app for beyondtherift
About You - The Player
Name: LADY MATILDA MONDEGREEN SPOCK THE FIFTEENTH. (Or Beka, that works, too)
Age: 12.4AppleDelta
Contact: thatlovingrainbow @ gmail.com
Past Role Playing Experience: french maid, catholic schoolgirl, frustrated housewife...
The Character
Name: Shaun Philip Mason
Age/Birthdate: 24/sometime in the first half of 2017 (date unknown due to zombies.)
Species: HUMAN! Oh, and Wanderer
Canon: Newsflesh trilogy
*Pre-existing powers: Awesomeness
*Rift Change, if applicable: electrokinesis! :D Also, the Kellis-Amberlee virus he is infected with is now only selectively contagious. Please see Georgia's app/journal for ALL THE INFO EVER. Seriously. Aubrey is very thorough.
Livejournal: badplanchaser
Played By: Jason Dohring (shut up, I need to update his icons)
Icon: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/111626329/39087090
Appearance: Six feet tall, lean muscled, with light brown hair that's mostly bleached from... well, being doused in bleach. Not as bleached as it used to be, though, due to not being in the field as often. Brown eyes. Almost always armed. Has a blue-and-red ID tattoo on his wrist, with his name, social security number, journalism license number, etc. to ID his body in event of, y'know, death.
Personality:
Shaun is, in essence, an angry co-dependent kid who lost the person who meant most to him in the universe a year ago.
When he’s having a good day - that is, pretty much every day before George died, and few days since - Shaun is a pretty laid-back guy. He’ll crack jokes, make light of dangerous situations, and generally be a goofball. He likes adventure and the rush of adrenaline he gets risking your life by poking things that want to eat and/or kill him - it's driven him to do some very stupid things, but nothing stupid enough to actually get himself killed. He cares about people close to him, he’ll run interference for them if he can and they need it. He used to flirt with the cameras and play off his good looks for ratings, but that’s something he’s dropped entirely because of losing George.
Georgia and Shaun’s relationship probably would’ve been called “co-dependent” and “unhealthy” pre-Rising, but for them, it was the safest thing they had. They trusted each other utterly, loved each other more than anyone or anything, and always knew that they had someone who had their back. Their relationship appeared, on the surface, to be two close siblings, mostly because they generally avoided public displays of affection, especially if the Masons were around. To anyone who knew them personally for any length of time, they were shockingly close, and those who were closest to them (their tech wizard Buffy and Georgia’s close friend Mahir specifically) could definitely put together the pieces that the reason George and Shaun weren’t interested in dating was because they had each other. Their relationship did have a sexual component, though it wasn’t the most important part. Shaun loves Georgia, end of story, and while he might not broadcast their relationship, and they might take steps to keep their privacy about it, if it’s brought up, he’s not going to deny it. Any protests of “but she’s your sister” will be met with a shrug and pointing out that they’re not actually biologically related, and that they were raised more as rating props for the Masons than anything else. Any further protests or claims that it’s disgusting and wrong will probably end with Shaun’s fist in someone’s face.
George is the most important thing in the universe for him, and losing her broke him. They always knew that one day Shaun was going to die poking things with sticks, and Georgia was going to be an only child, and they’d both come to terms with that idea. But even in his worst-case scenarios, Shaun had never actually given thought to a world without Georgia and him still alive. Losing his world when she died left him pretty much completely unable to cope, and it wasn’t long after her death that he started hearing George’s voice in his head, talking to him, prompting him when he forgot what he was doing, generally just being George, only… dead and in his mind. He only stopped talking to her once, at the urging of a well-meaning therapist. It nearly drove him to suicide and after about a week he started talking to her again, fired the therapist, and decided that if people couldn’t deal with the fact that he was crazy, they could shove it up their ass.
When they were alive, people tended to assume that George got all the angry and bitter and Shaun was perpetually laid-back and easy-going. And in some ways, that was true, because George handled most everything that needed handling, and Shaun didn’t need to bother getting upset. The truth is, though, that Shaun’s really got a worse temper than Georgia did, he just was able to save his anger for important things. Unfortunately, after losing George, that got fucked up to hell - he fell into a state of near-constant low-level anger - anger at the universe and the conspiracy (whoever was involved in it) for taking George away from him. His temper became much harder to control, and bringing up the wrong things or asking the wrong questions could land you a punch in the face. When he’s frustrated, Shaun’ll punch the wall until his knuckles bleed, and it’s happened often enough over the past year that he has some scarring on both hands.
