[tlv app]
User Name/Nick: Emmy
User LJ: stuff
AIM/IM: things
E-mail: I'm lazy
Other Characters: Elle and Parker
Character Name: Velma Dinkley
Series: Scooby Doo
Age: 25/26-ish, though that's just a guesstimate. She's somewhere in her 20's is all I can say for sure.
From When?: Towards the end of Monsters Unleashed (the second live-action movie).
Inmate/Warden: Warden. She's a good person, and she'll agree to come on board the barge in return for the monsters being defeated.
Item: Some technological gadget.
Abilities/Powers: Velma's "the smart one," and thus has a variety of skills, depending on what the movie or episode requires. She's mainly interested in engineering, but she's also got some computer science, biology, chemistry, archeology, history, entomology, and etymology/linguistic chops.
Personality: Velma Dinkley in a nutshell:
Favorite colors are orange and red.
Myopic to the point of being nearly blind without her glasses.
Likes include mysteries, mystery books, science, gadgetry, foreign films, traveling, and hockey.
Dislikes include clowns.
In a lot of ways, Velma's the stereotypical nerd. Science is her great love, but over the years she's picked up at least the odd fact or two about almost anything you could think of. She has a habit of speaking in polysyllabic words when not strictly necessary, though it's not exactly pretension on her part - she has a large vocabulary and just likes using it. The downside to being so bright is that when she doesn't have something to occupy her brain, she gets bored quickly. On the flip side, give her a project and she can sometimes get so wrapped up in it that she'll completely lose track of time.
She loves learning, is insatiably curious, and even as a small child she voraciously devoured any and all facts. Coupled with her natural intelligence, this has led to her winning a variety of awards, fellowships, and scholarships over the course of her late teens. And Velma absolutely loves winning these things, not because of the attention but because she enjoys traveling to award ceremonies in far-off countries or going on archeological digs or who knows what else, or just getting the opportunity to tinker with neat and expensive gadgets. She's only interested in science for science's sake. It's because she's not interested in the awards themselves that this is one area where she isn't driven by competitiveness. The projects and inventions she works on, for her, are their own rewards and it's mere icing on the cake that she's recognized for them.
Her main rival in high school was a boy called Eliot, who she invariably beat in any competition they entered together. But even though he tended towards brattiness, Velma was never anything but cordial to him, and never rubbed her victories in his face. She even gave him the ludicrously awesome robot dog she'd built as a sort of consolation prize, recognizing that her relationship with her real dog, Scooby, was far more important to her than all the nifty tricks a robot dog could do.
That isn't to say Velma is allergic to praise or doesn't like attention. She has her spotlight and she enjoys it, and that spotlight is solving mysteries. More often than not, she's the one that puts the pieces together and discovers the identity of the villain, and that's something she does want recognition for. When people step on her toes, she becomes jealous and yes, competitive. This aspect of her personality comes to the fore when dealing with Fred - whose repeatedly taking credit for her sleuthing is what makes her quit Mystery Inc. - and Verona Dempsey - an amateur detective whose ability to stay one step ahead of the gang gives Velma no end of frustration, rendering her irritable and unable to focus. It seems that Velma can't stand anyone besting her in the mystery-solving department unless they're working with her.
The reason for this is likely twofold:
First, very simply, Velma loves mysteries. Even more than science, they're her real passion. So naturally, she wants to be the best at solving them.
Second, Velma uses mystery-solving as a distraction from all the things in life she's not good at - which isn't to say it's SOLELY a distraction, because it's not and she really does love it. One of those things she's not so good at is being pretty, popular, and feminine, something that Daphne - the coolest girl at Coolsville High - inadvertently rubs in by her presence alone. Velma seems to believe that Daphne is the epitome of beauty, and that she herself falls short. As a teenager, Velma is often shown to be insecure about her looks, rarely willing to wear revealing outfits or dress up if she can avoid it. As an adult, "I'm not hot," is her response to Daphne's remark that Patrick finds her attractive. Though Velma's usually portrayed as very friendly with Daphne, and is never spiteful towards her because of this, she does resent Fred for being shallow and always picking Daphne, the 'swimsuit model' type, for teams when they split up to search for clues.
