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Applications
APPLICATIONS
Since the game is in the closing process, applications are permanently CLOSED.
Reserves are currently CLOSED.
Please be sure to review our FAQ, rules, and taken page!
Player Cap: 38/60
Please note that reserves only hold the character for you to apply with. Should all player slots be filled before the end of the scheduled application round, applications will close at that time. Due to the limited number of player slots, revision requests will be given a 24 hour window for re-submission.
To submit your application during an open round, copy and paste it directly in a comment here. If your application exceeds the character length, please only use one top-level and reply to it with as many comments as needed.
Please title your comments in the following format:
CHARACTER NAME | CANON | RESERVED/NOT RESERVED
Player
Name:
Age:
Contact:
Preferred Pronouns:
Other Characters: If this is your second character, please list your first here.
Character
Name: Please include any known aliases as well.
Age:
Memory Option: (1, 2, 3 -- see HERE for more information).
Established Status: Y/N. If yes, please state for how long (up to five years, more information can be found here) and detail briefly what they've been doing since they've come to Overjoyed. Please note that no memory regains will be possible prior to game-start: this option is only available to allow you to better establish your character and their potential organizations/business/etc.
Canon:
Canon Point:
Citizenship: Please review the settings guide and job guide, as not all characters will have citizenship. This will be very important for plot events and will not be easily changed once accepted, so consider your options carefully.
Job: See our jobs, FAQ, and culture pages for more information. Who they work for--whether it's The Company, The RAC, or another option, will have a significant impact on their daily lives. The most important thing to bear in mind is that the job should make sense for the character--we probably wouldn't have Gundam Wing's Heero become a pastry chef (though that would be its own level of awesome), and likewise, Ash Ketchum probably isn't suited for biomedical engineering.
* Level: For characters who are applying as members of the RAC, please state the level you believe is the most logical starting point for them. Keep in mind that no one begins higher than a level 4.
Abilities: For an overview of how your character's canon powers can translate to Overjoyed, please review the FAQ, powers guide and/or hit up the brainstorming meme where a mod will be happy to work with you. In short, we will only be nerfing those abilities deemed game-breaking, but will require that magical abilities translate into more scifi iterations of themselves. Additionally, you will need to classify your abilities between minor and major and explain why you chose that classification. Minor abilities will be available from day one, but major abilities can only be regained through AC purchases.
This section should also include any standard physical or mental abilities that are noteworthy about your character.
Personality: We expect this section to be thorough and as comprehensive as possible. While we understand that the nature of an AU-bending game will skew a canon personality, we ask that you refrain from heavy use of headcanon and, in the instances where you do use it, provide your logic and reference canon to back it up. Things to consider in this section: How do they react to conflict? What are their strongest traits and their weakest points? In their worst moments, what are they like? How about when they're at their best? We want to see well-rounded characters--no one is perfect and no one is completely flawed.
CRAU: Yes or no. If yes, please provide a brief summary of the world setting they're coming from, the developments and/or formative experiences that occurred during the time they were there, and a link to the game's main navigation page.
AU History: This is the section where you will blend the world setting with your character's original history. Because we realize that this isn't the easiest task, we want to make it as painless--and as fun--as possible. If you're struggling for ideas, please don't hesitate to hit up the brainstorming meme. Your history does not need to mirror canon precisely--some things just won't translate well at all, but try to stay as true to the original path as you can. The people tasked with rewriting your character's memory would try to align it as closely to true experiences as they could.
Original History:
If canon: A wiki link is sufficient as long as it covers the pertinent details and pertains to the specific universe in which you're pulling your character from (anime, manga, game, etc).
If OC: Please provide a detailed account of their life and general world setting of their original universe. If possible, try to limit this section to no more than 1000 words, but know that this is more of a general guideline for your moderators' sanity than unbending rule (so if you feel that you need to write more to convey important details, we understand).
Inventory: Items that your character had on their person at the time of leaving their universe will be permitted, though some may change form when entering Overjoyed to suit the environment (i.e., if you had a magical pocketwatch, it would probably look slightly different now.) For application purposes, please list any items within their possession at the canon point you'll be taking them from, and describe any changes the items will undergo.
Samples: Please provide either (A) a sample written within the game verse or (B) two threads, only one of which may be network, wherein at least one is set within game verse (i.e., tdm).
Miscellaneous Notes: Is there anything you would like the mods to consider that didn't quite fit into the above sections? For original characters, please note your PB here. Otherwise, feel free to add anything pertinent that didn't quite fall into the above categories.
river tam | firefly | expired reserve
Player
Name: Era
Age: old enough to buy my own booze for a dozen years or so
Contact: plurk: a_new_era discord: era#9221
Preferred Pronouns: she/her/hers
Character
Name: River Tam
Age: 19
Memory Option: Deteriorating but only in a very limited sense and River knows herself to be the most unreliable narrator, so. Out of everything going on she's not too worried about this detail.
Established Status: yes; 5 years present! More info in her AU history section.
Canon: Firefly (show) & Serenity (film)
Canon Point: post-film
Citizenship: Undocumented
Job: stowaway at the moment
Abilities
Minor: Combat: River was trained every single day for over two years to be an assassin by the largest government power in her canon. Thus, she is exceptionally skilled at hand-to-hand and weapons combat, be it blades, firearms, or whatever is accessible at the time. In episode 1.09 War Stories, she looks down a hallway of people shooting at her and Kaylee (the ship's engineer), turns back around a corner, and fires blind into the hallway, hitting each assailant with perfect precision.
In the general sense if River can lift it, she can use it. If she can't lift it, she can use her own fists and feet.
Minor: Telepathic Input: In canon River is a telepath; however she is a telepath with very little by way of control and can only receive information - she is incapable of doing any telepathic projection. At times her ability makes it very difficult for her to tell the difference between what is actually happening in front of her and what other people are merely thinking about/remembering/associating with the moment. She can't turn this ability off at all - it controls her a great deal more than she controls it, even at her most lucid. She can perceive secrets, desires, lies, anticipated actions. In the canon story "Crystal" by Brett Matthews, River is given a combination of drugs by her brother that accidentally allows her full access to her precognitive ability. Otherwise, her precognition is limited to a very small window of time and could be better understood as a sense of either good or bad to come or the possible futility of an action as opposed to a definite and clear vision of the future.
SO since this is a funky sort of power for a tech driven world I'm gonna call it an augmentation to her brain; there's definitely tech in there, and it's interacting oddly with all the other people who have had their memories changed and I'm going to put a line of sight limit on the ability when dealing with new/unfamiliar people especially.
Minor: Genius Intellect: There really aren't any limits to what River can do if she found a way to approach a problem. River takes to things the way fish take to water. No matter what it is; dancing, fighting, mathematics, River is able to understand it and improve upon it (to the annoyance of others, at times, in regards to religious texts and other things that are not considered in need of improvement) with very little effort on her part.
This also goes hand in hand with her fighting and balancing abilities; to her it's all math and art, which means she's efficient and graceful no matter what she's doing.
She can dance, shoot, engage in close-quarters combat, and pilot a spacecraft with little to no conscious effort on her part. And she is very good at whatever she does put effort into; no matter what the quantity of said effort is, the quality of her work will always be genius level.
Personality: At first glance, River seems like a severely emotionally unbalanced young woman with no brain to mouth filter who has a rather short attention span and a penchant for thinking things are games when they are, in fact, much more dangerous and put herself and others at risk. Prone to mood swings and bursts of shouting rage and throwing things, it easy to say that the initial understanding of her personality is accurate.
But it's incomplete.
River isn't so much mentally ill as she is traumatized; two years of experiments, brain surgery and mental conditioning turned a genius teenager who was bored with the typical schooling and somewhat telepathically sensitive into a young woman who cannot stop herself from feeling, saying, thinking, doing whatever comes into her mind. This includes information from the minds of other people, things they never have told her aloud or never intended for her to know. She deals with this the best way that she can; when she is lucid and happy everything is a game, even dangerous situations until they become glaringly obvious and must be dealt with. Because when she is not lucid, or when she is not happy, she can't stop remembering and hearing things that she doesn't want to remember or hear. When she's not happy or when she's scared she has even less control over the mind that's been altered to give her as little conscious and subconscious control as possible.
At lot of this changes when she's with Simon, her older brother. Because he is ultimately the person who spends the most time with her, the person she trusts and the person who took her out of the hell she was trapped in, a lot of the River from before the Academy shines through in his presence; the genius child, the bratty little sister. Their relationship is almost co-dependent, or could be argued as such already, considering that they're on the run from the law that would throw him in prison (or kill him) while shipping her right back to the people who did so much damage to her in the first place and they were close before anything terrible happened to them. The fact that their presence on Serenity is a constant issue of recurring conflict and that their parents refused to help Simon when he originally approached them about his concern that something was happening to River, they honestly don't have anyone to fully depend on other than each other. Or at least, they didn't, before the events of film, which worked to cement their status as crewmembers of Serenity.
I mention her shift around her brother because without someone directly in that role River will gravitate towards people who fill that space either in parts or whole, and the people she comes to trust will see more of the personality that River has when she is with her brother in canon than the one she has while interacting with strangers.
She has an active (and highly understandable) phobia to medical situations in which her brother isn't involved. Even when he is, that bratty part of her will come out unless it's something that truly reminds her of the Academy, in which case she will panic and flail and try to get away. If something is serious (to her - which is usually a life or death situation to anyone ELSE) then River does what she understands needs doing, though it takes a lot for her to get there. In her case? That means dealing with it with her own two hands, and with whatever weapon is nearby. And thanks to her own inherent abilities and what the Academy has done to her, River Tam can do absolutely anything she puts her mind to - and quite a few things it puts itself to on her behalf.
She loves to dance, hates wearing shoes, loves wearing dresses and has absolutely no sense of when not to be nosy.
AU History: Alright, so.
At the age of 14 is chosen to go to a prestigious Quad school. It's pretty standard stuff, and she excels for the 2 years she's there, makes friends, doesn't speak often with her family. It's a bit of a happy blur in her mind these days, as she was in her ideal environment, intellectually stimulated and challenged while learning languages and dancing alongside things like theoretical physics.
Then, when she's 16, she was transferred to a new school. This place was different; there was a lot of testing, and limited access to her classmates. The first year was nothing but physical training and a battery of exams which she assumes she passed because she didn't die.
So.
Queue up a few more years of being in a mix of training, half-forgotten surgeries, and long periods in a small, dark tube while her brain feels like it's being filleted in seven different ways. She has no idea about the telepathic uplink, because everyone she has interacted with as the school were shielded from what her brain can do without trying.
It'll be fun, getting used to that level of noise.
She has woken up at the school with no idea what's going on to her in particular or to the Quad in general and no one familiar and HERE WE ARE! The immediate follow-up will either be handwaved or logged out!
Original History: Here.
Inventory: Just the clothes on her back! A sweater, a sundress, a pair of combat boots. Also, a set of plastic dinosaur toys that were in her pocket.
Samples: one & two.
Miscellaneous Notes: I...am using an Asian pb (specifically Lee Ji Eun) because while I love the franchise there's really no reason not to. I COULD WRITE AN ESSAY ABOUT RACISM IN FIREFLY but I'm not gonna, because I love you.
REVISIONS REQUESTED
Thank you for applying to Overjoyed. The moderation team has reviewed your application and found it to be very strong. However, we would like to request some revision(s) before we can accept your application.
Please amend the material as discussed via PM, thank you!
If you’d like to discuss the specifics or need clarity, please feel free to PM the mod account. You have 24 hours from the time of this comment to reply with the requested revisions.
Additionally, looking over Overjoyed's FAQ, Premise, Culture/Factions, Powers, & Memory Mechanics might be of help to you during your revisions.
Thank you again for your interest in Overjoyed, and we look forward to seeing your revised application!
Yours,
Overjoyed Mods
<3!
That said, River was not the expected prodigal child; her brother was. River cannot quite remember if he is still alive or in contact with his family, and I'll honestly be leaving it pretty vague as to what exactly happened in order to allow someone to app Simon if they want, but. River grew up with her brother, who was her parent's shining star. He was intelligent and driven to thrive, practically shone in all of his educational goals.
River, on the other hand, was too smart for her own good. She questioned, she challenged, both the role of the Company and the role of the Nine in how people in Westerly were treated. She was vocal with these questions, often asking them of teachers and diplomats and other business people her parents knew and interacted with. Unlike Simon who easily fell in line with what his parents wanted, River was so impossible to keep mollified that their parents were frustrated with her genius instead of impressed or proud of it.
Pride for their children began and ended with Simon. River was an afterthought. A problem, really, and as such she was much closer to her older brother than to her parents by the time she went off to school. In fact, during her first "normal" year at school, she and her brother kept in contact much more often than she did with her parents; the latter were less interested in how she was doing and more that she was keeping occupied and doing well. The details didn't concern them.
She always had a knack for sensing the intentions of others, like when someone didn't like her, or when someone was really interested in her brother. She often teased him about it, but it also meant that the distance from her parents became both unsurprising and yet painful the older she got. She knew that they didn't like her, that they saw her as a political liability because she asked too many questions and could yet grow up to challenge the power structure and wouldn't easily fall in line, and while she tried to be more like the child they wanted, by the time she was 14 she felt it was too late to appease them except through her education.
The next year she had a harder time reaching Simon, as his medical practice took up a lot of his time. The year after that she was transferred, and contacting her family at all became impossible.
The Schools: The first school River was sent to was controlled by Land Hyponia and it's goal was to make, essentially, the best and the brightest students possible. The most culturally well-rounded, politically aware students. People who could bring unforeseen talents to the Nine, specifically to the Hyponia family. The school was their crown, and River was the shining gem. Unbeknownst to her, her abilities and scores were often broadcast to other families of the Nine, as her distant relatives were thrilled with her progress.
This was probably a bad idea, in retrospect.
River was one of roughly two dozen students who were taken from various schools the Nine had set up and were sent to a hidden school, run by Lands Derrish and Kendry in conjunction with one another. This meant that students from their own, more visible, schools also went missing for this hidden school project. Their goal, unlike the other schools, was not just to create awesomely well-rounded members of the Quad.
Their goal was to make awesomely well-rounded members of the Quad who could be controlled by specific families of the Nine in order to further their specific goals. People who, due to their rigorous training and some illegal modifications, would be unquestionably loyal to the needs of the Families that controlled them.
River is about 80% of the way there. She still had two years of training and mental reconditioning to go, but essentially the students were meant to be sleeper agents. People who could be put in positions of power and yet could upturn that power overnight, completely unknown to others. Perfect at untraceable assassinations, for instance, or getting information.
The school itself is located on a ship that moves throughout the J, under the name The Hellenic and is not isolated to the Quad. There is a facility on Qresh, as well, but River has never been there.
River's surgeries/modification: The primary goal of River's modification was to grant her an ability to obtain unspoken information based on electromagnetic movement within the brains of those she encountered. Like a projection of thoughts, feelings, associations based on her interactions with them. The tech is experimental, obviously; telepathy is not exactly something people would be too keen on, considering how many secrets there are in the Quad and the J in general.
So, while everyone coming in from other worlds have memory modifying tech in their heads, the tech in River's interacts with this in such a way that it practically broadcasts these unconscious reactions and associations into her head. She can see it, hear it, and sometimes has difficulty differentiating it from active reality.
In canon her ability to modify her behavior (think fight or flight reactions, or having an appropriate emotional response to a trigger or event) is completely stripped. Since this would not...make for a good assassin by ANY MEANS it is not that bad, here! But she does still have a tendency to react to things 'strangely', i.e. with either blown out of proportion reactions or entirely too calmly judging on the amount of danger she's in.
Why not Summer Glau as a PB? I'm going to preface this by saying I have nothing personal against Glau's portrayal of River, but I will also point people in the direction of various articles and conversations such as these two. To put it succinctly, for a world setting that is supposed to be comprised of American and Chinese superpowers in space, there is a distinct lack of Sino-played characters in the show. There's plenty of Sino culture, and language, but notably few people.
And that, put simply, is a problem. Representation matters, both in pretendy funtimes and in media. I personally feel it's very important to reflect that in this specific mode of storytelling. With that in mind, I'm using Victoria Song as a PB!
ACCEPTED
Congratulations! You've been accepted into Overjoyed.
We’re so excited to have you join our community. Before we can get started, please do the following:
- Request to join the following communities: Logs · Network · OOC · Memes
- Friend the mod account, thenine, and respond to the player contact page.
- Reply to the taken page.
- Fill out the job registry.
- (Optional) Follow the mod plurk here to stay up to date about upcoming plots, community discussions, and more!
- (Optional) Put your application, IC contact/inbox, and permissions post in your journal, then introduce yourself to the OOC community!
- Third Round Applicants: Chapter 3 will launch on February 11th! In the meantime, feel free to create pregame CR or play with the current timeline/setting of Chapter 2 (found here) until the next plot installment!
All characters will start with a balance of 100 bonus HP. This balance can be used towards AC bank purchases, but may not be used for satisfying monthly AC requirements.If you have any further questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to us by PM or on the contact page.
Once again, we’re so happy to have you, and thanks for joining us!
Yours,
Overjoyed Mods