Shaun mostly gets up in arms over safety, when he’s not angry at the universe in general. Following safety protocols, not taking unnecessary risks. Of course, his idea of “unnecessary risks” is different than most, because he used to poke zombies with sticks for a living, in a world where many people would consider being a journalist at all an “unnecessary risk”. But there are things you don’t do. You don’t focus on anything but your surroundings if you’re in an unsecured area. You don’t hang out in dangerous areas alone. If there’s a chance someone’s infected, you have a gun trained on them until you get a clean blood test back. He’s gotten more careful since George died - though that’s not saying too much, he had to be blackmailed into even just a kevlar vest in the past - because he doesn’t want to die before he gets a chance to at least kill the bastard who shot George with the hypodermic full of live KA. Preferably the entire conspiracy, too.
While he is angry and distressed over the revelation that George could very well have recovered from amplification, had he not put a bullet in her spinal cord, he doesn’t really struggle with feeling like he killed her instead of whoever induced her amplification. Oh, yes, he put a bullet in her when she might’ve recovered, but that’s what you do - and even if he hadn’t, the CDC had already gotten her positive blood test results and would’ve killed her regardless. At least he was the one to do it. That’s what family’s for.
Shaun doesn’t have any real specific fears aside from “not getting the bastards who killed George” - his deepest fear used to be something bad happening to George, but he didn’t really believe it would happen - or at least if it did, it would be happening to him, too. The most terrifying moment of his life was a time a zombie spit a mouthful of blood in Georgia’s face when they were in the field, but when the escaped and got a blood test done, it came back clean. The second most terrifying was a time he went out with some other Irwins (and not George) and he got scratched, drawing blood. He really thought he was dead, but when they got to safety, his blood test came back clean. After that, he went home and just clung to George, shaking and trying not to cry from fear, adrenaline, and relief. She never asked what happened, and he was always glad for that. With George back in his life (once he grasps that she’s not a hallucination), he will be terrified that he’s going to lose her again. Life without George was hellish for him, and if he has a chance to have her back, he’s going to hold on to that with all his might - losing her a second time might break him completely.
Shaun’s not always the brightest crayon in the box - he can deal with problems you can solve by hitting or shooting, but beyond that he’s a little out of his element. He doesn’t have much scientific knowledge, and it’s hard for him to follow conversations or information that’s based in statistics or science or something similarly academic. He’s slow to reach conclusions that even the Georgia in his head comes to, sometimes. It’s not that he’s unintelligent, it’s just that he’s not scientific-minded or book smart. He’s not used to tracking down, understanding, and presenting facts, he’s used to tracking down, understanding, and presenting zombies that he pokes with sticks on camera.
He’s similarly thick when it comes to people, in some ways - one of the girls on his team has been all but throwing herself at him for months, and he’s completely missed it. Given how young they were when he and George started the more physical aspects of their relationship (the summer they turned 13, George started it - she always had to be the first to do anything except zombie-poking), and the fact that he never wanted anything relationship-wise other than George, Shaun never learned how flirting actually works - he can do the fake, “look, aren’t I amazing?” flirting that he did for ratings, but it wasn’t real - any time a girl tried to get flirty with him, George would make her go away, and he never had to bother about it. He doesn’t know how to recognize actual interest in someone else if it’s not outright stated. He’s better at reading other signals, thankfully - anger, frustration, sadness, joy. But anything relationship-wise is going to be very skewed by the fact that it’s never been something he’s had to even think about, much less pay attention to.
The last really important thing to know about Shaun is that he’s come more than a little unhinged since Georgia’s death a year ago. He has a sort of incarnation of Georgia in his mind, that he talks to and can sort of feel there even when she’s silent. Whether this is entirely his own mind having cracked or if it’s something a little more unbelievable and KA related is not clear, though everyone in his universe (Shaun included) assumes he’s just crazy. For all intents and purposes, however, this voice in his head is Georgia, snarking, fussing, advising, noticing things he doesn’t and putting things together before he does. He’s just the only one who can hear her. He regularly responds to her audibly, though he generally tries to downplay it when he’s around other people. He can also (as he discovered relatively recently) be pushed into a brief, mild psychotic break, where he has a full auditory, visual, tactile hallucination of Georgia. This is, however, unlikely to happen again as he will have George back in his life again.