The other thing Velma is no good at is emotional intimacy. Having dedicated her admittedly thus-far-short life to research, her world revolves around facts, logic, and rational common sense. She's uncomfortable outside of that niche. She's often open, friendly, and enthusiastic, and she's not plagued by serious emotional hang-ups or crippling social ineptitude. Merely being sociable is hardly difficult for her, and she's usually pretty comfortable talking to new people. But asking her to handle anything more intimate than friendship is asking her to stray into dangerous territory.
Velma's romantic relationships generally fall into two categories: A) he likes her, B) she likes him. In the case of Situation A, Velma will do all in her power to ignore the guy, avoid him, pretend he doesn't exist, or find excuses to never see him again. In the case of overenthusiastic and obnoxious suitor Gibby Norton, this is entirely understandable. But when it comes to genuine nice-guy Patrick, it's clearly a case of Velma getting in her own way, made worse by the fact that Velma actually likes him back and has no idea how to cope with that. In the case of Situation B, the guy is more often than not a famous actor or writer that Velma has become infatuated with from afar. They never return her feelings, but it's probably for the best. Velma's not shallow enough to get into any kind of serious relationship just because the guy's good-looking and famous; brains and interests he shares with her are what she finds truly appealing. And then there's Situation C, which is mutual, and extremely casual, flirtation. It only crops up once, and Velma seems okay with it, likely because the depth of feeling involved isn't so deep.
Romance isn't Velma's only area of inexpertness. Outside the world of facts, Velma feels vulnerable and uncertain. Maybe it's a quirk of her nature, maybe it's years of relying solely on logic to guide her actions, or maybe it's something else entirely. But whatever the reason, Velma finds it unnatural to act on instinct. The facts don't lie, so they're what she bases her decisions on. She only ever trusts her brain, never her heart or her gut.
Velma's relationship with Shaggy, especially as it's presented in the second live-action movie, is very telling. It's clear in both live-action movies that Velma thinks very highly of Shaggy. After he tries and fails to reforge the bond between the gang post-breakup, Fred and Daphne leave but Velma lingers and gives him a rueful smile. This speaks to the fact that she's more indulgent of his idiosyncrasies than the others, and as she states in the second movie, she likes him for his idiosyncrasies. She doesn't care how much of a loser he is, she knows his heart's in the right place and that's much more important to her; I'd say Velma would take a lovable loser for a best friend over a shiny and fantastic jerk any day.
While indulgent, Velma doesn't actually participate in Shaggy's goofiness. She's significantly more reserved than he is. But there is one episode where Velma and Shaggy end up swapping roles, and Velma discovers that eating snacks with Scooby is as enjoyable as chasing clues with Fred and Daphne. So there could well be some tiny part of her that would love to slack off and eat pizza all day, but it's not a side of her that comes out much, if it even exists outside of very specialized circumstances. Suffice to say, she can at least understand non-braniac slackers, even if she isn't one of them.
There's more to it than that, though. The fact is that Velma tends towards slight awkwardness, she's a huge nerd, she's nowhere near as fascinating as her work would suggest, and the inability to cope with emotional intimacy tops it all off nicely. She knows all this about herself, and she's less than okay with it. When faced with the daunting task of going on a date, she even transforms herself into a completely different, and she hopes more glamorous, person. But Shaggy's a complete loser who hangs out in the back of a van with his dog all the time, and he's cool with that. Velma admires him for not being scared to be himself, no matter how unimpressive or silly that might be - something she wishes she was too.
Beneath Velma's nerdy nice-girl facade... is more nerdy nice girl. But that doesn't mean she's not capable of pulling off an underhanded deed or two of her own. Having spent her whole high school career unmasking villainous crooks, Velma takes what she's picked up and puts it to good use. Her intent is good: protect a newly discovered Egyptian tomb from treasure hunters who want to plunder its riches for themselves. But creating an elaborate ruse in which Cleopatra's spirit and her undead army rise to take vengeance on those who would dare trespass in the tomb by turning all interlopers to stone is pretty definite proof that Velma hasn't just been solving crimes, she's actually been learning from the criminals. She doesn't dismiss what people can do just because what they're doing is wrong - she'll learn how to do it, then find a way to apply it for her own purposes.
For Velma, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and all manner of creepy crawlies hold little terror - she's beaten them all in her time. In spite of her various encounters with real supernatural threats, her default assumption is that the monster is fake. She can still be spooked, though, and she knows when the best course of action is to run away, especially as she's probably the least fit member of the gang and can't defend herself physically with any sort of skill.
