Application for The Oregon Trail
PLAYER
NAME/NICKNAME: Dalrint
AGE: Old.
PERSONAL LJ: dalrint
TIMEZONE: EST
EMAIL ADDRESS: Use LJ messages? I always answer them.
IM SCREENNAME AND SERVICE: AIM: Farobservr
CHARACTER
NAME: Doctor Kim Ross AKA Kusanagi Kimiko.
AGE: 23.
FANDOM/MEDIUM: Dresden Codak / Comics
CANON PULL-POINT: Between Hob and Dark Science.
ABILITIES:
Kim is a cyborg. She has cybernetic legs and a left arm, a cybernetic left eye, and her spine has been modified and partially replaced with control and interface circuitry for her limbs. She's somewhat stronger than your average person because of all this, and her eye can see into some extra light spectrums. Her artificial left hand has dozens of small tools tucked inside the fingers, sort of like a highly advanced pocket knife. It also contains a small recording device for keeping personal logs.
She's also a brilliant robotics, mechanic and inventor. She has a doctorate in robotics. She is fluent in English, Japanese and Spanish.
CHARACTER BACKGROUND:
Kimiko, despite the strangeness of her world, is still a big too strange to really fit in. Raised by a brilliant mother and a mostly absent brilliant father, she fell in love with science early on and it has dominated most of her life. Aside from people who seem to have adopted her more than become friends with her, she’s terrible with people. She doesn’t know how to talk to them and never quite knows what to do around them.
She lost her mother when she was in her teens, something she never really got over, and used her inheritance to go through college and some of grad school, learning all the important things in life about science and psychology and everything in between. And then she opened a store using a machine she invented to help people relieve their fondest memories.
Also she was stealing those memories but she ISN’T A SUPERVILLAIN, dang it.
Eventually some travelers from an alternate future came back in time in an attempt to find a timeline that hadn’t been completely destroyed by the Technological Singularity, in which humanity advanced to the point where all their needs were granted by a massive artificial intelligence that eventually lost interest in them and refused to make them relevant again. They fought a war and ‘won’ but lost everything they had ever known, so they set out to reset it.
Kim had found the robot they used to travel in time and refused to help them, because she wants the technological singularity to happen. Unfortunately the travelers convinced her friends that she was wrong and to help them stop it from happening again, and they did.
A few days later, the time travelers returned…as TIME COLONISTS. Kim attempted to stop them and was hit by a laser that destroyed her legs, one arm, and half her face. The little robot she had found, which had cloned itself, grafted itself to her and she ushered in a sort of…technological singularity departure. The robot and the TIME COLONISTS all departed the earth, and Kimiko was left mostly crippled.
She built herself some legs and an arm and a spinal cybernetic system, her best invention ever, and then attempted as best she could to get back to living her normal, if odd, life.
CHARACTER PERSONALITY:
Kimiko enjoys reading, writing pre-history fanfiction, building robots, and committing affronts upon nature. She is not evil, or even amoral, but she tends to…miss the obvious moral queues sometimes. When building an Artificial Intelligence, she needed memories to use as a base platform for a mind. So she began stealing memories from the customers at her store, because she needed them. It never really occurred to her that it was probably evil, and when it was pointed out to her, she wasn’t all that worried.
She’s going to give them back eventually, after all.
She was raised by her mother, who was a kind, if strange, woman who nurtured Kimiko’s love of science and the unexplained. She adores solving puzzles, exploring the nature of the universe, and building machines. She has an extremely active imagination, creating whole worlds and alternate histories in her day dreams. (For instance, what would the earth be like if two of the major extinction events never happened. Pre-History Fanfiction to the rescue!) She comes up with theories that, for instance, memories are not stored in our minds but within the objects that trigger those memories, so it should be possible to find an object with future memories and learn about the future! That sort of thing.
She is vaguely neurotic and has no idea how to function in the normal social sphere of the world, probably stemming from a combination of living in strange third world countries where her mother could do her research, and simply not being that interested in society until it was too late to learn. When she forgot her locker combination in high school, rather than admit it to anyone, she changed schools! When a boy asked her for directions, and she thought he was asking her out, she panicked and ran off…and then completely changed her entire life schedule to make sure she was never in the part of town he frequents.
If she decides she likes someone, she’ll make up elaborate, complicated fantasies about them based on any small detail she might know, and then completely lose interest when they can’t measure up to that. Frankly though, she’s much happier around robots than people.
She DOES have friends…she’s not sure how it happens half the time, but she does have them. They mostly put up her odd moments and crazy half-cocked ideas. Or the random 3 AM phones calls about the most amazing discovery ever that she just made that no one else cares about. She does distance herself from people unconsciously, dealing with a moderate abandonment problem after her father basically left, and then her mother died. But it isn’t on purpose. She just thinks humans suck because they die. …or leave.
She designed her own prosthetics, the most advanced in the world now, and is probably more comfortable with them than she ever was in her own skin. Despite this she is self-conscious of her cybernetic arm, and tends to cover it up whenever possible with long sleeves, arm warmers, and fingerless gloves.
She is not very comfortable with the Asian half of her heritage, which is why she changed her last name from Kusanagi to Ross, and goes by ‘Kim’ rather than Kimiko. This stems from her disconnect with her mostly absent father. Lots of gifts do not a parent make.
WORLD:
Kimiko’s world is not very specific, in that it is implied it is in many ways similar to our own and in many ways very, very different. It’s entirely reasonable in her world to open a shop where you allow people to relive their fondest memories for a small fee, or for twin siblings to have magical powers that are mostly named after random acts of philosophy. Or for a Tiny version of Carl Jung to exist, who created Tiny Dream Analysis and lives on Kimiko’s couch. It’s the sort of place where the concept of the ‘Einstein-Rosen interdimensional bridge’ is actually the bridge on Second Street.
OCCUPATION: Wainwright
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON:
Kim stared at the bits and pieces of the battery charger she had just taken apart, frowning at them in frustration. She had almost everything she needed to make it work, and if she were somewhere other than trapped in the old west, she could've bought them at a radio shack like she had been planning.
But no, she had to be stuck here in the land of sand and heat and awful, and as fascinating as that was from a conceptual, exploratory standpoint, from a 'get shit built' standpoint it was a huge pain in the ass.
She carefully put everything back together, using the tools that sprouted from her left hand as she went, and eventually all the parts she had were right where she needed them to be. She just needed...two or three more. Maybe one. She could probably fake it with one.
...Of course, this meant actually talking to the rest of the people in the convoy, to see if anyone had something she could barter for/take apart. There had to be some technology here, enough people were from modern times or the future. But so far she'd tried to be an observer, impartial at best, and this would involve direct confrontation.
Which she was sort of terrible at.
Still, if she wanted to have a working laptop or tablet two days from now, she had to get this thing built. With a sigh, she pushed the charger back into her bag and carefully swung it over her shoulder. Then she climbed down out of the wagon, checking to make sure as much of her cybernetics as possible were covered up, before she started off towards the other wagons.
FIRST PERSON:
[voice transcribed to text]
The Journal of Doctor Kim Ross, currently trapped in the old west.
Day Three.
I have begun traveling with the others who arrived here, but I have not been able to catalogue everyone. They seem to be from diverse times and locations, even other planets and dimensions I hadn't realized exist. The technology is still woefully primitive but people have brought some things with them that are helping.
I am going to begin investigating the other wagons to - was that a giant robot?
...No, it was...hmm. Where was I? Right. I am going to begin investigating the other wagons in search of a power supply or some means of building one, and I believe I should be able to...that is a giant robot.
[Long, long pause.]
I have to go.
NOTES: Kimiko will have an old bag on her that contains a very fancy laptop, a small computer tablet, a flashlight, a fold-up unbrella, a mostly finished solar battery charger, a set of portable diagnostic tools for her cybernetics, a dozen notebooks and pens, several tattered books on philosophy, and the source book for Dungeons and Discourse: The Role-playing Game.
