application for siren's pull

[loverbayou]

Player Information

Name: Lauren
Age: 27
AIM SN: jesterwinged
email: unheard.rain (at) gmail [dot] com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Maybe.
Currrently Played Characters: idontregret, omnilinguist, and ingrate
Conditional: Activity Check Link: here

Character Information

General

Canon Source: X-Men (Marvel)
Canon Format: comics
Character's Name: Remy LeBeau / Gambit
Character's Age: ~26 (completely estimated, educated guess)

What form will your character's NV take? a cell phone that fits into a holder that looks like it belongs to a deck of playing cards

Abilities

Character's Canon Abilities:
Gambit's main ability involves biokinetic energy. He can take the potential energy within an item and change it to kinetic, thereby charging an item and giving it explosive capabilities. He can also time his charges so that they don't go off immediately. He prefers items the size of playing cards, as larger items take a longer time to charge up.

His biokinetic energy also grants him increased agility, which he puts to good use in his fighting techniques, as well as creating a "static" like effect that prevents telepaths from being able to get a clear read on him.

He can slightly alter the energy within a person's mind, giving him a hypnotic sort of charm. This makes it easy for him to win people over and talk them out of situations, but it generally doesn't work on more powerful minds or on anyone who already knows he's capable of it. (This also needs to be done in person, and would thus be impossible to do over the NV.)

More than once, he's displayed some minor precognitive abilities - first in his dreams, then on the face of playing cards while he was blind (though this won't have happened at the point I took him from). This has never been covered in much detail. He is at least a lucid dreamer, having confronted someone in his dreams before, and he tossed Psylocke out of his mind when she tried to search for information while he was unconscious.

Remy is a highly skilled thief, one of the best, whose talents are often bartered for. He helped design the X-Mansion's security system, and has also stolen from the X-Men more than once. He can pick locks of just about any type.

He's an excellent marksman and highly trained in many forms of combat, such as street fighting, Savate, French kickboxing, and Bojutsu (the art of using a Bo staff) along with various martial arts.

He speaks both English and French fluently, and also knows limited Japanese (that he apparently speaks poorly). When needed, he can drop his accent and has even been shown to be able to speak with a perfect English one. Because of working so long with the Thieves Guild, he's also versed in various types of code.

On a more playful note, he enjoys Zydeco music and can sing Hugh Boynton, cooks a mean jambalaya, and knows the inner workings of many large and famous pieces of engineering (the Panama Canal, for example).

Weapons: a collapsible bo staff, playing cards

History/Personality/Plans/etc.

Character History:
(Forgive me for the ten years worth of history I've attempted to squeeze in here. I hope it's not too difficult to make sense of.)
As a baby, Gambit is left abandoned on the steps of a hospital in New Orleans - one would assume because of his rather demonic eyes. These same eyes draw the attention of the Antiquary, a man in the New Orleans underground who deals with the trade of children and who believes strongly in the Guild Prophecies, in which it is stated that a man with red eyes will be responsible for uniting the Thieves and Assassins guilds (then in constant war with each other).

He is put in the care of Fagan's mob, a group of thieving street kids, before circumstances are arranged for him to be officially adopted by Jean-Luc LeBeau, the leader of the Thieves Guild. A future arranged marriage between him and Belladonna of the Assassin's guild is also set up early on, with them becoming childhood friends. When his powers begin to develop, he doesn't have very good control over them. He eventually meets the Pig, a trafficker of young boys trained as soldiers, when helping his cousin Etienne with a guild ceremony. This is the first time he uses playing cards as a means of directing his powers and they seem to work right. Sadly, Etienne doesn't survive the incident.

Sometime the next year he is hired by Nathaniel Essex (Mr. Sinister) to retrieve a lab journal from the Weapon X facility. (Weapon X is the project responsible for Wolverine's adamantium.) Wolverine is there at the time. Though Remy is caught, he manages to escape when Wolverine does. He reads the journal and decides to destroy it rather than return it.

Shortly before he is to be married to Belladonna, he runs a heist in Paris that involves romancing a woman named Genevieve Darceneaux in order to steal a jewel. He is successful, but Sabretooth (a vicious mutant) is hired to get the gem as well. He captures the woman and Remy's adopted brother Henri, allowing Remy to save the life of only one in exchange for the jewel. Genevieve falls to her death as Henri is saved, telling Gambit as she dies that she loved him and would have given him the jewel anyway.

The arranged marriage is carried out, but Belladonna's brother isn't pleased by it. Remy is forced to kill him in self-defense, and this results in him being excommunicated from the guild.

