Application;

Mar 27, 2011 16:37

[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Mici
AGE: OLD ENOUGH. (over 18, weep)
JOURNAL: arachnidism
IM: ShinRa Brat
E-MAIL: presidentshinra[at]gmail[dot]com
RETURNING: Nope!

[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Arthur
FANDOM: Inception (film)
CHRONOLOGY: After the Elevator Kick
CLASS: Anti-hero
SUPERHERO NAME: N/A
ALTER EGO: Arthur - point man and procurer

BACKGROUND: Arthur's background is sort of mysterious - possibly on purpose, but more likely because Nolan has a crap handle on how to address secondary characters. But on that note, what can be gathered from interviews and the like, is that Arthur was a military man, and part of the initial team of dreamers that participated in the military's dreamshare program. Why he left the military isn't revealed, but it's clear that whatever it was, it is a part of his life he no longer discusses.

When the movie opens Arthur is currently following Dom Cobb around the world, making what can be presumed to be ridiculous amounts of money through the art of extraction - breaking into dreams to steal people's secrets and sell them to the highest bidder. They are participating on a job on a man named Saito, who manages to realize it's a dream (with the help of Dom's psychotic and very dead ex-wife), and the extraction is a bust. Unfortunately for Arthur, Dom, and their architect Nash, the company they were trying to steal a secret for comes from the 'do it or die' school of criminal behavior, and the three have to get the fuck off the radar before they get caught by either Cobol, the company, or by Saito.

Saito manages to intercept them on the way out of Japan.

Saito says he'll make a deal - protect them from Cobol and also help Dom get back to the US, where he's wanted for the murder of his wife, if Arthur and Dom agree to perform an impossible task - they must successfully implant an idea into a rival competitors brain, a task referred to as inception. Inception has never been performed successfully, but Dom is desperate and Arthur is too loyal to say no. So they head to Paris, so that Dom can hit up his father-in-law for a new architect, while Arthur organizes basically everything else. During this part of the movie we find out the rules for why dreamsharing works, several new characters are introduced (notably: Eames the Forger, i.e. the bane of Arthur's existence, and Yusuf the Chemist, also known as the guy who didn't go to the bathroom before they started this heist), Saito buys an airline, and Arthur trains Ariadne, the new architect, on Arthur's very favorite mindtrick, paradox.

Then the actual 'heist' part of the movie begins. The team must dreamshare with the target, a man named Robert Fisher, on a ridiculously long flight. They all chill out in first class, Robert gets dosed with sedative, and they begin the dreamshare process. Right from the get-go, things are wrong. First, Saito, who insisted on coming along (the 'tourist') is shot. This is because it turns out that Robert has a militarized subconscious, which Arthur didn't find out in the background. To add to matters, Cobb forgot to share the interesting little fact that none of them can get out of the dream in the usual way - i.e. getting killed - because if they die in the dream, they fall into a deeper dreamstate known as limbo. So despite the fact that they're in an extremely dangerous situation, they continue with the plan - dragging Robert through three dream levels to attempt to implant the idea successfully on the final level. They kidnap Robert's dream self, put everyone in a van, and fall into the second dream, which belongs to Arthur.

Arthur's dream takes place in a hotel, and they decide to try and pull a con called 'Mr. Charles' where Dom pretends to be the head of Robert's dream security. Arthur, in the meantime, is being stalked by Robert's subconscious who senses he is the dreamer, so he tries to throw them off by kissing Ariadne (it doesn't work) and Arthur goes on the move
it's really Eames's, their forger's, dream) to uncover the 'truth' which is really the implanted idea to disassemble his father's company.

While the rest of the team goes into Eames's dream for the final inception, Arthur is left to lead the rest of Robert's security on a merry chase. He manages to kill and outwit several members of security (using paradox, and also amazing use of a revolving hallway). Because of goings on in the first dream, the gravity in Arthur's dream gets pulled, and he has to rig a system to force a kick without gravity. He first wraps the rest of the gang in phone and LAN cording and floats them down the hallway to the elevator, where he sets up the explosives, and detonates them.

Luckily the gang is just finished with the inception on the dream level below, and they get the kick just in time to all get sucked up back into the first dream, where it's revealed the inception took, and then to wake up safe and sound in the airplane. The movie, at least for Arthur, ends in the baggage claim where the team all go their separate ways.

PERSONALITY: Arthur is, primarily, defined as being the point man - basically the guy who in a military operation keeps everyone safe by being ahead of everyone else. That means that he has to see what's coming, predict things that might happen, know how to do every job in a heist at least to a minor degree, be prepared for anything, and be informed on everything. In a sense, he's the manager to Dom's creative mind, handling the minutae of any project they have. This bleeds into his personality. Arthur is a type-A personality: he sees what needs doing and gets it done, even if it's unpleasant or, as in the case of creating a kick without gravity, almost impossible. He doesn't like to be jerked around, which is one of the reasons that he isn't the biggest fan of Eames, the group's resident forger, and he doesn't like to be the butt of jokes. He is a very organized individual, something reflected in his sartorial choices, wearing three-piece suits and vests even when he's working in a filthy warehouse where the only other people who will see him are mind-criminals, and also in his habit of recording everything in a little moleskine notebook he carries around with him.

However, his uptight attitude makes him the best at what he does, something that he clearly takes pride in. When in the second layer, when Eames tells him that Robert's security will be all over him, he smiles and assures Eames that he will lead them on a merry chase, suggesting that he not only knows that fact but that he's not worried about it - he's good enough to do everything he has to do and distract Robert's security. That said, however, he's not phased in the least when Dom screams at him that he made a mistake, which suggests that the current job is far more important than his pride. He has to get the job done no matter what.

There are glimpses of Arthur's softer side throughout the movie, and they are things he guards carefully. Arthur clearly has fond memories of Mal, Cobb's ex-wife, which are clear when he tells Ariadne that she was 'lovely.' This is important to note because earlier in the movie, Mal's shade shot him. When he cares about someone, his loyalty is fierce and unquestionable; despite the fact that Cobb is basically putting him in intense danger almost all the time, he commits to Cobb's insanity and it's suggested that he's done that for the past two years of his life while Cobb was on the run. While he's not prone to smiling much, he does find humor in situations, like when he kisses Ariadne and when he tells Eames that he will 'lead them on a merry chase,' proving that he's not entirely a stick-in-the-mud. However these instances are rare, but can be attributed to the fact that Arthur truly loves what he does: there is a thrill in being in someone's dream that he adores.

(He also likes post-war British painters. It's canon.)

POWER:
All of his powers are non-canon.

1. Dream entry and manipulation - basically Arthur can do what he does in the movie, except without the aid of a PASIV device, and instead of dreaming himself, he literally enters the dream, where he can design dreams and extract secrets (but not incept).

2. Paradox creation - in the real world his powers are limited to the creation of paradoxes like the eternal staircase.

3. Research skills - why yes. Arthur has research skills as a superpower - meaning if he looks up someone or something, databases open up for him, libraries mysteriously yield results, obscure literature is easily tackled, even if it's been previously deleted or destroyed. This is limited to things put down on paper, however (so if he looks someone up, he can find aliases, social security numbers, jobs held, things like that, but not secrets that haven't been recorded anywhere)

[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE: I'm not sure what purpose this Network is intended to serve. A military channel would never be this open, and a non-military channel would suggest that this is it's own brand of vigilantism.

But somehow I doubt that how anyone really uses this channel for the purpose that it was actually designed for. Carrying out conversations in the open is a pretty standard internet concept, isn't it?

Look, I'm not really interested in being a hero. Is there some kind of solution to this? I'm hoping for something a little more elegant than, 'turn to villainry.' I'm sure someone out there has developed a way to 'go home.'

Wake up.

LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE: This is a dream.

That's all it can be. He has to be in a dream, although he doesn't know whose dream. At first he thought it was Yusuf's dream; New York Cityesque, but things he knew should have been there - the warehouse, the bridge, the streets, they were all gone. Yusuf might be a clever chemist, but there's no way that he would have messed with Ariadne's layout, not to the extent that Arthur and his meticulous mind would get lost in it. Whatever this is, it's not Yusuf's dream.

Which isn't comforting. Arthur doesn't remember how he got here (how did you get here, how did you get here, Arthur, is the first question he asks himself when he thinks it's a dream, because it's the question that the military never made him ask, so he has to ask himself, and he does, every single time) and there were no answers at the machine that the dream began in.

He thought, at first, that this might be limbo, but this limbo is populated, and he knows from what Dom told him, that limbo didn't have people in it. There were no projections in limbo, just vast eternities of time and buildings, huge and imposing, or tiny and fragile. Dom played God.

Arthur just wants out.

It's not that he isn't comfortable in the dream. The honest truth is that he's as comfortable in dreams as he is in the real world. Of course the real world doesn't bend at his hand, touched with the power of his mind. Of course, the real world has no easy escape route like a shot to the head - well, certainly nothing that Arthur would take. Dreams have an allure for him that cannot be denied. The insides of people's heads, sleeping and drifting, mapping out his world, seeing what others see in a way that is impossible to replicate, even the architecture, it's all something that is worth more money than any job could bring in. He loves it. He wouldn't do it if he didn't. He certainly wouldn't have to, with his talents.

But he does, so it says a lot that he wants out of this dream, because this dream is, in his opinion, the beginning of the end. The quick deterioration of his mind, the transformation from a strong, capable human being into someone like Dom, who lost everything, or worse, someone like Mal, who...

There is no more on that line of thought. With quick and brutal efficiency, Arthur cuts the thought off, and decides he won't think of it anymore. Frankly, it's a waste of time to think that way anyway, a path to something that Arthur isn't interested in pursuing. Instead he takes time to look at the City every which way, inspect the details, try and find who might be lost here with him in the sea of people. Where is the evidence of Ariadne, or Cobb, or heaven forbid, Eames? That's what Arthur is looking for - who else rode that kick with him into limbo.

That's the first step. The second, third, and fourth step have been neatly outlined in his notebook, because there is nothing that Arthur won't prepare for, even in a dream.

FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
Nada!
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