NAME/NICKNAME: Dalrint
AGE: Old.
PERSONAL LJ: dalrint
TIMEZONE: EST
EMAIL ADDRESS: Use LJ messages? I always answer them.
IM SCREENNAME AND SERVICE: AIM: Farobservr
CHARACTER
NAME: Doctor Kim Ross AKA Kusanagi Kimiko.
AGE: 23.
FANDOM/MEDIUM: Dresden Codak / Comics
CANON PULL-POINT: Between Hob and Dark Science.
ABILITIES:
Kim is a cyborg. She has cybernetic legs and a left arm, a cybernetic left eye, and her spine has been modified and partially replaced with control and interface circuitry for her limbs. She's somewhat stronger than your average person because of all this, and her eye can see into some extra light spectrums. Her artificial left hand has dozens of small tools tucked inside the fingers, sort of like a highly advanced pocket knife. It also contains a small recording device for keeping personal logs.
She's also a brilliant robotics, mechanic and inventor. She has a doctorate in robotics. She is fluent in English, Japanese and Spanish.
CHARACTER BACKGROUND:
Kimiko, despite the strangeness of her world, is still a big too strange to really fit in. Raised by a brilliant mother and a mostly absent brilliant father, she fell in love with science early on and it has dominated most of her life. Aside from people who seem to have adopted her more than become friends with her, she’s terrible with people. She doesn’t know how to talk to them and never quite knows what to do around them.
She lost her mother when she was in her teens, something she never really got over, and used her inheritance to go through college and some of grad school, learning all the important things in life about science and psychology and everything in between. And then she opened a store using a machine she invented to help people relieve their fondest memories.
Also she was stealing those memories but she ISN’T A SUPERVILLAIN, dang it.
Eventually some travelers from an alternate future came back in time in an attempt to find a timeline that hadn’t been completely destroyed by the Technological Singularity, in which humanity advanced to the point where all their needs were granted by a massive artificial intelligence that eventually lost interest in them and refused to make them relevant again. They fought a war and ‘won’ but lost everything they had ever known, so they set out to reset it.
Kim had found the robot they used to travel in time and refused to help them, because she wants the technological singularity to happen. Unfortunately the travelers convinced her friends that she was wrong and to help them stop it from happening again, and they did.
A few days later, the time travelers returned…as TIME COLONISTS. Kim attempted to stop them and was hit by a laser that destroyed her legs, one arm, and half her face. The little robot she had found, which had cloned itself, grafted itself to her and she ushered in a sort of…technological singularity departure. The robot and the TIME COLONISTS all departed the earth, and Kimiko was left mostly crippled.
She built herself some legs and an arm and a spinal cybernetic system, her best invention ever, and then attempted as best she could to get back to living her normal, if odd, life.
CHARACTER PERSONALITY:
Kimiko enjoys reading, writing pre-history fanfiction, building robots, and committing affronts upon nature. She is not evil, or even amoral, but she tends to…miss the obvious moral queues sometimes. When building an Artificial Intelligence, she needed memories to use as a base platform for a mind. So she began stealing memories from the customers at her store, because she needed them. It never really occurred to her that it was probably evil, and when it was pointed out to her, she wasn’t all that worried.
She’s going to give them back eventually, after all.
She was raised by her mother, who was a kind, if strange, woman who nurtured Kimiko’s love of science and the unexplained. She adores solving puzzles, exploring the nature of the universe, and building machines. She has an extremely active imagination, creating whole worlds and alternate histories in her day dreams. (For instance, what would the earth be like if two of the major extinction events never happened. Pre-History Fanfiction to the rescue!) She comes up with theories that, for instance, memories are not stored in our minds but within the objects that trigger those memories, so it should be possible to find an object with future memories and learn about the future! That sort of thing.
She is vaguely neurotic and has no idea how to function in the normal social sphere of the world, probably stemming from a combination of living in strange third world countries where her mother could do her research, and simply not being that interested in society until it was too late to learn. When she forgot her locker combination in high school, rather than admit it to anyone, she changed schools! When a boy asked her for directions, and she thought he was asking her out, she panicked and ran off…and then completely changed her entire life schedule to make sure she was never in the part of town he frequents.