Events:
Writing Sample:
Don't be an idiot.
Shaun sighed, and ran a hand over his face. He had Maggie's living room all to himself, for the moment, and was trying to take stock of what he'd managed to save from Oakland before the firebombing. "I'm just looking at what I've got, George," he muttered.
Which is why you've surreptitiously laid out your body armour and weapons so they can be put on quickly and with a minimum of fuss? Georgia asked from the back of his head, and he could almost hear the way she'd have her eyebrow raised, poking over the top of her sunglasses dubiously. He glowered at the box of bullets for Becks' rifle, since he couldn't glare at the voice in his head. Sneaking off would be idiotic and end in you getting killed before you find out what the hell's going on.
"I wouldn't get ten feet trying to sneak out," he pointed out, though he hadn't really thought of that until that moment. "Maggie's ninja security guards would be all over me." He deflated a little and pulled the black box out of the back, setting the ammo aside. He'd wanted to get out while everyone was sleeping - sneak off to deal with the shit that was going down by himself, so no one else would get killed. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to handle it if he got anyone else from his team killed, even if it meant being stupid and getting himself killed.
It's better this way, Georgia said quietly as he fiddled with the pair of her sunglasses he kept in the black box. You can't do this alone. They're in this whether they want to be or not, and it's not your fault.
“I know,” he whispered and put George’s glasses back in the box. He needed to clean up his mess before Becks came in and realized what he’d been trying to do.
Name: LADY MATILDA MONDEGREEN SPOCK THE FIFTEENTH. (Or Beka, that works, too)
Age: 12.4AppleDelta
Contact: thatlovingrainbow @ gmail.com
Past Role Playing Experience: french maid, catholic schoolgirl, frustrated housewife...
The Character
Name: Shaun Philip Mason
Age/Birthdate: 24/sometime in the first half of 2017 (date unknown due to zombies.)
Species: HUMAN! Oh, and Wanderer
Canon: Newsflesh trilogy
*Pre-existing powers: Awesomeness
*Rift Change, if applicable: electrokinesis! :D Also, the Kellis-Amberlee virus he is infected with is now only selectively contagious. Please see Georgia's app/journal for ALL THE INFO EVER. Seriously. Aubrey is very thorough.
Livejournal: badplanchaser
Played By: Jason Dohring (shut up, I need to update his icons)
Icon: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/111626329/39087090
Appearance: Six feet tall, lean muscled, with light brown hair that's mostly bleached from... well, being doused in bleach. Not as bleached as it used to be, though, due to not being in the field as often. Brown eyes. Almost always armed. Has a blue-and-red ID tattoo on his wrist, with his name, social security number, journalism license number, etc. to ID his body in event of, y'know, death.
Personality:
Shaun is, in essence, an angry co-dependent kid who lost the person who meant most to him in the universe a year ago.
When he’s having a good day - that is, pretty much every day before George died, and few days since - Shaun is a pretty laid-back guy. He’ll crack jokes, make light of dangerous situations, and generally be a goofball. He likes adventure and the rush of adrenaline he gets risking your life by poking things that want to eat and/or kill him - it's driven him to do some very stupid things, but nothing stupid enough to actually get himself killed. He cares about people close to him, he’ll run interference for them if he can and they need it. He used to flirt with the cameras and play off his good looks for ratings, but that’s something he’s dropped entirely because of losing George.
Georgia and Shaun’s relationship probably would’ve been called “co-dependent” and “unhealthy” pre-Rising, but for them, it was the safest thing they had. They trusted each other utterly, loved each other more than anyone or anything, and always knew that they had someone who had their back. Their relationship appeared, on the surface, to be two close siblings, mostly because they generally avoided public displays of affection, especially if the Masons were around. To anyone who knew them personally for any length of time, they were shockingly close, and those who were closest to them (their tech wizard Buffy and Georgia’s close friend Mahir specifically) could definitely put together the pieces that the reason George and Shaun weren’t interested in dating was because they had each other. Their relationship did have a sexual component, though it wasn’t the most important part. Shaun loves Georgia, end of story, and while he might not broadcast their relationship, and they might take steps to keep their privacy about it, if it’s brought up, he’s not going to deny it. Any protests of “but she’s your sister” will be met with a shrug and pointing out that they’re not actually biologically related, and that they were raised more as rating props for the Masons than anything else. Any further protests or claims that it’s disgusting and wrong will probably end with Shaun’s fist in someone’s face.
