Voidtreckers: Application

[worthallthis]

Player Information

Name: Gail
Age: 39
Contact details: cacopheny @ plurk, PM worthallthis
Other characters: NA

Character Information

Name: James "Bucky" Barnes, goes by Soldat
Canon: MCU
Canon Point: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, at the end of the helicarrier fight, before fishing Steve out of the river
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: CRAU from In the Night/The Next Night
Age: 98, though looks around 30 or so


World Information:
The modern world, only with superheroes. Most of the super-ness is grounded in science, but it's a very fantastical science, with super-soldier serum, gamma radiation turning people into giant green rage-monsters, and aliens who look like Norse gods. There are spaceships, genetically modified raccoon people, mysterious alien metals that are nearly indestructible, nanotech suits of armor, and electrified chairs that can wipe your memory and personality away (temporarily, anyway).

When the Winter Soldier died, a soul was snatched up by a portal to a dead town on a dead world, and a body was re-created to stash it in, effectively making a clone with the original soul attached to it via a lantern. The town, Beacon, was much like one on Earth from around the 1980s, only with slightly divergent tech levels (portals, clones, and lantern technology being the big ones), except for the fact that there was no light or animals of any kind, and it was inhabited by the twisted spirits of former residents, and it was threatened by eldritch monsters known as World Eaters. The setting was designed for cooperative horror and exploration, where residents could build something of a life between terrifying events and uncovering Beacon's past. The goal was to save Beacon from the World Eaters-- maybe even all of the universe.

Personal History:
MCU wiki

After dying in the destruction of the helicarrier, the Winter Soldier woke up on a ferry pulling into the dock on the lake shore of Beacon, tied to a lantern that held their remaining life force. For a year and six months, they lived in this town, dealing with hostile spirits, lantern malfunctions, and the looming threat of the World Eaters that eat the light, the life, from a world. These World Eaters were hunting for them in particular to finish this world off. Eventually taking the name "Soldat" rather than going by "Soldier" (their actual name, James or Bucky Barnes, hurt too much to hear, let alone say), they were instrumental in protecting the town from spirit invasion, from an overwhelming flood, and from being lost in underground cave systems. They forged strong connections with local spirits and took on a variety of general pieces of town functions, making twice-daily patrols of discovered areas, making a group lunch every day, and teaching others how to defend themselves and how to communicate with the native spirits.

Then when the World Eater finally closed in, Soldat was part of the team that got the bomb to destroy it primed and launched, and freed the world to hopefully start again now that the source of death was stopped. Soldat fully expects to fade into nothingness now, along with all the other spirits, for dead things can only live on a dead world-- and the world is hopefully coming back to life.

Personality:
James Buchanan Barnes, known around Brooklyn as Bucky, was a friendly young man, ready with a smile and a joke to lighten the mood, good with people to the point of being charming. Of course, the flip side was he was vain, particularly about his hair, and tended towards over-confident when it came to his relationships with other people, particularly ladies. His sense of humor leaned to the sarcastic side, but he was as quick with a compliment as snark, and he had an optimistic view of the future, fascinated with science fiction and new breakthroughs in actual science.

The most important person in his life was Steve Rogers, a boy one year younger with a list of health problems as long as his arm, and a heart and sense of courage far bigger than his small stature. Bucky was protective of Steve, and often wound up rescuing Steve from fights he couldn't win. They both grew up relatively poor and spent their adolescence and young adulthood in the Great Depression, which certainly left its mark. He hated waste, always needing to mend and re-use and scrounge rather than buy new, and put up with a terrible tenement apartment first with his family and later on with Steve just to save up for things like medicine and the occasional trip to Coney Island. It helped teach him patience. Above all, he was loyal to a fault and felt things deeply, from wonder to anger to love.

Then Bucky was drafted, sent to training, and then into World War 2. Sergeant Barnes was a different person than the Bucky from Brooklyn. He was more guarded and less friendly, because everyone in wartime was more guarded and less friendly, but his confidence and patience translated into innate leadership skills and extra training as a designated marksman, which was its own kind of torment as it turned him into a dedicated killer. After his capture at Azzano and torture at Kreischberg, he grew even more withdrawn, using his former cocky, sarcastic demeanor as a shield against anyone seeing just how off he felt. He still felt everything deeply, and after the experiments he was feeling wrong.

He still had Steve-- albeit a Steve who didn't seem to need him like he used to-- and he was still steadfastly loyal even to this new Steve, turning down an honorable medical discharge in order to watch his friend's back. His over-protective streak grew from just Steve to include the entirety of the Howling Commandos, as Steve's second in command and the sharpshooter watching above them all.

Then Bucky fell from the train and was captured by Hydra yet again. The Winter Soldier, also called the Asset, came from what they did to him, and it was again a different person. Implacable, ruthless, calculating, endlessly patient, highly skilled... and literally stripped of the ability to choose beyond the parameters of the mission. The Soldier no longer thought of himself as a person, just a pair of hands attached to triggers, knives, and a set of orders. If left out of cryo too long, or left too long between personality wipes, the Soldier was susceptible to flashes of memory, spurts of defiance, and moments of compassion, but even those were severely punished. It learned how to anticipate the moods of handlers and avoid punishment as much as possible, but still never entirely believed the propoganda about how what HYDRA was doing was right. The Soldier was just too afraid, confused, and alone to ever do much about it-- and didn’t remember anything else.

CRAU developments:
Over the year and a half spent in Beacon, a fourth person in the line of Bucky Barnes emerged. Soldat not only took a name for themselves, they stopped referring to themselves as "it" (hence the "they" rather than "he"; it's a personhood issue rather than an actual issue of being genderfluid), and they learned how to value themselves at least a little-- even if they don't quite consider themselves a person yet. Through flashbacks, trauma, and Beacon events, Soldat's brain has broken off into their own "self", the brash Sarge (a natural disassociation), the stoic Asset (the result of a lantern malfunction), and the always-hungry Bottomless Pit (part of a death toll, damage made to the lantern as part of the revival process). The four of them generally get along all right, after a lot of negotiation inside their shared head, and they are another reason Soldat continues to use "they" pronouns, for there really are several "selves" inside them. They often chatter at each other and occasionally Sarge or the Asset will take over their shared body, generally with permission from the others.

They have learned how to work through grief for the first time, through the loss of their first family (Aziraphale and Crowley, who took them in when they first arrived in Beacon) and then their second family (Javert and Sora, who lived in the house they rebuilt together with Misty), and through returned memories of the loss in their own past. They learned to structure their own time, rather than look for orders from others, and take initiative when there was no one else to do so-- Soldat no longer has handlers of any kind. They have filled in some of the gaps in their own memory, though nowhere near all of them, so they can admit they used to be a person, with family and a life. They've even started dealing with the mess of their constant fear, learning that they're allowed to want good things, and accept them when given, though asking is still hard. They've adopted people as "theirs" and found a comfortable place for themselves in a difficult world, and though they still have a whole lot of phobias and neuroses, they could be on their way to being a happy person-- if only they could make that step to considering themselves a person.

Key themes: Recovery from trauma, personal agency, and loyalty and how that can be supported or subverted.

Main Motivation: Protection. Soldat uses their skills to protect rather than kill, these days, and they have always had an over-protective streak in general. They are a great big mother-hen, sometimes.

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 Soldat's metabolism to the point where they heal from damage in 1/3 to 1/4 the time of an unenhanced human. They have increased strength, speed, and stamina, and excellent body memory. Their actual memory has improved to the point of being nearly edetic-- when not being wiped, of course-- and they have enhanced senses of sight and hearing and scent. Also, they can no longer get drunk or be affected by normal dosages of drugs. As much as Soldat enjoys cigarettes and coffee, there's no hit from nicotine or caffeine anymore.
* 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, and a lot of trial-and-error scrounging for food in Europe's forests. 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. They have crazy-high pain tolerance, too, and can do basic maintenance on the mechanical arm.
* Pre-War skills: Some simple mechanics, for fixing up old-timey machinery, and mending. Bucky spent time both working in construction and on the docks, so is at least passingly familiar with building things and ships.
* Beacon Skills: In Beacon, Soldat learned a lot of useful new things. They've gotten very good at cooking, particularly in large batches for a big group of people and making scarce ingredients last as long as possible. They are adept at repairing and remaking clothing, for oddly-sized bodies and for perfect tailoring, and expanded their abilities to repair machinery to more modern equipment and also radios. They can also make a wide variety of origami animals.

Item: A high-tech folding tablet loaded with music, text file notes, and some photos, from Beacon. It can no longer access the Beacon network or any of the archived public messages, but the personal inbox messages are still cached for reading over should they want to.

Sample:
A thread from Soldat's previous game

Notes:
Soldat also comes in with an old World War 2 lantern, worn on a strap on the shoulder woven with wire so it can't be easily broken, with welded metal shutters that can fold closed to both protect the light beneath and to keep that light hidden when necessary. This lantern is where their life force is housed. If the glass beneath the shutters is damaged, Soldat will take damage, whether it be psychological (i.e. mania, depression), physiological (i.e. body horror transformation, loss of physical equilibrium), or meta (i.e. mental time jumps, AU changes, or time distortion) until the lantern can repair itself over time or be repaired by someone else. If the lantern is destroyed, Soldat will die and need to be revived just as if their body died. They can, of course, still be killed through damage to their body. This is just an additional weakness to compensate for.