[ooc] // [TLV APPLICATION]
User Name/Nick: Emmy
User LJ: none I use much :/
AIM/IM: lackofsatin
E-mail: lackofsatin at gmail
Other Characters: Elle Bishop, Tommy Beresford, Edward d'Eath
Character Name: NOBODY KNOWS. SHE IS SHROUDED IN MYSTERY. She goes by Parker.
Series: Leverage
Age: The show's head writer has repeatedly said mid-20's. Since it's really hard to tell in canon, I'll go with that.
From When?: 1x12 "The First David Job." Let's say things didn't go so well when she jumped off a bridge onto a speeding truck being pursued by a car full of antagonistic flunkies.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Though Parker is something of a modern Robin Hood, she's basically only a goodguy by virtue of the fact that she's not as bad as the villains. She's got some things to work through before she's genuinely a goodguy.
Item: n/a
Abilities/Powers: Nothing superhuman. However, she's frequently said to be the World's Greatest Thief, so bottom line, she can steal your valuables.
Physically, she's strong, fast, agile, and mind-bogglingly stealthy. She can disappear from rooms and hallways that seemingly have no hiding places or exits, and appear somewhere else. She can also cartwheel really quickly through a room of crazy spinning lasers like some kind of super spectacular Olympic gymnast. She can climb, jump, rappel, and all that stuff like nobody's business, and is an expert at crawling through tight spaces. She's a very skilled pickpocket. She's decent in a fight, thanks to being incredibly fast and surprisingly strong (strong enough to crush a beer bottle with her bare hands). She's also decent with a gun.
She's very knowledgeable when it comes to her particular area of interest. She shows an encyclopedic knowledge of security systems, including cameras, heat and motion sensors, vibration detectors, keypands/scanners, safes, locks, vaults, etc. etc, and is adept at foiling or cracking them. She knows how to design and build her own climbing/rappelling rigs. As an art thief, she seems to have a sense for the authenticity and value of certain items, if not always what they actually are (she seems to be more familiar with diamonds than anything else). She's got some knowledge of electronics, and at various points has displayed the following skills:
- looping security cameras
- knowing which wire to cut to stop an alarm system going off
- dealing with explosive devices (she sets them up, knows how to trick a motion-sensitive one, and possibly builds her own)
- rewiring an elevator to make the system think there's a fire and go into automatic emergency procedure
- using a "cheat code" to start a car with an advanced security system
She can also pull off a character in a con as long as it's an off-putting or bossy character and she has someone else to rely on (she's always secondary to Nate, Hardison, or Eliot, or has Sophie or Tara telling her step-by-step what to do over comms).
In the random category: Parker can do advanced algebra in her head, draw beautifully rendered sketches, and knows enough about cars to get by.
Personality: Parker's crazy. That's the first thing you hear about her and the first impression you get of her. She's very obviously an adrenaline junkie: reckless, impatient, impulsive, jumps off of skyscrapers for fun and doesn't wait for things like countdowns. She does insane neck-breaking things just for the rush. If she had her way, life would happen at supersonic speed. She only takes her time when she's on a job, because the job means everything to her. There's a big part of her that's a thief solely because it's fun. And then there's a part of her that's a thief because she has nothing else.
Her job has completely consumed her life. She spends all her leisure time casing out banks she may never rob and thinking up ways to beat security systems she may never encounter. When it comes to stealing, she's organized and thorough. An abusive foster father taught her at a very young age that you get things by taking them. It's implied that Archie, the man who trained her to be a burglar, had her living in a warehouse because, as much as he cared for her, he couldn't treat her "like a real daughter" because she wouldn't have fit in with his regular family. This cemented in her mind that she's somehow different or other, not part of the "real world." And that gaping chasm between Parker and normality has influenced her in a lot of ways.
First, she still lives in a warehouse. Aside from her bed and a bookshelf of cereal, everything she owns is related to her job. She's stuck in what Archie taught her.
Second, she's always worked alone. She doesn't usually trust people enough to get close to them, and even after she's joined Nate's crew and has worked with them for years, she still keeps basic information secret from them. She's also got issues with physical contact, and will become uncomfortable if someone gets too close and openly violent if someone she doesn't like touches her. That we've seen, one guy ended up with a broken hand after touching her leg and another got himself stabbed by a fork when he invaded her personal space. If physical contact is a harmless gesture on the part of, say, a grateful client, Parker's instinct is to freeze up until it's over. As she gets closer with Eliot and Hardison, she becomes comfortable with fistbumping/high-fiving them, casual pats on the back or shoulder, and being in close proximity with them. But when she gets emotionally intimate with Hardison, she keeps her physical distance. This may be a result of abuse as a child; when the gang is watching a video of an orphan interacting with his kindly new foster parents, Parker points out, "When [the foster mom] goes to touch him, he flinches. He's expecting her to..." The implication being that Parker knows what it's like to get hit so often you start flinching at every touch.
On the other hand, when Parker gets attached to someone, she gets very attached. When Sophie goes off to Europe for a few months, Parker keeps calling her for advice, and even openly admits to missing her. She really seems to have difficulty pinpointing what she's supposed to do and what the group dynamic is supposed to be with Sophie gone. When she gets back, Parker actually hugs her.
Third, Parker's got plenty of social problems. Though she obviously has an intuitive grasp of other people's emotions, handling her own or those directly related to her is difficult. For instance, Nate and Sophie have a messy and complicated relationship, but Parker seems to easily get what's going on between them. But whenever Hardison wants to talk about their own relationship, Parker purposefully misinterprets what he's saying and starts talking about the job or somebody else's relationship instead. And when she's finally forced to face the fact that she's falling for him? She's totally incapable of spitting it out, and instead admits to having "weird feelings for pretzels." She doesn't know how to handle the emotions, and thus pretends that they don't exist at all. And she reacts similarly to Agent McSweeten's crush on her FBI alter-ego, Agent Hagen. She likes spending time with him, ultimate nice guy that he is, but doesn't quite know how to handle somebody flirting with her, so she just pretends that he isn't. But when another girl flirts with Hardison, Parker, all the while telling herself nothing's going on and she's not jealous, is openly hostile towards the girl, and winds up breaking a beer bottle with her bare hands over it.
She isn't cold or aloof, but she rarely shows anything more than mild emotion. She's clearly got emotions, but they don't show much, and she doesn't talk about them. There are a few occasions where strong grief, usually related to her childhood, or extreme exuberance, usually related to stealing something awesome, breaks through.
Basic social interaction isn't easy for her, and she has trouble putting certain things in a social context. In one episode it's even remarked that the one thing Parker is truly terrified of is regular human interaction. When forced to talk to people, she often comes across is stilted, pushy, or just plain weird. She has difficulty lying on the spot, and needs coaching to answer very simple questions like, "Where are you from?" and, "Do you have any hobbies?" She can also be painfully blunt; when a bridesmaid asks her if her dress makes her look fat, Parker's response is that yes, of course it does, that's why she had to let it out. She really does try, but her attempts to be comforting and friendly to normal people inevitably make them feel worse, because she has no idea what's the socially acceptable thing to do when somebody's upset.
Whether she truly has any mental conditions is left up for debate, but many of Parker's issues could be chalked up to Asperger's Syndrome (which the head writer claims she has, but it's never been mentioned on the show so it's not what you'd call official canon). I'm not keen on sticking her with a label, but since she's got most of the signs of it, it's probably worth discussing. She doesn't get non-verbal cues; in one episode, Nate and Tara have to carefully explain how a fake psychic cold-read her by reading her facial expressions and body language. She's got narrow interests that she excels in: namely theft. I can't stress enough how little she cares about anything that isn't crime-related. Her knowledge outside of crime is really, really limited. And like with that bridesmaid, she's been known to lack social empathy.
Parker also has literal-mindedness that she occasionally takes a step further into being downright gullible and slow on the uptake. Anything outside of crime is beyond her scope of knowledge, so somebody she trusted could probably get her to believe the sun went around the Earth if they wanted to. In one episode, Eliot convinces her that he's on a secret government council that's responsible for ordering all the US's wars, he's been to the fake moon landing set (which the government kept so they can repaint it red for a fake Mars mission), the Loch Ness Monster myth is the result of secret submarine testing, and Area 51 is real. On the flip side, when it comes to the world of crime, Parker's pretty savvy, tends to expect a double-cross and is totally expecting people to try and kill her... to the point where she doesn't take it all personally. She does come off as slow when metaphors get involved, though. For instance, when Nate says he's going to run a Fiddle Game, it takes Parker a solid twenty-four hours to realize that the fiddle is a metaphor for Eliot. When her literalness comes into play like this, it can really mess with her. For instance, when the team fakes Sophie's death, Parker is really disturbed by seeing Sophie in a coffin, and can't stop staring at her and occasionally poking at her afterwards because "it's like [she's] haunting [them]." And after Tara's conned the crew into thinking she's a lawyer, Parker's response upon finding out that she's a grifter is, "I bet you're not even a real lawyer!" She's not what you'd call dumb, though, considering that there are several occasions when she randomly blurts out a key insight or a great idea that ultimately leads to the gang's success. Her mind just doesn't work in quite the same way as everybody else's.
There are occasions where she does seem to cross the line from unempathetic to downright sociopathic. She blew up her foster parents' house as a kid, and may have killed them. Whether she did or not, she showed zero remorse. At one point, Sophie's coaching Parker in acting and tells her to think about something sad, "like when your father died," and Parker bursts out laughing. When Eliot talks about "taking care" of the cops guarding them, Parker immediately decides he's going to kill them, and tells him not to - not because it's wrong but because he'll "interfere with [her] getaway!"
In general, Parker seems intrigued by Eliot, who's the muscle of the group, and at times seems downright turned on when Eliot's beating someone up. She seems to enjoy the fact that Nate gets progressively creepier as he tries to deal with his alcoholism, and the loving description she gives of how one would die in an air duct (among other long descriptions of gruesome things) hints at quite the morbid streak. She also gets a huge kick out of tazering people, and even tazers a cop on one occasion. Repeatedly. For no good reason. And then there's blowing stuff up, which she also seems to love. The true extent of Parker's affinity for violence comes out when she thinks Tara's betrayed the group, and unhesitatingly flips her over the side of the building, hanging on long enough to creepily grin like she's imagining Tara splatting on the pavement and getting a whole lot of pleasure out of that mental image. Parker's no doubt well aware that she's easily capable of violence (and killing, though it's debatable whether we've actually seen her kill anybody), and thus probably feels a certain level of affinity for and comfort with Eliot, as he's the only other physically dangerous member of the gang. As the head writer says, "Parker and Eliot, as a team, are a lot more dangerous than the rest of the team. They actually modify their behavior when they're with other people." And when it comes down to it, Parker likes watching bad people suffer.
