pragmatics | DIADEM — application.

Player Information

Player: Bobby
Contact:

crowders
Invitation OR characters played: Currently playing Jack Rackham
Are you over 18?: Y

Character Information

Character: Julian Kinsey
Canon: Original, canon point is after about a week on the road with Nora
Age: 37
History: Here
Possessions: A backpack with a small collection of supplies: 5 emergency MRE ration packs, a flashlight, a fold-out map of major US interstates (accurate to the year 2085), a roll of duct tape, and a rolled up foil blanket.
Weapon: Her own M4 carbine assault rifle

Powers/Abilities: Kinsey is genetically edited. The edits are biological in nature and wouldn't quite put her at "superhuman" level, but they do give her a decent advantage.

Enhanced musculoskeletal density: Stronger bones and denser muscle fibres, leading to generally higher stamina and reduced risk of fractures.
Accelerated neural processing: Faster reaction times, improved spatial awareness, and stronger capacity for accurate memory forming.
Improved vision: Perfect vision and relatively strong night vision – she is able to see fairly clearly at night where others might need night vision goggles.
Increased respiratory efficiency: Boosted endurance and efficiency in low-oxygen environments, allowing her to hold her breath longer (six to eight minutes) and to operate at a higher capacity with little oxygen.
Stress response modulation: Tweaks to regulate cortisol and adrenaline spikes, meaning her physiology stays calmer in high-stress situations.
Accelerated wound healing: Her healing and recovery time after injury is about 50% faster than a regular human's. For example, a broken arm would heal in three to four weeks instead of the standard six to eight.
Metabolic regulation: Burns fuel more efficiently thanks to adjusted calorie processing – essentially, she can last longer on less food. An unintended side effect of this is that she runs relatively hot; she has a higher baseline body temperature and slightly increased resting heart rate.
Enhanced pain tolerance: She still registers pain, but the intensity is dialed down and her body prioritises function over sensation during trauma. This leads to a reduced shock response and increased chances of survival where immediate medical care isn't possible. As a result, Kinsey often underestimates the seriousness of injuries she receives.

Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?
There aren’t many people in Kinsey’s life who she really treasured. She had a fairly distant relationship with her parents, despite their efforts to be closer with their daughter. Her childhood best friend/boyfriend and erstwhile partner-in-crime, Kai, had something of an impact on her when she was growing up. The fracture in their relationship, after Kai was arrested and charged for a crime they both committed while Kinsey appeared to get off scot-free with only a few extra years added to her Future Life Credit balance, was Kinsey’s first example of how flighty and fickle people can be. His reaction, one of jealousy and bitter rage, was alien to her: he seemed to be personally betrayed by something that was completely out of her control. When they met up again later in life and he threatened to expose her secret for no reason beyond some mangled sense of moral justice, it just reaffirmed to Kinsey that most people don’t understand her or the world they live in if they think concepts like right and wrong or good and evil mean anything anymore.

The only other connection in Kinsey’s life that really meant anything to her was her relationship with Mara Lethbridge. Although the relationship was entirely fabricated in the sense that Kinsey lied to Mara constantly and spent the whole time essentially playing a character, the intimacy and closeness they shared felt real to her. Kinsey’s had a lot of time to think about Mara since she fucked her over and ran, but she decided pretty quick to tuck Mara into some dark recess of her mind and avoid thinking about her. Still, the effects of Mara are still present in her, if only as a warning never to let her guard down. If she’d never met Mara, Kinsey wouldn’t really have known that she can still be vulnerable with someone even if that person doesn’t know the truth about something as benign as her biography: there are immutable things that can be unearthed through closeness. Kinsey won’t make that mistake again.

Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?
As a rule, Kinsey avoids looking back on her life and wondering what might have happened if she’d done something differently. She’s not a creature of hypotheticals, and sees this kind of thinking as wasted time. When she was younger she would wonder occasionally what her life might have been like if her parents hadn’t sprung for the Class-M genetic edit that prevented her from being born with spinal muscular atrophy: her conclusion was that her life probably would have been pretty awful. Importantly, though, that decision wasn’t hers to make, and so in her opinion there’s no point wasting brainpower imagining the life she might have had if someone else had made a different choice.

It’s not hard for her to follow this rule: she’s an incredibly self-assured person, to the point that she can often be blind to her own faulty decision making, as every action she chooses and follows through on is perfectly justified within her own mind. Defending that justification to other people might be difficult, but Kinsey wouldn’t waste time doing that either. She’s very binary, in the sense that she’s right and everyone else either agrees with her or is wrong.

What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting? How might this impact their ability to adapt and in what ways will they confront this challenge?
In the last four years Kinsey has become a sort of chronic nomad. She can’t stay in the same place for too long because it puts her lies at risk of being discovered. Also, in a less practical but more internally dangerous sense, it opens her up to letting that vulnerability rule her again, like she experienced with Mara. Back home, her ability to run away from her problems was just about infinite, and while the Diadem is pretty large, it has limits. There’s only so far she’ll be able to go before she can’t outrun a buildup of lies anymore. She’ll have to be more careful about how she makes alliances and lets other people in; she’s grown used to being flippant with her identities, but it’s harder to shed a false identity entirely when you can’t run away forever.

She’ll learn this pretty quickly, and her first instinct will be to hold onto her lies for self-preservation, but make sure that the story isn’t too complex and that she’s staying consistent with different groups. On an emotional level, she’ll hate the idea of being known by such a wide variety of people, but the fake name she’s clinging to and the threads of a false identity will keep her going.

The Stormkissed mechanic will also be a huge problem for her. Kinsey hates to be known by others in any way that is out of her control, and will recoil at the idea of having connections with other people. Her instinct is always to power through something and, if she can't manage that, just run away with haste, but without running away being an option, she'll be forced to endure it. She struggles to empathise with others in general, so this mechanic might even open up new experiences for her, but at the very least it will forcibly prevent her from becoming a total hermit.

What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?
Kinsey has always been a survivor, even as a child. Fighting was drilled into her from a young age. Even without her biological advantages, she’s smart, strong, and not particularly vulnerable to moral quandaries that might force others to make decisions that threaten their lives. Essentially, she’s already been a roving nomad for a long time back home, so the actual day-to-day living won’t be that much different from where she came from.

Samples

Sample: TDM toplevel & log thread