Within the gang, Velma often finds herself shoehorned into the role of the reasonable one. After a while, the rest of the gang's completely unreasonable antics bring out her sarcastic side more and more. From "they'll never spot you" in response to Fred running around an army base with cammo paint on his face and a bush on his head, to her assessment of Daphne's excruciatingly unsubtle interrogation techniques as "masterful," she habitually points out the gang's little failings without them ever noticing or taking an ego-puncture for it. Her intent probably isn't mean-spirited, as she clearly cares about her friends. And Velma's very even-handed with her sarcasm, just as ready to direct it at herself or the world in general as at other people.
On the barge, Velma will take her job as a warden seriously, but unless she gets an inmate she shares a lot of interests with, it'll be just that to her: a job. She'll see rehabilitating an inmate as a puzzle that needs solving, and she'll do all of the research without putting it in emotional context. If she does get an inmate with whom she has a lot in common, she may get too caught up in talking shop to actually figure out how to warden them effectively. Will she be the best warden ever? No, probably not. But she'll give it her all and riddle it out as she goes along, and she'll definitely get better with time. Floods, ports, and the barge itself will fascinate her, and she may run the risk of becoming way too enthralled with examining how it all works to pay much attention to anything else. The library with books from all over time and space will be her idea of heaven and somebody may have to come pry her out of there with a crowbar.
Path to Redemption: n/a
History: Velma has a huge family, first off. Her parents are Dale and Angie Dinkley, she has one younger sister Madelyn, who is more conventionally attractive than Velma but even more of a nerd, an insane number of aunts and uncles scattered around the world and working in a variety of interesting professions (though there seems to be a disproportionate number of archaeologists), and several cousins. Velma grew up in the town of Coolsville, and she attended the local public high school with her three best friends, Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, and Norville "Shaggy" Rogers. One night, Shaggy was walking home with his pet dog/best friend Scooby Doo and happened upon a black suit of armor, which came to life and attacked him. The gang banded together to solve the mystery of the Black Knight Ghost, and discovered that it was the curator of the museum where the Black Knight was on display, who had disguised himself in order to scare people away and steal artifacts from the museum.
From then on, the gang was known as Mystery Incorporated, and made a habit of traveling around and solving mysteries that always ended in Fred concocting a crazy trap to catch the "monster." The traps never worked, but the gang had an unblemished track record nonetheless, thanks to the monsters never actually being real, but rather dudes in rubber masks. Eventually, Mystery Inc. started facing off against legitimately supernatural foes, but even they were no match for the gang.
Wiki link time! The stuff that happens post-Black Knight pre-live-action is this, this, this, this, this and the other direct-to-video animated films, possibly this, and maybe one or two other things listed here, not necessarily that order. Most of those take place in high school, with little to no continuity anywhere to be found, so the order in which they happen isn't terribly important (though the events of the original series are usually regarded as coming before the others). Zombie Island occurs a little later, probably when the characters are roughly college-age. When the live-action movies pick up, they're likely in their mid-20's.
Their knack for catching badguys in masks led to Mystery Inc. gaining recognition amongst the general populace. But as their fame increased, they began to clash more and more until Velma, fed up with Fred always taking credit for her intelligence, quit. They all went their separate ways, and Velma got a job developing hydro-powered missile defense systems at NASA.
When the four of them were invited to a place called Spooky Island to solve a mystery, they originally tried to compete to solve it but eventually teamed up to save Scooby's life from a vengeful Scrappy Doo, Scooby's tiny nephew who wanted to use Scooby's soul to transform himself into an unstoppable killing machine and command a horde of demons to take over the world. They saved the day, officially reunited, and set up their headquarters back in Coolsville. The local museum, the Coolsonian, opened an exhibit in their honor, including the costumes of several monsters they'd unmasked. But the costumes were stolen by an Evil Masked Figure and used to create real monsters. The Evil Masked Figure demanded that Mystery Inc. turn themselves in or the monsters would destroy Coolsville, and the people of Coolsville turned on Mystery Inc. and demanded their surrender. Velma agreed to take a job on the barge in return for the monsters being destroyed and Coolsville being safe.
Sample Journal Entry: [video]
[You can just about make out... nothing, until something flips the communicator over onto the floor and you can see it was lying face-down on the desk. From a distance comes a startled "Oh!" Then a pair of red Mary Janes appear, complete with orange knee socks on under them.
Velma mutters to herself:] Jinkies, this is unusual.
