multiversal: Application
In Character Information
Basics
Character Name: Rachel Conway
Username: notvictorymarch
Fandom: Heroes (OC)
Played By: Alicia Witt
Icon:
4. Original Character Section
Physical Description: Rachel is 25 years old. She stands 5’7” and has an average build. She has red hair and hazel eyes, and freckles all over her body-heaviest concentrations on the parts that get a lot of sun like her arms and shoulders, more faint elsewhere.
She tends toward casual dress-jeans, t-shirts, sneakers-unless there’s a business meeting or a date in the cards and then nicer clothes and maybe some makeup come into play. She’s not a girl that spends a million years in the bathroom each morning; hair brushed and left down, a dusting of powder to keep her face from shining, and a smear of lip gloss is standard for most days.
Sexuality: Rachel is heterosexual. She finds other women pretty and is curious about them but there’s not enough interest or draw for anything beyond possible experimentation. She loves men, loves them a lot. She loves to flirt; she finds it a harmless diversion provided both parties understand when flirting is just flirting and when it’s leading to something more.
Sex isn’t a huge deal to her. She’s had a couple of serious relationships, and a handful of less serious involvements. She has to feel affection for and trust in a partner but she doesn’t save herself up for committed relationships, nor does she believe that sex automatically equals a relationship--in fact, one of the fastest ways of turning her off continuing any sexual relationship is to act like the fact that sex happened means she owes a man something or he has some claim on her. She’s not a jealous person, nor is she threatened by partners having interest in or being the object of interest of other people, but she is private-she won’t go broadcasting what she’s done or who she’s done it with and she appreciates discretion. And while sex isn’t A Serious Thing for her, it’s better when it happens in the context of a friendship if it’s to continue; discovering that someone is interested in her solely for sex would be uncomfortable and not an involvement that would last very long. (That being said, a hot one-night stand is a hot one-night stand, and not out of the question.) Sex, too, is sometimes a balm for loneliness or her self-esteem. It’s nice to feel wanted, but not if that’s the only thing a man wants her for.
She’s a loving and open-minded person, eager to please and comfort. She hasn’t had multiple relationships or involvements in the past but I could see it happening with proper respect and communication between all parties. She’s not one that would hide things or sneak around behind a partner’s back.
World Information: Rachel hails from the Heroes universe at the start of Volume 4 (midway through Season 3). It’s June, 2007, there and the world is basically the same as ours was four years ago. In New York, where Rachel lives before being brought to Baedal, technology, politics, culture are all recognizable as Earth-standard.
The big difference between this universe and our own is that some people, due to either a natural or induced genetic mutation, have developed superhuman powers. They aren’t widely known, either to one another or to the world at large. There is an organization called The Company, founded by a group of these advanced humans, that has hunted, held, and experimented on these people, but they operate in secret. The Company has also covered up incidents where people with powers could have been exposed.
Currently, Nathan Petrelli serves as a United States Senator (and also secretly is part of the Pinehearst Corporation, a competitor to The Company), and he has mounted a campaign to “eliminate terrorism”. The rhetoric being thrown around about people with differences, people who could hurt ordinary people has been enough to make some evolved humans worry for their safety, especially with rumors of people being rounded up by the government and taken away. So the show’s canon is a world identical to ours on the surface but with a shadowy underbelly of people with secret abilities and machinations by and against them.
Rachel’s connections to Heroes canon are her own superhuman ability, the fact that she lives in New York (which is one of the major settings for the show), the fact that she has read Activating Evolution by Dr. Chandra Suresh, and the fact that she is aware of Nathan Petrelli’s stance on terrorism and is harboring worry that he means people like her. She has not met any canon characters or taken part in any canon events. She simply lives in the same world as the show’s characters.
History: Rachel was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California. Her father, Bill, was a biochemist and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who died of a brain aneurism when Rachel was three years old. Her mother, Annie, was devastated by this loss and began self-medicating with alcohol. Rachel has one brother, Danny, eight years her senior, who looked after her when their mother could not.
Rachel became very protective of her mother. She learned early on to lie on the phone that her mom was sick rather than passed out with an empty bottle, to lie to their parish priest and concerned teachers that everything was just fine at home. She and her brother were determined to present as normal a family face as possible to the outside world.
