[App] beyondtherift
About You - The Player
Name: Aubrey
Age: 23
Contact: taibhsearachd@gmail.com; meant to care (AIM); plurk
Past Role Playing Experience: I HAVE BEEN ROLEPLAYING SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME. ....seriously, you don't want me to list it. LOTS. LET'S JUST GO WITH THAT.
The Character
Name: Georgia Mason
Age/Birthdate: 23 / some time in the first half of 2017 (she doesn't know the actual date)
Species: Human
Type: Wanderer
Canon: Newsflesh
Pre-existing powers: Not so much a power, but important to know: As a result of the retinal KA that permanently dilates her pupils, she has stellar low-light vision - not what you'd call catlike, but no other human is going to see in the dark as well as she can. Her eyes don't water, she doesn't need to blink much, and she can't cry. The flipside of this is that light hurts - even when wearing her sunglasses, she's prone to killer migraines, and taking her sunglasses is the fastest way to completely disable her. Exposure to strong lights - which includes normal daylight and indoor lighting - for prolonged periods of time could cause permanent damage to her sight or blind her completely.
Rift Change, if applicable: Georgia now has the ability to sense when someone is lying, and force them to tell the truth if she chooses. This ability is not passive (that is, she can't always sense a lie no matter what) - it has to be deliberately invoked to take effect. In addition, Kellis-Amberlee is now selectively infectious, in both its dormant and live forms.
Livejournal: shotofdumbidea
Played By: Neve Campbell
Icon:
Appearance: • Average height (5'4" or 5'5"?)
• 135 lbs tops
• Short brown hair - she prefers it short enough that she doesn't have to do more than run a comb through it, and if it starts to curl, it is way too long for her. It's also dyed to her natural color, thanks to the bleach in her shower at home; she makes a terrible blonde.
• Wears sunglasses constantly. Yes, even at night, barring special circumstances. She will take advantage of this to watch you when you think she's not looking. Do not try to make her remove them.
• Behind the sunglasses, her eyes are mostly black, with a very thin ring of coppery brown around the dilated pupil. The effect of her stare minus the sunglasses is kind of creepy.
• Small blue and red tattoo on her wrist containing information like her name, social security number, journalist ID number... It's to identify her body if necessary.
Personality: Georgia is a natural journalist - smart, determined, and a born cynic. She makes a point of projecting a particular image to the world at large. She's the hard-hitting reporter of the team, the one who doesn't pull any punches, is absolutely devoted to the truth, and if she has a sense of humor, it's nothing but dry, biting sarcasm. There's a common perception among certain members of the press corps that she sucked up the entire supply of "jaded and cranky" between her and her brother, and now spends her time glowering from behind her sunglasses, gathering facts with which to ruin anyone who might annoy her, and possibly plotting the downfall of the western world. It's not true - mostly - but that kind of a reputation has its uses, so she doesn't really mind.
As a rule, Georgia is not terribly friendly. To anyone. It's not that she doesn't make friends, but if you're not used to her, it might take a while to recognize the relationship as friendship, at least on her end. All her friendships double as working relationships - probably a result of her warped childhood, if you want to look at it that closely (she doesn't) - and she tends to focus on the professional side of the relationship more often than not. Buffy's a "decent friend and a great techie"; Mahir, probably her best friend besides Shaun, is more likely to be regarded as her second in command than as a friend at all; and the highest praise and most affection she tends to show is in telling a friend they did well at their job.
Even when she does get close to someone, she retains a healthy awareness of their faults and weaknesses as well as their good points, and there's always a sense she's keeping them at arm's length - and that's because she is. Georgia's an extremely private person, who doesn't like to show emotion and doesn't even seem to have a personal life because that would mean opening up more than she's comfortable with. The only person who gets past that carefully constructed defence is her brother... and even then, she's more likely to express her affection for him by telling him she hates him and threatening to leave him for the zombies than in any normal fashion.
It's easy to think Georgia doesn't like people, but that's not what it is. Rather, she just has a fairly cynical outlook on human nature - people tend to accept the first easy answer given to them, and act on fear before reason - and she is not particularly surprised when people act according to it. That doesn't mean it doesn't annoy her when people don't bother to look for the right answer, or settle for entertainment value and what's comfortable to hear over the truth. She takes comfort in the fact that she and the people she cares about are smarter than that, and she has a tendency to get judgmental and sometimes just plain bitchy when she thinks someone's being stupid, especially willfully so. On the flipside, it tends to be somewhat of a surprise to her when people do use their brains, so that plus not being a horrible human being can sometimes be enough to earn you a little goodwill from Georgia.
