j a c k

player.
NAME/HANDLE: Waffle
PERSONAL JOURNAL: canorous
ARE YOU 16 OR OVER?: Yes!
CONTACT: lilithnightwalker @ gmail dot com, theatrechocolate on AIM, withsyrup
OTHER CHARACTERS: N/A


character.
CHARACTER NAME: Jack Ryan
SERIES: BioShock (specific character information here.)
CANON POINT: Just after stepping off the bathysphere at Fort Frolic.
AGE: Exact age unknown, he appears to be in his early to mid twenties, but in reality he’s only a few years old.
APPEARANCE: Jack appears to be a young man in his early to mid twenties. He is caucasian, with brown hair and brown eyes. He wears a light colored cable knit sweater, and has a tattoo of a chain on each wrist. Now, I’m going to note here that there are very few canonical images of him, and pretty much only one of them is easy to find and it’s not labeled. What I’m going to use for icons of him are nearly all fanarts and none of them will have a clear look at his face. In the game he’s an enigma, even to himself, and part of the unspoken struggle of the character is the man versus slave dilemma. A man chooses, a man has a face, has a name, has a voice. A slave obeys, is faceless, has no name, is silent.

So which is Jack? Is he a man or a slave?

And that’s why my icons don’t show his face.

PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY: N/A

PERSONALITY: Jack has memories. He remembers his parents, the house where they lived, and how they told him he was special and born to do great things. He remembers getting on the plane with the gift they gave him…

…and he remembers that plane crashing into the ocean next to a lighthouse, miles away from land. With no place left to go, he goes down to Rapture, hell under the waves.

And though he remembers home, Rapture feels strangely familiar, and his memories feel increasingly unfamiliar.

As I said previously, Jack is an enigma. He shows up in Rapture while it’s supposedly locked down and when faced with monstrous people trying to kill him, he kills them first. It’s strangely easy, much easier than it should be. And it’s easy to follow the suggestions of the man on the radio, easy to trust him, easy to take that needle and splice his own genes…

Jack arrives in Rapture a man willing to trust people for the most part. In any case, he’s willing to trust Atlas when he comes over the radio and tells him he’ll help him if in exchange he’ll only help Atlas and his family get out of the damned city.

And Jack’s willing to do an awful lot to help him. He goes from zero to killer in less than sixty seconds, and sure it helps that nearly all of the people he meets are insane splicers who are trying to kill him, but he doesn’t seem to have a lot of problems killing them before they can kill him.

It bothers him, though. Everything in the city bothers him, partly because it’s basically hell underwater, and partly because it’s far more familiar than it has any right to be. He’s never been there before, he’s never heard of it before, but when confronted with the plasmid syringe he only hesitates a moment before splicing himself.

Jack isn’t stupid. He can put the pieces together, but in Rapture’s case the pieces are so fragmented it’s hard to know which piece fits where, especially when one voice on his radio is telling him one thing and the other is telling him something else. So Jack does the only thing he knows that he can do: fight his way through the city to get to Ryan, and hope that he can get some real answers along the way, because he’s starting to have doubts about what’s going on.

Along the way, however, there is an awful lot of horribly spliced up maniacs. But Jack plows right through them, because he is resilient. Very resilient. Despite being shot at, yelled at, attacked, hungry, filthy, exhausted, and having died and resurrected a few times, he keeps going anyway. Because what else can he do? It’s either keep going or sit down and cry and be killed. And since there are Vita-Chambers in every building, even death offers no rest. So Jack persists, even when the odds are stacked against him.

But he’s not without kindness or empathy. The splicers may have turned themselves into monsters of their own free will, but the Little Sisters certainly didn’t. Atlas claims they’ve been turned into monsters and there’s no salvation for them, but Tenenbaum disagrees, and when presented with the choice between saving the little girls or taking advantage of the ADAM they carry and killing them, Jack chooses to save them.

He chooses to save all of them. Because the world is hell, and getting worse every minute, and Jack has the power to bring a little hope to these children’s lives. Because if he killed everything he’d be destroying himself as much as he was destroying the city. Because in saving them, in a way, he’s saving himself too. Because even though he can’t put his finger on why, he feels a strange kinship with those little girls. So he saves them, despite what Atlas says. He saves them because it’s right. Because he may be a killer, but he still has morals. He still believes in right and wrong.

Jack’s done a lot of things in Rapture he didn’t know he was capable of doing until he did them, and most of them are things he won’t ever be proud of. But he’s proud of saving the Little Sisters. And no matter what else happens, he believes he made the right choice.

ABILITIES: Jack is genetically engineered to be a killer, to be Frank Fontaine’s ace in the hole in the Rapture civil war. As such, he is fast, strong, has good reflexes, can take a hell of a beating before finally dying, and can splice himself with plasmids without the same risks as regular splicers. He can pick up just about any weapon and use it effectively, and has in fact spliced himself with passive plasmids (“gene tonics”) to be a better shot and more effective with the wrench, his melee weapon of choice. He is skilled at hacking machines in Rapture, and so can probably figure his way around other types of machinery but it’s unlikely he’d be as skilled at hacking it.

He’s also spliced himself with a variety of plasmids that grant him supernatural abilities: Electro Bolt, which gives him the ability to make a ray of electrocuting death; Incinerate, which gives him the ability to set people and objects on fire with a snap of his fingers; Telekinesis, which allows him to pull objects toward himself and propell them away; and Winter Blast, which freezes people and objects for a short amount of time, to name a few. There’s eleven total, and he can only use one at a time, and can only have six active at any one time. Obviously this is a pretty powerful thing for him to have, so I’m entirely willing for him to have a limited number of plasmids available to him, but I think he really should have at least one.

However, another thing to note is that plasmids do not work without EVE to power them, and there is a distinct lack of the EVE hypos that replenish it on the ship I’m sure, so he’ll be limited to the supply he has and whatever he can barter for from the Engineer. He’ll also be able to regenerate a small amount from certain foods and drinks, such as coffee and booze. In the game the only side effect from having no EVE is that you can’t use your plasmids, however I would suspect that being forced to rely on EVE so much could allow for certain withdrawal symptoms, which I am open to and we can discuss further if you’d like. Otherwise it’ll just be his inability to use his plasmids.

Oh also he’s pretty good with a camera. Sander Cohen seems to think so, anyway. In another life Jack may have even had the chance to be artistically minded, but he’s kind of got other things to worry about in Rapture, so his artisitic abilities mostly extend to snapping pictures of splicers so he can learn more about their weaknesses.

Also apparently he can carry a ton of weapons, first aid kits, and EVE hypos without any trouble and with no backpack of any kind? Maybe he’s been genetically modified to have acess to hammerspace, who knows. In any case that’s more a game mechanic than anything else, so I’ll tone this down so that he only arrives with two weapons and a small handful of health related items, but I’m willing to negotiate them down further if you prefer. In the same vein, he never ever takes a break in the game, and basically lives off of junk food and booze, so those really count for abilities as well: being able to go through long periods of active stress with a minor amount of rest and sustenance. Once again, willing to tone that down as needed.

Basically, I am totally willing to negotiate almost all of this.

This section is getting super long, but this part is really important. It doesn’t count so much as an ability, but as part of being created to be Fontaine’s ace in the hole, Dr. Suchong put in place a mind control imprinting when Jack was very, very young. Whenever anyone gives a command followed or preceded by the phrase “would you kindly,” Jack must obey it. There’s no choice or even questioning involved, he simply hears the phrase and does what that person asks. When Atlas tells him “now would you kindly get a pipe or something to defend yourself?” Jack picks up a wrench and defends himself. When Ryan says “sit, would you kindly,” Jack sits. When he says “stand, would you kindly,” Jack stands. When Suchong, at the very beginning of the mental conditioning process, tells Jack “would you kindly kill the puppy,” Jack, weeping, does it. He’s powerless against it. He also has no idea what it is or what it makes him do. At this point in his canon, he has no idea it exists. And it’s an innocent phrase, really. Such a polite way of asking someone to do something. Really, it’s just kind of Jack to comply.

What’s important about this is that when Jack arrives on the ship, the mental conditioning will still be in place. Now, the thing about this phrase is that even though it’s quite innocuous, it’s fairly uncommon, so I’m pretty sure not many people on the ship will be inadvertently ordering Jack around. Nevertheless, I’ll make it known that this is something significant and ask that people not use the phrase with Jack without talking to me about it first. I’m all for it being used! I wouldn’t be playing Jack if I weren’t. But I’d much prefer to have people ask me first rather than just throwing it out into a tag all gleeful like.

There's also a phrase conditioned into him, "code yellow," which forces his heart to slowly stop beating and eventually kill him. I'll ask that this one not be used at all unless the circumstances are particularly tantalizing. Basically I'm a terrible person, but I'm not that terrible. Er. I think.

With that being said, I realize that certain NPCs may have fairly extensive knowledge regarding the passengers on the boat, and I’d like to make it known that I am willing to have NPCs order Jack around, but I’d still like a little warning first, and I’d prefer it to be used sparingly if possible. It’ll be more interesting and fun for it to be a slow reveal, I think.

POSSESSIONS: Jack will arrive with the clothes on his back, a fully upgraded shotgun with 48 rounds of regular shot (the maximum ammunition), a wrench, four first aid kits (maximum carrying capacity of nine), and nine EVE hypos (which is the maximum capacity).


samples.
JOURNAL ENTRY SAMPLE: This dear_mun thread with Atlas and this dear_mun entry.

THIRD-PERSON SAMPLE:

It’s cold in Rapture.

It makes sense that it would be, the place is on the bottom of the ocean for Christ’s sake, and not all of it can be nestled into the warm bosom of Hephaestus’s geothermic vents.

Still, no amount of rationalizing makes it any warmer. Jack hugs himself slightly, his sweater wet with blood and seawater and who knows what else, and for a moment he looks out at the cold beauty of the city and wishes for the sun. He can’t imagine how people could have lived here for years without sunlight. The lights of the city are certainly incredible, like jewels rising from the ocean floor, but they can’t hold a candle to the light of the sun.

Maybe that’s part of what made people go crazy. No sun, no stars, no sky. The ocean presses in on all sides, making a sort of claustrophobia Jack can’t quite shake even though he’s never really considered himself claustrophobic before.

Then again, in a way it’s almost comforting. Like being wrapped in a blanket.

A very cold, wet blanket.

Okay, maybe it isn’t that comforting.

Still, Jack can’t stop feeling like he belongs here somehow. Like he was meant to be here. He doesn’t really pause to think about it, it just creeps up on him when he’s not expecting it. When he’s looking at a poster advertising Sander Cohen’s latest artistic achievement or the ruins of a store which once cheerfully sold cigars. Even the music of those damned vending machines is familiar somehow.

Jack doesn’t have time to think about it, of course. He has to keep going. He can’t stop now, and if he did, Atlas would probably be upset with him.

So he pulls himself away from the window overlooking the city at the bottom of the ocean and moves on.