Her brother left for college when she was ten. When he wasn’t home over summers and school breaks, Rachel was left to shoulder a lot of the burden of running the house and looking after her mother when her mother wasn’t well. Some days were good; Mom was mostly sober and able to cook, help with homework, and do the chores. But there were days where her mother couldn’t function well and Rachel had to fend for herself.
Around this time she started having odd experiences. At first she thought she was dreaming or mistaken that her shadow didn’t always fall where it should or seemed different, somehow. As she grew into her teens there were more instances of it not behaving as she’d expect, and she began playing with it here and there. She figured out there was more weirdness when she was in strong, direct light; over time she figured out that with a lot of effort she could get it to do things-wiggle its fingers independently of hers, slide small objects across a tabletop.
This frightened her as much as it fascinated her. She knew this wasn’t normal. At school, she was already That Redheaded Girl, That Girl Whose Dad Died, and That Girl Whose Mom Might Not Be All There; the thought of also becoming That Weird Girl That Can Do That Scary Thing was too much and she kept what she could do entirely to herself for fear of being ridiculed, feared, or even carted off to a hospital.
When Rachel was thirteen, her mother remarried. Her new stepfather was an attorney who had moved to their city and joined their church congregation. At first, things were great; it was easier, having another adult around, and her mother seemed to thrive, not needing to rely on drinking quite so much. But as time went on he showed another side-he was an angry and controlling man, given to bullying the ladies into giving him his way, intimidating them through shouting, and, eventually, hitting them. Rachel’s home life was tense and stressful all over again, in new and worse ways, but as always, appearances had to be kept up, and she told no one.
One night when she was fifteen, a particularly bad fight between her mother and stepfather broke out; he chased her mother up onto the second-floor landing and was striking her. Rachel joined the fray, trying to pull him off, and was hit a few times herself. In desperation she reached for him not with her hands but with her shadow, but she was angry and scared, full of adrenaline, and instead of just pulling her stepfather away from her mother she hauled him away and pitched him down the stairs. He died a week and a half later in the hospital from the injuries sustained in his fall.
Rachel’s mother covered for her, claiming she’d pushed her husband in their fight; the death was ruled self-defense and no charges were filed. Annie was accepting of what she’d seen but reinforced the family party line of “tell no one the truth about anything that goes on in this house, be normal”. On top of that, Rachel was more terrified than ever of what she could do. She stopped playing with it, stopped trying to understand it or learn how to use it, and stuffed the fact that it existed down with her guilt, presenting as pleasant and as “I’m just as normal as you” face to the world as she could.
Rachel finished high school in Santa Barbara and moved 400 miles north to the San Francisco Bay Area for college. After graduation she did an internship at a small city magazine in San Jose, and then she moved north to San Francisco where she worked for a small independent press that published books of local historical interest. Her professional life was developing nicely but her personal life went to hell over a year and a half; she got romantically involved with her married boss and their affair was eventually found out, leading to all kinds of drama, an uncomfortable environment at work, and falling out with her disapproving mother.
Rachel decided she needed a fresh start; she was offered an entry-level proofreading and editing job at a publishing house in New York City and she jumped at the chance to move far away and start over. At the point from which she enters the game, she’s been in New York just short of a year, and has been living a quiet life in the big city, making friends, getting herself established. She and her mother made up after a few months’ difficulty, and her brother is teaching at a university in Massachusetts so they’ve started to grow close again too, visiting each other when they can. She’s also quietly been researching about people with powers; she’s still too scared to admit she has one to anyone but she’s started to worry that denying it isn’t necessarily the best strategy and she has been hoping to find someone who can guide her. She’s read Dr. Suresh’s book but hasn’t tried to contact him; she’s gotten the idea there might be other people out there like her but she hasn’t met anyone. She’s also tried experimenting with it again in small ways, like she did when she was a kid, to try to learn some control.
Powers: Rachel is an evolved human like many of the protagonists in Heroes canon. She possesses the genetic mutation that grants superhuman abilities. Her mutation is inherited; unbeknownst to her since he died when she was young her father possessed the gene and an ability.
She is able to manipulate her shadow. Given a strong light source it can take corporeal form and move things (and people), acting as an extension of her body. It possesses strength approximating that of a strong male adult-in other words, not superhuman but more than what Rachel herself possesses. Her shadow can also be, when manifested, slipped into small spaces or used to briefly block an incoming blow or support her own weight.
