app to bete noire;;
1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Chrissy
Current characters in Bete Noire: N/A
2. Character Information
Name: Raven "Mystique" Darkholme
Livejournal Username: geminates
Fandom: X-MEN: FIRST CLASS AU
Image: Here.
Reserve: Here.
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: ~24 years-old, though appearance is a little tricky for this one. In her true form, her skin is dark blue, with patches of patterned scales on her face, arms, hands, chest, thighs, and feet. So basically everywhere. Her eyes are bright gold, and her hair is bright red. Also, when she's in this form, she doesn't wear clothes. Ever. Raven is ridiculously proud of her true appearance, and she's in ridiculously good shape from years of military training and field experience. Yes, she's easy to spot in a crowd. Sometimes. When she wants to be.
Otherwise, her mutation allows her the best camouflage in the world - the ability to look like literally anyone she wants. But! For the sake of her own sense of identity, when she's forced to hide her true form, she takes on the look of a very typical (but very pretty, because why not?) all-American blonde-hair (sometimes brown, depending on her mood), bluegreenish-eyed female.
History:
Wiki!
Though she will be taken from the world created in this fic.
Her life before the war:
- Age 10: Her mutation manifests, causing her to fall asleep looking just like everyone else, and waking up looking like this. After a few days of this, her parents (well, technically just her father, since her mother was too scared to face the little mutant), tell her to leave and never come back. She isn't their daughter anymore, and as long as she wakes up looking like that, she had no place in their home. Raven leaves, and never looks back.
A few months pass, and she's caught stealing food at a mall not too far from her home town. After she's unable to tell the officer who her parents are, she's brought down to the police station, where she gets the oh so clever idea of asking to use the bathroom, then using the time to try and shift into a female officer. She almost gets away, very nearly makes it to the door, when she's stopped by three men much larger than her, all of whom notice that as soon as the panic reaches her expression, her eyes shift from dark brown to gold.
It's not long before the security camera that recorded young Raven walking into the bathroom as a child and walking out as a full adult is sent to the CIA, and instead of punishment, this is where she finally finds her real home.
They love her. Well, her mutation. She never stays with the same agent for very long, but they all seem to adore her as long as she keeps her true form hidden, looking like whoever they want her to be. It's like a game, really. Raven is the perfect, temporary child. They learn quickly not to force her to be someone older than she is, because she's still too young to understand that just looking the part isn't enough - she needs to become that new person. The next few years are all a blur; homeschooling, a couple dozen homes, and at least a hundred different faces masking her own.
- Age 14: Training begins. She receives the same type of reconnaissance training that a full adult agent would, with a few advanced techniques that focus on her abilities. Now she's encouraged to look older, forced into a mature lifestyle that she doesn't fully understand yet. Still, these are the same agents that let her stay in their homes, despite her mutation, and she isn't about to question them. Her loyalty and dedication to the CIA is quite unmatched by anyone else.
- Age 16: Her first, very real mission. She has a week to study the man she has to change into for it, but when the day finally comes, she's struck hard with the reality that the CIA means to put down this man so that she can actually take his life, and infiltrate the home of their intended target that way. The man she studied wasn't even their mark, just a pawn. The same as she was just a pawn. She never makes that connection, though. Raven doesn't witness the man being shot, but she can hear the silenced gun fire, and she catches a glimpse of the corpse as they yell in her face to change, it's time, it's time.
The mission was a success, but Raven isn't quite the same after that.
- Age 18: She finally catches wind of all the things that the mutants Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr have accomplished on the other side of the world. Ending the war? Taking down the Nazis? On hearing the news, Raven pushes - that's what she wants to be doing. Fighting for something bigger than what she's been forced into. She pleads to be sent overseas, insisting they could use her there, for things more important than what she does here. That's when she learns about the camps.
She's given the option to continue working for the CIA, as she has been, or she can go to the camps. It doesn't take much talk of what goes on at said camps for her to make up her mind. Still, she hangs on every word she catches of the mutant activity in Israel, right up until Xavier's apparent assassination.
- Age 22: Her mission: Find Charles Xavier. It's impossible, most are pretty certain he's dead, it's all over the news. But the CIA had reason to believe it wasn't that simple, and off she was sent, to a world she'd never been to, to find the famed Telepath that could change everything for the CIA's efforts with homeland security.
Somehow, miraculously, she finds Xavier, though he's quite literally on the brink of death. She nurses him back to health in the few weeks they spend hidden away in Israel, but more than that, they form a bond that Raven hadn't quite ever had the chance to experience with anyone else in her life. A true partnership in every sense of the word, something she never knew she really needed until then. She's glad there was a chance they'd be able to fight side by side, once they were back in the States.
They made it to the CIA base in America with little complications, between their abilities, and Raven finds it easy to trust him, to trust that he had her back and that she could give him that in return. After finally making it to the base, all it takes is a few flimsy offers from her superiors to protect Charles as one of their own that he freezes the scene with his telepathy and finally asks her to leave with him. She's hooked with the promise that she could be herself, in her true form, any time she wanted. Something the CIA never let her do. Raven agrees, and after nearly two years of working with him in the fight for mutant rights, she... Ends up at Bete Noire!
Personality:
On the surface, Raven is quite calculated, confident, tough, and has a tendency to be a little short around people she isn't familiar with. First and foremost, she's a trained CIA agent (well, used to be anyway), and while that doesn't mean she walks around wearing all back and dark sunglasses and never saying a word, it does mean she has a tendency to not trust people until they've proven themselves worthy of it. She's also very good at detecting, ah, bull shit, through a person's body language and that sort of thing and will very likely call someone out if she feels like they're lying for no good reason at all. Just because she can. ... But that's only when she's provoked, really! She doesn't like being lied to. She knows when she needs to be very respectful though, polite and even friendly too, if she thinks that will help her in some way, though the chances of her opening up quickly to just anyone are very slim.
Although she's been trained to be wary of just about anyone she's never heard of, she will drop some of that guard if she finds out a person has abilities, like herself. Mutants could be dangerous, yes, she knew this, but at the same time, (she believes anyway) that there's a level of understanding there between mutants, that on a very basic level, they were on the same side. That's not always true of course, back home there were times she had to fight against other mutants, but optimistically, they could all learn to fight as one and be friends.
On the flip side of this, her only experience with humans so far is that they sure do like to start wars, they're likely to scream in fear when first seeing her true form, and they are also likely try and take advantage of her / use her and her abilities in some way, once they got a hold of her. So, you don't really have the best reputation with her, mankind. Despite (after almost a year of working with Charles instead of the CIA) coming to realize the CIA was only using her, not loving her for what she was, there will always be some part of her that will try and win over the hearts (or something like that) of humans, a need for acceptance, because it was that type of approval that gave her a home when she was a child. She couldn't win her parents' affection as a child, but she'll try damn hard to win yours if she thinks you're worth that.
Which leads to Raven's streak of optimism, underneath all the crazy training. Overall, Raven's very, very grateful for the life she's been given. She's fortunate in that she only had to know what it was like to be hungry and homeless for a very short period of time before being taken in by the CIA. She never once thought they were using her, instead fully believing that they had given her a home out of the goodness of their hearts, and for that she was grateful. It gave her a sort of hope that, even though she was sort of fighting their battles for them, humans and mutants alike all had the ability to be good. She feels that way about most anyone she meets.
If anyone bothers to get to know Raven long enough, on a personal level like the X-Men have, they'll come to see just how seriously she takes bravery, loyalty, and honesty. It's why she will opt to stay silent instead of trying to lie her way through a situation - she does not like liars, or telling lies herself. This of course is hard at times, her training in retcon was all about deception and talking her way in and out of situations, but that's a huge part of why she feels the need to be so honest now. It's a way of distancing herself from her old life, as an agent, one that she is constantly trying to redeem herself for because she knew now that she always had a choice to back out, to stop taking lives, but she never did. She wore the masks, told the carefully spun tales to manipulate her marks, and hurt more people than she can bear thinking about. Looking back on her jobs, she can't really place a time she ever used her mutation or her ability to lie for something good. But her new life, with the X-Men, gives her a way of using her skills for something worth while. She'd never try to deceive her friends with her abilities (okay, maybe as a joke, but rarely) and she would never mislead them with her words. This is why she expects the same from them.
Raven is very dedicated to those she calls her friends, almost to the point of being over-protective at times, if she thinks they need it. She's careful to only put her trust in those she knows will return it, and she certainly takes action over words as proof of someone's loyalty. At the very core of her relationships, she's aware that she sometimes cares so much that she can't afford to be too fickle in her standards for what makes a true friend.
As for her own personal opinions on herself, she actually is just as confident as she acts. She has to be. She's very confident in her abilities as an agent, her professionalism, and in her shape-shifting, as well as her judgment of character and ability to assess a tough situation that needs fixing. Her mind is a bit critical at times, in that once she gets an end goal in mind, she'll see it through no matter what. Even with this drive, she does still tend to work better when she's been given a set of orders, or guidelines, which is why she works well with Charles.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation:
Sex, for Raven, has always been sort of a tool more than anything else. A way of lowering someone's defenses, or a means of distraction, never anything emotional or meaningful. Not to say she's not capable of love - she very much likes the idea that true love and romance is possible for some, just... not her. It doesn't fit into her life style. Getting that close to someone, being that vulnerable physically and emotionally, it isn't something that she deems important enough to distract her from the things that are important to her, namely the fight for mutant rights and protecting those that can't protect themselves. It's not so much a self-righteous thing as it is the need she feels to give those the chance to have something she never could growing up - a normal life.
Still, the urges are certainly there, at times. Sometimes the right kind of adrenaline rush can catch her off-guard, or if she's allowed herself to get to know someone on a personal level instead of just a professional one. She's not one to love easily, but once she does let herself care, she cares very much. Her traits of loyalty shine brightest in that. Which is... why she doesn't let it happen very often.
As for her orientation, she is most definitely open to loving someone based on who they are, not their gender. Gender means very little to her, seeing as she can easily be either. Even if her true form, anatomically, is female, she can still become a male in every sense of the word, so really. How could she chose to love one or the other, when, if someone were to love her, they were sort of signing up for both, in a way. A mask is just a mask, and she sort of relates that to gender, in a way - gender doesn't define a person's soul, or their ability to love.
But again, these are all things she makes sure to push far in the back of her mind. Especially whenever she starts to feel anything like love or lust towards the one person she's especially close to, Charles, since that would just be- Yeah. Complicated isn't a big enough word.
Powers:
As stated, Raven has the ability to take on any appearance she desires. Though it's more than that really, she can become an entirely new person in the blink of an eye. Her mutation allows her to alter herself completely at will, including clothes, her voice, even matching fingerprints. She's perfected her abilities through years of training, and through that, she's learned to read a person's body-language, as well as pick up distinct cadences in their voice.
Her ability also allows her to heal faster than normal, seeing as her cells regenerate and shift in ways that humans' can't - though she's far from being invincible, and can be hurt by all the same things humans can. And while training is a huge part of why she's in top physical condition, her mutation also gives her a sort of grace and control over her body that many can't match. This is what gives her an advantage in hand-to-hand combat.
Reason for playing: It's all Mara's fault really, and by fault I mean she created and AU I instantly fell in love with and I just really love the idea of playing a Raven that's 100% confident in who she is, and in her abilities. In XFC canon, Raven's only just learning how to love herself and embrace her mutation, while this version of her never had a reason to hide it. I think it'll be reallyreallyreally fun to explore this character, especially in a setting that is so unlike (but similar, in some ways) her own world.
4. Original Character Supplement
World History: What kind of world is your character from? This part can be short, but it must focus on the particular character's context. What was their world like, from their point of view?
Character History: Let us have a summary of the highlights, the turning points of your character's history. What was it that made them who they are?
5. Samples
First-Person: Dear_Mun links: # 1 & # 2
Third-Person: A scene from her life before.