If she decides she likes someone, she’ll make up elaborate, complicated fantasies about them based on any small detail she might know, and then completely lose interest when they can’t measure up to that. Frankly though, she’s much happier around robots than people.
She DOES have friends…she’s not sure how it happens half the time, but she does have them. They mostly put up her odd moments and crazy half-cocked ideas. Or the random 3 AM phones calls about the most amazing discovery ever that she just made that no one else cares about. She does distance herself from people unconsciously, dealing with a moderate abandonment problem after her father basically left, and then her mother died. But it isn’t on purpose. She just thinks humans suck because they die. …or leave.
She designed her own prosthetics, the most advanced in the world now, and is probably more comfortable with them than she ever was in her own skin. Despite this she is self-conscious of her cybernetic arm, and tends to cover it up whenever possible with long sleeves, arm warmers, and fingerless gloves.
She is not very comfortable with the Asian half of her heritage, which is why she changed her last name from Kusanagi to Ross, and goes by ‘Kim’ rather than Kimiko. This stems from her disconnect with her mostly absent father. Lots of gifts do not a parent make.
WORLD:
Kimiko’s world is not very specific, in that it is implied it is in many ways similar to our own and in many ways very, very different. It’s entirely reasonable in her world to open a shop where you allow people to relive their fondest memories for a small fee, or for twin siblings to have magical powers that are mostly named after random acts of philosophy. Or for a Tiny version of Carl Jung to exist, who created Tiny Dream Analysis and lives on Kimiko’s couch. It’s the sort of place where the concept of the ‘Einstein-Rosen interdimensional bridge’ is actually the bridge on Second Street.
OCCUPATION: Wainwright
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON:
Kim stared at the bits and pieces of the battery charger she had just taken apart, frowning at them in frustration. She had almost everything she needed to make it work, and if she were somewhere other than trapped in the old west, she could've bought them at a radio shack like she had been planning.
But no, she had to be stuck here in the land of sand and heat and awful, and as fascinating as that was from a conceptual, exploratory standpoint, from a 'get shit built' standpoint it was a huge pain in the ass.
She carefully put everything back together, using the tools that sprouted from her left hand as she went, and eventually all the parts she had were right where she needed them to be. She just needed...two or three more. Maybe one. She could probably fake it with one.
...Of course, this meant actually talking to the rest of the people in the convoy, to see if anyone had something she could barter for/take apart. There had to be some technology here, enough people were from modern times or the future. But so far she'd tried to be an observer, impartial at best, and this would involve direct confrontation.
Which she was sort of terrible at.
Still, if she wanted to have a working laptop or tablet two days from now, she had to get this thing built. With a sigh, she pushed the charger back into her bag and carefully swung it over her shoulder. Then she climbed down out of the wagon, checking to make sure as much of her cybernetics as possible were covered up, before she started off towards the other wagons.
FIRST PERSON:
[voice transcribed to text]
The Journal of Doctor Kim Ross, currently trapped in the old west.
Day Three.
I have begun traveling with the others who arrived here, but I have not been able to catalogue everyone. They seem to be from diverse times and locations, even other planets and dimensions I hadn't realized exist. The technology is still woefully primitive but people have brought some things with them that are helping.
I am going to begin investigating the other wagons to - was that a giant robot?
...No, it was...hmm. Where was I? Right. I am going to begin investigating the other wagons in search of a power supply or some means of building one, and I believe I should be able to...that is a giant robot.
[Long, long pause.]
I have to go.
NOTES: Kimiko will have an old bag on her that contains a very fancy laptop, a small computer tablet, a flashlight, a fold-up unbrella, a mostly finished solar battery charger, a set of portable diagnostic tools for her cybernetics, a dozen notebooks and pens, several tattered books on philosophy, and the source book for Dungeons and Discourse: The Role-playing Game.