[She picks up the communicator, then sets it on her desk and leans out of frame to write something. After a moment, she remembers it's on. She props it up against something so the camera's pointed at her.]
Hello! [Dorky smile! And a dorky little wave too!] I'm Velma. The Admiral hired me to be a warden, so I guess I'll be working with at least some of you. And I must say, I'm very excited for the opportunity to work in a place like this. The overwhelming evidence presented here for the many-worlds interpretation should prove to be a fascinating area of study, which I look forward to exploring in my free time.
[ISN'T QUANTUM THRILLING? Velma really is very excited right now :c
Something in the background goes ding and snags Velma's attention. She ducks out of frame again, distractedly mumbling:]
E-excuse me, I'll be right back.
Sample RP: Velma hadn't been expecting her room to come along for the ride, but boy was she glad it had. This way she had at least a couple of her tools, and could continue to work on analyzing the randamonium that created the monsters and how to neutralize it. Just in case.
But she had to poke her head out of her room sometime, and when she realized her stomach was rumbling, that time had definitely come. "If only Shaggy and Scooby were here," she muttered to herself. "They could sniff out a galley a mile away."
She opened her door and stuck her head out into the hall, being cautious of a strange new place purely out of habit. There didn't seem to be anyone around, which struck her as statistically unlikely given how many people there must be on this ship, but who knew what sort of statistical models applied here. She was going to have to learn to adjust, she supposed, if she wanted to stay long enough to help an inmate rehabilitate him or herself.
Reading material in hand, she headed for the staircase, figuring she'd head downwards, start at the bottom, and work her way up. The food had to be somewhere, after all, and a methodical approach was doubtless the best way to find it. She did bump into a few people as she walked, and to each of them she gave a hesitant smile. Some reciprocated, some didn't; the ones who did made her feel better and the ones who didn't made her feel awkward.
As luck would have it, there was a cafeteria on the first floor. Velma grabbed herself some food and found an empty table at which to read. She was too engrossed in her book to pick out the sounds of someone approaching above the background hubbub of the busy room, so someone asking, "Is this seat taken?" startled her.
"No, it's not," she said, looking up at the newcomer. "Uh, please! Sit down."
Special Notes:
User LJ: stuff
AIM/IM: things
E-mail: I'm lazy
Other Characters: Elle and Parker
Character Name: Velma Dinkley
Series: Scooby Doo
Age: 25/26-ish, though that's just a guesstimate. She's somewhere in her 20's is all I can say for sure.
From When?: Towards the end of Monsters Unleashed (the second live-action movie).
Inmate/Warden: Warden. She's a good person, and she'll agree to come on board the barge in return for the monsters being defeated.
Item: Some technological gadget.
Abilities/Powers: Velma's "the smart one," and thus has a variety of skills, depending on what the movie or episode requires. She's mainly interested in engineering, but she's also got some computer science, biology, chemistry, archeology, history, entomology, and etymology/linguistic chops.
Personality: Velma Dinkley in a nutshell:
Favorite colors are orange and red.
Myopic to the point of being nearly blind without her glasses.
Likes include mysteries, mystery books, science, gadgetry, foreign films, traveling, and hockey.
Dislikes include clowns.
In a lot of ways, Velma's the stereotypical nerd. Science is her great love, but over the years she's picked up at least the odd fact or two about almost anything you could think of. She has a habit of speaking in polysyllabic words when not strictly necessary, though it's not exactly pretension on her part - she has a large vocabulary and just likes using it. The downside to being so bright is that when she doesn't have something to occupy her brain, she gets bored quickly. On the flip side, give her a project and she can sometimes get so wrapped up in it that she'll completely lose track of time.
She loves learning, is insatiably curious, and even as a small child she voraciously devoured any and all facts. Coupled with her natural intelligence, this has led to her winning a variety of awards, fellowships, and scholarships over the course of her late teens. And Velma absolutely loves winning these things, not because of the attention but because she enjoys traveling to award ceremonies in far-off countries or going on archeological digs or who knows what else, or just getting the opportunity to tinker with neat and expensive gadgets. She's only interested in science for science's sake. It's because she's not interested in the awards themselves that this is one area where she isn't driven by competitiveness. The projects and inventions she works on, for her, are their own rewards and it's mere icing on the cake that she's recognized for them.