George is the most important thing in the universe for him, and losing her broke him. They always knew that one day Shaun was going to die poking things with sticks, and Georgia was going to be an only child, and they’d both come to terms with that idea. But even in his worst-case scenarios, Shaun had never actually given thought to a world without Georgia and him still alive. Losing his world when she died left him pretty much completely unable to cope, and it wasn’t long after her death that he started hearing George’s voice in his head, talking to him, prompting him when he forgot what he was doing, generally just being George, only… dead and in his mind. He only stopped talking to her once, at the urging of a well-meaning therapist. It nearly drove him to suicide and after about a week he started talking to her again, fired the therapist, and decided that if people couldn’t deal with the fact that he was crazy, they could shove it up their ass.
When they were alive, people tended to assume that George got all the angry and bitter and Shaun was perpetually laid-back and easy-going. And in some ways, that was true, because George handled most everything that needed handling, and Shaun didn’t need to bother getting upset. The truth is, though, that Shaun’s really got a worse temper than Georgia did, he just was able to save his anger for important things. Unfortunately, after losing George, that got fucked up to hell - he fell into a state of near-constant low-level anger - anger at the universe and the conspiracy (whoever was involved in it) for taking George away from him. His temper became much harder to control, and bringing up the wrong things or asking the wrong questions could land you a punch in the face. When he’s frustrated, Shaun’ll punch the wall until his knuckles bleed, and it’s happened often enough over the past year that he has some scarring on both hands.
Shaun mostly gets up in arms over safety, when he’s not angry at the universe in general. Following safety protocols, not taking unnecessary risks. Of course, his idea of “unnecessary risks” is different than most, because he used to poke zombies with sticks for a living, in a world where many people would consider being a journalist at all an “unnecessary risk”. But there are things you don’t do. You don’t focus on anything but your surroundings if you’re in an unsecured area. You don’t hang out in dangerous areas alone. If there’s a chance someone’s infected, you have a gun trained on them until you get a clean blood test back. He’s gotten more careful since George died - though that’s not saying too much, he had to be blackmailed into even just a kevlar vest in the past - because he doesn’t want to die before he gets a chance to at least kill the bastard who shot George with the hypodermic full of live KA. Preferably the entire conspiracy, too.
While he is angry and distressed over the revelation that George could very well have recovered from amplification, had he not put a bullet in her spinal cord, he doesn’t really struggle with feeling like he killed her instead of whoever induced her amplification. Oh, yes, he put a bullet in her when she might’ve recovered, but that’s what you do - and even if he hadn’t, the CDC had already gotten her positive blood test results and would’ve killed her regardless. At least he was the one to do it. That’s what family’s for.
Shaun doesn’t have any real specific fears aside from “not getting the bastards who killed George” - his deepest fear used to be something bad happening to George, but he didn’t really believe it would happen - or at least if it did, it would be happening to him, too. The most terrifying moment of his life was a time a zombie spit a mouthful of blood in Georgia’s face when they were in the field, but when the escaped and got a blood test done, it came back clean. The second most terrifying was a time he went out with some other Irwins (and not George) and he got scratched, drawing blood. He really thought he was dead, but when they got to safety, his blood test came back clean. After that, he went home and just clung to George, shaking and trying not to cry from fear, adrenaline, and relief. She never asked what happened, and he was always glad for that. With George back in his life (once he grasps that she’s not a hallucination), he will be terrified that he’s going to lose her again. Life without George was hellish for him, and if he has a chance to have her back, he’s going to hold on to that with all his might - losing her a second time might break him completely.
Shaun’s not always the brightest crayon in the box - he can deal with problems you can solve by hitting or shooting, but beyond that he’s a little out of his element. He doesn’t have much scientific knowledge, and it’s hard for him to follow conversations or information that’s based in statistics or science or something similarly academic. He’s slow to reach conclusions that even the Georgia in his head comes to, sometimes. It’s not that he’s unintelligent, it’s just that he’s not scientific-minded or book smart. He’s not used to tracking down, understanding, and presenting facts, he’s used to tracking down, understanding, and presenting zombies that he pokes with sticks on camera.
He’s similarly thick when it comes to people, in some ways - one of the girls on his team has been all but throwing herself at him for months, and he’s completely missed it. Given how young they were when he and George started the more physical aspects of their relationship (the summer they turned 13, George started it - she always had to be the first to do anything except zombie-poking), and the fact that he never wanted anything relationship-wise other than George, Shaun never learned how flirting actually works - he can do the fake, “look, aren’t I amazing?” flirting that he did for ratings, but it wasn’t real - any time a girl tried to get flirty with him, George would make her go away, and he never had to bother about it. He doesn’t know how to recognize actual interest in someone else if it’s not outright stated. He’s better at reading other signals, thankfully - anger, frustration, sadness, joy. But anything relationship-wise is going to be very skewed by the fact that it’s never been something he’s had to even think about, much less pay attention to.
The last really important thing to know about Shaun is that he’s come more than a little unhinged since Georgia’s death a year ago. He has a sort of incarnation of Georgia in his mind, that he talks to and can sort of feel there even when she’s silent. Whether this is entirely his own mind having cracked or if it’s something a little more unbelievable and KA related is not clear, though everyone in his universe (Shaun included) assumes he’s just crazy. For all intents and purposes, however, this voice in his head is Georgia, snarking, fussing, advising, noticing things he doesn’t and putting things together before he does. He’s just the only one who can hear her. He regularly responds to her audibly, though he generally tries to downplay it when he’s around other people. He can also (as he discovered relatively recently) be pushed into a brief, mild psychotic break, where he has a full auditory, visual, tactile hallucination of Georgia. This is, however, unlikely to happen again as he will have George back in his life again.
Events:
- The entirety of Feed. :| No, but really, it was he, George, and Buffy being chosen to report on the Ryman campaign. If they hadn't been chosen, things would've happened very differently. He wouldn't have lost Buffy. He wouldn't have lost Georgia. He basically would've stayed a goofy, passionate Irwin beta-blogger who loved his sister more than anything, whose second best friend was a mass of sparkly amazingness, and who generally loved life. Instead, he... lost everything that mattered, really, and is all but suicidal.
- Finding out later, however, that Georgia was one of the 2 in 10,000 people with reservoir conditions that could've recovered from amplification... not only did it hit him hard, emotionally, but it gave him back his drive. He'd lost it, somewhat, in the year after her death, though he still desperately wanted to find and punish the people responsible for it. Learning all the things about reservoir conditions and Kellis-Amberlee that were hidden by the CDC, that Georgia could've recovered, was enough new information to really properly kick-start him again.
Writing Sample:
Don't be an idiot.
Shaun sighed, and ran a hand over his face. He had Maggie's living room all to himself, for the moment, and was trying to take stock of what he'd managed to save from Oakland before the firebombing. "I'm just looking at what I've got, George," he muttered.
Which is why you've surreptitiously laid out your body armour and weapons so they can be put on quickly and with a minimum of fuss? Georgia asked from the back of his head, and he could almost hear the way she'd have her eyebrow raised, poking over the top of her sunglasses dubiously. He glowered at the box of bullets for Becks' rifle, since he couldn't glare at the voice in his head. Sneaking off would be idiotic and end in you getting killed before you find out what the hell's going on.
"I wouldn't get ten feet trying to sneak out," he pointed out, though he hadn't really thought of that until that moment. "Maggie's ninja security guards would be all over me." He deflated a little and pulled the black box out of the back, setting the ammo aside. He'd wanted to get out while everyone was sleeping - sneak off to deal with the shit that was going down by himself, so no one else would get killed. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to handle it if he got anyone else from his team killed, even if it meant being stupid and getting himself killed.
It's better this way, Georgia said quietly as he fiddled with the pair of her sunglasses he kept in the black box. You can't do this alone. They're in this whether they want to be or not, and it's not your fault.
“I know,” he whispered and put George’s glasses back in the box. He needed to clean up his mess before Becks came in and realized what he’d been trying to do.