Name (or internet handle): Chrissy
Current characters in Bete Noire: N/A
2. Character Information
Name: Raven "Mystique" Darkholme
Livejournal Username: geminates
Fandom: X-MEN: FIRST CLASS AU
Image: Here.
Reserve: Here.
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: ~24 years-old, though appearance is a little tricky for this one. In her true form, her skin is dark blue, with patches of patterned scales on her face, arms, hands, chest, thighs, and feet. So basically everywhere. Her eyes are bright gold, and her hair is bright red. Also, when she's in this form, she doesn't wear clothes. Ever. Raven is ridiculously proud of her true appearance, and she's in ridiculously good shape from years of military training and field experience. Yes, she's easy to spot in a crowd. Sometimes. When she wants to be.
Otherwise, her mutation allows her the best camouflage in the world - the ability to look like literally anyone she wants. But! For the sake of her own sense of identity, when she's forced to hide her true form, she takes on the look of a very typical (but very pretty, because why not?) all-American blonde-hair (sometimes brown, depending on her mood), bluegreenish-eyed female.
History:
Wiki!
Though she will be taken from the world created in this fic.
Her life before the war:
- Age 10: Her mutation manifests, causing her to fall asleep looking just like everyone else, and waking up looking like this. After a few days of this, her parents (well, technically just her father, since her mother was too scared to face the little mutant), tell her to leave and never come back. She isn't their daughter anymore, and as long as she wakes up looking like that, she had no place in their home. Raven leaves, and never looks back.
A few months pass, and she's caught stealing food at a mall not too far from her home town. After she's unable to tell the officer who her parents are, she's brought down to the police station, where she gets the oh so clever idea of asking to use the bathroom, then using the time to try and shift into a female officer. She almost gets away, very nearly makes it to the door, when she's stopped by three men much larger than her, all of whom notice that as soon as the panic reaches her expression, her eyes shift from dark brown to gold.
It's not long before the security camera that recorded young Raven walking into the bathroom as a child and walking out as a full adult is sent to the CIA, and instead of punishment, this is where she finally finds her real home.
They love her. Well, her mutation. She never stays with the same agent for very long, but they all seem to adore her as long as she keeps her true form hidden, looking like whoever they want her to be. It's like a game, really. Raven is the perfect, temporary child. They learn quickly not to force her to be someone older than she is, because she's still too young to understand that just looking the part isn't enough - she needs to become that new person. The next few years are all a blur; homeschooling, a couple dozen homes, and at least a hundred different faces masking her own.
- Age 14: Training begins. She receives the same type of reconnaissance training that a full adult agent would, with a few advanced techniques that focus on her abilities. Now she's encouraged to look older, forced into a mature lifestyle that she doesn't fully understand yet. Still, these are the same agents that let her stay in their homes, despite her mutation, and she isn't about to question them. Her loyalty and dedication to the CIA is quite unmatched by anyone else.
- Age 16: Her first, very real mission. She has a week to study the man she has to change into for it, but when the day finally comes, she's struck hard with the reality that the CIA means to put down this man so that she can actually take his life, and infiltrate the home of their intended target that way. The man she studied wasn't even their mark, just a pawn. The same as she was just a pawn. She never makes that connection, though. Raven doesn't witness the man being shot, but she can hear the silenced gun fire, and she catches a glimpse of the corpse as they yell in her face to change, it's time, it's time.
The mission was a success, but Raven isn't quite the same after that.
- Age 18: She finally catches wind of all the things that the mutants Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr have accomplished on the other side of the world. Ending the war? Taking down the Nazis? On hearing the news, Raven pushes - that's what she wants to be doing. Fighting for something bigger than what she's been forced into. She pleads to be sent overseas, insisting they could use her there, for things more important than what she does here. That's when she learns about the camps.
She's given the option to continue working for the CIA, as she has been, or she can go to the camps. It doesn't take much talk of what goes on at said camps for her to make up her mind. Still, she hangs on every word she catches of the mutant activity in Israel, right up until Xavier's apparent assassination.