Her main rival in high school was a boy called Eliot, who she invariably beat in any competition they entered together. But even though he tended towards brattiness, Velma was never anything but cordial to him, and never rubbed her victories in his face. She even gave him the ludicrously awesome robot dog she'd built as a sort of consolation prize, recognizing that her relationship with her real dog, Scooby, was far more important to her than all the nifty tricks a robot dog could do.
That isn't to say Velma is allergic to praise or doesn't like attention. She has her spotlight and she enjoys it, and that spotlight is solving mysteries. More often than not, she's the one that puts the pieces together and discovers the identity of the villain, and that's something she does want recognition for. When people step on her toes, she becomes jealous and yes, competitive. This aspect of her personality comes to the fore when dealing with Fred - whose repeatedly taking credit for her sleuthing is what makes her quit Mystery Inc. - and Verona Dempsey - an amateur detective whose ability to stay one step ahead of the gang gives Velma no end of frustration, rendering her irritable and unable to focus. It seems that Velma can't stand anyone besting her in the mystery-solving department unless they're working with her.
The reason for this is likely twofold:
First, very simply, Velma loves mysteries. Even more than science, they're her real passion. So naturally, she wants to be the best at solving them.
Second, Velma uses mystery-solving as a distraction from all the things in life she's not good at - which isn't to say it's SOLELY a distraction, because it's not and she really does love it. One of those things she's not so good at is being pretty, popular, and feminine, something that Daphne - the coolest girl at Coolsville High - inadvertently rubs in by her presence alone. Velma seems to believe that Daphne is the epitome of beauty, and that she herself falls short. As a teenager, Velma is often shown to be insecure about her looks, rarely willing to wear revealing outfits or dress up if she can avoid it. As an adult, "I'm not hot," is her response to Daphne's remark that Patrick finds her attractive. Though Velma's usually portrayed as very friendly with Daphne, and is never spiteful towards her because of this, she does resent Fred for being shallow and always picking Daphne, the 'swimsuit model' type, for teams when they split up to search for clues.
The other thing Velma is no good at is emotional intimacy. Having dedicated her admittedly thus-far-short life to research, her world revolves around facts, logic, and rational common sense. She's uncomfortable outside of that niche. She's often open, friendly, and enthusiastic, and she's not plagued by serious emotional hang-ups or crippling social ineptitude. Merely being sociable is hardly difficult for her, and she's usually pretty comfortable talking to new people. But asking her to handle anything more intimate than friendship is asking her to stray into dangerous territory.
Velma's romantic relationships generally fall into two categories: A) he likes her, B) she likes him. In the case of Situation A, Velma will do all in her power to ignore the guy, avoid him, pretend he doesn't exist, or find excuses to never see him again. In the case of overenthusiastic and obnoxious suitor Gibby Norton, this is entirely understandable. But when it comes to genuine nice-guy Patrick, it's clearly a case of Velma getting in her own way, made worse by the fact that Velma actually likes him back and has no idea how to cope with that. In the case of Situation B, the guy is more often than not a famous actor or writer that Velma has become infatuated with from afar. They never return her feelings, but it's probably for the best. Velma's not shallow enough to get into any kind of serious relationship just because the guy's good-looking and famous; brains and interests he shares with her are what she finds truly appealing. And then there's Situation C, which is mutual, and extremely casual, flirtation. It only crops up once, and Velma seems okay with it, likely because the depth of feeling involved isn't so deep.
Romance isn't Velma's only area of inexpertness. Outside the world of facts, Velma feels vulnerable and uncertain. Maybe it's a quirk of her nature, maybe it's years of relying solely on logic to guide her actions, or maybe it's something else entirely. But whatever the reason, Velma finds it unnatural to act on instinct. The facts don't lie, so they're what she bases her decisions on. She only ever trusts her brain, never her heart or her gut.
Velma's relationship with Shaggy, especially as it's presented in the second live-action movie, is very telling. It's clear in both live-action movies that Velma thinks very highly of Shaggy. After he tries and fails to reforge the bond between the gang post-breakup, Fred and Daphne leave but Velma lingers and gives him a rueful smile. This speaks to the fact that she's more indulgent of his idiosyncrasies than the others, and as she states in the second movie, she likes him for his idiosyncrasies. She doesn't care how much of a loser he is, she knows his heart's in the right place and that's much more important to her; I'd say Velma would take a lovable loser for a best friend over a shiny and fantastic jerk any day.
While indulgent, Velma doesn't actually participate in Shaggy's goofiness. She's significantly more reserved than he is. But there is one episode where Velma and Shaggy end up swapping roles, and Velma discovers that eating snacks with Scooby is as enjoyable as chasing clues with Fred and Daphne. So there could well be some tiny part of her that would love to slack off and eat pizza all day, but it's not a side of her that comes out much, if it even exists outside of very specialized circumstances. Suffice to say, she can at least understand non-braniac slackers, even if she isn't one of them.
There's more to it than that, though. The fact is that Velma tends towards slight awkwardness, she's a huge nerd, she's nowhere near as fascinating as her work would suggest, and the inability to cope with emotional intimacy tops it all off nicely. She knows all this about herself, and she's less than okay with it. When faced with the daunting task of going on a date, she even transforms herself into a completely different, and she hopes more glamorous, person. But Shaggy's a complete loser who hangs out in the back of a van with his dog all the time, and he's cool with that. Velma admires him for not being scared to be himself, no matter how unimpressive or silly that might be - something she wishes she was too.
Beneath Velma's nerdy nice-girl facade... is more nerdy nice girl. But that doesn't mean she's not capable of pulling off an underhanded deed or two of her own. Having spent her whole high school career unmasking villainous crooks, Velma takes what she's picked up and puts it to good use. Her intent is good: protect a newly discovered Egyptian tomb from treasure hunters who want to plunder its riches for themselves. But creating an elaborate ruse in which Cleopatra's spirit and her undead army rise to take vengeance on those who would dare trespass in the tomb by turning all interlopers to stone is pretty definite proof that Velma hasn't just been solving crimes, she's actually been learning from the criminals. She doesn't dismiss what people can do just because what they're doing is wrong - she'll learn how to do it, then find a way to apply it for her own purposes.
For Velma, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and all manner of creepy crawlies hold little terror - she's beaten them all in her time. In spite of her various encounters with real supernatural threats, her default assumption is that the monster is fake. She can still be spooked, though, and she knows when the best course of action is to run away, especially as she's probably the least fit member of the gang and can't defend herself physically with any sort of skill.
Within the gang, Velma often finds herself shoehorned into the role of the reasonable one. After a while, the rest of the gang's completely unreasonable antics bring out her sarcastic side more and more. From "they'll never spot you" in response to Fred running around an army base with cammo paint on his face and a bush on his head, to her assessment of Daphne's excruciatingly unsubtle interrogation techniques as "masterful," she habitually points out the gang's little failings without them ever noticing or taking an ego-puncture for it. Her intent probably isn't mean-spirited, as she clearly cares about her friends. And Velma's very even-handed with her sarcasm, just as ready to direct it at herself or the world in general as at other people.
On the barge, Velma will take her job as a warden seriously, but unless she gets an inmate she shares a lot of interests with, it'll be just that to her: a job. She'll see rehabilitating an inmate as a puzzle that needs solving, and she'll do all of the research without putting it in emotional context. If she does get an inmate with whom she has a lot in common, she may get too caught up in talking shop to actually figure out how to warden them effectively. Will she be the best warden ever? No, probably not. But she'll give it her all and riddle it out as she goes along, and she'll definitely get better with time. Floods, ports, and the barge itself will fascinate her, and she may run the risk of becoming way too enthralled with examining how it all works to pay much attention to anything else. The library with books from all over time and space will be her idea of heaven and somebody may have to come pry her out of there with a crowbar.
Path to Redemption: n/a
History: Velma has a huge family, first off. Her parents are Dale and Angie Dinkley, she has one younger sister Madelyn, who is more conventionally attractive than Velma but even more of a nerd, an insane number of aunts and uncles scattered around the world and working in a variety of interesting professions (though there seems to be a disproportionate number of archaeologists), and several cousins. Velma grew up in the town of Coolsville, and she attended the local public high school with her three best friends, Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, and Norville "Shaggy" Rogers. One night, Shaggy was walking home with his pet dog/best friend Scooby Doo and happened upon a black suit of armor, which came to life and attacked him. The gang banded together to solve the mystery of the Black Knight Ghost, and discovered that it was the curator of the museum where the Black Knight was on display, who had disguised himself in order to scare people away and steal artifacts from the museum.
