trauma; bete noire application

[bamfcc]

1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): coffee
Current characters in Bete Noire: none
Past characters in Bete Noire: none

2. Character Information
Name: Terrance "Terry" Ward; Trauma
Livejournal Username: bamfcc
Fandom: Avengers: The Initiative
Image: Trauma's Default
Reserve: here.

3. Character Information II

Age/Appearance: Terry is approximately 19 at the time I'm taking him from. In his default form, he's 5'7" and around 140 lbs, with a pretty lean build and defined muscles. He wears his black hair longish and shaggy, and it always looks stringy. His eyes are credited on the info pages as being brown, but he is usually portrayed with blue eyes in the actual art. He has a perpetually downbeat expression, and his eyes are frequently pretty dark around the edges, so he either wears guyliner or never sleeps. Probably a combination.

When he's using his abilities, his skin goes ashen, his eyes turn white and then red, he drops his head back, and his hair lifts to stand straight on end until he completes his shapeshift.

History: Trauma @ Wikipedia

Personality: Trauma is, above all else, quiet. He's understated and a bit withdrawn, intensely private about his own feelings and personal life. Perpetually downbeat, he appears sullen and apathetic - but that's not really accurate. Underneath the outer "emo kid" layer, Trauma is a very compassionate person, sensitive whether or not he talks about it, and very devoted to helping other people.

Terry's focus is, and always has been, very outwardly faced. He doesn't like too much attention, partly because it's usually negative. As much as he hates to be invisible, he's spent his whole life working at staying in the background - if he doesn't get close to people, doesn't care, and can't access their emotions, he can't use his abilities on them. This is a lesson he learned the hard way after putting his mother in a mental institution by turning into her worst fear. When he was younger, Trauma would often force others away with a dark, dry wit, and sometimes overt emotional aggression. He would lash out at anyone who tried to break his barriers and get too close. Easily threatened, he would often end up manifesting his powers and driving the final nail into the coffin of any close relationship he tried to form. Because of this, he grew up lonely, sullen, and disliking the world, and hating himself and his own powers. He still presents this outward persona to some extent - despite the recent development of his ability and his knowledge of how to control it and use it for good, he still has an aversion to people getting too close, knowing too much about where he came from and who he is inside.

Fortunately, after learning from Dani Moonstar how to control his ability, and being steered by her down the path of "good," he's developed an interest in how to use his abilities to help others. He's turned his previously angry outward focus into interest in other people's problems, which he handles with a genuine compassion. Terry, having been alone and having dealt with so many awful things wrought by his own hands - from having driven his mother crazy to indirectly causing the tragic death of a fellow cadet - isn't one to judge others. Regardless of what the person has done, how awful or guilty they feel, Terry will still make every attempt to help them. He's in the midst of studying to be a licensed therapist, and he is already a functional therapist, having taken on the responsibility of helping fellow cadets involved in the Initiative on an unoffcial level. This is the work that he finds the most rewarding, it's his redemption, the one good use for his dark and brutal ability, his way to make up to his mother and MVP and all the people he'd hurt.

Despite this turnaround, Terry still suffers from the deep internal wounds he got growing up and in the first part of his Initiative training. This isn't helped much by the fact that he still refuses to get too close to other people - he might care about them and offer all the support in the world, but he won't open up in return. Not talking about his own issues has allowed his inherent lack of self-worth and guilt over what he's done to continue consuming him. He has no catharsis other than what he shares with Abby, his teammate who's gone through things as rough as him and who he bonded with while making her his first "client." Terry feels that he owes the world, and that anything he does is simply to pay back good for all the issues he's caused. Later in canon, he says that MVP's death was his fault, taking the blame on himself without question when others were being faced with the consequences of what happened. His guilt is a major part of who he is, something that's been with him from a young age, and it's what drives him to refuse to open up and put himself last.

Terry has some confidence in his abilities, while at the same time not particularly valuing himself - on many occasions in canon, he's put himself out as the point man, the "big gun," who would take care of a threat that hurt dozens of other superheroes. He stepped up to a raging out of control Hulk, the Omega-level armed clone of MVP, and Ragnarok, a part-android clone of Thor, telling others to stay back and get out, and that he had it. In these situations, he always ended up seriously hurt, and once he even ended up dead, but he continues to do it, over and over, showing both his devotion to good and lack of concern for his own well-being.

Finally, another defining trait of Trauma's is that he's very lost, in a way. He doesn't know where his abilities come from, a lot of what and who he is is a mystery even to himself, especially having just woken up from being very considerably dead. He doesn't understand why a normal boy could come by these abilities (and he knows he's not a mutant, after M-Day took away most mutant abilities) and how a normal boy could possibly resurrect himself after being autopsied and embalmed. This lack of understanding of who he even is, and facing his own lack of mortality, has caused him to take an entirely different track with his life - he is now on a mission of discovery, rather than being simply an aimless hero.

Terry, altogether, has a lot to learn - about himself, about where he's going, and where he's been. Fortunately, he's pretty resilient.

Sexual Preferences/Orientation: Terry has never shown any particular interest in sex or romance, other than becoming protective over Thor Girl when she had a crush on him. It's more likely than not that Trauma's never really considered having a relationship as something he could do, and by the time he was in control enough to think about it, he had bigger things on his mind, like conducting therapy or finding out the origin of his powers and himself. He's likely into girls as a sort of default - what small amount of romantic interest he's shown has been for a female - but with an open mind. He becomes very attached to a man later in canon and becomes just as protective and devoted to him as he was to Thor Girl earlier on (although the man is a patient). It's a toss-up, and because of his lonely life up until the Initiative, it's more likely that he'd respond well to anyone who shows a genuine interest in him and who he wants to help.