- Age 22: Her mission: Find Charles Xavier. It's impossible, most are pretty certain he's dead, it's all over the news. But the CIA had reason to believe it wasn't that simple, and off she was sent, to a world she'd never been to, to find the famed Telepath that could change everything for the CIA's efforts with homeland security.
Somehow, miraculously, she finds Xavier, though he's quite literally on the brink of death. She nurses him back to health in the few weeks they spend hidden away in Israel, but more than that, they form a bond that Raven hadn't quite ever had the chance to experience with anyone else in her life. A true partnership in every sense of the word, something she never knew she really needed until then. She's glad there was a chance they'd be able to fight side by side, once they were back in the States.
They made it to the CIA base in America with little complications, between their abilities, and Raven finds it easy to trust him, to trust that he had her back and that she could give him that in return. After finally making it to the base, all it takes is a few flimsy offers from her superiors to protect Charles as one of their own that he freezes the scene with his telepathy and finally asks her to leave with him. She's hooked with the promise that she could be herself, in her true form, any time she wanted. Something the CIA never let her do. Raven agrees, and after nearly two years of working with him in the fight for mutant rights, she... Ends up at Bete Noire!
Personality:
On the surface, Raven is quite calculated, confident, tough, and has a tendency to be a little short around people she isn't familiar with. First and foremost, she's a trained CIA agent (well, used to be anyway), and while that doesn't mean she walks around wearing all back and dark sunglasses and never saying a word, it does mean she has a tendency to not trust people until they've proven themselves worthy of it. She's also very good at detecting, ah, bull shit, through a person's body language and that sort of thing and will very likely call someone out if she feels like they're lying for no good reason at all. Just because she can. ... But that's only when she's provoked, really! She doesn't like being lied to. She knows when she needs to be very respectful though, polite and even friendly too, if she thinks that will help her in some way, though the chances of her opening up quickly to just anyone are very slim.
Although she's been trained to be wary of just about anyone she's never heard of, she will drop some of that guard if she finds out a person has abilities, like herself. Mutants could be dangerous, yes, she knew this, but at the same time, (she believes anyway) that there's a level of understanding there between mutants, that on a very basic level, they were on the same side. That's not always true of course, back home there were times she had to fight against other mutants, but optimistically, they could all learn to fight as one and be friends.
On the flip side of this, her only experience with humans so far is that they sure do like to start wars, they're likely to scream in fear when first seeing her true form, and they are also likely try and take advantage of her / use her and her abilities in some way, once they got a hold of her. So, you don't really have the best reputation with her, mankind. Despite (after almost a year of working with Charles instead of the CIA) coming to realize the CIA was only using her, not loving her for what she was, there will always be some part of her that will try and win over the hearts (or something like that) of humans, a need for acceptance, because it was that type of approval that gave her a home when she was a child. She couldn't win her parents' affection as a child, but she'll try damn hard to win yours if she thinks you're worth that.
Which leads to Raven's streak of optimism, underneath all the crazy training. Overall, Raven's very, very grateful for the life she's been given. She's fortunate in that she only had to know what it was like to be hungry and homeless for a very short period of time before being taken in by the CIA. She never once thought they were using her, instead fully believing that they had given her a home out of the goodness of their hearts, and for that she was grateful. It gave her a sort of hope that, even though she was sort of fighting their battles for them, humans and mutants alike all had the ability to be good. She feels that way about most anyone she meets.
If anyone bothers to get to know Raven long enough, on a personal level like the X-Men have, they'll come to see just how seriously she takes bravery, loyalty, and honesty. It's why she will opt to stay silent instead of trying to lie her way through a situation - she does not like liars, or telling lies herself. This of course is hard at times, her training in retcon was all about deception and talking her way in and out of situations, but that's a huge part of why she feels the need to be so honest now. It's a way of distancing herself from her old life, as an agent, one that she is constantly trying to redeem herself for because she knew now that she always had a choice to back out, to stop taking lives, but she never did. She wore the masks, told the carefully spun tales to manipulate her marks, and hurt more people than she can bear thinking about. Looking back on her jobs, she can't really place a time she ever used her mutation or her ability to lie for something good. But her new life, with the X-Men, gives her a way of using her skills for something worth while. She'd never try to deceive her friends with her abilities (okay, maybe as a joke, but rarely) and she would never mislead them with her words. This is why she expects the same from them.
Raven is very dedicated to those she calls her friends, almost to the point of being over-protective at times, if she thinks they need it. She's careful to only put her trust in those she knows will return it, and she certainly takes action over words as proof of someone's loyalty. At the very core of her relationships, she's aware that she sometimes cares so much that she can't afford to be too fickle in her standards for what makes a true friend.
As for her own personal opinions on herself, she actually is just as confident as she acts. She has to be. She's very confident in her abilities as an agent, her professionalism, and in her shape-shifting, as well as her judgment of character and ability to assess a tough situation that needs fixing. Her mind is a bit critical at times, in that once she gets an end goal in mind, she'll see it through no matter what. Even with this drive, she does still tend to work better when she's been given a set of orders, or guidelines, which is why she works well with Charles.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation:
Sex, for Raven, has always been sort of a tool more than anything else. A way of lowering someone's defenses, or a means of distraction, never anything emotional or meaningful. Not to say she's not capable of love - she very much likes the idea that true love and romance is possible for some, just... not her. It doesn't fit into her life style. Getting that close to someone, being that vulnerable physically and emotionally, it isn't something that she deems important enough to distract her from the things that are important to her, namely the fight for mutant rights and protecting those that can't protect themselves. It's not so much a self-righteous thing as it is the need she feels to give those the chance to have something she never could growing up - a normal life.
Still, the urges are certainly there, at times. Sometimes the right kind of adrenaline rush can catch her off-guard, or if she's allowed herself to get to know someone on a personal level instead of just a professional one. She's not one to love easily, but once she does let herself care, she cares very much. Her traits of loyalty shine brightest in that. Which is... why she doesn't let it happen very often.
As for her orientation, she is most definitely open to loving someone based on who they are, not their gender. Gender means very little to her, seeing as she can easily be either. Even if her true form, anatomically, is female, she can still become a male in every sense of the word, so really. How could she chose to love one or the other, when, if someone were to love her, they were sort of signing up for both, in a way. A mask is just a mask, and she sort of relates that to gender, in a way - gender doesn't define a person's soul, or their ability to love.
But again, these are all things she makes sure to push far in the back of her mind. Especially whenever she starts to feel anything like love or lust towards the one person she's especially close to, Charles, since that would just be- Yeah. Complicated isn't a big enough word.
Powers:
As stated, Raven has the ability to take on any appearance she desires. Though it's more than that really, she can become an entirely new person in the blink of an eye. Her mutation allows her to alter herself completely at will, including clothes, her voice, even matching fingerprints. She's perfected her abilities through years of training, and through that, she's learned to read a person's body-language, as well as pick up distinct cadences in their voice.
Her ability also allows her to heal faster than normal, seeing as her cells regenerate and shift in ways that humans' can't - though she's far from being invincible, and can be hurt by all the same things humans can. And while training is a huge part of why she's in top physical condition, her mutation also gives her a sort of grace and control over her body that many can't match. This is what gives her an advantage in hand-to-hand combat.
Reason for playing: It's all Mara's fault really, and by fault I mean she created and AU I instantly fell in love with and I just really love the idea of playing a Raven that's 100% confident in who she is, and in her abilities. In XFC canon, Raven's only just learning how to love herself and embrace her mutation, while this version of her never had a reason to hide it. I think it'll be reallyreallyreally fun to explore this character, especially in a setting that is so unlike (but similar, in some ways) her own world.
4. Original Character Supplement
World History: What kind of world is your character from? This part can be short, but it must focus on the particular character's context. What was their world like, from their point of view?
Character History: Let us have a summary of the highlights, the turning points of your character's history. What was it that made them who they are?
5. Samples
First-Person: Dear_Mun links: # 1 & # 2
Third-Person: A scene from her life before.