when she passed through a laser grid. The thrill of the job is in how to get to the item. High ceilings, ventilation shafts, harnesses and wire work, huge vaults with pressure sensitive floors -- all of those things are just a part of the equation to Parker and she is usually very quick at figuring out how to solve the problem.
Parker is a visual thinker too. She needs to see something laid out, preferring to draw it out herself than to rely on computers to map it out for her, before she can figure out how to work the problem. She's also extremely good at figuring out spacial dynamics and can do most math in her head. It's something that she's just naturally good at doing.
Because she's intelligent and thinks about things differently, she doesn't always understand the more basic-everyman type comments. She's a quick learner though and even though there are a lot of things that she doesn't "get" the more she is exposed to these situations the quicker she can sort them out herself. In "The Studio Job" she wasn't sure what the "Fiddle" they were selling was. Even after she'd been told directly that the Fiddle had just walked in, timed to Eliot walking in, it took her until later in the episode to finally make the connection. Extremely pleased with her discovery, she calls out to the team, from the other room, "OH! I get it! Eliot's the fiddle!"
Fear isn't something that Parker has. In fact she's so fearless, that she's an adrenaline junkie. She creates her own riggings, harnesses and would prefer to sail over a railing down on a line than try to actually take the stairs. She's more comfortable on rooftops, high places, or in a harness hovering over a pressure sensitive floor. She doesn't take unneeded risks, because she'll make sure to plan everything out first if possible. She's no stranger to thinking on the fly though and can adjust her plan accordingly, quickly and with a pretty good result.
Another thing Parker is lacking is shame. It comes hand in hand with her lack of fear and joins along side that lack of social knowing what is socially acceptable. She'll strip down in a room with other people, bluntly express exactly what is on her mind regardless of the reaction she'll get. In fact most times she's shocked at the reaction she gets. During "The Wedding Job" she plainly tells the bridesmaid that she's gained weight, wondering how the girl could assume that letting the dress out could mean she'd lost weight. When trying to frame a politician, she removes her dress without even being prompted, assuming that since they're dealing with a sex scandal that they'll need that sort of picture as well. Even with Hardison in the room, she just drops it to the ground, without even a second thought.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, where Parker is not so successful in execution would be her social skills. Shuffled through foster care, some of them not exactly the best of people, Parker's coping mechanisms were often categorized as extremely odd. Her fear of the dark was solved by being buried alive, which is not normal at all. She was training to be a cat burglar at age nine, a getaway driver at 11 and a car thief at 12. Because of these things, the usual things that children learn growing up - manners, how to make friends -- the usual kid things, just didn't happen for her. Even when she was training with Archie, she wasn't part of his family, but an apprentice that was kept away from that sort of life. That isolation and motivation to just succeed at her skills as a thief shaped her into the unstoppable, referred to as insane, thief that she was.
I say was because she's had over three years with a team, with a family-like environment that is helping to shape her. She has leadership from Nate and female support from Sophie, which is something she never had before. Because of this new family-like environment, she's able to take a look back at the path she took to get where she is and she can attempt to try and help out people that were in the situations she was in. In "The Stork Job" she tries to save the children in the orphanage, because she knows what it's like to just want a home and to do whatever it took to be wanted. In "The Boost Job" she recognizes 'Shorty' as being in the exact same situation that she was in when she was a kid. Where she got left behind, Parker tries to help her make a better choice than she did, and warns her to get away from the job the next day. These little choices, trying to do the right thing because that's what their team does, shows that she's grown up from the thief she was into the good person she is now.
She's getting better at dealing with social situations too. She doesn't understand all the social situations she's in, or the emotions that they bring up in her, but she is trying to adapt. Which, thankfully, is something she's good at. In "The Double Blind Job" when Hardison bonds with the female client, spending more time with her, Parker becomes jealous of that connection. She doesn't directly understand that it is jealousy, nor does she understand why she's jealous, not really. However, through the course of the episode, she learns that she has to confront the feelings and decide what to do with them. She starts to explain it to Hardison, but that sort of open trust that admitting that she wants that sort of relationship isn't something she's prepared for and she backs down at the last moment.
In some cases, Parker has the same adaptation technique that Sophie does. Sophie is a horrible actress on stage, but on the job she's flawless. Parker, while she's not perfect on the job, there is a certain level of grace and adaptative behavior that she can rely on. In "The Studio Job" she twirls and spins with grace and elegance through the room, lifting tickets and barely being noticed, but in "The Reunion Job" when Hardison asks her for a dance, she barely moves (granted, she's on a harness, but she could've actually danced, instead of being turned around on the wire by Hardison). In "The Juror #6 Job" she's put into a group peer setting and has to deal with being able to convince everyone to side with her. It takes her some time, but she becomes "Alice" and actually makes a few friends.
Parker is a very unique person. She has an interesting point of view on things, even if at often times that perspective isn't one that anyone else wants to hear. It's the blunt thing again. She is learning though and being exposed to more situations that she can plainly see as 'wrong' only pushes her harder and faster toward ensuring that they do the right thing, her included.
Abilities: (If applicable)
Lock-Picking, Harness/Wire work and construction, ability to fit into small spaces, high level math, diagramming and spacial reasoning skills. Car jacking and get-away driving. Vault entry. Gymnastics, laser grid clearance and item retrieval. Probably not the abilities you're looking for... but they count!
Third-person sample:
Taking a breath, her bottom lip extended out a bit, huffing the small bit of air up, trying to move her hair out of her eyes. It's warm in the vent and for some reason, her hair has a habit of getting right in her eyes when she's trying to concentrate on what's going on right outside of the vent.
"How much longer?" Parker nearly hissed in a whisper into the air.
"Chill, just -- hold on you've got the guards switching out in two. You're just too fast, I can't help it that you got through the vents quick."
There was a slow grin that came over her features, that moment of pride that came when she knew she'd done something unexpected. The vents had roof access and it really hadn't been the shimmying down the ventilation shaft that had been the fast part. It had been getting up to the roof that had given her these extra few minutes.
The extra -- annoying -- few minutes.
"They should move faster."
"Hey, they're not exactly the slimmest security team, alright? I mean, I think the guys got a donut in his hand as he's climbing the stairs," Hardison replied.
Drawing in a sharp breath, Parker waited patiently for the door to open across the way from the vent. Once the guard had let him know that he was there, they'd have to go through the logs, in the main access room. It would take both of them out of the file room and that was all Parker needed. One small little room and a dozen file cabinets. She heard the keys almost a moment before she heard the click of the doorlatch sliding out of the catch. Shutting her eyes she could visualize the ring they were on, and estimate just by the lack of shifting metal how many keys were on it. She could lift it. That was the important part.
They were also leaving the room, clearly, the much more important part.
"I'm going in."
Her fingers fit into the grating, pushing it forward and letting it hang in her hands before pulling it back behind her in the vent. Sliding out on her stomach, she let her fingers catch to the surface of the filing cabinet, her palms supporting her weight as she exited the narrow shaft. Arching backward, she managed to land on her feet, turning around using the ball of her foot to face the way she'd just come in.
"I'm in."
"Cool, cool. What you're looking for-"
Parker cut him off, "I know. It's a file marked Redshaw. All these cabinets are numbered though, it's not alphabetical." Her fingers ran down the side of them, eyeing the series of numbers trying to see if she could figure out a correlation.
"Numbers? Alright, hold on."
While Hardison went silent, Parker glanced over her shoulder and started to open cabinets. She knew she only had a few minutes and if there was any chance of her getting this, and getting it clean, she had to move faster.
"They're case numbers. What's the address of the house?"
"Hold on..."
Shutting her eyes once more, Parker tried to remember the files they'd pulled up when they ran the case earlier that week. She could see the seven, but other than that she was drawing a blank. They'd been so focused on the rental agreement documents being forged...
"Seventy-eight -- thirty-five."
"Got it," Parker replied, turning around again and moving toward another set of cases. She could hear a bit of laughter from behind the door, and that triggered her to move faster. Crouching low she found the right case, opened the drawer and started to rifle through the pages. "Hardison!"
"What?"
"There's more than one Redshaw file."
"How many are there?"
Exhaling a sharp breath, she kept her voice low as she counted them in her head, "Fourteen."
"Take 'em all."
"Okay." As her hand started to gather the files she could hear them moving around more outside. She was positive she heard one of them mention something about tomorrow. "I need more time!"
"Workin' on it... workin' on it..."
She had all the files in hand and was sliding them into the shaft when the alarm went off. "HARDISON!"
"Hey! You said you needed more time."
"More time, not to get caught!"
"Fire alarm, Parker. You're gonna get wet unless you hustle."
Her fingers held onto the edge of the cabinet, using it to lift herself back up on top of it, sliding her feet back into the vent and taking hold of the metal grate between her ankles. Bending her knees, she brought it up to her hands and slide further onto her back into the vent. When the sprinklers were set off, her head was still outside the vent, an eyesplashing of water happening before she could shimmy the rest of the way in.
"I'm getting wet!"
"Move faster!"
"I am!"
"Well, you wouldn't be wet if you were."
Exhaling a sharp breath, she slide the rest of the way back, reaching behind her to reattach the metal grate before twisting her body back around to crawl out of the vents back toward the roof. When she got there, though, there was a problem.
"Fire alarm?" Parker was staring out of another vent, to a team of rescue workers moving down the fire escape of the building, which had been her exit point.
"I know, I didn't expect their response time to be that quick."
"You know, I hate waiting in these vents."
"I'm trying to get them to leave, but they have to check the whole building. Even after I set out the call saying it was a false alarm. You know, if you'd been fas--"
The sound that came from Parker, made Hardison shut-up quickly. "How much longer?"
Name/nickname: Christina
Journal: Lollobrigida
Current Characters in El Dorado:
Faith Lehane - BtVS/Angel
Captain Jack Harkness - Doctor Who/Torchwood
Character Information
Name: Parker
Fandom: Leverage
Canon point: Post - The Underground Job (I'm writing this before that episode airs, but I want her to be as current as humanly possible)
Age: 24 (Canon states she's in her 20's - I'm guessing until I have a concrete answer)
Brief history: There aren't very many detailed Wiki pages about Parker. Even the Leverage Wikia that's "Official" is kind of sucky. However Livejournal has this amazing fact page! http://community.livejournal.com/leverage_hq/1501.html It isn't up to current canon, but it is the most complete thing I could find.
Just for your own information I also read John Roger's blog, Kung Fu Monkey to get more insight into the character, I went to ConCon back in March, I read all the articles on IfMagazine.com like this one -- http://www.ifmagazine.com/feature.asp?article=3861 and I'm a member of the press so I often get screeners and interview chances from TNT. Here's an article I wrote for the advance review of The Boost Job - http://www.b103fm.com/Blogs/ChristinasCatchUp/blogentry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10128961 -- which was a huge Parker episode. I do try to make myself extremely aware of what is going on with these characters.
Personality: Parker can be described in about a million different ways, but the only thing that won't be falling into her 'three words that describe me' is normal. In fact that's one of her few fears, is that she isn't fitting in with everyone else. Being a thief, she needs to be able to hide herself in the crowd, but due to everything else about Parker, she doesn't always pull that off.
She's a thief. Deep down, she doesn't even steal things for the actual item, but for either the value or the challenge. However, hardly anything is considered a challenge for Parker. She's been training to be a thief since she was a child, rewarded with ice cream sundaes when she passed through a laser grid. The thrill of the job is in how to get to the item. High ceilings, ventilation shafts, harnesses and wire work, huge vaults with pressure sensitive floors -- all of those things are just a part of the equation to Parker and she is usually very quick at figuring out how to solve the problem.
Parker is a visual thinker too. She needs to see something laid out, preferring to draw it out herself than to rely on computers to map it out for her, before she can figure out how to work the problem. She's also extremely good at figuring out spacial dynamics and can do most math in her head. It's something that she's just naturally good at doing.
Because she's intelligent and thinks about things differently, she doesn't always understand the more basic-everyman type comments. She's a quick learner though and even though there are a lot of things that she doesn't "get" the more she is exposed to these situations the quicker she can sort them out herself. In "The Studio Job" she wasn't sure what the "Fiddle" they were selling was. Even after she'd been told directly that the Fiddle had just walked in, timed to Eliot walking in, it took her until later in the episode to finally make the connection. Extremely pleased with her discovery, she calls out to the team, from the other room, "OH! I get it! Eliot's the fiddle!"
Fear isn't something that Parker has. In fact she's so fearless, that she's an adrenaline junkie. She creates her own riggings, harnesses and would prefer to sail over a railing down on a line than try to actually take the stairs. She's more comfortable on rooftops, high places, or in a harness hovering over a pressure sensitive floor. She doesn't take unneeded risks, because she'll make sure to plan everything out first if possible. She's no stranger to thinking on the fly though and can adjust her plan accordingly, quickly and with a pretty good result.
Another thing Parker is lacking is shame. It comes hand in hand with her lack of fear and joins along side that lack of social knowing what is socially acceptable. She'll strip down in a room with other people, bluntly express exactly what is on her mind regardless of the reaction she'll get. In fact most times she's shocked at the reaction she gets. During "The Wedding Job" she plainly tells the bridesmaid that she's gained weight, wondering how the girl could assume that letting the dress out could mean she'd lost weight. When trying to frame a politician, she removes her dress without even being prompted, assuming that since they're dealing with a sex scandal that they'll need that sort of picture as well. Even with Hardison in the room, she just drops it to the ground, without even a second thought.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, where Parker is not so successful in execution would be her social skills. Shuffled through foster care, some of them not exactly the best of people, Parker's coping mechanisms were often categorized as extremely odd. Her fear of the dark was solved by being buried alive, which is not normal at all. She was training to be a cat burglar at age nine, a getaway driver at 11 and a car thief at 12. Because of these things, the usual things that children learn growing up - manners, how to make friends -- the usual kid things, just didn't happen for her. Even when she was training with Archie, she wasn't part of his family, but an apprentice that was kept away from that sort of life. That isolation and motivation to just succeed at her skills as a thief shaped her into the unstoppable, referred to as insane, thief that she was.
I say was because she's had over three years with a team, with a family-like environment that is helping to shape her. She has leadership from Nate and female support from Sophie, which is something she never had before. Because of this new family-like environment, she's able to take a look back at the path she took to get where she is and she can attempt to try and help out people that were in the situations she was in. In "The Stork Job" she tries to save the children in the orphanage, because she knows what it's like to just want a home and to do whatever it took to be wanted. In "The Boost Job" she recognizes 'Shorty' as being in the exact same situation that she was in when she was a kid. Where she got left behind, Parker tries to help her make a better choice than she did, and warns her to get away from the job the next day. These little choices, trying to do the right thing because that's what their team does, shows that she's grown up from the thief she was into the good person she is now.
She's getting better at dealing with social situations too. She doesn't understand all the social situations she's in, or the emotions that they bring up in her, but she is trying to adapt. Which, thankfully, is something she's good at. In "The Double Blind Job" when Hardison bonds with the female client, spending more time with her, Parker becomes jealous of that connection. She doesn't directly understand that it is jealousy, nor does she understand why she's jealous, not really. However, through the course of the episode, she learns that she has to confront the feelings and decide what to do with them. She starts to explain it to Hardison, but that sort of open trust that admitting that she wants that sort of relationship isn't something she's prepared for and she backs down at the last moment.
In some cases, Parker has the same adaptation technique that Sophie does. Sophie is a horrible actress on stage, but on the job she's flawless. Parker, while she's not perfect on the job, there is a certain level of grace and adaptative behavior that she can rely on. In "The Studio Job" she twirls and spins with grace and elegance through the room, lifting tickets and barely being noticed, but in "The Reunion Job" when Hardison asks her for a dance, she barely moves (granted, she's on a harness, but she could've actually danced, instead of being turned around on the wire by Hardison). In "The Juror #6 Job" she's put into a group peer setting and has to deal with being able to convince everyone to side with her. It takes her some time, but she becomes "Alice" and actually makes a few friends.
Parker is a very unique person. She has an interesting point of view on things, even if at often times that perspective isn't one that anyone else wants to hear. It's the blunt thing again. She is learning though and being exposed to more situations that she can plainly see as 'wrong' only pushes her harder and faster toward ensuring that they do the right thing, her included.
Abilities: (If applicable)
Lock-Picking, Harness/Wire work and construction, ability to fit into small spaces, high level math, diagramming and spacial reasoning skills. Car jacking and get-away driving. Vault entry. Gymnastics, laser grid clearance and item retrieval. Probably not the abilities you're looking for... but they count!
Third-person sample:
Taking a breath, her bottom lip extended out a bit, huffing the small bit of air up, trying to move her hair out of her eyes. It's warm in the vent and for some reason, her hair has a habit of getting right in her eyes when she's trying to concentrate on what's going on right outside of the vent.
