counted stars } { application
Player Information:
Name or Handle: Emily
LJ: iluvroadrunner6
Email: iluvroadrunner6@gmail.com
AIM/ MSN / Plurk name: AIM & Plurk - iluvroadrunner6
Any current characters here?: Sam Winchester, (alt) Olivia Dunham
Character Information:
Character Name: Alec McDowell
Age: 22
Canon: Dark Angel
Appearance: Alec comes to about 6’1”, and weighs two hundred pounds, all of that muscle. He’s not overly big, though-the point of X5s were to blend in, not stand out-so he’s just nicely muscled. He’s also attractive, Manticore built them to be pretty, with boyish good looks, blondish hair and green eyes. He tends to use those looks to his advantage, as he was trained to. He moves with the comfortable ease of someone who knows his body well and exactly what it can do. When he’s in top form, he’s got catlike grace and poise, but most of the time, he’ll putz around like a normal person and often fake a bit of clumsy nature, just to seem more “normal” than he actually is.
He normally dresses in layers-Seattle is both cold and wet-with t-shirts under sweaters and topped with a leather jacket. He’s also fond of jeans, as they allow a good range of movement, and combat boots.
Personality: There are two distinctive facets to Alec as a character: X5 - 494, the soldier he spent most of his life becoming, and Alec, the person who’s free of Manticore and still trying to figure out who he is, as a person. There’s not a large difference between the two, but one can’t exist without the other and it shows Alec’s growth as a character, even over the course of one season. That, as well as the impact of several important relationships in his life, helps form the ball of Alec and who he is as a person. There are some general traits that accompany Alec at any point in his life just based on his genetic make-up, regardless of how he was raised, and they are as follows:
1) He does not consider himself human. A person, yes, and he can pass for human, but he’s not. He knows he’s not, and he’s comfortable with what he is. It’s the who that gets a little sketchy a lot of the time. He’s just recently come to the realization that he deserves to be treated as a person instead of a thing, and he’s fiercely protective of that. He will not tolerate anyone trying to treat him or anyone else of his kind like he’s less than they are. Because they’re wrong. He’s better.
2) He relies on his nose. A lot. He’s been seen in canon sniffing his money to make sure that it’s real, checking his food to make sure that it’s good. He’ll always try and get the smell of something first before he moves forward into it. He relies on his hearing and eye sight as well, but his nose is his best friend, especially for things he doesn’t understand.
3) He has a penchant for high places. In canon, he and Max have both been seen as sitting on the rim of the Space Needle when they want to go somewhere to think. That’s a kitty thing. Cats like to be up high because they’re a) out of reach of predators, and b) can see everything that’s going on around them. That’s a little bit of the instinct that’s slipped in as far as the X series of transgenics is concerned.
4) He likes things that go fast, fast, very fast. He has a motorcycle (he calls her Shelley) and has been seen in other pretty, fast pieces of machinery. He takes better care of the motorcycle than he does most of the other items he owns, mostly so that it can continue to go fast, fast very fast.
5) His fighting style preference is hand to hand first, guns and other weapons second. He’s always armed as a precaution-he is living around a group of people who want him deader than dead-but he’ll always disarm and knock unconscious before he’ll go for the kill with a gun or a knife. The people who go after him are human for the most part, so he tries to do the best he can to not be the killer he can be/people think he is unless he absolutely has to be.
6) His speech patterns are an odd mix of military slang, street slang and correct civilized English. He always uses his proper “be” verbs in the right place. The street slang can sound a little odd and off when he uses it because he learned it in a class and not in the world, but after a year outside with the rest of the world, his ear’s accustomed to more of the proper usage. He’s still much more comfortable with the military slang. This is very easy to notice because Alec Never. Ever. Shuts up. And it’s not because he likes the sound of his own voice, he just really likes to talk.
X5 - 494:
For the first twenty years of his life, Alec wasn’t Alec, he was X5 - 494, and he wasn’t a person, he was a weapon. He was raised in an absolute military lifestyle, with the same structure as any military set-up in the country. He was trained, from a young age, on how to be the perfect soldier, and for the most part, he was their golden boy. He followed orders, performed well on missions, and on the surface, was the perfect example of what Manticore was looking to create, even at a startlingly young age. He performed in the function that he was created to perform-nothing more, nothing less. He didn’t have a life outside of Manticore, no friends, no family. He didn’t even have a birthday-the only reason he knows how old he is, is because he adds one every January. He didn’t view himself to be a person because the people who were running the show, training them and teaching them, told him that he wasn’t, and he toed the line with the people running Manticore, under fear of death or worse-reindoctrination. He already had to go through it once-there was no way he was going to go through it again unless he had to. There was no exposure to art, music, or literature unless absolutely necessary, as well as popular television or world news because they didn’t want them to start thinking for themselves and forming opinions of their own. They were forced to swallow whatever Manticore wanted them to believe, and 494 did exactly that, no questions asked.
He never had a childhood, he never had parents. His early years as an X5 focused on training for simple basic skills that every X5 would be required to perform, from holding his breath for extended periods of time underwater, up to and including his first kill at age eight. He never looked at the world with awe-like wonder; he never was innocent by any means. Manticore wanted these children to be killers, to eventually grow up to be the best assassins in the world, and therefore they didn’t believe in the importance of establishing a moral code that would be deemed acceptable by most societies. They were taught that it was okay to lie, steal, cheat or kill for the good of a mission, regardless of the consequences, and if you got caught you were as good as dead, so it was best not to get caught. The only thing that deviated from the “the only line is the bottom line” mentality is the idea that you did not leave your unit behind, no matter what the cost. They taught the kids to have loyalty to each other, which is something that strongly stuck with 494.
Their “unit” became the closest they had to a surrogate family. They looked after each other, took care of each other, and on occasion fought for each other. When the unit that Max was in escaped from Manticore in 2009, all of the X5 class was brought in for what they called “reindoctrination,” which essentially amounted to brainwashing to make sure that the kids weren’t thinking too much for themselves. Because 494’s twin (an X5 with the same genetic code) was in the group that escaped, he spent six months in their Psy-Ops division to make sure that the impulse to escape wasn’t accidentally written into their genetic code. He was nine years-old, and it was one of the closest things to Hell that he experienced at the hands of the doctors at Manticore. They drugged him (large amounts due to his high metabolism), white washed memories, and reinforced his place as X5 - 494, and his position in the Manticore hierarchy. To this day, he still carries a heavy resentment towards his twin and the rest of that unit, even though he hadn’t met them before that point, because in his mind, they committed the ultimate crime one transgenic could do to the other, and left their kind behind. This is the first time that Manticore used the reindoctrination techniques on 494, but it won’t be the last. (See: Rachel.)
When Manticore was training the X series to hunt and to kill, they appealed to a lot of their natural cat instincts. They made deals with the local prisons and recruited death row inmates for their kids to practice on, released them into the woods, and said if they could get to the fence without being caught by the kids. They gave the man a gun and a head start, and exploited the natural hunt and kill instincts that the kids possessed and praised every kill they made. This instilled an idea that killing, while always acceptable behavior, because they didn’t want them killing anyone they happened to find on a mission aside from the target or any of the Manticore employees when they did something the kids didn’t like, was a good thing when necessary-for example, on a mission or when they needed to get out of a situation and not leave any witnesses. They were taught the best way to dispose of bodies so that they would never be found, and as a result, the element of wrong in taking someone’s life never fully sunk in. 494 kills without remorse or apology-in fact, on a level he even enjoys the hunt and culmination in the kill. It soothes the predator instinct in him. He understands the permanence of death, but the moral ramifications don’t always affect him the way it should. Post-Manticore, Alec understands the idea that killing someone is wrong, but he doesn’t allow the past deaths to weigh on his conscience. He only kills as a means of self-defense or in defense of someone else, and if he’s exhausted all other means. But when he does kill, it’s quick and ruthless, and it’s highly likely that he won’t be feeling bad for it later.