She does show the occasional aversion to violence. The reason for this is probably twofold: First, violent criminals tend to be sentenced harsher than non-violent criminals, so she's probably been taught to avoid violence where possible. And second, she doesn't like seeing innocent people hurt. This is especially true of children, as Parker probably sees herself and/or her brother in them, and either wants to protect them from the shitty upbringing she had or protect them to somehow make up for, as she sees it, causing her brother's death. She's also very protective of Maggie, because she genuinely likes Maggie and thinks honest people are too naive to do well in a corrupt world. She'll occasionally get to know and feel sorry for other normal people, but for the most part, non-Nate's-crew people only register as 'badguys,' 'victims,' or 'part of the scenery.' Though she might not care about the people she doesn't know, she wouldn't ever hurt them unless they willfully got in her way (like a cop who's chasing her). And generally speaking, her fight-or-flight reflex is weighted towards flight.
Parker also has a few idiosyncrasies that are generally presented as quirky and comedic. Number one, she's really greedy. Parker loves money. In a creepy way where she likes to hug and stroke cash. All the money she makes, she keeps in a Swiss bank account, only spending as much as she has to. She gets upset and confused when Nate gives money away (though she starts to grow out of that as the show goes on), and is off-the-charts offended and pissed off when somebody welshes on a payment. She's also surprisingly superstitious. She totally believes in things like ghosts, vampires, and Superman, and will occasionally say that Nate has x, y, or z superpower or they need ghosts for a con. Furthermore, she's got a few compulsions: all her tools and equipment are arranged on tables and shelves, in rows, each item equidistant from the next item, and she finds it bizarre that someone would mix black pens and blue pens together in the same cup. And finally, she has a habit of sniffing things, and sometimes people. In one episode, it's explained that, to the trained nose, smells can give away clues to the age, origin, and authenticity of certain artifacts, so Parker may have picked that fact up and failed to put it into any kind of context. Or she just might like smelling stuff, it's hard to tell.
In spite of all this, Parker clearly wants to fit in. She knows there's something wrong with her, so she tends to take her cues from other people, and will smile and nod and agree whether she knows what's going on or not. This can lead to confusion when she has absolutely no idea what the expected response is, like when Hardison and Eliot are talking about how hot Tara is, and Parker chimes in with, "Hot!" and then has no clue why everyone's staring at her (whether Parker is actually bisexual or not is open to interpretation). She seems very concerned about passing for normal to real normal people, and when somebody compliments her on a performance she's quite proud of herself.
And in spite of all her issues and traumatic childhood, Parker's usually pretty upbeat, and does not spend her time wallowing in misery. Circling back up to the first paragraph, she enjoys what she does, and she enjoys being awesome at it. She knows she's the best thief in the world, or close enough. And she can be a bit of a show-off about it. She could just jump down from air ducts, or step carefully over laser beams, but she always has to do some fancy gymnastic move instead. She doesn't like when people notice things that she wouldn't, can do thief-related things she can't, or show her up in any way, and seems to feel that she needs to prove her worth to Nate. She can be very competitive. This probably comes from her outsider mentality making her feel like she needs to work extra hard to be an effective part of a team.
Aside from all that, she's a tomboy. She doesn't take too many pains with her appearance, rarely bothering with makeup or doing anything with her hair. Her clothes are always comfortable and casual. A lot of the time she wears comfy blacks, but when she's not dressed for business she's usually in flannel, jeans, and converse. This is probably because she doesn't need to be pretty to steal things, and therefore her appearance is unimportant to her, as opposed to range of motion and inconspicuousness, which are very important to her. She also has fairly terrible eating habits (pizza, hamburgers, cereal, more cereal, cereal with soda, and fortune cookies are apparently her favorites), but considering how astoundingly fit she is, this seems to have no effect on her.
Path to Redemption: Parker needs to develop a strong enough sense of morality and a stable enough mindset that she won't go off the rails without somebody to keep her in line. This is complicated by the fact that in her crapsack world, she's technically already a goodguy. So, a warden would have two options:
1) They could either help her expand her skillset, and find more socially acceptable ways for her to put her talents to use. Or
2) They could help her develop a strong moral code so she could keep doing what she does, but for the right reasons and with a healthier frame of mind. At the end of season one, she still sees working for Nate as a temporary gig, and her being 'one of the goodguys' is pretty dependent on Nate and the crew being around, so a warden would have to make sure that if they went this way, she'd be using her thief skills to help people (with or without Nate and the rest of the crew), not plain old stealing.
Whichever way they decided to go, they'd have to start by finding ways to help her work out her various issues, find productive ways for her to deal with obstacles and emotional upsets without dangling anybody off a rooftop, and ground her in the real world. They'd need patience and persistence, since simply repeatedly telling Parker she's got problems won't get anybody anywhere. She's already got the groundwork for right v. wrong, and with the right guidance that could be reinforced to great effect.
History: The show is deliberately vague about Parker's past, and what we see of it are a bunch of isolated incidents with little relation each other. What we do know is that she's an orphan. She had a brother (or possibly foster brother) who died when he was riding his bike and got hit by a car. Since she taught him to ride his bike, Parker blames herself for his death. She may have lived in Camden, IL by way of Kansas City for a while, where she once watched a man in a horse costume beat a clown to death. To get over her fear of the dark, she got some other kids to bury her alive. Her foster father was hideously abusive, and after he stole her favorite stuffed bunny she blew his house up. She may have killed him and/or her foster mother. She drove getaway cars before branching into stealing cars, which landed her six months in juvie. When she got out, she turned to pickpocketing and was discovered by Archie Leech, the world's most infamous cat burglar. He taught her how to be a thief.
The details of her late teens and early twenties are unknown. When the show picks up, she's wanted in nine countries, is about as infamous as an art thief can get, and has never been caught.
This brought her to the attention of Mr. Dubenich, head of Bering Aerospace, who hired her to steal back airplane designs that had been stolen by Pierson Aviation, a rival company. He also hired hitter Eliot Spencer and hacker Alec Hardison, and convinced ex-insurance investigator Nate Ford to run the crew. As it turned out, the airplane designs actually belonged to Pierson, not Dubenich. To cover it all up, Dubenich tried to kill the crew, and - much more offensively, in Parker's eyes - didn't pay them. So they teamed up with a grifter named Sophie Devereaux and tore Bering Aerospace down around Dubenich's ears and had him shipped off to prison. With a multi-million dollar payday and no reason to ever see each other again, the crew planned to scatter. But they'd had a good time working with each other, they made a great team of elite super-criminals, and as long as they agreed to only go after corrupt marks, Nate would agree to keep leading them. So they reunited.
Eventually, Nate decided to get revenge on the company he used to work for, IYS Insurance. They'd refused Nate's insurance claim for his son's medical treatment, leading to the boy's death. Nate blamed the company's CEO, Ian Blackpool, personally. The team decided to sell him a fake of one of Michelangelo's maquettes of the David statue. When the statue was examined, it would be proven to be a fake, leading to Blackpool being sued for fraud by his own Board of Directors and losing his job and being thoroughly publicly humiliated. Unfortunately, there was a snag in the form of Nate's ex-wife, Maggie. She didn't know the role IYS had played in her son's death, and still worked as a consultant for Blackpool, verifying works of art before they were insured. Blackpool insisted that she verify the David maquette before he bought it. Fortunately, Blackpool already owned the other David maquette, all the team had to do was steal it. Parker pulled this off with ease, Maggie verified the "second" maquette as the real deal, and everything looked like it was coming up roses for Nate.
Enter Jim Sterling. He was an insurance investigator who had worked with Nate back in the good old days. He was well aware that the real second David had been stolen by the Vatican ten years ago, that Sophie had been responsible, and that her intent now was to get both Davids for herself. He set up a sting operation to capture Parker, Hardison, and Eliot. When Parker jumped onto the speeding IYS truck to switch the real David with a fake, Sterling planned to be in the truck waiting for her, with a car of his flunkies speeding up behind. Unfortunately, things went a little wrong and Parker ended up dead.
Sample Journal Entry: [There's a blonde girl staring at you. That's all. Just... staring....
After a few moments, she speaks as though reading off of cue cards.]
My name's Agent Hagan. [She flashes a badge.] FBI. I... am fresh outta Quantico. [She's starting to settle into it now, and sounds less stilted.] Yeah, I read a little about this place. I mean, I know, because I'm a warden, and somebody hired me. [Definitely less stilted now.] It's a prison, right? The security around here is really sub-par. You should look into some kind of laser grid system for after-hours, electronic locks with rotating vector combinations, maybe retinal scanners or at least some kind of I.D. tagging. And would some cameras be too much to ask for? Seriously? Getting around this place is like taking diamonds from the French National Bank.
[A pause, as she realizes an FBI agent wouldn't really know how easy it is to take diamonds from the French National Bank. A much more awkward pause ensues. She grimaces.]
...It's not well-guarded.
[What's she supposed to say now? She can't think of anything. Slight moment of panic. And the video switches off.]
Sample RP: This was Parker's favorite moment. The first few seconds. Standing on the roof of a skyscraper, staring down at the tiny white and red lights of the cars thirty stories below her feet, she waited for the signal. It was taking an awfully long time. She felt like she'd been up here for ages.
She glanced at her watch. It had been nineteen seconds.
Screw the signal, the rest of the team could catch up to her. Taking the lines firmly in hand, she turned around, felt her heels slip out into space as she rocked on the balls of her feet, and then jumped straight out from the edge with a shout of excitement. She liked this moment too. The wind was hitting her face hard, and she could feel her heart pounding in her ears.
Once she'd gotten down to the right floor, she slid to a halt and went to work cutting through the glass. That was the easy part. Well, getting to the safe was the easy part. Okay, no, breaking into the safe was the easy part. And maybe her favorite part, aside from the first few seconds and jumping off the roof. And this safe was a classic: Glenn-Reader 1945 model, cast iron, walls six inches thick. It had been a while since she'd done a '45. Gently stroking the handle, she flicked the knob a few times, smiling as she listened for the telltale click of the tumblers aligning. A few moments later, and she'd gotten what she'd come for.
"Meet me at the north staircase now!" Eliot's voice growled over comms. Parker stuffed the loot in a bag and dashed for the staircase. "You went too soon, Parker! Security's on to us!" Yep, Eliot definitely sounded mad. She skidded to a halt next to him, and they both froze at the sound of footsteps approaching.
She grinned. "Can I taser the guard?"
Special Notes:
User LJ: none I use much :/
AIM/IM: lackofsatin
E-mail: lackofsatin at gmail
Other Characters: Elle Bishop, Tommy Beresford, Edward d'Eath
Character Name: NOBODY KNOWS. SHE IS SHROUDED IN MYSTERY. She goes by Parker.
Series: Leverage
Age: The show's head writer has repeatedly said mid-20's. Since it's really hard to tell in canon, I'll go with that.
From When?: 1x12 "The First David Job." Let's say things didn't go so well when she jumped off a bridge onto a speeding truck being pursued by a car full of antagonistic flunkies.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Though Parker is something of a modern Robin Hood, she's basically only a goodguy by virtue of the fact that she's not as bad as the villains. She's got some things to work through before she's genuinely a goodguy.
Item: n/a
Abilities/Powers: Nothing superhuman. However, she's frequently said to be the World's Greatest Thief, so bottom line, she can steal your valuables.
Physically, she's strong, fast, agile, and mind-bogglingly stealthy. She can disappear from rooms and hallways that seemingly have no hiding places or exits, and appear somewhere else. She can also cartwheel really quickly through a room of crazy spinning lasers like some kind of super spectacular Olympic gymnast. She can climb, jump, rappel, and all that stuff like nobody's business, and is an expert at crawling through tight spaces. She's a very skilled pickpocket. She's decent in a fight, thanks to being incredibly fast and surprisingly strong (strong enough to crush a beer bottle with her bare hands). She's also decent with a gun.
She's very knowledgeable when it comes to her particular area of interest. She shows an encyclopedic knowledge of security systems, including cameras, heat and motion sensors, vibration detectors, keypands/scanners, safes, locks, vaults, etc. etc, and is adept at foiling or cracking them. She knows how to design and build her own climbing/rappelling rigs. As an art thief, she seems to have a sense for the authenticity and value of certain items, if not always what they actually are (she seems to be more familiar with diamonds than anything else). She's got some knowledge of electronics, and at various points has displayed the following skills:
- looping security cameras
- knowing which wire to cut to stop an alarm system going off
- dealing with explosive devices (she sets them up, knows how to trick a motion-sensitive one, and possibly builds her own)
- rewiring an elevator to make the system think there's a fire and go into automatic emergency procedure
- using a "cheat code" to start a car with an advanced security system
She can also pull off a character in a con as long as it's an off-putting or bossy character and she has someone else to rely on (she's always secondary to Nate, Hardison, or Eliot, or has Sophie or Tara telling her step-by-step what to do over comms).
In the random category: Parker can do advanced algebra in her head, draw beautifully rendered sketches, and knows enough about cars to get by.
Personality: Parker's crazy. That's the first thing you hear about her and the first impression you get of her. She's very obviously an adrenaline junkie: reckless, impatient, impulsive, jumps off of skyscrapers for fun and doesn't wait for things like countdowns. She does insane neck-breaking things just for the rush. If she had her way, life would happen at supersonic speed. She only takes her time when she's on a job, because the job means everything to her. There's a big part of her that's a thief solely because it's fun. And then there's a part of her that's a thief because she has nothing else.
Her job has completely consumed her life. She spends all her leisure time casing out banks she may never rob and thinking up ways to beat security systems she may never encounter. When it comes to stealing, she's organized and thorough. An abusive foster father taught her at a very young age that you get things by taking them. It's implied that Archie, the man who trained her to be a burglar, had her living in a warehouse because, as much as he cared for her, he couldn't treat her "like a real daughter" because she wouldn't have fit in with his regular family. This cemented in her mind that she's somehow different or other, not part of the "real world." And that gaping chasm between Parker and normality has influenced her in a lot of ways.
First, she still lives in a warehouse. Aside from her bed and a bookshelf of cereal, everything she owns is related to her job. She's stuck in what Archie taught her.
Second, she's always worked alone. She doesn't usually trust people enough to get close to them, and even after she's joined Nate's crew and has worked with them for years, she still keeps basic information secret from them. She's also got issues with physical contact, and will become uncomfortable if someone gets too close and openly violent if someone she doesn't like touches her. That we've seen, one guy ended up with a broken hand after touching her leg and another got himself stabbed by a fork when he invaded her personal space. If physical contact is a harmless gesture on the part of, say, a grateful client, Parker's instinct is to freeze up until it's over. As she gets closer with Eliot and Hardison, she becomes comfortable with fistbumping/high-fiving them, casual pats on the back or shoulder, and being in close proximity with them. But when she gets emotionally intimate with Hardison, she keeps her physical distance. This may be a result of abuse as a child; when the gang is watching a video of an orphan interacting with his kindly new foster parents, Parker points out, "When [the foster mom] goes to touch him, he flinches. He's expecting her to..." The implication being that Parker knows what it's like to get hit so often you start flinching at every touch.
On the other hand, when Parker gets attached to someone, she gets very attached. When Sophie goes off to Europe for a few months, Parker keeps calling her for advice, and even openly admits to missing her. She really seems to have difficulty pinpointing what she's supposed to do and what the group dynamic is supposed to be with Sophie gone. When she gets back, Parker actually hugs her.
Third, Parker's got plenty of social problems. Though she obviously has an intuitive grasp of other people's emotions, handling her own or those directly related to her is difficult. For instance, Nate and Sophie have a messy and complicated relationship, but Parker seems to easily get what's going on between them. But whenever Hardison wants to talk about their own relationship, Parker purposefully misinterprets what he's saying and starts talking about the job or somebody else's relationship instead. And when she's finally forced to face the fact that she's falling for him? She's totally incapable of spitting it out, and instead admits to having "weird feelings for pretzels." She doesn't know how to handle the emotions, and thus pretends that they don't exist at all. And she reacts similarly to Agent McSweeten's crush on her FBI alter-ego, Agent Hagen. She likes spending time with him, ultimate nice guy that he is, but doesn't quite know how to handle somebody flirting with her, so she just pretends that he isn't. But when another girl flirts with Hardison, Parker, all the while telling herself nothing's going on and she's not jealous, is openly hostile towards the girl, and winds up breaking a beer bottle with her bare hands over it.
She isn't cold or aloof, but she rarely shows anything more than mild emotion. She's clearly got emotions, but they don't show much, and she doesn't talk about them. There are a few occasions where strong grief, usually related to her childhood, or extreme exuberance, usually related to stealing something awesome, breaks through.
Basic social interaction isn't easy for her, and she has trouble putting certain things in a social context. In one episode it's even remarked that the one thing Parker is truly terrified of is regular human interaction. When forced to talk to people, she often comes across is stilted, pushy, or just plain weird. She has difficulty lying on the spot, and needs coaching to answer very simple questions like, "Where are you from?" and, "Do you have any hobbies?" She can also be painfully blunt; when a bridesmaid asks her if her dress makes her look fat, Parker's response is that yes, of course it does, that's why she had to let it out. She really does try, but her attempts to be comforting and friendly to normal people inevitably make them feel worse, because she has no idea what's the socially acceptable thing to do when somebody's upset.
Whether she truly has any mental conditions is left up for debate, but many of Parker's issues could be chalked up to Asperger's Syndrome (which the head writer claims she has, but it's never been mentioned on the show so it's not what you'd call official canon). I'm not keen on sticking her with a label, but since she's got most of the signs of it, it's probably worth discussing. She doesn't get non-verbal cues; in one episode, Nate and Tara have to carefully explain how a fake psychic cold-read her by reading her facial expressions and body language. She's got narrow interests that she excels in: namely theft. I can't stress enough how little she cares about anything that isn't crime-related. Her knowledge outside of crime is really, really limited. And like with that bridesmaid, she's been known to lack social empathy.
Parker also has literal-mindedness that she occasionally takes a step further into being downright gullible and slow on the uptake. Anything outside of crime is beyond her scope of knowledge, so somebody she trusted could probably get her to believe the sun went around the Earth if they wanted to. In one episode, Eliot convinces her that he's on a secret government council that's responsible for ordering all the US's wars, he's been to the fake moon landing set (which the government kept so they can repaint it red for a fake Mars mission), the Loch Ness Monster myth is the result of secret submarine testing, and Area 51 is real. On the flip side, when it comes to the world of crime, Parker's pretty savvy, tends to expect a double-cross and is totally expecting people to try and kill her... to the point where she doesn't take it all personally. She does come off as slow when metaphors get involved, though. For instance, when Nate says he's going to run a Fiddle Game, it takes Parker a solid twenty-four hours to realize that the fiddle is a metaphor for Eliot. When her literalness comes into play like this, it can really mess with her. For instance, when the team fakes Sophie's death, Parker is really disturbed by seeing Sophie in a coffin, and can't stop staring at her and occasionally poking at her afterwards because "it's like [she's] haunting [them]." And after Tara's conned the crew into thinking she's a lawyer, Parker's response upon finding out that she's a grifter is, "I bet you're not even a real lawyer!" She's not what you'd call dumb, though, considering that there are several occasions when she randomly blurts out a key insight or a great idea that ultimately leads to the gang's success. Her mind just doesn't work in quite the same way as everybody else's.
There are occasions where she does seem to cross the line from unempathetic to downright sociopathic. She blew up her foster parents' house as a kid, and may have killed them. Whether she did or not, she showed zero remorse. At one point, Sophie's coaching Parker in acting and tells her to think about something sad, "like when your father died," and Parker bursts out laughing. When Eliot talks about "taking care" of the cops guarding them, Parker immediately decides he's going to kill them, and tells him not to - not because it's wrong but because he'll "interfere with [her] getaway!"
In general, Parker seems intrigued by Eliot, who's the muscle of the group, and at times seems downright turned on when Eliot's beating someone up. She seems to enjoy the fact that Nate gets progressively creepier as he tries to deal with his alcoholism, and the loving description she gives of how one would die in an air duct (among other long descriptions of gruesome things) hints at quite the morbid streak. She also gets a huge kick out of tazering people, and even tazers a cop on one occasion. Repeatedly. For no good reason. And then there's blowing stuff up, which she also seems to love. The true extent of Parker's affinity for violence comes out when she thinks Tara's betrayed the group, and unhesitatingly flips her over the side of the building, hanging on long enough to creepily grin like she's imagining Tara splatting on the pavement and getting a whole lot of pleasure out of that mental image. Parker's no doubt well aware that she's easily capable of violence (and killing, though it's debatable whether we've actually seen her kill anybody), and thus probably feels a certain level of affinity for and comfort with Eliot, as he's the only other physically dangerous member of the gang. As the head writer says, "Parker and Eliot, as a team, are a lot more dangerous than the rest of the team. They actually modify their behavior when they're with other people." And when it comes down to it, Parker likes watching bad people suffer.
She does show the occasional aversion to violence. The reason for this is probably twofold: First, violent criminals tend to be sentenced harsher than non-violent criminals, so she's probably been taught to avoid violence where possible. And second, she doesn't like seeing innocent people hurt. This is especially true of children, as Parker probably sees herself and/or her brother in them, and either wants to protect them from the shitty upbringing she had or protect them to somehow make up for, as she sees it, causing her brother's death. She's also very protective of Maggie, because she genuinely likes Maggie and thinks honest people are too naive to do well in a corrupt world. She'll occasionally get to know and feel sorry for other normal people, but for the most part, non-Nate's-crew people only register as 'badguys,' 'victims,' or 'part of the scenery.' Though she might not care about the people she doesn't know, she wouldn't ever hurt them unless they willfully got in her way (like a cop who's chasing her). And generally speaking, her fight-or-flight reflex is weighted towards flight.
Parker also has a few idiosyncrasies that are generally presented as quirky and comedic. Number one, she's really greedy. Parker loves money. In a creepy way where she likes to hug and stroke cash. All the money she makes, she keeps in a Swiss bank account, only spending as much as she has to. She gets upset and confused when Nate gives money away (though she starts to grow out of that as the show goes on), and is off-the-charts offended and pissed off when somebody welshes on a payment. She's also surprisingly superstitious. She totally believes in things like ghosts, vampires, and Superman, and will occasionally say that Nate has x, y, or z superpower or they need ghosts for a con. Furthermore, she's got a few compulsions: all her tools and equipment are arranged on tables and shelves, in rows, each item equidistant from the next item, and she finds it bizarre that someone would mix black pens and blue pens together in the same cup. And finally, she has a habit of sniffing things, and sometimes people. In one episode, it's explained that, to the trained nose, smells can give away clues to the age, origin, and authenticity of certain artifacts, so Parker may have picked that fact up and failed to put it into any kind of context. Or she just might like smelling stuff, it's hard to tell.
In spite of all this, Parker clearly wants to fit in. She knows there's something wrong with her, so she tends to take her cues from other people, and will smile and nod and agree whether she knows what's going on or not. This can lead to confusion when she has absolutely no idea what the expected response is, like when Hardison and Eliot are talking about how hot Tara is, and Parker chimes in with, "Hot!" and then has no clue why everyone's staring at her (whether Parker is actually bisexual or not is open to interpretation). She seems very concerned about passing for normal to real normal people, and when somebody compliments her on a performance she's quite proud of herself.
And in spite of all her issues and traumatic childhood, Parker's usually pretty upbeat, and does not spend her time wallowing in misery. Circling back up to the first paragraph, she enjoys what she does, and she enjoys being awesome at it. She knows she's the best thief in the world, or close enough. And she can be a bit of a show-off about it. She could just jump down from air ducts, or step carefully over laser beams, but she always has to do some fancy gymnastic move instead. She doesn't like when people notice things that she wouldn't, can do thief-related things she can't, or show her up in any way, and seems to feel that she needs to prove her worth to Nate. She can be very competitive. This probably comes from her outsider mentality making her feel like she needs to work extra hard to be an effective part of a team.
Aside from all that, she's a tomboy. She doesn't take too many pains with her appearance, rarely bothering with makeup or doing anything with her hair. Her clothes are always comfortable and casual. A lot of the time she wears comfy blacks, but when she's not dressed for business she's usually in flannel, jeans, and converse. This is probably because she doesn't need to be pretty to steal things, and therefore her appearance is unimportant to her, as opposed to range of motion and inconspicuousness, which are very important to her. She also has fairly terrible eating habits (pizza, hamburgers, cereal, more cereal, cereal with soda, and fortune cookies are apparently her favorites), but considering how astoundingly fit she is, this seems to have no effect on her.
Path to Redemption: Parker needs to develop a strong enough sense of morality and a stable enough mindset that she won't go off the rails without somebody to keep her in line. This is complicated by the fact that in her crapsack world, she's technically already a goodguy. So, a warden would have two options:
1) They could either help her expand her skillset, and find more socially acceptable ways for her to put her talents to use. Or
2) They could help her develop a strong moral code so she could keep doing what she does, but for the right reasons and with a healthier frame of mind. At the end of season one, she still sees working for Nate as a temporary gig, and her being 'one of the goodguys' is pretty dependent on Nate and the crew being around, so a warden would have to make sure that if they went this way, she'd be using her thief skills to help people (with or without Nate and the rest of the crew), not plain old stealing.
Whichever way they decided to go, they'd have to start by finding ways to help her work out her various issues, find productive ways for her to deal with obstacles and emotional upsets without dangling anybody off a rooftop, and ground her in the real world. They'd need patience and persistence, since simply repeatedly telling Parker she's got problems won't get anybody anywhere. She's already got the groundwork for right v. wrong, and with the right guidance that could be reinforced to great effect.
History: The show is deliberately vague about Parker's past, and what we see of it are a bunch of isolated incidents with little relation each other. What we do know is that she's an orphan. She had a brother (or possibly foster brother) who died when he was riding his bike and got hit by a car. Since she taught him to ride his bike, Parker blames herself for his death. She may have lived in Camden, IL by way of Kansas City for a while, where she once watched a man in a horse costume beat a clown to death. To get over her fear of the dark, she got some other kids to bury her alive. Her foster father was hideously abusive, and after he stole her favorite stuffed bunny she blew his house up. She may have killed him and/or her foster mother. She drove getaway cars before branching into stealing cars, which landed her six months in juvie. When she got out, she turned to pickpocketing and was discovered by Archie Leech, the world's most infamous cat burglar. He taught her how to be a thief.
The details of her late teens and early twenties are unknown. When the show picks up, she's wanted in nine countries, is about as infamous as an art thief can get, and has never been caught.
This brought her to the attention of Mr. Dubenich, head of Bering Aerospace, who hired her to steal back airplane designs that had been stolen by Pierson Aviation, a rival company. He also hired hitter Eliot Spencer and hacker Alec Hardison, and convinced ex-insurance investigator Nate Ford to run the crew. As it turned out, the airplane designs actually belonged to Pierson, not Dubenich. To cover it all up, Dubenich tried to kill the crew, and - much more offensively, in Parker's eyes - didn't pay them. So they teamed up with a grifter named Sophie Devereaux and tore Bering Aerospace down around Dubenich's ears and had him shipped off to prison. With a multi-million dollar payday and no reason to ever see each other again, the crew planned to scatter. But they'd had a good time working with each other, they made a great team of elite super-criminals, and as long as they agreed to only go after corrupt marks, Nate would agree to keep leading them. So they reunited.
Eventually, Nate decided to get revenge on the company he used to work for, IYS Insurance. They'd refused Nate's insurance claim for his son's medical treatment, leading to the boy's death. Nate blamed the company's CEO, Ian Blackpool, personally. The team decided to sell him a fake of one of Michelangelo's maquettes of the David statue. When the statue was examined, it would be proven to be a fake, leading to Blackpool being sued for fraud by his own Board of Directors and losing his job and being thoroughly publicly humiliated. Unfortunately, there was a snag in the form of Nate's ex-wife, Maggie. She didn't know the role IYS had played in her son's death, and still worked as a consultant for Blackpool, verifying works of art before they were insured. Blackpool insisted that she verify the David maquette before he bought it. Fortunately, Blackpool already owned the other David maquette, all the team had to do was steal it. Parker pulled this off with ease, Maggie verified the "second" maquette as the real deal, and everything looked like it was coming up roses for Nate.
Enter Jim Sterling. He was an insurance investigator who had worked with Nate back in the good old days. He was well aware that the real second David had been stolen by the Vatican ten years ago, that Sophie had been responsible, and that her intent now was to get both Davids for herself. He set up a sting operation to capture Parker, Hardison, and Eliot. When Parker jumped onto the speeding IYS truck to switch the real David with a fake, Sterling planned to be in the truck waiting for her, with a car of his flunkies speeding up behind. Unfortunately, things went a little wrong and Parker ended up dead.
Sample Journal Entry: [There's a blonde girl staring at you. That's all. Just... staring....
After a few moments, she speaks as though reading off of cue cards.]
My name's Agent Hagan. [She flashes a badge.] FBI. I... am fresh outta Quantico. [She's starting to settle into it now, and sounds less stilted.] Yeah, I read a little about this place. I mean, I know, because I'm a warden, and somebody hired me. [Definitely less stilted now.] It's a prison, right? The security around here is really sub-par. You should look into some kind of laser grid system for after-hours, electronic locks with rotating vector combinations, maybe retinal scanners or at least some kind of I.D. tagging. And would some cameras be too much to ask for? Seriously? Getting around this place is like taking diamonds from the French National Bank.
[A pause, as she realizes an FBI agent wouldn't really know how easy it is to take diamonds from the French National Bank. A much more awkward pause ensues. She grimaces.]
...It's not well-guarded.
[What's she supposed to say now? She can't think of anything. Slight moment of panic. And the video switches off.]
Sample RP: This was Parker's favorite moment. The first few seconds. Standing on the roof of a skyscraper, staring down at the tiny white and red lights of the cars thirty stories below her feet, she waited for the signal. It was taking an awfully long time. She felt like she'd been up here for ages.
She glanced at her watch. It had been nineteen seconds.
Screw the signal, the rest of the team could catch up to her. Taking the lines firmly in hand, she turned around, felt her heels slip out into space as she rocked on the balls of her feet, and then jumped straight out from the edge with a shout of excitement. She liked this moment too. The wind was hitting her face hard, and she could feel her heart pounding in her ears.
Once she'd gotten down to the right floor, she slid to a halt and went to work cutting through the glass. That was the easy part. Well, getting to the safe was the easy part. Okay, no, breaking into the safe was the easy part. And maybe her favorite part, aside from the first few seconds and jumping off the roof. And this safe was a classic: Glenn-Reader 1945 model, cast iron, walls six inches thick. It had been a while since she'd done a '45. Gently stroking the handle, she flicked the knob a few times, smiling as she listened for the telltale click of the tumblers aligning. A few moments later, and she'd gotten what she'd come for.
"Meet me at the north staircase now!" Eliot's voice growled over comms. Parker stuffed the loot in a bag and dashed for the staircase. "You went too soon, Parker! Security's on to us!" Yep, Eliot definitely sounded mad. She skidded to a halt next to him, and they both froze at the sound of footsteps approaching.
She grinned. "Can I taser the guard?"
Special Notes: