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[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: DeathQuaker ("DQ")
AGE: 34
JOURNAL: deathquaker
IM: N/A
E-MAIL: deathquaker at gmail. Best way to be in touch with me. I do use Google chat once in awhile if you want to attempt that.
RETURNING: I used to play Maggie Mui (origamiguardian) here, but had to drop for awhile (largely due to a freelance job opportunity which is now completed).
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Jaime Sommers
FANDOM: The Bionic Woman (the 70s TV series, which shares continuity with The Six Million Dollar Man, which in turn is based on the book Cyborg by Martin Caidin)
CHRONOLOGY: She is coming after the end of the series, not long after the finale, "On the Run." She is still in the year 1978; well before the three reunion TV movies.
CLASS: Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: "The Bionic Woman" or "Dopey" (the former is what OSI agents say when they realize who she is, e.g., "Wait, you're the bionic woman!"; the latter is her actual, swear-to-god, in-canon secret agent nickname)
ALTER EGO: Jaime Sommers, ex-tennis pro/school teacher
BACKGROUND:
Jaime comes from the late 1970s in a world largely like our own, except that certain individuals have made significant, more potent-than-real advances in cybernetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence, as well as nuclear science. While her world’s “known” technology is about the same as ours in 1978, secret cloisters of the world have access to this extremely advanced technology, including the U.S. government (hence Jaime’s bionic prostheses).
Jaime Sommers grew up in Ojai, CA. Her parents were killed "in a car crash" when she was 16 years old (much later she learned they were federal agents who were assassinated) and then was raised by her childhood sweetheart Steve Austin’s family. She studied education at Carnegie Tech, but after graduating, she went on the professional tennis circuit. One of her star moments was beating tennis celebrity Billie Jean King at Forest Hills in 1974.
Preparing to marry Steve, they decided it would be fun to go skydiving before "the big day." Jaime's parachute tore and she nearly died. Steve himself had secretly been augmented as a cyborg after a plane crash and began to work as an agent for the U.S. Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), a branch of the National Security Bureau, and he demanded the OSI perform the same cybernetic replacement procedure on her that they did on him. They complied, giving her a reinforced, functioning spine, bionic legs, a bionic right arm, and a hearing unit in her right ear.
Jaime agreed to do a mission for the OSI (with Steve) as thanks for the new life they had given her. However, she began to reject the implants and developed a hallucination-inducing aneurysm, going on a psychotic bionic-powered rampage before Steve could talk her down and get her to the OSI hospital. She died on the operating table.
BUT at her moment of death millions of people cried BULLSHIT and wrote to the TV networks, the OSI managed to get her cryogenically frozen. They eventually revived her and were able to successfully complete the surgery needed to stop the rejection and clear the aneurysm, etc., but Jaime was an amnesiac. She underwent a final surgery to help restore some of the damage to her brain. This was largely successful, but she still does not remember much about her accident, her crazy-bionic-rampage, or about Steve Austin. She called off their engagement (duh) and offered to do occasional missions for the OSI where her special abilities would be needed. Unable to be a fair competitor anymore in tennis, she fell back to her education degree and love for children and became a middle school teacher at an air force base near her home in Ojai. She maintained a friendship with Steve, but dated many men, most recently a fellow OSI agent named Chris Williams.
She performed many missions for the OSI, both domestic and foreign, from wild, dare I say silly, events like investigating mysteries in a women’s wrestling ring, to the bone-chillingly devastating, like keeping an all-powerful AI from instigating a nuclear holocaust. She tangled with with fembots, weather altering machines, telekinetic children, and her own body double who tried to "steal" her life, amongst many other threats. After three years, she noticed her "occasional" missions were becoming "all the time" missions, and, burnt out, she asked to resign from the OSI. The overseeing NSB refused to let her retire, seeing her prostheses as "government property," unless she agreed to live out the rest of her life in a resort-like but very restricted, enclosed facility. She opted to run away and managed to evade the feds for several days, but ultimately, after struggling with her own identity and her sense of the difference between being a "bionic woman" and "just a woman," she decided to turn herself in. Fortunately, the NSB was willing to deal (bearing in mind how many resources it took them to track her down), and she agreed to continue to do missions for them so long as they remained "occasional." She also decided to look into a way she might be able to help others with emotional and accident recovery issues.
External reference: http://bionic.wikia.com/wiki/Jaime_Sommers
PERSONALITY:
Jaime is compassionate, poor at secret-keeping, and resistant to authority figures when their views conflict with her personal sense of justice-in other words, she is the world’s worst secret agent. And yet her extreme resourcefulness and her personal sense of loyalty is invaluable to both her employers and her many friends in the world. Despite her cybernetics and her job, she abhors violence and only uses it as a last resort. Her first "weapon" is always talking, and has managed to turn many confused "enemies" into allies. She prefers to use her bionics for "problem solving" more than fighting-ripping down doors, jumping over obstacles, overhearing distant conversations, and of course opening cans of tuna with her fingernails and intimidating unruly 7th graders by tearing a phone book in half.