Powers:
Telepathic Shapeshifting: Trauma has limited telepathy, allowing him to seek out the fears of those around him, which he then uses to change his physical form into a manifestation of that fear. It is of note that, while transformed into a person's fear, he will shitttalk them to enhance the fear and, as this shittalking has come out of him in languages he doesn't even know before, it's likely that this is part of the telepathic connection and serves as part of the transformation.

At the point I'm taking him from, he has the ability to choose which fear of several he wants to turn into, and can subtly force his ability into a therapeutic purpose by helping people face their fears. The ability doesn't work against robots or those without emotions, and can easily be brushed off by people who have faced their fears, forcing Trauma back into his human form.

Resurrection?: While he doesn't have any sort of enhanced healing (he's been beaten within an inch of his life several times and had to recover in the Infirmary every time), Trauma has canonically been killed and come back to life, even after his body had been autopsied and embalmed. This is likely because of his part-demonic heritage, though he doesn't know that at the point I'll be pulling him from in canon.

Reason for playing: Terry is an incredibly interesting character to me - he looks really cliche, and at first you'd think he is, but he manages to be an emo kid with deep-set issues while not being whiny at all. He's quiet and pretty stoic, without being emotionless. He looks apathetic but has a deep well of empathy. I think his path in the comic was incredibly interesting - he had so much "borderline evil" potential and ended up being a complete good guy, and a NICE guy. I like that he has a dark power and uses it for good as much as he can. I also think a setting like Bete Noire that brings out the darkness in people would be a very interesting place to play a character like Terry.

As for why panfandom? Dressing rooms are boring because they're too impermanent and I like sustained CR. Single-fandom games for Marvel probably exist, but I like new blood. So. Yeah.

4. Original Character Supplement
World History: N/A
Character History: N/A

5. Samples

First-Person: 30 comment Dear Mun thread with his canonmate Cloud 9.

Third-Person:

He'd been walking for what felt like days, lost in some strange place he didn't recognize. Unfamiliar, but somehow not quite that alien. He was starting to wonder if maybe he was still dead after all, if this was some kind of limbo afterlife, and waking up in his casket at the viewing of his own body with his mouth sewn shut was some kind of weird dream. Abby had been there, reached out for him, Hardball and Komodo and the others in the background, and it made sense for that to be some kind of weird post-mortem fantasy he had before passing on to the next world. Having friends, or even people who'd come see him after he died, was definitely fantasy material. He just wished that if it hadn't been real, he'd have left out the whole stitches tearing in his mouth part. And maybe brought his father and little brother to see him there too.

In fact, there were enough little uncomfortable details that he wasn't convinced it was fake. No way. Terry Ward was pretty good at imagining things, and if he was making some sort of post-death utopia where he was actually relevant and mattered to people, his family would've been there for sure.

Which left him here, in this weird scenario, with this weird, filthy city being his current reality. Filthy, obviously riddled with vices, and creepy. And when Trauma was calling something creepy, there was a serious creep factor issue going on. He could feel people's eyes on him, could tell he was being sized up, either as a piece of meat or source of a few bucks for the next meal or hit of drugs - he'd had that feeling before, in big cities, out at night in dark places, but it was kind more of a thing here. His skin crawled, and he turned, dark eyes scanning the shadows. A man detatched himself from them, advancing.

So. Time to make their move. Terry shifted, his feet separating to hold his balance, moves well-practiced from Initiative training, his hands coming out to either side in a defensive position. The man kept coming, his face dark and mouth set in a twisted smile, and Terry could tell he wasn't going to back down. Or be reasoned with. He took a deep breath, he reached out with his mind, sought out the emotions, the fear, buried down under the desperation for drugs and sex, and pulled.

"You think you're going to take me down?" he asked, his voice low and rough, his mouth sore, "Well, I'm not afraid...but I know what you're afraid of..."

Third-Person #2:

He'd never considered himself innocent, not in any way. It had even been a long time since he considered himself free of vice - adolescence was tough enough without being an introverted emo kid, and there was a point at which fantasy became more comforting than the prospect of trying to get anything from a girl in real life. Touching himself became second nature, like brushing his teeth, or eating when he was hungry, an automatic reaction to satisfy the part of himself that still longed for that human contact in the most primitive way possible.

But things had slowly been getting more screwed up, even inside his own head, and that was saying a lot. It always started the same - Thor Girl...no, Tarene, with her soft blond hair and perfect lips and perfect breasts, the way she smiled at him. This amazing beautiful girl with her stuck-up attitude and jock mentality that never would've given him a second glance if he hadn't turned into Thor in front of her. His mind would wander - what would she look like naked, her breasts heavy and soft, her lips parted, chest heaving slightly while he touched her...blue eyes locked on him. The wallflower. The scary introvert. Him.

He would think about her body and the feel of her skin, and his mind would wander - the smell of her skin, the smell of her hair, the smell of it as it burnt under the blow she'd taken for him. The power that swelled inside with the anger, the feeling of it like a heavy bubble rising inside him, growing, suffusing him, drawing him upward. He would protect her, he would avenge her, he would be the one to hold her while she was in pain, and she looked up at him with tears in her eyes, asking if she'd honored him...

His breath came in sharp little gasps, he could hear himself in the quiet of his room, smell his own sweat, enjoying the memory of the swell of power, the scent of burnt hair and skin, the adrenaline pounding as he wielded a power, a thing that had never caused him anything but pain, and knew...he knew that if he could just open himself, this beautiful girl would open herself to him, open her body, and he could be a man...

Exhaling a sharp little whimper, the power and pleasure swelled, his body tingled, his toes curled, and he came against his own belly. The heat suffused him, his fingers clenched tight, and he let out a soft moan. And then he came down, slow and sick, and the heat was replaced with guilt.