App for Posthumans
Player Name: Betsy
Personal LJ: ”be_themoon”
E-mail: oakashandwillow (at) gmail (dot) com
AIM: onceaspy
Other characters currently in-game: Alex Rider (”onceaspy”)
Who referred you to the game?:
Character Name: Max Gibson
Canon source: Batman Beyond - DCAU
PB: N/A
Personality:
Max is a, at heart, a lonely person. Though she loves her mother and older sister, their constant absence and inability to be there for her makes it difficult for her to not be bitter about them. One of her major driving forces is to be recognized for her abilities, though she tends to dismiss her excellent performance in school as not important. She feels a need to prove herself, as a way to gain the attention and companionship she so desperately wants. It seems very likely that one of the reasons she has worked so hard in school was because she thought it might gain her parents’ attention. Since no one at school, including initially Terry, one of her closest friends, was aware of how absent her family was from her life, it seems a good guess that she feels ashamed of that and tries to present herself as the girl who has it all.
She’s pretty reckless. She tends to view the possibility of personal risk as just part of the adventure, though she freaks out sometimes when confronted with just how much danger she’s in. She’s a smart fighter - she uses her surroundings and she tries to be prepared for a fight. She tends to do things without thinking the results through - leaping first and sometimes forgetting to look at all. She doesn’t like being sidelined and wants to be an active part of anything that’s going on, especially if it’s something exciting.
She’s friendly and outgoing with a rather irreverent sense of humor and a real concern for others. She’s emotionally intelligent, understanding when people need space and with a knack for knowing when they’re upset about something. At the same time, she doesn’t sugar coat things. She’s capable of juggling friendships with people with conflicting interests in such a way that neither party is upset with her and being genuinely sympathetic with both sides. Despite her high intelligence, she tends to toss that off and never brags about it, even when getting a perfect score on important tests. On the other hand, she tends to be loudly proud of her computer and gaming abilities. She’s pretty informed about current day news and even politics and keeps up with stuff, as well as being at least somewhat politically interested. She’s protective of the people she likes in particular and everyone in general, but is fiercely independent and determined to do things herself without any help from others. She’s curious as all get-out and likes knowing things. She stands up for herself and gets angry when people mistreat her, and she’s extremely confident. She’s got quite a temper.
History:
Max was born sometime around 2022. Batman had been in retirement for around three years. The specifics of her childhood are unknown - it doesn’t seem to have been a particularly happy one. Her parents were apparently divorced and both her mother and older sister worked long hours and were rarely around for her. She didn’t live with her father and he is almost never referenced in series. Max appears to have led a pretty normal if high-achieving high school life. By the time she was in high school Gotham was now neo-Gotham, Wayne was Wayne-Powers, and tech we would consider futuristic (hover cars, etc.) was common place.
Then, when she was seventeen, she began creating a program to determine Batman’s identity, unaware that Batman was actually her close friend Terry McGinnis, a fellow student at the school. He became alarmed, convinced it was making her a target of a Joker gang vandalizing the school and paying special attention to her. (The gang was actually led by a student who had been beaten by her on testing and thought he might get passed over for valedictorian in her favor.) She chose to scrap it and instead create a program that would come up with a list of likely Jokers in the school after the gang made an attempt on her life and she was only rescued by Batman. When Terry’s name came up on the list of possible Jokers, she told him to meet her and that she knew his secret. When the Jokers did in fact show up but made it clear Terry wasn’t one of them, and Batman showed up to take down the Jokers, Max put two and two together and realized that while Terry wasn’t a Joker, he was definitely Batman.
Max continues to provide assistance to Terry over the next unspecified amount of time - presumably around one school year, since they’re still in high school though probably about to graduate at the end of Season 3. While Max provides regular hacking support, friendship, and covering for Terry-has-to-go-be-Batman times, she has three major episodes. In “Hooked Up”, Max tries to prove that she can be Terry’s partner in the field as well as behind a screen and winds up addicted to Spellbinder’s illegal VR technology, which creates an illusion of her with the perfect family, who are all interested in her school projects and supportive of her pursuits. Though she knocks out Terry at one point in the episode so she can go back to it, she later manages to snap out of it long enough to knock out Spellbinder when he has Batman at his mercy.
In “Final Cut”, Terry is forced to protect Mutra Botha, an assassin, from his fellow assassin Curare, due to the bomb Mutra has planted in an unknown location. Max goes and breaks into Mutra’s hotel room while he’s out with Terry guarding him, despite Terry’s insistence that she remain home and continue trying to reach Bruce, who’s currently in Indonesia and out of contact. (It was also revealed that Max had figured out Bruce’s real identity almost as soon as she’d figured out Terry’s.) When Terry is distracted by trying to rescue her from Curare, the assassin manages to get to and brainwipe Mutra. Max’s technological know how and the evidence she swiped from Mutra’s room prove invaluable in finding the bomb, and Max is forced to disarm it by herself while Terry fights off Curare.