Eventually, Gambit's powers become increasingly difficult for him to control. He turns to Sinister, who dulls his powers. In exchange, Gambit runs several missions for him. The last has him forming together a group of Marauders (of which Sabretooth is a member) and leading them to the Morlock Tunnels. He is unaware that this would lead to a massacre of the Morlocks, a group of misfit mutants who wouldn't be able to fit in on the surface world. Incredibly regretful, he manages to save one child - a young Morlock named Sarah.

His first run-in with the X-Men involves a painting heist in the manor of someone who just happens to be the Shadow King. Storm, at this point stuck as a twelve year old and powerless, is being held there and he helps her escape. They spend some time together doing general Robin Hood-esque thievery until a run-in with Nanny and Orphanmaker (the ones responsible for Storm's de-aging in the first place) cause Storm to regain her memories. After they defeat them, Storm leads them back to the X-Men and Gambit joins them.

He fits right into the team fairly well from the start. Placed in the group's "blue" team, the one that would later be covered by the basic "X-Men" title, he helps them fight against Kree, the Shadow King, Magneto, Omega Red, the Brood (where Belladonna seemingly died), Mojo, Stryfe, Sabretooth, the Phalanx, and Legion before anything more is really revealed about him. Bishop, a time traveler from the future, accuses Gambit of being the one who would later betray the X-Men, but the thief insists this can't be the case and sticks around anyway.

During his time with the X-Men, Gambit falls in love with Rogue, a mutant who's incapable of touching anyone without absorbing their powers and memories. At one point, Gambit's brother is murdered while coming to him at the X-Mansion, leading him and Rogue back to New Orleans where they find out Belladonna is still alive. Gambit steals an elixir from Candra (an immortal who supplies the Thieves Guild with a drought of long life) in order to save her. In the process, an accidental touch from Belladonna causes Rogue to absorb her memories, leaving Bella without them. When Legion causes a rift in time and space (that creates the dimension known as the "Age of Apocalypse" universe) it looks as though the world is going to end for all of them. In that moment, Rogue and Gambit share a deep and passionate kiss. However, the world ends up being saved and in the aftermath Gambit falls into a coma for three weeks while Rogue is left tormented by some of his darkest memories. Though he goes after her once he's regained some of his strength, he can't get himself to divulge the truth about himself and she leaves the team for a while.

In her absence, the X-Men (and most of the Marvel heroes) take on Onslaught, a manifestation of destruction brought on by Professor Xavier's guilt over the measure's he'd recently gone through to stop Magneto. It's at this point that it's revealed that it was the Professor, not Gambit, that had been referred to in the recording Bishop had developed his original conclusion on. With Bishop's intervention, it seems they've kept that dark future from happening.

When Rogue returns, it's with a man named "Joseph," who appears to be Magneto who's been de-aged about twenty years and has no memories of his time as a supervillain. Her closeness to him causes Gambit to be jealous, and the two men have a difficult time getting along at first. A handful of X-Men, Gambit, Rogue, and Joseph included, are summoned to help the Shi'ar Empire (an alien race that's had close ties to the group for some time) battle the Phalanx (a race of techno-organic life forms). There's been a good lead up to the reveal of Gambit's past at this point, with him paying homage at the place of the Morlock Massacre on its anniversary and then taking the time to help bury a lot of the Shi'ar dead after the Phalanx was defeated.

Strange incidents on the way back to earth have them crash-landing in Antarctica near an old base of Magneto's. The real Magneto (not Joseph) holds a trial for Gambit there under the disguise of Erik the Red. Here, the secret of Gambit's part in the Morlock Massacre is revealed. Rogue is forced to absorb Gambit's memories again to give the details, and though she also uses the stolen powers to help them escape, Gambit's own self-hatred still running through her mind causes her and the X-Men to abandon him in Antarctica. Later she would regret this action and go back to look for him with no success.

Starving and near death, he is found by the spirit of a mutant named Mary Purcell, who bonds with him and gives him the ability to survive. With her help, he travels to the Savage Land where he meets a powerful man by the name of New Son who helps him return to the States, though now he's in his debt. He returns to the X-Men, who accept him back, though on the side he does a few jobs for New Son, gathering items and information (it's a complicated matter that involves New Son wanting to create a new world to save the current from destruction, but I won't go into that). He works with a man named Jacob Gavin Jr. (a.k.a. Courier).

During his time back with the X-Men, he gets to know Marrow, or Sarah, the one girl he'd managed to save from the Massacre. During a trip to the past involving the destruction of the Skrull homeworld, he accidentally injures her with one of his attacks and, when medical supplies aren't coming soon enough, takes her to one of the Skrull healing facilities. The healing process works better than expected, giving her better control over her own abilities where they'd been painful to her before. Sadly, this character fades out of the comics before Gambit's part in the Massacre is ever revealed to her.

In the middle of all this, he's told by his father and other members of the Thieves Guild that he needs to go back in time about a hundred years, since many of them (long lived as they are) recall him doing so in the first place. He does so, saving the guild from its own stupidity though also putting it back under the heel of Candra, as well as inadvertently making Sinister more powerful. In order to return to the current time, Gambit's biokinetic powers are jump-started to the point where he has a hard time controlling them once he returns home. New Son hires several villains to take him out in order to get him to push his abilities to their limits. He's successful for the most part, but with the help of the X-Men Gambit's able to put a temporary stop to his plans, though not before it's revealed that New Son is also Gambit (though through what means is still a mystery). Gambit also manages to unite the Thieves and Assassin's guilds during this, as both had come after him as well. He'd been made leader of the Thieves guild by his father not too long before.

We also find out eventually that his father has information on his birth parents, however at this point in time that information has still yet to be revealed. He's made leader of the Unified Guilds (a merging of the Thieves and Assassins) with Belladonna as his second in command.

When New Son appears again, we find out that he's Gambit from an alternate universe, and a loss of control over his own powers had resulted in great devastation. Because of this, he's gone around to other universes killing himself so his mistakes weren't repeated. Gambit manages to defeat him for the last time, burning off his excess energy in the process and returning his power level to the same as it had been before the time-traveling incident.

Gambit becomes the leader of one of the X-Men's two teams for a while (with Rogue in charge of the other). His team is Storm, Phoenix, Beast, and Cable. Together they take on a group called the Neo, as well as an underground slave cartel. In a separate instance, Gambit joins up with Bishop to tackle an issue involving Stryfe and Cable (accompanied by the Witness, who I'll go into better detail about later). Stryfe seems to have been killed in the conclusion of this.

The Witness
In Bishop's future, he knows of a man called the Witness. This man also goes by the name LeBeau. It's assumed that this man is a future Gambit, and he certainly talks like him, but we're never expressly told. Gambit himself found the Witness in a Mausoleum in New Orleans when he was a child, and spoke to him occasionally for guidance. The Witness claims to be in all times at once, knowing everything that goes on - hence his name. However, it's also said that he's killed in the Messiah Complex, so who knows for sure what's happened with that bit of plot but it was most likely just dropped for good and that's the best way they could think of to do it. The character was a product of an old plot that had to be redone and fit back into the main storyline. Originally, Gambit was going to be the traitor that caused Bishop's future, but fans liked him so much that Marvel changed things around to keep him on the team. Thus, Gambit's story can seem a little confusing in places and Onslaught was an absolute mess.

Point in Canon:
I'll be taking him from after "Gambit & Bishop: Sons of the Atom" and before he appears in X-Treme X-Men. (2001) At this point, the rest of his team is out searching for Destiny's Diaries. He'll have just stopped smoking, as this is about when Joe Quesada (Marvel's Editor in Chief) started having characters drop the habit.

Character Personality:
Remy LeBeau is a scoundrel by nature and trade. He might not always be entirely trustworthy, but you can trust him to have the best interests of his friends at heart even if things don't happen to go the way he wants them to. He takes big risks, often with good results but with a fair amount of failures too. Though he's gotten over some of the guilt from his past, taking on problems with a positive attitude, there seems to almost always be a new problem to take the place of the old.

He's a thief, but he's an honorable thief who will generally honor his debts, something that's gotten him into trouble as he'll find himself indebted to questionable people. If the person is disreputable enough, like Mr. Sinister, he'll probably double-cross them, but with most others he'll try and follow through. He can be something of a softy, especially when women and children are involved, and is mostly amiable and approachable.

Remy has a tendency to be cocky and arrogant with his adversaries, running off at the mouth a lot. (It's been pointed out before that he tends to talk more the more nervous he is.) He's not easily cowed, and doesn't like to let his enemies think they've won even when he's clearly defeated. Though most of this is just for show, he usually does a good job of keeping up the false optimism.

He does have a bit of a temper, and has been known to snap at people without thinking when on edge. Most of this is shown when he's defending someone else or doesn't think someone close to him is being treated right, rather than in regards to something being done to him. He's questioned the actions of both the Professor and Cyclops in this regard several times, though he respects both.

Despite multiple instances of seemingly betraying the X-Men, he's always been eventually welcomed back and has led teams on more than one occasion. Most likely, this is because he's never actually turning against them in his heart. Almost all of these instances have been acts of subterfuge against their enemies.

His relationship with Rogue has been a rocky one, what with her inability to touch him (except for certain instances when they were powerless). They both clearly care deeply for each other, but circumstances keep making things difficult for them. Though Remy loves her, he hasn't been a hundred percent faithful over the years. (Granted, they're not always technically "together" at these times.) Rogue has also displayed affection to others, such as Magneto. She and Remy have been on and off so many times that it's impossible to keep track. At this point in time he's had several flings with other women and Rogue has pushed him away some as she attempts to bring her powers under control.

Character Plans:
I assume he'll be claimed by the other X-Men rather quickly upon arrival and will most likely get involved with some of the thievery Magento and Jubilee have been up to, being the master thief that he is. He will probably avoid joining either AGI or SERO, despite some connections the group has to the latter, unless weird circumstances come up.

Appearance/PB:
[this outfit] Remy is fairly tall, at about 6'1" to 6'2" depending on what website or stat sheet you look at. He's well-built but not bulky, with brown hair and usually (but not always) a five o'clock shadow. His eyes make his mutant genes apparent, with their red irises and black sclera.

Writing Samples

First Person Sample
So I get dis is Canada, not de ol' U.S. of A, but I know slavery ain't s'posed t'be a common practice up dis way. I'm a southern boy, born an' bred, but I be fully in support of emancipation. [There's a sound like the irritated tapping of a pen against a table. Remy knows he shouldn't be making open posts like this when he's already not in the best of moods.]

[Though this doesn't stop him from continuing.] I jus' want t'know what sort of alternate world I done stepped in where dis can go on an' none of you hero types have done anythin' about it. Am I wrong in thinkin' dis be de twenty-first century?

Color me disappointed, mes amis. Just agreein' it's bad an' somethin' should be done ain't fixin' nothin'. As for me, I'm gon'-- [The feed seems to have been abruptly cut off at this point, likely not by his own doing.]

Third Person Sample
It was times like these that Remy really wished he had a cigarette. Even before he'd quit, though, he'd known better than to leave a trail of literal smoke on this sort of heist. At least now there was even less chance of him being smelled out before his job was done. He wouldn't count it impossible, not in this location, given that he was probably the cleanest smelling thing there at the moment.

The cajun was currently scaling the dark side of a dingy warehouse down in the industrial district. Given the lush condominiums on the other side of town filled with the city's wealthiest citizens, this wasn't the first place he'd expected to find himself when he'd been given the tip-off. Below him were two dumpsters and the stench wafting upwards assured him they were probably used for worse than just tossing out last night's dinner. He couldn't imagine they were emptied out on a regular enough basis either.

There was no darkness proofing on this building, the walls crumbling and many of the windows long since shattered. A fire escape ran down the top half of this side while the bottom half no longer existed. That was no more than a death trap. As he pulled himself carefully in through one of the windows, he heard the skittering of something much larger than a rat in one of the adjoining rooms. There was no security, nor anyone else on the property at all, really. Perhaps that was the idea. Why spend money on manpower to guard something when the darkness monsters would do it for free?

He had to give them props for hiding it right out in the open like this. Even street gangs hanging out in buildings like this during the day wouldn't think to scour it to the degree where they might locate the strong box he was after. Still, he wondered if this job actually required his level of skill to pull off. Any of the others could have done it just as easily.

Eventually, Remy reached the tile in the floor he'd been told to look for and peeled it slowly back. Inside was a metal box, completely sealed on all sides. He reached in to pull it out carefully and examine it better, but the moment he did so, there was a faint click like the opening of a lock. In an adjacent room, he heard what sounded suspiciously like the opening of a cage door.

Aw, damn.

Glowing eyes and gnashing teeth was about all Remy had a chance to see through the darkened doorway as the creature came barreling in. He dodged the first attack nimbly, but the beast was fast. He hit it with three explosive cards before it got a hold of his jacket and prevented him from grabbing more. With one dizzying swing of its head, he was tossed free of his coat and against the nearest wall.

Winded, he sought a counter attack before it could charge again and tear his head from his shoulders. As its massive jaws came at him again, he acted on instinct and shoved the box into its gaping mouth. Charged, the box then exploded, effectively blowing off the creature's head and ending the threat.

Unfortunately, that ended the heist as well. Though staying around the scene of the crime probably wasn't the best of ideas, he needed to let Magneto know of the failure. He brought him up on an encrypted line, preparing for the worst. "It's Gambit. I found de place an' I found de stash, but I ran into some trouble. 'Fraid I lost de box."

There's a pause. "What do you mean, 'what box?'" A glance back at the floor reveals a spattering of white powder - cocaine, most likely. That wasn't what he'd come for. Quickly, he hung up on Magneto and knelt back down over the tile. Where the box had sat he could clearly see where a panel might be covering something else. He managed to pry that back and underneath was a book, locked and bound. This he retrieved, making his way back to the window before something else appeared.

Next time, he was hitting the west side.