"How much longer?" Parker nearly hissed in a whisper into the air.
"Chill, just -- hold on you've got the guards switching out in two. You're just too fast, I can't help it that you got through the vents quick."
There was a slow grin that came over her features, that moment of pride that came when she knew she'd done something unexpected. The vents had roof access and it really hadn't been the shimmying down the ventilation shaft that had been the fast part. It had been getting up to the roof that had given her these extra few minutes.
The extra -- annoying -- few minutes.
"They should move faster."
"Hey, they're not exactly the slimmest security team, alright? I mean, I think the guys got a donut in his hand as he's climbing the stairs," Hardison replied.
Drawing in a sharp breath, Parker waited patiently for the door to open across the way from the vent. Once the guard had let him know that he was there, they'd have to go through the logs, in the main access room. It would take both of them out of the file room and that was all Parker needed. One small little room and a dozen file cabinets. She heard the keys almost a moment before she heard the click of the doorlatch sliding out of the catch. Shutting her eyes she could visualize the ring they were on, and estimate just by the lack of shifting metal how many keys were on it. She could lift it. That was the important part.
They were also leaving the room, clearly, the much more important part.
"I'm going in."
Her fingers fit into the grating, pushing it forward and letting it hang in her hands before pulling it back behind her in the vent. Sliding out on her stomach, she let her fingers catch to the surface of the filing cabinet, her palms supporting her weight as she exited the narrow shaft. Arching backward, she managed to land on her feet, turning around using the ball of her foot to face the way she'd just come in.
"I'm in."
"Cool, cool. What you're looking for-"
Parker cut him off, "I know. It's a file marked Redshaw. All these cabinets are numbered though, it's not alphabetical." Her fingers ran down the side of them, eyeing the series of numbers trying to see if she could figure out a correlation.
"Numbers? Alright, hold on."
While Hardison went silent, Parker glanced over her shoulder and started to open cabinets. She knew she only had a few minutes and if there was any chance of her getting this, and getting it clean, she had to move faster.
"They're case numbers. What's the address of the house?"
"Hold on..."
Shutting her eyes once more, Parker tried to remember the files they'd pulled up when they ran the case earlier that week. She could see the seven, but other than that she was drawing a blank. They'd been so focused on the rental agreement documents being forged...
"Seventy-eight -- thirty-five."
"Got it," Parker replied, turning around again and moving toward another set of cases. She could hear a bit of laughter from behind the door, and that triggered her to move faster. Crouching low she found the right case, opened the drawer and started to rifle through the pages. "Hardison!"
"What?"
"There's more than one Redshaw file."
"How many are there?"
Exhaling a sharp breath, she kept her voice low as she counted them in her head, "Fourteen."
"Take 'em all."
"Okay." As her hand started to gather the files she could hear them moving around more outside. She was positive she heard one of them mention something about tomorrow. "I need more time!"
"Workin' on it... workin' on it..."
She had all the files in hand and was sliding them into the shaft when the alarm went off. "HARDISON!"
"Hey! You said you needed more time."
"More time, not to get caught!"
"Fire alarm, Parker. You're gonna get wet unless you hustle."
Her fingers held onto the edge of the cabinet, using it to lift herself back up on top of it, sliding her feet back into the vent and taking hold of the metal grate between her ankles. Bending her knees, she brought it up to her hands and slide further onto her back into the vent. When the sprinklers were set off, her head was still outside the vent, an eyesplashing of water happening before she could shimmy the rest of the way in.
"I'm getting wet!"
"Move faster!"
"I am!"
"Well, you wouldn't be wet if you were."
Exhaling a sharp breath, she slide the rest of the way back, reaching behind her to reattach the metal grate before twisting her body back around to crawl out of the vents back toward the roof. When she got there, though, there was a problem.
"Fire alarm?" Parker was staring out of another vent, to a team of rescue workers moving down the fire escape of the building, which had been her exit point.
"I know, I didn't expect their response time to be that quick."
"You know, I hate waiting in these vents."
"I'm trying to get them to leave, but they have to check the whole building. Even after I set out the call saying it was a false alarm. You know, if you'd been fas--"
The sound that came from Parker, made Hardison shut-up quickly. "How much longer?"