Georgia's a leader almost as naturally as she is a journalist. She's happiest when she can delegate and trust people to handle their jobs without her worrying too much about them, but there's a reason she ended up as administrative head of After the End Times, and a reason that when she gives orders, people listen. She's practical and pragmatic, and very good at organization, with a head for facts and a talent for seeing the bigger picture. What's more, she doesn't panic in a crisis - she just goes cold and rational, expects the worst and plans for it.
Georgia and Shaun were raised to a faith of "tell the truth, know the escape routes, and always carry extra ammunition". That sort of thing is kind of bound to happen with parents like theirs. Knowing the escape routes and carrying extra ammunition are kind of background noise for her - she never forgets, but as far as conscious, active concerns go, she mostly leaves that sort of thing for Shaun to worry about. The part about telling the truth, though, she took to heart maybe more than even her parents intended. She's not really religious in any way, shape, or form, but her devotion to the truth comes damn close.
Telling the truth isn't just important to Georgia, it's her driving purpose in life. That doesn't mean that she's incapable of keeping a secret, or that she's tactless (though you might not know it from her habit of using the truth as a weapon when annoyed), but when it's important enough, there's not a thing in the world that can stop her from making sure the truth gets heard. She believes, above all, people should be allowed to make their own choices and form their own opinions, and doing that requires knowing all the facts. Knowing the whole truth means you don't have to be afraid of what you don't know. Given that, hiding the truth from people, or warping the truth until it's impossible to separate fact from opinion, and forcing people to live in fear is the closest thing to evil she can think of.
The only thing that matters to Georgia as much as the truth is Shaun. Growing up after the Rising means it's not safe to really trust many people - unless you know their personality so intimately that you can tell immediately when something's off, and know for sure they'll tell you if they know something's wrong, trusting other people means gambling with your life every single time, and Georgia's too attached to survival to do that if she can help it. This narrows most people's circle of trust to immediate family, significant others, and, on very rare occasion, extremely close friends. And with Georgia's parents being mostly interested in their children as props for ratings, the only person she really trusts is her brother.
In another time and place, their relationship would be described as unhealthily codependent - as it is, it's a survival mechanism, though still regarded by some people as a little creepy and questionable, even in their world. She can't sleep when he's not at least in the next room, preferably with the door open so she can hear him. She relies on him to run interference when she can't deal with people, and vice versa, and while she's perfectly capable of handling herself in field situations without him, she's happiest when Shaun's around and watching her back. Shaun being who he is, a part of her has accepted that she's going to lose him - probably some day sooner than either of them is ready for. The rest of her is certain that she won't survive all that long once he's gone, and doesn't want to. In the meantime, all she really wants is to keep reporting the news, telling the truth as best she can, and to be around her brother for as long as she can possibly keep him.
Like most people of her generation, she's got a bundle of issues any sane person is bound to develop in a world where zombies are a constant threat. She's deeply uncomfortable in crowds (which, for her, begins at maybe eight people in one room), though she's much better about that than most people her age, who tend to run screaming from crowds if you can even get them close enough to that many people. Animals over forty pounds - that is, big enough to amplify - are something she regards as potential threats, no matter how well-trained and controlled, and if she can avoid even being in the same general area as animals that big, she will very happily do so. She really dislikes physical contact from just about anyone but Shaun, and she very quickly gets tense and nervous in open spaces, anywhere without clear lines of sight, or any building that's not adequately secured and doesn't require blood tests to get into. Oh, and she believes that a person having obvious open wounds of any kind - even just a scratch - or acting strangely is a valid reason to point a gun at them until they get a blood test. That shouldn't be a problem or anything, right?
Events: • The death of her biological parents when she was just a few months old and her subsequent adoption by the Masons (at the same time they adopted Shaun) really set her life on a certain course right from the start. The first part is not such an uncommon story in her world. The world is full of zombies, people die, and sometimes they leave children behind. It's the Masons part that's important. The Masons lost their son during the Rising, and became journalists, turning to ratings in place of familial affection. Shaun and Georgia were raised more as props for ratings than as children - they went out of their way to give them things most children of their generation didn't have, like a yard to play in, trips to the movies and parks, and pets too small to amplify, but the only time they show their children any affection is on camera.
It's probably because of this that Shaun and Georgia are as close (and codependent) as they are - when your parents don't really love you, when your only real purpose in their lives is to help boost their ratings, your adoptive twin sibling is really the only person you can trust completely. Shaun copes by viewing Georgia as his only family, but Georgia doesn't go quite that far - the Masons are still her parents, it's just that the only person whose affection she gives a damn about is Shaun. She never learned how to make close friendships with anyone else, and at this point, she doesn't see a good reason to try.
• When she was sixteen, Georgia told her father she wanted to be a journalist, and he pulled some strings to get her enrolled in a history of journalism class at the university. Her parents had already kind of set her up for valuing the truth and ratings, what with her whole upbringing, but that was when she really fell in love with the truth. It hit her at the perfect time, really - she was just old enough to really know who and what she was and what she wanted to do with her life, and just young enough that she was optimistic enough to believe in the truth like it was a religion, and that she could make a difference by finding it and telling it. By the time a bit of that optimism wore off, it was really too late - journalism was in her blood, and she was hooked.
Writing Sample: [Excerpt from a fic (which I haven't finished yet):]
Shaun's home earlier than Georgia expected. He's still been gone for long enough that soon the only sensible thing to do with the empty Coke cans taking over her desk will be to start building a fort, but last she heard, he'd been planning to crash with his Irwin friends in Salinas, and wasn't supposed to be back at least until a couple hours after the sun rose. The distant sound of the garage security system, followed by Shaun's footsteps thumping up the stairs with absolutely no concern for who he might wake up, makes her jump and spin around in her chair just to check if she somehow lost several hours somewhere.
It's still three in the morning according to the alarm clock. There's no sunlight coming through the open door between their rooms. He really is home early, then - very early - for no reason she can think of.
She manages to get out of her chair and halfway to the door before Shaun comes barreling in from the hall, and throws his arms around her hard enough to squeeze the breath out of her. She wheezes softly, and then laughs - quietly, because she actually cares about not waking up their parents, albeit for the entirely selfish reason of not wanting to deal with them on this little sleep.
"Well, that was dramatic. What, you just couldn't bear to be away from me for a couple more hours?"
Georgia starts to twist away from him, buying herself just enough room that she can reach up to shove him off her. Her hands hit his shoulders, and she stops, because he's shaking. The muscles under her hands are knotted tight in a way that only comes from hours of fear and tension, he smells like bleach and sweat, and he's still clinging to her, hard.
"...Shaun?"
Name: Aubrey
Age: 23
Contact: taibhsearachd@gmail.com; meant to care (AIM); plurk
Past Role Playing Experience: I HAVE BEEN ROLEPLAYING SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME. ....seriously, you don't want me to list it. LOTS. LET'S JUST GO WITH THAT.
The Character
Name: Georgia Mason
Age/Birthdate: 23 / some time in the first half of 2017 (she doesn't know the actual date)
Species: Human
Type: Wanderer
Canon: Newsflesh
Pre-existing powers: Not so much a power, but important to know: As a result of the retinal KA that permanently dilates her pupils, she has stellar low-light vision - not what you'd call catlike, but no other human is going to see in the dark as well as she can. Her eyes don't water, she doesn't need to blink much, and she can't cry. The flipside of this is that light hurts - even when wearing her sunglasses, she's prone to killer migraines, and taking her sunglasses is the fastest way to completely disable her. Exposure to strong lights - which includes normal daylight and indoor lighting - for prolonged periods of time could cause permanent damage to her sight or blind her completely.
Rift Change, if applicable: Georgia now has the ability to sense when someone is lying, and force them to tell the truth if she chooses. This ability is not passive (that is, she can't always sense a lie no matter what) - it has to be deliberately invoked to take effect. In addition, Kellis-Amberlee is now selectively infectious, in both its dormant and live forms.
Livejournal: shotofdumbidea
Played By: Neve Campbell
Icon:
Appearance: • Average height (5'4" or 5'5"?)
• 135 lbs tops
• Short brown hair - she prefers it short enough that she doesn't have to do more than run a comb through it, and if it starts to curl, it is way too long for her. It's also dyed to her natural color, thanks to the bleach in her shower at home; she makes a terrible blonde.
• Wears sunglasses constantly. Yes, even at night, barring special circumstances. She will take advantage of this to watch you when you think she's not looking. Do not try to make her remove them.
• Behind the sunglasses, her eyes are mostly black, with a very thin ring of coppery brown around the dilated pupil. The effect of her stare minus the sunglasses is kind of creepy.
• Small blue and red tattoo on her wrist containing information like her name, social security number, journalist ID number... It's to identify her body if necessary.
Personality: Georgia is a natural journalist - smart, determined, and a born cynic. She makes a point of projecting a particular image to the world at large. She's the hard-hitting reporter of the team, the one who doesn't pull any punches, is absolutely devoted to the truth, and if she has a sense of humor, it's nothing but dry, biting sarcasm. There's a common perception among certain members of the press corps that she sucked up the entire supply of "jaded and cranky" between her and her brother, and now spends her time glowering from behind her sunglasses, gathering facts with which to ruin anyone who might annoy her, and possibly plotting the downfall of the western world. It's not true - mostly - but that kind of a reputation has its uses, so she doesn't really mind.
As a rule, Georgia is not terribly friendly. To anyone. It's not that she doesn't make friends, but if you're not used to her, it might take a while to recognize the relationship as friendship, at least on her end. All her friendships double as working relationships - probably a result of her warped childhood, if you want to look at it that closely (she doesn't) - and she tends to focus on the professional side of the relationship more often than not. Buffy's a "decent friend and a great techie"; Mahir, probably her best friend besides Shaun, is more likely to be regarded as her second in command than as a friend at all; and the highest praise and most affection she tends to show is in telling a friend they did well at their job.
Even when she does get close to someone, she retains a healthy awareness of their faults and weaknesses as well as their good points, and there's always a sense she's keeping them at arm's length - and that's because she is. Georgia's an extremely private person, who doesn't like to show emotion and doesn't even seem to have a personal life because that would mean opening up more than she's comfortable with. The only person who gets past that carefully constructed defence is her brother... and even then, she's more likely to express her affection for him by telling him she hates him and threatening to leave him for the zombies than in any normal fashion.
It's easy to think Georgia doesn't like people, but that's not what it is. Rather, she just has a fairly cynical outlook on human nature - people tend to accept the first easy answer given to them, and act on fear before reason - and she is not particularly surprised when people act according to it. That doesn't mean it doesn't annoy her when people don't bother to look for the right answer, or settle for entertainment value and what's comfortable to hear over the truth. She takes comfort in the fact that she and the people she cares about are smarter than that, and she has a tendency to get judgmental and sometimes just plain bitchy when she thinks someone's being stupid, especially willfully so. On the flipside, it tends to be somewhat of a surprise to her when people do use their brains, so that plus not being a horrible human being can sometimes be enough to earn you a little goodwill from Georgia.
Georgia's a leader almost as naturally as she is a journalist. She's happiest when she can delegate and trust people to handle their jobs without her worrying too much about them, but there's a reason she ended up as administrative head of After the End Times, and a reason that when she gives orders, people listen. She's practical and pragmatic, and very good at organization, with a head for facts and a talent for seeing the bigger picture. What's more, she doesn't panic in a crisis - she just goes cold and rational, expects the worst and plans for it.
Georgia and Shaun were raised to a faith of "tell the truth, know the escape routes, and always carry extra ammunition". That sort of thing is kind of bound to happen with parents like theirs. Knowing the escape routes and carrying extra ammunition are kind of background noise for her - she never forgets, but as far as conscious, active concerns go, she mostly leaves that sort of thing for Shaun to worry about. The part about telling the truth, though, she took to heart maybe more than even her parents intended. She's not really religious in any way, shape, or form, but her devotion to the truth comes damn close.
Telling the truth isn't just important to Georgia, it's her driving purpose in life. That doesn't mean that she's incapable of keeping a secret, or that she's tactless (though you might not know it from her habit of using the truth as a weapon when annoyed), but when it's important enough, there's not a thing in the world that can stop her from making sure the truth gets heard. She believes, above all, people should be allowed to make their own choices and form their own opinions, and doing that requires knowing all the facts. Knowing the whole truth means you don't have to be afraid of what you don't know. Given that, hiding the truth from people, or warping the truth until it's impossible to separate fact from opinion, and forcing people to live in fear is the closest thing to evil she can think of.
The only thing that matters to Georgia as much as the truth is Shaun. Growing up after the Rising means it's not safe to really trust many people - unless you know their personality so intimately that you can tell immediately when something's off, and know for sure they'll tell you if they know something's wrong, trusting other people means gambling with your life every single time, and Georgia's too attached to survival to do that if she can help it. This narrows most people's circle of trust to immediate family, significant others, and, on very rare occasion, extremely close friends. And with Georgia's parents being mostly interested in their children as props for ratings, the only person she really trusts is her brother.
In another time and place, their relationship would be described as unhealthily codependent - as it is, it's a survival mechanism, though still regarded by some people as a little creepy and questionable, even in their world. She can't sleep when he's not at least in the next room, preferably with the door open so she can hear him. She relies on him to run interference when she can't deal with people, and vice versa, and while she's perfectly capable of handling herself in field situations without him, she's happiest when Shaun's around and watching her back. Shaun being who he is, a part of her has accepted that she's going to lose him - probably some day sooner than either of them is ready for. The rest of her is certain that she won't survive all that long once he's gone, and doesn't want to. In the meantime, all she really wants is to keep reporting the news, telling the truth as best she can, and to be around her brother for as long as she can possibly keep him.
Like most people of her generation, she's got a bundle of issues any sane person is bound to develop in a world where zombies are a constant threat. She's deeply uncomfortable in crowds (which, for her, begins at maybe eight people in one room), though she's much better about that than most people her age, who tend to run screaming from crowds if you can even get them close enough to that many people. Animals over forty pounds - that is, big enough to amplify - are something she regards as potential threats, no matter how well-trained and controlled, and if she can avoid even being in the same general area as animals that big, she will very happily do so. She really dislikes physical contact from just about anyone but Shaun, and she very quickly gets tense and nervous in open spaces, anywhere without clear lines of sight, or any building that's not adequately secured and doesn't require blood tests to get into. Oh, and she believes that a person having obvious open wounds of any kind - even just a scratch - or acting strangely is a valid reason to point a gun at them until they get a blood test. That shouldn't be a problem or anything, right?
Events: • The death of her biological parents when she was just a few months old and her subsequent adoption by the Masons (at the same time they adopted Shaun) really set her life on a certain course right from the start. The first part is not such an uncommon story in her world. The world is full of zombies, people die, and sometimes they leave children behind. It's the Masons part that's important. The Masons lost their son during the Rising, and became journalists, turning to ratings in place of familial affection. Shaun and Georgia were raised more as props for ratings than as children - they went out of their way to give them things most children of their generation didn't have, like a yard to play in, trips to the movies and parks, and pets too small to amplify, but the only time they show their children any affection is on camera.
It's probably because of this that Shaun and Georgia are as close (and codependent) as they are - when your parents don't really love you, when your only real purpose in their lives is to help boost their ratings, your adoptive twin sibling is really the only person you can trust completely. Shaun copes by viewing Georgia as his only family, but Georgia doesn't go quite that far - the Masons are still her parents, it's just that the only person whose affection she gives a damn about is Shaun. She never learned how to make close friendships with anyone else, and at this point, she doesn't see a good reason to try.
• When she was sixteen, Georgia told her father she wanted to be a journalist, and he pulled some strings to get her enrolled in a history of journalism class at the university. Her parents had already kind of set her up for valuing the truth and ratings, what with her whole upbringing, but that was when she really fell in love with the truth. It hit her at the perfect time, really - she was just old enough to really know who and what she was and what she wanted to do with her life, and just young enough that she was optimistic enough to believe in the truth like it was a religion, and that she could make a difference by finding it and telling it. By the time a bit of that optimism wore off, it was really too late - journalism was in her blood, and she was hooked.
Writing Sample: [Excerpt from a fic (which I haven't finished yet):]
Shaun's home earlier than Georgia expected. He's still been gone for long enough that soon the only sensible thing to do with the empty Coke cans taking over her desk will be to start building a fort, but last she heard, he'd been planning to crash with his Irwin friends in Salinas, and wasn't supposed to be back at least until a couple hours after the sun rose. The distant sound of the garage security system, followed by Shaun's footsteps thumping up the stairs with absolutely no concern for who he might wake up, makes her jump and spin around in her chair just to check if she somehow lost several hours somewhere.
It's still three in the morning according to the alarm clock. There's no sunlight coming through the open door between their rooms. He really is home early, then - very early - for no reason she can think of.
She manages to get out of her chair and halfway to the door before Shaun comes barreling in from the hall, and throws his arms around her hard enough to squeeze the breath out of her. She wheezes softly, and then laughs - quietly, because she actually cares about not waking up their parents, albeit for the entirely selfish reason of not wanting to deal with them on this little sleep.
"Well, that was dramatic. What, you just couldn't bear to be away from me for a couple more hours?"
Georgia starts to twist away from him, buying herself just enough room that she can reach up to shove him off her. Her hands hit his shoulders, and she stops, because he's shaking. The muscles under her hands are knotted tight in a way that only comes from hours of fear and tension, he smells like bleach and sweat, and he's still clinging to her, hard.
"...Shaun?"