While Jaime can often keep a cool head, the traumas of her past-not to mention three brain surgeries-have taken their toll on her mind. Extreme stress, usually being trapped for a long period of time or in a situation where she feels entirely helpless (even socially-if no one listens to her or mistrusts her when she doesn’t deserve it), can lead to nervous breakdowns and hysterics, sometimes with violent results (though no one ever seems to get hurt thanks to the magic of 1970s TV). Rather than wallow in self-pity about her "little problems," as she calls them, she works hard to understand herself and improve her reactions to things, and her experiences also contribute a great deal to her empathy. Sometimes her efforts to be understanding of the enemy lead her to be duped by someone clever enough to play her for her compassion and need to help people, but she still considers her empathy and desire to help others a strength, not a weakness.
While a kind person, Jaime can be a bit snarky, and tends to try to diffuse tension through levity (likely so as not to trigger herself into a worse reaction). When in a good mood, she is playful and flirty. She is not heavily booksmart but certainly well qualified as the 6-7th grade teacher she is, and is an eager and fast learner (she’s picked up some random skills in her agent life, like how to be a Vegas-style casino dealer). Ironically, her worst area of knowledge is probably technology, and she barely understands the principles that keep her body working (and shows little interest in trying, beyond the very basics).
POWER:
All canon:
Bionic Super Strength/Endurance: Her bionic right arm, legs, and reinforced spine allow her to lift small vehicles, leap up to about three or four stories, bend bars and tear through weaker metal, and toss thugs about like they were basketballs. Her own “grounding” system allows her to grab some electric wires safely, through a direct shock to her system is still dangerous. Her plastic-and-metal limbs of course are unaffected by injections and small-scale bludgeoning and slashing damage; she knows when she is damaged and has a basic sense of touch but doesn't feel intense pain from these limbs.
Bionic Super Speed: Jaime can run upwards of 65 miles an hour and has fast reflexes.
Bionic Super Hearing: Jaime can hear from great distances and can hear subsonic and supersonic noises and some radio frequency buzzes. Her ear has a filtration system so she’s not hearing EVERYTHING all the time, and she can even shut it off to mitigate (but obviously not completely resist) the effects of a sonic attack.
Extreme cold compromises her bionics and makes them cease to function after a time. If she jumps further than her limit, her legs can short out. Her bionics are powered by a small encapsulated nuclear battery in her upper arm (it’s 70s sci-fi, okay?) which if removed will cause her body to start to fail unless she is put on life support.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
N-now listen! I’m tired of being given the runaround, here! Somebody get me Oscar Goldman! Don’t tell me you don’t know who he is, he’s the head of the OSI, the Office of Scientific Intelligence. J-Just… just tell him Jaime Sommers needs to speak to him! Just.Get.Me.Oscar!
*shakes head, running her fingers nervously through her hair* Look, I’m sorry… I… I just don’t know what’s going on here, you know? I mean, I’m pretty sure someone’s kidnapped me and it’s NOT to make me a “hero” or some kinda nonsense like that. But whatever it is you want from me, you are NOT going to get it. *voice raises* You hear me?!
I’ve dealt with smug megalomaniacal computers before and the last one didn’t turn out looking so hot, you got that?!
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
Was it really 2010? Weren’t there supposed to be flying cars and space stations by now? Jaime chuckled. Sure, technology had advanced, history and progressed. The Cold War was over, amazingly--half of her missions would never have happened in this time period. But there was a lot of the same old, same old too, though. Nations had new and old reasons to bicker; oil was still being fought over after all this time, and this time for whatever reason people weren't giving up their stupidly humongous cars.
"You want how much for a hot dog? What is it, made of gold?" She asked as she approached a street cart. The hot dog vendor was not amused and turned toward other customers. She stuck her tongue out at him, which he didn't see but was unlikely to help her cause.
Good thing this whatever-it-was had given her some money. She leaned up against a fence, wrapping her hands around the metal piping at the top. She couldn’t forget that no matter how amazing this place was, how big, it was a prison. She wrung her hands, frustrated by how helpless she was, how far she was from her friends, her home. Everything but freedom, she mused ruefully, recalling a talk with a little girl about the lifestyle of polar bears and what they could expect to have in a zoo. She grumbled. She hated being used. She hated not knowing what was going on. She had only just finished dealing with a load of feds who considered her "government property" -- God!
She snapped out of her reverie to the sound of twisting metal. She looked down, seeing that she’d wrung her right hand hard enough to seriously bend the fence pole. She looked at it sheepishly, then smiled nervously at a man watching her in bewilderment. "Did-did you see that?!" She feigned amazement in what she hoped was an adequate performance. "They really gotta take care of these things before they rust!"
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
I am assuming since she’s basically human that her cyborg parts will remain cyborg parts. Please advise if you would prefer this not to be the case.