regulatingpressure | + application (the pines) (Reply)

PLAYER

NAME: trace
CONTACT: idk
OTHER CHARACTERS IN THE PINES: katniss & fred

CHARACTER

NAME: Raven Reyes
CANON: the 100
CANON-POINT: end of 01x12 ("we are grounders: part 1")

DOSSIER

HISTORY: her wiki

WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTER'S STRENGTHS?:

BASICALLY FEARLESS: Aside from losing Finn, pretty much nothing scares her. In her very first scene, she takes off her helmet before the decontamination's complete despite it being dangerous. Then, when she arrives on earth, she confronts Bellamy immediately re: her missing radio, even though he's an attempted murderer and theoretically would kill her in a heartbeat.

She's also got no real regard for authority. She calls bullshit to Council members right to their face, and multiple times she spies on restricted areas with no hesitation — a crime which could get her sent to lock-up (essentially death row for teens). Raven's also not at all intimidated by people who are bigger or stronger than she is, talking shit at large and intimidating people with shady connections on her way to get the parts she needs back on the Ark. Overall, this unflinching ability to rise in the face of confrontation makes her the go-to when Clarke needs people to listen. She tells Raven to clear a room, and Raven just has to start shouting and everyone clears right out.
DRIVEN:Very much so. She'll basically stop at nothing to get a job done. Like when she first lands on Earth - even though she's bleeding from the head and reuniting with the love of her life, as soon as she's reminded of Abby she hurries back to the shuttle to try and make contact with the Ark.

In a more personal sense, she'll always get the job done despite whatever emotions she's feeling. She made a communications device that could talk to the Ark directly in the aftermath of putting two and two together about Finn and Clarke's relationship, as a prime example. In fact, in stressful situations, she throws herself into her work just for something to do with her hands. Raven's a problem-solver, and even if the problem isn't hers to solve, if it gets her upset or worked-up enough she'll charge in to solve it anyway.

In general, Raven has a strong sense of realistic optimism. She can be 100% aware of a low chance of success and still approach something like a sure deal, because she's got no doubt of her ability to beat those low odds. To her, there's no such thing as a no-win scenario.
HIGHLY COMPETENT (& INNOVATIVE): And she knows it, ready to correct everyone if they so much as say she's the youngest zero-G mechanic in 50 years instead of 52, but she's not just blowing hot air here. You can see it even in just how people treat her — Abby talks to her all of twice before she decides Raven's pretty much her only hope of seeing Clarke again and makes her privy to all of the Council secrets, not to mention how often the 100 on the ground turn to her for a solution to a million and one crucial technical issues.

Part of her competency lies in her flexibility — she's willing to work with whatever supplies she can get in whatever time frame she has. That's basically the entire story of her early-season dropship rebuild. She says she needs a week but Abby shortens it to five days and Raven says she'll do it. She says she can have the pressure regualator installed in a few hours, Abby says they don't have that long, she says she's on it. She says she can be ready to launch in 20 minutes, Abby says they have 5... And, you guessed it, she's on it. She doesn't say 'but that's impossible' — she gets it done.

Raven also tends to think outside the box, finding a solution that nobody else thought of because it was outside of the end-goal they were imagining. Like when everyone's fighting over the wet radio and how the hell they're gonna communicate with the Ark, and she says, "Hold up — we don't have to talk to the Ark, right? We just have to let them know we're down here." She does need the right environment for that kind of work, though, and she's not afraid to boot people out if they're hindering her process.

Raven can also take the lead when she needs to, but the only time she ever does so is when mechanical shit's concerned. Like when they're building something big and a bunch of people are involved in the process, or later, when Octavia's told to go up and get wires from the top level and Raven barks, "Stay away from the blue wires, they run through the ceiling - I hooked them up to the solar cells on the roof. That means they're hot, you got that?"
LOYAL TO A FAULT: Man, if you're one of Her People, you're fucking set. There's no end to what she'll do for you. Her capacity for love and ability to care about people, when she lets herself, is just so deep. Every choice she makes, both amazing and terrible, is made for the people she loves. She's willing to destroy herself for them, mind and body, without question. (More on this loyalty in the 'weaknesses' section... ahaha weeps.)

WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTER'S WEAKNESSES?:

two

INDEPENDENT TO A FAULT: Sure, she's competent and driven, but there's a flip side to that coin. She's overconfident in her own abilities, she's prone to thinking her perspective is the objectively definitive one, and she's also hard-pressed to find a situation where she can't do something more quickly or just plain better by herself than it would be done if she let others help her. She tries to be a team player, but only as far as it takes to get her teammates to keep all obstacles out of her way while she solo-runs the problem from start to finish. When she can't solve the entire problem, especially in cases when her part's done and it's time to wait for someone else to seal the deal, she's anxious and pacing and generally just wishes she were out there doing it instead.

This obviously rubs people wrong. Like, of course it does, she thinks she can do your job better than you can 75% of the time. She'll also disregard your opinions and priorities in favor of what seems to her like a logical solution, kind of insensitively at times. At one point, she decides they need walkie-talkies to communicate in order to survive, and in the process of building them, she scraps parts out of the radio back to the Ark... despite Monty's protest that the radio she's disassembling is his only connection to his parents in space. (She later apologizes for it, but only for how insensitive she was about it — not for actually doing it.)

Beyond just rubbing people wrong, it's honestly kind of dangerous. Oftentimes, she acts on her assessment of a situation, no matter how many people see it differently. For example, at one point the plan is for her to build a bomb and for someone else to take the bomb, plant it on a bridge, and shoot it from afar to take out that bridge. What actually happens is that she builds the bomb and as soon as she's left unattended with it, she disappears with it and hauls her sick and barely-conscious ass out to the bridge, plants the bomb, then tries to shoot it herself from like five feet away. What the fuck, Raven.

But that's all surface-level shit. On an emotional level, she sincerely has no idea how to let people in. Sometimes it's simple — easy teasing, adventuring together with a common goal — but if you catch her when she's already not in tip-top emotional shape, she'll shove back, and hard, then go for the throat for good measure. At one point, she tries to get out of the camp for air and Bellamy's concerned enough to stop her, and she instantly snarls out whatever scathing shit comes to mind. In the end of season two, someone (arguably the person who knows her best) spells it out plain as day: "They can't leave if you push them away first, right?"
ALSO HAS NO IDEA HOW TO BE ALONE: The concept terrifies her, honestly. While she's not had many people in her life, she's always at least had someone (Finn, specifically), and now she's at least halfway lost him and constantly runs the risk of losing him the rest of the way as he leaps into stupid idea after stupid idea to cover Clarke's ass. It's to the point that, when she first figures out that Finn loves Clarke, she willingly blinds herself to that fact in hopes that he'll change his mind because she 's really just scared shitless trying to fathom a life where they somehow don't have each other to lean on. That fear, the fear of losing the few select people she really has, supersedes literally anything else in her mind. It's stronger than self-preservation. It's damn sure stronger than her sense of morals.

Raven's willing to do some seriously shitty things to other human beings if it means the people she loves are gonna be okay. Example: When she tortures a Grounder to find out the antidote for the poison on the blade he stabbed Finn with. She basically tears power cords out of the drop-ship wall and electrocutes him, all the while screaming demands. It's not something she's even remotely glad to have to do, but she also doesn't regret it for an instant.

In a milder sense, a lot of her sense of personal well-being is directly dependent on those she loves. She's repeatedly shown to be injured, in danger, in a stressful situation, etc and be 'just fine' because Her People are present and okay. She's generally pretty unconcerned with personal injury in general. Like when she first lands and she's bleeding, when she says, "Crap. That's not good." In a way casual tone. In the finale (which is after her canonpoint), even when she loses feeling in her legs, she's still talking casually and cracking dry comments. Without Finn, she's still kind of lost on quite what to base her sense of well-being around, but I doubt the apple will fall far from the tree — she'll probably end up with a certain number of close CR whose well-being directly influences her own sense of well-being, just because that's what she knows, with or without Finn.

WHAT EVENTS OR CIRCUMSTANCES IN YOUR CHARACTER'S PAST HAVE IMPACTED THEM THE MOST?:

HER HOME LIFE: Two facets of how she grew up really impacted her: How she grew up, and how meeting Finn changed that.

Her childhood was honestly pretty ghetto. "Well, my mom was AWOL most of my life," she tells Clarke. "When she did show up, it was empty-handed. Pretty sure she had me just to trade in my rations for moonshine." She wasn't being dramatic — her mom literally traded her rations for booze. It's also revealed early on that her mom often prostituted herself out to trade for contraband and other luxuries. Clearly not a model parent, and it shaped a lot of who Raven is. She acts... well. Like the kind of girl who raised herself, basically. With precious few exceptions, Raven doesn't know how to depend on anyone for anything, and she pushes away most anyone who tries to get through to her. She also defaults to thinking outside the box, willing to go back routes to achieve her goals and unafraid of breaking the rules.

She probably would've ended up a lot more fucked up if it weren't for Finn. He was the boy next door, and he shared his rations when she had none. "Shared his rations, remembered my birthday... He saved my life," she says on the topic. Finn was basically her only family. And she's damn lucky she had him, because he seemed to keep her on the right path, at least well enough to achieve her goals of being the youngest zero-G mechanic in 52 years (don't say 50 — she'll correct you). Finn also kept her from being completely alone, which I feel like would have made her a fundamentally different person than she is now.

Raven also has a super soft spot for good 'mom' figures, and I guarantee it's because her own was so terrible that she's kind of craving something to fill the void. She gets extremely attached to Abby (Clarke's mom) when they're working together on the Ark, to the point where she refused to leave her behind when it was time to launch for Earth, even going so far as to tear up over the concept of Abby being executed for helping the launch. It's one of the only times she's ever shown to cry about something that isn't directly related to Finn. Later, Clarke's pissed off at her mom for getting her dad killed, and Raven's arguing Abby's case. She literally can't imagine how Clarke can walk away from someone who loves her that much, someone who'd get floated (executed) for her, someone who fought so hard to see her again. She'd kill to have a mom like that.
LOSING FINN: See, from the very start, he was always there. No matter what happened to her or how bad it was, she always had Finn to fall back on. So many facets of who she is were shaped by and around his presence in her life. And now that she doesn't have him, she has no idea who she even really is, anymore. What she's capable of. Like a girl on crutches for years who has to learn to walk on her own legs again (which becomes a Very Ironic Metaphor once I canon-update her down the line), Raven's learning much later than most how to deal with life when all you have to fall back on is your own personal strength. It's a process, and not a painless one.

WHAT MOTIVATES YOUR CHARACTER?:

calls her out on

appealing to her pride

never asks for help

WHAT IMPRESSION DO OTHERS TEND TO HAVE OF YOUR CHARACTER?:

unstoppable

IN WHAT WAYS DOES THAT IMPRESSION DIFFER FROM WHO YOUR CHARACTER REALLY IS?:

HOW DOES YOUR CHARACTER HANDLE CRISIS OR ADVERSITY?:

FIGHT: Time and time again, she's shown to try to solve problems with her fists, or less frequently, scathing words. This shows up in scenarios where the damage has already been done. When her pride is offended, or when something she's trying to do fails thanks to direct interference by another person and it ends up getting people killed.
FLIGHT: When the crisis is at hand, or when it's something that she can actively make an effort to prevent or neutralize, she basically disappears fully into her work. 'Finds a project,' so to speak. She won't think to eat or sleep or any kind of necessary self-care until the crisis is somehow averted.