The people who were raising him at Manticore were not the highest shelf of human beings. As far as they were concerned, 494 was a creation of science and not a person. They did experiments on the kids, cutting them open without the appropriate anesthesia, due to their fast metabolisms. Alec is pretty much traumatized in terms of all things medically related, and would rather treat his own injuries himself. He doesn’t have to worry about illnesses or infection; he mostly has to worry about bleeding out and making sure the bones set right, and he can do that on his own, or with the members of his unit. He has a violent reaction to any other kind of medical attention and he will not set foot in a hospital on his own behalf. He will go to save a friend, a person he cares about, but he will not do it to save himself without being forcibly put there-and it takes a lot to force him there.
Manticore also tried to raise their X series operatives without emotions influencing their actions. As a result, they’re supposed to emotionally detach from what’s happening to them and keep focused as soldiers. 494 could handle short term missions where he didn’t have to deal with the people involved, but when he was placed on a long term deep cover assignment, he managed to connect with one of the targets romantically. Having never experienced that before, nor understanding what the feeling was, he fell for her hard and nearly blew the mission trying to protect her. He was again sent to reindoctrination and had the memories filed away in his brain, but that mission still colored the remainder of the missions he did for Manticore, up to and including his working as a double agent against Max in 201: Designate This, his first appearance, which is when 494 switches over to Alec.
ALEC:
Alec didn’t really become Alec until Max named him in that first episode. At first, he didn’t really care about the name-his designation number had been his identity for so long that he didn’t feel he needed a name, but when Manticore was brought down, he needed to use some kind of name to get around in the world-he couldn’t go around calling himself 494. He had liked Alec when initially named it, and decided to keep it. And it was good that he liked it, but because her second choice was “dick.” That possibly would have been more appropriate, considering that in the beginning, Alec really was. At first he came off as being Max’s friend-not forcing her to copulate with him due to their being breeding partners, and vouching for her in front of Madam Renfro. That was all to earn her trust, however, as he intended to use her to get to Logan. Even as he had Logan dying on the floor and a gun on Asha, he maintained that it wasn’t anything personal-he was just doing what he was built for. Eventually Max took him down and managed to release the location of Manticore to the world regardless, but by the time Alec returned to Manticore, Renfro was already sterilizing the site, and the only home he’d ever known was coming down around his ears.
At first, Alec’s intention was to get as far away from the mess as possible, but that ingrained loyalty to his unit and to the other members of the X series brought him back. Alec is intensely loyal to his own kind, including Max, and will do whatever it takes to keep them safe. Even when he was captured by Ames White and told to kill three of his own kind and collect their bar codes in order to obtain his freedom, he didn’t go through with actually killing one of them, and when he tried to get Joshua’s bar code, unaware that he didn’t have one, he couldn’t go through with actually killing them. He was taught to never leave a man behind, and he wasn’t going to turn on them and start killing them either, no matter what it meant for him.
His own kind, however, is where the selfless streak ends, with a few notable exceptions. Alec is not a hero. He isn’t out to better the world, and he isn’t out to save people he doesn’t know. He knows about his abilities and what he could do with them, but he’s not going out of his way to save a world that doesn’t want him and would only kill him for doing so. Alec will fight to the death for the people he cares about, those he considers his friends and family, and he would kill for them, but only them, and it is very hard to make his friend list. You need to show that you would do the same for him, or he would really have to like you in order to really make it stick. He plays his cards very close to the chest, and will more likely offer up a smartass, out for himself façade than let people know he actually gives a damn.
Alec is a smartass, however, with an insatiable knack for getting himself into trouble and trying to talk his way out of it. The phrase “Curiosity killed the cat” is incredibly appropriate for this particular X5. After growing up in such a structured and isolated environment, being faced with all that freedom was a daunting position, and he wanted to try and experience as much as possible. He had been out in the world before, but always with Manticore’s leash around his neck. He wasn’t allowed to explore on his own, which meant he needed to learn relatively quickly which areas he was allowed in and which areas he wasn’t. He also wasn’t sure how to handle keeping what he was from the general public. Max hassles him a lot in his early days as a free agent to keep his bar code covered and not doing anything that grabbed too much attention, but he didn’t always listen. He got busted by White when he was street fighting to hustle up some quick cash and betting on himself.
Seattle in 2020 is in the middle of an economic depression and people do whatever they have to do to make a quick buck. Aside from betting on himself in the beginning, he also got a job working at Jam Pony as a bike messenger, while supplementing his income with some light burglary. He’s an unrepentant thief and a firm believer in finders’ keepers. Considering that everyone else was hustling to try and make a quick buck, he didn’t see the problem in doing it himself, and he was better at it than most people. He also is a person to take advantage of opportunities, no matter how awkward it may seem. When a fellow X series transgenic was killed on the course of a mission, Alec all too quickly moved into his now vacant apartment, taking the space his family had left behind without seeing a problem. It made things uncomfortable for him and Max at first, but he needed a place to live, and it was only natural for him to take what had belonged to his kind and made sure it stayed where it belonged.
Alec does have a temper, however, and a violent one at that. When a fellow transgenic, Biggs, was killed by a lynch mob in 221: Love Among Runes, Alec was one the one leading the transgenics to find those responsible and make them sincerely regret the decision. Alec would kill for the people he cares about, and he would feel one bit of guilt about it. The way he sees it, humans have the police, the armed forces, and their rights to protect them from other people, but transgenics aren’t afforded the same courtesy. They need to protect themselves, whether the rest of the world likes it or not. As soon as they get afforded the same rights and privileges as the rest of civilized society, Alec will stop protecting his people his way.
It’s also important to mention that along with being shut away from the rest of the world and not understanding how it works around him, he didn’t really have a childhood. Therefore, he will have the potential to get excited about things that a six year-old would, like it was the first time he’s ever experienced it, because odds are, it is. He doesn’t look at the world with awe-like wonder, and he’s not a big believer in magic-he’s a byproduct of science. If you tell him that fairies/demons/werewolves/etc are real he’s going to look at you like you’re crazy-but he might tell you that a slinky is one of the coolest things he’s ever seen.
If you are apping a character arriving from another game: To be honest, a lot of what Alec went through in the Wood opened him up more to people more than anything else. Coming into the Wood, Alec had taken on a “us or them” mentality with regards to humanity as a whole, and was more strongly indentifying with his fellow transgenics than he was with people. He actually rather disliked humanity as a whole because they weren’t giving them a chance and treating them like people, and while they were a few exceptions to the rule, he wasn’t all that inclined to trust them more than he had to.
Once arriving in the Wood, he had to trust people, because they were all in this together, and if he wanted to stay alive, he had to work with them, not against them. At first he was resistant and more worried about taking care of his own-Max was there, and he wanted to protect her, not them-he still reached out and made friends, especially when he had to fend off people who accused him of being a shapeshifter. He slowly built himself a family out of the people he found, and actually felt like he was part of the community as oppose to being forced into it. He really liked that feeling, so he tried to do his best to keep it. He actually found a bit of his humanity in the woods, even if he still acts a little off kilter for a human sometimes. Some of the friends in the Wood, he got to the point where he would protect them with his life, and that won’t change when he arrives on Coruscant. Even if those people don’t know who he is. He’s not the kind of person who can let go of his feelings easily, so while he may back off, keep his distance, and try not to scare them away, there’s always going to be a part of him that wants to protect them.
Also, a lot more of the protector that Alec is came out in the wood as well. They were left in the hands of the Powers that Be and while every part of him wanted to snipe back at them, when the people he cared about were threatened, he fell in line like the good little soldier he was. He didn’t care what happened to him, which opened him up more to get hurt, but also allowed him to build stronger bonds with the people around him than he ever had in his previous life. He also had to rely a lot more on his more animalistic survival instincts-hunting for food in the wild, with minimal weapons and only what little technology the Fae decided to give them. He had adjusted to that as best he could, and it will take him a second to be back among civilized society again.
Background: Canon history here, written by me.
Alec arrived in babylonwood shortly after Normal shot him in the beginning of 222: Freak Nation. He was met in the woods by Faith Lehane, who gave him the run down as to what was going on, and took him back to her cabin to patch him up, and then released him back into the wild. He nosed around, made some friends, and trolled some people on the network, trying to figure out what exactly was going on, and for the most part, he managed not to make too many major enemies. Not even of the Winchesters. It was pretty much a miracle considering he had Dean’s face.
Then Max showed up, and Alec’s life started to get complicated. Not only was Max back in the time when she didn’t like him very much, but with someone that he cared about without needing time or effort, Kitsune, one of the Fae, “recruited”s-and by recruited, I mean threatened his best friend in order get what she wanted out of him-in order to infiltrate her cousin and enemy’s castle and spy on her. Alec didn’t like it, because upon actually meeting the Princess he was supposed to spy on, he found out he really liked her (this is a frequent problem with Alec), but he did it anyway, because he cared more about Max. He joined Tempest’s court, moved to the castle, and did his best to balance all the flak he got for doing so by the people who were going “WHY ARE YOU BEING SO STUPID?!?” He didn’t think he was being stupid, he just thought he was doing what he was built for, but that’s besides the point.
He then moved on to spending most of his time poking around the castle and getting to know Tempest better, and he will be arriving on Coruscant from where I dropped him in the game, mid-spying mission, and being very confused as to why he’s not in a castle anymore.
Special Abilities or Weapons: Alec is what’s called a transgenic, meaning he’s not entirely human. In fact, to be specific, he’s a third human, a third kitty DNA, and a third that’s the X5 cocktail. In the Dark Angel universe, transgenics were created to be a better class of soldier, and the X5s were trained to be the generals, while the X6-8s are more of the infantry class of soldier.
As far as the X5 cocktail is concerned, it comes in two parts. Mentally speaking Alec has an eidetic memory and a genius IQ. This allows him to pick up new skills extremely quickly-for example, he went from beginner to classically trained pianist over the course of a few days. He’s also multilingual. Physically, his body produces bonus stem cells which allow him to heal more quickly from injuries. All transgenics are also O negative, so they can swap blood quickly in battlefield situations. He has a much faster metabolism which allows him to process drugs and other narcotics more quickly, has been inoculated for every disease known to man-and some that aren’t-and his natural body temperature is several degrees higher than a normal human. He also has enhanced speed, called blurring, which allows him to move faster than the human eye can process, making him a literal blur, as well as enhanced strength. Max has been shown as having the ability to hold a full grown man upside down off a balcony several stories up without breaking a sweat or losing her grip. Alec, having more muscle mass and concentrated training, probably is stronger. All that extra strength allows him to jump higher, hit harder, and throw further than any normal human would.
As far as the kitty DNA is concerned, Alec has all the senses of a big cat. He has enhanced sight for seeing long distances and night vision, as well as a stronger than normal sense of smell and hearing. He has a better sense of balance, a natural grace, and enhanced flexibility. He lands on his feet-most of the time. He also has a taste of cat instincts, which can include sensitivity to the supernatural-there’s a reason cats were used as familiars for witches-but it’s nothing overtly informative. It’s mostly a feeling, like something’s rubbing against him the wrong way-he won’t know what it means. It also includes a strong kill instinct-cats are natural hunters and killers, and Manticore was especially careful to nurture that instinct in their soldiers.
He also purrs. It’s sort of adorable, in the way a giant tiger purring is adorable.
As for his soldierly skills, Alec’s been trained to be a killing machine since he was old enough to hold a weapon. He’s proficient in almost every weapon known to man, as well as multiple forms of hand-to-hand combat, and he could probably kill you with just his pinky. He was raised to be a field leader, so he’s a strategist, and trained in infiltration, retrieval and assassinations. He was also trained for deep cover, so he can fake accents and slips on another identity just as easily as he would a pair of jeans.
… I have no idea how this all will translate into Force sensitive abilities. I think in theory, he could be Force sensitive, but he’s-man made, so I don’t think it’s something that would come naturally to him.
Sect: Civilian with potential for Republican military.
Job: N/A yet.
Samples:
First Person: Here!
Third Person: Here!
Anything Else: I’m sorry this app is so amazingly long, but … I wanted to make sure I got everything with him.