In “Where’s Terry?”, Max has to team up with Bruce Wayne to find Terry, who’s gone missing. Though Bruce ends up tricking her into being his decoy so he can get down a guarded tunnel in pursuit of Terry, Max demonstrates considerable courage and intelligence throughout the episode, including pepper spraying multiple gang members to rescue Bruce from them and standing up to Bruce himself at his most grumpy. Throughout the rest of the show, Max remains a secondary though important character who provides important backup and support for Terry and is a great and extremely loyal friend to Terry, Dana, and their circle of friends. There’s a two-parter in which she is kidnapped by a Kobra leader to be his bride as well, and is forced to escape more or less on her own and help Terry foil the Kobra plan to destroy the world.
She is best friends with Dana. There is relatively little seen of them together in canon, but they hang out regularly and Max has shown herself to be protective of Dana and generally sides with her when Terry’s secret hurts her, though she does understand Terry’s dilemma. Her family is never actually shown in canon beyond Max’s visions of them in “Hooked Up,” but she’s pretty distant from them. She is also close friends with Chelsea Cunningham, and given that both of them are free spirits I’d wager a guess that they tend to get up to shenanigans offscreen together.
The rest of her history refers to my AU version of her.
How does your AU differ from canon?
My AU splits off from canon just post Season 3. After the whole ‘kidnapped-by-Kobra’ thing, Max started to take a good hard look at what she wanted to do with her life. She was about to graduate high school. She’d already decided to attend Gotham U, wanting to remain in Gotham as Terry’s support system, but she decided she wanted more than this. One day that summer while Terry was out of town, she went to visit Bruce and informed him that she was going to be Batwoman whether he agreed to it or not, but that if he helped her train and told her who could train her best, she would let him decide when she was ready to enter the field and she would let him keep a stop button for her suit in the cave. Bruce agreed, and went one step further, paying for her to travel the world and train with the descendants of his former masters for the next four summers inbetween her time at Gotham U. Terry reluctantly agreed that if she was determined this was the best way, and Max continued being tech support for him, now working directly from the cave frequently. She double majored in electrical engineering and physics, graduating in three years. Bruce was a harsh taskmaster, and inbetween running her own all hours tech repair company to help pay her family’s bills, school, and training for him, Max learned how to survive without sleep.
Three years later, Bruce called Max into the cave and instead of giving her a training schedule for the week gave her a patrol. Over the next year she became well established, gaining her own rogues gallery and proving herself more than capable. She joined the Justice League in a part-time position and frequently does info jockey work for them. She became close friends with Barbara Gordon, who figured out her secret identity pretty soon and showed up to try to persuade her not to do it. When that didn’t work, Babs started inviting her out for weekly coffee and giving her advice. (There may have been a fling with Catwoman too. But nobody else, including Terry, knows anything about that and Max would rather keep it that way.) But it hasn’t all been success. Max received her first major injury about eight months after becoming Batwoman when she made a miscalculation that resulted in a bomb going off. Civilians died and Max broke her arm. When Terry wasn’t able to make it in time to back her up during the ensuing fight, Max barely managed to take down the criminal on her own and was wounded. She was in rehabilitation for three months. While outwardly this doesn’t seem to have changed her at all, Max blames herself for those deaths and is determined never to let someone die on her watch again. She’s ported in shortly after resuming patrols again.
Strengths:
Extremely intelligent, a skilled hacker, and has been training heavily in hand-to-hand combat armed and unarmed for the past three years, as well as various other Bat techniques (she’s reached Level 5 in Looking Badass on Gargoyles). Very confident in her skills. Has dual degrees in physics and electrical engineering. Has a self-designed Batsuit on the level of Terry’s with stealth capability, strength enhancement, a large supply of various Batarangs, grappling hooks, boots that can be magnetized, and a variety of other tech useful for detective work.
Weaknesses:
Still too reckless for her own good and with a lack of experience compared to the majority of the Batfamily. Very susceptible to emotional attacks that feed on her need to be wanted and loved. Has a strong temper and lashes out when she feels like she’s been put down or belittled. Despite her outer confidence, she has a rather fragile sense of self-worth as a person. She knows she’s very good at the things she does, but she sometimes worries that that is the only reason she’s worth anything. She takes the death of people she’s trying to save very personally.
Preferred drop-in point: Seattle
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment? Max is a good person. No matter where she’s dropped, she’ll fight for people who can’t. She’ll accept her new situation pretty quickly - she’s read up on old Batfiles, she knows how completely bizarre the world can be. I’d like her to interact with the Batfamily, as none of them know her at all but she knows who quite a few of them are. She’s really, really good with tech, and so might end up working sometimes as an Oracle-like figure.
Personal LJ: ”be_themoon”
E-mail: oakashandwillow (at) gmail (dot) com
AIM: onceaspy
Other characters currently in-game: Alex Rider (”onceaspy”)
Who referred you to the game?:
Character Name: Max Gibson
Canon source: Batman Beyond - DCAU
PB: N/A
Personality:
Max is a, at heart, a lonely person. Though she loves her mother and older sister, their constant absence and inability to be there for her makes it difficult for her to not be bitter about them. One of her major driving forces is to be recognized for her abilities, though she tends to dismiss her excellent performance in school as not important. She feels a need to prove herself, as a way to gain the attention and companionship she so desperately wants. It seems very likely that one of the reasons she has worked so hard in school was because she thought it might gain her parents’ attention. Since no one at school, including initially Terry, one of her closest friends, was aware of how absent her family was from her life, it seems a good guess that she feels ashamed of that and tries to present herself as the girl who has it all.
She’s pretty reckless. She tends to view the possibility of personal risk as just part of the adventure, though she freaks out sometimes when confronted with just how much danger she’s in. She’s a smart fighter - she uses her surroundings and she tries to be prepared for a fight. She tends to do things without thinking the results through - leaping first and sometimes forgetting to look at all. She doesn’t like being sidelined and wants to be an active part of anything that’s going on, especially if it’s something exciting.
She’s friendly and outgoing with a rather irreverent sense of humor and a real concern for others. She’s emotionally intelligent, understanding when people need space and with a knack for knowing when they’re upset about something. At the same time, she doesn’t sugar coat things. She’s capable of juggling friendships with people with conflicting interests in such a way that neither party is upset with her and being genuinely sympathetic with both sides. Despite her high intelligence, she tends to toss that off and never brags about it, even when getting a perfect score on important tests. On the other hand, she tends to be loudly proud of her computer and gaming abilities. She’s pretty informed about current day news and even politics and keeps up with stuff, as well as being at least somewhat politically interested. She’s protective of the people she likes in particular and everyone in general, but is fiercely independent and determined to do things herself without any help from others. She’s curious as all get-out and likes knowing things. She stands up for herself and gets angry when people mistreat her, and she’s extremely confident. She’s got quite a temper.
History:
Max was born sometime around 2022. Batman had been in retirement for around three years. The specifics of her childhood are unknown - it doesn’t seem to have been a particularly happy one. Her parents were apparently divorced and both her mother and older sister worked long hours and were rarely around for her. She didn’t live with her father and he is almost never referenced in series. Max appears to have led a pretty normal if high-achieving high school life. By the time she was in high school Gotham was now neo-Gotham, Wayne was Wayne-Powers, and tech we would consider futuristic (hover cars, etc.) was common place.
Then, when she was seventeen, she began creating a program to determine Batman’s identity, unaware that Batman was actually her close friend Terry McGinnis, a fellow student at the school. He became alarmed, convinced it was making her a target of a Joker gang vandalizing the school and paying special attention to her. (The gang was actually led by a student who had been beaten by her on testing and thought he might get passed over for valedictorian in her favor.) She chose to scrap it and instead create a program that would come up with a list of likely Jokers in the school after the gang made an attempt on her life and she was only rescued by Batman. When Terry’s name came up on the list of possible Jokers, she told him to meet her and that she knew his secret. When the Jokers did in fact show up but made it clear Terry wasn’t one of them, and Batman showed up to take down the Jokers, Max put two and two together and realized that while Terry wasn’t a Joker, he was definitely Batman.
Max continues to provide assistance to Terry over the next unspecified amount of time - presumably around one school year, since they’re still in high school though probably about to graduate at the end of Season 3. While Max provides regular hacking support, friendship, and covering for Terry-has-to-go-be-Batman times, she has three major episodes. In “Hooked Up”, Max tries to prove that she can be Terry’s partner in the field as well as behind a screen and winds up addicted to Spellbinder’s illegal VR technology, which creates an illusion of her with the perfect family, who are all interested in her school projects and supportive of her pursuits. Though she knocks out Terry at one point in the episode so she can go back to it, she later manages to snap out of it long enough to knock out Spellbinder when he has Batman at his mercy.
In “Final Cut”, Terry is forced to protect Mutra Botha, an assassin, from his fellow assassin Curare, due to the bomb Mutra has planted in an unknown location. Max goes and breaks into Mutra’s hotel room while he’s out with Terry guarding him, despite Terry’s insistence that she remain home and continue trying to reach Bruce, who’s currently in Indonesia and out of contact. (It was also revealed that Max had figured out Bruce’s real identity almost as soon as she’d figured out Terry’s.) When Terry is distracted by trying to rescue her from Curare, the assassin manages to get to and brainwipe Mutra. Max’s technological know how and the evidence she swiped from Mutra’s room prove invaluable in finding the bomb, and Max is forced to disarm it by herself while Terry fights off Curare.