Using it takes a lot of effort, akin to strenuous physical exercise. Sustaining it for more than a brief time drains Rachel physically so if she uses it at all, it’s in short bursts. The better defined it is, the more power it has and the easier it is to manifest it-she can pull it up at once in strong direct light that casts a good, solid shadow but she’d have less success in a space with indirect light, and could not call on it at all in a darkened room. She can’t create the shadow, only direct what’s there. It also remains connected to her, so while it could move around a space where she’s standing, and manipulate things within that reach, it can’t do anything like walk out of a room without her or manifest itself somewhere she is not.
Talents/Abilities:: Rachel is a very strong swimmer and quite a good surfer.
Personality: Outwardly, Rachel is one of those annoyingly wonderful people. She’s your polite neighbor who always says hello and asks how you are when she passes you in the apartment building. She’s your relentlessly upbeat coworker who always comes early, stays late, takes on extra work, and still remembers everyone’s birthdays and the names of their kids. She’s the friendly stranger who will strike up a conversation with you in line at the grocery store, let you get on the bus ahead of her, and ask you about your day and honestly listen. She’s warm and engaging, a little bit of a smartass but not insultingly so, bright and generous. She seems like the sort of young woman every mother hopes her daughter grows up to be.
All of this comes from a great personal effort. Rachel pushes herself to be all these things, to be perfect, as good a person as she can possibly be, because deep inside, she doesn’t believe any of it. She has low self-esteem and she tries to fill that void with good deeds and by making other people happy. She also carries a lot of guilt over her stepfather’s death and a lot of fear of being found out for what she is so she pushes even harder to try to make up for what she’s done and make people less inclined to question her.
Children who have an alcoholic parent frequently grow up to become adults who are hyper-responsible, who compulsively put others first, who have a deep-seated fear of abandonment, who confuse being loved with being needed, who become approval seekers, who hold themselves to impossibly high standards, and who are incredibly hard on themselves due to low self-esteem. Rachel is all of these things.
Growing up a lot of her identity was tied up in being a caretaker, and in being a good girl so that no one suspected what was really going on. She felt like she had to take care of everything and everyone and that’s carried over into adulthood. Also, throwing herself into taking care of someone else and putting their needs and problems first lets her step back from having to face her own needs and problems. She feels good when she feels needed, she feels powerful when she is taking care of things and people, she will let a lot of things slide and go out of her way to seek out the good in people and forgive things because she’s scared of losing them, and if things do go wrong it’s her fault and she’ll be hard on herself for failing.
She’s not entirely spineless; she wouldn’t put up with a man who clearly only wanted her for sex or who was openly awful, and any major breach of her trust would probably hurt a relationship of any kind. But she does tend to indulge people and try to be their friends, and if she had grown to love somebody she’d try to find ways to forgive their transgressions.
She’s very conflicted inside; she thinks she’s a bad person no matter how much she does that’s good, she craves attention and love but thinks herself unworthy of either, she wants someone to take care of her too but she’s scared to show too much of who she truly is. For all that she surrounds herself with people and develops loving, caretaking relationships with them she’s very needy and lonely herself and she’s uncomfortable with the idea of letting that side of herself show or be soothed.
She was also very strongly shaped by the whole “be as normal as possible, don’t tell anyone anything” mentality in her home, growing up. She finds it difficult to admit when she genuinely has problems or needs anything, and she has a hard time asking for help or letting anyone take care of her. That public air of complete self-efficacy and being on top of everything and being everyone’s caretaker is as much a means of feeling in control of things as it is an avoidance mechanism.
These may be coping mechanisms but her affection, respect, and compassion for people is genuine. She really does love them and want to help and protect them. Nothing angers her more than people being mistreated, especially by someone in a position of power. She doesn’t judge people based on their pasts or what other people say or believe about them, choosing to get to know someone for herself and appraising them based on who they are with her, and their actions. She desperately needs to believe that there’s some good in everyone so that maybe she can hope there’s some good in her, too.
Her affair with her married boss back in San Francisco was a perfect storm of all her ideals and drives. Sex wasn’t a big deal because they liked each other. She let him convince her that it was okay, that his marriage was crumbling and they weren’t doing anything wrong, because he made her feel like he needed her and she craved that attention and affection. She was able to still see him as a good person despite what he was doing, and she hid it because she wanted everyone to believe she was a good person too. Because she worked hard and was so responsible, their coworkers didn’t suspect and she was able to work to hide what was going on. She felt like she needed to stay with him because there was no one else and she didn’t want to lose him. And eventually everything went to hell and she was convinced it was her fault. When things couldn’t be fixed, her reaction was to leave and start over somewhere else.
Because she’s always strived to be such a good girl, she respects and obeys authority figures unless they betray her trust. She’s a bit taken with older men, which is probably a subconscious urge to have a father figure. She loves dogs because they’re loyal and love you back without condition. She’s bright and well-read, but no rocket scientist. She loves to learn, especially about other people. And she’s genuinely an optimist, always assuming the best and always hopeful.
Object: The pink quartz and silver rosary her mother gave her for her Confirmation, when she was 14.
Reason for playing: I mentioned in my application for Dean that I have a great love for characters who would be completely ordinary people except for one thing. Rachel’s “one thing” is her superhuman ability.
I liked the Heroes universe and the way they presented people with superpowers. At the time that I created Rachel, at the end of Season 2, there had not yet been a character who viewed their power as a burden or something they were afraid of. The show was full of people who, after they went, “Wow, I can do this thing,” either went on to be like “I’m gonna be a hero” or “I’m gonna fuck everyone up” with their new- found power. I wanted to play with the idea of someone who didn’t take either path, who instead went “Oh, hell, no, what is this shit, I don’t want it.” I wanted to explore the idea of someone who avoided and denied what they could do, who was uncomfortable with it rather than embracing it and running wild with it.
The show wasn’t exactly full of ordinary people. They all had interesting backstories but most of the protagonists and antagonists had all kinds of high drama in their backgrounds. They were centuries-old con men who’d traveled the world first. They were the heirs to powerful, wealthy, politically-connected and possibly scandalous families. They were scientists from other continents looking to avenge their murdered fathers. They were descended from the Company’s founders or their adoptive parents were Company operatives. So I wanted to make someone who was really ordinary in comparison, have a character with a bit of a tragic and difficult background to help feed that fear of her power but who was unremarkable in every other way-no legendary family, no crazy adventures, no super-important job. I made her a woman because there’s a hell of a lot of sausage on the Heroes dance floor, and I made her a redhead because every good comic/superhero series has a plucky redhead.
I’ve been playing her for three and a half years now, in various places. For this game I decided to do a clean reboot of the character, to take her back to her origins instead of working in backstories or old CR or taking her from a more recent time point. When I first started playing her I threw her into games and communities that weren’t as well fleshed-out or rich as Baedal is; I’m looking forward to the challenge and the opportunity of starting her fresh in a community with a strong premise.
Other people have always been both her strength and her weakness. I’d like to see how the CR she develops influences her and her choices. I’d like to see how she copes when taken away to a new place and forced to figure out how to fit in all over again. I’d like to see if she can still manage to try to love and take care of everyone when she’s presented with a wider variety of people and situations than she ever would have encountered back home. And I’d like to see if she ever gets past all her coping mechanisms and allows people in, or if she just winds up entrenching even further.
Mostly I’m looking forward to playing my favorite and strongest characters (Rachel and Dean) with a bunch of cool players in a kick-ass setting. Not even gonna lie about that.
Gods: Ruun might take an interest in Rachel, because she’s well-read and educated. Also before coming to Baedal she worked in the publishing field as a proofreader and editor, and she had aspirations of writing for herself, rather than spending the rest of her life polishing up things other people had written.
It’s more likely, though, that she would catch Shada’s attention. Shada is the patron of caretakers, and that’s pretty much Rachel’s identity, her comfort, and her drive when it comes to other people. The past drama and infidelity that Rachel was caught up in might also be a point of interest.
Writing Samples
First-Person Network Post: http://notvictorymarch.livejournal.com/183445.html
First-Person Journal Post:
Dear Diary,
Today wasn’t so bad. I think I’m starting to get used to this place. It’s still weird and I still want to go home but I think I’m starting to get the hang of things and I don’t feel so scared anymore.
Also there’s this guy. He lives down the hall and he’s really nice. We’re supposed to go for a drink sometime soon. I think it’ll help me a lot to get out and make some friends and get to know people. I’m not doing myself any favors moping around on my own.
And a job-I need to find a job. The city doesn’t seem to have any need for proofreaders so I don’t know what to do. I hear there’s a job office, I’ll probably go check that out.
Third-Person Action Post: http://notvictorymarch.livejournal.com/115314.html