Polymythos App

[dog_eat_dog]

PLAYER INFO

Name: Jenn
Age: 30+
Contact: victoryfanfare on plurk
Current Characters: n/a

CHARACTER INFO

Name: Tess
Journal: dog_eat_dog
Age: 39
Appearance: 5'8", athletic build (though underfed), shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, beauty mark under left eye, flecked with scars, considerable scar in the shape of a bite wound on her right shoulder. Image.

Canon: The Last of Us
Canon Point: Post-death

History: History

Abilities: Baseline normal human, with 20+ years experience in urban survival, including weapon proficiency, improvising tools/weapons, brawling and first aid.

Questionnaire:

1. What do they care deeply about? What kind of loyalties, commitments, moral codes, life philosophies, passions, callings or spirituality and faith do they have? How do these tend to be expressed?
Twenty years ago, even in the midst of society collapsing to the Cordyceps Brain Infection pandemic, Tess was an optimist –– she was even willing to make a crusade out of it, too, having been involved with the Fireflies, a radical resistance group that wanted to restore a democratic government by overthrowing the military state that governed the surviving quarantine zones. That didn't last; between the eventual fall of most QZs, the death of her brother, and the increasing violent tactics of the Fireflies that made them no different than the military they sought to overthrow, Tess's spirit was broken. No more hope. No more crusade.

Her loyalties are largely to herself now. In her mind, there's not really any other way to be: humanity is on a slow downward spiral into eventual extinction, and as a smuggler, she rules over her own tiny little kingdom. She walks into the black market and everyone's heads turn. She wants something, she gets it. Death is all around her and her way of life, so it's easy to accept that everything that comes into her life will go away again, whether it's to infection, execution, gang wars, or even bacteria in a contaminated tin of food. So it goes. The only people she commits herself to are people who can keep up with her, but she'll turn on a dime on anyone who turns on her. Tess will shoot someone just for standing in her way. Why not? Everyone dies eventually. There is no God, no master and no authority she won't skirt. Survival is all that really matters.

She knows it's awful. Most of the time, she doesn't care. She can ride the high of a good find, a good sale, a real fucking impressive cache of guns. Those moments of self-awareness, where she knows just how far she's sunk and how much of a shitty person she is, they only exist because deep down, she wishes it were different.

2. What kind of person could they become in the future? What are some developmental paths that they could take: best, worst, most likely?
Tess was robbed of a normal adulthood –– the pandemic wiped out any chance of that when she was nineteen. She had no opportunity to decide what she wanted to be or what she wanted to do with her life, and that's the same now. The idea that she might get to become a different person in the future is radical.

Best case scenario: it's something like a Cinderella story, but she's, you know, not a shitty person. As a player, I'm not super enthused about storylines where female characters settle down and become domestic and chill, and I like Tess's edges, but she's also a person who has never had an opportunity to live comfortably. Nothing she owns is less than 20 years old. Her clothes are threadbare. She's emotionally distant from people because she has to be, even if she doesn't want to be. She's violent because she often has to be. For her to have an opportunity to become a legitimately better person –– more open, more compassionate, more giving, more emotionally honest –– would be a best case scenario for her to earn a modest happily-ever-after.

Worst case scenario, she carries on the way she is. There is no getting worse, at least not without a living scenario worse than back home, but avoiding staying the way she is will be a struggle. Becoming a better person might seem easy to her at first -- after all, without Cordyceps Brain Infection and the military to duck and dodge (and mow through), does she really need to pursue nastier things? She can settle down and finally take that "vacation" she keeps promising and postponing on her partner, especially in a comparatively more relaxed environment. But she's done what she's done for almost twenty years, and the idea of living a "normal" peaceful life has only ever been a distant fantasy. If an opportunity presents itself, she will get right back into crime because it's all she knows how to do.

3. How do they behave within a group? What role(s) do they take? Does this differ if they know and trust the group, versus finding themselves in a group of strangers? Why?
Tess is a social butterfly and likes to be in charge. With strangers, she's very direct and particular about how things are done, and is very direct with others when she's happy, unhappy, or wants something from someone. She can be petty and vindictive when challenged directly, but she's comfortable finding compromise. If she can slip someone a ration card instead of threatening them, she will! She's easily flattered and easily bought. She can be quite patient (if not still blunt) with children and she's a fair bit more lenient with women than she is with men, but her standards remain high just the same. The black market is a very male-dominant "industry", and there is no room to show weakness whatsoever, as back home, it might mean her life.

She is also surprisingly soft underneath that hardened shell. She might let people think they're under it, but they'll know when they're really there -- when someone's her person, she'll check on them, dote on their health, and tease playfully. She'll encourage weak links in her circle to toughen up instead of outright abandoning them. In relaxed moments, she's got a quick wit and an ease to her, and she'll share what she has. Despite all her walls, she'll actually act wounded around people she cares for –– something she would never, ever show to strangers, because vulnerabilities are easily exploited.

4. What do they need and want out of relationships, and how do they go about getting it?
Tess needs stability, and for the most part, she gets it –– sort of. If people don't cut it for her, she finds stability by removing them from the picture. If they meet her standards, she works hard to keep them, whether that's by keeping them flush materially or with favours, or meeting their expectations. It is, however, transactional, and that isn't really stability. It's not honest.

On the other hand, she wants emotional openness. She can't have it because there is nothing in the world that can come close to guaranteeing it won't end up hurting worse in the long run, so it's too much of a risk. Romantically, the person she wants emotional openness from most is unequipped to give it to her; Joel's walls are practically Fort Knox, a lot of things are left unsaid even between them. In her last moments of her life, she threw out a hail mary and admitted there was something between them, but hey, anyone can say anything in a foxhole. Seeking the open emotional connection she wants is something she still has to learn to do.

5. How do they understand the world–what kind of worldview and thought processes do they have? Why?
Tess has a dog-eat-dog mentality –– it's the only thing that gets her by, so she doesn't really entertain any alternatives. The world is an ugly place, and thinking about how it was when she was a child only highlights just how ugly it is. She has a complicated relationship with it, too. On one hand, she's very much a city girl, and she's scarcely been in the "wilderness" for decades, and she owes that to living in a quarantine zone run by the military. On the other hand, she's willing to kill soldiers to skirt the very rules that are supposed to protect survivors from infection, solely for her own gain. Whatever gets her ahead is what matters most, even if it means biting the hand that feeds her, and she doesn't interrogate that. In her mind, everyone does (or should do) the same, because that's what it takes to survive, even if it causes collateral damage.

6. How much do they rely on their minds and intellect, versus other approaches like relying on instinct, intuition, faith and spirituality, or emotions?
Tess has some hang-ups about her intelligence. She's crafty, highly organized and meticulous, but she isn't a great long-term planner, and sometimes she can throw away a plan entirely in the name of impulse. She's good at strategizing on the fly, fortunately, but it doesn't always impress her partner. Joel makes "you are smarter than this" remarks when she does things he doesn't like, and Tess is generally very quick to try to find a solution he will like.

That said, her impulses are very much driven by her emotions. Feeling threatened or talked down to can prompt her to pull out a gun and just start shooting. If she wants someone dead, she'll mow through dozens of people to get to them. If she feels betrayed, she'll take all negotiations off the table and figure out a workaround later. It takes extreme moments of fear for her life and insecurity to get her to turn to blind faith, and even in those moments, she is very much driven by her feelings.

7. What is something others might find intolerable about them?
Setting aside the fact that she can be very trigger happy for petty reasons, Tess can very easily get smug, and can sometimes be transparently insincere. If she's up to no good, she'll only put the thinnest of "innocent" veneers over it, and she can tend towards gloating about how little she cares about the rules.

Samples:
third person
third person
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Why are you interested in this game?
I love redemption arcs, and Tess's character lends itself to that perfectly; while in canon she finds some redemption in dying for a selfless thing for the first time in a long, long time, there's something very different about earning a redemption by putting in the work, day by day, in making the world a better place instead of being a vulture on it.

Also, I love that the setting changes regularly. As much as the "one week a month" structure works, sometimes it's nice to get more time to dig into a particular setting/environment before moving on, and week often isn't enough.