In “Where’s Terry?”, Max has to team up with Bruce Wayne to find Terry, who’s gone missing. Though Bruce ends up tricking her into being his decoy so he can get down a guarded tunnel in pursuit of Terry, Max demonstrates considerable courage and intelligence throughout the episode, including pepper spraying multiple gang members to rescue Bruce from them and standing up to Bruce himself at his most grumpy. Throughout the rest of the show, Max remains a secondary though important character who provides important backup and support for Terry and is a great and extremely loyal friend to Terry, Dana, and their circle of friends. There’s a two-parter in which she is kidnapped by a Kobra leader to be his bride as well, and is forced to escape more or less on her own and help Terry foil the Kobra plan to destroy the world.
She is best friends with Dana. There is relatively little seen of them together in canon, but they hang out regularly and Max has shown herself to be protective of Dana and generally sides with her when Terry’s secret hurts her, though she does understand Terry’s dilemma. Her family is never actually shown in canon beyond Max’s visions of them in “Hooked Up,” but she’s pretty distant from them. She is also close friends with Chelsea Cunningham, and given that both of them are free spirits I’d wager a guess that they tend to get up to shenanigans offscreen together.
The rest of her history refers to my AU version of her.
How does your AU differ from canon?
My AU splits off from canon just post Season 3. After the whole ‘kidnapped-by-Kobra’ thing, Max started to take a good hard look at what she wanted to do with her life. She was about to graduate high school. She’d already decided to attend Gotham U, wanting to remain in Gotham as Terry’s support system, but she decided she wanted more than this. One day that summer while Terry was out of town, she went to visit Bruce and informed him that she was going to be Batwoman whether he agreed to it or not, but that if he helped her train and told her who could train her best, she would let him decide when she was ready to enter the field and she would let him keep a stop button for her suit in the cave. Bruce agreed, and went one step further, paying for her to travel the world and train with the descendants of his former masters for the next four summers inbetween her time at Gotham U. Terry reluctantly agreed that if she was determined this was the best way, and Max continued being tech support for him, now working directly from the cave frequently. She double majored in electrical engineering and physics, graduating in three years. Bruce was a harsh taskmaster, and inbetween running her own all hours tech repair company to help pay her family’s bills, school, and training for him, Max learned how to survive without sleep.
Three years later, Bruce called Max into the cave and instead of giving her a training schedule for the week gave her a patrol. Over the next year she became well established, gaining her own rogues gallery and proving herself more than capable. She joined the Justice League in a part-time position and frequently does info jockey work for them. She became close friends with Barbara Gordon, who figured out her secret identity pretty soon and showed up to try to persuade her not to do it. When that didn’t work, Babs started inviting her out for weekly coffee and giving her advice. (There may have been a fling with Catwoman too. But nobody else, including Terry, knows anything about that and Max would rather keep it that way.) But it hasn’t all been success. Max received her first major injury about eight months after becoming Batwoman when she made a miscalculation that resulted in a bomb going off. Civilians died and Max broke her arm. When Terry wasn’t able to make it in time to back her up during the ensuing fight, Max barely managed to take down the criminal on her own and was wounded. She was in rehabilitation for three months. While outwardly this doesn’t seem to have changed her at all, Max blames herself for those deaths and is determined never to let someone die on her watch again. She’s ported in shortly after resuming patrols again.
Strengths:
Extremely intelligent, a skilled hacker, and has been training heavily in hand-to-hand combat armed and unarmed for the past three years, as well as various other Bat techniques (she’s reached Level 5 in Looking Badass on Gargoyles). Very confident in her skills. Has dual degrees in physics and electrical engineering. Has a self-designed Batsuit on the level of Terry’s with stealth capability, strength enhancement, a large supply of various Batarangs, grappling hooks, boots that can be magnetized, and a variety of other tech useful for detective work.
Weaknesses:
Still too reckless for her own good and with a lack of experience compared to the majority of the Batfamily. Very susceptible to emotional attacks that feed on her need to be wanted and loved. Has a strong temper and lashes out when she feels like she’s been put down or belittled. Despite her outer confidence, she has a rather fragile sense of self-worth as a person. She knows she’s very good at the things she does, but she sometimes worries that that is the only reason she’s worth anything. She takes the death of people she’s trying to save very personally.
Preferred drop-in point: Seattle
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment? Max is a good person. No matter where she’s dropped, she’ll fight for people who can’t. She’ll accept her new situation pretty quickly - she’s read up on old Batfiles, she knows how completely bizarre the world can be. I’d like her to interact with the Batfamily, as none of them know her at all but she knows who quite a few of them are. She’s really, really good with tech, and so might end up working sometimes as an Oracle-like figure.