Tell me what you hate about me

OOC Info
Player: Em
Contact: paingravy
Age Confirmation: Yep
Other Characters: None

IC Info
Character: Conner Jaskulski
Canon: Original
Canon Point: Post death for the purposes of the game — about a year after getting released from the mental institution backstory-wise.
Age: 34
History:

○ born in Liverpool, subtle Scouse accent toned own through years spent in America
○ mother moved there to be with his father; father lost his job due to a drinking habit
○ relocated to Chicago at age 14 to be with mother's family until father got back on his feet
○ father never got back on his feet; rampant alcoholism, cheated on his mother, several half-siblings strewn about
○ ran away at 16 after a particularly bad physical altercation with his father; couch-surfed with some friends for weeks, then friends of friends,then the dealers of friends of friends, selling and doing coke
○ intermittent homelessness in between shacking up with friends/partners/dealers/drug houses, couldn't hold down a real job, didn't feel the need to
○ did some petty cons (name was actually connor but friends started spelling it conner as a joke, it stuck)
○ things got pretty serious when he was about 21, started selling for a pretty dangerous crew; joined a gang to be quite honest, even if that's not what they called it
○ some of them knew about his power, made him a necessary person when getting into altercations
○ somebody owed them money & made off with a ton of product; he went with two other guys to break in and collect
○ things got heated; the guy ran, conner chased him. blew through the back door of a bodega; shots fired, used his power to stop the bullets, chaos ensued
○ sudden movement in the corner of his eye, high and terrified, pulled the trigger; it was just a girl
○ he ran; doesn't matter, cops were called well before & it was all caught on tape
○ sat in an interrogation room in somewhere decidedly not a police station
○ "you killed that girl; you also have 3 outstanding warrants and there are drugs on your person. you could go away for a long time, or you could work for us."
○ seven year contract, age 22-29 working for a paramilitary organization with a strict NDA
○ the kind of organization where the government looks the other way; LAND - Learning and National Defense
○ ops ranged from shutting down black market weapons manufacturing to eliminating "terror threats" to capturing other powered individuals for undisclosed reasons
○ thinks he knows what those reasons were, still dreams about breaking up families and hearing them beg
○ the contract ended and he didn't know what to do with himself after he walked out; decided he'd rather die than go back to being what he was
○ refused to answer the phone for any of his old team or even older crew, contemplated suicide, started spiraling out, drinking too much, almost pulled the trigger
○ checked himself into a mental health facility instead; met the best friend he's ever had while smoking a cigarette outside of it
○ worked through things with over a year of therapy and anti-depressants, went back to school for welding
○ started channeling his energy into welding sculpture art on the side & selling pieces
○ tentatively has his life together at 33, good welding job, decent at art, still regularly attends therapy
○ no drugs, minimal alcohol, not an addict

About:

Here key points of his personality & motivating traits!

Loyal

His loyalty has been a defining trait since he was a teenager — unfortunately to his detriment when he was younger, pledging it to the wrong crowd and sticking with them despite the risk to his life and his criminal record. The time he spent with the crowd that could probably more accurately be called his 'gang' had nothing to do with any fondness for drugs themselves, but rather everything to do with his dedication to the people he surrounded himself with. It was incredibly naïve of him to think those people deserved his loyalty, or that it ran two ways, but when most of them helped give him shelter, friendship, and purpose, he found himself willing to bend to some really dark shit in order to cater to their expectations.

That loyalty withstood the reforming of who he was at LAND — while he has none for the organization itself, the tendency still exists. Most recently it's manifested in unwavering dedication to his best friend Raj, but it'll crop up fiercely toward anyone he develops any kind of positive CR with.

Quick Thinking / Creative

Something that comes in handy both in the field and in his personal life — Conner is a very creative individual. He can think on his feet in the heat of the moment and come up with interesting solutions to intense problems. He often demonstrates this with clever uses for his shielding ability, or in how he handles firefights. This creativity also crops up in his art — he sketches, but more importantly, has taken to welding sculpture art as an outlet for expressing himself.

Empathetic

Conner picks up on the emotions of others through their body language or their word choice pretty well, and is very easily suckered into sympathizing with them. He demonstrates a genuine caring for their troubles, and will go out of his way to try and help — whether that's something as simple as talking, or as complex as acts of service — subtly making their life easier by doing their laundry, fixing their sink, etc. He genuinely gives a shit about people and is extremely cognizant of their needs & how to best meet them, which is what ultimately helped drive him to suicidal ideation over the things he did with LAND. This trait might be a result of his abusive upbringing and poor childhood, with some lingering unaddressed desires to belong to and be loved by a family — something he never actually got to have, despite both parents being alive and supplying him a shitload of siblings.

Guilty / Accountable

Because of the choices he made as a teenager and young adult, he will forever carry the guilt of (probably) killing that young woman who got caught up in the crossfire. This guilt is what first drove him into working for LAND, but he really shot himself in the foot with that one. Things he did in service to LAND piled tons and tons on top of it. His actions still haunt him to the point of needing therapy, to occasional guilt-fueled anxiety attacks, and has led to him believing he doesn't deserve anything good in his life. All bad things that happen to him are justified, he sees it as his own personal karma. He has an extremely strong sense of personal accountability, and blames himself too easily for things that go wrong. His want to be accepted by people he likes and cares about makes him a little bit of a doormat to them.

Stubborn

Once he's made a decision on something serious, it can be incredibly hard to dissuade him from it. He'll commit to his choices just the same as he commits to people, and just the same as he commits to his guilt. That's part of the reason why he can't really get over it — he stubbornly clings to what he feels he deserves and outright refuses to change his mind on it. This willfulness can sometimes be a good thing — helping him stay strong for a good cause even when things get tough — but more often it winds up biting him in the ass.

Temperamental

To be clear, Conner isn't really quick to anger. He generally has a pretty long rope and a pretty cool head — the problem arises after he loses his patience and snaps. Therein comes his hereditary "Irish Temper", and can lead to him lashing out, yelling, saying hurtful things, throwing stuff, generally releasing anything he's bottled up in one big explosive outburst. Once he's popping off it's nigh impossible to calm him down again until it runs its natural course. He can be pretty easily baited into a fight during one of these episodes.


Skills and Abilities:

Conner's gift is Impenetrable Shielding

His shield manifests as a translucent clear-blue convex oval roughly 7 ft tall & 5 feet wide at its maximum. He needs both hands for this. Alternatively, he can separate his hands and make two smaller circular shields, both a maximum of about 2.5 feet in diameter (sort of captain america shield sized, for reference). He can make either variation smaller. His hands are required in order to direct the shield; they don't have to be open but they do have to be pointed in the direction he wants to cover -- you could zip-tie or bind his hands behind his back and he could still shield, it would just be a useless butt shield, yay.

He can't just mentally produce a shield anywhere willy nilly without his hands, so if one is looking for a weakness in combat it would most likely be that. However, he's spent several years working with an elite special forces team doing intense combat training and having that weakness exploited during drills, so he is generally aware of compensating for that weakness.

His shields are very simple, there is no electric/psychic energy or otherwise harmful effect aside from the fact that they manifest as something very physical. As such, he can use them to bash things -- no supernatural strength, he'd be bashing with his normal human strength. Still sucks to get shield-punched in the face though.

→ they stop momentum, and so block anything from bullets to cars, size or force doesn't matter, the shield itself does not depend on his strength
→ they have a texture that's incredibly strange, almost like a hybrid glass-plasma-wind to the touch.
→ it isn't particularly draining, he can hold it for long durations and the amount he's shielding doesn't really impact anything. you could, for instance, drop a building on him and he could hang out underneath his shield just the same as if he was using it to block rain
→ however, in a way it's like every other low-impact bodily human thing -- eventually his stamina will give out just like it would if he was made to stand up for an indefinite period of time. he can't hold his shield up and sleep, he can't maintain his shield if he can't keep his hands up
→ the curvature of the shield outwardly directs extreme heat or cold to protect his body from proximity-based harm; however, as his shield is not a bubble, it won't protect him from the environment as a whole. he can tank a flamethrower but not an oven, in other words.
→ despite being largely transparent, it also scatters light - ie, no lasering through it. spells cast at him, eldritch blasts, magical force balls, whatever -- no dice, impenetrable.
→ tl;dr look all he's got in the super power world is a shield, man, he can't even fly, let him have his scientifically baffling turtle shell ok.

→ they also faintly glow, making him a hit at raves or emergency Descent-style cave horror situations and that's clearly the most important part


Why does your character need to be redeemed? Conner's sins started young, doing and dealing drugs & being involved in petty street crimes. It eventually devolved into accidentally shooting an innocent bystander in a gang-related altercation. LAND swooped in to snatch him up right on the cusp of that, and he spent the next six years doing things he knew were wrong because of the contract he let himself be held to.

Charges:

→ theft
→ possession with intent to sell
→ assault & battery
→ breaking and entering
→ assault with a deadly weapon
→ kidnapping
→ attempted murder

Pick and Choose:

– What would you consider essential to their redemption?

Conner needs to find a way to make ammends for what he did. At the moment, he's consumed with guilt and essentially stuck in that state — feeling remorse for his actions, having done nothing in his life to balance all of the bad. He needs an opportunity to do penance, he needs to face what he did, and he needs to give back or contribute to society in order to feel like he's come out the other side and helped people. He needs to see progression, and he needs to feel like he's put good into the world.

Graduation:

He'd go into the defense business — he'd spend his time protecting gifted innocent individuals from LAND and people that would seek to do them harm or extort them. Finding an advocacy group or joining an organization committed to this is his best path forward, and he'd invest the rest of his life to it.

Sample:

here is a (very long) thread that has been going on continuously for a long time.
here is a much shorter text exchange if that's preferable!