WHICH 5 THINGS WILL YOUR CHARACTER REMEMBER UPON ARRIVAL, AND WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THEM?:

MECHANIC: Not only is she a mechanic, but she was the youngest in her specialized field in half a century. What exact field is that? Good question. ( I picked this because without this, she's basically aimless, and I don't want to even try to write her entirely aimless like that. )
SHITTY MOM: Her mom wasn't really there, and when she was, she was Not A Great Mom. ( Her false-mem mom is basically a suburban mirror of her canon one — absent, and shitty when she's around — so remembering this is going to make her false memories a little more 'real' to her. )
OWES SOMEONE HER LIFE: Who? She doesn't know. They just... basically saved her life, at least that's how she remembers feeling about whatever they did. ( I want her to know that even in canon, she's connected to somebody. Less emotionally isolated that way. )
WAS SHOT: Just before her canonpoint, she was shot in the gut trying to do something important. She can't remember how or why, but she does remember limping far enough to get help. ( She's going to be recovering from the wound still, so it makes sense to let her know kind of how she got it. )
ORIGAMI IS FUCKING STUPID: It makes her mad, for no good reason. ( I had no idea what to use for this last one, so here, have some salt about Finn and his stupid origami animals. )

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU FEEL WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER?:

I feel like her mother might've introduced her early on to the concept of alcohol as a coping tool, because it's canon that her mom traded her rations for moonshine and later when Raven's handed moonshine to sterilize her hands to help Finn, she takes a long drink first.
She likes explosions. Good thing her crazy life gives her plenty of opportunity to blow shit up, right?
While this hasn't happened yet at her canonpoint, she's coming in with a healed version of the injury that stole her feeling below her waist, and I plan to have that come into play at some point down the line. Because of that, it's worth noting that losing mobility, even more than losing Finn, is going to Fuck Her Up on an emotional level. So much of her self-worth rides on her competence and her ability to get the job done, and that will be strongly in question once the old injury kicks in again.

SKILLS, ABILITIES, & PHYSICAL WEAKNESSES:

SKILLS & ABILITIES

extremely good mechanic, both on solid ground and in zero gravity. the youngest in fifty-two years, in fact — and she's shown multiple times to be well-respected by people much older for her skills. she's good enough to rebuild a 100-year-old shuttle out of scrap parts.
also skilled in building and using multiple kinds of makeshift radios and communications devices.
very resourceful, able to do a lot with very little/unconventional supplies.
very familiar with working in zero-g.
can fly a shuttle decently well, though it wasn't her official job.
can shoot a rifle with decent accuracy.
can also take someone down with a knife pretty skillfully, not to mention fistfight.
can build multiple sorts of bomb with a number of different types of supplies. (canon examples include a rifle-shot bomb, land mines, and grenades.)
can apparently electro-shock torture someone for answers, though I doubt she's had to do so before she did so with Lincoln.
can cut hair with a knife with decent skill.
has built-in radiation resistance from being born in space. (the same amount that she can walk freely in is shown to kill folks with our regular human tolerance within minutes, in season 2.)
definitely has some muscle despite her lean frame - enough of it to muscle through rusted bolts and other common 'mechanic' problems

WEAKNESSES

regular human - no powers.
bullet barely grazing spine, which is gonna bite her in the ass sometime in the future when i feel like forcing a canon-update.
despite being able to fight, she'd be easily overpowered by someone bigger than her. she's no kung-fu master or anything.

INVENTORY:

her clothes
her knife
a metal crane on a necklace (her necklace from Finn) (not on her at her canonpoint, she gave that shit back)
a semi-automatic rifle and small supply of bullets (also not on her at her canonpoint, but shortly before it)

SAMPLES

PROSE-HEAVY:

principle

DIALOGUE-HEAVY:

right here

+ application (the pines)

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