From then on, the gang was known as Mystery Incorporated, and made a habit of traveling around and solving mysteries that always ended in Fred concocting a crazy trap to catch the "monster." The traps never worked, but the gang had an unblemished track record nonetheless, thanks to the monsters never actually being real, but rather dudes in rubber masks. Eventually, Mystery Inc. started facing off against legitimately supernatural foes, but even they were no match for the gang.
Wiki link time! The stuff that happens post-Black Knight pre-live-action is this, this, this, this, this and the other direct-to-video animated films, possibly this, and maybe one or two other things listed here, not necessarily that order. Most of those take place in high school, with little to no continuity anywhere to be found, so the order in which they happen isn't terribly important (though the events of the original series are usually regarded as coming before the others). Zombie Island occurs a little later, probably when the characters are roughly college-age. When the live-action movies pick up, they're likely in their mid-20's.
Their knack for catching badguys in masks led to Mystery Inc. gaining recognition amongst the general populace. But as their fame increased, they began to clash more and more until Velma, fed up with Fred always taking credit for her intelligence, quit. They all went their separate ways, and Velma got a job developing hydro-powered missile defense systems at NASA.
When the four of them were invited to a place called Spooky Island to solve a mystery, they originally tried to compete to solve it but eventually teamed up to save Scooby's life from a vengeful Scrappy Doo, Scooby's tiny nephew who wanted to use Scooby's soul to transform himself into an unstoppable killing machine and command a horde of demons to take over the world. They saved the day, officially reunited, and set up their headquarters back in Coolsville. The local museum, the Coolsonian, opened an exhibit in their honor, including the costumes of several monsters they'd unmasked. But the costumes were stolen by an Evil Masked Figure and used to create real monsters. The Evil Masked Figure demanded that Mystery Inc. turn themselves in or the monsters would destroy Coolsville, and the people of Coolsville turned on Mystery Inc. and demanded their surrender. Velma agreed to take a job on the barge in return for the monsters being destroyed and Coolsville being safe.
Sample Journal Entry: [video]
[You can just about make out... nothing, until something flips the communicator over onto the floor and you can see it was lying face-down on the desk. From a distance comes a startled "Oh!" Then a pair of red Mary Janes appear, complete with orange knee socks on under them.
Velma mutters to herself:] Jinkies, this is unusual.
[She picks up the communicator, then sets it on her desk and leans out of frame to write something. After a moment, she remembers it's on. She props it up against something so the camera's pointed at her.]
Hello! [Dorky smile! And a dorky little wave too!] I'm Velma. The Admiral hired me to be a warden, so I guess I'll be working with at least some of you. And I must say, I'm very excited for the opportunity to work in a place like this. The overwhelming evidence presented here for the many-worlds interpretation should prove to be a fascinating area of study, which I look forward to exploring in my free time.
[ISN'T QUANTUM THRILLING? Velma really is very excited right now :c
Something in the background goes ding and snags Velma's attention. She ducks out of frame again, distractedly mumbling:]
E-excuse me, I'll be right back.
Sample RP: Velma hadn't been expecting her room to come along for the ride, but boy was she glad it had. This way she had at least a couple of her tools, and could continue to work on analyzing the randamonium that created the monsters and how to neutralize it. Just in case.
But she had to poke her head out of her room sometime, and when she realized her stomach was rumbling, that time had definitely come. "If only Shaggy and Scooby were here," she muttered to herself. "They could sniff out a galley a mile away."
She opened her door and stuck her head out into the hall, being cautious of a strange new place purely out of habit. There didn't seem to be anyone around, which struck her as statistically unlikely given how many people there must be on this ship, but who knew what sort of statistical models applied here. She was going to have to learn to adjust, she supposed, if she wanted to stay long enough to help an inmate rehabilitate him or herself.
Reading material in hand, she headed for the staircase, figuring she'd head downwards, start at the bottom, and work her way up. The food had to be somewhere, after all, and a methodical approach was doubtless the best way to find it. She did bump into a few people as she walked, and to each of them she gave a hesitant smile. Some reciprocated, some didn't; the ones who did made her feel better and the ones who didn't made her feel awkward.
As luck would have it, there was a cafeteria on the first floor. Velma grabbed herself some food and found an empty table at which to read. She was too engrossed in her book to pick out the sounds of someone approaching above the background hubbub of the busy room, so someone asking, "Is this seat taken?" startled her.
"No, it's not," she said, looking up at the newcomer. "Uh, please! Sit down."
Special Notes: