Annexed: Application

[worthallthis]

PLAYER

Name: Gail
Over 18? Yes
Contact: cacopheny @ plurk or PM this journal
Current Character: Marc/Steven

CHARACTER DETAILS

Name: James Buchanan Barnes, aka Bucky aka Winter Soldier
Canon: MCU
Canon Point: The end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, after he's pulled Steve from the river but before he's found the Smithsonian exhibit
Age: 98, looks mid-30s


Heba or Tian? Heba. He doesn't really fit a lot of the personality profile right now, but he did in the past and does still have the potential to grow in his more outgoing traits. Also, he would not take the time to learn magic, and Marc and Steven are Tian magic users, so I'd rather go this route with him.
Acquired Ability: Control metal. He'll be able to mold it like clay through thought and willpower, heat it up or cool it down, and summon it if it's close enough, within maybe a six foot range. It will start smallish, with just his own metal arm, and expand from there with practice. He will not be able to create it from scratch or change the amount of it in any one place, though with time and practice he might be able to extract metal from very small deposits.

Personality Traits:
* Protective: The deepest and strongest trait he has, the one that defines who Bucky Barnes is, is his protectiveness. He has a habit of peering down alleyways, looking for people (Steve Rogers, in particular) who need rescue. He stayed in the war because he had people (again, including Steve Rogers) who needed looking after. He has three younger sisters who he looked after. It was this very trait that made it easier for HYDRA to manipulate him into serving them: with his memories gone and loyalty compromised by the trigger words, all they had to do was turn his protective streak onto the wrong people. Even once he starts coming back to himself, the first thing he does is save a life.
* Loyal: Once won, Bucky's loyalty is not easily shaken. Steve, for example, is a frustrating little punk but Bucky refused to give up on him. It took years of torture, conditioning, and finally a literal mind-wipe before that loyalty could be turned around to someone else, and even then all it took was seeing Steve's face and hearing his old name to start to reinstate that allegiance. No matter how annoying, how stupid, or even how dangerous someone is, if that someone has won his loyalty, Bucky will probably put up with it. He might snark at them about it, or do his level best to keep that person from tripping themselves up, but he won't abandon them.
* Charismatic: In Brooklyn, he was popular: he had friends, he had dates, he could convince his dates to go out with a grouchy Steve too, and it's clear he had a strong rapport with his unit in the army beyond that. Even when brain-fried and confused, even when ostensibly acting on the side of the villains, there's a certain charisma to him. There's something about his lost puppy demeanor and his rare smile that wins people to his side. He doesn't necessarily know how to exercise it intentionally right now, but with more time spent among friends than enemies, some of his extroverted nature will come back to him.
* Stubborn: Bucky is monumentally stubborn. It did, after all, take several years of torture and finally a mind-wipe to get him to turn. He refuses to give up on Steve in no small part because he's already made up his mind and isn't about to go back on it now. Even in smaller, day-to-day issues, he doesn't easily change his mind on things, even when he's wrong. This also makes recovery a little more difficult, since he'll stubbornly cling to the things he's known in the past.
* Passive: Bucky has never been comfortable in the spotlight. He doesn't like to lead. He prefers to find someone else to prop up who he can follow, to let them make the big decisions and catch all the attention. HYDRA took advantage of this and did their very best to make it worse, so he has largely stopped taking initiative unless under combat or mission conditions, or in life-or-death situations. This manifests in difficulty making choices, defaulting to someone else's preference in absence of his own, and in waiting for the plot to come to him rather than seeking it out. This may improve (or even wildly reverse) over the course of the game, depending on plots and CR.
* Fearful: Finally, after years and years of being controlled, gaslit, confused, and downright tortured, Bucky carries with him a lot of fear. Small spaces? Automatic fear response. Electricity sparking? Automatic fear response. Medical devices or the smell of latex? Automatic fear response. Human-shaped people approaching him? Automatic fear response. He is excellent at hiding it, basically able to mask the symptoms of an anxiety attack for hours on end as an extreme adaptation to not being allowed to show emotion, but it's still there.


History: MCU wiki

Canon Abilities/Skills:
* Super-soldier serum, the evil version: Not quite the kind that was given to Captain America, but rather one that's gone through some variations and remixes due to lack of resources, creative thinking, and indifference to the suffering of the subject. This increases his metabolism to the point where he heals from damage in about half the time of an unenhanced human; he has increased strength, speed, stamina, and sturdiness; his memory has improved to the point of being nearly edetic; he has slightly enhanced senses of sight and hearing; and drugs no longer work on him unless specially formulated and in a high dose. His enhanced metabolism also means he needs to eat a lot.
* Advanced training: Bucky Barnes' trained skillset includes basic army training and advanced sniper training, as well as an understanding of guerilla tactics and some mechanical expertise. The Winter Soldier's skillset is much broader, including advanced hand-to-hand techniques, proficiency with firearms and close-combat weapons of an incredibly wide variety, fluency in multiple languages, enhanced bodily control and flexibility, subterfuge, stealth, and standard mission skills such as looking after the basic necessities, obtaining supplies, and seeking out intel. He has crazy-high pain tolerance, too.

Suitability: Within the setting, the Winter Soldier can be pretty useful to a rebel army. He knows tactics and strategy, he knows his way around a gun or a variety of melee weapons, he knows how to sneak, and he knows who best to take out in a lot of political situations. My plan is to get him involved in that as a means of keeping him busy and allowing him to question the orders and morals he was fed as HYDRA's asset, and grow him into his own person again. This may or may not result in him sticking with the war effort.

The mechanic of tethering him emotionally to one or more other people will be an interesting means of seeing how he grows, as well. His brain is a mess of emotions, landmines, pitfalls, and holes, and letting other people see that on a long-term basis is something I've never tried before. It'll take a lot of work to get him to allow such a connection, but forcing it on him in order to stay healthy is one way to accelerate the process of actually learning to relate to another person again.

Inventory: His HYDRA body armor, buried under about three layers of hoodie. His tac pants with a variety of useful things in the pockets (needle/thread, a phone, a roll of bandages, a smooth rock he liked the color of, a broken feather, a scrap from Captain America’s uniform, extra ammo). His combat boots. Three guns and six knives. A backpack containing a couple of his HYDRA face masks and goggles, a map of DC's subway system, and a single spiral-bound notebook with a few pages filled with memories and plans.

CHARACTER QUESTIONNAIRE

What are your character's feelings on freedom? How would they define freedom? How important is it to them? Would they fight for it, or have they fought for it in the past? If they have, how did they go about it?
At this point, his feelings about freedom are extremely complicated. He is free. Is he free? He doesn't know what freedom is. He fears freedom. He fears his freedom being lost again. He's spent the past seventy years with his will and very personality being heavily constrained by others, and it's possible he'd be easy to sway back into service of someone he finds worthy of it, or he could turn out to be fiercely against ever being given orders again. It all depends on how the game goes.

Describe a formative moment in your character's life, something that changed them and defined who they are as a person.

Walking past the alleyway where a 10 year old Steve Rogers was getting beat up for his non-existent lunch money, and deciding to wade in to help rather than keep walking. From then on, the trajectory of his life changed drastically: he no longer had only himself and his family to worry about, he also had this scrappy Catholic kid he couldn't just abandon. Steve has been a guiding star for Bucky for most of his life, even now, decades later, as only a barely remembered image and the static of their fight on the helicarrier.

Does your character have a favorite person? If so, how would they describe that person? What do they like about that person? What do they dislike? If they don't have a favorite person, what would they look for in a favorite person? What traits would draw them to another person? What traits could they tolerate that others might not be able to?
The only person he remembers anything about who isn't an abuser is Steve Rogers. Luckily, Steve Rogers also happens to be his favorite person. He would, at this point, describe Steve Rogers as confusing, dangerous, and desperately in need of protection. He likes that Steve knows what he wants. He hates that Steve knows what he wants, since that appears to be himself. He likes that Steve does what's right. He hates that Steve does what's right because it means he gets beaten to a bloody pulp by rogue murder machines.

What has your character's arc been like so far? How have they developed from their first appearance to their canon point?
Bucky Barnes' arc through the end of The Winter Soldier is one of agency and loyalty. To whom does his loyalty belong? Can loyalty be coopted and repurposed? Can one really take away what makes a person themselves without repercussions? At the end of the movie, he saves the one he was supposed to kill, proving that the core of him is still there, and going forward his arc will be recovering from horrific abuse and learning to live like a person again, whoever that person winds up being.

How would you like to continue your character's arc in the game? How would you like them to develop? What would you like to have them accomplish?
Every new game is a new chance to see what kind of person the new Bucky Barnes grows into (and what name he picks for himself this time). This game gives me a new and interesting opportunity to see what he’s like thrown into a war scenario right away, how he handles a mission format, and whether he swings towards order or chaos. I want him to eventually think of himself as a person again, to gain function and social connection, but I am wide open as to what path that takes.

SAMPLES

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