jack (
craterwave) wrote2016-10-21 03:52 pm
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app
Name: Javid
DW username:
shacklebones
E-Mail: 18morehours [at] gmail [dot] com
IM: shacklebones
Plurk:
erlking
Other Characters: Amethyst (
brainmeme), River Tam (
brainleak)
Character Name: Jack
Series: Mass Effect
Timeline: After the suicide mission
Canon Resource Link: wiki
Character History:
Abilities/Special Powers:
DW username:
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E-Mail: 18morehours [at] gmail [dot] com
IM: shacklebones
Plurk:
Other Characters: Amethyst (
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Character Name: Jack
Series: Mass Effect
Timeline: After the suicide mission
Canon Resource Link: wiki
Character History:
*cw: child abuse and allusions to child and adult sexual assault
Jack had a name once. A name other than Jack, the name she adopted for herself after the name her mother gave her was stripped for her, and realer than Jacqueline Nought, the name she uses whenever she needs to pretend she has a legal identity. She had a name. She had a mother who loved her. A mother who cried when the Cerberus-aligned doctor told her that element zero exposure had left her four-year-old overcome by malignant tumors, so many tumors the body was too gruesome to show her.
Really, she was stolen for her biotic potential. Biotics were still relatively new to the human race, and Cerberus wanted to know the potential for the growth of humanity through the use of biotics. Jack's level of biotic potential was recorded as higher than any human ever before, and that made her valuable to Cerberus, a human supremacist organization. She wasn't the first child taken, but she was the most prized one, and she was sequestered away in a special facility called Teltin on a planet called Pragia, where Cerberus could experiment to find ways to further her powers. Her name was stripped from her and she was dubbed Subject Zero, and her life soon became hell.
Cerberus found a correlation between pain and suffering and biotic ability, as well as hundreds of different tests that they would first make sure weren't fatal by testing them on other biotic children. They didn't want to kill off their prized Subject Zero, so they used the other children as trial runs first. The other children were disposable, even pitted against Subject Zero in fights to the death. Subject Zero didn't want to hurt the other kids at first, but she was hurt for not fighting, and when she killed her opponent her body was pumped full of narcotics. The Pavlovian training gave Jack a lifelong love of killing, always feeling a high afterwards.
In Jack's child mind, she thought the scientists, the guards, and even the other children all hated her. She was placed in a special room at the center of Teltin with a one-way mirror, where the other kids could not see her but she could only scream at them to try to get them to even look at her for hours and hours, pounding on the soundproofed glass. Lacking possessions, she'd developed a love for her sparse furnishing, taking to her table and curling up under it to cry. Jack was a little girl given no information for why she was tortured and why the only time she ever felt good was when killing other children. She was confused and scared.
One day, the power suddenly went out and her cell opened. The other kids had started a riot and were fighting back against the scientists and guards, but paranoid, scared little Jack only thought that all of them were trying to kill her. She murdered everyone in her way and found her way to a shuttle and haphazardly flew it in a random direction off the planet. Eventually, she was found by a passing ship, but they were a group of outlaws. They abused her and sold her off to batarian slavers. She likely soon killed her way to freedom and lived homeless and alone, finding her way into the dark underbellies of various planets.
Jack, naming herself after "nothing", ran with outlaws and criminals, both as a way to survive and as a way to find that killing high she'd grown addicted to. For a while, she ran with a gang, becoming the pet of the leader and her boyfriend, working together to cheat, scam, and steal. One day, they cheated her out of her share and, feeling betrayed and assuming they were going to kill her, she killed them. At some point, she joined a cult as a way to find meaning in the universe, but they only attempted to abuse her biotic power and she killed every last member in revenge. For a while, she was a pirate, running a group that had a run-in with the turians, who fought back and killed most of her fellow crewmates. In turn, Jack commandeered a turian space station and crashed it into a hanar moon.
Through the years, Jack eventually fell into operations with a criminal named Murtock. At this point Jack's approach to sex was extremely casual, and they were sex partners in crime. Jack never brought feelings into the mix when it came to sex, but Murtock, unfortunately, did. During one of their raids to steal weapons, things went south, and the two were separated. Murtock had the prize, and Jack was held back and might have died. Rather than abandon her with the booty, Murtock went back for her to help and got killed saving her. She managed to fight her way back to their shuttle and run without him.
During her flight away, a recording started to play in the shuttle. It was set to play if Murtock didn't check in, in case he died. In it, he confessed his love for her, and fantasized about what could have been if they could only have stayed a couple. Jack wasn't in love, but the recording was heartwrenching, knowing that Murtock had died because he loved her.
Throughout the years, Jack consistently came back to attack Cerberus facilities and operatives, exacting revenge for her mistreatment and abuse as a child. During one of her raids of a Cerberus facility, she ran into unarmed student trainees. They explained to her that they were taken in by Cerberus, having lost their parents at young ages. She asserted that Cerberus probably killed their folks themselves, and told them to make a choice: to discard Cerberus or just wait until Cerberus discards them. A few of the students decided to go with her.
During their flight, Jack ran into Blue Suns mercenaries and more Cerberus agents. Fighting broke out, and Jack was prepared to just kill everyone and run, but a krogan merc hit her over the head from behind, making her pass out. She was taken into Blue Suns custody, which might have been preferable at least to being sent back to Cerberus.
She was shipped off to the private Blue Suns prison ship Purgatory, a prison-slash-extortion racket. There, the most dangerous prisoners in the galaxy were abused by the guards, the vast majority of the ship being men. Jack, the only woman we see on the ship, is instantly singled out, and a group of both guards and prisoners jumped her, and, though she fought back, she could only kill two.
Once Jack recovered, she hunted down every single one of her attackers and mutilated them with her biotic powers. Purgatory, however, was extremely high security, and, though she managed to kill them, she was subdued. Seeing no better solution, the warden had Jack cryogenically frozen to keep her harmlessly separated from the other prisoners.
The Illusive Man, leader of Cerberus, learned that Jack was on Purgatory, and realized this meant that he could buy her, a service offered by the prison ship. By this time, Cerberus was pumping most of its resources into bringing Shepard back to life, so he sat on this information until Shepard came back and could convince Jack to work with her. Jack's information was forwarded to Shepard as someone she could recruit in the fight against the Reapers. The warden, however, was given an even better offer by the Reaper-controlled Collectors for Shepard, so he attempted to imprison the commander on her visit to the ship to recover Jack. Shepard fought back.
In the fighting, Shepard got Jack out of cold storage, and Jack instantly went on a rampage, destroying everything and everyone in her path. Hundreds were killed on the prison ship as portions of the Purgatory lost life support. Eventually, Jack made her way to the docking bay, wanting to steal whatever ship was docked and escape. However, she saw the Cerberus insignia on the side of the Normandy, and flew into a rage. Shepard encountered her here. Shepard tried to calm her down, and, surprisingly, it worked, her kindness surprising Jack.
"Shit, you sound like a pussy," Jack muttered, before demanding that she be given full access to Cerberus databases should she go with the commander. Shepard agreed, to Cerberus operative and teammate Miranda's dismay. The Normandy was Jack's only way out of the destroyed prison ship, so the deal was upheld. Jack instantly hid away in the darkest, smallest corner of the ship, in the underbelly of the engine, where she could hide herself away and look through any Cerberus files she could find on herself or what was done to her.
As Shepard launched missions to look into what the Collectors were doing to human colonies, Jack tagged along, developing a sort of shaky trust in Shepard and her teammates (minus Miranda) to have her back. Occasionally, she would be visited in her hidey-hole on the ship, mostly by Commander Shepard and Yeoman-slash-psychologist Kelly Chambers. Shepard expressed genuine interest in getting to know her, which Jack assumed meant she wanted something out of her. But the other shoe never dropped.
Eventually, she found the name and location of the Teltin facility that housed her during her childhood on Pragia, and she demanded that Shepard make a detour there.
"I want to go to the center of the place, my cell. I want to deploy a big fucking bomb. And I want to watch it from orbit when it goes."
Shepard agreed, and eventually they made their way to Teltin. As they traveled through the facility, Jack discovered there was more to her childhood perceptions of what the place was like, and she wasn't the only one being tortured in that facility. In her cell, she ran into another survivor of Teltin, Aresh, one of the subjects. He also found his way back to Teltin, trying to find a reason behind his horrible torture as a child. He took up living quarters in Zero's room, and set about trying to rebuild Teltin, PTSD convincing him that there was a good reason for how he was treated. He wanted to bring the testing back.
Jack, furious, resolved that Aresh needed to die. Shepard talked her down, reasoning that he'd never be able to restart the facility with just himself and a few mercs he hired. She convinced Jack it wasn't worth killing him, and Jack relented, letting Aresh go. They deployed the bomb and left Pragia.
Jack grew attached and loyal to Shepard, and followed her orders henceforth, playing a huge part in the suicide mission into the Collector base. Everyone survived thanks to Shepard's guidance, and Shepard destroyed the Collector base in defiance of the Illusive Man.
Abilities/Special Powers:
Jack is a powerful, destructive biotic, which means she uses element zero inherent in her body to alter the mass content of space-time by subjecting it to an electrical current via dark energy, creating mass effect fields. This is a really complicated way to explain that she has space magic.Third-Person Sample:
When using her biotics, she can most especially remove the gravity of something or someone, fling them around, or send a shockwave in a far-reaching straight line to knock things and people into the air. She can also erect a biotic barrier and create tearing mass effect fields, or even charge bullets with these fields.
Thick, thick trees litter her view in every direction. Trees as thick as those on Pragia, where the rain always falls and the brush grows invasive if you let it. The perfect place to hide something you don't want anyone to find. It's setting off alarm bells in her head, and her mind races as she panics, stumbling in random directions. She's back, she's back, she's back, Shepard was done with her so she dumped her in the worst place possible, was she really secretly so cruel? Did she hide her true intentions throughout these months? Of course. Of fucking course. Of course Shepard eventually betrayed her. Everyone always does. Jack was a fucking idiot to think this could be any different. She's only surprised Shepard didn't sell her out to the highest bidder, but she must have really wanted her to squirm, huh?First-Person Sample:
Well, not today. She'll never squirm for someone else. She's stronger than that now. She growls through her gritted teeth, glowing blue and sending a cascading shockwave of mass effect pulses in a path directly through the forest. Bark splinters and the tall trees topple, knocking more down in their path. She storms through the makeshift road of split trunks. Fuck. Fuck! Her fist glows blue and she punches a hole through thick wood. Eventually, she finds that the trees just... end.
That's not right. The trees don't end on Pragia. The vegetation stretches out forever. But that's not the weirdest thing. Some kind of backwoods mansion towers in the near distance, a real vintage one. Like something she's only vaguely heard of or might have seen pictures of in passing, she doesn't remember where. This place must be extremely old. Or maybe she's actually on Earth, somehow. Huh. She's actually never been. But there are forests like this on Earth. Makes more sense than being dropped on Pragia, at least. But if she forgave Shepard just for that, she'd be setting the bar real fucking low.
Jack glowers at the building, but, since it seems to be the only piece of civilization within sight, she heads for it. Whoever it is that lives there better have answers for her. Namely, where she can find a ship, and where she can find Shepard to exact payback.
Hey. [A woman with a shaved head, covered toe to tip in tattoos squats into view of the camera. She's actually wearing a shirt today, graciously.] Read your brochure. Got some feedback. If your intended audience doesn't have a clue what a fucking microwave does, just give 'em up as a lost cause. That's just sad.
Models here are real vintage, though. The whole place is. I see what you're going for, and, I gotta say, I really hate it. Great job, whoever, on making the least appealing, most backwoods shack of a mansion I've ever seen. Not that I make a habit of seeking out a ton of mansions. Me and mansion-owners? Tend not to run in the same circles, if that ain't obvious.
Tell me someone's actually not lying back and taking it from Wonderland, [she says the name with appropriate disdain and mocking,] and there are actually people trying to break out. I don't think I can take another second of this place. I'm not the biggest fan of false security. There's always another shoe dropping.
Jack out.